Stephanie Alberti
EVWP Summer 2009
I taught English in a juvenile correctional facility for eight years. Or tried to, anyway. I was a pleasant distraction for most of the inmates; my activities helped the time pass and gave them something to look forward to during the long hours they spent locked in their cells. When they weren’t in school they read books from our poorly stocked library or the ones that I often bought or borrowed from the public library. The rest of the time they plotted and planned, everything from how to steal the candy from some hapless teacher’s desk or how to ferment smuggled fruit juice from the cafeteria and turn it into wine, to what they were going to do with themselves once they were released.
We teachers were always trying to find ways to connect with our students and make learning fun. After all many, if not most, of these young people had been mediocre to bad students who often missed school before they were incarcerated. Once locked up, they rarely missed any. The Staff didn’t want to have to watch them during the day and would deliver them to school even if they had fairly high fevers and were throwing up. On top of everything else, they came to us hating most adults and teachers in particular.
At the time, I had a black Lab named Bridget and a couple of cats. One day I noticed a big lump under the skin on Bridget’s belly. I took her to the vet for tests and was told that they were going to have to remove the tumor. The next day over lunch at work, Mr. Jones, the science teacher, became excited about my story and requested I ask the vet if I could have the tumor, then bring it to school so his students could look at it under the microscope. I thought it sounded gross, but who am I to stand in the way of scientific research?
The day of the operation I sheepishly asked for the tumor and explained why I wanted it. The doctor laughed and brought it to me afterwards in a plastic medicine bottle, like the ones you get filled with prescription pills. It was difficult to see the mass without taking the top off, but he said he’d filled the bottle with formaldehyde to preserve it. Bridget would be fine; the tumor wasn’t malignant.
The next morning I presented the bottle to the science teacher.
“This is going to be great!” he effused. Science teachers get excited about weird things.
He took it from me and put it on his desk.
“We’ll look at it later this week.”
I told him to let me know how it went and continued on to my room.
During lunch Mr. Jones came to my room. The students returned to their cottages every day for two hours and we had planning time (when we weren’t having endless meetings.)
“You will not believe this!” he announced. “Someone has stolen Bridget’s tumor!”
We looked at each other and burst out laughing. Some student must have assumed it was a prescription. One of them had stolen the gym teacher’s heart medication earlier in the year. I would have loved to have seen it when that poor kid finally had some privacy to open up the bottle. He would have had to smuggle it back to the cottage, then go to the bathroom to be alone so he could open up the bottle. I can’t even imagine what he thought or did when he got it open!
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
One-on-One
One-on-one by Ron Wheeler
It was night, and we were caught in the middle of a horrendous thunderstorm. As the small, 1940s-vintage DC-3 shook violently, I looked out the cabin window at utter darkness, save for streaks of lightening. Every time the lightening came, it briefly revealed the terrified faces of the passengers across the aisle. We were traveling from Kuching to Sibu in Borneo, a part of Malaysia. I was a 22-year-old Peace Corps Volunteer fresh out of college. I thought about my hometown, where I had spent my whole life, and from where I had always wanted to escape. I was half way around the world fulfilling my dream, but now I kept wondering if the next second would be my last. I thought about my mother, a single parent, who had struggled hard to raise me, her only child, and I wanted to tell her how much she meant to me, and I thought about the friends I’d known there, including Benner.
……………
Seven years earlier, as I walked across town from my place to Benner’s mansion on the hill, I had asked myself what am I doing? I’d gone by his house many times during the construction, and so had everybody else. It was a massive three-story white structure with a front portico overlooking an expansive yard and gardens. When they finally finished the place it had at least ten times more living space than the average 1950s rancher, which is what most well-to-do people lived in.
I stood in the drive wondering whether I should go up to the door. I had hated Benner ever since I could remember. I first met him when I was five years old and we both lived in another part of town. Mom and I had just moved into a wood frame house that had been converted into apartments. We shared a bathroom down the hall with some other tenants. My father had left us, and Mom worked fulltime in a shoe store, which meant I often had to fend for myself. Benner lived across the street in a large two-story house. His father was a big shot at a company that manufactured metal products, and his mother stayed home and looked after him and his sister. Desperately searching for some kids to play with, I ventured over to Benner’s house, but he already had a friend who lived next door, and their idea of fun was to pick on me. After getting bullied around and chased back home a few times, I wised up and stayed on my side of the street, but I never forgot what a jerk he was.
If anybody had told me that ten years later I’d be headed to Benner’s to play hoops, I would have laughed. When I first got to high school, I tried to avoid him, which wasn’t that hard to do because he was a loner. He missed school regularly, and after a two-week absence, rumors spread around the school that his parents had sent him off to a military academy because of his poor grades. When he reappeared one day, word was he had busted out, hitchhiked back, and talked his parents into giving him one more chance. I couldn’t wait for him to get kicked out for good.
But his grades improved, and we ended up in study hall together sitting at the same table. After spending several days ignoring one another, we finally struck up a conversation about sports and discovered that we were both obsessed with basketball. He liked the St. Louis Hawks, while I was a Boston Celtics fan. Benner knew I was on the high school basketball squad, and he finally got around to telling me he was the better basketball player, which made me laugh out loud. I told him that when it came to sports, he was just a big screw up, which explains why I was at his door. Benner wanted revenge. He wanted to beat me one-on-one.
Benner led me down to the horse barn. His father had created a lighted, half-court arena with regulation basket and backboard in the hayloft over the stable. The original loft floor was covered with smooth plywood and the sidelines and free-throw line were painted black.
That evening we played twenty-one for hours. Benner had the edge physically. Although only an inch taller than me, at slightly over six feet, he could jump high enough to dunk the ball. But I had a decent jump shot, and our games were hotly contested battles. Benner was the Hawks’ Bob Pettit, up against his nemesis, the Celtics’ Bill Russell. We kept up a constant stream of chatter: Good ball pressure by Russell, but Pettit drives for the basket. Pettit with the step! To the reverse! What an acrobat! We played often that year and the next, until graduation. Then we went our separate ways.
…………..
My mom called and told me of Benner’s death. The obituary in the newspaper did not include information about the cause, and when I talked to his sister on the phone, she didn’t disclose any details either. Only after I finally reached a mutual friend of ours, did I find out he had taken his own life. In early March, 1976, at the age of 35, Benner drove to a secluded nature preserve, sat down in the underbrush, and slashed his wrists.
During the search for Benner, they looked in the hayloft. That’s where they found his shirt lying on the hay bales, the sleeves spread out in the form of a cross. Pinned to the shirt was a poem, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
I grow old…I grow old…I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
……………
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
When I see kids playing hoops in their driveway, it puts me back in a time that seemed like it would last forever. We all try to remain boys as long as possible. Maybe that’s why Benner did what he did.
After all these years, I can’t remember who won any particular game, but I do remember certain moments, like when Benner was dribbling to the basket, sweat streaming down his face, and I reached in and scooped the ball away, then spun around and fired a jump shot. Somehow Benner leaped high enough to block the ball in midair. That’s a play I’ll never forget.
It was night, and we were caught in the middle of a horrendous thunderstorm. As the small, 1940s-vintage DC-3 shook violently, I looked out the cabin window at utter darkness, save for streaks of lightening. Every time the lightening came, it briefly revealed the terrified faces of the passengers across the aisle. We were traveling from Kuching to Sibu in Borneo, a part of Malaysia. I was a 22-year-old Peace Corps Volunteer fresh out of college. I thought about my hometown, where I had spent my whole life, and from where I had always wanted to escape. I was half way around the world fulfilling my dream, but now I kept wondering if the next second would be my last. I thought about my mother, a single parent, who had struggled hard to raise me, her only child, and I wanted to tell her how much she meant to me, and I thought about the friends I’d known there, including Benner.
……………
Seven years earlier, as I walked across town from my place to Benner’s mansion on the hill, I had asked myself what am I doing? I’d gone by his house many times during the construction, and so had everybody else. It was a massive three-story white structure with a front portico overlooking an expansive yard and gardens. When they finally finished the place it had at least ten times more living space than the average 1950s rancher, which is what most well-to-do people lived in.
I stood in the drive wondering whether I should go up to the door. I had hated Benner ever since I could remember. I first met him when I was five years old and we both lived in another part of town. Mom and I had just moved into a wood frame house that had been converted into apartments. We shared a bathroom down the hall with some other tenants. My father had left us, and Mom worked fulltime in a shoe store, which meant I often had to fend for myself. Benner lived across the street in a large two-story house. His father was a big shot at a company that manufactured metal products, and his mother stayed home and looked after him and his sister. Desperately searching for some kids to play with, I ventured over to Benner’s house, but he already had a friend who lived next door, and their idea of fun was to pick on me. After getting bullied around and chased back home a few times, I wised up and stayed on my side of the street, but I never forgot what a jerk he was.
If anybody had told me that ten years later I’d be headed to Benner’s to play hoops, I would have laughed. When I first got to high school, I tried to avoid him, which wasn’t that hard to do because he was a loner. He missed school regularly, and after a two-week absence, rumors spread around the school that his parents had sent him off to a military academy because of his poor grades. When he reappeared one day, word was he had busted out, hitchhiked back, and talked his parents into giving him one more chance. I couldn’t wait for him to get kicked out for good.
But his grades improved, and we ended up in study hall together sitting at the same table. After spending several days ignoring one another, we finally struck up a conversation about sports and discovered that we were both obsessed with basketball. He liked the St. Louis Hawks, while I was a Boston Celtics fan. Benner knew I was on the high school basketball squad, and he finally got around to telling me he was the better basketball player, which made me laugh out loud. I told him that when it came to sports, he was just a big screw up, which explains why I was at his door. Benner wanted revenge. He wanted to beat me one-on-one.
Benner led me down to the horse barn. His father had created a lighted, half-court arena with regulation basket and backboard in the hayloft over the stable. The original loft floor was covered with smooth plywood and the sidelines and free-throw line were painted black.
That evening we played twenty-one for hours. Benner had the edge physically. Although only an inch taller than me, at slightly over six feet, he could jump high enough to dunk the ball. But I had a decent jump shot, and our games were hotly contested battles. Benner was the Hawks’ Bob Pettit, up against his nemesis, the Celtics’ Bill Russell. We kept up a constant stream of chatter: Good ball pressure by Russell, but Pettit drives for the basket. Pettit with the step! To the reverse! What an acrobat! We played often that year and the next, until graduation. Then we went our separate ways.
…………..
My mom called and told me of Benner’s death. The obituary in the newspaper did not include information about the cause, and when I talked to his sister on the phone, she didn’t disclose any details either. Only after I finally reached a mutual friend of ours, did I find out he had taken his own life. In early March, 1976, at the age of 35, Benner drove to a secluded nature preserve, sat down in the underbrush, and slashed his wrists.
During the search for Benner, they looked in the hayloft. That’s where they found his shirt lying on the hay bales, the sleeves spread out in the form of a cross. Pinned to the shirt was a poem, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
I grow old…I grow old…I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
……………
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
When I see kids playing hoops in their driveway, it puts me back in a time that seemed like it would last forever. We all try to remain boys as long as possible. Maybe that’s why Benner did what he did.
After all these years, I can’t remember who won any particular game, but I do remember certain moments, like when Benner was dribbling to the basket, sweat streaming down his face, and I reached in and scooped the ball away, then spun around and fired a jump shot. Somehow Benner leaped high enough to block the ball in midair. That’s a play I’ll never forget.
Learning to Reach
Kevin Schoolfield
EVWP Summer 2009
I Remember…
The desperation of feeling out of my element
The desperation of trying to figure out how to communicate with Autism and Deafness
The desperation of working with a child who is living with both simoultaneously
The desperation of knowing a textbook could not have prepared me for this
I Remember…
Realizing that eating with a spoon instead of fingers can be an academic accomplishment
Realizing the disorder does not make the child
Realizing stubble on my chin can be a teaching tool if sensory stimulation and focused attention are the goals
Realizing how important it is to reach a child, not just teach a child
I Remember…
Feeling frustration alongside a child who can not get her point across
Feeling joy at the breakthrough of a smile
Feeling confusion when a repeated technique did not bring about a repeated result
Feeling anger at my inability to help
I Remember…
Seeing hope in the face of my mentor
Seeing pleasant surprise when I wanted to learn
Seeing a mess left behind what I thought was progress
Seeing her little face go blank in despair as she prepared to return home
I Remember…
Learning to love a child that was not my own
Learning to use actions instead of words to instruct and train
Learning that normal is a truly relative word
Learning that teaching is about so much more than grades and concepts
I Remember…
EVWP Summer 2009
I Remember…
The desperation of feeling out of my element
The desperation of trying to figure out how to communicate with Autism and Deafness
The desperation of working with a child who is living with both simoultaneously
The desperation of knowing a textbook could not have prepared me for this
I Remember…
Realizing that eating with a spoon instead of fingers can be an academic accomplishment
Realizing the disorder does not make the child
Realizing stubble on my chin can be a teaching tool if sensory stimulation and focused attention are the goals
Realizing how important it is to reach a child, not just teach a child
I Remember…
Feeling frustration alongside a child who can not get her point across
Feeling joy at the breakthrough of a smile
Feeling confusion when a repeated technique did not bring about a repeated result
Feeling anger at my inability to help
I Remember…
Seeing hope in the face of my mentor
Seeing pleasant surprise when I wanted to learn
Seeing a mess left behind what I thought was progress
Seeing her little face go blank in despair as she prepared to return home
I Remember…
Learning to love a child that was not my own
Learning to use actions instead of words to instruct and train
Learning that normal is a truly relative word
Learning that teaching is about so much more than grades and concepts
I Remember…
Para
Louise Warner
EVWP Summer 2009
Topic sentence, body, conclusion, indentation
Relative of essays, books, and papers
Clause, phrase, sentence
Lover of ideas, sharing, creativity
Feels complete, well rounded, and to the point
Needs commas, periods, and question marks
Fears shallow ideas, run-ons, and fragments
Gives knowledge, meaning, and information
Would like to see people learning, enjoying, and growing
Resident of literature
Graph
EVWP Summer 2009
Topic sentence, body, conclusion, indentation
Relative of essays, books, and papers
Clause, phrase, sentence
Lover of ideas, sharing, creativity
Feels complete, well rounded, and to the point
Needs commas, periods, and question marks
Fears shallow ideas, run-ons, and fragments
Gives knowledge, meaning, and information
Would like to see people learning, enjoying, and growing
Resident of literature
Graph
Near Death
Tripp Robinson
EVWP Summer 2009
In Memoriam Quan, Cierra, Skit, Thomas. RIP
Noah’s Tee Shirt shop is all about freedom. Noah’s a religious dude, likes to talk to you about how blessed he is. Matter of fact the other day a “foreign” guy, to Noah’s way of thinking, presumably less blessed, in the grocery next door was freed from his earthly sojourn though a crack in the Second Amendment. Not a bit daunted about his own safety, Noah asserted to the Times-Dispatch his contented confidence in God’s impenetrable shield protecting his store. Noah, who seems to possess a friendly heart, persists in almost non-stop religious commentary to anyone—listening or not. His adolescent customers seem to weary of it about the time he tells them that to stay in his shop they have to pull their pants up.
Two types of freedom shirts dominate Noah’s trade: Funeral and jail. Local custom demands a fresh tee at a funeral with a picture of the funeralized. (Nothing fancy, necessarily. Maybe just a snap from a cell phone.), birth and death dates, and RIP. Noah posts the images he uses to make funeral tee shirts. One wall of his shop is completely covered floor to ceiling. Imagine a wall entirely covered with faces of the dead. The mostly young dead. The mostly shot-to-death, young dead. I call it Noah’s wall of death. I have a picture of it posted in my classroom. Ten or fifteen students in three years have pointed out someone they know on the wall. One girl is particularly well known. My son knows one of the guys.
Got to meet Noah one day a while back when one of my sons, DJ, popped up one day with a sudden need to have a tee shirt made, the second kind—a freedom shirt—to wear on behalf of his buddy Marco who was in city jail. DJ wanted the shirt to say “Free Marco” and display images they valued. In my opinion those chosen were the worst possible pictures of the two together. But the pictures were about freedom of a sort. In general the photos reflect DJ and Marco engaged in a war to wage temporary freedom from the misery they have grown up with. Faces blank, stupefied, their expressions look like nothing so much as the calves I once saw being killed at a slaughterhouse in Richmond. It’s a three-blunts-to-the wind glaze, tweaked with maybe a few Percs or a couple of Zannie bars. That’s how Marco and DJ looked on the shirt—like the dying calves, childhoods slaughtered.
Inside my head, the calf connection is this: My college roomie and I once prodded each other to take a somewhat sophomoric, ghoulish field trip to the Richmond Abattoir. As we watched a group of calves begin their pilgrimages to final freedom, their attentive guardians anesthetized their young charges: A sledgehammer’s thud to the forehead left the little guys standing, but stupefied, eyes darting wildly, distracted from the last blade between them and freedom. I see this knocked-in-the-head expression of the dying calves disconcertingly echoed on the countenances of Marco and DJ in the photos. But I’d never have made an issue of it with DJ. He was so proud of the tee shirt he had designed. And when I leave him alone to find his own way he takes me inside his world and we understand each other better. It would hardly have been the death of our relationship, but such a petty comment would bring me only momentary freedom, and lasting regret. He’d survived Noah’s preaching. That was enough. So as with my college buddy long ago, DJ and I left Noah’s and went to grab a burger.
****
One of the guys on Noah’s wall of death is Too. DJ knew him casually, and later got to know him too well. Too was a boy soldier.
DJ himself is a boy soldier, the archetype. He was once also a businessman, which means survivor. Frequently he stayed up all night seeking income, excitement, warmth. For lack of a place to sleep he found camaraderie waiting on the corner with his “bruh” as he calls Marco, for a blustery midnight sale. He still feels safer with a Glock 44C than a teacher. Raised in the margins of the city which was once the capital of a country hastily thrown together to keep DJ’s progenitors in bondage, he has lived and moved without much being. His ephemeral dad’s obsession with other women, cost his dad the unspeakable fun of raising his kid. DJ’s parenting of himself was uneven, evinces itself now in tribulations with any authority. DJ is Everykid and the impact of the lash, stilled long ago, is still evident on him. Even though his agony may now have the psychiatric handle PTSD, it goes with him, as with his peers, untreated and misinterpreted. He reflects, staggers under, the same fiction that males enslaved bore: that he, they—were stupid.
Though not now prevented by law from learning, DJ is print-averse, feels unlettered. DJ and the battalions of kindred boy soldiers seem to be on an unconscious mission. With casual guns, raging rap, sagged jeans they assert some modicum of authority over the obscenity that mostly is their lot. Bullets are as gnats at a picnic. Can each bullet, ominous, unpredictable, be a time-bomb legacy hurled down through the unhealed generations— compressed anger finding voice as rage in firearms in the streets of the young soldiers’ Richmond haunts? Randomly, misdirected, the ancient lash returns in steel projectile guise, and stalks most those yet still reeling from its forbearers. In my classroom I, too, have my own wall of young warrior death. But each firing is only momentary release. Decade upon decade of rage remains, unperceived, unhealed. Unabated and deadly, disguised as weed, bravado, and sadness, this ancient and present rage marches with the child warriors into their classrooms. The soldiers sit and stare placidly. Grammar, the encryption of privilege, stares back. “It’s not “I’m is.” Say, “I am.” Vainly they scour their schools for their place. These boy soldiers’ hearts hear accurately the unspoken harmonics of worthlessness.
And so it is that one notorious weekend this worthlessness erupts savagely. Five people are shot to death on the Southside in two different venues by a regular guy with some ax with the world. It was his day to turn ordinary grinding into rampage. Dramatic headlines, several days of TV delirium report the bloodletting. DJ’s inheritance from this weekend was a more intimate acquaintanceship with Too, and even deeper layers of grueling insomnia and nightmares.
By chance DJ got drenched in Too’s blood. DJ was deep in hopelessness in the most hopeless of the bricks (his slang for the projects) still trying on facets of his life, sorting out the odds at 19 of staying alive past 21. Too and an antagonist were toe to toe in the middle of the street. The dispute was trivial, enlarged through the lens of tangled perceptions to an epic issue. It was four, five o’clock. August. Saturday afternoon. Heat snapping, humidity short circuiting sultry, sluggish reason. It got down to ok shoot me bitch. So he did.
Too instantly was at once suspended and dropping. Blood mist and eye-socket fragments flayed the air, stultifying, oppressing, confusing the helplessness personified as young men, arrayed at random around the roiling tableaux; DJ’s not part of the fracas, but closest to the impact. Too slumps, DJ kneels—a pieta in indigo and crimson. Too heaves. DJ cradles. Medics fail. Too, once friend, now pagan Eucharist, finds heartbroken acceptance and revulsion at the altar of godlessness trembling in DJ’s heart. It’s not so much death, it’s the dying that’s so tough, he later tells me.
DJ’s jeans and white tee, fresh with dammed spot, are abandoned, thrown into a nearby sewer.
And the telling when it comes is clipped. Wire reports lingering in my head complete the fabric of his story as I patch them into his laconic, staccato Teletype.
It took DJ three days to mention it.
EVWP Summer 2009
In Memoriam Quan, Cierra, Skit, Thomas. RIP
Noah’s Tee Shirt shop is all about freedom. Noah’s a religious dude, likes to talk to you about how blessed he is. Matter of fact the other day a “foreign” guy, to Noah’s way of thinking, presumably less blessed, in the grocery next door was freed from his earthly sojourn though a crack in the Second Amendment. Not a bit daunted about his own safety, Noah asserted to the Times-Dispatch his contented confidence in God’s impenetrable shield protecting his store. Noah, who seems to possess a friendly heart, persists in almost non-stop religious commentary to anyone—listening or not. His adolescent customers seem to weary of it about the time he tells them that to stay in his shop they have to pull their pants up.
Two types of freedom shirts dominate Noah’s trade: Funeral and jail. Local custom demands a fresh tee at a funeral with a picture of the funeralized. (Nothing fancy, necessarily. Maybe just a snap from a cell phone.), birth and death dates, and RIP. Noah posts the images he uses to make funeral tee shirts. One wall of his shop is completely covered floor to ceiling. Imagine a wall entirely covered with faces of the dead. The mostly young dead. The mostly shot-to-death, young dead. I call it Noah’s wall of death. I have a picture of it posted in my classroom. Ten or fifteen students in three years have pointed out someone they know on the wall. One girl is particularly well known. My son knows one of the guys.
Got to meet Noah one day a while back when one of my sons, DJ, popped up one day with a sudden need to have a tee shirt made, the second kind—a freedom shirt—to wear on behalf of his buddy Marco who was in city jail. DJ wanted the shirt to say “Free Marco” and display images they valued. In my opinion those chosen were the worst possible pictures of the two together. But the pictures were about freedom of a sort. In general the photos reflect DJ and Marco engaged in a war to wage temporary freedom from the misery they have grown up with. Faces blank, stupefied, their expressions look like nothing so much as the calves I once saw being killed at a slaughterhouse in Richmond. It’s a three-blunts-to-the wind glaze, tweaked with maybe a few Percs or a couple of Zannie bars. That’s how Marco and DJ looked on the shirt—like the dying calves, childhoods slaughtered.
Inside my head, the calf connection is this: My college roomie and I once prodded each other to take a somewhat sophomoric, ghoulish field trip to the Richmond Abattoir. As we watched a group of calves begin their pilgrimages to final freedom, their attentive guardians anesthetized their young charges: A sledgehammer’s thud to the forehead left the little guys standing, but stupefied, eyes darting wildly, distracted from the last blade between them and freedom. I see this knocked-in-the-head expression of the dying calves disconcertingly echoed on the countenances of Marco and DJ in the photos. But I’d never have made an issue of it with DJ. He was so proud of the tee shirt he had designed. And when I leave him alone to find his own way he takes me inside his world and we understand each other better. It would hardly have been the death of our relationship, but such a petty comment would bring me only momentary freedom, and lasting regret. He’d survived Noah’s preaching. That was enough. So as with my college buddy long ago, DJ and I left Noah’s and went to grab a burger.
****
One of the guys on Noah’s wall of death is Too. DJ knew him casually, and later got to know him too well. Too was a boy soldier.
DJ himself is a boy soldier, the archetype. He was once also a businessman, which means survivor. Frequently he stayed up all night seeking income, excitement, warmth. For lack of a place to sleep he found camaraderie waiting on the corner with his “bruh” as he calls Marco, for a blustery midnight sale. He still feels safer with a Glock 44C than a teacher. Raised in the margins of the city which was once the capital of a country hastily thrown together to keep DJ’s progenitors in bondage, he has lived and moved without much being. His ephemeral dad’s obsession with other women, cost his dad the unspeakable fun of raising his kid. DJ’s parenting of himself was uneven, evinces itself now in tribulations with any authority. DJ is Everykid and the impact of the lash, stilled long ago, is still evident on him. Even though his agony may now have the psychiatric handle PTSD, it goes with him, as with his peers, untreated and misinterpreted. He reflects, staggers under, the same fiction that males enslaved bore: that he, they—were stupid.
Though not now prevented by law from learning, DJ is print-averse, feels unlettered. DJ and the battalions of kindred boy soldiers seem to be on an unconscious mission. With casual guns, raging rap, sagged jeans they assert some modicum of authority over the obscenity that mostly is their lot. Bullets are as gnats at a picnic. Can each bullet, ominous, unpredictable, be a time-bomb legacy hurled down through the unhealed generations— compressed anger finding voice as rage in firearms in the streets of the young soldiers’ Richmond haunts? Randomly, misdirected, the ancient lash returns in steel projectile guise, and stalks most those yet still reeling from its forbearers. In my classroom I, too, have my own wall of young warrior death. But each firing is only momentary release. Decade upon decade of rage remains, unperceived, unhealed. Unabated and deadly, disguised as weed, bravado, and sadness, this ancient and present rage marches with the child warriors into their classrooms. The soldiers sit and stare placidly. Grammar, the encryption of privilege, stares back. “It’s not “I’m is.” Say, “I am.” Vainly they scour their schools for their place. These boy soldiers’ hearts hear accurately the unspoken harmonics of worthlessness.
And so it is that one notorious weekend this worthlessness erupts savagely. Five people are shot to death on the Southside in two different venues by a regular guy with some ax with the world. It was his day to turn ordinary grinding into rampage. Dramatic headlines, several days of TV delirium report the bloodletting. DJ’s inheritance from this weekend was a more intimate acquaintanceship with Too, and even deeper layers of grueling insomnia and nightmares.
By chance DJ got drenched in Too’s blood. DJ was deep in hopelessness in the most hopeless of the bricks (his slang for the projects) still trying on facets of his life, sorting out the odds at 19 of staying alive past 21. Too and an antagonist were toe to toe in the middle of the street. The dispute was trivial, enlarged through the lens of tangled perceptions to an epic issue. It was four, five o’clock. August. Saturday afternoon. Heat snapping, humidity short circuiting sultry, sluggish reason. It got down to ok shoot me bitch. So he did.
Too instantly was at once suspended and dropping. Blood mist and eye-socket fragments flayed the air, stultifying, oppressing, confusing the helplessness personified as young men, arrayed at random around the roiling tableaux; DJ’s not part of the fracas, but closest to the impact. Too slumps, DJ kneels—a pieta in indigo and crimson. Too heaves. DJ cradles. Medics fail. Too, once friend, now pagan Eucharist, finds heartbroken acceptance and revulsion at the altar of godlessness trembling in DJ’s heart. It’s not so much death, it’s the dying that’s so tough, he later tells me.
DJ’s jeans and white tee, fresh with dammed spot, are abandoned, thrown into a nearby sewer.
And the telling when it comes is clipped. Wire reports lingering in my head complete the fabric of his story as I patch them into his laconic, staccato Teletype.
It took DJ three days to mention it.
Childhood
Patricia Phillips
EVWP Summer 2009
Pancakes
Lovingly you let me mix
The flour, sugar, butter, eggs
After church on Sunday
Lovingly you let me climb
In front of the stove
On top of the chair
Lovingly you showed me how
Bubbles must be all over
Before I could flip
Lovingly we placed them
On the plate with flowers
One of the only things left
From your mother
Decorating
Remember the cake
When you let us
Cover the two layers
In frosting
When we piped all the flowers
Three inches high
When we decorated with little girl
Joy and style
When without
Complaint or word
You ate a whole piece
Station Wagon
Please, Mom, stop right here
Oh, I don’t know
With sweet pleading faces—
Please let us today
She gazes back in the mirror
Alright
Scrambling,
Beaming,
Giggling with glee
Unlatching our belts
We come to a halt
Back we go
Climbing the seat
Are you ready?
Up, up, up
She steers the car along the drive
That rises like a mountain
Laughing and tumbling
Free
List, what list?
Dad will bring us
To the store
Mom will stay
At home today
Because
Oreos
Sugar cubes
Ice cream
Candy
Will all be
In the cart
When Dad takes us
To the store
EVWP Summer 2009
Pancakes
Lovingly you let me mix
The flour, sugar, butter, eggs
After church on Sunday
Lovingly you let me climb
In front of the stove
On top of the chair
Lovingly you showed me how
Bubbles must be all over
Before I could flip
Lovingly we placed them
On the plate with flowers
One of the only things left
From your mother
Decorating
Remember the cake
When you let us
Cover the two layers
In frosting
When we piped all the flowers
Three inches high
When we decorated with little girl
Joy and style
When without
Complaint or word
You ate a whole piece
Station Wagon
Please, Mom, stop right here
Oh, I don’t know
With sweet pleading faces—
Please let us today
She gazes back in the mirror
Alright
Scrambling,
Beaming,
Giggling with glee
Unlatching our belts
We come to a halt
Back we go
Climbing the seat
Are you ready?
Up, up, up
She steers the car along the drive
That rises like a mountain
Laughing and tumbling
Free
List, what list?
Dad will bring us
To the store
Mom will stay
At home today
Because
Oreos
Sugar cubes
Ice cream
Candy
Will all be
In the cart
When Dad takes us
To the store
On The James
Jan Healy
EVWP Summer 2009
Written on the Jamestown-Scotland Ferry
Frantic dash to the ferry, racing to the appointed time;
cars impatiently form the line
to rumble onto the rocking platform.
Inner, middle, outer –
a man casually points to assigned spaces
for cars to sit gasping for a breath of air.
Radios and engines are stilled
while seagulls squawk and escort each ferry passing.
Silence the mind with the car.
Allow the eyes to ponder
the world near the ferry on the James.
Shivering in the morning cool,
the pushing current carries other boats down river.
Geese sift through beach debris,
nonchalantly considering the bouncing daylilies in a yard nearby.
Still-sleeping houses pay no attention while the
slender-fingered docks stretch out from the shore.
Later, loud tourists gawk and aim their cameras in the distance.
Children scramble to the front only to be splashed with the river’s sprays.
Meanwhile, the regulars visit with people known.
Others simply sit,
an exercise in patience
as the ferry lumbers forward.
Abruptly,
bouncing against the distant dock,
dreams and conversations are replaced
with the staggered starts of throttle.
All eyes turn to the motions of the man,
waiting for permission to leave
the ferry on the James.
EVWP Summer 2009
Written on the Jamestown-Scotland Ferry
Frantic dash to the ferry, racing to the appointed time;
cars impatiently form the line
to rumble onto the rocking platform.
Inner, middle, outer –
a man casually points to assigned spaces
for cars to sit gasping for a breath of air.
Radios and engines are stilled
while seagulls squawk and escort each ferry passing.
Silence the mind with the car.
Allow the eyes to ponder
the world near the ferry on the James.
Shivering in the morning cool,
the pushing current carries other boats down river.
Geese sift through beach debris,
nonchalantly considering the bouncing daylilies in a yard nearby.
Still-sleeping houses pay no attention while the
slender-fingered docks stretch out from the shore.
Later, loud tourists gawk and aim their cameras in the distance.
Children scramble to the front only to be splashed with the river’s sprays.
Meanwhile, the regulars visit with people known.
Others simply sit,
an exercise in patience
as the ferry lumbers forward.
Abruptly,
bouncing against the distant dock,
dreams and conversations are replaced
with the staggered starts of throttle.
All eyes turn to the motions of the man,
waiting for permission to leave
the ferry on the James.
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