There were two hazy gray rings creeping into the brownness of his eyeballs, sort of like two scoops of chocolate ice cream were slowly dissolving in a couple of glasses of yellowish-gray milk.
He tried to focus his eyes on me and finally it seemed he could tell he didn’t know who I was.
He grumbled a little and said, “Let me ask you this, young man”—his mouth kept moving even after the words had stopped coming out—“do you think you understand white people?”
Huh? Where’d that come from? I couldn’t help laughing. I said, “No. But I can’t say I ever really tried.”
His eyes closed again. “Good, if you ever think you do, you mark that day on a calendar ‘cause then you can go back and know that that was the day you made one of the biggest mistakes of your life.”
“I’ll do that.”
He kept his eyes closed. “And what about us? Do you think you understand black folks?”
I thought for a second. “That’s a definite no to that one.”
He smiled and that was enough to make the tiny piece of red and white toilet paper flutter off his lip. “Well,” he said, “God must still be good, ‘cause you’re a lot smarter than you look.”
A spike of Valium or Demerol or whatever the Sarge was using on Chester X Stockard must’ve shot through his heart—just like that he was out as cold as before.
Good thing for him, too, I know when I’ve been insulted and if I had, say, two or three days to think about it I probably would’ve been able to come back with something to put him in his place.
But things like this don’t bother me that much anymore. From dealing with Mr. Baker I’ve had lots of practice being insulted by the Sarge’s clients and have learned you’ve got to ignore them. Most times they don’t know what they’re saying. It’d take more than something that whack to get to me, I’ve been insulted by the best. I’m not one to unnecessarily brag, but I’ve even stood up to the Sarge and come away smiling.
Most times we keep the TV in the dayroom on the 24 Hour Cartoon Channel for the clients and I’m not ashamed to admit that a lot of my love of philosophy has come from there. When it comes to being dissed I’m just like my boy Batfink. Right before someone’s about to open up on him with a Tec nine he wraps his gigantic wings around his body and says, “Your bullets cannot harm me, my wings are like a shield of steel.” And sure enough, the hood’s bullets bounce off Batfink like hail off a sidewalk.
When the Sarge or Darnell Dixon or some fool at school is jumping all over me, trying to make me feel bad, I put on my game face and keep saying to myself, “Your words cannot harm me, my mind is like a shield of steel,” and all the negativity and hate-eration ricochet off me and float into space, as harmless as sunshine.
I looked back at Chester X Stockard. Nice try, old man, but you’re gonna have to do a lot better than that to get to Luther T. Farrell.
I poured a little extra of that stinging aftershave on the cut on his lip.
Not to be mean, but to help him learn a lesson that anyone who was going to be living in a group home needs to learn: Getting mouthy seconds before you lapse into unconsciousness is a pretty bad idea. Tell me that doesn’t sound philosophical!
My study of philosophy has taught me that there really are certain advantages to having the coldhearted, moneygrubbing, beastly sadist who runs your life be blessed with a good vocabulary and a real active imagination.
The Sarge has a way of describing things that the finest English teacher in the world, Ms. Roshonda Sue Warren, would say was “interesting and colorful, therefore able to provide a powerful impact.”
The Sarge can take you to whole new levels of fear when she calm-as-anything listens to what you have to say, then answers by going, “… is that right? Well, let’s say you do decide not to exercise the only real option I’ve given you. I’d have no choice but to slap you so hard that by the time you’ve stopped rolling, your clothes will be out of style.” Try sneering and muttering under your breath to the person who’s just broke something down to you like that!
I’ve had to grow up with that kind of thing hanging over my head and know that whether or not you can appreciate it, it’s a wise choice to pretend you do. Learning young that you have very little of what we philosophers like to call free will can make your life simple, especially when it comes to something like following rules.
Keeping it real, though, “rules” doesn’t come anywhere near to what the Sarge has set up for me.
What she makes for me are called mandates, which is like a rule times ten, or as Darnell Dixon puts it, “Break a rule, lose your allowance; break a mandate, lose your life.”
Mandates fit right in with what the Sarge likes basing everything on, something called a military model.
When she first started prepping me to take over her businesses she said, “What better way to run an organization? The U.S. military has had hundreds of years to practice getting things right, and what they do isn’t all that much different from what I’m doing in these homes.
“First they have to clothe and feed a large number of people. So do I. And who are these people? For both me and the military they’re a large, diverse, often unwilling and ungrateful group who most likely are where they are as a last resort. It’s a group of people that needs to have their minds and their time completely occupied or they get antsy. It’s a group that finds safety in the group—they may not know it but they neither want nor need individuality.
“Another thing they don’t need is that whole warm, touchy-feely nonsense. That brings emotion into it, and emotion is a loss of control. Oh, sure, it’s a great feeling to have people looking up and cooing at you, but when you’re the one in charge it doesn’t work. When push comes to shove you have to be in control at all times. That’s something that goes from raising a family to running one of these group homes all the way up to commanding the U.S. Army.”
She told me, “I know you’re deep into philosophy and love to flip these sayings out all the time so let me run it down to you in a way that you’ll get: as a great philosopher once said, ‘It is far better to be feared than to be loved.’ ”
That’s another thing that ain’t exactly what you’re gonna hear on the Parenting Network, but it’s worked all these years for the Sarge.
The first mandate I remember her teaching me is the no PDA, or no Public Displays of Affection, mandate.
I was nine or ten years old and the Sarge and Darnell and me had just made our monthly trip to Sleet-Sterling to buy some clothes for her clients. She had an arrangement with Mr. Brandon, who was the manager of the Thrifty Living clothing department, that on the last Wednesday of every month she’d come in and charge a thousand dollars’ worth of clothes for the clients. The next day she’d return all the clothes and slip Mr. Brandon a hundred dollars cash money. He worked some kind of magic with the receipts and the Sarge kept the original copies, which she just-like-that turned in to the Department of Social Services. In a week or two she’d get a check in the mail reimbursing her as part of the clients’ clothing allowance. When the clients really did need clothes we’d head over to the Goodwill to do their shopping.
But there was a reason for this and it all was for the good of the clients.
“Your average Goodwill clothes are so old they’ve been washed hundreds of times,” the Sarge told me as another take-over-her-business lesson. “That’s a virtual guarantee that they’re nice and soft and not irritating to people’s skin. If the clothes have survived that many washings you know they’re high-quality garments. Besides, that designer junk is way overrated, way overpriced and way too flimsy.”
She taught me the same lesson with food. We’d buy steaks and lobster once a month and they’d all go right over to the Sarge’s place and not to the homes. Then we’d head to Costco or the Warehouse Club and buy a ton of boxes of macaroni and cheese or spaghetti sauce and ramen noodles for the clients. If she was feeling real generous we’d go to the army surplus store and buy a bunch o
f Meals Ready to Eat. Social Services paid the Sarge back from the steak receipts.
“Steak and lobster are detrimental to their cholesterol levels,” she’d told me back when I was young and dumb. “Besides, if those MREs are good enough for the brave, patriotic men and women defending this country, then by God, they’re good enough for anyone living in one of my homes.”
Those are nothing but Sargeisms, where you have a long list of reasons why something you do is good for someone else, but surprise! surprise! it always seems that you get something even better out of it.
Anyway, on that day I first learned about the no PDA mandate, we were leaving Sleet-Sterling and going out the front door of the mall. I saw something that nearly made me puke out my breakfast right on the floor: slick Darnell Dixon reached his hand out and gave the Sarge a good, long, healthy squeeze on her behind when he opened the door for her!
I was at that stage when you think any kind of touching of someone’s private parts is about as disgusting as you can get, but, come on, the Sarge? What kind of sick person would want to touch the Sarge?
Especially on her behind?
The Sarge moved like a Serengeti lioness on the Discovery Channel. In a flash she dropped the bag of flimsy, overpriced, overrated designer clothes she’d bought for herself from Sleet-Sterling and pinned Pimp Daddy Dixon against the window with her left hand around his throat and her right hand balled in a fist, ready to knock him deep into next week. She squeezed his throat so hard that his eyes bugged and the juice from his Jheri Curl dripped like a leaky faucet onto the glass of the window.
“Uh-uh,” she said, calm as anything, “you will never show me anything but the utmost of respect anywhere I go. Touch me again like that and once you get out of the hospital you’ll be singing the unemployment blues so quick your head will spin. Need I say more?”
Poor Darnell couldn’t answer because she was crushing his windpipe and he couldn’t nod because she had his head on lockdown on the glass.
She arched that left eyebrow and quietly asked again, “Need I say more?”
Darnell managed to let her know that her message got through by making his eyeballs go from side to side.
She let go of him and he fell to the floor gasping and clutching at his throat.
I was impressed. I’d seen Darnell break three fingers of a man who was just too-too late with his payments on a Friendly Neighbor Loan while singing the “Snap, Crackle, Pop, Rice Krispies” song, I’d seen him beat the mess out of a man who was twice his size, and I’d been in the barbershop and had heard them talking about how he’d stood on the railroad tracks once in the middle of the night and waved some kind of secret Mason lodge hand sign at the engineer and made the man stop the train dead cold to give him a ride to Chicago.
But now I was seeing something else that could be added to the Legend of Darnell Dixon; even after getting totally punked out by the Sarge he picked himself up with massive cool, grabbed the bag of clothes she’d dropped and walked us to the car. If it wasn’t for his little coughs and throat-clearing and spitting you never would’ve known anything had happened.
I think I was the only one who was amazed by what I’d just seen. As we were driving home the Sarge sat as calm as could be in the passenger’s seat and dug Darnell’s neck skin out from under her fingernails with an untwisted paper clip while calmly talking to me about the importance of the no PDA mandate. As if I needed the picture to be painted any clearer.
It caught my eye because it was shaped like Madagascar. I was almost done scraping the loosest of the paint off the living room walls when one of the paint chips flew off in the exact shape of that big island off the coast of Africa. I bent down to pick it up and turned it over in my hands. This was unreal! There was even a old, dried-up, reddish-brown spot right where Antananarivo, the capital, is!
This was definitely a sign. Maybe it wasn’t something as deep or obvious a sign as Jesus waving at me out of a freshly fried tortilla, but no doubt, this Madagascar paint chip had “sign” written all over it.
And it was a sign that was meant for me.
I mean how many other Flintstones even knew what Madagascar looked like, much less where its capital is? The mystery was trying to figure out what someone was trying to tell me.
I kept scraping and thinking, thinking and scraping. I took my wallet out and stuck the paint chip in it. Then I took my student planner to write a note to remind myself why I did that.
At Whittier Middle School they give you this spiral student planner notebook at the beginning of every year. I carry it around with me all the time because at the back they’ve got about thirty lined pages where you don’t have to officially put anything. It’s like they made a mistake and gave you your own little private section of the book.
At the top of each page they’ve got the word “Musings,” and as a philosopher I like the idea of me sitting around and musing. That sounds a lot better than sitting around staring off into space, and a lot of teachers and other ignorant types confuse the two. I use that section to write down any philosophical things that I might think of.
I’ve learned that if you don’t write down what you’re thinking about, no matter how amazing it is you’ll forget it. I don’t like to brag, but I know I’ve had a couple of ideas that were so great and shocking that they’d’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize for Philosophy. The only problem was I didn’t write them down and by the time I got home or got out of the shower they were long gone.
I turned to the back of my planner and wrote, “Madagascar paint chip in wallet—DON’T THROW OUT—important sign from someone.”
Darnell Dixon stuck his head into the room. “Man, put that notebook down. You ain’t getting paid to be no reporter.”
I dropped my planner and started back to scraping.
He said, “I can’t believe you’re still fooling around with that scraper, how many times I got to tell you no one cares? Quit slacking on my time and get busy and lay down that paint, youngblood.”
The Sarge used to joke that when it came to getting slum housing up to close-to-livable conditions Darnell was the man.
Cable bill a little too high? Darnell Dixon can hook you up with a pay-one-time satellite that’ll get you so many channels you could get last Thursday’s high school volleyball scores from Uzbooboostan if you wanted to.
Electric rates more than what seems fair? Darnell Dixon’s a magic man when it comes to making meters turn a whole lot slower.
Short on cash and got some insured property that’s just sitting around? Darnell Dixon’s started more fires than seven out of ten cigarette lighters.
Want to encourage some low-life tenants to move on? Who you gonna call? Darnell Dixon.
He probably could’ve been a tough investment banker, too, ‘cause even though the Sarge only pays him minimum wage he buys a new one of those triple-white Rivy Dogs of Love every other year. And they want some big cash for those babies.
He’s the Sarge’s favorite employee, someone who she says “knows how to get results.” As part of her plan to leave me the business when she retires she kept sending us out together hoping that some of his tricks of the trade would rub off on me. But Darnell was smarter than that, he knew I was a hopeless case and gave up on me years ago. This is part of the reason he hates my guts so much. He figures I have it made and don’t appreciate it. He thinks I’m as soft as you can get. He’s never said it to my face but every time he looks at me his eyes spell out P-U-N-K!
In the Sarge’s eyes Darnell Dixon is also the lord of all painters, only because the brother can completely paint the inside of a two-story, four-bedroom house in five hours and forty-one minutes, closets, attic and basement included. Of course this doesn’t leave much time for cleaning up or prep-ping or taping or cutting or moving anything out of the way, but oh well.
He’s painted over dust balls the size of small watermelons, nails as thick as an elephant’s leg and picture hooks big enough to snag and hold one of those nuclear sub
marines, but the Sarge is more worried about speed than anything else so Darnell is her man. And I’m honored to work with him.
I know that many thousands and thousands of years from now Darnell Dixon will be a true hero to archaeologists, anthropologists and anyone else interested in studying these times. They’ll worship him because his painting has single-handedly trapped whole slews of twenty-first century Flint flora and fauna. If there was a magazine called Archaeology Today Darnell Dixon would be their Person of the Millennium.
When it comes to laying down the paint, this brother does not play. He’s right up there with volcanic ash and the La Brea Tar Pits in the specimen preserving department. Amber and fossilization don’t have a thing on him.
He’s painted over dozens of species of roaches, spiders, centipedes, birds and even small mammals. It would break a lot of kids’ hearts to know it, but half the missing pets in Flint are plastered to the walls of the Sarge’s houses after dying horrible, suffocating deaths buried under layers of discontinued Dutch Boy paint just ‘cause they weren’t fast enough or strong enough to avoid Darnell Dixon and his Roller Brush of Death.
When Darnell finishes a room the walls might be a little lumpy, but you can bet every square inch is slathered with paint, and that’s all that the Sarge and the renters seem to care about when I show them the houses.
If they ever start dropping the nukes or weapons of mass destruction I’m heading right over to one of the houses that he painted ‘cause with all the paint that covers the walls there’s no way in the world that radiation or anthrax could ever get through them.
I finished painting the living room while Darnell finished the kitchen. And the dining room. And three bedrooms. And two hallways.
After I cleaned everything up and changed back into my school clothes it was time for the ride-home inspection.
“Hands,” Darnell said as we stood on the front porch.
I showed him both hands, palms up and palms down.
“Shoes,” he said.