5

My next job was a similar situation. It was at a big retail chain. I was seventeen. I wanted to be there more than home, and to me the other two guys I worked with became like a little family for me, except that they had families and friends of their own.

Rob__ was a drunk, a crack head, and a murderer. When he killed the man, he killed his small son along with him, shooting them both in their car. He was short and wiry, with blood shot eyes, and a white smile to gleam from his dark brown face. He was wise .. They call that street-wise, but really it was almost philosophical except with an ease to it, lacking from the great writers; he knew the dark side of human nature so well that to him it wasn't even dark, it was just human nature.
He had a lot of tattoos but you couldn't really tell because his skin was so brown. He was in his thirties but you couldn't tell by looking at him; he looked more like he was in his twenties. Supposedly he loved me like a little brother. We pushed shopping carts together. Whenever he would sneak off to the gas station to get a forty he'd buy me a Snapple. He said he was so happy he had me to work with everyday. He told me his stories.

Then there was our supervisor. His name was M____. What they called a good-looking black man. He was kind of old, but everyone assumed he was in his thirties, and he didn't tell anyone any different. He was wise too, and the two of them started teaching me. They took me out and taught me how to fish. Every Friday and Saturday night: fishing, then spades and booze, then home. We'd argue:
I'd say, _What do you mean, we're packing up, it's still daylight, we could catch more fish, it's not even close to dark._
_It's dusk,_ they'd say, putting their fishing poles away, _You're a white-boy you can fish out here all night long if you want, but you ain't never gonna catch us n_ggers in these woods at night .. _

Then they taught me to drink. That is, after they found out I didn't know how to drink: R____ sitting on the edge of the tub, laughing at me as I'm puking into his toilet. Him saying,
_Hold on, hold on, little b, ... Watch your head .. no, you're not done yet, just sit on your knees for awhile, b..._
And I'd puke some more.

M___ always called me 'guy', when he was teaching me how to work on cars, or how to cook on the grill, or what was going on in the basketball game. Or little b, because there was this other guy from work who would hang out with us -- this huge black guy -- who's nickname was Big B.

This whole time I worked eighty hour weeks, knowing that their Christian God would kill me before I turned eighteen, because if he had wanted me free he'd a freed me long time ago.
I stopped crossing the road in front of the store. I stopped volunteering to go up to the high, high shelves in the warehouse and stock rooms. I never gave God the chance to kill me.
I bought a car, a convertible, I never ran a yellow light, never rolled through a stop sign.
R__ kept drinking more and more, turning into more and more of an alcoholic. M__ started having woman problems that kept him home. Big B___ got too heavy on the crack. R____ pulled a gun on Big B and me during spades, accusing us of cheating. That was the final blow, and we all naturally drifted apart, only seeing each other at work.
That is, except for M___ and me. He started trying to call me 'son' but I didn't like it even though I tried to hide it; still he could see it and abruptly stopped. Meanwhile everyone else called me his son.

By then I had just turned eighteen and the law finally allowed me my freedom. I moved into a townhouse, and the intense nightmares began. Unwittingly at first, we lived down the street from each other and I went to his house every morning for breakfast before work.
One morning a woman was there. I showed up for breakfast and she instantly disliked me. Turned out this woman was the woman he'd been off and on with for twenty odd years. She was a big black woman, what they called 'juicy.' With a clear, strong voice, and especially laugh. She wore her hair in a very short natural, like the way a guy’s hair would be, and people gossiped that she was lesbian.
I knew the rumor fit well, because M___ had a bisexual vibe. It made him more attractive though, because he had such a pure masculinity that nobody could box him up; his masculinity was so strong it stayed the same no matter what situation, no matter what story, or what relationship.
He was the one who taught me how to be masculine -- that's not right exactly; years later when I was first not-numb, and my masculinity showed up, on June 1^st, it was so much like his and a couple other men like him that I knew it was right and it was mine, it was the masculinity I had always wanted, but had been too numb to feel or own, too numb to feel my own infinitely masculine soul.

Just like that he chose her over me, he didn't want me around anymore; really she didn't, and that was that, I suppose. It was during those months that I realized that I would have to be my own man, instead of identifying with other people and their labels of me, because no one, even a lover, should own you in that way, be able to make you desperate like that, rocked like that.
In order to be safe from that I had to be in the moment, which meant to acknowledge my life and its memories -- and quick, the thought: _no, i'm not ready yet, just a little more time._
That's why I have known for so long that not being-in-the-moment and being numb were the same thing. I needed to be numb awhile longer. It wasn't the summer I was nineteen yet, which meant it hadn't even occurred to me that I needed to recover from the House, I didn't even think about the house in those days.

I understood and accepted that I wasn’t good enough; honorably, underneath my numbness the emotion directed its anger toward no one other than myself.