Autobiography of My Dead Brother Read online

  On the way home I was thinking about C.J. and how easy it was to hang out with him. He wasn’t that easy a guy to know, because he never talked about himself. All he ever wanted to do was play his music and be left alone. But I liked him. When we were together, there was never any tension between us.

  That used to be the way it was with me and Rise. We used to hang out at his house, especially when it rained, and just watch television all day. I always had more money than he did and we would go over to the supermarket and buy some junk food to eat while we checked out the cartoons or sometimes the talk shows if they were stupid enough, and they usually were.

  When we were growing up, Rise had always been taller than me and I had to look up to him. Then last year I saw that I had caught up with him and could look him right in the eye. I stood next to him and he saw what was going on, but just sniffed at me and said I still didn’t smell like a real man. We laughed about that, and I liked it when he kidded me.

  Now I was getting the feeling that when Rise was saying one thing, there was something else going on behind the words. He was still talking to me, so I got the feeling that he was saying something that he wanted me to know. I didn’t know why he didn’t tell me that he was taking over the Counts.

  I was easy with Sidney, too. He was a cop and everybody was supposed to be a little uptight with cops because we were all, like, deep down gangsters and just chill prowling to keep people out of our bizness, but Sidney was righteous. When he ran down the numbers about how Iron City had so many brothers hooked up that it looked like Homeyville, you had to pay some attention.

  When I got home, the house was in an uproar. Mom was all upset and Dad had a towel around his foot. There was blood on the floor.

  “What happened?”

  “He cut his foot and he won’t go to the hospital!” Mom said. “I wish we had a police dog here to bite his butt.”

  “How did your foot get cut?” I asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Dad said. “Your mama’s just panicking over nothing.”

  “The fool had an ingrown toenail and cut his foot trying to cut the nail,” Mom said. “I hope it gets infected and falls off!”

  There was a blood trail that led from the doorway to Dad’s chair. It looked serious. “Why don’t you go to the hospital and get it taken care of?” I asked.

  “And have to answer a bunch of stupid questions about how I cut my foot?” Dad shook his head no.

  One of the things I liked about my father was that it was only him and me who did stupid things around the house.

  “When that foot is hurting about two o’clock in the morning, don’t ask me to get up and get aspirins for you!” That from Mom.

  “Can I see it?” I asked.

  It didn’t look that bad, but I thought it needed to be taken care of because it could get infected.

  I thought about doing a cartoon of Dad with his foot all bandaged up. Sometimes when I did cartoons of my folks, it made them laugh. I thought a cartoon of Dad with his hurt foot would just get him madder, so I didn’t bring it up.

  I went to my room and took out my sketch pad, thinking about C.J. asking me how Rise was different. I thought some more about Rise’s new hairstyle. I did three quick sketches, trying to draw his hair, but none of them looked right. Then I set up my small easel and clamped a pad to it and thought I would draw Rise’s face from memory and then the hair would come out naturally. I worked on it for a while, and then Mom knocked on the door.

  “He’s finally decided to go down to the emergency room to have his toe looked at,” Mom said. She had her sweater on and her keys in her hand. “Can you believe that man?”

  I just smiled and she started to go, saw the easel, and asked me if she could look.

  “Go ahead.”

  Mom looked, and smiled approvingly. “That’s a nice drawing,” she said. “Who is it?”

  After my folks left, I looked all over my room for pictures of Rise. I stuck them up with tape all around the drawing I had done.

  I had done pictures of Rise before, and some good ones. Mom had bought me a little desk with drawers to keep my drawings and art supplies in, and I went through it until I found some of the old drawings. I found two good sketches of Rise and compared them to the photographs I had taken of him. The photographs were instant prints in color, but none of them were as good as the sketches. Then I compared the sketches to the drawing I had done from memory. Mom was right—it didn’t look like Rise or any of the photographs.

  Chapter 4

  “Okay, so what we can do is to start a Cuban band,” Benny was saying. “It’s going to be me on sax, C.J. on box, Calvin on bass, and everybody else playing rhythm. We’ll call ourselves the Exiles.”

  “We’re not Cuban,” Calvin said.

  “So what? The Grateful Dead weren’t dead, either,” Benny said. “That’s what you need, a name that’s like completely made up so people know you’re different.”

  “They’re going to know I’m different when I can’t speak Spanish,” Calvin said.

  “And what’s Cuban music about, anyway?” I asked.

  “It’s about rhythm,” Benny said. “This is a party for eleven-and twelve-year-old kids. All they want to do is to shake their little booties around and look good. We pull this off and we’re going to get a hundred and fifty bucks. That’s five of us, and we end up with thirty bucks apiece for two hours’ work.”

  “I thought you said your two cousins are going to play?” Calvin said. “Five and two is seven. That comes to twenty dollars and change apiece.”

  “That’s still ten dollars an hour!” Benny said. “And say somebody hears us and we sound good. Then we get a record deal and it’s get over time.”

  “We should have a movie of us playing on a big screen behind us,” I said. “That way we can keep it reel and real.”

  “Whatever,” Benny said. “You dudes in?”

  “I’m in,” I said.

  “I’m not worried about you,” Benny said. “C.J., you’re the man. You in?”

  I don’t know how C.J. got his mouth to work like that, but he got it going and it came out with a yes.

  Benny went on about how this could be our big break in life and how one day we were going to think back on our start. All the while I knew me and C.J. were thinking the same thing—how he was going to get this past his moms.

  After Benny and Calvin left, I turned and looked at C.J. and he looked away. Near the curb a little girl was beating her doll and screaming at it, and I nudged C.J. for him to look. The girl was about eight and skinny. Her hair wasn’t combed.

  C.J. held out his fists as if he was holding a stick. “Crraaack!” he said.

  “Her?”

  “Her mama,” C.J. said.

  We watched the girl beat up on the doll awhile longer, and it made me feel bad. When C.J. asked me if I wanted to take a walk down to the corner to get a soda, I said okay. We went down to the corner, past a small mountain of garbage bags that hadn’t been picked up that morning and a trillion kids playing around them.

  “My mother was thinking about moving,” C.J. said. “Except she wants me to keep playing piano in the church, and she thinks that if I move away, I’ll just keep finding excuses not to get over and play anymore.”

  “She right?”

  “I want to play.” C.J. played some air piano. “You know I love playing more than anything. And I love the way she sits on me to keep me out of trouble and everything.”

  “But you want to fly?”

  “Fly? I just want to walk a little. Nothing wrong with playing in a Cuban band.”

  “Can you play Cuban music?”

  “There’s no Cuban music,” C.J. said. “There’s just music. If you can play, you can play. And if you can feel it, you can play it.”

  “I can feel it and I can’t play,” I said.

  “That’s because your brain is wired wrong,” C.J. said as we went into the corner grocery. “Your brain is wired up for pictures like
a kid’s brain. I’m sophisticated, like Beethoven and Duke Ellington. You never heard of a sophisticated artist. All artists do is drink cheap wine, draw naked ladies with three eyes, and cut their ears off and stuff like that.”

  We got some sodas and C.J. bought some potato chips. Whenever he was nervous, he always ate too much, which is why he was heavy. That was one reason. The other was that his mother was always bringing him some food. She was like a mother bird always coming back to the nest with a worm or something and C.J. always had his mouth open.

  “I did a picture of Rise and it came out all wrong,” I said.

  “You sweet on Rise?”

  “Get out of here!” I pushed him through the door as we left. “Why you say something like that? He asked me to do it. He said I should write his biography.”

  “He wants his biography, he should write it,” C.J. said. “He knows what he did.”

  “I know what he did too,” I said. “I’ve been with him all his life, or at least most of it. The thing is he’s been changing so much, and I’m looking at him and I’m seeing him, but somehow the picture I did of him isn’t right and I’ve done good pictures of the guy. Some of the pictures I did just last year are really good ones. Even my mother didn’t recognize the picture of him I did the other day.”

  “Maybe you’re past your prime.” C.J. crumpled the empty bag of chips and dropped it in a garbage can.

  “Yo, C.J., how did you finish those chips that fast? You just walked out of the store!”

  “I got a feel for eating potato chips,” C.J. said. “It’s like a secret talent.”

  We got back to the stoop and the little girl was gone, but her doll was lying on the sidewalk, next to the fire hydrant.

  C.J. was talking about how if we got a Cuban band together, we could really make some money. He said that all we needed was one good record contract and that we wouldn’t spend all our money on bling-bling but buy some houses or something useful.

  I was down with what he was saying, but all the time I was thinking about that doll lying on the sidewalk. It was beat-up and dirty, but I knew that at one time it was new and pretty and somebody had loved it. If I had a sketchbook with me, I would have drawn it.

  Once I had started carrying a sketchbook around and drew things that I saw on the street, or people, or even some of the stores along the block. Then some older guys asked why I was drawing them and told me not to do it even when I said I wasn’t drawing them. They took my sketchbook and tore it up right in front of me, which made me feel bad. It wasn’t about what I was drawing so much as it was about me having something I could do. It made me feel good knowing that too. I could draw, like C.J. could play his music. And when you have something you can do, you can always bet that somebody won’t like it and try to take it away from you.

  “So what you got to do”—C.J.’s voice broke through my thoughts—“is to tell your mama to call my mama and ask her if I can play in the Cuban band.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Chapter 5

  Saturday morning. It was the end of June and there were two months left before I would really have to start thinking about school again. Moms had said it would be all right for me to go down to Cooper Union and see about the art courses, but if I didn’t get in she wanted me to find a job somewhere. I was down with me working, but Dad wasn’t. What he said was that work didn’t do you any good unless you needed the job or loved the job. The real deal was that he was always imagining something terrible was going to happen to me. Mom said he was like an old hen sitting on her last egg. I guess the last egg was me.

  Anyway, it’s Saturday morning and the phone rings and there’s my mother’s knock on my door.

  “Yeah?”

  Mom’s head in the doorway. “Yeah? What kind of greeting is that in the morning?”

  “Yes, sweet mother dear.” I sat up in bed. “Sweetest of the sweet and fairest of the fair. Queen of all that’s good and noble.”

  “That’s not bad,” Mom said. “Keep working on it. Benny is on the phone.”

  I got to the phone and Benny asked me if I had heard the news, which ticked me off. I hate it when people ask you one question and that’s not really what they want to say, but then you have to say something to get to the real thing.

  “What news?”

  “The bodega got firebombed last night,” Benny said. “Nobody got hurt, but there’s cops all around the place. Two white cops said they were looking for you.”

  “Get out of here,” I said. “Ain’t no police looking for me.”

  “That’s what Dorothy Dodson told me,” Benny said. “And she doesn’t go around making stuff up. They said that yesterday a young-looking black guy went into the bodega with a gun and threatened the owner.”

  “And who figured out I’m the only young-looking black guy in Harlem?” I asked. “That’s so lame it’s pitiful.”

  “So you think Dorothy’s making it up?”

  I didn’t think she was making it up, because that’s not what she’s about, but I didn’t know why they were looking for me.

  Pop must have heard me talking to Benny. When I got off the phone, he asked what was going on, and I told him, and he asked me if he should contact Joe Charles, our family lawyer. “For what?”

  “I don’t like messing around with the police,” he said. “I haven’t done anything, so there’s nothing to worry about,” I said.

  “So how are you going to find out what’s going on?” Mom asked. She and Dad were standing in the doorway. “You have any idea what this is about?” Dad asked. “I heard Mason wanted to muscle up the guy in the bodega,” I said.

  “Mason? Who’s that?” Dad grunted out the words.

  “He was in the Counts for a while,” I said. “Then he was arrested for holding up the bodega.”

  “The bodega that was firebombed?” Mom asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And how are you involved in it?”

  “I’m not!” I said.

  I went on about how they were making a big deal of the whole thing, but I wasn’t sure. There was nothing for me to worry about, because I hadn’t even been in the bodega and I wouldn’t even know how to set it on fire.

  My folks were real quiet and I could see they were worried. When I sat at the kitchen table and started dialing, Mom was washing dishes, very quietly, and Dad was reading Friday’s paper, also very quietly.

  “Hello, Mrs. Europe?”

  “Hello, Jesse, what are you doing up so early?”

  I looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was five minutes to seven. “I didn’t realize it was early, ma’am. I just wanted to speak to you for a minute.”

  “Speak to me or speak to C.J.?”

  “Uh, you, I guess.”

  “Well, you got me,” Mrs. Europe said.

  “Some of us were thinking about starting a band to play over the summer,” I said. “And the thing we’re missing is a good piano player.”

  “Uh-huh.” She could give out the flattest uh-huhs I had ever heard.

  “And I was thinking that I knew that C.J. wouldn’t want to play in a band that played Latino music, but maybe you could help to convince him that it would be all right because some really nice guys, like me, are going to be in the band. Ma’am.”

  “I thought your mother was supposed to call me and try to convince me,” Mrs. Europe said.

  “Oh.”

  C.J.’s mother laughed and asked to speak to my mother. I gave Mom the phone, telling her who it was. The whole time they were talking, and I could tell it was about the Cuban band, the expression on Mom’s face was about what did it have to do with the bodega and about the police looking for me.

  When Mom hung up, she asked me if there was anything she needed to know.

  “And you know I’m not talking about playing in some band,” she said.

  “If you think I’m into setting fires in bodegas, then you don’t have a clue to who I am,” I said.

  Dad put his pa
per down. “I didn’t know anything about this Mason guy because you didn’t tell me anything,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about this bodega stickup because you didn’t tell me that, either.”

  “I didn’t do it, so I didn’t think it was that important,” I said.

  “It involves my son, it’s important,” Dad said. There was a catch in his voice, and I could see he was getting really emotional. “You got that? You got that, Jesse?”

  “Yeah, I got it,” I answered.

  I hung around for a while, did some quick sketches of Rise, and then called C.J. and asked if he could meet me downstairs. I put on my sneakers and some shorts, then changed into some jeans and went down. C.J. was on the stoop with Bianca and Miss Essie. I asked him if he wanted to go over to see the bodega, and he said okay and got up.

  “You don’t say good morning to your elders, Jesse?” Miss Essie asked.

  “Good morning, Miss Essie.”

  “Did that hurt your face?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  On the way over to the bodega, C.J. said his mother was “thinking” about letting him play in the band. He said that was a good sign.

  “What did your father say?”

  “He’ll go along with anything she says,” C.J. said.

  There was a small crowd on the corner where the bodega was. An emergency fire truck was parked down the street, and some guys in yellow slickers and fire helmets were standing outside the store drinking coffee. We got closer and saw that the whole store was burned black.

  “Oh, man!” C.J. whistled through his teeth. “It looks like a bomb hit it.”

  “So what do you think?” The voice came from behind me and made me jump. I turned and saw Sidney standing a foot away from me.

  “It’s really something,” I said, which sounded kind of stupid.

  “I wonder if you would do me a favor,” Sidney said. “I want you to come over to the Island with me and just tell Mason how it looks. Think you can do that?”

  “Rikers Island?” I asked.

  “I can do that,” C.J. volunteered.