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Crackhead, 1.26.98
S say when I grow up Ima be a cop killer
S say when I grow up Ima be a crackhead cop killer
S say his mama out of jail, staying with his daddy.
S say she back on that rock.
A child named Chris was acting disrespectfully in Miss Amanda's Free School For The Soon To Be Criminally Insane today so she threw him out. I couldn't resist a small act of terror so I followed him out and told him he could come back in the future but that he must not fuck around in this house. He responded by telling me I was using violent language and I said, that's correct, do you understand it? When he nodded, I shut the door. Shelton, who was taking a break from pasting pictures of red and white blood cells on a piece of poster board said, while looking out the window, "You made him cry, Mr. Jim."
"Good," I said.
Sunday, me and the boys, Shelton, Fermin, Eric, and Glynn, were out at Boy Scout Island in City Park and later Sunday I read in the paper that on Saturday someone had wrapped a newborn baby in a trash bag and placed it under the back tire of a Minivan parked in the mud lot at Boy Scout Island. The baby made enough noise to be discovered before being squashed into the mud, and will "live."
After Boy Scout Island, we cruise to the river but the piece of land we usually play on is beneath five feet of water, river's up, and so we hang around for awhile and watch all the well-behaved suburban gutter punks. Check out those bell-bottoms. While I was waiting for the boys to return from somewhere they had disappeared to, I listened on the radio to this rap song by Tupac Shakur that kept asking the question does heaven have a ghetto? It was four years ago that I first wrote this and although I have never heard the song again, that question has become for me one of great spiritual significance.
I seem to be spending the whole day with these little jokers because now we are on our way to the dollar movies and Shelton, Eric, and Glynn are singing made up songs that make fun of Fermin's hands, the palms of which are covered with hard, scaly, cracked callouses. I sigh deeply several times and wonder if these children can ever stop being petty, hateful, and evil to each other. Just one Sunday. And then I threaten them with death, or worse than that, returning to Dumaine and they obediently shut up.
We get to the show a little early so I give the movie listings to the boys and tell them to decide on the movies they want to see. Glynn says, "I'm going to the movie Mr. Jim is going to." I say, "Okay, but if you go with me you can't talk, you can't act goofy, you can't make jokes, and you can't leave your seat more than once." Shelton chimes in with, "That's right," and Glynn pauses to consider the value of the father figure versus having real fun, and says, "Forget that."
I saw Alien Resurrection, thought it sucked, and the boys saw Home Alone III, and seemed to have enjoyed it immensely. Glynn and Fermin returned to the car first and were telling the best part of the movie, how this kid had a gun and stuff, and also that Shelton was cutting up and cursing at some girls through the whole movie.
"I am not sure that surprises me," I say.
"Why?" Glynn says.
"Because ya'll always act bad when I bring you here."
"No we don't," Glynn says.
"How about the time you laughed at that retarded kid."
"Yeah, but then you said if I couldn't keep from laughing to just walk away and that's what I did, I walked away."
"No," I say, "that was the week after you laughed at the retarded kid and we came back here and there was a whole group of retarded children you wanted to laugh at."
"But I walked away," Glynn says.
"You were laughing as you walked away."
"But I walked away."
And then Shelton and Eric show up and Glynn reminds me that Shelton was cussing in the theater and Shelton says, "I most certainly did, I most certainly did do that."
On the way home I yell at them all again for good measure, and, as they frequently do on the return to Dumaine reality, they all curled up into little balls and fell asleep, or pretended to.