Chapter Ten
November
“THERE’S NOTHING I can do to make it up?”
I studied my laptop and the electronic grade book with rows of assignments, scores, and student averages. The column of zeroes beneath Shawn’s name was almost impressive. He’d missed everything from the past two months due to a combination of truancy and falling asleep in class. Now here he was, staring down at me and seeming five seconds away from a meltdown. He was probably expecting me to say he had to make up the credit in night school next semester.
“There’s not a lot of ways I can fix this for you, buddy.”
I turned the laptop so he could see the numbers that were damning him with unyielding objectivity. I’d tried to give him a couple of random points for participating—even though his participation had been limited to breathing—but it had merely managed to lift his average to a measly 3 percent. None of his homework was done, and he didn’t even know who Napoleon was, which indicated that he deserved to fail. Still, something about Shawn kicked in my overprotective nerve, and I wanted to help him out.
Shawn skimmed the screen once, then again, and I could practically hear the wheels in his head churning while he tried to figure out a way to scrape by with a passing grade. Every few seconds he started to speak, paused, and then shook his head. He had to know that every scheme he came up with would not work. Not with me, anyway. I was infamous for my strict policy on makeup work.
“Fuck.”
I nodded in agreement. “Why did you wait until now to show concern? It’s the damn middle of November.”
“Because.” Shawn shifted from foot to foot, fidgeting and biting his lip like I was interrogating him about something more serious than cutting out on every group project. He looked at the open door of the classroom, then back at me, and walked over to push it shut. “Look, it’s some real personal shit, okay? My dad is in jail, I got to be picking my little sister up from school all the time, and I work at night.”
“Work where?”
“Rodriguez, come on….”
I turned the laptop screen back to me and tapped my fingers on the track pad. Shawn’s reputation had found its way to my ear long before he’d stepped foot in my classroom. Typically, I disregarded rumors about a student until I taught the kid for myself, but him being truant for three weeks at the start of the school year had not made a good impression at all. He’d managed to live up to every expectation—bad attitude, short temper, and constantly LTA (long term absent)—but there was still something about him that activated my guidance counselor instincts. He wasn’t a well-behaved student, but I’d seen worse, and I could tell he had a story buried beneath all of the sarcasm and defensiveness.
“You gotta help me out, Rodriguez,” Shawn insisted. He combed his fingers through his dark blond hair, knotting them up and then releasing with a loud exhale. “Look, I can’t do p.m. school or summer school. I got no one to watch my sister.”
“Who do you live with?”
“People. That ain’t the point. I can’t get stuck being in this building every night and over the summer!”
“Shawn, you’re not even here during the day, which is why you’re in this position.”
He opened his mouth to protest, but then the side of his mouth twitched up into a silly grin. “Okay, good point, but still, you gotta help me, Mister.”
“I don’t have to do anything.”
“Please. I’ll buy you breakfast for the rest of the year.”
“You don’t get here early enough.”
Shawn thumped his hand down on the desk. “Come on, Rodriguez. I thought we were cool.”
Hiding a grin, I crossed my arms over my chest and studied the rows of assignments again. “Let’s make a deal.”
“What deal?” He was instantly wary. “I can’t be doing no after-school stuff.”
“I don’t care where you do it, but you need to start putting in that work or you’re screwed. The only way this is going to happen is if you make up both assessments and every homework from this marking period, and do the chapters on the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment in the prep book.”
I ignored the dawning look of horror on his face and jerked my thumb at an orange textbook on my desk. “Don’t give me that face, because this is a good deal. And I can tell you now that this is a one-shot deal. I don’t believe in magical makeup packets and get-out-of-p.m.-school-free cards for kids who can’t be bothered to show up. You feel me?”
“Yeah, I feel you, Mister.” Shawn leaned against the desk behind him. “But what if I don’t finish in time?”
“You have no choice.”
“Yeah, but what if I can’t?”
I snorted. “Stop making excuses before you even try.”
“I don’t got time for—”
The door opened, and Shawn stopped midsentence. David poked his head through. Brow furrowed, he looked from me to Shawn.
“Hey guys. Try to remember to keep the door open during all after-school meetings, okay?”
The look I nailed him with should have shriveled his insides until he keeled over on the linoleum, but he was riveted on Shawn. The kid looked like he wanted to punch David in the face.
“Wow, son. We’re talking about some shit, and I wanted the door closed.”
“I understand that, but it needs to stay open.”
“What the fuck for? What are you trying to say?” Shawn’s voice rose.
I stood up and clapped a hand on Shawn’s shoulder while giving Mr. Oblivious an exasperated look. David was definitely not picking up on the vibes Shawn was throwing, and continued to stare into the classroom like he was waiting for a PowerPoint presentation on how to deal with irrationally angry children.
“Did you need something, Mr. Butler?” I asked when he failed to speak.
David didn’t get the hint and kept staring at Shawn, who had drawn himself up to his full six feet. The kid was big for a fifteen-year-old, and looked like an undergrad instead of a sophomore in high school.
Finally David turned to me. “They’re looking for your attendance.”
I knew it was an excuse, but I pointed to the blue folder with my bubble sheets. “There you go.”
“Thanks.”
David shot me a harried glare and grabbed the folder before marching out of the room with a click of his boots. Once the sound faded far enough down the hallway, Shawn stormed across the room to shut the door with a defiant kick.
“I can’t stand his faggot ass.”
“Watch it, Shawn.” I dropped into my chair. “Number one, you don’t say that word, and number two, you shouldn’t talk about your teacher like that or give him that attitude.”
“But he be getting me tight in class, Mr. R. Always talking shit and calling me out to make me look stupid. He pretty much told me his day was better when I didn’t show up. Little homo ass bitch.”
Nice one, David.
“I’m not going to tell you that Mr. Butler has to be your favorite teacher, but you have to respect him. And the gay slurs are unacceptable. Next time I hear it coming out of your mouth, you can pretty much count on me writing you up and making sure it leads to a suspension.”
“What’s the big deal? I’m not talking about you.”
“Okay, so can I go around making racial slurs just because I’m not talking about the person standing in front of me? Can Ms. Price go around talking about spics just because she isn’t directing it at me? Can I kindly request her to stop hiring so many crackers because I’m starting to feel like the last man standing?”
“No, that’s some crazy shit.”
“Yeah, so what you’re saying is some crazy shit. Talking about gay people is the same thing, kid.”
Despite all the tough-guy talk, he still seemed surprised to hear me curse. After a moment of giving me the side-eye, Shawn sucked his teeth and shoved his hands into the pockets of his black jacket. “Whatever. I don’t got no trouble with gay people. They’re everywhere in this fucking school. They don’t call it McQueery for nothing.”
And that was the damn truth. The nickname was widely used because the school had such a high population of gay students and gay teachers, but his excuse just made his lack of wherewithal even more unacceptable. It was starting to frustrate me, so I ended the conversation with a wave of my hand.
“Shawn, I need to get going. Clean up your attitude and download your assignments from the website. The marking period ends in two weeks.”
“Aiight, Mr. R. Thanks.”
I nodded and watched him go. The annoyance didn’t dampen the concern, and I was unable to stop wondering what he did for money that caused him to fall into a coma-like sleep every day in class. I had another student who worked nights in a Laundromat, but something told me Shawn wasn’t folding clothes to make cash. Between me, David, and the guidance counselor, we’d tried to get in touch with a parent almost ten times, but never received a response. It was coming to the point where I knew a caseworker would be put in charge of the situation, and even though I hated to watch that go down, I suspected it might be for the best. The burgeoning mental image of Shawn raising his little sister by himself would not fade.
Slamming my laptop shut, I groaned and put my head on the desk. There were piles of papers, folders, and student work beneath my face, but I didn’t care. The day had been long, and due to my students having serious misconceptions about geography, my lessons were behind once again.
I shut my eyes and thought about the long commute home, the crush of people on the train, and the mind-numbing volume of music my father or Raymond would inevitably be playing. In the past couple of months, my house had transformed into a messy bachelor’s pad, and even though I was nowhere close to being a neat freak, the place disgusted me more often than not when I took a moment to look around on Friday night. Apparently being the responsible one also meant being the clean one, and all of a sudden the motherfuckers had me mistaken for the maid. Going to my favorite dive bar to get toasted for the trek home was better than rushing back to that disaster.
My life choices were narrowed down to either arguing drunk or arguing sober, and the latter always left me ten times more stressed than I’d been at the start of the fight. The internal debate ping-ponged in my head, back and forth, left and right, until the only thing I was certain of was that the predicament I’d found myself in was going to give me an ulcer and a ton of gray hairs.
I sat mulling over my options until I heard another pair of footsteps moving down the hallway. After twenty years, the tread of Nunzio’s motorcycle boots and the jingle of his wallet chain were unmistakable, so I didn’t look up when he strode into the room, shut the door, and stopped by my desk. His fingers wound into my hair and combed back, petting me like he was trying to soothe a feral cat.
Leaning into the touch, I released a soft sigh and kept my face pillowed in my arms. The feel of his long fingers dragging through my hair, scraping my scalp, and the rough pad of his thumb brushing along the curve of my ear almost drove me to wrap myself around him and enjoy being spoiled.
There had been a time when I could do that—stretch out beside him, on top of him, or cuddle up with him—and not feel anything more than the contentment of unconditional friendship, but after fooling around with him, things had changed. Now, as he chuckled quietly and let me bask in the attention, my mind was playing tricks on me and whispering that going back to his place to extend this mostly innocent show of affection would be a good idea. But the logical part of my brain that acted on more than base desires and instincts knew better.
Evidence of that had come the week before, when I’d spent the night at his apartment after a spectacularly shitty day at work.
Vegging out while sprawled all over each other had been anything but platonic when I’d been incapable of not ogling his bare chest, the V of his torso, and the crotch of his sweatpants. In turn, I’d felt him tracing my mouth with his eyes, and his casual touches had grown frequent; his hands had wandered all over me until he’d wound up squeezing my thigh with his knuckles grazing the bulge under my fly.
After two hours of simmering tension, Nunzio had turned on the hardest-core gay porn he could find. We’d watched each other jerk off while two guys played edging games on his television. We hadn’t touched until the white-hot surge of an oncoming ejaculation had led to me kissing him.
There had been no fucking, but making out for a half hour after shooting our loads only led to a conflicting series of feelings and fantasized scenarios that had nothing to do with the just platonic sex haha story I kept tossing around in my head. But we’d slept in separate rooms, and everything had been normal after that, so who the hell knew?
“Hey.” Nunzio’s hand slid down to glide along the side of my face. “You okay?”
“Just have a headache.” I turned my head to peer up at him. His dark hair was messier than usual and his blue eyes shot through with red. “Are you okay?”
He shrugged. “This day just needs to end.”
I nodded in agreement. “Are you heading out?”
“Yeah. Why don’t you come with me? Get some dinner.” His hand moved to my shoulder and rubbed out the tension. I made an appreciative sound. “We could order something or whatever.”
“I should go home and make sure no one has died today.”
Nunzio pulled away. “Are you serious?”
“Unfortunately.” I shrugged. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. I feel sorry for you, not me.” Nunzio crossed his arms over his chest, the leather of his jacket creaking. “What are you doing next week?”
“What’s next week?”
“Thanksgiving, man. Are you doing shit with the fam?”
I’d forgotten all about the upcoming holidays. Either that, or I’d buried them in my alcohol-saturated brain, since it was the first holiday season since my mother’s death. Just the thought tightened my chest, and I wanted to go back to burying my face in my arms.
“Either my aunt will invite us over, or they’ll ask to do dinner at the house.”
Nunzio grabbed a student chair and straddled it. “They’re still gonna do all that even now?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it, but no one has said otherwise, so I’m going to assume they have the same plan. It’s not like there is anywhere better to have a get-together. Both my aunt and uncle have small apartments.”
He continued to stare at me, so I pushed on, desperate to change the topic. If someone had told me adulthood was equal parts being broke, depressed, and taking care of my family financially, I would have opted out and tried to find a one-way ticket to Neverland.
“What about you? Your parents doing anything?”
“No,” Nunzio scoffed. “Apparently they don’t celebrate holidays anymore. Besides, I haven’t seen them in almost a year.”
I remembered that—the past Christmas, Nunzio had wound up having his own family drama when he’d walked out on them in the middle of Christmas Eve dinner and fucked and drank his way through New Year’s. He’d never given me the details about what had happened, but I suspected it had a lot to do with his parents coming down on everything he did. It had been that way for as long as I remembered, and watching him grow up being rejected for not being the perfect Italian son had played a large part in my own decision to stay closeted.
As much as Nunzio said he didn’t care about having the approval of his parents, I knew it hurt him to be considered a disappointment, and that had been the Medicis’ consensus, even before they’d walked in on him railing some frail blond boy in high school. His gayness wasn’t the root of the problem, but it had been the final nail in the coffin of their relationship.
“You can come over and spend it with us. My aunt will cook a pernil and pasteles. You can chill and watch football with Raymond and keep him entertained while I try to talk my dad out of drinking himself to death. Sounds like a blast, right?”
It sounded like a goddamned tragedy, but Nunzio grinned like I’d just offered him a gold bar.
“You sure? Because I’m gonna come. Don’t offer if you’re not sure.”
“Of course I’m sure. I can have something normal to look at when everyone else starts driving me insane.”
“If I’m the only piece of normalcy you got, then you’re up shit creek without a paddle.”
“I think I’m there anyway.” I forced myself to stand, arching back in a stretch. I wished I could teleport back to Queens. I could take a cab, but I didn’t feel like shelling out forty bucks because I was too lazy to sit my ass on the train for an hour. “So you going out or going home?”
“I wanted to go with you,” he pointed out. “You don’t even want to grab something before getting on the train?”
“Nah, I don’t want to spend the money.”
“It’s okay, I got you.”
“Nunzio, stop asking me.”
He scowled. “Fine. I’ll just go to the gym since you want to be a fucking lame ass.”
“I’m fine with being a lame ass.”
Nunzio picked up a piece of student work. His mouth crooked up in a half smile, and I wondered if he’d grabbed the essay in which one of my kids had referred to Marie Antoinette as a thot—“that ho over there.”
“David was lurking around and waiting for you,” he said. “He made tracks when he saw me, though. I think I still make him nervous.”
“Maybe because you’re really aggressive.”
Nunzio dropped the paper on the desk while I packed up. “Oh please. I haven’t even looked twice at his prepubescent ass since that night at the happy hour. He’s lucky he got to touch my dick the one time that he did.”
“You seemed into it at the time.”
“Yeah, because I was drunk at the time.”
I avoided his gaze and stuffed folders of ungraded work into my backpack. Whenever David came up, the intensity of the conversation took on a vibe I wasn’t altogether comfortable with. It was in the way Nunzio’s voice sharpened, the way his eyes narrowed and mouth pursed into a slash.
“Why? Are you still into him?”
“No. He’s a good-looking dude, though.”
“If you say so.”
I met his gaze. “I already told you I have no interest because he has a boyfriend.”
“I heard they broke up.”
“Did they?”
“Yup. You could jump on that now if you wanted, and your morals wouldn’t be corrupted. I bet that’s what he was coming to tell you—that his ass is now free to be claimed by random dudes at the club, but he’d rather be full of your dick since you turned him out so good last time.”
“Wow, you really went in with that scenario.”
“Shut up.”
I jerked the zipper around my bag, but it was a tight fit with the amount of folders and papers. I hadn’t graded in two weeks, and I was two major assignments behind. It seemed like I’d been playing catch up since the first week of school.
“He didn’t want to bring himself in here to say whatever he had to say, so I’m going,” I said.
“You sure you don’t want to wait around and make sure he isn’t going to offer up his hole?”
“You’re obsessed.”
“No, I’m not.”
He was, but I let the issue drop and grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair. “Walk me to the train. Maybe David will show up so you can make fun of him some more.”
“If only.”
We left the building and parted ways. I spent my subway ride slumped in the seat, nearly dozing off twice before I was disrupted by an overexcited religious zealot preaching about hell and damnation. She was followed by a guy who was panhandling while wearing a brand-new pair of Jordans. By the time I was in Queens and getting off the train at Sutphin Boulevard, I was done with people for the day.
I made the walk from the train to my house without looking up, pretending not to hear the voices of numerous people calling out to me as I crossed the avenues and wound my way through the park. Living in the same neighborhood I’d grown up in was a pain in the ass primarily because I knew everyone, from the crackheads who hung out by the LIRR to the guy in the bodega who used to sell me loose cigarettes back when I’d been too broke to buy a pack.
Running into old high school friends wasn’t exactly a blast either, unless it was one of the curious guys I’d brought over to the gay side for twenty minutes in heaven on one of the rooftops. They always wanted to relive those old times, but I wasn’t even in the mood for that these days.
The grit and grime of South Jamaica didn’t make me reminisce about running through the streets with Nunzio back when the subway had taken tokens, Mister Softee had been seventy-five cents, and we’d been just fine sweating it out on the pavement as long as we could do it with a bag of chips and a quarter water. All I could see were the same sorry-ass bums hanging out on the corner, the avenue filled with litter, and the loitering undercover cops who still thought folks in the neighborhood were too oblivious to spot a DT.
Morale sank to an all-time low and deteriorated further once I turned onto my block. The house my mother had worked her ass off to pay for was starting to match my dismal perception of the entire neighborhood. I couldn’t tell if our lack of attentiveness was finally setting in, or if the depressing reality of the holidays was casting everything in shades of gray.
It was hard not to think I had let her down. Try as I might to convince them, Raymond wouldn’t get a job, my father wouldn’t stop drinking, and my childhood home was all but falling apart. The fact was cemented by the handful of bills in the mailbox—one was a cut-off notice for the electricity, another was a letter from the bank reminding me I was late paying the mortgage.
I crumpled the envelopes in my hand, shame warring with frustration after I stepped into the house. The heat was cranked up so high it was oppressive, and I caught a whiff of stale beer.
Dropping my backpack by the door, I kicked it shut and strode through the house. Each room was messier than the last, and every light was burning. The kitchen counter was littered with dirty dishes and glasses, the garbage was overflowing, and there was an array of laundry tossed here and there in different rooms.
I stomped up the stairs, ready to unleash my rage on Raymond or my father, but stopped dead at the unmistakable sound of bedsprings creaking. For one horrifying moment, I thought it was coming from my mother’s bedroom—the bedroom my father now occupied—but then female moans emanated from Raymond’s side of the hallway.
My relief was mirrored by revulsion, and I clenched my jaw. Great. Now I would have to listen to him fuck all night.
More aggravated than ever and spoiling for a fight, I peeked into the master bedroom. Joseph was sprawled on the bed, snoring and nearly sliding off the edge of the bed. He was drunk again.
I deflated.
Moving farther into the room, I examined the man who had been in and out of my life without ever pausing to stay for more than a moment at a time. Beneath the haggard face and unkempt appearance, he looked like me and Raymond. He was tall and lean, had once been attractive and strong, and I knew him to be far more intelligent than anyone would ever assume. But he’d wasted all of the things that should have made him successful.
Even now with his barely functioning liver, even after my mother had died so abruptly and so young, he was still knocked out and reeking of booze. Sometimes I wondered what had happened to make him give up. I’d asked him those questions for years and had never received an answer more substantial than, “I’m just no good. It’s not in me.”
For reasons beyond the realm of my comprehension, I tugged off his tan boots one by one. They thudded to the floor, but he didn’t even twitch at the sound. Shaking my head, I removed his jacket and wrenched off a scarf twisted around his neck. It seemed like he’d stumbled in after a bender and keeled over right after stepping into the room.
“C’mon, Pops,” I muttered and guided his limbs to coax him beneath the blankets. “Get in before you get cold.”
Joseph mumbled something unintelligible, but didn’t protest when I covered him up. His mouth shifted into a brief, tired smile before he began to snore once again.
I almost backed away, but something caught my eye. On the floor by his now discarded boots was an old picture of my parents. They couldn’t have been older than seventeen or eighteen, were grinning at the camera with big white smiles, and were wearing New Year’s party hats.
The anger that had sluiced through me in hot, violent waves transformed into a depression that sank into my bones like lead. I placed the picture on the bedside table next to him, careful not to set it in the sticky spot that had gathered from a long-dirty glass, and hurried from the room.
The sound of my father’s deep breathing, my brother and his girl, and the more distant laughing and music emanating from the neighbors culminated in my mind until all I wanted was to go upstairs and figure out which bottle to open first.