Black Edge

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Black Edge Three Short Stories

Eustacie Matthew 2

Copyright by Eustacie Matthew All rights reserved ISBN-13: 9781479153282 ISBN-10: 1479153281

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Dedication Dedicated to the 'Ancestors.'

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Prologue aston Wade fights against systems; he takes state workers hostage, mainly to correct an injustice, he feels, was done to him—his money intercepted by the state, seemingly had taken one step forward and two backward—he’s pushed to the edge by a state the size of New York

that ultimately takes him out in a hail of gun fire.

Going out in a hail of gun fire is worse than starting a conflict in someone else’s home over material things; it’s ‘a horse of a different color,’ crosses the line of human decency. Rebecca and her husband, Bantubain, trump decency with battling each other in their home, like ‘Love and HipHop,’ over material things, hate, loud acrimony, causing Tunka and Lucinda Menin to make split-second decisions to find solutions and end their violence; the last resort leads them not to kill, but to call 911; you might’ve done things differently . . . . . . always in need of more and more pleasure, for the world takes it from you and the Female on the Planes of the City. Not unlike Cinderella’s woes, her duration of slavery, drudgery, dehumanization, before the ‘glass slipper,’ Romero gets her happy ending, too, tried in relationship fire she wants to control with sugar, spice and all that’s nice with her body.

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Contents 1. Prologue 2. Dad (First three Chapters)

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Chapter 1

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Dad aston Wade’s path in life was never revealed to him early, like everybody else with a premonition, who’d meet a perceived, dramatic end to a way of life and had prepared for it. Changes are always occurring in this world, affecting you one way or another, but getting out of their way might save your life, just as preparation and ultimately

getting out of Hurricane Sandy’s force and wind power and rain destroying properties, uprooting people’s lives caught in their destructive path as a whole blown through New York and New Jersey, October 2012, made sense to those who had taken cover, and since meteorologists on TV had broadcasted her impending fury barreling up the East Coast with winds exceeding seventy-nine miles per hour, for everyone to see the combination and impact of wind-driven rain, make preparations, take cover, or suffer the predictable consequences riding her out, these reports saved many lives; a glimpse of the forces with which he had to contend in the future had cerebral content ideally similar to the ‘Minority Report,’ in which PreCrime Captain John Anderton plays a highly specialized, perceptive role selectively analyzing conspiracies, schemes leading up to crimes, his own crime, the violence that seems inevitable in that world, and destroy their developments; he and supporting character, Danny Witwer, deal with them the best way they know how to stop mayhem, lawlessness, before they happen, which show the script is onto something that Wade might’ve done well exploring and applying some of its applications to fix his own universe of internalizations, the thoughts that drove him forward; the premonitions the movie purports to show Anderton addressing suggest what can be possible possessing the foresight to see consequences, destructions, before they happen in the future, and thwart, misdirect, their causes, or prepare for them with time to set up a plan to meet the inevitable, like a society deals with pregnancy, police brutality, but it was not that simple to provide a way out of his predicaments on this beautiful afternoon, a brilliant sunlight shining nowhere else, but on New York, on her aliens about town, as well as on the religious, murderers, predators and prey. Driving his red 318i, five-speed, on Nostrand Avenue, one way, that snaked toward the dirty south, the sea, allotted time, expense—gas, the wear and tear of the machine, distance—to think, reveal some truths about himself, latently evolved truths that he had never acknowledged. Lately, they’ve become burdensome just to think of their ramifications that had affected him generally; he had often laid the burdens of life down in the sea, like the Christians, who said they’re . . . gonna lay their burdens / down by the riverside (why they chose a

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riverside, and not the sea, makes little sense, when you consider the size and scope of the sea, but believe what you want), cleansed himself in it, and would rather be reaching for the waves to cool off after a long day in the classroom teaching language to ninth-graders than fighting the traffic. For some ironic reason explained in his propensity to drive, riding out the collections of his thoughts seemed a fitting endeavor; you’d have known something was bothering him, how often he had got into his car to think on the things he couldn’t change; streaming across the avenue yesterday gave him aimless reliefs to see places, review things, awkward dispositions in which he had found himself. The low-ball negotiations made in a salary discussion had cut his potential to raise his financial status in half, he thought, after reviewing his life for gains he had made in the city; he could’ve held out on salary matters a little longer, having applied for that paralegal position at Werbel and Sadat, but that’s all gone, now; far off the mark of applying a plan to raise it, he hated it; would he eventually create a product he could sell?

He dabbled in mail order, publishing, in Bedford Stuyvesant, but abandoned them and held onto teaching, out of necessity, for a business takes time to grow, increase the bottom line, lacking investors, seed money and business smarts. Teaching was not a business, but a job, so the Atlanta teacher scandal would’ve further distressed him, choosing it as a career path, for he loathed cheating on tests scores, and perhaps had never cheated in school. Quite exemplary behavior in school, his honor, integrity, contrasting the Atlanta, Georgia, teacher cheating scandal, which stirred up, like defensive and agitated yellow jackets, legal and moral outcries, court proceedings shown on TV, to flesh out the truth; wasted time, legal expense, that cannot be recovered; nor the death of the chief defendant, superintendent, Beverly Hall, before she had testified, advanced the justice the prosecutors’ case sought. She and 34 other educators indicted by a Fulton County Grand Jury, in March 2013, for ‘racketeering, other criminal charges, alleging she had orchestrated a scheme to inflate achievement-test scores for thousands of Atlanta students, many of them the poor, minority children she [had] professed to champion,’ Hall strongly denied the charges, ‘to her dying breath,’ her lawyer(s) said, Monday. The charges might’ve been exaggerated, overblown, politicized; the good she did, while Fulton County’s superintendent, and secrets have been interred with her bones, but the allegations survived her; why proceed with prosecuting the other defendants, when the chief defendant died? She had faced up to 45 years in prison if convicted, declared the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Convicted, following the jury’s deliberations, the verdict was, guilty, Wednesday, 1 April 2015, of racketeering for their roles played in a scheme to inflate students’ scores on standardized exams. The case had people scratching their heads,

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some being interviewed, said, the convicts should ‘lay in the bed they had made,’ but others, like a defense attorney, said it was wrong to throw educators in jail. Before sentencing, 11 former Atlanta public school educators were immediately taken into custody. It was quite interesting the Jury reached a verdict on ‘April fools’ day. What ties does April fool’s day have with the Jury’s verdict? Probably nothing, for those who want to be teachers these days would overlook this type of tarnished professionalism, replacing it with honor and respect found in working honestly, and become teachers.

The efforts to educate the children will have to go on, in spite of low pay and ingratitude from the districts, the whims of those with ranks as low as assistant principals, who’s actions would discourage anyone with higher standards; the whole picture, standards and pedagogy had climbed onto special places of honor with himself, and he would’ve refused to advance the illegal schemes of which the educators were accused.

A critical way he made capitalist’s decisions emotionally based on a perceived job security wouldn’t have fully described his fight for benefits ‘cause he had none, and having analyzed it, you could say his propensity to accept low wages, his low-ball negotiations in job interviews, lack of selfconfidence, had guided him in his reasoning of things to accept teaching for its low pay; it needed him and others, like him, to teach; Crown Heights, the hot bed of livable glory, a part of New York that spurned police brutality, had clung to the memory of Amadou Diallo, a graceful man, whom cops in the Bronx gunned down, ‘In Cold Blood,’ says The New York Post. ‘Police kill unarmed man in hail [of] 41 bullets.’ The shooters, probably psychopaths, impulsively quick to draw their guns to fire, failed to make needed assessments of the incident and encounter on split-second decisions before firing their guns; that called into question their policemen academy training. The academy may not be blamed for their officers’ criminal actions, but cops policing tactics being placed in the spotlight led people to ask, what goes on in a cop’s mind to emerge in these ugly scenes? You’d get all kinds of answers. Cops in New York have left trails of depraved policing that went beyond their scope of duty. Salon.com starts its piece on police brutality here with a horrendous synopses: ‘New York police officer Justin Volpe’s guilty plea Tuesday to charges of depriving Abner Louima of his civil rights, conspiracy, obstruction of

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justice and witness tampering came as no real surprise, given that all last week was spent with his cronies in the New York Police Department testifying to what we already knew: that on Aug. 9, 1997, Volpe and three other police officers beat Louima brutally in a police cruiser, and then back at the station house Volpe sodomized Louima with a broken broom handle, while a fellow officer held him down.’ Empathize, for a moment, with Mr. Louima in that conflict. Have they retained any of the good training at the academy to preserve lives and not shoot unarmed citizens, or brutalize them? Cops, like Kenneth Boss, who fired, have been acquitted of criminal charges in the Diallo case, cleared of wrongdoing by the NYPD Firearms Discharge Review Board and given his gun back. The court and politicians, cops seemingly felt, would exonerate them of their policing tactics, even when they show the appearance of committing a crime; others argued that cops, in many circumstances policing New York, behaved as if they were high on racism, fear of the unknown, their own racist idiosyncrasies playing tricks on them, causing them to commit police brutality crimes in New York, Missouri, or California; plausible conclusions, but based on arguments that probably would’ve failed to prove police racism emerging out of their depraved psyche and feelings in court; however, their actions captured on video might, as the fatal shooting of Walter Scott by a North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer, named Michael Slager, April 4, 2015, showed. That shooting captured on video landed Slager behind bars and charged with murder for use of excessive force by a police officer. What was he thinking at the time, a foot pursuit, but trumped that acceptable policing tactic to reach for his gun and fire up to eight bullets into him, thinking he’d lie about the truth? Unbelievable. They’re hiding behind a culture on which videos are shining lights, exposing police brutality, which the people need to eradicate and prevent the harbinger of a police state from taking root in a society seemingly protecting the rich and deceptively degrading the average citizen’s human rights.

90% of cases examined and reported, on March 4, 2015, by the Justice Department showed the Ferguson police law enforcement department had used excessive force against African Americans, or 10

targeted them for frivolous arrests, traffic stops, outrageous fines in court, and a review of 161 such cases . . . found that none of the incidents resulted in police disciplinary actions taken against . . . sociopaths in the police department(s). The report described the deplorable caliber of some people running law enforcement departments and municipal courts, who might’ve broken the law. Describing a chimpanzee as ‘grotesque,’ and liken that mammal to a man, as intelligent as President Obama, who is easy to approach, a Nobel laureate, lacked logic, and the guys sending racially charged e-mails, written by members of the municipal court, have not gotten over their ‘grotesque’ racism, antisocial behavior, yet, not after so many marches, police brutal tactics in Alabama, attack dogs biting citizens demonstrating in the streets, were used to wipe it out; emails are free speech, but targeting people to drag them into court to extract exorbitant fines from them looked suspicious, and it showed police overreaching. Reproachable. In contrast, President Obama’s character showed he’s an exemplary figure, sitting in the highest office in the land, who took the political reigns with his team, on which Timothy Geithner, Former United States Secretary of the Treasury, sat, and fixed the country’s financial mess former President George Bush and his political cronies had left him, in his presidency, bringing back the country from the abyss of financial ruin. Low-lives will always try to elevate themselves, while trying to trample others’ standing in life, to satisfy their own demented perceptions of the universe that produced Mrs. Obama, many people regard with dignity, respect, honor, or intellect, in contrast to the barkers of hate in a tiny area of United States. Videos have shed light on the topic of police using excessive force, confirmed the people’s views and conclusions that the police had overreached their authority, painted them with an evil brush; with them seated in these offices only maintained a dying and racist status quo. Slowly being replaced by the people’s genes, this type of entrenched racism die hard, so it would often raise its ugly head to stir up strife, disgust, but videos will continue to bring it out of the closet for the world to see who the true racists in our world are, but it’s yet to be seen whether they’ll be punished for their crimes, like the rest committing the same.

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A video showed Daniel Pantaleo, committing the infamous ‘chokehold’ that ended Eric Garner’s life on Staten Island, New York, July 17, 2014; people saw excessive use of police force, but a so-called ‘Grand Jury,’ which, by the way, did see the tape, or one would’ve expected that the panel did see the same video of the kill everyone saw, which had not been transparent from the day it was brought to America, 1683, by colonists, failed to indict Pentaleo, stunning everyone, for videos have evidentiary value; anyone can get a divorce presenting infidelity on video into evidence; going into a divorce proceeding without a video, or image showing grounds for divorce, sets up a losing strategy; eye-witness accounts couldn’t have painted a more criminally vivid take-down scene, as in the Pantaleo take-down, than that video; the digitized version of their sorrows seen, people demonstrated against every grievance with the system, police brutality; seas of humanity from across the social landscapes of America, all shades, colors, cultures and customs, came out against injustice, police overreaching, grieved the dead; their values saw a murder on video tape, so they drew conclusions, and with so many demonstrators on the streets of New York, chanting, “Hands up” and “Don’t shoot,” their protests signified the system hadn’t only denied the dead justice, but it has also denied the living justice, thwarted accountability, a travesty of justice remained; protestors created a sense of solidarity, which can only ride politicians’ conscience, who have the power to write better laws to govern police and their interactions with citizens. Demonstrations emerging out of issues, such as police brutality, or injustice, do well to highlight society’s flaws, but they also refute the term, ‘just society,’ so calling on politicians to pass legislations to reign in killer cops would only add public pressure on them to write the laws that would affect them.

People want cops to wear cams, which would record their interactions with the public, but will politicians believe demonizing the images the cams shoot, or discrediting them, like they had dismissed them in the video that clearly shows Eric Garner being choked to death on the whims of Pantaleo, not the Police Department—one cop—aided by other wussy, ignoble officers, who swarmed around, 12

grabbed and subdued him, and who ultimately were remised for not calling out to Pantaleo to ease up, exculpate cops’ complicity in the crimes they commit? The so-called Grand Jury’s action, in New York, failing to indict the killer, slapped justice in its face, threw the system into damage control; they sent out subliminal messages, one of which was to disbelieve the crime and what you see on that tape, the other, regard it as an aberration; their choice to not indict suggested to many people that the system had eroded their confidence in American justice. Discredit what you see, and the ties prosecutors have with the panel. No transparency, but they maintained their proceedings were smacked with democracy.

Unleashing an outside prosecutor to investigate similar cases every time a cop crossed the line, like Pantaleo did, cutting that cozy tie local prosecutors have with the so-called Grand Jury, comprise of erudite and common law solutions, and would redress people’s call for more police accountability, put some fairness back into civility, not seemingly stunning those following cases like these with travesties of justice. It might’ve failed to indict Pantaleo, astonishing everyone, but in a bizarre proceeding, the Grand Jury did indict the camera man, Ramsey Orta, who videotaped the incident. Have people gone backwards, human rights blatantly being taken away in America? How ironic for a country, whose citizens—and outsiders—believed that they would be able to find justice in America, if nowhere else on earth, to now have it denied! The rest of the world will laugh at such justice systems. Would-be photographers with smart phones, who dared shoot videos of police brutality in the city, have suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the law, democracy and free speech. You might be prosecuted for video-taping killer cops in action. The local prosecutor, who supposedly represents you, presiding over a Grand Jury, also needs the police to win re-elections, do the investigations, so convicting a cop with such killer instincts bounded up in his psyche, whose dark side might emerge ‘any day now,’ amounts to taking the local prosecutor off these cases, recusing him of that pressure to act fairly and replacing him with an outside prosecutor. Demonstrators inspired the chant, looked at the video tape, and said, they ‘can’t breathe,’ the words of Mr. Garner; it was the cry he choked out of himself, while 13

Officer Pantaleo killed him in a dangerous chokehold; Mr. Garner’s cry was turned into demonstrators’ chants. Witnesses saw when police officer, Darren Wilson, shot Michael Brown his hands thrown up … in Ferguson, Missouri, whose death was also a rallying cry: ‘Hands up!’ Don’t shoot! The tape shows a cop killing a man, allegedly stemming from the sale of cigarettes on the streets of New York City, and demonstrators agreed that Officer Pantaleo went too far in his official duties, as an officer, policing the city. Whether a black man, white man, yellow, inquiries like these presumably failed humanity and fairness in the system, for they perpetuate racism, preserving it from oblivion; Daniel Pantaleo, a cop, killed Mr. Garner, allegedly over the sale of cigarettes, in a ‘chokehold,’ and the Grand Jury failed to indict; this case represented the catalyst legislators had needed to address the systemic flaw, tweak the law that governs police in New York City, especially when the obvious clearly showed accountability; Mr. Pantaleo got away with murder, but he was not the only one who got away with murder here.

Violence tends to take a one-sided perspective until its more brutal purveyor stands up to face and destroy it. Feeling happy, thug?

It was on a hot summer day the tragedy struck, when a motorist, an alleged Hasidic Jew, knocked Lenny Anderson, a little boy, off his bicycle, with his car and killed him. Now, Lenny was black, but emphasizing that fact in the universe, like the media constantly use adjectives, like minority, to describe humanity, would be pointless and insinuate racism, for Lenny was a boy, first and foremost, but apparently, the cause and effect of his death mysteriously formed social and political relationships, the communities oblivious to the widespread effects that would affect them and cost the mayor his job.

Police swarmed the area, took reports and held onlookers back, and a cop picked up the boy’s twisted and mangled bicycle frame and carted it away. Killed by the impact, he never had a chance, and Africans empathized with him, clashed with Hasidim; anger boiled over, and somebody killed somebody in the protests that followed, turning the accident into a tragedy stemmed from the violence ascribed to it, drove rifts between the two communities and compelled them to talk about morality, law, 14

order, punishment. The rumor had it that the driver was spirited out of the country, eluding prosecution, so no one was charged with Anderson’s murder that, believed to this day, finally withered on the social vine. The seeming travesty of justice was clear, while politicians and powerful figures of the city demanded charges be brought against Brian West, the other alleged murderer; the mayor’s opposition, Tony Venne, once a tough U.S. Attorney, Republican, who wanted his job and was fighting for the soul of the city, demonized David Dinkins, mayor, who, he and the press said, had allowed a ‘pogrom’ to continue unabated, which, others argued, was baseless because the police were present in numbers to restore and maintain law and order. He had done his research, for that word had been used to describe the large massacre of Jews in World War II; the attempted comparison was hyperbolic. Blaming Mr. Dinkins for the stabbing was without merit, who maintained a more dignified image in that office, honesty, but got defensive, pointing out where police officers were doing their jobs, and he also denied holding the police back from arresting lawless demonstrators in Crown Heights, but the politicians ignored the police presence and stepped up their rhetoric and ignorance, which further drove up the anger and resentment. Allegations also flew around that, in the protests that flared up, following the accident, West, one of the protestors, stabbed and killed a Hasidim. The politicians dug in their heels, demanded that the killer be punished, brought to justice, but their silence on the other death unsettled Anderson’s Mother and many people, who felt an injustice was done to them. Amidst the blames casted, Africans shrugged them off with belligerence, ignorance, their faces; the seething anger on their faces said they’d born the pain of the city, in which their ancestors’ bones were buried with the truth, in lower Manhattan, and wanted them redressed. The murmur at the intersections, on both sides of Atlantic and Nostrand Avenues, with Long Island Railroad running east on a platform before it disappeared underground, was loud and angry. As the politicians perceived it was politically savvy to ride a good demonstration to their victory, Dinkins lost his reelection bid for mayor to Venne.

You might’ve moved out of Bedford Stuyvesant, away from the reputation it carried for unrest, 15

crime—rent was never cheap—other forces might’ve kept him living there, with most of his income going to landlords, who’d increase the rent every time you renew a lease; he was not whining, or complaining, to his acquaintances about it, but clung to the cliché, ‘make a way out of no way;’ you, the world and Hollywood will show a change; not all of life’s variables had kept him there; you need others to help you in this life; the working class lived there, and like most of them his age, he had minimal job security; his was not that envious life anyone wanted.

Running well, he drove the car north on Bedford Avenue; something to do with his standing in there, Nostrand Avenue and side streets, where alternate sides parking remained on the books, had its own impact on him. You’d end up paying parking fines, failing to move your car on the other side the alternate days allowed; the rule made sense because it allowed delivery trucks, street sweepers with giant vacuums that suck up trash from in the gutters, to work without obstructions illegally parked cars would’ve created, parked on the wrong side of the avenues and streets; residing there and subjected to the rules, he had settled in after the divorce and would move his car to the other side of the streets, indefinitely, where police read tags on cars early in the morning to assess registration expiration dates, with the intention to write tickets, pick up revenues for the city; double-parked cars often set up dangerous zones in there at the expense of other drivers, so cops, their eyes scanning the avenues and streets to spot and fight crime, would routinely sweep the streets of them.

The light turned green, and he and drivers accelerated across Atlantic Avenue, his segmented past replacing his deepest thoughts, as focal points: the wife, the kid, intrigue, lies, the loneliness, happiness, sadness, the breakdown of a family, the courts, threats, the rule of law, the winners and losers in Brooklyn, where Bedford Stuyvesant and Crown Heights meet. Atlantic and Long Island Railroad cut through one community, and Eastern Parkway seemingly separated the two communities asunder. Politicians, like mayors, would stroll up Eastern Parkway, making sure the attendees at the annual West Indian Day Carnival see them. Fulton Street ran east and west; the cracks and bumps in 16

the streets paralleled history from which he couldn’t run away because it revealed facts about what made him tick in life, and he felt he had wielded very little control over which fragment showed him where he’d gone wrong, or made gains, in city life.

Graduating from college was defined as an achievement by himself, counted on as credentials he’d gained respectfully, and was proud of it, almost his single creative work over which he had control, but his other questionable actions in many experiences, in which he’d found himself, the unpleasant ones seemingly stemming from unpredictable caprice and erratic results that would’ve made anyone unhappy, dissatisfied with the results, as he was, described him well, so he attempted to think of some other events that had painted a pleasant picture of himself in school, but the routine duties in there seemed to have taken a back seat to his omission and commission of his actions. One fact stuck out at him made his life bitter-sweet: he had crossed the line with a buxom babe, Claudia, who rode his memory in a scene depicting him standing with her at the intersection of E. New York and Stone Avenues, near a bodega on the corner here in this community. Hugging the street corners, these bodegas closed at the crack of dawn, but early on this warm summer night, the breeze blew the limbs of a cluster of clover leaf trees fenced in with a corrugated iron fence with gusty forces, when he met her near one of them, a flood of light beaming out of its doors, like the others. The signs of customs left there by others before him, like the ‘star of David’ inscribed on the corners of a small synagogue—used now by the Baptist—at the corner of Stone Avenue and Grant Street and opposite the mom and pop hardware store located across the street that closed for the night, indicated stories of the people who were there before them. The deep, dark bricks used in the architecture of the two-story row houses reflected their presence long time ago on Wisteria Lane. Cars drove by, and people stepped out onto the sidewalk, clutching chips, soft drinks, bursting plastic bags and tossing junk food into their mouths, as they passed a dumpster filled with boxes, plastic bags, spoiled food, trash, rats, silently waiting for garbage collectors to empty it in the morning, and across the street, a huge apartment building 17

overshadowed them all and the area with size; a woman’s call echoed from one of its entrance doors.

Stalking him was easy to do in this dangerous world, but concealing it in the manner batting her eyes in which she’d observed him walking closer toward him gave her a boost of confidence. Drawing near him, she said, “Well, bless my eyes, tonight!” Saying that with a tone full of expectations, a smile spread onto her lips, moistened from natural oil in her skin, or she had spread some exotic oil on them; her approach struck him as gutsy, yet harmless; he liked to see the good in people first, then the bad would creep in to surprise him, after he’d bonded, or shared ties, so splitting from a relationship like that had cost him before, but he remained pleasant and courteous.

“Hi,” he said, in a sort of reserved tone, muted temperament, but stood up and listened to her.

She smiled rowed, straight, ivory teeth at him, who presumably saw beauty in her smile, in her wavy hair pulled back into a bun on the back of her head, her body still strong with flesh as thick as lean beef. In combination and his own assessment of her, the two caused him to linger there with her and talk. Led onto the surface of their interests with conversations they chose, he shared less personal information of himself with her, emotional conviction; neither did he want to ask her for some of her sugar and spice, the reputation in her smile and slide down the pole, for he was married and had made his vows to be loyal to Stacey. There was a limit to what he could take and certainly his vows had limited his options.

Society demanded it, made it law, to get married, but shaped by religion, morality aside, you might find its practice similar, or different, in every culture; help make sense of it.

“Give me some change,” she said, change that money buys. Money might be the god of the earth; say what you want about religion; money brings immediate joy and the solution to people’s problems. Politicians and preachers know that is true; why else are they constantly asking and begging for it?

“You don’t know me,” he said; “but asking me for money!”

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“If you don’t want to, that’s fine,” she said. “I asked because I need about a quarter to make up what I’ve got in my hand.” Unfolding her fist, she showed him the coins. “I want to buy some milk for my son.”

“Where’s his father?” he asked, digging a little deeper into her life before he gave her his money. He wanted no pledge from her, by which she’d remember him ’cause nothing would’ve become of it; he requested nothing from her in return.

“He’s not working. “Got hurt on his job the other day,” she said, her eyes moving up and down on him, searching for something credible, like his kindness. Her smile broadened, as if she had found something of value.

“I’m sorry to hear,” he said, shoved his hand in his pocket and pulled out four quarters, a small contribution to make to her son. Had she pocketed twenty dollars, or ten, milk and serial would’ve been in the refrigerator. Four quarters seemed small; what would one dollar, the four quarters he’d dropped in her hand, buy? Maybe all calls up to twenty minutes for ninety-nine cents; however, she thanked him. Gratitude was left in her by someone; he ought to have known he’d opened a window of opportunity by giving her money because he’d given money before to others and the takers returned for more.

Dogging the money, as it tumbled out his hand, she closed her fingers quickly to shut them in.

Unfolding her fingers soon thereafter, she counted the amount of coins, and said, “Thank you. Can we be friends?” She asked him that question with expectations in her tone that he took as same, without any reservation, and with all the intrigue he felt in it.

Having thought about it for several seconds, her request to be his friend, not the friend who’d come over and watch the game, that it was harmless to him just to say, ‘Hi,’ to her, whenever they meet again around the way, that was as far as he wanted to go. “Okay,” he said, and who was sure that he wanted no favors from her, but she never ceased and desisted asking him for money, which opened up 19

opportunities, he thought, to make demands equal to the value his money would’ve bought from her, or that she would’ve given up for money. Money buys sex, and having thought about it, he extended the invitation to her to visit him at home. “. . . too hot for comfort,” she said, abruptly, as soon as he’d extended his invitation, turned away from facing him, stepped about three yards away, turned around and faced him. “. . . too hot for comfort,” she said, again.

By now, he had internalized the pleasure he craved from her, sugar and spice, for that’s what’s girls are made of, and it was not long before she conceded to his innocuous demands, or he would’ve cut off the money he’d been giving her. After saying, ‘no,’ and ‘it’s too hot for comfort,’ she knocked on his door one warm evening, surprising him, when his wife was away. She must’ve been watching the apartment to see when Stacey had left, for he had not recalled revealing the time. He let her in, and taking the ante up a notch, gave it to her, and one thing led to another. He made mistakes. When Stacey picked up a condom from off the floor one morning she entered the house, she accused him of cheating, but he denied it, and one day, he was lying on the bed, when she accused him, again; bursting with guilt, he confessed, exhaling it to face the consequences.

In her Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, Stacey’s lawyer demanded legal fees, court costs and 75% of his assets.

Asking the court for so much was excessive, in his view, an attack on his pocket; her lawyer aiming at taking away the decency left in him, petitioned the court to confiscate what little money he had left, which was a paycheck. What would stop him from smelling in the streets? The money he’d left to buy soap, or provide shelter over his head, would take a hit if the court sided with them. That was not assets; that was accounts payable. Get another job; she’d always told him to get another job because she needed more money, and as long as he paid the bills; things are fine with more money coming into a household.

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Her divorce papers, Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, accused him of battery, and a paragraph accused him of adultery, just accusations without pictures to show rendezvous. He’d restrained himself from hitting her, so that charge was false, but a more insidious concept showed he had given up on the marriage in his mind: she had become loud, contentious, gone walking in the streets, and all his other suspicions led him mentally to throw in the marriage towel. Divorce was a new planet, something he was never prepared to accept ’cause he was married for life, but he had to respond, so Wade sought legal answers drafted by a lawyer, certain that he’d fired no blows on Stacey, so to allege battery was false.

The charge of cheating was her words against his. The court should know that, he thought, the truth, and he’d not just sit back and do nothing, but would answer, prove to the court her lawyer’s false allegations. Her supposed cousin, who had lived on the first floor, handed him the envelope, and said he’d picked it up off the floor under the mail boxes in the foyer at the entrance of the building. It was strange her cousin had picked up that one letter out of many addressed to him that had arrived and placed inside his mail box. It was a white envelope containing several pages of allegations and applicable laws. He saw his name printed on it in bold letters, took it from the cousin’s ignoble hand, affecting a service of process in his living room, satisfying the statutes governing service of process, while she coyly looked on. He wasn’t going to come back up there to eat; Wade would make sure of that.

Following service of process on him, Wade walked into Falcone Fisher’s office with the papers in his hand. Fisher was a lanky lawyer for whom he’d worked as a legal assistant at Nostrand and Church Avenues. Working for Fisher, his days were fraught with suspicions. Listing several duties one day for which his duties had called him to perform—working the phones to settle no-fault cases with insurances companies, interviewing clients, other clerical tasks—he found he was overworked and underpaid. His forceful and factual voice lacking an edge to it, including documentation in files he 21

worked on, brought lawyers and insurance companies, which had the money to pay and settle these cases before going to court, wasting lawyers’ time—when they could’ve spend it on contracts, or applying jurist prudence in disputes—together on the phone to discuss the merits and laws affecting the cases. Settlements usually followed, and he was proud of his accomplishments, knew he was building something special in that office, but Fisher destroyed its development. Wandering by his desk, Fisher saw the list, and the mere sight of it sent him into interrogatory mode, so he called him in the back office and denounced him for assessing his employable values. Wade resigned forthwith.

One year had passed since he’d left Fisher’s law office, he thought, while he was sitting in the chair before him, heard the traffic outside, when the front door slammed shut and someone entered.

Probably a client seeking legal counsel, and who had walked off the street, he thought, when Mariam, Fisher’s secretary, spoke with the person. He wasn’t interviewing any of his clients involved in traffic accidents anymore, but felt derisive sitting there in the office from which he’d run and given up a miserable job, in which he’d felt mistreated by Fisher. Of all the lawyers in Brooklyn, he could’ve consulted one of them than to return with his domestic difficulties in hand to ask for help from Fisher, so he felt he should leave, get up, walk out into the street and never look back, preserve his dignity, pride, but as Fisher’d initially showed an interest in his story, whose demeanor displayed a sympathetic reception of things to his otherwise tempestuous law practice, he relayed the particulars in the papers served on him.

“I think you should avoid any semblance of a fight with her,” Fisher said. “I'll tell you why I said that,” he said, pausing to gather his thoughts into unison. Frayed like the table near him, he twirled his black, long hair with his index and middle fingers continuously, twisting a portion of it, a habit used to calm his untamed nerves. Divorce was a sensitive issue, often acrimonious with the parties railing at each other over worthless objects, custody, security, and Wade’s case’d brought some seriousness to him because it contained hostility, lack of sympathy and mercy. First, the communication went, 22

bickering escalated, and the parties loudly accused each other constantly in the home of lies, dishonesty and vexation; all this account he’d brought to Fisher, who’d stopped twirling his lock. “The child will become resentful,” he continued; “and may even hate you. Don’t fight her.”

“I’m not fighting her,” Wade said.

“You’re not,” Fisher stated, his tone actually a question, which meant he’d disbelieved him.

“You know you’re not. I know you’re not, but your son views it as fighting. His daddy and mommy aren’t kissing, or hugging anymore. He sees that. You’re angry; so is she. He sees more than that; he sees a struggle to survive, and it’s not normal. Understand?”

“I’m not fighting her,” he said, got up and stepped toward the door. Returning with a renewed terse for answers, sat on the chair again; he felt he’d shown restraint in the home from beating her with his fists, and that it was good he’d conducted himself in there in a manner worthy of accolades for not firing a blow. “I avoided a physical confrontation with her,” he said. “I’d talk. I have a right to talk in the home, don’t I? I do not fight with her. Maybe I should’ve listened more, than talked, and maybe I wouldn’t be here with this problem,” he said, tossing his arm aloft his right side in disgust.

“Yeah. Yeah, and maybe the world will end tomorrow,” Fisher retorted, with sarcasm in the tone he used. “Are you still living there?” Fisher asked. “I assumed you’re not.”

“I paid the rent,” he said. “. . . man has to live somewhere.”

“Why are you still living there?”

Wade sucked in air then let it out, like a slow, deflating tire. He had no place to go; most men placed in similar situations would’ve move, but he loathed thinking about leaving his son behind, for he needed his love and attention to give him stability in this dangerous world, and leaving this reason-tolive would’ve deprived him of purpose, stability, or connection in this life. “What kind of question is that?” he said. “I live there, for Chris’ sake. My son is there. Where am I going? I don’t have any place to go.”

23

“You must find a place to go,” Fisher said. “If you stay there, you’re setting yourself up for trouble. The hatred between the two of you can mean the difference in going to jail for killing her, or she killing you. To avoid such trouble, I advise you to find somewhere to go.”

“I don’t have such thoughts of killing anybody,” Wade said. “There’s not a wicked bone in my body.” He’d slapped her once and felt blameless for it because her belligerence had interrupted his phone conversation with his friend, a young, friendly girl, who could’ve taught her about friendship. If you’re thinking whether the young, friendly girl was younger, you’re right. Pointing an accusatory finger in a man’s face, like she did, showed no respect for him, he thought. Something disruptive in her came out the night he decided to talk to his friend in the home in her presence. It was not a hush-hush conversation, where you’d whisper, speak in codes, or delay divulging specifics until another time, supposedly denying the other person in the room the option to decode your conversation, or ignore it; no, not like that; every word said had enough volume that she could’ve discern and listen to, so he felt his action was harmless, but little did he know, Stacey listened to them, and seething with jealousy, rage and anger, she erupted with violence.

“You’re crazy, and she’s crazy!” she alleged, thrusting her accusatory finger in his face. A little closer and she would’ve gouged out his eyes, but he jerked backward and fired his hand at her face, to send a message to her not to embarrass him, not to fight her, but to let her collect her senses, and know that he wasn’t hiding his conversation; from where he was, every word had volume and not the cryptic tone associated with the hush-hush phone conversation hiding some fact required to keep under covers; friendship didn’t constitute a sexual relationship. The slap went across her face and connected like a collision of antagonisms, which sent Stacey into a rage, so she attacked him.

Restraining her, he held both her arms and resisted her attack, while she wrestled to free herself, and the two of them fell onto a bed, as he held onto her arms. Unable to free them, she eventually calmed down, but was still seething with anger and rage on her feet. He was not fighting with her; he 24

could’ve punched her in her face, or jump-kicked her in any part of her body and caused severe injury, and with his training in Marshall Arts, that was feasible, but because there was no wicked bones in his body, he restrained himself from showing more aggression, end the hostility, let go her arms, assuming the end to the conflict, but Stacey thought differently.

She conceived herself as the victim. He was talking to a woman she didn’t know, and her ignorance led her to believe his cheating had damaged her marriage, and to show her disgust and intolerance, she attacked him. Stacey’s bitterness over it was enough to blow up the house with him in there, so the longer he stayed the shorter her intolerant fuse got.

It was a simple path to take, just pack his things, a point slow in coming, until it rushed on him like a flood. The likes of him would rather live on the roof than in a house with her again. Her contentions and accusations cut like blades, and it would’ve been better for him, and everybody else, to get out. You’ve spent your life to build a life with someone, and one act could destroy it, regardless of the good expended to build it.

Fisher refused to take the case. The cost? He wouldn’t take it on installments. Wade shelved seeking another lawyer to fight Stacey in court, but opted to allow her a win by default. Having failed to answer, the court granted her a divorce.

Wade knew he’d move, that the departure would both sadden and drive him to start over in the city. Knocked down once was an opportunity to start over again, which would be difficult, he knew, and that the court wouldn’t order her to go out of the home; he’d be the one walking, not her.

She pushed him out of the home they’d shared for several years. Returning from work one day, he found the mirror over the dresser gone, which described how she began to frustrate him; as he read to the little boy, she called him out of the bedroom and forbade him to be with his dad. While he was at work, she took the sheets off his bed. Her blatant actions had sent a message of rejection to him; it was time for him to go, and he packed up his computer, hired two guys and a truck to move him, and 25

walked out. The sadness on the boy’s face devastated him, but it seemed like a necessary hardship to bear, for he wanted the boy free of the bickering and fighting between his parents. That notion motivated him to act, and probably drove him out of the house more than her resentment and violence, but staying would’ve made more sense and probably salvaged the opportunity to make amends and restore the family.

The Supreme Court granted the divorce by default, which astounded Wade because it ignored equitable distribution issues, court costs and lawyer’s fees. The court’s action, he felt, was a hallow victory of sorts, for although it had ruled against him, it granted her the divorce she wanted, and his support order inflicted a heavy financial blow in his pocket; his take on it was that they wanted him to be homeless in New York. Wade kept his car, a computer, table and printer. Custody was muted, but he would travel cyberspace alone. Other means of traveling the streets had existed: buses, trains and taxis that ran twenty-four-seven on New York City streets, but the car gave him an independent mobility mass transit lacked. He loathed the dictates a bus schedule would’ve imposed on his traveling to and from work and elsewhere in the city, and anyone else, including him, would’ve liked the freedom the car provided around it.

He’d left the apartment with his table, computer and bed, leaving paintings, furniture, appliances, and Joshua, his son, behind to start over in America, he told himself. He should’ve hired a lawyer to do battle for him in court, he thought, and all this would’ve made sense, but lacking money to pay lawyers’ fees, resignation to the current decision had more recriminations; it wouldn’t be out-ofthe-question to marry a woman with money and benefits, the next time around. She’d become his enemy, and he wondered about the precise moment she began to seek his demise, questioned himself of whether Stacey was his enemy, or was his financial circumstances, on one hand, and Fisher’s admonition not to fight her in court, on the other, that had escalated things against him. It was clear Fisher had advised him to surrender to her and the courts, but that was partly conformity to the 26

system’s demands, like the state that . . . . . . sent notices to him to pay child support, but unable to fend them off, he ignored them. It was a bad idea not responding to them in some formidable way with a lawyer to fight for him and stop the state in its tracks, for it moved against him and garnished his wages. If you’ve ever had your wages garnished, or your bank account seized by the state, you’d understand how powerless you are and what it all meant for someone, or something, to invade your privacy, clean your money out of your account and also your confidence. He had no more privacy to defend, felt vulnerable, exposed and powerless to stop them from forcing him to live on a shoestring budget, from which he saw no way out of his financial hardships.

Wade rented a room on Dean Street from Ray, one of the landlords in Crown Heights, and made it his home. A couple of years ago, Ray’s wife had moved out of the brownstone the two of them shared not long ago, leaving it to him in a settlement. How ironic he resided in a room in the home from which Ray’s wife had left, but driven to that pitiable end also had presented dwindled choices.

Short on cash, his rent’s due date was coming at him, like a fast car; his other household expenses piled up and casted a gloomy financial awareness on him. Some bills would be paid and others would not; the self-awareness he felt and the state’s aggression had victimized him, pushed him on hard times, forces at work subjecting him to languish in a room the size of a box. The small room contained a bed, a white dresser with six drawers, a table set up for his computer and printer near the wall about two feet from his bed. Ray brought up a dorm room refrigerator into the room and pushed it away from a makeshift table that stood in the corner behind the door. It wasn’t difficult to see that space was limited and moving around in there liken to being locked in a cage, every side and space squeezing him of the sanity he had left. Feeling trapped, compelled to spend most of his time on the bed, or at his computer lost in cyberspace, the tranquility there that came with his home and time to reflect on things were free, but then realized he’d lacked the preparation needed before going into his 27

marriage. A prenuptial wouldn’t have suited him to sign by both parties, preventing the onset of grief going into marriage lacking one, and where assets were involved. Marriages that lack redistribution of assets have a better outcome in divorce proceedings, save time and money, avoiding the haggling the parties would get into over them. She would’ve taken no more, nor no less, but lacking a prenuptial was one issue, the other, he realized, was also a hell-of-a-thing blinded by lust and going into marriage with a traditional view based on feelings, in which no assets existed on either side, subjected to the whims of his emotions; his lost was not merely financial; it was the realization that he had merely lost his family, which was worse. He had no assets to worry about, for they had started out with nothing and ended with nothing.

A car whizzing by brought Wade back from the past to the present, and he glanced in the rearview mirror, signaled right and then changed lanes. Shifting the gears, the car took second, hummed, as he sped up Nostrand Avenue. Turning left, he pulled to the curb at 646 Dean Street. It was the last day of school, so the sultry days of summer vacation had begun, and the demands of school’d taken a back seat in his scheme of things to do, giving way to summer leisure he had intended to spend in the park, where he’d listen to the roll and thunder of drums on sunlit Sunday afternoons. Ah, New York in the summer would highlight the good in people. He felt the drum beats, musical vibe, pounding in his gut, from last Sunday’s performance, gathering his books under his arm to take them in his room.

The drummers would play in two days and he’d go to Prospect Park to listen to them, but tomorrow, he’d rise late, for it was the last day of school and the beginning of summer holidays, and he wanted a piece of it by sleeping in and getting up late, excluding having to travel to the classroom. He mulled over the summer heat, the excitement it carried, but out of nowhere, his tax refund check came into focus. Form 1040 filed several weeks ago said Uncle Sam, the government, owed him a refund, a check of several thousands. Just think of it, he told himself, several thousands to me. Locking the car door, he reviewed Form 1040 in his mind for the sum to be refunded to him.

28

Standing at the car door, Wade glanced up the street and on the rows of brownstones running up both sides of the street. Compared to his former residence, the features of this part of Brooklyn showed more property value than wealth, and realized he’d found a relative peace between New York and Nostrand Avenues, an affordable place in which to start over again. The change of pace might’ve been an illusion, for he felt the degradation of his life and the circumstances that’d brought him there alienating him from the love he’d shared with his family, that was now gone. The refund check, had it arrived? Only in America has a government given back money to taxpayers and even to those not paying any taxes. His would’ve given him a financial boost and latitude to move out of his tiny room to a bigger place, and having been waiting for his tax refund for several weeks, the expectancy of its imminent arrival rose in him. The mailbox fastened on the right side of the doorpost came into view a little sharper today; any day now, he thought, as he climbed the last step, raised its lid and pulled out several pieces of mail, one of which was a brown envelope, the dimensional type IRS used to mail tax refunds to tax payers each year, other than directly crediting tax-payers’ accounts. His heart leaped with the anticipation of a check in that envelope.

Inside his one-window room, he tossed the books onto the bed, ripped the envelope open and pulled out its contents. His eyes ran along the Pay-to-the-Order-of line on an enclosed check to ‘$59,’ and when he saw the small amount, all the expectation of having money in his pocket melted away; he’d just kissed having a wonderful summer good-bye.

The state’d intercepted his refund check, a letter said. It was a blatant intrusion into his life that profoundly and perceptively punched him in his gut; he immediately went into denial, believing rather that the state’d intercepted the wrong check, for he’d paid child support already with money garnished from his paychecks. Somebody had erred by confiscating his money and leaving him with ‘$59.’ It was a blatant show of power, but also an opportunity to prove the state’d made an error, and pulling a file from between the monitor and the printer, he read the copy of the 1040 filed several weeks ago to 29

confirm whether he had made a mistake in expected refund. That would’ve alleviated his anxiety. $4,000, the largest refund ever expected from IRS, was printed in bold letters on his copy, so the state’d made the error. Receiving ‘$59’ had destroyed his expectations of moving out of his room, and dissipated his needs of raising his financial status.

With no immediate recourse to take, powerless to reverse his poverty-stricken condition, dejected, alone, forlorn, perceptively sitting on a limb of despair that was ready to break, a glimmer of inner strength lifted him up off the bed. Shaking his head in disbelief and dejection, his lowness of strength and despair caused him to ram his fist in the wall several times. Breaking the stress that came with it, a feeling of defeat came over him, and it took a while before he acquiesced to his dire circumstances. A long time passed; he took a long time to settle down enough and then read the enclosed letter again. The combination of ‘$59’ and the state’s arrogance broke him, and tears rolled out his eyes, when his own vivid helplessness came forth.

Blaming someone for instituting his financial woes was easy. Stacey’d initiated it, he thought, started it by filing papers in court. She, the court and state surfaced as objects to blame. They’d taken his money with a blatant disregard for his welfare, forced him to subsist on the fringes of New York’s economy, a miserable disposition that meant he’d be scrounging around to eat. Tears fell in his hands.

Wade ate nothing that night, although hungry, not for food, but for information leading to the release of his money, and even if he wanted to eat, the strength of will to go out on the street to buy it eluded him, so he lay on his back, staring into the ceiling, for sleep had fled from his eyes. Several things: fight them wherever, in court if necessary, to recover his money, suggested an arduous fight loomed, but he’d the whole summer to fight them, visit their agencies, lay out his grievances and demand an immediate release of his money; let it go. Toward the early morning hours, he drifted off to sleep.

Setting off on Monday to recover his money, Wade emerged from the house with a back pack 30

strung over his shoulder on a bright and sunny day. He held an envelope containing pay stubs and correspondences from Office of Child Support Enforcement, a state agency. The aim was simple: visit New York City Board of Education in Brooklyn then Office of Child Support Enforcement in Manhattan, but a problem surfaced: the agency listed only a post office box, not its location, on its correspondences.

Board of Education may know where it was located and the amount of money garnished from his paychecks so far, he thought. Its payroll listed the amount of deductions on his pay stubs, so it would know to whom it’d sent his money, he reasoned.

At Nostrand Avenue and Fulton Street, Wade boarded the A Train to downtown Brooklyn, where he disembarked at Borough Hall, downtown Brooklyn, and trudged down to 65 Court Street that housed the Board of Education. Downtown, people crossed paths, browsed in stores, shopped amongst vendors set up on the sidewalk selling newspapers, candy, chips, magazines and trinkets. Pulling a glass door, he went in a great steel and glass building that housed Kings County District Attorney’s Office, or Traffic Court. Inside, he fell in line, while a guard watched the people sign a log declaring their various destinations.

“Where’re you going?” the guard asked Wade.

“On the 14th floor,” Wade replied. It wasn’t by coincidence he picked that number. Working as a paraprofessional in the public schools system, he’d picked up professional checks up there before, but time had changed, so the Board of Education was mailing his checks to him at Banneker High, where he was working as an English teacher. Following a simple reasoning and that he’d picked up checks up there before then their accounting must be done up there, he thought, and someone up there should be able to explain the deductions made and shown on his pay stubs.

“For what?” the guard asked. “They’re not gonna talk to you. If you go up there in person, they will not talk to you. You’ve got to send them a letter,” he said, with impatience.

31

His mannerism unexpected and regarded as another example of someone, a guard, who just tried to place stumbling blocks in front of him, Wade demanded entrance. “I’m going up there; do you mind?”

“The elevators are over there!” the guard pointed out, his wrist fanning in their direction.

On the fourteenth floor, Wade headed for a window to his left and poked his head through it. A woman, average height and a little on the plus side, read computer printouts then laid some envelopes in a box on the floor, and others sat at tables with headsets covering their ears, while others jabbed at keyboards.

“Excuse me,” he said.

Dropping the paper in the box on the floor, the woman approached the door and looked at him with a frown that contorted her face with curiosity, but then it receded, as she came near the window.

“Can I help you?” she asked him.

“I’d like to get a printout of all the money the board’s been taking out of my checks,” Wade said. That request was reasonable, free of hostility, and apparently no one felt threatened by it, so he swung the bag off his shoulder. The woman’s stare at him; she wanted to help him, understand him, and decided to do both. She stepped within two feet of him and the door between them, and said, “Honey, we do one thing here—” “I’ll explain,” he said, pulling out the envelope.

Another man came near and listened to his colleague’s explanation.

“I’m telling you,” the woman said. “We only send out checks from here, not cut them.”

“Look,” the man said, “go to 1 Center Street. That’s in Manhattan. They’ll tell you. There’s where their accounting is done.”

“Where in Manhattan is 1 Center Street?” Wade asked.

“I don’t know,” the man said. He looked at the woman, as if she’d the answer. Then something 32

clicked in him. “It’s downtown Manhattan. Take the number 4 Train and get off at Brooklyn Bridge.”

1 Center Street. That address was a start, but first, Family Court would get a visit. It all began there. Within walking distance, he arrived at Family Court.

At the entrance, uniformed court officers, three of them, relaxed on aluminum chairs near a table upon which several bunches of keys and a plastic container stood with the remainder of a dark liquid settled at its bottom. The officers stared at him disdainfully. “Where’re ya’ going?” Justine Graham asked, his badge pinned on his shirt.

“I’m going to Child Support,” Wade said.

“Who are you?” Daniel McKnowlty asked.

“A man,” Wade said. “The respondent,” as if to correct himself.

“Go through that door,” Graham said, pointed to their opposite and denying the opportunity to other court officers who would’ve subjected him to search-and-seizure routines further inside the hallways leading into the courtrooms.

Pulling another glass door, he went through a narrow passage, flung his arms on a small, round counter attached on the bottom section of a double door and looked in at a round woman writing at a table with papers and files piled up on it and two others further inside the room. It was burly Matilda Richards writing at a desk, surrounded by shelves and files.

“Is this Support?” he asked her.

“Knock on that door,” she said, pointing to his right.

Wade knocked on the partition, alerting Patsy Rivers inside.

Rivers turned her back to him, swung around, and replied, “Yes.” A review of his case might’ve taken several months, maybe years, so just a printout of the amount of money garnished from his paychecks would’ve given him the supporting documentation he 33

needed, and he felt by making a simple request for it was the best approach. “I’d like to get a printout of all the monies that the court has garnished to date from my checks,” he said. Rivers frowned at the odd request he’d made. You file Order to Show Cause upstairs, which would bring your case up to the bench for arguments before a judge, or other officers of the court, within several days, maybe months, not make request in person. The issue of the amount of money garnished may come up as well, he knew that, but pursued the shortest route to get his money and get to the bottom of it all.

“We don’t—” she began to say, stopped, turned, and looked at the monitor sitting on her desk.

“Wait a minute,” she said, rolled over to the keyboard and tapped a few keys.

Numbers popped on the screen; Wade saw texts, lines, and meaningless lines of texts on Rivers’ monitor. Of the data compiled on him, he thought, presumably, something in there should reveal that the state’d erred by intercepting his money. Once confirmed he owed nothing, it should release his money to him forthwith, so that he could go on living with respect and decency in the city; cut him a check now.

Finding search, Rivers wheeled around. “Wait,” she said, studied her facts before stating her findings. “Office of Child Support Enforcement would know that,” she said. She turned to look at the monitor again and tapped several more keys on her keyboard. “What’s the case number?” she asked.

“Where is Office of Child Support Enforcement?” Wade asked, looking at the envelope in his hand. “All I have here is a box number. I can’t go to a box number.” He gave her the case number.

“There’re on 66 Leonard Street,” Rivers said.

Wade wrote the address on one of his envelopes.

“Let me see here,” Rivers said, picked up a piece of paper on which she wrote numbers.

Curious of her writing, she looked at it leave her hand. “You owe $6022.03.”

The state having garnished his paychecks, court records shouldn’t have shown him in arrears, or back payments of child support owed; the records should’ve shown overpayments of child support 34

instead, unless it’d miscalculated his deductions every pay period, every two weeks. It sent notices, threatening letters, but he remembered ignoring them on principle that the state cannot teach him to support his son. His innate attributes would push him to support his son, not the state; leave him to live like a human being and stop interfering in his life; paternal instincts would haunt him to give his support, and yet, it was not enough according to the state, for it collected his name, address, phone number, social security number and imputed them into its database. Expensive computers kept track of his name and other personal information; the state sent him letters and made electronic deductions from his checks, and having done that, how could state workers not credit his account, when his check stubs listed the amount garnished per pay period? “How so?” he asked.

Rivers frowned. “Office of Child Support Enforcement knows how much they’ve been taking out your checks. Go to them. They’ll tell you,” she said.

66 Leonard Street was not one of the skyscrapers made of glass, concrete and steel, in Manhattan, but a brick and mortar building that housed Office of Child Support Enforcement. Situated on the corner of Leonard and Church Streets, the agency’s staff chased money that somehow had eluded neglected children of New York, enforced Family Court’s rulings on support orders, seized bank accounts and other assets of former husbands and wives, if it could get its hands on them, to collect the support deemed by law to be just. Although it seemed benign, it wielded power and deception by sending out Supreme Court Notice of Action papers without the signature of a judge of that court. How questionable were its tactics! Its workers ought to correct the error made by intercepting my check, Wade thought, for he knew it was the right thing to do: refund his money that they’d taken without cause. Anyone would’ve found fault with that, of cruel injustice, lacking recourse and solution to solve a problem as big as his. The state’d victimized him.

Wade read the pay stubs in his envelope, found strength in the numbers showing the amount of financial support given to Joshua, his son, numbers that would vindicate him and support his contention 35

that the state was wrong to take his money. With them in hand, he walked out of the elevator on the second floor and stepped near a glass window with a slot at the bottom. An open door to the right suggested that Office of Child Support Enforcement had been practicing a walk-in policy. Anyone could’ve walked in, but Wade veered toward the window.

Maud Rosen, David Rush’s secretary, sat at a table interviewing a haggard man. Rush directed the unit. She saw Wade standing at the window and waiting for her to call him. “You here for amnesty?” Rosen asked him.

“No,” Wade said.

“We don’t see non-amnesty seekers after twelve,” Rosen said. “Come back tomorrow at nine.”

She resumed interviewing the man seeking pardon from the state for nonpayment offenses. Clearly, at least to him, he wasn’t seeking amnesty.

Expecting a quick resolution to his predicament, Wade turned away from the window to ride the elevator down. In that instant he turned away, uniformed-wearing Proctor Crumps, a greasy security guard, stepped through the door with Doreen Price in tow. Crumps observed him, as a question released his face of the muscle spasms that had held below his eyes with twitches. “Are you here for amnesty?” he asked, smiling and making eye contact.

Who’d dared asked that question?

While Crumps waited for an answer to his question, Price revealed the workings of the unit to Wade.

“They see only amnesty seekers after twelve,” Price said. “You’ve got to come tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. They’ll see you then.” She pushed the elevator button.

Early the next day, at about 8:00 a.m., Wade rode the train to Manhattan, arriving at 66 Leonard Street. With the intention to sit down with the agency’s clerks and reach some resolution that may release his money firmly in mind, he fell in line. Crumps ushered him and others, after they’d signed a 36

log, into a room as large as twenty-by-fifteen feet with chairs laid out in rows. Two small windows too high for anyone to reach brought in light from the outside to shine on the women, children and men, some of whom might’ve been former husbands and wives, sitting and waiting for their turns to answer the state. Wade joined them, people with similar problems. No lawyers.

A woman called to her hyperactive son jumping from chair to chair in the back, while others narrated various details of their failed marriages, or analyzed the snail’s pace at which the staff worked.

Clerks would eat their breakfast first then serve them last. Where were the ethics violation watchdogs, when you need them? Others checked their receipts, other papers and waited with gloomy expectation on their faces.

As he sat in a hard chair for the long haul, Wade heard bits and pieces of their stories that mirrored his in various ways; money was taken from them, too; he was not alone in this, and although he found some solace in his views on the universal suffrage of men he’d shared with some of them, that sentiment failed to alleviate the apprehension and uncertainties that hung like wet clothes on him, so he sifted the thoughts flooding his mind, from the first indication the excitement had run out of his marriage to when she had pushed him out of the house. The bewilderment in his son’s eyes never stopped haunting him and setting his departure in a corner of his mind to remember for the rest of his life. He’d left part of himself behind, his son, who’d meant so much to him, a dad. He took the envelope out of the bag, thought about Joshua, flipped the pay stubs in his hand and turned them around, focusing on the amount of money garnished from his salary every two weeks. The withholdings, federal and state taxes, Medicaid tax, rent and other deductions had reduced his disposable income by two-thirds. Try living in New York with two-thirds of your disposable income taken from you. Reeling from such financial loss, he replaced them in the envelope, closed his eyes, and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, for he knew the state, through its agency, had made an error intercepting his check, and the right thing to do was to release his money.

37

Opening his eyes to the floor, he checked the figures again, flipped the check stubs, added up the numbers and arrived at a sum sent to Stacey. He knew where his money was going, hated it, a paradox that also benefited his son because, when she received money from him, the boy benefited from her spending.

The clock on the wall said ten-thirty, when a clerk called someone’s name. One-by-one, clerks ventured past the doorposts with papers in their hands, called the names of those they wanted to see, led them further into cubicles with desks, monitors and chairs, traversed the floor in every direction, made photocopies and chatted with each other.

More men entered the waiting room, which, after a while, got crowded, so they leaned against the walls like sacks of potatoes.

Appearing at the door, a man counted the amount of people with his eyes. He ushered in more, pulled his tie closer around his neck and stepped out of the doorway. Shortly thereafter, he returned.

“Mr. Roland,” someone called.

Roland went to the person after he’d finished counting the men and women seated on chairs and those leaning against the wall.

“Listen up,” Roland said, upon his return. “Some of you’ll be taken up stairs to the third floor.

You’ll wait up there ’ntil we call yo’ names. We cannot have too many of you in this room . . . against the law.”

Holding up a clipboard in everyone’s view, he said, “When I call yo’ names, please step out the room.”

A moment later, a subdued grumbling subsided, but Roland proceeded to call names. The hours ticked away, yet no one called Wade, and he felt he’d been sitting on the same armless chair forever.

The people among whom he sat were right about the clerks: they ate first then served them after they’d eaten their breakfast. He wondered what they’ll do at lunch time: perhaps go home for a nap.

38

Sitting there, vulnerable to his recollections, Claudia and her link to his marriage’s demise returned to his mind, and he felt that foresightedness in him to see the consequences in that relationship was sidelined; he’d failed to see the results of that innocuous contact on a warm, charming night, as he was walking toward his home, a scene that replayed in his mind, with the cars whizzing by, pedestrians roaming the streets and she striding toward him. A broader picture showed him talking to her.

His eyes surveyed her cleavage and admirable rise on both sides of her thighs and butt, her hair neatly combed and braided into one large braid. She wore tight short jeans that hugged the shape of her thighs and buns, and that imagery enticed him to strike a conversation with her. He wanted more than a conversation from her, and had accepted the notion she would be willing to give it to him, when the right circumstance presented itself; he had not the foggiest apprehension when, or how, it would be manifested, but felt it had links to the money he was giving her. “. . . too close for comfort,” Claudia said. “What will your wife say?”

Ignoring the question, he replied with a vague line: “She’s not home; she’s at work.” He had failed to convince her, ’cause she knitted her brows and turned away to face the Synagogue silently closed at the corner.

“I don't know,” she replied. “Too close for comfort,” she said, and stepped off, walked to the other side of the street, while he watched her. She turned to him again.

“Look,” he said; “I’m giving you money; every time you see me, you beg me for money. I should be able to get some sugar from you in return.”

She hesitated to answer. “I don’t know. It’s too close for comfort.” Her answer was negated by her apprehension they could get caught, not a definitive, ‘No,’ in which case, leaving the ambiguity in it; he only had to press her a little longer to get the positive he needed. Unwilling to give him that definitive, ‘yes,’ reply, she walked away leaving him on the sidewalk watching her.

39

He had let go his inhibitions and felt Stacey had also let hers go, had reasons to believe she had, for she often left the house and went on long walks in the streets. But in addition to that, it was clear she had other mischief on her mind after he returned from work one day to find one of his friends, whom he hadn’t spoken to in many years, comfortably seated in his home. Joseph Pines had traveled from New Orleans to New York, chasing a dream to appear on stage on Broadway in a singing contest, and wanted a place to stay. Whether Pines had fished Wade’s number out of the phone book, or one of Wade’s relatives had given it to him, his searched had paid off, for he called his home and Stacey picked up.

Without checking with Wade to get the okay and confirmation that he was his friend, or an opportunist seeking a foothold into their lives to kill, or rob them, Stacey invited Pines in their home. Nothing had prevented her from calling Wade at work to convey that his friend had called seeking him and a place to stay; she felt no need to accept protocol; deciding to let him in showed her blatant disregard to his place as husband and her propensity to defy him and did.

When Pines finally got to her door, Stacey immediately compared him and Wade. His hair leaped off his forehead with a greasy shine to it, and his muscular body seemed younger than Wade’s, giving him more of a sexy appeal to her. He was a little taller than him, with a tan complexion, dressed in shorts, T-shirt and boots on his feet, that Stacey felt was rugged, a breath of fresh air that had just blown in. Stricken with admiration, she let him into the home and fed him.

“You must be hungry,” she said. “He’s at work; he’s not here; he comes home after five.”

“OK,” he said. “I’ll just sit here and wait.”

“Yes, have a seat. I’ll prepare some food for you.”

Upon arriving home, Wade was flabbergasted to see him and angry at the same time, but he hid 40

his anger, for it was not Pines’ fault he got in; it was Stacey’s capriciousness to let him in without checking with him. She knew nothing about him, and to let him in showed her simple-minded concept of the world, the people in it and the role she played with him, as her husband, in that world.

Wade showed Pines to the third room, and Pines threw his duffle bag in the corner and sat on the bed. She brought towels to him and he took a shower. Wade and Pines spoke into the night, and he relayed his dreams to appear on Broadway, but he hadn’t made any contacts with anyone yet, so he’d go into Manhattan in the morning to seek his contacts.

Several days passed and Pines made no headway with his dreams; he had no appointments, and while Wade was at work, Stacey accompanied him to Manhattan and showed him around the city. They traveled on West 14th Street, and Pines tried his hand at the three card play. A guy’d set up a box on the side of the street, placed three cards faced down on the box, shifted them around, and urged you to guess the ace. Pines loss more than one hundred and fifty dollars at the games, but offered no money for his stay at Wade’s home; he gambled his money with Stacey standing beside him. They did this for several days, and she told Wade nothing about it.

In the years Stacey lived at their home, she never prepared breakfast for Wade once, but one morning, Wade watched as she held Pines’ hand and led him into the kitchen to prepare breakfast for him. It was then Wade suspected that she had left him in her mind and was just waiting for an excuse to leave.

Over lunch at Chuck’s, a Jamaican restaurant on Church Avenue, Pines revealed Stacey’s true motives for marrying Wade. Pines felt he couldn’t stand to listen to her character assassination anymore, so he open up to Wade.

“Do you think your wife loves you?” Odd question as it was, Wade felt its implications, and he knew the two of them were talking about him. They had spent so much time together and had spilled their guts to each other. He didn’t have an answer, for she’d never said it to him.

41

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I don’t think she does,” Pines said, and proceeded to elaborate. “She told me that she married you to get her Green Card.” That line devastated Wade, that he felt he had to reply with an answer.

“I don’t love her, either,” he managed to say, which was not effective, and Pines took it as weak.

Wade suspected something had happened between them, but he didn’t speculate what could be his reasons for revealing Stacey’s conversation to him, but it was not long before more of Pines’ and Stacey’s relationship was disclosed.

Whatever Pines felt about Stacey emerged defiantly one morning in the house. While Wade was in the bedroom, he heard Pines’ voice louder than hers.

“I don’t like the way you talk to this man,” Pines said. “You don’t treat him well, and I don’t like it!”

“Get out!” Stacey replied. “Get out of this house!”

Immediately, Wade rushed out of the bedroom and saw the two of them going at each other with belligerence and finger-pointing, and he separated them, for they were about to clash, which would’ve been ugly. “What the fuck are you doing?” he barked at Pines, who had become more aggressive than usual. “Are you about to fight my wife?” he said. “Not in this house. You’re not fighting her in this house.” His response wasn’t indicative of him saying Pines could’ve fought her outside the house; the inference was also declared to say Pines must, of all places, respect his domain, and fighting his wife was off limits, for it would’ve regressed into grave consequences.

“You better wake up,” Pines warned him. “She doesn’t like you, and you ought to know that. I told her that I don’t like how she’s assassinating you behind your back, and that’s why she’s angry with me.”

Determined to end the bickering, Wade grabbed Stacey’s hand and pulled her into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He pulled her onto her butt on the bed, sat beside and faced her. Pines had 42

become a burden to them, eating up their food, but proceeded to allay his wife’s fear. “He’s my friend, but he eats like a horse,” he told her to calm her down and let her see he was on her side, but he had no intention to prevent him from eating; eating his food was the least of his worries, but she thought his allegiance was towards her and against him.

“I didn't say anything to him,” she lied. “How can he come in here and want to fight me?”

Having spoken to Stacey, and without getting to the bottom of their conflict, Wade went out and confronted Pines. “Let me talk to you, man, outside.” After they had walked out the apartment and into the hallway and stairs leading to the street, he spoke all his objections at him: “What the hell is wrong with you, man, fighting with my wife in my home? You’ve crossed the line, disrespected my home and family.”

“I’m trying to tell you she doesn’t like you—” “That’s OK. We’re still married, and as such, she’s my wife. Husbands and wives have disagreements, but they still live together. You have shown no respect for my home, or my family.”

With that said, Pines saw the error of his ways, and finally, said, “I’ll leave, man,” picked up his bag and left.

Wade knew he was married, but only on paper. Stacey had used him to get what she wanted— her Green Card, so it was not difficult to let go the inhibitions his marriage had placed on him. Without grounds for a divorce, he’d act as if he were divorced. His actions from that day onward were done without restraint on him, so when Claudia seemed willing to give him sex, he asked her for it. It was not long before she knocked on his door, gave it to him; he paid her for the pleasure she gave him.

He felt dirty, but who would know? Claudia came to him again and again and gave him sex, and then he began to make mistakes. One morning, Stacey entered the home and picked up a condom dropped on the floor after one of his escapades last night. How the hell he didn't see it and threw it 43

away before Stacey found it and confronted him. It was indefensible, and he knew it, but lied about it.

She picked it up and knew another woman was in her home and felt betrayed.

He was not in love with Stacey; he loved his son and wanted him to grow up with a mother and father in the home; his paternal instinct had persuaded him to stay. He wanted more action, and as he reasoned with himself of the mistakes he’d made and how he could’ve fixed things up, given more time, a clerk broke his train of thought by calling his name.

“Wade. Gaston Wade,” Randy Abrams said, with contempt.

Snapped out of his set, Wade picked up his bag and followed Abrams, who led him to a cubicle.

At his table, Abrams shifted the keyboard toward himself, and he typed in some data not shared with Wade. As no words had passed between them, Abrams stared at the monitor, occasionally tightened the skin around the corners of his eyes, but said nothing relating to the data on the screen.

Wade sat in disquiet, anxious to read the data, for he felt confident that the state’d made an error, and he pulled out the stack of pay stubs from the envelope he carried, rested them on the desk to the right so that Abrams could’ve seen the documentation he had brought.

Abrams, incredulous in manner, and pulling his face away from the screen, looked at him with a cold stare in his eyes, putting a distance between Wade and himself, played it cool then introduced himself. “My name is Randy Abrams. What can we do for you, today?”

“I want to know why this office has blocked my tax refund.” Wade said. “I received this letter from IRS.” He unfolded the letter and handed it to him. “It states that this agency has intercepted my refund check because, supposedly, I haven’t paid child support. If money is garnished from my wages every two weeks, since September 29th, why do I still owe child support?” He waited for a reply.

Abrams stared at him with contempt. “Look,” he said; “if you owe child support, you owe child support. As for your tax refund, we didn’t block your refund check. The IRS did.” He tapped some more keys.

44

“They did it without any directives from this office?” Wade asked him. “How did they know without you guys notifying them? This office notified them.”

Blowing his cool, Abrams snapped, “No! We didn’t. We didn’t. They have their system. They know who’s on it. They did it. All I know is what’s here.” He turned to the monitor, shoved it around so that Wade could see, and he pointed to what he perceived was the answer. “It shows more than $7,000.30 in arrears.” He stared at Wade as if to heap the whole figure of his arrears on him. Here it is.

See the data for yourself.

“I find it hard to believe,” Wade said. “How have you arrived at that figure?” As for him, that question was fair. Figures do not just add themselves; humans must add them to arrive at a number indicating our errors, our gains, our losses and our worth in life. The different numbers showed his losses and illustrated a gain for the state. Any student would’ve asked the question, compared the different numbers and told Abrams a discrepancy, an unacceptable difference, lay between the figures in Family Court and his. “How did the state add up the figures to get $7,000.30?”

“Cool it!” Abrams said. His face tightened with disgust. “It says that you owe $7000.30. It’s what I have on my screen.”

“That doesn’t tell me how you’ve arrived at that figure,” Wade said. “I wonder whether you’ve understood that I’m asking a logical question. How did you get from point A to point B? What math did you use to get that number?”

“Just wait a minute!” Abrams said. “You’re shouting,” he said, leaped up, pushed his chair back against the partition with violence, stepped in front of Wade and breathed down on him, like a bully.

Already showing the unprofessional demeanor befitting his position, he composed himself, paced about and studied something: his place in the world, his lack of knowledge of the case, Wade’s adamancy, only he knew. “You cool it!” he said, and sat in his chair, again. “I’m trying to help you, but I can’t if 45

you keep asking me so many questions, alright?”

Heads turned.

Wade pulled himself up in his chair. Unrelenting, he asked for the figures so that he could do the math himself, but Abrams denied his request. “All I want to know is how did you arrive at the figure on your monitor?”

Looking at his monitor, Abrams ignored his question. He tapped some of the keys on his keyboard, raising the tension developed between them both. The choppy sound of a printer in the corner could’ve cut it in two.

Wade broke Abrams’ silence with another request. “May I speak to your supervisor?”

Abrams smiled at the unexpected request Wade made. “You want to see my supervisor?” he asked, with sarcasm ringing in his tone. A wry grin gathered momentum on his face, spread then retreated to scorn. He gazed across the floor to a cubicle located at the back wall then looked at Wade again. “I’ll call her for you.” In haste, he got up, trudged toward the cubicle to pass the matter on to someone else. Soon he returned with Torres.

Torres wore jeans, a blue shirt, hair the color of brass, a narrow face easily forgotten because neither laughter, nor sadness, got on her, but something between the two emotions remained. You wouldn’t have known what it was, as she walked ahead of Abrams, looked at Wade with contempt, drew near and sat in Abram’s chair. Having not introduced herself, she stared at the monitor then tapped some keys on the keyboard.

Abrams, with his arms folded like a soldier at ease, stared down at him with a mean, killer streak.

“Hi,” Torres said. “I’m Ms. Torres. How can I help you?” The product of John Jay, she’d landed her job here after graduation with a degree in criminal justice.

“How have you arrived at the figure on your monitor, the amount this office says I owe?” Wade 46

asked.

Torres ignored his question, as if he wasn’t there and that he hadn’t ask for confirmation of the amount, turned to the monitor, tapping some keys. “Oh!” she said. “You owe only $7056.57.” That said, she looked at him with expectancy, as though her reply came out of personal knowledge of his case, and that anyone placed in the same, or similar, situation, would’ve believed her; he most of all should’ve taken her words within their broad definitions. Torres’ evasive, ambiguous answer confused him with the increased $56.27. Between her figure and Family Court’s lay the difference and an opportunity to release the true figure, set his record straight, but their refusal to do it puzzled him.

They’d sidestepped his simple questions that sought honest answers.

“That does not tell me how you’ve arrived at the sum,” Wade said. “Let me ask the question another way. What mathematical methods have you applied to get that figure?” Wade showed no visible sign of intimidation.

Abrams, like a menace, cleared his throat like the menace he was—.

“You’re shouting!” Torres said. “I can’t help you if—.”

“I’m not shouting,” Wade replied.

“You’re shouting!” Torres said.

Abrams cleared his throat again, stepped toward the desk, and read the format on the monitor, the numbers and headings in the columns.

Heads turned in their direction.

Wade stuck to his line of questioning. “How have you arrived at the figure?” he asked, but the repetition, his insistence, irritated Torres, who leaped up from her seat.

“That’s it!” Torres barked, while thrusting her index finger into Wade’s face. There was disgust in her eyes, and her cheeks turned red, intimidating. “This is going into audit! We’re gonna audit you!”

Then she briskly walked out with her head raised superciliously in the direction from which she came.

47

“I came for answers and this is what I get!” Wade said.

“Fuck you!” Torres retorted, threw back her head and walked toward the back with arrogance.

Annoyance rose to Wade’s face, twisted it out of proportion to the symmetry of his cheekbones, for he perceived Torres’d threatened him, heaped contempt on him, and his own powerlessness couldn’t break down the wall of intransigence placed in front of him. Had they attempted to explain the different sums to him, the state wouldn’t have resembled a bully, taking his money whenever it wanted to.

What will it look at in its audit? To his minimal and simple calculations, he owed nothing to the state. His pay stubs had already pointed out the deductions, the sum of his payments made, so taking additional money from him had further victimized him with a brutal financial squeeze. It’d look for other excuses to target him for an audit, so Wade gathered his receipts and held them indefinitely.

Abrams, bolstered by Torres’ handling of the matter, pulled the keyboard toward himself, tapped a few keys, avoiding eye contact with Wade, who was looking for the truth in him.

Wade thought of a strategy: ask for a copy of the document shown on the screen. “Can I get a printout of what’s on your screen?” he asked.

Without looking at him, Abrams denied his request. “No. You can’t get one.” He picked up a sheet of paper, looked at his monitor, wrote numbers on it then gave the sheet to him.

Snatching the paper out of Abrams’ hand, Wade read, ‘You owe $7056.57 child support.’ “The figures are wrong,” he said; “they are all wrong.” He was unable to do anything else now, except to stare at Abrams, deciding not to press on with getting the right figures from him, for he’d hit an inflexible state wall, and in subdued anger, he folded the paper and shoved it and his pay stubs in the envelope.

Without looking at him, Abrams said, “Go to 1 Center Street and talk to them there.” The city did its payroll at 1 Center Street.

Out of the office, Wade avoided the elevator, and bolted the door to the right to ascend the 48

stairs. Stopping for a moment on the steps, he threw his bag over his shoulder. It was easier carrying it strung over his shoulder to allow his arms to dangle free at his sides as he descended the stairs.

At the same time, with the clipboard in hand, Roland was stepping down the concrete stairs leading from the third floor, having taken the excess men and women up there to ease overcrowding in the main room. He looked at him with scorn, and continued toward the door out of which Wade had just stepped into the hall. Why put out such hostility, not knowing what had transpired inside?

Roland had heard nothing, heard nothing about his confrontation with Torres inside, and he thought Roland wouldn’t feel threatened giving out her supervisor’s name. Only conjecture, but he went anyway. Fielding information from Roland, he mounted up the stairs to ask.

“Excuse me,” he said.

With one hand holding the doorknob, Roland stopped and stared at him with scorn. “What do ya’ want?” he growled.

Reaching the top level of stairs, Wade asked him, “Who’s Torres’ supervisor?”

“Who wants to know?” Roland asked.

“I was in there and—” Roland drew back, screwed up his face, as if Wade’d invaded his space. “You’re running up on me, man!”

“Take it easy,” said Wade. “I’m asking you—” Roland frowned with disgust, swung at Wade, knocked him to the ground, and followed up with a kick to the stomach.

In pain, Wade doubled up in a fetal position, his arms protecting his stomach and his face.

Roland kicked him again. Satisfied with his assault, he desisted, pulling his tie straight again.

“If you want to know,” pointing his finger in Wade’s face, “you should’ve asked in there!” He 49

straightened his coat, opened the door and walked in, leaving Wade lying in his own blood and pain.

Victimized again, Wade got on his feet, shaken from the assault. Holding onto the rails, he staggered down the stairs. With every step he took, sharp pain stabbed him in his spine and shot up his bones, and the pain keeled him over. Cringing in pain, as his foot touched the last flight, he held his rib cage with both arms, stepped into the lobby and staggered toward the door.

A shopkeeper, standing behind the counter of a small candy store in the corner of the building, pitied him. Several people coming into the building pitied him, whispered to each other, for his bloody condition had revolted them. On the sidewalk, he leaned against the facade, closed his eyes to the rays of the sun that beat down on him, but its rays failed to ease a sharp pain that traveled up his chest, and it stayed in his right shoulder. With them—pain, sorrow, possibly a broken rib—he staggered off down Church Street toward the subway on Chambers Street to ride the train to Brooklyn, silently rode in the last car, the last seat, the few people in there unconcerned with him doubled up in pain.

50

Chapter 2

State Representative, Joseph Bounty, represented Crown Heights, maintained his storefront office on Nostrand Avenue, between President and Sterling Streets, spent most of his political time in Albany, New York, where he, as he’d told his constituent, was instrumental in helping to pass legislations in its interests. Better housing, better transits, better protection from trigger-happy cops shooting its sons in the streets, between the projects, were important issues he cared about. Running his reelection campaign on a broad platform, surprisingly, won him his seat. Absent that day, when Wade walked into his office, his assistant, Ronny Briggs, greeted him.

In front, flowerpots lined a platform built along the base of a glass partition that blocked out the street, probably for the expressed purpose of setting up a surreal indoor garden of various species of plants already flowered. Briggs, a dark, calculating man, with an air of importance circling about himself, extended his hand to him. Smiling, he greeted Wade, who felt a little at ease, and lead him to the back office. An inexplicable smile spread on Briggs’ face and quickly faded, as he sat at a table. A bookcase stacked with books of various titles was his backdrop, and with the many titles, one would think he’d read a wide collection and diversity of topics, titles, knowledgeable in matters Wade’d brought to him. Briggs got up and drew water from a cooler against a partition leading into the front of the building. “Sit down,” he said.

Wade sat on a chair at the side of the table, close to the passage way leading to the front and glass partition, flowerpots and flowers near the street, opposite where Briggs returned to his table, sat, picked up a yellow pad and wrote the date. His eyes rested on Wade. “What can I do for you,” he asked him.

“I have a problem with the state,” Wade said.

51

“Office of Child Support Enforcement has intercepted my tax refund. They’re leaning hard on me.”

Unbelievable story, but a question about it was pushing its way out of Briggs’ mouth. Pressed to release it, he couldn’t keep a second question concealed any longer, and asked, “What kind of problem?

What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” Wade said.

“Did someone beat you up, or something?” Briggs asked.

“I fell down,” he lied, stopped there, deciding not to reveal any more of his conflict with the man so firmly etched in his mind. The bruised on his face and the pain still lodged in his back had embarrassed him, so his conduct, as it related to the ugly conflict with Roland, was a refusal to divulge any more of its gory details.

“Go on,” Briggs said. “You’re having trouble with Office of Child Support Enforcement. What kind of problem?”

Narrating the preambles that had lead him there, receiving a letter from IRS, and that the state’d intercepted his $4,000.00 tax refund, while Briggs scribbled on his pad. “Back up there a minute,” he said, cutting off Wade. “How much money?” “$4,000.00.”

“And was that your tax refund?” Briggs asked incredulously.

“Here are the papers.” He handed Briggs the letter from IRS and a copy of his 1040.

Having perused them, Briggs asked him, “Can I make copies of these?”

“Sure,” Wade said.

Briggs went back into the front with the papers, leaving Wade to sit in silence and hope, unable to do anything else, or predict the outcome of Briggs making copies of his papers. No other option presented itself, or was there enough room to maneuver around the obstacles thrown in his way so far, so he looked around the office, at pictures hanging on the wall, 52

one of which showing Bounty shaking hands in a photo-op with New York Governor, George Paldosky, a tall, lean politician that knitted his brow often, when explaining his political positions to the press. A facial expression reader might’ve detected when he was lying, telling the truth, or padding the facts with embellishments. Returning with the papers in his hand, Briggs said, “I’m a lawyer, and I used to represent clients who’d similar problems with them,” he said. “I know what you’re going through.

They’d drag their feet in matters like this because they know that the longer they hold on to your money, the more interest they’ll earn.” He looked up at him from his desk. “If everything you’ve told me is true—not saying you’re lying to me—if each one checks out to our satisfaction, we don’t want to bungle it, now, I think you have a good case.” He perused the papers to pick up anything he’d missed, collated them, and gave the originals to Wade. Then he clipped and shoved the copies in a folder on the desk. The phrase, ‘good case,’ meant the office would use its power to recover his money, Wade thought. He was not holding on to something tangible, except words and Briggs’ performance that seemed to fit the nature of the office’s politics. Words on which he could hang his hopes were enough for him, and he thought Briggs and Bounty knew the movers and shakers in the city and state government, who could shake the political tree to cause his refund apples to fall; call on their colleagues for favors. A small case as his may require a phone call from Bounty’s office to solve and return his money to him, he thought.

He was taking short cuts, believed they were the shortest route to the release of his money, he knew, and questioned the veracity of Briggs’ statements and strength of the office. “Then you’ll get the money for me?” Wade asked.

“We’ll most certainly try to get it back for you,” Briggs said. “I tell you what,” he paused, scribbled some notes on his pad, and said, “Call me in three days and I’ll have word for you.” He grinned.

Expecting a favorable result after the meeting with Briggs, that Bounty’s office would use its 53

power to recover his tax refund, Wade began thinking that time is close to move out of his present home to some place else, preferably an apartment with more room. With this expectancy firmly taking root in his belief, he exited the building, taking in the warm air outside. Soon, it’d be payday for him.

Bounty’s office’d throw its weight around to get back his money, and his attention shifted up the avenue. Subliminal calls that may have originated up at Church Avenue—numerous Korean vegetable stores, fish markets, people and traffic up there and stretched across Brooklyn and voodoo to the sea . . . seemed to say to him: ‘. . . come and spend the money you carried in your pocket.’ Lacking that, the resources he needed to shop up there, he strode across Eastern Parkway, on which Caribbean carnival lived once per year, and down Nostrand Avenue toward Long Island railroad and his home.

Approaching four young men, who had gathered on the sidewalk under a cloverleaf tree, laughing, talking, and gesturing on the corner at La Casa Grocery, a bodega amongst bodegas, restaurants, boutiques, extending beyond St. Marks Street to Fulton Street to the north, he stopped near King Vegetables Market, Hakim’s department store, with its cheap items on display, hanging from the ceiling and walls, out of which people stepped out its door across the avenue, reminded you of the free market. Some people say if you want to get rich, open a store in the poor neighborhood.

“We’ve got dimes,” said one of the men. One of two lanky girls took a small package from another and gave the pusher something in return. Money that made the other boys curious and interrogatory prompted them to inquire about the full amount. The pusher unwrapped the fold, counted the money, and as the amount satisfied him, he nodded to his pal, who stepped behind a filthy dumpster, returning with a small plastic bag containing a dark-brown substance and handed it to one of the girls. As they skipped across the avenue, scanning it for ubiquitous cops, the pusher’s stare was glued on them.

Refusing the pushers’ offer, Wade walked along the sidewalk against the heavy traffic, around the people darting in and out of the bodegas, ethnic storefront restaurants with Styrofoam food 54

containers, or plastic bags, in their hands. People entered and exited small department stores with no restrooms to use in them, and some entered cars parked on intersecting streets, or just walked to their roach ridden and mice infested apartment homes. Cars whizzed by; cops cruised up, turned on their sirens on double-parked cars, and drivers ran out of stores to move those parked along the avenue, cursed in the dust-filled, sultry afternoon that could choke bus riders standing at a bus stop.

Further down the avenue, cops pulled several cars sharply to the curb in front of a small store that had displayed canned goods, rice, chips, soft drinks, candies in its windows at Nostrand Avenue and Bergen Street. You’d believe these prominently displayed items were for sale, but cops revealed the merchandise that hot entrepreneurs had been selling inside. Jumping out of their cars, cops rushed into the store with their guns drawn, kicked in doors, jumped the counter, pulled packages out of the walls, cuffed men and boys, pulled out their pads and tallied up drugs, guns and money found in the store, while they snapped photographs. This raid didn’t escape the people’s notice. Gathered on the other side of the avenue, they held their breaths, pointed, whispered to their neighbors and persons standing by and listening to the rumors going around. Others cursed cops’ enforcement tactics.

Walking away from the scene toward his home, Wade passed a large church on the corner with a steeple taller than all the buildings around it, and turned right on Dean Street. A dude washed a car with soapy water taken from a pail near a fire hydrant that had been running all day at the corner, and further north, on Nostrand Avenue, another hydrant deluged the gutters, spilled into the street, and giddy, hot kids ran under and out of its powerful spray to cool themselves.

At his home, Wade explored ways of selling his car parked in front of the house. He’d sell it to raise cash and restore some dignity to his life destroyed by the divorce and its aftermath. He was in a cruel bind, having no money to spend, buy the necessities that’d keep his life bounded with decency, pride, with food in a refrigerator to eat. He needed enough living space, vital shelter, to survive, like everyone else, and selling his car’d bring needed cash, but also deprive him of transportation. It was a 55

tough decision to make, but he must do something to get cash, and selling it was an easy option.

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Chapter 3

Paldosky got tough on criminals, signed a bill reinstating the death penalty in New York, his predecessor, Marion Santini, had vetoed, saying injustice in the system would’ve convicted men to die by murderous, state-sponsored laws stacked against them: Latinos, African-American men, the poor, caught in the troughs of the city. The stalk contrast between these two men was never more clear.

New York activists came out in protest against the bill, but to no avail; Paldosky ignored their protests. He’d run his political campaign on a law, order, and punishment platform, and signed the death penalty bill into law soon after he’d settled into office. Tacked onto that bill was a provision that gave New York’s Child Protective Enforcement Agency power to intercept IRS checks of guys behind on their child support. New York State was already intercepting IRS checks of deadbeat dads before he signed the bill. News vultures surrounded him on the steps of the state capital and gave him a photo-op in which he denounced deadbeat dads. The state’d fight to get them to pay, even take away their tax refund checks, seize their assets, and lock them behind bars. Locking up a parent for child support, or taking away his driver’s license, made sense, for how would he work for the same money demanded of him, locked behind bars, or his license taken away, the same license he depended on to work? They probably thought about that point, but ignoring it, they would ‘kill two birds with one stone’ and let the children also suffer by locking up the fathers. Should a society focus more on punishment and less on solution to solve its problems? Notwithstanding other ways of solving society’s ills, politicians always find strength in touting punishment to fix them and rarely advocate solutions, undermining the society’s strength they espouse to build. The affiliates segmented his remarks on the evening news, which Paldosky made with a political zeal unmatched by his predecessor’s, looking into the camera lens. It was the most direct reference made of Wade’s tax refund by a politician. In Chucky’s, a Jamaican 57

restaurant, Wade listened to and watched Paldosky indirectly demanding action against him on TV. His statements confirmed the state’s war on deadbeats; he was not a deadbeat, according to his views of himself, but was caught up in a wide political dragnet the state’d thrown out in the sea of society, drawing in human fish and gutting them of money. With little of it on hand, he paid for a plate of rice and bony oxtail.

Paldosky coming out against him with such news in public churned his stomach. Better someone had told him than hearing it himself, for then he would’ve had time to chew on it. The governor’s statement came forth with power, authority, and it ruined his appetite. With nausea setting in, he pushed his food away and hurried outside to throw up. Like the parents he knew, who talked to their children and shared the little values they’d possessed, he shared similar values with the son he loved. The state should take money away from true deadbeats, not from him; hands off the little he’d left. Hands off. He’d paid his support already.

Returning with a sense of lost and defeat whirling in his mind, Wade stood at the corner awhile before crossing the street. A time to think, clear his mind of hate and focus on a plan of action to recover his money, came easy and obvious. He ended up at his car. Closing the car door, he drove south on Nostrand Avenue toward Church Avenue, Coney Island, where the amusement park stood silent against the roar of the sea and back to Flatbush. He’d time to think of a plan of action to initiate, in case Briggs failed to get his money, and time to realize he must wait for word from him.

Turning the corner, Wade ended up in front her home. He never did get enough of her, or control the urges he still nurtured for her, and he realized that that sentiment might’ve explained why he ended up at her doorsteps. On Stone Avenue, he pulled to the curb. Up the stairs, he knocked on her door, and upon opening it, Stacey stared at him with contempt.

A man was sprawled on her sofa, as if to stake out some territory he’d won recently. Whether her new man, or not, Wade couldn’t tell, and didn’t care; she was making her own decisions, and didn’t 58

need approval from him on bringing in her friends.

Stacey’d never rid herself of the contempt she’d stored up for him, or forgiven him for his cheating. She could’ve taken a chapter out of Hillary Clinton’s philandering solutions book and saved her marriage, but the question was, did she want to? The answer to that question was a resounding no, but in contrast, Hillary did forgive her husband and save her marriage. As wife and First Lady of the president, Bill Clinton, the eyes of the world were on her every move. Her power and position in life made her a target for criticism, hate, and certainly, she was hated by the political right, so she had all the reasons in the world to be circumspect in whatever she did and said in public. How could she have reconciled that her husband liked sex? Accused of fucking a sexy brunette, Monica Lewinsky, in his office, which rapidly built a scandal so far-reaching that the court intervened to settle it, and despite the dismay, criticisms, both religious and political pressure heaped upon her to divorce, or not to divorce, Bill, the leader of the capitalist’s world, she waded through all that negative opinions, gossips, and mended her relationship with her husband. She didn’t leave him, nor pushed her man out of their home, which was the White House, but endured extreme political pressure from the self-righteous political left and right to leave him. Having endured the scandal, she saved her marriage and preserved her dignity and family.

The phone call came from her sister, while he was at work in Manhattan: his wife had checked into the hospital. After work, he showed up in her room to find out what was wrong and impart sympathy, but she was thrashing about in her bed, refusing to give a true story about her ailment, and he got up and left.

On his way down the hall, he asked a nurse, “What’s wrong with her?”

“Who, the lady in room 732?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Why, are you her husband?”

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“Yes.” “The baby came out black.”

“What baby?”

“She had a miscarriage. Didn’t you know?”

Obviously not; he was kept in the dark about her pregnancy, and he began to deduce whether she was pregnant, or not, because he and she were careful to apply contraception after the boy was born. Unable to recall her suffering a fall to induce a miscarriage, it was likely she was not pregnant; she said nothing about being pregnant to him, but he couldn’t prove she’d cheated on him, so he was left without answers.

Her marriage with him had no comparison with the First Lady’s, who, with all her power and privilege, refused to divorce her husband, so what’s driving the women thrust in such loathsome dispositions to destroy their families they’d helped built for so many years over an act like that with divorce? Did Hillary know something less privileged women today know? The answer may lie in how much each woman has to lose. Hillary had much to lose, and you might’ve argued that the obvious had explained why she didn’t divorce Bill. On the other hand, Stacey had nothing to lose, but her dignity, and she would’ve destroyed her family to save her dignity, or prove a point, whether religious, or political; what’s dignity, when you’ve got your family to preserve? Preserving her family and forgiveness were the last things on her mind.

“What do ya want?” she growled at him.

“My books,” Wade said. “Do you still have my books here?”

“Look,” Stacey said, “call first. Don’t come here before you call.” She slammed the door shut in his face, an insulting act to him. He would’ve felt better had she thrown water on him; her attitude made him feel unwanted, rejected, shut out of her life forever; I should stay away, he thought, and he cowered away, taking her insult with him.

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Turning on New York Avenue, he drove down to Dean Street and parked. Locking the door, he tossed the keys on the table beside the computer. Picking up the phone, he hesitated and dropped it again. It was Thursday night; anyway, he’d call him tomorrow, call Joshua tomorrow. Reneging on that, he picked up the phone again and dialed her number. Joshua answered, “Hello” Hearing Joshua’s voice relieved the anxiety, loneliness, the shame his absence from the home had brought on him, that prevented him from being there, in the home, to watch him grow in a household both parents shared, laugh with him, teach, embrace his parenting responsibilities, all of which had built up the aloofness he felt daily, for had Stacey answered, he would’ve vented his frustrations. Joshua’s voice came to him like a breath of fresh air blowing through the window. Cool, he breathed it in, savored it then spoke. Speaking to his son renewed his parental bond that had waned since he had left the home. He saw less of him, and needed his smaller voice to give meaning to a larger life he wanted for them both. “Hi, Joshua,” Wade said. “How are you?”

“Fine,” Joshua said.

“We can go somewhere, like the beach,” Wade said.

“Yeah!” Joshua said. “Daddy, I’ll ask mommy,” he said, and dropped the phone.

Wade heard Stacey’s acrimony in the background. Get something from him, something he owed them. Whatever disgusting remark she’d made came across the wire with hostility, as she was preventing access to Joshua, attacking his character, but lacking the wherewithal to deal with her preventing him from seeing the boy, who returned and picked up, he listened to hear him say . . .

“Daddy.”

“Yes,” Wade answered with anticipation.

“Mommy said give your address before I come to your house,” Joshua said.

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Stacey wheeled control over his access to Joshua by micro-managing the visit: get more information about Wade that she didn’t have. Had she thought he’d have hurt him, or taken him away from her, depriving him of her maternal love and care? Ridiculous! New York State law, proscribing heinous acts, such as kidnapping a boy, taking him from his mother, or hurting him, came down hard on perpetrators, and would’ve been just against him, had he done one of such nefarious deeds just mentioned. The longing to see his son inferred a simple, paternal explanation, but she demanding the surrender of his address was odd; she had thought the worse of him, nurtured an inclination to suspect evil in him that amounted to nothing less than fear, suspicion, and in spite of the acrimonious remarks she’d made in the background, it was an opportunity to meet Joshua, and he gave up his address.

In the car, Joshua examined the cut over Wade’s eye and the scrape on his forearm. “What happened, Daddy?” Joshua asked. “Who gave you that cut, Daddy? Were you in a fight?”

He found it easy to tell the truth to Joshua, and not feel the embarrassment someone had beaten him up, but he needed sympathy from him, who wanted the truth, but why let him down by saying someone had attacked his daddy? What parent wouldn’t want a son to see strength in him, not weakness, or defeat? He felt that he should tell a story that’d mask the truth, a story depicting him in a strong position, not in a weak position, diminishing his confidence in him.

“I fell down in the house,” Wade said.

“Sorry,” Joshua said, believing his Dad, and refraining from asking anymore questions relating to his Dad’s wounds, directed his attention on objects out of the window, withdrew with sympathy for him, and he felt glad again to be with him. Wade looked at him and smiled to see how much he’d grown with a handsome, little face that someday would mature and be a light for the ones in the dark; he was a good boy.

Wade drove to Manhattan Beach that Sunday on a clear day, blue sky. Many people had converged on the beach, spreading themselves on blankets, sand and in the sun, when he arrived.

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Joshua ran onshore, never going in deeper than where the water had covered his ankles. Fear of the vastness of the ocean relegated him to stooping down, dipping his body in the shallows then crawling on his hands. Calm, innocuous waves lapped the shoreline, but the vastness of the ocean looked ominous out there, and the child in him, the boy in him, ran along the shore, picked up shells and tossed them in deep waters. He needed help to go further in, so he called, “Daddy, come for me.

Come for me,” he said.

He was stroking the waves when he heard Joshua’s call, and he went on shore and gathered him up in his arms. With Joshua clinging to him, Wade waded into the deep. Had he put him down, the water would’ve inundated him.

Joshua looked down into the deep, dark and foreboding sea; he’d rather not go down there, so he held onto his father’s neck tighter and wouldn’t let go.

“Let me teach you how to swim,” Wade told him.

“No!” he said. “I’m scared, Daddy,” he cried.

“Don’t be,” Wade said. “I’m holding you. I wouldn’t let you go.”

“Don’t let me go,” Joshua begged his father. He trusted the strong arms holding him, his father’s strong arms preventing him from sinking.

“I’ll teach you how to swim,” Wade told him.

“No,” Joshua said.

An attempt to lay Joshua across his arms terrified him, and he screamed. Wade assured him and made promises not to let him go, but would teach him how to swim only. Trust and bravery entered Joshua, and he released his stranglehold from his father’s neck, but eyed the deep.

Wade laid him across his arms stretched out to support him on the surface. His arms and legs propelled everywhere until he was tired.

“Take me out, Daddy,” he said.

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On shore, the two of them sat on a blanket in the heat of the sun. An enjoyable day spent at the beach, a day Wade treasured with his son, went a long way toward mending broken parental bonds.

Back in Brooklyn, Representative Bounty flew into his office at about 10:00 a.m., carrying a silver briefcase and several manila envelopes in his hand. He laid his correspondence and his briefcase on his desk. A graduate of Brooklyn Law School, he realized he’d procrastinated mailing his alumni dues. In addition, late fees would be added on to the car note on his SUV parked at the corner of President Street and Nostrand Avenue, so he sat down and wrote two checks, got up, pulled one of the drawers of two file cabinets against the wall and picked out a file. Behind his desk, he read the contents of one of them. The front door opened, and he looked up, and called, “Ronny, is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me,” Briggs said, who stood inside the doorway.

“I have a plane to catch, at noon,” Bounty said, picking up his traveling itinerary, which showed a stop in Washington, D.C., and then to Albany. He hated the plane ride, but would take his chances and fly, for Amtrak wasn’t safer. He looked at Briggs, and said, “Call Charlie Ranger and tell him the meeting is pushed back for tomorrow—let me see.” He looked at his watch. “About 2:00 p.m. We’ll have lunch, and then discuss business.”

“Sure,” Briggs said. “That should be an interesting discussion.”

“I didn’t get a chance to call anybody on that child support matter,” Bounty said. He dropped his pen. “Frankly,” he continued; “the court has spoken. I don’t think we can do anything for him. Tell him get a lawyer.”

“He doesn’t have money,” Briggs said; “his situation drove him here, initially, and the very thing he needs now.”

“There’s Legal Aid Society,” Bounty said. “Their lawyers may represent him.” He resumed 64

writing.

Not far away, just a mile, or so, down Nostrand Avenue, and less than a mile away from Bounty’s office, Wade bought oranges and two bananas from Han Sung’s Grocery, crossed the intersection of Nostrand Avenue and Eastern Parkway and entered Bounty’s office shortly thereafter.

They’ve got influence in the city, and should know someone in authority who’d release his money, he thought. He met Briggs striding from the back with papers in hand.

“May I help you?” Briggs asked, oblivious of the man whom he’d promised to help get back his money. How could he have forgotten him, when he’d discussed his case with Briggs about a week ago and given him copies of some papers? ‘Mr. Wade, we’ve got good news,’ would’ve made his day.

However, his demeanor was awful and sent a message that nothing was done to help his case.

“Don’t you remember me?” Wade asked.

Briggs searched his memory bank, squeezed his eyes with two of his fingers, and said, “Oh, yeah! Yeah! You came in for help in getting back your money from Office of Child Support Enforcement.”

“Correct,” Wade said.

“No. We have no word for you,” Briggs said.

“You didn’t do anything, did you?” Wade asked.

“Ah. No, we didn’t, or shall I say, we couldn’t,” Briggs said.

“Your office is to represent us,” Wade said. “We put you in office, but when we need your help, we can’t get it! Something is wrong with that kind of representation.”

“I’m afraid not, old boy,” Briggs said. “You’ll have to get a lawyer. I’m not practicing law anymore.”

“You gave me the impression that things would’ve worked out well for me,” Wade said. “You 65

said you would’ve helped me, man! Said your office’d get my money back, and now, nothing! You’ve done nothing! You’ve misled me.”

Bounty appeared from the back with a frown on his face. “Mister, we did what could be done with the resources available to us. It’s a bureaucracy out there.”

Disappointed, Wade tramped out the door. The choice was clear, whether to take up arms against the state, fight, and by fighting, end it all against that might, end his freedom to roam, end the relationship between Joshua and himself, to reclaim the money his labor’d brought to him. He chose to fight with the means available to him, and set off to find out what means were available.

Beginning with a letter-writing campaign, it wasn’t much, but think of it, it was one of the harmless, profound weapons available to him. He’d spell out his displeasure on paper of the horrible injustice done to him. At his computer, he composed, typed a letter. Three pages edited, revised and collated. He’d send a copy to the media that, he hoped, would publish details of the fight in which he’d suffered a severe beating at the hands of Roland. Yes, a fight with state workers would interest them, he thought. David Rush, the director of Office of Child Support Enforcement, would get a copy. Picking up three manila envelopes, Wade locked the door and descended the stairs. Several people loitered on the steps of one of the brownstones across the street, and the wind wrestled the trees, when he was turning the lock. That done, he headed toward Nostrand Avenue with them under his arm.

The story’ll interest them, the media, cause them to investigate, expose the state’s illegal practice of taking a man’s money without cause, Wade thought. The state’s bullying ought to interest them, and the publicity may even force the legislature to amend the laws. It was a tall order, considering against whom he was carrying out his campaign. In comparison, he resembled a mouse fighting against an elephant, which would’ve crushed him than him harming New York, but that notion didn’t deter him. He felt his pocket for money to pay postage, contemplating to go across the avenue after the traffic gave way. He thought he had stood under the overpass of Long 66

Island Rail Road for a long time, while the heavy train cruised overhead at Atlantic Avenue, and while the noisy traffic snaked its way south through the intersection of Atlantic and Nostrand Avenues; the sultry dust swirled around the humans roaming the sidewalks.

Time seemed to run fast in Brooklyn, and at about 4:20 p.m., Wade entered Brooklyn Bridge to drive across to Manhattan. ‘Righting’ the wrong done to him on his mind drove him forward, even when he turned on Leonard Street in Manhattan and parked about two hundred feet from the building that housed Office of Child Support enforcement; he needed his money, also to avenge himself of the beating he’d received from Roland, pay him back for assaulting him. Pedestrians passed him there sitting in the car.

His watch said 4:45 p.m. at about the time he pulled a .44 magnum, one of the most powerful hand guns made, and which could ‘blow a man’s head clean off,’ a six-shooter powerful enough to inflict the damage he perceived as just, from the glove compartment. Armed, he waited and watched 66 Leonard Street like a predator.

Only revenge would cure the humiliation he felt, for anything else would’ve left it there, the horrible imagery of the beating, in the craw of his psyche to haunt him for the rest of his life. How would he live with that, live with Roland’s fist connecting his face and his foot in his rib cage?

Revenge, all the emotional gratifications projected and consequences to bare, never stands alone in the mind of the avenger, for many other ways to avoid it would also stand on reasonable grounds beside it, as alternatives to help you resist the urge and unreasonable voice advocating the opposite outcome and self-righteous glory to be had carrying it out; laws and punishment supposedly commensurate with the crime of revenge meeting out on the perpetrator, who, having been influenced by some perceived gratification to inflict pain, would risk the repercussions; ‘getting away with it’ often would drive any criminal forward to commit crimes, like Wade was sure he’d get away with it. Every passing minute he sat there presented an opportunity for him to think about his move to kill, abandonment, live and let 67

live, but he was dominated by the aim to kill.

The stakes rose and conscientious questions came; why would he want to strike Roland, when he’d just edited a letter and sent it to his boss and the media, hoping that someone would shed light on his conflict with Office of Child Support Enforcement and Roland? The letter named him as a violent fiend, but killed, and cops would’ve suspected him as the slayer. It was not a smart thing to do, so he dropped the idea and replaced the gun back in the glove compartment.

The time was close to 5:10 p.m., when Roland stepped out of 66 Leonard Street with a female, who turned toward the subway on Chambers Street, and his appearance deepened Wade’s intent to kill him, which had trumped the consequences, but his aim was a prescription for legal troubles following him for the rest of his life, getting caught and accused. Continuing down Leonard Street, Roland crossed over Church Street then turned right into a parking lot, an acre of asphalt west of the IRS building left of Leonard.

Following him on foot, Wade observed Roland’s every move toward his car, it color, and whether he looked around his surroundings before he entered it, or not, or just plopped in the seat behind the wheel. Roland jabbed his key into the door.

Wade caressed the gun tucked in his waist, but decided against shooting him. He’d already written about Roland in his letter, so he was relieved he’d made the better choice, which led him away from murdering a man and jail.

At home, Wade added up the redeemable value of his car to price and sell it, and by selling it, raise cash. A loss of transportation would’ve set him back several years, back when ‘life sucked without a car,’ and he argued with himself about selling it and avoiding paying next month’s insurance premiums. Deciding on driving it for several more weeks, he delayed getting rid of it. Unpaid premiums would ultimately cancel the policy; the state would demand return of the plates, and he knew that by driving he’d be breaking the law, a desperate step to take. Making this crucial transportation cut 68

and relying on the bus bothered him. It was disturbing ending up on the bus because it meant he’d be arriving late for every appointment, getting up earlier to go to work, all strong appeals against selling the car. He dropped the idea after realizing several weeks had still remained in the policy.

Shopping for food, Wade strode south on Nostrand Avenue, passed the weed house, the Russian restaurant that sold only breakfast and lunch, and entered Chucky’s. In there, he bought a loaf of bread to satisfy his heart, crossed Nostrand Avenue to the other side, where he went into A&P Supermarket and bought four cans of sardines.

Back at home, Wade picked up one of the cans of sardines to prepare his meager meal. Peeling back the seal of the can, he inspected the rows of small fish lying in oil, longing for a hot meal, but without a hotplate, or stove, the feasibility of that fell to zero. He ruled out going outside to start a fire and going upstairs to his neighbors to use their stove; embarrassment prevented him.

He must improvise, he thought, when he saw, in the corner just behind the door, his electric iron with its cord wrapped around its handle on the floor. Please with himself he’d packed it, a semblance of smile stretched the corners of his lips. Then an idea hit him: use the iron as a hot plate to heat the sardines. A problem surfaced, such as getting it to work as a hot plate. He felt he wasn’t going to place the iron on the can, like one presses a piece of cloth. Picking it up, he plugged it into an outlet behind the small refrigerator on which he propped it on its handle within the corner’s ninety-degree angle that kept it steady. With the smooth surface facing up, he placed the can of sardines on it, and soon the heat boiled the olive oil in which the fish lay shoulder to tail. He ate and went to bed.

The four dingy walls in need of a fresh coat of paint would’ve brightened his world, but it had its opposite effect that saddened him, and he felt shut up inside, sat upright on the bed to ponder his next move. Looking out the window, nothing, or people, stirred about in the apartments in the back.

Lights went out in some of them above the tops of the trees; it was the world out there and him in there.

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