Chapter 6
I was back on my high horse. Maybe even a giraffe, because this time was different. Ashley Jackson who? I realize I just told you about Ashley and it would stand to reason I would’ve learned a life lesson. Nah. Ashley was a muddy ole river. Kelly was a genuine, ever-flowing waterfall worth chasing if ever a body of water deserved such pursuit – real or fictional – because, in terms of bodies of water, I’d put Kelly up against the Fountain of Youth in deserving obsession. I believed this with every fiber of my being and even knowing now, what I knew not then, I’d follow those currents, farther than even Ponce De Leon would, again and again, and again, every single time.
By this time, I’d all but forgotten about “FAT” scribbled on Shimika’s chart. It would’ve been impossible to dampen my joyous mood for the days to follow Kelly’s timely compliment. One day at lunch with Tyrone and Marcus, I boasted of my recent triumph.
“How them ladies treatin’ you?” I cunningly asked the crew.
“Not too bad,” mumbled a random tablemate.
“Can’t complain, how bout you?” Marcus asked.
Beginning with “well, since you asked with y’all nosey asses …” I retold the tale of my French class victory, in excruciating detail prompting Tyrone to retort: “Oh that’s it? The way you built it up, I thought you fingered her in class or somethin’.”
The lunch table erupted in laughter. I laughed too. I wasn’t so smitten that I was oblivious to the elevated joy my retelling brought me. Disappointed manual vaginal penetration had become the standard for bragging rights, I let the laughter dwindle and allowed the conversation to shift as I internally sulked on how much things had changed in junior high. It seemed like only yesterday getting a girl’s number was reason for celebration, but now I was being tasked to be intimate with girls in ways I didn’t fully understand. I mean the concept was pretty simple, but I didn’t understand the point, why someone would make this his goal, why a girl would be open to it, and how one could pull it off in a full classroom. Tyrone’s hyperbolic joke wasn’t lost on me, but it still represented an escalation in the childish games we played.
I refocused on how to capitalize on the headway I made with Kelly and on how not to make the same mistakes I made with Ashley. Each night I rehearsed talking points to employ before or after French class.
“Your mama voting for Clinton?”
“I dunno what Amy’s doing,” Kelly said with a shoulder shrug and polite smile.
“Did you see Arsenio last night?” I inquired after another day had passed.
“Boy, I be sleep,” she quipped with an eye-roll.
After a few more days. “That Malcolm X trailer looks tight, you gonna see it?”
“Huh? Yea. I gotta get to class.” That’s how it went. She was polite but none of my attempts were received in an efficacious manner.
Not ready to abort the mission, after another school day of half-hearted attempts with lukewarm responses, I returned to the drawing board. I’d take some time to reflect on next steps during my ride home. My mom would take me to school each day, but as she’d still be in the office at 2:15 p.m. when school ended, I was on my own to get home. This latchkey kid was dependent on the “#13 Elvis Presley Blvd.” or the “#20 Winchester Rd.” bus. They both followed the same route by the time they stopped just ahead of Casey’s Motel across from my house. These were city buses, not the yellow school buses I thought were only commissioned for school field trips, never knowingly living in a neighborhood where yellow buses frequented.
Likely this is more information on public transit than you care to learn, but I viciously hated MATA (Memphis Area Transit Authority), primarily for reasons in no way its fault, with the chief reason being quite relevant to Kelly, and another occurring during this commute. But first I’ll share a few other reasons to better illustrate our feud. When I lived on McKinley in the house across from the projects – the inherited house, which we were forced to move into because dad mismanaged his finances and lost the Karate school – there were times I was forced to use MATA because our car wasn’t running. This is the same house that temporarily lacked running water, a memory I hold because I remember sitting in the back seat with a collection of empty plastic milk jugs my mother would fill at the nearby gas station, then return home and boil the water so I could bathe.
On school days on McKinley, I got up extra early to walk a 5k race up a hill, to get to a stop to catch a bus that didn’t even take me to Hamilton, but to another stop serving as a transfer area to yet another bus. This second bus would get me closer, but not close enough to avoid another shorter, but still lengthy walk. I followed my older, faster cousin, who complained about my suboptimal gait, as we’d surely miss the bus if left to my pace. Contrarily, she’d request the bus driver to wait on her little cousin. The driver would comply much to the dismay of the other passengers. This once happened on Halloween and the patrons seemed extra annoyed at waiting on a chubby ninja. Except for one older Black lady who thought it was cute, though she struck me as a retiree, not on a strict schedule. We had a similar, unpleasant journey from the shelter to the closest bus stop and I blamed these unwanted cardio workouts on MATA for not designing routes more convenient for my homes, even the temporary ones.
There is also the story of how a classmate, Olu, who is currently alive and well, was run over by a bus right in front of Bellevue. I never saw it. And a part of me never believed it. Mainly because I heard speak of it at a time much later than it occurred and I couldn’t believe I missed it. Yet deep down, really deep, despite my disbelief, I knew it had to be MATA’s fault.
MATA also represented the fact we didn’t have enough money for two cars or, at times, one working car. Or while at Bellevue, Michael and I only had one parent who couldn’t both work and pick us up from school in the fashion I witnessed of so many other students. Maybe I didn’t hate MATA but rather it provided its share of negative associations unable to be overshadowed by the normally mundane rides upon its fleet or generally uneventful waits at its stops.
This particular ride began indistinguishable from any other. I walked up four steps, dropped my coins into the contraption, and walked to the back of the bus, where students generally sat to distance themselves from the driver and his requests to “quiet down.” My normal process was to find a pair of empty seats, or if unavailable, one empty seat next to a familiar, friendly, or simply not-hostile face. Latasha Rice, who by this time was riding to school with me, was a frequent companion on the ride home. My mom had seen her pass our house to catch the bus one too many mornings for her to feel comfortable not offering a ride. This soon became our custom. In fact, now, we would stop by her house on our same street, wait for her to come out, and then head to Bellevue. Sometimes her mother or stepfather would wave from the doorway but more often they wouldn’t. Latasha never referred to her mother’s husband as her stepfather but they were both dark-skinned and Latasha was clearly biracial with her light skin, stringy hair and European nose and lips.
Latasha’s mom offered Shirley gas money a time or two, but she refused, as was mom’s nature. I knew we could’ve used every dollar we could get, but Shirley wasn’t an “any dollar we can get” type of mom. Her principles stick with me, even today.
My stop was popular enough that I rarely had to pull the black cable myself to alert the driver I wanted to stop after we passed Kerr Avenue and the Subway sandwich shop. I’d sometimes stop there prematurely and order a meatball sub, six-inches or a footlong, depending on the promotion being offered and the degree of the school lunch’s failure to satiate me. Either was enjoyed with the “Disney Afternoon” lineup including DuckTales and Chip N’Dale or Batman the Animated Series. I don’t recall much about my time on the actual bus, except for while idled at a long red light, a car next to my open window blasted “People Everyday” by Arrested Development. The song stood out because my mom had just educated me on how the chorus used the sample and sound of the Sly & the Family Stone’s song of virtually the same name, but with the words switched back to their original, intuitive order. The song was from the sixties when she was growing up and was one more piece of evidence my generation was a bunch of musical frauds profiting off of the work of hers. She didn’t nearly say anything so harsh but that’s how those speeches would play back in my head.
The pulling of the cable by a passenger set off a wave of motion resulting in a ding as the driver released his foot from the brake, creating sound mimicking the bus sighing to be accelerating yet again, and we traveled a distance long enough for the driver’s foot to rest on the pedal without getting acquainted before having to return to the brake. As we reached a full stop, the handful of passengers stood up and gathered by the back door descending a stair or two before the doors opened. As was the case, frequently enough not to be paid any mind, the #20 or the #13, whichever one we weren’t on, was stopped right in front of us at the same stop, occurring when time and space between the buses weren’t staggered generally due to one getting behind schedule and rarely due to the other getting ahead. With all those who had wished to be off the bus and on the ground, we waited for both the buses to pull away and clear a path for us to cross the busy four-lane road, without a formal crosswalk, as we did every day. But as the first bus stalled, likely dealing with an on-comer who didn’t have exact change or wasn’t sure if he should catch this bus or the next, I got the eeriest of feelings I couldn’t explain, like a single grey cloud on a sunny day.
And that is when I noticed it. Latasha was getting antsy. She moved side to side and back and forth without ever leaving the space in which she stood. She reminded me of the crackhead played by Halle in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever. I agreed it was annoying to wait a few minutes more after a long bus ride but I didn’t quite understand her annoyed impatience or at least to the degree of urgency her jittery behavior depicted. The buses didn’t move. Latasha did. Unwilling to wait any longer, she walked between the two buses. I looked up at the driver of our bus, the one creating the back side of the gap, and he was as alarmed as I, if not more, honking his horn and gesturing for Latasha to stop. But Latasha proceeded with such great determination, for a second, I was forced to doubt my own suspicion this was a standout bad idea even amongst the most horrible of proposals. When she got to the end of the gap at the tip of the 2nd lane, she peeked around the sides of the buses, looking both ways, which was ironic to me, that this piece of safety advice she adhered to while forsaking all others. Satisfied with what she saw, or what she didn’t, she stepped into the next lane to cross and in what felt like less than a nanosecond, I heard it. I saw it. I felt it. A burgundy sedan came flying through and hit Latasha dead on, so hard she flew in the air, performed a somersault and a half and fell back to the asphalt, with a boom I imagined the Casey Motel residents mistook for thunder, while Latasha laid still, and presumably, lifeless.
I stood there just as lifeless. Shocked. Had I witnessed a death or even a murder? I didn’t know what to do. I was paralyzed as if I was the one who had been smacked by the speeding car. My heart felt it had been run into. Though I wasn’t as close to her as our homes were in address numbers, I did know her, and I cared for her more than a stranger. I was lost less than fifty yards from my own home. A couple of years prior my father encountered a vehicle in a similar fashion and I could only wonder if Latasha would meet the same fate or the alternative.
Despite the seriousness of the accident, this also represented a time I, somewhat humorously, questioned if I was a good person. (Full disclosure, “humorously” is only included to hopefully make you feel less disgusted with me.) After the initial shock, I debated how soon I could leave the crime scene. By this time an ambulance had been called, adults were kneeling by her side, and miraculously, though unconscious, she seemed to still have a pulse, but in all honesty, I wondered how many beats she had left. Yet and still, I was hungry and tired of standing in the South Memphis sun. I yearned for the comforts of my home’s in-window air conditioning unit I’d have to turn on and patiently wait for its cooling magic to take effect. I stood there daydreaming about fixing a sandwich on white bread with three thick slices of bologna and adding ketchup, my favorite condiment, and maybe adding a couple of chips to give it a crunch if the mood struck me. I swear I wasn’t without compassion, but I felt my work was done. Luckily, I thought of my phone and said aloud to anyone who would listen, but to no one in particular, I was going home to call my mom so she could alert Latasha’s parents. Maybe I’m not a completely selfish, horrible human because there is a 92% chance I called my mom and told her what happened before fixing my sandwich, but definitely after turning on the A/C. I want nothing more than to give you the other 8%, but unfortunately, God wasn’t yet done with me then, and as you likely have already ascertained, He ain’t through with me, still.
That night mom told me Latasha was in the hospital but she had no updates. She promised she’d call the hospital first thing in the morning and find out more about my friend. Mom referring to her as my “friend” made me realize she was more than the girl with whom I rode to school. I was worried. Though we didn’t talk much on our rides, there was a bond tragedy unveiled. My thoughts returned to Kelly. What if that was she or I in Latasha’s scuffed shoes? Would I be happy with the things left unsaid between us? I knew I wouldn’t be. The precious fragility of life couldn’t be ignored. I had to act. But for now, I had to wait and see if I’d speak with my friend, Latasha, again.