Darius Stewart
After five days detoxing in the hospital, it was so wonderful to be back home in the old neighborhood again. How the sunlight hung in the trees like toilet paper strewn in good-natured tomfoolery; how the streets were paved with speed bumps, now, tall as hurdles, castaway trash in the sewers, thigh-high grass yellowing in the yards, especially the house on the corner, its basement so flooded you could see inside the gaping hole on the side, the mortar crumbling like sand sifting through someone’s fingers . . . oh what a glorious day to come home!
And I was five days sober!
The old neighbors had neither moved away nor died; it was too good to be true, those crafty sons-of-bitches beaming ear-to-ear so happy to see me. I’d have to remember to keep the curtains parted, lest they have trouble peeping in my bedroom window to glimpse what new beau I’d be bringing home—just like in the old days.
And the new neighbors were a rousing bunch, indeed, particularly the woman two houses down, who, earlier this morning, I almost introduced myself to, except she was busy breaking up with her boyfriend. He had dreadlocks that roped to his shoulders, which probably tickled your nose when you leaned in close to him, smelling perhaps of sandalwood, his dark skin glowing as if he generously applied cocoa butter all over his body every single day; and why again was she breaking up with him?
Surely not because he wore a wife beater long enough to stretch over his ass, his pants ill-fitted to contain everything. How resourceful and what a sense of fashion, that man, leaning against a black Mazda where a door was rusted through, and the tailpipe, and the fender, and the roof almost entirely rusted through. The rims on that car, of course, were all silvery opalescent and gave underappreciated meaning to prioritization.
But her . . . oh, she was too good to be true; a voice like a drag queen’s cursing, I could almost imagine her tripping over a power cord and the goddamn you she was sure to spit out, bemoaning the day its creator was ever born.
She had what we called womanosity. When he told her, “You kicked me out, remember?” she responded, “You got that right, muthafucka!” *SNAP!*
Oh, why did I ever leave?
I forgot we’re family-centric here.
A little girl who I presume was her daughter, barely tall enough to reach the porch rail, stood just as I did: looking back and forth between them, learning multiple contexts for four-letter words. She sucked her thumb, tugging her earlobe as if to open the ear canal a little wider to receive this new vocabulary. I could imagine her one day on a Saturday morning watching SpongeBob SquarePants in the living room, laid out on the floor with a bowl of cereal in one hand and a spoon in the other, becoming fluent in how to say with perfect conviction: “Bitch! I want a Krabby Patty!”
By now, the couple had attracted a crowd, the streets lined with every resident—even the neighbors two blocks away ran over, envious of how skillfully we could attract the police so early in the morning.
That’s when I lost interest and returned inside. This was not the type of behavior I should be so engrossed in.
I only last night started AA again, and what a gorgeous night it was with the Supermoon a wonderful distraction from the otherwise pale faces (made paler in the moonlight) of the recovering.
We all watched it from the church’s multi-purpose room, sipping coffee, Diet Coke, anything caffeinated, really, to keep the superhighways inside our bodies busy with traffic.
Sitting in folding chairs, we engaged in the usual protocols, introduced ourselves, belabored the points of honesty.
We were addicts, all of us, grieving our ill wills, our lost battles, our messy beds damp from night sweats. Someone was always speaking, but all eyes were awash in the glow of the moon.
A woman grabbed my arm as if inhabiting a sudden flashback to headlights of an oncoming car and no time to steer out of its way.
A man nodded into his empty Styrofoam cup, tearing the rim to a jagged half-moon edge; saying yes so quietly, his lip quivering, it seemed almost too apparent it was too soon to discuss what all had happened in his life.
No one remarked how lucky we were, though, for the moon tonight, how its soft light was a gentle kiss upon the eyelids. No one gave themselves over to this higher power, nor to be pulled into its slow dance, so that you scarcely knew you were moving, like falling, unwittingly, in love with a man with dreadlocks who smelled of sandalwood, whose hair roped to his shoulders and tickled your nose when you leaned in close to him, so close.
Oh, to be happy for once without the constant threat of memory.
I wanted to share with them how I once fucked a man while a police car’s spotlight shone through the rear window of the car we were in, in the parking lot of a prestigious Southern university, how it was thrilling to be straddling him in the front seat while the light of the afterlife engulfed us.
Yes, some might have died of embarrassment or the fear of jail. But not us.
I wanted to share how we kept going despite the officer approaching with his flashlight sweeping across the fogged window, how he peered in so dangerously close it might as well have been a threesome when we rolled the window down revealing our sweat, our breathless chests heaving, our funky interloping bodies.
How he stared at us, placed a hand on his nightstick (and this was no euphemism).
He told us simply to move on, that we were trespassing, and gave us a pass.
I wanted the room to laugh at how young, how obscene we were, to insinuate either the officer was kind or perhaps aroused, that perhaps he even drove home with one hand on the wheel, the other on the rigid gear shift thinking of all the things he could do to himself.
I wanted blue-moon faces screaming yes yes yes, to be the straw that broke the miserable camel’s back, the straw incinerated like a meth lab poorly attended to.
I wanted them to wink, to nod as strangers do when they mean to say thanks, I needed that, the way anonymous sex used to be such a gift.
That night the lunar light was a marvel we should have all been equally beholden to,
perhaps encouraged to fall in love again gazing out the window, bent almost to falling from our chairs, internally combusting from such gratuitous beauty, and this man with his Styrofoam cup would no longer be ruined by his silence and say to hell with it, go around the circle kissing every woman he’d ever fantasized spending an evening tangled with in a blanket on the football field of his old high school, imagining himself a teenager scoring his first lay like the rest of the popular kids, beneath the black silk sheet of night while the brightest unblinking eye watched.
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