Growing Tomato/The Rising Dough (eBook)

ONE

We sat on the wooden steps at the back of the house and smoked cigarettes watching the tabby cats play between the stringers and the risers of the lower stairs. The wooden steps beveled in the middle, showing the ware of many feet. Paint that had not been worn free peeled and rised from the wood at the ends of each step. Dawn marched against the row of flat rooftops of the neighbor’s houses. We sat there mistakingly waiting to become men. Stephen sat a step from the top, his forearms rested on his knees, his hands clasped but for his right fore and middle fingers holding his cigarette, his stare on the ash. I sat somewhere in the middle, my right foot on the same step, my arm draped over my knee, my back against the railing. We figured some spirit of some other world and religion may appear through the dark of night and render us men so we could get on with our lives. We sat there until the sun began to pull the moisture from the small squares of grasses that lay between concrete paths through the backyard, misshapen with rounded corners by lazy feet and dogs with fast hearts. No spirit materialized within the smoke of our cigarettes or ever arrived at all and so with the sun fast climbing into the sky we retreated into his house to sleep a few hours. So, is that memory? Like every other soul there are more, some darker. That wasn’t the only time we had sat on those desperate, futureless steps. We had a million times. We didn’t really smoke that much, or at all, it was an act for each other to express our maturity and at other times for our friends. We had no money to buy smokes, you just wanted to separate from the house, the authority, the institution and it too gave us the illusion of independence, freedom, adulthood. Sitting in backyards and on people’s porches were like vacations. Those steps were not my parent’s. We, my friends and me, just wanted to be old, we were tired of being kids. Watching the cats was not just a pastime it was a lesson. The cats belonged to a woman who wanted more than we understood. She had eleven. I would love to be able to recite their names but then I would have to admit to being a totalitarian. We could name them A through K. Something silly like that. And I can’t recall her name either. She was as old as the turn of the century and we couldn’t understand her. It wasn’t her acsent, it was just that old people believed different back then. The cats would sit around the yard, at the back of the house, now and then sneaking to the front of the house to measure the distance to the neighbor’s house on the other side of the street. But they knew where dinner was served. Everything seemed to be green and yellow and sky blue, when you were thirteen. They would lay on each other in a wooden box, mostly, turned on its side, oblivious to the world until it encroached on their space, the life of a feline. I wouldn’t go in her house however unless she convinced me that it was important and she couldn’t handle the emergency; and they would sit and judge you. They knew you knew they studied you and you them. Their eyes big and glass like. They wouldn’t give an inch in their pride and honor. However, fuck the cats. Just spooky. Well Stephen and I were just looking to move on, to leave those steps and the alley at their bottom for good. We were thirteen. We were getting old but the time would come, would come to pass. We would move on looking to become the men we envisioned. To have freedom, the freedom to choose our path and to engage in the world that excited us not to be told what that excitement and those interests were. We knew exactly how life was going to be, we just needed to get the hell out of there. We did move to characters, popular fiction? Cinema? I mean how do you become a man when Andy Warhol is the art master per media? This is the shit I grew up in, Robert Raushenburg, Jasper Johns! How is a kid to move forward in that world. Everyone borrows but these clowns weren’t original at all. You’re afraid to step on the platform you belong. Fuck the cats. They can play wherever. The art world eats itself. If James Baldwin had something to say, why didn’t he talk about the society he actually lived in? His Harlem brothers and sisters didn’t live in his shoes. Me neither. Hope to, briefly. However, there’s nothing in Paris for the long term for me, and I wouldn’t think for any American, which his Harlem brothers and sisters and myself are from. So that telling was only one story of us sitting. When? We didn’t know. Chicago could sing us through most things temporarily. So, with trumpets blowing when do you become a man? We were working that out. We again, were thirteen. We knew everything, the world would be ours. I will tell you one more thing tonight, there were many occasions that I thought I was a man and I was wrong. I don’t believe it’s something we decide when or choose how. You don’t walk into a store and pay a few dollars when you feel you’re ready.

I rinsed my mouth and washed my face with the garden hose that laid in circles of sizes not at all alike, at the bottom of the steps. A few of the cats danced over the hose in their hurry to spread out, as I met it at the bottom. I dropped the hose in the pile of circles and ran home, skipping Stephen’s Mother’s plan for breakfast. She would explain later that night the dangers of skipping breakfast, and leaving my shoes and shorts on the floor, I laid on the couch and as she instructed me pulled the covers over my shoulders. I was home for a few hours. As I slept mackeral tabby cats lightly placed paw after paw across my corpse like body until they found the correct pace of life and laid within it, upon it. Fleas took their turn and manuvered through hair and ankles and ears. Spirits came too and warned me about being a man. There was no changing my mind, even in sleep I was ready. A ’34 Ford V8 went sideways, red I believe, around the house dust covered the clothes hanging on the line, dogs ran off, cats sat watching from a superior vantage. I woke, pulled on my shorts and tied my shoes and ran out across the yard, the door hanging a bit loose on its hindges slapped the jam. The rain stung my head. The cats sat piled under the porch and watched in all their aristocracy. My arms flailed wildly, my feet felt, appealing for control, fingertips slid across chipping gray paint, my ass hit the mud at the bottom of the steps in a ballet, a twist, unhurt, a slow act of kindness. Fuck those cats! Look at them look at you. I should have run them into the rain. At this point I slowly lumbered up the stairs, no dry cigarette on a wet day, can’t afford it.

There were breakfast leftovers the temperature of the kitchen, so I had some. My hair was in the act of drying, my ass in a chair, my pride in my ass, my body in Stephen’s clothes, my clothes in the washer, Stephen’s Mother in the kitchen talking. She would always whisper, “If you were only older.” And then exhale a dream. I would smile and think, “I know, I’m trying. I am older!” I didn’t know why women would always say that. What did that mean? I wanted to be older too. Stephen got his sense of humor from his father. His mother was more practical, her eyes were practical she didn’t have the sensibility of creativity. I eventually understood what her practical eyes were saying. She got in the habit, like it was natural, to kiss me good-bye. She would kiss me on the cheek and sometimes it would be very close to my mouth and then she would look deep, for a few seconds into my eyes. It initially scared me. I didn’t know what she was doing. But I got used to it and would make excuses to leave and come back, again and again. It became a game to us. I always knew, if no one else, the cats were watching. She didn’t mind the cats but she knew too they were watching.

It took a couple hours for the clothes to be done, thoroughly dry. In the mean time it continued to rain. Stephen’s little sister had a habit of sneaking up on us and announcing the desires of her mother in the most straight forward manner, trance like, creepy. She would stand at attention and say things like, ‘Mother would like to see you in the kitchen.’ Or, ‘Mother requests your presence in the living room.’ Or, ‘You’re expected in the basement before you leave.’ And then, as if in a trance march back into the house, the screen door slapping the jam behind her. She could have said, ‘Mother would like you to kiss her ass before you leave.’ But she never did. She did say, ‘Mother would greatly appreciate it if you took a minute to join her in the laundry room now.’ She stood unnoticed behind me until she spoke. I would nearly jump off the porch feeling her first breath, hearing her first word. I looked at Stephen and went into the house. Stephen’s Mother was standing at a table folding laundry. She had on one of my favorite dresses of hers. It was light in color and weight with a red and pink flower print, with little touches of green as leaves. It had short sleeves a collar and buttons down the front. She would only ever button just enough buttons, just past her breast so the slightest bend of her waist would reveal half of her breasts. “Here are your clothes. You can leave the ones you have on right here on the floor. I will wash them.” Leaving the clothes, I had on right “here” on the floor meant to change right where I stood, I thought. She stood sideways to me so I just turned a little, not to make it obvious and stripped down, my bare ass facing Stephen’s Mother and just as quickly...