Hold Love Strong Read online

  “She came with me to the store,” my uncle said, defending himself against my Aunt Rhonda’s attack.

  Luscious ignored Rhonda and wrapped her arms around Nice so he would ignore her too. “Baby,” she said. “Which one is the new one?”

  Nice glared one last moment at my Aunt Rhonda, then he sighed and smiled. He kissed Luscious’s forehead.

  “Over there,” he said, pointing at the two-foot-tall trophy next to the TV.

  My uncle’s trophies lined all four walls, each glowing and topped with a golden figure or a basketball. Some were a foot tall. Some stood two and three feet. A few were as tall as me. There were plaques, certificates, and ribbons. He was an MVP. He was a champion. And there were more trophies in the room he, Donnel, Eric, and I shared. They cluttered the dresser. They filled the shelf in the closet. He had sneaker boxes filled with medals and letters from college coaches begging him to consider playing for them. He had college brochures, and college paraphernalia, and college pens, pencils, and pennants. Sometimes, I took one of the college brochures or players’ guides the coaches sent him into the bathroom when I needed to use the toilet, and I’d sit there, my pants around my ankles, flipping through the pages, amazed at the contents of the glossy photos, the college students and their college lives. Coaches called nightly, and some called so often, I learned to recognize them by the sound of their voices just as they came to recognize me. Oh, hello, Abraham, they’d say. I bet you play basketball too. It seemed like every institution of higher education in America had a room, a jersey, a classroom, a professor, a tutor, and a plethora of salacious women just for my uncle. All he had to do was sit down, listen to what they had to say, and sign his name. Then he would be on TV, and win college championships, and be the MVP of tournaments and leagues. And then, with hard work, he would be a star in the NBA. He was a junior in high school. One day, everyone would wear Nice’s jersey. He was going to make millions. It was his destiny. And that destiny, he swore, would take us out of Ever. And we believed him. He could do no wrong. He was king. My grandma did everything for him. She cooked him extra meals when he got hungry. She woke him as many times as he needed to be woken before he got out of bed to go to school. She found a way to buy him new clothes and she made my Aunt Rhonda and my mother do the same. Nice was royalty, blameless.

  He picked up his newest trophy and showed it to Luscious. My grandma took the grocery bags into the kitchen.

  “Forty-two points,” she called out. “He was taking them to school! My baby couldn’t be stopped! It was like Jesus come down from the sky and took control of Roosevelt’s soul!”

  There was a moment of silence. Then my grandma shouted: “Roosevelt, I don’t see no milk!”

  “Damn,” he sighed, shaking his head. “I knew I forgot something!”

  God gave Nice physical gifts, court vision, the body, dexterity, and the stamina of a perpetual dancer. Yet, when not on the basketball court, he blundered. He tripped over himself. He forgot things of great importance. He made impulsive decisions, jumped to conclusions, and was easy to lead astray. He was carefree and untouchable, but because he was also a dreamer, solely grounded in everything related to hope, he struggled to recognize the difference between real need and fleeting desire. Although I was a child I had no doubt Nice had remembered the milk up until the moment he thought about something he wanted and hoped to get, and then, puff, what he needed to get and do left his head. Hoping, wanting, and getting, that was my uncle. It made him a great basketball player. It caused him to be loved, to not have a single enemy in all of Queens. Occasionally, it made him steal things from corner stores, clothing stores, any establishment he deemed unworthy of patience or money. Sometimes Nice came home bragging about the slice of pizza he didn’t pay for, the Chinese food he took and ran with. Sometimes he came home with the stolen article of clothing, the hat, the shirt, the jacket he wore.

  Luscious reached up and touched the side of Nice’s face. “Baby, didn’t I ask you if your grandmother needed milk?”

  Although he made many, every mistake Nice made exhausted him. He deflated. He was a perfectionist. It was yet another reason why he was so gifted on a basketball court. He practiced and practiced until everything was just right. His eyes softened. He laid them upon Luscious. He blinked. There was something more than his forgetfulness. He shifted his eyes to my grandma.

  “There ain’t no money left,” he said.

  My grandma walked out of the kitchen. “What you mean there ain’t no more money?”

  “I mean,” said Nice, “all that stuff we got cost more than what you gave me. I had to tell ’em that I’d bring the rest of the money tomorrow.”

  My grandma put her hands on her hips. “Well, that’s it,” she said. “That’s all the money I got.”

  “I swear to God,” said Nice, “I swear one day, when I’m in the NBA…”

  My mother interrupted him. “Abraham, where’s that money I gave you to get something to drink after your game?”

  I reached into my pocket. Then, smiling, suddenly feeling joyous and proud instead of heartbroken, I pulled three dollars out of my pocket and held it up for everyone to see.

  “Well, hurry up,” Nice said, a smile and shine easing upon him. “Go get your coat.”

  It was us versus the world, us against the snow. I looked at my mother. “I can go?” I asked.

  “Shit, you just bent on being as crazy as Goines, ain’t you,” she said.

  Then she thought for a moment. I waited.

  “So go ahead,” she said, waving her hand at me dismissively. “Probably do your ass some good to see up close how serious all this snow is.”

  Before anything else was said, I raced into the bedroom and dressed as fast as I could. I put on my winter coat, my winter hat, gloves, and an old pair of sneakers. Then I ran out of the room to join Nice.

  “Hold on!” said my grandma. “Stand together. The both of you.”

  Like two soldiers standing at attention, my uncle and I stood side by side.

  “Now tell me. What you gonna get?” demanded my grandma.

  “Milk,” my uncle said.

  My grandma shifted her eyes to me. “Abraham?”

  “Milk,” I said.

  “Good,” said my grandma. “I’m counting on you. Don’t let your uncle forget.”

  I looked up at Nice. He looked down at me. “You got me?” he asked, holding his hand out for me to slap.

  I slapped it. “Yeah.”

  We walked out of the apartment. Nice stopped, turned around, and locked all three locks with his key. Then we heard the chain latch clack and slide into place on the other side.

  “Milk!” shouted my grandma one last time. “And don’t keep Abraham out too long. You know how he starts coughing!”

  Outside in the hallway, the walls were cinderblocks painted eggshell white. They were scrawled and scribbled on; graffiti, names and nicknames, declarations of existence. There were hearts with initials in them and sexually explicit drawings. Fuck was spelled wrong. Gangs and crews proclaimed they were the most powerful, the utmost, the killers of all killers who killed for nothing, for everything, no matter the time. Things were written in pen and crossed out with marker. There were bullet holes. A few spots were still spattered with blood. There was garbage, foil wrappers, plastic utensils, papers, balled-up napkins, soda cans, broken glass. There was a backpack, torn open, classroom handouts and quizzes spilling out. The floor was concrete, painted industrial grey, and covered with dust so dense it looked like ash coated the floor. It was cold. A wind rushed through.

  Nice looked down at me. “You sure you’re gonna be warm enough?”

  I was so happy to be going outside I was sweating. I nodded.

  Once again, the elevator was broken.

  “Motherfucker,” said Nice, pushing the button repeatedly. “Me and Luscious just took this bitch.” He kicked the elevator’s doors. “Fuck it. Let’s go.”

  We walked to the stairwell and stopped in
front of its door. It was exactly eighty-four steps from our floor to the bottom.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  I swallowed. The stairwell was always dark and cold and all of the lights were blown so I feared what we’d find, brothers and sisters desperate for a place to sit, be warm, hide. Someone might be urinating or getting high or crying or a young couple might be ravishing each other, sucking and licking and humping with the hope to lift and carry the other away. Someone might be waiting to rob the first person coming down the stairs. They might have a knife or a gun. They might be reckless, distressed. Too many horror stories came out of the stairwell. Too many sisters were raped or almost raped. Too many brothers got jumped, beaten with pipes and bricks, cut with box cutters, stabbed with screwdrivers.

  Nice put his hand on the door, pushed it, and walked into the blackness of the stairwell. I followed and paid close attention to the sounds around us, listened more desperately than intently for clues and reasons to stop walking, run back, save Nice and me from bearing witness or, worse, being victimized. I wasn’t a fighter, but I’d fight if I had to, if I was forced to by circumstances and threats against those I loved. I descended with my fists clenched. I squinted into the blackness as if narrowing my eyes would help me see. Luckily, there was nothing. No sound; no one. In fact, the only noise came from our footsteps, sticking to something like syrup on the steps between the second and third floor.

  “A,” Nice said, somehow sounding calm, his voice echoing through the stairwell. “Who were you gonna be tonight?”

  The application of fantasy was how Nice survived, how he taught himself to play basketball and how, through watching and listening to him, I learned to play basketball as well. I couldn’t just be Abraham Singleton. I wasn’t enough. I was in Ever. I had to imagine myself as someone or something else for flight. So sometimes I was Michael Jordan. Sometimes I was Magic Johnson. I imagined I was the greatest, the strongest, the fastest, the highest leaper, the most courageous and clutch, and because I never made mention of it, because I never shared the notion with anyone, there was no one who could tell me no or prove that who I imagined was not who I was. So every time I played I chose a player and made the moves he made. I scowled like them, swaggered. But that night, that game, my first championship and chance to win a trophy, I’d planned something else. I’d decided to be the one champion, the one MVP, I knew.

  “I was gonna do ’em like you,” I said.

  “Me?” Nice laughed. “What you gonna waste your time being me for?”

  I thought for a moment, then said: “Cause you got all them trophies.”

  We made it to the bottom of the stairs. Nice pushed the door open. We crossed the dim, industrial green of the building lobby. We stopped at the entrance of our building, at the heavy steel door with the slim rectangular window fortified with chicken wire in its glass. We stared outside. All of the snow extinguished Ever, the bustling, ramshackle world we knew.

  “So Goines was outside?” Nice asked.

  “He was boxing,” I said. “Punching the snow.”

  “Maybe one day Ma will give him a chance, you know,” he said. He laughed a quick breath, then became serious. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t be me. Don’t be no one but you. You understand?”

  Nice pushed open the door and I followed him into the whiteness. I didn’t understand. Why not be him? Wasn’t he the greatest, a hero? If not be like him, then be like who? Be you, he said. What did that mean? Who was I? What could Abraham Singleton do?

  The wind whipped snow against me and ripped my face left and right. I tucked my chin to my chest and kept my eyes on the back of Nice’s legs. The snow was two feet deep. I pumped my arms and lifted my knees just to trudge through it. We crossed the snow-covered concrete courtyard, the parking lot, and the sidewalk. Then, when we reached Columbus Avenue, we made a left and walked down the middle of the street, past parked cars engulfed in snow, past streetlights and the circles of pallid yellow they cast upon the dusty blue darkness of fresh snowfall meeting its first night. Snow spilled, tumbled, and cast about each time I stepped. I thought about what Nice said, what he told me to do. Snow melted and dripped down my cheeks. We came to the basketball court and the twenty-foot chain-link fence that surrounded it. Nice walked up to the fence and stopped. Then reaching his hands up, he gripped the fence and gazed at the snow-covered court, the steel backboards, the steel rims with snow perched on them. We stood in silence for a few long moments. I looked at Nice and then at the court and then at Nice again. I wondered what he was thinking, what he hoped for.

  “You figure out who you gonna be?” he asked.

  “I’m gonna be you,” I said.

  He laughed. “Then who am I?”

  I shrugged. “You you too.”

  “Just like that?” he said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Ain’t no one else you want to be?”

  “Who else is there?” I asked.

  Nice considered my question.

  “I bet you three dollars I can make it from here,” he said.

  “We only got three dollars,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Then I’m betting everything. I’m putting the house down.”

  Nice let go of the fence, stepped back, and blew on his hands. Then he dribbled an invisible basketball. He paused and put it on his hip. I knew what he was doing: his free-throw routine. I’d seen him do it and I’d imitated it thousands of times. He took a deep breath, exhaled, and I watched the air billow from his mouth.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, speaking as if he were an announcer. “Here we are. No time left on the clock. Score is tied. Good guys versus bad guys. Nice versus all the snow in the world. We need this to win.”

  Nice dribbled his invisible basketball again, twice with his right hand, twice with his left. Then he stopped and measured the rim through the rusted fence.

  “Listen to the crowd try to distract him! Listen how loud they are, how much they’re booing and shouting!” he announced.

  He took a deep breath, in through his nose, out through his mouth. He bent his knees, brought the invisible ball to his waist, then slowly raised it above his head and shot, flicking his wrist, pushing the ball toward the rim with the tips of his fingers. And I watched it, the invisible ball soaring over the fence, floating through the falling snow, drifting across the fifty feet that separated us from the rim.

  “It go in?” he asked me.

  I looked through the fence at the rim. Everything was silent. I was just beginning to learn such silence could exist between two people, that despite proximity, people could be distant in their thoughts.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Thank God,” Nice said. “I ain’t trying to go home with no milk again.”

  So we trudged through the snow, toward the only open corner store ten blocks away, engulfed in a world of white, obligated and determined to get what my grandma demanded. All the way there, inside the store, and all the way back, Nice told me about basketball, about him playing in college and the NBA and him having a big house where we all could live and cars and money and I felt the earth moving. I felt it spinning on its axis, slowly revolving around the sun.

  “Between you and me,” Nice said when we got back to our apartment and he unlocked the locks. “In a few years, we won’t need to be getting no milk from the store. I’ll buy a plane and a cow farm and some white farmer niggas milk those motherfuckers whenever we’re thirsty.”

  BAR 3

  Distant Lover

  I

  The heat in our building was broken, or rather deeply confused. Hot, dry air blasted into our apartment. And the phone was out. And the electricity was cut off too. So our apartment was dark. My grandmother had been let go from her job at Queens Hospital. They were making cutbacks. Layoffs. “Restructuring” is what my grandma said the hospital’s administration called it. They started from the bottom. Everyone who needed the money most, everyone whose education and skill set made finding
a good job a difficult test, everyone who was simultaneously just getting by and trying to provide their children a better opportunity than they had were fired first, the orderlies, the porters, and the security guards. Trickle-down economics.

  My mother and I were in the kitchen, sitting at the table. She was slouched in a folding metal chair to my left and her bare feet rested across my thighs. I was doing my homework. It was June, the last weeks of school, and it was after midnight. Our only light came from the dozen prayer candles huddled in the middle of the table that my grandmother bought at the dollar store and kept in the closet for just this sort of thing. There was Our Lady of Guadalupe, Saint Michael and Saint Lazarus, Saint Anthony and Saint Joseph, Saint Clare and a few Saint Judes, the patron saint of difficult cases. There was even a candle for the pope and another for Mother Teresa, although being that they were alive no one in my family knew why. I was small and skinny, so wispy the thin gold chain with my name on it that my grandma bought me for my seventh birthday hung like a stone around my neck and tapped the top of the table when I leaned forward over my homework and wrote my answers. I wore shorts and a tank top. I multiplied single digits and wrote spelling words five times each. My mother wore shorts and a red bathing-suit top. A wet dishtowel was draped across the back of her neck. She had headphones on and she alternated between watching me and staring at the floor as she listened to the same song, Marvin Gaye’s “Distant Lover,” over and over again. Each time the song ended, she hit the stop button, the rewind button, and the play button on her Walkman. Then she settled into the song again, slouching deeper into the chair, disappearing in the four-minute sanctuary of the what and who of this distant love.

  I focused intensely on my work, aiming to please her, aiming to make good on the promise I repeated so often it was not a promise but, quite simply, a fact. I would do well in school. A film of sweat covered every inch of my body and caused the underside of my legs to stick to the chair, my arms to stick to the table, and my hand to stick to my homework paper. My grandma was asleep in the bedroom she shared with my Aunt Rhonda and my mother and the ebb and flow of her snoring dragged my thoughts to her. Just like the previous night, and just like the night two weeks before when our electricity was first cut off, she had gone to sleep early. She had been out of work for four months. She had no prospects for a job. My Aunt Rhonda and my mother were looking for jobs, they met with their welfare case managers, and they were enrolled in a GED class, but the class was so overcrowded and so egregiously organized their progress was so slow they decided there was no sense in going. David Dinkins was the first black mayor of New York. Ask your teachers what that means, my grandma said before she went to sleep. Ask them why folks is worse off now than we was before.