Note: There is language in this excerpt that some readers may find offensive.
Not that many years ago I would go to a house in the neighborhood, not always someone's I knew, one I'd never been inside of, where I'd only have to maybe hop a fence, nothing complicated, and from the backyard I'd crawl through an open window. People always latch the ones in the front but never in the back, and especially not the bathroom one, you know, and it wasn't so small I couldn't get in quick. I could've stole lots of shit in those houses, except that's not what I was going in there for. I wasn't like that. Maybe I don't know exactly what I was doing except I was doing it. I never took nothing, nothing much if I did, because I didn't want to. I was more watching how the people lived, imagining how it would be in their house. I stared at the framed pictures they had of their family. Husbands in suits and wives with necklaces and old grandparents from the other times way before. Unsmiling dudes, glaring at you, in tilted military hats and coats with medals and ribbons. Full-body shots of happy daughters in white veils and lacy crunchy wedding dresses that poured all over into the bottom of the picture. Shocked little babies on blue backgrounds squinting like What's going on here, what's all this light shit? Dopey-dumb I'm-so- proud high schoolers graduating and making a face like they were department store managers. If I felt like it, if I had the mood, I sprawled out on their couches or lay down on their beds. Go, How would I be if I lived here? I'd let that come into me, I'd let my mind go to the show it liked. Maybe you could say I would go off to my own world. To me it wasn't mine, nothing like mine, because it would go to black. I loved that color. It was like when the eyes aren't open but try to see. What would finally come were colors and lines busting through, flying out and off and cutting in, crazy fires and sparks, and it'd come out speeding, and I'd be like a doggie out the window, those lane dividers whiffing by on the freeway straight below an open car window. I'd start to see shapes floating and straightening and wiggling and see it like it was a music that didn't make sound but was making a story. Not a regular story and I don't mean one you would hear some loco nut tell you, one that didn't have nothing to do with people or places you've ever seen. It's that I can't describe it better. Just, I have to watch, I have to listen. It was always good too. Say like when you hear music and it gets inside your brain and goes and goes, sticking there. And so I guess it got in mine like that. I listened and watched until I stopped getting too stupid because, you know, I had to leave and get out of there fast. And once I got up, shook it off and remembered where I really was, even if I opened their refrigerator, when I looked inside, wasn't like I didn't think of eating or drinking, I didn't take even a soda, thirsty as I might have been. I didn't want them to know I'd been there. Though I kind of opened the fridge door because maybe I do think of—well, like orange juice. It's that I like orange juice. So maybe when there was some orange juice I might have taken a gulp or two. But see, even then, nobody'd really know. One time I was in this one house, and I was looking inside a drawer in this girl's bedroom. I knew about her because she was this dude's older sister, and she was in junior college. It was that there were a bunch of bras, and I picked them up and looked at them, touched them because I was holding them. Wasn't like I never seen my mom's and my sister's, it wasn't like I didn't know the difference. And it was the only time there was something like that, swear, and I did stop and yeah I still got jumpy about it and felt like it was fucked up, real bad of me and afterward I only snuck into one more house. Like I said, I didn't know what I was doing it for, and it wasn't like I liked doing it.
I heard this shit because she was on the phone and I listened to her. It was her sound, a white ripply line right into the black. Not above. Black was everywhere and the white came from the front, above, maybe below. I don't know. I think it was Nely she was talking to, probably. That was who she talked to. That's who I thought. My mom was going like What can he do? and So what he screamed. Listen to me, she said. No, listen to me. No, listen, listen. And I listened to what I could. I saw the white ribbon curling and swirling. Men. She kind of laughed. He will never know, she said. Ay, ay, no! She laughed. She said, He is a man, and I didn't ask for that. She was laughing but not laughing happy and I'm listening and I'm like going to that somewhere else inside my head, all by myself.
I got worried I was getting sent to juvie when I did have to go to the court because of nothing, for so much less. That was this time when the police scraped the tires of their black-and-white against the curb ahead of me. I was walking by myself. At first I didn't believe it was about me, but that policeman kept wanting to know what I was doing. I was not wanting to say. Okay, maybe, even really I was scared like anybody and I didn't want to show it but probably I did. How was I supposed to answer because what'd I do? I was just walking, you know? Maybe a couple days earlier I pocketed a chocolate bar and I folded a baby comic book down my pants. It wasn't like the first time I did that, and when I did get caught this one and only time, when a drugstore man yelled something, I ran, and I never made it back to that store again and that was the worst of it and that already was back then, and no way anyone could still care or remember. So the passenger policeman who came up to me first, he goes, So what're you doing? and I'm like, Walking on the street, mister, which is when the driver policeman comes around to stand next to his partner, and he frowns at me too, like I'm stinky. Until a second or so later, he gets this expression on his face. His eyes go a little up to the sky, and his body gets kind of stiff, and he blows this fat old pedo. And so, like anybody would, I laughed. I did because it was funny, right? And so yeah I'm all guilty of laughing. But that's when they both get all blowed up mad—I'm disrespectful, and I got attitude, and who did I think I am? They got so close into my face I thought they were gonna kick the crap outta me. And so that's why I had to go to the juvie court, to hear a commercial about disrespecting the police and authority and to hear about all the potential trouble I was going to be in if I didn't go right and goodboy, straighten out and care about school and my education and get good grades. My mom had to be there with me too. She had to take off from work and listen and act like she was all worked up about me too, which she wasn't, I knew it, because I heard her talking all the time on the phone about what she was up with, but the lady judge wasn't going to notice nothing. Once I told my mom how the police dude threw a fart, she cracked up just like me, because it was funny, right? But I knew not to say nothing to a judge about what really happened. I'm not stupid. That judge, she wouldn't have laughed, and then I don't think my mom would've laughed no more, and she never laughed as much as me. She was tired, and she didn't like to waste time because she was already way too busy.
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