I used to think that eventually, I was going to kill Gramps. It was a fleeting notion, the kind of thing that would hit me when he was walking me home from my after-school program by Marcus Garvey Park, way over to where we lived on Amsterdam and 1-2-4.
Keep in mind, I’d been making this trek home myself for weeks since Moms had taken an afternoon shift at the hospital. But somehow, she believed traipsing across Harlem together would bond us. I wonder if Gramps believed it too, because he never failed to show up, always punctual.
No matter the weather or the temperature, Gramps walked to Harlem from his teaching gig across the 3rd Avenue Bridge in the Bronx. There he was an instructor of remedial mathematics at the community college, which mostly meant he taught grown folks algebra.
“It’s a skill most normal kids master by 8th grade” he’d huff, usually after complaining about his students’ “inferior minds.” I guess you could say he was equally brutal to himself, insisting that he be “honest” about his role at the college.
“I’m a lecturer, NOT a professor,” he once snarled at Ms. Johnson, the after school teacher, after she’d called him “Professor Owen.”
Then, he’d turned sweet, batting his eyes at her in a flirtatious manner that I suppose most have worked for him when he was younger.
“The boy told you I was a famous thinker, huh? He just loves putting on airs.”
To be fair, I had started telling people Gramps was a “scientist,” hoping that folks’ own imagination would do the rest of the work. Sometimes I said he was an “astrophysicst,” a word I’d learned after watching a late night special on the 1969 moon landing. Sometimes I said he was a biochemist, a term my fifth grade teacher kept saying that all of us “dark skinned children of the sun” might become, if we just believed and achieved.
Making Gramps out to be something greater than he was seemed like the biggest insult I could deliver, but I can’t explain quite how I came to that conclusion. It was likely an unconscious nod at what I came to understand was Gramps’ deep insecurity about not having a PhD, but I was a long way from figuring that out. Maybe, I thought, the other kids at after school would believe that the man who’d started picking me up from after-school every day was some sort of high yellow Albert Einstein.
I mean, he sort of looked like Einstein, with that huge uncombed pure white ‘fro.
“You remember what I taught you about addition and subtraction,” he’d say, launching into teacher mode as we began the journey west across town. He insisted that we walk the whole way, decrying buses to be a “waste of capital.” It was a perfect opportunity for him “to sure up [my] algebra fundamentals,” young as I was.
“The game is ‘seventeen’,” he announced one freezing afternoon on our odyssey across Harlem. I nodded like he’d asked me if I'd wanted to play.
“Four” he’d spit out in that tremulous voice of his, dry and pedantic.
“Thirteen.” I’d reply.
“Sixteen,” he’d say, somehow fitting a whole lecture into a single word.
“One,” I’d snap back.
“Twenty-Five”
“Negative eight”
“Forty-two”
“Uh, negative, uh, negative—”
But by the time I’d find “negative twenty-five,” I was already bracing myself for a blow to the back of my head that would invariably cause me to bite down on my tongue. You could always tell if Gramps was living with us based on whether I lisped or not.
“Let’s try again,” he’d say after a while, the cheerful didact. “Excellence takes discipline, you hear?”
Tears in my eyes and murder on my heart, I’d mumble “Yes sir,” my goal to please Gramps, or at least to avoid getting walloped upside the head.
“What are you thinking about?” asks Hearts, next to me in the passenger seat of his whip, a Jeep Cherokee that’s probably a decade old. I don’t have my driver’s license, but it’s a straight shot down Brunah road, from the school house back to campus. It’s crazy to think that just yesterday I’d walked this distance—it now feels an expanse of interminable darkness.
The car’s back seat is crammed—Bryant and Paolo, and a dude I don’t know very well named Willie. He’s an old man who will soon be 30, a counselor who'd actually been there even back in my earliest days here as a Peewwee. He comes back year after year, his gig as an English teacher accommodating his Neverland habit, what he manages to unironically describe as his “vernal lust” for camp.
“What if I just kill him?” I say to no one in particular, pulling into the counselor parking lot just above main campus.
“Ahhhhh” yawns Hearts, blazed as fuck. “There’s no killing an unblemished spirit.”
Gramps liked going to a Columbia bar at 110th and Amsterdam. A lot of nights, he ordered a sloppy burger called “The Chubby Mexicano,” with guac and salsa. Then, he’d down six to twelve beers followed by two 40s of Tecante for the wavering stagger home.
I never observed all this myself of course, but I caught it from the back and forth Mom would have on the phone, tense and teary and always hush-hush. I think she believed she was negotiating with Gramps’ wife, a formidable woman both Moms and I both called Miss Roxy. Mostly though, she was just taking orders.
“That woman has some nerve kicking him out of his own apartment,” Moms would say, frantically vacuuming the tiny living room that would become Gramps’ bedroom while he stayed with us. “He doesn’t have a drinking problem, I mean not really,” she’d continue, looking at me as though I’d said otherwise. “He’s a math whiz for heaven’s sake!”
Health professional that she was, common sense just didn’t seem to apply when it came to Gramps. In her mind, his occupation somehow negated his compulsion.
Around the third or fourth week Gramps came to live with us that first time, he barreled into my room real late. In fact, it was 2:04am, the exact hour and minute immortalized in my mind by the Nickelodeon alarm clock I’d received for Christmas that year. Incidentally, I’d also gotten the TV in my room that Christmas. Moms said my father had finally sent her a check, and it was a big fat one too.
“The game is 'ten',” Gramps shouted, storming in with Hulk-like vigor. He’d flung my bedroom door so hard against the wall that the knob left a dent still there to this day.
“Hey Gramps, um, I thin—”
“Shut up,” he’d blasted, sitting heavily on my bed.
“Four!”
“Uh, uh, Six”
“Uh uh, NOTHING,” he’d said, snatching the sheets from my body and pushing me to the floor.
“Eight” He barked.
“Two,” I fumbled, rolling to my knees.
“What are you, a street whore now? Stand up, God Dammit! Negative fourteen!”
I struggled to my feet, desperately trying to see straight and wipe away the sleep somehow still grasping at me. Moms must have been home, had probably been there for a couple of hours, but I heard no stirring next door, no marshaling of the cavalry.
“Don’t play dumb with me boy,” he hissed, grabbing me by my thin t-shirt, and viciously tossing me into the steel-poled corner of the bed bedframe. “Negative fourteen.”
“Gramps,” I pleaded, “I wanna sleep, I wanna—can we just do this in the morning?”
His blood shot eyes stared deep into mine, unblinking. He’d bent down to within inches of my face, the malt liquor filling up my nostrils.
"Don't make me say it again," he husked.
I liked reading horror books back around that age. You know, like, the Goosebumps series with ghosts and evil spirits, and creepy magic. From my “research”, I could have told you that fear has the power to paralyze your limbs, and make them want to fling themselves into violent action. I could have explained that fear can make your heart beat something wild, and halt it in your chest. I could have pontificated on fear’s ability to wipe your brain clean, and yet overload it with trillions of disjointed thoughts. I could have written my own novel about how fear can freeze your tongue and at the same time make you want to scream, top volume. I could have riffed on fear’s ability to make you thirst for water, yet quake with the need to release an overloaded bladder.
I’d read a lot about fear. But that night, I really learned about it.
“Take off your drawers,” he said simply, pulling the belt from his corduroys.
With trembling hands I pushed down the “Aaahh-Real Monsters!!!” boxers that covered my junk, and stood before the old man, wondering at the nightmare I’d found myself in. I still hoped Mom would bust through the door at any moment, but I’ve since learned that hope is not a particularly useful strategy, especially in crisis.
“Turn around,” he commanded, standing me before the wall adjoining my bed.
That night, Gramps gave me eleven lashings, one for every year I’d been on earth. He managed to land them mostly on my ass, but a few of them, I think lash 2 and 4, struck me in my back, causing me to convulse all over. I’d never been hit like that before, with the full strength of a grown man.
“Excellence takes discipline, '' he slurred on his way out, twitching from the tremendous effort he’s just exerted.
I'm shaking now as we make our way over the massive hill that blocks the upper lot from Main Campus. Hearts, Paolo and Willie break towards the woods by Swim Station where the older kids’ cabins are situated, while Bryant walks next to me toward the Peewee units.
“You hearing music tonight?” I ask, just to disrupt the reverie threatening to overwhelm me. I point at the Hall, all barnlike and spooky.
Bryant looks over at the darkened theater and laughs out loud.
“Black people imitating white people imitating Black people,” he says, like he’s quoting from a school reader.
“Jazz, right?” I’ve moved over to 3rd base of the Peewee baseball field to relieve the sudden urge of my bladder.
“Not jazz, man. Ragtime. Early 20th century.”
“Right,” I say, shaking out the last drops of piss.
“Hey Bryant, listen,” I blurt, the idea suddenly coming alive in my head. “Is… Is Owen really gonna run Swim Station this summer? ”
“I don’t know, are you?” Bryant shoots back, his voice distant and cold but somehow mirthful at the same time.
We walk a couple steps in silence, and then I just can’t help myself.
“Hap promised me if I came back this summer I could be in charge, and I got my lifeguard certification and everything, so I just feel like it would be fucked up it—-”
“Dude, please give it a rest.”
Bryant turns so the maglight he’s been using to guide us shines straight into my eyes.
“It was funny for a while, but like, everyone’s laughing at you now.”
“Oh,” I say.
I know what he means, but I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. I want him to explain, but hope he’ll just let it hang there. Fear is a tangle of contradictions, and hope is never a strategy.
“Seriously, man,” continues Bryant, “ I’m just being a pal.” He holds the light steady in my face, and I stay stock still, taking it.
After a while, he swings the flashlight away from me, heading towards the trail to his cabin.
“I don’t care what you call yourself, but it’s getting fucking weird,” he concludes, disappearing into the woods.
Beside me, visible in the dark, Owusu cheeses big and nods his head in agreement.
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