A STORY TELLER’S STORY

“GROWING UP” - CHAPTER I “Two of the things I've always admired about myself was my ability to go back to sleep, after being awakened too early. The other thing was my ability to forget about being killed. Let me explain. I have to go back a whole bunch of times when my life was threatened by circumstances, I had no control of, and what happened as a consequence, in order to explain what I mean. Pressing my memory app, I'm going back to the first time I blundered into the Death Zone. Can’t think of a better name for it. How old was I? Five – six years old maybe seven, runnin’ in and out of the streets, over there on the Black section of Oak Street, on the Near Northside, Chicago. Where else were we supposed to play? No “playgrounds” in our section then, and maybe not even now. Yeahhh, playing – running this crazy game of “catch me,” I ran into the passenger side door of a long black limousine. Did I die? Maybe. So far as I was concerned, it seemed like I was dead. I fluttered around inside of myself like a very calm butterfly. I was in a deathly High and it felt Beautiful. This Death had a softness, a beauty that I had never experienced before. (Years later, drunk on cheap beer during a hot, humid Chicago summer day, I tried to equate that experience to being born. It didn’t work. I had no “high” from being born, nothing to equal the euphoria I felt when I was taken into the Death Zone.) This Death Zone euphoria didn’t last very long. An emergency trip to the White Hospital verified the fact that I had survived a pedestrian encounter with a chauffeur driven limo with no apparent, permanent damage to my small body. "This boy ran into the passenger side door of our car, causing a large dent, we didn't run into him.” That's what I heard the driver say in my butterfly driven fog. "If he had run out into the street two seconds sooner, we would’ve run over him.” No doubt he was right. None of the details mattered; I was still alive and anxious to get back out there, to continue our fun and games. The doctor advised Momma to keep me in bed for a couple days, give me a few aspirin (I guess that's what they were, no High there) and bring me back to ER if I started seeing double. Momma, usually a rebel, obeyed the doctor’s instructions to the letter, for two whole days, quietly quizzing me about the state of my being. "How you feel, baby?” What could I say? I felt wonderful, divine, young. "I'm ok. can I go out to play now?” "Let's give it another day." XXX XXX XXX On the morning of the third day of my forced lock down, I was planning to sneak out 'n play, if I was not granted "official permission.” Momma ambushed me at the pass. "How you feelin' baby?” “I’m o.k., can I go out to play now?” “Uhh huh, yeahhh, you can go out to play – just soon as I get thru whippin’ yo’ ass for dis-obeyin’ me! How many times have I told you not to run out into them streets? How many times?” I have no idea where this razor-strop came from. Maybe she borrowed it from the local barbershop. No matter where it came from, it pursued me around the confines of our cluttered one-room apartment for about forty-six hours, that seemed to be how long she razor stropped on my duckin’ ‘n dodgin’ body. Finally, with my body sizzling from razor strop blisters, she collapsed on our beaten up, camel humped bed and said, in a very tired, clear voice; “you got to obey me, else I’m gon’ whip yo’ ass. You hear me?” I nodded yes yes yes yes. What else could I do? That happened way back in my Dream Times, but I’ve never forgotten it. I’ve never forgotten how far I was into the Death Zone, by running into a car and by running up against Momma’s rules. To this day, I avoid J-walking. I go to the end of the block if I have to, no matter how far it is, and cross with the light. XXX XXX XXX My Momma didn’t pay a lot of attention to other people’s rules, but she insisted on me paying strict attention to her rules. It took me a few years to understand why she was so serious about her rules. She had saved my life by being so serious. In some ways she had made me fear her more than I feared Death. Example coming up. We were living (at the moment) in Uncle Thomas and Aint Mamie’s basement apartment, on 50th and South Parkway (Dr. Martin Luther King Dr. now), right across the center divider from this huge statue of this guy on a white horse, with him holding a sword straight up. I had no idea who he was and, truth be told, I didn’t give a shit. It was a really cool place to go sit on, around, when the humid summer monsoons came. That was about all I understood about the George Washington statue, back then. “Daddy of the Country” and the rest of that bullshit surfaced later. Directly south of where we lived (at that moment) was two of the most important places I would ever come to know in my life. After a few dull years of being shuffled from one dull, dark, rat-infested hole to another, I found myself a hundred yards from a place that was hard to believe. Washington Park is what it was called. I should hope that some thoughtful senators might’ve thought of re-naming this wonderful place – Dr. Margaret B. Burroughs Park. I know, I’m trippin’. Let me get back to where I was.