Prospect Hill

1. UNQUITY ROAD

August 23, 2016

AS UPON HER OWN axis the Earth knows She's rotating, so Tony Hill knew—even though he'd just finished writing his first novel only days before—his only friend in the world was in the mirror.

And most of the time he wasn't even sure about him.

Yet the Earth also revolves around the Sun.

He wasn't thinking about that, though, or remembering...or seeing that. At least not then, in those precarious, tension-filled weeks and months after the completion of his first true manuscript, still unpublished.

He was still homeless and living on the streets, still estranged from the children he'd raised into near adolescence while most of his black peers had chosen to raise guns. And Life was, so far, still giving him the situational equivalent of a digital penetration on a third date, when what she's really wanting (and hoping for) is a corporate merger with The Bone Company.

Nikki had dumped him five months before, and business wasn't thriving.

Not by a long shot.

Yet on this night, after spending a weekend in a VA psych ward, aka the looney bin, that was about to change. In a very unexpected place. With a very unexpected person.

Just a few weeks before, on the first day of the month, he'd been kicked out of the halfway house—where he had written his novel in 54 days from June to August—due to failing a third piss test.

It was okay, though. He'd been kicked out of worse places, i.e. the good ol’ Navy.

Need Any Vaseline Yet?

He was determined to publish the damn thing, though, if it was the very last thing he ever did. His whole life was bound up in those pages. They contained his secret sorrow, and chronicled the tragic and bitter loss of the ill-fated and ill-conceived interracial family he'd tried—and, at last, failed—to shepherd through 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and most of President Obama's two terms while living San Antonio, Texas. Although he had fallen far from his fundamentalist upbringing as a goody-two-shoes Jehovah's Witness in the 80s long ago, absorbing the slings and arrows of a cruel generation, now he was just a (according to his medical record) a bipolar former stay-at-home dad and veteran with anger issues in a hell of a predicament: he was now chronically homeless, an ex-con serving an eighteen month probation for a misdemeanor abuse and bodily injury rap, with a two year protective order barring him from contact with his wife and kids, to boot.

Yet and still, he was determined to publish the damn thing himself. There was never a better time to be an author, with the advent of the Internet and all that crap. He didn't have a plan after that. God willing, he'd land, by hook or by crook, in the national spotlight, become a rich fatso, and ultimately sue to win back custody of his two beloved children.

To whom he was becoming, with each passing day, more and more a stranger.

Yet the Third Rock—at least the part Tony occupied—was still facing away from the Sun, and his dark time of the soul was only just a midsummer's night past.

Speck no. 6,999,999,999 took off his gown, put on his street clothes, and prepared to check out of his free, government-sponsored weekend at the VA hospital on Unquity Road.

As usual, the pockets of the soiled jeans he put back on had rabbit ears—Tony was so broke that if a nigga robbed him on his way back to the Salvation Army downtown (which was where Tony planned to secure lodging for the night if he could make it there by 8 PM), they'd just be practicing.

Same shit, different day: George Zimmerman was still walking around, huh, and Trayvon was still layin’ in the ground, huh….

Ohhh child, things were definitely not getting a little easier...

The overhead speakers began playing “The Whole Town's Laughing at Me” by Teddy Pendergrass.

Umm, grass, Tony thought to himself. Just one tightly-rolled joint to take the edge off. Little did he know it yet, but he was about to get another kind of sedative that night to set his mind straight before the dawn on his long journey to freedom.

***

My road to glory was the road to perdition.

“And they say if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us,” came the voice of Ronald Reagan, almost as if from the grave, from a flat screen TV hanging from the ceiling of the VA hospital lobby on Unquity Road, as the sun was lowering orange in the distance beyond the automatic sliding doors, continuing, “all who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer—not an easy answer—but simple…”

I had to brandish my black steel in an hour of chaos.

A wave of frosted air came from the ventilation system, sending a slight chill through my bones. After I'd been discharged from the basement a short while before I'd come up here. To the lobby. My gray hard-shell suitcase on wheels was opened on one of the couches in the nicely-decorated waiting area, and all my shit was exposed for my fellow veterans to see: crumpled clothing and used Gillette razor blades, hole-ridden black socks and dirty Hanes T-shirts, various toiletries and soiled draws. Outside, where I'd inevitably had to venture if I wanted to make the bus to get me to Sally before 8 PM (and still somehow get a $10 money order on the way--they didn't take cash), a wet rain had already started to fall. Standing at the curb in the downpour, several of my fellow veterans were getting drive-by baptisms, regardless of religious affiliation. Loose change jingled in my pockets but it wasn't a merry sound, and the hunger in my belly had started gnawing at me again. My nose was running. I kept my head down, trying like hell to avoid eye contact with any and everyone. The last thing I wanted was sympathy, even though homelessness among disabled veterans wasn't exactly unheard of. Whether I was truly disabled, like, say, a kid with cerebral palsy or some shit, was another story.

I wiped the snot running down the cleft of my nose on my sleeve, no longer caring how it looked.

Damn it, I said to myself in an undertone. I don't think I'm going to make it…

Black steel in the hour of chaos…

The title of an old headbanger by Public Enemy in the 80s.

“Have you forgotten,” it began, I recalled involuntarily, with the voice of Louis Farrakhan speaking with the terrible moral authority a long oppressed and dispersed nation of black millions, “once we were brought here, we were robbed of our name, robbed of our language. We lost our religion, our culture, our god...and many of us, by the way we act, we even lost our minds…”

Or was that from Night of the Living Baseheads?

Maybe this was my night of the living pothead. I had to prove I was more than that. Hit a grand slam when my number come. For my children's sake, if nothing else.

Succotash is a name for kids who make cash, sellin’ dope to da brotha man instead o’ da other man.

Brothas and sistas!

This was not a moment for my life's highlight reel, for sure. This is the tale of a king with a titled crown.

My slumdog opera.

My neck craned up.

I don't know how long he'd been standing there, but an elderly white gentleman was standing on the other side of the double-sided couch next to some ferns in a potted plant against the wall, staring at me.

I looked down again.

Shit.

In my suitcase, strewn everywhere were the wrinkled pages of my manuscript. My tale of crucifixion...which I had turned into a work of fiction. No one knew that but me, though. Far as anyone else was concerned, the contents of my case could've been anything: loose diamonds, crack cocaine…

Oh, my life was a wide-open book to half the old veterans of foreign wars.

It was looking more and more like I might be stuck here for the night. I checked my watch again: 7:07 PM. No way was I going to make it downtown on time. The rain outside was coming down in sheets. I became more and more exasperated and angry, as the minutes ticked by, with this old man eyeballing me. I was aware of the beating of my own heart, like a hammer in my chest. Making matters even worse, my mobile phone had no real juice to speak of: the battery was about to die. It was a bitch, keeping these damn things charged. I couldn’t just mosey my broke-ass back downstairs, to the basement where the psych ward was: I'd just checked out of there, making them believe I had a place to go for the night. Well, perhaps I could've gone back down there, explained the situation, and go through the entire process all over again, finally giving up (again) my phone and freedom just for another free three 'hots 'n' a cot,' courtesy of Uncle Sam.

I could've done that, but my pride wouldn't let me.

By now the sky had clouded over and darkened. When the exterior lights came on, they made a real difference, like a mentor to a foster kid in Big Brothers or something, 1.21 gigawatts, no, 10 trillion kilowatts of fluorescent luminescence, even though it couldn't have been much later than a quarter to eight. So there I was, fumbling nervously through my meager belongings, lifting my clothes with these exaggerated gestures that made it look like I was really looking for something important.

Truth be told, what I carried was of supreme importance to me; the pages of my manuscript were, to me, what the Quran was to the young prophet Mohammed, or Mein Kampf to a Grand Wizard Imperial. It seemed like I was always on the move now; there never was any permanence to my dwelling places, and the stability I sought since the loss of my nuclear family, through my own doing, constantly eluded me.

The only thing certain in my life lately was Uncertainty.

Since my release from jail in late April, I cut a disturbing and often winding path through the free world. That so-called friend in the mirror? I needed him to have the foresight and discipline at the start of each month to squirrel away enough funds so that, by end of each said month, I'd still have a roof over my head with also a window to throw it out of.

If I was lucky.

Yet a familiar pattern was emerging. I was always scratchin’ and survivin’ at this point of the month, worse than Florida Evans and Co. in the Chicago projects after James died getting that job down in Mississippi on Good Times.

Something about that fictional job had always seemed too good to be true.

Damndamndamn.

It was a matter of chance that I should have found myself in the lobby of one of the best hospitals for veterans in America. It was in the bowels of that smoothly efficient, antiseptic environment (which extends itself six floors above ground level)—a mammoth facility any standard—and where there are, among other nauseating smells, a stench that can only be described as contaminated sterility, funky smells of burnt flesh and abscesses and gangrenous body parts. Twenty feet from me a bank of elevators—three on both sides—identical in color and size, took nurses and doctors and the people they cared for to higher floors.

I was starting to feel like Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny. And not in a funny, neatly-resolved Hollywood ending kind of way: I didn't need this...I swear to God, I didn't need this right now, okay? I've got a wife I'm still married to fucking her boyfriend a man I've never met all four of ‘em cooped up in a hotel room for months that's just aching to throw me back in jail...a mother who had a big part in breaking up my family and can't stop bringing up all my past mistakes…homeless shelters...halfway houses…weeks in jail. I haven't slept in three days. I got no money, no real friends, AND a year and a half probation for the assault and bodily injury rap which, if I fuck up, could land me back behind bars—for a long ass time. Not to mention I just plain ol’ miss my kids, who will be two years older before I'm allowed to see ‘em again. And I don't have a place to sleep tonight. And let me see, what else can we pile on? Is there any more SHIT we can pile on to the top of my life right now? Is there?

“Excuse me,” a man said. It was the old man who'd been staring at me.

Lord above. The old man had his hands at his sides; from what I could tell, they seemed to be marked up in some way, like with tattoo ink or something, but I couldn't get a good look. I said, “Yes?” and decided to fold my suitcase up and zip it at the same time like I'd found what I was looking for, not giving the old, bent man my full attention. I was trying so hard to look not homeless, to look stoic and unfazed, that I was almost rigid. (As a rule, I jittered and twitched, picked at my fingernails, drummed my fingers.) Face it: I felt like a screw-up. Kind of scared.

Scared to death, to be quite honest.

He said, “I couldn't help but notice you look like you have nowhere to go.”

I looked again at the man. At his hands, to be specific.

Then just near us, by the elevators, I chanced to notice a man in fatigues emerge, talking on his cell phone. A man in fatigues? In a hospital for veterans? Maybe he worked for black ops, or was CIA. Maybe he was a terrorist. I wished I knew how to read lips. But already he was beyond the sliding glass doors, into the wet and rainy night, never to be seen again. I wished I was him in that moment, with somewhere to go, to be able to go anywhere.

Anywhere but here.

“My name is Gene Snyder,” the elderly man explained. I noticed the hair whorl patterns on his head were predominantly counterclockwise, and he had a particular tone and quality in his voice that reminded me of Truman Capote. Having rightly deduced from my futile exercise of rummaging through my dirty clothes that I was something of a vagabond, the man swayed toward me and said, “You didn't answer. I suppose that means I'm right?”

I said, “I'm, ah, a homeless veteran trying to get back on my get on my feet and see my kids again.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I'm sure it will all work out.”

Was this a prediction? Did he know something I didn't? No, of course not. Get a grip, Tony. He put a hand to his cheek and I noticed a greater than usual density of fingerprint ridges on the thumb and pinkie of the man's left hand, and his arms, legs, and hands were smaller compared to his overall stature. I said, “I'm also an author.” (I pulled out the loose pages of my manuscript. Being the author of a finished novel I knew was good was going to be my calling card from now on, published or not.) “I'm going to get this published soon and hopefully sell enough copies so that I'll be able to win back custody of my kids. I'm not allowed to see them, ever, for the next two years.”

His eyes came back to me. “Why is that?” he asked.

“It's a long story. I was a bad husband to their mother, she finally got sick of my shit, left me for another man, left me to rot in my car with no money, and I...let's just say I lost my temper,” I said.

Then I said, “I have two children. My oldest child has autism. His name is Jacob. My name is Tony, by the way.” We shook hands. He seemed like a nice gentleman. I noticed now, for the first time, that he was dressed in pajamas, and that he definitely had not come in from off the street. Whoever he was, he must be a patient of some kind, I thought to myself. Anyway it's nice meeting you, old man, but I've got bigger ducks to fry and I'm sure there are some nurses looking for an escaped patient—take care…

“Yeah yeah yeah,” he said quickly, releasing my hand, almost as if he didn't give a damn what my name was or that I had strung a few words together.

“So anyway, it was nice meeting you,” I said rather darkly.

“You're not goin’ out there,” he said, almost as it were a command. “You don't have anywhere to go and you don't have no money. Besides,” he added, “don't you see it raining like all get out out there? You're comin’ with me. I have a room upstairs. I live here.”

I don't remember how it happened after that, but the next thing you know I'm rolling my gray hardshell suitcase with the one bad wheel behind me, following this old white stranger by the name of Gene Snyder to the elevators, about to go up to his room, where he has generously offered me the use of his shower—which I desperately needed—and shelter, even if only for one night.

Inside the elevator, I paused and looked at the floor around my feet. For the moment I was still free, I could excuse myself and hurry out of this steel contraption before its doors shut and vanish. It would simply indicate that I did not see the larger plan, the larger picture, or that perhaps I did see it and was shrinking back from it. From what it required. But if I were to escape I would simply be repeating past mistakes, for that would amount to an admission that I had seen and understood it very well, that meeting a man who just happened to live here—enabling me not to have to feel on my skin even one drop of rain—was not by Chance, nor by accident, and that I was ready to obey.

As the doors sealed shut, I heard the Gipper’s final words of warning drift from the TV mounted on the wall: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We can elect to secure for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or sentence them to take the last steps into a thousand years of darkness…”

The hairs on my arms and neck stood on end.

***

“What about the movie? Why does it make you cry?”

“I am thinking about a person long ago who used to look like the man who played Tony, the father.”

“And who was that person long ago?” I asked, genuinely interested.

“It was a man I knew as a boy growing up in the Jim Crow South. He used to take me places with him,” he said.

“A black man, in the South, taking a little white boy with him everywhere?” I asked ironically.

“It was a man I used to know,” the old man answered, “named Sammy Bennett. He loved me, and I loved him. He was very delicate.”

For the last three hours, I had listened intently to him, sitting beside his hospital bed. And his own story was as curious as his narrative. The tale of his life was the tale of a leader of incredible discipline, a former CIA reconnaissance officer running secret missions behind enemy lines in Saigon and a million other places in the 70s (he happily directed me how to find the YouTube videos on my smartphone and we watched them together—or rather, he watched me watch them, after I’d scooted my chair closer to his bed), a formal strategist, meticulous, intolerant of differences, fearless and self-confident, with a strong sense of self, and a nonstop talker and teller of war stories.

We had just finished watching a movie called War Room. A Christian movie of all things. He had insisted on watching with me, even though it soon became obvious to me that he had watched it several times before by himself from that very bed. What was ironic—at least to me—was, this was a little-known film with mediocre acting shown in churches that my mother had been trying to get me to watch for years. The name war room referred to a place many mainstream, evangelical-type Christians have in their homes, usually a sewing closet or what have you, where they go on their knees to Elohim to wage battle in prayer against principalities and powers and the forces of this present darkness.

Yet now I felt Mr. Snyder moving the conversation in a different direction. A decidedly more carnal one.

The movie was over.

Before it was over he fed me. He had called his nurse and had the staff bring me a burger and fries. The grub was cold, but I didn't care. As far as I was concerned, it was the most delicious meal I'd ever tasted. I was starvin’ like Marvin.

Not Gaye. But this man was starting to sound like he was.

In his hands was a remote connected by a thick beige cord to the bed that seemed to control everything. He cut the lights on. My eyes squinted.

I was sitting in a chair next to his hospital bed. During the movie, a nurse would come to check his vitals every so often, and he'd have to pause the movie. It was about this black family, a Christian version of the Huxtables, almost torn apart by the father's near-affair with an attractive white co-worker. The father's name was Tony, like mine.

And I couldn't help but notice, to my astonishment, that the daughter's name, like mine—was Danielle.

Tony, as I said, in the movie is on the verge of having an affair. That is, until the mother-in-law purchases an old home where she finds a hidden war room and goes to serious work in that gymnasium of the soul leading, presumably, to the saving of her daughter's marriage.

And then, just like before the movie, Mr. Snyder talked and talked and talked afterwards. He interrupted my several times whenever I committed the sin of trying to give him my own backstory. All he wanted to talk about was himself. But now, suddenly, he was talking, not about his secret missions as a CIA agent many years before, but an older black man from his distant past who, during his childhood in the Jim Crow South became, over course of his adolescence, his homosexual lover.

Or pedophile, by today’s standards.

Yet that was not the way Mr. Snyder described him. If anything from that night stands out, it is the love with which the old man reminisced about the man who had fucked his young white buttocks repeatedly as a child, an experience...he was now subtly hinting to me...he wanted to relive.

With me.

He told me Sammy Bennett had given him the nickname Lucky Seven.

Then, he did something I'll never forget, even if I get Alzheimer's: he, very forcefully, balled his hands into fists and brought them together in front of me, displaying his tattooed knuckles for me read.

Over his conjoined fists, in indelible black ink, one letter on each finger, in all caps, were the words GOD'S WILL.

I think I momentarily passed out.

I opened my eyes again. The cuckoo clock on the wall, mounted next to the TV, said eleven-ten.

(no, that was my imagination, I did not feel something move in my pants just now)

Did I?

Maybe it was all just an elaborate joke, the final crusher, the ultimate punch line. To be put in this position, with no pot to piss in and blah blah blah, raining cats and dogs outside, needing that shower—which had felt so refreshing and for which I was extremely grateful—and feeling horny as fuck. I did not think anyone could understand the brute courage it had taken to reconcile myself to this, to leave myself open to the possibility that sexual relief was mine for the taking, if I wanted it bad enough, and that the old geezer before me, whom I didn't know from Adam's cat, was willing—and badly wanting—to relieve me.

I thought of Jesus dying for our sins. And how I felt that what I was about to engage in, according to what I'd been indoctrinated over the years to believe, was like crucifying the Son of God afresh. Then I thought, somewhat with a sense of blasphemy, that if I didn't sin, Jesus had died in vain. Don't blame it on the Son of God, Tony.

Blame it on the Son of the morning.

Then he interrupted his own passive aggressive beating around the bush, and, speaking more slowly and with earnestness in his voice, said to me, “I think you’re beautiful, the most beautiful man I’ve seen in a long time. I love your face and your voice and everything to do with you, down to your book. I adore you.”

Funny, looking back now, how those simple words changed how I saw the man. I saw past his deformed, wrinkled shell, even saw past the indecent proposal he was clumsily fumbling all over himself to make me, through the eyes of my heart, to the deep insecurities he harbored inside. Those simple words of insecurity choreographed an infinity of feelings and responses in me. In that moment I was so focused on easing his gnawing loneliness that my homophobia vanished.

My need to be holy evaporated.

I no longer had anything to prove.

Compassion had entered my vision, and there wasn't any room left for ego.

I unzipped my pants, lowering my briefs, and whipped my dick out, harder than an intercontinental ballistic ICBM, for my host's viewing pleasure, despising the shame.

Yes. Despising the shame.

As he had already had his proverbial cherry popped long ago, my rod, wearing the condom which he eagerly provided, entered far more easily in him than in some of my former female partners, nor did I give him the pain that they had felt, even though my tool must have felt in him like a baby's foot. He stretched his hole open, the tip entered, he moved a little, half my dick was plunged in; he writhed around like a snake, side to side, up and down; after one or two gentle thrusts the whole turgid column of my enormous shaft was lodged within his body. When he was well pounded he put his arms around my neck, and hugged and kissed me.

I pulled out of him suddenly near the point of climax, tearing off the rubber and inserting my phallus into his mouth. He quickly brought me to the crest of the wave, the only man to have ever done so, as I looked away, beyond the blinds on the window and into the night.

It was a splendid finish.

Afterward, he was lying against a pillow, smiling sleepily, a white sheet pulled up just above the first suggestion of pubic hair. For reasons I still can’t put my finger on, he struck me like someone from another time, a contradiction, like myself, suspended in space, ruggedly masculine yet gentle of heart. Like a lumberjack holding a baby.

He wanted me to stay. For more than just the night. He wanted me to stay forever, he said. His children were all grown, Lucky Seven said, and they didn't care what happened to him.

He was afraid of dying alone.

I snuggled beside him, wrapping my arms around him from behind. I remained that way with him until I heard him start snoring. And he drifted off to sleep.

It was two minutes before midnight. The Moon outside the window was waxing crescent.

***

At five the next morning, Tony very quietly got out of the man's bed and put his clothes on. He had gotten as much rest as he was going to get. And even though he would grapple with what he'd done just hours before for months to come, the little sleep he had gotten in this warm bed with this strange man had been a lot better than the alternative.

Tony collected the rest of his things, surveying the hospital room one more time. Yup, he had everything. And with that, he opened the door as quietly as he could and snuck out.

But it was no use.

Lucky Seven swung his legs down from the bed to follow Tony, but his good leg was asleep and his bad leg was worse. Tony was far away, walking rapidly toward the elevators by the front desk, and the old man tried to hobble toward him. A couple of nurses walked past, talking quietly. Tony reached the elevators, and he was looking down at the floor as he waited. Then he turned toward Gene Snyder and waved his arms. Was he calling him? He seemed to be gesturing for him to follow.

The elevator doors parted like a stainless steel Red Sea—Tony entered, the doors closed, and Lucky Seven never laid eyes on him again.