“Carson!”
He sat quietly, or at least what he thought was quietly. He was sweating, his chest heaving up and down, up and down. He would need to go score soon to keep himself from dying.
When the voice outside the door started praying, Sonny knew it was his mother. She had done it a few times before, when he was still mostly sober, when dope was still mostly fun and he felt like he had some control over it.
“Lord, release my son from this torment. Father God, I know he done gone down to Hell to take a look, but please send him back.”
Sonny might have found it soothing if he weren’t feeling so sick. He heaved, nothing at first, but soon he was vomiting in the corner of the room.
His mother’s voice grew louder. “Lord, I know you can deliver him from what ails him. Bless him and keep him.”
Deliverance was exactly what Sonny wanted. He was a forty-five-year-old dope fiend, and he was tired but he was also sick, and the sickness of trying to come off the dope outweighed his exhaustion with staying on it every single time.
His mother was whispering now, or maybe Sonny’s ears were no longer working. Soon he couldn’t hear anything at all. Before long, somebody would be home. One of the other fiends he lived with would come in and maybe they would have scored something, but probably they wouldn’t have and Sonny would have to begin the ritual of trying to score himself. Instead, he began it now.
He pushed himself up off the ground and put his ear against the door to make certain his mother had gone. Once he knew, he went out to greet Harlem.
Harlem and heroin. Heroin and Harlem. Sonny could no longer think of one without thinking of the other. They sounded alike. Both were going to kill him. The junkies and the jazz had gone together, fed each other, and now every time Sonny heard a horn, he wanted a hit.
Sonny walked down 116th Street. He could almost always score on 116th Street, and he had trained himself to spot junkies and dealers as quickly as possible, letting his eyes scan the folks walking by until they landed on the people who had what he needed. It was a consequence of living inside his own head. It made him aware of others who were doing the same thing.
When Sonny came across the first junkie, he asked if she was holding, and the woman shook her head. When he came across the second one, he asked if he would let him carry, and the man shook his head too, but pointed him along to a guy who was dealing.
Sonny’s mother didn’t give him money anymore. Angela sometimes did if her Bible-slinging husband had made some extra cash on the revival circuit. Sonny gave the dealer every last dollar he had, and it bought him so little. It bought him next to nothing.
He wanted to shoot it before going back just in case Amani was there. She would take him for the next to nothing he had. Sonny went into the bathroom of a diner and shot up, and instantly he could feel the sickness moving away from him. By the time he made it back home, he felt almost well. Almost, which meant that he would have to score again soon to get a little closer, and again to get a little closer, and again, and again.
Amani sat in front of a mirror, braiding her hair. “Where you been?” she asked.
Sonny didn’t answer. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and started rummaging around the fridge for food. They lived in the Johnson Houses on 112th and Lexington, and their door was never locked. Junkies came and went, from one apartment to the next. Someone was passed out on the floor in front of the table.
“Your mama was here,” Amani said.
Sonny found a piece of bread and ate around the mold. He looked at Amani as she finished her hair and stood up to look at herself. She was getting thick around the middle.
“She say she want you to come home for Sunday dinner.”
“Where you going?” he asked Amani. He didn’t like it when she got dressed up. She had promised him a long time ago that she would never give up her body for dope, and, in the beginning, Sonny hadn’t believed she would be able to keep her promise. A dope fiend’s word didn’t count for much. Sometimes, for assurance, he would follow her as she walked around Harlem on those nights when she did her hair up, put makeup on her face. Every time he did, it ended the same sad way: Amani begging a club owner to let her sing again, just once more. They almost never did. One time, the dingiest joint in all of Harlem had said yes, and Sonny had stood in the back as Amani got up onstage to blank stares and silence. Nobody remembered what she used to be. All they could see was what she was now.
“You should go see your mama, Sonny. We could use some money.”
“Aw, c’mon, Amani. You know she ain’t gon’ give me nothing.”
“She might. If you cleaned yourself up. You could use a shower and a shave. She might give you something.”
Sonny went up to Amani. He stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her belly, felt the firmness of its weight. “Why don’t you give me something, baby?” he whispered into her ear.
She started to wriggle, but he held firm and she softened, leaned into him. Sonny had never loved her, not really. But he had always wanted her. It took him a while to learn the difference between those two things.
“I just did my hair, Sonny,” she said, but she was already offering him her neck, bending it to the left so that he could run his tongue along the right side. “Sing me a li’l something, Amani,” he said, reaching for her breast. She hummed at his touch, but didn’t sing.
Sonny let his hand wander down from her breast, down to meet the tufts of hair that awaited him. Then she started. “I loves you, Porgy. Don’t let him take me. Don’t let him handle me and drive me mad.” She sang so softly it was almost a whisper. Almost. By the time his fingers found her wet, she was back at the chorus. When she left that night to go out to the jazz clubs, they wouldn’t let her sing, but Sonny always did.
“I’ll go see my mama,” he promised when she left the front door swinging.
—
Sonny kept a glassine bag of dope in his shoe. It was a reassurance. He walked the many blocks between his house and his mother’s house with his big toe clenched around the bag as though it were a small fist. He’d clench it, then release it. Clench it, then release it.
As Sonny passed the projects that filled the distance between his apartment and Willie’s, he tried to remember the last time he’d really spoken to his mother. It was 1964, during the riots, and she had asked him to meet her in front of her church so that she could lend him some money. “I don’t want to see you dead or worse,” she’d said, passing Sonny what little change hadn’t made it into the offering plate. As he took the money, Sonny had wondered, What could be worse than dead? But all around him, the evidence was clear. Only weeks before, the NYPD had shot down a fifteen-year-old black boy, a student, for next to nothing. The shooting had started the riots, pitting young black men and some black women against the police force. The news made it sound like the fault lay with the blacks of Harlem. The violent, the crazy, the monstrous black people who had the gall to demand that their children not be gunned down in the streets. Sonny clutched his mother’s money tight as he walked back that day, hoping he wouldn’t run into any white people looking to prove a point, because he knew in his body, even if he hadn’t yet put it together in his mind, that in America the worst thing you could be was a black man. Worse than dead, you were a dead man walking.
Josephine answered the door. She cradled her baby girl in one arm and her son held her other hand. “You get lost or somethin’?” she asked, shooting him a dirty look.
“Behave,” his mother hissed from behind her, but Sonny was glad to see his sister treating him the same way she always had.