All American Boys Read online

  Dad, of course, would be really reading the newspaper. Politics, current events, sports, every single story. But he’d pull the comics section out and hand it to me. As I’m sure you can tell by now, my old man doesn’t do funny all that well. But me, I loved the comics. All of them. But there was one in particular that struck me more than the others, and the funny thing is, I’m not really sure why. It definitely wasn’t the funniest one. As a matter of fact, most times it wasn’t funny at all. Not to me, at least. It was called The Family Circus. A brilliant name for a comic strip, even though the family in the comic wasn’t much like a circus. They were pretty normal. And the strip wasn’t really a “strip.” It was just one image. One scene. Not like the others, which were made up of a whole bunch of different boxes, each one telling more of the story. I know you know what I mean. Everybody knows what comic strips look like. But this one, The Family Circus, was just one picture, in a circle. Not even in a box like normal comics. And it was all about this normal white family. Four kids, two parents, and a grandma. And nothing ever seemed to be happening. Like I remember this one, where the oldest son, Billy, and his younger siblings are watching their grandmother talk on the phone, and it just said, Grandma’s phone is really old-fashioned. That’s it. See? No punch line. Not funny, and if anything, it’s actually pretty lame. But maybe that’s why I liked them. Maybe I was fascinated by the fact that it seemed like white families, at least in comics, lived simple, easy lives. That, and also the images—I loved them. Loved them. And every Sunday after church I would tear The Family Circus out to save.

  By the time I got to Mrs. Caperdeen’s class, and by the time she taught the lesson about Aaron Douglas, I had collected like a thousand Family Circus clips. I stored them all in a shoe box under my bed and would go through them sometimes, just to pick one out to copy-sketch. And after a while, I got better at drawing and started making my own family cartoons in the same style. I called them The Real Family Circus, and most of them featured a cartoon version of my father shouting at a cartoon version of my brother. But when I saw Mr. Douglas’s work, well, The Family Circus kinda went out the window. Aaron Douglas was doing a different thing, on a whole other level.

  Let me describe what his work looks like. Imagine The Lion King. But all the lions are people. Black people. So Simba and Mufasa, are, let’s say, a black king and a prince. Now, imagine that you’re looking at them through the thickest fog ever. So thick that you can’t make out any actually feature on their bodies, but you can still see their silhouettes. So it could be any king. Or any prince. But you can still tell they’re black. That’s Aaron Douglas’s work. And the first time Mrs. Caperdeen showed us a slide from his series Aspects of Negro Life, I knew the kind of art I wanted to start making.

  And so I did. The only difference was that I framed mine in a circle, like The Family Circus.

  And that’s why I needed Ma to make sure she brought me my sketch pad and pencils.

  I woke up early, and before doing anything else, before getting up and having a morning pee, or brushing my teeth, or spirometering, I turned the TV on, muted it, then grabbed my stuff and starting sketching on a fresh page. I wasn’t sure what I was drawing.

  That’s not true.

  I knew exactly what I was drawing. The only thing I could. I was going to re-create the scene, what had happened to me, what was playing constantly on the news, on the page.

  First the outline. A teenage boy. Hands up. No. Erase. Hands down. No. Hands behind his back. Outline of a figure behind him. Bigger than he is. Holding him around the neck. No. Not that. Fist in the air. No. Not that either. Hand pushing through the teenage boy’s chest. A building behind him. A store. Person in the doorway. Cheering.

  After the rough outline I started shading, which was the tricky part. See, in Aaron Douglas’s work, there’s always this haziness. This ghostliness to everything. But then there’s also lots of light. As if light beams just break through certain parts of the paintings. I like that. But in order for me to get that look with pencils, I have to do a lot of shading. A lot of licking my finger and smearing the pencil lead to make a lighter gray on some parts of the paper, then scratch the pencil over and over again on some other areas to make darker marks. Like I said, tricky.

  Clarissa came in in the middle of me rubbing my wet thumb on the paper, adding a little light to a dark area.

  “Hey, there,” she said, bringing in breakfast. “How we doing?”

  “I’m cool,” I said, smirking. Clarissa set the food down. Pancakes and fruit cocktail. She glanced at the pad, the black and gray smudges probably seeming like a crazy mess to her. Then she shot her eyes at the silent TV.

  “So you’re an artist, huh?” she said, her focus now back on my work.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I knew it.”

  I looked at her curiously. “Oh yeah? How you know?”

  “I don’t know. I could just tell.” She could just tell? Yeah right. What she really meant to say was, I want to say something, but I don’t know what to say. Instead she followed with, “Mind if I look?”

  “It’s just the beginning,” I prefaced, handing her the sketch pad.

  Clarissa, who by the way couldn’t have been much older than Spoony, maybe early twenties, white, freckles, bright-red hair, looked at the start of my new piece.

  “What you gonna call it?”

  “Don’t know yet,” I said, shrugging. Sheesh. Even that hurt.

  “Well, it looks like it’s gonna be good. I mean, not good because I mean, this whole thing, this, I mean . . .” She went bright red but soldiered on. “I just mean it looks like it’s going to be nice. Nice art,” she finished, handing the pad back to me.

  “You’ve seen the news,” I said, letting her off the hook.

  Clarissa glanced at the TV again. Then back to me. She sighed. “Yeah. And . . . I think it’s bullshit.” She put her hand to her mouth, probably realizing that maybe nurses shouldn’t curse. Not that that was my rule, it just seemed like it was probably discussed somewhere in the training that you might wanna refrain from using foul language around patients. I liked it, though, and even thought about responding with a hell yeah it’s bullshit! but figured that would probably be a little too much. “I think it’s just so . . .” Clarissa couldn’t finish her statement. I nodded to let her know I understood and that I was having just as much trouble trying to figure it all out too. But one thing we could agree on was the part about it being bullshit.

  To cut some of the discomfort that now surrounded us, I flipped through the pages in the sketchbook to show her some of my more finished pieces.

  “This is what a completed piece looks like,” I said, holding the pad up.

  The image was of silhouettes of soldiers. Maybe twenty of them in a line, marching. At the back were babies. Marching. And they progressively got bigger, older, and right in the middle was the ultimate image of a strong soldier. And then they started getting smaller again, becoming a baby again.

  “Wow,” she said. “It’s beautiful. Why do you frame them in a circle like this? Why not use the whole page?”

  “Because, well, the circle changes how you see it. Like, what are we looking through? A telescope? A peephole? The sight of a gun?”

  “I see,” she said. “But how come none of them have faces?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’re there, but they’re not. Like, ghosts. Or invisible people,” I said, instantly thinking that sounded dumb, but hoping Clarissa would just think I sounded artsy.

  She nodded, then glanced at the TV again. It was like a magnet. My face was on the screen. “Well listen here, Rashad, the artist,” Clarissa said, low. “Don’t forget what I said about getting up and moving around. It’s important.” She wagged her finger at me playfully. “I’ll come back and check on you later.”

  I worked on the drawing for a while, until my hand started to cramp up, which is just one of those things that happen when you work with pencil. Seems like some genius
would’ve figured out how to make pencils out of rubber or something a little softer, even though that’s probably a silly thing to even think. But when your hand starts aching in the middle of such a personal piece, there’s no telling what you might think about.

  I put the pencil and pad down and decided to follow Clarissa’s instructions and get up. But not only did I decide to get up, I decided to get the hell out of that empty, boring, beige hospital room. Room 409.

  I climbed out of bed, snatched the back of my robe closed, and ventured out into the wild—not so wild—world of the hospital. I hunched over like an old man, protecting, I guess, my ribs—they hurt more when I stood straight. I eased slowly down the hall, each step pricking me inside, as I looked around at the nurses and the doctors and the families standing around the beds of their loved ones in the rooms with opened doors. Phones ringing. Machines beeping. Doors opening and closing. Soda cans dropping in vending machines. Conversations about next steps and tests and surgeries. At the end of the hall was an elevator that happened to open the moment I got to it. A doctor got off, and I got on for no other reason than that it was there, open, waiting for me.

  I hit the “1” button, and down to the first floor I went. Once the doors opened again, I found myself in the busiest part of the building, the main floor where people were checking in, doctors and nurses zipping back and forth to the cafeteria, and most importantly, where the gift shop was. It was the only thing remotely interesting. So, destination gift shop was in full effect.

  It didn’t take long for me to realize that hospital gift shops have terrible gifts. At least that one did. I mean, really bad gifts. Oh, so sorry you’re in the hospital having your legs amputated. Know what’ll make you feel better? A snow globe with a unicorn in it. Oh, so sorry to hear about your cancer. But I’ve got just the picker-upper. A refrigerator magnet of a lighthouse that says SPRINGFIELD. Ain’t no lighthouses in Springfield, but who cares!

  I poked around, looking at all the snacks (they did have good snacks), weird doodads, and whatnots, trying not to make any moves that were too sudden. It was more of a step-step-step, swivel head to the left, then to the right. Repeat. Nice and easy.

  The woman behind the counter didn’t seem to be paying me any attention and instead was flipping through the newspaper. She had to be in her sixties. I could tell, not because she looked old—she didn’t—but because she had all those little moles all over her face that only old black ladies get. My grandma had them.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, catching me off guard. I threw my hands up and backed away from the assortment of plastic flowers.

  “Just lookin’, just lookin’,” I said, wound up.

  She zeroed in on me, smirked. “Relax, kid. I’ve been here long enough to know that no one steals from a hospital gift shop. And if someone did, well, hey, I can’t blame them. We should be giving this stuff away.”

  I put my hands down, embarrassed. “Sorry.”

  “Never apologize when there’s nothing to be sorry for.” She put her eyes back on the newspaper, licked her thumb, then flipped the page. I just stood there like an ass, until she spoke again. “But seriously, do you need anything?”

  I almost apologized again, but caught myself. Not sure why I was all sorry sorry sorry, all of a sudden. “Nope.”

  “So you just came to see me?” she asked sarcastically. And before I could say no, she demanded, “Say yes.”

  I nodded with a big grin on my face and walked toward the counter. “Yes,” followed by the truth. “Honestly, I just needed to get out of my room.”

  “Yeah, I hear ya.” She closed the paper and extended her hand. “Well, I’m Shirley Fitzgerald.”

  “Rashad.” I squeezed her fingers lightly.

  Mrs. Fitzgerald and I talked a while, but I didn’t tell her anything about why I was in the hospital. At least, not the truth. I told her I got banged up in a car accident.

  “Were you wearing your seat belt?” she asked predictably.

  “Yep, thankfully.” I felt bad lying to an old lady, but I had to. This was the most comfortable I had felt in a while. Turns out the best gift in the gift shop was the fact that it didn’t have a TV. No news. No fuss.

  After we got through why I was in the hospital, I asked Mrs. Fitzgerald how long she’d been working there.

  “I don’t even know. Maybe three or four years. Lost track. Wait, let me think. Frank died . . .” She started running through the timeline in her head. “Yeah, four years. Mercy, has it been that long?” She put her hand to her neck and fiddled with the gold chain she was wearing. A ring dangled from it. “My babies are grown. My grandbabies, too. And my husband has gone on to glory, so this is how I spend my time. I volunteer here a few days a week, and on my off days, I go and volunteer down at the firehouse.”

  “What you do down there?”

  “I fight fires, what you think I do?” she snapped.

  “Oh,” I said, stunned. I mean, she was old. Like, too old to be hosing down blazing houses, that’s for sure. “That’s cool.”

  “That’s a lie, baby,” she said, grinning, and flipping the newspaper back open, fanning through it until she got to the comics. The rest of my time with her was spent with me standing at the register and her reading funnies out loud, and either bursting with laughter, or totally shit-talking about how lame some of them were. Eventually, my body, waist up, started broiling on the inside, and I knew it was time to make my way back to the fourth floor.

  “Come back and see me, Rashad. An old lady needs a little company every now and then,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said.

  “I will.”

  Around four o’clock, I had visitors. But it wasn’t my family this time. It was my boys.

  “Housekeeping,” a light voice came from behind the door, after a tap. “Housekeeping.” Then came the idiotic snicker of only one person—Carlos.

  “Don’t come in!” I yelled.

  “Oh, come on, Rashad. I know how much you love housekeeping,” Carlos said, lowering his voice ten notches below its normal tone. He pushed the door open and English, Shannon, and Carlos filed in, backpacks and all.

  “Oh man,” Shannon said, instantly becoming serious when he saw me lying in the hospital bed, my face swollen, bruised, bandaged.

  “Dude!” English came right behind him, shocked.

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “Nothing?” Now even Carlos was serious.

  “Come on, y’all. I’ve gotten it from my family already. So just chill. I’m fine,” I insisted. Carlos leaned against the wall. English and Shannon took the chairs. Their eyes, caught between bad and worse, bounced from me to the TV. The Rashad Show, on repeat. I tried to bait them back in. “Tell me about the party.” Carlos was the first to bite, of course.

  “Yo, guess who almost got some?” Carlos asked, a clownish smile spreading across his face.

  “Who, English?” I replied.

  Carlos shot me a mean mug. “Really? Really, ’Shad?” He lowered the lids of his eyes until they were almost closed, then popped them open wide and bawked, “Me, man! That dog bark thing totally worked! My game was on a million, man, I swear.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Sweet, sweet Tiffany Watts.” Carlos closed his eyes and puckered his lips as if he was remembering some passionate kiss.

  I glared at Carlos. “My Tiffany Watts?”

  “Yep, cartoon-character-looking Tiffany.” Now he wrapped his arms around himself and swayed. Asshole. My heart stopped. That cop didn’t kill me, but the thought of Carlos getting with Tiffany might be the fatal blow.

  Shannon couldn’t hold it in anymore and burst out laughing. Then Carlos flashed a toothy smile.

  “Sike, man. You know I wouldn’t do you like that. I know her Daffy Duck–lookin’ ass is the love of your life,” Carlos teased. When dealing with a clown like Carlos, the key is to never let him see you flustered. Never let him think you take him seriously. It’s the opposite, come to think of it, of how
we were trained to deal with police. With your friends, you never put your hands up. I have to admit, though, Los almost got me with that one.

  “By the way, she asked about you today,” Shannon said.

  “Word? What she say?” I asked, eager.

  “Just that she and a bunch of other people were thinking about coming to visit you,” Shannon explained.

  “No,” I waved my hand, as if I was waving off the thought of Tiffany coming. “No one can come. I don’t want nobody to see me like this.”

  “You sure?” Shannon asked.

  “Yeah, man. Please. Tell everyone I’m fine. But no visitors.” I caught eyes with each of them to make sure they knew I was serious. I didn’t need anybody else standing in front of me all teary-eyed, or sitting on the edge of the bed feeling awkward. I’d already had enough of that

  When I caught Carlos’s eye, he jumped right back into form. “Man, can I finish my story?! Damn!” he said, all indignant.

  “Yeah, yeah, go ’head,” I said, trying to rush him along.

  “So, the girl I got a little closer to was, drumroll please!”

  “Come on, man,” I huffed.

  “You wanna know or not?”

  “I don’t really care.”

  “Just give me a drumroll, bro. C’mon.”

  I shook my head and started patting on my legs, doing my best to ignore the pricking feeling in my abdomen.

  “Latrice Wilkes!” Carlos blurted this out like a dude squatting behind a couch waiting to yell surprise to an unsuspecting birthday boy. “Latrice ‘Silky’ Wilkes.”