Gumbo and I tossed a Frisbee, waiting for our mamas to call us in for dinner, while Danny, another one of my brothers’ friends, screamed by from one end of the block to the other, passing within a few feet of us on his gigantic chopper . . .
And in all the feeding of fine foods . . .
When I was eight years old, I was diagnosed with epilepsy. The Dallas school district saw I was brown, so they stuck me in ESL classes with the other brown children.
The actual problem was that I was having over a hundred minor seizures per day . . .
I lie on his couch. It’s my spot now. I’ve spent whole days lying here. The cushions remember the arch of my back and the angles of my arms and legs, so it’s easy to find my place again when I move. He sits at his desk—next to the couch, in front of a laptop—and waits for his phone to ring. He is a businessman. His business is crack. He is always on call . . .
You tell yourself you have a handle on it, that it’s not so bad. You catch yourself looking down at that once-precious, bleeding, now-scarring arm—blisters reddening, rotting boughs hemorrhaging, far from on the mend, things swelling where they shouldn’t. And those twitches you have . . .
“You need to build your confidence,” he says. “You need to build your self-esteem. You need to build a @better-you. For a @better-us #selfie-rule . . .”
He was talking too much; either he had unstable nerves or he was wasted. I asked what he was on.
“Blow,” he said. “Want some?”
I smiled like I felt sorry for him having to ask such a question. He handed me a bag under the table.
“Enjoy,” he said . . .
We used to sit in my friend Stevie’s tree house and huff nitrous oxide out of a gas cracker we had stolen from Crate & Barrel at the mall. Stevie’s older brother bought the cartridges for us at the local head shop. They were silver and shaped like bullets. They looked the same as the CO2 cartridges we used to operate Stevie’s BB gun, which we also kept in the tree house. The tree house was where we kept everything we held dear that summer . . .