Joey Cloudy online

TRAMP: ANDRÉ and AARON

“I never meant to cause you any sorrow

I never meant to cause you any pain

I only wanted one time to see you laughing

I only wanted to see you

Laughing in the purple rain”

-Prince

André wasn’t called André by anybody except his momma and his wife to everybody else he was “D.” He and Aaron had worked together on a few move jobs last summer when he was humping those gargantuan pieces of antique furniture, the affluent Americans were so fond of for D’s cousin Ricky Colman’s delivery service. They were just passing the time one day during lunch while they watched a poorly adapted screenplay of the short story ‘The Lottery. André had not cracked a book since he dropped out of school to start dealing full-time in junior high.

But, he thought it was a pretty good movie. Aaron began to talk about the differences between the movie and the book, and told “D” all about the controversial history of the short story when it was first published in the New Yorker in 1948. “D” normally didn’t give a flying fuck about all of this brainiac bullshit, but Aaron’s enthusiasm was contagious. So he listened, knowing that Aaron wasn’t soft.

The next day, he asked Aaron if he had the book.

“Well, it’s not a book. It’s a short story. Aaron took a kneeled and adjusted the brace on his right knee. But, yeah, I think I have it in one of my Norton anthologies.”

“Can I borrow it? I was talking to my wife about it, and she said it sounded cool, so I figured I’d just borrow it from you to read instead of trying to run down the thang.”

“Sure, I will dig it out of my stacks and bring it to work tomorrow.”

André recognized the scars on Aaron’s arms because he had caught one in the leg once. André, like Aaron, had rather eclectic tastes in music. Preferring hard rock and metal when they lifted weights. Bebop when they chilled around the house. André didn’t go for the classical stuff, though. He was on papers for the next four years after serving eighteen months on an aggravated assault charge. And he, like every gangster since Big Al, needed a way to account for his income.

Ricky was André’s cousin through marriage, and so when he got out of the pen, he hired André. André was a fat, bespectacled man with a round face and an easygoing smile, whose jovial nature masked his hardcore gangster mentality. Aaron thought he looked like Chubby Checker with glasses. He was married with three kids and a devoted wife. Power being an aphrodisiac, he was a notorious womanizer, but he had his own honor code. Never fuck your friends’ old ladies, being near the top of his list right under honor thy mother (he didn’t see his father much; he was a semi-retired gangster himself who had moved back to his hometown of Longview, a small town in the pine forest of East Texas about 150 miles east of Dallas).

And never get high on your own supply. André was fiercely loyal to his crew and his friends, regardless of race or gang affiliation. Now, in his late twenties, he had lost some of the wildness of his youth and was thinking about settling down to a legit gig. He had worked in a print shop for about a year before he joined Aaron on the trucks, but had been fired after kicking the cowboy shit outta’ some uncle tom assed nigga’ who thought that just because André was on papers, he could talk to him like he was crazy at work.

The owner liked André and didn’t particularly care for the shift supervisor, and since everyone who had witnessed the events that led up to the altercation agreed that the brother had earned an ass whopping. He didn’t want to call the police or involve his parole officer, but the owner’s hands were tied. Even though the disrespectful little shit who had let his mouth write a check his ass couldn’t cash was insisting on calling the police and filing charges.

André was fucked. He knew it, and the owner of the print shop knew it, but André was smart, honest, and hard working, so the owner of the print shop convinced the punk assed bitch, as André referred to him, to not press charges so long as he fired André. Getting fired was out of the question; his P.O. was a disillusioned, horny, middle-aged social worker who had taken to screwing her clients. While André was not against having extramarital affairs, he knew that she had also had several brothers’ parole revoked when she found out they were sleeping with other women, or whenever she grew unhappy for whatever reason with the relationship. So, he called Ricky and started on the trucks the next day.

D had never completely retired from the game, and so it was not a problem to make up the income from the slave job. Still, he needed some sort of cover to account for his income. Working on the trucks turned out to be the perfect cover because they all got paid out in cash in full because they were considered contract laborers.

Aaron’s father, Lou, also worked on André’s cars occasionally, so Aaron had seen André around a few times while they drank ice-cold cans of Schlitz malt liquor and shot the shit as they passed Lou tools while he tuned up their respective rides on the side of Miss Hazel’s yard on the corner of Metropolitan and Myrtle Street in old South Dallas. D was afraid of Miss Hazel’s dog a 100-pound black and brown German Shepard named Billy. But, Aaron would play with the dog every time he saw him, grabbing him up by the scruff of his neck and swinging him around in the front yard. Billie was not a friendly dog and had attacked dope fiends when they attempted to break into the house. But he turned into a big puppy whenever he saw Aaron in the yard. Aaron had been to André’s house once, where they sat around in his garage, which he had converted into a game room, and watched TV.

One thing André knew about Aaron and that was that he was one of the few human beings he had ever met who was worthy of his respect. Aaron had come from nowhere and been wild as fuck in his youth, but had somehow managed to transform himself into something completely different than what everyone thought he would become when he was younger and still running wild in the streets.

Aaron never talked about race, but people he knew that he read the papers and watched the news, but he didn’t really talk much about current events. When he did talk, he always talked about ideas. The philosophy of a politician, instead of the persona adopted while giving a speech. He talked about pop culture in a historical context. He was the first person that he had ever heard compare the Americas’ reaction to hip-hop to the country’s reaction to jazz in the early twentieth century, and rock and roll in the middle part of the century, and how both musical forms were initially met with contempt by older people and dismissed as being immoral and ignored by serious music critics at the time as just being a fad that couldn’t possibly have anything serious to say as an art form.

With all of his education and scholarly mannerisms, Aaron was, in his own quiet way, still battling for his people in his own admittedly strange and very private war. He was killing the idea that black men were not true intellectuals, unlike most black people who had achieved a similar level of enlightenment. Aaron had never dismissed his past or the people who were still living the life that he had left behind, and André admired that about him. Aaron had declared himself a man of peace, but he had no religious leanings.

André thought about it and realized that Aaron was the first black atheist that he had ever met. And that all of the changes that had occurred over the course of his life had been done through force of will.

Unlike Ricky, who had shackled his soul to the church. He could hardly open his mouth these days without delivering a sermon. Aaron was also the first serious writer André had ever met. After he read ‘The Lottery, he understood why Aaron said the movie was shit. The car chase and all that shit were never a part of the original story, and the bitches’ story was tighter than frog’s pussy from the get-go. André returned the collection of short stories a few weeks later, after he and his wife had spent many evenings lying around reading from it. When André returned the Norton anthology, he asked.

“Aaron, can I buy a copy of your book of poetry?”

“No, but I’ll give you a copy for free.”

They didn’t have any work for a few days with Ricky, so André and his wife read the whole thing several times and decided that even though most of it didn’t rhyme, and they both admitted that a lot of it went over their heads, the stuff in that slim book of poems was more real and more true than anything either of them had every read before and that only a madman or a genius could write such things down without bursting into flames.

After André and his wife finished reading Aaron’s book of poetry, he and his wife talked about the book all night and in the morning before work. They’d had some serious and deep conversations over the years, with the pregnant girlfriend calling, André getting shot, the money he spent on the wives and children of his people who were locked down for years, the last time he went to jail, and now they were having this serious talk about a book of poems written by a brother who worked part-time time with him on the trucks as a delivery man.

They both wondered how many others there were out there like him working jobs that utterly wasted their talents. How many other abilities went unacknowledged, potential unrealized? Andre’s wife, Sarah, had graduated from Bishop College with a degree in business and management. She had loved André since they first started dating, and she was loyal to him to the death.

Normally, she only read the occasional romance novel or horror; sporadically, she’d pick up one of the more popular best sellers. One thing she understood was that the brother who wrote that book was going to be famous if he could avoid the traps in life that had threatened to devour André. The book had frightened her in places and filled her with a profound sense of sorrow in others. But it never disintegrated into despair, and that was what gave the poems grace, that in the face of all of life’s horrors, here was a man who defiantly dared to have hope.

Other poems made her laugh at things she knew she shouldn’t laugh at, but sometimes you laugh even though it’s not really funny. That someone had gotten André to read, she had to admit, she was intrigued. She told André to invite Aaron to dinner; she had never invited one of Andre’s friends into their home before. When Aaron saw André at work again, he asked if Aaron could come by the house for dinner because his old lady was cooking dinner.

But Aaron had already made plans to eat with his friends that night, but could he get a rain check?

“Cool. Oh, I got a little something for you.”

André said as Aaron got out the decade-old purple Monte Carlo with gold-kitted trim and mirror-tinted windows, and André gave Aaron a QP of high-quality chronic shit.

“Soon as I get off a these papers, me and you gone sit down and smoke like Cheech and Chong. I still got all of my bongs in my game room player.”

“Thanks Negro.”

André smiled to himself as he drove away. He couldn’t wait to get home and read more poems.

-About the author

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.