John, my sister, and I would drive to the city together. I remember one time we were going somewhere, and the radio was playing a song he loved. He loudly screamed out the lyrics, while my sister and I giggled at his strangled singing. They let me smoke cigarettes in the backseat of the car. I felt cool and free.
We would go to IHOP to get pancakes. They took me to Adventureland and I played Pac-Man. In those moments, I almost felt like someone’s precious little sister. I was having all these fun adventures and thinking to myself, I finally know what it feels like to have a big sister who’s in my life for good. And I like this easy breezy guy, John. This was what I’d been missing. I was starting to feel something resembling stability, a sense that I had something that looked like a normal family and was moving toward somewhere I belonged.
But confusing and curious things quickly started happening.
The closer I got to my sister, the more clearly I could see her broken parts. She had secretly gotten me my own phone line, which only she called me on. She would have these desperate bouts of drug-induced hysteria and call me late at night, in the middle of an episode. I’d talk her down off the ledge, then try to go back to sleep, get up early in the morning, and complete the seventh grade. No one at school knew that frequently, just a few hours earlier, I had subdued my suicidal big sister. Killing herself became a common threat that she shared with me in the wee hours before I went to the school bus stop.
Then the calls stopped for a while. Finally, one day, Alison phoned and said she and John were coming to pick me up. I was excited to think of the three of us together again, riding, laughing, smoking, singing, and playing. But John showed up alone.
We began driving, but there was no radio blasting, no talking. It wasn’t fun at all, and I felt that something wasn’t right.
Finally I asked, “Where is my sister? When are we going to pick her up?”
John kept his eyes forward and assured me, “Oh, she’ll be here later.” I was sitting in the front seat, and I could clearly see the handgun resting against his thigh.
John, his gun, and I made two stops: a card game and a drive-in movie. There’s a look, a feel, and a smell to rooms where grown men play in the dark. It was dank and cluttered. The air was dense with cheap booze, stale menthol cigarette smoke, and unspoken perversions. There were no pretty things. It was hard for me to see and hard to breathe.
I don’t know exactly how many men there were; I don’t know how many guns, how much money, or how many vile thoughts were at the table—but I do know it was all men, and me. I sat in a corner on the sticky floor where I could see the door and held onto myself. I stayed still and kept my eyes down as the grown-man jokes, grown-man cussin’, grown-man hungers, grown-man fears, and grown-man fantasies flew above my head. Every now and then I’d catch a glimpse of one of them leering at me or hear a lewd reference to me in their conversation.
I don’t remember how I got from the card-room floor back into the front seat of his car. What I do remember is feeling dirty from the sticky floor and the men’s filthy words. I knew my sister was not coming to clean me up this time. A panic bubbled up in my throat. Where am I going? Why am I alone with my sister’s boyfriend? Why did he take me around those disgusting men? Why can’t we just go to IHOP? Where is my sister? Where is she? I began to pray.
Our next stop was the drive-in, where almost immediately John put his arm around me. My body went stiff. My eyes were fixed on his gun. John pushed in closer and forced a hard kiss on me. I was nauseous and scared; I felt immobilized. From the corner of my eye I noticed an elderly white man pull up and park next to us, peering directly into John’s car.
The look on the man’s face was a mix of revulsion and recognition. He clearly saw an adult man—John, with his round Afro—and a little girl, small with blond coils of hair. He saw the powder-blue car and John’s light-brown skin. He saw the details, and even if he didn’t detect my distress, he could see this was no place a little girl would ever want to be. John pulled out of the drive-in slowly and drove me home in silence.
I committed that man’s face to memory. He is still there, fresh and frozen in that terrible time. I believe he was a prayer in person.
After a couple of days back in my room, the phone began ringing again, but this time I wouldn’t pick it up. I resumed pretending I had a regular seventh-grade life. I wanted to be a child again. Sometimes all the kids in my neighborhood would play chase (tag) at night. Most of them lived in nice houses with two parents, and sisters who didn’t burden them with thoughts of suicide and set them up with pimps. I longed to blend in to a typical summer night in an everyday Long Island neighborhood, to play and clown around with other regular kids. I just wanted to outrun my drama through a game of chase.
We often played in an area not far from the beach that had a kind of roundabout. We would hang out at that spot and sometimes build a fire, make funny
