“I don’t know. But if we don’t figure something out, we on the streets.”
I begin to move my legs back and forth off-tempo, staying low to the ground. Alé pulls papers and a small jar with clumps of weed out of her pocket. I like watching her roll, the meditation of it and the smell when it’s sweet and unassuming, kind of like if cinnamon was mixed with a redwood tree. I never figured out how to do it right, how to make sure the joint was tight enough to not unravel, but loose enough to breathe. Watching Alé is better, reminds me of the way my mama used to fold her clothes, so determined to make the crease just right.
She pauses to look over at me. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.”
She sprinkles weed from the jar onto a paper and I catch a hint of lavender. She calls the lavender-infused weed her Sunday Shoes and it don’t even gotta make sense because when I suck it in, blow it out, I imagine my feet cased in something lavender calm and holy. She finishes, holding it up to inspect it, small smile, her lips almost pouting in their pride.
She pulls a lighter out and I cup my hand around the joint, a barrier from the wind. Alé’s thumb presses on the lighter until it sparks and the base of the flame is the same shade of blue our pool was before all the shit. She guides the flame to the tip of the joint until it finally catches.
We pass the joint back and forth until it’s too small to fit between our lips without crumbling. I’ve never really liked weed, but it makes me feel closer to Alé, so I light up with her and try to sink so deep into the high that it’s all I feel.
Alé begins to swing her legs, me following her lead, going skyward. At the top, I think I might just enter one of those clouds. I look down, see a tent behind the basketball courts and an old man pissing by a tree, not bothering to look around and see who is watching. I aspire to be so reckless, so unassuming that I could take a piss in San Antonio Park at noon on a Thursday and not even look up.
“You know what I been thinking?” Alé asks me.
We’re on opposite ends of the sky, swinging toward each other and missing, and for the first time all day I’m not thinking about the paper taped to our door, about Marcus’s sleeping face, about how wide Dee’s mouth opens.
“What you been thinking?”
“Don’t nobody ever fix none of these damn roads.”
She says it and I immediately begin to laugh, thinking she was about to tell me some philosophical wondering about the world.
“You don’t even got a car, what you worried about?” I yell back to her, across the wind and the space between our swings.
Even as I say it, looking out at the streets that extend from the park like the legs of a spider, I see what she means. Chunks of road sit beside holes they left behind, where wheels of broken-down Volkswagens dip in and for a second I don’t know if they’re gonna pull back out until they do, the only remnant of distress left in the slight rattle of the bumper. All the holes in Oakland never seem to leave nobody stuck for long, an illusion of brokenness. Or maybe that’s just for the cars.
“Don’t you ever think about how none of the streets ’round here been redone for decades?” Alé, a skater to the core, spends more time dipping in and out of potholes than I ever have.
“Why it gotta matter? The roads ain’t hurting nobody.”
“Don’t matter. I’m just saying it ain’t like this nowhere else, you know? Why Broadway not this torn up? Or S.F.? ’Cause they putting their money in the city just like they putting their money into downtown. Don’t you got a problem with that?” Alé’s whole body has risen from its slouch and we’re both slowing down now, returning from our sky.
“No. I don’t got a problem with that, just like I don’t got a problem with Uncle Ty buying a Maserati and a mansion down in L.A. and leaving us out here alone. Just like I don’t got a problem with Marcus spitting rhymes in a studio while I’m just tryna pay our rent. It ain’t my place to have a problem with somebody else’s survival. If the city get they money from paying to smooth over the roads on some rich-ass street, then they should go ahead and do that. Lord knows I won’t be thinking ’bout nobody else if someone offers me a wad of cash.”
I wiggle my toes in my Sunday Shoes as the swing comes to a halt and I feel Alé’s eyes on me, determined.
“I don’t believe none of that,” she says.
“What you mean you don’t believe it?”
She shakes her head, her own high making her slow. “Nah, you got too much heart to be a sellout, Ki, you ain’t cruel enough for none of that. I know you wouldn’t go leaving Marcus or Trevor or me just to make bank.”
I’d like to think she’s wrong, but if she was then I would stay on these swings all day, get so high I don’t have to think about nothing but Alé’s tattoos and how the streets are fragmenting and will keep disintegrating until we are walking on dirt.
Instead, I think of Marcus, how we used to stand on street corners trying to sell paintings I made on cardboard. It barely made us enough to buy more paint, but Marcus and I were in it together, choosing each other. It’s time I go tell him I can’t be doing all the hard shit for him if he ain’t gonna do nothing for me. Tell him it’s time to put the mic down and face these streets like I’ve been for the last six months.
“I gotta go find Marcus,” I say, hopping from the swing set and seeing the world fuzz, go in and out of focus, all of it sharp yet spinning. I leave her there, on the swings, a puff of smoke exiting her lips like she was holding it in this whole time, and she don’t even have to look at me again because now this blazer smells like her Sunday Shoes and, today, on funeral day, that is all I need.
It sounds like someone is giving birth. I descend the stairs to the recording studio cautiously, not sure if I’m about to find some strange woman with her thighs above her head, erupting.
Instead, the steps give way to the basement filled with Marcus’s best friend’s girlfriend—Shauna—moaning, throwing Taco Bell to-go cups into a trash can with more force than she needs to, and waiting for someone to ask her what’s wrong. The remaining soda in the cups dribbles onto the beige rug and nobody asks Shauna nothing because Marcus is rapping in the next room and they’re all trying to find a single word in his mouth’s jumble.
After I left Alé at the park earlier today I went home to find Marcus, but he wasn’t there. So I flipped through the yellow pages for hours planning where to go to ask for a job until it started to get dark and I knew I could find him at the studio. Now I’m preparing to enter the boys’ sanctuary to see if I can get Marcus to hold me close again, like Alé does, and figure out how to escape this mess.
Marcus’s best friend is Cole and his recording studio is hidden in the corner of his mom’s basement, behind a closed door, the house stuffed on a deserted street in the Fruitvale district, a short walk from the Regal-Hi and East Oakland’s own sort of downtown: always alive. The boys all pay Cole for studio hours, trading off nights of the week to record songs that never go further than SoundCloud.