Harlem Read online

  ALSO BY ERIC JEROME DICKEY

  Before We Were Wicked (Ken Swift)

  Bad Men and Wicked Women (Ken Swift)

  Finding Gideon (Gideon)

  The Blackbirds

  Naughtier Than Nice (McBroom Sisters)

  One Night

  A Wanted Woman

  Decadence

  The Education of Nia Simone Bijou (eBook)

  An Accidental Affair

  Tempted by Trouble

  Resurrecting Midnight (Gideon)

  Dying for Revenge (Gideon)

  Pleasure

  Waking with Enemies (Gideon)

  Sleeping with Strangers (Gideon)

  Chasing Destiny

  Genevieve

  Drive Me Crazy

  Naughty or Nice (McBroom Sisters)

  The Other Woman

  Thieves’ Paradise

  Between Lovers

  Liar’s Game

  Cheaters

  Milk in My Coffee

  Friends and Lovers

  Sister, Sister

  ANTHOLOGIES

  Voices from the Other Side: Dark Dreams II

  Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing

  Mothers & Sons

  Got to Be Real

  River Crossings: Voices of the Diaspora

  Griots Beneath the Baobab: Tales from Los Angeles

  Black Silk: A Collection of African American Erotica

  MOVIE—ORIGINAL STORY

  Cappuccino

  GRAPHIC NOVELS

  Storm (six-issue miniseries, Marvel Entertainment)

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY, 10014

  First published in Voices from the Other Side: Dark Dreams II, edited by Brandon Massey (Kensington Publishing, 2006)

  First Dutton edition, 2018

  Copyright © 2006 by Eric Jerome Dickey

  Copyright © 2018 by Eric Jerome Dickey

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  DUTTON and the D colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781524744892

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Lila and Vardaman, Virginia and Herman

  CONTENTS

  Also by Eric Jerome Dickey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Excerpt of Before We Were Wicked

  About the Author

  “Society is what decides who/s sane and who isn’t, so you got to measure up.”

  —Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  GREETINGS AND SALUTATIONS from the office in the crib in California!

  Once again, it’s Carolyn’s only son, aka Virginia Jerry’s grandson, aka the kid from Kansas Street.

  I wrote Harlem after my first crack at penning a screenplay with Cappuccino but before any of the novels were published. Actually, I was trying to create short stories to enter in a few contests, most being at the local colleges and universities in the Pomona area, but everything I created was just a little bit too long by a bazillion words. Most contests wanted fewer than five hundred words. I couldn’t master the short, and at the same time I couldn’t imagine writing a full-length novel. Writing something that was five pages long, had a decent beginning, middle, and end—that was good enough for me. To be honest, outside of my classmates, instructors, and a few friends I tortured, I never expected anyone else to read any of my work. For Harlem, I remember getting a letter from a publisher and somewhere in their no-thank-you they mentioned Silence of the Lambs. They said they liked it but didn’t want to dance and wished me better luck with the next girl. LOL. It was funny, out of the gate I would write something soft, tender, loving, and filled with light; write about older couples, teenage girls; then pen something that was 180 degrees from that. Light or dark, they all feel like character studies. I have to get under the skin of every character. That’s the fun part of writing. Finding their motivation, realizing what makes them tick, and creating what they fear.

  Enjoy the ride. It’s short, but very interesting.

  Let’s all laugh and dance the Cabbage Patch at the end.

  Eric Jerome Dickey

  Tuesday, July 11, 2018, 12:33 A.M. Jeans, gray Chucks, Nina Simone T-shirt, bald with a scruffy beard. 34.000402, -118.342862 ☺ 73 degrees, no chance of rain.

  ONE

  PEOPLE CALLED ME HARLEM.

  I dubbed myself after that dangerous city that I’d never seen.

  A place not everybody knew about.

  A place most people didn’t want to know about.

  I read life is rough in Harlem and a black man isn’t expected to live to see twenty-five. Before twenty-five, a brother is almost guaranteed death, by either drugs or violence. Usually at the hand of another black man. Statistics of Harlem.

  So that name fit me perfectly, described me to the hilt.

  I was twenty-three.

  The clock was ticking.

  Another reason I took that label was because one of the nurses at the hospital, Daphane, was from there. She was the first one that was nice to me. She never forced my medication on me. Always brought me some books to read. Snuck me in some extra dessert after hours. Plus she told me what was going on on the other side of the double-locked doors. On the outside. Liking her helped me like being Harlem. She understood where I was coming from.

  Daphane. She looked a few weeks shy of twenty but claimed she was around twenty-four. She came here right after I was boxed up and shipped here. A sweet, cute, caramel-flavored, thin sister who always gave a sincere smile back at me when I sent an earnest smiled toward her oval face and light brown eyes. She’d always wink and speak when I passed by her on my way to therapy. Whether I was handcuffed or not. My fat-assed, cigarette-smelling, Grizzly Adams–bearded, Bozo-bald counselor never smiled. He talked down to me in a slick sort of way. I hate that Doc Brewst
er with a passion. First chance I got, he would be my next one eighty-seven.

  All the rooms were white. White walls. In the corner, a white, twin-sized bed with white sheets sat next to a white porcelain sink that had white fixtures. Like they were trying to make this hellish place seem like somebody’s Ku Klux heaven. Nothing up in here but southern white nurses in white uniforms. Me decked out in a white hospital prisoner uniform.

  Daphane and Phyllis are the only women of color in this joint. Heaven and hell.

  TWO

  AGAIN, I JUST woke up in a heated sweat, calling out for them to stop. In my nightmare, my little arms struggled with the police as they pulled me away from the paramedics. As I woke, my eyes stung from the salty blood. It took me a few minutes to realize that I was a grown man and not still that terrified child. That it wasn’t still that day my soul died.

  I kept having the same nightmares. If you were religious, you could call them a recurring set of visions. So I called them nightmares. My mother beating me. My father beating my mother. Me finding my father’s body after my mother stabbed him in his sleep. Me crying about Daddy’s gagging on his own blood as he tried to find strength to pull the steak knives out of his neck, back, and chest. Me running into the front room and finding my mother’s faceless body after she put a shotgun under her chin and pulled the trigger. Me sitting at my father’s feet and looking him in the face as he took his last breath. Me getting his cigarettes off the kitchen table and putting them next to his dead body, just in case he wanted to take a smoke. Me balling up into a psychological knot and being quiet, not speaking a word to anybody for almost two years. Molestations. Me being shipped from place to place to place like unclaimed luggage. Me trying to kill two sets of argumentative, abusive foster parents. More beatings. More molestations. By then I was what they called an “incorrigible” twelve-year-old.

  The dreams didn’t bother me at first, because I kept my secrets to myself. All I did was read. Closed myself off from the world with newspapers, Shakespeare, Iceberg Slim. But reading let me escape only until my eyes got tired. My mind stayed awake and reminded me of what I had done. I knew I was to blame for it all.

  The cigarettes.

  When I became violent, they said visions like these were the reason. That I was reenacting what I had seen. I could’ve told them that. They said I had shit pent up and repressed inside and that was the only way I knew how to release it.

  THREE

  TODAY, DOC WAS trying to get inside my head and find out why I killed the people at the inconvenience store. That was the day I got caught. Silent alarm. I made it barely two miles on foot. Police helicopter chased me. It was live on three news channels simultaneously. Had higher ratings than Seinfeld. They showed me running, jumping fences, and whizzing through brush. Great stride. I should’ve run track or something. They played the tape of me shooting the guy.

  Damn, I looked good on tape. Great profile.

  That was my fifteen minutes of fame.

  Should’ve been an actor.

  “Why did you kill those people in the Seven-Eleven?”

  “One.” I flipped up my middle finger. I had to sound harsh and remind Brewster. “I only killed one. Damn, why you always exaggerating? I only wounded the others.”

  “But you killed eight others. Three women. Four men. One child.”

  “That’s between me and you.” I chuckled. “Patient-client confidentiality. And I already know the 187 count.”

  “It’s between me and you.”

  Daphane cleared her throat. “Why did you shoot him? The Caucasian man at the Seven-Eleven. He wasn’t bothering you. He was only twenty-four. He had a family. A pregnant wife.”

  “So I heard. He was smoking a cigarette.”

  Brewster asked, “You killed because of a cigarette?”

  Daphane asked, “Why?”

  “Dunno. I was just in one of those moods, I guess.”

  Brewster asked, “How did you feel when you shot him?”

  “What do you mean? I felt like I needed to reload.”

  “What Doctor Brewster is asking,” Daphane said, again clearing her throat, “did you feel any remorse for shooting an innocent man?”

  “Nope. He tried to keep me from getting away. That’s a no-no. Plus, his arrogant ass didn’t want Habib or Abdul or whoever to give up the money. And like I said, he shouldn’t’ve been smoking. Cigarettes kill.”

  Heard the 7-Eleven guy’s wife of three weeks had a nervous breakdown when they told her. Miscarried on the spot. She was too screwed up to come to the trial to watch me get ruled insane, then to watch me giggle and blow kisses when they took me away.

  Why did they think I was crazy? I was sane. Their idealistic view of the wretched world made them crazy.

  FOUR

  I APPRECIATED SOLITUDE and darkness. They both echoed what was inside me. So at night, I wanted to stay awake so I could appreciate myself by myself. But no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn’t. The medication left me weak, wore me down.

  FIVE

  THEY SAY JACKED-UP memories were trapped in my mind and had to be released if I was going to survive, if I was going to make it back to their version of sane. If I was to get normal again. I never talked about them: my insignificant black secrets. They stayed in me, sheltered from the rest of the nonchalant world. Now I was supposed to “let them out to play.” From the darkness into the light. From “slavery to freedom.” Why did they use racist terms like those to try to persuade me? Were those psychological clichés supposed to be so damn appealing to my blackness?

  SIX

  I HAD VERY few memories, and no positive memories of my mother or father. Not one, and I always hated that. I wanted to celebrate Mother’s Day with her, Father’s Day with him, birthdays with both. But the jacked-up memories had me trapped. Hey, they happened, right? Reality’s a mutha, for ya.

  “Daphane, hand me the green folder on Harlem’s parents.”

  “Yes, Doctor Brewster.”

  “You want to talk some more about your mother, Harlem?”

  “My mother? Let’s see, where should I start? Alcoholic. Liar. Alcoholic. Child abuser. Alcoholic. Selfish. Alcoholic. User. Alcoholic. Chain smoker. Did I mention alcoholic?”

  Daphane rubbed her neck, then sighed. “Yes, you did.”

  I heard Brewster’s frustrated breathing. I started to nod off.

  “Harlem, can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, Doc. Unfortunately, I’m still with you.”

  “I’m going to take you back.”

  “Been there, done that. But go right ahead. I’m ready for another depressing déjà jacked-up vu. My day was going too good anyway. And we can’t have that, can we?”

  “Start counting backwards . . .”

  “From a hundred. Why can’t I count up to a hundred?”

  “If you wish you—”

  “It was a joke, Doc. Yeah, yeah. Don’t matter. I know the routine,” I said. “Daphane?”

  “I’m right here,” Daphane said. I loved her smiling voice.

  “Thanks, Daph. One hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight.”

  I drifted to another horizon, went to a place where I was asleep and awake at the same time. I was here and there.

  “What do you see?” Daphane asked. “Look around.”

  “Lots of trees. Daffodils, and bumblebees looking for food. Close-cut grass. Sunshine. Lots of nice sunshine. Warm. It’s . . . damn . . . it’s beautiful.”

  “Anybody there?”

  “Me.”

  “How old?”

  “Maybe five. I believe about five, because I don’t have a memory of school. I’m in South Memphis. Ain’t it funny how black people always live in south something or on the south side? You want to find the ghetto, go south, young man!”

  “Tell me everything,” Doctor Brewster interjected.

 
“Clock-watching MF. Brewster, you a punk.”

  “Harlem,” Daphane said, her voice having that nice smile. “Pretty please?”

  “Sorry, Daphane.”

  “Tell Doctor Brewster what happened.”

  I exhaled. “Okay. Anyway. I’m five. My mother. We never bonded. When I was fresh out the vagina, she dropped me off with some old Mississippi folks who lived down the street, and didn’t make it back until I was six years and some change. I guess she forgot, or maybe something more important came up at the racetrack. Maybe she just couldn’t hang. I wasn’t a terribly atrocious child, so I know it wasn’t because of my looks. I wasn’t too dark, which was fashionably incorrect according to some stupid black folks back then. Nobody wanted a black-ass baby that looked like it came from deep, deeeep, deeeeeep ju-ju country in Africa.

  “Anyway, I’m mind-rambling again.”

  “That’s okay,” Brewster said. “Let your thoughts flow.”

  “Sorry. I’ll try to stay focused.”

  “Try not to get upset, okay?” Daphane said.

  “Okay, Daphane.”

  SEVEN

  DOC BREWSTER WAS trying this hypno bullshit on me. I was supposed to regress, go way back into my past, and see what else has me so jacked up that I behaved the way I did now. He kept calling me Ronnie, and they knew how I felt about that name. If I didn’t have these thick leather straps on my arms, I’d choke the life out of him. But I couldn’t, because whatever shot they just gave me left me too weak. I was fading.

  “Ronnie?”

  “My name is Harlem. Can’t you rememeber? Harlem. H-A-R-L-E-M. Harlem.”

  “Right, right. I apologize, Harlem. I’m sorry; I was reading off your charts.”

  “That’s all right. I’m sorry for going off in front of you, Daphane.”

  Daphane smiled. “That’s okay, Harlem. Don’t be too mean today, okay? I had a rough night last night. Just do what Doctor Brewster asks, and I’ll sit down with you and we’ll look at yesterday’s newspaper.”