Where should the story start?
A story about snapping turtles, children, bikes, jail, and Eminem.
A few years back, I was walking across my old neighborhood from one house to another visiting friends. I hadn’t been back here in a while, but not much had changed: Cracked sidewalks, barking dogs dragging heavy chains through the grass creating dusty half-moons around their tethers.
As I walked up State Street, I heard Eminem playing from a cell phone:
“I’m gone, I’m gone/It hurts but I never show this pain you’ll never know/If only you could just see how lonely and how cold/And frostbit I’ve become, my back’s against the wall/When push comes to shove, I just stand up and scream “fuck ’em all!”
On the last line, a group of teenage boys standing around the phone, chime in. Fuck ’em all.
Eminem is a demi-god here as if he were half the offspring of his very human mother and half risen out of the rubble of the Rustbelt itself. The older generation that helped pack up the jobs and ship them overseas is marked by sadness and resignation, they drink too much too long into the night. But the younger generation of this neighborhood was born to the boarded-up factories; they barely remember their dads or uncles working. They are rough, raw, torpidly furious. Slim Shady.
As I pass the boys, I pick up my pace. I don’t cross the road — that would show weakness — but I move quickly. I walk through the musty fog of their blunt. One of the teens has his shirt pulled up over his shoulders, showing off his red and swollen newly tattooed chest — a big Celtic cross.
I’m about to round the corner when one of the boys calls out after me. “Hey, hey, wait. Come over here.” I walk, pretending not to hear. I sense him starting to move up the street after me.
Mac is picking gravel out of his knee. His legs are a summertime assortment of bruises and cuts. He watches Blaine carefully even as tends to his own wounds.
Blaine is across the yard, dangling his little body on the fence with his bare feet sticking through the chainlink diamonds. He’s trying to watch the men in the garage next door playing darts and drinking tall boys.
Mac limps over next to Blaine, sits on a milk crate, and resumes his picking. His wrecked bike is still in the alley.
It is as if Mac were Blaine’s shadow, though he’s older and bigger. He’s always hovering close to him, at the ready. Blaine is six but can barely speak, his words are thick and sloppy as if they were being stirred with a big wooden spoon as they come out of his mouth. I hopscotch through his sentences hoping to understand him, only landing on every third or fourth word.
Mac understands all of it, however, and acts as his brother’s translator. “He said he would like the purple flavor. Grape,” he’ll say when I’m giving them freezer pops. But Mac also often steps back, letting Blaine practice having conversations with my roommates on the porch in the evenings, only jumping in if someone says “Huh?” too many times. He senses where Blaine is safe and where he needs his big brother’s defense.
One afternoon, the boys found a turtle. I can’t imagine where — the stream that runs through the neighborhood is filled with shopping carts and garbage and couldn’t possibly sustain life. But the turtle is big news, and Mac and Blaine spend the whole afternoon building it a cardboard mansion out of pilfered Frito Lay boxes they gathered behind the Village Pantry.
The next day, Blaine comes over with a bloody welt on the tip of his nose. I ask him about the turtle and he says something garbled that I can’t make out. I ask him to repeat himself twice, but I still can’t understand.
“He said he identified it as a snapping turtle and we no longer need your book,” Mac says, exasperated with me and pushing the Encyclopedia of Wildlife I loaned them back into my hands.
Summertime is hot in the neighborhood: City hot, which is different than country hot. It’s less a temperature than a smell. Car exhaust and baked concrete. The heat is also a sound. Ancient window units on their last freon and arguments that spill out of house interiors into the outdoors.
It’s the yelling that wakes me up night after night during the summer of 2006. I stand at my bedroom window overlooking the street with my phone in my hand, wondering which scream or crash is the one that will make me call 911.
One night as I stand in my window, I see Mac’s pale freckled legs sprinting down the sparkling broken glass sidewalk to the pay phone. Minutes later, that familiar blue pulsating light is strobing the block. Mac has called the police. This is something only snitches do; it doesn’t matter how old you are. You’re a snitch.
I sit with Mac on my front steps in the flashing blue vibration. We sit in defiance of the block norm — everyone else peeks from behind their curtains but will pretend later not to have seen. I’m ashamed of myself because it was my inaction that forced him take action.
Although it is still hot even in the dark, he has folded his arms and legs up inside his oversized George Straight tee as if he were cold.
The police tell the adults to stop “squabbling” and tell everyone to go to bed. They never ask Mac about what he saw or why he called 911. Neither did I.
After the police leave, it is just me and Mac out on the block. I notice, perhaps for the first time, that there are no fireflies here. I ask Mac if he has ever caught fireflies. He tells me he did once, but he let them go.
“It’s mean to put them in a jar,” he says “They want to fly, you know. That’s why someone gave them wings to begin with.”
Someone.
“I’ve seen nights full of pain, days are the same/You keep the sunshine, save me the rain.”
The young man is now running up the sidewalk behind me; I can hear the song playing from the cell phone getting closer.
“Gwen, Gwen!” he calls out.
Mac is holding up his pants in one hand, carrying a 20-ounce Red Bull in the other. He has a cigarette behind his ear and he’s grinning wildly.
“Holy shit!” I exclaim and immediately dive in for a hug.
I ask him about his family and get a vague reply. I ask him about school, about where he’s staying — all vague.
He asks me why I moved away. “Family” I explain, which is true but what I mean is that I couldn’t raise my son here, I was afraid he’d be trapped here if we stayed. I’ve seen what this place does to young men. But I can’t tell Mac that, I don’t need to remind him he’s all on his own; he already knows.
I ask about Blaine. He’s in juvy — something about fighting. I see that Mac’s eye has a faint week-old bruise around it, indicating that he too has been initiated into the neighborhood pastime of brawling. Then I notice his ankle bracelet. When he sees me notice it, he tells me the judge cut him some slack and didn’t give him home detention but just set up the monitoring so that he has to stay in the neighborhood. “I can’t go beyond the Dairy Queen or the creek or it beeps,” he explains.“But I can go all up and down State Street.”
I think about fireflies in a jar, lid on tight. Fuck ’em all.
There’s a reason someone gave them wings. That’s what I think about when I’m driving home to North Carolina the next day. I could tell you a thousand stories about Mac, some that would make you laugh, some that would make you cry, many that have no good finish line and many that seem like they’ll never end.
But when does Mac get to tell his story? Where can he tell it? Who is even asking? I remember how the police never asked him why he called them. Now, I imagine him in front of a judge trying to explain himself for whatever it is he has done that resulted in the ankle bracelet. How many minutes will they give him to explain? Can he tell them about Blaine? About the snapping turtle? He’s young, but already it’s a long story. Will anyone give him the time?
Humans think in stories. We make sense of ourselves and each other through stories. We teach and learn in stories. We go to sleep by stories and dream in stories. Stories make up our world.
Mac’s story might be about Blaine and turtles. It might be about trying to get help in the middle of the night. It might be about fights or jail. Where we start the telling of Mac’s story seems to determine its outcome; I wonder where would Mac want us to start?
I used to read the paper to keep up on the news from my old neighborhood but I stopped long ago. Things got busy, my own son growing into a young man. But I also stopped because I didn’t want to read these stories anymore: Stories about crime, addiction, and arrests. Sometimes I found myself worried I’d recognize the names — the defendants — of the kids I used to know. “How lonely, how cold/How frostbit I’ve become.”
Those stories always felt inadequate; they always had the wrong narrator. They felt like a betrayal; like a too-small jar trying to capture full and round lives; fuck ’em all; someone gave them wings.
