Room 18 Issue 1 (Online)
Content
LETTERS + STROKES
LETTERS + STROKES
ROOM EIGHTEEN
MARCUS BROWN - BRIDGET DEASE - MAX FRESHOUR LAURA FUNDERBURK - KRISTOPHER HALL - SIENNA LASTER \] CARA RACIN - SIERRA REAUX-MCNEIL - SARAI REED LAYLA SHARAF - HELEN STEINECKE - MALIA WILLIAMS-HAYNES
LAURA FUNDERBURK
DEATH IS SLEEPING
2
ROOM EIGHTEEN - ISSUE I
CONTENTS
LAURA FUNDERBURK -2 KRISTOPHER HALL - 4 SIERRA REAUX-MCNEIL -8 BRIDGET DEASE -10 HELEN STEINECKE - 13 CARA RACIN -17 MARCUS BROWN - 18 CARA RACIN - 21 SARAI REED - 22 MAX FRESHOUR - 23 SIENNA LASTER / MALIA WILLIAMS-HAYNES - 24 LAYLA SHARAF - 26
“Jimmy wants ribs. Jimmy wants steak. Jimmy want a piece of your chocolate cake.”
-EDDIE MURPHY AS JAMES THUNDER EARLY, IN DREAMGIRLS (MOTION PICTURE)
3
KRISTOPHER HALL
YOU CAN’T WIN FOR LOSING
The streets were as narrow as the minds that walked them, from the dealers to the fiends, the corner jockeys and the squealers. Shit, who didn’t know that money was what drove the market? But to be fair each niche didn’t share the same motives. The fiends ranged from crack heads to dopers, and everything in between. Some dealers dealt to pay the bills, to feed their kids, while others just wanted the customized rims and more shoes than anyone would need. It was a God awful place, a neighborhood with no sense of community, just a gathering of vices and trash, men bent on destroying one another. Yet at the same time you would be hard pressed to find a closer knit collection of illicit peoples. Everyone knew each other, and if someone didn’t know you, it meant you didn’t exist. You could stop a body on the street, point to any cat, and rarely were they incapable of telling you who that person was and the hustle they dealt. Someone from 34th could walk down 35th Street and make it to the end of the block. The gangs over here didn’t divide themselves by street or block, that’s what made this community different. Between Granger Street and Harper Street, we went without the drive-bys and all that other nonsense. The entire neighborhood was one. One unit, one gang, one community. Everyone looked out for one another, even the snitches. In fact it was the open mouthes that kept the balance. The snitches were like our peacekeepers, and if anything went awry it was them that blew the whistle. It was a system, and as with every system there were flaws, but it was our system and for the most part the community worked. The fact that everyone knew everyone was what kept people in line. We had ourselves a “Community Code”, something that resembled the most basic codes of the street: don’t sell to elementary school kids, don’t communicate with the cops, and so on. When this code was violated, the community acted as a whole to resolve it. *** Game’s real name was Maurice, but because he refused to roll up his weed in anything but Game blunts only his mother, lawyers, and judges called him that. Before Game he was called Morrie, like the gangster in the movie Goodfellas. In his seventeen years Game had felt as if the entire world was against him. That is, the entire world outside of the community, including God; especially God. Every year it was something new; every time he started to get back on top, God reached down and knocked him back on his ass. 4
5
He lived with his mother in a single room apartment that she had rented out when his father left, and that he now paid for. No, Game’s father hadn’t bailed on his mother. Most fathers in the community remained put, albeit often only until their kids were old enough to care for themselves. But Game’s father had died. Shot by a cop when he was reaching in his pocket for a lighter, shot in the fucking back. The officer was suspended for two weeks with pay. Since then his mother had raised him, until she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and had to quit her job and go on welfare. He was ten when that bad luck story went down and so he started fending for himself, started hustling candy to the kids at school. Less than a year later he graduated to selling weed. Before his twelfth birthday he had dropped out and now sold everything from weed to pills to crack. With the help of the community, hustling, and other illegalities, he managed to pay the rent. Then as soon as he turned thirteen, it seemed as though everything started going wrong. Whenever he was about to make something for himself, something always fucked it up. That something was usually the cops. By the time he was sixteen, he had been arrested over fifteen times before he lost count. Somehow he managed to never be in jail longer than a few weeks, and people would joke about how someday his luck with the law would run out. At the moment Game’s luck with the law didn’t seem to be running out any time soon. Roughly a month ago a white man, an outsider, was hit by a car and killed on the corner of 33rd and Tines. An hour later, the block looked like an overcrowded pig pen. There were a dozen cop crammed into the intersection with two dozen occupants clamoring around on the corner trying to make themselves look busy. It was a show of bullshit. That man wasn’t the only person who had been killed that night. Not even a mile away a twelve-year-old boy, Micheal Thomas, lay dead in an alley with his heart blown out by a twenty-two. One squad car had been dispatched, no leads. Yeah, there was never no fucking leads. It had taken the police less than thirty minutes after arriving on the scene to find the car that had hit the man, abandoned in an empty lot a few miles away. The car had been reported stolen earlier that evening; a witness claimed to have seen two young black men forcing the door.
Game was one of those men, his friend Jay was the other. They had been drinking since five, and by the time Game suggested going for a joy ride there was enough Grey Goose in both of them to go after the Batmobile. At fifty miles an hour, Game never even saw the white man as he sped around the corner on his bike. Boy, he didn’t stop to see if he knew him either. The consequences were sobering. Both he and Jay were on their last strike, hitting someone in a stolen car was a one way ticket to a life sentence inside. At first it seemed that they had made their clean get away. Cops put out a dummy statement, some shit that suggested that beyond the stolen car, they had no leads. They appealed to the public to come forward with any information they might have, offering a bullshit five-thousand dollar reward to any information leading to an arrest. The reward for Micheal Thomas’ murderer was five hundred dollars, a collection took up by the community. I put in my twenty bucks. Anyway, so you got the owner of a gas station on 40th, I mean that even in the community, he weren’t one of us; the motherfucker called the police hot line, spitting lyrics that two black men had filled up a car on the same night of the hit and run, and that they fitted the description. Who didn’t fit the description around here? Shit, even Mr Winston fitted the description, and he was pushing eighty-five with arthritis. Well the profiling didn’t matter, Game and Jay showed off some rookie moves by using a debit card to pay for the gas. Jay woke up shortly after one a.m. to find a shotgun and a warrant being shoved in his face. The police had suspected Game as Jay’s accomplice, yet they had nothing on him and Jay wasn’t about to talk. Case closed. Jay would get life and Game would dodge the bullet yet again. In the community, things were not so simple. They had a code to follow, and for the first time in his life Game found himself on the wrong side of it. It went without saying that you don’t snitch on your friends, and Jay had followed the code through it all. But there’s another bit to this part of the code, never forfeit your friends life for your own. Game had broken the code but the way he saw it there was nothing he could do. Shit happened, and if he turned himself in he and Jay would just both be fucked. Whether Jay was driving or not they wouldn’t let him go, they would slap him with some account of manslaughter like they tried to do with Game. When you kill a white man, everyone involved got fucked. That’s what let Game sleep at night. The community didn’t see it the same way. We got principles that put chivalry to shame. Whether or not it got Jay off the hook, the community wanted Game to own up. It had nothing to do with whether or not both of them would be fucked. For the community it was as simple as right and wrong. The code was not to be broken. As the day of Jay’s conviction loomed, the community started to talk to Game like only it knew how. When he went to the store, he was either refused service or the prices doubled, even his lotto numbers were screwed up. Every liquor store started carding him. Every club bouncer turned him away. By far the worst of it was the silence. To be shunned was to be exiled from the community. You can still
live in the community, but it wasn’t your community anymore. This was Game’s penance. He would walk down the street and past life long friends, men who had helped raised him, who now only stared at Game with an unforgiving coldness. Jay’s conviction came and went, without a confession from Game. He hoped that with time the community would forgive him, that the silence would give way to a calm acceptance; and then later noise, a greeting, maybe even a conversation. He knew this was unlikely, a leper would get more love. Except this wasn’t about love. There were plenty of people who loved Game, but there was a code to follow. It was never anything personal. And so for nearly three years the silence continued. Didn’t know why dude didn’t move the hell out the neighborhood. Instead he was holed up in his apartment, didn’t leave much, there wasn’t much reason to. He spent his time cradling a bottle of some sort, which he traveled forty-five minutes round trip on the bus to get. Tell a lie, I do know why he stayed. Getting away from it all was never that simple for him. For one he didn’t have the money to move anywhere, he hardly had enough to stay where he was. He was fired from the corner store about the time the community started talking, and no one would hire him since. He was frozen out the drugs market, no one would give him any stuff and even the fiends felt they ought to go elsewhere. So he had been living off welfare and odd jobs since Jay went in, and he was running out of money. Even if Game could move, he wouldn’t. The community was who he was. This was his home, where he always felt he fitted in. Now that he didn’t belong, he had nothing. Its been three years since Jay went in, and the silence has broken Game. His mother eventually died, and after that he gave up trying to make rent. You’d be able to catch him circling the neighbourhood in the summer, pushing a grocery trolley full of his belongings. I’d try and stop and talk whenever I could stomach it but the dude reeked of piss and God knows whatever else. ‘I did it, I did it,’ is all he’d ever say and I’d say yeah Morrie, we know. We went back to calling him Morrie those days, couldn’t call him Game if he had no Game. ‘I did it, I did it,’ he’d carry on, he damn well lost his mind. I’d look away whenever I replied. I couldn’t stand to see the sight of his nails. Game got caught by the blizzard the following winter, hypothermia while sat in his mother’s rocking chair in his usual spot, an alleyway on 35th. Sure there were enough group homes and soup kitchens that the cat could’ve frequented but these all stretched beyond the neighborhood. There was something both foolish but admirable about the way Game himself stuck by the code until his very last breath. It was like he knew he had a penance to pay for, just like the kid with the dummy hat that doesn’t move from the corner. Game weren’t going no where until the community said he could. I guess he never thought the day would come where he would suffer a fate worst than infamy. Yeah he was the kid with the dummy hat alright, the boy in the corner that never turned around to see that the teacher and his classmates had long since left the building and forgot he was even there.
SIERRA REAUX-MCNEIL
A SHADE OF GRAY
(LETTER TO ME) Dear Me Sahn, what the fuck is going on? Its funny how we forget all the things we are fucking up in, the day after we fuck up. Self-deprecation is always something we have been good at; we both know it’s not an attractive quality. Our inability to sustain a successful relationship is a mystery. As a result we enter into multiple meaningless relationships as backup plans. This results in a multitude of emotional outbursts that make us seem unstable if not slightly crazy. Nonetheless, we seem to attract the strangest of guys. Our love life serves as a mere distraction for the tasks at hand. School, oh lets talk about school. School has never been our thing let’s face it. We can’t force ourselves to do something we think is meaningless, I mean what is an “A” really? When am I ever gonna use Algebra 2 or Geometry? Those lengthy English papers, we both know we are capable of completing them, but what is the use? Why do we care about that shit? Newsflash. We don’t. Mother, oh yes, we love her dearly but she is enabling our ability to roam free through life. I think the small arguments with her will pass once I’m done with this whole teenage thing. Mom always supports us, which at the end of the day is pretty cool. In fact Michelle isn’t half bad; as far as moms go she is a pretty good one. I’ll admit we are not a piece of cake to deal with; sometimes we can be, dare I say, unreasonable (of course we will never admit this). I think we will skip over Mom’s boyfriend in this letter because we both know how we feel about that subject. We could go on for days. Father...Dad...What ever we are going to call him. He’s an Ass and most days an unreasonable self-centered pompous jerk. 8
Resentment is something we do well. I think we have come to a place where we begin to understand some of the choices he has made. We even, dare I say it, have begun to see him as an actual person instead of some type of soap opera villain. Speaking of soap operas (sorry another tangent): why are we always wishing our life were more dramatic? Some days we lay in bed thinking up exciting things to happen in our life. Sometimes the process is so vivid it feels as if it has actually happened. This is also another reason for our lack of homework. We sit down and think about something so much and so thoroughly, that we exhaust ourselves. But back to dear old dad... he’s not so bad. We should probably cut him some slack in the future. The future aaah yes...What are we going to do with it? Filmmaker, screenwriter, public relations, schoolteacher, housewife? Do we have to make a choice? One of our biggest issues is that we are always operating in the gray area. I can’t quite explain why we feel we must remain neutral on a lot of issues. We don’t speak up and we don’t choose sides. In reality we have strong opinions about most things that enter into our thought process, because - lets be real - we over analyze EVERYTHING. This is going to be a hard habit to break. We think that appearing to be a shade of gray makes us approachable and easily accessible to a wide variety of people. We both know I could ramble on and on about all the details of our life but let me leave it at this. Take one thing at a time (because you know how we get overwhelmed) and just graduate high school first. Fondly, Yourself (don’t know why I said fondly, we are always trying to be different - who are we kidding? Sincerely would have been just fine)
9
BRIDGET DEASE
SUBTLE HOPE
My brother complained about the move from the suburbs to the ratinfested streets of Lulleyville, Minnesota. He sounded as if there was nothing left for us. I couldn’t have compared his complaints to our mother’s abandonment. I still have a hard time figuring out whether or not she left because we were burdens or if she had problems to work out on her own. Distinguishing between the two was at times unbearable. A kid in my remedial English class once made a remark about me. “It’s funny how we poor kids perform poorly in school; it’s not like we have anything else to live for,” he’d said. I’d laugh along with him, but something about it stung. Word traveled quickly at Careplain high, and I feared it would be a matter of time before every student knew about my current predicament. Eventually, it came out why I, Elise Tamara Lane, went from preppy to diva in rags. You see, my father has and always will be a greedy man. He’d cheat his brother, his wives, and his employees out of a lot of money. When my brother and I were younger, we’d spend days trying to dislodge that one tooth that just wouldn’t come out, hoping that the “tooth fairy” would give us the shiny quarters we thought we deserved. But that coin was never given to us. A couple of months after my tenth birthday, my father stole from one of his employee’s bank account. Instead of spending his own money on my big day, he had decided it would be better to spend someone else's. There is no better temptation than success and so after the first theft, he decided to do it again. Only this time his luck ran thin. A former employee whom he’d fired a week before came to pick up her last paycheck and had stumbled upon printouts of the illicit bank transfer. A lawsuit was filed against him and his accounts were frozen. Matthew Michael Lane served time in prison for five years. In the meantime, without a nanny, cook and cleaner, motherhood reeled its ugly head and Merrilyn Beauregard did not like what she saw. Somewhere along this course, she looked into the abyss and decided that she’d had enough of my brother and me. A note was left on the kitchen table. My brother stumbled upon it the morning after she left. “I’m sorry,” it read. My brother’s eyes were like mini faucets. Faucets that were still running long after our mother had left. He was only twelve, and like many twelve-year-olds he wanted to have a normal family. I, being fifteen, assured him that there was certainly no such thing as a “normal” family. That almost all families in a sense were “abnormal”. Despite my father’s reluctance, we stayed with our Aunt Susan in Minnesota and when our father got out of prison he joined us there. She was wealthy enough to keep us on our feet, but she had children of her own and other responsibilities that were beyond us. We dreaded the days we spent with our father and the hours almost always dragged in his presence. It was as though a stranger had infiltrated our family. 10
In the mornings, I’d go to school; it was the lesser of two evils but an evil nonetheless. I’d walk through the narrow halls and pray that I was in remedial English, my last class of the day. When that class came and ended, I’d go pick up my brother from Careplain Middle School. He was just as happy to leave as I was, but also just as nervous to go home. To distract ourselves, we would make fun of something. We’d often say that Lulleyville was so stupid for labeling its high schools, middle schools and elementary schools all with the same name. It was pitiful, but so were we. Our jokes would not delay the journey home. My brother and I would eventually have to accept our new life, one without the glamour and being waited on for our every need. Although we were together, we were two individuals that each had to carry our own separate weights. Upon getting out of prison, my father found a liking to alcohol and yelling very loudly. He would blame it all on our Aunt Susan, and at first I couldn’t understand why; but then I thought that as she was our mother’s sister, her presence was a constant reminder of what he’d lost. He would drink a bottle of Jack Daniels every night and then yell my brother to sleep. It only made it worst when I confronted him. I would have wished that Aunt Susan would’ve let us remain with her and told him as much. I knew our father wouldn’t have considered yelling with other people living in the house. But she got us a small apartment for three about eight blocks from her house in Lulleyville, and we were expected to deal with him. But I couldn’t deal with him and I doubt my brother could either. One night, in his anger, my father yelled that whether we liked it or not we were stuck with him. It was directed at my brother and I could hear him crying in terror. I couldn’t blame him. Robert never found a way to deal with the horror. A few weeks later, my father broke the terms of his parole. He went on one of his early morning rants and near scared a woman to death. I don’t think he planned to hurt her, but the yelling, the alcohol and the bruise count on my brother’s back proved to be enough for the police to take him in. This time he was sentenced to ten years in prison without the possibility of early release. Robert and I were returned to our aunt for a while. She already had five children and two more would’ve been a struggle even for a wealthy single mother. Foster care seemed to be the only option for us. While in the care of adults that we hadn’t known for more than a couple of days, I began to think of my mother and where she might have gone. There weren’t many places for her to go. The only family she had was Aunt Susan, Robert, and I. 11
12 On the fifth night of our stay in the group home, Aunt Susan came to visit us. It was after five o’clock and visiting hours were over. As she left, she stopped and held a long conversation with Ms. Marie, the illtempered care worker. Robert and I tried to listen in on the conversation, but parts of it was vague. I heard words like “hurt” and “never” and “affair” but I hadn’t been able to make out much else. Aunt Susan began to cry. She held her face down and began to walk slowly toward us. She opened her mouth to say something but stopped and shook her head, Ms. Marie turned to her and said “It’s not fair to them or you.” I was afraid of what she would say. I guess I’d really hoped that whatever it was, it would not hurt my brother. I couldn’t see him hurt again. Moments later the words started spilling out of Aunt Susan’s mouth. “I’m your mother,” she said. Although muffled, we understood every word; it left us speechless. She’d kept staring at the ground even after those words had been revealed to us. Robert and I were in utter shock for most of the night but that didn’t stop the sun from rising the next morning. Over time, Merrilyn’s whereabouts and our father’s imprisonment began to matter little to my brother and I. We were taken out of the group home and spent time with Susan and the five cousins that were now suddenly half-brothers and sisters. Now, all of the unanswered questions were answered. Merrilyn and Matthew had raised us as their own for most of our lives, but I longed to know the answer to one other question. Why had we been the last to know?
HELEN STEINECKE
OVER THE RIVER
18
CARA RACIN
DREAMLINES
17
MARCUS BROWN
SUCIDE BOMB
18
19
Suicide Bomb is an experimentation with the use of monologue. What the author attempts to do is to combine a narrative with a visual aesthetic. The words in Suicide Bomb are not mere signifiers in the conventional sense. Instead size is taken into account as a measure of the weight that words can carry for an individual at any given moment. The author is well aware that as readers we will differ in opinion on the measure of each word, which in this piece is indicated by size, the larger the word the more weight carried. The author is interested in a dialogue with words, and how the configuration of each word would differ with not just context but also the readers constant flux.
CARA RACIN
ART & BEAUTY
21
SARAI REED
NINETY FIVE DEGREES OF SEPARATION
I lay my palm flat on the dash and leave it there until it begins to burn. I press my forehead to the window, looking for some relief there but even the glass is warm to the touch. Reclining my seat, I weigh my options. I can’t roll down the windows with the car off and I don’t want to get out. The asphalt looks molten. It’s always puzzled me how crime rates rise with the heat index. I can’t even muster the strength to unfasten my seat belt. How could I commit a felony? The seat belt is making me sweat. I can’t breathe. The glare of the Mercedes logo on the steering wheel threatens to burn my retinas. Outside my window, men and women are sitting on porches sweating. Even the children looked sapped of their energy, sitting on steps and curbs, fanning themselves with their small ineffective hands. I insisted on waiting in the car despite my mother telling me she’d be a while. She refused to leave the windows down “in a neighborhood like this.” I was sure that leaving me to stew here for a while was her intention, that she was taking her good time in order to teach me a lesson for defying her. I straighten up in my seat again. Through my window I see a man washing his car in an alley. I’m sure he’s the only person moving for blocks. He scrubs, soaps and rinses meticulously until a short round woman walks past, apparently catching his eye. He takes up the hose and applies pressure with his thumb to make it spray with greater force. Aiming with one eye open, he points the hose right at her and wets the seat of her pants. She turns around embarrassed. The hose is still trained on her lower half. The woman’s face breaks into a smile. Running and ducking behind the car, she grabs the wet soapy sponge from the bucket and hurls it at him. It leaves a big wet rectangle in the middle of his chest. A minute later, the scene has unfolded into an all out water fight. A minute after that, the two sit on the curb drenched and laughing. I get out of the car.
MAX FRESHOUR
SODIUM CONTENT
23
SIENNA LASTER - MALIA WILLIAMS-HAYNES
NEW TABLETS
From: [email protected] To: [email protected] RE: 6 & 10 her 6. I wrapped my sweaty palms around her neck, pulling my foggy close till we were face to face. I looked over glasses to look into the eyes of a dying lamb. A horrid screeching noise came out from between her lips, “Don’t kill me, I have a family,” she pleaded, but that wasn’t going to save her, who didn’t have a family? I yelled in her face, ed careless specks of spit escaped from my mouth. I watch from the corner of her choke and gasp for air, blood spilled her lips. 10. Everyday, I peek through my window in my room to to watch my neighbor. I envy how his life is being handed I him, while mine is being thrown in my face. If I’m lucky, catch a glimpse of his wife changing into her jogging clothes through the window in my bathroom, he doesn’t new deserve to be loved by his wife.He doesn’t deserve the washed house, but I’d car. He doesn’t deserve the white say he deserves those spoiled kids.
25
From: [email protected] To: [email protected] RE: 3
3. She thinks church is boring. That all you ever do is sit there and listen to someone preach to you all day. She told her mother how she feels yet she is dragged there each Sunday. She usually doesn’t listen to what’s been said. She’ll draw or write stories and poems. On this day she listened in to a bit of the sermon. Pastor was saying something about not saying the Lord’s name in vain. It didn’t interest me so I continued drawing. Church was almost over, thank God, she thought. She couldn’t wait to get home, take off her church clothes and relax. Maybe even play some video games. The sermon finally ended, hallelujah she thought, and as the congregation rose in anticipation of the final verse and the Lord’s Prayer, in spite of her mother’s glare, she decides not to stand.
25
LAYLA SHARAF
HOLIDAY
Beach trip. Alone. It begins with long lines, weird smells, shitty food, and constant pushing. Forever in the way. Lost a hair band and a lens cap. The FujiFilm is now going unprotected; she’s archaic and has a low megapixel count. She creates grainy, low-resolution images. She takes photographs that are similar to pointillism paintings; composed solely of little, colored specs. Forever stretching for a keen sense of perfection. There are over a million fragments composing one image, imagine that, interacting with one another in very specific ways, lovely. The lack of a lens cap has led to a thumb sized smudge on every picture she takes, throwing off a harmony that was once fundamental. Before, there was no doubt of what you would come across when scanning over a photograph. Looking through her pictures now gives her a tingling urge to wipe off the errors with the tips of saliva-covered fingers. But she can’t.
26
Vacation to the mountains, they are such photogenic masses of land. A series of day to night photos would serve well. If only the FujiFilm was in better condition. The Polaroid is manageable. However, she would need the Nikon to capture the wilderness, to have mother nature pose for her like she often does for those whose work fills the pages of National Geographic. The bitter air which was once refreshing, is now a frostbiting cold. The weather makes the fingerless gloves useful. She increases the shutter speed and lowers the ISO and the results are plentiful but not perfect. Besides the tenderness of her exposed fingers, a charley horse in her left leg strikes her and then leaves, only to return again with an increasing amount of discomfort. A resort with excursions into the New Zealand interior. The intruders host the indigenous in the former colonized towns; the indigenous still rule the grass here. With little observation the need to exploit the high megapixel count, zoom, and close ups is obvious. Dirt-stained faces, permanent smiles lines, and pain stricken eyes against the prim, the orderly, the unconcerned, and the frivolous create enough irony without an overpowering meaning. Beach trip. Vacation to the mountains. Trip to New Zealand. I’ve been off on a holiday. 2,740 pictures: 2,210 of which are in the trash bin, 28 saved in a folder within a folder within another five folders, 502 left for others to view, to critique, to destroy, to analyze, to lose all previous meaning that is true to the FujiFilm and to me. There are now 502 photographs pumped with testosterone, crushed Oxycontin sprinkled all over them, and flowers shoved down their gun barrels.
ROOM 18 - ISSUE #1- FEB 2011
PRODUCED BY THE LITERARY MEDIA & COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT
LETTERS + STROKES
ROOM EIGHTEEN
MARCUS BROWN - BRIDGET DEASE - MAX FRESHOUR LAURA FUNDERBURK - KRISTOPHER HALL - SIENNA LASTER \] CARA RACIN - SIERRA REAUX-MCNEIL - SARAI REED LAYLA SHARAF - HELEN STEINECKE - MALIA WILLIAMS-HAYNES
LAURA FUNDERBURK
DEATH IS SLEEPING
2
ROOM EIGHTEEN - ISSUE I
CONTENTS
LAURA FUNDERBURK -2 KRISTOPHER HALL - 4 SIERRA REAUX-MCNEIL -8 BRIDGET DEASE -10 HELEN STEINECKE - 13 CARA RACIN -17 MARCUS BROWN - 18 CARA RACIN - 21 SARAI REED - 22 MAX FRESHOUR - 23 SIENNA LASTER / MALIA WILLIAMS-HAYNES - 24 LAYLA SHARAF - 26
“Jimmy wants ribs. Jimmy wants steak. Jimmy want a piece of your chocolate cake.”
-EDDIE MURPHY AS JAMES THUNDER EARLY, IN DREAMGIRLS (MOTION PICTURE)
3
KRISTOPHER HALL
YOU CAN’T WIN FOR LOSING
The streets were as narrow as the minds that walked them, from the dealers to the fiends, the corner jockeys and the squealers. Shit, who didn’t know that money was what drove the market? But to be fair each niche didn’t share the same motives. The fiends ranged from crack heads to dopers, and everything in between. Some dealers dealt to pay the bills, to feed their kids, while others just wanted the customized rims and more shoes than anyone would need. It was a God awful place, a neighborhood with no sense of community, just a gathering of vices and trash, men bent on destroying one another. Yet at the same time you would be hard pressed to find a closer knit collection of illicit peoples. Everyone knew each other, and if someone didn’t know you, it meant you didn’t exist. You could stop a body on the street, point to any cat, and rarely were they incapable of telling you who that person was and the hustle they dealt. Someone from 34th could walk down 35th Street and make it to the end of the block. The gangs over here didn’t divide themselves by street or block, that’s what made this community different. Between Granger Street and Harper Street, we went without the drive-bys and all that other nonsense. The entire neighborhood was one. One unit, one gang, one community. Everyone looked out for one another, even the snitches. In fact it was the open mouthes that kept the balance. The snitches were like our peacekeepers, and if anything went awry it was them that blew the whistle. It was a system, and as with every system there were flaws, but it was our system and for the most part the community worked. The fact that everyone knew everyone was what kept people in line. We had ourselves a “Community Code”, something that resembled the most basic codes of the street: don’t sell to elementary school kids, don’t communicate with the cops, and so on. When this code was violated, the community acted as a whole to resolve it. *** Game’s real name was Maurice, but because he refused to roll up his weed in anything but Game blunts only his mother, lawyers, and judges called him that. Before Game he was called Morrie, like the gangster in the movie Goodfellas. In his seventeen years Game had felt as if the entire world was against him. That is, the entire world outside of the community, including God; especially God. Every year it was something new; every time he started to get back on top, God reached down and knocked him back on his ass. 4
5
He lived with his mother in a single room apartment that she had rented out when his father left, and that he now paid for. No, Game’s father hadn’t bailed on his mother. Most fathers in the community remained put, albeit often only until their kids were old enough to care for themselves. But Game’s father had died. Shot by a cop when he was reaching in his pocket for a lighter, shot in the fucking back. The officer was suspended for two weeks with pay. Since then his mother had raised him, until she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and had to quit her job and go on welfare. He was ten when that bad luck story went down and so he started fending for himself, started hustling candy to the kids at school. Less than a year later he graduated to selling weed. Before his twelfth birthday he had dropped out and now sold everything from weed to pills to crack. With the help of the community, hustling, and other illegalities, he managed to pay the rent. Then as soon as he turned thirteen, it seemed as though everything started going wrong. Whenever he was about to make something for himself, something always fucked it up. That something was usually the cops. By the time he was sixteen, he had been arrested over fifteen times before he lost count. Somehow he managed to never be in jail longer than a few weeks, and people would joke about how someday his luck with the law would run out. At the moment Game’s luck with the law didn’t seem to be running out any time soon. Roughly a month ago a white man, an outsider, was hit by a car and killed on the corner of 33rd and Tines. An hour later, the block looked like an overcrowded pig pen. There were a dozen cop crammed into the intersection with two dozen occupants clamoring around on the corner trying to make themselves look busy. It was a show of bullshit. That man wasn’t the only person who had been killed that night. Not even a mile away a twelve-year-old boy, Micheal Thomas, lay dead in an alley with his heart blown out by a twenty-two. One squad car had been dispatched, no leads. Yeah, there was never no fucking leads. It had taken the police less than thirty minutes after arriving on the scene to find the car that had hit the man, abandoned in an empty lot a few miles away. The car had been reported stolen earlier that evening; a witness claimed to have seen two young black men forcing the door.
Game was one of those men, his friend Jay was the other. They had been drinking since five, and by the time Game suggested going for a joy ride there was enough Grey Goose in both of them to go after the Batmobile. At fifty miles an hour, Game never even saw the white man as he sped around the corner on his bike. Boy, he didn’t stop to see if he knew him either. The consequences were sobering. Both he and Jay were on their last strike, hitting someone in a stolen car was a one way ticket to a life sentence inside. At first it seemed that they had made their clean get away. Cops put out a dummy statement, some shit that suggested that beyond the stolen car, they had no leads. They appealed to the public to come forward with any information they might have, offering a bullshit five-thousand dollar reward to any information leading to an arrest. The reward for Micheal Thomas’ murderer was five hundred dollars, a collection took up by the community. I put in my twenty bucks. Anyway, so you got the owner of a gas station on 40th, I mean that even in the community, he weren’t one of us; the motherfucker called the police hot line, spitting lyrics that two black men had filled up a car on the same night of the hit and run, and that they fitted the description. Who didn’t fit the description around here? Shit, even Mr Winston fitted the description, and he was pushing eighty-five with arthritis. Well the profiling didn’t matter, Game and Jay showed off some rookie moves by using a debit card to pay for the gas. Jay woke up shortly after one a.m. to find a shotgun and a warrant being shoved in his face. The police had suspected Game as Jay’s accomplice, yet they had nothing on him and Jay wasn’t about to talk. Case closed. Jay would get life and Game would dodge the bullet yet again. In the community, things were not so simple. They had a code to follow, and for the first time in his life Game found himself on the wrong side of it. It went without saying that you don’t snitch on your friends, and Jay had followed the code through it all. But there’s another bit to this part of the code, never forfeit your friends life for your own. Game had broken the code but the way he saw it there was nothing he could do. Shit happened, and if he turned himself in he and Jay would just both be fucked. Whether Jay was driving or not they wouldn’t let him go, they would slap him with some account of manslaughter like they tried to do with Game. When you kill a white man, everyone involved got fucked. That’s what let Game sleep at night. The community didn’t see it the same way. We got principles that put chivalry to shame. Whether or not it got Jay off the hook, the community wanted Game to own up. It had nothing to do with whether or not both of them would be fucked. For the community it was as simple as right and wrong. The code was not to be broken. As the day of Jay’s conviction loomed, the community started to talk to Game like only it knew how. When he went to the store, he was either refused service or the prices doubled, even his lotto numbers were screwed up. Every liquor store started carding him. Every club bouncer turned him away. By far the worst of it was the silence. To be shunned was to be exiled from the community. You can still
live in the community, but it wasn’t your community anymore. This was Game’s penance. He would walk down the street and past life long friends, men who had helped raised him, who now only stared at Game with an unforgiving coldness. Jay’s conviction came and went, without a confession from Game. He hoped that with time the community would forgive him, that the silence would give way to a calm acceptance; and then later noise, a greeting, maybe even a conversation. He knew this was unlikely, a leper would get more love. Except this wasn’t about love. There were plenty of people who loved Game, but there was a code to follow. It was never anything personal. And so for nearly three years the silence continued. Didn’t know why dude didn’t move the hell out the neighborhood. Instead he was holed up in his apartment, didn’t leave much, there wasn’t much reason to. He spent his time cradling a bottle of some sort, which he traveled forty-five minutes round trip on the bus to get. Tell a lie, I do know why he stayed. Getting away from it all was never that simple for him. For one he didn’t have the money to move anywhere, he hardly had enough to stay where he was. He was fired from the corner store about the time the community started talking, and no one would hire him since. He was frozen out the drugs market, no one would give him any stuff and even the fiends felt they ought to go elsewhere. So he had been living off welfare and odd jobs since Jay went in, and he was running out of money. Even if Game could move, he wouldn’t. The community was who he was. This was his home, where he always felt he fitted in. Now that he didn’t belong, he had nothing. Its been three years since Jay went in, and the silence has broken Game. His mother eventually died, and after that he gave up trying to make rent. You’d be able to catch him circling the neighbourhood in the summer, pushing a grocery trolley full of his belongings. I’d try and stop and talk whenever I could stomach it but the dude reeked of piss and God knows whatever else. ‘I did it, I did it,’ is all he’d ever say and I’d say yeah Morrie, we know. We went back to calling him Morrie those days, couldn’t call him Game if he had no Game. ‘I did it, I did it,’ he’d carry on, he damn well lost his mind. I’d look away whenever I replied. I couldn’t stand to see the sight of his nails. Game got caught by the blizzard the following winter, hypothermia while sat in his mother’s rocking chair in his usual spot, an alleyway on 35th. Sure there were enough group homes and soup kitchens that the cat could’ve frequented but these all stretched beyond the neighborhood. There was something both foolish but admirable about the way Game himself stuck by the code until his very last breath. It was like he knew he had a penance to pay for, just like the kid with the dummy hat that doesn’t move from the corner. Game weren’t going no where until the community said he could. I guess he never thought the day would come where he would suffer a fate worst than infamy. Yeah he was the kid with the dummy hat alright, the boy in the corner that never turned around to see that the teacher and his classmates had long since left the building and forgot he was even there.
SIERRA REAUX-MCNEIL
A SHADE OF GRAY
(LETTER TO ME) Dear Me Sahn, what the fuck is going on? Its funny how we forget all the things we are fucking up in, the day after we fuck up. Self-deprecation is always something we have been good at; we both know it’s not an attractive quality. Our inability to sustain a successful relationship is a mystery. As a result we enter into multiple meaningless relationships as backup plans. This results in a multitude of emotional outbursts that make us seem unstable if not slightly crazy. Nonetheless, we seem to attract the strangest of guys. Our love life serves as a mere distraction for the tasks at hand. School, oh lets talk about school. School has never been our thing let’s face it. We can’t force ourselves to do something we think is meaningless, I mean what is an “A” really? When am I ever gonna use Algebra 2 or Geometry? Those lengthy English papers, we both know we are capable of completing them, but what is the use? Why do we care about that shit? Newsflash. We don’t. Mother, oh yes, we love her dearly but she is enabling our ability to roam free through life. I think the small arguments with her will pass once I’m done with this whole teenage thing. Mom always supports us, which at the end of the day is pretty cool. In fact Michelle isn’t half bad; as far as moms go she is a pretty good one. I’ll admit we are not a piece of cake to deal with; sometimes we can be, dare I say, unreasonable (of course we will never admit this). I think we will skip over Mom’s boyfriend in this letter because we both know how we feel about that subject. We could go on for days. Father...Dad...What ever we are going to call him. He’s an Ass and most days an unreasonable self-centered pompous jerk. 8
Resentment is something we do well. I think we have come to a place where we begin to understand some of the choices he has made. We even, dare I say it, have begun to see him as an actual person instead of some type of soap opera villain. Speaking of soap operas (sorry another tangent): why are we always wishing our life were more dramatic? Some days we lay in bed thinking up exciting things to happen in our life. Sometimes the process is so vivid it feels as if it has actually happened. This is also another reason for our lack of homework. We sit down and think about something so much and so thoroughly, that we exhaust ourselves. But back to dear old dad... he’s not so bad. We should probably cut him some slack in the future. The future aaah yes...What are we going to do with it? Filmmaker, screenwriter, public relations, schoolteacher, housewife? Do we have to make a choice? One of our biggest issues is that we are always operating in the gray area. I can’t quite explain why we feel we must remain neutral on a lot of issues. We don’t speak up and we don’t choose sides. In reality we have strong opinions about most things that enter into our thought process, because - lets be real - we over analyze EVERYTHING. This is going to be a hard habit to break. We think that appearing to be a shade of gray makes us approachable and easily accessible to a wide variety of people. We both know I could ramble on and on about all the details of our life but let me leave it at this. Take one thing at a time (because you know how we get overwhelmed) and just graduate high school first. Fondly, Yourself (don’t know why I said fondly, we are always trying to be different - who are we kidding? Sincerely would have been just fine)
9
BRIDGET DEASE
SUBTLE HOPE
My brother complained about the move from the suburbs to the ratinfested streets of Lulleyville, Minnesota. He sounded as if there was nothing left for us. I couldn’t have compared his complaints to our mother’s abandonment. I still have a hard time figuring out whether or not she left because we were burdens or if she had problems to work out on her own. Distinguishing between the two was at times unbearable. A kid in my remedial English class once made a remark about me. “It’s funny how we poor kids perform poorly in school; it’s not like we have anything else to live for,” he’d said. I’d laugh along with him, but something about it stung. Word traveled quickly at Careplain high, and I feared it would be a matter of time before every student knew about my current predicament. Eventually, it came out why I, Elise Tamara Lane, went from preppy to diva in rags. You see, my father has and always will be a greedy man. He’d cheat his brother, his wives, and his employees out of a lot of money. When my brother and I were younger, we’d spend days trying to dislodge that one tooth that just wouldn’t come out, hoping that the “tooth fairy” would give us the shiny quarters we thought we deserved. But that coin was never given to us. A couple of months after my tenth birthday, my father stole from one of his employee’s bank account. Instead of spending his own money on my big day, he had decided it would be better to spend someone else's. There is no better temptation than success and so after the first theft, he decided to do it again. Only this time his luck ran thin. A former employee whom he’d fired a week before came to pick up her last paycheck and had stumbled upon printouts of the illicit bank transfer. A lawsuit was filed against him and his accounts were frozen. Matthew Michael Lane served time in prison for five years. In the meantime, without a nanny, cook and cleaner, motherhood reeled its ugly head and Merrilyn Beauregard did not like what she saw. Somewhere along this course, she looked into the abyss and decided that she’d had enough of my brother and me. A note was left on the kitchen table. My brother stumbled upon it the morning after she left. “I’m sorry,” it read. My brother’s eyes were like mini faucets. Faucets that were still running long after our mother had left. He was only twelve, and like many twelve-year-olds he wanted to have a normal family. I, being fifteen, assured him that there was certainly no such thing as a “normal” family. That almost all families in a sense were “abnormal”. Despite my father’s reluctance, we stayed with our Aunt Susan in Minnesota and when our father got out of prison he joined us there. She was wealthy enough to keep us on our feet, but she had children of her own and other responsibilities that were beyond us. We dreaded the days we spent with our father and the hours almost always dragged in his presence. It was as though a stranger had infiltrated our family. 10
In the mornings, I’d go to school; it was the lesser of two evils but an evil nonetheless. I’d walk through the narrow halls and pray that I was in remedial English, my last class of the day. When that class came and ended, I’d go pick up my brother from Careplain Middle School. He was just as happy to leave as I was, but also just as nervous to go home. To distract ourselves, we would make fun of something. We’d often say that Lulleyville was so stupid for labeling its high schools, middle schools and elementary schools all with the same name. It was pitiful, but so were we. Our jokes would not delay the journey home. My brother and I would eventually have to accept our new life, one without the glamour and being waited on for our every need. Although we were together, we were two individuals that each had to carry our own separate weights. Upon getting out of prison, my father found a liking to alcohol and yelling very loudly. He would blame it all on our Aunt Susan, and at first I couldn’t understand why; but then I thought that as she was our mother’s sister, her presence was a constant reminder of what he’d lost. He would drink a bottle of Jack Daniels every night and then yell my brother to sleep. It only made it worst when I confronted him. I would have wished that Aunt Susan would’ve let us remain with her and told him as much. I knew our father wouldn’t have considered yelling with other people living in the house. But she got us a small apartment for three about eight blocks from her house in Lulleyville, and we were expected to deal with him. But I couldn’t deal with him and I doubt my brother could either. One night, in his anger, my father yelled that whether we liked it or not we were stuck with him. It was directed at my brother and I could hear him crying in terror. I couldn’t blame him. Robert never found a way to deal with the horror. A few weeks later, my father broke the terms of his parole. He went on one of his early morning rants and near scared a woman to death. I don’t think he planned to hurt her, but the yelling, the alcohol and the bruise count on my brother’s back proved to be enough for the police to take him in. This time he was sentenced to ten years in prison without the possibility of early release. Robert and I were returned to our aunt for a while. She already had five children and two more would’ve been a struggle even for a wealthy single mother. Foster care seemed to be the only option for us. While in the care of adults that we hadn’t known for more than a couple of days, I began to think of my mother and where she might have gone. There weren’t many places for her to go. The only family she had was Aunt Susan, Robert, and I. 11
12 On the fifth night of our stay in the group home, Aunt Susan came to visit us. It was after five o’clock and visiting hours were over. As she left, she stopped and held a long conversation with Ms. Marie, the illtempered care worker. Robert and I tried to listen in on the conversation, but parts of it was vague. I heard words like “hurt” and “never” and “affair” but I hadn’t been able to make out much else. Aunt Susan began to cry. She held her face down and began to walk slowly toward us. She opened her mouth to say something but stopped and shook her head, Ms. Marie turned to her and said “It’s not fair to them or you.” I was afraid of what she would say. I guess I’d really hoped that whatever it was, it would not hurt my brother. I couldn’t see him hurt again. Moments later the words started spilling out of Aunt Susan’s mouth. “I’m your mother,” she said. Although muffled, we understood every word; it left us speechless. She’d kept staring at the ground even after those words had been revealed to us. Robert and I were in utter shock for most of the night but that didn’t stop the sun from rising the next morning. Over time, Merrilyn’s whereabouts and our father’s imprisonment began to matter little to my brother and I. We were taken out of the group home and spent time with Susan and the five cousins that were now suddenly half-brothers and sisters. Now, all of the unanswered questions were answered. Merrilyn and Matthew had raised us as their own for most of our lives, but I longed to know the answer to one other question. Why had we been the last to know?
HELEN STEINECKE
OVER THE RIVER
18
CARA RACIN
DREAMLINES
17
MARCUS BROWN
SUCIDE BOMB
18
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Suicide Bomb is an experimentation with the use of monologue. What the author attempts to do is to combine a narrative with a visual aesthetic. The words in Suicide Bomb are not mere signifiers in the conventional sense. Instead size is taken into account as a measure of the weight that words can carry for an individual at any given moment. The author is well aware that as readers we will differ in opinion on the measure of each word, which in this piece is indicated by size, the larger the word the more weight carried. The author is interested in a dialogue with words, and how the configuration of each word would differ with not just context but also the readers constant flux.
CARA RACIN
ART & BEAUTY
21
SARAI REED
NINETY FIVE DEGREES OF SEPARATION
I lay my palm flat on the dash and leave it there until it begins to burn. I press my forehead to the window, looking for some relief there but even the glass is warm to the touch. Reclining my seat, I weigh my options. I can’t roll down the windows with the car off and I don’t want to get out. The asphalt looks molten. It’s always puzzled me how crime rates rise with the heat index. I can’t even muster the strength to unfasten my seat belt. How could I commit a felony? The seat belt is making me sweat. I can’t breathe. The glare of the Mercedes logo on the steering wheel threatens to burn my retinas. Outside my window, men and women are sitting on porches sweating. Even the children looked sapped of their energy, sitting on steps and curbs, fanning themselves with their small ineffective hands. I insisted on waiting in the car despite my mother telling me she’d be a while. She refused to leave the windows down “in a neighborhood like this.” I was sure that leaving me to stew here for a while was her intention, that she was taking her good time in order to teach me a lesson for defying her. I straighten up in my seat again. Through my window I see a man washing his car in an alley. I’m sure he’s the only person moving for blocks. He scrubs, soaps and rinses meticulously until a short round woman walks past, apparently catching his eye. He takes up the hose and applies pressure with his thumb to make it spray with greater force. Aiming with one eye open, he points the hose right at her and wets the seat of her pants. She turns around embarrassed. The hose is still trained on her lower half. The woman’s face breaks into a smile. Running and ducking behind the car, she grabs the wet soapy sponge from the bucket and hurls it at him. It leaves a big wet rectangle in the middle of his chest. A minute later, the scene has unfolded into an all out water fight. A minute after that, the two sit on the curb drenched and laughing. I get out of the car.
MAX FRESHOUR
SODIUM CONTENT
23
SIENNA LASTER - MALIA WILLIAMS-HAYNES
NEW TABLETS
From: [email protected] To: [email protected] RE: 6 & 10 her 6. I wrapped my sweaty palms around her neck, pulling my foggy close till we were face to face. I looked over glasses to look into the eyes of a dying lamb. A horrid screeching noise came out from between her lips, “Don’t kill me, I have a family,” she pleaded, but that wasn’t going to save her, who didn’t have a family? I yelled in her face, ed careless specks of spit escaped from my mouth. I watch from the corner of her choke and gasp for air, blood spilled her lips. 10. Everyday, I peek through my window in my room to to watch my neighbor. I envy how his life is being handed I him, while mine is being thrown in my face. If I’m lucky, catch a glimpse of his wife changing into her jogging clothes through the window in my bathroom, he doesn’t new deserve to be loved by his wife.He doesn’t deserve the washed house, but I’d car. He doesn’t deserve the white say he deserves those spoiled kids.
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From: [email protected] To: [email protected] RE: 3
3. She thinks church is boring. That all you ever do is sit there and listen to someone preach to you all day. She told her mother how she feels yet she is dragged there each Sunday. She usually doesn’t listen to what’s been said. She’ll draw or write stories and poems. On this day she listened in to a bit of the sermon. Pastor was saying something about not saying the Lord’s name in vain. It didn’t interest me so I continued drawing. Church was almost over, thank God, she thought. She couldn’t wait to get home, take off her church clothes and relax. Maybe even play some video games. The sermon finally ended, hallelujah she thought, and as the congregation rose in anticipation of the final verse and the Lord’s Prayer, in spite of her mother’s glare, she decides not to stand.
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LAYLA SHARAF
HOLIDAY
Beach trip. Alone. It begins with long lines, weird smells, shitty food, and constant pushing. Forever in the way. Lost a hair band and a lens cap. The FujiFilm is now going unprotected; she’s archaic and has a low megapixel count. She creates grainy, low-resolution images. She takes photographs that are similar to pointillism paintings; composed solely of little, colored specs. Forever stretching for a keen sense of perfection. There are over a million fragments composing one image, imagine that, interacting with one another in very specific ways, lovely. The lack of a lens cap has led to a thumb sized smudge on every picture she takes, throwing off a harmony that was once fundamental. Before, there was no doubt of what you would come across when scanning over a photograph. Looking through her pictures now gives her a tingling urge to wipe off the errors with the tips of saliva-covered fingers. But she can’t.
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Vacation to the mountains, they are such photogenic masses of land. A series of day to night photos would serve well. If only the FujiFilm was in better condition. The Polaroid is manageable. However, she would need the Nikon to capture the wilderness, to have mother nature pose for her like she often does for those whose work fills the pages of National Geographic. The bitter air which was once refreshing, is now a frostbiting cold. The weather makes the fingerless gloves useful. She increases the shutter speed and lowers the ISO and the results are plentiful but not perfect. Besides the tenderness of her exposed fingers, a charley horse in her left leg strikes her and then leaves, only to return again with an increasing amount of discomfort. A resort with excursions into the New Zealand interior. The intruders host the indigenous in the former colonized towns; the indigenous still rule the grass here. With little observation the need to exploit the high megapixel count, zoom, and close ups is obvious. Dirt-stained faces, permanent smiles lines, and pain stricken eyes against the prim, the orderly, the unconcerned, and the frivolous create enough irony without an overpowering meaning. Beach trip. Vacation to the mountains. Trip to New Zealand. I’ve been off on a holiday. 2,740 pictures: 2,210 of which are in the trash bin, 28 saved in a folder within a folder within another five folders, 502 left for others to view, to critique, to destroy, to analyze, to lose all previous meaning that is true to the FujiFilm and to me. There are now 502 photographs pumped with testosterone, crushed Oxycontin sprinkled all over them, and flowers shoved down their gun barrels.
ROOM 18 - ISSUE #1- FEB 2011
PRODUCED BY THE LITERARY MEDIA & COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT
