The Breeze
The Late summer breeze was wafting through the window, brushing the makeshift canvas curtain across his chest. This woke him, though it should not have. There he lay in his hours old sweat, finally cooling down.
The alarm clock?
He turned and looked over at the dollar store alarm clock that sat atop the milk crate that served as the nightstand for his makeshift judo mat bed, where his sweat pooled to cool him in the sweltering summer night. The heat still shimmered up from the potholed asphalt-paved brownstone ghetto that was now his 'hometown'—had been for these past twenty empty years.
No berth in hell yet, just another day in the Armpit of the East Coast.
He leaned over to check the alarm and noticed that he had switched it off in his sleep. He wondered absently if this was the first of many coming signs of boxing dementia. The clock told 5:30 a.m. He then looked to the burner, his cheap disposable cellphone that kept him off the grid yet in contact with The People, who just now numbered so few. The burner had fallen from the crate—he had left it there, left it on vibrate, just in case he over did his 47-minute nap.
“Devils and wings!” he muttered angrily to himself, and then chuckled in self-deprecating mirth, “Old Fool, you are left behind.”
He raised up from the bed in the dim glow of the streetlight above his third story window. The corner boys knew not to knock that streetlight out, it being his, his night light, his kitchen table light. The kitchen table was an old electrical spool, with teapot, tea-lights, pencils and scrap paper. The entire house had been gutted for copper by crack-heads and junkies.
He regarded his ‘Fortress of Solitude,’ as Usef Ali jokingly called the third floor of the vacant row house, ‘where Black Superman dwelt above the ghetto waste.’ All piping, wiring and drywall was gone. He looked at brickwork and stud frames, from which his casual attire hung from nails. He stored no food here, because of rats, keeping only teabags and gallons of water. His casual clothes consisted of sleeveless T-shirts and cargo shorts for summer and black jeans and sweat tops for winter. He wore on his feet, either sandals or jump boots. He was a stranger to the sneaker and owned a half dozen pair of polished jump boots. His shoe shine kit hung from a rafter above his milk crate stool, well-used.
All of his formal attire was stored in the study of Usef Ali above The Call Gym. Usef was a harsh patron: mocking; demanding; unforgiving. But he did tolerate Akbar’s guilt-haunting and made allowances. Usef alone called him Akbar. The rest of the Brothers called him El Qama. Outsiders knew him as Poet; the name being his measure of separation from the sinful Whiteman’s World and his point of contact as well.
Usef did provide meaningful work and serene obscurity. The only domestic chores Akbar had to perform were the laundering of his own socks, underwear and casual attire. The care of his footwear and weapons, also kept in his quarters here [the later within the hollow cylinder of the spool], were not chores, but a warrior’s duty. He could ask for little more, and would not.
Akbar Qama did not ask.
It was 5:40 a.m., and the sun was beginning to creep tentatively above the dirty jagged horizon to the east. He had abandoned Islamic strictures, unbeknownst to Usef, as he was a recluse here. He maintained his prayer mat, but there it hung unused, draped over the gutted doorway to nowhere, above the stair he had sledged down, before the door he had boarded shut.
The Burner
As the streetlight to his right and west—out the window he had covered in canvas against the setting sun—leered faintly, he looked to his left, to the east, out the window that he had left uncovered to admit the morning light. He looked at the sun seemingly still hiding behind the far horizon, afraid to lay His massive eye on this sordid world yet again.
So, Old Fool, are you Akbar today—with bean pies to sell; El Qama—meeting a young fool to counsel; or Poet—some penance to be paid?
He picked up the burner from the termite-eaten floorboards and noticed two missed calls, a voice mail, and one text.
The text was from Mister Owen, the White funeral director of the nominally Christian Owen’s Funeral Home. It read ‘10 a.m. today’. He knew what that meant, what had to be done.
The missed calls were both from an unknown number, from 6:30 and 6:46 p.m. The voice mail was from 6:47 p.m. last night, two hours after he was supposed to have been at the gym, and it sank his stolid heart.
“Mister Poet, this is Janine Morris, the woman you met at the bus stop last week. Remember my daughter was interested in boxing lessons? We are here now, at the gym, hoping to speak with you. We took the bus uptown. Please call me at four-four-three, five-six-zero, nine-four-eight-two. Thank you and I will be looking forward to your call.”
“White devils on flying pigs! I let that lady and her child down. Why? To postpone Kismet's unstoppable claw for another portion of an hour, that’s why!”
Speaking to himself had become a bad habit ever since his separation from The Nation and his self-imposed exile from The People.
I have to speak to her, face-to-face. She will be at the transfer point waiting for the #8 on Baltimore Street at 7:50 this morning, on her way to work. I will see her there and make the funeral in plenty of time.
He shut down the phone, dressed, selected his boots, sat and laced them, rose and flexed them, and headed to the north window, his front door on The Sordid World…
