Walter Dunn Jr.
We were only fifteen years old when Gail and I excitedly introduced ourselves. It was after a night of losing ourselves in anonymous forgetful dancing, in a vacated shadowy commercial space that was rented as a club on Friday and Saturday nights. Continuous music with a DJ was new in the 1970s. This makeshift club was called “Kings Casino,” after Kings County, New York City, which included Brooklyn, where both of us were born.
It was love at first sight. I brought Gail home soon after our initial encounter to meet my parents. Despite feeling the characteristic 1970’s African American pride, my African American father got hung up on her light-skinned complexion, and referred to Gail as “light, bright, and damn near white.” The reference aptly carried through our courtship, marriage, and subsequent divorce.
After our divorce in the 1990’s Gail went from pride of the Big Apple to a Georgia Peach. By 2017, through random social media sitings, I was pleased that time had aged Gail quite well. There were just a few subtle changes since our time together. Her short curly haircut now had a tuft of gray in front. with a few additional pounds distributed tastefully about her five feet two-inch frame. But she was still unmistakably Gail. Time had also preserved her cute, crooked smile, and those friendly hazel eyes I fell for as that teenager.
We talked on the phone regularly over the years, exchanging notes on our daughters, doing damage control of their escapades, or just catching up. We had evolved. She had become my oldest dearest friend.
Gloria, her mother, still lived in Brooklyn. Suddenly, on a routine visit from Georgia, Gail asked to see me. This was going to be our first face to face meeting since her second marriage, over twenty years ago. Excited about the prospect of being with her again after all these years, I replied, “It has to be Sunday. Driving in from Jersey on a Sunday morning produced less stress.” Gail was good with that. Before the call ended, she reminded me. “Sunday is the thirty-fifth anniversary of grandma’s passing.” That was back in 1980s, while Gail and I were still married.
The mention of her grandmother produced long forgotten memories of their manure-colored frame house in the low-income Bushwick section of Brooklyn. It was back when house color didn’t matter. A house was a house. But theirs was distinctive from other frame houses on Jefferson Avenue. A shitty shade of mustard aluminum siding. The color was suited for very little else. Somehow a tree survived in ailing soil that filled the square concrete cutout on the sidewalk directly in front of the house. The pavement was always littered with nasty lumps of dog shit and didn’t look clean enough to step on.
Missing sections of cast iron fencing disappeared from years of “slow rot.” Over time not enough fence remained to stop even the smallest of brown paper bags. Gaping holes peppered the wooden stairs to a second-floor entrance. The steps had been previously repaired, several times, but the repair work never lasted, or maybe the stairs were just incapable of sustaining heavy traffic stampeding across them. But truthfully, no one really cared for the house.
Thirty-five years ago. That fact had not changed. Everything about that house was the same, last time I made it back. But something inside was dramatically different since I first met Gail’s grandmother. That damp odor, just inside the foyer, was still there. It smelled like a stray dog, lingering like commercial air freshener, despite no one in the house had ever owned a dog. The entrance area remained poorly lit, with dull yellow walls and punished wooden floors.
The only promising feature, going deeper inside the house, was a stairwell on the right-side, leading upstairs. But it always looked dark and foreboding from downstairs. The house stayed warm during winter; an oil furnace in the basement worked adequately.
I caught the dim blue light coming through a seam between pocket doors on my left, from inside the parlor, opposite the stairs. Gail was my first love, and through all the years we were together, funny how that room was never formally used as a parlor to receive guests. Charlie, her father, used it as a bedroom after he alienated Gloria, his wife. After Charlie left Gloria and moved in with his girlfriend, Gail’s oldest brother Butch took the parlor over. Between those two men, the room only served as a drunken lair, a flop. It was not until grandma got sick and could no longer negotiate her way up and down the stairs that the parlor became something respectable. It became her bedroom and final resting place.
I opened the pocket doors. The sudden squeaking noise made grandma turn her head with widening eyes. That bluish lighthad come from a small black and white T.V. sitting on a step-stool in the corner. It was the only light in the room. Tattered shades diffused sunlight trying to push through the two front windows. Beds were the only other furniture in the room, an empty rollout, and the hospital bed occupied by grandma, paid for by Medicare. Grandma was once a homemaker, and spoiled her only child, Charlie. Not much else about her was known to me, other than she was of American Indian descent.
Grandma became an untreated diabetic who contracted gangrene in one of her toes. Poor people’s medicine never got control of the infection. It escalated until she lost that toe, then the foot. Grandma ultimately lost both legs, and then her spirit. Once the spirit dies the sadness that comes is overwhelming, and the spirit never leaves without taking hope along with it.
She had only been home from the hospital for a few days. But the loss of hope was apparent, reflecting outward from her vacant brown eyes, as they gazed back at that Maybeline makeup model during a commercial. I noticed the emptiness walking towards her, courtesy of the crisp hypnotic medium of broadcast black and white television.
She looked pleased to see me once her stare broke away from the television. Before her illness we played cards together with her grandchildren many times; all ten of them. Although these days playing cards was the last thing on her mind. After I paid my respects, she smiled an empty, hapless smile, but it was a smile, nonetheless. I tried to look past the sadness in her eyes, hoping to see the light that once shined bright as a Christmas morning candle. But she couldn’t sustain eye contact with me long enough to show it. I prayed it still burned somewhere inside her. She closed her eyes and hummed a spiritual. I quietly backed out from the room and closed the pocket doors.
As I went up the stairs, it seemed like only yesterday when Gail and I were teenagers and she ushered me upstairs to meet the entire crew. Grandma and Gail’s grandfather lived on the third floor of the house. Her brothers and sisters regularly climbed the stairs and crowded around Grandma’s kitchen table. The older ones had first priority to sit with grandma around the table playing dealer’s choice. They included Gail, her two sisters, who had already moved out. They would always play cards whenever they came by to visit. It wasn’t about money; the fun was in the banter and collective energy. Meanwhile, the youngest ones stood on the sidelines impatiently waiting for a seat to open-up so they could sit and play too.
Gail was fifteen at the time and fourth oldest down from the top. Butch was twenty-six, Doreen twenty-five and Saundra was seventeen. The other ages around the table were fourteen and twelve. There were six active hands at the table. The youngins on the sidelines saw me as new money when Gail brought me up and introduced me. Grandma generously gave up her seat to make room for me once she saw my eyes light up at the action. We played cards in my family too, but it was never like this. The younger kids here hustled cards harder than the older ones! In retrospect, I was over-matched and under-prepared for these young hustlers from the very beginning. I think I lost twenty bucks the first time I played against them.
For a five-dollar table stake we would play dealers choice all night long. It never took long for quarters to become paper money flying across the table. Whenever I left the table a winner, grandma would announce it. Because of the undeniable poverty, winning always made me feel guilty. Instead of leaving I would sit on the side and watch. Before long I’d be back in the game and would eventually lose everything I’d won to these adolescent hustlers.
Grandma read me like a book. I couldn’t bear the attention winning gave me. Losing certainly brought more money into the house, and despite knowing this, I always convinced myself to go play anyway, believing next time I won I would walk away, but I didn’t.
Card playing was the national pastime in this house. A convenient distraction from the squalor they knew better than me. From four in the afternoon till bedtime these polite, hospitable, card hustlers played dealers’ choice like they were born to do it. Any disputes were settled like children, but then grandma always had the last say. She seemed so jolly back then.
When the younger grandchildren got older, Gail and I moved in together, before getting married. Still in our late teens, we continued the tradition of playing cards until we became too busy.
By the time I was twenty-six we were married with two children. After grandma’s diabetes kept getting worse, we planned to visit after work. I agreed to meet Gail at the house. Gail hadn’t arrived yet, so, after leaving grandma in the parlor, on her hospital bed, I started up the stairs. The closer I came to the top I found myself struggling. I wanted this visit to feel like so many visits before, with grandma overseeing the game. But then I just looked forward to seeing Gail’s siblings. To see the ones that were still living at home.
When they were younger, half were of the full-bodied type. I called them the “chubby brigade.” They would hover outside the game behind the players, like biblical cherubs, holding a handful of money waiting for their turn. But when I walked into the kitchen there were no little kids around the table. They had all grown up! Stan had a mustache, and David lost weight. They made coy goofy smiles around the table at me. I barely recognized Peachy, and Annette. I settled in and took a place at the table. Stan dealt the cards and my sense of it was different; somberly we began to play our hands.
There was never any cheating, and it seemed we mostly spent the evening keeping each other in the game. Over the years there were rarely any big losers. It was a stupid way to gamble I guess, but it was never a gamble. It was always more about enjoying each other, in companionship.
We were playing for a while when Tiffany, the youngest of grandma’s eight great grandchildren, walked in. A tiny, three-year-old. Tiffany caught my eye.
Tiffany bounced up and down, springing into every step. She was completely bald, which made her beautiful, evenly toned brown cabbage patch head quite outstanding. She had small sparkling eyes above plump, jolly cheeks. When she smiled her eyes got even smaller, but her face twinkled with excitement. She walked over to grandma’s old fluffy chair and climbed up the mountainous arm, rolling herself into the seat cushion. Her oblivious mother, Peachy, focused on her cards and hadn’t noticed Tiffany’s presence.
When the hand was finally over; everyone stared blankly at whatever fell into their eyeline: water stains near the top of the walls across the room; a faded picture of White Jesus hanging between the windows; or the open door behind me. The energy gradually disappeared like air from a leaking balloon. Tiffany noticed the silence like an alert three-year old would. Then she got off the chair and walked around the table curiously looking at each of us. Everyone else ignored the energy shift, except me.
Her age notwithstanding, I became convinced Tiffany somehow was aware of our energy shift too. I wondered how much she intuitively understood. Was Tiffany aware that Grandma wasn’t here even before we accepted it?
We’d been playing cards, going through the motions, but privately pretending Grandma was going to be better someday. Her legs were not growing back, regardless of how desperately we hoped she would be healed. It was also clear that grandma wanted no more of our sympathy that we had been pouring indiscriminately all over her. She was drowning in it. Every day, one by one, they all stopped in, looking sad, red teary-eyed faces saying, “good morning grandma, we love you” and then much later, “Goodnight.” And then more of the same. These overspent gestures only reminded her of what was coming next, while we obsessively glued ourselves to the kitchen table, waiting. Mourning her the only way we knew how, by playing endless cards. I didn’t understand any of it. Certainly, it wasn’t the same card game anymore. There was hardly any money played. Then why did we come up to play anyway? Why was I still here?
When I looked down Tiffany was climbing onto my chair and then she cuddled under my arm. Suddenly, one by one, everyone put their heads down and began crying. We could not hide the grief any longer. Tiffany placed her head down on my shoulder and I began sobbing too.
Grandma wouldn’t be playing with us anymore, and things in this house would never be the same again. This was the saddest game in town.
By the time Gail and I met that Sunday, thirty-five years later, the house on Jefferson Avenue and everyone in it was long gone. We met at Juniors, our favorite eatery, downtown Brooklyn. Brooklyn had also changed radically since our Kings Casino days. Unfortunately, change would also characterize our visit, and my relationship with Gail, moving forward. She wanted to meet me and say goodbye, for the second time in our lives. Doing it the same way as when we initially met, face to face.
Our history, and the familiarity of our phone calls to each other over the years have created a problem in her marriage and would have to end. She was informed by her husband there was only room for one man in her life, and it would not be me. I still loved her though and only wanted what was best for her. Our two daughters are grownups now. So, I offered no resistance at her simple request. We said goodbye and went our separate ways. Though something inside me said this was not the end, that she will always be my oldest and dearest friend.
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