The following is an excerpt from the story Corners of Life:
I’m standing on a corner on the upper West Side of Broadway, in New York City where personal history was made in the thirteen-story building you are looking at. My father and mother died with Jesus on their lips and an older sister and brother were found with alcohol in their blood and pills in their bellies. They had dusted Jesus at age thirteen when they topped attendance at the tabernacle of Pastor Nonsense and started down the backsliding road. Im staring up at the eighth-floor window where my remaining sister Rachel was nabbed at two in the morning by the police rescue squad after pedestrians had spotted her doing some of her funny stuff out on the window ledge. “I was just getting some air. I was looking for signs of Jesus in the night sky,” she explained to the officers.
An image came to me, shortly after the ledge event. I saw myself out below the building with a huge net, a man on a perpetual vigil never breaking to eat or sleep, so I would be there in case she took the plunge.
“She is a saint. She is in Heaven. She is resting with the Lord,” Rachel says in the psychiatric unit of a large hospital a block from the building where we grew up and she was living with my mother when she dIed. She doesn’t remember the event of this year or their sequence. She doesn’t remember the window ledge incident that got her committed here, or my mother’s death shortly after her release, or the overdose of prescription drugs she took that put her in a four-day coma shortly thereafter.
Half a lifetime ago when I was twenty, l visited Rachel at Bellevue Hospital, farther downtown. She was a drinker then, a verbally slashing woman who got committed for a drunken sprint naked down the street before streaking was the national craze. I remember that she gave me one of her smirks and a Shakespeare soliloquy – that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow thing – when I tried to get a conversation going.
The solarium, where we sit in pastel, stackable chairs, is cloudy with smoke. In a room off the solarium the plastic accordion shaped divider open, a black woman solo dances ,moving druggily to the disco beat from the radio of a cassette-recorder. Shifting from dance to the life around her, she says, harsh-tongued, ”It’s going to be payback time for you going in my room. Don’t be going in my room no more and stealing my things. My fine furs. My gold jewelry. My lacy, sexy underthings. But Rachel doesn’t appear to hear her accuser’s word . My fifty-year-old sister sits with her hands in her lap, her body gently rocking back and forth at the prompting of the Stelazine.
Rachel is doing so much for me. She is – she is just doing things.
Download this story as a pdf: Corners of Life