Then we moved to Manhattan. Lower Manhattan, where it was cheap. I had to take care of Patty while Moms worked. And when the guys in the neighborhood saw me and Patty playing, they’d call me a sissy and throw stuff at us. But then Patty started going to school and I went to school. By the time I was thirteen and had some hair under my arms and a dick getting thick as my voice changed, I put on track shoes and a leatherjacket. Stole a switchblade and dared them to call me a sissy again. I told Moms I was doing things for myself from now on. “I’m self-employed,” I told her. “Like Pops. I’m gonna use myself.”

She looked at me. “You mean you gonna use yourself up.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Christ Jesus. If your father were—”

“He wouldn’t say nothing. He’d build another wall somewhere or paint the apartment again. That’s what he’d do.”

“We could have had a house,” she said. “He always wanted one.” And she looked away from me without a smile or nothing on her face. I knew I was gone from her mind. I was lost to her. Maybe lost to myself But I was gonna work. I was gonna bring home some money. I just hated it when she asked me where it came from, that’s all. Why my pants leg was always bloody from the meat I’d stolen from the supermarket and left for her in the refrigerator. She always had the questions. She never wanted to hear the answers. Not the real ones, anyway. So I lied. I made up shit so she wouldn’t cross me off with that blank look and make me feel like I was some rotten asshole for trying to help out. Shit. So I started hanging out with guys I met. Cuddles and them. I wasn’t no Mama’s boy. No sissy. No faggot either. I just fucking missed my old man.

But you can’t keep thinking about the past. Naw. You can’t change it and you can’t keep feeling sorry for things you did or things you didn’t do. I mean even if Pops wouldn’t tell me things about the family, if he was silent all the time, it was probably’cause he was keeping in all the anger from people he worked for and looking at the crummy neighborhood we lived in. I could have said stuff to him, told him things I was feeling. I could have started conversations or put my arms around his shoulders so he’d know I was thinking about him, that I cared how he felt coming back nights when Moms was just too tired to help him rest. I could have held his hand even and told him he didn’t have to work at home too. He didn’t have to build things for us. I loved him anyway. I could have told him that. Maybe then he wouldn’t have worked and worked himself so, or built so many walls and cabinets and shelves, then painted and repainted the same damn apartment so many times. I could have helped him. But shit, I was in the streets. More so after he died. It was all too late. And I didn’t have to build any walls, they just grew up inside me like a fucking cancer or the clap that wouldn’t go away. And Metro? He thought he could stop the cancer maybe. All he did was make it grow worse. ’Cause there was something inside me I couldn’t get rid of. Maybe I’m gonna die from it.