I wanted to kill myself.
I walked to my bike with my head hung low, helmet hanging from my hand. In the dull shine of a Brook Hill morning, I looked up to find an over-turned garbage can where I’d left my bike at one in the morning. I threw my helmet to the pavement and cracked it, then I kicked it clear across the street like a soccer ball.
“Fuck!” I screamed at the blighted neighborhood. Texas was on my speed dial, as were both of my blood brothers, Rafa and Malik. I couldn’t decide who to call. Texas knew me well, but he didn’t know quite how far south my pathological self-loathing went. Rafael and Malik, I’d spent my life trying to protect. My instinct was to keep doing it, on into perpetuity even if it killed me.
“Raf, it’s Mav. I’m broke down in Brook Hill. Come help a brother out.” I gave him the coordinates and started walking toward the pawn shop we’d passed last night where I’d told him to pick me up. Rafa didn’t know the entire extent of what I’d been through, but he himself hadn’t been spared from our fucked up childhood.
It took him half an hour to arrive and I watched the sunrise over the cracked asphalt of the strip mall parking lot. It was quite the contrast, the golds and deep reds waking up the skyline, and the junkies climbing out of cars or tents to shoot their first hit, breath condensing in the chill of the bleak morning. An old homeless man passed me, pushing a rickety grocery cart filled with two garbage bags of belongings. I sat on my ass, elbows on my knees, both hands clasped under my chin. Brook Hill was an all too familiar scene.
“You got any dope?” he asked me. His teeth were long gone and his skin had turned grey with exposure.
I shook my head in dismay. Wondered if he had sold his kids, his family, his dreams to chase that high. I thought of all the things my own mother had given up to get her fix and where it had gotten her. Namely—us—her boys. And dead is where all the trouble landed her.
Rafa pulled up on his bike and stopped in front of the pawn shop; took off his helmet and looked around like he wasn’t sure he got the address right.
“Rafael!” I called out him. I picked myself up and dusted off my butt. He walked toward me, and I to him, until we met and knocked fists in the middle of the barren landscape.
“Holy shit, brother, you look like hell,” he told me. “Where’s your bike?”
“Police impound? Burned out a few lots over? Being sold for a speedball as we speak? Hell if I know.”
“Get out? Who did this to you, Mav?”
I bent my knees and spread out my arms, then slammed them down at my sides. Rafa looked scared of me. He was used to me being the one who always picked up the pieces.
“’Bout five foot two, red hair, one brown eye, one blue, maybe a hundred fucking pounds?” I told him.
“No shit? A woman stole your bike?”
I laughed out loud, but it was sardonic and dark.
“She stole my fucking heart, Rafael. A junkie probably took my ride.”
“Holy fuck.” Rafa’s statement was apt.
“Holy fuck is right. Take me somewhere before I shoot my own head off.”
“Where you wanna go? Church? Police station? Brunch?”
I smacked Rafael on the back and hopped onto the back of his Harley.
We ended up at a twenty-four hour donut shop drinking burnt coffee. I made some calls to the club to put out the word on my ride. I also made them put two prospects at Tight Ends for security and arranged for a driver to pick up the DJ after midnight every night she worked.
Rafael knew I’d been sexually abused as a child. He knew that Mom let her pimp use me when the numbers came up short or when he had a client with certain predilections she couldn’t fulfill. I’d been used by monsters and those scars ran deeper than my own roots.
“You ever been in love before?” he asked me. I took a sip of scalding awful coffee and swallowed it down, shook my head no at my little brother. “What’s it feel like?” he asked me.
“Fucked up,” I told him plainly.
“Fucked up good or fucked up bad?” he asked me.
“Both at the same time, but maybe that’s just me. I took her virginity, Rafa. She didn’t tell me.”
“Oh shit.”
“She’s tiny, really fucking young, and, wait for it—Raf, she’s legally blind,” I told him with a plea, because I needed someone to understand just how badly I’d fucked up. The last sin I ever wanted to commit in this world was taking advantage of someone less powerful than me—that went for size, social standing, gender, abilities. I never wanted to take someone’s agency from them, because I knew, on a profound level, how much it fucked you up.