Free No Lease on Life by Lynne Tillman Page B

exist. I didn’t have a hard time. That’s probably why I don’t fear going back. But I don’t want to go back. Some people go in with this attitude, they try to be too tough, and people beat them up. A lot of people from this neighborhood go. A lot of people have been in jail before—the more times you go, the more people you know. It’s like you’re a fixture. It would be very hard for middle-class people, people like you. My mother’d been incarcerated before I was ever born.
    Jeanine slept for a while. Then she woke up and they had coffee at the rectangular table in the kitchen.
    —Do you hate your mother?
    —No, I love the old goat. She’s a pain in the ass. I want to hurt her sometimes. We’ve had fights.
    —If you don’t buy her drugs.
    —She has a fit. You pay to stay home, you pay to stay somewhere else. I gotta give her drugs, because I know she has a fit. She’s had a hard time. My mother’s father raised them. Her mother abused them from when she was little. My mother was in the hospital for three years because she was getting beaten very badly. Then they grew up in homes, because they took them away from her father because back then it was a man with little girls. Then my mother came back home, and she was with my father since she was thirteen years old. My father was older, twenty-six, she was like thirteen or something. Hello. She should have realized then the man had a problem.
    Elizabeth nodded sympathetically.
    —Jorge used to beat me. First of all, he had an inferiority complex. I had to teach him how to read. The home setting was not happy. Very disturbed. He had the heroin habit. His sister died from AIDS, from shooting up.
    Emilia’s funeral. Jeanine couldn’t handle it, too heavy.
    —Jorge killed somebody during a robbery. They’re not too kind with you taking somebody’s life to deprive them of their property. If you kill somebody in a crime of passion or self-defense, it’s one thing; but if you kill someone to take their property from them, it’s worse. Jorge’s crazy. The heroin, man. When he was so sick he didn’t want to hear nothing, and he had attitude, and he wanted to beat everybody up, and blamed the world cause he was sick. When he was straight he didn’t want to be bothered; he wanted to enjoy his high. There was no in between. He became crazy shooting up towards the end. He didn’t cry for anything. He cried when my kids were taken. But this guy didn’t cry for nothing, except one day his fucking set of works got clogged, and he cried like a baby. That’s when I really started staying away from the house. It gets to the point where I’m like numb, I really am.
    Elizabeth wondered how Jeanine protected herself on the corner.
    —The customers are more dangerous, because you don’t know them. Though I got my leg broken out there, when the boss guy came out with a bat because somebody said someone was selling something besides his merchandise. We don’t harm customers, in fact, people in the neighborhood say they feel safer coming home because they know we’re standing there. I’ll walk down a drug block before I’ll walk down a deserted block. People are not likely to try and drop someone on a block where there’s drug dealers, because they’re afraid. I’m not afraid of my colleagues, I’m more afraid of my customers, because I’ve been raped by customers. One girl was chopped up in pieces, we don’t know who did it. You get some weird customers, they come out and like they’re mixing. These are people who don’t get high on a daily basis. Some do—they’re real cool. Some people that don’t, they’re mixing alcohol or coke, heroin and pills and everything all at one time. They’re not stable. Plus whatever problems drove them to get high. They want to take you somewhere. It’s bad to get in a car, I used to, but I had an incident. Sometimes I have customers, when I see them really messed up I don’t want to sell to them. They’re more