If You Must Know

You saw your lil friends drown in a whirlpool of white, one by one, or sometimes one by two like when Tay-Tay got shot during a pickup and the bullet passed through his neck and hit Raymond in the shoulder as he was running away. Thing is, Ray wouldn’t have died except that seeing Tay-Tay laid out on the glass-glittered concrete, jerking and spraying blood like a slaughtered lamb, put him out of his mind and he hid under the abandoned stairwell in the basement of number 24, sweating and cursing among broken vials and crusty rat shit pellets for thirty-one hours instead of going to the hospital. He was only fourteen, didn’t even know the word sepsis, and sure didn’t know that it could shut down his body like somebody was snapping off the lights of a house, room by room, which meant he died way more slowly and painfully than Tay. Then there was your boy Reggie, who you met when you were five that time somebody opened the fire hydrant, and ya’ll tumbled around in the violent blast laughing and whooping though it stung like friendly fire, and you thought about that years later when you heard that Reggie went down in a drive-by that wasn’t even meant for him. He wasn’t into bad shit, just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you had the crazy hope that at that last moment, he remembered the stinging hail of hydrant water and felt that wild joy and laughter rising up in him before it went dark. There were other cats too–your boys D’Shawn, Pooh, Box, Franklin, Little Romeo. Some of them aren’t dead yet, just act like it, live like it, because Death has always been just another part of the crew, cracking jokes on the corner, grinning its nasty white grin. And every time your mom and granddad tells you about another life gone, another life wasted, another life suspended, they shake their heads and start thinking at you, thinking loud enough for you to hear, see, this is why we started locking your lil butt in the house, this is why you had to take two buses, south-north, east-west, to get to school, this is why we didn’t let you say ain’t, this is why we snatched that hoodie off, this is why you were so alone, this is why we split you in half, this is why we strangled you, this is why we delivered you. They don’t know you’re a spirit caught between worlds, can’t cross over, can’t go back, and you drift around feeling the ache of phantom bullet wounds. Only when you found that first scraggly little one-eyed cat peeking out from in the boxwood bushes outside your apartment, only when you felt its thready life fluttering in your hands, that little heart beating machine-gun fast and you heard yourself saying, it’s okay baby, I know I know because you did know that even street cats get scared and have no idea what to do or where to go, and most of them never get a big hand reaching down to pluck them up and hold them close, only then did you feel life come rushing into you like blood. So yeah, that’s why folks call you Cat Man or Brotha with the Cats or whatever. You got eight of them now, every last one fucked up in some way, and you got your share of claw marks up and down your arms and some folks be laughing at you, a grown-ass man with a houseful of kitty-cats, but you don’t give a shit because they don’t know that cats are the baddest mofos on the planet and getting clawed hurts less than phantom bullets and all that matters anyway is that you were able to save them, you were able to save them all.