ANEW: B.C.Y: Reintroducing BCY: CHAPTER 1: A Reset Worth Your Time
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Reintroducing BCY: A Reset Worth Your Time
Since the beginning of this fall, my guiding ethos has been about forging connections—building bridges with people I’ve never crossed paths with before. This often means stepping outside my comfort zone, challenging old habits, and embracing new perspectives. After 34 years in the same industry, where community often comes pre-packaged, it’s refreshing—and sometimes daunting—to navigate uncharted waters. These new connections, and the shared humanity they reveal, have nudged me to reevaluate nearly every corner of my life. This quest has been both challenging and transformative.
In the process, I’ve surprised even myself. For instance, I ventured into the world of camping by purchasing a teardrop-style camper—a move that felt wildly outside my comfort zone. I’ve even toyed with the idea of attending one of those “sip and paint” nights at a local art bar. You know the kind: where you sip an adult beverage and follow step-by-step instructions to create a painting alongside strangers. It’s not something I’ve done yet, but I’m warming to the idea of shifting from passive consumer to active creator in new and unexpected ways.
One activity, however, remains my anchor: writing. It’s a deeply solitary pursuit, yet it brings me immense joy and clarity. Every morning, I sit down to write, clearing my mind of the previous day’s clutter and building something new, word by word. Writing is how I process the world and create meaning within it.
Last week, I shared something deeply personal in ANEW: the first installment of a novel I’ve been working on since 2015, B.C.Y.: A Novel. Inspired by serialized storytelling in the tradition of Charles Dickens, my plan was to release it in chapters, building suspense and drawing readers into the unfolding story.
But here’s where I miscalculated. My attempt to put the novel behind a paywall—a thought experiment in “providing value”—didn’t go as planned. Let’s just say, I took the training wheels off the toddler bike way too soon. I’ve heard from thoughtful friends, my writing group, and a few brave readers who hit the paywall. The consensus? Go back to the basics and let the story speak for itself.
So, here we are: a hard reset. Below, I’m sharing Chapter 1 of B.C.Y. in its entirety, free for the world to read. It’s a leap of faith, but one I’m willing to take because storytelling, at its core, is about connection—and connection thrives when we share freely.
I hope you enjoy this fresh start. Dive in, and let me know what you think. This chapter is as much yours as it is mine.
WORKING TITLE // D-R-A-F-T – B.C.Y.: A NOVEL
(Originally November 1, 2015)
Chapter 1
I imagine myself traveling on the Trailways Bus in its belly – from Chicago to New York and due north. I’m down there with my things, in the bus’s gut, bumping and thumping along via the interstate highway system. What’s under there? I try to remember. My new digital alarm clock that I bought myself, paid for it with money from working at the First National Bank of Harvey. The clock was the first thing that I bought after my acceptance letter came in, and after I secured work over the summer, counting money in the back of the First National Bank. Like the job at the bank, I needed something more reliable—a new alarm clock was my big gift to myself. Nobody waking me up anymore. I could wake myself up.
Down there I also have my records in the big suitcase. Of course, I’m hoping that someone in my close proximity will have a record player. Of course, they would. I’d be rooming with pretty wealthy kids who would have their own stereo racks and turntables.
“Are you cold?”
“No,” I lie.
“Okay. Okay. You can have…,” a yawn punctuating her “o” of a month, hand coming up to cover it, “...the blanket if you get too cold.” she shoved the blanket half-heartedly in my direction anyway, her eyes were already starting to go to half-mast.
“No, I ain’t cold,” trying to tell her before she faded again, all the while trying not to have my teeth clack like one of those novelty toys without a face or mouth. It made me think of Mymama, my grandmother, with her teeth in a glass by her bedside.
The rhythm of the tires made us either sleep or uneasy, forgetful. We left the other blanket somewhere in Pennsylvania. Or, I should say, I left the blanket somewhere in Pennsylvania when we changed buses. It was embarrassing enough to be so forgetful. My brain was a spaghetti strainer, especially these last few weeks. Not much coming in now, thinking about all the stuff I had to do to get to this point; I even tanked the last semester of high school – a lot going out and down the drain. Worse yet, I had to be the only person going to college 1,000 miles away who was traveling with his mother, one blanket, and not knowing if I would be okay in the end.
How could I be so stupid? Maybe stupid wasn’t the world. I had resolved not to be so hard on myself. What did it get me? Looking in the mirror, frowning, cursing, and spitting at my dumb-assery. On the other hand, that’s why I got into the predicament that I was in, being hard-headed and thick sometimes.
Mama was half awake and half asleep; her head was lolling around like one of those wrinkly dogs on a car’s dashboard, eyes half open, seeing down the road to our future, my future. I was unable to sleep all that well since we left the terminal in Chicago. Scared for our lives, I was both excited to be getting away and afraid for my very life. Everything at that time and during those years was like seeing through a telescope down a long hallway in a shotgun of a building. That way of seeing blotted out people, their reactions, their feelings, and sharpened our feelings. My feelings. It’s like nothing, or no one else, mattered in this moving movie-like world.
That’s why I was imagining myself in another place other than where I was. I was good at time traveling. I would have been good in that movie, The Fantastic Voyage, traveling through my own innards to try very hard to operate on myself, to fix things, and to make them right. Over time, that’s all there is, right?! It was about making things right.
I could not doctor on myself, ‘cause who does that? Doctors aren’t supposed to do that, I was told. What I could do was offer my brain and my body up. To make a sacrifice of myself, to make people proud at home. At this point, I didn’t feel anything, except shivery and embarrassed.
Another thing down in my bag under the bus was this knife that I had borrowed from my brother, Mylie. Okay, I had stolen it. He wasn’t going to use it in Med School. They had scalpels and stuff like that. Mylie’s deal was a whole different bag of worms.
Oh yeah, we were overachievers, Mylie and me. We had made it out of the Projects, out of the South Suburbs, and into our respective colleges. Mylie was four years ahead of me and had made it into Med School at the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle Campus. Maybe that was like a kiss-your-sister achievement, but it was an achievement. At least he didn’t have to go to Rangoon or some other faraway place where there still were witch doctors and leeches and whatnot. Mylie knew he wanted to be a doctor since he was four or five years old. Me, what the hell! I had no flippin’ idea at this point. Maybe I could cut my way out of Chicago, like some Roman demi-god, so the knife might come in handy. And I took Mylie’s knife because you never know when you might need some protection. Right now, I wish I had it on me instead of wrapped in my underwear in one of my bags down in the bus’s belly.
Knives were easy, any faux-ghetto gangster had a knife or a piece. I didn’t roll like that. What I didn’t have down there was a clue as to how I might do. I mean, I was pretty sharp, I knew, or at least that’s what everybody was always telling me. I could talk my way out of or into almost any situation; that’s what I was told – sometimes that worked, sometimes not so much. I was nowhere near the smartest kid in my class. When I told people where I was going to college, they would all say one of two things: “How did you get in there?” And, “You must be smart.” What the hell was I going to say, “I have no idea!” or, “No, they take people by drawing a lottery, and my luck was with me on that day.” Or, Thurston Howell-like “One never knows does one, Lovey. Our butler and maid, Braelsford and Hortense, did all of my typing and homework so that I could ride my polo ponies down at the club, My Dear.” In fact, in the auditorium where we were preparing for graduation, the top academic honor students, of which I was one, I guess, people turned and stared aghast when my name was called and where I would be traveling. And now the time was here…
In addition to projecting myself into cargo holds, I was also good at making most people feel comfortable. At least I had gotten good at making a lot of people feel comfortable around me. Yeah, old ladies still clutched their handbags when they got onto elevators or walked to the other side of the street whenever I was down some dark and lonely block, but hell, I had done the same thing when I saw a brother that looked like he might kick me in the face like Albert Lee did when we were both in sixth grade.
I had won over most people I met, like Mr. Clark, the District Superintendent, even though I knew that Mr. Menozi, the school’s Principal, hated me — with a capital HATE.
“How the hell you ever graduated from South Suburban Township High School is beyond me,” he said with a tight-lipped smile as he handed me my diploma.
I didn’t take it as an insult or anything. He said things like that all the time, especially to all of the Black kids, particularly to the ones he seemed to like the best. “How the hell you score that touchdown, Jennings? You are the slowest sum’bitch that ever laced ‘em up for us.” He always said with a smile like he was on our side, like he knew us. Maybe he did.
We knew better. Not too many years before, a person like Menozi had the power to hold us back with his beady little eyes and buzzcut on the side haircut, and a little dab’ll do you longer locks up top. Now, there were other white folks, dudes like Mr. Clark, who put their finger on the scale in a good way. South Suburban was rife with do-gooders, if you were smart or could dunk.
Doubters were good, I posited. People who doubted you either made you think of outdoing them, or they made you believe their point of view. Menozi was a guy who made you doubt yourself even on your best day. Sometimes just by the way he looked at you. Yet, I didn’t spend that much time with him or thinking about his lizard-looking ass. He sho’nuff looked like an iguana or something, with his scruffy-necked, beady-eyed, Tums-swilling butt-licking ass. Even on this day of escape where I felt warm in my gullet for everybody, I hated him. And there were lots and lots and lots of people on the far southside like him. I wouldn’t call him racist. But other people would!
Of all the twenty-something or other things that I did at South Suburban, the thing that got me through and won people over was my ability to stand and deliver. My world existed in the land of speech and debate, mostly speech and particularly mostly individual events. My strength as a person was in imagining alternate worlds (for myself) and talking the hell out of just about any topic you put in front of me. Mimic-ing and making fun. My jam! And I did every conceivable and inconceivable thing. From Neil Simon to Mary Chase to Shakespeare to Langston Hughes, I could battle with the best of ‘em. Stand and deliver. Dramatic Interp. Humorous Interp. Original Comedy. Hell yeah, I was funny to some. Cap on your ass like it was nobody’s business.
As I thought hard about what got me to this moment, I looked out the window and could see the New York Skyline looming ahead. It wasn’t funny that I felt not awe so much as fear. We had been on a bus or in a terminal somewhere for a solid day. I was beginning to get a little stir-crazy. Fugue-state and straight to daydreaming. Made me think of Aretha.
I peeked over at Mama, who was softly snoring. Usually a force, she seemed almost like she must have been when she was right out of high school. The cheerleader. Skipped two grades. No college for her. She was the marrying kind, especially after my grandpop died.
“Ma. Hey, Mama,” gently putting my hand on her shoulder. “Look. We almost in New York.”
Mama was sleeping, hard now, with the blanket pulled almost all the way over the top of her head. She sat up sudden-like at the mention of New York. She had regaled me and Mylie with the story of her and our father’s time in New York. Their “honeymoon,” she called it. How they had saved and saved and saved to go to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson after I was born. I was nine months old, probably hooked into one of them baby-bouncer things, safe and attached between the opening of the kitchen that bled into the living room, and Mylie was up on the second floor as the story goes, nearly five. Mama and Dad were just hugging Mymama good-bye, blowing kisses to me, as the story turns, when Mylie took off running from the top of the stairs. He fell head over feet, cascading down the cast iron stairs like a rag doll, not quite breaking his little neck. But almost – one/inch/more. I heard that story about a million times. How they thought he had broken his damned neck, and how they decided they would not to go to the hospital with him. That Mymama and her sister, Aunt Rayna, took him instead so that Mamma and Dad could still catch the train from Union Station so that they could get to New York to see Johnny Carson. Yet, it wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth all of the hassle at all. Not because they were worried about Mylie. He never figured that much into the conversation, at least he didn’t in the telling and retelling of the story. All he really got was a wisp of a scar on his chin. Maybe that’s why he always wanted to be a doctor – to take care of people like him who had nobody to take care of him.
Mama and Dad just missed Johnny and got Joey Bishop instead. Of course, now Mama makes it sound like she didn’t want to go because of Mylie and not knowing what was going to happen to him. But Mylie knew different. He thought about it every time he shaved or nicked the scar under his chin when he shaved.
She looked out the window, put her whole head back under the blanket this time, and went back to sleep.
I was back in my New York reverie. Who could sleep at a time like this? The thing that I thought and thought and thought about was Saturday Night Live. Since Mylie had been off these past four years at college, and Junious had lit out somewhere to the territories, we were way into TV. Correction, I was way into television. We loved TV and watched it religiously. Memorized lines and spit them back. Okay, that was me, but I could just as much see a show as I could read a book. I was an equal opportunity discriminator when it came to what to read or what to watch. I could remember when the Jackson Five were first on The Ed Sullivan Show.
“Here’s a group all the way from Gary, Indiana, that was discovered by Diana Ross. That Little Fella was good, wasn’t he, folks?”
I remember Michael Jackson singing some songs that were like James Brown or Four Tops kinds of songs, but he made it seem like it was just him and this little girl in his science class, like he was leaving her or she was leaving him at lunch or recess. I remember that like it was just yesterday, although I was just six when the Jackson Five were on television for the first time. The spins, the moves.
And now, like back then, I was making it to the land of stardom, making it to the world of television, or I was going to now. New York City. John Belushi. Dan Akroyd. Bill Murray. All those guys I grew up looking at on Saturday Night Live. Since I couldn’t sing, I certainly was told I was funny. I had good comedic timing.
Just then, the intercom came on, and the driver bellowed: “We’ll be arriving at Port Authority in twenty minutes.” Please do check around your seats at this time. We’ll be arriving shortly.”
With that, Mama woke up full force. I could tell that she was annoyed, waking up scalding mad like she did sometimes on a Saturday, when we was kids again, and being too loud. She probaby was remembering, once again, she didn’t want me to go so far away from home for college. Mylie graduated in June from Northwestern. I don’t ever remember her making a fuss about him leaving. Like she wanted him to leave. Mylie had gotten married in June. He was now not her worry now. He would have his own life. His own wife. Mylie was on his own. To her, I was the sickly child who crawled from behind the couch whenever I had an asthma attack. I vaguely remember that, but I just remember that she was never home when the worst ones came. Now, I was eighteen years old. I hadn’t had a bad asthma attack in over ten years, yet I was still this sickly child in her mind. The only fight we ever got into was over me going away to college. After getting my college interviewer, my high school counselor, and my speech teacher to intervene on my behalf, I was now headed off to Connecticut. But I had to make it out of New York City to get there.
The lights seemed to get stronger and stronger as we made our way over the George Washington Bridge. So, this was the George Washington Bridge, huh? Although it was like no other bridge that I had seen before in Chicago, it was like some weird Wizard of Oz Yellow Brick Road.
Before we knew it, we were in the bus terminal at Port Authority. As we got off the bus and waited for the driver to get our bags from underneath so that we could hustle our butts over to make our connector bus, I saw this group of men huddled over in the corner. Like that, my back was arched like a cat. Ready to fight or run my ass off. They were eyeing us eyeing them. It all seemed so confusing. Loud. Hot. I wondered if the Black people were different in New York. Or were they like the folks near Mymama’s house down on 71st Street in Chicago? I heard on TV, and those cop shows those Negroes cut an old lady’s throat for the piddly little three dollars that were in her pocketbook. Whatever they were peeping, I wasn’t going to find out about it. It was a standoff. I watched them as they watched us and as we walked slowly, making our way, looking for the big board to tell us what to do and where to go.
We entered the terminal scrunched pretty close to each other—like we was scared or something, which we was. I know that Mama and I were thinking the same thing. What on earth were we doing in New York? Why the hell would I have to go so far away from everything that I knew? That was a thought that I would get used to thinking.
What I knew more than anything else is that I hated being a quitter. I hated it more than just about anything. I stuck with things long after they had passed their prime or period of usefulness, or until the thing was ripe. I was going to stick—smelly or not, here I come.
A very tall man loped over to us from the bus bays four spots down, apparently from the huddle masses from over in the corner. As he approached, I instinctively stepped in front of Mama.
“Miss Eva, is that you?” We both tensed up like we had just been kicked.
“Who are you? How do you know…”
“I thought that was you getting off that bus! It’s me, Cedric. You remember, Cedric Hubbard. We went to Du Sable together. Remember?”
“Oh my god.” Mama dropped her defensive posture and gave him the biggest hug. Then, she took a step back. “Oh my god, man. Let me take a good look at you.”
“Eva. I swear this is a treat.” Cedric looked at Mama, then stepped back to take me in. “This must be Little Man’s son. Right? What’s your name, son?”
Mama saw the hesitation in my look. She released her bags and gestured over to me like she was introducing a stranger. “This here is Schaeffer.”
Cedric put out his hand and shook it with reverence. I could see now that he wasn’t just some bum off the street. By his nametag and Trailways’ emblem, he worked at Port Authority. He wasn’t huddled over a garbage can with the people who were going to stab us and rape us, he was just a supervisor giving orders to his men. “Look, boy, your mama was THE most beautiful girl at Du Sable High School. She still is.”
“Awww, Cedric.” When she blushed, she always put her hands up over her mouth to hide her teeth. I never knew why she did this because she had perfect teeth. “Have you been in New York since you left the service?”
“Yep, right here in the City that never sleeps.” Cedric put on the charm now. He laughed and cajoled. He told me how Mama was the prettiest of all of the fine cheerleaders at Du Sable and how he used to go to her daddy to get his haircut. That was before my grandfather died when my mother was fifteen. I can see that he was beginning to put the moves on Mama and we had just a slight layover here in New York before we had to get on the bus to go to New Haven.
“Mama, I’m going over there,” pointing to the big board, “to see where our next gate is. We have like twenty minutes before we have to board.”
“Okay. Okay. Cedric, it was so good to see you. Who would have guessed I would meet someone I knew from back home in New York?”
“Hey, Little Man? Now, it looks like you going to school somewhere up here.”
“He going to Yale.” I could hear the pride that was absent in her voice when I first got accepted.
I hustled our bags into the terminal. I was looking around, wary that someone would come along and try to snatch everything I owned before we had a chance to get it onto the bus. I had even heard about people who stood on the opposite side of the bus, waiting for the door to the belly of the bus to close. The thieves would just open up the door on the other side and snatch a bag from the many. Usually, the weakest person got his bag snatched, like thinning the herd. Well, I wasn’t going to be a sheep, not this time, at least.
We had to find the gate to the New Haven line. I looked up at the board that clicked clacked away, like at Union Station in Chicago. It was like someone was moving it with an invisible hand.
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We also had to haul ass to make it, or we would get left behind. There was no way I was going to get lost in New York like something out of a kid’s book. I didn’t want to be like that brother and sister that got lost in the museum. I realized that most of my references came from books and television as opposed to real life. In fact, I was fine with that.
On the way to Gate 47 to the Connecticut Limousine, which was not a real limousine carrying the family of dead people or famous people for TV, it was just another damn bus; we passed a lot of people just sleeping in the terminal. It was the beginning of the day, I knew, but there were more people than I had ever seen. “New York, just like I pictured it.” You could smell them as we passed. In fact, the whole terminal was like urine and hot garbage baking in the sun. Hot as it was in the terminal, and there was no air conditioning. It wasn’t anything like the bus or the movie musical Hair I had seen last summer. I imagined finding Berger and Claude Bukowski over in some corner with a bunch of hippies from Central Park or that band shell downtown somewhere.
“New Haven. New Haven. Last call for the bus to New Haven.”
“Wait. We are here. Don’t leave without us.”
“Hurry up then. We are just about to leave.”
I could see Mama rounding the corner. She was out of breath. I stopped and took a good look at her. If I looked like my Dad people told me all the time, 'Lil’man this and lil’man that’, then my brother looked like our Mother. She was short, about 5’2’’. Our Dad was about the same size. I imagined that they must have looked like the perfect wedding cake couple when they were married. They weren’t just handsome; they were beautiful. That’s one thing that I prided myself on: “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” My mother made her way down the Port Authority corridor, and she was still very pretty; I imagine that someone like Cedric would think. But the years with Junious weren’t easy. Junious was the man who became our stepfather. Technically, he was Dad’s cousin. Just about everybody was related to someone in our town. Yet, that had been a scandal. Mama had fallen for Dad’s older and more worldly cousin. As she came closer, we both could breathe. We had made it. As she came even closer, I could tell that she had been crying.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Just…nothing.”
“It’s got to be something,” I handed the bus driver our bags. He also wore a nametag with “Melendez” in the fancier script than “Cedric,” a non-uniform uniform.
“Tip the man,” Mama changing the subject to stop me and her from boo-hooing.
Of course, I knew why she was sad. I knew why all of these nights leading up to my leaving, why she cried herself to sleep every night over the sounds of The Tonight Show.
I tried not to notice, like when I was at home. I turned up the sound on the TV, Three’s Company, WKRP, One Day at a Time, a little louder each time. Imperceptible at first, I reached over and would click, click, click the channels so that she was thinking I was turning the channels and the sound would suddenly go way up with the clicking. I knew what I was doing. I was drowning her out. I couldn’t drown her out in the bus station.
“Let’s go,” she snapped the coin purse shut with the dollar in her hand that she gave to me to give to Melendez.
I don’t even remember sitting down in my seat in the so-called Connecticut Limousine, let alone going or falling asleep. I was damned tired. I awoke to…
“New Haven, folks.” The bus driver’s voice sounded more conspiratorial, talking low and slow like he was barking orders at us. “Make sure you look up top and down below to make sure that you have retrieved everything that you brought on board.”
New Haven came up before I knew it. I had sticky eye boogers all down my face. I could feel it. I saw everything as if it were new. I must have fallen asleep after not being able to get much sleep the twenty-six hours prior to our arrival.
I could see the red-bricked buildings towering over downtown, like I imagined I would see in Philadelphia, hemmed in like. There must be a thousand churches in this town, I thought. “Goddamn,” under my breath.
“My name is Luis and on behalf of Trailways, it has been a pleazure serving you. Safe travels wherever your journey may lead you.” This dude was way overdoing it, I thought.
“Do we have to tip him again, or just this time… Dang!” I always said mean smack whenever I woke up. It was mean to even to me.
“Schaeffer!”
“We just have…I don’t….We have to think about these things, or we gonna be tipping everybody.”
How wrong I was. We didn’t have to tip everybody. I was astounded at how normal everyone looked. They looked in New Haven as if they were getting off of work in the Loop downtown Chicago, except I didn’t see no women in their sneakers like those folks getting off the IC Train. From the bus window, they could have been people from South Suburban. I mean, there were some long hairs, and a few afros, but there were also the greaser-type dudes with the long chains from their belts. The girls with the pearls and white blouses. Everybody looked – normal.
They dropped us off right in front of this massive gate that looked like it belonged in Medieval times. There were tons of kids and their families streaming up to the “Old Campus Gate,” getting out of the limo that wasn’t a limo. Some of the limos looked like long station wagons, and some of them looked like buses, like ours. Maybe everything was mislabeled.
I had come sight unseen. I’m not sure how many people were like me and had never seen the school they were going to. I imagined I was the only one.
“See,” Mama leaned over to me.
“What?”
“You weren’t the only one who came with their mother.”
She was right. Everybody had their mother, father, sister, brothers, and grandmothers in tow. Some of the mothers were as old as grandmothers, I could see. I mean sixty or seventy-year-olds. I couldn’t believe that people that old were having kids—or twenty years before. My mother seemed to be one of the youngest.
We entered through the gate as if we were traveling back in time.
Looking at Mama looking at my new classmates, I could tell that she was thinking what I was thinking, ‘This is not what I expected.’
It was like one of those Where’s Waldo? Books with hundreds of would-be Waldos. There was a ball sport or stick sport or Frisbee sport for everybody. It was like dodging through some sports closet, a funky clothes-wearing montage that someone just opened up to this particular page in the book.
There were these older-looking students who were carting stuff for some of the more fragile-looking kids. Freshmen. Our two suitcases were bulky. Mama had the smaller of the two. Every twenty feet or so, I had to change hands and change grips. Mama also had the three shopping bags. I had one big bag that had my stuff and her stuff. I also shipped some things to myself. They would be here by the middle of the week.
We walked, mouths open wide, seemed like, across real cobblestone-looking pathways; we were told they were flagstone, whatever the hell that was, got my room key from a place that was a Chapel, and then there was the police station – they had their own police! – was inside of the gate we came into, which I had not much noticed until later. I felt like I had arrived in some behind-the-scenes of The Carol Burnett Show or the White House. It was like we were on the inside. Finally, on the inside, I know that’s what we were both thinking.
As I made it across the wide expanse of a field, the Old Campus, with fences and no gates. They were just decorative but looked like they had been here for centuries. Perhaps they had.
A little gnomish guy made a beeline right to us, spittle at the crease of his mouth, saying, “You must be Schaeffer. Am I right? Right!”
Mama and I looked at each other. This was my Cedric Hubbard moment.
“Yeah?” I sang upwards, like, ‘Who wants to know?’
“I’m Abner. Abner Moscow. Just like the city in Russia. But I ain’t Russian!” He smiled with his eyes. “I’m your freshman resident advisor!”
He said it like he just finished the punchline of a joke that was hysterical only to him, cracking himself up without laughing. Abner looked like an Abner. I had heard of Abner Doubleday, the guy who invented baseball or did something with baseball. This guy had one of those ski-type hats on the crown of his head. In the middle of a heatwave, a ski hat without the little ball on top. He also had round John Lennon glasses, a jean jacket, and a perpetual smile that was almost a laugh on his face. It was like I wanted in on the joke.
“You’re from Chicago. My Pappa’s family is from Skokie. Chicago Jews.”
I didn’t know what to say about that, but Abner just laughed in real time this time. It was like he was used to making people laugh by making himself crack up.
“I don’t like them though.” Again, that laugh on his face belied some sad-looking eyes this time. “Don’t worry, they don’t like me either.” A long guffaw, goose-honking made it out of him this time.
With that, he took my big suitcase and one of Mama’s shopping bags.
“Hey, I mean,” I tried warding him off, but he grabbed my bag before I could get a word in edgewise. That was okay because my arms were tired. I wasn’t used to doing a lot of heavy lifting. I took the other smaller bag from Mama as she wrestled with the plastic shopping bags.
“Follow me.” He turned on his heels. We did what he told us to do.
Across the thrown balls, discs, and Waldo-y sixties’ clothes, we made it up four flights of stairs in Lawrence Hall – the A entryway, we were told. Abner must have been a slave in another life. I found out that he was definitely into serving other people. He practically raced up the stairs like one of them Tenzing guides I saw on National Geographic once.
As he dug around inside a tiny manila key envelope, Abner solemnly handed me something sacred. The answer. He presented my key as if he was knighting me.
“For God. For Country. And, for Yale.” You are now an Eli, my friend. Use your power for good, Dorothy.”
Again, Mama and I just stared at him, then at each other. The three of us just busted out laughing at that. We got that reference. We all yelped and howled with laughter, like the air whistling loudly out of a taut balloon.
That’s when I knew everything would be much of the same, with a lot of laughing but the joke’s on me. I had no idea what the hell had just happened. A gnomish little dude took our bags as we made our way halfway across the country to be inducted into some strange ritual that maybe someday I might understand—or not.