Seeking Salamanca Mitchell

1. If the soul of our neighborhood were the sun, then I would have been on the planet Neptune, close enough to circle its comings and goings, but never in range of its true warmth. My face, a younger version of my father's, was as familiar to people as a grade school classmate's, remembered more from repetition than from any real noteworthiness. I received only casual nods and flippant waves as I passed by the dudes that mattered, the ones who had their names and streets silk-screened onto summer shirts so that everyone would know where they hailed from. Keith McEwan and his cousin Monty owned the hoops and backboards outside of the Greenleaf Projects. Phaedra Sanders and her little brother, Justin, were two of the founding members of a crew called the Capers, who in 1991 had turned a private party into a bucket of blood at the Southwest Navy Yard, just because the host wouldn't let them in. And I can't forget Tremayne Jackson, who'd robbed the local Safeway supermarket at gunpoint a record five consecutive times in the same year without getting caught. Then he got hit with a case for boosting bras for his girlfriend out of the Pentagon City Victoria's Secret. But I was not like them. Because I was my father's child. I was never allowed to wander the night, never permitted to forge bonds with those whose parents let them play unsupervised until the early morning. Most of my sanctioned outings were to my best friend Stevie's house, over on the safe side of the Waterfront's solar system. I knew nothing of risk, nothing of true danger, other than the echoes of screams and gunfire that came to my window while I slept like a baby. I was neither the hero of a rap lyric nor one who had been schooled in the code of the streets. But I wanted to be. And the desire to obtain something is often all that one needs for its acquisition. "And now he don't even know where she is," Kevin said with a chuckle to his audience, the twelve or thirteen impatiently waiting regulars planted in the chairs that stretched along the length of the barbershop and salon. It was a Saturday afternoon, the last of the four in August 1995. The heat that summer had been so insufferable that one city garbage truck had gone up in flames after its fuel tank spontaneously exploded. "Ain't that some shit, Junior?" he asked, turning his pug nose in my direction. "Yeah," I mumbled, less focused on his words than on the melody crawling through my skull. I needed to write it down. But it'd have to wait. There was too much going on. "Goes to show you how little folks care about marriage nowadays," I replied. "That shit is supposed to be sacred." The smell of oil sheen lingered heavy in the air as the signal came in clear on Kevin's stereo. D'Angelo's "Brown Sugar" made me think of my lady as I let out a yawn. I knew everything Kevin was about to say. "I remember back when I was a young buck," he began, as if on cue. Roger and Edward, his co-owners and partners in crime, went completely quiet. Roger, a burly brown-skinned man with a thin line of a goatee, busied himself putting the finishing touches on a high-top fade his customer was in desperate need of losing. And Edward, a peanut-colored kid with a huge Afro, kept to shaving an older man with a glob of cream and a pearl-handled straight razor. Barely five six, he leaned on the balls of his feet for the best positioning. The other barbers' silence had less to do with the heads and necks before them and more with the hope that Kevin's rambling might end more quickly without their encouragement. But like love, that hope was a blind one. "See, I was shackin' up with this Indian girl down in Georgia. And I had just got out the marines. And you know one day the girl come out at the dinner table, with her two kids sittin' there eatin' a buckeJasper, Kenji is the author of 'Seeking Salamanca Mitchell', published 2004 under ISBN 9780767916752 and ISBN 0767916751.