A beautifully spirited, slender light complexioned man with a Camel Menthol in his mouth and a pimp hat on his head helped raise me. In between his relapses he was the coolest thing walking. But when he did relapse on crack, he didn’t go to a rehabilitation center in Sonoma County, they sent his high yellow ass to San Quentin on a parole violation. This was the year 1989, way before Hunter Biden made the image of the family crackhead a brilliant yet flawed and ultimately sympathetic figure.
My mother’s family came straight from Arkansas to the Filmore district as teenagers and then eventually moved to East Oakland where they could afford to raise their own families. My Uncle, stubborn as he was, refused to ever claim The Town. He never lost his city energy. His words came out a half beat faster, and he kept a determined gait. Unlike the average Oaklander who was much more chill, he always walked like he had somewhere important to be—even when he was going nowhere.
We would get on the BART Train at Coliseum Station and get off at Embarcadero. He took me on the bus downtown with him to run errands and we went to Candlestick Park to watch the Giants play. The lineup starred Kevin Mitchell and Will Clark. It was the year of the big earthquake. It was the year the Giants got swept by the A’s in the World Series as well, and all my classmates playfully teased me because I was raised to root for San Francisco. I tried to defend my team like my uncle did. He always stood tall. He never lost a verbal spat to anyone. He spoke to me—which in retrospect is very odd—like I was a man, but he looked after me like I was a child. He helped me tie my shoes while telling me about hoes he used to pimp. It was so bizarre.
Everything in the 1980s was really strange. I don’t think we, as a society, had established what inappropriate truly meant. Indeed, it was the last generation where children were able to buy cigarettes for their parents. It was totally normal to see four kids and a dog in the bed of a pickup truck doing 70 mph on the 580 freeway. And we actually thought the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit was suitable for kindergartners because it had cartoons in it. Have you seen Jessica Rabbit’s titties popping out of her dress? It was wild fam. But anyway, back to my uncle.
I saw him when he had $1,000 in his pocket and wore $1,000 Gator dress shoes on his feet. I saw him when he had tickets to the Giants game, and when he had enough bread to send me and my cousins to the store with a $20 bill to get him some Camel cigarettes and let us keep the change. When he relapsed though, he became the invisible man.
The television and all of the furniture went missing from my grandmother’s house one day while she was gone, yet no police report was ever filed. We all knew what happened. He stopped coming over on Sundays to eat with the family after church. He even stayed gone on his own birthday. The grownups spoke around him on Holidays. They let his shoe collection get dusty in the backroom of the house. I suppose we all prayed for him, but we kept our prayers between ourselves and God. We refrained from speaking his name out loud, except for a few of my other uncles who said that they were going to beat his ass when they saw him for stealing from Mama. I knew they didn’t mean it though, and I’m pretty sure they knew it too.
One overcast Sunday afternoon while the family was over my grandmother’s house the phone rang, and she answered it. “Yes, I accept the charges.” We all looked at her from our respective spots in the kitchen. And we watched as our strong black matriarch began to cry.