JUST INSIDE THE DOOR
Jordan, June
JUST INSIDE THE DOOR June Jordan Stories of a Visitor Pierce stands about six-three. He looks like a linebacker. He's big. He's smiling at me. He laughs out loud like a happy man. Most days he...
...She put up with him when (I have to admit it, and I'm his brother) I would just walk on out the door...
...He works fast...
...A couple hours just looking at that beautiful (I mean I can't begin to describe to you how beautiful, except it's like whoooshhhhh...
...Before Budget, he worked for a San Francisco tourist attraction restaurant, as the chef...
...And, for myself, and for the rest of us, I'm thinking, like he said: "It's our time to...
...Yeah, but you know what...
...And his wife...
...So, anyway, this new year I'm rooting for Pierce...
...and all around you the same way...
...Everything so beautiful you don't want to breathe too loud...
...She the most beautiful, the most generous woman...
...This morning he comes to my house ready to clean the living-room rug...
...by which he means anything all the way from my sticky door to a new model VCR he must take apart and figure out or how to hand-carry and install plate glass without getting glass or blood all over everything...
...He stay depressed...
...Especially given the fact of the drugs he like to do...
...I hope he gets that promotion...
...Check that out: alive!' "And then I change the subject, or keep it going in a new direction or sometimes I go over and I pick him up when I'm taking the neighborhood kids out fishing or down to the basketball courts and little by little I think he gets the point: Be alive...
...wash the outside windows, fix a sticky door, and tell me stories...
...It's your time.' " And what Pierce likes almost as much as his 1992 Acura Vigor, which he originally leased from his ex-girlfriend who, when he broke up with her, said, "No...
...But she put up with him...
...He's huge...
...Like I was telling my brother—-he used to be the skinny one when I was heavyweight into food and not doing much of anything else, but, now, he have this stomach out to here, and if I take him to the gym, the other guys ask: "What's that supposed to be?!' pointing to his waistline, which you can't see no more, due to the fact that mv brother is very depressed...
...whoooshhhhhf), and you can feel something happen inside you so nice you don't never want to forget nothing about it...
...First off is the fact that he may be promoted to supervisor because "my attitude is, like, why not be positive...
...what Pierce likes almost as much as that pearly black Acura Vigor is the unbelievably good food his current lady puts on the table day after day, including lemon pies and serious gumbo and sweet sweet potatoes...
...If anybody can convert a Budget Rent-A-Car into a Cadillac experience of sweet sweet potato delight, he can: Pierce is the man...
...You alive...
...Or, like I say to him, 'Kick in, man...
...Pierce is big...
...He works hard...
...almost as much as that Acura Vigor, which, where he lives in East Oakland, looks like must be a set-up for somebody too stupid to know a set-up when you looking at it parked and pretty as can be next to the broke-down sidewalk...
...And what Pierce likes almost as much as that is what he calls "challenges...
...she couldn't afford the payments, so he could keep it, so he did...
...Most days he works for Budget Rent-A-Car, earning maybe $6 an hour...
...What have I got to lose...
...And at the end of the day he's running around athletic, or at the end of the week he likes to drive his special lady to this special spot he knows about over in the next county: off the map and kept a secret, this spot, Pierce says, is so beautiful that "it don't matter what you worrying about or what you think you should be worrying about, you just get out the car [the Acura Vigor], and walk maybe a hundred feet and boom\ You in another world...
...what Pierce likes June Jordan, the poet, is professor of African-American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, June Jordan, the poet, is professor of African-American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley...
...And I will drag him aside and try to talk him back to someplace he can deal from but he be saying how we was beat when we was little kids (you know, abused), and how momma didn't do this and didn't do that, or whatever, and there wasn't no money, to tell you the truth, and things was hard and he got hurt pretty bad and me, too, and all of that and I just listen and I listen and I say...
Vol. 60 • February 1996 • No. 2
