Rapscallion Days
by Richard Grayson
1.
Hugging.
I am hugging Kareem.
I am hugging Kareem because he is my best friend.
I am hugging Kareem because he has made law school.
I am hugging Kareem because I am so happy for him and because it feels like the thing to do.
Tina, another friend, is smiling as she watches me hug Kareem. She thinks: oh fuck, I don’t see people hug like that enough.
Tina is seven months pregnant.
2.
Kareem’s grandmother worked for rich people downtown. One night at a party, a man with red hair came into the master bedroom and raped her on the bed while all the coats were still on it. Kareem’s grandmother did not cry out while he fucked her. She was only the maid. The man told Kareem’s grandmother his name was Ray, like Ray Charles. Then he went back to the party. Kareem’s mother was very light-skinned.
The man Kareem called his grandfather died when he was four. He lived mostly with his grandmother even then. His grandmother overprotected Kareem. Kareem was on the swimming team in high school and won a couple of medals, but to this day Kareem’s grandmother insists he cannot swim.
3.
Tina and Kareem and I are driving in my car to the Slope, where Tina’s obstetrician’s office is. Tina is not sure she wants the baby. She got carried away at some party. I think she wishes she hadn’t gone to that party, but now it is too late.
My care needs new shock absorbers but I can’t afford them. Tina and Kareem and I feel every bump – especially Kareem, who sits in the back seat. He tells Tina she should sit in the back seat in her ninth month and I giggle. I have locked the seatbelt under Tina because it cannot go over her pregnant lap.
Kareem tells Tina that if she does not want the baby, he will take it and will raise it himself. Being a single father would not be that hard, Kareem thinks. He would do what his grandmother did.
“Fuck you,” Tina tells Kareem.
4.
Many years ago Tina spent a night at her grandmother’s house. That week her grandmother discovered a large sum of money that she kept in the master bedroom was missing.
Tina’s grandmother never accused her directly, but she implied to Tina’s parents that Tina had stolen her savings. When her parents questioned her, Tina cried her eyes out. She never touched or took anything from there. But since Tina had slept over there and no one else did, everyone doubted her.
Two years after that, Tina’s grandmother died at 81. Her mother asked Tina to attend the funeral, but with such a past, Tina just couldn’t. Besides, she did not want the family to know the fuck about the kind of life she was living.
5.
After her appointment with the obstetrician, Tina feels depressed. She has a bad headache. Kareem, who is still jubilant over making law school, says we should all drive down to Fulton’s for ice cream sodas. I start to drive there. On the way there, Tina says she isn’t at all hungry.
At Fulton’s, I order a coffee ice cream soda. Kareem orders a black-and-white. Tina giggles and decides to order a strawberry float but barely touches it. I give her a Datril for her headache, but she says it does not do her any fucking good.
Afterwards we go to Kareem’s apartment. It is Friday afternoon. We watch television and see a plane crash. Kareem takes Tina and hugs her. Then Kareem hugs me. Then I hug Tina, although not too tightly because I am afraid I might hurt the baby. I think kissing her is okay.
Kareem asks Tina if she still has a headache.
“I can’t remember,” Tina says, “not with all this going on.”
6.
When we are alone, Kareem says he bets that Tina’s baby will be a real rapscallion. I laugh, but then I admit it.
“Entre nous,” I say, “what the fuck is a rapscallion? A talking vegetable?”
“No, no,” says Kareem. Now he is laughing. “It’s a rascal, a rogue, a scamp. You’ve never heard the word?”
I shake my head no.
“I’ve known it since second grade,” Kareem tells me. “It was a word in my reader in a story about a raccoon. When I came home and used the word, my grandmother said I was making it up, that there was no such word. It bummed me out that she didn’t believe me.”
Kareem looks wistful. Wistful is a word I hardly ever use.
“Oh, she didn’t mean anything by it,” I tell him, then wonder if that was a dumbfuck thing to say. “What does it matter? You’re going to law school and you’ve got a big vocabulary.”
“Not just a vocabulary,” Kareem says, and the two of us start laughing like fucking idiots.
7.
I ask Tina why she doesn’t try to find out if the baby will be a boy or a girl.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, not really listening. “Either way I’m fucked.”
Tina is thinking of being a in a junior high school production of The King and I. She cried every night when the king died at the end of the play even though she was just a Siamese princess in the chorus. She also cried every time the king’s head wife sang the song “Something Wonderful.”
8.
Kareem calls me up to invite me to go ice-skating with him. I tell him I can’t, that I have to write a paper for my English class on carpe diem.
“Oh,” Kareem says. “The Vietnamese dictator.”
Kareem knows how to make me laugh. “You know very well it means ‘seize the day,’” I tell him. His vocabulary is huge.
“Right on,” Kareem says. “I’ll be over in ten minutes to pick you up. And be sure to have on a heavy sweater. It’s fucking cold tonight.”
9.
I met Kareem in high school. They transferred me there because the school needed more white students to get beat up. A bus took me there and picked me up. None of us white kids could drive but we wouldn’t have known how to get to the school even if we could. We never looked out the bus window.
I used to get depressed because I was the only white boy in my official class. So I used to stay out of school. One time I stayed out of school two weeks and said I had colitis. But I was really wandering the subway system, eating donuts.
When I finally returned to school because my parents fucking made me, Kareem handed me a get-well card with a funny saying. This made me feel guilty because I hadn’t really been sick.
I started coming to school more often and I started becoming Kareem’s best friend. To this day he still thinks I had colitis. Every once in a while he says something about how good it is that I don’t have it any more and I get uncomfortable.
But now there’s no point in telling him the truth.
10.
I am Irish, like the man who raped Kareem’s grandmother.
After we drink a pitcherful of beer, Tina tells me that she sometimes wishes that Kareem were the father of her baby. She says not to say anything, but sometimes she has fantasies about it. She and the baby could go to law school with Paul and take care of him and laugh at his lame jokes.
I tell Tina to accept fucking reality. She asks me for another Datril.
11.
Months pass.
Tina has her little girl, and it is not too unhealthy. Tina goes home to live with her mother. The father of baby actually comes around one day and offers to marry Tina, but she never liked him and says no.
Kareem goes away to law school and I take over his apartment. He leads a pretty monastic life, he tells me, spending many hours in the law library briefing cases for class. Talking to Kareem and reading his letters aren’t as good as seeing him in person. The last time we talked, he assured me that Tina’s daughter will grow up to be a rapscallion.
I write Tina and Kareem that maybe all three of us (now all four, including the baby) can get together for Christmas. Tina writes that she is going to take the baby to Florida instead. They have both been ill and are tired and the warm weather will do them both a world of good. Kareem writes back that he wishes he could make it, but he has already accepted an invitation to spend the holidays with his new girlfriend from law school. He doesn’t mention the girlfriend’s name. Kareem says he will give me a call soon.
After I finish my schoolwork, I go to Fulton’s and have a coffee ice cream soda. But it doesn’t taste any fucking good. They must be using a cheaper kind of ice cream.
This story was, in a somewhat different form, first published in Hanging Loose 37, Spring 1980. Copyright © 2006 Richard Grayson
Richard Grayson is the author of the short story collections With Hitler in New York, Lincoln's Doctor's Dog, I Brake for Delmore Schwartz, I Survived Caracas Traffic, The Silicon Valley Diet, Highly Irregular Stories and the forthcoming Dear Brain and And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street. He also wrote Diary of a Congressional Candidate in Florida's Fourth Congressional District, an account of his 2004 campaign which originally appeared online at McSweeney's. His nonfiction has appeared in People, The New York Times, The Miami Herald, The San Jose Mercury News and The Arizona Republic. Recently retired, he lives in Phoenix and Brooklyn.