Mayhem on Old Cutler
Ray needed drugs and we needed an escape from the heat
Granny’s voice was unmistakable as we pulled into her driveway.
“You son of a bitch, Tim!”
Yes, this was the house where my mother grew up, and this was the point of origin for the family’s lunacy.
Fluorescent orange shutters stung my eyes as Mom, Ray, and I made our way up the concrete steps.
The dilapidated one-story home sat tucked away on a forgotten part of Old Cutler Road.
My mother dragged us here because our air conditioner had stopped working and the electric fans were only sending the heat back to us.
There were only two, and they were missing their protective shields. The plastic blades were cracked or bent, transforming the air in the trailer (what little there was of it) into an efficient convection oven.
Either we had to go to Granny Friel’s or we had to watch each other cook to death.
A knitted doormat, green and frayed, lay on Granny’s front step. An owl was embroidered in the center, with the cheery words: “Hoo’s there?”.
Granny went through phases of buying specific animals depicted in arts and crafts.
For a few years she was very much into cows. From light switch covers and salt and pepper shakers, to paintings and oversized shirts, everything was bovine themed.
I recognized that owls must have been the new trend as I stepped onto the mat, watching the brown rainwater ooze from its sides.
Behind me, I saw Ray digging in the backseat of the car. He had joined us for the trip to Granny’s because there was something he needed to talk to my uncle about.
“Hey,” he hollered to my Mom. “Ray is comin’, baby!”
He emerged from between the two trailers and pushed his way past the makeshift clothesline and the dried-out shrubbery to scream at us.
“Tim owes me money! Scoot over! I’m driving!”
My mother parked and obliged, hopping over the console and into the fully (and permanently-reclined) passenger seat.
The locking mechanism of the chair had busted after Ray tried to jam a patio door into our car.
“Chingarrr, it shoulda fit,” he told us, as he handed my mother the keys to the broken car.
“Chingar” was a word Ray used a lot. Ray would also slip in the word “chit” or “chitty” for no reason but to fill space in his choppy English.
My mother screamed as she reached back to try and prop the seat up on my brother’s knees. “Come on, Ray!”
Our beat-up station wagon was a Cutlass Cruiser … beige, with a fresh coat of rust and a splotchy white line running down its sides.
The old car had been sold to us by Ci Ci, a housekeeper in the park — a friend of my Mom’s.
Ci Ci was a sweet black woman from Haiti — rail-thin and in her sixties, but she bounced around the park with a lot of energy.
“Dat’s Island Life, ya?” she would say to me with a wink.
Oddly enough, given my mother’s behavior and general demeanor, Ci Ci loved her.
She hated Ray. She hated Ray with a visceral passion. She would respond to him the same way every time they crossed paths.
“It’s Ci Ci!”
Then, as if to a village idiot, she’d enunciate it more clearly.
“Seeee! Seeee!”
Ray would snap back.
“That’s what I’m sayin’! Cheeee! Cheeee!”
Ci Ci was the correct version.
Ray did not have a lisp. He just could not say her name right for some reason. It hit the ear wrong and it bugged me too.
The real reason she hated him, though, was because he lived in the trailer next to hers and had been stealing her electricity for years by the time she caught him walking an extension cord out of her patio.
After she started to yell at him, he dropped the cord and simply ran off.
They never spoke of the incident again, not that there was anything that could have been said to remedy it.
The ugly station wagon idled when Ray leaped into the car through the driver side window, landing with a sweaty thud. It was impressive. It was also pointless.
Once, we’d had a Honda Civic that had a kicked in door which wouldn’t open. You had to crawl in through the window to drive the car.
This was not that car though.
Nevertheless, Ray leapt into the car like a drunk acrobat. No one even seemed to notice.
My mother waved at Mrs. Grandly, watering her weeds, and my brother stared out the window with the dazed look of a mental patient. No one cared that Ray was suddenly inside the car.
I stuck my head between their seats.
Cheap stuffing oozed out of the cracked leather of the headrests like open gashes bleeding cotton. The jagged edges scraped my cheeks.
“That was AWESOME, Ray!” I shouted. I was always entertained by him.
Ray acknowledged the compliment.
“Thanks Gregorio! Mi gaudito! Chit, I love you.”
***
Ray’s movements were shaky this morning — jumpy. We stood at the front door to my grandmother’s home as Ray rattled on about the rotting Mango tree that drooped over the crooked stoop.
“It needs water and chit. Cat chit works Gregorio. It does. Hey Gregorio. Escucheme (listen to me). Chit.”
I ignored him. He spoke in scattered, mostly rhetorical conversations, half of them slurred like he had suffered a stroke — the drugs were wearing off.
He was going to be in rare form tonight with my uncle.
Keep Reading to find out Who Murdered the Monkey…
Catch the RACE from the Beginning!
“Chasing Crazy”
