That’s My Son!
My mother meets the forearm of airport security
Dadeland South was the last stop on the Miami city train.
Commuters from the trailer park (tired motel maids, construction workers, hospital orderlies) would then have to walk another mile with their heads down against US1 traffic, to make it home.
The other option would be to take the canal banks and weave through the path of discarded and rusting shopping carts, or the rat-infested garbage bags, which seemed to set the perimeter of the park neighborhood.
If one were to walk a mere ten miles past that nightmare, they would enter the un-zoned district of Palmetto — a crime infested region where my uncle bought drugs.
I had been on one of these trips with him in the past.
I was six or seven when he had asked if I wanted to come for a ride (it was during a sleepover at my grandmother’s, where I’d try to stay up the latest).
We pulled down an indistinct alley at 2:00 am.
The abodes lining the eerie street weren’t trailers. They were small houses, dilapidated and mostly abandoned — beer cans and debris on the lawn.
Uncle Tim turned the headlights off but left the car running.
Cocaine made most people skinny. My uncle Tim took it a different route.
He was a large man. He was five-foot-six and well over three hundred pounds. He struggled to get out of the door, moaning back at me like a busted accordion.
“They call this street the ‘Hot Zone’. Gregory, you never come here without me. The police won’t even come here. So lock the doors, buddy.”
I was asleep by the time he got back in the car, just as the sun was rising over the spilling dumpsters and discarded sofa.
He jumped in the car with much more oomph than he had had several hours prior.
“Wanna get some breakfast at McDonald’s?”
I picked up the dirty phone outside the airport and called my mother collect, to let her know I was about to board my flight back to Miami.
I had been sent by plane to Washington D.C. to spend a week with my father while Hurricane Andrew tore through Southern Florida.
I began to speak loud into the phone.
“Why do you keep talking about Palmetto? I know where Palmetto is. Why?”
She didn’t acknowledge the question. Nor did she acknowledge the fight that she got in with my uncle for once taking me to Palmetto, or the “black neighborhood”, as she called it, to buy drugs.
My mother responded with a child’s tone.
“Oh good! It’s going to be a new start kiddo!”
The Palmetto topic arose because this was where my mother somehow stumbled into an apartment after Hurricane Andrew hit.
She lived directly next door to my Uncle Tim, who had been forced to leave my granny’s.
The flight back to Miami only took about three hours but I was exhausted by the time we landed. I was nervous about seeing my mother.
When I exited the plane, I kept at a steady pace with the herd of other passengers making our way down the long corridor leading to “Baggage Claims”.
I only had a backpack but I followed the crowd as they seemed to know where they were going.
There was a faint commotion in the distance, which was sounding more and more like muffled yelling.
As we got closer, the sound started to become familiar.
It was a woman’s voice and she was involved in some sort of confrontation but I couldn’t put my finger on the reason that this concert of sounds rang familiar.
The other passengers could now hear the commotion as well, as we all searched amongst ourselves to find some sort of answer behind it.
One man looked over at me while I shook my head and smiled as if agreeing with him…
“Only in Miami, right?”
The moment we shared, as two sane people, two normal people who had just de-boarded a plane to get home to our normal families … came to a sobering halt as I realized why I knew that sound.
It was her.
I mumbled under my breath as my confident march slowed to an uncomfortable amble that left me looking lost and confused.
My eyes darted up to the ceiling to stare at the elaborate paintings of pelicans and seagulls.
I studied every brush stroke in order to put off the inevitable for as long as possible.
The noise was gaining a face.
Then I saw her.
My mother was being pinned against a brick wall by a heavyset, black female security guard.
“It’s because I’m white, isn’t it? You hate me because I’m white!”
The woman wore a tight-fitting uniform, and beads of sweat were forming across her brow. She was now holding my mother in a bear hug.
“Ma’am, you cannot go past this gate without a ticket.”
My mother didn’t need a shit boarding ticket to see her own motherfucking son.
By now, everyone had gathered around the spectacle.
Her eyes caught mine. I looked sideways as fast as possible, hoping she wouldn’t make the connection.
“That’s my son!”
My mother gave a horrifying gasp as her eyes locked in on me from underneath the sleeper hold that she was being held in. She began to wriggle her arms out. Then she screamed louder.
“That’s my son, that’s my SON!”
I remained calm and tried to blend in with the other travelers. I focused on the sliding doors just past my mother who was now spitting at the guards, enraged because her thumbs were restrained behind her.
At this point, I wasn’t thinking of the lack of transportation from the airport because I would have willingly walked home on my hands if I could just have made it a few more feet to the doors.
My adrenaline was pumping hard now as I walked side by side with an old woman who had sat beside me in the plane.
She was talking to me. It was gibberish to my ears — white noise. But I only needed her babbling to continue long enough for me to slip by.
Keep talking lady.
“There he is. That’s my son!!”
My mother was waving now. Escape was no longer an option.
Hundreds of pairs of eyes shot over to me.
It was apparent that I was the other side of this insane equation. I was no longer an ordinary traveler.
I was her son.
NEXT UP…Driving down the freeway with a mentally ill person…
Feel free to start at the Beginning of the RACE:
CHASING CRAZY!
