Chartrain would be our savior. A Knoxville man born and bred, street genius, guiding light. We would not be aware of any of this for some while. Don you go no mofuckin Beaumont, boi, my bruh got kilt dae, fa real dey gone show you what dey got, Chartrain would tell us, and we would nod our heads as one. If at’n up air don make ye wood burn, ain’t naught will, we would say to him. At some point around six months in, we made contact. All good after that.
Chartrain explained that city people don’t look each other in the eye because they’re saving their juice. A person has only so much juice, and it’s ideally kept for your homeboys, not all pissed away on strangers before three in the day. Simple as that sounds, it was a game changer for me. I taught myself to save the juice. It’s a skill, like weight training, you do reps. Tell yourself ten times each night, don’t spend your juice on those sirens, worrying about the life screaming past on its way to getting tanked. Don’t spend it on the customers around you at Walmart Supercenter, just do your job without feeling the madness or sadness, the moms on the brink of snatching their kids bald-headed. The carts loaded with cases of PBR and Pampers. The carts with nothing but off-brand beans and marked-down stale bread. Not even on the guy I watched once while I rounded up carts, outside in the parking lot, trying to stuff his huge armload of pink birthday balloons into his hatchback, damning them to goddamn hell as they kept bobbing back out in his face, finally pulling a coping blade out of his pocket and stabbing every balloon but one. He slammed the hatch and drove off with it, home to some sad, one-balloon birthday girl, and I confess to spending some juice on her. Rehab possibly in her future.
Chartrain didn’t fully follow his own advice, he gave of himself freely, but it worked out because he had more juice than any normal human. He’d been a star athlete in his formative years, and it’s not something I’d planned to talk about again, but we ended up bonding over high school sports. Chartrain was basketball, already the A-team shooting guard as a freshman, averaging twenty or more points per game. A meteor, to hear him tell it, Division 1 scouts with eyes on him. But no college offers were good enough to keep him from a quick tour of Afghanistan, and he came home without his legs. The shuttle van that took us to our jobs and our meetings also rolled Chartrain twice a week to the East City Y to play wheelchair basketball, and once again he slayed. I went pretty often to see him play. As a guy that played football only until I lost my natural advantage, I had great respect for a guy with no legs that still played basketball. In my new life of feeling all the feels, the cesspool of self-disgust felt like a deal breaker. The whole existence of Chartrain shouted: Watch and learn, my brother. In addition to juice, he had front teeth incomprehensibly edged in gold, and calloused hands like vulcanized tires from charging and pivoting his chair around the court. None of this did he owe to the Veterans Administration that was paying his way.
One thing about sober living facilities. You come in thinking you’ve lost all there is to lose, then find out there are things you never knew were on the table. Chartrain still had his mother alive out there thinking Chartrain hung the moon, but he was otherwise nearly my equal as far as dead dad, dead brother, dead baby mama, and had seen a whole lot of guys shot dead in front of his eyes, not just overseas. Plus the no-legs. Gizmo, for his part, had been in a car that wrapped itself around a family of five, turning them into a family of one. Gizmo’s girlfriend, the only girl he’d ever dated and hoped to marry, left her good looks on the windshield and was doing time. She was driving because they had a fight and he’d deliberately crunked out, so. Lots to live with there. And Viking had lost something still more unexpected, his ears. He was tall and broad as a tree trunk and about that deaf. Thanks to oxy. He said it starts as a ringing, then one day you wake up to find the ringing is all you’ve got left. We all had the ringing. This fact was sobering in every regard. Viking wore hearing aids the color of dirty pink crayons and was impressive in that he still talked pretty well, just way too loud, and caught a lot of what you said if you spoke to him face-on. Doctors had told him it might come back if he stayed sober, and this was his higher power. He had a baby back in Bell County. He’d never heard her say “Daddy.”
Viking and Gizmo both worked in a warehouse, where they shouldered the yoke of labor like good-natured mules. No questions to ask or answer, and at least one of them was unbothered by the all-day whine of the forklifts. They were allowed to smoke on the job. It’s the one addiction they let us keep, don’t ask me why. Maybe because it won’t inspire you to rob a liquor store or wrap your vehicle around foreign objects.