Red Clay Weather

My Mother Dated Otis Redding

—30 My Mother Dated Otis Redding My mother is laughing in the hallway with her friends I don’t like much, maybe the numbers runner who gives me dollars to go see movies while they fuck, a mattress propped in the doorway where there’s no door. I know what’s “fuck,” and “dick,” and “pussy.” They’re “tipsy,” she says, they’re having a good time. “Don’t I deserve a good time now and then?” I’m looking through the telescope I just got from a catalogue, while they break out the Tanqueray; I don’t know what that is. They’re putting on some records, it’s 1970, Nixon’s president; there’s a dock in one song and I don’t know how to whistle, but I know what’s a dock, and a bay. There aren’t many stars because of the streetlights, it’s the Bronx, the singer sounds sad, he’s dead. My mother says, “You know, I went to high school with him, back in Macon,” and everybody says “I’ll bet,” and she laughs. I wish I was his son, I wish they’d all go home. It’s late and I just want to go to bed, but she just wants to have a good time. I turn my telescope on the Puerto Rican couple fighting, kissing in a window across the concrete courtyard, three parrots escaped from the loading dock freezing in a trash tree, it’s November, neighborhood kids throwing rocks at each other from bicycles, my mother standing in the hallway with a paper cup of Tanqueray, or lying in the hallway in a pool of her own shit. shepherd text-2.indd 30 11/22/10 2:07 PM ...