Blues For Julia Foster When Tyrone Lowell first saw Julia fosters obituary, he didn't recognize it at first. It was a bleary Sunday morning in the University of Puget Sound cafeteria and Tyrone was still half asleep, skimming through to the sports section to see who won the title fight on HBO the night before. They never have it in the an obvious and logical spot, he thought, you have to tear up the whole damm paper to find it. Using his thumb to scroll through the pages, he saw the obituary for a split second, stopped and scrolled back to look at the picture. It was Julia, but a picture of her as a college student, not the woman she had seen in the pike place market for over a year previous. From the last time he saw her, he knew that her passing was going to happen. Seeing her picture over breakfast served as a finality, a catharsis, closure in a relationship that took many twist and turns with many lessons learned. Tyrone first met Julia when he was twelve years old and living in a rustic, yet broke down condominium on the outskirts of Tacoma's north end district; right where the bohemian college district and the luxurious suburbs began to blend into the black slums of downtown. Living in the area was like living in a double helix, where both areas meshed and collided and the remains seemed more like the rubble of the crash. The condominium that Tyrone lived in served as the drug den to UPS's collegiate elite; with the bottom floor the epicenter to the party, Tyrone's father's top floor where the drugs were dealt and the middle floor the notorious sex room, where various acts of dark hedonism ocurred. The condominium was the place where the future homemakers, lawyers, doctors, CEO's and captains of industry would live out their sadomasochistic urban fantasies and ingest massive amounts of white powder. Tyrone's father rented the place when he got clean and got a nice landscaping contract, but after a few years he became another drug zombie, who only kept the apartment because he allowed drug transactions to happen there. Unlike most Black crack houses and drug dens, this condominium had rules, 80's yuppie student ettiqute. It was run like a posh nightclub;where everybody who wanted to get in and get high had to get into a line, and in order to get in the door you had to be presentable, be a "higher up, a somebody, a go getter, a social climber,not like the usual junkie filth that reside in the slums." The whole place was kind of like Studio 54 without the pretense. As he would become older, Tyrone, along with his Mute big brother Tee, would become detached observers of the line and how it's system worked. Every night they would sit on the front porch and watched how the line became a system with it's own checks and balances. Black drug dealers from the hill would dress in their finest gear in order to jockey a position to sell their product to an expensive clientele. The usual dope fiends would go to value village and buy their best clothes in order to bullsh!t their way in, but rarely did the upper crust ever fell for their schtick. In the line, you could see peoples fortunes falling week by week, payday by payday. A big strong safeway butcher turned into shriveled up skin and bones before tyrone's eyes. A doe eyed married couple of white collar professionals grew to be a bug eyed divorced couple living on welfare. Aspiring students turned into denzines, deacons turned the deviants, cheerleaders turned into crackheads and football stars turned into freebase junkies as the line served as deaths slow, painfully slow extension. But the bizarre thing that Tyrone and Tee noticed was that throughout the make up of the line and whoever rose and fell in it, the core students, the elite, stayed in the party almost unaffected by what they were doing. The same guys would sniff lines on the main table, the same group of girls would be sitting on the couch with their cute little makeshift pipes and take little chips out of a rock and smoke it, and go on as if it was a regular party. Why could they do ungodly amounts of dope, amounts that would knock other people the f*ck out, and then go about their day? Tyrone thought. Oh sure some people would leave, and the place even got busted once, but it was seen as anything criminal as it was a human interest story. " what was wrong with our children? was the usual cry from the parents of the kids and other higher ups who lived in Tacoma's various exclusive gated upper crust communities. The question haunted Tyrone, did god allow them to do what they did because they had money? because they were white? or did he just put a curse on dark and poor people? It was in the flux of this struggle of thought that Tyrone first saw Julia, then a freshman with wide eyes, a pretty face, boisterous personality, and an incessant ability to talk your inner ear off. The first time she came to the line was a balmy early fall Friday night, the first weekend of the semester, where freshman went through their selected rites of initiation vis a vi pledges or other various wild parties. Why, dear god, did this girl end up here, Tyrone thought as he and his brother observed her on the porch. Shouldn't she be in a glee club, a sorority, somewhere other than this place? The junkies and junkies-to be in front of her looked at her like she was crazy when she went on about how fun this party was gonna be and how she was going to love this year and how she was gonna be an opera singer and how she loved her classes and her teacher and how she was gonna meet this fine boy who invited to the party with him and did she mention that she was gonna be an opera singer? Looking at her, as she got to the head of the line, Tyrone could see that out of all the people that had been through this godforsaken junkie row, she didn't have the least bit of a premonition of what the hell she was gonna do. You see, crack and cocaine are drugs on an elitist stupidity, in over to even try them you have to be arrogant enough to think that they wont destroy you. You already have a decadent, self destructive mindset in order to even start smoking or snorting. Anyone with a hint of sense and two good eyes could see that Julia's frame of reference barely left beyond her snug warm comfortable suburban background, a place without a hint of the disgusting decadence that went down at the condominium she was about to enter. And as she opened the door, Tyrone and Tee shot her a sad look that caught her slightly off guard. " What's a matter" she said " You boys are too cute to be sad". But before they could answer, big Dan Barker, the "cute guy that invited her", grabbed her arm and whisked her in. The chain of events, as seen by Tyrone through the window, ran like a tragic silent movie; where he knew the unhappy ending, yet still watched because of a sliver of hope that fate might change course, that the impossible might happen, that, by divine provenance, a twist of fate might occur in her favor. She went with him to the main table and upon pressure took a metal vial and scooted/tooted her nose across it. She staggered for a second, then started to run around the room, talking as fast as she could, even singing. As her " friend" Dan was following around, the toot bougoise of the room started laughing her as if she was their own special clown show, and in watching it, Tyrone's heart sank. Dan finally grabbed her, hollered at a friend who passed him a packet of a thinner white powder( Heroin), took a bunch of it with his elongated pinky finger and violently put it up her nose, which in turned knocked her out cold. As Dan took her up the stairs, Tyrone started to think. He thought about calling the cops, but he had done it before and got his a$$ kicked by his father, and a gun to his head by the owner of the condo. And as he and his brother went up the steps and to their rooms in their dad's place, they heard screams from the sex room below started to cry. It was unbearable to listen to because their room was just a floor away, so they heard every scratch, every cry, every slap, every violation that happened. They started to pray, but after 20 minutes and nothing happened, Tyrone decided to take matters in his own hands the only way he knew how, stomp on the floor long enough for Dan to stop what he was doing and try and kick his fathers door down. If it ended up in him getting his a$$ kicked, fine, he thought. If that will get him offa her long enough to leave, that would be one a$$ whipping he would have to take. For his offense, he ended up getting spanked by his father, always eager to please the cognoscenti of the complex, but it gave her enough time to get outta there. But that morning, as Tyrone and Tee went into the library, they saw Julia wandering the streets in a stupor. Her eyes were blackened and bulging out of her sockets and she was walking in that oblong junkie stammer that says to the whole world watching that "drugs have got such a hold on me that I cant even perform the most basic of cognitive functions such as walking upright". But what struck Tyrone was that her smile, her speech, her attitude , every single piece of mental framework that she had looked as if it was violently snatched away from her. That whole year was just part of a long slow journey of decay, as Julia would get in that line every week to get her fix and look worse and worse every time she came. The students who partied there, the lifers, saw her as the butt of their many cruel jokes, making her sing on command for coke, making fun of her Irish Catholic heritage, and various other things. And she would always sit in the corner, with eyes that showed that whatever life she had was slowly being sucked out of her. Everytime she would come, Tyrone and Tee would look at her with those same sad eyes, and every time she would look back helplessly. She didn't want to do this, but she got hooked. And when she got hooked, she had the equivalent of an 800 pound gorilla on her back. And 800 pound gorilla's need to be fed. All the time. And then on a balmy Friday evening a fall later, they didn't let her in anymore. It was the same line, but different people, and the change that came over Julia was so unbelievably frightening that you couldn't even recognize her anymore. Tyrone and Tee were sitting on the same porch only now with a metal boombox, playing a tape of Roberta's flack's greatest hits. It irritated the party goers, but by then they really didn't give a f*ck. They didn't really look at the line anymore, just closed themselves into Roberta, the voice that gave them so much solace in whatever storm, be it their dad beating their mom, their dad beating them, or their dad's own drug taking. Roberta was like a second mother to them, healing with an angelic tone and musical solitude. They couldn't even look at Julia anymore, but turned when she started screaming at the doorman. " Please, please, please let me in." she said " You gotta let me in, please I got money." " Sorry" the doorman, who was also the owner of the building, said " You flunked out, your not in school , you are not in the in croud, go and shoot dope with the n*ggers in hilltop." " Please, I'll do anything, anything you want. sex, odd jobs, anything, please, I need my fix, Im on my knees, please." " Outta the way b!tch" the doorman said as he slapped her hard and to the ground. " Come back when you are presentable." She sat curled and in the fetal position while Tyrone and tee looked at her. The doorman tried to move her out of the way but Tee whipped out his pocket knife and motioned to him that he was gonna stab him if he touched her again. " killing me softly" came on and Julia got up slowly and asked Tyrone, " who is singing this" " Roberta flack, she's good isn't she" " yes she is" After the song finished, he took the tape out out the boombox and placed it in her hand. She thanked Tyrone, smiled and walked away. The next time that Tyrone saw her was a good twelve and a half years later, long after Tyrone and Tee had gone out of the hood with their mother. Tyrone got a scholarship and was a senior at the University of Puget sound. It was a cold, stark January and Tyrone was visiting the Pike Place market to check on the opening of his homeboy Siddeq's new bookstore on the second floor of businesses beneath the main market fruit vendors. With a bag of books and assorted Turkish foods, Tyrone had made it to the health food store right next to the market steps and was arguing with the long haired cashier over the price of hummus, when he heard out of the corner of his ear. " I wondered all my life, how'd i ever let you go" there's not a lot i'd change in my life, but one thing that i know Iffff ever i see you agaaaiin maybe next time it will turn out all right Maybe next time we wont say goodbye, but only good night with a love that wont end, if ever i see you again." It was " if ever i see you again" by Roberta flack, track 9 from the tape. A painfully beautiful lament over a lost love, an inwardly emotional epic of holding onto the slender thread of romance amidst a cascading tide of heartbreak, abandonment and regret. Tyrone hastily paid the bill and ran up the stairs to see this sweet voiced maven. What he saw was a small woman with frazzled, matted, blackened hair, rolls under her dark eyes that blended into ghastly red blots over her skin, scars over her face and arms, her cheekbones sunken in, a tooth missing and the rest brown from rot. Only from the remainder of her facial structure of what was her face could Tyrone tell that it was her. When she finished, Tyrone put a 10 dollar bill in her cup, to her delight. " Thank you kind stranger" she said " If only I was, You don't remember me?" " Nope but my memory ain't too good" " I gave you the tape" " Oh my god," she said running to hug him " you're that sweet little boy, you have grown up so wonderfully, you look so handsome." Tyrone took Julia along with her to get his usual Philly cheese steak sandwich. And as they sat and ate, Julia told him her story, how she ended up dropping out of UPS, how in order to feed her addiction, she scammed and hustled her parents nearly out of house and home, to the point where they had to disown her and switch bank accounts twice in order to save their own property. She ended up on the streets of Tacoma feeding her various habits, then migrating to Seattle's tent city( a homeless shelter), where she resided now, making her money by singing in street corners in the market. Everytime Tyrone offered to drive her to rehab, she would clam up and not say a word, and in seeing this he got his first inkling of that Julia was not long for this earth. Under the order of the store owners, the street performers took rotating turns. They varied in quality, ranging from old soul/ bluesmen that were pushed out of work when the black clubs on Jackson street in Seattle and on the hill in Tacoma closed down; to the old lifer folkies whose battles with the capitalist system laid waste to their financial future; to examples of the former and latter who were too sick or doped up to perform well; to the ultimate worst, the smarmy little Evergreen State College liberals who were " slumming" in order to tell their other smarmy little evergreen state college liberal friends that they knew what it was like to be poor. But as Tyrone would notice in his visits to the pike place market, Julia stood out greatly. The irony of it all was that even though she was still intaking huge amounts of toxic chemicals, her voice remained pristine. She might not be able to break plate glass with her voice, but she had a smooth contralto with exquisite technique that she told Tyrone that she learned from studying tapes of Irish singers who used block notes and vocal leaps similar to what soul singers sung. She conducted her stage and herself like a consummate professional. She had an elaborate Routine, walking out of tent city every morning to breath in clean air, stretch out her lungs and do various vocal exercises. When she would get to the market, she would squeeze a lemon that the main fruit stand owner gladly gave her every morning as a token of his appreciation of her chops. Then for two hours she would perform a concert, wowing crowds with her repatoire, singing Irish folks songs, Jewish cantors, stirring renditions of whatever dreck was in the top 40, and beautiful soul classics. She had no orchestra, but like all great singers, her voice and the way she uses it would subconsciously put the beat in your head, and when she sucks you in, you can hear an entire orchestra rise out of nothing. Not only did the customers love her for it, but so did the vendors too. Every place Tyrone saw her perform, the fruit sellers would smile, the restaurant waiters would open their windows and poke their head out to hear and the meat packers, the fish sellers, the sweepers, the nickel and dime jewelry sellers and craftsmen all the way to the stuck up lady who ran the newsstand would all have a extra spring in their step when they heard her. People even wanted to do more. During Tyrone's visits to her, many a doe eyed romantic offered to take her in, convinced that they could heal and rehabilitate their junkie angel. He even saw a Seattle university vocal teacher offer her a scholarship on the spot. But she turned them all down, usually going into a catatonic spell, walking away crying, not wanting to hurt them like she hurt her loved ones. Tyrone would usually give her 10 bucks not only just to hear her sing, but to hear her talk about the art of vocals. Not just because she had a lot to teach, but that she was at her most lucid and coherent when she was talking about music. She didn't look like she had one foot in the grave when she lectured on singing, which, given her condition, was rare. After 12 months and dozens of visits she suddenly stopped showing up to sing. It was a brutal December day when it happened, with a blustery gale of wind coming from the bottom of the hill, going through the market and hitting you like a Joe Frazier left hook that left every muscle in your body twitching in it's wake. As Tyrone walked slowly down the hill, bracing himself and trying to keep his balance, he pined for Julia's sweet voice, and some exquisite Turkish hot cocoa that had a brand of nutmeg that could keep you buzzed for a whole week. When he got to the market, he went to Julia's favorite spot right in front of the main fruit stand, the fishery and the meat market, but he didn't see her there. He went past the booths, but she wasn't there either. He went to the second and third floor with no results. He went to the bottom floor and saw nothing, and just as he was about to walk the bottom street that led to a hill that took you back to the booths on the top floor, he saw Julia lying on the side of the side walk, lying in two humongous coffee bags which covered everything but her face, which looked deathly pale. " Yo Julie, you allright" " wha...wha.... wha , I gotta go sing' " you look like you are about to die." " I can still sing" she said as she tried to get out of her Cget up Im gonna take you to the hospital" " No..no..no listen.... theyyyyy asssk...theyyy asked me how iii... they asked me how iiii kneeeewww..." She still tried to sing as Tyrone took her to the car, and the more she tried, the worse she sounded, and the worse she sounded the sicker she got. To her, singing was her only of contribution to life, it was her offering to the creator, her source of happiness, and if she couldn't do that she wanted to die. Tyrone drove her the University of Washington medical center, helped her to a wheel chair, and signed her on to a waiting list. When it came her turn to be admitted, He turned to her, took out 137 dollars out of his wallet, put it in her hand and told her. "Please go get some food, and get help when you get out, I gotta go, but please you gotta get help" "Please don't leave". she said " I'll change, I'll get well, I'll get clean, I promise, I'll be the best old lady in the world, please don't leave Tyrone, you have been nicer to me than anyone has been in the world, I'll do anything, just please don't leave me, please she said". " I cant" "Don't say that baby, I'll get well, I'll get clean, I'll go to college, you gotta help me, please." " I cant" he said before he started to walk away " I just cant" And as he walked through the emergency room door, she had to be restrained by two nurses who dragged her into the ER,screaming and cursing at Tyrone and anyone that was within her sight. Before you judge Tyrone too harshly, understand his position. He would have been lying to you if he said that a part of him didn't want to take her in, but he couldn't. It wasn't a matter of class, it was a matter of the fact that Julia had a foot and four toes in the grave. Tyrone was a college student with mounting aid debt, who was living on a part time job and a beneficiary scholarship from bill gates, so he didn't have an ability to support her. And he understood the sad( especially in this case) but true concept that no great and long lasting relationship comes out of saving somebody. Tyrone didn't even know her that well, nor she him. They only had a handful of meetings, nothing to constitute any foundation for a relationship. But he still felt sick to his stomach about the whole situation. The next day he called the hospital only to find out that she wasn't there. That was when he knew she was gone, which lead to that cold Sunday January morning and the obituary section of the paper, where over her high school graduation picture read. JULIA ELLEN FOSTER (1968-2003) She was our sweet, daughter a sister of Christ who was a lost lamb, who finally found her home. come celebrate her life In St Francis catholic church, on Feb 1 at 9:00 Am On the Saturday morning in question, it rained profusely. Her service was in a small, rustic church that looked more like a elongated cabin, but it was packed with people. High school teachers, homeless activists, and even some members of the old line came to pay their respects. Tyrone sat in the very back row, Thinking about her one minute, the line the next, the toot bougoise the moment after that. To him they all resembled an all too cruel metaphor for life itself.
Copyright © 2003 Brotherman |