John Rodriguez

August is the cruelest month: never enough daylight, too much heat, no holidays and nothing matters except September’s dawning responsibilities, but the August of 1994 I was Holden Caulfield, summer camp senior counselor for the junior trail blazers, black and brown children two weeks shy of first, second, and third grade. Nothing is as positive, as motivating a force within one’s life as a school bus full of kids singing along to the local radio station blazing hip-hop and R&B. (Imagine this cherubic chorus riding upstate to Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes the Hotstepper.” [“Muuur-derah!”]) My workday is filled with hazards like chocolate melted sticky swim trunk pockets, insistent sunburn, and the assorted rah rah of parental unsupervision, but those bus rides back from upstate water parks and pools were my favorite times working. Have you ever ridden in a cheesebus with ashy children asleep against you, staring at sudden trees — more numerous than project windows — blurring along the highways like confusion giving way to doubt, the heady smell of dried chlorine and musty towels lulling you into the soft timbre of a Midwest falsetto? Tell me what it is to fall in love with a lightskin girl covering the Isley Brothers. I was not two weeks into 21 years old. I had yet to wear a box cutter in my fifth pocket, or see a semi-automatic aimed at my center mass, to feel its dumbness against my spine. My life was uncertain, save for its unlikely length under my control, like the pilot who falls short of what he says, what he says he’s all about, all about. All my homeboys were still alive, just like Aaliyah Dana Haughton, not yet an angel of the cruelest August, begging a boy, who may not be in the mood to learn what he thinks he knows, to look beyond his world and try to find a place for her.