Juju

In the mid 1990’s I was living in an amazingly cool flat in North Oakland with my college homegirl E.  While I was pretty hunkered down in a fairly long term relationship, E was enjoying a very active dating life, including a set of very colorful, very diverse characters.  A drug dealer.  A politically active artist who was part of MTV’s Real World: San Francisco. A shy younger tomboy/lesbian rapper with impressive lyrical talent.

She dated one guy for a minute or two — it was the kind of relationship where he never actually came into our home, but would call her from his cell phone or simply honk when he pulled up in front in his chocolate brown hooptie.  The relationship with him didn’t last.  But during one of her visits to his home in West Oakland, she met Juju — his four year old nephew.

Juju was tiny for his age.  He had a mischievous smile, crazy bad-guy eyebrows that swooped up with impossible dramatics, and one of those birthmarks in his hair which left him with one blond patch in the middle of his head of tight dark brown curls.  His mom was a frequently homeless crack addict who had, I believe, four significantly older kids.  Juju was the result of a relatively late-in-life true romance that ended only when Juju’s father passed away when he was two.  Together Juju and his mom bopped about, couch surfing at the homes of friends and other family members.

Eventually E and I got into the habit of picking Juju up, from wherever he happened to be staying, on Friday nights or Saturday mornings, and returning him on Sunday nights.  He was fun to have around, he seemed to really dig being out of that environment, and it gave his mom a bit of breathing room so that she could, you know, do her thing.

I remember calling over to his house one Saturday morning to make arrangements to pick him up. When Juju answered the phone, I asked to talk to his mom.  “She’s not here,” he answered simply.

“Oh.  Well, what are you doing?”

“Making breakfast.  I’m making some scrambled eggs.”  A four year old boy, without any grownup supervision, cooking eggs for himself.

We’d take him to the zoo, or go to the movies, go shopping, or just hang out or visit with our friends.  We’d let him play in the bathtub, fixed him up a little bed to sleep on on the floor of our bedroom, and he seemed happy.  We even took him to family gatherings, and when I moved down to San Diego, E brought him down one weekend for a long happy visit at the beach.

Eventually, E moved to San Francisco, and while she’d still see him on occasion, his visits became less and less frequent.  We had a good run of things, for as long as it lasted, but really, we were only a constant presence in his life for maybe two, two and a half years at most.

Flash forward eleven years or so.  E was driving through West Oakland one afternoon and saw him standing on a street corner.  He was fifteen years old by then, and had dropped out of school.  He was dealing.  She picked him up and took him out to lunch.  She told me later that he looked just the same, only slightly bigger.  He was still small for his age, still had those crazy eyebrows, but he was clearly hardened.  His life had not been, would not be, an easy one.

The thing that kills me is that he was such a cool little guy.  Such a great spirit.  It makes me sad to think that his fate was pretty much already determined when we had our brief time together.  No amount of TLC at that point of his life would really sway his inevitable outcome.  It makes me sad.  Especially now as mother myself, a mother of a four year old boy who knows no limits to what he will be — one day it’s a cowboy, the next day it’s a police man, whatever he wants to be, he can be.

Not so with Juju, who now goes by his more “grown up” name of Julian.  Julian will probably never again get out of that predefined life of his.  I wonder if he ever thinks back on those weekends that we had together, or if all of that is just a fuzzy time of life that holds no special meaning.

I think about him from time to time, tonight being one of those times.  I hope … what?  I don’t know exactly what I hope for him.  I guess I just hope…

image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveglass/