What do get when you squeeze a lemon?

What do you get when you squeeze a lemon?

by

Lowell Jay Hochstein

Jesse hated me. I suspect he hated me from the first moment he saw me. He had just arrived home from prison. I was sitting in his mother’s kitchen, eating a fried baloney sandwich and drinking Cool-Aid from a jelly jar.

I was seven in 1956. Jesse’s mother, whom everyone called Miz Pat, took care of me during those long summer days when I was out of school, and my mother was at work at the local A&P. My summer with Miz Pat had begun two months before Jesse came home.

“What the hell’s that white boy doing here?” he asked, glaring at me with dead eyes. I was too young to understand prejudice, having never felt its sting. Prejudice was a subject Jesse knew only too well, however, having been brought up on the mean streets of Newark and within the meaner confines of Jersey prisons.

“What did I do?” I asked, once Jessie had stormed out.

Miz Pat pulled up a chair and sat beside me.

“You didn’t do nothin’, honey,” she said. “You know what you get when you squeeze a lemon? You get sour lemon juice cause that’s all that’s in there. All that’s in Jesse is hurt turned to hate. And he feels squeezed all the time.”

Miz Pat lived in a three-story apartment building. It was old and rundown, but I didn’t know it, and wouldn’t have cared if I did.

A long, narrow easement separated Miz Pat’s from the building on the other side. At the end of the alley, there was a high wooden fence. Tucked away in the farthest corner, nestled against the wall, there was a vacant apartment with no door. It was where men went to drink and sleep when they were too drunk to leave or had no place else to go. Miz Pat told me to stay away from there. Sometimes I forgot.

It happened on a hot August morning. I was playing guns with my best friends, Penny and Michael. It was my turn to be alone and hide out for them to find me. I remember the feeling of the blazing sun on my naked back and how cool the ground felt as I lay in wait, my toy pistol in hand, at the ready.

“Hey, boy.” It was a man’s voice.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Come here, son. I want to show you something.” The voice was coming from inside the room with no door.

I hesitated, unsure, but I moved closer anyway, to look. Inside, I could see him lying on an old mattress, clutching a half-empty wine bottle between his legs. I had seen him before. I remembered him because he was the only white man I had ever seen go into the room without a door.

“Come on, boy. Let’s you and me be friends”, he said. “You can trust me.”

Again, I hesitated.

“I don’t think I should go in there,” I said, stepping back out of the doorway. “Miz Pat wouldn’t like it.”

“Oh, don’t you worry about Miz Pat”, he said. “Her and me are good friends. She won’t mind if I show you something.”

He raised the bottle from between his legs and drank from it. A trickle of pink liquid spilled from his mouth and rolled down his chin to mix with the dirt and stains that covered his torn and ragged T-shirt.

“Want some?” he asked, holding the bottle out to me.

I looked at his mouth and his rotting teeth, and it made me sick to think of drinking from where his lips had touched.

“Naw, I better not. I got to get going now.” I started to leave.

He tried to get up, but couldn’t. Instead, he propped himself, half-seated, against the wall.

“I just want us to be friends,” he said, holding his hand out to me. “After all, we are the only white people around here. We got to stick together.”

I hesitated. It was not what he said, but the pleading way that he said it, that made me step forward.

“That’s it, don’t be scared. Come on over here. I’m just a nice old man. You ain’t no scaredy cat, are ya?”

“I ain’t scared of nothin’.” I said, offended by the thought that someone might think that I was afraid. I moved closer to show him that I wasn’t.

“Course you ain’t. I know that,” he said, smiling.

That’s when he reached forward and hooked his finger over the top of my pants. It startled me, and I started to pull away.

“Where you going?” he said, no longer smiling. He pulled me closer. “I told you I wanted us to be friends.” His voice deepened and grew harsher, and the odor around him intensified to a heady level.

He reached down with his free hand, while maintaining a firm grip on my dungarees, and undid his pants. I remember thinking ‘he don’t wear no underwear’ and how strange that was. I had thought everybody wore underwear.

He jerked me forward.

“Come here, boy. We’re going to be good friends now.”

I wanted to scream and run away, but I could not. I felt like I was in a dream and falling, falling into a deep hole. When I heard the voice behind me, I wasn’t even sure it was real.

“What’s that you doin’ there?”

A figure stepped in front of the open door, blocking the dust-stained light that filtered into the room. I couldn’t make out who it was. His features were all in shadow, black and unrecognizable against the outside glare of the morning sunlight.

The old man pushed me away and scrambled to pull up his pants.

“You get the hell out of here, you black son of a bitch. I’m a white man, you can’t touch me,” he screamed. He looked like a wild dog, trapped and half-crazed with panic. He struggled to get to his feet but fell to his knees and began to crawl to the back of the room, flicking his arm behind him, trying to ward off what was coming.

The dark figure followed him slowly.

“What are you gonna do?” he screamed.

Then I heard his voice, and I knew. It was Jesse.

“I’m gonna make sure you never hurt a child again.”

With one swift motion, Jesse grabbed the cowering old man around the neck and lifted him off the floor and straight into the air. Suspended from his human, like a human gallows, the old man kicked and struggled, trying to get free until finally he hung limp and lifeless. When Jesse released his grip, the old man dropped to the floor and lay there, motionless.

Jesse turned to face me.

“He touch you?”

“No, sir.” I was more afraid of Jesse at that moment than I had been at any time just before.

“He make you touch him?”

“No, sir.” I started to shake uncontrollably.

“Go on and get then, and don’t you never come back here. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

But I couldn’t move. My legs wouldn’t work, and I was crying so hard that I couldn’t catch my breath. Jesse walked over and stood above me. I cringed in the corner, not knowing if he would kill me next. He reached down, gently took me by the arm, and raised me to my feet. He squatted down and put his face so close to mine that I could feel his breath.

“Go on now, boy,” he said softly. Tears were streaming down his cheeks.

I ran from the room and up the stairs to Miz Pat’s.

“What is it?” she said to me as I burst into the kitchen, coming to me with her arms outstretched. “What happened?”

I threw myself into her arms and grabbed her as tight as I could. I buried my face into the folds of her warm flesh beneath her thin dress. I don’t know how much time passed before my grip could be loosened enough for Miz Pat to lift my face towards hers to ask again, “What happened?”

I couldn’t speak, or maybe I didn’t want to. I just pointed toward the room with no door and said, “Jessie”, hoping she wouldn’t ask me more.

I watched her run out of the apartment, and I heard her heavy footsteps as she thundered down the stairs. It would be the last time that I would ever see Miz Pat. It was the last time I saw any of them.

The years passed. My mother and I moved to a small town in central Jersey with a new husband for her and a stepfather for me.

I tried to remember and forget, but I could do neither completely.

When I had grown, I searched for Jesse and finally tracked him down. I stood at his graveside one gray, cold afternoon outside the prison walls in the pauper’s field set aside for men like him. He had died in this prison, sent there many years before for killing a white man.

I think of Jesse often and of what he did and the price he paid, and why? Miz Pat once asked me, “What do you get when you squeeze a lemon?” I guess now I’d have to say that you can never be too sure; sometimes a lemon can fool you.