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Julius before/after And then there was Julius. Julius, you broke my heart. He was a small quiet kid, in for a violent carjacking I met his dad, abusive alcholic living in the worst slums of Detroit teeth stained crack rock brown, eyes red and turgid walked into his house, saw a large woman sit down and avert her eyes submissive, afraid, and I knew a little bit of the terror of julius' life, like a starved and beaten dog, julius. His dad wound up with my cell-phone number, would call me up in the middle of alcoholic rage, so I decided to find julius' mother, maybe he could stay with her. So I found her. Squatting in a tenement. Dishes everywhere, filth everywhere, nowhere to sit, and the roaches the roaches covered everything, she brushed them away from the baby's lap, as the trick fled out the door when I walked in, seeing Julius bed matresses laying on the floor, imagining him crying, scared of the roaches, and his mom, there, high, stoned on heroin, unable to make eye contact, unable to hold a conversation, and I couldnt send him there, either. He didnt understand. "What did I do? Why can't I go home?" I saw the anger underneath, but when one world is all you know sometimes all you do is want to go back to it. Eventually my calls through the chain of command went through trickling through the bureaucracy, and Julius' mom found a new place to live with a trick even got Julius a bedsprings and a frame for his bed, (but sold it eventually when she needed money for a fix) looking for work, not finding it, I stopped by one day and she was purely stoned, unable to talk we sat and watched tv. I told her that her new place was nice. "Yeah," she said, coming out of the poppy fog"There's no niggers here." Yeah. Well, I was going to say something about the roaches. Julius got out a few months later, we sent him to mom. The last time I saw him, he was staying with a friend, she was there, animated as I've ever seen her, on something that gave her an evil snap. I did the wrap up speech, wished him well, shook his hand. It was pretty obvious that Julius' mom was living off of him. "Bye." she said, like giving me the finger. "Bye," I said, like I didnt care.
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