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June 23, 2009, 02:00 PM ET
'The Alphebet Houses'
God first whispered to Tyrone from a rickety old dumpster in the alleyway behind Happy Liquors.
The same night day, when the 12-year-old told his mother about what had happened, she would hear none of it.
“You mustn’t say things like that,” Denise yelled, staring into the blackness of his blinking eyes. “You can never, ever, say things like that, Tyrone. Do you hear me? You can’t say that kind of thing. People will start to talk bad about you.”
Their neighbors in the Alphebet Houses already considered this skinny kid from Building 16 a little off. That’s the word they used. Off. The psychological equivalent of a burned-out light bulb or a stovetop’s ice-cold back burner.
What Alphebeters liked about the word, what made it different from crazy or cuckoo or other more flamboyant choices, was that it seemed to leave space open for sanity’s future return, for the possibility that a sick mind could mend itself back to health.
Very few things are ever left off permanently. If something’s off now, it can still be flicked back on, maybe in an hour, maybe tomorrow, maybe at the beginning of next week when the landlord is scheduled to come by.
Off implies an on to come, or else something couldn’t be considered off, not really, only finished, or maybe even just dead.
But way back then, at around the time when Alphebeters first began to gossip about Tyrone’s alleged audience with the Almighty behind a local liquor store’s filthy rear end, there were still more than a few residents who thought that maybe the 12-year-old wasn’t all that off at all.
Long before Professor Nettlesome’s prize-winning monograph about his Life Among the Ty, before the unanticipated fame and untimely death that same book brought down on him, way before the stampede of court cases and magazine exposés, the rock-stars and their MTV-covered religious conversions, even before Samuel Diamond ever became “America’s #1 spiritual guru” (according to Fox News), there were at least a few people in this small Brooklyn neighborhood who thought Tyrone Greene Reynolds might really be on to something, though they could never have predicted what such a something would ultimately turn out to be.
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