MOVING PARTS: A Memoir

By Jason Hill

A poignant memoir of a black man you don't meet everyday, emerging author JASON HILL has raised the standard of the non-fiction narrative. A introverted kid growing up in Chicago, Hill recounts in a voice you'll never forget how he overcame everything from family dysfunction, bullying, incarceration and h

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dreamhill Press, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087984766

Book preview

1

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PRAISE FOR

JASON HILL

An engaging…intriguingly realistic social tale about a despairing parent, lightened by the narrator’s sense of humor.

Kirkus Reviews

This novel is supremely written! Heart-rending…first time author, wow! Brutally honest.

Debbie Hoos

Extraordinary book. A marvel…a journey…a lesson.

Danuta Debicki

Riveting, a masterpiece in the understanding of Bipolar Disorder. Leaves you with tears but hope. I loved it!

Kelly Englebrecht-Nelson

Really good.

Nicole Dei

Gritty and gripping.

Naomi E. Dominguez

"Saying a book ‘speaks’ to you is an understatement! I began to understand the heartbreak, triumphs, and everyday life of a person with mental illness. This book is a must read."

Aimee Sawyer

"Couldn't put it down, read it one night... I could feel the pain. Looking forward to the next book." Rebekah Fogle

Highly recommended!

Tate Olzewski

Wonderfully written.

Amazon Reader

Raw, gritty, a down to earth novel. As I read through each chapter, my curiosity grew with anticipation for the next. I look forward to reading more from this author. Agnes Varona Oquendo

"A good book for anyone who’s lost

hope."

Veterans Haven North, New Jersey

"Hill’s writing will put a smile on

your face."ReadersFavorite.com

Powerful.

Chicago Gazette

Books by Jason Hill

Social Hill: Book 1

Prospect Hill: Book 2

American Hill: Book 3

Love & Sex in a Time of Pandemics: Book 4

Born at the Age of 47

A Stage with Just the Right Glory

WHAT HAPPENED TO KAREN?

THE VOID

YOUR INNER CHRIST: A Biblical Formula for Victory

JASON

HILL

MOVING PARTS

a memoir

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank myself, Jason, for my perseverance. Every artist has a calling. Someone said once there are two kinds of productive people: the happy ones and the unhappy ones. The unhappy ones are the ones who have never figured out the psychology of creativity. I know; I was one. Not anymore. I am grateful for this gift of being a writer; maybe I did something great in a former life. This is my eighth, and perhaps last, book. I think I can safely say that.

May the revelation of what I have endured—and overcome—help someone who is struggling.

This is my highest aspiration.

And this is my story.

2

3

I WAS STANDING IN Mama’s living room, hoping we had not arrived too late for whatever she had planned, when she came out of her bedroom and almost immediately started going off on me. It was dark outside. A brisk December chill followed my daughter and me into the house, and we’d hurried to get there once we realized (duh) that of course there were no thrift shops open on New Year’s Eve, as we’d hoped. I was content to skip a perfunctory third holiday family get-together anyway and just go back to the apartment with my little girl, with whom I was recently reconciled after a long estrangement.

Robbie, my daughter, stood glum and worried a few feet away in the middle of the dining room while her father tried not to fly off the handle. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but her father had already pushed through the door. Robbie had on round white-framed glasses and a denim jacket to stave off the frigid temps and was about to take it off when her grandmother, a diminutive yet old and strong woman, commenced her minor tirade. Mama’s short hair was streaked with gray, uncombed and unkempt, and her eyes had black circles around them, but still she reminded me of the Mama she’d been when I was a boy, selling Mary Kay and performing in plays and theater productions. Even her cheekbones were headstrong, but the skin was peppered with blackheads and darkened from all those summers exposed to the San Antonio sun. 

I was concerned about Christina, that’s all, I said from the island in the kitchen. 

Well then for Chriss sake you coulda checked with me first, Mama muttered. It’s my car. She was in her bathrobe and barefooted. When she came into the living room and raised her objection, I found her dressed in it, the body of the womb that carried me in a long pea-green robe and house slippers.

Plus, she has to be there by seven in the morning and it’s all the way in Stone Oak, I said. I feel sorry for her, geez! I thought that’s why you got a second car, anyway, so we could do things likes this, help each other out, if needed. We’re supposed to be celebrating and happy—it’s New Year’s Eve, for goodness sake, but all you have is piss and vinegar!

Christina started crying and came over to me and leaned her head on my shoulder. She hadn’t done that in years. I pulled out a twenty and a five-dollar bill and gave them to her. A late Christmas gift. Mama was taking stock. "Oh, so now I’m the bad guy!" Mama said, shaking her head ironically in her pea-green robe, coming closer. 

I’m leaving, I said. I turned to my daughter. Do you want to stay here, Robbie, or come with me?

With you.

It had been almost five years since I spent any real time with my daughter. Not since that terrible night four and a half years ago that disintegrated our family and began the nightmares. I pulled out my cell phone and ordered a Lyft and Robbie went into her room and began packing.

We walked up the stairs to my floor. Princess was meowing, as she did whenever I came home, signaling she was thirsty for water, and the apartment was silent except for the intermittent squeak of the fire alarm signaling it was thirsty for a battery replacement. I put some Tyler, the Creator on the Bluetooth, hoping the music would lighten the mood.

I looked around the room. Everything was in order and chaos. There was the pull-out sofa sleeper I’d gotten for forty dollars back in August that she could sleep on. 

The position of articles in the kitchen and the refrigerator had never bothered me before, but as Robbie examined the contents of my pantry and cupboards and whatnot, now I was painfully conscious of it. The pantry was not being used for its designed purpose and utility—foodstuffs—and instead was stuffed with papers and notebooks. Robbie shook her head. She said she would take me shopping the next day for staples, as she called them, and some much-needed household cleaning products.

My little girl—once afraid to visit—wanted to upgrade her father. 

I could never have scripted an end to the year like this.

The year of the Pandemic.

I felt triumphant.

It was the best of years, it was the worst of years, it was the age of pandemic, it was the age of possibility, it was the year of civil unrest, it was the year of uncivil war, it was the season of Hope, it was the season of Fear, it was the epoch of the Big Lie, it was the epoch of the Little Virus. In my early forties, I found myself rudderless and the true way was lost. Now—four months away from my fiftieth birthday—I’d clawed my way back, pulling myself up from my bootstraps, and had done quite well for myself for someone still officially below the poverty level.

After years of homelessness and unfulfilled potential, I had seven books under my belt, all self-published, all written during the Trump years, no great shakes really, but still toiling in relative obscurity.

Not bad for a guy on Section 8.

The dove finally came back with a green sprig.

But after seeing my apartment through my daughter’s eyes—I hated myself—hated my fridge, my pantry, and my messy bedroom. She had to do something, so we went on New Year’s Day to Target, where I spent about two bills on the same stuff we could’ve gotten for fifty bucks at Dollar General. 

We were getting into the Lyft with our bags, putting them into the trunk, when I asked her. She’d cut her hair a long time ago; it was a short fro, now. My little girl’s long black locks were long gone, but she made her new asexual look work, too. She was beautiful, but I was biased.

What about the ending of the seventh book? What didn’t you like about it?

I wouldn’t have said, ‘Don’t be a crybaby, Dad.’

And what would you have said? I asked, smiling.

I would have said it’s alright for men to cry at the end of movies because I don’t believe in toxic masculinity or patriarchal male roles.

Is that right?

She looked at me. I’m not the same little girl you knew years ago, Dad, she said. I’ve changed.

I understand that, Robbie. Okay then, smarty-pants, just how am I supposed to write the end?

Just tell it how it happened, Dad, Robbie said. Just tell it how it happened. 

4

I BROKE MY FRONT TEETH.

It’s my earliest memory. I was five years old, and we were living in a suburb of Chicago called Matteson. Sprawled out on the classroom floor, I finally faced up to the grim reality, put a hand to my mouth, and felt blood. Intending to make a joke, I made a fool of myself. I was in third grade, attending a lily-white elementary school a few pristine blocks away from where we lived. As a young black boy, I stuck out like an alien. But at that moment, I was reaching my hand to where my two front teeth were supposed to be, finding them missing, and tasting blood as the late-morning sunlight shone indifferently on the classroom’s linoleum floor.

I cried. I tasted the blood and felt the horrible cracking of my own two teeth against the floor after when what was supposed to be me pretending to trip and fall over this girl’s outstretched legs in the aisle between our desks, inadvertently turned into an actual trip and fall. My two front teeth taking the brunt of the impact. All for the love of comedy. All to no avail.

I cried again.

Mama rushed to the school.

Mama, my mouth’s bleeding! I bawled. I was covering my mouth, holding a gauze against it, given to me by the school nurse.

Mama took me from the school nurse’s office and threw me in the back seat of the car and told me to keep calm as she hightailed it to the dentist. She told me to lay down and just keep that gauze to my mouth until we got there. Daddy was at work exterminating termites and other pests in lower-middle class suburbia in the age before cell phones, and he couldn’t be reached, so Mama stopped home and grabbed Marc, my older brother, and brought him with us. Mama, in an uncharacteristically soothing tone, asked what had happened. Curled up in the backseat of our ’75 Buick Regal holding a napkin to my chatterbox, I was finding it difficult to explain at the moment.

When we got to the dentist’s office, they put me in a chair and leaned it all the way back. The dentist leaned in real close while he attached something to what was remaining of my two front teeth. Somehow, they had found the chipped-off bits of my teeth and grafted them back on. How they did that still amazes me. Tony Bennett had left his heart in San Francisco; I, my choppers on the linoleum floor of a third-grade classroom in Matteson, Illinois, on the eve of the Iran-hostage crisis. As we left, I heard the dentist telling Mama that I was well-behaved throughout. Inside, I was screaming. But I stayed quiet. He squeezed my hand and told me I was going to be okay.

Your mouth’s gonna be swollen like that and you’re not gonna be able to feel anything for a while, chap, he said. But it’ll go away in a few hours, I promise. There’s also probably gonna be a tiny little yellow line where we put the teeth back. It’s nothing to worry about.

He squeezed my hand again and gave me a sucker.

His office was small and green, with bright lights and everything metal. I took one last look at the tiny metal instruments he and his crack staff of dental assistants had tortured me with. Mama grabbed my hand and I stepped from the patient’s chair and we walked out into the waiting area. Outside of the corner of my eye, I was aware of a hidden figure buckling over and grabbing his stomach. 

It was Marc, laughing.

Mama said I could miss school for a few days. She drove us home while I watched the tops of trees and the tops of houses and the white clouds go over me as shadows in rapid succession through the backseat window. 

They said it was called a tooth graft. 

Mama, does this mean I get to get out of the draft? I asked. She smiled and said I didn’t have to worry about the draft because President Carter had gotten rid of it. Besides, the last helicopters had already flown out of Saigon a few years ago anyway. The war was over. Peace with honor. I didn’t want to be drafted and become a baby-killer, I said, a common moniker for the veterans who had returned from ‘Nam. But that wouldn’t happen. The generation that was too young to remember World War II, too young to remember a depression, too young even to vote—from that