by Sapphire
“You has a sister?”
“Lemme finish! So I mean my mom and dad are dead but the brothers had x-ed the knowledge about the rest of my family. So they were, like, trying to make me the captive orphan sex slave. I mean really!”
“So the sister?”
“She died.”
“How sad. So this was when I meet you, you never tell me any of this. Sometimes you say ‘brothers,’ sometimes you say ‘priests,’ which one was it?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“So go ahead, this was when I meet you—”
“Yeah, just, so they got busted, I guess, and had to get rid of the kids who’d tell on them, so I got sent to live with my great-grandmother—”
“How they find her?”
“I don’t know. I mean, they probably always knew where she was. She was thinking, I think, that I had gotten adopted by some rich Arabs. At least that’s what she said. ‘I thought de Cath’lics had give you to de Ayrabs’cause of yo’ name—’”
“I never hear of Arabs adopting no colored kids.”
“Well, whatever, old people say weird shit. So anyway, I ended up with her in her house. Everything’s all old, nasty, and raggedy. She’s . . . I don’t know, maybe all old people is like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, just go off. So I had asked her to give me the 411, you know, the whole deal—her, me, the creepy crib, what’s going on here? I’m thinking, despite appearances that state otherwise, she’s normal, understand what I’m saying? I figure she’s gonna respond, you know, normal. I mean, I’m a kid who shows up on her doorstep, innocent—”
“I remember how innocent you was.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. You getting distracted. So what happened?”
“Well, she just started talking, like she was crazy or having a nervous breakdown or . . . or high, or I don’t know, like, like remembering herself being high. But, whatever, she was gone. She was sitting in the kitchen staring at the wall, or at something couldn’t nobody see but her. And she’s talking, just a-talking, loud too. Every now and then, she’ll check me out, look at me or ask me a question. But why I say nervous breakdown or something is because this goes on for hours. I don’t know, it felt like days, even. I mean, I would get up, go to the bathroom, and come back, and she’s still talking.”
“About what, Arthur?”
“Her life—Mississippi. According to her, she damn near walked to New York, and then she gets involved with some ‘nigger boy’ in the fast lane who gets killed. She never got over it. Then her daughter—”
“Ta mère?”
“No, my grandmother, this is my great-grandmother talking. You know, the whole bad-man story for generations—”
“She didn’t try to find you when they put you up for adoption?”
“I wasn’t put up for adoption.”
“But you said you were.”
What’s with this motherfucker!
“No, I said, she said or thought I had been adopted—”
“But that’s what I’m asking. Didn’t she, anybody, say anything or try to find you or . . . or anything?”
This faggot is starting to get on my last nerve!
“I don’t know. No, I guess not.”
Is that what he wanted to hear?
“Well, don’t get mad and stop talking. You do that all the time! It’s not fair!”
The sound of his voice makes me sick. The accent, the lisp—I never hear anysing like it. . . . You boys . . . you sink you cute! . . . I seen hundred of boys like you—I bet!
“Shall I fix you a coffee or a protein shake while you staring off into space?”
“No thanks, I got to get out of here. I have a rehearsal.”
“What else you got with that boy?”
“Boy? You make it sound like I’m fifty years old or something.” He winces. Good, faggot, feel it. “They’re all older than me downtown. And how do you know it’s a boy?” Period, end of sentence. Let that sink in.
“When will you be back?”
“Why?”
“For God’s sake, I just asked! I can’t ask you nothing no more?” Faggot! I hate him. “He wish it was him!” Joke, my ass. All of a sudden he’s so curious about some damn notebooks, my mother, the priests—he doesn’t care. He could have asked years ago, but then he would have had to deal with me being thirteen. He didn’t want to know, goddamn it! He’s panicking now. That’s what the motherfucker’s doing. He don’t care about no damn dance either, “la danse.” Maybe he used to, I don’t know. I know all he care about now is wrapping his lips around some dick? He can forget about me, I ain’t a “you boys” no more. Next faggot call me a boy is dead.
Walking down Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side, I turn my gaze away from the beautiful green and silver river snaking down the side of the city and look at the ugly black nannies pushing their pink babies on the sidewalk. Shit, what choices did I have back then? Slavery Days? Marcus Garvey Park—the bushes or the watchtower? Port Authority—the bathrooms? Central Park—the lake, the Meat Rack? Or Roman? I made a choice.
I think things are opening up for me downtown.
CPRKR, one of the pieces Scott set on Herd, has two screens placed on opposite sides of the stage. One screen shows a large vase falling off a kitchen counter, crashing onto a tile floor into smithereens. The other screen shows the same footage in reverse. The splashes of water unsplattering and coming back into the vase as the shards of glass unfragment and fly upward until the vase is on the countertop again. The DVDs are played over and over: falling, shattered, coming back together, rising, restored—again and again. And Herd is dancing downstage of the vases.
I only went back once after I left. “Tell ’em you put me on a train to Mississippi and my father picked me up at the station.” That’s when she gave me the notebooks. “I don’ know what dey say, I cain’t make out nothin’ wit’out my glasses.”
All I wanted was to get as far away from her as possible, forget, be . . . be the opposite—CLEAN, neat, leather down, cool city, Parker! Basquiat! Triple A—African American Artist. I didn’t want shit to do with “dis and dat” or “you de seed” or “down in Mississippi.”
I think of a piece of My Lai’s we just did, “Suicide Seed.” Behind the company is a still from “Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Super Masochist.” The piece ends with a line from a poem by John Donne: “For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love.”
“That’s not dance, it’s not theater either—you is doing nothing with them idiots! Dance is not some assholes reciting a poem in front of some porn video.”
Fuck him, if it ain’t a dying swan, it’s not dance to Roman’s ass.
I left the notebooks at the pad. I need to swing back and get them. I should have known he was going through my stuff, or was he? It was my fault for telling him to put my shoes in the closet? I stop in my tracks and double back up Riverside Drive home.
Henri the doorman stares at me. I try to joke. “Nope, you’re not seeing things, I just left.”
But he doesn’t say anything or smile; it feels like he’s looking right through me. Does he believe I’m Arthur Stevens? Twenty-five years old? Four years I’ve never gotten any mail here or visitors. He’s probably known something was up from day one. But I wasn’t worth losing those hundred-buck gratuities over. Plus, I don’t think he likes black people too tough. But that could be all in my head. He’s never said anything; if he had, where would I be now? Where would Roman be? What difference does it make, it’s almost over now.
Back in the apartment, I make a straight line to the closet for the suitcase I had the notebooks in. Where—okaay, one, two, three, four—where’s the other one? His ass! Where could it be, he had to have taken it. I am going to throw these motherfuckers so far away. The longer they’re lying around, the greater the, the potential for a mistake, that that shit will get into somebody’s hands who will mistake
me for that weird shit, think that’s who I am. Jesus Christ, I ain’t that! I don’t know what I am, but I’m different from that. On the real, I’m different from everybody’s expectations anyway. What’s a nigger spozed to be any fucking way! Even PC motherfuckers like Scott and them got stereotypes. They’re surprised when I say I was born uptown, and then they see I ain’t no yo-hoodie-coupla-forties-welfare-baby-daddy or a shitball-eating faggot walking around, “Well, hello, girlfriend,” and snapping my fingers like Roman. They can’t figure me out. They ain’t never been past Fourteenth Street. Who was I? Shit, man, I was who the fuck I had to be. But now, who am I now? Motherfucking Crazy Horse, that’s who! But that’s not real. I made up somebody to survive. I don’t know who I am, but I damn sure know what I ain’t. And I ain’t this shit. I toss the notebooks in my backpack. My inheritance, I snort. Scott’s ass is sitting on millions when his parents die. My Lai is due for mad paper too.
A sob shakes my chest as I drop down the subway steps remembering how easily I disappeared. Stan was supposed to take me to school that next Monday. I had started dance classes already but had missed nearly three weeks of school (now I’ve missed three years). Roman tells me again if I be his boy he will make me a dancer, feed me, and let me stay in his house, and keep me in leather and jeans and anything else I want. When I go back, Slavery Days begs me to stay. “You de seed.” I don’t know what she told them; I know I never picked up a milk carton with my face on it.
I never hid, I never ran, I never had to. All that shit—J.J., Crazy Horse, Arthur Stevens—nobody knew my fucking name. But the real deal was, nobody cared I was gone once there was no ass to eat or check to collect. I took two classes a day at Stride with Roman for free, no questions asked, took classes at the Y, came uptown and took classes from Imena every Thursday and Saturday afternoon. I didn’t have to hide. I never existed for nobody, no way.
What’s going to be hard is existing. Reappearing. This January I’ll be eighteen years old. Get a job, Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, or Mickey D’s, then take the GED and get in a college dance program, NYU or someplace? Just come on up like those boomer bombers in the movie, kaBOOM, we’re back! I like that! They’re like sixty now. Even though they didn’t kill anybody, they blew shit up. What did I do? Nothing. Sometimes I wish I had killed somebody or something, then at least I’d be suffering for some reason.
On the train I look across the aisle at some babes giggling, their ears stuffed with sounds, one player between them and one earphone in one girl’s ear, the other in her friend’s. Friends. Looking up above the girls’ heads in the train window, I see my reflection, and then it’s like a ghost, the black leather hood Brother Samuel used to wear, appears with smoke wafting out of the eye- and earholes. It’s smoldering like it’s about to burst into flames. Scared, I jump up when the train screeches into Seventy-second Street and dash out the opening doors instead of continuing downtown to Fourteenth Street, where I was going to switch to the Number 1 to the Loft. I run up the steps just in time to dash in between the closing doors of an uptown Number 3. I want to spit in that faggot’s face and tell him how he fucked up my life. Am I losing it? Why now? Can’t you let it go? You got a rehearsal, suppose you get in trouble? Then I see the babes in my head, listening to the same song, sharing earphones. I never had that. He should die. Yeah, by my bare hands! I ain’t thirteen no more. These four years been the beef years. I close my eyes shut but can’t squeeze out the leather-hooded ghost, then it morphs into Brother Samuel’s pink sweaty face.
I get off at 135th Street and Malcolm X Blvd. Shit, I spent most of my life here. On Lenox there’s the funeral parlor where my mother was laid out, and around the corner on 135th, the recreation center where I started dancing.
Where’s the security in this place? I think as I breeze through the front door of St Ailanthus and down the hall to the administration office. I used to put papers in piles here for Mrs Washington. I don’t recognize the girl sitting behind the wooden stile at the desk, working on the computer. All of a sudden I’m out of steam.
“Can I help you?”
“I want to see Brother John.”
“Who?”
“Brother John,” I say, like when you’re in one of those vintage stores downtown and you ask about some shirt you don’t really want because you’re nervous about the price of the pants you do want.
“He’s been gone a while now, almost three years.”
“I used to be in his earth science class.”
“Brother John is teaching in South Dakota on an Indian reservation. Some of the boys still get letters from him.”
I bet they do.
“Brother Samuel?”
She’s looks at me weird. “Brother Samuel died two days ago.”
So it was him.
“He committed suicide. Hung himself from one of the beams in the library. The kids found him like that, naked except for this . . . this thing . . .” She can’t finish but draws her hands down the sides of her face.
The hood. Yeah, it was him, him on his way to hell.
As if the girl is some kind of witch or something, I back out of the door without turning my back on her and then run.
Hail Mary Full of Grace Blessed art thou among women and Blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus—
“Fuck him!” I shout to the sky. Let somebody else pray for his ass. I’m glad he’s dead!
That night I dream one of the old dreams I used to have when I was a kid, flying over endless blue water. Flying and flying as if I’m some giant puffed-up bird, all-powerful. Nothing can stop me. Then I start to feel a little tired, just a little bit, not a lot, really. I look out over the vast blue water; some of the fun is gone, not all, just some. I’m looking for someplace I can land, except as far as I can see, water. But everything ends; there is no endless anything, except in dreams. If I can keep flying until the water ends, or I see some island, or I wake up . . . I’m scared, which gives me energy to keep flying. In the dream I feel so much sorrow. I think of how they killed Crazy Horse. I feel the knife through the centuries. It hurts worse than when they twisted my shoulder at St Ailanthus. I keep flying, I’m an Indian now, dead and crying, watching Brother John walk toward my great-great-great-grandchildren. I look at the full moon. Shit, go for it, I think, and I arch upward and start flying toward the moon!
When I get there, I see an old man with a straw hat on, his back to me, sitting on one of the glowing moon rocks playing a banjo loud and singing:
If I evah git from ’round dis harvest,
I don’ even wanna see a rose bush grow.
Who is he? I want to see his face, so I run up on him. But before I can get in front of him and see his face, he stands up and shoots forward on beams of light like long gleaming skis. I try again; the same thing happens. Then I see some beams of light and hop on them, getting my own “skis,” which turn out to be faster than his. I catch up with him and whip around on my beams of light in front of him to see who he is. But where his face should be is green vapor floating in the shape of a skull. A pair of eyeballs is staring out at me from the vapor as he plucks on his banjo, shouting:
If I evah git from ’round dis harvest,
I don’ even wanna see a rose bush grow.
An’ if anybody ask me ’bout de country,
Lord have mercy on his soul.
He keeps singing. I know who he is! He’s groaning now and singing out words from another world. I’m getting scared. I want to go back to my own world, but I don’t know how to get back from space. I wake up in a panic.
IN THE MORNING he’s talking talking.
“Let’s go for breakfast,” he says.
“What time is it?”
“Eight o’clock.”
I want to go back to sleep.
“Come on, sleepyhead, put something on and we go get some breakfast.”
I feel like shit. Life should begin at noon. Plus, I don’t want to go nowhere with him.
“What you is laying up th
ere thinking? I never know what you thinking anymore.”
“But I know what you’re thinking,” I snap.
“You is become so cruel. You was not cruel when I take you in.”
“I’m not thirteen anymore.”
“You is always bringing that up nowadays. That, and those priests that molest you. Roman don’t molest. You is bigger than Roman. I thought you was a man. You tell me you is seventeen. Who am I supposed to believe? Then you tell me the truth after it’s too late—we is already in love!”
We? This motherfucker is crazy. I got to get up; I got a rehearsal at ten.
“You want to go to breakfast?”
“I got a rehearsal at ten.”
“We never go anwhere!”
“You know why that is as well as I do.”
“Well, you is of age now. We can go out like . . . like other couples.”
For shit’s sake, “other couples.” Please, if it had been me, a black man, fifty-, sixty-something years old, bringing home his little white ass, I’d still be in jail.
“I’m not hungry.”
“So what, you need something, it’s not good to dance on an empty stomach.”
“Where’s the other notebook?”
“I don’t know what you is talking about.”
“Forget it, then.”
“No, what you is talking about?”
“No use talking about it if you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“So what I am talking about is, it ain’t good to dance on an empty stomach. You need to eat something. Let’s go get a coffee and croissant. I have to teach at eleven-thirty, that advanced intermediate. What time is your rehearsal over?”
He has a ten o’clock advanced professional class. He’s been telling me for almost a year I need to take a more advanced class than the advanced intermediate. It’s true, but I don’t want to take it from him.
“You taking class somewhere else?” he asks.
So this is what’s up.
“Come on, I’ve always taken class ‘somewhere else’!”