by Sapphire
“You know this piece backwards.” My Lai.
“I’ve never seen you like this before. Pre-performance jitters?” Snake.
“Can we try it again?” Me. I haven’t experienced this kind of disconnect between my body and my command of it since I started dancing in Imena’s class in Harlem. I look at Amy, My Lai, Snake—I thought they were my friends. They’re no more my friends than Brother John, and then I think that’s not fair, not fair at all—
“Where’s your head, Abdul? You are so not here today.” Scott.
They’re not my friends or they are my friends so what! I’m a dancer; I don’t need to like these motherfuckers to do my job. You think Nureyev liked everyone he danced with? Hell no, he hated some of them.
“Everybody has an off day—” My Lai.
“I’m not having an off day. Can we start over and do it again instead of yakking about it? I missed my cue, goddamn it, so what!”
“Bet!” Snake.
ME AND MY LAI are eating breakfast at a diner on Seventh Avenue off Sixteenth Street. My Lai is chowing down on a bowl of high-fiber cereal swamped with two orders of blueberries and nonfat milk. She’s spooning the cereal into her mouth, trying to get as many blueberries on the spoon as she can. The perfect smell of bacon sizzling on the diner’s grill brings tears to my eyes. I’m remembering Aunt Rita picking up a slice of bacon with her red-tipped fingers and holding it to my mouth. The greasy, salty pleasure of pork filled my mouth as I stared at the dark place between her breasts accented by her low-cut dress and hard black push-up bra. The bra I had thought was extra breasts when I saw it laid out on the white bedspread and buried my nose in the cups, drinking in her musky perfume smell. I get up and head to the restroom in the back of the diner, the tears almost spilling over. I head past the urinals for the one stall. Locked inside, I sob, seeing her leaning out a hotel room door as I trot down the hall to the bathroom, the floor always sticky-slick with piss, sometimes blood and needles, occasionally shit, no matter how she complained or cleaned. I couldn’t imagine why she felt she had to stand watch; I was a big boy, nine years old, what could happen to me?
The urgent sound of piss surging in the trough outside the stall, a rap on the stall door, and a “Hey, buddy, I need to take a dump” remind me I’m in the wrong place to get gushy. I open the door, and there’s a guy about four feet five and three hundred pounds at least whose face looks like one big pimple. Has he been listening to me cry, waiting for me to come out, because he can’t, I mean, no way can he fit in this stall to take a shit or anything else. He’s actually blocking my exit.
“Mind if I pass, buddy?” I say. He’s fluttering a fifty-dollar bill between his thumb and forefinger.
“Oh, no, of course not,” he says, still not moving and like a magician producing two more fifty-dollar bills out of nowhere. He looks up, I catch his eye, burn him. He flings his weight to the side and lets me pass.
When I get back to the booth, my pancakes are cold. I wave my hand for the waitress. “Could you heat this up for me?”
“Sure.” She swoops down on the plate and picks it up as gracefully as she put it down. She does her job well, I think, watching her wide hips walk away from the booth, wondering what it would be like to ride them. And why am I thinking about the waitress when I got life sitting in front of me? Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep last night, or maybe that’s just how guys are, we can’t help it. What Scott said runs through my head: Like, who is this guy? Fuck that dry-ass faggot. If it wasn’t for My Lai, I’d destroy his fucking ass loft before I split, but it’s not just her; I’m holding myself back because of me. I don’t want that kind of karma riding my ass, plus Daddy’s boy might call the pigs. I got enough dogs on my brain as it is.
“What are you thinking so hard?” she asks as I pick up a piece of bacon and put it down after one bite.
“I was thinking you’re right, the best thing about bacon is how it smells. It smells way better than it tastes—at least this stuff here does.” I push it to the side of the plate and spear a forkful of buttery blueberry pancakes, which taste pretty good despite being nuked back to life.
“That is not what you were thinking.” She pouts.
“Calling me a liar?”
“No, just saying you weren’t thinking about no fucking bacon. You know, every time, half the time you feel something—”
“Which is it? You’re contradicting yourself, every time, half the time—”
“Would you let me finish? When you feel something, you hide it from me.”
She’s pouting again, or at least that’s how it seems to me. And what can I say? It’s true. Instead of getting closer, I feel myself building a wall, or maybe I’m digging a hole.
I remember Roman’s meddling ass and look at My Lai and think it’s better not to know. I swear that ninny went through everything I had or brought into that apartment.
“You know, something is funny with you papers.”
“Why were you even bothering with them?”
“Because you live here, you mine,” he said, matter-of-fact. “I help you. So I want to know you.”
It didn’t register then, but I think now, if he had gone through that envelope, he had to know how old I was, fucking faggot. I hadn’t even gone through the envelope myself except to glance in it when I left St Ailanthus. There was nothing in it could help me with the shit I was going through. It was just I didn’t have shit, and whatever I had, I held on to. I remember Aunt Rita giving it to the white woman who took me away from the hotel, then Miss Lillie, then the Brothers at St Ailanthus, then they gave it to me, and I brought it from Roman’s to the loft.
I don’t give much thought to Roman’s “something is funny with you papers.” I figure it’s a mistake like so much of my life. So I call 311:
“Hi, I need to get a copy of my birth certificate.”
“Foster care?” She must could tell I’m young.
“Yeah.”
“Aging out?” she asks.
“Yeah.” In a way I wasn’t lying—it should have been true; legally, I was still over there on 805 St Nicholas Avenue with my grandmother (only she wasn’t my grandmother when I checked out my mother’s shit!). “I know I was born in Harlem. How do I get a copy of my birth certificate for school and a New York State ID?”
“You can get it by fax, Internet, mail, or you can walk in and get it the same day.”
“OK, bet, walk in?”
“To get it in person, you come to 125 Worth Street between Centre and Lafayette, Room 133, between nine a.m. and three-thirty p.m. Enter using the side entrance on Lafayette Street. It’s fifteen dollars, credit card, debit card, check, or cash. We need your full name, your mother’s name, father’s name if available, and the reason for requesting the birth certificate.”
“Reason?”
“You already gave your reason: aging out of foster care with no documents; just repeat that when you get down here. It’s common, you ain’t gonna have no problem. It’s fifteen dollars, credit card, debit card, check, or cash. If the form is complete and payment paid, you should walk out with the birth certificate.”
She was right.
I look at My Lai. “Ready to go?”
“I think I’m going to get a poached egg on toast, I didn’t have any protein,” My Lai says.
“Order me one too,” I tell her, not even half listening to her go on about the evils of protein deficiency. I’m thinking about the birth certificate. The mistake is on this one too: My father’s name is the same as my mother’s father’s name. What’s up with that? It’s another dog loose in my brain, a bad dog.
“To get in a college dance program I got to have what?”
“The whole shebang—Social Security number, you got to come up, dude; same thing if you want to get a driver’s license, got to come up. Did you get your birth certificate?”
“I did. In fact, I actually already had one.”
“So why the drama?”
“I . . .
there was a mistake on the one I had.”
“Mistake? What mistake? Did you fix it?”
“No.”
“Well, what is it, are you you? I mean, ah, nineteen, AA, a man, I know you got your Y chromosomes,” she teases.
“I’ll tell you later.”
“No you won’t,” and she stabs her egg with her fork. “Tell me now. Tell me now or get someone you can tell. I’m tired of being locked out. What do we have lately aside from you getting your dick wet regularly?”
“I’m . . . I’m in love with you.”
“Then tell me.”
I feel the hole getting deeper; I know I should say something, have to. She’s serious. But something won’t let me respond. At the same time, I can’t stop the tears from rolling down my cheeks. I wish Aunt Rita was here, she would tell me. I hang my head.
“Don’t leave me,” I beg, sobbing.
“Abdul, I love you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I was just being a hard-ass because I thought you were. Don’t worry. I should have known it was . . . was—whatever it was, was big. Honey, don’t, don’t,” she says, wiping my face with her napkin.
“IT WAS A good rehearsal, guys. I think, no, I know it’s going to go off great. It’s controlled where it needs to be and wild and free where it can be. We’re on and off in fifty minutes. I’m saying the names, and the two screens are behind me, then when these screens synchronize with the helicopter scenes, My Lai, you’re on. The Jenkins track doesn’t come on until you’re out there. Don’t wait for it, because they’re waiting for you. Your cue is visual—those two screens synchronize and then merge into one screen center stage, and when we see that helicopter scene, get out there! The lights don’t go down, there’s no intermission or part one or part two—we’ve got to provide those divisions with our presence—and when the Leroy Jenkins track starts, My Lai, I want you to do like in rehearsal, stalk that music, eat it!
“So when My Lai comes offstage, the stage goes dark for a second, and you have Abdul center screen, it’s superb, that—it’s still mind-boggling that footage we got that day. So he’s on one screen, and that’s fully three minutes, and then the screen splits again, and he’s on the two screens, and then, you know, I mean, you guys know all this, the images go on the ceiling, out into the audience, on the walls surrounding the audience, on the audience’s bodies, so for a minute they’re inundated with scenes from this dancing black soldier.
“The risks are real, this couldn’t be rehearsed. What Snake said is true: We can’t predict if this is going to have the same effect on a full house of strangers that it had on us doing it at rehears—”
“It was a great idea, Scott. What doesn’t come off opening night, we’ll tweak that shit and tighten during the rest of the run.” Snake.
“Or leave it alone. The purpose of taking the images off the screen was to foreshadow the action that’s going to come. To make them feel something for these guys who are going to do this horrible stuff. Whatever effect the bombardment has, I say let’s go with it.” Amy.
“Yeah, I agree, there’s no way to ‘tweak’ this. We got to let it fall where it falls.” Me.
“I was talking more about the tech.” Snake.
“OK, then everyone’s changed. Bare chest men, women dance bras fatigue material, everybody fatigue tights.” Scott.
“Yoho! Charlie Company!” Snake.
“Bet.”
“Bet.”
“So tomorrow we meet before the show?” Amy.
“Here, the ’Bucks and walk over to the theater together.”
“Astor Place?”
A chorus of “Cool”s.
“Nobody late, hell or high water.” Scott.
“Gotcha.”
“Gotcha.”
“Bet.”
“On it.”
BOOK FOUR
DIRTY 4 DIRTY
He recalled it far more vividly in his dream than he had done in memory.
—FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY,
Crime and Punishment
ONE
Is this a hospital?
Where are the doctors, nurses, other patients, telephones in your room, nurses’ station, charts, thermometers, people coming with their flowers? Where are the other people, windows, interns, the nurses walking up and down? What’s going on here?
How did I get here? Yeah, how did I get here, and how long have I been here? What am I? Whose body is this laying here? Where’s my black machine?
“You ain’ crazy. You lucky to be here,” some punk in marshmallowlooking white shoes tells me. He knows I’m too full of the death he gives me to jump up and kill him. Here? Where’s here? How did I get here? What am I? Is this my body laying here like a broken machine? How could I be “lucky to be here”? Unless someplace else is worse, but where could I be? When will I get out of here? Ever? I try to count the days, but counting eludes me like when I was little and used to try to grab goldfish. And where is it I used to do that? I don’t remember.
I do remember My Lai. Where is she? We were in this together, together, that’s all I remember, together after being alone so long. This is how it ends? What is the love shit they are always shitting you about? I don’t know. I just think her. I want, oh, I don’t remember what I was saying. I do remember leaping, jumping, that’s clear. But that was when I was a dancer?
I feel like a drooling lump. It’s so frustrating when I try to remember anything. I don’t remember, let’s say, dancing, but I know it. Every day it’s like my mind is a stolen wallet returned; I’m going through it, knowing shit is missing but not able to remember what. Every day it’s pills and shots, inhale this or swallow that. It might be fun if I didn’t have to do it. I look for names but don’t see any; I don’t remember eating or if I even can, but if I could, I would. Even though I’m not hungry, I feel a hunger to be hungry. They think I’m asleep, or do they? Who’s they? In a way I am asleep, even though I hardly ever sleep; it seems to me that I just go someplace I forget in between being awake, which feels like a nightmare, a quiet one but a nightmare just the same. You really can’t call this being awake or alive. What I want to do is remember what turned me into a weird lump, so I can turn back into myself. A bird. Hey, maybe I’m where the bird was? Is Basquiat here? Am I dead? Is this hell? Where, where is here? Who is they? And why am I alone? This is not supposed to happen. I remember the swans in Prospect Park; we had gone to see Prince. And she said that’s us, swans. We know our mind, we’re in this for life, we mate for life. Or is that something I read and then thought she said? She said she would die before she would let them—No, that’s a movie I saw. But who is them? Is she here? This is so hard. Everything is erased; I can make the outlines of words written in my head, but there’s no ink, only a raised white shape on white paper. Maybe what braille is, but I don’t know braille. If I could read something, move, write, move, if I could move, I would know. I wouldn’t be in . . . in . . . I can’t be in prison. I can’t be. It’s the shots they give me. I’m sure of it until I get a shot. Then I don’t know. In biology they show the white blood cells as wide white smiley faces with stick legs and running shoes. And they run to whatever bad thing is in your body. I wish they was in me now to eat the shots. They would dash out like smiley-face Batmen and eat whatever was coming down the needle, because I’m way too tired, dead, to do it. I can’t even think of doing it. Yeah, I mean no, I can’t even think, much less fight.
“They must hate you, homeboy, ’cause you gittin’ it old time. They don’t even do it like this no more. They want to see how your ass will react. Why else? Watkins come check out Big Dick.”
“Shut up, you sick freak. What do I care about his dick? Bite down! Bite down!” Watkins, he’s the devil.
Zip zip ZAAP! My body flip-flops—a fish, then it’s erect and quivering under the restraints. My brain drops, an egg, on a hot sidewalk. FRY. Passersby SPLAT step spatter yellow.
Zip zip ZAAP!
Is this really happening to me?
My
bowels empty with a furious ejection of putrid liquid shit, even though they already gave me an enema. My hands are strapped down. Are they afraid I’m going to kill myself or them? If I wasn’t strapped down, I’d fill my hand with shit and smear the blind white wall. I’m tired to my bones.
THE CONSTANT SMELL of bleach and alcohol, alcohol wipes, wiping, scrubbing, the smell is so strong it’s as if the ceiling was one big white alcohol prep pad sending fumes down throughout the room. The smell is so strong I know it can’t be real. Sometimes the workers’ voices come at me from underwater; other times they’re sharp as firecrackers hurting my ears, or a hammer that could shatter my heart, which feels like an empty glass in my chest. I hear fat marshmallow shoes fluttering around me when my eyes are closed. Mean ghost heads filled with feathers that they fly away on.
Alone, hate is my friend. Hate kill God friend hate kill God revenge. My body is swelling. My body has swollen. I’m a whale, a whale with a rash. A rash that begins behind my knees creeps up my thighs into the creases where my arm bends at the elbow and breaks into hives and boils and pus that smells like a dead rat trapped in a wall and that feels like ants stinging when I sweat. The pus cannot challenge the smell of bleach and alcohol, but it tries to. I itch, but I can’t scratch. I’m restrained. Tied up. Tied up restrained talked at. I feel soft, as if I’m beginning to melt, as if my bones are dissolving. Am I dreaming? Why won’t I wake up? I seem to not know things, the central knowledge of my life, how old I am, what my name is, for God’s sake. I feel sure here is a real place, that I’m not dreaming it. But I’m not sure. I ask one of the men in marshmallow shoes, Where am I, where am I? But my tongue doesn’t work. The words don’t seem to come out of my mouth. I’m in a hospital? A . . . a where? Something must have happened. Sometimes I feel within this dreaming, I am dreaming, and in that dream I’m someone with a name. My Lai is there. I tell my muscles, move. I command, speak. Nothing happens.