Too Beautiful to Die

by Glenville Lovell

  One crisp October morning, dressed in blue jeans and a neatly pressed blue cotton shirt, I set off, ostensibly to visit my uncle on Clarendon Road. Instead, I boarded the Number 2 train to Manhattan, where I got off at Forty-second Street and fought my way through pimps and hustlers to the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

  Tall for my age, about five-eight, with a smile that everybody said was cute, I ambled up to the Greyhound ticket window. Here was a chance to find if my smile possessed any mojo.

  The attendant, a white woman with crinkled eyes and a branch of purple veins knotted in her forehead, asked me where I wanted to go.

  I smiled.

  She frowned and repeated her question in a voice that stung like my grandmother’s lashes. I smiled again. I didn’t know where I wanted to go. I hadn’t worked out my flight plan that far ahead. She saw my dilemma.

  “What’s your name?”

  I panicked. If I was running away I couldn’t use my real name. Her name tag read Brenda Overstreet. Quickly I blurted out, “Blades Overstreet.”

  She laughed and signaled to a policeman strolling by.

  “Well, Blades Overstreet, why don’t you tell the officer where you live. I’m sure he’d be glad to see you get home safe.”

  I lived with Carmen until I was ready to sign up with the Marines. That’s when I became Blades Overstreet.

  MY MOTHER WAS barely five-two. She wore heels all the time to compensate, especially when she went anywhere with my dad, who was six-four. Unfortunately, in America’s eyes, that was not the biggest difference between them. She was white; he was black.

  Twice my mother married. Both men deserted her. Her first husband, Jason and Melanie’s father, who was white, left when he discovered she was having an affair with my father, who she met at an artist colony in Boston in the sixties. My father left when I was fourteen. One night I woke up to screaming. He and my mother were having a terrible fight. I don’t know what about. He left that night and never returned.

  After it became clear that he was not coming home, I drifted from resentment to resignation about his absence. In the intervening years, needing an easy answer for his desertion, I imagined that he left because my sister constantly compared him to her father. Or that the militancy that had once captured his spirit as a member, for a brief time, of the Black Panther party, had returned, making him uncomfortable with the world he’d acquired because of love: the white world of my mother and her children. And in my many fights with my sister, I used these deductions like pylons against my sister’s angry taunts that if my mother hadn’t married my father, he would’ve ended up dead like the rest of the Panthers.

  I don’t know what set off my desire to find him, but when I came out of the hospital I resigned from the Department and went searching for him. I canvassed all my known relatives in New York and his old friends from the Panther days, and after a month of dead ends I got a good lead, which took me to Panama. There I spoke to one of my grandmother’s brothers. My father had visited him about four months before I arrived. He gave me a number back in the States to call.

  A week later I met my father in a Miami motel. Almost twenty years had passed. He looked nothing like the man I remembered. There was a dankness about his wrinkled eyes, as if he’d been submerged underwater for a long time. He was now slightly stooped, from a back injury, he told me. The only thing that remained of the man who taught me how to hit a baseball was his deep voice, which could still snap you to attention in an instant. His eyes were now empty of the presumptuousness that once stamped him as one of the most outspoken men in the community.

  He’d changed his name to Paul Reese and apparently made a living selling prints of his paintings on the Internet. After the usual tango between estranged father and son, I asked him why he left. I rue the day I was so curious.

  The story he told me was a rambling account of his short-lived involvement with the Panthers and its aftermath. He didn’t leave the party because of his marriage to my mother as I’d presumed, but because of disillusionment with the ineffective leadership. Years after he’d left the party, indeed years after the Panthers had been silenced by COINTELPRO and had ceased to be a force in the national debate on race, my father, in a rash moment of guilt, informed on two past leaders of the party. Both were arrested, tried and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a police officer. One escaped from jail, and after a shootout with police that left his wife dead, he disappeared. Soon afterward, death threats began to rain on my father. He decided to leave New York.

  Why didn’t you take us with you? I asked him.

  He didn’t have an answer.

  I could not bring myself to accept that my father would run from anyone. Moreover, that he would leave his family behind. And I would never have believed his story had someone not tried to kill him while I was staying with him in Miami. The ghosts of the past had finally caught up with him. Luckily, I was there. After the Miami episode, my father moved to the island of Barbados.

  My mother grew up in New Orleans. Of the two children by her first marriage, Melanie was the older. She was now a successful lawyer in California. Jason, the birthday boy, was three years my senior. For most of his life Jason has suffered with depression. He became addicted to drugs in college and has been unemployed since he was twenty-five.

  When I was young I was very confused about my identity. It did not help that my parents couldn’t agree either. My father saw the world in black and white. To him, I was black. My mother, kindled by optimism, refused to accept my father’s declaration, insisting that I was neither black nor white but better because I was mixed. I had the best of both worlds, she told me. For a long time I actually believed I was better off for not being white or black. I had both black and white friends and was equally comfortable around them. All that changed at the age of thirteen.

  I was the best swimmer in the Park Slope prep school I attended. I was also the only kid on the swim team who wasn’t white. My black friends made fun of me; my white friends thought it was cool. There was a tradition at the school that the best swimmer was chosen as captain of the swim team. I was not chosen. The captaincy was given to another swimmer. When I asked the coach why I wasn’t chosen captain as was the tradition, his eyes sank deep into his head and he hunched his shoulders, mumbling something to the effect that the school decided to use different criteria that year. I sensed that he was lying.

  I withdrew from the swim team and joined the basketball team without telling my mother. I had been a better swimmer than anyone else, but I wasn’t good enough to captain the swim team. My mother was wrong. At my school, it was better to be white than mixed.

  I spent many afternoons staring at myself in the mirror. My face was seasoned with my father’s genes. I had his chunky lips and my complexion was a tawny brown rather than light. My hair was thick with curls. There was no way I could pass for white. And being mixed was the same as being black in America.

  IARRIVED AT my mother’s town house in Bloomfield, New Jersey, at seven-fifteen. I had keys and let myself in. Melanie was already there. When I entered she was sitting in a blue cotton dress, her legs crossed, on the red sofa. As always she looked stunning. She uncrossed her legs and got up to greet me.

  I’d seen her briefly on the West Coast when I visited Anais earlier in the summer. Melanie and I have always had a volatile relationship, but the smile on her face when she saw me made me forget all the awkward moments and fights we’d had over the years.

  “How’re you doing, Blades?”

  Melanie was frail and brittle in my arms. She’d lost some weight.

  “I’m doing alright, sis. How’re you?”

  She stepped back, holding me at arm’s length. “Fine.”

  “Lost weight?”

  “Some.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine. How’s the business going?”

  “Terrible.”

  We laughed and embraced again. It was good to see her in such h
igh spirits.

  My mother swept out of the kitchen looking handsome in a long yellow tight-fitting dress. Holding onto her youthful figure with a combination of yoga, ballet and a daily regimen of two bottles of Avian water and little else, my mother was the quintessential New Age woman. She taught French literature at Bloomfield College and was an insatiable traveler who spent a part of every summer in Europe.

  “Carmen!” She greeted me with her usual flourish, arms outstretched, a tent smile on her face.

  We hugged for a long time. Her hair smelled of roast fish.

  “Something smells good,” I said.

  “Wait until you see what I made you.”

  “What? Not seafood gumbo?”

  “I’m not saying.” Giggling, she pushed me back as I tried to go into the kitchen. “You have to wait.”

  “Making me wait for gumbo is torture, you know that.”

  “Who said anything about gumbo?”

  “It’s gumbo. It’s got to be gumbo.”

  “You’ll have to wait. Go make yourself a drink.”

  “Where’s Jason?” I said.

  From the painful silence that followed I knew that Jason had gotten into one of his moods. A wave of guilt washed over me. I’d been so consumed with my own personal troubles that I hadn’t kept in touch with my brother.

  Melanie took my arm. “Go talk to him. You’re the only person who can talk to him when he gets like this.”

  That was not exactly true. Growing up I’d idolized my brother, but we had never been really close. He’d been a star athlete at St. Francis Academy in Park Slope, winning a scholarship to North Carolina University. It was there that he started experimenting with drugs. After he was expelled from school, he came back to New York, where, a week later, he almost died from a heroin overdose. One day I saw Jason buying drugs on Flatbush Avenue and I decided my mission in life would be to get rid of every drug dealer in the world.

  In and out of rehab since he was twenty, Jason was later diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder and put on medication, which he refused to take, preferring to binge on alcohol, or cocaine, disappearing for days, sometimes weeks at a time.

  My mother was very upset when I opted to go to Lincoln University instead of Villanova, which had offered me a baseball scholarship. I was good at it but didn’t care that much about baseball and wasn’t good enough to play basketball. When I dropped out of Lincoln at the end of my sophomore year to join the Marines, she protested that she had not demonstrated against the Vietnam War for one of her sons to become a trained killer. But my mind was made up. I knew what I wanted, and a college education wasn’t necessary for catching bad guys. After four years of seasoning in the service, and two after that working on an oil rig in the Virgin Islands and security for rock bands, I was ready to join the NYPD.

  The door to Jason’s room was open. I knocked and walked in. It was dark inside. He was lying in bed, arms folded across his chest in the manner of a corpse. U2 sermonized from the boom box on the headboard. I started to speak but he held up his hand to silence me. While I leaned against the door waiting for his meditation to peak, I remembered how I used to love sneaking into his room to read his comics or look at pictures of naked women.

  After the song finished, he turned the music off and sat up. His long blond hair was straggly about his face.

  “Can I turn on the light?” I said.

  His shoulders hunched violently, and I moved toward him, thinking he was going to topple over. Before I could reach him, he stood and walked to the light switch.

  The light unfolded to my eyes the misery of my brother’s life. He wore nothing. His crumpled-up face looked ready to be thrown away. It was a mass of stubble and scrapes as if he’d fallen on barbed wire or been in a fight with a cat. Empty Three Musketeers wrappers dotted the floor. In one corner rock magazines were piled a pillar high. Newspapers covered the bed. Clothes dangled from every protrusion in the room, and the walls were covered with pictures of naked black women. The room was hot and drenched with the sour smell of stale pizza.

  “What’s happening, man?” I said.

  He rummaged around in a pile of clothes on the floor for a pair of shorts. Usually distant and cold when I came to see him, he surprised me with a deep embrace after he’d pulled on his shorts. It’d been two months since I last saw him. He was in rehab in Vermont when I left for the West Coast.

  “I brought you something,” I said.

  The bag I handed him contained a vintage Dodgers baseball shirt with the name of his favorite player, Sandy Koufax, printed on the back.

  His face exploded into a grin when he turned the shirt around and saw the name. He looked at me and he was shaking. I couldn’t tell if it was from happiness or from exhaustion, for he truly looked bedraggled.

  “It’s signed,” I said.

  “Awesome. How’d you get it?”

  “I was on the West Coast a few weeks ago. Anais knows some very important people. You like it?”

  “It’s great.”

  “I thought you would like it.”

  “It’s very nice. Thank you.”

  “Hey, is everything alright?”

  “Sure. Everything’s cool.” He laughed.

  “Put it on, man. Put it on.”

  “Now?”

  “It’s your birthday, man. Put on!”

  He slipped the shirt over his head and stood beaming like a twelve-year-old. “How’s it look?”

  I clapped my hands together, as I used to do when I watched my brother strike out batters in little league. “You look great.”

  The smile in his eyes quietly died. He sat on the edge of the bed. “I fucked up, didn’t I?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I could’ve been good. I could’ve been as good as Sandy Koufax.”

  “You’re still the best I ever seen.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Always.”

  “I’m tired, man. Always so tired.”

  “Melanie is here. Flew all the way from California to be with you. Left her rich husband out there to be with her brother. Now what do you think about that? You can’t disappoint her.”

  “What the fuck have I got to celebrate? I’m a loser.”

  “Hey, we’re family.”

  He snickered. “That’s a joke, and you know it.”

  “That’s all in the past.”

  “Nothing is ever in the past, man. Nothing. It’s all here.” He tapped his head. “It never goes away. It just sits there and churns and churns like it’s making butter. Turning your brain into fucking butter. Fuck it, man. I don’t want to celebrate. I don’t want a party. I just want you all to leave me the fuck alone.”

  He was becoming agitated. Once he became like that there was no way to talk to him until he’d calmed down.

  I left him and went outside to explain Jason’s logic, but my sister had dumped her compassion somewhere over the Grand Canyon.

  “Does he understand that I’m a busy woman? That I canceled a number of engagements to fly across America to be here?” she snorted.

  “He’s just not up to it,” I said. “He can’t do it.”

  “That’s not acceptable.”

  “Look, you’ll be here tomorrow. Take him out to lunch.”

  “I won’t be here tomorrow. I’m taking an early flight in the morning.”

  “When’d you get here?”

  “It doesn’t matter when I got here.”

  I turned to Mom. “When’d she get here?”

  Before my mother could speak, Melanie screamed, “What’re you? My fucking jailor! The issue is not when I got here; it’s that Jason is acting like a jerk.”

  I caught my mother’s weary eyes and was crushed by the weight of her pain. She sat silently on the sofa sipping coffee, her arthritic right wrist misshapen by years of wiping tears from her eyes. My mind flew back to waking up in the hospital flanked by my mother and my wife both crying. Now, as I watched my mother struggle to contain her ange
r at having to watch her two children continue the brawls that had marked their youth, a chill ran up my back. Her eyes were wet, and she kept blinking as though her vision was blurred. I felt myself lose steam for the battle with Melanie.

  Melanie never forgave Mom for marrying a black man, and since that black man happened to be my father, I imagined that her fury was also directed at me. Perhaps trying to compensate for America’s shortcoming, my mother made the mistake of trying to make me feel that I was somehow more special than special because I was mixed. That never sat well with Melanie.

  I touched my mother’s face. Her delicate skin seemed ready to crack. I could see the veins in her eyes.

  “I’m leaving, Mom.”

  She clutched my arm. “No, Carmen. Stay and eat.”

  “I got some business to take care of back in New York.”

  “How can you leave now?” screamed Melanie, her eyes wide as saucers.

  “Will you two stop it?” Mom said. “Carmen, I thought you would stay the night.”

  “I can’t, Mom. You know I would if I could.”

  “What could you possibly have to do that can’t wait until tomorrow? Anais isn’t even in New York. How’re things with her, by the way?”

  “Not too good. I know you love her, Mom, but I really don’t think Anais is coming back.”

  “Give her time.”

  “I’m running out of time.”

  “Why do you have to rush back to New York?”

  “I promised to help a friend.”

  “You’re choosing a friend over your family?” Melanie said.

  “Just butt out, okay?” I said.

  Mom got up. “Take some food with you if you have to go.” She walked off toward the kitchen leaving me and Melanie to stare at each other.

  “You’re just like your father,” Melanie whispered.

  “What was that?”

  “We were a very happy family until he came along. Nothing has been the same since.”

  “How happy could Mom have been with your father? She chose to have an affair. With my dad.”