Darling Days

by iO Tillett Wright

  To his credit, the boy is willing, enthusiastic even. We make an awkward pair. I lie down and shimmy my jeans off, looking at him expectantly in the darkness. He pulls his pants to his knees and gets on top of me.

  Behind his formidable head, I can see stars in the English night sky.

  He asks if I have a condom, but I tell him as long as he doesn’t have any diseases, it doesn’t matter. He laughs nervously and tries to kiss me. This amounts to him stabbing my mouth with his tongue, so I position my face away from his, guiding his hips to get the act done.

  In the half-light, I can see that his dick is massive and thick. I’m scared as he brings it toward my body and tries a half dozen times to get it inside me. When he finally does, it feels like I’ve sat on a lamppost.

  I try to find something to like about the experience, but my body is in full revolt. I don’t want this person inside me. I want the softness of a girl. I want my girl. I want Nikita. My thoughts drift to my friend who has a crush on this boy and guilt overtakes me. I feel sick.

  Abruptly, I push him away, yank up my jeans, and take off running for the main house. It’s nearly three in the morning, so I sprint as quietly as I can up the stairs and into my room. I feel filthy, like my entire body is covered in bugs. I don’t want to get in my bed like this, I have to wash it off.

  I go to the private bathroom and run the shower as hot as I can stand it. I sit in the tub and cry, scrubbing myself until my skin is raw. I feel violated, like I invited a stranger to invade my body. I did.

  Why did I do that? What am I trying to prove?

  When I’m done, I go down and crawl into Anya’s bed, whimpering, and wrap myself around her warm body.

  Word seems to spread through the school quickly, and that whole group of girls, including the friend who had a crush, drops me like so much rancid cheese. I’m dead to them.

  ASIDE FROM THE WEED and the social rejection I start doing super well, but then a beautiful black boy comes for a prospective week. He’s tall and graceful, gentle and soft spoken. He’s read the books the school is built around, and he believes in the philosophies. He is an asset to a soccer team, and he dances at the talent show.

  Once he’s gone the school tells us that they’ve decided not to allow him to attend. They “would have to ask him to cut off his dreadlocks because visitors might interpret them as a religious statement,” and they don’t want to ask him to do that. This enrages me, and I lead a charge taking the directorship to the mat about it. I have no problem calling it what it is outright: racism and hypocrisy. They don’t respond well to that.

  I want to stay here, but I’m disillusioned with the bullshit hippie diatribe. Spare me. I’m the only kid who’s had a lover of the same gender who’s open about it, and there’s no one darker than Indian, which seems sanctioned only because they have some kind of spiritual hall pass.

  At the next school assembly I propose, with lengthy justifying lead-up, that we abolish the fourteen agreements that make up the structural backbone of the school and start over. I suggest that since we’d been adding on to the agreements as needed over the years, we should be able to hit the reset button now that they’ve gotten out of control. I’m sure, I say, that no one here intends to be racist or exclusive, so let’s enact some proof of that.

  This lands in the room like a big fart. First it’s funny, kids snicker, then the seriousness of it hits and people are silent, repulsed or not, moved and alert, curious to see how the powers that be will react.

  It sparks a big discussion, which I am perhaps too vocal in, but by the end of the melee I’m still standing, holding my moral sword, covered in my own blood, and a few of the more patient of my peers have begun to see my side of things. They liked the prospective student, too, and equally don’t buy the bullshit excuse offered for his rejection.

  Over the next few weeks, the topic comes up again and again and again, with my tiny army growing glacially but steadily, despite the squirming and sighing of the less rebellious students.

  I get wind of the increased likelihood of my expulsion, so I kick my campaign to stay into overdrive. I ask every staff member who will listen to have tea with me, and I bombard them with horror stories of my other options. I tell them that this has become my home, that perhaps I’m poor at expressing it, but I cherish this place. If they kick me out, I’ll have to go and live with my ravaged mother and her abusive boyfriend in a hoarder house in New York.

  My instincts tell me that it’s a long shot, but I am too desperate to listen.

  I’m on my best behavior when the entire school is assigned their end-of-year jobs, scrubbing the laundry room until it’s unrecognizable. I pack up my room, just in case, but I refuse to say good-bye to everyone. I tell them I’ll see them in the fall and then I fly to New York.

  Chapter 40

  Homecoming

  New York City, summer 2002 through spring 2003

  EVERYONE HATES TO SUFFER. THEY’LL DO ANYTHING TO avoid it. Not my ma. She lives within pain like the war-torn overcoat of a Bosnian.

  Her scars form a moat dividing her from the rest of society, from those who have never experienced emotional dismemberment. Her stories are not about life’s pokes and pricks and sticky problems she had to solve. Her stories are tragic, Gothic, Civil War splatter flicks of amputation without anesthesia. Awful in the grand sense.

  She plows into pain, through it, with it inside her. Sometimes there’s the question of whether or not it’s possible to go on, but never of whether or not one should. You just find a way. This is life. No matter how heavy the blows.

  My mother is not of this world. In a city full of puffed-up, politically correct yuppies and gluttonous, self-centered adult children bursting with stories of that one time they volunteered to serve a meal to the homeless, my ma operates by a different code. For all her failings, for all her faults, she would curl up in a damp sheet in the cold of winter before she would ever take a blanket off me. She would go to sleep hungry if she ever thought I needed her portion of food.

  When she was under attack, accused of neglecting her most treasured baby child, she still never publicly shamed my father for his addiction. She never threw him under the bus, though she could have taken that cheap shot a thousand times. She knew I treasured him, and they had a deal.

  She worked several jobs with a brutal hip injury to keep us from starvation, for years, but she never touched the money I made as a child actor. She never stole, she didn’t lie, she never intentionally hurt anyone. She made do with what she had, and she gave the bigger portion of all she had to me.

  She is an eccentric in a world where eccentrics often live out their lives as untouchables; that is, until they die and are lionized as brilliant. When they overdose at twenty-seven we put their faces on T-shirts and call them “Bright comets” or “flares extinguished before their time.” We celebrate their art, their music, their performances. We love and exploit the products of those very peculiarities, but try growing up with them as your only guiding lights. Try having such an “eccentric” as a parent, your primary guide through the world.

  I’ve been home for a few weeks and I’ve been witness to a transformed person. My ma, who was once my superhero, my stalwart warrior queen, has been broken. It took several blows before the snap, but I know my being taken away was the ultimate wound, and the guilt of it is with me constantly.

  The severity of her hip pain has crippled her proud posture. Unable to overcome it with willpower, she has been worn down by the frustration of crappy health care provided to the impoverished: the endless runarounds, unmotivated doctors, interminable waits, cold-blooded refusals, and profound humiliations. She can’t have her hip replaced on Medicaid in any way that will be safe, but to get better insurance, she will need to put up thousands of dollars she could never earn. So she’s stuck.

  She won’t discuss Gus with me, but I see her thrashing in it, overwhelmed by the cruel joke of being in love with a man who batters her. It gives her a commonal
ity with countless women, but she will never seek a community or support. She’ll just tsk and nod and shed a tear or two when she sees another in such pain, but validation from them would do nothing to soothe her. She is isolated in time’s relentless forward march.

  The apartment is like I’ve never seen it. She has always hoarded useless shit, fragments of all the beautiful eras she sees being whitewashed and plowed over by this antiseptic new world. But now it’s hard to move through the place. A pile of empty jumbo olive oil cans takes up the center of my old room, something she claims to be saving for an art piece. There are pieces of furniture far outsized for the house and sacks of envelopes, each written on in her distinctive scrawl. I pick one up and read a dark poem about Gus, his betrayals, her misery. How she’d cut his back open in the night with a box cutter when he told her he had cheated with a woman who might have HIV.

  She has kept every single thing I have ever made, including a four-foot easel I built in wood shop when I was eight, a stack of cardboard castles I made in the second grade, and my entire autograph collection, gathered over my whole life, including Puff Daddy, Isaac Hayes, and James Brown. There are bags of my old clothes, my scarves, my baby shoes, my socks. It’s insanity.

  She thinks of all things I’ve touched as treasures. I am the exalted one, but it’s as if this distinction is reserved for the memory of me. In person, she can barely bring herself to be warm, she has so much to be angry about.

  A thick shell of emotions encloses her, feelings hardened into tangled armors of resentment, fear, love, fury, and responsibility. She has become a kind of giant tortoise, majestic, slow moving, unreachable. Everything vulnerable has been pulled inside. When I look at her a chasm opens within me and I long to fill it with maternal care, a space that hasn’t been filled since I was seven or eight. Since her eyes started to go dark. Since the visitor started to take her over. I want to mend her, fix her body, wrap her fingers in mine and protect her bones. I long for her to caress my head. When she offers to massage my back at night, I jump at the chance. But I know it won’t last. Her moods are fickle and her turns are violent. I carry apprehension like a shield into every interaction with her, but my affection weakens it and this angers me. My wounded hope for a true mother is scabbed over by disappointment.

  I love her. When people watch her jump the turnstile with judgment in their eyes, I want to cut them. I want to push them onto the tracks. What do they know about being a widow? What do they know about being a single mom, scraping together enough money to feed your fifth grader, trying to keep a kid’s mind stimulated by sneaking them into the second half of Broadway shows when you’re under threat of eviction? What do they know about surviving on ten dollars a day? Would they support their child if they decided they were really a boy? Would they wash the sheets to welcome her and her girlfriend when she came home as a lesbian teenager? Could they even begin to imagine what it’s like to carry a torch for a man who’s been dead for twenty years?

  Her greatest love was sundered by the horror of murder, but my ma goes on, left behind in a world too banal to understand her, an inverse ghost, too alive in a soulless void, wandering the wrong purgatory.

  IT’S SUMMER IN THE city. Nikita hasn’t given up, or so she says. The open relationship thing is a challenge, but she’s still mine. Am I still hers? I wonder this as I sit in Washington Square Park watching the freaks mill around in circles, enfeebled by the heat.

  The air steams off the pavement like a mirage, the sunlight blinding white. A giant gushing fountain is the center point of a thousand people forced from their homes by the weather.

  I got the e-mail from the boarding school directors shortly after I arrived in New York:

  Dear iO,

  It is with regret that we must inform you that you will not be invited to the Highland School for a third year. We fear that if you stay, you may incite a revolution amongst the student body.

  On behalf of the entire staff, we wish you all the best in your endeavors, and we are confident that you will find the perfect place for yourself and for the furthering of your education.

  This is the perfect place for me: three crackheads trying to lure a squirrel out of a bush with a filthy tissue; an old man’s broken lope wobbling to the beat in my headphones; a woman in a wheelchair with one leg pointed out in front of her, zooming determinedly across the circle; a pair of punks with two sets of fishnets, to better display the rips in them; the Rastafarian with dreads down to his ass, mumbling “smoke, smoke, smoke” as you walk by.

  This is it. This is home. The buck stops at Ma’s house. For all her crazy, she’s always had a roof to put over my head.

  Anya and I spend our days and nights together, smoking joints and walking around, counting down the summer. She will go back to Highland in a month and I will be very much alone. I have the phone numbers of two old friends, but really I don’t know anyone here anymore.

  A cigarette dangles from my fingertips as I spot Anya moving toward me now. She stops to ask a guy for a light. The way she leans down to him clearly piques his interest. He is sitting on a skateboard. His shoulders are broad and he has a clipped afro. She says something and points at me. He looks from my bathing suit top to my miniskirt to my skateboard and says something to her. She waves me over.

  He’s a cheeseball, an athlete hunk with washboard abs and reflective sunglasses. I almost don’t believe him when he says his name is Chico. He’s an import from Indiana, half black, half Vietnamese. His interest in my body makes me feel sexy in a way I haven’t before. He’s over six feet tall and his muscles push back against his T-shirt. This is what I’m supposed to be into as a female: a beefcake.

  The three of us spend the afternoon under a tree smoking cigarettes and talking about skating. Anya has to go back to Queens to have dinner with her family, so Chico asks if I want to get dinner with him.

  We skate up Sixth Avenue and stop to get takeout, where I let him know he’s eight years older than me. He feigns shock, but he still brings me upstairs to “watch a movie.” He says he’s in between apartments right now, his new one is being renovated. I smell bullshit but I don’t really care. This is an exchange. I judge him silently, because he’s twenty-four and wants to fuck a teenager, but it makes me feel wanted in the way that I long for.

  Maybe I watched too many LL Cool J videos, but Chico’s raw, lip-licking rapper sex energy turns me on. He tells me about the girls he fucks, basically copping to being a sex addict. He shows me pictures of them, and they’re hot women in their twenties.

  The night air is sticky, with the city noise just outside the window. I’m so excited by the fact that this man wants to fuck me, but it hurts when it happens. We do it doggy style on the couch. My body is stiff and uncomfortable and he says he’s fine to go slow this time, but one day “we’re gonna really fuck.”

  I leave as soon as it’s over and skate the forty blocks home in the muggy night air. The wind is nice in my hair, and my body feels different as I move. I can smell Chico on my skin. I played it cool but I’m intoxicated by the fact that he wants to do it again.

  For the next six months we will use each other, me just as much as him. I’ll drop by his place on my way to a movie or dinner, play with him, let him go down on me until he can’t stand it anymore and needs to fuck. I’m into it for the first few minutes but then I start to zone out and encourage him to get it over with so I can go. I never spend the night. Neither does he.

  Chico is the first in a series of attempts to prove something to myself.

  THE FALL COMES AND takes Anya. I turn seventeen without much fanfare and start at my new high school, a public school on the West Side that is half classes and half internships. It’s a hustler’s heaven, a bizarre intersection of young overachievers and intellectually challenged twenty-two-year-olds who repeatedly flunked the twelfth grade.

  My homeroom heartthrob is a Puerto Rican hip-hop dancer with eyes like a doe, who makes a pit stop in my bed. I miss ten minutes of a movie to
find out looks don’t make a lover.

  I’m up in Harlem doing a short film when I meet Jae, a six-foot-four drug dealer who carries his weed in a special hand-sewn pocket between his shoulder blades. He’s saccharine, and a great kisser, but one day he refers to his dick as “the purple-headed yogurt slinger” and I get so nauseous I can’t ever touch him again.

  All the while I’m talking to Nikita every day. I put her to bed in my afternoon and wake up to her calls, the random boys conveniently couched in the period when she’s asleep. She knows about all of them, but they’re irrelevant. It turns out that our love is strong. I actually talk to her, vulnerability made easy by the relative solitude of the phone. I tell her how lonely I feel, how doubtful I am that I am attractive, how the house is so crammed with shit you have to shuffle sideways to get to the bedroom, and how Gus goes the other way if he sees me on the street.

  In November, a thirty-six-year-old guy invites me out. I met him rubbernecking a bar fight at three A.M. I figure he’s good for a few free drinks and I’ll go home. When I arrive for our date, he’s wearing ostrich-skin pants. He smells clean and speaks softly. He tells me he does the soundtracks for animated movies, and buys me cocktails. We’re at the birthday party of one of his best friends, and he says I remind him of someone from his hometown who’s also there, Francesca. He pulls me over to her.

  She’s my height, nearly six foot, with big brown eyes and pouting lips, shoulder-length brown hair, and a pretty face. Her big tits spill out of her shirt and she smells good when she leans over to talk to me, several bracelets clanking on her wrist. She’s got a roughness to her, a tomboyish straightforwardness that I like. She puts an elbow on the bar and we bullshit until she asks how old I am.

  “Twenty-four. You?”