by Chris Stuck
You’re so in love that you actually consider it, but every time you smoke up, jerk off, drink too much, you know all that will go bye-bye if you devote yourself to her and Allah. Being Muslim will bring other words: raghead, sand nigger, dune coon. You realize this is probably as far as the relationship can go. You don’t want to live your life that way. It’s too complicated. You’re Black. She’s Algerian. You trade stories of prejudice. You tell her James Baldwin once said Algerians were the niggers of France, and she likes that you know that. She lets you kiss her one more time. You almost think this could work, but you know you’ll always feel weird about it. That wouldn’t be fair to her. Being mixed and Black is enough for you to handle. The combination of race and religion would totally fuck your mind up.
On the last day of the semester, she gives you a pocket-size Quran gift wrapped with a bow. You can tell she’s hoping you’ll read it and convert so she can introduce you to her parents. And you do read it. You talk to her on the phone about it during summer break. But then the fall semester starts. She vanishes into her new classes and you into yours. You talk on the phone once or twice, but now she’s just a voice. You never see each other again.
Your Ethiopian buddy, whom everyone calls Faheem the Dream and who is technically an orthodox Muslim, too, says you got off easy. You’re riding in your Jetta, which is now showing its age. Your tint’s got bubbles in it. “Believe me, my dude. Piety does nothing but cramp your style. You almost got hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray by love.” He passes you the Philly and then turns up the Wu-Tang.
You both sing, “Shame on a nigga who try to run game on a nigga.”
For some reason, this centers you. You’re no longer confused. The word is once again in play. You wipe the sweat from your brow. Phew, that was a close one.
* * *
Your life follows the usual ebbs and flows. College, graduation, career. The word is the thread. You are the tapestry. You realize one day that this one word follows you everywhere you go, like a black cloud or a guardian angel. You’re not sure which. The concept of the “real nigga” soon emerges in the collective consciousness. You embody that. On the streets, it means you don’t snitch, not even on your enemies. You stand by your people even when they’re wrong. But you ain’t in the streets. You never were.
You may be a minion in the corporate world now, but you ain’t no sellout. You’re a double agent working in the belly of the beast. You’re like Dan Freeman in The Spook Who Sat by the Door. You’re around more white people than ever. You may be a nigga, not a nigger, but at least you’re a real one. Even white people recognize it. After your supervisor holds you hostage at the water cooler, trying to bond with you over the NBA and the NFL, you go back to your cubicle, thinking you’ll burn this motherfucker down if it comes to it. You don’t give a fuck. Real ones never do.
Yet, here you are, climbing the corporate organizational chart, snagging a couple of promotions. You realize the word is invisible now. It’s a look in the eyes, an unsaid word at the end of a sentence. You imagine you hear it all the time. “Would you like fries with that, nigger?” “Paper or plastic, nigger?” “Where’s that feasibility report, nigger? I’m late for my meeting.” You’re not losing your mind. You think, Get a hold of yourself. You have a career now. You’re shining. Don’t fuck this up. You just bought a new car and some rims.
* * *
When footage of a famous white actor or politician saying the word comes out, you think, See, I’m not crazy. It is there. It’s always been. It’s never going away. Both versions: nigger, nigga. On the flip side, you hang with your cousins and you’re disappointed to hear them call everyone nigga. “Look at that Chinese nigga over there.” “Look at that Eskimo nigga, my nigga.” Even squirrels and inanimate objects. You still don’t say it. You realize you’ve actually had it easy in life, all things considered. You probably don’t deserve to say it. Does anyone deserve to? You didn’t grow up on food stamps. You’ve never seen a cockroach in your life. You’ve been harassed by cops only three times and you’re still alive to tell the tales. Sure, you’ve been called nigger by white people what seems like 7,867 times, but that’s way fewer than other Black people, fewer than your darker brothers and cousins, fewer times than your mother. You’re mixed, biracial, Black enough, but still not what some people consider really Black. How do you reconcile this?
You start dating Black women exclusively. You don’t dog them out either. You’re special. You date the darkest sisters you can find. Your brothers have shown you the way. When you roll up on a beautiful Black woman at a club, you say what your brothers would say: “What up, dark and lovely? May I have this dance?” Dark and Lovely is the brand of hair relaxer your mother has always used. Only Black women will understand this. It’s cheesy and sexist and probably racist, but the fact you pull the phrase out of your ass so easily shows you’re down for the cause. They like that you’re light skinned. You like that they’re dark. Race is a really weird thing, but it’s kind of working for you now.
* * *
One day, after a few failed relationships, you meet a woman named Tanisha at the gym. She comes up to you after weeks of you covertly checking her out from across the weight room. Working out, eating right, swearing off alcohol, it’s finally paying off. Why didn’t you do this long ago? Tanisha’s the most beautiful woman you’ve ever spoken to. And somehow, whatever game you’re laying down, she’s picking it right up. It’s back and forth like tennis. She’s not laughing at you. How are you doing this?
You’re both in your midthirties. You date for a few months. She surprises you with presents, small ones that are thoughtful but not relationshipy. You take her on affordable weekend trips to Ocean City and Virginia Beach and New York. You’re both corporate as fuck and mutually decide to go back to school to get your MBAs. She helps you with data management, which you hate. You help her with strategy execution, which, really, she doesn’t need any help with. Eventually, you both become executives at the same company, but you keep your romance under wraps. You fly all over the country for work. Your wardrobe game is off the chain. You have so much money, you have three bank accounts. She has four. Y’all’s portfolios are balanced, stacking money every second of the day. You both spoil your nieces and nephews, but you guys don’t have time to have your own kids. You’re intellectuals. You go to museums. You eat truffles in your pasta and heirloom tomatoes in your salads. You guys haven’t eaten chitlins or pig’s feet since you were kids.
You take trips everywhere: Bora Bora, Nairobi, Vietnam, Croatia. To stay grounded, you still go on cruises to the Caribbean with your relatives so you don’t look stuck-up. You more than willingly get married. Tanisha is black-Black, blue-Black, purple-Black. By extension, you’re Blacker now. Standing next to her, you even look a little darker. When DNA tests become popular, you buy the most expensive kits. You both spit into the plastic tubes. You send them off. Six to eight weeks later, you have the results. Genetically, she has way more African ancestry than you, 80 percent, to be exact. Surprisingly, since your mother is pretty dark, you are exactly 45 percent African. What are the odds? You are the most split-in-two, mixed Black person to walk the earth.
Damn, you’re so lucky.
* * *
But knowing your genetic makeup doesn’t stop you from feeling an absence in your life. What do you have to worry about? Two years in and your marriage is showing no cracks. After the wedding, Tanisha stayed at your old company and you moved to a startup so you both could flourish without any conflicts of interest. The people at your new company love you. They love Tanisha, too. You’re both known in the industry for doing good work. You play golf with your bosses, and you’re kind of good at it but not too good. Oddly, when you hit a nice shot, they never once call you Tiger. You can tell they almost want to.
Since you’re the new guy, one of the younger managers, a woman named Brandy, takes a liking to you. She’s white and in her late twenties. She constantly tells you how much she a
dmires your work. Rumors are she’s had some problems in her love life, so you let it all slide. You think it’s innocent. She knows you’re married. You’re not cocky or anything, but you wonder if she’s just living out some fantasy in her head. You don’t instigate. You let her flirt and try not to flirt back, though you’re pretty sure you’re failing.
One day, while none of this is on your mind, you go back to your office after lunch. Brandy is sitting behind your desk, in a skirt, her legs propped up and spread wide for you to see. She isn’t wearing panties. You don’t want to look, but of course you look. You fucking memorize the image. You don’t say anything, though. You just leave and go to your boss’s office. You tell him what happened. Brandy, who vanishes and then calls in sick for the rest of the week, is questioned the following Monday. You’re surprised she admits to all of it and doesn’t play the white girl card or the nigger card, which is sometimes one and the same. You tell Tanisha and the first words out of her mouth are “I’m gonna kill that little bitch.” It could’ve been the end of your career. Brandy has no concept of race. She has no idea how much your life is in her hands. One false word, and you could be in jail. You know all this. Yet you ask Tanisha to chill. You’ll work from home until the company decides what to do.
Brandy is transferred to the new office in Boston, where she meets someone and thrives. In a weird way, you’re happy for her. It’s fucked up, but it’s forgotten. You see her once at a conference, and you both act like it never happened. You two sit at the hotel bar, an empty stool between you. She shows you pictures on her phone of her white husband and her new white baby and her little white dog. After, you go back to your hotel room by yourself and jerk off in the shower. You don’t even know why.
The truth is you were never worried about Brandy. Not long after you started at this company, when no one was around on a Saturday, you installed a couple of tiny cameras in your office. Since your first job, you’ve always been paranoid about your white co-workers breaking into your office and stealing your ideas. Now, on a night you can’t sleep, you look at the video of her. Because of the angle, you can’t see anything X rated. You don’t care about that. You wonder what made her do it. Are you that special? In the video, she looks lonely, but maybe you’re just imagining that. She waits for you for fifteen minutes, sitting behind your desk, looking in your desk drawers and at your framed pictures of Tanisha. At one point, she almost leaves, but then she hears you coming in. She opens her legs. She tries to look sexy. When you leave, she immediately starts crying and then runs out of there.
She must’ve had an empty space in her life that she thought you could fill. Maybe she sensed your emptiness. Now you just feel emptier.
Nevertheless, you save the video file. You’re not stupid. You make three copies and keep them on separate flash drives in separate places in case you’ll ever need them. You’re mixed. You’re Black. You always keep your bases covered.
* * *
Sad to say, you’re getting kind of old now. How unfortunate. You’re only forty-three, but you feel ancient. Luckily, your geriatric ass hits the jackpot. Your company is bought by a bigger one from Germany, a multinational monster. You got in early with your firm. You’re a partner. You’re being swallowed up. After the acquisition, your company will no longer exist. With the stock options and the payout and whatever other shit you’re owed, you can not only retire, you have to. There’s a noncompete clause.
You have so much free time that you do all the shopping, all the cooking. You vacuum twice a week. You go to the gym and work off that paunch you put on. You go down on Tanisha more than she goes down on you. Once a week, you even take a few bong rips. It’s gravy. But then you start to feel like you’re retired, which really means you’re lonely as hell. At month five, Tanisha starts looking at you like you’re just some stranger walking around the house. You make her elaborate weeknight dinners that take hours of prep, yet she still asks what you’ve been doing all day. Knowing this can’t continue, you apply for a nonprofit job that you’re way overqualified for. The organization helps relocate African refugees. You become director of development and raise a shit-ton of money in your sleep. You run workshops and get some local news coverage. You become friends with the refugee families. You have some of them over for dinner. They get stomachaches off your lobster mac and cheese.
Feeling like you’re starting to fill the hole inside you, you offer to sponsor a young guy from Sudan. He’s a former child soldier who’s been bouncing from one big brother here in the States to the next. His name is Solomon. His voice is still thick with Sudanese Arabic. He’s a recent convert to Christianity, so you wonder if connecting with him will be a problem. You’re an atheist of the highest order. Though you flirted with religion in your youth, you’ve always thought anyone who truly believes in God is not a realist and can’t possibly be intelligent. You still think all that, but you’re older now. You’re fine with people believing what they want. Who cares?
Solomon doesn’t proselytize. He doesn’t even mention God. Maybe he can see you’re an infidel. So, you get along. You take him out for lunch on Saturdays. You call him during the week just to see how he’s doing. You give him books to read. You take him to Smitty’s, your go-to barbershop, so he can meet the fellas and get edged up by dudes who know how to cut his hair. Sundays, you even take him to church and watch him worship. Every now and then, as you sit on the hard pews, a small part of you feels something, a charge up the spine, but you don’t want to admit it.
Solomon’s English still isn’t the best, so you have to carefully correct him, but you love it. He’s learning. He’s smart. He asks why the word “knife,” when said, starts with an “n” sound, but when written, starts with the letter “k.” You tell him about silent letters. He wonders what’s more correct: to play the piano or practice the piano. You tell him they’re both correct, depending on the situation. This bothers him. He wants black-and-white rules. He wants things to make perfect sense. He’s eighteen years old. You teach him about context and nuance, and he slowly starts to get it.
Sometimes, when you’re driving, taking him back to his halfway house, you wonder if he’s been called his first “nigger,” or even his first “nigga.” In your most indulgent moments, you want to ask. Or better yet, you want him to ask you, the sage, about it. That way you could tell him all you know. But then your sense and decency come back. Your ego recedes. You watch Solomon look out of the car window with amazement, at all this new scenery, at his new home, and then over at you, his new friend. He’s the son you’ve never had. Admit it, you kind of love him. If you could have it your way, you’d keep him safe forever.
How to Be a Dick in the Twenty-First Century
The morning one awakens as a penis doesn’t feel that much different from any other morning. Most of my life, I’ve felt like a giant dick anyway. No matter the season, my entire body was always aroused, itchy, throbbing. That was my mentality, too. The testosterone, it was how I got ahead, my assertiveness, my swagger. As a man, it was expected of me. As a Black man, it was required. Every single morning of my adulthood, as I took a leak, I adjusted my medicine cabinet door so I could get a glimpse of my morning wood in the mirror. Somehow, everything would then seem right, if not in the world then at least in my life.
As with most men, I didn’t realize how deep my love for my own ding-dong went. I was vain about it, but how could anyone blame me? I’d known it for so long. When I discovered it in the womb, I’m sure I was instantly smitten. It was my first possession, my own bodily toy. And unless something really weird happened, it would always be there for me, my first friend.
To this day, I still don’t know how all this happened, how I magically transformed into a six-foot penis, but I like to think that, in the cocoon of my bed, I somehow dreamed about myself so intensely that I became the very thing I most desired: me.
* * *
Here’s the funny thing: as a man, I wasn’t even six foot. I was five foot six. So, tr
ansforming into a six-foot-tall penis was quite an accomplishment when you think about it. Then again, that was just how I rolled. I’ve always been gifted. Before I became a penis, my life had been going exactly as planned. I was loaded. I had businesses, big ones. I owned a skyscraper, where I lived on the top two floors. I had other homes, many others all over the world. Sometimes, I lost track of how many. I was acquainted with a few single women around my age who occasionally allowed me in their boudoirs if I threw around enough cash. I’d never been married. I didn’t have kids or that many relatives. What more could a billionaire ask for?
As I looked in the mirror that first morning in the fall, though, washing my face, hoping when I dried off and opened my eyes that I’d be me again and not a large penis, it was obvious that washing my face had no effect. I was still a large penis. Perhaps I was finally complete. I’d reached my ultimate form. Was there anything I could do? I didn’t look that different, really. Somehow, I still had arms.
I had a head, too, of course, but not my usual head. Unfortunately, I had a penis’s head. Thank God I was already bald. Hair on a penis might’ve looked—I don’t know—odd. I kind of had a face. If I looked at myself in the mirror long enough, there was something familiar enough there to make me think it looked like me. All things considered, I was just happy I was circumcised.
I could get around just fine, but I didn’t have legs in the traditional sense. That morning, before I even realized I was a penis, I’d risen out of bed and waddled about my home as I usually did, had a cup of tea and read a bit of the newspaper. It wasn’t until I was walking past my full-length mirror on the way to the shower, stripping off my pajamas, that I finally saw my new form.