“We’re messed up,” Naomie admitted. Without apology she belched into her fist and then examined her arm. A fresh cut rimmed with dirt ran from her elbow halfway to her wrist. She gently poked at the wound and then stared at the reddened tip of her finger.
When I asked if she was okay, she responded by trying to mark me with the spot of blood. I jumped back and she laughed. I exchanged glances with Claudius and then suggested we walk the girls home.
Naomie hummed as she peeled the sticker with her name from her upper arm. “A couple of goddamned gentlemen,” she said. “Chivalry is undead.”
We walked with their bikes while the girls, holding hands, staggered ahead of us. Their very movements, synced in drunken exaggeration, suggested a new rhythm to prolong the night. It was like the records my father would play in the wee hours of his parties, after the more delicate guests had gone home and those who remained sat and considered the hands of the clock. He had a selection of special vinyl, mostly bop, that made things jump into life again, nothing like the bleak music the deejay played back at the house. My father’s music persuaded you that nothing ever had to end.
Claudius and I, feeling good again, stared at the girls. Naomie’s calves and thighs were shapely for such a thin girl, but Sybil’s ass was still the prize.
Eyeing it, I said, “That’s a goddamn onion.”
“Make a grown man cry,” Claudius said in response to my call. But then he looked doubtfully at me. “You wouldn’t even know what to do with that though. I called dibs, remember?” He jutted his chin at Naomie and said, “That’s more your speed, B. Two sticks make fire.”
With a wink he picked up his pace and ripped off the sticker dangling from the seat of Sybil’s jeans. They had a good laugh about that and began to walk together, and eventually, trailing after them, I was back with Naomie. Another cut split the skin near her wrist. Whenever the wound grew rich with blood she sucked at it like an injured child. Despite her strange behavior, I pictured sleeping with her, maneuvering her thighs and hips as easily as I did the handlebars of her bike.
We walked for a long time, deeper into Brooklyn. It felt as though we were actually sinking. Wooden boards slanted across the windows of the apartments above a corner store and lines of stiff weeds punched through cracks in the sidewalk. We passed a bar called Salt, which looked as though it hadn’t been open for business in years, and around the corner, a series of names tagged on a brick wall. Each of the names had three letters—SER, EVE, RON, REL, MED—and the drips of paint made murky icicles of color. The ground became more densely littered with crushed paper bags, empty bottles of malt liquor, and other shapeless hunks of trash. I guided Naomie’s bike around inexplicable puddles layered with scum. It hadn’t rained in weeks, and it wouldn’t tonight. Men sat on the edges of ramshackle stoops or stood in front of shuttered bodegas. They leered at us, but their looks were less threatening than mysterious. Receptive to whatever the men were bombarding us with, I felt irradiated, all the way down to my bones.
Naomie talked incessantly, invoking the bubble, picking her words with drunken deliberation. “It’s not about being all profound and shit,” she said. “It’s not even about that. It’s like, can you tiptoe over every surface? Can you go anywhere and be open to every little thing?”
I tried to appear interested in what she had to say. There was no way I would screw up our chances a second time. I softened my tone and asked, “What’s all this bubble stuff about anyway?”
Sybil’s laugh drifted ahead of us. The sound of another dog barking shot through the air. Naomie said something I didn’t understand, and I asked her to clarify.
“It’s Japanese: mono no aware,” she said. “A sensitivity to things. An awareness. Everything lacks permanence. A way of understanding beauty. I studied world philosophies, in college.” To illustrate the idea, she started talking about sakura, the cherry blossom tree.
At first this all sounded like more pothead gibberish. Then Naomie explained she had been raised in Yokohama for a number of years, a notion that excited me as much as her hips did. She was African, maybe Jewish somehow, and possibly Asian in a way. Even more exotic than I had thought.
She talked about a dream she’d had about the cherry blossoms, a vision like a time-lapse video: the pink buds flowering, paling, and drifting down in bunches, left like soft skirts on the grass. “I asked my mom about it,” she said. “She can read dreams. She told me life is exactly like that.”
Naomie was holding something out to me, something real, but I couldn’t quite grasp whatever it was. “Here’s what I want to know,” I said, and then blurted, “Have you ever made love in the grass?”
She frowned and opened her mouth to reply. But then a thin, straw-colored dog appeared from between two parked cars. Claudius, startled, let Sybil’s bike fall to the ground. When the dog began to growl and bark, we tried to get around it. It didn’t move well but was able to stay in front of us. It may have been rabid. Some of its pink skin showed through its patches of fur, and in the glow of the streetlight it looked like a mix of hyena and pig. Its rheumy eyes gleamed, the sound of its growling nearly subliminal. I kept my eyes fixed on it. Though the night air had cooled, waves of heat pounded my head. My teeth clenched, and my chest tightened.
The dog edged closer, ready, at any moment, to spring at us as we backed away. Claudius cradled the fez against his chest and cursed under his breath. He slipped behind the rest of us and used us as his shield. I lifted Naomie’s bike, ready to throw it, but then Sybil rushed at the dog and kicked its snout. The dog listed for a moment, whined in a way that seemed almost grateful, and then fell over. Naomie joined her and before it was over they gave several more solid kicks, aimed at the dog’s head and shriveled belly. Then the animal wasn’t moving or breathing. All of its wildness had been extinguished. I turned my back even though the violence was done, but odd little murmurs from the girls, disturbing sounds, still reached my ears. Someone’s arms wrapped tightly around me—my own arms, I realized. Not far from where I stood, Claudius’s mouth gaped wider and wider.
The girls got quiet. Sybil walked her bike to us. She breathed heavily through her nostrils, skin shining from her brief exertions. She went right up to Claudius, grabbed the back of his head, and pulled him down to her for a rough, hungry kiss. His fez crumpled in their embrace.
Unsteadily, I made my way to Naomie. As she stood over the unmoving dog, her shoulders rose and fell. She turned to me and ran the palm of her hand down my forehead, smoothing it. “Stop being so … astonished all the time,” she said. “It makes you look old.”
Just then, a man across the street shouted from behind the bars of an apartment window. “Goddamn!” he said. “Y’all bitches fucked that motherfucker up!”
We laughed, first the girls and then me along with them. Claudius, holding his ruined hat, didn’t join in. I laughed with the girls and felt a sense of relief. All of a sudden everything seemed okay—what the two of them had done and how they had done it, that they had been the ones who were brave. It wasn’t just okay; it was exciting, and more.
As we walked on, Naomie stared ahead, in a dream state. “What was the dog offering us?” she asked. “What did its choice of death release into the world?”
I couldn’t reply. It wasn’t even clear that her question was meant for me.
We approached a station for a subway line I’d never taken before, and Claudius looked back at me. A question formed on his tired, wary face, and I knew what he meant. I shook my head, and he knew what I meant. When I nodded, that was understood too. We weren’t going back to campus. Wherever this night led, we would follow it all the way.
The girls’ building was set far back from the street and constructed in two moods, with clean brick on the first floor and gray vinyl siding on the second. A single window peeked out from the siding like a jaundiced eye. The girls skipped through the gate, up to the door, and stood on the threshold, waiting for us.
“Where are we?” Cla
udius muttered.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I think I’m done, man,” he said. “We got them home safe. Like they even fucking needed it.”
“And now they want to thank us,” I said. “A couple of goddamned gentlemen.”
“Man, I don’t even know where the hell we are.”
I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Who cares? The whole world is ours tonight, baby.”
Naomie asked if we were coming up or what, said to hurry up, she had to pee. I gave Claudius our habitual goofy grin. He stared at me. Finally, in a low voice, he said okay, but he didn’t grin back. We carried their bikes inside.
Other than two Elizabeth Catlett prints on the walls, the living room was barely decorated, as if the girls didn’t actually live here. Did anyone live here? The suggestion thrilled me, that the place was available to anyone in the know, who wanted or was fated for a crazy night.
The girls dropped some tablets into our palms—“love drugs,” they said—and I swallowed mine down with a swig of their overproof rum. Claudius followed my lead. The girls told us to sit tight and went together to take a bath. We sank into the softness of their couch. I let their voices caress me through the slightly opened door. The girls talked solemnly, like two sages, in the tub.
“Does it hurt?” Sybil was saying.
“It does,” Naomie said, “but I’m not afraid of the pain.”
“Good. No avoidance.”
“No diminished capacities.”
I joked, knowing it was lame, that the girls must be taking a bubble bath. Claudius didn’t say a word. Sweat ran from under his warped hat into his eyes. As the girls’ voices floated on and time got fat and lazy, my heart pummeled my rib cage. Drunk and high and nervous, I was ready nevertheless.
They emerged at what felt like the edge of forever, at first wearing only the thinning steam from the bathroom, and then essentially nothing, just some stray suds. Naomie had strips of bandage on her arm. They stood in front of us and began to pose, slowly turning their bodies so we could admire them from every angle. Their wet feet stained the hardwood floor. I’d never seen such blatant female nudity in person before. Whenever I reached for them, eager to move things along from this drawn-out moment, the girls took a step back. They wouldn’t let me touch them. “Just watch,” Naomie said, and I did, we did, until Sybil went into one of the bedrooms and gestured for Claudius to follow.
In the other room, Naomie lit some candles and told me to sit on the bed. As she approached, the door opened and Sybil scurried inside. Claudius, still fully clothed, shuffled along behind her. “I got lonely,” Sybil said. “I missed you.” Naomie said she missed her too. The girls kissed in the skittish candlelight. Then Sybil asked if we wanted in on the action. I said yes and they laughed at how quickly I said it. Sybil told us to take off our clothes. Quickly again, I began to undress but Claudius just stood there, gazing around the room. It seemed like he was trying to remember everything there—the large bed, the flickering candles, the heavy curtains—as the setting he might use for an entirely different story. He was remembering everything, it appeared, except the people in it, ignoring and therefore omitting us. Maybe he was even omitting himself.
While Sybil urged us on, saying she wanted to see what we were working with, Claudius forced his attention through the opening in the curtains, into the darkness outside, in denial of her voice. But then I called his name, scolding in my tone, and pulled his attention back into the room. What was it? The amount of booze we’d had, the drugs, the crazy talk, the vision of that animal dead in the street, or simply the girls themselves? All of it, in combination, made glorious sense to me. We had reached the proper destination of this night. Obviously Claudius and I had never been undressed in each other’s presence—but so what? The girls we’d wanted from the start were finally offering their fragrant brown flesh to us, and all we had to do was get naked too, together. Why should shyness, if that’s what it was, or fear, or a bit of further strangeness, a little kink in the first blush of day, stop us now? Why shouldn’t this, all of us collected in one room, be our path? I stared at Claudius until he understood I wanted him to do it. He could have said no, to the girls, to me, to that part of himself that also wanted to keep going, and for a second, when he opened his mouth, I expected him to say just that, to shout his refusal. All he did was stand there and tamely nod in assent.
Then he took off his clothes, as I did, watching the girls as they watched us. When Claudius and I were naked, they didn’t do anything. They weren’t satisfied yet.
“Well,” Sybil said, “look at him.”
I was confused for a second, but it was a command meant for both of us.
“You have to be fully present,” Naomie said, her first words in a long time.
“Look at him.”
“He’s your friend.”
“Don’t pretend he’s not there.”
“There’s always more to what you want than what you wanted.” It was Naomie again. “You have to take that too.”
I turned to Claudius, standing there with his hands clasped in front of his genitals. Sybil went to him and moved his hands aside. His calves were thin in comparison to his muscular thighs. He had a well-developed chest but a bulging stomach, bisected by a vertical stripe of fuzzy hair. His penis was half-erect. Sybil placed the crushed fez back on his head to complete the description of his nudity.
The girls told us to keep looking at one another, through the fear and embarrassment, all the way through the entire exposure. They wouldn’t let us proceed otherwise. Four naked bodies on the verge of sex together in one room had to be exactly that.
We managed to arrive at sex—Naomie with me, and Sybil with Claudius—as light began to slip into the room through gaps in the curtains. I didn’t get to enjoy Naomie’s body, not really. I was too concerned with keeping matters organized, under some semblance of control, fending off the orgiastic. I was much too aware of the other bodies on the bed, much too aware of my own. I did, however, get to use my father’s condom. I’d intended to use it, had become fanatical about doing so, and finally did, just as Claudius—perhaps another true son of another confused father—got to use the condom he carried around in his pocket. We had found our so-called wild and crazy women, and they slept with us. But first they made us look, for a very long time.
My father died, or completed his long process of dying, a year ago. On the day of his funeral, watching his rigid, almost smiling face in the casket, I was flanked by my mother and her new family. I had kept my distance over the past decade or so, estranging myself, and therefore hadn’t seen her in what felt like ages. At one point, she squeezed my arm and then she nodded. She didn’t force me to speak to her. Everything she had to say was expressed in those gestures. In her black blazer and dress, with her gray-streaked hair pinned under a slanted hat, she remained a striking woman. Perhaps my father still would have thought so. What struck me even more than the elegance and dignity with which she was growing older was the presence of her husband and his, their, adult children. They didn’t have to be there. Later, unable to settle my stomach or my mind, I stood alone, just as I had arrived, and my mother and her family talked together on the other side of the room. Other than me, I realized, they were the only black people in attendance. Together the four of them formed a portrait of serenity and grace that made me feel even more sick. I thought about the last public event my father and I attended together, a celebration of his long and successful career. There was desperation in the way he led me by the arm from guest to guest. To anyone I didn’t already know, and to some I already did, he said, “This is my boy. This is my boy.” He showed me off like a prize, as if to eliminate any doubt that I belonged to him. He’d done this kind of thing ever since I was a child. That day was the very first time it didn’t make me proud.
What did he mean back on that August morning in Philadelphia before I returned to college? Did he believe what he had told me about happiness? Could he have meant it?
Or was he just heartbroken, bitter, drunk? Maybe he knew he was talking to a young fool. Or maybe observing what I did with my life would be his way of figuring everything out. I don’t know. I don’t know, but I keep imagining what it would be like, to be a father to a boy who loves and believes in me and, despite all our differences, wants nothing more than to be a man in my image. I see that spectral boy, my son, vividly, and feel frightened when he is near. I want to speak to him, but I have no idea what to say.
Sometimes I feel all I’d have to offer, other than questions, are my memories of that time in Brooklyn and that terrible apartment I had driven us to, obsessed. It sounds ridiculous, even to me, yet it’s true. Among the strangest touches I felt there was my friend’s hand gripping my shoulder, long after Naomie and Sybil had left us alone in the bedroom. I gasped when Claudius first touched me. I didn’t look back at him and I didn’t move his hand. I just lay there on my side with my eyes closed and tried not to be awake anymore. When I finally rose it was past noon. My head throbbed, and the faraway sound of the girls’ voices rang in my ears. Claudius was sitting up in the bed, staring at me. All at once an acute ugliness shuddered into being, a face revealed within his face, and he must have seen it within mine too. It has been that way with people in my life, with people I have loved: a fine dispersal, a rupture as quiet as two lips parting, a change so sudden one morning, so slight, you wonder if they had ever been beautiful at all.
J’ouvert, 1996
All I wanted was fifteen bucks to go to the barbershop, but the thought of asking for it made me feel like punching a wall. It stressed me the hell out to ask Ma for anything, especially that summer, when I’d decided to leave my boyhood behind. Pop would have known just what to say to calm me down or make me laugh. He wasn’t around anymore though, and he had stopped responding to my letters. So I went to our room to gather myself and practice my appeal, but of course my little brother was there, too bizarre to ignore. Omari still had on his stupid rubber mask, a caricature of a great horned owl. A candy cigarette poked out at an angle from under its mottled beak. He was sitting at our desk, his butt swallowing the chair, and the clock radio played that boring white-people music he liked. The oscillating fan rattled as it blew his newspaper clippings across the floor. Our room was strewn with these sheets of taped-together headlines. As he paged through a neighbor’s discarded Daily News, a few caught my eye: HOMELESS YOUTH UNDER HOUSE ARREST, DEATH NAMED COUNTRY’S TOP KILLER, ONE-ARMED BOY APPLAUDS KINDNESS OF STRANGERS. Together they formed a patchwork calendar of the world’s absurdity.
A Lucky Man Page 3