Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  Sean ran his hand up and down my thighs. I couldn’t help but feel excited. I held my breath while he tugged at my zipper.

  “No, Sean, not here,” I said, as he stroked my panties. “Anybody could come by and see us.”

  I sat up and Sean pulled his hand away and glanced around the deserted street.

  “Stevie, I couldn’t help it,” Sean said hoarsely. “I just got really turned on. You said, Not here, well where? We’ve been going together six months.”

  “I don’t know, Sean. Maybe I’m afraid that once I do it you won’t respect me anymore.”

  “Stevie, I respect the hell outta you now and giving yourself to me could never change that.”

  “I don’t want to end up like Patrice, having to go to a school for unwed mothers. Did you know that by the time she found out she was pregnant Yusef was already going with Gail?”

  “Stevie, Yusef Brown always was a dog.”

  “Well, I tried to tell her that, but Patrice wouldn’t listen.”

  “All Yusef does is hang out on the corner and sell weed.” Sean sighed. “But, Stevie, not all brothers are about nothing. If I messed a girl up, I’d stand by her.”

  “But, Sean, there’s just no way I could get pregnant. It would kill my parents. They’re counting on me. And Mrs. Stuart says, with my grades, even if my SAT scores come back average, I can still get a college scholarship. She says our time has come. I couldn’t face her if I messed up.”

  Sean held my hand. “I heard that, hey, I’m proud of you, baby. I don’t want to be a daddy right now, either. I’m going to Chicago State in the fall, remember? I’ve got dreams, too.”

  “Thanks,” I whispered in Sean’s ear.

  “For what?”

  “For understanding.”

  “Oh.”

  The next morning me and Carla sat on the school’s stone steps and faced a row of fudge-colored buildings. Carla held her big sweater together with one hand as she took a drag off her cigarette. I glanced up at the cloudy morning sky.

  “So finish telling me about you and Seanny last night.”

  “Like I told you, Carla, I felt his thing up against me. And he touched me through my panties.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I told him to stop.”

  “You told him to stop! Why?”

  “You know why, because I’m scared. I can’t come up pregnant.” I tightened the belt on my rain-shine coat. “I finally ended up giving Sean a hand job last night.”

  “Again!” Carla groaned, “I don’t see why you don’t just get on the pill like somebody with some sense.”

  I shrugged. We’d had this conversation before.

  “Stevie, I know Sean is patient, but a man has needs, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  “A man is only willing to be frustrated for so long, before he starts looking for a new prom date. Get my drift?”

  “Carla, you don’t understand. Sean is different.”

  Carla blew out smoke. “He ain’t that damn different. He still a man. After a while them milkshakes begin to add up. Then it’s payback time,” Carla added.

  “Carla, I wish it didn’t have to hurt. It’s hard to get excited over something painful.”

  “It don’t be hurtin’ no worser than bad cramps. You done felt them before.”

  “I don’t look forward to cramps, Carla.”

  “Stevie, I got a idea. You smoke you a joint and do it when you high.” Carla exhaled. “You will be feeling no pain then.”

  I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows. “Carla, you get high now?” “Damn, Stevie, you lookin’ at me like I said I shot heroin or some shit like that. It’s just a little weed.”

  “You’ve smoked marijuana before! I can’t believe you never told me.”

  “Look, I’ve only done it a few times, once with my sisters and twice with Ivory.”

  Ivory was Carla’s fine yellow nigga, as she put it. He was tall, with a big ’fro, and his rap had been so powerful that he’d stolen her away from Tyrone. Me and Mama had run into Carla and Ivory in Kmart. Mama had taken one look at his lime-colored clothes and big hat and decided Ivory was about nothing. I had finally managed to convince Mama that Ivory’s pants were avocado, but she still insisted that the “negro” was no good.

  “Well, how was it?”

  “It was cool, you get the munchies, you wanna eat a bunch of shit. And shit be funnier than hell.”

  “Wow, did you do it with Ivory when you were high?”

  “Yeah,” Carla exhaled.

  “How was it?”

  “Hot! Ain’t nothing better than being high as a kite and getting it at the same time.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I’d never been high and I’d never gotten it. I tried to picture it in my mind as the bell rang.

  We were in gym class, jumping over a statue of a horse. Miss Bryant had a girl standing on either side of the horse, just in case. I stood in the line waiting to take my turn. I was still tripping on what Carla had said earlier. I wondered how it felt to be high. I had never even been tipsy. I had drunk a few sips of beer when they’d passed around a can on the bus after the homecoming game last year. That had been it. Maybe I should go ahead and do it with Sean. Carla said it wouldn’t hurt if I was high. Maybe a glass of wine would be enough. Who knows? I might even like it.

  I balled my fists and ran toward the horse. I grabbed each side of the saddle and lifted both of my feet to clear it.

  “Jean, are you all right?”

  When I stopped seeing stars, I recognized Miss Bryant’s thin, worried walnut-colored face.

  “Girl, your feet got caught, you hit your head up underneath on that metal part.” I heard Tanya’s voice. The group of brown faces and blue gym suits were all one blur. My head was swimming.

  “Jean, can you walk to the nurse’s office, or do you need for me to send for Miss Horn?”

  I looked up from the thick cotton mat, unsure where my legs were. “She looks monked up.”

  “Maybe her brain is damaged, huh, Miss Bryant?”

  “She should sue the school.”

  “You mean the Board of Education, girl.”

  “Quiet, girls.”

  “Miss Bryant, you want me to go get Nurse Horn?”

  “Yes, Rosita, ask her to come right away.”

  I heard footsteps and looked up.

  I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Nurse Horn looked like one of the angels on the stained-glass window at my church. She felt the bump on my forehead and frowned. She explained, that, no, I hadn’t lost my memory like the dude on TV. There were some sighs of disappointment and this one fool kept asking me what I’d eaten for breakfast. “Raisin Bran,” I answered, as Nurse Horn put her arm around my shoulder and walked me out of the gym.

  The cot had never felt more comfortable. Nurse Horn had propped two flat pillows under my head. She sat in a chair next to me, talking softly.

  “Jean, I think you’re going to be all right, but you should go to your doctor and have your head examined.”

  “Have my head examined.” I smiled.

  “Yes, just to be safe. Jean, all kidding aside, do get checked. You’re starting to get two black eyes.”

  I sat up. “Two black eyes!”

  “Don’t get excited. Here, take a look.” Nurse Horn walked over to her desk and returned with a large face mirror.

  I stared at my reflection. My forehead looked like a cone and I had a wide black circle under each eye. It was like I’d been worked over by the mob.

  “I can’t believe I look this bad!”

  “Just goes to show you, looks can go just like that.” Nurse Horn popped her fingers and smiled. “Well, how do you feel?”

  I tried to look as pitiful as possible, I wanted every ounce of sympathy I could get out of Nurse Horn. “My head hurts and I’m still a little dizzy.” “Well, the aspirin I gave you should help. I’ll keep you down here for the rest of
the afternoon. I want you to see a doctor tomorrow and maybe you’ll be well enough to return to school on Monday.”

  “I don’t really have a doctor. I’ll have to go to the clinic.”

  “That should be fine.” Nurse Horn looked out the window. “It’s starting to rain.”

  “April showers bring May flowers,” I mumbled.

  “Jean, you haven’t been down here since the first snowfall, remember?” “I know. Who woulda thought it would wind up being a blizzard, remember?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “My cramps haven’t been bad lately. I took your advice.”

  “You’ve been staying out of that ocean?” Nurse Horn asked.

  “So far, and I’ve been eating less junk food and exercising more.” “That’s good, I’m glad. I’m sorry that you’re hurt, but it is nice seeing you. I guess I’ve missed lecturing you.”

  “I’ve missed you too, Nurse Horn.” Seeing her in the hallways every now and then hadn’t been enough.

  “Well, you can always stick your head in and say, ‘hi,’ you know.”

  “You mean you want to see me in sickness and in health?”

  “Sure. I certainly don’t want you to develop into a hypochondriac, Jean.”

  I smiled. I was glad she wanted to see me.

  “Do you prefer to be called Stevie or Jean?”

  “My friends call me Stevie.”

  “Well, I’d like to be your friend. So I’ll call you Stevie, if that’s all right?” “Please do.”

  “Is there anyone who can come get you so you don’t have to walk home today?”

  “No. My father has the car and he’s at work. Sean might be able to get his brother to give me a ride.”

  “If not, I can drive you home. It might be pouring by three-thirty.” I swallowed. Had Nurse Horn said she would drive me home? I could ride in her ’67 Mustang with her! I forgot my pain for a minute. “On second thought, I believe Sean told me Brian’s car is in the shop. It’s getting tuned up or something,” I lied.

  “Well, that settles it, then. I’ll give you a lift.”

  I had no intention of arguing with her.

  The doctor shone a flashlight in my eyes and told me to take some aspirin for pain. That had been it. Daddy said the school should pay my clinic bill, but Mama said it wasn’t worth the red tape to try to collect ten dollars. They’d argued back and forth at the dinner table. It was settled when Mama sent me to get her checkbook. Of course, my brothers teased me no end about my shiners. And they were forever begging me to take off my sunglasses.

  A week later Carla and I were at my locker.

  “You think I still need my sunglasses?”

  Carla shook her head. “Not unlessen you just want to look cool.”

  Sean walked toward us. “Hey, Stevie, let’s say we check out White Castle ninth period? They gotta special going, ten burgers for a buck.” “I wish I could, Sean, but I’m booked.”

  “Booked? You gotta new nigger or something?” Carla cut in. Sean smiled but he looked worried.

  “No, I’ve got to help Nurse Horn.”

  Carla shook her head at me before rushing away to catch up with Ivory.

  “Help Nurse Horn? Help her do what?”

  “Different stuff, Sean, file, type, clean up, whatever. I’m her student helper now.”

  “How did you get stuck with that?”

  “I had to tell Nurse Horn what the doctor said. And while I was in her office, Barbara Taylor was in there.”

  “So.”

  “Anyway, Barbara was telling Nurse Horn that she couldn’t be her helper anymore, accounta she’s the new captain of the girls’ basketball team, and they’re in the finals and all.”

  “So, what’s that got to do with you?”

  “So I asked Nurse Horn if I could be her new helper. And she said, ‘Great idea.’”

  Sean frowned, “Why do you have to help her ninth period? Why would you want to be tied up at the end of the day?”

  “Because that’s when she needs me. Earlier she’s more likely to have somebody sick in there.”

  “What if I need you?”

  “Sean, you’re being silly. You go to swim-team practice three times a week. You play basketball during most of lunch period.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Well, I need service points for the Junior Honor Society. Helping Nurse Horn two measly periods a week will cover it.”

  “I forgot about your needing service points.”

  “Sean, we can go to White Castle tomorrow.”

  “Stevie, tomorrow it will be too late. This is a one-day sale,” Sean grumbled.

  That’s just too bad, I thought to myself.

  LARRY DUPLECHAN

  [1956–]

  MUSIC RATHER THAN WRITING WAS LARRY DUPLECHAN’S FIRST love. Following graduation from UCLA where he majored in literature, Duplechan spent six years singing professionally in nightclubs. When he reached a crossroads in his career, he chose to take up writing fiction, a talent that had first distinguished him in high school in his native Los Angeles.

  Duplechan’s debut novel, Eight Days a Week (1985), introduces the author’s alter-ego protagonist, Johnnie Ray Rousseau, a black gay vocalist with a preference for white men. Although Duplechan once referred to himself as an “assimilationist,” arguing that his sexual identity was more important to him than his racial self, his sexual politics are often characterized by wry, unapologetic humor and insight into the complexities of interracial love. Duplechan’s second novel, Blackbird (1987), looks at Johnny Ray’s isolated coming of age as a gay youth. His more ambitious Tangled Up in Blue (1989), an AIDS novel with an all-white cast of characters.

  In this excerpt from Captain Swing (1993), the author’s most recent novel, Johnny Ray returns, this time venturing from Los Angeles to visit his estranged father, Lance, on his deathbed in St. Charles, Louisiana.

  from Captain Swing

  [1993]

  “I’m here to see my father,” I said to the same braided-haired nurse I’d seen the previous day. “Lance Rousseau.” The nurse glanced at her wristwatch and then briefly down at the desk and said, “They givin’ him his breakfast now. You can go on in if you want to.”

  Nigel said, “I’ll wait over there,” indicating the small waiting area. Several long, deep yoga breaths failed to calm my racing heartbeat as I approached the door to my father’s room. I should have hopped the first plane home when I had the chance, I thought. Well, maybe the first train.

  “Please, Mr. Rousseau,” came a plaintive female voice from within the room. “How can I feed you if you won’t open your mouth?” From the doorway, I could see my father, propped up in bed with several pillows, his face set, jaw clenched, a food tray set before him. Bedside, perched on a high stool, spoon in hand, was a heavyset, caramel-colored young nurse’s assistant.

  “I said get away from me, girl,” Lance growled through clenched teeth.

  “Come on now, Mr. Rousseau,” the woman repeated in a voice like honey-butter laced with arsenic, “just one bite.”

  “No!” Lance said, teeth together as if wired shut. “You eat it.”

  I smiled at the little drama, at my father’s childish petulance, the woman’s exasperation. Suddenly I was considerably less nervous. The brawny-armed disciplinarian who had left so many stripes on my thighs, the paragon of masculinity who had made me feel so inferior for so very long, the father who had turned me from his home—that man, or what was left of him—lay all but helpless in a hospital bed, refusing to eat his porridge. Fate had had to nearly flatten Lance Rousseau before I could feel I had anything resembling the upper hand, but this was definitely it. “Let me give it a try,” I said, stepping into the small, machine-dense room. The nurse’s aide turned. Lance looked across the bed, across the room. Though Lance’s eyes gave me nothing, I could have sworn I saw the threat of a smile pass, if briefly, across my father’s tightly shut face. “I’m his son,” I added for the woman’s
benefit. She looked at Lance, then back at me. Perhaps finding a family resemblance in my

  features, almost certainly happy to be relieved of duty, she shook the spoon clean, walked over, and handed it to me. “Good luck,” she said, deadpan, and left the room.

  Wiggling the spoon between my fingers, I strolled toward the bed. “Hello, Dad,” I said, climbing onto the stool vacated by the nurse’s aide. No visible or audible acknowledgment from the man in bed. So I said, “Hello, son, how nice of you to drop everything and schlep halfway across the United States to be treated like so much dog shit by your hateful homophobic asshole father. What a good, good son you are.”

  Lance blinked. I considered emptying the breakfast tray onto my father’s head and fingerpainting obscenities across his hospital gown in strained squash, but thought better of it. I took a couple of yoga breaths and tried again.

  “How are you feeling today, Dad?” I said. Lance continued to stare straight ahead. But after a moment, he said, “I’m dying. How the hell are you?”

  I suppressed a smile. It wasn’t much, but it was an answer. “Well,” I said, “Garbo talks. How the hell am I, you ask. Well, let’s see, now… my lover was killed by a hit-and-run over a year ago and I’m still in mourning. I’m given to screaming nightmares, I’ve been taking an extremely habit-forming prescription drug just to keep my mind from flying apart like a New Year’s party favor, and I don’t know if I’ll ever love again. I’m in therapy with a shrink who looks like Opie, and who tells me there’s no formal timetable for grief. And right at the moment, I’m sitting in a hospital room in the middle of Nowhere City, Louisiana, staring at my dying father, who doesn’t want to see me. I’m fine.” It crossed my mind to mention that I’d recently made something very like whoopie with Lance’s nearly nineteen-year-old nephew, but chose not to just yet.

  Finding no discernible reaction from Lance, I waved the spoon I still held, made a pop-eyed, twisted-lipped Baby Jane Hudson face, and barked à la Bette Davis, “Time ta eat-cha break-fast!” I scooped up a spoonful of orangish-brownish mush from one of the larger compartments of the food tray and held it toward my father’s tightly closed lips. Lance continued to stare straight ahead, across the room and seemingly through the open doorway and into the hall. I raised the spoon high, then brought it slowly down in a long, wavy line. “Open up the hangar,” I singsonged, “here comes the airplane.” No reaction. “Come on, Dad,”