How Are You Going to Save Yourself

by JM Holmes

  “Put the potato one in a separate bag,” I said.

  Outside, Rye looked at the bag a long time before saying he didn’t want it.

  “C’mon, we’re lit. You’re starving,” I said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I don’t even fuck with the potato ones,” I said.

  “I’m not fuckin’ hungry.”

  “Stop acting shady,” I said.

  “Shady?” He laughed. “What are we, in middle school?”

  “Strange, weird, suspect, indignant. What the fuck you want me to say?”

  “Say my name, say my name,” he belted into the night.

  I was about to clown him for singing but started eating instead. The chicken ones were too good and I was too hungry to wait for his bullshit to cease. They were hot all the way through. I missed cutting class to come grab a bagful with Rye, talking about which coaches were after him. The day he got a letter from Morehead State, his mom broke down and started thanking God, even though she wasn’t religious like that. He was going to school for free. I bought bottles and we found a nice spot on the river, mixed Hpnotiq with Henney, threw it all on ice and drank until we couldn’t feel summer’s absence.

  “You know he woulda laid you out, right?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Dub. He woulda beat your ass.”

  I put the crust of my empanada back in the bag and stared at him. “Fuck him, I—”

  “Nah.” Rye cut me off. “He woulda fucked you up.”

  “You got something you want to say?”

  “Why you mad?” he said.

  “Why’d you stop him, then?”

  He looked off. “’Cause I didn’t know you were gonna swing on Rolls.”

  I flexed my fist and thought about Rolls, bloody-mouthed on the floor. I wished my car wasn’t parked at Rye’s. Madie would be waiting. She hated when I came home lit, but she liked getting lit with me. I visited her place so many weekends that we were trying to figure out how to move in together. Our time was like repeated honeymoons, languid and blissful—ordering food, frantic sex before, taking our time with the thing after, falling asleep in ways that only we knew, having worked them out together night after night until we fitted like matryoshkas.

  He quit smiling and watched the stoplight at the top of the hill. The city was built on hills, with roads that curved and ended abruptly and led deeper and deeper into a labyrinth split by a snaking river that changed color with the season ’cause of the dye left over from the textiles back in the day.

  “I did sleep with one white girl,” Rye said.

  I crumpled my bag from the market and tossed it, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Why didn’t you just say?”

  He sped up a little and I lengthened my stride to follow.

  “None of that shit would’ve happened,” I said.

  “Fuck you, you should’ve fought him forever ago.”

  “He roasts niggas, that’s just what he does,” I said.

  He eased up on the pace. “I’m just playin’. I didn’t sleep with no white bitch.”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bro, remember when I caught you looking through my aunt’s panties?”

  He shot me a look, then smiled. “What had happened was—”

  “Man, shut up.” The wind picked up to bring winter faster. “Whatever it is can’t be that bad.”

  “Aight,” he said. He glanced over at me. “Well, in the middle of it…” he started.

  We were at the stoplight. There were no cars. He bounced into the street. I followed.

  “When I was hittin’.”

  “Yeah?” I tried to catch up.

  “She called me a nigger.”

  I fell behind a step, then two.

  “That’s fucked up.” It was all I could say.

  I thought about if Madie pulled some shit like that. I thought about the type of white women who went out in search of that, the ones who kept the word in the backs of their throats—an ugly appetite. Madie wasn’t like that—guilt maybe, that was this country, but nothing dank and malignant. I thought back to when we’d looked at each other in the mirror together, floor-length at her parents’ in Manhattan, her smiling with a hand around my dick. I tried for a minute to see what she saw. I told myself I wasn’t on an auction block in front of her.

  “Rye,” I said.

  He woke up.

  “And?”

  I reached the left onto his street before he did. Still he was silent, trying to lock something inside, back where it belonged. He grew fidgety in the shadow of the streetlight.

  “Yo,” I said.

  He turned. “I liked it,” he said.

  “Liked what?”

  “When she said it.” He paused. “I fuckin’ liked it.”

  “How?”

  “It made me harder.”

  We neared his steps.

  “Like—hardened your resolve to find a strong black woman?” I raised my fist.

  He left the joke in space.

  I stopped as we reached his stairs.

  “You’re not staying?” he said.

  “Nah, man.”

  He toed a spot where the stair was chipped and splintered.

  “Over that shit?”

  I handed him the bag with his empanada. “I just want to see Madie,” I said.

  He put his hand on the rail before he turned to go up and paused. “I loved it,” he said. “It made me an animal.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, you don’t understand, man. I grabbed her hair and turned her face away. I don’t know.” He took a breath. “I wouldn’t even let her look at me. She said it again—Fuck me like a nigger.” He stared at the ground for a while. “I wanted her so bad,” he said. “She tried to turn her face toward me and I just buried it deeper. I thought I was going to break her. It’s like I couldn’t stop. I shoved my fingers down her throat with my other hand and she closed her eyes. I wouldn’t even let her do that. I raised her eyelid so she had to keep an eye open. I bit her jaw until I saw teeth marks.” He brushed his hand over his waves like he’d always done. “I lost my mind.”

  He went up the first step. The automatic porch light came on. I imagined him walking up the stairs to the second floor in the pitch-black. Going home to no one, eating his food alone.

  “Then it worked,” I said.

  “What?”

  I took a few steps back. “She got what she wanted.”

  He held the paper bag tighter, glared like he was going to start something, then his eyes softened. “Say hi to Madie for me.”

  I let the words hang in the night. As I turned the corner toward my car, I heard the apartment door close.

  Two pieces of my pops’ advice stuck with me—Don’t marry a white girl, and Never pick the skin off chicken—it’s the best part. I don’t pick the skin off of chicken ’cause he was right about that. And even though it was just my pops playing around, I can’t see the first piece of advice sitting well with my mom, Nicoletta.

  LONNIE CAMPBELL COULD run so fast. Lonnie could hit so hard.

  MY POPS WAS big enough to block doorways, and Mom was small enough to almost fit her whole body into one of his pant legs. It’s hard for me to imagine them together. They met back at the University of Washington. She was his tutor, but really she wrote essays for players on the Huskies football team to pay her tuition. Pops grew up an army brat and spent some time on Fort McChord when Big Daddy, his father, was stationed there. It made sense for him to stay in Washington. How my mom, an East Coast girlie, ended up in Washington, I still don’t know. She doesn’t speak much on it but always yells “U Dub!” every time she sees someone rocking the gear, and I shake my head.

  He left the university a year early to turn pro. Mom was a year ahead so it worked out. He was a D-end, first for the Tampa Bay Bucs and then for the San Francisco 49ers. My mom took the football bread that was
coming in and became a self-taught architect and real-estate developer. She made some investments, made money—at least, that’s how she tells it. But she had Italian hustle like that so I buy it. I don’t know many stories from the bliss times. I know that she played tennis well, and after I was born, my pops got a few sets in with her every day so she could lose that baby weight and get back in shape. Afterward, they’d bike through the burnt-out California hills, those rose-gold, cracked slopes that jutted up between the houses and kept all the lives private. My pops is fat as shit now.

  I was around six when they split—before I can really remember. His body was too shot to keep playing football, and he left to try and make some moves in LA. Mom got us a studio in Koreatown to stay close. For reasons I didn’t understand, the money was all gone. My mom and I slept in the same bed together with a baseball bat next to the nightstand. No one ever broke in and Pops never came back.

  After LA had squeezed him for the last of his football dollars, Pops moved back up to Washington and had a kid, my little sister Whitney, with his high-school sweetheart. I was around nine then and our communication went radio silent for a while. My mom and I fled east to Rhode Island to be with her mascarpone-colored family. But some years later, when I was old enough to fly alone, she would still send me to visit my pops, would buy the plane tickets and drive me to the airport. She never tripped over the lack of child support and even smiled each time she walked me to the terminal. The smiles were always nervous—Come back you, the you I’ve been building for years. Come back the way I’ve made you. Pops would send me back with my suitcase filled with FUBU and Coogi off the discount racks, clothes my mom accidentally ruined in the wash.

  THE SUMMER I was thirteen I clocked the Sea-Tac Airport for the first time. Pops was waiting at the gate in beat-up loafers and sweats. That’s the way he rocked, comfortable, the years of football stardom long gone. Back in his playing days, he used to wear suits to games, but I guess sometime after the lights dimmed and the yelling stopped and the bones in his battered knees ground like pestles into mortars, he wanted something more forgiving.

  His massive frame drew stares as he scooped me up. I tried to keep my feet planted, play it cool, but it’s hard to resist a forklift. In a too-loud voice he said, “Let me smell ya, make sure you’re my cub.” Then he dug his uneven beard into my neck and made snorting noises. I laughed despite myself. He let me down, said I was the right one, and we left those people at the gate.

  After he threw my suitcase in the trunk of his old DeVille, he squeezed himself into the driver’s seat and started the car. I brushed some cracker crumbs off the leather and put my bag next to Whit’s car seat in the back. Pops was a shitty driver. His legs were too long and got tangled beneath the wheel. (He got his license revoked later, but not for that.) After he turned the radio on, he accelerated into horns and oncoming traffic.

  “So what kind of music you into now?” he asked.

  “Rap.”

  “C’mon, G-Money, you gotta tell me more than that. Who you listen to?”

  “I dunno.”

  “What you mean, you dunno?” he mumbled, trying to clown me.

  The state grew greener as we headed south on I-5 toward Olympia.

  “I like Dipset,” I said.

  “You ain’t listen to my man Ricky Ross?”

  “He’s okay.”

  Pops looked over at me. The car swerved a little. “You know if I was a rapper, I’d be like Rick Ross.”

  I nodded.

  “You know why?”

  “’Cause you’re both fat?” I said.

  “You think I’m fat? Your cousins call me Uncle Love Biscuits. I only stay big for them.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “If they didn’t like it, I’d be lean and fast as my playing days. They used to call me Lonnie ‘Lion’ Campbell.”

  “Dad, you look more like a rhino.” I blew out my cheeks like a puffer fish.

  He stared over at me real serious. “You don’t believe me?”

  The highway got wider once we were south of Tacoma, and the people drove slower. I liked when my pops talked about his NFL days. He got animated and used my name for dramatic effect—Gio, G, G-Money, or, when he told his tallest tales, Giovanni.

  “Are you dunking yet?”

  “I’m thirteen.”

  “I was dunking by thirteen,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “I could still dunk now, G, that’s God-given. Just ’cause I got some fat on these muscles don’t mean the muscles ain’t there.”

  I glanced over at my pops, the way his tan sweats rode up, stuffed into the driver’s seat of the DeVille, he looked like a goofy-ass chocolate sundae drenched in caramel. I broke out laughing. My pops was funny when he lied. Maybe that’s why he got away with it his whole life.

  MY STEPMOM, DEE, Pops’ second woman, or the second I’d met, smoked cigarettes. They were brown and longer than straws and she’d stand outside forever in the summer breeze burning them down to the last. We got along all right as I grew a little older. Pops and I were still drifting back toward each other and I wasn’t going to let anyone mess it up. So on Sundays, to bond, I would even ride with Dee an hour to the Indian reservation, where she could buy her cartons tax-free. But back in the duplex, whenever she left them on the counter, I’d hide them in the big vase near the front door. There must have been thirty packs in there she never found. She used to bitch and blame my pops. He never yelled at me, though. He didn’t want her to smoke anyway and I just wanted to be a punk.

  TWO YEARS LATER, the summer I was fifteen, I saw Dee walk out of the bathroom in just a towel. I’d been watching preseason football on the TV in their bedroom ’cause that’s where the cable box was. She walked like she deserved everything and let her towel fall in front of the mirror. She was the right kind of full. The girls at my school were starting to grow up, but her figure still looked alien—her hair in two long braids that almost reached her ass, which curved and sat in place thicker than a basketball.

  “Jay Stephens used to come by the house when I was in high school,” she said, nodding toward the TV, her voice hissing like rain on a campfire.

  I didn’t even turn back to see who she was talking about. Before I had a chance to take it all in, my little sister came into the room and jumped on the bed with me.

  “Put Lilo on,” she said.

  I changed the channel to Disney. The smell of beeswax came off her hair.

  “You just get braided?”

  She smiled and whipped her braids around, letting the beaded ends bounce off each other. “Audrey says I’m gonna be a heart taker.”

  “Heartbreaker.”

  But she wasn’t listening to me. The Jonas Brothers were on the TV. She loved kid pop stars like her mom loved athletes, and I prayed she didn’t grow up to be a groupie.

  Then my pops walked in, big and calm. He smacked Dee’s ass and it rippled like a pot of hot water before it boils.

  She pushed him away. “Not in front of the kids!” She wrapped herself in the towel again.

  “What?” My pops had a hoarse laugh that came from deep inside him. He grabbed her around the waist and she pushed him away again. Then he caught me watching. “C’mon, G-Money, don’t act like you ain’t never seen one before.” He laughed again.

  I looked back at the TV. “I seen plenty,” I said.

  “Boy, you ain’t seen none,” Dee said. Then she dropped her own laugh on me and I shrank inside.

  “Whitney, show your brother the new paint job in your room,” my pops said.

  “I wanna go to the store,” I said.

  “And?” he said.

  “Let me use the car.”

  “Let me see your license,” he said.

  “Mom has me drive.” That wasn’t a lie. She’d let me get my permit early, but every time in the car with me, she still sweat the whole ride like the next hog in line.

  “You better start walking,” Dee said.

  T
hey were already fooling around by the time I got up and took my sister out of the room with me.

  Whitney didn’t play sports. At age five, she was all diva already. The walls of her room were painted light pink and periwinkle. My pops had painted the walls twice but painted them again when she didn’t like the shade of pink. She spent the next hour showing me toys, and I fell asleep on her bed surrounded by stuffed animals.

  MY MOM AND I moved around Rhode Island a lot while she got certified and chased teaching jobs. She stopped developing real estate, said it was ’cause she wanted to be home more, but I think there was no more football money. In small-town middle schools, I fell in love with some freckled girls in light-up sneakers and wasted my lunch money on giant Hershey’s Kisses for them, trying to steal a kiss—Dee would’ve called me a trick. Even when the kiddie-love dates never seemed to work out, my age kept me ignorant to hate-eyed parents. Mom said nothing and kept us moving, looking for a better place.

  When I got to high school, I fell hard for one Saba Thomas, a light-skinned Cape Verdean girl who had my nose wide open. My mom tried to keep me safe from the blaze. She didn’t like when I hung out in neighborhoods like Saba’s—everything in Spanish or Portuguese, police curfews, kids all ages mobbing on corners. She was always confusing safety for happiness. She still is. But she tried to like the girls once I brought them home.

  The only girls I brought home were ones my pops would’ve said had “the potion.” He would try to move his hips like a merengue dancer and tap his ass while he said it. “Campbells can’t fight the good potion,” he said. I still remember that. I still think about Saba.

  She liked my voice. You talk so sexy, she said.

  We had How High blaring from the TV to drown out the sounds of us flirting and drinking. Still, I listened for her mom moving in the next room.

  Yeah?

  Yeah, say something.

  What do you want me to say? I felt like I was whispering.

  Anything. Surprise me.

  What do you mean, anything?

  Jesus, just shut up, she said.