Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  “I knew it was a trap,” he half jokes, perhaps regretting some of the things he taught us, and some of the things he didn’t, after the mentorship turned into something more—turned into you. Later, he left the Nation to become a member at the Mosque Cares ministry, which was established by Elijah Muhammad’s son W. Deen Muhammad after the former’s death. W. Deen disbanded his father’s Nation of Islam (Minister Louis Farrakhan would later revive it) and pushed its members toward a more liberal direction than it had operated along in the days of Malcolm X’s excommunication—although idolatry, or worshipping any sacred images, is still strictly forbidden.

  “It’s all about interpretation,” Daddy responds whenever someone asks him how he reconciles this prohibition with his marriage to Mata and the paintings of different Hare Kṛṣṇa pastimes that hang all over their house. Aligning his practices with the woman he loves is one of the few contradictions for which he will never change the subject, that he is always willing to confront, even if the words he finds to confront it feel trite and indecisive. There is a lack of language for how to resolve his beliefs and his marriage, but he struggles to muster his own anyway.

  “God is whatever helps us get to self-realization, regardless of the road you take. Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim,” Daddy says.

  In the name of Allah, the most compassionate, the most merciful. God’s merciful acceptance of the sacrilegious way Mata raised us is why Daddy says he never really pushed us to go to the mosque and didn’t protest when Mata brought all her children up almost entirely within her religion.

  I hate when Daddy changes the subject after being presented with his contradictions, because it was he who showed me how powerful it could be to acknowledge the doubts that our contradictions raise. It was he who taught me that no matter how right I might think I am, I should always be willing to be wrong for something greater. It was Daddy who illuminated the necessity of struggling to name the unnameable, which ultimately brought me back to you, Hari-Gaura.

  There are always exceptions and contexts and gray areas in the space between and outside of the binaries constructed to make sense of ourselves in this carceral world. To refuse to place all your bets on either side of these binaries doesn’t mean one’s beliefs about oneself are weak; it just means they are as expansive as any god should be. As the gods of our ancestors were, which is why those are so appealing to me. And Daddy taught me all this without always recognizing when he could apply it to himself.

  “I don’t have a problem with you being Hare Kṛṣṇas,” he said, sitting on his hotel bed across from mine in Arizona, still mispronouncing it as “Kris-na” instead of “Krish-na” after all these years.

  “But I regret that Islam didn’t have more of a role in your lives,” he continued.

  “Sometimes, I feel very Muslim,” I said, “even though I am not religious.”

  I tell him how my last name gave me away to the Muslim cashier at my local deli in Brooklyn, how the cashier asked me to pray with him, and how I remembered the Arabic again. I tell Daddy that I don’t always trust the government’s narrative of the events of 9/11 either, and I know he’s not delusional for believing in things people who stay trying to kill us say he shouldn’t believe.

  I tell him how I thought of him when the controversy erupted over Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright, when Wright argued after the twin towers fell that God will continue to damn America until it stops avoiding its own violent contradictions. I tell him how I knew Wright’s was a correct assessment of the evils this government had enacted because Daddy is my Muslim father. Because of the rage I feel witnessing the violence that Muslim communities have experienced in the wake of that fateful day—communities that, through him, I have some kinship with. Because of the state-sanctioned Islamophobia that has only deepened since, and strengthened its grip across the globe—from Kashmir to Palestine.

  I tell Daddy that Wright’s “God damn America” sermon sounded a lot like, “These people have been liars since the inception of this country” to me, and that I never forgave Obama for abandoning someone he supposedly loved just because it contradicted his political ambitions. How I hope to never abandon what and who I love again just because it contradicts some ambition of mine, and how I learned this from how Daddy always reconciled loving Mata with his practice of Islam. And if I can make up for the abandonment I’ve done myself, if I can get you back, it’s because Daddy showed me how, even amid the moments when he abandoned what he shouldn’t have, too.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  GUILT AND GODS

  My baby brother Visnu swears I began my rebellion against my parents not long after I entered high school.

  “Boy, I was finding cases of Mike’s Hard in the closet every day when you were fifteen!” he chortled, as obnoxious as he is endearing, as he took a sip of a vodka soda himself. We were at our sister Kiss’s friend’s house, and Visnu had begun the conversation without prompting. Visnu isn’t a heavy drinker, and he weighs less than me despite a benefit of at least three inches and my not being very heavy to begin with, so when he starts, the effects come on fast. I think his self-consciousness around the speed of the whole process might make him feel the need to deflect.

  “Nah, you got the timeline all messed up,” I insisted, but he would not be convinced.

  “You were a teenage alcoholic!” he persisted, cutting an argumentative tone with a hint of laughter, as he does.

  “Okay, I was probably drinking too much, but not until later.”

  He just shook his head, stroking his patchy beard, which still covers much more of his soft chin than my own beard, only now beginning to grow in, covers of mine. He thought I was in denial. Visnu may very well have learned the urge to steer the focus away from his tipsiness to me—I am overly defensive about my drinking—but in reality I didn’t have my first drink until after the second semester of senior year, when Visnu was ten. I rarely even cursed before then, but by that summer I had become masterful at breaking my parents’ rules, and I can see how the rapid escalation of this behavior might have warped my little brother’s perception.

  After high school had let out for the final time, at least once a week I would wait until I thought Mata and my father were asleep in their room on the third floor, tiptoe downstairs from the one I begrudgingly shared with Visnu on the second, and swipe the minivan key from the hook in the kitchen. Our driveway at the Heights house was narrow, with concrete, waist-high stumps painted yellow to guard the side porch on the right, and a steep ditch that, on more than one occasion, had caused the van to get stuck between the pavement and the neighbor’s house on the left. Every year we tried to fill the ditch with dirt and gravel, but by the next it would inevitably sink significantly below the pavement again, as though being fed to some buried, insatiable beast.

  The setup meant I couldn’t reverse out quickly, making my escape a risky one. But I’d already been accepted into my dream school, and the worst I imagined could happen was that I might disappoint my parents—which wasn’t much of a deterrent, as I already felt I had disappointed them as much as I ever could. I wouldn’t have sneaked out of the house and had a drink for the first time that spring if I hadn’t been convinced by unspoken promises that this could mitigate the excruciating identity crisis that their disappointment had brewed inside me.

  Michael had become my best friend over the two years prior. We’d hit it off in our school’s gospel choir, where he initially drew my attention because he had a voice of molten gold, and where I drew his because he couldn’t understand why a Hindu was so excited to sing about Jesus. I explained to him that the way I was raised held space for other religious practices and that my enthusiasm for choir likely had something to do with how central music is in the Hare Kṛṣṇa tradition, and he found this fascinating. I told him how I’d grown up having to sing before sermons and before eating and how nearly every Vaiṣṇava event calls for music and dancing, a symphony of cymbals and drums, and he swore I was the most i
nteresting person he’d ever met. I believed him, and it quickly became apparent that he was the same for me, too.

  I was most taken by how he didn’t seem to give a fuck about all the things I gave too much of a fuck about, but he didn’t judge me all the same. Michael wasn’t especially academic or religious or popular or active in anything outside of his music, and I think a part of me hoped that his carefree nature would rub off over my constant need to excel regardless of the sacrifices excelling required.

  I have never been the best singer, and gospel choir didn’t require me to be, but soon I also joined our school’s show choir, with Michael’s encouragement, and then the more demanding a cappella choir, too. I even quit the track team, which I’d been a part of for the first three years of high school, to make time for this new activity. Michael could do effortless Maxwell runs to every song that came on the radio, picking up the melody on just his first listen, and when I tried to do the same to impress him and failed, he never laughed too hard.

  “No, that was all right,” he would say after chuckling, still smiling a tickled, dazzling smile at my floundering attempts to harmonize in the passenger seat of his mother’s Jeep.

  “You’re getting better,” he would continue, even though I still felt that compulsion to beat myself up because I was sure that I wasn’t getting better—or at least I had been sure before I heard the words leave his lips.

  Michael welcomed me with open arms into his friend group, which included two other dedicated choir boys, Jon and Calvin. The three were inseparable. Jon and Calvin wanted to be musicians just like Michael and weren’t as forgiving about my lack of skill, but Michael always defended me to them.

  “Hari’s not even a singer and still has just as good an ear as you, Jon,” he’d chastise when Jon would playfully latch on to a mistake of mine, forcing Jon into silence. Michael was far more skilled with music than Jon, and he knew Jon wouldn’t question his characterization of anyone’s musicianship. Michael defended me so convincingly that sometimes he even made me believe that I had the ear of a real singer.

  Michael, Jon, Calvin, and I hung out together and talked on the phone nightly, but as our friendship progressed, sometimes I would call Michael—just Michael—after we got off our four-way calls to talk about everything and nothing. He didn’t seem to find this weird. Sometimes he would call me—just me—too.

  “Can you come to the party?” Michael asked during one of our private calls the spring of our last year in high school together, after we’d rid ourselves of Jon and Calvin.

  “You know my mother . . . ,” I said, repeating an excuse I’d given him countless times.

  “Yeah, but I thought it was worth a try.”

  He sounded defeated. Hurt, even. And somehow that hurt me, too, though I didn’t have the words for why.

  “I mean, I could try to sneak out?”

  “Hari, sneaking out?!” He laughed that oddly understanding laugh of his, full of shock but lacking any real judgment.

  At first I didn’t know what made me want to break the rules for Michael. I’d had other very close friends before, and I’d have done anything to protect them from being hurt, but they’d never expressed pain for my absence the way Michael seemed to. I knew his feelings were different because his absence was excruciating for me, too, and I saw my pain reflected in his eyes. I saw myself when I looked into them.

  “We’re almost like brothers,” I said to him one day in an attempt to explain my feelings.

  “Yeah, like brothers.” He smiled, but that light wasn’t there when he said it, and nothing could ever be adequate without that.

  When I showed up to the first party I sneaked out to attend, the joy I saw emanating from Michael’s face no less than demanded I show up again to the next. It still wasn’t a regular occurrence then, but whenever I stole my parents’ van, it was almost always to be with Michael, to see that smile beaming back at me through a night I’d otherwise have spent shrouded in an indescribable loneliness away from him. I felt guilty, of course, but the alcohol came to help with that.

  When Michael gave me my first drink, he didn’t push it on me. I had noticed it seemed to help with his feeling carefree, and like I said, I wanted that, so I asked for his red Solo Cup, still fresh with the wet from his lips.

  “Are you sure?” He smiled. I imagined tasting a hint of his breath on the rim, and I’d never been more sure of anything.

  The drinking helped with the guilt only while I was drunk. It exacerbated it afterward, which only encouraged me to be drunk as often as possible. Drinking also gave me an excuse to be with Michael. High school kids seemed to understand why we spent so much time together when getting drunk was the reason, when they might not have been so understanding of any of the other reasons I could not yet name.

  Sometimes when I sneaked out—the best times—there was no party to attend. It was just me and Michael, drinking in his basement, talking shit about choir and school and Cleveland Heights, anything or nothing. His parents never discovered I was in their house or that we had stolen their alcohol, even when we crept up to Michael’s room, right across from theirs.

  “Why don’t you just sleep over?” Michael asked on one of these nights. My chest, in a prelude to its later persistent torment in my life, responded like a popular teen’s phone buzzing with a hundred notifications at once when it’s started up after a week being powered off.

  “You know my mother . . . ,” I said, trying to calm the fluttering.

  “I do . . .”

  I could almost see his chest rise and fall like waves in a high tide, matching mine.

  I was drunk. I shouldn’t have been driving anyway. I wanted to see him beam at me. I needed to.

  “I can just leave early in the morning,” I said, relenting, and there it was, that smile.

  Michael had only one sibling still living in the house, an older sister, and she had her own room, but for some reason he had a second bed in his. When I asked him why, he just shrugged and laughed. I was happy to fill in the blank with the fantasy that he had insisted it be there as he lay in wait for the perfect person to share a room with—for me.

  He’d brought drinks up from the basement, and he poured me another before plopping down on his bed. I kicked off my shoes and sat on what you could no longer tell me wasn’t my bed, too, as Michael turned on some singing-competition show. He sang along with the auditions and sounded better than any of the contestants. I never looked at the screen. I took constant sips of my drink, watching him and waiting for the night to brighten when he returned my glance.

  “Do you want to lie on the floor?” he finally asked, taking a large gulp from his glass.

  It shouldn’t have made any sense that we would move to the floor when we had two comfortable beds between us, but it was the only thing that felt logical at the time.

  “Sure!”

  Michael laughed with a noticeable discomfort I’d never seen on him as he unrolled a blanket on the ground, threw the pillows from his bed on top of it, and lay down on the pallet. I grabbed my pillow and lay down beside him.

  “Come closer,” he said. And I did.

  When I visibly tried my best not to touch him, he laughed again, as if I had sung the wrong note in the passenger seat of his mother’s car, then wrapped me in his arms, and I realized that was what he’d meant for me to do. I realized I was always supposed to have done this. And I held him back, as much as you can hold the sun.

  When I awoke at 4:00 a.m., I had sobered up. We hadn’t gone any further than holding each other that night, but still the guilt was suffocating. The most depressing thing about being queer in this world is the fact that it isn’t just the possibility of your sexuality that you are taught to be afraid of: a world where you can hold the person you love without guilt terrifies you, too. I had never held another boy in my arms. I had never been held that way with my consent either, and I had been taught that I was never supposed to feel that much joy, so I could only beat myself up when I
did.

  “I have to go,” I said, gasping for air and pushing him away.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “You know my mother.”

  I held my breath for what couldn’t biologically have been the entire ten-minute drive home but felt like it. When I pulled into the driveway, I found Mata waiting up for me.

  “Shit,” I mumbled to myself. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Though I’d made sure to shut off the van’s headlights before I inched back past the yellow stumps, it was futile. The shadow of Mata’s small frame behind the curtains of the living room, gusting around like the winds preceding a thunderstorm, seemed to jump through the window, piercing my stomach and morphing into a black hole inside me.

  In silhouette, the shape of the head wrap Mata wore every day for the sake of modesty became the plume after a bomb. Even before I cracked open the back door, I heard the chanting—“Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa!”—and my heart began to sprint. I sat in the vestibule between the door and the kitchen for what seemed like hours waiting for her to go to bed so that I wouldn’t have to face her. But she just chanted and chanted and chanted, her voice full of sorrow for all my sins. And in that vestibule, amid the sound of her prayers and the tangy smell of all the shoes lining its walls and the Bacardi on my breath, I had the second anxiety attack of my life.

  Mata believes that the Hare Kṛṣṇa principle of “no illicit sex” refers to queer sexuality. I think this belief was shaped by losing her own childhood in a fundamentalist Christian upbringing, marred by colonized and anti-Black interpretations of sex, but she would be able to find some way to use Kṛṣṇa to justify it—just as white devotees had for their anti-Blackness.