White Girls

by Hilton Als

  Of course, SL was more than aware, emotionally and otherwise, of what was happening as K began to leave. SL drove me to K’s funeral in Connecticut. He even helped me walk K down the stairs in the tenement building K lived in before he died so he could get home to Connecticut to be with his family one last time. SL even had dinner with my beloved and me and another friend on K’s last New Year’s Eve on earth, December 1991, and then SL drove him home, trying hard not to look at K’s body leaving his life—while sporting a cravat, even. For a time, after they first met, K would sometimes twitch in SL’s presence. And while K could let his periodic impulse to hurt but not his jealousy show—“I don’t know why I told you that!”—I wonder, now, if my twinship with SL flooded him with feelings he couldn’t sort out. When K was growing up in Connecticut, the Black Panthers were on trial in New Haven. This was in 1970; he was eight. One day, his mother drove her children into New Haven to do a little shopping. Upon arriving, his mother told her kids to lock the car doors because “those Panthers were loose.” And K remembered thinking: Oh, let them in, let them in. SL and I let him in. Sometimes things got even more confusing. Once, K’s boyfriend threw me a birthday party. I was twenty-three and K was twenty. After the party, K found me in bed with a woman. Later, over breakfast, K was tight-lipped for a long time. I don’t think I remember asking him what was wrong because I knew what was wrong. Finally, he exploded. “You were in bed with B!” Did K want to be my only white girl? It was a marriage.

  SL listened to me sob on the telephone once, after my beloved was diagnosed: But he’s only thirty. He doesn’t even know who he is. SL stood by my side as the lid was placed on K’s coffin and the dirt was being shoveled. There was a figurine on top of the coffin lid—a dark Jesus. Looking at that Christ, SL said, I bet K would like that black Jesus on top of him. And without hearing what SL said through his tears, I murmured through my own: I bet K will like that black Jesus on top of him. Then we said good-bye and SL became the only one for a long time.

  SL and I met at an alternative weekly, where we both worked in the art department; I was the department assistant, SL a freelance graphic designer. By way of introduction he would shyly offer me things he thought might interest me: postcards, books, photographs. One of the first postcards he sent me was by the photographer Helen Levitt. It showed two colored boys on a street in New York, in the nineteen forties. One boy is facing the camera; the other boy’s back faces the camera. Their arms are linked. They look like two sides of the same coin, like Janus. SL passed along a play: Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. In it, twin sisters long to be loved by or control the same man. He dies. In the end, the twins accept being “twin sisters...of one mind.” Because of SL—he loved her work—I also read Gertrude Stein’s Ida: A Novel. In it, Ida, the heroine, wishes for a twin. She writes letters to her imaginary twin, also named Ida. “Dear Ida my twin,” one such letter begins. Then, continuing, “Are you beautiful as beautiful as I am dear twin Ida, are you, and if you are perhaps I am not.” SL gave me a VHS tape: Chained for Life (1951). In it, real-life conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton star in a fiction about their struggle for love, set against a show-business backdrop. No man can separate them, though; they’re emotionally “chained for life.” Then there was Thought to Be Retarded, written and designed by SL himself. It was based on a performance he’d done in collaboration with the photographer Daniel Lerner. Their piece was based on the story of Grace and Virginia Kennedy, the famous German American twins born in Georgia in the early nineteen seventies, who developed their own language and were “thought to be retarded” because their parents, social workers, and speech therapists alike couldn’t understand them. (The Kennedy girls were themselves the subject of Jean-Pierre Gorin’s exceptional 1980 documentary Poto and Cabengo.)

  SL and I had both grown up feeling that the language we spoke was somehow incomprehensible or fuzzy to those around us. He’d spent his adolescence on army bases in England, France, and Germany, while I had no direct experience with white people until I was a teenager. SL’s parents were middle-class American Negroes from the Midwest who went to work in Europe to escape, if it can be done, racism. (SL’s father taught college-level chemistry on various army bases, while his mother worked as an administrator.) But his father brought that racism with him. Like many men of his background, his racism was really counterphobic: he revered white people. That his only son couldn’t assimilate enough for his angry, continually disappointed father—an impossible task; SL was a black kid in a white world; no matter how much he was lauded or fucked over in that world, he would always be black—was just one of the small crucifixions SL endured for his father’s sake. Other nails and splinters: the irrefutable sense that he didn’t really know why he was here, in the world, at all. He had no I because he had no country. He would not have his maleness because that was a sick and diseased and controlling thing—like his father.

  In the late early nineteen seventies, SL, a tremendous reader, began to hear bits of himself not in Piri Thomas or Eldridge Cleaver but in Shulamith Firestone, and Ti-Grace Atkinson, and Carolee Schneemann, and Robin Morgan: women who were of SL’s class, more or less, and had experienced, growing up, something akin to what he had known at the hands of a father: being subject to emotional violence because they owned you, you were their property. He and his mother had grown up in what Shulamith Firestone called “shared oppression.” The difference between her and her son was that she believed it: Wasn’t her pain the pain you suffered for family? Later SL would withstand mountains of pain for his family. But in the early nineteen-seventies he did two things: he got out, if only he could get out. That is, SL moved forward into his future, but his past resented it. He had boundless hope, but his past thought otherwise. Leaving home, he would kiss white women, or they would kiss him, with no expectation and every expectation, and then—sometimes—he would turn to me and love me as he had been loved in his past, walking in the Black Forest or wherever, tagging along behind his parents in his Eton cap, wondering about the forest worms as he served as an audience for his parents’ follies, their seemingly endless marital drama of acceptance and rejection, a form of theater many mothers, for instance, try to justify by saying, We’re staying together for the kids’ sake. That’s the first lie of family. It’s never for the kids’ sake. Why has no mother, including Hamlet’s own, not admitted to her libidinal impulses, saying this crazy-ass dick or uncontrollable freak works for me, I could never do what he does in the world, be so out of control, terrible and boundaryless, I’m a woman, confined by my sex, prohibited from acting out because other lives, my children’s lives, depend on me, but still there’s my husband acting out for me, what a thrill as he crashes against the cage of my propriety. What no mother in history, including Hamlet’s own, has ever been able to entirely process, let alone admit: My husband may not actually be our child’s type.

  From the first, SL and I were each other’s hall of mirrors, and is this me currently looking at my parents, or SL looking at his parents? Was it my mother’s competitive desire to make a kind of glued-together, unforgettable art out of her marriage, all the while saying: Who could make a better thing out of it? Me or your father? Wait. Who said that? My mother, or SL’s mother? Was it SL’s mother or my mother whom we loved beyond her comprehension, hating that she treated her own body as a thing to be manipulated by male hands, something that reinforced her idea of male authority, which she admired even as she did and did not admire her son’s repudiation of it, a rejection that made her ashamed of her need for it, and so there was nothing for it but to reject the son as weak, poetic, a loving pussy to be tolerated and sometimes reviled. Who could love her for having such thoughts? Who could say? SL and I were each other’s hall of mirrors, each a kind of Marvin Gaye in relation to our respective fathers, but SL got away, and left Europe for the United States. I can’t bear this part of the story, the he-got-away part, even if it was the best thing for him, and it was, because it presages his getting away from
me, the very embodiment of his boyhood isolation.

  I ate dirt until he came along. I had what they called the ringworm. I picked my scalp and there it was, underneath my fingernails, piles of sick. I was a preteen Caliban deformed by flaky skin; I had pus on my mind. My head was a compost heap. My fingernails dug into what they, the older people, called the ringworm, or eczema, and I sent shivers down my own spine—an erotic “pain” I could not wait to get my hands on. My gray woolen Eton cap was lousy with me. There was SL in his Eton cap and his forest of worms, and there I was in my cap, waiting until he came along. My contemporaries—other children—risked contagion if they touched my cap, let alone my diseased spot, which, come to think of it, looked a little like a woman’s private parts; boys spitballed it.

  My infirmity sat on the back of my head, just above my neck. My ringworm was my cruddy friend; it had no other friends and so many enzymes, a dark flower could be forced in it. My ringworm was philosophical. It had certain ideas about the world, about me. One thing that made my ringworm sick was my interest in myself—an interest I almost never uttered in the company of the well. My self-interest was not founded on self-love but on fury over my scabby presence, which no amount of love, from my parents or siblings, could cure. Self-interest ran in my family. They could see me only as the cute extension of what they felt to be cute about themselves. If I expressed, let’s say, a dislike of marigolds, that shocked them: I was too cute to contradict flowers. I shut up early on and let my imagination run wild, or as concentrated as my patch of sick.

  My ringworm was as infested with longing as I was. My body and soul were a sewer, briny and foul with sexiness. Daddy doesn’t like that about me, and I don’t like him, but my body craves him.

  Daddy says that I am strange, that he never knows what I am talking about. When he comes to call on my mother, he says, Goddammit-what-the-hell-Jesus-Christ-aw-shit-for-fuck’s-sake, and Huh? whenever I open my mouth to speak; consequently, I rarely do. Daddy turns me on because he doesn’t think I’m cute; he makes me work for his admiration.

  He knows that I spend a lot of my time at the big lending library at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, reading books. What he doesn’t know is that while there, I also listen to recordings by grand actors reading famous poetry, prose, and plays as a way of learning how to speak in an authoritative, genteel way meant to captivate my father, like a pus-y siren. I listen to white girls such as Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday in Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade, because she is not genteel or cute in the role of the knife-wielding anarchist: she is a gorgeous hysteric, as loud as the worst flower. She contradicts my family for me. One of Charlotte’s interlocutors begs her to turn away from her various hatreds and “look at the trees / look at the rose-colored evening sky / and let those horrible things pass you by / feel the warmth and the gentle breeze / in which your lovely bosom heaves.” Charlotte cannot. “What kind of town is this?” she asks. “I saw peddlers / at every corner / they’re selling little guillotines / with tiny sharp blades / and dolls filled with red liquid / which spurts from the neck / when the sentence is carried out / What kind of children are these / who can play / with this toy so efficiently / and who sits in judgment / who sits in judgment?”

  As Charlotte Corday, I can hate marigolds. Glenda Jackson’s ferocious tone encourages me to imagine Daddy dragging his big Daddy body toward me because I want him to, because I am, finally, all he could ever need: a person capable of screeching, How I hate the marigolds! He bites into my ringworm and eats the red, pused-out bits in the way my older sister ate the petals she pulled from red flowers: with relish. I am not a child. I am a judge. I have been made older through cultivating need, which feeds my imagination, the one thing Daddy does not have access to, the one thing I can make him a lovesick prisoner of.

  But SL got out. In 1975, he returned to America on his own, ostensibly to attend college, although he never went. Instead he fell in with New York–based feminists, some of whom roamed the Berkshire woods naked with bow and arrow, looking for men to kill, while others stepped on the accelerator when they saw men crossing the road. In this world, SL became a wife, supporting a number of friends’ and lovers’ work while his own work took a backseat; it was the least he could do: he had had a father, and he would have no further truck with that. By the time I met him and longed to be his wife, SL sometimes described himself as a lesbian separatist. No man could have him.

  I was attracted to him from the first because I am always attracted to people who are not myself but are. It was less clear why he was interested in me. I made him laugh, I suppose. Perhaps he enjoyed the fact that, in those days, I always looked like an old-school bull dagger, what with my thick neck, little gold earrings, no makeup, and hair cut short and shaved on the sides. Also, he knew, and chuckled over the fact, that I was a gay man who did not suck white dick: I refused on the grounds that the world sucked them off well enough. Most certainly he liked the fact that I came from an enormous family of women. He definitely liked hearing about my first-generation West Indian–American parents, who hadn’t been raised to be professional Negroes, and who didn’t know the first thing about how to keep up appearances: they’d never married, let alone lived together.

  But, like SL’s father, my father disliked men, less because he wanted to control me—that would require a closeness he wasn’t in the least interested in—but because he found them to be invasive, childish, loutish tit grabbers—the very thing he was, and accused his sons of being without knowing much about them. Once, after I’d won some prize in elementary school for writing a poem, my mother encouraged me to hug my visiting father; she knew he could not do it but she also knew I could not write that poem without him on some level; Daddy and his incessant on-the-phone language was one source for my “art.” While I stood before him, rigid and blank, he took me in his great arms—my father was a big man; I would grow up to be a big man; I wanted a bigger man to hold me so I could feel, as a grown-up, what my father’s embrace made me feel: that I didn’t want to grow up to be a big man—and whispered: When I was your age, I didn’t like my father to hug me, either. SL understood all that. Or, rather, what it set up in me: a horror of my I, since that meant being a him—my father.

  On one of our first dates together, SL and I took a walk. It was early spring; we had just finished work. SL was costumed in his usual striking manner: a stiff, ankle-length motorist’s jumper, blue-and-white-polka-dot tie, brown spectators, and a brown fedora. I loved his entirely adult attire; it relieved me of the responsibility of being an adult; in his company I got smaller and smaller, hungry for his protection. SL was a wit you didn’t want to cross. As we walked along, we started to talk about all the places we’d ever visited, or hoped to visit. In fact, in a few days’ time, I would be off to Amsterdam to visit a friend. Rather offhandedly, I asked SL if he’d like to join me, have a lark, and to my horror he said yes. It was as if he were cursing me in a baroque, foreign language. What could it mean—his acceptance? Where was this: my father offering me a ride downtown—I was a teenager taking a summer-school class in mathematics—but before I could get in the car, he jumped in and slammed the door, called out, So long, sucker! as the cab drove off. Where was this: my father telling me I’d go from “Shakespeare to shit” if I didn’t stop hanging out with my teenage friends, indeed, if I had any friends. Where was my father doing this: refusing to stand up, let alone look at any friends I might bring home, especially if they were white, sometimes if they were women.

  In retrospect, how could my father love me? I was that part of his self that wanted to write and would write but did not. I was that part of his self that wanted to love and would love but did not. Here was evidence of that: SL. He would go to Amsterdam with me. O Amsterdam, city of canals! SL would listen to what I would write about even if it was derivative, or boring, and find something of me in it to support and praise. He would look for me in every part of Amsterdam because I loved it so, in every canal, in the city’s flatness, and
in the waves that came up from Haarlem, and the city’s famous tolerance, its clouds and herring. But how did he find me now, on lower Broadway? I was short-circuiting because of this information, so casually offered: he would go with me, and he would love me. Would he die because of this love? Would I? Would I have to eventually mourn this memory on lower Broadway, his scratchy-sounding duster, and should we travel to Amsterdam together, him and an entire country? His existence was too much. I fumbled and made an excuse: oh, the place I’d be staying in was a friend’s, it was too small, maybe the next time, with better preparation? SL smiled. He knew enough about love—or, more specifically, about its offers and denials—to back off, say nothing, and smile.

  After I returned from Amsterdam, he continued to connect to me through metaphor, which is how he approached me in the first place. He would explain our “us,” not through direct touch or communication but through artifacts, all those books and films, postcards and films, with “we” or “us” as the subject, as if there is any other. SL gave me those gifts—the movies and books and so on—because he knew, too, that I was like everyone else, except him: I identified with other people. His gifts were road maps to our love, the valley of the unconditional.

  As we became friends, the strangest thing happened: most of our acquaintances abused adverbs in their rush to condemn—violently, passionately—our becoming a we. We were something dark and unforeseen: two colored gentlemen who moved through the largely white social world we inhabited in New York (the world where art and fashion and journalism converged) who did not exploit each other or our obvious physical traits—their coloredness and maleness—for political sympathy or social gain. People looked at us and thought we were really evil. That we had pointy heads and forked tongues. That we wore furs and had no animal rights. That we knew the twelve steps but skipped intimacy. That we betrayed every confidence and judged without impunity. That we lauded women and then denigrated them. That we mentored young boys only to corrupt them. That we borrowed money with no thought of returning it. That we were indolent and crackled with ambition. That we were gluttons who drank from a bottomless well of envy. That we were gay and couldn’t admit we were straight. That we were faithless Jesus freaks who had forsaken Him for tight pussy, credit cards we abused, and loose shoes. That we had lockjaw once but still managed to feed off our enemies. That we sold children down the river and watched then suffocate in an ocean of adult bitterness. That we were racists, especially against our own kind. That we were matricidal, especially toward our own mothers. That we were nothing like the “we,” or “just us,” in songs, lovely moments of togetherness we drowned out whenever we walked into a room, given our “loud” apparel, our conversation.