by Hilton Als
She shivered; she laughed; she looked at Gary as if she had never seen him before. She stood up and stretched her arms out wide. For Gary, there was no other woman in the world, except at home. Fran hugged herself, asked Olivia for a little music. But before Olivia had a chance to get up off the floor, or put the straw down, Fran had turned the radio on herself. Optimism. That’s what Fran looked like, dancing to the song that said: “Skip to my lou, my darling. / I’d love to be the man who shares your nights. / My name is Romeo if you’ll be my Juliet. / Let’s pretend I’m the shoe that fits you perfectly.”
Fran was dancing alone and not alone; the world, the man singing on the radio, the station’s antenna, the airwaves, the sky bouncing with sound no one could see, were with her. It was the first time Gary had ever seen her attached to anything. He had never seen her clutch life before, unless she was stealing something from it that didn’t matter to her much, like a cake or a boy.
Fran closed her eyes and extended her arms toward Gary in a way he’d dreamed of seeing one day. Now that day had come. But if he reached for her—reached for it, whatever “it” she represented—would every dream be fulfilled? And if they were, what would he be then? A boy without longing? How could he recognize himself otherwise?
There was the question of his body, too. If you prefer looking, and confer stardom on the thing you’re looking at, you don’t want to look at a different movie, one that features us instead of you.
“He won’t dance ’cause he’s a faggot,” Olivia said. “Ha ha, didn’t I tell you? A faggot or white. He can’t dance.” Olivia giggled, and Fran giggled, too, but drily. The weight of their sudden hatred weighed on Gary. He made a move to rise to Olivia’s challenge, but the floor pulled him back. Maybe he was white. He could be anything. In any case, there was no room on the dance floor. It was filled with female meanness, the thickest substance known to man.
“Go white boy, go white boy, go!” Olivia started chanting in time to the bright beat, the singer’s voice on the radio running at a clip underneath her. The singer was asking, “Will you be my Juliet? / I want to be the shoe that fits you perfectly.” They were dancing around him now. He could smell their girl bodies and drug scent. Fran pushed the table away from Gary; it was anchoring him and she wanted him to float free, too, near where the song was playing, near where she was, in the air. Pushing the table aside, she knocked some of Olivia’s mother’s fruit to the floor. It didn’t bounce. Olivia, bending down to pick it up, said: “Girl, be careful. Banging shit up.”
“Leave it.”
“But she’s going to kill me; it was a gift—”
“I said leave it.”
Olivia drew her hand back, stood up again, and looked down at Fran, who was squatting in front of Gary, rocking on her heels, legs spread. Fran looked up at Olivia as if to say, “So?” Which was what Olivia looked to Fran for in the first place: a dare. And the threat of punishment—if you do or don’t do this, this or that might happen—that gives the dare its spark.
Satisfied, Olivia turned to the radio and started flipping dials. Fran turned back to Gary. She asked him: “What you want to do?” He didn’t take it as a dare, but it was. Fran laughed. “Come on, now, you gonna let all of this spoil and go to waste?” There was no music, just static, but she was rocking on her heels as if the static had a beat. That’s what drugs made you hear: happiness and static. He thought: I wish I could hear it. Gary closed his eyes.
He was always waiting for love to be what he thought of it: an event informed by niceness, divorced from appeased egos, hatred, and pornography. Love would be his rescue one day, laying him down on a field of daisies, making him and his love lambs of Jesus.
He heard one of the chairs go crunch, followed by another of Olivia’s giggles. She said, from across the room: “I told you he was a faggot.” Opening his eyes, Gary found Fran standing above him. She was slapping her right thigh with her hand. She wasn’t as interested in corroborating Olivia’s statement as she was in going where the drugs were taking her: to the irritating realization that she didn’t know what Gary was, since if there was to be no fucking, his perceived rejection of her preceded Fran’s eventual rejection of him—and nearly everyone else. She couldn’t face that. She wanted to do another line, but it had to be in front of someone it might make a difference to. Fran walked over to Olivia and said: “Get up.” The radio was picking up reception from two stations simultaneously. Fran’s voice was hard against some man crooning crossed with a woman’s voice out of a commercial.
“What?”
“I said get up.”
“Girl, get out of my face.”
“I’m not in it. But it’s about to get the back of my foot if you don’t.”
Olivia gave a helpless little cry, struggling for a laugh. “But why—you could sit on the sofa, over there.” Fran stared her down. The radio played on; out of it came all the sounds that fall between love and advertising. Olivia got up, reluctantly; as she did so, the plastic made a depressed, whoosh-y kind of sound. Fran sat back in the seat, pulling Olivia toward her. Olivia opened her mouth and closed her eyes, like a baby baffled by its own hunger. Fran made her wait a while before she kissed her with her eyes open, looking to see whether or not envy would hurt Gary’s heart. But she had miscalculated his optimism; to Gary, she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He was reveling in his senses being dwarfed by her movie moves, and its soundtrack: the radio playing between two stations, and the ladies slowly lapping tongues.
Fran pulled her mouth away first. She said to Gary: “Now you can leave. But you know I’ll be rolling up in that store to take what I need again. Bitch.” Gary understood what Fran meant: she was coming back to the Jew place, and for him; he was what she needed. She was coming back—one of the sweetest phrases ever. He tried not to smile, all in love, as Olivia shut the door behind him.
Another Kafka. In “Conversation with the Supplicant,” the unnamed male narrator attends a church where a woman he loves goes to worship. One gets the sense that the narrator is not particularly religious; the young woman is his religion, inaccessible and therefore deifiable. In the church, the narrator notices, among the other supplicants, a young man who seems to take a particular interest in our narrator’s comings and goings. They strike up a conversation. One could take the narrator’s interlocutor as his double: the mystical voice to the narrator’s all-too-human reason.
The young man standing opposite me smiled. Then he dropped on his knees and with a dreamy look on his face told me: “There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that must have been calm and beautiful...” Since I made no answer and only through involuntary twitchings in my face betrayed my uneasiness, he asked: “Don’t you believe that people talk like that?”
I knew I ought to nod assent, but could not do it.
In other words, the narrator cannot agree or rather acknowledge the liminal, least of all in himself—the only “real” there is.
The scariest moment in Psycho is not when the people are getting hacked to death, but when Vera Miles, searching for the sister who is lost to her, walks into a bedroom and is taken aback by her own reflection in a floor-length mirror. I sometimes wonder if I am lost to Richard forever. Richard and I didn’t see each other much after he became Richard Pryor in the seventies, because we couldn’t see each other. That is, we see each other too clearly, and then past the actual seeing. I wonder what it would be like if I didn’t have to wonder what he thought. It can make you lonesome, knowing that you’re out there as another person with another name but still yourself and yet unavailable to yourself, traversing the trail of the lonesome pines littered with family memories. The way Richard and I are like now is like th
is, I reckon: being colored and walking into a restaurant full of white people and finding another colored person there. Genetics, politics, I don’t know what, makes you seek that black person’s eyes out as a way of acknowledging, yes, here we are, for good or ill, kind of together. Maybe I’m looking for a conversation among the supplicants. Invariably, the only other colored person in the restaurant doesn’t want to acknowledge your presence, let alone your mind. So they turn away. Being Richard’s sister was like that, sometimes. He’d look at me as if I were the only black person in the restaurant. And sometimes I was.
* * *
Gary felt that way all the time—like a supplicant—even without a sister. Skinny and strung out on his love for Fran, and the terrible responsibility he undertook when he decided to honor and obey her, he truly didn’t have anyone to talk to. Certainly not his mother. From the beginning, Fran and Mrs. McCullough tolerated one another for Gary’s sake, but there was no love lost between those two women he did it all for: the savings, the mortgages, pushing his sickening dick to the side so they wouldn’t have to deal with it if they didn’t want to. He understood that. They didn’t want to hear about his love of other women, being women. And since he was interested in little else, he became conversant with himself—a supplicant who would have understood Kafka’s tale of love, even if I don’t. “He remarked that I was well dressed and he particularly liked my tie,” Kafka writes at the end of his tale. He goes on: “And what fine skin I had. And admissions became most clear and unequivocal when one withdrew them.” Maybe that’s what Gary felt when he left Olivia’s that night, the night of Fran’s drug show: by leaving, he’d be able to feel those two girls clearly and unequivocally. Absence makes the heart think about what it’s feeling. And since this is a DVD world, where the story line is not equal to the star—I blame Richard and his kind for all that star-over-the-story stuff—maybe Gary would matter more to you now if Richard played him. I could coach him in the part: Gary, walking home from Olivia’s, a supplicant talking to himself, wanting nothing more than to withdraw his feelings from himself so they existed in a world made perfect by his absence from everything.
Richard could play that. Part of his charm, if you want to call it that, was his ability to look defeated by the attention he craved. His persona, onstage, in movies, and elsewhere, was interesting, if you want to call it that, because you could never be quite certain if he wanted you to look at him or if he wanted you to look away. Like Kafka, like Gary, Richard couldn’t play a pimp but he could play a pimple. Like Gary, once Richard understood that the women he craved loved to compete with him and one another for the rather dubious prize of head bitch of the Richard Pryor universe, he collapsed inside, became a stranger to himself, since he couldn’t imagine he was much of a prize. Add colored to that kind of feeling and maybe you’re totally fucked.
And like Richard, Gary thought his mother was above that kind of bitch shit, and so revered her. Neither Gary nor Richard could see it any different, because they couldn’t feel any different than how they felt. This was their strength and their tragedy.
Gary found out that his mother was just another woman when he brought Fran home for the first time. He and Fran had been dating for about two years by the time that happened. They were about to graduate from high school, Gary still cutting sandwiches in half. He gave Fran money on the side. Immediately upon asking her home to Sunday dinner, he was apprehensive about it. But he could not say why.
Of course his mother knew Fran by sight and reputation. She knew Fran’s entire family and blamed them for the dirt and drugs that were remaking their community. In the early nineteen eighties, East Baltimore was swelling up in the middle and oozing slime on the sides; it was fat with the drug traffic that had been dumped there because God knows why. When Gary was a child, the white children only came to his neighborhood if their mother told them to collect Mavis, her runny-nosed kid, and her bag of cleaning supplies. Now the white kids had red-rimmed eyes and runny noses themselves, looking to die a little, too. Rock and roll, fashion, drugs—white people will follow your colored ass into everything. The McCulloughs tried to keep their white steps white, but fools like Fran’s family were all too happy to get sick on those steps, thereby proving how ridiculous the effort to keep them clean was in the first place: what was the point of living in nigger heaven if you kept trying to scrub the clouds?
It was a Sunday in spring, fleecy-clouded. Even though Gary had been going out with Fran for two years and change, he hadn’t fucked her yet. Fran didn’t care as long as he kept giving her pocket change, and anyway, what was it to her, his old dick, the fact that it made him feel like a stupid interloper in her presence? He was too mother-soft for her anyway. There were plenty of hard motherfuckers around. She wasn’t even boy crazy unless the boys were crazy. If she did have to fuck Gary one day, she reasoned, she could get high first. She knew he was dick-soft that first night at Olivia’s, but she didn’t care. Drugs made her hard enough for the both of them. Maybe all she meant for him to be was a brother.
So while Gary cut sandwiches, she dealt drugs. There was so much money to be made, you had to be stupid not to develop some angles. Fran’d take little schoolkids into someone’s hallway and get them high on a variety of glues she’d mixed together and charge them fifty cents a pop. Or she’d buy bennies she got on Gary’s straight dime and drop them in her older sister’s hand for a dollar. She bought shoes with her money, too, but she didn’t wear any of her new shit when Gary dragged her over to his mother’s house for her first visit. Nor did she get high. She didn’t want that woman—a mother—to know who she really was. In any case, getting high would have been redundant, she thought, once she got a look at his mother’s Technicolor Jesus. It was such a trip.
“You like my Jesus?” Mrs. McCullough asked her, by way of an opening gambit. There was a pitcher of lemonade and three tall glasses on the kitchen table, with little rings of liquid sweat underneath them. Fran was standing in front of the stove, facing the kitchen windowsill. Jesus was standing on it. Gary sat across from his mother, not looking anywhere at first, and everywhere, as one does when one looks at a movie.
“He’s all right.”
Beat.
“I’m glad Gar brought you home for a Sunday, Fran. After church is the best time for visiting.”
“Huh,” Fran said.
“Don’t you find it so, Gary?” Mrs. McCullough asked, turning to her son. Gary twisted in his chair, not looking at either woman. There they were, together, because of him; the realization prickled his skin with sweat and made him feel trapped and slightly sick.
“Gary?”
“Yes, Mama?”
“It’s nice that you could bring Fran over on a Sunday.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Fran, why don’t you sit down, honey. You’re making me nervous.”
“Oh, I’m all right.”
Beat.
Mrs. McCullough got up, brushing one of the wet glass rings off the table at the same time. It was something to do, and having done it she couldn’t figure out what to do next, so she sat down. The kitchen was small enough without another woman standing up in it.
“Do you go to church, Fran?”
“No.” Pause. “Ma’am.”
“Oh, your mother—”
Fran cut her off.
“She just never—”
“I see.”
“Pardon.”
“Your mother.”
“She just never mentioned him. Jesus and all. Too many kids, I guess.”
“Well, it would be a shame if she knew what she was missing and still didn’t do it. He is a comfort. And the church! People just enjoying being together in His name. People like us. Like me and Gary. We go together all the time. Of course, Gary’s daddy never gets to church, because he works so hard every day, doing something or another. Like today. He won’t be here for supper.” She turned to Gary. “He’s working.”
“Oh.”
Gary t
hought he could say something, just on principle, but if he did, then the attention would be on him instead of the women, his two stars. So he shut up before he had a chance to speak. In this way, he was becoming a man.
“And you’ve lived here for how long?” Mrs. McCullough asked, knowing the answer. She was staring straight into the side of Fran’s head. Fran couldn’t stop looking at Jesus. If she wanted Him so much, Mrs. McCullough reasoned, then she might as well go on and take him, since she was in a taking mood.
“I don’t know,” Fran said. “A long time. Always over on Fayette.”
“And how many of you are there?”
“You mean in my family?”
“Yes.”
“Five.”
“And I bet you’re the baby!”
Mrs. McCullough knew as well as anyone that Fran’s younger sister, Denise, had been the baby. But she had burned up in a fire. Fran didn’t want to talk about that.
“I am now,” Fran said. She fingered Jesus’ long, shoulder-length plaster of paris hair.
“He’s got good hair,” Fran continued. “Does he always look like this?” she asked, turning to Mrs. McCullough, who said: “He looks like the person you imagine.”
“I think he could be black.”
“I mean, he should look like love,” Mrs. McCullough said sharply.
There it was; there was no taking it back. She didn’t equate blackness with love. Coloredness was so trying, why add love to it? And anyway, what did Fran know about praising anything? My son, my Jesus. Mrs. McCullough knew where Fran lived, all right; that’s what accounted for her flat, trashy affect. It was due to her family tradition, too, and its legacy of smells. When she closed her eyes for a moment, as she did now, Mrs. McCullough could smell and then see Fran’s parents smoking reefers while their children ate boogers, their nappy hair looking like hairy boogers on top of their idiot heads with their slack jaws underneath, dribbling snot from their flat, ashy noses, snot being what they fed on from generation to generation. And besides being nasty, Fran’s family was tearing down the McCulloughs’ neighborhood. Mrs. McCullough knew they were doing it out of nigger boredom and neglect. If that was the kind of love that Fran came from, what did she know about the Good, which was to say Mrs. McCullough’s son Gary, who was, after all, herself?