The first evidence came when we were two. Our mother had just put us to bed and given us strict instructions to stay put. As soon as she left the room, we got up to inspect the riotous noises coming through our second-floor window. A bunch of kids were arguing over a toy. To see better, I leaned hard against the screen, which gave way and landed twenty feet below in the dirt, a second before me. At the hospital I was given a variety of scans and X rays, but the only injury doctors could find was a small scrape on my left elbow, caused when I brushed against the brick wall during my descent.
Five years later Jimmy fell two feet from a swing and broke his arm. Within days of the cast being removed, he toppled off the swings a second time, breaking his arm again.
The following year, when we were eight, I developed a talent for reciting poems. Jimmy developed a stutter. My parents hoped it was a phase but it got worse over time. I remember us sitting in class one day when our fifth-grade teacher asked who wanted to recite Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool.” She scanned the room for takers. Five hands inched up, joining the one being swung wildly by a girl who always smelled of pickles. I hoped the teacher would call her. Anyone besides Jimmy. She called Jimmy. He looked up from his desk. The students sitting in front of us turned in their seats, already giggling. The teacher called Jimmy again. I was sitting directly to his right, close enough to see the rapid heaving of his chest, the tremor of his legs. “James,” she said once more, “whenever you’re ready.”
“We … We … We …”
A few students cupped their mouths to hold in the laughter.
“We … real … real… real …“
The teacher huffed.
“Coo … coo … coo … coo … coo …“
The teacher said, “Get it out, James, for Christ’s sake. Speak!”
But his throat had fully constricted by then. All he could do at that point was contort his face and gag. Our classmates laughed openly. The teacher shook her head while the pickle-smelling girl continued to wave. I lowered my gaze. The teacher said my name. I rose, recited the poem, and sat back down. When the teacher smiled and declared my recitation perfect, I was seized with a mixture of guilt and pity, as I had been since the third grade, when the onset of Jimmy’s stuttering became theater for our classmates and a key means by which teachers told us apart. Since then we had both tried to talk sparingly in each other’s company, unless we were alone, or with immediate members of our family, when his throat magically opened as wide as mine.
I was moved to an honors class in sixth grade. Jimmy was moved to a remedial one. It was our first time being separated at school. For the whole year, whenever my teacher wanted something read or recited, I eagerly waved my hand, like the pickle-smelling girl, and other than being compared to her there seemed to be no penalty for it. Except that there was. But I didn’t learn of it until one day in my fourteenth year, when Jimmy was sitting on my chest, pounding his fists into my face. I don’t remember what spawned the fight, only that he was yelling, “You think you’re better than me! You’ve always thought you’re better than me!”
I somehow got us flipped around, and now I was on his chest, pounding my fists into his face. “I do not,” I yelled back, “think I’m better than you!”
But I did; I understand that now. All of our lives we’d been compared and I’d always come out on top; girls told me I was cuter; boys told me I was more fun; teachers said I was smarter; and, as I kicked his ass that day, it seemed I was the better fighter too. But I didn’t want to be better than him at anything; I just wanted to be different, to have an identity other than as one of the twins. And so when people began noting my pros and his cons, I internalized them. So did he. We stopped spending time together, unless it was to get high. There’d always be mutual friends around, though, who would separate us when our banter turned to taunts, taunts turned to threats, and threats turned to blows. Only sometimes our friends left too soon, and things got ugly.
One of those occasions ended with me banging his head on the floor until he was unconscious. Another occasion had him chasing me through the neighborhood with a baseball bat and the police looking for us both. They found him first and, at my exasperated parents’ urging, took him into custody until he cooled off. Ninety minutes later, when they brought him home, after he’d apologized and expressed contrition, he broke through the barricade of my bedroom door and flung himself at me with a crazed rebel yell. By the time our father pulled him away, he’d bitten off a chunk of my thigh.
“That’s insane,” Brenda said when I showed her the scar, still visible twelve years later.
I laughed and said, “It’s nothing. We were just kids. Besides, we were so high all the time then, I mean, everything was just so messed up. It’s one of my biggest regrets,” I continued, “the way things were between Jimmy and me. We weren’t exactly what you’d call close.”
“It’s not too late to fix that.”
I should have said that it probably was too late, but it was still early in our relationship; I wanted to make a good impression. “You’re absolutely right,” I told her. “And I will fix it.”
And so that was the response she reminded me of several months later when I declined to visit Jimmy’s apartment to celebrate our twenty-eighth birthday. “Everyone’s here,” he’d said when I called, although that wasn’t exactly true. Missing was Zack, who was in prison for burglary; Steve, who was in prison for manslaughter; and Greg, who was dead. Just Tim, Paul, Rob, and Louis were there, and Louis was there in body only, because he hadn’t been the same since killing a woman while driving drunk.
If Brenda convinced me to go, I would be there in body only, too. That world was no longer mine, that company no longer the kind I kept, now that I was a college student at the University of Iowa. I was in Chicago for the weekend only to visit Brenda, whom I’d been dating for about eight months. For weeks I’d been looking forward to spending my birthday quietly with her, and now she wanted me to spend it with my twin. As soon as I’d refused his invitation and hung up the phone, she’d said, “Remember when you told me you wanted to fix your relationship with Jimmy?”
“I told you no such thing,” I said.
“Of course you did,” she responded. “We have to go to his party. He’s your twin,” she reminded me. “Besides, I want to meet him and your friends.”
“You don’t want to do that,” I told her.
“Yes I do. It’ll be fun!” she said cheerily. “Come on, Jerald.”
Everyone else I knew called me Jerry. But Jerry, she’d told me when we’d met, was the name of a child rather than a man. I liked that, how the switch of a name could bring maturity and signify a break with the past. I didn’t care much about the maturity part, but breaking with the past was important to me. It was that break I intended to honor now. I was trying to think of an excuse not to go to Jimmy’s when she went to her refrigerator and took out a cake.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“It’s a cake I made,” she said.
I laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“It’s just, well, these are not exactly cake-eating people.”
“What? Everybody eats cake.” She set it on the table. Then she lifted the receiver off the phone and held it toward me. “Call your twin back,” she said.
Thirty minutes later we left her apartment and went downstairs to Jimmy’s waiting car. I got in the passenger seat, and Brenda sat behind me. After I introduced Jimmy to her, he pointed toward the cake on her lap. “What the hell is that?” he asked.
“It’s a cake!” Brenda said.
Jimmy laughed. Then he took a swallow of his forty-ounce and eased away from the curb.
The stereo was turned up full-blast and the air smelled of cigarettes, marijuana, fish, and rancid oil. Brenda was in the living room, trying to learn how to play bid whist, while Jimmy hovered over the stove, pulling chunks of perch from the bubbling black liquid. I’d just walked in to get anothe
r beer. “Hey, bro’,” he said, “want some coke?”
I shook my head no. I opened the refrigerator.
“Come on, man,” he said. “It’s our birthday.”
“The beer’s cool,” I said.
“So you like them Iowa boys now?” he said, laughing. “You just eat corn and go to school and shit? And bowl?”
I forced a smile.
“Come on, Jerry. I mean Jerald.” He burst into laughter, just as the others had done every time Brenda said my name. He put a fresh batch of battered fish into the grease, causing it to roar. “One little hit, for old times’ sake,” he said. He wiped his hands on his apron, then reached inside his top pocket and took out a small piece of paper. He held it out to me. I glanced into the living room; Brenda was staring at her cards while Rob leaned over her shoulder, telling her something that brought a wrinkle to her brow. I turned back to Jimmy. He was still extending the coke. I took it and backed out of Brenda’s view. He handed me a dollar bill, already rolled. I took one small hit, but I wasn’t getting high, I told myself, so much as taking a sacrament of reconciliation.
At 2:00 AM the party started to break up. As we were saying our good-byes, Brenda exclaimed, “Wait, wait, I almost forgot!” She ran into the kitchen and returned with the cake. Ignoring the laughter, she sang “Happy Birthday.”
Brenda and I ultimately decided to spend the night at Jimmy’s and in the morning have him drop her off at her apartment and me at the Greyhound station. He offered us his room before carrying a pillow and spare blankets to the couch. After Brenda and I got in bed, she apologized for the cake, which hadn’t turned out the way she’d hoped. “But,” she added, “it was kind of everyone to try some.”
“They didn’t have to spit it out, though. I mean, they could have swallowed it. I swallowed some.”
“You’re sweet,” she said. “Everyone was sweet. Especially Jimmy. I didn’t know he stuttered, though.”
“A little,” I said. “It used to be a lot worse.”
She snuggled against me, and the next thing I knew I was being awakened by a ringing phone. I looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was 3:15. The phone rang some more, and I wondered who would be calling at that time and why Jimmy didn’t answer it. Finally it stopped. A second later it started again. Brenda was awake now too; she’d pushed herself up on her elbows. “Somebody keeps calling,” I grumbled, “and Jimmy’s not answering. He had a lot to drink, so he’s probably out cold.” The ringing stopped. Brenda laid her head back on the pillow. The ringing started once more.
Brenda sat up again. “Maybe you should answer it,” she said. “Maybe it’s an emergency.”
I dismissed that possibility, but only long enough for the ringing to pause and resume. I climbed out of bed and went into the kitchen, where the phone was mounted on the wall.
“Hello?”
“Jerry?”
“Yes? Who’s this?”
“Jimmy’s been in a terrible car accident.”
“Mom?”
“Jimmy’s been in a crash …”
“Mom, what are you talking about? Jimmy’s asleep on the couch.”
I felt a draft of cold air coming from my right. I glanced in that direction and saw that the kitchen door was wide open. My mother was saying something as I set the phone on the counter and hurried into the living room. The couch was empty, the blankets in a heap on the floor. I went back to the phone. “What happened?”
“What … aren’t you listening?”
“What happened?” I asked again. Brenda was standing next to me now, wrapped in the comforter.
“Jimmy was in a terrible crash.”
“Where is he?” I yelled.
“Cook County Hospital.”
I hung up. I told Brenda what I knew and we hurried to get dressed. Except there was a problem: Buses didn’t start running until dawn, and there were no taxis in that part of the city after dark, and rarely during the day. We put on our coats, left the apartment, and started walking.
Three hours later, just as the sun was beginning to rise, we walked through the emergency room doors. The receptionist offered no information on Jimmy’s condition, only that he was about to go to surgery. She told us where he was.
We found him in a hall, lying in a long row of gurneys covered with patients moaning and calling for help. His face was bruised and swollen, but he was conscious. As soon as he saw us, he tried to speak. “My … my … my …,” he began, and suddenly we were back in the fifth grade. “They’re … ta … ta … taking …my … my … arm.” I looked at Brenda. Her hand was over her mouth, like our classmates, only she wasn’t laughing. I started to reach for Jimmy but I didn’t know where it was safe to touch, so I just stood there, not knowing what to say or do, until an orderly wheeled him away.
I went to call my parents and they gave me the rest of the story. Jimmy’s girlfriend had walked away from the crash, leaving him lying in the street, his right arm trapped beneath the hood of the upended car. He hadn’t been wearing his seat belt. The doctors said he should have died.
Four hours later, when the surgeon came to talk to us, he stressed that point. “How he survived,” he said, “is beyond me.” They’d managed to save his arm, though only time would tell how much function it would regain.
Soon after the surgeon left, the double doors of the operating room parted and Jimmy was wheeled through. He was unconscious, with only his bandaged head and IV’ed left arm exposed from the bundle of blankets. Brenda and I followed the orderly as he steered him into a large room filled with a few dozen other patients. Jimmy’s bed was parked in an empty slot near a window and four folding chairs. Brenda and I sat and waited for him to wake. It took an hour. I saw his eyes flutter open, and then they filled with terror as he began clawing frantically at his blankets, yanking off layer after layer. I went to his side. And if I could have spoken at that moment, I would have told him that everything was okay, that his arm was still there, that he was lucky to be alive.
BADDEST NIGGER IN TOWN
When she led me through the living room, I was startled by a cage of agitated finches. There weren’t any finches the last time I was there. I was eleven then and selling cookies for my church. Her father had invited me in. While making change for a twenty, I’d eased onto the arm of the sofa and before I realized my mistake I was being roughly ushered from the house. “And don’t come back,” her father snapped, “until you can treat my property with respect!” That night, I hurled a rock through one of the windows, and now, four years later, I was standing at the very spot where the glass had littered the floor, removing my pants.
“Is this your room?” I asked.
She shook her head. “My parents’.”
“And they won’t be back for two hours?”
“Maybe longer.”
I took off my shirt. Jean was undressing, too, though she did so beneath the pastel blanket of her parents’ bed. It was a large bed and had an expensive brass headboard that was good for securing handcuffs. She’d found the handcuffs a few months before, when she’d also found adult toys, satin lingerie, Playboy magazines, some yellow pills in an unmarked box, and a stack of dirty movies. “Want to watch a dirty movie?” she asked, giggling.
“Sure,” I said, now undressed to my briefs and feeling self-conscious about my physique. I was very skinny, despite all the protein shakes I’d choked down and the fifty push-ups I did every night. But it was losing your virginity that would trigger a boy’s growth; Tim had told me so. I’d been wanting to test this hypothesis with Jean for two weeks, after she’d slipped me her phone number during our history class. I’d called her many times since then, my rambling, awkard efforts growing eloquent and witty when I’d had a little wine. I’d had a little wine when I begged her to have sex with me. She’d invited me over.
“Look in there.” She giggled again and pointed toward the closet. “To the right. There’s a chest full of movies and a projector.”
I did as I wa
s told and found a movie with a hilarious title, something like Baddest Nigger in Town. We laughed when I read that aloud. I read a few more funny titles, we laughed some more, and then I settled on one that was blank. I set up the projector and snapped on the reel. I flicked on the power. A square of white covered the wall when the reel began to churn. I inhaled a whiff of burning dust as I turned and faced Jean. The blanket was up to her chin. On the floor next to the bed were a skirt, a blouse, panties, and a training bra. I stepped over them as I went to sit next to her. After swinging my lower half beneath the covers, I slid my underwear off and dropped it with her things. The wall began to fill with naked bodies. Her hand crept up my thigh. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
For a second I was too mortified to respond. “I don’t know.”
She removed her hand. “Let’s just watch the movie,” she suggested.
We did for a while and then I stammered, “I’m not …I’m not a sissy.”
“What?”
“I’m not a sissy.”
“I didn’t say you are.”
“Don’t even think it.”
“I’m not thinking it.” She was silent for a moment before adding, “You’re just nervous.”
But that was unacceptable too.
BOBBY JENKINS
Erica was born and raised in a poor white community, where blacks were a rare and unwelcome sight. When I visited for the first and only time, it was at a barbecue in the backyard of one of her cousins, and throughout the day relatives dropped by to see the source of the scandal in person. It was an awkward, tension-filled event, though incident-free, except for when one of Erica’s brothers approached me while extending a can of Brazil nuts and said, “Help yourself to some more nigger toes.” He laughed; so I laughed and took a few. He patted me on the back before driving me to his apartment where, while we drank a case of beer, he showed me video after video of white women having sex with animals. Every once in a while, he’d grin at me and say, “Ain’t this some sick shit?” I would agree. Later, I would wonder if he’d been trying to make a point, but at the time I was too horrified to care.
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