by Mat Johnson
I am a big guy, six four, weigh 225 naked, and I decide to act like I am a big man and I shoot upright, head for the room my father’s work materials are in, go to grab the biggest thing I can find. This turns out to be a long wooden spear, an extension for a foam paint roller. I hold it with two hands. I am an African warrior! Who looks like a Celtic one. I grip it so hard my hands become even more white, adrenaline having replaced my blood. And then I go to the window. And I want him to see me. I want him to see my size. My determination, my intent. My lance. I look out the window.
And he’s gone.
And for a second I’m even more scared. I want to be relieved, but now I’m incapable of it. Rod in hand, I check the other windows. I see nothing. I go upstairs for a better view, but no change. Germantown Avenue, past the fence, is without life. I stare out for minutes. Then more. Occasionally a car drives past along the chipped cobblestones, but otherwise it’s empty, too late to come home and too early to drive out, which puts the time around four A.M. I stand there, on the second floor, in the burnt-out room of my father’s. He chose it because it has the best view of the lawn, I realize. And when, many minutes later, I grow more tired than scared, I head back downstairs to lie down.
Tomorrow, which is today, I will go sit at a table in a large crowded room and smile at strangers, drawing pictures of their heads on muscle-bound bodies covered in leotards, and they will pay me cash. It is so absurd I laugh a little in my head, and I need that to get into my tent again, slide myself into the sleeping bag. Fear that, I remind myself. Fear social failure, you’re better at it. I saw a crackhead, in the night, in Germantown. This hardly qualifies as a supernatural experience. I chuckle a bit, and go to zip up the tent, and then I see a person standing by my door.
She’s a woman. She’s not looking at me; she’s looking up the stairs. My breath gets heavy again, but she keeps looking up there, not over at me. And she’s a ghost. Not the dead kind. She’s clothed in a dirty gown, the lingerie of a drug-addled seductress. She’s a white woman, gaunt cheeks like bones around the dark hollows of her eye sockets. If she looks at me I will pee myself, I will shit myself on this very floor, and I will scream too. I don’t care what she wants, I just don’t want her to turn her head and look at me. She coughs. It keeps going, phlegm rising from behind her toenails with each convulsion till it gets to the back of her throat and jumps to her hand. It echoes through the house. It is more here than I am. There’s a splatter and then she’s gone.
When I hear the front door click behind her, I pull myself frantically from my bag and out of my tent and grab my spear and head for her. I am rage. I am anger. All the fear has been recycled. But I am caution, too, and when I reach the door I think there might be a pack of them out on the porch, the monsters, the rags falling from the skin, prepared to ambush me. So I let go of the handle.
I. Am back. In Philly.
Landing in an airport doesn’t count. Sitting in a taxi can be done anywhere. This, this feeling, this, is Philly.
They want something from me. They must or they wouldn’t be here. Do they think I’m white? Out of my element? Vulnerable? They want something and I have nothing. I am a man who has nothing, all this time meandering through life yet all I have is wounds. I have no treasure, and I never want to know what they’d take from me instead.
There is a tattered curtain over the entryway’s left window and I pull it aside and the glass revealed is hand blown and old and distorted. But I see movement.
And I see them. I see the figures. A man and a woman. Staring at the house. Standing on the lawn. Walking. Walking backward. Staring at the house, walking backward. Away from me. Until they reach the fence to the street and float up, and over.
I keep staring and waiting for more, but there’s nothing there. I keep staring though, until my breathing calms down, but nothing happens out there. When I turn around, I look through the shadows at this home. I look at the buckling floors. I look at the cracks in all the walls, the evidence of a foundation crumbling beneath us. I smell the char of the fire, the sweet reek of mold, the insult of mouse urine. I see a million things that have to be fixed, restored, corrected, each one impossible and each task mandatory for me to escape again. I see Sisyphus’s boulder, just with doors and beams. I can’t take it so I look out the window once more, where nothing is coming to get me, because the neighborhood doesn’t need to, because it knows I’m trapped and it has all the time in the world. Then I look back into the house.
And that’s when I decide I’m going to burn the fucker down.
2
IF YOU’RE A professional illustrator, you can show up at a comic convention, rent a table, and then charge people cash to draw a picture of whatever they want. If you show up early, do this all day, you can make enough to last for a month, tax free. I am broke. So after barely sleeping, I get up. I get out of the tent. I don’t look around. I stomp and bang so I can’t get scared by any other noises from unknown sources. I gather my supplies and let them slap around too. I lock the door behind me. And I run away from Germantown before it can wake up and stop me.
I’m an inept comic-book artist. My work is too realistic, too sober. My superheroes look like grown men standing around with their underwear on the outside of their pants. Even as I draw, I’m embarrassed for them. There is a line between being a fan of something and actually being good at creating that thing. “A line” makes it sound like a narrow, slight thing, but the difference can be more like an untraversable wasteland of parched failure. At first, Becks took my lack of success as a comic-book artist as a sign that I was meant for a more sophisticated audience, the gallery instead of the newsstand. She liked that idea, that she’d be a successful solicitor and I her famous artist spouse. The reality of this never took hold, though. So she loaned me the money for a comic-book store instead, a gesture she clearly regretted almost immediately, for years telling people at parties “he sells comic books” as a passive punishment for not abandoning the whole venture and agreeing to become a stay-at-home dad.
Most of the illustration work I’ve gotten from comic publishers has been “fill-ins”: some guy is supposed to draw a standard twenty-two-page comic but only shows up with eleven pages by the deadline, and they need someone to finish the job. Or to do a self-contained issue of a series that will appear between longer story arcs, put out by the publisher just to give the regular penciller time to catch up on his or her monthly due dates. After a while, I accepted that I will never achieve more than this. The closest I came was a 144-page hardcover published three years before. A real book, with me as the sole illustrator, not somebody else’s backup. But this I only got because it was the story of a biracial detective who passes for white. The publisher wanted an authentic ambiguous Negro for political cover. With my days sitting in a comic-book store devoid of customers, and my nights with a wife disinterested in sex with me because of my own disinterest in procreation, I was free to commit the time needed for the project. So that worked out well. I still hated them, these anonymous people I was emailing in my pages to every day, for making this be my entrée into the larger comic world, but I took the job. My consolation was that finally the idea of race and identity, another aspect of my life that I’d failed to master, had actually paid dividends that weren’t fruit of sorrow. I drew that thing like it might be the last image anyone would ever see of me.
—
The convention is underground, literally. It’s at the back of Suburban Station, the commuter hub where I spent much of my childhood waiting for the R8 to take me back to Germantown. The place is gray, but only because of the plaster dust of the cracked walls. Low ceilings, no windows, the smell of mold dried dead, a hint of train sulfur. I walk through the paltry crowd with my portfolio of samples, my box of paper and pens, and immediately I fall deeper into depression. Hanging on the walls, from the ceilings, on pillars, are superhero pictures, fantasy figures I know too much about. It’s a shameful place, this space, which reminds me that comic books
are a shameful thing. Bright little pictures of tight bulging bodies. Visual masturbation for boys with manhood issues, and men with boyhood issues.
They are happy to see me. The guy running things, a skinny, red-bearded comic-store owner from the area, is named Travis, and he wears a badge that backs this up. It says TRAVIS! and he’s taken time to make the exclamation point big enough to beat down the letters.
“You’re here!” he says, recognizing me, and before I can wonder where I’ve met him before I see the event poster over his head and my face is one of the ones on it, which is a good sign because I’m a nobody and they didn’t have to do that. Travis is so happy. He smiles the width of his wire-framed glasses. He looks like he just received an official letter that says he is not a juvenilia-obsessed dork. The letter is wrong. He twinkles on his sandal-clad toes as he pulls out my paperwork and I find myself feeling for him as he guides me to my seat. We walk to a table with a sign over it that says, presumptuously, TALENT. Behind the table are a bunch of middle-aged guys, which is just to say they’re not young enough to be youthful but haven’t yet achieved the dignity of the elderly. They’re organized by company, and I recognize names of artists from the two big comic publishers, one of which is my own past employer. These are the heavy hitters, flown in from around the country to attract the crowd. I need to sit next to the heavy hitters. I need to sit next to them because when the punters show up there’s going to be a line stretching back through the building to get an illustration from them, and there won’t be enough time. I need to sit next to them because I have $1,103.86 in my bank account. My business strategy is: overflow. My greatest hope: lowered expectations. I see an empty seat by a guy who draws a Batman series—one of the bestselling titles this year. I’ve read his sales figures online: 150,000 copies sold a month, and that’s with illegal downloads gutting two thirds of sales. Best part yet, I did a show with him in Cardiff just three years ago; we went to a group dinner with our shared editor. I get excited now because, if he remembers me, he might even send a few of his extra punters my way, and I start speeding up my walk, my portfolio and box banging at my side. And then I feel the hand on my shoulder.
“Oh no, we already have a place set up for you over here. We’re organizing by theme this year. You’re in the ‘Urban’ section,” Travis tells me, and pulls me steadily to the corner of the convention room back by the exit. “Urban” is the nicest way to say “nigger.” I try to tell him that my book took place in the rural South, and he says, “That’s cool! You’ll be on the ‘Urban’ panel too; it’ll start in about an hour,” and sits me at a long table with three other black guys.
There’s a sign propped on the counter with my name and the cover of my book and my own face on it staring back at me. The folding chair is bent, slanted. I start to get angry. I have a race card in my mental pocket and I want to throw it down and scream “Blackjack!” but then I look at the other brothers looking at me, and they’re not complaining. And if I complain, it will seem like I just don’t want to sit next to them. And for a second I think, No, complain anyway. But the brothers are already set up, their art displayed and issues of their comic books stacked up for sale, so who am I?
“Who are you?” the man already sitting in the chair next to mine asks. He’s around my age, with more gut to show for it. There’s an eagle on his sweatshirt, its wings spread around his midriff as if it’s trying to fly off before his belly explodes. The guy’s tone isn’t rude, but it isn’t a casual entrée into small talk either. He really wants to know. He looks down at my seat as if some invisible, insubstantial Afro-entity had already laid claim to it, and really wants to know why I’m motioning to sit there? Why am I at the black table?
“I’m a local writer. Just back in town, you know, peddling my wares,” I tell him, and then babble on a bit more, eventually getting to my name and the last book I worked on. The words don’t really matter. What I’m really doing is letting my black voice come out, to compensate for my ambiguous appearance. Let the bass take over my tongue. Let the South of Mom’s ancestry inform the rhythm of my words in a way few white men could pull off. It’s conscious but not unnatural—I sometimes revert to this native tongue even when I have nothing to prove. Often when I’ve been drinking. I refer to my last graphic novel with the pronoun jawn. I finish what I’m saying with “Know what I’m saying?” He nods at me a little, slightly appeased, because he does know what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, I’m black too. What I’m saying is that he can relax around me, because I’m on his side. That he doesn’t have to worry I’m going to make some random racist statement that will stab him when he’s unguarded, or be offended when he makes some racist comment of his own. People aren’t social, they’re tribal. Race doesn’t exist, but tribes are fucking real. What am I saying? I’m on Team Blackie, And I can see in the slight relaxing that he’s willing to accept my self-definition, at least tentatively, pending further investigation.
I am a racial optical illusion. I am as visually duplicitous as the illustration of the young beauty that’s also the illustration of the old hag. Whoever sees the beauty will always see the beauty, even if the image of the hag can be pointed out to exist in the same etching. Whoever sees the hag will be equally resolute. The people who see me as white always will, and will think it’s madness that anyone else could come to any other conclusion, holding to this falsehood regardless of learning my true identity. The people who see me as black cannot imagine how a sane, intelligent person could be so blind not to understand this, despite my pale-skinned presence. The only influence I have over this perception, if any, is in the initial encounter. Here is my chance to be categorized as black, with an asterisk. The asterisk is my whole body.
I pull my book out of my bag, show it to him. It’s about fighting racism, or racists, or whatever. I didn’t write it, I wouldn’t have, but I should get some extra Negro points for drawing it. It says, I’m not just black, I’m conscious. The guy looks over at it, but his eyes narrow in on the publisher’s logo.
“So, you make a living selling your art to the big corporate machine, huh?” says brotherman.
“Well, you know, sometimes you got to fight from the inside,” I tell him, and keep pulling out my materials. The fanboys are starting to come in now. I can see them queuing at the white guys’ table across the room.
“Hey man, no judgment. If you got to suck the corporate teat, that’s just what you got to do. Ain’t no shame in that. That’s a good gig. Not my way, but, you know, I just think it’s important that we each do our thing.”
The big white guys down at the other end, they’ve got the cash-money Caucasian customers all queued up. The place has just opened and they already have a little crowd growing to see them do their stuff. They’re already making money. My new best friend and me, there’s nobody in front of us. There’s nobody threatening to come to our table either. As I watch the crowd build across the room, a white guy walks toward us, face buried in the latest Miracleman reprint. When he looks up and sees us staring at him, smells the desperation, he smiles sheepishly and then quickly walks away.
“So, you’re publishing on your own. That’s brave,” I tell my neighbor as I watch our sole potential customer of the last five minutes waddle away. It’s the truth. If I was going to risk further financial ruin it would be for something more than comic books. Installation art. Found-object sculpture. Or language poetry; that would be a rewarding way to fall into the pit of poverty. This guy, he looks vaguely familiar too. Not in a way that I know him. He just looks real Philly. His beard: perfectly straight-edged an inch above his jawline and dyed a deep black, its hair shooting long past his chin in a salute to Islam and anything else that scares white people. I want to get on an outbound plane back to Wales just looking at him. But I nod, smile, shake his hand, give it a snap, and listen respectfully as he tells me his name is Mandingo, which I assume means his mother really named him something like Maurice or Monty.
“Look at us, over here. Only
brothers in the room,” he tells me after fifteen minutes. I look up, pleasantly surprised I’ve been elevated to brother status. I’ve gotten two sketches done. Both doodles for free, done in autograph books, drawn slowly to keep these warm bodies in front of the table, to prove it’s safe for paying customers to enter into our neighborhood. “You know that ain’t a mistake. You know what that’s about. It’s all good, though. It’s all good.”
And that it is. Here I agree with Mandingo wholeheartedly. In failure, there was this mercy. No crowds means an early exit. The small blessing of obscurity.
“We’ve been color-coded,” I tell him. The guys at the Caucasian table, I haven’t seen them since their crowd obscured them in adoration. They’re white guys and there are a lot of white guys here who want to appreciate them. Black, yellow, and brown ones too.
“That’s right. You damn near white and it don’t even matter. See, when you’re doing work that threatens the preconceived notions of the white power system, they get real nervous. They get real scared. That’s why my book would never fit into that world. They couldn’t handle it.”
“I’m sorry, what’s your book about?” I ask. All his promotional material is facing out; I can’t even see the cover of the glossies on the table for the glare. Mandingo looks a little hurt that I don’t already know his oeuvre, but he nods it off.
“It’s called Aphrodite,” I think I hear him say, and he reaches to get me one. “Aphrodite,” I repeat, approvingly.
“No,” he says, pointing to the cover. “Afro-Dike-Y.” And there Afro-Dike-Y is in all her glossy glory.
“Why do you separate the y at the end?” is all I can think to ask, and because I really think people would get the reference even if it was connected, but then I notice that the little fabric she is wearing is actually shaped like a Y. Sort of a cross between a thong and a leotard. The fabric physics of the two-dimensional world. It’s genius.