by Mat Johnson
“Okay, that was great. Do you want to continue?” Sunita Habersham asks me. She’s wearing a Nehru collar today, on a knee-length, pale blue cotton shirt that’s proudly wrinkled and wants everyone to know it doesn’t go in for that ironing bullshit.
“That’s all. Thank you. Thanks for listening,” I tell her, and I go to sit down. But there is a hand on my shoulder, so I stop, look back at her.
“No, that’s not all. You have two parents. They were an interracial couple. We are all here, because at some point, there was an interracial couple that conceived us. We all share that legacy. That’s not something to be ashamed of. That’s not even something to be proud of. It’s just our reality, and we can’t run from that and only claim one side. As long as we do, we’ll be haunted by what we’re denying. Your surname is Duffy,” Sun tells me. And I think, Yes, yes it is. When I don’t know what to say, Sun continues, “What about your father’s side of the family?”
“They’re Irish.” I tell her. When this doesn’t seem to satisfy her, I continue. “My dad just passed away. Very recently.” This is a truth that’s also meant to stop the conversation. Yet fails too.
“Where in Ireland are they from?” Sun asks, but it sounds like a demand.
“What?”
“How long have they been in America?”
“I don’t know. When did they run out of potatoes?” I ask, utterly sincere.
“What were their occupations?” She keeps going.
“All I know about them is that they were really pasty,” I tell her. Sun doesn’t laugh. No one does, except One Drop, harder than the joke pushed him. Everyone just stares at him. Me too. He keeps going. I’m smiling, but I want him to stop. This is my family. This is my family, pasty but still mine. When he finally ends with, “Nice one, Holmes!” he holds a hand to slap and I do but I’d rather smack his face.
“Warren, you knew your father, correct? So give us something about him before you sit down. Something as detailed as your mother’s anecdote.”
The first thing I think of is that goddamn house. That rotting mansion. But I don’t really think of that as my father, only as his European legacy, his aspiration for himself and for me if he really did imagine that I’d come back to inhabit it. So then I think about his car, and that’s what I tell them. Craig Duffy drove a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle, black, that he bought in 1972 and never let die. I loved that car. It had such a distinctive lawn mower purr; when he’d pick me up from school I’d know he was coming from a block away. It used to break down all the time, but the thing had such simple mechanics. My dad would get used parts sent straight to the house, fix it out on the street, car radio blasting classical music in the middle of the hood to drown out the sounds of other cars blaring hip-hop as they drove by, which is hilarious now that it’s not actively horrifying me.
I tell Sun that story, I tell the bleached tribe surrounding me, and feel the release. I usually don’t like talking about my white side in public, in front of non-Caucasoids. I’m of the firm belief that, if I never bring up the fact that half my family is white, somehow the fact that I look white will be forgiven. But I look at these people, and among them there is nothing to apologize for. So I remember out loud the way the seats were so old that, where the cushions still remained, they’d oxidized into sand. I feel my dad again, even more than the first night back, and I want to sit down before the emotion it invokes overtakes me. But Sunita Habersham doesn’t allow this. She sighs. Her breasts get bigger when she does but I barely notice it other than to notice it.
“That’s good, but a car is a thing. Why do you think of that particular object in relation to your father, Warren?” Sun asks me. “It’s just a car. What does that mean? To you?”
I know what I can give her about the silly little car, but I don’t want to because I don’t know if I can give it without losing something. But there’s something there I want to lose and I don’t trust myself to pull it out later. So I tell everyone in the room, including myself.
When my mom went into the hospital, I was eleven and they had been broken up for three years by then. My dad unexpectedly picked me up from school one day and that night I went to his house. Visits to my father were strictly every other weekend, so I knew something had changed, but there was no explanation. That night, we went to my mom’s apartment, got more of my clothes and favorite toys. He had keys, somehow. At first, I thought this might be the beginning of a reconciliation, that I had them back together, that my mother would be joining us the next day. I wasn’t actually that freaked out about it; they’d gone on a few dates after the separation, tried to see if they could get things started again, so this just seemed like another attempt. But the next night, she didn’t arrive; my dad finally told me she was in the hospital. He made it sound like she was at a spa retreat. I wasn’t worried; people stayed in the hospital on TV all the time, and usually they were smiling. That Saturday, we drove the Bug to Jefferson Hospital. Two months later, we drove the same little black car to her funeral. We drove that car to a boarding school in New Hampshire a week after the funeral, for me to have an interview and see if I liked it there. I was eleven. My mom had made him promise, with me in the hospital room, that he would make sure I got a good education. That this one thing, this one thing in his life, he couldn’t be cheap on.
So there was this big fancy boarding school up in the granite state, like a six-hour drive first thing in the morning, but it was worth it. A campus of castle-like buildings surrounded by trees, right by a river. I liked it. It was like Narnia up there. When we left that night, my dad tried to make the trip back to Philly in one shot to avoid having to pay for a hotel room.
Thing is, we got hit with a rainstorm not long after passing into New York State. I mean, it was coming down hard, flooding, I could barely see to the next car. At points, we were creeping along so slow I watched the frogs jumping along the side of the road like they were planning an invasion. We didn’t talk, we rarely did anyway, but at that moment we couldn’t if we wanted to because the sound of water hitting the Bug’s roof was so loud we would have had to scream. It was a horrible, horrible world out there, beating down on us. But I was protected inside that little can, with my dad at the wheel. Him staring forward, hands at twelve and two. I fell asleep a couple of times, the last time close to the end after the rain had stopped. We must have been in New Jersey by then. And I could hear my pop now. Craig Duffy was crying. Craig Duffy, freckles and mustache and bristles of brown stubble, was sniffing and crying, still staring ahead. He’d probably been crying all night, but I was laid out on the backseat and couldn’t hear him.
We got back and we never spoke about boarding school again. I stayed with him, in Philly. I went to Greene Street Friends, walking distance right down Germantown Ave. My father raised me, every day of the year till I could run away on my own.
I tell this story, and now I’m crying. I’m crying about halfway in, but I don’t stop because this is the moment. Come on out. Mostly I don’t stop because I didn’t cry when my father died and I know this is a shameful, shameful thing. So I cry for Craig Duffy now, and I deserve all the shame I feel for it. And even as I do I finally understand why he cried. Not just for my mother, not just for me, but for himself. Because he was scared he would fail me. And I know I don’t just cry for Craig Duffy, even in this moment. I cry for myself as well. For the ways I have failed Tal, my daughter, and the ways I’m sure I will.
Sunita Habersham lets me sit down now.
But I see she’s crying too. Just a little, but I catch the shine. And a small part of me, a part of me not crying, it sees her tears and thinks, Got her.
—
I leave class with a large, loosely defined assignment to do some research on my Irish heritage before the end of the week so I can complete the course, and a feeling of raw embarrassment at standing in front of a group of strangers and tearing up. There’s a huge difference between “balling” and “bawling.” Also, I leave with the need to get drunk or h
ave a cigarette or find some other way to kill just enough of myself today that I can go on living. I want to go home. I want go home and come back for Tal after her student orientation session, but I have four hours to waste and I’m already too tired to drive back and forth twice. Strolling slowly and without much purpose, I come to the last trailer before the woods, where a group stands around waiting for something. I try to bum a loosey, but nobody smokes real analogue cigarettes anymore. Nobody smokes anywhere on earth. Humanity quit and abandoned me to negotiate the ghosts of my own nine-year addiction. I’m left, having exposed my habit to the crowd, standing awkwardly among them for another couple of minutes, straining at small talk until I see Tal literally skipping from the next building.
On Tal’s ears are the biggest hollow gold bamboo earrings I have ever seen in my life. At least I hope they’re hollow, because they nearly reach from her lobes to her shoulders, and with each hop their octagon shapes swing violently as if my daughter had attached gilded coat hangers to the sides of her head.
“Oh man, you got to see this. You got to. Come now. Come now or you’ll miss it.”
“What the hell is in your ears?”
“Class assignment. I’m on break till the student orientation. Come on, you got to see something, it is so cool. You got to see it now.” Tal starts pulling on my hand and I grab hers tight and run with her for the chance to run with her.
We stop at an old RV lined up directly behind the trailer they have my art classroom set up in. Airstreams are supposed to be shiny silver and smooth and perfectly round like pods from a fifties alien-attack movie, but this one looks like the carcass of a mutant dung beetle. Its skin is dulled, oxidized, and covered with stickers, most of which are half-faded and peeling. Then I hear the moans inside. It’s a woman. I look at Tal, who’s giggling, and I think I must have this wrong. But I don’t: there’s a woman and she’s moaning.
“Tal, no,” I tell her and start to pull her away from this and sexuality in general, but Tal insists and pulls me again, this time to its door on the side and it’s open.
In the dark small space inside, a women lies on a massage chair. Her head’s captive to the hollow face cushion at the end of it. Over her stands a spider of a man, webbed veins lining his skinny arms. Literally webbed: there are blue lines inked between his bulbous blood vessels. He’s shoving something into her back. When I hear the buzz I think it’s some kind of spinal vibrator, but a moment reveals it as a tattooist’s needle.
“You gotta see it,” Tal tells me again, like this is not enough, then pulls me even closer, into the can with them, where the air reeks of burnt sage and rubbing alcohol.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind,” comes from the lady getting her back split open. She’s a heavy woman, and her exposed flesh looks as soft as a marshmallow. If you laid your head on that meat, you would be asleep before you sunk all your weight down.
“Check it, this is the biggest Sesa I’ve done yet. And I will be braggadocios: the dopest as well,” the arachnid tells me.
“It better be because it hurts, Spider!” she yells back at him, letting the words and the pain out in mock whimpers.
“Tell her,” Spider says to me, lifting a hand to beckon me even closer. “Tell her how amazing it looks. How original.”
“Tons of people in the camp have this tattoo. It’s like a biracial tramp stamp,” Tal says to me. The lady getting written on just laughs harder, so hard Spider has to lift his needle up and nod at our good-natured appreciation of the spectacle of the fat on this lady’s back rippling.
“Actually, it’s the badge of mulatto pride. And everyone’s is different. Look at this one, lovely right?”
I look at this lady’s back. There is a big Star of David that goes from the tip of one shoulder blade to the other. Around it is a circle. If he drew it free hand he’s a genius, because it looks like a perfect 360. Past the line of the circle, what looks like drops of water spin off of the shape.
“See? See how I incorporated her freckles into the rivets? None of them are covered up, instead they make it look as if the image is splashing off into her organic fiber. Really, you have to listen to the flesh for the art to work like this.”
“You sound pretentious,” the lady says, and she stops laughing. Her back stills.
“What is it?” I ask him. He’s got a jeweler’s visor on with a light attached and when he looks right at me all I can see above his nose is the glow.
“My greatest creation. First, I took the West African Adinkra symbol Sesa Wo Suban, which basically means ‘Transform your character.’ ”
“Sounds like a diss.” The guy’s got no shirt on. The only thing covering his torso is nipple rings. Silver hoops, and a blue arachnid body painted right on the center of his chest like Spider-Man.
“Sure, it can be used as an insult, okay, but the meaning I like is that you have to change to become who you are. Perfect, right? So then, to further mulatto-tize it, I changed the classic Akan star to the star that corresponds with the wearer’s European ethnic heritage, thereby bonding together their ethnic nature. In Doris’s case, the Star of David. Which despite what it says about tattooing in the Torah, has been very popular around here.”
“Leviticus 19:28 is very contentious,” says Doris, and starts laughing again. She’s high. There’s no way she’s not high.
“That’s the one I’d get, Pops,” Tal says, leaning in closer to get a better look at it.
“Not until you’re eighteen. As your father I feel very strongly about Leviticus 19:28,” I tell Tal. And I do, suddenly, though I’m not sure what Leviticus 19:28 says.
“Listen to your old man,” Spider tells my daughter, then looks at me. “But Pops, you got to see them. Sixty-three different versions of this design walking around here. Linking us, you know? Spiritually. I once inked the entire Leaves of Grass on over a thousand people at Burning Man. One verse written on each person. That was dope. But the Sesa? It’s, like, on another plane of consciousness. We’re creating a people, man.”
There’s silence. There’s no one talking because he was speaking to me, and I have nothing to say in response. Because I’m actually listening to him, and he terrifies me. The very idea, of creating a tribe where I would fully belong, of changing my definition to fit me instead of the other way around, terrifies me. It scares me because it’s not crazy. It’s attractive, logical even. It’s just priced at abandoning my existing identity and entire worldview.
“G-d, you’re pretentious,” Doris breaks the pause, laughing.
8
THERE’S A FRIDAY NIGHT powwow the last workday before school starts, and all the grown mixies show up. They have a full bonfire burning and the faculty and staff stand around like a god might arise from the flames. Fresh tattoos shine on the oiled skin of the newly branded: I see six-pointed druid stars, Soviet-style red ones, two-dimensional Nordic sailor stars that look like shuriken, all encased by the Sesa’s black swirls. There’s even a Sesa with the star from Star Trek—presumably worn by Captain Kirk’s lovechild. I recognize the intricately knotted Celtic pattern in several of the stars, and know if I got one, that would be it. And I also know I won’t, though I think it does look good. I think things like: they are all connected, these people. I think these sorts of thoughts because I’m drunk. There are about seventy people here, and they’re all shades from pink to dark ebony. Fat, thin, whatever. But they’re all connected. Spider knew. How to draw a symbolic line between them, from calves to arms to shoulders to the meat on Doris’s back. She walks by me and she’s wearing a tank top and the skin back there is still red and painful but she looks so happy, as if the pain has been sensualized. And the fat of her midriff hangs out on the sides and again I am drunk and so don’t deny its beauty. Doris knows. She knows that meat is her and she loves it and she loves everyone else here enough that she is willing to let them see all of who she is in this moment. I find that easy to envy. I want to live in a fantasy world too.
I get another d
rink, because they’re free and my mouth has nothing else to do. I stand staring at the fire, wait for some sort of formal ceremony to begin, but it doesn’t come. This is a school that doesn’t feel like one even in the daytime, but as it gets dark its true nature unspools. It’s less a school than a family reunion. I don’t know these people, but I do, because they’re like me. They don’t look like me, they don’t sound like me, but they know what it’s like to be me. To be in the group while intangibly excluded from it. I know they know by how relieved they appear to be together. To be completely at home. Without question of identity or membership. I belong here, I catch myself thinking, and I’m too drunk to question or squash that joy. Spider comes over and, from my elation, my new admiration for his work pours.