by Mat Johnson
After I call the cops I take the coffee can of dead matches and cigar butts off the porch, remove the cigar butts, then I walk to the side of the house and dump the remains there. I don’t want to go near the garage because of the crackhead infestation, but I risk it and it’s okay, no one’s there. I dump the rest of the butts and matches inside the garage, in a corner, kick them around a bit for a more natural look. Evidence. When I get back in, I make coffee while we wait for the police.
The crackheads haven’t stolen anything from me. No, they’ve given me the gift of a documented incident to later prove probable cause. Crackheads destroy things. First, their lives, obviously. And then their families. But they also destroy houses. They light fires and they have poor judgment; both things are required if you’re going to be a crackhead. They make houses burn down. They’re not as thorough as meth heads, who have the benefit of their exploding labs, but crackheads have left a respectable number of ruined buildings in their wake. A crackhead did it is a reasonable cause of destruction on any forensic report. A history of crackhead infestation is a legitimate explanation for loss of property. It’s all so exciting I catch myself whistling.
“Are you still drunk?” Tal’s wide awake, standing in the kitchen doorway, her hair hidden under the wrap of a pink scarf.
“What? What kind of thing is that to say to someone? To someone who’s your father?” When Tal’s quiet in response, and stands there till I feel my guilt starting to answer for her, I say, “I’m not drunk, okay? Anymore.”
“You’re not high, are you?”
“Jesus, Tal!”
“It’s just, you were a mess last night. And now you’re, like, entirely too upbeat for seven o’clock, Saturday morning. You’re, like, serialkiller upbeat. It’s freaking me out. Please stop.”
“I’m just looking on the bright side. Of things.” In response to that, Tal keeps staring at me. I go back to putting the milk away. Then drinking what I’d poured into a glass. Tal keeps watching, motionless, without comment.
“I need things. And I’m going to tell you what they are.”
I put down the glass, say, “Okay. Hit me.”
“I need quiet. At night. Late at night. After midnight.”
“That’s totally understandable. I do too.”
“And no drinking. Not like never, but not like, on the regular. I mean, wine, that’s okay, but no heavy stuff. Of any kind. I’m done with that. With how it was with my mom, even with Irv. Not doing that again.”
“I don’t drink often,” I lie. “I usually don’t get drunk,” I clarify, which is closer to the truth.
“It just turns people into assholes.”
“Glad you don’t think I’m already an asshole,” I tell Tal. Her response is just to continue staring at me, the process judgment visible in her eyes.
“Good,” Tal says, and keeps standing there. I take another drink of milk. I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know what her life has been like. I know that I wish I had been in it, but I don’t know where she was all that time, really. I know what it is like to lose a mom, but not to lose her mom, and not the way she did.
Tal steps forward, hand outstretched. We shake. And it’s not enough; it shouldn’t be enough. So I pull her in, wrap my arms around her. After a moment, her arms lift up and hold my back. I’ve never held my daughter this long before, and it’s only a few seconds. The thought makes me grip tighter.
Before Tal can pull away, I say, “I’m going to have to go out, get some things this afternoon. But I’ll be back to take you to dance practice, okay? I’ll give you a ride to campus.”
“Oh God, not on the bike. I can’t sit for an hour after I get off that thing.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got a car now.”
“That car?” Tal says, and releases me to point out the window, where the Constables of the Police of the City of Philadelphia are hooking up their tow.
—
I don’t call George. I call Tosha. I ask Tosha to talk to George, tell her that they’re trying to impound my dad’s car just because of an overdue inspection, a missing registration, and twenty-seven unpaid parking tickets dating back to 1982. Sirleaf Day’s number leads to a recording of him saying “Hello?” followed by a three second pause. I fall for it, talk into the space, then hear the beep. The joke is old, but young compared to him. Into his voice mail I beg him to get over here before I’m stuck on a bench at the 14th Police District, staring at a linoleum floor. All I get in response is a beep, which is more than the dead expression I get trying to explain that my dad is deceased to the cops. The officers seem pretty intent on having me take “a trip” with them to “sort everything out” until George pulls up.
He’s wearing a fedora and a raincoat. He’s been a detective for four years and yet he’s still playing at it. The awkward part about talking to George is that our friendship is based entirely on the fact that, despite my closeness with Tosha in those younger years, I never tried to seduce the girlfriend who became his wife. What George and I have is not even a real friendship, more of an established truce.
“Sins of the father,” he says, and he laughs at me. It’s the first smile he’s broken since the uniformed guys pulled away. “Man, you got a $3,439 bill on a car that hasn’t had legal tags for two years.”
“Well, it runs. It did last night. Or rolled, at least.”
“It won’t again if you don’t pay in ninety days.”
“Yeah, well, we all got our problems.” I try to shrug this one off. He laughs again. Harder this time, longer. Sighs at the end of it. “So Tosha told you.”
“She told me. Sorry man.”
“You are sorry, but not as sorry as my ass. My life is all kinds of fucked the hell up.”
He slaps his hand on my back as we walk up the hill to the garage. It’s a relatively weak tap, like he knows not to push me too far right now. “What else did she tell you? I mean, what specifically?” he asks.
“She said you moved out. That you come in the mornings so the kids don’t know. She thinks you met someone else. She thinks,” I start to say, and then I pause.
“You want me to help you? You got to help me. Just tell me what’s going on so I can fix it.”
“She thinks you might be fucking some white dude.”
“ ‘Some white dude?’ She thinks I’m gay? What the hell?”
“Hey, I don’t know what’s—”
“You don’t know because it’s none of your business. Man, just show me what you got to show me.”
I open the garage door. I bring him over to the corner to look at the cigarette ashes, but he’s sighing, barely paying attention. I stand on the perimeter of my imaginary crime scene and point to them, like on cop shows. I give him my theory: that the crackheads moved in when my dad was gone. Maybe they were here when he was sick, but he couldn’t do anything about it. “And they smoke too. By this old, wooden house. That’s really dangerous, you know? I don’t want there to be a fire,” I tell him, and say it louder to break him out of his distraction. I try to sound as somber as possible on the f-word. Fire. Glorious fire. All-changing fire, destroyer of worlds, lifeblood of the phoenix, god of renewal. All that.
“Of course they smoke. They’re crackheads. It’s not like they’re shoving rocks up their noses,” and with that, George pulls his own cigarette out, pads himself for a lighter. He turns, barely even looks at the evidence I have so generously provided.
“That’s some shit, that I’m gay. Man, I wish I was gay. I wish I got a pass like that. I’m the opposite of gay: I’m not happy. I’ve been unhappy for a lot of years now; she knows that. And I know—and trust me I know this—I got no no good reason to be unhappy. I got a beautiful wife, beautiful kids, beautiful house and all that, but I’m unhappy. That’s the fucked up thing. If I was gay, I could point to that and say, ‘Sorry, I fucked up. Turns out I’m gay,’ and no one would be mad at me. Instead I’m unhappy with the perfect life and everybody hates me.”
He’s right about this: I hate him right now. That could have been me in his house. Those could have been my kids, even the ugly one. He took that. George is a good cop, because he can read minds. He turns to me and says, “Don’t get no ideas. She ain’t single.”
I know she isn’t single. I knew when I went to Wales, got drunk every night, then eventually married a woman who would give me her own well-earned “I’m not happy” speech. He gave his wife kids and yet fared no better. You start with “I love you” and then you build everything on those three words, but then it only takes those three other words to strip it all down. “I’m not happy,” and then the misery goes from the speaker to the recipient. Speaking it wasn’t the end to unhappiness, it was the transfer of it.
“Look, man. That’s between you and her. I’m sorry this is happening, but you’re right, it’s none of my business. So…what do I do about the crackhead thing?”
“You move, nigga.”
“That’s not an option.”
“You know how to leave town. Just do it again.”
“I can’t fucking move, George. I’m broke. I got to spend all the money getting this place good enough to sell. I got a seventeen-year-old girl in here to protect and this place is infested with crackheads. So now what?”
“Warren, you’re on the border between Germantown and North Philly. You’re dealing with the side effects of centuries of economic and social disenfranchisement. So yeah, there are drug addicts here. You know this. It’s like complaining there are chipmunks in the woods. Don’t get a gun. You’ll miss and wound them and then they’ll sue you and then you’re really screwed. Just get a security system. Protect yourself, protect your daughter. Buy a Taser if you want—but don’t get a gun unless you’re willing to kill somebody, and trust me, you’re not. Head to a security store. Matter of fact, have Tosha help you, because that woman knows all about that shit. I know she knows all about that shit. You can tell her I told you, that I know, that she knows, all about that shit.”
“You know she loves you,” I tell him. It seems like the right thing to do. Not for him, but for me, because he’s starting to piss me off and Tosha is my true friend and I like the way he flinches when I say it. I know Tosha does, though. I’m sure no matter how bad he’s done her over the years, she still does, and would take him back. I say it also because I want someone to say that to Becks every time I come up in a conversation. I know he still loves you. And I want it to hurt when she hears it, too.
“I know she loves me. And I love her. But saying that shit is easy and doing it, working on it year in and out, keeping it alive when it feels like it’s slowly killing you, that’s fucking hard. I’m tired, bro.”
George sniffles that broad nose and walks off down the hill toward his car. He’s bald, but shaves it so you can’t tell, and there are enough brown men still doing that for style that he gets away with it. He puts his fedora back on, and between that and the raincoat he probably never has to pull the badge to prove he’s a detective. Still, it doesn’t look like a costume on him. It just looks like detectives must face some sorts of rainstorms they haven’t told the rest of the world about. When George turns around to stop and look at me, he’s got a dramatic strut going too. All he’s missing is a synthesizer soundtrack and he’d be a living embodiment of the investigators we watched on prime-time television in our childhoods.
“ ‘Are you gay?’ ” he repeats, yelling to me over his shoulder. And then he laughs again, pointing at me like he’s caught the playful prank I was setting. “Man, I’d suck a thousand dicks if I could get away with that excuse.”
—
With Tosha’s credit card, I buy sixteen closed-circuit video cameras with night-vision and thermal detection, all of which feed wirelessly to an external hard drive connected to my laptop. I get the cheapest cameras I can because I want low-quality images. I want blurry faces and dark shapes. I don’t want proof that any specific crackhead is haunting my house, I want proof of a general, unknowable infection, something to show the insurance company later without making some pathetic wretch’s life even worse. I buy Digital Night Vision Binocular Goggles, 1x24 zoom, with head straps and a carrying case. I buy a M26c Taser gun with laser targeting, and a baseball bat—Triton Senior League model SL12T aluminum composite—the only sporting equipment in the store. Then I buy two more bats, one for each door in the house, another for upstairs.
“So he says I know surveillance? Damn right I know surveillance. Glad he knows I know surveillance,” Tosha says a little too loud. She’s been talking too loud since she picked me up, arriving a few minutes after George drove away. Tosha laughs and the sound is red, bitter, dry. It scares the clerk behind the counter and he motions to go help another customer, but she won’t let him leave either.
“Can we get a GPS tracker? A little one. Real little. Hardly noticeable. Something like that.” Tosha points to the one she likes. It’s as small as a cigarette lighter. To me she says, “Oh I know all about George. I know all his secrets now.”
“You still think he’s screwing some dude?”
“Come on,” she tells me, brushing off her earlier theory. “The only man that bastard loves is himself. This isn’t about another man. It’s even worse. It’s a goddamn white woman.” The white guy on the other side of the counter pretends he didn’t hear that, keeps his expression passive and servile. We have truly arrived in a new age.
Already, the boxes of equipment are piled up as if we’re in the early stages of invading a rogue state. Already, we have twice what I’d budgeted.
“Don’t worry about it, just pay me back when you can. Unless they rob you blind first.” Tosha is inspecting the GPS device, turning it in her hands. “This tracker’s too big; I need a smaller one.”
“They didn’t take my car. They even left the keys in the glove compartment. I’m not really worried about theft, I’m worried about them getting in and getting near Tal. I don’t need a tracker.”
“It’s not for you. It’s for the white bitch.”
—
I don’t know if the “white bitch” is really white. I mean, even through the bookstore window I can see that the blond is bleached and she’s got a tan that looks like it doesn’t go away in the winter.
“I got to get back to the house. I got the roofers coming,” I whisper to Tosha from the passenger seat. This gets her to drop the binoculars she’s been staring through since we parked. They’re not like the high-powered, professional scopes we were just looking at in the spy shop. These are pink, plastic, and have a purple strap that dangles loosely in front of Tosha’s face as she peers through them. It almost makes what we’re doing seem light, trivial, instead of wrong and creepy and probably illegal.
“Let me get this right, it’s a whole big compound, with an education program and all, just for half-black people? In the park, with the bugs? What the hell is the point of that? All that just to run away from being black?”
“They’re not trying to run away from blackness. Some of them are even learning to run to it. They’re just mixed people trying to be themselves.”
“They’re not mixed,” she snaps back, the word wet and viral. “I’m black. You’re black. African American, Bilalian, Negro, Colored folk, blackity-black, black. Those Oreos up there, they’re black too, although I’m sure they’d cry if you told them. We’re all mixed with something, no one is pure. Who cares about percentages?”
“Yeah, but it’s not about genes, DNA. It’s about being able to express all of who you are culturally. I mean, they would say that. That if you grew up connected to parents of two races, just saying, ‘I’m black,’ or whatever, negates part of who you are, culturally. As a person.”
“They realize they’re in America, right? You could dress in just kente and only eat fufu and you still wouldn’t balance out the whiteness. We speak English. We wear European clothes. Really, all that’s not enough white for them?”
“I’m telling you, they’re not trying to be white.�
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“Because they can’t. And they think they’re better than black people.”
“How is acknowledging that they’re not just black acting superior?”
“They’re trying to abandon the community. They’re trying to cut black America loose, so they can live some post-racial fantasy. That shit is dangerous. It weakens us, as a people.”
“They’re just trying to be themselves.”
“Okay, so you’re mixed now? Then say it,” she demands.
“I’m mixed.”
“No.” She looks over at me, studies. “Say you’re not black.”
“I am not…” going to say that. I can’t. I even try for a second, and I can’t. I can’t bring myself. It’s too damn scary. It’s up is down and down is up and nothing is right. Just the thought of it. It brings the enormity of this whole line of reasoning to my mouth to clog there. “I could have used this, you know?” I do manage. “When I grew up. Having the world see me as what I was and not as what I wasn’t. My daughter could use that,” and that’s enough to get Tosha to wag her head and raise the binoculars back to her eyes and focus outside the car once more.
“There she is. That fucking cracker whore,” Tosha says, and there are two words I’ve never heard her say before. But I look at the woman in the bookstore window. She doesn’t look like a whore, but I’m not sure what a whore is. I’ve met several sex workers in social settings—lovely people on average. When I think of the word whore, I think of a cancerous leach of human dignity, but that woman in there doesn’t give off that vibe. She isn’t even a seductress. She’s dressed like any other young professional in work attire, a contradictory mix of attractive and uninviting. Her face, though, is really beautiful. She looks like someone you could see a movie with then fall in love with after the conversation it sparks.
“I don’t understand how he could do this. I keep looking at this bitch—I’ve been here before, okay? I’ve seen them holding hands, kissing, this shit is real—and I don’t know how that bastard could do this to me. Explain that to me.”