“Ah yes, the proverbial red herring!” he would boom out when we showed him black and whites of peace rallies and bankrupt supermarkets. This was classic Philly: nonsensical, yet hilarious.
I had no knack for photography. I couldn’t open the canisters, my exposures were wildly off because I didn’t understand how and when to change them, and my subjects were blurry. Nonetheless, I had, by far, the most ambitious ideas. Philly once congratulated me on my vision when he and I were the last ones in the darkroom, him patiently wresting open the canisters that I had already mangled with my efforts. I had done a series featuring a pair of headless Barbies who engaged in a lovers’ quarrel that ended with Malibu Barbie giving Pocahontas Barbie her right arm as a token of her devotion. The images were muddy and my captions were illegible, but Philly laughed harder than anyone during my presentation and gave me an A for the semester.
I began spending Tuesday and Thursday evenings in the studio, on the pretext of developing pictures. I told Ayale and my father that I was getting physics tutoring. Philly would tell me stories of growing up in Vermont and being Indian-burned by someone you loved. I didn’t love Philly, but I wanted his unconditional approval and undivided attention. Loving someone and wanting love from someone are usually diametrically opposed emotions, and it took me a long time to understand that, long past the point when Philly left and I had to look elsewhere.
My English teacher taught in the basement and began each class with detailed descriptions of how the air around us was probably giving us stage I lung cancer. We called him Mr. C, and his dark stubble perfectly suited his weathered face and his plaid suspenders. He was the first person to fail me. The test was on Black Boy, and I cornered him as soon as class ended, ignoring the kids who had to climb over my oversized backpack.
“What is this?” I spat out.
“It’s the grade you deserved.” He looked amused.
“I read that book three times.”
“It shows.”
“I should have aced this test.”
“And yet you didn’t.”
“Why?”
Mr. C grinned as he fiddled with the silver bracelet that soothed his arthritis.
“What you did only works on multiple-choice tests and asshole teachers who don’t know how to teach. This was an essay test. I wanted your thoughts. You didn’t give me your thoughts. You recited the book back to me. That’s not learning. That’s being a trained poodle, and so I gave you the grade I would give to a trained poodle.”
“You must be joking.”
He guided me toward the door.
“I rarely joke in public. Take a goddamn aspirin and calm down. It’s one test, not the rest of your life.”
I began to request extra oral book reports with him. When he asked why, I would point to the failed test and explain that I needed to raise my average. In the middle of the last one I wrangled out of him, he closed the book before I’d finished.
“I’m not done.”
“You’re never done.”
“No seriously, there’s just one more thing that I want to say, and then I’ll be done.”
“I have to tell you something.”
“Was I wrong?”
“I’m not going to be your father.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I am not here to be a substitute for something you don’t have.”
At our last conference, he asked me what I was planning on doing in college. I told him that I didn’t know and he smiled, for the first time seeming almost proud of me.
“That’s the best response.”
“That’s idiotic,” Ayale told me afterward. “Everyone needs to know what they want to do.”
“What if you genuinely don’t know?”
“You’re just not trying hard enough.”
“Questioning is the most important step.”
“Bullshit.”
He was closing up the booth as he spoke, and as I watched his familiar movements, I was surprised to feel a kind of fatigue. I was never good enough for him, and he was never what I wanted him to be, no matter how hard I strained to make him so. I didn’t notice how closely Ayale was scrutinizing me until he spoke again.
“You’re better than that.”
“Excuse me?”
I was afraid he’d read my thoughts. He often did.
“You’re better than the garbage that privileged white people can afford to tell you because they have no investment in you. They don’t know that if you or I were to run around, talking about how we’re too busy feeling and finding ourselves to look for a real job, we’d be considered jokes, at best. When he and his friends tried it, they were congratulated for being a youth revolution. This isn’t our country. We can’t play the games the natives play.”
“I was born here.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry, but it’s true.”
He hesitated before leaning close to my ear.
“Just you wait: our people were meant for greater things. I’ll get you there. I’ll get you there even if I die doing it.”
Mr. C’s dismissal was school-wide knowledge the next day. I realized that Ayale didn’t have to read my mind anymore, since he was too busy seeing the future and making those who angered him pay heavily in it. He was winning both the battle and the war, although only now did I see that there was a struggle. That night, I dreamt of a God with Ayale’s face.
ON THE SUBJECT OF THE DISCIPLES
No one remembered when or how, but in what seemed like too little time to judge anyone’s trustworthiness, Fiker and Ayale had become inseparable. It was obvious that they’d known each other for years, although nothing about this shared past was ever divulged. Fiker was the largest human I’d ever seen; he ate nothing until evening and then didn’t stop consuming food until he passed out from whiskey. Ayale disapproved but always caved into indulgent laughter as Fiker recounted the previous night’s misadventures: how he’d kissed a woman who wasn’t his wife, had fallen down the stairs of a house that wasn’t his own, proved yet again that Ayale held fast to a moral high ground that Fiker hadn’t even suspected could exist. Nonetheless, Ayale recognized the man’s intellectual acuity, on par with his own, if not a bit sharper in some areas, and their closeness deepened at the same rate as their mutual distrust.
Along with Fiker came Elsie, whose visits to the lot would end with her husband shoving her off the premises, her beating him with whatever came to hand first, the rest of us pretending we’d temporarily lost sight and hearing, and Ayale never intervening. Everyone knew she was the only reason Fiker wasn’t dead, although it sometimes felt like she might kill him herself. It was Elsie who’d rescued her husband from wherever he was before Boston—location and circumstances never defined or requested—and it was Elsie who’d wheedled a job out of Ayale. No matter how many times Fiker offended, attacked, stumbled, she stayed by his side, radiant, persuading, laughing, as one by one, the women, the charges, the accusations evaporated. We knew nothing about what she did as pastime or career but understood that while you might get a broken leg from Fiker, we were never going to see you again once Elsie was through. She acted as though I wasn’t present, which only added to her appeal: I would have given anything to look and behave like her.
I’d become all eyes and few words since Fiker’s arrival. It took only our introduction for me to grasp how he loved to mock me, how delicious he found my envy.
“Do you know what ‘Fiker’ means?”
Such a simple question was insulting.
“Love.”
“Look at you! Learning words, remembering words, saying words … you’ve trained her well.”
Ayale didn’t glance up from his newspaper.
“She came to me like that.”
I didn’t appreciate being described as trained, like I was a dog. I aimed for a cutting tone.
“And what do you do?”
“I observe.”
“And then what?”
“I
act upon what I’ve seen.”
“In what way?”
“In whatever way seems appropriate.”
“What are you observing now?”
Fiker smiled. Despite his constant exhibition of unfettered joy, his smiles and laughs never touched his eyes; every indication of elation got cut off at seemingly predetermined moments. This was his slow special, merely raising his lips to expose his brown teeth, nearly the same shade as his caked skin.
“You’re still a little girl. You may think you’re ready for more, but I’d keep that to yourself. Once word gets out, it’s hard to shove it back in.”
His eyes lingered on me before abruptly turning. I felt filthy for the rest of the day.
Having Fiker at the lot put the other attendants and hangers-on in stark relief. The four that had shadowed Ayale at our first meeting were neither the most nor the least important: all of them were interchangeable. They looked the same, talked the same, smoked the same, worshipped Ayale the same. They followed their leader with a passion rarely displayed in other areas of their depressed lives. They were easily identifiable by their words and actions, which mirrored those of their guide: they had been divested of themselves, with nothing of their individualities remaining. They were drenched in Ayale.
He hadn’t meant to create them. He simply spoke to them as he had to others before, looking directly into their eyes, giving utterance to what he believed to be right, unflinching, beautiful. It’s nearly impossible to foresee whether one will become an icon for others, a standard at the forefront of a war one did not mean to create. There are those cocky enough to gather followers (see: Jesus Christ), although usually those with the most ardent devotees didn’t initially seek them out (see: Robert Redford). Universal, however, is the element of flattery created by such a willing following, one that all but the strongest would find difficult to resist. Ayale was perhaps the least capable.
At the time of Fiker’s introduction, the disciples were growing too numerous and spread out to be accurately cataloged. Ayale had divided them into categories: those in positions to carry out favors with key people, those with banter, those willing to run errands. The women moved easily between “disciple” and “lover,” often multiple times, until Ayale or they tired of the game. The group to which a disciple belonged was made clear by the manner in which Ayale greeted the individual, although one had to hover on the outskirts and retain enough interest to notice these minute variations, I being the only person who did.
There was something unnerving about coming upon one of the disciples without Ayale there to offset the sting. I was at the cinema in Randolph when I recognized a new recruit to the parking scene, the first to arrive from his Welo village, and the first Ethiopian I’d met who’d actually seen the famine, insofar as these things are visible. We greeted each other as we’d been taught to as children, and then found we had nothing more to say.
“Did you read the latest about the hurricane?” he finally asked.
“I think so.”
“Isn’t it horrible?”
“Yes.”
“Can you believe they’re letting that shipping magnate build his condo on the graves of those dead black kids? I almost threw up, I was so furious.”
I cautiously drew back.
“Shipping magnate?”
“Of course!”
The businessman in question, Sheldon Graves, was a point of outrage for Ayale as well and, as far as I knew, had yet to appear in a single English-language news outlet. Ayale claimed to have heard about him from an insider in the life-jacket business.
“I didn’t hear about that.”
The man seemed scandalized.
“It’s everywhere!”
“Where exactly did you see this?”
I wondered if Ayale had so completely penetrated his psyche that he had ceased to associate him with how or what he learned.
“I don’t need to remember where I read every little thing.”
“I was just curious.”
“It’s a shame how little your generation cares about current events.”
He raised a hand, a signal of farewell and dismissal, an exact imitation of the gesture I’d seen a million times before, always with the same hand, often with a Winston clutched between its first two fingers. It was as though Ayale moved within him, putting on this guise before taking up residence in another host.
With Fiker’s arrival, Ayale appeared unsure of how best to use his ideological army, surprising since he was quite talented at espying the ways in which others could advance his goals. One day, I didn’t see his car, and when I inquired, he smiled.
“I found a better way of transporting myself.”
“Public transportation?”
The last time that Ayale remembered using a bus, it was to go to a used car dealership after winning six hundred dollars with Mega Millions.
“That’s one way of putting it.” He couldn’t stop laughing. “It’s public because it’s available to the public…”
He splintered into hapless hilarity. My incomprehension only made it funnier, and so I patiently waited until he had tired himself out.
“Well?”
He only laughed again, moving toward a woman who was looking doubtfully at the rates.
I was impatient to see how Ayale would take himself homeward. He prolonged the torture by scrutinizing the sky and sighing at the uncertainty of the weather. He wondered aloud at those who depended on bicycles. He apologized profusely for not bringing his car to take me home, and he verified that I had my T pass. By the end, I was laughing, too. Five P.M. arrived, as it always does. While he locked up the booth, a taxi pulled up to the curb. Ayale raised a hand in greeting and, with the other, steered me toward its doors. The driver lowered the front passenger-side window and peered out. He looked furious.
“Can you please just get in? Please?”
“We’re making two stops tonight.”
“You must be joking, man! Do you realize I’m still on duty? Huh? That means I’m working, okay? I could get fired if they find out, okay?”
“One more stop won’t make a difference.”
“Actually, it’s super easy to get home from here—”
“Don’t be ridiculous—get inside.”
“No, seriously, I’d rather take the train. I have some stuff to buy anyway.”
“Then we’ll take you there, too.”
“No, we will not. Look, yene konjo, you’ll get home faster by train, I promise.”
“Right, so I’ll just—”
“Are you refusing to help me?” Ayale sounded incredulous.
The man glared but was the first to look away.
“I’ll take you wherever you want,” he finally muttered.
“Thank you. If we hadn’t wasted all this time arguing, you’d be halfway done by now.”
I climbed in after him and we drove to my apartment, Ayale smoking contentedly while we raced past late night lights and people. I thanked the man upon our arrival, and when he said nothing, Ayale tapped him on the shoulder, and he grunted. Ayale winked at me.
I heard the story the following week. Our sullen cabbie was the brother of a Stuart Street attendant, a longtime Ayale acolyte. Ayale had paid for their mother’s blood transfusion, and if the attendant had respected him before, there was now no one in the universe who could match his magnificence. All offers to pay the sum back were refused. One morning, Ayale arrived at the lot only to find the man prostrate before him on the ground, begging him to name anything that could serve as a meager token of his gratitude. Ayale was his true brother, not like the other vultures who passed as kinsfolk in this land of coyotes. Ayale responded that he only hoped the transfusion would take. The man wept harder.
It was then that Ayale remembered to ask after his brother: how fared the taxi business these days? Fine, sighed the man, made wretched by his debt. How lucky he was, continued Ayale, what fun, speeding around the city, meeting new people at all hours of the nigh
t, while he was saddled with a barely running sedan. The man put two and two together and noted that his brother often kept the taxi later than he should for his own joyrides; would Ayale be in need of some chauffeuring? And so it was that the one gained a driver, and the other relief from his guilt.
The truly loyal were the smallest in number. There were many fools who parroted Ayale’s words to whomever would listen, but the ones who really believed were chained to him for eternity, doomed (blessed?) to be destroyed at the same moment his number came up. However, they were also the real beneficiaries of his generosity, receiving new cars, round-trip tickets to Ethiopia, promotions, apartments, medical treatment, extended time with dying parents, all paid from the depths of Ayale’s capacious pockets. No matter how angry they might become, no matter how suspicious their families and friends (who soon disappeared, since being Ayale’s man was a full-time job), there was simply no way to pay everything back. Even if there had been, Ethiopian insistence on infinite misery requires that the recipient of any favor, no matter how basic, be forever indebted to the giver of that favor. It’s in an attempt to restore these men’s dignity that I call them disciples instead of indentured servants; perhaps it’s even a bestowal of holy order.
With the grafting of Fiker onto the tree of Ayale, the disciples grew confused: to whom did they now pledge themselves? Ayale had initially won preeminence through seniority, his having been there first and created them more than enough to ensure his omnipotence. Gradually, though, it became apparent that Ayale and Fiker, if not different sides of the same coin, knew that the coin existed and that it was a pretty important one, and the disciples grew unsure about whether Ayale remained supreme. Perhaps he and Fiker were engaged in a silent struggle as the latter mutinied against the former; perhaps they were brothers who must live as one in order to survive. After a month of befuddled imbalance, it was tacitly decided that Ayale was king, Fiker was first mate, and everyone had to stay on their toes: there was no telling when whatever was being kept at bay to sustain this relationship would be unleashed.
The Parking Lot Attendant Page 8