Pops

by Michael Chabon

  After the show ended, Abe caught sight of Virgil Abloh backstage, but the designer was surrounded by press and fans. He nodded and smiled at Abe, but they didn’t get the chance to speak again. Fashion Week was over. It was time to go home.

  “I don’t want to go home,” Abe said.

  “I know,” I said. “Paris is fun.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “It’s been so exciting for you,” I suggested. “You don’t want it to end.”

  “Yeah. No, it’s not that.”

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “Tell me, buddy.”

  But he didn’t want to talk about it. We rode in a taxi back to our rented apartment in the 12th Arrondissement. Abe slowly packed up his clothes and laid out the jeans and T-shirt that he planned to wear on the flight home. He grew more silent and sank even deeper into whatever was eating him. He grew tearful. We had an argument. I was tired of fashion and fashion shows. I could feel only that I had had enough and that I wanted to leave and be done. It was hard for me to imagine feeling any other way.

  “We had a good time,” I said. “You got to do a lot of fun things and meet cool people. You got some nice things to wear. You were in Paris. Now it’s time to go home. Come on.”

  “I don’t want to go back,” he said.

  “We’ll come back to Paris. When you grow up, you can live here.”

  “It’s not Paris. It’s not the clothes.”

  “What is it?”

  “The Pigalle show,” he said.

  “That was your favorite. I wish I’d gone.”

  He looked at me, a funny expression on his face. I realized that the reason he’d had such a great time that night was because I had not been present. I had not been his father or his friend this past week. I had been only his minder. I was a drag to have around a fashion show, and because I could not enter fully into the spirit of the occasion, neither could Abe. He was worrying about me, watching me, wondering whether I was having a good time or not, whether I thought the shaggy Muppet pants, for example, were as stupid as the look on my face seemed to suggest.

  “It wasn’t the show, really,” I suggested as his eyes filled with tears. “Was it? It was the people you were with, the GQ guys, the buyers, that dude who owns Wild Style.”

  “They get it,” he said. “They know everything about all the designers, and the house, and that’s what they care about. They love to talk about clothes. They love clothes.”

  You are born into a family and those are your people, and they know you and they love you, and if you are lucky, they even on occasion manage to understand you. And that ought to be enough. But it is never enough. Abe had not been dressing up, styling himself, for all these years because he was trying to prove how different he was from everyone else. He did it in the hope of attracting the attention of somebody else—somewhere, someday—who was the same. He was not flying his freak flag; he was sending up a flare, hoping for rescue, for company in the solitude of his passion.

  “You were with your people. You found them,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “That’s good,” I said. “You’re early.”

  Adventures in Euphemism

  Do you remember the guy in a university town who thought it was a good idea to go through the text of Huckleberry Finn, editing it so that each instance of the word “nigger” was replaced with something less offensive? Not the professor at Auburn. Another guy. The one writing this sentence.

  Tom Sawyer was bedtime reading for me and my two youngest kids (son and daughter, then seven and nine) a few summers back. Of course we all loved it. It has some slow bits and some prolonged bouts of humor (Tom’s lovesickness, his punctilio about make-believe) that must have felt at least a little labored even back in 1876, when it often took weeks or months for a punch line to arrive. But it’s exciting and funny and often surprisingly tender, even capital-R Romantic, and the classic bits—the fence, the Bible-study tickets, the cave, the murder—appear to have lost none of their power to delight and scare children who dwell in a world of childhood so alien from that of Tom and Huck, half-feral in their liberty, alongside whom my own children seem like dogs in a run, no longer even straining at their cable.

  Reading Tom Sawyer occupied the entire summer, and during that time I don’t remember wrestling at all with the question of what to say out loud, with my actual lips and tongue, when my eyes arrived at that strange little word. A cursory search of Google Books suggests that it makes a total of only eight appearances in the entire book, which is, after all, not told by a backcountry boy in his own dialect but narrated, with a great deal of mock decorum, in the third person. Eight is probably fairly close to the number of times that I have said “nigger” in my life, never once without some kind of ironizing or sterilizing quotation marks of tone fitted carefully around it. At those fleeting moments when I encountered the word while reading Tom Sawyer to the children, I would substitute, without missing a beat or losing any literal meaning, “slave.” It was no big thing. The kids had no idea that a switcheroo had been run on them.

  But then we finished Tom Sawyer, and they had loved it, most especially the character of Huckleberry Finn, so much that they begged me to carry on to the eponymous sequel, starting the very next night.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a little bit more of a grown-up book.”

  It had been at least fifteen years since I’d read it last, and my memories of it were pretty vague. I was kind of repeating the conventional wisdom (which turned out, in my view, to be questionable—apart from the narrative voice, huge stretches of Huckleberry Finn don’t feel all that different from Tom Sawyer, especially toward the end, after Tom and his punctilio make their annoying return. The Duke and Dauphin and the feuding families complicate the book in ways that my kids needed help to understand. And then there are a few incredibly profound passages, above all the famous one in which Huck wrestles with the situational evil of absolute good as he determines to help Jim get free). But I knew—half-recollected, half-intuited—that there was some thorniness, that something in the book was going to complicate bedtime.

  We encountered the first of what must be at least two hundred instances of the bedeviled word on page six, along with Jim himself. Now I remembered!

  I flipped ahead, finding the word on almost every other page, twice or three times a page. The damned thing was lousy with it.

  “Guys,” I said, putting the book down. “We need to talk about this.”

  I explained to them that because this book was written in Huck’s own voice, and because, in the time and place of its setting, people of both races commonly referred to black people as “niggers,” and because there were a number of black characters, major and minor, in the book, I was going to be obliged to say, or not to say, that word a great many times. I explained that saying the word made me extremely uncomfortable, that it was not a word I ever used, that some black people still used it sometimes to refer to each other, but that was importantly different, and that black people I had known were just as uncomfortable using the word around white people as white people were using it around them. I told them about my childhood friend Harry, who, when discussing the Richard Pryor album Bicentennial Nigger with me, a fellow Pryor fan but, unlike Harry, a white boy, used to refer to it by the safe code name of “Bice.”

  Next I reminded them that Mark Twain was a great artist, a moral man, and, furthermore, an accurate writer. I said that as a writer myself, I was driven insane by the idea of somebody taking the words I had worked so hard to get absolutely correct and spatchcocking in whatever nonsense made them comfortable. Then I asked my kids what they thought I ought to do whenever I arrived at the word over the course of the next few months. I told them how I had substituted “slave” while we were reading Tom Sawyer, but that in this book, the word was going to mean so vastly much more, and less, than that.

  “You know what word I’m uncomfortable saying?” said my daughter, the nine-year-old. “Negro.”r />
  I remembered the earliest days of my consciousness of black people, when that was still, fadingly, a proper term. It had long since acquired distinct overtones of offensiveness, though it was not remotely, I thought, taboo. I could say it without feeling like I was licking a battery.

  “Negro,” I said. I really did not know what else to do. “All right, let’s give that a try.”

  So we did, and stuck with it, and it kind of worked, but every time I said “Negro,” I wondered if they, my new companions in bad faith, were feeling the acid charge of the true word in their minds.

  “Hey, Dad,” the little guy said at one point. “How come if you can’t say you-know-what, when you were reading Tom Sawyer you kept saying INJUN Joe, because that’s offensive, too.”

  “Because I’m an ass,” I said. Only I didn’t say “ass.”

  The Bubble People

  I was with my elder daughter, then fifteen, in the Peet’s on Telegraph Avenue, with a big Saturday-afternoon crowd, and as we waited for the barista to get to our orders, I started looking around at the other customers with a fresh and appreciative eye for the numerous freakazoids among them.

  I had just returned from a trip to a middle-size city deep in the middle of the country, where the people keep their freaky on the inside, deep down where it tends to fester and gasify. Now I felt that I was back among my kind. There was the lady in a coral fake-fur bonnet that featured pink hamster ears. There was the whippet-thin tall guy with the chains and the leather and a haircut like the Sydney Opera House dyed black, knitting something enigmatic—a cock sock, was my guess. At a table in a corner by himself sat a quietly ranting theorist of some subject understood only by him and his invisible interlocutor. And then there were my daughter and me. She was wearing giant flare jeans, a T-shirt that said SPECIAL CARE ORTHOPEDICS on the back, a raspberry pillbox hat with a black net veil and a big pouf of black tulle at the back, and plaid rubber rain boots, even though it wasn’t raining. I don’t have a really clear picture in my mind of the way I look—no clearer than the view you get of a house when you look out one of its windows—but I travel pretty frequently into the deep middle of the country. And every so often while I’m there, somebody will let slip an observation that seems to suggest I may give some indication of being a Northern California freakazoid, with my long hair, my scruffy beard, my pointy shoes, my pink shirts, my man purse, et cetera.

  I felt like telling my daughter that she ought to be grateful she was getting to grow up in Berkeley, where, if you are fourteen and feel like wearing a crazy Jayne Mansfield hat and rubber boots down the street in broad daylight, that is okay with your fellow citizens. Crazy is a choice they can get behind; indeed, they might on balance be inclined to insist on it. So I told her. “You’re lucky you get to grow up here. You can be as weird as you want to.”

  “I should probably be even weirder,” she said a little sadly. “It’s kind of a waste.”

  “Just be glad we don’t live in Middleburg,” I said, referring (though not pseudonymously) to the town from which I had, as I say, recently returned. And I shuddered, only partly for effect. “Man.”

  “Scary normal?”

  “So scary normal.”

  Now, this characterization was no doubt grossly unfair to the good people of Middleburg. Everybody there had been extremely kind and generous to me. They were, in many instances, literate and enthusiastic people, not to mention hospitable, solicitous, polite, and warm. They were proud of their city and all of its many advantages.

  It was not their fault that the whole time I was there, I felt like a kind of animated human scrawl moving across the ruled blue lines of their community. It was not their fault that I entered the atmosphere of their lives and landed on their homely planet as an alien probe, with all my instrumentation—recording devices, analysis units, story samplers—turned up to high gain. And it certainly was not their fault that I have spent my entire life, from the dawn of consciousness until this very moment, even here in hamster-eared Berkeley, feeling totally weird.

  When I was ten years old, I read Edgar Allan Poe’s verse for the first time and immediately decided (though that verb implies far more consciousness than was actually involved) that I was the poet’s living reincarnation. I must have been, for I, I mean he, had written the lines:

  From Childhood’s hour I have not been

  As others were—I have not seen

  As others saw—I could not bring

  My passions from a common spring—

  The hair stood up on my nape as I read those words from “Alone,” as did the neck hairs, I’m sure, of ten thousand other kids all around the world at that very moment, in the lonely redoubts of the solitudes we all shared with poor old Edgar Poe (even in Middleburg). Every crowded room I have ever entered, every public space I have ever crossed, every gathering I have ever attended—everywhere I interact with other people, except at the very heart, the absolute Middleburg, of my own family—I have done so with the consciousness, at times acute, at times negligible, that I did not, at some fundamental level, belong. This was true even as I stood there in Peet’s, surrounded by the other freakazoids of my adopted hometown; but in Middleburg, the consciousness was so acute as to be dispiriting, even painful.

  Driving along the semi-desolate, semi-beautiful boulevards of that city, trying to get a handle on the lives and natures of the mostly white, mostly Anglo-Saxon, mostly Protestant, mostly Republican people who were treating me with such kindness and showing me around their tidy little planet in their great big vehicles, I kept having the thoughts, familiar to anybody who lives in a place as “funky” as Berkeley (i.e., mixed-race, politically progressive, densely urban) that run something like: Is this my country? Are these my countrymen? We seemed to have so little in common, to see eye to eye on so few subjects, to find our way into so many conversations where so much could not be said without giving mutual offense or wandering into mutual incomprehension. “I have as much in common with people in Africa or Kyrgyzstan as I did with those folks,” I told my daughter. “Maybe less.”

  But then again, I told her, the only reason I could ever know how wide the gulf was between the Middleburgers and me was because they were my countrymen. We were woven, in different patterns, of the same materials of language, economics, politics, and culture. In Africa or Kyrgyzstan, it would have been impossible for me to pick up on the countless nonverbal cues, the artful and artless euphemisms, the cultural and subcultural and pop-cultural references that enabled me to interpret the racial and class biases, the underlying religious and social mores, the styles of dress, the decor of houses, the makes of shoe and automobile, to read all those manifold texts in a way that made the differences between us so plain to me. In other words, the reason I knew we had nothing in common was because we had so much in common.

  What was more, I explained to my daughter—the line was moving very slowly—while I was in Middleburg, I got into a couple of conversations, with people whose lives differed almost entirely in their histories and particulars from my own, during which what got revealed to me was not the shared humanity of my Middleburg companion and me but, rather, his or her own fundamental freakazoid nature, the solitary, often forlorn path he or she had wandered through illness, hardship, through the loss of a child and the distortions of consciousness imposed by grief, through a lifelong lonely way of seeing the world. As if the Poesque way of being Alone were indeed the paradoxical essence of that shared humanity. Solitude was our homeland, its population at once one and six billion.

  Sometimes you hear—I have said it myself—that if you live in Berkeley or someplace like it, you are “living in a bubble,” with the implication that surrounding us here along the banks of Strawberry Creek, or on the shores of San Francisco Bay, is a great uniform mass of normality—scary normality, if you prefer—from which we, to our glory or our shame, more or less flamingly deviate. But the truth is that the bubble is at once much smaller (it is exactly the size of one human bei
ng) and much larger than this whole freaky invisible-man-haranguing town (it is as big as this lonely nation, this solitary world).

  “So you’re saying we’re weird,” my daughter said, lifting the veil of her hat to take a sip of her decaf gingerbread latte. “I’m weird, is what you’re trying to say.”

  “Yeah, but it’s okay,” I told her, waving to the lady with the hamster ears. “You have to be weird somewhere. It might as well be here.”

  Against Dickitude

  This girl started texting my older son. They had known each other since kindergarten but ended up at different middle schools for sixth grade. Whassup, was her typical opening gambit; then, What r u doing? Sometimes she went on and on, inflating balloon after colored dialogue balloon on the screen of my son’s phone.

  I couldn’t quite get a fix on how the kid felt about it. He seemed flattered, I thought, and a little embarrassed; tickled; annoyed; unable, perhaps, to quite get a fix on how he felt about it himself. For over half his life, this girl had been a source only of that mingled tedium, irritation, and indifference with which little boys tend to regard their female classmates (and vice versa). On the other hand, she was a pretty girl, and their recent separation had no doubt dissolved some of the quasi-incestuous feelings of taboo that previously rendered them unappealing to each other.

  My son’s response to her text messages, however, was consistent and uniform: He shut her down. Nothing, he would text back. I’m busy. I cant talk right now bye. My wife and I had attempted to impose some controls on texting as the new behavior came online in the life of our family. No texting while homework remains to be done; no texting during dinner; no texting at all after nine p.m. But even when, by family statute, he was perfectly free to text away, my son would tell this girl that he could not. With other girls in his class, he texted freely, but there was something different in his eyes about this particular relationship, a premonitory tinge of the romantic, which brings me to my point: My son’s response to the proffered attention of an attractive young female was, systematically, I would almost say with devotion, to keep his distance. To frost her. He leaped to grab his phone when it quacked; he saw that it was her; he smiled, clearly pleased to hear from her; and then he thumb-typed: g2g. bye.