The Best American Essays 2014

by John Jeremiah Sullivan

  My father, somehow, appears to be in animated grinning rapport with a young woman in minuscule shorts, brassiere, and pierced tongue. “I’m nineteen,” I think I hear her say.

  Out before the Man, a gang of tribal majorettes brandish flaming batons. My father and his young friend take note, but it does not halt the flow of language between these two. What are they saying? Something naughty? Is my father—horrible! miraculous to imagine!—getting some sort of angle going here? I draw near to them. She is telling my father that she is interested in doing something to do with environmentalism. My father is getting the opposite of an angle going. He is saying, “Yeah, but I worry that all that environmental stuff is going to inhibit trade.” She is saying that she would like to go to Africa someday. “I once calculated fertilizer subsidies in Malawi” is his reply.

  This is why I love my father. Probably ninety-nine out of a hundred men in the vicinity would be trying to persuade this girl out into the dark of the evening with talk of “Baby, let’s bump uglies. Let me fly my freak flag with you.” But of course that particular flag, the lecherous-septuagenarian-horndog flag, is not freaky at all. Much freakier, much more radically self-expressive, when you are down in the dust with some winsome young lady, is to ply her instead with talk of fertilizer subsidies and not take it there at all.

  The fire dancers retreat. The drill-chuck-mansion pedestal goes up in a great pumping beefheart of flame. My father sits in a rain of cinders big as playing cards, more than sufficient to ignite the infant wisps of his remaining hair. Unconcerned, he gawps at the flames. The danger is unreal to him, or not as important as the splendid inferno before him. In childhood, I knew my father as a man to cringe at loud noises, to wince, cower, shield his precious carcass when you raised your fists to him, as I did at least once in my teenage years. That man is not this man, to whom the risk of minor incineration is worth an extra instant of beauty. The transformation dates, I think, to the cancer treatment. There is likely some best-selling wisdom here, à la Everything I Need to Know I Learned from My Christ-Bitten Kindergartner. If not a bankable bathroom title, the inferno begs at least some modest, affirming revelation. Don’t fear the reaper. Regret not the past. Stand in the flames. Hide not your genitalia. Naked boobs like to be photographed.

  But my mind, unfortunately, is dwelling not on life’s precious evanescence but on the eight-hour traffic jam we’ve been told to expect in the postburn exodus. Instead of getting into a soul communion with my father, I am screaming at him, “Move! Move! Move!”

  We speed back to the RV and beat the traffic handily.

  “Well, I thought that was extraordinary,” says my father. We are riding south through the Great Basin Desert in the small hours of the night. “A fine capstone to our adventures. I hope not, but perhaps.”

  He is returning to the real world, to thoughts of his faltering immune system, his racking cough, the sores in his mouth, the rings around his pupils.

  As it turns out, these troubling symptoms are unlikely to kill him. The pupil halos turn out to be benign. His lung infection proves treatable. The doctor doubles his transfusions of immunoglobulin, and when I see him next, he’s looking healthy and feeling fine. We ponder a trip next year to Myanmar.

  And Cam. I almost forgot about Cam. Cam stayed at Burning Man, still on the lookout for a new community, a desert sweetheart, a sense of clarity and closure to his curious year. On Sunday evening the Temple burned, and Cam had a good, exhausting cry over the decline and death of Sierra the dog. By the pulsing light of the embers, Cam met a lovely young woman, a “playa goddess,” in his description. By gosh, he and the playa goddess hit it off, and by his own account he got to third base with her. One Californian wrinkle was that two other people were also getting to third or some other base with her at the time Cam stepped onto the field. But that was okay, that was cool. The only truly disappointing thing about the evening was that when the playa goddess started trying to get to third base with Cam, that project got derailed because Cam was wearing some high-concept outdoorsman’s trousers that had no zipper access. Still, no regrets. He got more out of the week than he’d honestly expected. He’s going back next year. He will be wearing different pants.

  JERALD WALKER

  How to Make a Slave

  FROM Southern Humanities Review

  GATHER SCISSORS, CONSTRUCTION paper, crayons, popsicle sticks, and glue. Take them to the den, where your thirteen-year-old sister sits at the table thumbing through your schoolbook on black history. Smile when she notices you and turns to the premarked page with a photo of Frederick Douglass. It’s one from his later years, when his Afro was white. Realize you need cotton balls. Leave and return with them a moment later to see that your sister has already cut from the construction paper a circle that will serve as Douglass’s head. Start gluing popsicle sticks together to make his body. As you work silently, your sister tells you basic facts about slavery and abolition that you will present to your class. You’ll end the presentation by saying with passion that Frederick Douglass is your hero, which will not be true because you are only ten and the things you are learning about black history make it difficult to feel good about his life, and sometimes yours.

  But feel good about the beating he gave his master. Your classmates feel good about it too. They cheer when you describe it, as they cheered seconds earlier when you recited Douglass’s famous line: You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man. “I wouldn’t have taken that stuff either,” one of your classmates says after school. Forget his name in a few years but remember his skin was so dark that you and your friends had no choice but to call him Congo. Congo explains how he would have gouged out his master’s eyes, and then other boys break their masters’ legs and amputate their arms, and when someone curls his fingers into a claw and twists off his master’s balls everyone cups his crotch in agony before laughing. Enjoy how wonderful it feels to laugh at that moment, and as you walk home, with Douglass staring somberly out of your back pocket, wish black history had some funny parts.

  Find a funny part. One has been captured on an FBI wiretap of Martin Luther King, Jr., in which he’s in a hotel having sex and at the right moment yells, “I’m fucking for God!” The funniness is not immediately apparent, though, because you are twenty-five now and King is your hero and the woman with whom he is performing God’s work is not his wife. Wonder with indignation how he could do such a thing, but while smoking the second of three bongs come to terms with the complexity of humankind and the idea of moral subjectivism. Now it is clear that the important thing here is not the messenger but rather the message. It is also clear that the message bears repeating.

  After you repeat it, your girlfriend looks confused. She opens her mouth as if to respond but all she does is stare up at you, not even blinking when a bead of sweat falls from your forehead onto hers. Try to explain that you are only quoting some black history but be overtaken by the giggles and conclude that this is a conversation for a different time, when you have not smoked three bongs and are not doing God’s work. And maybe it is a conversation for a different person too, because this one is white and does not like to talk about race. She does not even see race, she has said, having taught herself to judge individuals solely by their character and deeds. She is postracial, the first postracial person you have ever known, but because the term has not yet been invented you just think she’s stupid. And because you are the first person she has ever known who has taught himself to see race in everything, she thinks you are stupid too. In time, you both seek and find smarter companions.

  Yours, like Frederick Douglass, is, to use a phrase from that earlier era, a mulatto. This appeals to you a great deal because you know mulattos give race a lot of thought, and so this girlfriend probably will not mind helping you see it in places you might have missed. And maybe she can understand it in ways you cannot, since her perspective was not shaped by a stereotypical ghetto experience, like yours, but by a stereotypi
cal suburban experience, like the Fonz’s.

  “It wasn’t quite like his,” she says.

  The schools she attended were excellent; her neighborhood was safe; the parks and streets were pristine; racial diversity was negligible; the community had its own Fourth of July parade. As you remind her of these facts, sense her getting uptight, and diffuse her discomfort with a wide grin and a bad joke, something along the lines of her only run-in with the police being with an officer named Friendly.

  She nearly smiles.

  Give her two thumbs up at the hip and say, “Aeyyyyyyy!”

  She does smile as she calls you a moron. “But seriously,” she continues, and do not interrupt when she relates some of the challenges she faced as one of the few black kids in high school. You have been disappointed by how little she talks about race, to say nothing of her inability to see it everywhere, so her self-pity is a rare treat. Nod sympathetically when she broadens her grievances to include her family; the stares and snickers her parents faced in restaurants; how her brother was routinely followed by mall security; how her sister had trouble getting a date for the prom. Say that while these are excellent blemishes on her community, they are relatively benign. Some people, like you, for instance, lived in communities with drugs, gangs, crime, bad schools, police brutality, and the collective view that white people were and would always be racists. Let the conversation end as she concedes that, should you have children, her stereotype is preferable to yours.

  Have children, two boys, two years apart, and decide that neither stereotype will do. The ghetto was never an option, but do not be thrilled about raising your sons to be Fonzies. Want a racially diverse, progressive, urban community, but instead move to one that is 96 percent white, conservative, and rural. It is in a college town near Boston where you and your wife land professorships, the primary appeal being that your house is only a block from campus. It is also, the realtor tells you, on the parade route. Buy four lawn chairs. Sit in one next to your wife and sons on the Fourth of July and wave American flags at the procession. Enjoy this. Your boys are happy.

  Later that evening, wrestle with this question: How long will your boys be happy in a 96 percent white, conservative, rural town near Boston?

  The answer for your older son, now five, is sixty-eight more days.

  That is when you come home from teaching one afternoon and your wife informs you that one of his classmates told him that people with his skin color are stinky. Your son reported this incident while crying, but that night he appears to be fine, based on your observations of him, conducted from his bedroom closet. For the twenty minutes you have been in there, he and his little brother have lain in their adjacent beds chatting about cartoon characters and imaginary friends and a new fire truck they wish to own. When they finally fall asleep you sneak out and report the good news to your wife, though you caution that more observations will be necessary. In the meantime, you say, that classmate of his should be disciplined. Curl your fingers into a claw and tell your wife you are twisting off his tiny, five-year-old balls.

  “First of all,” your wife responds, “the person who said it is a girl. Second, let’s not make a big deal out of this. I’ve already told him that she was just being silly. I’m sure he’s already forgotten the whole incident.”

  Dispute this. Tell her that kids remember these sorts of things, sometimes for decades. Tell her about Congo. Imagine Congo’s father learning of his son’s nickname and later that night hiding in his closet, watching to see if he cries.

  A few weeks pass and your son has not cried again. Decrease but do not suspend the observations. Remain on edge, as there are many kids out there who at any moment could say something potentially harmful with long-term consequences.

  This is exactly what happens. And this time the culprit is your older son’s little brother. He recently started preschool and has noticed that his skin color more closely resembles the other kids’ than his brother’s, and that his brother’s skin color more closely resembles yours than your wife’s, and that your wife’s skin color is closer in resemblance to his than to his grandmother’s, and that his grandmother’s skin color is exactly the same as that of the kids in preschool, except for the brown spots on her hands. He turns to his six-year-old brother and asks, “Why is skin different colors?”

  A beat passes before your older son responds, “I don’t know.”

  Wonder if this is the moment to have your first important discussion with your sons about race. You can do it by revisiting that “stinky” comment, for starters, and then by warning them of other insults they’ll likely receive, though be sure to note that insults, relatively speaking, are not much compared to what they’ll learn studying a history that is not very funny. Determine that yes, the time for this talk has come, and then watch it evaporate when your sons scream bloody murder as you emerge—perhaps too quickly—from their closet. Fail at your attempts to calm them before your wife hurries into their room and catches the full rush of their bodies. She sits with them on the bed as they wail through tears that you frightened them. Your wife gives you a look that foretells a coming drought of affection, and your boys give you looks that make you seriously wonder if you have the capacity to be a good father. Conclude that you probably do not, but decide to give yourself a fighting chance by ending your subjection to race. Tonight the boys will sleep with their mother, and you will sleep alone in their room, but tomorrow evening, while the boys are in the den playing with their new fire truck, find your wife. She will be sitting at the kitchen table grading papers. Scoop her a dish of mint ice cream. Lower yourself across from her. Stare into her eyes and say this: You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man. She will look confused. Explain.

  PAUL WEST

  On Being Introduced

  FROM The Yale Review

  ONCE THE PERSON introducing me bit his tongue so badly that blood poured over his necktie onto the index card on which he had inscribed my entire life. Another time one of the more combative younger poets introduced a colleague in terms so stark and acidulous the speaker seemed struck dumb: “If I were you,” our host opined, “I’d go do something else, not listen to this genius’s gibberish; he screws better than he writes.” One day at the University of Tulsa, my introducer actually read aloud my entire curriculum vitae, taking up some thirty minutes, smitten at the outset by parroty echolalia and devastating nerves. Even as he spoke, on and on, I ran a 2B pencil through paragraphs of comparable length in my speech. Indeed, given time enough, we could have exchanged roles completely; the introduction would have supplanted the speech. I cannot think why someone has not attempted this—suddenly the audience twigs it that the introducer is the real draw after all and the ostensible speaker is a figment, a ghost who will slink away when no one is looking.

  Stanley Elkin, never the master of the gentlest turn of phrase, used to proffer an introduction of such glistening eloquence, such magisterial authority, such daunting length that the speaker, humbled, only mumbled, aching to get off and away, not having been warned what he or she would have to follow. In the same neck of the woods, St. Louis, on the campus of Washington University, William H. Gass used to do a similar thing, reading an introduction even more resplendent than anything of Elkin’s, achieving something between encyclopedia entry and red-hot book review, leaving you more or less to flounder (or shine) in the afterglow, but with one plus: he left behind him a cloud of menthol and eucalyptus from the big toffee on which he had sucked to clear his tubes. So even as you trotted up into that aroma and began, your sinuses behaved, and you excelled. Or choked by newly descended phlegm, you coughed on your finest phrases.

  Gass, that formidable introducer, had (no doubt still has) another trick, however. Having studied temptation, he lays on something you cannot resist, a treat for having sung for your supper—in my case a huge iced chocolate cake, perhaps to keep me from speaking ever again, such was its sleek sweet softness.

  You s
ee how, as memory spins and serves things up, the worst evokes the best, calling in from the periphery of aversion the silliest goings-on, I have been introduced, in my time, as a former test pilot, a professional cricketer, and an expert on cheese. I have had the introducer who interrupts you halfway through to pose a question, the introducer who fell off his chair, having been driven to sleep by my speech, and the one who set me up as Paul Weiss. You never know what’s coming, what’s in the water, whether the reading light will work. Once at Binghamton University, mine host led me up several flights of steep stairs so that I arrived too breathless to speak, not that it mattered anyway; we entered a room wholly in darkness, with nonetheless a murmur of people at the front and who knew how many behind them. The power had failed. So had the mike, the lights. He nonetheless maneuvered me into a chair in what I recalled as a Bob Hoskins motion from The Cotton Club (in which movie he is always positioning people) and began his introduction without a pause, getting the facts right and even paying tribute in the dark to things I’d written. I was then supposed to get on with my reading: no flashlight, no academic flare. For a few moments I fudged in the dark, heard appreciative glottal sounds, and stopped dead. Then the lights came on in dazzling anticlimax.

  I once saw the classical scholar Michael Grant introduce himself in Latin, having waited in vain for his host to show up, and what an urbane, concise job he made of it. Had it been me, I’d have spoken it in Greek—given Grant’s linguistic mastery, of course. Carlos Fuentes, handed a minibottle of Tang or some such to slake his thirst, tried it before beginning and treated us all to an agonized rictus of the mouth that merged loathing and disgust with hauteur and warned us not to do anything else vulgar or he would stalk off back to the Mexican embassy. One speaker, who must remain nameless, arrived in a wheelchair and, perhaps made nervous by his introduction, wheeled himself gradually backward as he spoke, destined to cannon against the blackboard as the hour ended. Yet another speaker, introduced in a blaze of NASA light, clawed at her crotch the instant the lights went down for her slide show, and kept doing so whenever darkness descended, fired up by the occasion.