The Crown Ain't Worth Much

by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

  II.

  I’ve read about the afterlife, but I’ve never really lived.

  Pete Wentz

  THE YEAR MY BROTHER STOPPED LISTENING TO HIP-HOP

  I was 19

  & four girls went missing

  from the rusted swing set beside scottwood elementary

  where we used to throw basketballs at the bent

  rim with no net after dark

  & Trenton

  who was once young & stole

  kisses from high school girls

  underneath the Bishop Hartley bleachers

  got arrested for pulling

  a .45 in the club because it was Saturday night &

  the N word crawled out

  from behind the wrong tongue &

  swam through the bass right before the beat

  dropped & someone always gotta throw fists

  into something sacred after last call

  & it was still eastside

  & we still so hood

  & Jay-Z called himself Hova

  twelve times in one song

  which blared from the speakers in my first apartment

  so loudly I couldn’t hear my father when he asked why

  I didn’t come to the mosque anymore

  & I got a ticket for my window tint being too dark

  & maybe my skin bearing too much of a resemblance on

  a backstreet in Bexley but I lied & told my grandmother

  it was for speeding so that I could stay fly

  & my new nephew howled into the world on the same day

  Biggie would have turned 30 so I was late

  to the hospital because it was almost summer in the Midwest

  & mo’ money mo’ problems was on the radio at sunset &

  I was cruising down Livingston

  with a girl riding shotgun who woke up

  that morning in my Tribe Called Quest t-shirt hoping

  I would finally tell her I loved her back

  & two months later she fell in love with a coast

  where my phone calls were no longer currency

  & I didn’t know how to define that kind of alone

  so that year I spent my tuition refund check on new headphones

  & turned the volume up on everything & slowly

  walked into the water

  DUDES, WE DID NOT GO THROUGH THE HASSLE OF GETTING THESE FAKE IDS FOR THIS JUKEBOX TO NOT HAVE ANY SPRINGSTEEN

  & it is the end of another summer where I have slept on my couch for days only allowing another body to interrupt long enough for our limbs to tangle like weeds up the side of a brick house, reaching for something impossible. I promise there have always been dishes spilling out of the sink, love. It’s how I discovered this kind of hunger. Last week, Rick lit a cigarette & yelled across the bar that the only difference between smoking & kissing someone who smokes is the way mouths collide before death sits in your lungs like an abandoned city & everyone laughed while I tried to wipe another’s lip gloss from my cheek. Most people I know cannot sleep until they crawl through someone else’s hollow. There are nights when I wish we were all still children, but then again, I suppose we may be or at least there is no other way to explain how we make every doorway our own. The way we stain ourselves & anything else that moves. The way we scream into the dark like a siren & the weeping, yet another thing we never mention in the morning. I think I am starting to vanish slowly from head to toe. There are ten different ways to say sunset. The bartender says my face is wearing all of them.

  COLLEGE AVENUE, HALLOWEEN, 2002

  Earlier, on the floor of my dorm room, Brittany told me

  I mean, dude, I know you’re Buddy Holly but only because YOU’RE telling me you’re Buddy Holly. Everyone at the party may just think you’re a black guy in an old suit.

  And I told her that she had no idea what she was talking about because this was the 2000s, and we are only 19 and not yet saddled with the burdens of our parents except for in the middle of some nights, when the loneliness slides itself along our necks like a crucifix and we gasp for anything familiar,

  but I told her that time is not now, not when this tweed striped jacket was 49.99, and I spent all morning shining these shoes, so clean I could see my face in them, if that face were white which it kind of will be in a way later, I told her, if only in the confidence it will have in itself.

  But, right now tonight, everyone at this party thinks I am dressed as Sammy Davis Jr., and the decades old couch I am pushing my fingers in between is wrapped in torn cloth covered like a grandmother’s bible the girl next to me curves her spine around the 90s pop song swinging its legs over the air and asks me where Frank Sinatra is and I want to ask her what she knows of the Apollo, the Mecca, bowing to four white kids from Lubbock Texas in 1957 if she knows how hard it might be for her to squeeze a standing ovation outta all of those black hands but I smile instead and just say Frank’s buried in California so she will give me her phone number and I can pretend to have lost it on the hardwood floor of this house which has the consistency and activity of a beehive, all at once sticky and buzzing

  so I go outside to escape the coat of dried beer throwing itself over the bare and cracking walls. Outside, my white friend Andy, who sits in the back during documentary film class and wears his pants and fitted cap so low we think he’s sleeping, tells me I make a good Sammy Davis Jr. and I tell him I am supposed to be Buddy Holly, so he laughs and says what’s the difference, and I say a burning plane in an empty field, and a burning cross in front of a house and then he stops laughing and asks if I saw the girl dressed as Pocahontas

  and I said no at the time but then she was stumbling out of the previously locked bathroom when I went back inside and she was followed by Tupac, or at least someone who was once close to resembling Tupac before this moment when the brown and black makeup sweats from his previously white skin and he pulls a feather once belonging to a headdress from his tongue, and stares at the girl whose taste was still splitting his throat wide open, and without looking at me he says Man. there are some things that stay with you your whole life. there are some things it is impossible to sleep off.

  I promise the girl on the couch I will call her and maybe I will after all because I am becoming more and more like my father every day, the way we both swing into the darkness like it is our birthright, the way we both crave the moon and the breeze dancing in for the gossip after we walk out of the party, which I do to get back to the dorm, so I can tell Brittany she was right

  up until the corner of College and Ruhl, where back in ’75, before the houses were worth millions, I hear the dealers would kill you right where you stood for fuckin’ with their corner and the police sirens knew these streets like a second language and still do though for different reasons, or so they say

  as the red and blue glow devours the blackest parts of the night, and the officers press arms into my back and yell questions which don’t desire answers, the kind of questions that have nothing to do with what I’m doing out at this hour.

  On the other end of the sidewalk Andy from documentary film class and his friends finish their cans of beer and throw them on someone’s lawn before running into the alley, but none of the officers move, except for when my student ID falls out of my pocket, and only then, when a flashlight shines on it just long enough for one of them to get a glimpse,

  and when our legs are all once again planted to the pavement, though only mine trembling, and when my jacket is wearing a fresh tear, one officer looks me up and down.

  Says,

  Sorry. We thought you were someone else.

  ALL THE WHITE BOYS ON THE EASTSIDE LOVED LARRY BIRD

  cuz he put up his finger to celebrate before the 3 even went in back in ’86 / during the 3-point contest / i guess he knew it was good / or i guess he knew he already won / like the white boys in bexley who we would find when there was no food in our kitchens / and play them for whatever money their parents could spare / knowing they couldn’t hang
/ cuz tony and mario just made varsity and we could take their money easy / and they would always get more / their 3-pointers would smack the backboard / the rim a trembling halo / and still their hands raised letting the late summer drink from an underserving fingertip / before they walked home on a street where no one had died / while we took twenty dollars to mcdonalds and got enough food to last the weekend / i know that if i sweat enough i will be fed / or something will be built / but not bear my name when it is finished / i tear open a hamburger and my fingertips are slick with grease / i hold them to the sky but no breeze comes / always the eager mouth / never the hand that feeds / when i scored 20 against watterson / their student section called me a nigger / a small price to pay / for my name in the newspaper / a picture of my face / 3 pages past the section where my grandmother checks for funerals / they say to have your name stripped and sewed back together by the same hands / is a kind of victory / where i’m from / none of the black boys celebrate / until the ball slides through the net / falling satisfied from its mouth / this is what waking up without a mother will do / the story about larry bird goes / he walked into a locker room that night and asked / which one of you is playing for second place? to a room full of black players / and no one made a sound

  THE SCOUTING REPORT FOR THE ONLY BLACK BOY ON THE SOCCER TEAM

  says:

  he real

  fast but he prone to gamble

  like his daddy was when

  harlem was still loud and

  tall and swaying

  and they both make the kinda

  mistakes that leave whole families

  on their backs

  in the grass mourning and

  hungry

  he real fast though and

  short but he jump real

  real high like there

  might be somethin’ in

  the sky he trying to reach

  he jump way higher this season

  heard the sky opened up and

  got his grandma last winter but

  he take plays off

  like he out here sleeping

  he be sleep through 6am practice

  sleep through women’s studies class

  sleep through his mom’s throat

  closing shut like an old wound

  sleep through the sirens and gasping outside

  his bedroom door and barely even

  move ‘til she a ghost

  but he real fast

  and see the whole field

  sometimes think he

  may never stop watching

  just waiting for someone

  to come home.

  ODE TO ELLIOTT SMITH, ENDING IN THE FIRST SNOWFALL OF 2003

  & when they come for us & whatever is left of our spectral bodies

  tells them that we were always as lonely as we were the day we were

  pulled from our mothers, thrashing & cold

  when screaming was the only language & therefore it was a gift &

  not the burden it is when trying to call out to a lover quickly

  evaporating into shadows

  as your own blood congregates in your lungs

  on the day when the knife grew impatient in its demanding of flesh,

  six of us piled into the corner booth at twin palace

  & emptied our nearly barren pockets so that we could order two

  plates of beef fried rice because

  if you pretend to love enough

  people

  you will never go to bed hungry &

  we don’t have any money to tip but we leave anyway because other

  people’s hunger is not our problem once we are fed & we took

  extra fortune cookies &

  Kristen’s said Drink up, baby. Look at the stars &

  Rick’s said everything you were born with will provide you with infinite

  warmth & we laugh at the starless night sky dressed in thick clouds

  & how Rick shivers even though it is only October & the air

  is not supposed to settle into our bones with knives

  until months from now when we

  lie to our families about why we won’t

  be coming home for Christmas break & Kristen yells

  all fortunes are liars at the sky & it answers back

  with heavy white powder that licks

  at the sidewalks & rests in our hair until we

  are covered in this broken promise of stars & warmth

  & I look at the discarded fortunes & the broken cookies that

  once held them & I wonder if this

  is how our parents see us now promising gifts

  birthed & pulled from

  a loving shell only to grow into another disaster

  uninvited & spreading itself along the streets with a

  slow crawl & the wind blows one last tiny strip

  & it lands on my shoe & says WE ARE ALL GOING

  TO DIE ALONE & I don’t tell anyone the truth

  for a whole year

  IN DEFENSE OF THAT WINTER WHERE I LISTENED TO THE FIRST TAKING BACK SUNDAY ALBUM EVERY DAY UNTIL THE SNOW PEELED ITSELF BACK FROM THE GRASS AND I FOUND MY COLLEGE SWEATSHIRT AGAIN

  We got kicked out of the only bar that could fit us

  & all of the sadness we latched to our backs when

  Jared swallowed too much of something dark & burning

  right before

  he took the microphone from someone singing Beat It during

  karaoke night & started to read a poem he

  found in the ice outside our apartment the morning after the

  cancer came back & stretched itself wide

  in his mother’s lungs & all I heard before he got pulled

  by the collar was something about the slow dying of a town

  drowning in its own oil & now we have nowhere to drink

  ourselves into whatever silence will make the night into

  a time machine. Instead, I give another new girl my warmest

  clothes while we stare up at the moon and clutch each other out

  of the necessity for warmth & never the hunger for romance.

  She asks if I have ever watched a singer throw

  his grief over an audience like a blanket, a mass of boys

  weeping in the front

  row & I tell her yes because I have seen a father singing

  a prayer into his palms while a woman he loves

  fades away forever & I think

  this may be the same thing

  I think I have been among the mass of boys

  crying in the ruins of a city painted in

  the cool grey of heartache. Ice is starting

  to fall from the sky again.

  It falls into the hair of the girl I am holding

  & I run my fingers through it,

  looking for the end of a poem. She asks

  if I have ever watched someone

  take a shovel & chisel the ground until it fits only them & what

  they can carry in their arms to heaven &

  I tell her no even though I can see Jared sitting in the light

  from the upstairs window, holding the picture of his mother

  where he is small & holding her hands & crying next to a wooden

  roller coaster that once stretched high into the Cincinnati

  sky but was just torn to dust & replaced

  with something metal & fast & howling

  because the boys stopped being afraid

  & told themselves that they could never die

  from anything & I think of this watching Jared in the glow

  of his younger self & his living mother & the two cigarettes

  he is holding in each hand, drinking the thick

  black smoke into his lungs &

  closing his eyes in prayer & I don’t know if it is love that carries us

  to that kind of drowning so I ask the girl I am holding

  if she has ever seen a boy so in love with another pe
rson

  that the boy sews his own burial suit with his bare hands

  WHEN I SAY THAT LOVING ME IS KIND OF LIKE BEING A CHICAGO BULLS FAN

  what I mean is that my father can tell a bunch of cool stories about back in the day when I was truly great. there is a mountain of gold that has gathered dust in the corner where I used to sleep, and look at all of these pictures. in this one, I am wearing rainbow shorts and hurling rocks at a shoreline. in this one, I am smiling in the glow of 13 lit candles pushed into a sheet of dark sugar. you may ask why I allow my face to drown in less and less joy with each passing year and I will say I just woke up one day and I was a still photo in everyone else’s home but my own. or I will say I promise that my legs just need another season, and then I will be who you fell in love with again. and then probably just I’m sorry that there was once a tremendous blue sky and then a decade of hard, incessant rain.

  CLUB 185, BEXLEY, 2003

  Nick Drake killed himself by overdosing on anti-depressants

  29 years ago tonight which no

  other soul cares about in this bar

  but I have just enough money to search out Pink Moon on the juke

  so I do and go to press

  play but my roommate Rick who is drunk, and laughing,

  and already casting

  his heartbreak over every girl in this bar like a dark cloud

  says c’mon man. no one here wants to hear that shit

  so he presses play on “Don’t Stop Believin”’

  instead and the whole bar locks arms and sings along while I