How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

by Kiese Laymon

  I start to spend more time at home over the next few weeks since Mama is out of town with her boyfriend. Mama and I still haven’t paid the phone bill, so I’m running down to the pay phone every day, calling one of the admissions counselors at Oberlin College. He won’t tell me whether they’ll accept me or not, but he does say that Oberlin might want me because of, not in spite of, what happened at Millsaps.

  A month passes and I haven’t heard from Oberlin. I’m eating too much and dry-humping a woman just as desperate as me, and lying like it’s my first job, and daring people to fuck with me more than I have in a long time. I’m writing lots of words, too, but I’m not reckoning. I’m wasting ink on bullshit political analysis and short stories and vacant poems that I never imagine being read or felt by anyone like me. I’m an imitator, not a writer, and really, I’m a waste of writing’s time.

  The only really joyful times in life come from playing basketball and talking shit with O.G. Raymond “Gunn” Murph, my best friend. Gunn is trying to stop himself from slowly killing himself and others, after a smoldering breakup with V., his girlfriend of eight years. Some days, Gunn and I save each other’s lives just by telling and listening to each other’s odd-shaped truths.

  One black night, Ray is destroying me in Madden and talking all that shit when we hear a woman moaning for help outside of his apartment on Capitol Street. We go downstairs and find a naked woman with open wounds, blood, and bruises all over her black body. She can barely walk or talk through shivering teeth, but we ask her if she wants to come upstairs while we call the ambulance. Gunn and I have taken no sexual assault classes and we listen to way too much “The Diary” and “Ready to Die,” but right there, we know not to get too close to the woman and just let her know we’re there to do whatever she needs.

  She slowly makes her way into the apartment because she’s afraid the men might come back. Blood is gushing down the back of her thighs and her scalp. She tells us the three men had one gun. When she makes it up to the apartment, we give the woman a brown towel to sit on and something to wrap herself in. Blood seeps through both and even though she looks so scared and hurt, she also looks so embarrassed. Gunn keeps saying things like, “It’s gonna be okay, sweetheart,” and I just sit there weakly nodding my head, running from her eyes and getting her more glasses of water. When Gunn goes in his room to take his gun out of his waistband, I look at her and know that no one man could have done this much damage to another human being.

  That’s what I need to tell myself.

  Eventually, the ambulance and police arrive. They ask her a lot of questions and keep looking at us. She tells them that we helped her after she was beaten and raped by three black men in a Monte Carlo. One of the men, she tells the police, was her boyfriend. She refuses to say his name to the police. Gunn looks at me and drops his eyes. Without saying anything, we know that whatever is in the boys in that car has to also be in us. We know that whatever is encouraging them to kill themselves slowly by knowingly mangling the body and spirit of this shivering black girl, is probably the most powerful thing in our lives. We also wonder if whatever is in us that has been slowly encouraging us to kill ourselves is also in the heart and mind of the black girl on the couch.

  A few weeks later, I get a letter saying I’ve been accepted to Oberlin College and they’re giving me a boatload of financial aid. Gunn agrees to drive me up to Oberlin and I feel like the luckiest boy on earth—not because I got into Oberlin, but because I survived long enough to remember to say “yes” to life and “no” or at least “slow down” to slow death.

  My saying yes to life meant accepting the beauty of growing up black, on parole, surrounded by a family of weird women warriors in Mississippi. It also meant accepting that George Harmon, parts of Millsaps College, parts of my state, much of my country, my heart, and mostly my own reflection, had beaten the dog shit out of me. I still don’t know what all this means but I know it’s true.

  This isn’t an essay or a woe-is-we narrative about how hard it is to be a black boy in America. This is a lame attempt at remembering the contours of slow death and life in America for one black American teenager under Central Mississippi skies. I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and sift all this into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don’t want to lie.

  I want to say that remembering starts not with predictable punditry, or bullshit blogs, or slick art that really asks nothing of us; I want to say that it starts with all of us willing ourselves to remember, tell, and accept those complicated, muffled truths of our lives and deaths, and the lives and deaths of folks all around us over and over again.

  Then I want to say that I am who my grandma and Aunt Sue think I am.

  I am not.

  I’m a walking regret, a truth-teller, a liar, a survivor, a frowning ellipsis, a witness, a dreamer, a teacher, a student, a failure, a joker, a writer whose eyes stay red, and I’m a child of this nation.

  I know that as I got deeper into my late twenties, and then my thirties, I managed to continue killing myself and other folks who loved me in spite of me. I know that I’ve been slowly killed by folks who were as feverishly in need of life and death as I am. The really confusing part is that a few of those folks who have nudged me closer to slow death have also helped me say yes to life when I most needed it. Usually, I didn’t accept it. Lots of times, we’ve taken turns killing ourselves slowly, before trying to bring each other back to life. Maybe that’s the necessary stank of love, or maybe — like Frank Ocean says — it’s all just bad religion, just tasty watered-down cyanide in a Styrofoam cup.

  I don’t even know.

  I know that by the time I left Mississippi, I was twenty years old, three years older than Trayvon Martin will be when he is murdered for wearing a hoodie and swinging back in the wrong American neighborhood. Four months after I leave Mississippi, San Berry, a twenty-year-old partner of mine who went to Millsaps College with Gunn and me, will be convicted for taking Pam McGill, an amazing social worker, into the woods and shooting her in the head.

  San confesses to kidnapping Ms. McGill, driving her to some woods, making her fall to her knees, and pulling the trigger while a seventeen-year-old black boy named Azikiwe waits for him in the car. San will eventually say that Azikiwe encouraged him to do it. Even today, journalists, activists, and others folks in Mississippi wonder what really happened with San, Azikiwe, and Pam McGill that day. Was San trying to swing back? Swinging back at what? Were there mental health issues left unattended? Had Ms. McGill, San, and Azikiwe talked to each other before the day? Why was Azikiwe left in the car when the murder took place? How could someone as committed to people as Pam McGill die so violently? Was the eventual pardon of Azikiwe an act of justice?

  I can’t front, though. I don’t wonder about any of that. Not today.

  I wonder what all three of those children of our nation really remember about how to slowly kill themselves and other folks in America the day before parts of them died under the blue-black sky in Central Mississippi.

  Our Kind of Ridiculous

  WHEN I WAS TWENTY-FOUR, I FLEW PAPER airplanes past the apartment of a thirty-two-year-old white boy named Kurt in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Kurt rocked a greasy brown mullet, bragged about ironing his bleached Lee’s, and said the word “youse” a lot. Even with caked-up cornbread sealing the cracks of his teeth and a raggedy mustache that looked like it was colored by a hyper six-year-old, Kurt always reminded me of somebody cute.

  Kurt, whose apartment was directly above mine, lived with two women. One was his girlfriend. She could see. One was his wife. She could not.

  Three little boys lived in the apartment with Kurt and his two partners. The youngest boy was Kurt’s girlfriend’s child. This miniature Viking loved to run his muddy hands through his blond hair and grin when he wasn’t growling. The other two boys looked like they rolled around naked in a tub of melted Tootsie Rolls before coming out to play.r />
  I was in Pennsylvania working on my graduate thesis while Nicole, my girlfriend at the time, interned at Rodale Press. Though I had spent most of my life in Mississippi close to black folks who were thirty cents away from a quarter, that summer in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, was the most intimate I’d ever been with white folks who barely had a pot to piss in.

  After paying our rent, food, and utilities, Nicole and I had about $140 left in disposable income every month.

  That $140 had me feeling quite bougie.

  It was the first summer I hadn’t worked as a phone book delivery man, a waiter at Ton-o-Fun, a health care assistant at Grace House, a knife salesman at Cutco, a bootleg porter at the Buie House, a counselor at Upward Bound, or a summer school teacher at Indiana University. I was on a fellowship, which meant for the first time in my life, my job was simply to collect a small check in exchange for not wasting reading’s and writing’s time.

  During the day, when I wasn’t reading and writing, I made paper airplanes and talked outside with Shay, our eight-year-old neighbor; Barry, her six-year-old brother; and Kurt’s kids. For most of the summer, Kurt’s kids looked into our empty apartment through a huge sliding glass door. At first, they would stand about a foot from the door, looking directly at their reflections and our empty living room. A week or so into the summer, all three of Kurt’s kids started smashing their faces against the door and running their muddy hands up and down the glass.

  Shay and Barry had what Grandma called good home-training. They simply watched Kurt’s kids watch us from a distance and whispered in each other’s ears.

  Our apartment held one chair, one desk, a blow-up bed, a fridge covered in word magnets, and a cranky Mac. While Kurt’s place smelled like fried meats, thin gravy, sticky fruit punches, and nappy carpet that rarely got vacuumed, our place smelled like new paint and feet. Miseducation, ATLiens, Aquemini, and the greatest hits of Joni Mitchell and Curtis Mayfield worked to shield our ears from Kurt’s mash-up of Zeppelin, short-people screams, laughter, and that gotdamn Cartoon Network.

  One July weekend, someone got shot in the building next to ours. As soon as the police left, Kurt and I walked over to see what we could.

  As we walked, Kurt asked me how to pronounce my name. He’d heard his kids call me “Keith” and Nicole call me “Key” or “Kiese.”

  After I told him that Keith was fine, he asked me if he could borrow ten dollars. I told him I’d give it to him when we got back to our building.

  Kurt and I kept walking and talking about his odd family arrangement and money a little while longer before he asked me if people got shot a lot where I was from.

  I stopped to look him in the eye and see if he was asking a question he really wanted answered.

  He wouldn’t look back.

  I didn’t tell Kurt anything about missing Mississippi, or how I was reckoning with the fact that a friend of mine had taken a young woman into the Central Mississippi woods, blown her brains out, and was now serving a life sentence. I ignored Kurt’s question completely and asked him about Pennsylvania amusement parks, Italian ices, and when he planned on getting a job.

  After he answered all my questions, Kurt got really close to my face. He looked up at me and didn’t run from my eyes. “Keith, youse should move here,” he said. “I’m serious. Youse are different. Youse ain’t like your kind.”

  He kept saying it too, absolutely sure he’d given me that gift that a number of white folks I’d met loved to give black folks at the strangest times, the gift of being decidedly different than all them other niggers. It felt like Kurt wanted a pat on the back for not saying the word “nigger,” two pats for distinguishing one nigger from another nigger, and three pats for inching closer to the realization that black Americans were never niggers to begin with.

  On the way back from the murder site, Kurt walked ahead of me. I gripped his bony shoulder before we got to the hill leading up to our building. I asked him if his greasy mullet, his two in-house partners, his caved-in chest, his white BeBe’s kids, and his belief in niggers made him different than his kind.

  “I ain’t racist, Keith,” he kept saying.

  “That’s sweet,” I told him.

  Kurt wiggled free of my grip and walked up the hill to our building. I caught up with him outside of our glass door. I told him that the problem was that the niggers he believed in knew so much more about his kind than even he did, and that the niggers he believed in were taught to never ever be surprised by the slick shit that came out of the mouths of white folks. Then I got all graduate school on him and spouted some mess about dissonance, dissemblance, white absolution, and how it might be impossible for him to know if I was different than my kind if he didn’t know himself.

  Kurt turned his back on me and my big words.

  He walked upstairs to his family and slammed his door. I walked into our empty apartment, partly disappointed that I didn’t slap the taste out of Kurt’s mouth and mostly ashamed that there was so much more I wanted to say to him.

  If white American entitlement meant anything, it meant that no matter how patronizing, unashamed, deliberate, unintentional, poor, rich, rural, urban, ignorant, and destructive white Americans were, black Americans were still encouraged to work for them, write to them, listen to them, talk with them, run from them, emulate them, teach them, dodge them, and ultimately thank them for not being as fucked up as they could be.

  That’s part of what I learned in Emmaus, Pennsylvania.

  Kurt avoided me the rest of the summer, but his kids still banged their muddy hands on our sliding glass door every morning. A few days after Kurt said I was different than my kind, his youngest child walked into our apartment and started playing with the word magnets on our refrigerator. I placed the words “wash” “your” “dirty” “face” “and” “hands” “sometimes” “boy” in a line and asked him to read that sentence.

  Kurt’s son looked at the words, moved them around, smiled, and clapped his muddy hands like he was lightweight touched before proudly saying, “Nope. I can’t even read, Keith. Nope. I can’t. I can’t even read!” The little muddy joker said it the way you would expect a white child to say, “Gee! I found the treasure. Yep! I really found the treasure.”

  I laughed in that child’s face for a good minute and a half.

  Deep. Terrible. Evil. Sad laughs.

  And he laughed back, thinking I was laughing with him.

  For worse—never better—nothing I saw, or heard, or smelled, or touched, or felt from Kurt and his family surprised me that summer.

  I can’t say the same thing about myself.

  A month or so after I laughed at that little boy’s illiteracy, two of Nicole’s friends came to visit. I don’t remember much about Nicole’s friends except one of them was the roundest short adult I’d ever met and she tried too hard not to sound like she was from rural West Virginia. Every few seconds, she managed to throw the words “ridiculous” and “totally” into something that wasn’t ridiculous or totally anything.

  Nicole drove a tiny green Geo Metro that I couldn’t drive because it was a stick, and also because my license was suspended. The four of us piled in that Geo and headed to a Lilith Fair concert in Hershey. The concert wasn’t Fresh Fest, and I didn’t love the wet fog of patchouli and weed, or the lack of my kind at the show, but it ended up making me smile and feel a lot.

  After the concert, we stopped at a gas station before leaving Hershey and heading back to Emmaus. A few minutes after we got on the interstate, I reminded Nicole to turn on her headlights.

  Seconds later, we heard the siren.

  A young white cop came to Nicole’s side and pointed his flashlight at me in the passenger seat. I asked him if I could open the glove compartment to get her registration. He told me to keep my hands in plain sight.

  I laughed at him. “See?” I said to Nicole.

  An older white cop came up from behind us and approached my side. Both cops walked to the front of the Geo, talked fo
r a second, then told me to get out of the car.

  “For what?” I asked, now fake-laughing.

  “Because we saw you throw crack out of the window.”

  I sucked my teeth. “I’ont even drink,” I stupidly told the cop.

  I pointed toward the field and told both cops again that I didn’t throw shit out of the car and that we could all go look if they wanted to.

  When I raised my arms, the bigger cop put his hands on his gun and told me to put my hands on the car. He patted me down and handcuffed me while Nicole watched from the driver’s side and her ridiculous round friend sat quietly in the back of the car talking to the girl whose voice I can’t even remember.

  Blackness is probable cause, I tell myself.

  They got me.

  I’m standing handcuffed in front of the flashing blue lights of a parked police car and a green Geo Metro. I’ve had guns pulled on me before and I was never afraid.

  This is different.

  The handcuffs hurt more than the thought of bullets. The two cops with deep frown lines place me in the back of the police car “for my own good” as a parade of mostly drunk white folks, on their way home from Lilith Fair, drive down the highway looking in our direction.

  Shame.

  I am guilty of being too much like my kind, which means I am one mistaken movement from being a justifiable homicide, or a few planted rocks from being incarcerated.