How We Fight for Our Lives

by Saeed Jones

  “I went to a house party,” I said. “A lot of people came.”

  “You sound tired,” she said. I thought I heard Kingsley’s collar jingling in the background.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, okay, baby. Drink water. I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  On the flight back to Nashville, I could see a dark blue crescent-moon bruise rising under the skin where Daniel had bit me. I went to the bathroom three times to throw up. Kneeling in the compressed space with my knees on the hard floor reminded my body of being in that dark room. The memory started in my kneecaps then raced through me, lighting up every single ache, scrape, and bruise my body had endured.

  16JANUARY 2008

  BOWLING GREEN, KENTUCKY

  Who are you the morning after the most beautiful man you have ever kissed tries to kill you? And the morning after that? How about the following week?

  Someone from the party uploaded the pictures she had taken on New Year’s Eve onto Facebook. Clicking through them one at a time, I leaned toward my computer screen like a forensic scientist. These didn’t look like images from what could’ve been my last night alive. If I hadn’t gone to the party myself, I’m not sure I would have even known that these were photos of a New Year’s Eve party. Had there even been a theme, or did The Future just mean wearing more black and white than usual? I tried to read my face but its language was inscrutable. I didn’t look interesting. I didn’t look like a man who was screaming behind his smile. I just looked drunk, stoned, and sweaty.

  Daniel isn’t in any of those pictures. I can’t tell you how many times, in the years since, I’ve gone back through them, hoping and fearing that I will see him, perhaps just out of focus, staring back at me. But he’s never there.

  I caught myself in the days afterward wishing I had a black eye, a broken bone, or a few more cuts and scrapes, if only to confirm that what I believed had happened in Phoenix had undeniably happened. I wanted to look how I felt: somehow both drowned and washed up, a survivor and a whore who got exactly what he deserved.

  “Deserved.” I started circling that word like dirty water whirling down a drain. As I saw it, I had pursued Daniel for much of that night, hoping that he would invite me back to his place. I had seen him as a sexual object, or rather, I had built a metaphor around his body. And then, once we were alone in that room, he broke out of it, and almost broke me. Did I deserve what had happened to me? Had I been asking for it? Had I pushed too far? Or was this simply the risk I accepted, and would have to continue to accept, any time I went back to a guy’s place?

  * * *

  AS THE DAYS went on, I did everything I could to avoid taking the time to answer these questions. Instead, I tried to write past them. I thought productivity was what survival looked like. At the time I had been applying to MFA programs; I had been trying to finish poems; I had been imagining myself as a writer and mostly failing.

  The next week, sitting in the Writing Center, waiting for a student I was supposed to tutor, I opened a blank Word document on my computer and started writing what I quickly decided was a “nonfiction short story”—about a black gay writer who goes to a New Year’s Eve party in Phoenix, meets a straight guy, and goes home with him. I wrote so quickly I didn’t even notice that the student hadn’t bothered to show up for his appointment. I just kept writing.

  When I had to go to class, I started writing in my notebook instead. I wrote in the library stacks between classes or until the librarian announced closing time on the crackling intercom. I wrote until the crescent-moon bruise Daniel’s teeth had left on my thumb started to throb; I wrote until the throbbing went away.

  The story was a retelling of that night’s events, mostly accurate until just before the end. The writer and the straight man wrestle in that dark room until the writer’s head is bashed against the floor one final time, one time too many. As he dies, the writer narrates the rest of the story while he looks down at his body, sprawled in a pool of blood. The straight man unlocks the door and leaves. He doesn’t even bother to run.

  I believed that I could control any story I told. If something happened, I could write about it, own it, resolve it. Simple. You could afford to be interesting if you could pin everything to the page afterward. Perhaps just to prove how tough I was, I had turned a nightmare of a near miss into a fatal one in my retelling. See? I’m not scared or weak. I’m not afraid to push through what happened and on into what could have happened.

  I needed to turn in a piece for a creative writing workshop so I submitted the story. It had been less than two weeks since the attack. I didn’t have nightmares about that dark room. I didn’t cry. Instead, I wrote and insisted that each new draft multiplied the miles and days between me and that room in Phoenix. But when it was time to discuss my story in the workshop, my classmates were mostly baffled. The assignment had been to write a nonfiction essay so how could the narrator—presumably me—die at the end? One of the workshop’s rules was that you couldn’t talk while your work was being discussed. It was just as well. While my classmates tried to make sense of the perspective or the tense, I listened without hearing them. Daniel had been wrong when he told me I was dead. I felt my classmates were wrong too. They couldn’t see what I had survived.

  But then maybe I was wrong too. On one level, I knew I needed to write it out. On another, every time I saw a man on campus now who reminded me of Daniel, and damn near every man did, my hands would clench into fists. If a man ever puts his hands on me like that again, I’d think, I will kill him. I won’t be able to stop myself. Even as I’d leashed Daniel to the page, he wouldn’t stay there.

  * * *

  A YEAR LATER, I was in the MFA program at Rutgers–Newark. I had gotten in. I had kept writing. I had escaped and survived. I had proven—to myself, to others—that I could do it. Yet still, so much inside me kept roiling, half contained, like a dam waiting to burst.

  I was in a coffee shop one afternoon, at my favorite corner table, with a pile of books in front of me. I had come here, as I often did, to read, take notes, and revise poems before walking to campus. The storm in my chest started the way all my storms do: I exhaled, then inhaled, but there was a little less air in my lungs than had been there before. I exhaled, inhaled again, even less air this time. Looking up from my book, I scanned the shop, hoping no one had noticed the panic attack quickly taking hold. Exhale, inhale. My poetry workshop was in a couple of hours. Exhale, inhale.

  I had just highlighted a sentence in the Reginald Shepherd essay I was reading, about why he writes—or why he had written. “My aim is to rescue some portion of the drowned and drowning, including always myself.”

  I couldn’t quite place it, but something about that sentence sent me spinning. Shepherd had died a few months before, just after turning forty-five. One thought, exhale, led to another, inhale, and another, exhale, and another. My heart was a bruised fist, knocking about my rib cage. I leaned forward, looking at the books and my notes again.

  My notebook was a graveyard of poets: Melvin Dixon: dead, 1992. Essex Hemphill: dead, 1995. Joseph Beam: dead, 1988. Assotto Saint: dead, 1994. Reginald Shepherd: dead, 2008. The names ran together as I blinked back tears. The names became my name. It’s just too easy for a gay black man to drown amid the names of dead black gay men. Since I had started my graduate studies, it seemed that just as soon as I looked up the name of a gay black poet whose work I aspired to one day see my own work read alongside, I’d learn that the poet had died of AIDS, or poverty, or some other tragedy that left him abandoned on the margins of literature’s memory.

  I stood unsteadily and walked to the restroom, biting my lip, staring at my feet as I moved, to keep from falling apart altogether in front of the baristas, the college students, and the professors cheerily chatting around me. It was like being a teenager again in the Lewisville Public Library, sitting cross-legged on the floor with my hands trembling as I paged through all the books I could find about being gay. Book a
fter book about gay men dying of AIDS. After having put so many years and miles between the scared little boy and the young man I had fought so hard to become, here I was again: alone in the crowd, the black kid trembling in the middle of a graveyard only he could perceive. “The drowned and the drowning, including always myself.”

  Alone in the restroom, I leaned toward my reflection in the mirror above the sink and sneered. Just stop, I thought. Those names are not your name. But it was too late now. Memory pulled me under and down into that dark room in Phoenix. I could feel my body pinned under Daniel’s weight. My head ached as if it had just been banged against the wood floor.

  I slammed my eyes shut to make him and myself disappear. How had he found me here? It had been so long since I had even thought about that night. I didn’t see Daniel hiding in other men’s shadows anymore. I had walked out of that room and written about it. I wrote about him, then past him—one poem, one story, one essay at a time. Pen as weapon, page as shield. But what was the point of beating him back, only to look up all this time later and feel that history itself was shouting: “You’re already dead, you’re already dead, you’re already dead”?

  I stood in front of the mirror, sobbing, unable to stop myself.

  Boys like us never really got away, it seemed. We just bought ourselves time. A few more gasps of air, a few more poems, a few more years. History hurt more than any weapon inflicted on us. It hit back harder than any weapon we could wield, any weapon we could turn ourselves into.

  I sunk down, I looked away, I felt that loneliness and let it settle in, heavy and final. I don’t know how long I sat on the floor in that restroom, staring and seeing nothing. Eventually, I stood up again and washed my face, still avoiding my reflection. It seemed as if my life were waiting for me outside that room, like a polite guest I’d left behind at the table. It was rude to keep him waiting. It helped to think of my life as someone separate from me, a person who didn’t deserve to be abandoned.

  Sitting back down in front of the pile of books, I returned to Reginald Shepherd’s words: he was gone but they were still here. I thought about all the poets who had kept me going, one more minute, one more step. Of the drowned and the drowning. I felt the cord pull taut between us. I took a breath. I started a draft of a new poem.

  PART FOUR

  When we lived in Dallas on Northwest Highway, we had gone to the Tom Thumb on a cold, wintery Friday night for groceries. I chanted that the check I wrote would be approved. I remember putting the groceries in the kitchen and you were in the den watching TV. I just started crying. I wanted to give up. I was so tired and depressed about raising a child alone and always worried about paying the bills and putting food on the table. I knew if I made a phone call to my mom, she would take over raising you in a heartbeat. The thought was so loud in my heart and mind to just “give up” and move into a smaller place alone.

  I went to the altar and chanted through silent tears because I did not want to upset you. I can’t imagine how both our lives would have been if I did not have that hope in my heart to keep going and do whatever possible to keep us together. I know for sure I have absolutely no regrets for you in my life.

  Love forever,

  Mama

  February 5, 2007

  17APRIL 2011

  JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY

  4:45 a.m., Monday. My coffee maker had its own alarm clock, clicking itself awake fifteen minutes before me, and three hours before first period. Moving, but still not awake exactly, I’d walk across my studio apartment, the smell of coffee wafting around me, and pour myself the first of two cups.

  As I sipped that first cup of coffee, I’d light the two candles in front of my altar and start chanting. Sitting cross-legged on the rug next to my bed, I’d chant nam-myoho-renge-kyo for forty-five minutes. I’d chant for my twelfth-grade students to get into college. I’d chant to be able to write another poem. I’d chant for it to be good. I’d chant for my mother. My mind would drift like a boy wading into a river, the current gently pulling at his waist. The sun was not up yet. My street was silent. I’d check my watch and, after forty-five minutes, blow out the candles.

  I would pour myself another cup of coffee, then sit down at my desk to write. I wrote poems on the back of old lesson plans; this made it easier to ball up the failed ideas and throw them away. I’d pick up another sheet and write a line. The blue dress is a river. I’d stop, draw a dash, and try again. The blue dress is a silk train is a river.

  I dressed. I put a book in my bag to read during my lunch break. I locked my front door. I went to the high school in Newark where I worked. My ninth-grade students were reading The Catcher in the Rye. They loved Holden. I thought, Well, of course, they love Holden. They’re ninth graders.

  As usual, after I dismissed them for lunch, I’d pull out the lunch I packed for myself and a poetry collection to read while I sat at my desk. I did this every day during the week; I worked on my poems for forty-five minutes every morning for fear that if I didn’t make a constant effort, I’d look up one day and five or six years would have passed without me having published a single poem, much less an actual book. Same with the lunchtime reading. Even though I was too tired to understand everything I was taking in, I forced myself to run my eyes over the entirety of two poems before I allowed myself to put the book down. This was the routine. I needed to use all the time I had. I needed to keep kicking to stay afloat.

  Often, with the book facedown in front of me, I’d text Mom about my day, maybe send her a picture of the pile of homework assignments on the corner of my desk waiting to be graded. I was proud of my exhaustion, as if the darkness circling my eyes was proof of my adulthood. Proof that I could hold my own, no longer just a son or grandson but an I.

  This day in April, Mom texted me first: “Could you call me later?”

  I felt a spark of panic. I put my phone back down and picked up the book, gripping it a little tighter. Over the last year, Mom had needed help with money, and I knew that asking me couldn’t have been easy. Her “Could you call me later?” texts gave me the same ache I felt when people used to tell me that I was “the man of the house,” spawning a swarm of mosquitolike questions in my head. Was everything okay? What did she need to talk about on the phone? Was it her health or money? Do I even have any money saved up right now?

  After work, I went home, poured myself a glass of wine, and climbed into bed with my laptop, intending to watch a movie. “Are you home from work yet? Call me.” I’d been pretending to ignore the ache in my chest but I couldn’t anymore. I was ashamed that I hadn’t already called her back. Downing the last of the wine in my glass, I dialed her number.

  “I want you to meet me in Memphis for your grandmother’s birthday,” she said as soon as she answered, as if we were already several minutes into the conversation. I had expected her to sound pained, but there was a song in her voice, wrapped around steel.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Well?”

  “Isn’t her birthday really soon?”

  “You can fly in this Saturday. We’ll take her to lunch and you can fly back that night or the next morning.”

  She had already looked up flights we could take for free using her employee benefits at Delta. She had already picked out a restaurant too. It was a little funny to see my mother as the devoted daughter, but also frustrating. I’d been making up excuses to avoid going to Memphis for so long that it actually took a bit of effort to remember why I stayed away. But I still hadn’t forgiven my grandmother. Even as I felt the pull of Mom’s eagerness, I tried to resist the current.

  “My lesson plans are due on Sunday afternoon,” I said. “You know that.” I yawned, because I was tired and because I wanted her to hear that I was tired.

  “Saeed, I’m not asking,” she chimed. “I’m telling.”

  It was a line she had been using on me since I was a little boy. It was partly a joke, but really not. It was an announcement that the discussion was over and decided. In fact
, it had been over and decided well before I answered the phone. She knew it, and now I knew it too. I might as well have already been on the airplane.

  “Okay,” I said, “but you owe me.”

  “Sedrick Saeed Jones, quit playing. I made you.” She laughed then hung up. I wanted to laugh too, but I felt swept along, swept past. It annoyed me, how easily she was able to pry me away from myself. When I put down the phone, though, my frustration curdled into shame. How could I begrudge the woman who raised me on her own? How dare I, when she had found it in herself to keep loving her own mother through decades of ups and downs?

  * * *

  MY MOM LIKED to say “we don’t eat coconut cake in this family,” as if we were the kind of family who created traditions and stuck to them. We weren’t. No family reunions; no silly nicknames with winding backstories; no annual family vacations. We did, at least, have a family story about coconut cake. As my grandmother tells it, in 1968, she had just started to slide her knife into the coconut cake the family had made for her birthday when a woman in the living room started wailing. The radio in that room had just cut to breaking news. The announcer said that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed downtown. Everyone stood stunned until that woman—a neighbor from down the street—started screaming. My grandmother set down her plate, the piece of cake untouched. She knew that woman was just going to keep on wailing until someone went in there and calmed her down.

  It had been years since I’d heard the story, but I thought about it often. The sweetness we deny ourselves because the world is wailing. Now, in the car on our way to brunch, my grandmother retold it once again. I found myself drawn in, giving her all my attention for the first time since I was a little boy. “That neighbor was always so dramatic,” my grandmother said, eyeing the curb while Mom parked the car. “Always fussing and carrying on.”