Wow, No Thank You.

by Samantha Irby

  I have had very few encounters with the people who live in our surrounding towns since I moved, because I once drove past a house in which a person had literally built a makeshift wall in their yard made of Trump signs and I’m terrified the neighbors will sense the pro-choice vibes rising off me like steam and start inaccurately lecturing me about embryonic stem cells. One time, a man I’d never seen walked his golden retriever by our house as I was dragging the garbage can up the driveway from the curb, and he stopped and said, “You must be new here.” How did he know I was new? Could he smell the lingering stench of unreliable public transportation on me? Could he see in my eyes that I couldn’t really tell the difference between a cucumber and a zucchini without cutting it open? Did he register my smooth, uncalloused hands and instinctively know I had never driven a tractor?! What kind of sorcery is this? HOW DID THIS RETIRED MIDDLE SCHOOL PRINCIPAL KNOW MY SECRETS? Trying not to judge a Republican by his sensible dog-walking cardigan, I said, “I don’t speak English!” And then I left the recycling bin in the street and slouched away before he could say “Benghazi.” Although, in hindsight, I’m surprised there wasn’t an ICE raid at our crib later that afternoon.

  I have never really cared about voting. Until this year, I lived in a blue state and was always scheduled to work a twelve-hour shift on Tuesdays. Plus, I’m not really sure if this is real or not, but I don’t want to be stuck for three days trying to think up ways to paint myself as an undesirable juror to overworked Cook County public defenders ever again, so I’d been like, “HARD PASS,” when optimistic young people approach me on the street about registering to vote. I shouldn’t admit this, but I am never going to read the qualifications of all the hopeful circuit court judges, and even if I did, how would I even know which one I should vote for? How does a statute work? What does adjudication mean? You’re kidding yourself if you think a person who couldn’t remember how the number of electors for each state is decided for the eighth-grade Constitution test is the same person who should be deciding who’s the best candidate to interpret the law. Can you turn in a ballot if it’s only one-third filled in? Seriously, does your vote actually count if you don’t take the time to fill in every single school board bubble?! Since I had to move to a little blue dot in a big red state to participate in this cross-cultural marital experiment, when the post office asked if I’d like to register to vote as I filled out my change of address form, I sighed and said, “Girl, I guess.”

  I voted for Barack Obama one time, in 2008. Not that I wouldn’t have voted for him again, but I didn’t believe I could get my boss to buy the “new Black holiday” line two elections in a row. I had already gotten a pay raise out of him by citing reparations, but I am definitely not clever enough to pull off that kind of magic twice. I’ll never forget all the winks and nods and knowing looks exchanged with every black and brown face in line as one by one, we cast our votes for our boy Barry, and I will also never forget walking what felt like 137 miles through downtown Chicago and Grant Park to watch the election results roll in with thousands of my new best friends, and, once Barack won and delivered that super-inspiring speech as African America’s first president-elect, getting pushed and shoved and stampeded as I fought to get a spot on the northbound train after everyone realized it was two in the damn morning and we all had to be at work the next day.

  The most exhilarating part of Obama’s Post-Racial America for me was when salty white people taped Lipton tea bags to all the fedoras and straw hats gathering dust in their closets and started saying “nigger” with abandon in the middle of the grocery store. Remember when liberal whites tried to trick us into thinking racism was over, when every night their uncles were on the news, their DON’T TREAD ON ME and GO BACK TO KENYA signs on proud display? I was preoccupied sitting at home waiting for the mailman to deliver the reparations check Obama was surely going to sign himself and send out with priority shipping, but I heard that some of you idealists had your hearts broken when the secretly racist lady next door who called the police on your dreadlocked cousin that one time didn’t start leaving her front door unlocked and inviting you over for a cold glass of milk and a warm slice of the American dream.

  I can’t reliably find West Virginia on a map, but I knew that eight years of the Socialist in Chief, or whatever people who watch Bill O’Reilly called him, was going to break bad as soon as America saw its opportunity. I thought for sure it was going to be Ted Cruz, but when Donald Trump won the nomination I was like, “Oh shit, these dudes ain’t playing. And now I live near them.”

  My wife and I went out to eat the other night at the kind of place where you slop a pile of room-temperature food out of a chafing dish onto your plate while fogging up the sneeze guard keeping it safe. As I was raising an egg roll stuffed with pale mystery meat up to my mouth, in walked a group of rowdy dudes in unironic “Make America Great Again” apparel, ready to shovel ambiguously Chinese food you pay for by the pound into their freedom-loving mouths, and I braced myself for a conflict. I am a black lady with a white wife in a Red state, and I can’t be sure that bro with the backward visor (LOL, WHY?) isn’t about to start some shit with me just because I have the nerve to show my face in public.

  This new political edgelord kind of bro is usually pretty easy to spot. He is wearing a North Face fleece and mirrored sunglasses made of neon-pink plastic, possibly multi-pocketed shorts, and definitely shower shoes. He’s probably not saying any real English words, just grunting and whooping and huffing at varying volumes. He looks you right in the eye for an uncomfortably long time, and if you challenge him, he’ll throw an unlandable punch in the direction of your face and grumble unintelligibly about your going back to Africa, a continent which you have never even visited. His friends are named Brody and Kevin and Kyle, and they punch one another a lot and call things they don’t like “gay.” These are dudes know what thirty-seven dollars’ worth of Taco Bell tastes like, and nothing will get in the way of their path toward domination, not the opposition party media propagating their fake news, nor the shrill feminazis stepping on the white man’s dick with their unsexy man-shoes. On a typical weekend, you’ll find him kicking over Planned Parenthood barricades. Or he’ll be shitting his cargo shorts in the back of an Uber on his way home from the college bar he’s definitely too old to still party at. Or he’s railing at anyone who will listen about the exorbitant taxes he has never actually paid. Or he’s saying “state’s rights” so you won’t think he’s actually racist. Or he’s grabbing women by the pussy, and he will be back in the office denying you a lower rate on your mortgage bright and early on Monday.

  I don’t want to make it seem like I’m not well versed in unintentional racism, or latent racism, or hipster racism, or whatever you’d call “wow, I can’t believe someone like you really read that new Ann Patchett novel” racism, but it’s one thing when a lady in overpriced exercise clothes starts overenunciating her order at the young immigrant man working at the coffee shop and quite another when a person dressed in the flag on any day other than the Fourth of July loudly reminds your queer ass that you currently reside in an open carry state. This, until recently, I thought was just a hilarious punchline to the joke of my new life. But a few months ago after I moved here, a guy with a salt-and-pepper ’70s mustache casually wearing an inside vest with a laugh told me he might shoot me if I took my phone out to text in a movie theater from his assigned seat behind mine. And not that context matters (should I actually be shot for ruining a climactic scene in the live-action version of Beauty and the Beast with my tiny glowing rectangle of doom? well, probably?!) but it was half an hour before the movie even started. Like, the lights were fully illuminated and that Entertainment Tonight movie trivia that plays before the previews hadn’t even started yet. My stomach fell out of my butt as I contemplated being murdered while Maria Menounos patiently waited for my answer to “What is the name of the kleptomaniac monkey in Disney’s animated film Aladdin?”

  You scoff at Miss Lululemon a
nd her bone-dry latte, and roll your eyes behind her back as you mumble shit about “microaggressions” under your breath and hope that the Land Rover she left idling in the middle of the street has a ticket on it when she gets back. But I’m not yet ready for the kind of racism that screams: THE PERSON WEARING THIS RED HAT MIGHT HURT YOU. I don’t have a plan ready if he spray paints a swastika on my car or loses his shit on the Mexican woman at the apple orchard while I’m paying the real price for a half-peck of freshly picked Honeycrisps. If a “fiscal conservative” asked me what my hair feels like in downtown Chicago, I could recite some Ta-Nehisi Coates or whatever to deescalate the situation, but what should I do if an American Worker Who Loves Winning decides to fuck with me out in the wilderness for fun?

  I don’t know—it’s not even that rural here. And it’s not like I’ve never seen a tree before, but I’ve definitely never spent a lot of time around people who say the words “family values” in earnest. I drove up north once to spend a week writing in solitude in a cold, dark room (read: watch whatever movies were on Amazon Prime because the place I rented had a complicated TV system, so please be on the lookout for my new horror novel, Help, This Airbnb Uses a PlayStation Instead of a Thing I Actually Know How to Fucking Use, in stores this spring). In a tiny town, on the side of U.S. 131, I saw a billboard featuring a smiling Trump giving a thumbs-up with something like “We’re so proud of our president!” emblazoned on it, and look, if you like borscht and economic depression, what do I care? Like who you want, do whatever the hell you want. But goddamn, that shit was chilling. I made a mental note not to stop there for gas.

  Maybe I can just watch reality TV in the safety of my home and avoid eye contact with a newspaper for the next couple years. I mean, I talk a lot of shit and everything, but I’m a doughy creative, and I live with a lady who cans her own pickles and can’t fight. I can’t be out here defending the mainstream media against people wearing homemade “Lock Her Up” T-shirts. I mean, we just put a canoe rack on our Honda. I’m starting the paperwork to make our male cat an emotional support animal. There’s no way we’re getting out of a Freedom Headlock.

  a guide to simple home repairs

  what is that thing attached to the back of our house, a deck or a patio

  what do gutters do

  how do you clean a fucking screen

  how many smoke detectors do you have to have? Like, is it a law or is it just up to your discretion

  can I just try to step around the squeaky stair when I’m coming down, or is that the kind of thing that eventually needs to get looked at

  what do you mean “store the hose”

  sheesh, do I have to become a goddamn electrician to put this stupid Home Depot ceiling fan up

  the dishwasher stinks—is that a real problem

  what is that damp-looking shit on the ceiling

  weatherstripping???

  at what point can I just throw up my hands and concede this shredded chair to the cats

  are houses supposed to be washed on the outside?

  Over the last couple years I have had to learn to live in a house, and that is one of the hardest and most boring things I’ve ever had to do. There’s a lot of basic shit I absolutely DO NOT KNOW as I uncomfortably masquerade through life in the body of a human adult and the brain of one of the aliens from Earth Girls Are Easy. I’m not going to remind you yet again that I grew up in a trash-filled possum nest with intermittent basic cable, but in case you’re unfamiliar with the plight of my youth, let’s just say that the first time I had to work my own thermostat, I was thirty-five years old.

  The house my eight-pound infant self was brought home to was a two-story, six-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom single family home whose current value is listed at $723,988 on Redfin, which is $359,000 more than it was worth twenty years ago, which is probably even more than it was worth when my dad bought it in the late ’70s with help from a VA loan that he earned cooking beans and shirking any actual responsibility for his fellow troops during the Korean War. I will never actually know how Samuel Irby came to own the big, beautiful house down the street from Mason Park, but if I had a time machine and the stipulation on my using it was that I could only go back to one specific point in history, I would 100 percent choose to go to the bank office the minute before my dad and his tidy little Afro strutted through the doors to buy that fucking house. How did he get it? What earnings potential did he show them? Why was there no background check? Did he know the loan guy? Were they just giving suburban houses away in 1978? Did my dad pull out a shotgun in the middle of the bank?!

  I have very specific memories of that house, where I lived until my parents divorced in 1984:

  the record player with every Barbra Streisand LP lined up in the cabinet it sat on top of (to this day I can sing Color Me Barbra from start to finish, and, trust me, that’s my best party trick)

  I had a little television set in my room that I used exclusively to watch Soul Train and the Lou Rawls Parade of Stars telethons

  we had many pets, the grossest of which was an Alaskan malamute my dad loved that lived in the garage and once killed another dog while I was playing in the yard next to it

  a giant Chevy Caprice gleaming in the driveway

  the many, many bottles of 1980s-style 50-percent alcohol NyQuil from when my dad got big into AA and pretended he was going to stop drinking but basically just mainlined cough syrup instead

  my oldest sister had a bedroom in the back of the house a bit removed from the rest of us, and that felt very glamorous to me, because I had zero idea what she did in there

  When I sweep away the mental cobwebs hanging over that time in my life, I can’t find a single memory of either of my parents hammering anything or using a tape measure. There was never a table saw set up in the driveway on which my dad handcrafted a replacement cabinet door. My mom never stood in the paint aisle at True Value, clutching swatches of the various shades of marigold she was considering for the kitchen. Once, I locked myself in the downstairs bathroom and was too scared and clumsy to get it unlocked, and my dad told me to crouch in the bathtub so I wouldn’t get knocked unconscious by the falling door as he kicked it off the fucking hinges. For the rest of the time we lived there, that bathroom just didn’t have a fucking door. And now you expect me, a feral dog with PTSD who had to maneuver a heavy door haphazardly against a splintered frame to poop in relative privacy, to know my grout from my caulk?!

  Shortly after I was born, my dad, (a terrifying, unstable person and hypothetical entrepreneur) got it into his head to convert the basement of his starter home into a rooming house for his wino friends. This is the ideal living circumstance for a helpless baby! He constructed makeshift walls out of plywood to make “rooms” and stuck twin beds between them. I wish I could say he was on some benevolent hippie community-living type of shit, but this was about getting drunk and loan sharking and playing dice, and more than one person died under suspicious circumstances in that basement. I’m not being dramatic. I don’t mean murder or whatever—I mean something like “drowned due to a malfunctioning water heater” or something like that. Bad but not, say, investigation bad. All his tenants were men who weren’t allowed in the rest of the house, and I’m honestly surprised that this isn’t a story about how I was kidnapped and trafficked by a man missing his front teeth and doused in Cutty Sark.

  do I have a septic tank

  whose responsibility is the sidewalk

  if we never attach the water hose to the icemaker, is that bad

  is there a way the mailbox is supposed to, you know, be

  I thought hard water was just a made-up thing to get me to buy shower spray

  the washing machine stinks—is that a real problem

  why does the lawn have to be mowed so often, and how do you oil the mower or put gas in it, and if so, do you pay a guy to do that

  how many types of batteries do I really need to keep on hand at all times

  “vacuum the freezer coils”
?

  try to replace this interior door ourselves or just move into a hotel for the winter

  when was I ever supposed to learn how to measure blinds

  how often do I really have to go in the garage

  is defrosting the refrigerator still a thing

  When my parents divorced, my mom and I moved from that house to this two-flat on the other side of town, across the street from both the church and the middle school I would eventually attend. My mean grandma owned and occupied the first floor of the building. Other than a man who occasionally came by to mow the lawn, no actual caretaking of the house took place. At least not in an explicit way that I can remember, and certainly not in a way that translated to me. There was a shed at the back of the house that my grandma made me keep my bike in. Remember, this was firmly in the Jason Voorhees/Freddy Krueger era, so I was 100-percent prepared to get murdered when having to retrieve my sky-blue Schwinn Stingray from that crumbling outhouse because she didn’t want me tracking in any “outside dirt.”