Tyrant/Love

The Tyrant Manifesto.

 I am the Tyrant of Small and I reside in your head.  But I ain’t little, yo.  Don’t let the nomenclature fool you.  I’m a big mofo ‘cause I eat very well and very often.  I exist to feed on the ideas and dreams and visions you have of yourself.  The more I eat, the tinier those visions of who you think you can be, become.  I exist to feed on the daydreams and mental sketches, imaginings that flow into you.  I exist to masticate and digest the living, the being, the largeness that you stretch your soul to believe you are worthy of.  It is my mission to saturate your cells with self doubt, to fill you with questions about your ability, lose faith in yourself, in God, however you define that entity.  All the better if you have no belief in a higher force at all.  And once fed, I shit.  I shit big and consistently.  I shit in your head.  I shit in sound, in voice.  My shit is that niggling cacophony in your brain that’s got you looking at her and thinking “Damn, I wish I had…” You know I’m in there, you fill in the blank: her career, family, security, her boldness, her friends, her girl, her money, her apartment, her peace.  I shit nevers and alwayses: “I will never have…” peace, dollars and security, the synchronous glory of being an old woman with an old woman who has loved me through the decades.  “I will always…” worry, struggle, be less than my brother, be in debt, be misunderstood, be a disappointment, need.  “The grass is greener on the other side of the fence” – That’s me.  I make that happen.  My shit is fertilizer for those greener pastures and I have all the space I could ever need up in your cranium.  I resolve to grow so much that you can’t.  I exist to expand and suffocate your vision.  I stand against your breath.  I gotchu, yo.  

The Love Manifesto 

I am Love.  Believe and own that you are huge because I am huge and you are full of me.  Believe and own that you are powerful because I am powerful and you are full of me.  Believe and own that you are a gift to yourself and those around you because you are full of me.  You are incomparable.  Listen to your girl, Jill Scott: You busy comparin’ me like I need comparison/How you gonna fuck wit dis?/ Can’t live in the air I’m in.  Here’s what you know: we all come to this life an original but many of us want to die a copy.  Knowing this you will not violate the Creator’s brilliant intentions by attempting to reconfigure yourself to be like another.  That would be an act of violence.  You are loving.  You are badass.  You must know that the Tyrant of Small is a necessary knucklehead.  His shit is banging in your thinking space to build more of me in you.  You are expansion.  You will hear him, you hear him now as you write this, as you read this.  He’s yapping, “This positive thinking, healing words mindset is some Oprahfied, 12-step, Kumbaya, punk ass bovine excrement that ain’t about nothin’.  I own you.”  That is not possible.  He cannot own you.  The hugeness of you, the love in you will chew his shit to taste and know what he’s about.  It will sizzle on your tongue like Pop Rocks.  But you will not swallow, not ingest, not digest.  You will spit it out.  You will spit elegance and intelligence and integrity and patience and fire.  You will scorch the earth to prepare the soil for the growth the tyrant swears he’s impeding but cannot even see because I drench your molecules.  I am your enzymes.  You are not his shit but The Shit.  You cannot be stopped.  Love cannot be stopped.

Going Straight Pt. 1

    “So,” I told her, “there are three things you’ve got going against you: you’re 24; too young, you’re white and you’re straight.”

    She wasn’t just straight but recently out of a difficult eight-year relationship with a guy.  One of those unions where they had been together since they were teens and their families in South Dakota, where she’s from, had basically become one.  I guess that would be the fourth thing against her ‘cause I really wasn’t lookin’ to be no rebound thing. 

    See, my heart has been goin’ boom-bap for the female essence since RUN-DMC was on Jamaica Ave. copping their first pair of shell toes.  Senior year, high school in the back stairwell, I was kissin’ on my first girl.  (We thought we were being slick and didn’t nobody know we was a ‘we’, while anybody who looked at the two of us — as a I ran from my classes to walk her to hers and began each school day waiting for her on the front steps — could see this wasn’t just a best friend-type situation.)  And it’s just a lesbian postulate: don’t mess with no newbies.  They got too much stuff to cogitate before they’re ready: what their people are gon’ think, owning the right to kiss your girl in the street like any straight boy, getting past their nerves so they can sex right.  Let them work that mess out with some other young thing like we all did and come to me when you done with that.  And I most definitely was not up for being no Girls Gone Wild- type experimental plaything for some chick who just needed company till she found a dude to her liking.  I am not the one.

   You gotta understand.  At that point, it was ’05 and I was weeks away from turning 38 and had no woman for almost a decade.  On purpose.  Heart had been masticated one too many times, so like becoming the vegetarian that I am, I decided relationships weren’t something I needed in my diet.  Wasn’t for me.  I needed my friends.  I needed my writing.  I needed God.  Women, a girl, a lover, a chick, a fuck?  Not so much.  Which is not to say I didn’t think about women or that my chest didn’t get tight when I saw couples, homo or not, together.  Naw, I thought about it.  Felt lonely — worse — damaged.  But that was cool with me or at least I that’s what I told myself.

    And though I’m as proud to be black as the next Negro, I ain’t all anti-white and Farrakhan-ish.  But I do think the sight of black people in love is as righteous as sunlight in the mornin’.  There have been more than two white chicks I’ve called my girl.  I loved them all and they returned the lovin’.  But even with my barricaded heart I knew that if I was ever gonna date any woman again she would be a sista or a hermana (for the Panamanian in me) ‘cause sistahood is necessary.  The world I inhabit is so very white it would just be cool to begin and end my days with the love of another who knows the headache and heartache of dealing with Mista Charlie.   Someone who just knows the innate skin code and the joys of being black and brown.   Otherwise, no matter how down my white girl may be, it can just get tiring.

    So, here comes this one.  All wrong in every way.

    Still, Jessica* was somehow both cute and womanly and we shared a thick smartass vibe.  Even one of the straight girl cashiers noticed her at the egghead bookstore where I was full-time and Jessica was a temp.  Told her, “With those dimples you can get any guy you want.”  On the sly, I would check the schedule for the days Jess was working.  When she walked in for her shifts I knew my day — good or bad — was gonna get mo’ better.  There was something there.  Shit.

    We saw In Good Company and we were.  Towards the end of the film, for reasons I wouldn’t let myself have any understanding of, I sunk down in my seat and tilted my head till it nestled on her shoulder.  My brain was blasting, “What am I doing!  What am doing!  What am I doing!”  Still, I didn’t move with no kinda quickness.  She put her soft palm on my face holding it there.  After the movie there was a giggly charge in the February damp as we went to get cigarettes at Duane Reade and walked around in the chill of the upper west side not far from her Columbia student housing.  Started to feel familiar, more than a Saturday night movie with a friend.  Without either one of us naming it, what we had here was a date, our first date.  We ended up at a diner on Broadway and 72nd.  Over fries and salads, she let fly with inquiries into the reasons behind my dating embargo.  I deflected each one like Wonder Woman with her golden bracelets.  (Add your own sound effect)  And, finally, I shut it down with the prereqs for me to date again: “1) the woman I would be with would have to have all her issues in check.  2) I’d have to feel and be completely whole on my own.  Not feel like I need her.  3) And, most importantly, and most impossibly, only I could end it.  ‘Cause I have never broken up with anyone and I’m tired of hearing the ‘You’re really great but I just can’t right now’ speech.  So I’m done.”  She leaned back into the Naugahyde looking shot down.  Outside, though, puffing on post-meal smokes, she said something all casual that caught me up.

From: Jessica  <Jess1@abc.com>
To: Gail <writegail@abc.net>
Subject: Re: movie night
Date: Feb 7, 2005 6:22 PM 
 I guess what was sticking in my head was your reaction when we were smoking and I told you that Monica thinks you and I would make a good couple.  I can’t say I haven’t thought about it.  She could be right, you know.  I don’t know how I would describe your reaction, but there was something about it that stuck with me.  Anyway, talk to you later.

    I got this two days after our ‘date’ and was drenched in terror and tingle all at once.  Feigning calm poorly, I left a couple messages on her voicemail at work to call me ASAP.  When I finally reached her that night I told her I was coming over.  Now.  I didn’t know what I would say.  “Just don’t say anything stupid,” I coached myself as I changed clothes four times before speeding out of Queens on the Van Wyck like it was the damn autobahn.  We sat at Cannon’s Pub, an Irish bar near Columbia where she was a social work grad student and I had gotten my MFA in writing three years ago.  Now facing each other in our booth like we had a few days before, we both knew what needed to be said.  But she was gonna make me to say it.  Like a ten-year old youngin’ who doesn’t want to admit that maybe girls aren’t so icky, I literally squirmed in my seat before I got the words out: “I.  Like. You.  I like you a lot.  I don’t want to but…there!  I’m attracted to you, okay?!” 
“I know.  Me, too.  I don’t know what to do.”

    I told her about her three strikes: young, white, straight.
    “Those are all things I can’t do anything about.” 
    True.  I was kind of speechless. 

    We left Cannon’s and just drove.  Took our tension onto the West Side Highway, down past Christopher Street pier, where I have spent many a Pride, trying to find the place in ourselves where it would be safe to go ahead and do the damn thing.  In between our admissions of helpless, mesmerizing attraction and the risks we would be taking, I’d tell her how badly I just wanted to kiss her.  She kept giving me her nervous permission, saying, “That would be okay.”  I never realized how many stoplights there are on the West Side Highway till that night sitting next to Jessica, the car idling, permission granted.  My fear was tight.  I waited for the green and just kept driving.

    But here’s what she said that got me: “After Kevin (the ex-boyfriend) I told myself that there were certain things I wanted in the next person I was with.  They had to be kind and open and want to be with me.  There’s other stuff.  And whatever package that person came in didn’t matter.”  Wanna bet that when she left her small town in South Dakota for the big city that package didn’t look nothing like me?  Ya damn straight.

*******

    Do a Google search for ”end of gay” and dozens of articles and books fly up.  Most questioning whether as young folks embrace a label-resistant sexuality, if ‘gay’, as a movement and identity, is, like, so last century.   Since the 90s, when gay cultural visibility acted up into mainstream media, those who think about such things have been in the town square, with broadsides or soap boxes debating whether the movement is dead or even necessary.  For those who have eulogized it this crossing — erasing? — of sexual borders has been Exhibit A.  Nearly ten years ago even Anne Heche sat up on Oprah pledging that though, like Jessica, she had been strictly dickly all her life, seeing Ellen across a crowded room on Oscar night transfixed her soul.  This willingness by Jessica, and even nutcase Heche, to go where the soul leads is the evolution of the gay movement.  Just as the women’s movement gave men the permission to be softer, over time the lgbt movement’s mandate of sexual openness has granted everyone permission to sex outside of their presumed orientations.  Still, for women like Jessica and even Heche, the move to go where the feeling takes them, is kinda courageous as they aren’t politicized activists taking a sex positive stance or engaging in Britney/Madonna/Christina/t.A.T.u minstrelsy.  It is for such women that author Jen Sincero, wrote Straight Girl’s Guide To Sleeping With Chicks (Fireside, 2005).   Sincero has been called an “evangelist for female sexual exploration and the rejection of labels” and Straight Girl’s Guide is a kind of new century Our Bodies, Ourselves/Joy of Sex.  It features tips, positions and even troubleshooting charts for the hetero chica open to scratching that girl-on-girl itch.    For me, a clearly labeled lesbian, the tricky part of that freedom is not the sex but the emotion.  I’m not the only one.  A Tyra episode from last season featured a face-off between what the show called “part-time lesbians” — three chicks who identify as straight but enjoy kissing on girls — and three full time lesbians like myself.  The gay girls were pretty insulted viewing the straight girls as playing games without having to slosh through the stigma of being a lesbian.  All of this while risking the possibility of hurting some “real” lesbians feelings by coming on to them.  Which is why I appreciate that while Sincero is pro-pussy, she warns hetero ladies, “Lesbians are into women.  If you’re experimenting don’t be a dickhead and use her for sex if you can tell she has feelings for you.”  (Thanks for that, girl.)  At the same time, sparkly lesbians Lauren Levin and Lauren Blitzer’s gay girl user’s manual, Same Sex in the City (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2006) has an entire chapter about straight girl attraction and warns them to be careful about catching feelings.  The chapter, “Hooking up With Straight Girls” schools the newly out that if they’re not gonna fight the feeling don’t expect anything deeper from straight girls than a night of tangling the sheets.

    Still, while some are taking to a more liquid sexual identity the old guard is not quite letting go.   Sincero, who has gotten some static from certain lesbians for refusing to call herself bi, said “at times I find a degree of inflexibility in the more traditional homosexual community that seems to me every bit as ‘straight’ as straight.”  But it is because of the movement that there is an audience for her book and that this freedom exists.   So death of the movement my hind parts!

*******

    Having processed it all to the endth, I drove Jess home.  We stood outside her building on 120th St. in the cold wondering who would, if someone would, make the move.  I hugged her goodnight.   She asked me to think about staying over after work the next night.  Nervous, I already knew I’ d be there.  So, maybe it was I, gripping my list of her three flaws, lesbian postulate and relationship moratorium, who was doing the experimenting.

Tell

I release and relive my catalog of tales because I am storyteller.  On my Mac at the coffee spot surrounded by the alert laptops of others tapping out their reports of life past; real, real quiet in bed on my cell speaking to the girl I love with the ignored LED burn of my alarm clock segueing from late to early; in a bar with limey Cuba Libres and my lovely peoples, my acquired fam: “Nah, for real, when I was five I hated eggs but I saw Cookie Monster eat an egg sandwich.  So I thought maybe I was wrong about the egg thing since he was eating them so …”;“I accidentally knocked my brother’s two front teeth out before he was six, one with an umbrella because I told him to…”; “I was like, four and we were on vacation and I ran ahead, to our table at the Chinese restaurant and scooped up some of the hot mustard on the table and…”  I am animated and percolating, I know the pulse, when to hold, what to press.  These stories, these memories, my relating them, wins me smiles and persona, entices women to call me charming, allows me to live again.

But I ask myself is it really my memory or is it someone else’s recounting of my life that has fused itself to me?  Am I fraudulently claiming to remember when what I’m doing is repeating?  Would I swear on a stack of Iyanla Vanzant books that carved into me is the experience of being a five year old at an amusement park with my whole family, I think in Canada, straying away, my mother hysterical?  Do I remember her coming to claim me at the lost kids area with little kid cars on giant bouncy springs?  Her face releasing the creases of concern and seeping into relief as she grabbed my hand and I smiled saying “I wasn’t lost; Mommy, I knew where I was; You were the one who was lost.” – is that in me, from me?  Do I really remember these moments or have I spent so much time with my native born peoples, open photo albums and pictures of me in 70s corduroys and bell bottoms and little girl swimsuits, in the homes and spaces that were ours because we were there?  With Mom telling my story to her audience of our peoples that I am now claiming events as remembered history, as something I access?  And if I don’t genuinely remember that slice of time, the chuckle and torpor, the wood paneling and the fresh Pro-Keds, the breezes and fishcakes, but am only telling what I’ve heard, can I own that moment?  Is it really a part of me or is it a part of my cousin who can talk about the time I tried to…?  And if I do not actually remember am I not a storyteller at all, but a narrator, offering color commentary to events not witnessed, spoken Xeroxes?  Or is my retelling a declaration of love for both the gift of the story and the giver?  An oral and aural certificate of ownership of my history?  Is that why I have the people around me, to record and replay the stuff that I have not, to give my life back to me? 

There are places in my soul’s memory that hold the sense of happenings in my youth, a warmth, a fear.  But the tactile crystals of detail are absent; there are empty surfaces and quadrants in my head but my inlands are full of knowing.  The stories come back to me, packaged by my cherishers to make me full.  I am not remembering the tales but I’m aided in recollecting, in re-collecting.  These guardians hold them in their crates, hold them in a trust for me, from which they draw to give me age five, giggly kidlet me at the beach, shy girl attached to Mommy who wailed when left at the babysitter.  But these guardian cherishers do not just hold me for me, but share Gail tales with both their native born and lovely peoples, with their youngins, their neighbors and friends.  And I do the same with stories of them. Because I am a storyteller who comes from storytellers.  And we will always live.

The Grandma Journals Pt. 2

November 14, 1997

I hate going there I hate going there I hate going there.

I wake up and that thing, that feeling, that voice is there, talking to me: “You know you haven’t visited your Grandmother in a while. If she dies today you’ll have to kill yourself for not going.” I bargain with myself, try to put it off, create some rationalization that I can live with for not going today. What could that possibly be? It doesn’t work. I start bracing myself for the subway and bus ride in the cold, to what feels like the end of nowhere but is really Canarsie, Brooklyn, to fulfill my grandaughterly duties, to honor what my father taught me about taking care of your own. I wish I felt more humble and honorable about it, but most of the time, while I’m going, it’s like some heavy, onerous chore I just want to get over with.

I will never get used to that smell: pissy diapers, industrial cleaners, and stagnant people, washed in medicinal soap. I always have to brace myself on the elevator before I get to her floor. Then when the door opens the stank knocks me over. I always worry that it will be glommed on to me when I leave, my long wavy hair, my jeans. I hate it. I hate visiting her there. Day room is the worst. Slices of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. A bright room with lots of big windows, mismatched chairs of naugahyde or metal and long folding tables with that fake wood grain. Humans in various states of dysfunction and hysteria and outrageousness and ossification, cursing streams or silent or almost normal. Tongues hanging like deli meat, limbs flailing at unseen demons or limp or petrified. Wearing Salvation Army throwaways crusted with today’s breakfast, yesterday’s lunch. No longer grasp that food is supposed to go in that hole between their chin and nose (What’s a chin? What’s a nose?). Or maybe they do but can’t seem to hit it. Constant cacophonous chatter making sense only to the chattering. A drooling, lumpy white man with skin hanging, somebody’s grandfather, sits with a cigarette and an inch of ash precariously hanging. The TV is always on. TV is always on. Blaring Xena or some infomercial or something. Sometimes that therapist with Jersey hair and cowboy boots tries to entice them to sing simple songs and remember what season it is.

“Toooo-Daaaaay iiiisss?………THuRRRZZDAY!!!!!!”

Upbeat but kind of desperate, she waits for responses but mostly gets grunts and slobber. Answers her own perky questions.

“The Sea-ZONNNN iiiiissss?……………FAAAAAALLL!!!!”

“THE NEXT HOL -I- DAY iiiisss???……….THANXS-GIIIIVVVIIING!!!!!

By the end she always looks pained and frustrated.

I love the nurses though! Caribbean nurses in fresh whites always saying to Grandma,

” How you doin’ Miss Wilson/Momma?!”

“All right, baby. This is my granddaughter!”

“She’s beautiful!” in tones one would use for a child, like I’m not there.

I know their accents are familiar to Grandma. Hope they’re a comfort. I know they are taking good care of her.

I usually bring her Jamaican beef patties and ginger beer, food from her life outside that she doesn’t even remember.

But this time there was that one nurse! Here I am slowly walking with Grandma who hasn’t been out of the home since Mom had her placed there last year Thanksgiving. I’m walking with her on my arm, back to her room, having this quiet visit. I’m only 5″6’ but she seems so small now. I’m thinking of the oddness of this moment; how odd it is that she feels shrunken next to me, this woman who was enormous in all the ways one can be enormous. She feels fragile. Fragile? My bigmouthed grandmother? I think about how my brother and I used to be embarrassed by her mass. Now she has the shape of a bottle of salad dressing, narrow on top with wide hips but her skin and the caftans she wears droop off of her. Odd. How odd it feels to be the one living on my own while she lives with babysitters. How odd it is to look at her and see part of myself and be uncertain of what or who she sees when she looks back at me. But we walk and I smile at the nurses sitting at their desk as we are passing. This knuckleheaded nurse, without compassionate eyes for the situation, shouts to me in my Grandmother’s presence,

“So has there been any talk in the family about taking her home for the holiday?”

I hold my breath. Just shake my head no, put my hand up to indicate to her to hold on. I’ll come back to talk to her in a minute. Please, not in front of Grandma. Walk. Lightly. Hope Grandma doesn’t catch on. Watch her carefully from the corner of my eye.

“Not even for a meal?!”

She’s hit me again. Lose a step from shock. I just wonder. I just wonder if she purchased this special brand of stupidity or was this a family trait. She just doesn’t know. She just doesn’t know.She doesn’t know what it was like before, the twisting we endured, especially Mom. She doesn’t know that Grandma, my sweet, fogged, unclear Grandmother, used to be violent when Mom took care of her. That’s why Grandma is in the home now and on medication.I remember when Mom was taking care of her at the house and she hired an aide for Grandma on the weekends. When Mom would take Grandma back to her apartment to give herself a break, Grandma would assault the aide. Whenever I called Mom she sounded weary and lost. Sometimes she could barely speak above a whisper. Always had some new war story about Grandma and these patient workers — “She did it again!” It seemed that practically every other month Mom would have to call the service to request a different person to look after Grandma. They just could not handle her, especially since Grandma was in her own house. Some strange woman gonna try to tell her what she couldn’t do in her own house?! Were they mad?! Swung that cane at the aide’s head and cursed her like a crazy person on the subway when the skinny woman wouldn’t let her eat what she wanted or did some slight thing to rile her in her domain. Started screaming and having tantrums. My parents would get phone calls from another fatigued, apologetic, suffering woman saying she had to call EMS to take Grandma to the hospital and sedate her. After a couple months, Mom couldn’t really find any more sacrificial saints willing to be thrown to Grandma. So she stayed at the house all the time. Then Grandma started swinging at Dad and Mom. That was it. Mom admitted defeat.So now
I’m stunned and stuck between impulses and questions:

Stabbing guilt.

Going Brooklyn on this nurse and cursing her out.

Did Grandma hear?

Will it set her off?

It did. THEN Grandma did the slow build, manic pacing thing, which I had never seen but only heard about from Dad. THEN, after the knuckleheaded nurse opened her reckless mouth, Grandma thinks I came to take her home with me. I get her to her room okay but she won’t sit but for a few seconds as I try to have this visit. She, of the legendary 16-IHOP-pancakes-upon-arrival-to-U.S.-soil only eats part of the beef patty I brought her. She’s got no teeth and either loses or won’t wear her dentures. Still she chews with her mouth open leaving masticated orange crust for the viewing, indifferently dropping flakes on her lap, which I clean up. I wipe her mouth and open the bottle for her. She only takes a few sips. Tells me,

“I’m ready to go.”

“Go where?”

“I’m ready to go.”

“You want to go back, back to the day room?”

“Yes.”

Heaves her bottom-heavy body up and I walk with her slowly, her arm in mine, guiding her to keep her hand on the wall railing, so she won’t fall like she’s done before. When she does, Mom and Dad get more phone calls. Ludicrous, early morning, sleep-ending phone calls from the nursing staff saying our 79-year-old muddled matriarch fell again but they “shouldn’t worry.”

I thought we were going to sit in the Cuckoo’s Nest for the visit. She sits for a moment, paces.

“Mommy coming?”

“My Mom’s at home, Grandma.”

“Unh.”

Goes back to her thoughts.

The vicious old lady with the pink floral K-Mart housecoat is sitting next to Grandma’s usual spot by the window. That window that looks out on to the homes for mentally disabled adults across the street and the crabgrass dumping lot. Vicious Old K-Mart Lady was cursing at me as usual,

“I’ll beat the shit out of you! I’ll beat the shit out of you! Fuck you! Get the fuck out of here!!!”

I know this woman is out of her head. Her medication is fading.

“Get the fuck out of here!!” Not bothering me, nope, not bothering “You stupid idiot!! Fuck” me. I know she’s not well. “you!!!! Dumb dick ” It’s sad, ” I’m gonna get somebody to kick your ass!!” really.

Grandma comes to my defense.

“You shut ya Dyamn mout’!!”

“It’s okay, Grandma, it’s okay.”

“Fuck you!!! I’m gonna beat yur ass!!!

“You shut ya Dyamn mout’ She’s just a young girl!!”

“I’ll kick yur ass, too!!”

“Come now!!! I’ll slap ya mout’!!! Ya too Dyamn fresh!!”

“It’s okay, Grandma, it’s okay.”

Sitting in the Cuckoo’s Nest between geriatric ids with not enough sense left to rise above. Besides, Grandma never could hold her tongue. Was always talking about how someone — family, friend, or foe was “vexing me and I gon’ to box her one if she don’ act right.”

Grandma, pissed at Vicious K-mart Lady, decides she wants to move again. We walk the obstacle course of smelly people in wheelchairs, past bedrooms with hospital beds holding her moaning and incontinent neighbors. She stands by her closet, stone still, not opening it, like she wants something, is waiting for it to pop out. Then when I gingerly ask her if she wants something, quickly turns, snapped from her trance, and walks back to the Nest. By this time, I’ve been here an hour. My good girl limit is up. Every time we move she gets a little more irritated. I get a little more nervous. I’m waiting for her to start swinging at me. Good luck, medication, and being a favorite grandchild can only last for so long.

We walk the course again, back to her room.

“You take me home now!”

“You are home!” Not true and you know it.

My brain is on fire with guilt.

Her home is a pleasant one-bedroom apartment 15 blocks from here that she was very proud of. It smells like curry, has a white crushed velvet couch and two red velvet armchairs covered in plastic slipcovers. It’s where she slept in that big, big bed she’s had as long as you’ve known her with the painting of a beatific white Jesus at her bedside. It’s where you spent a lot of Christmases eating good food, with your cousins and uncles and aunts and watching Uncle Papito get drunk and pee in the bathroom with the door open. Where Grandma used to go the Waldbaum’s in the shopping center across the street and sit in the courtyard with her friends afterwards on sunny days. Then she’d tell Mom about what was on sale when Mom called. Where you spent practically every Sunday of your childhood, visiting her after going to church with Mom, drinking sodas Mom wouldn’t let you have otherwise.

This is not her home.”Take me home wit’ you.”I know she means my parents’ house. The Alzheimer’s has taken her remembrance of the fact that I don’t live with them anymore. It’s one of those things that has slipped from her. Like the fact that I’m not in school anymore, graduated from college eight years ago. She was at my graduation, the only graduation she has ever been to. Still, every once in a while she’ll ask me how’s school like I’m still a freshman trying to get used to the dorms and life away from home.

I say nothing. I am dying.

As we walk out again, me too drained to guide her, she stops by the elevators at the top of the hall that leads to the Nest, like she’s the visitor waiting patiently to get on. Like she was just here to look in on a friend and bring her some stew. But she’s not even allowed to leave the floor like some residents. Might get lost and not know it. I remember in the Staten Island nursing home she was in briefly before she was placed here, she used to wander the building, causing the panic-stricken nurses to stop what they were doing to search for her.

“Mrs. Willllson!!! Mrs. Willlson!!!”

That happened the first time I went with Mom, Aunt Carmen, and Beverly to visit her there. The nurses found Grandma in the corner of somebody’s room sleeping, conked out from a night of fighting the nurse and refusing to go to bed. So now Mom got her a name registration bracelet from the Alzheimer’s Foundation, like those construction paper nametags I used to have to wear on kindergarten field trips.

I pull her away from the elevator and lead her down the hall. She questions me like an impatient child.

Back to the Nest.

Back down the hall.

“Where’s Mommy?”

Stop by the elevator.

“She gettin’ de car?”

Back to her room.

“We go home soon?”

Stop by the elevator.

“Where’s Mommy”

Back to the Nest.

“She gettin’ de car?”

Stop by the elevator.

“Where’s Mommy?”

Back to her room.

Keep walking past nurses, including the knucklehead who ignited the Great Panamanian Grandma Hallway Tour. She keeps looking at me like I am so very evil. The others must think I’m nuts or maybe they’re used to it working here. Anyway, they already think I’m weird because of my eyebrow ring.

Like I said, my good girl limit is up. There is no honor or comfort in this visit. I am fucking tired and depressed and I want to go home. On the edge of my own delirium, my defense field starts cracking and I can’t stop the toxin of affliction from seeping through again.

 

*****

“Your Grandmother was what they would call abusive in this country.”

“Grandma never said I love you, always found fault.”

“She hit me with a broom stick. Waited for me at the door.”

The voice of my Mother from a Sunday dinner a while ago, while Grandma was living with her and Dad. I hear it as I watch Grandma pacing, spinning, searching, waiting, wanting out. Wanting to go home, to my parents’ house to be cared for by the daughter who told me this. I try to wrap my brain around it: this fuzzy, bottom-heavy prune with loose skin and a grey buzz cut abused my mother. I’ve heard Mom’s voice a lot since that day, the purging. I hear it every time I wrestle with my conscience to get out of bed and come to this place to visit the woman who abused my mother and loves us both. I hear it all the time. See Mom’s face as we sat at the kitchen table that night after dinner. Feel the click that sank my chest and said we have crossed over. Don’t know where we are. Just know how I see Mom will never be the same. Feel achingly guilty all the time. All the time. Am I wrong for loving Grandma still?

*****

“I WANT TO GO HOME NOW!!!”

Her confusion has worn her patience.

Even with Alzheimer’s, even at half the heft she used to be, Grandma still scares me sometimes. So I’m a little shaken. In the midst of this moment of terror and the Grandma Tour, I am back in the body of the terrified little girl not understanding the strangeness of Grandma, afraid of her heavy hands. For a moment, not seeing another way free, I actually contemplate the impossible notion of taking her to my house in Park Slope, a house in which even I don’t want to live. I hate my three nosy housemates and there are way too many stairs for her.

Grandma and I are frustrated with each other.

Finally, with purpose and a plan, before I really do bawl on the floor in front of these nurses and my confused Grandmother, I grab my coat off her bed, walk her back down the hall — “Mommy comin’?” — through the course, past the bedridden moaners, past the nurses both sweet and knuckleheaded, to the Nest, holding a little tighter, tugging a little when we get to the elevator. Sit her firmly back in her chair in the amid the smell of vomit, by the window that looks out on the acre of chunky detritus of lives lived, next to Vicious Cursing K-Mart Lady. It ends like every visit does:

“I love you, Grandma.”

I kiss her very soft cheek.

“I love you, too, Baby.”

She smiles that smile that twists and warms my tired heart.

I run down the hallway looking over my shoulder. Feeling like a fugitive, I pace as I wait for the elevator. Get on before some bit of her former brash-mouthed self swipes away a chunk of her haze. Before she catches on that I’m not going to get Mom or the car. Walk quickly down the street talking to myself as always:

“I wish I could take her home I wish I could take her home I wish I could take her home!!! God, I wish I were rich.” And I understand why Mom brought her to our house to care for her.

It ‘s almost five. The sun is waning. I wait, near tears, in the cold for the bus that will take me to the train to the house in which I live without her. As I wait, the spasmodic soundtrack of voices and eight-millimeter memories of my tender childhood with Grandma converge again with Mom’s night of confession, cramming in my head for space and pieces of my allegiance.

“Mommy comin’?”

“Your Grandmother never wanted me to have any fun.”

“Good to see you!!! Good to see you God bless you”

“When I got my period she used to let your Uncle Papito watch me and her tear up strips of cloth for my underwear. We didn’t have sanitary napkins then in Panama.”

Grandma in her small, sunny kitchen cooking dinner

just for me when my mother was repulsed by me.

“She gettin’ de car?”

“I would be so embarrassed. Would wait till late at night,after everyone was asleep, to tear them.  He’d wake up and watch me. Sittin’ there just grinnin’.  When I begged her to make him go to bed she told me,  ‘Just shut ya mout’ . He not botherin’ you!!’”

“This is my granddaughter!!!”

“She told me I was found in a trash can!! I believed her for a long, long time.”

“Gailie, what you want to eat? Take whatcha want.”

The two of us mischievously adding more 100 proof rum to the Christmas rum cake batter while Mom’s back was turned.

“I did everything for her. Washed clothes, cooked dinner. Papito and Mamita were always in trouble.  Runnin’ the  streets. She defended them. I could never do anything right. Never!!”

.

“You grow up so nice!!!” </font“

“Whatever self-esteem I have, I got from me!

I had to tell myself. ‘God don’t make no garbage!!”

7, 8, 9 year-old me on Grandma’s bed hypnotically combingher hair because she asked me to.

 

“She never said ‘I love you’.”

“I love you, too, baby.”

 

“She made me walk on my knees across upside-down bottle caps!!!!”

I don’t know what to do with the voices, whose side to champion. I love my mother. She has taught me to love Grandma. She is also the one who has always preached to me just let go of the past. Especially when I try to talk to her about how much her ostracizing hurt me after I came out. We don’t talk about it anymore. But she purged that night like she was at confession. I’d heard only pieces of the story before, written off as strict moms in the old days, a cautionary tale to remind me or my brother how good we had it. But that night was different. Some seal on a box buried long ago was broken. Her voice started to tighten and I saw in her eyes the rage encrusted behind her heart for so long. I saw that some things don’t ever heal, no matter how much you may cant a mantra to convince your spirit to let go, to bloodlet the soul of past pain. I saw the tortured little girl in Panama living with the strict mother with heavy hands. And I loved her small self.

And I look at Grandma, who has been part of my most special moments, who took care of me when her daughter was too embarrassed and betrayed by the honesty Mom assured me she and I would always have, when I told her I was gay. I look at Grandma’s shrinking heft, misshapen body, her hazy, erratic mind. I just want to take care of her. Any sliver of maternal instinct I have arises when I’m with her. I love her small self. Though, from the fear Grandma struck in me as a child, I know Mom is not exaggerating. That night sitting at the dinner table, I saw it. I saw what I had read in that book about caring for older parents happening: the pain and resentment from years ago arising in the midst of caring for this person. Resenting her more for needing you and having to be there when perhaps she wasn’t there when you needed her as a child. I was glad Mom was finally opening up to me. But I read the book so I knew: This, the letting go of past rage, is one of those things that has to happen to prepare for Grandma’s death. Knowing the why of a situation doesn’t make it any easier to take.

I’m gonna have a hard time sleeping tonight.
__________________________________________________________
November 15, 1997

I’ve been asking God what am I supposed to get out of this, watching Grandma exist like this. Don’t know yet. Some might say, some even in the family, she is receiving the boomerang of karma: she didn’t always treat people right when she could so now she’s getting hers. Now she has lost her mind and lives with people who vomit on themselves. The God I believe in is not a punishing God so I can’t go there. I always hear the clock ticking.

I got the message about living well and treating those around you well while you can.  To the point of paranoia, I realize that a life can be over in some way without actually being dead. So I’m trying to pack all these important moments and conversations in, to really know the people who matter so that when they or I begin to disappear, the brain begins to melt like gel down a sink, there will be nothing left unsaid, no love or anger or concern kept within. You can take that with you.

Ghetto Smut Redux

This is a response to a NY Times Op-Ed by Nick Chiles entitled Their Eyes Were Reading Smut. In the essay the other laments the inclusion of urban lit in the African-American section of Borders and other stores.   

 I am an admitted book snob.  Receiving my MFA in writing from an Ivy League a school for “real writers” while working at a high-falutin’ academic and literary bookstore has only inflated my snobbery.  So I understand what Mr. Chiles is saying and the pull of judgement.  As a young black writer working on an historical memoir, I, too, wonder who will read what I write.  I have also thought that maybe the people read “ghetto smut” will eventually want to experiment with things beyond that genre.  But—and this is where I have to challenge my own judgment — why is that a goal?  Is it that as a reading community we judge that work as less than?  Or is it really, as the black learned middle-class, we are embarrassed by those images being representative of us?          

    Baldwin, Edward Jones, Audre Lorde and Langston are exceptional writers, craftspeople.  But their experiences are no more valuable than those of “urban lit” authors.  To me the embarrassment experienced by some blacks regarding the genre is more about wanting the authors, readers, and even the characters, of those popular titles to assimilate.  It is more about personal discomfort with that part of our culture than the books themselves; it’s the exposure that makes them squirm.  This is not at all unlike the desire of some to squash gangsta rap due to their judgment of that reality and how the rapper chooses to express it.            Rap, at base, has its roots in the African-American oral tradition, storytelling.  The preservation and study of that tradition has been a core component of African American studies.  But there is a line of acceptability in that study designated by those scholars, thinkers and writers who define what is important.  Gangsta rap, though definitely part of that oral tradition, is not often deemed unacceptable.  Now, am I thrilled that there are black men who rap about gang battles and letting their AKs spray?  No.  Respectful that they speak from their life experience?  Absolutely.  Saddened that they have had those particular experiences?  Without question.  Am I glad that other people who may not know that life may learn something about how other people live?  Actually, yeah.  Do I wish they would choose to not demean women or—if they are women—themselves?  Hell, yeah.  But that’s how they are conveying their world.  The subjects explored in these urban lit titles — adultery, sexual orientation, crime life — are similar to those in gangsta rap and have always been talked about (in plenty of mass market titles by authors of every hue, by the way.)  By Mr. Chiles’s view, black authors are cinched to a standard that requires us to be “better” than other authors which deprives us of the freedom to be individuals, lest we confirm racist suspicions.  This is not the first generation of black folks to produce hustlers, pimps and baby mama drama.  But this may be the first generation to have wide access to the means of producing and selling those books and an audience that values those stories.  That Mr. Chiles is offended his books are shelved with urban lit titles in the African-American literature section is just plain snobbery.  Both he and those authors write about African-American life and ideas.  And, yes, it would be great if the people who read titles like Legit Baller or A Gangster’s Girl would try authors outside of that genre (I know people who have).  But not because they’re better but because reading is good.  I think Mr. Chiles’s issue is a larger one.  He, and I guess I, should ask what are we doing to change the experiences of the characters in those books and the audience who relates to them?  How are we helping our people?  I have a friend who’s a high school teacher and whose students, many of them of African descent, inhale these books and write book reports on them.  Though both Hustler’s Wife and Beloved are on the class’ bookshelf, Ms. Morrison’s work has been untouched.  Rather than despairing about her students’ disinterest in literary fiction, she uses these titles as a tool to discuss the issues that are of import to them.    

    Where I think there is room for critique is not the literary value of the writing but the grammatical form.  Those authors got’s to learn how to write, fo’ real.  KnowwhuI’msayin’? My teacher friend is also considering using these books to illustrate poor grammar.  Perhaps that is where both Mr. Chiles and I can begin to give back.  Not by dismissing urban lit as trash unworthy of shelf space next to our works.  But by sharing the love of our craft with its authors inspired to craft works of their own.

The Grandma Journals Pt. 1

 May 26, 1995 

“Next year, if I’m not dead, I’m gonna buy a Coke.”            

 This is what Grandma says to me now.  She pulls me in tight like she’s got some conspiratorial, heirloom lore to bestow upon her grandchild before it’s too late.  She’s losing her mind.  She lives in that blissful space of unconscious senile insanity.  Nothing that she says makes sense.  She wants to lift her heavy, stiff, body to her walker to visit people who aren’t there.  She laughs at jokes untold.  She sits, sleeps, then speaks.  Sleeps then speaks.  Nothing makes sense.  She’s incontinent.  Has to wear one of those adult diapers with the commercials by that bright-faced aged movie star who talks about living an active life, not letting a silly old little thing like peeing on yourself when you’re 70 hold you back from rollerblading with your grandkids.  That’s not what she says, but it’s what she means.             

     Grandma is afraid of her apartment, doesn’t live there now.  Thinks someone is trying to get her there.  Won’t sleep in her bedroom.  She’d sit up on the foldout sofa in her dark living room watching the security camera images wired to her television, watching who’s coming in and going out of the building.  Started running up and down the halls, banging on her neighbors’ doors, begging them to save her from some motorcycle-riding phantom attacker.  Now she’s living with Mom and Dad in my old room, where she still won’t sleep.  Mom struggles to put her to bed like Grandma’s the stubborn child who just wants one more glass of water, one more bedtime story, just a little more tv.  She sits up in my old twin bed putting the covers over her head.  That’s how she wants to sleep.  Then she gets up at three in the morning to take a shower and wake Dad and Mom.  Tells Dad to take her back to her home now.  Unravels at his ardent pleas to go back to bed.  Disrupts the house.  Screams and hollers in that intimidating West Indian accent,  

” ME NO STAY HERE!!!  ME GOIN’ TO ME HOUSE NOW!!!”              

     Mom is overwhelmed.  My mother is overwhelmed by her mother and doesn’t know what to do with her own emotions, because she never has known.  Doesn’t believe in being emotional even if no one would blame her for dropping to the floor and bawling right now.  I wouldn’t blame her.  I’d rock her in my arms on the floor and bawl along with her.  She believes in doing and moving on.  So she’s coping because it’s what she does.  I wish she would let me in.            

    Grandma is one of my favorite people.  Wasn’t always.  I remember when I was very young she scared shy me.  This 200-pound woman who spoke a strange language that I didn’t understand.  She used to hit me with her heavy hand when I didn’t do something she asked in that thick accent.  Called me “fresh” when Mom and I would have discussions.  Grandma was from the old school.  In her mind, there were no discussions with children.  They did what they were told.  Then something changed; my ear understood her speech.  Her other grandkids ignored her or, by failing to comply with her strict and mercurial thinking, did her wrong.  Couldn’t act right, do right.  I was a good girl.  I think that made her like me more.  Something with us smoothed out so we could see each other better.  Can’t really explain what happened.  Wasn’t a conscious thing.  Somehow I realized that there was never going to be any changing her, that her sharpness was just who she was, where she came from.  I knew she loved me.  She made me laugh.  Now she has Alzheimer’s.            

    I expected worse.  I went to see her at my parents’ house last Tuesday.  I needed to see her and Mom.  I expected Grandma to be this shriveling, crazy woman who wouldn’t come out of the bedroom or something like that.  It wasn’t that easy.  She still looked the same.  Still sounded the same, same accent.  The Grandma I know was still there from appearances: the large big-faced mahogany-skinned woman with pressing curls.  The one who used to let me comb and braid her short, silvery hair when I was a kid and slept over.  The one who would cook for me after I told my parents that I’m gay and moved out of their house to Brooklyn, like her.  Kept telling me that I should live back with them — “Dat’s where you belong.”  Didn’t understand why I, unmarried, would want to live by myself.  Thought I needed to live with people who would take care of me.  Didn’t understand those people and I weren’t on the best terms because they had recently found out that the person I would eventually marry, whether or not they chose to acknowledge the union, would be their daughter-in-law.  Didn’t understand how much it meant to have her making me curried chicken, rice & peas, and sweet plantains and letting me drink from the six packs of soda she bought only for her children and grandkids.  How much I needed someone in my family to accept me even if Grandma didn’t know the whole story.              

    So she still looked like the Grandma I adore.  It’s just that she didn’t completely realize I was there.  When I arrived, she was so excited: “So good to see you, good to see you!!  God bless you.  You grow up so nice.”            

    Then ten minutes later she started talking about me like I wasn’t there.  About how nice it would be to see Gail, as I was standing across the room from her.  

                                                                                                                         December 23, 1996            

     It’s the first Christmas with no fruitcake and no Grandma.  Mom is not up to it.  She doesn’t know how much I need this.  Every year, practically since my conception, I have baked West Indian rum fruitcake with Grandma and Mom the Saturday before Christmas.  Very Cosby Christmas Moment baking cakes with Mom and Grandma for those in the family Grandma deemed deserving.  I remember when I was little and Grandma was still working, cleaning NYU hospital, Dad and I would get up before the sun to go pick her up from work on Baking Saturday.  I fell asleep in the car every time.  I think a couple times I went in my p.j.’s.  Little brown me with the big head of Chaka Khan “good” hair twisted into thick braids, a half inch scar on my face under my left eye from the time I fell and hit my face on the coffee table when I was three, small gold filigree G’s hanging from my ears, a gift from a relative’s trip to Panama.  Dad’d shake me awake when we got there.  I’d peel my little eyes open to see the wanna-be-dawn light and see Grandma, through the frosty window, in all her girth, waiting at the door with her shopping bag of rum and mince meat, and vanilla.  ” ‘Ello Miss Gailee!!  Come kiss you’ Granmottha.” 

             We’d drive back through the Midtown Tunnel and she’d grill me, make sure I took care of business to make the cake come out right.  Made sure I got her butter softened and with all the sugar from the night before.  She’d come in the house, change from her uniform, eat a little fried bluefish or porgies, white bread and mint tea that Mom had waiting for breakfast.  Then we’d get to work.  When the sugar and butter were all mixed together, we’d blend them in with the rest of the ingredients for the batter in the huge washtub Grandma bought only for baking fruitcake, stirring with that big, big wooden spoon.  We’d be baking through dinnertime when Dad bought Chinese food: wonton soup and pork fried rice, her favorites.  Every single year of my life.  Nearly every year of my Mom and Grandma’s life in Panama and the States, too.  It’s the only part of Christmas I like anymore, especially since I came out.  I see Mom and Dad only at holidays, and they only call me to find out if I’m coming over for dinners on Christmas and Thanksgiving.  With Grandma around, though, everything is cool with all of us.  I know it’s mostly for appearances for Grandma.  She still doesn’t know that I’m gay and treats me like her little Gailee.  She will never know.              

    If I told her she wouldn’t understand.  I’m sure that even before her illness, she didn’t know what gay or lesbian or homosexual meant.  Sure it’s not even in her universe of possibility that two “girls” could be in love like husband and wife.  I’d have to explain it to her in pieces, make sure she comprehended what all of it meant (“There are men and there are women…”)  It’d be part plea for absolution having sinned in the eyes of Grandma, part instructional, like explaining death to a child.  If I could finally drag us both through, my reward would not have been compassion and an international coffees moment.  I’d be cast out of her heart.  Period.  She’s from the old school.             

    I told Mom I’d do the cake.  I’d buy all the ingredients and do all the work.  Still no.  Doesn’t want it in her house; not the sound of mixers or clanging of pans; not the smell of the year-long rum-soaked fruits bought at the Waldbaum’s across from her building and Jamaican markets in Brooklyn (stored in those huge jars Grandma kept on the kitchen counter in her apartment) baking into batter of brown sugar, butter, over-proof rum and West Indian vanilla; not my younger brother, Howard and Dad, “manhandling,” taking their turn mixing the batter, grabbing the big spoon with both hands until it stood up straight in the stiff batter; not the melodies of Nat King Cole and Barbra Streisand singing “O Tannenbaum” while I mix and stir; not me commenting to Mom how ironic it is that a Jewish woman could make a classic Christmas album.  None of it.  I understand but I need it anyway.      

         Mom’s soul finally collapsed.  Got sick after she and Dad put Grandma in the home.  Had the flu for nearly a month.  Kept going back to doctors who couldn’t explain it but I knew: God put her to bed to grieve.  Mom was too stubborn, too afraid to pay attention to the torrent roiling around in her well-guarded heart.  So God laid her down with nothing but time and no choice but to deal.  Her body and soul mercifully unbound.  I tried to take care of her, but she wouldn’t let me.  Howard and Dad bought take-out and dealt with their own lives.  I know my Dad and my bro aren’t completely insensitive, just oblivious.  Besides, Mom is Mom.  I talked to her on the phone and she told me how she was still going grocery shopping and running errands with a high fever and flip-floppy stomach.  Told me how she almost didn’t get finished shopping because she nearly had to run out of Pathmark to vomit in the parking lot.  She couldn’t possibly have thought of asking Dad to go because he wouldn’t buy the right things.  Can’t let go.  Gotta keep moving.  Soul healed enough to set her free to go on the cruise to the Bahamas they’d been planning for six months.  The thing she was thankful for at the Thanksgiving table was that cruise.            

    All I can think is that I want my Grandma back: the one who bought me my first television when I was seven against my parent’s objections.  They thought I was too young.  She wanted her favorite granddaughter to have it.  The one who loved food.  Had Sunday dinner cooked by 11 am.  Huge feasts she’d call Mom to tell her about Saturday night.  Even though I know it was just for show, I miss that when she was around my folks acted like nothing was wrong, no stress or tension in the Dottin fam.  No yelling and screaming about how they sacrificed to send me to Sarah Lawrence and it turned me into one of those people.  I loved them and they loved me.  Just like when I was a kid.  And for the hours we may have spent with her I could suspend reality and things really were cool with us.  It was nice for a while. My heart misses her.            

     So I’m trying to give Mom space.  Be a big girl about not baking.  But I need what I need.  I fucking hate Christmas.

Shorties

   There’s a semi-squished E train destined for Jamaica,Queens, destined for the domiciles of black people, middle class and po’.  The train makes its way through many stations, many neighborhoods before it gets there.  It clacks through tunnels and heaves at its stops –Fifth Ave., Lex. After a day at the midtown mines, multi-hued riders slug on and off the cars, sighing in air-conditioned relief or pushing through the sodden thickness of the platform air as the train shuts itself and lurches onward. 

     Olive legs in sheer hose lazily bend and ankles rotate after a day in heels.  Hands — peach to saffron, jasmine to blue-black — grip the centering pole and fists align on top of fists, like choosing sides for stickball.  They steady themselves for the subway surf — 23rd & Ely (1st stop in Queens), Queens Plaza, Roosevelt.  At Roosevelt Ave.-Jackson Heights — a poster board snapshot melting pot — the car empties many hues.  Complexions still riding onward become nearly binary — brown ones and peach ones.  

    Two skinny brown kids enter through the sliding door at one end of the car, a couple of round-the-way shorties of opposite gender, about 13.  Shorty One and Shorty Two wend through the standing, the leaning, the balanced, and the dazed.  The girl has straightened hair pulled back tight tight tight in a short ponytail.  She is holding a violin and a bow, no case.  Figuring the kids are on the hustle, the laborers wall up in Pavlovian fashion.  They sit, defended and expectant, waiting for the kids to stop mid-car, to get them to give up some cheddar, a nibble.  Wait for Twinkle Twinkle to tap on the wall.  But the kids keep skittering through the car and don’t even ask for a piece of lint.  As they move through, a few women on one bench seat — an accountant, a student, a contracts assistant, a cafeteria worker — all Nubians of variant melanin and heft — cease engaging in ride-time distractions.  They put aside “news” of that day’s images of coffee-hued young men in handcuffs, squint open from a doze or slow the bopping to Beyonce in their heads.  The boy, lanky arms and legs sticking out of oversized light blue football jersey and navy blue shorts, is engaged in the tactic of male juvenile pursuance — mimicking every move the girl makes in the goofily inverted way young boys have of saying “I like you like Play Station” without having to risk being soft.  He’s getting off on his own mischievousness, giggling himself purple.  She is too through, not havin’ it.  In her little girl red shorts and red striped top — something from GapKids — she stands there staring him down like she’s grown. 

    The women, amused by the “I remember when” of the boy, follow Shorty One and Two with eyes and swiveling heads, transfixed by the warming sight of the “cultural anomaly” of a black kid with a violin.  Curious, they are all curious.  The young ones stop at the sliding door at the opposite end.  Boy takes instrument from the girl, steadies himself against the door and tunes up, turning and tightening strings.  Errant notes vibrate in the air for a moment but he makes no music.  He’s just holding the stringed thing, still “playing too damn much” with the girl who sucks her teeth and punctuates with rolling eyes.  The pale laborers remain glued to the news, their psyches held by the coffee-hued in handcuffs.   Tuned, the boy checks his violin.  As the train wobbles and heaves, screeching its own cacophonous concerto, he draws bow across strings.  The brown kid plays a bar of something unfamiliar and glorious — something he learned or wrote himself, something strong and lilting — which resounds underground off the subway walls, the poetry of Ashberry, the stainless steel doors, the destination signs, the ads for low-cost lawyers, off the frosted surfers for just a moment.  Perhaps the thoughts of the pale, the olive-skinned, the frosted immersed in their tabloids are not familiar to Shorty, playin’ his minuet like the E train is Carnegie.  Perhaps those thoughts have more play in his young life than he cares to know.  He’s not thinkin’ about them.  He’s playing his music and tryin’ to make honey take those hands off her hips and crack a smile.  Separate but together, the brown women smile like proud mothers at the brown kids, gratified.  That’s who we know ourselves to be.  The white folks don’t even notice.