by Ben Philippe
They did not know each other. Dad might have muttered something casual in German, the man’s eyes might have suddenly widened in shock and then delight. Mom and I might have been left hopping in place for warmth, each carrying multiple grocery bags, while these two stray men carried on in German for twenty minutes and parted ways with a proud, brotherly handshake, the man clasping Dad’s between his two giant white paws, crackling with transparent hair and brown spots.
“When did you learn German?” Mom pondered on the ride home, impressed like she always was. “It’s like you don’t even have to translate it in your mind.”
“I don’t.”
“That’s so fascinating to me,” she said, arm on her window, watching him drive from the front passenger seat like a schoolgirl.
I hid it better, but I was probably as curious as she was. Why isn’t he a translator? Or an ambassador at the UN? Why did we just cash a welfare check and get groceries at Super C, the cheap grocery store with stained bananas? I suspect he often pondered the same thing.
“When did you realize you could think in German?” Mom asked at a red light.
“Why are you asking that?” He sighed, distracted by traffic. My father saw women speaking as a time to gather his thoughts. A respite from the intellectual rigor of other men and maybe a shift to seduction, though I never witnessed that myself.
“Because you just spent twenty minutes speaking German, maybe,” I chimed in from the back, a preteen aware I could no longer get the belt after being put on my knees for two hours as punishment, not in a white country like Canada.
He’d “just learned it, at some point,” he shrugged off, not in the mood to talk.
Now, I realize that this was probably a lie. He probably took many courses, and after spending X amount of years (or months, or decades) in Germany, became fluent. Where and how he became fluent in the Spanish, English, or Latin, I have no clue.
Dad was an equation. Incomplete, partly because I didn’t have all the integers in hand, or maybe because I resented having to solve him in the first place. Asking him any questions about his life, no matter how superficial, was like putting quarters into a very specific jukebox that would stutter through a full song, turning it into a string of words and leaving you to solve the equation and imagine the rhythm yourself.
Ultimately, the father I choose to remember was a man trying his best, falling short, who disliked not being in control and who couldn’t stop being selfish in the end. Rather than a convenient stack of stereotypes, tank tops, and chains, it turns out my father was complicated, nuanced, infuriatingly contradictory: in short, entirely human. Who wouldn’t have some light daddy issues every time you brush your teeth because, I’m told, I look exactly like him when he was my age.
Eight
Sure, I’ll Be Your Black Boyfriend
At school, our student body vaguely changes. A few kids leave, a few newcomers arrive. There are now a total of three Black students at Saint-Esprit Elementary. Two siblings in the third and first grades. They have each other and, presumably, their own Erics with folded lists in their pockets. I spot them across the playground while playing ballon chasseur—dodgeball—at recess. I refocus on the game. I can’t be seen talking to babies. I can’t warn them. I wouldn’t even know what to warn them of.
Puberty is looming within my fifth-grade cohort. We’re learning English in class. It’s the language of sexy teenagers on television. In our minds, we’ll soon be joining the cast of Degrassi: The Next Generation. I’ve become more Quebecois than Haitian. At home, we watch La Petite Vie, the hyperpopular Friends of Quebec sitcoms. I pay attention to hockey and feel involved when the Canadiens lose, though I still find the games too long. Celine Dion is now our household’s national icon. We have opinions about her, and the amount of time she’s spending in America feels like a betrayal to our Canadian household. We’ve made friends with other Black families around Sherbrooke, yet it still falls short of a community. These friendships are not unlike the ones you find at work: based less on a shared sense of identity than geographical proximity. Dad goes to play cards at their houses on the weekend. He’s there from morning to night on Saturdays. I don’t understand why Mom resents these absences so much until I realize that the difference between her and me is that I believe him.
Kevin is just another fifth-grade classmate now. We’re still friends, but I no longer wonder what he’s eating for dinner while I’m eating Haitian rice and fish at night. I’ve noticed that his blond hair is slowly turning brown, and I wish it wasn’t. He and I now talk about the subtle eroticism of Ms. Pac-Man and how that fluffy tight little bow at the top of her head and those Jezebellian eyelashes and that bright red lipstick make all the difference. More complex Ms. Pac-Man feelings—simmering around the decidedly more three-dimensional forms of my now pubescent classmates—are nearing but remain at a distance, a mirage coming into focus.
Mom and I spend two consecutive summers in Florida to recharge her batteries and improve my English. These extended two-month-long summer vacations elsewhere are our household’s clumsy steps toward a divorce that will flood my toes with relief.
When we come back from Florida, the sixth grade is a sudden battleground none of us expected. Bodies have changed. Previously chubby Melanie now has heaving breasts.
The boys are lankier. Some kids now look exactly like their parents picking them up from school. It’s not here yet, but you can tell who will be bald in adulthood. I compare my two first-day-of-class pictures, hanging from last year and now—fifth grade and sixth. I haven’t changed. I might be thicker, but it’s the same thing: “boy, Black.”
The starting shot for our nascent romantic aspirations is the fact that Jean-Philippe Desmarais, now taller, even better looking than before, still smart and charming, too—honestly, screw him—suddenly has an ex-girlfriend. No one is quite sure who the girlfriend in question was and how that status had even come to an end, but no one questions his explanation that she goes to another school, an exotic claim that only adds to his reputation. Another school? Jean-Philippe is smart and nice and doesn’t need to lie about this thing—unlike say, Vincent who lies about vacationing in Miami on long weekends—so we trust it, pepper him with questions, and find that suddenly our own lives seem lacking. Behind in puberty, we start to pair up. We have to catch up, or middle school will smell it on us next year and eat us all alive.
I’m one of the kids who tries to put it out of their minds. I have other, purer interests of the Pokémon variety. I should mention that I have a Charizard. It’s not a first-edition version of the rare holographic card, but a Charizard is still a Charizard. It’s the elementary school version of being verified on every social media platform all at once. Kids are stabbing each other for those across North America. (Don’t make eye contact with me like we’re the same, you Charizard-less peasant.)
I can only keep myself in check for so long. The sixth-grade hormonal crusade hits a fever pitch when Emiles G. gets a girlfriend, too. Yes: Emiles, that chinless expanse of neck with an Adam’s apple the size of a fist at age twelve, walks hand in hand with Catherine C., the skinny one who wears makeup and is on her way to becoming a chick who can hang. The rest of us accelerate our processes. The boys split apart and start mingling. Some crack jokes in class. New looks proliferate. Steven L. starts to experiment with hair gel, a swoop situation covering half his face. In a few months, he’ll become “the most handsome boy in the neighborhood.” The girls have decided. No one will see it coming when it happens. He can barely read in class.
We rush to learn the timeless art of seduction and run toward monogamy like someone’s handing out medals. The whole point is to not be left on the bench.
I’m still the one Black kid in our grade. Somewhere along the way, I’ve recognized that as the opposite of an asset. I stop by the Pharmaprix one morning and start aggressively smelling deodorants. The shopkeeper assigned to follow me upon entry laughs to herself in a way that’s not entirely concer
ned with my hearing and gives up, returning to the counter to tell her friend. I buy two sticks of Axe Chocolate assuming it’s the one made for Black people. I also don’t hate the smell, which may speak to some deviancy at the bottom of my soul. I’ve aligned with the rest of the world.
Soon, I’m officially dating Genevieve M. I give her a squeeze monster from Toys “R” Us when I ask her. She gets good grades and has long, pretty hair. She wore makeup one day and didn’t anymore because too many people noticed, which may be what emboldens me to ask. Genevieve says yes and her friends giggle. I’ve secured a girlfriend, but I am entirely unclear on what, exactly, that means. I don’t tell my parents but, later that night, I will relentlessly search the topic on AltaVista. I can’t take her on trips and don’t know how to procure body oils and/or what to do with them. Mom’s hair stuff smells right but it’s not the right type.
Dad walks into the bathroom to find me kneeling on the bathroom sink going through Mom’s shelves of third-tier products salvaged from the supermarket, pharmacies, and specialized stores. She’s looking for alternatives to her neat shelf, left back in Haiti. Dad raises two mocking eyebrows.
“It’s for my girlfriend,” I tell him defiantly, gathering as many of them as I can to carry into my room. Mom is already asleep. She goes to bed early while Dad reads on the toilet and waits for the lotto numbers after the evening news and I play video games in my room with the door closed.
He smirks at me and keeps the door open waiting for me to exit. “Is she white?” He knows the answer. I lie anyway.
“No.”
In the morning, I wake up to a sheet of condoms on my desk. I won’t fully understand the significance of this for a few more months.
I stuff it into my backpack, knowing that I would be in trouble bursting into the kitchen asking any follow-up questions. I’m too young to know that Mom wouldn’t recognize them. I don’t know what to do with them, but some of the kids at school enjoy them and seem in awe that I possess them. So, I milk it.
“You two are going to have sex?” someone asks, suspicious, inspecting the labels carefully at lunchtime.
“Maybe,” I answer coolly, collecting the condoms from him and folding them neatly into my backpack’s side pocket. They’re my new Pokémon cards.
“Black guys have sex early,” someone else says. They’re on my side.
“Black guys have sex early,” I repeat, emboldened.
Genevieve wants to make out, but getting me to put out is like trying to draw blood from a laptop. I want to watch cartoons and hold hands. I wish she was in love with me. Or, maybe that I was in love with her. Some big emotional swell that would be sated by holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes.
She leans her head on my shoulder during recess while we’re sharpening all 120 color pencils of the leather box case she got for her birthday. I didn’t know it was her birthday, so I’m the one who sharpens the pencils and she empties the shavings into neat little color-coded piles. Other kids look at us and in doing so reverently learn that this is what it means to be in a relationship: arts and crafts together and minimal conversation about TV shows and music.
She sometimes says things that stay with me but that I don’t understand.
“Faye and I decided that if you were white, you would be a redhead.”
I still won’t know how to decipher this eighteen years later. While writing this essay, I still don’t.
Our wholesomeness as an age group is declining, too. South Park is our new religion. Even the French-dubbed version that airs at 10:30 p.m. on Teletoon is joyful to us. Dad doesn’t think we need cable TV, so I learn to lie well. I chime in around Kevin’s plot summary and add to the chorus of laughter.
Occasionally, I stumble too badly to recover.
“I bet you didn’t even watch it!” Eric charges.
Eric dislikes me suddenly. I wish he’d ask to feel my hair again.
“You’re such a liar, Rubeintz!” I won’t be Ben for another six years. Rubeintz is still a name with too many letters in the middle and hard to pronounce at the end. A sandwich with German aspirations.
Genevieve and I watch Save the Last Dance on VHS in her purple bedroom, and she starts holding my hand. It’s a harrowing tale of interracial love: the type we might have both thought we were signing up for in dating. The characters are racial mythologies serving up dramatized proxies for our sixth-grade romance. Her, the ballerina, learning hip-hop to get into Julliard, and me, risking my bright future for a friend I grew up with and who is already on a dark and druggy path.
“That was such a good film!” She says film, not movie. And just like that, we’re one of those couples who has a favorite film.
Years from this moment, I will somehow remember that the Black guy got shot at the end (though this never actually happened). It will confuse me that they dance together at the end as the credits roll. Every cell in my body was expecting the Black boyfriend to die. Dramatically. I’m already conditioned to expect the Black boyfriend should have died.
Even with a degree in screenwriting two decades later, I still think the movie would be stronger if Sean Patrick Thomas’s character died in Julia Stiles’s arms. But I do not know that right now.
We cuddle and I say something like “This is nice,” like Buffy and Angel that one time. She nods her agreement and scoots into me.
“Do you have pot?” she asks, giving me Ms. Pac-Man eyes.
“What?”
“Pot,” she repeats, arm locked around me and eyes bright with the intensity of someone who has finally psyched themselves to voice a long-standing query. Her eyes are the greenest things I’ve seen. So many shades of green . . . How strange.
No.
“Oh. Do you know where to get some?”
No again.
“I know you do. Someone said you definitely did.”
Her next question being obvious makes lying a nonstarter. She’s disappointed, but cuddling is nice. I don’t ask who told her. I wish we could stop cuddling now. I want to go home. Mom is alone there again tonight.
One morning, the games are declared over. The sixth-grade class of Saint-Esprit primary school has a declared pair of victors: Simon and Catherine allegedly had sex. Actual sex. Both tell us separately while glancing at each other from their end of the fenced-in schoolyard, and we decide that their stories line up enough for it to be true. His performance is enthralling. He’s recently become the class clown, the same way I’m the class Black guy. In his mouth, sex sounds wet and meaty. He makes a sound that reminds me of a wooden spatula going in and out of a jar of preserves.
“No, you don’t understand,” he interrupts someone trying to chime in, maybe me. “It feels so good. Like, way better than just jerking off.”
I haven’t done that yet either. I wish I was at the girls’ table hearing the soft and tender version of the same story. Lots of kissing and oils that suddenly reveal their usefulness.
At home, I try to jerk off to Ms. Pac-Man. I picture her eating me whole—me falling into a yellow ravine of Ms. Pac-Man. Mrs. Pac-Man: her being a married woman, with a husband hard at work eating ghosts for her, from a vaguely racist conservative background who does not approve of interracial trysts, is as crucial as the bow. Yes, it appears I have some issues.
“We should move,” Dad says one day. “This is not a great neighborhood for a teenager.”
He starts looking for apartments in Rock Forest and will eventually find one with a spare bedroom that we will visit, sign a lease for, but never move into as a family. It sounds like a ridiculous concept; a town a few miles away that sounds like it should have a Pokémon Gym.
He’s right. Our neighborhood is bad. The same kids that used to rub my head and ask me if Haiti has beaches now skip classes together. The ice rink behind the school is where they hang out, and I’m one of the only ones left skating, with the younger kids and their dads. They now sit on the side, kicking snow and passing around cigarettes stolen from their parent
s. Simon becomes a fourteen-year-old social smoker. I’m a good kid, so we don’t talk again. The final straw is that I have a girlfriend.
“Should we have sex?”
“I have condoms.”
“Do you want to?”
“Not really.”
We’re both relieved.
“Am I handsome?” I ask Genevieve as we sit with each other on the steps of her wooden porch. She is only the first girlfriend out of three who will go on to hear that question. She sits up and tilts her head at me because it’s as strange to her as it is to me that a boy would ask that question or care.
“Well, you’re Black. It’s different.”
“How?”
“It just is.” Eventually, when I’m quiet for a beat too long, she offers, “You’re a cute Black guy.” I’m not thrilled that it’s that easy to appease the acid in my guts.
“Okay.”
“You should get dreads,” she suggests out of the blue one day, I think simply because she just learned about dreads. I consider it briefly. I still see no point in dating someone. You have to find things to do and there are a lot of silences to fill that feel too intimate. My puberty is still two years away.
After three chaste afternoons of nothing on her bed, lying head to toe with her socks on, holding hands, except when she’s doing homework or I’m playing my Game Boy Advance, she breaks up with me because she likes Jean-Philippe.
“I thought it would be funner to date you,” she eventually says when we decide to be friends after two weeks of the silent treatment whenever we bump into each other in stairwells. For me it’s drama, for her, it’s sheer disinterest.
“I don’t know . . . You’re kind of boring,” she elaborates, though I have no idea what I am expected to do with this epiphany.
