Sure, I'll Be Your Black Friend

by Ben Philippe

  “He called,” Mom says, and I spend my day steeped in enough gossip to know that tone, complete with a sly private look, like a teenager keeping a secret they want you to ask about for the thrill just so they can deny it.

  Goddammit. Between high school, the emergence of man tits, and this powerful new advanced form of pubescent horniness, my mind had been elsewhere. Harboring crushes on classmates, talking with strangers on the internet, the wholesome tenets of teenagedom had distracted me from the return of my father to our lives. The better life he had promised us from his office in Haiti had been cashed in without him. His presense was no longer required! The teenage iteration of these complex thoughts was a groan and slamming of the fridge door followed by a weekend of unsupervised Kazaa pornography. (God, you don’t know what Kazaa is, do you? Illegal. It means illegal. Please stop attacking me with your insufferable youth.)

  I hated the looming intruder he now was, crawling back toward what was supposed to be our doorstep, hers and mine, two hours away from the one he’d left her in. I hated how I had to pretend to be happy to be a family of three again, mourning the awesome single-parent-and-emotionally-thriving-while-being-fully-broke family of two we previously were.

  When I tried to prevent it, it was already too late. I began eavesdropping on the other phone (one landline but three phones because my mom liked one in every room) occasionally—fine, compulsively—fearing the worst. They had been talking on the phone for weeks. Not like teenagers do after school, crapping on classmates, but instead talking about things like finances and rent. How the money he was paying in rent for his sister’s basement in Cote-des-Neiges, Montreal, where he had been staying, after having burnt out in his most recent attempt to leave wife and child/children behind and start over in Haiti with a new younger woman of means, could serve our household. Careful use of pronouns was always one of his strong suits.

  “I could fix that,” he would say of a sink he couldn’t fix. “I buy a lot of paper towels. I can drop a few rolls by.” To her, it sounded like a new and better paper towel than the ones we dragged home on the bus, two rolls at a time every week because buying bulk is a luxury meant for car owners. I pictured gray, rough, industrial towels and remembered how our quilted toilet paper would turn single-ply the second he moved back in.

  They gossip. Bits of gossip about people they knew or still know. How other people heard about us and liked to gossip—getting back together would show them.

  Mom liked the familiarity because otherwise she’d be sitting alone at the table, staring. Being a little sad never translates to being a little happy for her. She always wants to be happy; only happy. And a little bit of sadness is not something you just live with. You chase it out with radio, TV, phone calls, and neighbors. Baye audience, in Creole; shooting the shit. Strangely enough, I had never accounted for the fact that my mom might love, genuinely love, her husband.

  “Don’t make that face,” she would say when I glared at her after I hung up the phone she would push into my face to make me say hi to him and tell him about my schoolwork.

  “He’s your father. I can hate him but you can’t. You should remember the good times.” People always say that, failing to acknowledge the main flaw in that advice, which is that those “Good Times” file cabinets are sometimes filled with faded facsimile receipts; small moments that can be presumed to have been there at some point but were not properly preserved.

  “Life would be easier if he was here with us, no?”

  She partly meant money.

  He had his retirement fund, a steady check every month from his first stay when he taught high school in Canada.

  “I have a job,” I say. “I chip in.” I shouldn’t have bought the iPod. It reminded her she lived with a child who didn’t like to make conversation.

  “He has a new car.” A dark burgundy Subaru that looked wealthier than its leaser. That car was the only thing on the pro/con list I saw of value in Robert’s return to our lives, considering neither Mom nor I knew how to drive.

  “I like taking the bus,” I try, but eventually, after two dinners at Au Vieux Duluth, my favorite restaurant chain where as a child I was once berated for wanting ice cream on top of my $14.99 plate of shrimp on my birthday, I lose the battle.

  Robert begins to plan his move back in with us.

  Three-person households work best with a common enemy, and it was clear that I alone would be waging the battle against Robert’s return. The condo was ours, with many asterisks, loans, and co-signees; he would have less power, he would be more polite. Her logic was both sound and stupid considering the man we were dealing with. No zookeeper puts a lion in a panda habitat thinking the lion will mind his manners.

  “I love you, son,” he said at the door, with his two bags of dirty clothes, ready to settle into the guest bedroom upstairs and inch his way back into our new life. He’d flamed out in Haiti, and his offering to the teenager he was coming back to Canada for a trial reunion with was a sloppily folded red 101 Dalmatians T-shirt and a pair of matching shorts I used to wear when I was a toddler. He extended them from his backpack at the door, as if he’d rehearsed it in the car and couldn’t wait for a more intimate moment.

  There was something in his voice. It wasn’t fondness, not quite. It was the memory of fondness, an echo. He might have believed it, too, I now realize. Holding that bundle of clothes, sweepingly extending them to his fat offspring, he might have actually believed he loved me or wanted to so badly that the difference between actual love and wanting to love was now negligible.

  “I don’t have a bedtime anymore,” I answered from the top of the stairs, annoyed by how moved Mom looked by the awkward declaration. You have to set boundaries early with vagrants you take in.

  “Well, we can discuss it,” he chuckles.

  “No,” I repeat. “There’s no bedtime here.”

  There was a brief flicker of disdain in his eyes that I know that high school me, all greasy forehead and hoodied, standing at a meaty five-feet-eight and 180 pounds, would have happily returned, but with Mom looking at both of us—her family—he eked out a truce with a forced laugh. This theater encapsulates our following year of vague animosity skirting one another’s existence around a condo in Greenfield Park, Quebec, seven minutes away from Montreal.

  “I don’t have a bedtime anymore” was a catchall for all the things I couldn’t explicitly say at the time.

  I don’t go to bed at 9 p.m., because I have real homework now. Stuff you maybe don’t even know. Mitosis, motherfucker. Do you even know mitosis, bro?

  I’m going to watch so much European porn with the door to my room wide open. Do something about it. I dare you.

  No, you don’t. Why are you lying?

  You wouldn’t be here if she was stronger, and we both know it, old man. Aren’t you embarrassed? You dreamt bigger than us and failed. How many new siblings do I have now?

  I don’t pout. The three of us converse without communicating. He assumes I’ll be applying to McGill soon. The local college with affordable Canadian tuition. About $5,000 a year for Quebec residents, or something.

  “I’ll help you fill out the application,” he says one day, and Mom smiles. “If you want.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “If I was around, I wouldn’t have let you two buy this condo,” he says, looking around with vague disdain at the home he was borrowing, turning the tiny guest bedroom into his office.

  “The location, the layout,” he sniffs. “It’s all wrong.”

  “It’s all wrong,” I repeat casually, eating cereal, standing by the fridge, floating above my body vibrating with rage.

  Mom smiles and cleans the kitchen counter more ferociously and pretends she didn’t move heaven and earth to get us this little corner of the world, being dismissed in her own kitchen. She doesn’t look up. She doesn’t have to. Making eye contact with me at the moment might incinerate her. I blame her, not him.

  I make myself smaller and bigger all a
t once, staying in my room and spending a lot of time on the internet. I keep my paychecks from work to myself entirely. The fighting starts again and I don’t even bother listening in. I don’t enjoy reruns. I order delivery, collect it at the door, and eat it in my room over SAT prep books as I plan my exit. Every SAT practice test taken in my room is another spoonful of dirt I’m shoveling out.

  When I reemerge from my room, five months later, fatter and a bit feral, to eat dinner at the kitchen table again, Dad is gone. Back to Haiti again. It was a mutual decision, I’m told. People don’t change. None of us had. All three of us had stayed the same as we were in Sherbrooke, only now older.

  I must have said goodbye, I simply don’t remember it. I move his furniture to the curb that weekend without Mom having to ask. She makes my favorite chicken and prepares my favorite potato dish in the oven that evening.

  “He was mean,” she says while we’re watching television one night, mostly just not to stare right at each other now that we’re back to two. “So effortlessly mean.”

  “He’s gone now,” I summarize and wrap up all at once. I hate reruns.

  “We were supposed to have more children here,” she says a few minutes into the nightly news.

  “What?”

  “Once we were settled in Canada.” She shrugs. “That was the plan. To give you little siblings to look after. Only children grow up crooked.”

  It sounds like the slightly awkward translation of some Creole saying.

  “You’d have been a good big brother.” She smiles, patting my neck, sad but smiling. Would I have been a good sibling? Maybe, maybe not. One of the perks of being alone is that there is no one around to reflect how crooked you are. I like that open space that lets my branches flare out in awkward and contradictory directions.

  Even before it was made into a literal exit, my father always lived elsewhere. This elsewhere-lived was in the maps in his office, the books on his shelves written in languages I couldn’t understand, the next wife he hadn’t met but believed to be a given when the time came. The man I knew dreamt big and, for better or worse, always put his dreams first.

  Occasionally, Dad has aspirations of Haitian politics and connections. Of being the next Aristide or Lavalas. Big loaded names that the Haitian diaspora still gossip about to this day. People worthy of worship in their communities. Dictators who put burning tires around the necks of dissidents. (It’s the harsh side of Haiti that our big red gates protected me from as a kid and that he sought to raise me away from, and I get that and am grateful for it.)

  For the record, I sincerely do not resent him for leaving. Nor are there any lingering questions in my mind. I almost worry that I should probably have cared more, at some point. The indifference sometimes feels too vast for comfort. Though ultimately, I much prefer to be left with the shoes to fill than the feet here to fill them. People come into your life for a reason or a season, right? The season was my childhood and early teens, and the reason was to give me the world. (On top of the whole, y’know, conception thing.) The man was a proud mountain with greed in his eyes and fire in his belly and I’m grateful for the sliver of whatever it all amounts to.

  Black communities, especially in America, are often put on trial for the literal sins of their fathers. It’s that familiar refrain of “Where are these thugs’ fathers?” “No wonder they’re all rioting in the streets!”

  That notion is not only overly simplistic but largely inaccurate. It also dismisses the presence and agency of non-head-of-household Black fathers who continue to parent through cohabitation, visitation, mentorship, providing important albeit nontraditional support. And that is without even getting into the fact that these Black men getting incarcerated or killed at a systematically higher rate all over America also have children at home whom society will not think twice about until it is time to punish them for the sin of having been raised without a nuclear-family-model father figure. I am not equipped to pull at that thread in any coherent manner, so allow me to recommend some books.

  BOOKS YOU SHOULD READ IF THE BREEZY BEACH-READ TOPIC OF SYSTEMICALLY BROKEN BLACK FAMILIES INTERESTS YOU:

  The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

  The Myth of the Missing Black Father by Roberta Coles, PhD (editor), and Charles Green, PhD (Disclaimer: This one is a big ole expensive schoolbook, but it is a very important one.)

  Thirteen

  From Another Mother

  I’M SIXTEEN again, looking ahead to two full months of summer vacation before the eleventh grade, and ready to be a man. Now, this requires a few precise things, namely facial hair and a job. I have no facial hair yet. It will burst out of my face at age twenty and not a day before. One of the two will suffice for now.

  My head is almost perfectly spherical these days, my ties are flat and wide. They look borrowed but were actually purchased online.

  I get very few callbacks, but one gets traction quickly.

  The man who interviews me is Black. I know this because throughout our four-minute phone interview he senses it in my voice and asks me point-blank before moving on to the next point of my overstuffed two-page résumé filled with interests in things that don’t interest me in the least, like “kayaking” and “world issues.” The energy would have shifted if one of us had been white. I wouldn’t have been told to come in.

  Upon arriving at the grocery store for more interviewing, I further learn that he is in his early thirties, has a closely shaved head, easy smile, and, if I had to guess, works out a lot without dieting. His handshake is strong, and I admire his posture.

  None of his co-managers, cashiers, stock people, or the receptionist is Black. Yet, he is at the front of the poster on the bulletin board at the lobby of the grocery store, crossing his arms confidently and showing all his teeth.

  “Rubeintz,” I say. “Or Ben.” Pick your own name, you tell yourself. Isn’t that what immigrants do sometimes? No one is stopping you. “Thunderous Nomad Knight” was a close second.

  “Roger,” he says as he introduces himself and escorts me through the aisles. “Let’s go up to my office. I imagine you already know what a grocery store looks like.”

  He has tired eyes but the vibe of someone who comes alive on specific occasions—his arms are extended to encompass everyone into the office photo framed in the corner of his small, well-lit office.

  The interview goes well. I have the conviction of the well-researched sixteen-year-old with dreams of a GameCube, Xbox, and PS2 all lined up under my bedroom television. The job itself amounts to designing the weekly flyer for promotions and posting them both online and in print. The branch wants a local identity on top of the safety of being a countrywide retailer.

  I flip through the Bible-thin pages of the weekly flyer, with deals in red blocky font bursting out of yellow thought bubbles.

  “Yeah, I can definitely do this!” I say, trying to be charming. “And I’m not just saying that because this is an interview and stuff.”

  Two dollars over minimum wage. I’m sixteen, without experience, the position is low enough and temporary enough that I want it. I don’t risk running into anyone from my high school there.

  “You’re four years old, dude.” He smiles. “How do you know Photoshop?”

  He’s funny.

  “Up until last year,” he explains, “we didn’t even have Photoshop, or, like, a Facebook page. Just some fucker playing around with printout pages and an X-Acto knife and glue stick.”

  I get the teenage thrill of hearing an adult casually curse and instantly decide that I like him. I would like to work for him, chitchatting like this all summer.

  “Photoshop, a Facebook account . . . you’re turning this place around.” I smile.

  It’s emboldened and dickish but he takes it in good humor and laughs. He doesn’t have a ring on his finger and there’s no framed photo of himself with another person claiming ownership sitting on his desk. I suspect there woul
d be stories of dates.

  “I should hire a white kid,” he eventually sighs, at ease after a few questions about my favorite subject in school.

  “Um, what?”

  “If I hire you, everyone is going to think it was because we’re both Black,” he says. “Trust me, it’s a thing.”

  I nod. The logic tracks. I’m already learning about the real world. He leans back into his swivel chair and assesses me with crossed arms, how the visual might play out.

  “Okay, first the name, now . . . Weird question,” he interrupts. “But, what’s your father’s name?” His eyes narrow into focus and he stares directly at me.

  “Robert.”

  He repeats the name. “Robert . . . Do you have an aunt here?”

  I have aunts. Everyone has aunts. Well, I suppose the children of only children don’t but they’re—

  “Atalante,” he continues before I can work out the math. “Do you have an aunt Atalante?”

  “I have an aunt Atalante,” I finally say, having completed the equation.

  Neither of us says it. He has an aunt Atalante, too.

  Again, for context: I’m my mother’s only child and my father’s seventh chronological. He had six from his first marriage and two from his third, after my mother. So, nine legitimate children in total. A few not-so-legitimate ones, too, I imagine. Don’t pick up my father’s used condoms if you’re ovulating.

  “Well, shit,” he eventually says, stunned, through a laugh. “Shit!”

  I don’t say anything. I wish this was an interview again.

  Do half-brothers share the same blood type? No, right?

  Do you watch anime? Who do you like more, Naruto or Sasuke?

  Do you miss your mom? I heard she died. How much of you dies when your mom dies? 95 percent or 99 percent?

  I’m sorry she died and your dad left for Haiti to find a new wife. I’m sorry he nutted and now here I am.