Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

by Z. Z. Packer

  “If you don’t shut up—”

  I don’t speak to him, he doesn’t speak to me. We pass a billboard that reads, WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, MAKE LEMONADE. I try to think of what my mother will say. She knows I had to get him out of jail, that’s why she let me borrow the car. But she wasn’t about to pay bail, and she definitely won’t want me coming home at midnight, her car smelling of cigarettes and Mad Dog.

  My father sees me fuming and says, “I told you I was going to get your money back, right? Well, there’s going to be a march, tomorrow. A million people in Washington, D.C. One. Million. People.”

  “No,” I say. “Dear God, no.”

  “Exactly,” he says.

  Even though the windows are closed, I feel a breeze pass through me. At one point, I wanted to go to the March; I imagined it would be as historic as King’s march on Washington, as historic as the dismantling of the Wall. The men’s choir of my mother’s church was going, but I didn’t want to be trapped on a bus with a bunch of men singing hymns, feeling sorry for me being born with Ray Bivens Jr. for a father. And what’s more, I have a debate tournament. I imagine Sarah Vogedes, my debate partner, prepping for our debate on U.S. foreign policy toward China, checking her watch. She’d have to use our second stringers, or perhaps even Derron Ellersby, a basketball player so certain he’d make the NBA that he’d joined the speech and debate team “to sound smooth for all those postgame interviews.” This was the same Derron Ellersby who ended his rebuttals by pointing at me, saying, “Little Man over here’s going to break it down for ya,” or who’d single me out in the cafeteria, telling his friends, “Little Man’s got skills, yo! Break off some a your skills!” as if expecting me to carry on a debate with my tuna casserole.

  I’d never missed a day of school in my life, and my mother had the framed perfect-attendance certificates to prove it, but the thought of Sarah Vogedes’s composed face growing rumpled as Derron agreed with our opponent makes me feel something like bliss; I imagine Derron, index cards scattered in front of him, looking as confused as if he’d been faked out before a lay-up, saying, “Yo! Sarah V! Where’s Little Man? Where he at!”

  For once I’m glad Ray Bivens Jr. is scheming so hard he doesn’t see me smiling. If he could—if he sensed in any way that I might be willing—he’d find a way to call the whole thing off.

  “That’s in Washington, D.C.,” I remind him, “nearly seven hundred miles away.”

  “I know. But first we’re going to Jasper,” he says. “To get the birds.”

  TECHNICALLY, the birds are my father’s, not Lupita’s. He bought them when he was convinced that the animals were an Investment. He tried selling them door to door. When that didn’t work and he couldn’t afford to keep them, Lupita volunteered to take care of them. Lupita knew about birds, she’d said, because she’d once owned a rooster when she was five back in Guatemala.

  It is completely dark and the road is revealing its secrets one at a time. I ask, once more, what he plans on doing with these birds.

  He tells me he plans on selling them.

  “But you couldn’t sell them the first time.”

  “I didn’t have a million potential buyers the first time.”

  For a brief moment I’d wanted to go to the March, perhaps even see if Ray Bivens Jr. got something out of it, but no longer. I tell him that I can take him to Jasper, Indiana. I can take him home, even, which was what I was supposed to do in the first place, but that I absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, cut school and miss my debate tournament to drive him to D.C.

  “Don’t you want your money back?” he says. “One macaw alone will pay back that bail money three times over.”

  “What are a million black men going to do with a bunch of birds? Even if you could sell them, how’re you going to get them there?”

  “Would you just drive?” he says, then sucks his teeth, making a noise that might as well be a curse. He stretches out in his seat, then starts up, explaining things to me as if I’d had a particularly stupefying bout of amnesia: “You’re gonna have Afrocentric folks there. Afrocentrics and Africans, tons of Africans. And what do Africans miss most? That’s right. The Motherland. And what does the Mother Africa have tons of? Monkeys, lions, and guess what else? Birds. Not no street pigeons, but real birds, like the kind I’m selling. Macaws and African grays. Lorikeets and yellow napes and shit.” He might as well have added, Take that.

  He’s so stupid, he’s brilliant; so outside of the realm of any rationality that reason stammers and stutters when facing him. I say nothing, nothing at all, just continue on, thinking quickly, but driving slowly. He hits the dash like he’s knocking on a door to make me speed up.

  Off the interstate, the road turns so narrow and insignificant it could peter out into someone’s driveway. The occasional crop of stores along the roadside look closed. We pass through Paoli Peaks and Hoosier National Forest before finally arriving in Jasper.

  We pull into Lupita’s driveway. In the dark, her lawn ornaments resemble gravestones. Motion-detector floodlights buzz on as my father walks up to the house. Lupita stands on her porch, wielding a shotgun. She’s wearing satiny pajamas that show her nipples. Pink curlers droop from her hair like blossoms.

  “What do joo want?” Her eyes narrow in on him. She slits her eyes even more to see who’s in the car with him, straightening herself up a little bit, but when she sees that it’s just me, just nerdy οl’ Spurgeon, she drops all signs of primping.

  I stay in the car. She and my father disappear into the house while I watch the pin wheel lawn daisies spin in the dark. The yelling from inside the house is mostly Lupita: “I am tired of your blag ass! Enough eez enough!” Then it stops. They’ve argued their way to the bedroom, where the door slams shut and all is quiet.

  But the calm doesn’t hold. Lupita breaks out with some beautiful, deadly Spanish threats, and the screen door bangs open. My father comes out clutching cages, each crammed two apiece with birds. I can hear birdseed and little gravelly rocks from the cages spill all over the car interior when he puts them on the backseat. The whole time he doesn’t say a word. Looks straight ahead.

  He makes another trip into the house, but Lupita doesn’t go in with him. He comes back with another cageful of birds.

  Lupita follows him for a bit, but she stops halfway from the car. She stands there in her ensemble of sexy pajamas and pink sponge curlers and shotgun.

  “Don’t get out,” Ray Bivens Jr. says to me. “We’re going to drive off. Slowly.”

  I do as my father says and back out of the driveway.

  Lupita yells after us, “Joo are never thinking about maybe what Lupita feels!” For a moment I think she’s going to come after us, but all she does is plop down on her porch step, holding her head in her hands.

  ONCE THEY get used to the rhythm of the road, the birds swap crude, disjointed conversations with one another. The blue-and-gold macaw sings “Love Me Do,” but recent immigrant that it is, it gets the inflections all wrong. The lorikeet says, repeatedly, “Where the dickens is my pocket watch?” then does what passes for a man’s lewd laugh. If there’s a lull, one will say, “Arriba, ’riba, ’riba!” and get them all going again.

  “Bird crap doesn’t have an odor,” my father says. “That’s the paradox of birds.”

  “She loved those birds,” I say. “And you just took them away.”

  “They learn best when stressed out,” he says. “Why do you think they say ‘Arriba!’ all the time? They get it from the Mexicans who’re all in a rush to get them exported.”

  He almost knocks me off kilter with that one, but I stick to the point. “Don’t try to make excuses. You hurt her. And what about the birds? You didn’t think to get food, did you?”

  “You are a complete pussy, you know that?”

  He’d only used that word once before, when I was twelve and refused to fight another boy, and said if I didn’t whup that boy the next day that he’d whup me.

  “Y
ou need to go to this March. When you go, check in at the pussy booth and tell ’em you want to exchange yours for a Johnson.”

  I check the rearview mirror, then cross all lanes of I-65 North until I’m on the shoulder. It’s the kind of boldness he’d always wanted me to show to everyone else but him.

  “You better have a good reason for stopping,” he says.

  “Get out,” I say, as soon as I stop the car. The birds also stop their chatter, and when I turn around they’re looking from me to him as though they’ve placed bets on who will go down in flames.

  Ray Bivens Jr. clamps his hand to his forehead in mock dumb-foundedness. “You ain’t heard that before? Don’t tell me nobody never called you no pussy?”

  “Get out, sir,” I say.

  “Yeah. I’ll get out all right.” He opens the passenger-side door just as a semi whooshes by, and even I can feel it. He slams the door and traps the cold air with me.

  IT’S LATE: past midnight. I stop at the next exit to call my mother. She says if I don’t get my tail back in her house tonight, she’ll skin me alive. I tell her I love her too. She likes to pretend that I’m the man of the house, and says as much when she asks me if I’ve locked all the doors at night, or tells me to drive her to church so she can show off what a good son she has. But it’s times like this when it’s clear that the only man of the house is Jesus.

  I buy a Ho Ho at the gas station and as I separate the cake part from the creamy insides with my teeth, I think about how Derron would have shrugged Ray Bivens Jr.’s schemes away with a good-hearted hunch of the shoulders. “Pops is crazy,” he’d say to the mike in an NBA postgame interview, then put his gently clenched fist over his heart like someone accepting an award, “but I love the guy.”

  I get back in the car and the birds squawk and complain at having been left alone. I return to the last exit before heading north again, going slow in the right-hand lane. When I see my father, I pull off to the shoulder, pop open the electronic locks. He acts as though he knew I would come back for him all along. We don’t talk for nearly an hour, but everything is completely clear: if I am not a pussy, I will cut school, forget about debate, and go to D.C.

  JUST OUTSIDE Clarksburg, West Virginia, I pull over. I can’t make it to the exit. Twice I almost nodded off. When I slump onto the steering wheel my father gets out and rouses me enough for us to exchange places, even though he’s not supposed to be driving.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep, but I wake to the umbrella cockatoo chanting, “Sexy, sexy!” My eyes adjust to the dim light, first making out the electric glow of the dash panels, and then the scenery beyond the cool of the windows. We are on a small hilly road. It is so dark and so full of conifers I feel like we’re traveling through velvet.

  Ray Bivens Jr., I can tell, has been waiting for me to wake. At first I think he wants me to take over the wheel, but then I realize he wants company. He raps on the car window and says, “In ancient Mesopotamia it was hot. There was no glass. What they did have was the wheel—”

  The yellow-naped Amazon breaks into the Oscar Mayer wiener jingle before I can ask my father what the hell he’s talking about.

  “Shut up!” he yells, and at first I sit up, startled, thinking that he’s yelling at me. The bird says “Rawrk!” and starts the jingle over, from the beginning.

  He sits through the jingle, and as a reward, there is a peculiar silence that comes after someone speaks. For once in his life, he has had to use patience. “Here’s why windows are called windows,” he says with strained calmness, but the lorikeet interrupts: “Advil works,” the bird says, “better than Tylenol.”

  My father blindly gropes the backseat for a cage, seizes one, and slams it against another cage. All the birds revolt, screeching and shuffling feathers, sounding like bricks hitting a chain-link fence. One of them says, almost angrily, “And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson!”

  But Ray Bivens Jr. raises his voice over the din. “The Mesopotamians cut out circles, or O’s, in their homes to mimic the shape of the wheel, but also to let in the wind,” he yells. “And there you have it. Your modern day window. Get it? Wind-o.”

  I look to see if he is taking himself seriously. He used to say shit like this when I was little. I could never tell whether he was kidding me or himself. “You’re trying to tell me that the Mesopotamians spoke English? And that they created little O’s in their homes to let in the wind?”

  “All right. Don’t believe me, then.”

  WE MAKE it into Arlington at seven in the morning, park the car at a garage, and take the Metro into D.C. with the morning commuters. White men with their briefcases and mushroom-colored trenchcoats. White women with fleet haircuts, their chic lipstick darker than blood. The occasional Asian, Hispanic—wearing the same costume but somehow looking nervous about it. More than anything though, we see black men—everywhere—groups of black men wearing identical T-shirts with the names of churches and youth groups emblazoned on them. Men in big, loose kente-cloth robes; men in full-on suits with the traditional Nation of Islam bow tie.

  My father hands me two cages. He hefts two. While the morning commuters eye us, he breaks down the bird prices loudly, as though we’re the only people in the world.

  When we get to the Mall, all you can hear from where we stand are African drums, gospel music blaring from the loudspeakers, and someone playing rap with bass so heavy it hurts your heart. Everything has an early-morning smell to it, cold and wet with dew, but already thousands have marked their territory with portable chairs and signs. Voter registration booths are everywhere; vendors balance basketfuls of T-shirts on their heads; D.C. kids nudge us, trying to sell us water for a dollar a cup. The Washington Monument stands in front of us like a big granite pencil, miles away, it seems, and everywhere, everywhere, men shake hands, laugh like they haven’t seen one another in years. They make pitches, exchange business cards, and congratulate one another for just getting here. But most of all they speak in passwords: Keep Strong, Stay Black, Love Your Black Nation.

  The birds are so unnaturally quiet I can’t tell if they don’t mind being jostled about amid the legs of a million strangers or if they’re dying. As we work our way through the masses, Ray Bivens Jr. keeps looking off into the distance in perpetual search for the perfect customer. I try to follow my father, but it’s hard to plow through the crowd holding the cages.

  “Brother,” one man says, shaking his head at me, “I don’t know if them birds males or not, but they sho ain’t black!”

  I nod in my father’s direction and say, “Looks like you’ve got a customer.”

  He shoots me an annoyed look. “Let’s split up,” he says. “We’ll cover more area if we’re spread out.”

  “O.K., chief,” I say. But I pretty much stay where I’ve been.

  AFTER A few speeches from Christian ministers, a stiff-looking bow-tied man gives an introduction for Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. I’m so far back that I have to look at the large-screen TVs, but as Farrakhan takes to the stage, the Fruit of Islam phalanx behind him applauds so violently that their clapping resembles some sort of martial art.

  I make my way toward the edge of the crowd to get some air. Though I’m already as far from the main stage as one can be, it still takes me a good half hour to push through the crowd of men, most of them patting me on the back like uncles at a family reunion. Although I’ve seen a sprinkling of women at the march, some black women cheer as they stand on the other side of Independence Avenue, but others wave placards reading “Let Us In!” or “Remember Those You Left Home.” Quite a few whites also stop to look as if to see what this thing is all about, and their hard, nervous hard smiles fit into two categories: the “Don’t mug me!” smile, or the “Gee, aren’t black folks something!” smile. It occurs to me that I can stay here on the sidelines for the entire march. A hush falls over the crowd, then they erupt into whistles and cheering and catcalls, and though I can barely see the large convention screen anymore, peop
le begin chanting, “Jesse! Jesse!”

  I look at the screen and see him clasping hands with Farrakhan, but he doesn’t do much more than that. If anything, I’d like the chance to hear him speak in person, purely for speech and debate purposes, but it seems as though the day will be a long one, with major speakers bookended by lesser-known ones.

  Now a preacher from a small town takes to the platform. “Brothers, we have to work it out with each other! How are we going to go back to our wives, our babies’ mothers, and tell them that we love them if we can’t tell our own brothers that we love them?”

  At first it sounds like what everyone else has been saying, breaking a cardinal rule of public speaking: One should reiterate, not regurgitate. He reads from a letter written in 1712 by William Lynch, a white slave owner from Virginia. It occurs to me that Farrakhan read from this same letter, the content of which got lost in his nearly three-hour speech. The letter explains how to control slaves by pitting dark ones against light ones, big plantation slaves against small plantation slaves, female slaves against male ones. The preacher ends by telling everyone that freedom is attained only when the ant of the self—that small, blind, crumb-seeking part of ourselves—casts off slavery and its legacy, becoming a huge brave ox.

  “Well, well, well!” An elbow nudges me. “Wasn’t that powerful, brother?” A man wearing a fez extends his hand for me to shake.

  I shake his hand, but he doesn’t let go, as if he’s waiting for me to agree with him.

  “Powerful!” the fezzed man shouts above the applause.

  “Yes,” I say, and turn away from him.

  But I can feel him looking at me, staring through me so hard that I’m forced to turn toward him again. “Powerful,” I say. “Indeed.”

  I must not be convincing enough because the guy looks at me pleadingly and says, “Feel this! The power here! This is powerful!”