How Are You Going to Save Yourself

by JM Holmes

  I never had game. I went to kiss her and she lay back on the couch, playing like she was trying to avoid me. Back then, everything happened on couches. Bedrooms were never vacant. She shared a room with her little sister, and her mom and step-pops had the other one, even though he was never home. Her skin was almond, and the shape of her gets fuller the longer it brews in my memory. I remember her hips hatching out of her jeans and the soft lines of her slender shoulders.

  Won’t your mom wake up? I said.

  My mom’s a drunk.

  Drinks don’t put me to sleep.

  Then you don’t drink enough, she said, and kissed me. Are you drunk now? she asked.

  Should I be?

  She puckered her lips at me. Her skin stretched tight at her temples like a drum. I looked down at the empty pint of rum we’d gotten from the A+.

  I’m tipsy, I said.

  She bit me.

  Fuck! I said.

  No, you’re not, she said and got up off the couch. She took off her shirt in that cross-armed way, exposing her smooth café con leche skin. In only her panties, she walked around the wall to the kitchen. I followed but trying to slide in slow, like my pops. The kitchen was a narrow strip separated from the TV room by a small round table. I was tall enough to see on top of the fridge, where her mom hid the box of Fruity Pebbles from her younger sister. Saba went for the wine rack on the counter and pulled a bottle with a dusty French label.

  Damn, that’s old, I said.

  It’s my grandmother’s.

  She grabbed a bottle opener and uncorked it.

  Really? I asked.

  Stop being a pussy, she said. My mom won’t notice.

  She drank from the bottle in deep pulls, spilling enough that it ran all the way from the corners of her lips down her neck and chest to her stomach, staining the white edge of her underwear. The green stripes, dark and fine, didn’t show it as much. I tried to take the bottle, but she held on to it and danced around—curves and hips and black hair.

  Here. She handed me the bottle and kissed me with purple lips.

  I sipped it.

  Drink it, she said.

  I’m good, I said.

  I didn’t know you were such a bitch.

  I tipped the bottle back again. The wine was sweet and warm.

  More, she said.

  I drank till there were only sips left to swirl at the bottom and set the bottle down. She grabbed my cold hands, lifted them up, and twirled underneath my arms. She moved in circles with her waist—her eyes took everything into their black. We danced for a while in silence. I started to feel warm in the fingers and bent down and lifted her up.

  Good, she said, and she kissed on my neck.

  I let her down and she opened the door on their fourth-story porch. She flung the empty bottle over the railing and the glass shattered across the parking lot with a pop.

  Ay, maricón, someone yelled, looking up at us.

  Yo, no speaki español. She smiled and grabbed below my belt. I smacked her ass. She was too thin to ripple.

  AFTER PROMOTING BOXING, Pops tried to start a clothing line, then a recording label. It all went belly-up, and the football money vanished. He started cleaning office buildings at night with my uncle Bull, his brother-in-law. He claimed my mom resented him for not taking the NFL insurance money when he had the chance, but she never said as much to me, and, to her credit, even when we were living off my grandmother while my mom went back to school, she never came after my pops for the piece of nothing he had.

  The days after his night shifts, he’d sleep till dinner, so I wound up spending more of the summer with my sister and Dee. I grew to like Dee. She acted younger than she should have, but my pops did too, so it all failed just right.

  During the summer after my sophomore year, she started chopping it up with me about weed and tattoos and I thought that was cool. One day, she finally gassed me into wanting one, then said she’d take me.

  The whole way there Whitney talked about all the tats she was going to get when she was old enough. She was only seven. Dee said nothing, blew smoke from her long cigarette out the window, and laughed hollow like she was far away.

  The spot we pulled up to wasn’t a shop. It was a house. Dee had called twice on the way but no one had picked up.

  “Maybe he’s busy,” I said.

  “We’ll wait.”

  The duplex had a bunch of cars out front.

  “We could just go to a real place,” I said.

  “Stop acting shook.”

  We walked up to the front door and rang the bell. A dude with good tattoos on his neck and arms and the worst tattoos I’d ever seen on his legs answered.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mando here?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Tell him it’s Deandra.”

  “Aight, hold on.” He disappeared into music and barking.

  A short, dark Asian came to the door next. “Damn, Dee, look at you, still fine as hell.”

  Dee laughed and they hugged. “How are things?” she said.

  “Not bad. Been a little tough since I lost the shop but they still spread the good word.”

  “I can see that.” Dee glanced back at all the cars on the lawn. “You look real busy.”

  “Nah, half these cars are just sack chasers here to buy movies from Quintin.” He stared out into the yard at his grass burnt brown from the summer heat. Then looked at the sky like he was waiting for rain and the cool northwest breeze that blew when the sun started to go down.

  “How long’s the wait? My kid wants some work done.”

  “Little Whitney?” He smiled.

  “Boy, stop. Lonnie’s kid.”

  Mando looked me over like I was an ink-blot test. “Okay. I gotta finish up homeboy that’s in the chair now and then I can hook him up.” He moved aside and we all walked in. The walls inside were hung with modern art, and 808 drum kicks pulsed from everything. Muted music videos were playing on a box flat-screen TV, and the two leather couches were packed with people. Mando got jittery for a second. “Ay, turn that shit down,” he said. “We got kids in here now. Put that dutch out too.”

  “I just sparked it.”

  “Fuck, nigga, then take it outside.”

  I wanted to tell them they could smoke inside, I wanted to evaporate into the tree clouds with them. To the left of the couches, away from the TV, a man lay facedown on a table with towels taped to it. The towels had been white once but were now smudged across with black ink. Mando’s fingers were eternally black. He reached to pick up the needle and shuddered, then went to the bathroom for a long time.

  I sat and looked at the binders of his work. Unlike most artists’, Mando’s had no photos. The binder was filled with paintings and sketches and notes on napkins.

  The man with the bad and good tattoos came and sat next to me on the couch. “He’s nice, right?” He pointed to the binder.

  “Yeah, dude is real nice,” I said.

  “I don’t think you appreciate—Mando’s a fuckin’ maestro, kid.”

  I fixed my eyes on his bad tattoos, but the way he kept tapping his feet moved their uneven lines and made me sick.

  “What’s with those?” I said, pointing to the half-sketched faces above his knee.

  “Oh.” He laughed. “He’s teaching me. These are my practice runs.”

  “You couldn’t get a dummy or some shit?”

  “Mando believes in learning on the job. That’s how you get nice. Not with fuckin’ dummies.”

  I wanted to ask him if he knew that his shitty tattoos were permanent, but his eyes bounced around like something was pressing them out from the inside. He made me nervous.

  Mando came out of the bathroom and closed the door behind him. Whitney sat on a plastic folding chair playing on her chunky red Game Boy, and Dee had squeezed herself between some dudes on the other couch. She was rocking the Cleopatra weave those days and the men were licking their lips and leaning too close.


  Soon enough, Mando was done and the man got up from the raised table. He walked over to the mirror to inspect the deep black lines of a crucifix that seemed big enough to weigh him down. The Jesus was tragic and Latin-looking. The cross was beautiful and seemed to raise off his back like it was somehow staring down from above even if you were looking straight at it. The whole picture came off graceful, even with the deep, painful lines of Christ’s wounded body.

  Mando came up to me and nodded toward the table.

  I walked over and Dee got up from her fans and followed.

  “What do you want?” Mando said.

  “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

  He cut his eyes at Dee. “You ain’t tell me all he wanted was a quote.”

  “In script,” I said.

  Dee stared at me. “I didn’t know,” she said.

  “That shit’s a waste of my time.”

  “Why don’t you get some art?” Dee said.

  “’Cause I want a quote.” I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted.

  He sighed. “What’s it again?”

  “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

  He glanced at Dee. “Where the fuck you find this kid?”

  “I don’t know. He’s Lonnie’s kid. He’s half white.”

  They laughed.

  “You’re open.” Mando shook his head. “Who said that?” he asked.

  “James Baldwin.”

  “Who?”

  I was silent for a while, listening to them roast me.

  Then Mando got real irritable again. “I ain’t dealin’ with this shit,” he said.

  “Relax,” Dee said.

  “It’s a waste of my day. I, I, I try and do you a favor—” He stormed off toward the bathroom.

  “Again?” she called after him. “Right now?”

  “What? You want some?” He threw a knowing smirk at Dee.

  She shook her head and he disappeared into the bathroom. Dee stared at me, vexed. I thought we shared a storm, but I guess that didn’t matter here. I wasn’t her blood.

  I imagined my pops sliding through the front door and freezing the room. People would look at him and he’d come throw his paw on my head a little too strong ’cause he didn’t know any better. People would think, Damn, that’s a big nigga! Big. Big. And I’d smile ’cause I knew what they were thinking. He’d slap Dee’s ass again and tell her to wait in the car. Then I’d tell him the quote I wanted and he’d say, Man, G, that’s real cold. Keep your head in them books. I’d smile again, the biggest one, from my gut, because I was going to write our history—history of our pride, lions of blackness in all our shades. I pulled my shirt off, my skin cold even in the dead of August.

  No one burst through the door. I ended up getting a tattoo of Jesus walking on water, just the outline, with light shading, after an Alexander Ivanov painting I’d seen online once. It took Mando three hours and it hurt like hell and I wanted to cry because the needle felt like it was scraping through my ribs, but he just kept moving. Even though he had glassy eyes and seemed to tweak a lot, his fingers stayed steady, and then he was done.

  WHEN WE GOT back home, Pops was in the kitchen eating cold pizza. He was going to work in a few hours, but I asked him if he wanted to play ball anyway. He said he was tired and I told him I knew he couldn’t dunk. He just kept eating.

  “I got a tattoo today,” I said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  I lifted my gray shirt, which was stained black on the inside from the ink, and showed him the art going from my chest down to my ribs.

  He opened up the fridge, took out some fruit punch, and drank it straight from the bottle. “Keep it Christian,” he said, and laughed, and that was it.

  I called my mom and told her. She cried for a long time. Why’d you ruin your beautiful body? she asked. Why’d you mar yourself? Then she cried a while longer and told me to move out here if I loved it so much, and I said I would, Pops would be happy to have me. We stayed on the phone for a bit in silence. Her breathing finally calmed down and she said she loved me and hung up.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up to yelling from their bedroom. “You took him to that crackhead!”

  “Shut up, Lonnie. He’s not a fuckin’ crackhead.”

  “Deandra, niggas who smoke crack are crackheads.”

  “You would know,” Dee said.

  I never knew my pops to raise his hand to a woman, but I heard something break. There was some more shouting and then the garage door opened. I lay awake on the air mattress until the sun broke through the brown blinds on the window and spilled out across the white sheets. Some manila folders had fell from one of the storage boxes next to the bed. I pushed them off my sheets, rolled to face the wall, and waited until I heard the peace of bacon frying. It was Saturday. Pops left again and came back around midday with bagged eyes, smelling like hot-dog water instead of bleach. He took a long cloudy look at me, then looked away and went into his room before I could say anything. I waited up as late as I could that night for him to wake up. I fell asleep to the sounds of summer-league basketball coming from the TV in the other room.

  LEAH CAME DURING my junior year of college. The girls before her faded and I started again at one.

  July was hot in Ithaca, and the heat came in damp from storm clouds, turning my dorm room into a sauna. Leah sat on the edge of my bed. We were fresh from a cold shower and already starting to sweat. I sprawled on my back letting the last few drops of water air-dry. Her eyes scanned the room like a mother’s eyes. Her brown hair hung wet and clean down to the middle of her back. As I got up, she asked where I was going. I gotta work, I said. As part of the scholarship, I had to coach basketball camp for at-risk kids in Ithaca. Aw, my baby giving back, she said. I pulled on a pair of basketball shorts. Gotta sing for my supper, I said. Stop complaining, she said, brushing some crumbs off the corner of my mattress, her hands pale against the maroon. And change your sheets, she said, then smoothed the edges tight and flat. She liked to smooth and fix and make things neat, molding with her narrow fingers calm and knowing, the look in her eyes gentle—Let me help build you. She lay down and patted the bed next to her. I pressed into her and she draped an arm across my stomach. Her limbs were long and smelled like soap, the soft-scented bar kind, not the mango-cocktail gel shit.

  I had to go soon but didn’t want to move just yet. She traced her red nails around my tattoo, her hair heavy and warm across my collarbone. Her fingers moved along the outline of His robes, and I asked, Why’d your people kill Him?

  She smiled with her deep brown eyes and kissed my chest, where His head was engraved. ’Cause it made for a good story, she said. She licked up to my nipple and I pushed her head away. I didn’t know you were even religious, she said.

  I’m not, really, I started. It’s mostly my pops’ side. They all sing in the choir and do the Gospel thing. My pops had two choices—preacher or ballplayer.

  She moved her face up till her lips rested in that soft spot below my jaw. The spot that made me want to taste her. I’m sure he had more than two, she said.

  I didn’t feel like putting her onto my history so I was silent.

  She looked across the room at a picture of my pops in his NFL uniform. I guess he made the right choice, she said.

  It’d been almost five years since I’d seen him last. My mom said he wasn’t the same. More than his body had been banged up. I thought about the shadow-quick phone calls. I hadn’t heard much from Dee or Whit either. No one wanted to speak on it. Somehow, not naming Pops’ troubles kept them minor.

  Yeah, I told Leah. I couldn’t put his unraveling on the NFL like my mom did.

  He’s huge, Leah said.

  And I’m not? I said.

  Not that big, you’re not, she said.

  I pretended to bite her nose and she scrunched her whole face up.

  When she left that day, I watched her from my fifth-story window, watched her stride away to her
business as the wind from the coming rain shook the maple leaves and obscured her image. I watched her walk up Highland Ave. as long as I could, until she bent around the corner and I lost sight.

  LEAH WANTED TO meet my parents. My mom would have loved her because she could only glance at women, at people in general, always confusing security for a life fulfilled. I think the trauma of the divorce and Koreatown was still with her. After Saba’s parents and a few others’, Leah’s mom and dad would’ve looked like salvation. They were both professors out in Denver and would’ve signaled peace where there was none, at least not in my vision. When I’d visited, her parents had a group of PhD students over for dinner, and her mother let her eyes linger too long on a couple of the young men, made comments about what we were wearing, asked me how tall I was, said she loved the basketball build, then got dreamy like she wanted a night away, or maybe a few, from the life she’d made. But then she’d go back to talking about the politics of cleft states, and everything returned to normal. Leah’s dad looked at me a few times like he might’ve caught it too, and then after dinner I heard her parents whisper-fighting in the den. I kept my ear open to the lessons—hoping history wouldn’t repeat itself.

  Leah’s eyes wandered just like her mom’s. When I’d call her on it, she’d say, Aw, you’re jealous, or Relax, tiger, and I imagined she’d learned how to manage men from her mother too. My mom had gone on loving my pops every day for fourteen years since the split, without cease. At least that’s what she claimed. I guess she was romantic like that, but it’s always easier to love a memory.

  One time, at her place, after I rolled her out, Leah sat on my ass, leaned her forearms on my back and blew on my neck. I didn’t mind cuddling in her bedroom. It had pastel-colored paintings and scented candles, shit that gave you a cuddly feel.

  Stop, I said.

  She put her face down next to mine. You know you like it, she said.

  Why don’t you give me a back rub? I said.

  Who do I look like? she said. You should give me one.

  Girl, I’ll rub every inch of you, I said.