Elsewhere, California

by Dana Johnson

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgments

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  For Leo and Hattie Johnson

  Now I face home again very pleas’d and joyous;

  (But where is what I started for, so long ago?

  And why is it yet unfound?)

  —Walt Whitman, “Facing West from California’s Shores”

  “Let’s make an alliance! I’ll look out for you, and you look out for me! I’m good at catching and I’ve got a damn good pitching arm!”

  —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

  This ain’t fun. But you watch me, I’ll get it done.

  —Jackie Robinson

  PROLOGUE

  MY PARENTS WERE not playful people. They did not tell jokes or laugh a lot. When I try to remember how they were when I was a child, I only remember them working very hard. And fighting. But once, when I was five, my mother and father played this game with me. I asked, Where am I from?

  My father listed all the possible places. He started with my mother. That’s where you came from, he said.

  Where else! I asked. Where else!

  Watts, he said. That is where I was conceived. Then 80th Street, he said, the place I first knew as my home. Then Los Angeles. Then California. All the way from Tennessee. All the way from Africa, my father said.

  Where else, I cried. From kings and queens?

  No, he would say. Kings and queens had buckets of gold, and we never had any of that. Yes! I said. No! he said, and we went back and forth. To prove it, he tried to tell me serious stories about hard times and sacrifices and how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. Boring, sad stories. And so I said, I’m not from any of those places. I’m just from California.

  Where in California then? he asked me. California is big, he said. I couldn’t pick Los Angeles, because I was already here. So I picked a name I really liked, all by myself, with the help of television. A crazy, complicated name. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Hmm, my mother said. She frowned. Supercali who? Who lives there, then? she asked. Anybody who wants to, I said. How you get to this place you talking about? she asked. I was stuck then. I didn’t know. How was everybody going to get there? I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I loved where I was already, in Los Angeles. But I still loved my invented place in California even better because it sounded like confetti and long streamers coming down from the sky, caressing my face—this other place in California, like glitter and myriad pieces of confetti, the beautiful Blue Chip Stamps my mother and I used to save, and all kinds of other images and words and ideas I couldn’t put a name to at the time.

  THE FIRST TIME my father told me my mother was crazy was after one of their fights. She had tried to stab him with the butcher knife. He had said that he’d be home by eleven that night, but he came home at eleven thirty. Half an hour. She was waiting for him when he came through the door. My brother grabbed for the knife, but she slipped away from him and chased my father down the narrow hallway of our small apartment. He made it to their bedroom and slammed the door just in time. My mother stuck the knife in the door and pried it out. Stuck it in and pried it out. My brother and I stayed away until she was done, had tired herself out. Later that night my father sat me on his knee while I cried in the living room of our five-room apartment on 80th Street and my mother cooked his dinner. Your mother, he said in low, soothing tones. Something is not right. Her brother is crazy. Her sister. I told her eleven and I came home at eleven thirty. All she had to do was wait one more half hour, he said. What difference does thirty minutes make?

  I told this story when I first met the therapist. At first, I didn’t tell anyone I went to a hypnotherapist. Massimo rolled his eyes and shook his head. But I went anyway, though I had to wrap my mind around the idea of hypnosis. My first attempts at therapy did not do me any good. I was defensive and could not submit to the idea of giving myself up to someone I didn’t know, someone who thought they knew what and who I was. I thought it would be true what my family and Massimo said, if I were to go to therapy. I was weak. I was self-indulgent. And there was this: Therapy was for people with real problems. Terrible loss. Trauma. My brother Owen said that my main trauma was that the house I was living in was too big for me to clean all by myself. Me, throwing good money away in Massimo’s big house on the hill. White folks. Rich folks, and they doctors, Mom said when I told her. But I needed help. I couldn’t get it together on my own. I needed someone who would listen, yes, but also hear. The first two therapists didn’t have a chance. I did not respect their earnestness, their kindness, their gentleness. They looked at me and this is what I thought they saw. A success story. A bright and articulate woman. An affirmative action baby. A bourgeois snob. A hard worker. A whiner. A well-dressed woman. A whore. A woman who spread her legs for a nice place to live. A woman who wanted to be an artist, who was not really an artist. A charming, smiling, elegant liar. They didn’t tell me that this is what they saw. I already knew. I already thought I knew. I was already negotiating the twists and turns of the people and personalities I could be to anyone at any given time, so, kindness and gentleness, what good were those things to me?

  But the moment I saw him, I liked the hypnotist.

  He was handsome, patient, and paying attention—and I thought I was in trouble, even though I knew he wasn’t what he appeared to be. I thought I should pick another doctor, someone else who looked different, who didn’t have sandy hair and turquoise eyes. A man who looked like that, who looked at me. Dr. Harrington. He was a hypnotist, after all. He was going to hypnotize me. He hypnotized me.

  I told him all kinds of stories when he said, Good. Let’s start from the beginning.

  WE CAINT GO tricka treating. The Crips went and shot somebody and the Bloods done shot em back. Me and Mama standin out front the partment building with all the other mamas and they kids. We pirates and princesses and witches. My cousin Keith got on glasses with no glass in em, a black tie with green stripes and a blue vest with his jeans. He a lawyer. I aint never heard of no lawyer before, but I guess he look awright to have no money for no real costume. And Im happy to see him because he come all the way from the desert to come tricka treating. Thats where he live.

  Auntie Janice holding Keiths hand. She say, Aint no need a walking around, up and down the street getting shot up for no candy, not with these niggas running the streets and carrying on.

  You right, Cassandras mama, Miss Channey, gree with Auntie Janice. She run her hand over the part of Cassandras hair sticking up in the front so it lie back down. Cassandra got pretty hair, almost straight but still kind of nappy and the color gold like her eyes. Cassandra try to fix the crown on her head and mess up what her mama just fix.

  I got a princess outfit too, from Newberrys. Mine just a mask with blonde hair painted on the sides and a plastic dress you slip into. Itty bitty red lips with a hole you posed to breathe out of. I beg and beg Mama for the
costume and a baton. I want to twirl and throw it up in the air like I seen girls on TV do. Majorettes, Mama say. She say, No, I caint get no baton, neither, but she get it for me later. But its hot inside the mask right now. I pull the mask back so its sitting on top my head so I can breathe.

  Mama wearing a patch like she a pirate, but she and Daddy fight and now she wearing the patch cause he hit her in the eye. Mama say, Lets go on over to Miss Maxies house, and Howard and nems. I know they got some candy for yall. We go to a couple houses, Avery, she say to me. Then we gone get on in the house.

  Mamas afro is orange this week. She look like a lion, the way it stick out all around, with her eyebrows painted on dark black. Mama make me feel like we may as well go tricka treatin. Caint no bullets hurt us. She wont let em. I ask Mama can we go to the liquor store after the houses cause last year and the year before that they give out candy. But she say, Not now, not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

  We all go to the same four houses right next door to our partment building and then we go to each others partments. And then, thats it.

  Later Mama dump all my candy on the bed and pick out all the ones that look like might be something wrong with em. And the apple. My brother Owen pick it up and shake his head. When he do that, his eyes got extra light in em. They light brown eyes and he the only one in the whole family got light brown eyes like that. Dont nobody know where them eyes come from, but he look different because he so dark and them eyes so light. Look like somebody color them eyes.

  He say, Who this stupid gone put a dang apple in the bag? He pretend to bite it and Mama snatch it out his hand.

  Quit playing boy, she say, and throw the apple in the trash. And dont call Miss Shepard stupid, Mama say. She old and dont know how mean the world done got, thats all, bless her heart.

  I get to eat bout five pieces of the candy Mama aint throwed out, and then I take my costume and fold it up neat for next year.

  Girl, that thang aint gone fit next year, Mama say. May as well throw it out.

  It barely fit now, fatty, Owen say. He sitting on his bed on his side of the room, trying do his school work. Owen tall and skinny like JJ on Good Times. He tall and skinny like a rail, Mama say. He always calling me whale and fatty, and I call him bean pole back, but he never care that he skinny. And I dont care they calling me fat.

  I stick my tongue out. I dont care. Ima keep it.

  Suit yourself, Mama say. Owen just laugh at me.

  When Daddy come home, I listen for cussing and fighting but I dont hear nothing but Marvin Gaye and Mama and Daddys words sound far away and soft until Daddy say, Goddamn. Kids caint even go tricka treating no more without getting a bullet in they ass. We getting out of L.A.

  1

  MASSIMO IS IN the air. Due home from Rome very soon. He will be here to support me in this little show that I’m doing with a few other artists. He has always been on my side, though we come from completely different worlds. “Different worlds, yes,” Massimo always says, “and yet we came from the same places, places where people have no money. Nothing and nowhere.” And so my goal is to show something that will make people think about different worlds, to look at the same old thing they’ve been looking at in a new way. Maybe they will say, I never saw it that way before. “Your show will be fantastic,” Massimo has been saying, and I have always been so unappreciative of this support in the past. He doesn’t understand the source of my inspiration and, yet, he thinks understanding isn’t necessary, as long as he lets me be and do whatever I want. I don’t know. Maybe he is right about this.

  The show is small, just like the only other one I’ve had. In just a few hours. A box of a gallery on La Brea, owned by a friend of Massimo’s.

  I have gotten used to thinking that Massimo, with all his Roman grace and European credentials, makes me more—to those who value such commodities. I’m not just another person trying to be an artist showing work that nobody will buy, let alone understand, but a sophisticate. Not just another hard-luck story who “transcended her humble beginnings, who may fulfill her potential,” according to a recent, scant mention in the Sentinel, L.A.’s black newspaper. A paper I don’t ordinarily read. Potential, always there is potential lurking around like a mandate. It had one paragraph, this mention. But it was still a mention. Now, though, because of our struggles throughout the years, Massimo and I have arrived at the same oxymoronic conclusion. I am, and am not, the ideal American, African-American, and any other identification one wishes to project.

  “How can you let them put that shit, that American boot string bullshit—” Massimo said when I showed him the article one morning. He had toast crumbs in the corners of his mouth, and I had reached across the table and brushed them off.

  “Straps,” I said. Boot straps.”

  Massimo lit a cigarette and considered me through the smoke. We were in yet another argument, the one about something being wrong with me. “What does it matter? You are here. You do what you do. That is all,” he said, turning up the palms of his hand.

  But today I’m really missing Massimo, fights and all. Massimo, with his perpetual cigarette which is either bouncing off his lips as he talks or dangerously close to burning someone as it sweeps the air with grand, elegant gestures. He is the best publicist I could have. He works a room, Massimo, making everyone fall in love with his accent and malapropisms, elevating us both at the same time, yet with another elevation through language that I can’t achieve. I’m only American.

  “That is because you have no accent, my love,” Massimo says, and he’s right. I’m flat. I sound as though I come from no particular place at all. My flatness started out as a costume, a disguise—hand-me-down words accessorized with various inflections until at last, without even realizing it, I’d settled on the voice I now have, a voice that goes anywhere with anything. Flat. But my lack of accent is only half of it; the other half of it is that one must have the right kind of accent, phrasing and diction, the kind that opens a door and lets you in. Massimo knows this because he uses language whenever he takes me by the elbow at gatherings and says, “I’d like you to meet my wife, Avery. She is an extraordinary painter who seduced me in Piazza Navona.” He knows this line with words like “piazza,” “painter,” and “seduced” is much more charming, sounds much better than: “This is my wife, Avery, from West Covina. The suburbs. She is trying to make art.” And anyway, painters don’t come from West Covina. They come from Italy, France—New York, Los Angeles—but never West Covina. Massimo reminds me that I was born in L.A. and only moved to West Covina when I was a girl, but L.A. feels like the before of who I am, who I turned out to be. I can hardly remember before. And anyway, he picked me up in a bar. In Hollywood. Less romantic. So as it turns out, the past does matter, whether it is invented or not.

  Massimo likes to tell half-truths, and the half-truth about us is that he picked me up at the Formosa, worlds away from Rome, where I was out with Brenna and he was out trying to get laid, wagging his accent around like a big cock. After he bought me many drinks and spoke to me with so much Italian charm that I now understand to be nothing more than leg-spreading rhetoric, I gave him my number. Later, much later, after Massimo and I were already living together and I had blended into his life, there was the Piazza Navona, me sitting at a café sketching, waiting for Massimo. Still, Massimo insists that everything he says is the full truth—at least emotionally—and that I’m always the one with the caveats and qualifiers, with a tendency to diminish. He’s a struggler, a fighter. He knows how to win. He says that I am too, but what drives him crazy is that I won’t struggle. I won’t fight, and so how am I going to win?

  I was a child then. Twenty-one years old. “Massimo’s little girl,” he used to say with affection. Now, in my forties, I am too old for such a term of endearment to be endearing. This is the struggle between us now, the struggle with myself. Wanting someone, usually Massimo, to do all the things I need to do on my own, like a teenager who insists, “I know. I know. I can fix everyth
ing I need to fix by myself,” thinking, but would somebody just help me?

  My art doesn’t sell, except to people close to Massimo. Almost every painting or every installation I’ve sold has been to friends of Massimo, and friends of Massimo’s friends who have wandered through my workspace and/or came to the other show and purchased a piece or two. The people I know, my friends and family, they spend money on rent, on food, on gas. And if they had the money, they wouldn’t spend it on most of the things I make now: found objects or random pieces of things that put together a story. Old shoes with holes I have repaired with red thread; piles of candy—Pop Rocks, Now and Laters, candy cigarettes, Pixie Stix, and jawbreakers—formed in the shape of a heart within which I have typed the name of every teen idol I have ever loved.

  Before that, I had to paint away the reactionary anger of my youth. It was as if I had discovered racism all on my own, made a record album of it, and let it skip and skip and skip. I wasn’t remembering the nuances of other recordings, a record or song, a piece of art that goes all over the place and back to the place it started, like John Coltrane, like David Bowie. Before, I’d painted portraits which were, I’ve been told by the few people who have seen them, offensive, racist, and, according to the mention in the Sentinel, “unsettled in their critique of iconic negrobilia images.”

  Racist. I was twenty.

  I read that word over and over and could not process it. Some woman had gone to a coffee shop that let me hang my portraits on the wall. The owner was a young man, his hair dyed jet-black and arranged in carefully messy spikes. He rubbed his arms, both covered in lavish tattoos before people started covering themselves in tattoos en masse. He bent his noodle of a torso over my portfolio. “Badass,” he said. “Fuck yeah.” But the woman who had seen my portraits hanging had been so disturbed, so offended, that she wrote me a long, hateful letter and e-mailed it to the owner of the coffee shop, but it was addressed to me, Averygoodbyeain’tgone, a name I’d made up by combining my name with a saying of my mother’s. She says, all the time, “Every shut eye ain’t sleep and every goodbye ain’t gone,” and I’ve carried that phrase with me my whole life, like a warning, a threat. The woman’s e-mail said that I “obviously hated white people” and that I had some kind of hysteria about white people. I had inappropriate, misplaced anger, which she didn’t want to be subjected to while she sat and drank her coffee. She closed with the almost-funny question, What did I have against June Cleaver?