The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  The first time I experienced the May I see your ID? syndrome, outside of when I tried to enter Pa’s room—Whose child are you?—I was fourteen or so and wearing white ballet slippers. I was a student at the School for the Performing Arts, which was then on West 46th Street. There, I majored in theater. To get to the school from my home in Brooklyn, I took the IRT express—the 2 or 3 train—and got off at Times Square. I always wore ballet slippers then, and, frequently, tights. Sometimes I carried a bag, a kind of pouch my mother had made for me. A queer costume for her queer child. One day, as I hurried through the filthy labyrinth that was and is the IRT subway system at Times Square, a cop stopped me. Give me your ID. I showed him my train pass. I didn’t have any other ID. The blood was pounding behind my eyes. Something—instinct—told me not to show my real face—the face of my fear and hatred. I was no longer myself: I knew what it was like to be almost annihilated or have some part of your natural trust annihilated by men. Become “nothing” and maybe they won’t kill you. When I was a kid, my boy cousins used to try to suffocate me with plastic bags. They wanted this faggot to die. Maybe that long-ago cop wanted this faggot to die. With no provocation at all, he walked me down some more filthy corridors and we ended up in his headquarters, where I was booked as a truant. I said, once, that I was not a truant, that I was on my way to school, but that wasn’t the story he wanted to hear or his buddies wanted to hear, and something in me went silent. How could I contradict his idea of my body? With what? My ballet slippers? My mind? My love of art and theater and movie lovers in anguish? And let me just say that what I felt then is not so very different from what I feel as I walk toward my new home where Love waits. I’m adrift in a stop-and-frisk universe that has always been a stop-and-frisk universe. My silence is a form of protection: Do I want them to cut my tongue out, too? Or an equally effective private part of my anatomy? This feeling goes back centuries, no doubt, and is in my DNA and has saved my life in the past, all the way back to the ships and the lash. But it has also stomped on my heart and given Love quite a job. Call it what you will—white backlash, Obama-era payback, or whatever—but I find our present condition difficult to write about. Part of what drew me to the pieces collected here is how the writers managed to discover, during a hard rain, times even of humor, and sometimes beauty, and a great heaping of pain and incomprehension that they wanted to make sense of. These voices encourage me to not not speak, despite history and most evidence to the contrary saying otherwise.

  Even before I moved out of my old apartment with all those bodies, one could feel the need for blood to be spilled in the streets, an extension of all those shot bodies in North Carolina or mowed down bodies in Lexington, Kentucky, not to mention other parts of the world, now and forever, somewhere, always. As I’ve said, some folks call our present condition white backlash, but I call this wave of violence the tedium of having to give a shit. All those years in college reading Beloved, all those seminars on women’s bodies, including reproductive rights, and Dad down at the office having to deal with hearing about equal pay even if he never forked it over. All those years of talk of immigrant care and elder health care and social security this and fair that. Even entertainment wasn’t safe. Tender movie and TV shit about lesbians and gays and trans people, and will it never end? So says the guy sitting in that classroom or in that movie theater, emboldened by the vile slime that comes via the airwaves night after night, so says this guy as he watches TV reflecting the rich and his constantly rightly exasperated-by-all-this-difference president. Lock those immigrants up, says this guy following his commander in chief’s example, sterilize them, separate them from their children like in the slaves’ days, and let me get mine, my stuff.

  Once, in my old neighborhood, a guy with a BMW was looking lovingly at the stuff under the hood of his shiny car as his little son, a toddler, walked out into the street and was minding his own unsupervised baby business when the world stopped but reality didn’t: as the child toddled, a taxi suddenly rounded the corner near where he was, and I screamed, the car stopped, and the man stopped looking at his stuff for a moment to pick up his living stuff. Then, holding his neglected child, this dad followed me home to make sure that I wasn’t going to report him to the police. I should have. Ma’s ethos interfered: Perhaps the man had “learned” something, Ma said in my heart, while my body said, If I went to the police, who would believe us? Would I be the dude who pushed his baby into the road, while caring rich fathers looked on helplessly? Looking at his BMW stuff, that father—a version of my father?—was, perhaps, tired of giving a shit even when it came to his own child and its baby needs. Maybe he was tired of all those other baby needs over the past eight years or so, when he had to deal with imagining how someone else might feel. Maybe he was tired of living through some version of the civil rights era again, all those Obamas. It was exhausting to be made aware of the world’s concerns, all the moral bullshit of the underprivileged and whatnot, including those guys in ballet slippers who scream when a child may be harmed, who the fuck wants to deal? Now it’s my turn, the same guy may think, my time, mine, and what I want to ask is how long will it be before even the most enlightened person starts calling me a nigger? This guy may say: If all those niggers and cunts out there can’t take what we’ve had to swallow all these years—all those years of trying to empathize with crap that has nothing to do with us at all, that has nothing to do with power—surely it’s all those niggers’ and cunts’ time to deal with us guys who have had to listen to what they’ve had to say, all that whining, ignoring the fact that America was never theirs and always ours, ignoring the fact that America has always heard them first. And because these guys are American, they want me to hear them first.

  Here’s some stuff they’ve said that they are surprised you don’t want to listen to as you listen because of Ma’s ethos, the body that took it all because Ma considered it her job. At a memorial service where I eulogized a white woman I didn’t like but her family asked me and what can you do?, one of the bereaved came up to me and said, I’ve been reading you for years, I didn’t know you were black. And so big. Then, at a party, out of nowhere: I really like Dear White People—as if you’re in the cast. At a business meeting with a potential producer: Don’t you miss that comedy troupe that used to say, “I’m black and I suck dick”? At a small theater, a small black female performer in a solo work. The show is over, and when I retire to the men’s room, a gentleman in the opposite stall: You were so great in the show. Then there is the usual, someone mistakes me for another writer of color, and when I say, No, I’m the other one, he looks at me cockeyed: Was I sure? Then there’s the guy you go out on a date with before you find Love who tells you that his relatives owned a plantation in Haiti years ago and the people who worked it looked like you. Sometimes you try to convince others, these guys, that you are yourself—Where’s my I?—especially, hideously, if they are your friends. Remember the moment when the dying woman you were trying to help said, You see that black guy crossing the street, my grandfather would have called him a mook. Remember the former friend who loved to tell the story of how, when her father thought someone was unattractive, he’d say, They’re uglier than a bag of nigger rectums. Or the other, dying friend who said, while bending over to kiss her, Whoa, this is just like the Tennessee Williams story “Desire and the Black Masseur.” This casual and not so casual hatred and aggression, even in presumed love, is as old as America, a country defined in part by people defining who they are least not. While America is happening to my mind and body, I try to make sense of it as I walk toward home and Love, but my mind can’t make writing of it somehow, because how can you tell a story that all the metaphors in the world can’t enhance or help make into art?

  Love wants so many things, wants your story without metaphors if it comes to that. Love says, Tell it, baby, tell about that walk from east to west, marred and marked by others, that which makes for a different kind of reflection. Tell it, because Love is interested.
r />   All a writer has is his epoch and how it shapes him. In her very interesting introduction to the first volume of The Best American Essays series, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote that the essay was a “slithery form, wearisomely vague and as chancy as a fish in the open hand.” In short, the essay, like love, like life, is indefinable, but you know an essay when you see it, and you know a great one when you feel it, because it’s concentrated life, whole and in bits. Indeed, the essays I’m attracted to—and I think the present volume shows that—have something unfinished about them, a circle that cannot be closed, filled with dread—even or especially when humorous—anxious that certain national politics, say, are generated by nothing more and nothing less than certain revenge fantasies vis-à-vis identity politics, say, all those bodies rising up out of the dust and grief of racism and sexism to say “I.”

  In “Why I Write,” a 1976 talk about her early years as a writer, Joan Didion said that she borrowed the title of her essay from another—George Orwell’s “Why I Write”—because, first off, she liked the sound of the words: Why I Write.

  There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:

  I

  I

  I

  In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions . . . but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space?

  And in her Best American introduction, Hardwick said, “The aggressiveness of the essay is the assumption of the author to speak in one’s own voice.”

  Rereading Didion and Hardwick, I wonder if, indirectly, these authors were telling us something about their experience as women, and that their description of aggression was the result of having been aggressed upon, told what to do, claimed, putting their “I” aside on more than one occasion to make a difficult situation work, to pacify a husband, to not be a target. Just as queer writers of yore, and writers of color who had to smile and twirl in between bitter descriptions about life in America in order to be read at all, often told the reader more about who they were in between the lines, saying “I,” if you are a different person, can feel like a dangerous proposition, let alone reality: being a target hurts. And since writing is the author’s deepest self, writing about one’s “I,” standing up for it, can feel like an aggressive act, I suppose, given how we targets are programmed not to. I wonder how many heteronormative men and some queer ones worry when asking for your ID, or saying, in so many words, stay out of my room, or worry about how aggressive their language is after they put a plastic bag over your head, trying to smother your faggot voice and concerns. How did we get here? That’s the subject of many of the essays that we read and remember. How did we get here, and are we stuck here as men and women and Other?

  Living as we do in a broken world, essays are bound to become more broken, fractured, as power becomes insistent on showing its power further by breaking more backs, jailing the innocent, cracking Love in the knees. The majority of us are not whole individuals, because there is no such thing as a whole society. Sometimes, on my walk home, in the short space between the rest of the world and my front door, I will have a moment to dream and reflect, and I speculate on what the essays to come will look like, read like. Of course they’ll be made up of many things, including questions and images and gestures, because we live in a world of too many things and half-understood selves. But the essays of the future will or should start with questions, generally political in nature, and if you don’t think so, think again.

  Here’s one essay born out of these times: The comedian Richard Pryor asking once why targets on shooting and archery ranges were always black. Add to that the sound of the woman crying, “Why are they shooting?” as she filmed Antwon Rose being gunned down in East Pittsburgh. Another essay: Looking at Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1983 painting Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart), which the artist produced after Michael Stewart, another graffiti artist, was beaten to death by policemen in the subway. I remember Michael Stewart, the guy my female friend went home with the night I told her we could not be lovers. We were in our early twenties, players in a club on lower Broadway, in Manhattan. After we parted for the night, my complicated companion wasted no time finding herself a guy, a thin man of color with dreads who seemed to be drowning in his overcoat. (Interestingly, she had been involved with Basquiat himself off and on for some time before and after he made that painting dedicated to her murdered friend.) Basquiat, on hearing of Stewart’s death: That could have been me, that could have been me. I didn’t have the presence of mind to say then: But it is.

  Another essay: The music video “This Is America,” starring the performer Donald Glover. Directed by Hiro Murai, who oversees many of the episodes of Atlanta, a history-making series about race, relationships, and place, also starring Glover. In “This Is America,” Glover performs under the name Childish Gambino. The look of the clip is airy and claustrophobic. Folks record acts of violence on their cell phones. A KKK figure rides in on a horse. Glover plays both sides of the racial coin. As a “white” man he blows away a chorus of black singers in a church, impersonating Dylann Roof murdering nine black people in a church in South Carolina. As himself, Glover critiques how blackness can become a pose, commodified, and how that commodification repeats itself, for bigger and bigger bags of cash. At one point, he stands on a pile of cars, just as Michael Jackson did in his 1987 “Bad” video, and just like Beyoncé did in her 2016 “Formation” video. This is black anger as entertainment. Is Glover doing the same thing by putting out a video at all? At the end of the piece, Glover, black and naked with fear, is chased down a seemingly endless corridor by white people.

  The terror in Glover’s eyes and open mouth, gasping for breath, is familiar to me, and now to Love, as Love holds my body, not seeing it as the wrong one but as the one. And that’s the thought and feeling that gets me down the stairs on most days when I leave my house to walk east to west. I have a little ritual when I close my apartment door and face my day, after checking to see if I have my ID, checking to see if I’m ready to make the journey once more. (Joan Didion: “Every day is all there is.”) I look across the street at the colored lobby guy sitting at his station. He’s an essay unto himself. Every day I go out and he’s at work in his glassed-off world. We wave to one another, quietly happy and satisfied to find that we’re still here, each in the other’s world.

  Hilton Als

  Marilyn Abildskov

  The Trick: Notes Toward a Theory of Plot

  from The Gettysburg Review

  The hospital sat high on a hill. The city smelled of coffee and salt. When I wrote my name, I thought, “There’s a record now.”

  Beside my name, friend. Beside others’ names, mother, sister, wife, wife, wife.

  His hands were bare. The first time we’d met, both his hands were covered in rings. The rings repelled me. I was surprised to be so repelled. But here he was, alive and ringless, in a sweatshirt and khaki pants. He’d just finished dinner. His feet looked funny in beige socks and flip-flops.

  I told him about a movie I’d just seen, set in Japan. There had been a lot of scenes involving feet. He said he would like to see it. He said, “This is the first time I laughed all day.”