by Jess Row
There’s no jobs in Atlantic City, Martin says. Economy’s dying. Now that there’s slots at every racetrack in the tristate. Plus Foxwoods. Plus the hurricane. I wouldn’t worry about it.
He’s got a friend, though.
A friend’s not a job. Job’s not your mom taking her babies out of Baltimore.
A fire engine races by on 29th Street, barking and screeching, sending a flock of tiny birds up into the air, where they form a cloud, a disk, and then drop all at once back onto the grass. Davis discreetly flicks through the messages on his phone.
Where else’d you go to college? he asks me.
Oh—Amherst. You know where that is? In Massachusetts?
Where Emily Dickinson’s from, he says, expressionless. We just did a unit on her. That’s a real place? I mean, it’s still there?
Yeah. Actually, it hasn’t changed that much. The buildings, I mean. It’s still a quiet little town. Great school, though. Really small classes. Why, I’m thinking, can’t I squeeze out a sentence longer than three words? Nobody falls through the cracks there, I say. You can’t be anonymous. You get all the attention you could ever want. On the flip side, you’re stuck with the same four hundred people for four years.
He gives me a look halfway between astonishment and disgust.
Four hundred people in the whole school?
Davis, you have got to understand, Martin says. The really good places are small for a reason. Lots of advantages to that. Plus, it’s a tiny school sitting on a mountain of money. Get into Amherst and they’ll give you a full ride. Books, travel, everything. It’s the all-star league of the mind. Here, show Kelly that video you made.
I deleted it.
BS, man. It’s on YouTube.
My data plan’s off.
Okay. Fine. Martin takes out his phone, taps the screen, and hands it to me. I bookmarked it, he says. It’s Davis in front of a wavering camera, in an alley, or an abandoned lot, with two girls flanking him in matching black hoodies and pink wide-frame glasses. The audio isn’t tracked with the video, and I can hardly hear the beat through the phone’s tinny speakers, but I can hear Davis’s piping, slightly flat falsetto: I willed my keepsakes signed away—what portion of me I could make—assignable and then there interposed a fly—with blue uncertain stumbling—buzz between the light and me—
That was his class project, Martin says. For the Dickinson unit.
He’s gay, I’m thinking. For what good reason? Because he sings too high? Because he’s secretive and drawn into himself, because of the way he folds his legs, the delicacy of his fingers tapping the table like a keyboard? He’s gay, and Martin doesn’t know. Is it true? Would it matter, even if it was? All Martin’s trying to do is get him through twelfth grade. And give him the chance to unmake himself.
By the time he’s in college—say, three years from now—Martin will no longer be just Martin. The truth will be out. And another avenue of unmaking will be open.
I look at Martin’s face, and at Davis’s.
The truth is, I’m thinking, it could be almost anyone. There’s a fly beating against the glass of this thought. If the hole is deep enough. If the wanting is bad enough. Did I think we were special? Was Martin special?
Mom’s asking when I’ll be back, Davis announces, chin buried in his chest.
Okay, Martin says. Got to clean all this up first. Want some crabs? There’s extra.
Mom does that, he says. Cleans them and all. Makes crab cakes.
Stay just as you are, I want to tell him. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t go.
20.
The second night of the L.A. riots, April 30, 1992, was also the night of L’Arc-en-Ciel’s biggest show, at the Spring Fling at Johns Hopkins. We were supposed to show up for sound check two hours early, but by four-thirty we were stalled in Alan’s living room with the TV on; our amps and cases stacked in the hall, my station wagon unloaded. Reginald Denny’s beating—the white man yanked from his cement truck, kicked, struck with a brick, left lying with his long blond hair splayed in blood on the asphalt, all filmed in the shaky lens of a helicopter camera—played in an endless loop on all four stations.
Alan sprawled across the couch, guitar in his lap, fingering chords silently and staring at the set list he’d written inside the back cover of Heidegger: Basic Writings. Martin had gone to the bathroom and never returned. I sat curled up in an easy chair, smoking one of Ayala’s Camel Lights from a pack she’d left on the mantelpiece. I hadn’t smoked since one obligatory trial cigarette in sixth grade; in fact I hated smoking, was opposed to it, considered it a form of mass corporate poisoning, an addiction factory, but I needed something to ease my ratcheting heart, and we didn’t have any weed in the house, and drinking was out. It was bad luck to drink before shows. And in any case my personal feelings about smoking, as about anything else, had never seemed more irrelevant, more like piss in the ocean.
I had been sitting, immobilized, for the better part of an hour, watching plumes of black smoke rising from South Central, lines of policemen with shields and shotguns, spidery looters carrying stereos and sacks of diapers through shattered windows. I had a splitting headache. I wanted to break my sticks, take a kitchen knife and slash my drum heads, or pour gasoline over the whole kit and set it alight, if that wasn’t such a cliché. Instead, I concentrated on each inhalation, trying to measure out a lungful of smoke, swallowing the dry cough and the urge to spit.
We can’t just play a fucking show, I said to Alan. Right? I mean, what do they want us to say? Happy fucking spring?
He got up and turned off the TV.
What the hell are you doing?
Enough, he said. Enough is enough. Just sit tight for a second.
I stood up to stretch my legs, and saw a flicker of movement in the window: Martin was standing on the front lawn. He’d taken his shirt off and hung it around his shoulders, and he stood, hands on hips, staring up at the mulberry tree that hung over the side of the house, now just beginning to bloom.
When Alan returned he held out a record for my inspection: Fugazi’s Repeater, lyric sheet turned up. “Styrofoam,” he said.
There are no more races to be run
There are no numbers left to be won
We are all bigots so filled with hatred
We release our poisons like Styrofoam
This is what we’re going to do, he said. To start with. Hold still. He popped the cap off the Sharpie and wrote something in block letters on my forehead. Now you do me, he said. Martin! Come here!
• • •
Bigot, Alan’s forehead said.
Mine said Racist.
Martin’s: Burn This.
The songs we played, without more than a fifteen-second pause in between, were our angriest, loudest, most dissonant. That was all: three songs, and then two tall guys rushed the stage; one threw Alan off, into the crowd, and the other leaped over the guitar amp and then tripped on the drum riser and knocked three teeth out on the edge of the bass drum.
It happened, as they say, in slow motion, in a kind of sludgy, badly colored filmstrip: Alan balling up around his guitar in midair; Terc kicking a third guy off the stage as he tried to climb up; a complete stranger running right at me, for me, fists outstretched, and falling, and rolling across the stage with his hands wrapped around his face, blood running through his fingers. My crash cymbal was in my lap, the snare under my feet; a guitar cord whipped through the air; Martin’s bass cabinet groaned as someone knocked it over. Sirens; squawking megaphones; I pushed the hardware away and scooted off the stage to the left, thinking I would circle around and find Alan out front, and promptly, as I reached the stairs, tripped myself, and planted my elbow in a row of stage lights. I still have that scar.
21.
Young man, says the elderly woman in the salmon suit next to me, nudging me with her elbow. Young man. It’s y
our turn.
She hands me the collection plate, full of bills, of course, fives and tens and a few folded inconspicuous ones. I’m on the aisle, and the deacon is already waiting beside me. I balance the plate on my knees, trying to let nothing drop, and reach for my wallet. Three bank receipts, a misplaced Acme Coffee Frequent Flier card, and a twenty.
In goes the twenty.
Did she notice? Her eyes stay locked on the choir, which is cooling off after a fast “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” The deacon, who can’t be less than eighty, puts his hand on my shoulder as he shuffles to the next row. Possibly for balance. And at the same moment Martin, packed in with Sherry and Tamika and Robin in the row in front, turns around and gives me an assessing look. You okay? he mouths.
I nod and smile.
What else can I be here but a quiet, insignificant alien, an observer, a gap in the fabric? There are the women with enormous hats, great tilted slabs of taffeta and satin; there are men with two-toned shoes and matching purple ties and pocket squares; the choir wears burgundy robes with kente-cloth scarves; and the minister, Dr. Reginald Charles, looks a little like Samuel L. Jackson with deeper-set eyes and without the indignant stare. The air is thick with the smell of gardenias and hyacinths and musky cologne. And those of us without fans are fanning ourselves with our programs. It’s hitting all the marks, as Martin said it would, when he gave me the address over the phone yesterday. Don’t come expecting to be surprised. Moved, maybe. Overwhelmed. It’s not about subtlety. Sometimes even Robin gets a little embarrassed. She’s not sure she wants you to come.
Tell her I’m really looking forward to it, I said.
Yeah. I’m not sure that’ll help.
We’re near the end now, after a sermon that must have lasted forty-five minutes; I followed the first half, a reading of the parable of the talents as a message about financial security and self-sufficiency, but lost the thread somewhere in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and even the woman next to me, who had punctuated every other sentence with Mmm-hmmm and Tell it and Yes, Lord, lowered her chin and began to list against me toward the end. And then sprang awake, and up, with the first chords of “Forever Praising Him,” the burbling of the fretless bass and the snap of the electric snare.
Here’s the thing: I don’t follow the rituals, I’m shaky on the good news, but I know the music. Contemporary gospel is just a hair away from Eighties pop R&B, and if you grew up, like I did, with Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, El DeBarge, Jermaine Stewart—we don’t have to take our clothes off to have a good time—then the sound of this music, minus the choral singing, the multiplied voices, is the sound of MTV in 1986, all squiggly neon lights, shoulder pads, pink lipstick. It’s The Cosby Show. Irrepressible happiness. Teflon happiness. And I don’t mean that in a bad way.
At several points along the way, in fact, I’ve been wiping tears out of my eyes.
I get this way in churches. And synagogues. Partly because I associate them with funerals and weddings. But mostly because, like many areligious people, I secretly love the idea of church. Human beings need rituals. I took an anthropology of religion course in college—the professor was a lapsed seminarian from Ghana—and I remember him saying, we’re only a hundred years removed from an absolute reliance on sacredness, at most. That’s a hundred years versus a hundred thousand years of human development. Sacredness doesn’t disappear; it migrates into the realm of the absurd. Going to the gym. Putting on makeup. Collecting wine. Riding a speedboat.
I’m staring at the back of Martin’s neck.
If you had nothing—if you started from nothing—and came upon this, a fully formed world, based on the idea of not enduring, not even resisting, but actually refusing pain, not sitting and waiting for the spirit but actually embodying it, loudly and clearly, every week, whether you feel like it or not—
It could be anyone.
Young man, the woman next to me says again, when everyone is standing, embracing, collecting hats and purses, I could use a hand getting up. She holds out her hand, I take it, and her grip locks against mine; under the loose, ashy skin, speckled with liver spots, her frame is rigid, the joints welded by sheer determination. Help me with something, she says, reaching into her handbag and producing a smartphone in a pink rubber case. Check and see if there’s a text message on there, would you do that for me? My grandniece just had a baby and said she was sending me a picture. I can’t read the buttons. All I do is, people call me and I swipe the thing and talk.
I open the phone, and indeed, there’s a text from Kimmy, grandma sylvie we luv u heres the newest member of the family thomas javon turner, and a picture of a swaddled newborn in someone’s arms, with pasty black hair, narrow cheeks, and puzzled green eyes.
Oh my, Sylvie says, when I hand back the phone.
Looks like my little one, I’m about to say. Because he does look a little like Meimei: that same grayish skin, and the wide, startled look, melatonin and pupils meeting daylight for the first time. But that would be a weird thing to say. A bad omen. Congratulations, I say, instead. That’s a beautiful baby.
Sister Sylvie, Martin says, I need my friend back now, if you don’t mind. But she’s already turned away, under the spell of life.
• • •
It was Alan’s decision, Martin says. He was the one who found the marker. He was the first one to do it. I know he wrote that it was consensus. It wasn’t. I wasn’t comfortable with it.
Slowly, pensively, with a rounded, overfed gait, we’re crossing Taylor Park, which leads from Martin’s neighborhood to the far side of the Maryland Institute campus and the expressway. For lunch Robin made blackened snapper, quinoa salad, and miniature quiches with kale and bacon. It’s the one decent meal I’ve had in a week. There are chickadees and killdeer skittering overhead and the trees are just furred with green. A moment of fragrant life, life springing underfoot.
Then why didn’t you say anything?
What was I supposed to say? I just wanted to play the show. Maybe with a dedication to the victims. Something neutral.
That’s your big realization? That you felt nothing? During the riots, when the rest of us were so outraged?
You want to know what it felt like? Think about it. Think about everything I’ve told you. Forget who you thought I was. Can you imagine the sheer oddness that I was feeling, the sense of not being where I was supposed to be? And where was I supposed to be? That’s what I’m talking about. I was stunned. I felt sick. What I did not feel was some righteous sense of us and them. I felt—you want to know what it was like? Remember that ectoplasm thing I was telling you about? So this was like that—like being an egg. Someone picks up an egg and taps it on the edge of a bowl. Tap, tap, tap. Testing. How hard is it going to be? How much force is required, to break that egg? Every egg is a little different. Too hard, and you spill it everywhere. Too soft, and it’ll take you forever. There’s a thrill in that moment of testing. You want to know what it was like? It was exciting. It was stimulating. You think that’s sick? That’s how it was. I feel my insides coming out and I didn’t know whether I was supposed to cover up the wound or just let go. Was I supposed to be the guy with the brick, or the guy on the ground?
Those were the only alternatives?
In that moment, yes.
I don’t think so. I don’t agree.
Oh, come on, he says. Remember, Kelly. Put yourself back in that moment. He spins around and takes a snap at me, one hand half fisted, the other slapping his shoulder. You’re telling me that there wasn’t part of you that was saying, don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me! It wasn’t my fault! I’m not talking about logic. I’m talking about brute visceral response. You were Reginald Denny. How could you not be?
How would you know?
I was there. You were crushed. You and Alan both. Disappointed. In that moment there was no subtlety, no nuance, right? Savagery. Primitivism. The great Ame
rican nightmare. Help! There’s a big black man with a rock!
And you would have been Reginald Denny, too.
This is what I’m talking about! Do you see it now? He bends over and palms an imaginary rock, tests its weight, squints at me, measuring me as a target. I could feel—I could feel my own hand with the brick and my own head as the target. Total cognitive dissonance. It was like I was having a stroke. And you know what I did? Did you ever wonder where I was, when the fight was going on? I ran. Unplugged my bass and hopped off the stage and got the heck out of there. I wound up in some dining hall, still carrying the bass. Reading the flyers, trying to look nonchalant. Then I came back and found you. By that time the police were cleaning up. I pretended I’d gone for help. Not my most courageous moment.
We weren’t supposed to be courageous, I say. We were ambushed.
Oh, come on, he says. Look, I loved Alan as much as anyone. But he was asking for it. I mean, this was Hopkins. He wanted to see what it was like to be Abbie Hoffman. He thought it was funny. Don’t you remember, Kelly, how happy he was? He kept flipping down the mirror in the car, trying to get a better look at his black eye. Laughing the whole time. Remember how he insisted we all take pictures afterward? And then he wrote that piece for the City Paper. It was his little excursion into the life of a provocateur.
And what about the music? What, you’re just embarrassed by it now? Just a passing phase?
Stop here for a second, he says, extracting his phone from his back pocket. Robin’s texting me.
We’ve crossed out of the park onto Wilbur Street, a long row of low-rise public housing units, single-family, built to look like Eighties condos—all angles and planes, brown metal sheathing and slabs of brick. Just about every building I can see, down to Pennsylvania Avenue, has that boxy Seventies-Eighties look, with the windows high up and long blank walls facing the street. Even the New Evergreen Baptist Church across the way is built in modernist-bunker style. Which means, of course, that they were all built after the riots, in place of the old ornate row houses and tenement houses and shop fronts burned or condemned as blight. A small banner strung up over the rear entrance to the church reads
