The Book of Delights

by Ross Gay

  “Asshole!” we screamed into the woods behind the apartments. “Shitbag!” The tears making our faces shine as this big twelve-year-old twisted the meat on our arms. When we went home crying to our mom (my brother more from the pinching than the cursing, which I suspect he was glad for the excuse to do), she found the kid and read him the riot act, calling him a gutter mouth, telling him that Rossy and Matty are not going to be little gutter mouths like him, before telling him he would probably grow up to be a child molester. She was fucking his ass up. I remember him listening quite calmly, almost demure, calling my mother Mrs. Gay and suggesting he would not become a child molester. I think Tim was probably right, and was just in a sadistic phase, not unlike my own at around twelve.

  But mostly I offer this story as a kind of background against which to enjoy the easy way my mother described her granddaughter’s, my niece’s, third-grade teacher, who evidently could sometimes not be very nice to some of the kids, as a real dickhead.

  (May 14)

  77. Ambiguous Signage Sometimes

  I do not want to be the kind of person who feels superior, or is irritated, or, god forbid, sneers at a sign that has a typo or a grammatical error, especially if that sign is not in an English department. I have a feeling you know what I mean. I come from a family of educators, many of them black educators, from whom my father, not a black educator officially, but unofficially, inherited the reflex of correcting, often ironically, this child’s speech.

  Me: Dad, can I have a quarter?

  Dad: I don’t know, can you?

  Me: I don’t understand.

  The lesson, as you know, is may I, a lesson I never, ever, demonstrate having learned unless I’m speaking with a British accent.

  But what I have learned is the worry one might have about one’s child, perhaps most especially one’s black or brown child, speaking “improper” English, wearing “improper” colors, having “improper” etiquette, or displaying “improper” tastes, which, in the case of my dad and me, really meant behaving in the style or manner of black people, the idea of black people, which really meant one’s black or brown child being perceived as the idea of black people, the prospect of which, for my father, though I never heard him say it plainly, must have been a terror. (Let me pause here to recommend Margo Jefferson’s brilliant book Negroland.)

  Which explains my father ejecting my NWA 100 Miles and Runnin’ tape from the boombox and dropping it in the trash, a performative gesture really, meaning something between you aren’t running from anything and you’re going to be running from my foot up your ass, but one that imprinted on me as I was keeping it real by digging through my spoogy tissues to retrieve Eazy-E and friends. “You will run less if you know how to say may I,” he actually meant, “and don’t even think about ain’t.” It is not too much to say, and the older I get the more I understand it’s really not too much to say, that he was trying to keep us alive physically and psychically by inuring us to the many registers of hatred, overt and subtle, leveled at black people. He was trying to make our blackness, or the idea of our blackness, invisible, which he must have known was not quite possible.

  My father could be viciously protective, like the time he nearly murdered the posse of teenaged skinheads in our apartment complex who pinned me to the ground and held a cigarette up to my face. Or was about to stomp into oblivion the dog that charged me when we were delivering the Piggy Back Shopper. But my favorite, I think, was when he was with me in Hulmeville municipal court where I was to defend myself against trespassing charges, a citation or something, for I had been sledding in the wrong place and was handcuffed and put into the back of the squad car. And when I lied to the judge, telling him I never saw any trespassing signs along the route to fireman’s hill, the cop asked Can you read? My father answered for me, Yes, he can read in a tone that meant motherfucker.

  This essay might as well be called the tangent, for I mostly thought I would talk about, but will instead end on, this delightful sign in the room where I’m staying, just to the side of the mantel, which somehow feels relevant to the conversation. It reads, like a haiku:

  FIREPLACE

  OUT OF ORDER

  THANK YOU

  (June 5)

  78. Heart to Heart

  I like to think of myself as fairly capable. I know how to plant a tree. I am a good hauler. I can spot edible plants most anywhere I go. Passable hammer skills. Sufficient typist (keyboardist). Not bad dancer. For the most part, I manage to do my job pretty okay. (Interruptive delight: one of our great translators taught at my university for decades and retired a few years before I arrived. His advice to his younger colleague, who was my older colleague, and offered me the story not as advice, was to be such a bumbling clusterfuck [my translation] on his next committee assignment that he would never be invited again. Which is another kind of capable, I suppose.) Not to mention, I have been blessed with a fair amount of athleticism, some of which was bestowed upon me by my ma and pa, and some of which I have cultivated by hacky-sackying and ollieing, et cetera.

  And so it surprised me that when I went to hug my friend Michael (yes, another hugging delight), and his arm position was such that my arm position was not going to work (his left arm was up and right down, whereas my right was up and left down), and I inelegantly shifted my arm position to left up right down, I nearly sprained my ankle going in for the hug like this, so flummoxed, so off-kilter was I.

  The delight is something about the exposure, the alert, of a physical and emotional rigidity, for adjusting hugs should not, I would think, be difficult to me. Especially as I am well practiced at deferring, or demurring, in the hugging department. I try to be a submissive this way, not always, but sometimes, in part probably because of my size, which as you know by now is in the largish ballpark, and I don’t want to be that guy. I can’t stand that guy.

  My first encounter with this particular brand of flummoxment happened with my friend Aaron, who, in addition to inventing the very best jokes, always, always, hugs left cheek to left cheek, as opposed to right to right. Something to do with lining up the hearts, something space age like that. The first time he aggressed me so, I tweaked my neck, for his heart-to-heart is uncompromising. And, long hugging Aaron, I now know if I don’t want to get hurt I better lead with my heart.

  (June 7)

  79. Caution: Bees on Bridge

  Walking over a bridge in downtown Middlebury I noticed a gathering of bees, maybe twenty or thirty, on the waist-high wall to my left. I watched for a minute and noticed they seemed to be crawling around something gooey. I thought at first that was all it was, some kid dropped some of their butterscotch topping while looking down at the water tumbling beneath, and now the bees were slurping it up. But I noticed the bees were also veering off to the side of the bridge, beneath their sisters eating the butterscotch, so I trespassed onto a steel fire escape to the side of the bridge and, sure enough, I found what seemed to be the beginning of a swarm of bees clustered beneath the little eave made by the stone cap on the bridge wall, which seemed an insufficient eave now that the rain was starting to fall. The swarm was about the size of a Nerf football, and growing slowly as the apical version of a pile-on was happening before my eyes, this bee landing on that one’s back, and this one, and this one.

  A few times a bee came my way, one even landing on my hand, but they were mostly otherwise concerned, mainly with the pile-on and the butterscotch above, it seemed to me. I was wondering if a beekeeper would come catch this swarm, and lazily considered figuring out how to get in touch with one, but I was distracted by a city worker wearing a reflective vest walking in my direction with a sign that I noticed, as he got closer, read: CAUTION: BEES ON BRIDGE.

  Good reader, I work with a community orchard in my town, and I have been in conversations about the possibility of putting in a mini-orchard at one of the schools in town. The school corporation has always refused us, primarily for fear of the bees the blooms would attract. Liability is the wor
d. Which, yes, is ridiculous, and is half a step away from thinking RAID is a good way to deal with these beloved and necessary creatures. Half a step. And the teaching of fear makes it less.

  Someone I just met told me she and her husband were rehabbing an old farmhouse and hearing a humming behind the mantel discovered, through a crack in the plaster and lathe, an enormous beehive in the walls, massive comb between the joists like the lungs of a great beast. It was their house, she said. I say they put their asses in the blooms, bring forth the fruit, and vomit honey. What do you do?

  The worker unfolded the sign that said the bees belong here as much as we do, orienting it so pedestrians could read it, and we both walked on by.

  (June 8)

  80. Tomato on Board

  What you don’t know until you carry a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane is that carrying a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane will make people smile at you almost like you’re carrying a baby. A quiet baby. I did not know this until today, carrying my little tomato, about three or four inches high in its four-inch plastic starter pot, which my friend Michael gave to me, smirking about how I was going to get it home. Something about this, at first, felt naughty—not comparing a tomato to a baby, but carrying the tomato onto the plane—and so I slid the thing into my bag while going through security, which made them pull the bag for inspection. When the security guy saw it was a tomato he smiled and said, “I don’t know how to check that. Have a good day.” But I quickly realized that one of its stems (which I almost wrote as “arms”) was broken from the jostling, and it only had four of them, so I decided I better just carry it out in the open. And the shower of love began.

  It was a shower of love I also felt while carrying a bouquet of lilies through the streets of Rome last summer. People, maybe women especially, maybe women my age-ish and older especially, smiling with approval. A woman in a housedress beating out a rug on a balcony shouted Bravo! An older couple holding hands both smiled at me and pulled into each other, knitting their fingers together. My showerers might have been disappointed to know I was not giving the lilies to a sweetheart but to my friends Damiano and Moira, who had translated a few of my poems into Italian and were so kind as to let me stay at their place a few nights while I was passing through. On the way to the vegetarian restaurant Damiano’s ex-wife owns with her partner, we walked by what I’m pretty sure Damiano said was the biggest redbud tree in the world. It stretched for yards, lounging periodically onto the mossy earth, its beautiful black bark glistened by the streetlights. Though translation is an act of love, so my showerers needn’t be disappointed at all.

  Before boarding the final leg of my flight, one of the workers said, “Nice tomato,” which I don’t think was a come on. And the flight attendant asked about the tomato at least five times, not an exaggeration, every time calling it “my tomato”—Where’s my tomato? How’s my tomato? You didn’t lose my tomato, did you? She even directed me to an open seat in the exit row: Why don’t you guys go sit there and stretch out? I gathered my things and set the li’l guy in the window seat so she could look out. When I got my water I poured some into the li’l guy’s soil. When we got bumpy I put my hand on the li’l guy’s container, careful not to snap another arm off. And when we landed, and the pilot put the brakes on hard, my arm reflexively went across the seat, holding the li’l guy in place, the way my dad’s arm would when he had to brake hard in that car without seatbelts to speak of, in one of my very favorite gestures in the encyclopedia of human gestures.

  (June 9)

  81. Purple-Handed

  Which the phrase red-handed, meaning caught in the act, meaning smeared with guilt, out out damned spot, is a bastardization of, given as purple-handed is the result, this time of year, of harvesting mulberries, which Aesop’s ant might do with freezer bags or Tupperware, but, being sometimes a grasshopper, I do with my mouth, for that is one of the ways I adore the world, camped out like this beneath my favorite mulberry on cemetery road, aka Elm Street, aka, as of today, Mulberry Street, the wheel of my bike still spinning, as the pendulous black berries almost drop into my hands, smearing them purple and sweet, guilty as charged.

  (June 11)

  82. Name: Kayte Young; Phone Number: 555-867-5309

  Today I was sitting down to a meeting with my friends Dave and Kayte to discuss the excerpt of Kayte’s graphic novel our little press is going to publish. When Kayte pulled the box from her bag that contains all her beautifully drawn pages, her beautiful cargo, which she’s calling Eleven, I noticed a tag on the interior of her backpack with a space for a name and phone number. There might also have been an “If you find this please return to.” And Kayte had filled it out.

  The last person—the last adult—I knew to fill that space out was Don Belton, whose every journal, it seemed, had his name and phone number, or name and address, along with the admonition “DO NOT READ THIS,” which strikes me as an invitation, if not a command, to read this. Though I had known Don, and so respected his wishes from this, the other side, as we boxed up those hundreds of journals and pictures and correspondences and mementos and took them to what would become his archive at the Lilly Library. There was something literary, and also of another era, in Don’s naming and addressing or naming and phone numbering all of his journals, which makes sense to me, for Don also sometimes seemed to be of another era. One time, when the children in his class were going on about Li’l So-and-so coming to perform for Senior Week or whatever they call it here, Don said, probably with a very straight face, When I was in college, Duke Ellington played. Do you know who that is? Not to mention, Don was an E. M. Forster man.

  But Kayte’s naming and phone numbering her bag, which truly filled my heart with flamingos, or turned my heart into a flamingo, strikes me as a simple act of faith in the common decency, which is often rewarded but is called faith because not always. Like the time when I was delivering papers in the predawn, cutting paths through the dew-wet grass in between the apartments, and I found, on the sidewalk, a wallet with five hundred dollars in it. There was plenty of identifying material in the wallet—not a license or credit card, but other things all with the same name on them. When I found that one of those things was something like a frequent-gamblers card issued by one of the Atlantic City casinos, I decided this was dirty money and I might as well get some. I’m sure I would’ve figured out how that money belonged to me even if I found evidence in the wallet that the owner was a frequent donor to Oxfam or Amnesty International, as I needed that new Steve Caballero mini and about four hundred and twenty dollars’ worth of gummy bears. But he wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, keep that money today. Maybe in part because I can afford my own gummy bears, but even more so, I think, because I now believe in the common decency, and I believe adamantly in faith in the common decency, which grows, it turns out, with belief, which grows, it turns out, with faith, and on and on, as evidenced by Name: Kayte Young; Phone Number: 555-867-5309.

  (June 11)

  83. Still Processing

  Unraveling bindweed from the squash and buckwheat and onions and zinnias, I was listening to a Still Processing podcast about Whitney Houston. The hosts were discussing Whitney’s early career, her royal family (she’s connected to both Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin), and her relationship with Bobby Brown, which some channel decided ought to be a reality television show, and which, from the sounds of it, a lot of people thought made good TV. As I understand it, they were not having an easy time, which, yes, is a euphemism for they were a train wreck, and we do love a train wreck, especially if all the passengers on the train are black.

  I imagine you have to pitch a show like that. I imagine you have to have meetings and secure producers or directors, get a budget, things like that. Many decisions and agreements have to occur, probably many handshakes, some drinks, plenty of golf, trying to figure out how best to exploit, to make a mockery of, a black family, the adults in which have made some of the best pop music of the last t
hirty years. I never saw it, but it’s old hat, the commodification of black suffering. If I had a nickel for every white person who can recite lines from The Wire. I have no illusions, by which I mean to tell you it is a fact, that one of the objectives of popular culture, popular media, is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering, and suffering from blackness. Is to conflate blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blacknessandsuffering.

  Which is clever as hell if your goal is obscuring the efforts, the systems, historical and ongoing, to ruin black people. Clever as hell if your goal is to make appear natural what is, in fact, by design.

  And the delight? You have been reading a book of delights written by a black person. A book of black delight.

  Daily as air.

  (June 12)

  84. Fireflies

  Just beyond the pear tree already wealthy with sun-blushed fruitlets is an alcove of trees, a dense black screen made by the walnuts and maples that is, for these lucky weeks, pierced by the lumen-tummied bugs, one of which landed on my neck earlier today, crawling down my arm to my hand, balancing itself when I brought it closer by throwing open the bifurcated cape its wings make. How common a creature it seems before its cylindrical torso starts glowing, intermittently, at which point it is all of strangeness and beauty in one small body. What’s the opposite of anthropomorphism? That’s what I mean to do.