by Jess Row
Would you do me a favor? he asked. Go in the bathroom. I have to take my diabetes shot. There’s a couple of new syringes in the cabinet. Get one out for me, would you? I’m feeling so dizzy I can hardly get up. And then maybe you can make me that soup you were talking about.
The syringes were on the top shelf inside the cabinet, still in their sterile packaging; they were bigger than the ones he usually used, which were no wider than pencils, and their labels, oddly, were printed in Chinese. Did it matter? Maybe adults used larger syringes. What was the other presumption: that he was back to shooting up? I was so angry, so shut out, and wounded, in the way that only nineteen-year-olds home from college can be wounded, that I thought, fuck him if he is. Live and let live.
Where’s the insulin? I called out to him. Doesn’t it come in a little bottle?
I have it here.
Alcohol pad?
Yeah. One of those, too. Man. All of a sudden I’m starving.
All right, I said, all right, dropping the syringe into his waiting hand, I’m going down, I’m on my way.
—
When I came back into the room I smelled something odd—something sweet, a burnt-sugar smell, out of place. And thought that I must have dropped something on the stove by accident. I left the soup with him and hurried down to check, and then came back, and he had taken a few sips of the soup and fallen asleep. He looked good. He looked happy. I say this not to excuse myself, but because it is merely, entirely, true: there was color returning to his cheeks, or at least that was what I saw. I pulled the blanket up around his chin. I didn’t wake him. I watched him for a minute, and then I left. He was only sleeping.
12.
Recording #1 (41:32)
Source: TDK Chrome cassette tape, 90 minutes, condition ++
Labeled side one “Tape 1 PRIVATE DO NOT DESTROY”
Digitized to .flac with ProTools noise reduction
Note: Speaker frequently pauses for intervals of :10 or longer. To preserve consistency, all such intervals are marked in the text with a space break.
I was four years old before I ever met a black person. Can you believe that?
I remember it so clearly—my clearest childhood memory of all. I guess that’s not really surprising. She was sitting at the picnic table on the back patio, where we had meals in the summer. In a caftan, a bright orange-and-red print. She had an Afro. Lots of silver bangles on both arms. I imagine she must have been about thirty. I had no idea where she’d come from. It was the morning; she’d arrived overnight. I came out to ring the dinner bell—it was a big iron triangle, the kind they use on ranches—and I startled her, but then she looked over and saw me and smiled. She had been crying. There were tracks of tears on her cheeks. But when she saw me her mouth split into this enormous grin, the widest mouth, the friendliest mouth, I had ever seen in my life. A slice of the sun. She laughed, and she said, where did you come from? And I just wanted to run to her. Hell, maybe I still am running to her.
You know what the sex-change therapists say? Begin at the moment you knew. But in my case, it’s more complicated than that. Nature versus nurture: I’ve been playing that goddamned chess game my whole life. Out of context, or out of nowhere? Out of them, or out of me? By which I mean, of course, good old Mom and Dad. Or Dad, I should say, since she’s just a shadow, an afterthought. I was born, wasn’t I? Though sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. It seems almost like something to mention in parentheses. Oh, yeah, her.
Sometimes, sometimes I wish I didn’t remember her, but I do. Just barely. She was incredibly pale, with that light, light blond hair, eyebrows, everything, and the one image I have of her is in our kitchen, this enormous kitchen—it was the conservatory of the house before the commune converted it. She’s standing against the windows, her back to the windows, and it’s as if the sunlight is coming through her. I remember I was terrified of that. And fascinated. In any case, there’s my one memory, and then she was off. Untraceable, unidentifiable, or so my father claimed. I have no record of her whatsoever, not even a picture. I used to beg him to tell me whether I had her nose, or her ears, anything, and he would say, sorry, but as far as I can tell, you’re all me. More’s the pity. Well, it was the Seventies, wasn’t it? On a commune, in the Seventies? Nobody was keeping records.
Big Love. That’s what the place was called. It’s near Baltimore, actually. Edgewater. I went back there once, a few years ago, out of curiosity. The owners tore down the old house and built this gigantic Venetian palazzo. Circular driveway, tile mosaics, fountains, the whole thing. And a Maserati out front. But the barn was there: the barn I played in. That’s the only way I recognized it. The barn, and the trees, and these little hills looking out on the Severn.
Toward the end we were the only ones there at all. All I ever knew, in those days, was people leaving and never coming back. That black woman—know who that was? Shirley O’Dell. She was a backup singer for Ike and Tina, and later had a disco hit, “Give Me Someone to Love.” Her boyfriend, her ex-manager, had come out to Big Love and said he was never leaving. She showed up and they left the next day.
All those communes had the same trajectory—some of them just took longer to follow it all the way through. The guru, the big buildup, high times, donations, crowds, then the scandal, the blowup, people start to defect, the guru takes off, or dies, or whatever, then it dwindles down to the diehards, then the land gets sold for tract housing. Soon there’s nothing left but an old farmhouse, or a Home Depot, and a bunch of kids with names like Kali and Starflower Moonbright scattered around the county. But at least—and it’s a huge at least—there was no sex at Big Love. Or, I should say, at least, no sex I ever saw. At some of those places it was open season on the kids. Beneficent may have been downright crazy, but he was no Jim Jones. Should I give you the history, the whole rundown? Silpa wasn’t too interested. And maybe it’s tangential. But still, it’s culturally important. Beneficent Walker, the founder, that was his real name. Ex-Mormon, ex-seminarian, claimed he could speak fifteen languages, started the Church of Universal Holy Kindness. CUHK. He published a book, too, a bestseller: The God of Now. No one remembers it these days, but if you ever meet a boomer ex-hippie, chances are they’ll have it on an old dusty shelf somewhere, next to Ram Dass and the Tao Te Ching. That paid for Big Love, and kept the power and water on for a couple of years, but it wasn’t meant to last—he died the year I was born. Spinal cancer, claimed he could cure it through prayer, then changed his mind and decided God wanted him back. Of course, I never knew any of that until later; all I knew at the time was that there was with Beneficent, which was all happiness and harmony and light, and then there was after Beneficent, which was now. We had a shrine to him behind the house, in a Quonset hut, which was supposed to be temporary, until they raised the money to pay for marble. For a while it was Dad’s job to keep fresh flowers on the altar and keep the universal flame going. Which meant a new Sterno can every six hours on the dot, day or night. He had me doing it instead, toward the end. Popping off the lids with a screwdriver, flicking a rusty Bic lighter. Five years old.
My mother—she was a devotee from the beginning. Sat at Beneficent’s feet, transcribed his talks from reel-to-reel tapes, mimeographed the newsletters. Her name was Katherine; she never told anyone her last name. Straight up refused. It’s not even on my birth certificate: Katherine Doe. Like a nun. A bride of Christ. And here’s the thing: ordinarily that would just mean she was the guru’s secret girlfriend, but Beneficent was celibate, actually celibate; he believed women were serpents, channels of sin. On the other hand, he was a student of religious history. Think of the cults that proscribed sex: the Essenes, the Gnostics, the Shakers. Self-erasing. He understood the value of procreation, but his compromise was to make it impersonal and assigned, and my parents were his experimental model. Dad already knew he was gay. And Katherine never wanted children. To say the least. Dad used to say I was a product of pure faith. A prototype.
And Dad? He was a fair
y. A flaming queen of the first order. I mean, look, I suppose he could have disavowed me outright. He could have given me up for adoption or abandoned me. He did his duty, but that doesn’t mean he was what I would call a family-oriented person. I had to pry the details out of him with a crowbar, and that was just before he died, when he was too weak to resist and I was the one feeding him Ensure through a straw. But the thing about me, the distinguishing feature, you could say, is that I never really cared that much about my genes. Past a certain point. To me it’s the absence that makes the difference. I had the lightest dusting of mothering one could ever imagine. Ostensibly the reason was that after Beneficent’s death she was completely shattered, and she spent my first few years in and out of a catatonic depression. It doesn’t really matter. Somehow I was kept clothed and fed and sane. There were other women around, though I don’t remember them, either. Shortly after she left, we left and moved into Baltimore. Big Love was sold; my father got some of the money. I was never quite certain how that went down. He had already finished his Ph.D. at Hopkins—Russian history. And was kept on as a lecturer for a few years. Then somehow, I don’t know exactly, he moved into being a librarian. And that’s what he was, for life. The Slavic languages librarian. Which is like being the priest of some obscure religion no one actually practices. For some reason you’re kept on. You’re a relic, but a relic with a continually renewed contract. I mean, this was the tail end of the Cold War. Russian studies was going the way of the LP record. Who would be in there looking for volume thirty of Mayakovsky’s collected works? But universities are like that, right? I mean, what is a university, otherwise, than a kind of giant pack-rat collection, betting that all this stuff is one day going to be useful?
So that was his life. It didn’t pay much, but what did that matter? Our house was practically free. It was a dump when we bought it, not much more than a shell. Enrique rebuilt it from the ground up. That was Dad’s boyfriend, his first one. They really made a go of it, too: seven years. These days they might have been married. As it was, he didn’t even live with us—not officially. Dad was afraid the neighbors would object, or at least that’s the excuse he gave. None of the boyfriends ever lived in his bed. They were always bickering about toothbrushes and borrowed underwear. It was all part of his generalized paranoia, and of course that’s why none of them stayed, in the long term.
Paranoia. That was his native condition, his MO, even before he got sick. I’ve never met a person who could read more into less. He’s stopped using my shampoo. That kind of thing. Maybe he’s washing his hair at someone else’s house. At work he had two officemates, Janice and Philip—the three of them must have worked together for fifteen years—and I don’t think they ever stopped fighting. Not one day. He would come home in tears because Janice refused to water his Virginia creeper. That bitch has the blood of my plants on her hands. It was all theater, only sometimes not. And as a child, how could I tell the difference? I thought grown-ups were that way. I looked forward to the day I could use foundation and Pond’s Cold Cream.
This house we had, this house Enrique built for us, for my dad’s specific requirements, had no windows to speak of. It was a row house, of course, but the front window, too, was blocked off; there was this huge built-in bookshelf there instead. You had to have the lights on twenty-four hours a day. I had a window, in my bedroom, the front bedroom, upstairs. But Dad’s were covered with velvet drapes, always closed. I’m not kidding. It was cliché piled on cliché. Richard Simmons on TV? Remember him? For a while I thought we had to be related to him. There was no one else I could imagine. This was in the Eighties, after all. No gay men in wide circulation. No Nathan Lane, no Will and Grace. And apart from boyfriends, Dad had no friends to speak of. No meals on Friday nights, no Thanksgivings, nothing. If you want one fact about my childhood that matters, there it is: I was alone. But it’s too easy to say that. Those words are meaningless, really. There’s no adult language for what it means to be alone as a child. Those first years in Baltimore—it was like I was the only child on earth.
Shabazz. I went to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz Elementary. I was the first white kid to enroll there in eight years, since they’d changed the name from Paul Revere. Too much, isn’t it? But here’s the thing: all those horror stories, those urban-pioneer, reverse-gentrification stories, the white kids getting picked on, beat up, you know the drill, none of that happened to me. I wasn’t a curiosity, I was a nonentity. I was invisible. Even my teachers hardly remembered I was there. I always sat at the back, I paid attention, I did all the worksheets on time, and in between, when the fights happened, when someone threw a chair through a window, or broke another kid’s nose, or whipped out a box cutter, I took cover, mostly. There were always a few of us at the back taking shelter; sometimes we turned the desks over and made ourselves a little foxhole. At lunchtime we hid in the cloakroom or in the bathroom stalls. Those were my friends. The hiders. This was the Eighties; there weren’t police in the schools yet. No metal detectors, no security checking bags at the door. And the school itself was new—new carpets, new paint on the walls, new lockers. But no windows. That was my daily migration, from one cave to another. And you know what? I didn’t hate it, at the time. I had no grounds for comparison; I made a life out of it. Frankly, I was glad to be out of the house. I’d never been to school before I entered the first grade at Shabazz. I’d learned to read—somehow I’d always been able to read. I could add and subtract. But I’d never played with a basketball before. I’d never had a lollipop. Never listened to Michael Jackson. For better or worse, that was my gateway into the world. And then, lo and behold! I had a friend. William Thurgood Marshall Hayes. Willie.
As I said—you have to always bear this in mind—I wasn’t a threat. I wasn’t a symbol of anything, at least not as far as six-year-olds were concerned. In that place, at that time, I was simply odd. Willie kept saying, You’ll grow out of it. That was his theory. Eventually, he said, your hair will fall out and grow back, you’ll get darker, you’ll be just like the rest of us. Small kids anticipate everything adults will ever imagine. Isn’t that what Picasso said, return me to the mental world I had when I was five?
Willie was the best. A little kid, like me, small for his age. Small and wily. His father was a wrestling coach at Dunbar; he had a practice mat in the basement and used to put us through self-defense drills. How to get hit. How to fall. Arm blocks and pressure points. To give us inspiration he let us watch Enter the Dragon and Kung Fu Action Theater. God, we spent hours down there, eating Cheetos and pretending to be Bruce Lee. Willie had two older sisters, much older, teenagers, and they ran an unlicensed hair salon with his mom in the back of the house. His mother was half Cape Verdean, and that was the food they ate. Cachupa. Jagacida. Canja. Canja, especially. It’s a thick chicken soup—thickened with rice, like avgolemono. Almost like a porridge. The world’s best comfort food. Robin learned how to make it. It was either that or keep making pilgrimages to New England. No Verdean restaurants around here. Anyway.
I mean, the point is, it was a family. Not in the nuclear sense; in the original sense. The elastic sense. No matter what time of day, somebody would be home, the TV would be on, and something would be on the stove. No one once questioned my being there. I could go on for hours. I remember that house better than my own. The orange shag rug in the living room. Herbs in pots around the windowsills. There was an enormous Ali–Frazier poster hanging up in the hall, and another one in the dining room—Ali knocking out Sonny Liston. And a couple of Benin masks, the ones with the enormous foreheads and tiny eyes. We used to do our homework at the dining table, and Willie would go up to the masks and pretend they were whispering the answers in his ear.
My father was relieved by this arrangement. To say the least. I would call him from their phone, and say, I’m staying at Willie’s till bedtime, and he would say, good, because there’s nothing in the fridge. His mother—Rashida was her name—she even cut my hair, you believe that? The barber’s chai
r was right there, next to the sink; you tilted your head back for shampooing and then swung right around to the mirror on the opposite wall. I wanted it cut super-close, just like Willie’s, and she did her best. Kind of a Roman style, is how it came out, slicked down with pomade. Wish I had a picture. That was how I wore my hair all those years. Christ, I mean, you have to understand, I must have had dinner there two or three nights a week. How else can I explain it? It wasn’t just that I was happy. It was that I felt human, as if for the first time. Let me refine that statement. I felt part of the human world. And so when Willie told me it was okay, because I would turn black one day, too, I wanted to believe him. Part of me did believe him.
So that’s the story of my happy childhood on Greenmount Ave. An accidentally happy childhood. Until I got shot.
There’s still a trace of a scar. It was a graze, a flesh wound. Walking home from school. Guy opened up on his girlfriend right across the sidewalk, in broad daylight; killed her, her new boyfriend, I guess he was, and Dwayne Pierce. Dwayne was in third grade with me. I got caught with a ricochet. My leg was a bloody mess, but I didn’t feel anything. Passed out and woke up in the hospital. After that a social worker came to visit. I’ve no idea why. Maybe the school thought I was too much of a liability, too easy a target? In any case, I was moved in the middle of the year to Roland Park Elementary. Dad objected, believe me. It meant he had to drive me to school. One school is as good as another, he kept saying. A boy should be able to walk to school.
Should I move on? Should I skip ahead, a little? Somehow this seems like the place to do it. My father had AIDS. He died of AIDS. In secret, of course. The way he did everything. It was Enrique, most likely, that gave it to him. Enrique died from it, too, back in Honduras, after he left us. But it could have been any number of people. After Big Love, when we moved back to the city, we went through a time when there was a new guy around the house every month or so. He bragged, in the end, that he never once used a condom with a man. He may have been delusional.
