by Laura Goode
“Hell, yes.” Marcy offered a fist-pound and we tapped a knuckle quartet. “Rhythm and poetry, motherfuckers.”
“Be somebody, motherfuckers.” Tessie grinned as we crowed at her dropping the F-bomb.
HIP-HOP FOR HETEROS AND HOMOS: OUR MISSION
Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos, or 4H, is a sex-positive hip-hop collective devoted to thoughtful discussion of the intersections between girls, boys, beats, rhymes, and bombs. We are committed to nonviolence and the pursuit of lyrical happiness; all are welcome in our safe space. We celebrate the unexpected coupling, the sampled homage, the queer, subversive, multicolored, and mixed, and our task is to complicate, to investigate, to question everything.
4H holds central the First Amendment: that the public school, as an outreach of the government, may not make a law upholding any one religion over another, or prohibiting the free exercise of any religion; it may not abridge our freedom of speech, or freedom of the press, or the right of the people to assemble peacefully, or to petition the government for a redress of grievances. We believe that truth is found in words spoken out loud, and we accept love and brilliance in all forms in which they are found. We are Catholics, Hindus, Jews, Lutherans, Muslims, all faiths and all colors, and our common religion is the nation of hip-hop, of rhythm and poetry.
By combining our inquiries into hip-hop and sexuality, we aim to create a place for people and ideas that some might consider renegade. Queerness, as we understand it, represents a refusal to conform to roles prescribed to us by others and a belief that we are all equal as interconnected agents of love: each in our own way, whether we love women, men, or both, we are all queer, either because of our own orientation or because of the orientation of someone we love. We reclaim a word that once expressed hatred to express support for and solidarity with our GLBT brothers and sisters. By integrating feminist and sex-positive language into hip-hop, our mission is also to make hip-hop queer in our sense of the word, or to illuminate the queerness that has always been inherent in hip-hop. Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos celebrates sameness in collective otherness.
It’s almost uncanny how much things between Rowie and me have gone back to the way they used to be, a playful camaraderie with subtly resolute boundaries, sisterhood with a perimeter. No more hair-ruffles or biceps-punches, no hugs, only a parting fist-pound here and there. It’s an unspoken doctrine we both observe, as though one stray of a hand could send the whole house of cards crashing down. What sticks in my craw about it is how electric the untouching is, a negative relief as charged as its positive, an acknowledgment by denial that something still courses in the space between us. For now, we just don’t talk about it.
I don’t know if Rowie will ever be with another girl the way she was with me — as much as I’d like to claim sameness with her, I don’t honestly think she’s whole-hog homo. I think the shape of a girl-body in her bed was one that kind of snuck up on her. Maybe things would’ve been different if we’d been in college, that undetermined Other Place where things that haven’t happened yet happen, a place we understand only as a space separated from here, like abroad or the streets. All I want for her is that she finds a way to be who she is, the imp of an MC we’ve seen, alongside the images of model-minority MDs her parents have cast her in.
Maybe growing up is mostly just about learning how to play more parts at once, how to give them each their scenes.
“You can do everything you want,” Pops tells me when I’m brooding. “Just not all at the same time.”
I shift on the ice, starting to feel the cold a little. It’s time to do what I came here in the middle of the night to do. I press PLAY.
The first few seconds are a fraught jumble of background noises: Yusuf fiddling with the controls, the four of us switching on our mikes and blowing into them, the crackle of Yusuf whispering to us that we’re live over the walkie-talkie. He’s left the recording all but uncut, I realize, and as I listen to it, I can hear every charged particle of anticipation, the crude rustles of a room packed with bodies, Nordling droning, Ladies and gentlemen, please find your seats. I hear our last words to one another before we brought the house down and blemished our permanent records all at the same time, and I hear myself barreling onstage.
In the first verse my voice is shaky and a hair too fast, tight-throated. I can hear myself begin to relax and roll with it, and I can hear myself pick up speed and realize I’m having the best time of my life, and I can hear the wallop in all our voices as we land hard on the illest Sister Mischief. I hear myself holding my breath as I wait for Rowie to plunge in, hear the release when she whips out her wicked and throws it down. By the second verse, I am fully my own irrepressible self, powerless to hold any of it in. And MC Ro and me are MC Ro and me like we always were, rhyming, soft and serrated aloft in a common rhythm, her sweet and my skanky all tangled up like skinny legs.
I hear Marcy scratching on her portable turntables and Tess’s raging caterwaul, and it strikes me that I do roll with a cast of talented bastards, that I’m getting ahead of myself again, and that this is the way I’ll always remember them: sixteen and throbbing with a heavy mixed-up beat, authors of their own chaotic destinies, caught in between one thing and all the becoming still left before the next, wild-eyed and wide-mouthed, jamming hard with our joy spilling out all over. Careening across a frozen lake on a prayer that none of us will fall in.
Yusuf’s added a little coda to the EP that I haven’t heard before, some B-roll of the four of us fucking around in the Njakas’ garage-studio when we didn’t know he was recording.
“Yo, do you all remember that time we made Ross Nordling crap his pants?” Marcy’s voice drifts in over the laughter. “That was the sickest.”
“Dude, I done saw it with my own eyes,” a disembodied Rowie says. “Homeboy had to throw away that pair of boxer briefs.”
“Cracka got served!” I crow. “Let’s jam on this for a minute. Marce, count it off.”
“One. Two. Three. Four,” she gutters. She’s live on the beat, hammering on an old drum kit Yusuf scrapped together for her birthday.
“Sister Mischief all up in here,” Rowie starts. “MC Ferocious in the house.”
“I got sick-ass sistership,” I call.
“Lemme get a hit of it,” she responds.
“I got the wickedest mischievists,” I call.
“Yo, lemme get a hit of it.”
“I got a Rooster J.”
“Yeah, lemme get a hit of it.”
“Yo Ro, you got deodorant in that purse?”
“I got it, Fero.”
“Lemme get a hit of it.”
The beat peters out as all four of us scatter in laughter, tossing good-natured insults at one another, loving in name-calling. You dirtbags. SheStorm, where’s my beat? You fools didn’t even let me get to my hook. I got a beat for you right here, slick. Perv. It’s so un-self-conscious, freed from the body, just the casual intimacy of four girls amassed as something greater than any lone one of them. There’s a slow fadeout, our jabs and postures and laughter slowly dying, as if I were a car pulling away from a party still in full swing. It leaves me bitten by something like awe, feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of our becoming.
The cold has hooks now, and the whole span of my dorsal side feels like it might be frozen to Lake Calhoun. The little dipper in the southwestern sky points me home as I count the constellations I know, a fistful of pinpricks in an unbounded galaxy, so many still nameless in the mass of everything I haven’t learned yet. It’s the naming, I think. The naming is the question. I stand up and shake the snow out of my blanket. Cocking my head at the crescent moon, I say a silent prayer that life will always feel like this, all shot through with magic words and glittering samples hovering just out of reach, just the same as now, except — I pull my headphones back over my ears as I dust off the snow and cue up the SM EP again — except I’m listening, really listening this time, and older now.
To Rachel Gaubinger, Meera Menon,
and Victoria Baranetsky, my wickedest mischievous sisters, most beloved friends of my mind, baddest bitches on the block, Brooklyn rollers, whiskey-pourers (or I poured), discourse without borders, who inspired me with genius e-mail chains, no-joke dance parties, etc. Without you, this book would not be a lady, would have no title, no samosas, and no staying up laughing until dawn. Thank you for showing me how to be somebody. Mad, mad, fiercest Thuggette love.
To my boo Patrick Cushing, partner in all journeys, for his love and support throughout the unenviable task of living with me as I was writing this book. My heart, my home.
To my parents, the indomitable Lar and Car, who have always believed in me, or at least suspended their disbelief at my most outlandish dreams. I love you. Thank you.
To the ferocious mind of my editor, Katie Cunningham, who got it from the beginning, and to my agent, Ted Malawer, dear genius, who first talked me into this adventure.
To Justin Hulog, my San Francisco sibling, and to our understanding of the search for sameness.
To my poet cadre — Ethan Hon, Emily Wolahan, Sara Femenella, Stephanie Adams-Santos. To words, and toward them.
To my teachers at Columbia — Timothy Donnelly, Sophie Cabot Black, Leslie Woodard, Eamon Grennan, Julie Crawford, Michael Golston — for their generosity and mentorship.
To Sandy Close and the NAMily for giving me the time, space, and brain food I needed, and for their truth-telling. Love especially to Rupa Dev and Neela Banerjee for being such clever desi babes and to Carolyn Ji Jong Goossen.
To Justin Lopez and the max unit B8 of the San Jose juvenile hall. Stay up.
To my Minnesota homies — Jess Dunne, Mike Fabio, Brother David Highhill, Alison Silvis, Laurel Somerville, and Maureen O’Connor, who is not adopted. To Paul Farris, departed brother, who pointed me home.
To Sara Blachman and her mama, Eve, whom I love no shit. To Lauren Lillie, the original Lizzie Borden.
To Vince Passaro (Virgil) in particular, and 1020 Amsterdam (Inferno) in general, who raised me from a pup.
To Jon Brilliant, for his beautiful portrait of an author as a young authors’ portrait.
To Yvonne Woon, with whom I commiserated hard, and Kate Berthold, who shared her openhearted history with me.
And to all the smart girl word nerds. This one’s for you.
Laura Goode was raised outside Minneapolis and now lives in San Francisco. She received her BA and MFA from Columbia University, and her poems have appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Slope, Cannibal, JERRY, and as a chapbook in Narwhal. Sister Mischief is her first novel.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2011 by Laura Goode
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Excerpt from Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown, copyright © 1973 by Rita Mae Brown. Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Random House.
“Yesterday I told my girls” used with kind permission of Lucie Brock-Broido.
Excerpt from Roseann Lloyd’s “Norwegian Spring, 1962” from War Baby Express. Copyright © 1996 by Roseann Lloyd. Reprinted with permission of Holy Cow Press, www.holycowpress.org.
“MC Lyte Likes Swingin” by Lana Michelle Moorer, copyright © 1988 by Lana Michelle Moorer. Reprinted with permission of First Priority Music.
“Deathless Aphrodite of the Spangled Mind” from If Not, Winter by Anne Carson, copyright © 2002 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, copyright © 1985 by Jeanette Winterson. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
“Party for the fight to write” by Atmosphere, copyright © 2001 by Atmosphere. Reprinted with permission of Rhymesayers Entertainment.
First electronic edition 2011
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2010038706
ISBN 978-0-7636-4640-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7636-5464-1 (electronic)
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