I Am Not Sidney Poitier

by Percival Everett

  “Of course, it is your money.”

  “And I can do anything I want with it? I can throw it off a building downtown if I want to?”

  “That sounds foolish, but yes.”

  “Okay, I want fifty thousand dollars,” I said.

  “Do you really? Or are you just saying that?”

  “No, I want it.”

  “I’ll bring it by this afternoon.”

  I felt for some reason defeated, even though this smiling Podgy Patel man was telling me that I was insanely wealthy. “Never mind,” I said. “I guess I don’t want the money.”

  “I knew it.”

  Like most people I am smarter than some, dumber than others, skinnier than most, and fatter than a few, but none was ever more confused than I was. I flew with confusion always parallel to me, and a whole internal chase at my rear. The one matter that was not confusing to me, but seemed to escape all others, was the fact that the only thing that was certain to become obsolete, would necessarily become wearied and worn, was the truth. I knew this in spite of the truth that I had had little truck with the truth in my life. It was not that I considered myself a resident in a den of lies, but rather that my history was shrouded and diced and soaking wet with hysteria and contradiction. Contradictions or no, my trajectory through life, though different from most, was, nonetheless, a trajectory. The move from my bizarre early childhood in Los Angeles to my strange latter childhood in Atlanta was abrupt, yet somehow seemingly seamless, the sudden death of my mother and my induction into the world of a media icon notwithstanding.

  A few years disappeared into wherever time goes and with them my childhood, Claudia, the cook, and my karate instructor. Betty graduated from college and married a Morehouse man from Ohio whom I never met. For a couple of years I received the occasional, uninformative postcard from Akron, usually depicting something called the Soap Box Derby. I lived in my part of the house pretty much alone as the Russian woman who cooked for me spoke no English and the woman who cleaned refused to speak to me. I saw Ted often.

  By the time I was in high school, it was common knowledge, or at least it was no secret, that I lived at Ted Turner’s house. To my teachers my name was odd, but to my classmates I was Sidney or Not Sidney or something other than Sidney. My real name became a mystery to be solved for many. Still, I was beaten often, but now in an attempt to have me give up that bit of prized information, namely my name. There was some upside, as some of the looser girls would offer to kiss me if I told them my name. I would gladly agree to the arrangement. I would receive the kiss and then say, “My name is Not Sidney.” Unfortunately, the looser girls often would and could be more violent and fierce than the boys, and so they would offer up an entrée of whup-ass with sides of hair pulling and scratching.

  A steady diet of humiliation leads to a kind of immunity or desensitization to abasement and discomfiture and so I found myself caring less and less, and the less I cared the less anyone seemed interested in beating me up. Lack of interest or not, the beatings continued, perhaps because they had become a habit or ritual for a few. Sadly, that journey to pointless and profitless immunity often is completed with a degree of permanent injury, usually to the brain and/or nervous system, but I luckily made it through without any perceptible lasting marks—physical, physiological, or neurological. Psychic damage, however, is far more difficult to assess, though I think I was saved from even that by my sense of irony.

  My mother’s insistence on my reading as much as possible made me bored in school. I never imagined that I was terribly bright, but I turned out to be extremely well educated. I made friends with a squat, square-headed, bespectacled white boy named Eddie Eliazar in my American history class. He had an overdeveloped fondness for World War Two–era airplanes and suffered all the ridicule and only a fraction of the beatings I endured. I imagined that his diminutive stature saved him the physical abuse. We shared a crush on and competed for the attention of our history teacher, Miss Hancock, a narrow-shouldered blond woman with pale blue eyes and long legs who was not so much beautiful as perhaps honest looking. Eddie attempted to wow her with plastic models of Messerschmitts, Zeros, and Corsairs while I became obsessed with the concealment of FDR’s disability from the American public, my real interest being the definitions of disability and public. About this interest, Miss Hancock would say, “How fascinating,” a response that I loved then, but would later come to recognize as code for any number of things. There were clearly codes in her employ that fell short of my understanding, but it soon became evident that my emerging resemblance to Sidney Poitier was not lost on her and that an inappropriate and, I must say, welcomed relationship began to surface. The girls of my school were too accustomed to teasing, ignoring, or beating me to observe any maturation or change in my appearance or bearing, but Miss Hancock, unfortunate name and all, did notice and with much zeal, eagerness, and a surprising and confusing amount of enterprise.

  The relationship took flight, not unlike one of Eddie’s Messerschmitts, when after school one day Miss Hancock asked me if I would accompany her home and move some bags of topsoil and manure from the trunk of her car to her garden shed. I should have read her signals, as she told me all this while crossing and uncrossing and recrossing her smooth, miniskirted legs and applying dark red lipstick. But I was naïve, dumb, inexperienced, fifteen and, most importantly, stupid. So, I rode with her in her powder blue Mustang convertible, top and tinted windows up, to her modest house at the edge of Decatur. I got out of the car and walked to the back, waiting for her to open the trunk, which she did and all I saw was a spare tire, a jack, and jar of petroleum jelly. I looked at her, I imagine, rather blankly.

  She responded by saying, “Do you know what fellatio is?”

  I told her I did not, but the subtext was becoming clear. I had heard other guys talking about encounters, desired encounters of this kind, but I felt this was all being wasted on me. I was a sexual imbecile. More than that, I was an innocent, a stowaway. I had come to her country with no visa, passport, and with no destinations in mind. I had come to move topsoil from the trunk of a blue Mustang to some garden shed in the backyard.

  In her house, and I’m not certain how she got me in there, the teacher put her mouth on my penis and sucked on it. My eyes rolled back into my head, and I recalled the long, drawn-out, luxurious days of my youth. I was lying in the backyard, staring up at the forever cloudless blue California sky, except that it was brown. I could hear my mother in her study by the open window, dictating into her recorder her ideas about politics and the culture. I was alone, as I was always alone. No one would play with me, the freak. But somehow I loved the moments in the backyard, my mother’s ranting a kind of white noise from the house and the sounds of boys playing elsewhere a comfort because that meant they had no interest in torturing me. I lay there and identified the birds, my trusty Peterson guide beside me. I was enjoying the memory of a Rufous-sided Towhee when sharp pain brought me back.

  I did have some idea what fellatio was, but I hadn’t known the extent to which teeth were involved. I was contemplating this while sitting in the garden at home. Ted joined me.

  “When I was a boy I always wanted to collect me a jar full of fireflies, but I never did,” Ted said.

  “Have you ever been seduced?” I asked.

  “Once or twice,” he chuckled. “When I was younger. What about you? And why are you sitting like that?”

  “Do you know what fellatio is?”

  “Why, yes, Nu’ott, I do. It’s when one person wraps his or her lips around the penis of another and either sucks it or rubs it with the tongue, sometimes causing ejaculation. It’s also referred to as giving head, a hummer, or a blow job, though blow seems antithetical to the actual action employed. Why do you ask?”

  “Someone did it to me,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “My history teacher.”

  “A woman?”

  “Yes, a woman,” I said.

  “An attractive
woman?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, you know, that doesn’t sound too bad on the face of it, but it seems a little inappropriate.” Ted folded a stick of gum into his mouth. “Gum? It’s Juicy Fruit.” When I shook my head, he looked back at my part of the house. “Do you get lonely living here all by yourself?”

  “Not really.”

  “These are Italian shoes. I’ve often wondered why those Italians should be so good at making shoes. They don’t walk more than other people. When I was a boy I read this story about a man who lost his arm in an accident. Scared me so much I taught myself to tie my shoes with one hand.”

  “But wait. Ted, how do you get to choose which arm you’ll lose in an accident?” I asked.

  Ted stopped working his gum for a second. “That’s a very good question, Nu’ott. I hadn’t thought of that. I guess it had better be my left. So, are you going to turn this teacher in?”

  “Do what?”

  “Report your teacher for making improper advances to you, a minor. Did you like it?” he asked.

  “Not terribly,” I said. “It did feel kind of good before the biting.”

  “It’s up to you, but I say report her. She’s contributing to the delinquency of a minor. And apparently giving defective blow jobs.”

  “I don’t think I’ll tell on her,” I said. “She seems kind of sad.”

  “Everybody is always maligning the granny knot, but I think it’s every bit as good as a square knot. Left over right and right over left. Who the hell cares? What do you think?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know, I miss that Betty.” Ted looked down at the peonies near where we sat. “She was a smart young woman.”

  “She’s in Ohio with some minister dude with dreadlocks. She sends me postcards.”

  “Minister dude? God save us. Are you going back to the history teacher’s house?” Ted asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said.

  “Is that fatherly advice?” I didn’t mean what I said in any snide way, but I could imagine him hearing it like that. But he didn’t.

  “No, this is just advice from a fellow penis owner,” he said. “These things don’t come with a manual. As far as I can see, nothing of any importance comes with a manual.”

  “And so that’s why we have television,” I said.

  Ted looked at me blankly for a second, then said, “I guess so, Nu’ott. I guess that’s right. Everybody should have a headstone. You know what I want written on my headstone when I die? I want it to read, I have nothing more to say.”

  I nodded. “What does my mother’s headstone say?”

  “I don’t know, son. I never actually saw her grave. I learned of her death because she had named me executor of her will. I suppose her stone gives the dates of her birth and death and maybe says something like Loving Mother. I think that’s kind of standard.”

  I didn’t say it to Ted, but I wanted to see my mother’s grave. I wanted also to come up with something fitting for her headstone.

  “I remember your mother’s cookies. Damn, they were good.”

  I thought about the cookies and didn’t remember them being so tasty, however, they were remarkably uniform in size and color.

  “This teacher, does she have full lips? Does she wear makeup? How short are her skirts? Just trying to get a picture of the whole thing.”

  Hormones and a weak spine conspired to put me again at the split-level ranch home of Miss Hancock. I hadn’t during my previous visit been able to take in the décor, but a quick glance around made me appreciate in what a confused state I’d been and to conclude that Miss Hancock was not like most people. Three of the walls of the living room were tiled with patterned mirrors, allowing broken reflections of everything and nothing in particular, and on every surface—the mantel of the fireplace, the coffee table, the top of the television—were little dinner bells, the size of a shot glass and smaller, from the fifty states, from amusement parks, from funeral homes, from hotels and motels and hostels, county and state fairs. I walked around the front two rooms while she went into the kitchen for iced tea.

  “Why all the bells?” I asked.

  She handed me an already sweating glass of tea. “I like bells,” she said. “You can ring any one you like. All, if you want to. I want you to ring my bell.” She laughed at that.

  I sipped the too-sweet tea. I searched for something to say to her, anything. “Which one is your favorite?”

  “That’s easy.” She walked across the room. I watched her legs beneath her short, pleated skirt. She wore knee socks. She picked up a little blue porcelain bell from the top of the television. “This bell is from a motel in Sparta, Mississippi, the Tibbs Inn. In the restaurant they had barbecue, Tibbs Ribs.”

  “Why was that so special?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t really, but the bell is blue. It’s periwinkle. It’s the only periwinkle one I have. Take off your pants.”

  “I don’t know about this, Miss Hancock.” I took a step back. If I had only added a “gee” in front of my statement, I could have been completely the cliché I felt like—Beaver Cleaver getting a hummer.

  “Call me Beatrice when we’re here.”

  Her name caught me off guard and I had a notion to laugh, but I suppressed the deeply buried tickle.

  “I really don’t know about this,” I said.

  “Of course you know, Not Sidney. Didn’t it feel good last time? I was sure you liked it.”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “Okay, take off those pants and we’ll try it again. We do it until we get it right. How does that sound?”

  I backed into a large-wheeled tea cart and set a rack of tiny bells swinging and dinging.

  “See, you’ve upset the bells. The little bells are crying out. Now, stop backing away from me.”

  “I’d better go home,” I said.

  “If you leave, then I will fail you and you’ll never graduate from high school and you’ll never get into college and you’ll waste away on the street until you turn to drugs and die hopeless, helpless, and alone.”

  “All of that from turning down a blow job?”

  “You’d better believe it.”

  “You can’t do that,” I said, not so much worried about the picture she had painted, but offended on principle.

  “Can and will.”

  “I’ll report you,” I told her.

  “Go ahead, report me. Who will they believe? Me, teacher of the year, or you, a kid without a proper name, angry because he couldn’t live out his fantasy with the hot teacher?”

  “It’s ‘whom.’ ”

  “What?”

  “It’s ‘whom will they believe.’ ”

  “Shut up and take off those pants. Be a good boy and I’ll pretend none of this silly stuff ever happened.”

  I unfastened my belt, understanding at that moment how what was happening had nothing to do with sex, only and simply power, watching as she approached me like the predator she was. She reached out and grabbed the waistband of my khakis, pushed them down past my thighs. My penis hung there unimpressive and unimpressed. Beatrice dropped to her knees and took me into her mouth. Hormones got the better of me and I began to swell, at least my penis did, but before I could get completely hard she’d start in with her teeth and my organ would retreat. It went like that for a bit, back and forth, pleasure and pain, arousal and repulsion, erection and deflation. She sucked away like a maniacal vacuum and I stared down at her, hating her for threatening to fail me, while not caring actually if she did fail me, fearing her for her clumsy teeth and my compromised position.

  I had nothing to do but watch and so I leaned into my Fesmer gaze. She seemed turned on by my staring, reading it as intensity, and so she sucked harder. The sight of her working away like that was somewhat comical. What came with her increased excitement was, sadly, more employment of teeth, but I focused and stayed
with it, and my suggestion was mainly the cessation of biting. The gnashing and gnawing did subside, and I believed I had put her under, so to speak, and so I encouraged her rather strongly to give up the idea of failing me in history.

  Without the chewing and chomping, the fellatio became pleasurable in that animal way that any kind of genital manipulation is pleasurable to a teenage boy, in spite of her name being Beatrice, in spite of the audience of dinner bells, in spite of my being a victim.

  The biting stopped, but I was bitten nonetheless. Beatrice Hancock flunked me and I sat there, dumbfounded, feeling more or less exactly like someone who might actually flunk history. I didn’t like the feeling, though I was momentarily fascinated by it. She gave me a look when I glanced up from my report card, as if she’d been aware of my attempt to manipulate her mind. I wondered if sexual arousal or distraction had served to diminish my Fesmeric thrust. Perhaps with my penis already in her head there was no more room for any more of me, including my unspoken and poorly formed mental suggestions. The failing mark was certainly an attack, perhaps even an insult, and still it meant little to me. However, it was now a matter of principle, a matter of fair play, decent behavior, and so I found myself marching down the corridor to the principal’s office.

  The principal was a squat, bell-shaped man named Clapper. Mr. Clapper had been made hard and tough by years of dealing with abuses to his name. He or the custodian or both were ever vigilant in erasing the Clapper-driven graffiti from the walls of the crapper.

  He did not stand when I walked in. He looked at me with his good eye. “Why are you in here, Not Sidney Poitier?” He called everyone by his or her full name to show off his memory.

  “I have a complaint,” I said.

  “You know you’re looking more and more like that Sidney Poitier every day.” He tilted his head as if to get a better view. “Yes, very much like him. Tall and dark like him. Thick red lips like his.”

  “Mr. Clapper.”

  “What kind of complaint?”