I Am Not Sidney Poitier

by Percival Everett

  “What about you, Poitier?” Morris said. “You got any ideas?”

  “Yeah, keep your things on your side of the room.”

  “We should have left all these motherfuckers in the garbage cans where we found them,” Maurice said. “Crazy fucking idea. Recycling, my ass. We don’t even have a truck. You got us driving these cans to the recycling place in two cars. Man, that’s crazy.”

  I opened my book bag and pulled out a bottle of juice I’d started earlier, swallowed the last couple of ounces, and tossed it into the waste bin. Morris walked over and retrieved it, put it on his pile.

  Maurice watched him. “Dude, I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you. I’m getting out of here. I’m going to my room and throw every motherfucking can I got back in the trash.”

  I surveyed the room and realized that my stupid suggestion was compromising the quality of my own living situation. I Fesmerized poor Morris once again and instructed him to end the collecting madness and to drive the cans and bottles to the nearest recycling center.

  And that’s what he did. Nonstop for two days, back and forth in his Corvette. I have to say that I felt a little bad, but only a little. I discovered that I too had a bit of a mean streak—a realization that left me both saddened and relieved.

  It came as most dreams, while I was asleep:

  My mother encouraged me to buy bubble gum at the convenience store and sell it at school. I was in fifth grade. I bought the balls for a penny apiece and sold them for a nickel. My transactions were conducted behind the cafeteria before school, and all went smoothly until a teacher got in line. She took me to the principal, who in turn called my mother. He was quite surprised to find out that my mother was upset only because I had been interrupted during the conducting of my business.

  “Is there a rule against a child selling candy on school grounds?” she asked.

  The principal was dumbfounded. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “It’s disruptive,” he haltingly said.

  “Disruptive of what? Show me the rule in the governance.”

  “I can’t say there is a rule, per se.”

  “Then my son will be allowed to continue his business?”

  “What will I get out of this?” he asked.

  “A percentage,” she said. “How does 5 percent sound?”

  The principal looked at me. “If he can answer a question.”

  “Shoot,” my mother said.

  “Explain supply-side economics,” the principal said.

  My mother laughed.

  I looked at his face and then hers.

  “Tell me, honey,” she said. “And don’t forget to talk about the proper indicators and about inflation.”

  I of course said nothing.

  “Tell him!” my mother shouted.

  “Tell me!” the principal shouted.

  I started to cry.

  “Is that sweater made of wool?” the principal asked. He touched my shoulder and cocked his head oddly to the side.

  “It is,” my mother said.

  “Doesn’t it itch?” he asked.

  “Yes, it does,” my mother said. “But it itches him, not me.”

  “And so that makes it all right?” he said.

  “Yes, it does,” she said.

  I began to itch and then to scratch and that made me itch even more. I scratched until I knew I was bleeding under the sweater.

  “Don’t worry,” my mother said to me. And then she said nothing else, but sat in a chair against the wall.

  The principal opened my wrinkled paper sack of gum balls and began to toss them, underhanded, to my mother, who clapped her hands like a seal and barked. She caught them in her mouth and seemed to swallow them. I shook my head, concerned about my mother swallowing the big purple, red, and yellow balls, but what came out when I opened my mouth was, “My profits!” I stood straight, looked left and right, wondered where those words had come from. I watched my mother swallow another yellow ball. I wanted her to stop, and again I opened my mouth and out came, “My inventory!” I slapped a hand over my mouth.

  “Not Sidney,” the principal said.

  “You must build,” my mother said, as if finishing the principal’s sentence. “Build is what … ”

  “You must do,” the man said.

  “Not Sidney?” my mother said, the voice more my mother’s than it ever had been in life.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Wake up.”

  And so I awoke to find myself sweating and frightened and unsure why. It had not been a terribly scary dream as dreams go, and yet I was terrified. But I had scratched my arm raw in a place.

  Everett was doing push-ups in his office when he called for me to come in. He stopped and faced me while sitting cross-legged on the floor. “I used to be able to do seventy of those.”

  “How many can you do now?”

  “Six.”

  “That’s not very good,” I said.

  “It beats none. Why are you in my office?”

  “May I ask you a question?”

  “You just did, and I might point out that you did so without asking. What does that tell you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re troubled, Mr. Poitier.”

  “No so much troubled as confused.”

  “Then you’re not troubled at all. And if you’re confused, then I’ve done my job and so I don’t have a problem. Yet here we sit, me on the floor with my leg going to sleep and you in a chair.”

  “Is this whole course some kind of object lesson?”

  “That’s good. I’d never considered that. You’re a lot smarter than me. I have no problem with that. Some people are thinner than me, some taller, some uglier, cuter, faster, and many smarter. That’s the way it all shakes out.”

  “I don’t feel very smart,” I said.

  “What does smart feel like? If it feels like an orgasm, then I’m going to start studying right now. Me, I’m only slightly above average. It fits me.”

  “Some of the students think you’re brilliant.”

  “Yeah, well, like I said.”

  “What did you say?”

  “How many push-ups can you do?”

  “I don’t know. Fifty maybe.”

  “Probably more,” he said. “Have you had lunch?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you had better go grab some before they run out of whatever it is you eat. And close my door on your way out.” He said as I was halfway out, “Oh, and one more thing, don’t imagine that you have limitations.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “I’m sure you do, but don’t imagine it. Good day.”

  At the next class meeting, Everett informed us that we would be taking an essay examination that day.

  “You said ‘no tests,’ ” one of the women said.

  “This is an examination,” Everett said.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she said.

  “Well, be that as it may.” He passed around the exam. “There are three questions, and I urge you to divide your time unevenly on them, as they are of equal value. Since one hundred is not divisible by three, there is no way for you to achieve a perfect score. Unless of course we decide that ninety-nine is a perfect score, and I wouldn’t mind that at all.”

  The examination:

  1) Imagine a radical and formidable contextualism that derives from a hypostatization of language and that it anticipates a liquefied language, a language that exists only in its mode of streaming. How is a speaker to avoid the pull into the whirl of this nonoriented stream of language?

  2) Is the I one’s body? Is fantasy the specular image? And what does this have to do with the Borromean knot? In other words, why is there no symptom too big for its britches?

  3) How might it feel to burn with missionary zeal? Don’t be shy in your answer.

  We students looked at each other with varying degrees of confusion, panic, and anger. And like idiots, we set to work. At least they did. I read
the questions over and over and after the numbers 1 and 2 on my paper I wrote, I don’t know. After the number 3 I wrote, Awful, then added, damn it.

  Podgy Patel was tapping my desk with the eraser of his pencil. He looked around the dorm room, then at me sitting on my narrow mattress. He said in his lilting singsong accent, “You know you don’t have to live like this.”

  “I choose to live like this.” I looked at his chinos and red sweater. “Thanks for not wearing a suit.”

  “Casual Friday,” he said.

  “It’s Thursday.”

  “At home it is Friday. Or Wednesday maybe. I cannot remember which way it goes.”

  “What’s up, Podgy?”

  “Your money continues to grow, but it would be growing much faster if you made an investment.”

  “Why should it grow faster?” I asked.

  This agitated him slightly. “Mr. Not Sidney, money should be allowed to grow as fast as it can. This is my business. I am your advisor, and your money wants to grow faster.”

  “I don’t know anything about investing.”

  “Of course you don’t. That is why you have me, Podgy Patel. That is why I am here.”

  “Thank you. So, what do you want me to do? Buy stocks or something like that? I trust you. Just buy whatever.”

  “No stocks. Stocks are no good. Chimp change.”

  “Chump change.”

  “That, too. No, I don’t like stocks. I think you should buy a television network. A cable network.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A television network.”

  “I heard you, but I don’t understand you, or at least I think you’re nuts. You mean like Ted’s network?”

  Podgy nodded. “Yes, like that, but not so big. I have one in mind, and it will not cost you much. It is called N-E-T.”

  “What’s that stand for?”

  “I believe it stands for Negro Entertainment Television. I say so because there are many many black people on all the time.”

  “Why would I be interested in that?” I asked.

  “Are you not black?”

  “I don’t know the first thing about running a business, much less a big business, much much less a television network. I couldn’t run a doughnut shop. Hell, I couldn’t run a lemonade stand.”

  “Ah, doughnuts. Those Krispy Kremes sell themselves.”

  “Then maybe I should buy one of those.”

  “Oh, no. The boom of that franchise has peaked and will soon crumble. Pardon my pun.”

  “N-E-T,” I said.

  “The infrastructure is in place. All you have to do is own it. You simply show up for meetings now and again and listen to how things are going. You can participate however you like.”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  He laughed his high-pitched giggly laugh. “When you have so much money, everything is easy.”

  “You’ll be involved?”

  “I am a financial advisor. Nothing more.”

  I reached over and took the pencil from his hand. “And the new head of my network. Pay yourself what network heads make.” I thought about the whole business. “N-E-T. Net. I like that it spells net.”

  “It is a very nice word.”

  Ted was pleased to hear of my bold move into the media business. I was surprised, however, to learn that not only had he not prompted it, he’d known nothing of Podgy’s advice to me. We were sitting in a Church’s fried-chicken restaurant. We’d entered at his insistent, whining request. His lips, his face, and fingers were shiny with grease.

  “Jane would shit her yoga pants if she saw me eating like this,” he said. “I no doubt will later.”

  “Nice image, thanks.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Why are you eating this stuff?”

  “A media mogul.” He nodded. “You’ll do great.”

  “I won’t be involved in running the thing,” I told him. “I decided to put Podgy in charge.”

  Ted poked at some chicken skin with his finger. “I don’t believe Podgy knows anything about running a company.”

  “He knows more than I do.”

  “I wonder if the skin is good for you. I can’t imagine it is. It tastes good, I know that.”

  “If the network fails, it fails,” I said.

  “That’s the spirit. How are classes?”

  “Fine. Most are boring, predictable, and nondescript. And then there’s Everett. He’s a nut. No one knows what the hell he’s talking about.”

  “Must be a genius,” Ted said.

  “He’s an idiot. He admits to being a phony.”

  “What network is it?” he asked.

  “N-E-T.”

  “The black soul station,” he said. “I actually thought about buying that once. Then I figured I’d be stepping out of my comfort zone. As if that ever stopped me before.”

  “I’m out of mine, I can tell you that.”

  “I wonder how astronauts go to the bathroom? And how much do they eat? Can you get fat in a weightless environment?” He chewed more chicken, then laughed to himself. “Not to sound racist, which, being American I no doubt am, you’d better watch Podgy. Next thing you know you’ll have shows on the air called Punjabi Profiles and Getting Down on the Ganges.”

  “You’re right, that is kind of racist.”

  “Your point being?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind if he did program stuff like that.”

  “I think I left the front door unlocked at the ranch in Montana. People always think of blue as a cool color, but the hottest part of a flame is blue, so blue is actually a hot color.”

  Everyone in the class was confused, even angry. I too. We had been handed back our surprise midterm exams, and to a person we had received failing grades. This was bewildering, especially in light of Everett’s assurance that we would all get As for the semester.

  “You failed the test,” Everett said. “That’s all I can say. That’s all I need to say.”

  “You said we were getting As,” a big guy in the front row said. “This is not an A.”

  “Had you been that astute on the exam, you might be looking at a different grade. However, for your observation, you now have a D. Does that make you happy, Mr. Winston?”

  “Only slightly,” Mr. Winston said.

  “That it makes you happy at all forces me to lower your grade once again.”

  “How do we raise our grades?” I asked.

  “Now, that is the question to ask,” Everett said. “Mr. Poitier has hit the screw on its head. That is the question. How? Pray tell, how?”

  “This is bullshit,” another guy said and seemed to pull together his things to leave. “I’m dropping this motherfucker.”

  Everett smiled at him. “You’re willing to give up an A in an upper-level course because you failed an exam?”

  The student fell back into his seat, looked around at the rest of us, then back at Everett. “I’m just saying I’m confused. Is that it? Is that all you’re trying to do, confuse us?”

  “Not all,” Everett said. “Not all. Class dismissed.”

  “What if we don’t come back?” Maggie Larkin asked.

  “Then you won’t know if I’m here waiting for you, will you?” Everett looked out the window at the sky. “On that rather shrill note, which is very close to a C-sharp, I’ll say again, and with a clarity unheard of in the hallowed halls of academe, class dismissed.”

  “He’s crazy,” Maggie said to me as we stepped out of the building into the autumn air.

  “He’s boring, that’s what he is,” I said. “May I ask if you find me in any way attractive?”

  “You may ask,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  “I do.”

  And so began my first relationship. Maggie Larkin was from Washington DC. Her father was a lawyer, her mother a physician in training only. Her older sister had graduated from Spelman and was in law school at Georgetown. She spoke proudly of her family, and I never mentione
d mine, as there was none. To her questions about my past, I told her I’d come to Atlanta after the death of my mother. She asked me why, and I deflected the question by telling her that I needed to get away from Los Angeles, which was true enough, and lied to her about an uncle with whom I lived until his death. When she asked me where I got my money, I told her that I had worked three jobs to save up for college. I lied stupidly and clumsily, and I am afraid with little gusto as my story was anything but detailed. Though not well thought out, my answers for some reason went unchallenged, though I could sense a raised eyebrow. We kissed and rolled around on the little bed in her private dorm room. I soon was spending most of my time with her. We sat beside each other in Everett’s class, which we continued to attend despite his insanity and lack of coherence, but our being together at least made it more bearable. Everett even noticed us once as we made eyes at each other, and I believed he nodded approvingly. The man unnerved me, but his nonsensical rambling became a sort of entertaining white-noise sound track to everything that I pretended or perhaps hoped would entify, crystallize, or coalesce at some point into something vaguely useful or at least coherent, however shapeless.

  Thanksgiving came around, and Maggie haltingly invited me to DC to meet her parents.

  “Do you think it’s a good idea?” I asked. “I mean, isn’t it a little soon? You seem a little nervous.”

  “You’re nervous,” she said.

  “I’m scared to death. Aren’t you a tiny bit nervous?”

  She nodded. “My family is slightly class conscious,” she said. “A lot class conscious. Hell, they’re snobs.”

  “I see.”

  “They expect me to be with someone whom they consider to have a pedigree. It’s not enough for them that he be a doctor or a lawyer or a CEO, his parents have to be as well.”

  “I see. I have no parents.”

  “Oh, but Not Sidney, I don’t think like that. Honestly, I don’t know how they’ll be. I just want you to be aware that they might, I emphasize might, try to make you feel uncomfortable.”