by Mat Johnson
‘You’re American, aren’t you?’ he said, finally.
‘Yes.’
‘I know who you are and I know why you’re calling.’
‘I’m calling for David Crombie?’
‘You’re calling because you either want a job or I blew your fucking hand off.’
He was doing an American accent, poorly. A ghetto John Wayne. ‘Christopher Jones! The tangelo fellow, finally making his appearance onto the scene. Fantastic, man, fantastic work. Bad picture, though, the one they took of you. Pick your afro even next time. You really must mind that. You looked like one of those troll dolls from the sixties, like. One of those little dolls with the big nose and the eyes bugging out and the hair shooting up in the air, cute bastards. Do you know what I’m talking about?’
Yes, I offered. He kept talking. I could almost see him, somewhere on a couch far away in a room I couldn’t imagine, staring into that magazine at a picture of me. ‘You’re a little bit older, aren’t you? Than most of the other prizewinners in the magazine, you’re a little bit older. Am I right here?’
‘Yes, actually I am bit more mature than my peers. I only began my undergraduate degree three years ago. Previously, my mom was suffering from cancer, so I provided home care assistance for her for a while, for my first six years out of high school. I only began my undergraduate studies three years ago and, as of this August, will have managed to finish a year early by taking courses during the summer and Christmas sessions, as well as an increased credit load during the regular terms. A major in marketing and a minor in photography. So, yes, I am mature, and I think I bring that maturity to the work that I do as well.’
‘Fuck mature, mate, you’re talented. That’s what you are. I didn’t ask you to call because you’re long in the tooth, I called because your work’s brilliant.’
We spoke of oranges.
After that, David called me. Usually about once a week, but never at the same time or on the same weekday. I sent him my portfolio, just some clippings of print ads I’d done for groups on campus and a few black-and-white ads in the local paper for some mom-and-pop stores, but he liked it. Every time the phone rang I thought it was David, and due to the state of my social life, it usually was. I feigned illness and stopped going to class so as not to miss a call, but since I’d never been absent or even late before, nobody questioned my claims. I had a sense that school didn’t matter anymore. Finally, almost exactly one month after the first contact, David called and asked, ‘What’s the Grand Canyon like?’
‘It’s really big, kind of red and orange color, and you can rent donkeys to ride down into it.’
‘You’ve never been there, have you?’
‘No.’
‘How about Mardi Gras? All that music, the dressing up and the beads. It looks brilliant.’ No, it doesn’t look smart, but it does look fun, doesn’t it? Never been further south than D.C., and then just inside the Smithsonian pushing my mom around, right before she passed. ‘Okay then, what about New York? The Big Apple itself. The missus, she’s been a couple times for business recently, but I haven’t been in years. Usually all I have time for is holidays on the Continent; when I do get a chance to visit, it’s down to Jamaica to see my family. I got a job offer in New York once, from Binger-Strauss. How close is that to Philadelphia, then?’ Two hours, no more. ‘So, do you go there a lot?’ I went once, in sixth grade, to the Natural History Museum. I remember the tunnel we drove through. I tried to hold my breath the whole way but couldn’t.
‘Well, when you weren’t in university, what did you do for fun? What did you do to tell yourself you were alive?’
‘I don’t know. Like I said, I took care of my mom. I read books a lot, got a lot of books from the library. I rented movies. Basically stayed inside and avoided all the craziness.’ He was laughing at me now.
‘You mean life.’
‘That life, the Philly life, yeah, basically.’
‘Well, now you’re going to start going places.’
‘Yeah. I’ll be done with school in August.’
‘Right. And then you’re coming here.’ Here?
‘London. You’re coming to work for me now. Urgent’s not much. I broke off from the Patterson Group about nine months past, took some clients with me. But it’s just a beginning. I need a real talent by my side, someone I can build something with.
And I know you’re the one to do it. So, you willing?’
F Philly
Alex was driving, and I didn’t notice she was taking Exit 34 off 176 until we were already snaking too fast along the curves of Lincoln Drive into Germantown.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Dread, realization that escape was not to be so simple, that I was being forced to confront the beast before passing it.
‘Chris, shut up. Your flight isn’t for four hours. Why don’t you just lean your head back against the window and continue drooling like you been doing since Harrisburg,’ Alex said, and kept going. She’d gained a little weight, but she was still that skinny ass, bucktooth, high yellow, crazy thrift-shop-clothes-wearing camera clicker she was when we had gone out years before. My buddy, my confidant, my fellow freak. That’s how we understood each other: in this place we were twins of rejection. Alike except she was crazier than I would ever be, because Alex’s way of negotiating this city’s disregard was to counter with her own blind adoration. Wasting good love on this place.
Kelly Drive: a coiled pathway through a forest where traffic insisted on driving as if the road were straight, a slalom beside a creek within a cave of trees so big, so old that they had been here even before Germantown was a ghetto. Before the blacks, before the Irish, before even the Germans themselves. We drove, under the stone angles of the suicide bridge, into that dip in the road that makes your stomach yo-yo. Together, leaning into curves even before we saw them because our bodies knew this path like that.
‘You need to eat something,’ Alex told me. ‘Get a cheesesteak in you, a hoagie, a couple of Tastykakes, maybe take a goodie bag with you for when you get homesick.’ We turned right, along the exit into Washington Lane, up the hill and under the train bridge and another right at the abandoned gas station on Pulaski, turn left and park in front of the Stop ’n’ Go, turn the key and listen to the car cough a bit before letting go. Finally motionless, for the first time since we left my campus two hours before, Alex stared at me.
‘I’m not eating. They serve food on the plane,’ I told her.
‘Plane food.’
‘That’s right, plain old food. That’s all I need.’ Stop ‘n’ Go on Chelten Avenue. When I was a kid this was the only place that would sell me beer. Forties of Red Bull I could barely pull down.
‘You coming in?’ Alex asked me, but she knew I wasn’t. She just didn’t comprehend why. She didn’t understand that if I put a foot down on the sidewalk it would turn the rubber of my sneakers to concrete as well, fuse me to the ground and force me to live the life I was originally destined. The city wanted to keep me here even though it had no use for me.
‘Fine. You sit there.’
‘Please hurry. I need to check in. It’s an international flight, you know? You’re supposed to check in early for those,’ I reminded her. Al slammed the door on me.
The car stunk like forgotten garbage. She’d parked in the sun, probably on purpose, and it was getting hotter, like Philly could. Outside was home, and I wasn’t going to open the door. Home was too many niggers. Too many guts, too many sweaty brows. Too many hand towels held on shoulders as if it was a symbol of elegance. Too many radios on different stations, each one blaring songs about boning or blasting someone away, every noise fighting to take control of the air. Too many pop-pop gun shots peppering the night, divulging neither location nor story, only the knowledge that eventually it would come for you. Too many damn kids yelling for their moms, yelling at one another, some just crying to themselves as they walked alone down the sidewalk. Why are poor people so fucking loud? Why can’t they all just
shut up and go home? Why are the same guys who were here when I left three years ago still standing in front of Stop ’n’ Go like anti-security guards, drinking septic beer and speaking some language that sounds as if their mouths are half closed? What is the point of home if this is the way it makes you feel?
‘Dukey-head.’ I turned around, and Al, crouching, with her Canon 35mm in hand, clicked at me until I put my face down.
‘Stop with the pictures. You ready?’ I asked. Alex held up a white paper bag.
‘Eats,’ she said.
The ticket David sent me was in my hand. I had to get on a plane, go to London, get out while I had my chance, and Alex was taking pictures.
‘Come on, smile. Pretend you’re selling teeth whitener. I don’t have any shots of you.’
‘You have tons of pictures of me, you have more than I have.’
‘You’ve hardly been back all year. Get out of the car,’ Al said. I looked outside my window at the concrete, the litter glitter of broken bottle glass on cracked beige asphalt. A lump of dog crap harder than life. No step outside for Christopher. Christopher was not stepping outside till he got to the airport. Chris’s quitting this place for good.
‘I don’t want to,’ I said. The malt-liquor boys were looking over at us, taking a rest from lying. I recognized the big one from summer camp. He was looking at me, pointing, saying something while laughing to the degenerate who leaned against the wall next to him. Look, there’s Christopher. They were both laughing now. Wasn’t it funny? I was a joke: I was not a thug, I was not a bailer, I was not a mack, I was not paid. I was not a comedian, even though I inspired great mirth. All I was was clever and creative, and unless you had a ball in your hand or your mouth in front of a microphone, this place had no respect for either one of those things. I hated them because they were violent and ignorant-and arrogant about both of those deficiencies. They hated me because I was not.
‘When you coming back to Philly?’ Alex asked me. So we were going to play our game again. The one where Alex tried to get me to love this place and I tried to get her to hate it. Bring it on.
‘I’m not coming back. I hate this place.’
‘See, that’s wrong. This is the community that helped raise you.’
‘And made me have to sneak home, terrified, every day growing up so as not to get my ass kicked. The community that broke in my mom’s house, taking everything she had that they didn’t, three times. I don’t owe these people nothing. I’m gone.’
‘See, you’ve become a sellout.’
‘Shit, I would love to sell out, but who the hell would buy any of this crap?’
Alex shrugged me off, deciding it was in jest, and took more pictures, her narrow elbows jutting out on both sides as she aimed.
‘Get your camera,’ she told me.
‘I know what this place looks like. I grew up here.’
‘Then what the hell are you so scared of?’ she asked, dismissive and annoyed. Beyond us, invisible, pop-pop-pop went the niggers. Someone was discovering lead. Alex didn’t even notice, didn’t even hear this answer to her question. That sound: that was my fear. I was scared of becoming them or becoming their victim. I was scared they were all life would allow me to be. Alex took the roll of film out of her camera and then made me move my knees as she reached to the glove compartment for a fresh one. She’d put two ice packs in there, but it still looked too hot.
‘Your film’s going to go bad. You should buy a cooler.’
‘Buy me one. So what happened? You just quit taking pictures?’
‘No, I still shoot. Or at least I’ll be art directing some shoots. That’s part of what I do, Alex. That’s part of my job. I have a job now. I have a career. That’s why I have to be at the airport, remember?’ Suddenly exhausted that I wouldn’t reinforce her Philly delusions, Alex got back in the car.
This was my last time seeing this place, so I looked around. Most of the stores I’d grown up with had closed, or changed names, or gotten tackier, just like the people. But those weren’t changes: they were continuations. The laundromat still had video games in the back where grown men dealt drugs while their children shot gigabit punks. The bar across the street from the Superfresh still smelled like a whore’s hangover, door always open in hope that its patrons would get off their stools and go. Across Pulaski, pushing a stolen shopping cart filled with junk, that same crazy man: skin orange and hot like the pulp of a sweet-potato yam, hair rust-red and dusty and shaped like the top of a mushroom cloud, muscled body taut with the steam of madness, his smell walking twelve feet before him. He was staring at me, both hands pushing that wreck my way. I felt sorry that Alex had to stay in this place. ‘You know, after I get settled, you could move out to London, too.’
‘Wouldn’t that be sweet? Maybe, if this photography thing ever starts happening for me, maybe I could swing through for a little visit. That would be so nice.’
‘When your shit drops, you need to just move out by me for good.’
‘Move? Chris, why would I want to move?’ Alex looked over her shoulder for traffic. Outside my window the yam-skinned man was getting close, smelling like he wore shit for clothes. Next to the car, he stopped pushing his cart and kept staring. All that fire-flesh focusing its rage on me, angry because I was getting out, that I wouldn’t be forced to negotiate his existence. Yam-skinned man staring at me angry because I wasn’t letting him climb on my back while I pushed his shopping cart up the road. The yam-skinned man, standing there, eyes wide as if I was the abomination, vibrating like he was going to go Osage on me, end my life because I was smiling back at him, daring to yell out, ‘Niggawhat? I’m gone!’
‘What the hell is wrong with you? All the years he’s been out here, that man’s got enough problems without you applying your own.’ Alex pulled out into the road. Below us, the heat made the asphalt sluggish, soft, and I could feel the Yam-man behind me, still standing there, stinking up his part of the world. Refusing to accept my rejection, willing the tar to slow our wheels and fuse the rubber to the road.
Philly was me, speeding back down 176, looking at the daytime glamour of the crew clubs at Boathouse Row thinking, yeah, they look nice, but they’ve still got to get into that nasty water. It was me sitting in Alex’s car, so damn happy that this was my last victory run.
‘You’re going to miss this,’ Alex said, watching my face as I stared Center City down, passing the violence of South Philadelphia, moving beyond muscle T-shirts and pidgin English, the narrow street parking space fights. Fuck water ice.
‘How long do you really think you’ll be gone?’ Alex asked. She maneuvered her little car amidst the bigger beasts by bobbing her head around like a Rittenhouse Square pigeon as her callused palms tugged at the wheel.
‘This is it.’ Outside, the oil refineries we passed made the air smell like hot dog vendor farts. In the car next to us a white woman with a man’s haircut, sleeveless T-shirt, and GO EAGLES sticker on her passenger side was yelling at a little Barbie doll-chewing girl who ignored her, staring instead at me, at my escape. Sorry, I can’t take you with me. Sorry you’re going to turn into that beast driving.
‘For real, Chris, when do you think? Next year? Two years maybe?’ No more Moonies selling exhaust-fume pretzels on exit ramps for Christopher.
‘This is my terminal. It’s over here.’ Alex moved her wreck of a car to the curb and let it die for a second.
‘So this is it?’ It was me asking, too excited to trust just my eyes.
‘I guess so.’
‘Watch. I’m gonna make you proud.’
‘What the hell are you talking about? I already am proud. You earned this. Be proud of yourself.’
‘I will be,’ I nodded, hopeful.
‘You want me to park, come in with you? I brought extra money, I can cover it. I can’t park here.’
‘Nah, you don’t have to. I’m cool.’
‘You gonna miss me?’
‘Yeah, you I’m going to miss.’
‘F Philly.’
As Alex bent to get something from the back seat of the car, I kissed her on the side of her big butterscotch forehead. Twins: we recognized each other’s wounds, the need for their tending. When Alex turned around she had the white paper bag she’d gotten from Stop ’n’ Go.
‘Don’t forget, I got something for you.’ She pulled it out. I didn’t have to see its slender torpedo shape to know what it was.
‘I told you I wasn’t hungry,’ I lied.
‘A cheesesteak. You can eat it while you wait for the plane.’
‘I don’t want any Philly food.’
‘Then save it for when you get there. I don’t know, put it in the freezer for when you get homesick.’ Yeah, sick and home, but not in that order. Alex placed it in my palm, and it was heavy. Hot, soft and heavy. Weighing down my hand as I hugged her, wanting to carry her with me, praying that she would come to her senses before this city made her its meal.
At my departure gate, as I waited with the other runaways for my plane to arrive, the sandwich sat on my lap like an anchor, thick with greasy Philly nourishment. There would be hot sliced beef inside, melted pale provolone cheese because Alex didn’t like the processed kind. If I unveiled the white wrapping and then the aluminum that held that steak, steam would rise slowly from its salted innards; there would be onions, browned by heat and oil, overflowing from the tan, thick crusted roll that attempted to hold them. When my boarding call finally came I left it on the lobby seat behind me, relieved when they took my ticket and I couldn’t go back for it.
Landing
I saw ‘Chris Jones’ written on a white sheet of cardboard, quick black letters from a thick black pen. The woman who held it was tall and light, made up of a group of curving lines (neck, legs, arms, even hair), staring down at a paperback instead of into the current of arriving faces. When I stopped in front of her, she turned up and started aiming the sign at my face like I might forget who I was.
‘Urgent Agency?’
