The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014

by Daniel Handler

  It hadn’t been one of my better moments—Jerry and I had gotten laughs by spitting on each other, and Groucho, it turned out, had a few things to say about that.

  “Young man, you’re a comic?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I nodded. “Yes, I am.”

  “So how do you want to end up? Have you thought about that? Do you want a career you’re proud of? Or do you want to end up a spitting wad like Jerry Lewis?”

  The man was right . . . I could feel the stirrings of an identity crisis. It was coming on like the beginning of an acid trip. Groucho’s comments spoke to me. “Wake up, Richard. Yes, you are an ignorant jerk, pimping your talent like a cheap whore. But you don’t have to stay that way. You have a brain. Use it.”

  The next sentence? “The thing was, I didn’t have to.”

  The thing about Chappelle is that he wanted to use it, and he knew how. There is no doubt that Chappelle’s Show is his finest work, but the block party that he put on and filmed in Bed-Stuy in 2004 is also a revealing production in the sense that we get to see the comedian almost at rest, listening to the music he enjoys with his celebrity friends. I was there, both in the crowd and backstage, and there was a remarkable amount of solidarity, love, and exuberance even in the drizzly September rain. The kind that I can’t forget. Watching a triumphant Lauryn Hill resplendent in cream slacks and a Yankees cap, reunited with her bandmates from the Fugees. Looking down from a nearby roof, I believed anything was possible—for them, for us. Chappelle was the kind of celebrity who wanted to reach out to fans who looked like him, and it was clear that as much as he aspired to universality, he realized that “the bottom line was, white people own everything, and where can a black person go and be himself or say something that’s familiar to him and not have to explain or apologize?” So sometimes it was very nice to have, as the comic himself said, “Five thousand black people chillin’ in the rain,” like a Pan-African Congress right off of Putnam Avenue.

  When I ask Yvonne Seon what she thinks about the n-word and how easily it is used these days in hip-hop culture, she says, “There has always been a tendency to try and rehab a word that has been used as an epithet for you. It’s a way of claiming something that hurt you, hoping that you can say, ‘Now this word won’t hurt me anymore.’ It’s a part of the attempted healing. When James Brown sang, ‘I’m black and I’m proud,’ that is an example of how he tried to rehabilitate that word. Because there was a time when I was growing up when you didn’t call anybody black unless you wanted to get knocked into next week. There was too much shame involved.”

  “Do you think—” I start.

  And she laughs and cuts me off with a question. “Do I think, like, ‘I’m black and I’m proud,’ ‘I’m a nigga and I am proud!’ could exist?” We both laugh at the absurdity, and also the very real possibility, of that song. “Hm,” she says. “I have trouble with the word nigga. I associate that word with lynching, violence, and hate, and I don’t associate the word black with that. But I do associate the word nigga with that history. So it’s not a term that I could ever use easily or encourage the use of. There have been articles written about teaching this history, and we’ve discussed them in my black studies class, but what usually happens is that the class eventually decides that they’re going to be part of the movement against the word nigger. Once they understand what the history is and what the word means, they stop using it and they encourage their friends to stop using it.”

  “It is about choices,” I say, feeling guilty for a lot of reasons before she demurely stops me.

  “Yes, it always is,” she says, “about choices.”

  Just being a Negro doesn’t qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.

  —Dick Gregory

  Tamra Davis, the director of Half Baked, is feeding her children, so she can’t say out loud the last lines of the movie she directed. These are lines she had to fight for, and, along with Brennan and Chappelle, she had to try to convince fifteen studio executives that they deserved to be in the movie. She tries to talk around the lines, but finally she whispers, “I love weed, love it! Probably always will! But not as much as I love pussy!” She giggles. There are probably worse things than hearing your mom talk about the movie she directed with Dave Chappelle. Tamra Davis is nonchalantly cool, despite having the distinction of having directed the early movies of Adam Sandler (Happy Gilmore) and Chris Rock (CB4). She grew up in California and has been around comedy all her life. Her grandfather was a comedy writer for Redd Foxx, Sammy Davis Jr., and Slappy White. She understands comedy instinctually, and knows that the difference between a writer and a comic is the energy and love a comic must bring to the stage, to the audience.

  Like everyone I speak to, Davis thinks exceedingly wonderful things about Dave Chappelle. The man has a hagiography; I hear it from everyone: from Neal Brennan to a former executive of Comedy Central, who tells me, “I have so, so much respect for Dave. He is a great guy.” For all the bridges he has supposedly burned, Dave Chappelle is beloved. Tamra Davis is the most direct. “I just really think his voice is an important voice to be heard. I’ve spent my life working with young people who all of a sudden get launched into an incredible position of celebrity and fame and it’s very, very difficult to handle. And people handle it in different ways. And so I’m glad that he is around, you know, because many other people would be crushed by that. Having to have that inner dialogue in your head, knowing that everybody is talking about you. It’s a very difficult thing to have to navigate.”

  What separated Dave Chappelle not just from Neal Brennan but also his fans is that he was suddenly vaulted into the awkward position of being the world’s most famous interlocutor in a conversation about race—the one conversation no one likes having. Yes, it is hard to look back. But it’s easy to understand why Chappelle was done with being misread, tired of explaining, finished talking. As Brennan, and then everyone else, told me: the man turned down fifty million dollars. You will never get him to speak with you.

  Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear. —Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

  When a chance came to visit Yellow Springs, I had no expectation that Chappelle would be there. But I wanted to see it. In Yellow Springs, I met Yvonne Seon. We had a good time. We discussed my wedding, we discussed Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and she introduced me to her family. It was a lovely day. Idyllic, even. On my way out of town, I felt tired, so I stopped for some coffee at a local coffee shop. As I was paying, I saw a few guys out back in the garden, talking, and then I saw Dave Chappelle, in a weird white tank top that strained to contain his muscles. No longer lean. Well-defended.

  So at a cash register in Yellow Springs I stood and watched as the person I had so badly wanted to talk to walked toward me. But when he said hello, I made a decision that—until my plane ride home—I kicked myself for. Moving on pure instinct, I simply said hello, turned and finished paying my bill, and left.

  Did I mention that the light is beautiful at dusk in Yellow Springs? The people walk the streets, going to the grocery store or looking at the theater listings. There is a café that was once a house on the Underground Railroad that now serves delicious Reuben sandwiches and plays disco music. People say hello in passing, kids with Afros zip by on scooters. It is small-town America, but with hemp stores. I didn’t want to leave, because it seems like an easy place to live. Not without its problems, but a place with a quiet understanding that conversation is the minimum for living in a better world. You know, simple things.

  At a memorial for his father a few years back, standing next to his mother at the podium at Antioch College, Dave Chappelle ended his speech by thanking the community of Yellow Springs. “So,” he said, “thank you to you all for giving my fa
ther a context where he could just exist and be a good dude, because to be a good dude, as many good dudes have shown you before, is just not a comfortable thing to be. It’s a very hard thing to aspire to. And so thanks for honoring him, because sometimes it is a lonely, quiet road when you make a decision to try to transcend your own demons or be good or whatever he was trying to do here.”

  In my car’s rearview mirror, it doesn’t seem strange to me at all that I am watching America’s funniest comic standing in a small town, smoking cigarettes, and shooting the shit with his friends. Like everyone else on the street, one friend is white, the other is black—the only difference being that they are with Dave. But here Dave is just Dave. Totally uninterrupted, unheckled, free to be himself, free to have a family, and land, and time to recover. Time to be complicated, time to be a confessed fan of fame who one day decided that it was important to learn to be himself again. Chappelle took a drag on his cigarette, and laughed, and it was apparent that he was doing what he said he wanted most in life: having fun and being funny. So, for better or for worse, I took this to be my answer.

  REGGIE WATTS

  Cat n Leo

  FROM 15-Second Plays, a chapbook

  British accents.

  CATHERINE

  Hello. I thought that I might find you here.

  LEOPOLD

  Yes, Catherine, it is me. What do you want?

  CATHERINE

  I don’t know I—I just can’t explain it anymore. I mean what with everything happening and all. I just don’t understand.

  LEOPOLD

  Well I’LL give you something to understand!

  CATHERINE

  Oh! Leopold!

  GABRIEL HELLER

  After Work

  FROM Fence

  I WAS WAITING ON THE PLATFORM for the subway to come, zoned out after a long day of work, looking at the tiles on the wall across the tracks, examining their symmetry on either side of the arches, when a woman I knew with a son the same age as my daughter appeared. We said hello to each other and immediately the train came. It wasn’t too crowded. We stood in the middle of the car, holding the silver bars, talking. We talked about work, the subtle, hard-to-navigate politics, the annoying people, and we talked about graphic design, because my neighbor is a graphic designer, and I asked her if she’d seen a film I’d recently seen, a documentary about Helvetica font, which was surprisingly good, and she said she’d seen it, and we talked about the film, and I asked her if she wanted to start her own company, and she said she wasn’t that ambitious, and then she said she used to freelance, but she didn’t like it, though maybe that was because it overlapped with a difficult time in her life seven years ago when her best friend died. We were on the Manhattan Bridge. It was raining. The East River was the color of smoke. She said he was injured in a swimming accident, out at Coney Island. He was participating in the Polar Bear Swim. He’d never done it before, and he dove into the water and hit a little sand dune, she said, and he broke his neck and was paralyzed from the neck down, and he made it clear that he didn’t want to be tubed, he didn’t want to live if he had to breathe through a tube, he was very clear about that, but the doctors wanted to operate on him, and when he came out of surgery he was tubed, and he was all alone, his parents weren’t even there, because his father, who was an anesthesiologist, had just assumed they would keep him under, but they hadn’t, and when he woke up he was all alone, paralyzed from the neck down, and he had a breathing tube in, and it was just awful, she said, it was just very fucked up and awful. By this time we had crossed the bridge and were in the tunnel again, and I asked how old he was, was he in his mid-twenties, I don’t know why I cared about that, and she said no, he was in his thirties, and then she immediately changed the subject. We spent the rest of the ride talking about our children, their typical two-year-old behavior, their sleeping problems, and how she has to lock her son in his room to keep him from getting out of bed and coming into their room, her and her husband’s, and she said that at first her son hated being locked in his room, but now he likes it, he needs to know he’s locked in before he can fall asleep. We said goodbye at Church Avenue. She walked home from there, and I waited on the platform for the local train to take me two more stops, and it took a long time to come, but eventually it did, and in the end I was only a few minutes late to relieve our babysitter. My daughter was very happy to see me. She hugged my leg and said, my dada, my dada, and I picked her up and kissed her. I wrote a check for the babysitter, and my daughter gave it to her, like she always does on Thursdays, and when the babysitter left, we sat on the couch and read a few books, A Sick Day for Amos McGee, Where the Wild Things Are, and then she started running circles on the rug, and I watched her for a little while, running around and around, and when she started playing with her cash register I got up and went to the computer and when the Times site came up, which it always does first thing when I go online, I saw the headline in big bold letters, that Muammar Qaddafi was dead, he had been killed, and I read the article, and I was amazed and horrified. But my daughter wanted my attention. I want to eat something, she said, so I closed my computer and took her in the kitchen and made her an egg, but she didn’t want it. She wanted her bunny crackers and hummus, bunnies and hummy, she said. We sat at the kitchen table together while she ate, and then my wife, her mom, came home, and this caused a big stir, because they were both so happy to see each other, and before I knew it she was running circles on the rug again, and I was looking at pictures of corpses. I told myself I wouldn’t look at the videos, but I couldn’t resist, something inside me that I don’t understand couldn’t resist. I saw this once-powerful man being dragged through the street, and the camera was shaking and jerky, and I saw his dazed eyes and his face covered in blood, and my wife looked up and asked, What are you watching, in a voice that suggested she was annoyed at me, and I said, Did you know Qaddafi was killed? and she said, Oh wow, but then right away asked, Can you run the bath? I said sure I would, so I closed my computer and went in the bathroom and ran the water, but it was yellow, so I sat on the edge of the tub and let the water run for a long time, till the yellow had all gone out of it, and then I let the tub begin to fill, and I went back in the living room, where they were sitting on the floor, and our daughter was showing my wife all the stickers in her sticker book, the stickers she’d gotten for doing things she didn’t like doing, like going in her car seat, brushing her teeth, getting her hair washed, and then I went back into the bathroom to discover the tub was filling with water that was in fact yellow, the clearness had just been an illusion, and I cursed our apartment in my head, turned the water off, and unstopped the drain. I don’t know how to do this water, I called to my wife. It’s always yellow when I do it. And she called back, Don’t turn the hot up too high. You want to do it? I asked, and then I heard her footsteps, and she was in the bathroom, and I went into the living room, and there was our daughter on the rug, but she didn’t want to be with me, she wanted to be with her mom. She started crying and ran in the bathroom. I sat on the rug and thought about my neighbor’s dead friend, and I thought about Qaddafi being dragged through the street, the thoughts that must have been in his head before he was dragged out of the storm drain where they found him, he must have known it was all over, but maybe he didn’t, and I thought about his son, who’d also been killed, there were pictures of him captured, smoking and holding a bottle of water, and then there were pictures of him lying on his back with a hole in his throat, and I asked myself why do I feel sad about Qaddafi? I knew how awful he was. I remember being a kid and asking my dad who the worst leader in the world was, and he told me it was Qaddafi, I must have been eight or nine years old. Qaddafi and Khomeini, he said, but neither one of them was as bad as Papa Doc, my dad said. I knew Qaddafi was insane, and I wanted his army defeated, but his death made me sad, because despite him not being a good man I’d come to feel through reading about him and seeing him on television and internet videos and growing up hearing about h
im that I knew him in a way, and now I had watched someone I knew in the chaotic, violent moments leading up to his death, and it was not a good feeling at all. Out the window, it was totally dark, the days were getting shorter and shorter, soon it would be winter. I heard my daughter splashing in the bath and singing, my daughter, who despite her mood swings and her sleeping troubles, was overall a very happy kid.

  THOMAS PIERCE

  The Real Alan Gass

  FROM Subtropics

  HE’S BEEN LIVING with her for not quite a year when Claire first mentions Alan Gass.

  “I think I need to tell you about something,” she says. “About someone.”

  Walker turns down the stereo above the fridge and readies himself for whatever comes next. They are in the kitchen—formerly her kitchen, now their kitchen. The butter crackles around the edges of the potatoes he is frying in a big cast-iron pan. He flips his dark hair out of his eyes. If she confesses an affair, what will he do? First, switch off the burner. Second, grab his jacket and go without a word. The third step could involve fast walking, tears, and possibly a stop at the ABC store. Beyond that, it’s hard to say.