It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  I kept putting the jars on the shelf, sliding them back, lining them up.

  “The team needs you.”

  I kept the crate against my chest. I didn’t think of how I’d mastered this, pricing them and then using both hands. I thought of the break in about an hour, and a donut, and two or three hurried games of whist, and Vinny and Ray and Sal and Omar and Felix, and “Who dealt this mess?” I’d listen to their talk, and maybe they’d ask me to tell the story again.

  “I’m working,” I said.

  Roy shrugged, and scuffed the floor with his foot to show me he was disappointed. He looked small from where I stood on my ladder, as I watched him walk away, burdened by his gym bag bumping his leg, down the aisle, past Ray, past Mr. Crotty, out the door to the game. Then I resumed stocking the shelf, and whistling.

  PAUL THEROUX, former grocery store employee in Medford, Massachusetts, of Native American, French, and Italian ancestry, is the author of more than fifty books—novels, short stories, travel books, and essays. His most recent books are Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads and the novel Mother Land. His Figures in a Landscape: People and Places will be published in 2018.

  JUSTIN TORRES

  * * *

  The Way We Read Now

  On the feed it’s the hurricane, great big snaking lines of folks in need—and they want you to write a story? On the feed it’s words in a grown man’s mouth—someone’s president—about let me tell you how much your suffering is affecting my budget. On the feed it’s the familiar and unsurprising but no less dispiriting spectacle of the morally bankrupt lording over the willfully, colonially bankrupted and tossing out paper towels to the masses. Five frowny faces and seventeen angry, but mostly it’s thumbs-up.

  On the feed it’s a clip called RuPaul Explains the Difficulties of Being a Go-Go Dancer in 1988. Vintage VHS footage of Ru tipsy backstage after a gig, wearing a cream bodice and a platinum wig, both candid and performing, pleading and defiant, aware the camera is rolling but looking elsewhere, around the room, for her shoes, her lipstick, before finally giving up the search. Oh well, I don’t have any lips, I kissed them away. She’s looking at herself in the makeup mirror, talking to herself, talking to her reflection, about these men she allows to touch her all over, for the money, but then she finds the camera to land the line, to ask the question Isn’t that terrible? And it’s the tone here that kills, at once searching and mocking and vulnerable, amused and amusing. Is it terrible? What else is there? What am I going to do? I’m in show business. I’ve got to live, right? Ru asks, and a disembodied voice from behind the camera jokes, consoles, maybe commands, You’ve got to live, Ru. You’ve got to let men touch you.

  On the feed a message: Are you okay? Do you know folks there?

  And then you’re looking for that older message, from months ago, to which you’ve yet to respond—but no, it was a post to your wall—a second cousin, a decade younger than you, saying she’s not sure the two of you have ever met, but hey, you’re family, right? And isn’t the world just so small and strange—she saw something you posted and she wanted to find you, and she did, could. But you have met—she was too young to remember, but you remember well, the apartment in Brooklyn, this sweet little toddler, bumping cars around the kitchen floor, her mother’s people from China, her father’s from Puerto Rico, and it’s a fucking stunning combination in this kid, she looks beautiful and like she will look more beautiful still, but already drugs and old wounds and bullshit and sexuality are pulling you away from the family and you don’t suspect you’ll see her again, and maybe for her too there will be drugs and bullshit and beatings and sexuality—or perhaps not—but it’s the unknowing that causes you to ache for her, what the world can and might do, and what’s going to become of all that potential? And then there she is, or this profile pic of her, next to her post on your wall, and all the years apart flatten into the present and you’re looking for the seed of the girl in the woman, and nothing to say, searching and finding ain’t nothing to say, thumbs-up—no, heart. No heart.

  Return to Ru, who is herself returning to her reflection, conversing with herself about a prior conversation she had earlier in the night, again with herself: I said to myself, I said, you know, what do you want? These guys, they look at you, they want to touch you, charge them for it, dammit. And then back out, back to the camera, and again that tone—searching, defensive, defiant—What’s the damn wrong with that, huh? Then Ru’s back whispering to herself, turning away from the camera, about some protective mats they’ve placed on the bar, protective mats that the dancers must use because of recent renovations made by the owners to the surface of the bar itself. They’ve touched it up, Ru says, Made it new.

  On the feed, superimposed, a notification that someone unmet yet friended has donated their birthday to the Red Cross, which reminds you of posts you’ve half read about how the Red Cross is everything from a bureaucratic money-suck to actually doing evil in the world, a think piece referring to another think piece about the Red Cross, and there’s one about the Jones Act, which you’ve always understood to be another colonial tool in the subjugation of the island—but hold on, there’s a think piece about the merits of protectionism—and everyone has a point. The lawyers have a point, the doctors have a point, the marchers have a point, the mamas, the daughters, the nobody’s mamas, the nobody’s daughters, the politicians, the peaceniks, but you can’t help laughing at one comment by a dyke friend that says, simply, My pussy ain’t pink, though. And here’s a piece about colorism in Latinx communities, and here’s one on whether Afro-Latinx folks have a right to the n-word, which is really just someone mad at Cardi B. And J. Lo’s throwing some money to the First Lady of Puerto Rico, many thumbs-up and a prayer-hands emoji, and Beyoncé’s doing . . . something . . . you’re scrolling too quickly past the celebrity efforts to investigate, but you do notice that someone has posted a reminder in the comments of the J. Lo post that, yo, the Red Cross is straight-up evil.

  Read about the Puerto Rican diaspora, read again about the Spanish American War, and now the algorithm has you figured, on the feed it’s Rough Riders, Buffalo Soldiers, articles about statehood, independence, somehow there is Lolita Lebrón, elegant, restrained by three cops after shooting up Congress, but mostly it’s images of folks wading through water, a clip of San Juan’s mayor all at once overwhelmed with grief and insisting on resilience. Try to make it real, research where best to send money—send money—fearing any aid, any resources accumulated, will be repaid, with terrible interest, terrible appreciation, over the months and years ahead. Vulture capitalists have vowed to pick the island dry, this is a promise, una PROMESA, but try instead to believe in the potential of a reconstruction.

  You’re supposed to write a story, but on the feed somebody’s president is popping off about nuking millions. On the feed somebody has sold a book, somebody has failed to sell a story, to place a poem, somebody you love has been held by TSA because trans and arrested and released, and this is the first you’re hearing about it. You try to picture them in a faraway city.

  Are you okay? Do you know folks there?

  Trump Furious Tillerson Refused to Deny Calling Him a Moron Trump Rolls Back Obama’s Birth Control Trump Talks of Calm Before the Storm Donald Trump Is a Textbook Racist Trump: Puerto Rico “Quite a sight. We are doing a great job there.”

  Try to make it real. Try to resist making it all into a lyric, into blurred lyricism, look at all the photos, watch all the clips, all the cell phone footage somehow uploaded despite a total blackout on the island, all the articles, the op-eds, try to make it real, real, real, real, real—but on the stream Roberta Flack asks, Compared to what?

  Thirty years ago RuPaul is tipsy backstage, and it is a semiprivate moment, a moment of transition, coming from being a persona, from being a public figure fully available, in all senses of the word, for public consumption, and now retreating to a private space, backstage. 1988, the end of Reagan, the thick of the AIDS crisis, ACT UP, th
e thick of the response. This is all well before RuPaul became a household name—and while it’s impossible not to see the seed of the future media empress Ru in this twenty-something queen, it must have been equally impossible for this young Ru to know with any certainty what the future held. Isn’t that terrible? she asks, and the way she’s asking, it’s as if she’s keeping herself from knowing the answer.

  On the feed someone leaves a sincere comment in reply to a cynical post: It’s easy to live like we know what the future is going to be like; we don’t.

  They’ve touched it up, Ru is saying, Made it new. You’re watching the first half of the clip on a loop, like a broken record, until you realize what’s grabbed you—in less than a minute, the very meaning of “touching up” has been transposed from an act of violation to one of improvement. Ru has performed a kind of linguistic alchemy. Maybe that’s the extent of what’s possible; maybe that’s the goal.

  Cousin, I’ve been watching news of Maria’s aftermath come in for a week now. I’ve been drinking a lot and feeling immobilized, and also thinking of you.

  Cousin, I thought I might tell you about the time we met, when you were very young and you were bumping toy cars around the kitchen floor. No, that’s imprecise; there was only one car, which you ran very deliberately along the linoleum, tracing the pattern.

  Cousin, we did meet once, I was a teenager, and was terrified I’d die from exposure.

  Cousin, you’ve got to live. You’ve got to let men touch you.

  Cousin, I’ve been trying to parse out what the difference is between believing in progress and believing in potential.

  Cousin, you’ve got to make it new.

  A million false starts, but at least you’ve begun; something semiprivate about the desire to be pierced and not numbed by the news of the world, about keeping a cynical kind of knowingness at bay, about finding new ways to use the old words.

  Cousin, I wondered what life was like for you at home, your parents were very handsome and only kids themselves, and I wondered what would become of you.

  Still the wrong tack, but closer. Anyway, you can act, write, start, now, now the response begins.

  But on the feed breaking news, another mass shooting, they say this one shatters the record.

  JUSTIN TORRES’s first novel, We the Animals, a national bestseller, has been translated into fifteen languages and was recently adapted into a feature film. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is Assistant Professor of English at UCLA.

  ALICE WALKER

  * * *

  Don’t Despair

  When I was a child growing up in middle Georgia, I thought all white men were like Donald Trump. They too seemed petulant and spoiled, unhappy with everything they were not the center of, brutal toward the feelings of those beneath them and comfortable causing others to act out of hate. How did we survive this?

  I think of my father, a poor sharecropper with eight children, so desperate for change in a system that left his family in danger of starving that he walked to the polling place, a tiny, white-owned store in the middle of nowhere, to cast the first vote by a black person in the county. Three white men holding shotguns sat watching him, for niggers were not supposed to vote and they were there to enforce this common law. My father voted for Roosevelt and a New Deal he hoped would also apply to black people.

  I come from a line of folks who chose to live or die on their feet. My four-times-great-grandmother was forced to walk chained from a slave ship in Virginia, and carried two small children that probably weren’t hers all the way to middle Georgia. There she was forced to work for strange, pale people who could only have appeared to be demons to her. She was given as a wedding gift to a young married couple when she was advanced in age; what the story of this event was is a mystery to this day. All we know is that she lived to bury all these people and that it is she who is remembered.

  My aunts and uncles learned trades, tailoring, bricklaying, masonry, house building, whatever was allowed for black people, and raised their children in homes of stability and even comfort, while the white world beyond their neighborhoods attempted to squeeze them into corners so tiny that to the majority of citizens of the cities they lived in, they did not even exist.

  How to survive dictatorship. That is what much of the rest of the world has had to learn. Our country has imposed this condition on so many places and peoples around the globe it is naive to imagine we would avoid it. Besides, do Native Americans and African American descendants of enslaved people not realize they have never lived in anything but a dictatorship?

  In this election we did not really have a healthy choice, as is said in a commercial for something I vaguely remember. Or, as a friend puts it: “The choice was between disaster and catastrophe.” If this puzzles you, here is the next step of my counsel: Study. Really attempt to understand the people you are voting for. What are they doing when they’re not smiling at you in anticipation of your vote? Study hard, deeply, before the internet is closed, before books are disappeared. Know your history and the ways it has been kept secret from you. Understand how politicians you vote for understand your history better than you do, which helps them manipulate your generations. It is our ignorance that keeps us hoping somebody we elect will do all the work while we drive off to the mall. Forget this behavior as if it were a dream. It was. In some way, many of us will find, perhaps to our astonishment, that we have not really lived until this moment.

  Our surprise, our shock, our anger—all of it points to how fast asleep we were.

  This is not a lament. It is counsel. It is saying: we can awaken completely. The best sign of which will be how we treat every being who crosses our path. For real change is personal. The change within ourselves expressed in our willingness to hear, and have patience with, the other. Together we move forward. Anger, the pointing of fingers, the wishing that everyone had done exactly as you did, none of that will help relieve our pain. We are here now. In this scary, and to some quite new and never-imagined place. What do we do with our fear?

  Do we turn on others, or toward others? Do we share our awakening, or only our despair?

  The choice is ours.

  • • •

  ALICE WALKER is an internationally celebrated writer, poet, and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books, and volumes of essays and poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award.

  Her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and her books have sold more than fifteen million copies. Along with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Walker, in 2006, was honored as one of the inaugural inductees into the California Hall of Fame.

  Her upcoming nonfiction work, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, will be a book of lasting significance—tracing her development as an artist, human rights activist, and intellectual.

  EDMUND WHITE

  * * *

  Learning American Values

  He had grown up in Rome as a sort of prince, not titled but rich, handsome and charming, with a lively personality, a fast car, beautiful clothes and the best hands in Italy—lean, articulated, muscled, neither too big nor too small and dusted with dark hairs that turned golden at the tips. If deer had hands they would have resembled his, so strong and elegant were they, undeniably but not oppressively male. He lived in a palazzo.

  He was called Bobby Fitzjames and yes, he was American, but that was just a technicality since, as his parents discovered when he turned eighteen, his visiting American godparents revealed he couldn’t speak English. Or not very well, though his accent was perfect—casual, slangy, a bit nasal. It was just that he didn’t know many English words. His mother was rich, the daughter of the president of a major American corporation who’d left her a portfolio bristling with stocks. His father was penniless and an “artist,” though no one could have named his exact art.

  Bobby was the complete Roman who slurred
his words like a greengrocer on the Campo de’ Fiori, who wore his well-tailored dark jackets over his shoulders, who knew you should kiss a lady’s hand only in private and never touch it with your lips. He didn’t hesitate to park his car on the sidewalk, he didn’t know how to swim but he could ride a horse, and he seldom read a book though he could work Proust’s name and Elsa Morante’s convincingly into a conversation with an elder statesman. He drank but had never been drunk, he ate pasta at lunch and at dinner but seldom gained a gram, women were more likely to seduce him than vice versa and he’d played an extra just for fun in an Italian crime thriller.

  Sure, he’d spent the summers of his eighth and ninth years near Blue Hill, Maine, in his mother’s family’s compound, and at that time he was fluent in American boy talk. After all, he’d played with his Murphy cousins day and night (his mother was a Cleveland Murphy). But soon after that his parents had become so Europeanized and his aunt had been accused of murdering her husband; his parents had decided it was “easier” to go to their villa on Stromboli and Bobby, apparently, had soon forgotten his English. He even pronounced his own name with the dark Italian o as in monster not hobby.

  His father was especially shocked about Bobby’s lack of English, was embarrassed by it since he thought it reflected badly on him and showed he’d neglected his son. Bobby’s mother, who was half-Italian (her mother), was the real Italophile and was secretly proud of his language deficiency, since she pretended to grope for words in English and always spoke to him in Italian (though he begged her not to talk around his school friends with her weird accent; he seldom brought anyone home).

  He was enrolled at Brown, full of Eurotrash, true, but at least English was the campus language and the Europeans were more likely to be French or Greek than Italian and they spoke airport English to each other. His father chose Brown because he’d gone there when it was decidedly less chic and all male. Bobby wasn’t a good student but his father got him in by funding an Olympic-sized pool anonymously, permitting the school to sell naming rights to someone else. The father feared naming the pool would embarrass Bobby. Brown, unlike Bobby, wasn’t very well endowed and would admit rich but dim students if their parents were generous.