How We Fight for Our Lives

by Saeed Jones

  I took him back to the Question Game. He kept driving; we kept talking. With each volley it became a little more difficult to remember why, just moments ago, I had been furious with Dane. “Nigger” dissolved back into an “err” sound, a memory that could be washed out with enough alcohol, enough sex. I can’t remember any of the slurred questions we slid back and forth across the purring car—only that it was now foreplay without pretense.

  I also can’t remember when I started to unzip Dane’s jeans. He held up his arms so I could reach in without disturbing his already questionable driving. With his dick in my hand, I chuckled. When he started to ask what I thought was so funny, I swallowed his dick to the hilt, replacing his half-uttered question with a surprised moan.

  He pulled over and put the car in Park. We were in a warehouse district on the outskirts of town. Dane reclined his seat. I came up for air and tried to kiss him. Maybe he let me kiss him. That’s a blurry memory too. Just before I went back down, I saw a figure on the other side of the road, several yards away. A man, maybe, all shadows. I shrugged and went back down. I felt electric in the way I always did when I had finally won a guy over. Fevered. Dane let out a moan, his head slowly turning from left to right. The windshield was totally fogged. I came up to kiss Dane again and the man was closer now, a couple of yards away from the driver’s-side door, if that.

  “I don’t want you to panic,” I started, easing back into my seat. “But there’s a guy watching us.”

  Dane went from silent to panicked in half a second. It would’ve been hilarious if it weren’t so clear he was about to try to speed off. With his jeans tangled about his ankles, his seat halfway reclined and the windshield impossible to see out of, he started screaming about “getting caught” and threw the car into Drive. The instant the car’s engine roared back to life was also the instant I noticed an electrical box just ahead of us. A big, metal, unmovable box, perfectly aligned with my side of the car. I didn’t have my seat belt on. I saw what was going to happen just a few clicks before it happened. We were already jutting forward, the car’s tires peeling as they tried to gain traction on the dew-slick grass.

  We crashed into the box head-on, and the force of it sent our untethered bodies flying. Arms waving above my head, mouth open in mid-scream, my body’s two-foot journey from passenger seat to dashboard felt like it took hours. My life didn’t flash before my eyes so much as a stinging, embarrassed awareness that this could very well be the end. My jeans were unzipped; my dick, limp now, was hanging out of my open fly. I reeked of Bacardi 151 on a Tuesday night. This is how whoever found my body would find me; this is how my last moments would be described to my mother.

  My chin slammed into the car’s dashboard, then the force of the collision threw me back into my seat, knocking the air out of my lungs. The taste of iron filled my mouth as Dane put the car in reverse and peeled out again. Wrecked, but apparently still alive, we sped back onto the road. I didn’t think to look behind us to see if the man was still in the parking lot.

  Blood pooled in the space between my gums and lip. I swallowed and it welled up again. The front fender of Dane’s car scraped along the asphalt as Dane raced toward campus, cursing the entire way.

  “I can’t get another DUI, Saeed,” he cried. “I fucking can’t. Fuck. Fuck! My car.”

  I swallowed my blood and kept quiet. The only thing worse than being a disaster is being a disaster with a witness. I pulled my hoodie over my head and tugged the strings as tight as I could without hurting my already throbbing face any more.

  Dane pulled in front of my residence hall and barely let me stumble out before speeding off into the fog. The screech of his broken fender echoed through the trees like the car was begging for forgiveness.

  I stood and listened, as blood pooled back up in my mouth. I realized I liked the taste.

  15DECEMBER 31, 2007

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA

  A joke I used to repeat in those days was: Why be happy when you can be interesting? I knew how to be interesting. There was power in being a spectacle, even a miserable spectacle. The punch and the line. Interesting: sentences like serrated blades, laughter like machine-gun rounds, a drink in one hand, a borrowed cigarette in the other. If you could draw enough glances, any room could orbit around you.

  That New Year’s Eve, I wound up at a party that was exactly like every party I had ever been to. An iPod hooked up to a pair of speakers, an awkward costume theme I tried and failed to adhere to, and an apartment clogged with white people. The only difference was that I was getting wasted in Phoenix, Arizona, instead of Bowling Green, Kentucky. In the few days I’d been there, I’d concluded that Arizona was perhaps the whitest place I had ever visited. It was like stepping onto the surface of a very well-lit moon.

  The party’s theme was “The Future,” which is why more than half of the people in attendance were wearing some combination of synthetic fabric, aluminum foil, and sunglasses. I hadn’t known there would be a theme and the only other shirt I had packed was a blue calico button-down, so I put my dreadlocks into two pigtails and kept telling everyone I was Dorothy. No one found this in any way strange because, of course, this was The Future and all bets are off in the year 2075.

  Over the last few years, at college parties just like this one, I’d been an ice queen; I’d been Plato with a boy dressed as Aristotle in tow; I’d been the hot pink negligee all nuns wear under their robes; I’d been Dorothy from Kansas, fake poppy blossoms woven into my dreadlocks. Maybe a theme like The Future was supposed to get us to wonder, starry-eyed, what the future would be like. But I couldn’t find it in myself.

  Instead, all I could wonder was whether there’d be a future left for any of us. A black man was running to become president of the United States of America, and I was checking the news every morning, anxious, half expecting to read that he’d been assassinated. Lately, I’d been calling home less. I hadn’t even told my mom I was going to be in Phoenix for the holiday. A professor who had known me since I was a freshman confronted me in her office just before the fall semester ended. “What happened to you, Saeed? You used to smile.” I stared at the professor blankly, then remembered that this was the part where I was supposed to cry, so I cried. The last time I fucked the Botanist, I’d left bruises, broken skin; I deleted his number and told him to delete mine, again.

  This was a future I’d have to figure out on my own, but I didn’t want to think about it, at least for one more night. I wanted to dance at a huge, messy party and get black-out drunk. In this particular version of The Future, I was one of three out gay men at the party and the other two were dating each other. But I would find a way. I wanted to spend the night in someone else’s body or let someone borrow mine.

  * * *

  FOR THE FIRST few hours of the party, either I didn’t notice him or the man who would later try to kill me simply hadn’t arrived yet. All night, I was a terrific, bright black mess. I stomped, slinked, sauntered in and out of the kitchen to refill my cup or do shots. I shouted orders about songs that should be added to the party’s playlist. Out on the porch, smoking cigarettes, then passing around a blunt, I stared at an orange tree just out of reach until I finally plucked off a fruit. It seemed miraculous, oranges in the dead of winter. Then I realized the unseen side of the fruit was rotted, ants pouring out of the ruin like ink.

  Looking back, I can see how someone might see me that night and argue that I had it coming—that I had a man like him coming. If that someone was America herself, I can understand how she might rattle off a warning. “That black boy has been too hungry for too long. One of these nights he’s gonna bite off more than he can chew.”

  I will say for myself: America, I did the best I could with what I was given.

  The man—let’s call him Daniel—looked familiar when I saw him from across the room, as if each part of him had been borrowed from some other boy or man I had wanted. Leaning against that wall, dispassionately sipping a beer, he was the kind of quiet I
’ve noticed in certain men and long hungered for: the silence of men who have it all and thus find it all boring, who don’t exert the energy necessary to flirt, persuade, or convince because they know America will come crawling to them on hands and knees. I realize now that what I wanted was not just the bodies of such men, but their power and what they could use that power to do to the rest of us. The brutal exertion of will, destiny made manifest by the unspoken threat their muscled bodies and white skin posed. I hungered for the power of the all-American man, the Marlboro Man and the Marlboro Man’s firstborn son, the high-school quarterback, the company’s future CEO, Ernest Hemingway, John Wayne, Odysseus, Hercules, Achilles, the shield itself, the stone-cut archetype, the goddamned Everyman, the golden boy, the one.

  If I couldn’t actually be the one myself, I thought I could survive by devouring him whole. The more “straight,” the more “masculine,” the more I wanted to see him with his legs spread or up, back arched in an orgasm that didn’t just bring him pleasure but a warning: In spite of the man you say you are, in the Future I live in, men like me are coming to conquer you and we will take no prisoners. This is what I thought it meant to be a man fighting for his life. If America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself.

  * * *

  MIDNIGHT CAME AND no one noticed. A few people out on the porch tried to stir up a pathetic countdown, a couple of minutes late, spurred into action by firecrackers going off at other parties in the vast apartment complex. Standing alone outside by that orange tree as the sky lit up then went dark again, I had no one to kiss. Now, I was just a sad college student at a random house party in the middle of a college town. I should’ve been home with my mother and my dog. She’d be sitting in front of the altar now, candles lit, Kingsley nestled at her feet, praying for a good year and, probably, praying for me. My Solo cup was empty.

  Daniel and a girl from the party went into a bedroom together. A group of us crowded around the closed door, eager for entertainment now that midnight had passed and we were apparently out of booze. I can’t remember how long we stood there, stage-whispering and laughing with our hands over our mouths, before the door opened again and the girl walked out. She was black too. I wonder now what her night must have been like, a black woman partying on the other side of the otherwise all-white room. When she passed me, I felt a chill that, had I been less drunk, probably would’ve brought me back to myself. Just like the gay couple I’d assiduously been avoiding all night, I’m not sure I had said a word to her since I got to the house. I was smart enough to understand that my loneliness tended to drive me away from people like her and the gay couple rather than toward them, but I wasn’t grown-up enough to understand why.

  She made her way through the living room and out to the porch without looking at any of us. Like actors in a camp comedy, we stared in her direction until the porch door closed, then turned our heads back to the bedroom in chorus. Daniel was still in bed, sitting up with his back against the head frame, hands almost politely folded on his lap. All he needed was reading glasses and a novel to complete the look.

  I heard the laughter before I realized I was the source of the laughter. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, talking to Daniel like I was a doctor visiting a longtime patient. This was me being interesting; there was nothing else left to be. He spoke in the most efficient sentences possible, and even then still radiated that intense silence, his voice soft enough to make you want to lean in a little closer. The Greek chorus left us alone.

  My eyes raked his bare chest: the color of his nipples, the goose bumps rising on his skin, the sparse hairs sprouting up in the valley of his pecs, the gradients of his summer tan. This too, for the all-American man, is a kind of offering. Look at the weapon I’ve made of myself. You want to cut yourself on me, don’t you?

  His lips were pressed into the faintest smirk when I looked up. He knew. Satisfied, he slid out of the bed, wearing only his green and yellow plaid boxers. He put his clothes on with his back turned to me so I couldn’t see just how much he knew. I picked up his beer from the nightstand and handed it to him as we walked out together, not a couple but a pair nonetheless. We spent the rest of the party at each other’s side, the silence a magnetic force.

  * * *

  I LEFT THE party without telling anyone where I was going. Daniel invited me to his apartment and led me into what I assumed was his bedroom. I didn’t flinch when he locked the door. When I realized that this was not, in fact, his bedroom, but an empty room with a few boxes in a corner, I shrugged. I wasn’t about to turn back.

  I started taking off my clothes. Daniel undressed, and the smell of sweat and beer flooded my nostrils. I paused to look him over, but he impatiently pulled my pants off for me. Daniel took me into his mouth and then took over completely. If I hadn’t already known the word “straight” was a lie, I knew it then. In my experience, straight men never took the initiative when they had sex with other men. They needed to be seduced or tricked into doing what they had really wanted to do all along; or they needed to believe they had been seduced or tricked into being the kind of straight men who suddenly find other men’s dicks in their mouths. Daniel, apparently, was different.

  He got on top of me and started kissing me, scraping my neck with his teeth. His bites were like sweet little cigarette burns. His urgency was cute, if a bit overwhelming.

  He wanted this—not me, I knew better—he wanted what we were finally doing. He’d probably wanted this for a very long time. It was difficult to breathe with his body bearing down on me but he, in turn, was what I had wanted all night long: a body, a football player’s build, a real man’s body.

  The straightest thing about him was how terrible he was at giving head. I didn’t mind, though. For me, Daniel was the point, not the sex. I saw him. I watched and waited and now I had him.

  Somehow, the blow job got worse. I thought, smiling to myself, Straight guys really are terrible at this. It feels like he’s hitting me. And then, in a flicker of clarity, harsh as a flash bulb, I realized he was hitting me.

  Daniel went from sucking me to punching me so quickly I could still feel my erection pressed against his stomach. His arms came down from above like lightning bolts. Trapped underneath, all I could do was watch the storm.

  In that moment, I shrank into the distance, looking down as two men struggled in a dark room. It wasn’t like he was beating me, exactly. He was beating the desire I had brought out in him, shoving it back down to where it usually hid. There, on the floor under him, when I looked up at Daniel, I didn’t see a gay basher; I saw a man who thought he was fighting for his life.

  Like a driver too drunk to tense up as his car collides with another, I was too drunk to realize I was the one who was supposed to be fighting. Or maybe I knew and still didn’t care. I raised my arms to block his punches, tried to hold his fists in mine. I floated in and out of focus, and then I noticed that Daniel was talking. His voice deep, slurred, and low now.

  “You’re already dead,” he said. “You’re already dead. You’re already dead.” His voice sounded strange, like he was underwater. “I’m so evil. I’m so evil. I’m so evil,” he said. He repeated each phrase without so much as a pause. He looked up at me again, fearful, distraught, pleading. “I’m so evil.” He shook his head left and right, then pulled his fist toward his face as if to wipe away tears. He was crying, I realized. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to pull his body against my own and tell him that I felt broken too, even evil sometimes.

  I almost let go so I could wrap my arms around him, but as I moved he bit my thumb, smiling as his teeth sought to draw blood. I yanked back in pain and he laughed a lost, wild laugh. “I’m so evil. I’m so evil. You’re already dead.” I struggled to grab his fist again before he could land another punch.

  We may have been wrestling in that room for minutes or hours. I couldn’t tell. He would struggle, then tire, his arms going slack for a moment, then striking out ag
ain just when I thought he’d exhausted himself. I kept ahold of his hands, pushing back every time he tried to batter me. I couldn’t let go but I was starting to think about it. Releasing his fists was all I would have to do. I could let my head and body fall back into the room’s dark water and he would swim through me, past me, beyond me.

  His slurred chants rose and hushed, his arms went slack and stirred. Finally they stayed slack. I risked letting go of his hands and looked at him again. He was snoring between my legs, flat on his stomach, boxer shorts hanging around one of his ankles. As I pulled myself out from under him, I looked down and realized that my dick was still hard and that spurts of cum were drying on my stomach.

  Without dressing, I unlocked the room’s door and walked into the kitchen. Kneeling beside him again with a glass of water, I tried to prop Daniel up against my knee so he could drink without choking. The water went in one side of his mouth and spilled out the other onto the floor. I eased him back down and stood up.

  If standing over the unconscious body of a man who, just moments before, had tried to bash my head in is the closest I will ever come to feeling like a god, I can say now that I understand how a god might look down at a mortal man and love him all the more, precisely because of his vulnerability. There was no part of Daniel left to hide from me. I’d seen how much he wanted another man; I’d seen the storm he’d been struggling his entire life to contain; I’d seen how much he feared and raged against himself; I’d seen so much more of myself in him than I ever could’ve expected when I first saw him. I didn’t know real men hurt the way I’d been hurting.

  * * *

  “WHAT DID YOU do for New Year’s Eve?” my mother asked when she called in the morning. My friend had parked his car in front of the departures section at the Phoenix airport. Instead of getting out, I insisted on sitting in the car and talking to my mom. I didn’t want her to hear the planes flying overhead.