The Best American Essays 2016 (9 page)

The worst of it, though, is the nasty pathology of presence. The honeymooner wants, above all, to be present. But he wants to be that way so that he
can have been that way
on his honeymoon. The result, in my experience anyway, is the opposite of that intended: each moment slips through his fingers; everything is always already over.

In its own way, the wedding too is lived to be looked back upon. But for the wedding this has an intrinsic nobility. The wedding is an experience that is to be fulfilled through time. Importantly, in the case of a wedding, the self-consciousness that marks the ceremony, the sweaty palms and anxiety and audience and all, is a match for the deliberateness of being married—the work, the will, that is poured into it and makes its inner life, perhaps in the twenty-first century more than ever. In contrast to this, the contemporary “honeymoon” has no place to put self-consciousness. It has plenty of portent, but the portent has no path to development in one’s life. The honeymoon confusedly tries to commemorate something sensual and spontaneous—the honeyed early times of marriage. The idea, vaguely, is not to fulfill its memories but just to relive them, to reminisce. The result is a minor disgrace of the mind.

As we descend the Sleeping Giant we can hear the crowing of Kauai’s feral roosters. Kauai is full of wild chickens. They live in the woods. They are all colors: gray; black-and-white speckled; green; orange with a rust-brown hood; a skinny drab brown one who looks like a mother who has no time to take care of herself, with ten chicks, beaks down, pecking, peeping, taking up a sidewalk. They stand on the posts of chain-link fences. They dart in and out of the fluorescent square of light under an awning. The guidebook had mentioned these. The chickens were brought over by the original Hawaiians in their double-hulled sailing canoes on their 2,500-mile colonial voyage from the South Pacific in the fourth century. (The big mystery with these colonists being where they thought they were going.) With no predators—for example, there are no snakes on the islands—the chickens thrive.

When we get back to our car at the bottom of the climb, a rooster with an electric blue-green body and a gray tail is standing in the crook of a U-shaped tree branch. He goes “cock-a-doodle-doo,” then hops off and struts away into the lush understory. The honeymooner can’t hear it. The end stage of honeymoon sickness is when
A-MA-ZING
—itself the most numb of exclamations—is mouthed by your face.

PAUL CRENSHAW

Names

FROM
Hobart

K
ELLER WAS
K
ILLER
and Weaver was Weiner and Penn was Penis or just a dick. Benavidez was Bean Burrito and Ellenberger was Hamburger and Alarid got called asshole more than his real name. Hoteling was Hot Ding-a-ling. Ramirez was Rape-kit. I was Crankshaft or Cumshot or Cocksucker, depending on who was doing the calling, whether my fellow soldiers or the drill sergeants who stalked the halls of Basic Training scowling behind mirrored shades, their boot steps ricocheting like rifles.

Crawford got called Crotchface. Rhea became Gonorrhea after Talley(whacker) scrawled the gonor in front of Rhea, though with a name like Rhea it was only a matter of time before someone put the gonor in front. Clapp was too easy and so no one even bothered changing his name, only put “the” in front of Clapp, and Syphers couldn’t escape syphilis any more than any of us could escape Fort Sill where we found ourselves in the summer of 1990. Sackett was Sackbreath and Swallows got asked what he swallowed more times than I care to count, though we all laughed every time, exhausted as we were from long hours and little sleep and hard training, our eyes red and bones tired and some fear lingering deep inside that made us think such jokes were funny.

Nguyen we just called Gook. Ten Bears became Ten Bears Fucking. Black we called White and White we called Black and Green we called Baby-shit and Brown was just Shit. Bevilacqua was Aqua Velva, which was getting off pretty light as far as names went so sometimes we called him Bologna or Ballsack.

Leaks had a leaky dick, and Lebowitz was a lesbian, to which he would proclaim loudly that he was indeed a lesbian, trapped in a man’s body, another lame joke that we all laughed at because there was nothing else to do, no other way to get through the long days than to laugh and name each other dicks and diseases and dysfunctions. At eighteen we were barely grown boys wielding weapons of war while bombs went off in our little part of the world and the ground shook beneath us. Our drill sergeants were constantly calling us cocks and cunts, threatening us with physical violence. We were scared all the time—of our drill sergeants, of the base where we had been sent to train, of the future—and to keep the fear from flying out we flung bravado at one another in our choice of words. We were all dysfunctional, we thought, for we were told so by the drill sergeants all the time, from the first long days when we arrived at Fort Sill and cried sometimes in this harsh new place, through the hot afternoons of drill and ceremony, marching in big round wheels under the summer sun, all the called commands a way to discipline us, make us move as one unit instead of fifty different men, like the naming was to break us down so we could pull closer together; through Basic Rifle Marksmanship and the hand grenade course and the bayonet course where we stabbed dummies of Russian soldiers; through med-training where we learned to treat sucking chest wounds and splint broken limbs and administer antidotes for anthrax and sarin and mustard gas; through morning eight-mile runs and evening mail call and even through the too-short nights. We could shoot and fire and knock out hundreds of push-ups but were constantly derided, a strategy meant to demean us but also demand that we rise above such degradation.

I’ll say we did. That a man can get used to being called dickhead or dumbfuck or some other designation, to be named by his nationality or upbringing, some physical attribute like Aaronson’s Dicknose or Biobaku’s almost blue skin. Twenty-five years later I laugh at being called Crankshaft and Cumshot. Benavidez’s big belly did seem to hold a lot of burritos, and when we graduated and were waiting to be released for the last time, some of us to go to college and some of us to war, we shook hands hard. I’ll miss you, Motherfucker, we said, and other words that only made sense in light of living with fifty men for months at a time, hearing farts and of football and girls they’d fucked, all the things men say to make themselves sound stronger.

Perhaps we were scared of letting one another know how we felt so we hid everything behind a screen. Perhaps all our words are only screens for what we might say if we were better people or perhaps we only use words that fit what world we find ourselves in. Our voices were hoarse from yelling all the time, making us sound much older than we were, and we had to shave every morning now, look at ourselves in the mirror and see the men we might become.

In our final days of training, as we wound down toward release and finally began to relax a little, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and we were all called together so the drill sergeants could tell us we were going to war. We stood there in stunned silence until someone—Talleywhacker, maybe, or Hot Ding-a-ling, said we’d fuck that fucking towel-headed sandnigger right in the fucking asshole is what we would do, and we all cheered with our hoarse voices standing there in our young boots.

But later that night after lights out, as we lay on our bunks in the darkness, we had no words to contain how we felt. The silence stood around us like stones. We could hear bombs off in the distant part of the base, as if the war had already come. The windows rattled softly in their panes. There were no jokes, no called names. Only a hundred quiet conversations, Alarid or Benavidez or Talley whispering across the big bay dorm, “Hey Crenshaw, hey man, are you scared?”

JAQUIRA DÍAZ

Ordinary Girls

FROM
The Kenyon Review

W
E STARTED TALKING
about dying long before the first woman jumped. What our parents would do once we were gone. What Mr. Nuñez, the assistant principal at Nautilus Middle School, would say about us on the morning announcements, how many of our friends would cry right there on the spot. The songs they would dedicate to us on Power 96 so that all of Miami Beach could mourn us—Boyz II Men’s “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” DRS’s “Gangsta Lean.” Who would go to our funerals—boys who’d broken our hearts, boys whose hearts we’d broken.

She was a French woman, the first jumper, that’s what people said. She didn’t live in Southgate Towers—Papi’s high-rise apartment complex, where he also worked as a security guard—but her boyfriend did. According to the boyfriend’s neighbors, they’d been having problems—she drank a lot, he drank a lot, they fought. That night, the neighbors told Papi, she’d been banging on the door for a while, calling the boyfriend’s name when he wouldn’t open. My father was in the security booth outside the lobby when he started getting calls from some of the Southgate residents. They thought they’d heard a crash, something falling from the sky, the air-conditioning unit on the roof maybe. Or maybe someone had flung something heavy off their balcony. Nobody had expected it to be a person, least of all my father.

Our planning started way before the French woman jumped, during a four-month stint living with my mother in Normandy Isle, across the street from Normandy Park. One day after school, Boogie and I were on the swings, rocking back and forth, digging our sneakers into the dirt and kicking off. We talked about how we’d do it, imagined we could make it look like a tragic accident. We’d get hit by a Metro bus while crossing the street, which would be easy since nobody expected a girl to just step in front of a bus in the middle of the afternoon. The park would be alive with people—ballers on the courts, kids on the merry-go-round, boys riding their bikes on the sidewalk, hood rats on the corner waiting for who knows what. We’d smoke one last stolen cigarette, flick the butt before we jumped the fence out of the park. Then we’d take care of it, the business of dying.

Some girls took sleeping pills and then called 911, or slit their wrists the wrong way and waited to be found in the bathtub. But we didn’t want to be like those ordinary girls. We wanted to be throttled, mangled, thrown. We wanted the violence. We wanted something we could never come back from.

Ordinary girls didn’t drive their parents’ cars off the Fifth Street Bridge into Biscayne Bay, or jump off the back of a pickup in the middle of I-95, or set themselves on fire. Ordinary girls didn’t fall from the sky.

We spent most afternoons that way, in the park, smoking my mother’s cigarettes, drinking her beer. Sometimes we paid the neighborhood
tecatos
to get us bottles of strawberry Cisco, or Mad Dog 20/20, or St. Ides Special Brew. Occasionally Kilo, my boyfriend, and his cousin Papo would show up with a bag of Krypto and smoke us out. We’d lie on the bunk beds, listen to DJ Laz’s power mix, and laugh our asses off. Until the effect wore off and we were ourselves again—reckless, and unafraid, and pissed off at our parents for not caring that we spent most of our time on the streets or drunk or high, for being deadbeats and scutterheads. But it wasn’t just our parents. We were pissed off at the whole fucking world—our teachers, the principal, the school security, the DARE cop. All those people, they just didn’t get that there was no way in hell we could care about homework, or getting to school on time—or at all—when our parents were on drugs or getting stabbed, and we were getting arrested or jumped or worse. Only three months before, Mikey, Kilo’s best friend, had been killed in a drive-by shooting.

One Saturday morning, after a long night of drinking and smoking out on the beach, the four of us walked back to Normandy Isle in a haze. It was so early the sky was still gray and the Metro buses had just started running. The sidewalk along Normandy Drive was secluded except for the four of us. For a while we just walked, sand in our sneakers, our mouths dry, my hair frizzy from the beach air, Kilo holding my hand, Papo and Boogie holding hands in front of us, the four of us marching down Normandy Drive, laughing and fucking up all the lyrics to Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di.” It was our thing—pretending we were beach bums, that nothing could touch us, that life would always be like this. Carefree and limitless and full of music. We didn’t yet know that Miami Beach wouldn’t always be ours, that even in a few years when we were all gone, we would still, always, lay claim to it, that we would never truly belong anywhere else.

We had just gotten to Normandy Park when we spotted this kid riding his bike across the street. He was dark-skinned, with hair shaved close to the scalp, wearing a wifebeater and baggy jean shorts. I knew him from the neighborhood. Everybody called him Bambi. He was older than us, out of high school already, but he looked young.

When I glanced at Kilo, his face had changed, turned the color of paper. His lips were pressed together, and I could see the vein in his temple throbbing like it did when he was fighting with his mom, or when he was about to throw down. We all stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, and Kilo let go of my hand, pulled out his pack of Newports, and lit one. He took a long drag, then rubbed at his eye with the back of his hand.

“Y’all know that guy?” Kilo asked.

“That’s Bambi,” I said.

“Doesn’t he look just like Mikey?” Kilo asked, but nobody said a word.

Back in my room, the four of us piled up on the bunk beds. Kilo and I sat side by side on the bottom bunk, our backs against the wall, and Boogie and Papo fell asleep on the top. After a while, Kilo leaned over and laid his head on my lap, the vein in his temple still throbbing. I put my hand on his head, listened to him breathing, and after a while I noticed he had tears in his eyes. I wiped them away with my thumb, but they kept coming. He wrapped his arms around my waist awkwardly like he needed to hold on to something but didn’t know how. This was not the Kilo I knew.