“It still hurt.”
“Have you ever forgiven anyone?”
“No.”
THE PICTURES ARE DREAMS,
or I’m dreaming pictures: My Lai floating in a see-through beige leotard; then myself, nothing on, charging across the floor, a tiger taking her like an animal from behind, sinking my teeth into her neck, busting her open,
I
open. We collapse when we’re through. Free. I see Richie Jackson, Jaime, like dreams, bad. Jaime bad. I started to hate him. He wanted to kiss me, I wanted him to stay little forever, a child, and me the . . . the king father like Brother John. Not him screaming like a bitch, “Papi!” Ugh!
I’m on the D train coming out of the tunnel. Aha! The surprise, no matter how many times you see it, of the dark sky and the city lights dancing on the water beneath the bridge, wires me to another surprise: the vision of myself—step step jeté! We’re coming across the floor, one by one, step step leap. I’m strong, like Roman said, I have ballon, but I’ve never had the stretch to be able to open my legs in the air in a split before. But when I turned my head to look in the mirror, I was doing a perfect split in the air! What I had thought was going to take another four or five years had crept up on me while I was stretching and working and practicing. I looked like the people I had been envying. My own beauty shocked, like just now coming out of the tunnel onto the bridge, seeing the lights glowing and sparkling on the water. Yes, Roman, I want to be the black swan. So what am I doing laying up here swollen with drugs, constipated, and pretending I’m asleep dreaming, or was I really asleep dreaming?
I am asleep now, eating bagels at St Ailanthus. Thursdays we have bagels, as many as you want, whole wheat, jalapeño, poppy seed, everything, salt (my favorite), cinnamon raisin, pumpernickel (ugh!), cream cheese with: scallions, or lox (my favorite), or vegetables (ugh!), or walnuts and dates. Orange juice. And cereal with milk for kids who don’t like bagels, I eat both, bagels and the cereal. I’m on another subway car now; Slavery Days is sitting next to me. I’m hungry. She knows I’m hungry, tries to give me her fried ham and grits, but what first looks like jelly in the middle of the grits turns out to be blood pulsing from the hot white center of the grits, covering the plate that I let drop with a SMASH!
I get off at DeKalb, cut across to McDonald’s: fries, fries, fries, four Mickey D baked apple pies, and a quadruple cheeseburger I eat there. I turn to the side and there’s Slavery Days again! She says something, but it’s like when the Mexicans or Russians are lost and they come up to you on the street, their mouths open with a language that surrounds you but doesn’t penetrate your brain. Their words flying around like red arrows from cupid. When I was at P.S.1_, me and my mother made a Valentine’s Day card for everyone in my class, even the kids I didn’t like. Each card had a big red lollipop taped to it. Everybody in first grade loved me. Slavery Days is her young self now, Toosie, dressed up in her orange dress singing old blue songs: “Good Morning Heartache” as I wake up.
I wake up hungry. “I’m hungry,” I said. I repeat, but louder, “I’m hungry.”
“OK, OK.” Dr See. “Someone is going to come within the hour with some food. In the meantime don’t leave this room, OK?
OK?
”
“What if I have to use the bathroom?”
“Go out, turn right, the first door is the WC.”
The WC is a toilet and sink. Fuck, I say to myself. I can make words with my mouth now,
talk.
For a while it seemed like I was a fighter in a ring and in the opposite corner was my tongue, swollen and paralyzed from the waist down. I haven’t shit in a long time. The last thing I ate was two baloney and cheese sandwiches two days ago. If I had anything else, I don’t remember. I sit down on the toilet and stick my finger up my ass and with a groan start to pull hard little balls of shit out one by one till I’m able to pass shit that’s not rocks. I’m still washing my hands when I hear the rattle of a cart that’s probably got food on it.
I get back in bed and lift the tray onto my lap and immediately attack the hot, fluffy mound of scrambled eggs, the bacon strips, and the buttered whole wheat toast. When I finish, a woman in whites and marshmallow shoes comes in with a pot of joe and a cup.
“Coffee?”
I shake my head affirmatively and thank her while she’s pouring and again when she’s through pouring. The smell of fresh coffee is good music. It carries me away. By the time I notice the chalky residue at the bottom of the cup, I’m already drifting away under the fluorescent lights, feeling too good to get mad. I do think
why
? Then I’m dreaming, a mugger running down a dark street, the buildings growing taller and grayer, the street dirtier and dirtier, until I run out of it like a tunnel, onto a sunlit green. Herd, we’re all there. My Lai is hopping around like Rumpelstiltskin, shouting, “I want him dead! I want him dead!”
I’ve killed him and set the house on fire, and she’s still screaming, “I want him dead!” Everyone’s looking at me, not her. Scott comes up with his pointy, surgeried nose and blue breath. “Hey, man, you just sold it to the junkman.” I know it’s true. I look down at my offending hands. Warts and worms are wriggling from them. I shiver at my life, at what love has done to me. I want to choke My Lai, but my hands won’t obey. Everyone backs away from me, even My Lai. “I did this for you!” I shout, enraged. “I did this for
you
!”
Bitch doesn’t care! Chinese whore! “Yellow
bitch
!” She’s laughing at me. My hands are a useless mass of wriggling worms and warts now. I’ll bite her throat out, that’ll shut her up. I lunge for her, yeah. If I can’t strangle her or beat her, I’ll tear her throat out. AHH!!!!!!!!!! I’m so angry. All that shit, pretending she loved me, and she just wanted me to be her slave.
Suddenly we’re on their lawn; it’s like a pretty park, green grass, sky blue with white puffy clouds. All this for one famly? White statuettes on the lawn remind me of the grave markers in cemeteries. This is how people in magazines live, I think. I notice people, a lot of people, like it’s a party or something. They seem to be moving; maybe they’re leaving this party and going to another party, or home. I start moving across the green, but the people are moving away from me faster than I’m moving toward them. When I get to the other side, it’s just Scott, Snake, and Amy and a bunch of Herd groupies standing there. Snake’s taken off all his clothes and is wading into a pond that’s in front of us.
“You’re making it hard for all of us,” Scott says.
“Me?” I shriek. “What about him!” I point at Snake, whose hair has turned into thick, red curls that are smoldering like they’re going to erupt in flames.
“Same difference.” Scott, dry as stale bread.
When I do meet My Lai’s father, the guy looks straight through me. Big fat motherfucker, he’s taller than me, so he’s way over six feet. He smells like dog shit. His gut is hanging over his belt, and he has bags under his eyes that look like balloons filled with water. She wants me to kill this? He’s already dead.
“You know, a word in her defense—”
“Poison Oasis.”
“Poison Oasis?”
“Yeah, it’s one of my favorite paintings by Basquiat. There’s a man, and on one side of the man is a green snake coiling upward. The snake has big, sharp white teeth; the man has a square splash of paint on the side of his penis, setting it off. He’s skeletal, a lot of brown paint. On the other side of him is the carcass of a dead or dying cow, and flies, flies big as birds around the cow—What made me think of it? Well, My Lai’s parents’ mansion in Connecticut and here, this place.”
“You’re quite articulate.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“What did this painter mean to you?”
“He’s great. He did his thing. I wanna do mine. He lived his life out—”
“He’s dead?”
“Yeah.”
“When did he die?”
“I don’t know exactly, a while ago.”
“How old was he when he died?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Twenty-seven? You call that ‘living his life out’?”
“If you a black man, yes. Living long is not our forte.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a young person as cynical as you.”
“Is that why I’m in here?”
“Tell me about this painting. Where did you first see it?”
“I don’t remember, but I got a poster of it on my wall at home.”
“Where is home?”
“I don’t know anymore. There’s a tree with a big line through it. The guy is outlined in white paint like . . . like—”
“Like?”
“Like chalk around a dead body on the sidewalk. My mother grabbed my hand, pulled me away, saying that would never happen downtown. They would never leave a body laying in the street that long downtown. You know, since when do you leave a body, fuss, fuss—she’s fussing. But I’m little, I didn’t really understand it, until I saw a fly buzzing in his open mouth.
That’s
dead. I knew that fly was like torture and, and he would stop it if he could. And he couldn’t. It was my first whiff of death.”
“Yeah?”
“The man’s—”
“The man on the street?”
“No, in the painting. His hands are crossed over his chest like, like my mother’s were.”
“What else?”
“He’s . . . there’s a patch of blue above the cow, but he’s standing in red.”
“Blood?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you thinking now?”
“Really?”
“Yeah, Abdul, really.”
“Right this minute I was wondering if you were gay.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, whenever a man is . . . is nice to me, or sympathetic toward me, you know, it’s never . . . I don’t know,
pure.
The next thing I know, they’ll be trying to crawl on my dick.”
“What about your father?”
“I never had one. I guess that’s what got me about My Lai. She had all that, and . . . I don’t know, her own crib—really cool pad, credit cards, she could
drive.
They had her hooked up! So he stuck his finger in her cunt. Even Scott didn’t have the kind of training she had. She went to,
lived
in, a ballet conservatory, breathing it in for a year, day and night. For a
year.
And—”
“And?”
“And I didn’t have shit. I mean, everybody gets fucked one way or the other. At least she got paid.”
“That’s your philosophy?”
“That’s reality!” I insist.
“That’s reality, period?”
“Period!” I shout.
“OK, OK, I didn’t mean to make you angry, but you know it’s OK to be angry. But if that’s life, yadda-yadda, and everybody’s getting fucked, why are you so upset, if that’s just the way it is?”
“’Cause I’m still getting fucked! When is it gonna be my turn!”
“But you got something out of it, as you say too, with Raymond?”
“Roman, you mean.”
“Yes. He used you sexually, but like your girlfriend’s dad, he provided—”
I interrupt him. “Yeah, provided and
paid.
”
“Come again?”
“Well, he paid me, and he paid too.”
“What do you mean, Abdul?”
“I’d come, and then, you know how after you come you want to piss. Well, he’d be swallowing my load and then try to draw his head back, but I’d hold him there and piss in his mouth and then all over his ass. I’d do shit like that all the time to show . . .”
“To show?”
“I guess to show he wasn’t totally ruling the situation. And I think because I hated him and couldn’t really show it.”
“Then you knew how My Lai felt.”
“I couldn’t understand why she couldn’t just play the game.”
“Well, why couldn’t you have just hung in there and played the game with Roman?”
“I did, but he kept wanting more and more. Plus, I’m a man, I’m not supposed to have to put up with that shit!” I shout.
“You say he kept wanting more and more—you mean sex?”
“No, he wanted to, like, be in love and shit.”
“You couldn’t be in love with another man, is that it?”
“Well, I
wasn’t,
just say that. And I couldn’t be! I couldn’t be in love with that old fake-hair faggot! He could have been my goddamned grandfather! It’s alright because I’m a nigger—”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“What’s that got to do with it?” I mimic his stupid accent. “When was the last time you saw a nigger walking down the street with a white underage? Huh? My Lai said Woody Allen would never have gotten away with his shit if the girl had been white and he had been Asian.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You never heard about Woody Allen marrying his girlfriend’s daughter?”
“Ah, maybe vaguely.”
“Where you been?” I taunt.
“Well, obviously in some place where I haven’t been able to keep up with every tabloid story that comes along.”
“My Lai was obsessed with that shit, adoptees this, adoptees that. She never saw any shit like where I come from, little kids, five or six years old, lined up in front of steel cots in striped pajamas, like they’re in prison or some shit. Little kids who know they’re gonna be wards of some charity until they’re grown and probably have to pay with their little booties every step of the way! Good luck is some foster home where someone sucks a check out of their ass till they’re eighteen, and they age out on the motherfucking streets, homeless!”
“So, pretty hopeless, no escape, just get—”
“Fuck you, I’m tired of your stupid-ass questions, or whatever it is you’re trying to pull. You just say the same shit over and over. I’m tired of talking! I WANT TO GET OUT OF HERE!”
“Abdul, I’m curious about the man in the Bronx, at the motel.”
“So what, you’re curious? I already told you about that. Anyway, that happened a long time ago.”
“I don’t think it happened that long ago.”
“How would you know?”