I stood before the massive wall of neckties hanging at the back of Dad’s walk-in closet at around eleven on a Tuesday morning. I’d spent plenty of time in the closet, rummaging around for porn or money I could swipe, and I had taken to stealing the old clothes he no longer wore, which were too big for me and communicated my disdain for social norms. But today was different. I needed a tie. I actually needed five of them.
I let my fingers linger a moment over the silken feel, appreciating the smoothness for the first time. I didn’t particularly care about the pattern or the cut but tried to pick ties from the margins of the collection, ties I couldn’t remember him wearing. I pulled down a red one with blue paisley patterns swimming across it. Then another red one, this one with white diamonds on it. Two blue ones and a black one.
I draped the ties over my forearm and walked back, otherwise naked, toward my room, my bouncing erection leading the way. Molly was also naked, lying back on my bed. She looked up at me from under her bangs and laughed. I walked toward the bed. She tried to kiss me, but I pulled my face away and took her right hand. I tied that arm to the bedpost, then the other.
Now it was time for the legs. She had just shaved her bush the night before—the first time I had ever seen such a thing in real life—and it was intoxicating to be able to clearly see that which had, for so long, been a mystery. As I took hold of the other leg, I could see the folds pull apart, and I thought that I should slow down.
I looked over at the brass pipe, still partially packed, sitting on my dresser. I took the final tie, the black one, and I wrapped it around Molly’s head, pulling her hair as the knot caught her blond strands. Then I stepped away. She writhed a bit, the sun shining in through the pine tree onto her pale belly.
Instead of going to her, I stepped over to the dresser. The bowl was pretty much cashed, so I walked over to the window and dumped out the ashes. I opened my dresser and pulled out the sock I hid my bag of dry, crumbly weed in. I opened the bag and pulled out a small bud.
“What are you doing?” Molly asked, impatiently. “You aren’t getting high again, are you?”
Sometimes she was like another parent, complaining about me getting stoned. She had already graduated and was going to the community college. Her friend Mindy had moved away and she was depressed and we were fighting a lot, sometimes about pot but also about all kinds of other dumb shit. I was supposed to be in school that day but we’d had a big argument on the phone the night before and we wanted to make up, so I had ditched class and she had shaved.
I held the lighter to the pipe and breathed in, just looking at her.
“You motherfucker,” she said upon smelling my exhalation. But it was only pantomime, she was not really angry.
I put down the pipe and stepped toward her.
That’s when Mom pushed the door open. I turned and looked at her, stunned. I saw her eyes dart from me to Molly, spread-eagled, splayed and shaved. And even worse, with the blindfold on, Molly didn’t even know my mom was here yet. But she must have sensed something was going on.
She freed one hand and pulled off the blindfold.
Molly and Mom screamed at the same time.
“I’m running away,” I cried, simply because there was nothing else I could possibly say. Molly tried to cover herself and extract her remaining limbs from Dad’s ties.
I pushed past Mom and out of my bedroom into the hallway. I was still naked, so I ran back into Dad’s closet and pulled on a faded old pair of Levi’s. They hung low and I had no underwear, so my pubic hair showed when Mom came in, and when she looked at me, I grabbed a white V-neck undershirt of Dad’s.
“I cannot believe you,” Mom howled. “We did not raise you to be like this. Skipping school, smoking pot, and…this!”
I stepped out of the closet into Mom and Dad’s room, where I could see Molly in the hallway busting it toward the steps, clothes bunched up in her hand.
“Well, I don’t want to grow up to be like this,” I said, gesturing not at a single object but at the entire edifice she had attempted to construct.
Tears started running down Mom’s face, and I started to cry as well. We were screaming at each other through our tears as I ran down the stairs, following Molly.
“I can’t believe after all we’ve done for you that you would disrespect our home in this way!”
“You just try to control my life—that’s the only reason you do anything for me,” I replied.
I ran to catch up with Molly. I caught a glimpse of her as she burst out the kitchen door and into the garage, her black eyeliner smeared by tears, her eyes full of horror.
“You cannot live like this,” Mom cried. “Not under my roof.”
“I’m running away,” I said again, and ran out the door.
By the time I got to the driveway, Molly’s beige Buick was backing out, fast, into the street, where she slammed on the brakes, put it in drive, and hit the gas so that the tires let out a little squeal like she’d run over a gerbil.
I got into my car and slammed the door. I turned the key and backed out of the driveway and drove in the other direction, away from Mom and away from Molly. I got to the stop sign and had no idea where to go. I lit a cigarette and turned up the Replacements song on the tape player and just sat there until another car came up behind me, forcing me to make a decision and turn.
I drove around from park to park that we hung out at—from Butler Springs Park to Cleveland Park to Gower Park—and walked around smoking cigarettes. Then I sat in my car listening to music until school was out and drove over to Glenn and Hector’s. I didn’t want to see their mom because I was angry and upset and had been crying and didn’t know how to deal with an adult. I walked first to the place we had back in the woods behind the apartments, but no one was there. Finally I knocked on their door, but their mom said they hadn’t come home from school yet and she didn’t know where the boys were.
I drove downtown to my friend Bo’s house. He was a tall, stringy, smart hippie kid. At his house, when we smoked pot, we’d usually talk about Hermann Hesse or the Beat poets, whom we had just discovered.
When I knocked, I heard some motion inside. I knocked again. When he opened the door, I could tell he’d been napping, as he often did after school. I told him what had happened—the need to tell the story to someone had been the prime motivation for my rounds of the city searching for friends, I realized, as the words poured out and Bo chuckled and shook his head in disbelief. But when I asked him if I could stay for a few days, he got kind of squirrelly.
“I don’t know, man. Me and my moms have a lot going on, and I, I don’t think it’s a good time for it,” he stammered, softly, as the sage incense he’d been burning in a seashell sent up a ropy, crisp white smoke against the afternoon sun.
“I understand,” I said.
“You don’t have any pot, do you?” he asked, drowsily.
“No,” I said. “I forgot and left it in my sock drawer.”
After I left Bo’s house, I tried each of my friends in turn. No one would let me stay, so at 10:00 p.m., I drove my car back home. I sat in the driveway a long time before going inside, and there was no confrontation that night. That wouldn’t come until Dad got back to town. Until then I’d do my best to avoid Mom, and it seemed she was trying to avoid me as well.
The night Dad came back from Charlotte, Glenn and I managed to get someone to sell us two twelve-packs of Milwaukee’s Best, and we sat in the playground of an elementary school near my house and drank it all. Intoxication was a competitive sport for me and my friends, all of us bragging about how many beers we drank, how much pot we smoked, or how many hits of acid we took. Still, it was the first time I’d ever just sat down with a twelve-pack and determined to drink it all before I went home.
I was a little worried about what Dad was going to say about Mom catching Molly strapped to the bed with his neckties, and I figured this was an appropriate preparation. We plopped our asses on the rubber swing seats and started to drink.
“It’s really done this time,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what you said the last time you and Molly broke up,” Glenn said.
“Fucking for real, this time,” I said. I crunched my can, let out a loud burp, and dropped it in the sand. I reached into the damp cardboard box behind me and brought out another sweating can of now-warmish beer.
Glenn kicked his feet up on the swing, and the streetlight shimmered on the toes of his combat boots.
We hadn’t talked about David Duke or the NAAWP in the weeks since our conversation on the roof, but I ended up in a confrontation with another of Glenn’s skinhead friends. Some of the Grubs had just smoked a joint in the parking lot of a punk show when a guy everyone called Skinhead Steve walked up to us in his bomber jacket as we lit cigarettes.
Steve was the kind of freckle-faced, skinny-necked redhead who looked almost like a rodent. I think he was the one who’d first started preaching this shit to Glenn.
He looked at my Bob Marley Uprising T-shirt.
“He was a race traitor,” Steve said.
“What?” I said, annoyed.
“Ask any of the Rastas. It’s about Blackness. It’s not for you,” Steve said, condescendingly. “Bob Marley was half-white anyway, and he betrayed the Rastas to become popular with other race traitors like you.”
Like most suburban white kids, all I knew about Rastafarianism was that it enthusiastically condoned the consumption of cannabis.
“Fuck off,” I said.
“Oh yeah, race traitor?” he said, puffing out his chest beneath his bomber jacket. “Can’t take the truth?”
“I said fuck you.”
He pushed me, lightly, his fingertips pressing into my chest. I was skinny but surprisingly strong from skating, and I pushed him back and he stumbled and caught himself on his hands as he fell back onto the rough asphalt. He started to jump up, but Glenn grabbed him, and Hector and our friend Mike grabbed me and pulled me back. That was fine with me. I didn’t really want to fight, but it was a fight that I was confident I would win.
The fucked-up thing was that I didn’t know what side Glenn was on. Did he have my back or Steve’s? He and I hung out all the time, and he rarely saw Steve, but in the parking lot at the show that night, it seemed that he had aligned himself with the skinhead.
Was he a skinhead or a Grub? Hanging out on the swing set that night, I thought he was a Grub, a member of our ragtag group whose only shared ideology was pissing off authorities and getting as fucked up as possible. But I couldn’t shake the idea that he was also aligned with this other group of shitheads.
I was still brooding on this as we sat on the swings gulping down our beers in the queasy dusk. I watched as Glenn swung higher so that in my drunkenness all I could see was the top of his head when he reached the acme of his arc, where he paused a second before rushing backward toward me. I slid my feet back into my Birkenstock sandals lying in the sand in front of my swing and staggered to the woods behind us to take a leak.
As I pissed, I could hear the metal swing set moaning behind me and the last of the year’s crickets chirping in the woods in front of me. The trees were barely visible, only vertical lines in the gloaming.
I don’t know when Glenn left or how I got home, but I became a bit more cognizant as I stumbled in the door and saw Dad standing there in the kitchen, his arms crossed over his chest.
I tried to turn my stumble into swagger.
“Son,” he said. “We need to talk.”
“Son,” I mocked.
“OK,” he said as Mom walked in the kitchen. “It’s clear you’ve been drinking—”
“He’s been drinking?” Mom exclaimed, and immediately started to cry. This was not new, but she was shocked anew with every infraction.
“And we’ll just wait until tomorrow,” Dad finished.
“Why do you always think I’ve been drinking?” I slurred. “I haven’t been fucking drinking.”
“Watch your mouth,” Dad said.
“Fuck you!” I screamed. “You’re always telling me what to fucking do. Jesus Christ.”
“You’re drunk,” Dad said. “Just go on up to bed and we’ll talk about skipping school and all the rest of it in the morning.”
“I can’t believe he’s drunk again,” Mom cried. “Drunk. My son. My baby boy.”
“I’m not fucking drunk! Why does everyone always try to say what I am?” I said. “You don’t get to define me!”
My belligerence, and my belief in the veracity of my claims, increased with every articulation of this lie. Of course I was drunk. I had sucked down an entire twelve-pack over the course of two hours. I was smashed. But as I stood in the kitchen screaming at my parents, I convinced myself, if no one else, that I was absolutely sober.
“And he was with that girl,” Mom cried.
Me and “that girl” were broken up, and Mom’s words reminded me that I was pissed off about that too.
“God,” I said. “Why are you such a bitch?”
That’s when Dad punched me. I didn’t see it coming, but at the moment his fist connected with my chin, it went all slow motion, like a movie, and I was aware of everything as spit flew out of my mouth, as my head turned. There was a roaring sound and the world went red, then black, and then I spun on Dad, adrenaline ripping through me.
He had hoped to knock me out, but I didn’t go down. He stood there, fists cocked, wondering if we were going to have a real fight. I wondered too, fight or flight coursing through me. We both stepped forward, our fists raised.
And then I stopped. I looked at him dismissively. He was breathing hard. Mom was standing behind him, wailing.
I thought I could kick his ass. But I knew that if I did, if I punched my dad, I would be the one who lost. So I stood, waiting to see what he would do, and I knew I had won. Now I was the victim. My father had punched me for doing nothing more than sharing my side of the story and protesting my innocence. I could just walk away now, and I would be the winner, embattled, unjustly treated, and righteous.
I walked right past him toward the door into the dining room, which led to the stairway up to my room. When I reached the bottom of the stairs and looked back, I noticed my brother Christopher, who was fourteen and still skating every day, standing behind the dining room door. I could see he had been watching what was happening in the kitchen through the crack between the door and the jamb, and now he was left there in the dark holding an aluminum baseball bat in his hands.
Christopher and I had been close until I started hanging out with the Grubs. When he was born, he had a heart condition that the doctors told my parents would kill him. They were gone for months, leaving me with my grandparents while they went to Charleston and Birmingham for surgery. He survived and he thrived. I’d felt a deep affection and even tenderness for him when we were smaller. He was athletic and healthy, but he was less open and talkative than I, and for much of our lives he had hung out with my friends more than he did with anyone his own age. Once I started driving, he went everywhere with me as we found new places to skate around town. When I first started smoking weed, it didn’t seem to bother him. I’d usually do it in the afternoon or at night, after we’d skated. Then I started smoking while we skated, and that made him nervous, since I was the one who would drive us home, and finally, when I pretty much quit skating and only smoked, we stopped spending time together. But as I looked at him standing there with the bat, a line of light from the kitchen cast on his face, I finally realized that the kid who had idolized me all my life now despised me. And it would only get worse.
A few days later, Glenn and I were hanging out at my house, working the telephone, looking for somebody who might sell us a joint.
“Call Molly,” he said.
“Fuck you, man. She hated when I smoked weed,” I said.
“But she usually had some stashed in that cigar box in her room,” he said.
“I’m not calling her,” I said.
“Then I guess we’re not gonna get high today,” he said. “I can’t think of anyone else.”
“Me either,” I said.
Glenn and I were both realizing that we didn’t enjoy hanging out with each other that much when we weren’t fucked up.
“Let’s go skating,” I said, looking at one of the pictures of pro skaters now anachronistically hanging on my wall, relics from another era.
“Whatever,” he said. “I guess.”
Glenn was not a good skater; he looked stiff and awkward on a board. But it was a beautiful, bright, and crisp day and I hadn’t skated in a long time, and if we weren’t going to get high, I figured it would be fun to cruise around.
“We’ll go over to the ramp by Stan’s house,” I said. “There’s a dude who hangs out there who might have a bag too.”
I was only half lying. My brother had started skating with a Black kid called Blaze. We’d hung out only once or twice, when he was over at my house, but I thought my brother might have mentioned that Blaze had gotten in trouble for smoking a joint behind the skate shop. I didn’t know if he would have weed, but it was worth asking.
We got in my car and cruised over to the ramp, a half-pipe, which looked like the letter U, in some twins’ backyard. The twins weren’t very good skateboarders, but the ramp was nice, and a lot of good skaters hung out there.
As I pulled the car to the curb, I could see them—Blaze, the twins, and my brother—all standing on the platform at the top of the ramp, which loomed up above the ivy-covered fence at the back of the twins’ driveway.
“Hey,” I said as Glenn and I got out of the car.
“What the fuck you doing, Nazi?” Blaze snarled from the back of the ramp four feet above us as Glenn and I walked into the driveway and made our way toward the backyard. Glenn’s head was shaved, and he had on combat boots with white laces and a leather jacket.
“Fucking n*****,” Glenn said as he started to run toward Blaze. The back of the ramp was higher than the fence, and Blaze jumped down, easily clearing the chain-link and landing in the driveway. He darted toward Glenn.
I stood there stunned for a second. I hadn’t expected this at all. But I had caused it. By the time this thought flashed through my mind, I was already running behind Glenn, hoping I could stop what was happening as these two bodies, one white and one Black, screamed toward each other, intent on collision.
Glenn was short and stocky, Blaze tall and lanky. Glenn hunched forward and burrowed his chin into his chest like he was going to tackle Blaze, but as soon as he was close enough, Blaze brought his fist down hard on the back of Glenn’s stooped head. I could hear the sound of bone on bone as knuckles hit skull. Glenn swung wildly in reaction but barely made contact with Blaze’s chest.
The rest of us stood there watching without a word until a few of us jumped in to pull them apart.
“The police are on the way!” I heard. I turned to see the twins’ mom yelling. Glenn was already dashing toward my car.
That was when I caught my brother’s disappointed and embarrassed eyes. I looked at him and at the twins and their mom. And then I looked at Blaze. He didn’t know Glenn. But he’d been to my house and he had thought he knew me. His eyes showed both pain and fury as he stood there panting.
All of this was my fault. Even though Glenn had done everything possible to tell me what he was about, I had not taken his racism seriously. I thought his David Duke talk was goofy and outdated, an embarrassing and unfortunate phase. But I had not recognized its danger.
I turned away from Blaze and my brother, unable to take their eyes any longer, and I realized they must have thought I was running to help Glenn rather than to stop him. I looked toward my car, where Glenn’s bald head and angry flared eyes were framed by the window. Why wouldn’t they think that I would help him? I paused. I could hear a police siren. “I’m sorry,” I said quickly, quietly, before turning and sprinting toward my car. And I was sorry, but I couldn’t articulate what I was sorry for.
“‘Chase those crazy baldheads out of town,’” I heard Blaze yell, quoting a line from a Bob Marley song.
Glenn and I didn’t talk as we drove back to his house. But I thought about it that night, sitting on my roof and smoking, and realized that all rebellion is not the same.
And though I didn’t recognize it for a few weeks, I think Glenn learned that this skinhead shit wasn’t worth it. He was mad at the world, sure. But he didn’t want to get into a fight every time he saw a Black person. His hair grew out, and the white laces came out of the combat boots. But we never talked about what had happened that day with Blaze.
And though my brother looked at me with an even greater sense of hatred when we passed in the hall at home, he never mentioned it either.
Whiteness is a conspiracy of both silence and violence.