When I walked in the door, I knew something was wrong. Dad was standing there, in front of the kitchen sink, just staring out the window. He turned when he heard the door close.
I’d just dropped off a woman at the strip club where she worked and bought a bottle of Jim Beam, and I was stopping by the house to steal a two-liter of Coke, and I hadn’t expected anyone to be home, and something about the way Dad looked standing there staring, for the second before he heard me, was startling. It felt almost as if I’d walked in on someone about to jump out a window.
“You can’t live here anymore,” Dad said suddenly, but flatly and plainly, with no drama or affectation—just stating a fact.
“What?” I said, shocked.
For once, I had no idea what I had done wrong.
“Your mother walked into your room this morning to get a coat hanger and saw you lying there with some naked woman she’d never seen before,” he said. “It was one thing when it was Molly or Zooey, someone we knew, but she’d never even seen this girl before. And I’m sorry, but it’s going to kill her if you keep doing things like that.”
Zooey had left me a couple of months earlier, shortly after I graduated high school, when she and Bo and a lot of my other friends bought a school bus together and went on the road with the Grateful Dead. I had no idea what I was going to do after graduation. Mom had filled out an application and even written an essay under my name and without my knowledge and somehow managed to get me a small journalism scholarship to USC, but I had turned it down and decided not to go. But just because I didn’t want to go to college didn’t mean that I could devote my life to following the Grateful Dead from town to town, seeing little of the country but gas stations and coliseums.
I felt as if the universe had swiftly rewarded my decision to reject both of these paths when I started hanging out with Blake, who was, I thought, the only really smart person I had ever known. She had studied literature and writing at USC but quit a semester before graduating because her professor had called poetry “the dung heap upon which the flower of literary criticism grows.” Instead of taking a job in New York, which she said another teacher, James Dickey, had offered to get her, she had started stripping under the stage name Kali, after the Hindu goddess of destruction, in Greenville, the heart of South Carolina’s Bible Belt.
We were both hanging around in Columbia and I had offered to give her a ride back to Greenville, where she shared an apartment with another dancer who had also moved up from Columbia. Instead of going to her place, she’d slept with me in my bed, and that’s how Mom had evidently found us.
And now Dad was kicking me out—for that? I laughed. We hadn’t even had sex, although she had given me a blow job, which was probably as bad in Mom’s eyes.
“OK, I’ll be back in a minute,” I said to Dad. “Let me go get a few things, and I’ll come back for the rest of my stuff later.”
I went upstairs into my room, which still had posters of skateboarders hanging on the walls above the two double beds, and grabbed a couple of pairs of underwear, some pants, and a few T-shirts.
Just before I turned off the lights and walked out, I looked back at the room.
“I’ll never live here again,” I swore to myself. I turned off the light.
Blake and I had spent a nice day together, walking around downtown and shopping for books before I dropped her off at the club where she worked. She’d asked if I wanted to come pick her up, so I was confident I would have a place to stay that night.
I turned and walked down the stairs, away, I felt, from my childhood and into the world.
“I’m sorry, Son,” Dad said when I stepped back into the kitchen. “Don’t think that this means we don’t love you. But Mom just can’t keep living like this.”
It looked as if he’d just wiped tears from his eyes. But it was hard to tell. His cheeks puffed up beneath his eyes, so it could have been sweat glimmering off his pink flesh.
“It’s OK,” I said as lightly as I could, as if moving out of my parents’ house, with nowhere to go, were no big deal at all. “I’ll see you around.”
I told myself I was trying to spare his feelings, that this was something Mom’s prudish Christianity had forced on him, but as I turned away from him and toward the door, I knew my indifference was intended as a final jab.
When I walked into the garage, I stood there a moment, taking in the oily, musty odor in what seemed to me the final act in the drama of my independence.
There were warm plastic bottles of soda stacked up by the kitchen door in the garage, and I grabbed one and walked back to my car. I got in and drove away from my parents’ house.
When I went to pick Blake up from the strip club, I was drunk from the whiskey but took speed to counteract it, to make sure I could perform should she want to have sex. From the parking lot behind the club, I nervously glanced at the big tuxedoed bouncer who would stick his head out the door and scan the lot every few minutes. My pulse was enlivened when his head dipped back into the building and then from the cracked door Blake appeared and started walking toward my car, her long dirty-blond hair, parted in the middle, kissing her shoulders with each step. She wore a short purple velvet dress and a pair of thigh-high boots. The dress rose up as she crouched into the car.
“Hey, so, um, my mom came in and saw you in my bed this morning,” I said as I pulled out of the parking lot, the bouncer watching my car to make sure she was safe.
“What?” she said.
Even beneath her thick makeup and the pale parking lot light—even after dancing almost naked for the last six hours—it seemed she was blushing.
“Why didn’t you lock the door?”
“They caught me with girls too many times before and they took the lock off,” I said with a shit-eating grin.
“You can stay with us,” she said.
She directed me to the old mansion downtown that had been divided up into apartments.
“It used to be a brothel,” Blake said as we walked up the stairs to the second-floor entrance of the place she shared with another dancer, Tammy, and Tammy’s boyfriend, Vince. “There’s a ghost of a whore in there—I feel like she’s happy we’re here.”
Tammy and Vince weren’t there that night, but over the coming weeks, I got to know them well. Tammy was a five-foot-tall petite white girl with thick black hair, and Vince was a morose Italian American motorcycle enthusiast with sunken cheeks and long stringy brown hair he wore tied in a ponytail. He usually kept a gun within reach: pistols, assault rifles, and shotguns were all placed strategically around the house in case of Tammy’s ex-husband’s return.
This was a bit scary because Vince liked acid and weed, and he loved to clean and study his guns when he was high.
“Man, check this shit out,” he said, holding up what looked like a machine gun with a banana clip. “A fucking Kalashnikov.”
Dad had always had guns, but he didn’t fancy them. They were grim tools to remain mostly hidden. And I’d never seen one of these Russian rifles outside of movies. Vince and I were flying on acid as he waved this gun around like a recruit for the redneck Red Army.
“You wanna hold it?” he asked.
“Nah,” I said, terrified. “But I would love to hear you sing ‘Angeline.’”
It felt like the only time Vince wasn’t gripping a gun was when he cradled his guitar on his knee and sang, and I was always trying to get him to play something for me.
Blake still had a boyfriend, Fred, in Columbia, but we were sleeping together in every sense of the word, sharing a bed and having sex, except on the weekends when Fred came up and I went to crash on a friend’s couch. I knew I didn’t have the right to be jealous, and I tried to treat it as a vacation from her voracious sexual demands, which required that I maintain a certain level of sobriety—at least enough to get it up—but something about the arrangement did bother me. I told myself the feeling in my gut was a vestige of the traditional uptight, white bourgeois relationship where one person thought they had to own or control somebody just because they slept together. I took more drugs.
I’d been staying with them for only a couple of weeks before Blake started talking about getting a place of our own—because Vince’s guns and paranoia were just too much. I had really come to love both Tammy and Vince in that short time, but they were hard to live with. It finally came to a head when Vince came out of the shower holding a towel around his waist with one hand and a Glock in the other.
Blake grabbed my arm and pulled me into our room.
“I haven’t told you this, but I am schizophrenic,” she said. “Having these guns around is not a good thing. I can see bad things happening. The future. I can see the paranoia manifest into reality. We’ve got to find another place to live.”
Her urgency freaked me out. The big volume of Percy Shelley’s poetry that I’d stolen from the library lay by the open window, its red cover glowing in the light as the sounds of children playing outside drifted into the room. I knew she exaggerated a lot, and I wasn’t sure if she actually had schizophrenia or if she was romanticizing mental illness as she did when she talked about Sylvia Plath and Syd Barrett, but I knew that she was right about the danger.
“When I saw my mom the other day, she said that my grandfather had an opening in the duplex he owns,” I said. “She said I could live there if I enrolled in the community college.”
“You have been so smart and strong to avoid school,” she said. “College would kill your poetry. Especially the community college.”
She had written part of a beautiful novel, which she said she was taking a break from, and in the meantime, she promised, she was going to help me become a poet.
“She said I had to enroll,” I said. “Not that I had to go.”
Blake looked at me for a moment before her mouth stretched into a tight smile.
“Let’s do it,” she said.
When I dropped her off at work later that afternoon, she peeled off one hundred singles that I’d counted out the night before.
“Try to get some weed and some pills,” she said, handing it to me. “And talk to your mom.”
I stuffed the money in my pocket. She kissed me on the mouth before she got out.
“And finish reading A Season in Hell,” she said. “No more excuses. You need to know Rimbaud if we’re going to achieve poetic insight through a derangement of our senses.”
I’d been climbing a ladder of suburban rebellion, moving from skateboarding to punk rock to weed, and now with Blake I was setting out to use Rimbaud’s “prolonged, vast, and systematic derangement of the senses” to destroy the vestiges my upbringing had left on my consciousness. I was trying to break down whiteness while only falling further into it. Whiteness is a power structure on whose refuse I was feasting. I could not get outside of it because I could not see it.
Then the bouncer walked into the parking lot, and Blake got out of the car and slammed the door. I thought about my luck again as I drove away, wheeling toward the carpet store.
I could smell the barbecue cooking at Little Pigs BBQ when I pulled into the shopping center, and the charcoal smoke in the air mixed with a hint of fall washed over me with a wave of roaming nostalgia—I’d been eating at that little barbecue joint with the smiling pig on its sign all my life, and I couldn’t help being moved by its smell into some unbidden reverie of my childhood.
Summey was sitting in his rocking chair by the plate-glass windows at the front of the store.
“Goddamn worthless son of a bitch,” he said as I walked in, and for a moment I thought he was talking to me. Then I realized he was cussing at someone on the other end of his cordless phone. His other hand gripped his spit cup so tightly that it looked as if his fingertips would puncture the foam, sending a mass of tobacco spit down the front of his pants.
His tirade stopped when he saw me looking at him, the rocking chair paused midrock. I kept walking to the back of the store, where Mom had her desk, with a space heater under it even in the summer and Bible verses hanging from the wall above it, along with a very bad poem I had written to her and illustrated with watercolor one year for Mother’s Day.
“Hey, honey,” she said, jumping up to give me a big hug. She looked older already than she had a couple of weeks earlier.
“I was thinking,” I said. “And you know, maybe it would be a good idea to just take a couple classes at Tech this semester and move into Summey’s duplex.”
Her eyes lit up with delight and then clouded over with what looked like worry.
“Oh Lord,” she said. “It is a mess over there. Jesse, the guy who is supposed to be painting it, he’s a drunk and he got in a fight with this man who lives over there. Apparently the man was drunk and riding on a moped, and Jesse was drunk and almost ran over him with his van. When the man saw the van in front of the house, he picked up a big metal pipe and came in there at Jesse and made holes in all the walls and shattered the toilet.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “Those rednecks are a mess. But it should be ready for you by the end of the month if you’re really going to go to Tech.”
She paused a moment.
“But don’t you regret not taking that scholarship and going to USC?” she asked.
“Regret,” I laughed. “I’ve been living with two strippers who give me everything I need. We eat steak every day. And she is a great writer and is teaching me. I told you I am going to be a poet, and journalism would ruin that.”
“What are you going to take, then?” Mom asked, hiding the pain in her eyes.
“Philosophy,” I said, without having really thought about it.
“Well, as long as you’re studying something,” she said. “You better go by and enroll. School starts in a couple weeks.”
“I will,” I said. “And we’ll plan to move in on September first.”
“Move in where?” Summey asked as he walked into the room, followed by Jacob, a Kenyan student at Bob Jones University, who worked for him.
“To your duplex,” I said.
Summey stared at me with his mouth agape just enough for me to see the brown tobacco spit swirl around the viscous pink of his tongue. The wrinkles around his eyes were amplified by his spectacles.
“He’s going to Tech,” Mom said.
“Well,” he said. “If you’re going to school, that’s great. Maybe you’ll turn yourself around. I was just talking to Jacob about what he needed to do over there to fix all the goddamn damage that lunatic caused.”
“Hi, Jacob,” I said.
Jacob waved and smiled but did not say hello.
Summey had used Bob Jones students as labor for as long as I could remember, but they were mostly anonymous, interchangeable white boys with bad haircuts and midwestern accents. Jacob was different; he had been working for Summey for two years now, and as a foreign student with no work visa, he had no other real options. And he was Black.
“School is very important,” Jacob said. “That’s how I’m able to be here.”
“I know,” I said.
I hated the idea that I was pleasing everyone, even if it was just a scam for room and board.
“I’m sure Jacob can get the place ready before September, can’t you?” Summey said.
Jacob smiled and nodded.
There was something about the relationship that bothered me. It reminded me, perhaps, of the way Mom talked about Slim, the Black woman who’d raised the Summey children. To hear Mom tell it, she and Slim had loved each other, and I didn’t necessarily doubt her, but I felt as if they must have had very different experiences of that relationship.
“When they tried to make her sit in the back of the bus,” Mom said, “I tried to go with her, but she told me to sit my butt down in the front right now before I made things worse.”
It seemed suspect, and something about the emotional part of Summey’s relationship to Jacob bothered me in the same way. Jacob didn’t just work for Summey doing odd jobs like helping fix the duplex. He also had to provide emotional support.
Beneath his bravado, Summey was a scared man. He could never be alone. He was terrified of silence and slept with the police scanner blaring by his bed at night. He was also petrified to travel and never went anywhere but Florida, for baseball spring training. But Nanny wanted to see the world, and she had started taking more trips, with my mom and dad or with my aunt Gaile—Mom, Nanny, and Gaile would go to three-day gospel music festivals the way Zooey went to Dead shows—and when Nanny was gone, Summey made Jacob spend the night with him. But then, he would always talk about how much he was helping Jacob, how much he did for Jacob, and how much Jacob loved him. I didn’t know what to make of all this, or if there was anything to make of it, as I left the carpet store that day.
Later that night, when I mentioned it to Blake, she tilted her head when she looked at me, as she did when my naivete astonished her, as if the four years that separated us were an uncrossable frontier.
“Me and Candy, a white girl, and Syreeta, who, you know, is Black, were talking at work one night. Candy said her parents weren’t racist, because her mom had been raised by a Black woman,” Blake said. “Syreeta laughed so hard she spit out her drink. ‘Your mama is just like the men who come in here and believe we love them.’”
I laughed, but I recognized something I’d not noticed before, something about how the strip club worked. The men who went in there weren’t paying for a naked body, they were paying for a flattering fantasy. They wanted to believe the women would want to spend time with them even if they hadn’t been working as strippers. It reminded me of Grandmother Woods’s illusion that the Africans were happy to have been enslaved; she’d tell me how lucky they were to have been brought to America and how much they loved Ole Marse.
The fantasy of love in this sort of racism is not incidental, it is an essential feature. If we can tell ourselves that the people we oppress love us and are happy about it, then we can justify that oppression.