CHAPTER 1

I am the ill-starred fruit of a hysterical pregnancy, and surprisingly, odd though I might be, I am not hysterical myself. I’m rather calm, in fact; some might say waveless. I am tall and dark and look for the world like Mr. Sidney Poitier, something my poor disturbed and now deceased mother could not have known when I was born, when she named me Not Sidney Poitier. I was born after two years of hysterical gestation, and who knows what happens in a mind when expectant, anticipative for so long. Two years. At least this was the story told to me.

To make a long and sad story abbreviated and sad, this is how I have put it together: My mother, famously eager to have a child and likewise famously odd, offbeat, curious to all who met her and famously very much without a partner, one day told her neighbors, near and not so near, that she was pregnant. Everyone nodded in appropriate and understandably sympathetic, if not outright patronizingly though benignant ways, but then much to their surprise, horror to some, befuddlement to nearly all, my mother’s belly began to inflate. Her belly grew quite large from all reports, but after the customary nine or so months there was no baby. This full and soon to be overfull, too-full term had been preceded by two hysterical miscarriages, both matters of public knowledge and joking, and so there was already plenty of room for doubt. And then after ten, eleven, twelve months there was still only brown belly-skin stretched drum-taut over what many believed to be a volleyball, and so everyone understood that my crazy mother, volleyball theory notwithstanding, was suffering, or perhaps perpetrating, yet another hysterical or, more likely or precisely, insane pregnancy. Then after twenty-four months I was in fact born and not terribly quietly, mind you, as my mother woke many people with this emergency, at first by knocking, then by howling like a coyote, and so my entry was well attended and well documented by a shocked few who told a shocked, though mainly uncaring, many.

It was also, as one might suspect, a bit of a hysterical delivery. My mother’s wailing caught the attention of a nearby woman who called another neighbor woman and soon there were three of them huddled like conspirators around the spread-eagled legs of my mother, staring at her privates and believing that nothing would be forthcoming. One of them had a notion to summon the doctor from down the street, and so she did. The short, waddling doctor, bleary eyed and out of sorts, arrived and asked a reasonable enough question: “What week are you in?”

“One hundred and four.” This came from the first woman.

The claim was backed by all present, including my mother, though her exact words were, “Far too many!” She then wailed, “Stand back, girls! Two years he’s been forming and now he’s coming!”

The doctor thought in his Thunderbird-booze haze that all of them were crazy while the huddle of neighbors believed only my mother was crazy. Then the doctor pulled out his stethoscope and gave the belly a long listen. Standing back, he said, “This woman is going to have a baby.”

Another wail from my mother.

“I’d say imminently.”

“Would you like me to boil water?” one of the women asked.

“If you’d like,” the doctor said. “Tea would be nice.”

But my coming was not as imminent as my mother might have liked as the labor proceeded to last some forty hours, a forty hours that saw a parade of curious well-wishers, voyeurs, file through the house: some drinking coffee, some eating popcorn, and all commenting on the very strange gestation period and even stranger actual existence of a baby. The doctor was quite sad he’d been called because even though he had taken the Hippocratic oath, he thought that there were better things he could have been doing, not the least of which was finishing the bottle he’d abandoned, though the neighborhood women finally used the kitchen to prepare much food that he found to his liking. As it happened, I finally burst out, though perhaps burst is not the right word as I came along feet first and oversized head last, all ten pounds of me, nearly tearing my mother apart, all of this very slowly. Her screams filled the streets like screams.

The birth astonished everyone in the community, perhaps no one more so than my mother, who viewed me as nothing less than an immaculate conception. Even news crews from as far away as San Diego and a couple of university sociologists and biologists came around to sneak a peek. The best I can figure is that my mother was in fact hysterically pregnant and that in month fourteen or so of that pregnancy she somehow managed to find and utilize the sexual organs of my father (a term I of course use in the strictest zoological sense), who may or may not have been Sidney Poitier, and she actually did become pregnant, and so here I am. Twenty-four months in the womb was the local legend, and so as a tyke I was seldom called by my odd name Not Sidney, but instead I was tagged Elephant Boy and on occasion Late Nate and once Ready Freddy by a boy who had moved to Los Angeles from Ohio. That one never did make sense to me.

As described, my birth was a difficult one, to say the least, sheer hell to say the most, a scary thing certainly, a near-death experience for my mother, a near-life one for me. She became obsessed with the belief that her pregnancy need not have ended so painfully, and that belief led to a campaign that she took very seriously, a campaign against all vaginal births. Our house was perpetually cluttered with T-shirts and posters with the same image and slogan: a vagina in a circle with a line through it and MISCS which stood for Mothers In Support of Caesarian Sections.

Though my mother, her name was Portia Poitier, was absolutely, unquestionably, certifiably crazy, she was not without resources. Perhaps she simply was lucky, I will never know, and therefore neither will you. When I was two, in 1970, she invested every dime she had in a little-known company called the Turner Communications Group that would later become Turner Broadcasting System. Every dime she had came to about thirty thousand dollars, most of a settlement from an elevator accident at her job with the phone company—a lot of money at that time, and for someone in our neighborhood it was a fortune. It turned out to be enough to make her filthy, obscenely, uncomfortably rich. Not as filthy rich as she would have been had she lived a little longer. Instead, I became filthy and insanely rich. In fact, so much stock did she have that Ted Turner actually paid her a visit shortly before her death. I was seven and remember the manic white man exploding into our house like a pale, mustachioed, talking tornado.

“Hello there, young fella,” he said to me with that fast southern accent, engaging and alarming at once. “You seem like a nice young man.”

I was standing on the porch of our house when he arrived, and a couple of the guys had just ridden by on their bikes calling out, “Hey! Where’s your trunk, Elephant Boy!?” My mother, who had spoken to Turner numerous times on the telephone, called him Teddy.

The neighbors stared at us from their yards and through their windows. My mother, not out of any distrust but out of disposition, had kept her wealth guarded, not spending more than would seem ordinary. What she did spend her money on was hardly perceptible to those outside our home: books, music, and language lessons for me, and really good, sensible, and therefore ugly, shoes. She would spend hundreds of dollars on a pair of shoes that no one suspected cost more than thirty. My white and blue Oxford shirts came from London’s Savile Row, she told me, though I had no idea why that mattered. All I knew was that I hated the shirts that no one else wore, longing every day for a T-shirt or a jersey of some kind.

Turner clicked his tongue against his impossibly white teeth and surveyed the neighborhood. He seemed comfortable in his skin and that made me comfortable with him. “Your mama’s quite a businesswoman, yessireebobby, quite a business mind.” I kicked a couple of toys away from the center of the floor. “Is that Lego you’re playing with? I love Lego. Didn’t have Lego when I was a boy, had an erector set. You’ve probably never seen one. Used to cut my poor fingers to kingdom come, blood all over the little screws and bolts. Always loved building things. Are those brownies I smell? Don’t tell me your mama can bake brownies too? Don’t you love them when they’re just out of the oven, all warm and gooey and smelling to high heaven? Chocolate all over those screws and bolts. Yep, some businesswoman, your mother.” That was what he was like and I have to say I liked him, and he genuinely liked my mother and loved the fact that she had had such faith in his business. And she liked him, called him Teddy, as I said. When he asked her why the kids had called me Elephant Boy, she told him that they were just jealous. He chewed his brownie and stared at me; her answer seemed to satisfy him.

“Tell me, Portia, just what kind of name is Not?” he asked.

“It’s Not Sidney,” my mother corrected him.

Turner was puzzled momentarily, then nodded his big head and laughed. “Oh, I get it.”

Then it was my mother’s turn to look puzzled. I never knew the story of my name. One might have thought that my mother imagined that our last name, rare as it was, was enough to cause confusion with Sidney Poitier, the actor, and so I was to be Not Sidney Poitier. But her puzzled expression led me to believe that my name had nothing to do with the actor at all, that Not Sidney was simply a name she had created, with no consideration of the outside world. She liked it, and that was enough.

My mother died shortly after that visit from Ted Turner. An illness came over her. That was how it was put to me. An illness has come over your mother. Within weeks death came over her as well. She passed away in her sleep, and I was told that was a good thing—no suffering, no pain. Even then I wondered why that was a good thing. We had no family, and certainly no one in the neighborhood would take in the abject spawn of the crazy lady, the product of such a strange and probably demonic, prolonged gestation. Had they known I was worth millions of dollars Elephant Boy might have been slightly more attractive, but they didn’t know and they wouldn’t have believed it if I or anyone else, even Ted Turner, had told them, even if they had known who Ted Turner was.

Enter Ted Turner once again. Turner saw my mother’s substantial investment in his dream as a kind of symbol and charm for his success. My mother was the kind of grass-roots, if not proletarian, person he wanted to imagine his media world touching, however tangentially, on his way to great and obscene wealth. Anyway, Turner showed up and, to the drop-jawed bewilderment of the neighborhood and city, took me away to live with him in Atlanta. To say that I lived with or was raised by Turner is misleading and simply or complexly untrue. I lived at one of his houses and was left pretty much to my own unformed devices. The staff of my part of the household, mostly black women, prepared my meals and took care of my needs, and my teachers, mostly black women, came to the house to educate me. I hardly ever saw Turner or his family, though for a while, during puberty, I found a place to secretly watch his leotarded wife, Jane Fonda, perform her disco exercises by the pool. Her ribs jutted from beneath the spandex, and I felt more than a little lust, though I held no crush.

To Turner’s credit even he was not comfortable with the scenario of the rich do-gooding white man taking in the poor little black child. Television was polluted with that model, and it didn’t take a genius to understand that something was wrong with it. My situation was somewhat different as I was in fact extremely wealthy as a result of my mother’s business acumen.

I was supposedly free to make decisions concerning my own life. The house staff was run by a statuesque woman from St. Lucia. Claudia, with her massive afro and keen stare, made it clear to me, on more than one occasion, since she had decided: that, though sweet, I was a bit of a numbskull; that it had been made very clear to her that I was paying the bills out of my own pocket and not Ted Turner’s; that she worked for me and not for Ted Turner; that her job was to please me, not Ted Turner. She liked the truth of that; I could tell by a certain tilt to her afro. And so did the two women who took care of my part of the house along with her. My teachers were a string of girls from Spelman College who thought I was either simply adorable or a stinking pariah, a pathetic social abomination better left unhandled, if not unconsidered. One, however, Betty, was a raving socialist who liked me, liked teaching me, and liked especially the fact that I had money to burn, real money she called it, and I trusted her because she spoke of it openly. She imagined that one day I might use my wealth for good. Still, she had some difficulty accommodating the reality of my residing in Ted Turner’s house. I was eleven when I told her that I actually paid rent to live there and so really wasn’t being cared for by Turner at all. Technically I was paying rent, but the money was being funneled back to me through some kind of manipulation of stock options. I understood the concept if not the machinations. I was slightly precocious, and Betty liked that about me. Betty was my first crush, though I never imagined her working out to disco music the way I did with Jane Fonda. Betty called herself “big boned,” and she was even in my eyes a little plump, but I thought she was beautiful.

She taught me about Marx and Lenin and Castro and the ills of American democracy and the fall of the Roman empire and about how the British lost their empire because they were likely as not to stand around in sheer amazement upon recognizing that they were not loved by their colonized peoples. She taught me that America preached freedom yet would not allow anyone to be different. She usually told me all of this while stuffing her face with big greasy sandwiches from Hardee’s and greasier chicken from Popeyes. Wiping her mouth the while and sighing, she was likely to say, “This is why I’m big boned,” and then she would let out her rather endearing snorting and loud laugh.

“Multinational and defense corporations, those greedy bastards, they are the real powers of this country,” she said. “The mass media and the oil, they’re the movers, the facilitators. Politicians are just tools used to make us think we have some choice and a little power.”

I was rubbing my shoulder under the coarse white fabric of my karate dogi. A bigger boy had roughed me up the day before, and I was awaiting the as-usual, one-day-too-late visit from my martial arts instructor.

“Ted is in the media,” I said.

“My point exactly.” She looked around the room as if to be sure no one was listening. “He’s precisely the kind of pestilential, poisonous, pernicious parasite I’m talking about.” She often gave in to some inexplicable and strange, but I thought quaint, alliterative urge.

“I like him.”

“You’re a child.”

“He likes you,” I said.

This threw her off. “Why do you say that?”

“He said so.”

“When?”

“I don’t know.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“He said, ‘You know, Nu’ott, I like that big-boned teacher of yours.’ ” I affected my best, but not very good southern accent. I was confused by how much Betty enjoyed hearing this. “Do you like him, too?” I asked.

“Of course not, Not. That man is the devil. You be careful around that white man. And around whitey in general.”

“Why do you say he’s the devil?” I asked.

“Young brother, young brother, you have no idea. Money be green, we be black, and the devil be white. That’s all we know and all we need to know. Trust me, your big-boned sister.”

“I just don’t see why him being white makes him the devil. My mother liked him. My mother was smarter than you. I like him. And he likes you.”

“Stop saying that.” She reached into her bag for some hard candy and unwrapped it. She stared at me while she put it in her mouth. “Why do you insist on repeating that he likes me.”

“I said it only twice,” I said.

“That, Not, is called repetition. I’m amazed. Really, you would think that after all I have tried so untiringly, diligently and untiringly to teach you, you would know that.”

“You said ‘untiringly’ twice.”

“I did not.”

“Are you saying that ‘you did not’ or that ‘you did, Not’? ” I asked.

“I did not say untiringly twice, Not.”

I didn’t press the matter, but felt mightily puzzled by her behavior.

“Besides,” she said, “you must have misheard him.” She rearranged her big bones in her seat. “What expressly, explicitly, exactly did he say?”

“He said, hating to repeat myself, ‘Nu’ott, you know, I like that big-boned teacher of yours.’ ”

She bit into her candy. I think it was butterscotch. “And why does he say your name like that?”

“I don’t really know,” I said. And I didn’t. I imagined that he considered Not to be an actual name and couldn’t believe it would be simply the single syllable it was. So, it came out Nu’ott, the same way god became ga’awd for the evangelist on the street in downtown Decatur.

One sunny day Turner and I were sitting in the garden between our parts of the mansion and he was rattling off figures and theories about television, not caring whether I understood or not. I in fact enjoyed our one-sided chats and viewed them as important and essential to my education.

“Now, it’s true that we don’t have significant market share at the moment,” he said, “but good old country persistence will win out. It does every time. This is a simple war of attrition, and if we resolutely stick the course we’ll gain a foothold and, well, that will be that. But you can’t show the news and The Three Stooges all the time.” He looked at me. “And aw hell, son, who can afford to make brand-new crappy shows, and who wants to? Especially with so many crappy shows just sitting in cans waiting to be aired again? I’ll let the networks waste their money on making the new trash. I’ll take their stale old crappy shows and air them again and again until they sit in people’s heads like jingles.”

“Jingles?”

“I need a new pair of Weejuns. And I want to apologize again about this abstruse arrangement. Boy that’s a lot of a’s in one sentence. I know it must seem strange to you. Hell, it’s strange to me, this situation of ours, I mean.”

“I’m okay.”

“You ever see that kidney-sick little boy who can’t grow on that Diff’rent Strokes show? Well, I think that’s just obscene, Not. Not him, but that picture, that model of the black child being raised by some great white father. I’m not that arrogant. You think I’m arrogant like that, Nu’ott?”

I just looked at him.

“Maybe I am, a little bit. Arrogant, I mean. Lord, I can’t help it. I’m an American.”

“So am I,” I said.

“Well said, son. Society, some like to call it the culture these days, shouldn’t be subjected to that kind of pernicious and deleterious rubbish, the Arnold and Webster model. That’s why I’m going to take over television and air that trash every day several times a day instead of only once a week. That way we’ll all become desensitized to its harmful and consumptive effects by sheer overexposure. That’s what I mean by jingles. They’ll become meaningless and innocuous little ditties.” He popped a stick of gum in his mouth and offered one to me. “It’s cinnamon. Have you ever been sailing, Nu’ott? Of course you haven’t. I love sailing, the bright sun on your face, the sea smell, that breeze running through your hair.” He looked at me. “My hair anyway. Yep, I’m going to take you sailing. It’s a shame about that sick dwarfish boy with bum kidneys, never growing and all that.”

I asked if Jane would be coming along with us on the sailing trip. I had an image of her deck-lounging in a bikini stuck deck-lounging in my brain.

“I don’t know,” he said. “She’s mad at me a lot these days. I think I talk too much for her. I’m not the silent cowboy type like her daddy. Don’t you just hate raisins? They’re too sweet, if you ask me. And they look like flies, don’t you think? Flies without wings. And they’re too sweet.”

Weekly I would be driven into town by Claudia as her big hair filled the space behind the wheel of the Volvo station wagon that had been purchased with my money. In town, I was allowed to ride my bicycle while she did the shopping. I was always receiving beatings from boys with whom I sought to play. It would always start the same way.

“What’s your name?” a kid would ask.

“Not Sidney,” I would say.

“Okay, then what is it?”

“I told you. It’s Not Sidney.”

“Ain’t nobody called you Sidney.”

“No, it’s Not Sidney.”

The boy would make a face, then look at his friends and say, “What’s wrong with him?”

And I would say, I always thought in a polite and nonthreatening way, “Nothing’s wrong with me. My name is Not Sidney.”

This would be about the time the first punch found the side of my head. They were understandably and justifiably frustrated and angry with me. They thought that I was being, if not petulant, then wearisome, but I saw myself as merely answering the question honestly.

As I mentioned, I had a martial arts instructor. Claudia hired him after my third thrashing. He was a stocky Korean man named Raymond, a name I found disappointing, and he came by the mansion every Thursday. This was unfortunate because my trips to town were on Wednesdays. Though he was able to observe the damage, debrief me on the tactics used against me, all of his instruction was lost into the air during the following six days, so that by the next Wednesday I was facing either a brand-new attacker or an old one with new tricks.

“Okay, Not Sidney, show me what that bully did.” Raymond said to me. We were standing on the lawn near the pool in our bright white dogis, he with his black belt and I with my white. “How did he come at you?”

“He was bigger than me,” I told him, “and he grabbed me around my neck and punched me on the top of my head with what felt like iron knuckles and then, while I was holding my head and trying to find balance, he punched me viciously twice on the shoulder. I think I have nerve damage.”

“That’s simple to fix,” he said, reassuringly. I thought at first he was referring to the aforementioned nerve damage, but I remembered that he always said that, and after he said it, I was to be either hurt and/or humiliated. “Grab me just the way he grabbed you.” Raymond leaned over and allowed me to place him in a headlock. I didn’t like that position, A, because of the anticipation of whatever demonstration of defensive measure was coming and B, because his hair stank of cigarettes, some kind of coconut-perfumed substance, possibly shampoo but unlikely, and god-knew-what-else. “So, what you do is you reach over his head and put your index and middle fingers into his nostrils like so and yank the bastard’s head back thusly!” He did so, thusly, which was synonymous with roughly or violently, as he always did, thusly, and threw me to the mat with a hollow and sick and sadly familiar thud. I of course landed on my already-bruised and nerve-damaged shoulder. “Simple, right? Do you get it?”

“Simple.”

“Now you try it,” he said.

Raymond put me in a snug, and what I found to be meaningful, headlock and said, “Go!”

But I could not reach over his shoulder and certainly not around his misshapened, oversized, and smelly head to come even close to his red and bulbous nose with nostrils ample enough to accommodate a few fingers each had they been able to get there. “I can’t reach,” I said.

“Keep trying,” he said and gave my head a squeeze and a little twist that incidentally must have affected my spine because my shoulder pain lessened. “Close your eyes and visualize your actions, your movements. Picture everything. Imagine you are me.”

I shuddered at the very thought. Still, I couldn’t reach his nose, and now I was finding it extremely difficult to breathe. I tried to say as much, though I’m sure it sounded like mere gurgling to him, and then he let me go by tossing me to the mat. Rather thusly.

“We’ll have to come up with another stop, another strategy altogether.” He paced. “This is the thing, you can’t let him get you in the headlock in the first place. Yeah, that’s the thing.” He studied me for a long scary second, as if to figure out what part of me might make the most noise upon breaking. “Okay, okay, come at me as if you want to put me in a headlock.”

I did, but it must have looked incredibly silly since he was at least a foot and a half taller than me. As instructed, I went at him like the complete fool I was. He stomped my left instep with one of his turned-in monkey-looking feet, hooked that same foot behind my right ankle, and popped me in the chest with the meaty heel of his hand, sending me sprawling onto the mat.

I lay there and he stood over me. He put his fist in his palm and bowed. “Our time is up today, Not Sidney. I will see you next week.”

“Thank you, Raymond.”

One of my favorite places, no doubt for its relative safety, was the small public library in Decatur. The librarian became accustomed to my face, and when she finally asked me my name and I told her, she simply said, “What an interesting name.” So, I liked her. She let me go into the old part of the stacks where the books were dusty and damp, and many were falling apart. I loved the smell of the books there, with their staleness and floating dust. I studied and studied, devouring all sorts of books, confused much of the time. I could hear my mother’s voice. “Read. Always read. No one can take that from you. The evil picture box [her name for the television] won’t make you smarter, but books will. Read. Read. Read.” And then she would lock me in my room with the Britannica. It was in the stacks of the library that I found a book by an Austrian psychiatrist named Anton Franz Fesmer. The slim volume was titled Passive Carriage Manipulation. The manipulation described was very much like hypnosis and perhaps more like the thoroughly debunked mesmerism; the similarity of the names was no doubt in great part responsible for Fesmer’s notable lack of recognition. Fesmerism was a method of gaining control of a subject without the subject’s awareness. The idea was a beautiful one, and it of course appeared to me as the perfect form of self-defense. The program had, however, one, rather huge, procedural hurdle. It required that the practitioner stare for some time, minutes, at the subject. The claim was that once one got better at it, the time of eye contact would become shorter. Fesmer also claimed that, unlike hypnosis, the subject’s actions would not exclude those that he or she would find offensive or unacceptable when not under the influence. I read the book twice and on a Wednesday went to the playground and got my ass kicked.

“Why are you staring at me?” Those were the last poorly formed words I recall hearing.

But I persisted, and I practiced on Claudia, Betty, and Ted and finally had my first success with Raymond.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

I stared at him.

“Not Sidney, why are you looking at me like that?” Then his eyes glazed over, and he said nothing.

I had him stand open, defenses down, exposed, and he received my punch to his midsection. He crumpled and became immediately un-Fesmerized. And so I stared at him again, and he slipped under. I beat him up fairly well that day, and he went home sore without any inkling why.

I still couldn’t Fesmerize Claudia, but I thought I might have gained just a bit of influence over Betty when I had her toss away the remaining portion of her Arby’s roast beef sandwich, something she had never done before.

Wednesday came, and I found myself at the playground. The biggest of the bullies was there alone, and without the others to show off for he showed little interest in me, except to say, “Hey, little motherfucker, you wait till later.”

I stared at him. I was about twenty yards away, no doubt trembling though I really don’t recall, and I launched my gaze at him, complete with one eyebrow raised, as clearly described in Fesmer’s procedural guide. The bully, his name was Clyde, asked me at what I was staring, his precise words being, “What you starin’ at, li’l motherfucker,” the “li’l motherfucker” saving him from ending a sentence with a preposition. However, I kept to my immediate business of raised-brow staring. Irritated, and no doubt bubbling with sadistic urges, he started toward me, grinding his fist into his palm the way he always did before pounding me. I felt my stomach tighten and tremble, but I stayed with it, and by the time he’d dragged his knuckles the twenty yards to me, his dull bovine eyes were glazed over like Raymond’s. I issued post-Fesmer instructions to him to not only protect me, but to allow me to strike him in the face whenever I pleased. When I said, “Oh, dumbshit,” he was to lean over and put out his chin. I practiced once, and then just had to do it again. I was somewhat impressed by the punching skills that Raymond had somehow taught me.

It all worked beautifully that day, and I found myself equipped with a tool that I knew would serve me for the rest of my life, a kind of psychological Swiss Army knife. The problem with the method was and would be the fact that not all people can be Fesmerized, and when they are impervious to it, they are not, sadly, oblivious to the person who is staring at them like some kind of maniac. So, if it doesn’t work, one comes across like an insane and possibly dangerous person. Unfortunately, I was never able to come up with a reliable profile for susceptible subjects. At first, I thought it was dumb people who made good subjects. I thought this until I was one day beaten to within an inch of my life by a remarkably stupid boy named, simply, Sidney, who had the obvious problem with my name. My staring bounced harmlessly off his pit-bull head like so many marshmallows. “What you be starin’ at?” he shouted. “You, yeah, I talkin’ to you!” I have to admit that I was distracted by his diction, and so perhaps my stare was somewhat weakened. By the same token, Betty, one of the smartest people I knew, turned out to be highly susceptible to the old Fesmer eye. The weapon was revealed to me as flawed and unpredictable and unreliable, and so I resigned to use it sparingly.

Betty was teaching me about the evils of supply-side economics when Ted came into the room. Betty was just finishing a sentence, “. . . and though Keynesian economics is no kind thing to common people, Say’s Law is truly the work of the white, European, devil mind.”

“I’d have to agree,” Ted said.

This startled Betty. She had not seen him enter.

“I believe that the market is driven by demand,” Ted said. “Otherwise, people get screwed up the hind end. The only thing that ever trickles down to poor people is rain, and that ain’t much more than God’s piss.”

Betty didn’t want to agree with Ted, but she nodded.

“How’s our student doing?” Ted asked.

“Very well,” Betty said. “Not Sidney is quite smart.”

“He’s got his mother’s brains. Have you ever had one of those itches in your ear that you have to scratch with your tongue inside your mouth? In fact that’s the only way to get to it.”

Though I had a boy’s crush on Betty, I knew that I was but eleven and that all the brains and money in the world wouldn’t make her kiss me. I in fact had a kind of crush on Ted as well, and so I found that what I really wanted was for the two of them to kiss. So, I tried to Fesmerize them. I couldn’t stare them into submission at the same time and decided to begin with Ted, as I remembered that I might have had earlier success with Betty during the sandwich incident and so chose to save her for last. I raised my left brow and sharpened, then leveled my penetrating gaze at Ted. He stared back at me for a while with an expression that could only be called quizzical, and I thought that I might have been making some headway until he said,

“Nu’ott, what’s wrong with your eye?”

“He does that sometimes,” Betty said. “I think it’s gas.”

“That doesn’t look good.”

A less persistent person, or a saner one, might have stopped at that point, but I gave it another push.

“Looks like the boy’s gonna pop. Nu’ott, you all right?”

I gave up. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Funny little episode you had there.”

“Just thinking,” I said.

“Okay, well, I’m going to talk to a man about a German shepherd dog. They’re great dogs. I especially like the way they walk, all slung low like that. You’re in charge, Betty.” He said that, then leaned over and gave Betty a kiss on the cheek before exiting the room.

Betty was taken by surprise, but hardly offended.

I was more confused than ever. Had my Fesmered suggestion been received and, more importantly, processed? Was I in fact responsible for that unexpected, unseemly, and glaringly inappropriate action? I was left not knowing if I had succeeded or failed, a state worse than failure itself.

“He kissed you,” I said to Betty.

“Oh, that wasn’t a kiss. That was what we call a peck.”

“Why do you think he kissed you?”

“It was a peck, Not Sidney.”

I let the matter rest, though I was no wiser or more percipient for my experiment or for having witnessed the event that I might or might not have caused. The only thing that was clear was that Ted and Betty now believed there was something wrong with me. I suppose I could have likened my new tool to a sort of psychological Swiss Army knife, as I said before, but to continue the metaphor, I could never know whether I was opening the scissors, saw blade, corkscrew, or leather awl, or whether it would open at all.

No one was more surprised than I when Ted invited Betty to join Jane, himself, and me on a sailing day-trip, except perhaps Betty, who surprised herself into a silk sundress and equally inappropriate wedge-soled sandals and onto a bus to St. Simons Island. Jane was glamorous and aloof, attributes that I imagined fed each other. From behind her oversized dark sunglasses she addressed me politely and warmly, pronouncing my name as she had learned it from Ted, Nu’ott. She received Betty politely yet somewhat less warmly, as she was baffled by the presence of the chubby tutor in the silk wraparound. Joining us also was a niece of Jane’s, daughter of her brother, a freckled girl about my age named Wanda Fonda who took an immediate, intense, and indefatigable shine to me.

It was sunny, but there were some clouds drifting around, and it was almost cool. It was cool enough that big goose bumps formed on Betty’s hefty thighs that were continually in view because of the attack of wind at her dress, despite her hands busily clutching fabric. Betty looked sorely out of place as she stepped aboard the Channel Seventeen, and I’m certain she felt that way as well, more so after Jane peeled off her raw linen trousers and white linen shirt, revealing her yellow bikini and cartoonishly narrow waist. There were no goose or duck or sparrow bumps on her as she lay out on the deck and appeared to have the sun’s rays zero in on her like a spotlight.

While Ted motored the sloop out of the slip and toward open water, Wanda Fonda had attached herself to my side. “What kind of name is Nu’ott?”

“My name is Not Sidney.”

“Okay, Not Sidney,” she rather nicely said. “Just what kind of name is Not Sidney?”

“One my crazy mother dreamed up.”

“I think it’s a nice name. I find it much better than my name. I hate that my name rhymes.”

“It’s not so bad. At least it doesn’t get you beaten up all the time.”

Wanda Fonda put her surprisingly strong grip on my forearm and sighed. “Do they beat you up?”

I was saved by Ted calling me over to him at the tiller. I moved to him, Wanda Fonda tethered fast.

“Nu’ott,” he said, “what we’re sailing today is a sloop. A sloop has one mast and two sails—mainsail and foresail. This fractional rig sloop was made by some Frenchies named Beneteau, was made in their factory in South Carolina. They grow great peaches up there. I love to suck on the pit, but then I never know what to do with it. The wind is the most important part of sailing. Without wind, there is no sailing. Today you’ll learn about the wind. Next time, knots. Yep, today you just sit back and watch and I’ll teach you about the wind and the beat and the close reach and the reach and the broad reach and the run, about luff and what it means to be in irons, about coming about and jibbing and about sails. You ever see what the sun can do to a convertible top over time? I had a little MG when I was in college, and the sun turned the top into a shag carpet.”

“Nu’ott, I’m going below for some lemonade,” this from Wanda Fonda. “Can I bring you some?”

“You can bring me a tall glass, Wanda Fonda,” Ted said. The girl was always called by both names. “Bring some for Betty, too. You want some lemonade, Betty? Maybe you want some iced tea instead?”

“Lemonade sounds nice,” Betty said. She was sitting not far from the tiller.

“You want some lemonade, Jane?” Ted called forward.

Jane waved her hand in the air in a way that could have meant yes or no or my nails are perfect.

“What about you, Nu’ott?” Wanda Fonda asked me, again.

“No, thank you,” I said.

With that Wanda Fonda disappeared down the companionway.

We passed under the sweeping suspension bridge, and Ted turned to me and said, “This is the Not Sidney Lanier Bridge.” He chuckled. “Just joking. I think Sidney Lanier was a poet or something.”

I looked at the bridge, looking both east and west along its length, but could not see where or if either end ever found land.

Once past the bridge Ted switched off his motor and raised the mainsail. The feeling of moving under the power of the wind was thrilling even though we weren’t making great speed. The motion of the sloop was hypnotic, at least to me. To Betty, it was nauseating. She swayed against the boat’s rhythm and took on a greenish cast.

Wanda Fonda came back with a tray of glasses of lemonade. The sweating glasses made me instantly wish that I had said I wanted some.

“You look like you’re going to upchuck, Betty,” Ted said. “Do me a favor and lean over the side when you do.”

Betty looked at the glass of lemonade being held out to her by the freckled Wanda Fonda, then turned to release her last meal into the Atlantic.

“Attagirl,” Ted said.

“Uncle Ted?”

“Yes, Wanda Fonda?”

“I’m glad you brought Nu’ott with us.”

Ted smiled warmly at me. “Of course I brought him out here. He’s a sailor at heart. A lover of the sea. An admirer of the wind. A free spirit. A mighty Viking! Or perhaps a Moor.”

My eleven-year-old ears liked the sound of that.

“Go up there and raise the foresail, Wanda Fonda.”

I watched as she did. The girl pulled a line and the sheet of canvas slid up the front side of the mast and I thought it was just beautiful. The sun found Wanda Fonda’s face and I thought she was beautiful as well.

We sailed on, tacking once to make a forty-five-degree turn. Betty tried to put on a strong front. Ted tried to talk to her over the roar of the wind, and she politely pretended to listen, but she was not faring well. Wanda Fonda had found again her station next to me and had even managed to inch her arm close enough to mine that we ever so slightly touched.

“I’d say we make a run!” Ted shouted. “Ready to come about, Wanda Fonda?”

Wanda Fonda’s lithe body sprang into action as she made her way forward and grabbed a crank and some line, I didn’t know what, and clearly listened for Ted’s next words.

Which were, “Hard-a-lee!,” if hard-a-lee is three words and not one. Ted let loose the line behind him, then pushed me down into the cockpit and let the boom swing quickly over me. The sail luffed, making a sound I immediately loved, then caught the wind as the boom swung out well to the starboard side of the boat.

Wanda Fonda dropped the foresail, then cranked as fast as she could, and the blue and white spinnaker went up and ballooned out.

“That Wanda Fonda is a heckuva sailor,” Ted said.

Now, with the full strength of the wind, we were really moving. The spray, the sun, the breeze, Jane’s thighs, it was all intoxicating. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the movement, the smells, the wet luxury of it all. The sky was the bluest I had ever seen, and the ocean seemed a part of it.

Betty was lying on the long cushion now, her face turned to the sky, as green as I had ever seen a person and growing paler. Jane was unimpressed by the coming about and lay still and magnificent under the sun; her skin seemed to bronze in front of me. She grew darker as Betty grew lighter.

Betty looked from stem to stern and then to Ted and asked, “How much did this boat cost?”

“A lot,” Ted said.

“Does it bother you to have so much?” she asked.

Ted paused, perhaps considering the question, perhaps considering lunch, and said, “Not yet.”

“Well, it bothers me,” Betty said.

“Then I won’t share it with you.” Ted laughed. “Did you know that horses can’t throw up? That’s all a cow does, back and forth, stomach to stomach, but a horse can’t. Strange.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Wanda Fonda asked me.

“No, and I don’t want one,” I said.

“I go to a private school. All girls.”

“Girls beat me up, too.” I turned to hear Ted telling Betty about how to make perfect pickles every time. “Where the bathroom?” I asked.

“The head,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s called the head. The bathroom is called the head.”

“Where’s the head?”

“Below,” Ted said. He turned to Betty. “Now, Nu’ott’s mother, she had a head on her shoulders. Brilliant woman. I wish I’d hired her, but, you know, I never thought to do that. Perhaps because I’m a privileged white male.”

“Come on,” Wanda Fonda said, taking my hand. “I’ll show you.”

I peed into the toilet, mostly into the toilet as the rocking of the boat made the project a challenge. When I came out, Wanda Fonda had pulled her pants to her ankles, revealing loud pink, high-waisted panties.

“Would you like to see my tattoo? We’ve all got them.”

I had never seen a tattoo, and I was, honestly speaking, interested, but I said, “You should pull up your pants.”

“Are you scared?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Of me?” she asked.

I nodded. “What’s the tattoo a picture of?”

She pulled down the front rim of her underwear and revealed a red circle with a stem, obviously a fruit, and I said, “An apple?”

“No, stupid, it’s a cherry.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It has to do with sex.”

Oddly, it was when she called me stupid that I first took a liking to Wanda Fonda. Enough of a liking that I decided to try my cyclopean eye at Fesmerizing her. I leaned into my stare. Before she could complain or clock me one across the head, she relaxed into that cow-eyed state that I so welcomed. I looked about the cabin and wondered what I might have her do, and I came up with nothing. I did have her pull up her pants. Then I remembered that I was eleven, almost twelve, and though sexual activity or exploration with Wanda Fonda was clearly out of the question, I did very much enjoy the idea of seeing actual tits. I instructed Wanda Fonda to go up on deck, make her way to Jane, and toss Jane’s bikini top overboard. I knew that it was already undone; the ties were lying teasingly alongside her as she lay facedown on her towel. I gave a post-Fesmer suggestion that she would remember none of my instructions and spend the rest of the trip fawning over Betty.

I followed back up the companionway topside. Wanda Fonda went directly to Jane and stood over her, blocking the sun.

Jane lifted her head and looked back at Wanda Fonda. “What is it, Wanda Fonda?”

The girl said nothing, but as Jane raised herself while lifting her shades to get a better look at the face over her, Wanda Fonda snatched the bikini top from the towel and tossed it into the air. The wind played with the abbreviated garment top for many seconds before letting it fly away from the boat and high into the air. Jane sat up and watched the article’s flight.

I looked at her breasts, and though I was sort of thrilled to be seeing them, I thought finally that her chest looked a lot like mine, only puffier.

“Why did you do that, Wanda Fonda?” Jane asked.

“Do what?”

Jane didn’t become even slightly upset, she just lay back down and said, “Never mind.”

It was all terribly disappointing, the breasts and the reaction. The sight of Jane’s breasts was made the more uninteresting by the fact that she simply didn’t care that I was seeing them. She paraded her boobies out and about for the rest of the time on the boat. Her eyes, hidden behind the dark glasses, became of far more interest to me. It was her eyes, the ones I couldn’t see, that seemed to work on my under-construction libido. I wanted, needed to see Jane Fonda’s eyes. I therefore set to the business of casting my cyclopean stare her way.

“What’s wrong with you, Nu’ott?”

I was terrified once again that I would be thought insane, but I persisted, raised my left brow another millimeter.

“Excuse me, but would someone, Ted, please ask this child what’s wrong with him?” Jane said.

I wondered as I worked on her, if her sunglasses would diminish the effectiveness of my gaze. I could not see behind them to detect any shift toward the desired cow-eyed state, so I pushed my suggestion that she toss her glasses overboard. It turned out that the dark lenses must have actually amplified my power because she whipped them from her face and tossed them out into the ocean without the slightest pause. Jane’s eyes were sad-making, not weak, not really sullen, but cheerless, tenebrific. I pushed the suggestion that I was sorry and that she should not associate me with the action, but I knew that I needed to back off. My ability, two successes in a row, scared me greatly. I remained quiet for the rest of the trip. Betty was entertained mercilessly by the cherry-tattooed Wanda Fonda and Jane sat around with eyes and tits unabashedly uncovered and Ted railed on about the first television—“It was nothing but static, but what moving static it was”—and how baseballs were made—“In Haiti, by women who bend all the way down and stand all the way up with every stitch”—and whether inflammable and flammable were really the same word—“I mean, invariably and variably don’t mean the same thing.” Except for the wind-driven ride itself, I had pretty much controlled the action on the boat.

I never saw Wanda Fonda again, and Jane barely acknowledged me when I would greet her by the pool. I continued to sail with Ted, and time went by. Tutors came and went. My wealth grew, or so I was told by Ted’s accountant, an Indian man named Podgy Patel.

“You have vast money,” he said in his singsong accent. “Vaster this week than last.”

“How much money do I have?” We were sitting in the living room of my quarters.

“How old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

“Let me just say ‘vast.’ The actual figure might frighten you.”

“Tell me.”

“I cannot.” He smiled the smile he always smiled, a smile I imagined he would wear whether he was being tickled, being praised, or being fired. “I can only say that your wealth is … ”

“Vast,” we said together.

“Very good,” he said.

“What if I want some money?” I asked.

“Just ask.”

“What if I want fifty thousand dollars?”

“Just ask.”

“What if I don’t want to ask?”

“Write it down.”

“Can’t I just go to the bank?”

“You are thirteen. They will not give you fifty thousand dollars.”

“But you will,” I said.

“Of course, it is your money.”

“And I can do anything I want with it? I can throw it off a building downtown if I want to?”

“That sounds foolish, but yes.”

“Okay, I want fifty thousand dollars,” I said.

“Do you really? Or are you just saying that?”

“No, I want it.”

“I’ll bring it by this afternoon.”

I felt for some reason defeated, even though this smiling Podgy Patel man was telling me that I was insanely wealthy. “Never mind,” I said. “I guess I don’t want the money.”

“I knew it.”

Like most people I am smarter than some, dumber than others, skinnier than most, and fatter than a few, but none was ever more confused than I was. I flew with confusion always parallel to me, and a whole internal chase at my rear. The one matter that was not confusing to me, but seemed to escape all others, was the fact that the only thing that was certain to become obsolete, would necessarily become wearied and worn, was the truth. I knew this in spite of the truth that I had had little truck with the truth in my life. It was not that I considered myself a resident in a den of lies, but rather that my history was shrouded and diced and soaking wet with hysteria and contradiction. Contradictions or no, my trajectory through life, though different from most, was, nonetheless, a trajectory. The move from my bizarre early childhood in Los Angeles to my strange latter childhood in Atlanta was abrupt, yet somehow seemingly seamless, the sudden death of my mother and my induction into the world of a media icon notwithstanding.

A few years disappeared into wherever time goes and with them my childhood, Claudia, the cook, and my karate instructor. Betty graduated from college and married a Morehouse man from Ohio whom I never met. For a couple of years I received the occasional, uninformative postcard from Akron, usually depicting something called the Soap Box Derby. I lived in my part of the house pretty much alone as the Russian woman who cooked for me spoke no English and the woman who cleaned refused to speak to me. I saw Ted often.

By the time I was in high school, it was common knowledge, or at least it was no secret, that I lived at Ted Turner’s house. To my teachers my name was odd, but to my classmates I was Sidney or Not Sidney or something other than Sidney. My real name became a mystery to be solved for many. Still, I was beaten often, but now in an attempt to have me give up that bit of prized information, namely my name. There was some upside, as some of the looser girls would offer to kiss me if I told them my name. I would gladly agree to the arrangement. I would receive the kiss and then say, “My name is Not Sidney.” Unfortunately, the looser girls often would and could be more violent and fierce than the boys, and so they would offer up an entrée of whup-ass with sides of hair pulling and scratching.

A steady diet of humiliation leads to a kind of immunity or desensitization to abasement and discomfiture and so I found myself caring less and less, and the less I cared the less anyone seemed interested in beating me up. Lack of interest or not, the beatings continued, perhaps because they had become a habit or ritual for a few. Sadly, that journey to pointless and profitless immunity often is completed with a degree of permanent injury, usually to the brain and/or nervous system, but I luckily made it through without any perceptible lasting marks—physical, physiological, or neurological. Psychic damage, however, is far more difficult to assess, though I think I was saved from even that by my sense of irony.

My mother’s insistence on my reading as much as possible made me bored in school. I never imagined that I was terribly bright, but I turned out to be extremely well educated. I made friends with a squat, square-headed, bespectacled white boy named Eddie Eliazar in my American history class. He had an overdeveloped fondness for World War Two–era airplanes and suffered all the ridicule and only a fraction of the beatings I endured. I imagined that his diminutive stature saved him the physical abuse. We shared a crush on and competed for the attention of our history teacher, Miss Hancock, a narrow-shouldered blond woman with pale blue eyes and long legs who was not so much beautiful as perhaps honest looking. Eddie attempted to wow her with plastic models of Messerschmitts, Zeros, and Corsairs while I became obsessed with the concealment of FDR’s disability from the American public, my real interest being the definitions of disability and public. About this interest, Miss Hancock would say, “How fascinating,” a response that I loved then, but would later come to recognize as code for any number of things. There were clearly codes in her employ that fell short of my understanding, but it soon became evident that my emerging resemblance to Sidney Poitier was not lost on her and that an inappropriate and, I must say, welcomed relationship began to surface. The girls of my school were too accustomed to teasing, ignoring, or beating me to observe any maturation or change in my appearance or bearing, but Miss Hancock, unfortunate name and all, did notice and with much zeal, eagerness, and a surprising and confusing amount of enterprise.

The relationship took flight, not unlike one of Eddie’s Messerschmitts, when after school one day Miss Hancock asked me if I would accompany her home and move some bags of topsoil and manure from the trunk of her car to her garden shed. I should have read her signals, as she told me all this while crossing and uncrossing and recrossing her smooth, miniskirted legs and applying dark red lipstick. But I was naïve, dumb, inexperienced, fifteen and, most importantly, stupid. So, I rode with her in her powder blue Mustang convertible, top and tinted windows up, to her modest house at the edge of Decatur. I got out of the car and walked to the back, waiting for her to open the trunk, which she did and all I saw was a spare tire, a jack, and jar of petroleum jelly. I looked at her, I imagine, rather blankly.

She responded by saying, “Do you know what fellatio is?”

I told her I did not, but the subtext was becoming clear. I had heard other guys talking about encounters, desired encounters of this kind, but I felt this was all being wasted on me. I was a sexual imbecile. More than that, I was an innocent, a stowaway. I had come to her country with no visa, passport, and with no destinations in mind. I had come to move topsoil from the trunk of a blue Mustang to some garden shed in the backyard.

In her house, and I’m not certain how she got me in there, the teacher put her mouth on my penis and sucked on it. My eyes rolled back into my head, and I recalled the long, drawn-out, luxurious days of my youth. I was lying in the backyard, staring up at the forever cloudless blue California sky, except that it was brown. I could hear my mother in her study by the open window, dictating into her recorder her ideas about politics and the culture. I was alone, as I was always alone. No one would play with me, the freak. But somehow I loved the moments in the backyard, my mother’s ranting a kind of white noise from the house and the sounds of boys playing elsewhere a comfort because that meant they had no interest in torturing me. I lay there and identified the birds, my trusty Peterson guide beside me. I was enjoying the memory of a Rufous-sided Towhee when sharp pain brought me back.

I did have some idea what fellatio was, but I hadn’t known the extent to which teeth were involved. I was contemplating this while sitting in the garden at home. Ted joined me.

“When I was a boy I always wanted to collect me a jar full of fireflies, but I never did,” Ted said.

“Have you ever been seduced?” I asked.

“Once or twice,” he chuckled. “When I was younger. What about you? And why are you sitting like that?”

“Do you know what fellatio is?”

“Why, yes, Nu’ott, I do. It’s when one person wraps his or her lips around the penis of another and either sucks it or rubs it with the tongue, sometimes causing ejaculation. It’s also referred to as giving head, a hummer, or a blow job, though blow seems antithetical to the actual action employed. Why do you ask?”

“Someone did it to me,” I said.

“Who?”

“My history teacher.”

“A woman?”

“Yes, a woman,” I said.

“An attractive woman?”

“I guess.”

“Well, you know, that doesn’t sound too bad on the face of it, but it seems a little inappropriate.” Ted folded a stick of gum into his mouth. “Gum? It’s Juicy Fruit.” When I shook my head, he looked back at my part of the house. “Do you get lonely living here all by yourself?”

“Not really.”

“These are Italian shoes. I’ve often wondered why those Italians should be so good at making shoes. They don’t walk more than other people. When I was a boy I read this story about a man who lost his arm in an accident. Scared me so much I taught myself to tie my shoes with one hand.”

“But wait. Ted, how do you get to choose which arm you’ll lose in an accident?” I asked.

Ted stopped working his gum for a second. “That’s a very good question, Nu’ott. I hadn’t thought of that. I guess it had better be my left. So, are you going to turn this teacher in?”

“Do what?”

“Report your teacher for making improper advances to you, a minor. Did you like it?” he asked.

“Not terribly,” I said. “It did feel kind of good before the biting.”

“It’s up to you, but I say report her. She’s contributing to the delinquency of a minor. And apparently giving defective blow jobs.”

“I don’t think I’ll tell on her,” I said. “She seems kind of sad.”

“Everybody is always maligning the granny knot, but I think it’s every bit as good as a square knot. Left over right and right over left. Who the hell cares? What do you think?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know, I miss that Betty.” Ted looked down at the peonies near where we sat. “She was a smart young woman.”

“She’s in Ohio with some minister dude with dreadlocks. She sends me postcards.”

“Minister dude? God save us. Are you going back to the history teacher’s house?” Ted asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said.

“Is that fatherly advice?” I didn’t mean what I said in any snide way, but I could imagine him hearing it like that. But he didn’t.

“No, this is just advice from a fellow penis owner,” he said. “These things don’t come with a manual. As far as I can see, nothing of any importance comes with a manual.”

“And so that’s why we have television,” I said.

Ted looked at me blankly for a second, then said, “I guess so, Nu’ott. I guess that’s right. Everybody should have a headstone. You know what I want written on my headstone when I die? I want it to read, I have nothing more to say.”

I nodded. “What does my mother’s headstone say?”

“I don’t know, son. I never actually saw her grave. I learned of her death because she had named me executor of her will. I suppose her stone gives the dates of her birth and death and maybe says something like Loving Mother. I think that’s kind of standard.”

I didn’t say it to Ted, but I wanted to see my mother’s grave. I wanted also to come up with something fitting for her headstone.

“I remember your mother’s cookies. Damn, they were good.”

I thought about the cookies and didn’t remember them being so tasty, however, they were remarkably uniform in size and color.

“This teacher, does she have full lips? Does she wear makeup? How short are her skirts? Just trying to get a picture of the whole thing.”

Hormones and a weak spine conspired to put me again at the split-level ranch home of Miss Hancock. I hadn’t during my previous visit been able to take in the décor, but a quick glance around made me appreciate in what a confused state I’d been and to conclude that Miss Hancock was not like most people. Three of the walls of the living room were tiled with patterned mirrors, allowing broken reflections of everything and nothing in particular, and on every surface—the mantel of the fireplace, the coffee table, the top of the television—were little dinner bells, the size of a shot glass and smaller, from the fifty states, from amusement parks, from funeral homes, from hotels and motels and hostels, county and state fairs. I walked around the front two rooms while she went into the kitchen for iced tea.

“Why all the bells?” I asked.

She handed me an already sweating glass of tea. “I like bells,” she said. “You can ring any one you like. All, if you want to. I want you to ring my bell.” She laughed at that.

I sipped the too-sweet tea. I searched for something to say to her, anything. “Which one is your favorite?”

“That’s easy.” She walked across the room. I watched her legs beneath her short, pleated skirt. She wore knee socks. She picked up a little blue porcelain bell from the top of the television. “This bell is from a motel in Sparta, Mississippi, the Tibbs Inn. In the restaurant they had barbecue, Tibbs Ribs.”

“Why was that so special?” I asked.

“It wasn’t really, but the bell is blue. It’s periwinkle. It’s the only periwinkle one I have. Take off your pants.”

“I don’t know about this, Miss Hancock.” I took a step back. If I had only added a “gee” in front of my statement, I could have been completely the cliché I felt like—Beaver Cleaver getting a hummer.

“Call me Beatrice when we’re here.”

Her name caught me off guard and I had a notion to laugh, but I suppressed the deeply buried tickle.

“I really don’t know about this,” I said.

“Of course you know, Not Sidney. Didn’t it feel good last time? I was sure you liked it.”

“Well, sort of.”

“Okay, take off those pants and we’ll try it again. We do it until we get it right. How does that sound?”

I backed into a large-wheeled tea cart and set a rack of tiny bells swinging and dinging.

“See, you’ve upset the bells. The little bells are crying out. Now, stop backing away from me.”

“I’d better go home,” I said.

“If you leave, then I will fail you and you’ll never graduate from high school and you’ll never get into college and you’ll waste away on the street until you turn to drugs and die hopeless, helpless, and alone.”

“All of that from turning down a blow job?”

“You’d better believe it.”

“You can’t do that,” I said, not so much worried about the picture she had painted, but offended on principle.

“Can and will.”

“I’ll report you,” I told her.

“Go ahead, report me. Who will they believe? Me, teacher of the year, or you, a kid without a proper name, angry because he couldn’t live out his fantasy with the hot teacher?”

“It’s ‘whom.’ ”

“What?”

“It’s ‘whom will they believe.’ ”

“Shut up and take off those pants. Be a good boy and I’ll pretend none of this silly stuff ever happened.”

I unfastened my belt, understanding at that moment how what was happening had nothing to do with sex, only and simply power, watching as she approached me like the predator she was. She reached out and grabbed the waistband of my khakis, pushed them down past my thighs. My penis hung there unimpressive and unimpressed. Beatrice dropped to her knees and took me into her mouth. Hormones got the better of me and I began to swell, at least my penis did, but before I could get completely hard she’d start in with her teeth and my organ would retreat. It went like that for a bit, back and forth, pleasure and pain, arousal and repulsion, erection and deflation. She sucked away like a maniacal vacuum and I stared down at her, hating her for threatening to fail me, while not caring actually if she did fail me, fearing her for her clumsy teeth and my compromised position.

I had nothing to do but watch and so I leaned into my Fesmer gaze. She seemed turned on by my staring, reading it as intensity, and so she sucked harder. The sight of her working away like that was somewhat comical. What came with her increased excitement was, sadly, more employment of teeth, but I focused and stayed with it, and my suggestion was mainly the cessation of biting. The gnashing and gnawing did subside, and I believed I had put her under, so to speak, and so I encouraged her rather strongly to give up the idea of failing me in history.

Without the chewing and chomping, the fellatio became pleasurable in that animal way that any kind of genital manipulation is pleasurable to a teenage boy, in spite of her name being Beatrice, in spite of the audience of dinner bells, in spite of my being a victim.

The biting stopped, but I was bitten nonetheless. Beatrice Hancock flunked me and I sat there, dumbfounded, feeling more or less exactly like someone who might actually flunk history. I didn’t like the feeling, though I was momentarily fascinated by it. She gave me a look when I glanced up from my report card, as if she’d been aware of my attempt to manipulate her mind. I wondered if sexual arousal or distraction had served to diminish my Fesmeric thrust. Perhaps with my penis already in her head there was no more room for any more of me, including my unspoken and poorly formed mental suggestions. The failing mark was certainly an attack, perhaps even an insult, and still it meant little to me. However, it was now a matter of principle, a matter of fair play, decent behavior, and so I found myself marching down the corridor to the principal’s office.

The principal was a squat, bell-shaped man named Clapper. Mr. Clapper had been made hard and tough by years of dealing with abuses to his name. He or the custodian or both were ever vigilant in erasing the Clapper-driven graffiti from the walls of the crapper.

He did not stand when I walked in. He looked at me with his good eye. “Why are you in here, Not Sidney Poitier?” He called everyone by his or her full name to show off his memory.

“I have a complaint,” I said.

“You know you’re looking more and more like that Sidney Poitier every day.” He tilted his head as if to get a better view. “Yes, very much like him. Tall and dark like him. Thick red lips like his.”

“Mr. Clapper.”

“What kind of complaint?”

I looked at the open door.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said.

“It’s about Miss Hancock.”

“Have a seat.” When I was seated, he said, “Go on. What did Miss Hancock do?”

“She failed me.”

“That’s her job,” he said.

“I did A-grade work.”

“That’s not for you to say.” He leaned forward and interlaced his fingers on his desk, staring at me. Had I not known better, I might have guessed he was trying to Fesmerize me.

“She took me out to her house, supposedly to move bags of topsoil and manure, and then she—” I found myself unsure about how to proceed with my accusation. I could not say blow job to the principal and neither could I say to him that Beatrice Hancock had given me head or fellated me, so I landed, like a blind roofer, on rape. “She raped me,” I said, regretting it before I had uttered the final word.

I never heard such laughter. Mr. Clapper turned beet red, his tongue rolled into a tube and pushed out of the O of his mouth as he coughed, and tears trickled down his corpulent face while he pointed at me. I think he said, that’s rich, or maybe, you wish, or that bitch, which made no sense. But it was clear, clearer than clear, that he did not believe me.

I got up and walked from his office into the outer chamber and looked at all the wide-eyed potato faces of the staff who had evidently overheard the exchange. They didn’t laugh out loud, but they found me plenty amusing.

As much as I didn’t want to care, I was unable to let the matter rest. The whole thing gnawed at me, much in the manner of Miss Hancock. Things were of course made worse by the story buzzing through the entire school. I was used to the pointing and laughing, the insults and beatings, but somehow, in that strange universe of high school, my universe of high school, that abuse made sense. But now what lay at the core of my ridicule was a lie. Even Eddie Eliazar turned against me; I had either lied about his beloved Beatrice Hancock or, worse, been with his beloved Beatrice Hancock. He was obliged to hate me either way. One thing surfaced through this, a kind of bodily discovery. I realized that I was not small. At just over six feet and looking much like Sidney Poitier, I was becoming a man. One of the usual bullies approached me in the cafeteria.

“You gonna eat that cupcake?” he asked.

I was sitting alone, in my usual place, wherever there was an empty seat alone. “Why, do you want it?”

“Yeah, I want it.”

I looked at the yellow-and-white-topped cupcake. I never had any intention of putting the heavily buttercream-iced sawdust in my mouth, but I said, “I think I’ll keep it.” I looked up at him, surprising myself that I had not even thought to attempt Fesmerization. And then I stood. As it turned out I was a good three or four inches taller than the bully.

I saw retreat in his eyes, but he was pushed forward by the pressure of his friends and everyone else in the cafeteria, for that matter.

“I think I’ll eat it.” I took a bite of the awful thing.

“I’m gonna fuck you up,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Fuck me up.”

Now even his friends were nervous. The bully turned to his backup singers and said, “Let’s go.” And they went.

What should have been a moment of triumph for me, standing up for myself and even settling the matter without blows, turned oddly sour as I realized that the kids around me were now afraid of me. By so daringly stepping away from my role as victim, I was to be feared, or at least made to feel like a shit for abandoning the rules.

I hated everything about everything. The rules that had been broken, the trust that had been broken, were all broken by that slutty history teacher, that orally fixated predator who didn’t know that normalcy was coined by a dumb president.

At home, I ate alone and in the dark. I paced the grounds. I was walking back and forth the length of the pool on Saturday morning when Ted came out in his trunks for a swim.

“Hey, Nu’ott,” he said, then dove into the deep end. He came up and looked at the sky. “I’ve never been struck by lightning. You?”

Had it been anyone but Ted I would have thought he was speaking metaphorically. But he was talking about lightning. “No,” I said.

“I bet it hurts like hell.”

“Well, my teacher failed me,” I told him.

“Wow.”

“I went back to her house, I don’t know why, and she did it again and I asked her not to and she said she’d fail me if I didn’t let her and so I let her and then she failed me anyway.”

“Wow.”

“I went to the principal, but he laughed.” I sat on the edge of a pool chair. “You know, I really don’t care, but I care. Know what I mean?”

“Absolutely.” He went under and came back up.

“What should I do?”

“I can’t tell you that, Nu’ott. You can climb the ladder of command if you want, but I can’t say that’s what you should do. You have to decide what you need out of this, what’s important to you. I wonder if you know the lightning’s coming. A fellow told me that when he got struck he felt like he had glass in his shoes. Welded his zipper shut. If I were you I might go to the school superintendent.” Then he was submerged again, swimming to the far side.

The following Monday I skipped school and went to the office of the superintendent of the school system. The downtown building that housed that office was glass and steel and looked like it was probably outdated and obsolete before it had been completed. Everyone there seemed shocked to see an actual student on the premises and stared at me like I was an experiment of some kind. I believe I got in to see the superintendent only because they were all so confused by my presence.

I stepped into the plush, tastelessly decorated office to discover that Dr. Gunther was a gray-haired woman with square glasses. From looking at her I felt confident that if she had ever seen a penis she certainly had not put the thing in her mouth. I had the immediate thought that I might fare better with her than I had with Mr. Clapper. She asked me to sit and if I’d like some water. I sat in the low, hard chair and said no to the water.

“What may I do for you, young man?” She pulled a pad of paper in front of her. “First, what is your name?”

“My name is Not Sidney Poitier.”

“I can well imagine.” She studied my features. “You do look a little like him. Now, what is your name?”

“Not Sidney Poitier. My name is Not Sidney Poitier.”

She appeared suddenly nervous, perhaps afraid, casting sidelong glances at her door and phone. “And you’re here because?”

“I’d like to report the inappropriate behavior of a teacher,” I said.

“Sexually inappropriate?”

“Yes. Of the oral variety.” I said this and looked away from her at one of the two big-eyed clown paintings on the wall behind her.

She appeared to be genuinely concerned. “Just where are you in school?”

“Decatur Normal.”

“And your principal is—”

“Mr. Clapper.”

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“And the teacher in question?”

“My history teacher, Beatrice Hancock.” I took pleasure in saying her name, so I said it again. “Beatrice Hancock.”

“And what did she do?”

I decided to not beat around the bush, but dove straight into it, to offer the shock of it. “She drove me to her tacky house, got on her knee-socked knees, and gave me what I have since learned is called a blow job.”

“She did, did she?”

“And, to tell the truth, she wasn’t very good at it. I don’t think it’s supposed to hurt.”

She cleared her throat. “Well, never mind that. This happened once?” Dr. Gunther asked.

“No, twice.”

“I thought you said it hurt.”

“It did, both times,” I said.

“Why did you let it happen a second time?”

“She forced me.”

Dr. Gunther stared at me for a few seconds. “Did you tell Mr. Clapper that Miss Hancock did this to you?”

“I did. He laughed.”

“You don’t mind if I call him, do you?”

I shrugged. As she asked her secretary to get Clapper on the phone I realized what a bad idea it was for me to be there. This woman didn’t believe me and wasn’t going to believe me. I thought she might call security at any second and that I would then be just one twitch away from getting shot by a product of this very school system. She smiled, rather insincerely, at me while she waited, receiver pressed to her small gray head.

“Mr. Clapper? Yes, this is Superintendent Mrs. Dr. Gunther Junior down here in the central office. Oh, I’m fine. And how are you? And how is your wife? And how are your children? I’m sitting here in my office with a tall young black man. Do you have a student named Poitier? Really. So, that actually is his name.” Her sounds became absurd and muted, and then she was nothing but a working mouth in front of me, like a crab eating. I wanted to dash out of there, down the glass-and-steel corridors and into the street, but I didn’t. Then the sound of her voice came back and now it was laughter, cackling, witch-cackling laughter, which at once frightened me, irritated me, and justified all of my not-so-kind preconceptions. She hung up the phone, looked at me, and laughed harder.

As I walked out of the building and into the light spring air, I realized that I truly did not care, not even about the principle. I had no desire to see Miss Hancock punished and no notion to give her a piece of my mind. It of course helped me in not caring to remember that I was filthy rich. Grades and diplomas, perhaps sadly, simply didn’t matter to me. And as far as blond Beatrice Hancock was concerned, at least she had learned to suck a penis without drawing blood, and so I had performed a sort of public service, offering a measure of protection to the next in her line of victims. I was fairly clear in my desire to become a high school dropout. I decided right then to light out for the territory, as it were, to leave my childhood, to abandon what had become my home, my safety, and to discover myself. Most importantly I wanted to find my mother’s grave and put something fitting, perhaps beautiful, on her headstone. What? I’d yet to figure that out. The warm and humid spring air filled me with clean inspiration and a sense of independence.

And so, this became a prophetically, apocalyptically instructive, even sibylline, moment. I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in this world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.