There’s Never Any Trouble Here in Bubbleland

When I was a kid, maybe six, Maryland Public Television (MPT) took Lassie rebroadcasts off the air. My younger brother Stephen and I were incensed. Our youngest brother Jeffrey hadn’t been born yet, but I’m sure he was furious in utero. The Saturday morning following, Stephen and I came marching downstairs and went right to the set of desks our parents had set up for us in the living room. My mom asked what we were doing. Stephen told my mother, in no uncertain terms, that he’d decided I was going to write a letter to MPT and make them turn Lassie back on. Stephen was the spokesman and idea man, even at three, so I deferred to him.

We fumed about Lassie’s removal. We were shaking with anger. It was outrageous. I excused myself and went to scream in another room for a moment. Who did these people think they were?! I was determined to let them have it.*

Even from an early age, my parents imbued in us the knowledge that although life wasn’t just, we could always do something about it. We lived, the soon-to-be five of us, in a big house in the middle of a broken-down neighborhood in West Baltimore, lassoed by red-lining and crippled by the drug trade. My parents’ pleas to elected officials and city agencies, about everything from broken streetlights to increased police presence near open-air drug markets, were constant. Sometimes they got a response, sometimes they didn’t. But they were relentless because they were trying to create the world that they wanted their children to live in. At six, I saw the discontinuation of Lassie as a perhaps less urgent injustice but an injustice nonetheless. I assumed my parents’ mantle and set about to make the world I wanted: a world containing a highly communicative collie with an impressive sense of urgency. At Stephen’s prompting, I wrote a strongly worded letter to MPT on that beige paper with the big blue lines that they give you in first grade. My mother mailed it and we waited. I remember going to the television the next day, turning it on, and being thunderstruck that they were still playing whatever trash they’d replaced Lassie with. “Haven’t you received my letter?!” I bellowed, as I threw a plastic plate filled with plastic food against the wall of our playhouse. “What is this world coming to?”

Eventually, MPT sent us a couple of tchotchkes for our trouble, among them a mug with Disney characters on it. I unwrapped it and poured myself a juice, shaking with indignation. If this was a parable, I guess the lesson would be that life isn’t fair but if you complain sometimes you get free things. Useful.

For much of my childhood, the only television channel we were allowed to watch was MPT, so Lassie (RIP), Mr. Rogers, and Sesame Street were in heavy rotation. This was fine with me, especially considering Mr. Rogers was home to the original dramatic queen Lady Elaine Fairchilde, the fearsome, overly rouged, cardigan-wearing antagonist of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. I was obsessed with her, with her feckless but fangless villainy, with her catchphrase “Toots!”, with her all-business dirty-blond bob. (Lady Elaine would always like to speak with the manager.) And, although I was a very nice child, I absolutely loved the contempt with which Lady Elaine Fairchilde viewed literally everyone else. Her misanthropy was electrifying. To this day I am amazed that someone as chill and Presbyterian as Fred Rogers created someone as over-the-top fabulous as Lady Elaine. She has a royal title and she is constantly in feuds with her brother; she’s essentially a reality star. And like the most successful reality stars, Lady Elaine Fairchilde is the gay icon we need and want. She has all the hallmarks of gay iconography, eighties edition: an old-timey name, frequent appearances in musicals despite a lack of apparent singing ability, eyebrows, no time to date because she is too busy plotting drama, hates people. Why is there not a Lady Elaine float at every Pride? Why can’t I buy a bedazzled tank top that says “TOOTS!” to wear to the beach? Where is the justice in this world?!

I didn’t have as complex a read of Lady Elaine as a child. I just knew that this queen was extra as hell and I was living for every terse line reading. I would frequently turn from a television playing Mr. Rogers and say to an empty room, “I can’t wait until Patricia Clarkson and Sarah Paulson play her at different stages in her life in a biopic that I am currently writing.”

One of my favorite Lady Elaine moments also spawned one of our household’s favorite catchphrases. It came from the episode titled “Mr. Rogers Makes an Opera.” Oh, by the way, because he was relentless in his pursuit of eccentricity, Mr. Rogers cast all of the puppets in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe as characters in an opera that would form the basis of many future homosexual personalities. I really want to tell you, from memory, the in-depth plot of the opera Windstorm in Bubbleland, because, honey, it will blow your wig back. But it would take too long because every single detail is essential. Put this book down right now and google it and then come back. Wait, first grab a snack, then come back. You gotta eat, Toots.

Suffice it to say, Lady Elaine played Hildegarde Hummingbird, a resident of a burg called Bubbleland who sensed that there was trouble on the horizon that would threaten the primary feature of the landscape—bubbles. No one believed her. In fact, they sang a whole song called “There’s Never Any Trouble Here in Bubbleland,” which is the kind of petty, extra shit I live for.

There’s a whole lot that happens—an evil executive who hates the environment reveals himself to be a wind monster! The dramatic reveal is accompanied by a costume change into a silver caftan! It’s EVERYTHING!—but the thing that I was most affected by was the idea that Lady Elaine, despite her eccentric, sometimes antisocial ways, was not the villain. She was the only resident of Bubbleland who saw its weaknesses and therefore the only resident who could save it from destruction.

The rest of my household picked up a different takeaway. “There’s never any trouble here in Bubbleland” became my mother’s frequent ironic refrain, a sardonic way of expressing frustration at a situation that was set up for my parents to fail. Our neglected neighborhood was crumbling around us; my parents worked tirelessly but still struggled financially; their parents were ailing. When the weight of it all threatened to overtake her, my mother, with a lightness, would sigh, “There’s never any trouble here in Bubbleland.” It became a relief valve, a code word, a cry for help. It also served as a guiding metaphor. The world outside was troublesome, but the house and the world my parents built for us within it was a bubble. A delicate, permeable utopia.

Utopia came at a figurative and literal price. I was aware as a child that the economics of making a life were hard. I knew it in simple ways, like “We don’t have money to add every available cereal to the grocery cart just because Eric would like to taste one spoonful and then decide he doesn’t like it.” I wasn’t sure if a cereal smorgasbord was something that happened at other people’s houses, but I knew that it didn’t happen at ours and I presumed it was because every time we asked to add something to the cart, we were informed that it wasn’t on The List. The List was a buzzkill. I did not like The List. I also knew that money was an issue for my parents, because I’d sometimes walk in on them in the middle of tense conversations, and even though I had yet to watch a Lifetime movie about hardscrabble people trying to make ends meet, I had a sense of what the air in that particular room felt like. I didn’t think that we were poor, per se. But after nearly four decades on this planet and a long, nightmarish conversation about “economic anxiety” and the “forgotten working class,” I am willing to entertain the idea that there are many kinds of poverty, that your mortgage can be paid on time and your children can be fed and you can still live in Poor America.

As an adult, I have an even clearer, more terrifying understanding of what the stakes must have been for my parents. As a child, I had no way of contextualizing how much things cost or how difficult it can be to stay on top of everything, even without kids. Now I know and I look back at the feat my parents pulled off with awe and a shiver, as I shovel one spoonful of every kind of cereal into my mouth. I also know that I’ll never fully get it. I’ll never be in their exact context: I’ll never know exactly how much the frequent ER visits for their children’s asthma set them back, exactly how many times car repairs or school uniforms or a layoff or the cost of heating a four-story house in the middle of a dilapidated neighborhood knocked them off course.

One thing I didn’t know then but now can’t forget is that my mother didn’t purchase an item of clothing for herself for over a decade during my childhood. As she explains it now, “There simply wasn’t money. My clothes didn’t make The List.” In the present, my parents will drop details about how things used to be for them with a casualness that belies how stunning those facts are. They shared a car for many years, so my father sometimes walked for miles to get home; he worked three jobs to afford school for me and my brothers, including a paper route in the wee small hours of the morning. My mother worked tirelessly to build a nurturing and educationally vigorous home for a decade and then went back to teaching elementary school, while putting herself through grad school and taking care of her ailing parents. And, for a ten-year stretch, they didn’t buy themselves clothing.

When I ask my parents about that decade, they demur. “It’s what we had to do,” they say, which, as an adult, I both recognize and refuse to accept. I tinker with my budget constantly. I download apps and spreadsheets and read blog posts and complain to friends about money all the time. I know that every money decision comes with a choice. Even a choice that is compelled is still a choice. So when they say it’s what they had to do, I know that the choice implicit in that sentence is me and my brothers. They chose us. And in so doing they created a world motivated by that choice. That’s the goal. You work hard so that your children are able to live a life somewhat free from the burdens that plagued you. That’s the gift my parents gave us, free of charge. Or, at least, I assume that’s a parent’s goal. I don’t have any kids but I want those things for my houseplants.

Much of my family’s financial difficulty came from trying to put me and my brothers through private school, a decision that made everything in my life possible. My brothers went to a private Episcopalian school and I went to Park, a progressive K-12 school with a campus comprised of one hundred acres of woodland. It’s a remarkable place that functions more like a small liberal arts college than a traditional private school. A pond sits in the middle of campus; a stream winds between athletic fields. The students are empowered to be part of decision-making about the school but not in a ridiculous way where you end up having every kind of cereal for lunch every day. At Park, they recognize that students are people and worthy of being listened to, but they’re also a school and, as such, recognize that children are lunatics.

This lunatic thought he had died and gone to heaven when he enrolled at Park in fourth grade. It is hard to put into words how perfect an environment it was for me. The faculty saw me. That’s the whole thing. They saw my creative spirit and my curiosity and my tactile learning habits and my aversion to being outside and they affirmed all of it. Prior to Park, I’d gone to a very tiny arts conservatory that may have been a Ponzi scheme, to a Baptist elementary school, and, for three months, to public school. At the public school, one of my classmates bit me on the hand in protest for having to share computer time with me, and my mother rolled up on that place like a flash flood to whisk me and my lightly bleeding hand out of there.

The people at the school had the temerity to try to keep the computer lab fee my parents had paid at the beginning of the year. Guess how well that went over? My mother arrived at school to collect me, most of my hand, and our computer fee, wearing a black wool pantsuit with chalk stripes that I knew as “Betty Grey’s suit.” Betty Grey, a woman at our church, had befriended my mom and offered her some of her professional attire at some point. When my mother talks about it, her voice gets soft; it catches a bit. “She didn’t have to do it,” she will say. “She could have thrown them out or kept them. But she knew I needed clothes to wear to work, and that generosity has always stayed with me.”

Betty Grey’s winter-weight blazer and skirt were the most serious of the items in my mother’s closet. She wore this outfit to funerals and to meetings in which she had to set someone straight. She called it her death suit because if she was wearing it, “either someone is already dead or someone’s going to die.”

We didn’t have money in Bubbleland, but we were rich in bon mots.

The world outside Bubbleland was unjust and frightening and sometimes violent, but inside was different. Inside, our futures were brimming with possibilities and our backs were straight and we had as many choices available to us as any of our contemporaries. And that bubble extended seventeen minutes up I-83 to Park, where I was classmates with the daughters and sons of some of Baltimore’s wealthiest families. We rode horses as an after-school activity and I went to bar and bat mitzvahs in every fancy building in the city. I knew I was not the same as my classmates, but I was compelled to believe that my options were just as promising. Demographically, I, a black male growing up in West Baltimore, didn’t have great odds. But inside the bubble, even statistics seemed to work differently.

Not everything at Park was foreign and new to me. Though we couldn’t necessarily afford the resources that some of my classmates’ families could, my parents used everything at their disposal to expand the walls of our bubble. They filled our home with new experiences and ideas; they took every opportunity to expose us to the worlds outside of our neighborhood; they told us about the things they couldn’t yet show us. They crafted new spaces inside our minds and our imaginations just waiting to be filled up with details and experiences. And I brought all of that to Park with me. I didn’t always feel different. I think that’s the point. Most of the time, I actually felt like I belonged there.

These days we tend to talk about bubbles like they’re bad things. A bubble connotes a lack of awareness of what’s really happening, a disconnect from the real world. But bubbles have transparent walls and gossamer skin that allows sound to permeate. Bubbles, like the kind you blow from a wand dipped in soapy liquid, don’t keep anyone out or anyone in. They’re just different environments.

I also like to think of bubbles as transportation systems, the bubble as flotation device, as oxygen, as a sign of life. In Bubbleland, we were separated from forces that sought to harm us and given resources that could expand our worlds. This mobility is the best kind of intention to set for your child, I think. And not only that, it’s what every child should have. It’s what they deserve. And if the world were just, they could have it. And so, if you’re my parents, you do everything in your ability to make that world appear, even if it is partly an illusion, even if the effort is breaking you. You do it, because perhaps if your child can live in this more just world for long enough, it will become their reality.

As is probably the case with nearly all independent private schools in the nation, Park is mostly white. (I have done no research on what other independent private schools are like, but I have a hunch based on literally everything I know about America.) I was one of three black students in my grade when I started, and by the time I graduated I believe there were eight of us. The majority of my classmates were Jewish, which provided an exciting secondary education for me. Much of the first couple of years I spent at Park were comprised of learning by doing, learning by reading, and learning by asking things like “What is Rosh Hashanah and why is no one in school today and does this mean we can watch a movie?”

The exposure to a different culture was invigorating for me. I felt like every day I stumbled into new terrain. I wasn’t a pioneer, of course. I knew that. That was part of the appeal of Judaism—I was not discovering it; it was being revealed to me. And just as I peppered people with queries about Judaism, my classmates were curious about blackness and Christianity. I guess we learned from each other. Sometimes it was awkward—Baltimore has a long history of difficult relations between black and Jewish communities, although that rarely carried over into school—but it was seldom ugly. I think it’s a testament to the school’s ability to create a safe environment that microaggressions didn’t turn into macroaggressions and that students treated one another with respect. Another bubble.

Which is why it was such a surprise when one of my classmates called me a nigger in fifth grade.

It happened, as I suppose these things can, for no reason. The class was briefly unattended, working on a project and talking. One girl was needling a boy. Let’s call the girl Dora and let’s call the boy Prentice because those names are quaint and if we’re going to use pseudonyms, they ought to bring joy. So Dora says, “You know, another word for ‘Prentice’ is ‘nerd,’ ” or something equally toothless. I don’t really remember the quote so much as I remember thinking, This utopia is terrible at shade. Somehow, Prentice thought it might be fun to get me involved in this, which is odd because although we were friends I was definitely not volleying back and forth with the bush-league put-downs. He replied to Dora, “Another word for ‘Eric’ is ‘nigger.’ ”

Everyone fell silent and then I burst into tears. Someone ran out of the room and got a teacher. My thoughts and prayers are with a teacher at a mostly white, very liberal bastion of progressive education who has a ten-year-old run up screaming, “Someone called Eric a nigger.” It sounds like a lot of paperwork at the very least.

Prentice and I got whisked off to the principal’s office and asked to explain. I, understandably, had no explanation. Prentice said he hadn’t meant it. Our parents were called. Betty Grey’s suit came out of the closet.

My first “nigger” was what I think of as a casual “nigger.” (Casual Nigger was the first title of this book but literally everyone started screaming the minute I said it, so I came up with some alternatives.) Even as a child, I understood that Prentice was pushing a button he knew was a button but was unsure of what the result would be. It was an experiment, I think. Testing out language. The way Prentice said it was not at all loaded, unlike the other times in my life I would be called that word.

The point is, this wasn’t a battle between him and me. We remained friends, and I wonder if he even remembers it, or if the people in the classroom that day remember it. I’m not sure it matters to me either way. I was in my utopian bubble and what I learned was that even in a bubble someone can casually toss off a racial slur and go about their day.

There’s no response to being called a nigger. I’ve been called a nigger a fair number of times. (How many times is acceptable? That’s the question of our age. I think it varies by region of the country, but that may be my Mid-Atlantic prejudice showing. Also, does it count if it’s online versus in person? What are the rules?) Every time it happens, I’m like, “I’m not sure what you want me to do with this information.” We’re not engaged in a dialogue; we never have been. And we weren’t engaged in the room in fifth grade. So, the why of the “nigger” is on that guy. I’m not part of it. And the why of the moment is of less concern to me. It’s like Baldwin says, “What white people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I’m a man. If I’m not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why.” If it hadn’t been him calling me a nigger for the first time, it would have been someone else someplace else. But in the middle will always be me. I am the one I seek to understand.

To that end, I get stuck, in the retelling, on my own casualness. I’ve never forgotten the mortification of the moment, the shock, the sensation of all the blood running out of my face. Yet, here I’m sanguine. “It’s just a thing that happens,” I’ll say with the sort of horrific matter-of-factness that my parents have adopted when talking about their lives in segregated Baltimore. Is the point that some part of the past will always sound horrific as a price for living in a presumably better future?

Because of the incident at school, the principal decided she wanted to put me and Prentice in racial sensitivity training. Both of us? Honey! The two of us, together, learning about difference. My mother, perspiring in Betty Grey’s suit in the humid late spring, was having absolutely none of it. She walked into the principal’s office in that black suit with white stripes, spoke to her at length, and then walked out and took me home. I don’t know what Betty Grey’s suit told them, but you should already know I didn’t take anybody’s racial sensitivity training. Obviously. I mean, hello, I am problématique! And besides, my parents didn’t sacrifice themselves, their time, their prospects, the clothes on their backs, for me to go to school, get called a nigger, and then take a class about it.

My mother showed up to fight for the world my parents so desperately wanted for us, a world that must have seemed ephemeral and fleeting in that moment. I’m sure they never thought that the world they were trying to craft would be perfect for me; why would they? But this particular controversy—a mix of nineties bureaucracy and age-old prejudice—must have seemed a strange kind of trouble.

In the bubble, however, the trouble didn’t last. Things went back to normal relatively quickly. And, to be frank, I was glad. I was a fifth grader and I thought the moment was an anomaly, completely divorced from me or who I might be able to be. It was all just so weird and random and nobody really disliked blacks, so what was one really to do? Besides, we were studying the Middle Ages that year, so there were, truly, larger concerns like flying buttresses and the plague. I never forgot the incident, though, never figured out where to put it.

Prentice and I didn’t stop being friends. In retrospect, maybe this reflects badly on me. I can feel your judgment. And I would like to remind you that you are judging a ten-year-old. And I am judging you for that. So. We’re all just trying here, okay? Maybe it doesn’t reflect badly. Maybe it’s like one of those “heartwarming” race movies where a white person with suspect ideas and a black person become friends and they both learn a lesson about difference except nothing that’s learned is new to the black person, who was just going about their black business when this whole thing started. If you see it that way, please feel free to option this story for an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie. (I am not above this, honey.) But that’s not why I’m telling this to you. Oh God! Can you imagine? All those trees chopped down and made into books so I could tell you about how we all bleed red, white, and blue? How embarrassing for everyone involved. How embarrassing for those trees! No. I’m telling you this because it was a moment that felt both strange and familiar, and I tucked it away inside myself, to fidget with and worry at until its rough parts disappeared and it shone. I’m telling you this because the more I think about that incident, that moment in a bubble, the more it tells me about the delicate, permeable utopia my parents were striving to create. And it suggests to me that they succeeded.

I know that my parents wanted me to live in a better world than they had, but they must have also desperately hoped I’d be prepared to live in the real world. Why else would they teach me to raise my voice against injustice, to write letters, to make hard choices? And so that painful moment in the classroom was as much an answer to their prayers as the moments of triumph and discovery and freedom, of which there were far more. As they prepared me for the world, they prepared the world for me, one difficult decision at a time. And it’s a world that’s complex and misshapen and poised for discovery and ripe with promise. I look back and I can see the dreams they had, glimmering and evanescent and steely and diffuse, forming a trail from the place where we started to the place where we are, and the place we hope to be. And I know what it means when they sigh, “There’s never any trouble here.”