The plan was to drink until the pain over / But what’s worse: the pain or the hangover?
—Kanye West, “Dark Fantasy”
It was 2011 and by all outward appearances I was not Kanye. I was being paid fourteen dollars an hour at a law firm that helped banks foreclose on people’s homes, spending more than I could afford to rent a room in a two-bedroom house in South Philly, and trying to figure out whether I had the pain or the hangover. A few years earlier, I’d come across an ad for a local storytelling open mic, wandered in, told a story about living in Baltimore and being adrift and sad, and, to my surprise, I won. When I spoke, the audience leaned forward; when I made asides, they laughed; when I exposed my raw, messy heart, they didn’t look away. I felt like a conduit had opened up between me and a room full of strangers, and I could remix my life—the happy parts, the mysteries, the pain, the hangover—into beginnings, middles, and ends, with vulnerability and humor. I was hooked. By 2011, I was telling stories regularly and had begun hosting shows occasionally. I’d even put together an hour-long storytelling solo performance, about softball and hair tragedies and dating profiles and self-love. It was freeing and terrifying, an unexpected way to access my creativity.
Every once in a while I thought I might want to do something more with my life than work at a law firm, but it wasn’t clear what. I wanted to write, I wanted to create…something. But besides the open mics, I wasn’t finding any outlets to do so. I’d listen to The Moth podcasts all day at work as I processed legal complaints and wished that I could see my way out. In the balance, I was maybe a couple of years behind where some of my contemporaries were, professionally. But I was light-years behind the place I thought I’d be, light-years behind the person I envisioned at eighteen as I packed for college and set out on what was supposed to be a hazily sketched but still sterling life. Things weren’t bad; they were better than they’d been. But I didn’t recognize myself.
Sometimes I thought I was, in some small way, supposed to be the Old Kanye. I was obsessed with the Old Kanye. I was perplexed by the Old Kanye. Post-Katrina, post–Video Music Awards Kanye but pre-whatever-it-is-that’s-happening-now Kanye. Wild-card-genius, mercurial-enfant-terrible, grieving-son, producer-savant Kanye. Despite the fact that he was one of the most famous rappers alive and I was a paralegal in Philadelphia, I sensed a kinship with him, like we’d both experienced the same creative frustration, the story clamoring to get out, the competing forces that threatened to rip us apart from the inside, the darkness at the edges.
So I started to write about it. I was fascinated by Kanye’s then-most-recent release, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a furious, brilliant, sonic barrage of an album. It served as his comeback after a self-imposed exile following his Taylor Swift outburst at the VMAs, but it’s also a deeply conflicted rumination on fame and fatalism. I idolized him even though I knew I could never be as bold, as self-assured, or as iconoclastic as he was. Kanye was, to my mind, the ultimate example of society’s Good Black Man and Bad Black Man, and he didn’t seem to wrestle with any of the duality of these harmful figments so much as delight in it. I had been good once but I wasn’t so sure I was good anymore. I didn’t think I was bad, but I wasn’t sure. Kanye lived life in stereo and I coveted that.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a masterwork, but it’s also an incisive exploration of Kanye’s deep depression, his substance abuse, and his thoughts of suicide. It’s like if Virginia Woolf wrote bangers. And I was drawn to that because I still felt lost most of the time. There were times that I was furious at myself for hating being gay. And other times I was furious for loving myself, gayness and all. I was frustrated by the mess I’d made of college but unsure how to make it right. I felt like a disappointment, even as my parents offered reassurances. And I found that though I could take all that and turn it into good stories, they never got close to revealing my unresolved beautiful, dark, twisted feelings.
There were times when I’d be standing on the subway platform, waiting for a train that would, hopefully, get me to the office just in the nick of time, Kanye blasting in my ears, and the thought would occur to me, What if I just stepped in front of the train? It wasn’t ever a surprise, the thought. Sometimes it showed up as the imp of the mind, the common phenomenon of obsessive bad thoughts; other times it was an honest suggestion. There had been dark periods where I couldn’t dig myself out of a hole of self-doubt and misery, but this was different. At a train station, walking across a bridge, standing by a window, I’d have thoughts of killing myself that were as mundane and as pragmatic as my work life. I felt so utterly not myself, so divorced from the person that I thought I was, or the person I thought I was once becoming, that ending my life seemed almost an afterthought. Hadn’t it ended a long time ago, after all?
“Now this would be a beautiful death,” Kanye sings on the third track on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, “Power,” a rumination on his toxic relationship with his own narrative. “Jumping out the window / letting everything go.” Despite its ideas, it’s not a mournful dirge, and I loved that the most. It’s Kanye having a matter-of-fact conversation with his darkest thoughts. I read it as a song of triumph, a dance with death. I blasted it on repeat, reveling in the energetic, cocksure way it begins, with claps, syncopated chants, and sirens heralding Kanye’s arrival on the track. I memorized Kanye’s self-assured couplets, like “I just needed time alone with my own thoughts / got treasures in my mind but couldn’t open up my own vault.” I imagined what it might be like to stare down an abyss and shout self-affirmations into it.
I struggled to figure out what I was supposed to do to change the story I was living, so I glommed on to Kanye, who wrestled with life but at least understood the context he was in. “Power” is in C minor, a key that musicologist Cole Cuchna points out is the trademark of a heroic struggle. It’s the same key that Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 is in. The one that goes “dah-dahdah-DAH”; the one he wrote about battling back against suicidal thoughts stemming from going deaf. It’s commonly referred to as “fate knocking on the door.” Beethoven wrote about fate stalking him; Kanye used C minor to reframe his public exile after interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the VMAs. Beethoven was losing his hearing; Kanye was mocked on Saturday Night Live. But they both decided, in their own contexts and in their own worlds, that they were the hero and that their struggle was heroic. When presented with the question, What do you think should happen to you? they responded, I should triumph. Indeed, Beethoven once said, “I will take fate by the throat. It will never bend me completely.”
At this point in my life, I wasn’t so much a hero struggling as a man immobile, trapped between who I was and who I wanted to be, between mistakes and goals, between life and death. And so I played and replayed the album, and went to work, and nothing changed. Nothing changed. Nothing changed. Until a car in Baltimore showed up out of the darkness and I felt my fingers graze fate’s throat.
One night, while I was living in Philly, a car burst through the wall of my childhood home like the Kool-Aid Man and landed, as fate would have it, on a pile of my high school yearbooks. The car had lost control after leaving a speakeasy up the street from my parents’ house. My mother had just had ankle surgery and was confined to the first-floor apartment that I’d stayed in after college, so when the car pierced the side of the building, my parents were sleeping mere feet above it. My father bolted awake and helped my mother get out of the house, not knowing what kind of threat they were about to face. Turns out, it was three drunk women in an Acura, not the most sinister of villains, but villains nonetheless. Emergency vehicles showed up and so did my youngest brother, Jeffrey, who was a police officer and the only one of the three brothers who lived in-state.
The scene, as my mother tells it, was the stuff of 10 P.M. cop shows: three stranded club-goers and their drunk-driven vehicle, one tire impotently spinning its way into a cardboard box, slowly sloughing off the successive pages of a stack of my yearbooks. My mother had to be carried out of our row-house home after the accident, still drowsy, but also woozy from the postsurgical pain and the requisite prescribed medication. My father, a coiled spring in every emergency situation, talked animatedly to the first officers on the scene while keeping an eye on his wife. Coming into herself a bit, my mother did what she always does: she started taking photos. My mother stood in the middle of the street, on one leg, and took photos of a car that had crashed into her house and the women who were stumbling around beside it. For posterity. She’s a scrapbooker; she’d trained all year for something like this.
Jeffrey arrived moments later, his siren on, his lights flashing. I assume he then skidded to a stop in the middle of the street, body-rolled out of the car, and went to get the lowdown from the responding officer. Based on my knowledge of my youngest brother and my knowledge of expository crime-scene dialogue from television shows, I am sure that this conversation was full of quickly rattled-off jargon spoken with a menacing growl. Jeffrey, according to my mother, then approached the driver of the car, who had just finished peeing beside my parents’ staircase, and he wrote her a ticket for public urination. A ticket.
In the family lore, the positioning of the car in my parents’ wall was seen as a blessing, because if the three drunk women had careened off the road a few feet sooner, they would have hit the house-heating oil tank in my parents’ basement instead of my pile of childhood mementos, and everything—our house, the car, the three drunk women, and our beloved parents—would have instantly combusted and disappeared.
Needless to say, when three drunk women drive into your parents’ house, you should probably go visit. To see the blessing. And to exclaim things like “Look at that hole!” and “That’s what he said!” and “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that” and “But really, there’s a huge hole in the side of our house and I’m having trouble processing this” and finally “Where is all my stuff?”
So I boarded the bus to Baltimore with a list of things that I had to say and the knowledge that the car had come to its final resting place in the spot in the basement where I deposited all of the things that weren’t coming with me to college. I went to make sure my parents really hadn’t disappeared, to make sure the house was still standing, to thank my brother for his service. And I went to collect the things I had left behind like Horcruxes from Harry Potter, the things I didn’t need with me, but still needed, the things I wasn’t done working through, the things that had survived the relentless grinding of the wheel.
If you haven’t ever arrived at your childhood home to find a gash through the brick, covered with plastic and plywood, I recommend that you first steel yourself. Your brain tells you two things: (1) Objectively, this is a disaster. Like, an actual disaster. Like, FEMA. Like, shouldn’t someone be starting a GoFundMe? (2) This disaster is your life. (Stitch that on a pillow.) And this thought makes you want to look even harder, to search the chaos for the things that made you feel whole, that shaped you, that nurtured you. I stood in the basement and stared at the mess of my life. I couldn’t make sense of any of it.
My mother called out to me from the top of the stairs. “Looks terrible, doesn’t it?”
I called back, “I don’t see a difference.” She was in pain, she was medicated, there was a hole in the side of her house, and her oldest son was making jokes about it.
“Take what you want,” she called. “Leave the rest; we’ll throw it away.”
I tiptoed through some piles of bricks and knelt next to a box. Under the ruined lid, I found a collection of books with which I’d been obsessed in middle school. So, basically, every book. It looked like a buzz saw had cut through the whole collection. Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game, Alex Haley’s Roots, Christopher Pike’s Last Act, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, all destroyed. I stared at them forlornly, like you do when you have to get rid of a book because you’re moving or you’re Marie Kondo or your house has a hole in it, and you know they have to go but you want to honor them for the role they played in your life. I shifted the box to the side, into a heap of other boxes, a broken picture frame, and some lawn furniture that would all be disposed of after I’d left. I found the box with my yearbooks in it, also now wreckage. I flipped open a few of the broken spines and looked at the inscriptions inside, some of them smeared with water or oil or nuclear waste for all I knew. A teacher’s note, “So excited for what’s coming next for you,” had been transformed into a well-intentioned smudge.
We hadn’t been able to afford a yearbook my first five years at Park. Well, I think it was a combination of a tight budget and the reality that a fourth grader does not actually need a yearbook. I get that now but I was incensed when my mother informed me, during my first year at the school, that I didn’t know most of these kids and I wasn’t going to do anything with the book except eventually put it in a box that would be run over in a freak accident. “That’s very specific,” I said. “Just you wait,” she said. So getting yearbooks all four years of high school felt like an accomplishment, a vote of confidence from my parents, and a sign that I’d actually come into my own in the prestigious private school where the outcomes were so drastically different from those of my neighborhood. I felt, when I graduated, that I was launching toward something phenomenal and worthy, something that would make my parents combust with pride. Like my teacher, I was also excited for what was “coming next.” Over a decade later, staring at the remains of the yearbooks, I felt like perhaps I was the one who had combusted at my launch and all that was left was debris.
One of the things that so fascinated me about Kanye’s return to music with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was that it didn’t reject the prevailing public narrative about him, even though it was negative. Rather, the album embraced it. He leaned into the sharp edges of his personality. He made them parts of his self-constructed mythology. You could never tell a more compelling story about Kanye than the one he was telling about himself.
On the album’s penultimate track, “Lost In the World,” Kanye raps, “You’re my devil, you’re my angel / You’re my heaven, you’re my hell.” He’s talking to an unnamed woman for whom he’s cycled through feelings over the course of the whole album, but he’s also overtly addressing his career, the public, and most of all himself. Behind the words, Bon Iver wails, “I’m up in the woods / I’m down on my mind / I’m building a still / to slow down the time.” Minutes later, Kanye reinterprets the lyric by rapping, “I’m lost in the world, been down my whole life / I’m new in the city, and I’m down for the night.” The two men’s voices blend together and multiply, producing a chorus of loneliness. When I played the song, I lost myself in the place where isolation and company, mistakes and self-actualization intersect like voices layered over each other. “Lost in the World” is a song about resurrection. It’s a song about sequestering oneself until one gets one’s mind right, and it’s a song about dying and being born anew. Kanye’s only path to freedom is to exist in the duality of his life; the extreme lows and the unimaginable highs. And not just exist, but revel.
Due to the place I was making for myself in the live storytelling scene, I would, on occasion, teach workshops where I would try to find a way to tell people the “secret” of my storytelling, which, as I understood it, was just to tell the truth because you had no other choice. I would remind people in my classes that the storyteller gets to choose the beginning and the end, often despite what happens in life. And that you have to tell your listener what you, the protagonist, want. This connects directly to the “why” of it all. The impetus for raising your voice to speak. There’s a power and a clarity in saying, “This is where it begins for me, and this is where it ends,” and knowing why. The why is the most crucial. It’s what elevates an anecdote to a story; it’s the thing that makes people lean forward with anticipation, their pulses quickening, accepting the invitation of empathy. “Why are you telling this story?” I asked the people in my workshops. I said it over and over again, in conference rooms and classrooms; I wrote it on whiteboards in messy penmanship, but I wasn’t living it.
Why are you telling this story? I asked myself now, standing in my parents’ basement, surveying the wreckage of my potential-laden childhood. If I don’t know what I want, how will I know if I’ve got it or if it’s lost forever?
I tossed everything I’d sorted into the trash pile and peered through the blessing of the hole in the wall. I didn’t know if the beginning of my story was in a promising private school and a yearbook full of hope and my ending was in here, in this ruined space, letting it all go. But I was determined to accept it, perhaps debate it, and then move on to a new story. I did want things: I wanted to express myself; I wanted to get out of my dead-end job; I wanted to feel loved; I wanted to love myself; I wanted to know that this was not the end.
I couldn’t start a new story until I gave words to the why of it, even if it hurt, even if it felt too messy, even if it wasn’t the story I set out to tell. It was my story and it was all I had.
I dusted myself off and left the basement.