FORTY-EIGHT

I stopped at a StarMart on the way home, picked up a couple forties of malt liquor. Why malt liquor? I’ll put it straight out: I bought malt liquor because it’s the niggeriest drink on the planet. It’s the drink of abjectness, of prostration, of laying on your back with your knees in the air and taking it, the cheap high, the shortest, ugliest route to the dark place that I’d spent my whole life flirting with.

Complicated thing, explaining what it is to be a nigger. It’s about being black, I suppose, but that’s not mainly what it’s about. Mainly being a nigger is about seeing yourself through the eyes of other people, folks who look at you and see nothing, see a dark, empty, worthless, stinking hole. Nobody can nigger you but you. And right then it was time. Time for me to nigger it up, baby.

I cracked open the Olde English 800, drove back to Decatur nice and slow, taking my time. That’s the whole thing about niggering it up; once you’ve fully niggerfied, niggerized, and niggerated yourself, there’s no point to getting anywhere. When you’re nothing, there’s no future, no past, no consequences, no right, no wrong, no pretty, no ugly. Just here. This ride, this beer, this hot, sticky, sad, hopeless, aimless night. And underneath it all, of course, is the sick sensation of worthlessness, almost a taste in your mouth, like a bitter old penny sitting on your tongue.

About the time I hit Clairmont, I got on the phone and called the GBI crime lab.

“Yo, baby,” I said.

“Mechelle?” Mark Terry said.

“Whasssup.”

“What’s going on? You sound funny.”

“Nah, baby, nah. I feel good. I feel calm and shit.”

There was a long pause. “Did something happen?”

“You could say. Sure. Something happened.”

“Like what, Mechelle?”

“Like it ain’t the Chief.”

“How do you know this?”

“Yo, baby, I just know. How come you be dissing me?” I was laying on the street speak, toying with the feel of it in my mouth.

“And why are you talking like somebody who lives over in the Carver Homes?”

“Yo, dawg. Listen up. Here it is. You might as well quit running them tests. It ain’t gonna come up the Chief anyway.”

“You’re sure of this.”

“Damn straight I’m sure.”

Terry didn’t say anything for a long time. I guess he was waiting for an explanation, but I didn’t much feel like going into it. Finally he said, “Well, fair enough.”

“All right then. Pack up the camel, go home, get some rest. Forget this whole bidness.”

“Mechelle. Listen. Be serious here. Do you really mean this?”

“Stop them tests. Throw it all in the shitter. We done, baby.”

I closed my cell phone, turned the radio on to some hip-hop station, started grooving around in my seat, dancing against the cheap vinyl. It felt kind of good in a trashy, stupid kind of way. It was this song called “Back That Thang Up” by this boy, Juvenile, that came out a few years back. I’d seen the video a few times. It mostly showed girls with big butts, pumping away, showing their booties to the camera.

I stopped in at this twenty-four-hour record shop, bought a copy of the CD. When I got home I put the song on infinite repeat, cranked it up, danced around the room for a while. Juvenile would go, “You a big fine woman, why’ncha back that thang up,” and I’d back up, bumping and grinding against the wall, pulling on the Olde English 800. After a while the brother next door started banging on the wall, telling me to shut up. I yelled some nastiness at him.

Alcohol is not really my drug. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t the real thing—it wasn’t meth, ice, crank, whatever—that I still had this thin little thread of hope dangling down into the darkness that had opened up underneath me. My heart wasn’t really in the drinking. It took too much energy to drink.

After a while I lost track of things. I hadn’t slept in so long that it didn’t take much of the Olde English 800 to ease me out of consciousness. I just remember the sound of the phone ringing over and over and over, but not being moved to get off the couch and answer it. I remember some yelling, somebody banging on the wall. And mostly I remember that song, playing again and again and again and again. “You a big fine woman, whyncha back that thang up.”

And then eventually it was all darkness and prostration.