In the middle of the afternoon, Reggie went out to sell our gun to NP, who bought it for fifty cents on the dollar. We rehearsed cover stories and settled on, We were running through the woods to Clive's house and I ran into a branch that was sticking out! I coulda poked my eye out! That way they could scold us for running in the woods, and leave it at that. But they got home and never noticed. This big thing almost in my eye.
The BB guns didn't come out again that summer. We weren't the only ones to get rid of them. The thrill was gone, plus the girls finally appeared, like I said, contorting our Thursdays into a new sort of miserable. For some of us, those were our first guns, a rehearsal. I'd like to say, all these years later, now that one of us is dead and another paralyzed from the waist down from actual bullets—drug-related, as the papers put it—that the game wasn't so innocent after all. But it's not true. We always fought for real. Only the nature of the fight changed. It always will. As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world.
An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless.
It's still there. Under the skin. It's good for a story, something to shock people with after I've known them for years and feel a need to surprise them with the other boy. It's not a scar that people notice even though it's right there. I asked a doctor about it once, about blood poisoning over time. He shook his head. Then he shrugged. “It hasn't killed you yet.”
WE WERE A COSBY FAMILY, GOOD ON PAPER. THAT was the lingo. Father a doctor, mother a lawyer. Three kids, prep-schooled, with clean fingernails and nice manners. No imperial brownstone, but our Prewar Classic 7 wasn't too shabby, squeezing us tight in old elegant bones. Did we squirm? Oh so quietly.
The Cosby Show was the Number-One Show in America, leadoff man of NBC's Thursday Night Dynasty. White people loved it, even the ones who took it as science fiction, some colored version of Time Tunnel or Lost in Space. Who are these people? We said: People we know. And we watched it. People we knew started wearing sweaters with mind-melting patterns, in tribute to the Coz Himself, and the barber shops buzzed up versions of Theo's latest haircut, whatever he and his friends sported on set, in their brief careers, those handsome boys who went nowhere. The young men marched out of barber shops to all coordinates with flattops, fades, hi-tops of Pisan ambition: Theo's army. “They're a real Cosby Family,” people said, when acquaintances broke the atmosphere to better orbit. A term of affection and admiration.
From the street, I'd been relieved to see that the bedrooms were dark. A long day at work, then suffering through Friday-evening LIE traffic—my parents were often asleep when I got off the late shift at Jonni Waffle. Then I reached the steps and heard the TV and saw the moths staggering in the light from the living-room windows. My father was awake. “Where's Shithead?” he asked as I closed the door.
“He's still at Burger King,” I said. We were a few months into When Dad Called Reggie Shithead for a Year. That spring, my brother brought home two C minuses on his report card, a new record. Reggie and freshman year were not buddies. He flunked test after test, the ones handed out by teachers and the more important ones, the ones given by other students. It was this latter brand of pop quiz that he really cared about, which is a pity because you can never prepare for them. Especially if you were kids like us. These other grades went down on your real Permanent Record, the one you carried on your person at all times even when high school was long over. Everyone saw the marks you got, as if they had X-ray eyes.
Our father reacted with the boilerplate threats and harangues, and finally this renaming. Whenever our father was in the room, Reggie disappeared and in his place lingered this embarrassing, ever-accountable stain. “Is this Shithead's?” he'd ask, holding up a copy of Spin that had fallen between the cushions of the couch. Lightbulb burn out? “Shithead's using too much electricity.” I got off the hook a lot. I was grateful. We were always grateful when someone else got the business. If I left some dirty dishes in the sink, my father said, “These must be Shithead's,” as he passed by, and I took the hint and scrubbed them. It wasn't until Labor Day that I realized that over the course of the summer Reggie had moved most of his Burger King time to the weekend, trading and swapping with co-workers shift by shift to minimize exposure. That night he was at BK like I said, and had arranged for a double on Saturday. That was a big chunk of quality time disposed of right there.
I opened a can of cream soda and leaned against the fridge. My father said, “I was wondering when you were going to stop having me cut your hair.”
I ran my palm across my bristly scalp. “Clive has a whole clipper set.”
“Look like one of those corner niggers,” he said. Groups of brown young men—black, Dominican, Puerto Rican—hung out in alternating shifts outside the bodega on the corner of 101st and Broadway, that locus of licentiousness. Whenever something went awry in the neighborhood, the corner niggers eagerly stepped up for scapegoat duty. Gum mashed into your shoe, runny dog shit in front of the building, transit strike: these were all well-known manifestations of corner-nigger high jinks. They kept their hair grazed down to quarter-inch stubble, and Clive had inducted me into their gang.
“I like it,” I said.
“Your head.” He shrugged. He leaned back on the couch and returned to the TV. It sounded familiar. I'd seen the movie before.
It was the first time someone else had cut my hair. Since I could remember, me and Reggie had a ritual. When our hair got too crazy, we asked our father to give us a haircut, and he put us off, saying he was too busy or had had a long day at his practice, and over the next few weeks or months we'd ask again, judiciously spacing out our requests so as not to “nag like an old woman,” and then eventually one evening he'd come home tipsy after “a meeting” and break out his scissors. Black barbers the world over, they use electric clippers. These are modern times. In many sectors, technological advances are welcomed and embraced. My father, however, loved his special pair of old-school barber scissors, and we loved them, too, because the sound of the long, thin blades sniping against each other was the sound of his undivided attention.
As I sat on a chair in the bathroom, holding the towel tight around my bony shoulders and staring into the black-and-white subway tile, he trimmed and trimmed, grumbling about the light, tilting my head to and fro with a firm push of his index and middle fingers. He drew up tufts with a pick and squinted and clipped. I murmured the Prime Directive to myself, “Don't move your head, don't move your head,” even though it never worked. I moved. He always told me I moved no matter how much I concentrated, no matter how many oaths and pledges I devised between haircuts, as if a new arrangement of words might make things turn out differently next time. At some point he'd say, “You moved your head. Now I have to even it out,” and I cursed myself as he cut and cut, and my 'Fro grew shorter and shorter and shorter …
But when he was done, it was perfect. Like when he grilled—you had to admit that despite everything, he was a master griller. It was one of those things he did well, you couldn't say anything against it, it was a cornerstone of our reality. He gave us miniature versions of his own cut, the same one he'd given himself since high school, when he took over haircut duties from his father. The haircuts remained perfect for whole hours—don't be thrown off by the fact that no camera ever recorded them. The spell broke when you took a shower or slept on them, whereupon all his tucks and pats and proddings were undone and our superb crowns became utterly misshaped and disordered, the underlying principles revealed as counterfeit. What occurred on my scalp could not be called a “style” in any true sense, and it got wilder the longer it got. It was a weird black amoeba testing the edges of itself, throwing out nappy pseudopods here and suddenly there, an unpredictable new direction every day. I swear it lived, and have come to believe that its ever-shifting
lumps and tendrils were a doomed attempt at communication with the humans. The tragedy of the day-after haircuts! And all the days after! The months passed until we had to admit to ourselves that the world abhorred us, and the process started anew.
Needless to say, I had no idea how fucked up the haircuts were at the time. To us they were normal. Just how things were done in our house. (Raise your hand if you can relate.) My delusions ended that spring when I was cleaning out my desk during one of my periodic purges of nerdery. My twenty-sided die possessed a curious will, returning to pester and trouble me even though I had thrown it out a hundred times, the specter of D&D games past. This time I threw it out the window. (I found it under the radiator a week later.) I stashed dog-eared copies of Famous Monsters in a box at the back of the closet and hid all the comic books I'd bought since the last purge, in case a girl materialized in my room due to a transporter malfunction. I was in a good mood or something, feeling optimistic, like someone had chuckled at a joke that I'd made in Biology, or History, and it had gone to my head.
I came across a packet of fifth-grade class pictures under my copy of Swamp Thing #35. It is the nettlesome quality of elementary-school pictures to reveal the true nature of our childhoods. Nothing is how we remember it, and all the necessary alterations we've made in order to survive with semi-functioning psyches are exposed. Best to leave them alone.
Looking back, I think I had what is best described as a prelapsarian fondness for fifth grade, its lack of complication. No more. Miss Fredericks, the Social Studies teacher whose cruel smile had haunted me for years and who was actually the default setting in my nightmares when I needed an evil authority figure, had a melancholy face now that I really examined it. She seemed a bit too skinny, almost ill, and I got to thinking about what her house looked like, picturing the shadows in the kitchenette where she prepared her lonely meals. Two scoops of cottage cheese on a big leaf of wilted iceberg lettuce, and a side of misery. She never appeared in my dreams again.
Scanning the rest of the photograph, it was clear that none of us, teacher and pupils alike, had remained untouched by that horrible epidemic making the rounds back then, '70s fashion, the manic stripes and prints of the shirts and skirts and pants a kind of rash on our flesh that only a new decade could cure. Then there were the kids themselves. No one looked like they were supposed to. These changeling creatures surrounded me in polyester, touching my elbows. Strangers. I traced a finger along their faces like a movie amnesiac … that must be my best friend … his name is Andy … that's the smart girl who sat in front of me all year … she ate frankfurters out of a Bionic Woman thermos filled with hot oily water. Then there was my own face. My face was not the one I remembered showing to the world. Were my eyes so dark, those days? There was something amiss with my mouth, always my mouth, even before I got braces. My lips were chapped, sure, but the chappiness seemed to have extended its territory, so that a huge white halo encircled my mouth, like I'd been eating ashes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then there was that thing on top.
That really fucked-up haircut.
I recovered from the class picture pretty quickly. It wasn't that bad. Seeing the white letters identifying my homeroom, the construction-paper map of France we'd toiled over that winter, the poster of Neil Armstrong floating down to the lunar surface, I felt a nice warm tingle of nostalgia. The killer was the four panes of wallet-sized photos beneath the class picture. It was just me there. They should have stopped me. They should have stopped me at any number of checkpoints. As I tried to leave the apartment—here, a close relative would have been key. The doorman could have taken me aside. We got along, him and me, trading heys with enthusiasm, or so I thought. But he said nothing. Certainly the bus driver, de facto deputy of the body politic, could've forbid me entry, ripping my bus pass in half and tossing it to the dirty black treads. The security guard outside school should have beat me with his flashlight, and surely my homeroom teacher, Miss Barrett—stickler by nature, wielder of a bifocaled annihilating gaze—should have shoved her big wooden desk up against the classroom door, back brace or no back brace. All of them should have said, What the fuck is up with your hair?
Obviously it had been months since my last trim. Instead of a haircut, the photographer had captured some primordial process unfolding. The universe tugged and pressed on my hair with invisible fingers, the way it had pulled up mountains to the sky and gouged the deepest ocean chasms, where the only living beings are pale boneless things rooting around in everlasting gloom. What else is there to say but that in my vicinity larger forces were at work, the ancient underpinnings of it all. There are natural laws. The Third Law of Thermodynamics says that as temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant. Sir Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion holds that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The entity on my head was proof of another fundamental law: a fucked-up Afro tends toward complete fuckedupedness at an exponential rate over time, as expressed by the equation,
AN = F * t
where AN is Absolute Nappiness, F is fuckedupedness, and t is time
The pane of photos was uncut, of course. Who'd want a picture of that in their wallet, poisoning their money?
I don't remember being teased about my hair or my acute chappiness. But surely they made fun of me, the children in the photograph and the strangers out of frame. Surely they had to see it. Why didn't they say anything? I was due for another haircut when I found those pictures, but it never occurred to me not to ask my dad to cut my hair as usual. We'd always done things a certain way. Then out in Sag I was at Clive's house when he was cutting NP's hair, and when he was done he turned to me and asked, “You want me to cut off that jungle bush or what?”
I finished my cream soda and went to wash out the can. Chicken parts bobbed in a big pot of water in the sink, defrosting. He was going to barbecue tomorrow. I made a note.
“He just boiled that dizzy bitch in the hot tub,” he said.
Halloween II. “Dag,” I said. I sat down on the couch and watched the rest of it with him.
Reggie woke me up with his french-fry smell when he came in. The french-fry smell was almost another person in our room, stumbling in the dark. When I got up, he'd already gone back to work.
It was almost noon, from the noise. Saturdays in Sag Harbor, I liked to lie in bed listening to the weekend rev itself up. First, though, I concentrated on the house noises, to see what I'd be getting into. The screen door slammed shut and someone entered the living room—my mother, from the walk. She made a comment, my father responded in his wisecracking intonation, and both of them laughed. I relaxed. Things seemed okay out there.
I had three speakers—the two windows and the crack beneath the door—that functioned as my tri-phonic hi-fi, filling the room with the melody of an Azurest afternoon. If I closed my eyes, I saw everything perfectly. Things never happened otherwise. Last-minute lawn mowers spun and spat, and a car made a slow turn 'round Terry onto Walker, reconnoitering to see which houses had cars in the driveway. That eternal question: Who's out, who's out? Three houses up, Big Dennis cranked up his Earth, Wind & Fire best of, which by that point in the summer I knew track by track, crooning the next song while this one was still on the second verse. “Reasons, the reasons that we hear.” Out on the water, two motorboats cruised in circles, preparing for the busy weekend workout: hauling worthies up on water skis; fishing expeditions in the Great Beyond outside the bay; and slow jaunts around the Neck or into Baron's Cove, depending on one's motives. The weekend jigsaw fit together into the shape on the box, the one we were promised. Then I heard it, a sound the normal person would never notice.
Poomp.
It was the magnet. There was one magnet with which I was well acquainted. It resided in the next room, in the lower left quadrant of the kitchen island, securing the liquor cabinet door. It produced a sound—Poomp—when the twin metal strips on the cabinet door connected with the magnet in the cabinet i
tself. Poomp meant the liquor cabinet had been depleted. Poomp meant it had started.
I felt a twinge. Then relaxed. It was okay—I'd devised an exit strategy when I saw the chicken in the sink.
I haven't gotten to the layout of our little hideaway yet. The beach house was a ranch bungalow my grandparents built in the late '60s. Long planks stained a deep, earthy red covered the exterior, and the roof sloped at a narrow angle, like a book that had been set facedown. The two small bedrooms faced the street; walk out of them and you were in a hallway with a bathroom on your right before things opened up into the living space. The TV area and encircling couches on the left, kitchen and dining on the right. The north wall was glass, facing the deck, and beyond that stretched the beach and the bay. Visitors coming up from the beach used the screen door, and those from the street used the side door next to the stove. The clomping up the side stairs was an invaluable early-alert system, allowing us to scurry into the back if we decided to pretend not to be home. Which was quite often.
We'd spent three summers there. We used to stay on Hempstead Street, in the old house my grandparents put up when the developments started going. My mother and her sister inherited the two houses, and then in some intricate bad-blood transaction our family got the beach house and my aunt got the Hempstead House. Obviously, from an objective real estate point of view, the beach house was the better property. Location, location, etc. But I'd spent my true childhood at the other place, and I never got over leaving it. My laundry list of psychic injuries aside, the Hempstead House was just bigger. In the new place we were on top of each other. My sister got the second bedroom whenever she came out, forcing me and Reggie to sleep in the living room, waiting for her or our parents to get up so that we could stumble off into their rooms for the short but important stretch of late-morning sleep.