I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight (9 page)

I found
The Jeffersons
a particularly intense, subversively political sitcom that had quite an impact on me growing up, and still does to this day. I think my selfishness can be directly attributed to that show. The maid, Florence Johnston (played by Marla Gibbs), never did any work. Weezy Jefferson, the pampered wife (played by Isabel Sanford), with her comfy name, presumably a diminutive of "Louise," and her soft, generous body, led a life of leisure. Her silk jersey pantsuits and expensive furniture were a glowing advertisement for conspicuous consumption. For black America,
The Jeffersons
was a positive example of the new middle class, a first foray into formerly racially restricted territory. They were knocking down the walls of
class and race, showing the possibility of the true definition of the American dream, "movin' on up." Of course there were conflicts, which were subtle yet loud bombs. There was an obvious yet unspoken competitive element between the Jeffersons and their neighbors, a racially mixed couple, the beautiful and elegant Helen Willis (played by Roxie Roker) and her white husband, ironically named "Tom" (Franklin Cover). Their style of living set the standard that the Jeffersons were constantly trying to meet, as even in friendship they were not immune to jealousy and envy. The Jeffersons, without examples of other people like them going before them, had to carve out an identity with the bits and pieces of what they knew of white culture and black upward mobility. George Jefferson, a self-made powder keg of inarticulate resentment, was constantly losing his temper and challenging the system, angry at the way upper-class African Americans were still not accorded upper-class privileges, even while paying upper-class rent. This raw angst was fueled by his own selfishness, which provided the axis of conflict within the story structure.

George rages at Florence, who no matter how much money he has made or what floor he has moved on up to, won't let him forget his race. His futile attempts to boss her around only serve as elaborate gags that always leave him with egg on his face, even if the egg happens to be the one Florence has dutifully prepared for his breakfast. Weezy was a comfort to George, and a barrier—sometimes even a physical one—between him and Florence. It was a war of what we were versus what we've become. Do we forget our roots when we move on up, or do we take them with us and continue to fight for
racial equality? Do we have a responsibility to fight for those who still struggle for a piece of American pie, or can we merely savor what we have and let everyone else fend for themselves, and live in the penthouse of privilege without the guilt of obligation? Finally, has our own attainment of unprecedented affluence allowed us to ignore everyone we consider "less than" because it feels justified?

Then, of course, there is the beautiful and troubled Lionel (Mike Evans), adult son of the Jeffersons, romantically handicapped, culturally confused. Lionel represents the next step. Where are we going now? There's a nice view from up here, but you can look up or you can look down. What's your choice? Will you celebrate how far you have come, or will you look back, fatigued and bitter, at what a long journey it's been for you when others seemingly had such an easy time of it?

Selfishness is the right of all of us who struggle. That such introspection is depicted in a negative way is racism in action, as if self-realization—the dreaming of dreams, the achieving of goals, the living out the rewards—is bestowed upon the modest, the unambitious, the passive, the oblivious. Selfishness needs to be reclaimed as a tool for empowerment, so that we might all one day live in a world where class can transcend race, where the color of your skin does not affect the color of your money, or the color of the upholstery on your couch. That we are selfish gives us the opportunity to gain the power so that, in time, we might be selfless. To give back what we have learned. To teach what we know, and shorten the journey for those who will come after us. The one thing that really bothered me about
The Jeffersons
,
though, was that British guy was always out in the hallway in his underwear. I still can't decipher the hidden meaning behind that.

how i loved you, michael

M
ichael Jackson has been the public freak for so long, it's not odd that he owns the Elephant Man's skeleton, unless he's sold it to defray court costs. Why does it still go on? Who are the people that want to cast him as the evil burgomaster who runs the village of terminally ill children who will either go into remission or get felt up while they lie asleep helpless in his bed? He said that stairs lead up to his bed, which makes me nervous because nobody should go up some stairs to get into a bed. You might go for a glass of water in the middle of the night and break your leg trying.

Is Michael Jackson worth this kind of media attention as phantom, bogeyman anymore—Jacko, the weirdo tabloid hero? What is the point of it now? I don't know what's going on. There are weird celebrities accused of murder (Phil Spector, Robert Blake) who don't undergo this type of public scrutiny. If they were to be as completely dissected by the media scalpel, I'm sure much more bizarre sound bites and makeup mania would surface. Why is it that Jackson's case is also very racially sensitive? No doubt, he is the undisputed King of Pop, and there's no one that can take away the glory of the past—who he was as a child star, and then his speed-of-light rise to fame and
welcome journey to adulthood—the songs, the beats, the eloquence,
The Wiz
. I'm not being sarcastic. I love
The Wiz
. Nothing beats
The Wiz
. He took Brooke Shields to the Grammys, then Emmanuel Lewis, then Madonna. He was best friends with Elizabeth Taylor.

How does the public judge Jackson's racial identity? He seems to have tried to erase the race, so it would seem. Yet he really is still black, and there is tremendous emotional support from black artists who have come forward to speak of his influence on them. I always loved Michael Jackson. All the weirdness, too. But it's the music that made him unique and beautiful.

All in all, Michael Jackson may be the patron saint of celebrity insanity, but aren't we, the public, through constant finger pointing and accusing and indicting, for years and years, guilty too? Being the butt of jokes for so long can make anyone want to look like Enya.

See, I am doing it, too.

We are in the huge high school of life, and we bullied the odd kid because we became jealous of him, because we all knew that, inside, he had something so bright and beautiful we would never have, that we beat up on him instead. Is that the point of all this? It will be soon in the telling. The demise of Michael Jackson has been prophesized since the beginning of his career, and has reached a crescendo in the last decade.

H
ow I loved Michael Jackson when I was young. When he was in the Jackson 5, I would watch them on our TV, which was made of
wood and had the rabbit ears and we kept a baby pumpkin on the cabinet because the screen kept giving way to stripes and then we'd bang the pumpkin on the cabinet and usually that would fix it. What I saw, when it wasn't all striped, was this baby angel. This beautiful, dancing, singing little miracle. Like he was made by God, personally. You know them people that's so fine, you know that God personally took time out and made them Himself. Like they don't come out of the factory, you know, churned out, sometimes they look okay, but there always gonna be irregulars. Anyway, you looked at Michael Jackson and you saw that God did a good-ass job, probably even patted Himself on the back. Probably looked at Saint Peter and said, "Playa, playa, playa—check this out. This is the shit!"

I think God put Michael in a fucked-up family because sometimes that's what an artist needs—loneliness, struggle, abuse, pain—not all the time, but sometimes. When you grow up hard, there's gonna be some tears in your voice when you sing, you can reach out to all the other people who grew up hard who aren't artists and they can understand you. And they can feel like they aren't alone. Because thinking that you are the only one who feels bad is about the worst sadness there is. I heard all those tears in Michael's voice, but I also heard joy, and laughter. And hope. Which is what I needed then, because I, too, grew up hard. I wore out
Off the Wall
on my Mickey Mouse record player, listening to it over and over in my room, so I could drown out the sound of my parents fighting, so I could stop worrying about how I was going to get my ass kicked at school the next day, so I could stop thinking about my uncle's hands on me, touching where nobody
needs to touch a little girl. I played it over and over and over and over. I stared at the cover. I kissed it. I put it next to my face. When I saw him, all grown up, with hands in his pockets, looking sly, having fun, with this smile so pretty nobody ever smiled as good before, he was the most beautiful thing in the whole world. I was just glad he was real. He was out there in the world somewhere. He may be drinking a Pepsi, or out on a date, or watching TV, or eating a corn on the cob—but he existed. This knowledge kept me going through the bad shit of being a kid. Not that I thought I'd ever meet him or anything. It just gave me so much love to know that someone could be that beautiful and perfect, and it seemed like he had good manners. It gave me this fever dream that maybe one day I would grow up and be like that. Be so beautiful and talented that I made kids who grew up hard want to keep going, because maybe one day they could grow up and be like me. I did. Michael helped me do it.

I got older, and so did he. He changed. The hyperbolic chamber, the Elephant Man skeleton, the plastic surgery, the nose that was not there anymore, the race erased by the vitiligo, the disease that made him whiter and whiter and made him look more like Lesley-Anne Down every day. Michael—what happened? You were there for me. I don't know if I can repay my debt to you, for what your music gave me. I hope Liz Taylor is there for you. I hope that monkey is still around, or is he dead? I can't remember. I don't know what you did to those children. I ask nothing, I accuse nothing. I only say that you helped this child to grow up into a woman, to be fully alive, to not
only survive but thrive. Thank you for that. I dare anyone now to go listen to "She's Out of My Life" and not cry like a bitch.

i love hip-hop

I
love hip-hop. It's a language that speaks to me, with the complexity of the beats, the dexterity of the rhymes, the posture and pride of rappers who make me swoon. It's like opera to me, with all the Wagnerian Sturm und Drang, but with modern values and transformative knowledge. My newest obsession is the Neptunes' song "Pop Shit." I've never heard anything so beautiful in my life. The layering of the samples, the vocal harmony perfectly dovetailing with the MC's swagger, there's small heaven in that song. I believe that we get complimentary snack-size portions of the afterlife, and we all receive them in a different way. For me, it's the arrogant smirk in Pharrell Williams's voice, the skittish percussion and the dizzying freak I get on whenever I hear that song.

The overture that captured me for life was Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype." In the late '80s, I worked at Stormy Leather, a leather dyke emporium on Howard Street in San Francisco. Sundays, it was quiet, and we'd listen to a radio station that ran Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. speeches over phat beats, which felt like the birth of something great. Word was born, and the DJ would spin you
right into Chuck D.'s booming voice. There was such truth to rap right then, and there were no apologies made to anyone about anything. It was the first time it struck me that music could be political, even though I had grown up in San Francisco at the tail end of the Summer of Love; musicians then were rebelling against their own establishment, and even though there were also amazing poets, their rhymes didn't affect me like the epics of Afrika Bambattaa or Grandmaster Flash. Who gives a fuck about
Howl?
What was it supposed to mean, anyway? Wasn't that dude in NAMBLA?

Chuck D. I took to as my new leader. His righteous anger and eloquence was infectious, the beats hypnotic, the passionate struggle of not only people of color but really of all minorities was expressed in his lyrics. I got it. We all got it at Stormy Leather, toiling over the sheets of black leather, the scent getting into our skin, as we bobbed our heads. We understood oppression—as below-the-poverty-line women, as queer, as Asian, Latino and Black. Not only that, as sex workers we were vilified by feminists as traitors to our own movement, since sadomasochism was viewed as accommodation and supplication to the patriarchy. We were also blasted by the queer establishment for wearing chaps, and making the entire GLBT constituency look like perverts. Like
we
were the ones in NAMBLA.

For the first time, we got to make our shame into rage, and rap gave us the formula, the
pi
, for our feelings of misery and displacement, which before went unanswered, an equation burning in our just-born political brains. Yes, Public Enemy was talking about the ghetto, but we all lived in the ghetto no matter what our address. In
the projects of the mind, 911 is, and always will be, a joke. It would take a nation of millions to hold us back. The revolution will not be televised. I am a black man, and I will never be a veteran.

Things turned around when Ice Cube released "Black Korea," a wrathful, venomous anthem against the Korean merchants of the inner city. I felt like I was cast out of a tribe that I so desperately needed to belong to. Gangsta rap, still powerful, had sexist themes that I blocked out because I still wanted to have that hardness, something that would exist as a melodic talisman inside me when the "rainbow was enuf." I was partly in agreement, because the song was about people I knew, relatives who had banished me years ago, so there was an odd satisfaction to it, but, then again, my face I could not camouflage, even though my mind belonged behind enemy lines. I also felt that kind of weirdness you feel when someone makes fun of your mom—a sense of propriety, like, "I can say that but you can't." Also, the undeniable violence and racism of the song made an indelible mark on my precious amulet, and it just felt like bad luck. Ice Cube eventually apologized for the song, and made the genius film
Friday
, yet that same antagonism between Koreans and blacks exists, in a mythological realm, in that neighborhood between
Do the Right Thing
and South Central during the riots.