Long Past Stopping (14 page)

The next night we played in a building owned by the Cleveland Communist Party since the 1930s, but since party membership had been on the decline, they had donated the first floor to a bunch of runaway teenagers, who were allowed to do whatever they wanted with it.

A couple of frat boys had apparently beaten up Grux during our set, but it was always hard to tell when the line had been crossed from good-natured violence to mean-spirited violence. The fight had gone down outside of the narrow vision of my mouth hole, but Grux looked pretty bad after the show. They had gone after him with a ladder, but he couldn't run with his three-foot boot on, and I doubt he could see any better than I could. I took only half of a methadone pill that night and slept on the stage with four cute two-week-old kittens. They were still cuddled up with me when I woke up the next morning, finally over the withdrawal.

I felt great, but Grux was bruised up beyond belief, and his mood was deteriorating. He claimed it was the result of getting closer to New York Shitty, as he called it, but now that I wasn't so sick and self-absorbed as I had been, it was clear that no one was doing that well. Cheryl had had it with Grux and was on a hunger strike due to the lack of anything remotely edible. Thomas, who was a pretty quiet guy to begin with, had receded even further into his silence, and Jeremy was limping around in severe pain as a result of not taking off his shoes.

“Jesus Christ, Jeremy,” Thomas said as we all stood around looking at Jeremy's green foot in the parking lot of a truck stop. “You've been wearing them since we left?”

“I took 'em off to take a shower, but…yeah. They smell so bad I got to keep 'em on.”

“Come on, man. If you don't give them some air, you're going to lose your foot. It'll be fine if we just leave the windows open,” I said.

It didn't work, though. Even when he tried sticking his foot out the
back window, it caused all of us to gag, and we had to air out the Suburban at the next exit while he put his shoes back on. It was an unfortunate example of the good of the many outweighing the needs of a few, or in this case, one. I gave Jeremy the rest of my methadone, hoping it might help with the pain, but there was nothing else to do about it.

After Buffalo, we got a much needed day off, so Thomas could hang out with his family. I woke up early and caught a train to Manhattan to meet up with Heather. I didn't know what was happening to me, but for the whole seven-hour train ride down, all I could think about was sex. It came out of nowhere, and I kept having to shift around in my seat to hide what was going on. I hadn't experienced anything like this since high school. It occurred to me that my lack of sex drive may have been at least part of the reason I had been so productive over the last six months. I wondered if there was some sort of substitute that would curb my sex drive the way heroin did without the nasty side effect of addiction. I had heard about kings in olden times putting saltpeter in visiting princes' wine (or was it sex offenders in modern times? I couldn't remember), but I don't think it took away the urge, just the ability to perform. I needed the opposite of that.

God, I couldn't wait to see Heather.

 

R
UNNING LATE,
I found Heather waiting outside for me. I was actually a tiny bit proud of myself for having just gone through the worst experience of my life and come out the other side, and Heather was the only person on the planet who knew about it. We went straight to her friend's apartment, and on the way there I gave her a short recap on my adventures of the last two weeks, but didn't go into too much detail about kicking. Other than not sleeping, the crawling skin, the nausea, the aching, the sweating, and the diarrhea—the boring shit everyone has heard about a million times—I couldn't find the words to describe it. What does any of that mean to someone who hasn't been through it? It didn't matter. It was just good to be around someone I wasn't lying to. Heather's friend was out of town, so we had the place to ourselves. After what must have been another hour of talking about myself, it finally occurred to me to ask how she was doing.

“Fucking Scott is driving me crazy,” she answered.

“What's he doing?”

“Oh you know, just being Scott.” Her boss was always driving her crazy, but that was the only reason she ever gave me. He seemed like a nice enough guy to me.

“How's New York been? Have you seen any friends? Has it been fun at all?”

“No! I'm here for work! I sit in that fucking building all day talking about Ansel Adams to idiots! I wish I was on vacation, or touring across the country, playing music with crazy people, but I'm not! I'm fucking working!”

Whoa. I had never seen Heather like this, or I had been oblivious to it before. Wrapped up in my own shit for as long as I had been, I'm not sure it ever occurred to me that she might have problems of her own. Of course that made me start thinking about myself again and what an asshole I was for being so selfish. It felt as if the dynamic had shifted, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

“Hey. Tomorrow night we're doing an improv set under a different name. If there's another drum set, why don't you play with us?” I said, partly trying to change the subject, and hoping to give her something fun to do in New York.

“I don't know about that. I can't play that stuff.”

“What stuff? There is no stuff until you play it. It'll be fun. You just said you wished you were playing music.”

“We'll see.”

“Good,” I said, leaning in to kiss her.

She was still preoccupied about something, and the sex felt a little one-sided, as if she wasn't really there. It made me feel kind of gross about myself afterward, as if I had just experienced what it was like to fit my mom's description of all white men everywhere. Usually, just thinking about sex made me feel guilty of that, but I had never experienced it in real life.

“I'm sorry,” I said, for no reason in particular.

“About what?”

“Everything.”

 

I
MET HEATHER
the next night after work, and we headed up to Harlem on the A train. The crowd was neither communist nor anarchist, but some weird brand of negative urban hippie I hadn't encountered before. Long hair and beards were not to be mistaken for peace and love. There were little groups of people hiding in dark corners whispering to one another, lest they be overheard and judged by another little group of whispering people. As more and more of these quiet hippie artist types showed up, the small whispering groups morphed into a larger
silent group. It was an uncomfortable atmosphere, and Heather really didn't want to play. I wasn't sure I did either, but I kept trying to talk her into it anyway.

“Don't worry. We'll be wearing masks. If it really sucks, no one will know who was up there anyway,” I said as I tried to convince her.

“I'll know,” she responded. I didn't have an answer for that one. No one ever judged me as badly as I judged myself.

“Well, yeah. You're right, but look at these people. They're just here to be seen anyway. They're going to like whatever we do just because they're supposed to.”

Since we were performing under the name of the Commode Minstrels, not Caroliner, we had to come up with a different idea for the masks. We all had clean laundry, courtesy of Thomas's family, so I thought of wearing underwear. It wasn't all that creative, but we didn't have time for anything more elaborate. Heather joined us in donning our various tighty whities, boxers, and long johns, and we played forty-five minutes of some of the most jarring, unlistenable music possible. As I expected, the audience loved it. It had very little to do with us and almost everything to do with alcohol.

The next morning I said good-bye to Heather, and the band began its journey back to California. After kicking dope I found that life on the road rather agreed with me. Our only responsibility was to show up at the next club on time. The shows got progressively worse as we made our way back west. We played for video game nerds in Philly, empty cages that were supposed to contain naked women in South Carolina, alcoholic ghost people in New Orleans, one confused guy in El Paso, and a pretty good sampling of almost every stereotype Los Angeles had to offer.

As Grux said, “the best thing to ever happen in L.A. was us going home.”

A
FTER FINISHING OUT
my fifth-grade year at Malcolm X Elementary School on the south side of Berkeley, we moved across town, two blocks away from the Arts Magnet School. Considering my history as a performer, it didn't seem that far-fetched that I would qualify for admission, but something to do with racial quotas prevented Kyle and me from being eligible. Instead we were to be bused a few miles away to Columbus Elementary. Mom tried every method of persuasion she could before deciding to boycott the Berkeley public school system and charge them with engaging in reverse racism, which according to my mom wasn't as bad as the regular kind but was pretty bad nonetheless. I said good-bye to my dream of a normal childhood and reluctantly went along with the boycott.

The truant officers came around every couple of days to try to get us to go to the other school, but Mom just lectured them on how she never would have joined the freedom rides if she had known it would have ended up keeping her kids out of school.

“But, lady, your kids got to go to school. It's the law.”

“First of all, my name is not lady. You can call me doctor. And second, when a law doesn't make any sense, I'm just supposed to follow along? There wouldn't be any civil rights if we had just mindlessly obeyed the
law. That's the problem with this whole country, and frankly it's the last thing we expected to encounter when we moved to Berkeley.”

“Okay, lady. I mean doctor. But can't the kids go to Columbus until we get this figured out?”

“No way. This boycott is in response to an unjust system that victimizes kids because of the color of their skin. If the school was full, then that would be one thing, but can you honestly say that it makes any sense to keep my kids, both of whom are very involved in the creative arts, from going to the Arts Magnet School because they are white? Reverse racism is still racism.”

“I'm just doing my job, ma'am.”

“Yeah, that's what they said in Germany.”

I turned away in embarrassment. Sending us to Columbus Elementary was a far cry from sending us to the gas chamber.

“And I'm not a ma'am, either,” she added. “I'm sorry about your job. Will that be all?”

“For today. But we'll be back. You can't keep your kids out of school forever.”

“Oh, really? These are my kids, and I am not raising them to mindlessly participate in a system whose only concern is filling quotas and has no respect for the individual, especially when the victims are innocent kids. So don't bother coming back if that's what you intend on asking me to do.”

Not surprisingly, a different truant officer would show up every day, each one higher up in the chain of command, until the superintendent himself came by.

Kyle and I were shut out of that meeting, but afterward Mom called us downstairs and said, “Guess what? The boycott worked. You guys are starting at the Arts Magnet School tomorrow.” It was confusing after all that to find only two other white kids in my class. What kind of quota were they trying to fill?

 

W
HILE IT MAY
have been my secret fantasy to start living a normal life, the other kids didn't view me as normal. It took me almost six months to realize that one reason might have been that I was still wearing these shiny black satin pants, a red muscle shirt, and either Capezio dance shoes or checkered Vans. It was too weird to even make fun of, so for a while the other kids just left me alone.

Once a year Mom would get five pairs of the pants custom made for me, and she would buy an equal number of red muscle shirts, which she liked because they were made of a 100 percent cotton, not an easy thing to find in the 1980s. Kyle's wardrobe consisted of a couple of identical kung fu uniforms, and—when those needed to be washed—the satin pants and muscle shirts I had grown out of. My only friend, it seemed by default, was one of the other white kids, Muni. The other white girl was so awkward that not even the teachers could talk to her. I never heard her say one word.

I realized I couldn't keep wearing this same uniform every day if I had any hope of fitting in at all, so at Christmas break Mom took us to the mall to get some new clothes, protesting the whole way there that we looked fine. She objected to the fact that we would now have to waste valuable time thinking about what we were going to wear just so we could look like everybody else. She was so against the idea that I figured we would go in and grab some stuff off the rack and be done with it, but eight hours later I was in tears, pleading to just go back to Berkeley and get some more satin pants made. It felt as though we had tried on everything in the mall at least three different times. Every time I tried a new shirt, it meant retrying all the pants I had already put on to see how they went together, and just when we thought we were done, Mom would see something she hadn't seen before, or she would catch me glancing at something, and we'd have to start the whole process over again.

The mall was absolute hell, but I did come out of there looking a little less vaudevillian. Walking back to the car, we could have almost been mistaken for a couple of normal kids, except for the fact that we had somehow ended up getting our ears pierced. The part about looking like everyone else did concern me. I just didn't want to look like a clown.

 

T
HE CHANGE IN STYLE
worked as far as getting the other kids to talk to me.

“What are you, some sort of fag or something?” Akbar asked me when I came back from break. Akbar was the most popular kid in the class. He was charismatic and good-looking, and his dad was well known for owning the Black Muslim Bakery. Despite the insult, it was the first time anyone other than Muni had talked to me since I started going to school, so I took it as a good sign.

“Would you call Mr. T. a fag?” I asked him.

“Well…uh, no, but…”

“Anyway, you're only gay if you pierce your right ear, not your left,” I clarified.

Soon after that I was allowed to join the basketball games at recess, and it kind of sort of seemed as if I had friends. I was getting a little too comfortable with them, though, because when I called Akbar “blood” one day, trying to get him to pass me the ball, he spat on the ground and said, “Uh-uh, man. You ain't my blood.”

“Come on, cuz. I didn't mean anything by it,” I responded.

“What's wrong wich you, honky? You ain't my cousin neither.”

I had never thought about what these words meant and assumed that they were just terms of familiarity. Now I realized they were about race. My new clothes may have helped, but there was no way I was ever going to completely fit in. I had been calling Muni and Kyle
blood
and
cuz
for so long it was just part of my vocabulary, and I kept using the terms out of habit until I had almost no friends again. I didn't understand why we couldn't all be
bloods
and
cuzzes
.

After all, we had learned in class that everyone originally came from Africa. We also learned about a lot of the atrocities “my people” had done to other people that didn't look like me, and I could understand why the other kids didn't want me to call them
blood
. I didn't want to be associated with white folks either. In American history we learned about the genocide of the Indians, slavery, the lynching of black folks by the KKK, and the shooting of white folks who helped blacks in the civil rights movement. In California history class we learned about Japanese internment camps and Cesar Chavez's struggles to help the Farm Workers Union. At home I learned about Ronald Reagan's secret war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the lower classes right here at home. In my ten years of life, I really hadn't seen many examples of white people, or more specifically white men, that negated any of these horror stories.

I don't know if it was because of white guilt or what, but I ended up joining a South African Dance Troupe and spent my weekends up at UC Berkeley protesting U.S. involvement and support for apartheid. When Kyle and I started taking part, there were no more than ten or fifteen people following this guy with a bullhorn who would yell at students to boycott the university. As more people joined the protests, he started organizing sit-ins and got people to handcuff themselves in front of doorways. In a very short amount of time, there were a few thousand people
marching onto campus demanding that the UC system divest its money from South Africa. What had started with a guy holding a bullhorn had turned into a national movement.

For the most part the protests were peaceful, and the police only focused on those who were obstructing access to buildings or roads, but as the gatherings grew in size it became harder to know what was going to happen. Riots had broken out a few times, and Mom was worried that if Kyle or I got arrested, she would be deemed an unfit mother and they would take us away from her. Instead of not allowing us to go, however, she made some kind of arrangement with Wavy Gravy, our old camp leader, that if either of us got arrested, we should tell the authorities that we were under Wavy's care and should be returned to our mother.

Because of my new guardian, I was now free to do whatever I wanted as long as it didn't interfere with any of my ten other extracurricular activities, which included tap dancing on Monday, jazz and modern dance class on Tuesday and Wednesday, South African percussion class on Thursday afternoon (before heading to gymnastics class), and Capoeira on Friday night. Saturdays were usually my day to go and protest apartheid or nuclear weapons, and then on Sunday I would take BART into the city to the juggling meet in Golden Gate Park. It seemed like every minute of every day was accounted for. No wonder I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I might as well have stayed in the circus. The fatigue, coupled with the thought of having to do it all over again the next week, was overwhelming. I felt like that Greek guy who pushed a rock up a hill every day, just to watch it roll back down.

Mornings were always horrific, and I pretty much hated everyone and everything until about noon. Mostly I hated my mom, whose job it was to get me out of bed. She tried all sorts of ways to get me up, but the most ruthless trick was the water treatment: threatening to pour a bucket of cold water over me. In the beginning, it worked like a charm, but one day I was too tired to care if she poured cold water on me or not and found out that she was incapable of bringing herself to follow through with it. Instead she talked Kyle into doing it, and it worked. I jumped out of bed kicking and punching Kyle. I then crawled back under the covers, threatening to beat the shit out of anyone who ever tried that on me again.

“You motherfucking cocksuckers!” I yelled at them. “I'm coming into your fucking rooms tonight, and I'm gonna pour water on your heads. See how you fucking like it.” I was wide awake, seething with hatred. I stayed in bed out of protest.

“Come on, honey. You have to get up. Remember how hard we tried to get you into school? We can't let them down after all that.”

This was another thing she brought up every morning.

“I don't give a shit. You don't pour water on someone when they're asleep, for fuck's sake.”

“I didn't do it. Kyle did. I would never do that to you.”

“You fucking told him to do it. That's even worse.”

“Oran David Canfield! Get out of bed right now!” she yelled, trying out authoritarianism.

“No.”

“This instant!” It was rare that she tried the same trick two sentences in a row.

“Fuck you.”

“What did you say?” She was almost laughing at the absurdity of it, which pissed me off even more.

“You heard me.”

“You just said that to your own mother? Well, since none of this is working you leave me no choice but to come over there and physically get you out of bed.”

“How about leaving me the fuck alone?”

“I can't do that, honey, because then you won't make it to class, and I'll look like a bad mother,” she said, getting closer to the bed.

“I don't care what you look like,” I said, at which point she grabbed my arms and tried to pull me out. I started thrashing my arms around, trying to scare her off, but she didn't give up. She got her arms around my waist, and I flinched and let out a little laugh despite being as angry as I ever had been. I could see the lightbulb turn on above her head when she realized what just happened.

“Aha!” she said, going for my armpits this time.

“Goddamnit.” I was trying to yell through the most painful involuntary laughter I had ever experienced. “Fuck you!” I screamed, leaping out of bed. “That is totally unfair. Don't you ever do that to me again.”

But she did. Almost every morning I woke up to the threat and eventual execution of the “tickle treatment.”

Kyle never had a problem waking up, and in retaliation for getting beat up over the water treatment, he somehow snuck into my room, and I woke up naked with my wrists handcuffed together behind my back. It was unclear how Kyle had come across a pair of handcuffs, or why he didn't have a key for them, but I showed up late to school that day with a
note from the police officer who had been called to let me out of the things. I couldn't understand how Kyle didn't get in trouble for that one. I got in trouble for everything. When Mom caught me eating a hamburger, she dragged me to the McDonald's, asked to speak to the manager, and demanded that they tape one of my school photos to the wall and never serve me again. The punishment for handcuffing your brother in his sleep was laughter. Even the cop laughed at me.