Loving Day (10 page)

“They’re Irish.” I tell her. When this doesn’t seem to satisfy her, I continue. “My dad just passed away. Very recently.” This is a truth that’s also meant to stop the conversation. Yet fails too.

“Where in Ireland are they from?” Sun asks, but it sounds like a demand.

“What?”

“How long have they been in America?”

“I don’t know. When did they run out of potatoes?” I ask, utterly sincere.

“What were their occupations?” She keeps going.

“All I know about them is that they were really pasty,” I tell her. Sun doesn’t laugh. No one does, except One Drop, harder than the joke pushed him. Everyone just stares at him. Me too. He keeps going. I’m smiling, but I want him to stop. This is my family. This is my family, pasty but still mine. When he finally ends with, “Nice one, Holmes!” he holds a hand to slap and I do but I’d rather smack his face.

“Warren, you knew your father, correct? So give us something about him before you sit down. Something as detailed as your mother’s anecdote.”

The first thing I think of is that goddamn house. That rotting mansion. But I don’t really think of that as my father, only as his European legacy, his aspiration for himself and for me if he really did imagine that I’d come back to inhabit it. So then I think about his car, and that’s what I tell them. Craig Duffy drove a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle, black, that he bought in 1972 and never let die. I loved that car. It had such a distinctive lawn mower purr; when he’d pick me up from school I’d know he was coming from a block away. It used to break down all the time, but the thing had such simple mechanics. My dad would get used parts sent straight to the house, fix it out on the street, car radio blasting
classical music in the middle of the hood to drown out the sounds of other cars blaring hip-hop as they drove by, which is hilarious now that it’s not actively horrifying me.

I tell Sun that story, I tell the bleached tribe surrounding me, and feel the release. I usually don’t like talking about my white side in public, in front of non-Caucasoids. I’m of the firm belief that, if I never bring up the fact that half my family is white, somehow the fact that I look white will be forgiven. But I look at these people, and among them there is nothing to apologize for. So I remember out loud the way the seats were so old that, where the cushions still remained, they’d oxidized into sand. I feel my dad again, even more than the first night back, and I want to sit down before the emotion it invokes overtakes me. But Sunita Habersham doesn’t allow this. She sighs. Her breasts get bigger when she does but I barely notice it other than to notice it.

“That’s good, but a car is a thing. Why do you think of that particular object in relation to your father, Warren?” Sun asks me. “It’s just a car. What does that mean? To you?”

I know what I can give her about the silly little car, but I don’t want to because I don’t know if I can give it without losing something. But there’s something there I want to lose and I don’t trust myself to pull it out later. So I tell everyone in the room, including myself.

When my mom went into the hospital, I was eleven and they had been broken up for three years by then. My dad unexpectedly picked me up from school one day and that night I went to his house. Visits to my father were strictly every other weekend, so I knew something had changed, but there was no explanation. That night, we went to my mom’s apartment, got more of my clothes and favorite toys. He had keys, somehow. At first, I thought this might be the beginning of a reconciliation, that I had them back together, that my mother would be joining us the next day. I wasn’t actually that freaked out about it; they’d gone on a few dates after the separation, tried to see if they could get things started again, so this just seemed like another attempt. But the next night, she didn’t arrive; my dad finally told me she was in the hospital. He made it sound like she was at a spa retreat. I wasn’t
worried; people stayed in the hospital on TV all the time, and usually they were smiling. That Saturday, we drove the Bug to Jefferson Hospital. Two months later, we drove the same little black car to her funeral. We drove that car to a boarding school in New Hampshire a week after the funeral, for me to have an interview and see if I liked it there. I was eleven. My mom had made him promise, with me in the hospital room, that he would make sure I got a good education. That this one thing, this one thing in his life, he couldn’t be cheap on.

So there was this big fancy boarding school up in the granite state, like a six-hour drive first thing in the morning, but it was worth it. A campus of castle-like buildings surrounded by trees, right by a river. I liked it. It was like Narnia up there. When we left that night, my dad tried to make the trip back to Philly in one shot to avoid having to pay for a hotel room.

Thing is, we got hit with a rainstorm not long after passing into New York State. I mean, it was coming down hard, flooding, I could barely see to the next car. At points, we were creeping along so slow I watched the frogs jumping along the side of the road like they were planning an invasion. We didn’t talk, we rarely did anyway, but at that moment we couldn’t if we wanted to because the sound of water hitting the Bug’s roof was so loud we would have had to scream. It was a horrible, horrible world out there, beating down on us. But I was protected inside that little can, with my dad at the wheel. Him staring forward, hands at twelve and two. I fell asleep a couple of times, the last time close to the end after the rain had stopped. We must have been in New Jersey by then. And I could hear my pop now. Craig Duffy was crying. Craig Duffy, freckles and mustache and bristles of brown stubble, was sniffing and crying, still staring ahead. He’d probably been crying all night, but I was laid out on the backseat and couldn’t hear him.

We got back and we never spoke about boarding school again. I stayed with him, in Philly. I went to Greene Street Friends, walking distance right down Germantown Ave. My father raised me, every day of the year till I could run away on my own.

I tell this story, and now I’m crying. I’m crying about halfway in,
but I don’t stop because this is the moment. Come on out. Mostly I don’t stop because I didn’t cry when my father died and I know this is a shameful, shameful thing. So I cry for Craig Duffy now, and I deserve all the shame I feel for it. And even as I do I finally understand why he cried. Not just for my mother, not just for me, but for himself. Because he was scared he would fail me. And I know I don’t just cry for Craig Duffy, even in this moment. I cry for myself as well. For the ways I have failed Tal, my daughter, and the ways I’m sure I will.

Sunita Habersham lets me sit down now.

But I see she’s crying too. Just a little, but I catch the shine. And a small part of me, a part of me not crying, it sees her tears and thinks, Got her.

—

I leave class with a large, loosely defined assignment to do some research on my Irish heritage before the end of the week so I can complete the course, and a feeling of raw embarrassment at standing in front of a group of strangers and tearing up. There’s a huge difference between “balling” and “bawling.” Also, I leave with the need to get drunk or have a cigarette or find some other way to kill just enough of myself today that I can go on living. I want to go home. I want go home and come back for Tal after her student orientation session, but I have four hours to waste and I’m already too tired to drive back and forth twice. Strolling slowly and without much purpose, I come to the last trailer before the woods, where a group stands around waiting for something. I try to bum a loosey, but nobody smokes real analogue cigarettes anymore. Nobody smokes anywhere on earth. Humanity quit and abandoned me to negotiate the ghosts of my own nine-year addiction. I’m left, having exposed my habit to the crowd, standing awkwardly among them for another couple of minutes, straining at small talk until I see Tal literally skipping from the next building.

On Tal’s ears are the biggest hollow gold bamboo earrings I have ever seen in my life. At least I hope they’re hollow, because they nearly reach from her lobes to her shoulders, and with each hop their octagon
shapes swing violently as if my daughter had attached gilded coat hangers to the sides of her head.

“Oh man, you got to see this. You got to. Come now. Come now or you’ll miss it.”

“What the hell is in your ears?”

“Class assignment. I’m on break till the student orientation. Come on, you got to see something, it is so cool. You got to see it now.” Tal starts pulling on my hand and I grab hers tight and run with her for the chance to run with her.

We stop at an old RV lined up directly behind the trailer they have my art classroom set up in. Airstreams are supposed to be shiny silver and smooth and perfectly round like pods from a fifties alien-attack movie, but this one looks like the carcass of a mutant dung beetle. Its skin is dulled, oxidized, and covered with stickers, most of which are half-faded and peeling. Then I hear the moans inside. It’s a woman. I look at Tal, who’s giggling, and I think I must have this wrong. But I don’t: there’s a woman and she’s moaning.

“Tal, no,” I tell her and start to pull her away from this and sexuality in general, but Tal insists and pulls me again, this time to its door on the side and it’s open.

In the dark small space inside, a women lies on a massage chair. Her head’s captive to the hollow face cushion at the end of it. Over her stands a spider of a man, webbed veins lining his skinny arms. Literally webbed: there are blue lines inked between his bulbous blood vessels. He’s shoving something into her back. When I hear the buzz I think it’s some kind of spinal vibrator, but a moment reveals it as a tattooist’s needle.

“You gotta see it,” Tal tells me again, like this is not enough, then pulls me even closer, into the can with them, where the air reeks of burnt sage and rubbing alcohol.

“It’s okay. I don’t mind,” comes from the lady getting her back split open. She’s a heavy woman, and her exposed flesh looks as soft as a marshmallow. If you laid your head on that meat, you would be asleep before you sunk all your weight down.

“Check it, this is the biggest Sesa I’ve done yet. And I will be braggadocios: the dopest as well,” the arachnid tells me.

“It better be because it hurts, Spider!” she yells back at him, letting the words and the pain out in mock whimpers.

“Tell her,” Spider says to me, lifting a hand to beckon me even closer. “Tell her how amazing it looks. How original.”

“Tons of people in the camp have this tattoo. It’s like a biracial tramp stamp,” Tal says to me. The lady getting written on just laughs harder, so hard Spider has to lift his needle up and nod at our good-natured appreciation of the spectacle of the fat on this lady’s back rippling.

“Actually, it’s the badge of mulatto pride. And everyone’s is different. Look at this one, lovely right?”

I look at this lady’s back. There is a big Star of David that goes from the tip of one shoulder blade to the other. Around it is a circle. If he drew it free hand he’s a genius, because it looks like a perfect 360. Past the line of the circle, what looks like drops of water spin off of the shape.

“See? See how I incorporated her freckles into the rivets? None of them are covered up, instead they make it look as if the image is splashing off into her organic fiber. Really, you have to listen to the flesh for the art to work like this.”

“You sound pretentious,” the lady says, and she stops laughing. Her back stills.

“What is it?” I ask him. He’s got a jeweler’s visor on with a light attached and when he looks right at me all I can see above his nose is the glow.

“My greatest creation. First, I took the West African Adinkra symbol
Sesa Wo Suban
, which basically means ‘Transform your character.’ ”

“Sounds like a diss.” The guy’s got no shirt on. The only thing covering his torso is nipple rings. Silver hoops, and a blue arachnid body painted right on the center of his chest like Spider-Man.

“Sure, it can be used as an insult, okay, but the meaning I like is that you have to change to become who you are. Perfect, right? So then, to
further mulatto-tize it, I changed the classic Akan star to the star that corresponds with the wearer’s European ethnic heritage, thereby bonding together their ethnic nature. In Doris’s case, the Star of David. Which despite what it says about tattooing in the Torah, has been very popular around here.”

“Leviticus 19:28 is very contentious,” says Doris, and starts laughing again. She’s high. There’s no way she’s not high.

“That’s the one I’d get, Pops,” Tal says, leaning in closer to get a better look at it.

“Not until you’re eighteen. As your father I feel very strongly about Leviticus 19:28,” I tell Tal. And I do, suddenly, though I’m not sure what Leviticus 19:28 says.

“Listen to your old man,” Spider tells my daughter, then looks at me. “But Pops, you got to see them. Sixty-three different versions of this design walking around here. Linking us, you know? Spiritually. I once inked the entire
Leaves of Grass
on over a thousand people at Burning Man. One verse written on each person. That was dope. But the Sesa? It’s, like, on another plane of consciousness. We’re creating a people, man.”

There’s silence. There’s no one talking because he was speaking to me, and I have nothing to say in response. Because I’m actually listening to him, and he terrifies me. The very idea, of creating a tribe where I would fully belong, of changing my definition to fit me instead of the other way around, terrifies me. It scares me because it’s not crazy. It’s attractive, logical even. It’s just priced at abandoning my existing identity and entire worldview.

“G-d, you’re pretentious,” Doris breaks the pause, laughing.

THERE’S A FRIDAY NIGHT
powwow the last workday before school starts, and all the grown mixies show up. They have a full bonfire burning and the faculty and staff stand around like a god might arise from the flames. Fresh tattoos shine on the oiled skin of the newly branded: I see six-pointed druid stars, Soviet-style red ones, two-dimensional Nordic sailor stars that look like shuriken, all encased by the Sesa’s black swirls. There’s even a Sesa with the star from
Star Trek
—presumably worn by Captain Kirk’s lovechild. I recognize the intricately knotted Celtic pattern in several of the stars, and know if I got one, that would be it. And I also know I won’t, though I think it does look good. I think things like: they are all connected, these people. I think these sorts of thoughts because I’m drunk. There are about seventy people here, and they’re all shades from pink to dark ebony. Fat, thin, whatever. But they’re all connected. Spider knew. How to draw a symbolic line between them, from calves to arms to shoulders to the meat on Doris’s back. She walks by me and she’s wearing a tank top and the skin back there is still red and painful but she looks so happy, as
if the pain has been sensualized. And the fat of her midriff hangs out on the sides and again I am drunk and so don’t deny its beauty. Doris knows. She knows that meat is her and she loves it and she loves everyone else here enough that she is willing to let them see all of who she is in this moment. I find that easy to envy. I want to live in a fantasy world too.

I get another drink, because they’re free and my mouth has nothing else to do. I stand staring at the fire, wait for some sort of formal ceremony to begin, but it doesn’t come. This is a school that doesn’t feel like one even in the daytime, but as it gets dark its true nature unspools. It’s less a school than a family reunion. I don’t know these people, but I do, because they’re like me. They don’t look like me, they don’t sound like me, but they know what it’s like to be me. To be in the group while intangibly excluded from it. I know they know by how relieved they appear to be together. To be completely at home. Without question of identity or membership. I belong here, I catch myself thinking, and I’m too drunk to question or squash that joy. Spider comes over and, from my elation, my new admiration for his work pours.

“That’s my thing. I haul my camper to all the festivals, tattoo conventions, you know, make my money. North April to July, south and out west till fall, hole up in Santa Fe the off months. Dude, I came to Mélange thinking I’d stay two weeks. And here I am, still. First time I’ve been still for a lunar cycle since 9/11. No lie.”

“So you’re one of the people who were here from the beginning?” I like Spider. He’s a little guy, in height and weight, and I like little guys that don’t immediately point out that I am a big guy. If he never mentions this, I could grow to love him. Surely I could.

“Yup. You know Marie Bella? The folk slash fusion singer? She’s got a song that goes—” Spider sings a few bars I’ve never heard but I nod to get him to stop. “Well anyway, that’s one of Roslyn’s exes, she got bank; she funded it to start. A lot of her friends gave money. You wouldn’t believe how many biracial cats get rich in the entertainment industry. It’s like the family business for zebras.”

“Yeah, but why squat in a park, in Philly?”

“We were already here.” Spider shrugs. “Mutts take what we can get. I mean, it’s a little crazy, right? This whole mulatto thing. But I say, enjoy it while it lasts, and keep a full tank of gas just in case.”

I toast to him on that, and we both drink all the way down for good measure. A portion of his beer ends up on his T-shirt, but Spider doesn’t seem to care. Without comment he takes it off and pitches it into the bonfire. It’s a beautiful sight, the crackling flame, the way the glow reflects off his nipple rings.

I’m ready to leave, but my body isn’t. I am allowed to drink one serving of alcohol every hour and still drive home. I can’t mess up the ratio, not with the bike. Bad math is the single biggest killer of motorcycle riders. Based on my six drinks over the last two, I estimate I’ll be drunk for four more hours, so I turn to head back to the art room. There’s a pile of packing blankets in its closet, left over from the tables just brought in, and I plan to make a hobo cot with them. But then Roslyn walks by and squeezes my arm, pulls me around again.

“Don’t go, sugar. Fun’s about to begin.” The words come in a hum of matriarchal authority strong enough to make my muscles stop and obey before I’ve even processed the words. I don’t take it personally, the mothering is clearly for everyone, and as she releases me she’s already hushing another attendee.

Roslyn stands before the fire and lifts her arms and we all fall silent and start forming a crowd around her. Immediately I am bored, and there’s nothing to do with my hands but grab another beer. I drink that and think, You know what, I can get even drunker if I sleep behind my desk till dawn. Be fine and go back for a shower before Tal even wakes up. Then I remember the crackheads. Crackheads are a major responsibility. But there haven’t been any more break-ins, and Tal has her cell anyway, so I grab another beer and lose count of how many I’ve drunk because it doesn’t matter anymore.

Roslyn definitely gets her style from the black side of the family: the endless acknowledgments and appreciations. I get my introduction, which commends me for creating “the greatest biracial graphic novel of his generation,” which could probably be qualified by “and
the only,” but I don’t interrupt her, or bring up the fact that I just drew what some faceless dude instructed. I am tired. She keeps talking. I don’t want a speech. I want a lullaby. I look at Roslyn, trying to think of a scenario where somehow, somehow it would be prudent of me to lay my head on her lap and take a nap as she kept humming.

“Congrats on completing your balance training. Sorry I made you cry.”

Sunita Habersham is standing next to me.

“I made me cry,” I tell her. I really did make myself. Not that I faked the tears, but I forced myself to feel the things I knew would bring them. I made a decision in the moment. I can do that without losing too much face because as guys go, I’m butch; tears are counterintuitive coming from a man like me. They make me interesting. And how upset can I be with losing control when I controlled the act?

“I cried, my first week. Everybody cries, everyone who gets it. Change hurts. You have to make the decision to undergo it, or it rips you apart. That’s why Spider’s tattoo is so cool. It’s a reminder. To roll with it.”

I want to make a joke about choosing change by marking yourself indelibly, but ask, “You get one?”

Sun hands me her wine cooler. I really look at it hard, because I didn’t know they still made wine coolers. When she turns around, I think she’s just going to walk away from me once again, but she lifts the white cotton of her shirttail and shows me the skin at the base of her spine. And there it is: a Sesa the size of my fist with an Anglo star right in the middle of it, beaming.

“Yeah. I went for the Kundalini chakra.”

It’s lovely. I say that out loud too, because the skirt she is wearing is long and heavy and the weight of the fabric has pulled it low, and my eyes are on her ink for a moment before the crack of her ass pulls them down. Everything there is so
plushable
. It’s so plushable, it creates the word. Now the light of the bonfire flickers in that crack and makes it look deeper and living and I look away because it’s wrong of me to even notice.

“I already had a tattoo there, since I was sixteen. It was Cutter from
ElfQuest
.”

“Cutter the Wolfrider.”
I don’t say this, I gasp it. She spins her head back, smiling at me.

“Nobody got the reference. They just thought it was a really shitty Hello Kitty. I was sixteen. My dad’s girlfriend ratted me out when she saw it. Pissed him off, so it served its purpose. Spider did my Sesa over the top. Check out the woven design. It stands for the interconnectivity of—” what I will never know, because even if Sun finishes her sentence, I don’t hear words. I just hear a pop and then the world goes mute and I’m on the ground because One Drop has gone Viking and punched me in my cheekbone.

—

I don’t black out. I want to, want to just give the fuck up and fade to black and let someone else carry my body as my head fills with enough blood to completely reverse my center of gravity. But I keep my eyes open. And when hands come at me, I grab them, get back into a standing position. And I smile. I smile as big as I can without moving my jaw because I don’t know yet that it isn’t broken. I get that smile out though. I remember to do that, because it’s the only way to fight the humiliation of getting dropped by a sucker punch, at least until you find out who’s hit you.

I’m seated in the backseat of a minivan, its door slid open, and have already been given water and the repeated instruction not to go to sleep tonight in case of concussion. I can barely stay awake as it is. I don’t even know why he did it, until Roslyn walks over with One Drop, their hands clasped together, and tells me that he has something to say to me.

“I’m sorry, bro. I shouldn’t have punched you in your head.” That’s it. I wait for more to come, but he just buries his chin in his chest, not even meeting eyes with me. Roslyn looks up at the giant, and he sees this. He holds out his hand to me. I stare at it for a moment, realize everyone gathering is staring at me, so take it.

“Sorry I beat you down, Holmes. It’s not you, it’s me. I got issues. That was not copacetic. My bad. We cool now?” He reeks of Phillie Blunts and Pink lotion. And maybe the words work or maybe it’s just that I want him to free me from the prison of his Icelandic death grip but I tell him, “We cool.”

“You can be such an asshole,” Sunita Habersham yells, and I know I can be, but she’s talking to One Drop. Me, she’s pulling away, across the parking lot to a station wagon, which is another thing I didn’t know they made anymore.

Spider’s laid out in the backseat with his legs hanging out the door. The whole cab smells like weed.

“I want, like, my own zonkey, man.”

“A what?”

“Zonkey…half zebra, half donkey”—Spider’s eyes are closed, even though his mouth is open—“like the most gangsta mulatto beast of all time…” but then he drifts off. I roll the windows down. The wind is loud as Sunita drives back down through Mt. Airy into Germantown and that’s fine because aside from my directions nobody says anything, not until Spider wakes momentarily to offer “Woah. You live in the straight up hood, man. That’s so cool,” before rolling over, presumably drifting off into the zonkey dream from which we interrupted him.

In front of Loudin, nobody’s out on the street, and the lights are off in the mansion, which means Tal had enough sense to go to sleep without me. When the car stops, Sun still doesn’t say anything. Her hands are on the wheel, and the bracelets that line her arms jingle for seconds after she brakes. She looks ahead, as if she doesn’t want the next thing to happen, whatever it is, that she’d rather the night keep going, even though it’s been going badly for a while now. The tension of the moment seems to be making her angry.

My face is throbbing. I can count my heartbeat with the pulses of pain, and now that the adrenaline has worn off and taken most of the alcohol with it, my face hurts, and I think I deserve some understanding with the suffering.

“Are you sleeping with that WASPafarian nutjob?”

“Don’t slut shame me. It’s none of your business.” Sun spins her head to stare me down and seems relieved to find a target for her anger. I whip my head right back at her, pointing at the side of it where the bastard hit me. I don’t know what it looks like; I can’t bring myself to look at it in the rearview mirror, but it feels like it has attained the size and texture of pumpkin. It must look bad, because Sun pauses a moment.

“Look, I’m real sorry about what happened. So yeah, we used to have a casual thing, is that what you needed to hear? It’s really none of your business. Can you go to bed now or do you need to hear more? He’s hung like a tree, does that help? Really, a big brown tree—in fact, it’s actually the darkest part of his body. Is that good enough?”

“Great. I was punched by Thor Odin-Cock.”

Sun’s about to say something, but it trips over her getting the joke. “I just saw that, as drawn by Jack Kirby, in my head.
Stan Lee Presents: The Adventures of Thor Odin-Cock
,” she says then is lost in laughter and I go with her because I want the sound to keep coming. The sound, it takes a while to work out of our systems, and then finally it does. And there are sighs. And then quiet. Then Spider starts snoring in the back and we lose it again.

“Yeah. Not exactly a great shining moment in my life. It’s been a long year up there. One Drop’s not bad. Just damaged. Grew up on army bases, looking like he does with a mom everyone always thought was his nanny. All his siblings came out darker than him. A Dutch dad who’s married four other black women since. How could he not be a little crazy? Mélange started as a retreat. You can’t retreat unless there’s something to run from.”

“So what are you running from?” I ask her. Sunita thinks about it, and for a few seconds, it looks like she’s going to tell me. That there’s a story to tell, something shapely enough to be packaged into a synopsis.

“Guys who ask too many questions.” And then all the humor is gone. Like it was never there. So I get out of the car.

On the street, I watch Sun pull around, prepared to drive back the
other way. There’s still no one out here, but I want to make sure she gets a least as far as my line of vision unmolested. She doesn’t care that she’s in the hood. She’s comfortable. She’s comfortable in the hood, she’s comfortable in the woods. I’m jealous of that but it still makes me nervous, so I yell for her to roll up her windows till she’s out of Germantown. When Sun’s grille is pointed in the right direction, she stops her car on the other side of the street and yells back at me.

“You said your dad, he never threw out anything, right?”

“Right,” I yell back. I’m waiting for her to give me my platitudes now. Something like,
And he never threw you out either
.