Sister Mischief (3 page)

“Haaahhrya?” he asks, still painting. “Kinda looks like a rough night.”

I open my mouth, wondering if this is the right time. He probably already knows.

“So it turns out I’m gay, Pops.”

He looks hard at me, not upset, probably just checking if I’m serious. When he doesn’t say anything, I keep talking.

“Definitely a homo. Like, Same-Sex City, population Esme. Just a big gay, gay lesbian.”

He nods.

“Cool with me, kiddo. Eat a sandwich.”

Saturday night with my girls. We — Marcy, Tess, Rowie, and me — are seriously the four fiercest, baddest rhyming lionesses these few miles west of the Mississippi. In our hip-hop lives, we make rhymes, we make beats, we go big or go home. Marcy once said that hip-hop is what happens when a bunch of disparate parts explode into a big swaggering corners-sticking-out Technicolor whole. I think the four of us are kind of that way, too. We are MC Ferocious (me), MC Rohini (Rowie), DJ SheStorm (Marcy), featuring vocalist The ConTessa (obvi). We write sex-positive reflections on our location in the present; we are a sisterhood of lyrical explosion, and we first throw down mad props to the following: all hail the most righteous Queen Latifah, all hail our fierce sister from the East M.I.A., all hail the powerful partnerships of Salt-n-Pepa, M1 and stic.man, Mos Def and Talib Kweli. All hail Slug and Dre and B.I.G. and Pac, and Lauryn and Kim and Missy and Lyte. We claim comradeship with Jay-Z, with Mary J., with Nas, Pras, the GZA, the RZA, Raekwon, Rahzel, Rakim, and Roxanne, Ghostface Killah and Killah Priest, K-OS, K’naan and KRS-One, Black Star and Gang Starr, and we are also a fusion of our lonesome hometowners: with Prince of many purple names, or with Robert Zimmerman, the Jew from Minnesota who later became one Bob Dylan, and with David Bowie, James Brown, Patti Smith, Tina Turner, Freddie Mercury, and Lady Gaga, just to up the glamour factor.

The four of us have another life together, though, a quieter, costumes-off kind of understanding. For example, last summer, we all got curious about liquor and stole some bottles of wine from Tess’s parents’ wine cellar. We sat in the gazebo Pops built for the Grinnells and got drunk for the first time, so drunk that Marcy pissed on my leg in her sleep. I told them I thought I didn’t like guys like that. I hadn’t told anyone else. But I did tell them, and Tess looked mildly rattled, but it could have been the spins. Marcy’d gone back to sleep before I finished the sentence. Rowie just nodded, not a nod exactly, more a gentle rock of her head side to side, an acceptance.

Tonight we’re piled into Marcy’s ’97 GMC Jimmy on our way to the light rail. Minnesota has crap for public transport, save the twelve-mile Hiawatha Line, a modern reincarnation of the Twin City Rapid Transit streetcar system, which stopped operating in 1954. I think there’s something about the in-betweenness of transit that appeals to me, the fact of being changeable in motion.

“I’ll tell you what you love about me.” Tess pushes me, laughing. “You love that I thought up this whole adventure. None of us would be making our first public performance on the light rail if it weren’t for me.”

“We worship you, golden-headed queen,” I mock her, bowing with my hands in a steeple. “We revere you.” Tess is so blond her dome glows in the dark.

“‘How thou art fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!’” she quotes back.

“Where have I heard that?” Rowie asks.

“Isaiah,” Marcy says, showing a little of the Catholic in her.

“Naw, dude,” Tess says. “I mean, yeah, but it’s also straight out of the book of Jay-Z.” We all place the reference as Tess busts the hook:
“Lucifer, Lucifer, son of the morning.”

“It kind of freaks me out how you can quote Jay-Z and the Old Testament in the same breath,” I say.
⁵

5. Me on Tess’s Facebook wall a few months ago:
I first noticed Tess when she sang the pants off all of Plainview Middle School at the sixth-grade talent show. I was biting my nails in a magenta wool poncho I knit myself, too chicken to perform anything, when in walks this radiant girl in some sort of preteen power gown, poised like a pageant queen. Tessie brought the damn house down with her rendition of “How Can I Keep from Singing?” and after the talent show, she told me my homemade poncho was fresh. Tess is bomb.


“I didn’t do it. He did,” Tess says with a shrug, a dreamy look coming over her face, her I’m-fantasizing-about-Jay-Z look. “What can I say? The man is as obsessed with moral authority as I am.”
⁶

6. SiN:
Just like Jay-Z’s preaching on moral authority / We’re just four girls teaching an aural majority.


“And world domination,” Marcy says.

Tess’s sitting in the backseat with Rowie in our standard Jimmy seating configuration. We’re driving east on 394, heading for the Warehouse District/Hennepin Avenue mouth of the light rail. I’m sitting shotgun next to Marcy, who’s flirting with the Ford pickup driver in the lane next to us. It’s probably the Golden Gophers bumper sticker that caught her attention; Marcy’s a sucker for sports fans.

“Take the wheel!” she yells over the blare of Atmosphere’s
Lucy Ford.
I reach over and hold the wheel steady as Marcy makes a litany of obscene gestures at the truck. Golden Gophers honks in delight.

“Marce, that’s disgusting. Does that really feel empowering to you?” I scowl in her direction as she waggles her tongue at the truck.

“Whatever, dude. You’re the one sitting around listening to rhymes about bitches and hos all day. If that isn’t demeaning to you, I don’t see how this is.”

It’s a typical Marcy-and-me exchange. Marcy of the men’s beaters and slouchy low-riders, of the thick biceps and cropped shock of black man-bangs, anti-pretty but tall, blue-eyed and luminous, the butchest straight girl I know,
⁷
is my oldest and best friend, having entered my life at age five, the year both of our dads joined a playgroup for single fathers. Marcy and me were raised by men; we have the same mother part missing. We missed the same lessons on how girls are
supposed
to be,
⁸
the lessons pretty girls with pretty moms like Tess got in spades: no one ever taught us how to put on eyeliner or what to do when you just up and start bleeding all over your Supermanderpants one day. The last time I saw Marcy in a dress, she was six years old and looking like she was about to pitch a shit fit on the way to Mass for her First Communion. Later, we cut up the dress and used it to turn a bunch of plastic flamingos in her front yard into flaminghosts for Halloween. Her dad thought it was too funny to punish us; he’d just bought the dress at K-Mart because he thought he should, or something.

7. Text from Rowie, during lunch on Friday:
Is it just me or is Marcy’s outfit today a page straight out of the A.C. Slater guide to style?


8. Me on Marcy’s Facebook wall:
When we were about eight, Marcy made me play Dog Fight with her, and she bit me on the leg so hard that I had to go to the ER for stiches and I still have a scar. She let me borrow her Game Boy while we were in the waiting room. That wasn’t the only time Marcy and I’ve injured each other in fun gone wrong, but it was the only time she’s let me borrow her Game Boy.


I guess the difference between us is siblings. I don’t have any, but Marcy was an oops baby, born six years after her closest brother, Rooster, and two years before their mom died of breast cancer. Her two oldest brothers, Paul and Allan, were in high school by the time she could talk. Between the three boys and her dad, Bob, who’s the wrestling coach at Holyhill, most of Marcy’s early life was spent learning how to evade ringworm and surprise half nelsons. Paul and Allan have both been in Afghanistan for a little over a year now; Marce doesn’t bring it up a lot, but she worries. Rooster, whose real name is Thomas, just finished college at the university in Duluth and works now as a cameraman for KIND-11 News. And, probably because of all those dudes, Marcy, while by no means someone anyone would compare to a swan, or really any kind of water bird, has a confidence with guys like nothing I’ve ever seen. Her dad has no idea about her adventures with athletes, and God knows no one’s dying to spill the beans to Coach Bob, who, by the way, benches a cool 250. Marcy defies the term
brazen.
Marcy’s solid bronze.

“I have a question,” Tess says.

“Imagine that,” Marcy replies, wiggling her tongue in between two fingers at the pickup truck.

“I mean, I have lots of them,” Tess says.

“Ask!” Rowie says.

“I guess I want to know if we really have any right to be doing this,” Tess says.

“What do you mean?” I say, intrigued.

“I mean, don’t you ever wonder if hip-hop really belongs to us?” Tess asks. “It had to travel from black urban areas to the radio and MTV to the suburbs. It’s, like, it goes from being this spontaneous kind of performance at block parties and clubs to being this huge moneymaker, and all of a sudden what used to be a black-owned industry moves to bigger labels owned by old white men, and this is how a movement born out of poverty and oppression arrives in our tender suburban hands.” She reaches the end of her lung capacity and takes a long breath. “You don’t ever feel conflicted about that?”

We take a collective pause.

“Your white guilt is overpowering,” Marcy mutters.

“I know,” Tess snaps. “Why isn’t yours?”

“But the progression isn’t really that simple,” Rowie says. “All that commercialization also sent hip-hop out into the rest of the world, where it became a whole new global uprising. I mean, if you frame this only in black and white, where do I fit in?”

“Dude,” says Marcy, “what we should really be asking is how your people win so many spelling bees.”

“It can’t be genetics. Spelling bee kids all die virgins,” Rowie sighs.

“Naw, spelling bee kids all become horny debate kids,” I say. “I heard debate camp is basically a big nerd sex party.”

“What about band camp, Marcy?” Rowie says, shoving her. Marcy raises one eyebrow and keeps driving. “Everyone knows the trombones were sweating you hard this summer.”

“What happens at nerd camp stays at nerd camp,” Marcy says, shutting down the topic. “But as for the rest, with hip-hop and everything, the question isn’t whether or not it’s, like, kind morally and racially messed up. Of course it is. The problem is that if you stop listening to music that makes you uncomfortable because it was stolen from black people, you’re basically starting with Elvis and working your way backward. There’s really no way to listen to just white music or just black music anymore.”

“Seriously,” I say. “And look, I love a good white guilt pity party as much as the next mope, but isn’t the whole tradition of hip-hop based on artists taking samples from each other out of respect and composing new musical collages? Rhythm and poetry. So if you think about it, by taking in hip-hop and spitting out our own rearrangement of what we’ve heard, we’re really just doing what everybody else in hip-hop has been doing for thirty years. I mean, that’s gotta be more respectful than just stealing samples for our ringtones, right?”

“Even my church friends listen to it,” Tess says. “I mean, only what’s on the radio, but still.”

“Your church friends listen to the Jonas Brothers,” Marcy says. “And dry-hump.”

“You don’t have to crap all over them for being different from you,” Tess shoots back defensively. “They’re mostly good people.”

“Mostly posers,” I mutter.

Tess goes to this big Lutheran church that sort of unofficially, like,
governs
Holyhill, and her parents are sort of Those Holyhill Parents. There’s Darlene, Holyhill’s 1976 homecoming queen, a lawyer elected to the school board last year, and Dr. Gary, of
Minneapolis/St. Paul
magazine’s “Best Physicians in the Twin Cities.” Tess’s older sister, Ada, was wilder than Tess, notably causing a minor scandal when she turned down Princeton to study musical theater at NYU. Anthony, the youngest, was adopted from Guatemala when he was five and is so charming and easy to love that you almost don’t notice his right arm is gone. He was just born without it, some kind of congenital thing. Anyway, until last year — that is, until she really started chilling full-time with us — Tess spent a lot of her time with her Old Best Friend, the wicked stepsister, Mary Ashley Baumgarten. I think Tess found other believers easier to relate to for a while.