The Best American Essays 2015 (21 page)

One conversation during this period stands out. It was a few months after she'd moved back, right before I turned sixty-five. I'd just pitched a TV show, receiving the inevitable pass. The thirty-year-old executive, who looked at my partner and myself as a pair of Willy Lomanish narrative peddlers who had washed up like graying hairballs on his sleek desktop, listened to our spiel and pronounced it “too optimistic.” This was a new one. Hollywood is like Eskimos and snow—they've got a million ways to say no. For a century they peddle fake uplift, the bogus happy ending, and now everything is supposed to be so bleak.

My daughter, who knows far more about current television than I ever will, explained it all to me.

“Things are shitty,” she said. “The politics are shitty. The economy is shitty. You can't even lie about it anymore.”

Did she really believe this?

Yeah, she did.

“Shitty,” I wrote on my pad, a useful note for further TV pitches.

Later I felt like weeping. It was no fun to hear my own daughter characterize her world in such a dystopic fashion. What do you do to help someone you love in such a situation? It was time for the voice of experience to step forward. It was time for Wisdom, the font of accumulated knowledge, the voice of experience. In this I cannot say I stepped to the plate. The future was the best I had to offer. That was the extent of my wisdom: Wait. It will seem better in the morning.

A few months later she informed us she would be moving out. It wouldn't be easy because she is easily made homesick, but for the present time she regarded Chicago as a better place to be than Brooklyn. Sure, it won't be New York, city of the collective soul, but you could get a share for $350. Life is full of passages, and it was time to move on.

As a very young man, fancying myself a budding filmmaker of rare potential, I thought I had all the time in the world. Orson Welles didn't make
Citizen Kane
until he was twenty-five. I hadn't even turned twenty. Today I note that Robert Bresson directed
L'Argent
when he was eighty-two, which gives me a whole decade and a half to work up to it, provided I learn French in the meantime. This is one more game I play on the approach to sixty-six (the number of a once-endless highway, you may recall, that used to wind from Oklahoma City, oh so pretty, on through Flagstaff, Arizona, and don't forget Winona, except it doesn't anymore).

This isn't to say I am not serious about the future. In fact, I've never been so excited about my prospects. Unshackled from infinity, with a mind thankfully still fueled by a not-inconsiderable trove of accessible empiricism, I feel as creative as ever, brimming with new ideas. Whether this newfound clarity is a result of something growing together at long last or a chunk of gray matter falling off like a rusted lug nut, it's different up there. I can feel it. Time may be short, but in this job, you learn to produce on a deadline.

Years ago, in a last gasp of heroic ethnobotanical exploration, I ingested a fair amount of ayahuasca, the so-called Vine of the Soul, which transported me from a small apartment on East Seventh Street to the Amazon jungle, where all time dissolved and I was faced with the ineffable assumption that the world had gone on for billions of years before my birth and would continue for billions more after my death. The concept left me clutching my frayed ego like an airplane-seat cushion in a stormy sea. But not anymore. Rather, it seems an ultimate freedom, to glimpse a vision of the vaunted self in the rearview mirror, my atoms redispersed to the ceaseless continuum that is the true beauty of things.

Longevity has its place, but those nineteen years referenced at the top of this tome now sound like a reasonable deal. If a bus with my name comes around the corner tomorrow, so be it. For a schmo born into a lower-middle-class, second-generation immigrant family, eater of pastrami, fan of the Ramones, I preemptively declare my life a success.

The other day, after the requisite period of denial, I got my half-price MetroCard. It goes with my senior citizen movie tickets, although I've been getting into multiplexes cheap for some time (twenty-year-old cashiers rarely think someone would claim to be older than he is). After years of lying to get the “child price” during my early teens, I delight in the symmetry of the subterfuge. Indeed, I've gone underground, invisible to most people I pass on the street or stand next to on the subway. It is good for picking up dialogue. Get caught eavesdropping and no one cares. You're just old, and all old people are the same, aren't they?

So it goes. Last week, on the theory that everyone should at least try to die laughing, I drove by Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay, where my late friend George Schultz ran his comedy club, Pip's. The place was replaced by an all-you-can-eat sushi joint, but the vibe remained. Once a roommate of Lenny Bruce and Jacob Cohen (aka Rodney Dangerfield), George was called the Ear because he could always tell what was funny and what was not. Comics like Richard Lewis and the recently deceased David Brenner would journey out to the Bay on the old D train, which Lewis called a “bad neighborhood on wheels,” and go through their routines for George, joke by joke.

“Funny . . . not funny,” the Ear would croak, the late-afternoon light playing across his rubbery face as he sat slouched in the empty club in his green terry-cloth robe.

George lived in the apartment above Pip's with his two sons, then in their early twenties. “Look at these young Warren Beattys . . . steaming hot Warren Beattys,” he'd say, in a rare moment of
kvell.
“I let them stay here, but I don't let them see me naked. It is the old ass. Way of all flesh. They don't need to see the old ass. Let them live a little.”

That was George's Wisdom: the old ass.

I try to follow his dictum, hiding the wrinkly bottom from da youth whenever they're around. Today's modern world is full of technological flimflammery, subject to every manner of visual and structural manipulation, capable of convincing anyone of anything. But the old ass is analog, it cannot be Photoshopped; its impression is indelible. It is truth. And recently I've noticed that the children have turned a tad more solicitous. When I come in the room, they actually look up, ask me how I'm doing, offer to bring me a glass of water. They even look worried sometimes. I like this and am milking it for all it's worth. Just when they think I'm laid low, I pop out again, like the guy in the hockey mask. Good to keep them, and everyone else, on their toes. Still, there's no doubt about it. Things have changed.

MARGO JEFFERSON

FROM
Guernica

I.

A
RE WE RICH?

Mother raises those plucked, deep-toned eyebrows that did such excellent expressive work for women in the 1950s. Lift the penciled arch by three to four millimeters for bemused doubt, blatant disdain, or disapproval just playful enough to lure the speaker into more error. Mother's lips form a small, cool smile that mirrors her eyebrow arch. She places a small, emphatic space between each word:
Are. We. Rich?
Then she adds, with a hint of weariness,
Why do you ask?

I ask because I had been told that day.
Your family must be rich.
A schoolmate had told me and I'd faltered, with no answer, flattered and ashamed to be. We were supposed to eschew petty snobberies at the University of Chicago Laboratory School: intellectual superiority was our task. Other fathers were doctors. Other mothers dressed well and drove stylish cars. Wondering what had stirred that question left me anxious and a little queasy.

Mother says,
We are not rich. And it's impolite to ask anyone that question. Remember that. If you're asked again, you should just say, “We're comfortable.”
I take her words in and push on, because my classmate had asked a second question.

Are we upper class?

Mother's eyebrows settle now. She sits back in the den chair and pauses for effect. I am about to receive general instruction in the liturgies of race and class.

We're considered upper-class Negroes and upper-middle-class Americans
, Mother says.
But of course most people would like to consider us Just More Negroes.

II.

Ginny asked me if we know their janitor, Mr. Johnson. She thinks he lives near us.
Ginny had spoken of him so affectionately I longed to say I knew our janitor as well and that he liked me as much as Mr. Johnson seemed to like her. She had rights of intimacy with her janitor that I lacked.

It's a big neighborhood
, Mother says.
Why would we know her janitor? White people think Negroes all know each other, and they always want you to know their janitor. Do they want to know our laundryman?

That would be Wally, a smiling, big-shouldered white man who delivered crisply wrapped shirts and cheerful greetings to our back door every week.

Good morning, Mrs. Jefferson
, he'd say.
Morning, doctor. Hello, girls.

Hello, Wally
, we'd chime back from the breakfast table. Then one afternoon I was in the kitchen with Mother doing something minor and domestic like helping unpack groceries, when she said slowly, not looking at me:
I saw Wally at Sears today. I was looking at vacuum cleaners. And I looked up and saw him
—here she paused for a moment of Rodgers and Hammerstein irony—
across a crowded room. He was turning his head away, hoping he wouldn't have to speak. Wally the laundryman was trying to cut me.
She made a small
hmmm
sound, a sound of futile disdain.
I don't even shop at Sears except for appliances.

Langston Hughes said,
Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it
—the right, in this case, to snub or choose to speak kindly to your laundryman in a store where he must shop for clothes and you shop only for appliances.

Still, Wally went on delivering laundry with cheerful deference, and we responded with cool civility. Was there no Negro laundry to do Daddy's shirts as well or better? Our milkman was a Negro. So was our janitor, our plumber, our carpenter, our upholsterer, our caterer, and our seamstress. Though I don't remember all their names, I know their affect was restful. Comfortable.

If perchance a Negro employee did his work in a sloppy or sullen way (and it did happen), Mother and Daddy had two responses. One was a period wisecrack along the lines of “Well, some of us
are
lazy, quiet as it's kept.”
Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it:
in this case a spotless race reputation.

The second was somber and ominously layered: Some Negroes would rather work for white people. They don't resent their status in the same way.

Let's unpack that. Let's say you are a Negro cleaning woman, on your knees at this minute, scrubbing the bathtub with its extremely visible ring of body dirt, because whoever bathed last night thought,
How nice. I don't have to clean the tub because Cleo/Melba/Mrs. Jenkins comes tomorrow!
Tub done, you check behind the toilet (a washcloth has definitely fallen back there); the towels are scrunched, not hung on the racks, and you've just come from the children's bedroom where sheets will have to be untangled and almost throttled into shape before they can be sorted for the wash. Cleo/Melba/Mrs. Jenkins will do that.

Would you rather look at the people you do all that for and think,
If the future of this country is anything like its past, I will never be able to have what these white people have
, or would you rather look at them and think,
Well, if I'd had the chance to get an education like Dr. and Mrs. Jefferson did, if I hadn't had to start doing housework at fifteen to help my family out when we moved up here from Mississippi, then maybe I could be where they are.

Whose privilege would you find more bearable?

Who are “you”? How does your sociological vita—race or ethnicity, class, gender, family history—affect your answer?

Whoever you are, reader, please understand this: never did my parents, my sister, or I leave a dirty bathtub for Mrs. Blake to clean. (My sister and I called her Mrs. Blake. Mother called her Blake.) She was broad, not fat. She had very short, very straightened hair that she patted flat and put behind her ears. When it got humid in the basement, where the washer and dryer were, or in the room where she ironed clothes, short pieces of hair would defy hot comb and oil to stick up. My sister and I never made direct fun of her hair—Mother would have punished our rudeness—but we did find many occasions to mock Negro hair that blatantly defied rehabilitation. We used hot combs and oil, but more discreetly. And our hair was longer.

Mrs. B's voice was southern South Side: leisurely and nasal. Now that I've given my adult attention to the classic blues singers, I can say she had the weighted country diction of Ma Rainey and the short nasal tones of Sippie Wallace. Vowels rubbed down, end-word consonants dropped or muffled.

Mother made clear that we were never to leave our beds unmade when Mrs. Blake was coming. She was not there to pick up after us. When we were old enough, we stripped our own beds each week and folded the linen before putting it in the hamper for her to remove and wash.

Mother's paternal grandmother, great-aunt, and aunt had been in service, so she was sensitive to inappropriate childish presumption.

Mrs. Blake ate her lunch (a hot lunch which Mother made from dinner leftovers) in the kitchen. When her day was done, Mr. Blake and their daughters drove to our house. He sent his daughters to the front door to pick her up. They had the same initials we did. Mildred and Diane. Margo and Denise. Mother brought us to the front door to exchange hellos with them. Sometimes Mrs. Blake left carrying one or two bags of neatly folded clothes. What did Mildred and Diane think as they unfolded, studied, and fit themselves into our used ensembles and separates?