It wasn’t terribly surprising to Kenya that Commodore had come to this. It seemed to her that there had been something very wide-eyed about his pursuit of art. It reminded her of Lolly Lewis’s violent enthusiasms; this was a girl who had believed in Santa Claus until the sixth grade. Sure, Commodore had spoken passionately at the art museum, and he’d once claimed that he would paint with bloody stumps until he achieved artistic greatness. But none of that seemed real now.
What did seem real, what Kenya could remember sharply, was him as a ten-year-old, waiting for her parents to leave the room so he could call her “Ooga Booga,” and being so distracted that he couldn’t follow the rules of Uno. She remembered his air of irony even in elementary school. She could not imagine him scowling with concentration at a canvas. The image of him sucking a water pipe, reclined on the couch, giggling at reruns of
Inspector Gadget
—which he had loved at the age of ten—well, it was sad. But it was more fitting.
The big surprise, noted nonchalantly by Commodore, was that he was living with Oliver Gold. Though she was relieved that his roommate wasn’t a girl, Kenya nearly fell off of the uncomfortable wooden chair in his apartment when he told her.
“That lunatic?” she asked.
“You know Oliver?”
Kenya shook her head in an exaggerated fashion, as if to clear out the cobwebs. “Com, you mean the Oliver you used to talk shit about all the time? The one who called himself a ‘niggerpunk’ and talks with a British accent?”
“That’s my boy,” Commodore said, laughing. “Crazy as hell. But one hundred percent original.”
“You
hated
him!”
“I never said
hate
. We don’t say that,” he said, grinning.
That had been a big thing with the Seven Days. Never hating—except for the absolute worst white people and black traitors.
“Is he still wearing that jacket with the swastika on the back?”
“Naw. He had to give up his Sid Vicious stylings.”
“I just can’t imagine why.”
“Not what you’d think,” Commodore explained. Not the disgusted clucking of black people on the street—he could never please black folks anyway, according to Oliver. Not the skinheads who routinely started shit with him when he went to punk clubs—they had always started shit with him anyway. Not even the Jewish hotheads whom he’d numbed into silence with his complicated philosophical defense of his right to wear the jacket—well, that and the fact that Oliver’s mother was Jewish. No, finally an old woman in the Gallery mall drew back her coat sleeve to show him the number tattooed on her arm and then tried her best to knock him over a balcony with her cane. On the way to the hospital, where he received five stitches, the jacket had quietly disappeared and that had been that.
“Yeah, I couldn’t really roll with him wearing that,” said Commodore. “He told me later that he wore it to an interview for a scholarship from the Alphas.”
“Didn’t
you
get a scholarship from the Alphas?”
“Well, I wore a suit to
my
interview. But forget about all that. He’s cool now. In fact, to be really real about it, he’s the man.”
“Guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”
Kenya, who’d turned up on Commodore’s doorstep in Powelton Village fresh from the farm, was prepared to deal with Oliver if she could crash in the apartment. When she’d found the address, her heart had sunk taking in the splintered stairs and curling paint. But the inside of the place was sunny and cream-colored, with soft wood floors and a skylight in the largest room. She felt, when she walked in and looked around, the way she’d first felt in the loft at her father’s house: like she could hide there.
* * *
It was after Kenya read her father’s manuscript for the third or maybe fourth time that she decided not to go back to her mother’s house. Her father was a dramatic idiot, her mother was a fool, and yet she understood both the butler’s feeling of being hounded and his wife’s decision to get away from the crazy person who supposedly loved her.
Her parents didn’t know where she was. She had led her father to assume that she was going back to her mother’s house. She hoped that he’d call to make sure she arrived, only to find out that she’d disappeared. But she knew that he wouldn’t. Meanwhile, her mother was not expecting her until the end of the summer. She would find out that Kenya had disappeared only if she called Johnbrown’s again. But Kenya felt her mother’s shame might keep her from calling back.
On the bus she wavered in her decision not to go home, but then she thought about her last conversation with Sheila, and it made her tremble.
Denial.
This had been a favorite word among Barrett girls some years back. They had hurled it at one another for months. You’re in denial: the Police are never getting back together. You’re in denial: Mademoiselle Lambert will never let us out early. You’re in total denial: this
does
make me look fat!
She was considering her mother’s denial, and Commodore had popped into her head as the city came into view. It wasn’t quite true that he popped into her head. He was often there, lurking in the shadows, and he had sent her a letter at the farm filled with the kinds of declarations he’d made in “A Plea for Black Complexity.” She had kept the letter, which was how she had his address. But on the ride back to Philadelphia he strode to the center of her thoughts as more than a romantic fantasy. She had hesitated at first, not wanting him to think she was looking for more than a couch to sleep on. She didn’t want him to think
she
was in denial about who she was, or was not, to him. But as the highway exits became more familiar, Kenya practiced first in her mind, and then in a low voice, the businesslike manner she would use with Commodore. “I wondered if I could stay with you for a few days while I figure shit out,” Kenya mouthed, her voice going in and out. Her seatmate, who was wearing a Walkman, tossed her a couple of sidelong glares.
Commodore said yes, but then it turned out that Kenya was beholden to Oliver, not Commodore, for a place on the couch. It was his name on the lease, and he paid extra rent to use two of the apartment’s three bedrooms. When he came home from classes at Temple the day she arrived and Commodore mentioned she’d be there for a few days, he simply nodded and said, “Cool.” Then he disappeared into his room to make grinding noises on an electric guitar. He kept odd hours, so she barely saw him for the first few days while she flipped TV channels, walked around the city, and watched Commodore get high, all the while pondering the great black maw of her future.
For the first couple of days at Commodore’s, Kenya planned to call home. But she imagined her mother answering the phone while Teddy sat a few inches away or, even worse, Teddy answering the phone. So instead, she took to wandering the edges of Penn’s campus, near the library where her mother used to work before she’d finally gotten a job in one of the township libraries.
One night she came home to Commodore and Oliver sitting in the tiny kitchen. It had been a week and she rarely saw them together. She had started to wonder if they were actually friends.
“Hungry?” asked Oliver, gesturing toward a pizza. His nasal voice went up and down. He did not speak with a British accent, but his inflections were pretentious.
Kenya demurred. She’d been using her savings to eat McDonald’s and the lo mein from the Chinese food truck near Penn’s campus that always had the longest line. It was certainly a comedown from Cindalou’s cooking, and she constantly had the taste of grease in her mouth, but as a guest she was committed to a certain standard of conduct.
“Suit yourself,” Com said, helping himself to more. “I am
starving
like
Marving.
” He laughed at his own joke.
“Kenya, you should have some,” Oliver insisted. “We can’t eat this whole thing.”
“Oliver’s gotta watch his figure,” said Commodore. Kenya noted that Oliver’s body resembled a twisted-out hanger.
“Okay,” said Kenya, picking up the last slice of cheese pizza. The rest was pepperoni.
“Take my seat,” said Oliver. “I’m done eating and I have a crapload of work to do.”
“I feel so bad breaking up your—” she began.
“Our romantic dinner?” Commodore laughed and turned to Oliver. “Honey, we never talk anymore.”
“Honey,” Oliver said with fake emotion, “all you want to talk about is that Mary Elizabeth. Do you know how that makes me feel?”
“Who is Mary Elizabeth?” Kenya asked.
“Some dizzy white broad,” Commodore said.
“Your favorite flavor,” sang Oliver. “Now if you two will excuse me…”
After Oliver closed his door, Kenya wanted to ask again about Mary Elizabeth, but she didn’t want to embarrass herself. Instead she gestured toward Oliver’s room. “He’s okay, I guess.”
“Not so bad, right?” said Commodore with a grin. “He must like you okay, too. I mean Oliver’s not exactly what you would call a
people
person, but he said he’d clear out of his music room if you want it. There’s a futon in there you can sleep on. Of course I told him you weren’t planning on staying much longer.”
Kenya was silent.
“Ooga Booga,” said Commodore, laughing, “what is your
plan
?”
Kenya felt sure that some earlier version of her would have started crying right then. Perhaps even the self that had been at the farm. But there had been too much crying and it had gotten her exactly nothing she wanted. She could hear Oliver’s guitar scraping in his music room.
“The Sad Dry Blues,”
she thought.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Well, like I said, you can stay here, and you don’t have to sleep on the couch anymore. Oliver said he’d clear his junk out of that second room. And you get the privilege of being in the room next to his. But you might want to get earplugs. This scraping right now is bad enough, but there’s talk of a Niggerpunk reunion.”
“Oh my God. I’m staying with Niggerpunk?”
“Little-known fact: originally they were Fucksauce.”
Kenya pushed her plate away. “What’s the rent?”
“Talk to Oliver. It seemed like he was planning to let you stay for free.”
“How come Oliver makes all of the decisions and you’re the one who tells them to me?”
“I told you. He’s the Man,” Commodore said. Then he was speaking solemnly. “Are you sure you really want to keep hanging around here? I mean, Oliver’s sort of in school for music theory or something, but there’s really not a lot going on here, you know, in the immediate future department for our merry band of black depressives.”
“Well, the two of you aren’t exactly a band. You know, not like Niggerpunk. And what about your art?” Kenya asked.
“There is that,” said Commodore. “That is there.”
Kenya looked down for another slice of pizza. There was only pepperoni, but she reached for it.
“Hold up! You eat pork now?”
“No, but—”
Commodore snatched the box away. “I can’t let you get involved with that.”
“Why not? You eat it.”
“But I don’t want to be responsible for Johnbrown’s daughter putting pork on her fork. You can have the pizza. But at least pick the meat off. Please?”
Kenya did as she was told, trying to stifle a smile at Commodore’s concern. But the urge to smile disappeared easily as she watched him scarf down the pieces of abandoned meat.
* * *
“He’s a mess,” said Oliver with a wry twist of his mouth, indicating Commodore, who was napping on the couch at eleven in the morning. Kenya and Oliver were moving a jungle of electronic equipment out of the room where Kenya would now sleep.
Oliver continued, shaking his head. “It’s really time for him to get back to his art. I mean, unlike me, the kid is actually kind of talented.”
“Umf,” Kenya said, trying to balance an awkwardly shaped amplifier and a stack of Led Zeppelin records. Oliver made her nervous, but she had to do some thinking to figure out why. It was true that he was odd and slightly gross. Besides being unusually tall, he had a tree trunk dreadlock that stuck straight up the middle of his head. He always smelled slightly of mildew. Though he had nice, shapely hands, the color of perfectly browned biscuits, the starkly irregular lengths of his nails ruined their pleasantness. But none of that was what put Kenya ill at ease. It was that though he also acted nervous, he seemed to want to give the impression of speaking casually. It was as if he had once been shy, but had been forced into a new personality. Conversations with him gave her a flash of Tuff Wieder, Barrett’s butchy star lacrosse player, stumbling across the dance floor in her heels at prom.
Kenya took a break from hauling and went to the kitchen to pour a glass of orange juice. She drank it and watched Commodore sleep. She couldn’t help musing that if she’d created his face, she wouldn’t have done it any differently: not his skin, which
actually
looked like milk chocolate, not his discerning pug nose, not the mole at the side of his eyebrow. She remembered her mother remarking when they were little on the thick fringe of eyelash that had been wasted on him. After high school had ended, he had stopped having his hair cut in a high top like everybody else and wore a little round Afro that reminded Kenya of wooden paintings of Ethiopian Jesus she’d seen in the Penn Museum.
“He’s just the cutest. Isn’t he?”
She didn’t know how long Oliver had been standing in the doorway of his bedroom, watching her look at Commodore. A smile played on his lips.
Kenya rolled her eyes. “So how much do you want me to pay in rent?”
“You got any money?”
“A little. I mean—I’m going to get a job.”
“Well, I guess you shouldn’t worry about it until you start getting paid.”
“Thanks, Oliver.”
“No big,” he said. Though he did not smile or even look at her directly, Kenya could tell he liked saying that.
* * *
“Would I be, like, a really bad son if I told my mom that I was moving to Alaska?” Oliver asked them one evening after he showed his mother out of the apartment. Though they were all technically adults, Kenya felt like she lived in a home for orphans at Commodore and Oliver’s. It was jarring, then, that someone’s mother had stopped by bearing brownies.