“I mean, they managed to slap it together again for my sake. But I don’t like being in that house, and I don’t think they like it either.”
“That’s sad, Commodore.”
“Is what it is. So have you heard from your”—and here he gave a small smile—“Baba?”
“He’s in prison.”
“What?”
Commodore stood up and then fell back down. “All I heard is that he ran off with Cindalou. Where does prison come into it? Stop dropping these bombs! Prison for what?”
He didn’t know, Kenya realized. Maybe none of the Seven Days knew about the night with the sleepwalking, the gun, and the hospital. Kenya left it in the little sealed box. “Well, there was some madness with tagging a bunch of police stations, and then he jumped bail. I saw him there, in prison. I guess he’s probably out by now.”
Commodore said, “Maybe he’ll try to start it again. You know.”
“The Seven Days?”
“Yeah, ’cause obviously these niggers need something in their lives.”
Kenya still had not trained herself to not wince at the word
nigger
, though it was a regular feature of Teddy Jaffrey’s speech.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Seems to me that’s where everything started.”
“I guess you could see it that way,” said Commodore. Suddenly he made as if to pour his cup of red juice on the rug. “From the Creator, for the martyrs,” he said.
“For the martyrs,” she repeated.
They didn’t laugh.
“Commie!” screamed a chunky white girl in combat boots and with thin pigtails. “You better fucking dance with me!”
“Excuse me,” he said, rolling his eyes but not really. “I’ll be back. Or—you should come over in a minute.” He leaned close to her. “Save me.”
Kenya wanted to go find one of the people she came with and tell them the miracle of what had just happened, but when she tried to stand, the floor seemed to fall away. Across the room, she watched Commodore moving to “Bonita Applebum,” a song that made her dizzy with happiness but also made her heart ache. It had a melancholy blackness that sounded like the music her father used to listen to. Kenya found herself wondering what had happened to her father’s old records: Doug and Jean Carn, Ornette Coleman, pre-disco Earth, Wind & Fire. Commodore moved languidly with the girl, but quickly enough to thwart her attempts to drape herself around him. Kenya imagined herself dancing with him.
Commodore walked up to say he’d be back. Then he disappeared. She didn’t know how much time passed before Zaineb was standing over her saying that it was time to go and asking if she’d seen Lolly or Phyllis. After struggling to get off of the slippery leather couch, and a tenuous walk up the stairs, Kenya and Zaineb found them in the enormous master bathroom. Phyllis lay on the floor laughing and writhing while Lolly groped around under her short denim skirt.
“Oh my God, you guys! Phyllis lost her tampon!” Lolly yelled.
“What?”
“It’s true,” Phyllis said merrily. “I totally forgot about it and I’m too blasted to get my hand up there! It’s been in there, like, nine hours or something.”
“It’s not funny, Phyllis,” Lolly hissed. “You could get toxic shock syndrome.”
Suddenly Reggie burst into the bathroom. “Phyllis, did you take those fucking ’shrooms out of my freezer?” he yelled. His eyes were bleary and his bare feet were filthy.
“Get the fuck out of here, you pervert!” hissed Zaineb.
“Phyllis, did you do mushrooms?” yelled Lolly.
“Phyllis, where are my ’shrooms?” he yelled. “Hold on, what are you guys doing to Phyllis?”
“Oh my God, who has ’shrooms?” Phyllis said, pushing Lolly aside and shooting up from the floor.
Kenya closed her eyes and tried to wash it away. Even if they never spoke again, she was glad Commodore was in the world.
* * *
She resisted briefly, tried to push it down, but it was still there later when she thought of him, rising in her chest, flooding outward in her body. He wasn’t the Man by anyone else’s standards. When Kenya tried to mention him to Zaineb and the others, they didn’t remember who he was. But to Kenya he was cute. She concentrated on seeing him as he was at the party, tall and slender, maybe with muscular arms, cigar-brown, with a high, neat fade. And he was like her. He knew her in a way that no one else did these days. Or at least the way no one else—namely Sheila—admitted to knowing her.
Commodore had been in the rooms filled with eccentric black people from Kenya’s childhood, and now inhabited the ones filled with drunken white people. She thought again and again of their conversation on the leather couch, her head swimming pleasantly with punch, surrounded by dancers who seemed to push her and Commodore closer together. She had gotten so absorbed in touching and retouching the fantasy version of the scene that she experienced something like fear one Sunday afternoon two weeks later when he called her. Kenya, who had her own phone, but not, like every other Barrett girl, her own line, didn’t even hear the phone ring. She was, at that very moment, dreaming of Commodore over her American history textbook. Her mother’s voice floated up to her through the door.
“Who is it?” Kenya asked, though it was always Zaineb.
“It’s Commodore,” Sheila said, her voice full of wonder, moving closer.
By the time Kenya picked up the phone, Sheila was knocking on her door. She came in before Kenya could answer.
“Ooga Booga!” Commodore said.
“Oh hey,” said Kenya, feeling crazy. “Hang on.” Sheila was looking at her with wide eyes. “Mom,” Kenya said, “can you go hang up the phone?”
“Tell him I said hello,” Sheila said, backing out. She shook her head as if she, too, had been interrupted in a reverie.
Kenya felt as if she were the main character in one of the novels she hated but still read, the ones where the plain girl dreamed and her dream came true. He was calling to invite her to hang out downtown. She nearly tripped on the carpet going down the stairs, though she had tried very hard not to rush at all.
“Mom,” she said, catching her breath, “can I have a ride to the train station?”
“You didn’t tell me you saw Commodore,” Sheila accused. She looked up from where she liked to sit on her new furniture with the Sunday paper while Teddy watched basketball for what seemed like the entire day. During commercials he paced to the back of the house and glared at the lack of progress contractors were making on the “sun porch.”
“Who’s Commodore?” Teddy said. “I thought you were too hip for Lionel Richie.”
Kenya addressed Sheila. “I saw him at a party.”
“Well, how did he seem?”
“Fine. He goes to Creative and Performing Arts.”
“Do they still live in the same place?” Sheila asked. She did not speak the name Yaya or Alfred.
“Yeah. Commodore says it’s pretty bad over there.”
“I should say so. This crack business,” said Sheila.
“Uhm!” affirmed Teddy.
“So,” said Kenya, “can I get a ride?”
“Well, you know I don’t like to go out on Sundays,” her mother said, as she had perhaps ten thousand times, just before taking Kenya somewhere on a Sunday. Sheila never said anything about it and never asked questions, but it was clear that she would sacrifice even her at-home Sundays so Kenya could have some kind of social life.
“Please?”
Sheila raised her eyebrow.
“I mean, it doesn’t really matter,” said Kenya, too late. Her mother was already smiling.
They met in Rittenhouse Square Park, where Commodore waited with Ned, an overweight black kid named Peter, and a whispering white girl named Dawn, who mostly looked out at Ned from under her bangs. When Kenya walked up, she heard Commodore saying, “I
hate
him.”
“Who?” said Kenya.
“Oog—I mean Kenya!” said Commodore. “What it
do
?”
Ned said hello and extended his hand with cute formality, as if they’d never met. Kenya shook his hand and didn’t remind him.
“So who is this that you hate?” she asked Commodore.
“Ugh! This kid Oliver, at school. He is
the worst
!”
“He’s not that bad,” said Peter, who had a rumbling bass voice.
“He really
is
that bad,” Commodore said.
The girl Dawn whispered something.
“Of course he’s nice to you, Dawn,” said Commodore. “He wants to poke you with his long weird curvy penis!”
Ned threw back his head and laughed. “Come on, Commie, what do you know about his dick? That’s a little gay.”
“I don’t need to be gay. I can just tell that it probably looks like one of his gross dreadlocks. That guy is so wannabe, but wannabe what? Punk? Rasta? Pasta? A tragic mulatto indeed.”
“Bro, you are
wrong
,” said Peter. “Ain’t he wrong?” he asked Kenya.
They were sitting in a circle on a patch of grass. An older white man stood nearby looking at them pointedly while his large dog sniffed the ground in a preparatory fashion.
“We need to get in out of the elements,” said Commodore.
“Agreed,” said Ned.
Kenya followed them to Ned’s parents’ condominium high above the park, with its exposed brick walls and gleaming honey-colored floors. The windows, which were taller than Kenya, looked down on the park. Kenya stood in the huge open space that seemed to be the main room, trying to look nonchalant. Commodore went to the kitchen and asked if anyone else wanted a Screwdriver. Dawn took off her sneakers. Peter flopped onto the suede couch and used several remote controls to turn on the television.
“I’m going to bake cookies,” said Dawn, who was easier to hear indoors.
“My dad rented a bunch of movies just before he left,” said Ned. “This one’s about the Sex Pistols. Might be okay.”
“Ugh—you know who loves the Sex Pistols?” said Commodore.
“Dude, you are obsessed with Oliver. Should I be jealous?” Ned said, winking.
“I’m just saying, what black person in their right mind wears a leather jacket with a swastika on it?”
“Isn’t that supposed to be a punk thing?” asked Dawn. “Isn’t he in a band called Niggerpunk?”
Kenya tried not to flinch.
“Niggerpunk, indeed,” said Commodore, who didn’t seem bothered by a white girl’s voice saying “nigger.”
Peter began singing “Thin Line Between Love and Hate,” a song whose clunky title made a bad thing much worse.
Except Kenya, none of them sat particularly still while watching
Sid and Nancy
. Ned fiddled with a joint; Dawn baked cookies from premade dough; Peter complained about punk music; Commodore worked on his terrible British accent. At first, Kenya, who sat next to him, was distracted by his nearness. But he didn’t appear to notice, and soon she found herself absorbed in the movie, which was very gross and poignant. Though her family had taken three trips to New York, she’d never felt strongly about it, had never caught Zaineb’s zeal. But she was struck by the bombed-out scenes at the end of the film, the purgatory where Sid Vicious danced with chummy black kids, then took a taxi to punk heaven with his dead girlfriend, whom he’d stabbed in a drug-fueled haze. She teared up briefly as the credits rolled. No one seemed to notice.
“What kind of shit was that?” Peter asked. “That’s the kind of movie your dad watches? What if I made my Jamaican grandma watch that? I can just hear her now. ‘But why de boy don’t take ’im shower?’” he said in a rich, feminine voice.
“That heroin must be something else,” said Commodore.
“I’m going to try, like, every drug just before I die,” said Ned. He stared off dreamily into the middle distance.
“But it wasn’t just the drugs,” said Dawn. “They were addicted to, like, their love. That was what killed them.” She sat on the floor and gazed up at Ned on the couch.
“Heroin,” said Ned. “I’m trying that first.”
“What’d you think, Kenya?” asked Commodore.
“Worst couple in history,” she said, hoping that Dawn wouldn’t feel insulted.
Commodore laughed.
Kenya hung out with Commodore and his friends at Ned’s house several times that spring, happiest when it conflicted with some invitation from the girls. She loved to say no to them in order to hang out with high school seniors who went to school in Philly. She was no longer socially desperate.
When she was with Commodore and his friends, they talked endlessly of the other people at their school. While a lot of it was dull, she listened carefully for hints that he had a girlfriend or anything like it. They smoked pot (except Kenya) and baked cookies, played cards, and after the
Sid and Nancy
incident and, even more disturbingly, the
Blue Velvet
incident, only watched movies they’d already seen:
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
,
This Is Spinal Tap
,
Gremlins
, and
Nightmare on Elm Street
. During comedies, everyone worked hard at laughing, flopping around and gasping for air. They narrated the horror movies using funny voices, calling the characters “douchebag” and “dipshit.”
It was almost always the five of them, give or take Peter, a tuba player who sometimes had weekend band practice, or Dawn, who was intermittently angry with Ned.
“She wants a relationship, but it’s just not the time for us,” he once told the others in her absence; this reminded Kenya of speeches she’d heard on
The Young and the Restless.
Kenya waited to hear how Commodore would respond to that, but all he said was “Uh-huh.” He never seemed terribly interested in Ned’s relationship with Dawn.
* * *
When her mother asked if she and Commodore were “an item,” Kenya tried to act nonchalant. While it was true that they were alone only when they spoke on the phone, they had begun talking nearly every night. At first they reminisced a lot about the Days and the way it had been with their parents.
Then they talked about other things, arguing about whether rap music would outlive soul, or making lists of their favorite movies. Commodore had snuck into
Angel Heart
and would never forget Lisa Bonet naked or bloody. Kenya thought
The Lost Boys
was high art. Sometimes Commodore complained bitterly about Oliver with what Kenya felt was an unhealthy intensity. Kenya spent more time than she wanted to trying to picture this boy. (Based on Commodore’s description, she could picture only a photo she’d once seen of Jean-Michel Basquiat.) Though the bulk of Commodore’s complaints involved Oliver’s terribly named band and his affected British accent, it became clear that Commodore’s rage was a competitive one. Oliver was always garnering a teacher’s compliment for his work or an art prize that Commodore felt he deserved, and then there were confusing stories about Oliver “trying to flirt.” A girl named Pippa figured heavily in these anticlimactic tales.