My infirmity sat on the back of my head, just above my neck. My ringworm was my cruddy friend; it had no other friends and so many enzymes, a dark flower could be forced in it. My ringworm
was philosophical. It had certain ideas about the world, about me. One thing that made my ringworm sick was my interest in myself—an interest I almost never uttered in the company of the well. My self-interest was not founded on self-love but on fury over my scabby presence, which no amount of love, from my parents or siblings, could cure. Self-interest ran in my family. They could see me only as the cute extension of what they felt to be cute about themselves. If I expressed, let’s say, a dislike of marigolds, that shocked them: I was too cute to contradict flowers. I shut up early on and let my imagination run wild, or as concentrated as my patch of sick.
My ringworm was as infested with longing as I was. My body and soul were a sewer, briny and foul with sexiness. Daddy doesn’t like that about me, and I don’t like him, but my body craves him.
Daddy says that I am strange, that he never knows what I am talking about. When he comes to call on my mother, he says, Goddammit-what-the-hell-Jesus-Christ-aw-shit-for-fuck’s-sake, and Huh? whenever I open my mouth to speak; consequently, I rarely do. Daddy turns me on because he doesn’t think I’m cute; he makes me work for his admiration.
He knows that I spend a lot of my time at the big lending library at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, reading books. What he doesn’t know is that while there, I also listen to recordings by grand actors reading famous poetry, prose, and plays as a way of learning how to speak in an authoritative, genteel way meant to captivate my father, like a pus-y siren. I listen to white girls such as Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday in Peter Weiss’s play
Marat/Sade
, because she is not genteel or cute in the role of the knife-wielding anarchist: she is a gorgeous
hysteric, as loud as the worst flower. She contradicts my family for me. One of Charlotte’s interlocutors begs her to turn away from her various hatreds and “look at the trees / look at the rose-colored evening sky / and let those horrible things pass you by / feel the warmth and the gentle breeze / in which your lovely bosom heaves.” Charlotte cannot. “What kind of town is this?” she asks. “I saw peddlers / at every corner / they’re selling little guillotines / with tiny sharp blades / and dolls filled with red liquid / which spurts from the neck / when the sentence is carried out / What kind of children are these / who can play / with this toy so efficiently / and who sits in judgment / who sits in judgment?”
As Charlotte Corday, I can hate marigolds. Glenda Jackson’s ferocious tone encourages me to imagine Daddy dragging his big Daddy body toward me because I want him to, because I am, finally, all he could ever need: a person capable of screeching, How I hate the marigolds! He bites into my ringworm and eats the red, pused-out bits in the way my older sister ate the petals she pulled from red flowers: with relish. I am not a child. I am a judge. I have been made older through cultivating need, which feeds my imagination, the one thing Daddy does not have access to, the one thing I can make him a lovesick prisoner of.
But SL got out. In 1975, he returned to America on his own, ostensibly to attend college, although he never went. Instead he fell in with New York–based feminists, some of whom roamed the Berkshire woods naked with bow and arrow, looking for men to kill, while others stepped on the accelerator when they saw men crossing the road. In
this world, SL became a wife, supporting a number of friends’ and lovers’ work while his own work took a backseat; it was the least he could do: he had had a father, and he would have no further truck with that. By the time I met him and longed to be his wife, SL sometimes described himself as a lesbian separatist. No man could have him.
I was attracted to him from the first because I am always attracted to people who are not myself but are. It was less clear why he was interested in me. I made him laugh, I suppose. Perhaps he enjoyed the fact that, in those days, I always looked like an old-school bull dagger, what with my thick neck, little gold earrings, no makeup, and hair cut short and shaved on the sides. Also, he knew, and chuckled over the fact, that I was a gay man who did not suck white dick: I refused on the grounds that the world sucked them off well enough. Most certainly he liked the fact that I came from an enormous family of women. He definitely liked hearing about my first-generation West Indian–American parents, who hadn’t been raised to be professional Negroes, and who didn’t know the first thing about how to keep up appearances: they’d never married, let alone lived together.
But, like SL’s father, my father disliked men, less because he wanted to control me—that would require a closeness he wasn’t in the least interested in—but because he found them to be invasive, childish, loutish tit grabbers—the very thing he was, and accused his sons of being without knowing much about them. Once, after I’d won some prize in elementary school for writing a poem, my mother encouraged me to hug my visiting father; she knew he could not do it but she also
knew I could not write that poem without him on some level; Daddy and his incessant on-the-phone language was one source for my “art.” While I stood before him, rigid and blank, he took me in his great arms—my father was a big man; I would grow up to be a big man; I wanted a bigger man to hold me so I could feel, as a grown-up, what my father’s embrace made me feel: that I didn’t want to grow up to be a big man—and whispered: When I was your age, I didn’t like my father to hug me, either. SL understood all that. Or, rather, what it set up in me: a horror of my I, since that meant being a him—my father.
On one of our first dates together, SL and I took a walk. It was early spring; we had just finished work. SL was costumed in his usual striking manner: a stiff, ankle-length motorist’s jumper, blue-and-white-polka-dot tie, brown spectators, and a brown fedora. I loved his entirely adult attire; it relieved me of the responsibility of being an adult; in his company I got smaller and smaller, hungry for his protection. SL was a wit you didn’t want to cross. As we walked along, we started to talk about all the places we’d ever visited, or hoped to visit. In fact, in a few days’ time, I would be off to Amsterdam to visit a friend. Rather offhandedly, I asked SL if he’d like to join me, have a lark, and to my horror he said yes. It was as if he were cursing me in a baroque, foreign language. What could it mean—his acceptance? Where was this: my father offering me a ride downtown—I was a teenager taking a summer-school class in mathematics—but before I could get in the car, he jumped in and slammed the door, called out,
So long, sucker!
as the cab drove off. Where was this: my father telling me I’d go from “Shakespeare to shit” if I didn’t stop hanging out with my teenage friends, indeed, if I had any friends. Where was my father doing this:
refusing to stand up, let alone look at any friends I might bring home, especially if they were white, sometimes if they were women.
In retrospect, how could my father love me? I was that part of his self that wanted to write and would write but did not. I was that part of his self that wanted to love and would love but did not. Here was evidence of that: SL. He would go to Amsterdam with me. O Amsterdam, city of canals! SL would listen to what I would write about even if it was derivative, or boring, and find something of me in it to support and praise. He would look for me in every part of Amsterdam because I loved it so, in every canal, in the city’s flatness, and in the waves that came up from Haarlem, and the city’s famous tolerance, its clouds and herring. But how did he find me now, on lower Broadway? I was short-circuiting because of this information, so casually offered: he would go with me, and he would love me. Would he die because of this love? Would I? Would I have to eventually mourn this memory on lower Broadway, his scratchy-sounding duster, and should we travel to Amsterdam together, him and an entire country? His existence was too much. I fumbled and made an excuse: oh, the place I’d be staying in was a friend’s, it was too small, maybe the next time, with better preparation? SL smiled. He knew enough about love—or, more specifically, about its offers and denials—to back off, say nothing, and smile.
After I returned from Amsterdam, he continued to connect to me through metaphor, which is how he approached me in the first place. He would explain our “us,” not through direct touch or communication but through artifacts, all those books and films, postcards
and films, with “we” or “us” as the subject, as if there is any other. SL gave me those gifts—the movies and books and so on—because he knew, too, that I was like everyone else, except him: I identified with other people. His gifts were road maps to our love, the valley of the unconditional.
As we became friends, the strangest thing happened: most of our acquaintances abused adverbs in their rush to condemn—violently, passionately—our becoming a we. We were something dark and unforeseen: two colored gentlemen who moved through the largely white social world we inhabited in New York (the world where art and fashion and journalism converged) who did not exploit each other or our obvious physical traits—their coloredness and maleness—for political sympathy or social gain. People looked at us and thought we were really evil. That we had pointy heads and forked tongues. That we wore furs and had no animal rights. That we knew the twelve steps but skipped intimacy. That we betrayed every confidence and judged without impunity. That we lauded women and then denigrated them. That we mentored young boys only to corrupt them. That we borrowed money with no thought of returning it. That we were indolent and crackled with ambition. That we were gluttons who drank from a bottomless well of envy. That we were gay and couldn’t admit we were straight. That we were faithless Jesus freaks who had forsaken Him for tight pussy, credit cards we abused, and loose shoes. That we had lockjaw once but still managed to feed off our enemies. That we sold children down the river and watched then suffocate in an ocean of adult bitterness. That we were racists, especially against our own kind. That we were matricidal, especially toward our own mothers.
That we were nothing like the “we,” or “just us,” in songs, lovely moments of togetherness we drowned out whenever we walked into a room, given our “loud” apparel, our conversation.
We faced these faces so many times: white women who had been denied nothing most of their lives feeling bitter about me and SL because they could not be part of “us,” but continuing to be attracted to us past the point of reason since they lived to be disappointed; white guys who wanted to fuck me for sport and who resented SL’s presence because he was perceived to be the embodiment of my conscience, which could not be defiled; black women who called us freaks since we somehow represented their twisted relationship to their own bodies and other black women; ambitious black male artists who resented our presence, largely because SL and I did not play by the rules they followed in their quest for success—a sad game James Baldwin describes in his 1961 essay “Alas, Poor Richard,” which concerns his intellectual twin or father, and occasional nemesis, novelist Richard Wright:
[O]ne of my dearest friends, a Negro writer now living in Spain, circled around me and I around him for months before we spoke. One Negro meeting another at an all-white cocktail party...cannot but wonder how the other got there. The question is: Is he for real? or is he kissing ass?...Negroes know about each other what can here be called family secrets, and this means that one Negro, if he wishes, can “knock” the other’s “hustle”—can give his game away...Therefore, one “exceptional” Negro watches another “exceptional” Negro in order to find out if he knows how vastly successful and bitterly funny the hoax has been. Alliances, in the great cocktail
party of the white man’s world, are formed, almost purely, on this basis, for if both of you can laugh, you have a lot to laugh about. On the other hand, if only one of you can laugh, one of you, inevitably, is laughing at the other.
We felt sad when all those Negroes couldn’t look us in the eye at parties. But we understood. No narrative preceded us. We were not “menchildren” in a promised land, as Claude Brown would have it. We did not consider ourselves as having “no name in the street,” as James Baldwin did himself. We did not suffer the existential crisis that afflicts some male Negro intellectuals, as Harold Cruse presumed. We did not have “hot” souls that needed to be put on ice, as Eldridge Cleaver might have said. We were not escapees from Langston Hughes’s “Simple” stories. We were nothing like Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas, nor did we wear white masks, as Frantz Fanon might have deduced, incorrectly. We saw no point of reference in
The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger
, by Cecil Brown. We did not see the point of Sammy Davis Jr.’s need to be loved by not one but thousands, as detailed in his autobiography,
Yes I Can
. We were colored but not noirish enough to have been interesting to Iceberg Slim. We were not homies in the manner of John Edgar Wideman’s young proles floating around Homewood. We were not borne of anything Nathan McCall or Ishmael Reed, in his recent books, certainly, might deem worthy of talking about. In short, we were not your standard Negro story, or usual Negro story. We did not feel isolated because we were colored. We did not want to join the larger world through violence or manipulation.
We were not interested in the sentimental tale that’s attached itself to the Negro male body by now: the embodiment of isolation. We had each other, another kind of story worth telling.
No one seemed to understand what we were talking about most of the time. There was no context for them to understand us, other than their fear and incomprehension in the presence of two colored men who were together and not lovers, not bums, not mad. Sometimes, as a joke, I’d wonder aloud to SL if we sounded like this to them:
Ooogga booga. Wittgenstein. Mumbo jumbo oogga booga, too, Freud, Djuna Barnes, a hatchi! Mumbo lachiniki jumbo Ishmael Reed and Audrey Hepburn
. And because the others couldn’t understand us, meaning was ascribed to us. We couldn’t be trusted. We should see a shrink. We should not spend so much time together; we were only hurting ourselves. We should spend more time in the art world, separately, so that SL could have more of a career as an artist. We should get on with our lives, separately, since there was no such thing as fidelity anymore.