Heaven Could Be Ours, Omar.
Siblings are the secret ingredient to a full life. Take my sister, Julia. She sheds penthouse Manhattan for our crumbling Brooklyn brownstone every third or fourth Sunday and treats me and my broke partner to brunch, lunch, dinner, drinks, dessert, or some combination there of. She sings to our cock-eyed, under-bitten, special-needs dog, then walks her down the street swiftly putting the children and grown men into their place as they say things like, "what is that thing?" She asks questions and pulls good-natured pranks and then, even though she can afford the car service, takes the winding mismatch of tangential buses and local trains back towards her island with us. So it was, that after attempting to pinpoint the year our parents went crazy while eating the best 6 dollar burgers ever on a lonely Sunday night street in Red Hook on the day after Valentines we stood waiting for the B61 bus. And saw this:Heaven could be ours, Omar. Love Nausheen
Game Face
There are different kinds of memories. This one is visual, no, spacial. If I could share the physical sensation with you of my mind remembering that large sun hat, and her dress, and the way she had sat in the front row with a complete disregard for what sitting in the front row of a sporting event meant (as expressed by her ridiculously out-of-place attire), I would talk to you about a flash, no, a spark and a liminal, ghost-like sensation in my chest and arms and legs and fingers, and yes - I think it is there - in my toes, too. But I may just want to believe that my toes remember her too, it is more poetic that way. Like so many other things we cannot see or otherwise measure. Like the smell of the thing. But I am getting ahead of myself now. What I wanted to say is that it took all of my intestines to invite her to come watch me. Because I knew she probably would not come. It was a precondition of being allowed to get close enough to her that I could fall in adoration: she would not adore me back. For one hour before the start of the game I scanned the crowd every 5 minutes, straining to make out the faces in the back row, trying to see beyond my eyes and interpret her looks in the way a person leaned forward or sat down. I thought for sure a person who loathed anything competitive the way she did would sit in the back of the stadium wearing large sunglasses, where no one would see her. But no, five minutes before kick-off she paraded in with five friends in tow and sat in the front row. With a blanket, a picnic basket, a sun hat and a dress. I had never seen her wear a dress before. She was on stage again, acting. I had invited her to prove that I was aloof enough to not care if she didn't show up. And she one-upped me by stealing the stands. I wanted her to come because every moment I knew her, every role she played was pitch-perfect. She performed life. Everyplace was her stage. But me, I had only this one place, 50 yards by 100 yards. And I just wanted her to see me . . in my element . . . once.She was gone by the time I was put in the game. I knew she would be, and I glanced over my shoulder, really, only to be sure I felt her absence fully. But I said this was a spacial memory. And here it is. She dominated even that space. A thing that had been barely more than two dimensional, my position on a triangle between the ball and the two goal posts, had suddenly become enormous. I was constantly checking my position in reference to the ball the goal posts and the place where her huge hat had been just moments ago. She was the only other person I had ever played for.And here is the last bit, the thing I loved before her. I never really wanted to play again after that season. Do I give even that to her? I could say she took it from me. That she outshone it so, that she changed it irrevocably. Or do I keep that for my own?
The Unbearable Lightness of Peeing
I went to the bathroom by myself today. It was in a bookstore in Brooklyn. The store was crowded. There was a line. I had to pee. I had locked myself out of the apartment earlier and drank a coffee in the front window of a Bodega hoping one of my roommates would walk by. No such luck. In line I made sure to look at the floor. It was my first time in a public restroom in a week. I didn't want the other women to feel threatened by my presence. I realized recently that I almost always stand with all my weight on my right foot, which I broke a few years back. It has begun hurting me significantly at the end of the day. So I tried standing on my left foot. Which I am sure made me look unusual while I waited. After the bathroom, I read three short stories and last chapter of three nonfiction books from the 'thought-provoking' section of the bookstore. Apparently, the traditional literary categories have been erased and now books are either thought-provoking or something else entirely. In this case all the books spent many chapters going into great depth about what is wrong with the world and spent one chapter talking about how to change it, so that is what I focused on. The security guards followed me with their eyes. Apparently it is unusual to read books from more than one section. For example, people either pick things from the Malcolm Gibson Table or the David Sedaris Table, from the Holiday Table or the Chanukah Table, the Science Table or the Art Table, but not both, or in my case all. Outside the bookstore I asked three awkward teenagers for a light. Which made them act more awkward. The lighter said "Coors King of Beers" on it. They shifted their collective weight as I tried to use the Coors lighter with my left hand. I don't know why I tried to light it with my left hand. I mean, I am not left-handed. It took longer than usual, so they had to shift longer, reflecting on the circumstances that might have led a person of an older generation to walk through the red tape of American social decorum and address a member of a younger age group without the pretext and correlating social laws of a classroom.Then I rode the bus home. Careful when I got off not to walk the same way as the woman in front of me. Lest she think I was following her home.
The Sight of Bridges and Balloons
"Oh, my love, oh it was a funny little thing . . . to be the ones to have seen." (Joanna Newsom from Bridges and Balloons)The Afrikaner called my mother from her final safari. "I am standing face to face with a great and wild lion. The others won't understand, but I know you will. It may kill me, but I am finally happy."She had been working as a nurse with my mother in upstate NY. They had become unwitting friends. Outside of that hospital they believed in two different worlds. But inside the hospital, every day, they brought new people into the world, and sent them off to face their individual demons alone. The Afrikaner's lion had no designs on her life. But Africa itself did. She moved to the states after Mandela was elected. Here, she suffered from deep sadnesses and a spending addiction that put her family into an irrevocable debt. Shortly after returning to work from her safari she jumped off of the top floor of the hospital.I was sitting by my mother when she received the call that her friend had fallen from such a great height. I don't know if you have ever yourself seen a person disintegrate into grief. But that is what happened to my mother. She sat shifty-eyed and and moaning across from me at the restaurant she told me about the lion, over and over again. "She sounded so alive. So much better."The Afrikaner survived the fall. My mother visited her and watched the imprisoned loathing in the eyes of her friend as the hospital's all-black critical care nursing staff moved her paralyzed body, undressed her and cleaned her bed soars. "Please, kill me." She managed through unimaginable pain. It was only a few days until she found a way to free herself from the tubes and wires that kept her breathing. Then, as I said, Africa finally took her back. I don't mean to say that it was the black attendants that drove her to her death, I mean certainly she had been hunting death for some months, but still, she couldn't escape the reality of race in the end.I sometimes feel it is those of us who have walked in the darkest corridors blindly, who have not just wrestled our demons as they place hoods over our eyes, but also loved them a little, who understand most acutely the power of a pure vision - the tiger standing before us, who decides not to strike, this time. This morning as I stood on the fire escape in the back of my brownstone apartment building in Brooklyn. I looked out to right, where there are four housing project buildings that loom 15 stories above the tree line, and easily another 15 behind the trees. Then I looked to the left where a latino worker stood on the top ledge of a new luxury condominium building with a pulley, bringing a bucket to the top from the street. The world seemed so different from yesterday. Last night, from both directions, the projects and the luxury apartments, there was a cacophony of cheering. Obama. Obama. Barrack Hussein Obama. On the television, there were people of all ages and races crying in joy because a black person named Barrack Hussein Obama was elected, elected, president . . . PRESIDENT.I felt, like the tear-stained faces on the TV, like the Afrikaner on safari, that I had seen something amazing. It is not often that joy is heard coming from the block with the projects on it. It was joy. There was rejoicing. People were in the streets, peacefully, chanting and laughing, and hooting and singing. The country was cheering for a black man with a muslim name. And he isn't an athlete. He is a dad and a community organizer and a symbol of our collective belief that if we all show up and are counted we can choose something other than tyranny and fear as our guiding principles. Hey, I hate to be so corny and cliche. But he did it. We did it. We all fucking did it, man. We did it. Tomorrow, when I return to teaching my class of lower income students that hail from the other side of colonialism - students who are first and second generation kids from places like Liberia, Guinea, the Dominican Republic, Korea - I can say, honestly, the world can be a different place tomorrow than it is today, and they can believe in me, the chubby white queer video teacher. Who would have thought, really? Who could have known? When I say, a muslim, a black person, a woman can be president, they will have already forgotten a week ago, their own disbelief. It will just be explicitly true. I am so deeply happy, I can hardly begin to explain. After all the horrible things that have happened in these past eight years, many personal, many global, there is hope, there is light. I am so very very happy. -------Just as an interesting side note: The word Afrikaner is in my computer's built-in dictionary. The words Mandela and Obama are not, each time I write them a little red line appears underneath.
THURSDAY: Project Resistance Meeting
Project Resistance prevention â awareness â education Emergency Community Meeting to respond to recent violent attacks on members of the queer community[7 p.m., Thursday, August 7th in the Lawrence Public Library Gallery][1] (smaller meeting room across from DVD collection) 707 Vermont StreetDue to recent violent attacks on members of the queer community in Lawrence, a group of concerned individuals scheduled this first meeting to discuss the creation of an organization to respond to these incidents.We need your help!Project Resistance works to eradicate violence motivated by bias against individuals' actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.For more information contact: [myspace.com/projectresistanceks][2] or [resistanceproject@gmail.com][3] [1]: /events/2008/aug/07/30408/ [2]: http://www.myspace.com/projectresistanceks [3]: mailto:resistanceproject@gmail.com
Tieland
For the past three weeks I taught a documentary film making institute for 14 young media activists. Yesterday was our last day of meeting as a big group. The focus of the documentary we shot was teen homelessness in New York City. The students ranged in age from 14 to 21 and come from four metro-area under-served schools. Many of them live in the projects in Harlem or the Bronx, one student hails from South Brooklyn, and one student lives in a group home.Shamrod is fourteen. He is 6 feet, 3 inches tall. Everyone in the class knows his exact height. He tends to say things like, "Hey, Billy, I will hang that poster for you. I am 6 feet, 3 inches tall. I can reach up high."On the second day of class, while downing a triad of whole granola bars in two bites each he informed me, "Billy, you know we are in a recession." I could tell he thought this information was very important to the focus of the class. "I am aware of this, Sham. Were you listening to the news this morning?" I ask. "Nah, nah. See, Billy, I live in the projects, so I know everything."At the beginning of the third day we played a game called "Identity Twister." Sham was very upset that "Jamaican" wasn't a choice under the category of race. He begrudgingly chose "West Indian" and "Black" but he felt cheated. I told my partner, The Activist, that the thing I love the most about knowing Sham is the sheer mathematical improbability of our relationship. When we did a pronoun check-in after our game, Sham was shocked to learn that some of the people we were going to be interviewing in our project were transgender. "Wait, you mean transvestites?" We talked about language and letting people self-define. Then we did an exercise in which we read stories about youth who were about to become homeless. Sham was appalled by the story of Blossom, a teenage Jamaican lesbian who left her family and came to the US as an undocumented immigrant to flee homophobia in her home town. "That's not right," he said.Later, we were discussing the relationship between poverty and disability. We read the story of a family that couldn't afford to take care of their paralyzed son and were contemplating giving him up so that he could get the health care he needed. Olivia, the film's director said, "Our group decided that the family should give him up, even though it is hard." Sham shook his head, he wiped his face with his large hand and said, "But, but, but you can't do that. Even if it feels right. Listen, I just know that if I _ ever_ had to give up my son . . . that would just haunt me every day for the rest of my whole life. I would miss him every minute, every day."I asked the group if anyone had a family member who was differently-abled. "I do," said Sham. "My cousin was born without part of his leg. It is awful." I worried he was about to say it was gross or weird, but instead he said, "It makes me mad. Grown men, teenagers, my age, make fun of him. He was BORN that way. I have to fight peoples my own age, who should be nicer, cause they are always yelling stuff at him."At the end of the third day Sham asked me, "Billy, what is the last stop on the J train?" The J train, anyway you take it, goes to one of the poorest and roughest Ghetto's in New York, Jamaica, Queens. "Why do you need to know that Sham?" He looks at me anxiously, "I am meeting someone at the last stop on the J train." My newbie teacher self is uncertain what to say next. The thought of my youngest student leaving class and getting in some type of bad situation way out in Jamaica while his mother thinks he is safe and on his way back to Harlem worries me. "Why are you going out there?" He shifts uncomfortably, "I just need to meet someone." I tell Sham that it is important to go to new neighborhoods with someone who knows their way around. He rolls his eyes, "Billy, I am from the projects, the projects, Harlem." I cannot help myself from saying that everyplace has its own set of rules.I realize he is probably going out to see his dad, who got out a jail the day before. I think long and hard about whether to call his mom. I decide to trust him. But, I call him later that evening, "I just wanted to be sure that you found the person you were meeting." He laughs. "Oh, Billy."Sham has an amazing way with people. He says he is shy, that he doesn't like asking questions, and yet in nearly every interview he took part in there was a moment when he would step out from behind the camera or take off his ear phones and hand the mic to another student and ask a question like, "Has this experience made you a stronger person?"He is an amazing speaker and interviewer. He is articulate and thoughtful. He can remember the most minute of details. He thinks hard about everything he sees and hears. He has an amazing mind. But, he can barely write or read. On our fifth day of class the students each wrote a rough draft of a short letter to the mayor about why and how the mayor's office should help with teen homelessness. Sham's letter was two sentences long. It read:Deer Meyr. Pleze end ten homlesnessnesess. It not rite. Thx, ShamI . . . I didn't know how to . . . I felt betrayed for Sham. How had he been let down so badly that he couldn't spell the word that fell so coyly and effortlessly from his mouth, please? I asked the group to share their letters. Several students read their notes aloud. Then, Sham asked to go. "Go for it," I feigned optimism."Dear Mister Mayor," he looked down at his paper and pretended to read the next line, "I know you are a busy person and that you have a lot of responsibilities." He went on, "Imagine, Mr. Mayor, if you were poor and if your own son, your own flesh and blood, was homeless. Imagine how sad you would feel if he was homeless because he had a disability or because he was gay or because there wasn't enough housing for him. What if he had no place to sleep or no food or shelter? How would that make you feel?" He pretended to glance at his paper again, "Oh, yeah. Homes are a human right. Everyone deserves a place to live. Thank you, very much, Sham.""Two snaps for Sham's, letter." I said, "Sham, that was a great emotional appeal and a wonderful letter, I hope you will help us write our final letter to the Mayor at the end of the institute." My heart felt like a ton of bricks. He has so much to write, but each word is a mangled painful jumble of shaky lines.I decided to take a soft approach. The next week we did a writing assignment on a worksheet. "Just give me bullet points" I instructed the class, being sure to follow up with Sham. The sheet asked, "What are some reasons why documentary film makers can't always tell their version of the truth?" Sham wrote down two illegible scribbles. "What are you thinking, Sham, what are the reasons?""Well, there are three reasons, really: Money, Power, Respect." I said, "Can you explain that a bit more?" "Money, if someone doesn't like what you say in your film, they might not give you the money for making it. Power, if someone has power over you they might not let you tell the truth. Respect, if you have a lot of respect for someone, you might not want to show bad things about them." I pointed to his paper, "Those are great answers, Sham, can you put three bullet points on your answer and write money, power and respect next to them?"A couple of days later we were riding down in the elevator together. Sham rested his elbow on my shoulder in a way he has become accustomed to doing. It makes him feel tall. He said to me, "Billy, I have a lot of things on my mind." "What's up, Sham?" I ask. "Well, I have just been thinking. Do I do the things I do because of something in me, because I love them, or do I do things because of other people, because society tells me I should love them?" "That's a tough question, Sham. What are your favorite things to do?" He shifts his weight, "Well, skateboarding, but see, do I really love skateboarding or do I love it because I am a guy and society tells me to love it?" He is deep in thought, "Well, Sham, sometimes you just love the things you love. Regardless of the reasons, if you love skateboarding, you love it and that's okay as long as you aren't hurting anyone or yourself." He thinks some more, "I guess," he says, "but I am just really trying to figure out who I am, who is Sham?" I poke his stomach with my finger, making him giggle and grab his side, "That is the question I would like to figure out, too."On the second to last day of class I had to remind Sham for about the two-hundredth time to throw away his granola bar wrappers. He smiled, and snatched them up. Then he said, "Billy, you know, you are one of my, okay, you are my favorite teacher, but you are really annoying." He has an amazing knack for saying exactly the wrong thing in a way that feels perfect. "You are always making me do 100 things at once. And I do them, but it is a lot of work, then I am like, whew, I need a nap. Then I realize I liked them."That morning all the students wrote a pitch for a documentary they would like to make next summer. Sham asked for my help at the computer. He was researching Muay Thai boxing, the subject of his documentary. He asked me what country Muay Thai comes from. I replied Thailand. A few minutes later he called me over, "I am having trouble finding information." He said. I looked at his Google window. There was a long list of men's clothing stores. In the search box he had typed "Tieland."He gave the best pitch in the class. He was passionate. He spoke about international cultural exchange, about physical and mental fitness, about learning from people across the globe. He had an amazingly accurate and thoughtful budget. We ordered Phad Thai for the class lunch. "I am definitely going to Thailand, now!" Sham said wolfing down noodles. Despite everything, I believe he will.
Ecstatic Bouyancy
I heard this song today and I couldn't work anymore. I just sat at my computer all day enjoying it too much to think about other things. Diane Cluck - 1/2 a Million Miles from HomeI was imagining myself as the man and the singer at the same time. It was delightful.
What’s Going on in the Kitchen?
There were helicopters all over Brooklyn yesterday afternoon. Thousands of people marched to protest the rulings handed down in the Sean Bell case. In class, my students laid it out in twenty minutes. Americans have rights. But 'Americans' are white, speak English, wear suits, are straight and have college degrees. Twenty minutes. Then later, I sat in a room of twenty LGB, Gender Variant and Intersexed folks who are outraged about the Sean Bell case, and all around the room I heard the same thing, "Where are our people?" And then the answer, "They are scared. They feel unsafe."Three of the women in the room had been harassed by police on the way to the meeting simply for being trans and walking through the Village. The cops assumed they MUST be prostitutes, not community organizers. I am so frustrated right now, because I feel the institutionalized poverty of queer people, of people of color, of disabled people, of non-native speakers. People are being criminalized for who they are. Their very essence is illegal. How can we make people illegal? Who has the right to do that?Every day the Bush regime erodes away at our freedoms, the things people have literally died for in this country, and most people can't be bothered to care. Where is the personal responsibility? Where are the good Samaritans?
Latent Runner
Start and stop. My father died this month, April.I have tried to write down what has happened since, and failed. So I thought I would start writing again with something simple and off task.¢ ¢ ¢ I loved track, but hated track practice. I was a thrower and every practice began with a one mile run to the armory near our school. I would always find some cohort, usually another thrower, to duck down a side street with on the first half of the run and wait for the other athletes to come back from the armory and join up with them on the trip back.But one day the other throwers were absent, and I was forced to hide alone, which seemed shameful, or actually do the whole run. So, with snot running down my face and a sharp pang in my right side I ran the entire way to the armory. When I turned around I saw that I was the first girl to get there. Inspiration struck and I promised myself I would run the whole way back without stopping to jog, figuring I would be passed soon. When I reached the park next to my school the pang in my side screamed, tears welled up in my eyes, it was hard to see and hard to breath through the phlegm. I was alone, running in the park that bordered our high school, up hill. When my left foot fell I started chanting, "It takes," right foot, "some pain," left foot "I think," right foot, "I can." Then suddenly I saw the doors to the school gymnasium. At the entrance stood the women's track coach. She looked at me with shock, then started saying, "Yes, yes, finish strong." I hadn't anticipated witnesses. Then some of the boys came down, they were saying "Keefe is first, look its Keefe!" Then, I heard it . . . "Hear comes Ekhardt."Carrie Ekhardt, the girl who always did the right thing, the girl who had a solid B in every class. The girl who always ran the mile at meets, not because she was fast, but because she was consistent. I did not turn to look, as I realized she was close enough that I could hear her breathing. I just started to sprint. Without form, without skill, arms flailing, head swinging wildly side to side, choking, burning. She sped up. I could only think of the time a neighborhood boy stole my bike when we were poor. How I ran after him without breathing, and with no shoes on, and almost caught him, before he pulled away from me. I held my breath and pounded my way to the door. The track boys, our friends, started cheering. Chanting. Calling our names, laughing, hooting. And I beat her. By a second at most, then I barfed. Our friend, Nick, who died a few months later put his hand on my back and said, "I have never seen you run that fast."It was a cold, rainy day in a dying city in Upstate New York. No one really cared which one of us won, even Carrie. But it was me, it was me that won.
A Dream Revisited
I first read A Dream Deferred in 7th grade. I know because my English teacher was Miss Harding. She was the type of woman who knew her gas station clerk by first name. She was an unnatural blond with a serious caffeine addiction, I am sure the clerks knew her name too. She strolled into work each morning wafting an intoxicatingly nauseous blend of nicotine and coffee fumes, often double fisting a canteen and a stack of novels. She would breeze by the nuns who frowned upon everything about her and wink at the science teacher, who was married.Her English class was unbearable. For the life of me I could not figure out what a comma splice was. The difference between a run on sentence and a compound sentence seemed so subtle that I thought only a genius, like Phil Ticknor, could figure it out. Phil Ticknor knew everything. Tuesday mornings we had confession in the back corner of my home room. If I hadn't felt so much Catholic guilt at saying the words aloud, I would have confessed repeatedly to coveting Phil Ticknor's brain. Phil always got a big red 100% and a "Well Done!" on every test, assignment and pop quiz, including, 5 years later, the SAT. (Was that another comma splice?) He knew the answers to questions before they were done being asked. He single-handedly won our school the junior high trivia trophy. I was an alternate, the only girl on the team and I cheated on the test to make sure I even got my spot as an alternate.Plus, Phil Ticknor had read Shakespeare. The only author any of us knew by name. When Miss Harding announced that we were ending our grammar unit and starting work on poetry it hardly inspired me to shake off the drunken sun that shown on the back row of seats where I spent most of English class thinking of things other than diagramming sentences.A pile of papers came back down the row. To my dyslexic delight, poetry was short. The lines were well spread out. There were ONLY eleven of them: What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.Or does it explode?I got a little caught up on the word 'deferred'. I kind of knew the word, I mean I had heard it used before, but I wasn't exactly sure what it meant there. Miss Harding finished passing out the carefully measured stacks of photocopies then retreated to the edge of her desk where she sunk into a long tug on the straw to her 2 liter of Coke. I was done reading the poem by the time she got around to asking if anyone would read it aloud. My hand went up. "Uhm, yes, Miss Keefe," she managed through her surprise and soda."What happens," I began, "to a dream deferred?" I finished reading, then did a quick third read, anticipating the oncoming questions. I became consumed with that line - Does it fester like a sore? "What is this poem about?" asked Miss Harding, staying off another nicotine fit with a gulp of Coke. I couldn't understand why dreaming would be deferred. I imagined a person thrashing in bed. I imagined a dream in their head, heavily sagging, then the head exploding and brain bits splattered on the pillow and head board. Surely that wasn't what this Langston Hughes was talking about! What nonsense. Fucking Phil Ticknor raised his fucking hand. Well, he said, referring to the itallicized paragraph after the poem, "Langston Hughes was an influential part of the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem, where black people live. Renaissance, rebirth. This poem is about the rebirth of black people."God, if you are real, PLEASE let him be wrong, please let him be wrong, please let him be wrong, God."Very good observation, Phil, well done," said Miss Harding.Damn you, God, you're such a phony. I racked my brain for something better. Silence. "What does the word deferred mean, anyone?""It's like when you let someone else talk for you," I said, "You defer to them.""Close, but not quite what I am looking for."Phil raised his stinking hand again, "It means delayed." Fucking encyclopedia head over there. Too bad he sucks at drawing, and hockey."What does the first sentence mean?"I looked at the words and I remembered a TV commercial I had seen, "Raisins are grapes that shrivel up in the sun." Then it clicked. I heard it through the Grapevine! The dancing raisins. "The raisins are like black people," I said. "Wow. Very good, Miss Keefe." Eat that, Ticknor. "What about the second line?""Well," I said. "if something festers, it like gets worse and worse.""And . . .?" I didn't know. How does a sore run? "What happens to a boil when it bursts?""OOOH, the juice comes out!" I knew this from my mother's (The Midwife) graphic description of infections. This incited a whole host of ews from the girls in the room, who then immediately seemed to write poetry off as a boy thing. Phil was searching for something to say, but the hard parts of the poem were already figured out. I read it again. It wasn't about a dream you have at night, it was about the other kind of dream, the ones you have when you are awake. And it was about being black. I imagined a black man, hanging from a noose, his body covered with sores from the sun. And the thought occured to me, this is what it feels like to be black, you put your dreams on hold until you feel like you are going to explode. I felt like I was going to explode every minute in junior high. I had no friends. I was picked on mercilessly. I frequently got into fights. I imagined all the things that troubled me suddenly creating oozing boils on my skin, as I struggled under the weight of a yolk. I fell in love with poetry immediately. Then there was a commotion at the windows. Frank Rogers, one of the great assholes of our lives, pointed at something. The neighborhood our school was in had gone from a good Catholic neighborhood when I started there in Kindergarten to a bad, presumably Godless neighborhood now that I was one year from graduating. Later, I came to understand that 'bad neighborhood,' when falling out of the mouths of good Catholics, meant a 'black neighborhood.'One twin toddler who lived on the second floor of an apartment house across the street from our school had climbed over the edge of his porch and was walking on the roof. The other twin had one leg over the edge of the porch and was teetering close to a two-story fall. Their white diapers gleamed against their dark skin. Suddenly, their father came running out. Screaming. Swearing. Swinging. He grabbed the first twin by the diaper and yanked him back into a hail storm of slapping until the child fell down crying. Then he saw the second child. He straightened up and pointed at the edge. The boy backed away from him, stepping ever closer to the end of the roof."No," I said, go back. The dad lept over the railing. The kid began running in evasive circles. At every turn I was sure he would fall to his death. The whole class was glued to the windows now. Miss Harding ran down the hall to call for help. The safe twin went inside and shut the porch door, apparently locking it, because when the father finally caught his arrant son and pulled him to safety by his arm while his feet drug protestingly on the floor, he found they were locked out. He eventually shimmied his way down a drain pipe and went in the front door of the house. With the major action over, we started giggling and shuffling. Then Frank Rogers, true to form, said, "Ah funny little niglets." The white boys laughed uproariously. The white girls giggle coyly. And my anger festered like a boil. I saw Phil Ticknor's smile suddenly retreat and he turned and slunk to his desk. I knew, in my indignation, that he and I were no longer rivals.
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