I ain’t no blockhead, I live with my family because that’s where I was born and I got no paper tucked away in my mattress like a girlie mag. With so little cash flow, I’ve been on the grind since I was sixteen, but now I got some chrome, something fast, cold and glitzy, something completely off the hook with deep grooves and polished dubs, a nice little SUV to help me pick up a bustdown or a goddess or a buttaface. You got to take what’s yours, naw’mean? I ain’t trying to outshine your ass in the street like an industrial street lamp, I just wanna survive, get out of the Q sometimes. But how can I work in the city, even if I want to, when 2/3’s of Queens don’t got no subway? You can talk about equality and cultural mobility all you fucking want, but that shit’s on campus. Out here, the world is mad fierce and the streets is my lab. Since politicians ain’t coming out here to bridge the gap, we coming to their hoods on a mission, to spread the good word, to volunteer our exasperation, to muscle slippery city politics.
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This intimacy will never be love, never pretend to be. The way you touch is animal but not fierce. The way you touch is tender. Beside each other on this cold park bench just after midnight your cigarettes smoke themselves out beneath your first kiss. And later, fingers smell of nicotine, while lips taste of alcohol and a stranger’s tongue.
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It took less than a year to perfect vegan pancakes. I grew up reading Tommie Di Paola’s Pancakes for Breakfast, in which an old woman collects eggs, milks cows, and churns butter to feed her craving for a thick stack of pancakes. The only words in the story are read over the shoulder of the woman as she looks at the recipe in her cookbook. It was this recipe I grew up on and this recipe I would not quit.
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Mom quit smoking on a Tuesday in March of 1996. Nobody knew it at the time. It was about two a.m., and all we knew for sure was that she’d quit breathing.
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At ten years old, it felt as though I spent my whole summer dancing in Sonya’s living room, trying to memorize the strength of her fingers and the flatness of her palms. They were different when we danced, not the tight, clenched hands on a pencil during math tests, or the careless fingertips twirling through her shiny black hair, but sharp and precise, twisting and flashing tanned wrists and slender fingers. I held my arms still, flexing tiny muscles so that my forearms might appear sleek and electric. I concentrated on the blue veins running up the underside of my forearm, waiting for the music to begin. The Indian songs were a rush, a sweeping wave, a swirl of high-pitched words in Gujarati, Sonya’s other language. We shook our hips for eight counts, then stepped rapidly on the balls of our feet, criss-crossing each other, socks gripping into the shaggy brown carpet.
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Big Joey was, as his name suggests, enormous. Often when I visited little Joe, his dad would be clad in only a black t-shirt and tighty-whities, lying on the couch with bolts of pale flesh seeping out the cracks and sticking with the taut grip of perspiration to leather upholstery. The homely sight was all the more reason for Joe and me to spend our time in their apartment tucked away in Joe’s room listening to Morrisey, Green Jellö, Tool, or whatever he had recently deemed ‘the next big thing.’
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When I was seven years old, as I stood on the winner’s podium at the Junior World Fencing Championships, I became a murderer. I’m not sure why I chose that moment—perhaps it was the reflection of my silver medal in my father’s cold eyes. He looked at his watch, counting down the seconds until he and my mother could return their attention to my sister. Then and there, with hulking fat Tommy Chesterson balling like a baby over his gold medal on the podium above me, I had wished my sister was dead. ↩
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“He who puts pen to paper writes of himself, whether knowingly or not.” —E.B. White
That is true. It’s also largely anachronistic. Gone are the days when the majority of people sit down with a pen for the purposes of composition. So I wonder: Do people sitting at computers reveal and express themselves the same way as a writer who uses pen and ink?…
…It makes me think of Peter Bibler, my roommate in the days of old. He and I shared that anachronistic habit (yes, out of place even in the mid-nineties) of writing out first drafts of our essays long hand. Sometimes we’d sit together at a table in the Great Room to do this. Peter’s manner during these sessions revealed a lot about his personality. He’d stretch and lean over his papers, rubbing his face and hair into all manner of shapes. By the end of the night his hair would be mountainous, his eyes deranged. His intensity was glorious, inspiring. I’ve never seen anyone look like that at a computer. That was some stupendous hair.↩
