Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (11 page)

“I like how it sounds, too,” Farrah says. She actually slides on her barstool and leans toward him, leans so close it looks as if she might kiss him.

“Farrah and Ray,” I say. “That sounds like a Vegas act.”

“It
does
!” she squeals.

M
Y FATHER
and Farrah get drunk while I play an electronic trivia game with the Goiter. He knows more than I gave him credit for, but he’s losing to me because he bets all his bonus points whenever he gets a chance. The Goiter and I are on our tenth game when Ray Bivens Jr. taps me on the shoulder. I look over to see him standing very straight and tall, trying not to look drunk.

“You don’t love me,” he says sloppily. “You don’t under
stand
me.”

“
You
don’t understand you,” I say.

Farrah is still at the bar, and though she’s not saying anything, her face goes through a series of exaggerated expressions as if it were she responding to someone’s questions. I plunk three quarters in the game machine. “Your go,” I say to the Goiter.

“Does anybody understand themselves?” he says to me softly, and for a second he looks perfectly lucid. Then he says it louder, for the benefit of the whole bar, with a gravity only the drunk can muster. “Does
anybody,
I say, under
stand
themselves?”

The men at the bar look at him and decide it’s one of their many
jokes, and laugh, though my father is staring straight at me, straight through me as though I were nothing but a clear glass of whiskey into which he could see the past and future.

I grip my father’s elbow and try to speak with him one on one. “I’m sorry about what I said at the March.”

“No you ain’t.”

“Yes,” I say, “I am. But you’ve got to tell me how to understand you.” I feel silly saying it, but he’s drunk, and so is everybody else but me.

He lurches back then leans in forward again. “Tell you? I can’t
tell
you.” He drums each word out on the counter, “That’s. Not. What. It’s. Α -bout. I can
tell
you about Paris, but you won’t know ’less you been there. You simply under-
stand.
Or you don’t.” He raises an eyebrow in clairvoyant drunkenness before continuing. “You either take me, or you
don’t
.” He throws his hands up, smiling as though he’s finally solved some grand equation in a few simple steps.

“Please,” I say, giving up on him. I beckon the Goiter for another game of electronic trivia, but he shakes his head and smiles solemnly, a smile that says he’s more weary for me than for himself.

“Let me tell you something,” Ray Bivens Jr. says, practically spitting in my face, “Lupita
understands
me. That woman,” he says, suddenly sounding drunk again, “
understands
. She’s It.”

Farrah, suddenly sober, smacks him on the shoulder and says, “What about me? What the fuck about me?”

A
NOTHER HOUR
later he says, all cool, “Gimme the keys. Farrah and I are going for a ride.”

I’ve had many 7 Ups and I’ve twice asked my father if we could
go, told him that we either had to find a motel outside the city or plan on driving back soon. But now he’s asking for the keys at nearly three a.m., the car all the way over in Arlington, and even the Metro has stopped running.

“Sir,” I say. “We need to drive back.”

“I said, Spurgeon, dear son, that Farrah and I are going for a ride. Now give me the keys, dear son.”

A ride means they’re going to her place, wherever that is. Him going to her place means I have to find my own place to stay. Giving him the keys not only means he’ll be driving illegally, which I no longer care about, but that the car will end up on the other side of the country, stripped for parts.

“No,” I say. “It’s Mama’s car.”

“Mama’s car,”
he mimics.

“Sir.”

“Maaaamaaa’s caaaaar!”

I leave the bar. I’m walking for a good minute before I hear him coming after me. I speed up but don’t run. I don’t even know how I’m going to get back to the car, but I pick a direction and walk purposefully. I hear the
click click click
of what are surely Farrah’s heels, hear her voice screaming something that doesn’t make sense, hear his footfalls close in on me, but all I see are the streetlights glowing amber, and the puffs of smoke my breath makes in the October air. All I feel is that someone has spun me around as if for inspection, and that’s when I see his face—handsome, hard-edged, not the least bit sloppy from liquor.

Sure. He’s hit me before, but this is hard. Not the back of the hand, not with a belt, but punching. A punch meant for my face, but lands on my shoulder, like he’s congratulating me, then another hit, this one all knuckles, and my jaw pops open, automatically, like the
trunk of a car. I try to close my mouth, try to call time out, but he’s ramming into me, not with his fists, but with his head. I try to pry him from where his head butts, inside my stomach, right under my windpipe, but he stays that way, leaning into me, tucked as if fighting against a strong wind, both of us wobbling together like lovers. Finally, I push him away, and wipe what feels like yogurt running from my nose into the raw cut of my lip. I start to lick my lips, thinking that it’s all over, when he rushes straight at me and rams me into something that topples over with a toyish metal clank. Sheaves of weekly newspapers fan the ground like spilled cards from a deck. I kick him anywhere my foot will land, shouting at him, so strangely mad that I’m happy, until I finally kick at air, hard, and trip myself. I don’t know how long I’m down, how long my eyes are closed, but he’s now holding me like a rag doll. “What the hell are you talking about?” he says as if to shake the answer out of me. “What the
hell
are you talking about?”

I only now realize what I’ve been screaming the whole time. “Wind-o!” I yell at him. “You and your goddamn ‘wind-o’! There was never any ‘wind-o’! And you don’t know
shit
about birds!
Arriba! Arriba!
” I say mockingly.

When he grabs my collar, almost lifting me from the ground, I feel as though I’m floating upward, then I feel some part of me drowning. I remember something, something I know will kill my father. My father dodged the draft. They weren’t going to get this nigger, was his view of Vietnam. It was the one thing I’d respected him for, and yet somehow I said it, “You didn’t know fucking Huey P. Newton. You never even
went
to Vietnam!”

That does it. I had turned into something ugly, and of all the millions of words I’ve ever spoken to him in all my life, this is the one that blows him to pieces.

“Vietnam?” he says, once, as if making sure I’d said the word.

I’m quiet. He says the word again, “Vietnam,” and his eyes somehow look sightless.

I try to pull him back, begging in the only way you can beg without words. I go to put my hand on his shoulder, but a torrent of people, fresh from the March, it seems, has been loosed from a nearby restaurant. They slap one another’s backs, smelling of Brut and Old Spice, musk-scented African oils and sweat. I go to put my hand on his shoulder, but already my father has gone.

R
AY
B
IVENS
J
R
. left with the car and Farrah left with someone else. The birds are gone. My blazer is gone. After I have a scotch, the bartender says, “Look. I can float you the drinks, but who’s going to pay for that, youngblood?” He points to one of the bar’s smashed windowpanes.

After I pay him, I have no money left for a cab or a bus. The bridge over the Potomac isn’t meant for pedestrians, and it takes me half an hour to walk across it. For a long time I’m on New Hampshire Avenue, then for a long time I’m on Georgia. I ask for directions to the train station and someone finally gives them to me.

I wonder if he’s right about Lupita. When she sat on the porch and held her head, it seemed she felt more sorry for him than she did for herself; not pity, but sympathy.

I pass by an old-fashioned movie theater whose marquee looks like one giant erection lit in parti-colored lights. People pass by, wondering how to go about mugging me. A well-dressed man asks if I’m a pitcher or a catcher, and I have no idea what he means. I tell myself that it’s good that Ray Bivens Jr. and I fought. Most people
think that you find something that matters, something that’s worth fighting for, and if necessary, you fight. But it must be the fighting, I tell myself, that decides what matters, even if you’re left on the sidewalk to discover that what you thought mattered means nothing after all.

“W
HERE DO
you want to go?” the Amtrak ticket officer asks.

“East,” I say. “Any train that goes east this time of night.”

“You’re in D.C., sir. Any further east and you’ll be in the Atlantic.”

Of course I’m not going east anymore. I’d been going east the last day and a half, and it’s just now hitting me that I can finally go west. Go home.

After the events of the day, I’m not surprised that I get the snottiest ticket officer of the whole damn railway system. I look into the his gray eyes. “West, motherfucker.”

The ticket officer stares at me and I stare right back.

The ticket officer sighs. He looks down at his computer, and then at me again. “Where, pray tell, do you want to go? West, I’m afraid, is a direction, not a destination.”

“Louisville, Kentucky,” I finally say. “Home.”

He enters something into his computer. Tilts his head. He smiles when he tells me there is no train that goes to Louisville. The closest one is Cincinnati.

I walk away from the counter and sit down, trying to think of how I’m going to pay to get to Cincinnati, then from Cincinnati to Louisville. The only other white person in the station besides the ticket officer is an old woman in a rainbow knit cap. She’s having quite an intelligent conversation with herself.

I’ll have to call home, ask my mother to give her credit card number to this prick. I start to try to find a phone when a man approaches the ticket counter, his half-asleep son riding on his back. He probably just came from the March. Probably listened to all the poems and speeches about ants and oxen and African drumming, but still had this kid out in the hot sun for hours, then in the cold night for longer. It’s almost five o’clock in the morning, and all this little boy wants, I can tell, is some goddamned sleep.

“Hey,” I say to the man. When he doesn’t respond, I tap him on the non-kid shoulder. “It’s pretty late to have a kid out. Don’t you think?”

He puts his hand up like a traffic cop, but apparently decides I’m harmless and says to me, “Son. I want you to promise me you’ll go clean yourself up. Get something to eat.” He produces a wallet from his back pocket. He hands me a twenty. “Now, don’t go spending it on nothing that’ll make you
worse
. Promise me.”

It’s not enough to get me where I’m going, but it’s just what I need. I sit down on a wooden bench. The old white woman next to me carefully pours imaginary liquid into an imaginary cup. The man with the kid goes up to the ticket officer, who stops staring into space long enough to say, “May I help
you,
sir?”

“Do y’all still say ‘All aboard’?”

“Excuse me?” the ticket officer says.

“My son wants to know if y’all say ‘All aboard.’ Like in the movies.”

“Yes,” the ticket officer says wearily. “We
do
say ‘All aboard.’ How else would people know to board the train?”

Now the boy jiggles up and down on his father’s back, suddenly animated, as if he’s riding a pony. The ticket officer sighs, hands grazing the sides of his face as though checking for stubble. Finally
he throws his arms up in a “Sure, what the hell” kind of way, and disappears into the Amtrak offices for what seems like an hour. The father sets the boy down, feet first, onto the ground. An intercom crackles and a voice says:

“All aboard!”

The voice is hearty and successful. The boy jumps up and down with delight. He is the happiest I’ve seen anyone, ever. And though the urge to weep comes over me, I wait—holding my head in my hands—and it passes.

O
RIENTATION GAMES BEGAN
the day I arrived at Yale from Baltimore. In my group we played heady, frustrating games for smart people. One game appeared to be charades reinterpreted by existentialists; another involved listening to rocks. Then a freshman counselor made everyone play Trust. The idea was that if you had the faith to fall backward and wait for four scrawny former high school geniuses to catch you, just before your head cracked on the slate sidewalk, then you might learn to trust your fellow students. Russian roulette sounded like a better way to go.

“No way,” I said. The white boys were waiting for me to fall, holding their arms out for me, sincerely, gallantly. “No fucking way.”

“It’s all cool, it’s all cool,” the counselor said. Her hair was a shade of blond I’d seen only on
Playboy
covers, and she raised her hands as
though backing away from a growling dog. “Sister,” she said, in an I’m-down-with-the-struggle voice, “you don’t have to play this game. As a person of color, you shouldn’t have to fit into any white, patriarchal system.”

I said, “It’s a bit too late for that.”

In the next game, all I had to do was wait in a circle until it was my turn to say what inanimate object I wanted to be. One guy said he’d like to be a gadfly, like Socrates. “Stop me if I wax Platonic,” he said. I didn’t bother mentioning that gadflies weren’t inanimate—it didn’t seem to make a difference. The girl next to him was eating a rice cake. She wanted to be the Earth, she said. Earth with a capital E.

There was one other black person in the circle. He wore an Exeter T-shirt and his overly elastic expressions resembled a series of facial exercises. At the end of each person’s turn, he smiled and bobbed his head with unfettered enthusiasm. “Oh, that was good,” he said, as if the game were an experiment he’d set up and the results were turning out better than he’d expected. “Good, good, good!”

When it was my turn I said, “My name is Dina, and if I had to be any object, I guess I’d be a revolver.” The sunlight dulled as if on cue. Clouds passed rapidly overhead, presaging rain. I don’t know why I said it. Until that moment I’d been good in all the ways that were meant to matter. I was an honor roll student—though I’d learned long ago not to mention it in the part of Baltimore where I lived. Suddenly I was hard-bitten and recalcitrant, the kind of kid who took pleasure in sticking pins into cats; the kind who chased down smart kids to spray them with Mace.

“A revolver,” a counselor said, stroking his chin, as if it had grown a rabbinical beard. “Could you please elaborate?”

The black guy cocked his head and frowned, as if the beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks of his experiment had grown legs and scurried off.

“Y
OU WERE
just kidding,” the dean said, “about wiping out all of mankind. That, I suppose, was a joke.” She squinted at me. One of her hands curved atop the other to form a pink, freckled molehill on her desk.

“Well,” I said, “maybe I meant it at the time.” I quickly saw that this was not the answer she wanted. “I don’t know. I think it’s the architecture.”

Through the dimming light of the dean’s office window, I could see the fortress of the old campus. On my ride from the bus station to the campus, I’d barely glimpsed New Haven—a flash of crumpled building here, a trio of straggly kids there. A lot like Baltimore. But everything had changed when we reached those streets hooded by gothic buildings. I imagined how the college must have looked when it was founded, when most of the students owned slaves. I pictured men wearing tights and knickers, smoking pipes.

“The architecture,” the dean repeated. She bit her lip and seemed to be making a calculation of some sort. I noticed that she blinked less often than most people. I sat there, intrigued, waiting to see how long it would be before she blinked again.

M
Y REVOLVER
comment won me a year’s worth of psychiatric counseling, weekly meetings with Dean Guest, and—since the parents of the roommate I’d never met weren’t too hip on the idea of
their Amy sharing a bunk bed with a budding homicidal loony—my very own room.

Shortly after getting my first C ever, I also received the first knock on my door. The female counselors never knocked. The dean had spoken to them; I was a priority. Every other day, right before dinnertime, they’d look in on me, unannounced. “Just checking up,” a counselor would say. It was the voice of a suburban mother in training. By the second week, I had made a point of sitting in a chair in front of the door, just when I expected a counselor to pop her head around. This was intended to startle them. I also made a point of being naked. The unannounced visits ended.

The knocking persisted. Through the peephole I saw a white face, distorted and balloonish.

“Let me in.” The person looked like a boy but it sounded like a girl. “Let me in,” the voice repeated.

“Not a chance,” I said. I had a suicide single, and I wanted to keep it that way. No roommates, no visitors.

Then the person began to sob, and I heard a back slump against the door. If I hadn’t known the person was white from the peephole, I’d have known it from a display like this. Black people didn’t knock on strangers’ doors, crying. Not that I understood the black people at Yale. Most of them were from New York and tried hard to pretend that they hadn’t gone to prep schools. And there was something pitiful in how cool they were. Occasionally one would reach out to me with missionary zeal, but I’d rebuff the person with haughty silence.

“I don’t have anyone to talk to!” the person on the other side of the door cried.

“That is correct.”

“When I was a child,” the person said, “I played by myself in a corner of the schoolyard all alone. I hated dolls and I hated games,
animals were not friendly and birds flew away. If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tree and cried out ‘I am an orphan—’”

I opened the door. It was a she.

“Plagiarist!” I yelled. She had just recited a Frank O’Hara poem as though she’d thought it up herself. I knew the poem because it was one of the few things I’d been forced to read that I wished I’d written myself.

The girl turned to face me, smiling weakly, as though her triumph was not in getting me to open the door but in the fact that she was able to smile at all when she was so accustomed to crying. She was large but not obese, and crying had turned her face the color of raw chicken. She blew her nose into the waist end of her T-shirt, revealing a pale belly.

“How do you know that poem?”

She sniffed. “I’m in your Contemporary Poetry class.”

She said she was Canadian and her name was Heidi, although she said she wanted people to call her Henrik. “That’s a guy’s name,” I said. “What do you want? A sex change?”

She looked at me with so little surprise that I suspected she hadn’t discounted this as an option. Then her story came out in teary, hiccup-like bursts. She had sucked some “cute guy’s dick” and he’d told everybody and now people thought she was “a slut.”

“Why’d you suck his dick? Aren’t you a lesbian?”

She fit the bill. Short hair, hard, roach-stomping shoes. Dressed like an aspiring plumber. And then there was the name Henrik. The lesbians I’d seen on TV were wiry, thin strips of muscle, but Heidi was round and soft and had a moonlike face. Drab henna-colored hair. And lesbians had cats. “Do you have a cat?” I asked.

Her eyes turned glossy with new tears. “No,” she said, her voice quavering, “and I’m not a lesbian. Are you?”

“Do I look like one?” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“O.K.,” I said. “I could suck a guy’s dick, too, if I wanted. But I don’t. The human penis is one of the most germ-ridden objects there is.” Heidi looked at me, unconvinced. “What I meant to say,” I began again, “is that I don’t like anybody. Period. Guys or girls. I’m a misanthrope.”

“I am, too.”

“No,” I said, guiding her back through my door and out into the hallway. “You’re not.”

“Have you had dinner?” she asked. “Let’s go to Commons.”

I pointed to a pyramid of ramen noodle packages on my windowsill. “See that? That means I never have to go to Commons. Aside from class, I have contact with no one.”

“I hate it here, too,” she said. “I should have gone to McGill, eh.”

“The way to feel better,” I said, “is to get some ramen and lock yourself in your room. Everyone will forget about you and that guy’s dick and you won’t have to see anyone ever again. If anyone looks for you—”

“I’ll hide behind a tree.”

“A
REVOLVER
?” Dr. Raeburn said, flipping through a manila folder. He looked up at me as if to ask another question, but he didn’t.

Dr. Raeburn was the psychiatrist. He had the gray hair and whiskers of a Civil War general. He was also a chain smoker with beige teeth and a navy wool jacket smeared with ash. He asked about the revolver at the beginning of my first visit. When I was unable to explain myself, he smiled, as if this were perfectly reasonable.

“Tell me about your parents.”

I wondered what he already had on file. The folder was thick, though I hadn’t said a thing of significance since Day One.

“My father was a dick and my mother seemed to like him.”

He patted his pockets for his cigarettes. “That’s some heavy stuff,” he said. “How do you feel about Dad?” The man couldn’t say the word “father.” “Is Dad someone you see often?”

“I hate my father almost as much as I hate the word ‘Dad.’”

He started tapping his cigarette.

“You can’t smoke in here.”

“That’s right,” he said, and slipped the cigarette back into the packet. He smiled, widening his eyes brightly. “Don’t ever start.”

I
THOUGHT
that that first encounter would be the last of Heidi or Henrik, or whatever, but then her head appeared in a window of Linsly-Chit during my Chaucer class. A few days later, she swooped down a flight of stairs in Harkness, following me. She hailed me from across Elm Street and found me in the Sterling Library stacks. After one of my meetings with Dr. Raeburn, she was waiting for me outside Health Services, legs crossed, cleaning her fingernails.

“You know,” she said, as we walked through Old Campus, “you’ve got to stop eating ramen. Not only does it lack a single nutrient but it’s full of MSG.”

I wondered why she even bothered, and was vaguely flattered she cared, but I said, “I like eating chemicals. It keeps the skin radiant.”

“There’s also hepatitis.” She knew how to get my attention—mention a disease.

“You get hepatitis from unwashed lettuce,” I said. “If there’s anything safe from the perils of the food chain, it’s ramen.”

“But do you refrigerate what you don’t eat? Each time you reheat it, you’re killing good bacteria, which then can’t keep the bad bacteria in check. A guy got sick from reheating Chinese noodles, and his son died from it. I read it in the
Times
.” With this, she put a jovial arm around my neck. I continued walking, a little stunned. Then, just as quickly, she dropped her arm and stopped walking. I stopped, too.

“Did you notice that I put my arm around you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Next time, I’ll have to chop it off.”

“I don’t want you to get sick,” she said. “Let’s eat at Commons.”

In the cold air, her arm had felt good.

T
HE PROBLEM
with Commons was that it was too big; its ceiling was as high as a cathedral’s, but below it there were no awestruck worshippers, only eighteen-year-olds at heavy wooden tables, chatting over veal patties and Jell-O.

We got our food, tacos stuffed with meat substitute, and made our way through the maze of tables. The Koreans had a table. Each singing group had a table. The crew team sat at a long table of its own. We passed the black table. Heidi was so plump and moonfaced that the sheer quantity of her flesh accentuated just how white she was. The black students gave me a long, hard stare.

“How you doing, sista?” a guy asked, his voice full of accusation, eyeballing me as though I were clad in a Klansman’s sheet and hood. “I guess we won’t see you till graduation.”

“If,” I said, “you graduate.”

The remark was not well received. As I walked past, I heard
protests, angry and loud as if they’d discovered a cheat at their poker game. Heidi and I found an unoccupied table along the periphery, which was isolated and dark. We sat down. Heidi prayed over her tacos.

“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” I said.

“Not in the God depicted in the Judeo-Christian Bible, but I do believe that nature’s essence is a spirit that—”

“All right,” I said. I had begun to eat, and cubes of diced tomato fell from my mouth when I spoke. “Stop right there. Tacos and spirits don’t mix.”

“You’ve always got to be so flip,” she said. “I’m going to apply for another friend.”

“There’s always Mr. Dick,” I said. “Slurp, slurp.”

“You are so lame. So unbelievably lame. I’m going out with Mr. Dick. Thursday night at Atticus. His name is Keith.”