God's Gym (3 page)

How would such unsaid words sound, what would they look like on a page. And if you had uttered them, surrendered your stake in them, forfeited their meager, silent claim to work miracles, would it have been worth the risk, even worth the loss, to finally hear the world around you cracking, collapsing, changing as you spoke your little secret tale.

Would you have risen an inch or two from this cold ground. Would you have breathed easier after releasing the heaviness of silent words hoarded so unbearably, unspeakably long. Let go, Mom. Shed the weight just once.

Not possible for you, I know. It would be cheating, I know. The man of unbending faith did not say to the hooded inquisitors piling a crushing load of stones on his chest,
More light. More light.
No. I'm getting my quotes mixed up again. Just at the point the monks thought they'd broken his will, just as spiraling fractures started splintering his bones, he cried,
More bricks. More bricks.

I was scared, Mom. Scared every cotton-picking day of my life I'd lose you. The fear a singsong taunt like tinnitis ringing in my ear. No wonder I'm a little crazy. But don't get me wrong. Not your fault. I don't blame you for my morbid fears, my unhappiness. It's just that I should have confessed sooner, long, long ago, the size of my fear of losing you. I wish you'd heard me say the words. How fear made me keep my distance, hide how much I depended on your smile. The sunshine of your smiling laughter that could also send me silently screaming out the room in stories I never told you because you'd taught me as you'd been taught, not to say anything aloud I didn't want to come true. Nor say out loud the things I wished to come true. Doesn't leave a hell of a lot to say, does it. No wonder I'm tongue-tied, scared shitless.

But would it be worth the risk, worth failing, if I could find words to tell our story and also keep us covered inside it, work us invisibly into the fret, the warp and woof of the story's design, safe there, connected there as words in perfect poems, the silver apples of the moon, golden apples of the sun, blue guitars. The two of us like those rhyming pairs
never and forever, heart
and
part,
in the doo-wop songs I harmonized with the fellas in the alley around the corner from Henderson's barbershop up on Frankstown Avenue, first me, then lost brother Sonny and his crew, then baby brother Rob and his cut-buddy hoodlums rapping, and now somebody else brown and young and wild and pretty so the song lasts forever and never ever ends even though the voices change back there in the alley where you can hear bones rattling in the men's fists,
fever in the funkhouse looking for a five,
and hear wine bottles exploding and the rusty shopping cart squeaking over the cobblestones of some boy ferrying an old lady's penny-ante groceries home for a nickel once, then a dime, a quarter, four quarters now.

Would it be worth the risk, worth failing.

Shouldn't I try even if I know the strength's not in me. No, you say. Yes. Hold on, let go. Do I hear you saying, Everything's gonna be all right. Saying, Do what you got to do, baby, smiling as I twist my fingers into the brass handle. As I lift.

Kap-plow. Crack. Boom. Pow-pow ... Boom. Boom. Boom.
We got 'em. We got 'em. They's down. Both of 'em. Dumb niggers running like they could outrun bullets.

Damn. They sure a mess laying there, ain't they. Got 'em both good.

Lookit the ass on this one. Looks like a woman's ass.

This one's got a big fat nigger butt on him too, and long nappy hair like a girl.

Oh, shit, man. This ass too fine for a man. Shit. I think we shot us a woman. And goddamn. She's still groaning and gurgling. Shit.

Groaning. You sure it's a bitch. Kick 'er over and see.

Don't need to turn her over. Female, all right. And she ain't dead yet.

Well, what you waiting for, boy. Flip the bitch. Yank down them drawers. Cop us some pussy while the ho's still warm.

Man, she's fucked up. Groaning.

What's wrong with you, fool. Why you standing there staring and looking dumb. She be gone in a minute. C'mon. Turn the bitch over.
Uh-uh.
Get the other damned sneaker. Now pull, boy, pull. Pull them jeans clean off.

Owhee. Lookee what we gots here. Some sure-nuff chocolate roundeye. Yessiree. Woolly wench, ain't she. But she's fine, all right. Long, skinny legs. Owwhee. There you go standing looking dumb again. Guess you don't mind cold poontang.
Like mine hot. G'wan now. Move out the way now, boy. You riding sloppy seconds on this one.

And that's how the story starts of what white boys did to my baby. To the only woman I've ever truly loved. Now you'd think from what you've read so far, I'd be mad at them, the white guys. The hunters who came upon us innocently macking in a meadow and shots rang out and we took off running like startled deer for the trees. Weird thing is, though, I'm madder at her than at them. She swears none of them raped her. None even tried. Says nobody ever got rough with her. Which means, as I see it, nobody's fault but hers for giving the booty up. Why should I be mad at white guys. Every time she got down with one of them she was doing what she chose to do. In a way. Or so she says.

Maybe we better go back before the beginning. Back before the nasty scene above that always makes me unhappy, makes me, if truth be told, cry. Back before the woodland slaughter. Before the barking rifles and slobbering
Deliverance
goons.

She was born Jill Jones. As if her name her fate, Jill curtsied and churched and niced her way into the light-skin Jack and Jill social set. A prize Jill in spite of a little extra dark in her velvet skin. No, my Jill's not light and bright nor possesses blow hair, you know, as in blowing in the wind in the back seat of a sky-blue drop-top Chevy blow-blown-blowing past, chicks stuffed in the back seat, laughing, squealing, waving bye-bye all pearly teeth, tans with blue eyes to match the car's color, their blond manes whipped by the wind on their way to the beach. Not Jill. The beach presented problems for my girl's grade of hair. It would sneak home before Jill did if she dunked her sweet cinnamon-doughnut body in the sea. Thus colorful scarves, various experimental cuts, wigs, chemical aids, prayers, and cute hats.
Owwhee.
Her pale girlfriends shouted once when
oh my god
Jill's hair, drenched in a sudden shower, became a nappy storm
all over her head. Jill confided to me that she'd wished for a nest of coiling, hissing vipers atop her skull, wished she could flash Medusa's glare, turn to stone the silly, wide-eyed looks, the innocent, knife-edged questions, nervous titters, the pity and stage-whispered asides: Did you see Jill. Wow. What happened to her hair. Talk about a bad hair day. Wow. Are you okay, Jill.

Our hair's better than theirs, Jill once asserted, with what I hoped was conviction. In fact it's finer, more delicate hair than theirs, a fact scientifically confirmed, she declared. Finer follicles. More flexible. Hollow or curved or something, she said, combing her hair out, the first of many hours preparing it for work the next week. The reason why, she said, I couldn't sleep over at her place Sunday night. I hate doing it, I look a wreck, Jill said. Why would I want you here the whole time gawking, spying. Hours to twist it. See you next weekend, okay. And oh how I yearned to grab a big handful of her bushy cotton candy, the soft shield she'd raised between us. More hair than I would have ever guessed she owned. A beautiful morphing mystery and I wanted my nose in it. My fingers and toes. Would drink it. Or wade in it. Baby, ohhh, baby. So beautiful. Brown and comely. Ethiop's star-dusted daughter. Hair the mysterious and fine-stranded texture of ancient perfumed Arabian nights. Let me touch it. Wash it. Towel it dry. Kiss it. Let me lie on its fluffy pillow. Slobber in it while we sleep. I should have begged for a fistful, for one long, lithesome reed of it. She could have easily spared either. As easily as she could have said yes, of course, spend the night. Pounds of fine-spun Egyptian cotton crowning her regal forehead. Framing her dark eyes, her African lips and nose and cheekbones rendered Somali style, full, delicate, chiseled.

In a story I read recently, author had to be a sister cause the hair business runs all through the piece as it often does in sisters' stories, good hair, bad hair, poster girl hair, heads destined never to grace nobody's billboard. Lord, girl. What's happened
to your hair. Nappy. Kinky. Turbanize it. Bald it. Dread it. Braid. Twist. Cornrow. Afreakanize. Turn the tables. Make them eat their labels. I was intrigued by a scene in the story in which the main character allows her wayward white husband to play with her hair, indulging him with this usually forbidden pleasure because it's the first night of a weekend they've stolen away from their beige children, beige lives, attempting to repair a deep rent in the marriage cloth, the wife going to the max, letting his white hands muck about in the hair his people had set afire and left burning on her skull for centuries, fire and smoke, skanky, nasty ruins smoldering sometimes when she'd rake her fingers through its thickness, the ash, the grease, the evil words and acid rain would sear her flesh, paint black moons under her nails, recall the burning, smelly curling iron, branding iron, her body still chained, writhing, dancing in the kindling naps, the dry straw pyre heaped at her feet she's trying to stomp out, combing, straightening, fighting back the flames consuming her.
Black sheep, black sheep, have you any wool. Yes sir, yes sir. I'm the Queen of Sheba holding a whole hot head full.
Girl what happened to your hair. What you do to yourself, girl. In the story the sister knows better but lies with her head in her husband's lap anyway, dreaming of a different life she knows won't happen, even as she settles her cheek against his thigh, even as she submits to his curious, loving strokes and rubs and fingerings and quiet awe and perhaps even rapture like a blond, glassy-eyed, tummyful Gerber baby-food baby sucking its thumb, she knows they've lost their chance and this last desperate forty-eight hours or so won't alter a thousand years of failing, failing, but she allows him to play on anyway in her soft acres of hair, her woolly mammoth bush, girl, untouched, natural like Allah or Buddha borned her with, girl, ain't nothing but a party up there and I'd prove it to Jill if she'd let me dig in, spelunk, deep-sea dive, strum the thinner, rounder, hollower, whatever strands like a lute and chant their praises.

But like the dying marriage I read about in the sister's story, it was not to be.
It
in this instance being the project I imagined in my nappy head of saving Jill from herself, salvaging from the ruins and handing her on a platter my own strayed, lost and found head, the head returning home from its long wilderness of chasing what I couldn't have, shouldn't have, didn't need, tan blond girls and black brown girls who tried their best to make me forget what they were or weren't, I forget which way it was supposed to go, we were all confused back then, weren't we baby, we all needed to be counseled, hipped, switch partners, forsake and reclaim our innocence, have certain matters—fears, inadequacies, lies, paradoxes—lobotomized as I hoped to do for you, Jill, offering my funny valentine bloody head on a platter I presented as a heartfelt gift after you'd danced for me naked to a slow-drag Coltrane blues and I'd nearly died I was so happy. So I presented you my head—what's a little talking head between friends—in my solitude, my gratitude, baby, I said I love you just as you are, as you've always been, you are perfect who you are, brown and kinky-headed, tender-headed just like my tender, preachy head on a dish I wish was a silver platter, babe. As if words could restore peace, as if I could extinguish a fire burning for centuries and simultaneously with shout and chant rekindle what had waned between us. Let me touch your hair. Kiss it. Bundle it in a spirit bundle and weigh its incalculable wealth on the scientific scale I hold in my hands, my battered body parts barely functioning on autopilot, Sweet, cause you stole my heart and blew my mind, but here's what's left of my head, the wide eyes, thick lips plastered too high above my chin, my big nose wide open for you, babe. Please, please, please, don't go, girl, don't take my love away, just one more chorus. Encore the part of your naked dance where you sorta collapse or rather get down,
down,
loosen everything you own, giving it up, giving it all up and sinking, flowing down slinky to the floor onto your back and elbow, then roll, coil, twist like the
sacred python rubbing the earth's rich life-giving juices into your gloriously colored, speckled skin, the part like one strand of hair bonding, braiding with others till your dance thickens and rises again royally, like Nefertiti's snake-twined crown above her bronze forehead.

It didn't work, did it. You didn't dance for me with your clothes off ever again. Damage done to you too deep to be undone by words, wishes. You never had a chance. Is that hopelessness part of what I love in you. No chance from the jump, even though you excelled in those areas where everybody expected not to see you represented, didn't count on you being present, let alone deserving of praise. My Jill outstanding at math. Blew tuba in the all-city orchestra. Captain of the county champs, undefeated debating team of her 97-percent-white suburban high school. You aspired to become an astronaut, didn't you. Took flying lessons, I bet. As skilled at aeronautics as aerobics. Earned an AAU Junior Olympic bronze medal swimming the 1500 meters, in spite of denser bones and less buoyancy than your pale opponents, in spite of banks of fast-twitch muscles and minimal slow-twitch, you overcame the biological burdens of African descent predisposing you to sprints and attention deficits and dooming poor me to quick starts, rapid acceleration, early burnout, premature ejaculation some whispered when they weren't dissing my slower, reptilian brain's brawn, how its muscles retarded mental activity, rendering me sluggish and thuggish, intent they said on one and only one thing, my one-track mind chasing beasty, fleshy pleasure, you know, what your mom meant when she told you again and again,
Boys are nasty
(read
black
boys). Boys are
only after one thing.
What others, higher up than your mom on the image-making chain, proclaimed and proved by lynching Emmett Till.