I Am Not Sidney Poitier (3 page)

One of my favorite places, no doubt for its relative safety, was the small public library in Decatur. The librarian became accustomed to my face, and when she finally asked me my name and I told her, she simply said, “What an interesting name.” So, I liked her. She let me go into the old part of the stacks where the books were dusty and damp, and many were falling apart. I loved the smell of the books there, with their staleness and floating dust. I studied and studied, devouring all sorts of books, confused much of the time. I could hear my mother’s voice. “Read. Always read. No one can take that from you. The evil picture box [her name for the television] won’t make you smarter, but books will. Read. Read. Read.” And then she would lock me in my room with the
Britannica.
It was in the stacks of the library that I found a book by an Austrian psychiatrist named Anton Franz Fesmer. The slim volume was titled
Passive Carriage Manipulation.
The manipulation described was very much like hypnosis and perhaps more like the thoroughly debunked mesmerism; the similarity of the names was no doubt in great part responsible for Fesmer’s notable lack of recognition. Fesmerism was a method of gaining control of a subject without the subject’s awareness. The idea was a beautiful one, and it of course appeared to me as the perfect form of self-defense. The program had, however, one, rather huge, procedural hurdle. It required that the practitioner stare for some time, minutes, at the subject. The claim was that once one got better at it, the time of eye contact would become shorter. Fesmer also claimed that, unlike hypnosis, the subject’s actions would not exclude those that he or she would find offensive or unacceptable when not under the influence. I read the book twice and on a Wednesday went to the playground and got my ass kicked.

“Why are you staring at me?” Those were the last poorly formed words I recall hearing.

But I persisted, and I practiced on Claudia, Betty, and Ted and finally had my first success with Raymond.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

I stared at him.

“Not Sidney, why are you looking at me like that?” Then his eyes glazed over, and he said nothing.

I had him stand open, defenses down, exposed, and he received my punch to his midsection. He crumpled and became immediately un-Fesmerized. And so I stared at him again, and he slipped under. I beat him up fairly well that day, and he went home sore without any inkling why.

I still couldn’t Fesmerize Claudia, but I thought I might have gained just a bit of influence over Betty when I had her toss away the remaining portion of her Arby’s roast beef sandwich, something she had never done before.

Wednesday came, and I found myself at the playground. The biggest of the bullies was there alone, and without the others to show off for he showed little interest in me, except to say, “Hey, little motherfucker, you wait till later.”

I stared at him. I was about twenty yards away, no doubt trembling though I really don’t recall, and I launched my gaze at him, complete with one eyebrow raised, as clearly described in Fesmer’s procedural guide. The bully, his name was Clyde, asked me at what I was staring, his precise words being, “What you starin’ at, li’l motherfucker,” the “li’l motherfucker” saving him from ending a sentence with a preposition. However, I kept to my immediate business of raised-brow staring. Irritated, and no doubt bubbling with sadistic urges, he started toward me, grinding his fist into his palm the way he always did before pounding me. I felt my stomach tighten and tremble, but I stayed with it, and by the time he’d dragged his knuckles the twenty yards to me, his dull bovine eyes were glazed over like Raymond’s. I issued post-Fesmer instructions to him to not only protect me, but to allow me to strike him in the face whenever I pleased. When I said, “Oh, dumbshit,” he was to lean over and put out his chin. I practiced once, and then just had to do it again. I was somewhat impressed by the punching skills that Raymond had somehow taught me.

It all worked beautifully that day, and I found myself equipped with a tool that I knew would serve me for the rest of my life, a kind of psychological Swiss Army knife. The problem with the method was and would be the fact that not all people can be Fesmerized, and when they are impervious to it, they are not, sadly, oblivious to the person who is staring at them like some kind of maniac. So, if it doesn’t work, one comes across like an insane and possibly dangerous person. Unfortunately, I was never able to come up with a reliable profile for susceptible subjects. At first, I thought it was dumb people who made good subjects. I thought this until I was one day beaten to within an inch of my life by a remarkably stupid boy named, simply, Sidney, who had the obvious problem with my name. My staring bounced harmlessly off his pit-bull head like so many marshmallows. “What you be starin’ at?” he shouted. “You, yeah, I talkin’ to you!” I have to admit that I was distracted by his diction, and so perhaps my stare was somewhat weakened. By the same token, Betty, one of the smartest people I knew, turned out to be highly susceptible to the old Fesmer eye. The weapon was revealed to me as flawed and unpredictable and unreliable, and so I resigned to use it sparingly.

Betty was teaching me about the evils of supply-side economics when Ted came into the room. Betty was just finishing a sentence, “. . . and though Keynesian economics is no kind thing to common people, Say’s Law is truly the work of the white, European, devil mind.”

“I’d have to agree,” Ted said.

This startled Betty. She had not seen him enter.

“I believe that the market is driven by demand,” Ted said. “Otherwise, people get screwed up the hind end. The only thing that ever trickles down to poor people is rain, and that ain’t much more than God’s piss.”

Betty didn’t want to agree with Ted, but she nodded.

“How’s our student doing?” Ted asked.

“Very well,” Betty said. “Not Sidney is quite smart.”

“He’s got his mother’s brains. Have you ever had one of those itches in your ear that you have to scratch with your tongue inside your mouth? In fact that’s the only way to get to it.”

Though I had a boy’s crush on Betty, I knew that I was but eleven and that all the brains and money in the world wouldn’t make her kiss me. I in fact had a kind of crush on Ted as well, and so I found that what I really wanted was for the two of them to kiss. So, I tried to Fesmerize them. I couldn’t stare them into submission at the same time and decided to begin with Ted, as I remembered that I might have had earlier success with Betty during the sandwich incident and so chose to save her for last. I raised my left brow and sharpened, then leveled my penetrating gaze at Ted. He stared back at me for a while with an expression that could only be called
quizzical,
and I thought that I might have been making some headway until he said,

“Nu’ott, what’s wrong with your eye?”

“He does that sometimes,” Betty said. “I think it’s gas.”

“That doesn’t look good.”

A less persistent person, or a saner one, might have stopped at that point, but I gave it another push.

“Looks like the boy’s gonna pop. Nu’ott, you all right?”

I gave up. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Funny little episode you had there.”

“Just thinking,” I said.

“Okay, well, I’m going to talk to a man about a German shepherd dog. They’re great dogs. I especially like the way they walk, all slung low like that. You’re in charge, Betty.” He said that, then leaned over and gave Betty a kiss on the cheek before exiting the room.

Betty was taken by surprise, but hardly offended.

I was more confused than ever. Had my Fesmered suggestion been received and, more importantly, processed? Was I in fact responsible for that unexpected, unseemly, and glaringly inappropriate action? I was left not knowing if I had succeeded or failed, a state worse than failure itself.

“He kissed you,” I said to Betty.

“Oh, that wasn’t a kiss. That was what we call a peck.”

“Why do you think he kissed you?”

“It was a peck, Not Sidney.”

I let the matter rest, though I was no wiser or more percipient for my experiment or for having witnessed the event that I might or might not have caused. The only thing that was clear was that Ted and Betty now believed there was something wrong with me. I suppose I could have likened my new tool to a sort of psychological Swiss Army knife, as I said before, but to continue the metaphor, I could never know whether I was opening the scissors, saw blade, corkscrew, or leather awl, or whether it would open at all.

No one was more surprised than I when Ted invited Betty to join Jane, himself, and me on a sailing day-trip, except perhaps Betty, who surprised herself into a silk sundress and equally inappropriate wedge-soled sandals and onto a bus to St. Simons Island. Jane was glamorous and aloof, attributes that I imagined fed each other. From behind her oversized dark sunglasses she addressed me politely and warmly, pronouncing my name as she had learned it from Ted,
Nu’ott.
She received Betty politely yet somewhat less warmly, as she was baffled by the presence of the chubby tutor in the silk wraparound. Joining us also was a niece of Jane’s, daughter of her brother, a freckled girl about my age named Wanda Fonda who took an immediate, intense, and indefatigable shine to me.

It was sunny, but there were some clouds drifting around, and it was almost cool. It was cool enough that big goose bumps formed on Betty’s hefty thighs that were continually in view because of the attack of wind at her dress, despite her hands busily clutching fabric. Betty looked sorely out of place as she stepped aboard the
Channel Seventeen,
and I’m certain she felt that way as well, more so after Jane peeled off her raw linen trousers and white linen shirt, revealing her yellow bikini and cartoonishly narrow waist. There were no goose or duck or sparrow bumps on her as she lay out on the deck and appeared to have the sun’s rays zero in on her like a spotlight.

While Ted motored the sloop out of the slip and toward open water, Wanda Fonda had attached herself to my side. “What kind of name is Nu’ott?”

“My name is Not Sidney.”

“Okay, Not Sidney,” she rather nicely said. “Just what kind of name is Not Sidney?”

“One my crazy mother dreamed up.”

“I think it’s a nice name. I find it much better than my name. I hate that my name rhymes.”

“It’s not so bad. At least it doesn’t get you beaten up all the time.”

Wanda Fonda put her surprisingly strong grip on my forearm and sighed. “Do they beat you up?”

I was saved by Ted calling me over to him at the tiller. I moved to him, Wanda Fonda tethered fast.

“Nu’ott,” he said, “what we’re sailing today is a sloop. A sloop has one mast and two sails—mainsail and foresail. This fractional rig sloop was made by some Frenchies named Beneteau, was made in their factory in South Carolina. They grow great peaches up there. I love to suck on the pit, but then I never know what to do with it. The wind is the most important part of sailing. Without wind, there is no sailing. Today you’ll learn about the wind. Next time, knots. Yep, today you just sit back and watch and I’ll teach you about the wind and the beat and the close reach and the reach and the broad reach and the run, about luff and what it means to be in irons, about coming about and jibbing and about sails. You ever see what the sun can do to a convertible top over time? I had a little MG when I was in college, and the sun turned the top into a shag carpet.”

“Nu’ott, I’m going below for some lemonade,” this from Wanda Fonda. “Can I bring you some?”

“You can bring me a tall glass, Wanda Fonda,” Ted said. The girl was always called by both names. “Bring some for Betty, too. You want some lemonade, Betty? Maybe you want some iced tea instead?”

“Lemonade sounds nice,” Betty said. She was sitting not far from the tiller.

“You want some lemonade, Jane?” Ted called forward.

Jane waved her hand in the air in a way that could have meant yes or no or my nails are perfect.

“What about you, Nu’ott?” Wanda Fonda asked me, again.

“No, thank you,” I said.

With that Wanda Fonda disappeared down the companionway.