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The first couple of years on the street was the worst. From working under Ma, even though I do everything, I really did not know how to get a job, talk to social service—what's that! So I was just out there! I would go with men to bars, drink, go home with them, hope I get to stay the night—

that they don't tell me go after they come. After I do this with, oh, is it five or fifty or a hundred guys, I start dissolve. I don't know how else to explain it. I'm strong woman, if you was looking at me you could see this. Redbone, what Americans say, some color to her, Jamaicans would say. Five foot eight inches, heavy set, or fat some people would say. Kimberton (who is dark) say I look like a mutant, what ever that is.

But after the I don't know how many mens I start to break into little pieces and the men look funny, like worms is growing out of their skins, worms that turn to little penises, till I am sick with the walking dicks of Harlem. Everywhere is a hand rubbing, a dick going psst psst come here come here.

I can't stay in shelters. I just can't, they is crazy people houses. So

I just wander the street, get little money here and there. I meet this one guy, give me enough to get a room at the Y for one week, tell me to go down to welfare. I check that out. They are so nasty to me, send me so many different places to get so many different papers, things I don't have no way of getting! I don't have no birth certificate unless my mother got it but I know where I was born—

Kingston, Jamaica. September 22, 1963. I say fuck the whole welfare thing. It's crazy. I walk out office but not before I break one white woman's nose. She send me to get a social security card. I tell her the number but she say got to have the card, go get a duplicate at downtown office. By the time I get back from downtown, where they tell me was an office I could go to on 125th Street, she got coat on talking 'bout she through for the day, going home. You know just as breezy as she can be! Come back tomorrow and she help me right off. What she saying, and she know it, spend another night in. nowhere sleeping next to death. Git on that park bench, subway, rooftop—freeze, get stabbed, raped; I'm going home. I haul off and hit that bitch so hard whole room could hear her nose go CRUNCH.

At the Y this woman from Trinidad tell me about ol' white bitch in Brighton Beach she taking care of but she gonna hafta quit cause she got something better on Upper West Side wheeling some doctor's children to the park. Say she recommend me, don't need no social security card and all that.

So I work for ol' white woman with degenerative disease and mind to equal. HATE black people, always a "you people this" and "you people that."

Call me to her daughter Swortkraus! "Swortkraus is a little slow today," what kinda goddam shit is that. But you know she ol' and helpless I forgive a lot. I think I could put a pillow over her face and no one know, no one care. But I would know, plus I be out of a job. I leave when she throw, try to, throw bed pan at me (end up spilling it on her self) cause she grandson, who she putting through NYU medical school did not come to see her when he say he would. She good and crazy.

I go back to welfare, this time I say to myself, some money or jail. All the Porta Ricans and American niggers can get something—white people is getting it too. Why can't I?

The security guards get me while my thumbs is closing down on this white devil's throat. Tell me cool down mama! I'm not your mama! Everything is red, I go end this cracker's days! They pull me off, take four of 'em. I don't go to jail though. They get me job! One of the black guys, not even a desk to himself, hand me a three by five card with a name and address on it, tell me, go there.

I get position looking after ol' white man, tubes all in him. He not so bad, but he nasty. Want me to wash his penis and carry on. On all the walls, I mean on every wall, is a picture, I mean a big picture of Michael Jordan. OK, 16 walls, you got it, 16 pictures of Michael Jordan.

But he pay me. I get room with bathroom, things looking up for awhile, you know. Then the ol'

mutherfucker die. After a while it's pretty hard again. I get three day notice to pay or quit my room. What I'm gonna do? I'm a person don't just like to sit there. Just sit there I be throw out for sure. I get couple of big big garbage bags and start going from trash can to trash can collecting aluminum cans. To fill the bags take awhile cause is some competition out on the Harlem streets for these bottles and cans. But I am strong and desperate. I'm looking like a beetle bug or something, hunched over with two huge black garbage bags on my back. I'm on Adam Clayton Powell Blvd which I usually avoid cause it's where Ma's restaurant. ROTI 'N MORE Take Out or Eat In, is. But today I don't care, I don't wanna be homeless again. It happen again I might not get up from it. I gotta do something.

So I'm on the Avenue (which is also the Boulevard) near 134th Street moving, trash can by trash can, toward 133rd. I pass ROTI 'N

MORE. I look up and see a FOR RENT sign in the window, and next to sign is Kimberton. Our eyes meet. His is shock, mine is like a kiss, my brother! Always my first thought of him is before he rape me then the memory roll in like fog. I see Kimberton's mouth fall open at the horror of me bent over, hands gripped around the black bags.

I remember my hands grating coconut, washing rice, stirring peas, scrubbing pots in cold greasy water, pulling the catheter out the old man's penis, scraping shit from old Mrs Feld's age spot ass. I look back at him. I am not ashamed. I could be dead all these years. Rage hot fill me.

Kimberton 's eyes glowing like radioactive in my mind, his fly eyes, his hands pushing me down on the bed, years. Years. Kimberton comes to the door. He has on some clothes that cost a lot and should look great but he just look foreign and skinny and dark. He don't look like American man like he want to. I stare. This a man fuck his sister and say so what. This a man go to dental school, graduate high school at sixteen. A credit to his family and race, Ma say. But I'm his family and race ain't I?

"What do you want?" he say.

I don't speak.

"Ma already buried. No one can find you to tell you."

Ma dead? The fog like a coming down on me.

Kimberton step toward me, pull one hundred dollar bill from his wallet. To take it I would have to put the bags down. I look down at Kimberton's orange colored leather shoes, stupid pointed toes, and up to his head which is beginning to bald.

I figure I better get moving 'fore the fog is too thick to see my way out. Kimberton is walking behind me now saying stupid things. "We wondered about you." It's like some kinda dribble, his voice, that fall on top the fog. "You wanted it as much as I did!" he say. How could he say that. I keep walking, such a long way I have to go.

It's a guy at the soup kitchen, Asian guy, advocate from Young and Homeless, find out I got a work history get me job cleaning office building over in East Harlem. I get me a room over on Convent Avenue from old light-skinned dude got one of those big old prewar apartments, renting out rooms. Tell me when his mother had the place she rent room to Marcus Garvey. My question is, did Marcus Garvey get heat? It's at rooming place I meet Rita Romero, who is in class, who tell me about school which is how I get in this book.

the end, no the BEGINNING

HARLEM BUTCH by Jermaine Hicks

Why you wanna be a man?

Why you wanna be a man

man

man

why you wanna be

a man?

why you wanna be

a man

man

man?

Look it never occurred to me to dress like a man!

For Chrissake, what the fuck

is that? I was dressing like myself.

Myself.

I'm 7:

"Hurry up! Get dressed or you'll be late for school!" my mother is shouting. The whole block can hear her for sure. She has a mouth like an express train. She has to be out the door by eight to make sure she's not late for

the white woman she works for. My father is already gone by 6 a.m. Every morning. I look down from the top of the bunk beds to my brother's empty unmade bed. The sheet is a gray tangle twisting out underneath dingy blue poly blankets. His brown corduroy pants are red flags signalling something in my 7 year old soul. I jump out the top bunk, pick up the pants and put them on. That was seventeen years ago. They were not my pants but I felt they should be. I, how to describe a feeling so deep it's like a river? How can a river be wrong?

"Take off those pants!"

"No! "

"Those are your brother's pants."

"Git me some."

"They're not lady like."

"So what!"

"It's wrong!"

"Why?"

How can a river be wrong

a river that engorges my clitoris

and fills me?

Ms Rain, rivers, what makes rivers

run?

"Huh?"

A river, what makes it go, run?

"Well, I don't really know. I never studied rivers in college. I mean, I imagine some type of gravity, the

riverbed's resistance to absorption; you know rainfall,

water running down hill—"

A river ever run wrong?

"What?"

Run wrong, a river ever run wrong?

"Well, they overflow—flood—"

she flailed.

Yes, that was the word, flailed,

flailed helplessly Ms. Rain did.

"In 1811, the Mississippi flowed backwards due to an earthquake."

If I didn't have a record I'd join

the Navy,

Be ON water, IN water all the time!

(I could have passed my G.E.D. test months, no a year ago. Ms Rain is

upset I won't take it. Taking it

will mean I will have to leave the

class.)

I'm still 7:

a boy holds me down

under the stairwell

that smells like urine

(pee I woulda said at seven)

tries to push his dick

into me.

I am 8:

when I put my tongue

in Mary-Mae's mouth

for the first time

(under the same steps)

9:

my fingers

10:

my tongue but this time

I put it in her

where he tried to put

it in me

13:

I am pressed close to her

against the wall

in her room

we will fall on the

still pink in some places

chenille bedspread

My fingers A trains howling thru her dark tunnel We will-DADDY! DADDY!

Come LOOK what Mary-Mae and Jermaine is doing!

BULLDAGGERBULLDAGGERBULLDYKE

DYKEBULLDYKEBULLDYKEDYKEDYKE the

voices become like the programmed messages in the subway time unpredictable loud irritating expected

but it is Mary-Mae's father who catches me one night to show me what a MAN is, what a woman is when I get up from my new knowledge one of my front teeth is gone The doctor will tell my mother damage is done I won't tell her by who I never told that part of my story before because I hate to see their square eyes light up with, "Oh that's why! I understand now! I see—"

No! You don't see! Before I was snatched out the air like a butterfly, wings torn off me. BEFORE

any all that I had slid my fingers up the sweet stink of another child and knelt down to lick her thighs. Men did not make me this way. Nothing happened to make me this way. I was born butch!

I was 14:

my mother is a religious movement. I don't know how else to describe it, a walking church. A wake up, go to sleep, jack off, shouting ass Christian. It make me sick. JESUS this, JESUS that, fuck that shit.

We are nuclear but poor

four of us

mother father sister brother sitting around the white formica covered table, little flecks of gold embedded like sunshine in the white plastic. We are eating breakfast, which is sardines out a can emptied onto our plates and some cold biscuits left over from last night. He went to take a sip of coffee and she said, "According to Luke Chapter 9. verse 16, Jezus took the five loaves and the two fishes and looking up at heaven—" And his arm flew out like a jack-in-the-box and snatched the Bible from her and threw it in her face HARD.

Hitting her in the eye. A blood red spot grew and spread across her eye for seven days. By the time she went to Emergency she was another colored woman shoulda come in sooner story there's not really much we can do for you now except call in the medical students from NYU to stare at how stupid you people are and you can learn to see almost as well with one eye as you can with two.

So my mother—one eye, no man, two children and the Bible.

What hurt more than the dark hole of Daddy's leaving, than Mary-Mae's father raping me, more than seeing the spot grow in Mama's eye like a radioactive tomato, was seeing her afterward on the D train, holding her Bible over her head screeching, "HELL! You are going to hell! Unless you accept the word of God's only son JEEZUSS!! JEEEEEZZUUSSS!!! The train hurtling through the dark tunnel, the laughing pitying and annoyed eyes of the riders and my mother, blind eye, a snot colored marble in her chocolate face screaming, "JEZUS! JJEEEEEE-ZZZZUUUUUUSSSS!! ! ! !"

I'm 17:

when she walks in on me and Mary-Mae fucking.

Can't she see we're in love?

No, she can't.

She starts to foam at the mouth screaming curses in the name of God.

FILTHYSICKHELPMEJEZUSIDIDNTRAISEYOU-THISWAYFILTHYFILTHY The words float over our naked bodies like clouds of poison gas. They drop on us soiling Mary-Mae's long copper legs, smooth child free body. The smell of us sweet, stinky, swollen with sex contracts and dies in the air.

I love Mary-Mae.

I pull my underpants, jeans, shirt, shoes on, all in one seemingly impossible move. Mary-Mae is in a daze. The poison gas shaming her causing her to stumble. We fall out the room together and then the front door of the apartment. Mary-Mae turns down the hall to her father's apartment. I keep going until I hit the street. I never see Mary-Mae again.

I'm seventeen and parent free. An emancipated minor. I mean my father was not hard to find. In a tiny studio in Queens, where, "I'm welcome to stay as long as I want." But at night when he flops down on the convertible sofa, the kind you see advertised on the subway for five hundred dollars, I am left on a thin mat near the door listening to him masturbate. Does he think I'm asleep? In the morning over a breakfast of boiled eggs and salmon cakes that reminds me of sardines, he asks me if the floor isn't hard. The sardines remind me how swift and long his arms are. The sun coming through his window is a blood red spot that covers the sky.