Redefining Realness (5 page)

When our parents split, Mom returned to Grandma’s house with me, Cori, and Chad. Dad protested that he wanted his boys back, and they agreed that Chad would live with him; I’d stay with Mom. Chad, whose skin was as yellow as the corn bread on the Jiffy box, says he remembers crying every time he saw a plane in the California sky, hoping I was on it to be with him and Dad. I imagined his big black eyes swollen with tears as he looked up in hope.

Selfishly, I wasn’t mourning our separation, because I had Mom all to myself. I was the baby now. Being beside Mom as she read her paperbacks and snacked on canned tuna spread over Hawaiian soda crackers and crunched on cups of ice—that was home. But Mom wasn’t all mine for long. She soon found another man, one she moved in with, leaving me at Grandma’s.

Sitting on Grandma’s couch, I meditated on Mom’s belly, which carried my baby brother. I was excited to have another sibling and assumed that, with his birth, she would get a place big enough for all of us. When Jeffrey was born in August 1989, Mom and Dad made plans to send me to Oakland to be with Chad. “We never should’ve separated the two of you,” Mom later told me.

The seven-year-old in the adult me can hear the silent outbursts.
What about you and me? What about us?
But I knew the answer to my unspoken protests: Mom was moving on, starting anew, and in order to fulfill the promise of new love, she had to discard her past. Like Cori and Cheraine, who were initially denied by my mother when she met my father, I represented her past, a remnant of her failure. Mom needed to travel light, so she sent her baggage to Oakland in 1990, and I wouldn’t see her for another five years.

I
learned to ride a bike without training wheels atop a hill in an Oakland-area park. I was just seven years old and terrified of Dad’s accelerated cycling method. Chad stared Dad’s challenge in the face and excelled.

“There you go!” Dad applauded. “That’s how you do it right there.”

Hovering over my seat, I watched Dad clapping and smiling his starry smile as Chad made that steep hill his bitch. He was pedaling fast while our father’s gold-toothed grin broadened, as if those pedals were a jack that lifted Dad’s entire pleasure and pride system.

“Hit the brakes, baby!” he shouted when Chad reached the bottom of that grassy mount, conquering his first solo ride.

Placing his hands on my handlebars, Dad leveled his face to mine. I could see him rummaging his mind for the words to coax me down that hill, something he never had to do with Chad. There was a natural ease in my father’s interactions with my brother that was nonexistent in our relationship.

“Just start off slow. And once you feel yourself going faster, press this right here,” he said, pointing to the hand brakes that controlled my back tires. “You got it?”

I didn’t hear much of what he said because I was lost in his tooth. The artistry of it, that is. I wondered how the dentist had cut the gold to fashion the shape of a star, an ode to the Dallas Cowboys, whose plays and wins and losses were discussed like philosophy, Chad being Aristotle to Dad’s Plato.

I shook my head.

“What?” he asked, stunned by my refusal. “You just saw your brother do it. It ain’t
that
hard.”

“I’m not scared or anything like that,” I lied. “I just think I will fall.”

“You think I’d put you in danger?” he asked. I wondered if this was a trick question. It had been only a few months since I’d moved from Hawaii, and already I had been forced to swim, throw a spiral football, share a house with strangers, and now ride this bike that I hadn’t even asked for.

“Boy, answer my question,” he continued. “Do you think I’d put you in danger?”

I shook my head.

“Well, stop being a sissy and get your ass down that hill!” he said as Chad rolled his bike up to where we stood. I could see the excitement drain from his face as he traced Dad’s speech. I hated that I took the fun out of things for him. I often imagine what Chad’s childhood would have been like if our parents had kept us separated. He probably would have had a ball: baseball, basketball, dodgeball, and the holy grail of football. I can see Chad and Dad being heckled by Raiders fans when the Cowboys came to town; Dad studying Chad’s form as they played catch; and Dad teaching Chad flamboyant ways to triumphantly slam a domino. Instead, Chad dealt with reality: his older sibling breaking down during an afternoon bicycle ride because he was such a sissy.

Sissy
became one of the first epithets thrown at me with regularity. My father would say “Stop being a sissy” with the same ease as he’d say “I love you, baby!”
Sissy 
’s presence in my life helped numb me early on to harsher words that would soon be hurled at my body, from
freak
and
faggot
to
nigger
and
tranny
. When I was younger, I would protect myself by rebutting with the playground mantra, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!” As my adoration for words deepened in adolescence, I grew to feel that mantra was a well-meaning lie, a pacifier meant to temporarily soothe the hurt and pain of such violent words. I now know that epithets say more about the user than the target, and I believe Maya Angelou, who says that “words are things” and that “someday we’ll be able to measure the power of words.” Words have the power to encourage and inspire but also to demean and dehumanize. I know now that epithets are meant to shame us into not being ourselves, to encourage us to perform lies and to be silent about our truths.

To my father, I was a sissy, and he tried his hardest to squash my femininity the only ways he knew how: intimidation and fear. He seemed to believe that if Chad enjoyed the bike ride, then I should also enjoy it. Chad was held as the standard of acceptable boy behavior; I grew aware of the fact that I negated that standard, and I internalized that on a deep level. I thought that something must be wrong with me because I didn’t enjoy the things Chad did, the activities that Chad took on with such ease and little debate. The constant friction between my father and me led me to not like him. I would focus on the loudness of his voice, the aggressiveness of his actions, the argumentative nature of our conversations. As he compared me to Chad, I found myself comparing him to my mother, whose gentle, calm presence was in sharp contrast to his. The crux of our conflict lay in the fact that we each couldn’t be who we wanted the other to be.

“If you don’t go down that hill, I swear I’ll buzz your hair when we get home,” Dad said.

That threat, one Dad often wielded to put me in my place, gave me all the courage I needed to ride that bike. An actual haircut would cause irreparable damage, cutting the girl right out of me. With the sound of clippers buzzing in my head, I took a deep breath, rested my feet in the pedal loops, and began riding downhill.

“You can do it!” Chad said.

This isn’t so bad
, I thought as I descended. I didn’t know what I’d been so afraid of. It was a nice day in Oakland, in the seventies, the same warmth of Hawaii without the humidity. I had been with Dad for a few months, and my memories of Mom were fading and enlarging and being replaced all at the same time. She was like a dream. I had fantasies of her picking me up from school and taking me back to Hawaii or even just to a movie, something like
Look Who’s Talking
or
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
. It all seemed unlikely, since she barely called after the first few months. I blamed her new baby, her boyfriend, and the Pacific Ocean that separated us.

My maternal thoughts couldn’t keep up with the pace of my ride. The acceleration made me flustered and fearful, and Dad’s instructions about the brakes left me. In a panic, I began to cry and kicked my feet out of the pedal loops and spread my legs wide, hoping they’d keep me balanced and reduce my speed. I was sure Chad and Dad had lost sight of me from their mount. Soon I was approaching a busy intersection outside the perimeter of the park. I whipped into a sharp turn on the sidewalk and crashed into a mailbox. I was shaking with fear that I would get whipped, fear that I had ruined my new bike, and fear that my father would cut my hair.

“Boy, you damn near gave me a heart attack,” Dad panted, picking me up from the cement. “You could’ve run straight into traffic. You all right?”

I nodded, burrowing my wet face into his neck. Chad reached his arms around me from behind, which sandwiched me between the guys who were now home.

•  •  •

We lived on the top floor of a yellow two-story house on a hill. The house was shielded by trees that shut out the sight and sound of patrons from the strip mall across the street. Our backyard was trimmed with some kind of wild berry bushes along the far gate. Chad and I would eat the warm red berries, which tasted like sugar and bitters and a hint of dirt. We’d pop them in our mouths until our lips and tongues and lazily brushed gum lines were stained pink and our stomachs ached from the acidic sweetness.

It was at this same gate that Chad and I lit a bunch of ants on fire. I put a lollipop in a cereal bowl to attract an army of ants, and as they worked their way around the stick, I lit matches, one by one, striking and throwing them into the bowl. We watched the ants scurry around the melting red lollipop. Chad held a cup of water nervously while standing watch to make sure no one caught us. I initially wanted to fill the bowl with alcohol but couldn’t reach the bottle in the medicine cabinet, and figured the ants would drown before I could burn them. Unfortunately, our downstairs neighbor caught me with the matchbook and told our father what we were up to, prompting Dad to give us our first whipping, which involved Chad and me stripping down to our underwear.

Dad punctuated each of his words with a lashing of his belt: “What’d (SMACK) I (SMACK) tell (SMACK) y’all (SMACK) ’bout (SMACK) playing (SMACK) with (SMACK) fire (SMACK)?”

I refused to cry during my whipping because I felt it gave Dad satisfaction to see me whimpering from his lashing. It was the same satisfaction I felt when I saw the ants scurrying away from my
matchstick, an exhibition of my own power. My refusal to acknowledge the pain only made my whipping longer. My brother anticipated the pain, crying before the belt even struck his light-skinned behind. Afterward, I told Chad that I hated Dad, clutching my tear-soaked pillow. “You shouldn’t say that,” he said in between his own sniffles.

When I wasn’t playing with fire, Chad and I watched television from the moment we got up until we lay back down on our bunk beds. We fixed our attention on cartoons (
Doug
,
The Ren & Stimpy Show
,
Rugrats
), sitcoms (
Clarissa Explains It All
,
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
,
Family Matters
), and late-night fare (from reruns of
I Love Lucy
and
Diff’rent Strokes
to
The Arsenio Hall Show
and
In Living Color
)
.
The kids’ shows we watched were filled with precocity and sentimentality, which I was equally attracted to and disgusted by. If Clarissa, the babies on
Rugrats
, or Steve Urkel got reprimanded, there was always a lesson that tied up conveniently at the end of the show. Unlike a sitcom, life’s lessons weren’t always clear-cut, and discovering them often took longer than thirty minutes.

Our home belonged to Dad’s girlfriend, Janine, and her teenage son, Derek. Janine seemed to be built of bird bones that looked incapable of having once carried Derek. She was a slow-moving woman who slid her feet, spreading her coconut-oil scent throughout the house. She had large eyes, similar to Diana Ross’s, that were childlike, making her look all the more vulnerable. She lived with diabetes and underwent a strict dialysis routine that shuffled her in and out of doctors’ offices and clinics. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for Janine to be away from the house for chunks of time and for Chad and me to be left with Derek as Dad slept with Janine in the hospital.

When Janine’s health was stable, I clung to her as a stand-in mother figure who handled me with care, giving me the nurturing and feminine influence I craved in Mom’s absence. I sought solace
in Janine’s gentleness and her demure smile and her hair routine. I’d spend evenings seated atop the back of our sofa, she on the cushions in between my short legs. I’d part her hair with a fishtail comb and lather her khaki-colored scalp with herb-infused conditioning oil. If Dad was around, he’d sit in judgment of my femininity with a clenched jaw as I greased Janine’s scalp to the comforting, sweet sounds of Anita Baker singing, “Don’t you ever go away, it’ll always be this way . . .”

Derek’s father had left when he was just a baby. This house was the only home he’d ever had, and he’d shared it with his mother up until two years before, when Dad and Chad moved in. Derek and Dad seemed to stay out of each other’s way, having only Janine in common. You’d think something as intimate as living together would have bonded the five of us. Instead, I always felt like the yellow house was Derek and Janine’s home and that Dad, Chad, and I were temporary boarders, squatters. A sense of homelessness looms over my memories there.

Dad had a home in his heart with Janine, and Chad, Derek, and I merely cohabitated because our parents had a bond, though we had independent relationships with one another. Dad and Chad and I were family. Janine and Derek were family. Dad and Janine were romantic partners. Chad and Derek were Nintendo competitors. Janine and I were feminine comrades. Derek and I went unformed for months, but we found our way through the darkness.

Derek had a high-top fade, like Kid in
Kid ’n Play
, and usually paid us no mind because of our age. Chad soaked up any attention Derek threw his way. They played Nintendo together and watched basketball games on TV.  Derek was a guard on his freshman basketball team and wore Karl Kani and Cross Colours. I gave him props for style but disliked him when his friend Rob came over. Rob had a belly that hung over his saggy jeans, and he wore a herringbone necklace
that was supposed to be gold but was turning silver and green from rubbing against his neck-fat folds. Rob enjoyed barking orders at me and nicknamed me “The Fag One.”