Beer

Holidays. Everything is on a kind of pause. There's no one around these days and I've been in a sort of slump. I'm having a hard time making definitive statements. Like: "I like this" or "I don't like that" or "I am this" and "I am not that." And I know I'm avoiding finishing my story. The one about mom and me and Eli. I know you (invisible you) are getting pissed.

 I know I should be happy that I'm out of bars, but it was like my mind was running faster in there. It's slowed down a bit out here, on the Midway, which isn't a good thing, considering the kind of work I have to do. We have to do. Me and Sue. And Tobe (which rhymes with homie). Homie Tobe, who hasn't been around in six months. He'll be back on the 31st. After that it will be straight strategy. I'm looking forward to it.

Yesterday after a long walk -- me and Sue, we walked and talked for two hours -- we were thirsty and dirty. So we took two Heineken's into the shower. God, they were good. Water pouring down us and the beer getting wet, but it didn't matter, it still fizzled and lingered on our tongues, the lick of fermenting yeast still reaching out its kick. 

Mom is arriving in two days for a visit from the colony. On the 22nd. She'll have good stories.

True Sue

Sometimes when I see Sue in her old-school camouflage, I wonder what it must have been like for her. And I remember how we met, and what that meant. She still wears her uniform sometimes, when she feels like getting into that mode, that old West Point mode, that stiff, commandeering mode, outdated now, like her uniform. And when she's like that, especially when her nose bleeds, because her nose bleeds all the time, and she has to put two tissues in her nostrils like torpedoes -- when she's pacing our bedroom like that, barefoot, it's all I can do from jumping her and entering her from behind, no matter what kind of work she's brewing up in her head, what kind of plans. All I want to do is push her down, not even on the bed, but on the ground, on the dirty carpet, and make her mine. I shouldn't have these feelings, violent feelings, I know. Me, who used to have porcelain fingers, whose mother is a god damn writer of all things -- sensitive boy that I am, the one who can name a Bartok symphony seconds in. But it doesn't matter, not any of it, not when I see her like that. What rises within me is more real and sometimes it wins out, and sometimes Sue really likes it. She likes it when I'm tough with her and tells me: don't be afraid, Mo, be as rough as you wanna be, I'm yours. She says this panting into my ear, and it echoes for days.

I always (always) spend the next day wondering what she means by that: I'm yours. I know she doesn't really think that. So why does she say it.

"Why do you say it, Sue? Why do you tell me, sometimes, when we're fucking, why do you tell me: I'm yours," I asked her once, as I was sitting near the bathroom sink, watching her brush her teeth, her hair let loose from the tight bun it's usually in.

"Because. Because in those few moments it's true," she said.

True. True Sue. I can't wait until my bones and torn tendons heal so I can ride you and you can pant in my ear: I'm yours, Mo, I'm yours. And for those few seconds make you something I can touch, and hold, and keep, and not be afraid of losing.

Smoking

A week ago they took me out of my cell and into an adobe-walled room with cold soil at my feet and the smell of mud all around, wet and hard to absorb. In this room were several men, men who for me still have no names or faces. Cowards.

Today, I'm limping, walking, bruised as an old boxer, to and fro impatiently, smoking cigarettes, of all things -- those antiquated, nostalgic slips of chemical and ash. And yet, here I am puffing away; the crinkling of the paper Sue has used to wrap them in -- a sonic massage, easing me into calm, aiding messages from one synapse to another with the particular buzz of nicotine. It's quick and rhythmic because it's been so long since I've dragged out an afternoon on one of these. Like when I sit down at a Piano, after months at a time, more time than that sometimes. Funny how something so deeply imbedded in your life can disappear. Like music did for me.

                                  

And because I can't talk about what happened these past few days. Not yet. I will finish the story I started. The story of  my mother and me, in that car with Eli in Lagos.   

We were on our way to meet my father, who we hadn't seen in a long time, who was staying at the Sheraton, after he drilled deep and struck it rich. I wondered whether I'd recognize him. He'd been around for the first three years, and so I had these infantile memories. Except I didn't know how many were actual memories or just old photographs mom had lying around in files. Whatever they were, and are, they're crisp color images of enormous gifts -- a stuffed giraffe and an elephant named Xanadu from FAO Schwartz, an elephant I still had at the time of the trip. It's ears were twice the size of my face when my father gave Xanadu to me.

"You'll never have to worry about Samuel. He will go the best schools; he will always be cared for," he'd said to mom. And then, one day, he disappeared. Seven years later, mom got a letter from dad's mother, my grandmother, who had seen me in the paper. I'd been the youngest kid to have been accepted into the Peabody Conservatory. Papers all had made a fuss and called me Little Mozie.

Anyway, the letter from my grandmother, who I hadn't seen since I was a baby and wouldn't recognize with a DNA test in-hand, said: He hasn't returned for many years. I think we may have lost him. But he still has a responsibility to that boy. She then went on to list the address my father was at -- The Sheraton Hotel in Lagos, Nigeria.

I don't know what made my grandmother do it, or what made my mother, four days later, get on a plane with me. But off we were to ask for a quick dose of cash -- not even for child-support, nothing as consistent as that, my mother didn't care about that. All she wanted was the tuition money so I could go to the Peabody.

...More tomorrow. My left rib aches like it had an ice-pick permanently puncturing it. More tomorrow...

Sue, if you can read this, I can't connect. I've been trying to connect and can't. Don't know if it's been hours or days. Or how many hours and if those hours are days yet. Try and get through, try and get them to tell you where I am, to bring you to me, to get me out of here.

The Making of Me: Hard as Egusi

L, from what I understand, was nothing like my father. L could have been my father, and, sometimes, when mom stares at my eyes and calls me her Siamese Cat, I swear it's possible. That something happened between them although she says the relationship was platonic and that that was precisely the great tragedy of that time in her life, the lack of touch that existed in it. I don't know; I really don't know. I've never seen a picture of L.

This is how I imagine what happened after L, what happened with Roger, my father:

Four consecutive months ravaging one hotel room after another, right after she was back from Africa with L -- trying to ignore her heart, tricking it into adventure and keeping it from aching. Mom had met Roger at a bar, had told him, over a glass of cheap champagne, the only one she could afford, that she had just returned from West Africa. He said he traveled there often, and so she went home with him. Or, to a hotel, rather. She didn't see his house for five months. In a dimly lit luxury-hotel room with chocolates carefully lain on their pillows, they drank champagne priced ten times higher than the one she'd sipped from at the bar. How many circles life can take, she'd thought. How if you don't hang on to the horns of the bull, you better say goodbye because it'll butt you right off.

Roger was the kind of person that made promises, and you believed him. There was no subtext to anything he said, everything was right there, out in the open. Except everything was a lie. "I love you. You're a jewel, a gem, I want you in my bed, in my life." She let him have her. For nothing. Four months of exorcism, sex; a grinding, rough patting and eating of each other, and six months after the whole affair was over, her belly was almost as hard as Egusi, protecting me, protecting me.

Heartbreak



Mom

 Mom had been to Africa before the trip we took together, before she had me. Right before she met my father. She had started out in Nigeria also, but made her way further west on that trip, to Accra and then Cape Coast, where bats hung from trees and the soil was mineral-rich-red.  

The first time was a very different story than our trip; it took her a long time to tell me about it. I was twenty when she first mentioned it, about to leave Doddie's house on my way to South America for a while, I hadn't decided how long, when she caught me packing and snuggled onto my bed, taking my pillow between her arms and chest. I watched her from above, peripherally, as I slowly gathered everything I thought I might need. It was going to be the longest trip I'd ever taken alone. I wanted to be prepared.  "You and your Siamese eyes," she said, giggling. "You excited?"

"Sort of nervous," I told her. My hands had started to sweat in bed the night before when I imagined myself alone, in a new place, lost, without mom, without Doddie. I knew what could happen in new places. But I had to do it, I had to leave and go somewhere on my own, know that I could lose my fear of landing on distant shores, and not so distant shores. I hadn't left Key West in nearly 10 years and I thought I might be ready. In fact, I felt a little like I was drowning, sinking slowly with the Florida Keys. But I was scared. I was scared shitless. Imagine being that scared. No matter how many prunes you eat, you just can't shit, not for days. Your stomach hollow like a taught drum, spasms cricketing along the lines of your intestines with no release.

"I was twenty-two when I took my first real trip," mom said. "You've already been places, Mo, but this is going to mean something for you, it always does when you're your age. I was so awake, so wide-eyed."

"Where did you go?" I asked her, folding boxers and socks into the corners of my single bag, "You've never told me this."

"That was the first time I went to Africa; my first heartbreak. It's funny, both times I went to Africa, I was heartbroken. Well, not really "funny." But, well, appropriate, I guess," she said.

I knew what she meant -- it was a place you could seep into, bleed into it's beautiful chaos; feel a sudden bust in the gut, a deep pulling of muscle; and impending rupture -- and all of it was appropriate.

That first time she went because of L. Who also, she said, had eyes like the Siamese slants of cats.  

L, who broke her heart, who made her curl up in a squeaky bed near Cape Coast where slaves had once been shackled and shipped off; where America had begun its strange journey into its own heart of darkness, and where later cocaine and heroin seeped through porous ports, inflicting the population on its way to Europe.

Mom was L's protégé. I guess that's what you would call it -- she never said that, but that's what it sounded like. She also loved him.