O
And where do you stand?
ANDRE
I used this language. It was built into my DNA of growing up in America. I know it’s not right. But the addict is always the addict even when they’re clean. Relapse is always an available option. And when you try to get better, there’s another drug—you don’t say faggot, but then you substitute words like pussy, cunt, or bitch—they all get back to the same idea which is attacking people, attacking sexuality, attacking gender.
O nervously LOOKS at her cue cards.
O
So what I’m hearing from you is that faggot really is the new nigger?
ANDRE
Well yes and no. The word nigger or a “nigger moment” takes away black manhood while faggot takes away male sexuality. It’s a fine distinction. The erosion of black manhood is the erosion of the patriarchal role of black men. We are made unable to protect our women, and consequently, our children. A black man caught in a nigger moment is no king. When I call your boyfriend a faggot, O, I am saying he is unable to complete the male sexual role in bed. He can only love men and, in a sense, he is left infertile, unable to further his bloodline through traditional sexual means. Gay sex is a dead end in the construct of white male supremacy.
O
So, Andre, why can’t we as a people, and why can’t you as an upright citizen, bring yourself to stop saying faggot when you know it’s wrong?
ANDRE
It’s the nigger in me.
O
Cut the tape.
ANDRE
That was a joke!
RAUCOUS MAN IN AUDIENCE
Get on wid it. An’ make it good, nigger!
O
Cut the goddamn tape.
Author’s Note: The term “nigger moment” was originally conceived by Aaron McGruder in the Boondocks comic strip and television show, although I define it quite differently. Or maybe they’re two sides of the same coin.
We Thought We Were Rock ‘n’ Roll
He was sucking me off and god he looked so hungry. His shoulders were broad, popping out of the straps of his dress. His face was like concrete and his mouth was warm. I’d grab the sides of his face and the stubble would scratch my palms. I turned him around but I couldn’t get the condom on. I kept going soft. That’s when people stopped watching. It was clear the show was over, their fantasies deflated by my limpness. I kissed him on the cheek and put my pants back on.
Upstairs, out of the dungeon of the sex club, my head was full of coke and whiskey and light beer. The night had started differently. It hadn’t been dirty, although beneath the surface, I suppose I have always been dirty, waiting for or even courting something like that, wanting it to happen. Or maybe I had really gone there for a woman and settled for anything with a hole. At any rate, it wasn’t worth the hundred dollars I paid to get in. The cashier, a short lady with brown hair who looked bored, glared at me on the way out. I worried that I might see her again, but in a legitimate venue and she’d look at me, pointing and whispering to her friends, telling them, “that guy is pure filth.” In daylight, I would tell myself, I was respectable and highly educated and she must be trash working at a place like that. Anything I could tell myself to make that darker version of me seem okay.
I stumbled along the streets of SOMA. Van Ness Avenue was as wide as a riverbed and empty, suffering a drought of cars. I trotted across the road, waiting for something, like getting caught in the crossfire of a drug deal gone bad, stabbed by a hooker or a mad homeless derelict, or struck by a drunk driver. But nothing dark ever happened on those streets. Or maybe nothing was dark to me anymore. Or I was too scared to go to the places where I really might get hurt. I slid into Christopher’s loft where I was poaching space for a couple of months. Christopher, his girlfriend, and the other poacher were all asleep, thinking the night had ended with that final drink in the bar, those last hugs, handshakes, and laughs. I pulled the covers over my eyes. It would be morning soon and my mother’s son was something like a whore, a street urchin, or a maggot.
*
Josh and I were walking up Mission Street. It was late. We could hear the echoes of the evening: drunks crawling home, cars parking and unparking themselves, and lights laughing off. The real drunks—the street folk—gathered around the edges of curbs and slid onto corners. Down the block a gunshot rang out and a bunch of guys ran to the other side of the street.
Oh shit, we said. That’s crazy.
We cut up 20th to Valencia where things were less dicey.
Josh worked at a bar that was too expensive for our friends. All of the drinks were top shelf and beers started at 10 dollars. I would go there looking a bit tattered and get drunk on his employee discount. I would filter into the crowd, full of rich patrons. There were imposters there too. The imposters put the tabs on their credit cards. Josh wore black shoes and liked his job because it wasn’t the sort of thing most of his friends did. He was an artist and he worked at an upscale bar. Later he would work as a writer on a popular television show. But before that, before his success, he wrote stories and when he tired of stories he wrote lengthy nonfictions—philosophies and reflections of the people around him, and the telephone poles, and the bus cables that ran a network across the city 14 feet above our heads. And he even wrote about the birds that sat on the cables, talking to each other like the drug dealers on the stoops of the low-income projects around which developers unveiled nouveau-riche neighborhoods.
The gunshot on Mission Street had rattled us slightly. We walked north, away from the Mission and all the way across town to the Marina and the bay. A couple of hours later, rich grapefruit slices of sunlight opened up across the bay and we watched men jump into the water with wet suits—out for morning swims, training for triathlons before work. We took the 22-Fillmore back to our side of town and I remembered a girl Josh had been with. Years ago we had gone to her house for a party and he had found her in a bedroom with another man. He left the house with precision—anger on his face—not as if he had been hurt but as if his calculations for an equation had proven erroneous, as if a closer proofread would have rendered the situation differently. He was disappointed in himself, not her. He brooded for two years and then we heard that gunshot and saw the sunrise by the bay. He left for Los Angeles with a new lover he had met at the upscale bar. She was freer, less of an East Coast equation. She was all West Coast with magnolia smiles and twinkling eyes. She made crafts with her hands and painted pictures of rock musicians and the birds that sat on the cables 14 feet above her head. They married and a year later she left him. He remained on the television show, which, although being a spin-off of another show, had become quite popular on its own and when I last saw him he wasn’t drinking anymore. He was sure of himself and the look on his face suggested that he wasn’t the one making errors in the equations; rather the women had been the wrong variables, foolishly slipping into his complex romantic theorems, entirely out of their league. Each of us walked with our own seemingly foolproof logic, expecting the rest of the world to understand and obey the rules of our perspectives. But it was each one of us that would need to adapt to or be crushed by the motion of life.
I descended from the 22-Fillmore. It was maybe nine or ten in the morning and I was just getting to bed. A roommate might have shaken his head at me and laughed. I just held tight to the covers and curved around my pillow like a lover, happy that my windows only looked upon the walls of other buildings.
*
It