Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now. Andre Perry

I stared at the globe, amazed and transfixed. My friend walked over to it and gave a hearty push. North America spun by, then Asia, then Africa. “This,” he said, “is where the rich white men decide how they will divvy up the world.” He laughed loudly, his voice echoing, filling up the room.

      I was glad I had seen it. I was glad that I knew.

      *

      I kept writing but the words eluded meaning. I couldn’t understand myself so how was I to understand the world? For all of my privileges I felt vacant and broken. Despite this fog, new songs took form and I played a show at the Hemlock Tavern on Polk Street. Friends from past and present gathered ’round to see me, to see each other, and to begin the weekend. If it had happened in black-and-white then it would have been a film, the closing scene that walks us out of the woods to show that the masks we wear aren’t faces we can ever lose: someday we will have to wear them again or at least look at their faded and crinkled edges and realize they are just layers of skin we peeled away. If my parents had been there and had the first girl I ever fell in love with been there too, it would have been a Hollywood ending. But really, my movements are just endless episodes of a television show: slight changes in setting spliced against unforgettable, unshakeable patterns.

      I saw Hayden and was happy to see him. He seemed clean and sharp, back on his feet with a modest cocktail in his hand. He had broken up with his girlfriend and other habits had left with her; though he did look a little pained and distant for choosing to live the straight life.

      I played the show. Men and women shook my hand and hugged me. Everyone bought drinks. Amidst the swell of excitement, I snuck away, exiting my own dream, and converged with a familiar clutch of characters at a separate engagement on the south side of town.

      We were at Gavin’s and Nick was there. There were women and men laughing and drinking wine. We listened to The Clash and I got close to a woman who had dated a rich friend of mine, a guy who always came to see me whenever I got it together to play a show. He was probably still at the show. She was sweating and we kissed. I wanted less to love her than for her to just give me someone or something to wake up to. And then there was Nick. He no longer told us the story about losing his mind at the end of college, he just said: cut me a line and make it fucking big. I was briefly dizzy and a feeling came over me, one of these moments I have from time to time. It occurred to me that there was nothing that had changed except my age. I was still black. I was still lost. Even to myself I was an invisible man.

      I started to say something aloud to the group, but caught myself and pushed forward into the slippery cavity of the girl’s mouth.

       American Gray Space

      1

      “Nigger music,” he said.

      He paused and thought deeply for a moment. “Yeah, that’s what we do: full on nigger music. It’s fucking great.”

      I wasn’t quite sure what to say so I leaned into the couch and mumbled something like, “That sounds fascinating. I’ve got to come see that sometime.”

      San Francisco hipsters filled the corners of the dark apartment. Outside, a light rain came down around the city. Conversations oscillated between fashion and music. I could have talked to so many people but I had chosen this skinny musician who had tried to French kiss me earlier. In that moment, he seemed like a true artist to me—someone who created, revised, destroyed, and rebuilt in an effort to understand the world. And, he played nigger music. Was it a travesty or a triumph that this skinny, five-o’clock-shadowed white guy had so comfortably described his band’s style of music to me, a skinny, five-o’clock-shadowed black guy, as none other than “nigger music”? He apparently didn’t know what else to call it. He said that his rock band, Mutilated Mannequins, constructed lyrical diatribes on racism, pairing them with gripping art-rock freak-outs. He was so sincere, calm, and honest. His eyes homed in on me, his confidence unwavering. His philosophies unfolded: “We are doing important shit, man. Rethinking the whole world. The whole fucking paradigm.”

      He went on describing his music. After some time his words echoed listlessly like the distant pitter-patter of rain on the windowsill. I thought about punching him in the neck. I was in a state of existential shock. Lifting up from my body I considered that I needed to spend less nights like this: 26 years old, going to work, making music, barely sleeping, and then going out just to hear someone talk about nigger music. The enduring question lingered: would it ever be possible for a non-black person to throw around the word nigger in a non-malicious sense? Does the weight of such a word truly vary with context or is it a shotgun shell whenever it gets fired into the air? And, damn, sometimes it takes a minute to figure out how they’re shooting. Former NAACP representative Julian Bond said that the 2nd Civil Rights Movement will be harder because the “Whites Only” signs have been taken down. Yet their shadows remain firmly placed to doorways and water fountains. How do you challenge a ghost when you can’t even touch it?

      I visited the University of Virginia when I was 19. I was a freshman studying at Princeton but I joined some friends for a road trip. The campus stood as a memorial to Thomas Jefferson— political leader, slave owner, and sexual violator. I stumbled down fraternity row, drunk and foggy, beneath a warm blanket of Gentleman Jack Daniel’s. I had chased down the whiskey with half a case of Natural Light. Then I had lost my friends at the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity house. That was the place where they tossed couches from the second-floor balcony when they got bored.