Except for a mixed girl I made out with in twelfth grade, none of these girls had been black. I did plenty of looking, got shot down a couple times, and never quite clicked with any black girls in high school—not their fault, I knew I was the odd man out. I’d been relieved to have the friends I had, even if most of them were white, but lately I’d been sure I was missing something.
I glared while Mason hooted at Russell’s joke.
Then Mason said, “Like you should talk, Russell.”
I laughed. Russell jabbed his cigarette into the air between us and said, “It doesn’t work like that! He’s clowning both of us!”
“He’s just jealous because he’s watching us players from the bench,” I said.
Russell nodded.
“You players don’t seem to be scoring,” Mason said, and I leaned back in my seat, defeated. I’d heard that men date their mother’s color. My dad disproved that theory, but it still made me feel a bit better when I got down on myself for not dating black women.
Russell looked out the window and smoked. Mason took a hand off the steering wheel and cranked the radio back up. A dancey rap song with chintzy synths roared over the engine.
“Yay-uhh,” howled Russell, imitating one of the rappers.
I growled, “Get low, get low,” like the other guy on the song. The synths kicked in and Mason murmured, “Get low . . . butts . . .” reverently, like his mind was in a strip club.
We were all quiet for a few seconds, then Russell lolled his head over at me and asked, “You ever had butt sex . . . with a girl?”
Mason gave the windshield a creepy smile and cut out around an eighteen-wheeler.
“No. No, I haven’t.” I sent a nervous grin to the windshield then asked, “You?”
He set the soda bottle ashtray in the cup holder and shuddered, almost offended I’d ask something so dumb. “No—”
“I mean, I’d try it,” I said. “But the chance hasn’t come up. And I’m not pushing for it.”
“Ha,” Mason said, and humped his seat like a dog scratching its ass on the rug. “‘Pushing for it.’”
Russell leaned in, voice hushed like white people do when race comes up, “But I thought black guys fucked girls in the ass.”
Suddenly, the radio cranked up louder. We all startled as the bass made the speaker covers buzz, and the van shook as we cut it close in front of the truck. Mason reached for the volume knob and it snapped off in his hand. He tossed it on top of the dashboard and clutched the steering wheel with both hands. A gleaming black luxury sedan shot up the highway and matched our speed in the right lane.
Our van’s side door slid open as another Yay-uhhh blasted from the speakers. Wind roared in and the gray highway flew by between us and the fancy car. I gripped the back of Russell’s seat, shouting, “Damn! What?”
The other car’s back window slid open and Lucius rocketed out, drilling through the air between the vehicles. He landed next to me on the bench seat, slammed the van door, clapped his hands to his knees, and bellowed at Russell, “What did you just say, cracker?”
Russell threw his chin back in offense and whined, “Sorry.”
I tried to smooth things over by saying, “Not that I’m aware of.”
I hated to admit that, because then Russell could say, “Well, maybe if you were all black instead of half black, you’d do it.” He stayed quiet, though, and Lucius turned to me and shouted, “Well?”
I wondered if Russell had some info that I didn’t, so I asked, “Why do you think that?”
“Yeah,” added Lucius. “That’s foul.”
Mason was sitting there, listening and driving.
“Well, just,” Russell opened his hands to the road in front of him, “all the rap songs talk about booty and get low and you always hear about girls’ butts, so I figured that’s what it was all about.” He had his hands spread in front of him, jiggling the biggest invisible booty in the world.
“No, man. No,” I said. “The vagina is right there, too. You can reach it from behind. White guys’ dicks go that far, right?”
Mason guffawed. Russell gave an embarrassed grin and nodded. Lucius fell sideways laughing, then hopped back to dap me up. The lines on the highway ahead glowed chalk-white in the overcast afternoon. I worried at how Russell was one of my closest friends and could still ask questions that made me feel so alone.
Our show was at a dive in a part of Wilmington far from the chain restaurants and traffic that clogged southern cities in the ’90s. The peak-roofed club looked like an old barn and smelled like one, if the animals smoked.
You’d think that the best shows would be in the biggest cities, but if you’re in a lesser-known band like ours, you do better in smaller towns, where people aren’t so jaded. They come out of the woodwork just because something’s going on. That doesn’t happen in places like New York and Los Angeles. People there have more options.
On the short stage, I peeked up from fiddling with my amp and saw a good fifty people already waiting. More were drifting in from the bar and parking lot, called by the twang and drone of our tuning. They seemed like our crowd: the weird kids, from “my first show” fifteen-year-olds in new cutoff army pants, to older guys in the sweet spot between high school and pain pills. Searchers, intent on finding their own fun. We were that fun, dug up online or passed along on a mix CD.
I ran through the slinky riff from Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” to tune the A string to the E and looked to my bandmates for levels. My breath got short as my racial hang-ups and stage fright melded into a sun-hot beam that turned my fingers electric as we passed eye contact in a triangle and nodded, ready to blow off the long drive, the stupid week.
Mason was irritated about the shift-leader job he might as well quit.
Russell was ready to hit the drums so hard he’d get out of his dead-end life.
I wanted to turn a shade blacker every time I hit a bass string, envisioning a funk bassist with star sunglasses and a five-pointed bass; a jazz musician with his head back, the neck of his standup bass by his ear; even a lanky baseball pitcher folding himself into a crane shape on the mound before unleashing a fastball. Anything that read as black and performing.
I’d been playing shows for years. I was twenty-one and among the oldest people in the room. Still, I was hooked on the moment when the amps’ hum faded, Russell sat back on his drum stool, and silence washed back through the crowd, loud and full, like a two-string power chord could burst it.
I held my breath as Mason said, “Hi, we’re Paper Fire from Richmond, Virginia.”
At that moment, everyone was on the same side. We all wanted four clicks of the drumsticks and twenty minutes of release. I wanted to disappear and sense how far my headstock pointed out so I didn’t knock over a cymbal. I wanted to whip sweat from my forehead before it slicked up my bass, make eye contact with the knot of people up front headbanging and shaking their fists, and be amazed when they knew the lyrics Mason had written on a gas station napkin.
All the funk records I played at home, and I learned none of their rhythm by osmosis. In that punk band, my soul flailed and thrashed, and the room felt it more than heard it: a thick rumble that ripples out from the heart, shaking loose all the problems inside me.