Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

I’m waiting at the bus stop with the father and his two daughters. He’s just laughing, mumbling, uh-huh-ing and yes sweetie-ing. Still can’t tell if he’s Jamaican. One just makes assumptions about anywhere between Gun Hill and Boston Road. They don’t even notice he’s giving them the daddy gaze. This man in the hospital said to me, You just didn’t know you could love anybody or anything that much. It frightens you all the time, every time you hear some kid got hit by a bus. The daddy gaze, I wonder when they lose it.

I never hear anything good, so I stop watching news. I don’t even want to know what’s going on in Jamaica, but if it’s spilling into Bronx and Manhattan then the news can’t be good. Jamaicans here never tell me anything I want to hear so I don’t talk to Jamaicans. I never missed the country, not even once. I hate nostalgia, nostalgia is not memory and my memory is too damn good for it. The thing is, if all of this is true, then why the r’asscloth am I in Jamaican Bronx? Corsa, Fenton, Boston, Girvan, you might as well call the whole place Kingston 21. On Corsa I’m the lonely woman in the house on the corner, the person who is going to die, rot and sprout poppies before anybody even wonders whatever happened to her. The witch at the end of the street, the Boo Radley. Who the r’ass am I kidding, they probably think I’m just the Christian lady who never have no boyfriend. I’m the stuck-up, stoosh nurse who always wears white stockings and sensible shoes who always leaves and returns to her house in uniform so that nobody will know her in any other context and who don’t talk to nobody.

I wonder if anybody ever sees me go out at night. I like to think I don’t give a shit about what people think, but then I always leave through the back door. I just hope no more Jamaicans with gunshot wounds show up at the hospital. I just hope… You know something, Millicent Segree, nothing good ever comes from taking your thoughts down that way. Even thinking about thinking them just makes the headache beat down the side of my head even more. No more damn thinking. Last week a white college boy heard my accent and asked if I ever met the Singer. And it hit me: I’m one of the few who can answer the question with a yes, but it still pissed me off. Then he started to sing the song with the birds, and for a while I could bear it until it made me think about dead years. Shit, thinking about remembering dead years always makes me remember dead years for real and fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck all that. Fuck the dead. I’m still living.

The bus is here.

I’m still living.

N ah, this is the C . The A doesn’t make stops until 125th.

— Ah.

The man steps back from the doorway as if he saw somebody in the train he didn’t want to run into. I watch the door closing him out and sit back down as the train starts to move. New Yorkers, the uptown train has been lying to you. This is what you do, you take the C from 163rd to 145th Street to jump on the express because you’re in a fucking hurry and this is uptown, and there’re always delays or some drama. I mean, only last week, when I was rushing to JFK to catch a flight back to Minnesota because Mom wasn’t doing so hot, a man pulled down his pants and started to shit on the train. He just squatted and dumped, yelling the whole time like he was giving birth. Of course he did this the second the train pulled out of Fulton, which meant it would be forever before it reached High Street all the way in Brooklyn. Six or seven of us, I don’t know how many, rushed to the door only to see that it was the one door that didn’t open for transfer to the next car. I’m there thinking, begging, please don’t start throwing your shit. Please, please don’t. When the train finally pulled into High Street we all tumbled out and ran. But that’s not my point. My point was, you take the C to 145th and then switch to the A because it’s the express. But the A is fucking slower than the C. Come at, say, West 4th Street and wait a minute or two, and there is the same damn C train you jumped off at 145th.

So now I just stick on the C and try to read. That’s not true. I stay on the C train to check out people reading The New Yorker . I wonder if they’re reading IT. An Irish novelist friend of mine told me how once on the train he saw someone reading his book. He asked her, Is it any good? and she said, Some of it but other times it’s a slog. For some reason it made his day, and that she didn’t even recognize him. So yeah, sometimes I’m on the C looking for that woman, and it’s almost always a woman reading The New Yorker and hope I can sit beside them and wait for them to turn to IT. I can say, Holy shit, this is like the movies. I mean, this never happens in real life, right? And she’ll say what happens? And I’ll say that a writer happens to be on the train to see somebody actually reading his stuff. In this version of the story she will also be cute, hopefully black and if not single, then certainly not beholden to a concept as passé as monogamy. Who am I kidding? With all the free-love bullshit I spout I’m the one who sounds old hat. Thanks to Republicans and AIDS, everybody is marrying now, even gay guys are thinking about it.

But one guy’s riding the C and he’s some kid in torn-off sweatpants and long johns underneath. Leather jacket but I can’t see much else because he’s reading Rolling Stone with what looks like Axl Rose on the cover. Guns N’ Roses supposedly saved rock and roll a few years ago, or at least that’s what anybody who works at Rolling Stone will tell you. I say if this is true, then why am I hearing shitty dance pop from faggy limeys on the radio all the time? A fucking band named Jesus Jones, Christ. And please for God’s sake don’t play that Black Crowes album again, I heard it the first time when it was called Sticky Fingers. God, maybe the reason why the cab’s so empty is that everybody can sense I have grown into such a belligerent motherfucker. It’s the weird time after rush hour but before lunch where you can ride an empty car in broad daylight. Cab’s covered in new graffiti, on the windows, seats, even the floor, the new ones looking sharp and sci-fi with letters, I think they are letters, that look like molten metal. That and posters for Tang! Non-Invasive Cure for Bunions and Fucking Miss Saigon .

Shit, I wish I had a New Yorker . Or anything for that matter. Rushed out of the office because I realized I was close to deadline and preferred working from home when under pressure. I handed in part four yesterday. Four of seven. Yeah, a part of me hopes people still read The New Yorker or at least pay attention to it the way they did for the Janet Malcolm thing on Jeffrey MacDonald and Joe McGinniss only a few months ago. Not that I’m working on anything so heavy, and besides, who the fuck gives a damn about the Singer or Jamaica now other than frat boys? You, Alex Pierce, are what the kids today call a relic. And it’s only March.

I get off at 163rd, climb up the steps hoping the guy who tried to bum a cigarette off me isn’t there for another one. Shit, why buy a pack when he can score one or two from me every day? The further I step away from C-Town the more it hits deep that there’s nothing good in my fridge. I’m going home to no food, which will only piss me the fuck off, and I’ll put this coat back on to walk right back to the C-Town I’m walking away from right now. But fuck it, I’m on 160th already.

It’s March, it’s still fucking cold and you can’t even give these fucking homes away. The brownstone I bought didn’t need any work and yet the owner was itching so bad to get out I became convinced something was seriously wrong with it. That only made him drop the price more. He tried to sell me on some shit about Louis Armstrong living here. Only three minutes later he said Cab Calloway. Whatever, I liked a neighborhood that people were trying to get away from, though if you asked me, people are probably skipping because they hate how this part of Washington Heights, pardon me, historic Harlem, had been going to shit since the late seventies, brief eighties fake boom to real bust notwithstanding.