Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

I cherish my earliest memories of home, like the Marvelettes playing on our tiny AM radio in the kitchen. Sitting on a plastic chair on our tiny concrete balcony while my mother plaited my sisters’ hair into cornrows. Chicken and waffles on Saturday mornings. And the terrors: stuck in the never-working elevator for two hours one morning. Hearing gunshots in the hall, hiding under the table, hiding in the bathroom, turning off all the lights so they’d think there was nobody home. Never coming to the door when the police knocked afterward.

All these things made me who I am.

Young, unattached, successful, owner of my own consulting firm — branding and product development — I live in a condo in Center City. I drive a leased BMW. Without family in the area, having lost most of my childhood friends to crime, prison, or simple drifting and dislocation, and simply too busy with my work, I have a very limited social life, which I am seeking to rebuild.

My childhood church was the Church of God in Christ and His Disciples, a storefront church, at the corner of Cambridge and North Percy. It burned down when I was in college. Therefore I am a new member of the choir at Elon Baptist. Starting with the Saturday-night services — the beginner’s choir. From there I find my way into other service opportunities in the community. The Urban League. Big Brothers Big Sisters. I volunteer my time as a computer specialist and financial counselor.

I don’t follow music or movies very closely. Though of course I loved hip-hop in my youth, I now tend toward neo-soul and jazz vocals — John Legend, Esperanza Spalding, Macy Gray, Erykah Badu, Cassandra Wilson. You’ll usually find my radio tuned to R&B 100.3. Though when I’m especially stressed (this goes back to my track and field days) I put on Schumann or Brahms or Vivaldi. My high school coach, Pop Garfield, was a Brahms devotee; he used to make us listen to the First Piano Concerto before meets. Play like geniuses, he always said.

I have a credit card at Lord & Taylor. I subscribe to Black Professional and Vibe . My look is understated but right in all the details. A black silk Balenciaga pull-on over Emporio Armani pants on a Sunday morning. A Brooks Brothers double-vented suit, warm brown, with a chartreuse pin-striped shirt and a blue-and-green paisley tie. Gold cuff links with tiny emeralds. I keep my head clean-shaven and occasionally stop in at South Street Barbers for a straight-razor shave.

I may advertise myself on dating sites or even contact a matchmaker. I would like to meet a woman much like myself. Eventually, I would like to get married. With one caveat: because of a rare genetic disorder, I can’t have children. Biological children. So — and this is what I’ll tell the matchmaker, or write in my profile — I’m hoping to find a black woman open to adopting a black family.

On a tattered legal pad from my suitcase I make a list:

Martin Lipkin

Matthew Wilson

Mark Wilbury

Wilbur Martinson

BodyMore

Grnmnt10234

XcashKingX

Alan93

Martin Wilkinson (Philadelphia version)

Martin Wilkinson (Baltimore version)

Martin Wilkinson (Bangkok version)

How many more, I’m wondering? How many more could there be, between Northern State and Bangkok, between 2001, say, and 2004, when Martin married Robin, and they adopted Sherry? How many versions are there now? If I did a Yahoo! search for all the Martin Wilkinsons in the Northeast Corridor, would they all be him?

But that isn’t the point, it’s not germane, I can hear him saying, it’s just routine corporate secrecy, for one thing. Just like Apple hiding its latest version of the iPhone. After all, what was the word Tariko used? Prototypes.

The body is raw material; the story is raw material.

What is it that he’s really been telling me all this time?

I flip back through the pages — mostly scrawled notes, nearly illegible, from when I was listening to Martin’s tapes the first time, before I got down to the hard work of transcription.

— even if classical methods of creation should prove inaccessible

(furthermore?) there still remain some illegal methods

a (finitude?) of heretical and criminal methods

It isn’t that difficult, I’m thinking, is it, to tell people what they want to hear? To mold a story to the listener’s ear. This is a kind of fiction that really has legs. The customized memoir. The Novel Genome Project. What did he say to me, back when he handed over the tapes? You’re the Alex Haley to my Malcolm X. A black man, I’m thinking, is the perfect vehicle, the vessel for every American desire, the vector for every narrative. It’s almost tempting to keep this project secret ad infinitum.

In a sense, publicity is the kiss of death.

Goddamn, I almost say out loud, Martin, you’re a fucking genius. I roll out of bed, my gut vibrating, as if I’ve been kicked. The nausea is coming back now, in a hellish green wave. I drop down in front of the toilet, shoving back the seat with a loud clack , but the bubble lurches to a stop in my throat and refuses to move. Enough, I would say, if I could speak. Enough! I split my mouth with a fist and drive the index finger back until it scrapes my tonsils. And then vomit in a great whiplashing heave.

From:Kelly Thorndike

Subject:postcard from Bangkok

Date:April 14, 2013 8:07:08 PM EST

To:Rina T

It’s been four days. The place I’m staying is this beautiful, large, landscaped house, sort of stucco-like, Miami-ish, on the outskirts of the city. Although it’s hard to say “outskirts” here, because Bangkok is the kind of city that feels like a village on the street level almost everywhere. China is like this, too, of course, but because it’s never truly cold here, the outdoor life is much more permanent than in the China I know. Everywhere you look there’s a food stall or an outdoor market or a pedicab vendor, or all three. Where there are sidewalks, the sidewalks serve two or three purposes; other places (like out here in the burbs) the action just spills into the road. You see people washing dishes and chopping vegetables, arranging flowers, eating, nursing, just chilling with the newspaper, their toes an inch away from the traffic. And it’s all rather orderly. There’s something about being an American that just imposes the frame of poverty and desperation on any scene like this. But Thailand’s not Cambodia. Or Burma. In fact, it’s full of illegal Cambodian and Burmese refugees, according to the Bangkok Post .

And then there are the ghastly avenues and expressways like any Western city, only twice as large, eight or ten or twelve lanes across, always streaming with traffic, and impossible to get across all at once, so you wind up stuck in the traffic meridian with trucks practically scraping your nose. Thank god I only had to walk a little ways, around one neighborhood where the guy I’m interviewing lives. You don’t want to try to get anywhere substantial on foot. The scale of the city is just madness, and I say that judging by the cities I know a little better, Beijing and Shanghai and Taipei and Tokyo. I asked about taking public transportation and my driver just laughed. It exists, of course; there’s an elevated train, the Skytrain, very neatly designed, but it only covers about a fifth of the metro area, if that. How would Tokyo work without a subway? With pink taxis, eight every block. From this guy’s house to his office took an hour and a half, and that was a lucky break, I was told.

Here’s something I read in a tourist brochure, and I don’t know if it’s true, but it sounds right. When Thais decorate a room, inside or out, they start with the plants first and then add the furniture and whatever else. In the house where I’m staying you can hardly walk around without banging your shins against planters and bowls and these huge clay tanks for lotuses and little winking fish. The small streets, the village city, is just overrun with plant life, and the absence of it makes the large, grandiose public spaces unbearably dusty and sick.