Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“So how’s that crazy boy of yours? What’s he calling himself now?”

“X.”

She spits out her drink. “I’m sorry.” She dabs at the spittle with her napkin. “That’s hilarious.” She sighs and gives me her teeth again. “What does Claire think of that?”

“She calls him X.”

“What’s that about?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. I imagine she already has one. I first saw her on the street, pregnant, one hand resting on her tummy, with her man, waiting for the light to change. I was alone and she was anxious and he kept his head down, the way many white men do when they’re with a black woman and they encounter a black man — as though I cared. I would see them later, walking around with their stroller. She would smile at me when she was alone. She brought her girl to the same kiddie gym classes and the same kiddie art classes that Claire brought X to, although she never talked to Claire, never even acknowledged her until I showed up one day. And then there were inquiries and invitations — she let Claire pass on my ticket.

She looks off dreamily to the monitor above my head. She smiles. A few seconds later I see why: One of the astro-girls has grown to enormous size. She throws a spinning crescent kick to the side of a space monster’s head, which sends him into orbit — all while singing. She bends down and rips the top off a space cage, where I assume the space monster has incarcerated her pals.

“School starts soon?”

“Yes.”

“How do they like it?”

“Cecil loves it. I suppose his brother will, too.”

“Is it worth it?”

“What do you mean?”

“The tuition. The homogeny?”

A new video has started. Three brown women of varying shades and hair texture are in leather thong bikinis dancing on what looks to be a panzer tank. They’re out of step because they’re moving to the beat of the previous song. Finally, their beat kicks in. They’re still out of sync, but it’s a little better. They start shaking it.

“Even if we could afford it, I don’t know if I would do it — you know?”

“X likes to be naked.” I look down from the video. “They’ll let him be naked. All day.”

She shakes her head. “What about your other son?”

“He’s doing fine.”

She’s ready for another drink and signals the waiter. Her arm is unusually long for her body, but she extends it gracefully — the dark skin complemented by her sleeveless pink top. Her shoulders are the same size as her breasts. She senses me looking at her. I look back up at the monitor. A college-age white kid with heavy sideburns and a Brooklyn Dodgers cap gestures spastically at the camera. In the background the girls are still shaking it. The video cuts to a close-up of one of them. She’s stunning. My butt gets warm. I look down. Judy or Jane has had prior knowledge of the flesh parade and has been watching me watch. She’s smiling again, extra toothy, as though she’s discovered some great secret about me: I’m a man.

“She’s pretty hot, huh?”

I shrug my shoulders. She’s not entirely right, anyway. I’m a man, yes, but my thoughts shift from her and the dancing ladies to junior high English — Ms. Rizzo’s class. She’s only twenty-four. She calls me to the board, rolling the chalk in one hand, her other on her jutted-out hip. I’m in my seat, stiff and immovable in my wide-wale corduroys. Ms. Rizzo has just said “diphthong” and let her tongue peek out through her perfect teeth and stay there. I know she has peppermint breath and her perfume smells like citrus water. The other boys are in heaven. I’m in hell. I try to think of ugly girls and bland literature. “It nods and curtsies and recovers . .” The heat from my ass moves its way up my body and settles in my neck and cheeks.

“Sure you don’t want a real drink now?” she asks. Her first, on top of the wine before, has gotten to her. She has boozy confidence. It enables her to slouch, speak in low tones, and stare.

“I’m sure.”

“A bohemian who doesn’t drink — what’s that?”

“Why am I a bohemian?”

“Well, you sure ain’t a lawyer. I know them. I’ve got one.”

I wonder if she leaves her paintings out to torture him, the assistant DA. I only shared selected paragraphs with Claire, complete with contextual introductions, and I always read them to her. I picture her husband in the coffee shop, beaky, dark bearded, and thin, ashamed when seeing me, shocked when I say hello. I see her paintings hanging in their house, her sketches and doodles beside the telephone and on the fridge along with their son’s. I wonder how he exhales in the galleries of her depicted flesh.

The video is ending. The panzer drives off into the sunset with the dancers. Now a blonde tart on a jet ski zips along the coast of the Riviera. She’s wearing a Stetson hat and wielding a boomerang.

“Oh, that bitch is so dry,” she hisses. My mother used to call white girls tarts and hussies. If I were in the video, and if she were drunk, I’d walk the jet-ski tart home. Jane or Judy closes her eyes and leans back. She opens her mouth in the shape of a small circle and exhales. Black girls, as I remember being told, were fast. She will have to be walked home, too.

“That was harder than I thought.”

“What was?”

“Finishing the work for that show.” She leans forward, exhaling heavily. She puts her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. Her radii and ulnae are mantislike, longer than her humeri. No bone in her arm can be thicker than a chopstick. With all the soft, bright colors on and around her she almost looks like a child except her face is showing signs of age. She has two deep creases running alongside her nose and another across her forehead. Her age and her fatigue against the creamsicle backdrop make her look out of place, and because of this, I imagine her to be lonely. She smiles at me again, broadly, and her eyelids droop.

I had always put girls to sleep. It was a gift. Whenever I was broke and hungry, I would go to a bar or a party, meet a girl, and listen to her talk about her parents, her job, her last or current boyfriend, about her dissatisfaction with her life, and her theories on how life could be different. I’d listen and that alone would be enough — a great enough act of heroism — to be invited home with them, where I would then talk about pretty much anything until they couldn’t listen anymore. They’d drift off. In the morning I’d make breakfast and they’d look at me strangely, no longer a hero, just a symbol of their great dissatisfaction. I’d leave them wherever it was they believed themselves stranded — hero-less — two eggs and a slice of toast short. They all fell asleep. All except Claire. I’d lain beside her, hand in the air, not touching her. I talked and talked until she told me to put my hand down on her hip. I did.

“How’s writing going?”

“Fine.”

“What are you working on?”

“A book.”

“Who’s your agent?”

“I don’t have one now.”

She finds the energy to raise her eyebrows. My last agent had told me that I needed to do some serious editing, that it didn’t seem urban enough, but that mostly, somewhere in the philosophy, I’d lost the story and, therefore, the emotional core. It had reminded me of what William Lloyd Garrison said to Frederick Douglass, that Douglass should tell the story and leave the philosophy to him. Which would mean, if Garrison was correct, then there was nothing beyond the simple narrative — no context. Or that everyone understood the context, that the context was available for all to decipher and that they all had the scope and the willingness to do so. Perhaps it was me. Perhaps I had only disconnected thoughts and anecdotes flaring up in me like bouts of gastritis. “By the rivers of Babylon . .” Perhaps I have no narrative. Perhaps I have no song.