There’s this Asian dude on the street. He’s weaving left and right, shouting about how his heart is so big it could explode, how he can’t feel his toes, how he so so so so so so so happy. He’s wearing one of them Columbia University football sweatshirts which I think is supposed to be ironic, because everyone knows the Lions haven’t done football in a long time, probably since the 20s.
He’s got two friends---- him and her? They? Whatever gender bender they’re on, love is in the air, and they’re sucking each other’s faces off, just two almost black kids adding to Columbia’s diversity quotient. The Ivy League hasn’t admitted poor niggas in decades, so I don’t wonder at the super chic clothes their wearing, some designer shit, or maybe just hand-me-downs from the attic of Mommy and Daddy’s 6000 foot “modest” home in Darien or Larchmont. All of them, the Asian and the two dark ones, seem so carefree and so sad at the same time.
I’m surprised these kids of color are so brazenly partying this far downtown. Don’t they know that some Klansmen might take the opportunity to shoot them down? Then again, my black ass is out here too, but my shit ain’t no party.
“Poser,” someone whispers in my ear, as I stand at the bar.
I’ve come in to one of the slickest speakeasies in the city, “Risk Averse,” and I’ve ordered their specialty, a Sazerac, with an 80 year old aged rye. It's on my sister so I figure, what the hell.
“Cunt,” I reply. I’m talking to the bitch behind me, but I make sure to catch the eye of the butch-cut tatted-up-white-looking-Puerto-Rican behind the bar. We had a thing last year, but I guess she hates me because I was hittin’ one of her boys at the same time we were supposed to be exclusive. She smiles at me real pretty, and then carefully dribbles a bit of saliva into my rye mixocology.
The white girl in my ear, my sister, observes the whole thing, and laughs in a manner so perfectly out of sync with herself that it feels as though real time sound has a delay effect on it.
“You’re late,” sis says, half way through our drinks at a tall table some distance from the bar. We don’t do small talk well, never have, so for the last 10 minutes, we’ve been letting the bar’s prehistoric music, a Motown soundtrack, fill the space.
Space: that cold, airless void, the abyss, crawlingly expanding into more abyss, stretching to infinity. Even the plaintive crooning of Marvin Gaye gets lost in it.
It’s a Sunday night, but the bar is kinda packed, I guess because tomorrow’s Columbus day, no no no, indigienous people’s day, but they should call that shit “Day of the Dead.”
“You’re late” my sister says again, throwing the last of her Manhattan to the back of her throat, and signaling the bartender to bring another. There’s no table service here, but she owns this joint, like literally, so she gets what she wants.
“Fuck you,” I reply, but my heart just ain’t in it. I tired of fighting her eons ago.
Sis runs her mouth now, on and on, but I fix my attention on the wallpaper behind the bar. It’s a mushroom cloud explosion of reds and oranges, in a perfect concert of destruction. The Puerto-Rican bartender thinks I’m staring at her and glowers at me as she comes from around the bar and sets down my sister’s drink.
“So, that’s that Wright,” my sister concludes with an affected sigh, “It is what it is.” Her deep blue eyes stare searchingly into mine. It takes me a while to finally get it.
“Petra,” I say slowly, belying my racing pulse, “what the fuck?”
Her eyes grow round in fear, but I know this is just a reflex. In another time maybe I’d been able to frighten her, but that was long ago. And anyway, she’s always been a master actress.
“Listen,” she begins, “Mom made me in charge of the estate…”
“Oh, here we go-“
“And I think we can both agree, I’ve been more than fair to you----”
“The same shit every time,” I explode, drawing looks from the yuppie patrons around us. “You have me come all the way down here, and then I always gotta listen to you talk talk talk. Why do you insist that I bow at your feet like some typa slave? Does it make you feel good?”
Petra plasters an ironic smile on her face, her eyes now all ice. She takes a slow drink of her fresh Manhattan.
“I love you, brother,” she says, her voice full of brittle Waspishness. “Family must stick together.”
The apposite irony of her comment isn’t lost on me, even in my state.
“Give me my credits,” I spit, the swanky establishment beginning to spin around me. “NOW!”
“Do you ever listen when I talk?” Petra says in a sing song voice. “There’s. Nothing. Coming.”
She takes another slow sip of her drink, delicately pursing her lips as though the content of her glass is scalding hot.
“As I explained earlier,” she drawls, “I’m not giving you a dime until you seek help. I mean honestly Wright, you’re a mess. Like, how high are you right now? What is this accent you’re experimenting with? Are we, what, full blown menace-to-society-gangsta now? We’re from SCARSDALE, for Christsake.”
She shakes her head, and an ironic smile plays across her thin lips. Stevie Wonder blares over the speakers, and I can feel it all over.
I have to hand it to my sister. I ain’t felt this kind of pain, this kind of rage, in a long while. I haven't really felt anything, if I’m perfectly honest with myself.
Abruptly, I come to my feet and fling my half empty spittle laced Sazerac to the floor. In what feels like stop motion, I watch the glass shatter into a thousand iridescent stars. The dyke at the bar and my waste of space sister are screaming something, but I’m already out the door, this prematurely arctic mid-October night slashing at my face.
*****
A long time ago, when I was a senior at the University, Anders Marzen explained Murphy’s Law to me.
“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” he’d said as we’d huddled together on one of those college issue extra long beds. We were taking a break from studying for our last exam of the semester, a philosophy of religion class that had brutalized us.
Wrapped up in the sheets, snuggled against Anders, I’d wondered why I’d never heard of this axiom, Murphy's law, but then I guess, to that point, I’d been pretty successful in life. I’d gotten into The University, after all. I’d won the academic award for highest GPA for the third year in a row. I’d just signed a record deal, a totally unexpected consequence of a rendition of Ben E King’s ancient classic “Stand By Me” I’d performed a cappella at the banquet dinner of the national championship lightweight crew team I rowed for. And, I’d found love.
“You’re a faggot,” I’d declared to Anders, early sophomore year. We’d just met, paired as roommates, and I’d just come home from crew practice. There he was, stark naked in front of his computer, jerking off to a dude in drag----I could see it plain as day because he had one of those huge monitors.
When he got up, I readied for a fight. He was lean, but he was strong, and I wasn’t quite sure if I could beat him if I needed to. Anders stopped inches from my face, his hard dick inching just past his belly button. Slowly, he leaned in, and kissed me full on the lips, tongue searchingly exploring my mouth.
“You’re a faggot too, Wright,” he whispered, his hazel eyes staring a billion miles into mine...
Two years later, sitting in bed with Anders before finals, first semester senior year, he must have known that shit was about to fall to pieces for me.
“Murphy’s Law, dude. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” he’d repeated whimsically.
“Man, we can study later,” I’d muttered. I was still under the spell of a good dick down. “Can’t we just enjoy this moment?”
He’d wrapped his lanky arms even more tightly around me, reeking of sweat and cum. It was the sort of musk I think the manufacturers of Old Spice must have been going for when they were developing their speed stick just for men.
I’ve reflected on that moment a thousand times, from a thousand angles, like a diamond district jeweler contemplating the precision cut of sapphire. If I were God, maybe I’d have stopped time at that moment. Or maybe, as an Infinite Purveyor of Time and Space, I’d have been pleased to end my Journey, capital “J,” in those blissful moment laying in Anders’ arms still naked and shimmering.
“Hello?”
“Wright?”
“What do you want Petra? You’ve been blowing up my phone. ”
“So you have gotten my calls. The hell didn’t you answer?”
“I was...I’ve been studying, you know that.”
“Wright…I…Mom’s dead”
“Petra, what the fuck?!”
“I’m SERIOUS!”
“I’ve got an exam tomorrow, and here you gotta try and pull some mind game--”
“It was an accident Wright, and’----”
“I’m hanging up now, Petra. Fuck you very much.”
*****
Six months after my mother passed, I went to number 7 on the Billboard hot 100, celebrated as having brought a blues sound back to shit kids loved. It was a track called “Black Madonna,” a crooning joint about the most beautiful girl I’d ever met, the drummer for my band, an amazon warrior queen princess.
By then, I was unraveling fast, cancelling appearances, showing up fucked up to radio spots, and generally not giving a shit. The will had been sorted: my mother, a clinical psychologist who had made a singular fortune writing a book about raising a black boy and a white girl, had left everything, everything to the white girl.
It was inexplicable. We’d always had a solid relationship, Ma and me. I mean she’d once caught me doing lines of coke while home from break sophomore year, and she did try to put me in military school after I’d threatened to sodomize my sister when I was fourteen and Petra was twelve. (It’s an episode that made it to her book to the delight of liberal white readers everywhere). Other than these minor skirmishes, though, Ma and me had never really clashed.
Maybe she thought “Wright will be able to take care of himself, you know, with his music thing.” Except, my music thing wasn’t really a thing yet when she’d drafted her will. Maybe she wanted to do some sort of psychological experiment, dabbed with a touch of the sociological. Give the white girl everything, the black boy nothing, even though he’s the eldest. Even though she’s adopted. Even though he came from her vagina, her own flesh and blood. I was a test tube baby, but I can’t help but feel she must have resented the nigga whose cum had made me. I mean I am totally guessing here, like honestly, because we never talked about this shit, her will or her fortune, and no one ever expects to die in a car crash, as my mother did. She’d been on the way to a lecture at some posh club somewhere.
In the will, Ma’s instructions had been simple: “Petra, look after your brother.” And that was that.
