Another Country

Feeling more than usually restless, James Baldwin flew from New York to Paris in the late summer of 1961, and from there to Israel. Then, rather than proceed as he had planned to Africa—a part of the world he was not ready to confront—he decided to visit a friend in Istanbul. Baldwin’s arrival at his Turkish friend’s door, in the midst of a party, was, as the friend recalled, a great surprise: two rings of the bell, and there stood a small and bedraggled black man with a battered suitcase and enormous eyes. Engin Cezzar was a Turkish actor who had worked with Baldwin in New York, and he excitedly introduced “Jimmy Baldwin, of literary fame, the famous black American novelist” to the roomful of intellectuals and artists. Baldwin, in his element, eventually fell asleep in an actress’s lap.

It soon became clear that Baldwin was in terrible shape: exhausted, in poor health, worried that he was losing sight of his aims both as a writer and as a man. He desperately needed to be taken care of, Cezzar said; or, in the more dramatic terms that Baldwin used throughout his life, to be saved. His suitcase contained the manuscript of a long and ambitious novel that he had been working on for years, and that had already brought him to the brink of suicide. Of the many things that the wandering writer hoped to find—friends, rest, peace of mind—his single overwhelming need, his only real hope of salvation, was to finish the book.

[The New Yorker]

Train sex

The train, as though protesting its heavier burden, as though protesting the proximity of white buttock to black knee, groaned, lurched, the wheels seemed to scrape the track, making a tearing sound. Then it began to move uptown, where the masses would divide and the load become lighter. Lights flared and teetered by, they passed other platforms where people waited for other trains. Then they had the tunnel to themselves. The train rushed into the blackness with a phallic abandon, into the blackness which opened to receive it, opened, opened, the whole world shook with their coupling. Then, when it seemed that the roar and the movement would never cease, they came into the bright lights of 125^th Street. The train gasped and moaned to a halt. He had thought that he would get off here, but he watched the people move toward the doors, watched the doors open, watched them leave. It was mainly black people who left. He had thought that he would get off here and go home; but he watched the girl who reminded him of his sister as she moved sullenly past white people and stood for a moment on the platform before walking toward the steps. Suddenly he knew that he was never going home any more. 

From Another Country, just before this character throws himself off of the Washington Bridge.

Eff love.

Even if this is for album sales, I don’t care. This is inspiring. At least she said those things. At least someone said those things. And she looked fucking terrific. It’s amazing that she said those things looking like a fucking black rock star. Amen.

For Halloween

Thanks, Frederica! Depending on which look I choose, I’ll need a ponytail, which I can probably pick up around lunch at Ricky’s. Thinking Cherish The Day look is the best bet as it’s probably most iconic, but am not sold on the idea of having to wear a midriff all night.

This is what I think about, almost always, before I write

I can’t even choose an excerpt from this post by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I was discussing another one of his posts with Freddie that I twittered recently, and we talked about how amazing it is that so much amazing writing today is written on blogs. This is more timeless shit, from one of my favorite writers. I met him at a reading once, and just before I could do my whole, you should write another book, here is my info spiel, he introduced me to his editor. I don’t remember what he said he was working on, but I just wish that he would collect all of these blog posts into a book. That would be enough, really, just to make sure these pieces aren’t forgotten. 

One of the reasons I’ve been blogging so much about obesity, class, and race, is that these are the questions I live with. To set down the road of food consciousness, to endeavor to understand what you’re putting in the only body you’ll ever have, is to phase-shift into a parallel world. You become acquainted with ritual of unwrapping aluminum foil on long plane rides. You cut elaborate deals with your partner over child-care and cleaning. You go hurtling through the internet in search of a decent pizza stone. It angers your son, because his simple request for Pop-Tarts turns into a pop-quiz referencing the ingredients on the box.

But more than that, it’s the world I live in. The buses in Harlem heave under the weight of wrecked bodies. New York will not super-size itself, so you’ll see whole rows in which one person is taking up two seats and aisles in which people strain to squeeze past each other. And then there are the middle-age amputees in wheelchairs who’ve lost a leg or two way before their time. When I lived in Brooklyn, the most depressing aspect of my day was the commute back home. The deeper the five train wended into Brooklyn, the blacker it became, and the blacker it became, the fatter it got. 

I was there among them–the blacker and fatter–and filled with a sort of shameful self-loathing at myself and my greater selves around me. One of the hardest thing about being black is coming up dead last in almost anything that matters. As a child, and a young adult, I was lucky. Segregation was a cocoon brimming with all the lovely variety of black life. But out in the world you come to see, in the words of Peggy Olson, that they have it all–and so much of it. Working on the richest island in the world, then training through Brooklyn, or watching the buses slog down 125th has become a kind of corporeal metaphor–the achievement gap of our failing bodies, a slow sickness as the racial chasm.

The metaphor is, of course, deceptive–more about how it feels, than how it is. For one thing, because of where we live, some of the most afflicted areas of black America are five minutes away from major media. Unless someone kills a census worker, media generally avoids Clay County, Kentucky. Moreover, you can’t really hide in your car in New York. On the train, it’s all right there. And then there’s the absurd illusion of WhiteLand–this mythical place where there are no problems, because white people don’t actually have problems.

But intellectually understanding something doesn’t change your religion. In every black person, there’s a desire to, as a buddy once put it, “show these motherfuckers.” I keep going back to Bill Cosby, not as a leader, but as a marker of how we feel. “My problem,” he once told a crowd of black men. “Is that I’m sick of losing to white people.” When I heard him say that, I heard my mother and father. I heard my older brother. I heard the Babas from my old Rights of Passage program. I heard my professors at Howard. I heard one of my good friends–and his wife is white.

I heard them all. And I heard me. And I know that it is small of me. And I know that it is wrong of me. And I live for the day when I am right. But this is what I think about sometimes on the 2 train uptown. This is what I think about sometimes while cleaning the kitchen. And this is what I think about, almost always,before I write. I think about showing them. I think about showing myself.

[Ta-Nehisi Coates]

What a great picture

Just had to post it.

Monster

I’m quite proud of this little piece, and I’m planning on running it in the publication my writing group is putting together. I was originally planning it as a blog post, as it’s something I actually experienced, and I’m pretty much recounting it as it happened. But I’ve been reading a lot of Salinger lately–first Franny & Zooey, then Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and I’m starting in on Seymour: An Introduction right now. When I started writing I imagined the narrator was similar to one of the Glass men. It really works in this situation, because the point of view is so sociologically opposite from the “monster”, or beggar. There’s more of a disconnect in the way that narrator processes his own actions, and the result is more complex than my experience. At least I like to think so. I was horrified, but didn’t feel so guilty about it. I wonder how my fellow groupers will receive it. The theme of the publication is “Vermin, Pests, and Plague” (great, huh? I can’t take credit for it, sadly). Obviously, deformity does not equal disease, but the narrator treats the beggar the same way he would a leper.

I was riding the 4 train to work. It was at 8:48 in the morning—I remember because I was running late that morning, and I was watching the clock on the digital ticker impatiently. We pulled into 14^th street at 8:46 and a whole swell of people came into the car. It was completely packed and my legs were forced into the knees of the person sitting below me. I was clinging onto the handrail with one hand desperately.

I remember that I had nothing to do—no book to read, no headphones to listen to music with. If I’d had a journal, I couldn’t have written because I didn’t have both hands free. So I was there with nothing to do, free to look around at the other passengers. I turned to my right and at the crowd that was swaying with the movements of the train.

Shortly after we left the station at 14th, I heard gasps and I saw the crowd parting. Then I saw the head of a black man inching slowly towards me. He was carrying a blind man’s cane, and wearing wrap-around sunglasses and a baseball cap.

I knew what he was before I saw him. I knew from the gasps that he was some kind of monster, and I prayed that he would not come too near me. He moved closer still, his head bopping up and down as if he was moving to some silent beat. I didn’t bother to look around me—there was nowhere to go, so I stayed there put, gripping the bar tighter, my skin beginning to feel electric.

I tried to look ahead of me and concentrate on the poster in front of me. It was an ad for the Botanical Garden, and had a photograph of young people lounging on the grass in the park in Brooklyn. I focused on the couple in the foreground that was sitting cross-legged next to each other, their hands on each other’s back.

But then I heard him. The sound was a low moan that sounded like someone screaming from behind a closed door. It was short at first, then as it came nearer it grew lower, more guttural, and it started to stutter. Then there was the rustle of change being shaken in a cup.

When I looked up he was two feet from me. This was the first time I caught a full view of his face. The mouth below the sunglasses was huge and swollen—like he had hit head-first into something and the whole thing was puffed up. His top lip was the biggest, and the cleft below the nose was so large that it resembled a monkey’s. The two lips were fused together. This is what muffled the voice like it did, and as he got closer to me I realized the sound was less a scream than a whimper, a pleading sound, like he was yelling for someone to free him from the body.

As he came further at me I ducked my head under the bar and leaned over the passengers in front of me. I could not help but contort my face into a look of displeasure, and I immediately felt bad once I realized what kind of face I was making. I did all that I could to keep from uttering a gagging noise myself, but a little sound came out. But I looked at the passengers next to me, and remembered the gasps that I had first heard when he came onto the train, and my guilt was assuaged.

I was standing with my back to him now, and I could feel his weight moving against my back. I heard the whimpering sound again. I turned once more to look at him, and just caught the sight of his profile, just inches from my face. I could see what was beneath the sunglasses—nothing more than a crater, with a hole that puckered down in the middle where the eyeball should have been.

It seemed like just as soon as I had glanced the crater, the doors were opened, and people streamed out of the car like air out of a punctured tire. I rushed out of the doors, and once I was on the platform, I looked back in the window of the train to make sure he was still in there. He was, and I felt myself sighing with relief when the doors closed, sealing him in.

I felt truly awful for the whole slow walk up the subway stairs, and I searched the faces of the passengers around me for a hint that they were feeling the same thing. I knew that I shouldn’t have felt like I did, but I couldn’t help it.

Then when I got up to the street, there was a homeless person huddled in a blanket, with a sign printed on cardboard that read, Homeless, no job. 5 kids. There was a hat with a few bills inside. I realized that I should have given the man on the train some change.

A year ago on Halloween

Here is a post I drew up for my lifelong friend and brilliant newswoman, Jasmine, over on her dating blog, 20SomethingJaz. It’s an account of the events of last year, when I became estranged from my longtime boyfriend, first love, and best friend. It was a tremendously difficult experience that, in truth, I’m still dealing with, and this little piece of writing is only the beginning of me figuring out how to talk about it. I’ve received some positive feedback already from some ladies over there. It’s always nice to know that you’re not alone in these experiences of the heart.

***

A year ago on Halloween, I was invited to an amazing party. It was a celebration for a husband-and-wife author team who were releasing a magnificent cookbook, and as the Editorial Assistant for the book, I was invited to partake in the festivities.

The party was a New York dream. It was held in the kitchen of a four-star restaurant, and the guest list was a who’s-who of the New York food world. I looked incredibly cute: I was wearing a sexy, short vintage dress and Marc Jacobs heels. My roommate was dressed up also and on her way uptown in a cab to be my plus one. But I never made it inside. I spent the entire time outside of the party, crying on the phone to my very patient best friend in LA. When my roommate showed up, she hustled me off to the subway, and we went home.

I had been in New York City for about a year, working my butt off in book publishing as an assistant to an Executive Editor. My ex-boyfriend and I had been in an on-again, off-again relationship for five years. When he moved to New York from Texas, where he was living with his parents after graduation, we were in different places. We broke up but remained close—we were best friends, and on occasion we were intimate.

The previous Friday, we’d shared the most pleasant night together since he’d moved to New York. We met up at a mutual friend’s birthday party, and he looked great. There was something different about him. Something about his posture, and the way he walked that night. He had an aura of confidence that he hadn’t shown since he’d moved to the city. We went home together that night, and two days later I found out he was seeing someone else.

I spent a month going back and forth with him while he was seeing this other person, during which I lost two dress sizes from not eating, spent countless nights up, either on the phone with him or just unable to sleep, and suffered a couple minor panic attacks. Finally, after a particularly harrowing night of insomnia, I confronted him, and forced him to choose between me and her. He chose her, and we cut off all communication, ending our relationship for good.

My life since has been a complete whirlwind. I’ve made some strides in my job—I finished editing my first book. I’ve developed great relationships with people I work with, including the authors who threw the party, whose book went on to win the top honor in food writing. I got a great new apartment. I made friends and re-connected with others. I’ve written a good part of a novel.

So what have I learned? First, it’s important to remember that pain is inevitable. All I can do is trust myself that when it happens, I’ll figure out how to handle it. It’s also important not to be afraid to risk being alone when someone is hurting you. I think often about where I would be if I hadn’t had the courage to confront him when I did.

I’m sure other lessons from this experience remain to be seen. I’m not sure if I’m “over it” yet. I miss him sometimes. The pain is gone, but I remain pretty hesitant to trust others romantically. I can’t report a happy ending yet. After several romantic disasters, I took a self-imposed break from dating. I’m currently inching myself out of isolation, and let me tell you, it’s scary.

I’m writing this because Halloween is in two weeks, and I hope it will be better than last year. For those of you not in New York, Halloween here is amazing. Everyone goes out and is in good, mischievous spirits. Masked strangers crowd the streets lining parade routes, dancing and singing. The subway is one giant, mobile costume party. It is mysterious and romantic, and you feel that anything can happen.

Maybe I will fall in love with a masked stranger, or maybe I will have another heartbreak—I don’t know, and for the first time in awhile that feels like a good thing. I know this for sure: I’ve gotten a few invites to parties, I’ve sent my RSVPs, and I plan on attending. I look forward to celebrating with my friends, whom I’ve grown closer to, it’s safe to say, due to the events of the past year. I don’t have a costume yet. I have a vague idea of being an angel, but haven’t found the perfect pair of wings yet. But I am excited.

 [A Far Too Common Story]

Nicki Minaj: An endorsement, with reservations

Nicki Minaj is bad. She is young, original, astoundingly proportioned, and her talent goes without saying. Minaj is not the sex pro of what we can now probably call the old guard of female rappers, of which Trina, who co-stars in the above video with Minaj, is the leader. She’s fashioned herself as the “Harajuku Barbie”, a non-sensical (and racist) designation for the type of feminine role she occupies. Amber Rose, who she’s notably been seen rolling with lately, is another hip hop babe who fits this role. “Barbies”, which Minaj has also taken to calling her fans–have plastic-perfect good looks, an aloof confidence, and an affinity to girliness that flirts, ostentatiously, with homosexuality.

Is this still objectification? Of course. Witness Amber Rose’s unfortunate recent Complex photoshoot, in which she appears in a cage in homage to Grace Jones’ infamous Jean-Paul Goude photographs, as proof of the negative potential of such an identity. It’s not as negative as “slut”, but it’s still an object, and can be just as limiting. In Minaj’s case, the intimations of bisexuality seem put-on for the pleasure of men, but for homosexuality to be present in rap music without an automatic negative connotation is still exciting. It’s a step in the right direction.

Earlier: Nicki Minaj

Shyne is free

Another New York rapper home, hope he does something big. In his honor.