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Eagle Rock Reservation Overlook, West Orange, NJ | 3 Apr. 2022 | Difo

Strange Days

I didn’t have a bedroom in the House anymore. Mom had told me to leave a couple months before, and I had. Enough was definitely enough, and I didn’t blame her. But I would have stayed if she’d let me.

Mom inherited the House in 1997 after Grandpa died. She’d done much more redecorating than renovating as if in implicit acknowledgment that Grandpa had built a perfect house. The House was always “Grandpa’s House” to me and I suspect so too for Germain and Harmony.

Grandpa built the House not long after he returned from WWII. In the 1940s, Black men weren’t courageous enough or disciplined enough for combat, their proper role being to support White gallantry. So Grandpa spent his War driving the Red Ball Express, a massive convoy network that trucked war fighting supplies—food, fuel, and ordnance—from the beachhead at Normandy to the Allied forces fighting their way through Nazi occupied France. It was an astonishing feat of logistics that wasn’t enough to earn its mostly Black operators a spot in the postwar middle class. Grandpa spoke even less about race and racism than he did about the War. But even as a kid, the irony of Black men fighting to liberate Europeans from oppression while enduring oppression within the very army doing the liberating left a coppery bitterness in my mouth.

Finding and Loathing

One afternoon, years before Grandpa died, Germain and I were digging around in one of the closets in Grandpa’s bedroom. It had been less than a year since Mom had fled The Church Universal and Triumphant—a fanatical and semi famous religious organization in Montana that ensnared our family during the 1980s. We called it The Church. The Church devoured my father’s identity entirely. We called him “Papa.” That is, until he died of a preventable illness to which his faith had blinded him.

September 10th 1990—the date that cult leader, Guru Ma, had prophesied would be the end of days—had come and gone without incident. Without Argmegeddon, anyway. That bogus prediction was the latest in a long line of bogus predictions, but boy was it a whopper. A $60,000 per family member whopper. It was apparently also the last straw for Mom, because not long after we crawled out of the bomb shelters in the Montana mountains, having been assured that our fervent piety had averted the apocalypse, we were on our way to “vacation” at Grandpa’s house in New Jersey. I told my best friend, Garland, that I’d see him in a couple weeks. I never lived in Montana again.

The weather on that afternoon in Jersey was decidedly not Montanan. The little town of Boonton was socked in, low cloud cover punctuated by a damp, just-above-freezing, kind of cold that’s unique to the polluted woodland climate of the Northeastern United States. The gray rain seemed to mock Germain and me as we stared outside, our little Brown noses pressed against the window pane and fogging the glass with each exhale. Mom had recently bought Germain and me military fatigue pants. As soon as we’d completed our academic assignments every day we’d change our clothes and become soldiers, crawling around under the thick shrubs that surrounded Grandpa’s House with sticks standing in for assault rifles.

Mom homeschooled us during the day and in the evenings was a hostess at Rod’s Steakhouse in Madison. She usually left for work at around 4:30 in the afternoon though she was usually running late, calling out last minute instructions to my brother and sister and me as she crashed out the backdoor toward the garage. We were usually asleep when she got home. I didn’t fully appreciate how difficult Mom’s life had been in those days until I was much older. She was also about seven months pregnant with the being that would become my youngest brother, Justinian.

Grandpa returned home from work at different times depending on where the job site was—he was a union carpenter—but he usually didn’t get home until around seven. The sweet spot for Germain and me was those few hours after Mom left for work but before Grandpa got home. It began when Mom, driving the blue GMC pickup Grandpa had lent her, shot out of the driveway like a warplane off the front of an aircraft carrier. It ended when we heard the calm rumble of Grandpa’s eight cylinder, Z28 Camaro as he eased it back into the driveway.

The weather was keeping us inside that day but it couldn’t stifle our thirst for marshal conquest. Grandpa's room was the next frontier! When we were sure Mom was really gone, we crept on tiptoe into the bedroom, even though there was nobody other than Harmony in the house. The bedroom was impeccably clean and neat, sterile almost. I felt like a cat burglar infiltrating a museum.

I was rummaging through the back of Grandpa’s closet a little while later when my hands stumbled upon something that looked kind of like a safety deposit box. The lid and sides were wrapped in soft vinyl-like material, like the little book-like thing high school diplomas come in. It was about the size of a large shoebox, and colored a dark blue that was basically black.

I fumbled with the box’s latch. The mechanism reminded me of the latch that secured my diary—the locked diary whose key I couldn't find anywhere. I’d probably left it in Montana along with the other three quarters of my life. The box’s latch wasn’t locked.

There was a small sheath in the box that grabbed my attention right away. It looked like something that should contain a dagger, and for some reason, daggers and throwing stars and other ostensibly ninja-related equipment were a huge deal among boys in the early 1990s. Probably among some girls too, but in the 90s there were two distinct genders and two distinct gender roles. Liberals wouldn’t invent “non-binary” for another two decades.

I tossed the sheath to the side, along with a pistol holster and the rest of the box’s non-dagger-related contents. I sorted through the box. “There has to be a dagger in here somewhere,'' I reasoned poorly.

There was no dagger. Germain and I lost interest all together in the Grandpa’s room conquest once it became clear that there were no other WWII vintage weapons to be found there. Pretending to kill people just wasn’t that fun indoors. We decided to play legos instead. We exited the room with none of the stealth with which we’d arrived, and left the contents of the closet strewn across the floor.

I noticed the pistol holster for the first time when I returned to the room a couple hours later to clean up. It was 6:30 and Grandpa would be home soon. It was beautiful and for some reason, captivating. I’d never seen anything like it. My slender brown fingers glided slowly, almost reverently, over the holster’s surface, like passing a hand over a tombstone. My hands stopped at an empty space on the holster’s surface where the pattern of tiny holes in the leather betrayed that there’d once been a swastika stitched there. I recoiled as though I’d stumbled upon a snake, the hate it represented seeming to reach forward through time to throttle my neck. My plans to return the room to the exact condition in which I found it evaporated. I threw the holster down into the box on top of the sheath, and slammed it shut.

My heart thudded in my ears as I backed away from the closet, retreating without thinking to the living room, which until this moment had been the spookiest part of Grandpa’s House. The living room was a shadowy and mysterious place, made so in part by the multiple layers of heavy curtains—Grandpa called them “drapes”—that framed the room. There was a baby grand piano in there too that I never saw anyone play, and a large mid-century couch covered in plastic. It squeaked and squealed and crinkled when anyone sat on it, like someone was folding a tarp while also squeegeeing a window. 

There was a framed black and white photo of Grandpa hanging on the wall in the living room across from where I was sitting. We weren’t supposed to sit on the couch, but I did anyway. It was a bust shot of Grandpa in his Army dress uniform—young, handsome. The picture had always made me feel good—proud, patriotic—but peering into his dark eyes that day was like traveling backward through time. What was there to be so happy about in 1939, I wondered? Racism? War? Nazi daggers?

To my mind, the Nazi paraphernalia was incontrovertible proof that Grandpa was a war hero. Somehow believing that, framing the hate in that way, helped me make sense of what I’d found in the box. Really, Grandpa was just one of tens of thousands of Black men and women who, when called upon, stepped up to serve the interests of a country that hated them. He wasn’t a hero because he killed Nazis. He was a hero because he didn’t kill the White people who oppressed him. He was a hero because of the way he lived. He’d found a way to be satisfied in a world designed to exclude him. He’d found a way to step out from behind the shadow of White maleness and stand for something. He’d been a good man: reliable, honest, committed.

Strange Calls

I was none of those things.

When I woke up on the morning of September 11th, 2001, in Grandpa’s house, the specifics of my late grandfather’s character were far from my mind. They were shoved into the crawlspace deep in my mind where I stored the parts of myself that hurt too much to think about—the stuff that reminded me of who I might have been if I’d not been me. 

Mom was allowing me to sleep at the house only because I had provided her written evidence that I would check into an inpatient drug detox program up in Bergen County. She was going to drop me off there on Thursday. The detox program would last four days, and then a social worker would arrange for me to be transferred to some rehab for indigents. Like a sheriff’s officer transferring a convict from the county jail to the state penitentiary.

There was no bedroom for me anymore at the House, so I’d made camp in the family room, which was also the one room in the house with a cable TV connection. The conditions of my stay included that I could not be in the house unless Mom was in the house. Windows and doors, locked by keys I didn’t have, were the enforcement mechanism. It meant that when Mom left for work, I had to leave, too, even though I didn’t have anywhere in particular to be.

I was still lying on the pull out couch, uncomfortable and avoiding until the last possible minute the realities of my life when Flight 175 slammed into the south tower. Mom hadn’t come into the room to scold me out of bed.

It was a strange start to the day. Yes, because a handful of guys with box cutters had stolen several symbols of American superiority, and crashed them into titanic symbols of American military and economic imperialism. It was also strange though because Mike called the House. That normally would have been unremarkable, but Mike was supposed to be “Upstate.” We called drug rehab “Upstate” for some reason. The second tower had just collapsed. 

Like junkies everywhere, Mike and I had many times sworn to each other, while floating in the buttery throws of good highs, that “this is the last time,” and that, “we’re going to detox next week.” Those pacts and deals would disintegrate the next awful morning at the first signs of dope sickness. Like the last bit of snow in March rainstorm.

That September, I’d finally stumbled into motivation enough to honor one of those pacts. Not because I’d arrived at some life-altering epiphany. There was no honor in it. No courage. Stealing or scamming or scaring up enough money every day to satisfy my ever-accelerating habit had become untenable. Untenable and risky. I’d been arrested twice already in the preceding eight months. Petty stuff: trespassing and shoplifting. But I’d become increasingly willing to take outrageous risks to come up with money. The physical and emotional and mental scarcity—the desperation—to which I woke every morning demanded it. I was out of options, and there was no amount of drugs I could ingest to blot out the sensation of being at the end of an emotional rope. I was serious about shipping Upstate. 

So was Mike. Or he was supposed to be. 

“Will you pick me up at Daytop?” he panted. 

Mike sounded desperate and small on the other side of the phone line. His voice sounded like a Chihuahua looks.  

“When?” I replied. “Now?”

“Yeah.” 

For a long moment, I said nothing. I could hear a voice in the background working hard to convince Mike to stay, rotating among chiding, cajoling, and begging. The voice was soothing, in a perfunctory, professional sort of way. And familiar somehow.

On White Seas

“The White Sea is rapacious and it’s vast. It erodes the Black sailor like an ocean smoothing a pebble. The Black sailor loses his way, the Black sailor loses his way, the Black sailor loses his way. Until he learns to navigate. Until he masters the tools of the master sailor’s trade. If he masters them. The Black sailor, the deck of his tiny cabin pitching ceaselessly beneath his feet, looks into the mirror bolted to the bulkhead, and finds a house negro, an Uncle Tom gawking back at him.”

It would take my ’91 Ford Escort and I about 30 minutes to struggle from Grandpa’s House in Boonton Township to Daytop Village in Mendham. We’d cover a large chunk of Morris County along the way, passing through corridors of new money like a mansion tour through the Hollywood hills. There weren't many glitzy celebrities living in the gated properties we passed and there weren’t any paparazzi or starstruck fans. CEOs and hedge fund managers and law firm partners—the class of people the American socioeconomic system exists to enrich—inhabited that tucked-away corner of the Garden State. Close enough to New York City that it was commutable by Midtown Direct, but secluded enough to shield wealthy children from the vicissitudes of pedestrian life.

“Ho, hey, it’s OK. You’re gonna work for us one day.”

The Del Barton School—one of the most exclusive prep schools in the country—lay nestled in that cocoon of staggering privilege. Of Whiteness. Del Barton was a Catholic school. My alma mater, Morris Catholic, was a parochial school, too. But that’s precisely where the similarities between the two institutions ended.

“Ho, hey, it’s OK. You’re gonna work for us one day.”

My highschool friend Vincent was captain of Morris Catholic’s proud varsity soccer team, and played against the Del Barton boys several times each season. Morris Catholic’s boys soccer program had been well regarded for a long time. Long enough that uncle Connie—Mom’s brother—was scoring goals for Morris Catholic in the 70s. Vin’s team was really good—they beat Del Barton most of the time. But the Del Barton boys were always laughing in the end.

“Ho, hey, it’s OK. You’re gonna for us one day.”

That the coaches and parents and school administrators ignored those chants, or encouraged them, says a lot about Del Barton values. Vincent slipped and fell off a waterfall in Hawaii In 2008. He didn’t survive. The spirit of Del Barton lives on without him.

“Ho, hey, it’s OK. You’re gonna for us one day.”

Generator

Humans are exceptionally social beings, even by primate standards. Our species’s relentless longing for our peer’s acceptance is a key integer in that evolutionary equation. Those attributes mean that we can work together, build teams and organizations, the end result of which are marvels like airplanes and skyscrapers and jet fuel. The downside is that we are utterly ill-equipped to cope with solitude. Any freshman psychology major knows that solitary confinement turns even the toughest prisoners into babbling lunatics. The pain of ostracization transcends the plane of psychological anguish. It physically hurts to be “other.” 

Whiteness generates “otherness” like no other institution. It was designed in the 17th century to justify the enslavement of Brown people, and the indentured servitude of poor White people, without whom capitalism couldn’t generate the private power and exclusivity of which Del Barton is a modern incarnation.

The distinction between the terms is important—privilege and Whiteness. Many people aspire to wealth and privilege. Many have achieved it. Including many Black people. But Whiteness, now Whiteness is an inheritance. Whiteness is why the poor White man believes that he’s in a position to shout down President Obama. His sense of entitlement is not unjustified, either. This is America. And at least he ain’t no nigger. 

No Black person, however talented or successful, can earn Whiteness or have it bestowed upon them. Not ever. Whiteness is a birthright.

Nobody taught me that, or if they had, I hadn’t heard them. Mom did teach Germain, Harmony, and me where we’d come from––there were books, and there were plays, and there were the National Geographic looking documentaries with British narrators. My organized education and understanding around Blackness was intensely cerebral in that way. I discovered what my skin color meant in real world terms the same way I learned about sex and drugs and everything else of which The Church’s moral system chose not to take notice. I learned from my peers, and through fraught progressions of trial and error. Mostly error.

Here’s the thing: anyone who wants to change their life, or change other people’s lives, or change a community, or change a country needs power. Most powerful people are White. The gatekeepers who control access to powerful people are also mostly White. The pragmatic, Black sailor who wants even to navigate that sea of Whiteness, let alone thrive in it, has got to learn to speak and behave in a way that doesn’t make White people uncomfortable. The skill is necessary—though certainly not sufficient—to make up for the social deficit Blackness carries with it in circles of power. Being Black and successful is to masterfully tiptoe around White fragility and White rage, while simultaneously developing a strong Black identity. It’s a careful balance, a lifelong practice quite apart from the challenges everyone encounters along the way toward success.

My understanding of that critical skill, and the tactics it implied, were at best rudimentary in the 90s. Blackness was to me just a demographic fact, and it was Martin Luther King documentaries, and it was black and white photos of Grandpa on the wall in the living room. I pawed blindly through the 90s, painfully unaware that most everything I did, or said, or felt about myself was an involuntary reaction to the world in which I found myself. A world that would let me watch the adults divvy up power at the big table so long as I joined them in pretending that I wasn’t Black. Denying the significance of my identity became my identity. There was no indignity I wouldn’t suffer, no element of Blackness I wouldn’t denigrate, no element of my spirit I wouldn’t prostitute to maintain the favor of my White peers. 

Especially my White, male peers.

“Ho, hey, it’s OK. You’re gonna work for us one day.”

Daytopic

I’d turned left off of Mendham road and onto Daytop’s property 35 minutes after I’d left Grandpa’s House, late and flustered. Weekend road work had reduced traffic along a large stretch of Mendham Road to a single lane. I’d sat waiting for this signalman and then the next to waive me forward, the sun reflecting off of their mirror-reflective wraparound Oakleys. Oakleys knock-offs, let's be honest. Nobody is buying three hundred dollar sunglasses, who’s entire job consists of trying to look tough while waving a flag, and roasting alive in an asphalt skillet.

My smug sense of superiority, unwarranted and frail, had evaporated immediately once I’d glanced down at the temperature gauge on the Escort’s scuffed instrument cluster. The car could always overheat at any time, and to that extent, sitting in traffic was about the worst place for the ailing Escort to be. I’d been irrationally self-conscious about it, too. None of the White ladies in traffic around me had known anything about the Escort’s radiator or thermostat, or would have cared one way or the other if they had. But I’d been able to feel their disdainful stares burning toward me from inside their Porches and Range Rovers. I’d cursed them for thinking about me the same way I’d been thinking about the guy with the knockoff Oakleys.

The radiator was fine. I was grateful for that for a few moments. Happy at least. Those aren’t the same thing. I’d been feeling guilty about my haughty signalman musings, and the small rush of endorphins my functioning radiator had delivered lifted my mood a bit.

I eased the Escort up the meandering driveway that connected the buildings of Daytop Village to Mendham road. The driveway cut through a sprawling lawn, dense woods bordering the manicured turf on both sides. The main building sat at the crest of a small rise. It was an old mansion which had been converted into a drug and alcohol rehab—and behavior modification center–-for adolescents and young adults.

It had been the spring of 1999 when I’d pulled up in front of Daytop for the first time. I’d arrived in handcuffs and shackles, and sitting on a vinyl-covered bench seat in the rear of a sheriff's van. I’d spent the preceding several months detoxing in a cell—they’d called it, euphemistically, a “room”—at Morris County Juvenile Detention Center. Daytop’s property was impressive enough that I’d had the sense that I’d been admitted to a ritzy celebrity rehab. I’d assumed back then, incorrectly it would turn out, that life at Daytop would be better than life at M.C.J.D.C.

I harbored no such delusions on September 11, 2001. Daytop was nothing like reality TV rehab. A new Daytop inmate could look forward to countless hours of hard labor and being berated, often publicly, for even minor violations of a hopelessly convoluted code of conduct. I didn’t at all blame Mike for leaving Daytop “Against Medical Advice.”

The driveway terminated in a small cul de sac, on the far side of which rose a set of stairs. The individual steps looked thicker than they needed to be and they were of that bland, tannish color that seemed to shade everything during the 90s. Mike stood waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, a massive black garbage bag on the pavement next to him. I’d been kicked out of enough rehabs, including this particular rehab, to recognize that contractor grade trash bag as the makeshift suitcase that it was. Mike looked even more anxious, and sicker, and skinnier than he usually did.

I recognized the counselor standing at the top of the stairs—Jim Tambini—and I realized that it’d been Tambini’s voice in the background when I’d talked to Mike earlier in the day. Mike began moving toward the approaching Escort, and Tambini stayed perched up there like a gargoyle, watching the scene unfold below, and dropping last minute admonitions on Mike like a pigeon shitting on tourists in Washington Square Park.

Mike had grabbed the handle and begun to open the car door before the Escort had come to a complete stop. “Pop the trunk?” he asked through the open window without saying hello. Before I could answer, he was drag-lifting his AMA luggage toward the rear of the Escort. I winced when Mike slammed the trunk shut, and I wondered whether that day would be the one that the trunk lid or the bumper finally dropped off of the car. In this awful rehab’s cul de sac. With Jim Tambinni wailing in the background like a Euro style police siren.

There was a sheen of sweat on Mike’s forehead when he finally settled into the passenger seat, and he was breathing hard. His eyes were twitchy and unfocused and they bulged out of his narrow face adding to the classic junkie caricature his visage always evoked. He seemed to be avoiding looking me in the eye.

Mike yanked the door shut, too hard, behind him, and it reminded me that I’d never known Mike to drive a truly shitty car. I winced again. He pressed the flimsy plastic button on the door handle to roll the window up, and the old mechanism chugged the pane of smudged glass up toward its slot in the top of the door jam. Tambini was finally silenced.

I shifted the Escort into gear, and the car lurched forward disconcertingly when the decrepit transmission caught. We’d both spent enough time in the Escort to expect lurch, and neither of us said anything. There was nothing to say. We both knew where we were going.

M-City

“Do you fuck-faces sell heroin here or do you not?” I muttered to myself as I surveyed the empty courtyard, spite and frustration having overwhelmed my fear of the police. It was about 11:30 AM. Copping that early in the day was never easy, but M-City was also never this empty—it was a ghost town. Something was off. I walked back across the courtyard, my beat-up Etnies kicking up little clouds of orangish dust as I shuffled from one end of the grassless expanse to the other and back again.

The itchy desire to get high and the ever-present risk of arrest had coalesced into a barely tolerable tension by the time I’d completed my fourth crossing. I approached one of the L-shaped buildings that formed the perimeter of the M-City complex. Each of the perimeter buildings had a public passthrough on the ground level which connected the courtyard to the outside world. I approached the nearest passthrough and peered into it like a frightened child looking down a well. It was the space that an armed robber would no doubt produce if he were asked to design the ideal environment for performing his craft. I could hear excited chatter echoing off the passthrough’s walls, and the drive to find smack began to overwhelm my fear of being robbed. I stood there for a long moment, like a kid standing on a diving board convincing himself to jump. “There dope on the other side of this passthrough,” I whispered to myself. 

The passthrough swallowed me like a white marble dropped into a pot of ink. The air was putrid. Too cool. Too damp. Half of the lights in the passthrough were out, and the lights were too few and too weak to light the space enough even if they’d all been working. I couldn’t see the rats that scampered from in front of me but I could hear them. The 30 seconds it took me to negotiate the passthrough felt like ten minutes.

I emerged on Orange street, and the drug dealers were there. Some of them were posted up on the sidewalk. Several were standing in the middle of Orange street. One guy was trying to climb one of the bony trees that jutted out of metal sidewalk grates along Orange street. Wherever they were standing, all of the guys were facing east, toward the Hudson river. They were pointing and craning their necks to get a better view of lower Manhattan whose skyline peeked out from between the abandoned industrial buildings which framed the horizon. There wasn’t much to see.

“Oh right,” I remembered. “That’s happening.”

My appearance didn’t seem to register with anyone standing there for some time. Eventually, one guy turned to me and said simply, “We at war,” the hierarchical distinction between drug dealer and drug user having apparently been suspended under the extenuating circumstances.

“Yo, can I get three DMX and four Air Force One?” I said quickly.

Regarding Michael

“I’ve been here before. I’ve been here before. I’ve been here before.

It’s slicing and searing through my heart, rolling out through my chest—like napalm fire. Jolting, surging like power through a live wire. Vision blurring, narrowing. Adrenaline spiking. Head spinning, heartbeat thumping.

I’ve been here before. I’ve been here before. I’ve been here before.

History, and slavery, and genocide. A Black history. Inner city kids, and shame. What would Grandpa do? Always so quick to anger. To rage. Embarrassment. Another angry Black Man. Never talk Black to a White man. Color blind and the playground. Sticky cup holder, and a dirty Voyager. Alone. Peering through the glass in Black and White. And betrayal.

I’ve been here before. I’ve been here before. I’ve been here before.”

My relationship with Mike La Salle had begun some ten years earlier during recess. It was my first week of seventh grade at St. Pius X in Montville, a wealthy town in suburban New Jersey. I was the only Black person in Ms. Driver’s seventh grade class of 25 students, and one of three non-White people in the entire school. My classmates had known each other for a decade already when I met them, having developed together along a relatively obstruction-free path from kindergarten to junior high school.

Mike stuck up for me when a popular kid—Steve was his name—tripped me at recess. For the St. Pius boys—all of the boys—recess in early September meant tag football games. The girls sat and stood on the ancient cement stairs at the corner of the cracked parking lot that was the playing field. The low status girls—the girls with acne, or flat chests, or a few extra pounds, or whose parents had too little money—stood reverently around the popular girls. They chatted and laughed and whispered and pretended to be uninterested in watching the popular boys wield arbitrary playground justice on the football pavement.

The football games were ostensibly “two-hand-touch,” but touches transitioned to pushes and shoves, and then into something so violent that any recess chaperon who was paying attention—none ever were—would have ended the game on the spot. At least in organized football, players wear equipment, there are rules, and someone cares about enforcing them. These weren’t games. These were demonstrations of power. These were a place where, as in the adult world, people with power and status targeted people with less power and status. Just because they could.

I'd found myself on the ground for the third time before I accepted that they’d targeted me. The sun shone directly into my eyes as I lay there so that I couldn’t see the origin of the chorus of voices mocking me. But I didn’t need to see in order to recognize Steve's voice. Before I could leap to my feet, Mike was standing over me, reaching down, hand outstretched. His body blocked the sun so that he was silhouetted against a sky that was of that deep blue that only late summer brings. It took me a moment to realize that he’d just cashed in his influence with Steve and the other kids to purchase my freedom and safety. I grabbed his hand.

Over the decade that followed that auspicious introduction, Mike and his family—he had two, very cis parents and an older sister—treated me with kindness. The kindness was genuine in the same way that a Christian missionary’s kindness is genuine—kindness interwoven with pity and hierarchy and a hint of disdain. We might call it a “White Savior” complex today, but that sort of descriptive language—that “wokeism,” I guess—didn’t really exist in the 1990s.

Silos

“See, I knew they weren’t racists,” I boasted out loud to myself. I returned the phone’s pea green receiver to its cradle mounted vertically on the kitchen wall. Mom had replaced a lot of furniture and appliances after Grandpa died but weirdly, not that old, rotary phone. I added the La Salle family’s last minute invitation to attend their BBQ to the evidence I was always assembling to persuade myself that White suburbia would eventually forget that I was Black. “I knew it,” I whisper-screamed to myself. “Maybe that football game was the best thing that ever happened to me,'' I said, rubbing the scabs on my elbows. “I’m in!” 

My first look at the La Salle’s house the following week confirmed my suspicions. Mike was rich. The house sprawled across a large plot of land in a prefab development in Montville. Mrs. La Salle smiled and waved enthusiastically as Mom backed her blue Plymouth Voyager out of the La Salle’s driveway. I was grateful for once that she so frequently had places to be that weren’t in my life. Mom often intimidates people. Unintentionally, but still. Plus, the Voyager looked so shabby next to Mrs. La Salle’s Lexus. If White suburbs people were ever going to excuse my Blackness, it wouldn't be because of my membership in a family led by religious fanatics, or their weird as hell macrobiotic diet.

I searched Mrs. La Salle’s face for evidence of judgment, inadvertently honing a valuable navigating skill for my life on the White Sea. The skill meshed so seamlessly with the high-level communication skills I inherited from my parents that it was difficult to pinpoint where the performative Christophe ended and the authentic Christophe began. If there even was an authentic Christophe in the first place.

My search yielded no negative results. “See, I knew they weren’t racists.”

Mom’s Blue Voyager disappeared from view, and the commotion and excitement around my arrival abated faster than anyone seemed to have expected. I twisted the friendship bracelet around my wrist between my thumb like a farmer might with a piece of hay. Garland had the other one. I wondered if he still wore it.

Mrs. La Salle looked after my Mom for longer than seemed normal, and she looked slightly startled when she finally turned to face me. A broad, wistful smile had engulfed her face yet had somehow not reached her eyes.

“Michael, why don’t you show Chris to your bedroom so that he can change into his swim trunks,” she said without turning to face Mike. “I hope you brought an appetite along with those swim trunks, young man,” she said, taking one hand off of her toned thigh to point at my backpack. She half squatted when she spoke, in the way that an adult does when they’re talking to a young child. I smiled and thanked her more times than necessary, and Mike led me through the massive three-car garage, and into the house.

I changed like I was an actor switching costumes between scenes in a Broadway play. I didn’t want to give the La Salles any reason to wonder where I was. I didn’t doubt the La Salles trusted me to not rummage through their belongings looking for something to steal. I was equally certain though that the image of Chris the Black burglar would appear in their consciousness. Like a reflex. They’d dismiss the image, of course, confident in their “color blindness,” and they’d deny that it’d ever existed even if god itself had asked them about it. And they’d believe themselves to be honest. But the image would have been there nonetheless. Tiptoeing around stereotypes about Blackness motivated nearly all my public behavior. It was another tool that would serve me well across a lifetime of navigating the White Sea.

“That was fast,” Mr. La Salle said as he strode toward me and away from the grill, his hand outstretched. “I thought you’d just gotten here.” There were about 20 people in the La Salle’s large backyard—kids jumping in and out of the pool, young mothers judging each other’s clothes and mothering skills with barely concealed contempt, middle aged fathers dolling out friendly, unsolicited, advice to anyone who’d listen. 

The party’s atmosphere changed when I walked in. Noticeably. It was as if someone turned the BBQ's volume and playing speed down by 75 percent. It stayed that way until Mr. La Salle reached me. “It’s OK, he’s safe,” everyone seemed to be thinking but not saying.

Mr. La Salle clapped me good naturedly on the shoulder. “Welcome,” he bellowed in a voice that was too loud under the circumstances. I winced and then smiled at him broadly, and in a way that felt a little absurd. “Thanks so much for having me over, Mr. La Salle,” I gushed, the words bubbling through my smiling lips like foam out of an overflowing washing machine. I hoped that my voice reflected my gratitude.

“You don’t have a drink!” Mrs. La Salle crowed, feigning genuine alarm. “Go back inside and find yourself something,” she commanded through that same paper mache smile from earlier. “There’s plenty of stuff in the fridge.“

“But hands off my brewskis,” Mr. La Salle quipped, and winked at me in that way dads from the suburbs wink at kids after cracking bad jokes. The joke wasn’t funny of course but the smile smeared across my face was genuine.

“See, I knew they weren’t racists.”

I was still smiling to myself when I shut the refrigerator door and noticed the “Flour,” “Sugar,” and “Salt” containers on the counter. Sometimes they’re just decorative, sometimes they’re not, but some version of those containers sits on counters in millions of American kitchens. Like ballistic missile silos on silent watch. I never did discover whether there was really flour or sugar or salt in the large red and white containers on the La Salle’s counter. Because there was a mammy printed on the container underneath the word “Flour.” The words, “If mammy ain’t happy, ain’t nobody gone be happy,” were printed below the image.

“Those are some big hands you’ve got there,” Mr. La Salle exclaimed. Again, too loud.

I blinked. “Wha, what?” I stammered.

“Big hands, you’ve got big hands. Like Hendrix.”

“Yeah, I do,” I said, adjusting my mask and getting back into the game—the master sailor bounces back quickly from the shock of racism. 

I didn't remember making my way back to the BBQ, and I was surprised to see that I was holding a large cup of Pepsi out in front of me, rather awkwardly.

“Yeah, my hands are alwa-”

“You know what they say about guys with big hands …,” Mike interrupted.” Mr. La Salle and Mike snickered. I mustered a fake laugh.

Overlooking

My eyes snapped open.  “Fuck,” I thought to myself. “How long have we been here?”

12:38 pm. Not too long.

I shook Mike. “Bro … Dude … Wake-up.”

Mike was hunched in the passenger side seat, leaned over as if he was about to take a drag from the cigarette wedged between his fingers. Just as it seemed certain that he’d fall forward and slam his head into the dashboard, his head would suddenly bob back up suddenly, as if it were a beachball a kid was trying to hold underwater. The cigarette had burned down to the filter, which itself had begun to smolder. It had been the sharp stink of cooking fiberglass and cotton, I realized, that had ripped me out of my dope dream.

It came back to me then. The silos and the mammy and Rosali La Salle’s paper mache smile. I hadn’t realized how much energy I’d spent forgetting that nightmare. Minimizing. Discounting. I’d never forget it again after that day. The relationship that had been conceived on a playground in Montville many Septembers before began to die that day. Slowly and painfully, with a clear, cerulean sky as its backdrop. 

I stopped trying to wake Mike and instead plucked the smoldering butt out from between his fingers without touching his hand. I yanked on the Escort’s black, plastic door handle and shoved my shoulder into the door to force it open. It didn’t. I sighed and rolled the window down so that I could open the door from the outside.

I walked against traffic, hugging the curb alongside the bowling alley’s one-way driveway, until I emerged back on Eagle Rock Avenue. I looked left and then right, marveling, before merging into the river of people that was streaming toward Eagle Rock Reservation. They trudged, faces sullen, many eyes puffy and red from recently shed tears. There wasn’t much traffic, and the cars that did come up Eagle Rock yielded to the flowing pedestrians. Either out of deference or because there was no other choice.

Then I was standing alongside hundreds of people at Eagle Rock Park overlook, not realizing that I was standing on a future 9/11 memorial. Hudson and Essex Counties sprawled across the valley beneath us, helping to make the Garden State the most densely populated state in the nation. Everyone faced east, stared east, the opaque cloud of aerial debris on the far side of the Hudson obscuring carnage of which we didn’t yet know the extent. It was like staring into a used vacuum cleaner bag that someone had torn open with a knife.

So too did opaque clouds obscure my view of myself, the world, and my place in it. A milieu of self hatred worked like ‘round the clock masons on invisible scaffolding, chipping away chunks of my Blackness, and pasting the corrosive mortar of White supremacy in the resulting spaces. Until virtually no part of the original structure remained.

On September 11, 2001, some combination of serendipity and shock shot a quake through the infrastructure of my self-loathing. I could see then that I’d always defined myself in terms of the White boys and men around me. Sidekick. First officer. Support staff. Escort.

The Towers’ collapse was a matter of hours, my self hate would collapse in stages over the course of years. A slow motion demolition. An even slower rebuild. But the foundation did crack on that strange, strange day. The lies about my Blackness and their Whiteness beginning to peel away, glimpses of the core goodness, and core beauty, shining through from beneath. Grandpa’s living room picture looking back at me across time.