Heavy: An American Memoir(27)

I did not answer because I did not know what was wrong with me.

Abby Claremont and I continued to have sex until near the end of the school year, even though I lied and told you we thought it was safer to just be friends. One weekend, when Malachi Hunter invited you to New Orleans, I told you I was staying at LaThon’s house. When you left, I climbed through a window I left open and Abby Claremont and I spent the entire weekend having sex in your bed. We did not use condoms.

That Sunday night, Abby Claremont sat on the edge of your bed talking about cycles of depression in her family, and how our relationship was triggering responses from her parents she never expected. I’d never heard an actual real-life person use the word “depression” before. Scarface was the only artist I knew of who talked about depression. I didn’t understand what depression meant, so I told myself it was a made-up white word Scarface stole and it meant “extremely sad.”

I asked Abby Claremont if she thought we should stop seeing each other since our relationship was making people in both of our families extremely sad.

“I’m not talking about extreme sadness,” she said. “I’m talking about fucking depression.”

A few weeks later, you saw me crying in my bedroom after I found out Abby Claremont was considering hooking up with Donnie Gee’s cousin, a kid with the highest vertical leap in Jackson. You asked me what was wrong. I told you I was upset that you and my father didn’t try harder to make it work.

That made you cry and apologize.

That made me smile and tell more lies.

Other than playing basketball, writing paragraphs, and having sex with Abby Claremont, making you feel what you didn’t want to feel when you didn’t want to feel it was one of the best feelings in my world. Another incredible feeling was getting away with lying to Abby Claremont after we got back together. I congratulated myself for only kissing and having sexy conversations with other girls, but never having sex with them at Donnie Gee’s parties.

Donnie Gee didn’t drink our entire junior year because he wanted a basketball scholarship. I lied and told Donnie Gee I wasn’t drinking for the same reason. Really, I was afraid I’d hurt myself or someone else if I ever got drunk again.

Before the first party of the year at Donnie Gee’s house, Donnie Gee and I bought two forty-ounces of St. Ides. We poured out the malt liquor and filled both empty bottles with off-brand apple juice. We checked each other’s noses for floating boogers. We checked our breath for that dragon. We stuffed our mouths with apple Now and Laters and cherry Nerds. When Donnie Gee’s doorbell rang, we stumbled around the house, whispering Jodeci lyrics inches under the earlobes of girls who didn’t run from us.

Abby Claremont wasn’t at the party because she was on punishment for dating me.

About three hours into Donnie Gee’s party, Kamala Lackey asked me to follow her into one of the bedrooms. I walked into the dark room behind Kamala Lackey loud-rapping Phife’s “Scenario” verse. The room we walked into was the same room where Donnie Gee and I watched Clarence Thomas talk about experiencing a hi-tech lynching when Anita Hill told on him for sexually harassing her. I knew Clarence Thomas was lying because there was no reason in the world for Anita Hill to lie, and because I’d never met one older man who treated women the way he wanted to be treated. Every older man I knew treated every woman he wanted to have sex with like a woman he wanted to have sex with. Clarence Thomas seemed as cowardly as every older man to me.

Once Kamala Lackey and I were both in the room, I complimented her on hair I couldn’t see and asked where she got the perfume I couldn’t smell. I turned on the light. Kamala Lackey just sat on the edge of Donnie Gee’s bed, her fists filled with the comforter, her eyes staring toward the window. I wondered how drunk she was.

“You, you look like Theo Huxtable tonight,” I remember Kamala Lackey stuttering as she got up and turned the light off.

I was a sweaty, bald-headed, six-one, 224-pound black boy from Jackson, Mississippi. I owned one pair of jeans, those fake Girbauds that were actually yours, and one decent sweatshirt. Nothing about me looked, moved, or sounded like Theo Huxtable.

When Kamala Lackey asked me if I wanted to see her boobs, I ignored her question, assumed she was definitely drunk, and tried to tell her what I hated about The Cosby Show. The sweaters, the corny kids, the problems that weren’t problems, the smooth jazz, the manufactured cleanliness, the nonexistent poverty just didn’t do it for me. It wasn’t only that the Cosbys were never broke, or in need of money, or that none of their black family members and friends were ever in material need of anything important; it was that only in science fiction could a black man doctor who delivered mostly white babies, and a black woman lawyer who worked at a white law firm, come home and never once talk mess about the heartbreaking, violent machinations of white folk at both of their jobs, and the harassing, low-down, predictable advances of men at Clair’s office. I remember telling Kamala Lackey how never in the history of real black folk could black life as depicted on The Cosby Show ever exist. And it only existed on Cosby’s show because Bill Cosby seemed obsessed with how white folk watched black folk watch us watch him.

I didn’t exactly say it that way, though.

“Bill Cosby and them be lying too much,” is what I said. “That shit fake. You think it’s because white folk be watching?”

“Why you still watch that show?” Kamala Lackey asked me. “A Different World is way better.”