The Sun Is Also a Star(9)

Instead, I decide to kill time by walking the three miles to the lawyer’s office. My favorite vinyl record store is on the way. I put my headphones on and queue up the Temple of the Dog album. It’s a 1990s grunge rock kind of a day, all angst and loud guitar. Chris Cornell’s voice rises and I let it carry some of my cares away.





NATASHA’S FATHER, SAMUEL, MOVED TO America a full two years before the rest of his family did. The plan was that Samuel would go first and establish himself as a Broadway actor. It would be easier to do that without having to worry about a wife and small child. Without them, he would be free to go on auditions on a moment’s notice. He’d be free to make connections with the acting community in New York City. Originally it was only supposed to be for one year, but one became two. It would’ve become three, but Natasha’s mom could not and would not wait any longer.

She was only six at the time, but Natasha remembers the phone calls to America. She could always tell because her mom had to dial all those extra numbers. The calls were fine at first. Her father sounded like her dad. He sounded happy.

After about a year, his voice changed. He had a funny new accent that was more lilt and twang than patois. He sounded less happy. She remembers listening to their conversations. She couldn’t hear his side, but she didn’t need to.

“How much longer you expect us to wait for you?”



“But, Samuel? We not no family no more with you over there and we over here.”

“Talk to you daughter, man.”

And then one day, they were leaving Jamaica for good. Natasha said goodbye to her friends and to the rest of her family, fully expecting that she would see them again, maybe at Christmastime. She didn’t know then what it meant to be an undocumented immigrant. How it meant that you could never go home again. How your home wouldn’t even feel like home anymore, just another foreign place to read about. On the day they left, she remembers being on the plane and worrying about just how they would fly through the clouds, before realizing that clouds were not like cotton balls at all. She wondered if her dad would recognize her, and if he would still love her. It had been such a long time.

But he did recognize her and he still loved her. At the airport, he held them so close.

“Lawd, but me did miss you two, you know,” he said, and he held them even closer. He looked the same. In that moment, he even sounded the same, his patois the same as it always was. He smelled different, though, like American soap and American clothes and American food. Natasha didn’t mind. She was so happy to see him. She could get used to anything.

For the two years that Samuel was alone in America, he lived with an old family friend of his mother’s. He didn’t need a job, and he used his savings to cover what little expenses he had.

After everyone moved to America, that had to change. He got a job as a security guard working at one of the buildings on Wall Street. He found them a one-bedroom apartment for rent in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.



“Me can make this work,” he said to Patricia. He chose the graveyard shift so he would have time to audition during the day.

But he was tired during the day.

And there were no parts for him, and the accent would just not go away no matter how he tried. It didn’t help that Patricia and Natasha spoke to him with full Jamaican accents, even though he tried to teach them the “proper” American pronunciation.

And rejection was not an easy thing. To be an actor you’re supposed to have thick skin, but Samuel’s skin was never thick enough. Rejection was like sandpaper. His skin sloughed away under its constant onslaught. After a while, Samuel wasn’t sure which would last longer: himself or his dreams.





Resigned Local Takes Westbound 7 Train to Childhood’s End

Sure, I can be a little dramatic, but that’s what it feels like. This train is a Magic Fucking Train speeding me from childhood (joy, spontaneity, fun) to adulthood (misery, predictability, absolutely no fun will be had by anyone). When I get off I will have a plan and tastefully groomed (meaning short) hair. I’ll no longer read (or write) poetry—only biographies of Very Important People. I’ll have a Point of View on serious subjects such as Immigration, the role of the Catholic Church in an increasingly secular society, the relative suckage of professional football teams.

The train stops, and half the people clear out. I head to my favorite spot—the two-seater in the corner next to the conductor’s box. I spread myself out and take up both seats.

Yes, it’s obnoxious. But I have a good reason for this behavior that involves a completely empty train one night at two a.m. (way post-curfew) and a man with a big-ass snake wrapped around his neck who chose to sit next to me despite there being one thousand (give or take) empty seats.



I take my notebook out of the inner pocket of my suit jacket. It’s about an hour to Thirty-Fourth Street in Manhattan, where my favorite barber is, and this poem won’t write itself. Fifty minutes (and three very poorly written lines) later, we’re only a couple of stops away from mine. Magic Fucking Train’s doors close. We make it about twenty feet into the tunnel and grind to a halt. The lights flicker off, because of course they do. We sit for five minutes before the conductor decides communication would be good. I expect to hear him say that the train will be moving shortly, etc., but what he says is this: