How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(10)
“You gonna pull a gun on me over some college application?” I ask her.
“You don’t listen until it’s too late,” she tells me. “Get out of my house and don’t ever come back.”
I leave the house chuckling, shaking my head, cussing under my breath. I go sit in a shallow ditch. Outside, I wander in the topsy-turvy understanding that Mama’s life does not revolve around me and that I’m not doing anything to make her life more joyful, spacious, or happy. I’m an ungrateful burden, an obese weight on her already terrifying life. I sit there in the ditch, knowing that other things are happening in my mother’s life, but also knowing that Mama never imagined needing to pull a gun on the child she carried on her back as a sophomore at Jackson State. I’m playing with pine needles, wishing I had headphones—but mostly I’m regretting throwing my gun into the reservoir.
When Mama leaves for work in the morning, I break back into her house, go under her pillow, and get her gun. Mama and I haven’t paid the phone or the light bill so it’s dark, hot, and lonely in that house, even in the morning. I lie in a bathtub of cold water, still sweating and singing love songs to myself.
I put the gun to my head and cock it.
I think of my grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I’m so sad and I can’t really see a way out of what I’m feeling but I’m leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I’m already hurting. I’m not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America.
I start to spend more time at home over the next few weeks since Mama is out of town with her boyfriend. Mama and I still haven’t paid the phone bill, so I’m running down to the pay phone every day, calling one of the admissions counselors at Oberlin College. He won’t tell me whether they’ll accept me or not, but he does say that Oberlin might want me because of, not in spite of, what happened at Millsaps.
A month passes and I haven’t heard from Oberlin. I’m eating too much and dry-humping a woman just as desperate as me, and lying like it’s my first job, and daring people to fuck with me more than I have in a long time. I’m writing lots of words, too, but I’m not reckoning. I’m wasting ink on bullshit political analysis and short stories and vacant poems that I never imagine being read or felt by anyone like me. I’m an imitator, not a writer, and really, I’m a waste of writing’s time.
The only really joyful times in life come from playing basketball and talking shit with O.G. Raymond “Gunn” Murph, my best friend. Gunn is trying to stop himself from slowly killing himself and others, after a smoldering breakup with V., his girlfriend of eight years. Some days, Gunn and I save each other’s lives just by telling and listening to each other’s odd-shaped truths.
One black night, Ray is destroying me in Madden and talking all that shit when we hear a woman moaning for help outside of his apartment on Capitol Street. We go downstairs and find a naked woman with open wounds, blood, and bruises all over her black body. She can barely walk or talk through shivering teeth, but we ask her if she wants to come upstairs while we call the ambulance. Gunn and I have taken no sexual assault classes and we listen to way too much “The Diary” and “Ready to Die,” but right there, we know not to get too close to the woman and just let her know we’re there to do whatever she needs.
She slowly makes her way into the apartment because she’s afraid the men might come back. Blood is gushing down the back of her thighs and her scalp. She tells us the three men had one gun. When she makes it up to the apartment, we give the woman a brown towel to sit on and something to wrap herself in. Blood seeps through both and even though she looks so scared and hurt, she also looks so embarrassed. Gunn keeps saying things like, “It’s gonna be okay, sweetheart,” and I just sit there weakly nodding my head, running from her eyes and getting her more glasses of water. When Gunn goes in his room to take his gun out of his waistband, I look at her and know that no one man could have done this much damage to another human being.
That’s what I need to tell myself.
Eventually, the ambulance and police arrive. They ask her a lot of questions and keep looking at us. She tells them that we helped her after she was beaten and raped by three black men in a Monte Carlo. One of the men, she tells the police, was her boyfriend. She refuses to say his name to the police. Gunn looks at me and drops his eyes. Without saying anything, we know that whatever is in the boys in that car has to also be in us. We know that whatever is encouraging them to kill themselves slowly by knowingly mangling the body and spirit of this shivering black girl, is probably the most powerful thing in our lives. We also wonder if whatever is in us that has been slowly encouraging us to kill ourselves is also in the heart and mind of the black girl on the couch.
A few weeks later, I get a letter saying I’ve been accepted to Oberlin College and they’re giving me a boatload of financial aid. Gunn agrees to drive me up to Oberlin and I feel like the luckiest boy on earth—not because I got into Oberlin, but because I survived long enough to remember to say “yes” to life and “no” or at least “slow down” to slow death.