How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(21)
I’m black and from Brooklyn, so my spending time in Mr. Gilmore’s house ain’t no thing nowadays. Y’all know the stats about black men in prison, so I will spare the choir the gospel. But, man that ain’t the half of it all. I got people telling me that I need to see a quack because they think I’m emotionless…gotta admit, I think I am too. I mean, I care about a whole lot of people and things and issues. In fact, my whole life is dedicated to caring. That’s why I do the work that I do, mentoring and nurturing the hood to be safer and so on. But, brothers, I’m numb when it comes to deep feelings. I don’t quite know when it happened, but I might be messed up in the head, at least by therapist co-pay standards.
It’s late and I don’t feel like giving you all the whole book of my life right now, but I will give you all a little context as to how I became as emotionless as I am. This is going to be confessions on speed, so keep up.
Ready?
Last of three kids, older brother, good…no, great parents. Older brother hated the crap outta me (no clue why…well, I have some ideas), nerdy kid, jumped badly at fourteen, almost raped at gunpoint at fourteen by some random bitchassmofo (had my first nut at the same time), lost my virginity at eighteen, shot at eighteen (doctor said I’d never walk the same again…proved him wrong), arrested for first-degree murder at twenty (though I never killed anyone), sentenced to a dozen plus five at twenty-two, released at thirty, doing great things for myself and others since then.
LOL, maybe I need some therapy. I don’t know.
What I do know is that I meet great women who want to love me, who I want to love back, at least in my mind, but I have a hard time replicating that want in my heart. So, y’all are talking about loving, and I’m talking about loving. I love myself and others to the bitter end, and I’m proud of myself for surviving so much unscathed. I’m the easiest person to get along with, or disagree with.
I write well. That’s what folks tell me. I speak well. That’s what folks tell me. I inspire others. That’s what folks tell me. Don’t get me wrong, I believe all of that stuff, and I thank God for it (I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, BTW, though I’m not really an active JW right now because I drink and screw and all that good stuff, though I don’t cuss on the regular), but all this surviving and experience is so f’ing much at times. You know, my pops once told me that you shouldn’t suffocate the spirit, meaning you shouldn’t hold in how you feel for someone.
Oh, did you expect me to give some sort of anecdotal moral to that quote, like you’re taught to in English class? Like, you shouldn’t leave a paragraph without finishing your point? Nah, I ain’t got the answer, homies. I guess that’s what I’ll leave for you all to finish. You know, keep the flow going.
Bless,
Marlon Peterson
Kanye West and HaLester Myers Are Better at Their Jobs…
MY GRANDMOTHER MARRIED A BEAUTIFUL brown troll named HaLester “Les” Myers twenty years ago. The Christmas before last, Les slumped across from me in Grandma’s gaudy pink throne while she finished making supper. I watched the still water flooding the gutters of Les’s sleepy eyes, the way his nappy gray chin folded snugly into the top of those musty blue overalls, and I knew that this dusty joker really believed what he had said the night before about Kanye West and the importance of treating females like cats.
“Look at Les over there faking sleep,” my Aunt Sue said from the doorway. “He ’sleep? Get up, Les! Time to eat. Wake him up, Kie.”
Les’s sweaty face didn’t move. His chest didn’t heave in or out. But his fingers, which doubled as raggedy overstuffed cigars, dug deeper into both arms of Grandma’s favorite chair.
HaLester Myers was preparing for takeoff.
The night before, on Christmas Eve, I joined Les outside in his runaway spot. No matter the time of day or night, Les was likely to clutch his yellow folding chair and lumber out to the right side of Grandma’s porch. Really, unless he was drunk, Les’s runaway spot was the only place my Grandma allowed him to do the 2.5 things he’d mastered in his 83 years on earth: 1) sipping that Crown Royal Black, and 2.5) balancing a dangling Newport on his bottom lip while telling the loudest lies you’ve ever heard in your life.
I’m convinced Les tells so many loud lies not necessarily because he’s deceptive, but because he has no inside voice and Grandma rarely lets him talk over volume five inside her house. When Les is lying about being a forty-ninth degree Mason, his voice sounds like flat tires rolling over jagged gravel. When he’s lying about what he did to the dog, cat, or car of the white man who “ain’t know how to pay a nigga right,” his voice sounds like burning bubble wrap. No matter what Les is lying about, all of his lies have an acidic slow drip to them, and nearly all the lies carry stories rooted in what “the black man” deserves.
This Christmas Eve, like every Christmas Eve in Forest, Mississippi, I grabbed a chair from the kitchen before we lit our fireworks and walked out to where I knew Les would be sipping that Black.
“Les, you know who Kanye West is, right?” I asked him and sat down under some droopy white Christmas lights.
“Kanye!” he said. “Say do I know Kanye?” Les stood up like he did whenever he told lies in his runaway spot. When he stood up and you stayed seated, Les could look down at you and say one of his favorite lying sentences—“Look up here, man”—with more precision.