The Black Kids(40)
For a few years after the attempted drowning incident, before Michael, and after her dad left her mom and her mom was having a rough go of it, we were closer to each other than to the others. She would stay over at my house so often that my parents bought Kimberly her own toothbrush. She and Lucia and I would make those little pizzas out of English muffins and dance in my room to “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” and sometimes we would fall asleep in my bed whispering little secrets in elaborate pillow forts.
“I missed you,” I told her once after I nearly drove us into a bus. I’m pretty certain I actually saw my life flash before my eyes and was feeling extra sentimental. “I miss us.”
Kimberly looked over at me. “I’m right here.”
* * *
Eventually, when we’d pick Miss Doris up, I would drive the three of us around for a bit. Miss Doris would stick her face out the window like a dog soaking up the world outside.
“Faster, child, faster!” she’d yell.
Kimberly was the one who took me to the DMV for my test. I was number sixty-nine, which we both thought was funny in a stupid way. The instructor was a permed she-devil who made me parallel park two separate times on a hill, and by some divine miracle, I pulled it off. When I passed the test on the first try, we jumped up and down and hugged and screamed in the middle of the DMV, while some girl in the corner across from me blubbered into her mother’s shoulder.
“Freedom!” Kimberly said.
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” I said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” she said.
Miss Doris fell down and broke her hip one afternoon, and her kids sold her house and placed her in a nursing home close to them in Florida. Kimberly and I stopped delivering meals after that. We’d already exceeded our required service hours, and I think both of us felt her absence like an ache. We stopped hanging out one-on-one again.
PART III: Today
The janitors are constantly cleaning, but somehow the girls’ restroom always reeks of period blood. The left stall is flooded, which it does once a month. The toilet water starts to spread to the other stalls. I have to pee really bad, though, so I can’t wait. The rising water barely misses my Keds.
I take a very funky piss. Cool funky, not smelly funky. I’m listening to the album Maggot Brain by Funkadelic, which is another of Jo’s cassettes. The song I’m listening to is called “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks,” which seems like it was written for these times, except these times were decades ago. Eight years after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Six years after the Watts Riots and Malcom X’s assassination. Three years after Bobby Kennedy and MLK died. Bobby Kennedy was shot in Koreatown at the Ambassador Hotel. If you drive down Wilshire, you can still see it, regal and crumbling. You wouldn’t want to drive down there now, though, on account of the rioting.
It’s the lyric about hate multiplying that gets to me most. It’s like nothing ever changes.
On the cover is a black woman buried up to her neck in dirt, her Afro reaching toward the heavens, mouth open in a scream somewhere between agony and joy, while maggots squirm on the ground around her. All the songs make you feel like dancing, or like you’re on drugs, or both.
They’re singing about how we all need each other if we’re going to be better, but if we don’t help each other, hate is just gonna multiply, and people are gonna continue to die. And how there’s not gonna be any peace, even though everyone wants and needs it. Something about that shit gets me right in the gut today. Maybe because it feels like nothing ever changes. Not really.
This is what was on the news this morning:
Yesterday, Long Beach declared a state of emergency. In Riverside, there are fires. A security guard killed a seventeen-year-old when looters entered a discount store in San Bernardino. In San Francisco, young people smashed windows and set fires. In Atlanta, young people protested, while more than four hundred others gathered at a nonviolent rally in front of Martin Luther King Jr.’s crypt. They carried signs reading L.A. HAS NO JUSTICE; PUT JUSTICE IN THE JUSTICE SYSTEM; KING VERDICT WAS A WAKEUP CALL—STOP THE KILLING; and LIVE AS BROTHERS OR PERISH AS FOOLS. A peaceful protest against the verdict on the steps of Cleveland’s City Hall almost turned violent when a thirty-one-year-old white man drove by in a van with both Nazi and Confederate flags flying from it. So far there have been twenty-five deaths, 572 injuries, hundreds of fires and arrests, and $200 million to $250 million in damages.
No peace.
* * *
In New York City, students at a private school in Queens walked out of their classes chanting, “Rodney, Rodney, Rodney.”
Nobody is walking out of school here.
Walkman still on, I wash my hands. Somebody taps me on the back. I jump up, startled, and my sunshine player crashes to the floor.
“What are you listening to?” Kimberly says as I scramble to get to my Walkman before the flood does. She neatly applies two coats of mascara and flips her hair over one shoulder, smiles, then flips it over the other. For some reason she decides that shoulder’s better.
“Maggot Brain. It’s by Funkadelic. It’s old.”
I take the cassette cover out of my backpack and show it to her. She scrunches her mouth to the side and nods her head. I put the cassette back in the bag. She peers into my backpack. I’ve got a bunch of Jo’s cassettes in there now. Sometimes when you want to disappear, it’s easiest to hide in music.