Knucklehead Read online

I stepped aside. “Oh, you know. Drinking brandy and reading the Constitution.”

  The study group had only met twice so far, and we’d been all business. But Amalia had no business tonight. She didn’t bring any books with her; she didn’t have some question she could have asked over the phone. She came with no cover whatsoever. Amalia Stewart had basically just knocked on my door and told me she liked me. What moxie! Of course, the odds I didn’t like Amalia Stewart were quite low.

  Then I remembered the TV. Fuck. I’d been watching Cops; it was still playing on the screen. Worse, I was not watching The Cosby Show.

  I don’t think you heard me: I said that The Cosby Show was on, and that I was not watching it. And I was black. And it was 1989. If being black has rules—and it does—then in 1989 Thou Shalt Watch Cosby was easily Rule Number Two, after Thou Shalt Keep It Real. I was doing neither.

  I wasn’t watching Cosby because the shit wasn’t funny. It was just normal. I understood that America likes to pretend that there is no such thing as normal black people, so it was revolutionary or whatever to show some in prime time. But I was a normal black person, and the novelty was wasted on me. Honestly, I found it mildly insulting. I was down with A Different World, and I would soon be down with Fresh Prince. They were funny. Watching Cosby was like watching an ant farm.

  But my opinion didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Amalia Stewart was about to walk into my bedroom and see 16 Philly cops stomping some brother instead of Theo and Rudy laughing at the Cos’s bit about pajamas. I bit my lip. I done did it now. I’d never minded not being tall enough, and I’d learned to live with not being cool enough. But not being black enough was something I’d dragged behind me my whole life. And it was about to drag me down.

  Amalia floated past me into my room. “Cool—Cops.” She plunked down on my bed without asking. “They’re showing a marathon tonight, aren’t they?”

  They were. Is this a trap? Is Amalia Stewart Black Police? You can usually spot the kente cloth. Is she working undercover?

  “Uh. Yeah.” I felt my eyes darting around, searching for the exits. If Amalia Stewart was Black Police, she was working deep cover. Amalia was a full-on prep, old school, all headbands and pearl necklaces. This evening she was sporting a purple polo shirt with a red sweater tied around her shoulders and what my brain was telling me were called “boat shoes.” She wore shit like that every day. Definitely not Black Police. You couldn’t get Black Police to dress like that once, not even for The Cause.

  I took a breath and tried to relax. Even with being outed as a Cops fan, this was still pretty much the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. I went to the bed and sat down. I didn’t touch her.

  We watched the rest of that episode, then another. “People say this show is racist,” she remarked at one point. “I don’t think so. Sure, they show folks getting arrested, but there are a lot of them too.” She gestured at the screen. At that moment, a 30-year-old white man with no teeth was removing his shirt. Two suburban Jersey deputies alighted from their vehicle and administered his beating.

  When it was over I got up to get us a couple of sodas. I checked my face in the toaster to make sure I didn’t have anything hanging out of my nose. When I came back into the bedroom she was studying my notepad. The back pages.

  “What’s this?”

  “Oh. Just what it says. Days without an . . . uh . . . incident. I . . . keep track.”

  “What kind of incident? Do you turn into the Hulk?”

  I couldn’t decide whether to respond Sort of or I wish! so I didn’t say anything.

  She moved closer to me. “What kind of incident?”

  I looked away. “Oh, you know. Bullshit. The kind of bullshit that happens on the street.”

  “I do know. It isn’t as if I’ve never been to New York, but living here is crazy. People back home think Manhattan is nothing but investment bankers, but it is more like a mob of drunk investment bankers fighting in the street.”

  “Heh. Ye.”

  “But why do you need to keep track? Count the days?”

  Here was the thing about this conversation: I could detect no hint of fear, of judgment, of anything negative, in either her tone or her demeanor. Only curiosity. If we had known each other a long time, that would have made sense. But we hadn’t.

  “I’d like to go a year without . . . without getting into it with anybody. That seems kind of impossible right now. But other people do it.” Not for the first time, I was grateful that black people don’t blush. Why isn’t she leaving? Why isn’t she excusing herself and never talking to me again?

  She stared right at me. “You start fights?”

  “No. Absolutely not. I’ve never had a problem with anyone who wasn’t being aggressive toward me. Or someone I care about. Or someone helpless. But I’m trying to find other ways of dealing with people. Even aggressive people. Trying to. I’d like to.”

  She glanced down at my notepad. “A hundred and twenty-two. Days. Is that good?”

  “Yes. It’s really good.” I couldn’t meet her eyes anymore. “For me.”

  “Hm. Good luck with that.” She put the pad back down on the desk and closed the distance between us. She grabbed a soda, then took my hand and led me back over to my bed. Now short-sleeved Cuban officers were beating down shirtless Cuban drunks in Miami. We sat and stared at the screen an hour or so longer. At least, she did. Mostly I stared at her.

  The Door.

  Saturday, February 25, 1989

  It was about 11:00 p.m. and we were walking through Alphabet City, on our way to a performance art thing on Avenue D. Mohawked punks huddled in doorways smoking. Skinheads marched along in packs. Today there’s probably some fake nice name for the long letter-named streets at the far east of upper lower Manhattan. Something like Kenwood, maybe. Gardenside. Bullshit. It’s Alphabet City. It’s crazy, but I still look back on dirty, violent, corrupt eighties Manhattan fondly. Even though I should have died there.

  I was determined to make her think I was hip. It was our third date—our third real date, anyway, by Amalia’s standards—and I was literally praying that the Three Date Rule was in effect. As we picked our way through the vomit and dog shit and used needles, I dazzled her with my critique of the upcoming film Do the Right Thing. Spike had favored his alma mater with an advance screening the week before.

  “The film itself is brilliant, but its true greatness is in the context of its time. Our times.”

  “I think I agree,” Amalia said, smirking. Those anime eyes were smiling. At me. “My Bull Meter just came on by itself. But continue,” she waved her slim pretty hand at me. Her eyes were like two brown puppies under a shiny black Christmas tree. “Please.”

  “A’ite. So, the way the press has been bugging out about the movie and it’s not even out yet. Almost all the advance coverage Spike’s getting includes—no, features—a warning not to see the fuckin’ movie. ‘It’s gonna cause riots,’ they say. ‘Race riots in the streets of New York. Across the country. Around the world.’”

  “That is the fantasy, yes.” She crinkled her nose and pursed her lips. Her lips. Her mouth. Focus!

  “Right. That’s their fantasy. That black people are clueless. Spike is going to tell 20,000,000 black people something about our own lives that we don’t already know. Nobody ever says that that something isn’t true, mind you. Just that, somehow, none of us know it yet, and when we are finally told we will promptly lose our damn minds.”

  Amalia wasn’t smirking anymore. She was walking and staring down at the sidewalk. Granted, in Alphabet City you really did need to watch where you were stepping, but also it was clear that she was listening very closely. That Amalia Stewart was listening to me run it down made me unspeakably happy.

  A man who looked an awful lot like Pete Townsend got out of a cab and walked over to a pay phone. We and everybody else were too cool to notice.

  “All they can imagine us doing is what they would do. Since we have not yet burned this entire disgusting country to the ground, we must have no idea how fucked we are, right? They think that they can know this about us. As if their consciousness, their experience, encompasses all others, and the rest of us are just subsets of whiteness. How else could you have groups like Creedence Clearwater Revival playing bad blues with a straight face in front of huge crowds listening with a straight face? How else could they write those same tired roles over and over on TV?”

  “‘I ain’t be got no weapon,’” Amalia said softly.

  “Right. How else could they talk about ‘minorities,’ as if white people are the majority race on this planet, or in this city, or anywhere?”

  Now she was frowning. I felt bad that I had made her frown. “People at school speak of ‘women and minorities,’” she said. “As if I cannot be both. As if only they can be women. It would be easier to interpret that some other way if they did not deny my womanhood a thousand other ways as well.”

  “OK. That was deep. I never thought about that one before.”

  We slipped through a forest of dealers at the corner of 6th and C.

  “But . . . um . . . so, the movie,” I went on. “This mindset . . . this God complex, whatever you want to call it, well, it’s what Do the Right Thing is about. Sal had it. That’s why he was so surprised by what happened. He thought that, even though those people had lived in Bed-Stuy their whole lives, somehow they didn’t know where the hell they were. Their view of him was so different than he thought it was. They thought of Sal like a neighbor, and Sal thought that he was their king or a missionary or Tarzan or something. Sal is them—the media. The media is Sal when they freak out over Do the Right Thing. They are freaking out over their own reflection, like a parakeet.”

  Amalia was staring across the street. I followed her eyes just in time to see a young woman in a motorcycle jacket slap a large, hairy man in the face. The man was wearing an ill-fitting wedding dress.

  She was smiling again. I kept going. “It’s funny. Everybody says that black people are obsessed with racism. We are—because they are obsessed with race. Sal never forgot who he thought he was and who he thought they were. Not for one day. He was sure he was doing them a favor by being there, making money. And they had simply accepted him. Sal lived among us for a generation—well, he worked among us—and he never really knew what we were like, or wondered, or even wanted to wonder. It never even occurred to him to wonder. Because we were not real.”

  That sounded lucid to me, so I shut up. Amalia ruminated with her eyes and her mouth.

  Sure, I saw dude coming. And I admit that I noticed we were on a collision course. And no, I did not try to get out of the way. Maybe I thought that if Amalia saw me scoot out of a dude’s way it could negatively impact my whole getting-laid agenda. I guess I figured that if we bumped shoulders as we passed, then we bumped. Happens all the time in New York. I didn’t care.

  He was big, but I was pretty skilled in the ways of NYC Bump Fu. We bumped. Hard. Neither of us yielded. A tie. I was fine with that.

  A moment later, dude started calling, “Ay, mang!” to my back. I took a few steps more but he kept calling me out, and something in his voice put me on notice that having my back turned would in no way alter his response. It wouldn’t have altered mine.

  I was wrong. Dude wasn’t big. He was huge. The man was the size of a door. Even now, sometimes when I look at a door I think of him. That was what stood glaring at me: a door in some sort of jersey with a head on it. My shoulder must have hit him in the nuts. But by then I was pissed too. This punk was calling me out in front of my woman!

  Pathetic.

  The door said something to the effect of, “What the hell?” For the life of me, I can’t remember his exact words. I do remember what I said in response, though. I said, “Ey, man. You bumped into me!”

  I still do not fully understand why those were not my last words.

  As soon as they left my mouth, even before The Door started moving, everything slowed down. To a crawl. Almost to a stop. My brain knew that something important was happening before I did. There is a name for that phenomenon, when everything slows down. I can’t recall what it is. But it’s not uncommon. You’re on a commuter bus, speeding across a bridge in the rain, on your way to work. There’s barely time to settle down and read two stories in the paper before you are off the bus again. But let that bus hit a puddle, hydroplane, and go sliding toward the guardrail, and suddenly there is time to make peace with your Maker, say goodbye to each of your loved ones, draft your will, and carefully replay each regret, not the least of which is taking the bus that morning when you knew you should have taken the train. Anyway, the scientific name for it escapes me. But I know the feeling well. I get it a lot.

  Slowly, The Door shook his head at my stupidity, and then he started walking toward me. Incredibly slowly. And, as he walked, he reached into the duffel bag he held in his left hand.

  I stood and stared. On paper, I was fully capable of knocking that bag into the street and delivering several punches to his head. Or, if I couldn’t reach his head, I could have hit him in the nuts some more. It felt like it took The Door five minutes to close the short distance between us. But it never occurred to me to do anything. Instead, I gawked, frozen, and wondered what he had in the bag.

  It was shiny. Not chrome-shiny; stainless steel. I know this now. I also know that it was a Smith. Looking back, I recognize it. A Smith & Wesson .45 auto, stainless. Years later I would own one. But back then it was just Huge Gun in My Gut.

  My life flashed before my eyes. Sort of. What happened was, I remembered every ass whupping I didn’t get in my life. Every time I got away. Every fight I’d gotten lucky and won. I had been quite lucky. But I realized in that moment (which felt much longer) that I would have been better off taking more thumpings every now and again, because now my tab was about to be settled all at once, in one unsurvivable lump-sum payment. My life had caught up with me.

  I don’t know what my face looked like, but I can guess. Because instead of squeezing the trigger and blowing my chitlins all over Avenue D like he was supposed to, The Door only sneered and shoved me with his non-gun hand and turned his massive bulk around like a giant column of living smoke and blew down the street. I watched him. It was puzzling. My body was confused that it was not dead. Death had come and then just floated away. I watched it go.

  And my dumb ass, my crazy dumb ass, picked up where I left off and started talking at Amalia again. “So, anyways, by the time the movie finally does come out—”

  “Marcus. What the heck. What the hell, Marcus.” I flinched. Amalia didn’t cuss. I don’t have enough motherfuckers in me to match that one hell.

  She was staring down at the ground again, only now instead of puppies they were laser eyes cutting deep into the earth. “Don’t . . . touch me,” she said, even though she wasn’t looking at me and I hadn’t even realized I’d been reaching for her.

  “Marcus,” she murmured, “I did not know this needed to be said. But. You cannot be that way around me. You just can’t.”

  “What way?” She shot her laser eyes at me. I really wanted to touch her. I didn’t.

  The lasers were cutting into me now. Blowing right through. “What were you just talking about. About people not seeing people. About people not being real. I do not see you? I am Sal?” I started shaking my head no like crazy. No. No. “I see you, Marcus. And I am telling you that you can not be that way around me. Not ever. This is not negotiable. Are we clear?”

  I looked away. “Yes.” Fluffy clouds of shame muffled the word. She was right. I hadn’t thought about it, not consciously, but yes, I guess I thought I was fooling her. I guess I thought she must be fooled, because she was with me.

  She turned and walked on. It seemed like she was walking away from me but I followed. I figured she knew how to tell me to stop if she wanted.

  “The next time that happens,” she said to the ground, her back to me, still walking, “every time that happens, from now on, this is what you do. You take a deep breath, and you unclench your fists, and you say to the person you have offended this word: Sorry. In the situation you were just in, you say ‘I’m sorry’ to the person, as sincerely as you can, and you get on with your life.”

  “Really?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “OK.”

  She walked on, me trailing behind. We were leaving Alphabet City. Guess she’d had enough performance art for one night. She didn’t speak, which scared me. I almost could have laughed at that. Sure—now you’re scared. When she led me back to my university apartment building and stood aside so that I could open the heavy lobby door I felt confused and relieved and still a little scared. But grateful. And confused.

  I came to think of The Door as my guardian angel. You wouldn’t have known it from how I acted those next few years, but the reality check he delivered unto me that night probably saved my life down the line. That’s guardian angel shit.

  Later that night, while Amalia was in the bathroom, I snuck over to my desk and pulled out my notepad. I opened it to cross out the 166 and start my day count over. But she had already written the word “ZERO” large across the bottom of the page.

  Home.

  Wednesday, March 22, 1989

  It wasn’t cold, but I was wet, so I engaged my afterburners and moved down Broadway at Maximum New York Walking Speed. It was almost 6:30; most places, people would be coming home from work. But in this neighborhood of Lincoln Center and the Met it seemed like most people were going to work. Divas and ballerinas glided alongside musicians and teamsters, everybody ignoring everybody.

  I’d loved growing up here. It was so out of step. Everywhere you turned, there was someone who had proverbially made it here. Artists who’d forgotten to take their vow of poverty. No one would ever pay money to see me dance, but I could relate. This was my scene. I’d known little else. I slalomed through the crowd on autopilot, trying not to hit anybody with my gym bag. At 134 West 66th, I ducked into the lobby.