Your Face in Mine (7 page)

I even started doing it with Alan. If gay people could be queers, what was the harm? What up, devil? I said to him once, within James’s earshot, and James turned around.

Did you just say what I think you said?

You’re right, Alan said. It’s not funny.

You don’t hear me calling anyone around here a nigger, do you?

You could if you wanted to.

Thanks, James said. Thanks for giving your permission.

That’s not what I meant—

Lookit here, he snapped. We got a job to do. I watched, so clearly, as all his affection for us folded up in his face like a fan. No names, no name-calling.

Well, we are, aren’t we?

Aren’t we what?

Aren’t we the devil? I mean, aren’t we the
problem
?

He shrugged.

Choose, he said. Be the devil if you want. What you are right
now
is a pain in my ass who can’t sort tomatoes worth a damn. This look ripe to you? Get back to your job, okay? Just do your
job
.

—

In October of the following year, our senior year, James was shot twice in the head in his apartment above the food pantry, and the building was torched; when I drove down, that same afternoon, it was still smoking, wound around with police tape, and the roof had caved in. It reminded me of photographs of the ruins of Europe in the Second World War. I recognized one of our weekly clients, Dawson, wheeling a shopping cart filled with neatly sorted bags of beer bottles and aluminum cans. Hell, he said, you didn’t know? Motherfucker was selling drugs out of there the whole time. Wednesday through Friday, when the pantry was closed. Went in there one time myself, see if I could get me some extra cans of beans. Didn’t want none of
those
kinds of beans, feel me? Yeah, he had a good thing going there for a while.

I don’t believe it, I said.

Then forget it, he said. Forget I said anything. Don’t matter now, do it? Still dead. Still fucked it up for the rest of us. Got to go down to Jonah House now, stand in line.

I’ll give you a ride, I said. It felt, obscurely, like being at the end of a TV movie; I was supposed to have learned something. I was supposed to be changed. Black people’s lives, I should have said, facing the camera, are no more expressive of statistics than anyone else’s. Who am I, who are
you
, to go looking in this horror for a pattern?

Naw, Dawson said. Can’t leave the cart.

Put it in the trunk.

Everything’s going to turn out all right, he said, pushing away from me. Trust in the Lord. You hear me?

—

When I went to college I snapped out of my love of hip-hop, as if out of a dream. Someone looked at my tape collection and laughed. Who are you supposed to be, homeboy? I dumped them all in a box and began buying CDs instead—Pavement, The Spinanes, Stereolab, Liz Phair. I grew a goatee, developed a taste for expensive coffee, read Baudrillard and John Ashbery, read Ginsberg and Williams and Pound, read Rexroth and Kerouac and D. T. Suzuki, and began getting up at seven-thirty for daily Chinese classes.

Was I fleeing from something? Was I certain why I loved this new language, with its four tones and eighty thousand characters, its unshakable alienness, its irreconcilability with any language, any world, I knew? Is that even a question? Did any of us know why, given all our advantages, our entitlements, our good study habits and chemically inflated self-esteem, we were still so prone to spastic fits of despair, why we sought out more and more exotic ways of getting high, why we wore Sanskrit rings and tribal tattoos, salon-styled dreadlocks and Japanese see-through raincoats? How could it be running away, when it was nothing more than running in place? How could it be guilt, when the air was so thick with good intentions, with accusations and counteraccusations?

All I know is this: when I came home, I never went downtown. I
tore my
Illmatic
poster off my bedroom wall and used the back for calligraphy practice. In a fit of orderly pique, I carted off the contents of my high school bookcase—
Invisible Man
,
Native Son
,
The Fire Next Time
,
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
,
Soul Brother
,
Black Like Me
,
Black Ice
,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—
to the Salvation Army. I waited, listening, for the thunderclap, the world splitting open under my feet, and heard only the tinkling of the Good Humor truck down the block, the moan of Mr. Takematsu’s aging lawn mower over the backyard fence. I thought of my parents’ earnest faces, of my father, clean-shaven, playing the guitar for my kindergarten class—
If I had a hammer, I’d hammer out danger . . . I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land—
and their sententious, balsamic-sprinkling, Chablis-swilling, late middle age, their faces puckered with concern over the prospect that I would go off to China and become a mercenary investment banker. How vicious and unfair to blame them for my lack of imagination, with the short and pathetic half-life of my good intentions! When all I wanted, all any of us wanted, was to go back to that childlike state, hand-holding, faces raised to the words of the beatific saint, promising us that this story, like all good stories, had an ending, that everything was going to be okay.

—

What is there in Mookie’s face, when he staggers away from the scene of Radio Raheem’s death, picks up the garbage can, and carries it, like a javelin thrower, to its launching point, to the window of Sal’s Famous? Why, that is, doesn’t he have any expression at all? As if he’s watching his life flash by on TV. As if he’s watching an old, old movie. His whole body sags with the effort of acting out the script. And I, even then, even at fourteen, knew that I was supposed to hate him, and couldn’t. And wanted to
be
him, and couldn’t.
Here we go again,
his face says.
I don’t want you to witness this.
He is alone. He doesn’t want to be the Representative Black Man. But he can’t be anything else. The credits roll,
I wipe my popcorn-greasy hands on my shorts. I walk out of the theater in a daze. I’ve glimpsed something. But a glimpse, as it turns out, is not enough.

—

I lived in white dreamtime. I have been living in white dreamtime. And the problem with dreaming, the epistemological problem, is: when you think you’ve woken up, have you really? Is this waking, or a deeper, more profound state of sleep, the state of the most vivid and palpable dreams?

—

There’s something else I forgot. Or, rather, something else I can’t remember. I can’t remember what caused me to fight the boy; I was seven, we were at some school summer camp, not in Newton but nearby, he appeared out of nowhere, and like that we were grappling in the dust, the only fight I’d had in my life up to that time. He elbowed me in the shoulder, pushed me over, and walked off; I was blinded, howling. That nigger, I said, when my counselor picked me up, and he put me down immediately and pinned me against the wall by my shoulders. Don’t
ever
say that again, he said. He had greasy shoulder-length black hair, a knobby nose, a Ziggy Stardust T-shirt fraying at the collar. You understand? Say it again and I’ll beat the shit out of you myself. I’ll fucking
kill
you. You understand?

How is anyone supposed to understand?

—

Thus ends my confession.

When I interviewed for the job at WBCC last fall, the Monday of Thanksgiving week, the board could have paid for me to take a cab from the airport, or, more likely—this is public radio—instructed me to take the MARC train and a cab to my hotel. They didn’t. Winnifred Brinton-Cox, the chairwoman, met me at the baggage claim and drove me into town herself, a trip of nearly three hours in afternoon traffic. It was a strange and uncomfortable position, sitting inches away from a stranger who was offering me a job; it meant my interview began the minute I stepped off the plane. That was—that is—Winnifred’s style. She was born in Negril, moved to Brooklyn as a child, but she still speaks with West Indian flourishes, a kind of expansive, jovial quality combined with a certain stiff English hauteur, and she has a beaming smile that she bestows on all sentences equally, whether she’s delivering good news or saying something cruel and gratuitous. Her day job is in community affairs for the Johns Hopkins Medical Centers, which, as I understand it, entails explaining to very poor people why their houses have to be demolished to build the world’s most advanced, most expensive hospital. It’s hard to be on the side of progress, she told me, when I asked her about it. On the side of development. On the side of the inevitable. But God didn’t put me on this earth to be Santa Claus.

It was within fifteen minutes of leaving the airport that she told me the job was mine, if I wanted it; I was the most qualified candidate and the most exciting. What I like about you is that you have an outside perspective, she said. You come from a place of success. Efficiency. A functional station structure.

You make that sound exotic.

You’d be surprised, she said. The question is, are
you
ready to be unpopular? Because let me make a prediction. If you take this job, no one’s going to invite you out for happy hour. You might not even get a birthday card.

If you’re asking if I depend on my work for self-esteem, I said, the answer is no. Work is work.

You sure about that? she asked. You sure that hasn’t, eh,
changed
?

I’d forgotten that in my phone interview with the board, when asked why I wanted to make a move, I’d explained, in the briefest possible terms, what had happened with Wendy and Meimei.

Sorry to be so direct, she said. But I want you to think this through. These people smell indecision, understand?

I’m not undecided, I said, a patent lie. I want this job. I’m here.

—

Two nights ago Winnifred called me at eight forty-five—on the late side, for a business call, but I had nothing better to do, as she surely guessed. I’m wondering if you could come down for a quick breakfast meeting, she said. Henry’s, at eight sharp?

There was no way I could refuse, of course, though I longed for the days of daycare drop-offs and family responsibilities, so painfully, so wetly, that I could hardly hold up the phone.

When I turn around the pastry counter into Henry’s seating area I see immediately that this is no ordinary meeting: Winnifred is squeezed into a corner table alongside Walter Avery, the college president, whom I’ve met only once before, and a tall stranger in a navy blazer and polo
shirt, a pudgy, bulbous-nosed man in his forties who looks like a high school football coach, complete with bristly red hair and a sawtooth mustache. They have in front of them a platter of assorted danishes, croissants, pecan rolls, bâtards, and scones, and the table is already scattered with crumbs and wadded napkins lumped from coffee spills.

Kelly, Winnifred says, let me introduce you to Ron Dwyer. Ron, Kelly.

Kelly’s a good Irish name, Ron says, pumping my hand.

I think my parents chose it out of a hat. We’re Dutch and German all the way back.

New Amsterdam Dutch?

Ellis Island.

I can’t imagine why we’re having a conversation about genealogy in front of two African Americans, but Ron looks pleased to have the details in order.

Kelly, Walter says, Winnifred’s told me that you’re scheduled to have a meeting with the staff this week about the accreditation issue, and so I felt we needed to have this conversation first, just so that there’s no miscommunication anywhere along the line. I’ll keep it simple, because I know you have places to be. BCC has opted to embrace a new arrangement for the WBCC license. This is an opportunity we’ve been thinking about for a while, and the letter from NPR gave us a window of time. Now we’re about to act.

Walter is also a big man, with very wide features—his nose in particular is like a lump of pancake batter dropped onto the griddle of his face—and I have the sensation, at this moment, of being a place kicker facing three linebackers across the line of scrimmage. All three of them have hunkered down at the same moment, waiting to hear what I will say, and I feel as if they could upend the table at any moment and reach out for my throat.

I’m sorry, Walter, I say—what else can I say?—can you clarify that a little? I don’t quite follow.

BCC is selling the station, Winnifred says, with one of her characteristic Teflon smiles. It’s a very difficult decision, and one I’ve questioned all the way along the line. But in the end I think it’s a disservice to the community and the college to keep things going the way they are.

You can’t sell a public radio station, I say. I mean, you know that, right? The FCC—

Walter holds up a long and impressive hand. No lecture needed, he says. We’re not selling anything. Winnifred spoke imprecisely. We’re
trading
the existing WBCC, 107.9 FM, to WATB, 930 AM, and the owner of WATB, Ron here—

Ron, Ron says, pleased again to be speaking of himself in the third person, only as a representative of PureLine Communications—

—is going to assume the WBCC frequency for a new format.

Sports-talk-traffic-weather.

NPR doesn’t license AM-only stations, I say. What’s the WATB transmitter like, anyway?

Two thousand watts.

That’s a fifth our size, and we’re tiny as it is.

Kelly, Winnifred says, let’s be honest here. I know this must be a shock, though I did, of course,
warn
you that the situation at WBCC was unstable when you took the job. Baltimore isn’t a large enough market for two NPR stations. The letter more or less said that. Our expectation for the new WATB will be more along the lines of a true college radio station, staffed primarily by students and interns with a very small professional leadership.

Hold on, Walter says, we’re putting the cart somewhat before the horse here. The first thing you’re worried about, no doubt, is your own future and your family’s future.

As soon as he says it, an innocent slip, a bit of rhetorical filler natural to anyone who fires people often, the mortification spreads over his face like a port-wine stain. I was very open and honest during my interview
about what I called, for lack of a better word, my
life situation
. I thought it would win me sympathy, which, of course, it did.

Okay, I say, trying to distract him. I get what you mean. No offense taken. Lay it out, Walter.

You’re a very understanding person, Kelly. And we’re willing to offer you three options. One, keep your role at WATB. We will keep your existing contract and renegotiate when it comes up for renewal. Two, take a severance package now. Three months fully paid, COBRA after that, with full TIAA-CREF contributions, the whole nine yards. And a nondisclosure clause, of course. Three, assume a new role at the new WBCC.

What new role?

Assistant PD, Ron says. We’re confident that someone as enterprising as you obviously can make the switch to commercial without too much difficulty. Of course, the staff will be much smaller. Most of our programming is national feed. Primarily, you’ll be in charge of sales to the local market.

Who’s going to tell the staff?

Walter clears his throat. I’m leaving tomorrow for Venezuela, he says. It’s a fact-finding trip organized by the mayor. Intercultural exchange. We’re thinking about doing a sister city down there. So unfortunately I’m out. Winnifred will go with you, I think, if there’s time in her schedule.

I won’t do it alone, I say. It’s not right. It’s immoral. I feel that I was hired under false pretenses, I’ll say that right now.

So I assume that means you’re taking the severance?

You can say what you want about WBCC, I say, but public radio isn’t something to be trifled with.
Morning Edition
is the top-rated morning drive show in greater Baltimore just like everywhere else. There’s going to be outrage. I hope you’ve consulted with your lawyers, because I wouldn’t want to be in the crosshairs of an FCC audit over giving up part of the FM dial to commercial radio.

Jesus Christ, Walter says to Winnifred. You told me he’d be glad to get out.

This is all news to me. I didn’t hire a stone thrower.

I’m just giving you some advice based on a broader perspective. There have been other cases like this, and they’ve all been ugly. So, in other words, gird yourselves for some nasty media.
City Paper
is going to be all over this story, no doubt. WYPR will pick it up. NPR stations tend to stick together. The
Sun
will be pissy, too, if anyone over there’s still awake. Plus, you know, the whole philanthropy side of things. The Greater Baltimore Commission. The Abell folks. No one’s a big fan of commercial radio these days. No offense, Ron.

This, Walter says, thickly, with a susurration in the back of the throat, this, this, what you’re saying—this is over a station
no one listens to
.

It’s the principle of the thing. Plus, WBCC is weird. It’s local color. Turn us on any time of day and you’ll hear something you won’t hear anywhere else. We’re like the homeless guy who sells his little poetry books down on Gay Street, right? No one buys the books, but we’d sure miss him if he left.

I wasn’t prepared to do this, he says. Blinking, recovering himself. Because I didn’t think it would be necessary, but there
is
a final offer available. Six months’ severance with an additional limitation: you can’t work in radio in Baltimore again. No station, nowhere. You’re out of town. I guess that’s not such a dealbreaker for you, is it?

And before you say anything, Winnifred says, beaming again, yes, this
is
hush money, and yes, we
will
sue you if you so much as utter a word out of turn to
anyone
.

Ron pulls at his collar, his Adam’s apple protruding, as if he’s just swallowed a golf ball.

Who wrote the checks, I’m wondering, and how was it disguised? Perhaps Winnifred has political ambitions and a PAC of her own. Who is PureLine Communications, at any rate? If I were the muckraker I’m
pretending to be, this would be the story, and I would be wearing a wire. It all feels so ordinary, so matter-of-fact, this transaction, this yielding up of the comparatively innocent, the unprepared, to the profiteers of this small, small world. Who would have thought that a tiny public radio station you can’t even
get
clearly in half the city would be any kind of a prize? Or, on the other hand, perhaps the scandal is that there is no scandal. BCC needs money. WBCC is underperforming. Winnifred is fulfilling her fiduciary responsibility, and who could say otherwise, if WATB really does become student-run, a low-wattage flight simulator, so to speak? Surely that’s what WBCC was in the beginning. In that case the real scandal is
us
, the eternally subsidized, the overeducated, undermotivated, the preachy, those who hide their resentments in lectures, who think that the world—in the form of a university, a government office, some fragile and temperamental nonprofit—owes us a living.

Kelly, Winnifred says tenderly, reaching across the table to touch my hand, given the circumstances, I’m sure you understand that we need to have your decision before you leave here.

I realize, only now, that no one has offered me coffee, tea, a baked good from the tray, and my stomach is clawing at me to eat. I’ll get something on the way out. Winnifred, I say, I’ll be there, but you’ll do the talking. After that I’ll take the six months. But I’m not signing anything until after I hear
you
tell them what you’ve decided.

Fair enough, Walter says.

Winnifred appears to have risen slightly in her seat, though it may be just a trick of my perception. You
took
the job, she says. I warned you it might be rough going. And now you want to wash your hands. That’s not the mark of a leader.

Winnie, Walter murmurs, you know the man’s right.

I’ll let you work it out, I say, rising. You know my terms. Good to meet you, Ron. Best of luck.

It’s almost as if I could do this, too—I could be a dealmaker, a manipulator. Or is it just a role we all learn, now, watching TV? I walk along Charles Street, trying to remember where I parked, feeling a little dizzy, short-footed, as if I’m leaning over to one side, and slightly shrunken, as if I’ve just shed a skin.