Testing.
One, two, three.
Gosh, I sound like such--
OK.
Does it sound like anything from here?
Can you guys hear me?
I mean, I'm kind of a loud mouth anyway.
That's OK?
Kosher.
Good.
Good, good.
Great.
We're going to go.
We're going to go?
Yeah, I guess if you're ready.
Hi, I'm Alison Deming, director of the University
of Arizona Poetry Center.
For those of you who are new to our events,
I'd like to welcome you.
And in particular, I'd like to thank Antigone's
and the wonderful women who run this terrific bookstore
for their hospitality once again in hosting our summer
resident for a reading.
Some of you are familiar with our summer residency program.
I just want to briefly say a couple of words about it.
This is the fourth year.
Is that right, Karen?
Fourth?
Fourth actual year.
Fourth actual year of the Poetry Center summer residency
program in which, through a national juried competition,
we select one writer, poet, fiction writer,
or nonfiction writer, to spend a month in residence at our guest
house with no obligation other than to have free time to focus
entirely on his or her writing.
And this was the first year we selected a fiction writer.
Anyone who's interested in finding out
information about the residency can call us at the center.
One of the people who was very instrumental in helping
us make the decision this year is
going to be the introducer of Caroline Langston.
So let me introduce to you Bob Houston,
who is the director of the creative writing
program at the university.
And then I will introduce someone who
will really introduce Carol.
[LAUGHTER]
Caroline Langston is a native of Yazoo City, Mississippi.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Yazoo City.
Inescapable.
She was educated at Phillips and at Tulane
and has her MFA from the University of Houston.
She now teaches at Rose Hill College in Aiken, South
Carolina, teaches literature and writing.
She won a Pushcart for her story,
"The Dissolution of the World," which is a great title.
And has published in the Oxford American, Sonora Review,
Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere.
She's at work on a novel called The Memory of Whiteness
and new short stories.
She will be a scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference
this summer.
Caroline Langston.
[APPLAUSE]
I told Michael Spurgeon that my true desire was to come up here
and do my air guitar rendition of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,"
which I might be slightly more comfortable with.
But that I shall refrain for the benefit of everyone here.
I was thinking of a quotation, and it's slightly pretentious,
the one that I've always kind of come back to.
"There are things known and there are things unknown,
and in between, there are the doors," from Aldous Huxley,
which of course Jim Morrison adapted
to come up with the name of the band, The Doors.
But I want to say a few thoughts on what revelation is to writers
and why this is significant.
I thought we could think about the figure of Moses
in a sense, patriarch of the three world's
great monotheistic religions.
And the figure of Moses, in a sense,
is a paradigm for our work as writers
because his life is a series of multiple alienations.
I think to be born into as a member of the chosen people
yet to not have access to that heritage,
to be raised in sort of the intimate cosmopolitan
and sophisticated world of the Egyptian court
yet feel, because of one's blood and one's birth,
that one's [INAUDIBLE] that.
And so to feel that inextricable fighting within oneself
of multiple heritages.
And at the very moment that Moses sort of comes
to an understanding of his Jewish identity
and slays the Egyptian who's persecuting another Jew,
the Jewish man turns around and says, who are you.
You live with them.
So what does he do?
He escapes to the land of Midian.
And he's stuck out there, married away from his heritage
again, and yet in the burning bush, revelation pursues him.
Now if we look at this aesthetically
rather than religiously, that's sort of the work that all of us
are in touch with, seeking the burning bush, in a sense.
Seeking that authentic contact with the divine.
So what does Moses do?
He obeys the message in the burning bush.
His shoes are off.
And I think Flannery O'Connor echoes this wonderfully
at the end of "Parker's Back," where Parker
has been fighting and fighting this haunting that's
pursued him.
And what happens is his detractors throws him off,
the tree explodes into flames, and his shoes are thrown off.
So he has to submit to that.
And I think all artists, whatever
their religious persuasion, have to come
in contact with that kind of sense of religious communion.
So Moses goes ahead and leads his people.
As writers, most of us come from privileged backgrounds.
And in a sense, we often are unwilling to rise
to the responsibility that coming
from a privileged nation and a privileged heritage requires.
And I think there's a sense of social responsibility
about that.
So Moses goes to the top of the mountain and gets the law.
And what did he do?
He comes back down off the mountain
and finds that nobody believes him.
Everybody's mind is turned to something else.
And I think that that also can stand
for a number of the multitude of betrayals that each of us
faces when our family doesn't understand our work,
when our friends don't understand our work,
that we, in a sense, are placed in the position of having
to follow this transcendental revelation whether anybody
buys it or not.
But in that sense, I also think of in The Great Gatsby,
the great scene-- that's sort of a wild transition,
to go from the Hebrew scriptures to The Great Gatsby.
[LAUGHTER]
But that moment when Nick Carraway is at the party
and there's this drunk guy in a car
and he's trying to drive somewhere
and his car's in a ditch and he said, let me back it out.
And somebody else says, but the wheel's off.
And he says, but there's no harm in trying.
So I guess as far as one's transcendental contact
with revelation, even though we are faced with a culture that
basically says, this is BS, then there's
no harm in trying nonetheless.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm reading a story called "The Haitian Necklace."
Those of you who know my writing that I submitted
as part of my application for the Poetry Center, this
perhaps will be slightly different for some of you.
But it's a story that I think is fun,
and so I thought for a public venue like this it would be.
And it's dedicated to a former student
of mine named James McConnell.
And it's called "The Haitian Necklace."
"Kenny's mother stood at the head of the stairs
behind him, looking for all the world,
he thought, like one of those helmet-headed goddesses
in the operas to which his father was always listening.
'Kendall Sebastian Brooks,' she threatened,
stabbing a cigarette-stained yellow finger in the air as she
descended, 'stop right there this minute.'
55 years old, tall, and embarrassingly chesty
in her Shetland sweater, she appeared as though at any moment
she might try to swoop down off the landing
and spear him in the side.
Even so, Kenny was too fast for her.
He bounded down the stairs two and three
at a time with great, sloppy steps, landing so hard
on the parquet floor that the walls shuddered.
And when he attempted to snatch the car keys off the hall table,
a framed brass rubbing of an English fell off its hook
and came crashing down upon his hand.
'Damn it,' he said as the car keys scattered across
the mahogany table and fell in a thunk on the Persian rug.
Momentarily arrested, he yanked out
his fingers, which hurt from under the heavy wood frame,
trying not to pay attention to his mother's anguished gaze.
The expression, he thought, of a bug
impaled upon a straight pin, pathetic and wriggling.
Kenny was in 10th grade biology and had recently
to complete an insect collection.
'Sebastian,' she called out helplessly.
And when she did, the room fractured.
The sound of her voice made Kenny's very head hurt.
There was no answer.
'Sebastian,' she repeated through the living room door
behind which Kenny's father sat leafing through an issue
of The National Review as the MacNeil Lehrer NewsHour blared
away on television.
For a brief, incredible moment, there was silence.
And to his horror, Kenny could actually
visualize himself sitting down on the tufted hall
and actually listening to her as the therapist had once
suggested to him.
Then, as if by delayed reaction, his father
lumbered into the hall, loosening his tie.
The bottom of his starched white shirt,
untucked, hung like a wrinkle skirt
over the top of his suit trousers.
He screwed up his eyes and glanced hard at Kenny, frowning
and speechless as though his son were under a microscope
and Kenny's father couldn't quite find him.
Kenny, meanwhile, stood firm and stared his parents down,
his mother suspended in the air like an astonished angel
and his dad creeping across the floorboards
like that old cartoon of Father Time, both
of them open-mouthed, ridiculous, and revolting.
Then slowly, defiantly, he bent to pick up the Peugeot keys.
'What is it, Nancy?'
his father finally answered.
His mother did not answer but continued to glare at Kenny.
'You are not taking the car,' she said.
'not after that stunt you pulled last time.
You are not taking the car.'
'OK!' he shrieked and threw out his arms dramatically as he
always did during these confrontations,
which were choreographed to the smallest detail,
every instant an eternal return of the same.
Only this time, he stumbled over his own giant athletic shoes,
dropped the keys again, and felt like a loser.
'So I'm not taking the car.'
Instead, he strode right out the front door,
smacked the edge of his skateboard leaning
against the porch pillar, and caught it in his hands
as he descended the old house's steep porch
stairs, only once glancing back at his motionless parents,
broken by the leaded glass doors into 1,000 beveled pieces.
He punched in the code on the front gate lock
and the iron bars rang shut behind him.
Then he was off, helmetless, careening in the October
twilight down the Jefferson Street Hill, the oldest
neighborhood in Jackson, at the bottom of which
was the Jitney Jungle Grocery Store where he hit the payphone
and used his parents' AT&T calling card
number to call his friend Jackson Lee to come and pick him
up.
'That stunt you pulled last time'
to which his mother referred was the reason
that, though 15 and possessed of his license,
he was not being allowed to drive.
In Mississippi, you could get your license at 15,
and it was damned embarrassing to have to hitch rides
and be dropped off by her every day at school
in the ancient rusted Saab whose bumper bore the legend:
a man without a gun is a citizen.
A man without a gun is a subject.
Nevertheless, as far as the consequences of the last time
went, Kenny knew he was exceptionally lucky.
Friday night of the first weekend of the school year--
coincidentally the first time he was allowed to drive the Peugeot
to the football game--
the most unpopular boy at Country Day, Wade Rivers,
had thrown a party while his parents were out of town.
175 people from high schools all over Jackson
had showed up at Wade's house out in the fancy Madison
suburbs, and Kenny had gotten wasted
on eight Milwaukee's Bests.
None of the stuck-up sub-debs from rival Jackson Prep
would talk to him, of course, and he lost his Isaiah, his best
friend, in the crowd.
When the police showed up and started dragging off people
left and right, Kenny had to dive out a window
and stumble 10 blocks in unfamiliar darkness
to a strip mall, call his parents collect,
and ask them to come pick him up.
This comprised the whole of 'the last time,' but after nearly two
months Kenny was still not being allowed to drive.
'Heck I didn't even get arrested,
unlike Wade,' he grumbled to himself,
standing at the Jitney Jungle payphone waiting for Isaiah
to answer.
'You mean she changed her mind again?'
Isaiah said on picking up, laughing.
'All right, you just chill.
I'll be there in a minute.
Your mom is crazy.'
Too true, it occurred to Kenny, as it occurred
to Kenny many times before.
His mother really was crazy, and the last time
was merely the latest.
Kenny's parents hadn't even gotten married
until they were old already.
And Kenny was their only child, with the result
that his mother, unlike everyone else's,
had no idea how to do anything and was paranoid
about everything.
She may have come from an old Jackson family, the Westerbergs,
of which she was continually reminding him,
and who had once owned the most famously elegant hotel in town,
but some of Kenny's earliest memories were of his mother
helplessly imploring Ruthie, their Black maid, for advice
on how to deal with him.
She had also made the mistake of having his IQ tested
while he was still too young to know what was going on.
The number had come back exceptionally high.
She had told him what it was.
And now he could not get out from under it
no matter how hard he tried.
The IQ score existed on some high shining
summit of her mind, predictive of his future expectations.
No matter how many failing papers
he pulled from his knapsack at the end of the day,
wadded up and lacerated with red pen from one end to the other,
the score would not be jarred.
The worst thing of all, though, was
that Kenny's mother was president of the local chapter
of the John Birch Society.
She even had her own television show
that came on the public access channel Friday
nights at 11:00 after The Reverend Louis Farrakhan Hour
and before a local self-appointed Black political
commentator named Elisha Speaks, who
sat in front of an upside down American flag, ranting
and raving about gangs, drugs, the city
council, the racist police chief, and America in general,
which she spelled, he said, with a K.
And in the middle of it all, with Kenny's mother smiling
in a gold-buttoned suit pronouncing the John Birch
motto, less government, more responsibility,
and with God's help a better world.
Thinking on these things, enumerating her grievances
to himself, Kenny was fuming more than ever
by the time he noticed Isaiah pulling up in front of the bus
stop outside the Jitney Jungle where Kenny set clutching
his skateboard in his arms.
'Hey, Kenny, man,' Isaiah called,
rolling down the electric windows of his parent's glossy
black Olds 98, pushing open the passenger door as he swept
a pile of compact disc cases off the passenger-side floor.
Kenny threw a skateboard into the back seat
and clambered inside.
'Sorry I'm late.'
'Huh,' Kenny said, glancing at the clock on the dashboard.
The sky was dark violet now, the color of a bruise,
and he had no idea what time it was.
Usually it took Isaiah around 20 minutes
to drive downtown from Woodlea, the neighborhood
in northwest Jackson, Kenny's father like to say,
where all the rich Black people lived.
'Bad stuff going down at home.
My mother was really upset about that thing that happened down
at City Hall today.'
He punched the gas, and they shot up the Fortification Street
hill.
Isaiah glanced over at him, aquarium-green light
from the dashboard catching the lines of his face eerily.
'Apparently this woman-- this Black woman,' he added
uncomfortably, 'who worked for the city was caught embezzling
money from the payroll department and got fired.'
Isaiah spoke calmly and clearly like an adult.
He, unlike Kenny, was not an underachiever.
'Except she, the woman, says her supervisor's lying,
that it's a personal thing.
So she appealed it to the council.
But mama didn't believe it and voted with all the, well,
you know, white guys.'
Kenny added in the silent missing words.
In that instant, the memory flashed
through his mind of the first time Isaiah
had to come over to Kenny's house to spend the night.
'Now, why is it,' Kenny's father said to Isaiah over his
customary evening glass of bourbon,
'that you're named after not one but two Confederate generals?'
Kenny had cringed inside.
'So what happened?' Kenny said.
Isaiah turned right onto State Street, the central artery
that traversed the city.
'So she gets to City Hall this morning,
and there's this tire, like a car tire, on the steps
along with the sign saying, this is a necklace
for Diana Jackson Lee and any other Black council members
if they ever against sell out Jackson's Black community.
You know what that is, don't you, Kenny?
A Haitian necklace.'
'No.' On their left past the shining white hulk
of the Baptist hospital.
'They do it like, in the Caribbean and South Africa.
They cover the tire in gasoline and put it around your neck
and light it.'
He paused, and when he spoke again,
his voice was rough and eerie.
'It's how they watch you burn.'
He paused again, sniffed.
'A bunch of idiots.'
Kenny sat dumbly with no idea what to say.
There had never been this mood before when
they hung out together.
'Anyway,' Isaiah said, his voice signaling a change in subject.
Kenny's mouth widened involuntarily into a grin
as the idea came to him.
His body remembered the feeling of wind across his back
as he ran lightly through the Madison subdivision.
'You know what we ought to do, Isaiah,' he said,
sounding even to himself confident and slightly reckless,
like somebody who knew what he was doing.
'We ought to go get drunk.'
'Yeah,' Isaiah said, as though it was a good idea that it just
dawned on him as well.
'Yeah, that's what we ought to do.'
They had only done this a couple of times before,
including 'the last time,' all at other people's houses.
'I know this place on Northwest Street where we can get
beer,' Isaiah added.
Then a second later, 'Shoot, I forgot my money.'
'So did I,' Kenny said.
'You always forget your money, Kenny.'
He didn't act mad though. 'I'mma go back to my house.'
Going north, he floored the accelerator,
and the law firms and antebellum mansions peeled past as Kenny
rode through the scattered CDs on the floorboards for something
to listen to.
Triumphantly, he came up with an album called Superunknown
by the group Soundgarden and fed the disk
into the player's mouth.
The inside of the Oldsmobile erupted into heavy guitar
and screaming.
It was magnificent.
Isaiah was driving fast, and Kenny
lowered the electric windows just
to feel his face against the breeze.
This was it.
This was the life.
They were out of the old part of town
now, into the wide city band of what had once been middle class
white Jackson but was now ebbing into respectable working class
Black.
Unless you took the interstate, to get to Isaiah's, you
had to go through there.
Everywhere there were lights, at check
cashing places and appliance stores,
the streets were crawling with Friday-night traffic.
And everything was cool, normal, conversational, typical,
and random.
What bands were coming to the Midnight Sun soon,
and what were their odds on getting in?
Who's the biggest asshole at Country Day and why?
Whose parents at Country Day had the most money already
and whose parents just had to make it themselves?
Which of their teachers used to get stoned
and how you could tell?
How everything at Country Day sucked completely.
And how even with tuition at $6,000 a year and the place
being a waste of both money and time, both of them
were still glad they didn't go to racist Jackson
Prep, established only in 1970, just when, Kenny's mother said,
the federal government came down and had the schools integrated.
'I could have gone to public school like my parents,' Isaiah
offered.
The Black elite, as they were sometimes called,
had gone back then to Jim Hill High in Lanier,
but now they all sent their kids to Country Day.
The magnet program, of course.
'I couldn't have,' Kenny said.
His mother had gone to a girls' school
somewhere in Virginia and his father to Phillips Exeter.
There was no way with his [INAUDIBLE] Kenny
could have gotten into either.
People in the Birch Society were always
asking how Sebastian and Nancy Brooks could
send their only child to the most godless, liberal school
in town.
But all Kennedy's father said was, 'Maybe I am a conservative,
but I didn't raise my son to be a redneck fundamentalist.'
So as a result, here Kenny was with Isaiah Jackson Lee,
whose mother had been Secretary of the Urban League
and whose father had once been some kind of militant.
There was a faded black and white picture
Isaiah carried around his father with a huge afro and sunglasses
standing in front of a fuzz ball microphone
at a press conference.
The truth was the reason that they
were such good friends was because they were both geeks.
Isaiah, though, had been to the Duke and Northfield Mount Hermon
Summer Schools.
And Mr. Levenstein was giving him
advance paced tutoring in Latin because Isaiah had always
wanted to read Horace.
'Now, how come some of that didn't rub off on you?' his
mother always asked him.
Furthermore, compounding Isaiah's problems
was the fact that the other members of Country Day's
self-proclaimed Black elite made fun of him
for reading weird French poetry from the 19th century
and listening to white alternative music.
He and Kenny also had head-banging in common,
along with overbearing mothers in politics and lives
tyrannized by Stanley Kaplan programs
and the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New
Jersey.
They were each also acolytes to two separate Episcopal churches
in town.
Not wanting Kenny to turn into a gloomy reactionary
atheist like his father, Kenny's mother
had signed him up for the job at her church
where they used the 1928 Book of Common Prayer
and the priest who was a retired army colonel from the Vietnam
War named Rex Rohatyn.
She after the experience would be spiritually
enlightening for him.
But unfortunately, she had not stopped
to consider the main thing that acolytes do, namely
to set candles on fire, which he enjoyed rather more than she
would have liked and had once, in her words,
practically burned the place down.
Someday, he and Isaiah planned, they
were to start a combination garage funk heavy metal band
and play guitar in their cassocks
with nothing on underneath.
He'd get dates with the Jackson Prep girls then.
Isaiah clearly had the edge, though, being smarter.
On the stereo, Soundgarden was still playing.
'Black hole sun, won't you come and wash away the rain.'
Just thinking about the lyrics made
Kenny feel the oddest surge of power
within him, as if he were become that sun itself,
every bit of Kendall Sebastian Brooks dried away and gone.
A bar-- a ball of fire, he'd glow
and be able to cinch things like the prep girls' hair
just by touching them.
It was the kind of thing about which he liked thinking,
and he wondered if Isaiah felt the same.
'Hey, man,' Kenny said, 'what do you think the lyrics to that
song 'Black Hole Sun' mean?'
They were pulling into the semi-circular driveway
now, however, and Isaiah didn't answer him.
The houses in Isaiah's neighborhood
were dark, flat, low, expensive, and huge,
set in the middle of giant green lawns
and winding drives that smelled like the country.
Kenny followed Isaiah through the garage
into the kitchen where the dishwasher was running
and the air full of hot mist from dinner.
The house was decorated in a million shades
of brown, framed prints of tribal women,
and a dense layering of lighted mirrors in the dining room
cabinet bar shelves.
'Hey, Mr. Lee,' Kenny said as they passed Isaiah's father,
who was sitting on the overstuffed white living room
sofa watching TV.
'Good evening, Kenny,' he said, grave and stentorian as usual.
And then his beeper went off at his side.
Isaiah's father, like everyone else's, was a lawyer.
Kenny followed Isaiah to his room
where Isaiah looked for his wallet in the piles of laundry
on the floor while Kenny stared at Isaiah's computer screen
saver in the framed gargantuan biology class insect collection.
When they were on their way back out,
Isaiah's mother was standing in the kitchen.
Barefooted in a silk robe, her long
relaxed hair was down and wild, flying out
loosely into it spun strands.
The front of her robe was low, and Kenny tried but could not
help looking at her warm bronze skin
and into the shadow of her cleavage.
She looked as though she had been crying or drinking, one.
Her eyes were water-rimmed, and her diamond earrings
winked weakly.
For some reason, standing there, she
reminded Kenny of Hecuba, the old queen of Troy
at the end of The Iliad that they'd had
to read last year in school.
When everybody was dead, she [INAUDIBLE]
in the middle of the ruined streets and wailed.
'Isaiah,' she said, crazily rushing over and trying to hug
him as if he were a baby.
'Don't go out.
Don't go out,' she said. 'It's dangerous out there.'
There was not a word from Isaiah's father, the ex-militant
in the next room.
'It's cool mom.
It's cool,' Isaiah said, pushing her back and looking annoyed
as he sauntered by.
'I promise.'
She tried Kenny instead, patting him on the shoulder.
'Make sure he's careful, will you, Kenny son?'
Kenny just smiled, but he couldn't think of anything
to say.
Then they were off back into the night.
The first thing they did was head back
downtown to the Amoco station on Northwest Street
where Isaiah's father's cousin had
worked since he got out of the state hospital at Whitfield.
'This is my friend Kenny Brooks, Roderick,' Isaiah said,
introducing him as Kenny cooly slid two packs of Michelob onto
the counter.
'Kenny, this is my cousin Roderick.'
Kenny nodded politely, but Roderick was already
off in conversation with Isaiah, speeding miles ahead of them.
'Hey, man, how you doing?
I ain't seen your mom in a while.
I've been going to Vicksburg to casinos any chance I get.
You know, they got them free shuttles that leave from
the Western Sizzlin' parking lot out on I-55.'
He was a tall, wiry Black man, paler than Isaiah.
His hair an unshaven flat top with a pick comb
shoved idly idling at the side and the random frenetic
expression of a schizophrenic.
This, Kenny recognized.
He had cousins too.
But as he stood there smiling again,
he wondered what it felt like for Isaiah's family
to be that close to the bottom, no matter how rich,
successful, and smart all of them were.
After all, Kenny's schizophrenic cousins
didn't have to work at Amoco.
'And you hadn't won nothing yet?'
Isaiah said, lapsing into what he called the vernacular.
'Not after having been over there all those times?'
Unobtrusively, he handed his cousin a $10 bill.
Without even looking, Roderick punched
and the digital green total popped onto the LED display.
'No, I hadn't won nothing, but the food is good.
You hear me?
And the drinks is free.'
He handed the change to Isaiah, Kenny already hefting
the six packs in his arms.
Behind him, the fuzzy TV security monitor
and the 'we accept food stamps' sign,
bright orange banner that proclaimed 'we ID' appeared both
futile and ironic.
'You take care of yourself now, you hear?'
Isaiah called back to Roderick, who
smiled and nodded as the plate glass
door swung shut behind them.
'Nice to meet you,' Kenny added.
Then there was the question of where
they were going to drink it.
Isaiah thought that a second-story window
of an abandoned warehouse across from City Hall
would be good, while Kenny, thinking of that
wind again against his back, that the top branches
of the Magnolia tree in his own damn yard would suit just fine.
They ended up in the parking of a seedy strip mall
on McWillie Drive, half hidden by a dumpster,
the metallic lights of a laundromat brooding deli
behind them.
From there, they had an angle on the redneck sports bar
across the street and the procession
of loud-laughed smoky-voiced women
drifting intermittently out of its doors.
Their exotic gestures were pronounced and filled
with knowing, their bright hair stylized
and earrings dangled pendulously.
There was something about them that it
was at once both fascinating and disgusting.
'It's like Kabuki theater,' Isaiah said,
slamming his third beer and chucking the can into the back
seat.
'No, it isn't,' objected Kenny, who had also been to Japan.
Still, they sat there, though, working their way systematically
through the rest of the two six packs, most
or more or less in silence.
After the Soundgarden album played a second time,
they listened successively to groups with names like Alice
in Chains, Marilyn Manson, and Nine Inch Nails.
Then Isaiah pulled out of his pocket
a package of Sher Bidi clove cigarettes,
and they shared a couple, the Olds 98 filling
with thick, sweet smoke.
But the more Kenny drank, the more his head
filled up with crazy lightness, the more
that the mere sight of the redneck girls grinding past
on spike heels poured longing into his loins,
the more he was unpleasantly surprised at how restless
and dissatisfied he was.
He and Isaiah were giggling at nothing,
looking at girls pouring out the doors,
but now it was only a drag and a bore.
Everything [INAUDIBLE] dreamy, yes, but it was also,
he realized with horror, not unlike what's sitting in class
had felt like before his mother had gotten the therapist
to put him on Ritalin to calm him down.
'This sucks,' he said to Isaiah.
'Let's get out of here.'
'Yeah,' he agreed and started to crank the car.
The record stores were still open.
They could go there or park in front of Alicia's house
and see what time she gets home.
That was the Country Day homecoming queen
Isaiah had an insufferable crush on who'd actually once told him,
'I don't care how smart you are.
You and Kenny are still insufferable bastards.'
Insufferable bastards.
Kenny liked that, kind of.
'She's just a slut,' Kenny said encouragingly.
'I wouldn't mind,' Isaiah said, giggling,
stubbing his Sher Bidi butt out in the ashtray.
The vision of Isaiah's mother's chest
and the wetness of her weeping eyes swept through Kenny's mind.
Whatever he was upset about, he thought drunkenly,
he'd like to fix.
Then his mind reeled back.
40-year-old woman, my god.
Then Isaiah said, 'Except the wagon hut gal think I'm some
Black rapist.'
That was the security guard in Alicia's neighborhood.
[INAUDIBLE] hands were slippery on the keys.
The engine coughed, started to turn over, and died.
'Shoot, man.
I forgot,' he said. 'I can't go anywhere.
I'm drunk.' Involuntary gurgles of laughter bubbled out
of Kenny's throat.
Almost at the same moment, it seemed,
they noticed the bright, yellow sign
proclaiming Waffle House in capitals
hanging like a bilious moon over the interstate.
Both of them giggling crazy, they slammed out
of the car doors and bounded stumblingly
across the strip mall lot, very nearly running
into an enormous heaving woman loading bales of laundry
into the back of her station wagon
while her children scrawled out the open windows.
'Sorry,' they yelled almost in unison, only a beat apart.
The air smelled of oil and exhaust,
but Kenny could feel the wind at last.
It was exhilarating.
When they stumbled through the Waffle House door,
everything inside was warm and glittered.
The music from the jukebox was loud.
'Country,' Isaiah groaned.
Together, they fed in a palmful full of quarters,
punched in every remotely hard rock song on the deck,
then sank down on either side of the booth.
'What you want, honey?' the faceless waitress crooned.
And they started pointing at the color menus
randomly, each of them naming things
and all the choices running together in Kenny's mind.
Eggs over easy, toast, two strips bacon, hotcakes,
Belgian waffle with strawberry compote and real whipped cream,
and coffee.
Yes, coffee.
The waitress's face snapped vividly
into the sunny fluorescent haze.
'Don't you go messing with me, now,' she growled,
pointing her finger especially at Kenny.
'Don't think you can get away with this foolishness any more
than he can.'
Kenny and Isaiah just smirked at each other.
Redneck racist, yeah, yeah.
Still they hesitated, reordered, and when
the several bright plates arrived almost
as part of some giant steaming banner of grease, they devoured.
Bacon crisp, Kenny could hear it crunch.
Melted butter got between his fingers.
Boiling coffee scalded his throat
but started slowly to restore his depth of vision.
Just as that song came on the jukebox again,
repeating like a promise its insistent refrain,
'Black hole sun, won't you come and wash away the rain?'
The heat, indeed, was escalating,
Kenny noticed uncomfortably.
As his stomach filled and his nerves
started to jangle from the coffee.
Isaiah was saying something, but it was aberrant
or Kenny couldn't understand.
He hoped, the wind again, that there was another beer waiting
when he got back to the car.
All at once, a voice cracked in the air like a gunshot.
'How come you ain't on your own turf, North Jackson boys?'
There, reclining in the next booth, his arms slung
over the back of the booth lazily,
was none other than his mother's public access
nemesis, Elisha Speaks.
Kenny and Isaiah flinched, suddenly
feeling as vulnerable as spotlighted animals
and instantly sober.
'That old fool is nuts,' Isaiah said, and added knowingly,
'Vietnam.'
Isaiah asked the waitress for some more coffee,
and Kenny slurped up another fork full of grits.
But then it came again.
'Where do you think you get off ignoring me like that?'
He said, his voice astonishingly loud.
'Cool it, Speaks,' the waitress barked at him from over
by the deep fryer.
Nevertheless, to Kenny's and Isaiah's dismay,
Speaks pulled himself out of the booth,
tucked a stack of ragged paperbacks under his arm,
and started limping toward them, wagging
a gnarled finger in the air.
First thing Kenny thought about was how short he was.
Only about five feet tall, like a little doll, his head swaying
back and forth so that his dreadlocks bounced like springs,
crowned by an enormous crocheted African hat.
He sank into the booth on Kenny's side
and glared across at Isaiah.
'Your mama,' he said, 'is a traitor.'
Occurrences like this and the sudden remembrance
of a public identity were to Kenny not unfamiliar.
'How can your mother really believe all that right-wing
junk?'
He'd actually been asked by the too-cool Spanish teacher
and soccer coach who just graduated from college
and who looked disappointed when Kenny answered.
This was on the soccer field during PE.
'Hell if I know.'
Kenny was impressed at Isaiah's smooth response.
'Mr. Speaks, I believe?
I'm afraid I don't understand exactly that to which
you're referring.'
'It's Reverend Speaks,' he muttered,
but Isaiah's words seem to make him only angrier.
'You know exactly what it is I'm talking about, boy.
I'm talking about why come it is your mama won't stand up
for the Black people.'
He cut his eyes at Kenny, who in turn glanced at the pile
of Speaks' books on the table, four ragged,
yellow paperbacks with faded, anemic covers that look like
they came from the '60s.'
African Liberation, screamed the top cover of the one on the top.
Isaiah paused and spoke.
'I'm aware that public servants decisions are, in fact,
often controversial ones, certainly.'
His Harvard voice.
But he was still drunk enough, Kenny observed,
that the voice fell flat.
He couldn't get it right enough like usual
to make it seem perfect.
His eyelids made a nervous motion,
the first sign of discomfort Kenny had seen him make.
'Hey there,' Kenny exclaimed with the tennis club grin,
inspired, reaching out his hand for Speaks to shake.
'I'm Kendall Brooks.
It's nice to meet you.'
Speaks glowered at him.
The volcano in Isaiah burst.
'Just tell me you didn't have nothing to do with that crap
on the City Hall stairs,' he boomed.
The waitress broke in. 'If y'all don't stop yelling,
I'm going to have to call the police.'
Speaks' face assumed 'hey, don't look at me' expression.
'I didn't have nothing to do with it,
but I could sure make a bunch of good guesses who did.'
Not waiting for Isaiah to answer,
Speaks turned, his tone laced with irony.
'Kendall Brooks, you say?
I think I recognize that name.'
'Oh yeah?' Kenny said.
Instantly, Isaiah regained his composure.
This time, he got the Harvard voice right,
sounding practically like Kenny's father.
'Actually, we were just going,' he said,
casually ripping a $10 bill out of his wallet and dropping it
on the table.
'Yeah,' Kenny echoed. 'We were just leaving.'
Annoyingly, a country song now whined again on the jukebox.
'I got friends in low places where the whiskey drowns
and the beer chases.'
'Shut up,' Kenny silently ordered the singer as they
walked out the door.
Speaks, however, was right behind them.
'Let's just play it cool, mind our own business,' Isaiah said
softly to him. 'He's just a crazy man.'
'You don't think I, like, know that already?'
Then Speaks muscled in front of them,
walking backwards trying to command their attention.
'You didn't think I'm going to let you all go just like that,
did you?'
'Frankly,' Isaiah said, 'I wasn't thinking about at all.'
'Jerk,' Kenny added.
'You better watch that kind of language around Reverend
Speaks,' he said, snorting.
[INAUDIBLE] 'You think people think alike just
because they're Black?'
'Shut up, Kenny,' Isaiah said, and Kenny did.
Speaks was running backwards as fast
as they could to keep up with them, books in hand,
making it look easy.
'I ain't got no car,' he shouted,
his voice resounding in the hollow night air.
'Can't you boys just give me enough money so I can get a ride
home, you rich boys?'
He must have seen Isaiah throw that $10 on the table.
'Forget it,' Isaiah said.
Suddenly, Speaks halted and threw his arms out
as if to keep them from passing.
'You've got to pay me if you want to cross the river.'
Isaiah shot Kenny a bewildered expression.
Slowly, self-consciously, and grinning, Speaks
reached inside the breast pocket of his shapeless lumberjacket
and pulled out a pint bottle of Canadian Club whiskey
that Kenny saw was almost full.
'Y'all give me enough money for a cab ride home,
I'll give you this.'
He held up the bottle in his hand.
Under the streetlight, it was luminous,
like some amulet that could ward off evil spirits.
Isaiah are pulled out his wallet,
and Speaks handed Kenny the bottle.
'OK, is this enough?'
Isaiah said, pulling out a $20 and extending it.
The bill was crisp, new, impossibly green.
'I knew what'd get you boys,' Speaks started to croon.
There was only an instant's glance from Isaiah
to Kenny, a flash of recognition kindled between them.
Isaiah pulled back the $20 before Speaks could grab hold
of it, and he and Kenny were running as fast as they could
toward the car, trying to stifle their laughter while Speaks
yelled after them, 'Goddamn you racist honky bastards.'
They jumped in.
Isaiah scratched out of the strip mall,
past a couple of astonished laundromat faces.
And Kenny turned up the CD player
as they tore off in the direction of I-55.
Once they were safely on it, its high, multiple-laned hum
bearing them along toward downtown, Isaiah sighed.
'Well, that was interesting.'
'You just need you some of this,' Kenny he said,
tipping Canadian Club bottle back and forth,
watching the green dashboard light reflect through the glass.
'Maybe I better go home now,' Isaiah said.
'Maybe for one night, this has been interesting enough.'
The [INAUDIBLE] implied the evening's imminent end,
a fate that Kenny--
here he imagined his mother, bug-like and wriggling,
wanted at all costs to avoid.
'Don't listen to him, Isaiah.'
Isaiah glanced at him doubtfully.
On his side of the car, the lights and stabilization pools
of the old city sewage plant floated by dreamily.
Kenny continued, 'You've seen that stupid show of his,
after all.
He's just a dumb ass wino junkie.'
He had no idea if this were true,
but at least it sounded good.
At that, Isaiah's face relaxed, and he
laughed, pointed at the bottle in Kenny's hand
that rippled with light.
Then he said in a tone that sounded like a riddle,
'If you were a wino, where would you go?'
'Downtown.'
For blocks, the sidewalks were deserted.
The only signs of activity were at
the all-night neon-lit bonding companies clustered
at the foot of the city jail.
They parked next to City Hall in the space marked
Reserved for D. Jackson Lee.
Floodlights illuminated the facade
of the massive white antebellum building, its stand of columns
and naked stair [INAUDIBLE] lit up
the lawn in unreal candy-ish green.
Standing next to the tree that would, come December,
be the Capitol Christmas tree, they
opened the bottle and each took a swig.
Isaiah practically spit his out on the sidewalk.
'Jeez, how can we drink this without chasers?'
He said, then took another sip.
Then the shadow of the night watchman
paced across the front of the building.
'We can't stay here, Kenny.
We'll get into trouble.'
So they started walking.
The tall, glass headquarters of banks and insurance companies
were massive and empty, steely against the sky.
Their footsteps resounded on the concrete
as they meandered along, passing the bottle back and forth
between them.
A persistent night wind was blowing down the street chilly,
but the Canadian Club warned them.
They passed by the loading dock at the Clarion-Ledger building
where men were shouldering stacks of Saturday papers
onto trucks, barking at each other in staccato voices.
'Where are we going?'
Isaiah asked.
'I don't know,' Kenny answered, borne along now only by feeling.
Like a river, the streets seemed to flow [INAUDIBLE]
toward the ancient railroad by a dock, suspended in the air
a half mile in a distance.
They began to pass buildings that
were closed for the evening and others that were closed forever,
where bare, incandescent bulbs hung on cords, rooting
behind soaped up windows.
And as they went, Isaiah seemed inexplicably
to grow only more excited.
When at last they arrived into the viaduct's massive shadow,
Isaiah pointed up at the shell of the old railroad hotel next
to it and said, 'Didn't your family used to own that
or something?'
Sure enough, there it was, what was left of the King Edward
hotel, which once, famously, his Westerberg relatives had owned.
And even now, his mother was proud of the connection.
'From the Capital City chapter of the John Birch Society,' she
always ended every episode of the access show,
'this is Nancy Westerberg Brooks.'
He had never understood why.
It was actually sort of embarrassing to him
at Country Day since the place was now just
a broken-down old building.
But Isaiah actually acted like it was cool.
'How come you never talked about this before?'
he said, crossing the street toward the chained entrance
to the closed hotel's covered garage.
'I don't know,' Isaiah said, following after.
They were both drunk again by now,
and it made him dizzy to try and focus.
Isaiah stepped over the chain and strode across the concrete
where no one had parked in nearly--
dates Kenny's mother had mentioned
before began to occur to him strangely--
30 years.
'I think this must be the back entrance,' Isaiah said,
walking toward the outline of a boarded-up door.
He sounded like an archaeologist.
This was his Harvard voice again, the mania of someone
who had amassed the mass the largest insect collection
in Country Day history.
There was a scratch.
A match flame flared at the end of Isaiah's fingers,
picking out the door more clearly.
Then the match went out.
Isaiah tried the door, but it would not budge.
'Oh well,' he said, walking back to where Kenny stood
in the middle of the lot.
'We probably ought to get out of here,' Kenny said.
All of a sudden, he realized he was very tired.
But Isaiah lit another match, its tiny light loomed
[INAUDIBLE] surprisingly large circumference.
'Wait, look,' he said.
'Isn't it amazing?'
And Kenny had to admit that it was.
Light from the outside filtered through a bank
of chicken-wire windows, and a ramp
led upward to a second level, giving
the effect of a vaulting in infinite space.
It seemed to Kenny that he was standing
in the middle of something timeless and still.
This had once been his family's, he remembered again.
The second match went out, but Isaiah
had already lit another one and was climbing up the ramp,
peering into the upper floor.
'What the hell,' he said.
'Kenny, there's something up here.'
All of a sudden, it was as though a light came on.
A familiar voice boomed.
'Aha, I caught you Jackson boys now.
What the hell are you doing in here?'
It was Speaks, a flashlight in his hand
and a tricolored knapsack slung over his shoulder
like some Rastafarian Santa Claus.
'Ah!' Kenny blurted out, startled,
running up the ramp toward where Isaiah was thinking Speaks would
want both his money and whiskey back now.
'You hold up right there,' Speaks yelled belligerently
chasing behind.
[INAUDIBLE] But Kenny ran even faster
until he reached the top of the ramp at the second level
and saw what Isaiah saw.
In the middle of the concrete floor,
there was a fire blazing in an oil
drum, its dancing flames reflecting a corona
around the cavernous space.
'Must be homeless people,' Isaiah mumbled.
Then the sound of slow footfalls echoed.
'What is it?' a voice spoke, ringing clear and metallic
on the air.
Out of the parking garage, its shadows, the figures of two men,
walked into the light.
The weight of heavy gold chains glittered on him,
around their necks, and on their hands,
but otherwise, they were somehow featureless.
One was even wearing sunglasses.
The hand of the other moved down to his side,
and through his hazy vision, Kenny
saw a flash of duller metal in the man's hand.
Crooks, drug dealers, the labels crowded haphazardly
into his head.
'Hello there,' Isaiah said awkwardly.
The whiskey was making him stumble over his words.
'We didn't mean to interrupt or anything.'
'You didn't, did you?'
he said.
'Well, I can't help that now.'
The one in sunglasses walked over to Isaiah then Kenny,
thrusting his hands into their pockets,
taking Isaiah's wallet and car keys.
Then he walked back to the fire.
After that, they all stood there motionless for a long minute.
'Uh-huh,' one said.
And Kenny heard the unmistakable click
of a handgun's hammer cocked.
'But this is crazy,' Isaiah blurted out, terrified.
And by the firelight, Kenny could see
that he was starting to cry.
Suddenly Kenny felt the stirrings
of something new and unfamiliar within him, a feeling for Isaiah
that was as tender and stinging as an open wound.
Then it happened.
'OK, honky bastards, this is it,' Speaks threatened,
running up the ramp behind them with his dreadlocks flying.
Too late, he saw the two indistinct men, their shadows
lengthened by the fire into shapeless and distorted phantoms
behind them.
And he looked frantically at Kenny and Isaiah
with an expression of solemn and apologetic recognition.
The gun fired.
'No,' Kenny tried to yell, but the words confused themselves
and his [AUDIO OUT].
All at once, he was horribly conscious of his inadequacy,
of every second-rate thing he'd done and been.
A vision came to him then, his mother descending
from the sky in full martial fury
upon him, the guardian of history and future,
her gaze fierce and filled with knowledge.
He did not try to escape her this time,
but instead steeled his limbs, preparing himself
for wherever, if ever, the bullet's pain would pierce him."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]