The Bold World Page 14

  From what I was experiencing, it felt as though male energy was something to wrangle and contain—outmaneuver it before it outmaneuvered me. Whereas with Georgia, I was trying to help her explore and expand and dominate, Cassius—and even Joe these days—needed to be lassoed.

  The story life kept telling me was this: The world is divided between two genders. My son and daughter were different, Joe and I were different—my own parents were night and day. All men and all women were meant to operate in silos, drawing from strengths unique to their sex. It sounded too absolute, but the supporting evidence was so overwhelming that I couldn’t cogently argue against it. And when I looked back at what happened when men and women deviated from their assigned positions, it made me nervous even to question those roles.

  My father used to tell me stories about his mother, who became the family’s sole provider in 1920s America while her husband was repeatedly denied stable employment simply because he was a Black man. Domestic jobs were often the only steady source of income for Blacks during that time, and they were given to our women, mostly because our men were rarely allowed in white people’s homes—or near white women and children.

  So, while Pop-Pop stayed home with their three kids, Grandma Mildred went to work as a housekeeper, serving and cleaning for people to whom she was invisible. Then after work, before going home, she would take to the basketball court down the block, sweating out all the injustices she’d endured that day.

  My father hated his mother working and his father at home cooking. He resented the imbalance of power—a woman in control, the breadwinner of the family, implied divine order askew. He spent his whole life, with his own family, trying to restore the balance, often bending my mother to his will.

  He’d belittle her in front of us, often at the dinner table, where we all gathered at the end of each day. “Jamelle, why are we having steak again? We had it last night.” Dad looked at her, leaning back in his chair.

  “John, I asked you this morning what you wanted and you never answered. So I made steak.”

  My grandfather John Tollie Patterson Sr., or “Pop-Pop,” as we called him (seated on the ground, second from left), dressed in his Sunday best.

  “Wait one second.” His laugh was hard, almost bitter. “So now I have to decide on the menu, too?”

  Mama remained silent, gently resting her palms on the table—composing herself.

  I jumped in for comic relief. “Yup, Dad, Mom’s asking you to tell her what you want to eat, and then actually eat it.” Everyone laughed, but I knew, even at twelve years old, that I had skirted the issue. What Daddy was implying was that Mama hadn’t done her job, which consisted strictly of children, house, and food. And he was explicitly denying any involvement in her lane. My father had laid down the law.

  I’d regarded these stories almost as a warning. In instances where people subverted tradition, like Grandma Mildred, or fell short of expectations, like Mama not handling dinner duty properly, the outcomes were never good. Sure, I knew gender roles could keep marriages together, families together—they could even keep a movement strong. But if they could not answer to me, if they couldn’t put me at the center, how beneficial could they actually be? If these roles held me back when I wanted to go forward, made me ask permission when I wanted to steer, whom were they serving? And why were they there in the first place? When it came to my individual need for self-determination—or to take a taxi every damn day if I wanted to—these roles, these positions, were no longer, not even halfway, enough.

  So many questions, chipping away at things as they were.

  EIGHT

  Faith Is Karma. Karma Is Faith.

  I ALWAYS THOUGHT FAITH WAS LINKED to the unknown, like when you don’t know, but you simply decide to believe. However, now I see it differently.

  A cabdriver told me once that karma is faith, and faith is karma. At the time, I didn’t fully understand, but I was open to learning. I had found myself in the backseat of his car, crying over an embossed black leather attaché folder that I’d lost earlier that afternoon. I needed a lesson that day.

  I’d traveled to Boston to participate in a conference sponsored by Dell Computers. I was part of a think tank of techies, bloggers, and parents brainstorming better ways to engage in social media, ways that could unite people instead of polarizing them. On my way back to the airport I sat proudly in the backseat of my taxi, taking in our success. And then, without warning, like an alarm clock jolting me out of a glorious dream, my head slammed against the passenger window—hard and fast. Next I remember the screeching sound of rubber dragging against cement. We’d been hit. Directly after impact, my brain functioned erratically. I cursed. I cried. And then, as abruptly as it had all begun, I jumped out of my taxi and dashed into another conveniently located two cars behind. “Take me to the airport!” I yelled, dazed and confused. About ten minutes later, as my mind started to clear, I realized I’d left the folder behind. It had belonged to my dad—he had carried it with him while stomping all over Wall Street and the South Bronx during the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties; it represented so much dreaming, so much fearlessness and trailblazing. Of the few things I kept of his, this one was extremely important, maybe the most.

  I asked the driver to circle back to the scene of the accident and I spent the next several hours walking all over the city, calling car companies and police stations, retracing my steps and ultimately missing my flight. But all roads led to dead ends. Eventually, I was forced to head back to the airport for fear of missing the last flight out of town. There were three taxis in front of me. The first driver was way too aggressive, waving his hands frantically for me to enter. The second one was way too messy, trash strewn about the front seat. The third one seemed just right, so I crawled inside, feeling and looking miserable.

  In the rearview mirror, I could see my driver’s eyes. They looked compassionate. He asked me what had made me so sad, and I told him my story.

  “Have faith,” Ahmir said then, peering at me through the mirror. He drove us around to search a bit more, pulling over whenever he saw a cabbie friend to ask after the folder, but with no luck. As a last-ditch effort, he made a call to Vinnie Z, “the man who knows everything about every cab in Boston.” Ahmir told my story—for the twentieth time—to Vinnie, and this time, miraculously—karmically—the man responded with the words I thought I’d never hear: “Yep…I found the cabbie who says he has the folder.”

  After meeting up with the cabbie and collecting my prized possession, more accomplished than I ever thought I could feel, I climbed back into the car with Ahmir for the final trek to the Departures terminal. We spent the next twenty minutes together talking, praising the outcome of the day and believing in the goodness of life. It was then that he started talking about belief and faith and karma. “Karma is faith, and faith is karma,” he said, looking up at the rearview mirror to see whether I understood. I didn’t, but I wanted to hear it all—something about the day’s bizarre string of events humbled me, opened me up.

  Faith, he said, is an activity. Through rituals and acts and circumstances, we create situations that put God in front of our eyes. We create these moments—or sometimes they happen to us—and from those experiences we gain a stronger ability to believe in a higher force, something superhuman. Karma, similarly, is an action, or an event like the accident, that causes the entire cycle of cause and effect.

  That accident was my karma, and the series of events that followed were my faith. Or something like that. “I still don’t quite get it,” I said from the backseat.

  “That’s okay—it takes us a lifetime,” said Ahmir.

  It was that kind of divine, cosmic happenstance—karma—and that same kind of strange and mysterious series of actions—faith—that led me to a young man called Nain.

  * * *

  —

  “This song is bananas—I
love Jodeci!” he proclaimed as he rolled into my store on his skateboard that very first night, bopping his head along to the song playing from the speakers set up around my shop. He looked like a modern-day Jean-Michel Basquiat, maybe nineteen years old, with bushy, almost dreaded hair, beautiful dark brown skin, and an air of confidence that all amounted to quite an impressive entrance.

  The Georgia beauty boutique was positioned in a busy part of lower Manhattan on East Houston Street, just off the Bowery, a historic home to delinquents and artists alike. Houston was more like a thoroughfare, spanning the width of the city from the Hudson to the East River, transporting millions of people from west to east, borough to borough, and state to state. Most New Yorkers, at some point each week, crossed Houston Street.

  I kept the store open late each night, hoping to capture any spillover business that might occur, from happy-hour drinking to last-minute grocery shopping in the neighborhood. Amani, who often kept me company at the shop on Friday nights, would pull up a stool next to mine at the front counter, and together we’d watch the action unfold: a wino scamming a tourist out of a few dollars, a belligerent banker stumbling around in his overpriced suit, a mom racing home with her three kids after school. We did this just about every Friday, until midnight, when I’d finally close shop. It was on one of those late nights that Nain rolled in.

  He looked familiar, oddly handsome and vaguely like someone I knew. I couldn’t put my finger on whom, exactly. I think he reminded me more of an era than an individual—a time when there was more personal interaction, less virtual living, and people carved out time each day to talk to one another—at the dinner table with family, to a stranger on a park bench, even in a dimly lit banquette in the West Village. He had a welcoming look on his face, like someone I’d have had a good time talking with downstairs at Nell’s on a Saturday night until the sun came up.

  Nain was tall, about six feet, lanky, no more than 145 pounds, and athletic. He wore black fitted jeans that revealed his bow legs, a worn black T-shirt that draped loosely around his neck, a stylish jacket that showed off his broad shoulders, and some sort of black sneakers without any logos or embellishments. His look was understated and monochromatic—a city-bohemian-grungy-high-low fashion vibe. Everything he was wearing was slightly worn, slightly androgynous, and slightly deceptive, each piece looking like nothing much but secretly costing a small fortune—like the Helmut Lang jeans he had on. I spotted those first. He was cool—cooler than I would have expected from someone his age. Beyond-his-years cool.

  “What could you possibly know about Jodeci?” I teased him, a bit taken aback.

  “Waaaay before your time!” Amani jumped in, trying to assess his age with her eyes.

  “Whaaat? How you gonna play me like that?” He threw his arms up in the air for effect. “Just because I’m young? Eighties music is my thing!” He was gesticulating now with total abandon, rattling off all the songs and artists he loved from the era—Shalamar and Immature and Soul for Real. “Actually music is my thing. I got like a million songs in my head—all playing right now. As we speak.” He tapped his forehead, pointing to the internal record player that was his brain, then leaned up against the counter, making himself more comfortable.

  “Smell me!” He stretched his neck toward us. It was a strange request, and neither Amani nor I made a move. “It’s Comme des Garçons, Anbar. Savory and manly—the only thing I’ll ever wear.” Curious, I leaned in a little and sniffed, surprised by the pleasant mix of citrus and something like incense.

  “Yeah—nice, right!” It was a declaration more than a question. “So, I need a little decanter to carry around with me so I don’t have to take this big bottle in my knapsack every day.” He pulled out a bottle from the side pocket of his carryall and spritzed, refreshing himself. “Do you sell decanters?”

  “Sorry, we don’t have any.” I hadn’t met a teenager like Nain before, with so many peculiar identities all coexisting in one body: skater kid, eighties R&B aficionado, perfume connoisseur. He looked part hobo, too, as though he needed a nice warm bath and a good solid meal. I didn’t want him to leave, so I asked, “What else do you have in that bag?” It was big and scuffed, bulging with things I could not see.

  “Ha!” He seemed to like to start off sentences with a laugh. “Well, I got my computer and a toothbrush, my phone—oh, and this magazine I like, and the perfume, the Anbar…and a few other things that I might need tomorrow. Like, you never know, you just always want to be prepared.” He smiled directly at me and winked, like we spoke the same language. I desperately wanted to understand him, but there were so many questions. My mind raced: Where would he be tomorrow that would require such a random assortment of things? Everything about this strange, magnetic young man was a puzzle I wanted to figure out.

  We talked for hours that night, about music, skateboarding, and high school, and he shared bits and pieces of himself. That his name was Ernain, Nain for short; he was named after his father, whom he hadn’t lived with for years—and nope, he had no idea where his name came from. He’d laughed off his senior year of high school but still managed to graduate, and he hadn’t really considered applying to college. He talked about all the couches that he’d crashed on recently, illustrating in vivid detail the characters that flitted in and out of his life in the days and weeks before.

  Between every other story, he returned to his love for music. He mentioned that he’d studied classical flute at Juilliard’s precollege division during grade school, and that he wanted to make music now, as a producer.

  In all of Nain’s stories, in all of his excitement about music and perfume and art, he didn’t say much about his mom other than to offer her name, Beverly, and that she lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with her mother, Nain’s grandmother. I could tell, just from the brief time we’d spent together, that Nain was sensitive and caring and thoughtful—and it seemed reasonable enough to assume that he’d been raised well, with a lot of care and attention. So when he spoke very little of his mom, practically leaving her out of the conversation altogether, I noticed.

  “How’d you end up at Juilliard?” I asked, trying to understand all of the moving parts.

  “Ha! I’ve always gravitated toward music—in school, church, wherever. I find it somehow, or it finds me. If you want, go ahead and google me. You’ll find mad articles…I was like, umm, a musical prodigy.”

  I probed a bit more, looking for clues, anything that would give me a better understanding of who he was and of the people who raised him.

  “Did Beverly sign you up for Juilliard? What a great opportunity—to study with the best of the best.”

  “Nah, it wasn’t Beverly. It was me…They came to my school and I auditioned. I don’t want to brag or anything, but yeah, they chose me.” There was that smile again, lighting up his entire face—the entire store, actually.

  Everything about Nain’s energy was on the verge of bubbling over. You felt it in the tilt of his head—how wide his eyes and mouth got when he smiled, his big, almost frantic hand gestures. Every single movement was charged, oversized and exciting—and there was so much joy in his voice. It was totally intoxicating. I could tell he was meant to leave a mark on this world. I couldn’t help taking a series of pictures of him in action with my phone. In all of them, he’s laughing, mouth wide open—his enthusiasm barely contained within the frame. It was his eyes, though—light brown, wide, expressive eyes—that revealed something else. A vulnerability, an unrootedness, a naïveté, that I recognized, very deeply.

  After he left the store late that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about him: Who he was. Where he came from. Where he was going.

  Several days later, he rolled back in off the street, and again sat for hours laughing with me. It seemed like wherever the wind took him, that’s where he’d be—just drifting through the streets on his skateboard. I would hope to see him again and he’d appear and
reappear, night after night. On the few days he didn’t show up, I’d notice his absence, hoping he’d drop in. I’d try to call him but his phone would be turned off. Those days, I worried. But then, he’d reemerge from wherever he was and roll into the shop again and we’d start just where we’d left off, talking, laughing, vibing off each other.

  Over the course of a month, Nain visited with me at the store nearly every day. He’d stay until closing, helping me take out the garbage and pull the gate down over the glass storefront when it was time to lock up. Then I’d drive him to the train station on Canal Street, and we’d talk some more—sometimes about his music, sometimes about my kids—sitting together for a long time before he’d get out of the car. Almost stalling, making small talk, in order not to leave each other.

  “Where will you sleep tonight, Nain?” I often asked him, sensing he never really knew. On most occasions, he’d be wearing the same clothing I’d seen him in the day before, and he looked tired.

  I could tell Nain was running, as I’d been for so many years, from his past, and from people and their stories. It seemed as though he was trying to make new ones, maybe some with me, stories of his own, with new characters and new energy, something calmer than he’d known before. Something he could fully claim.

  “I got this friend who’s letting me crash,” he’d always say. “And, umm—Ha! I got my computer in my backpack…so, maybe we’ll make some music together.” It frequently sounded as if he was piecing it all together in the moment, grabbing at ideas as they came. Night after night, I hoped I would hear something more concrete, like I’ve got to rush home, my mom’s expecting me. Something I hoped my own kids would be saying at this time of night, if they were his age.

  But Nain just sat there in the passenger seat, always fidgeting with his knapsack straps, looking lost. He made me think of myself in my senior year of high school, doing everything I could on a Saturday night not to go home. “Don’t get distracted by the city, Nain,” I’d say, as if he were one of my own. I wanted to tell him not to trust people too easily. Jacinda, the exotic dancer from years back, was right. People are crazy, and we need to keep our eyes open. But something about Nain wasn’t jaded, he was still optimistic and bright in spite of life—and it was that specific something that kept pulling me toward him, like the sun.