What He's Poised to Do

“I don’t have time to put on a play,” you said. You were studying to be a lawyer, and the fact that you seemed unencumbered in the morning was only the shadow of the way you were at night: walled in by textbooks and mimeographed papers, ballpoint pen in your mouth, glasses pushed high on your head. Many times I’d go to bed by myself, and you’d show up hours later, slipping silently between the sheets. I wasn’t asleep, but I didn’t let on, and you didn’t go to sleep either, but rather stayed up repeating names to yourself: names of cases, names of judges, names of laws. That exercise filled your mind with answers, but overnight the answers turned into more questions, which you liked to ask me in the morning. That morning the questions were about belief, or at least they started that way. You asked me if I could believe that there was a time in our country’s history when there were no penalties for obstructing minority access to a polling place.

“Black people can vote?” I said. “Heavens to Betsy. No one told me.”

“I just get tired of this sometimes,” you said.

I felt a chill race down my spine. “This?” I said, waving my arm around the kitchen like a TV pitchman. “But it has everything.”

“Not this,” you said. “This, America, now. We’re all working to make it better, except for the ones who are working to make it worse. But it all goes so slow.” You looked out the window for the bird, another form of progress. You crunched your toast again. “Have you ever thought of visiting Africa?” you said.

“Why?” I said. “I like wearing pants. That way, I can take them off when I want to get with you.”

“Be straight for a minute,” you said. “It’s where you came from, the place that created both your problems and your promise. Aren’t you curious? You really should go.”

“You go.”

“I’m broke as a joke.”

“I have money, but do you really want me to crack open my Diamond Ring Fund?”

Usually this got you to stop: it was marriage talk, which sent you off into a speech about how you didn’t believe in marriage, that it was only a ceremony to verify a love that, if truly felt, didn’t need a ceremony for verification, that you were wary of entering an arrangement that made you formally dependent upon another human being, let alone an abstract idea that shared more with slavery than with salvation. This was the only time you seemed as though you were joking, and it was when you were at your most serious. You had been doing it as long as I had known you; Larry used to say you were a secular preacher with the whole world as your congregation. “I’m just saying that even a pea-brained rising radio star might want to reconnect with his own identity now and again.”

“Not guilty as charged,” I said. It’s true that I worked at a radio station, that I played a little music, made a few jokes on the air, pocketed a bit of dough. It advanced my reputation to some small degree, or, I like to say, at least cemented my reputation as a man who can only be advanced by small degrees. But I was secretly proud of what I did. I leavened moments in people’s days that were otherwise leaden. I offered a balm for the spirit. I encouraged people toward the divine without resorting to anything godly. “But if I see a pea-brain, I’ll let him know,” I said. I got up to put my plate in the sink, and I took yours, too, and you said, “Thank you,” and whatever little bit of tension was rising in the room dissipated. We went to the couch and listened to records and you let me kiss your neck a little bit. “I’m just saying,” I said, “I’m happy here in America. I know there are problems. There’s always going to be problems. I know we were kept down, and we’re rising up too slowly. But I also know other things. Do you hear what we’re hearing? Is there another place you can listen to Marvin Gaye and then the Beatles and then Chuck Berry and then Mary Wells and feel like you really know what they all mean? I love being here in this place and I love being here in this place with you.”

“It is nice,” you said, nuzzling into my shoulder.

“I would recognize this country even from the back,” I said. “You think I need to investigate my identity? This is my identity.” Then I headed off to work and proved my point, played “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Thirty Days” and “Your Old Standby,” all as messages to you.