So there was this big fancy boarding school up in the granite state, like a six-hour drive first thing in the morning, but it was worth it. A campus of castle-like buildings surrounded by trees, right by a river. I liked it. It was like Narnia up there. When we left that night, my dad tried to make the trip back to Philly in one shot to avoid having to pay for a hotel room.
Thing is, we got hit with a rainstorm not long after passing into New York State. I mean, it was coming down hard, flooding, I could barely see to the next car. At points, we were creeping along so slow I watched the frogs jumping along the side of the road like they were planning an invasion. We didn’t talk, we rarely did anyway, but at that moment we couldn’t if we wanted to because the sound of water hitting the Bug’s roof was so loud we would have had to scream. It was a horrible, horrible world out there, beating down on us. But I was protected inside that little can, with my dad at the wheel. Him staring forward, hands at twelve and two. I fell asleep a couple of times, the last time close to the end after the rain had stopped. We must have been in New Jersey by then. And I could hear my pop now. Craig Duffy was crying. Craig Duffy, freckles and mustache and bristles of brown stubble, was sniffing and crying, still staring ahead. He’d probably been crying all night, but I was laid out on the backseat and couldn’t hear him.
We got back and we never spoke about boarding school again. I stayed with him, in Philly. I went to Greene Street Friends, walking distance right down Germantown Ave. My father raised me, every day of the year till I could run away on my own.
I tell this story, and now I’m crying. I’m crying about halfway in, but I don’t stop because this is the moment. Come on out. Mostly I don’t stop because I didn’t cry when my father died and I know this is a shameful, shameful thing. So I cry for Craig Duffy now, and I deserve all the shame I feel for it. And even as I do I finally understand why he cried. Not just for my mother, not just for me, but for himself. Because he was scared he would fail me. And I know I don’t just cry for Craig Duffy, even in this moment. I cry for myself as well. For the ways I have failed Tal, my daughter, and the ways I’m sure I will.
Sunita Habersham lets me sit down now.
But I see she’s crying too. Just a little, but I catch the shine. And a small part of me, a part of me not crying, it sees her tears and thinks, Got her.
—
I leave class with a large, loosely defined assignment to do some research on my Irish heritage before the end of the week so I can complete the course, and a feeling of raw embarrassment at standing in front of a group of strangers and tearing up. There’s a huge difference between “balling” and “bawling.” Also, I leave with the need to get drunk or have a cigarette or find some other way to kill just enough of myself today that I can go on living. I want to go home. I want go home and come back for Tal after her student orientation session, but I have four hours to waste and I’m already too tired to drive back and forth twice. Strolling slowly and without much purpose, I come to the last trailer before the woods, where a group stands around waiting for something. I try to bum a loosey, but nobody smokes real analogue cigarettes anymore. Nobody smokes anywhere on earth. Humanity quit and abandoned me to negotiate the ghosts of my own nine-year addiction. I’m left, having exposed my habit to the crowd, standing awkwardly among them for another couple of minutes, straining at small talk until I see Tal literally skipping from the next building.
On Tal’s ears are the biggest hollow gold bamboo earrings I have ever seen in my life. At least I hope they’re hollow, because they nearly reach from her lobes to her shoulders, and with each hop their octagon shapes swing violently as if my daughter had attached gilded coat hangers to the sides of her head.
“Oh man, you got to see this. You got to. Come now. Come now or you’ll miss it.”
“What the hell is in your ears?”
“Class assignment. I’m on break till the student orientation. Come on, you got to see something, it is so cool. You got to see it now.” Tal starts pulling on my hand and I grab hers tight and run with her for the chance to run with her.
We stop at an old RV lined up directly behind the trailer they have my art classroom set up in. Airstreams are supposed to be shiny silver and smooth and perfectly round like pods from a fifties alien-attack movie, but this one looks like the carcass of a mutant dung beetle. Its skin is dulled, oxidized, and covered with stickers, most of which are half-faded and peeling. Then I hear the moans inside. It’s a woman. I look at Tal, who’s giggling, and I think I must have this wrong. But I don’t: there’s a woman and she’s moaning.
“Tal, no,” I tell her and start to pull her away from this and sexuality in general, but Tal insists and pulls me again, this time to its door on the side and it’s open.
In the dark small space inside, a women lies on a massage chair. Her head’s captive to the hollow face cushion at the end of it. Over her stands a spider of a man, webbed veins lining his skinny arms. Literally webbed: there are blue lines inked between his bulbous blood vessels. He’s shoving something into her back. When I hear the buzz I think it’s some kind of spinal vibrator, but a moment reveals it as a tattooist’s needle.
“You gotta see it,” Tal tells me again, like this is not enough, then pulls me even closer, into the can with them, where the air reeks of burnt sage and rubbing alcohol.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind,” comes from the lady getting her back split open. She’s a heavy woman, and her exposed flesh looks as soft as a marshmallow. If you laid your head on that meat, you would be asleep before you sunk all your weight down.
“Check it, this is the biggest Sesa I’ve done yet. And I will be braggadocios: the dopest as well,” the arachnid tells me.
“It better be because it hurts, Spider!” she yells back at him, letting the words and the pain out in mock whimpers.
“Tell her,” Spider says to me, lifting a hand to beckon me even closer. “Tell her how amazing it looks. How original.”
“Tons of people in the camp have this tattoo. It’s like a biracial tramp stamp,” Tal says to me. The lady getting written on just laughs harder, so hard Spider has to lift his needle up and nod at our good-natured appreciation of the spectacle of the fat on this lady’s back rippling.
“Actually, it’s the badge of mulatto pride. And everyone’s is different. Look at this one, lovely right?”
I look at this lady’s back. There is a big Star of David that goes from the tip of one shoulder blade to the other. Around it is a circle. If he drew it free hand he’s a genius, because it looks like a perfect 360. Past the line of the circle, what looks like drops of water spin off of the shape.
“See? See how I incorporated her freckles into the rivets? None of them are covered up, instead they make it look as if the image is splashing off into her organic fiber. Really, you have to listen to the flesh for the art to work like this.”
“You sound pretentious,” the lady says, and she stops laughing. Her back stills.
“What is it?” I ask him. He’s got a jeweler’s visor on with a light attached and when he looks right at me all I can see above his nose is the glow.
“My greatest creation. First, I took the West African Adinkra symbol Sesa Wo Suban, which basically means ‘Transform your character.’ ”
“Sounds like a diss.” The guy’s got no shirt on. The only thing covering his torso is nipple rings. Silver hoops, and a blue arachnid body painted right on the center of his chest like Spider-Man.