I passed by a public school adorned with murals the students had made. The blue-hued art shone dull but proud. These were images of old men and young children who had grown up in these neighborhoods. The murals bore a glaze, if not of immortality, at least of substance, of meaningfulness. They were not marketing ploys devised by a bunch of bored and underemployed people for money and recognition and attention. They were just attempts at representation made on the sides of easily forgotten buildings. They seemed to say that the canvas was not important, and neither was the paint, and neither was the amount of response one might evoke. The only thing that mattered was to take all of what was inside and turn it into something that had a chance of glowing.
It became hard to remember how many successive days I floated around these parts of North Philly. The abandoned homes of Strawberry Mansion. The steaming sewers of Susquehanna. The knocked-over newspaper kiosks of Cecil B. Moore. I was there during the day; late in the afternoon; even sometimes in the evenings when Marie-Anne was at home making arrabbiata, or on the phone talking about taffetas and organzas with her Dixie friends. I didn’t stop and speak to anyone. I didn’t stop anywhere. I put my business cards — my sole form of identification — in my pocket and lost myself.
Yet I experienced a reticence in allowing myself this immersion. I couldn’t help but think that without my own misfortune I would have never noticed this Philadelphia. Wasn’t I only here to liken its emptiness and desolation to the failure that was my life? Didn’t we seek hell only because it resembled the hole inside of us? My hunger for the hood felt fake, fatuous. If I were to continue coming here, I would have to face the fact that my sponging was parasitic and utilitarian.
In the streets I tussled with the Salato fiasco. Looking back at it now, I could hardly believe I had found myself in such a position. It was the first time in my career that a prospective client had refused my work outright. Aside from coming up with something new and different, there was no way to salvage the client. But I was afraid of even making that effort. I had been exposed and flayed for dissimulating, for pretending to be something I wasn’t. It would be too difficult to go back. There was also the matter of first having to explain myself to Marie-Anne. It was a task I was unwilling to engage in. I resented her for throwing me among the sharks. She should have known better than to force me into something I didn’t want to be.
One day, one of the Moorish men, in a floor-length robe with poof pants underneath, a red fez on his head, and beads around his neck, started following me around. He hadn’t quite yet become a shadow — remaining respectfully distant — but it was impossible to shake him. I made getting rid of him into a personal challenge. With my newfound familiarity with the alleys, as well as the cover provided by an occasional passing truck, I tried to double back so I could follow him. But he was an elusive foe, and just when I thought I’d pulled off my trick, the two of us came face-to-face in front of New Freedom Theatre on Broad Street. There was a production of a play by Langston Hughes set to take place. Young thespians sat on the porch and recited lines.
The Moor and I were about ten feet apart. He was not as young as I previously thought. There was gray in his hair and beard. His eyes were a milky brown and his teeth were yellow. Nearby, a stubborn bag got caught upon a rusted metal railing, the iron spear lodged in its mouth. A puddle of water lapped at the Moor’s feet like an obedient acolyte. There was a puddle near me as well, with motor oil passing over it, making it shimmer.
“You want your true passport?” he said.
“What?”
“It’s free, ancient, and accepted,” he sang. “Come on. You want your true passport?”
“No thanks.”
“Every African should have it.”
“I’m not African.”
“Yeah you are. Light-skinned African.”
“No. I am West Asian.”
“So you’re one of the Mooslims?”
“That’s what my wife says.”
“And what do you say?”
“I don’t know.”
He laughed. “Don’t matter where a man is from. He always got to listen to his woman. You sure you don’t want your true passport? Join the righteous nation?”
I told him I would have to pass on joining a new nation; I was having a hard enough time with the one I had.
The Moor clapped his hands and showed me his bare palms as if he had made something disappear. We walked down Broad Street together, all the way to Girard Avenue. The subway rumbled underground. This was where we parted. The Moor turned back to North Philadelphia, seeking someone else to invite to Moorish Science. I kept going, all the way to the art museum, to my wife, who had decided what I was.
I left the Moor behind, but my envy did not. He was from a people who, for all they didn’t have, had in their blood hundreds of years of overcoming; they had established ways of dealing with the exclusion that the people in the skyscrapers imposed. What was Moorish Science but the erection of an alternative sovereignty? Pretend that we don’t exist in this America? Then we will pretend that your America doesn’t exist either! Hell, America belongs to Morocco. Do you want your true passport or not? The Moor and Richard Konigsberg had much in common. They both had a second passport to fall back on. A communal identity that existed underneath their status as Americans. One that they could appeal to if being American wasn’t going well. I didn’t have any such backup.
I just had Marie-Anne.
There was a word out there for when you belonged to a single person.
* * *
The Moor’s pursuit put a stop to my aimless wandering. The next evening, when I went out for my walk, I headed straight toward Temple University, that oasis of familiarity in North Philly where the science took its mooring from Europe, from Benjamin Franklin, and from other men who didn’t grow beards or put beads in them. The universities had always been a kind of sanctuary and harbor for me. The universities had this way of claiming ownership of everyone inside of them such that the classifications outside their doors no longer applied. They weren’t bastions of democracy so much as sovereign protectorates where they could apply their own local despotism. In their case, the tyranny was aimed at keeping safe all those who could afford to be inside their walls. I wasn’t a student at Temple, but by my appearance I felt like I could fit in.
I found a bulletin board in the film studies department. I might have gone wrong with Salato, but the idea of promoting new film projects still made economic sense. I was also taking a great deal of money from Marie-Anne’s account, and every time we had a fight this left me humiliated. I might have become reliant upon her for housing and food, but my extra expenses I needed to cover on my own.
I walked to the kiosks and bulletin boards around the university and pinned my business cards all over. I forcibly channeled a sense of optimism during the task. Once I got paid for these projects I would be able to help cover some of our monthly bills. I might also gain a measure of revenge against Plutus. Any one of my clients, in five years’ time, could become someone of importance and pick me to do their promotional work. I pictured myself running into George Gabriel somewhere — maybe he would be in the audience of a panel discussion I was leading. I would flag him down and carry out a mundane conversation about business without making the slightest mention of the original episode. I would pretend that the reason he had let me go hadn’t so much as registered in my mind, which would be the best way to irk him. It would frustrate him to learn that he hadn’t been able to derail my life.