Yeah, a likely story. Remember lynching, back in the day? Crackers went for the black middle class, the shopkeepers, the folks who were coming up in the world. Envy, pure and simple, it’s human. But what you do with it is the right or the wrong. One week before 9/11, Colin Powell was at an international conference on racism in South Africa. He said the US wasn’t about to apologize for slavery if that apology involved reparations, and the United States delegation got up and walked out, in front of the whole world. What a meathead.
New Year’s Eve, 2010
I dropped my last fare of the day downtown and stopped at the Bank of America near Lake Merritt at two thirty p.m. Later that night the bank showed up on the TV news. It was the scene of the last homicide of the year — at three twenty p.m. That meant I had dodged a bullet by forty minutes. Witnesses said two Latino males and two African American males had a parking lot altercation. The Latino used an ethnic slur, and one of the black guys pulled out a gun and shot him. The two blacks drove off. Bruno, who was from Brazil and delivered pizza, for God’s sake, died on the spot.
May 5, 2013
I drove a white Lovelle Mixon home one night from the Oakland Arena. Rolling Stones concert. You could hear Mick all the way to the BART station. I went to pick up this white kid, twenty-two or twenty-three, high as I don’t know what. Gets in my cab and my dispatcher says, “Take him to Sebastopol” — that’s a four-hundred-dollar ride. His father called in the fare. This kid is high out of his mind, all the way up there, and it’s in the middle of nowhere. But we get about a mile from his house and he sobers up enough to give me clear directions. The kid stumbles out, the father pays me double fare, and then he pulls out two more hundred-dollar bills. And thanks me for my troubles. White, black, same stupid kids, different outcomes.
The guy that’s teaching me dispatching says I’ll never be unemployed, right up to the end of my life, because there’s always a need for good cab dispatchers. I know, though, that dispatchers don’t have to see what cabbies see. Nevertheless, I like security as much as the next guy. I’ve seen enough to last me.
Two To Tango
by Jamie DeWolf
Oakland Hills
Love is a straitjacket you’re waiting for someone else to tighten.
Oakland, 2004: I’m fresh out of the ground zero of a break-up with apologies stitched vertically on my left wrist. I move out of my ex-girlfriend’s house before she gets evicted; just another waiter with a misanthropic streak and cheap tattoos he buys with tips. I’m saving up by sleeping on any couch I can beg for, or any bed I can charm my way into. I’m homeless, living out of my backpack, hopping couches and BART stations. I have an appetite for destruction that wants dessert.
The night I meet her is a slow night at Van Kleef’s on Telegraph, and the saxophone player is six drinks in, slurring blues to the empty street. I’m writing poems on bar napkins but the ink keeps bleeding through with whiskey. I can’t afford a psychiatrist, but Jameson picks up the slack. The future is laid out in front of me like a railroad track I tied myself to. I have no idea what’s gonna fix anything, besides a deposit, two months rent, and anything that will make me forget today.
And in walks my future — Bettie Page in combat boots, damage in a dress. I smell her perfume before I see her, cinnamon mixed with cigarettes. She takes the empty stool next to mine. She doesn’t look like the other girls in the bar, with their thrift-store fashion sense and flower prints to complement the pretty umbrellas in their drinks. This girl has eyes dark as a black hole, lips red as an opening curtain.
She orders a whiskey neat, but a meathead stumbles into her, spilling her drink. She turns with her fists out, but he’s already moved too far past the sucker punch that had his name on it. She meets my eyes straight on and apologizes for the spill. I tell her it’s all right, she asks what I’m writing. I hold up the ink-blurred napkin — it’s my autobiography drenched in whiskey. Art imitates life.
She asks about the scorpion tattoo on my arm. I tell her poison should always be labeled. She’s a Scorpio herself, tells me her name is Syd, short for something she doesn’t want to tell me. She was just in the neighborhood, back home from a year alone in the mountains. She takes kickboxing classes and is working on a photography portfolio. She asks if I want the next round here or in a mansion alone with her. Easy question.
Fifteen minutes later we’re driving up in the Oakland Hills and she pulls up to a house at the top, buzzes open the gate, and I’m walking up the plush staircase past seascape paintings. Daddy’s liquor cabinet has got Scotch an Irishman can’t pronounce and sherry glasses. She pours us a Cognac, takes me to the basement, shows me her portfolio. Every picture is a self-portrait on a timer where she’s standing naked on a box with the words Whore and Slut scrawled across her in lipstick. She says this is how the world sees her, as if the Scarlet Letter was an entire alphabet written across her flesh.
She holds up the largest print, a photograph of her blindfolded in front of a mirror. She says this is how she sees herself. She says she loves how photographs take weeks to finish, like watching a scar heal.
In the living room, I toast to the ashes of the past. She says, “We can be as loud as you want,” and smashes her glass against the wall. It shatters across the living room, then she grabs my hand, puts it around her throat, and tells me: “You won’t break me. But I want you to try.”
She kisses me like anger is an aphrodisiac. We hit her carpet, our bones crashing into each other like a wet car wreck. After, she blows smoke rings at the ceiling, says, “You can stay here, you know. This house is too big for me and I can’t stand it alone at night.”
I was the right blend of poverty and horny. When you’re drowning, a partner can make you feel like you’re swimming instead.
The next night she cooks me a blood-rare steak, cracks open a bottle of champagne. A week later we’ve drunk half the liquor cabinet. We toss the empty bottles out of the third-story windows into the pool. We live every night like we broke in.
Every evening starts to get more physical. She shows me how she trains at her gym, swinging fists into my hand in combinations. Then she wants to wrestle and throw me against the wall. Syd rakes nails across my back until it bleeds, scratches her name into my chest until I can still read it the next day. We hit the walls so hard paintings fall. She wants a knife to her throat, she wants me to say things to her I’d never repeat. She wants me to love her like I want to kill her.
Self-destruction is lonely; she’s made it into a duet.
One night we lie there after and her hands trace my rib cage. She traces where she’d cut out my heart and keep it with her. I tell her this is moving a little fast. She says restraint is for hospitals and cops — don’t hold myself back.
I need a breath, a break. I tell her I gotta work double shifts for three days, and I don’t have a cell phone yet so I don’t have to worry about ignoring her calls. My friends haven’t heard from me in weeks. A buddy asks me why I keep picking poison. I tell him it’s because I learned to love the taste. I need to try something else.