Rewind

The young brother working as a bus boy asks me how the night went. I tell him it was cool. He's maybe 21 or 22. I don't think the Black folks who come here say hello. He's happily surprised when I ask him his name. I get this strange feeling that I'll run into him again.


Only in LA would one stumble across a 1930s costume party on a Monday night. The lights come up at the SLS Hotel. Last call is long gone. The night is through. 12 hours before I banged out 14 pages in four hours, the first leg of a 20-day run that I will never attempt to do again. I am Atlas carrying the burden of a book that is not there. But it will be, as rent is always due.

Moving back in time I'm at Dragonfly on Santa Monica meeting a friend of a friend for an art show and music showcase. A skinny, curly mop headed front man throws himself around the stage as the song comes to a climax. An artist paints a portrait of a woman on a red ship atop blue seas. I watch a pair of legs cross from the other side of the room. My tastes are changing with my times.

It's three days after my birthday and I'm taking stock of the year that has just passed. Standing in the face of a new place where crafts and talents must be honed once more, I perhaps got my wish of being a nowhere man, of being in a place without short-term memory. What I did before no longer exists. So I gotta do it again.

Hopped up on the 2 liter of Coke that got me through the grind on three hours sleep I needed to breath air outside of this compound. To sit in a bar where silent films are show on screens under transparent tabletops, a brass menorrah in glass in the lobby, I'm kinda liking this moment. Here and now I'm kind of thinking that the sun will shine for me here. I keep surprising myself.

My godsister's houseguest made salmon and shrimp with okra and peppers. Heroes was halfway decent. I'm sad about the fact that I won't see my family for Turkey Day and that my sister will turn 15 without me. A blog reader on Facebook tells me to hang in there. I appreciate the words. God is good.

To think that I woke up yesterday morning full of doom and gloom, a little engine that could stalled out from doubt. But God spoke to me through a friend who said to only worry about the immediate task at hand. The beauty of the future is that you can always deal with it later.

Commando

A year ago today I found myself surrounded my entire family. I had my parents, my sisters, uncles, Grandma and even my Cousin Cordelia from down the country. There were crab legs and cake and wine and gin. We laughed and smiled and felt the energy of being as one. That hadn't happened in a long time. I thought that it was really something special. I had no idea of how true that was.

All through a hellish 33 I found myself clinging to that first night of my year, as the many things said and done there were the ledges I held onto when it felt like I was sure to fall. I thought it was going to be another case of blowing into town and making things happen fast. And they did. But fast in LA equates to a lifetime of New York minutes.

Here nobody says what they mean and the money comes last. Here intelligence is valued as much as a hump in the spine. Yet and still I stayed the course. There may not have been platinum but I've formed some precious friendships, folks who will help me get to where I need to go. It took me almost a year but I'm writing this blog from my own bedroom, through the creature comfort of wireless is only there to help me get this job done.

I feel like couch potato who just went through boot camp. Disregarding my wounds was the only way I could make it to the goal line. No lips to kiss my bruises out here, no safehouses to give me shelter from the war ahead. I've had to remember steps I didn't think I would need anymore. I've had to rely on God more than anything and anyone else. If He/She has disappointed its only been because I didn't understand the full plan.

There were so many things I took for granted, so many uncomfortable worlds that I needed to know and understand. I had to learn how to wait without watching the clock(Still learning that one actually). I had to learn how to sacrifice for the things I wanted, and to hold on until it felt like my fingers were going to snap.
My reasons for doing it are different than what a lot of people would think.
If I didn't go I couldn't come back home.

I'm trying to get into living here. I will called the fish guy at the supermarket by his first name. I need to explore the Farmer's Markets. I need to go on a date that doesn't feel like an Ashton Kutcher concoction. I want to believe what my higher self tells me all the time. But then again he knows that the rest of me is more hard-headed than two Tauruses and John McClain with a helmet on.

In the movie version of this I would have touched down at JFK last night. The Dervish and I would've had dinner, Me, Rich and the Chrises would be on for drinks around eight. Then I was gonna take the boys and girls up to Sin City in the Bronx, then Saturday night a Casa de Seda playing Jenga and floating amongst the ckouds of Brooklyn City. I dreamed a dream, but that one's long gone.

Even if I know how this chapter ends, I have to live the story to get to its conclusion, which means letting go of my plan and letting ""the plan" take shape. It's how I ended up in this crib in a part of town where I never planned to plant stakes. But this is where I'm needed. So this is where I am. 'Nuff said.

I want to flirt with someone tonight. I'll tell her that I'm a teacher or life coach or an editor when they ask. None of these are lies, but they'll shadow my selling points well enough for me to see what's really behind her curious eyes. I might drink a glass of Macallan. Or I could settle for Jameson. Either way it'll be the beginning of a brand new journey, footprints on a snowy mountain that I'll never cross again. I'm heading back to the world. They don't know what's about to hit them.

The Healer

It's just another day in the hood as I stand in front of the Baldwin Hills Library on just another Friday afternoon. My eyes scan the perimeter and the traffic approaching in both directions. He's late. But so am I. I hope the exchange is still going down.

This is my first excursion as a bagman. My sister's new roommate left his cellphone unattended at a library computer terminal and was quickly relieved of it. I texted the phone with a message that there was a cash reward for it's return. Later that night someone texts back and says they bought it from a guy on the street and want to return it for what he paid.

I agree, knowing that the man I'm playing proxy for lacks the "negotiation ability" needed to have this switch go off without a hitch. The phone has crucial numbers in it he needs, hence his willingness to pay the price.

A new text comes in. Parking lot side of the building. Be alone. I have backup waiting just beyond the sight line of the parking lot entrance, just in case. A minivan filled with five Mexican teenagers pulls in front of me.

The window rolls down. They are nervous but trying not to show it, seemingly more worried about the whole thing than I was. I give them the dough. They give me the phone. And I'm on my way to my next, crucial appointment.

I remove my shoes at the door, as I'm sure is custom. There is sage in the air. A relaxation CD plays, jumping from a track with the sounds of a forest, to one of the ocean. I am told to disrobe. I go down to my boxers and get under the towel. She tells me to relax.

I don't tell her much about myself to learn as he uses fingers and hands, arms, knees and elbows to push the toxins out of the many knots in my flesh, some in places I could not feel on my own. But she shows me.

"A lot of stress," she says, making note. Tell me about it.

I can feel her working hard, but it's not painful. The shea butter, oils and other liquids she uses turn it into an astral experience. I take a step away from the sensations to study how she works. My lungs clog with mucus that needs to leave me. She gives me tissues and water. My eyes are comfortably closed all the while.

"I know you're a helper," she comments. "Relax and let me help you."

I see flashes of what could be peacock feathers, and a forest, a reflection of myself in the mirror that seems weathered and worn, almost crazed. As the body is relieved so are it's concerns. Two hours melts away like two minutes. This is my first massage of this kind. I feel like I need a cigarette, or at the very least another hour a lounge in the effects. I savor every moment, dreading the beeping alarm that says the session is over.

It takes a few moments for me to stand. I forget about the cellphone handoff. I forget about bills due and dough expected. I don't see the deadline speeding towards me or the fear that 34 will be as difficult as 33. There is just the sage and the music and this sense of being somewhere outside of the world, before I got back into it.

"Thank for you allowing me to take care of your body," she says.

I glance up at drawing of the woman taken a god 20 or 30 years before. Her fair skin still has few wrinkles. The girl in the picture has cornrows. The woman has a blown-out fro. Ain't much changed in the life of this healer. I can't say I know that for myself. But I feel it.

On the road ahead many will seek my help. Far more will need than those who will have to give. Not unlike the woman before me I will have to take my time. I'll have to limit the number of clients I can handle. I'll have to feel my way through solving problems, relieving stress and changing the game.

She tells me to come and see her once a month, which is easy as she lives at the end of my street, a direct line to God right at the corner. I'll be using it regularly.
End of line.

Ice Cream

I am standing before a diverse crowd of faces: black and white, twenty-something to sixty-something, all there before myself, four other contributors and Meri Danquah, my friend and the author/editor who brought us together for The Black Body anthology, a collection of creative nonfiction essays on the titled theme.

In under ten minutes I go from describing the first time I ever copped a feel in science class to breaking down the sociopolitical implications of the world's perceptions of Black women in terms of their behinds. I get a lot of laughs and good praise. I get invited to speak at a college. I sign the book of a tall curly redhead from Dublin and a sista from LA I haven't seen in 12 years.

It's my first public appearance as author in LA. Here I'm not the manny or the craft services guy or the PA. Here, in these moments, I feel for the first time in a long time like I've done something with my life that I can be proud of.

On the way home my Ipod takes me to a track I haven't heard in years. I love Sarah McLachlan. This cut, "Ice Cream", was on the one album of hers I didn't own, the one I inherited from a love gone awry, the last one, which feels so much further away than it actually is.

With enough time away from it I now recognize that its beauty rested in the inevitability of its failure. Like Neo and Trinity we were both destined to give up our love life in the name of things that were more important to each of us. We had an inoperable aneurysm that I kept trying to fix, refusing to accept the fact that God had a much different plan.

The beauty of it was that it helped me to understand what I wanted from what I didn't get. It was also a lesson that knowing the future doesn't mean you can change it. I was hard-headed about that one for a long time and it cost me. Luckily it was a price within my journey's budget.

So I paid. Shields went up. The knob on my phaser went to 'kill'. If I was gonna go out the whole world was going with me. Needed surgery is painful as shit but it saves lives.

For two minutes and 44 seconds I remember the illusion of being home, Odysseus back in Ithaca with his wife and child. Then I woke up back on that long desert road to keep on walking farther than neither Cece nor Nancy Sinatra had ever expected. Had I been a DJ back a decade ago I would've gotten Raekwon to put Sarah on his "Ice Cream"'s remix. Perhaps I'll blend on it on my own on some lazy afternoon as I glimpse at the mausoleum down at the bottom of the dead sea that gave us new life. Love is neither created nor destroyed. It just is. End of line.

The Appetizer (from Intercourse, coming in Summer 2010)

I was almost eighteen when I met Nasrene within the incense-heavy cloud of a place called Dejoulle African on Cascade Road. I came armed with a “best of” selection of poems, which were all I was writing for public consumption at the time.

I was one of the last readers of the evening. So I was happy for the little applause that I got. The club’s closing tradition involved standing in a circle, holding hands, and repeating a mantra (which I’ve long since forgotten). When in Rome I do as is custom. When the circle shattered she was standing there, a pure chocolate goddess standing 5’8 high. She had on these silver frames with no glass in them and a long crocheted dress that looked like something fresh out of Woodstock. She listened as I spoke to others giving me praise. She was waiting for me.

I walked her back to the front gate at Spelman. It turned out she was from a town not far from my own. A day later we’re sitting under the tree next to the student parking lot. Using a pencil, she sketched my face on a big pad. She wanted to know me. She wanted to be with me. I wanted to be with her. It had never and would never be that simple again.

It was only a few days later that she led up the two flights of stairs to her dorm room. During the single hour (out of two semesters) that I managed to pry my roommate from the other side of my room, she had swallowed me whole with the trifecta of force, rhythm and endurance. It was my first time and the moment where I definitely understood why so many dudes hailed the blowjob as the best experience of their young lives.

The grin on her face those few days later had been both shy and mischievous. I was afraid to touch her. I didn’t want to mess it up. I didn’t want to make mistakes. It was both nothing and everything like what I had imagined, not the self-serving act captured in present-day porn, but a flood of warmth and intensity that had taken me beyond the known universe for six minutes of pleasure. I was in love. But that, however, had been a mere prelude to the real deal.

I had been hard from the moment she scribbled the question on a slip of paper and handed it to me just as my roommate reentered the room. It read: “Do you want to have sex?”

We couldn’t get to her dorm fast enough.

I remember the way she smelled as she wiggled her panties over an ass God had taken with. A single drop of wetness ran down the inside of her thigh. I did a double take. She couldn’t have been that turned on already.
She dropped Janet’s Janet into the changer and “Throb” burst through the speakers as she pulled me on top of her. Her tongue deliciously knotted with mine before it traveled into various unchartered territory.

Her hands and her lips and her feet and her ass were a well-oiled machine that I tried to drive pro, even though I barely had a learner’s permit. She was in total control, even though I was the one on top. I tried to create a rhythm, moving in time with her hips. I wanted to have absolutely nothing in common with the subject of BWP’s famed classic, “Two-Minute Brother”.

And I didn’t. As a matter of fact it went on for far longer than even she would have wanted.. Some kind of way she came, and if she didn’t, her performance, complete with moaning and trembling, was worthy of critical acclaim.

We pushed and pulled until the hourglass ran out on male visitation. Then we danced the night away at Dejoulle, on the same floor where we’d met not long before.

The next day she brought a Tupperware container filled with rotini and marinara. The sauce was sugary sweet as she fed it to me under a streep lamp in the parking lot outside of my dorm. I could tell that she’d put a lot into it. She wanted our meal to matter.

In the weeks that followed she would give me a private class in Intercourse 101, a series of nightly expeditions into all that the dudes back home claimed to know about, but most likely did not.

My biggest regret is that I didn’t get to cook for her in those days, that timing and circumstance made it impossible to express my appreciation for her many gifts. Even when I saw her the last time, just before she married one of the truly good guys, I know that she still cares, as do I. That’s what love is.

Pieces of A Dream

I spent my night watching the same documentary over and over. The work of the artist himself, the flick holds the keys to what I'm looking for, a framework upon which the book can be built. In this case the hours of tape and the shorthand, and all the things I've scribbled into the corners of countless lined pages over the course of the last two or three weeks can only help me once I see the story through and through. I'm still putting together the pieces, still trying to make this puzzle work.

I am no longer undercover. As a matter of fact I feel as if I'm standing naked with nothing but the truth to keep me warm. Because in this case the truth doesn't matter. In this case sex and violence painted with the candy coating of clout go down like just another pull prescribed for the ever-sickening American psyche. I, yet again, am the harbinger of death for good reading, or at least a reluctant cog in the only machine that's cutting me a check at this point. Cest la vie.

I keep waiting for someone to walk into my place. It's not that I'm preoccupied by security concerns as much as I am still working hard to grasp the fact that I have a place that is completely my own again. No one else's alarm clock. No longer am I subject to other people's bedtimes, kitchen rules and the sounds of other people's intercourse through walls too thin. Now all I need is some furniture.

I will paint in between writing and write in between bouts of painting and furniture buying. I'll need a U-haul on retainer, or at least a planned day or snatching up as much furniture off of craigslist as time and money will allow. It's all a part of the process I guess, all a part of starting over.

But now that I feel like I'm getting over the hump I'm back to figuring out what in the hell I'm doing this for, why my life has been reduced to some living parable that didn't manage to make the good book. I still dream of being a simpler man with simpler goals. I still wish that I were driven by the same trivial pursuits that keep most moving around the board. I hope that unclogging the garbage disposal will be relatively simple. But even if it ain't, I'll find a way to make it work.

I'm not fortunate enough to say that I'm at the end of anything. At best I've gotten through one security checkpoint just to end up in line at the next. But there is a plane taking off with my name on it. I just have to get there. And I'm closer than I was yesterday. End of line.

The Death of The Remix (As I Knew It)

As my 34th birthday approaches, I have come to full grips that I am just about out of the target demographic for all things young and hip, or at least the group of folks who that spend the most money on entertainment products. I no longer dwell in places where promo flyers and mixtapes land in youthful hands in hopes that we will purchase whatever the latest audiovisual offering might be. And for me, this is a good thing.

As I recently moved in the first place of my own I've had in over a year, what I took with me on my Exodus west had mostly remained in sealed boxes. These boxes held the few things that I didn't sell, giveaway or leave at the crossroads of Hancock and Nostrand for the world to have its way with. I chose a good 300 CDs out of a collection that was well over 1000, the spoils of working as a music journalist and proof that once upon a time I was a true insider. But as I've said repeatedly, purging is a good thing.

As I've added each disc to my Itunes drive in the name of portability, I've found myself running into a large numbers of CD singles with various b-sides, something which wasn't so much of a rarity a decade ago. As a matter of fact it was expected for any real fan out there.

Back then rappers and producers would step in a studio to attack the same beat with new verses, or the same verses with a new beat. Sometimes cats got so crazy with it that you barely recognized the song at all. The beauty was in the looking and finding as many of these tracks were promos used to push the sales of that artist's current album. It was remixes that allowed groups like The Fugees, Common, Method Man, Busta Rhymes, and countless other artists to maintain a hold on the listening spotlight when their original records didn't deliver commercially, creatively or both.

But such remixes, as were, are now a thing of hip hop history. It saddens me that with the state of the game, which I like to view as that Thanksgiving turkey on day four, nearly picked completely to the bone of its true treasures, the younger generation gets such a diminished version of the spontaneity and originality that was the very heart of what we were listening to. Very few new artists actually freestyle, and the age of the superproducer has created a monolithic sound that very few in the short list of codified genres deviate from.

This isn't to say that folks don't still come with it. I've been impressed by the work of new artists ranging from Drake, Rihanna and T.I. to subterranean folks like The Kids in the Hall, Blu, and the Justus League. Still I buy new stuff less and less. And when I do it's from artists whose work I know well.

I find myself looking backwards more and more, trying to snatch up as many of the tracks that made me lose it as a teen and college kid. I think Jigga said it best just after he took over Def Jam when asked how he felt about music today. His response said that nothing is like the music of your youth, no matter how good what is current might be.

I'm proud to have far more of what was released in those days than most of my peers. And with Itunes I manage to pinch a little more from all my music head homies. I'll never stop play and I'll never stop exploring. But as what's in the rearview gets further away, I still need to reach back every once in awhile, while I can still touch it, while it still feels real. End of line.