White Girls (35 page)

“It is just us. Gary’s just tagging along. What you got?”

“Enough for us. Nothing extra.”

“That’ll be fine. Gary, you don’t do this shit, do you?”

They were in the living room now. Along one wall was a pink sofa made up in crushed pink velvet. It was covered in plastic. There were two pink chairs on the opposite wall. They were made up in the same fabric as the sofa, but the plastic the chairs were covered in was older, cracked, slightly yellowed.

Gary didn’t know what Fran was referring to, but he shook his head no. They sat on the carpeted floor between the sofa and the chairs, in front of the living room table. The furniture looked as if it was reserved for grown-ups, or wakes. Olivia didn’t have to tell them that. The table was littered with the signs of Negro respectability:
doilies, a tall bowl filled with plastic fruit, a little hymnal. Gary sat across from the two girls. Fran fingered a doily on which a bowl of fruit rested, as if she was trying to recall where she had seen one before, a lace thing that felt as if it had been dipped in wax. For some reason it disturbed her, these artifacts of someone’s idea of home.

“How can we spread our shit out with all this bullshit out?” Fran said, in a sudden fit of pique. She swept Olivia’s mother—that is, her mother’s bowl and hymnal—to one side of the table. The bowl partially obscured Gary’s face. But he could see Olivia take a little brown envelope out of her pocket, tap it against the table’s edge, and put a line of white powder down on the table. She handed Fran a little cut-in-half straw. All of this they did in silence. Gary watched it all in silence, too: Fran snorting up the mysterious substance in one nostril and then another; rubbing her nose; and just like an actress becoming the substance she imbibed.

She shivered; she laughed; she looked at Gary as if she had never seen him before. She stood up and stretched her arms out wide. For Gary, there was no other woman in the world, except at home. Fran hugged herself, asked Olivia for a little music. But before Olivia had a chance to get up off the floor, or put the straw down, Fran had turned the radio on herself. Optimism. That’s what Fran looked like, dancing to the song that said: “Skip to my lou, my darling. / I’d love to be the man who shares your nights. / My name is Romeo if you’ll be my Juliet. / Let’s pretend I’m the shoe that fits you perfectly.”

Fran was dancing alone and not alone; the world, the man singing on the radio, the station’s antenna, the airwaves, the sky bouncing with sound no one could see, were with her. It was the first time Gary
had ever seen her attached to anything. He had never seen her clutch life before, unless she was stealing something from it that didn’t matter to her much, like a cake or a boy.

Fran closed her eyes and extended her arms toward Gary in a way he’d dreamed of seeing one day. Now that day had come. But if he reached for her—reached for it, whatever “it” she represented—would every dream be fulfilled? And if they were, what would he be then? A boy without longing? How could he recognize himself otherwise?

There was the question of his body, too. If you prefer looking, and confer stardom on the thing you’re looking at, you don’t want to look at a different movie, one that features us instead of you.

“He won’t dance ’cause he’s a faggot,” Olivia said. “Ha ha, didn’t I tell you? A faggot or white. He can’t dance.” Olivia giggled, and Fran giggled, too, but drily. The weight of their sudden hatred weighed on Gary. He made a move to rise to Olivia’s challenge, but the floor pulled him back. Maybe he was white. He could be anything. In any case, there was no room on the dance floor. It was filled with female meanness, the thickest substance known to man.

“Go white boy, go white boy, go!” Olivia started chanting in time to the bright beat, the singer’s voice on the radio running at a clip underneath her. The singer was asking, “Will you be my Juliet? / I want to be the shoe that fits you perfectly.” They were dancing around him now. He could smell their girl bodies and drug scent. Fran pushed the table away from Gary; it was anchoring him and she wanted him to float free, too, near where the song was playing, near where she was, in the air. Pushing the table aside, she knocked some of Olivia’s mother’s fruit to the floor. It didn’t bounce. Olivia, bending down to pick it up,
said: “Girl, be careful. Banging shit up.”

“Leave it.”

“But she’s going to kill me; it was a gift—”

“I said leave it.”

Olivia drew her hand back, stood up again, and looked down at Fran, who was squatting in front of Gary, rocking on her heels, legs spread. Fran looked up at Olivia as if to say, “So?” Which was what Olivia looked to Fran for in the first place: a dare. And the threat of punishment—if you do or don’t do this, this or that might happen—that gives the dare its spark.

Satisfied, Olivia turned to the radio and started flipping dials. Fran turned back to Gary. She asked him: “What you want to do?” He didn’t take it as a dare, but it was. Fran laughed. “Come on, now, you gonna let all of this spoil and go to waste?” There was no music, just static, but she was rocking on her heels as if the static had a beat. That’s what drugs made you hear: happiness and static. He thought: I wish I could hear it. Gary closed his eyes.

He was always waiting for love to be what he thought of it: an event informed by niceness, divorced from appeased egos, hatred, and pornography. Love would be his rescue one day, laying him down on a field of daisies, making him and his love lambs of Jesus.

He heard one of the chairs go crunch, followed by another of Olivia’s giggles. She said, from across the room: “I told you he was a faggot.” Opening his eyes, Gary found Fran standing above him. She was slapping her right thigh with her hand. She wasn’t as interested in corroborating Olivia’s statement as she was in going where the drugs were taking her: to the irritating realization that she didn’t know what
Gary was, since if there was to be no fucking, his perceived rejection of her preceded Fran’s eventual rejection of him—and nearly everyone else. She couldn’t face that. She wanted to do another line, but it had to be in front of someone it might make a difference to. Fran walked over to Olivia and said: “Get up.” The radio was picking up reception from two stations simultaneously. Fran’s voice was hard against some man crooning crossed with a woman’s voice out of a commercial.

“What?”

“I said get up.”

“Girl, get out of my face.”

“I’m not in it. But it’s about to get the back of my foot if you don’t.”

Olivia gave a helpless little cry, struggling for a laugh. “But why—you could sit on the sofa, over there.” Fran stared her down. The radio played on; out of it came all the sounds that fall between love and advertising. Olivia got up, reluctantly; as she did so, the plastic made a depressed, whoosh-y kind of sound. Fran sat back in the seat, pulling Olivia toward her. Olivia opened her mouth and closed her eyes, like a baby baffled by its own hunger. Fran made her wait a while before she kissed her with her eyes open, looking to see whether or not envy would hurt Gary’s heart. But she had miscalculated his optimism; to Gary, she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He was reveling in his senses being dwarfed by her movie moves, and its soundtrack: the radio playing between two stations, and the ladies slowly lapping tongues.

Fran pulled her mouth away first. She said to Gary: “Now you can leave. But you know I’ll be rolling up in that store to take what I need again. Bitch.” Gary understood what Fran meant: she was coming
back to the Jew place, and for him; he was what she needed. She was coming back—one of the sweetest phrases ever. He tried not to smile, all in love, as Olivia shut the door behind him.

Another Kafka. In “Conversation with the Supplicant,” the unnamed male narrator attends a church where a woman he loves goes to worship. One gets the sense that the narrator is not particularly religious; the young woman is his religion, inaccessible and therefore deifiable. In the church, the narrator notices, among the other supplicants, a young man who seems to take a particular interest in our narrator’s comings and goings. They strike up a conversation. One could take the narrator’s interlocutor as his double: the mystical voice to the narrator’s all-too-human reason.

The young man standing opposite me smiled. Then he dropped on his knees and with a dreamy look on his face told me: “There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that must have been calm and beautiful...” Since I made no answer and only through involuntary twitchings in my face betrayed my uneasiness, he asked: “Don’t you believe that people talk like that?”

I knew I ought to nod assent, but could not do it.

In other words, the narrator cannot agree or rather acknowledge the liminal, least of all in himself—the only “real” there is.

The scariest moment in
Psycho
is not when the people are getting hacked to death, but when Vera Miles, searching for the sister who is lost to her, walks into a bedroom and is taken aback by her own reflection in a floor-length mirror. I sometimes wonder if I am lost to Richard forever. Richard and I didn’t see each other much after he became Richard Pryor in the seventies, because we couldn’t see each other. That is, we see each other too clearly, and then past the actual seeing. I wonder what it would be like if I didn’t have to wonder what he thought. It can make you lonesome, knowing that you’re out there as another person with another name but still yourself and yet unavailable to yourself, traversing the trail of the lonesome pines littered with family memories. The way Richard and I are like now is like this, I reckon: being colored and walking into a restaurant full of white people and finding another colored person there. Genetics, politics, I don’t know what, makes you seek that black person’s eyes out as a way of acknowledging, yes, here we are, for good or ill, kind of together. Maybe I’m looking for a conversation among the supplicants. Invariably, the only other colored person in the restaurant doesn’t want to acknowledge your presence, let alone your mind. So they turn away. Being Richard’s sister was like that, sometimes. He’d look at me as if I were the only black person in the restaurant. And sometimes I was.

*
     
*
     
*

Gary felt that way all the time—like a supplicant—even without a sister. Skinny and strung out on his love for Fran, and the terrible responsibility he undertook when he decided to honor and obey her, he truly didn’t have anyone to talk to. Certainly not his mother. From the beginning, Fran and Mrs. McCullough tolerated one another for Gary’s sake, but there was no love lost between those two women he did it all for: the savings, the mortgages, pushing his sickening dick to the side so they wouldn’t have to deal with it if they didn’t want to. He understood that. They didn’t want to hear about his love of other women, being women. And since he was interested in little else, he became conversant with himself—a supplicant who would have understood Kafka’s tale of love, even if I don’t. “He remarked that I was well dressed and he particularly liked my tie,” Kafka writes at the end of his tale. He goes on: “And what fine skin I had. And admissions became most clear and unequivocal when one withdrew them.” Maybe that’s what Gary felt when he left Olivia’s that night, the night of Fran’s drug show: by leaving, he’d be able to feel those two girls clearly and unequivocally. Absence makes the heart think about what it’s feeling. And since this is a DVD world, where the story line is not equal to the star—I blame Richard and his kind for all that star-over-the-story stuff—maybe Gary would matter more to you now if Richard played him. I could coach him in the part: Gary, walking home from Olivia’s, a supplicant talking to himself, wanting nothing more than to withdraw his feelings from himself so they existed in a world made perfect by his absence from everything.

Richard could play that. Part of his charm, if you want to call it that, was his ability to look defeated by the attention he craved.
His persona, onstage, in movies, and elsewhere, was interesting, if you want to call it that, because you could never be quite certain if he wanted you to look at him or if he wanted you to look away. Like Kafka, like Gary, Richard couldn’t play a pimp but he could play a pimple. Like Gary, once Richard understood that the women he craved loved to compete with him and one another for the rather dubious prize of head bitch of the Richard Pryor universe, he collapsed inside, became a stranger to himself, since he couldn’t imagine he was much of a prize. Add colored to that kind of feeling and maybe you’re totally fucked.

And like Richard, Gary thought his mother was above that kind of bitch shit, and so revered her. Neither Gary nor Richard could see it any different, because they couldn’t feel any different than how they felt. This was their strength and their tragedy.

Gary found out that his mother was just another woman when he brought Fran home for the first time. He and Fran had been dating for about two years by the time that happened. They were about to graduate from high school, Gary still cutting sandwiches in half. He gave Fran money on the side. Immediately upon asking her home to Sunday dinner, he was apprehensive about it. But he could not say why.

Of course his mother knew Fran by sight and reputation. She knew Fran’s entire family and blamed them for the dirt and drugs that were remaking their community. In the early nineteen eighties, East Baltimore was swelling up in the middle and oozing slime on the sides; it was fat with the drug traffic that had been dumped there because God knows why. When Gary was a child, the white children only came to his neighborhood if their mother told them to collect Mavis,
her runny-nosed kid, and her bag of cleaning supplies. Now the white kids had red-rimmed eyes and runny noses themselves, looking to die a little, too. Rock and roll, fashion, drugs—white people will follow your colored ass into everything. The McCulloughs tried to keep their white steps white, but fools like Fran’s family were all too happy to get sick on those steps, thereby proving how ridiculous the effort to keep them clean was in the first place: what was the point of living in nigger heaven if you kept trying to scrub the clouds?