How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America Read online

  I am regretful and ready to love.

  I need your help,

  Kiese Laymon

  ***

  DEAR KIESE, DARNELL, AND MYCHAL,

  I THANK you.

  I THANK you for being vulnerable. I thank you for going deep and being unafraid to share that with me. All of these letters made me ask myself a question that I ponder a lot: What do we do with the scars, those of us who did not die, but still aren’t free? We struggle. We fight. We make a way out of no way. Every day we prove that the impossible is possible just by living.

  You are right, Mychal, trading worry for living, for being, is freedom—it’s about being present.

  You are right, Darnell, loving ourselves is a revolutionary act—we have to practice because the preachers and their Bibles don’t always tell us so.

  You are right, Kiese, love can’t be attained through ownership—love is a relationship that must be cultivated through honesty. The truth can hurt, but a lie will never set you free. I, like you, choose truth. Please love me enough to tell me the truth.

  Can we heal ourselves?

  Yes! And we are modeling that process here. It takes self-reflection.

  These days when I look in the mirror, I see change. I see my hips narrowing. I see my jaw-line sharpening. I see the physical markers of black manhood etch a divine design upon my body, and I feel pretty.

  But I wasn’t born this way. I was born a black girl and I grew up into a black woman. I was once a queer hippie kid searching for peace in a New England boarding school because home could no longer hold me. I was once a masculine-identified lesbian, a femme-loving stud who was afraid to love other masculine folk—I was never told it was okay for us to love one another and that our love was valuable too. And today I write this as a black transman, queer boi, lover of love. I chose this life.

  But what do we do with the scars? I have scars. Visible scars from falling as a kid. Visible scars from nights of self-inflicted cutting in high school. Visible scars from my recent double mastectomy. Those scars are easier for me to deal with because I know where to find them. I know what might irritate the recent scars on my chest. But what of the scars that you can’t see?

  You ever go so deep and remember the things you didn’t know you were reminding yourself to forget?

  Sadness. It haunts me. It sits on me sometimes and I wish I could move it, transition it.

  I only recently learned that the sadness I carry is not just my own. It was inherited. Both my mother and father struggle with depression, but no one ever told me. I thought I was alone, and we still struggle to talk about it—how things from way back when still hurt us. And how we never got to take a break after losing so much.

  Once I asked my mother about crack. I asked her about my dad. I asked her how she loved him. I asked her why she made me love him even though he hurt us over and over.

  She told me she felt shame. She told me that I was the only one she could talk to because everyone thought she was crazy to stay, but she loved him. That he was her husband and my father, and she knew his heart. Crack changed him. Crack destroyed so many black love stories.

  She told me that it was only in the last couple of years that she had stopped sleeping with her purse under her pillow for fear of having it stolen. She hasn’t been with my my dad in more than six years. Scars…

  If you cared about it, you had better lock it up in the back room. I remember the frustration of forgetting, forgetting that nothing was safe unless you locked it away. I remember when something of my big brother’s got stolen. I remember how angry he was. I remember how guilty I felt because it was my father who was the addict, not my big brother’s father.

  I remember God. God and my mother were the only people I was allowed to talk to. We kept secrets from the outside world—we built our own. But we needed more. We couldn’t save my dad. I couldn’t save my mother. I learned the most radical thing I could do was figure out how to save myself. We all have to save ourselves. We all have to find our way toward healing and forgiveness. And it is a long road.

  I am a black transman who loves men and women. I am a man who is just now learning to love my femininity. I was a girl named Kiana once. She survived a summer of sexual abuse when she was eight. When she told the truth there was no counseling. There was no processing, only a fast girl who needed to be watched closely. I prayed to God for forgiveness. Guilt hurt, and I started getting migraines. I moved with guilt in my heart, guilt as my center. I didn’t want to be bad, but I felt bad. I carried guilt when I left my mother with my father, but it was the only way I could get free. I had to leave.

  I am Kai. I had to leave. I had to move into this new body.

  Sometimes we don’t get what we deserve because we don’t know our own value.

  WE deserve great love, laughter, poetry, sweetness, sunshine, and smiles.

  WE deserve true love, open and honest.

  We deserve healthy love—love, a home where you don’t have to hide what is most valuable in order to keep it.

  I write with love for you, brothers, the agape kind.

  Kai M. Green

  ***

  DEAR KAI, KIESE, DARNELL, AND MYCHAL,

  Damn, you guys are bringing up some things that are making me go deep within. Just two months ago, I was finally able to voluntarily move out of my parents’ house. FYI: I said voluntarily because I spent a decade in what some of my brothers call Mr. Gilmore’s house, aka the big house. I’ve been in prison for the last ten years of my life.

  I’m black and from Brooklyn, so my spending time in Mr. Gilmore’s house ain’t no thing nowadays. Y’all know the stats about black men in prison, so I will spare the choir the gospel. But, man that ain’t the half of it all. I got people telling me that I need to see a quack because they think I’m emotionless…gotta admit, I think I am too. I mean, I care about a whole lot of people and things and issues. In fact, my whole life is dedicated to caring. That’s why I do the work that I do, mentoring and nurturing the hood to be safer and so on. But, brothers, I’m numb when it comes to deep feelings. I don’t quite know when it happened, but I might be messed up in the head, at least by therapist co-pay standards.

  It’s late and I don’t feel like giving you all the whole book of my life right now, but I will give you all a little context as to how I became as emotionless as I am. This is going to be confessions on speed, so keep up.

  Ready?

  Last of three kids, older brother, good…no, great parents. Older brother hated the crap outta me (no clue why…well, I have some ideas), nerdy kid, jumped badly at fourteen, almost raped at gunpoint at fourteen by some random bitchassmofo (had my first nut at the same time), lost my virginity at eighteen, shot at eighteen (doctor said I’d never walk the same again…proved him wrong), arrested for first-degree murder at twenty (though I never killed anyone), sentenced to a dozen plus five at twenty-two, released at thirty, doing great things for myself and others since then.

  LOL, maybe I need some therapy. I don’t know.

  What I do know is that I meet great women who want to love me, who I want to love back, at least in my mind, but I have a hard time replicating that want in my heart. So, y’all are talking about loving, and I’m talking about loving. I love myself and others to the bitter end, and I’m proud of myself for surviving so much unscathed. I’m the easiest person to get along with, or disagree with.

  I write well. That’s what folks tell me. I speak well. That’s what folks tell me. I inspire others. That’s what folks tell me. Don’t get me wrong, I believe all of that stuff, and I thank God for it (I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, BTW, though I’m not really an active JW right now because I drink and screw and all that good stuff, though I don’t cuss on the regular), but all this surviving and experience is so f’ing much at times. You know, my pops once told me that you shouldn’t suffocate the spirit, meaning you shouldn’t hold in how you feel for someone.

  Oh, did you expect me to give some sort of anecd
otal moral to that quote, like you’re taught to in English class? Like, you shouldn’t leave a paragraph without finishing your point? Nah, I ain’t got the answer, homies. I guess that’s what I’ll leave for you all to finish. You know, keep the flow going.

  Bless,

  Marlon Peterson

  Kanye West and HaLester Myers Are Better at Their Jobs…

  MY GRANDMOTHER MARRIED A BEAUTIFUL brown troll named HaLester “Les” Myers twenty years ago. The Christmas before last, Les slumped across from me in Grandma’s gaudy pink throne while she finished making supper. I watched the still water flooding the gutters of Les’s sleepy eyes, the way his nappy gray chin folded snugly into the top of those musty blue overalls, and I knew that this dusty joker really believed what he had said the night before about Kanye West and the importance of treating females like cats.

  “Look at Les over there faking sleep,” my Aunt Sue said from the doorway. “He ’sleep? Get up, Les! Time to eat. Wake him up, Kie.”

  Les’s sweaty face didn’t move. His chest didn’t heave in or out. But his fingers, which doubled as raggedy overstuffed cigars, dug deeper into both arms of Grandma’s favorite chair.

  HaLester Myers was preparing for takeoff.

  The night before, on Christmas Eve, I joined Les outside in his runaway spot. No matter the time of day or night, Les was likely to clutch his yellow folding chair and lumber out to the right side of Grandma’s porch. Really, unless he was drunk, Les’s runaway spot was the only place my Grandma allowed him to do the 2.5 things he’d mastered in his 83 years on earth: 1) sipping that Crown Royal Black, and 2.5) balancing a dangling Newport on his bottom lip while telling the loudest lies you’ve ever heard in your life.

  I’m convinced Les tells so many loud lies not necessarily because he’s deceptive, but because he has no inside voice and Grandma rarely lets him talk over volume five inside her house. When Les is lying about being a forty-ninth degree Mason, his voice sounds like flat tires rolling over jagged gravel. When he’s lying about what he did to the dog, cat, or car of the white man who “ain’t know how to pay a nigga right,” his voice sounds like burning bubble wrap. No matter what Les is lying about, all of his lies have an acidic slow drip to them, and nearly all the lies carry stories rooted in what “the black man” deserves.

  This Christmas Eve, like every Christmas Eve in Forest, Mississippi, I grabbed a chair from the kitchen before we lit our fireworks and walked out to where I knew Les would be sipping that Black.

  “Les, you know who Kanye West is, right?” I asked him and sat down under some droopy white Christmas lights.

  “Kanye!” he said. “Say do I know Kanye?” Les stood up like he did whenever he told lies in his runaway spot. When he stood up and you stayed seated, Les could look down at you and say one of his favorite lying sentences—“Look up here, man”—with more precision.

  “Look up here, man,” he said and lit another Newport. “I been know’n Kanye. His mama come over to the Public Museum when I was working security in Milwaukee around 1986, I believe it was. I been told her little Kanye was go’n be a prophet. On one hand,” Les slung out his right hand, “you got Kanye telling the white man the truth about what the black man deserve, see?”

  He put down the Black and slung out his other hand.

  “On the other hand, look up here, you got Obama deciding who deserve to get what in America. White man can’t stand that. Obama and Kanye, they the same, though, son. Yes they is.”

  I was confused. “Wait,” I told him. “So Obama is deciding what white folks deserve and Kanye is telling white folks what black folks deserve? And you’re saying white folks hate both of them for that?”

  Les tapped me on my knee and bent at his waist until he was inches away from my face. The Newport smoke, his Crown Royal Black breath, and that eighty-three-year-old tartar confused me even more. I couldn’t figure out whether to breathe through my nose or my mouth.

  “Fifty years ago,” he said, “I’m saying that the white man woulda hung both of them niggas over yonder in that field just for thinking about doing what they did. Yes he would, too!”

  It wasn’t until Les asked the question, “Kanye sang them songs, don’t he?” that I knew for sure that Kanye West had never sculpted a beat, never sung a hook, and never rapped a bar in the mind of HaLester Myers. Les had never heard of Taylor Swift. He didn’t know Kanye’s mother had passed and definitely didn’t know that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye’s most acclaimed album, had just been released a few weeks earlier.

  To Les, Kanye West was simply the young black man with the goatee and the boxed jaw, who told the world that black folks drowning in poisonous water deserved more from the president of our country.

  “The white man give Kanye that microphone ’cause he ain’t think there was no way he could tell the truth,” Les told me and sat down. “After all them Afghanese that Bush killed, now he claim Kanye the worst thing that happened to him in eight years? White man’ll say anything, you hear me?” Les said and stood up again. “Look up here, man. Anything! He believe everything he say, too. Just like Brett Favre...”

  At this point, even though it was cold for Mississippi, Les started to sweat. I knew I was supposed to ask Les another question about Brett Favre, but I’d heard the Brett Favre set of lies two Christmases in a row. I wanted the Kanye West set of lies for this Christmas.

  Les put his Black back down again and pulled a rag out of the front pocket of his overalls. I watched him wipe from the middle of his George Jefferson all the way down to the base of his thick neck.

  “You okay?” I asked him.

  “I reckon I am,” he said and picked up his bottle again. “You ain’t hot, son?”

  “I’m good,” I told him. “Back in the day, you think the white man would hang a black woman for saying the same thing Kanye said?”

  Les looked up at me and took a few more drags off that Newport. “Naw,” he said in his best inside voice that was both formal and afraid. “Naw. I don’t reckon he would, but you never know. I ain’t one for guessing what a female gon do.”

  I wasn’t sure how Les moved from never knowing if a black woman would have been lynched, to guessing what a “female” would do, but I just nodded and kept listening.

  “You got a better chance of winning every dime they got off in them Indian casinos.” He blew the smoke toward his work boots. “Expect the unexpected from a female, son. Care for them like you care for your cat. Just don’t never trust na one if you can help it. If you do, that’s the end of you...”

  I stood up and looked down at Les. He kept his slowly blinking eyes directed at the Mexican trailer park next to Grandma’s house.

  I felt like smacking Les in his heart for implying that my Grandma should be treated like a cat. But mostly, I felt a healthy heaping of something else, a superbly satisfying something else that I hadn’t needed to feel since the day Kanye’s latest classic, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was officially released.

  The day the CD drops, I’m invited to give a talk at Columbia Law School on black literary imagination for Kimberle Crenshaw’s class, “Colorblindness and the Law.” I had the bootleg of the CD for two weeks, but my boy, Hua, and I still dart to Best Buy in between classes to get two originals.

  On my way to the train station in Poughkeepsie, I play the first minute of the actual CD in my car.

  Then I replay it.

  Shit is just too good.

  I play the last minute of the album in the parking lot of the station. And I replay it.

  Mercy.

  I love that Kanye West, the self- and society-anointed international asshole, not only frames his album with the questions, “Can we get much higher?” and “Who will survive in America?” but also borders his fantasy with the faux British voice of Nicki Minaj and the grainy revolutionary voice of Gil Scott-Heron. Within this frame, with all the guest verses and distorted vocals, it’s obvious Kanye West believes that plenty of voices other than h
is own also deserve to be explored in his beautiful dark twisted fantasy.

  I step on the Metro North and folks are in their usual pre–New York states of mind. Heads nearly down. Fists almost clenched. Purses, backpacks, empty McDonald’s bags, and pleather briefcases damn near snug against puffy coats, blouses, and suit jackets.

  Unusually though, there are lots of downward-turned heads bobbing as familiar static came from a few headphones. Different tracks from Kanye’s twisted fantasy compete for space and time on that train.

  Literally.

  For the sleepy-eyed woman across from me, it’s “Runaway.” For the man two seats behind me, it sounds like “Gorgeous.” For a kid I know who got on at Beacon, it’s “Power.”

  I get into a dollar cab at 125th and I’m shocked that the driver looks like he could be one of my students named Jacob or Seth. I’m even more shocked that JacobSeth is bumping “Blame Game.”

  “This Kanye shit is unreal,” JacobSeth says.

  “Yeah,” I tell him, more weirded out that JacobSeth is driving a dollar cab than the fact that JacobSeth just assumes I love Kanye West, too. “It is kinda crazy.”

  By the time I get to the law school, Chris Rock is asking the voice formerly known as that of a real woman, “Who reupholstered your pussy?”