The Portable Promised Land Read online

  But a year into the Commercial Channel phenomenon, America got bored. The New York Times’s TV critic wrote, “The Commercial Channel made dubious television history by offering television stripped of the skeleton, the muscles, and even the soul. For one long year artifice was art. But the Commercial Channel has gone the way of the pet rock, the Rubik’s Cube, and disco. It has finally, thankfully, become culturally irrelevant.” Those last two words were a dagger in Dad’s heart. Money was important to him, but impacting the Zeitgeist was paramount. He slumped in his chair as if smacked by a heart attack. He went to his bedroom and sat there all day and the next and the next, never getting dressed, never turning on the lights, just eating Häagen-Dazs with his hands and watching ten television sets at once. After a few months he waved us into the car. Without a word he drove all the way to Cricket Academy in New England. As we looked at a building memorializing alumni who fought in the Revolutionary War, he arranged for us to stay until we graduated and drove off. Four days later we got a call. The only home we’d ever known was a pile of ashes. Dad had cremated himself.

  “Five seconds to air.... three...two...” and then the three of us were live on MTV with Kurt Loder in a sortof national town-hall meeting that was supposed to be about openness and healing. But with all those secrets in the room — The Black Widow’s, ours — how could it be about healing?

  “Black Widow,” Loder said, “do you feel responsible for what happened here this afternoon?”

  “We’ve lived under wartime conditions for hundreds of years. Our souls are restless. We got a right to be hostile.”

  “So this is something you’re proud of ?”

  “If you’re in hiphop and white people aren’t afraid of you, you ain’t doin your job.”

  “But are you warning America about the danger of racial tension or urging someone to fire the first shot of the race war?” Loder turned to us. “How can you as Black men feel good about presenting the world this image of your people?” I almost laughed. If he only knew.

  The day we graduated from Cricket we came into our trust fund and bought a duplex in Manhattan. Finally we would go break into the record business and change America. But as we taped down our cardboard boxes, we realized we were leaving home. We’d spent eight years walking among the red-brick, ivy-drenched buildings. It was as easy as losing a parent for the third time. We felt like wet leaves on a rickety limb in a strong wind: weak and lonely and about to be blown away. As the sun went down we sat on the floor in our empty room and watched dust floating through the air.

  Our best friend, Cornbread, came by. “See, y’all’s problem is y’all don’t have no people,” he said. “Everyone needs some sort of family. Even if you never use that safety net, as long as you know someone’s there you can go out and walk the highest tightrope.”

  He said maybe there was a way to get us in a family. “I always told you white boys you look Black.” We had dark-olive skin, short dark hair, and what a professor once called “ethnically-vague features.” We had a look that put us at the visual intersection of Italian, Latino, Arab, Creole, and light-skinned African-American. People were always asking, What are you? And what was race worth if it could be so ambiguous? “Race is fluid,” Cornbread said. “And y’all already live in an epidermal-racial no-man’s-land. I’m just sayin you should take advantage.” Why did we have to accept the assignment we were given by the accident of birth? Why couldn’t we choose our tribe for ourselves?

  We talked Blackness with Cornbread that night and on into the next day. He came with us to Manhattan and stayed the summer. “Listen, race isn’t essentially about color,” he said. “It’s about rhythm. The way you speak, walk, eat, think — it’s all tied to a sense of rhythm. If y’all can just start moving to a different philosophy of time then y’all will come off like niggas.” He talked about always being at ease, your every movement saying, Oh this ain’t nothin. But at the same time, having a controlled danger about you, as if your every movement suggested, I dare you. “But the most important thing in the world,” Cornbread said, “the thing that most separates Black men from white is the dick. Black men have nothing if they don’t have a big dick. I don’t mean literally. There’s niggas walking around with a pinky tween they legs. The dick I’m talkin about is in your mind. The symbolic dick in your head that tells you how much of a man you are. That dick gives you unshakable confidence that leads to what they call cool. That dick scares whitey. That dick is a Black man’s best weapon.”

  We spent months studying Richard Pryor and Samuel Jackson and Rakim for voice, tone, and diction, then Ron O’Neal in Superfly, Duke Ellington, Michael Jordan for movement, then Miles Davis on wearing the clothes and them not wearing you. Huey Newton’s lion strength and dancer poise made a deep impression. Marvin Gaye, Thelonious Monk, and Mobutu Sese Seko showed us how to wear a hat. Clyde Frazier showed us how to be nonchalant, Eddie Murphy how to play brer-rabbit tricks, Denzel how to magnetize women, and Bryant Gumbel, Blair Underwood, and Grant Hill showed us how not to be. Everything else you could think of was covered in James Brown, Muhammad Ali, and Antonio Fargas.

  After a while Blackness began to emanate from us. One night a Black man on the street nodded to me the way Black men do when they pass on the street. I smiled for a week. Then Corn-bread drove us out to Bed-Stuy, to a little hole-in-the-wall club called Coffee. A place that white men couldn’t get into even if they had badges. He sent us to the door by ourselves. The two linebackers blocking it looked us up and down and stepped aside. We were in the club.

  It was pitch black inside and except for a few purple spotlights you could barely see. The DJ threw on an old record — A fly girl! A fly girl! A fl-lyyyyyyyy girl!— and everyone started doing the wop. The sound, the smells, the dances, the hair, the sneers, the smiles — it was an entirely new world, as though we’d gone beneath the surface, into the core of the Black earth, where the natural resources were mined. My heart careened around my chest like a crashing skier.

  Then the DJ spun into a beat with a dangerous edge. It was music to kill by. A woman began rhyming with the fury of a fascist dictator inspiring the troops to world domination. Her voice set off orgiastic explosions in heads around the room. We squoze to the front of the crowd and saw a six foot one, cornrowed, immaculately curved dominatrix. That’s how we met The Black Widow.

  Loder was digging the screws in deeper with each question. “How do you defend accusations that you’re destroying hiphop with this music?”

  “The Black Widow is an authentic representation of how our people feel,” Dice said. “She’s saying things people have long wanted to say but have been unable. She’s jumped directly from the Black subconscious into reality.”

  Was that true? Had The Black Widow given voice to something that was best left quiet? Had we all gone too far? Dice and I had approached Blackness seeing only the new things we’d be able to say and do. We’d never considered our responsibility to the tribe.

  “Dice, we can’t go on like this,” I said. “What?”

  “We’ve got to take these masks off.”

  “We’re giving them what they want.”

  “We’re killing people.”

  He leaned in and whispered, “I’m killing you.” And then his Glock was in my face. I could see the far end of the empty barrel and the bullet sitting there. “You will not ruin my life,” he said.

  I scrambled up out of my chair, snapped my gun from my waist, and pointed it at him. We stood there in a nationally televised Mexican standoff, neither wanting to kill, neither willing to give in. Race had made us Siamese twins, the shared lie tying us together.

  Then my cell phone rang. The grating sound shook my concentration.

  “Yeah?” I said, still pointing a gun at my brother.

  “James!”

  Who knew my real name?

  “I can’t believe you two are fighting again! You’re worse than the fuckin Jeffersons!”

  “Who is this?”

  �
��You don’t know my voice anymore?” It was my father.

  Dice and I found Dad just outside of Las Vegas in a small apartment in a dingy complex. He answered the door in a faded orange robe that had to have been born red. Neither the robe nor his pallid skin had seen the sun in years.

  Slowly he turned from the door and led us toward his living room. We heard a mélange of angry voices, laugh tracks, big explosions, thumping drums, crowd noise, and theme songs blending into one giant, collective sound. Then we got to the living room. There must’ve been 100 television sets stacked atop each other, covering three entire walls. It was an explosion of red, green, blue, and yellow, Springer, Oprah, Jordan, and Seinfeld, CNN, South Park, SportsCenter, Sex and the City, Saturday Night Live, Sally Struthers, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston, the Weather Channel, The Brady Bunch, The X-Files, The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Court TV, Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Manson, college football, pro wrestling, women’s rugby, Heather Locklear, Charlie Rose, Tony Robbins, Alec Baldwin, Tae-Bo, LA Law, NYPD Blue, and Julius Erving, ball in hand, rising to the sky. Dad lowered himself into his grandpa’s TV chair. It was the room’s only piece of furniture. We sat on the floor.

  He said he’d faked his death and ran to Vegas, thinking he could imbibe the culture, conceive another Zeitgeist-shifter, and use his rebirth to gain extra publicity for the new project. “Ya know, scare em into thinking the great icon is dead, like Fonzie did that time he let the tough-girl gang kidnap him and almost cut his hair so he could get Richie freed.” But no new idea ever came. All he had to show for the last decade was a lot of TV watched.

  “I been following you boys, your progress, your trial,” he said. “Lemme tell ya one thing: becoming Black was a masterstroke! Alex Trebeck couldn’t have been smarter.”

  We still couldn’t believe all those televisions.

  “But this little spat on MTV,” he said, shaking his finger, getting all Dadly on us. “You cannot let personal differences get in the way of business. That’s the real reason Gilligan and them never got off that island — couldn’t work together! The most important thing in life is to control the truth. The genetic survival of the fittest is over. Now it’s all about your ideas, your influence, your conception of the truth! Do you know who Shirley Polykoff was?”

  Who?

  “She’s got space in your head and you don’t even know it! In the 50s this woman wrote the advertising tag line “Does she... or doesn’t she.” In one fell swoop she made it acceptable for the average woman to dye her hair. She changed the way people think and now the world is different. The truth is mental real estate. Own that and you are a truly rich man. Make your vision of the truth the world’s vision and you’ll never die. With this Black Widow thing you two are snares in the big beat of life! Don’t let anything come between you!” The excitement had worn him down. He fixed his eyes on an old Seinfeld rerun — “I love these ones from the first season where Jason Alexander is just doing a Woody Allen impression....”— and before the scene was over he’d fallen asleep.

  Dice and I sat there, looking at his walls of TVs. High in one corner a young Eddie Murphy was in a barber’s chair getting heavy makeup. It was that old sketch where he turns himself into a white man to see what life is like when there’s no Blacks around. He goes to the newsstand and leaves money for the vendor. “What are ya doing?” the vendor says. “Go ahead, take it. Take it.” Eddie gets the newspaper for free. He goes to the bank and a Black executive refuses his loan application. A white executive comes out of nowhere, sends the Black one to lunch, and says to Eddie, “That was a close one!” Eddie says, “Silly Negro.” The white man hands him stacks of cash. “Take it,” the white man says. “Return it when you can. Or never!”

  It was like looking at an inverse mirror. Like Eddie we’d slapped on masks and secretly collected the spoils of the other tribe. Did we look like that, caricatures of Black men bumbling through the world, collecting advantages for our so-called Blackness? A guilty anger gathered inside me. I looked at my brother with disgust and thought, Do we deserve to be Black?

  Dice said, “We need to fight.”

  Our fights weren’t your normal boxing-match-turns-wrassling brawl fiasco. Our fights followed a regimen that went back to our early teens. Whoever initiated the fight would be the first to drop his hands and take a punch to the face. Then the other would pound the first in the face. And back and forth, on and on until someone gave in. You could only give in before you punched. Once you threw a punch or someone started a punch, you had to take it. There was no last-second ducking. Usually you could only take four or five to the face before you crumbled, so going first was a big advantage. But if you really wanted something, you didn’t care.

  “What’s this for?” I said. “Let’s be exact.”

  “I win, we’re Black. You win, we’re white.”

  “I start.”

  “Let’s go.”

  I sent a sharp left uppercut to his chin. The last time we fought — over who would get to fuck porn star Charisma Donovan one night — I won with that punch. But Dice’s return blow put me on my knees. He swiveled through a roundhouse right that curved into my left temple and put me on my back. A headache shot up from the back of my neck. I hadn’t hit him half as hard. He was more willful than I’d imagined.

  I sent a straight right from behind my shoulder through the air like an arrow to his left eye. He landed on his back, jumped up, and sent his fist down onto my nose, trying to crack my bridge. Blood, mucus, and snot spewed out and my knees buckled. Dice was over there leaping around on his toes and I was on the floor wiping up.

  I crawled to my feet and planned another punch. His left eye was starting to swell. Maybe I could close it. His jaw seemed a little loose. I could dislocate it. God, Dice was good at disguising his pain. He didn’t bleed, he never cried. He just stood there, acting as though you’d never touched him. Bastard. There was a loud, obnoxious bang on the door. “Police officer!” I opened the door sweaty and bleeding, with a bag of weed and $5,000 cash in my pocket and an unlicensed Glock on my waist. Dad never woke up.

  The cell they put me in was in the basement of the station at the end of a long, dark, cold corridor of cells, most of them empty. Three rats sipped from the pool of piss in the corner. They didn’t even move when I walked in. I kept saying, Once I get my phone call I’ll be all right. But hours went by. Finally a cop came to the bars, slouching like he was a nice guy. “What happened?” he said.

  “You wouldn’t even believe it if I told you.”

  “Look bro,” he said, “just tell me....I can get ya out of here.”

  “Do you know where my brother is?”

  “Ya know, bro,” he said, “life is all about favors. You do me a favor, I’ll do you a favor.” And he put his hand on his gun, rubbing it softly with his fingertips like it was a lady’s thigh.

  I was no longer in Vegas.

  “You can slide out of here any time you’re ready. Just do me a favor.” He gave his lips a quick lick as he caressed his gun.

  I was in some corrupt little country, lost in the crevices of a dictatorship where the man with the gun was in charge of all laws.

  Could I say no? A nigger in a secluded cell with a strange white cop? No one knew I was in prison. No one even knew I’d been arrested. Could I afford to defy someone who could kill me and dump me in the trash and walk away? My choice was bless his dick or, maybe, die. Way off I could hear singing from someone with soul in his throat. “Cold, empty bed... Springs hard as lead... Feel like ol’ Ned...Wish I was dead... What did I do?...To be so Black and blue....”

  “Do me this favor, bro.”

  “... I’m white... inside... but that don’t help my case....”

  “C’mon, bro....”

  “... Cuz I... can’t hide... what is in my face....”

  And just as I was about to be pressed for a decision, I heard a yell. “Lucid!” a cop’s voice came from the end of the hall. “Time for your phone call! Now!” My cop fri
end zipped away. Finally, my phone call. But no one came.

  After a long moment that voice came again. “Lucid!” “Who’s there?” I yelled back.

  “Louis Motherfucking Armstrong!” We were so far from each other we had to yell and then wait for the echo. “Don’t worry about Smitty,” he said, “he probably won’t kill you.”

  “Thanks. Shit. My brother’s up in here somewhere.”

  “Dice.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I get to watch TV sometimes. Say, lemme ask you a question, boy. I been lookin close at ya on that TV and I know ya say ya Black, but I been lookin at ya. What is you?”

  “Well...”

  “Cuz Black ain’t in a man’s face. I got white cousins darker than you and Black cousins lighter. Black don’t register on the eyes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Black is sweaty slow-grinding in a dark basement while Marvin Gaye sings I want you. Getting spanked on your thighs with a switch from a tree in the backyard. Combin your Afro til all the naps get out. Slidin your hand up a Black woman’s big, round, firm, tender ass. Playin the dozens. Smokin Newports. Bootleg whiskey, double dutch, and spades. Hittin a quick crossover dribble as you come down the lane, stutter-steppin, and goin up for a nasty dunk right in someone’s mug. Flippin a cane to the beat as you cool down 125th street. Lettin the word nigga just flow off ya lips. Bending the King’s English til it’s inside out. Stayin sane in a world constructed to make you insane....”