As summer descended, sweltering with little letup, I spent whole afternoons in our cool, dark basement, at what was now called “Mom’s.” As if pressed to trick continuity into my life, I started compulsively watching movies. Sometimes the same ones over and over until the tapes became too hot and the images and sound slowed. I’d persuaded myself that the only way to arrange time and, essentially, postpone how differently things felt upstairs was to devise a pattern of uninterrupted escape: Hitchcock, Bogart, Cary Grant. Hitchcock, Bogart, Cary Grant.
It seems obvious now, but I couldn’t reconcile with summer’s aliveness. How everyone was out and on their way somewhere, riffling through corner-store freezers for raspberry popsicles or peddling fast only to sail downhill, hands-free. I wasn’t having any of it. I chose instead to live out my feelings through film, by pleading with Grace Kelly to not answer the phone—Turn around! I’d scream. There’s a man hiding behind the curtain! Or mouth the words as Audrey Hepburn points to Cary Grant’s cleft chin in Charade and tunefully asks, “How do you shave in there?” Or enjoy with great enchantment Peter O’Toole’s slapstick charm in How to Steal a Million. His blue eyes, I remember thinking, were pure fiction: they were movie-blue.
V.
Going to the movies means securing a momentary fissure in time where I might cede to improbable bank heists, shit-out-of-luck heroes, to the very concept of a hero, to the winsome appeal of first love, star-crossed love, or an unlikely yet pleasing ensemble cast, a disappointing sequel, rapid-fire buddy-comedy banter, to the obstinate gloom of a boxing movie, a bummer car chase or a sensational one too, to the congratulatory thrill I procure from identifying voices in animated films.
When I exit the theater I feel smug with power having just stalled time. At least that’s the lie I tell myself, because in my own misshapen idea of it, I have successfully suspended summer’s most common emotion: longing. What it comes down to—despite having sat motionless for two or so hours—is being possessed by energy that I can only describe as kinetic.
12
Some Things I Cannot Unhear
1.
IN 1968, James Baldwin, a guest on The Dick Cavett Show, said, “As Malcolm X once put it: the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday.” High noon, he said in a slight baritone, as if trying to find the right key for a song. Baldwin then went on to give examples of other institutions, not just the Christian church, where systematic racism has wielded its power; the labor unions, the real estate lobby, the board of education. Part of this episode can be found on YouTube and runs a swift one minute, one second. Baldwin’s voice—its near-sport of a voice—is one I cannot unhear. The way he says “evidence” is capable of galvanizing the most blasé listener. His is a staccato that quickens in clip when Baldwin repeats words like “white” or “hate,” but ripples when he says “idealism,” diminishing its meaning into a na?veté.
When Baldwin asks a question, it does not ferry the inflection. Instead, he issues it declaratively, testing the acoustics of a room. Close your eyes and, sure, Baldwin has a sermonizing tone, but one that bounces like someone hurrying down a flight of stairs without holding the railing. Baldwin’s voice multitasks, and requires of me to pay attention. His words have carried their repercussive meaning into today, so much so that in August when the headlines read “No Fly Zone Over Ferguson,” for a minute, I only heard those words in Baldwin’s voice.
2.
My father has taught our two-year-old Welsh terrier, Willis, to “Play dead.” PLAY DEAD, I’ll hear him say when I’m home for a visit, sleeping in and playing dead myself. PLAY DEAD. Two words that I can now never unhear. PLAY DEAD; two words that oppose but aren’t opposites. One is meant to be light: Play! The other is blunt. It moors.
When Willis hears PLAY DEAD, he lays flat on his side and possums into a jelled state. In those seconds, he is the ultimate state of “dog.” Meaning, he is expectant. A treat is on his horizon. Sometimes Willis will side-eye my father, like, “C’mon, man.” When a dog side-eyes you, the whites of his eyes can deploy more attitude than the most teenaged of teenagers. The most silent depiction of exasperation. A limit has been reached. The dog is letting you know.
And so, sometimes I’ll stand on our stairs and spy my father saying PLAY DEAD, and even when Willis only half-obliges, my father stills hands him a treat and lies down beside him. In those moments my father is the ultimate state of himself: father first and everything else second. And in those moments when the two of them are playing dead, I quietly climb back upstairs because, as time passes and as I spot my parents doing young, lighthearted things, I’m overrun by some cruel and preoccupying sense that I’m watching the memory of them.
3.
There’s a recording of Nina Simone’s “Ain’t Got No,” where Simone, after listing all the things she doesn’t have—a home, shoes, money, class, a country, schooling, children, sisters or brothers—she begins, around the two-minute mark, to list all that she’s got, that “nobody,” she sings, “can take away.” Hair on her head, brains, ears, eyes, a nose, and her mouth. She has her smile too. Her tongue, her chin, her neck, and, my favorite of all, her boobies. When Nina Simone shouts “my boobies” in her syrupy, cool-wail of a voice, it’s as if she’s invented a whole new body part. Boobies. These aren’t just breasts, they’re boobies; they bob and hang. They’re funny and beautiful. They’re boobies. And I can never unhear Nina Simone claiming hers.
4.