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1. |
parts 1&2
07:25
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1.
An orchestra of chalkboards bowed by the thinnest fingernails of Midwestern-make hit the eardrum through the maze of headphone wires. Smoke exits in lungs in long streams. Niggas on the corner comment on the ways vapor floats into the vast nothing. The city hums underneath the songs of Field Hollers. Corner kids sit on the curb. The forty ounces of Colt 45 clinks against each other. Glass on glass. Bottles clang. Bodies of black boys frozen mid-though. They’re behind the three-point line. Up for student council. Frozen at the skatepark. Kids on the sideline sit with faces stuck. Hardened with knowledge that time’s up. Mouth flushed with calm. Corners of lips firm. Hands clenched or folded; some caught fallings. Some let their headshang. Whether in shame or solidarity. Bodies wrung with its own weight and tells how the noose stretches in its effortless way of accommodating the subject.
2.
In the barber shop on Fourth and Janes Street Vivian says, “America made us only citizen enough to pay taxes.” Clicks her long press-on nails on the counter by her clippers. They hit like snare drums like thye playing along to the news. It’s the same shit. Same old song of a kid killed on the East Side. Buena Vista. Down by the pub. A kid shot near the ice cream parlor while riding his bike home after dark. He pedals his way home quick enough to be driven to Hospital across town. The anchor calls it a miracle before shifting to the meteorologist who makes a joke about rain that won’t come.
A woman fields Vivian’s comment and responds. “You right… but you know i won’t give a damn when those reparations come in.”
she and vivian cackle in the corner of the nearly empty barbershop taking turns smacking each other’s arms with the back of their hands. One after the other. Than other after after another. The barbershop is mostly empty. The sound of the laughs carry-on for a while. One chair is being sat in by a customer. The four-year-old calls out in discomfort a young barber grips his head give him a line. The boy cries hysterically.
Moe sits in silence. His barber’s chair only filled by him most days. His eyes not as keen. His hands nowhere near as steady. His lines crooked, his fades have become sloppy. A copy of the Saginaw News opened wide to the middle. Today’s copy rancid with the stench of menthol cigarettes and the absence of literacy. It always is. Moe sighs. The same one his momma used to make when she was contemplating how to respond. However, nothing would come from him today. His head slides back to rest on the chair. A log being chainsawed soon follows.
The child stops crying long enough for the line to be cut. The young barber takes money from the mother of now pacified four-year-old boy, who now stands behind her leg with a Dum-Dum sucker securely tucked in his mouth. She asks what Moe dreams about. No one cares to guess these days.
The plantation his grandfather picked cotton on and the one-room-sharecropping hut Moe grew up in. Somewhere between the asscrack of Baton Rogue and the swamp New Orleans sinks on. They never ask about the Magnolias he yanks from trees in the midst of R.E.M cycles. Never ponder the window he place them on and how the smell makes his momma his hysterical.
Never ask how Momma used to tell him not to worry about reparations. Told him they weren’t coming. Told him his Granddaddy already sold that forty acres and a mule they had received from the first payout. Buy out? Sell out? She told Moe that his granddad sold out. Said he traded his life, well-being, and her life for a crisp ten-dollar bill. He used it to buy bread and butter that they overcharged him for at the general store in the town over. His momma said he sold the mule, Jelly Roll for a bottle of tonic on the way back home to the shack.
“Mm.” Moe says again slipping out of his dream. This time in the absence of his employees. He smiles at the Styrofoam plate of Fried Catfish from Magic Kitchen. The first six letters of the sign have worn away. Probably still blowing across the city of Saginaw by the wind and what remains is comparable and just as accurate.
Moe takes the plate from chair beside him. He runs his hands across his name written in sharpie before clicking the lights of the shop off before clicking the lock behind him. He drives home to his dog, Lucille, and a picture of his wife Clementine put on a rather empty bookshelf. He eats the fried fish before falling asleep to whirr of static from television losing signal.
The barber shop burns the next day.
As a matter of speaking, we could say it was Moe’s shop. But truth being told, the bank held the deed. His Down Payment securely slid into the depths of a vault. And we could be polite and offer the fact that they liquidated the shop, but there was nothing left to sell. Only cinders piled on top of trauma. A bank intern didn’t think selling the cinders were still lit was a good idea, and the bank manager didn’t either. But only because they thought they would make back their investment if they liquidized the collateral, and besides Moe was only in Saginaw because of water.
The Stop and Shop owner around the corner saw Moe a few times after that. Before no one else and after no one else cared to look. Said she’d never watched an old man cry like that before. Said it was a silence. The sound of a heart exploding or imploding or breaking. She didn’t settle one of those modes because she said it was all of them at once. Said she heard Prince after that moment and understood. Told me that she knows doves cry in the absence of sound because the absence of war doesn’t exist so how would they know to cry for it.
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2. |
parts 3,4,&5
07:11
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3.
The neighborhood drunk stumbles into his sister, Carrie Mae’s home. He barely notices her three grandchildren rolling matchbox cars between them on the floor.
He says her name the words slur together into soup. Her voice lifts in defense along with her hand to usher him out.
They burned down Moe’s. They burned down Moe’s. They burned down Moe’s. They burned down Moe’s. They Burned it down. They burned Moe. Moe Burnt. They Burnt Moe’s. Moe’s gone. Moe’s gone. Moe...
The alphabet soup had a gin base. It wafts through the small house. Carrie Mae was sure the whole Eastside could smell it. The kids smack lips to show a detest for the smell they could only pretend to taste. Dreams of future delicacies growing to haunt Ronnie Jr. who would grow to love its smell. While Jaz and Yolanda took his turn rolling his Hot Wheels to each other while he watches the scene unfold
They couldn’t leave us a damn pebble.
Carrie Mae shakes her head in disgust. An anguish that she knows too well. Death. Saudade--only no happiness here. A deep sadness in every crease of her body. The weight of the news breaks her will to speak. She is Atlas with just her appendages and a faint whisper that held the question, “does Moe know” slipping out from underneath.
Ronnie Jr. sees it leave her lips. Watches it rise above the ceiling fan and stay there. i am sure he still sees it on occasion. Hope he still takes quick glances at it before he heads up the stairs from his night shift. It is void of all meaning and every mention of the memory.
4.
A fanfare blaring car horns signal mass exodus. People running from the city. Black kids grip the white Barbies their Aunts pass down to them. Usually in moments when they have nothing left to give. They give the kids their memories of better days. Before they knew the difference between pure and shame. Before they thread the line of perfection or ideal through the eye of “not you.”
They scream Midland. Shout Bay City. Settle for anywhere but here. Keisha’s momma proclaims Bay City. It is where Madonna is from. Says her daughter can be found by some record company there. Fuck American Idol. Says they don’t let us sing how we need to. Keisha’s momma’s gold cap gleaming from her mouth as she hangs out the driver’s seat.
Nah, i know Stevie’s from here, but Barry ain’t nowhere here. And ain’t no Motown ‘round here. If we’re going to get out, we need Pop music money. Need that Beyonce, Rihanna. Need that King Kunta and SZA “got [this] cover for the weekend” money.
Years from now Keisha, who sits on the back seat of the Ford Focus, will describe the way her mother took her hair from the braids. Removed the letters and beads from the ends and mixed in the relaxer into her hair. Stripping her of Double-Dutch in the road until the streetlights cracked the mystical nature of the sunset. Hiding behind the horizon to recharge somewhere far, far the fuck away from here. With every kink unwinding from her hair, she losses the moments she ran to her father when he came home after work.
Naps scare money away.
Keisha’s mom would say this on a constant loop while she sat under the hairdryer. But that is years from now. Today she is seven, and has no concept of why she will be forced to play piano for her church. Today she is seven and relaxer is being worked into her hair in order for her to be something she has no understanding of.
5.
Seventh hour at Midland High, Andrew sits in a ninth grade Biology Classroom on his first day praying that his teacher will crash through the heavy lab door. Andrew was particularly nervous, but there were too many eyes sprinting in his direction and then sidestepping out of eye contact with him. Andrew starts to relate the stare patterns and the rising murmur of collecting in the class to that of a hornet’s nest. Buzzing with the excitement or danger of something new. Something that isn’t like them. Don’t look like them. Is not them.
Finally, Richard Dickerson, but everyone took pride in calling him Dick, extends leg muscles and a hand to introduce himself to Andrew. Andrew responds in a semi-uniform fashion.
Dick smiles displaying rows of heavy metal around rows of heavy metal encasing a row already straightened teeth. His parents paid for years of correction. Correction. Whiter teeth. Brightest smile. All-American hatred.
Where are you from?
Stumble through a story about why the family moved across town schools across from the high school midway through the semester. Leave out everything to do with the number of pills, the number of nights in the Mental Health ward,
No, no. Where are you really from?
Look around. The class is making sideways looks at him. Roots was playing. The only black kid in the room and other the kids will promptly ask how the experience of feeling the gaze of 28 nonblack students turns to see the reaction of your face to see if they are allowed to cringe, smile, or laugh is reoccurring.
The Lab door flings open.
Nails bow a silence that settles over Saginaw. No soul left. Stevie’s gone. Serena left. The rappers that pretend to be making moves are all dead or moved to Atlanta. Kids afraid to go outside. They spend days waiting for bombs to drop. Wait for the cloud and the pollutants to waft all over the room. Wait for the local chemical company to disappear, disperse. Stop. Burn. Waiting for the Tittabawassee to form new rivers of acid. Stop. Burn. Wait for the Tittabawassee to swallow Midland like an insolent child. And then up and leave it sunken.
Leave it as an artifact for American-centric Historians will proclaim its importance. Rewrite the chain of events. Rewrite war crimes. Show Agent Orange in a positive light. Spin the levels of toxins in river. Change the meaning of death of thousands of people that have cancer as a necessary sacrifice for the common good. Is good even that common.
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3. |
part 6
06:05
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6.
i think these things all at once, or maybe they are kaleidoscope overlapping one another. i listen to the ensemble of fingernails rip my voice from my throat and wonder why am i the instrument of approval? Why am i the rite of performance. A way to shift from themselves. A way to harmonize with the notes they sing. A voice i house but cannot use. A song i sing but am not allowed to strum. The bodies still frozen mid jump shot. i turn to the friend that speaking on my behalf. Maybe it’s just in my stead. Is it for me instead. Maybe it’s just for me. Before i can say anything, they look at me seeking approval after successfully warding off what they describe as a terrible human. My blank stare prompts one of them into telling a joke:
Two black kids go to shoot hoops before 8 o clock. Their parents tell them to be home by eight or nine? What time do they make it home?
i squirm and try signal discomfort in a semi half-ass attempt to stop the joke or at least minimize the joke’s harm to no avail.
They don’t.
i use the strings they never let me use. i say my truth in the brassy horn sounds. The brightness of every timpani strike. The glockenspiel chime. The snare syncopates in rhythms that are organic. All of this in a way i know they will notate, contextualize, notarize and sign off on the appropriation of the sound of my voice as it hits the brain wires.
i hear the words as they leave my tongue. Watch them scurry out of the cracks in its underuse. The blinds fling wide. Embalmed in light. i scream. Whether to the void or to the sound of them panicking at the instrument that played their own song. A piano that no longer be written for and banged out their own melody using its own hammer. Writing its own truth.
i know somewhere Moe is sitting in an armchair whether this side or the next with the Saginaw News opened to the middle. The pages crinkled in the absence of fear. His eyes on the third page. Somewhere in the bottom right hand corner. The headline will read: Soloist Explodes on Stage. It will only be followed by a brief two sentence explanation. It will read:
Soloist, known for bowed the chalkboard with fingernails explodes mid-performance. When asked why they only could say “i know it sounds like shit, but at least it’s mine.”
They will omit most of my five-minute explanation, reframe my syntax, and strip back my diction to confine me to its two by two slot. It’s fine. i relish in even its slight visibility. And even now, years past the explosion, i think of Moe. Imagine the drive back and forth in a hell i never wish on anyone. Even now, i think of his dog waiting up the night to see him walking through the door. Even now, here, i can only see the picture of his wife reflecting the static of the television. It will only reflect the static. Or some other electrical feedback that now must be substitute for a human eye until the power is cut.
And in the dark--still, even now--i think of the kids sitting on the curb. The sound of Colt 45 and chiming against another. They celebrate the last nights in a place they call home. No car stereo able to play loud enough to reach the city. No ceiling to house the children of a city built on them, but never for them. Just trap hymns played off a cell phone speaker. We dance, smoke and laugh as we see fit. No cop is going to come down here to send us home. Ain’t no cop left to call. They were the first to leave. Took their Dodge Chargers as payment for our tax increase and drove to Midland. And besides if someone did call, there isn’t a home for us to go back to.
i look to the right, the Stop and Shop is closed. Maybe it only exists as an after image and no longer is standing. Just memory fills in the empty space. i know the barbershop Moe owned on the corner of Fourth and Janes Street is reduced to a moss-in-cracked-cement parking lot and we still gather there if only to exhale a river smoke from our lungs to watch it flow into the vast nothing.
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guero Midland, Michigan
Hi my name is Thomas and I make music that feels like a middle schooler at the 7-11 mixing genres at the slurpee station. It comes out alright.
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