College Avenue, Halloween, 2002 // Hanif Abdurraqib
Earlier, on the floor of my dorm room, Brittany told me
I mean, dude, I know you’re Buddy Holly but only because YOU’RE telling me you’re Buddy Holly. Everyone at the party may just think you’re a black guy in an old suit.
And I told her that she had no idea what she was talking about because this was the 2000s, and we are only 19 and not yet saddled with the burdens of our parents except for in the middle of some nights, when the loneliness slides itself along our necks like a crucifix and we gasp for anything familiar, but I told her that time is not now, not when this tweed striped jacket was 49.99, and I spent all morning shining these shoes, so clean I could see my face in them, if that face were white which it kind of will be in a way later, I told her, if only in the confidence it will have in itself.
But, right now tonight, everyone at this party thinks I am dressed as Sammy Davis Jr., and the decades old couch I am pushing my fingers in between is wrapped in torn cloth covered like a grandmother’s bible the girl next to me curves her spine around the 90s pop song swinging its legs over the air and asks me where Frank Sinatra is and I want to ask her what she knows of the Apollo, the Mecca, bowing to four white kids from Lubbock Texas in 1957 if she knows how hard it might be for her to squeeze a standing ovation outta all of those black hands but I smile instead and just say Frank’s buried in California so she will give me her phone number and I can pretend to have lost it on the hardwood floor of this house which has the consistency and activity of a beehive, all at once sticky and buzzing
so I go outside to escape the coat of dried beer throwing itself over the bare and cracking walls. Outside, my white friend Andy, who sits in the back during documentary film class and wears his pants and fitted cap so low we think he’s sleeping, tells me I make a good Sammy Davis Jr. and I tell him I am supposed to be Buddy Holly, so he laughs and says what’s the difference, and I say a burning plane in an empty field, and a burning cross in front of a house and then he stops laughing and asks if I saw the girl dressed as Pocahontas and I said no at the time but then she was stumbling out of the previously locked bathroom when I went back inside and she was followed by Tupac, or at least someone who was once close to resembling Tupac before this moment when the brown and black makeup sweats from his previously white skin and he pulls a feather once belonging to a headdress from his tongue, and stares at the girl whose taste was still splitting his throat wide open, and without looking at me he says Man, there are some things that stay with you your whole life, there are some things it is impossible to sleep off.
I promise the girl on the couch I will call her and maybe I will after all because I am becoming more and more like my father every day, the way we both swing into the darkness like it is our birthright, the way we both crave the moon and the breeze dancing in for the gossip after we walk out of the party, which I do to get back to the dorm, so I can tell Brittany she was right
up until the corner of College and Ruhl, where back in ’75, before the houses were worth millions, I hear the dealers would kill you right where you stood for fuckin’ with their corner and the police sirens knew these streets like a second language and still do though for different reasons, or so they say as the red and blue glow devours the blackest parts of the night, and the officers press arms into my back and yell questions which don’t desire answers, the kind of questions that have nothing to do with what I’m doing out at this hour.
On the other end of the sidewalk Andy from documentary film class and his friends finish their cans of beer and throw them on someone’s lawn before running into the alley, but none of the officers move, except for when my student ID falls out of my pocket, and only then, when a flashlight shines on it just long enough for one of them to get a glimpse,
and when our legs are all once again planted to the pavement, though only mine trembling, and when my jacket is wearing a fresh tear, one officer looks me up and down.
Sorry. We thought you were someone else.
