The Quiet Parts Pt. 3
THIRD STORY
Black: the color of art, music, poetry, and dance. Color of the real, the raw, the pain that feels so good. Color of the most lit party.
Of all downtrodden people, Leigh has been drawn to the indomitably joyful spirit of blackness. She likes Delta blues. She can name the entire Wu Tang Clan. She has seen every one of Spike Lee’s good movies. On weekend mornings she will venture down the street with a bottle of Ancient Age to the corner where winos dice, to catch up on neighborhood gossip with them, bold and brassy like any broad at the hooch.
Her admiration for blackness led her to UC Santa Cruz for a dual major in Activism and Ethnic Studies. There she grew to hate her ultra-serious, über-tenured professors who assigned incessant homework and insulted white people in their lectures, like being brown women gave them a pass for prejudice. Despite her boredom with the program she loved college, days on the beach and moonlight raves in the redwoods.
Queer. Free to explore her sexuality, she became events coordinator at Cantú Queer Center. She had outlaw sex with female bodies. Magical queerdo artist. A potter. Slam poet. Soprano in the pan-African a cappella troupe. Magical queerdo artistic poly kinky. No fault to her female lovers but she desired handsomely dark men, a forbidden door she opened an inch at first—he was a poet, light brown and harmless as a grain of rice—until she was pursuing militants at Occupy Oakland. Men who grew beards shaped like upside-down turrets, owned Glock 19s, wore ankh pendants, and called her people devils. From her first shy overtures it became clear they found her burgeoning eroticism addictive. They loudly named the black man God, then come night worshipped her clit with those same ardent tongues.
Magical queerdo artistic poly kinky activist. The summer before freshman year, she volunteered at a school in Uganda. Sophomore year, she joined the student movement against UC tuition hikes, occupying public spaces a year before Zigotti Park. (You might call her a pioneer.) She joined Occupy; she marched for Ferguson; hurricane relief in Texas; childcare at Standing Rock; organizing for university workers all through college.
“A little Norma Rae,” her dad, the fourth-highest-Yelped pediatrist in Napa County, called her over graduation brunch. At her favorite kitschy dinner, they’d reserved the corner table with action figures embossed in gelatin under the glass top, because Mom insisted closeness to two windows helped clear her allergies.
Dad teased Mom through a mouthful of omelet. “Remember when you used to protest?”
Mom managed to deadlift her eyes from Facebook in order to roll them hard. “Don’t remind me.”
“You were in ACT UP,” he chortled. “The group protesting AIDS. Did you win?” he kept picking on her. “Did you get them to ban AIDS?”
“Stop getting fresh, Lee.”
It occurred to Leigh, who loved her dad, who knew him for a good man and father, that a man named Lee naming his daughter Leigh seemed a bit self-involved. Somehow she’d never really thought about it.
“There’s no money in leftism,” he went on. “You need to apply to grad school. That’s where people start their careers.”
Leigh felt like an ant crawling across a kitchen counter who someone keeps flicking away but refuses to squash under their thumb. Punished for existing. Trapped in a cycle.
“Oh look!” Mom cried at this latest wonder to pop across her screen. “Your old equestrian teacher liked your graduation photos. Do you remember Keri?”
“Of course,” Leigh lied. “I love Keri.”
“Oh! April made a drawing for you!” Mom extended the phone at her. Silently Leigh pushed away her wrist. Angry at first, Mom shrugged and resumed hunting for likes.
It startled Leigh when her dad began to cough, hack, then drooled a mouthwash-green bolus of omelet into the center of his plate. He rasped, “I told them to hold the avocado. What if I had an allergy? I could have died eating that shit.”
As he coughed and guzzled water, Mom stared out the window. Leigh followed her gaze over a Volkswagen Beetle with a Polynesian-themed surfboard strapped on top to the trio of black men laughing it up around a teal Lexus.
“These people,” Mom droned, then summoned the waitress. “The black guys in the parking lot. They’re disturbing our brunch.”
Visibly uncomfortable, the waitress informed her, “They paid for their meal.”
“So that means they reserved a parking spot forever? How am I supposed to feel safe with thugs out there? I’m trying to eat with my family. Go tell the manager to make them go somewhere. What’s with that look?” she snapped at Leigh after the waitress left.
“We’re in public,” Leigh pleaded.
“And they aren’t? Go tell them to pull their pants up in public.”
“You’re being kind of racist.”
“Are you trying to ruin Graduation Day? Whatever, Leigh! Whatever!”
“Stop being a brat,” Dad agreed, still coughing.
At the mention of graduation, Leigh stared down at her gown and sash, as if to ascertain whether she had in fact passed an adulthood ritual that afternoon. She pondered a ‘70s Luke Skywalker pilot figure trapped in gel under the tabletop. Her parents meant the best for her, but she saw no reason her world of nocturnal adventure and starchy breakfasts need end so soon. A month later she moved into Top/Bottom, a queer co-op by Lake Merritt.
Magical queerdo artistic poly kinky activist intersectional feminist antiracist ciswoman. Badass daughters of Stonewall in steel-toe boots and sequined halters, Ziggy Stardust makeup, vogueing, shoplifting, cursing out catcallers, doing all the drugs and gyrating their cute bodies at the Trans Parade. Campfire singalongs with hobo punks in the Pogonip.
Then came the Berkeley riots, where she learned she wasn’t ready to face bloodthirsty white men in dollar store Sparta cosplay shouting COMMIE BITCH I WILL KILL AND RAPE YOU! She took a sabbatical from protest. She quit Peet’s Coffee for a job in San Leandro Public Schools. Her landlord evoked the Ellis Act to purge the queers from Top/Bottom—evicted!
Fortunately around that time she was playing second fiddle in a folk band called Thunderqueers. The accordion player Sequoia had her sights set on new housemates. Their previous two had left, one for cheaper rent in Portland, another to a mental hospital. Cismale Jason agreed to join the lease after police closed down his squat near MacArthur BART in an early morning raid where he’d been forced to jump out a two-story window, thus avoiding arrest like his housemates, something Leigh would consider a blessing were she in his place, while Jason complained endlessly of the money he’d invested in that dump only for it all to fall apart five months shy of the five years he’d need to claim the property under adverse possession.
“Cops chased me through the alleys like a deer!” he always cried. “A fucking deer!”
The three of them, now in their late twenties, veterans of clown-car-style punk housing, agreed to no more housemates. A rent increase in exchange for stability.
The day Leigh moved in, her landlord met her in the foyer. Chen Wo was an elderly, narrow man with liver spots and the blunt manner of someone who operated on routine. He wore battered black slippers, brown slacks, an untucked powder-blue dress shirt, and black suspenders that looked like bungee cords on shoulders that angled sharply like the wings of a sleeping bat.
“You lucky you live here.” His English was so-so. “Could sell house for millions. I let you here ‘cause you good people.”
By good he meant white. She silently judged the little old man, the kind of racist grandpa too often excused. He shuffled to the kitchen, fingers laced behind his tailbone. “I show you hallway,” he entreated.
Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined renting a house with halls. Seeing the doors for the first time had her craving adventure. Why then did the hall look abandoned?
“Use as much you want,” he offered with a blithe wave. “I raise rent.”
Thrilled at first, she went adventuring in a different city every night. This satisfied her for a time. But as the months wore on everywhere looked the same crowded, sanitized, corporate, off-white monocultural nowhere with pockets of local flavor you had to hunt for like a slave on the Underground Railroad hunting for the next safe house. (The exception being New York City, and even then she had to endure rude-ass people and the stench and the strange itch she contracted every time she rode the subway.)
Nowadays she uses tunnels to see bands who aren’t touring California soon, and only if she has the energy following her work week.