The Quiet Parts Pt. 4
FOURTH STORY
Leigh moves through her days in a sad, confused state over Andre’s words. Counseling kids feels inadequate against the demon of racism.
She lies awake at night imagining the emptiness of the hallways. She remembers Top/Bottom with its lofts and couches where you could always find a queer punk crashing. Weighty and immovable, her privilege presses down on her chest. Andre has not returned her texts. It shocks her how strongly she pines for him.
In a sock she stashes the gram of coke gifted to her by a friend from UCSC, a sweet Bengali boy who some months ago carved out two hours from his week at Facebook to join her for pizza at Lanesplitters. He disliked the comedown from coke, so, here, you have it.
This she has been saving for a special occasion, and, at this point, getting Sequoia off their easel on a Friday night fits the bill. Crosslegged on the floor in Leigh’s room, surrounded by handmade ceramic critters, Sequoia looks a true flower child in a red fleece hoodie, cargo pants, and sandals. They snort a line off the hand mirror and stare out the window.
It occurs to Leigh she might be growing tolerant to uppers because it takes two lines scourging her nasal epithelium before dopamine swells her synapses and disco hedonism neons her blood. Alert, she listens to Sequoia talk like people on the internet write, zero punctuation.
“Are you still seeing that black guy he seems chill just a real chill jazz guy.”
“He’s not returning my calls like a fucking asshole,” Leigh complains. “But he works a lot. Does shows. Bartends.”
“I thought you were the one who ghosts.”
“I never ghost. Men always expect me to get back to them in a timeframe and that’s some hella fucking patriarchal shit. I’m my own woman. I like Andre,” she adds. “He totally calls me on my shit. And I know it doesn’t sound very queer, but he’s just so masculine.”
Sequoia does the hang ten sign. “That’s chill.”
At dusk, they bike to Berkeley for candlelit vinyasa at Yoga to the People. Over the course of the hour, Leigh moves through poses with ease. Only on Warrior Two does her strength flag. Arms extended in front and behind her, the point is to open her heart, open her fighting spirit. Her arms stay upright, buoyed by tiny Bolivian soldiers marching through her bloodstream.
At the end of class she reclines in glorious exhaustion, closing her eyes in the dark, in a cloud of blue energy expunged. The erudite voice of Yogi Melissa paddles leisurely through her brain channels.
“Listen to your body,” she says. “Listen to your heartbeat. Listen to that shamanistic instinct. But you should also listen to your gut. And if your gut is telling you what other people say is untrue, question why they would question you. Why am I wrong to believe we are being manipulated by Satanic pedophiles? I’m not hurting anybody. Free thought is the key to self-care.” She rings the Tibetan gong. “Go into your evening with love and energy. Namaste.”
Energized—still a little coked—Leigh and Sequoia power-bike San Pablo toward home. At a red light she yells, “Koi Pond! You think we should be doing more for the revolution?”
“Like protest?” Sequoia inquires, their twitchy eyes following the passing cars.
“I want to start renting out the tunnels to people of color. We should be using our privilege to help keep them in Oakland.”
Whether Sequoia takes to the notion, Leigh cannot predict; an agreeable person by nature, that same nature makes them reluctant to any change in routine.
The non-binary person flashes hang ten. “Chill.”
Their assent comes with an asterisk. Nothing gets done in the house without approval from Jason, a man decidedly uninterested in altruism. Biking, breathing, feasting on night air Leigh plans her next move.
Tuesday morning, Andre texts her during work with an invite to his show that night. Reading it makes her smile throughout her day. Her restraint lasts until recess duty when, no longer able to ignore her throbbing clit, she seizes her chance after a fourth grader pukes up lunch. Leigh hurries her to the bathroom to wipe cheese pizza off her jumper. Then she slips into the unused library and fingers herself in the storeroom.
Downtown Oakland. Starline Social Club. She wears a sleeveless navy green dress, Revlon Colorstay lipstick, smoky eyeshadow, and a gray hoodie with a screen print of the Oakland port cranes on the back. At the bar she sips a Bloody Mary and watches his band. Stylish in sweaters and flat caps, they conjure for her a ‘60s NYC Afro-Latino vibe, thanks largely to Andre’s fluting. Is there anything sexier than a man with an instrument?
He leaves the stage in the middle of the set and hurries her to the black-walled men’s room. Bringing his own coke, he chops a line on his phone and takes a hit. She insists he tap a white trail up the length of his dick. A sharp inhale. Then she takes him in her mouth. Holding his dickhead in the back of her throat, she grabs his ass to trap him, his loss of power signaled with a moaning, choking noise that fills her with triumph. Her rewards comes in a tart, watery glaze she flashes on her tongue before swallowing with a puppyish whine of satisfaction. Then that devil Andre up and leaves without a word.
It pleases her to wash her hands and check her makeup in the key-scratched mirror. On her way out, a pair of older black men come in, the kind she would call uncles. She smirks at them like a troublemaker.
Around one in the morning, the band ends their set with a crescendo and she watches him move fluid as a dolphin through the techies in the audience, collecting handshakes and business cards. When he reaches Leigh, she loops both thumbs in his belt, intentionally conspicuous.
“Look at you,” she says, “Mister Pseudo-celebrity.”
He kisses her and the whisky on his tongue tastes sweet. “Give me ten minutes. Then we’ll get out of here.”
Later, undressing in her room, he tells her, “I got three more gigs off this one.”
“Starving artist no more,” she teases, naked on top of a leopard-print comforter. “You reminded me a lot of Miles up there.”
Stripped to his briefs, he carefully folds the rest of his clothes. “That’s funny. My hero’s Duke Ellington. You ever hear Black, Brown, and Beige?” She says no. “I’ma play it for you. It’s like he synthesizes music from all over the world, but it’s still the blues. Man was a genius.”
Instead of playing this amazing song, or better yet coming to bed, he proceeds to complain about the yuppies at his Nob Hill bar who order boring cocktails.
“Bro-grammers are creepy,” she mechanically states, annoyed when he starts perusing her bookshelf.
“Audre Lorde!” he approves. “Octavia Butler! Maya Angelou!”
“Octavia was an earth mother prophetess. She predicted Trump in Parable of the Sower.”
At least, she read that in an article once. Andre, meantime, thumbs her copy of Invisible Man.
“We had to read this in high school,” he rambles. “I liked the Battle Royal scene—well, liked isn’t the right word—but the rest I was like, eh. But then there’s always this part that comes back to me about the factory that makes the whitest paint. And there’s the black man who works there—the only guy there—and he makes the paint white by adding that one drop of black paint. It says so much about how white supremacy is built on blackness.”
“Definitely,” she agrees to hurry him up. “Ralph Ellison was just so smart. And he totally challenged white supremacy saying there’s that drop of blackness.”
He sounds mischievous. “What do you think about the part about white women? Where he says they mistake the class struggle for the ass struggle.”
She laughs. “Nobody ever said that! You made that up.”
“I think it’s the chapter where he sleeps with the Socialist’s wife.”
“Suuuure.” Nobody has time to read that long-ass book, let alone her, and she doubts he read it, either. She slips onto the rug to wrestle his underwear down to his knees and then touch him like a doctor performing a checkup, lifting his balls to kiss the rubbery, hairy flesh of his taint. He moans like a girl. A queer act nests within her worshiping his dick, a lust almost disgraceful and—Oh! She must never speak it out loud!—the sensation of black cock in her cunt makes her proud, a crossing the line from libertinism to perversion.
Three orgasms later, the sensation of expelled desire rocks her like explosions up and down her skin. “I want to rent out the halls,” she says. In the light through the curtain his brown eyes regard her curiously. “I want to rent to black people.”
“Can you do that?” he asks like she made a joke.
“Not legally. Chen would throw a fit. But people rent them for Airbnb all the time. I want to do my part to keep black people in Oakland.”
Astonished, he sits up. “You’re serious?”
“I want you to help me,” she proposes, jerking him off for another round. “You really care about Oakland. Even if you’re from fucking Hayward,” she teases.
“Did your parents vote for Trump?”
He sounds arch, ironic. She wonders if he is gaslighting her. After a pause, she concedes, “Yeah. And I know what you’re going to say. Instead of trying to save the world I should focus on the”—she hesitates to call her parents racist—“fucked up shit in front of me.”
“It’s cool.” He kisses her forehead. “Baby steps. That’s all I’m saying.”