JP Infante
“People post Baldwin quotes, but they don’t read him.” – Marwa Helal
On March 23rd, 2024, my stepfather passed away. I’m writing this four months later. The U.S. presidential election is taking over the news cycle. They say democracy hangs on a thread. Russia attacks Ukraine, the U.S. funds Ukraine. Israel commits a genocide in Palestine, the U.S. funds Israel. I’m seeing the faces of Palestinian children being dug out of the rubble of bombed buildings. So many dead children, like a horror movie—a screen between me and the genocide.
A year before his death, on May 17th, 2023, my stepfather texted me: “Yo please answer it’s important I’m in trouble I need help.” That same day Donald Trump, the front runner for the 2024 Republican nomination at the time, took credit for the U.S.Supreme Court overturning Roe V. Wade. On social media he posted: “I was able to kill Roe V. Wade.” On that same day, Congressman Bill Foster, Democrat from Illinois, reintroduced the Expanding Opportunities for Recovery Act, which would allow states to be awarded grants through the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. The money would expand prevention efforts and evidence-based treatments, including medication-assisted treatment. The headline on Congressman’s press release said: “Forster introduces legislation to combat the opioid epidemic.” Later that day my sister texted me that my stepfather– her father– needed the money for heroin. I texted back: I know.
In two months, I’ll hit 40. By this age, I thought my experiences would help make sense of the endless breaking news alerts on my phone. But it’s the opposite. The closer I get to 40, the more confusing the news, no matter if it’s from New York City, Appalachia, Bangladesh, Palestine, D.R. Congo, or Sudan. At night, a yearning for coherence keeps me up in bed. My mind tries making a single story out of hours of scrolling Instagram, Tik Tok and YouTube. Behind my eyelids is a game of chance. A slot machine with three reel spins. They show an erratic assortment of every image I have ever seen, whether with my own eyes or on a screen. There’s no jackpot to win as the spinning never stops. No combination of images in my head leads to meaning. I just wake up tired the next day.
Making sense of the daily news cycle is like making sense of life when one day you realize there are fewer years ahead than behind. What the fuck happened? You can chronologically order the images you remember to find some meaning, but that requires confronting what you did and what you didn’t do. Why try to remember and make sense of what happened? This examination keeps me questioning.
As I age, the more fragmented my autobiographical notes become. I can’t tell you if what I remember is a childhood memory, a scene from a movie or a book, or something I saw on some screen. In a speech titled, “The Artist’s Struggle for Identity,” James Baldwin speaks about the life of the poet and the artist. “And in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bull-whipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you,” he says. At this moment, I can’t distinguish the life I’ve lived from the retrospective screening of events in my mind, an in-memoriam of all the people I’ve known and all the people I’ve been. How many times have I revised the beginning and ending of my own story?
I get flashbacks of walking down Fort Washington Avenue toward the George Washington Bridge on a brick winter night, ready to fly. I couldn’t finish Another Country in my first two tries. Today, I think of one of the novel’s characters, Rufus Scott and how he was successful where I failed. Scott is an African American jazz drummer who commits suicide, jumping off the George Washington Bridge. I can’t discern my ruminations from that night and Scott’s suicide in Badlwin’s novel. I remember being dead broke. Then I called my stepfather, who sent me money the following day. We never had an honest conversation about my suicide ideation and his substance use disorder. Even when he congratulated me for a writing achievement, we never discussed the past my fiction was based on, a history we shared.
*
In the Devil Finds Work, Baldwin reviews the Exorcist (1973). He’s not convinced the possessed 12-year-girl-old, Regan, masturbating with a crucifix was a realistic portrayal of evil. He claims the movie prioritizes special effects over actual damnation, writing, “For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some junkies, the eyes of some preachers, the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in my mirror.” For Baldwin, the movie’s depiction of evil ignores the real, unacknowledged evil in American society.
As a kid, I watched horror movies with my parents, but can’t recall watching The Exorcist. I know the image of the possessed girl levitating from the bed, cursing at priests and playing with the crucifix. Watching as an adult, I laughed when the possessed 12-year-old told Father Damien Karras, “Your mother sucks cocks in hell, Karras, you faithless slime.” Karras is tormented by guilt because he wasn’t present when his mother passed away alone in a small apartment. In another moment, the demon tells him, “You killed your mother! You left her alone to die! Bastard!” Baldwin writes, “This uneasy, and even terrified guilt is the subtext of The Exorcist, which cannot, however, exorcise it since it never confronts it.”
I wish I had seen The Exorcist with my parents. My 24-year-old mother and 19-year-old stepfather let me watch the horror if I whined and begged. If I didn’t watch any Rated R horror movie with them, it wasn’t because they were protecting me from the profanity or special effects, it was because I was scared.
I wish they had exposed me to the horrors of their lives, how they let me watch Rated R movies. At eight, I saw what was happening on our side of the screen. No matter what I heard from adults in my family and at school, I only believed what I saw. Mood altering substances or drugs were all around my neighborhood. They were in my family. Aspirin, coffee, nicotine, etc. Beer and Liquor. And yet in the apartment I lived in and the school building I attended, I was only told, “Just Say No.” If someone offered me drugs I had to just say no. Based on the public service announcements I saw about drugs, I got the impression someone in the street was going to pull me into an alley and force me to do drugs against my will. That never happened. Any drug I’ve done has been consumed enthusiastically. The last time I fought against taking drugs I was a child, swiping at medicine on a spoon.
There was no transparency. There was no conversation. Only thing I knew about drugs were the “special effects.” I saw alcoholics, junkies, crackheads, piperos, tecatos. And called them these names. Adults called these people these names. I judged the people who weren’t strong enough to say no to drugs and were now too weak to stop cold turkey and save themselves. As a child I never recognized those who were “functioning” and consumed out of sight in secret or during weekends. In my mind when a person failed to say no to drugs they instantly transformed into someone with a substance use disorder. Casual users, social users, experimenters didn’t exist. Drugs were evil. To this day this is how many adults talk to teenagers about drugs. The instructions are don’t take drugs and the solution for those with substance abuse disorder is to stop using.
By adolescence I knew my parents used drugs, but I never talked to them about it. They never talked to me about it. For many years this didn’t affect me because you couldn’t see it in their eyes. It was a secret. But I knew long before that. I knew some of what I saw could only be thought of an you can only think about. I saw and shut. Baldwin writes, “Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions.”
I regret not speaking to them about the reality. I never questioned them. I’m aware even if I had faced them as an adult I wasn’t guaranteed the truth or their survival. But like Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it’s faced.”
We rented VHS tapes from the Blockbuster on 178th Street and Broadway. We also rented from a small VHS store on 186th Street and St. Nicholas, where All Star Barbershop is located today. I can’t remember where we rented Faces of Death (1978). We watched it in my parent’s bedroom. I can’t remember my parents ever telling me I was too young to watch a movie. One time I put my finger in a sugar jar and rubbed the sugar in my gums. I was imitating Christopher Walken or Lawerence Fishburn in King of New York (1990). My mother called my stepfather over and asked me to do it again. I refused. They never said not to do it, but I knew not to.
The night we watched Faces of Death, I didn’t know death. My great grandmother was alive then. My mother was alive. My stepfather was alive. When I revisited the film recently, I learned it wasn’t a documentary. For years, I recommended it to people as a documentary about people eating monkey brains and dead bodies. I say dead bodies, but I mean faces. Death is in the face. Doesn’t matter if someone overdoses, commits suicide, or dies of cancer, or old age. Soon as the heart stops, the face changes. Heavy handed mortician. Gentle mortician. Makes no difference. There’s no mask for death. Many lives after I first see the film, I learn Faces of Death is not a documentary, but a mondo horror film. Mondo is a subgenre of exploitive documentary films,sensational pseudo-documentaries made with stock footage and staged scenes. They portray cultures outside the United States, focusing on subjects like death and sex.
For years, I imagined I had gotten a kind of education, swore Faces of Death taught me something about death other ten year olds didn’t know. What exactly did I imagine? I don’t know. I only just learned, two months away from 40, that this movie I have been recommending is not a documentary. I learned this long after my great grandmother’s death in the Dominican Republic. Eight years after my mother passed away in Cali, Colombia. A few months after the death of my stepfather in Jersey City.
For a long time, I thought I knew something about the world that other kids didn’t because I watched Rated R movies with my parents. I never considered my mother almost overdosing in the 7th grade as a lesson. Visiting my stepfather in jail never answered a thing for me. I believed Faces of Death, a horror film, taught me about death.
In the Anatomy of Genres, John Truby says the genre of horror revolves around “sins of the past.” As kids, we watched all genres but I remember the horror movies most of all. God commanded that children obey and honor their parents, that to ignore your mother’s texts is a sin, especially if she’s in another country asking you to send her money. That sounds to me like the premise of a horror film.
I remember Dr. Giggles (1992). A psychopath who thinks he’s a doctor returns to the town where his father was killed and begins killing people. I remember Candyman (1992). A vengeful ghost appears when you say his name five times in the mirror after being brutally murdered for loving a white woman in the late 19th century. We watched these horror movies on VHS. I’d sit on the floor, my back to the bed. I’d face the television, the only light in the bedroom. My mother and stepfather would watch from the bed. I was always shocked at the abruptness of loud noise and change of images on the screen when a movie started. I was shocked. I’d look up at my parents. I was worried they’d notice the fear in my eyes, see me ashamed of my feelings, of the movie’s intention. But my parents weren’t paying attention to me. They weren’t even there. They were lost in the movie. Two young, beautiful faces in the TV glow, immersed in the horror.
*
The goal was to get students to write about themselves. They didn’t ask, but I told them the word “essay” comes from the French; to try or attempt. I added that the word “ensayo” means both “essay” and “rehearsal” in Spanish. I mentioned Walter Benjamin’s essay, the one he writes about being high off hashish somewhere in France. We listen to and read Nas’s “One Love.” I’d forgotten that these students weren’t adolescents at the turn of the century. They weren’t teenage me in the early aughts.
The assignment was to write about what they remember about yesterday. When they tell me they don’t know what to write, I quote Baldwin: “When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out…”
Back when I taught, smart boards weren’t in every high school classroom. If there was a smart board with YouTube I played clips of Baldwin interviews. Some school’s blocked YouTube. The same YouTube they have in their cellphones and at home.
Videos of Baldwin strolling the streets got their attention. I showed a clip where Baldwin tells Dick Cavett, “Perhaps I don’t think that this Republic is a summit of human civilization. Perhaps I don’t want to become like Ronald Regan or like the president of General Motors. Perhaps I have another sense of life which in fact my situation here has forced me to trust. And perhaps I know more about you and your institutions than you know about me. And perhaps I have a judgment on them. Perhaps I don’t want what you think I want. Perhaps there is something that I can give you…”
For most of the teenagers I served, there’s no going from video to reading. They wanted to keep watching YouTube. Watching Baldwin. And I wanted to keep watching Baldwin too. I wanted to “bear witness,” doom-scrolling the algorithm. Back-to-back images of everything everywhere. I could spend hours watching clips of Baldwin, pretending to research.
When my students complain they rather keep watching Baldwin instead of reading, I complain social media is destroying their attention span. I admit I can barely read these days. The older I get the harder it is to read Baldwin or anything else. It’s easier when I read aloud or read while listening to the audiobook at the same time. Reading has always been hard for me, but these days it feels impossible. Words used to conjure their literal meaning, now they trigger a mess of connotations.
*
Currently, I’m working my last summer for an after school program in Harlem. After leaving the Department of Education, I began working for a nonprofit that provides 24/7 holistic support for Black and Latinx youth. This is my last summer because after four years with the org, I’ve been getting flashbacks. Suddenly it’s not a 16-year-old Black girl from the Bronx I’m talking to, but my teenage mother. Being fully present across the teenagers I serve transports me to the past that’s stored inside me. So I have to pretend it’s not my mother talking to me about why she snuck out of the workshop to make a Tik Tok dance video in the bathroom. I have to fake that it’s not my stepfather and that it’s a 15-year-old Dominican boy recently arrived from Capotillo, Santo Domingo.
One warm winter, my co-facilitator and I were at Riverbank Park with our group of teens. They gradually joined us, as they were coming from high schools throughout New York City. This one teenage girl sat on a bench across from my co-facilitator and me. The teen played with fries and a cheeseburger. She said the fries tasted like fridge. We were talking about alternatives to prisons when she reminded us her father did a ten year bid. We knew this, but didn’t know why. Without warning, while talking about Kalief Browder over soggy fries, she tells us her father shot the man who molested her.
This is the evil Baldwin said The Exorcist failed to portray. My co-facilitator and I continued to listen to the teen. She was matter of fact about her history. At some point the teen became bored with us and got up to show her cell phone to another teenager. My co-facilitator and I looked at each other anticipating our end of day debrief.
As this teen spoke about her father, she became my mother. She was my mother’s age when she gave birth to me. I don’t know what my mother went through as a child.
The actor Heath Ledger’s autopsy and toxicology report concluded he died, “as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine.” I’m no expert, but I can’t help but think it was benzodiazepines that got him. It depresses the nervous system, slowing your breathing and bringing you closer to the big sleep.
When I think of Heath Ledger, I don’t think about his role as the Joker and then his tragic death as most people do. I think about how the actor was found with a movie script. According to director Stephen Gaghan, Ledger was supposed to star in the adaptation of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The book is about the science of snap judgments and first impressions. Supposedly, the director Stephen Gaghan was obsessed with the chapter on emotions, which delves into how some people are good at immediately knowing what people are feeling or thinking. I had this ability with my mother when I was a kid, but the older I got things changed. And I don’t know if it’s that I lost the gift or if she herself lost the ability to know what she was feeling or thinking with age.
I found Osho’s book, Fear: Understanding and Accepting the Insecurities of Life—the Spanish version—in my mother’s bag when I searched her apartment in Cali, Colombia after her death. I still haven’t opened it. I also have a copy of Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie. My mother said the book reminded her of my relationship with my great grandmother. I still haven’t read it. Sometimes, I imagine dying not having read these books. Another text that followed my mother was The Pill Book: The Illustrated Guide to the Most Prescribed Drugs in the United States. My mother owned a copy when we lived on Riverside Drive by 181st Street. It was an older edition, tattered and worn. When I saw the book as a child it reminded me of the bible. The mass market paperback 15th edition is 1,296 pages.
In Nice & Smooth’s “Sometimes I Rhyme Slow,” Smooth raps about a past lover. While the rapper was out on tour performing, this lover crashed his car. He finds out she was sniffing in his Mercedes Benz. He raps: “Time went on I started noticin’ weight loss/ Then I had to ask her was she ridin’ the white horse.” For a long time I thought the etymology of the slang “white horse” had to do with the Book of Revelations.
In the final book of the bible Death rides a pale horse as the fourth and final horseman of the apocalypse. From the King James Version:
“And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him. Was Death, and Hell followed him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”
In 2024, when I take the MTA subway, I feel like I’m in the Book of Revelations. I see bodies on the platform and I can’t tell if they’re living or dead. Not that it matters to me because I’m more worried about my other fellow passengers. There are headlines of people getting pushed on the train tracks, so I’m ready to defend my life.
I’m writing this during a presidential election year and according to social media and mainstream news my vote will determine whether or not we accelerate towards the end. On social media, I follow friends who are attacking people not posting about Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. Silence in violence. Meanwhile, both warring parties in Sudan—the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed forces—have been accused of rape and gang rape. Just last year the conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo turned thirty. The election results have declared Nicolas Maduro the president of Venezuela. On social media, you’re either an interventionist in support of the right and U.S. Empire or a communist in support of dictatorship. In the midst of all this, Joe Biden dropped out of the race, making Kamala Harris the democratic presidential nominee. Democrats and Republicans alike support and fund the genocide. The images of dead babies and dead children are no longer jump scares. Did I mention that Trump survived an assassination attempt?
It’s August of 2024, and the last cohort of the students I taught within the Department of Education are in their early 20s. All of the youth I taught are of voting age. I wonder if they’re losing sleep over the U.S. elections or Israel committing genocide against the people of Gaza. I imagine one of them telling me something about “the lesser of two evils.” I wonder how many have reached a point Baldwin describes in “The Struggle of the Artist,” where he says, “…most of us, white and black, have arrived at a point where we still believe and insist on and act on principle, which is no longer valid, that this is such and such an optimum, that our choice is the lesser of two evils, and this is no longer true. Gonorrhea is not preferable to syphilis.”
I’m glad they’re no longer teenagers and I’m no longer their teacher because I don’t want to contaminate them. I remember leaving the theater after having seen Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) feeling hope. My vote that year wasn’t for the democrats or John Kerry, my vote was against Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. I was with my friend Hansel. He couldn’t vote because of his immigration status. We both agreed this was a shame because every vote was a matter of life and death. Looking back on it now, I don’t know how much of a difference it would have made if Senator John Kerry had become the U.S. President. But we were kids back then who believed in democracy. Baldwin says it’s only a matter of time before one is forced to, “recognize that the major effort of our country until today is not to change a situation but to seem to have done it.”
*
In his book, Behold a Pale Horse, Milton William “Bill” Cooper claims, “for many years the Secret Government has been importing drugs and selling them to the people, mainly the poor and minorities. Social welfare programs were put into place to create a dependent, nonworking element in our society. The government then began to remove the programs to force people into a criminal class that did not exist in the ‘50s and ’60.”
During a conversation over weed with a friend I shared this passage. We were trading fictions at the barbershop. My friend didn’t react to it how I thought he would. He asked me if I was going to vote for Trump. I said, “Hell no. I don’t even know if I’m voting.” My friend went in on how democracy was on the line and he used the phrase, “the end of times.” This friend had never voiced a political worldview, but he sounded like everyone on mainstream news and social media. This friend called Trump evil. He said many will die if he’s elected. This friend of mine is a heroin dealer.
*
James Baldwin zoned out at his father’s funeral. “My mind breaking out with a rash of disconnected impressions.” Baldwin is 19 years old. While watching over the children in attendance, he thinks of “Snatches of popular songs, indecent jokes, bits of books I had read, movie sequences, faces, voices, political issues.” He says, “I thought I was going mad…”
In that moment, at his father’s funeral, Baldwin had lost his own narrative thread. The part of the brain that gives life beginnings and endings. That thing between your ears that helps you determine the end. This is what happens when I have moments of quiet to make myself meditate when I felt overwhelmed by all the screens and voices in my life. But I struggled to sit still and meditate. Today, I don’t know how to meditate because I won’t.
*
In The White Album, Joan Didion writes of the time she,” began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.” She shares a psychiatric report, the findings of a Thematic Apperception Test. It described Didion as, “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her.” The first time I read this essay I was in undergrad. Professor Yood at Lehman College gave me her marked up copy. Reading it then, I was shocked at how unique her voice sounded. Reading it now, two months from 40, Didion’s mental breakdown feels universal.
At this age, I read The White Album and Notes of a Native Son as two people navigating mental health during end times. Didion writes, “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
This gets me longing for one story to explain how the world got to be as it is now. How does the fire this time, at this present moment come to be? How can so many of us suffer? How can we bear witness to a genocide without losing sleep? When I try figuring out how I sleep at night after experiencing hundreds of images showing dead Palestinian faces I break night. However it’s not the faces of dead Palestinian babies I’m struggling with, but my lack of struggle after almost a year of dead faces.
*
From Behold a Pale Horse: “AIDS was introduced to the U.S. population in 1978 when Hepatitis B vaccine trials were conducted by the Center for Disease Control in New York, San Francisco and four other American Cities… Since large populations were to be decimated, the ruling elite decided to target the ‘undesirable’ elements of society. Specifically targeted were the black, Hispanic, and homosexual populations.”
On many nights this seems plausible even after reading about the writer. Milton William Cooper was an antisemite who claimed that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated because he was going to expose that extraterrestrials were taking over planet earth.
Apache County deputies attempted to arrest Cooper at his Eagar, Arizona home on November 5, 2001, for assault and endangerment. A gunfight ensued and Cooper was killed after shooting a deputy in the head.
Behold a Pale Horse is the ideal book for anyone who sees the end everywhere and meaning nowhere.
It seems to me the four horsemen have been galloping since this country’s inception. One’s seeing is not a curtain rising on a stage. One’s seeing had nothing to do with the eyes but reaching an age. At some point, the several jump scares you thought were one-offs become coincidences. Until one day these jump scare coincidences become a pattern. You see them everywhere in the map of your life. The Four Horsemen have always been, your whole life has been an extended ending, it just knows you have the lens of times through which to see. It’s not an apparition, but noticing the mundane.
And then, one day, my ten year old daughter asks, “ Why did this happen?” Dead babies being dug out of rubble. I don’t know what to tell my daughter or where to start. But I know it started long before October 7th, 2023
*
In Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind, Baldwin writes that at the age of 14, for him, “School began to reveal itself…as a child’s game that one could not win… I no longer had any illusions about what an education could do for me; I had already encountered too many college-graduate handymen…”
These teens know a high school diploma doesn’t mean shit. If you’re rich and you drop out it doesn’t matter. If you’re poor and you graduate, it doesn’t matter.
I tell them to at least finish high school. When they show any curiosity in higher education, I sell it. Tell them it’s a different world, a safer world. I emphasize they should never-ever-ever-ever take out loans.
It’s how I made it out, through a higher education. So, I project. Made it out of what, exactly? My block. Gone from my great grandmother’s apartment. Now my grandmother’s apartment. I didn’t really make out, instead I moved. I moved from St. Nicholas Avenue overlooking the Neon Riverside Drive Taxi Base sign. I moved west across Broadway to Haven Avenue by Fort J Hood Park, across elementary school. I couldn’t afford the peace and quiet on the other side of Broadway so I moved again. Even with all my higher education I couldn’t afford west of Broadway Washington Heights.
I moved out of my great grandmother’s apartment, but the childhood lived within those walls remains. I tell students I took out loans. I tell them to get a high school diploma. I don’t know what else to say.
How long had I misled teens? In my third year of teaching at a high school in Washington Heights, I was awarded Instructional Lead of the Year. The truth is, I got the award for my work with other adults, not for my work with students. Many of these kids were immigrants who lived or commuted to and spent most of their time in Washington Heights. The neighborhood is a portal. Six bridges. The I95 runs through it. Drugs come in there, drugs are sold there, drugs are consumed there. And yet, there’s no conversation with these students about drugs besides “don’t use them.” No conversation on the possibility that someone in that classroom might use drugs and or sell drugs. The only directive and expectation for those teens was: “Just say no.”
*
“James Baldwin’s biological father is said to have been a drug addict; his mother had to leave while Jimmy was still in utero,” writes Harmony Holiday.
I also read this claim on several websites without any citations. This belief makes me feel less lonely. Reading about the opioid epidemic in the United States reminds me I’m not alone in death. This knowledge does nothing to my shame. Beth Macy opens Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, And the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis with the etymology of stigma. “In ancient Rome, when tormentors branded an enslaved person with a hot iron, the scar left behind was called a stigma.” In the Middle Ages it meant the wounds the government left on Jesus’s body. Shame and stigma were used interchangeably by the 17th century.
Macy writes, “It turns into a given, then, that stigmatized people are branded and judged as beyond redemption, as ruined. Drug-addicted people often react to stigma by excluding themselves from public life. They do this, in part, because drugs feel good when the actual world doesn’t. Drugs help them forget, set aside, and numb their feelings of shame in a looping effect that exacerbates the very behaviors society initially reproached them for. In this way social death can become literal death.”
For a long time, I was ashamed of my mother. I was ashamed of my stepfather. This shame has nothing to do with either of them. It’s about me. How you perceive me. You could be a stranger who is a user or a childhood friend whose own brother and cousin overdosed. No matter who you are.
My stepfather texted me saying it was an emergency. The emergency was money. On the phone, he told me he had just got out of rehab and needed money to get home. He asked if I could send money to his Chime account because he didn’t have CashApp or Zelle. I downloaded the Chime app and created an account, but I couldn’t send him the money. We spoke on the phone trying to find a way. I hit up my younger sister, asked if she had a Chime account. She said he was only going to use it on drugs. I told her I already knew that.
My stepfather said he needed the money to get to his mother’s place in Jersey City. So, I told him I could order him a Lyft to his mother’s address. I checked in with my sister to make sure the address he gave me was his mother’s address. The address my stepfather gave me was in fact his mother’s address. When I tell this story to childhood friends, survivors of the drug game, I make sure to not sound too serious, so it sounds like a punchline and not an ending. These friends are the sons and daughters of drug pushers and consumers, some who have overdosed. They’ve suffered enough to find humor in substance abuse. The Lyft app shows a little car following a purple line that ends at my stepfather’s mother’s home. And then something happens to the purple line. The purple line moves, ending at a different location. The little car makes a right turn. The final destination is no longer my stepfather’s mother’s home.
At this part of the story, I typically say, “When I saw that the address changed from his mom’s crib to a Martin Luther King street, I knew we was in trouble.”
It always hits—that part always gets laughs.
After this, I mastered talking about my stepfather’s substance abuse with childhood friends who know the details. We never speak about it openly. We laugh. I make my sister, Mati, laugh. I make Alexo laugh. I almost make Abe laugh. Only Abe hesitates before he smiles.
When the Lyft driver arrives to pick up my stepfather I text: “He’s in front of the Dunkin. Let me know when you’re home.”
He replies: “I’m in the cab, answer.”
I text back: Let’s talk this weekend ……………….. . This is throwing me off.
He: Don’t worry, thanks for the ride.
Me: I love you ……………….. . Be easy on your moms.
He: Nah fuck that. I always try to be there for everyone but when I ask for one thing everybody wants to find reasons not to help me.
Me: Say less ……………….. .
*
Maybe my obsession with getting teenagers to self-reflect was the projection of my own suppressed needs. Maybe my caginess with that one therapist was a form of protecting my inner child. If set free, who would I be? Except a 40 year old man responsible for himself and his daughter.
I am attached to the fifth grader who wrote the story of a boy whose parents were secretly vampires. My handwriting has always been shit. In elementary school, penmanship—neatness and few eraser marks—guaranteed your work a place on the bulletin board. At ten, I understood that all teachers valued presentation and the shape of the bottle over the liquid inside. But something changed in October of 1994.
That fall, Ms. Arroyo, my fifth grade teacher, asked that I revise my Halloween short story. Her only edit was the ending. The original ended with an M. Night Shyamalan twist where the parents weren’t actually vampires, were just playing a prank on the narrator. Ms. Arroyo asked me to rewrite it. She emphasized the word “neat” in her request. I rewrote it and she asked that I rewrite it again. I rewrote it a second time and she examined the handwritten story again. I know she wanted me to rewrite it, but she accepted the story that third time. On the bulletin board, my story stood out at a glance because of the handwriting. My doubts written into the lines of each letter. Suspicion at my very certainty of thought. Since the fifth grade, I’ve been convinced I am a writer.
It wasn’t until 2020, the year most of the world shut down because of the pandemic, that I realized most people read to find answers that already reside inside of them. This was the same year I left the Department of Education. The year I published On the Tip of Your Mother’s Tongue. I’ve always been a reader. But I’d taken for granted that other readers don’t look for questions in their reading, but answers. Chekhov comes to mind.
Folks who read the On the Tip of My Mother’s Tongue want answers about my mother. Their questions have as much to do with their curiosity as it does with their own relationship with their mothers. In my answers, I omit my experience and relationship with my mother.My writing did little to help me understand that. In The White Album, Didionadmits, “writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.”
*
I was working as a data entry specialist for a nonprofit in Queens when I found out my great grandmother died. Days earlier, in the Dominican Republic, she had told me, on her deathbed, “cuida esa loca.” When I got the news of my great grandmother’s death, I left work early and walked from Queens to Manhattan, only stopping at a used bookstore where I bought one of the volumes of George Orwell’s diary.
I called my mother who was working as a home attendant. She yelled at me, angry that I’d called her while she was in the middle of work. She hung up on me. At some point during my walk from Queens to Manhattan, my uncle called. He was angry with me because I hadn’t warned him of my great grandmother’s death. She’d died in the middle of the night, hours before his flight to the Dominican Republic.
Days later, my mother asked me to tell my little sister about our great grandmother’s death. We were at my mother’s apartment on University Avenue in the Bronx. I sat next to my little sister. My mother was there. My sister, Mati, was there. My stepfather was there. And maybe my uncle. I can’t recall exactly. They all watched me tell my youngest sister that her great grandmother had passed away. She began crying. I hugged her.
It was my other sister, Mati, who told me about my mother’s death four years later. It was she who told me about my stepfather’s death—her father—eight years later. It was me who told my grandmother about my stepfather’s death. By the time of my stepfather’s death, I had experienced so much death, I had no doubts about the news. I was certain he was gone.
*
Reading about the United States in the 1950s and 1960s in 2004 reminds me that The Book of Revelations is not a final act, but the perpetual present. “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!” The rainbow, the flooding, and the fire is happening now as I transcribe onto a laptop, deciphering the handwriting on my notepad.
I read in the words “the fire next time,” the promise that it can always get worse. On some nights, I find this is comforting.
*
In Baldwin’s speech “The Artist’s Struggle with Integrity,” he says, “And what is crucial here is that if it hurts you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt… You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.”He goes on to say, “One is attempting to save an entire country, and that means an entire civilization, and the price for that is high. The price is to understand oneself.” There’s a difference between self-reflection and licking each other’s wounds in community.
June Jordan writes, “I am saying that the ultimate connection cannot be the enemy. The ultimate connection must be the need that we find between us. It is not only who you are, in other words, but what we can do for each other that will determine the connection.” I believe the ultimate connection is our children. Like Baldwin said, “The price… is to recognize that most of us, white and black, have arrived at a point where we do not know what to tell our children. How do you talk about breaking news with a ten year old? Or a seventy-six year old for that matter? How does one reflect without being consumed by all the suffering in the world?” They are all our children.
Presidential election years in the United States feel like The Book of Revelations. Civilization and democracy is on the line. Kamala Harris, the current vice president, a former prosecutor, is the Democratic nominee. Donald Trump, the former president, a right wing insurrectionist, is the Republican nominee. The Democratic National Convention takes place in Chicago this year. I imagine breaking news, local, national and international; the worst case scenario; living in the fire next time that’s to come. I can imagine either Harris or Trump as president. I imagine a president, an amorphous face perpetually changing, adapting its phenotype and social identity. No matter the face, I don’t feel safe.
I am certain we will always be confronted with hurting teenage faces, the faces of young people who will nevertheless survive the never-ending breaking news. I don’t know what we are supposed to tell our teenagers. I don’t know what we are supposed to teach them. I do know we have to keep them hopeful. I do know they need hope. We all need hope. And I don’t mean the feeling that comes from voting. I’m talking about the kind of hope that comes with speaking to your children like they deserve to know the truth. Once you tell them the truth, you’ve done your part. There’s hope in knowing that at least one person in the world has not tried to deceive them. I believe in earned hope.
In the documentary Take This Hammer (1963) Baldwin speaks to residents and activists of Black neighborhoods in San Francisco. A teenager tells him there will never be a Black president explaining, “We can’t get jobs, how we going to be president?” Baldwin replies, “It’s not important really, you know, whether or not there is a Negro president, I mean in that way. What’s important is that you should realize that you can become the president. There’s nothing anybody can do that you can’t do…”
Our teenagers in general, New York City Black boys in particular, should feel like they can be. And then one day they’ll grow out of myths and aspire to be something greater than president or drug dealer.
In order to create a world where humanity can exist and cope no matter who is elected president, we have to talk and listen to our teenagers as if they have the world wide web in their pockets. They are also witnesses testifying on the stand. We can’t pretend they don’t know what is happening in their homes and in the world. We can’t silence them because we fear what they’ll say and how they’ll say it. We can’t let the fear of being called out for our complicity as adults. We have to expose them to other ways of thinking and being. Sometimes that means letting them be. Ways of existing in the world, which believes in the best of human nature and accepts the fact that safety is not certain. No prison-industrial complex, no police presence, no surveillance and no criminalization of drug consumption will make teenagers and children safer.
The truth is that adults do not know the way. So as adults all we can do is talk about the world with teens as it is and not as we pretend it to be. There always comes a point in the lives of adults with teenagers in their life, when a subject comes up and adults have to negotiate whether they should encourage the teen to act as someone in the world as the world should be or act in the world as it is. Does the adult tell them to turn the other cheek or reveal to them that sometimes all it takes is turning the other cheek once for the world to make a swivel out your neck. Does the adult tell the teenager “Just Say No” to drugs without explaining what happens or what to do when other teenagers around them are using drugs? Does the adult ever consider that their own teenager might experiment with drugs? At this moment does the parent realize that omission does not protect but postpones betrayal. When does the parent reveal the truth to their teenager?
Adolescence is the Book of Revelations. The world you thought you knew is gradually ending with each change in your body and each mask falling off the faces of those adults in your family. There is always a point in one’s life as a teenager when one realizes the adults don’t know what they’re doing. There’s a before and after in the story you tell yourself about your mother, your father and other adults in your life. This made you angry because in essence they lied and omitted the truth about themselves. And these truths about them allowed them to cast judgment and punish you like some diva God throwing a tantrum.
How do we speak to our teenagers without a mask? We can’t hide our face from teenagers forever. Sooner or later they will be adults. Sooner or later we will die and our masks will be taken off for us. It’s heartbreaking that so many famous people’s lives have been reduced to the way they died. Famous people and people we know. When autopsy reveals the death was due to an overdose the story of the person’s life becomes something else in the mind of those who never knew them. Autopsy derives from the Greek autopsia, meaning “seeing with one’s own eyes.”
There is no one moment when the real adult world is revealed to our teenagers. Our teenagers won’t complete a transformation process that will equip them with processing adult-truths. They are exposed to drugs at school, their neighborhoods and online. Preparing them for a world with mood altering substances AKA drugs by telling them to resist and refuse is setting them up for failure.
In The Harm Reduction Gap: Helping Individuals Left Behind by Conventional Drug Prevention and Abstinence-only Addiction Treatment, Sheila P. Vakharia goes over the failure of the “Just Say No” drug prevention campaign and abstinence-only treatment. In the book she referenced a 2021 survey that showed that “70% of the US population over the age of 12 had used alcohol, a tobacco or nicotine product, or an illegal drug in the past year. And nearly 60% of people in the nation, over 100 million people, had used one of these substances in the past month.”
A lot of people are using drugs for many different reasons and yet there’s no honest conversation taking place. There are spaces that focus on formal addiction treatment where people can get substance related support, but these spaces are for folks with addictions or diagnosable substance use disorders. Some are Overdose Prevention Centers (OPCs). These centers provide a place where people can safely use previously obtained drugs under the
supervision of trained staff. What happens with those who consume drugs or alcohol in social settings, sporadic binger, or experimenter? Our focus has been on preventing drug use and treating those addicted. What about everyone else who uses drugs?
Accoding to Dr. Vakharia, “People can live safe and fulfilling lives in a world with drugs, if armed with proper tools and education…”
*
My sister, Mati, called me to tell me about my mother’s death. She called me to tell me about my stepfather’s death. I commend my sister because even through their addictions and mental health issues, she stuck by their side and was welcoming whenever they returned. I took breaks from my mother and stepfather. To be frank there were many, many months if not years, where I didn’t speak to them. I wonder if they’d be alive if they had had an Opioid Prevention Clinic in their lives. I wonder how the last text messages between us would have gone if I didn’t feel shame, guilt and anger. Now I know they wanted to feel normal. Getting high is about not sinking into the past. Anger at someone else getting high is about control. I was angry I couldn’t stop them from getting high. I was angry that I couldn’t protect them from death. And yet that didn’t mean I should protect myself from being hurt by pretending they didn’t exist. Before their deaths, I had deleted them from my life, because it was too difficult to confront and embrace them for who they were.
There were parts of myself I contained in what I wrote. I wrote in the second person to separate myself from myself and many people in my life. I wrote with so many silences because I didn’t want to hear it. In “The Creative Process” Baldwin writes, “We are responsible for our actions, but we rarely understand them…if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less.”
*
My daughter is almost a teenager. At my daughter’s last doctor visit, I barely spoke. She explained her daily routine, her diet and goals next school year. She spoke clearly about her body and school life. At some point the doctor asked that if at any moment she would feel more comfortable being with a woman doctor, she should let me or her mom know.
At that moment I felt something I felt once before. When my great grandmother on her deathbed told me, “Take care of that crazy woman.” I felt it then. When my stepfather sent me a text that even though he tries to be there for others, they always find reasons not to help when he asks for help. I felt it then. My 10-year-old daughter speaking for herself at the doctor’s office felt like the foreshadowing of an inevitable ending.
An impending meeting with death. There is no doubt that I will die and she will mourn. But that’s not the death I’m concerned with– at least not right now. I’m talking about her becoming a teenager and seeing the face behind my mask. And she will be certain in what she now only suspects. The father she sees me as will die. My daughter will learn I am the wizard from the Wizard of Oz (1939). A movie we’ve seen several times. The last time we saw it she was interested in Dorothy. Not Dorothy, but Judy Gardland. She asked if Dorothy was still alive. I know in the near future she’ll learn either from me or the world that the teenage Gardland was forced to take stimulants to keep her working long hours. By 1968 Garland was taking Valium, Ritalin and Thorazain. Supposedly she was taking as much as 40 Ritalin pills every day. Whether I reveal the facts about the teenage Judy Garland or omit what happened behind the scenes, my daughter will discover the truth.
I’ll be past 40 and my daughter will be a teenager. She’ll have many questions about me, about her mother, my mother, her grandmother and great grandmother. I will tell her what I know. I will read Baldwin with her without dismissing what she sees between the words. I will listen how I listened to her at the doctor’s office. And pay attention. My goal is to give her my attention, in other words, love. We will watch rated R movies together. We will talk about death without divorcing it from life.
I will be an honest father and a good writer.