How We Fight For Our Lives

by Saeed Jones

“I Wanna Be Your Lover” comes on the kitchen radio and briefly, your mother isn’t your mother— just like, if the falsetto is just right, a black man in black lace panties isn’t a faggot, but a prince, a prodigy—and

Some songs take women places men cannot follow.

because you’re young and don’t know the difference between abandoned and alone just like your mother’s heart won’t know the difference between beat and attack.

Just as some cultures have a hundred words for “snow,” there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy can lie awake at night.

The blood of all the loved ones we failed to save would be on our hands come Judgment Day.

People don’t just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The “I” it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, “I am no longer yours.”

Maybe she had been right about me after all. Worldly: “concerned with material values or ordinary life rather than a spiritual existence.” Worldly: “experienced and sophisticated.” Of course I wanted to see the world, to experience its fullness. I wanted to be a real part of it, rather than the passing shadow I so often felt like. I wanted to devour the world.

Being black can get you killed. Being gay can get you killed. Being a black gay boy is a death wish. And one day, if you’re lucky, your life and death will become some artist’s new “project.”

The existential shrug of young men afraid to admit that they’ve been touched by art, and that they want to be touched in that way again.

I knew I had to return to those streets and sidewalks, crowded with people who had found a way to be themselves.

Her choreography and bravado were so certain she was almost scary, in the way that being in the same room with someone who is overconfident can make you feel shy.

That night was the first time in my life I felt like the words “gay” and “alone” weren’t synonyms for each other.

But now, pressing myself into the bed’s many pillows, I felt my body and realized that my body could be a passport or a key, maybe even a weapon. A body like a brick thrown through a sleeping house’s window. I got hard then just thinking about all the things I would be able to do with myself.

The sons of single mothers inevitably encounter well-meaning family members who like to remind us about our role as “the man of the house.” The statement usually made me wince, the way it implicitly merged the roles of son, father, and husband; the way it erased the grown woman to whom the house actually belonged.

I felt larger than I had any right being, encased in the body of an adult but ignorant of how to use it.

and I closeted myself again. No one shoved me back in there. Maybe I’d just been standing in the doorway of that dusty closet, tripped, and somehow fell back inside.

Debate kids aren’t all that different from theater kids, except we’re more arrogant, tend to speak faster, and have a habit of constantly trying to outdo one another with stories and arguments.

How many versions of myself I’d perform by week’s end was anyone’s guess.

Autry wasn’t mentioned directly during the one-hour presentation, a testament perhaps to the unique talent Americans have for talking all the way around exactly what needs to be said. I remember the orientation leaders continually emphasizing the perils of binge drinking; I don’t remember words like “rape,” “sexual assault,” or “consent.” Katie Autry was a specter between the lines. Her story haunted the room, all of us hearing and not hearing her at the same time.

At times, I was proud of my sluttiness. I liked to think that it was radical, as if the act of fucking another man and then bragging to my friends about it was a form of protest against the shame I’d grown up with, and against the shame I felt silently radiating from the new people in my life. But just as often, I found myself pushed to wonder, by the wide eyes around me, whether something was wrong with me.

It followed me into the shower where, just as often as not, I’d feel like I was trying to scrub away much more than the smell of sex.

In retrospect, I think I didn’t feel as if a burden had been lifted because my being gay was never actually the burden. There was still so much I hadn’t told my mother, so much I knew that I would probably never tell her. I had come out to my mother as a gay man, but within minutes, I realized I had not come out to her as myself.

AS I WRITE, I want to pull myself out of him and out of that room. But outside the Botanist’s bedroom is the Latino man who, years later, will look back at me while I fuck him—not hard enough, apparently—and sneer, “Aren’t you a black man?” Outside of that bedroom is the dating profile of a handsome twentysomething living in Brooklyn who notes in all capital letters “Not interested in Black, Mexican, or Asian cuisine.” Then there is the younger black gay friend who will confess that someone told him once “I just don’t find black men beautiful, but I love you as friends.” I still don’t know what to say to the men outside the Botanist’s bedroom. There are so many of them, so many rooms where they are waiting to wound one another with their bodies and their preferences.

Lower your voice, change your posture, call yourself Cody, dress differently if you want. A man might still decide that when he looks at you, all he sees is a nigger, a faggot, or both.

I tried to fuck my hurt into him, but he just writhed beneath me, moaning that it felt “so good.” I wondered how many black men had been in this bed surrounded by trees; I wondered if he had made this jungle just for us.

Moving out of your longtime home means quite literally unsettling the dust of your past. Dust shimmers in the air, coloring rays of sunshine as they cut through the windows. Dust marks the outlines of where your childhood bed used to be. Dust collects in your hair. Your body unwittingly inhales your past and rejects it.

When I looked up, she was staring at me, wide-eyed, almost pleadingly—as if I’d led someone afraid of heights to the edge of a rusting bridge. And then I did exactly what I thought all people who love each other do: I changed the subject; I changed myself; I erased everything I had just said; I erased myself so I could be her son again.

Everyone became someone else. And I wasn’t green anymore. I wasn’t new. I wasn’t ashamed of my sex life, exactly, but this didn’t feel like enlightenment either. Sex was simply what I did between classes or debate practice to get by, or at least buy some time. I buried myself in the bodies of other men so I could feel something other than the depression that was rolling in like a fog bank.

Maybe, a decade older than I was, he knew what I would eventually learn: it’s possible for two men to become addicted to the damage they do to each other.

A joke I used to repeat in those days was: Why be happy when you can be interesting? I knew how to be interesting. There was power in being a spectacle, even a miserable spectacle. The punch and the line. Interesting: sentences like serrated blades, laughter like machine-gun rounds, a drink in one hand, a borrowed cigarette in the other. If you could draw enough glances, any room could orbit around you.

In the few days I’d been there, I’d concluded that Arizona was perhaps the whitest place I had ever visited. It was like stepping onto the surface of a very well-lit moon.

Looking back, I can see how someone might see me that night and argue that I had it coming—that I had a man like him coming. If that someone was America herself, I can understand how she might rattle off a warning. “That black boy has been too hungry for too long. One of these nights he’s gonna bite off more than he can chew.” I will say for myself: America, I did the best I could with what I was given.

If I couldn’t actually be the one myself, I thought I could survive by devouring him whole. The more “straight,” the more “masculine,” the more I wanted to see him with his legs spread or up, back arched in an orgasm that didn’t just bring him pleasure but a warning: In spite of the man you say you are, in the Future I live in, men like me are coming to conquer you and we will take no prisoners. This is what I thought it meant to be a man fighting for his life. If America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself.

I believed that I could control any story I told. If something happened, I could write about it, own it, resolve it. Simple. You could afford to be interesting if you could pin everything to the page afterward. Perhaps just to prove how tough I was, I had turned a nightmare of a near miss into a fatal one in my retelling. See? I’m not scared or weak. I’m not afraid to push through what happened and on into what could have happened.

Pen as weapon, page as shield.

A nurse at the station nodded at my uncle and smiled at me. The look of someone who knows the next sentence of your story before you do.

Tears don’t always just fall; sometimes they rip through you, like storm-painted gusts instead of mere raindrops.

And now this check was in my hand, bought and paid for with her life. I climbed the steps to my apartment and slid back down to my knees once I was in the kitchen. We could’ve had more flowers at her funeral. We could’ve decided on the casket with the rose-gold handles. We could’ve buried her in a designer gown with diamond rings on every finger and black pearls around her neck. Instead, my mother would wear the suit her sister picked out for her until the fabric disintegrated and succumbed to the dirt and worms. My ears rang with everything we could’ve done, everything we could no longer do. I would never get to bury her again.

“Well, last summer I visited all the Holocaust museums and memorials.” “Wait. All?” “Every single one in Europe. Took me all summer,” she explained, smiling broadly. In the glint of her eyes, I could tell that I was giving her that baffled stare again. “Are you Jewish?” “No. I just… oh, I don’t know.” She paused. “I was just curious about how one man could get so many people to do something so awful.”