Rogues

Rogues

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Dai Lee (for my Earth benders)

With my feet planted firm, yo I stand stiff/
Imprint this sanskrit/
Flick of my wrist, like this, makes sands shift/
You bandstand fans can't stand it/

My horse stance makes your whores glance and your land split/
Brought fire, water, air, and still couldn't dance with/
The Bronx Blind Bandit/
In touch with the Earth, Avatar, Captain Planet/

Indigenous people with internet bandwidth/
Living off the minerals/
Walk through Omashu or Ba Sing Se like a 4-star general/
The writing's on the wall - I wrote it in the ground, so it's legible/

From space, and I can see the tears on your face/
Which means you don't wanna die/
Cuz I redirect lightning like i'm Water Tribe/
Rock shock your block with a bop that change water tides/

Come back for more, I make sure you're immortalized/
Cuz all you got is ad-libs and pot shots/
But I could bust a stance that make your bullets look like pop rocks/

Killer In Cold Clothes

>(For anyone who has ever wanted to know what the story of the scar on the center my forehead)

Tuesday. Again. Waking up for school in the winter sucks. Especially on a Tuesday. Too close to Sunday to forget how fun the weekend was, just far enough into the week to forget how to have fun. That, and it’s still black as night at six-thirty in the morning in the Bronx, like God forgot to hit the switch on the sun here. I’m slipping on my clothes, which are cold as hell, which doesn’t really make sense, but if in hell they made your clothes out of ice that’s what this feels like. By the time I put on my Raiders hoody, which my mom got because they were sold out of Dallas ones, I swear I’m already frostbit. The streetlights reflecting off the snow are forcing orange through my window, so I can see my breath and everything. It looks like a ghost I gave life to by just breathing.

I make my way downstairs to head out for school, tip-toeing past mom’s room like a Navy SEAL behind enemy lines, each time my foot touches the floor it makes the sound of small firecrackers with short fuses popping off on a hot day. I sneak like this for like ten whole minutes, past her room, and pick up my backpack from the living room. I realize my house in the morning is like a train at four in the morning. ‘Cause you can remember it full of people and when it’s empty you feel like the world is upside-down. Anyway, I turn toward the kitchen and my there’s my mom, making juevos con tostones, filling the apartment with my infancy in PR. With half her Puerto Rican accent intact she says, “You know, it was cute to watch you sneak around when you was little. Not so much anymore.” She doesn’t know, but when mommy speaks, even when she’s mad, it feels so nice, ‘cause she gives me her attention. I said back to her, “You worry too much ma’. I’m twelve now, I can handle going to school by myself.”

“If that’s the case flaco, then how come your teachers say you miss school like twice a week? Don’t even try to answer, just take your butt to school, please!”

I leave the plate on the table, full, and steaming in the cold apartment. Mommy says some curses in Spanish at me, but I’m already out the front door, so it sounds like her mouth was duct taped, and she’s cursing her kidnappers out for dear life.

It makes me wish Papi was still here, he always knew how to calm her down. Mommy says he was a mad smooth Dominican chulo, and that he always wore pants so tight you could see his junk. That’s probably how he ended up with that Melinda lady. When I go with Papi some weekends she’s there with him, in their nice house, and she’s cool, and he’s happy. I have fun there, but when I think of how hard it is for mommy and me. I ask all the time, “Why did he leave?” She just gets mad and screams at me that I’m just like him, and I’m gonna leave her too. Makes me so mad to think about it, and I always think about it when mommy’s mad, which is all the time. Can’t be late, or they’ll mark me absent.

On my way to school I gotta watch my back, especially since it’s so dark out. I dip into the Domincan bakery on the corner of my block since it’s always lit up with bright pink and green neon lights that say Rainbow Diner spelled “Raimbow Dinner”. Knowing that when my mom comes in here for a coffee later, the pretty Domincan girl behind the counter with the beauty mark on her upper thigh that looks like Florida (my boy Alfredo told me) and them fake gold hoop earrings will tell her I came in and bought a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich with my allowance. It’s like a message in a bottle that always get’s where you want it to go. Bochincheras are good for that. I killed the sandwich quickly and ran to the bus stop like I was getting an Olympic gold medal. Anyway, I go back to sleep on the bus ride to school, I don’t really have a choice, the bus driver has the heat set on ‘desert’, which the setting after ‘Cuba’ and before ‘Africa’. Getting to school early gives me the same feeling as when I’m in my living room in the morning, except for one difference: excitement. No one is here, and the playground gates are wide open.

After running and skipping with joy to the playground, carefully bounding over the broken glass of last night’s drunken morons and dropping my bag in the snow, my day comes to a screeching halt: there’s a boy on the tire swing. There’s this little black boy sitting in the swing, he’s so weak that he can’t even move it, but he’s laughing so loud. It’s like a little black smudge on the all-white painting of my day. The sun is starting to come up now, and the blue light is tearing shadows into the calm of my early morning. Between the sun and the boy on the swing, I can’t tell which is pissing me off more. Don’t know where it came from, but an idea was climbing up my spine using the spaces between the bones. Next thing I know, I threw my hood on and let the dark colors of my hoody into my actions. By the time I got to the swing, I was sure between the sun and the boy, I could at least cause the boy some pain. Anything to get my swing back.

He was wearing a thin denim jacket with a white, furry collar, navy blue uniform pants, a sky blue button-down uniform shirt, and some Payless loafers. His clothes were the exact same color as the morning. That made me angry. Changing my voice to sound older I said, “You want me to push you on the swing?” He was shocked, as if he didn’t know I was there. He responded in a small voice, “No thank you. I’m okay.” He had to be a third grader, how did he get to school before me, or any of the other fifth graders? The fact that this kid got here before me just pissed me off, so I started to push him on the swing. Faster, and faster, and higher, and higher, then spinning one way, then spinning the other; hoping he’d fall off. The boy started to yell for me to stop, so I pushed harder and harder. It started to drizzle a bit, then it rained a little. The playground was lit with an even, grey light, like the world matched my hoody, matched my mind, matched my heart. I stopped pushing when the boy started crying. I was just trying to scare him, but he wouldn’t let go.

I went to pick up my bag when I noticed that the boy was too small to get out of the moving swing, he looked like a baby bird trying to take first flight out of the nest, so scared. Then he jumped out of the swing at its highest point, it was a good jump too. He landed like a cat, perfectly on his feet. Then the speed of his jump forced his upper forward while his feet stayed planted in place, half a second later he was falling face first onto the stone stairs that led to the swings. There was a crunching sound when his face hit, like stepping into fresh powdered snow and compressing the first footprint. I froze. He jumped up like he was asleep and realized he was two hours late for class, took three steps and dropped down. I ran over to him and asked what his name was, he said something like, “France” or “French”, and I was gonna go get help. Then I noticed that all the students from school were there now, the playground fully lit in a bright grey light, the school bell ringing. Right then, I could hear my mom in my head saying, “Flaquito, go to school now!” So I started walking toward the sound of the bell. I looked back and saw a pool of blood surround his body like a black hole opening under him, devils and demons waiting to dress the boy in cold clothes. I never saw the boy again, but I remember watching his breath leaving his mouth and wondering if his ghost was following me to school.

Written By: Frantz Jerome
(All rights reserved to the author.)

Digital Tradition

For all the negative things said about the increasingly inorganic landscape of New York City, it begs to be said that there is much natural beauty here as well. Parks, miles-long streaks of green leaves and forest wildlife. Streams…Browning, babbling capillaries running perpetual laps from the Hudson to the gulf of the South Bronx. The sun, playing tricks along the tips of skyscrapers, and lie across the ground with imperfect perfection. My family…saw none of it. We were too busy playing video games. Eyes glued to computer monitors, television sets, flat panels, and flat screens. My family’s tradition was playing video games.
For all the skeptics out there thinking to themselves, “How can a hobby, barely forty years-old, be a family tradition?” The answer: Who the hell asked you? Video games became tradition when I realized that from the day I was born, video games were there. My mother, stepfather, older brother, and younger brothers are my immediate family. Our tradition is based in the ever-evolving technologies of the video game console.
At some point in 1967, Ralph Baer writes the first video game for television sets. My mother was seven years of age at the time. She was being raised on a farm in rural Mississippi. My mother’s strong sense of justice and inability to do anything but work would be key ingredients in the gaming gumbo of my family. Ralph Baer was an employee at Loral, a television electronics company. As fate would have it, my stepfather was an employee at Loral in the eighties, but I digress. In 1975, Atari releases the godfather of modern gaming: Pong. My stepfather gets a degree in information technology, sends his resume to Loral. The rest is my family history.
In 1985 Nintendo released it’s first North American console, the NES. I was two years of age, and totally unaware how this would affect my life. My younger brother, Ronald would be born four years later, on the cusp of the release of Sega’s Genesis console. It’s always been Sonic versus Mario in our household. This is the set-up. The beauty of this integration, this melding of man and technology, the summation of our social recombination comes on the heels of the most complicated political occurrence of the 21st century.
In 2001, Sony Entertainment released Metal Gear: Solid. A video game whose overarching theme is that of the gene, meme, scene and sense. I was sold on the graphics alone. The game’s themes were broken into three amazing sensory-blurring adventures. Metal Gear Solid dealt with genetics and the moral implications of genetic engineering, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty deals with how identity can be affected by the philosophies of one's society (a 'meme') and the effects of censorship on society, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater dealt with how the time and place one lives in (a 'scene') affects their identity and how politics change along with the times, and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots dealt with the 'sense' that people die, things move on and times change and that life shouldn't be lived fighting. We played each of these games for days, as in the hours we’d played could be measured in twenty-four hour increments. The technology premiered in this fictional world blew my brother and I away. My step-father would sit and watch us play. One day, he leans over to us, smelling explicitly of Drakkar Noir, and say, “You know, this game is only ten years behind what we’re working on now at L------- M-----." Here comes the summation.
September 11th, 2001. Some crazy stuff went down. The political climate was torn asunder. My brother and I were dismissed from school early. As latchkey kids, we made our way home, sat in the living room and did what any kid home from school would do: played video games. My mother would come home shortly after, angered at having to leave work early. Her sunset pink nurse’s uniform was soaked under the arms, around the neck, and across her back. She’d run into the house like she was being chased by the Taliban high command. She slammed and locked the door, froze at the sight of us placated by the video game during this extreme tumult. Right when our eyes met our mother’s rigid frame, a lion sat on the front steps and roared. At least, that’s what it felt like, but for the vibrations that shattered every glass table we owned. In reality, planes were flying overhead. My mother screamed, hit the deck like a Marine ducking mortar fire. My brother and I: perfectly still. Utterly calm. Zen-like. My mother jumps towards us, hugging the breath out of my still-changing adolescent body, sobbing hysterically. My brother, eleven years of age at the time, turned his head what little he could in mom’s grasp and confidently said, “It’s ok mom, those are just F-22 Raptors making a net formation across the city. The shaking is from the after burners, they’re going mach 1, breaking the sound barrier. That’s why the tables broke, calm down. That means we’re safe.” I was in shock. My little brother, memorized and comprehended the entire day’s events, lost his innocence virtually, then actually. Somewhere between his newfound fear of girls and understanding of nuclear proliferation, I’d noticed that video games taught my brother more than school ever could. Since then, my mom has mastered every form of Tetris.

What Not: short story of a 'true' memory

I was rocking a white Kangol with a slight tilt, a white t-shirt one size too small, brown cargo pants, and a pair of white Nikes I saved my summer youth employment money to buy. It was July…or August, in the year of our lord 1999. Or I was wearing khaki cargo shorts, and black Nike uptowns, with a black tank top, or whatever she liked. I always did whatever she liked. Those were the terms of our relationship, terms that would eventually force me away. She liked when I wore dark pants and bright shirts, so I did just that. Alyx, my girlfriend, was never busy, but I could never get to her on that archaic Star Tac cell phone of hers. It would be five more years until I even had a beeper; her mom was well to do. Whether it was July or August escapes me, but it was hot! Newly tarred New York City streets were bleeding translucent waves of heat, but I was keeping my cool. She had this thing about ‘cool’ guys, and maybe I took it too literally, but I was determined to keep my disproportionately attractive girlfriend. I wasn’t pleased about having to make an appointment to see Alyx, (afraid she would start charging, she was so hot), but I was eager to see her. Or nervous, whichever.

In about ten hours from this memory, I’ll be in my room, taking off my clothes. With each article shed, removing a layer of her expectations thrust upon me by predetermined pubescent pressures. I would know who I was, and who she was forever after. Standing at the precipice of my becoming a man, I would look back on this day with regret. Ten years later (at twenty-seven) I would turn over to see my wife asleep, her fertile mind mothering some loving danger, and laugh at how hung up I was on Alyx.
Right now, I’m a seventeen-year-old black kid standing on a stoop in the East Village. Looking a gangly collaboration of brown and white, some rice and beans The Bronx spit out into Manhattan. The blanket of smarmy heat is so oppressive the ginkgo trees are sweating – but I looked like I just stepped out of the refrigerator. It helps to be the lone person of color amongst the homogenized hipster trash strolling carelessly along Avenue A and Ninth Street, my cocoa skin acting as cooling agent. So damned cool.

She's late for our appointment, five minutes of so, actually an hour, but I never mind when she’s late. I can remember her as being so attractive, like ‘too hot for a guy like me’ attractive. The perfect equation: equal parts track and field athlete, valedictorian, and my sexual equivalent to boot. She’d just moved to New York from its wicked step-sister New Jersey. We’d just reached the point in our courtship where we were meeting each others parents. You’d think that should’ve been before the sex, but clearly we thought otherwise. It’d been about a year since we met eyes and locked private parts in some Jersey playground at night, and this was our anniversary date…or it was a random Thursday with no particular meaning. Either way, I was getting to know her as a person, and I was falling inexorably in lo--. Hold that thought.

She finally comes downstairs. As she does a breeze slowly crawls up the block and grazes her frame in the vestibule, right when as she crosses it. Her long, boxed braids gently jumped from behind her ears and landed on the soft of her neck and shoulders. The hem of her tan, linen dress skipped up her knees and revealed the carved, mocha-hued musculature of her thigh. Wind, the gentle pervert. She looks at her watch, beauty and beast in synchronicity. Gracefully parting her lips to say inconsiderate things perfectly.

“Sorry about that.” She says, guiltily.
“About what?” I reply, knowingly.
She whispers in my ear, “You’re so sweet.”
Or was it, “You’re too sweet.” In a flat, cool, even tone to my face.

She made reservations at a cozy Latin bistro on Avenue B a few blocks away, that, or we just walked in a found a table. It was designed so that patrons could walk in, go through to a back yard, and eat outside. She ordered an appetizer, the most expensive entrée on the menu, and a modest desert. I had the chicken with mango salsa. Or just a water. Whichever. The summer sun was setting, the pink and zephyr sky painting her brown skin in ethereal pastels. She was glowing. All of which, coupled with my combustible hormones, fueled my most daring and foolhardy adventures in romance. I started to say,

“Alyx, I think I love y—“

Before I could finish, as if she’d had something just as amazing to say to me, comes:

“I’ve been thinking about the idea of free and universal love.” Dreamily delivered deathblow.
“Uh, what’s that?” I replied, genuinely baffled.
“You know, like, being with whoever you want sexually. But always coming back to us.”
“Hmm.” Was all I could muster.

I didn’t say another word to her. Like, ever. Until I bumped into her very pregnant belly at an airport in Arizona ten years later, en route to see my fiancé perform her one-woman show in LA. Alyx would go on to say that she remembered the amicable and lengthy break-up conversation, or was it the really awkward and short one. You know, the one that happened? Whichever.