Who Put This Song On? Read online

  Jordan backs away, shrinking from the scene, but he definitely laughs. It breaks my heart.

  Mike turns to his audience, just sickeningly tickled with himself. “You can’t give blood if you bone other dudes. ’Cause like AIDS and shit. Fuckin’ faggots. Fuckin’ pervs!”

  Mike Something’s finale is a lewd thrust of his hips, as if he’s gracelessly humping something. I’m devastated and helpless listening to the crowd erupt—a few gasps, but mostly laughter. It all happens so fast, and both of them are completely faded. No one present is in any condition to process what’s going on.

  Jordan snickers scandalously, drunk and fascinated. “Fuck, dude!” He takes a couple of steps toward James, who’s just standing there nakedly, with his arms crossed and a blank stare. Everyone watching gets quiet.

  Jordan looks super serious and lowers his voice, as if James was just revealed to be one of those “devil worshippers” who do weird rituals in the park at night, huddled around candles arranged in the shape of a pentagram.

  “For real?” Jordan spits out, slanty Sid-from-Toy-Story eyes all beady and red.

  I’m so drunk I think I might just clobber him, curse the entire Jordan Jacobsen lineage. Pushing forward, I make sure to elbow him as I approach James, who mutters something mangled and messy. David appears at his side and links arms to guide him to the car. We follow.

  “Jesus Christ!” Meg exclaims, fishing David’s keys from her tote.

  David throws me a look of concern, his arm wrapped around James’s waist. He’s still wearing that stupid tie.

  “Where were you?” I hiss.

  “Nowhere,” he shoots back with an attitude.

  * * *

  —

  The ride back to my house is silent, other than me and David alternating asking James if he’s okay and him swatting our concern away. He looks like he’s gonna puke, his eyes closed and leaning his head against the window. Meg cracks the window to give him some air, but she’s obviously pissed—her lips pursed and stern. She plays the Unicorns, followed by Tegan and Sara; there is no negotiation. I’m trying to hold on to my buzz for dear life, especially since the vibe is so awkward.

  I turn to David in the backseat, who keeps looking nervously over at James and peeking at his phone every few minutes. “Can I smoke in your car?”

  “Yeah, yeah!” he gasps, looking up at me too readily. “Do you.”

  As I light my cigarette I roll down the window and turn up the song, “I Know I Know I Know.” I look over at Meg and poke her arm, trying to coax a grin and the energy we sparked earlier tonight, barefoot and childlike in the grass.

  “The same as I love you…” I sing between puffs.

  “You’ll always love me too…” she finishes, and we laugh.

  David’s rejection, James’s sloppiness, Mike Something’s horrible display of hate and Jordan cosigning him—all of it vanishes for a sec.

  James groans strangely in the backseat, eliciting coddling from David and more laughter from Meg. At the stoplight, she slams the breaks haltingly, teasing James’s gag reflex.

  “Oh my god, you’re such a dick!” I squeal, drunkenly thrilled.

  At the next light, she does it again, and smirks, self-satisfied. I realize how exasperating it must’ve been to be sober around all of those drunk people she hates, and us, too.

  “Pull over!” James slurs, and David echoes him.

  “Oh, come on,” Meg says, speeding up.

  “Dude, maybe you should,” I try gently.

  Meg sighs, annoyed, but complies at the next place to pull in, the gated entrance to my neighborhood shooting range. James juts out of the car and yaks, his left hand on his hip and his right clenching the gate. Meg whines impatiently. David’s outside, leaning with his arms crossed against the car door, poised to run to James’s rescue.

  “Yo, what’s wrong?” I ask her. (We were just having such a good time. Did I do something?) “I know James is ridiculous, but he is really wasted tonight. He’s clearly dealing with some other shit.”

  “Fuck being DD!” she shouts, and seeing my eyebrows dart upward with worry, she puts up her hand.

  “I don’t really mean that. I don’t feel like drinking. I just…I do wish I could just…let go somehow.”

  “I know,” I respond, though I don’t, exactly. She’s still so close to the vest.

  David sticks his head through the back window. “Hey, Morgan, can you bring me your water bottle?”

  Meg and I look at each other with a mutual side-eye, and I take the water directly to James, who’s now dry-heaving at the gate. When I back away, David’s right there, lifting his arm to scratch my back lightly. I pull away.

  “I’m just trying to be your friend, I’m trying to be nice,” he says.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t think a friend is someone who disappears to make out with my freaking nemesis. A friend isn’t so obviously repulsed by me.”

  “What? Morgan, what in the world are you talking about?”

  I huff.

  “That dumb girl I was talking to?”

  I open my mouth, but can’t muster anything sassy and biting enough, so I go with the silent treatment.

  “If you must know, she just latched on to me. She was drunk, Morgan. And we talked mostly about you. And the San Diego Chargers, for some weird reason. It was totally random. If it seemed like something else…I dunno, I’m pretty trashed…but I swear it wasn’t anything like that.”

  I throw my head back, like, Gimme a break.

  “I really, really like being friends. Please don’t be mad at me.”

  “Come on, David. I’m not an idiot. You already said you didn’t like me.”

  “Hold on,” he replies sharply. “I like you. I just don’t know what that means yet. Is that a crime?”

  James dry-heaves some more as a plane juts through the sky.

  NOTES ON THE SARTORIAL AND SEXUAL PROCLIVITIES OF MORGAN PARKER, FLAMBOYANT AND OTHERWISE

  Okay, so: I don’t actually care that David thought I’m gay. Even I’m only 90% sure I’m not.

  (What we’ve learned about gender and sexuality in school is very narrow and very skewed. It just seems like more dumb rules: how to dress, how to talk, how to love. Another list of limited options I’m pressured to choose from, while I’m just trying to figure out how to be me. I’ve never had a boyfriend, and no one’s having sex with me, so what’s the big deal with clinging to a label? It all feels irrelevant.)

  But this has happened before—me being misread, misunderstood, mistaken for someone else. I “seem” gay, “act white,” I’ve got a very specific look and vibe happening. There’s no word that rhymes with me. That’s actually a thing I like about myself, even when people make fun of me or don’t understand—and even when it’s the reason for my loneliness.

  All throughout eighth grade I wore baseball sleeves and clip-on ties, a jean bucket hat studded with snarky pins—those were my skateboarding days, with Dickies and slip-on Vans. Not because I wanted to dress like a boy, exactly, but because it was a look. And when I’m trying out a look, I commit. At our commencement that year—I was also really into Big Band then, I played Benny Goodman while applying mint-green eyeshadow for the ceremony—I wore a vintage chiffon dress and ivory gloves.

  In ninth grade my look was a college professor, with penny loafers and reading glasses on a chain around my neck, sometimes channeling Katherine Hepburn in pants. Last year was somewhere between Enid from Ghost World and Zora Neale Hurston in a hat. If having an imaginative and explorative fashion sense makes you gay (for the record, to my peers who seem befuddled by basic definitions: it doesn’t!), then maybe I’m gay as hell (also, mind your own business).

  People believe whatever they need to in order to deal.

  What I mean is, me being gay is not a totally unfair assumption fo
r anyone to make, and it doesn’t insult me. What does hurt about David’s rejection is that I’ve never been an option to him. What hurts is the way his eyes bugged out, how he completely freaked at the possibility of kissing me, as if I’d just suggested we bomb the White House or something. Am I that disgusting, that the thought has never crossed his mind? Did I miscalculate or imagine our connection? And at the same time, I feel like, of course. Of course he doesn’t want me. Why can’t I ever remember the price of everything I like about myself?

  I should be over it by now, but I don’t hear from David all weekend. Our hug at the end of homecoming night was awkward, all our muscles tensed up. He doesn’t email, and I don’t. We don’t text. I don’t even text him when I see a guy at the gas station who looks like Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic.

  If it’s any consolation prize, I was hungover pretty much all weekend, even at Greek Orthodox church with my yia yia.

  I guess I might as well tell you guys the real reason I didn’t give blood is because men who have had sex with other men can’t give blood. I wanted to tell you before you heard it somewhere else but I didn’t know how. I was scared. My sister told me someone in her class was caught being gay and he couldn’t walk at graduation. So please TELL NO ONE. It’s bad enough that the football team found out.

  And the worst thing is I think I’m in love with a straight boy. Again. *Sigh* Our first outing was playing freaking board games at Coffee Bean and it was rediculously cute. Then we went to dinner and talked about films.

  Below the entry Meg wrote:

  We don’t care if you’re gay! We love you and you are our lover!

  (But of course she still corrected his spelling and added Oxford commas.)

  * * *

  I find James after school Wednesday for a hug, and we take a long walk toward the train tracks downtown, smoking and chatting.

  “So, let’s hear it.” He grins expectantly. “Are you surprised? Weirded out?”

  “No…” I’m not. But I don’t not feel something. Relief? “I guess I just wish you’d been able to tell me sooner. I’m here for you, you know?”

  “I know.” He lights another one of his fancy cigarettes. A bright red. Where does he even get these things? I wonder if he picks colors to match his moods or T-shirts. Selection is never random for me.

  “So, do your parents know?”

  When James came out to his parents, he tells me, he was sitting across from them at a booth in Coco’s.

  “I said, ‘I’m gay.’ ”

  They said no, he probably isn’t sure, maybe he should sleep with a few women first and figure it out, and by the way, does he even know what it means?

  “So of course at that point I was like, I have sex with men! I shouted it just like that to shut them up. It was amazing! Such a scene.” He swats at wild hairs on his forehead.

  “Oh my god. So good.” I smile, imagining all the gray heads in the restaurant turning to stare when James emphasized sex.

  I imagine that having remained in the closet for so long makes him even more lonely and isolated than the rest of us, even though he seems unmoved by the drama of his existence. It’s admirable, his ability to commit to a certain level of swagger. Still, like me, he probably removes a mask every night in front of the mirror, feeling heavy. Being a person in this world is draining.

  “I just don’t understand why they said you couldn’t give blood. Or that you even had to tell them who you’ve had sex with. Is that even legal?”

  James shrugs, takes a long drag. “They just don’t want our gay blood, I guess.”

  They probably don’t want mine either, laced with all kinds of chemicals and psychopharmaceuticals. Where the intake form asked for a list of medications I was taking, I only listed birth control. I don’t know why.

  “I’m just sorry the night got ruined.” I shake my head. “I can’t believe Jordan Jacobsen! We used to be really close and now he’s such a dick. I don’t understand how he could be part of that.”

  James lights my cigarette. “He’s a boy. He’s just acting how he thinks he’s supposed to.”

  “Why are people always so disappointing?”

  James, I love you! Who is this mysterious man? Do you want me to beat him up? Kelly, did I imagine you were a little tipsy when we were dancing to “What’s Your Fantasy?” are we finally corrupting you?! I was so mad at David that night. I don’t even really have a good reason. But he’s been sucking up. He texted me today that he finally watched All About Eve. Ugh, I love that movie. I love when she downs a martini and says, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s gonna be a bumpy night!” We should do a movie night soon. NO ROM-COMS.

  MAKE A LIST OF THINGS YOU KNOW ABOUT YOURSELF

  “What year were you born?”

  “Excuse me?” Mr. K scoffs, American flag pin affixed to his wrinkled Oxford shirt. He gets exasperated by the mere sound of my voice. He’s just assigned us a “personal essay” about civil rights. I’m hovering at his desk being cheeky because I was mostly delightful and quiet for the whole class, plus it’s the end of the day and no one’s paying attention anymore.

  “Well, I was just thinking, my parents were around for all this, the civil rights movement, that’s crazy.”

  “I was young, but yes, I was ‘around for all this’ too.”

  “So, what happened after?”

  He grins like the Grinch. “Well—”

  “I mean, after that and before Reagan,” I quip. He laughs smugly. “I guess I’m curious about black people, specifically. It seems like we’re always talking about Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks and then that’s it. I mean, what happens to black people between then and now? We’re just quiet in American history until the Obama chapter?”

  The bell rings.

  Mr. K shrugs. “There’s a library down the hall.”

  Technically, the assignment is to reflect on one of the cases we discussed leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but I see it as my duty to creatively interpret all my assignments, and it’s my impulse to bend the rules to see what I can get away with. Sometimes you have to be the syllabus you wish to see in this world or whatever.

  The school library at Vista, incredibly, does not contain any books about black life and civil rights in the 1970s and 1980s, so after school, I head to the public library, my last remaining hope.

  Unsurprisingly, as a nerd, I love libraries. Specifically, the public one near my school, with seats in big bay windows and what feels like miles and miles of wooden shelves. I’m not sure what I expect to find here, but I know there are answers in books. I find a computer with a window view of a big tree swelling with orange leaves. It’s Yo La Tengo weather. I pop in my earbuds and skip ahead on I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, because I must hear “Autumn Sweater” immediately. The song actually feels like wearing a chunky cable knit sweater on a fall afternoon. It’s the perfect song for the trees.

  I start by searching “black people” in the library’s inventory portal, chewing on the inside of my left cheek and absently biting a thumb nail. Immediately sensing my mistake, I type “African American History.” There are six pages of results, most of which are dated biographies and books for kids, like the only time to learn about black history is in school. Like black people are the Pythagorean theorem—they don’t really come up in real life.

  I lean back in the hard wood chair feeling defeated. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.

  A second-grade-teacher-looking white lady bustles around the room, moving books from a cart to a shelf, stopping to lean over kids and recommend them picture books or whatever. A complete and total Susan, down to the bird sweater. Her face is tight, with thin lips and wild eyes. Her hair, fashioned into a curly bob, is badly dyed red. Susans like this make me nervous for some reason. The condescending type of Susan, whose sole mission is to make me feel like I
don’t deserve to exist anywhere. I feel her staring at me, expectantly, but I ignore her, opening the ancient internet browser.

  “Can I help you with something?”

  Of course, she’s also a close talker. Coffee breath.

  “No, probably not.” Not with anything, really.

  She contorts her mouth into a grimace—I think she may be trying to smile. I pull the Black Notebook out of my backpack and flip it to a fresh page. I don’t owe this lady anything, I realize. I’ve spent my whole day giving away all my perfectly good minutes to people I don’t like.

  And I can’t let her distract me.

  My Wikipedia journey goes like this: Civil rights act 1964 > Civil Rights Movement > Black Power Movement. Now we’re getting somewhere.

  10/8/08

  The Black Notebook: Research

  —After Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement

  —Pacifism was not enough: Black Panthers

  —Black Power

  —Slogan for movement, Stokely Carmichael

  —Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

  —1965: Assassination of Malcolm X, uprising

  —Watts Riots in LA

  —Huey P. Newton + Bobby Seale

  —1966: Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

  Oh, hell yes. I’m gonna write my paper on the Black Panthers. Mr. K will absolutely hate it. I stretch my arms and my back, grinning to myself. No one ever talks about the Black Panthers, except to imply that they were bad guys. Gun wielding and reckless, angry, a distraction from true progress and unity via MLK’s nonviolence. That’s how they tell it, if they even tell it at all. They’re a relic, a bad idea frozen in time. Meanwhile, I’ve heard they still hold Ku Klux Klan rallies a few towns away in Fontana. I guess some things outlive history, they get to grow into the present. Other things, other people’s stories peter out and expire, or else, get buried.