Chapter 6

On October 31^st, 1990 I lost my “blackface virginity” (if only I had popped other cherries at the proper time.)

And I got high on the shoe polish fumes too!

Mom and dad took us trick or treating through the Governor’s Crossing development, a bourgy area of proto-McMansions. Kayla, born to blend into the background, wore a drab witch costume.

The white people who opened their doors enjoyed my full-blackface minstrelsy just as much as paranoid black nationalists would have suspected. Critical acclaim for my blackface Urkel!

“Oh, honey,” said some white man or another. “You have to come here and see this one! Look who he is!”

“Oh my goodness! That is hilarious! Can you say ‘Did I do that’?”

I pushed down my glasses and uttered “Did I do that?”

“Oh, that’s great. Take some extra candy! As much as you want! Your costume made our night!”

Kayla did not receive any extra candy. The mediocrity.

We covered most of Governor’s Crossing. After my sister and I filled our buckets with a suitable amount of candy (I had received about two times as many Kit Kats and M&M bags as Kayla) the four of us walked back to the Constitution Court cul-de-sac. Mother’s van waited for us at the phallic tip of the court like pre-cum on the reservoir of a condom.

Had I worn a blood-stained Jason hockey mask like the year before, we would have just gone home and called it an early evening (as we almost always did with every other event.) But a sense of mischief waxed strong that Halloween. My controversial costume had awakened my parents’ long-dormant spirit of adventure.

We buckled ourselves into the van and then my dad said:

“We have to take him over to my mother’s so she can see his costume.”

Grandma J lived on Ridge Avenue in Neptune. The people in her hood breathed hydrogen, helium, and methane, but the helium did not heighten the pitch of their deep Negroid voices (unless they were impish Eddie Griffin types.)

Tall, thin, post-war Victorian houses lined her block like a string of dust(k)y jewels. Some of the houses sagged like the heavy eye-bags of a lead-depressed mad hatter. The houses (skinny and lurching, like Lurch from “The Addams Family”) looked old (because they were) and spooky; haunted by the ghosts of long-gone whites. Oooohhhhhh… A Halloween Hood.   

The “others” lived behind the Jack-O-Lantern eyes of the skeletal houses. What did the “other” do behind their closed doors? Were the “others” wicked, even wickeder than our family? And we were wicked! 

Mother made it seem like we were the Tanners from “Full House” compared to the people in Grandma J’s neighborhood:

“You’re damn lucky I don’t send you to live with the niggers in Neptune! I oughta send you to live with Grandma J. That’s where you belong, little nigger child! Little nigger child in nigger Neptune! You don’t know how good you have it over here, Mr. Man. I used to work with these people at the hospital (yes, mother had been employed for a brief period of time in the early 80s.) I saw how they treated their kids! They bite their kids! They beat them until they’re almost dead. They smoke crack in front of them! You spoiled, rotten brat! You have no idea how good you have it! You should be like one of the little Puerto Rican kids I used to take care of! They had to pick their Christmas presents out of other people’s trash! You spoiled, rotten brat!”

            I shook with each “spoiled, rotten brat!”

            Spoiled (shake), rotten (shake) brat! (shake)

            She made the “others” seem savage, barbaric, and nearly incapable of having a conversation let alone holding a job or raising a family. Cunt mother’s racist “ignorance” was “ignorant.” “Ignant” anti-racists, by the way, overuse that word for any sort of speech, act, or person perceived as racist. Richard Spencer might be a jerk, but he is not an ignoramus. Mother was. The day would come when I would choose any “nigger” over her! The mean, hateful wretch might have turned a lesser man into either a racist or a Social Justice Warrior! One extreme or another. Only through strength of spirit have I inhabited the Alt-Lite “Differance” between the two.

            Grandma J’s house looked like a pup tent version of the Amityville House. A pentagonal second floor face looked over the block like an old lady chuffing at the decadence of the hoodlums below. An overhang met the bottom side of the upper story and sheltered a rickety porch from rain, sleet, and sometimes snow and hail. For a younger person, the porch would have been a perch to catch gossip and a summer breeze, but my grandmother preferred the stuffy indoors. The siding of the house was mint green/pea soup green, as if an ingenious scamp had mixed the two incompatible foods in a plastic bowl.

            We pulled into her stony driveway and up to the perimeter of her metal chain-link fence.

            “Now, follow us into her house and don’t dilly-dally,” said mother. “We don’t want anyone to see your blackface. I’m glad her street light isn’t working.”

            They rushed me up to Grandma J’s front door as if I were a VIP under Secret Service protection. My dad knocked.

            “Who is it?” croaked Grandma J, a warble from the living room. A deep, wolf-like bark boomed from the posterior kitchen: “Woo-woo-woo-woo-woo!”

            “Your son!” shouted my dad.

            Grandma J opened the door.

            “I thought you were another trick-or-treater.”

            She tilted the sheet-wood door (complete with semi-circular window, the geometry of a psychedelic return to pre-white flight suburban memories) and we stepped into her house.

            “WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!”

            “Satan! Quiet down!” shouted Grandma J.

            Satan, Grandma J’s Doberman Pinscher, mounted his front auburn paws on the cheap, wooden dog gate that confined him to the kitchen. He obeyed Grandma J’s order to cease barking but rumbled a defiant growl from the back of his throat.

            Satan looked like Satan: fiery eyes, a long, sharp, angular snout, curved canines, and well-cropped ears that resembled horns. A black dog, like the Zeppelin song.

My dad had rescued Satan from a one-legged biker, a sadistic coward who had taken pleasure in beating (but not kicking, obviously), burning, and starving the poor cur. Like many products of an abusive environment, Satan was incurably vicious. Nothing in the unfortunate creature’s eyes suggested that he regarded humans as anything other than a malignancy. Satan, like Satan, knew how the world worked. He lived but did not seem to find joy in his status as a gift from my father to his mother; a deterrent to burglars; the fearsome protector of the last white woman in a black neighborhood.

“That damn dog can’t even go in the backyard anymore,” carped Grandma J. “Jim has to come over and walk him every day. The little nigger children tease him through the fence! They stick their asses right through. He’ll bite them and their parents will sue me. And then he gets into it with the German Shepherd next door. All that neighbor’s damn dog does is bark all day. I complained to him and hopefully he’ll do something about it.”

Grandma J sat down on a faded tan recliner. A clutter of weeks-old Asbury Park Press newspapers – perfectly folded – provided an extra layer of cushion between seat and seat back. Foodtown circulars glossed a protective layer over the threadbare arms.

“Mom, do you like Will’s costume?”

Grandma J looked at me. Her icy blue eyes simultaneously trembled and steeled a look in my direction. Her curly, white, cotton candy hair framed a dour face, angular on the sides but more spherical under and over her lips and chin.

“Who’s he supposed to be?”

“Tell her who you are,” said my mother.

“I’m Darryl Strawberry.”

“Oh.”

Grandma J did not “get” my costume. She was neither amused nor offended. Nor would she have been had she considered my costume or its transgressive implications. As the administrator of the local Presbyterian church she had housed Cuban refugees and sheltered the homeless, but not a solitary drop of SJW blood ran through her WASP veins. She complained of the “able-bodied” who lived on the dole because, after all, a day without work is a day without food and, of course, “idle time is the devil’s playground.” Just as a messy kitchen is Satan’s domain. She could have cared less if anything offended the perpetually offended.

She also tended not to notice children or anything they did. Just a whole lot of tomfoolery, silly antics not worthy of the slightest acknowledgement. Nonsense, shenanigans, and monkey business were never pertinent to grown-up matters, issues of concern such as what was on sale at Foodtown that week.

(Though I do wonder if she ever asked herself why Darryl Strawberry was dressed like a nerd.)

“Are you hungry?” asked Grandma J. “Marilyn brought over some extra meatloaf that she made for John John and the kids.”

“No, thanks, mom.”

We never ate any food that passed through the doors of Grandma J’s house. She hoarded before hoarding was television-cool. Junk, knickknacks, yarn, kitsch, dolls, dishes, tools, dog food, dog bones, dog treats, dog toys, cat food, cat treats, cat toys, quilts, comforters, throws, pillows, clippings, photos, books, magazines, newspapers, cards, letters, bulletins, and even a hundreds-strong collections of empty frozen O.J. cans lined every floor, step, chair, couch, corner, and bed in the entire house from foundation to ceiling.

The house smelled like dog treats and mothballs, the mothballs a futile attempt to mitigate a rat and mouse infestation that had plagued the premises since the 1950s (by 1990 there must have been thousands of generations of rodents who had lived their short mouse lives and died their forgotten deaths under Grandma J’s roof!) Samantha, Grandma J’s cat, was as misanthropic as Satan (the dog) himself and barely lifted a paw against the mouse problem. The mice in Grandma J’s house tended to die of natural causes (but not before living off the fat of the loaf - meatloaf that is.)

            Grandma J’s police radio squawked. The high-pitched spear-tip of the transmission pierced my ears like an aural-medieval torture device.

            “29-7 to dispatch, dispatch come in.”

            Bala-loop. Bee-deep.

            “Dispatch, go ahead.”

            The cops talked to dispatch in unintelligible cop code about suspicious males and random traffic stops. Grandma J, when home and awake, blared the jarring racket of a world in chaos. The radio even beeped, bleeped, screeched and squawked over the Mets games.

The radio suited her nosy nature, but she also used it to keep tabs on Jim, her favorite son, a cop in the next town over. Jim, the son who daily took Satan to “do his business."

            When quiet, red blips passed from left to right along the bottom of the rectangular box. Then the radio would squeal, the blips would cease, and an emission of danger, potential danger, or an exasperated cop’s report of ghetto dysfunction would assault the ears of the captive audience.

            “Do you have any Halloween candy for the kids, mom?”

            Squawk!

            “Dispatch to 29-7. Report of suspicious male at Northwest corner of 11^th and Atkins.”

            “29-7 to dispatch. 10-4.”

            “I had a few Twix bars, but too many damn kids came to my door this Halloween. Some of them are too damn old to be trick or treating. Nichelly’s son came over here with his friends and he’s at least in High School. His mother doesn’t watch him and she doesn’t have any other damn thing to do all damn day. Perfectly able-bodied and doesn’t want to damn work. She came over yesterday and asked to borrow some milk. I gave it to her, but that’s the last damn time. I have some hard candies if the children want those.”

            Grandma J lifted herself – still strong and spry – from her recliner and walked to the dining room table. She grabbed a handful of swirly red-and-white dinner mints from a glass jar and dropped them in our buckets. A lousy (maybe literally so) treat, but we would not eat them anyway.

For the rest of our time there, my sister and I stood in the background and shuffled in boredom as Grandma J briefed our parents on the latest family gossip: the trivial slights, minor incidents of rudeness, and the many moments when one person may have been inconsiderate of another. In short, we were all updated on how everyone in the family was doing!

  We bid adieu to Grandma J and tip-toed back to the van as inconspicuously as we had exited it.

Just as we were about to back out of the driveway, a Latino man approached our van and signaled us with his right index finger. My mother put the gear shift in park and rolled down the window.

“Hello… Sorry to bother you…”

Fear! Mother had instilled me with a fear of the other! Would he grab, rob, or bite us? Geez, do you now see how that racist bitch had warped my 9-year-old mind?

“No problem,” said my mother.

“Did Elizabeth (Grandma J) say anything to you about my dog?”

“She just told us that Satan wasn’t going outside anymore because she didn’t want him fighting with your dog.”

 “Oh, okay… I haven’t had a chance to talk to her yet, but I just wanted to let you know that we’re keeping our dog inside mornings and nights now. He’s only out now during the afternoon and I know Elizabeth goes to work at the church around that time each day. I know Jim is walking Satan, but he doesn’t have to because I’ll make sure not to let mine out if I see Satan out there.”

He spoke with a twangy clippedness, a jumbled phonemic brevity common to many New World Spanish speakers, Puerto Rican and otherwise. My ear, untrained in linguistics, heard Desert Southwest just as much as it might have picked up Brooklyn, the Bronx, or even Perth Amboy Jersey Dominican (though I did not yet know what Dominicans were, whether monk, ethnicity, or otherwise. Everyone was either Mexican or Puerto Rican and those ethnicities seemed interchangeable to me.)

“Don’t worry about it!” said my mother, lapsing into good-natured phony mode. “You know how Elizabeth is!”

The man looked like a tall, handsome, but just as mustachioed version of Cheech. He wore the blue-collar shirt of an auto body shop. The stitched name on the shirt: Joe. Joe written in cursive letters. Joe or Joe did not seem like a grabber, robber, or biter.

“She’s a strong woman, I know that,” said Joe. Wow! The “other” used euphemisms too!

Joe’s front door opened. Two female figures stepped out and onto Joe’s mums-decorated front porch. Mums? Were we in mayhem or Mayberry?

The first woman was older and, presumably, the mom, the mami (though back then I did not know the popularity of “mami” and “papi” in the Latin community – a term of affection for any person or animal worthy of affection.)

I did not know their last names, so let’s call her Mrs. Joe.

Mrs. Joe looked to be in her mid-30s. 35-40, the very prime of life; the best time for a man to find and settle into his orgy groove. Yes, the HB-HO and Skinemax had given me the idea – and validated by most – that the 30s and 40s are the time to fuck a lot, smoke Camels, and ejaculate brownish tar. By 35-40, men still have all the energy but none of the virginal over-eagerness; women, for their part, have not yet approached the very foothills of a woman’s Himalayan sexual peak. Fuck the “Saturn Return” 20s! The 30s, 40s, and even 50s are the time to fuck and suck a lot. Did Mr. and Mrs. Joe fuck and suck a lot? How often? And how did they do that?

Yes, my young mind was already prurient! Prurient indeed! To think of a fine, respectable “other” woman like Mrs. Joe in that kind of way!

Weren’t they others? Didn’t others fuck? Yes, fucking was primal enough to be done by the others! And the others certainly must have done it more than us! Though Rousseau and Levi-Strauss might have argued that their natural fucking was closer to nature than the white man’s cultural fucking! We fucked on top of harpsichords as Johann Sebastian Bach knocked out his “Concerto in D Minor”! Sophisticated, abstract, Baroque, powdered wig perverted fucking far from the spontaneous and uncomplicated “natural” courtship of the other. I later learned that 98% or minorities are as perverted as us, though some of them find gayness to be “strange” or immoral and others wouldn’t dare to think of a paraphilia like, say, coprophilia.

“Joe,” said Mrs. Joe from the porch. “Did you tell Elizabeth’s family about the other night?”

Mrs. Joe had black, wavy hair that came down just under her pearl-pierced ears. Her face was symmetrically roundish-rectangular (but all the more pretty owing to God’s most sacred geometry) and almost stern (she looked like she could have wacked her kids with a rolling pin.) The sternness of her face made her sexier (as in sexy to the Aleph-Infinity power), but a guileless smile offset the stoniness of her noble face. Her severe brow and narrow eyes suggested she would hit a kid with a choncleta, but her smile said otherwise.

“Oh yeah… About two nights ago my wife heard a noise around 4 o’clock in the morning. We looked out the window and there were two kids on Elizabeth’s front porch. Now I ain’t never seen these kids around the neighborhood before so I went out there with my dog. I chased them down the block and they took right off but I didn’t know what they were up to. I didn’t want to tell Elizabeth, but you all should think of getting a burglar alarm for her. This neighborhood’s been bad lately. Satan’s getting old now and I don’t know how much longer he’s going to be around.”

Sometimes the other beat, bit, and smoked crack and sometimes they protected vulnerable old ladies from street punks. My racist cunt mother never told me about that!

“We’ve been thinking of moving her out,” said my mother.

Bullshit.

She could have moved in with us, I suppose (some say that’s how they do it in an elder-respecting society like China), but that was not going to happen on mother’s watch over hearth and Hell! Grandma J would have to hold on for other arrangements or move into the home of a lonely old widower. Until then she would remain an island of whiteness in a sea of black and brown.

With all this talk of race, racism, others, and othering, we have forgotten the most important person in this scene: the young girl on the porch, the one standing next to Mrs. Joe, a dutiful daughter flanking her mami.

For our purposes here, let’s call her “Joe’s Daughter.”

Joe’s Daughter, Graced by the Graces themselves. But Grace, even when referring to the Graces, is too delicate-sounding a word, too much a quill-scratched trace against the blackboard of Being and not enough of a blunt-faced mallet of sheer beauty to the panting face, one that knocks the male of the species into a welcome oblivion, a timeless cosmic abyss where all paradoxes and contradictions are reconciled in a simultaneous paradox/non-paradox-contradiction/non-contradiction; the beginning and end and the end and beginning of all maths and other structural and non-structural forms and non-forms of Being and Non-Being; the be-all and end-all of nothing and everything and everything and nothing; the ultimate Being beyond what could even be called Being. We’re talking beauty that reminds us of unthinkable – inconceivable – dimensions.

A beautiful – very beautiful – other.

She was even prettier than Danielle (and until that moment I did not know that such a possibility was even possible.)

She looked about Danielle’s age. Perhaps she was a Freshman at Neptune High, where kids got high at school, but on prosaic weed rather than exotic fungus. If her hair looked so good to my sober eye, how would it look under the influence of a psychedelic? Would I see her long (just a bit past her shoulders), black, shiny (almost greasy), curly, kinky, bouquet of hair in its Divine Suchness, just as it is? I didn’t need mushrooms for that! Just pizza mushrooms! Joe’s Daughter and I could cuddle up, eat mushroom pizza, and watch the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies (it was Halloween after all.)

Joe’s daughter looked like this, but even hotter: 

(Though Joe’s Daughter, unlike this babe, wore a conservative, Pentecostal-approved flower dress – and on the most devilish night of the year no less!)

“So, anyway,” continued Joe, but I had ceased to pay attention to him. “I just wanted to let you know that I took care of the dog situation… She can tell Jim…”

A man just slightly handsomer than Cheech had produced a daughter like that? A girl hotter than Danielle…

Wait! Was she really hotter than Danielle? Yes, she was! Oh, was I being disloyal to Danielle? Was I wrong to be disloyal to Danielle aka Dee Dee?

No. I had committed no sin against Danielle aka Dee Dee.

Danielle was “nice to me” and all, but she was one of them. Maybe she was only “nice to me” because I was younger and Myra’s cousin. Would she have been kind toward me if I were her age and unrelated to Myra? She would have likely either ignored me or even made fun of me (Myra sometimes bragged of how she and “Dee Dee” bullied and mistreated classmates who were different or unpopular.)

Joe’s Daughter, unlike Dee Dee, lived in a small house, a modest but well-kept Victorian on Ridge Avenue, the most treacherous part of “The ‘Tune.” She lived in what I then perceived as a dangerous neighborhood. Right then and there at that junction of time and space, fear and eroticism (because a visit to Grandma J’s house and neighborhood meant nothing to me other than danger, darkness, and dinginess) mingled together and formed an engram that would only grow in psychic intensity as the years passed (and the neural charge continues to grow in strength as of this writing.)

Dee Dee, contrariwise, lived at the end of Carter Drive in Wall Township. Her Jew daddy made even more money than my daddy (she had her own in-house sauna and tanning bed for Moses’ sake!) I’m sure she daydreamed of the brand-new Porsche Carrera she would receive on her 17^th birthday. Joe’s Daughter would probably have to work for her used car (though I’m sure her parents would offer humble financial help.)

But I’m falling too deep into socioeconomic-mongering, once again. There were poor kids in my town who were just as popular as Myra and Dee Dee. Mikey O’Brian lived in a tiny, shitbox house, an Alisa-esque bungalow, a plastic Virgin Mary statue on his front lawn. He would have to work for his car too.

But he fit in.

Mikey O’Brian was poor compared to Danielle (Dee Dee.) But he fit in. He just somehow knew the social tricks.

Danielle fucked the Mikey O’Brians in her grade. The rich ones, the poor ones, and all the Mikey O’Brians in-between. Because a Mikey O’Brian (at least in the days of yore) was archetypal. He existed in every suburban school, in every grade, and in every social class. Did they make black Mikey O’Brians? Popular bullies who don’t (in a moral sense) deserve their popularity, but who somehow know how to fit in? Or were social and sexual dynamics more egalitarian in the black and Hispanic community?

They seemed – at my first Fourth Grade glance – more egalitarian.

Joe’s Daughter was not only prettier than Danielle, but she seemed more accessible. Like she would neither look down her nose at me nor treat me as just a cute little kid, a dickless “friend.” The “other” girl had a friendlier face and a sunnier smile. She smiled at us as she stood next to her mami. Danielle only smiled when she was trying to be nice to me (not that I’m ungrateful or looking gift pity in the grin.)

Mami and daughter smiled. Did they see my blackface? Did they also find it amusing? If so, they did not say anything.

Joe’s Daughter smiled extra-wide. A bright sun cut through Samhain shadows.

I would not ask Joe’s Daughter to protect me from aliens. I would protect her from everything. Even black and Puerto Rican boys who were tougher than me. I would be like the chivalrous Charlie Bowdre from the first “Young Guns” film and wrap my coat around Joe’s Daughter, my South of the Border bride. My Senorita. Charlie Bowdre was not as fearless as Billy the Kid, but he was brave enough to fight just as hard.

(I couldn’t find an image of Charlie and his Mexican wife from the film, so I have cut and pasted an historical photo. His wife here looks more like Mrs. Joe than Joe’s Daughter.) 

And so, this was the origin, the seed, the genesis of Latina Monomania; a quark that would grow to the oak of obsession.

When I first saw Alisa (in Sophomore year Math class) she was not just a “fat Mexican from West Belmar” (though, in my then-newfound arrogance, I might have initially and consciously thought her so.) Rather, my subconscious was activated at the first sight of her.

The Obsessive Oak of Latina Monomania was a wee seedling upon my first encounter with Alisa. Not only did I not yet differentiate between Mexican and Puerto Rican, but I still had feelings for white women (oh, the insanity!)

By Sophomore year the tree-like Latina Monomaniacal framework was there but very green; ready to sprout the darling buds of May, but pure, young, simple, and completely unguarded against the forest fire and subsequent deep freeze that would be Alisa.