Grave New World

I watched a disturbing film the other night in which a British photographer, mourning the death of his teenage son, takes revenge on one of the local gang members who has been terrorizing his alcoholic grieving existence with acts of violence.   In the end, there is a bizarre twist and change of heart…. it was difficult to watch.

So many of my friends 'forgot' to have children.  It could have happened to me; I was sailing through a relatively self-centered existence when I found myself unexpectedly pregnant.  At first it seemed a little 'conceptual'… not much change in my day-to-day.  I ignored it, denied it… and suddenly in my 5th month or so, I thought I was miscarrying.  In the ER, the Drs. scolded me a little for my callow attitude.  It was a hot summer night; walking downtown I began to acknowledge that I was carrying life, and by the time I got home, I was teary and praying.  Cricket, I called the baby-- because that's how it had felt… don't leave me, Cricket.  I got on my knees by the bed and begged my version of God to give me a chance.  Next day I began eating well, frying liver for lunch-- making better choices… talking to my child silently, singing-- chanting, whispering in the dark, sending internal messages and listening.

I'd never felt this sort of intimacy before… I even dreaded the separation of birth, but that turned out to be another revelation.  How could anything, anyone… be so perfect and fascinating-- so miraculously lovely and infinitely compelling?  Instincts kick in… protection, love, compassion, empathy… the utter dependence and trust of an infant… the complete fulfillment of maternal devotion.  The smallest discomfort is a challenge-- a pain or illness is your own wound… you will lie down in front of cars for this being, give up blood and organs, sacrifice all creature comforts for a train set.

As they grow and separate further, you obsess over their daily absences and little independent lives-- you worry, pace, long and miss.  Their sweaty face after a ballgame is like celestial radiance.  Their victories are joy, their losses are devastating failures.  My son had a seriously trying teenage spell.  Arrests, troubles, suspensions-- he was cooler than cool, gangsta-tough, but so vulnerable.  I spent scores of sleepless nights; days were worse.  An illness or flu which kept him in bed --- my only respite.  There were panics and police visits… one night where I had a terrorizing call from a weeping mate of his who informed me after many minutes of distress that he was in jail.  My relief was beyond anything I'd ever felt; for a moment I was sure he'd been killed.  That moment-- the paralyzing, gut-shaking wrench of perceived loss-- taught me something about the impact of this kind of news.  The emotional range between life and death-- is massive.

Recent acts of terror-- the relentless sequential delivery of statistics and details-- have stacked up into a skin-thickening coat of familiarity.  In countries of civil distress, violence and death are a fact of life.  In New York, we live with daily shootings, muggings, elevator shaft accidents, crane collapses and drownings.  Domestic abuse, rape, cruelty and gang wars, concert violence and pediatric cancer-- heartbreak and suffering, neglect and wheelchairs.  We read, we watch news, we speak of it… we cry at movies, at ASPCA commercials, at sad songs and when our boyfriends or husbands stray.  But when I hear and see recent news of these mass killings, I think only of how every tragedy everywhere has a mother, a father… how the very possibility of my own child being taken from me is beyond any tolerable grief.  Unbearable:  this is the operative word.  We have all lost parents, friends, husbands… but our own child-- the thing we created and nurtured and carried as our own-- this is an unfathomable hole.  In the moment where I misunderstood that phone call, so long ago… I experienced the unbearable… and have never fully recovered.  I don't know how the parents of the Trayvon Martins and the Eric Garners-- of every single child in the Orlando incident, in the Paris incidents-- Nice-- the shopping malls, the schools and movie theaters-- of 9/11-- how they can go on.  I have seen them go on,  with varying paths of bravery-- some wanting revenge, some choosing forgiveness and mercy, some using medications or alcohol, seeking some peace or cause to fill part of their 'hole'… some discovering nothing but suicide relieves the pain.

Looking back to our own childhoods, so many of us find them lacking; possibly my own son will dis his childhood-- after all, he grew up without a father.  My own father the hero failed to protect me.  Times were different, he was not a natural parent, and he missed things-- people who wait in the wings to take advantage of children's innocence-- bad people.  We grow up and must learn to cope with these violations.  Some people hoard possessions to compensate for things they missed-- they collect lovers to try to forget their own neglect-- they seek new pain to purge that which someone inflicted on them.

But we devoted parents-- who take a vow every single moment-- for our babies, for our toddlers and adolescents-- for our naughty, bratty budding gangsters and our angelic young men with sparkles in their eyes--  we swear we will not let these things happen to our children.  We speak gently to them-- we touch them with tenderness,  we listen to their tiny terrors and bad dreams, we dry their tears, we cheer them on and share their defeats and try hard to give them some independence and core while we fight for their innocence and defend them with all we are.

And then there is a random train ride… or a subway psycho… a black plastic bag underneath their foot… an assault weapon at a rock concert-- a plane crash during a happy vacation… rifles in a classroom.  How do we process this, we careful, passionate, doting parents?  Every single senseless murder and death is a tragedy of incalculable proportion-- a catastrophic event-- a searing, ripping, unsealing pain that scars over only temporarily but opens like an unhealed wound with every memory.  Statistics are a leveling, distant thing… but death and grief are relentless bedfellows.  The dream of gravestones, of blood and tears and the remembered joy of birth-- how does one reconcile these things, how does anyone go on from such a gatepost?

The end of the film-- the hideous staging of revenge-- and the victim was clearly a perpetrator of heinous evil-- provided nothing but further grief, twisted non-closure, the sick panicky epiphany of regret, of human frailty and the utter fragility of even the roughest child-- of the line between death and life.   And the power of the crossing only reminds us that all this violence has a kickback-- a reaction, a consequence-- a hideous rippling brushfire effect--- and how the sorrow from an unnatural, premeditated murder or random death-- for the mothers-- gentle or tough--  is an utterly crippling, indelible life sentence.

Blurred Lines

I’ve been thinking since Saturday about race.  About how perfect black men look in a white T-shirt.  About how people in Harlem wait patiently for long minutes for a bus to take them maybe 5 or 10 blocks.  About not really complaining about the heat the way white people do. About why I swipe in black teenagers at subway turnstiles because they don’t say thank you.  They don’t even look at you.  Gratitude in a situation like this is unbearable.  A deterrent.

Last night I was on a packed uptown 2 at midnight and a great looking black woman had her maybe 18-month-old kid in a stroller.  Big enough to know what he wants, but not to ask for it.  Still has that baby mouth pout.  No chance is she going to fold this thing up, as per regulations, nor is anyone going to ask her.  She has gang tattoos and her midsection is bare.  She is wearing short shorts and Nikes and is buff and sexy and tough and her kid is yelling his head off because it is claustrophobic and he is at knee-level, strapped in, surrounded by sweaty tall people.  She doesn’t even flinch.  I am waving and playing peek-a-boo with him, and he is trying hard, but he can’t help panicking.  After all, when you are 18 months old, every moment is permanent, for all you know.  No one is telling him it will get better at 125^th Street; his mother is a tigress.  So this guy gets on the train… clean white wifebeater, tattoos, Daddy B shades… takes his earbuds out and puts them in the kids’ ear, hands over his iphone….finds some U.E.O.N.O….whatever… the kid is frozen… dead quiet.  No pacifier, no snow-cone or lollipop could do this.  3 stops later, he is getting off and takes back the iphone.  The mother?  She doesn’t flinch.  No eye-contact, no gratitude.  For me?  The good-hearted sympathetic middle-aged mothery white lady?  I get up and she gives me the smallest version of a smile…maybe not.  Anyway, I give one to her.  She is my idol of the moment.

Maybe it’s because I married a black man once---  but I don’t fear thugs.  I can’t get enough of them—the physical beauty, the style— what it represents-- -the ultimate tough soldier-macho thing… the obvious appeal Hip-Hop has for rich white kids.  No matter how much money they have, no matter how much power or success, how many women, how big their dick is--- white kids don’t walk in the hood alone after midnight.  But there is a certain safety that comes with middle age… no one is leering at me on trains, licking their lips in bad neighborhoods, touching and threatening.  I’m invisible. 

The young guys in my local Starbucks… sweet and attentive, hard-working and polite.  When I see them on the street, with their aprons off and their hoodies on—a different animal.  My husband pre-dated Hip-Hop.  Yes, he was a musician, and yes, white women threw themselves at him because he was dangerous.  Yes, he rocked my world literally.  Sometimes I could look at him objectively—after he went running with his dreadlocks and his glistening body—and I could appraise his physical power, his total composure and refusal to get upset or neurotic the way white men do.  Except when he played soccer, he slowed things down.  Easier to admire his wild and instinctual MO when I am not married to him, as these men in the white T-shirts, for the most part, do not seem like conventional good-husband material.  They seem unattached and unphased… life is there, in the moment. 

It took a bullying twisted cowardly asshole with a gun to get a child like Trayvon to scream.  And wasn’t that enough?  To get a scream out of him?  A little blood?  He didn’t run, that boy.  He fought the odds.  I can’t get it out of my head.  All the great sex he will not have—who knows what was on his mind before his life took that hellish turn and some sick perverted non-black man who knows he will never ‘get it’ decided the thrill of some primal hunt would ‘make his day’, would turn back a racial clock that didn’t need rewinding. 

Sunday evening I stopped by Union Square.  My demonstrating days are way over, and I can’t say I took any comfort in the company of a mixed crowd who were equally angry and sad.   Instead I took a train up to Harlem… walked around.  It felt calm and solid.  White people are guests there.  It is its own kind of gated community.  I actually stopped to watch a neighborhood basketball game in one of the community courts, with the blaring boombox and the Gatorade and the girls primping and laughing, just like Florida didn’t exist.  An outsider in the Projects.  At first I had a few stares—what the fuck was I doing, some white bleeding heart psycho… but it was too hot.  Some grandmother actually offered me  Kool-aid in a Dixie cup.  The game was fun… the boys had their shirts rolled up to cool off their great young abs and each and every player had their own style.  They were safe here.  Everyone seemed okay. Calm. 

I walked back thinking how some white people still fear black people.  Instinctively---are they taught this?  Like animals and their natural predators?  And black people embraced this, for a while… being perceived as the predator.  But now the President is black (well… almost)… and maybe Superman,  and some of the power-broker people in New York, and white rich kids of course take most of their fashion and music cues from uptown.  But most of all, I think the core of being cool is to not be afraid, and that’s what George Zimmerman will never admit, along with his primal murderous guilt: that any average black kid--- with his iphone and his body--- is cooler than he could ever be, and no violent victory or acquittal will ever make a champion out of a poor pathetic loser.  Don’t retract your words, Victor Cruz.  Your instinct was right.  Fierce you are.  Fierce you were, Trayvon.  Trayvon I was.   May you rest in oblivious peace but justice will at some point have to be done.