The Study of Human Life

Trash I All the men I loved were dead-beats by birthright or so the legend went. The ledger said threeout of every four of us were destined for a cell or leadshells flitting like comets through our heads. As a boy,my mother made me write & sign contracts to expressthe worthlessness of a man's word. Just like your father,she said, whenever I would lie, or otherwise warp the historicalrecord to get my way. Even then, I knew the link between me& the old man was pure negation, bad habits, some awfulhyphen filled with blood. I have half my father's face & not a measure of his flairfor the dramatic. Never once have I prayed & had another man's wifewail in return. Both burden & blessing alike, it seemed, this beauty he carriedlike a dead doe. No one called him Father of the Year. But come wintertime, he would wash& cocoa butter us until our curls shone like lodestone, bodies wrapped in three layersof cloth just to keep December's iron bite at bay. And who would have thoughtto thank him then? Or else turn & expunge the record, given all we knownow of war & its unquantifiable cost, the way living through everyone around youdying kills something elemental, ancient. At a certain point, it all comes backto survival, is what I am saying. There are men he killed to becomethis man. The human brain is a soft gray cage. He doesn't know what elsehe can do with his hands. II The Knicks were trash. Head coldsat the outset of a South Bronx summer: trash. The second hour after she is gone,the moment the song you both used to slow -dance through the kitchenetteto comes on, moving on: all trash. Death is trash. Love is a robust engagementwith the trash of another. Monthly bills of any kind are trash,although access to gas and electricity is not, so there is that to consider.Blackouts are incontrovertibly trash. Much like student loans, or the factthat we live in a culture of debt such that one must always be behind to make some semblanceof what our elders might have called living. My friends often state in the midst of otherwiseloving group chat missives that life is trash, though we all keep trying to make one for some reasonor another, and the internet says my friends are trash, that black men and boys are trash, and it makes me thinkof the high Germanic roots of garbage-which is perhaps the first cousin of trash-that part of the animalone does not eat, and we are sort of like that, no? Modernity's refuse, disposable fleshand spectacular failure, fuel and fodder, corpses abundant as the trashon the floor of the world. Aging is trash. I am years past thirty nowand so any further time qualifies as statistical anomaly,you can't expect good results with bad data, trashin, trash out, they say, and I'm really just searchingfor better, more redemptive language is the thing,some version of the story where all the charactersinside look like me and every single one of us escapeswith our heads. III Saturdays, it was my job to pick the bonesfrom cans of fish which became the unwieldy piles of pink flesh that, once fried, became the cakeswe ate for dinner that night, breakfast the next day, dinner again to close the loop. Decades passedbefore I saw the beast in real time, realized, like Baldwin- who once saw his mother lift a yard of velvet, saythat is a good idea, and for months thought ideas were shocks of black fabric-that salmon lived outsidethe bounds of Foodtown shelves we searched for deals in the early '90s,supermarket circulars held tight in our too-small hands, armamentsagainst American cost. Older now, a literary type with insuranceto boot, I tell you this story at our kitchen table, unsure of whatI am trying to convey, exactly. Something about the flexiblenature of human knowledge, perhaps: a speed course in semioticsover poached eggs. Or maybe some version of the same taleI am always telling, that the wall between the world & megrew weaker once I left what I loved. Childrenof the poor, their small words & smaller sense of scale.Back then, life on Earth was Yonkers, NY,& my grandmother's salon. Every leather-bound bookwas a Word of God. And there I was, an affront to history, creative, evenin my ignorance, sketching planets in the air as my big sister sang soul outsidemy bedroom window, her voice like something ancient and winged,pulling summer into being.