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Man Alive. Thomas Page McBee
Читать онлайн.Название Man Alive
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781786890894
Автор произведения Thomas Page McBee
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
prologue
South Carolina
August 2010 ♦ 29 years old
What makes a man?
It’s not that I haven’t studied them: their sinew, their slang, their beautiful bristle; but before I was held at gunpoint on a cold April day, I couldn’t have told you.
A real man, a family man, the Marlboro man, man up.
The man in the mirror.
I loved that Michael Jackson song, growing up. Used to forget my girl-hips, used to sing it to my best imagination of myself.
What makes a man? The need to know led me to my father’s hometown in hot-damp South Carolina. The story starts there because that’s where I went when I could no longer afford to leave the question alone, to let it rear up every few years, when I’d had too much to drink and it was just me and my reflection and my hungry ghosts. And so I steered my rental through the swampy South with my cap pulled low. I had that teen-boy swagger, scars like smiles across my chest, and a body I was just beginning to love.
But the story also begins the night I almost died, back in April of 2010. And in 1985, when my father became a monster, and in 1990 when my mom found out he was one.
“Men,” she’d said then. And I’d learned to say it the same way, a lemon in my mouth.
In South Carolina I could smell it through my open window: alligators and secrets; the embers of Sherman’s march, the Klu Kux Klan, my father’s farm, burning. It smelled like my animal fear and the spicy deodorant I used to cover it.
Men, I thought with that old bitterness, but I already knew my body was shifting. In fact that’s why I was there.
A good man is hard to find.
The windshield blurred; the road was inky, the rain biblical. The cheap motel off the highway seemed like not such a hot idea after I passed my fifth gun-racked pick-up, but there wasn’t any turning back.
Once a body is in motion, it stays in motion. My mom’s a physicist; she told me that.
The truth is, this is a ghost story. No, this is an adventure story.
This is an adventure story about how I quit being a ghost.
I Freeze
1
Oakland
April 2010 ♦ 29 years old
Here’s what you need to know about Parker: she hummed with a magic that vibrated her long strides, her quick-wit, her dressings-down. Though softened by Southern manners, her mood could turn sharp as a knife’s edge, and it wasn’t too hard to find yourself on the sticking side of it. I’d seen her make a cat-caller wither and call a real dick of a roommate a piece of shit, repeatedly, until he just sort of disappeared, his stuff packed and gone within the month.
It was like loving a hurricane.
That night she was wound-up, the plastic bag with a new pair of shoes tossed over her shoulder. We’d spent the day in San Francisco, bumming around and seeing a play neither of us cared much for—something about three generations of women—it felt like those sorts of plays were always about three generations of women. As we left the BART station and headed to our neighborhood in Oakland, Parker outlined her issue with associating women with domesticity in the sort of hilariously acidic free-association tirade she’d go on just for kicks.
She was in her French New Wave phase, and it suited her: short hair, shirts thick with nautical stripes. She looked like Jean Seberg in Breathless, her blue eyes big as saucers. She could be merciless in her assessments, but beneath that lay a kindness so clear it was almost painful to observe. I squeezed her hand, and she startled into holding my gaze.
“What?” she asked.
I shook my head. Six years in, she knew.
Mostly, she was a smart-ass. “I have an opinion on everything,” she’d say.
“How about whales?” I’d ask.
“Love them! Key to the ecosystem; smart.”
I’d try to think of the most innocuous, boring subject. “Row houses?”
“Depressing in brick, cute in wood.”
Parker also had strong opinions about walking home so late at night, and I knew why: our friend who discovered a man under her bed, our friend who was bound to a chair during a home invasion, our friend who got punched in the face in broad daylight for no good reason.
That night was the worst kind of foggy: you could