Pippen

There are no curtains on my kitchen window, so I people watch.

There’s a couple who live in a basement apartment across the street. Every saturday morning, they walk their two dogs; one a Husky, the other a black labrador. Bombarded by the scents, sounds, and sights of the outside world, the dogs work themselves into a frenzy in the couple’s makeshift courtyard, forcing their owners to double and triple wrap the leashes around their hands and wrists to maintain control of their “babies.” I watch as “Dog dad” wags a finger dripping with stern severity towards the dogs, imagine him using words like “sit” and “stay,” and am impressed with the speed and frigidity of the dogs compliance to the commands. After a moment, “Dog mom” reaches into her jacket and pulls out treats she feeds to their dogs in recognition of their good behavior and obedience. This makes me think of Pavlov. I think he would be proud.

This makes me think of a bedroom in Brooklyn. This bedroom doesn’t belong to me, but this morning, as was the case for the entirety of last night, I am the Guest of Honor. We lay together, my host and I. Her head is resting on my chest as my fingers dance up and down her spine delicately. Whenever they pause, she nudges me with her elbow, and my fingers, obedient little digits that they are, resume their trek up and down the length of her back. This shouldn’t matter, but my host is a white woman who sees color and doesn’t pretend this world is anything better than what it has proven to be, but even she isn’t above her appropriations.

The night before this moment, before she is “gracious host” or “naked host,” we are standing at the front door of her home as she fumbles in her bag for her keys. A sign has been artfully taped to the door that reads “UBUNTU.” I know I’ve seen this word before, but I can’t remember what it means. I know the word is African somehow but don’t find much more than that in my personal database. A struggle begins in my mind between my natural curiosity, which desperately wants to ask what the word means, and my pride; pride that abhors learning black culture through a white lens. A moment after my mental tussle, I decide to ask anyway. As she’s looking for her keys, I seize the moment and drop the question.

“Ubuntu, it’s one of those words I’ve read before, but never had to say out loud. I had an ex once. We went to a concert and she pronounced ‘bass,’ ‘bass,’ y’know, like the fish? She’d only ever read the word, so she… shit, I’m rambling aren’t I? Anyways, what does it mean?”

She smiles at me, but doesn’t answer my question. Instead, she poses one herself.

“What do you think it means?”

“No Idea.” I reply, annoyed at her question following my own.

“Didn’t you say you were really smart?” she asks, smirking.

“I did.”

“But you won’t take a guess?”

“Why guess when you can tell me?”

“Why tell you when you can guess?”

I stand there in silence with a thousand answers to her question, none of which I share with her, all of which insulting, waiting for her to open the front door.

I am in the bedroom. My fingers pause their adventures over the valleys and peaks of her back as I think about the exchange at the door. She nudges me, and with her pop quiz now at the forefront of my mind, I realize I am not her Tiger, and she, she is not my Mary Jane.

“Listen,” I say, “If you’re going to insist on behaving like Pavlov, the reward needs to be more than the bony end of your elbow.”

She is absolutely shocked I know who Pavlov is and voices her concern at my truly basic knowledge of psychology. Leaning into me, in a hushed and worried voice as if I’ve just spoken ill of Christ in church, she asks,

“So you know who Pavlov is, but not what ‘Ubuntu’ means?”

“Yeah,” I reply, shifting uncomfortably, “so?”

“I just think it’s odd, is all.”

She thinks “it’s odd, is all,” but I looked up Ubuntu. Means compassion and humanity in South African; I think that’s a beautiful message. However, when it comes to how the world operates according to what I’ve seen? Things have a tendency to move much more along the lines of Pavlov’s conditioning than Ubuntu’s compassion.

But anyway, there are no curtains on my kitchen window, so I people watch.

Across the street, there are three buildings side by side with matching awnings. I envy their front-facing fire escapes and red brick facades. In comparison, my building sits on the corner of my block at the bottom of a hill. Sometimes, people piss in the vestibule between the security doors of the entrance; the super never shovels or puts rock salt down for the snow; once a year a betting man can make a bundle if he puts money on the pipes bursting, with 2:1 odds on the heat in the building not showing up until the second half of winter as a decent side bet; the buildings mice show no respect, scurrying in through the crack in my front door while I’m entertaining guests of the female persuasion. The traps I set don’t work and I’m not allowed to own a cat.

However, I can see Yankee Stadium from my window, a subtle reminder that home, and therefore my heart, is only a stone throw away, and in the springtime, the park across the street explodes green, obscuring the stadium from view as the trees wake from their hibernation, heralding the return of wildlife to Highbridge Park. For three years running, I’ve watched this resurgence with joy as the world plays with the gifts the gods have given.

Still, the buildings across the street are beautiful by surrounding area standards, and all are near full capacity. People come and go at all hours on such a regular basis, I begin crafting stories for them. Nothing overly elaborate, one-minute tales for my own amusement to pass the time. It is during my fourth story involving a woman being chased by a faceless boogeyman that I begin to notice a strange pattern. Men and Women do not enter buildings the same way.

Where men get to the front door of their building and scrounge around in their pockets for their keys until they find them, women, almost everyone I observe, have their keys in hand when they arrive at the door to their building. When men enter their buildings, rarely do they look back when they’re alone. Women not only look back over their shoulders, but make sure the door is closed and locked behind them before turning and entering into their buildings. Every time.

I think about this. About the people in the world who are forced to live looking over their shoulders to ensure their own safety, and I wonder; In a woman’s book of life, what chapter covers the ugly of the world, the dangers in it, and how both can wreak havoc on the unsuspecting? What chapter ends the carelessness of youth? In what chapter do we explain to our daughters that we truly believe they can do anything and deserve a world that lets them have a go at it safely, but won’t extend that belief to the daughters of our neighbors? In what chapter do we let them know we will fail them, blame them, judge them, and vilify them to appease our own phallus fallacies of what they should be? I don’t have the answers, but then, I’ve never been blessed with daughters. I know I’ve done my fair share to spread the false gospel of that chapter myself, projecting my own demons onto women I professed love for, and hope sincerely that I do more than the lion’s share in atonement going forward for the beliefs I held true. Not because I have a sister, or had a mom, or have nieces. But because plainly put, that chapter is wrong and in need of a drastically overdue rewrite.

I am with my son. We are on the train traveling into the city on one of our “Father/Son” adventures. My son and I don’t talk much; there have been one too many lengthy stretches where we didn’t talk at all, and I’m convinced, in his eyes, I am just a stranger who takes up quality time on his Sundays he’d much rather use playing Fortnite with his friends. But we do bond over superheroes, proof that there are perks in refusing to stop believing in selflessness.

The train snakes steadily towards the heart of the city as he reads an X-Men comic on my tablet, stopping occasionally to pull knowledge from the history of comics in my head to add into his own. He tells me he likes the X-Men because they all look different. There’s a blue beast; an Asian girl named Husk; a powerful African weather wizard named Storm; a short, belligerent Canuck named Wolverine who is the best there is at what he does, but to be fair, what he does isn’t very nice, with the list being updated every few seconds to include another hero.

I’m disappointed Gambit doesn’t enter his personal gallery of X-Men greats, but enjoy his breakdowns of each character and am glad that he sees anyone can be a hero, anyone can do the right thing, stand up for people who are in a position to be hurt or taken advantage of, and that anyone can help. And I hope the kid understands that he can be that anyone.

I tell him, in my excitement, that the X-Men are supposed to represent a fight against prejudices people have towards others simply because they don’t understand their differences, or scarier because they do understand. My son, like me, isn’t afraid to ask when he doesn’t know what things mean, and immediately follows my comic book history lesson with a question.

“What’s a prejudice?” He asks.

It is the first time I realize I have to tell him something ugly about the world that he

doesn’t know. I, having no father myself, have shaped my views on a lot of life’s issues alone and am always nervous that what I share as “wisdom” will do more harm than good. I want to drop the subject, but the pages in the book of our relationship have turned into this chapter, and it’s important to me that he knows the meaning of the word before ever feeling the sting of it. Besides, the world will not care in the slightest if the scamp knows what prejudice is or not when putting it into practice. I steel myself, take my tablet from his hands to monopolize his attention, and do my best to answer his question.

“Prejudice,” I say,  “is when a magoo dislikes something about you, usually something you 

have no control over, and uses that dislike to make your life harder.”

“What’s a magoo?”

“A magoo? Y’know, a magoo, a mook, a schmuck, a Charlie Brown?”

“Charlie Brown is a prejudice?” He asks confused.

“It’s not ‘a prejudice,’ Scamp, just prejudiced. And no, Charlie Brown isn’t prejudiced, Charlie Brown is a loser; a mook is a stupid person, so’s a schmuck, and a magoo is more of the same.”

“You’re using a lot of words.”

“Well, prejudice takes a lot of forms. The point is this, if you think someone is a cool person, I hope it will always be because they are kind. If you think someone is a shitball, I hope it’s because they’re unkind. If you think they’re uncool because of, for example, how they dress without knowing them, you’re acting with prejudice, and then you're a Magoo. There aren’t any magoos in the X-Men. Does that make sense?”

I think I may have bombarded the scamp with too much information on this front. He stares at me with a look of confusion briefly as if he has another question, but after a moment, snatches my tablet from my hands, shifts his attention back to it, and continues to read. I don’t press the issue. As the train continues its descent into the heart of Manhattan, I can’t help but think I’ve done a piss-poor job of explaining the idea of prejudice to him. But then, maybe the difficult conversations to all of our children get easier if we’re better people.

Anyways, there are no curtains on my windows, so I people watch.

I live in an “exercise-y” neighborhood. People leave their homes in their most sweat absorbent gear, the soldier’s uniform in a battle against old age and death. This makes me think about denial. That makes me think about my stepfather.

At 50, smart men come to accept their losing the war with time. Not my stepfather. Every other Sunday like clockwork, he could be found in my Grandmother’s bathroom, hair dye covering his head, a towel covered in angry black blotches wrapping his shoulders, fighting against the inevitable. In the mornings before work, he’d put on what I believed was a bulletproof vest for years before heading into the outside world. This was a never-ending source of confusion for me. Why put on a vest to go sit in an office? Only after watching Cinderella one day as a teenager did I realize he was actually wearing a corset. To his credit, it was quite slimming.

This makes me think of the Magnificent Seven. In the original, an aging gunslinger named Lee, played by the remarkable Robert Vaughn, laments the loss of his once lightning reflexes after swiping at two flies on a bartop and only catching one. Lee, known throughout the Americas as the most dangerous man to ever draw breath, has secretly grown cowardly because of his diminished skills, protected only by the pile of bodies he’s amassed throughout his life. In his mind, his best days are behind him and the last thing Lee wants is to be killed by someone he knows wouldn’t be able to take a shot if he were in his prime. But primes don’t last.

This thought enters my mind a lot. The speed in which this next seven years will pass. The decline of my physical prowess. Growing old. I tell myself it’s irrational, fearing the inevitable, but right now, as my good friend Brian will attest, I can swipe both flies. I can still be faster than those stronger than me, and stronger than those faster. If neither is in my favor, I think about my cunning and still, I like my chances. But in the words of the great Robert Frost, nothing gold can stay.

Someday I’ll be a step too late, a tad too weak, with wit too slow to save me. On that day, I hope for something straight out of Lee’s playbook. In a scene that I’m convinced gives the movie the label of “magnificent,” Lee enters a house filled with bandits who are using hostages as cover, and with finesse completely gets his gun off. He kills every bandit inside before being murdered exiting the house. If that’s a result of only catching one fly? Well, I still like my chances.

There are no curtains on my window, so I people watch. At 5 AM, societies working class make their way, coffee in hand, to destinations that surely under pay and overwork them. They are up before the sun arrives, back after it has gone, and miserable through all points in between. I watch from above as they walk, head down, music up in their headphones, and imagine them hoping the day won’t put a damper on their lives.

I am in a meeting with selfish, inferior minds and my annoyance is at peak levels. Having sliced the middle finger of my right hand open earlier in the day, the last thing I want to be doing is discussing money with people who only see me as a means to their ends.

I say, “Twelve cents off the dollar is ridiculous.”

I say, “Everyone else is thinking it, but I’m going to come right out and say it.” 

I say, “You’re giving pay bumps lower than the annual New York inflation rate, putting us behind before the New Year even begins.”

I say, “What’s the point of an evaluation if you’re going to give the best of us the same pay bump as the worst of us?”

I say all this from a position of power. Not power in rank, mind you, but performance. Consistently I’m one of the best at my position, be it knowledge of said position or execution of the work. I say all of this for nothing.

They say, “We’re looking into it.”

They say, “We share your concerns.”

They say, “We have plans to work on this in the next calendar year.”

They say all of this from a power position; with comfortable paychecks and overlord mindsets; with no desire to investigate how fair or unfair the system they have in place is; with eyes staring at someone replaceable. And I sit there, applying pressure to my ravaged finger, realizing they’re not saying anything at all. My only hope for fulfillment in this world that will use me up, smiling the whole time, is my escape plan. My only escape plan is pen and paper. There is nothing left to say here.

Still, there are no curtains on my kitchen window, so I people watch.

In the springtime, love is in the air. For me, this means Len. She is beautiful in the ways that should matter to all of us; direct, honest, kind. And all the ways that matter to my eyes; raven-haired, hazel eyed, lithe and slender as a ballet dancer. The Great Muse in the age of Pippen.

We met at two very similar chapters in our personal books of love. Mine entitled, It's definitely me, let's not make this weird; Hers, Bouncing Back, Rebounding after Fuckboys. Both of us, I think, were looking for proof that love doesn’t have to be a shit show, or a nonstop exercise in making things more complicated than they need to be. Two jaded people desperately trying to prove they weren’t.

Her kitchen became a monument to voyeurism, as we, naked as the moments we came into this world, enjoyed each other carnally at all hours of the day. You see, there were no curtains on her window, so I know people watched. I like to think that Len wanted the world to see that if it insisted on trying to screw her over, sometimes she’d enjoy it. For my part, I wasn’t thinking that deeply. In all things I excel at, I’d prefer an audience. Suffice to say, no one was springing for curtains.

Len and I hiked trails that led to nowhere, danced salsa in the shadows of skyscrapers, and spent weekend mornings sipping coffee in bed; alternating between reading, talking, and warm silences.

I fell in love with her. A love that wasn’t mired in complication, but not without it’s strings. After a decade long relationship, Len didn’t expect to find herself in another relationship. She didn’t expect anything more than a tryst. She most certainly didn’t expect to love me back. Two people falling, desperately trying to pretend we were too adult for childish butterflies; as if matters of the heart are reserved for the children of the world. But then, we are all children of the world.

We are in my living room. Len is wearing an expression I’ve begun to equate with bad news.

“Jerrald,” she begins, nervousness etched into the beauty of her face, “I don’t want to hurt you but--”  I raise my hand to cut her off.

“Stop. I didn’t expect this, but you don’t have to do this.”

“This? What’s ‘this?’” She asks confused.

“This conversation. The ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’ I hate the parts of a breakup, wait, you’re breaking up with me, correct?”

“Well, yes.”

“Okay, then, yeah. I hate the parts of these things where we blame ourselves for why we’re ending it.”

“But it is my fault.” she insists.

“Look, I’m not going to argue, there’s no point in this moment. Know that in my life, you’ve been a blessing, but in my life, these things don’t last, so it’s better if we don’t go in-depth. Instead, let me say I love you, I loved the time we’ve spent together, and you’ll be missed.”

She stares at me intently for a moment before asking sheepishly, “Friends?”

“Len, you know, and more importantly, I know, that ‘friends’ is now and will forever be, the shittiest consolation prize this side of the little plastic dinosaurs they give children for two tickets at amusement parks.” I smile weakly so she knows I don’t mean it aggressively before continuing, “What I can promise is this, if I ever see you on the street, you’ll never be a stranger.”

I say all of this while taking her hands and leading her to the front door. She manages a laugh, realizing I’ve timed our final moment together perfectly, unlocking the front door as the promise is delivered.

“Is it wrong of me to tell you I’m impressed with how well you’re taking this?” she asks, stepping out into the hallway.

“Naw, I understand. You’ve read my book.” I respond nonchalantly. “But a lot has changed since then.”

“Care to share?” she asks.

“Mainly, my understanding that it really isn’t you,” I say this closing the door, bracing myself for a spiral into loneliness.

Still, there are no curtains on my window, so if people watch me, I’d like them to

understand what they’re seeing.

At 33, here’s what I know. We are all of us assholes. Don’t take offense, that’s myself included. All of us look out at the world and judge it based on the experiences we’ve had in the lives we’ve led. We take our wins, our losses, our hopes, our dreams, and our nightmares, grow into ourselves, and then move through the world judging people, in comparison to ourselves; people who’ve grown into themselves with differing nightmares, dreams, hopes, losses, and wins, as if they’re the ones with the malfunction. The secret is, we’re all malfunctioning.

While looking out at the world, it’s important for us to remember that there are 7 billion ways to partake in this human experience and not one of these experiences can be classified as “the right way to do it.” Anyone who tells you otherwise, isn’t telling you any truth worth knowing, and all I’m telling you is this- Everyone of us shares a lot more in common than we know, to see these things, it’s really as simple as taking the curtains off of your window.