M-Dreem sort of rolls his eyes and looks away, and he can’t really bring himself back to the here and now after that. He wishes he had a blunt. As he often does when he’s uncomfortable, he thinks about the snapshot with its date stamp: 04/14/1984. The short, pudgy, goofy-looking Dominicana thinking she’s fly with the Sheila E. asymmetrical haircut and the studded leather jacket, the lace leggings under the denim mini and the high heels, big dark eyes darting just to the left of the camera’s gaze, one arm up on the shoulder of that gay-looking moreno with the boom box on the ground under his left high-top. Damn. M-Dreem can’t believe there was ever a time in New York City called the 1980s; how could he have missed that shit, Basquiat and Haring and Fab 5 Freddy and all the rest? But miss it he did. He was born in 1992.
At least his grandma, his bubbe, told him about the woman in the picture, the woman who gave birth to him, Ysabel, who died of AIDS before he was old enough to have a memory of her. Bubbe fought for the AIDS people alongside Ysabel, and Bubbe took care of Ysabel at Bubbe’s special home for women with AIDS when Ysabel was pregnant with him, then after, right up to her death.
“Issy went from being a scared girl from Queens who didn’t want anybody to know she had AIDS,” Bubbe told him once, “to an amazing activist and fighter. And she had you! And I told her I’d make sure you were taken care of and loved.” Bubbe stroked back his hair. “Do you think I did an okay job?”
He smiled. “I think you did okay,” he told her. He loved his Bubbe, the loud, strong, pushy Ava, who got things done fast. Ava wasn’t all soft-spoken and mushy like her daugher. That is, his mother.
Bubbe had told him all this when he was twelve, “old enough to fully understand,” as his parents put it. He’d felt better knowing that Ysabel had been able to accomplish things before she died and hadn’t lived a totally sad life. But he thought a lot about that disco-party boom-box side of her, too. The Sheila E. side. The side that looked a bit like a good-time party ho.
“She didn’t know who my real father was?” he asked Bubbe.
She sighed, stroking his hair more. “She got really lonely and scared sometimes and she reached out to different places for love,” Bubbe said.
He was old enough at that point to read between her lines. Nobody knew who his real father was. He could’ve been anybody. He was embarrassed to feel tears, hot tears of shame, pool in his eyes.
“Now, hey,” Bubbe clucked, holding him by the chin. “That man was handsome, whoever he was. That’s obvious.”
That made him smile a little bit.
He comes back to earth, back to the final crit with Adeyemo. After that, school’s out — forever! He’s back downtown in the hood now, the East Village, at Two Boots pizza with Zoya, Alexa, Horatio, and Yusef and Ignacio, these two art-head juniors who want to inherit his mantle — Ignacio with his Mohawk and obsession with lucha libre masks. They’re all just talking shit, swapping around iPods. Eventually Oscar, who’s having the party at his place that night on East Broadway, comes around. Oscar, who graduated from the not-special neighborhood high school, Seward Park, three years ago, and nobody really knows what he does — something tech related in a warehouse in Red Hook. But Oscar has his own place and always has beer and herb, which is key. Oscar, with so many cornrows you can’t count them, and his vintage 2 Live Crew T-shirt on today, and his vague coolness without purpose that could be M-Dreem’s own fate, he knows, if he hadn’t had certain opportunities handed to him by — well, by them. Mr. and Mrs. Parental.
“Look at the children about to graduate,” Oscar says, sitting down with the crew. “The future of New York City.”
“M-Dreem, show him the future,” Horatio says. “Show him your spiders.”
He pulls out his big spider illo. “You like this, Oscar?” he asks.
Oscar’s eyes pop out; he jerks back from the image. “Fucking spiders, damn! You one mad sick nigga, M-Dreem. But you got skills, I’ll say that.”
M-Dreem beams; he doesn’t know exactly why Oscar’s opinion means so much to him, but it does. “Thanks, my nigga,” he says. Zoya looks at him and smirks, sensing his self-consciousness with that word; he smirks back at her. What? he wants to ask Zoya. Are you my fucking conscience? But he knows the Parentals hate that word, too. Maybe partly because when he uses it, he reminds them that, not being white, he can sort of use it, but they can’t.
“You niggas coming tonight?” Oscar asks. Hell, yeah, they chorus. “That’s good,” he says. “I gotta go get this party ready.” And then Oscar’s gone.
It’s hours till the party, but M-Dreem doesn’t go home. Home always makes him feel vaguely uncomfortable, even though he doesn’t know quite why. Ever since that flare-up with the Parentals last year, that incident with him punching the wall and calling her the B-word, it’s never been quite the same with them, even if therapy and time have softened the impact. So today, he and Zoya and Alexa go to Alexa’s place a few blocks away and smoke herb and listen to the new Mos Def. They end up in a cuddle puddle, Zoya and Alexa spooning him on either side, him wondering if Zoya can feel his boner as he falls asleep, knocked out from the weed. They all wake up at ten o’clock, Zoya and Alexa taking an hour to dress and fix their hair while he smokes more herb and watches stupid reality TV, and then they head over to Boots again for dinner, two slices between the three of them because they’re all mad broke, then over to Oscar’s, where his friend Nanyelis, the shy bi girl, is DJ’ing: Ghostface Killah, Back Like That. A bunch of kids from school are there plus Oscar’s crowd of slightly older, scarier, intriguing who-are-theys. M-Dreem’s drinking Negras from the fridge, and Oscar comes over. He always hooks people up. He offers M-Dreem and the girls X, and the girls decline but M-Dreem does a whole one, and in about an hour, and a little more herb, he’s dancing, having the best time. Someone’s got a rainbow-patch clown wig on, clothes are coming off, he’s graduating from high school, he’s going to Pratt, he’s got mad skills, Madvillainy sounds sooo sick coming out of the speakers right now.
At some point the girls are like, “We’re leaving, you coming?” and he’s like, “No, I’m gonna stay,” and Zoya gives him a long hug and she’s like, “Be careful, baby,” and they’re gone. The kids from school thin out; he feels like he’s going into a deeper, darker zone, dancing now mostly with this older white girl with a cute tooth gap and short bleached hair like that English model Agyness Whatever’s Her Name, reaching out, holding hands, eventually with his hands slipped into the back of her jean shorts, and finally she grabs his hands again and says, “Come on, let’s find Oscar.” And she winds him back through the apartment.
They find Oscar in a back bedroom, behind a door only cracked open, with some of his friends. They all look half asleep and happy, passing around a plate and inhaling something off of it with a straw. Oscar looks up and smiles when M-Dreem comes in. M-Dreem whispers to the Agyness girl, “What’s that?” and she goes, “It’s heroin.”
“Ah, shit, man,” he says. He hasn’t tried that one. That one’s a no-no.
Agyness girl kind of frowns at him and tugs at his arm. “Snorting a little isn’t very strong,” she says. “You’re done with school, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Sooo?”
Artists must have these experiences, M-Dreem thinks. Out of pure experience comes pure expressions of form; he needs to have new visions, see new forms. He sits down on the floor with Agyness, hand in hand, his heart pounding. The plate comes around to Agyness, who passes it to him.