Nerissa and Rog’s romance lasted a week. She was too boyish, with her big shirts and shorts, so Rog broke up with her. But they were still friends. Years later, when she was living in her first apartment, Rog would visit, walk through the front door, throw his arms around her, ask her, “When you going to be my old lady?” Smile.
“You had your chance,” Nerissa joked. Rob, her boyfriend, sat on the sofa, with a black cigar in the corner of his mouth, a beer at his side. He smiled, his genial, easy smile, and showed the gold teeth he polished so religiously they shone against his dark face.
“Aw, come on Nerissa, give me another chance,” Rog said.
“Nope,” Nerissa laughed.
Rog’s bedroom was dark: dark walls, dark curtains. He had shelves up, and on his shelves were model cars with shiny chrome wheels on them, so carefully put together, down to the smallest detail. In his stereo, you’d find Tupac. Old No Limit and Fifth Ward Boyz, both out of New Orleans. Camron and Dipset out of New York City. And on his wall, he hung pictures. He was a good artist. In Mississippi, out in the country where there is no concrete or enough buildings crammed closely enough to make a good canvas for graffiti, kids who would normally develop their street art and tag do it like Rog did, by papering their rooms with sketches. Rog drew pictures of cars and some of people. He tried his hand at stylized words. OPT, one piece of artwork said. Another: THUG LIFE. And another: LAUGH NOW, CRY LATER.
Rog dropped out of school in the tenth grade; it’s not uncommon for young Black men to drop out here. Sometimes they are passively forced out by school authorities, branded as misfits or accused of serious offenses like selling drugs or harassing other students: sometimes they are pushed to the back of classrooms and ignored. Rog sat in the back of one such class and beat-boxed while his cousins sang spirituals that substituted the teacher’s name for Jesus’. He left school, worked, and then in 2000 went to Los Angeles to live with his relatives. He loved it. He worked in an auto body shop, made more money than he would have been able to make in Mississippi, and enjoyed the city: theme parks, roller skating rinks, the beach, where the water was blue and rushed the palm-decked shore in waves, so different from our beach, where the dirty gray Gulf lapped desultorily at a man-made beach ringed by concrete and pine trees.
Later, I wondered if it was a kindness to Nerissa, a remembrance of their short middle school romance, that made Rog hang out with us during the 2001 Mardi Gras Pass Christian parade, when he was visiting home. I had been out of college and without a job for almost a year, but I’d booked a ticket and flown home from New York City for Mardi Gras. This added to my considerable credit card debt. I didn’t care. I needed to go home, even if only for three days. My brother was newly dead. I expected him to be alive every day when I woke. On that February day, I did not know he was only the first. It was raining and chilly. We were all subdued, except Rog. He swaggered between clusters of friends and cousins from DeLisle and Pass Christian. He stood at the edges of pictures with a haul of big purple and green and gold beads on his neck, the kind that in normal years we’d plead the loudest for the pleasure of wearing them for a day. My sisters and I huddled under umbrellas and watched the press of people, ignoring the beads that pelted our umbrellas. My three-year-old nephew, newly bereft of his uncle and bewildered by the crowds, hugged my leg. My grief was so great that the sheen of the colorful beads, the music sounding from the floats, the celebration of that day felt like a farce, an insult.
On the day of the first Mardi Gras parade I’d attended after my brother’s death, the reality of Joshua’s absence was soothed by Rog, his easy smile, his arm casually slung over my or my sisters’ shoulders. Hey, he said. And then: What’s up?
I don’t know why Rog returned home to Mississippi for good in 2002. I imagine that it was because he was homesick, because he missed the narrow, tree-shaded streets of Pass Christian, the houses scattered here and there and set twelve feet high on stilts to protect them from hurricane storm surges. Maybe he missed Mrs. P., his sisters Rhea and Danielle, his large extended family scattered through Pass Christian and DeLisle, his cousins. Many leave and never come back, lured away by cities where it’s easier to find working-class jobs, where opportunity comes easier because those in power are less bound by the culture of the South. But I’ve heard others who’ve moved away from Mississippi, worked for five, ten years of their adult lives somewhere else, and then moved back to Mississippi say: “You always come back. You always come back home.”
The first night Charine and I went to Rog’s house in that summer of 2004 after Aldon and I had driven home from Michigan, we didn’t go inside. Our cars lined the street, bumper to bumper. The night swooped down in great black swaths, and the streetlights, spaced far apart, shone weakly. Insects swarmed in foggy clouds around the bulbs, dimming them even further so we were dusky shadows, and the stars dozed on the dome of the sky like larger, distant insects.
The boys turned the bass up on their car stereos, and we sat on their trunks and hoods, jiggling to the beat, sweating and sliding down the steel. Rog walked over, his Budweiser in one hand, his other hand waving like a child’s slicing through the air out of the passenger window of a car.
“Aaaaawwww,” he said, and hugged all three of us at once: me, Tasha, my brother’s last girlfriend, and Charine. He half jumped on us. Threw his leg over the row of our feet.
We laughed. We could laugh when we were drunk, even in the summer of 2004.
“All right, Rog,” Charine said. “You messing up.”
“What you mean?” Rog slid off us.
“I can’t feel the trunk with you jumping like that. Do you feel that?” she asked me.
“Like a massage, huh, Charine?” Rog said, and then he passed her a black cigar. “You dead wild.”
He danced around the trunk that night, kept us laughing. His smile never disappeared from his narrow face. While the other boys huddled in their cars, having conversations that we were not privy to, discussing and doing things I had no idea they did, Rog held court with us. He reminded me of Aldon. There was something gentle about him, considerate. Good. The first time he saw one of his younger cousins experimenting with weed in the street in front of his house, he stopped him. He walked up to him in the dark and said, “Aw, man, what you doing? You need to cut that out. You don’t need to be fucking with it like that.” His younger cousin laughed; he was already high.
We partied inside the house only once that summer. We were drinking. We were always drinking. But it was a different kind of drinking from what we’d done the previous summer. That drinking had been insane, ecstatic. We’d taken shots of Everclear that summer, felt that liquor running through us, thrumming: for this moment, you are young and alive. Live, more. The summer of 2004, we were no longer rebel drinkers, imbibing to break rules, to shit on mores. Now, we were subdued drinkers, drinking to forget. By the summer of 2004, we knew we were old: by the end of the summer, we’d know we had one foot in the grave.