The Town of Babylon Read online

  Alex was one of those guys who smoked immense amounts of pot but never seemed to get high. He was short, tough, and lean, and one of the handful of Puerto Rican kids in our class—the dominant Latinx group. I don’t recall ever going over to his house or meeting his parents. I think his dad was a security guard. Alex lived on the cushier rim of an otherwise gritty town that shared a sliver of border with my town, this town. I was lucky to have befriended him early on—a freshman-year global studies project about the practice of foot-binding in tenth-century China. One time, he shoved an older kid against the lockers because he’d called me a fag. Another time, he threatened to beat up someone who’d joked about lacing my joint with PCP. Alex was, in these ways, more of a guardian than a friend. He and a few of the other guys took me under their wings, like Mafia dons, and as a result, I sensed that a certain degree of reverence was expected. They were friends with whom I would never be too direct or familiar, or at ease. After high school, Alex tried to join the marines, but he was rejected because of a heart condition. Then he tried to be a cop, but according to the instructor, he rated too high on an empathy scale. Alex drives a bus for the county now. “Twice, I’ve been Driver of the Year,” he told me earlier. “Came with a bump in salary and a month of movie passes for the family.” He’s content with the job’s benefits, especially the pension. Alex married Charisse, the stoner cheerleader who didn’t go to school for a week when Kurt Cobain died. I recall a two-blunt cypher where I took too many hits; after a few minutes, I was a shell of myself, propped up only by my paranoia. Everyone else eyed each other and suppressed laughter. I had gotten too high to care that I was being ridiculed, but Charisse told them all to grow up, walked me to the kitchen, and made me drink a glass of water while she rubbed my back and reassured me that I’d be back to normal in twenty minutes. Charisse didn’t come tonight because they couldn’t get a babysitter. Alex doesn’t vote because “I always forget until after I get home from work and I don’t wanna have to go back out. Who cares, they’re all the same, you know?”

  Then there’s Greg, the kid who had the pencil-thin mustache and a Tupac obsession. He wasn’t the only white kid in high school who rode around in a tricked-out Celica that could be heard vibrating blocks away, but I didn’t know anyone else who got as high as Greg and meditated as deeply on Tupac’s lyrics. He was the sort of boy who would become so entranced with “Hail Mary,” for example, that the rest of us could leave his room or house and he wouldn’t take notice. Greg’s high school evolution took everyone by surprise. Freshman year, he was, like many of us, scrawny and high-pitched, but he was popular from the outset because of his basketball skills, which were disproportionate to his stature. Greg grew stronger and more attractive each year, and by junior year, everyone had a crush on him or wanted to be his best friend. All of that changed when his father died—throat cancer. He wasn’t the same afterward. Pot became coke; then, heroin. He cheated on Dina with Erica; then he cheated on Erica with Ashley. I recall everyone worrying that he’d show up to their graduation parties high and end up crying in their backyards into the morning. Today he looks alright; he’s thin-faced and potbellied. He’s a real estate agent, into his third marriage, one kid from each. In fact, it’s Greg who’s offered up one of his houses for the alternative afterparty—poor Nicole. According to several people, it’s an enormous place, with a pool and a hot tub inside the pool.

  Greg’s McMansion isn’t far away, but it’s far enough that I’d need a ride, and I don’t want to risk getting into a car with anyone here. No one is sober—here or within a five-mile radius—including all of the taxi drivers with their styrofoam cups. That’s the way of this and every nearby town. We may not have invented drunk driving, but surely, we’ve perfected it. If I had to guess, I’d say that at least a third of the room has spent the night in jail. Myself included.

  “Leaving so early?” Nicole says, as I make my way through the velvet curtains. Her recently repainted lips are glossy red and catch the light from above.

  “I’m tired, and more than a little buzzed.”

  “Did you see the espresso station in the back?”

  “I have to get up early, but thanks for tonight. I’m sure this was a big project to organize.”

  Nicole runs a long red nail across an eyebrow before a slow smile walks across her face. “My pleasure.”

  I continue out quickly, until I remember Simone and double back.

  “She came to a reunion once—one of the first ones,” Nicole says. “But she hasn’t responded to anything since. Did you ask Rhonda? They were close.”

  “Rhonda says she hasn’t heard from her in some time.”

  Nicole shrugs.

  “Goodnight. Thanks, again,” I say, while stepping through the final velvet curtain.

  There’s a part of me that wants to remain here, in this moment, with all of these people. The past was rekindled so effortlessly. This opportunity won’t come around again soon. I’ll never be this age again. My parents might no longer live here during the next reunion, and I won’t return to this town for anyone but them. I should go back inside and finish the night, go to a hot-tub party where no one has bathing suits, get fall-down drunk, embarrass myself, kiss Jeremy for the first time in twenty years. The problem is, I’ve been propping up this wall between them and me for so long that I’m afraid of what will happen if I put my arms up and step out from behind it. Does it fall squarely on me? On them?

  I look over at the matrix of steel, glass, and rubber. The lot is now full. It surprises me that the cars are all parked so neatly. It’s an unmarked gravel field, and yet everyone has parked equidistant from one another, with sufficient clearance for car doors to swing open. Maybe we aren’t a devolved species. I scan the bumpers and back windows. I count six Blue Lives Matter stickers and twice as many Trump decals. How many tires could I slash before someone else comes out of the restaurant? My eyes briefly scour the ground for something sharp before I abandon my plan.

  As I approach the main road, a tepid gust runs through my hair and through the spaces between the buttons on my shirt, inflating it subtly. It makes everything good. Better. Bearable. It also radicalizes the nostalgia. I close my eyes and take it in, pretending the particulate matter from the racetrack is missing my nostrils.

  “Andy!”

  Reverie neutralized.

  Nicole wobbles over the loose ground in her life-threatening stilettos. “Andy, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I remember you two were close. I heard a couple of people tonight say that she’s not well.”

  “Who?”

  “Simone.”

  “Oh. Is it bad?”

  “She’s in the hospital.”

  “Shit. Which one?”

  “Not the regular kind,” Nicole whispers, as if we’re being recorded. “She’s in the loony bin.”

  Loony bin? Christ. This person’s a schoolteacher?

  “Do you know which psychiatric hospital?” I ask.

  “No, sorry. But Puritan, by the interstate, closed a few years ago, so there’s a good chance it’s the other one, the one that looks like a haunted castle. It was bought by Be Well—they own everything. Across from the new Cheesecake Factory.”

  “Thanks. I’ll look into it.”

  I speed up toward the street, but Nicole calls out again. “Andy! Why didn’t you park in the lot?”

  “I walked,” I shout back.

  “What?” Nicole’s face wrinkles, as if I were setting her up for a joke. I say nothing more, and she continues, “Do you want a ride?”

  “It’s six blocks. I’m good.”

  “Really, I don’t mind.”

  “It’s okay,” I respond, and wave as decisively as I can.

  “Don’t be a stranger!”

  * * *

  Simone.

  The phone call in college, during which I came out to her, was one of the last times we spoke. She called another time to let me know she was thinking of transferring schools. Then once
more, to tell me she’d dropped out. After a couple of years of not talking, she called my parents’ house one Thanksgiving; I happened to answer the phone. She was either drunk or high and almost unintelligible. She needed to tell me something. “We need to talk to you,” she kept saying, without clarifying who we was. I searched for a reason to end the call, as if she were a telemarketer. I told her I’d be in touch about hanging out that weekend. “Promise?” she said. “Yeah,” I responded. I was a few months out of college then and thinking only of my future, which I couldn’t reconcile with my past. Simone felt like all the other people who I used to know, and I didn’t want to know anyone I used to know.

  If I were in a psychiatric hospital, Simone would come visit me. When we were sixteen, she would have visited every day. She’d have made mixed tapes and brought Swedish Fish. Heck, Simone would have busted me out of there. She’d have hooked an anchor from her car onto the metal bars of my bedroom window. She’d have revved the engine and peeled out. “Andy, get in the fucking car! Get in the fucking car, now!” And I would have because Simone could be eerily authoritative when she wanted to be and because she is one of the best humans I’ve ever known.

  It’s certainly the hodgepodge of martinis, beers, and pot talking, but I feel a strong desire to do the same for her now.

  Yes! I’m going to bust her out! But first, I’m going to download the first three Pearl Jam albums; I’ll play them as the soundtrack to our escape. When we’ve gotten far enough away, I’ll drive her to a 7-Eleven so she can have one of those terrible canned-cheese nacho platters that we used to love. After that, the sky’s the limit, wherever she wants to go. We’ll stage our own queer BIPOC retelling of Thelma & Louise.

  I feel dizzy and a bit nauseated. And suddenly, I have a desperate urge to pee. I won’t make it all the way home. I’ll go to the Applebee’s.

  “Wait for me, Simone!” I shout, as I run across the six lanes, an army of headlights approaching on either side.

  6

  HIGH SCHOOL

  Americanos, Rosario and Álvaro called them. Them were white people, and Andrés wanted to be like them. He might not have realized it or admitted it if he had, but he wanted his skin and eyes to be lighter, his hair to be straighter, his nose to be narrower. But more than that, he wanted the attention and the value that seemed to correspond to them. The beauty, the camaraderie, the self-worth.

  The relationship between Andrés and white people was paradoxical, marked in equal measure by reverence and disdain. Americanos weren’t only standard-bearers for all things aspirational and dominant, they were also ignorant, uncouth, and informal. They were lazy too. They chewed their hamburgers and pizza with their mouths open. They’d never studied a map of the world. They cursed and had tattoos. They didn’t wash their hands. They kept pets. They complained about everything. They lacked self-awareness and humility. Ignorance was a primordial value and flag-waving their Olympic sport. And yet, they were in control. They held the reins and the benefit of the doubt. They were the owners, the hosts, and the guards. They demanded explanations and proof. Americanos were the ones who asked for ID. They were the ones who needed to know where you were from and where you were going.

  As far as Andrés and his family were concerned, they were guests. And as guests, it was their duty to navigate the perennial discomfort that accompanied being smarter, savvier, harder working, more interesting, and more curious about the world than their hosts. ¿Qué van a saber estos bobos? was a common refrain in Andrés’s home. What do these fools know? Looking down on los Americanos undercut their size, their ignorance, and their malice. In this way, humility, charity, and pity weren’t only pious attributes, they served as buffers and coping mechanisms.

  Andrés was both lost and found in this context. He knew, for example, that he and his family were Colombian and Salvadorian and immigrant and different, primarily their color, which he came to know as tanned, olive-skinned, and, on rare occasions, bronzed: euphemisms for his particularly bloated category of mixed race, a designation that was never parsed—then as now. A curdled bloodline that had culminated in a subtle, white-supremacist-fueled self-loathing, prioritizing the Spanish imperialist ancestors over the Indigenous ones and completely ignoring any trace of the African and African Indigenous mestizajes, pretending instead that an entire continent had been born as if by immaculate conception and not through colonization, holding within its own porous, undefined boundaries internecine struggles that mirrored and perpetuated the racism at their inception. A people and a boy desperate to fit in.

  Andrés could hardly imagine the scale of everything. What happened to him, he believed, happened to him alone. He was an embodiment of reflections, of norms, foods, spices, language, music, and dances that he knew only superficially, if at all. He traipsed through a haze of expectations, self-hate, and self-importance, the confluence of which concretized his desire to peel everything away and show them that he was no different from them. And so was seeded a lifetime of contradiction: Stay out of the midday sun. Avoid bright colors. Cover up. Lower your voice. At the same time: Be yourself. Be proud. Be the best. Be.

  Succeed while hiding in plain sight. Be better in order to be equal.

  * * *

  In elementary school, there were a few classmates who were worse off than Andrés. Their houses, smaller and shabby. Their parents, disheveled in attire and teeth. They smelled of depression and neglect. They were white people that even white people made fun of. But they were uncommon. Most of Andrés’s classmates lived in bigger homes and owned lawn mowers. Their dads had better jobs than his dad; careers, they called them. Their moms had college degrees but didn’t typically work outside of the home; the few who did were nurses, teachers, or cashiers at the local shops.

  The landscape and scale of everything expanded in high school. Towns mingled, social spheres overlapped, hierarchies twisted into helixes. For at least a few hours of each day, an affluent kid afflicted with acne was effectively a pauper, and a working-class kid with muscles or a dependable three-pointer was king. There were a few more Black and Latinx students. There were spoiled brats who’d been kicked out of better schools in faraway towns, and poorer kids whose families struggled as much as Andrés’s. All of them united under one catechism.

  But despite everyone’s belief in the Holy Trinity and the resurrection of Christ and Lazarus and that Pontius Pilate washed his hands of it all and that Judas had a pocket full of coins and that wine was truly blood, Andrés began to feel different, different in all the ways a kid can feel different.

  Before high school, white kids had made up the majority of his neighborhood and school; now, members of Andrés’s original long-lost tribe appeared in the wild. Suddenly, he was one of several brown kids.

  Andrés had never before felt the need to affirm anything. He’d spent the nine years of elementary school with the same group of kids; he’d been an altar boy, he’d ridden bikes and played basketball with his friends; he’d become, rather unceremoniously, one of them. High school changed everything. There was an inexorable sorting, and there was no hiding now: Andrés wasn’t white. There it was, a secret that seemed to be at all times broadcast over the PA system.

  Although Andrés couldn’t deny who he was, neither could he let go of what he’d briefly been. Who, after all, willingly relinquishes their upper hand? White, in a way, remained right. White was safe. White was clean. White was quiet. White was attractive. White was next door. White was on TV. White was on the cover. White were the teachers. White were the doctors. White was the president—all of them. White was the Lord and Savior. White was on top. White was everything.

  Black was different. Black was loud. Black was brash. Black was funny. Black was angry. Black was unsafe. Black was the mugshot on the news and the anti-drug PSA. Black was homeless. Black was Eddie Murphy. Black was Jesse Jackson. Black was Michael Jackson. Black was Janet. Black were the Jeffersons, the Winslows, the Bankses, the Cosbys. Black were Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson, a
nd O. J. Black was terrible or glorious, but nothing in between.

  Asian was Oriental. Asian was exclusively East Asian. Asian was karate. Asian were the workers at the Chinese restaurants. Asian was one man: Mr. Miyagi and Arnold. (And Lou Diamond Phillips.) Asians built good cars. Asians were the future. Asians were jokes. Asians were punchlines.

  American Indians were a chapter in a history book. American Indians were Native Americans. American Indians were the names of states, cities, towns, roads, and waterways. American Indians were face paint and headdresses. American Indians were scrimshaw and wampum and teepees. American Indians yelped and scalped but never spoke. American Indians were mystical, righteous, and invisible. American Indians were either incredibly fit and mythical or diabetic and drunk, but nothing in between.