fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
We stood in front of a shelf marked 1953. A gap sat in the middle of otherwise tightly packed volumes. He began stroking the dust from the empty space. Again, it felt as if he were stroking my skin. This time I let myself experience it, for a little while. “Where are those volumes?” I…
Light, airy, and meticulously clean, attributes that well describe Mr. Horton’s apartment. His closet embodied the exact opposite. As we entered, he reached up and pulled a cord. A single bulb, brown with dust, hung on a thick wooly wire. The light revealed a cavern, cramped, long, and narrow with a pale wall grimed by…
“Listen, why are you here?” Startled, I looked up from my notepad. “The lifetime achievement award, Mr. Horton. My magazine wanted an interview.” “No! Why did they send you?” I had no immediate response. “You’re awfully young, you know that? How the hell do you even know who I am? What work of mine have…
When I was about 13 I had to endure a week at Reverend Schlep’s Summer Camp for Men and Boys. It’s a right of passage in my family. My grandfather took my father. My father took my older brothers Mark and Karl, Jr., when they reached the right age. Now it was my turn. If…
February filled every classroom and hallway at Norman Avenue Elementary School with red, black, and green. As the month’s end approached, the colors blossomed in the school auditorium in preparation of the annual Black History Month Dance. Parent volunteers filled red, black, and green balloons with helium and tied similarly colored streamers to their tails….
Grease splattering, water boiling, pots and pans clanking, bodies moving and shuffling, and layered above it all were the voices of the too many chefs against a backdrop of old school blues moaning its heart out. Crissy got annoyed. She always got annoyed. “Can’t we play something more upbeat than this? When I’m cooking I…
(Ed.’s note: This story is vaguely inspired by a dream.) A motley group of Americans found themselves wandering around a rail yard in the outskirts of Pyongyang, North Korea. They were captured and taken in for questioning. They didn’t know how they got there, so the story goes, and they were anxious to get home….
“No one knows the answer to that one?” I had my hand up, waving the little green flag we’re supposed to use whenever we wanted to be called on. “No one?” I started wiggling it a little bit more. “Going once, going twice. . .” No one else waved their flags. Maybe she couldn’t see…
{Editors Note: The dialog between Jameel and Alfonso was taken from my unpublished novel Sin Against the Race.} He knew Hegel. He knew Marx. He knew Lenin. He knew Trotsky. He knew Mao. He knew Ché. He knew Cleaver. He knew a whole bunch of others that none of the rest of the group knew. …
This story could be called a love letter to the Duke Ellington Orchestra. I wrote it around the time I fell head over heels for all things Ellington and started listening to his music 23 out of 24 hours in the day — a practice I continue to the present time. I immersed myself in…
