Just a Dream?

I have this recurring dream where I am confined to a wheelchair for the rest of my life because the chair fell in love with me. Every morning when I wake up it’s there by the side of my bed waiting, genuflecting, demanding I join with it just once more, and then it will leave me alone. But it lies, and the next day it is there again feigning compassion, while clandestinely leaving it’s accessories around the house. When I confront it, it threatens to leave, rolling to the door, leaving me and my lifeless legs on the floor. Only after I beg does it return, daring me to ever again rebuke it.

Clyde Moves On

Clyde was always so wise, everyone said so, intelligent beyond his sixteen years. One day Clyde decided to charge people for his sagacious guidance. He went to a nearby community center, found an empty room and set up shop. The room was a pale white with two metal folding chairs, one a pukey beige color, one textured dusty black, and cheap card table all found right there. Clyde added a box of Kleenex. He it took from the old, mostly broken wooden nightstand, a remnant from an unknown long-dead grandmother, which was next to his mothers’ bed.

He didn’t rent the room or ask the permission of any staff member, but with all the comings and goings at this popular local hub, no one noticed Clyde or his growing practice. There was always a basketball game, pottery class, Weight Watchers group, N.A. or A.A. meeting to cover the hourly comings and goings of Clydes’ patients.

A number of them married or left their wives, children, husbands. Several got jobs or quit them, going away on long Saharan safaris. Some got tattoos or adopted Chinese and eastern European orphans, some got off the sauce or in many cases got on it. There was one thing however, they all had in common. They all, each one of them, loved Clyde and recommended him to their friends, and enemies.

In October Clydes’ father was transferred to another city back east. He and his wife sat their son down and told him of the move. Clyde was ecstatic, looking forward to greener opportunities. Clyde continued to see his tyros for another few weeks, compassionately looking them in the eye, or thoughtfully touching them on the knee, telling them nothing of his upcoming move, just listening.
One bright over sunny day, Clyde got in the backseat of the family Ford Windstar and left town. He took the cell phone which he had bought for himself at a local mall one day while he was supposed to be in Ms. Burgess’ fourth period math class and threw it in the garbage at a Cinna-bon along the interstate. The phone rang all day and night, its’ cries for attention stifled by heavy duty plastic and old food. After twelve hours the battery, burdened beyond its limit’s, died.

Clyde’s bereaved patients never knew why he left them; they never formally met one another to compare notes. They, most of them anyway, looked at their new lives smiled, and kept it moving…Some of the more abject among them continued to call his old cell phone number until the mailbox was full and Sprint finally cut the phone off for non-payment. And even long after they hoped the number would be re-connected and Clyde would be back to help them.

All the while Clyde was walking down a new street with several teenage boys laughing and smoking cigarettes in cupped hands, attempting to conceal them from fucking cops, and trying to attract the attention of youthful ladies bought up much to well in parochial schools to fall for the antics of such childish young schoolboys.

Interview

Adarro Minton Author of Gay, Black, Crippled, Fat!

A writer— and, I believe, generally all persons— must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
-Jorge Luis Borges

This quote came to mind after having a conversation with Adarro Minton, the author of the short story collection Gay Black Crippled Fat. Minton has a lot of clay to work with. From seeing the death of Disco at the Paradise Garage to hard years in the grip of crack to living clean in upstate New York, Adarro’s life has provided him with a myriad of experiences, people, and places that find their way into these stories. In that sense these stories are true stories. In fact they are stories of people that you probably know or knew in another subjective lifetime. They are stories people who live next door or whose eyes you struggle to avoid while walking the streets late at night, holding secrets that you never guess could be as close as your own unspoken desires.

Adarro Minton’s work is a fresh look at life, not simply gay life or urban black life, but life experienced. His greatest strength lies in his ability to capture moments of beauty and crisis. He draws you in to the setting, be it White Plains or Queens or some unnamed forest in New Jersey. The often staccato style of writing gives every word and scene the precious sense of occurring in the here and now. You can feel the bitter early morning busstop winter cold biting your skin like it does the man-child Clyde in the introductory story or the hot-as-hell sweat covered fucking of a one night stand and the freshness of crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in the early morning hours. You can even taste the delicious moment of ecstasy that greets a crack head lighting up in a squalid apartment transformed in to a cathedral of heaven as the rock hits the brain.

I admit that when I looked at the title of the first story in this collection “Friends don’t let friends fuck fat girls or drag queens no matter how drunk they get” I was more than a little concerned that Gay Black Crippled Fat, would be a shallow romp of template ghetto stories. However, by the second paragraph those worries were dispelled. The variety of stories in this collection is surprising. The tales are written in a variety of styles and points of view which gives the world that Minton creates a certain kind of richness. He moves with few moments of awkwardness from the bus stops of Queens to the manicured lawns of suburbia.

Minton’s characters are perhaps one of this collection’s most memorable elements. They may at first glance be generic, but with some of the players in these stories he quickly builds history for them backgrounds and drives that lead them to the crossroads of choice. The tension ranges from the awkwardness of loose romance (“Friends don’t let friends”) and the monotony of suburban life (“A look at the base, vile, twisted deviant world of gay marriage”) to the self annihilation of hustles and tricks to grab the addicts holy host, the crack rock (“Crack story ‘99: You Understand”). However, when the stories end, many of them feel unresolved, the works of clay unfinished. It is as if Minton has decided to simply leave us at the crossroads and make up the rest of the stories ourselves. At times I found myself wishing that every tale was expanded for ten more pages.

Despite the number of vibrant personalities in these stories, such as Cherry, the smooth talking club kid with a gangster lean from “clyde of nyc” or the alzheimer’s inflicted grandmother of “Life with Doris,” some of the short stories focus on individuals who feel little more like cardboard cutouts. As with any collection there will be some works that are more powerful than others, yet in this work Minton seems to either delve deep in to the motivations of his character’s actions or simply devote a sentence or two and let the plot carry on. For example in “How Some Niggas Get AIDS” Mike displays a combination of bravado and cowardliness. He is sexually aggressive to the point of almost being abusive, and yet he seeks not to reap revenge on the person who harmed him, but rather he finds victory in spreading the illness as far and wide as possible. Minton sums up his motivation in just one line “someone had infected him. And he was not going down by himself.” This quick reasoning is one of the few sections that simply falls flat compared to the richness that marks the rest of the collection.

Yet even in its most hollow of moments the characters in Gay Black Crippled Fat are not merely stage props. Minton has put real people in these bodies, complete with scars, blemishes, moments of grace and clarity and hopes both simple and grand and perhaps most importantly the desire to love and be loved. The exploration of this last desire is perhaps the most profound in this collection. Perhaps the best example of this exploration of love in both the physical and metaphysical sense of the word is the multi part story “Three in Love.”

Minton’s stories are not simply tales of gay life or urban life but are true stories of life itself. Gay Black Crippled Fat is filled with the tragedies and hopes of everyday living, and that in itself makes it a remarkable book. Even though the work does fall victim of the unevenness that is inevitable in any short story collection, the quality of his writing, his ability to draw you in to his world, which incidentally is our own, is remarkable. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what he will pull out next from the clay of life.

-Campbell Kennedy