Five Reasons for Spending the Night at Bobby’s

1. He wanted Madden 09 for his birthday; I bought it for him…

…with the money grandma sent for Christmas, excited, front of a crowded big-screen TV, Bobby tank top and boxer shorts, me in black sweats, to sleep in, we both bare feet, we scores, we jumps, he slaps ass, NFL style, masculine, consoling me. I thought my stripped toes would confess my blue-fire orchid scream, I am only my spat fingers, and my patient red diamond abides.

2. A big snow-blast tonight...

…so I run to him, ahead of the cascade, ringing bells, I am black Santa Claus with the forty-ounce sack four filled with Old Gold, and Acapulco Gold smoke on the bed behind me. And Bobby’s landlord keeps the heat on high. Fire weed against walls, against butter, against black skin. I fall asleep in the middle, after booze from bottles, and talking all night about football, about boxing, about cars, and about girls. Bobby pulls off my pants and socks, he throws a huge sleeping bag over me and nods off across the room, crooked, in his favorite chair; talking to a lady-friend on the phone.

3. That funny clicking in my engine…

…in my drivers seat, Bobby is under hood twirling wires, wiping dipsticks off, smudged tattoo, dark brown skin spinning, crumpled paper pocket numbers, flying alley dark showers. He is shirtless and worried about who will be the Jets new quarterback. After the disco bump, after the h-bomb sneak, after the dim slippery; approaching a grey like a drip drinking bar.

4. Its Payday…

…and I’ve got the green tree grow. We are the royal leaving limousines, names.

I am the mirror. Bobby looks, smiles, and he tilts his head. Barstools ride and red wine glasses, dancing rooms filled and jumping, like children chasing ice cream trucks. Bobby has the sun (I thought the sunlight would tell him) and we become a ride, a drunken taxicab, a noon-brewed coffee cup, and a wet shower towel (Bobby bathes in pools of green daises.)

5. Because this is the day…

… for Bobby to open his windows. I am the purple blood bloom. A genie rose from the burning flower between us found Bobby giggling, found my resting face, “Warrior, Spear, Kingdom,” and we are on a hill above a rolling river, we become the water. We become peeled orange sections. Thank you for the wet mouth, the glass wine, or this black boy, the pulling dreds, (his toes his ankle) and soft cotton underpants, and I a calico alley cat in spike red shoes searching Bobby’s chest for a warm heartbeat.

Forgiven

He bathes for me

on the tops of mountains

under full moon sky fire.

He pulls off clothes for me.

He raises legs and points and curls, and points and curls, and points and curls his toes,

an arabesque,

honey blue music drag, naked,

deep dances under midnights’ sliding black satin.

My bare hand holding him,

on dark corners, his night beauty spilling

rubies from his veins and repairing contracts torn

and tossed from my table.

I Crack Head

In September of ninety-seven

cocaine cut me a loose coke said, “go take you

a bath.” And then laughed at me as I dragged my evil body

up from below the tilted bridge. I was not more than naked really. All that was left

was the smell of blood on me, like a left-out package of ground beef grey

surrounded by swimming eggs and more pregnant flies.

Vote No on Prop 8

You and I are fucking

but we are not fertilizing eggs still

I wait at frosted windows during snowstorms

and warm up pot roasts (with my faggot ass)

that tasted better at six-fifteen when you should

have walked through the door and stomped grey slush

from your foots and said It’s cold out there

while touching my mouth with your lips do you see how cold my mouth is

our faces are frozen together.

Stay at home Mom

She discovered lies, an asp wrapped around her marriage.

She stole an internet love look.

She met two black strangers in a desolate parking lot.

She fucked them both, hidden behind rusted leaves.

She came home, woke her husband’s left-alone flaxen baby girl.

(the infant had slid out of her seven months ago like a green turd)

She fed the brat’s sniveling pink mouth with milk from her soiled sticky breast.

She drew gravel from her nostrils and spat on the boiling beef stew prepared for her spouse.

She served his 6 o’clock meal and slippers dressed in a crisp Donna Reed apron and smiled him a kiss.

The Crack Head

We ran low.

While smoking over Murt’s house

so we sent him out for more but he was cut down

By five pieces of lead spinning quickly I stepped over

his staring eye after blood running down the street to trap

the fleeing gunman to beg him please sell me two more.

The Ghetto

Maria saved her own and her three beige children’s

yellow project piss in large Hellmann’s jars,

and threw it out of her neat third floor apartment window

at the crack head bitches she heard

loudly sucking dick at all hours of the night.

The Widower

Crows are in late autumn trees

and you are gone, Empress.

I am broken in the places

you have touched me.

The chain around my neck

is your heavy hands and they are cold now,

smoke leaves my mouth.

My heart beat is a red apple.

I perch on stiff chairs a marionette, unused,

with tattered ropes; freed from your loud party.

I am a smoky jazz trio sadly playing.

I am dark in drunken saloons

with no money for more wine.

A Break-up

a paper cut,
a dark night table stubbed toe
-----(the un-funny funny-bone)
a vibrating mosquito,
the reflected eyes of a pink pull-over cop,
a dropped sweet vanilla ice cream cone,
a baby crying plane
-----(trapped on a three-hour fleeing runway)
a dog shit heel step,
locked in keys,
all this, and the loss of my love.

Mom I’m gay…(period.)

To stop bashing rock waves,
Mother went to the African butcher
for the blood of a slaughtered lamb;
and cast red spells over me.
To uproot the steeped in earth,
she paid the Jamaican Obeah woman
for the hair of a virgin gal.
To break the slashing blind tornado,
my comb was given to a Haitian Vodun;
who was immediately possessed
by the god Damballah.
Drums were beaten.
Stones were tossed.
And they all danced by fire,
possessed,
on a dark night beach.

Dad I'm Gay. (period.)

Instead of swinging
his coarse blue-collar fists at me
in antipathy
and tossing my creased Lee jeans
and red Pro-Keds into the
ragged alley behind our
fertile home; on Saturdays
he drove me passed the
pugilistic football fields in
his masculine Cadillac
car, to the tittering
ballet studio where I
learned to tuck my dick
and point my toes, and
sat amongst the proud parents
of girl-children
watching me signify and finger snap.

Fucking the Wrong Nigga

It was dark before; quiet.

A white cat, a black patch on its left eye was fixed on a fish tank’s jade bubbles.

With old muddy boots, crushing splendid red orchids, wearing brown shirts, and shouting Adolph Hitler speeches, it came, through a lightning shower driving a rickety grey car.

It banged on doors and scraped on windows, jolting me. Love.

Casting passing black shade shadows. Flatulent, defensive, dragging bags filled with broken heart pieces, jagged crack-pipes, bounced checks, and bad credit.

Honestly.

With its hat in its hand, down on his luck, hungry, wearing milk chocolate eyes, a whisper smile, and athletic six-pack belly.

Love wore old blue jeans and a sweatshirt; they both smelled of last week, and sex.

The Crack Head

all he sees through the kissing cloud
is the tiger’s beauty as it leaps and tears
a ballet of gleaming teeth and claws

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