As we walked to the corner store sex shop in the Flatbush Avenue junction, we’d already deliberated that our tallest friend would manage the purchase. He had, of course, bought the first tape that we watched over and over again. Our other friend, with the glasses, looked even younger than the rest of us and it would’ve been breaking some kind of law to sell him the tape, we knew. So, in our boxy sneakers and shifty glances, we huddled off to the right like we were going in a candy store and left it to Rock to bring the collected money to the counter. This was 1996, I wanna say, and the tapes weren’t labeled nor would we have stayed in that seedy store long enough to browse. These were the kind of New York adults who fomented a dangerous contraband tradition of selling to anyone with the money to buy their ill-gotten goods.

We arrived at Rock’s house before his parents and sister and while his brother was in practice. There was a small window we had to review the tape of unknown runtime, blank white label box, and banned sound. We’d need to close his door, sit there mouths agape and ears alert to the front door downstairs. I was practicing my giggle and the jokes I’d make about what looked gross to offset the silence that enveloped us when something became both nasty and intriguing. Three young Black boys, slurping up a screen full of men going inside women, live action style with sweat and hair. At that point, we were thirsty consumers so the VHS tapes were edits of many gonzo hardcore movies spliced together so that the original order was lost. Sex wasn’t a story, we learned, just an act. Two body parts thrumming in a roughly syncopated beat. No matter how many jokes I rehearsed, the silence beat us every time.

I find this ritual unimaginable now. In college at the turn of the century, it was even more surreal and cramped. My friends then had access to an older brother’s apartment that served as a kind of flop house. His brother had been minted Eldest Boy and enjoyed privileges like free rent from his parents for being in college. That midtown Atlanta boys’ club was a strange refuge and screening ground for his unreal pornography collection. “Booty Talk” represented the best of West Coast Productions slime and we’d wait, again like we were captives to thirst, for the Friday haul his brother inevitably wrangled on his way back from the strip club. At the time, those studios were putting out an insane number of titles, none scripted or lampooning like the White adult film industry that was their close parallel. Dick and pussy. Floppy organs and straight rods and bulbous breasts and tattoos and blunts and severely choppy edits characterized these raunch-a-thon reels.

They were also a communal affair. It was not my apartment so I got no quiet time with my friend’s brother’s stash. That was an etiquette we wouldn’t dare violate. Again, we sat like a gallery, his older friends and us, the freshmen, viewing like we were in a Times Square theater trying not to get arrested. No one spoke except for a few shaky puns or the click of a soda can opening to address the pervasive thirst. Were we meant to watch these flicks with Our Boys, none of us daring to touch and fully clothed? I don’t know, but that’s how we did it. Oddly, we had been among each other when the idea of ganging up on a girl was in play or when someone hired a stripper and brought her back for the entertainment of two or three of us (like on my 20th birthday when we ran a train on a girl and I was too dizzy of 8 Smirnoff Ices to get my pants from around my ankles).

This was a bizarre time when, through porn, I adopted the wrong belief, that sexual performance was about impressing other men and discarding women. I did not understand that Black men’s sexual conquests had taken on a homoerotic meaning in the bonding customs we’d been subject to. That had been in my lyrics, my lockers, my lies and my loneliness. I did not understand that I would become addicted to porn, the mechanism of proving manhood through a hard-cocking display, the opportunity to bond with other men the only way I knew how—by proving we could fuck anything but each other. That was the calculus of love among friends I had at the time and I didn’t resent them their ignorance just like they let me have my sensitivities. It’s only after I committed one sexual taboo, during the train, that I knew we were all in an obstinate cycle of denying ourselves pleasure so we could inhabit better masks.

I’ll explain in part 5.

“Sex, like any experience, is a lens through which we learn to see ourselves—sometimes a warped version, sometimes a truer one. We don’t have to be fucking to look through it. Our access to pleasure is determined, to some extent, by the story we’ve been told of what a body like ours deserves.”

— Melissa Febos, Bodywork

Read: Black men don’t write about sex, part 1 here, and part 2 here

I used to be strong-backed. This is a title Jamaican men assume from young. We drop the S so it sounds like, “Him back ‘trong!” And then it’s like, the man is telling the woman he’s something to be feared.

But today, I have a sore knee. The effluvium of my workouts has transformed into a twinkling lava behind the cap. My wrists are whispering to me from the ghost of thousands of push-ups past that didn’t protect them. My groin, worn from many days and weeks sexing one or two or three bodies, is often swollen. My hips are tight from walking like a man, not letting them swish around lest I be called a suspect in the never-ending case against the Black feminine.

Since I’m backing off sex so much, reminiscence is the only option and it pains me. That’s because when I was fucking, I wasn’t doing what I could to enjoy myself.

Viv would prod me about this. The few sleepovers we had warmed my entire being and placed me squarely back at my childhood slumber parties, a time for games and watching too many movies. The goal was to not sleep or to become so delirious with exhaustion only a concoction of Kool-Aid syrup and crushed ice could rouse us.

With her, as adults, there was no mandate to stay awake. Instead we kept alerting each other’s bodies like the call came from within our primal love for one another. One of us would drift and the other would pull closer, interlocking a calf with a thigh, as the first signal. Then the other would pretend sleep was still on the menu, squeezing our eyes shut. Soon, the sappy paste of my snoring mouth and chapped lips was just another glue for us. Viv would make her request.

“Can you just wake up and turn into me, please?” she would ask.

I obeyed. There was never a time, in her presence, I said no to her. No ankle was too sore or thigh too bruised to join her. There wasn’t a cell in my flesh, a breath from my nostril, that escaped my devotion to Viv’s pleading obscenity. “Fucking bastard,” she would call me as I became her second skin.

In a hurried exhale, I’d coat her entire wide, strong chest with mine. I would pour my legs over her thighs, plastering my hairs on her smoothness. I’d lay down my solitude, finally and completely.

When we played roles, she acted as if I was some commander and I’d lose myself in the rodeo. Grab a limb and twist her center of gravity around, pull her into me by the mane, curse her back. But we both understood she was in command as the only person able to hold me still, stop my grabbing and bucking. My strong back sat there unused.

I don’t know what a man is if he is unused. I am not used to sitting there like a flower, petals pluming, absorbing touch, being sniffed. I don’t know what a man is if he’s not at least playing at leadership, pretending his way through the world by the point of his dick. Except with Viv, I was a whole body, batteries included. Her touch infused me with the energy that my near-40-year-old self had forfeited to work-from-home gigs and dinners out. I wondered sometimes if her cursing at me had actually cursed me, cast a spell that would seize my moves and make them her show.

We would joke about her thin lips. She would joke, really. As a Black woman with certain white features, she feared being exiled from my preferences by a puffier pair. I loved her lips, not only for the solace they provided as she directed her spells, but for remaking me. I wasn’t some stud in her stable, nor was I a reliable boner for her to toss into her drawer like the others.

I was a man who also contained a boy. I was a man with opinions and feelings who could be hurt. And though she regularly said things that hurt me — and that I wouldn’t admit hurt me — I knew she cared for my art and what I was trying to express. She would read so many books and hand them to me like, “YOU, of all people, haven’t read this? What are you doing with yourself?” She would suggest stories for me to write and how to write them. I could disagree but she’d tell me I was fighting my instincts because she was the part of me I wouldn’t tend to.

My softness and my bravery.

I’d get on her about not having a process. She didn’t need one. Her art traveled all over the globe and would obviously outlive her. I’d press her to find jobs to support herself and pay the long-indebted rent. She didn’t believe in landlords until her own, a Caribbean woman, started showing up. We had to make love quietly — a gag — when we suspected the footsteps in the brownstone were coming from Cathleen the collector.

We were not a good couple. I kept her hidden and she knew it. She was a fierce dresser, a classic beauty, and not one to be relegated to the background. I’m scared she will read this and not feel complimented enough relative to the unspeakable joys she gave.

“You don’t like strong women. You don’t like women at all,” she said. This felt like one of our final arguments. I’d sat on her step for an hour after a week of blocking each other. I had to see her before she left for good. “I can’t stand how stubborn you are,” I replied, “You think just because I disagree with you that I hate all women. That’s black and white, and you know I don’t do that.”

“It’s not my fault you’re a coward, just another man with mommy issues,” she said and I blew up. She put one of those whale hooks in and gutted me, stood over the viscera like one of the princesses from the revenge movies she loved.

We were not a good couple so I think we were each other’s lessons. That’s a big fancy lie, though. I learned that controlling a wild woman wasn’t the goal. I am learning that beholding and witnessing has as much to do with the person doing the beholding and the witnessing as the one playing the subject. I learned that consuming a person whole leaves nothing to them. We all need something to bring back with us in a loving encounter. (And it doesn’t help if you’re only taking turns consuming the other if the remains are all scraps.)

I started out writing this about the sex I believe I deserved. Or more importantly, sex that I didn’t deserve. I ended it seeing beliefs shattered in memories that hurt so good I can’t retrieve them.

Last week, I watched Belly, the 1998 technicolor splash from Hype Williams that taught me silly rap songs could make or unmake a man.

There’s a really simple recipe for making a 1990s thug rapper. The bones and broth of that recipe made lots of people lots of millions. It’s the same recipe for making a shitty American man today, just stripped down.

The making of a man is in lust. Lust for money. Lust for power over other men. Lust for territory, inside and outside the confines of a woman’s slit. Lust for numbness, the searing cherry tip of an endlessly lit blunt.

Tommy, played by DMX at his supernova brightest, may be the most confused, terrified protagonist in Black cinema. Forget the acting — and Nas would be lucky if we could all yeet that performance into the clouds — Earl Simmons strutted that screen like a pulsing knot of proto-masculine pain. His muscles ever tense, DMX could pop raw corn between clenched jaws.

The unmaking of a man is in indecision, the blind adherence to a macho whatever he wasn’t meant to continue, loyalty to a street code he never had jurisdiction over. The rules, if observed, will eventually kill you and your homeboys.

Ox, the drug kingpin who dies in a brutal stabbing after his Scarface moment, marches to the beat of everyone’s Big Man Tings drum. Tough, rude boy, killing for fun, always high, always numb, solitary, pocked, and flat, Ox could’ve been a statue or a poster, pointing his gun barrel down at you like a Jamaican Uncle Sam.

Sincere, played by Nas, reads as confused and mute, how I felt watching him on screen. A few times, I saw his stunted Street Poet character as the kind of relic it was. The kind of relic I was.

A few times when the audience laughed, it was because we’re a generation removed from when manufacturing elegant thugs as platinum-selling products was considered a very serious enterprise. They didn’t know we respected Nas for his music performance so much that his complete failure as an actor meant next to nothing for his golden boy rep.

In one giggle-evoking scene, part of the film’s slow anti-climax, the project bench shot is meant to mimic the third verse of “One Love.” Nas’s narration describes the little boy, cinematic Shorty Doo Wop, as a “loser ass nigga.” That’s when the laughter exploded. I felt so embarrassed but why?

On a basic level, I don’t think Hype Williams or his Belly co-writers meant for viewers to break into mocking laughter at this description of a doomed child soldier. I was embarrassed for that part of the 1998 artistry that didn’t survive into 2026.

But more than that, I was embarrassed I was still that little loser ass nigga myself. In 1998, and then 2002, and a little in 2012, I was sure I was only good for selling and smoking weed, peeking over my shoulder, fucking, and roaming city blocks. In each of the years when I was a loser ass nigga, by my own estimation, I lit a joint’s flame to engulf my loves in that infinite loss. While the crowd was focused on stilted storytelling, I got swallowed into my seat, shrinking but not quite disappearing. That one misplaced line lit me up amid the laughter.

I kept thinking of the impossible Black masculine, how heavy a burden it was for Nasir Jones and Earl Simmons, tasked with reselling it to hungry, desperate Americans. On one hand, they had already been conquering heroes of the Billboard charts and teenage dreams.

As Nas. As DMX.

On the other, their music was a more authentic vehicle for character and world-building, tiny snippets of gangster life but with the discursive anguish they could wail out. They were angry and strong enough to trade on national adolescent fears and hormones, to drag the cowboy machismo John Wayne left behind into the New York gutters with them.

But they were too angry and too strong to notice how ridiculous they seemed pushing pioneer imagery as they cooed to caged spirits. We were just a bunch of little boys who wanted fly sneakers and designer jackets, sticky, pungent drugs under our fingernails, and handsome jailbirds to adore.

I felt too much in my body right then. At once, I thought, do hip-hop writers even exist anymore? That term probably died with Greg Tate but the analysis is just as relevant now: Black minds sorting the wheat from the chaff, the soft, silky cream that is the music from the jagged graveyard gristle that built a death cult around catchy-ass melodies.

I used to work under DMX’s first biographer for E.A.R.L. and read, through Fontaine’s eyes, what the rapper had been trying to do with his brief, powerful life. One quote from the author’s blog eulogizing X says a lot about how men like him feel strapped to the needs of the same society that beat them down and unmade them. They see themselves as both the symptoms to be eradicated and the disease to be inoculated against.

He found his purpose. His purpose as Marcus Garvey said back in 1922, to “lift this yearning race of mine in lofty tale and song.” The purpose behind everything he had been through, all of that suffering. Earl Simmons understood it was all for a reason. “You got to walk through to talk to. And I have no regrets, dog.”

There’s one strange scene in the film’s third act where Sincere meets Tommy in a diner after they’ve been split up for almost a year. Tommy’s cleaned himself up, and Sincere, ever the pretty boy, sits opposite. The two men, fully inside their rap archetypes, cannot perform the regret, paranoia, and suspicion required to give the frames their full weight. What we get is more interesting though.

DMX slumps down in his seat and Nas leans forward. They’re exchanging pleasantries but ain’t shit sweet. Nas’s lines should read like a veiled interrogation but they nest somewhere between reluctant small talk and friendly banter. DMX rushes his lines, and as a nervous tic, licks and folds his bottom lip under the top after each one. But where he fails to slow down and live in the script, he succeeds at self-loathing. The Earl Simmons biography carries him through the wilderness of what must’ve been an uncomfortable set with too many people. He goes into solitary confinement mode and his body crumples. You want to see him on screen, if not for this film then to get closer to knowing what kind of tragedy lives under that pursed lip.

It’s not beyond me how every time I think of myself as a little loser ass nigga, my throat tightens. Even though I’m one cup therapized and three cups marginalized, and while I might be a pinch healed and a dash reformed, I still get incredibly sad watching DMX in Belly. I get sad watching Nas trying to toughen himself up enough to play a thug he never was.

I don’t know, I guess I mainly see Earl Simmons, the boy who’d been locked up and chained like an animal before he was 18. I see Shorty Doo Wop as a little loser ass Nas, and how he must’ve thought of himself to write that verse. To narrate that line. With that context, it’s much harder for me to laugh at how bad it really was for a rap star in 1998.

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Read: Black men don’t write about sex, part 1 here.

Author’s note: Any characters mentioned here are based on real people but are not one-to-one versions of anyone.

I still haven’t been in my body. This is how I know: at the Tantra retreat, the teacher called for each pair of partners in a class to play a role that required receiving touch. I was surprised to see how many hands went up when she asked, “Does everyone understand that? And does anyone have an issue with that now so we can discuss it?”

I should not have been so surprised. J, a tall, exceptional woman who would later go on to live with our teacher for months at a time, said: “I’m used to taking control, both in the bedroom and in my career. It’s not like I’m a Domme. I just like knowing where things go so I’m usually the giver and he’s the one receiving.”

“Can I break down for you why you don’t play that role? Here’s a hint, the word “play” is in the answer too.”

“I don’t know how to play?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t say that. It’s more like, you don’t associate receiving with play. Your nervous system may go into retreat mode. Receiving makes a lot of people aware of their limitations in that state.”

“I am always ready to go! I’m not like one of these dead fish!”

“That’s not what I said though, hun. I said you go into retreat mode when it’s time to receive. Do you know how to calm yourself?”

I watched along as if I did. I’d gotten head before. In all the rap songs, there was a manly default, a statute that said we stood atop the world and our giver was on her knees doing our bidding, not asking for anything.

But the pleasurable head I’d gotten was all across the board in terms of the giver’s styles. There was the more timid, coquettish head, where the giver would hedge around my organs, examine my skin like a biochemist measuring assay fluid for the next test. There was the get-up-and-go type head where my climax was license to run out of there like a grenade pin had been pulled. There was the absolute bodily takeovers from women who enjoyed giving, and who could pin me down if I fought the aspects of pleasure that made me squirm. I had no trouble receiving, obviously.

Except, when it was our turn to shift the exercise to my role as the receiver, my skin remained hard rubber. I felt the pocks on my arms and heat below my clavicle and down to my stomach, like soup had traveled down my throat or like touch was a shot of cheap whiskey. I couldn’t hear the instructions for the receiver because I kept looking at my giver, searching for signs she’d become uncomfortable, that the exercise was treacherous, that I was the worst thing in the world she could possibly lay eyes and fingers on. A slug or a palmetto cockroach, wings freshly spread.

My assumptions like sandcastle bricks fretting the sea. The teacher walked us through something called the Wheel of Consent from Betty Martin’s The Art of Receiving and Giving, a book I wish I’d had in puberty’s trial by premature fire.

I’m afraid that, in my Black feeling and fearful self, no one would love me.

Not love me right. Love me at all.

Imagine the hurdles this presents when receiving. I know where this idea came from, but I’m not sure whether knowing is enough to save me.

Lately, since the Tantra retreats and the plural love life got underway, I’ve done what any dedicated nerd would do. I read books and watched videos to point me in the direction of a fearless icon, a model of sexual bravery who also looks like me. Teachers like showed me I could find my tribe on social media, but I knew I’d have to engage my lived experience more. Of course, I adore her practice but came to it indirectly, after reading an entire Tantra memoir by Caroline Muir that was like a sexual odyssey.

Muir went from a loving but tame first marriage into a planned separation and then a life-changing surgery. After she starts to understand her body beyond its conveyance of male desire and satiation, she leaves home. I would have to leave home. First via my memory, reshaping my fears about who I had touched wrong and who had ever touched me right. I wanted to know who I could become and what my Black erotic fears would do under the compromising duress of an untethered masculinity.

In 2022, I found out.

I had two lovers who were visual artists. Many commit to the concept of the body as a canvas but few mean it like the female artist lover. An artist, of any gender, lives out their expression, for better or worse. The haphazard ejection of feeling into the world infuses art with necessary chaos. We put all our chips on the table in lovemaking, sometimes losing our only stash, never to recover. We are the worst type of gamblers, mortgaging sanity for a kiss. I know because, since a teen, I’ve loved, kissed, and fucked and failed like an artist, for better or worse. I had to observe and then avoid the gates constructed around sex, lest I forfeit my romantic privilege. With the artists who bedded me, I had to unlearn habits and cede control. And what I was experiencing wasn’t control in the first place. I was performing, but not for my lovers, for a fictional masculine council who didn’t care about my pleasure anyway. With the artists who bedded me, I had no practice receiving beyond getting head or having them ride me.

As they straddled my waist for consummate tongue swirls, I would issue a disclaimer:

“I get nervous when I’m being rode so that won’t happen for very long.” Sounding like an old maid. Like a clinician draping scrubs over my nakedness.

Never mind that I’d sent them these proud, sturdy nudes where I sat, phallus waving northward as if to say I wanted to be their next mount. I said as much in the replies.

Lucky for me and my sexual awakening, they put an index finger seal on my lips. They waved a soft, knowing hand when they witnessed my fears.

“Don’t you worry, baby. This won’t be long.”

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It was an assurance that no salute would be rejected, no result shunned. I could lay there soft as room temp butter or shivering like a cat in a rain storm. They would take me, find the soul under the Black feeling, fearful self, and engrave pleasure on my skin, wrecked though I was.

With the first artist, I was a John under her gaze and she was a lap-dancer. Like I’d paid her $10 a song and her only job was to get through the album. She bolted down every part I thought was strong, two hands on two shoulders, hips heavy on my lap, and kisses tilting my chin up and my scalp back. As she pressed her solid pelvis into my softened one, I thought it might be perfect to melt and while I turned into an atom and she into a galaxy.

Under the second artist, her mouth was a shackle and an anchor and a home I’d never had in my own body. Only once, as a teen, did I know what it felt like to be held by an adoring mouth.

Not a hungry mouth.

Not a desperate mouth.

Not a trying mouth.

A mouth of sweet harbor and refuge. A mouth still. Slow, fevered breaths descended from her lungs onto me, keeping me in place. She spoke to me, teacher to student, determining my need, assessing my capacity, and, mostly, ignoring my Black feeling, fearful self. We had the business of utter pleasure to complete and she wouldn’t let me get in the way. I tried raising my hand, in protest and shame, because surrender while this aroused, was unacceptable.

“I won’t let this go for very long,” I repeated, except with curse words replacing the subject and predicate. My name was “Fuck” and my slogan was “goddamn you” or “fuck you.” She had to understand that what she was doing tipped the balance of power, that we were both huffing from the source, blowing shotguns of adrenaline into the other’s heart valves and inhaling grief. Grief that we had lost our knowing selves to substitute in some bizarre animal living off lust.

All types of “motherfuckers” and “bastards” because our performance had ended and we were each subject to the other’s fallacies, misnomers, griefs, and Black erotic fears. I felt the shock of my orgasm in my sternum and then in my vena cava. Forget “la petite mort,” I could’ve died my big death right there. She blurted something equally shocking to disrupt things.

“I’m putting this in my self-portrait project. You’re gonna love how you look because you’ve never seen yourself on 16MM before.”

“I’m okay being in your art but not the center of it.”

“That’s all right. You won’t be. I don’t center men.”

“Well that’s clear but what are you trying to show?”

“I can tell you’ve never done this before. You ask too many questions because you won’t let it be, or let me out of your grip. Just let it be!”

I couldn’t. We had a long reel of our private encounters but this was different. Even on the small sessions with her ring light, she’d witnessed me. She’d opened the camera and undressed my eyes, disrobed my smile, and demolished my presets. I’d never been so done with a person who just started with me.

This was Viv.

I was at a retreat in Miami, Florida a few years ago. It was a writer’s workshop wherein mostly Black writers were getting a week with some dedicated professionals to unravel our gifts and decide whether or not we were still “emerging.” That meant a lot for me to get into the workshop because I’d been twice rejected and it seemed at least important for me to surpass certain milestones in my forties so this avocation wouldn’t feel so silly to pursue. Anyway, it was very validating by several measures but it also broke me down in ways I couldn’t have expected. For one, I met one of my dear writer friends and he was my teacher. He could be a peer to me, in another sense, because he grew up under the influence of hip-hop, has many of the same heroes, and lays out the best of his work inside self-deprecating humor. He loved to hoop and we had run a few games on the university campus.

Once when we were leaving a game he said to me, concerning my writing and my life, that I was in a unique position because I could write about an area that others hadn’t. I asked him what he meant.

“Black men don’t write about sex,” he intoned.

I still wasn’t sure what he meant.

“Well, it’s not like there’s no Black male erotic writers, but that’s mostly women when you break it down. And, saying this about myself, a lot of times when men mention sex and they’re first-person writers, it’s under the guise of humor. Or it’s very typical and about the act.”

I started to question his definition of “men” and “sex” but I was also being obtuse. I knew what he meant and he was right.

The publishing industry is prone to some of the same stereotypes as all American and commercial art forms: it trafficks useful tropes about Blackness that keep our sexual and human side on the margins in favor of comforting the middle class white woman reader. If a Black male author were to become explosively popular as a fiction or nonfiction writer, I imagine he’d have to be a sex worker. His name would be Trey or Big T and he would tell tales of suburban cuckolding and his role as a bull for couples who played his submissives behind closed doors. The actual emotional value would be in the validation of white readers who either live that life or fantasize about it and the author would simply cede himself to that crowd.

The joke would be on the publishing industry when they found out it was an Asian woman or some AI who wrote it.

I’m interested in writing about sex because of a Melissa Febos title that’s in my reading list right now. The craft memoir “Bodywork” is about writing into sex and the attendant traumas, catharses, and overall advantages of sensory work when peeling back the layers of an artist self.

I love writing about myself, like most awful, indulgent memoir people. I hesitate to write about sex, both because of the aforementioned sexist and racist rigidity for my demographic, but also because I would have to reveal, even to my lovers, how I truly feel during the act.

That’s the ultimate value of sex writing, which should be distinguished from erotica. I would write erotica if I wanted to chase the fantasies of success and, again, appease a reader who was looking for the expression of their desires on the page. That’s not what would feed me or fuel me spiritually though. I’ll tell you about the first time I realized I had to write about sex, the mechanics of it, sure, but mainly how the feelings that come up during our most intense experiences are a map for what makes art essential in the description of the great human project.

I was in Costa Rica, this was 2021. My live-in partner and I had decided we would join a retreat where I’d eventually meet one of my treasured friends in life. She was hosting a couples’ Tantra excursion where, as typical as that sounds, I found the most atypical group awaiting me. We walked up the steps to a canopy where each person was masked and being rapid-tested for Covid. This was a crazy time, I’m realizing, because we had to test before the flight to even embark to Costa Rica, which meant that any positive test here meant you basically caught it on the plane or in the airport. Also: very possible. As we waited our turn, I started taking in the sights. Everyone was Black there and most of the other retreat-goers were women. They cut a certain figure: curvy, mid-30s or later, and decidedly single or within a modest pair of women. There was laughter and there were head rolls. There were neck snaps and lean-backs as each woman greeted others they clearly knew from stateside.

There was also my friend, the retreat leader, shuffling around to every station within this jungle center for yoga and some level of escape. She had tasks and was delegating them to various worker bees in her orbit. She wore a flowy tank top and short shorts. Her close-cropped hair and perfect jawline gave her an androgynous bent to her long eyelashes and huge brown pupils, both inquisitive and officious. This was her actual tribe, a group of professional women who wanted nothing more than to access some pleasure without the lingering white or male gaze of their past.

I didn’t know how much I fit in. My partner was great at research so I trusted how much she had vetted the retreat and its head teacher. We grabbed itineraries after shaking our tests to show the negative hyphen on the white sticks. There was a daily nude yoga class I’d be excited to join. I won’t lie that the various shapes and honeyed colors of women and couples there were a feast for my attentive eyes. Each time I thought I’d found my thoughts again, another woman pranced by me and snatched my concentration into the bop of her hips or the slope of her shoulders. I love everything about the human body in tropical weather. The warmth brings the blood to the exact part of the skin that makes it look more alive than it ever has or will and allows the crowd to participate in joyful spectatorship.

Except this wasn’t regular looking or watching. In other spaces, and when I’d engaged my body as a tool or a weapon, my gaze focused on consumption. The long, hungry stare. The unjust taking of bodies by soaking them in. A woman at the grocery store. A couple entwined at the sex party. Morsels for my endless appetite to see without being corrected. With this group of Black women, I couldn’t snare them in my stare traps. Every time I prolonged my gaze, they would look me in the eyes, sometimes with equal curiosity. Not all of them returned the look; a few swiped off my gaze by turning a shoulder or laughing it away. The vast majority spoke to me, complimented me on my hair, my smile. They talked to my partner as if I wasn’t there, like, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt. Is he spoken for?’ and then they would introduce themselves.

I wouldn’t call it a role reversal. I had attempted to stare but in turn became a witness. I also couldn’t see myself the same because I had been witnessed. As a Black man, I have stumbled into all kinds of behind-closed-doors acts: taboo kisses and sucks on my belly and blowjobs under cafe tables. I’ve loved, privately, the drooling videos of those I dated but wanted to see in their candid acts of passion, mouths breathless and wanting. I had consumed and I was certain I’d been consumed.

But I had never felt the immersive tide of being witnessed.

I had felt like lovers knew me — or, at least, wanted to know me — up until the point of pressing my vulnerable, hard parts into them. Then, their query ended. I was a surrogate, the exact sledgehammer I’d imitated before bludgeoning them with my desire. A tool and a weapon. Since this feeling was one of many firsts at the retreat, I felt dutiful about writing it, even though my own desire and my own witnessing hung shame on my shoulders.

My partner and I went to our bedroom, with an outdoor shower, canopy bed and a small living space where she would scatter her 82 facial care products. I smirked at her collection of small bags and joked that I only tolerated it because her skin was perfect like a Korean billboard model. I wonder if she felt objectified then or seen. We joined the opening ceremony. I’ll admit I remained skeptical of anything that felt “self-help,” or that would be priced for my middle-aged crowd. In the couples realm, so many products are built for you to shortcut doing the work yourself, whether it’s a diet that ships you all the meals, or a former sex worker who coaches you through “the last sexless year of your marriage…guaranteed.” But this was not the objective I learned about at the retreat. Instead, the teacher calmed the room chatter while she handed out a bunch of sharpened wooden stakes. Near her altar at the front of the room lay feathers, crystals, yarn and string, leather strips, and a variety of small, neon sex toys.

We knew we were in for something but hadn’t settled on what. She handed out small pieces of paper and said:

“I want you to write down your intention for your body during these next five days. Five days isn’t a lot of time and many of us waste time without even thinking what that took from us. This is not that kind of place. We have to create intentions or you’re gonna leave here all mixed up, crying, facing a comedown like no other talking ‘bout ‘I came the hardest I’ve ever come but now I’m not in Costa Rica no more and I don’t know how to get it back’ I won’t have answers for you either.”

That matter-of-fact delivery called out to me. She was not making us any promises but had shown us what we could do if we were careful with ourselves and intentional. I thumbed the pages of the schedule and saw that tonight there was something called “The Self-Pleasure Ritual” and it would be in the same humongous room that doubled as a yoga stage for the center. There were mats and long body pillows, blankets, and cushions. I could see in the braids and beads, in the eyes and hips and waists, in the puffed lips, that we all needed the effects of what would happen next. I just had to be willing to try it for myself.

Sopranos Diary #1

Like many of the prestige shows from my younger days, The Sopranos escaped me because I’d suffered from Mafia overload in movies, TV, and rap. Goodfellas and Casino were my primer in masculine performance for Black boys from rough areas. We needed dreams with low ceilings and those pulp stories were the remedy for feeling like nothing was possible without guns and duct tape. Tony Soprano, though, is one of TV’s great characters, and he’s as immigrant-sturdy as they come, a natural draw for me.

Right now, I’m on the scene where Tony (James Gandolfini) is chewing out Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) for misreading his love for his nephew as a noble vulnerability. He believes his recently shot nephew was loyal and bearing the weight of his boss’s sins. She thinks he’s underestimating the moral conundrum of his bulky, vertical power — and how that crosses paths with his nagging sense of compassion. Tony is a stone cold killer and somehow a warm ruler. He’s an obtuse, selfish husband and somehow a gentle (if temperamental) father. He’s wizened by age but crippled by anxiety.

The series opens with a mobster in the grips of psychological decline, lashing out at the soldiers in his troop and, eventually, himself. His nervous system crumbles so much he loses sight and passes out. By the end of Season 1, the patriarch can’t stand his family and his responsibilities and the forces conspiring to snuff him out. Without trust, Tony has to find peace amid the chaos and balance his inborn lust for greatness with the need to preserve an evermore fragile domestic world.

In other words, he’s living the middle aged American dad struggle. Just the Cement Boots and rosary beads version. He suffers erectile dysfunction when he can’t square his love for debauched whores with his Mommy issues in the master bedroom. He manages to reflect, self-correct in key moments like when his daughter gets drunk with him on their first college visit on the same night he has to kill a relocated informant. It’s a miracle how much Tony lets slide and the transgressions that stick with him, the minor slights that tip him over the threshold of reason.

I wish I could relate to his mostly even-handed reign, his ledger-balancing instincts as the stolen cash overflows. Perceived slights send me spiraling, judging my every misstep. Tony Soprano is a terrible model for middle age America. Although he destroys himself as most Americans do — with food and drugs and self-hatred — he’s also responsible and enriched by his pole position. Tony refuses, in dire times, the depths of pathos. I am as pathetic as they come, searching for a sense of self in power at the margins. Fringe desperation molds my choices when I wish I could whack my enemies. I am the strongly worded email version of Tony’s hit jobs. I am the first-person blog version of sending a message that hurts ‘em where it matters most. I love Tony Soprano because he’s as brutal as I wish I was and somehow just as weak. I’ll finish the second season this week and send out an update post.

For my reviews and essays on Industry, Season 4, go to the links below.

• Yasmin from Industry Is On the White Workplace to Ghislaine Maxwell Pipeline

• Industry Episode 5 Asks What If You Can’t Or Simply Don’t Want to Parent

• Industry Episode 6 Has Entered the TV Hall of Fame With Epstein Allusions and Family Ties

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I have drank this same Ras’s sugar cane juice from the hand mill and felt replenished. He will include a shot of ginger in it at your request. Yet I hesitate to buy coconut and “jelly” in Brooklyn because my palate was trained on Jamaican coconuts and I know the imports won’t remake me like those cold, sweet, jelly waters do on the Portland roadside.

I’ve learned not to hold the same expectations of homeland food in New York, lest I ruin my capacity to enjoy food at all. The same is true of music.

Trim’s song Coconut Wata, my favorite new ear worm, is that enjoyment in a perfect pill constituted with Minaj-lite, the shaky timbre of an imitative but audacious star. I was unsure of Ice Spice as a Nicki Minaj disciple, although she did really well to parrot those stiff-hipped gyrations in her early stage shows. What she successfully copied from Minaj was eventually her own: the bristling charisma of a New York baddie. An almost villainous need to erase her rivals’ reps and run off with their boy. Pouty and irrefutable, she twerked in the bodega like it was her soundstage because who could tell her it wasn’t?

Before her, Doja Cat had transformed some Nicki Minaj vocal tics into single keys on her vast soundboard. Her lyrical quality, manic performances, and singing prowess staked a lane of her own well before Minaj stans could accuse her of wholesale lifting a style. No matter how wild Nicki gets, she’s not going to dress up in a mascot costume and say she’s a cow. Doja seemed cut from a different cloth and her unidentified flying subjects conquered comparison chatter.

Trim is not very different from the rap queen from Queens. She is a carbon copy in all but her frame, a tiny, brown-skinned Black girl from South Carolina. Everything else is Barbied out. Not inspired by, not tips or chuck. The whole fillet.

@trimsetters_@itsmstrim Coconut water live performance with Apple Music 🔥🎤 #fypシ #trim #itsmstrim #xxl #viral

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And I am not mad. This gives me the same electric feeling as when I heard Nicki in the early aughts, tearing up DVD scenes and snapping her neck back and forth like a New York chick smashing an argument. If you should choose anyone to copy, choose a master. This is a better foundation, with higher technical requirements than any ol’ rap single. The fact that Trim is so boldly jacking Nicki is a good sign that her flavors will hit when she has enough bravery to add her own ginger shot to it.

Mi wan tun rude-bwoy. Or something close.

I’m pained by how American I am. So at this book-writing crossroads, I’m writing about my dead father and his Rasta origins, but I’ve also begun to measure my Yard-ness against all things Jamaica. All things Clarendon. All things May Pen. All things Barbican Beach.

Not that it’s a cleansing process. I love the Black American upbringing that tempered me, taught me how to move in global rhythm and how to feel showy.

Yet to be from Jamaica is a special artistic prize I didn’t know I’d won at birth.

I want to know each waterfall, the national flora, not just in 90-second short form. I want to bootstrap and hike and sweat. I want to pore over books and reclaim road signs.

Last time I went up to Reach Falls, I decided to walk, against anyone’s better judgment. Jungle heat is snug in your pocket and lives in the collar, at the roots of hair, like my long-grown locs has told me on too many July days.

At one point, snaking up the hills, I checked the heart rate reading on my Apple Watch and it was in a red zone. My pulse had hit something like mile-high exertion, though I was nearly at sea level or no more than a few hundred feet above it. I had an ice-cold “WATA” I was initially nursing but it had heated to the temperate of my insides so I gulped the rest of it down before taking a beat at the side of the single-lane road.

Reach Falls is a national park with admissions hours that I’d ignored by starting the 100-minute trek only 30 minutes before closing. Like Jamaicans, I believe that nature should be free.

Me nah pay no fifteen U.S. fi run dung ah riverbed. When mi used to play up deh so since mi a bwoy pickney? You mussi mad!

Nearby Boston Beach started charging a $5 USD entry fee for the upkeep of the grounds. I don’t care how socialist I am at heart, or how much the long-term theory says this works, I’m not about to be paying à la carte for strips of paradise.

That’s a problem of my Americanness: too much pioneering, too much possession of stolen or established land. There’s also the simultaneous problem of my Jamaicanness there: too stubborn, too entitled, too unruly to cede rights to governance. Soul rebel vibes. I have to find a way to work out cognitive resistance in each of my nationalities. Cultural identity only works if I submit to something. I can’t be open and accepting of every Jamaican custom and also stay rude when it’s one I don’t like.

My inner mission has led me to biographies, memoirs, and glossaries. Speeches, dissertations, and pamphlets. I’m tallying points, trip by trip, until my wounds bleed green, black, and yellow. The beautiful part of having a shared mission is how much I get referred to moving titles like Jason Allen-Paisant’s The Possibility of Tenderness. It’s a Jamaican memoir that everyone should read. But it’s especially beautiful for a third-culture child, born in one place, raised in another, searching for meaning in the Old Country.

Allen-Paisant’s writing is a tear into a freshly fried dumpling heaped with a forkful of ackee and saltfish. He luxuriates on the homecoming theme, bringing the narrative essence of Jamaica’s plant species and fuzzy land history to the fore. That narrative wraps around his relationship with his mother, the surviving record-keeper of his family’s oral history and land ownership, and the author’s tenuous ties to a Jamaica that keeps shifting with each year he’s living his life in the UK.

Last night, I dreamt a new Jamaica, one I hadn’t seen before and in the dream I was older. I remember little except I felt the heft of my locs snatching my head backward, pushing my nose skyward. I had been to the beachfront so this idea of boxy condo development kept swimming in my mind. I wanted to cry because I ran into the same messy dilemma, like, will I always miss this place because I don’t live here? Chunks of it change that I can’t pin down because I haven’t inhabited any of it long enough to feel sure of its existence. With time rushing behind me at unreal speed, I must instead establish a Jamaican imaginary. Allen-Paisant’s book helped me to do so with his process so closely mapping the one I’m following to write my story.

He moves into a space of tender receptivity, allowing a combination of his family’s sparse artifacts and mysteries to wash over him. He walks trails, inhales humid air, and, literally, touches grass. By exploring the idea of a “cast garden,” where the cultivator simply tosses seeds at random in their yard, he comes to more fully grasp what Jamaica is. A bearer of eternal fruits and an ultra-rich terrain from which to birth his tale and reconsider his mum and grandma.

Whether his travelogue leads him to sure conclusions like which herb to take for kidney ailments and addiction, or it shows him the rough outline of his granny’s ambition, he presses the limits of his country’s tenderness. He stalks the land like a constable seeking clues until someone permits him membership. Congolin, a local farmer he follows ‘til he knows more about natural generosity toward soil than he does about farming technique, gives him access. The national archive and records offices at first look at him with a cut-eye, as they say, until he persistently defers. He has to let them be rude to him. Then he can enter. Then he can become a Yardie.

It’s the famous social media meme about Jamaican restaurants and their lack of food and the rudeness you get for even asking.

“You’re a restaurant!” you think, “You should be happy I’m here!”

But no, you must be invited to get service and receive these gifts. Jamaica understands its value, between the richness of the bauxite and limestone deposits, and the willingness of the country to be a way station for wanderers, hope is the wealth. There’s unique possibility in the island sunrise but we are still clamped to our worry about drainage.

Yes, another way to look at it is rudeness is the guardian of a tender existence. We’re too rude to quit or bend, which makes us ample when we could be depleted, and headstrong when we should be spent. When the floods wash the homes away, we are too rude to die. I confess I have not been tender the way I ought to be for my family. I haven’t held up the bargain where they fought for me so I could fight for them. I have no children and I need to start taking care of the elders more actively. They need to soften, to witness more of their tenderness before they die. It’s up to me to show them that possibility, to be rude on their behalf.

I’m the kind of monster that turns into a boyfriend. I hide in the bed, not under it. I’ve been groomed at very good schools, read very good books, and had very good jobs. I’ve learned under the vilest patriarchs. I’ve cemented my rep so I fit right in.

But still, I’m a monster. Let me explain a recent encounter where someone saw my monster fur, my ugly, rough scales long after I was supposed to have outgrown them. Claws, and long, sharp teeth, it turns out, are much harder to conceal. The past is the past but mistakes and cruelties live in me, shrinking only a little with age.

In my twenties, I had a girlfriend I disrespected because I loved her. I thought love meant irrational disrespect. Shouting matches were proof of passion. Broken dishes, little exclamation points on my upside down love letter of a life. I raged when she was out with other men, even though we had an arrangement. I used and misused her gifts openly, from her apartment to her parents’ connections, to run with the Brooklyn black artists of the early 2000s. She made me into someone promising just by association. She doted on me so her friends doted on me.

I felt my impossible outsider insecurity had finally been cured. She loved me so I was finally whole.

Then her brother got ill, the kind that doesn’t cure. I turned right back into a full-fledged monster. In our tiny apartment, I stalked her shadows, pried her journal pages looking for clues to mind control. When I saw her bike parked one day, near her other lover’s house, I hung out at my friend’s place nearby, deliberately making store runs and checking to see the bike’s whereabouts. My twisted thinking said I would finally discover I was unworthy of her love. Through her cheating. Through her abandonment. I became convinced I could “catch her” even though she had chosen me and we were together.

How many hours she gon park that shit there?

When the bike was still there, after many rounds of blunts, at 11 p.m., I trudged home. I was building a case against her, the voices in my head served as character witnesses.

I’d let her know she couldn’t lie to me anymore. (She hadn’t lied. I knew where she’d be just not for how long.) I would turn my jealousy into her lie by omission in this planned argument. There would be no objections since, everyone knows, women are liars. Especially women who love men, and love sex, and live out loud in their love for those two things. Those are the ultimate liars, I reasoned. How would she form any rebuttal? I’d figured out, the girl that I loved and had sex with was the very same loving, lusting, breathing phenomenon whether I was there or not.

That destroyed my boyfriend shell. Soon, only the monster presided. I smashed the vintage globe she’d gotten as a housewarming gift from her father. During that same argument, I threw a glass of water in her face, almost like a bad sitcom. A horror show sprouted from her face as the liquid hit her and dribbled from her precious lips down to her Coogi sweater. She was a Biggie fan. I loved her so much it made my head hurt.

I had to read better books, study better philosophies to deserve her. Since I couldn’t keep up, I subconsciously wanted to pull her back down to where I was.

That’s the short version. The longer one gobbled up sleepless nights. Waking up to argue, following her location pin, standing by the window in the rain, the ink smearing a long hate letter that she later told me she couldn’t decipher — to my benefit, because I was saying crazy shit that couldn’t be reversed.

That girlfriend, from almost twenty years ago, moved in with another Black woman, a writer, who helped pay the big rent hole I’d left in her Brooklyn life.

So back to the present. In June, I ran into that ex’s roommate at a big street fair standing next to one of my newer Black woman friends. The newer friend reported that she could no longer be a friend of mine, could no longer share backyard blunts or strange hotel nights after lots of whiskey.

“I talked to my friend about you. Are you an abuser? I need to know.”

The following is not what I said but paraphrases. I recorded it in a voice note. The names have been omitted to protect survivors of abuse.

“I was a monster in a past life. I once consumed a woman who volunteered her love to me — if only I didn’t consume her. That was her only wish. Instead, I tore into her flesh with my jagged canines. We thought we loved each other. Whatever mistakes we made, I worsened them by treating her poorly and being cruel.”

The note went on:

“The first few times I gashed her and took parts of her I couldn’t return, she said, ‘All right but that has to be the last time.’ Like any monster, I laid low for a bit but resumed my heart meal once she entered my bed or I entered hers. She was irresistible. Plus, I was young.”

She answered in a voice note:

“That sounds victim-blame-y, when you say it like that. I don’t like that one bit, Andrew, and I’ve done so much to keep abusers out of my life. You know about my situation with R_ and I don’t want to invite toxicity like that if I can avoid it.”

I replied, knowing she’d heard my low growls between the lines:

“It’s your right to keep safe. I can’t blame you for choosing your best interests. I am a monster, after all. I ate that one woman and I killed the villagers. I never once denied my crimes. But you take care.”

I started to feel prickles of fur poke out from under the layer of thin skin, pushing and itching where it had once laid still. Under the wrists and knuckles the most. A patch started to protrude from my lower back. Maybe there would be a tail this time. I had always been a monster, just integrated very well by this point. We have lost touch, but I esteem if I run into my former friend she’ll see my eyes glow like the monster I’d said I evolved from.

To her, I was a “nice guy.” Everyone knows nice guys are the monsters they’d never claim to be. I’m not the type of nice guy to run a tab of niceties a woman then has to pay by sleeping with me.

I’m the other type, where a pleasant experience or two has to be weighed against co-dependent jealousy, ill-tempered vandalism, performative goodness alongside crude subjugation.

I have knelt to the patriarchy too. I’ve washed my sins in thicker sins than my bloodline. Not ones to hit women, my kinfolk do their nastiest work as adulterers, absentee fathers, pride mongers. anti-woman philosophers.

I loathe tenderness, especially when it’s from me. I’ll tell a woman I’m trying to sleep with or have slept with the opposite. Bring your softest self, by which I mean: “tenderize your flesh to make it easier to consume.”

I am a typical movie monster. In “Hansel and Gretel,” I’m the sweet old lady in a gingerbread house who is really a witch. In Scream, I’m Billy Loomis, the heartthrob. In Obsession, I’m Bear, the store clerk who makes a bad wish.

Bear, played in a doe-eyed, sniveling turn by Michael Johnston, can only love Nikki, the object of his infatuation, if there’s no risk. He needs her to empty out so he can better consume her. That’s not Nikki, though. She’s complex, funny, sweet, and sharp. Rather than risk being cut by her fine edges, Bear wishes (wrongly) for her devotion beyond all reason, beyond what her soul can summon. He doesn’t wish for a lasting love or for the chance to date. He wants prey.

“I wish Nikki loved me more than anything in the world.”

What kind of monster wants a love like this? The nice guy monster must lurk among your circle if you ask. Obsession’s brilliance is in this choice: Bear presents as a protagonist but he is the monster. His love is a deal with the devil that he can’t break because, despite its grotesque consequences, he’s too greedy to turn away. Faced with the prospect of either rejection or the homicidal obsession of his love object, he’ll choose carnage every time.

That’s a choice only a monster would make.

Built into masculinity as we know it is the admission — and submission to — the worst of greedy men. Left with the choice to breed with thousands of women or to settle with one, our culture celebrates and rewards the reckless. But the depletion of communal harmony in favor of cruel gratification makes men monsters. This is the design flaw in human evolution. Not only are the men destroying women and families in the short term, we’re becoming part of a biological donor class, shriveling up and dying alone once our seed’s been spread. Playing to our basest instincts, we hobble into isolation, the weaker of the sexes left to fend for ourselves in a truncated lifespan.

I’m often examining my inner monster, because even as he atrophies, his hunger remains. I had a friend leave me because she wanted no parts of that. When I look my monster in the eyes, I can’t blame her.

I’m in the armpit of summer so the cookouts smoke a-plenty — three weekends straight of graduations and anniversaries. Love and country and a Knicks championship.

I can celebrate more life by just living. I imagine my kin dearly, dollar-winin’ as our days get long and then short again. I see Brooklyn sunrises ruing the feeling that our overall day count also shortened a little.

A while ago, I was in Rahway, New Jersey with my girlfriend’s family. They’re a proud Dominican bunch with jet-fueled Spanish and thick-curled grandmothers. A mean margarita pitcher. Playful jabs with warmth wrapped around.

“I haven’t seen you in forever, mi amor. You got thick! Don’t tell me you hiding a baby under there!”

Then to me: “You know I’m the one who taught her to dress. Don’t let them tell you any different.”

A younger cousin was graduating high school. She calls them all ‘the baby.’ The baby just started sophomore year of college. That baby is driving down from D.C. to finish her med school program. The baby got married and they’re talking about having a baby!

I keep saying these ain’t babies you’re talking about and she resists.

“Everyone under 30 with no kids is a baby,” she says to me.

“But then I can’t tell who it is you’re talking about when we meet your family. One baby is in the military about to do his first tour and one is in fourth grade and starting his own YouTube. Those is different kinda babies, baby,” I say.

But she’s right. The passage of time is cruel and unjust, and I don’t want to imagine any of these younger people enduring the hardships that we start to call life as a means of getting used to it.

The World Cup is on. Uncle is the DJ, and he loves it, but I suspect it keeps him out of the spotlight too, providing the seasonal groove.

“He keeps playing Bel Biv Devoe and this party is more Hector Lavoe, dique!” someone yells. Then he switches it up and he’s dancing by himself a little while the others give him the best possible approval: wordless dancing in the grass out back. Some have taken off shoes and closed eyes to get further into their two-step bag.

I’m one in a quartet of grown men, half of us not really useful in this setting. The women have made the food, set up the tents, chilled the ice, slid the chairs outside, everything. One dad is on the grill, quietly attending to his half of the family, the non-Spanish speaking Black side. DJ has his place, as described. I’m in a frightening purgatory of half-overhearing and roughly translating Dominican Spanish chatter, and bobbing to salseros I don’t know well enough to name. The memories of their tunes not yet ingrained in my hips or feet.

“Do you think your uncle’s family is off in the cut because they don’t speak Spanish?” I front-load my question.

“They’re just like that,” she says.

“How many of the kids speak it? They’re all second generation at this point. They have each other, I guess.”

“I know the eldest daughter might understand a little, but you’re right they don’t speak it. Trust me though, his family is, like, stone-faced. It gives ‘not my culture’ vibes.”

“Well, it’s not.”

“Fair point but you don’t gotta be sitting around like that,” she offers. I know the discussion is over because we don’t see eye to eye.

I imagine her, who has not yet met my Jamaican family, especially with tongues syruped in patois, folding her body inward, obscuring her light so she doesn’t cross sun rays.

Or, maybe that’s how I’m feeling. Either way, I shut up, which is the best way to enjoy this party.

Soon, the swells of each song support an all-cousin dance break or an all-auntie laugh-scream. The waists are rocking, and the flesh is searing in the midday sun. But no one feels anything, not even the sweat trickling down our spines and into our shorts. Much less the crunch of the dry grass or the barks of dogs.

The story stops there because dancing and smiles and laughter wash out the discomfort of a two-hour commute to the sticks. The fatigue of the NJTransit ride with drunken fans fades. We get back to my place too full, perfumed with charcoal and lover’s fondness.

The following week was more of a heatwave, but with the advantage of our good fortune, my mother’s house to cool us off. I have relatives from Jamaica who go back and forth from the country there to Long Island, New York — the country here, in a sense. The humidity stifles in New York without the sea breeze to relieve the sun’s quick lashes.

Plus, mom’s fridge broke down during an outage the previous day. We took a ride out to pick up forty-pound ice bags. At one point, after assigning pounds to each cooler, shuffling sodas into place, freezing personal spray bottles for the DJ, I laid on a lawn chair with the last of the ice pack on my chest. My locs have grown too long to have even a minute of respite in New York’s highest temps. I begin to shrivel at the first sign of 80-degree weather. I must be put on ice or in a pool or I’ll perish.

But as the dehydration headache set in, and I found my way to the basement den where I could hoard my own ice and plate, I got teary eyed.

I heard the identical laugh-scream rolling in from outside that I’d submitted to at the Dominican party. The air had cooled enough so three generations of women in my tribe were dancing to reggae hits from the 90s. Getting lower and lower and defying space. The religious pair were seated in plastic chairs in long skirts but clapped along. Granny has her shortest haircut but her dress flowed long and wrapped her in wind enough to glue a placid smile on her. She’d been up since 5 a.m. cooking for this moment. (Lord be damned if anyone helps her, she’s getting these pounds of fish fried and pickle-peppered.) I tried grabbing my phone and my other camera but stopped on the staircase instead. The moment was better.

I paused and watched my mother, replenished from seeing her younger sister dance, her cousins mouthing holy curse words, and her mother giggling they’d pulled it off. I froze myself in time to stop guilting over whether I’d done enough or sufficiently taken over this tradition.

They don’t want me taking over yet. They are living their lives just as fully as they had hoped or something close to it. They’re able to understand suffering, under a thick layer of warming Earth or under oppressive regimes, is relative.

We have house and home; we have music and dance. We had those uncles who are now gone for long enough to know they would’ve tapped a foot to this tune.

We had language for each other, for school days past, for dropped plates and melted ice baths from the cooler as the rhythm closed. We had sunglasses and sun dresses, cargo shorts and linen shirts, towels draped over the shoulder.

We had each other. We were a poem, soaking in the last of our flesh, spreading our molecules among millions. We were recipes charred. We were light.

How could anyone write about this, I thought.

It’s hard for me not to get choked up when I hear the Daddy stories of this World Cup. If you are new to writing memoirs, there are terrific father-themed ones. Abusive daddies. Absentee daddies. Delusional daddies. I have the blessing of maybe covering all three in the book I’m working on about my own father.

Erling Haaland, I learned, is a player for Norway who’s built like a machine. But like me, he has a traceable human father. Unlike me, he has a father who raised him and passed along his sport. I so wish I had become a fan of The Beautiful Game when I was young, especially under the guidance of my dad, who truly loved footie. They called him “Skip” in Jamaica and I imagine his modest, lithe body, with shoulders swinging and legs crossing over, skipping to a dub beat as he struck the ball over and around opponents.

I can’t tell you much about soccer, but I know there are standout strikers like Haaland. His combination of power, stature, speed, and cunning betray his boyishness, his elation at tossing rivals down like rag dolls, at chewing up patches of grass in his cleats, at mauling the net with goal after goal. When I see him, I know there must’ve been Norse boatmen who had bones like steel and crashed the shores ready to take your land and your women. A bunch of beasts.

With star athletes, the types of fathers who create incredible sons in the sport are often a perilous roulette ranging between failed obsessive and gold-digging latecomer. There’s the story of Jalen Rose in the NBA, for instance, who knew nothing of his father except that he had played NBA ball. Then Good Ole Pop showed up shortly before his son’s biggest college year. Karl Malone, too, was an NBAer of real esteem who did not appear in his daughter’s life until her debut with the WNBA, it was reported. He dragged with him a torrid reputation of leering at teammates’ wives and that nasty statutory rape the league somehow whitewashed with stories of his Republicanism and love for fishing. I hated Karl Malone when he played, but I especially hated his character even before discovering how terrible of a father he’d been.

Watch Haaland in his next match, and as my brother explained, you’ll note a careful assassin. He conserves movement, like Messi would even though he’s a much younger player. He strikes exactly when his team needs to score, not more or less. He also converts his chances at a higher rate. A young man sharking around, plotting on the weakness of the defender so he knows exactly how to catch him off guard, suggests a well-taught player. His father was a notable midfielder who played for Manchester City — the same team where his son now builds a legend with the namesake.

I suppose it’s not very unusual for a pro athlete to create and groom another pro athlete. That part’s become so common that the NBA is a sport now composed of the fairer-skinned sons of NBA players past. It’s also not uncommon for a father to pass on his love of a sport to a son.

We are all common somehow, as men are in their diversions. However brief, my father and I had conversations about sports. It was like me translating to him why I admired the roundball greats I did, and holding up my cultural lens to them. I didn’t get much from him about soccer, like who his greats were. He’d taught me some basics when I was 10, but ultimately felt I was too fat and groused at my unseemly motions with the ball. I’d been training my hands and flicking a jumpshot. I wasn’t sure what to do with this thing I could trip over.

For a year or two, I’d kick the hexagonal ball around my room but always left the house with a basketball. Dribbling that orange rock just got way more cred in New York than that other game where short maybe-Mexican dudes would take over any stretch of green longer than 60 strides. But inscribed on my curiosity for soccer was the gnawing sense that it was my father’s game, not mine to have, not for one who runs like I do, who sees asphalt where there are fields and concrete where there’s grass.

So I hit up my brother during the World Cup, in this, the first year after our dad died. The first year of the World Cup after our father is gone raises questions. So I ask him. I ask him questions because I know he’s studied it for so long. He was a goalie, played for the national squad in Jamaica, loves it like his children. I ask him what he thinks of Harry Kane, the English striker who looks, to me, like a proper gentleman from the Royal Court, a blue-eyed conquerer. I ask what’s happened to Brazil’s dominance, forestalled by the expansion of a global game, brain-drained of its stars in pro European leagues.

Occasionally, a little WhatsApp text from me reads: Haaland.

Just one word.

Or, the other day: “Whoa!” When Cape Verde nearly pulled off the unlikely upset against Argentina. I don’t know the particulars, only the heft of the game.

We may beat the colonizers (we won’t). We may see an underdog Mexico dethrone a European power (also no). The U.S. could take the big leap (nah).

It’s the first time I wish I could speak to my father uninterrupted. Free of the delusions that haunted him. Free of my resentments. Just me, him, the world, and some fans.

After a lovesickness for the Knicks and a sport where men make billions to throw a ball, it’s time for me to ratchet down and enjoy summer.

To a sport where men make billions to kick one.

Yes it’s been fun to see my lifelong road to redemption end at Jalen Brunson, my King, my Savior, blessed be His Number. But I can’t always gush tears of joy from 53-year sport droughts. While I do still occasionally daily mainline the 29-point comeback into my eyeballs via The Almighty Feed, life’s showing me razor-sharp beauty in art exhibits, two books I read, and the World Cup.

I’m a basketball fanatic, ofc. But there’s nothing like enjoying a sport where I neither have context nor want any. I’m just a boy who likes an underdog. Don’t feed me your gripes about player contracts and politics. I get that at home.

I wanna know who’s the GOAT: Messi, Pelé, or Maradona? Who’s a free kick choker? Who’s the upstart [African] nation to watch four years from now when I check back? I want to root against empire-stealing colonizers and for the downtrodden oppressed (within reason, though, cuz outside of the last four centuries, it’s dicey 😬). I want fanbases that collapse in agony that ain’t got NAN to do with me.

This is how I stay hydrated and healthy.

Which brings me to the Japan versus Brazil in the knockout round of World Cup. Twitter was phenomenal to witness this as a casual. I neither watched the game nor knew what time it aired. So instead of silly stats, I got the best possible alternative: Brazilians and Japanese being racist to one other. Real Earth Day, Michael Jackson “Heal the World” type time…if world-healing meant, breaking your whole culture down to its worst parts and re-selling them on Elon Musk’s black market.

There’s something honorable about a roast with agreed-upon terms where the bigotry cuts both ways (take notes, Kevin Hart.) You get Brazil cracking on Japan’s suicide culture and Japan roasting Brazil for rampant crime. All’s fair in retweets and war. Seeing non-white cultures absolutely destroy their opponents is poetry.

I think Brazil won, but in the long run, we all did.

Now on to the list!

Staff Picks

Books

Last Night In Brooklyn by warmed me so. In 2007 Brooklyn, protagonist Alicia Canales is supposed to be finding her place in a post-Black, post-classist, post-feminist world. In this Gatsby-esque tale, though, the hero is toiling through existential jealousy about not being rich enough, pretty enough…or anything enough to make heads or tails of her 20s as she breaks off her one big achievement, engagement to her doctor-to-be fiancé, James. Alicia projects her fears and fantasies onto La Garza, a neighborhood Bohemian with shared roots. After mixing friend groups, La Garza’s defeats and triumphs feel like her own and Alicia’s temporarily up on pretty people Everest with the other Black and Brown cool kid creative class. Gonzalez then lulls you into a series of rapid changes that upend Alicia’s view of aging, Brooklyn, and the American Dream.

Spawning Season by kind of caught me at the wrong moment where my desire to be a dad clashes with my girlfriend’s timeline/conflicts with maternity as a concept. This conception-to-surrogacy memoir follows Osmundson and his friends as they decide to co-parent in a nontraditional family. The author innovates the form by tracing the mating and gestation process of fish, specifically salmon, as a proxy for the difficult feelings about mothering, fathering, loving, denying, hoping, and collapsing that come with the question of family-building. I’m loving the book but loath to finish it because there are hints at a devastating outcome. Osmundson’s writing is palpable and Millennial, characterized by doubtful awareness and springy verbs. But read this book for the fetal daughter’s voice above all.

Movies

Go see:

• Disclosure Day - Spielberg back in his ‘are aliens real’ bag. But as with all his alien flicks, it’s about humans joining to fight authoritarianism.

• Hokum - I’m sorry I wasn’t familiar with Damian McCarthy’s game before this. This film is about the horrors of life hurtling onward through your specific unaddressed trauma because it does not care.

• Is God Is - Summer revenge smash. Ignore anyone who peddles you discourse about it.

Don’t see:

• Backrooms

Essays

Natasha Elle Thomas

The Revolution Will Not Keep You Sober

Here’s my latest piece, published in The Los Angeles Review, June 2026…

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2 months ago · 20 likes · 10 comments · Natasha Elle Thomas

Chris Stuck

Dancing on the Edge of Bitterness

Around the time I graduated college in ’97, my brother dropped out of society and became homeless. He wasn’t living on the streets in a cardboard box but in the house our grandfather built in 1942. It was boarded up and abandoned yet still livable if you didn’t mind the occasional rodent and big spider. There just weren’t any utilities. We hooked up a g…

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3 months ago · 42 likes · 9 comments · Chris Stuck

Loosies

This Twitter screenshot of a NYPost article. I know. I know. But it’s about the Knicks comeback so we’ll allow the tabloid.

Let me take you into my world in 1999. We thought the computers would take over then too. I thought I was in love with T. I also thought I was in love with L. E thought she was in love with me. Or, at least, someone kept calling my landline, palm over receiver, hanging up.

None of us loved each other like I loved the Knicks. Teenage love can’t stack up to fan heartbreak. My mother’s Canarsie bedroom was my secret haven with a mirrored wall-length closet and plush green wall-to-wall carpet. I hated the Spurs and we were facing them in the Finals via one-handed phenom Latrell Sprewell, Light-Skin-Always-In Allan Houston, and spindly-armed Marcus Camby. Larry Johnson was also on the tail end of his very decent career, and had been imported to get New York one step closer. He’d done just that.

Patrick Ewing, our Caribbean hero of the 80s and 90s, had run out of gas, and sat on the bench like a rusty tow truck on a country road.

There are no long odds when you’re young. The world unfolds like a series of wins, like my hands up T’s skirt on the L train, her grinning and breathing different. Like the doughy aroma of 6 a.m. Avenue L bagels.

Catching the bus by the straps of my backpack caught in the door. I didn’t know how to mourn yet. How disappointment sat in the lower intestine waiting to drag me to the sewer. I knew sadness through the Knicks and being Black and young and overlooked. But these were vague emotions, the kinds I recorded in the little raps stuffed in my math notebook. I knew sadness like I knew ghosts who kept me awake. They had no texture, only a chilly presence in rooms I needed to escape.

The night the Knicks won their only Finals game, I was hanging out with my mother in her beautiful boudoir, sitting on the floor. She had laid on the bed in her curlers and bonnet, invested but not as knowledgeable once Ewing, the Jamaican, had faded into his sunset. I have to look at the box scores to remember all of it, but the expansive letdown started that evening as a kernel of light in my chest and kept widening until it poured out of my ears and eyelids.

They barely held on to scratch out the win. No Knick shot well. I felt stymied, like I’d been tricked into believing something unlikely and cruel. As Michael Jordan’s career had ended, I thought, “We’re up next, obviously” not realizing ‘next’ could mean ‘never.’

Then Tim Duncan entered the picture. Then LeBron James. Steph Curry. A lot of stars were better than the Knicks, and shined brighter lights. They were also giants who shunned playing for a team that had more commercial wins outside of Madison Square Garden than in it.

That didn’t stop them from celebrating on our logos, stomping out our dreams. Duncan and company grabbed their first title in New York, and it’s like the basketball world left the Orange and Blue behind while each great went to the dance. Curry lit up 7th Avenue with 54 points in his debutante performance. LeBron James and Kobe Bryant bested each other’s 50-point outpourings during the same dismal season.

We sunk to the lowest rung of sports fandom: watching home games to witness other players.

A certain forlornness can be excused when you live in a walkable city, webbed with taxi stands and bikeways, local and express trains. The Big Apple’s protective of both your anonymity and your simultaneous, constant need for attachment and noise.

No worry.

Sirens will always drown out the quiet of your soul’s saddest depths.

Then, there was this week. Last night. With the greatest comeback in basketball history. The greatest comeback of my life, too, though.

Life ain’t been no crystal stair for New Yorkers, for Knicks, for me. A couple days after the president dragged his demonic sludge through the place, some magic happened.

There are those who’ll tell you magic doesn’t exist. They’ll scoff at your altars and demolish your prayers. They’ll call your hope foolishness and their cynicism wisdom.

It’s the opposite. You have to reach the far edge of life, cliffhanging, roiling in apathy and sorrow to realize that faith is the only deliverance.

The Knickerbockers delivered an entire city, bred and masted at the maw of hell, to a single ecstatic reality: no hope is too silly. No dream will flourish unwritten. With 12 minute stretches of basketball, a game where the turns of a literal sphere dictate your pulse, the New York Knicks purged an entire city’s trauma.

Your world can exist in a bounce.

Then they won the championship. I was with my boys, from post-college, from the smoke-filled rooms, from the days where some left their dreams hanging just as thick as the weed in the air. We hugged and we cried and we FaceTimed. One of my best friends has two sons who now love basketball because they watch their dad break down the game and all the life to be learned from it. The thought alone tightens my rib cage around my swelling heart and produces the flood.

This year’s been really hard. My father died and — because of our difficult relationship— I refused to ID his body. The brutal mist of funeral home formaldehyde almost sucked my pupils out of their sockets as I signed his death certificate. Then I was laid off from my job for no reason. I had to accept my reality, but not lose my spirit in the agonies of a professional game.

I wrote. I wept. I exercised. In private.

But sometimes neither life nor fantasy is enough. My love for the Knicks occupies that indefinable space between improbable imaginary wins and heavy, cold stuck-ness.

Take, for example, their contradictions:

They’re run by a famously stingy, out-of-touch owner, James Dolan, but led by a star who took an enormous, unheard of pay cut to enlist his college bros to play with him.

They preside over the “World’s Most Famous Arena” but have long struggled to bring glory to it.

Their team is staffed by 8-figure millionaires, none of them classic “stars” — more like redemption stories, grinders, and hardheads who have few individual pro awards but plenty proof of their commitment to each other.

Knick fans — and this must be said — are almost exactly like New York itself: a group of transplants, recent arrivals, and dreamers contending against a league of old diehards, long rooted residents, and tastemakers. Miami financiers and Brooklyn plumbers. Astoria graphic designers and Long Island realtors. Only abiding by the paper chase.

Yet we manage to get along in the spirit of never quitting before the finish.

We have seen the valleys, trust. Karl-Anthony Towns is a befuddling and dazzling player. Prone to foul trouble and mental absences, he stirs the ire of crazies and critics alike. At one point during this epic season, he seemed pouty, dissatisfied with his role and terrified to be traded. That seemed to coincide with his engagement to a socialite and Kardashian familiar, Jordyn Woods. When the Knicks could’ve been hitting their stride, both he and the fanbase worried about the Towns tenure. He would be just another in the litany of stars who jumped on the wagon past their prime, carrying away with him more hope refuse. Amaré Stoudemire Lite.

Mikal Bridges also seemed degraded to pure fossil fuel, unable to convert his usual shorthand flick shot against Atlanta in first round. The fans banished him to Governor’s Island despite his penchant for late-game heroics. He’d turned from stud to dud when the playoffs came. John Starks Redux.

Before he was 2026 Finals MVP Jalen Brunson, he was tunnel-vision Brunson in my living room and others. “He can’t keep trying to shoot over everyone.” “Why does Jalen force the action so much when he can’t beat the D?” “That’s not the shot we want!” The very qualities we watched in awe became the bad luck omen we’d feared. A star-less franchise, we couldn’t afford another MacBeth-like arc. A Carmelo Anthony Incarnate.

Forget rewriting legacies. The team who entered the 2026 Playoffs looked like another reference stub for the endless index of futile years past. Hash marks on an old slab. The drudgery of real life where imaginary wins are all most of us get.

That’s how I entered my friend Shak’s place, after a Lyft Citibike ride from Greenpoint to Bed Stuy, and heavy with dread that this would be the loss that turned the series bleak. My basketball cohort has grayed so we don’t run threes in the parks anymore. Bad knees and separate lives. Things change in an instant.

So then how do we rewrite love? A reunion on championship night.

His wife, C, let us in on a spell she’d cast the other night, during the Big Comeback.

“Whatever you want to happen, just say it to the T.V. I promise this works.”

I tried it. “Jalen’s gonna get 44, 45 tonight.”

“Mitch got that rebound! Yea, let’s go Mitch!” And we forgave the players their flaws, that they flop against talented foes. We zeroed in on the Spurs pups, non-shooting bursts of vigor.

“He’s gonna miss that free throw.”

“Let him shoot that, that’s what we want.”

The tidal wave of New York magic started to lift our guys and sink theirs. Instead of preparing for the restless aches of more loss, we froze in consensus joy.

We were about to do it. As the buzzer sounded, the spell’s final chant came.

“We did it! I can’t believe we did it!”

Had we really done it?

Yes.

It’s true they had practiced, lived for the game, moved coasts and roles as athletes. But it was in order to leave the worrying, wishing, and hoping to us. Unlike Midwest industrial haunts or South Atlantic brewery hubs, New York’s powered equally by 80s gold chain hip-hop and 80s Wall Street cocaine.

We are violence and friction and maybe, by will of our pessimism — the bulky sense that nothing good is allowed to happen to you as a New Yorker — we found an exception. The Knicks should win because we need a win more than anywhere else.

We are addicted to opioids too. We’ve been priced out of our homes and jobs by corporations and their robots. We don’t know what the hell is going on but shit keeps changing without getting cheaper, easier, or smarter. Nothing feels like rest.

Until today.

I walked up to Fancy Free on Lafayette for Spike’s Annual Block Party. It was 18 hours after the Knicks had won the championship when I’d strolled Tompkins Ave in Bed Stuy. I’d never seen so many new New Yorkers like that night.

It scared me. The neighborhood had been majority Black all my life but you wouldn’t know it that Saturday.

Shit keeps changing.

As our group huddled near Herbert Von King Park, we noticed that the main people screaming “Knicks in five” were young and white with mullets. They were rolling in packs. New York looked like a small town, people remarked, but more like a college town in Iowa than a steel town in Jacksonville.

At Fancy Free the next day, the OGs sang hip hop standards. Biggie’s “Warning” and Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones.” Songs made from struggle and grit and crime. We are violence and friction so the songs from that time lay us bare. I snapped pictures of jubilation in graying locs and bamboo earrings. Nike sneakers and Oakley jerseys. I guess we were at a survivor’s rally and we could fit the whole group into a neat quarter-block right off the corner of BAM.

I wanted to let out the flood and couldn’t.

Before and since the Knicks won, I’ve made love. I’ve wept. I’ve sat one hundred percent still. Life has almost nothing left to give me, I figure. I’ve experienced so many rushes as a New Yorker, most from tragedy and sin.

Before and since the Knicks won, I’ve raged. I’ve screamed at a screen that wouldn’t let me in, composed and erased the same text, wondered if me and all the lovers ever loved each other. I’ve passed exes like commuters on a train and forced myself to forget where ecstasy lived.

But I’ll be damned if since the Knicks won, I didn’t think of the wonderful, hopeful, broken and broke-down New York loves who cursed that team with me. I’ll be damned if I didn’t spend the three nights, after the three decades waiting, holding back the flood.

I’ve constructed an entire personality on my relationship to disappointment. I have outsmarted, outfoxed, and denied hope. I have convinced the small light flickering inside me that it is the worst type of fiction: a false god ready to snatch me away. Secretly, I prepared for a humble life because I saw my child-self tearing up every time he lost. I didn’t want to do that to him so we both stopped praying.

Since the Knicks won, I don’t know what do with myself.

I’m gonna start off by saying this is a very-fucked-up story to tell about my high school friends because one day I want them to be my real friends again. It’s not that I violated them or that they felt disdain for me (that I know of).

It’s more that life took its own route and tonight was our 25th-year reunion and I still have no idea if they worry the way I do.

About waking up pissing wrong instead of right. Or right instead of left.

About to-do lists.

About my next boss being white or a woman or both.

About how much longer I have with my mother.

About whether or not I shot through that last rubber.

I worry about mortal weight because if my brain feels too light for too long, it’s like I’m cheating life, giving it room to uppercut me under the belt.

When I get started worrying about real things, I need distractions, like the story of Wynn and June and the girl they shared.

They say appreciate your body now when you’re young because when you get old, you’ll see those were the best bodies you really ever had.

When we wore chunky Filas and our girlfriends’ ponytails stayed slicked back, waves were the point of entry. Even if you ain’t have game, or pretty almond eyes, a round head and seasick waves could help your first approach not be a dub.

I was not hollering because I didn’t have Carolina Blue contacts or Jordan VIs or enough Murray’s pomade to really kill ‘em with Botox luscious waves. I used an S-Curl gel, a hot shower, a stocking cap, soft bristle brush followed by hard bristle followed by soft.

I still couldn’t bag no Tamara, the Haitian-Italian baddie all my friends kept drooling over. She had her pick, too, but was all about straight As and varsity tennis (along with the skirt riding just under her butt). Wynn had been crushing on Tamara since about 5th grade and his 4-wheel drive Landcruiser, Nike Air Max, and North Face confidence assured him bagging Tamara for life if he so chose.

June was in the Beemer, earned from his dad’s First Black Hedge Fund bread. I noticed when Tamara came out to see Wynn, June would screech that Beemer around the corner, peeling off little bits of attention with each exit. June invited us out to his country home after prom and our dates, who looked like backup dancers from an Ashanti set, dropped jaws and looked at us and June way different. Wynn was Brooklyn Caribbean rich, mom worked at the bank, pops ran an auto body shop. Four-floor, two-family in East Flatbush that they owned.

The first on the block with a Motorola, 2-way pager who wasn’t selling work or boosting Polo denims.

But June was on a totally separate plane, private jets to the Bahamas for spring break, country homes plural. I was lucky enough to go to Jamaica some summers, but also had to choose between that and SAT prep once high school came.

And their bodies. Wynn was a lean wrestler and track athlete, so he had arms and abs and his neck looked like one big muscle extension of his bicep. A chest accessory.

June was a hooper who wore size 14s. He made varsity as a sophomore and we ran out the gym screaming when he first dunked after AAU summer league. They almost had to call the police when he yammed in a game. His girls were there and looked dead set on fighting out their claim to him. He had 6-foot-3-inches in height and sometimes faked being a man well enough he could get us in clubs by lying that he was on the Knicks. Since I was neither tall enough nor cut enough, I rode passenger with Wynn or June and picked up the scraps and overflow. Girls who wanted a shot at them might join the wait list and give me a spin in the meantime.

Senior summer jumped off and we knew where we’d all go to college so parties were priority billing. Ronald and Wynn had the hookup to the Carib boat cruises and we’d swing through the Bronx or Queens in the Landcruiser, pending pick-up of whichever sweeties were down to sweat and grind to the diwali riddim and sharp rum. One night, Wynn scooped me from Canarsie with a scowl. He wouldn’t pick up his head and was listing off the night’s stops like a pilot giving an itinerary.

“You good, bro?” I asked.

“Nah, man. Tell you the truth, I’m not fucking good, yo. Tell me why a nigga go to pick up these new tires at the shop to see a very familiar Beemer on Flatbush near St. Marks,” he said.

“June live right over there. You know he put in work at that musty ass pool hall.”

“Right. So, I figure lemme stop by the light and honk the shit out the horn and fuck with this nigga. I start honking. Mad loud, mind you.”

“He pop out on some crazy shit?” I laughed.

June did not laugh.

He crinkled his face up til it was just nostrils and lashes.

“Not even. But I could see bro’s big ass head and hat turning to look me like, this caking-ass nigga looking dead at me, bro, not saying a fucking word. Just turning and looking back through the windshield, turning again. I’m like, why is this nigga being funny style?” he explained.

I started feeling the pit of my stomach and my toes getting numb like when my anxiety turns into a swarm of fear wasps.

“Then I see Tamara come out the same fucking bodega he’s waiting at. She goes to hug up on this nigga but he mad hesitant, looking back at me in the truck. She pops fly and they bickering before he leans down and whispers something. This trick wanna look back at me in the car now.”

“Tamara, nigga??”

“Yup, Tamara who I took to prom. Who call my mother every Sunday. Who be chilling with me and my brother at the shop.”

Now, I knew June had other girls. One of his other girls was my other girl, in fact. These things happened — overlaps, war stories, pass-arounds.

But she had achieved special status with him.

He was calling her wifey because he thought they might do the high-school-to-the-pros fairytale wedding. Tamara had violated and he saw this confirmed in the side view mirror where heartbreaks were closer than they appeared. One August afternoon in front of the bodega. T in the Baby Phat jeans, silky hair down her back, and Wynn breathing the same air at the same pace like they had done this before. Like many befores.

“Charge it to the game, yo. I don’t even know what to tell you. That nigga rich as fuck. He probably hollered cuz he was bored.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better. Man, fuck that tall-ass lil nigga. Bro on me like that? He got everything, yo! I’m bout to find one of his bougie curly-hair girls and pipe her.”

He already was. Because that’s how high school goes when you’re in your best body. Your body is a conduit for insecurities, spilling out in acne pustules or wayward tongues pulled to other bodies. I can’t say who was more beautiful at the time, Wynn or June or me. But I can say we all wanted our beauty retold to us, verified and salivated over. We chased our own body ideals through the rating systems we had for girls. Pretty bodies with weird faces were nines but not dimes. Weird bodies with the young, cute faces were solid sevens or, best, eight and a half.

Lips. Hair. Legs. Shoulders. Designer cashmere, Gucci leather, silken suede and crushed velour contouring our bodies into bright blue sex.

As we first entered the marketplace of sexual desire, we paid the steep admission fee of childhood. We stumbled into magazine spreads — Maxim, Smooth, Men’s Health — where the best guidance was to shrink, rip, and chisel ours down to nihilistic sizes and mock anyone who couldn’t zero out. We weighed in before wrestling matches and basketball games, sliding the tab way over for anyone who came in bloated and slapping open hands at the remaining fat that teen hormones hadn’t yet devoured.

I blasted myself in the mirror, pinching the stretchiest, softest parts of my mold, and ignoring all the undeniable manly muscles pushing their way to the front.

This is my view of Euphoria, a show meant to reduce us to our teenage essence, where no one exists if they’re fat, dark, or sad. I have an unhealthy view of my body. I do not need this American writer-director reinforcing my internal critique. That might not be the point of his show, but isn’t it?

American stories can be reductive in their happy-ending-or-bust framework. Levinson at least writes into the cracks of this conceit. The popular kids in high school often walk into premade yearbook tragedies. Dreams can be stunting and early praise misleading. To distract from his A-list leads’ megastardom (Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney), the writer shapes a tragedy around small-scale fame and the narcissism of youth. Rue can get away with so much because her promise, her face, and her snark grant her special privilege that will soon run dry. Nate scams his preppy bro friends because those men are obviously attracted to him. Cassie can dumb out as the shallow blonde because, well, look at Sweeney’s career.

Where Euphoria falls apart is in the excessive gore, where the main damage to its characters happens only to their bodies. Nate has his little toe amputated by vicious mobsters and, in the melee, Cassie catches a knuckle sandwich to the nose. In the campiest moment of the season, one that I’m not sure should’ve so easily played for a laugh, Sweeney cries “I’m bleeding!” as if to remind the audience we need a new reference for her mug as bruised. Rue, too, vomits, bleeds, and expels fluid in each episode. This body horror is Levinson’s only way to complicate or challenge his characters but, in life, much simpler pains visit us.

A romantic rejection. An interview flop. The deaths of parents, friends, and lovers all haunt us into the plain conclusion that living is hard. Life pauses for no one and spares no innocents in its wake.

I learned a lot about my friends and classmates after 25 years and also very little. Having kids makes them happy. Work isn’t as rewarding as we once thought. The measure of a man isn’t his wealth, but his character. Our teachers could’ve told us some version of these truths and we would’ve thought ourselves beyond disappointment, maybe immune.

They were right. They fell because they loved. They cried because they expected. They failed because they wished. They were also kind enough not to detail their failures or to force us to live in ours.

While it may not be Euphoria’s job to summarize how quickly these powers vanish, I demand better of prestigious art. What can’t be captured in 35mm reveals of perfect curves is the disdain of aging that we celebrate. The hate we feel about scars. I contend that scars are where you feel love and tenderness. They’re where you understand yourself because they don’t peel away smooth. They linger. They spell out regret.

My high school reunion has fucked me up for weeks now. But it’s not because anyone’s doing bad or that I am not where I want to be. Although, I’m sure both those things are true. My high school reunion is fucking me up because we’re at the exact point where we can see our teenage selves as imperfect and still love them with our broken hearts and weary eyes.

I will take that over scripted, injected, blushed cheeks any day.

I remember where I was when Michael Jackson died. You remember where you were when Michael Jackson died.

Less clear to me is where I was when I first heard Michael’s voice. He was always in the air. A song walking around in my body. Showing up at cookouts and Christmas.

A primetime event. The Simpsons was on or the news would stop. Michael bought broadcasts. He Superbowled himself into ubiquity. He MTVed himself into history.

I knew he was fallible — he was human, of course — but, as a child, I couldn’t see his flaws. I just felt confused. He was secretive about his inner life. I wondered whether he was a boy under all the layers of his altered body. Under the special effects. He had to be, no?

I walked out of the Michael biopic admittedly a little stunned. I felt the gray sprigs in my hair as I saw my reflection in the escalator glass. I saw the Black women in front of me on the ride down, ornate twists braided into a top bun and also gray. I heard myself say, “This was for our generation,” as if the Jackson brand could belong to an age. He’s an orchestrated series of decisions, measures of familiarity, fine enough secrets.

In elementary school, I remember someone brought the LaToya Jackson Playboy spread. Latoya and Michael looked very much alike to me. Would her centerfold be like seeing him naked? Was that part of the reason she showed herself? To reveal more than her brother?

I remember the 9 p.m. Oprah Winfrey interview, where the box lights on Michael made his skin glow. He was like an alien. “Look pon him face,” roared out of my living room as we got a close-up view of how much procedures had changed our icon.

Michael denied things we’d already circulated as true. He wasn’t as sexual as the other stars were. He didn’t say so, anyway. He was neither man nor woman. He’d charted the course for a gender fluid presence that became common after his death.

“What a way ‘im look like girl!” from inside my house, again. I wanted to be skinny like Mike. He was so skinny he could break. He was skinny enough to fit the space between gender and race and sound and laughter. I started to wonder what Michael ate if he ate at all.

Then, the other interviews aired. Michael Jackson was speaking about friends, who were celebrities too at times. They were boys. Michael Jackson liked famous boys. We wanted to hear sentences from him about his devotion to the music. We wanted to hear proof he could love us the way it echoed in the notes.

But Michael Jackson liked famous boys. That sentence keeps ringing in my ears and my nose. And then the lyrics feel like they support my strange theory.

When they say why, why…tell ‘em that it’s human nature.

I’m so stunned by the Michael biopic that I come home craving more music to drown out the noise of the sentence I hate. I pull the sentence apart and rearrange it so that it feels better as the moonwalk video from MoTown’s 25th anniversary loads on my YouTube.

“He liked famous boys, Michael Jackson. He never had a childhood.”

I append the phrase. I want the sentence to soothe me, percolate tears like the other Michael traits. Michael had perfect pitch. Michael was the best dancer I’d ever seen. The women loved Michael. Michael made fans faint in Turkey and Brazil.

But I keep thinking about sadness and happiness in those boys. I know they liked him back. Famous boys liked Michael Jackson. They said he’d done nothing unsavory to him. Famous boys like Macaulay Culkin and Emmanuel Webster were forbidden to touch. We’d never sacrifice a famous boy’s childhood, right?

It’s like Michael was asking us about himself through these bizarre behaviors.

Then as I grew older, I noticed that Michael was not weird to us. The sentence I hate would ring out as the stories got stranger. Sleeping in the chamber. Living in a museum and becoming an artifact. It’s like Michael needed us to go away and we wouldn’t.

Around Black families, I became a dissenting voice. The chorus said that those regular boys were lying. They wanted money and they knew they could get it from our very own Grown-up Boy. He was too kind and they had their own designs.

“Then stop befriending them!” I’d say. But Michael Jackson liked famous boys. Wasn’t that his right, they shouted back. Who doesn’t want to love and protect children?

This passage from ’s essay “BAD” tells me what I thought of Michael might’ve been true for regular little 1990s white boys too.

Myths don’t protect children. Myths protect childhood. They allow us to believe that the monsters only live in dreams and camp out under the bed. In reality, we send children into the monster’s beds and then pretend they don’t exist when the kids run out screaming.

We tell them there’s no such thing as monsters. They were a little weird, or they estranged themselves for unknown reasons. The accusers and their parents were trading innocence for recognition. We wanted Michael Jackson to like us so we offered children in our stead.

I’m still torn about why he was both weird and not weird to us. Why we refused to let him go despite all that we knew and felt bad about not knowing. My hope is that this biopic — made to answer and seal some reputational questions — goes on to raise more important ones.

I’ve had bosses like Dr. Robby. I’m sure you have too.

Patronizing, empathetic sheep in scrubs hiding their narcissist wolf fangs.

The second season of The Pitt limped through the finish line like that same lame boss who made you donate to his wife’s melanoma GoFundMe as he ran the Brooklyn Half. “In honor of Tess.” The one who sent you the link to his TedX webinar where attendance was optional but suggested.

At every critical juncture, Dr. Robby failed himself, his staff, and his patients by centering his existential suffering. The Woe-Is-He storyline, irresponsibly teased and spray-painted over each episode this season, gave us each a silent endorsement of blunt patriarchy.

If the boss is unhappy but keeping everything afloat through self-imposed sacrifice and heartache, how bad could it be for you, the worker?

I’ll tell you how bad.

As Dr. Al-Hashimi pulls out of the lot in the final act, she breaks down into tears. She spent a day in her best version of survival mode under intense examination and facing antagonism from her attending, Dr. Robby, while offering consistent principled support as a counterweight to his scolds and tantrums. Yes, she’s incurred a risk, measuring the probability of emergent medical injury like a scientist of her own lifelong concern. Eventually, she folds to her crisis of conscience and to Robby’s pressure, pulling him into a private room to confide.

He wields this info with cruelty, stinging her with verbal lashes about her professional recklessness. This from the man poorly hiding a severe anxiety condition and the illegal protection of a senior staffer’s drug larceny. That’s how toxic bosses do, though. They gain a morsel of trust in order to choke you on later betrayal.

At my last job, I did well. I wasn’t a perfect employee, but I showed up for my team and met goals we set for ourselves and the company. For reasons unclear to me, I never gained my boss’s trust. In fact, she and another young white woman plotted to usurp my role, undermine and push back on winning strategies, and eventually push me out of the role so the young white woman could assume my position. The slow leeching took place over two years, and I kind of just ignored it because what use would it be bellyaching over it? Corporate media is a cutthroat game of cronyism and patronage, so uniquely competent black thought can only last for so long.

I can see a countdown clock overhead whenever I start one of these gigs, but that’s because I don’t value myself enough. I know there’s so little leverage to be had that I concede pride in my work, accept lower pay for the same labor, and plod along like the functionary I am until my number’s called.

Except this time, the bruise of a quiet layoff, internal chicanery, and the AI hype tsunami have soured me on this national project altogether. My toxic white workplace was the bullhorn for a tech giant now under query for lies about AI capabilities. Behind the guise of reducing headcount to increase value — will they or won’t they go public? — the outlet laid off a slew of employees after threatening AI doom for a year and a half if we didn’t use its tools to do the work of three and four humans.

Most of us played along, fiddling with the tools like zoo pandas with bamboo and staging presentations that politely detailed how ineffective many of them were. They could write some emails, help with basic brainstorming, or even configure code foundations for product improvements.

But on their own, they produced egregious errors. News articles cited the wrong dates, fabricated entire quotes in people, and generally took longer to do a worse job than a worker who could see, touch, and question the material. So, incompetent robots were sold to do a job, competent humans still do better. But your competence is not your security.

Your competence was never your security.

Your excellence is not your humanity.

Dr. Robby is a victim of his own patriarchal standards. Except he wants his co-workers to wear his white knight burden too. I see this in my male friends and in me.

The whole tough guy routine, the protector role no one assigned, the John Henry work ethic locks us in a prison of repression. All we’re left with is angry outbursts and shame spirals. Our overdue cries for help implode relationships. Bottlenecks become bottle rockets.

There are messy bedrooms with the blunt ashes next to crusty socks.

There are surly snipes at the unkempt girlfriend, too tired from work to assuage her always-angry man.

There are PS5 controllers and glowing blues from the 64-inch sleep demon staring back at insomniac pupils.

There are paltry paychecks, taxed to hell for Medicare that can’t get an appointment in the six-week window because the pallid bedraggled Dr. Robby in our life burnt out four months ago but won’t stop overbooking himself.

He has to win. He has to be perfect. He has to sacrifice your care like he sacrificed his own.

That’s the workplace monster who will consume raw the remaining flesh once your pound is tallied at the door. That’s the machine.

I’m tired of T.V. telling me to empathize with the master. I don’t even have the master’s tools in my house. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be when Master ain’t around, and as his anger cloud swishes through the room.

The Pitt was a great opportunity to show Americans how healthcare workers — and all of us — manage to care in a system that won’t ever care back. The script and characters are allegorical, written into tight parables and frozen archetypes. Ostensibly, it leans toward change and redemption.

But as American stories often reveal, there’s no redemptive arc for the least of us: the Black, the female, the poor, the addicted must receive our lessons in pain. The white, the male, the paternalistic, the autocratic bathe in the merciful glow of dusk as we absorb their dire, despicable blows.

Forgive me for not tuning in. I’ve seen that one before.

There’s a junkie at the cafe where I walk to write in the morning. In winter, he sleeps in the outdoor seating area. In spring, he creeps down stairwells after he’s copped so he can light up. He eats the stale challah bread left on Eastern Parkway to survive.

He’s the odd white junkie in a Black neighborhood and I ought not call him a junkie because he lives here, after all. He’s my neighbor.

My neighbor who occasionally steals packages or steals bikes or lays out in the summer sun overdosing on opioids as the solar glare bakes the boils on his pocked skin. He is very tall, at least 6 ‘4, and walks hunched because he’s injured from junkie travels stealing bikes and Amazon boxes.

I’ve never heard him speak, only grunt. And under his tousled reddish bangs, I only see the hint of a face that was conscious once but isn’t now. This is the closest thing to a neighborhood monster that you can see.

The other night, my partner was letting her boyfriend out of the house at 4 a.m. and she saw a shadow darting around between cars. She said it was bigger than a dog. Annoyed, I said it was probably a raccoon, that she shouldn’t think too much of it. The next morning I said it might’ve been a chupacabra or a real infamous monster. “I knew werewolves were real. It’s only a matter of time the hood got them.”

It was probably the 6-foot-something junkie.

Zendaya plays Rue in Euphoria like a sophisticated monster, or a monster in hiding. In the season premiere, instead of her monstrous fame weighing down her frame like it does her co-stars Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi, she sports lithe mischief and a slippery gait like my neighborhood dopehead. Her lean portrait could slip through the border fence between the U.S. and Mexico. Her slick smallness manages to take up the room and the scene.

(Except when she holds the stage with Colman Domingo who, unlike his more junior colleagues, brings gravitas with his recent exposure. Respect.)

I love this show for its performances because they make up for sophomoric writing, unrealized Black and female characters, and free us from the conventions of having to think of youth so literally. As the characters transition from the high school setting that once made the story relevant, we wonder if this will become a Saved By The Bell: The College Years vibe or if creator Sam Levinson can keep up with his reputation of ripping post-pubescent urgency apart at the seams. He’s a legendarily horny 40-something but pines for the same blasé attractiveness American cinema’s been force-feeding us for decades. Bursting boobs on blue-eyed blondes.

Unfortunately for him, he’s also under the kind of scrutiny that befalls NBA coaches or Texas politicians in that he’s running an operation with way bigger stars and stakes than him. That might work out if Zendaya keeps — and I mean this existentially and linguistically — GIVING. She’s saving Levinson’s ass from that weak script.

Within minutes of the first episode finding its momentum, she’s a drug mule deep-throating 8 balls. The dramatics of her junkie actions immediately transform suburban, local tragedy (again: small) into an opera that can only be staged in the huge sets they’ve built in rural Mexico.

Grandeur.

The pivotal moment comes before the hero really embarks. She runs into a family on the prairie who spell out the crux of her mission. The patriarch says she’s doing “the Lord’s work” based on a lie she told about outing gender ideologues in schools. Will she find salvation in a deeper belief system, borne of recovery but not nearly large enough a seed to combat her tenacious hunger for life? This is the exact challenge Zendaya has been asking for and crushes under her delicate thumbs.

As for Elordi and Sweeney, who are pining for global stardom that their central casting good looks alone can’t afford, there’s a piece missing. Their Alpha has bigger plans, bigger visions. Zendaya is less Michael Jordan playing with Rodman and Pippen and more Kobe Bryant with the new look Lakers, Lamar Odom and Andrew Bynum. There’s no Shaq to match her talent or drive, only a lot of would-be greats in a game too intense for their skills. I am selling Elordi a little short here. He was better than expected in Frankenstein and that little streamer joint, Saltburn.

Because she’s so compelling on screen, I went to see The Drama, an anxiety-pilled A24 vehicle about moral panic after a meet-cute. Zendaya and co-star Robert Pattinson rouse the audience into understanding love beyond the honeymoon phase by conveying a duo’s first brush with disgust. Multiplied by a million. She’s shifted her tune from one-hit, classic chord progression to jumpy jazz notes and sudden retreats. There’s no expression her face skips transporting us into her lover-girl blues.

During the previews, Zendaya’s Dune 3 trailer with Timothee Chalamet played, and then her trailer with boyfriend Tom Holland’s Spiderman played. Zendaya is everywhere. She is racially amorphous but chooses Black roles. She is sexually charged but hesitant to sell that alone. She’s a movie star in the exact era they’d have a robot do it and clean it up in post.

We need movie stars. We need Black women in challenging positions, in interracial relationships, in the throes of addiction. We need original stories to prevent the onrush of manufactured ones. In New York’s plushest movie theater yesterday, six of us sat in the recliners, unable to hear each other’s reactions.

Something about that feels wrong. At BAM the night before, I saw a replay of The Taking of Pelham 123, with Denzel Washington and John Travolta. The house was full and we rejoiced in cheesy punchlines and moviehouse raunch. Travolta probably said “motherfucker” a cool 84 times in that 100 minutes.

But it was the recognition — the embrace of a shorthand between audience and star — that made the sit-down experience so much different. We could allow ourselves to be suspended by the bigness of the show.

Zendaya is big enough to occupy our phone-glued minds for hours at a time. Zendaya creates allure by manicuring her public presence. This may not last long as the tendrils of fame create more unrealistic demands, like revealing her political stances about genocide or whatever else keeps the outrage machine sizzling that day.

The ship has sailed for Euphoria as anything beyond a Zendaya vessel. The premiere undercooked the “where are they now” intros and I won’t stick with these characters much longer. Which is a gift because Zendaya doesn’t have time for small change streamer hype.

Turning your back on it is the last step.

Trust me, I know this as a Black boy from an ain’t-shit city on an ain’t-shit block.

I’ll tell you how I knew this last name was going to be my greatest obstacle aside from my zip code.

It’s 7th grade in the 90s, and I don’t care what nobody say, 7th grade in the 90s was lit even if you were a short and fat and ugly Black boy from Ocean Avenue. I have a tapered fade that’s too low on the sides. The exposed scalp has razor bumps raised in the back of a tragic bowl cut.

I live in a 1-bedroom apartment and it’s my birthday during my first year at prep school. The white kids get a car service home while I only hear the crackle of my concierge if the train gets stuck between Times Square and 72nd Street.

Not to say I’m broken, but I believe, deep down, I’m not worth much if I don’t go to this school and get these grades — which by this time are starting to slip.

I print seven invites for my birthday party. My mother, through her daily miracles, reserves a cake and pizzas and Chinese food, catering size. We have ruthless palates, designed solely for sugar and fat. The are two white classmates I want to join. My friend Cal and his boy Daniel. I don’t realize the reach of my long shot, that Brooklyn is un-romantic for them, a pox on the city.

I love my borough for Heavy D blasting outta my cousin’s onyx Jeep Cherokee, for icee stands and melted crimson syrup on the knuckles, for double dutch dormant at the crosswalk. I love Brooklyn for backyard basketball and the John Starks game winners I rarely make.

They know Brooklyn for rap lyrics on crack vials and “Crime Stoppers” posters. Reward signs. Missing signs. They know Brooklyn for gangland hoodies and gas leak effigies. The incubus of crack babies. The land beyond the bridge. Trains taken over by tag names.

I should note that three of my best friends from Brooklyn attend private school with me so they ride the Q or the 2 as far as they can. Inside graffiti-candied trains, we laugh harder than I ever have before or since.

The two white friends take the invitation and one of them even comes out to the party.

When I say I’ve never felt my 1-bedroom was smaller. I wish our wall-to-wall carpets could evaporate on the spot. I wish I could vanish into the arms of a compassionate God or a cheeky devil when I bring Cal into our cramped elevator with the painted gray door and the frosted Plexiglass looking out to a blur. The fluid drains from my chin down to my heels as he enters and the walls of my flat constrict to my rib cage, sticking the matte beige finish to my hearty shame.

I wish Cal didn’t have to be there living like us, just long enough to blow out candles, argue about Shaq-Fu on Super Nintendo versus Sega, get into his mom’s Volvo, and head back to Westchester.

LeBron James is from Akron, and some say he spent his middle school years homeless. Prior to his reign, he slept on coach furniture, and wondered if the sky would cave in on him. He slept hungry or ashy a few times, I’m sure. How he managed to dispatch the self-hatred long enough to construct a hoop mansion is beyond the scope of my tired visions. I couldn’t dream my way past Brooklyn.

I’ve never been to Akron, Ohio but I know what the world does to poor cities, and I know what poor cities turn around and do to themselves. The median household income is about $51,000 yearly.

I wouldn’t like to live any place but Brooklyn because I love our ugly even though life kept forcing me to love uglies of my oppressor’s making. I’m pressed because what does it say about me that I choose to accept that? What if I had a different mother who loved the ugly more than she should, who caged herself in the red bricks and stairway shit? I could’ve been born with a wicked jump shot that rolled off the fingers and into a moon palace deluxe hoop with the star lights.

I could’ve left Brooklyn behind, believing I was better than a place, but forgetting the place has people in it.

Turning my back on it is the last step.

I’m writing directly to LeBron James, which, on its face, remains foolish. For one, everybody knows LeBron don’t read.

And for b, there’s a trillion dollars invested, with interest, over time, in you hating your black self, whether you LeBron or some kid who picked up a pen in an Ocean Avenue 1-bedroom to drown out the sirens.

LeBron, bro, I cannot tell you to love yourself better than you do.

I just wish you did.

I wish that — between loving those wonderful sons and that beautiful wife and that amazing daughter — you saved a spare hour to love the Black boy who felt small once, sitting there in an Akron gym. I wish you’d reach out and let him know that defiance is protection too, that resistance is protection too.

I’m not from where you from and will never get what you got. But remember when they shot that boy dead in Ohio and you maybe saw yourself — felt yourself — in the blood range of a hot bullet? They tried to kill you. The little boy. They tried to kill you.

I’m making sure, for him and for me, that the shield over his spirit is as big as his dreams and bigger than his fears. I gave up on that childhood self a few times, and he be loud as fuck, shouting for water, lotion, hugs, and a witness. He is so loud sometimes I believe the best thing for me and him is to just shut him up. Remind him the world has nothing for us we don’t go out and take.

Instead, I let him scream, let the tears pool heavy in my chest. I let him stop my breath until I’m dizzy, leaning backwards at the bus stop, because he has something to share.

He tells me I was born with ghosts to take care of and an ancestor to make sure I live long enough to complete what they set down. That little boy self controls the night sweats. Turn your back on him and invite terrorism into your unread books and false prophets into your earpiece. He may be sensitive but he ain’t dumb.

He can’t hate where he’s from because that place made you.

You turn your back on him and poof.

There is no Black political class.

No, celebrities don’t count.

Ever since Barack Obama perfumed our American stench with “Amazing Grace” biracial charms. Ever since Cosby/Diddy traded media power for pills and deviance.

Ever since Malcolm X pointed out that Negroes were the only fools choosing musicians and actors as leaders.

Ever since Bob Marley got shot for singing freedom songs in an election year.

Black people were and are consumers.

We play shocked that Nick Cannon exposes conservative views because no one asks Nick Cannon anything.

Rightly so.

The host of Wild N’ Out should host shows and wrap turbans so tight we never see or desire to know what’s going on in that dumbstruck brain of his.

I love that Dave Chappelle joke “Where’s Ja Rule?” because it ages like wine.

Chappelle, Black culture’s most potent satirist, is now the subject of his own punchline. We care what he thinks of women, race, and money because we lack and we are starved.

Black people lack politics. Worse than that, we lack a political imagination.

The best and most useful Black celebrities parrot talking points from Rupert Murdoch’s news and scold you for saying you deserve to eat.

Bree Newsome said you can tell they’re scared we’ll act up when they send out Jay-Z, Obama, and Oprah to pacify us. Start talking too clearly about upending the system and here comes Rihanna with a Korean cleansing mask.

There is no Black politic. There is Black distraction. There is a Black circus. And we are the clowns.

Unless your suffering can be sold back to you in pissy jobs and rap songs, you will keep crying over 50 Cent’s campaign donations and Beyoncé’s tax breaks.

Saying Nick Cannon and Amber Rose were talking about their political views is like saying a monkey and a bird were talking about how to fix the Iran oil crisis.

Sure, I’m surprised the monkey and bird are talking. But frankly, I’m stunned that you’re taking their advice!

What are their qualifications? What are yours?

Doesn’t it bother you that the first facts you know about singers and dancers is how they think you should vote? Doesn’t it worry you that the most vocal — and platformed — voices of Black politics are reality show stars and Instagram shills? There is nothing they solicit that’ll benefit you to give, save the joy of the show they put on to soothe you momentarily during our collective slide to hell.

As you may know, Chilli from TLC relies on you talking about her to bring in the bucks. Nick Cannon hasn’t released an album or starred in a movie since before my nuts dropped and he’s all over my feed. He brags on how many children he’s sired with sparse attention to their well-being as he explore his love life. I shouldn’t know this much about Nick Cannon.

That he fits a Black male stereotype — lascivious and absent — has become incidental to the point. He’s always there, ready for you to know more about. These are our heroes.

Loud but voiceless. Visible but harmless. Brazenly incomplete.

We want celebrities to shoulder the blame for our lack. Let me show you something real quick, though.

I just opened my phone and four different Black celebrities told me they hated being poor in four different videos.

That’s half-true.

They hated themselves and they hate you too.

When the rapper reminisces on the projects, he wants you to buy the Black pathology myth. Everything was desolate. Nothing impressed or motivated him. He had to get out.

When the stripper takes you back to that oily stage and the chunky heels, it’s through the lens of her infinite shame, a gyrating, embodied urge to escape.

But they will neither critique nor notice the conditions that put them there. They’ll soft-sell self hatred and make you believe it’s the only reality. It’s to remind you these are your only options.

Unfortunately for us, as we circulate Toni Morrison quote memes and misquote James Baldwin, we’ll fold up into an inconsolable ball when Pharrell says politics aren’t real.

Because we will our own ignorance forward instead of, say, reading Morrison and Baldwin. We fish for likes on this app or that one, and ground libraries into dust as the battery drains from our phones.

The truth is, if you had the courage to demand of the billionaire media titans what you demanded of your billionaire rappers, you would not fear death. If you had even the single ounce of temerity it took to put your phone down when the monkey and the bird talk politics, you’d reap the marvelous pain of catharsis. The grown-up realization that the people who hate themselves and teach you to hate yourself will never know what it means to deliver a better future.

They make too much profit off the opposite.