“Who?” Michael asked.
“Toni Morrison, and beside her is June Jordan,” I said.
“You’re crazy,” he said. “No way. That can’t be them. How can you see that?”
“Yes, it is.” We investigated. Sure enough, sitting beside a low fence of the café was Toni Morrison with June Jordan in dark sunglasses. I approached. Michael lagged behind, astonished. “I love your work, Ms. Morrison,” I said. At the time I wasn’t such a huge fan of June Jordan. I’m not sure if the reason I disliked her had to do with the fact she had tried to pick up my girlfriend Cheryl while visiting/lecturing at The New School or perhaps I wasn’t ready for her message. Knowing what I know now—if only I could go back through a time capsule and tell her how much it meant for me to hear her in person. Long after she would die of cancer and wrote the words in dialect “G’wan, G’wan!” telling us a new generation, to go on. Long before the collapse of the twin towers, before the massacre of so many gay men from AIDS, wars against Brown bodies in Iraq, Harlem, and Afghanistan, before the growing epidemics of cancer, rape, police violence, domestic violence, mass incarceration, depression, demise of our pop stars, she said to a class at The New School in the true form of a prophet, speaking of the U.S.: “This country needs a revolution.”
Maybe it was June Jordan, like Audre Lorde, who taught me the power of what words could do. In retrospect, she opened the doors and flung open the windows to my consciousness, like when I heard Maya Angelou’s poem, “Still I Rise,” when I was nine years old. It awakened me. Just recently, with the terrible results of the 2016 presidential election, with Donald Trump elected, I can see June Jordan in sweet smiling profile, reciting as resistance, “Poem About My Rights.”
Michael and I had many other adventures. We frequented Lower East Side Clubs like The Pyramid and The World. The Pyramid was a dive on Avenue A near Tompkins Square Park and famous for its vodka and lime specials; where some nights vodka gimlets were 2- for-1. One night I was asked to dance by a handsome young white-skinned man. I learned he was from Brazil. When the dance ended, I walked away.
“OMG,” Michael said. “Who was that guy you were dancing with?”
“I don’t know,” I answered and shrugged.
“He’s beautiful,” Michael exclaimed. “Go back and get him.” Michael had a thing for Latin men.
I danced back over. I yelled over the music, “My friend wants to meet you.” I introduced him to Michael, and the rest was history. We learned he was visiting from Brazil and on vacation in New York for two weeks. It was his first time to New York. He spoke little English. He was bisexual. He and Michael had a two-week affair and fell in love. His name was Karim.
Six months later, after Karim had returned to Brazil, Michael and I were in Tompkins Square Park. It was the time right before they’d begun to gentrify the park. They started to impose curfews and later the police occupied it in a standoff with local residents. Michael and I were swinging on the swings. He had a container of beer masked in a paper bag. We were discussing Toni Morrison. Out of the blue Michael said, “I want to go to Brazil and get Karim.”
“Sure,” I said, just like that, no questions asked. We saved all of our money and six months later ended up in Rio. It was our first stop in a month-long trip to Brazil. Our mission was to get Karim and bring him back to New York.
I had only ever been out of the country once before. In Boston while still at Northeastern University, I met Annette. I’d been invited by her to go with her and her family to Jamaica. It was an exciting and new endeavor getting my first passport. It was also exciting when I received the blue square document, too square and big to fit in my wallet. Annette was mixed-race, Jamaican born, with brown skin and green eyes. I was working with the African American Institute at Northeastern to assist in recruiting more Black students. I traveled to New York with a Black man who looked like Sidney Poitier. He was dark and very proper, from the Islands as well. We stayed at a high-rise, budget hotel on 34th St. It was far from luxury, but you could see buildings and some rooftops of New York City. From the window you could also see people bustling on the street below. It was hot, there was a steel beige air conditioner in our meeting room.
The pool of Black applicants came. I noticed Annette immediately, she was pretty and exotic. I didn’t have a language then for attraction. Annette looked at me and shouted “That mole.” She was referring to a prominent black mole on the left side of my nose, a beauty mark. Annette also had a mole in the exact same place. We bonded over our shared feature. Later, I’d notice former President Barack Obama also has a mole in the exact same place. I see myself in him, in his long elegant stature. I imagine sometimes, not knowing my origins, he is my brother. Annette ended up enrolling at Northeastern. We became friends. We were both pot smokers. Annette’s appetite for it was much larger than mine. She stayed most days in a near coma. I suspected then she was hiding something, always numbing herself, but we never talked about it. She never talked about her feelings. I did learn something, which surprised me then, that she had a white boyfriend and expressed disdain for Black men. Still, she was fun in other ways and at the end of one school year, she invited me to Jamaica
