The Weekend

It's 7:30 on a Friday and the rain is coming down in buckets. I'm in a t-shirt and shorts, unshaven, unmotivated and not sitting on the kind of dough that would thrust me out into the night to do anything particular. My cell ignites to the sound of a lightsaber, my chosen ringtone. It's a new friend of mine and she asks only if I'm interested in attending a gathering to support Black literature. Insert eye-roll here. Been there done that.

Niggas don't read what people like me write. And it's their time, not mine. Smells like a case of the usual suspects coming together for mixing and mingle at the headquarters of my old publisher. Many of those faces will only serve to remind me of a past that isn't completely pretty. All in all, I decide to pass. But my friend is slightly persistent. And as I think on her lovely eyes I am moved more by the desire for her company than I am about the theme of the evening. Still it's enough to get me into the showers and the next thing I know I'm racing into Midtown in the midst of pouring rain and the phantoms of my own past.

It turns out that her invitation was a kind of Divine trickery as the trains are against me. While she is off to the next spot I am stuck in a subway tunnel somewhere between 23rd and 42nd. By the time I get to the designated place our meeting time has long passed. And she is gone, and I am standing at the mouth of a room filled with my contemporaries, men and women whom I have known for most of my adulthood. We've worked at the same places, drank from the same open bars, spoken on the same panels. Etc. Etc. in a cashmere sweater.

The refreshments have been all but depleted. My boy Gonzales is on buzz. My former agency-mate Mat Johnson is rocking a pimped out purple jacket that I wish I had the balls to drape over my shoulders. But my first conversation is with a young brother who reads this blog, who is a wordsmith in his own right, who is standing in a room full of folks whom he most likely deems as giants (except for the bitch who who got me fired so long ago. The hell is she doing here?)

I suddenly remember being this kid before me. It feels so far away right now, back before it became my job, before all kinds of things started to matter that I never wanted to, back when I was still the youngest kid in the room. But those days and dreams have so easily escaped me, and while the craft is still one of the loves of my life, the honeymoon had ended long before I ever set foot on this contaminated soil.

But as it turns out this little shindig leads to another up in Harlem. New places and faces and the like. Good nachos. Good meatballs. Malibu on ice. New adventures. I ride home with a brother whom I've only talked to in short bursts for most of my tenure in town. Turns out we're on the same page. But there are two others whom I owe arrows through the chest.

The next night I'm back Uptown amongst fromer schoolmates, drinking heavily spiked punch and admiring the beauty of a few different girls I should have gotten to know better back then, or at least now, or make at the next social gathering. Time can get so weird.

I take drunken steps from Fort Greene all the way home, wondering where this rabbit hole goes, wondering if the crown I've been chasing was ever meant for my head in the first place. I don't know what the plan is upstairs but I'm doing my part, trying to play by their rules instead of mine for once.

Wood's in town for the weekend. The Superbowl. Cheesesteaks and pizza and beer. I pass Ls all over the place but do not partake. I have a client project I'll be working on day and night for the next month. The ever-growing rat has eaten a new way into my kitchen. I plug it, the third of such preventative measures. The cheap tile on my kitchen floor is coming up like it was scotch taped. Phil is a cheap bastard.

I can't get the cable guy out of my mind. He says it's a two month training program and tells me the annual salary. I think I can live with it. Then I took can do my job while arguing with my wife about sex problems via cellphone in a stranger's house.

Now don't get me wrong. I count my blessing daily, but maybe it was just something about the fact that there's this need to mixers to talk about shit we already know, to congratulate ourselves on not being a part of the problem while those that are make millions and captivate the minds and hearts of easily-swayed masses. Ifaniyi once said that my my intelligence was my biggest obstacle. He was probably right.

So here I am, my hourglass running out of sand before a two-hour run going to work on a woman's words that are not my own. I wish I had been Walter. I wish I had been Stephen. The ugly truth is that I've spend more than half my life trying to be a someone else who I thought had it easier. But all I can be is me. So it's back to the grind. Heist the ball off the boards and start another drive down the lane. One more basket. One more fake. Game ain't over as long as the clock's still ticking. Out.