I’m doing it. I’m posting some of the novel. Why not. I’ve been hiding like some kid with time stretched infinitely in front of her and believing the street lights will never come home. I guess sometimes you have to beat the darkness.

Anyways, this is my second novel and it’s called “Girls Boys Headwraps and Haikus” and it’s VERY loosely based on my time becoming a woman in Brooklyn during an artistic movement that was as authentic as my discovery of mangos in my 20s. No lie. Never had one before that.

To kick it off…something from my homegirl, my little mama, my Jessica Care Moore-Poole (buy a book dammit). Below is her poem “I Am A Work In Progress”:

I was born writing

but will be taught to wait

I am an incomplete sentence

a work in progress

and i’m not finished

yet

The Beginning

This story just popped in my head while I was standing here. I’m about to do a fucking cartwheel amongst the half tickets, beer spills, lost gum and old hot dog buns. Let me tell you why I’m excited. I’m a writer who doesn’t write. I’ve come up with all of these really amazing “theories” as to why I don’t write (you know—“I think writing is beyond pen to paper; it’s idea to brain” or “I collect stories and wait for them to sort themselves out” or “This is a delicate story I have to tell; it needs care…”—I got a million of ‘em). Picture this: Hot day in New York. Sun is peaking through all the buildings like a child playing hide and seek. Millions of people are walking down the street—some poorly because they’re tourists and they’re looking up instead forward. All of us pedestrians, however, have our worlds wrapped around us as we charge to where we’re going. Almost like a force field that’s invisible to everyone but ourselves. Some are wearing the “where’s rent coming from” and some are rocking the “No, that shit didn’t just happen to me” when this happens to me:
“¡Oye bebé! ¿Puedo obtener yo de ese caminata?”
“Say what?”
One of the first sentences I heard uttered by somebody I didn’t know in New York. Celebratory, huh? Some man thinking I was from his island cause I looked like his sister. Here’s my problem: I don’t speak Spanish. I speak Detroit.
“La chica negra, usted es bonito. Venga conmigo al Starbuck es para el café.”
“Starbuck’s is down by the Kmart on Astor Place, I think.”
He shook his head and licked his lips, staring at my hair, and walked away. I have no idea what happened. Which leads me to this moment. I thought of my intro to New York because I feel just as confused here, right now, as I did then, when little Pablo gave me his wrap…wrong audience.
I’m possibly the wrong audience right here in this stadium with the plastic cups of beer under your feet and the smell of hotdogs on a stick mixed in with some chronic smell that’s attached itself to tracksuits, hair pieces and thousand dollar purses. It starts at this moment because this is the last damn place anybody ever thought it would end up. We were just minding our business minding the world in a cliché coffee shop trying to be new and improved beatniks and revolutionaries when somehow it all blindsided us and took us on this road to this theatre where we’re watching…a poetry concert. Like a “Put your hands in the air! And wave ‘em like you just don’t care! And if somebody’s feeling prose instead of hoes let me hear ya say OH YEAH!” type concert. I mean so, so, so something I can’t name. More because some folks are like “OH YEAH!” I mean I guess this is better than wave your guns but, um, this feels like a bad movie that had good intentions.
I look at Hiero and Gayl and I think that we think we’re in some sort of time zone lapse because “Throw Your Hands in The Air” isn’t quite what we heard along the way to where we were standing. I don’t mean the literal walk from the car to the concert but way before that. And we’re just fucking hoping that Vangeline doesn’t come out on some old star-type shit…I mean she’s our girl and all but we haven’t seen her in awhile and this is Hollywood. And even Madonna wrote a song about “Hollywood” so we KNOW this place is Babylon. Plus she drives an SUV despite the war in Iraq. I asked her about it and she sucked her teeth like I was a hippy. “I got these rims for a steal, girl,” she said. “I have to go; somebody’s trying to cut me off on the 101. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU, GRANDPA??? Sorry, Larri. Call you back…MOTHAFUCKA-“ Click. I was in Brooklyn. I didn’t know what a “101” was and it was three in the morning. Vangey doesn’t know time difference. Scratch that. Vangey could give a fuck about time difference.
What she does give a fuck about is us dropping everything to come see her. But none of us were sure why. It’s not like this is her first tour. It’s her first concert, maybe, that we’ve seen but we left the road of poetic ingenuity a long time ago so most everything poetry-related would be new to us. Gayl maybe less than us. She makes money from it still. But Vangey called all of us, out of the blue, demanding that we fly here to see her because of something she “had” to go through with us. I said “maybe” which means “no” because I just don’t do those things anymore where I drop shit to go see drama. Too old. Gayl was in Seattle covering a possible lead in the Biggy murder. Hiero would never turn down a free ticket, that is, unless his wife wouldn’t let him go. But she did. So he’s here.
“Dude,” Hiero says not in the white boy surfer way but in the ‘round the way kind of way, “This shit is on some old…man, yo…” Though not articulate right now, Hiero is one of the best poets of all time. He’s just a father, a husband and an advertising writer now. But he’s the bomb. He will do anything for anybody in his circle, no matter how much they have acted a fool towards him. That story will come out later.
“I mean…I could see if we were here to see Kweli and Mos, maybe even Jessica and her band but…did he just say…?” Gayl was an okay poet back in the day. I mean she meant well and all but she never quite hit the nail on the head. And then, self-admittedly, she got involved in the whole sensual politics thing, going around talking about war but doing it in that breathless Marilyn Monroe type way. It works for some people. Not Gayl. Now she’s a hip hop journalist. Thank god, for fate. And for the fact that her man is the Editor-In-Chief. Thank god for love and fate. Or lust. Or just thank god altogether since that might be a theme later. But let me not let you have sympathy or care about Gayl because she’s great. She is older than me by a few years but all I ever want to do is put her in my purse and walk around with her.
“Yo, ma,” this dude said to her at the Union Square train station, “you smell like cookies. Are you a cookie? With yo fine self…Let me conversate with you for a second, Bronze Queen. That your real hair color? It’s hot, like copper and shit. You dance in videos? You got that video vibe. I’m liking your style—“
She cut him off with just a look. Didn’t stop him from licking his lips. Didn’t stop her from spitting while she looked at him.
Me? I talk shit. From the sidelines mostly because I never really had enough courage to rock a mic or a stage like everybody else did. I’m the observer, the one voted mostly likely to write all this shit down later when our dust settled and our intentions didn’t quite live up to our goals. I’m Larri. Weird name. Portuguese. After my grandfather. Don’t trip. I’m a girl rocking the metro-gender name. And I’m a coward. I hide behind my own words. I’m a struggling writer. I had higher hopes for myself and my own inflated PR is running thin. It’s not like I’m about to get over on my looks. I figure, in the grand scheme of hanging out around this town, I could be one of the backstage girls, but not THE backstage girl.
I’m orange (I had a boyfriend call me that) or pumpkin colored with jet black dreadlocs (now—later it might be different since I’m addicted to hair color), chocolate eyes—I’m Chic Aunt Lucy. That’s what this girl said to me. She said I reminded her of her Chic Aunt Lucy that used to wear dashikis, black horned rimmed glasses, go go boots and sport a long Virginia Slim back in Evanston, IL when EVERYBODY thought the Black Panthers was a football team on the South Side. Chic Aunt Lucy with issues. That’s me.
Hiero and Gayl go get more mini-kegs and I’m happy about that because I like Hiero so much more now that he’s not a tree humper and professing some kind of unusual love for Mother Earth and only eating roots, twigs, leaves and such. Beer is natural, I used to tell him, the Indians drink it like water. He used to eat broccoli for fun…until the babies started coming. Try telling a baby how much fun broccoli is.
I didn’t begin that story right. Let me start this way. While they’re gone, I will introduce the both of them so I can properly do my reflection about everybody else without being rude. That way they won’t interject while I’m trying to describe them.
I met Hiero when I was trying out the subway for the first time after I moved to New York from Detroit. I was going to college in Brooklyn but I had no idea how to get anywhere. So I used to ride the train a lot longer than I needed to because god forbid I ask somebody. I would ride until I recognized something. That’s me: learning by fuck up. So anyways, one day I’m on the train reading Faulkner and in addition to not knowing where the fuck I was (the colors of the trains and the colors of the train on the map don’t add up! Just so you know…) I had no idea what the hell Faulkner was talking about towards the end of “Light In August.” I mean so abrupt. Like he was saying “Figure it out, asshole.” Like the train. So I had the only look of confusion on my face. And when I looked up, there were NO black people on the train. So I was screwed. Because this wasn’t Brooklyn. Then a stop comes. And I do the “Is this my stop” dance—body on the train, toe dancing from the platform back to the train in hopes that I figure out in the five seconds it takes for the doors to close, where I am.
“Don’t get off here,” a voice said. I hadn’t been to church in awhile. Is God talking to me? Then I see it’s actually this tall dark-skinned dude (Hiero=Posdnous from De La Soul—split at birth) with a backpack, some Pumas and a Charlie Brown t-shirt. Classic. “You get off here, you’ll be waiting until you’re crusty.”
I laugh. People around us are all in the mix because we’re having a strange conversation like the one they always wanted to have but never really had because most people are guarded by the time they turn twenty-seven (scientific, ain’t I?). Hiero is holding the pole and reading a Neil Gaiman graphic novel. I “hung out with” (code word: I liked him, he wasted my time) a wannabe illustrator once so I know who some of these rockstar nerds are. Hiero looks down at my book.
“No wonder you’re confused.” Then he goes back to his book. And I stand there. He smells like an incense shop. I imagine it’s because (as I later find out) he wears one oil on his body, one is probably left over on his shirt from when he wore it last, one oil he had stays on his jacket from last spring and one he runs through his hair. There are about four too many but that’s okay because they kind of compliment each other in that manly oil sort of way. Like when kids put ketchup AND mustard on their faces.
“I want to go to Brooklyn,” I say to him.
“Brooklyn is big.”
“I’m going to Levels Institute.”
“The smart school? Baby girl, you are so on the wrong train. You want to take this to Union Square. You want to transfer to the…”
I’m staring at him blankly. I’m a smart girl but this subway system is a maze. Like people who do bad things to society should be sent here to figure out how to get home. And if you die in the mean time, what are you gonna do? Later, I would find a fascination with the subway. But that’s another story. Hiero is tall and my neck is starting to hurt. He notices that I’ve spaced out.
“Look, I could go there now. I wasn’t going to but my boy lives around the way so I’ll show you.”
“Am I supposed to wonder if you’re about to kidnap me or something?”
“I don’t exert that much effort to get a girl.” And I knew I liked him. He could give two shits about me. This was going to be a great friendship.
Flash forward, he shows me how to get where I need to be blah blah. In true typical New York style, this is not the last I see of Hiero. Actually the next time I see him is when I see Gayl for the first time. Spooky. We had matching headwraps. That’s like worse than wearing the same damn dress to a party. Let me tell you. A girl can go out of her way to make her crown look unique. I mean sometimes we’re only peacocks to our core, screaming “Look at me! Look at me!”
It was like we were in the Michael Jackson “Beat It” video. She circled me. I circled her. All around us women are saying “Peace Queen” to each other. But we’re bitches. And we like it. We smile at each other and nod at each other’s headwrap. She looks at my Converse and I look at her cute Indian top.
“I don’t want to like you but I feel like I’m going to anyway,” she says to me.
And then, just as I opened my mouth, these three Indian girls with their saris and jeans, exotic complicated hair jewelry and champa smell and exposed bellies with legs for days walked in between us. Which was fine. Except forty-seven brothas, with dreams of exocticizing in their eyes, were trailing them like they just got off the whore boat, which they didn’t. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t treated that way. One of them even bumps us out of the way without an “excuse me.” And I’m mad.
“Yo! Are you so anxious to run your fingers through her straight hair that you gotta put your big foot on my toe and not act like you got a mama that taught you way better than that???” One day, my mouth is going to get me in trouble.
“My bad.” That’s all he says. However, the Indian tribe looks at him with the same crazy expression me and Gayl are giving him. Not only did he disrespect his queens in efforts to get some other country’s queens…
“You got moted,” one of the Indian girls says to him and the rest of us laugh. Even his boys start moving away from him sl0wly. They all sort of mosey along, even wack boy, leaving me and Gayl standing there.
“What ‘moted’ mean?” she asks me.
“De-moted.”
“Dammit. I’m gonna have to like that bitch too.” And we laugh. And then we see Hiero walking with one of the Indian girls. And we aren’t smiling anymore for a few reasons (at this point I can only give you my few reasons…Gayl had her own): 1) I had developed a crush on Hiero even though I hadn’t seen him since that day probably because he was the only tall black man I knew who looked like he could get me (so superficial—like a Charlie Brown t-shirt says “I love you, Larri!”). 2) At this point, I’ve been around enough to know that the straight haired girls with the fill-in the blank au lait skins usually get the boys that I think I would like. I’m average brown. And I’m wack for using the word average even though I’m bitter. 3) I hate underlying subtext and I’ve just discovered that Gayl (because of her reaction too) has some kind of connection to my crush who doesn’t really like me but obviously my heart is bored and needs a hobby.
“Don’t like her again.” Gayl says.
“Curry over collard greens. Happens more times than you can imagine,” I say, just as Hiero walks over to us with Masala girl.
“Y’all know each other? Course. What up, ladies?’ We are all standing around waiting for the show in the loft to begin. It’s hot as a whore house in the summertime and my headwrap is making me want to melt. But I’m styling. All of us are standing with some kind of internal dialogue going on. I know it. There’s pouting, there’s standoffishness, there’s oblivion (guess which one since men NEVER seem to be clued into woman shit?) and there’s defensiveness.
“You two know Prana? Prana, you know Gayl and Larri?” Hiero says in this sort of absent way. Like he abandoned this introduction mid-way through and only followed through because he has hometraining. We all nod at each other. And then I realize that Gayl and I didn’t know each other’s name. And I start laughing. Which makes me look certifiable since nobody knows what’s going on in my head. But they can’t hear me. Because the show is about to start.
“Lofty” is a space owned by this one tribe of web designers who live and work in this massive space in Brooklyn Heights. One night a month, they throw a big poetry night and everyone who’s anyone goes. There are a few people from my school but it’s best that we keep those boundaries clear. School. Social. Conscious. This is my problem. Everything is connected but I choose at this point in my life to believe they aren’t and I can control everything. Foreshadow! Foreshadow! Foreshadow!
Anyway, back to “Lofty.” It’s hot. It’s packed. Mostly everyone is hot in that “do it to you” kind of way, all backed up against the brick walls merging into the artistic graffiti. In fact, it does look sort of like a pre-orgy with everyone sitting all on top of each other and standing all close and what not. And then it gets worse when Lib gets onstage. I think Lib means “sex” in some language I don’t know because it comes out of his skin and floats through the air and lands somewhere on the inside of a girl’s underwear. I have confirmed this with a bunch of girls I know. Walking down the street, he’s not much to look at it, pretty average. But put his average height, average weight, average face on stage and something pretty much above average happens. His hair is in coils everywhere, his mustache hugs his face, he likes to take his shirt off to reveal a really lean vegetarian enhanced small build and he moves like a cat. Not to mention that he has the tattoo of a subway token on his chest. How many times he’s heard “Can I ride?” or “How much is your token?” I can’t tell you but I’m sure I said something dumber than those and still got the same evasive stare the other more clever girls got. Whatever. He rhymes like he ate dictionaries for breakfast, lunch and dinner (just as tasty as those veggie meals he comes up with, I bet).
With poetry, at least in those days, you didn’t need a DJ or a beat really because there was something in the air that made it for you…and it was collective. We all heard the same space in between each word. DJ’s got their own time. Poets had theirs.
We are all still standing their: me, Hiero, Gayl and Masala Girl. Don’t think I’m being racist. That’s what she calls herself, I find out later. She’s, of course, a “spoken word artist” (we aren’t sure what that means because it kind of sounds like smooth jazz) and performs under the name Masala Girl with a bunch of other girls from the Caribbean: Honey Coconut and La Dulce. Think Destiny’s Child except…well, not. Don’t think Destiny’s Child. Think poetry that wants to be ethnically sensual but kind of comes out like a cultural roll call.
“Baby let me tell you about my mama’s rice and beans cause that’s what’s up in these jeans…” begins one of their poems. “Ohhh ginger ginger ginger on the tip of my tongue, lingering everywhere I have been, burning through my body to satisfy needs I don’t know about yet…” says another. You get my point. I’m usually very hungry after they read a poem.
But let me stop because I don’t know about this, in the moment I’m telling you about. What I do know is that Hiero is surrounded by some dramatic female energy and we are potentially being catty in our heads and possibly with our battle language. Meow, kitty. Psycho-dramas ends when:
“Hiero, I’ll see you. I gotta get home. Remember Dad wants you to come over and be the ref for the kids’ game tomorrow,” Masala Girl says.
“Tell Mom to check your homework this time, dude. You can’t be pulling that bullshit ass shit about you seeing the answers with your third eye,” He says back to her. She flips him the middle finger and walks away. Her torso is almost as long as the column she passes and her hair sways around her waist like it’s playing hide-and-seek.
“Couldn’t pay me to be seventeen anymore,” he says. Gayl and I are confused.
“That’s your sister??”
“Yeah. I’m adopted by my parents’ best friends. They died.” He doesn’t look at us. But he should because we’re bitches. And we deserve the evil eye for being catty bitches towards a guy’s sister. We both feel it. And then…well, the obvious happens. We turn on each other, internally. Remember nothing is being said. But women know. And, in typical damn fashion, Hiero is oblivious.
“That nukka is DOPE!” he yells.
Nukka? What the hell is a “nukka”? It takes me two months to learn that it’s one of those attempts to not use “nigga” but still be fresh. I haven’t much of a stance on this since my entire family uses “nigga” but that’s because they never thought about it in the text book way. How does this relate to my Hiero thing? I instantly tried to imagine him around my family, at Belle Isle in Detroit, talking about some “nukka business” and instantly loosing man points around my daddy and uncles. I could HEAR my cousin Cece say “Yo, if he gonna not say nigga, then just don’t say it. Ain’t no in between, boo.” My daddy would say that he met some “niggas” and he met some black people too. Daddies have the last word. I hope Hiero doesn’t teach his daughter nukka as a last word. That would suck.
Anyways, next few weeks I go to class and I go to the spots. I battle my weight since I live in the little Caribbean and they love them some half & half and cheddar cheese on sweet bread. And so do I. Until one day I wake up on my futon like a beached whale and decide that I must do things in moderation. Do I hear from Hiero? Not really. Do I speak to Gayl again? No. We just eye each other. Until that fateful night (cue music) where we all congregate at Tulip, the café that turned itself into our “Cheers” only we’re not allowed to clap during the poetry nights because we’ll disturb the damn tenants above so we have to snap. But I don’t because it’s kind of obnoxious. Don’t judge though cause I have very good friends who snap. I’m just not the one.
Anyways, I’m sitting at Tulip, in the dark wooden booth, looking around and at asses (yes, women do it too). I’m tickled about how this used to be some sort of glorified Lipton stand and now, after a few big mouths and a few regulars who got soda commercial gigs on the radio, this place is getting adult. Like exotic teas, signature smoothie blends, organic pastries. You can see them sitting in that pseudo-french bistro display case, waiting for the new Ohio migrant who came here with dreams of dancing on Broadway. Like, “Please, dancer girl, hand me to that fine tall brown skinned brotha who just walked in and looks like he could use some cane sugar root tart!” Everyone who walks in does the “look around” cause you can see everyone one in one turn of your head. Especially in the day time. There is no place to hide since it’s just a bunch of booths and café tables. Even the booths are dark orange so you can’t nestle yourself in the usually safe darkness of a restaurant booth. No, you’re on Front Street if you’re trying hide in Tulip.
I am trying to figure out what the white green tea I just bought smells like but I’m failing because Tulip smells like magnolias. I have no idea why and could never find the origin of it. But there are worst things to smell like, I guess. Much to my own discomfort, Gayl is announced as the first poet for the night. Gayl gets on stage and basically does the best job anyone’s every done of shocking the shit out of me.

Copyright © 2006 by Tureka Tara Turk

Thoughts? Comments? Do you know how hard it is to post your work? Hm….