Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man

The Brown Boy’s Black Father Loses It

17 the brown boy’s bLacK father Loses it in the dream, the brown boy’s father is crazy. He is naked and has come out into a kitchen scattered with open boxes, his cock shiny, hard, and sticking straight into the room. the brown boy knows he must get his father to a mirror so he can get him to look at his own eyes. if he can only drag him out of the kitchen and down the hallway where he sees a mirror against a wall, he thinks, maybe, he can save him. the brown boy is not fearful. He feels the presence of his entire family in his head, as though he’s speaking to them all on the phone, each one of them lying quiet on the line, hoping that he will be able to save his father. So he holds him and drags, pulling his father closer to the mirror at the end of the hall. the brown boy thinks if he shows his father his own eyes, he can snap him out of it, get his clothes on, get his cock down and soft so they can head back home. As he holds him, his father begins to shit. the brown boy knows this is a dream, that his own black father is not crazy, not lacking control, but in the dream the brown boy realizes that he has this job to do: he must take care of his father, who is losing it. in real life, the brown boy remembers this story from when they lived in tennessee: His father took the family to a barbecue, where the brown boy stared into a field behind the fence at the small white face of an animal he could not name. As he 18 stared, the animal stared back. The brown boy wanted to shoot it. He wanted to kill whatever it was, but when he returned, BB gun ready, to the spot where he first saw the tiny white face, the animal was gone. He remembers the slow drive back from the barbecue to the small military base where they lived. His father, drunk, zigzagged from one side of the road to the next. To the brown boy, his brother and sister, this was all a game. Maybe their father was swerving on purpose, racing back and forth as though between pylons. When they got home and his father sat on the octagon end table made of marble and cherry that he brought home from Japan and began pissing, the brown boy knew that this wasn’t play, the yellow liquid spreading in one sheet from the table’s marble center to the wooden edges, dripping onto the lattice doors down to the rug. He remembers his brown mother, angry and quick with a sponge and bucket, trying to catch some of the flood his black father released, sopping up his drunken freedom. in his dream, the brown boy holds his black father tight as the shit floods out of him. the brown boy begins to cry, saying sweet father, sweet father, sweet father, holding him as his father lets go. in bed, when the white man, while meditating, asks the brown boy to lie back between his legs, the brown boy cannot. How could he, after realizing, like this, how much 19 his mother’s love made her willing to absorb what his father could not control? How could he, after realizing how much he was willing to do the same? out of the dream, the brown boy sat on the pot. Piss shot between the lid’s gap, cascading outside, down the bowl’s neck. of course, he caught himself, well before he realized how much he was like his black father as he gobbed the piss at the base with toilet paper, absorbing all of it. ...