31st year. 3-16-2025.
My windows in this tiny apartment will forever be black and sooty.
Not the cute sooties from Miyazaki’s Spirited Way.
My blinds are black and yellow, I doubt they were replaced. But this place is mine. I’m-
safe.
One Month Ago, Feb 3, 2025.
3-16-2025 2:30pm.
My father was not a deadbeat.
He was always there. Capricorn dad’s tend to be tight-pocketed, but he always told me if I needed anything, reach out.
Then his number changed.
Then it changed again.
It may have changed again, or I could just feel like being hyperbolic…
He was always there. Just across the bridge, a few blocks from my Gramma, a literal block from my Auntie, and a few country streets aways from his younger brothers. I, a world away in the third best trailer park in the district.
I don’t know if he was ever on child support. I assume. My mother was young, we are 20 years apart, we literally raised each-other. I was her will-to-live and she was my reason-to-stay. We went through a lot. Stability came from the housing voucher program around like ‘96. We were W.I.C.ed out. So much fucking spaghetti. Milk and cheese (I’m lactose intolerant, went to the E-Room because my gas wouldn’t escape)! Vienna sausages. And other canned stuff I believe. I wasn’t buying the food, just chilling in the cart, or walking alongside when my baby brother came. He was the best. He is the best. He knows the origins.
His dad was on child support for a bit, and around this time mom got an office job. I remember because she would come home with bandages on her fingers from paper cuts. She wore like business like clothes. My mom was a young professional. I was going to a racist school, in a racist town, eating WIC Kiks Cereal at a racist’s Daycare program.
Clock it.
I am a child of the Clinton/Gore Administration.
I am child who grew to believe in electoral politics late, who interned for the Hilary/Kaine campaign in 2016. I felt the facade crack, tectonically shift on November 8 2016. The quiet streets. The combination of wailing and hushed tears from the white women in my home. My bestie at the time, returning from an Election Day party, eyes red runny nose, self-soothing with deep breaths between hiccupped tears. I remember looking deeply in my trans partner’s eyes, holding them silently with salty tears racing down my face. It will be okay.
The next few weeks in retail were very awkward for any underpaid Black bookseller in a conservative white city. Leading up the election, shit was awkward. A petite red-haired man asked me to help him find The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump written by journalist Tony Schwartz, published 1987, yet still in print after Trump’s FOUR Chapter 11 bankruptcies. Of course I helped the petite red-haired man, manning the main register to help him learn from the Trump business empire/self-help book, minimally relevant 30 years ago…but before I digress as I wish I could… the petite red haired man came by a few days later, flagged me down, and requested that I help him return the book he purchased a few days earlier. I obliged. We weren’t a library, where I’m sure he could have silently self-checked this book out at any of the municipal branches, but a purchase and return is fine. I’m only making ~300/bi-weekly here, and I spend it on BOOKS, frozen coffee drinks, cinnamon twists, and sometimes lunch or dinner a shift. Dirty Cokes were free from the cafe, it’s just Sprite with Splash of Coca-Cola. If you know, you know.
BACK TO PETITE RED-HAIRED MAN
I helped him the return the book. I put it in the shelving pile and returned to the children’s section, the initial place I was flagged down to do the return. The team shifted tidying duties on a cycle, I was still in the children’s section, the messiest section of the entire store… because children loved stuffed animals, blocks, and miniature horses and lions, and whose parents would read a book to the crying child in the corner, and abruptly leave when the child’s wailing continued.
He found me, again. Time number three. And he says hey, I need to purchase that book again… I actually notated and wrote in the book, so I would like to purchase it again because I was a bad person to return the book knowing I annotated the book. He’d been hovering for about ten minutes before approaching me with this information. He seemed to be childless. Yet, hung around the children’s section, the health section, and sports sections which were in the same vicinity. I said okay. I told him to head to the register, that I’d meet him at the far register for this very specific return. I again, helped him PURCHASE the book again, for the second time that week. The same book.
“The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump written by journalist Tony Schwartz, published 1987, yet still in print after Trump’s FOUR Chapter 11 bankruptcies. Of course I helped the petite red-haired man, manning the
mainfar register to help him learn from the Trump business empire/self-help book, minimally relevant 30 years ago…but before I digress as I wish I could…”
The petite red-haired man, harrily (? harried? harri-lied?) apologized, too profusely for my comfort as a Visibly Black Person (Femme/She/Her/girl/woman) helping this petite red-haired man buy the Mein Kampf of 2016. I thanked him for his honesty, bagged his purchase and returned to the Children’s section. Where a few months from then, I would have a run-in with a Hebrew Israelite, who asked me to go out. About a year later, I saw his wanted poster at the liquor store. He was on the lam, wanted for Double Homicide of the Black Women he stayed with, a mother and her daughter.
The petite red-haired man, harrily (? harried? harri-lied?) likely took the book home, and jacked off to the fading image of my Black Femme Face, perhaps my figure, dreaming about how he would suck my toes off the bone, like Armie Hammer, cumming a trickle onto the cover of the book he just re-purchased from this liberal independent bookstore, after he successfully found the Only Black Bitch selling books in the city.
Have the day you truly deserve. Wren Smith.
