Tag Archives: family

07.22.26
by

A Conversation Between Two Grown Men

When I find out where to catch the local taxi in a country then it’s over with. That’s exactly what happened in Namibia. The audacity of the driver at the airport to charge me 350 rands for a ride to my Airbnb. It was downright disrespectful. Yes, I could afford it—I mean it’s about $20 USD—but that isn’t the point. Not only am I a traveler that likes to blend in with the people as opposed to staying in tourist traps but, more important than that, I’m just cheap. Not gonna lie, I do not like spending money. You can’t use the threat of a high crime rate to make me cough up a grip in order to stay in an all-inclusive resort. You can’t force me to commute around town in vehicles approved by the official board of tourism and charge me $20 a trip because the car has air conditioning and the seatbelts work. I’m not built that way. I do not scare easily. Blame it on my East Oakland California upbringing. 

So, I’m coming back from eating Kapana and fat cakes at a little hood spot called Wizy Man not far from The Dunes Mall in Walvis Bay.

I’m walking down the side of the main road trying to hail a taxi back to my place but for some reason they’re all passing me up which is quite weird because normally they would be honking in rhythm and screaming out of the window trying to get passengers into their van but now they’re acting all afraid. At this point a slender dark complexioned Namibian dude of about 35 years old says; 

“Eish! You can’t get a cab here. You’ll get a fine. This is a highway.” 

His warning forced me to actually talk in order to thank him, which may seem trivial but when I’m trying to blend in with a local community the last thing I want to do is speak because people instantly detect my American accent and from there it can get dicey. Maybe they ask me for money, maybe they try to scam me, maybe they ask me what the hell is wrong with Donald Trump, maybe they ask me if I know Meek Mill, either way my cover is totally blown. As was the case with this gentleman when I told him I’m from California. He was very chill about it though.             

He did ask me questions about the weather and what brought me to Namibia, however, he exuded a sense of calm in his curiosity. Then he offered to walk with me to the Taxi rank, and I obliged. As we walked through the weathered Namibian sand his line of questions got rather personal. He had already established that he worked for the gas company and he was still in his uniform. He didn’t strike me as someone that I should be afraid of. He had an upright gait and was reserved in his nature. He spoke to me about the history of Walvis Bay and how it was the one region of Namibia that the South African colonizers did not want to give up because it was so lucrative. 

We were chopping it up pretty tough which made my commitment to taking the local taxi more than worth it. He asked me if I found a woman back in Johannesburg and I opened up to him. I told him that I had. She was a pretty faced Tsonga girl from Limpopo, but I lost her and I was kind of heartbroken about it. He asked me what happened, to which I replied that we had gotten into an argument and the situation never got back to where it needed to be. He asked me whose fault it was and I stumbled with my words. I finally managed to say that it was debatable. I told him that I apologized to her twice, however, it didn’t have the desired effect. 

“She took my apology as a sign of weakness. And after that she kept doing more and more. Like, she started talking super reckless and getting bold with me.”

I struggled to confide in him. This was actually the first time I had ever spoken about it, and I wasn’t sure that I was even making sense, but he got it. 

“Yeah. Women can get that way.” He said somberly.

He slowed down half a beat as we were nearing the taxi rank. I could have hailed one on my own. We were close enough for the drivers to cruise by beeping their horns in quick succession while looking at us to see if we needed a lift. He did not need one because he lived nearby and suddenly, I had the patience to wait. I knew that whatever this man was about to say, he needed me there to listen. And that’s exactly what I did.

He and his wife were business owners but, in the beginning, their venture wasn’t doing well. They couldn’t get clients in their home turf of Walvis Bay which, by American standards, would be a rather slow, medium sized coastal town not unlike Monterrey, California. Somehow a decision was made to expand the brand to Johannesburg which, by American standards, is New York City. They decided—or she decided—that she should go to the city alone. He spoke to me with great clarity and with a bright veneer of confidence, while somehow simultaneously exuding the quiet vulnerability of a schoolboy telling his best friend about the problems that he was having at home.

“When you get married too young there’s always drama,” he said.

His face was stoic like a war veteran emotionally preparing himself to tell a combat story to civilians. It took all the power in his soul to keep him from falling apart as he spoke to me. His wife’s trips to Johannesburg grew longer and longer and to exacerbate the situation, she left him with their two small children every time she went to the city. At some point during the scaling of their business, she reasoned that it would be cheaper for her to get an apartment and live in Johannesburg part time. This is what sparked his investigation. He began checking her emails, her text messages, and eavesdropping on phone conversations. It didn’t take long for him to confirm that she was indeed having an affair. When he confronted her about it, she dug her heels into the ground. Not only did she admit to it, but she demanded a divorce.

I went mute. I did not say, Woooow. Nor did I say, Damn that’s hella crazy, under my breath. I only looked at him as he told a story that men typically never share with other men. And he did this while maintaining the utmost dignity. I just couldn’t imagine a young stranger back in the states recounting this to me while being completely sober. By now we had stopped moving. Our feet firmly planted in the sandy Walvis Bay Road. Our physical destination no longer mattered. We stood apart from all the Namibians who walked by us on either side with I just got off from work energy. His home no longer mattered and neither did my Airbnb. I listened to him as if it would save his life. And he spoke to me as though each syllable that he uttered was poison, and if he did not get it out of his system then he would surely die. 

In his tribe, divorce is not handled by the courts. It is handled by the elders. The first step in the process, he told me, was both parties agreeing that they wanted to separate. He refused. He told them flat out that he did not want to divorce his wife. There was a pause at this point of his testimony. Then he cleared his throat. I nodded to let him know that I was still with him, but I still rendered myself inaudible. They received village counseling on their marriage for weeks. In the process her lover in Johannesburg backed out of the situationship due to the steady stream of anguish that she was bringing to him now that their affair was out in the open. His only intentions were to have fun. After all, he was there for the sex and not to be her therapist. Finally, after dozens of hours of mediated conversations, they were instructed to go back home and work on their relationship in earnest.

 As soon as they settled back in together, his wife was as pleased with the marriage as she was when they were newlyweds. Her vibe was much lighter. She spoke to him with a sweetness that sounded foreign to his ears. And the more she cuddled up beside him in bed the more he realized that he was still extremely pissed with her. He told me that he had only stayed with her for the children. He also felt like she was mocking him with her joy. While she played, he tended to the children, and he worked every day at the gas company. Now that she was back it was his turn to go outside and play.

My mouth opened slightly while I moved my head closer to him in disbelief as if I was having a hard time hearing him from a mere two feet away. He had an affair; he told me with a sense of deep conviction. He is having an affair with a younger woman. His wife knows about it and does not like it, but he feels like he deserves it, for it brings him genuine joy every time he’s with this woman. He looked me directly in my eyes and with a levelheaded intensity asked me;

“Should I stop seeing my side chick because my wife doesn’t like it? Considering the fact that she has no moral ground to stand on?”

“Breh!…I mean damn. Ok. I feel like. Well first off…”

I was caught so far off guard. When I listen to someone, I listen aggressively. It requires all my strength, therefore the transition from being a listener to being a talker is always a difficult one for me to make.  

 â€śShout out to you for fighting for your marriage. I think most men, including myself…Especially myself, would have let their ego take over when she asked for a divorce and just went along with it whether we wanted to or not. You deserve all the adulation in the world for that. And then you know what? Shout out to you for even getting married at such a young age. When my daughter was on the way the adults felt like I should have married her mom, but I explicitly said I wasn’t ready and though I meant it, sometimes I wish that I would have done it just so my daughter could know that she comes from a solid union. But you stepped into your faith and that’s very commendable.”

He nodded and said thank you as he looked off somewhere over my head and into the distance. I rambled a little longer before asking him what the agreed upon terms of their healing process were. I asked him if there was a grace period where the both of you could see other people or was the expectation to be 100% committed. He said it was the latter. Then I reminded him that he gave his word as a man. 

“Once you give your word,” I went on. “Then you are beholden to it. You gotta look at it like this. You’re not giving your wife a second chance so much as God is giving your union a second chance. If you want your marriage to work, then you’re going to have to be 100% committed. You gotta let the side chick go. She’ll be alright.” 

I try really hard not to give relationship advice because I am so bad at them but there, I was at a taxi rank in Walvis Bay, Namibia trying to fill up a depleted man with words of love. He received it. He did not say as much, however, I could see it in the relaxation of his shoulders and how deeply he began to breathe. He turned to the road and hailed a taxi for me which in this case was a white Nissan that already had four people in it. He asked for the price in Oshiwambo. It was 20 Namibian dollars straight to Langstrand which is about $1.25 USD. Hell yeah! 

I gave him a quick fist bump before climbing into the backseat of the taxi. We did not share any more words with one another. The conversation was over though its qualities still resonate in my head as I’m sure it still resonates in his. We didn’t make things fake by exchanging social media or promising to hit one another up on WhatsApp. We just went our separate ways knowing that we had both made the other a better man. 

04.06.13
by

Writing my Sickness Away

I woke up sick this morning; sick in my mind, sick in my body, and sick in my spirit. I feel like I may be drawn to misery in the same way that insects of the night are drawn to streetlights. Even when things are well for me I always make room in my heart for pain. Or maybe I had too much to drink last night.

It’s always deeper than it is. Last night I sat across the table from an old friend who I have known for over half of my life. We probably see one another an average of once every two years so when we link up we are forced to cram everything that has happened in our lives into one conversation. How’s work, how is your daughter, who are you dating, what you been doing, who do you keep in touch with, how is your family, how is your cousin; and I then I tense up. I cover my ears and brace for the pain because the trigger has been pulled.

 

My cousin ain’t doing so good. He’s on the streets. He stole from my aunty. He has problems separating fantasy from reality. For him there is no real line between the past and the present. They say he’s schizophrenic. Sometimes he takes his medication but most of the time he doesn’t. But of course I don’t say all of this when she asks. “Awe you know, he’s out there doing his thing.” Then I look into my glass and take a sip. Next question please? And the small talk has just gotten a whole lot smaller.

 

 

My mother is the older sister of his father. When I was a young boy and my uncle was full of tall cans of Old English malt liquor, he used to break down in tears as he recounted the story of my mother picking him up out of the Arkansas snow because his other sister had kicked him out of the house for peeing in the bed. My mother then placed him in her bed and after he stopped shivering he slept through the night.

My cousin and I grew up really close. I signed up for football then he signed up for football. He ran track one year and the next year I did too. He was a lot larger and more athletic than me but I had a bigger personality. In essence I ran my mouth a lot but no one ever tried to fight me because they knew that he was my cousin. It worked out really well for me.

 

By our senior year in high school I had given up on sports while he excelled. I ended up going to college to pursue a career in writing and he got a full athletic scholarship at a division one school. It was a major accomplishment for him and everybody considered it to be a big deal. There was a banquet thrown for him and the other scholarship athletes on campus that was attended by my grandmother, his father, a few dozen other relatives, and various local media outlets that were itching to cover a positive story involving black youth. I considered the path that my life had taken to be pretty normal but his was extraordinary. After all, as young black boys growing up in the ghetto, naturally we wanted to one day become professional athletes. When we entered the 10th grade I was about 125 pounds soaking wet with Timberland’s and I knew then that I had no chance at all of going to the NFL, but he still did. He was about to make it, unfortunately for him however, he didn’t view things that way.

He wanted to go to another school, a school that was an NCAA powerhouse and a school that a few ballers who had graduated from our high school the year before we did were attending. They sent him on an official recruiting trip and he had a lot of fun. Too much fun. He committed before they offered. He told the coach he wanted to go there, no question about it. But as national signing day approached they gave his scholarship to another kid. He couldn’t understand it. It wasn’t fair. He cried about it, he told me in confidence. He cried about it a lot. He expressed to me that the whole thing was fixed. That old punk ass coach knew he wasn’t going to offer him a scholi in the first place. That it was all a game. That people were playing with him. Why were people always playing with him?

 

I was a little bit taken aback by his testimony but not too much. I figured it to be a very minor setback, something that he would get over as soon as he got situated in college. There was truth to my assessment but ultimately my reasoning was completely skewed by my on denial.

He was, for his freshman year, the big man on campus. He dominated on the football field taking a starting position from a senior less than halfway through the season. He even picked up a fumble and ran it back 60 yards for a touchdown at a game attended by our whole family. In they end, however, they lost that game. They lost nearly all of their games and my cousin was quickly losing focus.

He did a lot of partying and was getting into a lot of trouble. When he came back for Christmas breaks he had several fight stories that sounded like scenes from the old Patrick Swayze movie The Outsiders. By Spring break he had revealed that he had gotten a woman pregnant and was on academic probation and by the end of the school year he was asked not to return to the University.

 

He didn’t sweat it much. He figured he would get more scholarship opportunities, and he did (he actually got a couple more). He spent most of the summer bonding with his newborn son.

 

On one day in August we took the baby on a family tour. We went to our grandmother’s house in Bayview Hunter’s Point and we took him to see our aunty on Havenscourt, and then our cousins on 90th. The little guy slept peacefully and very rarely cried. When we took him out of his car seat and into the cold San Francisco night air he wasn’t tripping. Even when I, at the age of 19, drove way too fast over the Deep East Oakland speed bumps he wasn’t afraid. He was with men that would die for him and he knew it. He was chilling. He was good.

 

When we got him home his mother was exasperated. She snatched the baby and said very little to us because we didn’t matter. She was very displeased and it showed but one got the sense that she felt as though it wasn’t worth talking about. For all intents and purposes her relationship with my cousin was over anyway and when she went back to school a few weeks later she made it official. It was only then that he became truly unraveled.

As I made it through college and experienced my own fair share of drama and got my own girlfriend pregnant and was nearly ousted from school myself the women of the family began to whisper. “You know your cousin ain’t right in the head no more. He’s a little off, a little touched. Do you know what he said to me the other day…?”  And this would always be followed by their laughter, a very disturbing defense mechanism that would piss me off. No one ever really wants to deal with pain so people force humor into things that aren’t funny.

 

Nevertheless I refuted their claims for years. I even argued with my uncle, his dad, about it. I would say he’s just a little down because his football dreams are finally over. It’s only natural. He’ll bounce back I said. All ya’ll are doing way too much.

As the years went by I managed to graduate from college but he didn’t. I established a very solid relationship with my daughter but he was asked by his son’s mother not to come around them due to his strange behavior. I was able to maintain a job— no matter how lame it was—but he wasn’t.

We were about 23 years old I when I got word that he was living in a shelter in Palo Alto so, of course, I went to go see him. By that time I could no longer deny the reality of it all. My cousin was gone.

As elementary school age children my cousin and I, along with all of the other neighborhood children, would play games of hide and go seek deep into the night. Sometimes one of us would fall and scrape our knees and elbows. In which case we would cry a little bit, go inside to get a band-aid, and come right back outside to play. When we ran track my cousin pulled a hamstring. He missed a few track meets but a few weeks later he was right back on the relay team. So when it was discovered that my cousin had a mental illness I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t bring it back. I can’t express the hopelessness that I felt knowing that he would never get better. That he would never fully recover and even worse, there was nothing that I could do to help him.

I tried very hard though. He was hungry so I bought him Round Table Pizza. I saw that he needed shoes so I bought him some. I literally gave him the coat off of my back because he was wearing a dusty old blazer with no hood and the October rain was going to start coming down soon. But giving him all of those material things ultimately didn’t matter because I couldn’t give him peace of mind.

As we walked down a street close to Stanford University he spoke to me in a strange kind of whisper that seemed very distant and very loud at the same time. And he talked to me slowly, reminiscent of Master Splinter in the Ninja Turtle movies. Like he was trying to sound very wise. We passed a bar and he asked to go in. I told him I wasn’t going to buy him alcohol. He then told me that he was trying to use alcohol to stop smoking weed in the same way that heroin addicts use methadone to quit their habit.

We walked into Walgreens to get him basic necessities and he asked me to buy him some painkillers. I told him that I was not going to buy him drugs and he became irritated but quickly got over it. He asked for some candy instead and I obliged.

A few hours later we were back at the shelter and I had to leave him. He said thanks. I said be cool and that was that. Every interaction I have had with him since then has been the same way. He oscillates between his former self and some dreamy voiced person whom I wish I had never met. He goes out of his way to try to get me to remember events that I did not attend and he asks me for money. I cannot help my cousin.

I miss my cousin and it sucks to know that although he is still alive he will never come back. So many memories from our childhood are dead because he can’t remember that he was there with me. And right now I want to call him up but he doesn’t have a phone number. I want to swoop him up but he doesn’t have an address, so I write about it. I write until I don’t feel sick anymore. I write about it because really, there isn’t much else that I can do.

 

 

 

 

11.22.11
by

The Trials of Fatherhood

November 22, 2011

I remember when my daughter was a baby of about 11 months and I had to go to court to see her on a regular basis. I ended up having to fight the system as hard as I could to get two days a week for visitation. I can recall doing everything I possibly could to not only never miss a date when it was time to pick up my child but also to never be a second late. And I realize now just as I realized then that the main reason for my dedication was the constant fear that if I ever went over a week without seeing my child then she would forget me and I would soon be replaced.

Fatherhood can be a very unforgiving enterprise. It is very common for people to spend their whole lives hating their fathers without ever making an honest attempt to empathize with him. It’s a role that has become dispensable in society. In most cases having a healthy relationship with ones father is seen as a luxury as opposed to a necessity. At times when I would go to get my little girl I would read the faces of the people in the house where she lived and they would all say; “Why are you still coming here? How long are you going to keep this up?”

 

American households no longer know the function of a father. Fathers have become the appendix of the family unit, particularly when a couple splits up. There is no law in place that says a woman must allow her children to see their father. A father must go to family court and in the state of California he must pay upwards of $400 to start the mediation process. I’m sure most people can’t imagine how degrading it feels to, in essence, have to save up to buy your own child. I do believe this is was what caused Huckleberry Finn—the protagonist of Mark Twain’s most revered work—to experience an epiphany regarding the institution of slavery. It occurred after he discovered that his good friend Nigger Jim planned to work hard up north so that he could earn enough wages to eventually purchase his children who were still in bondage. Ultimately Huckleberry Finn who in so many ways represented the American conscience began to see that despite the popular opinion of the day and alleged biblical verses that justified the practice, slavery was in fact very immoral.

 

I wonder about the emotional shortcomings of a fatherless culture. How limited is the future of a people who fail to appreciate half of what brought them into existence?

-YB

10.17.11
by

Work Sucks for an Artist!

 

 

October 17, 2011

                When I was a senior in high school I worked at a movie theater and I hated it. There was something extremely traumatic about having to sweep up the spilled popcorn of the girl you had a major crush on while she was on a date with the captain of the basketball team. I couldn’t wait until I went away to college so I would never have to work in that pissy place again. Now over ten years later I have a much better job as an educator; molding the minds of young people, changing society one child at a time and blah, blah, blah—to be honest with you I hate this job too.  I realize now, however, that it’s not so much the gig that I hate as much as I just have an extreme dislike for working.

                Just in case you were wondering, I am fully aware that it is a recession and I should be grateful to have a job at all. And for the first week or so I was very grateful but now it’s just lame all over again. It’s not the daily tasks that bother me so much, nor is it the students. What I find to be so unbearable is the hierarchy. During my adult life I have had an impossible time dealing with people who feel as though they have the right to tell me what to do. It just really annoys me. I mean supervisors, coordinators, leads… often times the fake titles become too much for me to stand. And the extent to which people internalize these titles can be downright laughable at times. But then again maybe it’s me.

                 I must confess that I have always been an odd ball. Even at the movie theater when we were getting paid minimum wage I remember some people trying to make a career out of it. I have had so many jobs in my life—some a lot better than others—and I have always managed to mentally check out of all of them. I never cared. They always tried to brainwash us with that propaganda of being a family whether it be the movie theater, the grocery store, the restaurant, the electronics store or wherever, yet they always fired people for bogus reasons. I never bought into that trash, not even as a teenager.  

                My obligations in life are pretty simple; I work to keep a roof over my head and I write to stay out of the psychiatric ward. But if I had to choose between the two I’d rather be homeless with a pen in my hand and less than a penny to my name.

-YB