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From Autobiography of My Alter Ego

2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.2005.0107

1080-6512

Yusef Komunyakaa,

American Literature and Culture

Summers when Mother & I visited Tulsa, Grandpa Augustus would say, Boy, you were born one hundred steps ahead of many. You inherited the benefit of a doubt. That's your birthright. A man may have a million bucks in his pig-skin billfold, but you're still ten steps ahead. I'd say, Do Mama & Granny have the benefit, too? He'd grin & say, Hell, yeah! But, son, you're already miles ahead. Then we'd each take a spoonful of our home-made peach ice cream. Granny would appear big as an Oklahoma sunset in the doorway with her hands on her hips, & say, Gus, please don't teach that boy your craziness. A new day is around the corner. I could see my mother getting smaller. My father was somewhere on his touring bus outside Orlando or skirting Las Vegas, humming a new song under his breath as they rounded a curve. Sometimes she cried herself to sleep or drank small bottles of rum, [End Page 478] & then we'd chew Juicy Fruit till I could see the man in the moon sitting on the windowsill. Grandpa would whisper, I don't care what your Granny says. The benefit of a half doubt is worth more than gold in the bank, more than rubies & diamonds stolen out of the eye sockets of some Egyptian sun god hidden in a cashbox somewhere in the Florida Keys. My Daddy, bless him, body & soul, was a cover artist back in the early '50's. So, I grew up with a white face mouthing black voices, with Mister Bones talking black & making love to my mother in a midnight room. He was debonair in powder-blue suits & paisley ascots, in patent leather shoes that moved the sky as he walked across the grass. When he wasn't on the road or here at The Chimera Club like a hawk at the cash drawer, he lived in a room of mirrors, his chrome turntables spinning up the bottom of a well as he tried to capture Nat Cole & Mister B. The voice was always his when he spoke, but I heard the yardman's "Amazing Grace" those nights & days he sang. [End Page 479] * * * I hitchhiked a year with Bullet, my impish gray mutt. She was the only one who didn't come to me as a stranger, wagging her tail as if I'd gone around the block for an hour. I left my mother waving in the doorway, my father drunk in the den. With guitar & rucksack, we slept in bindweed & kudzu, apple orchards & ball fields, beneath trestles & in voluptuous, borrowed beds in one-horse towns, flophouses & parks in big cities, wild songs & flowers in my wild hair. I thumbed the pages of dog-eared Articles of War, a ghost of Nam still in the clothes I wore. I was thankful for the Big Dipper & the night owl in the oaks, thankful Bullet hadn't growled & barked that morning, as she'd done so many times before when I brought home the slow perfume of women on my clothes & hands. [End Page 480] * * * Sometimes I feel broken. My arms a boy's, daydreaming baseball & horseshoes. My legs with weights tied to them. One part of me feels unlived, & another feels almost used up, licked clean by too many desires good for one man. Sometimes it seems I've been everywhere Adam's Bridge, Les Eyzies, Nicobar, Swan, Zadar, & then again sometimes it feels as if I haven't been broken in yet, depending on how daybreak falls into a bedroom window. I've bartended here at The Chimera Club for over twelve years, but I've also worked as a tool-&-die man in Detroit, a dogcatcher in Manitou, a blackjack dealer in Biloxi, a dishwasher at The Cosmic Onion in the Big Apple, a gang boss in Galveston, & smelled nothing but death for over a year on a floating factory off the coast of Alaska. Yes, friend, there are seven or...