What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (phonics story books txt) 📕

the homos. That’s for real. What’s that make him? A homeboy?”

“Word!” Carla chimed.

“See, Elvis was for real once too,” Oku explained “Poor boy, like Eminem, but the system only knows how to co-opt so they even co-opted his poor ass in the white supremacist shit.”

“Well, what do you think’s happened to Eminem? And don’t think for a minute that you’re trumping me with that. It’s still kill women, kill the homos, whatever. I’m dead either way.”

“She got you there,” Carla threw back another shot of tequila.

“Word. Hey, your turn,” Oku conceded, reluctantly turning to Carla.

“Okay, Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn’t. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn’t let her. She didn’t believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.”

The table fell silent.

“Word,” Tuyen said finally, softly grabbing Carla’s hand around her beer bottle. “Hey, Carla …”

“I’m good, I’m good. It’s just I get it, you know.”

The game was over. They sat drinking and feeling, looking at the rain still falling outside and listening to the blare of horns and the clatter of forks and dishes around them. As disturbing as all they were living was, they felt alive. More alive, they thought, than most people around them. They believed in it, this living. Its raw openness. They saw the street outside, its chaos, as their only hope. They felt the city’s violence and its ardour in one emotion. It was dark now; the rainy summer light had descended. The water glistened on everything—cars, neon signs, newspaper boxes, people. The blind singer across the street in front of the movie theatre packed up his tuneless voice, going home; teenaged boys hobbled along in too-big jeans; girls holding cigarettes between French-tipped nails walked briskly by. Next door the Lebanese shawarma place, which had been a doughnut shop, and had once been an ice cream store, and would in another incarnation be a sushi bar, now exhaled odours of roasted lamb. A stream of identities flowed past the bar’s window: Sikhs in FUBU, Portuguese girls in DKNY, veiled Somali girls in Puma sneakers, Colombian teenagers in tattoos. Carla had said it all, not just about her mother but about all of them. Trying to step across the borders of who they were. But they were not merely trying. They were, in fact, borderless.

“Anyways …” They all started laughing at the same time as Tuyen broke the moment. “Let’s stop this cerebral shit.”

“Where’s Jackie today?”

“At the store!” Carla and Tuyen said together. “Where else, Oku?”

“Look, man, get over yourself, okay?”

“I know. I’m just asking.”

“Christ. You’re gonna lose out, man.”

“You better think of something, Mr. Poet.”

“Have you done anything? Have you called her, talked to her? What is the big deal?” Tuyen was always impatient with Oku in regards to Jackie.

“She’s got a white boy, man. I saw them in the market the other day. It looked really intense.”

“Intense? Jackie intense? Which girl are you talking about?”

“Yeah, Jackie holding hands and shit. The shit looked critical.”

“So, you got nothing to lose, right? Man, you are so slow.”

“I’ve got to do some research, all right?”

“You’re just scared.” Carla said quietly.

“Nah, I’ve got to figure out this white-boy thing. I’m not going out like that …” He hadn’t told them about sex with Jackie. He wanted to keep it to himself.

“What’s to figure out, Oku? Jackie’s really wise,” Tuyen said. “She doesn’t want any hassle, no trouble, and Reiner’s like that.”

“Well, if she don’t want it hard, it’s not me, right?”

“Hard! Listen to you! You give it hard, do you?”

“I don’t mean that, okay, time out.” They were laughing at him. “That’s not what I mean. You all are dirty, man. Hey, let’s burn.”

“No, I have to develop some film tonight.” Tuyen felt for the camera.

“You do that high all the time.”

“Yeah, that’s when I want it to come out fucked up.”

“You and me then, Carla?” He needed a place to crash. He hadn’t shown up to Kwesi’s, and he didn’t want to explain. He couldn’t explain.

“Okay, for a bit, then I need sleep. I’m gonna get fired because of World Cup.”

“There’s hundreds of courier services. You’re like Miguel Indurain on the bike. You can always get a job.”

“Yeah, right, Poet. Let’s get the bill.”

“Word. What’s Canadian in 9.79 seconds and Jamaican in twenty-four hours? Ben Johnson,” Oku joked as they were leaving the bar.

“Oh, that’s lame, that’s so tired.”

The rain hadn’t let up, nor had the party in Korea Town. The police had moved the crowd on farther along to Christie, clearing the intersection of Bathurst and Bloor of the pile-up. The car horns still blared. Korean flags flying intercut occasionally with Brazilian and Japanese ones. Tuyen, Carla, and Oku stood watching and waving and singing, “Oh, Pil-seung Korea! Oh, Pil-seung Korea!”

Quy

Of the eighty-one poems of the sage Lao Tzu, Loc Tuc liked number forty. “The motion of nature is cyclic and returning. Its way is to yield, for to yield is to become. All things are born of being, being is born of non-being.” But me, I liked number twenty. “The sage may seem to be perplexed, being neither bright nor clear, and to himself, sometimes he seems both dull and weak, confused and shy. Like the ocean at night, he is serene and quiet, but as penetrating as the winter wind.” See, that’s me. I look stupid, I play dumb, but I’m working. Penetrating as the winter wind—that’s me.

Some ask if there were times that I enjoyed my life. To know this is to know the way. And why, others may ask, did the monk latch on to me? I would catch him off guard, staring at me when he thought I was not looking. I could feel his gaze burn my face from time to time.