The Red Caboose
Now that I am an adult, I realize that everything I ever learned about white people, I learned from the enormous color television set, a Magnavox, that sat front and center in our tiny, ramshackle living room. It was the only one in the house, and it was on constantly. It served as a clock telling us what time of day it was by whatever show was on. It was a babysitter for when my mother had to go to work and my father laid in bed all day behind a locked door. It was a disciplinarian in absentia when my mother took it away or hung the privilege of watching it over our heads like the Sword of Damocles. Since there was only the one, there were evenings when the fighting over it shut the whole place down. When my mother turned it off as punishment, it sat there, dark and dead of all its potential; drained of all its colors.
It was an almost seaworthy floor model in which a thick glass screen wrapped in a credenza's-worth of lacquered, brown wood was the gateway to all the things in the world that I couldn't have. A crystal ball of covetousness. I sat day after day allowing that television to teach me that the most important thing in life was to be liked. By everybody. Between its teachings at home and social life at school, I learned that the whiter you acted, the better liked you were. So I changed the way that I spoke to mimic the characters on television. I concealed every part of myself that I deemed to be too "Black." Because my life up until then had shown me that white wasn't just a race, it was a goal. And, at fifteen years old, I decided that this was a goal I wanted to achieve.
Sitting cross-legged and a foot from the screen, I looked up at the TV and learned that white children were ethereally beautiful and perpetually innocent; even their mistakes were charming. White children got sent to their bedrooms or were given a good and loving talking to—​punishments that shamed the knee-jerk ass-whuppin's my siblings and I were subject to for a misspoken word or the slightest infraction. I didn't even have a bedroom to get sent to.
White children were given "allowances." Allowances: money that was given to them just for being alive. White children became indignant when their television parents did not raise these allowances or withheld them as punishment for some adorable mistake they'd made. Their household chores seemed more of an option and not a command necessary to keep the very household functioning. Their clothes were never out of style, never dingy with wear. Their homes were beautifully decorated. They all had bicycles and their own bedrooms, and I was in thrall to the opulence and ease of it all. The parents of white children were loving toward each other and playful with their children. They acknowledged them and talked to them and always seemed to be in a good mood.
In contrast, my parents were endlessly angry—​either at one another or at their children—​and our existence was anything but opulent. Our home was a shack, especially when compared to the two- and three-story palaces that lay just at the other end of town. Money was a constant discussion: lack of it, what to do with it, where it was going to come from. It was always a problem. The white parents on television were always canoodling, doting on their children, and smiling at one another with an air of playful romance, but my mother didn't like my father at all and it was fairly evident. Their utter lack of resemblance to the white parents on television made me wonder why they'd ever married in the first place. They seemed to tolerate each other well enough when my father had a job. But once he lost it, there were chasms of silence between them filled only with duty and avoidance. I didn't quite understand what was going on between them, but they seemed to view my siblings and me as an inconvenience at best. But the white people? They had it all figured out. They always had money. Their problems were fixable within thirty minutes if you added in the commercials for things we couldn't afford. I watched them through the looking glass of the Magnavox with my mouth hanging open, wanting so badly to be a part of their world.
Between the family sitcoms and commercial breaks, there were brief seconds when the screen would go black, and I would see my reflection in the television screen. It was then that I knew I would never get to experience the heady highs of Caucasianism. My skin was so black. I could barely make out my features in the darkness of the glass. I was just eyes looking in on a world that I'd never be invited to join. In those seconds, I wondered if Blackness was responsible for inferiority or if God just made those who were inferior Black.
Growing up, my town was perpetually colorless and damp, even in the summertime, and the place where I showed up every day for education was built like a prison. The school colors were red and gray, like a gunshot wound through an old man's head, and every wall in the high school hallways was painted pea-soup green. There was no place more miserable than my high school. The floors were the gray kind, speckled with different colors like vomit. I would often stare at the flecks, zeroing in on the silver ones and trying to connect the dots. They looked to me like an infinite cosmos, a getaway route I could follow to escape having to use the dreaded welfare lunch card, which glowed fluorescent pink, begging for attention.
When the steel mills in Warren and the Rockwell bumpers plant in nearby Newton Falls closed, every Black family in the area was thrown into turmoil. With no other work options, every Black man in the area was left stunned. Some took to the bottle and became either angry or maudlin drunks. I watched them stumble around the streets of our town and vowed that I would never be so pathetic as to touch alcohol. And because these manufacturing jobs left to seek out greener pastures for their executives, every Black child's hand was holding a fluorescent pink free lunch card. I hid mine to avoid the embarrassment. It was a mark, a brand. In the end, it was just easier to skip lunch. I tried to be cool about it even when my stomach growled.
A boy in my class, Alex, embodied all the boys I saw on television. He had a father who wore a suit and tie to work and who would show up for school events and smile at his son lovingly and with open affection like the TV dads. They even hugged. His mother was the typing teacher at the school and surely didn't come home with a scowl carved into her face only to grumble out grievances before she fell into bed exhausted like my mother did. His sister was pretty and outgoing. He had no older brother under whose shadow he lived or was so embarrassed by him that he didn't want anyone to know they were related. I imagined their house to be a three-storied affair—​white with brown trim and all manner of shrubbery and flowers surrounding it, which I assume his mother tended to vigilantly in a sun hat with a wide and floppy brim. A house that was a perfect backdrop for after-show credits to roll. Our house was a hovel in comparison.
All in all, Alex and his family were just better people than us. Alex himself was the epitome of the gentle and thoughtful white boys I could only have access to via the electricity running through the Magnavox that my family could barely keep on half the time. He was the exact opposite of the Black boys who gave me hell every day. He was sensitive. I wanted Alex and I wanted to be Alex.
Homosexuality, as it so often does, attacked me in my bed in the middle of the night. I resisted with every fiber of my being until I could resist no longer. Alone in my bed, thinking about Alex unendingly, my eyes rolled back in my head, and I didn't quite know what to do with my hands. Much to my shame, I would soon figure that out. I let the thought of him wash over me night after sticky night. I wanted to hold Alex. I wanted Alex, with his chocolate brown eyes and coal black hair, to love me. I didn't even mind his occasional pimples. I thought they were charming. I wanted him to save me and take me away into his television world. I would stare at him openly at school and make a fool of myself by awkwardly trying to talk to someone who was talking to him so I could somehow make my way into his field of vision.
I fought my demons every night and prayed that the Good Lord would take these desires away from me. The Good Lord never did. In fact, He only made them worse. I abandoned all hope. I couldn't stop and decided that hell was where I should end up. But I wanted to take Alex with me.
Onanism became habitual. When I was "done," I would imagine myself in Alex's mother's class and her repeatedly smashing my penis with the manual typewriter on my desk, over and over again, with pure hatred in her eyes for what I'd just done to her son. I had to look this woman in the face every day, knowing that just a few hours before, she had lost her son to me and my wicked imagination. She would come by my desk sometimes to reposition my fingers on the keyboard, and I would seethe with jealousy that she got to see so much of him, but I would also thrill to the thought that maybe she'd recently touched his hair and was using the same hand to correct my hand positioning. I smiled and hoped that she didn't catch a whiff of the lust that might have stubbornly stuck to my recalcitrant fingers despite all of my scrubbing. All of my praying and scrubbing. It was only a matter of time until someone locked me up.
They used to like to watch me dance, the white kids, and I would dance for them. The levels of coonery to which I sank were unfathomable. There were Al Jolson–style minstrel shows given in our high school gymnasium, starring yours truly. A real live Negro. I shucked and jived my way into their hearts every day in the gym after they'd had their lunch. They may as well have thrown watermelon slices as payment. The Black kids from my neighborhood would look on from the other side of the gym, shaking their heads in disapproval. But I didn't care. They were doomed to be Black their whole lives. Plus, they had all called me "faggot" enough to earn my hatred forever. I had found acceptance. That's all I ever wanted. Someone would bring a little cassette deck, and I would dance for all I was worth while they smiled and clapped me on the back and congratulated me for having rhythm. Alex was impressed as well, smiling broadly at me and clapping along goofily to the music. He noticed me in this capacity only and I danced even harder and faster under his gaze until all the others disappeared and I was dancing for him alone. And then, one day, it happened.
"You should tooootally come with us to The Red Caboose on Saturday!"