Black Boy Smile

“My muva and grandmuva make the best seafood salad for reallllll, I’m tellin’ you,” Kavon said. The streets nicknamed him Burger, because he was big, dark brown, and lumpy, with a flat spotty face that looked just like an overcooked burger. Burger was only a few years older, but triple my size. “Shit is sooooooooooo good, man, don’t debate me,” he spat, stuffing the mashed-up shrimp deep into his mouth, globs of wet mayonnaise oozing down his wide puffy jaws.

“Mmmmmmmmm, mmmm, mmmmmm,” he groaned, wiping the chunky off-white filth away from the corners of his mouth.

It was about two weeks before our first day of school. We were posted on the corner of Ashland Avenue, in front of a slouched redbrick collapsing row house that had been boarded up longer than any of us could remember. All us boys were baked a shade darker than our real complexions from riding our bikes, hooping, and swimming at the rec center in the ninety-degree weather every day. The happy bunch of us were all summertime ashy in tank tops with socks pulled up to our knees. Burger eclipsed our edge of the block as he shoved more of that cocktail of canned shrimp, corner store mayo, and imitation crab-meat-shit that he swore was seafood salad into his nasty mouth. He was spooning it out of a tan faded plastic Country Crock bowl that used to be a margarine container a long time ago—everybody from our block used them as bowls when the fake butter inside had run out.

“That stuff stink!” I accidentally mumbled. Shit. Fear instantly shot through me as the thought escaped my mouth. What in the fuck is wrong with me? Every kid in the neighborhood knew Burger could beat the shit out of everybody, even the adults, and he was glad to, for any reason––we all held countless stories detailing the way Burger swung his puffy scarred mitts against somebody’s teeth, so why would I comment, unless I wanted to be next? Did I lose my fuckin’ mind?

My friend Troy who was with us looked at me like I had three heads with a “Are you fucking crazy?” face and then went back to his Game Boy. As my heart sank into the bottom of my stomach, all I could hear was Troy’s bony fingers clicking away on Mario Brothers, and Burger shoving more of that shit into his mouth like, “Muuuuuuuummmmmmmm, so good.”

Burger was a bully in every sense of the word. He always started fights and finished them. He was bigger than grade school teachers, bigger than the principal, and bigger than his big brother, who was also a bully. We were only friends with him to avoid being on the wrong side of his fist. Once he’d run up on the school bus and knocked out the driver. POW! Burger’s fist blasted right on top of his face. The driver went straight to sleep and only the ambulance crew and their fists full of ammonia tablets could wake him. He’d only done that because someone had dared him to. That was Burger, and that’s the kind of things Burger liked to do. Pissing him off had me so shook that I could’ve shit myself, until I realized that he probably didn’t hear me.

After Burger sopped up the last of the “seafood” salad, he trained his eyes on Troy’s Game Boy. “I wanna play, yo, I got next,” he said, snatching it out of Troy’s hands. Troy and I were the only kids in the neighborhood with Game Boys, as most parents didn’t have $90 to spend on a handheld game console. But what Burger’s mom couldn’t buy him, he took.

“Come on, man! I was about to win Mario!” Troy protested.

Burger shrugged, looked at Troy, and breathed, “I should sell this shit.”

“Come on, man!” Troy pleaded.

Us kids were just starting to see the effects of crack cocaine, or what the streets called ready rock, ready, or crack—a cheaper, rock-like, smokable form of powder cocaine. Crack hit our neighborhood like a missile, and nobody saw it coming. Respected coaches, the flyest uncles, and the prettiest teenage girls had morphed into funky, stealing, toothless addicts that roamed the block like zombies all day and night looking for crack. Many of the top dealers were teenagers driving brand-new Acura Legends, Nissan Pathfinders, 300Zs, and 5 Series BMWs, bossing other kids, beating the snot and shit out of grown men begging for a rock, and fucking bent-over grown women in the alley who needed a blast. Kids like me, Troy, and Burger were the young soldiers, next in line—so we had to be tough, because the older kids were always watching, offering us money, work, making sure we represented the neighborhood and carried ourselves like men.

We weren’t men, and didn’t really want to be men, we wanted to be kids, but had to always act like men, whatever that meant—it was all a lie. And I quickly learned how to be a liar. As a matter of fact, I mastered it.

“Yo, give it back!” Troy yelled at Burger, who was holding his Game Boy up in the air out of our reach. “Come on, I was about to win! Give it back, yo!”

Burger laughed, mushed Troy’s forehead against the brick wall, and put the game into his pocket. Defeated, Troy slumped down on the steps and wrapped his face up inside of both of his hands. A few girls, Nay Nay, Mia, Ki Ki, and Lil Shannon, made their way over to the corner. Burger, realizing that he had a more attractive audience now, whipped the Game Boy back out.

“Y’all freaks wanna free Game Boy?” he teased. Collectively, they all rolled their eyes and popped their necks in annoyance.

I looked in Troy’s eyes, saw them filling, becoming wet glossy slits, hungry to spill over—Burger had tested us before, knocked us down, gave us wedgies and wet willies, but he never took anything from us, he took things from other kids all of the time, but not us, because we were a part of his crew. This was new, and painful.

“Let me give your lil game back,” Burger said, approaching Troy on the steps. “You look like you gonna cry, like a lil bitch. Why you always around him, D? He a bitch!”

“He ain’t a bitch,” I pushed back, regretfully.

Troy looked away. The girls were scribbling hopscotch squares in the middle of the street with broken-off pieces of fat chalk when they stopped to look. Nay Nay’s expression toward me mirrored a deer’s gaze in the brightest of headlights. I liked her, so though I was scared, my fear masqueraded as rage. I swallowed my throat, feeling the sweat form into dots of Braille that stretched across my forehead. “Burger, why you gotta be so extra all of the time, man?” I said with my chest poked out and my face twisted into an angry question mark. “Give his fuckin’ game back!”

That was the start of my lie, knowingly pretending that I wasn’t terrified.

Instead of pummeling me on the spot, Burger turned and spit a piece of shrimp shell that must have been resting in between his jumbled teeth onto Troy’s face. The warm slimy shell that was the size of a flake stuck to the center of his forehead and everyone watched as it slid down his nose, leaving a slippery trail.

“Ewwwwwwww,” one of the girls shouted. “He nastyyyyyy!”

Burger erupted in triumphant laughter.

Troy wiped his face, and caught the tear that finally slipped out.

“Yo, leave him alone, Burger—you fat bitch, what the fuck!” I yelled.

“Chill, yo!” Troy shouted.

And suddenly I felt my body being swooped into the heavens and then planted deeply into the roots of the concrete, followed by a hailstorm of fists tagging my nose, forehead, and both of my eyes. As he beat me, Burger dug into my pockets. This was his reward system, what he had earned for stomping me out—he got me for a few dollars, my Now and Laters, Lemonheads, and everything else I had. I managed to break away, running down Ashland Avenue faster than Flo Jo.

Burger was yelling after me, “You bitch-ass nigga! You can’t come around here no more!”

I kept running and running and running, feeling my eye tighten as tears dried down my cheeks.

I ran up all the way through Madeira Street, down Jefferson, over to Robinson where I lived. “D, what’s wrong, are you okay?” a couple of people asked during my marathon. I only stopped briefly to say, “I’m great!”—they knew that I was lying. Anyone with eyes could clearly see that I wasn’t okay by the look of despair tattooed on my face, a look I’ve never learned to hide. My broken facial expression created the foundation that my lies were built on as I grew from a boy to a man. It became my default.

I don’t have a poker face; my egghead and my blank stare that drifts off into space mirror exactly how I feel on the inside. When I’m angry, my forehead slopes and the meat under my eyebrows puffs up—this is when I shut down. I don’t talk. I struggle to think past anything that isn’t revenge. And when I’m happy, my cheeks inflate like party balloons and sit on top of a smile wide enough to wrap around my entire head—this is when I open up. I can’t stop talking. I struggle to think past anything that doesn’t involve me emptying my wallet and giving everything to everyone around me. My pain, like my joy, has always been clearly visible, yet I lie. The lies are self-justified by understanding that the Are-you-okay? askers can’t do anything anyway. The Burgers of the world could and would steal your money and beat the shit out of you, too.

When I got home, I headed straight toward the bathroom to clean myself up. Once inside, I locked the door and then stared at myself in the mirror—on the other side was everything a man wasn’t, a chump with a bruised face and a knot the size of a tennis ball forming above my eyelid.

“What happened to your eye?” Mom asked, as soon as I exited the bathroom.

“Dammmmmmmn,” Dad enthusiastically followed, sipping a Coke. “Dammmmmmmn!”

“I fell down playing basketball,” I lied, on my way into hiding.

I was a prisoner in my home for over a week after the attack. I ran like a punk, was humiliated, and felt like I didn’t deserve to go outside or have fun with the rest of the kids, doing the things that kids in the summer do. I could see Burger’s blubbery jaws bouncing up and down, laughing at me. I could hear Nay Nay along with the girls clutching their stomachs as they laughed too at the way I ran, without fighting back. I wanted to stay locked away in my room forever, but school was starting in a few days and I knew I would eventually have to confront them all.

“Are you ready for school?” my mother asked. “This summer blew by.”

“It did,” I answered.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “I know when something is wrong with you.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Okay, you figured that lock out yet?”

I pulled the Master Lock out, held it up in front of her—three times one way, two times the other way, and straight to the last number, click. She raised her thin eyebrows in that I’m impressed gesture and made her way down the hall. I laid back on my bed and watched my dusty ceiling fan whip around and around. I wasn’t being who I was supposed to be. I don’t get bullied, I thought, I shouldn’t fear anyone, I am me.

And then it all came to me one night while binge watching a day’s worth of cartoons and sitcoms that destiny was mine, I was responsible for my own hero story. From Transformers to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to Boyz n the Hood, the hero always had victory, as long as he had a plan. I needed to do something that no one else was willing to do to erase the icky feeling that Burger left me with. I needed to win.

So I took the lock that my mom had given me, dropped it into a long sock, and tied it into a knot. Then I put on my Nike Air Max sneakers, which were much lighter than all of my Jordans and the shoes that I could run the fastest in—and I bolted over to Madeira, swinging the long knotted sock like nunchakus. Burger, along with some of the girls, including Nay Nay, a bunch of other kids, a collection of addicts, and the dealers that always decorated the block were there. Everything was the same, nothing had changed in my absence. Burger was knee-deep in a dice game with some older dudes, sweating like a hog, screaming his point, rattling dice and picking loose bills up off of the ground. I was surprised to see Troy clicking away at his Game Boy. I didn’t know he’d be coming to the corner without me.

“’Sup, Troy?” I asked.

“What you ’bout to do, D?” Troy grimaced, safely securing his Game Boy in his pocket.

Burger looked up from his game, and our eyes met. He laughed and turned back to toss the dice against the wall. I winded up the sock, aimed, and cracked a healthy chunk of meat out of the back of his head. POW! He slapped the pavement like a sack of trash. After the first blow, I hit him again, this time harder, hard enough to redden us with his blood as I whipped again and again, basking in the carnage. I didn’t hear anything—a silence blanketed my surroundings. I blacked out, cracking him again and again and again—then a clapping crowd shook me out of my trance, and I heard kids singing my praises, cheering at the slain menace. A few older dudes rushed to yank me away and scooped up Burger so that he didn’t bleed out. Word on the streets was that he got 180 staples and stitches after my blows.

Victory! Victory! Victory––a lie.

Burger whipped my ass at least twenty or more times after that. And to make matters worse, hitting Burger didn’t protect Troy or make me feel any better. It did make me look better in front of my peers and homies; Nay Nay even kissed me on the lips a week later. But I felt like a terrible person. And knowing this, I continued to choose violence––like a wave of destruction that I continued to ride for most of my life. But this is what it took to handle all things like “a man,” like the men in my family, and on TV––you had to pretend that fear and regret didn’t exist.

Years later, while passing a blunt around on a corner with some friends, close to where the beatdown took place, someone said that Burger had been gunned down for hustling on another dude’s block. I snickered and said something like, “That fat-ass nigga always had his hands on something that wasn’t his.” Everyone on the corner laughed while agreeing. We’d grown up with Burger, he was one of us. He was an asshole, but he was ours. We spent years with him playing basketball, talking to girls, and just being kids—but the lie did not allow us to acknowledge our loss. We were hurt, saddened by his death, but we could not show it; that wasn’t allowed, we had to take it like men. We said “Fuck ’em” and went on with our conversation, our lives—feeding, clothing, providing, nourishing the lie as men.

This lie has been told for generations—strangling the emotions of Black men everywhere, forcing us to hold back our tears, our smiles, our joy, and reject feeling anything, at least too much or much at all. I bought into this act for too long, and now, after decades of it, before and after the death of Burger, I’m finally at a place where I want to abandon the lie. I want to bury it. I want to freely experience joy and love and hurt, to stop using trauma like a currency.

What I learned from cracking Burger in the head with a Master Lock, or from the years of crack sales and the rest of the madness that came next, is that it was all a lie. None of it made me happy. I was taught to use the violence that accompanies toxic masculinity as my own personal painkiller, as if aggression could heal, and I was tired. I don’t want to be a liar. I don’t want to be the hero.

What I want?

I want to smile.