It was 1982 and I was 21 years old, holding court in the recreation room of a squat house in Berlin. The residents—some artists, some revolutionaries, anarchists all—were sitting around, ostensibly for a casual chat. But it was really a tribunal. They were sizing me up to see if I had the right stuff to be a member. I had just arrived with my bandmates from the U.S., and I needed a room.
A leather-clad German girl with an asymmetrical haircut asked, "What's life like in the ghetto?"
"I don't really live in the ghetto," I said. The silence following this statement was so pointed, you could hang the committee's confusion and disappointment on it. Were I a braver young man, I would have begun describing my middle-class, conservative black world, our big house and the nice lawn. But instead I stuttered, "I mean, I don't live in the ghetto now."
"Ahhh," the room collectively sighed with relief. They were now ready for me to earn my keep by regaling them with tales from the 'hood.
My cousins lived in a rougher part of town than I, so I launched into my own rendition of some of their Greatest Ghetto Hits featuring wild narratives about gangs and abject poverty. I stuffed the stories with tropes from movies, grabbing a scene or two from the works of Richard Wright whenever I needed a flash of literary bravura. None of it, however, had anything to do with my daily life.
It was a survival tactic. My mouth seemed to be moving faster than my morals. And the irony was that the reason I left the U.S. was I was sick of people expecting and needing me to be someone I wasn't. Back home, I was often accused of "acting white." But here I was "passing" for someone else—the inner-city gangster of their media-driven fantasies.
As a teenager, I was listening to rock, to experimental pop, to punk. Neighbors would stand by my window in confused awe of the hideous "un-black" noise blasting forth. Whipping out a boom box with rock music on the playground meant risking a beating from the actual gangsters. Identity was serious business back then.
At my church, where everyone was dressed impeccably, terrified of looking like anything lower than royalty, the ladies would chide me for carrying around comic books instead of a bible. "Son, you play guitar, right?" they would ask. "Then why don't you play that guitar here in church?" "I'm just waiting for the calling, Mrs. Kelso," I'd sometimes remark.
My mother's biggest heartbreak was that, in a bedroom plastered with posters, I hadn't put up a single black idol. My father, who worked at a bank, looked at it logically: "He likes loud, noisy guitar music, and the people that play that music are white." But my mom thought my musical taste somehow reflected self-hatred. The frustrating thing for me was that I didn't want to be white; I just wanted to be me. Teen angst knows no color. I had it all, and I was still pissed off.
My big adolescent epiphany was that my own community oppressed me more than the white community did. White people never tried to change me. But as far as my black world was concerned, I wasn't listening to the right music, styling my hair the right way, or speaking the right assortment of dialects.
So I took off for New York and then, after some time, escaped to Europe. Europe was a world I'd learned about while sneaking off to watch art house films in high school. A world where people sat around in cafés and talked openly about sex and politics. A world where James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Dexter Gordon had walked down streets and felt free.
Yet in the squat house, a force beyond borders hit me: the huge need to be accepted. It's amazing—once you find the buttons you can push to make people like you, you find yourself pushing them before you can even consider whether it's the right thing to do. My housing audition was a dance that the Germans and I choreographed together. As I self-mythologized, they self-romanticized, delighted to have me, their official mascot of black solidarity. They welcomed me with revolutionary arms into their creative gang. Baldwin and those guys must have done stuff like this too, no?
Once I was safely into the house, I stopped outright lying about my background to the Europeans I met. But there were still those who saw me as a walking myth. I called the girls who were more interested in the myth than in me "anthropologists." On dance floors all over Germany, then and now, black men can enjoy the dubious advantages of being objectified because of their blackness, although no real relationships can come of that.
A year later, I met a Berlin woman who wasn't looking for a myth. We were married for 15 years and she's still my best friend. Our daughter, Bibi, is 16. She relishes coming to New York to buy Afrocentric accessories that they don't sell in Berlin. She's not consumed by any particular identity, neither one she wants to embrace nor one she's fighting against. She loves the German language, and she's a true Berliner. But she also cracks up at Dave Chappelle. I envy her. She's what I always wanted to be: at peace with her world(s).
Tags:
2 minute memoir,
authentivity,
bandmates,
betrayal in friendship,
big house,
black,
drug advertising,
getting conned,
ghetto,
grief recovery,
identity,
inner city,
MMR,
narratives,
painful friendship,
pharmaceutical sales,
poetic faith,
race,
reality-testing,
right stuff,
rock music,
self-regulatory depletion,
stereotypes,
trusting authority,
willing suspension of disbelief
