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fleetsummers · 2 years ago

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with @vallaurent | the daybreakers : a bottom dollar conversation about self-identity and parents who've damaged it

Val Laurent Hey there, hun. Am I botherin' ya? -Val felt tired and weary, so she'd decided to step outside and grab a quick breath of her. When she'd stepped into the cool night, she'd found Fleet there- Tryin' to find a quiet spot to be alone or just enjoyin' some fresh air?

fleet summers Just ... spacing out, actually. -he's been standing there with his arms wrapped around himself, watching the Ranch, and smiles at Val- I knew this would all be more physical activity than I'm used to, but it's making my brain work in ways I'm not used to, either.

Val Laurent What do ya mean? -she takes that as an invitation to stand next to him, letting her eyes wander over the ranch. In this moment, she strangely has the urge for a cigarette- You feelin' restless?

fleet summers Restless, jumpy, tired -- a bunch of them all at once. Sore, too. -he gives a groaning laugh at that one- Zack's teaching me how to fight. -Fleet gives a tight sneer and a dismissive toss of his chin, saying bitterly- Like a real man.

Val Laurent -she grimaces- Did he say that to ya? Ya don't sound too happy about it. -she pushes her hands into the pocket of her jacket- If ya feelin' sore, some warmth will do ya good. Or a massage. Or more exercise.

fleet summers Oh -- oh, no, Zack would never say anything like that to me. Not now, anyhow. I was thinking about my dad. -he marches a little in place to keep warm, the movement inevitably becoming more of a dance step than anything else- I'll be getting more exercise tomorrow, no worries about that. Are you a fighter, Val?

Val Laurent Did Cole say that to ya? I'm sorry, hun. -there is a soft hint of surprise in her voice, but no disbelief as she regards him- Nah. What do they say? I'm a lover, not a fighter? -she chuckles, softly- I ain't any good at fightin'. I know how to shoot, but that's it. What 'bout you, sweetie?

fleet summers No, I'm in the same boat as you -- lover, not a fighter. I'm used to other people taking care of me. -he dithers on that for a while; Zack's been making him reconsider what Fleet had always categorized as 'care', but he's not ready to delve into that yet- Daddy said a lot but he didn't say much at all. Which is the worst because then you're left wondering if all those microaggressions were just you blowing things out of proportion.

Val Laurent But it's a big deal to you, ain't it? Ya feel the way ya do for a reason, hun. -she tilts her head upwards, looking at the night sky- Maybe Cole didn't mean anythin' by what he said or didn't say, but it still hurt ya.

fleet summers -Fleet looks over at her, squinting slightly- Yeah, Maybe. -he laughs suddenly, shrugging against his turned chin- And who cares, anyway, right? What anybody thinks about Daddy anymore. Everyone came and told him how wonderful he was on that last day and I'm sure he loved it. Finally, recognition! -he lifts both his hands in fists, shaking them in sarcastic triumph at the sky- What I think about him is just another drop in the pot, good or bad or noncommittal. Who am I? Just his son. I guess. It never mattered to him.

Val Laurent -she turns her head to face him, some of her curls falling onto her forehead- I care about what ya think. -she regards him for a moment- They didn't know him like you did.

fleet summers It's exactly what I never wanted. To meet him and get smacked in the face with this -- this desperation to mean something to him. I've been running from that my whole life and I thought I'd avoided it. -Fleet presses his lips together, folding his arms again and curving his shoulders- Hubris. I'm just another faggot with daddy issues after all.

Val Laurent Aw, sweetheart. -she steps over to him, reaching out to wrap her arms around his shoulders- You're still you, darling. That means something, right? -she gives his shoulder a squeeze- Ya don't gotta be defined by your dad, or how he felt about you.

fleet summers That's the thing! -he's laughing outright now, none of it actually happy or amused- That's what I realized! I have been defined by my dad, my whole life! Everything I've ever done was to create some wonderful magical me who everyone would like so much that they would know, they'd know that it was my dad who was wrong. He was wrong and it wasn't because I wasn't worth staying for. -Fleet's breathing hard now, mouth downturned and distressed, and he wheels away from Val and walks away a few steps, staring up at the sky again-

Val Laurent Oh, honey. -she waits a few moments before she follows him, though this time she doesn't wrap her arms around him again, just offering her company closeby- Everything? What about singin'? You did that to prove your dad wrong, and not because ya like singin'? -she regards him for a moment- I can't say I've been in your situation but... I kinda know what it's like being so tangled up with someone or somethin' ya don't know where ya start and end.

fleet summers No. Singing is all me. -he tosses Val another of those tight smiles, although this time it's paired with softer, sadder eyes, his brows raised towards the middle- That's me being Pilipino. They revoke your heritage if you can't karaoke like a pro by age five. -saying that does make him laugh for real, suddenly overcome with tears- I miss my family. I've lost them all and I thought being a Reznik might help me get through it but ... it hasn't done anything for me. -Fleet wipes his face fiercely with the heel of his hand, sucking in a breath- Who was it for you? Or what was it, that you're tangled up with?

Val Laurent -her heart aches when she sees his sad, big eyes, his choked laugh- My parents, too. My dad and my momma. -she let's her eyes trail over the thick darkness in front of them, barely illuminates by the starts and the farmhouse- Momma left us when I was 10. Dad didn't take it well. Stopped takin' care of himself. So I had to be my dad's momma. And when I couldn't anymore and I left, I became someone else's momma. And that's what I've always been tryin' to be. With everybody. -she chuckles softly- It messed me up, it really did. In ways, I'm glad for it. Because I like helpin' people. I think that's me, in all of that. And you got stuff that's all you. And now, you get to figure it out. Even if it feels bad now.

fleet summers -Fleet's pretty good at reading between the lines so he has some idea of what Val might mean, being her dad's momma, and he makes a hum of contrite sympathy in his throat, reaching to clasp and interlace her hand with his as he steps closer- It sounds messy. I tried to be the most enchanting bauble in the room. That wasn't much better, but ... yeah, I get that. Being glad for it in a way, even though things happened along the way that weren't great. -Fleet stands shoulder-to-shoulder with her as they both look out across the Ranch and at the sky- I don't like not feeling like me. Even with the doubt that meeting Daddy introduced in there, I've still got a hold of myself. Even though it feels bad now. -he looks at Val, eyes half-lidded, and starts to offhandedly, lightly sing:- The sun'll come out, tomorrow...

Val Laurent -Val gently squeezes his hand as their fingers interlace- I know. But eventually, you're gonna feel like you. And then it's gonna be truly you. You're still you, below everythin' else. -she leans her head on his shoulders, her curls brushing up against his neck. She sings the next lines quietly, her voice slightly wavering- Bet your bottom dollar, that tomorrow there'll be sun~

fleet summers -they finish the song together, easily slipping into the harmonies, and when the last strains of their voices have faded, they simply stand together, holding hands, a moment of solace-

#with: val #c: vall001 #trauma cw #plot:daybreakers

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stronghours · 4 years ago

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2021/2022 LibraryZone

the review of the annual reading list has been part of my end-of-year housekeeping since attending fake grad school. as with sex matters, I have been met with huge successes and squalid failures year to year

my original 2021 reading goal was a lofty 100. In a vast oversight of timing, I also picked this year to make my sexual debut and was often called away by dear friends, and my own noble spirit, to thrill the ladies. as you can see below, god doesn't give with both hands

2021 Completed Reading List:

Crisis Zone – Simon Hanselmann

All Creatures Great and Small – James Herriot

Chilly Scenes of Winter – Ann Beattie

Cheri – Colette

The Last of Cheri - Colette

The Cannibal – John Hawkes

A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara

Cleanness – Garth Greenwell

Call Me Ishmael – Charles Olson

Darryl – Jackie Ess

My Loose Thread – Dennis Cooper

The Sluts – Dennis Cooper

Castle Faggot – Derek McCormack

The American Dreams – Two Screenplays – Philip Ridley

Nightmare Abbey – Thomas Love Peacock

The Sweet Science – A.J. Liebling

Cows – Matthew Stokoe

Evelina – Frances Burney

Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin

Girl’s Against God – Jenny Hval

Les Liaisons dangereuses - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

my ignorant findings:

Darryl is a top contender, possible the most loveable contemporary book I've ever read

Garth Greenwell is the most overwrought disappointment of a contemporary gay writer that I've ever had the misfortune to experience. I stop short of accusing him of being disingenuous because...

...A Little Life is truly a god-example of disingenuity in fiction. a freakshow of insincerity. a place/time novel completely unmoored from time and place. I've never seen anything like it and the world is worse for it existing

I should have started reading Dennis Cooper years ago. The Sluts really bolstered my only true fetish, which is reading about individuals falling apart physically and mentally as they fail to build and then fail to repair the illusion of an impossible, ultimately nonexistent fantasy (the consequences are terminal)

Les Liaisons dangereuses - that's france, babye!!

In retrospect, I should have read Cows and All Creatures Great and Small back to back, as they're both often about men sticking their appendages into bovines. a lesson in context

Of 2022

without goals, I would sit on a cool rock and marinate like a snail. so I hold myself to standards. I can't discipline others if I can't discipline myself.

the list of 2022 has already careened into the 100s, so in lieu of that, some highlights that I'm most looking forward to:

The Sea of Fertility (tetralogy of novels by Yukio Mishima)

a big pile of Colette, especially Gigi & Claudine

can I read all the Dennis Cooper in existence? we'll see!

Thomas Mann: Diaries 1918-1939, + The Magic Mountain

at least a triptych of Flaubert, that big old bitch

Ingeborg Bachmann/Paul Celan: Correspondence - I read Malina for 2020 and was totally stymied at all points of entry. I need whatever insight I can get into Bachmann

Authors who I could not get ahold of in 2021 for various reasons: B.R. Yeager, Gary Shipley, Steve Dunn, Christopher Chitty, Matt Lee, Maggie Siebert, blah blah blah

The Lonely Lady and Endless Love - started up a late-year interest in salacious 70s pop sex novels that inspired some affectionately awful 80s movies

The Blind Owl – Sadegh Hedayat

The Family Mashber – Der Nister

Against Nature – Joris-Karl Huysmans

The Underwater Welder - Jeff Lemire

When the Monster Comes out of the Closet – L. Steinhorst (I would love a physical copy but paperbacks run into $200 - challenges!)

Proust: I Want That Twink Obliterated

multiple Barry Hannah collections I have lying around

multiple Melville/Moby Dick criticisms I have lying around

multiple Everything Else I have lying around

last year, around this time, I was finishing Flaubert's letters from 1857-1880 and found, not a new years eve letter, but a summer letter to Maupassant which I interpreted for myself as a letter for the new year. Flaubert, that old cunt, along with ordering Maupassant to stop fucking so much and compassionately acknowledging that he is "living in an inferno of shit", counsels:

But from five in the evening to ten in the morning all your time can be devoted to the muse, who is still the best bitch of all.

am I going to do exactly that? no. I'm a monk, not a hedonist, but no. and yet! goals might go out of fashion, but maybe everybody should take some time out and locate their Best Bitch of 2022.

so, here's to 100s of books 2022, one of many fulfilled bitches to come. unless I actually do get my hands on a sjambok, in which case, all best are off.

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ohwereusingourmadeupnames · 5 years ago

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roommates AU!! Maybe one where young Tony has had a string of awful roommates (ie. they bully him for his age, etc.). The housing office transfers him one last time and tells him to give it a week. If this one still doesn't work out, then they'll let him room alone. At first, Tony just wants the week to be over, but of course his new roommate is the sweet Peter Parker. Cue pining!Tony, oblivious!Peter and a fluffy resolution... Just my rambles, but always excited to see what you come up with!

do the thing - send in all the prompts.

Nonnie, this was a lovely prompt - thank you so much for the idea! I aged Tony up a little bit to make sure there wasn’t anything underage, but I hope I hit all the things you were looking for!

Tony always figured flying through school would be a breeze. And for the most part – it was. The class material turned out to be easier than even he anticipated; he could’ve easily gotten through high school with his eyes closed. At 16, the concept of winning was the only thing that registered to him – what he was winning, he didn’t really know; but beating out his peers around him always made him feel just a bit better about how ridiculously brainy he really was.

Of course, the social aspect of school wasn’t nearly as easy. Most people didn’t understand what it was like to be the son of Howard Stark – Tony knew the inside of a lab before the age of 4 and attended dinners with some of the world’s figure heads on a consistent basis. As one of the youngest people in the entire room always, Tony struggled to fit in. Being smart wasn’t the piece of school that people admired, especially when the age gap was already so substantial. To say he was picked on was putting it mildly.

He assumed getting to college would end all of the bullying that came pre-packaged in the high school experience. Why would people in the pursuit of a degree in higher education care how old anyone was? The shocking reality of how wrong he was came when his very first roommate locked him out of the dorm for a full 48-hours. Tony didn’t like to throw around the weight of his name, but he hadn’t showered and needed textbooks to get to some of his classes. Needless to say, his roommate did not remain in the room for much longer.

Tony’s next roommate at least lasted for the rest of the year – he was an asshole at all points in time, but he didn’t lock him out of the room or touch his shit. There wasn’t enough of a connection to ask him back as a roommate – so Tony put his name back on the list for a roommate and went about his summer vacation.

Coming back from Italy, Tony was refreshed and more than ready to get through the next year as quickly as possible. He’d turned 17 over the summer and was one step closer to being on the cusp of independence. Then, people couldn’t judge him for his age. Tony walked into the year with a positive attitude – that was quickly bat down by the homophobic bigot they stuck him with. Tony still didn’t like the way faggot sat on the surface of his skin.

The struggle to keep a roommate brought him in front of housing for what felt like the hundredth time – all he wanted was some peace to get through school and maybe enjoy some of it. The notoriety of the university kept the supply of single rooms scarce, but he figured if push really came to shove, he could find a way to get one for himself. Cindy, who’d been dealing with him since his first gem of a roommate screwed the pooch, looked at him with a mixture of pity and concern. “I need you to give it a go one more time, for at least a week. There aren’t any singles available and I’m certain that this person will be suitable for you. In the meantime, I’ll see what I can do if all else fails.”

A barely concealed scoff left his mouth, but he nodded, anyway. After the stream of lectures he got from his father when the initial trouble started, Tony was determined to settle the situation by his own means, even if that meant trying to stomach one more person for 7 days. All of his other roommates proved how terrible they were right from the get-go, so he figured he could make it – the other side held the key to his single and a little bit of peace from the boring monotony of societal norms.

A couple of days later, a knock on the door drew Tony from the book in front of him – he’d been balls deep in the chapter on electrical energy conversion. Standing up from his seated position, Tony realized how long he’d been sitting when his feet felt a little numb. The break was obviously needed.

Pulling the door open, Tony let a soft gasp leave his lips – the person standing there was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen. Long legs led to a torso that was covered with a white and purple striped shirt and flight jacket. The length of this person’s neck held a head covered in dark brown, curly hair. Tony took a couple of steps back on instinct, his brain going haywire.

“Are you Tony?”

In an attempt to speak, Tony opened his mouth – no words followed, however. Blushing, he chose to nod instead. He opened the door a little bit wider, his hand swinging in a ‘come in gesture’. His lips were quirked into an involuntary smile, everything about his body he could usually control now running on instinct and the overwhelming hormones that coursed through him.

A soft chuckle left the other’s mouth, the sound like music to his ears. Why did it take this long to deliver someone like this to his door? More than anything, Tony hoped that handsome person walking into the dorm that must be his new roommate wasn’t a total piece of shit – he wanted to be able to hold out a little hope.

“I’m Peter – Peter Parker. I just transferred here,” the man, Peter, said – his eyes wandering around the modest fixtures that Tony kept around the shared space. “Is that really a big-screen TV?” Peter’s plumps lips formed a roguish grin, coffee-colored eyes flashing with genuine excitement. “I never thought I’d see one of those in a college dorm room.”

Tony watched him trace a hand across the top, his fingers fiddling with the wiring at the back of it. “And it has HDMI capability. We can get both of my systems set up on this thing.” Peter’s excitement took him by surprise, everyone else who walked through the door didn’t care about the cool shit he brought with him – just the differences between them; his age, the sexuality he refused to hide – his academic abilities, even.

Not Peter, though – he went on to explain that he was getting a degree in Electrical Engineering and didn’t get to have some of the newer appliances growing up. It was weird, to see someone so excited about the nerdy stuff Tony liked, too. They heartily discussed the best way to get both the Xbox and PlayStation set up through the tv without bogging down the cable setup already existing in the room.

By the time they were both happy with how Peter’s things mixed into the fixtures of the room, Tony figured he was already head over heels for the guy – for the first time in his life, someone took him at face value and didn’t hate what they saw.

----

The rest of the year with Peter went by seamlessly. During the spring semester, they planned to have a class together, both of them still needing to take some of the basic engineering classes. There wouldn’t be a lot of cross over later in their degrees, so they took advantage. It was different, having someone he could rely on sitting in class next to him, and then being there at home later on, too. Tony never got to experience the sort of camaraderie that Peter so freely gave to him.

Mornings were filled with the two of them trying to make breakfast on the little hot plate Peter brought from home. It was always an adventure, trying to get everything cooked all the way through and evenly – at least, Tony enjoyed watching Peter puzzle it all together. Their day started together and as the time passed, it ended together, too. Peter liked to spend time in their shared space, so Tony found excuses to be out there, too.

Tony found himself seeking out Peter’s company all the time, if he were being honest. Peter was the most interesting person – he didn’t care about the normal things; he wanted to learn and explore, he wanted to see what the world had to offer. Best of all, he seemed to want to include Tony in the things he wanted to know more about.

A couple of months into their second semester living together, Tony looked up to find Peter staring at him. “What’s your middle name?” Peter asked, a smirk slipping across his lips. “Are you an Anthony, or just Tony?”

Putting his pen down in the book he’d been reading to keep his place, Tony shifted a bit and gave Peter his full attention. “My full name is Anthony Edward Stark. No one but my mom calls me Anthony, though.” Tony tried to keep the blush he couldn’t help under cover, but his ears were warm – there was no escaping it. “What about you? Are you a junior, or something?”

The exchange went on a for a while, Peter talking a bit about his family in Queens and the Brainiac’s team he left behind when he graduated and came to Cambridge. Tony soaked up the information and attempted to be open about pieces of himself, too – he talked about his dad and the weird relationship they had and about Dum-E and the never-ending tweaks and adjustments he made to better him.

It was a little easier after that conversation, both of them felt a little more comfortable and for Tony, he felt closer to Peter than any other person in his life. He hoped it wasn’t obvious, how much Peter meant to him. There were stars in his eyes constantly – so he kind of doubted it.

Even his mom noticed how things shifted for him – he wasn’t his normally surly self when he went home over spring break. Maria looked at him with a weird smile – Tony didn’t think he’d ever seen the look on her face before. “School okay, Tony?” she questioned, her hands brushing through the hair by his ear. He figured she missed the little kid he used to be – he would sit for hours and let her pet him like that back then.

Grinning, Tony nodded – his teenage hormones making it hard to keep himself calm, cool, and collected. “Yes, it’s okay. I’m doing well and really enjoying Differential Equations this semester.” He kept his answer brief, his inability to talk to her still in place despite the weightless feeling that accompanied him. “I’m thinking about picking up a class in the summer and sticking around.”

He didn’t tell her that Peter was involved in a work study program and would need to be on campus all summer working. It seemed silly to give up his bedroom in the place that was now his home simply because summer came around.

Tony didn’t want to miss a single second of time he could be around Peter – no matter how weirdly pathetic that probably was. Later, when he left the kitchen and headed towards his room, Tony missed the smile his mom beamed his way.

Their end of the semester project was due a couple of weeks after they got back from spring break, so Tony and Peter spent a lot of time together when they got back from visiting their respective families. It was a little like the time away from each other strengthened the need for the bond between them. Peter spent more time in the dorm and when he couldn’t be there, Tony pestered him at work, the help desk more than familiar with him after all the time he spent there.

The closer they got; the more Tony wondered if Peter felt the same way that he did. Tony knew he was still young, his 18th birthday creeping slowly toward him. There were tons of great looking people on campus, people that were closer to Peter’s age – but he hoped, he crossed his fingers and looked up in search of a person he didn’t believe in just to send up a little wish into the atmosphere.

Tony tried to gage things between them a couple of weeks before the end of the semester – he wanted the summer to go off without a hitch and knew his useless pinning would be more of a burden than anything if he didn’t at least try and find out if he stood any chances. He wasn’t completely sure of how he’d try to fish out the truth, but he needed to – the probable thought of exploding crossing his mind frequently.

A perfect opportunity presented itself when Peter came home a little tipsy from a party that Friday night, his face split into a loose smile, eyes shining with the blaze of alcohol and something simmering just below the surface. Tony paused the round of Tekken he’d been playing, his hand patting the cushion next to him. “Have a good night?” Tony asked curiously, his lips slipping into a smile when Peter threw himself carelessly down onto the couch. Their shoulders brushed, that little bit of contact sending a torrent of happiness through him.

“I definitely drank enough to make it feel like it was a good night,” Peter replied, the alcohol letting the words fall easily from loose lips. “MJ brought 151 in a little flask – it doesn’t taste like shoe cleaner, so it was easy to drink a little bit too much.” He smiled and leaned further into Tony’s side. “Glad to be back, though.”

A nose brushed the side of his neck, Tony holding his breath to stop the gasp that tried to escape from the confines of his chest. He put the controller down on the arm of the couch and sat more fully on the couch – his arm going around the back of it. “I’m glad that you’re back, too,” Tony admitted, his hand moving inch by inch until his fingertips were just barely fumbling with the sleeve of Peter’s black t-shirt.

“What are you doing, Tony?” Peter asked from his place against Tony’s shoulder, his breath tickling his skin, the sensation distracting. He drew his bottom lip between his teeth and absorbed he warmth while he could – Peter nestled in the space Tony wanted him the most might never happen again.

“I – don’t know. I – “ Tony started to speak, but the common problem of getting a little tongue-tied around Peter coming back with a vengeance. “I think I was trying to put my arm around you.” He felt his face flush even further – his cheeks and ears the same colors as Peter’s without the influence of alcohol and its properties.

While he didn’t actually move away, Tony felt Peter stiffen. Sucking in a hurt breath, Tony froze, too – he must’ve read the room wrong. “Oh,” he heard Peter say, the word muffled by Tony’s skin still. He gulped, then extracted himself from the tangle of longer arms and warm skin – his eyes already starting to burn with tears he wouldn’t be able to control for much long.

“Sorry – I didn’t, I mean. I – sorry, Pete.” Tony babbled, the inability to speak in full sentences hitting him double time now that embarrassment coated the nervousness that threatened to overcome him. How stupid could he be? Turning before he could embarrass himself further, Tony made a quick beeline to his room and shut the door. He slumped back against it, sliding down to the floor.

----

Tony avoided Peter as much as he could leading up to the end of the semester, and subsequently, Tony’s birthday. He’d already made the commitment to stay over the summer, and he steeled himself for the awkwardness that would more than likely settle between them. The soft ‘oh’ Peter mumbled that night still played in his mind – his voice just as confused as the rigid posture of his body.

Either way, he needed to find a way to get over it – Peter was the best roommate he ever had, and he still had at least one more year of school to get through. It felt good to finish a semester and he did his best to focus on that instead of the weird ache in his chest. No wonder so many people were so wrecked by the love thing – when it didn’t work out, it hurt like an absolute bitch.

The two weeks before finals and Tony’s birthday followed much of the same pattern – Tony stayed in his room until he couldn’t stop the rumble in his stomach; he did his best to time his ventures into the shared space of the dorm when he thought Peter wouldn’t be there. It was easier to just ignore the situation and hope it past.

His birthday rolled around without much fanfare – he was glad to be 18 and didn’t need the huge party his parents wanted to throw him. They were never about him, anyway. Tony figured he’d spend the day watching the TV in his room and making his way through the couple different cartons of ice cream he put in the freezer the day before.

A knock on the door around 10AM had him muting the TV to answer it, his eyebrows furrowing when he saw Peter on the other side of the door. “Hey. Happy Birthday, Tony,” Peter started, the card in his hand being thrust forward into Tony’s chest without much finesse. The hand he could feel against him shook; Peter obviously nervous for some reason.

“Actually – that’s not why I’m here. I thought maybe you’d be more willing to open the door when there was something to celebrate.” Peter shrugged, his legs crossing in front of him. “Tony, that night – I wasn’t… upset, or anything. About what you said. I was surprised. I didn’t have any idea that you felt like that. It was a shock – I’d been crushing on you for months at that point and there you were, adorably trying to put your arm around me. You were gone before the ability to think started to work again.”

He reached out and traced Tony’s cheekbone with a soft finger, the caress barely there. “I like you, Tony – I want you to like me, too.” The fingers trailed along Tony’s soft skin and into his hair, the entirety of his hand palming the back of his neck when it got there. “And I think you do.”

“I do, Pete. I do. I really, really do.” Tony let both of his hands drift to the bare skin of Peter’s forearm, his fingers gripping the grounding warmth there. “Will you kiss me?” Tony asked the question so sweetly, the blazing in his eyes a sharp contrast

Peter used his lips to answer, the hand on the back of his head pulling Tony close enough to press their lips together. A gasp left Tony’s lips, the touch like an electric shock. In an attempt to keep his feet on the ground, Tony fisted Peter’s shirt in his hands, the move bringing them closer still.

The need for air had them pulling apart, Tony’s eyes opening wide to take in the look on Peter’s face – he figured the loopy smile there mirrored the happiness etched into his own cheeks.

“Want to go out with me, Tony?” Peter mumbled, his face breaking into a beaming smile.

Laughing, Tony used the grip on Peter’s shirt to pull him back in for a chaste kiss, his entire being thrumming with life.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

#starker #ironspider #au prompts #bobbie writes #nonnie #anonymous #college/university au

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lymricks · 7 years ago

Note

“Take my jacket. It’s cold outside” for the writing prompts 💞

@gothyringwald this one was your prompt, too!!!

“I think you need to come home,” Nancy says over the phone. Her voice sounds far away and tinny. She sounds tired. It’s been months since he’s seen her, but Steve thinks that he will always know the sound of worry in her voice.

“I have class tomorrow,” Steve says, sighing and glancing out the window. He’s thinking about how long the drive back to Hawkins will feel when the weather in Chicago is this pretty, when he has a test the next day. Nancy goes silent at that. When listening to her breathe and the faint sounds of her walking around the house becomes too much, Steve finally says, “Have you seen him?”

“No,” Nancy answers. “He’s avoiding me.” She pauses. “Steve–Mike says he’s not doing well.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think you should come home.”

Something in her silence convinces him. By the time he rolls back into Hawkins, it’s been dark for hours. A September chill creeps into the air in the absence of the sun. Steve thinks about checking Billy’s house, about checking the quarry, but he knows that it won’t matter. He knows exactly where he’s going to find Billy.

When he gets to the bar, it’s lit up by ugly neon, a light flickering over the door. The inside isn’t any better. Steve coughs on the haze of smoke, squints against the dim light. He stills spots Billy, though. He’s hard to miss, stands out to Steve.

Billy looks older. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise Steve. Joyce is always saying that boys their age change like the weather. It’s only been a few months, but Billy looks older. Steve remembers, then, that he’d missed Billy’s eighteenth birthday. He’d been taking summer classes, then. Trying to get ready for college.

Steve shoulders his way through the crowd of ugly old Hawkins men. “Billy,” he says, has to talk loudly to be heard over the shitty country music that’s playing too loud.

Billy looks at him, a redness to the blue of his eyes. He’s drunk. “Harrington,” Billy says. He does a bad job of hiding his surprise.

Has it really been that long since they talked?

Billy looks awful. Not well had been an understatement on Mike’s part, on Nancy’s. He’s paler than Steve’s ever seen him–and their friendship bloomed in the dark cold of an Indiana winter. He’s got bruises yellowing on his face, his throat. Something fresh peeks up under the low collar of a dusty green henley. It makes his eyes look even bluer. It makes the bruises on his skin stand out, stark against his complexion. Too pale. Unhealthy, even. He wears his exhaustion in the corners of his mouth, the sag of his shoulders.

Steve stares at him, mind going blank for a second, because the Billy slouched in this stool in front of him doesn’t look like he has any fight left in him at all. Steve can’t even see an echo of that fire that Billy used to burn with.

“It’s been a while,” Steve hears his mouth say as he stands there. That shitty country songs seems louder. He has to raise his voice.

“Yeah, well,” Billy says, and Steve reads the shape of Billy’s mouth more than he hears the words. He doesn’t have an end to the sentence, just looks at Steve with those red-edged eyes of his. Steve doesn’t even feel like he has to duck his own gaze. Billy’s eyes are dull, not sharp. He doesn’t even muster the energy to sound accusing.

Steve feels like he’s watching Billy go through the motions when Billy’s mouth twists into something like the ghost of a smile. “Lemme buy you a beer,” Billy says. He nearly knocks his glass over when he hauls himself jerkily to his feet.

“Neither of us are old enough to drink.”

“Never stopped you before.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Steve asks, watching Billy sway on his feet.

Billy laughs. Like the rest of him tonight, it’s dull. Hollow. “I don’t think you get to ask that question.”

When Steve left Hawkins after graduation, Billy had been his best friend. Maybe he hasn’t called enough. Maybe he’s barely called at all, but he’d thought–they were friends–

Steve can’t figure out why it feels so much like they’d broken up.

“Let me take you home,” Steve says.

Billy downs the rest of his beer. Licks his lips. For the first time, something a little like a spark seems to light Billy up, just for a second. Billy takes a half step back, drags his tongue back and forth over his bottom lip. His eyes look somewhere over Steve’s shoulder. “No.”

“Billy,” Steve says. “Let me take you home. You look half dead. Come on.”

Whatever spark that had zipped through Billy dies, then. Leaves him with his shoulders hunched. “Always leave me with him in the end, dontcha, pretty boy?” Billy asks. His eyes look a little afraid, but his voice is all resignation.

“Did you drive?” Steve asks, pushing out the door ahead of Billy. It’s disorienting, for a second, the sharp, silent chill in the air compared to the loud, hot chaos of the bar.

“My dad has my keys,” Billy says. He drops down into the passenger’s seat of Steve’s BMW and rests his temple against the window. The fading bruises across his jaw look ugly.

“Your face hurt?” Steve asks. “That’s–a lot of bruising.” He means, he doesn’t usually hit you there.

“Less people ask questions when your faggot son finishes school,” Billy says. Steve remembers a time when Billy would have spat that out, when his anger would have been tangible. His voice is distant from the sentence now, like he’s repeating something he’s heard a thousand times.

“Billy–”

“Okay if I sleep?” Billy interrupts.

Steve is silent for a long minute, but finds he doesn’t have anything to say. “Yeah,” he tells his best friend. “I’ll wake you up when–”

“Yeah,” Billy cuts him off. He shuts his eyes and falls asleep so fast that Steve’s barely at the end of the block before Billy’s breathing evens out. In sleep, Billy’s face still looks unfamiliar. An unknown landscape, all of Steve’s careful maps gone to shit from time, from distance.

Only the bruising seems familiar.

Even sleeping, Billy looks exhausted.

Steve’s grip on the steering wheel is white-knuckled when he turns onto the highway.

It’s a couple hundred miles before he can manage to relax it at all.

Billy sleeps for hours. He doesn’t even move. Doesn’t make a sound. A few times over the longest drive of his life, Steve has to check to see if Billy’s still breathing, panic licking like flames up the back of his throat.

It’s light again when Steve finally parks. Has been for a few hours as Steve drives into the sunrise. Steve reaches out, curls his fingers around Billy’s shoulder and squeezes. “Hey,” he says, voice quiet. “We’re here.”

Billy recoils from the touch. He startles so violently that he smacks his head against the window. Once, Steve had been able to wake him up and Billy hadn’t been afraid.

“The fuck?” Billy says, looking around, eyes wide. “Where the fuck are we?”

Steve gets out of the car. “C’mon,” he says, slamming the door shut behind him. There’s people around, but it isn’t busy. He ducks around a young couple trying to get their toddler to walk with them. The air smells like salt. The light looks different, here.

“You don’t have a jacket,” Billy’s saying. Steve looks over his shoulder to see Billy pulling his own on over his shoulders.

It had been sunny and warm when Steve left Chicago. He shrugs. “It’s the beach. I won’t need one.”

Billy looks at him with the kind of skepticism that Steve mostly associates with Dustin trying to help him study for a science class, but he falls into step next to Steve and doesn’t say anything. It takes them a little while to cut through the parking lot, to hit sand and see ocean, but Steve’s glad that he’s looking at Billy when they do.

Billy’s eyes go so wide that it should be comical, but his lips part and his face goes tight for a heartbeat, but then it just looks calm. Calm. Not empty, not distant. Just–he looks, for the first time in the last sixteen hours, like Billy.

Billy takes off his boots to walk across the sand and Steve does the same thing, follows him out all the way to the edge of the ocean, where waves that are big enough to almost be frightening crest, crash, crawl nearly to their toes. They stand shoulder to shoulder and look out at the ocean.

Steve isn’t sure which is louder, the rushing sound of the waves or the rushing sound in his ears.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says.

The sun makes Billy, when Steve finally gets up the nerve to look at him, glow. He’s not washed out, then, not a wilted version of the person Steve had been best friends with, once, a few months ago. Billy, looking more like himself against sunlight and sand and salt-smelling air, presses his shoulder against Steve’s. It means, you’re forgiven.

“I’m not going back to Chicago,” Steve says, which he hadn’t meant to say, but he means.

“What?”

“I’ll transfer. It’s early. It’ll be fine.”

“Why–”

“Because,” Steve says, staring straight ahead, voice strained. “You’re right. I left you with him and–and you asked me not to, but I still did.” He looks at the horizon and not at Billy.

“You said it yourself, amigo. For the best–”

“If it was for the best,” Steve says, almost growls, angry at himself and not even a little bit at Billy, “You wouldn’t look like you’re wasting away. I left you with him. You asked me to wait a few weeks and I just left–” A breeze blows hard off the water. Steve shivers and swallows down the rest of his sentence. It doesn’t matter how angry he is at himself. “So you’re not going back to Hawkins.”

“Shit doesn’t work like that, pretty boy.”

“I said that I would take you home–”

Billy raises an eyebrow at him and then looks out at the beach they’re on.

Steve groans. “California was a thirty hour drive, Billy. I tried my fucking best, okay. I got you to a beach. I’ll get us plane tickets.”

Steve finally looks at Billy, nervous, but Billy’s smiling at him. “You drove fifteen hours,” Billy says. Steve wraps his arms around himself against the chill.

“Yeah.”

“Because you realized you wanted to take me home.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. He can feel goosebumps rising on his skin.

“Only an asshole thinks the beach won’t be cold this early in the morning,” Billy says, sounding exasperated. “Here–take my jacket. It is cold, dipshit.”

Steve accepts it when Billy holds it out, wraps himself in it. It smells like Billy and Steve shuts his eyes and ducks his head, presses his nose into the collar. He startles when he feels arms come around his waist, when Billy’s chin hooks over his shoulder, when his nose presses against Steve’s cheek. “Fifteen hours is a lot of driving.”

“You weren’t awake to help,” Steve says, but his voice is a whisper and the wind snatches it away. He shivers again, wrapped in Billy’s jacket, wrapped in Billy’s arms.

He really only means to turn his head to look at Billy, but then their mouths are so close, and it seems silly after driving all this way not to do what he’s been thinking about doing for months. Steve brushes his lips against Billy’s, fear fluttering in his chest, but then Billy’s turning him around, hands at Steve’s hips and kissing him back.

When they part, Steve’s got a hand tangled in Billy’s hair and Billy’s got both hands pushed up under Steve’s shirt, his fingertips digging into Billy’s skin. “So?” Steve asks, quiet, nervous, keeps their foreheads pressed together.

“Yeah,” Billy says. “All right.”

#harringrove #my fic #prompt thing #first kiss things!#to keep my life organized #happy Friday everyone sorry I apparently love the idea of Steve leaving like a jerk and coming back #THANKS FOR PROMPTS <3

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edsrich · 8 years ago

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Bruised (Richie/Eddie) 1/12

Summary: It’s 1993 and the summer from many years ago is dead and gone. Many have drifted apart from the Losers club and its at the point where there is no club at all. The atmosphere is cold just like the winter months and the only blushes to be found are the ones that are caused from the piercing spikes of cold that heat skin up. Being a teenage boy is hard; especially for the two boys that now count each other as strangers. In which both boys make a plan, but both disrupt each others.

Warning(s): Suicide attempt?? , depression, mental illness��, mixture of fluff and angst throughout the series, homophobic slurs

A/N: Hi!! welcome to part 1 of IDK HOW MANY but ayy!! Honestly, i’M MAKING A TAG LIST FOR THIS SERIES SO IF ANYONE WHO DOESN’T WANNA FOLLOW ME OR WANTS TO BE NOTIFIED JUST ASK!!

Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |

Richie Tozier brought the cigarette between his lips, letting the toxic smoke fill his decaying lungs and pulse throughout his insides and swirls around in each crevice of his body. He then takes away the cancer stick, after a moment blowing out the toxic waste into the thin November air.

Beverly Marsh raised an eyebrow at him, sitting across from the much taller boy on the brick wall with her own cigarette between her fingers. She watched as the smoke faded into nothing, sighing lightly as she proceeded to watch her best friend smoke away.

“You seem to be going heavy on the cigarettes today,” She paused, “I mean, isn’t that your fifth one in the past half hour?”

Richie shrugged, “I like smoking.”

Beverly eyed his cigarette with her green embers, frowning. “If you carry smoking on like that daily, you’ll die.”

“Well I obviously don’t smoke this much to look badass- as much as I am, Bev.” Richie grumbled, pushing his glasses up on his face.

“You’re worrying me a lot lately, how are your parents-”

“I don’t wanna talk about them, alright? I’m fine and I’m always fine. Look, I’m just moody as fuck today and I need a few more cig’s. I’ll lighten up soon, just getting used to my man period.”

Beverly laughed a little at that, running her free hand through her short ginger curls before taking a puff of her cigarette, flicking away the excess ash onto the bricks under her.

“A man period, huh? Must sucks, I wouldn’t know what it’s like.”

“Yeah, it fuckin’ sucks. I piss blood and shit like that, have to shove a few tampons up-”

“Beep beep, Richie.” Beverly grins.

That simple sentence took Richie back a few years for a moment, as he remembered his old friends that he had grown apart from due to his bad habits. He sighed, thinking of Ben, Stan, Mike, Ben and... Eddie. He quickly shook away the thoughts and nodded at Bev.

“Bottoms up, princess.” Richie lifted his cigarette up with his pinky finger high and clanked it against Beverly’s, before taking a quick puff again.

Beverly smirked at Richie, before stumping her cigarette out. “That’s me done for today.”

Richie frowned and watched as the ash disintegrated. “You coulda’ gave that to me, wasting a perfectly good cig.”

“I think you’ve had one too many for today, Tozier.” Beverly winked, trying to lighten the mood with a subtle hint of sarcasm to coat her seriousness and concern.

“Gosh, Bev. Shut up- you’re not my Mom.” Richie snapped, trying not to seem too harsh but his words had a bite to them.

Beverly furrowed her eyebrows before huffing, not saying anything more for a few minutes before finally piping up again. “I’m just being your friend and caring, since no one else seems to- someone has to.”

Richie flinched at her bluntness, but knew that she was telling the truth. Richie’s habits had slowly made him unravel away from others and not become a priority on others lists.

Even his own parents didn’t give a shit about him.

Hell, his parents were the ones who funded the cigarettes for him. Every day he’d ask either his Mom or Dad for cigarette money and without any hesitation, they’d hand over 10 dollars.

“Well shit, where would I be without you?” Richie chuckled dryly, running his fingers through his dark brown locks that reached his jawline.

Beverly smiled, “You’d be lonely and homeless, probably.”

Richie then finished his own cigarette down to the stub, crushing the leftovers under his all black converse shoes. He flipped his hair back that fell in front of his eyes and looked to Bev.

“Do you mind walking home by yourself today? I’m gonna stay behind after school.”

Beverly snorted loudly, “You? School?” She gasped, “I’ve never heard two words in one sentence before!”

“Extra credit, some stupid shit.” Pausing before speaking up again, “I’m failing in every class and I need to try, you know?”

Richie was a good liar, a great one in fact. He’s been lying for years. “Are you okay, Richie?”/“How are you doing, Richie?” Whenever anyone asked, which would only be Beverly nowadays, he was good at covering up what was reckoning with himself. The seventeen year old boy had learnt over the years that he wouldn’t be missed if he had left the planet, possibly by one person- that being Bev. But even Bev would get over him quickly, she’d probably be able to get over her smoking addiction too. After all, it was partly his fault for bringing it back up to the surface. Bev had Bill, not to mention Ben still fawning over her.

Richie didn’t even talk to them anymore.

The only person he had was Beverly and she didn’t even need him, whereas he needed her more than anything. She was all he had and she knew that.

“Well, shit alright then. I can hang out with Bill instead.” Beverly nodded, pushing herself off the wall. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess?”

Richie nodded, “Walk home safely.”

Beverly smiled at him, “You have a nice night Rich.” With that, the ginger girl walked off down the street and away from the school building to which they both once sat outside of.

Richie watched her walk off, making sure she was safe whilst in his sight. A smile remained on his lips until she had vanished out of his sight, soon replaced by his natural void of emotion expression.

Richie jumps off the wall, landing on his feet and stuffs his hands in his pockets as he walks in the opposite direction and down the road.

“You fucking faggot!”

Punch, kick, punch.

“You ought’a be knocked straight.”

Eddie croaked out a strangled sob, attempting to protect himself from his usual bullies as much as he could. With his hands in front of his face and his knees tucked into his chest, cradling himself.

“Go pop some more fucking pills, maybe then you’ll overdose and the world will have one less faggot breathing.”

With that, Eddie’s box of tablets were quickly scattered against the concrete with the force of a shoe kicking the box open. Eddie’s eyes widened and he looked as the rainbows of the variety of pills for his health were disbanded elsewhere.

“Hey-”

Before Eddie could try and plead for the bullies to stop, a stomp to his head knocked him out clean.

“Eddie? Oh fuck, not again.” A voice muttered out, groaning almost.

Eddie could barely see, his eyes seemed to be glued shut. However, he could feel the immense pain that pulsed on his skin, possibly new bruises forming.

“Eddie, I don’t wanna do the water thing again, wake up dude.”

Eddie’s eyes cracked open in little slits, seeing a buff form kneeling next to him.

“Mike?”

Mike smiled sadly, chuckling. “You got yourself into another one of these situations again?”

Eddie sat up with the help from his friend, cracking his neck and sighing. “By coming out as gay, then yeah. I suppose so.”

Mike frowned at Eddie’s words, patting his back to somehow comfort the fragile boy, “The best thing you could’ve done was come out Eddie. You’re so brave and despite knowing how awful the kids are at school, you still did it.”

“But if I wasn’t gay in the first place then maybe I wouldn’t be in this situation. Again.” Eddie spat, biting his words at himself.

Ever since Eddie came out to friends and family about his sexuality, he already regretted it the next day. His mother had taken him to several councillors about ‘mental health problems’, his friends distanced themselves from certain activities with him and bullying was never so brutal.

Mike grabbed Eddie’s shoulder, “I don’t wanna hear you say shit like that, Eddie. You’re perfect the way you are, your sexuality doesn’t define you.”

Eddie glanced at Mike and sighed sadly but nodded anyway, “Thank you.”

Mike gave a comforting smile and ruffled up Eddie’s hair before collecting the boys pills for him, grabbing the small blue container and placing them all in the right places as Eddie sat and watched.

Mike eventually handed the full container back to Eddie and Eddie quietly put the blue box in his fanny pack.

“You know, if they are gazebos, then why do you still take them?” Mike asked in genuine curiosity.

“Its just a routine, something I feel the need to do...” Eddie trailed off before shrugging, “I don’t know.”

Mike sighed, holding his hand out for Eddie to take which he gladly took. Mike pulled him up to his feet for support, patting off any dirt that remained on the boys attire.

“Thanks Mike, I uh- I should get going now.”

Mike nodded, smiling. “Say hi to the other guys for me, I barely see them anymore with work. It was great seeing you again, and hey- don’t you ever feel ashamed of yourself Kaspbrak.” Mike paused, before waving his hand. “Adios.”

Eddie waved timidly, watching Mike rushing off with a sack hanging over his bag, possibly from him doing a job.

“Bye.” Eddie whispered, his hand grabbing his fanny pack for emotional support.

A few days later, Richie sat in class with several others around him, familiar people from his past included.

Richie was no longer the cocky trashmouth that wouldn’t be afraid to be the class clown, no. He was a different person due to all of the changes in his life. He’d act like himself around Bev and only Bev, No one ever saw the old Richie anymore, he was dead and gone.

Richie slowly became irritated at the sounds around the classroom, for example. Some random kid thought it was fucking amazing and decided to piss the teacher off badly, now he was lecturing the whole class about something he couldn’t give two shits about. Another kid was tapping his pencil against his desk in an uneven rhythm and another kid was throwing spit balls around the class.

He needed to get away from here, now.

Richie waited for the teacher to turn around and start scribbling his chalk against the board angrily, before he slid up- despite the strange looks he received, he simply walked out without a care in the world.

Yet, no one even cared that he left.

The teacher looked to his side, seeing Richie’s figure fade out into the hallway and he shook his head, scribbling more.

“Now kids, that’s a perfect example of a person you shouldn’t be.” He of course, was talking about Richie.

Richie ignored his comment; speeding down the hall whilst his feet echoed down the empty hall, making their way towards the steps in order to reach his destination.

He fidgeted with his keys in his pocket, letting a sigh racket from his lips, with his feet making their way up towards the roof of the school, which was nothing out of the norm for Richie. He and Bev would smoke here all the time, only today however was different.

He wanted to do more than smoke himself to death today.

Eddie whimpered, being flung into the dark navy lockers- his temple smacking against the cooling surface which caused him to collapse to the ground. He felt the blood trickling down his nose, to which he raised his sleeve and held it against the liquid to stop it from trickling further. A hiss left his lips as his nose stung and tingled his brain senses.

“Get the fuck up, faggot.” One of his bullies hissed.

Eddie tried to do as he was told, trying to grab onto the locker to hoist himself up- but to no avail, Henry only kicked him back down.

Eddie let out a pained yelp, falling on his face to further make his nose bleed more. His head shook with pain due to his forming headache and the overwhelming situation.

“Have a dashing weekend, twink.” His new found bully friend, spat down at Eddie before another laughed, pushing him along to leave elsewhere.

Eddie glared at their passing figures, wiping away the blood that dripped onto the floor below. Eddie couldn’t help but glance around at the small attention the scene received. Everyone was watching, but none were helping. Even Bill, who watched in nothing but sympathy.

“Shows over.” Eddie whispered harshly, grasping the locker to help him to his feet.

“E-Eddie-”

“No Bill, fuck off.” Eddie hissed, tears brimming his water line with his fingers jittering as he brought his inhaler to his lips, taking a strong puff.

“Eddie, i’m-”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence, you’re not sorry and you’re not my friend. I stick up for you every time, every fucking time, this happens daily and not once you help.”

“E-Eddie, stop. I just...”

“You just what? You’re scared? Big Bill is scared?” Eddie started to cause a scene, his voice raising by every passing second.

Bill’s eyes were wide in shock at how Eddie was talking to him, but he remained silent.

“You’re not my fucking friend. Are you homophobic too, is that it?” Eddie knew he was over reacting, but he didn’t care. “Is that why you don’t help me, huh? You just watch?”

Bill’s eyes were wide in not only shock now, but hurt. “Y-You think I’m h..homophobic?”

“Well why else, Bill? Why else would you just leave me there?!” Eddie’s voice raised, his hand shaking with the light blue inhaler tight in his fist.

Bill shook his head, “I..I’ll see you on Monday Eddie.” With that, Bill rushed off with his head low.

People stared at Eddie with a mixture of disgust and of pity, both of which he hated. He hated it when others pitied him or were disgusted of him. Eddie looked around, realising these looks and he quickly grabbed his bag from the floor and pushed through the small crowd, holding back his tears and rushing off down the corridor, people watched him go but didn’t offer a shoulder to cry on.

With each step Eddie took, he felt more bruises form on his arms and shoulders and anywhere else he was kicked or punch by his bullies. This wouldn’t happen much anymore hopefully.

Eddie rushed up the steps to the school, gripping the handle rail with his clammy hands. His head swung full of anxiety and anger, swirling and attacking at his emotions over and over again. He made it to the second floor of his school, before swinging himself up the next flight of stairs to ramble over. His destination was the roof.

He needed everything to stop.

His breaths only became heavier as he shoved open the door that was now in front of him after climbing the mountain of stairs. The door made a large creak throughout the silent air, causing a disturbance to perhaps anyone up here. However, no one was. It was empty.

That was perfect for Eddie.

Eddie closed the door, before walking out across the abandoned roof which was full of dead potted plants and green gardens that had failed. He walked around the entrance to the other side of the roof, looking at his feet whilst he did so.

Was he really about to do this?

Eddie sighed shakily, tilting his head up to look ahead of him- only for him to see another shadow standing around the next corner. Eddie tilted his head in confusion before turning around the small box that belonged to the fire escape entrance to cover it up from any rain or harsh weather.

Eddie gasped, begging his eyes to deceive him. A tall lanky figure was stood at the edge of the rooftop with his toes hanging off. A mere cigarette between the index finger and the middle finger, whilst Eddie held his inhaler.

“Richie?!”

The figure almost fell forward whilst stood at the edge in complete shock, looking back with those large coke bottle glasses. Him almost falling caused Eddie to rush forward with a hand out for Richie to grab.

“Eds?”

Eddie felt his chest tighten at the nickname he had not heard in several years, Eddie felt water leak from his eyes at the nostalgia and memories of the two old friends flooded back as his emotions poured out. His head was tilted in confusion and shock to see Eddie, just as much as Eddie was to see Richie. The two were complete polar opposites now. Eddie raised his hand higher for Richie to take, saying no words as none would form due to his throat becoming dry as realisation dawned upon him.

Both Eddie Kaspbrak and Richie Tozier had came to the rooftop to kill themselves on this late Friday afternoon.

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thelasthundredmiles · 45 years ago

Text

January 24th, 1981

Weighing 150 pounds is tantamount to being happy. It is only when I am that weight that I feel really good about the way my body looks, and consequently how comfortable I feel about sex. After four days of strict observance, I went off my diet yesterday. My last day at work and Don had planned a lunch for me at McCann's across the street from Gimbel's and not having a couple of beers withe the boys and a hearty lunch just seemed inappropriate. I was flattered by this show of well-wishing on their part. That job has just left such a horrible taste in my mouth, I was so unhappy doing it that I'm surprised that I did it well. Everyone hated to see me go. Every job I've ever had has resulted in strong feelings for some of the people. Even my short term at JWT caused some tender feelings when I left. Yesterday as I walked down the hallway toward the elevator, I just breathed a sigh of relief and thought to myself "Whew, you barely survived that one." So, I drank and ate with the boys and later in the afternoon the office had a little wine and cheese party in Terry's office. I was up from all the excitement of leaving and Allan and I decided to go uptown for drinks after work. A real rarity. This winter has been so brutal that even going out for drinks in the neighborhood has seemed an effort. We met at Cahoots, a first visit for both of us. The bar is nearly empty. A pretty man plays the piano and several other pretty men stand around the piano and drink. Two business men sit at the bar and talk. A solitary bearded guy sits at the end. Allan and I stand against the wall and have a draft beer. For a change both of us are in office clothes. We leave after the drink and walk several blocks out of the way as I attempt to intuitively find the Wildwood, where I had gone several time last summer. Finally we stop at a phone booth and I called information. It turns out, it was close to Cahoots, which we had been walking away from. The bar is comfortable, we both like it. But it is also nearly empty and the crowd is huddled at the bar, neighbors. Allan and I stand against the wall and eat peanuts and drink beer and leave after the drink. We take the subway home, but I stop at Gimbel's where I have left a package. The package (coffee cup from the office, layouts on the Garfinckel's book, roses as a going away gift from Rosann and a banana and an orange leftover from lunch on Tuesday) was not where it was supposed to be and the guard and I had to look for it for 15 minutes. At home, my mother's Christmas package to me had arrived, a huge cardboard box that was battered and torn. I dragged it up to the apartment where Allan already was. I opened the box expecting just maybe the leather jacket that I had hinted I wanted. Inside, I found a horrible middle-aged man J.C. Penny coat of fake suede and polyester pile lining. Just dreadful. Also a really tacky bathroom ensemble made of lurid shiny black polyester velour. Imagine: a fuzzy seat for the toilet. Curiously, she had also included two worn bath towels, one green, one red (for padding perhaps?) and a Crisco can full of marvelous homemade fudge and divinity and some other kind of candy. Rene had sent me a bottle of really nasty cheap after shave called "Flag and Sails" which he had wrapped completely in heavy grey industrial tape.

There was an address book titled "Red Hot Numbers" for straight men with cute little pictures of girls dressed as angels and pictures of devils with pitchforks. It was for meant for rating their dates as saints or sinners. Some couple, friends of mom and Rene's. I can only imagine the scene when they joked to my mother about sending that bachelor son of hers an address book to keep score of all those women. And of my mother, and Rene, not saying anything. The box of presents depressed and saddened me. All this cheap merchandise. Makes me feel so sad for the awful world these people inhabit. These poor people are so dumb, and god dammit, they're my family. They're so ignorant and their lives are so hard and mean. They have no spark, no verve, no imagination, their joys are so simple-minded. These are working class people with no intellectual capacity. I love it when my family and I remain at a healthy distance. But boxes full of their sadness arrives at my door. Visits home make me face them directly. I like to pretend that they are just a normal middle American family living out of the heartland. But when I really have to deal with them I am appalled at their lack of intelligence. It scares the wits out of me to realize how stupid my family is. Although I admire in remote ways certain characteristics and values of these people, that doesn't cause me to want to have them in my life. I do not want to play a substantive role in their lives either. So play the role of son, grandson, and nephew from long distance and connect to their real life only under duress. So tonight my mother sits in her double-wide trailer in Mississippi and wonders if her faggot son got his Christmas. I would call her and thank her, but she's probably drunk by now.

So ate fudge and drank white wine and had Chinese carryout for dinner and watched television until both of us fell asleep. Then he left for Boots and Saddles and I pulled my Futon out and went to sleep watching television.

Today, I walked to Allan's apartment. His friend Joe was just getting there as I arrived. Beautiful day. Not too cold. Good to be out walking and New York shined like a jewel. Allan I bought an ounce of grass from Joe and split it. Joe and I sat at the table and had coffee (actually he had tea) and he told us all about his plan to go into business for himself. With friends, he is planning on opening a messenger service. Then Allan and I took the subway to Times Square and met Diane at Leowe's theater and saw Altered States. I loved the movie. Afterward, Times Square was grey and neon and rushed with crowds of people. New York, I love you. We had coffee at Howard's and then Diane went home and Allan and I came downtown and went to Boots. I had two sodas with a twist (my diet cocktail-- I chug them) and decided I couldn't stand just standing around the bar. So I left Allan there and went to Sloanes, my favorite grocery store. At home, I had my broiled chicken and salad and drank diet soda and smoked dope and tried not to think of the fudge in the refrigerator. John called late last night and made a date with me for tonight. By 8:30 I knew I had been stood up and was relieved to know it.

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writingsbyexiledfromazerath · 8 years ago

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Saudade; Chapter 9 Hoops

If Eddward had a backbone, he would go straight up to Kevin and demand an explanation for his behavior. If he had any spine at all, he would call him out in front of everyone so he could not shove Eddward away. If Eddward had any ounce of courage or stubbornness in his body, Keving would be forced to confront him whether he wanted to or not.

But Eddward did not have have a backbone; all he had was vulnerability and a secret that was becoming too heavy to bare. Surely someone knows something….

When Eddward decided to speak to Nazz about Kevin, he recognized the risk of it. Either she knew about Kevin and him or she was blissfully ignorant. Either way, mishandling the confrontation could be devastating for the three of them combined. Eddward would rather anyone else speak to Nazz about this, but he had few options.

While it normally would have taken some time to track Nazz down, he had heard from Ed that she was coaching the Junior High cheerleading squad across the street. Eddward turned the corner to the junior high football field and recognized Sarah's blaring screams of cheer before he saw her face. How Ed dealt with his sister regularly was beyond him; Eddward thanked whatever heavens there were that he was an only child.

Nazz had Jimmy on a handstand, holding his ankles to keep him steady.

"There you go, Jimmy, now just push off and cartwheel over!" Nazz smiled brilliantly, her freckled nose scrunched up under her blue eyes, blonde hair glistening behind her. If Eddward was interested in girls, he was sure Nazz would make his heart stop. No wonder Eddy seemed to be perpetually drooling over her. She just had this aura over her.

Jimmy collapsed under his own wiry frame, crying out as the crown of his head hit the ground. Poor kid; cheerleading certainly did not look easy. Sarah sighed heavily before approaching her lunch bag by the bleachers. She grabbed the ice pack from the bottom of her bag before jogging over to Jimmy. The amount of patience she had for that boy was astonishing.

Eddward took that opportunity to flag Nazz down, waving and calling her name with a friendly smile.

"Hiya Double D! What's up? Still coming to my party next weekend?" She embraced Eddward in a warm hug, her golden tan skin contracting with his pasty complexion.

"Greetings, Nazz. The jury is still out on that decision, but I will keep you updated. How are you?"

"Just swell, Double D! Jimmy has almost mastered a cartwheel! Haven't you Jimmy?" Jimmy groaned in response, starting to push Sarah's ice pack closer to his temple.

"It's a work in progress." Nazz continued with a chuckle, before turning back to Eddward.

"Yes well I can only imagine how difficult that can be. Have you seen Kevin recently?" He paused, working up an excuse; "I want to check on his academic progress following last year."

She smiled "You're such a good friend, Double D! He's at the basketball court. He and his dad are fighting again, so he'll probably be there for a while." Eddward nodded.

"What kind of fight?" He propped, Nazz's smile faded.

"Oh you know, raging irish stereotype kind of fights. Mr. Burns gets loaded and he and Kevin go at it. The beginning of last summer he put Kevin in the hospital for like 3 weeks. It was really really scary."

Eddward flinched at the thought.

"That's awful! Why have the police not been contacted?!" Nazz shrugged.

"They have been, but Kevin is 16 now. I guess he's old enough to decide whether or not to stay or something. He said if he let children's services take him away, he'd end up in a group home or something. He doesn't want to leave Peach Creek." NAzz faltered.

"But don't tell him that I told you that, okay? He doesn't want people getting into his personal stuff." Eddward nodded with a kind smile.

"Of course Nazz, my apologies for intruding. I will go and check on Kevin now, thank you." Nazz smiled back.

"I better see you at my party, Double D, I mean it." Eddward smiled again before saying his goodbyes. It sounded like she would hound him about this party until he agreed. He sighed, wondering if he should just accept the invitation or risk harassment for the rest of the school year.

Perhaps he would consider such a debate at a later time.

He could hear the dribbling of a ball the pavement when he approached the high school basketball court. Kevin did not notice immediately as Eddward approached. He continued to run back and forth on the court, shooting the orange orb into the white hoop over and over again. His face was scrunched up tight and covered in sweat, like he was frustrated with something. His sneakers thumped violently against the textured court.

When Kevin noticed Eddward's presence, he slowed to a stop. Sweat dripped down his temples. He said nothing as the ball flew through the hoop and bounced off of the court.

The two teenagers stared at each other for what felt like years, but could only be minutes. Kevin maintained his gaze, wide eyed, while Eddward could only stare at Kevin's black eye; purple and black, swollen, his eye was no longer white but red. Eddward wanted to reach out and treat it desperately.

"What happened to you, Kevin?"

The flash of vulnerability that came to Kevin's face faded to a scowl quickly, but it was slow enough for Eddward to catch it. Maybe something else was going on. Maybe Kevin was not pushing him away out of choice.

"None of your business Dork, but someone decked me at the football game this weekend. Are you done invading on my life again, you creep?"

Eddward flinched.

"Kevin you can't keep doing this to us. Whatever happened, I'm here for you. I still…" Kevin held up his hand, halting Eddward again. He slowly approached the basketball on the edge of the court and picked it up.

"Look, Edd. I'm sorry about what I did to you. But I'm not gay. I can't be. I thought I was, but I was wrong. I didn't know how to tell you, and I'm sorry."

"Kevin-"

"Just leave me alone, Edd. Get out of my face. I can't….I can't be associated with a faggot like you."

The words hit hard, jolting Eddward and causing him to stumble backwards."

"That's it!" Eddward growled, finding some fire within himself for the first time in months. He stomped up to a confused Kevin before sticking his finger in his face and raising his voice.

"Now you listen here you son of a-"

"Kevin!" The loud deep booming voice almost made Eddward jump out of his skin. At the foot of the court was a sleek red sports car. Inside appeared to be a gruff redheaded man calling about from the drivers window.

"Let's go, sport, I can't wait all day for your nonsense." The man was terrifying, carrying a square chin and matching square shoulders. His red facial stubble only accentuated his empty grey eyes. Cigarette hanging out of his mouth in a haphazard manner. He almost looked like Kevin.

"Yes Sir." Kevin called out. In what appeared to be a display of masculinity, Kevin shoved Eddward back with force, grumbling for Eddward to "Take a hike, nerd!" before slowly climbing down the hill to the gentleman's car.

"Was this faggot causing you more trouble, son?" The man jeered. Kevin shook his head as he opened the passenger side door.

"No dad, I was just telling him to go screw himself." He sat down slowly before shutting the door.

"Good job son. No need for that bullshit again." The man put the car into drive before continuing, "You learned your lesson, right?"

Kevin looked down as he buckled his seat belt.

"Yes Sir."

The two took off in a flash of red and car exhaust, leaving Eddward surrounded by the smoke of the tailpipe mixing with his own tears.

So that was it.

#eene fanfiction #eene #fanfiction #saudade #kevedd #exiledfromazerath

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laurlovescookies · 8 years ago

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Kadam Week Prompt 4: He Struck You (A Crescendo)

Prompt Four: Someone strains, sprains, breaks, or otherwise injures himself doing something really stupid. How does his partner react?

When a heckler starts harassing Kurt and Adam, Kurt’s sass flares up and Adam hopes his boyfriend will live to see fifty. Rated for brief violence.

-O-

“I still think we should take you to the hospital.”

Kurt looked up from where he lay on the sofa, accepting his boyfriend’s pro-offered ice pack with a soft “Thangs.” He softly pressed it against his still-swollen nose, hissing as it stung. Adam patted Kurt’s legs, and the latter drew them up so that Adam could sit beside him. He stared at his entwined hands.

“I—“ He let out an incredulous snort and looked over at Kurt, whom didn’t look the slightest bit contrite. “I don’t know whether to yell at you or call you a hero.” He shook his head. “I still think we ought to ought to get you to a doctor. Your nose could be broken.”

Kurt wearily shook his head. His voice was so nasal compared to his usual trill; it sounded as if he had a bad cold. “I dun thing suh. Ospital visits ah expensive ‘ere, even wif ‘ealth insdurance.”

“If you’d been stabbed, that’d be a good reason to go.”

“But I waddint. And om nod bleedig now.” Kurt pointed helpfully towards the wastebasket in front of him, which had been steadily filling with bloodstained tissues for the past half hour. “And my node idint crookud, and dere aren’t ony bruises…”

“Yes, but we don’t know for certain, dahling,” said Adam nervously, squeezing Kurt’s knee. “He…hit you quite hard.”

“I know. I wad dere.”

Adam briefly smiled, but it was just as quickly washed away.

“Are you sure you won’t go? I’m…my heart is still going a mile a minute. He hit you in the bloody face and you’re being awfully cavalier.”

“Nuh. Ninedeen years and ma node idint broken yet. Nod for people haven’t trying.”

Adam said nothing for a moment, drawing up his knees to hug them. For a moment he’s just so appallingly sad he can’t speak. This was Kurt’s normal; that was self-evident by the fact he managed some garbled speech about the new Project Runway series as Adam rushed them into a taxi, hand shaking so hard as he tried to dial the police Kurt finally had to do it for him. And one of his hands still had a fistful of napkins pinched around his nose.

He sagged back against the couch, still looking at Kurt, whom was now gazing at the ceiling.

Adam certainly had been mocked at school for being gay, but to have been assaulted to the extent that Kurt was, to fear for his life and have to switch schools (with the fantastically-abysmal result that he’d wound up seeking solace with some tool?)

It was vicious. Not for the first time he wondered if Kurt might’ve found a safer home in England, possibly in Wessex, quite-possibly at Adam’s own school, where people could be little berks but not violent little berks.

Brow creasing, suddenly feeling incredibly tired, Adam reached for Kurt’s hand, grateful when the latter squeezed his.

He’d been struck and knocked to the floor, and when Adam scrambled down beside him there was already so much blood streaming across the tile it ran blackish. He’d slid in it as they hurried out, Kurt pausing to seize some tissues at an empty booth on the way. “Kurt,” Adam had panted as they hurried to the curb, heart hammering in his throat. “Kurt, sweetheart—“ Aghast, he stared at Kurt, whom gazed back, looking nonplussed.

“Are you alright? Do you need ice? Do you want me to call for—“

“I ope dere won be blooddains on ma shirt. Are you oday, ‘oney?”

He’d only stared. Kurt hadn’t even cried, didn’t seem the slightest bit unnerved.

“I’m just surprised you had the nerve to lay down the law as well as you did. I think my new nickname for you is Judge Judy.”

Adam had dragged Kurt out to a sport bar earlier tonight so that they could watch the summer Olympics. Adam was interested in swimming events being that he swam competitively in high school, and while Michael Phelps was as much of a beast in the water as ever, he hoped England might at least find a place on the podium.

Kurt had humored him, albeit with a martyred expression, especially as he tentatively poked at the salad he ordered. “The healthiest thing on the menu is stuffed with bacon bits. Reminds me of all the old dives my dad used to take me to after work.”

Still, Kurt had spotted a television featuring women’s gymnastics and was very happy to watch the musical floor routines.

“The coordination is incredible,” he marveled, putting a hand on Adam’s arm as a young Russian dance rushed across the floor, ribbon swirling in her wake. “I wish we’d had her coach back in high school.”

Suddenly they both became aware of a series of tootles and jeers across the room; a crowd of beefy-looking men in jerseys were grinning at them. One of them even stood up, ugly eyes feverish. “Hey girlies! Why don’t you stop feelin’ up each others pussies and get the fuck out of here? This ain’t no place for faggots!”

Kurt’s expression hardened. Adam sighed and looked up at Kurt. “Perhaps we should move to the bar. I don’t particularly like the ambiance here.”

The same man started mimicking Adam’s accent—very poorly so—and as his friends laughed Kurt leaned back in his seat, the picture of cool composure.

“You seem inordinately interested in our sex lives.” He stirred his drink and raised an eyebrow. “Have you tried getting one of your own?”

The man’s friends collectively froze, and started hooting with fiendish glee. The rascal glowered at Kurt.

“You better not be propositioning me, faggot.”

Kurt’s eyes narrowed into slivers and Adam’s breath caught. “Don’t flatter yourself. First of all, you’re a singularly unpleasant person. Your face looks like someone tried to put out a fire with a fork. And judging by those thunder thighs, you stuff cake in your socks. Good luck finding a girl to be with you whom you don’t have to pay by the hour.”

As his friends hooted and howled, pounding the table with their fists, the man’s teeth clenched, face reddening. To Adam’s great alarm he got up, strode over to their table where he stopped, breathing deeply.

“Take it back. All of it.”

Kurt frowned up at the man.

“Apologize to him.”

“Kurt—“

“No. No one has the right to treat you like that.”

“No one has the right to treat you like that—“ The man simpered mockingly. Eyes flashing, Kurt abruptly stood up—he was taller than the stranger.

“You know, I think I might apologize to you,” he said sweetly. “Considering I know you just broke up with your girlfriend.” Surprise momentarily flitted across the man’s face. “I’m thinking it’s because you have more dick in your personality then you ever did in your pants.”

The entire bar exploded at that, and a second later the man’s fist flew towards Kurt’s face in a sharp uppercut.

-O-

“How in the world did you know that he’d broken up with his girlfriend?”

“Just a guess. I figured he couldn’t keep one for very long.”

Adam chuckled and Kurt smiled softly, sitting up and resting his cheek on Adam’s shoulder. The latter wrapped an arm around him.

“Well,” Adam sighed. “I suppose I should tell you to never do such a thing again. But just this once, I’d like to call you my hero.”

“I like it.”

“You’re sounding better now.”

“I feel better.” Kurt touched his nose cautiously. “Sore, but not terrible.”

“Still, I feel awful that you were hurt on my behalf. How about I be your slave for the evening?”

“That sounds like something like you’d have to pay someone for to say.”

“Kurt.”

“Right.” Kurt raised his hands up. “Turning off the snark.” Going to a sport bar aside, there was no great indicator that Kurt Hummel loved Adam. “But I do still feel kind of gross. I think a shower’s called for.” He quipped a brow, eyes still playfully sassy as ever.

“Any chance you could help me with that?”

Adam grinned, reached for Kurt and tossed the squawking boy over his shoulder before hurrying out of the room.

u�!;��

#kadam fanfic #kadam week 2017 #kadam week #kurt hummel #adam crawford #glee fanfiction

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yasbxxgie · 8 years ago

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Transcript [MP3]

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Mahershala Ali co-stars in two films nominated for best picture Oscars, "Moonlight" and "Hidden Figures." And he's nominated as best supporting actor for his performance in "Moonlight." That performance won him a SAG Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award last month. He gave a very moving acceptance speech in which he referred to converting to Islam. We'll talk about that later.

Ali was in four seasons of the Netflix series "House Of Cards." He co-stars in the Netflix series "Luke Cage," which is an adaptation of the Marvel Comics superhero series. And he played Boggs in the first two "Hunger Games" films. Let's start with a scene from "Moonlight."

Ali plays Juan, a drug dealer who comes across a young boy named Chiron who's being bullied. Juan take Chiron under his wing and becomes a father figure, offering the kind of guidance that the boy's increasingly crack-addicted mother is not providing. In this scene at Juan's house, Juan and his girlfriend are trying to reassure Chiron who is upset because the boys bullying him have called him a faggot and he doesn't know what that means.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MOONLIGHT")

ALEX HIBBERT: (As Little) What's a faggot?

MAHERSHALA ALI: (As Juan) A faggot is a word used to make gay people feel bad.

HIBBERT: (As Little) Am I a faggot?

ALI: (As Juan) No. No. You could be gay, but you ain't got to let nobody call you no faggot. I mean, unless...

HIBBERT: (As Little) How do I know?

ALI: (As Juan) You just do, I think.

JANELLE MONAE: (As Teresa) You'll know when you know.

ALI: (As Juan) Hey, you ain't got to know it right now. All right? Not yet.

HIBBERT: (As Little) Do you sell drugs?

ALI: (As Juan) Yeah.

HIBBERT: (As Little) And my mama - she do drugs, right?

ALI: (As Juan) Yeah.

GROSS: Mahershala Ali, welcome to FRESH AIR. I love your performance in this film. Congratulations.

ALI: Thank you.

GROSS: When I interviewed Tarell McCraney, who is the playwright that wrote the play that the movie's based on, he said a lot of it came out of his own personal experience. You know, when he was young, his mother was addicted to crack. And one of the guys that she dated was a drug dealer who befriended Tarell...

ALI: Right.

GROSS: ...When Tarell was young and became, like, a really important presence in his life and a very...

ALI: Yes.

GROSS: ...A very helpful presence in his life. So that character that you portray is rooted in Tarell McCraney's reality. Was he rooted in your reality? Did you know characters like that? Did you know people like that who were...

ALI: Yes.

GROSS: ...Both, like, drug dealers and could be very ruthless if they needed to be but could also really be just kind of, like, you know, warm and gentle and encouraging?

ALI: Look, honestly, the reality is is that there's a lot of guys like that. And anyone who grew up in the crack era - you know, I grew up in that era - knew that there were also people out - and there are still guys to this day that are out there, you know, obviously drug dealing - but those were the guys who had access and had money. And some of those guys felt responsible to create opportunity for other people and were also aware of the dangers of their work and often aren't really the ones that are encouraging kids to get into drug dealing.

And when I read "Moonlight," Juan reminded me of several people that I knew - at least parts of them, anyway - that I knew growing up. And I was a little surprised at Barry capturing that reality. That just wasn't something that I...

GROSS: Who's Barry Jenkins, the director of the film.

ALI: Barry Jenkins, the director, yes. I was a little bit surprised at actually reading that. I know I was blown away by seeing characters from my own life and people that I recognized on the page.

GROSS: Did the crack epidemic have a direct impact on your life?

ALI: It definitely has impacted folks in my family, most definitely. Look, I think that's true for most, if not all people, regardless of color, that grew up in and around areas that were closer to the nucleus of the crack epidemic. Like, where - like, if you look at, you know, what happened in, say, you know, Baltimore or D.C., Detroit, Chicago, Oakland, like, Los Angeles.

GROSS: What was your neighborhood?

ALI: I was born in Oakland and grew up, probably about five miles from Oakland, in Hayward. And Hayward was OK. Like, Hayward wasn't - very much a working-class area and had definitely went through a decline and is now, seemingly, coming back around, which is nice to see. But Oakland was definitely where that was happening when I was growing up - where that was more of a problem.

GROSS: Did you ever get into any kind of trouble yourself?

ALI: Nothing serious. I was fortunately able to avoid getting into any trouble with police. There was - I remember I was 12, and I did something really (laughter) - a couple of friends, Cinco de Mayo - we were off school, and we saw some people looking like they were having a party. And we had a little bit too much time on our hands, and so we figured, as kids, a great idea would be to throw some things over the fence and hit all these people with stuff, like eggs and everything. Come to find out, it was, post-funeral, people were gathered together. Yeah, hanging out.

GROSS: That's really awful.

ALI: And it was...

GROSS: Yeah.

ALI: And - yeah. So that was the time I got in trouble with the police. We got caught throwing eggs and ketchup on people who we thought were having a party. But it was post-funeral, and that was pretty horrible. But besides that, I've been able to stay out of trouble and very grateful for that.

GROSS: So you won a SAG Award last month for your performance in "Moonlight." I loved your acceptance speech. And for listeners...

ALI: Thank you.

GROSS: ...Who haven't heard it, we're going to play it right now (laughter). It's a short acceptance speech.

ALI: I thought you were going to make me do it again. You scared me for a moment.

GROSS: Yeah, yeah - by heart.

ALI: For listeners who haven't heard it...

GROSS: Please recite it now (laughter).

ALI: ...Say it again.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: OK. So here's a recording from the SAG Awards last month.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE 23RD ANNUAL SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARDS)

ALI: I think what I've learned from working on "Moonlight" is we see what happens when you persecute people. They fold into themselves. And what I was so grateful about in having the opportunity to play Juan was playing a gentleman who saw a young man folding into himself as a result of the persecution of his community and taking that opportunity to uplift him and tell him that he mattered and that he was OK and accept him. And I hope that we do a better job with that.

(APPLAUSE)

ALI: You know, when we kind of get caught up in the minutiae, the details that make us all different, I think there's two ways of seeing that. There's an opportunity to see the texture of that person, the characteristics that make them unique. And then there's an opportunity to go to war about it and to say that that person is different from me and I don't like you, so let's battle.

My mother is an ordained minister. I'm a Muslim. She didn't do backflips when I called her to tell her I converted 17 years ago. But I tell you now, we put things to the side, and I was able to - I'm able to see her. She's able to see me. We love each other. The love has grown. And that stuff is minutiae. It's not that important.

(APPLAUSE)

GROSS: That was a really beautiful speech that you gave.

ALI: Thank you.

GROSS: You were really tearing up when you were talking about people who were persecuted by their own community. It sounds like that's something you really personally connected with. Were you thinking of things that happened to you when you said that?

ALI: Well, look, yeah. I just - I've - I have seen it, and I've personally been on the outside sometimes. But I was - I personally was never persecuted especially in the way in which sharing my own experiences. But...

GROSS: I was thinking maybe you felt yourself folding into yourself like you...

ALI: Yes.

GROSS: ...Describe during a part of your life.

ALI: Yeah, for sure. For sure because I think there was - I know there were periods of times where I didn't feel understood, and there were very few people around me that I felt like they really got me. There was one person who was sort of the one in my life that really got me. And he's one of my close - I'm talking like when I was in high school - he's one of my really close friends to this day. But in general, I felt a little bit on the outside and not totally included. There was a period of time when we were moving around a lot. So I couldn't really hold on to a certain set of friends. And so that was a little bit difficult.

And also my experiences growing up - my father lived in New York, so I was going out there in the summers and meeting really interesting people and people having what seemed to me to be extraordinary experiences and really taking advantage of these wonderful opportunities. And so I will go - I would go to the big city and watch these people performing onstage and doing television and films. And then I would go back to Hayward, and it just suddenly felt that much smaller and sort of limiting because I had this hyper awareness of how much larger the world was.

And so I think in some ways, I would go back home, and I didn't really quite fit in and couldn't - didn't have a person to bounce those experiences off of. So I felt a little bit trapped within me, and it made me feel lonely because I really couldn't - the things that were exciting to me, I couldn't really share those with another kid and that other kid understand that.

GROSS: Well, why don't we take a short break here and then we'll talk more? My guest is Mahershala Ali. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ALI: This is FRESH AIR, and if you're just joining us, my guest is Mahershala Ali. He's nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in "Moonlight." "Moonlight" is nominated for Best Picture. He also co-stars in "Hidden Figures" which is also nominated for Best Picture. Your parents separated when you were 3...

ALI: Yeah.

GROSS: ...And you said your father moved to New York. You stayed with your mother on the West Coast.

ALI: Yes.

GROSS: So your father was a dancer. He danced on "Soul Train." Was he a regular on "Soul Train?"

ALI: No. They had - there was a period where they did, at least in 1977, they did a national dance contest. And my father won that, and he won $2,500 - I'd recently found his letter from Johnson and Johnson...

GROSS: Oh, gosh.

ALI: ...In my storage - yeah. So he won $2,500, and he won a car.

GROSS: Wow.

ALI: And my parents were - yeah, so they were kids when I was born. My mother was 16. My father was 17, and they got married in high school. And they split a few years later. So - and that's - when they split was when all that was happening also, and he - they were just coming into themselves. But they remained friends.

My dad lived in - he moved to New York after he won "Soul Train" and the car and got settled in out there and was able to step right into Dance Theatre of Harlem and felt like he was in a show called "Omnibus" and "American Dance Machine." And he just started touring and being out a lot and he was in the chorus a lot and understudy for...

GROSS: In the chorus of shows?

ALI: In the chorus like of shows like kind of one of the chorus guys but then also being an understudy for one of the leading parts - or like in "Dreamgirls," for instance, he was on Broadway with "Dreamgirls." But then also in the national tour or one of the international tours played James Thunder Early a few times as well so one of the principals.

GROSS: Well, I could see what you were talking about the difference between spending time with your father who is in the Dance Theatre of Harlem and was working on Broadway shows and international touring productions and then going home to - I forget the name of...

ALI: Hayward.

GROSS: Hayward, yeah.

ALI: The Bay Area basically.

GROSS: Right in the Bay Area. But your mother was involved with the church. She was not living that kind of performing life. You were not surrounded by artisan and performers when you went home, so...

ALI: Right.

GROSS: ...Let's compare your father's life with your life at home and with your mother's life. What was her role in the church? Was she...

ALI: Well...

GROSS: ...An ordained minister when you were growing up?

ALI: No, she wasn't. Her mother was an ordained minister, so her mother was the assistant pastor at Palma Ceia Baptist Church in Hayward - my grandmother, Evie Goines. And so my mother was doing - I remember when my mother graduated from beauty college, so I was about 5, and so I guess she was about 21. And I just remember being there, taking the pictures and seeing her get her diploma and everything. But she was doing hair for many years.

And during that time, she kind of started to discover or tap into her religious studies. It was around the time I was starting to go through puberty and hitting, like, 12, 13. And as a kid, you're starting to grow up and want more freedoms. And - but if - when you have people who are absorbing and adopting religious principles and teachings, they start drawing these lines and creating confines in their life to live within certain lines.

GROSS: Yeah, so what didn't she want you to do?

ALI: So there was things just like not being able to date or - I'm talking like 15, 16 - like just certain things that my friends started to do. Like, they started to get phone calls from girls or like, you know, go and hang out 10, 11 at night, kind of going to the movies. There were just certain things that - it's not that I couldn't do all of those things. It's just that every choice was really deliberate and conscious and thought out and sort of balanced against the religion in a way where I felt - I wasn't necessarily trying to convert at 12 like she was (laughter).

GROSS: Yeah.

ALI: You know? Like, it felt like it disrupted my rhythm in growing up. But I will say that I'm really grateful for her own personal transition. The freedom that I wanted as a kid would - probably would not have been good for me and not in the way in which I wanted it. And so over time, I think how strict my mother's home could be with my mom and my stepfather, there was a fluidity and freedom in my dad's existence that I enjoyed when I was around him, though the responsibility was just different. He expected me to carry myself a certain way without all the rules and confines. And I think my mom gave me the borders, the - gave me a very clear understanding of what the perimeter was. And I had to find my fun within those boundaries (laughter). So yeah - so between the two, it was a really unique upbringing, I think, especially for where I was from.

GROSS: Oh, what two different worlds.

ALI: Yes.

GROSS: So in your acceptance speech at the SAG Awards last month, you mentioned, you know, your mother's an ordained minister and you say she didn't do backflips when you told her you'd converted to Islam. When did you convert?

ALI: I converted December 31, 1999. It was a Friday.

GROSS: (Laughter).

ALI: And I had gone to - that was my second time going to the mosque. The woman who is my wife now - my extraordinary wife - I knew in college. And she had - I was really curious at that time just in general, just studying different things from, you know, learning more about reincarnation. I had read some books on the Baha'i Faith. I had read - I was looking into Buddhism and trying to understand sort of the agnostic approach, so there was just a bunch of stuff I was just looking at. And then at that time we met, she was Muslim and - but was at a point where - because her father is an imam and her mother, though, is a convert, but she was basically raised Muslim. And she was at that point where she was deciding or trying to come to terms with her own relationship with Islam and how to embrace that for herself. So I was sort of trying to come walk toward it. And she was - she wasn't sure if she - if it was what she wanted for herself. And so she kind of, like, introduced me to things kind of like, hey, here's this book. Check it out, if you respond to it.

And so she - I went to a mosque in Philadelphia with her in December 24, 1999. And we we went to this mosque in Philly, and I just had such a strong reaction to the prayer. And I was really emotionally - I felt really grounded at that time. And so to be in this prayer and the imam is doing the prayer in Arabic and I don't understand a word of Arabic but I just remember these tears just coming down my face and it just really connecting to my spirit in a way that felt like I needed to pay attention to that.

GROSS: My guest is Mahershala Ali, who's nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor for his performance in "Moonlight," which is nominated for best picture; so is "Hidden Figures," which he also co-stars in. After a break, we'll talk about what it was like to be a Muslim after 9/11, just a year and a half after he converted. And Maureen Corrigan will review a novel by the writer known as the Indian Chekov. It's just been published in English. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "ANI MAAMIN")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Mahershala Ali. He co-stars in two films that have Oscar nominations for best picture - "Moonlight" and "Hidden Figures." He's nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor for his performance in "Moonlight" as a drug dealer who becomes a father figure to a young boy who's bullied. He won a SAG Award for that performance. When we left off, we were talking about converting to Islam.

So you converted to Islam basically a year and a half before 9/11. So you converted just in time for a lot of Americans to become, like, super phobic about Islam.

ALI: Yeah, just in time to enjoy all the benefits of it (laughter).

GROSS: Right, yeah.

ALI: Yes.

GROSS: (Laughter) So how did your life as a Muslim change after 9/11? And how would people project onto you change after 9/11?

ALI: Well, that's where I think the connection with, I think, Chiron can happen is you as Muslim...

GROSS: Chiron's the character of the boy in "Moonlight," yeah.

ALI: The character from - yes, yes, from "Moonlight" - is it was - so many Muslims would tell you that they felt like - and still do, but especially then - that you had to - you fold it into yourself because people were looking at you and recognizing you as being the culprit even though, look, I'm American. I don't believe that the teachings of Islam justified those actions. I feel like those acts are un-Islamic. So to see that happen and somebody do that in the name of God, it just - and the religion that you practice, it just - it hurts your heart so deeply because it's such a misrepresentation of the faith.

And then you - and you are an American, so you're hurt that other American citizens have been hurt, but you end up having to shoulder the shame for something that you don't even believe. There's a lot of years where Muslims have dealt with having to make themselves very small and not disrupt the flow and not - make sure that you're not noticed because, you know, deep down inside people are not really excited that you're around (laughter). So - yeah.

GROSS: You know, it's funny, like, your birth name is Mahershalalhashbaz Gilmore. And it sounds like your first name is a Muslim name, even though your mother is Christian and wasn't...

ALI: But it's Hebrew (laughter).

GROSS: It's Hebrew, really?

ALI: Yeah, yeah, of all - yes, yes.

GROSS: Oh, that's interesting.

ALI: Yeah. And I've been on - I remember after 9/11, I started - I was working quite a bit in Vancouver. And then I realized I would go to catch my flight, and it would take me like 20 minutes to get cleared to fly, like, every time. I'm like, what is going on? Again, having - fortunately having never been in trouble. And eventually I found out that I was on a watch list. And I was just...

GROSS: What year is this?

ALI: This is 2003, 2004. And then I started - after the Patriot Act, I would always get my financial packages in the mail and they would just be opened. And it was like, what is going on here? So, yeah, I don't know how I drifted off to that, but...

GROSS: We were talking about your name and you were saying it was Hebrew. And I was saying it sounded Muslim.

ALI: Yeah, yeah. Oh - because on that watch list, they would be like, yeah, your name - they told me like, yeah, your name matches the name of a terrorist or someone that they're watching. I was just like, what terrorist is running around with a Hebrew first name and a Muslim - Arabic last - I'm like, who's that guy?

GROSS: (Laughter).

ALI: So, yeah, I've had...

GROSS: So who are you named after? Is it - it's an Old Testament name?

ALI: It - yes, Isaiah the prophet, Isaiah's second son was - his symbolic name was Mahershalalhashbaz. And Isaiah was - the Prophet Isaiah was instructed to write the name in all capital letters as a prophecy. And it means hasten to the spoils, speedy as the prey. And I've been - also been told that another meaning of it is divine restoration. So, yes.

GROSS: OK.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: So what made you think about acting? Did your father have anything to do with that?

ALI: Wow. Yeah, my father had a lot to do with me thinking about acting, though he never saw me act. He passed away probably - he passed away as I was doing my first play, but I just think being exposed to it and being around it. It wasn't something that I ever thought I couldn't do because I grew up around it. So when it finally came my way and doors opened up for me to do it and to be on stage, it felt like a natural thing to try out. And it just so happened to speak to me. I really couldn't do what I needed to do in the most fulfilling way in Hayward, Calif., or in the Bay Area, that it required me to go off to NYU. And that...

GROSS: Where you studied acting, but you started off on a basketball scholarship at St. Mary's College.

ALI: Yeah, I did.

GROSS: Yeah. So what was the transition between basketball and acting?

ALI: Well, I wanted to get that scholarship. I wanted to get that scholarship to - a division one scholarship and play ball and go to school for free. And that, to me, was - I was always about getting to that next step. If I could get to that next place, then I could figure out essentially what to do with being in that space and how to manage my time and handle those - handle all the benefits of being in that space in a way that would get me to the next place. And so I was always sort of ahead of myself in some way, shape or form and trying to envision how to get further along and closer to fulfilling that dream of being of being free and having a creative agency, so to speak.

And so getting to St. Mary's College was a big deal for me because that essentially led to me getting to go to NYU. And in my time at St. Mary's College, drifting out of sports because it was something that began to feel really finite. And I could see that I didn't have the passion to sustain a career in sports. I didn't have the passion for athletics in that way, that there were other parts of me that felt under-served and that needed to be nurtured and needed my energy. And so I played all four years with - at a certain point, basketball became the thing I was doing most, but it was really in my periphery. And it was really a focus on how to in some ways keep moving in this direction towards something that allowed me to express myself in a way that sports didn't.

GROSS: When you started acting, were you concerned about there being a shortage of roles for black actors?

ALI: Well, I got into it so late because of sports. And then when I was in grad school, I sort of got lulled into basically forgetting I was black, in - meaning that everyone you play at a conservatory, 95 percent of the characters are non-black (laughter). So you don't even - you're - if anything, you're thinking about how do I transcend this? How do I transform and be believable as Krogstad in "A Doll's House" or Sir Peter Teazle in "A School for Scandal" (ph).

You know, you - these are things that are so far from my reality. And it's once you - when you graduate is when you start to find yourself looking at the information in the audition breakdown and it says tall black African - or African-American built such and such. And you start seeing these character descriptions and seeing that, oh, you're only going in for the ones that are described as your look. And it - and so if anything, in my mind, I just didn't - I never wanted to accept that. And so I have always fought against that in some way, shape or form and had - I've had people who have supported trying to get me in for things that were beyond the character description.

GROSS: If you're just joining, us my guest is Mahershala Ali. He's nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar. And two films that he's in are nominated for best picture - "Moonlight" and "Hidden Figures." We're going to take a short break, and then we'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE ROOTS' "ADRENALINE")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is actor Mahershala Ali. He's nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for his role in "Moonlight." "Moonlight" is nominated for best picture and so is another film that he co-stars in, "Hidden Figures."

So a big break for you was a few years ago when you got cast in "House Of Cards," which is the Netflix series about a congressman turned president - very ruthless - played by Kevin Spacey. And you play somebody who had been his press secretary when he was majority whip, but then you become a partner in a major lobbying firm. And your main client at the beginning of the series is SanCorp, which is a natural gas company that gives a lot of money to Frank Underwood, the Kevin Spacey character. But I'm going to play a scene from...

ALI: OK.

GROSS: This is actually your very first scene...

(LAUGHTER)

ALI: Oh, yeah, yeah.

GROSS: ...In "House Of Cards." And so at this point - so you're lobbying for SanCorp. And SanCorp is giving a lot of money to Frank Underwood, the Kevin Spacey character. He's been avoiding your calls. So the scene we're going to hear plays out in three parts. First...

ALI: I'm so glad that you're bringing all this up because I'm, like, I don't remember any of that.

(LAUGHTER)

ALI: That was so long - it's like five years ago. I'm, like, oh, yeah. That's right. That's right. OK.

(LAUGHTER)

ALI: That's great.

GROSS: OK. So to refresh your memory further...

ALI: Yes.

GROSS: ...This scene plays out in three parts. First, you come up to talk to Frank Underwood in a restaurant. Then Underwood addresses the camera and talks about money and politics. And then you...

ALI: Yes.

GROSS: ...And Underwood have this meeting in the hall.

ALI: Right.

GROSS: So the scene starts with you walking up to the restaurant table where Frank Underwood is having lunch with another congressman and the speaker of the house. You speak first.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "HOUSE OF CARDS")

ALI: (As Remy Danton) Congressman, sorry to interrupt. Just saw you sitting over here and...

KEVIN SPACEY: (As Francis Underwood) Remy, gentlemen, this is Remy Danton. Remy, this is Speaker Birch and Congress...

ALI: (As Remy Danton) I'm well aware. Mr. Speaker, Congressman.

SPACEY: (As Francis Underwood) Remy just made partner at Glendon Hill.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Glendon Hill, great team over there. Congratulations.

ALI: (As Remy Danton) Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) When was the last time they added a partner?

ALI: (As Remy Danton) It's been a while.

SPACEY: (As Francis Underwood) Well, they know a winner when they see one. Remy was the best press secretary I ever had.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Why'd you let him go?

SPACEY: (As Francis Underwood) Well, I didn't. They stole him away.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) What accounts do you have?

ALI: (As Remy Danton) SanCorp Industries is my main one. I run that account now. Anyhow, I'll let you get back to it. Sorry again to interrupt.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) No problem.

ALI: (As Remy Danton) Very nice to meet you both.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Christ - lobbyists keep getting younger and younger.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) He's probably making more than all of us combined.

SPACEY: (As Francis Underwood) Gentlemen, this one's on me. I'm going to track down that check.

Glendon Hill fronts SanCorp Industries. SanCorp is deep into natural gas. I don't give a hoot about natural gas, but I have 67 deputy whips, and they all need cash to win races. SanCorp helps me purchase loyalty and, in return, they expect mine. It's degrading, I know, but when the [expletive] that big, everybody gets in line.

Tell them I'm on top of it.

ALI: (As Remy Danton) I need more than that.

SPACEY: (As Francis Underwood) You are well aware that I do not drop the ball on things like this, Remy.

ALI: (As Remy Danton) Promises, Frank - the secretary of state, Argentina, the offshore drill contracts.

SPACEY: (As Francis Underwood) Talk to me when I've solved the problem. Don't waste my time when I'm working on solving it.

ALI: (As Remy Danton) There's billions on the line. You can't not call me back. And I can't not show up.

SPACEY: (As Francis Underwood) Fine. Thank you for your diligence.

ALI: (As Remy Danton) Eight figures to you and the DCCC - $6 million to build that library of yours in your name.

SPACEY: (As Francis Underwood) I know.

ALI: (As Remy Danton) Don't make them throw money at your challenger next cycle.

SPACEY: (As Francis Underwood) You've made your point.

ALI: (As Remy Danton) Have I? I hope so.

GROSS: OK.

ALI: Oh, fun stuff.

GROSS: Hardball politics there.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: So did you start paying a lot more attention to lobbying and politics after playing this part?

ALI: I started paying attention to - if anything, I became more curious about the story behind the story. So what was really going on behind the headline? And it's a little bit sad that that show, it doesn't seem so much like entertainment the way it did (laughter) back when we started doing it. You know, it felt, like, so far from - or far enough from the reality of things that we can enjoy it purely as entertainment. And now it feels a little bit too in alignment, honestly, but yeah - so we'll see how season five goes over there.

GROSS: But you're not in season five, right? You left the show.

ALI: No, I'm not. I'm not in season five, so I can't spoil anything for you...

GROSS: (Laughter).

ALI: ...Other than the fact that I'm not in it (laughter).

GROSS: Right (laughter). So you're in two films now nominated for best picture, "Moonlight" and "Hidden Figures." So in a way, you're competing against yourself.

ALI: (Laughter).

GROSS: You're in a kind of strange (laughter)...

ALI: Yeah.

GROSS: ...Position. At the same time, your wife is due to have her baby. So...

ALI: Any minute now, I could get a call while you and I are talking, and I'd just have to dash away and finish this interview.

GROSS: Wow. I think she can hold on that long.

ALI: (Laughter).

GROSS: We're almost done. Hang in there.

ALI: No, I'm joking. I'm joking.

GROSS: (Laughter) So...

ALI: But yeah - so yeah, we're a couple days past the due date.

GROSS: Oh, OK. So she's probably not going to be in labor on the day or the night of the...

ALI: No.

GROSS: OK, that's good.

ALI: No, no.

GROSS: So you'll be a father by then.

ALI: Yeah. Yes, fingers crossed.

GROSS: Fingers crossed (laughter). So just one more question. So I know you've made mixtapes, like - or imaginary mixtapes for characters that you've played to kind of help define who they are by figuring out what their taste is.

ALI: Yes.

GROSS: So I imagine you made a mixtape playing Juan, the character that you play "Moonlight," who's a drug dealer but also a surrogate father to this young boy. A lot of the music in the score for the film is more, like, chamber music.

ALI: Right.

GROSS: So when you heard the scoring for the film, were you surprised at the music?

ALI: Not at all, not at all. And the reason being is that for the first time in working with the director, Barry said - Barry Jenkins, the director, said, you know, I got some music, man, I want to send you. And I said, that's crazy, man, because I'm up here trying to, like, make this playlist for Juan. And I'm just having a little bit of trouble with it because he's just so - he's so different from anyone I've ever played. And so I'm just trying to figure out, with him being from the South and being Cuban and being - so I'm really trying to find an in just sonically for this guy, especially because I was doing several other projects at that time.

So I really needed something, like a specific thing, to kind of clue me into who I was playing and on what day. And Barry sent us, several of us, some music from - not that it was necessarily intended to be in the movie but it was music that inspired him while working on the film and sort of essentially trying to set the tone for the movie. And I just thought that was so amazing because I always do that for my character, so that was a case where I heavily leaned on music that he had in that playlist.

Some of it was some - what's called chopped and screwed but basically slowed down, the BPMs are dropped way down - chopped and screwed versions of Erykah Badu songs. And I believe there was, like, Outkast on there and Goodie Mob, Frank Ocean, some Bach. That's what I can recall - and oh Aretha Franklin I want to say. So yeah, there was a good bit of music that was there that really spoke to me and gave me a real sense of the character, the pace and feel, what the weather of Miami felt like, the spirit of the project. Like, I had enough in there to go off of.

GROSS: Mahershala Ali, it's been great to talk with you. I wish you very good luck at the Oscars.

ALI: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: And I wish your forthcoming baby a speedy and happy entrance into the world (laughter).

ALI: Thank you. I really appreciate it. It was good talking to you.

GROSS: It's good talking to you. Be well. Thank you so much.

ALI: You too.

GROSS: Mahershala Ali is nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor for his performance in "Moonlight." He also co-stars in "Hidden Figures." Both films are nominated for best picture. Let's hear a recording that's used in the soundtrack of "Moonlight." This is Aretha Franklin singing "One Step Ahead."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ONE STEP AHEAD")

ARETHA FRANKLIN: (Singing) I'm only one step ahead of heartbreak, one step ahead of misery. One step is all I have to take backwards to be the same old fool for you I used to be I'm only one step ahead of your arms, one kiss away from your sweet lips. I know I can't afford to stop for one moment 'cause I'm just out of reach of your fingertips. Your warm breath on my shoulder keeps reminding me that it's too soon to forget you. It's too late to be free, can't you see?

GROSS: After we take a short break, Maureen Corrigan will review a new novel by the writer known as the Indian Chekov. This is FRESH AIR.

#mahershala ali #terry gross #npr #interview #interviews #transcript #mp3 #moonlight

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jessicakehoe · 6 years ago

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How Mina Gerges Went From Being a Viral Meme to a Body Positivity Champion

Mina Gerges has had a rollercoaster few years. Since 2015, when his elaborate Instagram recreations of celebrity red carpet looks went viral, he’s dealt with a fallout with his family, a body image battle, homophobia, and online trolls but has emerged as a body positivity champion and now, one of the faces of Sephora Canada’s new national campaign. Read on for our interview with Gerges about body diversity, LGBTQ representation and more.

View this post on Instagram

Literally crying in excitement to share that I’m in Sephora’s new national campaign😭 When I was 9 years old, I’d sneak into my mom’s room and wear her red lipstick when she wasn’t home. I went to an all-boys school in Abu Dhabi and had to pretend to be someone I’m not so that I’d fit in and not get bullied more, and I always cherished these moments of joy I felt in my mom’s red lipstick. I think about my younger self, and how much he needed to know that he’d be okay. That there’s nothing wrong with him for being different. That our culture may never understand him, but that he’s so beautiful and nothing’s wrong with him. Fast forward to this monumental campaign – a gay Middle Eastern immigrant as the face of a makeup brand. I’ve been looking at this picture for a week, in awe of the confidence and power that radiate through this image. I see resilience and beauty, shining so bright and unapologetically as an openly gay Middle Eastern man despite belonging to a culture that systemically erases and persecutes our LGBTQ community. Representation matters, and I am grateful to fight for the visibility of our community and share the struggles we face, because we’re still so unrepresented in the media. To think that this can give hope to just one young queer Middle Eastern person that they matter, that they’re seen, and that there’s nothing wrong with them brings me tears. I’m beyond grateful that my first ever campaign is with a brand like Sephora that has always been a safe space for me to explore my gender expression, and that’s so unapologetic and bold about celebrating diversity. To me, beauty is reclaiming my culture from the toxic masculinity that’s so engrained within it, and creating new narratives about what it means to be LGBTQ and Middle Eastern/ North African. To that young, scared, lonely Mina who was always told there’s something wrong with him for being gay, I just want you to know that you’ll be okay, and you’re going to look so beautiful in billboards all over this country one day. Shot by the incredible @leeorwild 🌟@sephoracanada #SephoraPartner

A post shared by MINA GERGES (مينا) (@itsminagerges) on Jul 2, 2019 at 4:01pm PDT

Buzzfeed writing a post about your Instagram account is the sort of thing most teens dream about. But for Mina Gerges, then a 19-year-old student at Western University, it was a bittersweet moment. Yes, his cheeky red carpet recreations suddenly had thousands more likes, his inbox was flooded with emails and interview requests, and he’d even gotten a repost from Katy Perry but that Buzzfeed story had another consequence: it outed him to his conservative Egyptian parents.

“We somehow went eight months without talking about it,” recounts Gerges over black coffee at a Toronto cafe. But unbeknownst to him, his parents were Googling him every day, suddenly privy to the secret life that Gerges had been living for months. They’d seen the tongue-in-cheek recreations he’d been shooting in his bedroom with the help of his sisters (looks that included a dress fashioned out of a garbage bag and tinfoil to echo Jennifer Lopez’s outfit at the 2015 Vanity Fair Oscar party and curtains painstakingly painted to resemble Kim Kardashian’s look for the 2015 Met Gala), the interviews he’d been giving to various media outlets, and even the Arabic news sites that had picked up the story. Finally, several months after that first Buzzfeed post in January 2015, his parents sat him down to talk.

View this post on Instagram

Yes, those are cheese slices on my head 🧀😂 #MetGala #MinaGerges #RitaOra

A post shared by MINA GERGES (مينا) (@itsminagerges) on May 1, 2017 at 8:06pm PDT

“The language barrier made it so difficult to communicate what I felt or to communicate even what it is [to be gay],” explains Gerges. “At the time the only Arabic word for what it means to be gay, ‘khaneeth,’ directly translated to something negative—it connotes being a pervert, effeminate, and is more commonly used as a way of saying faggot.”

Since then, fuelled by the efforts of LGBTQ activists, the terminology has expanded to include words like ‘mithli’ which translates to “same” or “homo,” but the perception of queer people as being sexually deviant is so ingrained in Middle Eastern culture that no matter how hard Gerges tried to mend the relationship with his parents, nothing worked. Hard as that was—and continues to be—it also gave him the motivation to use his social media presence to change the way the Arab community viewed LGBTQ people, and to give them positive examples to look to.

“A lot of what I do now is informed from what I learned trying to deal with my parents,” he says. “I’m educating myself on what it’s like to be queer in the Middle East and what I can do with my platform to talk about this or to create any kind of change. And I’ve found a community of kids who have felt exactly the way that I have felt. I take that back. Not just kids, but older men and younger men, queer women, trans people from the Middle East, who have found similarities in our stories.”

Photography by Samuel Engelking

Gerges, who grew up between Cairo in Egypt and Abu Dhabi in the UAE, moved to Canada at the age of 12 with his mother and two sisters (his father came later). In both the countries where he grew up, being gay or even acknowledging LGBTQ people or rights was completely missing from the culture. In fact, he had no idea what the word ‘gay’ meant or even that it existed until someone called him that in high school. To be out and proud may not have been something Gerges ever saw growing up, but even after moving to Canada it was a very narrow version of “gay” that his formative understanding of the term was built on.

“The first time I Googled “gay men” all I saw was images of white, muscular, slim men,” he says. “So I thought that that was the norm.”

In trying to fit that mould as a young man grappling with his identity and sexuality, Gerges went down a spiral of eating disorders and body dysmorphia. He became anorexic in his first year of university, a time when he was not only struggling with being accepted in the gay community “as a plus-size man of colour” but also deeply unhappy studying science, something his parents had encouraged him to do. (He later switched to media studies.) When he began his celeb recreation posts in the summer of 2014, he was already suffering from anorexia.

“The people who may have followed me from the very beginning saw a Mina who was anorexic, at 150 lbs. And when I was in recovery shortly after, I started gaining back some weight and I was happy. But it was hard to find that happiness when I went on social media. I was at the height of my creativity where it wasn’t just drag, it was DIY, it was kind of like the golden age of my work. But all that people could comment about was my weight. I was like ‘I just spent eight hours painting this garbage bag so it can look like a million dollar dress and all you have to say is to call me a whale.’ It broke me. It was one of the worst things I’ve experienced in my life.”

He took eight months off social media between October 2015 and May 2016. During this hiatus, Gerges took the time to heal, using the distance from people’s hateful comments to learn how to love and accept his body. When he was finally ready to return to social media, he made a promise to himself that things were going to be different.

Photography by Samuel Engelking

“I decided I wasn’t going to FaceTune my body anymore. Instead of hiding it I’m going to be so unapologetic about this body and maybe if people see confidence they will be less likely to say mean things. Honestly something as simple as not FaceTuning out stretch marks felt like such a liberating act of protest. And also reclaiming a platform that I was basically bullied off of.”

And that was the beginning of a new chapter for Gerges’ public persona. In 2018 he posted a shirtless picture of himself along with a lengthy caption about why it was “the scariest yet most empowering post I’ve ever made.”

“The feedback was unlike anything that I had ever experienced. It was a lot of people from the LGBT community, not just men, who were sharing with me very similar stories about their struggles with their body image and experiencing an eating disorder. That’s when it clicked for me. I’d felt so alone when I was 19-20 years old but here I was getting all these messages from people telling me they’d had the exact same journey but were ashamed to talk about it. That’s when I was like ‘this is my calling.’ Let’s shift this conversation.”

Last year, Gerges did a nude photo shoot with NOW Toronto for their annual Body Issue. He posted the nude photos on Instagram when the issue came out and lost 4000 followers.

“You see male models who are thin and muscular pose for pictures just like these, or even more scandalous ones, and those pictures end up in editorials and in ad campaigns for Dolce & Gabbana and Versace.” But when a body like his is nude, he says, the comments move swiftly from praise to criticism. “That double standard is why we need to talk about body positivity and the fact that bodies like mine, which don’t fit into this beauty ideal, experience the world differently and are treated differently because of it. It was crazy to get the backlash for that when thinner, more muscular guys are being praised for the exact same thing.”

Photography by Samuel Engelking

“It was a voice that needed to be heard and a story that needed to be told,” says Samuel Engelking, the photographer who shot the images for the Love Your Body issue. Engelking, who has photographed the likes of Margaret Atwood, Ai Weiwei and MIA, says of working with Gerges, “When we first met on set I was immediately taken by his positive spirit and confidence despite the unusual circumstances of the shoot.”

This newfound confidence is what Gerges’ followers are responding to, and he’s seen a shift in the way they interact with him online, even though the negative and hurtful comments about him, his body and his Middle Eastern identity—even from others in the Arab world—do still keep rolling in.

“Giving up my culture as these, for lack of a better word, these haters would want me to, is not an option,” he says. “I refuse to be shamed out of my culture. It is mine just as much as it is yours. Nothing that you can do will prevent me from embracing being Egyptian and being North African. You cannot take that away from me.”

The post How Mina Gerges Went From Being a Viral Meme to a Body Positivity Champion appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

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topmixtrends · 7 years ago

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THE FINAL PASSAGE of Joan Bauer’s Hope Was Here contains one of the finest analogies I’ve ever read. The eponymous protagonist, whose stepfather has just died, is working one of her last shifts in his diner before she heads off to college:

People say it’s so awful that I only had a real father for less than two years and then had to lose him. I wish like anything he was still here, but it’s like getting an extraordinary meal after you’ve been eating junk food for a long time. The taste just sweeps through your sensibilities, bringing all-out contentment, and the sheer goodness of it makes up for every bad meal you’ve ever had.

Hope Was Here was published in 2000, and since then I’ve searched, mostly in vain, for novels that washed away the taste of poorly written contemporary fiction that did nothing for my mind, even less for my soul. Not one, but two new exemplary short story collections have renewed my faith in American fiction. Sweet and Low by Nick White and Fight No More by Lydia Millet employ a seldom-used conceit: the stories revolve around a cast of characters, and each collection is devoted to a specific geographic locale. White’s incisive exploration of the South — you can practically hear the scrape of a wooden chair across a dusty floor, the rustles of swampy groves, the flies buzzing over a dead dog’s carcass — is beautifully tempered with sincerity and irony, while Millet, choosing present-day Los Angeles for her tightly woven trove of adults and teenagers slowly losing and finding their minds, breathes more life and texture into life into sun-baked Southern California than anything since Robert Altman’s Short Cuts.

A central shtick that alters the expectations of short stories can be a clever method for soliciting a reader’s respect; for example, the minimalism of Lydia Davis’s short stories netted her adulation and a Man Booker Prize. Melded narratives and characters is a tricky feint, but when done well it allows characters to blossom and expand the ways in which they relate to one another and the reader. In fairness to White’s and Millet’s work, neither collection demands that the reader sit down and trace the presence of each story’s DNA in the tale that follows. Both authors are aware, however, of the richness embodied by each of their characters, and if you do grab a pen, as I did, and map out how and where the people in their stories overlap, you’ll be rewarded.

While the first four stories in Sweet and Low do not partake in the central universe conceit, they do share one important, and fatal, story arc: knowledge is power, and more than a little knowledge has the power to unmake you. (“Bird-Headed Monster,” a taut and mordant tale in Fight No More, follows a similar path: a young woman is touring a house in Los Angeles when she learns that her wealthy boyfriend is buying it not for them, but for himself and his fiancée.) Rosemary is the widow of Dr. Arnie Greenlee, and in “The Lovers” she runs into a young man named Hank in an airport. He promptly faints due to low blood sugar — a result of his diabetes, which was first diagnosed by the late doctor, who had also begun an affair with Hank, and took the latter’s grandfather’s watch to be repaired. But Arnie died before the watch could be restored to its owner. Only the reader and Hank know about the affair; Rosemary only knows that her indifference in the bedroom following their only child’s birth helped her grant Arnie permission to have affairs. She does not, however, know about her husband’s fondness for male sexual partners. A meandering terror wraps itself up in White’s prose:

She drives on, thinking.

At the airport, he mumbled something about a watch. Her brain makes some connections. A month or so after Arnie’s death, she was in the bathroom cleaning out his cabinet. […] If she remembers correctly, initials had been carved into the back of it, but she couldn’t make them out, which frustrated her.

[…]

Home from following Hank, she retrieves the watch and holds it in the palm of her hand. It ticks. There are things in this world, she decides, you keep for no particular reason, the things you haven’t yet found a language for.

Arnie’s secret bisexuality isn’t nearly as much of a shock to the reader as the terse, oblique hypothesis about Rosemary’s dual nature, the same nature that happily permitted Arnie to have affairs without her needing to disclose that:

Say, just for conversation, there once lived a girl who was one person — one complete person, not a person for the world and a person for herself. They were one and the same. Then, let’s say, it’s her first week at college, and a boy she trusted, a boy from her hometown even, pushed his way inside her bottom-floor dorm room while her roommate was out. Say he did things to her that split her in two. Right down the middle. Years later, this same girl met a boy who was sweet and unassuming and never curious about the other girl behind the girl, the one she hid so fiercely.

Hank and Rosemary are two very different people bonded by a loss, but there’s just enough precarity in their incipient acquaintance that they lose sight of one another, and ultimately, must seek closure on their own. White has a profound talent, one writers decades senior to him frequently lack, for imbuing his prose with bombs of shock that land with ferocity and precision, leaving a devastation far greater than might be successful in longer stories and many novels. The reader may feel no pity for Pete in “Cottonmouth, Trapjaw, Water Moccasin” — he’d “run off his faggot of a son” many years ago — and that he’s trapped under his lawn mower after a fall, “one leg crushed under the back end” of the machine feels like karma for a bigot. There are, however, horrors in Pete’s own childhood that caused me to stop reading and draw a deep breath before I could continue. After Pete’s mother died, Pete’s father would take him snake hunting:

He was lucky being a boy — his sisters, after their mother died, had to deal with things much worse […] This usually happened late on summer weekends when his father was high on corn whiskey. His sisters slept in the room next to his, and on those nights, he could hear the terrible grunting coming through the walls.

That a snake slowly slithers into the crevasse in which Pete is pinned feels like the literal manifestation of his failure to defend his sisters and accept his son. He tries, in vain, to aim handfuls of soil at the snake, but it remains unmoved, “refusing to be anything but predator.” Dying is easy. Staring down near-certain death is much harder.

The title story — which also opens the latter two-thirds of the book, a section titled “The Exaggerations” that focuses mostly on the Culpepper family, emigrants from Illinois to and residents of an unnamed town in Mississippi — posits a simple but ambitious theme: our families influence, and often dictate, everything about us. Forney Culpepper’s father Reuben died of a heart attack — weak hearts run in the family — so his widow Felicia decides to give stardom a shot with her beautiful voice. When she prepares to audition for a talent scout in Memphis, a 10-year-old Forney finds himself at the helm of a quest for self-awareness:

The two of them — mother and son — gaze at the reflection of themselves wearing their new getups. Like different people, Forney thinks. Happier people. But is he happy? Or on the way to happiness? This singing stuff makes her happy, and he guesses he’s happy that she’s happy. But is he?

In the six stories that constitute most of Sweet and Low, the perils of being a writer are given attentive, and often hilarious, consideration. Buck Dickerson, Felicia’s music teacher and a sugar-addicted radio host, reveals to Forney that his son, a member of the Peace Corps, harbors literary ambitions: “My son says he wants to be a poet. Can you believe that? I didn’t know people decided to be poets. […] Thought it just happened to them, or something, like a car wreck.”

White unfolds the tales of Forney’s Aunt Mavis and Uncle Lucas with such care that reading about them is one of the purest abject pleasures in the book. Told in the first person, the story picks up once Forney lives full-time with his aunt and uncle, after his mother leaves for Nashville to pursue stardom full-time: “We were, for better or worse, a family. We had long dinners together […] we saw plays and ballets in Jackson […] took weekend vacations to Biloxi and Memphis and New Orleans.”

But for all their cultural excursions, the Culpepper family has its share of disappointments too:

In her younger days […] [Mavis] fancied herself something of a poet. She […] had plans of attending graduate school, but after graduation, my grandfather suddenly died, so she stayed behind to “see about things” for a while. Twenty years later and she was still seeing about things and remained single.

Nina the real estate agent is single too; she is our foyer into Fight No More. In “Libertines,” she is showing a house to a group of three men, one of whom, she thinks she was told by a colleague, is an African dictator. Millet has a knack for two specific, brilliant devices. First, infusing her prose with the part-confident, part-bored, part-ironic intonation of upper middle-class conversation in Los Angeles:

Had the person who lived in the house died?

Well yes, in fact, she’d wanted to say, because that’s the only way anyone ever leaves a house this stunning.

Second, trading from the beginning on the necessary maintenance of fact as fiction. Business cannot be conducted if apparent flaws are pointed out with loudspeakers and fluorescent flags:

This house always seemed to be waiting for the mudslide that would drag it down the cliff, snagging those giant, spiky plants as it fell. Chunks of frame and plaster would be dangling off plant stalks as beds and espresso makers tumbled down the hillside. Till that day came: 2.8 million, if you don’t mind.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” might be one of the best short stories I’ve read in the last 10 years. Millet dances between first and second person in the story, an interesting effort given the speaker is Jeremy, approximately age 16, who has decided to cut school and openly masturbate in his bedroom, knowing the real estate agent will be bringing a family on a tour through his house. For all his boorish antics, Jeremy’s internal musings are peppered with Latin, and he is concerned about his mother, who is reeling in the aftermath of the boy’s father leaving to start a family with a younger woman. Still, he celebrates when Marnie and the prospective buyers walk in on him during his orgasm, then rush out: “Murmurs outside the door. He felt a grin spreading. Reached for the Kleenex. There you go. Veni, vidi, vici. Julius Caesar shit.”

Later, Jeremy starts to roam the empty house. At his mother’s vanity, he does something he tends to avoid: he lets himself reach for a memory. Millet’s prose here is charmingly graceful, a turn from the obscenity-laced monologue from moments before:

He used to watch her put up her hair. Like in the movies: rich kids watched their mothers get ready. Good feeling. Dinner parties and evening wear. She’d been so deft with bobby pins it looked like sleight of hand. Magic, he called it then. He flashed to one time when her long hair, in the space of a few seconds, was transformed into a great shining round atop her head.

That shit looked elegant. Audrey Hepburn. “Magic mama.” She picked him up and twirled him. He’d been so small. Hard to believe.

Jeremy’s actions and their consequences create a breathtaking paradigm for Fight No More. One of the buyers, who sees right through his bullshit and tells him so, causes him to look back on his childhood, which in turn exposes a brief glimpse of his truth: there’s a difference between anger and hatred, and what he felt was anger at the “paterfamilias […] sowing his seed in younger soil.” The sardonic humor of the teen boy masturbating as a stunt is not forgotten, because Jeremy, in order to do something nice but not melodramatic for his mother, decides to use her credit card to fill the house with flowers. When his new stepmother — pregnant with his soon-to-be half-sibling — invites him to dinner, he is forced to examine the reality of his new existence. Being a teenager, Jeremy masks exploration of a new family dynamic as “a movie [that] could really crack you up,” but each step he takes as a new stepson, the child of a newly divorced couple, the grandson of a woman exhibiting signs of dementia, he reconsiders. Millet isn’t out to provide redemption, but she is interested in how people change when they finally come to terms with change. Jeremy remembers a cousin’s baptism he’d attended:

In the church she was dressed in a snow-white robe and smiled without end. She beamed. His whole life, he could swear, he’d never seen anyone look that happy.

Do you renounce Satan, the author and prince of sin?

I do.

“I renounce him,” he muttered under his breath […]

And all his works?

I do.

Jeremy wasn’t alone in his bedroom when Nina and her clients walked in. He was getting off to a cam girl named Lexie, living in Carpinteria, almost certainly underage. The small degree of respect he affords her — “She wasn’t dumb” — is important because, in “Stockholm,” the reader receives a visceral look inside Lexie’s mind. Her stepbrothers are meth dealers, her mother a drunk, and her stepfather has been raping her since she was 16. There is something astonishing, even electrifying, about Jeremy’s offer for her to come to Los Angeles and be au pair to his new stepsister; it energizes the book. Lexie’s other duty will be to keep an eye on Aleska, Jeremy’s paternal grandmother, a retired professor of the art and propaganda of fascism, who is selling her home to live in the guest house on her son’s property. “Jem” gives the new babysitter a quick rundown about Professor Korczak:

[D]on’t be fake Christian, she’s Jewish, well, kind of, but she was raised by some kind of missionaries so she’ll see through it. Tell her about your trashy family. I mean, don’t mention the Internet sex biz […] just try to be a straight-shooter. She won’t mind the white-trash part, as long as you’re smart and not rude. She likes an edge but she really doesn’t like rudeness. Treat her with respect, she’s had a hard life. Her whole family died in the Holocaust when she was six.

Aleska has experienced other losses too, namely her husband to suicide. It’s unclear when this happened — later in the book it’s hinted that Paul was still a child — but his widow does not dwell on what cannot be changed. In many ways, “Gram” is the hero of Fight No More. Her wry, self-possessed manner, her request for stiff cocktails in the evening, her general determination to keep track of her marbles before biology takes over and slowly sends them spinning off, one by one, into the darkness of senility, is nothing short of fearless. Some of the book’s best dollops of humor come from a woman whose framed posters of swastikas unnerve her new daughter-in-law.

Members of Lexie’s family, residents of Carpinteria, turn up in Los Angeles too. A content warning should be issued for “I Can’t Go On.” I don’t fault Millet or the publisher for not providing it, but anyone who has suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a relative/family friend should proceed with caution.

Both White and Millet are keen observers of the interpersonal expectations between people who are sure of themselves and people who aren’t. The chasm that separates fully functioning adulthood and reality is often invisible to characters in both books. “The Men” in Fight No More is a dizzyingly paranoid but mildly comic tale about a group of male midgets who are performing repairs on a house. Its resident, a production executive who “otherwise leads a normal life” but whose husband has left her, becomes unnerved “when the midgets grew into regular-sized men overnight.” Nina, the agent selling the house, wonders if she’s become “a magnet for eccentrics” in the aftermath of a lover’s death. The unnamed narrator of “Break” in Sweet and Low is befriended in college by a girl named Regan and her boyfriend, Forney Culpepper. The latter is by now an aspiring poet, but hasn’t written any poems yet. “Instead, he spent his mornings retyping the work of other poets — Ginsberg, Stevens — on a sky-blue IBM Correcting Selectric II […] When I asked him about it, he said, ‘I’ve not found the right words for me yet, so I’m using other people’s until then.’”

Very rarely in modern American literature is the reader afforded an opportunity to so fully absorb a character that it feels like he’s sitting right next to you. Forney Culpepper is such a creation. I understood his confusion when he glimpses Uncle Lucas kissing his best friend Buddy Cooper’s neck. I respected his reluctance to hear Aunt Mavis untangle the truth from the exaggerations, but appreciated his need for facts. I teared up for him during “The Curator,” White’s tour de force and the penultimate story in Sweet and Low. If you’re from a certain part of the South and you’re immersed in literature, at some point you have to contend with William Faulkner. His name doesn’t appear in White’s book, but we can safely guess that “the Author,” referred to only by that title and capital A, as the force manipulating lives in an unnamed Mississippi town where Forney lives as an adult, is a stand-in for Faulkner’s towering presence as the literary legend associated with the South.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles and I was partly raised in the South, so I appreciated the lack of myopia in both White and Millet’s prose. Both areas function as characters because everyone in “The Exaggerations” is stagnating, paralyzed by circumstance and expectations lowered over time. Aunt Mavis never went to graduate school; Uncle Lucas moved out, took a trip to Canada, died of a heart attack. Homosexuality — repressed, concealed, unidentified — is as common in the South as ostensibly cool and collected facades are in Los Angeles. The sun hangs heavy over both sets of stories, only the one in the Delta is intimidating, and bossy, and the one in Southern California is part of the glossy psychological veneer of the region. And both books end with the yearnings of elderly women.

Sweet and Low and Fight No More share a brutal lesson about human frailty: we are flawed because we want so much more than what we have. This want, this hunger — financial, sexual, physiological, emotional — turns into a blind spot, and often our Achilles’ heel. Attempting to meet that want can take a lifetime, and even then that feeling, the comforting realization that overtakes you as gently as a cotton sheet over your body on a summer night, that we’re sated and at peace, may never come. The only reassurances we’ll ever get are momentary. Fleeting precious seconds of calm and security. By the time we learn this, it’s too late.

Nandini Balial is a writer and copy editor whose work has appeared in the AV Club, the New Republic, Vice, The Week, among others. She lives and works in Texas.

The post Resurrection of the American Short Story: Nick White’s “Sweet and Low” and Lydia Millet’s “Fight No More” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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mayweathermcgregorppv-blog · 8 years ago

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Watch Mayweather Mcgregor Fight Live Stream online

Irish mixed martial artist Conor McGregor will take on eleven-time undefeated boxing champion Floyd Mayweather this summer in one of the most mismatched—albeit predictable—fights in history.

LIVE NOW: http://mayweathermcgregorlivestream.us/

Unless the world is turned on its head, the showdown between So, in an attempt to hype up fans who will fork over $89.95 or more for Showtime’s pay per view experience, the two fighters have turned to hurling insults at each other riddled with racial undertones and offensive language during a four-day world tour. The unnecessary charade and name-calling does a disservice to the sport and industry behind boxing, and continues promoting the toxic masculinity that has spurred a continued rise in hate crimes against virtually all marginalized communities. Whether McGregor knows it or not, his statements about Mayweather and black bodies in general fanned the flames of racism that have plagued professional sporting events since their inceptions. He’s railed on Mayweather for being illiterate during their nightly onstage shouting matches, suggested his appearance lacks that of a "real man" and yelled at him to "dance for me, boy"—a belittling phrase white men have used to demean black men for centuries. In a now-viral interview along the red carpet for the world tour, McGregor described black boxers as “dancing monkeys” in a scene from the third film in the Rocky series. His father has since had to come out in defense of the Irish fighter, promising he isn’t racist and that the upcoming match has nothing to do with skin color. "Race is a factor in all aspects of our lives," ESPN analyst Domonique Foxworth said Thursday. "It’s a factor particularly apparent in boxing because they always traffic in that. In this particular case, I think Floyd has made a lot of money by playing up or playing into the historic black trope of 'the black brute.' He’s played that up, and people hate that and get angry, and they want to see him put in his place. "There is no one more perfect to combat that in this day in age than Conor McGregor," Foxworth continued. "A lot of poor white citizens in America have been angry for many years for what they feel to be is this society turning against them. Conor has embodied that and become that, and is an awful lot like our president in that he is moving from one arena that he’s been very successful to an arena that he has not had very much success, and he’s talking very brass and offending people, hoping to have success." Mayweather is also guilty of pushing the lines for what could be considered appropriate to say during a televised event, calling McGregor a "faggot" during one of their heated exchanges. That term has been used by countless attackers as they beat and kill LGBTQI citizens. It’s a loaded phrase that has become even more problematic as the rate of trans folks’ murders have surged in 2016, with figures on their way to breaking records in 2017. It doesn’t matter if McGregor isn’t actually a racist, or whether Mayweather truly has respect for the queer community or not. What does, however, is that both men are wholly aware of the attention their words will receive. In fact, that’s exactly why they’ve said what they have: By calling each other derogatory nicknames and in creating such controversies, the fighters are playing into universal themes of racism, oppression and hatred. The two celebrities are knowingly exploiting the current polarization amongst intercultural communities in an effort to maximize the profits both will receive the night of their match. If McGregor and Mayweather’s antics are the new normal in promotional boxing tours, what will young fighters of all creeds have to look up to? As long as this type of rhetoric continues in boxing and professional sports, high-profile events like the one arriving in late-August will only continue to become more divisive, damaging and dirtyboth stars will play out like a typical rollercoaster ride: hours and hours of standing in line, anxiously waiting for the big moment to arrive, followed by 20 to 30 seconds of adrenaline-pumping action before a hard and fast stop completes the entire experience. The fight, scheduled for August 26, could be one of the most viewed (and expensive) boxing matches in recent years, trailing behind Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao’s underwhelming "fight of the century" in 2015. But, in essence, it’s a total nothing burger. Save for the fact that Mayweather came out of retirement to bring his total victories to 50-0, and that McGregor is an MMA fighter entering the boxing ring instead of his normal octagon, the outcome will likely be no more thrilling than it is expected.

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djrelentless · 8 years ago

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“Breaking Dad”

(a Father's Day greeting to a father who wasn't there)

June 15, 2014 at 7:41am

Last year this time I had just learned that my father had died in 2005 of AIDS. It was a bittersweet moment. For years I had dreamed of seeing his face as I told him of all the things that his faggot-ass son had accomplished. All the things I had done without him. All the places I had seen that he would never see. But I would never get that chance.

That first conversation with my step-mother was really hard to wrap my head around. I spent so many years angry at my father and now it was over.

About 3 days ago, I reconnected with an old roommate and friend. It was so good to hear from her after all these years. She told me that she had wondered what had happened to me and would go by my father’s home to ask had he heard from me. He told her that he did not have a son. I don’t know why, but that really hurt to hear her say that. Probably because I could hear him saying it. Probably with a few beers under his belt.....and still bitter after our confrontation on Thanksgiving of 1991.

Sad to think that a part of me still wants his approval and acceptance......even after all these years. Even after the knowledge of his death.

Suddenly I am seven years old again. I am at my mother’s mother’s house. It’s my birthday. I had spoken to him two days before and he said he would stop by to see me on my birthday. I remember being so happy to think that my dad was gonna spend some time with me. All I ever wanted was for him or my mother to be with me since I spent most of my time being shuffled between my grandmother and my great grandmother’s house.

I remember I woke up early that day. I picked out my best clothes. I ate my breakfast in a hurry. I figured my dad would have been there by noon so we could spend the day together. The morning hours moved really slow, but by noon I had decided to wait on the front porch. I watched every car that went past 40th Street and 32nd Ave. There was a generic gas station diagnally across the busy highway.

By 3 PM, my grandmother started trying to convince me to come in and open my present. She had baked my favorite......chocolate on chocolate cake. But I wasn’t havin’ it! I didn’t want to do anything until my father got there.

Funny thing about being a kid......the strength of your hope is boundless. I was not giving up because I really believed that my dad was just running late or was stuck at work. But he was still coming to see me.

By 6 PM , my grandmother made me come in for dinner. I could barely eat for trying to listen for a car door in the driveway. But there was no car sounds outside at all. I remember beginning to feel doubt. I reluctantly opened my gift from grandma. It was the game of LIFE. What an ironic gift! I had asked for it because I had seen the commercial and I dreamed that would play it with a brother and perhaps my father. My grandmother offered to play the game with me, but I didn’t realize it until years later....my grandmother didn’t read well. I don’t think she made it out of elementary school. She was a very smart businesswoman. She definitely knew how to manage her money, but I remember her getting frustrated because she couldn’t understand what teh directions were for the board game. I think she thought by playing the game with me that she could take my mind off of the promise that my dad had made.

Unable to play the game with me, I quickly drew my attention to the porch again. we still had about and hour of daylight. There was a chance that he would still show up. So, I returned to the rocking chair and began counting cars again. As the sun began to set in the Tampa summer sky and the mosquitoes were feasting on me, my grandmother told me to come inside. I protested and she ordered me in. Tears began to fall and my grandma held me as I accepted defeat. Lied to once again.

Now I am 13 and I have gone to live with my father and his new wife after my mother had been arrested again on drug charges. There were already 2 kids and one on the way when my half brother, Zuberi and I went to live with them. Often my dad would come home drunk and very abusive. I was awkened one night as he had cornered my step-mother in the kitchen of this tiny two bedroom apartment. I jumped up and got in the way before he could hit her again. He immediately punched me in the stomach. Knocked the wind right out of me.

“So, you think you a man now, huh?” he taunted.

When I caught my breath, something made me be a smart ass and I began singing “We Shall Overcome”. He was not amused.

My next thought is of me at the age of 14 and my father arranging for a “family friend” named Carol to show me what a man and woman do. Apparently, he and my uncle had slept with her on a regular basis. When you are a teenaged boy, sex isn’t a difficult task. Hell....if the wind blows the right way any boy would be sex ready. I remember Carol came out of the room and declared that there was nothing wrong with me and that I knew how to handle a woman. My dad smiled and said “I knew that you had it in ya!”

And now I am suddenly 16. I am packing my stuff at my Uncle Herb’s place. I lived there with my father. A noisy neighbor had spied on me as I kissed my boyfriend goodbye in his car as he dropped me off. Lousie was her name and she couldn’t wait until the next morning to casually stop by during breakfast to tell my father and Herb. My father lost his mind and started yelling at teh top of his lungs. He smoked. So, it wasn’t that loud. He said “As long as you live under this roof you are gonna have to keep that sissy shit away from here!”

I had decided to rent a room from a friend’s mother rather than spend another day in that apartment with my dad. Throughout my childhood I kept telling myself that one day I would be in control of my life and that was the only thing that kept me going. I figured after that statement, there was no time like the present.

“You’ll be back. You ain’t got no real job to take care of ya-self!” he said as I was dragging my last bag out of Herb’s place.

I made sure that he never knew of the time I spend homeless and slept in the bus station downtown while still attending High School and worked at The Tampa Tribune. He never knew of the days that I went hungry or only had tuna sald sandwiches to survive on. My pride would not let me. I was never going back to any place that he lived.

So, by the time we had gotten to that awful Thankgiving at his mother’s house, too many years of conflict and homophobia had passed. So, as he told me how I was ruining his name by being a faggot and how I was gonna die of AIDS if I kept on running around with those punks, I could not hold my tongue. I felt that I had to defend myself and get somethings off my chest.

I chose not to tell him that I had already contracted the virus. I was already living with HIV+ when he said those words to me. Instead I said....

“You got a lotta nerve! You ain’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of and you wanna tell me how to live my life! Fuck you! This punk makes good money and takes care of hisself. I don’t mooch off my brother!”

I thought he was gonna jump across the table and hit me. But he didn’t. He looked like I had murdered my grandmother. He was about to say something, but his mother told him to get out. She threw him and his girlfriend, Michelle out of her house. That was the last time I saw him.

In this past year of reconnecting with my family, I have learned a lot about the man who was my father. None of what I learned has med me like him in the least. But I do feel sorry for him. Whatever love he had inside of him, my mother killed that when she left me with him and ran off with her boyfriend. It must have been hell to realize that she had used him to get out of her mother’s house.

In fact, the only good memory I have of my father is the few times that I went to find him at his hang out bar on Nebraska Avenue and he invited me inside to show me how to play pool.

I can’t say “I love you, Dad.”

I can’t say that I looked up to you or that you were there for me. You weren’t.

But how could you have been? You weren’t even there for yourself. You never took care of you so that you could take care of the people who were depending on you.

And in some strange way, instead of hating you on this Father’s Day I just hope that you are finally happy and resting in peace. Lord knows.....you need it after the life you led.

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