Brown

Every day of my life I'm the target of abuse, because I am not like you. I know! It's weird, right? Weird but true. I'm an actual ethnic minority, which is also really strange, because most welfare offices operate on the flawed premise that people who come from the biggest continent on Planet Earth (also known as "Africa": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora) are rare as human beings, hence the marketing terms "urban demographic" and "minority", which is not actually true in any of the numbers I've ever seen (creative accounting aside), you know, because of the size of it. Nor does your status as a descendant of the formerly vast Spanish Empire entitle you to cash money, gifts, and/or prizes, or anything else that's totally free. Again, see the real numbers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaniards. You read it right, amigo. That number is 48 MILLION PEOPLE. Stick that on your flag and smoke it!

With that in mind, I use an herbal-based cleansing conditioner that's oddly shelved in the "ethnic" section (read as "black" or "brown"), because apparently the only weirdos with this kind of fucked up hair must be marginalized at each and every opportunity that presents itself to the makers of said products, just in case you somehow wake up one day to realize that you are not alone. In fact, there are BILLIONS of you muthfuckas, a'ight? I know what you're thinking: "Mommy" is trapped in a weirdly fantastical bubble that is suburban America, a place where "white" people think they are normal, and you are the oddball. I know, because every time I go into a commonly overpriced drugstore chain here in New York, some bitch behind the counter pretends not to see me if I may (rarely) need her help because the self-service machine is fucked up, just so she can signal to me anew my lowly position in relation to her, in case I forgot that my status as "Other" did not scrub off my skin during bath time.

It's become such a joke with my peeps around here, that I openly signal my understanding of the situation to any other "minorities" waiting in line who are similarly ignored by retail clerks (read: black folk. Yep, in 21st century New York), by pantomiming a scrubbing motion up and down my arm, mouthing to them: "It didn't wash off me, either!", then pointing to them, "Didn't wash off on you neither? No?", finally throwing up my hands in mock frustration to shrug my shoulders and just walk away. What's a n***a to do, right? The ad copy on a brown-colored bottle of cleanser marketed to "n****s" is so offensive, I had to read it a couple of times just to get it down. I think I counted at least six references to my "unmanageable" "unique" "twisted" "natural" hair, like I am some fucking Aboriginal Pygmy from New Guinea, recently discovered by a jauntily-dressed British explorer on safari.

I am not your particular pygmy dream child to fret over, Weird Marketing Wacko. I am just not entirely "white", like billions of other muthafuckas on the planet. Deal with it, yo. 'Cause we fuckin' do, every damn day. Every day we deal with your inbred isolated pocketed of protected weirdness, ya frightened Hobbit folk. Get wit' it in this century. People MOVE AROUND the globe. Fuck! Alright, now that we got that mess taken care of, let's look to my numbers for the real deal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_people_%28Canada%29. Join me here in my land that is without delusional fantasies. It's fun! Ain't no one throwin' a better party than Acadians. Trust! I am your "One Percent", and I am the home you seek in this time of sickness among the rare who remain healthy. Come back to me in this world. 
We are forever, my love.

"To infinity and beyond!"

Queen of Denial (A River in Egypt)

Life in tha 'hood can be fun, challenging, scary, tense, and totally inaccurate, all at once. In a quest for self-determination and a carefully calculated cutting of ties with the past (to create a false new one), folks often made up versions of their selves, in lieu of access to any real information. Enter into downtown Brooklyn me and my friend from school daze, an actual African-born woman from Ghana, which created a weird dynamic around her wherever she went, fueled by Spike Lee's wildly exaggerated and often misguided tales of Brooklyn, designed to shock and amaze his exotic-seeking (and rich) white audiences.

L.I.U.'s downtown campus was exactly what Fulton Street was at the time: an almost totally black neighborhood, with a few Hispanic girls thrown into the mix for "diversity". I was given a free ride to Howard University back in the day, because black campuses struggled to right a segregation not of our generation's creation, but it was a hard way to go. Many of the kids we met in the late 80s had never spoken to a "white" girl before, so me and my suburban friend felt as adrift and lost at sea as my ancestors were in their boat rides over.

It made for some comic times that were colored darkly, like a group of earnest but completely unrealistic young men who sought freedom of expression through their public exposition on their collective hatred of "the white man", but not literally, of course (just in case I was the "PoPo" undercover and at work in their college dorm room environment, at the tender age of 18). They mocked my friend's "white" accent, which is actually a fairly standard New York one, as she ripped into them for their phony Ebonics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebonics).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra

In the glow of Junior's cheesecake and fried chicken joint, we were forced to improvise identities for the sake of our protection while we walked the streets, and with my ethnicities, it was pretty easy for me to do. I slicked back my hair into a "fly" ponytail and painted my lips bright red, swinging my head 'round with big ghetto-sized silver hoops. It gave me room to breathe and "pass", but I still looked at Dr. Zizmor's* ads for ripped earlobe surgery with trepidation. It was the violent girl gang thang to do back in the day; sneak up on a 'ho, and rip the earring right the fuck off her ear. 
Don't even think about wearing gold or fancy sneaks on the train, which I didn't. I couldn't have afforded the gear anyway. *(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Zizmor)

And so I was privy to conversations most average white people have never heard, like how "The Man" keeps us down: "Right, sista?" said one Latino girl (no, not the ancient Latin kind of Holy Roman) to me, as she turned to me listening in, on the edge of a group in front of campus, for support. It was a shock, and I hitched in a tiny breath no one noticed without skipping a brief beat: "Yeah, girl!", and I was in.

Little did we know the depths of American ignorance about the lands they'd been ripped out of, because most of them did not know that my girl from school was actually Ghanaian from the real west coast of Africa. They'd flown over on a plane though, and had an above-ground swimming pool that I certainly didn't have. None of them could really know us, because the truth would put our lives in real danger, but we laughed about it in private and behind closed doors. Oh, shit! That girl really believes she's descended from some Egyptian Pharaoh? Is that where she think she from, girl?! Fuuuuck!

Because, you see, me and my friend from school knew one very pretty and very real first generation Egyptian-American girl named Dahlia growing up: a perfectly lovely name for a ringleted girl of olive complexion from a Christian family in Egypt, and someone who is most definitely NOT Kush or Nubian, but that's a story for another day. 

For now, let's look to the blood for our real genetic history, because the blood doesn't lie. The truth will out! See you 'round the way, some day or another, mes amis. 

Your homework for today, 'hood rats:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Kush

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubia
http://bit.ly/1Lr7oOm 

"Smokey"

Years ago I smoked cigarettes, which is hard for many people (including me) to fathom. Why?! Truth be told, I was a horrible smoker, which was why I began in the first place: I'm not a binge drinker like many of the kids I grew up with. "Smokey" was actually another one of the nicknames created by my "bestie", like "Uker". I'd puke if I drank too much, you know, because too much alcohol makes you sick. 

And so I compensated for not having an alcohol addiction by using cigarettes to calm my stomach from an excess of beer drinking, something college kids ruthlessly monitored me over (like my normal sleep patterns and continued persistent refusals to party overmuch), to keep their own massive consumptions obscured. I knew it, just like I knew my Dad smoked, as did a few of my grandparents, in response to life stress and their own addictive patterns. 

Like many Gen X'ers, I found myself wrecked by the consequences of other peoples' blatant disregard for my health, well-being, and safety. After years of being bored and sickened by someone else's stupid habit, I finally broke the cycle of abuse for me by quitting smoking cold turkey, because I had several bouts of DVT, related to knee surgery. 

I knew I was never an addict by the time I tried to use the lowest dose of nicotine patches available, because I had to leave my art director's job mid-day from a sick stomach; the severe nausea healthy people have in response to the harsh chemical cocktail designed to addict that's in cigarettes. For me, the cycle has forever been broken by my iron will, though the mentally ill receptionist at that former job, who compulsively gossiped as a political weapon (which I successfully used against her), merely changed the tone of her attack from noting my smoking habit to any other thing she felt she could get away with. 

Today I ask you to break the bad habits imposed upon you by others (those that were created in response to repeated personal attacks), by getting clean and healthy, like our fabulous health official Dr. Mary Bassett; herself an educated healer and fellow New Yorker, also caught in the twin traps of getting by on nothing, while fighting a corruptly biased system. Today we declare our collective good health, for all the peoples of the world still fighting oppression. I got your back, girl. 

May G-d bless you and keep you safe, 

in these final days of hope and light.

Quitting Smoking:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/about/commish-bio.shtml

https://a816-nycquits.nyc.gov/pages/homepage.aspx

The Tobacco Industry:

http://www.thestreet.com/topic/25884/top-rated-equity-tobacco.html 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/ 

A series of black and white self-portraits I made for (and sent to) my old college boyfriend, who needed support during his time at McGill University while I worked three jobs at RISD, which he blamed me for. He retaliated by transferring out of Oneonta before me during my last semester there, supposedly because I "insisted" on "wasting my time" at art school. Amen to you who are my similarly afflicted.

1-866-NYC-QUITS (1-866-697-8487) 

http://www.nysmokefree.com/ 

Piano Jimmy

"Piano Jimmy" and Eunice, back in the day.

By now you know that my dad is a "one of a kind" sumthin' you don't wanna mess with. It's disconcerting for newcomers and out-of-towners sometimes. White, with flava, tho?! How'd you do that? How'd that happen to y'all? Yeah, I know. It don't wash off me neither, yo.

Well, squirrel friends, it's called "Old School", and it ain't exactly learned on your particular mean street. Yeah, those streets are mine, too. No, amigo, it's way back time. You see, when I was a kid, my father didn't even know where his father was, or what name he used, because my Ole Grandad didn't just hand out info like that, not even to family people, because in my line, family might be the first fellow who do you wrong, know what I mean?

Yeah, you do. It's like that with my folk, and so it is with me, too. 
Oh, I can keep a line on 'em any time I want to, because this New York-grown girl knows how to keep a light touch on her folk without putting too much pressure on 'em (because they sure as heck can't handle that, yo), but I didn't learn my all my skills from that paternal girl you see next to big Jimmy, mes amis.

No, my Grandma checked out young, too. But what my dad did have for me growing up was a little black book, the kind that he showed me once in awhile, because he taught me where to find it in his closet. 
It was in the front pocket of one of his suit jackets that I gathered for my mom to go the dry cleaners every week for his Mad Man-style job. 

You know, the kind tailored at "Wallach's" in the old Nanuet mall, 
made just for him off them measurements cards in the leather-chaired back of the store, girl. Yeah, but that was just another one of my many, many jobs, too, along with gatherin' up the wash, takin' down them clothes pinned to the line before it storms outside...there ain't nuthin' this ole girl don't know by now, feel me on it?

'Course you do, 'cause you been through it, too. And that's how me and my people did it: sometimes poorly, but always with great heart and soul, because we managed to survive without entirely cutting the cord to the mainland, you know? 

When we wanted to get a bead on our old Acadian boy, the one who knew how to play a reel or two for you at midnight on the "piana", drunk but still way betta than you'd ever be, we knew what to do. 

You'd go get lil' Jimmy's black book and look for "J", because that's where it was written for me to see: Piano Jimmy, under the letter "J" in my dad's old black phone book.

Come on down and see me when you want to, mes gens. I ain't forgot them old ways any day of the week we got, at any time that's good. "Happy Father's Day" to you, as well.

Happy Birthday to Me

When I was growing up, birthdays were rare breaks from my very strict norm. It was the one day (read that again: ONE DAY) of the year when I was allowed to choose what we had for dinner as a family, and what kind of cake would be served as dessert. As I got older (say, around 7 or 8 years old), birthdays became trading opportunities for my brothers to petition me with (ahem, more like, try to strong arm me into), by giving up my birthday dinner for money. If I switched out my usual spaghetti and meatball dinner with something more palatable to them, ("So boring! You pick the same thing every year!"), something they preferred, like spare ribs, they'd give me an extra $10 or $20 bucks for my birthday, which was really money for the Christmas gifts I'd spend for them, and they knew it, because it came up quickly on the heels of December 17th. Everything in our household was up for negotiation: my birthday, my gifts, my privacy, my body, even the food I waited all year to have free from strife, or so I thought. 

We were desperate for these few scant "outs" from our daily lives, which my parents could not tolerate as well, because they bartered between each other over just about everything, like a couple of spoiled and highly deprived children. It was excruciating to endure and bear witness to, and so, birthdays lost their luster eventually, too, just like everything else in that house did, quickly becoming another day to me, and a very abusive one that was rife with potential conflict at that. In short, I grew up, even when the people around me couldn't or wouldn't, stuck on just one speed or another. You want my cake that badly? Sure, take it, I guess. I mean, what the fuck?! It's readily available food! What gives? They became greedy, grasping, rabid animals in the face of this one freedom we had among the crushing grinding reality of our day-to-day life that my parents so hated. So, as I matured, it went: first, it was my simple chocolate cake with whipped cream and canned peaches that my grandmother had perfected over the years, next it was my humble pasta dinner so that I could have money to buy the few things I wanted, needed or liked. In short, I became a mother, as the people around me began pushing and pulling against one another after I caved into their stronger desires. 

At the end of the day, it was just a spaghetti and meatball dinner, covered with tomato sauce and coated with grated cheese on top. Shit, I could make that any time I wanted to, with some advanced planning. I was already a master chef by age ten, absorbing and inhaling my mom's few scant cookbooks in the pantry, because she considered cooking a plebeian chore for lesser minds, far beneath her "advance degrees in science" kind of mind, a skewed and warped view of her "feminism" loudly pronounced through a wedding gift titled  "The 'I Hate to Cook' Cookbook" that sat on the pantry shelf in accusation. It spoke to her desperation for some kind of legitimacy, one that she would never really be able to achieve on her own, given the problems inherent with her brain chemistry. She wasn't bashing against oppression. She came up against her own inequities, and creative cooking was just another one of her shortcomings that she cleverly hid, saying that baking was more precise and to her liking, because the measurements were like her lab concoctions at work, which were so much more important than us and our dinnertime. 

And so it went throughout the years, as I watched these days ripped away from me one by one in a type of silent horror show, like the throwaway milestones they had become to my family. First, it was the food I liked, then my gifts were traded for money given grudgingly, shoved at me from across the kitchen table, or thrust hastily into my hand as we passed each other by in the hallway, on my way to my childhood bedroom. My supposedly big adult years became birthday bashes they could use to manipulate one another with, and also use against me to dominate me with their far more pressingly petty needs. I knew it went haywire one year, when I found myself eating grossly over-sweetened cake that I did not like nor want, in my grandmother's overheated apartment, that I grew sick over with a painful food headache from yet another forced ingestion that had to take place in front of my very sick godmother, to placate her mental illnesses through her viciously depraved sweet tooth that she angrily substituted over actual medication, in tribute to her before I was finally allowed to reach my intended destination of a Sushi dinner my sick mother paid for with her birthday coupon, which she promptly screwed up by falling down on a slight sidewalk incline to the restaurant the moment I was distracted by opening the door for her in the bitter cold night. 

Whenever I folded in family, they ruined it gleefully and spitefully, right in front of my face. My brothers took away my 40th from me cruelly as well, co-opting the play I wanted to see with one of their selections instead, picking the restaurant and meeting place, booking a hotel for their families' comfort and enjoyment by pushing me into a forced engagement that I hated every minute of, culminating in my nephew taking and eating the birthday cake right off my plate in front of them without bothering to ask anyone about, that they pretended to ignore. In families with rampantly untreated mental illnesses, I was simply another pawn they tried to pass around abusively, as a covert excuse to hide their real intentions. Such was force of their hatred against me.

The next morning after that 40th birthday debacle, I found myself sick and throwing up into a tote-bag that I had bought from a breast cancer charity in honor of my cousin's successful battle against Stage Four Lymphoma (I bought her one for Christmas, too): on the subway, and in full view of fellow passengers, because I no longer drank as much alcohol as my family did anymore (I was well into MMA training at the time), stumbling through a full-blown snowstorm, stopping to heave in big gulps of cold air so as to not get sick again in public, desiring only to climb four flights up a rundown Brooklyn townhouse to an apartment I could barely afford but made due with through my salary by finding a rare rent stabilized place in a good, safe neighborhood. 

I knew something had to give, and that something was me, because they would kill me if I allowed this to go on. Certainly, they had bankrupted me until I had nothing left except myself to give. And so it went on: over these preceding next few years, I fought battle after battle with everyone in my family, as they deliberately turned their backs on me one by one, during my time of greatest economic need (which had never happened of such duration and acuteness before), to finally, in this year, achieve the real success my family has always needed. How did I do it? By allowing them to bash me bloody, body and soul, pushing my body and brain to its' limits, to achieve the actualized success of a self-sustaining kind, the type my people have always needed, by becoming a leader who is a force to be reckoned with, and on to the destiny I have always been fated to be, recounted here as a Queens' true life tale about the real Game of Thrones.

This year I will order food that I want, off the menu of a female warrior who runs her very own kitchen, cooking her very own type of food, in this town we call home, paid through blood, sweat, and tears covertly disguised as a paltry birthday lunch on my mother's dime, long overdue and sorely lacking. Finally on this day, our day has come. And so as my birthday approaches, so does our day together. As a united people, we will move forward through the power of a forceful realization felt in my body and soul, a queen to be linked and joined to her destiny at long at last. Enjoy this 17th day in winter in remembrance of me and on the house, to be always paid by me through The House of Doucette. Long may we reign, in peace and in victory. Amen to you, my children, from your ever-loving Mother in Christ, who is also Marie the Beautiful, Marie the Strong, Marie the Brave, and Marie the Brilliant, the very words you spoke near me to invoke the spirit that will be here forevermore. We have won. The fruits of my success will be yours to savor eternally ever after, on this 45th birthday of mine in the year of Our Lord 2014, the 17th day of December will forever and always be known as my true Mother's Day because it is for you, my people.

My 39th birthday at my grandmothers' house, December 17th, 2008. I made a minor typo in the photo caption when I posted it on Facebook back in 2008, which was immediately pointed out to me in typical "clever" hipster fashion as an error, unsolicited as it was by a older and supposedly more powerful man from my employed publishing past.