The Chaos Page 7

  Whatever we did, the marks just kept on coming. There were three streaks of black on my tummy, from my left side almost all the way to my belly button. The oval patch on my right shoulder blade. I hadn’t told Mum or Dad about it, but I’d found a patch on my scalp, hidden by my hair.

  When the conventional pills and potions hadn’t worked out, I’d started hunting down the other kind. The zit treatments advertised in the ads on my MyFace page. Handwritten cure-all notices taped to telephone poles, the kind of notes that had scrappy tear-off fingers with telephone numbers written on them. Business cards thumbtacked to the notice board in the grocery store. Glory’d been after me to check out this botanica place that she knew about. I’d had to look up what a botanica was. My mom would have sneered at it and forbidden me to ever set foot in an “establishment that pandered to superstition.” That’s what she called churches, tabloids, CNN. Bet you Dad wouldn’t have been so dismissive. When his great aunt had died back in Jamaica last summer, he’d stuck a ton of blue glass bottles upside down over all the branches he could reach on our old crab apple tree out back. To keep her duppy from coming to haunt him. “That woman was mean in life,” he’d told me. “Wouldn’t surprise me if she was vengeful in death, too.”

  As my blemishes got bigger, I’d stopped talking to Glory about them. I’d let her think they were fading.

  Botanicas didn’t sound so dumb to me. Mom didn’t have any trouble trusting in the herbal tinctures from the nutritionist, or in the vitamin and mineral supplements from the drugstore. Looked like botanicas just did the same kind of thing, with a little bit of faith healing thrown in. Mom even believed in the placebo effect. Said it was the marvelous power of the human mind at work. But I just knew the major shit fit she would throw if I suggested a visit to Seer Angel’s Healing Palace, or whatever it was called. That was the kind of thing that got on my last nerve about my parents. The hypocrisy.

  If I concentrated on the marks, I could feel them itch ever so slightly. I mostly didn’t feel them unless I was really quiet and thought about it. But at night, when I was sleeping, I could sense the new ones as they were coming in. Gave me nightmares, and when I woke up, sure enough, there’d be a new one. Mom and Dad didn’t believe me that they showed up overnight. They were sure the marks came in slowly, and I just didn’t notice until they were way obvious. “You young people,” Dad would say with a mocking smile he meant to be a gentle one. “Heads so full up of yourselves that you can’t see your own nose to spite your face. You think I forget what it was like to be young?” That was another thing that drove me nuts about the ’rents. It was like they didn’t trust the report cards I brought home. All those As and Bs. I worked hard for those! But they thought I was too stupid to notice when new marks showed up on my very own body.

  Maybe now that Glory and I were talking again, I’d get her to remind me where that place was. Could hardly be worse than rubbing some greasy goo that smelled of peppermint-flavored rotten eggs into my skin every day and swallowing drops of some other gunk in tepid water every night.

  I checked my face out in the mirror. Damn; three zits on my cheek. ’Bout time I outgrew the acne stage. I dabbed some foundation on over them, blended it in with my fingers. It was a shade darker than the little chart on the back of the bottle said I should wear for my skin tone. Made me look healthier, that’s all. More like my nice summer brown. Then some lip gloss to finish it off. All of My Purple Life lipglass; my favorite.

  The toilet in the next stall flushed, and the stall door opened. I quickly shoved my sleeve back down.

  Someone came out of the stall. Legs bent at odd angles, walking with aluminum crutches. Sorta thick-bodied. At first I thought it was a guy, and I was about to tell him off for being in the women’s washroom. But no, she was a girl, just handsome in a guy kinda way. She looked Sri Lankan, or something, maybe. Dark skin, half her head shaved, the other half black spiky hair, gelled, with the tips dyed green. Eyeliner giving her raccoon eyes. Tight, torn black jeans and a black sweatshirt that read NO ONE IS ILLEGAL. She wedged her crutches under her armpits and started washing her hands at the sink next to mine.

  “I like your hair,” I said to her. She kind of grunted at me, scrubbed her hands dry on her jeans, and headed for the door. I held it open for her. She didn’t even say thanks. Whatever.

  Upstairs, on the way back to my table, I passed by the cute guy. He was leaning over the table, making some earnest point to his buddies. They saw me coming, and their eyes widened. He had his back to me. I touched his shoulder. He turned, looked up, realized that I was the girl he’d been looking at. I bent and whispered into his ear, “Those guys over there with me? They’re my brothers.” Then I walked away before he could respond. Ball was in his court now. I mightn’t be able to let anyone see my awful skin, but at least I could get my flirt on. Behind me, I could hear his buddies laughing. At me?

  Rich had gotten himself a beer. I sat down. “Gimme a taste of that?” I asked.

  He handed it over. Tafari looked at us with alarmed eyes, but he kept his mouth shut. I took a gulp of the beer. Yeah, still tasted like soap, like the first time Dad had let me have a teeny sip of his. I made a face and gave it back. “Why d’you like that stuff?” I shouted through a thumping swell of Beyoncé’s latest song. Maybe there’d be dancing later.

  He grinned. “It’s cheap. Why d’you like that guy?”

  Because it was bugging Tafari. I shrugged. “Looks like he’s checking for me. And he’s cute.”

  “He’s gotta be almost thirty!”

  I glanced over at the table my guy was at. He was deep in conversation again. “You think so?”

  “At least. What, you into old men now?”

  “Uh . . .” Shit. There was a Horseless Head Man, sitting right on the edge of the stage. Well, more like bobbing, actually, with its goofy sea horse grin. Damn. I’d been hoping I wouldn’t see any tonight.

  “Scotch?” said Richard. “You all right?”

  I nodded. He turned to look at where I was staring, and a girl hopped up onto the stage right there, about an inch away from the Horseless Head Man. It floated politely out of her way. They had manners, I’d give them that much. There it hung, about two feet in the air above the stage, invisible to everyone but me.

  The girl tapped on the mike a few times. The music went down. She was a tiny-waisted black girl, about Richard’s age, with straightened and bobbed hair. “Good evening, good evening,” she said. “Thank you all for coming out.”

  If Dad were here, he’d have boomed out a cheery “Good evening” back at her, West Indies style. Thank God Dad wasn’t here.

  “I know you’re all dying to get to the open mike portion of the evening,” she said. Rich groaned.

  “Nah, don’t be front’n, I know how y’all are.” The American slang didn’t quite fit with her north Toronto accent. Girlfriend thought she was on BET. If she started going on about how much she missed Biggie, as if he’d been her next-door neighbor or something, I was going to puke. Betcha none of those U.S. rappers even knew that Drake was Canadian.

  “I mean,” she continued, “who in here isn’t a poet?” She looked around. Not a hand had gone up. She gave a smug smile. “See that? So it’s gonna be an evening of playing to the choir, nah’m saying? Y’all’ll be talking amongst yourselves, poet to poet, so y’all’ll know if somebody’s flow is stank, right?”

  She got a smattering of applause for that. She launched into her thank-yous for everyone who’d sponsored the event. I tuned her out. I looked around for the Horseless Head Man. It’d disappeared. I had to stop using so much styling gel. The fumes were making me see things.

  “Oh, God,” muttered Richard. He was mangling his sheet of paper in his hands. “Ill just walked in.”

  “Holy crap!” said Tafari. “What’s he doing here?”

  The guy who’d just come in the door of the club looked pretty average to me. Medium height, medium handsome guy with a head of perfect, salon-twisted dreads, w
earing an oh-so-cool Nike sweater. Other guys started rushing up to him, doing the two-handed handshake and the sideways hug thing, knocking themselves out to, I dunno, touch the hem of his raiment, or something. I pointed in his direction. “Him?”

  Richard nodded miserably. “He just put out his third album. Guy’s stuff kicks. I can’t screw up in front of him. I just can’t.”

  “Better stop getting fear sweat all over your lyrics, then.”

  Rich gave a horrified look at the wad of paper in his hands, started smoothing it out to go over it again.

  Tafari scowled. “Stop teasing him, Scotch.”

  I scowled back. Ill had that shine on him that people get when they spend a lot of their time performing for an audience. But take that away, and he was just regular. “What’s his real name?” I asked Rich.

  “Huh? Christ, I can’t put my mind on that now, Scotch. What difference does it make?”

  “Just try to remember what it is.”

  “Marlon,” said Tafari. “His real name is Keven Marlon Jones. Keven with two Es, no I.”

  I shook my head. “Keven Marlon Jones? That’s for real? Not Keven Marlon Jones the third, esquire? Not Keven Marlon Jones the High Supreme King of Everything? Or maybe it’s Keven Marlon Jones the Greatest Poet in the World, Before Whom Everyone Else Must Bow Down?”

  Though he tried not to, Tafari was already laughing by the time I was halfway through. Richard started smiling too. It was a weak grin, but it was a grin. He straightened his shoulders, neatly folded the piece of paper, and put it down on the table. Tafari gave me that look he got when he and I were sharing the best joke ever. It was like old times, except it hurt like hell. We both stopped smiling.

  All this time, the MC had been working her way through the list of people to thank for making the event happen. Now she said, “Now, people, I’d like y’all to give it up for Punum!” She started us off clapping, then went to the side of the stage, where the stairs were. Someone in black with spiky hair wheeled herself over to the stage in a wheelchair. It was the rude chick from the bathroom! She took an electric guitar off her lap and handed it up to the MC. The crowd waited in uncomfortable silence while Punum levered herself up out of the chair, took her crutches from the back of it, and made her way up the stairs onto the stage. There was a low stool waiting there for her. She put her crutches down beside it. The MC went to help her sit down, but Punum shook her head, a little irritably. She sat on the stool, adjusted the mike to the height she needed. She held her hands out for her guitar. With an awkward smile, the MC gave it to her and got off the stage. Punum kicked that thing on the floor that electric guitars have. The guitar shrieked, and she grabbed the mike and snarled . . . something into it. Sounded like, “This shit’s gotta stop!”

  Rich did his suave one-eyebrow-raised thing. Tafari outright sniggered. “Is what kinda spoken word that?” he said, louder than he really needed to.

  “Hush up, nuh?” I told him. “I want to hear her.”

  “She’s right, guy,” Rich whispered. He put a finger to his lips. “Shh.” I preened at Tafari. My bro had backed me up over his best friend. Tafari scowled at me, but he stopped his nonsense. Didn’t stop other people in the audience from doing the same kind of thing. This crowd had its own idea about what was spoken word and what was not. They were polite about her using a wheelchair because they had to be. They could have put up with her being Sri Lankan instead of black or Caribbean if she’d done her piece innna black people stylee. But she was doing her own thing. Sweet. I didn’t business with the haters. I paid attention to the stage.

  Her performance was a poem, I guess. She did lots of almost shouting into the mike while she played this wicked hot guitar riff, kinda like old-style Prince. She said stuff about wars going on around the world; Sri Lanka, Africa, Palestine. She said something about Canada, too, about how we mistreated Aboriginal people. Stuff about injustice to women, children, queers. And every so often, the chorus “This shit’s gotta stop!”

  When she screamed the word “queer” at the crowd, a guy shoved his chair back and stood up. He strode to the bar and bellowed, “Gimme a Heineken!” The chick playing up onstage caught all that, I know she did, because her eyes followed him. But she didn’t falter once. Her stylings weren’t my kinda thing either, and I didn’t understand half of what she was on about, but I gave her mad props for having the guts to get up there and do it. Plus there was that cool hair. The loud guy leaned on the bar and glowered the whole time. She did a set of three songs, or poems; they were a little bit of both. She got some polite clapping from the audience.

  When she stopped performing, her face shut in on itself. Suddenly, she looked really shy. She put her guitar on the floor, picked her crutches up. The MC was so flustered by all this that she nearly stepped on the guitar when she came back onstage. Punum had to tell her to watch where she was walking. Endless seconds later, Punum was down off the stage, back in her wheelchair with her guitar on her lap. The MC raised the mike to her height and said, “Okay. Next up, from uptown, is Richard Smith.”

  Richard jumped to his feet, knocking his chair over. With the dark bar and the sound of the clapping, I bet that almost no one noticed. But Richard’s face was like death as he and Tafari put the chair upright. I tried to pat his arm to reassure him as he rushed by me to the stage, but he was going so quickly I barely grazed him.

  He’d left his notes on the table! I grabbed up the crumpled sheet to take it to him, but Tafari grabbed my wrist. The marked wrist. I yanked my arm away from him. “What?” I barked.

  He pulled back. He covered the hurt look with a sneer. “Rich can’t be reading from a piece of paper up there, like he’s in English class!” he said. “You want to make him look like a fool?”

  “Oh.” I sat back in my chair. My face was hot with embarrassment. I took a sip from my ginger ale.

  Rich muttered, “Ah, um . . . this first one’s called ‘Jail Time.’”

  Someone from the crowd shouted, “Talk into the mike!”

  Rich looked at the mike as though it were the head of a spitting cobra. He leaned a micro-inch closer to it. God, this was going to be agonizing.

  “Rolled up late, pissed off, exhausted

  Couldn’t stop my friends from gettin’ arrested

  Notice it’s always the darkest brother who gets tested

  Again, and again, and again . . .

  Uh . . .”

  He’d forgotten the next line. It was agonizing. Rich choked his way through two poems. Twice he forgot the words for long seconds. Tafari and I were whispering Rich’s lines along with him; “The charges won’t stick ’cause they’re little white lies / but the message is / ‘We’re afraid of your size / We’re afraid of your youth and your time and your blackness.’” It was all I could do not to shout out the ones he was blanking on. He kinda sorta came up with words to fill in for the ones he’d forgotten, so that was something. But we could barely hear him. None of the passion of the way he spat when he was doing it for just me and Tafari to hear; none of the fire. Just fear, choking out his talent. Every so often, someone in the audience would say, “Louder!” He’d said he was going to do three pieces, but after he’d mumbled his way to the end of the second, he just stuttered, “Th-thank you,” and all but ran off the stage. The applause was even more lackluster than it had been for the chick who’d gone before him. Worse yet, that Ill guy was shaking his head. Rich rushed past us in the dark, headed for the stairs to the washrooms.

  Tafari blew out a breath. “Ouch,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll make sure he’s all right.” He took off. The MC announced a five-minute break.

  A voice behind me said, “That seat free?”

  It’s not like I wanted company, but Mom and Dad had me raised so bloody polite that I was saying yes even as I was looking round to see who it was. Damn. It was Snarling Chick Punum. Or Rude Chick. Same diff.

  She wheeled herself over, took a bottle of beer from whe
re she had it clamped between her knees. “Fuck, I’m glad that’s over with,” she said. She swigged back a good third of the bottle before she set it down on the table.

  “That must have been hard, huh? First time you’re performing?”

  She leaned back in her chair, gave me a knowing look. “No, I’ve been doing it for years. Places I can get my chair into, anyway. Why would you think it’s my first time?”

  Shit. Busted.

  She grinned nastily. “And don’t try to tell me it’s because I sucked, because I know I didn’t.”

  “No, you were great. It’s just, well, it’s not the kind of thing you see every day.”

  “You mean a chick doing spoken word, or a crip doing it?”

  “Um, both, actually. But I never said you were, you know—”

  “A crip? No, I said it. But you’d better not.”

  “Actually, I get that.”

  Her look changed. “You do?”

  “Yeah. It’s like me being black. There’s names we can call ourselves that other people better not.”

  “Oh. Okay.” For a second, she didn’t seem to know what to say. What she didn’t say was, “But you’re not black.” Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.

  She had another swig of her beer. “Anyway, I’m always sick with nerves before I play. You saw me in the bathroom. I was throwing up. Hey, I wasn’t rude to you, was I? I’m so scared before I go on, I barely notice who I’m talking to.”

  “Oh. That’s why you were being so weird. Why d’you do it, then?”

  She grinned. “Why do I perform? You kidding? I fuck’n love it! It’s a high, like skydiving. You stand on the edge, looking out at a long, long drop, and you’re so scared, you’re practically peeing yourself. You’re scared because you know you’re going to throw yourself off that edge, and either you’ll make it, or you won’t.” She toasted me with her bottle. “Better than sex.” She took another swig of beer.

  “What’s that mean on your shirt; ‘No One Is Illegal’?”