guffawed. Russell gave an embarrassed grin and nodded. Lucius fell sideways laughing, then hopped back to dap me up. The lines on the highway ahead glowed chalk-white in the overcast afternoon. I worried at how Russell was one of my closest friends and could still ask questions that made me feel so alone.
Our show was at a dive in a part of Wilmington far from the chain restaurants and traffic that clogged southern cities in the ’90s. The peak-roofed club looked like an old barn and smelled like one, if the animals smoked.
You’d think that the best shows would be in the biggest cities, but if you’re in a lesser-known band like ours, you do better in smaller towns, where people aren’t so jaded. They come out of the woodwork just because something’s going on. That doesn’t happen in places like New York and Los Angeles. People there have more options.
On the short stage, I peeked up from fiddling with my amp and saw a good fifty people already waiting. More were drifting in from the bar and parking lot, called by the twang and drone of our tuning. They seemed like our crowd: the weird kids, from “my first show” fifteen-year-olds in new cutoff army pants, to older guys in the sweet spot between high school and pain pills. Searchers, intent on finding their own fun. We were that fun, dug up online or passed along on a mix CD.
I ran through the slinky riff from Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” to tune the A string to the E and looked to my bandmates for levels. My breath got short as my racial hang-ups and stage fright melded into a sun-hot beam that turned my fingers electric as we passed eye contact in a triangle and nodded, ready to blow off the long drive, the stupid week.
Mason was irritated about the shift-leader job he might as well quit.
Russell was ready to hit the drums so hard he’d get out of his dead-end life.
I wanted to turn a shade blacker every time I hit a bass string, envisioning a funk bassist with star sunglasses and a five-pointed bass; a jazz musician with his head back, the neck of his standup bass by his ear; even a lanky baseball pitcher folding himself into a crane shape on the mound before unleashing a fastball. Anything that read as black and performing.
I’d been playing shows for years. I was twenty-one and among the oldest people in the room. Still, I was hooked on the moment when the amps’ hum faded, Russell sat back on his drum stool, and silence washed back through the crowd, loud and full, like a two-string power chord could burst it.
I held my breath as Mason said, “Hi, we’re Paper Fire from Richmond, Virginia.”
At that moment, everyone was on the same side. We all wanted four clicks of the drumsticks and twenty minutes of release. I wanted to disappear and sense how far my headstock pointed out so I didn’t knock over a cymbal. I wanted to whip sweat from my forehead before it slicked up my bass, make eye contact with the knot of people up front headbanging and shaking their fists, and be amazed when they knew the lyrics Mason had written on a gas station napkin.
All the funk records I played at home, and I learned none of their rhythm by osmosis. In that punk band, my soul flailed and thrashed, and the room felt it more than heard it: a thick rumble that ripples out from the heart, shaking loose all the problems inside me.
My lips are full, my nose is broad, and my hair’s a cloud of cinnamon. Usually, black people can tell that I’m black, because we know how to find each other in an unfriendly world. But white people see my green eyes and freckles and assume I’m white. They live in a world where they are the norm. Why would they expect me to be anything but?
Still, there’s something about the way I look that gets black and white people to try to place me. This leads to what I call the “You Look Like” Game, where they explain my existence to themselves by telling me I look like someone else. The more they decide, the less control I have over my own personality.
Here are the “You Look Like” Game’s top scorers:
Kid from Kid ’n Play
The light-skinned guy from a fun early ’90s rap duo that did synchronized dances and starred in some movies that still pop up on cable. He was famous for his high-top fade, a cylinder of hair rising nine inches off the top of his head. He’s also a mixed brother, and basically my color.
The good part about being told I look like Kid is that people love Kid ’n Play. No one’s ever said, “You look like Kid ’n Play. I wanna fight those fools.”
On the downside, I think white people are into old-school black stuff like Kid ’n Play because it’s from the past, and can’t change anything right now.
Embarrassing fun fact: I can’t grab my ankle and jump over my leg to do Kid ’n Play’s trademark dance.
Justin Timberlake
He’s straight-up white, but has curly ramen hair, which I guess is where we sorta link up. He’s also a great dancer with hit songs for days. I actually get called “Timberlake” a lot by black people, but mainly associate it with drunk white girls pushing up on me at dance parties. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and I’m jealous of how much black people like J.T.
Lenny Kravitz
He’s handsome, half Jewish and half black, and dresses like he’s from the ’70s—he probably has a whole shelf just for the leather vests he wears with no shirt. We look nothing alike. This one bugs me. Out loud, I say it’s because his music is bland and unoriginal. Truth is, I’m mad because he’s beating me at my own game: he’s got a better music career, money for cool vintage clothes, he looks blacker than me, and a couple of his songs are pretty ill.
“This light-skinned cat useta work with my sister at the supermarket”
This one’s followed by an expectant look, like I should know the name of this random high-yella cashier. But not all mixed people know each other. We don’t have brown bag parties where we listen to smooth r’n’b and make jokes about people working all day in the field. Sometimes I wish we did, though. Then I’d have someone to talk to about this stuff without feeling like a stereotypical halfie having an identity crisis.
Getting called “light-skinned” is a blessing and a curse, though. It’s cool because it means I’m black, just paler than the average black person. Since being mistaken for white erases half of me, and happens so often that I think I’ve failed at blackness, I cherish being called black. Still, it also makes me feel like I have to reject my white side. That’s why I feel guilty for loving punk rock.
After our set, I spread Paper Fire’s albums and T-shirts out on a sticky black table by the bar. Lucius presided over our merch from the back of the booth, the red-and-white beer light glowing off his white football jersey. He sipped a brown-bottled beer, actively ignoring me while I stood by the table. It was a good show, but he was clearly unhappy with the evening’s demographics. A hundred people had watched us play, gawking, nodding their heads or bouncing on their toes, and they were all white, an ocean of moons spreading back through the small club.
