Free Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

closest friend, Maddy, had a white father she had never met. The rumor was that her mother was her married father’s dark secret, a macadamia-nut-colored woman with curly hair that matched Maddy’s. I loved Maddy because she was smart and kind and had anopen capacity for compassion that I envied. Once Maddy’s half-sister, Aisha—who favored her mom, all sharp lines and angles anchored with almond-shaped eyes—yelled at Maddy, “Mama don’t care ’bout us. All she cares about is her glass dick.” Maddy, with tears welling up in her downcast eyes, whispered to Aisha, “You shouldn’t say that. She can’t help herself.”
    My feelings for my father didn’t come close to empathy. What little that remained, I disposed of when I heard John, our neighbor, call Dad a crackhead.
    Dad worked well with his hands and had a passion for cars, and John’s champagne-colored Cadillac, with a matching leather interior that smelled of lemony oil, was Dad’s adopted baby. At the time, Dad had a green Volkswagen Bug. He never complained about the size or its horrendous vomit color, but there was no hiding Dad’s love of that Caddy. “This is a car right here, man,” Dad said to himself, giggling, while changing the oil one day.
    He babied John’s car as if it were his own. It was Dad’s “I’ve made it” marker, a sort of black man’s dream, trumping white picket fences, Girl Scout cookies, and lemonade stands. Dad’s care for John’s car—the washing, the waxing, the tune-ups, and the oil changes—were a gracious act, in my perspective, one of friendship and passion. I was unaware that John and Dad had their own arrangement.
    Dad was sweating under the hood of the Caddy on one of those sunny days in California that a kid born in Hawaii and living in Oakland took for granted. Everyone was outside. John wore a brown and beige silk shirt that draped over his rotund belly. He was bald on top of his head, with hair on the sides—he looked like Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air , and he had the same air of superiority, which showed in the volume of his voice. Only his should be heard.
    As Dad tinkered on the Caddy, I sat on a patch of grass between the driveway and the street, where Chad and Maddy and Aisha wereplaying. Dad was on one side of me, under the hood, and on the other side was John, standing with a man who looked at Dad suspiciously. His sideways glance captured my focus because I recognized that I looked at my father the same way. I was the kind of child who, as Dad said, “can’t stay out of grown folks’ business,” so my interest was piqued.
    “How much you pay Charlie?” the man asked John.
    I had to stop everything inside of me from saying that Dad did not get paid to tend to John’s car. He was no one’s employee; he did it because he was John’s friend and he loved the Caddy as if it were his own.
    “He loves that car, man,” John said, calming my defenses. I knew he knew my father and appreciated his work. “But,” John continued, “I feel sorry for him, you know. He’s a crackhead. I give him twenty bucks here, another there.”
    I turned my head toward Dad, who was polishing away at a rim. Beads of sweat ran from his hairline to the lines of his forehead as he bobbed his head to a tune only he could hear.
    In one instant, Dad was . . . a crackhead. Just like Maddy and Aisha’s mom, ashy and antsy, circling the dudes in do-rags who hung outside the corner store. I realized then that I’d held on to a shred of hope regarding Dad; he was still a hero to me, if flawed. Rationalizing him and the glass pipe, Dad smoked crack, but he was not a crackhead; it was just something he did. To do something didn’t define you, I thought.
    I saw Dad through a dusty lens that distorted our relationship, as tarnished as his pipe. He was no longer just our father; he was his own person, with an identity and label and body separate from his relationship with us. He was someone who was