Free Redefining Realness by Janet Mock Page B

guy who would break out and dance if “his song” came on. “Ooooh, this my jam here,” I remember him saying, putting our car in park at a red light, opening his door, and making the street his dance floor. Thatsense of endless amusement is what led women to fall so quickly. It was what made me love my dad while also rolling my eyes at him. Looking back, I can’t distinguish which parts of him were fueled by drugs and alcohol and which parts were not. I don’t know what before looked like. His lectures became tangent-filled, disjointed. He often lost his point and would be easily distracted by imaginings of some perceived slight from me. “Boy, why are you looking at me like that? Don’t look at me. Look at your hands,” he’d say. Seconds later, he’d rebut, “Why aren’t you looking at me? Boy, look at me when I’m talking to you.”
    I began avoiding him, even forging his signature in jagged all-caps print on report cards and permission slips for field trips for Chad and me. I didn’t want to bother Dad in the mornings; I didn’t want to wake him. I felt that the more he slept, the less time he’d have to search for drugs.
    Despite the hardship, there were happy times, too, like the time Dad embraced me and told me he was proud of me after I got my ass kicked by the neighborhood bully in defense of Chad, or a vomit-laden car ride home from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. It was just Chad, Dad, and me, the only time I ever saw the Pacific Ocean from California. I remember the smell of salt in the air from the bright blue water and the sweet taste of cotton candy and sticky caramel between my back teeth from the glossy candy apples. We rode the Pirate Ship, the Sea Swings, and the Ferris wheel. Dad was clear and present that day. His eyes were bright, and he strolled with a steady calm that relaxed me.
    I looked over the rail bridge that crossed the San Lorenzo River, and I thought that maybe we were crossing over, maybe there was better in store for us, maybe there’d be more days like this, maybe this was the beginning of good fortune. Chad and I flanked Dad as we walked over the wooden tracks of that old bridge. I could tell Chadwanted to run across the bridge, but I was worried that one false move and I would slip through the gaps in between the tracks and fall into the river.
    “Y’all are all I got, man,” Dad said. “Y’all give my life purpose. Wherever I go, y’all go with me.” He didn’t say it sentimentally; he said it as a fact. His love for us was undoubtedly a fact. I had a father who loved me. This was a gift I wouldn’t fully appreciate until I fell in love in my twenties.
    On our way home later that afternoon, I threw up in the backseat of the car. I was scared I would get yelled at for being so greedy and eating too much. “Your eyes are always bigger than your stomach,” Dad often scolded me. He pulled over at a car wash and cleaned up my mess without saying anything mean. It’s still one of the top five moments of my life.

Chapter Five
    W e all fulfill our quota of misfortune at some point in our life. This is what I believed as a ten-year-old. It was a belief system of my own creation, part of a silent theory based on fairness and balance. I believed that some reached their quota early and advanced to a life of access and abundance, while others had beginnings filled with open doors and opportunities until they were met with their share of misfortune. This theory helped me cope with the foreboding darkness of Oakland. I held on to the hope that fortune would soon knock on our door.
    Instead, when Chad opened our front door one night in 1993 as we watched TV, misfortune fell on our living room carpet in the form of a wounded Derek, who’d been shot just blocks away from our apartment. Blood trailed down Derek’s bare legs, peeking through the fabric of his shorts. Chad’s high-pitched screams launched me off the sofa andinto our room, where we huddled together in our