Free No Land's Man by Aasif Mandvi Page A

while baked out of our minds.
    On one weekend during one such car ride, a few minutes after Roy and I had picked up Rick from a local pizza restaurant where he waited tables, I experienced something that changed the rest of my high school experience. As we drove up North Dale Mabry Highway out of town, toward the open fields of north Tampa, we toked and smoked like three Easy Riders. Roy had forgotten his cassette of
The White Album
so we blasted the radio and, since it was the eighties, it was only a matter of time before the familiar drum beat and weeping falsetto of “Billie Jean” began to squeeze its way through Roy’s tinny speakers. We didn’t care, we sang along like it was Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild,” rolling down the windows as we let the humid Florida wind whip us into a sixty-mile-per-hour frenzy. As Roy floored the pedal we accelerated just as Michael hit the all-too-familiar chorus and I leaned forward from the backseat throwing my head out of the passenger window, screaming to thesurprised shoppers in the Winn-Dixie parking lot, “She says I am the one. But the
kiiiiiiiid
is not my son!”
    Rick turned to me, his eyes bloodshot, his face beet-red, his surfer dude blonde locks wildly blowing like his entire head was enveloped in flames, and shouted, “Oh my God. Listen to you. You sound like Michael Jackson, dude.”
    He was right! And I was as surprised as he was. It seemed that without really trying I was managing to hit those high falsetto notes and doing a pretty good impersonation.
    Earlier that year, Michael Jackson had sealed his stature as being bigger than Jesus while performing at the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary celebration; a single glove, a fedora, and the moonwalk all came together in a magical moment. Michael seemed to walk on water that night. Truth be told, it was not the first time I had ever seen the moonwalk—the black kids in school had been popping and breakdancing outside the lunch room for almost a year before I saw Michael do it on TV. I had even tried doing it myself in my bedroom late at night, but I always looked less like I was dancing and more like I was being riddled with bullets. I lacked three basic components: grace, control, and coordination. But while many of us had seen the moonwalk before, just the same way many had seen a magic trick before Houdini ever put on a show, no one had ever seen it elevated with the style and attitude that Michael gave it. So in that drug-induced moment in the back of Roy’s sky-blue Volkswagen, I made a decision that would change the rest of my high school experience. The school variety show would have its very own Michael Jackson.
    Rick’s girlfriend had taped the Motown performance, and since my family didn’t own a VCR, I went over to her house every night after school to watch the tape and memorize the kicks and squealsand the part where he jumps up and down and screams, “She led me to her room, hey, hey, hey.” I practiced that dance everywhere, all the time. I danced in the shower, to the thumping of my mother on the other side of the bathroom door yelling, “What are you doing in there? Why are you taking a shower at two o’clock in the afternoon?”
    I danced in my sister’s bedroom when she was not home in order to gain inspiration and ape Michael’s pained facial expressions from the posters that covered her walls.
    I even broke into the dance one night before bed, while I was grabbing a glass of milk. My parents’ bedroom was just off the kitchen of our small two-bedroom bungalow. With my first jump I woke my father, who emerged from bed to the sight of his teenage son kicking and twirling and emitting piercing high-pitched squeals while holding a glass of milk and wearing only his underwear at two in the morning. He must have wondered in that moment, as he watched me from the shadows, why he had ever come to this country. In the middle of a sliding moonwalk across the linoleum floor I was startled back to