Take Me Out Tonight

Personal Essay, Winner of the Yoshiko Uchida Prize for Creative Prose

I always believe the worst is going to happen.

Three years ago, on the night of Christmas, my table manners were impeccable in front of my ex’s white suburban family. I could never forget the key phrases of my Ps and Qs, despite enjoying the three glasses of wine with my holiday dinner. As a Black partner to my white ex, I felt the performance of these manners was the case for my continued admission into her family’s dining room. My ex, Bella, was a student at Diablo City College, and despite attending the CC for an associate’s in psychology, her lack of investment in the subject was a common topic of conversation between us. Bella, a child of the white middle class, would often lament the modern artist’s struggle for financial security between the drags of a white owl, i.e., a $20 marijuana pre-roll, and me, a Black Latinx poet from Stockton. Time and again, but mostly after the cooking of her white-passing, islander mother’s dinner, we would share white owls while walking the connected streets that would pocket into the cul-de-sacs of San Ramon’s suburbia. Bella and I had met as a Tinder fling; our first and only date, pre-pandemic mandated lockdown, was at a Valentine’s Day concert for an indie rock band called Sad Girl in San Francisco. I adored the pulls of those white owls as I made out the contours of the person I whispered “love you” to over the phone in our late-night/early-morning calls before we could physically reunite. I found that Bella had adorned her interior world with jazz, shonen jump anime, the iconography of the court jester, astrology readings, and an alternative pop-punk aesthetic from the early 2000s. More than anything the constituents of her security (her family, suburbia, or even the weed) could offer her, Bella wanted to be a critical artist of her time but was unable to pay the price of self-discipline to perfect any endeavors' expression.

However, I have to admit that Bella was my first love, lasting almost two years.

Somewhere, I remember hearing that romantic love is supposed to ground you. But in my experience, this love, with the pre-rolls, lifted me, along with each weekend I spent over her family’s home. I became indebted to her for sharing the only bed I knew to be a consistent place of rest while I was unhoused for the three months leading up to 2020 Thanksgiving. During those three months, my Black life in transit was carried by the rhetoric of my actions—the stage of suburbia was a constantly shifting apparatus from the living room to the grocery store to car rides—any of these places I could feel my Black ass flesh against what Hurston would call the “sharp white background.” I was grateful for the hospitality of Bella’s family, but I often wonder how her father could be more worried about his daughter driving to Oakland on Sunday nights than the wellbeing of the 19-year-old, who was concurrently taking online college courses while working full-time out of a downtown motel room and struggling to eat. For any combination of reasons, but perhaps more so due to the melanin in my skin, my performance didn’t elicit a temporary room from Bella’s father sitting at the helm of the dinner table while I was preoccupied with the curveball life had thrown at me in the back of my head.

Christmas dinner in the suburbs of San Ramon was an ostensibly communal event for the household. To my right was Bella, but I couldn't help but notice that her positioning at the table was as long as the distance she felt was erected by her father's patriarchal attitudes toward the women of the family. One instance was when Bella injured her knee playing on the women’s high school basketball team. Her father then quickly lost interest in his daughter, who ceased to be an all-star athlete removed from the superfluous femininity of girlhood. Across the table, seated to the left, was her younger brother, Dominic, who was accompanied by a school friend who sat at the end of the table. In contrast, Dominic was often coddled in light of his male teenage angst and played hooky for a career as a hyperpop SoundCloud rapper until he was threatened by truancy officers and a letter from the school proclaiming that he would have to finish his senior year of high school in adult continuation. Dominic’s experimental drug habits, manga collection, and trips to LA to watch the Dodgers were also all enabled by the love—and cold cash—of his father. To the right of Dominic, next to the father, dutifully sat the mother, a well-meaning but centralist woman who sang Chaka Khan like a songbird in the kitchen and other domestic spheres of the home. Dominic and Bella’s mother embodied her role as second in command to the father's familial regime, as a mother who refused to give into, or maybe even acknowledge, a pessimistic view of the social forces knocking at her bedroom door. This glimpse into the nuclear family revealed to me a petri dish of white, all-American value structures.

Dishes of turkey, various decorated salads, mashed potatoes, and blood-red cranberry sauce passed through the hands of dinner participants along the table's perimeter. As folks ladened their plates, I began to settle into the familiar persona and mannerisms of a guest of color in a white household. I believe this habit was carried over from my early years worrying about the increasing precarity of my enrollment at Wildwood Elementary in the redlined city of Piedmont meant to keep hegemony. To my memory, my family probably moved about four times in total, further and further out of the city limits from our first renting arrangement on Boulevard Way. The reality that my spot was never secured seemed abundantly clear, as my sister and I were on the margins of being excluded from a foundational education. One late afternoon, as a group of blonde-headed boys ran past me in the outside corridors, I remember passing through the thought, the force of which slowed me down in comparison: “I always believe the worst is going to happen.” The origin of the sentiment fades into the recess of my memory; however, the realization nonetheless remains a potent rub for me to go back to and explore. Just like the potent memory of a clay project that was assigned in art class. I had decided to sculpt what I believed to be the American era I lived in, or perhaps aspired to be a part of, as a rhetorical argument. It was of a face divided in half, one side African-American, the other white. The post-racial face snapped in half once removed from the ceramic kiln. My retrospective conclusion: I’ve always been a highly aware kid bargaining for a place in the world. For me, elbows off the table, “please” and “thank you,” and laughing at the right moments were all meant to be transactional movements that Christmas night, an utterance of unconscious programming from growing up in an anti-black environment. No matter how much the mother proclaimed that the family didn’t see color in prior casual conversations when she would point out that I didn’t have to “talk so properly," it only meant to me that the familycouldn't see the endurance required of me to house myself while continuing my education. In light of this, the people around me occupying the setting of the Christmas dinner were made translucent by their steadfast beliefs. However, during the holiday dinner conversational topics proceeded as they usually did—with me enrobed under an inauthentic guise.

Christmas dinner was coming to a close. Dominic and his friend both had their phones out and would intermittently tilt the screens of their devices while nudging each other and discussing “who knows what” in hushed whispers. The father, being a man in the marketing business, continuously talked to me and Bella as if he were trying to close his next deal. Uninterested in his proposal, Bella locked hands with me underneath the table and tried to excuse the both of us by telling her parents that we had plans to see the neighboring Christmas lights after dropping off a present to a friend. Having but one more thing to say to us before we left, the mother looked at me and smiled, related how proud she was of the two As that I had scored that semester, and handed me an envelope with 50 dollars taped to a Peanut’s themed holiday card. I thanked her for her generosity and left the table, scooting my chair into its place and gathering the plates of anyone who was done eating. I even washed the dishes in the sink for the cook.

* * *

Bella and I stood outside a little ways from the front of her house as we shared a pre-rolled white owl. The anxiety that would arise from my living situation, my previous occupation as a Starbucks shift leader, and the general milieu of constantly being on the precipice of my racing thoughts seemed to vanish as the smoke faded into the bitter cold of December 25th. I’m often anxious around other people when I smoke joints. To this day, I don’t understand the pleasure, followed by the shame, that I derive from being slightly inebriated around people I care about. I used to think that masking wouldn’t apply to me and that I'd always been an authentic representation of myself, regardless of external stimuli. I’ve had this assumption deeply challenged by the passage of time since then. There was a period during the last spring semester when to stave off depressive episodes, I would smoke before my assigned readings and, on weekends, celebrate with chardonnay and comic books. I still remember the call with my mom when I told her to hold off on gifting me red wine for my birthday. I felt her smile through the phone as she understood her baby's request. Moreover, the memory of reading Wretched of the Earth with a couple of Modelo beers always hits me as Fanon speaks of the abundance of liquor stores in low-income environments. To state a fact, in Stockton, Oakland, and Berkeley, I've always lived my adult life in the vicinity of a walkable wine cabinet. But to digress, there I was with my ex, feeling the light within my chest grow duller besides the glow of green and red injection-molded plastic plugs lining the houses up and down the street. A mixture of these thoughts probably flowed from the end of the white owl couched between my middle and index finger, held that way because I thought it looked like my idea of how French punks would smoke. I guess it seems like no one from anywhere ever knows best, except for the person narrating the story. I pulled one last drag and stomped out the lit end of the stick, finishing the white owl.

I believe I tend to live through the lyrics of the songs on my playlist, which may be a reason why I should change the radio to something uplifting more often. The Smith's classic 1986 track "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" played softly off the car’s Bluetooth speakers as we drove through opulent neighborhoods beautifully decorated for the holidays. Morrisey, the lead singer of the British rock band, croons over a string section translated directly from the drama of an emotional adolescent’s heart. The lyrics describe a young man who dreads going back home for fear of not being accepted anymore; rather, he wants to go out and see the lights of the town in a car driven by his romantic partner. Death is a returning motif in the song, and the opening line “Take me out tonight” may be synonymous with a pleading sentiment for one’s demise. Along with this, the character idealizes a romantic death crushed with his lover by a double-decker bus and a ten-ton truck, lamenting that “to die by your side, well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine." The morbid attitudes explored in the song expressed to me a deeply lodged feeling of exclusion. In a construction of the world, explored through perhaps my intimacies with being othered, there is a comfort to the social exclusion afforded to those unable to easily assimilate with the times. Often, the death of a person’s iteration of the self is necessary to move forward into the next chapter of their life. Perhaps, to exist outside of the limitations imposed upon others' perceptions, a mask has to die in the process. Underneath the high from the white owl, my previous exhibited table manners, and the reflection of Christmas lights passing through the glass window and striking themselves across my skin felt like they burned from the mirroring effect between my life and the song’s narrative. I sat farther back in the passenger seat of my ex’s car, cradling the gift bag for her friend in my lap.

The heater was on as I nodded off to sleep in the passenger seat while Bella mapped the destination on her phone to drop off the gift she had for her friend. My head bumped slightly against the right window as we turned the corner like a quiet tap from a stranger telling me the show was about to start. Take me out tonight. Everything I had accomplished, which amounted to just staying alive, felt petty in comparison to what I saw before me. The trailer park at the bottom of my heart imploded under the weight of their excess.