It Matters

I did a lengthy butoh practice this morning, the first one I've been able to do since I burned the skin off my stomach two weeks ago. An accidental spill of boiling water had made it impossible to do some of the contorting or flailing movements I don't even sometimes realize my body is pulling itself into until they're happening. Afterwards I cleaned myself off with a towel dampened with Florida Water and plain old faucet water, put on my street clothes, and headed out for the day.

Tonio was at the combination Rastafari/toy store/head shop place, sitting on his milk crate and trying to drum up business. He's not really an employee there, or anywhere. He's an all around the hood character, fixing a busted door hinge for this place, sweeping up and moping for that one, for a little extra scratch. Everyone knows him. "They got some new incenses! Got some new soaps!

"We're still going through the ones I got here before" I said. "Black soap and neem."

"Oh." he says, momentarily taken aback. "They work good, right? Your skin looks good. Fresh. I like that tattoo on your leg." He's mentioned that before. It's a tattoo of one of Trevor Brown's nurse doll-baby-punk-children that inhabit an uncanny valley of the collective unconscious where things exist in their own autonomous bubble, away from the horrors of this world, and the pearl-clutchers and secret predators who mistake them for the horrors of this world. That's why I like such images. That's the exact same reason other people hate them. "Is that supposed to be you?"

"No," I explain to him not for the first time. "An artist I know of paints them." At this point he says they have in some new stickers, on the other side of the store, with the toys and stoner culture ephemera, so I tell him I'll look at them. Tonio sees someone else he recognizes, a loud woman with a cane and a brightly dyed orange hairdo, and they both get into a conversation where he tries to unload some beads to match her earrings and gossiping about someone they mutually know in one of the projects.

I must have looked for a bit, without finding anything, because by the time I came back out Tonio was back on his blue milk crate outside, drinking a barely concealed beer out of a paper bag. Two more were at his feet. I adjusted my mask, which read "Black Lives Matter" on one side and had the black power fist on the other, so it would fit over my nose better.They were a fairly popular mask style in the neighborhood. Eric had gotten them on 116th St. where vendors sold them for $5 apiece. Fiddling with the mask brought Tonio's attention to it for the first time. He squinted his eyes and pointed at the cloth object declaring "I wouldn't wear that".

"Why not?" I say nonchalantly. He's not black but he's brown Dominican. And today he's been drunk and high as a kite. He says, "Cuz it's they white lives that matter."

"Yeah, well we already know they matter." I said.

"Right cuz they got all the power. they see you wearing that and they gonna come for you, they got the power to do that cuz only the white lives matter in this world. The white pooowwww-eeerrrrr..." He began to cackle and wave a fist around lopsidedly, and I realized he was fucking with me. "They come for black lives and us too."

"Yeah, well, all the more reason for me to wear this mask."