THE BLACK MEN AND STEVEN SPIELBERG
By
JC Andrijeski
Copyright © 2011 by JC Andrijeski
Published by White Sun Press
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Also by this Author:
Urban Fantasy
Rook: Allie's War, Book One
Shield: Allie's War, Book Two
Sword: Allie's War, Book Three
Shadow: Allie's War, Book Four
The Alien Club
Middle Grade (Children's)
Monkey: An Indian Tale
Elephant
Jack Dervish, Super Spy
Maya Papaya
For my brother
Table of Contents
The Black Men and Steven Spielberg
Bonus Pages! Rook: Allie's War, Book One
THE BLACK MEN AND STEVEN SPIELBERG
“...It’s gonna rain tonight, son.”
I sit in a dormitory at University of California at Santa Cruz, hearing my father’s disembodied voice. I am not his son, but his daughter; it is a sort of private joke between us, only he likely doesn’t remember it.
I live in Porter College because it is cool; my friends live there. If I followed my major, which is Politics, UCSC’s version of Political Science, I should have lived in Stevenson.
But I never really do what I’m supposed to do.
I’m not even sure why I’m in college yet.
I sit, sketching. The drawing reflects feelings far darker than mine; it is detailed like my best friend’s art, cool like my best friend’s art.
It is not mine; mine would come out wrong, inexplicably “not cool,” if arising from where my mind actually lives, the things that preoccupy me when I’m not wearing one mask or another. I am the consummate faker. The face-changer. In New York, my best friend, who is much more of a real friend, and who sees past my masks, will call me the chameleon.
I hear my father’s voice, and take a sip of Black Label, which is terrible, terrible beer, but again, my friends have informed me that it is cool and I haven’t learned yet how little that really means. I also haven’t figured out that I will never create anything but crap while I am drinking. I’ll find out in a few years, maybe five, maybe fifteen, that I’m consigned to sobriety.
Cursed with it, some would say...but not me. Drinking was a guise, too. A boring one, most days, that only pretended to fill my eyes with pretty lights. Most of those things that we think make us so exciting and different are the very things that make us so grindingly the same. The banality of drinking got to me in time, even apart from a wish to create.
One must be attentive when one waits, and I always wait.
For what, I do not know.
I wait, but not patiently.
I do not want it to come, but I have no purpose until it does.
“...Gonna rain tonight, son.”
I hear my father’s voice, but he is not there.
I am seven.
I sit in the gnarled branches of the old apricot tree at the top of the hill that makes up my backyard growing up. The hill is ours; it belongs to me and my father and and sister and brother. It is ours, a part of me, of my body. I am designing shapes in curling dark clouds laced with gold and white streaks of breathtaking purity. The sky behind them drops a deep blue canvas for shocking white and I watch the birds dart overhead between branches, and they all seem to be speaking.
I tell stories. It is ingrained in me, a means of interpreting my world, of communication. Emotional truths mixed with imagery and blatant falsehoods and myth...it is how I understand things, how I breathe, how I think.
Sometimes this works with the rest of the world. Sometimes it makes me friends, entertains, brings joy, wonder, laughter.
Sometimes it is like chewing glass.
I am a mutant. Unable to hide it.
My family calls me a liar. All but my brother, which is not to say he believes me.
Our neighborhood grows slowly. Only it is only slow in my eyes, in the eyes of a child. Really it is lightning speed, the growth of mutant cells, plump with Silicon Valley money. For me, at least in my earliest years, it retains hints of a recent rural past. I read books like My Side of the Mountain, Call of the Wild, The Island of the Blue Dolphins and The Black Stallion.
I am a foreigner, but atypically typical. There are millions of misfits like me.
It will take me many years to learn just how ordinary I am.
I watch my dog rattle the chain that ties her to the garage.
I am seven and my world is dying. We all feel it, but no one wants to talk about it.
No longer a place of long grasses, of endless stretches under mountainous crystal clouds heavy with rain and pregnant with clean-smelling water, here dogs are chained or their owners are called negligent. Many kids I know don’t see the point of going outside.
Later, this will get much worse.
Much, much worse.
Here, at the base of the Santa Cruz mountains, you cannot help but feel the land. Whoever leaves me in this place gives me a view backwards and forwards, if not a portrait of the thing itself. Like a prisoner with a view of a single tree through the bars, I stare at it, long for it. I can taste it, even as it dies slowly around me, leaving ashes.
Below our house swims the “S” trail, a barely discernible footpath through grasses that remain sun-yellow most of the year, their green sequestered by the length and depth of winter rains which ebb and flow like the tides.
I love those few months of wet green stalks; on windy days they ripple like an ocean, flattening and straightening so that I feel a wooden deck beneath my feet, hear shouts of men hanging from rigging, pointing at spouts of foam and the glimpse of a whale’s white, scarred back. I see the man in the black hat, his arm flopping back and forth from where he is lashed to the whale’s side, and I shiver, thinking of pirates.
We don’t have snow, but I have that long slippery ocean, and the steep hill dotted with my father’s orchard becomes our toboggan run.
My sister and brother and I sit cross-legged on saucers and garbage can lids as we shoot down the wet fronds, gripping the edges with fat white knuckles to hold the front of our ships off the worst of the rough ground, smacking into stumps and laughing aloud, occasionally yelling and blaming one another before we grab the lid or saucer or once a giant cardboard box my father gave us after they bought a new refrigerator, and trudge back up the hill to do it again.