The Machine

When I say I didn’t feel anything as a teenager, yo, what I really mean is I refused myself the freedom to feel. Because, to put it simply, that was the playbook for how one navigated the world of Highland Springs, Virginia as a young Black boy in the early 2000s. That feeling shit, that whole opening up and leaning into personal expression via the outpouring of emotions could result in you getting jumped in the dying glow of some streetlight on the corner of Elm or South Daisy. And so I would stand stone-faced while witnessing someone get beat down for tilting into their sentiments more than the hood allowed us. Even during a middle school football game, after tackling a boy and harming that boy to the point where he never returned to the competition, I convinced myself that I never felt a thing. I could never admit how his silver helmet fractured my forearm, left a silver streak on my skin. I’m considering these memories while gawking at a picture of Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, in which he has painted himself—for no apparent reason, reportedly—silver, while rocking a robe, socks, and sandals for his opera “Mary”—the garments are likewise silver. I cannot explain why I envision the color silver when I listen to the track “Water” from his Jesus is King album, acknowledging how much Ye is trying to impart the importance of becoming the substance which makes up most of the human body. “We Are Water” spills from the collective mouth of the spirited choir. The instrumental flows seamlessly; the bass bubbles under a retro synth which seems to rinse the soundtrack’s surface, and I imagine some silver-skinned ballet dancer gliding across a deep-sea-blue stage to this joint; pirouettes and pas de chats—a body executing a flurry of fluid movements. See, the thing is, bruh, my lower back has been stiff these past few days; I’m massaging circles of Icy Hot just above my tailbone, the menthol choking the air in my room, the lidocaine seeping into my pores. Naturally, homie, my heart goes out to the Tin Man. Like, no bullshit. Like, I need Diana Ross and Michael Jackson to hit a brotha with a few spritz of oil. Here. Here. And here. I am, of course, pulled more in the direction of The Wiz than The Wizard of Oz. The yearning to feel from Nipsey Russell’s Tin Man is undoubtedly more convincing. No disrespect to Broadway’s Tiger Haynes (first black Tin Man) or Jack Haley (that other cat). I would, of course, expect nothing less from Russell, once deemed “the poet laureate of comedy.” But they literally found my man still alive among the ruins of a deserted amusement park; various gears and gadgetry seized in place, a roller coaster’s framework stained and rusted, the extremities of countless leaden bodies forever paused in paralysis. What it is to be ensnared inside the wreckage of abandonment. And I still can’t believe he had enough life left in him to break into song. His smile cutting through rust. Sure, he might’ve not been able to feel, but there is something in his eyes when his gaze drinks in his hands, which often act as our vehicles for touch and feeling. I am not ashamed to avow that sometimes, on a mindful stroll in the woods or on some winding path through a park, I might stop, pick up and fondle a rock from the ground, or glide a finger across the blade face of a leaf, leaving behind a trickle of dew. Damn, the physicality of reaching out and touching nature without the motivation for its destruction. And damn, I just watched and then rewatched Ne-Yo, who played, probably, the best Tin Man ever, in The Wiz live, argent on stage, singing “What Would I Do If I Could Feel.” I sink slowly into the lyrics as he sings, the rest of the cast looking on, holding him in their stares as if they do not know where the leak drew its first tear, can only spectate this beautiful flooding of the Tin Man’s affliction. And suddenly I want to transplant my own heart into the metal adobe of his chest. The line that pulls me all the way under is: “what would I do if I could look inside me, and know how it feels to say I like what I see.” Not many of us, I think, study our internal machines. And so the song, for me, speaks to the vacancy of identity given our inability to gaze inward. It is also a song about reckoning with emotions you wish you could unearth, but, because of the bloodletting reality administers, you do not have the capacity to do so. In 1978, the year The Wiz came out, Grease was the number one film in theaters, and James Alan McPherson became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize, for his collection Elbow Room. Sure, the title story is about race on its surface, but more about what it means to inhabit a space as a Black person after the Civil Rights era, how we nudge ourselves into spaces in which we are not initially accepted. I think about the ways in which the dexterity of identity is tested as we contort and or stretch who we are in hopes of embodying a self into “a self,” according to Virginia Valentine, the sun all characters orbit in the story, “as big as the world.” And it is made even more clear when the Tin Man asks Dorothy to nourish his elbow with oil so that he may have the ability to flex elegantly into the film’s expanding universe. I read somewhere that the original Tin Man supposedly represented the overburdened and exhausted factory worker of the 1880s, the puberty of American capitalism; a country in the throes of its own growing pains, aching in the bones of its citizens and still, today, throbbing in the marrow. I can say, perhaps with more assurance now, how much I revered the Black women who worked innumerable hours at the packaging plant in Dublin, Virginia, where I once took up a gig to make ends meet during a smoldering and broke-as-shit summer which nearly swallowed me. Let me stop right here. Let me introduce you to one—I’ll call her K—who wore a messy bun under her hair net, her oversized work shirt enveloping her slight frame, who hardly ever took a day off standing for ten hours straight catching plastic cups and containers spat out from growling, gargantuan machines. K punched in earlier than all of us in order to squeeze an extra dollar or so to care for her two kids, one of whom, according to her phone calls in the breakroom trailer, was not doing so well in school. And when K would notice me not eating much, because rent money devoured everything else, she’d share a Tupperware of her homecooking and say, “You gotta eat good with these long hours.” What it is to be lucky enough to have someone who comes along to nourish your tiring and exhausted body, though all the while plagued with even more fatigue. And there is a strength in this I will most likely never acquire. And there is a strength in my homie Antonio, who did a seven year stretch in prison for a crime he never disclosed, working the extruder which slowly oozed melted plastic from its mouth. When I greeted him one morning, the extruder sent clouds into the air and we bumped forearms, our elbows meeting in a delicate embrace. And this was a rain-soaked day. But Antonio was beaming. In a week he was flying out to witness his son graduate from Berkeley. He told me that when he sees his son clutch the diploma, he knew, right at that moment he was going to cry. This is the part when I tell you that I have only seen my Pop cry once. And truth to be told, I cannot place a finger on that episode. However, how and why he can steer away from his sorrow remains a mystery but is also quite clear. It is the case, I believe, that when you grow up in a place like Newark, NJ, crying or showing any sign of weakness whatsoever could immediately deliver more suffering to your doorstep. I can acknowledge now that I strived to absorb this austerity when I branded myself, during staged wrestling matches against my Pop, “The Machine.” I dreamed of possessing a metallic body, robotic limbs, and plated flesh. What it means for an emotionally distant boy to covet the ideal of that which cannot feel pain. I wanted to be incapable of understanding pain’s agonizing existence. When my Pop hit me with a pillow once and accidentally caused my face to knock against a bed post, blood streaming down my cheeks, I do not recall shedding one tear. I did this, I assume, to impress my Pop, who expressed great guilt and drove me immediately to get stitches. I consider the real fact that men are more given to express themselves physically through the verbalization of fists, the grappling and seizing of limbs as conversation—a brutish therapy. It can, of course, be emotionally expensive to show our hearts. The Tin Man, comparably, wrestles with time and the demands of reality and is promptly defeated. Then oil is issued into his armor. Then his joints loosen into mechanized freedom. And Nipsey dances off the decay. I have a confession: I have never been one for dancing. Not at all. I would, regrettably, be more like Haley’s Tin Man, stuck to an adherent wall in the corner of some closet-sized club. You could find me and my homies statuesque, posted up in the corner all night as the club’s cheap strobe lights splashed beams on our life-hardened faces. Our only movements came by way of watching girls strut by, nodding our heads to a puncturing bass, or shifting a gaze to another group of boys, also there harboring the same desire to destroy anyone whose eyes lingered and attempted to expose the countless fissures in their armor. This is why these days I am so confused when I see rappers dancing. Because I come from an era when dancing was not part of rap’s criteria; it was not about the body bursting into moves, but about your barbarity bursting into a crowd of your enemies. But this does not stop me from breaking into a smile when I walk by a group of Black boys dancing outside the Starbucks on the university campus where I teach. There is, I believe, something magical that happens when you silence the outside world, when you throw a veil over the eyes of the public and dance intimately with whatever feeling flows through you. I watch Nipsey’s Tin Man caper with vitality and cannot help but consider the Robot Dancer, Karl Lake, from The Chappelle Show. His head forever tilted toward the sky, his eyes fixed on something above him that only he could see, hands and elbows carving into real estate around him. As though nothing but the dance mattered. As though he located his expression above the possibility of ridicule from his peers. You cannot change the mind with the mind, you must change the mind with the body. We can learn from this what it means to experience a feeling no one else can touch, one that none of us are allowed to touch. I always wondered what this felt like. I always wondered what it felt like to open your chest and show the world your beaten and bruised core. I wonder if Harlem rapper Max B—aka the Silver Surfer, aka “the Drake before Drake,” I like to say to people—felt the same way as he rose from Harlem, singing hooks swelling with soul, a voice equal parts harsh and harmonious, his dubbed euphony crawling through every track. Oh, how it feels when another’s outpouring of pain becomes your medicine. Max B became, at least for me, the pulsing heart of every kid who thought themselves, to some degree, from the streets, who felt as though they could not sing the songs their hearts so desperately craved to release. And this came at a time when I wore anger on my sleeve. When I lived inside the boiling cauldron of fury. Madness vibrating through my veins. I had organically and somewhat ignorantly aligned myself with rappers who claimed to be heartless. It seemed alluring to play the part of gladiator in every single arena. And so an overzealous kid is almost demolished inside of a Burger King from which I bounced before the police arrived and flooded the scene with sirens. And so a door would slam and slam again, sending the body of a house into seizures. Once-buried emotions crept out of the graves I didn’t think to cover. Thus Ye’s “Heartless” acts as a cautionary tale and I would argue that the album cover of 808s and Heartbreaks—that floating paper heart torn out from some imaginary chest, crumpled and creased, wrinkled, roughened, and left deserted—acts as the very thing all of us attempt to avoid; a simple symbol which further drives home the crucial discovery of the heart’s fragile enginery. So, what follows then, is the logic of the street: if the heart is so easy to fracture, it seems more prudent to remove it as early as one can. The irony: around the way, as a youngen, if someone said you “had heart” it translated to simple courage; your ability not to quake at anything, even when a fist was propelled in your direction, even when you pissed off “the wrong one” and your life jousted with jeopardy. Having a “heart” was measured by how much you could withstand pain, your unwavering stillness in the presence of peril. However, if you had knocked on my sternum then, I put money on it you might’ve not heard the music of a heart knocking back. But yo, nowadays, if I am totally surrendering to honesty, I am more easily moved to tears; distance from a place can make you know yourself more. And so I am more empathetic because I can be, because being out of the reach of one’s block results in some kind of emotional freedom. I am liable to let a sensation or two escape from within. Sometimes I consider that I might be plunging into my sentiments a little bit too much—but so be it. Perhaps this is me making up for those countless episodes when I caged my emotions. Giving life to my interior machinery. Or a song I’ve been eager to sing. Me, finally, dancing freely with my feelings right in front of you.