Last week Mr. Evans introduced us to Endasia, Hakim, and Chucky, and he also had a thing or two to say about his Lacoste sponsorship. Or rather not.

What I am saying is that in fourth grade, Endasia, Hakim, and Chucky were the triumvirate of power. In that class, they were power. There were the axis around which it achieved movement, or motion. They were an inside delineated by three poles. Endasia was light-skinned, pockmarked, and nicked and dotted with scars. He was rough and ugly and nasty. Hakim was a different story. He was the Jose Antonio to Endasia's Franco, or the Che to his Castro. He was beautiful. He had a long, wet curl that perhaps today would look either ridiculous, nostalgic, or "retro," but at the time was simply beautiful; his skin was dark and smooth, flawless, and he smelled of cocoa butter and cologne. Their mistake was Chucky. Two poles produce an ontology, a border with no inside which is to say, an impenetrable inside; but three produce a space, and a space is vulnerable, and can be penetrated. The following year my family moved to a suburb of Milwaukee, and I changed to a grade school in the suburbs, so I don't know, officially, what ever became of that tripartite axis of power, but I do know that if it had been a movie, and they had been bad, then Chucky would, inevitably, have been the twist that allowed for the inevitable victory of good. Chucky doubted. He was embarrassed of his strength. He desired to be good. It was written all over his face. When Endasia and Chucky turned their backs, he was doing things like offering to write your name on your football for you, and while on the surface the offer was at most arbitrary, there was a subtext, which was that Endasia and Hakim would be much less likely to be able to steal your football from you -- or get away with it if they did -- if your name was written on it in permanent marker. Mine was: Elxi.

In permanent marker, too. It was a pretty football, smaller than official size, so children of our size could throw it, but the same colors and design as an official football. And now it was flawed. Permanently. Now it bore, permanently, the mark of my inability to achieve what famous American nice guy philosopher Richard Rorty calls solidarity.

*

Which isn't to say that I would turn Lacoste down if they -- or it, I guess? -- offered to sponsor me. I could use the free clothes. And yet if I were in such a socio-economic position -- whatever that might mean -- that it would be in Lacoste's interest to sponsor me, then would I still want to wear Lacoste? Wouldn't the gesture mean something very, very different than it means now? Isn't that how they get us? We try to crash their party and when they realize that they're not going to be able to keep us out, they invite us in. "Hey," they say, in other language. "My nigger!" And then we're in. Not just in but in, which is to say we are in, which is to say that now that we are in, we have not brought the outside in, which is to say that we have not subverted the integrity of the inside by polluting it with the outside, making it no longer an inside. Tommy was no fool. He recognized the marketing opportunity in Q-Tip's pronouncement. He realized: hey, these people will spend money they don't have trying to make it look like they do. I remember reading, a long time ago but after the explosion of prep-influenced fashions amongst urban black people, that ironically enough Tommy Hilfiger was an active republican and a racist. Tommy Hilfiger should, then, be killed. Q-Tip should be slapped on the wrist. If this were all a big game of chess, then Q-Tip failed to see the move after the move, and for that he should be slapped on the wrist. Tommy should be killed. I'd do it myself but I don't want to go to jail.

I might meet up after all these years with Endasia.

*

But if I could still be me, exactly who I am today, on Tuesday, but sponsored by Lacoste, then I would most definitely accept that arrangement. But if I were sponsored by Lacoste then I wouldn't still be me. There is this idea floating around out there that only that could change, and everything else could stay the same, but it doesn't work like that. Remember what Deleuze called it? A system of coordinates. One coordinate shifts and all of the other coordinates shift. Lacoste's sponsorship of me would be a performative. It would be, for all intents and purposes, like them -- or it, as a corporate entity, a twisted kind of individual -- standing up and calling me its nigger, a kind of symbolic social invagination. If Lacoste sponsors me, I will have been invaginated by its socio-economic coordinate, to a certain extent.

*

Anyway, Lacoste brand clothing -- all of it acquired after it has been converted into garbage, of course -- is only one of the ways that I signify that I am what I am not, or attempt to contaminate the significations of symbols which symbolize membership to clubs or parties into which I have not (yet) been invited. I've always approached the task from various angels, and the specific contents of those angels -- and I recognize that I'm stretching the metaphor, but so be it -- has always changed depending on my place in Deleuze's system of social coordinates; recently, for example, I've been wearing a lot of gold. This bejeweled condition sprung from an old tradition. For my golden birthday -- when I turned seventeen on the seventeenth of August -- my grandmother, my mother's mother, gave me a gold necklace. I think she got it at TJ Maxx in Milwaukee. It doesn't matter. It was from my grandmother. That was just a year before I left for college, and a year later I showed up at my dormitory at the University of Wisconsin dressed more or less like Adrock from the Beastie Boys and, yes, wearing my gold chain, which my best friend Jesse says is the first thing he noticed about me. That and my big, Jewish nose, such that the two in combination, he says, caused him to ask himself, or, more generally, to the world: who is that Jewish guy with the gold chain?

I didn't take the gold chain off not because I felt particularly attached to the notion of being a guy with a gold chain -- it didn't have much relevance to my entirely-derivative Beastie Boys style -- but because it came from my grandmother, my mother's mother, whose place in my life I can't really describe but can try to reflect by saying that, when the referee of an intramural basketball game I was playing in my senior year in college asked me to take the necklace off -- he claimed that it was a strangulation risk to me and a sort of projectile risk to the other players -- I dropped out of the game, leaving my team without its second string two-guard, rather than remove the necklace. That kind of thing. It is an amulet. Simply because it was chosen by her -- and it's not like the choice was all that particular: it's pretty much a generic gold chain -- it is sacred to me, inseparable from my body. And it's the kind of thing that's easy to forget about. You don't have to take it off to shower or sleep. It was only really a choice to put it on. It would be a choice to take it off, but it's only passive to keep it on.

Still, it became a part of me. I didn't think much of it -- in fact, I hardly ever thought about it, except on the few occasions when it was suggested that I remove it -- but over the years I began to take note of the fact that Jesse wasn't the only other person who thought of it. I realized, over a number of years, that it was something that people noticed about me, and I suppose because I had come to understand this, and because I knew that I didn't want to take it off because it came to me from my grandmother -- my mother's mother -- at some point not all that long ago it occurred to me that it was something that I could build on, a theme that could become a full participant in the game of befuddling signifiers that I have always liked to play. Or perhaps it was when I came across, in a drawer in my grandmother's house, my grandfather's old gold Seiko watch, and my grandmother told me I could have it, that the necklace, which was a particularity, started to become a theme. One gold necklace makes one gold necklace. A gold necklace and a gold watch make a gold theme, and it seemed to fit. The Lacoste shirts and faux-hawk and the limited edition sneakers and now the gold. A friend who had worked with me three summers running on my summer job in Spain told me, that fourth summer, when the gold had become a theme and the collars had started to turn up, that he thought I was really starting to find it in terms of my style. And he was gay, so he must have known something about style!

Digging through my mother's jewelry box this summer, I found an inch-wide twenty-four karat gold bracelet to add to the mix. It's an incredible piece of jewelry design: at once dense and delicate in a very airy sort of way. It reminds me of sculptor Liz Larner's guests, which, she says, index any space into or onto which they are introduced. I love it. The woman in charge of the Hospital Tavera, the greatest and most underappreciated attraction in the otherwise overrated Spanish city of Toledo, was nearly knocked flat she was so impressed with it. My father shrugs his shoulders and rolls his eyes. He's into fleece in the winter and breathables in the summer, and he loves pants which can be converted into shorts by zipping off the legs. My mother laughs nervously. The thing that some people struggle with is the tiny gold chain that loops from one side of the clasp to the other and acts as a sort of safety, such that if the clasp comes undone the bracelet will not just fall off. Most people think a safety is a sort of feminine feature and they might be right, but I need it. I'm clumsy and sort of absent-minded. Twice already I've found the bracelet loose on my wrist, held in place only by the safety, and who knows how long it had been since the clasp came undone and I hadn't noticed. My Aunt Sue tells me, every time she sees me wearing it, that I look like a faggot, but I sort of like it because, with her Wisconsin accent, she pronounce the word faygit. In Spain this summer the same friend and co-worker who more than a year ago told me I seemed to be finding it in terms of my fashion bought me -- in Toledo, of all places -- a tiny, twenty-four karat gold E, like the letter which begins both my first and last names, and I have since attached it to a gold chain slightly longer and thinner than the gold chain from my grandmother, the mother of my mother. And then, on my most recent trip home to Milwaukee, after my most recent trip to Spain, I turned up the item, which I tend to think completes the look: a ring, white gold with two small diamonds on either side and a cracked sapphire, and therein lies a story.

The ring, apparently, belonged to Burt, who was both the third and fourth husband of my father's mother Ruth. Ruth was a piece of work. I know that much for sure, although many of the other details are sketchy because she is someone my father doesn't like to talk about. The entire period of his life which belonged to her -- his first eighteen years -- are something he does not much like to talk about. I know that she was an alcoholic and a drug addict of some sort. I know that my father's father died before he was born and that at least one of Ruth's subsequent husbands was fairly cruel, in particular with the belt. I know that my father spent a lot of time on his back in his bedroom with his baseball glove throwing baseballs at the ceiling and catching them, and doing it again, and imagining that it was the seventh game of the World Series and he was stretching to make the great catch that won the game for the Dodgers-- his team, since he spent part of that childhood in Brooklyn -- and that when he refused to give his mother control of the money that he inherited from his grandfather on his eighteenth birthday -- because he knew she would spend it on her own problems -- she declared him no longer her son, although later she wanted him to be her son again.

I only met her once, when I was too young yet to be forming conscious memories, and after that knew her only by a name that was always associated with a largely unarticulated sense or presence of malice. Ruth. Burt was her husband, and then her husband again, after my father had already left for college in Wisconsin, where he would meet my mother. The only thing I used to know about him was that on the day he died Ruth called my father and when he answered the phone she said: "Burt is dead." And he was. Literally. Right there, dead on the floor in front of her. When she died, years later, my father and his sister split the estate, and apparently we ended up with one of Burt's rings, and, in particular, the ring that Burt was wearing when he died, and now we're getting to the story. When Burt died he was wearing the ring I have described, and which I now wear. Moreover, Ruth had diarrhea. She had diarrhea, as she often had diarrhea, and when she had diarrhea she drank tea to calm her stomach, and on this particular occasion she was sick with diarrhea and demanded that Burt, who perhaps was tired or not feeling so hot himself or trying to watch the game, make her tea and bring it to her. He did. I have understood that she was a difficult woman, and Burt's family understood it, too: they blamed her for his death. They said that she was too difficult, too demanding. She wore him out. She did him in. He was bringing her tea to her -- maybe grumbling or complaining himself, or despite that strange lethargy or that inarticulate pain in his chest -- and he dropped dead. Literally. Died standing up and just, dead, dropped. Dead weight. And dead weight falls hard. I've seen a man die standing up, and I can confirm that dead weight falls hard. I'd never seen a human being fall that way, and so I can imagine what Burt must have looked like, and anyway, I know that he fell hard when he died because when he fell his dead hand hit the ground with so much force that the sapphire on his white gold and diamond and sapphire ring cracked, or, actually, a little chuck came out of it, and that's the ring I'm wearing now.

I am very Freudian in that my father occupies a god-place in my life. When I was in high school, I refused to capitalize the letter D, unless I was writing Dad or Doug, which is my dad's name -- or, actually, not my dad's first name, which is Harold, the name of his father who died before he was born, but his middle name, the name his mother called him instead of the name of the dead father -- and on some level he remains the person to whom I write when I write, and in that sense I have written thousands and thousands upon thousands of pages to him over the course of my life. But if I have deified my father, it has been not because of his authority but because of his benevolence, and so the fact that he is a sort of deity for me in no way has rendered him invulnerable, and so I have always been protective toward him. The very notion of somebody hurting him -- directly or indirectly, and whether he knows it or not, such that this notion includes the notion of somebody saying something bad about him anywhere and at any time in the world -- brings out the beast in me, so it follows that I would feel a lot of ire toward the mother who created for him a life he will not even talk about, really, I imagine because it involved a lot of pain. It is for that reason that I thought about ending this piece more or less as follows:

The story doesn't end there. Years later, Ruth herself died.

On the toilet

The fucking bitch. Her diarrhea killed two people.

*

But things aren't as simple as they should be, and I've never been a very good liar. Because the story doesn't end there. It ends after school in sixth grade. I'm playing in a football game between my suburban grade school, Atwater, and the parochial Catholic school across the street, St. Roberts, for bragging rights or I don't know what. There were a number of such football games and they all just sort of blend into one, with some very particular memories attached to them. For example, Jeremy Westlake, the fattest kid in my class, pulls down his pants to moon the opposition but his butt crack is streaked green. Or: I overheard someone from the St. Roberts side asking someone from my side, in reference to me, "is that a girl?"

Dead serious. I was a very small, very delicate grade schooler. Now I'm increasingly hairy and have a big nose and a pronounced Adam's apple, but at that age, my gender was actually pretty indeterminate. It wasn't the first time that someone had wondered whether I was a girl, but I refused to accept that indeterminacy: I always attributed it to something. The first time I cut my hair shorter. That time, when it happened during the football game, I took off the denim baseball-style cap I was wearing and never, never wore it again.

We pretended we hated St. Roberts, that we were us and they were them, but the real us and them was the us and them established when one of them stepped across the line to ask one of us about me. Inside-outside. A very different inside at that suburban grade school than at the other one, but I never found my way in, either way.

But during one of those games -- which could have been any of those games, since they appear indistinct in my memory -- I had a very distinct thought. I thought to myself: Ruth is dead. Just like that. It came to me in three words. Ruth is dead. No question. No speculation. Nothing to contextualize it. And it also, as I remember it now, came as language. Ruth is dead. I did not formulate some mental image of Ruth, or come across one, and proceed from there to asking questions, or offering speculations. Rather the three words, as such, appeared in my head: Ruth is dead. Ruth is dead.

And I knew that she was, although I don't believe in ghosts and didn't then.

When I went home, my father was home, earlier than he should have been, and on the telephone. Indeed, as it turns out -- although I wouldn't know this until he hung up the phone -- Ruth was dead, and he was going to have to go to New York. I don't know how to explain it. I don't believe in ghosts, so I can't explain it that way. I suppose that maybe at that moment, when those three words entered my head, her death had become inevitable, the world had rendered it inevitable, and through some crossing up of signals I was suddenly aware of that inevitability. Or perhaps this: perhaps it was a performative. Perhaps my certainty, my sudden linguistic certainty, made it so. I should have been glad, or in any case I shouldn't have cared. So what? Ruth was dead. She was not good to my father. She caused him to suffer. She caused him pain he to this day prefers not to speak about. She is unforgiven. Good for her. Die a thousand deaths. I should not have cried because my father did not cry -- for his mother -- and yet perhaps, some hours later in the bathroom in my parents' house, the house I still go home to visit, I cried for precisely this reason. The easy explanation for those tears would be that they were for him, because he could not cry for the loss of his own mother, but I know that they were not. They were for her. For her because she died and her own son did not cry for her. Because her own son did not cry for her and, therefore, in the profoundest sense, she died alone, and it is possible that that aloneness is the one human condition with which we will always -- thrust, as we are, like distended limbs into the great Heideggerian nothing -- feel solidarity, the one special kind of suffering we can never not understand, or in which we will always join.

She was in my arms. I was in the bathroom in parents' house and she was in my arms, or I in hers, the way years later my sister would be in my arms, or I in hers, the two of us suffering her suffering together, doubling it in one another, not alone. I like to think that in me Ruth did not die alone, or that my tears removed the trace of her aloneness from her death in me. She could have never known that years later I would, with other gold and upturned collar and name brand jeans and colorful sneakers, wear on my finger the white gold and two-diamond ring with the sapphire that broke against the ground when Burt, because of one cup of tea or bowl of diarrhea too many, fell already dead to the floor in their apartment in Manhattan, causing her, before anything else, to call my father, in Wisconsin, to tell him, in three other words tracing upon the irrevocable present the presence of what had already passed: Burt is dead.

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