Benson is Black, a native of the Houston melting pot that Bryan Washington calls home.
Here, an excerpt from the book we need right now.
My parents pretend I’m not gay.
Dailey Hubbard
It’s easier for them than it sounds.
Before that, we took most of our family dinners downtown.
My father was a meteorologist.
It was a status thing.
My mother never debated him or cussed him out or anything like that.
She’d repeat exactly what he said.
That was her thing.
Big job today, she’d say, in the car, stuck on the 10.
Eventually, she left.
Lydia went with our mother, switching high schools.
I stayed in the suburbs, at my old junior high, and my father kept drinking.
He lived off his savings once he got fired from the station for being wasted on-air.
Occasionally, in blips of sobriety, I’d come home to him grading papers.
Some kid had called precipitation anticipation.
Another kid, instead of defining cumulus clouds, drew little fluffs all over the page.
He waved them at me, asked why everything had to be so f—ing hard.
A few months in, Mike said we could be whatever we wanted to be.
Whatever that looked like.
I’m so easy, he said.
I’m not, I told him.
You will be, he said.
Just give me a little time.
It’s past midnight when we pull onto our block.
Most of the lights are out.
Some kids are huddled by the curb, smoking pot, f—ing around with firecrackers.
When a pop explodes behind us, the kids take off.
That’s their latest thing.
Mike’s mother doesn’t even flinch.
Ma, says Mike, this is home.
We live in the Third Ward, a historically Black part of Houston.
Our apartment’s entirely too large.
It doesn’t make any sense.
But the block has recently been invaded by fraternities from the college up the block.
And a scattering of professor types.
With pockets of rich kids playing at poverty.
Our immediate neighbors are Venezuelan.
They’ve got like nine kids.
Our other neighbors are these Black grandparents who’ve lived on the property forever.
Every few weeks, Mike cooks for both families, sopa de pescado and yams and macaroni and rice.
But, after a little while, I noticed people let him linger on their porches.
He’d poke at their kids, leaning all over the wood.
Sometimes the Black folks invited him inside, showed him pictures of their daughter’s daughters.
Mike’s lived here for years.
I left my father’s place for his.
Now Mike’s mother drops her shoes by our door.
She runs her hand along the wall.
She taps at the counter, toeing the wood.
A few years after they split, my parents took me to lunch together in Montrose.
We hadn’t all sat at the same table in years.
The week before, my father had walked in on some guy jerking me off.
It wasn’t anyone who matters.
We’d met on some f—ing app.
The boy beside me made a face like, Should we finish or what.
That night, after he left, I waited for my father to bring it up.
But he just sat on the sofa and drank his way through two six-packs.
The incident dissolved in the air.
Then my mother smiled.
You know you’re able to talk to us, she said.
Both of us, she added.
My mother smelled like chocolate.
My father wore his nice shirt.
Or that this lady, immediately afterward, stuck a fork into his elbow.
Awesome, I said.
About anything, said my mother, touching my hand.
When I flinched, she took hers back.
My father didn’t say s—.
COPYRIGHT (C) 2020 BY BRYAN WASHINGTON.
