He was telling me what the world told me at every turn: there’s nothing beautiful about your people or where you come from. When that professor returned my piece he said, “This isn’t writing.” He didn’t have the cojones to look at me when he said it. I am a writer, in part, thanks to Teresa. I’d read them up in my plum tree in the backyard. In return she’d give me stacks of back issues. Sometimes, she’d call to me from her second-floor window she’d lower an old rice bag on a string with seventy-five cents in it so I could go to the newsstand up the block to get her the World News, the tabloid that claimed that Elvis was alive and living on Mars, and Big Foot was his cousin. When she was sober, Teresa rarely came out of her house, and when she did, she hid her face, and she could be so mean.
I was just a kid, but somewhere inside me I knew something had happened to this woman who cried whenever she sang about loss and endings. I’d watch her and wonder at how beautiful and sad she was at once. Tenemos que recordar que no existe eternidad…” As the song went on, her smile became a frown and tears came, soft and quiet. She always danced and sang when she was high, eyes closed, mouth in a big smile-it was the only time she wasn’t ashamed of her rotting teeth. Once, she balanced herself on a fire hydrant, arms spread wide like wings, she laughed loudly, hair wild, she looked like something straight out of a circus act.
Teresa became the “neighborhood crackhead.” Back then, we all had a “neighborhood crackhead.”
#Roxane gay audacity of hopelessness crack#
I wrote about Teresa, my friend Ulysses’s mom, who got lost to crack like so many of our people did in the 1980s. The professor asked us to write about something beautiful from our childhood. The first time I wrote about addiction was in the mid-1990s, in a creative writing class at Columbia University.