When I was in the 5th grade I knew a kid
named Javier. He was black, which was confusing.
He was an African American kid who spoke
Spanish, loved country music, wore cowboy
boots, play jump rope and had a look on his
face that said: I wish a motherfucker would say
something. None of us said anything. For show
and tell, he brings in his pet chameleon. When he
walks in, the eyes of every kid glaze over like the
windows to our souls shook hands with the winter
for the first time. A girl with box springs in her throat
felt the silence and it was just too heavy for her fingertips
to hold on to she drops the quiet like a suitcase full of
habits that no one wants to keep and says, "So what's his name?"
He replies, "I call him Rudy." When the class realized that me
and the lizard had the same name, they laughed uncontrollably.
Twenty years later, the irony hits me over the head like an empty
Heineken bottle inside of the car fight that I call my everyday life.
I get it. Chameleons have the ability to paintbrush themselves
into whatever will match their surroundings. They do it so often,
they probably wouldn't be able to recognize a photograph of their
own skin. They think it is far better to be invisible than it is to
grind their teeth into "I dare you" and to ride their bones like a
magic carpet, no steering wheel, no tires, no brakes, no battery
just bravery and a chest full of "I am not dying today."
Courage has never been a chameleon's best attribute.
and some days, it's not mine either. I was mentored by black men
with brown skin who turned yellow at the sight of bellies
swollen with half their DNA, I was taught that a woman's vagina
is just an underground railroad to masculinity, that real men
have tunnel vision and treat girls like subway cars,
like nothing more than a space to parallel park our genitals,
a hole to bury seeds and leave orchards in our rear-view mirrors.
They say you have to peel a woman like a tangerine
and your job as a man is to chameleon yourself into her trees,
bite a piece of her fruit and leave the rest hanging
crooked and confused. This is an apology to every woman
I changed colors just to get inside of.
I still haven't stumbled across a definition of a man,
but I know that we are hotels that stand a million war stories tall.
I know that we carry guitar cases full of phobias
hoping we can turn fear into our strongest instrument,
I know that our hands break things just as frequent
as we can fix them. And we often forget that sexism
is a family heirloom that we've been passing down for generations.
As men, it is important that we start asking ourselves,
What will the boys learn from us?