* * *
—
Most people don’t have to think about what their faces mean the way I do. Your face in the mirror, reflected back at you, most people don’t even know what it looks like anymore. That thing on the front of your head, you’ll never see it, like you’ll never see your own eyeball with your own eyeball, like you’ll never smell what you smell like, but me, I know what my face looks like. I know what it means. My eyes droop like I’m fucked up, like I’m high, and my mouth hangs open all the time. There’s too much space between each of the parts of my face—eyes, nose, mouth, spread out like a drunk slapped it on reaching for another drink. People look at me then look away when they see I see them see me. That’s the Drome too. My power and curse. The Drome is my mom and why she drank, it’s the way history lands on a face, and all the ways I made it so far despite how it has fucked with me since the day I found it there on the TV, staring back at me like a fucking villain.
* * *
—
I’m twenty-one now, which means I can drink if I want. I don’t though. The way I see it, I got enough when I was a baby in my mom’s stomach. Getting drunk in there, a drunk fucking baby, not even a baby, a little fucking tadpole thing, hooked up to a cord, floating in a stomach.
* * *
—
They told me I’m stupid. Not like that, they didn’t say that, but I basically failed the intelligence test. The lowest percentile. That bottom rung. My friend Karen told me they got all kinds of intelligences. She’s my counselor I still see once a week over at the Indian Center—I was at first mandated to go after the incident with Mario in kindergarten. Karen told me I don’t have to worry about what they try to tell me about intelligence. She said people with FAS are on a spectrum, have a wide range of intelligences, that the intelligence test is biased, and that I got strong intuition and street smarts, that I’m smart where it counts, which I already knew, but when she told me it felt good, like I didn’t really know it until she said it like that.
I’m smart, like: I know what people have in mind. What they mean when they say they mean another thing. The Drome taught me to look past the first look people give you, find that other one, right behind it. All you gotta do is wait a second longer than you normally do and you can catch it, you can see what they got in mind back there. I know if someone’s selling around me. I know Oakland. I know what it looks like when somebody’s trying to come up on me, like when to cross the street, and when to look at the ground and keep walking. I know how to spot a scaredy-cat too. That one’s easy. They wear that shit like there’s a sign in their hands, the sign says: Come Get Me. They look at me like I already did some shit, so I might as well do the shit they’re looking at me like that for.
* * *
—
Maxine told me I’m a medicine person. She said people like me are rare, and that when we come along, people better know we look different because we are different. To respect that. I never got no kind of respect from nobody, though, except Maxine. She tells me we’re Cheyenne people. That Indians go way back with the land. That all this was once ours. All this. Shit. They must not’ve had street smarts back then. Let them white men come over here and take it from them like that. The sad part is, all those Indians probably knew but couldn’t do anything about it. They didn’t have guns. Plus the diseases. That’s what Maxine said. Killed us with their white men’s dirt and diseases, moved us off our land, moved us onto some shit land you can’t grow fucking shit on. I would hate it if I got moved outta Oakland, because I know it so well, from West to East to Deep East and back, on bike or bus or BART. It’s my only home. I wouldn’t make it nowhere else.
* * *
—
Sometimes I ride my bike all over Oakland just to see it, the people, all its different hoods. With my headphones on, listening to MF Doom, I can ride all day. The MF stands for Metal Face. He’s my favorite rapper. Doom wears a metal mask and calls himself a villain. Before Doom, I didn’t know nothing but what came on the radio. Somebody left their iPod on the seat in front of me on the bus. Doom was the only music on there. I knew I liked him when I heard the line “Got more soul than a sock with a hole.” What I liked is that I understood all the meanings to it right away, like instantly. It meant soul, like having a hole in a sock gives the sock character, means it’s worn through, gives it a soul, and also like the bottom of your foot showing through, to the sole of your foot. It was a small thing, but it made me feel like I’m not stupid. Not slow. Not bottom rung. And it helped because the Drome’s what gives me my soul, and the Drome is a face worn through.