Freedom Of AssociationChapter 12 free porn video

He earnestly tried to have fun, but what exactly is fun without a woman? Chasing them is fun, but there’s always something about a woman that one can never have, something she protects so fiercely, something she won’t trade, and these things aren’t necessarily secrets that need to be hidden from public view, but instead things so blissful as to transform him from the rotten man he was to a better—oh, what should he call it?—a better human being?

He could no longer stand being away from Amanda. He summoned power within, failed, and would have liked to move on as soon as possible, but he couldn’t let go. Mere friendship wasn’t enough. Never seeing her again wasn’t enough. No matter how close he came to her, she moved farther and farther away, like a bottle drifting from a shoreline until it falls out of range, and with it any hope that he could become a better human being.

For Claude Carolina the search had only begun, and already he needed rest or at least a break from the constant searching. He didn’t think of it as chasing her but searching for her as a ship does. The joy certainly wasn’t in the journey anymore. Perhaps Amanda needed to be achieved? No, that wasn’t it either. He ruminated for some time on the subject and discovered that he didn’t know exactly why he needed her. They’re trouble, these white women. They like to see men fighting, reminding them of some childhood fairy tale, but the blood and the guts are real, as this was the problem for him. The lynchings and the bar fights and the lack of courtship in a world dominated by brute strength and verbal and visual pollution were also very real to him. They never disappeared but surreptitiously stayed in place, if not in subtle ways, then in the dark closet of fear he hid beneath his animus. It seemed that society hadn’t moved an inch forward in securing a place for them.

This is what disturbed him. The pendulum always swings back into an historic struggle with the parts of humanity that cannot be navigated unless some person dies for it in the process. And this, perhaps, pushed Amanda away from him from the very beginning. He figured she must have been hiding this knowledge—that the two of them would always have to watch their backs—or else forfeit their own lives to the systematic division, marginalization, and finally a concentration of their own kind if only to be devoured whole whenever society got angry. Maybe America wasn’t the place for him, or did he think this because there was an easier, softer way to sidestep the process of Western evolution? He didn’t know. Regardless, he came to see the savagery of their relationship rather than its bliss, and at this point he almost gave up the struggle for Amanda Larson. Their colors would always get in the way, and it just might be easier and softer if he denied love and gave in to the collective mindset of other strangers with their ideas on how a man and a woman should be properly matched. Either way, he saw himself as screwed, and yet there had to be a hole through which they could both crawl and find themselves in the garden of their mutual belonging.

He hung on to her hand with the last finger of his grip. He didn’t know any longer why he held on to this woman, as if she could show him a bountiful other side free of his confusion. Was it his eyes that immediately latched on to her, like a kid watching a movie screen? Was it his mind that needed her accompaniment through his thick fog of confusion? Or how about his loins, as they fit into hers perfectly, or her skin, because he needed the calm and ease of her whiteness for a while, just to avoid the exhaustion of being black for so long. And his heart? It remained stored in his mind with all of his other turbulent emotions, such that the heart, barely beating, only thumped when the mood struck him at the right time.

There was no clear way around Amanda Larson. Not for him. He saw the violence in it. He would always have to compete against other men for her affection, and the competition would never stop until a racial war bloomed from the competition for her. Finding her became this grave impossibility, and he could not pursue her until she herself met him halfway, which any wise white woman would never do. Loving her wasn’t practical, and while he yearned for their being together, he soon realized that love, in thought and in deed, hadn’t an ounce of practicality to it. Love instead involved the irrational and the unforeseen and the unreasonable on the part of both genders, or it at least involved the statistical improbability of two hearts, both on separate voyages, colliding at the center of an infinite sea. There was no strategy he could implement in order to win her, and yet she wouldn’t meet him halfway. Hence the paradox. Hence the intolerable frustration of loving her.

He could try to elbow his way into her heart, but that only built up her resolve to keep him out, to shut him out, or else he may get too close and destroy, wreck, pillage, and plunder what she had maintained: her innocence in all of this, perhaps, or her childhood fairy tales, perhaps, or even a past lover whose control over her heart remained so complete that it transcended time and fought tooth and nail to prolong his own agony.

Regardless, he knew she would never return to him, and like Preston said, he should make a clean break with her in order to avoid even more pain and hardship.

He walked home after the sushi dinner deciding whether or not the break was clean enough and wondering whether his own heart could finally mend and move along with the other lost souls in the South Orange town that night. He found himself kin to the lonely and the woebegone, a trend that didn’t bother him so much as it did startle him. Nothing hid the fact that he could no longer handle it alone. His body, his disposition, his mentality all seemed very old to him, old and tired for such a young man.

‘This is what you get for seeing a white woman,’ he thought.

Besides, he had other things to think about, like getting the money

together for this trading scheme with Preston. He knew Clarence, his old pal, had the money tucked away somewhere, and Claude made a plan of it to visit him at the playground in Newark where he shot baskets in the afternoons. How he would convince him, Claude didn’t know.

He sneaked into his house late at night like he had done so many times before, making sure not to wake up his mother who snored a few paces down the hall. Sleeping without Amanda by his side, his blanket an ersatz body, Claude searched for cold spots in the sheets and waited for another reluctant morning that delivered yet another day of pain.

Morning came slowly, and despondency lurked in his room when the sunshine shot at an angle between the blinds. This despondency seemed to be everywhere, not only in his bed. His desk, his books, his posters all became dull matter. They became colorless, odorless objects that didn’t mean anything to him anymore. They lost their shape and detail, as the once- exciting room fell within a wash of blandness, the pile of clothes at the foot of his bed like a modernist sculpture that refused to be moved. His room turned into a museum of vague and barely-identifiable objects that he had to maneuver around in order to get to the shower, and once under the spray, he struggled to cleanse and ready himself for the hike into Newark.

Exhaustion found him standing under the warm, weeping water, listless, like a pregnant bird. He looked into the crevices of blue tile beading with moisture as his mind created nonsensical images that obscured his vision of the same tile he stared at. He flipped through strategies to meet her once again in the utopia of his unregulated imagination. He had very little will or energy to hunt down Clarence that morning, as his thoughts were consumed by what he lacked and what he needed right then and there.

He stood under the shower for a good half-hour, nodding off into dreamland. He then ran the shower cold, and the chill of the water reminded him that Amanda was also a real person and not this mythical creature whose status he elevated to divinity. She must also have real needs, real wants, and true desires, and he mistook her good looks for the actual woman beneath the makeup and that glossy red lipstick she wore. To know her mind was one thing, but to comprehend what she needed as a woman took the bulk of his imaginative powers. Sex, indeed, wasn’t everything. It was perhaps the last thing on her mind.

How about security? Hell, with one phone call his old pal Clarence could have come over and popped the shit out of the asshole who tried to rape her, assuming the police didn’t get to the guy first. Clarence, in fact, was more dangerous and more alert than most of the Newark detectives. But aside from security, what then does a woman need? A loving and caring man?

He believed that as white women get older, they look for men who can be kind and generous and supportive, but only if they’re white. Strike one against him. They look for white men with steady incomes. Strike two. And they want men who can live apart from their mothers. Strike Three. Even worse, he saw his pursuit of Amanda Larson in theoretical terms, and the conclusions were downright lousy.

Say Amanda were the captain of a quasi-baseball/sex team, and she had to choose among ten players or bachelors with whom she could have a long- lasting relationship. One player would be left off the team, since a ball team has nine players. As Claude imagined it, he was the only black player on the team among nine stalwart, virile white men. If the players are notified by mail, guess who’s the one getting the rejection slip?

It worked this way with all white women. A black man always came in last place when competing for her affections. The races generally stayed apart when it came to romance, with a few exceptions of course. Why the country operated against him in this fashion Claude didn’t know, but if it were indeed a stubborn system of mating that operated against him, then the flaw was in the system of things and not with him. There lied the rub, because either he had to change or the entire system had to change, and Claude wasn’t budging for anyone. All of this talk about setting free the one you love amounted to nothing but hard time in prisons of loneliness, and Claude certainly wasn’t going back to that. He had had several girlfriends up to this point, but he never fell in love this completely before. He blamed it on his father for ass-kissing white people too much. He blamed it on watching too much television during his formative years. He blamed it on the village of South Orange and the university that catered to white women. No matter whom or what he blamed, however, he still could not extinguish the fire that raged in his heart for Amanda. His mind turned like a Hungarian mill under the cold spray of water, until he decided, finally, that he had had enough.

A woman cannot be won through force, proper planning, or even brute luck. Neither does money nor the fast car capture her affections. It is usually their choice to begin with. The most effective remedy is extreme and heart- rending patience while watching them walk to and fro on some city street corner as they eat salad at a restaurant or jog on the grass at a park where the ducks on the water play second-fiddle to their passing. Until then, a man must wait, watch, and not expect too much.

After he dressed and schlepped himself along South Orange Avenue, his feet like two sandbags, his legs like wet noodles, he headed straight into Preston’s neck of the woods—the turbulent inner-city.

Off one of the side-streets where old, dilapidated storefronts yawned with their open doors, the small park where Clarence could be found, guarded tenuously by a sagging chain-linked fence and small stumps of trees, sat amidst mid-rise apartment buildings and a couple of vacant, rubble-sprayed lots. He spotted Clarence’s black SUV with chrome rims still spinning like pinwheels. The thud and spank of a basketball hitting the pavement echoed throughout the small park: the ball often bouncing on the steel rim of a hoop with no net, which jarred the otherwise tranquil setting.

Clarence bent his back to the ball and dribbled it a few times before making his next shot. He was shirtless, and an ornate serpentine tattoo, etched into his skin with the darkest of inks, filled his upper back. The tattoo must have been new, as the artwork was impeccable. Claude hadn’t seen any tattoos on him before. He felt a little nervous about approaching him, now that ink was carved into his back. His body was chiseled and leaner than before. He suspected Clarence had been working out or at least worked hard at his shady business to merit this noticeable lack of body fat. He missed most of his baskets.

“Some things about a person never change,” called Claude from behind him.

Clarence let out a smile, and Claude noticed a gold tooth where an incisor should have been. A gold chain complemented his gold tooth along with a diamond-encrusted ring and a solid gold Rolex. Apparently Clarence lived well, although he never told him directly how he made his money. The hints Clarence doled out usually sufficed—and no, the money didn’t exactly come from a do-good non-profit organization. Clarence lived high on the hog, and he had been doing so for some time. His new sneakers were the latest leaps on his cutthroat urban climb.

“You think you can do better, huh?”

“Damn right I can do better,” said Claude.

“Oh, so now that you’re a big time scholar and all, let’s see if you can take it to the hole. Books aren’t gonna help you this time.”

Claude took the ball from him and shot. He missed by a few inches.

“Yep. Some things don’t change,” smiled Clarence, who then hugged his friend. “How you doin’, bro?”

“I’m alright. How about you?”

“Still livin’”

“Just barely for me.”

“Shit,” said Clarence, “even the way you talk has changed. What have you been doin’ with yourself?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time. Nothin’ around here but time anyway.”

Clarence rolled the basketball next to his gym bag on the far side of the court. He usually had his posse with him, but today he was alone, and this was better for them both.

“It’s a long-ass summer,” said Clarence.

“Tell me about it.”

“This neighborhood’s getting worse and worse. It takes all you got just to stay on top of things.”

“You’re getting to be pretty well-known around these parts I take it?”

“Yeah, they know me, that they do. I’m turning into quite a celebrity around here.”

“With a ride to match,” said Claude, pointing to his SUV.

“Y’know, you could have something like that too. It’s just a ride to me, but if you still want to get your spoken-word going, you’re welcome to it.”

They took a seat against a firm part of the fence.

“So what brings you around these parts, if it isn’t to do some gigs with me?”

“I’m here to ask for your help with something.”

“Help? Me help you? I find that hard to believe.”

“Seriously. I need your help. I may be going to college and all, but I still need your help every now and then. I’m here to ask you to invest in a publishing company.”

“A what?”

“A publishing company.”

“Publishing what?”

“My work and the work of others.”

“I’m not putting money into a publishing company.”

“Can I explain first?”

“Go ahead.”

He explained the story down to the very last detail.

“So you’re in love with a white woman, is that what you’re telling me?” was Clarence’s immediate response.

“Yes.”

“Awww shit.”

“I know.”

“This is not you. I always knew you were one smart brother, but—shit, I don’t know what to think anymore, about anything.”

“I guess we’re finally growing up,” said Claude.

“But a white girl, though? How the hell did you get into this mess?”

“I don’t know, but I’m trying to find my way out of it.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“Start this publishing company.”

“And you need a five-hundred thousand dollar loan to impress this girl? Shit, if you want a white girl, I can get you one in a half-hour.”

“I’m in love with her, Clarence. This is not about getting a white woman into bed.”

“And you trust these white people too? Your man already dicked you over once. What’s to say he won’t do it again?”

“Because you’ll kill him if he dicks me over.”

“Ah. Now I see. I’m the bill collector on this one.”

“It’s the only way.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“You’ll own a part of the publishing company.”

“What the hell am I gonna do with a publishing company?”

“Promotions.”

“Hmmmm.”

“We have to move quickly. Breakthrough’s being bought out any day now. We don’t fail with this plan, Clarence. You’ll make back your initial investment, plus you’ll control a young company with a top-notch editor. Your investment will appreciate.”

“Now you’re a banker all of a sudden?”

“Wouldn’t you like to go legit for once? Do something positive with your money?”

“I have people to answer to too, y’know.”

“C’mon, Clarence. Have I ever steered you wrong?”

“No, you haven’t, but you have a white woman interfering with all this. You’re doing this because you want her, not because you want to make money. Money, in this game, is the bottom line. What men do, how we operate, is the bottom line. We don’t want any honey getting in the way of that process, now do we? The company’s gonna come to an end pretty quick if you chase the girl and not the Benjamins. You know that, don’t you?”

“I want this company to work.”

“Well, then it has to be a priority. Priority number one. If I’m spending that kind of cash, I have to be sure that the money’s not being used to buy her flowers or getting her nails done, if you know what I mean. Because our bond is stronger than that.”

Clarence looked him in the eyes, and his reasoning registered. He wanted more than just his money back. He too wanted to make the company work while laundering his cash at the same time, and if the trading scheme succeeded, the company had to come first and not Amanda Larson. Claude had little choice but to agree with his friend-turned-financier and hope that he could keep his own deep longings for Amanda under control. No easy task. He longed for her so much that it sickened him. As Clarence stood from his position against the fence, Claude stayed put, unable to move.

“Look at you,” said Clarence. “You’re like a high school kid who can’t get a date for the prom.”

He lent him a hand and lifted him off the pavement.

“It’s a tough call,” he said, “but I’ll let you know by supper time,” as his expression turned serious.

“Bet.”

“Bet.”

The knocked fists, and that was the end of it. Clarence returned to shooting baskets, and Claude headed into the thick of South Orange Avenue on his slow walk home. He needed the distraction only money could bring. He knew Clarence well enough to know that he wouldn’t deny his request for the 500K. Clarence still trusted his mind, even though book smarts and street smarts had diverged between the two. Clarence knew the streets much better than he did. And books? That was Claude’s department. Put the two together, and that’s one intelligent front for the advancement of a dream. But the dream as it stood didn’t thrill him enough to ease his sluggish amble home.

And on the slow sludge-like trudge passed the university and into the friendlier estate section of the town, the resplendent sunshine interrupted by shadow from oaks too thick to conquer, Claude wondered when his sickness would cease. Perhaps an infatuation lingered beneath his idea of love and wasn’t love at all but a pressing need to have her, just as one collects a trophy for all the suffering he endures, and, once received, smoothes over the scars of this long, tortuous suffering with relief, joy, and fulfillment. No, it wasn’t like that. He saw his suffering as needless, unfortunate, and endless. No one should suffer this way, he thought. No one should have to feel this sick over a woman. No one should have to think this much about a single person, but it was all that he could do, and God, the eternally absent one, wouldn’t remove his pain unless he took some sort of action.

‘Like what?’ he asked himself.

He considered travelling alone from now on with little or no family help.

If he showed her that he walked alone without other black family members or black friends getting in the way, then perhaps she would feel a bit more comfortable about being with him. His conversion to the white point of view, the white quest for beauty, the white version of reason, almost complete in its ferocity and abnormality, provided him with one last chance. If he could articulate to her his complete psychological makeover in this regard, it would ease the pain of spending her nights in bed with a black man for the rest of her life. He didn’t even need to meet her halfway along the color line, as his love for her proved to be so intense that he had already broken through countless barriers to touch her whiteness. If he could change his skin color as well, he would do so, although the idea didn’t sit well with him, considering some of the freakish repercussions of such a transformation. Nevertheless, he would do so if she asked him to and would never look back. He hoped she wouldn’t ask.

He checked himself here, because Claude already heeded these warnings about strange obsessions that he carried too far. He didn’t want to be white himself. He never thought a change of skin color would appear in the equation, but just the mere thought of changing his own skin color quickly relieved him of the obsession, and luckily it cowered behind the pride he had for being a black man. Even Motgomery wouldn’t have gone as far as he did, and considering that Monty’s disposition was as white as buttermilk and that Claude jumped far beyond his own limits, what did his situation say about himself exactly?

Some mega-questions of the universe had no answers to them. He searched his way through, just like every other person and thus far hadn’t come up with a single reasonable solution to anything. The last item of business, of confronting Monty with the trading scheme, seemed to him an act of the bizarre. He disliked Monty since the day he first gained consciousness, and suddenly he was the only person in this entire scheme he could trust.

He considered the various approaches he could take with him. They were all set to have Sunday dinner. The last time they ate together Claude stormed off from the dining room on account of what he and his buppie wife brought to the table. Their family hung together by the thinnest threads, so it would be of little or no surprise if Monty flatly refused him. He did the unthinkable when he got home, though. He peeked into his closet full of garment bags and plastic dry-cleaning wrap and unhooked the same suit he wore for his father’s funeral not too long ago. He had traveled many miles since that warm spring day. After careful deliberations, he decided to wear it at the Sunday feast.

He planned to present himself as slick and corporate at the table, which meant cutting his hair. He even wrote out a business proposal, painstakingly outlining the entire scheme, along with a money flowchart of the new publishing company and a list of its investors.

He could have written another poem before he fell asleep, but instead necessity became the mother of invention. He cranked out a business proposal that would raise Monty’s eyebrows, and it connected him to the wavelength of global business and entrepreneurship. A new interest, he surmised, that took poetry’s place and would impress Monty enough for him to help.

As of late he hadn’t penned a good solid poem that reflected his love for Amanda or his new role as owner of a publishing company. Along the way he slipped off track. His tongue lost the language of the turbulent urban ghetto. In its place he had vague notions of what ought to have been the English language in all of its prim and proper forms and handed down from poets who had died years ago and left only their ink on the page.

He admired the white poets he studied, but he realized that he had another calling besides poetry. Another raison d’etre besides crafting interesting lines for a wider audience. His own survival mattered to him. Reconnecting with Amanda and mending their relationship was another new pursuit that mattered as well. Expanding his limited experience so that he could one day write more quality and less quantity also mattered greatly. Granted that he was still at the beginning stages of his poetic life, but he came to understand that writing poetry wasn’t the only reason for his being. Poetry can only feed from experience, and his experiences with the white folk, although rocky at best, was essential if he was to continue with his art. They weren’t so bad, were they?

He actually kind of liked Preston and even some of the students in his class. He handled his affairs diplomatically, a real change considering how loud and confrontational he used to be. In fact he looked back on his life as a slam poet and wondered what virus of spirit and mind led him to such ghastly, apocalyptic, and radical conclusions. No wonder his father yelled at him so much. He teetered on the precipice of a blackness so fierce and bellicose only to dive headlong into a sea of white. He was amazed at how far he’d gotten, and now he had the option of returning to slam poetry, or at least finding an awkward and lonely, and dare he think, academic middle ground where he exuded the bite of a black man with the traditional respectability of being white?

He considered this to be a position of advantage. How Monty would react to Claude Version 2.0 he didn’t know, but surely there had to be something his elder brother admired, now that he had crossed over. He planned meticulously for his presentation. He revised his business proposal. He dressed in his funeral suit and rehearsed in front of his closet mirror.

“The plan must work,” he told himself, a mantra that eased his worry.

Sunday approached rather rapidly, and a week had passed since he attended classes over at Seton Hall. He sensed Amanda’s return, as though he had built-in radar that pin-pointed her departures and arrivals from and to the gilded South Orange village. Yet he refused to return to classes on account of the harrowing pain he had suffered during her absence. Better to forget. Better to focus on the plan instead of suffering needlessly.

Preparing his business proposal actually relieved him, and he was somewhat thankful to have gotten rid of her. Some great wheel turned within him, and it felt like day one of an entirely new and different life. A strange feeling this was, because he had heard many times before that a man could wake up the next day and begin life anew and head in a totally different direction without regard to the past or the crimes committed yesterday. He was a stone with thick moss all over him, so he sighed heavily when he woke up on Sunday afternoon with the bulk of this moss shaven from his skin and cut from his hair, his stone ready to roll.

His mother called him from the kitchen, and after dressing up in his suit, he rushed downstairs to embrace her.

“What have you been doing all this time?” asked Phyllis, a little starry- eyed after seeing her son in a suit.

Claude hugged his mother tightly and almost lifted her off the floor.

“What has gotten into you? Put me down.”

“Sorry,” he smiled.

“Where have you been?”

“What do you mean? I’ve been here.”

“No you haven’t. You come in late every night, you don’t get up until evening, and then you go out again. You’re not in any sort of trouble, are you?”

“Why would I be in trouble?”

“You’re in trouble. I know it.”

“No, I’m not in any sort of trouble.”

“Then what’s with the suit? You never wear a tie at the table. And your hair. You look like Monty.”

“I’ve got something special planned for this evening.”

“Every Sunday’s special,” she said. “I guess the real Claude Carolina decided to show up. Not the angry Claude. I hope you and Monty and Eliza can get along this evening. These dinner haven’t been going too well.”

“Tonight’s the night I make amends with Monty.”

“And what about all these papers? I know you’re up to something, and it better be good, or else I’ll have to break you two up again.”

“No fighting tonight,” he said.

“You promise?”

“Promise. In fact, tonight I make my first peace offering to Monty and Eliza.”

Phyllis hung her hand on her hip and looked at him suspiciously.

“I’m serious,” he said. “I’ve changed my ways. I want this family to be complete again.”

“Complete?”

“Yeah, and I know it sounds awkward, but if Monty and I could get along, there’ll be no stopping this family. Family is the only thing that matters to me now. It’s the only thing I can call my own.”

“You haven’t been smoking any of that reefer, have you?”

“No. I’m high on life, so high in fact that I’m prepared to make peace, and I need your support at the table tonight. You will help broker this peace between us. Ever since Dad died, we’ve done nothing but fight, and there has to be an end to it somewhere.”