A Lucky Man Read online

  Advance Praise for A Lucky Man

  “A Lucky Man is just one of those collections that takes your breath away: the voices we hear, the people we meet, they scratch and pull and ache and rage, revealing secrets we usually keep hidden. Every line is pitch perfect. Jamel Brinkley is a writer of extraordinary talent.”

  —Daniel Alarcón, author of The King Is Always Above the People

  “Jamel Brinkley writes the kind of fiction that reads like the whole truth. As his characters—from estranged siblings in Virginia to surrogate families in Brooklyn—love, hurt, challenge, and sometimes save each other, their stories vividly expose our ideas of masculinity and the fumes of racism and injustice in the American air we breathe. A Lucky Man is full of insight and music—a bold, urgent debut.”

  —Mia Alvar, author of In the Country

  “I loved this book. From sentence to sentence, these stories are beautifully written, and they are wonderfully moving and smart about the connections—firm, broken, or mended—between siblings, and parents and their children, and couples who profess to love each other. Jamel Brinkley writes like an angel, but he also knows how low human beings can sometimes go, despite their own best intentions. How does luck, or its absence, visit our lives? Read these stories and find out.”

  —Charles Baxter, author of There’s Something I Want You to Do

  “There’s just no way to overstate this: A Lucky Man is a stunning debut. Richer than most novels, this collection calls a whole world into being, and the names and fates of these people will follow you into your life and never leave. Ambitious themes arc across the entire book—troubled masculinity, family in all its broken forms—but on a lower frequency these are love stories, intimately told. And they could come from no other than Jamel Brinkley, so there’s the pleasure of that encounter too, of hearing a new voice for the first time, and taking a deep plunge into the allegory of an artist’s soul.”

  —Charles D’Ambrosio, author of Loitering

  “The stories in A Lucky Man have a necessary urgency—their characters need to confess or seek comfort, to tell the reader how they’ve been wounded or whose hurt they carry. These stories do not shy away from heartbreak and brutal consequences, but they always remember how much of the way to despair was beautiful and full of tenderness and joy. An unforgettable collection by an important new voice.”

  —Danielle Evans, author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

  “This is the rare debut that introduces not a promising talent but a major writer, fully formed. The psychological penetration of these stories astonishes me, as do the grace and emotional scope of their sentences. Jamel Brinkley is brilliant, the real thing, a revelation.”

  —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

  “A Lucky Man is subtle yet loud, heartbreaking yet utterly unsentimental, uncompromising yet a damn good read. These breathtaking stories find energy in the friction of humanity’s contradictions. In this masterfully written debut, Jamel Brinkley proves he’s got next.”

  —Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day

  “Jamel Brinkley’s stories tell of absence and abandonment, sometimes confronted and sometimes met with resignation, but always edged with pain and beauty. In vibrant yet restrained prose, Brinkley illuminates the longing for home, which lurks in all of us. A magnificent debut.”

  —Laila Lalami, author of The Moor’s Account

  “There’s true magic in Jamel Brinkley’s stories. He finds the subtle and humane lurking within the drama of our lives. Brinkley writes with great insight and honesty about people you’ll recognize, flawed but still worthwhile. By using all his formidable talents, he’s shown us a vision of ourselves.”

  —Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling

  “A Lucky Man is filled with characters who long to become better sons, better fathers, better friends, better lovers. Often they have no words for their complicated feelings. Happily they are the creations of an author who has all the words. Jamel Brinkley is a wonderful writer and these richly imagined stories will stay with the lucky reader long after the last page.”

  —Margot Livesey, author of Mercury

  “The lucky men of Brinkley’s debut are haunted: by the past, by family, by love and ultimately by masculinity itself. These sober and elegant stories delve deep. A debut of subtlety and power.”

  —Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

  “Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man captures so perfectly the myriad ways in which we struggle daily not only for connection but to be heard and understood. At once covert and exuberant, ferocious and tender, heartbreaking and hilarious, these are the stories we always needed. A marvelous debut, glowing with life, and a major new voice in American fiction.”

  —Paul Yoon, author of The Mountain

  A Lucky Man

  A Lucky Man

  Stories

  Jamel Brinkley

  A Public Space Book

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2018 by Jamel Brinkley

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Stories in this collection appeared originally in different form in the following publications:

  “Wolf and Rhonda” in American Short Fiction

  “Infinite Happiness” and “A Lucky Man” in A Public Space

  “J’ouvert, 1996” in Epiphany

  “Everything the Mouth Eats” in Glimmer Train

  “A Family” in Gulf Coast

  “No More Than a Bubble” in LitMag

  “I Happy Am” in Ploughshares

  “Clifton’s Place” in the Threepenny Review

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  This book is made possible through a partnership with the College of Saint Benedict, and honors the legacy of S. Mariella Gable, a distinguished teacher at the College. Support has been provided by the Manitou Fund as part of the Warner Reading Program.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN 978-1-55597-805-1

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-995-9

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2018

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952103

  Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

  Cover art: Page Light Studios/iStock.com

  For my mother and my brother,

  Marilyn and Christopher

  The difference between

  God and luck is that luck, when it leaves,

  does not go far: the idea is to believe

  you could almost touch it.…

  —Carl Phillips, from “If a Wilderness”

  Contents

  No More Than a Bubble

  J’ouvert, 1996

  I Happy Am

  Everything the Mouth Eats


  A Family

  A Lucky Man

  Infinite Happiness

  Wolf and Rhonda

  Clifton’s Place

  A Lucky Man

  No More Than a Bubble

  It was back in those days. Claudius Van Clyde and I stood on the edge of the dancing crowd, each of us already three bottles into one brand of miracle brew, blasted by the music throbbing from the speakers. But we weren’t listening to the songs. I’d been talking into the open shell of his ear since we’d gotten to the house party, shouting a bunch of mopey stuff about my father. At one point, sometime around the witching hour, he stopped his perfunctory nodding and jerked his chin toward the staircase. “Check out these biddies,” he said. Past the shifting heads of dancers and would-be seducers I saw the two girls he meant. They kept reaching for each other’s waists and drawing their hands quickly away, as if testing the heat of a fire. After a minute of this game the girls laughed and walked off. We weaved through the crowd and followed them, away from the deejay’s setup in front of the night-slicked bay windows, and into the kitchen, where we took stock of the situation. One of the girls was lanky and thin-armed, but notably rounded at the hips. She wore a white tank top, which gave her face and painted fingernails a sheen in the dimmed light. A neat, ladylike afro bloomed from her head, and she was a darker shade of brown than her friend with the buzz cut, a thick snack of a girl whose shape made you work your jaws.

  The party, thrown by a couple of Harvard grads, happened just weeks before the Day of Atonement, in late September of 1995. Claudius had overheard some seniors talking about it earlier that Saturday after the football game, as they all smoked next to the pale blue lion statue up at Baker Field. Later he dragged me from my dorm room. We slipped out of the university’s gates and took the subway down to Brooklyn, determined to crash. The party had been described as an affair for singles, so when you arrived you had to write your name on a sticker and affix it to your body. The taller girl with the afro, Naomie, wore her sticker on her upper arm like a service stripe. The friend had placed hers cleverly, as both a convenience and a joke meant to shame. “Hello,” her ass told us, “my name is Sybil.”

  “Dizzy chicks,” Claudius said to me, and we gave each other these goofy, knowing grins. The main difference between a house party in Brooklyn and a college party uptown was that on campus you were just practicing. You could half-ass it or go extra hard, either play the wall or go balls-out booty hound, and there would be no actual stakes, no real edge to the consequences. Nothing sharp to press your chest against, no precipice to leap from, nothing to brave. You might get dissed, or you might get some play. You would almost certainly get cheaply looped. But at the end of the night, no matter what, you would drift off to sleep in the narrows of a dorm bed, surrounded by cinder block walls, swaddled in twin extra-long sheets purchased by someone’s mom.

  We approached the girls and pointed to our stickers to introduce ourselves. The one with the afro pronounced her name Now-me and did so with her nose. True to this utterance, she seemed the more insistent and lunatic of the two. She vibrated. We asked where they were from. Most of Naomie’s family had scattered across northeast Africa. Sybil was Dominican. Claudius and I liked to know these kinds of things.

  “You enjoying the party?” I asked. Naomie didn’t respond. Her attention flew all over the place. The party house was old—you felt its floorboards giving, perceived its aches being drowned out by the music and conversations that swelled with everyone’s full-bellied bloats of laughter. In hushed moments, you heard the creaking of wood, followed by the tinkle of glass, the crunch of plastic, or the throaty rise of the hum. Naomie seemed attuned to all of it, to every detail of the house and its subtle geographies. She stared now through the glass doors that led to the backyard, where lit torches revealed little groups of smokers breathing vividly into the air.

  I tapped her on the shoulder and she turned to me.

  “Oh, it’s you again.” Then she gave her friend a bemused look.

  “Yep, they’re still here,” Sybil said.

  “Enjoying the party?” I repeated.

  Naomie waited a long time to reply: “We’re bubbling.” From the living room the deejay began to play a new song. “What is this?” she said. “I’ve heard it before.”

  “You don’t know about this?” said a guy standing near us. He had a patchy beard and double-fisted red cups of foamy beer. Maybe he was a Harvard man. “Man, y’all are late,” he said. “This is ‘Brooklyn Zoo.’ Ol’ Dirty Bastard.”

  Claudius and the girls nodded in recognition but to me it all sounded like code.

  “Why’s he called that?” I asked.

  The guy laughed at my ignorance. “Because,” he said, “there’s no father to his style.”

  The girls turned to each other and began a kind of stomping dance. “Damn damn damn,” Naomie said, “this song is so bubble!”

  They understood the good life according to the image and logic of this word—simultaneously noun, verb, and adjective—its glistening surface wet with potential meaning. Their faces became masks of anger, nostrils and mouths flexed open as they danced. Naomie kept her arms pinned to her sides while Sybil jabbed the air with her elbows. Claudius nodded at Sybil and told me, “I call dibs.”

  “Nah, man.”

  “Already called it,” he said.

  We both preferred girls of a certain plumpness, with curves—in part, I think, because that’s what black guys are supposed to like. Liking them felt like a confirmation of possessing black blood, a way to stamp ourselves with authenticity. But Claudius had made his claim. I was left to deal with Naomie, the prophet of the bubble. Fine, no big deal. He could have his pick. This was all his idea anyway. We wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for him. He knew I needed a good distraction.

  A few weeks earlier, late one August morning in Philadelphia, shortly before the start of sophomore year, I sat with my father, Leo, at the kitchen table and got drunk with him for the first time. He told me to beware of crazy women, angry women, passionate women. He told me they would ruin me. “But they are also the best women,” he said, “the best lovers, with a jungle between their legs and such wildness in bed that every man should experience.” I felt I knew the kinds of women he meant, and I knew for sure he was talking about my mother, Doreen, but I didn’t give a damn. She had left us, left him, a few years earlier, and recently she’d announced she was getting remarried. I saw how this news affected my father. He had stalked around our house all summer and appeared smaller and more frantic by the week. He searched as though the answer to the question of how his life had gone so wrong were hidden in one of the rooms. All but undone by this effort, my father regarded me that morning through his heavy eyelids and long Mediterranean lashes. He’d inherited bad teeth from his own father, and before he turned sixty he’d had a bunch of them yanked right out of his mouth. He wore a partial denture but didn’t have it in as we drank. The bottom of his face was collapsed like a rotten piece of fruit. “The best,” he repeated. “And so …” His Italian accent deepened the more he drank. His tongue peeked out of his broken grin. “And so every man should experience this, Ben,” he said. “Once.” He held a chewed fingernail up by his high nose and then reached into his pocket for something. It was a condom, wrapped in silver foil. “Use this with the most delicious woman you can find, una pazza. Let her screw your brains out, once and never again. Then marry a nice, boring, fat girl with hands and thighs like old milk. Make a dull life. It’s the only way to be happy.” He gave me the condom. It was an ill-timed ritual—I’d already gone out into the world. Still, he believed in it, just as he believed there was a guaranteed way to be happy. Since I was his disciple, and quite drunk myself that morning, I believed in it too.

  Claudius and I slid in behind the girls and danced with them right there in the kitchen. Naomie moved well but with aggression. She spun around, hooked her fingers into my belt loops, and slammed her pelvis into mine. She ground herself a
gainst me for a while and then backed away to show her perfect teeth and claw the air between us. She was a kitten on its hind legs, fiercely swiping at a ball on a string.

  I leaned in and asked if she’d gone to Harvard too. I tried to sound older, like I’d already graduated and was fully a man.

  “We’re Hawks,” Naomie said in her nasal voice. Then she spread her arms like wings and slowly flapped them. Claudius had a theory that I liked about girls with nasal voices. He said girls who spoke this way, cutting their voices off from their lungs and guts, did so as a kind of defense, a noisy insistence meant to distract men from the flesh.

  “Hawks?” I asked.

  “Hunter College, ninety-four. Hey, why don’t you get me and my girl some whiskey bubbles?”

  “That would be whiskey and … ?”

  “Magic.”

  “Where do I get that?”

  She gave a disappointed shake of her head. “It’s just whiskey,” she whined. “Be a good boy.”

  Passing Claudius and Sybil as they danced, I winked to let him know we were in. The sensation of Naomie’s moving hips ghosted against me. There in the face of the kitchen cabinet floated her pretty smile and dark eyes, flecked with a color close to gold.

  After making four healthy pours of Jack, I carried the cups back over. Sybil sniffed the whiskey and let her eyes cross with pleasure. Naomie lifted her cup and with a dignified tone and expression said she was thankful for the universe and all of its moments. “And for whiskey and music and madness and justice and love,” she added.

  “And for the sky,” Sybil said. “Have you seen the fucking sky tonight?”

  Their words were completely meaningless. It was a toast to nonsense.

  “And for your tits,” Naomie said. She reached out and squeezed Sybil’s right breast. “Doesn’t she have great tits?”