Shane and I used to finger each other. Don’t worry mom, this isn’t me coming out. Fingering is a bit dramatic. It was just pre-pubescent exploring. I remember one time when we had our pants off, figuring out each other’s, in Shane’s room—my mom and Shane’s mom knocked on the door. We hadn’t heard them make their way from the living room. Shane and I rushed to button up. My mom didn’t notice the way my pants hung loosely from my hips.
I went to see Shane for the first time in ten years. His mom, an ex-police detective who had moved out to California, was hosting a Christmas party on her return to New York. I could discern which retro-fitted Harlem apartment building was Shane’s. Years of play-dates made it easy. Shane, in 2025, parts his curly hair down the middle and wears a designer belt. He introduces me to his girlfriend. I figure out she’s from “the valley.” After she names a series of increasing larger California counties; all lost on me. Shane hops back in. He’s a car salesman now. He shows me a picture of his BMW. He wanted to bring it to stunt in New York.
Shane moved me on to a friend of his: a big red-haired white guy. I can’t figure him out. He’s got a Southern accent, but he’s only from Delaware. He studies German seriously—Hipster?!—but still uses snapchat. He went to Jewish summer camp, isn’t Jewish, and reps Frederick Douglass academy in Harlem: “my excuse for racist jokes is that I was the only white guy at my school.” His street pass is shiny…Shane’s party is, after all, in a place known as Harlem.
We head for Shane’s room. Shane’s friend asks why I don’t have a drink. I tell him my mom is Muslim. “So can you eat pork?” I say I like bacon. Shane tells me he wants to move to Texas, to have his own land, so he can raise cattle and shoot hogs, and nobody can tell him what to do. His girlfriend interjects, “if you really want cattle then we have to go Wyoming.” “Wyoming” she repeats, nodding her head. I peek around Shane’s room. A book shelf with Trump’s America. Melania. Shane’s friend is now telling us about how he was raised by a single mother, the sacrifices she made: “She’s the smartest woman I know… smarter than Kamala, or Hillary, she would kill any of those politics women in a debate.”
Back in the living room, I end up talking with a Liberian-Staten-Islander. He had even taken the ferry today, on his way uptown to Shane’s mom’s apartment. My mom did her mom-thing apparently, because he’s convinced I’m the joint (or, per American immigrant dialect, a star student). He tells me he came across many kids who lost their way during his career as a de-tox nurse. I ask him why he thinks young people turn to drugs—are they searching for respites from rough stretches in their lives or hard times. He eyes me up. “They think it’s hard here. I tell you about hard back in Liberia.” Elon Musk, he tells me is a true exemplar—someone with a real boot-straps story. “His father taught him biology and physics… Elon isn’t a talker… You could be like him if you keep doing good in school.”
I see my mom from across the living room. I always get worried when I see her on the computer through most of the day. It’s vacation time to be fair, she just finished a grueling nurse certification course, and most of the time she’s keeping up with political news in Senegal. I put my number in Shane’s phone as I was leaving. When the phone shut down, a screen saver of his girlfriend kneeling on a bed, wearing a push up bra, flashed. You know when you see a man’s instagram discovery page?
Looking up—around at the party, at America’s young and old men, an interracial Puerto Rican-and-white couple with their mixed children’s luscious curls and formal cute suits, a very out of place quaintelligent English gentleman investment banker—my mom is smiling at me and my respectable pink shirt that she picked for me, and the khakis she likes, and probably my ears, still pierced, yet unadorned with those moons she really hates; or maybe she’s smiling at our American gathering who seem to have precious little in common.