Status Updates From When We Were Brilliant

Later, people would think the photo was of you looking sexy, as if the image were a come-on to take your body, or a shot of postcoital bliss... But I knew the truth. It was just an image of you, exhausted beyond human limits.

I watched through the viewfinder as he led you to a gambling table. He handed you a pair of dice.
"How do I do this?" you said.
"You women overthink things. Don't think about it," he said, as if we have that privilege. "Just roll."

Through my 35mm lens you were but a small girl in a jean jacket on a vast, bleak plain. Dwarfed and alone on the hostile expanse, you bunched into yourself like Rocky Marciano in a crouch and, with fists to your mouth, incanted lines.

I took snaps of you cuddling on the laps of everyone... and then snaps of the men cuddling on your lap.

You became Roslyn, the divorcée trapped in a body so beautiful that no one could see the lonely woman within it..

He grabbed your waist and your hand, then pushed you around the floor. You lowered your head, not in submission but as if ashamed for him.
Furious, I snapped the shot.

"I have never seen Joan Crawford look so" - she laughed - "likable. What did you give the old girl?"
I signed. "A break."

"I followed them around for a week, doing the whitest things rich, white Eastern WASPs could do. Forgive my boasting, but if this poor Black boy from Fort Scott, Kansas, can get into their heads, he can get into anyone's."

From her table, she extended one finger, which he then clenched, clinging to his lifeline. My camera, with me behind it, swallowing tears, caught it all.

They raised their brows at each other, now in cahoots against the weirdo taking their picture in the school bathroom. This lady's crazy.
Oop!

"My soul flew up through physical barriers to my son, even as I forced my attention back to my tray, where Thurgood Marshall's thick-lidded eyes were swimming into view."