Black or white. Black or white.

I close my eyes, picturing their watery blue focus turn inwards, aiming for the almost-invisible pinpoint of light embedded like a diamond in the dark purple galaxy of my mind. This is the best place to make a decision.

Black or white? Black women make me feel like a baby. I like that. White women make me feel like a loser. I like that too … when it’s over.

But it’s not about what I like or don’t like. Or in this case what I like more. It’s about the color. Always about the color. And when black versus white presents, it gets my full attention; it’s pure. All colors. No colors. Black or white.

This is how I choose my path. It’s never about carrots or corn. Or Minnesota versus Philadelphia. I eat orange or yellow. I bet on Purple or Green.

The shrinks say I’m obsessive-compulsive. They try to cure me with pink Luvox, green and yellow Prozac, yellow Zoloft, blue Paxil, white Celexa … I tell them it won’t work. It doesn’t.

They don’t medicate the blessed masses who turn to God for truth and enlightenment. So why do they want me to pop every pill on the planet just because I believe in colors? Colors got me this far—with only one setback of note.

I’d been fixating on red. Zoning red for a week. Following it everywhere I found it. Shunning all other colors out of fear. I meditated on dragonflies that gleamed like waxed chili peppers, ate Matina cherries by the quart, chased after screaming fire engines. The answers seemed so near they were practically inside me, coursing like scarlet in my veins. And then a traffic light changed from red to green. I slammed on my brakes, and a bright yellow school bus plowed into me from behind.

The purple of my mind spits me back out without an answer and I note for a second that the two women at the bar aren’t even technically black and white. Their feminine hues tend more toward Pennsylvania mud and baby scallops. But black and white are such powerful notions that they won’t be denied.

I feel lucky, so I decide to let the sherbert haze of neon light guide me across the floor, through strewn peanut shells and cigarette butts and up to the bar where I’ll choose black or white. Or it’ll choose me.

I push the ebony ball of my joystick in the direction of the golden beer taps, but nothing happens. I try again. Nothing.

“Goddam it!” I curse louder than I intend, turning the few heads that still remain upright at 2 a.m. “This wheelchair is a fucking piece of shit.”

The problem with this sort of blue screaming is that, contrary to the first law of thermo-dynamics, it doesn’t help me blow off steam. It just adds to the rage.

I don’t see red when I go ballistic – I spill it, or rather, it spills from my nostrils in scarlet dollops that explode on my striped shirt. I should’ve had my sinuses cauterized a long time ago. As the blood soaks the fabric, I realize the shirt’s colors have faded to what a paraplegic friend of mine calls the “revealing threshold”: the point at which an impartial observer will realize you can’t be a socially acceptable human being if you’re wearing a shirt like that.

Then again there’s the wheelchair, the great chrome giveaway.

I let go of the joystick, cock my head back and pinch my nose, listening to the electric motor die down with a disconsolate whirr. The Contrapshun stops short of the counter by a foot.

As my head rolls back I see two blurs of motion: Baby Scallops recoiling from me in her attempt to protect the seaweed-green strapless gown she is wearing as a misguided enticement to her morgue-white shoulders; the other blur is Pennsylvania Mud’s hand whipping out towards me, stuffed with an immaculate piece of silk.

While I contemplate the starless blackness of the ceiling, I feel the hand land softly below my nostrils, several times. She’s dabbing at me with her silk handkerchief.

“I’ve seen your face before” I hear her say.

Roberta’s Turn

There were no mirrors in my nana’s place, and that’s probably why I’m so good at remembering other people’s faces but so bad at seeing my own. “She seen you once girl, she could pick you out in a po-lice line-up any tahme” my mom would say.

My Dad left when I was three years old, and wherever my Mom and I went I’d scan the crowds to see if I could find him. Once you start looking at people, you realize how different their faces are. My friends say they can’t tell white people apart, but that’s because they’re lazy. They don’t really care to look. Noses, lips, cheekbones, eyes, ears, even the creases on a forehead come in all shapes and sizes. And if that’s not a testimony to the power that constantly invents the world, I don’t know what is.

Yes, that’s how the power shows itself to me: through people’s faces. I can’t help but see it, each face a bold new take on an old theme, a fine work of art forever engraved in my mind. Sometimes it makes me cry, and when I drink alone, as I was doing tonight before the man in the wheelchair showed up, it’s because I can’t figure if I should be crying or not.

So much for peace and quiet. The man is bleeding and my hand flies to his thin wide mouth. A strange bead of flesh gives the upper lip a bit of a curl right in the center.

I know exactly where I’ve seen him before.

He’s my daddy.

Even as he looks at me with crimson covering his face and his head tilted back, I would recognize that hawk nose anywhere. When I was two or three, I would wail at night until my mama fetched me from my room and lifted me up to nestle in their bed, between her and him. I’d reach up and hold onto his nose with my left hand and my mama’s nose with my right. Strangely, that process comforted me, and I would fall into a fast, black sleep. At first, my parents objected to my ritual, but in time they realized that indulging me was the only way they would get any rest themselves.

Once I’ve finish cleaning him up, I say:

“Mister, I know you’re all uncomfortable now. If you’ll just let me put my hand directly on your face, I’ll be able to work some magic and get your nose to stop bleeding.”

He looks at me for a long time. He keeps his head tilted back. He’s peering at me from what seems like the bottom of a long canyon—at the far end of which rest his blank, grey eyes.

“Whatever you say, pretty lady,” he replies. What can he do? I feel sorry for him in his crippled, bloody state. I wonder what has happened to his legs, and picture a car slamming into him from behind.

I close my eyes and place my thumb and first two fingers on his nose, just as I did when I was little. I can feel the hard broken cartilage, running like a plastic river beneath the veiny crook of his nose. I feel myself starting to get woozy.

It’s him. I would swear my life on it. I can stop his nose from bleeding with just a pinch at the very top, near the area between his eyes. I guess I didn’t become a Trauma Ward nurse for nothing.

“Thank you … thank…,” he says to me with tenderness and awkwardness. He doesn’t know what else to say.

The Pointer Sisters’s sonic chirping now flies at me from the juke box; a cheap strobe light and fog machine turn the room into a palate of jumpy black-and-white.

Tonights the night we’re gonna make it happen. Tonight’s the night we’ll put our past aside ….

I kneel down beside him and sense his entire face with my eyes, just to be sure. He’s all there: The strong, sunken jawline, the buttery areas just under the lashes, the coarse bit of stubble on his adam’s apple and nowhere else.

I stand up, kiss him delicately on the forehead, step around to the back of the wheelchair, and begin to coast him toward the back door of the bar.

“Where are we going?”

I don’t answer: I just smile my best smile.

This woman … Pennsylvania Mud … she’s wheeling me out of here, and I can’t decide if I want to stop her or not. White light from the bar lanterns make her skin gleam, surrounding her like halos. The silk stuffed in my nostrils makes it difficult to breathe. 

“Why are we leaving?” I try again. Although the answer is obvious: I’m a repulsive, stoned, bleeding cripple, a bartender’s nightmare. But hey, I have just as much right to be here as any of the rest of these drunks. Probably more, considering the hell that has been my life up to this point. 

Still, Pennsylvania Mud intrigues me. She’s too young and attractive to be interested in a freakfest lapdance on the Contrapshun. But she’s obviously into me somehow. Go figure. A bleeding heart, I suppose. Wants to hear all about my accident, the stupidity of jumping three stories into a swimming pool feet first, and why the hell I didn’t just jump headfirst and get the whole bloody mess over with. 

Yep, Pennsylvania Mud is probably a do-gooder in search of a project. Well, what else do I have going on tonight? Meds at 11 … that’s the highlight. That and red neon. And listening to the yellow bug light outside the back door zap the jesus out of those sorry-assed mosquitoes. 

 “Alright sister, do with me what you will,” I tell her.

We headed out into the cool, brisk night and I looked up into the night sky. It was a glorious array of blacks and dark blues, the stars twinkling like Christmas lights. I love these kind of night skies, when the colors mix together like it can’t decide which way to go and anything could happen. A gentle gust of wind rolled down the street and Pennsylvania Mud reached down to button up my coat, sending a slight charge through my body. Mud it is.

“So, how’d you wind up in the chair?” she asked, soft and polite as she started to push me down the street. Or so it seemed. I couldn’t help but notice a little edge at the fringe of the question.

“You know how you always hear that voice in your head telling you to do something you absolutely know you shouldn’t do? Like when you’re on a cliff and you hear this voice telling you to jump? I always seem to listen to that damn voice.”

“Where you from?” she asked, again, with just a twinge of frostiness.

“Oh, you know, here, there…everywhere. Lately more here than anywhere these days, of course.” I smiled when I said it, hoping to get a smile out of her. Didn’t get one. She just gazed down the street, as if she was looking for something, her face now like stone.

“What did you do while you were here, there, and everywhere?”

“Full of questions, aren’t you?” Again, I aimed a smile her way in hopes of eliciting some sort of response. Nothing. “Oh, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.”

“Why, you certainly are a man of mystery, aren’t you?”

“Well…uh…when you get to a certain age, like my age, it’s kinda hard to say something that sums you up in a sentence or two. The older you get, the more loose strands you have that can’t be tied up in a nice, beautiful bow. I have a lot of loose strands.”

And then, silence. We continued on down the street, for a few seconds, until we passed one of those funky furniture stores you see bubbling up everywhere these days. For some reason, I had this feeling I know this place, or at least knew this place. Something deep in the back of mind was beginning to tell me that I should know something. “Hey, didn’t this used to be kind of an antique toy store? And didn’t they used to sell these kind of tiny, toy mice dressed up in various costumes?” I asked

“Yeah,” Pennsylvania Mud responded, “when I was a young kid, around eight, my father used to come here every week to buy me one of those mice things.”

All of a sudden, the sky looked jet black, all the shading and colors gone . The night sky had made it’s choice.