How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon

Author:Kiese Laymon [Laymon, Kiese]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781572847262
Publisher: Agate Publishing

Kanye West and HaLester Myers Are Better at Their Jobs…

MY GRANDMOTHER MARRIED A BEAUTIFUL brown troll named HaLester “Les” Myers twenty years ago. The Christmas before last, Les slumped across from me in Grandma’s gaudy pink throne while she finished making supper. I watched the still water flooding the gutters of Les’s sleepy eyes, the way his nappy gray chin folded snugly into the top of those musty blue overalls, and I knew that this dusty joker really believed what he had said the night before about Kanye West and the importance of treating females like cats.

“Look at Les over there faking sleep,” my Aunt Sue said from the doorway. “He ’sleep? Get up, Les! Time to eat. Wake him up, Kie.”

Les’s sweaty face didn’t move. His chest didn’t heave in or out. But his fingers, which doubled as raggedy overstuffed cigars, dug deeper into both arms of Grandma’s favorite chair.

HaLester Myers was preparing for takeoff.

The night before, on Christmas Eve, I joined Les outside in his runaway spot. No matter the time of day or night, Les was likely to clutch his yellow folding chair and lumber out to the right side of Grandma’s porch. Really, unless he was drunk, Les’s runaway spot was the only place my Grandma allowed him to do the 2.5 things he’d mastered in his 83 years on earth: 1) sipping that Crown Royal Black, and 2.5) balancing a dangling Newport on his bottom lip while telling the loudest lies you’ve ever heard in your life.

I’m convinced Les tells so many loud lies not necessarily because he’s deceptive, but because he has no inside voice and Grandma rarely lets him talk over volume five inside her house. When Les is lying about being a forty-ninth degree Mason, his voice sounds like flat tires rolling over jagged gravel. When he’s lying about what he did to the dog, cat, or car of the white man who “ain’t know how to pay a nigga right,” his voice sounds like burning bubble wrap. No matter what Les is lying about, all of his lies have an acidic slow drip to them, and nearly all the lies carry stories rooted in what “the black man” deserves.

This Christmas Eve, like every Christmas Eve in Forest, Mississippi, I grabbed a chair from the kitchen before we lit our fireworks and walked out to where I knew Les would be sipping that Black.

“Les, you know who Kanye West is, right?” I asked him and sat down under some droopy white Christmas lights.

“Kanye!” he said. “Say do I know Kanye?” Les stood up like he did whenever he told lies in his runaway spot. When he stood up and you stayed seated, Les could look down at you and say one of his favorite lying sentences—“Look up here, man”—with more precision.

“Look up here, man,” he said and lit another Newport. “I been know’n Kanye. His mama come over to the Public Museum when I was working security in Milwaukee around 1986, I believe it was.

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