Ebony was at the mall, in the men’s section of Dillard’s, looking for a shirt in her cousin’s size, when she saw a man her age, almost thirty, looking at a leather jacket. He was wearing a handkerchief around his neck, which Ebony thought was really funny but kind of cool, since no one ever wore anything like that. The man saw the pail, dark-haired Ebony looking at him. They made eye contact and Ebony looked away.
Ebony stared down at the shirt her thumb was touching. She picked it up and tried to look like she was considering it, but she was really just trying to forget about her face, which was probably blazing right now. She put the shirt down when her face stopped burning, and the man was walking over to her. She was annoyed as she felt her face reddening again.
“You’re a woman, I’m a man. You know what I want,” the man said. Ebony blushed even more. No one had talked to her like that since high school. Ebony looked down and pretended to check out another shirt.
Joe could see that line wasn’t working, so he tried another approach. “Don’t be afraid. I just want your female opinion on this jacket.” He held up the leather jacket and stared into Ebony’s dark eyes.
Maybe he’ll leave if I just humor him for a while, Ebony thought. She noticed he had bad teeth, but other than that, he was very handsome. Like James Franco, but scarier, like he could pull a knife at any second. “I like it a lot, but winter is 70 degrees here,” Ebony said.
“I’m glad you like it. You can wear it tonight when I take you out,” Joe said. Ebony blushed. She worked in a middle school library and usually only left home for small errands, so she didn’t get asked on dates very often. Ebony loved men to the point where it was almost un-lady-like, but that was her secret. She was too shy to ever do anything about it, and too passive when she rarely met a man she did like.
You look like the kind of guy who would have AIDS, Ebony thought, but she just said, “Oh, are we going somewhere?” She was still trying to humor him, but she knew she was doing it wrong when Joe became more intrigued and asked her name.
“Ebony? That’s ironic.”
“Why?” Ebony asked.
“You look more like Snow White.”
“Yeah, well, my parents weren’t big on fairy tales, so I wasn’t named after one.”
“Okay, Ebony, so where do you live?” Joe asked. He was leaning on a stack of sweaters with a cigarette in one hand.
“I can almost hear that song by The Police right now,” Ebony said.
“I know what song you’re talking about. Don’t worry, I’m not going to be watching you.” He kept smiling at Ebony and staring into her eyes, which made her like him but also made her nervous. Ebony reluctantly agreed to Joe’s offer to go to the food court so he could prove he wasn’t a psycho.
They sat at a table, and there was more of Joe’s staring into her eyes as he mashed his cigarette into a wet napkin that the person who sat there before didn’t throw away.
“What do you do?” Ebony asked him, trying to get the focus off herself.
“I write songs, I fix motorcycles for people, and I collect clocks,” Joe said, lighting a new cigarette.
“What do you do for, like, a living?” Ebony asked.
“I can’t tell you yet.” There was silence as Joe blew smoke rings like Eddie Van Halen but still stared at Ebony. Finally, he offered to buy her lunch. She declined, but strangely liked him and wanted to be friendly, so she added, “I don’t want to spoil my appetite before tonight.” They smiled and Ebony thought, “Your teeth can do it for me,” then she felt guilty because Joe was being so nice to her.
Before Joe got a page on his beeper, Ebony gave him her address and decided she would draw a picture of him and give it to her roommate just in case he kidnapped her.
As Joe shook her hand and left, Ebony wondered what she could’ve gotten herself into now.
Ebony and her roommate, Alexa, were in the kitchen that evening, making pasta.
“I think you should go. You need to have some fun,” Alexa told Ebony.
“But I don’t want that kind of fun,” Ebony told her. She thought Alexa would be a better match for Joe.
“You’re twenty-five! You’ve never even had a first kiss!”
“That’s not true. I have.”
“With whom?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Probably that hick cousin you’re always talking about,” Alexa said. Ebony threw a spoonful of sauce at her.
“Wait ‘til you get back.” Joe knocked on the door and Alexa opened it. “Ebony’s in the bathroom. She has diarrhea.” Joe frowned at Alexa as Ebony appeared around the corner. She punched Alexa as she and Joe walked down the three flights of stairs. Alexa went into the kitchen and spread sauce on her bread and butter, plotting.
Outside, it was dusk and the sky was purple and red. Joe’s motorcycle had an extra helmet on the back seat, on top of the new leather jacket Joe had bought. They got on and Joe drove out of the city limits. Ebony thought that if she knew where they were going, riding off into sunset might be kind of cool.
Joe stopped by some swamp. That’s where my body will be, she thought, trying to make the situation less serious, but it didn’t help, of course.
They sat on the edge of the road, conveniently in the middle of nowhere, almost in the dark, except Joe started a fire. He got some plastic bags out of the leather bags on the sides of the motorcycle.
The rope and tape, Ebony thought, regretting her desperation or whatever it was that made her accept his offer.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“A few miles out of Boerne,” Joe said. Ebony wanted to hitchhike back to San Antonio, but she was too paranoid, and who knew what a truck driver would do? Ebony shivered. “Put the jacket on, that’s what it’s for.”
“Yes, master.” Ebony put it on and she and Joe roasted the hotdogs and marshmallows he had brought in silence. “Are you going to tell me now what your job is?”
“A gravedigger. Part time. The rest of the time, I’m doing other things,” Joe said, and he gave his marshmallow to Ebony.
“Like what?”
“Selling stuff.”
“Like a merchant?”
“Sure.”
“Why’d you bring me out here?” Ebony asked.
“You can’t see this many stars in the city,” Joe said, and they ate under the stars and talked until two in the morning, when Ebony said she had to get home.
While they were driving, Ebony wished Joe had a sidecar so she could sleep, but she settled for his shoulder and fell asleep.
When Ebony woke up, it was with a jolt that knocked her off of the motorcycle at a red light. It was now three in the morning, and there were few cars in the streets. Ebony got back on, disoriented, and several minutes later, they were at her apartment. Joe wanted to go in, but Ebony called him crazy and fell onto her bed, where she slept for the next four hours in a splatter of spaghetti sauce that Alexa had smoothed onto the old quilt Alexa’s great-grandma had made.
In the library, Ebony had coffee with the male librarian, who was forty-something and straight, but he gave the impression that he wasn’t. He, Marc, and Ebony watched some volunteers from the YMCA move around the sections. The interesting books were being moved to the back, and the encyclopedia aisle, the one where no one went and therefore the most incidents happened at, was being moved to the front.
“Who’s that man?” Marc asked Ebony. “He’s delicious.”
Ebony snorted. “You’re married.” She looked around and saw Joe. “It’s Joe, the guy from yesterday.”
“Gorgeous.” Marc drank his coffee within earshot as Joe came over to Ebony.
“Ebony. I found you,” Joe said.
Round two, Ebony thought.
Ebony ended up going on several more dates before Joe pointed out the facts that they were both unmarried, getting old, and that they looked good together, and Joe proposed. Ebony, feeling that she’d never find anyone else who would want to marry her, accepted the proposal.
The first year Joe and Ebony were married, Ebony noticed Joe didn’t brush his teeth.
“It wastes time,” he said. One day, Joe used all of their savings to pay for an expensive dental treatment. When he was seeing the dentist, Ebony went into his closet and looked around. There were Christmas presents wrapped and in boxes. Ebony found one box for her and several for Mel, the daughter of Joe and a Chinese woman he had married years ago so she could get citizenship. Recently, Mel was sent to Joe’s and Ebony’s by her mother, who demanded Joe take care of her because she couldn’t handle the eleven-year-old girl.
“What? He told me he only got her a couple of DVDs,” Ebony said to herself. The bizarre thing was that Joe had bought Ebony a first edition Tolstoy and some plum-colored lipstick, but he told her he didn’t want to wrap the lipstick because he didn’t want Mel to feel like Ebony got more things than she. Joe told her this one night when Mel was at her mom’s apartment.
Joe and Ebony were drinking hot chocolate in front of the campfire he made on the balcony of their apartment. Joe liked starting fires.
“That’s the weirdest thing anyone has ever said to me, Joe,” Ebony said, wondering again why she didn’t think twice about marrying him.
“Well, the thing is, I only bought Mel two DVDs, and I bought you an expensive book. She’s going to think I love you more,” Joe said, sure that what he was saying was completely normal and understandable.
Several years after that incident, which Mel was so happy about, Ebony and Joe had daughters: Jazz, seven, and Lola, five. Mel was a teenager now, and a tyrant. She beat up kids at school and argued with her teachers, sometimes laughing at them as they taught.
One Sunday morning, the family of five was eating French toast Ebony made, and when they finished, Ebony asked Mel to wash the dishes, which started a huge scene between Joe, Mel, and Ebony.
“You would never let me tell Jazz to do the dishes,” Joe said.
“She’s seven. And if I did ask her, she would do it because I’m raising her differently. I don’t spoil her,” Ebony said. There was more arguing, which Jazz and Lola witnessed, humiliating Ebony, and finally Ebony went over to Mel and hugged her.
“Mel, when my kids are told to do something, they do it because they were taught to. Now, I realize I can’t ask you to do things for me because you’re not my daughter, so I won’t treat you like you are,” Ebony said. She meant this in a way that normally would have made a kid ashamed of themselves, but the insult when over Joe’s and Mel’s heads. Mel stood up and hugged Ebony and said, “Thank you.” In her mind, she felt like she’d finally won the battle and would never be told to do chores again. Even Joe was happy.
God, kill me now, Ebony thought. How did I get stuck with such idiots?
That night, Joe came home drunk. Ebony met him at the door and helped him to the couch so they could talk. Ebony thought that if she could ask Joe if he was cheating on her while he was drunk, she’d get the truthful answer.
“Joe, can we talk?” Ebony asked him as she set him on the couch and took off his shoes and jacket.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he said, his eyes closed and his hands on his head. He was lying down and sweating in hid LSD-induced filth. Ebony sat down on the cold tile and patted his forehead with a paper towel. Joe rolled on his side and looked into Ebony’s eyes, which he hadn’t done since they were dating.
“What did you want to say?” he asked. Ebony was about to subtly quiz him, but Lola came in the room.
“Mommy, can I get some water?” she asked in her sweet voice, which sounded like Joe’s at times.
“Sure, love, your bottle’s on the table,” Ebony said.
“But it has my lunch germs on it,” Lola said.
“I promise, baby, there are no lunch germs on it,” Ebony said. Lola thought for a few seconds, then got the bottle, said good night, and left the room.
“Why didn’t you just give her a new bottle?” Joe asked, his sweat sticking on the couch and making scotch tape sounds when he moved.
“She didn’t finish the first one. It didn’t expire in a few hours,” Ebony said.
Joe stood and towered over the petite Ebony. “You’re a dreadful mother and you’re terrorizing the kids!” he yelled.
“Hey! Stop projecting your emotions toward your mother onto me, okay?” Ebony yelled back. Joe fell back into the couch into an alcohol-induced coma.
Jazz and Lola came into the room and ran to Ebony. “Dad’s wrong, Mommy,” Jazz said. “You don’t terrorize us.” They hugged Ebony and sat for a while together, watching Joe breathe.
“Why’s Dad do mad?” Lola asked. Ebony didn’t want to scare her daughters with stories of her husband’s life as a drug dealer and habitual user, and the story of his brother’s suicide, which was the cause of Joe’s depression in the first place.
“His brother died in a bad way. Your Dad found him on a bench in the park across the street when he was a teenager, so he’s been sad ever since,” Ebony told the girls.
“He won’t be sad if Jesus gets into his heart,” Lola said. Ebony took her girls to bed and spent the rest of the night in her own bed, praying for an escape from insanity.
The next morning, Mel informed Joe that she was pregnant, and Joe decided to walk the dogs and smoke some dope in order to forget about it. Ebony left to the store with her girls as Joe left with the dogs. Ebony still didn’t know about Mel’s pregnancy when she was getting into the car, and when she came home with Joe’s heart medicine, she found him on a chair.
“Joe, I got your stuff,” she said. “Wake up, you need to take it.” Joe didn’t move. He had died, slumped in his favorite chair, with the dogs sitting next to him and whimpering.
After Joe’s funeral, Ebony moved herself and her girls to Ankara, Turkey, where they lived with Ebony’s diplomat cousin. She never remarried, and Mel never married her baby’s so-called father. Her mother wasn’t too happy about having Mel live with her again, but there wasn’t another option.
Bite Your Tongue
based on some events in my life and Joe Strummer’s life.