6:30

What I  decided to take from Blue Colonial is how Broderick uses the history of his home to create a dialogue of sympathy and judgement, where he puts in dialectics the troubling history of colonialism and the necessity of action. However, in thinking of home in the most immediate sense for me, I quickly realized that I came from somewhere plagued more by a lack of culture and history, where the social precedent is set by a singularity established by those who know history and have rejected it to us, so I cannot have the conversation Broderick has in terms to understanding the past, but rather how I can use that discuss ideas of nihilism and alienation. also, because of time constraints, I could only get half done.

Six thirty marked the awaited respite of evening when toy men, propped with false confidence and dressed in burly outfits, hustled off their turf stage and into the locker rooms. Six thirty marked not just when the sun had departed and turned its back off the melodrama of the adolescent world, but when we descended into the bristling depths of our private tumult. Somehow, though, everywhere was a minstrelsy act. Yet the masks we donned implied neither race nor class, but rather delirium in fanfaronade. Six thirty marked when sensual steam bandaged our sweat and blood, and water caressed our necks and backs, and the symposium of field house chauvinism gave way to hollering and scripted call and response.

            I, alone in the corner of the cavernous bathroom, waited for the stalls to open to change from these sopping clothes, dripping with effort, into something that did not strangle my chest. Rather, one might jest that they were bosoms, but the others, the fortunate souls unburdened by the maladroit condition of weight, seemed to distance themselves from such easy taunts. They distanced themselves from mocking me entirely, despite the fact everyone disrobed before each other while I retreated to the sanctuary of the bathroom stall. The hinges called me hither as a nearby door explodes open and the nude youth enters the boisterous enclave of the showers where the misogyny and homophobia departs just as thick as the scorching clouds of steam. I ignore them and change, wringing out my shirt above the toilet as I change into my dry clothes within a minute. I walk back into the bathroom, a sanitized division between two locker rooms, one side being football and the other every other sport: the cathedral and the multi-purpose spiritual center.

            I transverse the cluttered halls of cat-calls, dick advertisements, the threats of banging moms and the cool lies of fornication until I reach my locker. I am uncertain exactly how many of these claims are even within the vicinity of actuality, but I do not bother to indulge the tabloid exclamations. There is a clammy heat, an atmosphere groping and choking me and my mind as my body dwindles too long in places it ought not to be: in places where school colors envelope everything in a nationalistic fervor. I head for the door, but then suddenly am intercepted by a fellow player, I am ordained to consider him a brother and compatriot. He is akin to me in his portliness, but there is not much else remarkable in his features: he is a plain overgrown baby. “Hey Che. I’m having a party this weekend for my 17^th birthday and it’s going to be pretty awesome, man. You should come.”

            I should hesitate. I should allow thoughts to relapse. I should indulge my memory with pain and alienation. I should remind myself, “no parties.” Yet, I am compelled by the demands of my animalistic footloose, my trigger happy feet that longs for release. I am compelled by the possibility of perhaps surmounting recognition in the form of even the slightest inkling of attractiveness. I am compelled by optimism. In Frisco, that is all I can afford myself. “Yeah, that does sound awesome. Where is it? You know I’ve been dying to do some dancing.”

            “Yeah, we know you, Che. My parents rented out this bitchin’ place over in Richardson; I’ll send you the e-vite.” I thanked him and wished him a good evening, but in his macho language rather than mine own. I have been called pretentious on account simply of the vocabulary I used, and somehow such misconceptions manage to permeate and form barbs in my heart. I exit the building, surrounded by the looming hallways where we were herded day in and out onto our field to graze on machismo and mock-heroics. Thursday nights we would have pageantry to the delight of bored suburbanites who envied our youth and so embodied it through our performance. Across the door of the field house was constructed four tennis courts, forming this compact square in the courtyard that the septum between the school and the holy grounds. It was never within my ordinance to set foot on those courts.

Rather, day after day, I turned left on my exit and carried my wretched prop of a body alongside the bleachers outside the courts and to the bike rack on the exterior of the parking lot. Waiting for me was my vermillion Schwinn beach cruiser: the iconography of my brand name, for when people drew my name from the shallow social conscious this bike was often a recurring definition of me. I petted the handlebars, taking a moment of respite. I mounted it and I was off, racing through the parking lot. It was a gallery of sloth, the leisure of effortless travel granted to those who didn’t even know effort. And, worse yet, the multitude of posh wheels with their leather interiors, soiled and lecherous, ridiculed me as I passed in gales, the pauper on a bicycle in the presence of entitlement. I eventually was clear of the school premises and was riding down Legacy, a lonely street, into my subdivision of a unit of a cluster.

The ordinances set by the Home Owner’s Association, the breathless front yard, were manufactured and stamped onto every household with the same two stunted trees, like children poisoned to stay docile. Green had never seemed so lifeless. Yet, as I passed under auburn shades swallowing the sky, I glared at the bushes and little flowers that scorned flair and liveliness and I glared at the French colonial facades that seemed to change with every home. Yet, I knew better. Each home was forced, a point blank interrogation by the devil of culture, to adopt one of three pre-designed floor plans. So, no matter whether the exterior was marked with a subtle red collection of bricks or a teal wooden wall, every house was predictably one of three pre-determined molds: expression be damned. There was a serenity within the streets, an eerie and pestilential quiet that reeked with decay as the world, the diegesis of a 1950s tv commercial pleading to you this wonderful product called “The American Dream”, slipped into the unconscious, only to return in dull droves the next morning. This used to be farmland, but someone planted their children in those fields and these mausoleums grew, staring us down.

When I sleep, I would wish that dreams and the brisk of liveliness would flutter like a mass exodus of butterflies through my window, but it is hermetically sealed from the world. My room, if not for my penchant for documentary and serious literature, would be a bubble within another bubble, a much larger dome that occupied this fabricated bonhomie of what life ‘should be’. Yet, there is a peculiarity when your idea of searching for the roots of your home becomes no more difficult than going to the intersection of Main and Preston and gawking at the railroad track. The tracks form a barrier before entering this strip of low income housing and day-laborers perched in front of gas stations we call “Downtown”. Somehow, I still need a small fizzling of light to sleep.

The next morning I awake the slave to routine, meticulously implanted into my head, as I take my newspaper and read the Points section, discarding the actual events section of the Dallas Morning News. I glance at it amidst the crunching of Special K, guaranteed to drop inches in weeks, and sip on my self-concocted mocha. The repeating noises are players in a lifeless requiem. After that, I relieve myself in the restroom of the feelings and discomforts that are strictly taboo, so that I may function with regard to the unspoken boundaries. Or is it for myself, so I maintain some dignity in the hordes of impropriety?

I settle on my bicycle and descend into the whiteness, reticent and condemning, and I was a streak of orange blazing across a blank canvas. I was a conqueror dismayed to find his lands spoiled after having already set fire to his ships as did Cortez, and ambition was what carried me through the squalor that perhaps it is in reality a peninsula. I spent years lost, traveling alone. Today was a blurry memory, a sober blackout. Anything that might have occurred amidst small blips of light in these hazy recollections was immediately super-imposed by the thought of tomorrow, of the party. And I ask myself, “What do you think is going to happen?”

“Something good.” Optimism, I have learned, has become my most toxic hallucinogen.

But so long as it gets me to Six thirty