Red River
“Yeah, you scared the shit out of me.” Nicole’s voice deadpans and she looks at me with a rare and jarring seriousness. It’s been seven years since we’ve talked about that night, maybe now I know why.
It’s the summer of Mike Brown’s murder. The blazing hot summer we held our breath and kept our eyes fixed on Ferguson. I’m twenty-six and organizing queers against the police in Austin. I’m a young man falling in love with an unfamiliar cocktail of hormones coursing through my veins. Our whole world is on fire and when we aren’t working we’re in bed, leading organizing meetings, having the kind of sex that makes my heart race for days after, yelling in full voice and raising our fists to the state, saying I love you before we understand, fully, what it means for us, getting wasted on the rush of movement building.
We slip away from karaoke at Swan Dive and tumble out onto the busy street. It’s your usual Thursday night crowd on Red River: not a sober soul in sight. Fifty feet away a rundown gas station is a traffic jam of food trucks who keep the night going, softening the edges of our jagged inebriation with tacos and barbeque.
Our focus on getting safely from a to b is sharply snatched by howling, spinning bodies. In the flurry I see a slender young Black man being pummeled by three towering white bouncers in the entrance of the bar next door. I can feel the danger radiating off their movements and it draws me in. The air is thickening with tension as things escalate and we are all swimming in it. But my newfound anonymity as just another guy on the street feels like a life vest and what once felt like drowning suddenly just...doesn’t anymore. For the first time in my life I’m not afraid of getting into some shit.
Before I know it I’m moving closer to the action and shouting at the main bouncer like it matters.
“Get off of him you piece of shit. Get the fuck off of him!”
Nicole is pulling at my arm, “Come on baby, let’s go.”
I pull back to join the chorus of drunk girls now screaming at the main bouncer who is still hitting his much smaller victim.
“You racist fucking piece of shit, what the fuck is wrong with you get off of him!”
I’m close now. Close enough to lock eyes with the enraged bouncer who is telling me to “back the fuck off, bro.” I’m hoping that he engages me. I tell myself that it’s because I want to distract him and give the other guy a break. The truth is some part of me wants to get hit. This is the apex of the kind of manhood I’ve only ever seen through a screen and my own rite of passage to it is inches away, so close I can taste it. Earthy salt and bitter iron. Every other part of my maleness has been man-made, why wouldn’t my initiation into violence be the same?
Nicole’s hand slides down to my wrist against my stubborn writhing. She pulls and I can feel the wristband on my watch pinching the hair and skin beneath.
“Baby, come on!” and she yanks me away just in time.
The pit of masculinity was deeper and more toxic than I could have imagined. Mesmerized by its darkness, it sucked me in like a tidal wave and spat me out, scraped up by the undertow. I got a glimpse of myself at my wildest and I couldn’t ignore how alive it made me feel.
Years later I sit across from Nicole on the bed we share, with so much softness between us, hearing her tell me how much I scared her. It’s impossible to ignore how I forced the woman I love to be a reluctant peacemaker like so many other men before me. I think about how I gave her few other options but to try and keep an unstoppable wave of brutality at bay, and how close I came to becoming just another violent man for her to avoid that night in August.