No Land's Man Read online

  I had even done it myself. When I was ten years old my cousin Munir came to visit us in England from Bahrain, where his family lived. I despised him. I didn’t want to be associated with him or his accent. I treated the poor kid with contempt, making fun of him among my friends. I didn’t know why at the time, I just didn’t like him. In retrospect I realized I was jealous. Munir seemed to be okay with the person he was. He was okay with his accent, he was okay with his fashion sense, he was not trying to fit in, not trying to be accepted by anyone. He was just a kid and he didn’t think much about it. It was baffling to me that he had not learned something that I had learned very early on: The world is a much easier, friendlier place when white people like you.

  Munir didn’t know this for two reasons. First, he was brought up in a world where everyone looked like him. Second, his family was wealthy. His father (my uncle) had made quite a fortune as a successful businessman. While my father stood behind the counter of his own store, Munir’s father employed ten men like my father standing behind the counters of many stores. I admired Munir for his self-confidence, which I expressed by punching him in the mouth when I found that he had decided to borrow my five-speed British-made VMX bicycle.

  So, following my failure to become friends with Dilip, I found myself without an ally or a group that I could call my own in this new American petri dish. It was only a matter of time, therefore, before I got involved with the wrong crowd: The Actors.

  My mother had suggested that I take a course that hadn’t been offered in my British school. She had spotted acting on a list of what American high schools call “electives.” Knowing that I’d enjoyed being part of a children’s theater group back in England, she suggested that I sign up. I did, and in doing so I found my true cafeteria clan-mates.

  I became one of the drama kids, those histrionic thespians, comedians, tech nerds, and attention-seeking dorks, drawn to the limelight of the high school auditorium. We were all shapes and sizes and had varying degrees of talent, but drama class was not about talent, it was about celebrating our individual uniqueness amid a high school culture of conformity. We were residents of the island of misfit toys, a place where you could exchange the skin you came in for the possibility of becoming anything and anyone. The drama department did manage to put on a couple of plays each year, which we all got to participate in one way or another, but classes mostly consisted of games and improvisation exercises. It was a sanctuary of play and freedom where there was no right or wrong way to be.

  Unlike the well-travelled offspring of business tycoons and diplomats back in boarding school, the drama kids I befriended were mostly middle-class American kids who hadn’t met many Indian people before. And even fewer like me with a thick English accent, which is probably why during improvisations I often ended up playing either an alien or an English lord, or an alien who happened to also be an English lord. I even developed my own go-to character: a half-lizard, half-human with a funny walk that made everyone laugh and let me finally feel accepted in this foreign land. Perhaps I’d been too quick to judge poor Aurungzeb.

  Truth be told, I was wholeheartedly accepted by my new drama buddies, and except for my accent and the occasional question about life in England, there was not a whole lot of conversation about my background pre-Florida. It didn’t seem to matter that I was Indian or English or Muslim because like everyone else it was assumed that eventually, I would be readily absorbed into the tapestry that is Americana.

  The difference between being an Indian immigrant in England and in America was that in England, despite (or perhaps due to) the long history between the two cultures, no matter what I did to be accepted, I was never considered truly British. In fact, as far I can tell, the British are mostly mistrusting of foreigners. Perhaps it’s understandable, after defending their tiny island from invasion again and again for thousands of years. The irony about America is that even with all the flag waving and overt nationalism, I found the opposite to be true. Generally speaking, Americans are open, accepting, and un-cynical people who take to new things quickly and easily. The downside of this seems to be that in a country made up almost entirely of immigrants, there is little curiosity about other cultures. Perhaps because the American identity has been so tied to self-sufficiency and exceptionalism, many Americans assume that everyone would be American, if they had the choice, surely.

  In other words, Americans think about the rest of the world the same way New Yorkers think about the rest of America: they don’t. Which is why when I woke up one day to find that my name was no longer Aasif (aah-sif), but instead I had been given a brand new American moniker, Aaseeeef, I didn’t mind at all.

  NO LAND’S MAN: YOU CAN’T BE MICHAEL JACKSON ALL THE TIME

  YOU CAN’T BE MICHAEL JACKSON all the time, unless you are Michael Jackson.” This was the title of a poem I wrote while lying on the floor of my friend Roy’s bedroom during my senior year of high school, while in a marijuana-induced haze of lucidity. It was 1984 and MTV had recently launched on American cable television. It was the first of its kind and would revolutionize the music industry as a channel dedicated solely to music videos—by white artists. That’s right. It wasn’t a stated purpose, per se. I don’t believe it was part of their marketing campaign, but let’s just say the network was suspiciously sans R&B. If one was looking for Stevie Wonder or the Gap Band, one mostly got British punk, new wave, heavy metal, and glam metal, a tragic combination of Led Zeppelin and Liberace that aliens might one day use as a justification for destroying our tiny blue planet. But all that changed with the release of one monumental album: Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

  Thriller quickly became the bestselling album in the world with people dancing to “Billie Jean” as far away as Mumbai and Tokyo, a phenomenon not seen since Elvis or the Beatles. But what was equally as amazing as Michael’s meteoric rise from ordinary pop star to the King of Pop was his striking physical transformation. His nose had been pinched, his chin squared, and his eyes lifted. Eventually he no longer looked like an African-American man at all. Instead, his delicately miniaturized features looked more like those of a beautiful Indian girl.

  That same year the drama department at my high school decided that instead of producing a traditional fall play, they would put on a variety show in collaboration with the music department. The drama students were asked to perform some kind of musical number, even if their lack of singing ability left them to resort to lip-synching, for which there was an actual category. This was absurd to me, since lip-synching requires no talent at all; I would rather listen to bad karaoke than watch pretty good lip-synching. Initially I decided to boycott the show entirely, but a few weeks before the performance I changed my mind . . . because of Michael Jackson.

  It would be fair to say that most Indian immigrant parents would assert two important restrictions on their sons before entering high school: “No dames and no drugs.” I use the word dames here simply for alliteration purposes—no Indian parent would use the word dames. To be fair, no non-Indian parent would use the word dames, unless your dad happens to be a James Cagney impersonator. My larger point is that up until my senior year I had never partaken of either. However, as my interest (and frustration) in the former increased, my attraction to the latter did as well. If only being a 125-pound geeky Indo-British theater nerd with an Afro who specialized in funny walks had somehow made me more attractive to women, I may never have settled for drugs as my act of rebellion.

  When I say drugs, I don’t mean hard drugs, or even medium-soft drugs; I mean marijuana. This probably sounds innocent enough, but for someone who had never even kissed a girl or tasted wine, it might as well have been crack. Actually, it was not the pot that I was drawn to; in fact, for a long time I refused to inhale and only pretended that I was high. I just wanted to hang out with the guys who were smoking pot because they seemed cool, funny, and intellectual.

  Unlike the rest of the kids in high school, Roy and Rick, my soon-to-be stoner friends, were no
t listening to Duran Duran or going to the mall to play video games and watch Molly Ringwald movies. They were two handsome white guys with 4.0 GPAs who had given up student government to be actively counter-culture. They didn’t care what anyone thought of them as they passionately discussed for hours on end the literary merits of Jack Kerouac and Jim Morrison. I realize now this is just what happens when you are stoned, but at the time they seemed completely unlike myself and the other kids in drama. Most importantly, unlike me, Roy and Rick seemed to be having lots of sex . . . with dames.

  Roy and Rick reminded me of some of the boys in my British boarding school, super-smart kids from wealthy families who would snort glue behind the cricket field. I was never foolhardy enough to join them, but I wondered what it must take to risk being suspended or even expelled. Perhaps you had to be incredibly angry, I thought, to be able to say “Fuck you” to the school, to your parents, to risk ruining your future. As an immigrant kid whose parents had sacrificed so much to give me the life I had, I never felt I had the luxury to express my anger in that way, but I was nevertheless envious of those that did.

  In Roy and Rick I found a similar expression of anger and rebelliousness. They both came from wealthy, divorce-traumatized homes. Unlike at my house, where my parents had never heard of personal space and if I had a friend over my mother would walk in to my bedroom every five minutes with offerings of Indian delicacies or random food items like peaches, Roy’s parents never seemed to make an appearance. We would spend hours after school and on the weekends getting stoned in Roy’s basement bedroom and freaking out on the few occasions the front door slammed. We spent a lot of time driving around in Roy’s beat-up sky-blue Volkswagen Bug blasting Beatles tunes and discussing Nietzsche while baked out of our minds.

  On one weekend during one such car ride, a few minutes after Roy and I had picked up Rick from a local pizza restaurant where he waited tables, I experienced something that changed the rest of my high school experience. As we drove up North Dale Mabry Highway out of town, toward the open fields of north Tampa, we toked and smoked like three Easy Riders. Roy had forgotten his cassette of The White Album so we blasted the radio and, since it was the eighties, it was only a matter of time before the familiar drum beat and weeping falsetto of “Billie Jean” began to squeeze its way through Roy’s tinny speakers. We didn’t care, we sang along like it was Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild,” rolling down the windows as we let the humid Florida wind whip us into a sixty-mile-per-hour frenzy. As Roy floored the pedal we accelerated just as Michael hit the all-too-familiar chorus and I leaned forward from the backseat throwing my head out of the passenger window, screaming to the surprised shoppers in the Winn-Dixie parking lot, “She says I am the one. But the kiiiiiiiid is not my son!”

  Rick turned to me, his eyes bloodshot, his face beet-red, his surfer dude blonde locks wildly blowing like his entire head was enveloped in flames, and shouted, “Oh my God. Listen to you. You sound like Michael Jackson, dude.”

  He was right! And I was as surprised as he was. It seemed that without really trying I was managing to hit those high falsetto notes and doing a pretty good impersonation.

  Earlier that year, Michael Jackson had sealed his stature as being bigger than Jesus while performing at the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary celebration; a single glove, a fedora, and the moonwalk all came together in a magical moment. Michael seemed to walk on water that night. Truth be told, it was not the first time I had ever seen the moonwalk—the black kids in school had been popping and breakdancing outside the lunch room for almost a year before I saw Michael do it on TV. I had even tried doing it myself in my bedroom late at night, but I always looked less like I was dancing and more like I was being riddled with bullets. I lacked three basic components: grace, control, and coordination. But while many of us had seen the moonwalk before, just the same way many had seen a magic trick before Houdini ever put on a show, no one had ever seen it elevated with the style and attitude that Michael gave it. So in that drug-induced moment in the back of Roy’s sky-blue Volkswagen, I made a decision that would change the rest of my high school experience. The school variety show would have its very own Michael Jackson.

  Rick’s girlfriend had taped the Motown performance, and since my family didn’t own a VCR, I went over to her house every night after school to watch the tape and memorize the kicks and squeals and the part where he jumps up and down and screams, “She led me to her room, hey, hey, hey.” I practiced that dance everywhere, all the time. I danced in the shower, to the thumping of my mother on the other side of the bathroom door yelling, “What are you doing in there? Why are you taking a shower at two o’clock in the afternoon?”

  I danced in my sister’s bedroom when she was not home in order to gain inspiration and ape Michael’s pained facial expressions from the posters that covered her walls.

  I even broke into the dance one night before bed, while I was grabbing a glass of milk. My parents’ bedroom was just off the kitchen of our small two-bedroom bungalow. With my first jump I woke my father, who emerged from bed to the sight of his teenage son kicking and twirling and emitting piercing high-pitched squeals while holding a glass of milk and wearing only his underwear at two in the morning. He must have wondered in that moment, as he watched me from the shadows, why he had ever come to this country. In the middle of a sliding moonwalk across the linoleum floor I was startled back to reality by his quiet voice saying, “I think it’s time for bed.”

  Around the same time that my Michael Jackson transformation was in its pupa stage, my grandparents came to visit us from India. They clearly wondered what had become of their grandson. I wore dark shades, my Indo-fro was Jheri-curled, and I would spend hours in my bedroom singing and dancing with my Walkman on my head. Roy and Rick even started calling me Michael.

  After much provocation from my sister I even deigned to perform for my grandparents. I couldn’t imagine how this was going to go over, but at least it would explain why I kept jumping up on to my tiptoes all the time. My grandparents looked puzzled as they sat in the living room with my mom next to them. My sister hit the cassette player and as the song began I came out from my bedroom wearing shades and one sparkly glove. I began singing too early in the music so I started again. This time I attempted the 360-degree spin and my shades flew off and landed by my grandmother’s feet. I don’t think she knew if she was meant to laugh or not. I sang and danced through the rest of the song, missing notes and missing steps. A couple of times I even lost my balance completely and collapsed to the floor. By the end I was exhausted but had learned two very important lessons: singing and dancing at the same time is really, really hard, and moonwalking on a carpet just looks like you are trying to wipe something off the bottom of your shoe.

  Despite my poor display my family was supportive. Even though my grandmother didn’t understand what it all meant, my less-than-average homage to Michael Jackson brought a smile to her face. For the rest of their visit she would walk into my bedroom every day and sing “Billy Jesus not my lawyer.” She had no idea what she was saying, and it didn’t matter. She was now a fan.

  For most of the following week, I kept practicing while feeling increasingly sick to my stomach. I realized that stoned people make impulsive decisions that lack judgment and that this was the backbone of the “Say No to Drugs” campaign. I also realized that singing like Michael and dancing like Michael at the same time was probably out of the question for a kid with asthma and so I reluctantly switched my name from the singing category to the lip-synch category, knowing full well that the only way this would work was if I nailed those turns and kicks. My moonwalk had to look like my shoes were made of glass.

  The day of the variety show arrived and my transformation was complete. I was about to lip-synch “Billie Jean” for the entire student body.

  I walked out in the darkness and stepped into a spotlight at center stage. My heart was pounding and in an instant my mouth seemed to lose all moisture. My limbs felt
heavy as I assumed a familiar pose. The audience recognized the silhouette but not the person and there was a murmur that went through the auditorium. Before I was ready for it to happen, the familiar throbbing beat began and students began to look at each other. A whistle pierced the air and I heard an “Oh yeah!” as I reached up with my makeshift glittered glove, drenched in sweat, and slid my fingers across the brim of my fedora. Here we go, I thought, as I thrust out my hip and kicked my right leg straight and hard. A girl screamed, “I love you!” I heard another voice scream, “Hell yeah!” Then another, and another, and in an instant something felt different. For the first time I was not just recreating choreography—I was inhabiting it.

  A confidence began to come over me that I had never experienced before. I felt strong and graceful as I began to release my anger, rebelliousness, sexuality, and playfulness through the pounding of Michael’s rhythm. As the drumbeat gave way to the first few lyrics I turned from profile to face front. There was an explosive scream from the audience as I swallowed and opened my mouth, becoming a vessel for Michael’s pitch-perfect lament. Before I knew it the fedora went stage left and I glided stage right. I had to land the next move like an Olympic gymnast, a 360-degree spin that ended with me on my tiptoes. It happened so fast I barely had time to think, but I nailed it. The room erupted with hoots and hollers. Then I put one foot back, thrust my neck forward, and as the music hit the crescendo, muscle memory kicked in and all I had to do was bring the swagger. I walked forward and glided backwards. It couldn’t have been easier.

  I was an Indian, English kid who had been transplanted to America, dancing on a Tampa high school stage, channeling a black man who looked like an Indian girl. My grandmother was sitting in the audience and there was no turning back. It is true that you can’t be Michael Jackson all the time, but on that day, for four minutes and thirty seconds, the entire student body—black kids, white kids, the jocks, the prom queens, Roy, Rick, the drama kids, and even the two Asian kids and Dilip—stood up and screamed, “Michael!”