Tanisha is saying that finding Betty Davis is our sacred duty.
She always speaks like that, like she’s gunning for lead in drama class.
I watch her foot as she digs the toe of her red Converse into the sidewalk. Back and forth so that the top makes a scrunch sound. The wind slaps my chest and I zip my hoody tighter.
Digging toe into ground is Tanisha body language for I’m About To Make A Very Bad Decision.
I met her in AP Psychology last semester. We were both in the back row and I let her cheat off my unit tests. She ended up getting an A in the class and I got a B+.
“You’re not going to bitch out on me?” she asks, eyes witching.
She asks this as if we hadn’t just taken two buses to get to this exact quiet street, lonely with trees.
Tanisha is jutting shoulders and hollow face, a brown-skinned wanna-be punk girl with fried green hair. It’s hard to imagine much energy is contained in something so skinny, but Tanisha is a walking sun.
I nod at her wide forehead and for the sixty billionth time, think about how I will kill myself tomorrow.
“I don’t think this a good idea,” I finally answer.
I’ll probably use Darnell’s leftover pills. Google says its less messy that way.
I’m not sad about it or anything.
When I finally decided to do it, whatever was squeezing my heart in like old trash stopped its pull.
Even my mom says I’ve been in a better mood this past week.
It’s the magic point between sunset and setting and the sky is a bluesy purple, the street is all wet with hours ago rain. I finger a rusty nail in an electric post and let Tanisha go on about Betty Davis and ordained journeys and black girl magic.
There’s no real use arguing with Tanisha’s logic.
It’d be like talking to the radio.
“You’re really gonna stop me from meeting The Queen of Funk?” she asks, “You know this is my dream.”
Tanisha does not talk about how this dream began about fifty minutes ago after we both finished watching the Betty Davis documentary at Regent Theater.
Tanisha does not mention how I was the one who caught the throwaway shot of Nancy B’s Bakery, which helped us zero in on the fact that Betty Davis must’ve lived on West Seventh.
She also doesn’t talk about how Betty Davis does not want to be found.
I mean, even her old band can’t find her.
Tanisha whoops her arms up and down like a crazy propeller, ready to move.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asks, “Her voice was like the sweetest lullaby.”
“Sure,” I say even though Betty Davis did not sound like something you’d sing a baby, “But that doesn’t mean she’s gonna be happy about two random stalkers showing up at her door.”
Tanisha sighs, pushes her foot into the ground like she wants to leave a dent.
And then starts walk-running towards West Seventh.
I’ve always followed people like Tanisha, people who I think will light me up.
And then I just end up in the audience alone, clapping.
Before Tanisha, it was Ashima, an Indian girl with a supermodel complex and me as photographer.
After tomorrow I won’t even be here, so why bother switching up.
So, even though I’m about four inches shorter than Tanisha, I do my best to keep up with her long strides.
* * * * *
“I wonder what she’s going to tell me,” Tanisha says slowing down.
“Maybe she hates fans,” I say.
“Sunny. She wants us to find her, it’s all over the film,” Tanisha says, “You’ve got to increase your scope of imagination.”
I’m supposed to agree, but I look at the ground.
I know her big eyes are searching my face for an affirmative.
My silence balloons around me until it’s so big it pops.
“You’re so annoying,” Tanisha says and starts walking fast again.
She keeps checking her phone and murmuring under her breath, curls of vapor escaping like cigarette smoke.
It’s just us in this street.
Dewy cars, naked trees with gnarled branches lifting to the sky. A forgotten toy car turned over on its side. It’s like we’re the only people alive.
Seven years from now, Tanisha will get exactly what she wants.
She’ll glue 686 maxi pads smeared with red glitter onto the house of a right-wing mayor.
Her hair will be blue.
She will become famous.
Tonight, she doesn’t know that.
Tonight, she is boiling with a buzzy anger at me for not playing along in this stupid ass quest.
“I think this one is it,” I say pointing to a house with a dim porch light on.
Tanisha had almost walked right past it.
She didn’t notice the vases of fake gold roses surrounding the door.
They were the opening shot of the documentary.
Even if we didn’t watch the movie, if I had to guess where a former rock-star now shut-in black lady lived, this would be it.
In the night, the light purple of the house looks white and dead bushes line the sidewalk.
A waving black gnome with apple cheeks and a chipped hand guards the front door.
One of the windows is yellow with a light still on.
My heart starts hurting again. Like someone pushed a fist into my chest and grabbed hard.
Tanisha looks at the house and for the first time since I’ve known her, I see her fear. She takes out her phone and starts to scroll, but even I know that she’s stalling.
“I’m going to knock,” I say.
The only star you can see tonight, shining like its desperate between folds of cloud, is Jupiter. My brother says you know it’s a planet and not a star because planets don’t try as hard to twinkle.
Maybe tonight Jupiter is a spell because I walk right past Tanisha and even though my heart is a jumpy bird dying all over the place, I step over the spilled water hose and the soft, frayed carpet that says Welcome in faded blue and I rap my bare knuckles on the door.
Once. Twice. Three times.
Nothing.
I’m about to turn back to Tanisha with a See?
But then the door opens and it’s Betty Davis.
She’s dressed like everybody’s grandma except she has this dancing fire in her lower lids that bites at everything.
The light hits her hair and forms an orange halo and I don’t have words.
She’s beautiful and she’s older and a little fat. Her hips are snug in her sky-blue velour track suit and she has on a matching robe that hangs on her shoulders like a cape.
She looks like she just stepped out of the ocean.
“What are you staring at girl? Get in.”
She turns around and I don’t even have time to say anything to Tanisha because Betty Davis has already closed the door after me.
She walks toward her living room.
The lamps are rimmed with something red and heavy. A sleepy white Persian cracks opens its milky eyes and yawns in my direction. Betty’s robe billows around her and I follow in its wake.
“Good evening, Ms. Davis,” I say, because what else do you say?
“This won’t take long,” Betty Davis says and sits down, she leans into the plushness of the gold couch and regards me, head to toe.
She doesn’t frown or smile, she just sorta lingers, like she’s reading me or something.
“No one comes to give,” she sighs.
“Maybe I should go get my friend?” I say and wish I had bought her something.
Maybe some real roses.
“That girl will be fine,” she says as I sit down on the least flashy piece of furniture in the room, a simple black wooden chair.
“You though, you want answers,” she adds.
I wanted the entire world to be outlined like a composition book.
Like how I could make my brother into the person he was before Iraq.
Or ask why my mom ignores me one day and slaps me the next.
If you saw Betty Davis, guitar between her legs, smile electric, sounding like late night cable sex, you would think, this is a woman who knows.
And so I nod and Betty Davis lights a cigarette, blows it out like an old-school diva.
“Well, I aint got shit,” she says.
She sits deeper and the couch makes a cough noise, her jeweled hand starts automatically petting the cat on the couch. She pats her thighs with a defiant slap, leans forward a bit and shrugs her shoulders.
This is when I start crying.
I haven’t cried in about two years and the sobs scare me.
I reach a corner of my sweater to wipe at my running nose and the snot stretches like a bridge before finally letting my nose go.
I know I’m not going to kill myself tomorrow.
I’m just gonna keep on barely being here.
I’ll be the trusty sidekick to the Tanishas of the world.
I’ll let my mom hit me until I can leave her house forever.
I’ll sneak Darnell’s pills back and my brother will keep being the type of screwed up angry who is only nice to me when he’s trying to pawn my laptop.
Betty Davis doesn’t move an inch, but her eyes become flowers instead of inferno.
I try to calm myself down, breathing deep into the pit of my stomach.
I get up to go, only turn around when I hear Betty Davis stand up.
Her bangles jangle. She probably wants to tell me how to unlock the door.
When I’m facing her again, she’s so close to me I kinda trip back.
She places her hands on my shoulders like she wants to press me and the words she’s about to say into the center of the earth.
I’m close enough to see the thin outline of blue around the brown in her gaze.
Betty Davis’ eyes are a planet of churches which pin me to their altar.
“This–is all I’ve got,” she says.
She breathes deep, smiles a bit. And then she’s says:
“____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ .”
One day these eight words will swing my legs out of bed when Darnell dies.
A pierced tattoo artist will ink these words on my right forearm when I’m thirty-seven and my mother won’t speak to me for three years.
Disgraceful, she’ll say.
Betty Davis claps the sides of my shoulders softly and then hands me a CD of her greatest hits from a cardboard box near my feet.
“I don’t know what Hue Records thinks I need with 68 CDs of my own damn songs,” she says and opens the door for me to leave.
I sneak the CD into my hoody pocket and just like that, I’m outside again in the cold, Tanisha sitting out front.
“She says you can come in now,” I say.
Tanisha jumps up like the curb is made of brimstone and runs past.
The door shuts with a soft click.
Minutes later, Tanisha is outside and telling me about how Betty–she’s just Betty now–talked about some magical crow and that art is for the brave or something.
We’re walking back to the 64 bus stop and I’m a couple of steps ahead of Tanisha.
This time I’m looking at the sky, but there’s no Jupiter, just foggy clouds and darkness. In my head, I sing Betty Davis’ eight words like a spell and it feels like my feet don’t meet the sidewalk.
* * * * *
“You were with Betty longer than me and she didn’t tell you anything?” Tanisha asks at my back.
I know this makes Tanisha feel special.
Sacred even.
I turn around to face her.
“No, she barely said a word,” I say.
