I was in a 5th/6th Grade “Split” class, ostensibly because I was Gifted & Talented. Back in 1979/1980 they still did things like rank the kids, publicly. Nowadays all the parents would cry foul, I think. But I mean they also had a special parallel track at our elementary school called Emotionally Disturbed (ED). And of course Special Ed. I vaguely remember worrying that I would be taken out of Gifted & Talented and put in Emotionally Disturbed. It’s that same fear I’ve had my whole life of being found out.

_____

If I can figure out why I find almost everyone boring, it will unlock me.

I don’t like the way they end the film, they should not have had her go back in sans disguise, that was kind of superfluous. They seem to have been trying to make some overdetermined point about beauty and talent in the age of Susan Boyle.

Andy Warhol’s future, at least in the way it is commonly misinterpreted, is here. (From what I have read, his actual intended meaning was: “In the future, everyone who is or becomes famous will only be famous for 15 minutes.” Restrictive clause in italics. He did not mean everyone — all 6+ billion of us — would become famous for a quarter-hour.)

At any rate, everyone is “famous” now if they wish to be. Because of teh Internet.

More to my Jewel karaoke analogy’s point, everyone seems to be a producer of culture now. Just as everyone is allowed to do karaoke. Even if that piece of culture is just to put together a Facebook profile or Twitter feed for a couple dozen friends and family members. Everyone can take creative action, forming something that they then display publicly and wait for people to Like or RT.

But I’ve been dwelling on this lately: Even with 500 million Facebook users and hundreds of millions (billions?) of blogs and websites in existence, you can still pick out who has true talent. You can fool Mother Internet, but you can’t fool Mother Nature. She’s the one who handed out “gifts” so capriciously to this or that person, she knows who they are and so do we. The “real deals” still stick out from the incalculable, massive crowd of dilettantes.

Something about that constancy causes a secret pleasure to ripple inside me.

True story: The 30-foot-high magnolia tree I passed the other day in my neighborhood had one single flower blooming on it. I stopped on the sidewalk and inspected the tree with my eyes for a moment to be sure. Yes. Among the repetitious waxy green leaves and the craggy branches spreading up and blocking the sky from where I stood, there was just that one white-petaled blossom, hanging low enough to pick it, if you wanted to.

I reflexively thought of taking a picture and posting it online, but then I shook my head no. The child-born-in-the-20th-century in me said: This moment was just for me and the solitary magnolia flower to share. Seeming proud of herself she smiled at me, and I smiled gratefully back.

Don’t look. I have baby feet.

I’m only 5′ 4″ and a half. But even for that diminutive height, my feet are too small. I wear Size 8 (U.S.) shoes/boots, but that’s a bit of fudging. My real size is smaller, but those sizes just plain look too small. I look like a Chinese girl whose feet were bound.

No less an authority on men than famous heterosexual Queen Latifah recently called me a “grown-ass man” (she was upbraiding me for trying to push some young girls out of the way so I could be in a picture with her, and she added, “Now chill out!”), but there is something she didn’t know about. Something underneath...

My wee 10 toes have no visible “knuckles,” and they form this perfectly tapered line at the top, instead of the wacky jutting toestyle of others that I see on the summer streets. Take an average 1-year-old’s feet, increase the size by a factor of 5, but keep the shape: That’s my feet. I’m not exaggerating.

Not only are they small, they are flat. Which is a shame, because I really, really, wanted to join the Army and now I can’t, just because I have flat baby feet.

My baby feet keep my from dating, because if you date someone, eventually they will see your feet, and as soon as someone does, it’s Game Over. “See ya later, baby-footed freak!” they always say.

I only wear pants in the summer, because what footwear could I do with shorts? Everything I would wear would require socks, and shorts and socks is a fashion no-no. So I just wear jeans and boots all year round.

The only time anyone sees my bare baby feet anymore is on the rare, brief occasions when I go to the sauna at the gym. I sit in there looking at everyone else’s feet and feeling bad. Comparing their normal feet to my munchkin cloppers. Then I go cry in the shower for an hour, cursing my dumb little pink-and-yellow flip-flops that I bought in the children’s section at DSW.

“What’s wrong with looking like a baby?” you may ask. True enough: Babies are cool and chill, but I’m almost 40. I bumped into a childhood friend at the grocery store a few years back, I hadn’t seen him since high school. Within seconds he produced a picture of his newborn from his wallet. I said, “Oh, she’s cute! Here’s mine.” And I pulled a baby picture out of my wallet and showed him. “Why… who… this is dated 1972…” he stammered. “Yeah, that’s me!” I said, beaming with pride.

I’ve tried to put a positive spin on my baby feet. 1) I’ve never had a problem with foot odor, just like other real babies don’t. 2) I can borrow my girl friends’ shoes when I need them for a witch costume. 3) I try to tell myself maybe small feet mean I’m more evolved somehow?

It’s either that or they are a symptom, a reminder, that I am less developed. Less of a man, for sure, but also less of a human being. Not a real adult.

I feel bad about my feet.

But it wouldn’t be like me to just keep the heartbreak of baby feet inside. I have to externalize it. I openly campaign against flip-flops, sandals, and the people who wear them. IF I CAN’T WEAR THEM, NO ONE CAN. I turn to molten lava inside when I see all the doods showing off their big, normally developed feet just because they can.

Bitter, unstable adult baby that I am, sometimes I do lash out. I do. I’m only human. Just last night I went up to this gnarly old asshole who lives in my building — he has two small children that he’s always showing off — and he had his Tevas on and his gross fingery toes were hanging out and I got in his face and snarled, “Why don’t you go put some real shoes on, faggot?” He pretended not to hear me so I grabbed him by the nape of the neck and repeated myself, but louder this time. His one kid started laughing.

Then I stomped on his Tevas. But he didn’t notice, because… well, because baby feet.

A little witch is reaching out to you.

Come closer.

It’s okay, children. You don’t have to be afraid of the middle-aged man dressed in a witch costume. It’s only for Halloween! Doesn’t that make it better? What are you going to be for Halloween this year?

_____

Like all little kids, I took refuge in the idea of magic.

I was just a little boy who preferred witchcraft. I wanted to join a coven, in fact. Then I found out they have to ask you to join. OK, fine. I’ll skip the coven. It sounds kind of cliquish anyway. But I still want to dress the part.

I discovered the book The Littlest Witch a few weeks before my 5th birthday, which is itself a few days before Halloween. After that I would check it out of the library every year from the Royal Oak Public Library and just savor the story of this small supernatural creature trying to make her way in the world like I was. She seemed a lot like me. My mom finally just bought me a copy. At left you can see I colored in this page.

My mom sewed me a witch costume at my request that year. And we bought a plastic witch hat and mask. I started wearing the dress a month before Halloween, and I would wear it at other times of year, too. I felt so powerful when dressed as a witch! I believed I could change the weather. When a thunderstorm would come, I would run out to the front yard in my witch costume, flapping my cape and casting spells skyward… spells to bring more thunderstorms, of course.

_____

My dad still sometimes refers to those days. If something weird comes on TV while we’re watching, he says, “Remember when you used to dress as a wizard [sic] for Halloween? And you’d run around the yard? The neighbors said they thought that was so cute,” he chuckles.

He’s just misremembering. I was a wizard one year when I was about 11. I feel like a sellout. I somehow got away with being a witch at ages 5, 6, and 7, but it would not have been okay in anyone’s eyes for an 11-year-old boy to “go as” a female figure for Halloween. I didn’t have the stones to ask my mom to sew me another, larger witch dress. I could tell something was wrong with the crossdressing thing. I had to bottle up my witchiness and save it for when it was safer, i.e., when I was an adult.

_____

I have dressed as a witch for Halloween every year for the last 10 years. Every year I have high hopes that people will like my witch costume, and every year they do not. But that’s okay, it’s for me.

_____

I don’t really “do drag” at any other time of the year, maybe throw on a wig here and there for fun, but I don’t desire to wear women’s clothes in the least except for my Halloween witch costume. Just so you know.

Last year I did three variations on a witch costume — I start dressing up about a week before All Hallows Eve — and got a little sick of the fuss myself, so for a party on the night of Halloween, I changed out of my witch dress and devised a “warlock” outfit instead. My mom emailed me later that week to ask what I had been for Halloween… Living thousands of miles away, I had not  been “out” to them as a once-a-year crossdresser, but I got my courage together and I said, “A witch for two nights, and a warlock for the third.”

She responded, “Oh! Send me a picture of the warlock costume!” : (

People don’t usually want to take pictures of me in my witch costumes. I have to force them, or take photographic matters into my own hands.

Would I want to be a witch permanently? Of course I would. But there’s any number of things I’d rather be. Rich. Famous. Heterosexual. Tall. Smart. Good-looking. My spells didn’t work.

Like Samantha on Bewitched, I’ve had to make do with mortal powers… it’s so boring.

To keep things zesty, I vary my witch costume every year.

But I always look simply beautiful. Never monstrous. And I’m sure I won’t look hideous even when I’m 89 and still dressing as a witch every October 31. In fact, it will probably work better! If I’m not too fat, that is.

Got away mostly unscathed from my mugging, which happened on my 25th birthday as I came home from the bar alone. Many of my friends had recently got beat up when they got mugged, and I’d stopped carrying a wallet at night because so many people I knew had been stuck up, see? So that night I only had my driver’s license and a $10 bill in my pocket.

Three hazy figures materialized two short blocks away from me on an otherwise deserted Pine Street. My heart stopped when I saw them see me and then pick up their ambling gait to an excited gallop. Like horses or cows do when they catch sight of the barn at the end of a long day of grazing. Tipsy and fatalistically ready for what was clearly coming, I turned onto the alley-street that led to my front door about 75 feet away. Had time to try one house to see if the door was open. Nope. That made me sad… and mad.

Half-way down Uber Street I was, when I heard “HEY!” Froze and put my hands up just like in the movies. The three hoods floated up to me and stuck one long Wild West pistol and one snub-nosed revolver, at 45-degree angles, into my front and side. “Whadda u got?” Only looked at the guns, not their faces, and said, “I’ve only got $10 on me! You can check!” They did check my pockets and took the money but left the license. Then they ran off cinematically into the night.

Dizzy from adrenaline, unable to feel my body, but aware it was not full of bullet holes, fumbled my way in the front door of my building. In the midst of such jangleshock, I had this calm-minded thought: “Ha! They only got ten bucks!” Carry no wallet at night, cheapo’s delight.

Found out later that they jumped a whole group of people after me, and one had broke away and run off to a payphone to call the police (this was before cellphones) just about the same time I did. Which is how, using the two coordinates of the phone call locations…

They caught the son-of-a-bitches.

NOTE: You don’t have to read the parts in italics below if you don’t want to, they’re about race.

The cop who’d arrived about a minute after I called was black. He asked me to describe the muggers and I detailed what they were wearing, but I didn’t say their race; weirdly, it seemed discriminatory to me at that moment, plus I wasn’t sure whether to say African American or black or what. He helped me out, tilting his head to show his understanding of my quandary, which he seemed used to: “Black?” “Yes.”

Officer Tilthead drove me to the scene of the arrest. Made me ID the perps (or not) right in the paddy wagon. No lineup at the station. Just opened the back door and pointed in there, where three faces were glowering at me out of the dark, their eyes intent and glowing like opossums’ when your headlights light them up aside a night road, but with more shame and anger at being caught. “Is that them?” asked the Fuzz. Said I didn’t know, but that sure looked like the coats they’d been wearing. Put me in the squad car to wait, wait, wait for the long, boring arrest process to get done. A knock came at the car window, I rolled it down. A cop’s arm dangled two guns through the window in front of my scaredyface and asked, “Is these the guns?” Startled and none too happy to have guns so close to my face again, I nodded with a sad (and mad) frown.

Back at the precinct, Detective Gray (who was, in fact, completely gray in hue) questioned me for an exquisitely tedious hour. By now it was well past 3 a.m. and I had to teach in the morning. After taking my statement in which I told the truth, i.e., that three young black guys in long down coats had mugged me with two guns, but I could not be sure it was the same three in the paddy wagon, Det. Gray went back to his desk behind a closed door to type things up.

He walked up to me a while later holding a statement that said that I’d positively ID’ed the suspects. “Sign here,” he said. Yours truly sputtered, “But…” He interrupted me: “Look, you know and I know that it was these guys. Let’s don’t act stupid. Come on.” Tried to protest and he said, “OK, fine, if you say so, I’ll just go back and retype the whoooole thing!” Exhausted and still with a faint screamy sound in my head on account of the guns earlier, I said, “No, I’ll sign it, if you cross out this part about the positive ID.” He did and I signed it.

After that’s when the second mugging began: Reams of subpoenae.

Obeyed the first one, telling me to show up at Family Court. See, one of the muggers was a juvie.

The group that had been mugged after me was all there at the court, we greeted each other somberly but with no sense of shared experience (they were all from South Jersey). At the precinct the girls had been hysterical — the muggers’d been much rougher to this group than they were to me.

REMINDER: The italicized parts are “racial.” Don’t read them.

The judge was a crotchety, sassy older black man. Defense counsel was a young white woman dripping with liberalness. The ADA was a white man in his 30s with a stern demeanor. I was a white, too. ADA asked me if I had ever seen anyone in the courtroom before and I said yes and pointed at the defendant, and quickly started to add I recognized him from the paddy wagon only, but the ADA clipped me off with “Nothing further!” I tried again and he cut me off again. Defense told Judge Sass how my statement to the detective did not reflect a positive ID, but judge asked, “What time was it when this happened?” She responded, “2 a.m., your honor.” He said, “Well, then it was dark out! How in the hell was he supposed to see anything anyway?” I was excused from the stand.

The kid was sentenced to juvenile detention till his 21st birthday. The juvie’s family was there: Well-coiffed and -heeled, real nice-looking folks. Even Grandma had come for the hearing. Felt bad for the family, obviously. Wow, three years is so long, I thought. But then I noodled on how he and his fellow robbers had pointed guns at me. If I did that, I’d expect to go to jail.

That’s the post-mugging conservative side of me I mentioned up top there. Don’t want to hear your sob story about abuse and neglect: You robbed me at gunpoint. You’re a jerk and there’s no excuse for you. In other words, we all have to live by the same societal standards regardless of our demographic profile.

See, my Self fell through a trap door, I felt my very Humanity “go” when I saw the guns. Because pointing a gun at someone is robbing them not just of whatever money you mug off them but taking away their civil right to not think they’re about to be murdered. Your Money or Your Life: It means the money is worth more than you, and that hurts your feelings real’ bad, expecially when the amount at stake is $10.

During the endless season of subpoenas, I was getting more and more afraid of retribution for testifying, so I decided to ignore the invitations to the two adults’ trials. Mr. ADA called one day to make sure I was coming and I said Nope. He said they’d send an officer to arrest me and bring me in to the court and I said Go ahead. They didn’t. The group of students who got mugged after me would suffice for them to make the case, is what I figure they thought. Arresting the victims is not a popular thing to do.

I told my dad by phone about what happened to me, and he helpfully offered this summing up: “Yeah, I mean, you’ve lost a sense of security that you’ll probably never get back again.”

That turned out 2B wrong; I’m just more careful now about nighttime walks. But I don’t walk around with a heightened fear of muggers. As a matter of fact I feel like Charles Bronson in the Deathwish movies — unarmed, though, but with the same secret, insane desire to be attacked so I can retaliate with lethal force against my attackers — with my bare fists! I got so much anger, and no one to victimize with it (legally). So a mugger more on the hapless side — say, one of those that sticks his finger out under his jacket like it’s a gun — would not be lucky to choose me. If they have a real gun, though, I’ll just have to surrender my money and wait for my next turn to go berserk on someone, like a fucking banshee when you step on its tail accimadentally and it flies into your stupid unsuspecting face.

I know, I’m morally all over the place. It’s probably because I was the victim of a violent crime, though. I don’t think so good since then.

I never got my $10 back, either. I asked for it and the ADA said Nope. But you wanna know what, I learned a lot for that ten bucks. It’s a bargain as far as life’s tuition goes.

SCOTT MICHAEL SHRAKE
1970 –

It’s reassuring that even though I don’t know when I’m going, I know where I’m going. This is THE graveyard to be in, if you’re a Detroiter. J.L. Hudson, the Dodge family, all these big imposing tombs with famous family names on them.

When I went home to Detroit the last time I found the handbook at left among Grandma Shrake’s things.

Grandma and Grandpa bought their plots in the 1960s, I believe. Someone has used a red pen and a blue pen to make some changes to the first page (see below).

Then someone has crossed out one other paragraph with the same red pen:

The pamphlet is not dated. I assume the crossing out was done post-1964. I don’t know when cemeteries were desegregated. I do know the wording is brutal, especially the part about the burden of proof being on the lot owner to prove the body interred is a white body.

Well, this here white body is proud to report that my future final resting place, Woodlawn, hosts the remains of Rosa Parks, Mother of the Civil Rights Movement. As well as Aretha Franklin’s father and siblings. Someday Sister Re herself will join them. We’ll all be together. In our long old quiet home among the trees and tombs and headstones. All Detroiters, all the way through.

It took a while for our trails to converge here around the office, and before I started talking to her regularly, I would just silently be in awe when overhearing her amazing, limit-busting Southern dialect. Southern accents are always kind of musical, but hers is Big Band. Wall of Sound. More like she is singing than talking. And I love it.

I could write a whole book about the special affinity GWMs like me have with Black Women. It’s a giant sociopolitical-racial loophole. Because there is precious little love lost (in general) between straight white males and Af-Am ladies. (Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings excepted.) And yet no love is spared between your average Gay White Boy and your average Strong Black Woman.

The bond is mysterious, and not without occasional miscues and awkwardnesses. I had to laugh the other day when Ruby sidled up to me and said, “Hey, I seen Sylvester on TV last night. Did you see that too?”

Confused, I paused for a moment to think. “You mean… what do you mean? The ’70s drag disco diva Sylvester? Like, ‘You Make Me Feel Mighty Real’ Sylvester? Or… Sylvester the cat? Or…”

She interrupted me loudly, like a car horn. “Yeah, the disco one! You like her?”

Sure, who doesn’t? I thought. Then I saw what this was. Ruby is very religious, she don’t like cussing, she says grace before eating anything, even a chili dog and potato chips. She’s a generation older than me and lives in a different world than I do. This was a coded overture, a special invitation to share, the charmingly clumsy thought behind it having probably been, I’m a black woman, he’s a gay guy, we’ll meet in the middle with Sylvester.

_____

I went over to her area of the office to get something recently and she said, “Hey, Scott. Come show me that thing you was talking about the other day. That picture of you and Aretha.” Ruby and the other Af-Am ladies had very graciously listened to me rehearse my story “Why Doesn’t Aretha Pay Her Bills?” and given me lots of helpful feedback (as well as blunt criticism, when I asked for it. Such as: “You should try to make it… you know… funnier.”)

“No, Ruby, you’re thinking of the picture of me with Queen Latifah.” “Yeah, where’s that at?” she asked. So I stood over her computer and told her to google Shrake and Huffington or something, and my post about crashing the White House Correspondents’ Dinner came up. Ruby was a bit lost about what she was looking at, so I explained that this was a hobby of mine: Crashing swanky events and then blogging about it, after hours. She had some follow-up questions, but then she understood.

“Oooh, okaaay,” she said/sung. “You just do this [Points at the pictures of me with celebrities] for a hobby, then?” I nodded yes. “You don’t get paid or nothin’?” I shook my head no. Ruby then explained, with a tetch of disappointment in her voice, “Oh, see: I thought you had a part-time job where you was famous, or something.”

I wish.

_____

If you read my stuff, you will quickly notice my lifelong affinity for Divas of Color. Etta James. Bessie Smith. Tina Turner. Aretha, of course. When I started telling my stories six months ago, those were the ones that jumped out first. No mystery. They just seem like the right voices to personify my inner life.

Ruby and her girlfriends here at work don’t seem to mind at all when I imitate the way Aretha talks in my Aretha story. Again, I just don’t think my straight white male counterparts would fare so well with that.

Last week one of the girlfriends inquired how my story show had gone at the art museum the night before. Ruby then asked which story I had done. “Was it the one about Barbra Streisdale?”

We all laughed. Ruby shrugged dismissively. “StreisAND!” her friends corrected her. I don’t know, I kind of like Streisdale better. It sounds more melodious, and classier.