I'm Down: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

that I hadn’t expected—something wonderful. Rodney slapped me five! Even with a messed-up knuckle it felt good.
     
    That summer I learned Uno, and Chinese jump rope, and Chinese checkers, and Chinese jacks and double Dutch. Ilearned hand-slapping chants that had the N-word in them—I had no idea what I was saying. Like “Downtown Baby,” which was totally inappropriate for me to be chanting, but none of us knew that. I went through the various hand slaps and acted out gestures with Caprice and Gitana chanting along with them:
     
Downtown baby—down by the roller coaster
(roller coaster with your hand)
    Sweet sweet baby—I’ll never let you go
(hugging yourself)
    Just because I kiss you—don’t mean I love you so
    I like coffee—I like tea
    I like the colored boy—and he likes me
    I say, Hey, white boy!—if you ain’t shy
    Call me a n***** and I’ll beat your behind!
     
    I also learned that if I wanted friends, picking up bugs was a no-no. And I got better at capping every day. I was pretty good for a white girl. But there were other cappers who were better than me, for sure. At night I would lie in the top bunk of my room and fantasize.
    Maybe if I come back every summer and really practice capping . . . maybe one day, I could be the best.
Then it hit me,
Maybe I could even find a way to cap for a living?
That seemed too good to be true, so I second-guessed my own fantasy.
Nah . . . I’ll just stick with being an anesthesiologist,
I thought as I lay in bed sniffing my Mr. Sketch markers.
Or a
Solid Gold
Dancer. Yeah, like the pretty white one with the crimped hair
. I threw my head against my pillow as I contemplated my preferred order of things I wanted to be when I grew up:
     
Solid Gold
Dancer
    Capper
    Anesthesiologist
    Governor (presidents have a tendency to get shot)
    Assassin (someone needs to do all that shooting)
     
    About halfway through the summer we started to have visits with our mother. I saw this down time as an opportunity to take my capping to the next level. Mom had moved into the top floor of the house of a solar architect and his family, and she was a Buddhist now—it was “part of her process.”
    So when we got to her house and checked out our room, I told her, “You ain’t no Buddhist, you’re a booty-ist.”
    “What did you say?” she asked.
    To which I replied, “You’re so dumb, you thought Buddhism was about booty.” It wasn’t one of my finer moments, but Anora laughed.
    “What’s going on?” she asked Anora.
    My sister smiled and rolled around on her bed and said, “Mishna capped on you.”
    That was when Mom bent over, looked me right in the eye, and said in a very sincere voice, “I really don’t like being capped on. It hurts my feelings.” Hippies have a way of sucking the fun out of everything.
    I couldn’t really cap on my father, either. He was happy that I was getting along at GSCC, but my few attempts at capping on my father (the six-foot-four, two-hundred-pound exlinebacker) were experiments in fear.
    One day after day camp, I had swaggered up to him on the sofa where he was outfitting the broken TV knob with an adjustable wrench, and said, “You’re so ugly, the itsy bitsy spider saw you at the other end of the water spout and decided to take his chances with the rain.” That was when he pinched me in a place between my neck and shoulder, like a Vulcan, until I went limp.
    But I assumed that the reason he Vulcan-neck-pinched mewas because the cap wasn’t very good. So next day, I decided to make fun of his head shape, with a surefire winner I had stolen from Rodney. Dad, however, didn’t laugh or high-five me. In fact, he didn’t react at all. He just quietly grabbed some nuts from the nut bowl and began cracking them with his bare hands. He did this in silence for a while, looking me right in the eye before saying, “I’m not about to take it from my daughter in my own home. . . . I take it from the Man every day.”
    “Okay,” I