If Melvin is different from men like Otis, it is by virtue of his fundamentally curious nature. A skeptic whose posture towards life is characterized by a fundamental uncertainty, and an outsider who cannot quite fit himself into the cohort of horny alpha males who dominate his world, Melvin is attuned to a certain dissonance in the given world, the possibility that the world can be otherwise than it is. He is not a critic of this world but a questioner, a rebel without commitment to anything in particular, save what seems to be a pathological inability to accept things as they’ve been given to him—or to tell a story that doesn’t zig and zag in an ecstatic directionless-ness. Listening to Melvin think is like listening to Charlie Parker improvise a solo by following an idea or concept wherever it will take him, without any concern for whether or not it lines up with what came before, or what people will think of it.

And, just like “Bird’s playing started everyone in the joint to jumping giddy and yapping in a strange tongue that emphasized the buzzing sound of the letter Z,” Melvin’s improvisatory, itinerant thought process is an intimation of a new and different language of gender and masculinity. He sees and hears what his brethren cannot—or are unwilling to—see and hear. Back in the prison shower, for example, he perceives that the prison doesn’t really mandate one strict definition of masculinity. Far from it: it’s a space where men routinely break their own rules about what it means to “be a man.” Melvin realizes that even as his fellow prisoners enforce certain gender norms, they themselves are “indulging in a favorite shower-room pastime: comparing the size of each other’s Swanson Johnson.” There’s some kind of improvisation happening here, a possible riff on staid, boring heteronormativity, maybe a new language. The inmates engage in a comparison of virility, a test of manhood that will be “determined by the one who can get his rizz-od as hizz-ard as a rizz-ock at a mizz-oments nizz-otice.”

The spirit of Bird lingers over the proceedings, shepherding us towards something other than a dangerous and tragic notion of the masculine. This is the gift that Wesley Brown has given us: a new way to speak, a language that we have to excavate and rescue from the murky depths of gender expectation. This novel is an unruly and difficult story of how gender works in the world, and how we might find our ways to new modes of being. This is a novel that denounces reification and casts off stasis in favor of itinerant movement, in the hopes that we might come to find the meaning of our lives by playing our own solos, by riffing on the given world in search of other possibilities.

—ISMAIL MUHAMMAD

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

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