AVATARS IN THE COMPANY OF MEN

Reflection inspired by Tupac Shakur and my dead homies

Over the past two years I’ve been working on a book about the deaths of several friends and mentors — all of them black men who had an impact on my life. It’s been a tough, painful and occassionally joyous process. Not sure when I’ll be finished — if ever — but I’m chipping away at it. Working these last few years on several visual projects that touch on these issues of mortality, including the ‘Dear Mama’ series currently airing on FX an Hulu, has definitely impacted what I’ve written. I just recently stumbled across a short obit I penned about Pac for the Village Voice in 1996 and was fascinated to find that I focused on the questions of agency, of how I saw the slain artist as a man in control of his destiny and not the victim of outside forces.

I didn’t know what an avatar was back then, but now it strikes me that most of what we knew about Tupac then was based on his avatar and not on the core of his being. In fact I now see a lot of my interactions with my male peers was based on the character they created, their external projections, than who they really were. Since most men are notoriously reluctant to expose their inner life to others, you always have to be aware that who you’re talking to has put tremendous effort into an convincing one or two dimensional version of themselves constructed for public consumption.

I know none of my late friends were as flat or simple as they sometimes seemed to me. In the company of men information about private passions, secret fears, and concealed vulnerabilities are rarely revealed and, when they are, its often done with great reluctance and under duress.

In the history of American men, the current generation of social media oversharers are very much anomaly. I grew up meeting the stoic men of my grandfather’s generation, who used alcohol to self-medicate and unleash their demons. The men of the 1960s and 1970s I encoutered growing up were superficially more open and utilized a wider array of drugs to conceal and reveal their hearts. My friends, men who are in their ‘50s and ‘60s (if they survived their youth) are talkers, but were most fluid in the language of commerce, sporting obsessions, sexual intrique and creative expression. But the urge to explore their inner lives with each other? That was largely an undiscovered country. Tupac was an incredibly prolific writer — poems, hip-hop rhymes, screenplays etc. In that way he shared more of his inner life than most men in their twenties were even capable of. Yet the public persona he nurtured in the last years of his too short life was an avatar, a projection of who he felt he needed to be, way more than a window into his complex inner life.

I’ve been trying to understand the avatars of my youth. How did I construct them? Why were they necessary? Did they serve me well or were they barriers to true communication? Its an ongoing process of analysis and emotion. Maybe even acknowledging my exterior construction is a way to build another?

I was thirty-nine when I wrote the piece below, on the edge of middle age, young enough to still enjoy the recklessness of hip-hop, but old enough to see its limitations as a lifestyle.