A Harp in the Head
This is an excerpt of “A Harp in the Head.” Read the full story below.
I’ve only just turned thirty, but I’ve already told this story a thousand times. It all starts and ends with water. At least, that’s what Pops liked to say. We grow in it, our skin sponging up the life-giving nectar of our mothers, then, when we die, it oozes out of us like out of a punctured plastic bag. Punctured plastic bag? No, that’s a bit gruesome. It flows from us like an ocean rushing to meet the shore, its ancient waters soaked by cosmic sand. Too poetic. I don’t know if I’ll ever get this story right, but, here I am, sitting in the shade of my camouflage bimini top, tap-tapping away on my computer as the Atlantic Ocean rocks me and this 54-inch Carver side to side.
Even though I’m facing away from Coney Island, I can still feel the tourists wearing away at Riegelmann Boardwalk as they stuff their mouths with salty hotdogs and jumbo fried shrimp from Paul’s Daughter, mothers dragging children in a hurry toward the aquarium, Deno’s Wonder Wheel embodying democracy as it spins people of all heights. I couldn’t escape it all even if I wanted to. It’s also where this story takes place. Thirteen years ago.
Why am I just writing it down now? Well, to preserve its integrity. You see, a close friend of mine told it to a semi-close friend of theirs who told it to a big-shot Hollywood exec who they sat next to in a plastic surgeon’s waiting room. This Hollywood exec became so excited that he played a game of reverse telephone in order to track me down, even flying all the way from LA to meet with me in Crown Heights. This man, with skin the same hue of mahogany as mine, said that the world needs more stories like this one. That what I have is valuable. But that I need to hand it over to those capable of doing it justice. When he said, “You need to put it in the right hands,” I heard, “the white hands.” And even if that’s not what he said, I told him the only way he was getting this story is if I wrote it myself. He scratched his surgically narrowed nose and said okay. I suppose I’m also doing it because I’m a bit too comfortable in life right now and I need to…rock the boat.
I promise I’m only half as corny as that pun.
***
“You’re late,” Pops said, angling his wristwatch toward his face as he leaned against the black door of his pickup.
“You and I both know that’s broken,” I said. “Plus, you know getting from the West Village to Sheepshead Bay is like going from New York to Ohio.”
I knew he was mad, but I still went in for a hug, and he wrapped his arms around my back, holding for a beat longer than usual. I’d only seen him a few days before, for dinner at the house, but the way he held me felt like the way someone hugs you when they haven’t seen you in a long, long time.
Then he got in the truck and nodded at me.
Without a word, I went to the trailer that held the Cinqué Express, our Lund A14 fishing boat, named in honor of Joseph Cinqué, who led the revolt on La Amistad. The boat was one or two steps up from a dinghy, and if we got caught in the wake of even a tugboat, we’d be holding on for dear life, but it did the job.
We lived in one of those rare Crown Heights brownstones with a driveway, but I still remember Pops parking the Cinqué Express, its hull painted fire hydrant red and the words “Cinqué Express” emblazoned in Big Bird yellow, right on Nostrand Avenue for everyone to gawk at. Even as I write this, my jaw clenches from the way the kids at school used to call me “Boat Bitch,” right before running down an ever-changing list of names for Pops: Skippa the Nigga, Hood Gilligan, Black Sparrow, and, an all-time favorite, Moldy Dick. That is, until Pops and I took Keenan Richards on the Cinqué Express one Saturday, and come Monday, everyone was asking for a ride.
“Make sure that drain plug is in,” Pops said from the front of the truck.
“I know, Pops.”
“Yeah, you didn’t know that one time.”
“That was ten years ago, Pops. I was seven.”
“You still didn’t know.”
At this point, it was muscle memory. I inserted the drain plug into the stern, undid the safety straps tied to the trailer, and slapped the hull twice. It was like ballet, or the Knicks running a play that actually worked. I stepped away, and Pops, without checking to see that I was out of his way, reversed the trailer toward the water, until exactly two-thirds of it was in.
I unhooked the safety chain from the bow, then from the wench, and stepped onto the trailer, my beat-up Reeboks planted firmly as I guided the boat away from me, into the water, until it began to float. I gripped the frayed rope attached to the bow, and Pops drove off to park the truck, eventually reappearing on the same path; two telescopic pole nets and a debris grabber in one hand, and an old school blue Playmate cooler in the other…
Listen to Mateo Askaripour’s oral history interview, conducted by UNY founding editor Nicki Pombier on February 21, 2022. Read an edited excerpt below.
ON BEGINNINGS
I was born in Brookhaven Memorial Hospital in Suffolk County, New York. I was born on August 26, 1991. Born into a family of five. And then I made it six. Then my younger brother, two years later, made it seven. My childhood—I was extremely inquisitive, very curious. My mother’s from Jamaica, and my father is from Iran. And growing up, my maternal grandmother lived with us. She was an English teacher in Jamaica, and she taught my brothers and me how to read. She instilled in us a love of the written word and an understanding that writing and reading are sacred arts. And yeah, so for me, I was always very curious. There was a lot going on in the house, a lot of testosterone, a lot of strong personalities, people whizzing by left and right up and down in every direction. A variety of interests. But I was always, again, very curious about anything and everything. Anything I saw, everything I was told, I would ask why or why is something the way it is? Because even at an early age, if someone told me something, or someone told me that this is just how it is, I had a strong sense of that internal pull of whether it resonated with me or not, you know, and there were times when I didn’t listen to it. Because I was young and you can only ask so many questions until someone says to just follow protocol or have faith or what have you. But then there were also many other opportunities when I had a lot of people teach me a lot of different things, whether through the ways that they carried themselves, right— actions speak louder than words at times—or through things that they said.
For me, oral history is very important as well. Sometimes the power would go out. And we would all get these, I don’t even know oil or kerosene type lamps. I don’t really know. But they’re the ones with the long glass and the wick, and then you’re twisting the metal, and we would set them up around the living room, and then my mom, and my grandmother would tell us stories of Jamaica. That’s also something that we did when we would visit Jamaica. My grandfather, when he was alive, would tell us stories on his veranda. My mother and my people on the Jamaican side come from a place called Cave Valley, in Saint Ann, the parish of Saint Ann. A pastime is just people getting together and telling stories, whether stories of our family or what are known as Duppy Stories. You know, a lot of different cultures have what they would call a duppy or a jinn or some type of spirit, right? So again, growing up, I was surrounded with storytelling, vivid animated storytelling, with questions, with movement, with the longing to discover more about the world and myself.
ON THE YEAR OF SIXTY BOOKS
It was only after I left that place of work [in a startup] and I really began to pursue my career as a writer, or I’ll say more accurately, to take writing seriously, that I unlocked a whole new dimension of reading that I hadn’t experienced, possibly ever. That was one of the most enriching moments of my life––leaving this world of startups and sales for a while and traveling a bit. And writing a novel, and it not going anywhere. Learning more about the industry, learning more about writing, writing another novel, it not going anywhere—and by going anywhere, I mean, gaining an agent or a book deal. You know, I’m self taught. I never got my MFA in writing or anything. And then being back in my parents’ house, and saying, there’s going to be no more traveling, no more moving about. I’m going to consult with organizations, teaching them how to build and scale sales teams, so that I don’t feed into the whole starving artist trope, but at the same time, I’m going to double and triple down on my dream. And one way I did that was by reading more than I ever had before. I know some people read tons of books, over a hundred books a year, but in 2018, I read sixty. And that for me was so much. I was reading and enjoying and learning and also digesting with a critical eye––asking myself, what about a book is resonating with me? What about a book isn’t resonating with me? And it wasn’t just books—it was also documentaries, TV shows, films.
At this point, I was back in my parents’ house. I distanced myself from a lot of the people that I had known in the lifestyle that I was living, when I was working at that startup in sales. I would go into the city, though, and go to readings. And again, just try to soak up the energy of what it meant for at least those people to pursue their craft, to have published books, see them interacting with the audiences, and oftentimes interacting with me because I would wait. I’d be the last person in line, and then I’d try to ask them a few questions or try to make a connection. So yeah, that period of my life was so exciting, so enriching. Again, talking back to who I was as a child, I was extremely curious about what it meant to write, about the type of writer I was and was going to be, about what it meant to write something true that resonated with people beyond you. And then also, I wanted to unlock the code of how to get into the industry. I wanted to face that challenge head on. And fortunately, you know, it worked out. But yeah, that part of my life was very difficult. Because I had to work on myself as a person first, not just as a writer. But it was also again, so invigorating. I was back in my parents’ house, I was in my childhood bedroom, and I was surrounded by my family, but I’d lock the door during the day when I was writing, working on my debut novel. It’s a feeling that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to capture again, but I’m so grateful for it.
ON FORMATIVE BODIES OF WATER
First and foremost, I come from the land of wood and water. That’s what “Jamaica” means. Definitely wasn’t pronounced “Jamaica” in the original. I’m not sure if it was from the Arawaks or another group of Indigenous folks. But the word “Jamaica” means land of wood and water. I’m here because of water. My ancestors were taken and put on water and brought to the Caribbean. So water is definitely a part of my journey and it always will be. But growing up where I did on Long Island, right? It’s an island, surrounded by bodies of water. I grew up with salt in the air all around me. I wasn’t one of these people, to be completely honest, that loved the beach. I wasn’t one of these people. But we would go every once in a while. My family definitely didn’t have a boat or anything like that. I don’t even know if I really ever went on boats, to be completely honest. Growing up, I don’t have strong memories of that. I think we went on like a little boat ride once and someone in my family threw up or got sick. But aside from that, yeah, nothing, nothing really related to that. But for me, in that year of sixty books, in 2018, I would go to this place that we called the bay in the town where I went to high school. And I would go to the bay and the bay is at this yacht club, which I’m certainly not a member of. I would just park the car and roll down the window, fill my lungs with the salt-filled air, and just breathe and hear the seagulls and probably some other birds squawking, eating random, you know, pieces of bagels, and just stare at the ocean—it was a bay, I believe. Now that I’m bringing it up. It’s called Bellport Bay and across the way you can see Fire Island and beyond that is the greater Atlantic Ocean. So yeah, for me, that was and is an important body of water. I don’t return to it that often. But the times I do it brings me back again to that space of where I was in 2018, and it allows me to tap into a lot of grounding, and now in hindsight, really wonderful feelings. It’s like a marker in my personal history. A portal of sorts, transported back, and then I get to see where I am now. And I get to say, “Okay, what did I do? How do I feel? How did I grow? How did I not grow? Or how did I grow in a different direction?”
Another one was the East River. I went to New York University, and the East River was important for me, especially in my sophomore year. I’d say, it was the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010, I lived in a dorm called Gramercy located in Gramercy, and I had a Sector Nine longboard, and I would take it all the way east. I’d go down 23rd and cut down some other streets, and then I’d pass a gas station. I would end up at this place that I think, looking it up now, is called Stuyvesant Cove Park. I remember when I first came upon it, I said, “What is this place?” It looked so cool. Only later on did I learn that it was connected to this running path or walkway that runs along the East River. And that for me, my sophomore year, was one of my special places. I loved that place. I’d go there at night, again, just to breathe. And this is before I had that transformative year of sixty books where I was in nature all the time. But even back then, I knew that it was important to have places where you could breathe, and be quiet and be silent. So that for me was one of those places.
ON WRITING “A HARP IN THE HEAD”
I was perusing Underwater New York’s website and looking at the list of options, and I saw a lot of objects, and I was seeing which sparked anything in me. It was when I came upon the pocket watch from 1897 that I said, “Huh. I could maybe do something with this.” Then I allowed myself to just open up to whatever was present in my mind. I saw a father and son on a boat, but in the East River, you know, going back to my connection to the East River. I was asking myself, “Who are these people, this father and son? What are they doing out there? Are they searching for something? Is there a lot of garbage out there?” I know that these waters around New York City are, respectfully I’ll say, very dirty and polluted. I say respectfully, because these are ancient waters, right, and they hold a lot of significance for a lot of people, as I said, for myself and I’m sure a lot of Indigenous folk. But today, the fact is, they’re super dirty. They’re super polluted. You know? Sometimes people say they’re going to go for a swim in them, and I say, “Have fun with your skin peeling off.” So I was wondering, what are the father and son doing out there? I pictured the father. I pictured one of them standing and one of them, you know, sitting at the back, steering. And then I allowed the idea to continue to grow in my mind.
Again, I love challenges. I said, “I’ve never written anything like this related to the water or objects in New York. I want to explore that. I also want to continue to explore the form of short story.” And this piece unlocked a lot within me, helped me grow as a writer. I’m becoming more comfortable with the short story and understanding that for me, my short stories are actually little novels. Very long, beautiful stories, a little novel. There’s a name for that, I learned, a novelette. My short stories are really novelettes. And I’m okay with that. But yeah, so I was thinking okay, more about the pocket watch. The pocket watch was found by the Cultural Research Diver himself, Gene Ritter. I said, “Okay, where was it found?”and it was found in Coney Island Creek. So I wanted to set it there. Of course, I’m moving things around. I’m playing with history, because this is fiction, and I felt as though I could, you know, respectfully, and that’s also why I did choose to discuss Gene Ritter. He is the one who found the pocket watch, and he was someone who was so dedicated to cultural research through diving, that while I didn’t know anything about him, I felt as though his pursuit and love of his own art was so pure, that I wanted to pay homage to him in a way, despite reattributing who found what he actually found in reality, you know? So yeah, I challenged myself to set it in Coney Island Creek, even though I had never heard of Coney Island Creek, to be honest. So I had to do research. And I’m someone who does research on the fly. I don’t do months and months of research in order to write something because I’m like, I’m going to do it as necessary, and then keep moving in terms of what I write. Of course, it’s different if you’re writing nonfiction, you know, fact checking all of that. But I also was afforded the opportunity to work with Helen [Georgas] from Brooklyn College. I said, “Okay, you know, let me actually make use of this?” Again, I’ve never done this before. I’m typically someone who just does it all on my own. So I said, “Let me see how this goes.” I had a bunch of questions and sent them over to Helen. And one of her other colleagues, Marie [Lorenz] helped a lot as well. And now I had this small batch of information to go through—PDFs and links and understanding from their experience whether the average person could just go out on the waters and what that would mean. Having that as the base or the background, I then allowed myself to run free.
Before I began writing the piece, I had an idea of a couple of the parts, but one of the parts that was missing was how he gets the watch back into the hands of the original owner. I purposely don’t jot down too many ideas, or make sure that anything is too too defined, because I love playing it out on the page. A con to that is sometimes that you write too much. But again, revision. A pro to that is that there’s a level of spontaneity and wonder. I’ve had a few people who have already read the piece, people close to me, use the word “magical,” which for me feels special. I wanted it to have that feeling. And I wanted that feeling to be spread throughout the protagonist’s journey in New York City. New York City, despite the fact that there are millions of people here, could seem as though it lacks wonder, to those who even live here. But I wanted to impart that feeling of magic. I wanted to impart that feeling of discovery to the life of a character who has lived in New York his whole life, and also to readers who live here. I wanted people to say, “Wow, this is something special, and this is something that could maybe even happen if I open up my mind to it.”
ON READING AS TRANSPORT
My grandfather, he lived on the top of a hill. I won’t go into it too much, because to truly capture the essence of what I’m about to impart will take longer than a few minutes, but my grandfather would sit on his hill, when he wasn’t doing some type of work, and people would come up to the hill and say, “Mas Will.” “Mas” is a term of respect, likely coming from the colonial times of a “master,” right? But they would say, “Mas Will, what are you reading or what’s going on,” you know, in the world? My grandfather would then tell them all about Spain, or what was happening in Japan, or what was going on in some South American country. And they would say, “Wow, when was the last time you were there?” And he would look up at them and say, “I’ve never been.” I’ve never been. But for him on this hill in Jamaica in the countryside, reading allowed him to go to these far worlds, whether it was reading novels, or whether it was just reading the newspaper, which he read every morning in addition to his Bible. So he was traversing time and space. For me, hearing that, and knowing that growing up, and realizing the importance of that, and how special that is, as I get older, only continues to grow my love of reading, to know how transporting it can be for people, how it can often serve as an escape, or as we already discussed, just a portal into new worlds and new reflections of ourselves.
Object
1897 Pocket Watch, Silicone Breasts, Quester I Submarine, Ghost Ships
Body of Water
Coney Island, Coney Island Creek
About the Artist
New York Times bestselling author Mateo Askaripour aims to empower people of color to seize opportunities for advancement, no matter the obstacle. His first novel, Black Buck, takes on racism in corporate America with humor and wit. Askaripour was chosen as one of Entertainment Weekly’s “10 rising stars to make waves,” and Black Buck was a Read With Jenna Today Show book club pick. He lives in Brooklyn. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter at @AskMateo.