No Land's Man by Aasif Mandvi

pitch-perfect lament. Before I knew it the fedora went stage left and I glided stage right. I had to land the next move like an Olympic gymnast, a 360-degree spin that ended with me on my tiptoes. It happened so fast I barely had time to think, but I nailed it. The room erupted with hoots and hollers. Then I put one foot back, thrust my neck forward, and as the music hit the crescendo,muscle memory kicked in and all I had to do was bring the swagger. I walked forward and glided backwards. It couldn’t have been easier.
    I was an Indian, English kid who had been transplanted to America, dancing on a Tampa high school stage, channeling a black man who looked like an Indian girl. My grandmother was sitting in the audience and there was no turning back. It is true that you can’t be Michael Jackson all the time, but on that day, for four minutes and thirty seconds, the entire student body—black kids, white kids, the jocks, the prom queens, Roy, Rick, the drama kids, and even the two Asian kids and Dilip—stood up and screamed, “Michael!”

BORN AGAIN
    I T WAS HER HAIR THAT I FIRST NOTICED . A giant mound of brown curly hair surrounding a small, thin, alabaster-skinned face, punctuated by penetrating hazel eyes. Flirtatious one moment and aloof the next, they had a paralyzing effect on me the first time I saw them as I walked into the administration office on the second floor of the School of Theater building where I was getting my undergraduate degree, and where she was the brand-new Tuesday and Friday receptionist. Based on her clothes and her poise and the way she smelled, I imagined, in my limited experience with women, that she was older than me and the bubblegum-scented girls who ran around the sun-drenched University of South Florida campus.
    I didn’t know what she was studying, but it was clear that she was not one of us. She was not walking around with a copy of Aristotle’s
Poetics
nonchalantly protruding from her back pocket, she didn’t smell of cigarettes and coffee, she didn’t wear sweatpants, and proudly not wash her hair because it was what the “character” required. She didn’t over-enunciate or feel the need to pick up a guitar and start playing “Stairway to Heaven” during free periods, and she had probably never felt the need to narrate the progress ofher bowel movements with improvised Shakespearean verse to the person in the next stall over:
Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a . . . poo
. In other words she was not a student of The Theater. If she had any of her own obsessions, they were quietly hidden behind a rather unassuming demeanor. She possessed the sophistication of a grown woman, with a kind of self-assuredness that I had rarely encountered before.
    I decided I had to know her better. I also knew that she was far out of my league. I say “out of my league” implying that there were women who were actually in my league. The truth is I was eighteen years old and what most people would call a late bloomer. My father often drove this point home by reminding me of the fact that even in birth I had arrived two weeks past my due date, as if seeking an apology from me because his joy at having a firstborn son had been forever tarnished by my tardiness. To make matters worse, my initial lateness seemed to throw off everything in my life by several years. I was late potty-training, crawling, walking, and learning to ride a bicycle; and I was especially late when it came to girls. Of course, when I say girls, I mean the art of talking with girls and when I say talking with girls I mean flirting with girls, and when I say flirting with girls I mean knowing the difference between actually flirting versus buying coffee beans every week just so you can talk to the girl who works at the coffee counter in the mall, even though you don’t drink coffee that much or know how to operate a coffee grinder. But you now have so many bags of coffee beans in