I originally wrote this as a bit of an obit. I miss X.
I love bad men. The first bad man I loved was a neighbor in our apartment complex when I was a little kid. He and his girlfriend would let me come into their mostly empty apartment and they’d play me music from the LA hardcore scene, they let me eat candy and listen to them say bad words. He loved to show me things, he’d show me how his guitar amp worked, or he’d let me watch him work on his car. He was handsome to my eye, I thought he was smart and cool and said fuck a lot.
He also abused his girlfriend. I remember he gave her a black eye once and I asked her if I should tell my dad so he could punish the guy, she said no. I remember she held me and cried into my hair because I’d promised her, I’d find someone to do something. And I still loved him. She left thankfully and I still spent some time with him when I could. He was not good.
When I was older, I was drawn to being friends with bad men. Gangsters, not just random teens sagging, I’m talking about real actual gangsters. Other criminals, I was friends with a pimp for years until he retired, assholes, sexists, abusers. Many bad men. When I was quite young, I believed that since I didn’t have abusive relations with them that I was maybe helping them. I believed that in modeling a non-abusive relationship with them, it would somehow change them.
Mostly it did not.
All these years later, I don’t hang out with gangsters or criminals in general. That said, when I meet them, I often end up liking them more than I should. I know this. In the last ten or so years, I’ve watched other people start to try and come to grips with how much they too love bad men. Our heroes are getting more publicly exposed for their misdeeds and it hurts.
For me, I have made a sort of peace because, I have experience. The bad men I have loved, the thieving ass junkie who when I think of I still cry because he could have had a great life, he was a shitbag and I loved him. I think about the street dealer who used to like to walk me to my bus stop so we could talk about books, I know he’s in fed prison and I miss him.
I have had a good number of people fuss at me for not saying more about whatever information comes out about whatever terrible man. Part of why I act the way I do is that I refuse to play the game where we pretend like these things are black and white, yes or no for everyone. They are not. It is unfair and not how many humans work in terms of how we might feel about every bad man that comes along.
I’ve been meaning to write this and then yesterday DMX died. I was heartbroken when I heard. DMX’s music saved my life more than once. It is what I listen to when I’m walking to work in pain and wanting to hide. When I was desperately trying to fix myself and my eating disorder, he was what I listened to when I lifted weights. DMX symbolizes for me, the complexity of my love of bad men.
X did a lot of bad things. Some of his lyrics said things that if someone said them to my face we’d be fighting. I’m seeing a lot of folks who never gave two shits about his music or bad behavior prior to his death and who now are strolling their presumed moral high ground because he was bad in a way that most of us can agree about.
Here is the solution. Let people have their complicated feelings about bad men. Even evil men. Letting folks work through their grief and through what follows is important. For me, I need to be able to get to the grief and also think about why I loved a man like that, what it means, what comes after. You can allow people to go through their double consciousness without shaming them.
DMX was a man I could envision having met at one point in my life and just loved. Roxanne Shante told a heartbreaking story about some advice you could say she got from X and watching her struggle with her tears and I imagine complex feelings about that man, I feel it in my chest.
Many of us love these men for lots of reasons. For me, part of it is that those men, were the men who protected me from each other and from myself. A few of them abused me. I used to struggle with this so much. Many of those bad men I loved died, some in very violent ways and I got the message of how I was supposed to behave and feel but, it was performative and fake.
Rather than forcing the performance, let’s let people have their complex feelings and when they are not raw, let’s talk about how we talk about bad men in general. I want us to be able to talk about our complex feelings, to talk about the larger generalities regarding bad men and I want us to be able to give space when folks say, OH X died fuck that guy. But keep the same energy for the bad men you love.
I loved X (here he is a symbol of the bad men I have loved) but also fuck X for a lot of the choices he made and stuff he said. Let me have my complicated feelings. You can have yours and the we can give each other the space and grace to mourn and figure stuff out.
My favorite X song