Bio Hazard Pay

PART ONE: I AM BORN

It was a dark and stormy night.

The young couple raced their car through the rain, through the wind that threatened to push the vehicle across the slick surface of the rain-soaked asphalt. The husband drove, frantically torn between the need to guide the vehicle carefully through such weather and the need to get his wife to the hospital.

He stopped only three times, twice for red lights, during which he leaned close to the windshield, steamed with their anxious breath, while tapping the steering wheel nervously with his flattened fingers and muttering "C'mon. C'mon." The third stop was unplanned: the limb of an oak tree crashed into the lane in front of him, and the husband had barely enough time to stop the car before he struck the limb, its lichenous bark shining perversely in the car's headights.

Finally they arrived at the hospital, a tall building of yellowish-brown brick and too many windows. Despite the late hour, the emergency entrance was brightly lighted. The wet sedan pulled beneath the awning, and two orderlies greeted it with a wheelchair and curt instructions on where to park. The wife was wheeled through the automatic doors as the reluctant husband drove to find a proper parking space.

He followed her through those doors after mere minutes, shaking the drops of cold rain from his head. His wife, he was told, had been taken straight to maternity, on the fourth floor. If he didn't hurry, the bespectacled dispatch nurse told him with a grin, he'd miss the birth.

The elevator to four seemed laboriously slow, but the husband finally emerged onto the floor, only to be directed by yet another receptionist to a waiting room. His wife was in the delivery room already, she told him. This shouldn't take long. But "long" is one of those words the meaning of which alters with perception, and it was a horribly long thirty minutes later when the husband looked up to see this same nurse smiling down at him.

"Congratulations, Mr. Ellis," she said, "you have a son. Would you like to see him?"

And that baby boy grew up to become somebody else.

I was born on a sunny afternoon, backstage at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, to a disco singer mother and a Tibetan immigrant father. Behind their backs, I refer to them as "Genghis and Chaka Khan."