It’s Not Like I Even Wanna Talk about How I’m the Only Black Person Watching Clerks III

Kevin Smith rolls into town and sells out the local arts theater. The place is packed with remarkably full beards and colorful hair, Iowan stoners wearing Mooby’s and Quick Stop uniforms and graphic tees they got at Spencer’s. I’m certainly no exception: I’m a fat dork obsessed with pop culture and paralyzed by the horrifying prospect of living among all the gross indignities of Western society, the often humiliating process of building a life and then having to keep building it, which is why I bought these tickets two months ago and have been wrapped in a cocoon of hype ever since.

I don’t wanna talk about how I’m the only Black person watching Clerks III the night Kevin Smith comes to Iowa City. The joke is that there are no Black people here, and the ones who are here are really good at hiding, or else they’re really good at being hidden. It’s the kind of joke you learn to make as soon as you spend more than twenty minutes living in Iowa, a joke that lives alongside all the funny ways to complain about the drunk undergrads and the increasingly elaborate metaphors for the cornfields that surround us like, I don’t know, something vast and unfathomable that intends to do us harm.

These jokes are both true and built to distract from the truth. The truth, in this case, is that I’m tired and lonely and no exception to any of this, the earnest alt sensibilities of everyone here who looks like they have a lot of opinions about Boba Fett and Insane Clown Posse. There’s an entire history of Black people meditating on the fact of their being surrounded by people who do not look like them, and I’m also the only Black person at the post office, the only Black person at Uncle Sun’s getting takeout, the only Black person at the Hy-Vee off Dodge as I try to figure out which flavor of ice cream I want to drown that particular evening in. When everything is the Loneliness, I think about it so much that it becomes completely forgotten, and so maybe I just wanna talk about something else.

When Smith jogs onstage, he’s wearing a red satin blazer and jean shorts and orange color-blocked Sperrys and a snapback that’s too big for his sunken, used-to-be-fat face. He talks for twenty minutes about how the Q&A after the screening is going to be longer than the movie because he never shuts the fuck up, and everyone cheers because no one wants him to.