When I was in the 5th grade I knew a kid

named Javier. He was black, which was confusing.

He was an African American kid who spoke

Spanish, loved country music, wore cowboy

boots, play jump rope and had a look on his

face that said: I wish a motherfucker would say

something. None of us said anything. For show

and tell, he brings in his pet chameleon. When he

walks in, the eyes of every kid glaze over like the

windows to our souls shook hands with the winter

for the first time. A girl with box springs in her throat

felt the silence and it was just too heavy for her fingertips

to hold on to she drops the quiet like a suitcase full of

habits that no one wants to keep and says, "So what's his name?"

He replies, "I call him Rudy." When the class realized that me

and the lizard had the same name, they laughed uncontrollably.

Twenty years later, the irony hits me over the head like an empty

Heineken bottle inside of the car fight that I call my everyday life.

I get it. Chameleons have the ability to paintbrush themselves

into whatever will match their surroundings. They do it so often,

they probably wouldn't be able to recognize a photograph of their

own skin. They think it is far better to be invisible than it is to

grind their teeth into "I dare you" and to ride their bones like a

magic carpet, no steering wheel, no tires, no brakes, no battery

just bravery and a chest full of "I am not dying today."

Courage has never been a chameleon's best attribute.

and some days, it's not mine either. I was mentored by black men

with brown skin who turned yellow at the sight of bellies

swollen with half their DNA, I was taught that a woman's vagina

is just an underground railroad to masculinity, that real men

have tunnel vision and treat girls like subway cars,

like nothing more than a space to parallel park our genitals,

a hole to bury seeds and leave orchards in our rear-view mirrors.

They say you have to peel a woman like a tangerine

and your job as a man is to chameleon yourself into her trees,

bite a piece of her fruit and leave the rest hanging

crooked and confused. This is an apology to every woman

I changed colors just to get inside of.

I still haven't stumbled across a definition of a man,

but I know that we are hotels that stand a million war stories tall.

I know that we carry guitar cases full of phobias

hoping we can turn fear into our strongest instrument,

I know that our hands break things just as frequent

as we can fix them. And we often forget that sexism

is a family heirloom that we've been passing down for generations.

As men, it is important that we start asking ourselves,

What will the boys learn from us?