“What kinda things did you write about when you wrote?”
“You really want to know? Is that shrug a yes or a no?”
“Yes, girl—tell me.” I laughed. “Why would I ask if I ain’t wanna know?”
You laughed, too. “I think I just wanted to hear you say it. I wrote about private school admissions corruption, grade inflation, curriculum communalism—”
“Curriculum communa-what?”
“School curriculum, the stuff the teachers teach. A lot of it is based upon the Great Man theory. Like, this ‘Great Man,’ almost invariably a dead white man or a living very rich white man, did A, B, or C, X, Y, or Z. And that’s it, that’s history, that’s literature, that’s political science, that’s science. When we communalize the curriculum, we’ll make it more about everybody and everything, how what an entire community endured or overcame or protested about led to a historical outcome or landmark legislation or scientific discoveries, and it will be a lot less about what one guy wrote or did or whatever.”
“And a bag of chips. Is y’all’s school communified?”
“Communalized,” you corrected me. “It has a long way to go.” You looked back at the courtyard, which was definitely communified, communifried, communalized, and crowded than a mug with folks hanging out, playing ball, talking mess, watching they backs, coming home from they jobs, headed to they jobs, collecting cans, living homeless, shooting up, nodding off, and everything else under the sun.
“It ain’t no Rockwood,” I joked.
“I never said Rockwood was or wasn’t anything,” you said. “Piedmontagne has its own issues, especially when it comes to racial stuff. It’s just got resources, like”—you paused over your sentence like a plane circling the Oakland airport in deep fog—“resources like a mug.” You laughed at yourself for using some slang, which was kinda cute and kinda high sediddy at the same time, which confused me. “You know,” you went on, “Piedmontagne’s the only city in America that’s surrounded on all sides by another city. They literally established Piedmontagne within Oakland as a separate jurisdiction from Oakland because they liked everything about Oakland except being a part of it.”
“Damn.”
“It’s not exactly a diverse place. The copresidents of the Black Student Union are a black guy named Booker Taliaferro Adebayo and a white guy who wears boat shoes.”
“What are boat shoes?”
“They’re shoes—it doesn’t matter. There’s Chinese kids, of course, and maybe, like, five girls from Singapore. There’s one guy from Dubai and a couple kids from another oil empire in the Middle East—they’re census white, but not real white. All the other students are real white.”
“Damn.”
“My mom jokes around and calls me a ‘social justice warrior,’ which I think is some weird, played-out thing people used to call each other as an insult or something. She likes to say that all the best social justice warriors live with their parents and all the smart ones gave up and got law degrees. She wants me to go to law school, not work in media. I wish she would just let me do me. You know what I mean?”
Yeah, I had some experience with a parent who vetoed all my ideas and bossed me around like he was paying me. I just nodded, though, not wanting to start talkin’ about me and the old man and all the ways he had me in check.
“Yeah, I’m on scholarship at Piedmontagne,” you said, not really needing no prompting. “She made that happen. And she did pay for the study abroad immersion program, that she did do. I’m totally grateful for all of it, for real. I just wish she would ease up. And maybe have some sympathy and sensitivity for my position in that school as one of a handful of black people who aren’t from Nigerian oil money. She has her whole AKA sorority of successful black women to lean on. What do I have? You know what I mean?”
*
Yay and nay on that one, homegirl. Your momma seemed like a superhero to me, she and all her AKA soros. I was in awe of all that black excellence. I would learn to live with whatever parental supervision and intervention I had to put up with if it meant I could study outta the country and learn to speak five languages and shit. Damn, I had to deal with the same shit and wadn’t gettin’ shit for it. I was too sprung and infatuated with you to tell you the truth about your problems. The truth was, wadn’t no cavalry coming. What was your momma supposed to do, get you into Pied-montay for free on scholarship and then bring the rest of Rockwood with you, all of us delinquent, arrested, tried, and convicted mofos? What part of the game would that be, Jacq? Nah, Momma (your momma) was right: play that position, girl. Parlay that private school into a good college, get that law degree, and come back stuntin’ on fools in your own brand-new Lexus, or whatever’s above a Lexus. Buy that car and bring it back to whatever’s left of Rockwood. Don’t worry about us. We can hold our own out here. Or we cain’t. We would survive on our little piece of Oakland. Or we wouldn’t. Either way, it wadn’t your issue. You wadn’t even a Rockwood resident for real, turf by birth, loyal to the soil. You was just passing thru due to your daddy falling on hard times after his divorce—and wadn’t nothin’ wrong with that. If I were in your position, I would be hella optimistic, and maybe once I had it made in the shade to where I had the money to do somethin’ for folks like Copeland Cane, then I would come back and do that.
Who knew if folks like me would be around by then. But again, that wadn’t your fight. We was fighting our own battles. I was fighting, or at least hustling, or at least learning how to hustle.
*
Miguel might be a ghost, but that ghost stayed flying around in my thoughts. I remembered that he had mentioned a man named Guzzo. More than mentioned him, matter of fact: Miguel had made it a point to tell me that it was Guzzo who put him on the shoe game. I wondered what it would take to meet with Guzzo, get a supply of shoes, and start sellin’ them bad boys at the sneaker shows that I knew happened online and in real life all the time. I had heard the sneaker heads in my hood boast about how much they kicks cost—jokers who couldn’t do better than living in Rockwood was droppin’ all kinda cowry shells on shoes. It didn’t make the slightest sense to me, but so be it, I always figured. Like I said, fools love Jordan. That Negro is the American dream.
Now I did the math: If Jordan-loving Negroes in Rockwood would see fit to drop a hundred dollars on some shoes, what would people who actually had money be willing to pay for the same kicks? What if I could provide better shoes than what the hood rats of Rockwood would rock? What if I could get me a regular supply of Jordans from a trusted supplier and turn them mugs over at real profit?
My thoughts returned to Guzzo. Mr. Guzzo, that dude who Miguel had spoke so highly about back in the Youth Control. Mr. Guzzo, the Italian who would put you on if you had enough game to sell his shoes. He remained a mystery to me, this hustler or businessman or mixture of the two.
I had to go thru Mr. America to get to Miguel’s cousin in L.A., who got Miguel on the phone from the Youth Control to call Guzzo and give him my number. When the grapevine finally got back to me, I had forgot I had even flown that kite. A 347 area code flashed on my phone. That was when I was still rockin’ my old phone, which was newer’n this new phone. Telemarketer jokers and fools tryna talk me into signing petitions for stuff happening in Mississippi and North Dakota and shit used to call me all the time on that bitch. Sometimes I would pick up and listen to them just so I would learn what was poppin’ on the other sides of America. “Hello.”
“Yo,” this strange accent that ain’t quite sound like it wanted to speak English said across the phone line. Which was a surprise: ninety-nine times outta one hundred, if someone wasn’t speaking English, the call was coming from California. But this call was from elsewhere.
“Who this?” I slipped out the apartment and into the courtyard.
“What kinda question is that?” That voice, confrontational as fuck. “Who says, ‘Who this?’ when they’ve just been cordially greeted by someone whose contact you’ve sought out?”
/>
“Excuse me?”
“That’s a little better, sweetheart. Let me introduce myself, since you clearly have no idea what you’re doing: I’m Michael Guzzo. I run a pop-up shoe business. You’re Copeland Cane, I assume?”
“Yeah. Yessir.”
“You’re looking to sell some shoes?”
“Yessir.”
“You’re flat as a board, kid. If you didn’t sound black, I’d swear you were white.”
That didn’t make no sense. I didn’t even know I was being insulted, let alone that I was down to my last seconds to impress this man. I didn’t say nothin’.
“Look, kid, I don’t have all day. I don’t have all hour. I barely have this minute and the clock’s ticking on that. Out of kindness and because I believe every motherfucker deserves a second chance, I’ll kick your request back to Miguel and let him decide what to do with you.”
“But Miguel’s locked up—”
“You don’t say? Criminals ain’t the only people who can fly kites, kid. Look, while you’re waiting on that shoe to drop, my advice is to lose the laid-back California dreamin’ thing and go for yours every chance you get. Is that a deal?”
He ended the call ’fore I could answer. The silent phone went weightless in my hand. I sat there on my dumpsters processing backward. The call from Guzzo had finally came and here I was unprepared than a mug to shoot my shot with the man. I thought that I had learnt game in the Youth Control, maybe from the medication. But Guzzo only needed a few seconds straight out the 347, wherever that was, to prove me wrong.
I stood up on the dumpsters where I could see the whole Rock. It was no way in a neighborhood like mines, where every soul was some kinda character and every street was a stage, that I couldn’t find not one Negro or Mexican or Tongan to hook me up some sorta way so I could entrepre-negro them shoes my own self. I spotted the chance right in eyesight, in the Rock’s courtyard.
Trey was sporting the type of sneakers that I imagined Guzzo’s vendors sold at the pop-up shoe shows. I got not just glimpses but two-hour movies of Trey’s joints every day (and today was no exception): Trey hoopin’ like his life depended on it. And maybe it did. Trey was one of them kids who would jump in front of a train for a basketball scholarship but wouldn’t read a book if you paid him by the page. Being six and a half feet tall helped, gave him an easy-made identity to live with in the world. He was simple in that way that someone can be hella simple, even when the world that’s spinning them around by the shoulders is totally complicated and confusing.
“What up, Trey?”
He dribbled around me and didn’t say nothin’. Unmannered motherfucker. He was a whole drum line all by hisself, dribbling two balls at once on rhythm, between his legs, behind his back. I had zero in common and less to say to this dude.
“Where you get your Js, Trey?” I said.
Old boy kept on dribbling.
“They’re nice,” I added, going for the ego stroke even though I figured this must be how Mr. Guzzo felt right ’fore he finished his call to me.
“Fam.” Trey finally stopped dribbling, the basketball spell broken. “Wha’chu think? Coach gave these to me.”
That was the books of Genesis and Revelation of our relationship. Ain’t spoke to Baby Jordan since, let alone done business with him. But I did take from what he told me that other athletes whose brains wadn’t on strike for life might just maybe work with me.
(Full disclosure: I’m finna be hella vague right about now— the game is to be sold and behold, not to be told, especially when National Collegiate Athletic Association rules violations is in the mix and it’s not just me I have to look out for but some never-to-be-named student-athletes whose scholarships and standing with they universities I refuse to jeopardize. Matter fact, Jacq, let’s not even deal with no particulars pertaining to how I got connected. I’ma scratch and skip the record to where I’m jumpin’ off BART at the downtown Berkeley station. I had an address, a phone number, and a name that I won’t name. He was a college student-athlete.)
*
I approached his building, one of them tall, dingy, old, sad Berkeley buildings, which when you see it and realize hella students live in that mug, just beggin’ for the virus to come and kiss them, it kinda makes you wonder why everybody and they momma wanna send they sons and daughters to go to school there. Inside, the structure was full of deep, empty hallways like sunken eyes, reminding me of Rockwood.
In his small room, I recognized the student-athlete. Ask me which shoes this brother, whose faceless silhouette decorated a downtown billboard that advertised the tickets to the next big game,* this brother whose dimly lit dorm room was the size of a shoebox, this brother sporting house shoes and high school hand-me-downs, eating Cheerios for lunch and shit—ask me what shoes brother man handed me to go and sell and I might could make some shit up, tell you they was a couple pair of the Air 12s with the white OVO leather that we marked up 300 percent and three of them red-and-black flu game joints, 200 percent markup, or whatever, but I don’t remember and at the time couldn’t tell one pair from another.
I took what shoes I could carry in the tomato-sauce-stained cardboard box that the athlete lent me, went down to the flea market, and did the best I could, which wadn’t very good. After that first afternoon spent shoulder to shoulder with the vendors of essential oils and homemade tamales, herbs and incense and African scarves and African American memorabilia, I had sold just two of the five pairs of shoes I had came with.
I knew I would need to do better. I thought back on all what Miguel had told me. His voice echoed in my memory: The train is the bloodline, blood.
According to what Miguel had told me back in the day in the Youth Control, BART riders made for the toughest audience on earth. These were folks had other shit to do, places to be, headphones to turn up so high they might go deaf in old age just to avoid you. Blood, Miguel’s words returned now, you need to peep the most straightlaced, professional-to-the-nines businessman muhfucka and approach that nigga. I’m not talkin’ some nerdy techie: “Hey, Chad, want to video game it out on Friday night!?” Nah, not them niggas. We uppin’ the degree of difficulty out this bitch. I’m talkin’ find you a downtown lawyer, Financial District dude. Suit, tie, and briefcase; even better if he got on some expensive wingtip shoes since you wanna sell him on some basketball shoes and you know them business shoes is killin’ his feet. He’d step out them joints and cry his eyes out, but he don’t want people questioning his precious masculinity. You gotta understand, every man no matter his airs is insecure some sorta way. He wants somethin’ that he don’t have, or he’s scared to lose somethin’ that he ain’t even sure is his to begin with. You find that dude who’s frontin’ the hardest and you rap to him. Your odds is, like, close to zero—I ain’t gonna front—but ain’t no other way to learn.
Aboard the BART, it only took one stop for the perfect white man to appear before me. I’m talkin’ a beautiful corporate muhfucka: expensive earth-hued suit, honey-toned tie, black leather briefcase, wingtips newly polished. He was standing in the middle of the train car, his legs straddled wide to balance hisself against its shakes and brakes. I thought about the downtown financiers, big men like this man, who would come from the Financial District down to earth where they would walk amongst the people. They would nod at the petty hustlers, complected men and boys like me who came up out the cracks in the concrete with cloth rags and tins of shoe polish. The big men would wave they ten-dollar white God at the little men. The big men would mount the grand old leather chairs that the city had sat out there waiting just for them like so many thrones right there on the street, and the little dark men would smile wide as East Oakland at the big men and thank the big men and praise the big men and kneel down at the feet of the big men and polish they shoes.
I got up from where I was chillin’. The car was half empty, so I knew the man would see me coming his way. I tried to approach with confidence, but then I said, “Sorry to bother you, sir,”
and like that I had handed him my manhood. I stopped a few feet from him and leaned against the peeling fabric of an empty seat. My stained cardboard box jutted into the aisle as I held it against my hip.
The businessman’s briefcase sat in the floor space between his legs so that his hands stayed free to work the tablet that he held. He looked up from it only briefly. “I don’t have any money to give, sorry.”
“I don’t want money,” I said, lying without meaning to. I did want his money, just not in the panhandler way that he expected.
“That’s what they all say.” He made a point of jabbing his fingers into the tablet keyboard real decisive and shit.
I felt defeated again, at the get. This man could shut me the fuck down without effort. I considered just taking the loss and going back where I had came from, back to my seat on the train and back to the athlete in his little room with his unsold shoes. I looked at the man as I rocked in time with the train. He kept his eyes on his tablet. I needed to get my balls back.
“Who’s the greatest basketball player of all time?” It was the last question I would ever want answered, but it leapt onto my lips because it had meaning in the world of men.
“Who cares?” The man jabbed the tablet like it had said somethin’ foul to his momma.
“You do.”
“Me and who else?”
“Everyone and they daddy cares who the greatest is.”
“Oh, really? Enlighten me, genius. Who is the greatest of all time?”
“The Glove.”
The man slowly logged out from whatever program he was working on, knelt, and dropped the tablet into a compartment of his briefcase. He zipped and locked it and stood to attention. “Not in a million years, man. Not in a million goddamn years. Did I hear you correctly? Kid, how do you even know who Gary ‘the Glove’ Payton is? I’m barely old enough to know who that is!”
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 14