The Confession of Copeland Cane

by Keenan Norris

  “I be seeing you around, but you hardly even say hi, my nigga.” She smiled. Sharing the same building meant that we had seen each other in the wind for years even if we rarely spoke. I had watched her change over the years, her height topping out around six feet, her body filling out from ass to shoulders, her hairstyle flip-changing every few weeks. But that didn’t mean we socialized. We weren’t in grade school anymore. We weren’t even in the same school anymore. But this time under the bleachers, it felt different, like we shared somethin’ again. Her face softened into a question. “I heard from Miguel that you had the hookup with the shoes? Brand Jordan and shit?”

  “I just hustle a little bit here and there. Nothin’ special.”

  She laughed. “You sound like you’re pushin’ weight, my nigga. You can chill. Don’t nobody care that some broke-ass student-athletes give you they shoes to sell.”

  “It is against the rules,” the Mexican kid pointed out, speaking for the first time.

  Keish, not one to be contradicted, cut her eyes at him. “This is Innocente. Y’all raced just—”

  “I know, Keish. I have a short-term memory. What’s he want? How do y’all even know each other? Ain’t you from Fresno?” I asked a flurry of questions of both of them.

  “I’m from Visalia, next to Fresno,” Innocente answered.

  “We know each other from track,” Keisha said. “Been watchin’ this nigga in the state meet ever since freshman year. We both got the Nike scholarship to go to Oregon University full-ride in the fall.”

  I dipped my head a little at that. I was late to the scholarship game. All the fast kids had been offered scholarships early in the year. I would need to figure some other way to get into a school with a relevant track program for free. “What y’all want?”

  “The shoes, nigga.”

  I went into my bag for the Brand Jordan track shoes I had brought with me to the meet. I mostly flipped shoes at the little shoe shows in Oakland, but I also took extras when the team left town. They were small, easy to pack away and pull out real quick to flash at potential buyers as I walked around the hotel lobby or strolled thru the stands at the meets. It’s not somethin’ I wanna speak on more’n I have to cuz I ain’t tryna get no one caught up in a rules violation. Plus, like hand-to-hand drug deals, once you know what you’re doing selling shoes, it is not exciting. I don’t wanna give the people a false impression: I was a part-time merchant, nothin’ more. Still, I had been steadily upping my hustling as the school year went on. It had been a long time now that I had been serving as a connect between those who wanted shoes and the broke college athletes who was lookin’ to get paid without the risk of a rules violation. I knew I was subject to similar rules and that I should stay careful. Which was why it was kinda sketch to me that these two had just came out the ether already knowing my hustle like a website manual, like someone had clued them in on me.

  I knew Keisha wouldn’t snitch. She was the homegirl. But I didn’t know this incredibly fast, resilient, unwinded nigga Innocente from Adam. I only knew it was no come up in a future Olympian like him going to the authorities about me.

  I held the Brand Jordans up by they laces. Inside the dark shadows cast by the bleacher planks, the two shoes looked like South America and Africa fittin’ to cross the water and reconnect.

  “Aye, I love them,” Innocente said. I could tell by the apologizing tone in his voice that he couldn’t afford what they cost. He tried changing the subject. “Did you get offered by …” He hesitated, wanting to match my time and place to one of the schools that had offered him a scholarship.

  Above us, the meet announcer’s booming baritone rang out. He was prepping the crowd for the final races, the girls’ and boys’ mile relays. “I need to go,” Keisha said. “I have a race to run. You sellin’ them shoes or not, blood?” She gestured at the female version of the same shoe, which had fell out my bag and lay gleaming on the ground.

  “Do you have $150 cash on you?” I asked. Cuz by that point, I was Iceberg Slimming them joints. “And $175 for the men’s shoes.” I nodded at Innocente.

  “Oh, it’s like that, Cope?” Keisha asked.

  I shrugged. “Yeah, girl.”

  “Cool. I can respect that shit. Who spends that kinda money on spikes?”

  “White people.”

  “I see your hustle, Cope. I respect that, I feel that. Innocente, you tryna get in on this big-money spending?”

  “I’ll save up,” Innocente promised. “I’ll see you at the state meet and buy them then—after I beat you.”

  “I love it!” Keisha said. “A man with a serious-ass plan. I’ma buy mines then, too, after I wax you, Cope.” She laughed her way back out from under the bleachers and into the light of the stadium.

  Then it was just me and dude standing there with ego and competition and money and poverty running between us. It felt like I was back in the Youth Control. Months later, in the heat of the protest, I seen Innocente take his shirt off and took note of the chest full of tats he sported: Día de los Muertos masks and skulls. The Santa Muerte draped with an ammunition belt. A burning marijuana leaf. The Virgin of Guadalupe weeping blood.

  *

  I was memorizing lines for my role as Mercutio in our drama class—A pox on all y’all houses—deep in Mercutio’s characterology. (Here the nigga is, caught between two worlds that only wanna fight each other. Ain’t no one even attempting to extend a hand or listen to the other side. Here Mercutio is tryna make some kinda peace, and the audience knows from jump that the peacemaker, the bridge builder, is bound to get got.) Then I seen that New York number in my inbox and a text: “Cope. It’s Michael Guzzo.”

  Why would he wanna contact me without go-betweens? Ever since that first phone call, he had played me distant. Before my thumbs could respond another text came in: “Let me cut to the chase: I have reason to believe that your scholarship may be in jeopardy due to a business issue.”

  I froze. Mercutio disappeared from my mind after the third text: “Freelancers can make an impact, but they take a risk on behalf of their client. Vendors who work for branded resellers transfer that risk to the business entity—and they can make much more money.”

  A fourth text gave an address, a day and time, and told me to have myself there.

  *

  The next day in drama, I played a mean Mercutio: They done made worms’ meat out your boy!!

  I remained everything Pied-montay wanted me to be, for the time being.

  *

  I discovered that San Francisco’s Financial District was freezing now that I had to get out the train and walk the streets to a high-rise, all-glass, see-thru building. Guzzo’s office was on the fifteenth floor and had no furniture. The space was just one long hallway with a few posters taped to the clear glass walls: Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar in Monterey. Ice Cube holding up his platinum plaques. The Ramones rocking out. President Obama brushing the haters off his Armani shoulders. The day’s light shone in from all angles, and I could look out on the city: the skyscrapers all around me, the blue bay in between and beyond the buildings, and the hills hovering above the fog, piled with homes like hella dominoes fittin’ to fall. It’s the highest I’ve ever been. Only less than two years before, I had been locked up, incarcerated for no good reason, and now here I was. I drank in the difference. Lookin’ out at the city, I breathed in everything and damn near caught a contact high off Guzzo’s cologne.

  “I rent this motherfucker by the hour when I need to meet with an employee and speak,” he explained. “These are not official company facilities. Figured out during the pandemic that company facilities are totally unnecessary. I like to think of what we do, our business, like a ghost. There’s nothing tangible about us except our product, the shoes that we buy and resell. We just fly in and fly out, know what I’m sayin’?”

  I nodded. But I felt his heavy movements vibrating the office walls, the opposite of a ghost on the premises. Guzzo was all torso—high, rounded shoulders
and barrel chest—a big silverback gorilla of a dude who stalked his Financial District digs slow and dramatic, his head always up, his eyes and face always the black shadow beneath his Yankees hat. He took space, his and yours. I thought of my hustle like the ghost that he spoke of, light and fast, barely there and gone quicker’n a eye blink.

  “I like how you move amongst those Pied-monty fucks,” Guzzo said, kicking off the meeting. He paced back and forth in a tight line. “This Kennedy character, I guess he’s a school principal, the rancid Irish fuck. Apparently, someone dimed you out to him for selling university-provided shoes for college student-athletes and for conspiring with my vendors in the process. The motherfucker’s harassing me with phone calls, telling me not to allow you to vend at our pop-up shoe shows, rules violations, yadda-yadda. I told him one, I don’t employ you, I just allow you and a dozen other freelance motherfuckers booth space at the shows; I can’t control what you and Miguel get up to outside Miguel’s work hours. Two, I’m A-rated with the Better Business Bureau. Three, if he doesn’t leave me the fuck alone, I’ll put enough cash in front of you to make you quit school. Fuck a rules violation. Fuckin’ pussy.”

  Guzzo talked faster’n Innocente ran, and just like with that little dude from nowhere, I couldn’t keep up with this man. I had never met anyone like him. “Kennedy’s cool with me,” I said, almost defensive about it as I remembered the finger food platter he gave Momma on the day of my interview, meanwhile forgetting that he had made her wait in the lobby. It had been almost two years since I entered the prep school. I was used to all its little put-downs and whatnot; it was the price of the ticket. “I think he’s just lookin’ out for the school’s rep,” I said.

  “Exactly, motherfucker. Exactly. He’s looking out for the school, not for you. You need to look out for yourself. You have a gift that has nothing to do with athletics. You might not sell a lot of shoes by my standards, but I’ve never seen a seller who has the kind of athlete access that you have.”

  “That’s cuz I’m an athlete. I’m not a shoe seller, not really. I sell some shoes here and there.”

  “Whatever. Let’s get philosophical: Is anyone what they do? No, not necessarily. But you claim to be an athlete because it’s something that you do. You also would call yourself a student because you do that, too. But you’ve sold shoes longer than you’ve run track, and you’ve made more money vending than you have by going to that stupid prep school. Academics is ninety-five percent bullshit. I say, fuck school. Run your track races for a club team and work for, no, with me. Not only can I pay you a decent wage right now, I have a long-term goal that might interest you.”

  He whipped out his smartphone and played its keyboard till its screen glittered to life. The image of a beautiful basketball shoe dissolved into gold dust, and the gold dust remixed into an island that looked hella like Treasure Island. “That’s Treasure fucking Island,” Guzzo said. Pixeled properties sprang up on the island, and I noticed that they massed in areas I knew to be off-limits due to the pollution. This was not what I expected at all.

  “The shoe game’s been good to me, but it’s time for me to diversify and make some real money. That means real estate. With the Bay Area housing crunch, local government has lowered regulations,” Guzzo explained. “Certain shit is being back-burnered, OK. The island should be open for development within the year.” The words RENT CONTROL rose up in puffs of white lettering like skywriting by an airplane, hovering above the golden apartments. “Do you know how much the government will pay you to provide rent-subsidized housing? It’s bananas. I plan to get some of that development money. To do that, I need to build my brand. I propose that you, with your unique access, serve as a community ambassador for me: you bring me the best amateur athletes the Bay Area has to offer, perhaps help me organize and promote a series of outreach events, basketball tournaments and the like, on the island.”

  The mere mention of that place triggered me. I flinched.

  Guzzo arched an eyebrow. “This gentrification thing is a motherfucker. I’m not insensitive to your situation.”

  “How do you know about my situation?”

  “You think pretty boy Miguel got anything less than a homicide-investigation-level interrogation from me when he recommended you? I didn’t pass the bar to play patty-cake with motherfuckers. I know that you, your family, and everybody else in your building will be evicted within the year. I can, you know, hook your family up with affordable housing options on the island. That way you get to stay in the Bay, I grow my business, and ultimately, once we’ve worked together and these plans have come to fruition, we’re able to rehouse your whole community in a location that boasts the best vistas in the Bay Area. You win, the gentrifiers get fucked, relatively and figuratively speaking. That’s what back home we call a ‘virtuous cycle.’”

  He stopped pacing and tipped his cap up so that I could see his eyes. I seen my image twice over, treacherous as the third rail, black as midnight. Then he laughed in the same megaphone tone that was his voice.

  “I’m bullshitting. No one in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, has ever used the phrase ’virtuous cycle.’ Fuck outta here with that Bay Area hoodoo voodoo. Yes or no?”

  He waited.

  “I sense your hesitation,” he said after a second. “Look, I’ll admit, the nuclear waste thing is rather problematic. It’s a bad look. But the way I see it, there’s no perfect solution. Either people of color will keep getting displaced by gentrification, or these wine-and-cheese San Francisco fags will cry about the nuclear waste this, the soil contamination that—clutch those fucking pearls, Becky. You should see the pigsty I came from: pollution for breakfast, larceny for lunch, and corruption for dinner. But look at me now.” He flexed and his mountain range of a biceps rose up. “Who knows, maybe there are physical benefits to environmental degradation that haven’t been researched yet.”

  He stopped flexing and produced from his track bag two of the smallest drinking glasses I’d ever seen along with a very big bottle of liquor. I read the label, ISLAND RUM, and below those words a sketch of palm trees overlooking a sunlit beach, a few stark-neked slaves serving Deadrich’s great-great-great-grandaddy.

  “You drink liquor, kid?”

  “Nah.”

  “Not even jailhouse hooch? Well, goddamn it, I guess Hollywood’s been lying to me about prison life. Imagine that. Fuck it, there’s a first time for everything. You’re about to take a shot for me!”

  He poured the rum into the two small-ass glasses and handed me one. I took it and watched him watching me. I did what I had seen men in movies do and tilted my head back and lobbed the rum down my throat. It burned instantly. My throat and then my stomach and then my en-tire body lit up like Christmas lights downtown.

  Guzzo took his shot and muttered, “Jesus Jordan.”

  “Jeez—”

  “Jesus. Jordan. Consider my offer, please.”

  “But I hate Treasure Island.”

  “I think you’re overthinking this shit. Remember that the auspices of my business provide a protection that you’ll otherwise be without.”

  “But you yourself said Kennedy is threatening you about employing me?”

  “Yes, he is. But the dumb fuck doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on. Only one of us is a lawyer and it isn’t him and it isn’t you. The Constitution is crystal clear on this, despite whatever these scholastic athletic organizations that restrain the income-earning ability of student-athletes will have you believe: restraint of trade laws protect all adult-aged citizens.”

  “But I’m not—”

  “A citizen? Where’d you immigrate from? Detroit?”

  “—eighteen.”

  *

  On the BART train back to East Oakland, the liquor closed my eyes, somethin’ I advise you never to let happen on public transit, don’t matter where you’re at, but especially not if you happen to be riding round the hood. Still, when I woke, I looked at the other riders and not a one of them looked like DeMichael o
r Vista or Guzzo. One upside of gentrification: no one on the train that night had the balls to rob me. I looked out the window at dead old East Oakland. The town would be hella safer and untroublesome once all the DeMichaels and Vistas and Guzzos and Copeland Canes was gone. But what would become of us? What would become of me and mines? Clearly, I couldn’t just run across town and be at home there. Someone at Pied-montay wanted me gone and outed my hustle to Kennedy for that purpose. It hurt to realize that my dream city might just be another nightmare. I felt flung open inside myself, exposed the way a flu rattles inside your chest.

  The only question was who at the school had snitched on me. The handful of kids and even fewer grown folks I had sold shoes to, any of them could be the culprit. Or was it someone from the outside? Innocente? Keisha? Anyone and everyone else who knew anything about me? I couldn’t call it. I would probably never know. But I realized my hustle had an expiration date on it. The cold reality of it was that it didn’t matter who the snitch was. The truth was Mrs. Greenberg had warned me about the predators at Pied-montay. I was fool enough to ignore her. I was fool enough not to watch my back with them folks and for it I was caught slippin’—a mistake I never woulda made on the Rock, which might make me a racist on top of being stupid. What else but race would allow me to lower my guard around these white cats, yet watch my back, front, and both sides with black folks?

  I deserved to get caught just for that.

  Or maybe not. The rules I broke by selling shoes is only there to keep me and my people broke and begging. The rules themselves is the real problem and everybody knows it. That’s why I violated them without apologies. That’s why I ain’t really try and cover my tracks: because I knew what I was doin’ wadn’t wrong.