The Confession of Copeland Cane

by Keenan Norris

  I had to keep thinkin’, had to keep pushin’, I told myself. I couldn’t give up and just wait to get expelled or evicted or both. The problem was every opportunity canceled another one out: I wadn’t tryna earn my diploma and find myself homeless for it. If I went with Guzzo, I would have to give up on Pied-montay, which was maybe OK if I got paid out the deal, but what about that island now? I couldn’t see myself shaking the memory and the fear of its earth opening wide and eating me alive, pulling me into its pollution. Wadn’t nothin’ changed about that place, meanwhile everyone who spent a season on it went thru hella changes. I couldn’t handle no more change, no more upheaval in my life. My only options was no options at all.

  *

  I got home, opened the janky door, and walked in, and there was Daddy posted up at the kitchen table. He held a letter in his hands. “I been waiting up for you, Cope.”

  I didn’t wanna lie to him. He knew I flipped shoes; wadn’t like I was slingin’ coke. “I had to go talk to this shoe supplier person.”

  “Out late only for that?”

  “That’s all,” I said, hoping he couldn’t smell the alcohol on my breath, hoping he would just leave me alone.

  “You be careful in these streets, Cope. Oakland ain’t nice. I don’t wanna lose you, boy. You gotta understand, I failed as a father by not keepin’ my son close enough to me. Given a second chance, maybe I’ve failed oppositely with you, done held you too close and now you rebelling, don’t wanna listen to me for nothin’. That’s probably my fault. I’ll wear that. But be careful. Will you promise me that?”

  “I promise,” I said cuz I didn’t want the old man worrying about me. The rent was enough to worry about without me.

  He nodded and almost smiled. “I trust you, Cope. You know, I heard you just the other day practicing them lines—hella clean. Was that Romeo and Juliet?”

  “We finished Romeo and Juliet. We’re doing a new play now.”

  “Did they have you be Romeo?”

  “Mercutio.”

  “Who that?”

  A text message pulled me away from any explanation I could give him. “It don’t matter,” I said. “You don’t care about no Shakespeare no kinda way.”

  He didn’t say nothin’ to that and my words hung there between us heavy and mean. He laid the letter on the table edge nearest me where I could see its Pied-montay logo and the school colors. It balanced just barely, momentarily, before falling on the kitchen floor as quiet as a breath. He bent over to pick it up, sinking outta sight. I knew what I said was wrong, but somethin’ small and spiteful in me wouldn’t let me turn back. I looked at my phone instead as I walked past the old man. It was Guzzo texting me, drawing my attention away: “You’re a genius, kid,” the message read. “Keep hustling. But exercise caution. Destroy this cell phone and buy a new one. Don’t get caught up. The law does not protect you.”

  Daddy’s words about whatever it was he had just said fled from memory as I took that legal opinion under advisement.

  *

  The first chance I got the next morning, I snuck off to the ghetto marina, which is down Sixty-Fifth, just a few minutes from the Rock. It’s not a real marina with miles and miles of coastline like the Berkeley Marina. What we got is a small strip of land in between warehouses. But I believe the water runs out to the bay. I bet you can find apartments downtown that are bigger than Oakland’s little marina. But whatever, I’m not tryna make a point, that’s just where my phone went, drowning in the water as the sun rose above the city. The old men who had parked they cars in the little parking lot that surrounds the mini marina watched me while they smoked. I could tell they wouldn’t care if I dropped a body in that bitch, let alone a little phone. Probably it’s a million phones and other things floating there, people like me treating it like just another landfill.

  *

  Piedmontagne High Times-Picayune

  STUDENT-ATHLETE SCANDAL

  When You Know You Done Fucked Up

  Imagine that meme. But even though that headline only existed in my nightmares, the truth was I was not safe. An actual attorney had told me that the law as it’s written would not protect me. I feared everything from expulsion to reincarceration. Selling shoes wadn’t illegal, I knew that for a fact, or how else could a nigga like Guzzo run his shoe business out in the open, holding trade shows in Berkeley and Oakland and downtown San Francisco? From what I could tell, it was a business that was legal for everybody but me and my fellow student-athletes.

  If you commit a crime, or whatever you’d call what I was perpetrating, it’s best to do it by yourself and to get ghost as soon as it’s done. But I couldn’t sell them shoes to myself. I couldn’t act alone, and Lord knows I couldn’t lay low as a high-caliber athlete. It was really no way out for me but to hope the world just spun in my favor.

  I was finishing out my classes, working toward my diploma, meanwhile wondering if each day would be the day that I got caught out, called in, and expelled. I had that rabbit-eared anticipation, no different’n when I was in the Youth Control. I won’t front: I had GED daydreams, Jacq, like I was only one step away from losing aye’thing.

  Good Enough Degree or prep school paperwork, I would need a college scholarship, and I knew the best way to get one in the twenty-fourth hour of college admissions was to win state in the 400 or 800. It might also be the only way not to get expelled: make them realize it was better to keep me than to kick me to the curb.

  But winning state wouldn’t be easy. Innocente had took my heart and outdid me, outdid me in the 800. No one who had seen him let me take the lead only to rip it back from me in a matter of moments would give me a chance against him. I didn’t even give me much of a chance against him. Whatever he had in him was easily the equal, plus some, of my haunted self.

  My best bet was to stay away from him. He didn’t run the 400. I did. I had run fast at the Mt. SAC and Stanford relays. Then at a dual meet on our home turf, I slid thru in 46.6 seconds, which placed me third in the state. I was a legit contender, even if the two boys with times better’n mines looked like they was on Guzzo’s workout plan, like they had swallowed all the radiation and flu in California and had only grown stronger from it.

  I turnt my attention to speed and power as I trained and counted down the days to the state meet. But before I got there, an email from the principal hisself finally summoned me to a meeting.

  “So what is it, Cope?” The old man stopped me in the kitchen that same evening the email came. Momma was there, too.

  I felt my heart drop. I could see the tight, drained disappointment in his face. I didn’t dare look at Momma. They had to have received the same summoning email since I was a minor, still just a student. When I started to speak, it was stammers coming out.

  Daddy caught me off. “I know it’s hard, leaving Oakland. Me and yo’ momma, we’re ready to go. We got a good nice place out in Antioch we can rent. Makes this little apartment look like a tent underneath the freeway.”

  I slowed down my breathing and looked from the old man to Momma and back from Momma to the old man. Her face was shiny with sweat and enthusiasm. I studied the old man’s face and wadn’t nothin’ there waiting to take me to task. He appeared not to know a single detail about my issues at school, which I could only figure musta got lost in the sauce, what with them having to pack and move and not keep me informed about it, just like I had got lost in that same sauce spending all my time training for the state meet and selling shoes and smoking weed with Miguel and trying to keep from being expelled. Our minds occupied two completely different places, two different worlds, and it wadn’t anger I felt, or anything else really, but just empty. I was vacated, like the last apartment in Rockwood when everybody was moved out and the wrecking balls and dynamite was set to do they thing.

  “I know y’all been at this for a while and Momma been wanting to move to the Ock—”

  “For years.” The old man finished my sentence for me. “She was the one went and got the
deal done out there.”

  “But I want to finish out the year at prep school,” I insisted. “I want to graduate from a good school, not some wack old Antioch school. What schools is even out there? Have y’all looked into that? What does y’all moving now even gotta do with me?”

  “It’s gotta do with you livin’ under our roof and this place finna be leveled and it’s a deal on the table right now out there,” Momma jumped in. I might could sway Daddy on the matter, but wadn’t no swayin’ her, and her sway was what was leading this decision.

  “You can get that diploma piece of paper anywhere, Cope,” the old man said. “It don’t matter the name of the place. I know you’re in a little trouble at that school. What they call trouble, at least. Don’t trip, Cope. I ain’t mad—but you could finish out school elsewhere and not have to deal with none of that mess.”

  Here I was worried about gettin’ expelled for violating a rule that wadn’t even a law when right in front of me, in plain sight, my family was planning to move for financial reasons (the very reason I was sellin’ shoes to begin with). They wadn’t even slightly tripping about the trouble I was in. They wanted me to move to Antioch, which would mean I would have to finish school online on a home computer Daddy had saved in the 1989 earthquake or some shit.

  “I’m just tryna bank some money,” I tried to explain, but he cut me off.

  “That ain’t my concern, Cope. I’m just sayin’, it might be easier somewhere where they ain’t watchin’ you like some damn hawks. Look, I know Antioch ain’t your dream city. You ever known anyone to say, ‘Hey, let’s take a vacation to the Ock? I wonder what the hell is poppin’ out there in Antioch. I caught myself daydreamin’ about the Ock.’ Nah, you haven’t and it’s a reason for that.”

  “Oh, now you got jokes, old man,” Momma said over her shoulder.

  “At least I tried to make somethin’ of myself—more than you did,” I said, and I know it came out cold, colder’n I wanted it to come out, like I couldn’t care less even though it’s the only thing in the world I cared about.

  Those words shivered the space between us, reached out and froze us both.

  “I still have ideas,” he said. “And whatnot. But if that’s how you feel, Cope, the less said, the better. I’m not lookin’ to argue with my son. It’s your world, boy. You can come with us and do like I said, or if you can find one of your friends whose momma will let you sleep on they couch, then you can go and do that, try and see if they’a come up off they little rule book long enough to let you graduate.” And he said other things, and so did I, and none of it was even memorable, no curse words or insults. But it was mean, the things I said to him, and frustrated, the things he said to me. Mean and frustrated in the ways that two sensitive people can be toward each other when they nerves is shot and they feel empty and nothin’s what it should be.

  *

  After classes, I took the walk that I’d been dreading like a mug: the path that led past the birds-of-paradise and the fancy pillars and all the other things that first welcomed me to the prep school, all the things that it felt like might get snatched back now. All my trying was turning against me. I walked into Principal Kennedy’s office, a place which was hella intimidating now that I was inside of it in some trouble instead of in his good graces.

  He didn’t waste no time gettin’ to the point: “You could potentially find yourself in a great deal of trouble, Copeland. You do know that, I hope.”

  Don’t admit to shit, I thought. Don’t say shit. I looked at the table between us and kept my quiet. The green light of Kennedy’s custom-made desk lamp pooled out like weird waves of water across the carpet, and I remembered physically, in my muscles and bones, the courtyard and the cops and the Youth Control and the cops. Principal Kennedy was just another officer of the law.

  “When we granted you your scholarship nearly two years ago, we might not have done our due diligence. Douglas was so hot to trot that we more or less took you on as a fully known, fully vetted individual, even though what we knew about you was based on your description of your past. Of course, I did some background checking. I found that the facts of your past as you presented them were true and that your dynamic risk assessment and parole mentor evaluation scored you in the lowest risk category, all of which suggested to me a basic solidity of character, which was what I felt was necessary to know to make the decision to enroll you at that time. Obviously, I was in error. Since then, we have been notified that those evaluative algorithms are being reevaluated. My concern is that you may have missed out on this critical bridge in your rehabilitation.”

  I kept keeping my quiet.

  “Do you feel that you are fully rehabilitated, Cope?”

  That question put me in a corner where I had to respond. I nodded.

  “Are you experiencing stressors at home or in your community that might have caused you to fall back on some of your negative modes of behavior?”

  I shook my head. If I was stressed out, so was the whole community. Rockwood was being re-placed around everyone, rents was rising everywhere, hustlers and homeless was everywhere.

  “All right then, Cope. You don’t have to respond, though you can if you wish without repercussion. There’s no need to treat this as an arrest. You also don’t have to worry about what you say being used against you at a later date. Nothing here is being recorded, nor will I make a record of it after you leave. You have my word and state law on that. (In case you didn’t know, it is against state law to record anybody without their permission, and I’m doubtful you’d permit me to record this—you seem quite cagey.) In light of how street smart you evidently are, I think you and I are both best served to come to an agreement.”

  Was this a good cop routine? If that was the case, where was his counterpart, the dirty, crooked-ass cop? Or could both roles be played by the same person in the same confrontation at the same moment in time?

  I could only figure that the man meant exactly what he said: he was speaking the truth, he had no intention of treating our meeting as an arrest or a trial. He was no Judge Khan fittin’ to throw the book at me. Principal Anthony Kennedy was a different authority figure completely, smarter’n Khan and, to use his word, quite cagey, cagey like a muthufucka, too cagey for me to out-clever.

  “Name a college. Name a university,” he said, in the same way most dudes talk about which rims to put on they car. “Name one that you would realistically seek to attend given your total profile—grade point average, athletic and other extracurricular accolades, personal narrative, ethnic background.”

  I stayed silent. That lamplight was starting to look downright radioactive. I looked at the degree plaques on Principal Anthony Kennedy’s wall. He’d graduated from the elite of the elite universities. So had his children. They family graduation pictures displayed them in Ivy League regalia. Kids at Pied-montay talked exclusively about Ivy League schools and Stanford, with Williams and Amherst and Emory thrown in for diversity’s sake. I knew that the elite schools was altogether out of the question for me. My GPA was still recovering from Rockwood. With all the schools that my rehabilitating grades excluded, no one at the private school had ever told me where I might be included.

  Principal Kennedy stared square at me. I noticed how easy he filled his suit and how easy his hubcap shoulders and hubcap head filled the ergonomic leather chair where he sat. He had paperweights on his desk. Each paperweight featured the mascot of a different college floating inside its clear glass shell: a roaring bear, a beaver dressed in orange and black, some kinda big cat, too small to be a lion, too white to be a panther, and a Roman soldier, and a red bird, and a duck standing upright wearing a green-and-yellow hat. I felt suspended like I was the mascot suspended inside the glass shell of Pied-montay Prep. People with nothin’ better to do was eyeing me in my enclosure, examining me, admiring me, and there I was, prized, sought after, but suspended, caught in mid-float, unable to move. The green lamplight shone over the paperweights, bathing them in its color.


  “Perhaps the conversations around campus and in your counseling meetings are a bit skewed,” he went on. “There are four-year institutions beyond the Ivies, beyond Stanford. I have a niece who is at Amherst. We’re proud of her nonetheless.”

  “All right,” I allowed. Speaking, I found, made me feel no less floaty. I wondered about the logos, if each animal was in eternal limbo when they wadn’t parading around at homecoming celebrations and football games. Were they as trapped as they seemed to be?

  “Think about schools on the West Coast with strong athletics programs and good academics: San Diego State, Long Beach, Fresno, the University of Oregon. These are all credible institutions. As an athlete of some note, you will be more prized than most. I can practically write and sign your scholarship myself—not for this year’s fall term, those enrollments have already been capped. For the following school year, however, I can place you at the university of your choosing. I’ve done it for other student-athletes. Our connections here at Piedmontagne run very, very deep. The only problem in your case is that information has come to light which might jeopardize your candidacy. Frankly, I’ve known ever since Douglas Deadrich told me about how he encountered you on the train that there was the potential for this kind of problem. I braced myself. I planned ahead. I thought about contingencies. That’s the essence of being a lead administrator, taking the long view and envisioning multiple options rather than locking oneself into a predetermined path.”

  He stopped and stared me down. Where was this headed? Kennedy had this all planned out, had had this in his back pocket the whole time, just waiting on me to give him a reason. This was it.

  “I’m good at what I do. What I need you to do is to get better at doing what you do. If you want an academic and an athletic future, you will need to forego the California state track and field championship, as this rules violation prohibits you from further competition. The school might incur sanctions if you run; we need you to forego all competitive athletics for the time being. Also, you need to stop selling the shoes and discontinue any future meetings with Michael Guzzo, as well as his associates. Lastly, I ask that you agree to serve in an institutional liaison role. It’s not an unusual thing for our graduates of color to engage in. It’s good for the high school and it’s good for you. Whatever you want will be yours, collegiately speaking.”