Losing My Cool

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

  On the morning of the drawing, a warm June day, the town children run around playing, gathering rocks into piles and stuffing their pockets with pebbles and stones, as their parents and grandparents congregate in the main square. The adults chat and gossip and rumors circulate that one or two neighboring towns have begun to float the idea of doing away with the lottery altogether. In fact, a woman says, some places have already gotten rid of the practice. This is craziness, everyone agrees—a betrayal; the lottery has been going on for as long as anyone can remember—to break with it would be to break with a part of themselves.

  When the drawing begins, husbands from each family step forward and pull a folded slip of paper from a battered black box that is older than the oldest living resident. One of the husbands, a man named Bill Hutchinson, draws the winning ticket marked with a black circle, and his family now must participate in a second drawing to determine who of the five of them will be the ultimate winner. It is Bill’s wife, Tessie, who pulls the marked slip this time. She becomes frantic and shouts and pleads for a redo—it isn’t fair, she cries in vain. The townspeople, including her husband and children, form a circle around her and the first stone strikes her in the head.

  “Oh, hell no!” Charles shouted. “I would never go for that—I’d go down swinging, or better yet, I’d have left that place ahead of time, moved to one of those other towns where they don’t pull that stuff anymore.”

  “You think so?” Pappy said from his desk. “Well, that can be hard to do when the time comes.”

  If I wasn’t in school or studying with Charles and Pappy, I often hung out and listened to rap music at my friend Sam’s house. He was a year younger than me and from one of the two other black families on the white side of town. Naturally, we had been friends for years. Sam’s mother was a worldly woman, from Manhattan not New Jersey. She was well educated, literary even, and hers was the only other black household I had ever visited with shelves of books in it. Sam was a quiet, strong, dark-skinned boy, with beautiful hazel eyes that had flecks of green in them. He was far more interested in riding bikes and deejaying than in reading, but books were a familiar sight to him and he didn’t think they were dangerous like everyone else around us did. Sam and I were close, but he was something of a loner. He didn’t much care for team sports or for the other boys I hung around with, and that put limits on the amount of time we spent together.

  When I wasn’t with Sam, I split my time between the basketball courts at the park and friends’ homes on the black sides of Fanwood and Scotch Plains. I became tight with one of Sam’s classmates, a boy named Antwan who lived a ten-minute walk from my house. Ant, as we called him, was handsome and well groomed, with ebony skin, a low-cut Caesar hairdo, and deep, brushed-out 360 waves, which he kept “spinning” beneath a black cut-off Calvin Klein stocking cap. He spent hours each day on the bench press fine-tuning his enviably muscular build. At fifteen, in Polo jeans, Timberland boots, and a white wife-beater tank top, he drew comparisons to Tyson Beckford, the male model with the Apollonian physique.

  By age seventeen, Ant’s torso was covered in tattoos like Tyson’s, but it was Tupac Shakur who was his inspiration. “I wanna get that THUG LIFE tat across my stomach like Pac,” he used to say as we idled away hours at the park or on his front porch, shooting baskets and the breeze. On his pumped-up right biceps there was the image of two emerald-hued hands clasped in prayer, framed in negative-relief against a burst of light, with Tupac’s famous dictum—ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME—inscribed below in an intricate Old English font. On his left, there was a portrait of his newborn baby sister. One forearm spelled-out A-N-T in block letters; the other inner-arm displayed a page from the Old Testament turned to Psalm 23:“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .” I don’t know whether Ant was religious or not; the ink seemed more about being chic, and Psalm 23 especially, because it spoke to our generation’s paranoid sense of oppression and persecution, of being in foreign territory surrounded by enemies yet anointed and special, had become a smart fashion accessory.

  Sometimes Antwan would come over to my house to work out in the basement when Charles and I were finished studying. The three of us clicked, and from time to time we would go together to Sayreville for teen night at Club Abyss. Abyss was like a parent’s worst nightmare on teen night. Fifteen-, sixteen-, and seventeen-year-old black, white, and what people who have never been to Spain call “Spanish” girls came there less to dance than to simulate sex to a hip-hop beat. As a black dude, if you could just look and sound like enough of a thug, you could approach one of them and do it, too. I spent hours in the mirror before we went, getting my pose just right.

  Charles, who was a kind of virtuoso of teen night, didn’t need any practice. He had what Ant called “the gift” and pulled a variety of females like a hamstring, without trying. Ant and I didn’t have the gift, but we did have our types and we zeroed in on them accordingly. For Ant, there was nothing better than a girl with lighter skin and straighter hair than his own. By far the darkest one in the trio, he strictly approached white or Latina chicks, avoiding girls that resembled him as though he hated them. (In this way, and in this way alone, he was willing to break with the School of Pac.) I couldn’t understand Ant’s mind-set in any way, but I had met enough black guys with it to know it was not unusual. My attitude toward women, on the other hand, was a lot more like Henry Ford’s toward automobiles: Give me any color so long as it’s black. Ant and I used to argue about this all day. In the end, though, he would say, and Charles would agree, that it really didn’t matter what type of ho you preferred—playing women was a hobby, and the bottom line was that each was as disposable and interchangeable as the next.

  I had just gotten my permit and was whipping down the street toward home one hot summer afternoon. The windows were down and Tupac’s “Picture Me Rollin’” pumped from the speakers. Out of the corner of my eye, I peeped a shirtless Antwan beating a hasty path down the side of the road, his black do-rag like a pirate flag in the wind, his tattoos glistening beneath beads of sweat. As I pulled over to the shoulder, honking, he jogged up to the car and hopped in.

  “Nigga, that’s good timing!” he panted.

  “What the hell are you doing on the side of the road without a shirt?” I teased.

  “This white bitch I’m tossing up was supposed to give me some sneaker paper, but she ain’t have my money, and we got into it,” he explained.“Then her pops pulled up and I had to dip up out that winnnndooooow, nigg-uuuhhhhh! I barely got my shoes on.” (Ant had this hilarious way of speaking in undulating tones, drawing out certain syllables in the words he chose to stress; had he been born twenty years earlier he’d have been a soul singer or soapbox preacher for sure.) We both started cracking up.

  In some far-off region of my mind I knew the way that Ant treated girls was wrong. But it didn’t strike me as particularly bizarre. All of my friends who could do it, me included, got money out of bitches and professed to look down on them in the process. We called this “running game.” The better you could run or spit game, the more respect you could get from your boys. I sported a $1,500 gold chain on top of $500 hand-knit Coogi sweaters from Australia, which my girlfriend, Stacey, bought for me with cash.

  My relationship with Stacey was in many ways the fulcrum upon which I hoisted up my sense of self. A year younger than me, she was the epitome of the black girl I had hoped to attract when I chose Union Catholic over Delbarton that day in the car with Pappy.Winning her attentions authenticated my blackness and justified my swagger. Stacey was sassy and flip, flashy like a pinky ring. She modeled when she could, appeared in black magazines like Hype Hair and local fashion shows and beauty pageants. She rolled her plaid skirt three times at the waist and wore her cotton blouse open a button lower than it should have been. I was by no means the only one who coveted Stacey, and this, for me, only magnified her allure. I treated the clothes and jewelry that she bought for me like trophies,
advertisements for my prowess.

  They were also body armor, defense against the lingering gossip. People always talked about the way Stacey got her money, what drug dealers she ran around with on the side—girls run game, too. I didn’t like to think about that; I couldn’t let myself think about that. The point here, I knew enough to know, was not whether you had a solid relationship, whether you were equipped to treat other people with respect—most of us were not. The point was whether you were getting over—whether you were getting something out of the exchange. You certainly didn’t care about the girl.

  Money, hoes, and clothes, that’s all a brother knows; Fuck bitches, get money; Gs up, hoes down; All I’ve got for hoes is hard dick and bubble gum—this was the rhetoric that was drummed (literally) into our heads. It wasn’t the way my father felt about my mother. But Jay-Z told us straight up: We don’t love these hoes. Not if we’re going to be cool by his book. And on these matters we listened to him and those like him. If for some reason you did end up caring, as I hopelessly cared for Stacey, well, that was something to be kept close to the chest. You got no respect—not even from the girls themselves—for wearing your feelings on your sleeve. We called the me-myself-and-I position that we adhered to many things; most commonly we called it pimpin’.

  I tried my best to keep it pimpin’ in all matters concerning Stacey. There were so many rumors floating around about her. An especially resilient one was that a boy in her class named Marion had slept with her. She denied it. It was not improbable, though; we were all players and pimps, nasty girls and freaks in our own minds. I tried to brush it off until one morning a classmate handed me a tennis ball container’s worth of carefully folded loose-leaf correspondence between Stacey and Marion. It spanned an entire year. My first response to the letters was not what it might have been. I didn’t break things off with Stacey or even acknowledge Marion. Rather, I went into full-on damage-control mode like a one-man public relations firm, seeking to protect my reputation by any means necessary, to release a calibrated statement, to let everyone know I had my ho in check. I stormed through the sophomore corridor on a warpath. I found Stacey standing at her locker with a group of girlfriends and confronted her.

  “What the fuck are these?” I screamed.

  “Nigga, I don’t know—what the fuck do they look like?” she casually replied, rolling her eyes and resuming the conversation with her friends as though I were not there. It was the final provocation that I needed. It felt as if my body were functioning on autopilot. What I knew I had to do and what I knew I would do became one and the same. The crowds of other students in the hallway suddenly seemed to vanish and all the noise of their chatter went mute. It was just Stacey and me standing there, as far as I was concerned, and all I could hear was a chopped-and-screwed mishmash of hip-hop aphorisms playing through my head, telling me in metered rhyme exactly how to treat a bitch, how to reach a bitch, who thinks she’s all that: Bitch get out of line? Slap her; Punch that bitch, slap that ho . . . All you heard was Poppa don’t hit me no’ mo’!

  I yanked Stacey by the arm and dragged her kicking and screaming out of the building, her friends staring in amazement. We marched through the parking lot and into the woods that surrounded a park down the street from the school. As soon as we were alone and before she could say a word, I brought the back of my hand down across the side of her cheek in one swift motion that would land her in the nurse’s office. The sound reverberated off the trees with a sickening thwack. It sounded like an isolated high-hat from one of Puffy’s drum machines. I threw the canister of notes at her head and lunged for her feet, trying to rip off the sneakers I had bought for her for Christmas that year. She grabbed my shoulder for balance and our eyes met. Her mascara ran, dissolving the steel veneer on her face as she whispered, “Thomas, Thomas, please stop.”

  I felt myself suddenly emerge out of autopilot. I had been delusional with rage, envisioning myself some affronted suburban Iceberg Slim, but it was hard as hell to keep the act going now. Looking at her, at the fear and hurt in her eyes, the fear and hurt that I had put into her eyes, I no longer felt ice-cold. I wasn’t pimpin’. I felt nauseated. More than anything, I felt terribly sorry. We both crumpled to the ground, huddled in each other’s arms, sobbing.

  As we slowly made our way out of the woods and back toward school, I glimpsed my brother’s aquamarine Camaro fly by. “There they are!” I heard him shout, as he broke to the shoulder. It was a warm day, and the T-tops were in the trunk. Clarence put the car in park, hopped through the open roof, and ran across the street to where we stood. As I feared, I could see Pappy in the passenger seat, waiting. “Hey, Stacey,” Clarence said, nodding and lighting a cigarette. As scared as I was to see Pappy right then, I was equally grateful that my brother had come along for the ride. Clarence, in terms of disposition, was the polar opposite of our father. Whereas Pappy treated everything as a matter of life and death and sought to prevent even the minutest problems from ever arising, Clarence’s theory of life was more like: Hey, shit happens. He accepted that premise as a given and didn’t ask many questions or judge anyone else’s motives or mistakes. In that way he was the yin to my yang, too, and he was far more generous with his view of me and my behavior than I was with him.

  Just a few weeks earlier, he had rescued me from a situation with Stacey that could have gone terrifically wrong. It was a holiday from school and I had taken the train to her aunt’s house to see her. To my horror, mid-coitus, I contorted my leg into an awkward position; my knee slid out of place, locked up, and remained bent at a neat right angle, suspended in the air. I couldn’t walk. Stacey’s aunt, a police officer who carried a loaded strap and did not appreciate boys even talking to her niece, was due home in no time. As we scrambled to get me dressed, I called Clarence in a delirium. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said, chuckling. “Just be ready when I pull up.”

  I thanked him profusely, and with Stacey’s aid, hopped on my good foot over to the park across the street, where I lay down in a field and waited for my brother’s sweet chariot to come and steal me away. A few moments later, from out of a marigold sandstorm I saw Clarence’s Camaro shoot across the baseball fields toward me. He spotted his baby brother lying prostrate in the grass, an upside-down Air Jordan perched atop a beige chicken leg sticking up from the ground like a flagstick on a golf course. He punched the brakes, fishtailing the back of the car like he was Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop. Without cutting the ignition, he jogged over to me, picked me up gently, and dropped me through the open roof into the backseat. We exchanged a quick pound, then he slammed the gas, hit off one more peel-out, and sped over the curb onto the street.

  “Yo, thank you so much, Clarence!” I said once we were at a safe distance and I had caught my breath.

  “Don’t mention it, man,” he said, lighting a cigarette in the dashboard and shrugging. “I’ve been looking for an excuse to take this thing out on the grass for a while now.”

  That was my brother, and I loved him. He wouldn’t be able to save me this time, though—I knew that. When neither Stacey nor I had shown up to homeroom in the morning, the front office called Pappy at home, Clarence explained. Pappy, of course, had been waiting for that call all along.

  When we got back to school, a shaken Stacey went inside to the nurse’s office, where she claimed to have had a panic attack. Outside, Pappy wanted a word with me, he said. I braced myself for the deluge, but it didn’t come. Very calmly he turned around in his seat.

  “You know, Thomas, I never had a father growing up, so I’m learning how to be one as I go. That’s the best I can do. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah, Babe, I know that,” I said.

  “Well, let me just ask you something, then, son, because I really don’t have the answer.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If you had spent years of your life trying to do something, son, trying to rear a thoroughbred, say, a thoroughbred who would go on to run beautiful races and make y
ou proud, if you had sacrificed everything for this thoroughbred, giving it everything you could, giving it the best you had to offer, if you hoped that this thoroughbred would represent the best that you and your people could achieve—well, after all this effort, after all this time and hard work and hope, after all that, would you be able to just sit back and let your thoroughbred run around in the mud with a herd of mules and donkeys? I mean, it might get hurt doing that, right? It might really get hurt. Or—and this would be even worse, in my opinion—it might somehow start to believe that it, too, was a donkey or a mule. Now, that would be tragic, wouldn’t it?”

  I just stared; there was not much I could say. Clarence leaned out of the window, dragging on a cigarette. Classmates going to their cars for lunch pretended not to look.

  “Well, I know you can’t just keep that thoroughbred locked away forever,” Pappy said, shaking his head slowly. “That ain’t very realistic, is it, to keep it locked away?”

  I went back into the building. I didn’t feel like much of a thoroughbred right then, that was for sure. As for Stacey and her mysteriously welted cheek, she took an ice pack for the swelling and that was the end of it. No matter how many ways they put the question to her, she wouldn’t snitch on me. For my part, I was a student of Biggie Smalls: I did not discuss my problems with my wife. I wouldn’t talk about what had happened to anyone other than Charles; other students could speculate and make their own assessments. The result was that Stacey and I stayed together, people continued to gossip, Pappy continued to listen for the sound of me falling, and the very next week I came to school with a fresh new pair of Versace shades courtesy of my girlfriend.