“True,” I said, and on a certain level I agreed with him—that was what mattered.
Still, on another level it was getting stupider and stupider for me to try to stand my own ground whenever it was contested. I posted some of the highest SAT and SAT II scores in the school that year, and Pappy explained to me that I could go places with them. Before that, I had only conceived of college in terms of the men’s basketball rankings. Now all of a sudden, off the team and having done better than I ever imagined on standardized tests, I found myself putting together applications to fifteen of the best academic institutions in the country. Most eighteen-year-olds with ambitions of going where Pappy had shown me to apply would do anything in their power to avoid a fistfight.
Talking the matter over with Charles, though, it became clear that I would not be able to be like most of those other eighteen-year-olds. I was going to have to step to Marion, and that was that. However foolish it was and despite his own college dreams, Charles would back me up, too. He would back me up whether it was one-on-one or the two of us on twenty. Charles was loyal to a fault. But what dumbfounded him to no end, what pained him—his face looked like he had sipped rancid milk—was that I had even put myself in such a position in the first place, that I had let myself get so close to Stacey.“This should never happen over a bitch,” he said, shaking his head. All my boys echoed this sentiment at one time or another: Never trust a bitch; never love a bitch. Those were the rules, and they were beyond questioning. Why I couldn’t just live by them was a mystery to us all.
The afternoon of the lunchroom chat, I boarded Marion’s Irvington-bound bus with Charles in tow, my gold chain wrapped tightly around my fist, my back, so to speak, against the wall. We took our seats in the rear and when the driver pulled into the street I stood up, walked forward and smashed my chain, and the medallion attached to it, into Marion’s jaw. Latitia screamed, but Charles made sure that no one broke us up.“Nigga, I’ve been dying for this,” Marion snarled.At well over six feet, he was a lithe kid who looked like a young Jay-Z with more refined features. He fought his way into a standing position and out into the aisle. Our classmates moved away, parting to both sides like the curtains in a theater. This seemed appropriate, we were on stage now, and I wanted everyone to see.
The bus driver slammed his brakes—which sent us flying forward, holding on to each other for stability with one hand while railing on each other with the free one—before making a beeline back to school and radioing in for help. The two of us spilled from the bus into the parking lot, partners in a furious tango, pausing to kick off our unlaced Wallabees so they wouldn’t get scuffed, then lunging at each other like skinny, demented pit bulls. Our classmates hung from the windows, pumping their fists, roaring their approval. I knew how to box a little bit. Pappy, a man who even in old age could handle himself with his hands, had taught me the basics when I was a kid: how to bob and weave, parry a punch, take a punch. But this was not boxing, there was no grace to this, no artistry—Marion and I were swinging for the fences on each other’s faces, dodging nothing, eating each other’s knuckles in lumpy bites.
Outside, everything began to move in delirious slow motion. I saw my fist crawl past Marion’s nose, missing the mark by inches. I saw his lanky arm cock back and felt my own nose grow hot. I felt my eyes get wet and blurred. I saw my fist connect with Marion’s chest. I saw Marion lose his footing and fall backward. I saw myself on top of his ass in the bushes edging the walk. I saw him on his knees. I saw my fist come down on his head one, two, three, four times like a hammer beating a stubborn nail into submission. The damn nail would not submit. It felt like one of those nightmares where no matter how hard you swing, the decisive blow eludes you and your tormentor continues to taunt, undeterred. I kept trying to knock him out, no longer able to hear my classmates’ cheers or see anything beyond Marion’s close-cropped head in my hands. I didn’t see myself go down. I felt my right shoulder pop loose from its socket before I saw my vice principal’s flushed cheeks and terrified gaze hovering over me. I felt myself pinned to cement. I felt the pain in my nose, my eyes, my arm, my back, my bloodied feet—it hit me from both sides, top to bottom, like a supercollider.
Even though there were rules on the books against fighting, I didn’t get suspended for this, partly because I was, compared to my peers, a much more promising student and partly because my father just gave more of a damn than most. At the faintest whiff of trouble concerning his boys, Pappy would sweep into the school’s administrative offices with the severity of a man from another era, decked out in his finest worsted suit and tie, hair pomaded back, tortoiseshell glasses magnifying his gaze, wing tips shined to a mirror polish, and demand to speak with the principal.“The principal may be busy,” he would tell the nervous secretary whose unfortunate job it was to run interference, “but he’s going to have to come out and see me.”
If on the occasion Clarence or I had done wrong, Pappy would not defend us or object to punishment, but there was nothing the school could do that would approach what awaited us at home. He made this so clear to all of us that there were times when the same teachers who had called him in reversed themselves and lobbied for clemency on our behalf. Pappy’s point in these instances, then, was not to secure special treatment for his children. The point was that if the white administrators of the school were going to discipline his boys, his black boys, its head would have to justify this decision to Pappy’s satisfaction—and also he would have to know that he would have to do so every single time. But Pappy didn’t scream or shout; he argued—forcefully, rationally, carefully, and with an intellectual sophistication that was uncommon at the schools Clarence and I attended. With his gold Phi Kappa Phi tie bar and with his deep Texan voice, he was intensely formal and formidably intense. Everyone knew Dr. Williams at Union Catholic, and they dreaded an altercation with him.
“It sounds to me like this is a case of unrequited lust and that Thomas has been provoked by a would-be Lothario,” Pappy insisted. “My son isn’t going to be punished for defending himself against a bully.” I sat there in silence. The truth is I had spared my father some of the less flattering details when presenting my side of the story. The principal and the vice principal—whose tackle I could still feel—were the kind of ethnic white men who had seen it all, racking up decades between them in the New Jersey interparochial school system. Each looked quizzically at the other and then with sympathy at Pappy. They had nothing but respect for my father, and they wanted to make that clear. It would be a shame, they said, for something like this to compromise my college applications, which was why they were going to be lenient this time. Without going into any particulars, however, what they both wanted to know was why a nice kid like me with such a nice family would be running around with a girl like Stacey in the first place. Didn’t I know that she was trouble? Didn’t my father know this? The split-second wince on Pappy’s face hurt much more than Stacey’s infidelity had.
I knew that my courtship of Stacey was an open, festering wound for Pappy, a source of lasting embarrassment against which he could not defend himself. Like Charles, honor meant everything to Pappy, though he had different ideas of what that word signified. Pappy couldn’t give a damn about a street rep. He was self-schooled—a black, self-described bastard from the segregated South who had taught himself how to live from the beat-up copies of Plato’s Dialogues and Aesop’s Fables he’d managed to dig up in the meager colored library in Fort Worth and at the little Jewish synagogue in Galveston, where a stunned rabbi had invited him to study after Pappy had won a blind-entry essay competition with a piece on Maimonides.
All Pappy ever wanted to do in life was to distinguish himself, to be a man capable of commanding respect in a world that was madly hostile to anyone who looked like him. A world as unrecognizable to Charles and me as ours was to him. Pappy’s word was his bond and his name was all he had, all that he could control. He didn’t keep it real; he kept his name out of the street. I had brought
shame home with Stacey. I was continuing to bring shame home, for he knew I had no intention of distancing myself from her and, powerful as he was, short of moving the family back across the country, he was powerless to keep me away from her.
For Pappy, it was all very simple. If life in fact was a chess game and I had taken Stacey as my queen, well, then my king was terrifically compromised. At best she was pure foolishness in his eyes, a street chick, five minutes with her amounted to a terrible price to pay for a piece of ass. At worst, there was the prospect of pregnancy, whether by me or by someone else—the difference was negligible to him and the potential for disaster incalculable. It kept him up at night. But Pappy and I saw the world through different lenses: What he found so troubling I found intoxicating—Stacey was street and that was what was so hot. She was ’hood, she was hip-hop, she was black, she was real. She had my nose open, Pappy told me. He was right.
I was propelled into bed with Latitia by the winds of my ego and by my hatred for Marion. Inside the motel room, however, with just the two of us together, my desire to keep it real, my thirst for revenge against Marion, it all faded away, receding like the ocean tide outside the crusted window. As her clothes piled up into a lace-capped mound on the floor, I noticed, as if for the first time, just how pretty Latitia was.With soft, wavy hair, sun-kissed caramel skin, and a body shaped more like a teardrop than an hourglass, she could have been a Brazilian exchange student or one of Gauguin’s Tahitian nudes. I reminded myself that I’d had a crush on her since I was fourteen years old. I let myself get lost in her embrace and in the moment, forgetting about trying to be hard or gangsta or disrespectful. For a minute, I forgot that she was a bitch.
Suddenly there was a violent rapping at the door. I tried to ignore it, but it only grew louder. “Fuck, who is it?” I said.
“Nigga, it’s Charles, open up!”
Latitia hopped under the covers as I threw on some basketball shorts and cracked the door. There was Charles holding Candy by the hand.
“I’m sorry, yo, but Nate and Takira locked us out; this is the only place we can go,” he said. I either stared at him or shrugged or laughed, I can’t remember which, but I know I didn’t resist. What could I have said—that I was feeling tender toward Latitia and that now was not a good time to interrupt, that we had emotionally connected just now? Charles barged in. “Don’t worry, nigga, you won’t even know we’re here,” he said as Candy—who at seventeen was shaped like an hourglass and built thick like a 2 Live Crew video dancer—met eyes with me, pursing her lips into a half-smile that landed in nebulous territory somewhere between babelike innocence and pure wickedness. I could have gladly bounced right then from the room, from the Shore, from the world, and I think Latitia could have, too, had things been different. But she said,“Fuck it, it’s cool,” which surprised me, and I realized that I would have to stay. After all, what would it make me look like if I left? It would make me look like I had caught feelings over a bitch. It would make me look corny as hell.
“No doubt,” I said, and I slunk back over to Latitia.
Now and again I glanced over at the adjacent bed (I couldn’t help it). Charles was pure business, focused, like he was about to beat a video game. Candy was wailing at the top of her lungs, saying she’d always wanted this, which even then struck me as one of the most preposterous declarations I had ever heard. I looked back down at Latitia, who had closed her eyes, perhaps also her ears. If any of this made Charles the least bit uncomfortable, he was able to conceal it.
I couldn’t take it. Latitia and I went into the bathroom to take a shower. When we returned, Charles had lit a cigarette and put Biggie’s “One More Chance” on the portable CD player. I flopped onto the bed with Latitia and tried to crack some jokes when Candy, visibly tipsy, got up and stumbled toward us, collapsing on top of me. She lay there, motionless, as Biggie slow-flowed about prophylactics and being “black and ugly as ever.” I watched Latitia get up and walk away as Candy started to kiss my neck.There were things that I had wanted to say to Latitia, I realized, things that I now knew would go unsaid. I looked over to the other bed and saw Charles on top of her; she was giggling, and I knew right then that I was powerless to treat her like anything other than a silly ho.
I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words at the time, but the truth is that we had got caught up in one great big demeaning dance, all of us: Marion, Charles, Stacey, me, Latitia,Takira, Candy . . . , you could go on down the line. We all had memorized the steps to this number early on—and sometimes it was the girls who took the lead. A wave of sadness waxed over me then waned as quickly as it came. Candy had taken off her shirt and was telling me that she’d always wanted this.
Without fully realizing it, however, I already had begun the long process of unlearning the routine. At the very end of the school year, when a classmate, Jerry, who had felt provoked over some slight he thought I had given him—or maybe it was a slight I really had given him, the difference in these situations is semantic—challenged me (and Charles, indirectly) to an after-school fight that coming Friday, Charles started making arrangements to meet him. But I could find no good reason to fight Jerry, to want to fight Jerry, to waste my time dealing with Jerry, aside from that all-purpose issue of “respect,” of course.
“He’s disrespecting,” Charles said. Who cares about Jerry’s respect? I thought to myself. It was clear that this guy—a quick-tempered seller and user of drugs—was one step from getting stuffed away in one of those high schools for kids with emotional and behavioral disorders, two steps from jail, and uncountable steps removed from anything like a shot at a good college. Who cared what he thought—screw what he thought, I wanted to say, wanted to shout until I was hoarse—but “word up” was all I could muster.
Without the SATs to prepare for, Charles was no longer coming home with me every day after school. Most days it was just Pappy and me, sitting in his study, half-listening to Jenny Jones or Ricki Lake, playing chess and talking until my mother got home from work. We would play every day. Pappy always played black, which moves second and is therefore a perpetual step behind white, always on the defensive, like the receiving side in tennis. And just like in tennis, when good players play chess, it is assumed that the receiving side, the side to go second, will lose. Like breaking serve, a win or a draw for black is considered an upset.
“Why do you always want to be black?” I often asked him. “Don’t you want to go first?”
His response never changed.“I prefer black because it’s a realer representation of life, son,” he would say. And he would add: “The odds are stacked against you when you go second, which requires you to play smarter—you’ve got to think.”
Born left-handed, Pappy painstakingly taught himself as a child to write with his right hand and as a result it became the stronger of the two. The same way he had learned penmanship with his off hand, Pappy had made himself an even stronger chess player with black than with white. Most games, he beat me handily.
The afternoon after Jerry’s challenge, I couldn’t concentrate on chess at all. I was playing sloppily and Pappy could tell that something was wrong. I debated with myself whether I should tell him about Jerry or not. I fiercely admired the fact that Pappy was no coward. He wasn’t like a lot of the white fathers I had known at Holy Trinity; he wasn’t meek or passive-aggressive, and he didn’t think that fighting was inherently wrong or some sort of sin. If Pappy had a problem with you or you had one with him, he would address you to your face, like a man. He was old-school like that. Turning the other cheek is foolishness, he would say. As he saw it, there were times when the right thing to do—the ethically right thing to do—was to resort to violence. Malcolm X had a metaphor that resonated with Pappy: If you step on my foot, then you’ve just surrendered your right to tell me how I ought to get you off it. Pappy hated bullies. Bullies step on other people’s feet. A coward accepts the affront; a man defends himself.
Finally I just came out with it and a
sked him what he thought I should do about Jerry. Leaning back in his worn leather swiveling-chair, in one of his colorful Nike jogging suits, he pulled at the coiled hairs of his salt-and-pepper beard, which seemed to grow a pinch saltier by the day, and pondered my question. “You should come home from school one period early on Friday,” he said. “Just walk home instead of taking the bus.”
This was not the answer I had necessarily expected, but it was one that I knew I could trust. He didn’t lecture me that day as he might have and as I had expected. Maybe he could tell that I was going through some things and that now was not the time to apply any more pressure. Or maybe he figured that it was pointless, that I was eighteen and impetuous, and that he couldn’t protect me from everything anymore. Or maybe he was just tired of it all, himself. I promised him that I would do as he told me.
That Friday was hell. Everyone was talking shit back and forth, calling their boys and their big brothers to come through, psyching themselves up like child soldiers drunk off blood in some war-ravaged African province. Jerry had been calling me a faggot and a bitch all around town, which by extension reflected on Charles, which by extension somehow reflected on Charles’s neighborhood. And that was serious, because Charles’s neighborhood did not produce any faggots or bitches, as far as he and his boys were concerned. Over the course of the week, things had metastasized from an infinitesimal problem between Jerry and me (and, of course, by extension Charles), to a meta-problem between Jerry’s Linden/Rahway hometown and Charles’s Piscataway/ Plainfield neighborhood.
Losing My Cool Page 7