That night as usual I went to New South with Dee to grab some dinner. Dee was like my shadow back then. He was this sweet kid with yellow, almost Chinese skin and long cornrows, which he would tap instead of scratch when they itched so as not to disturb the careful weave coursing across his scalp. He came from a very rough part of D.C. (“the uhrea,” he called it in his accent) and sometimes, when I heard him on the phone with his mother, I would think it was his little sister or a neighborhood friend he was talking to. He lived below me in Harbin and buried himself in video games, slam poetry, hardcore hip-hop, and sentimental R & B. He had little to no money and mostly kept to himself. If I was at sea with schoolwork, Dee was like a man overboard being ravaged repeatedly against a wall of rock by the crashing surf. I liked Dee a lot and I made it a point to include him in anything I was doing, and I think he was grateful to me for that.
The two of us sauntered down the steps into the cafeteria, and I noticed three or four basketball players milling around the foyer in shower shoes and Hoyas sweats. I was friendly with two or three players on the team, older heads, but the rest of them I said what’s up to and nothing more. These were what’s-up guys. As I rolled past, I threw the usual head nod their way and kept it moving. Then I felt a tug on my arm. The Burkina Fasoian had my wrist locked in a vise grip; he wheeled me around. “Yo, the fuck is up?” I said.
“You know what is up, my nigger,” he said, sounding like a castrated Dikembe Mutombo in his melodic African-francophone English.
“Huh?”
“You cannot disrespect me like this, do you hear me?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You cannot disrespect me!”
I wrenched myself loose from his astonishing grip. “What are you even talking about?”
“Today. This afternoon. You spray my girl. You cannot disre - spect me like this.” All of a sudden I realized why he was so hot. I had forgotten all about that. Now I looked around; his boys all were watching me. Dee looked nervous, but he was loyal and stood with me. Burkina Fasoian Dude was tall, like six-foot-six, but not scary. I had a difficult time believing he would get violent, and decided there was no way I could let him scold me.
“Man, fuck that bitch,” I said with affected temerity and in a voice that sounded more like Charles’s than mine. The Burkina Fasoian’s eyes bulged, the vein on his neck popped like he was getting exercise, and before he could respond, one of his teammates, who up till that point had stayed off to the side, flew at me.
“Nigga, you better show some got’damn respect!” he said, with his Los Angeles inflection.
Now, this brother was enormous, played backup center—and if the Hoyas are known for anything at all, it is for their Herculean low-post. He was a legitimate seven feet, a jet-black Frankenstein—fearsome-looking, a brother you’d be seeing in your sleep. I didn’t know this guy well, but some of the girls called him Free-to-Mess, because shortly after freshman orientation, he had told each of them individually that he was “free to mess.” With his chest in my face, Free-to-Mess towered over me, glowering, munching on a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Pops, of all things.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, this doesn’t have nothing to do with you,” I said to him, aware I may have gotten a little exuberant a moment earlier and catching out of the corner of my eye a glimpse of Dee, who, I noticed now, was even smaller than me!
“Nigga, you heard my patna; don’t be disrespecting him like that again, dig?” Free-to-Mess said, shoveling Pops into his mouth, high up over my head, even as he spoke. I didn’t say anything, wasn’t trying to escalate the situation. “He won’t fight you, feel me? But I’m red-shirted this year, nigga, I will.”
The third player, who remained seated on the stairs, blue bandana tied neatly around his clean-shaven head, didn’t say a word, looked at me. I scanned my brain for plausible options.What would Charles do? Charles might actually throw down, try to snuff the giant in the solar plexus and then play it as it came. Well, that was a universe of pain I wasn’t trying to visit. What would Pappy do? Pappy never would be in this situation in the first place, fool! My heart plummeted through me like a cinder block.
“Nigga, say I won’t just pour these Co’n Pops all on top of yo’ head, patna? Then whatchu gonna do?” Free-to-Mess was egging me on now, and I knew enough about these things to know that it was time to leave.
“Man, whatever,” is all I could manage to mumble, and I broke toward the public space of the dining room, firing off one of those God-if-only-you-let-me-get-out-of-this-I’ll-be-good-I-promise appeals, praying Free-to-Mess would let it drop and not follow me inside talking shit in front of everyone in the cafeteria. Meanwhile Dee, who had spent weeks with all these players in the extra-help summer session for black and Latino students on the edge, said something conciliatory on my behalf, and to my relief they walked off in the opposite direction.
I ate a quick, tasteless dinner, then excused myself from Dee’s company and shut myself inside my room. My nerves were on fire, temples throbbing with anger and a lot of wounded pride. I had come to Georgetown thinking things like this couldn’t happen anymore. That I would be tough and everyone else would be soft. Yet there I was, back in the same position I had been in a year earlier with Jerry, only now I was on my own. I snatched the cordless phone off my roommate’s desk and dialed a fraction of Charles’s number up in New England before slamming the receiver back down on its base. Charles was in school, too, and he had his own shit to deal with. He wasn’t my keeper. I sat back down; I didn’t know what to do.
What was I supposed to do? Was I supposed to call my boys back home who didn’t go to college? Call Stacey and have her get one of her drug-dealing cousins to come down? Call my brother and see if any of his or Michael’s peoples from the military—older dudes who smoked and drank hard and considered me a little brother—might come up? This was foolish as hell and I knew it; I was in college, not in the street. Why was I fronting like I was in the street? Why did I always front like I was in the street?
Of course Pappy was no longer at my side to guide me, and I missed him something awful right then. I wanted to sit across the chessboard from him and search his face for answers. As I sat in my room fuming, I thought about him and I could hear his voice inside my head:“Son, slow down and think. Remember Bismarck’s balanced-alternatives approach? Always keep more than one arrow in your quiver.” Such lines never could hold a candle to Tupac’s When-We-Ride-on-Our-Enemies philosophy in the mind of a black teen with raging hormones and sometimes-violent girl problems. Yet here I was, years later, recalling Pappy’s words, not Pac’s. They must have seeped in deeper than I had known. “You don’t immediately have to respond to anyone, and sometimes your response can be not to respond at all,” I could hear him say. “You have an option A, an option B, an option C, an A-1, A-2, A-3, son; take your time, be cool. Don’t react blindly; don’t allow anyone to make you jump; keep your options open.” Pappy’s Bismarckian flow spouted and welled in my head as though a stopper had been loosed. What if my option A was not to respond at all? I asked myself.
As the days went by and the calendar continued to flip, nothing further came of my confrontation with the bottom of the Hoya bench. None of the players stepped to me again or bothered me in any way. And yet I wasn’t in the clear by any means. When I sat down at the black tables in the cafeteria, no one really looked me in the eye. I felt like my jokes drew less laughter than they used to. I received fewer and fewer invitations to chill. I swore I could detect eyes rolling in my direction and shit-talk rippling out from behind my back, lapping against my ears. More and more, it began to sink in: I had been excommunicated from the black community at Georgetown. Of course, I still had my boys: Pup, Dee, some upperclassmen and -women who were so close to graduating they no longer kept up with campus gossip. These were my black friends. But by and large, there were no two ways about it. I was an outcast, an untouchable, no longer at home or welcome in the only microcosm I had eve
r bothered to know.
When I had attacked Ashley with my water gun, I couldn’t really say why I hated her so much; the feeling was far more visceral than it was rational. I acted on a whim, an unthinking desire. Had I been in the presence of another black friend, I am sure I would have suppressed it completely. But standing there with Playboy, an outsider, a guy who didn’t and truly couldn’t understand all the vagaries of the caste system I lived in, I felt all of a sudden moved to rebel against this hierarchy, not just to reject it but also to defile it. I think I felt compelled to reject and defile whatever part of myself there was that still believed in it.
Thrust into my new role as persona non grata in Georgetown black society, the more I marinated on the significance of this random, pathetically melodramatic turn of events in my life, the more the absurdity of the situation started to press its full weight upon me. For as far back as I could think, I had followed and tried to fit in with cats who seemed black, who seemed real, to the exclusion of all else. I had allowed these brothers on TV and on my block—the majority of whom did not have shit figured out—to participate in my own self-definition.As a child I worshiped what I saw on BET. In high school, I still worshiped what I saw on BET and I rolled with a posse of self-proclaimed “niggers” who were not going to make it and they knew it. Now, at an elite private college, I still worshiped what I saw on BET, and I had spent the majority of my first year barely getting by academically, killing myself to belong in a hierarchy whose ruling caste was made up of C-walking swing guards and forwards and their coed sycophants, some of whom could freestyle at house parties but could not read at grade level. Was any of this what Pappy had sent me to college to achieve: To watch and emulate BET all day? To clash with a seven-foot Southern Californian wielding a bowl of Corn Pops? To debate an enraged and rumored-to-be-impotent African, who, all things considered, was really a pretty nice guy but who was trying as hard as I was to fit in and be hard? Had I really come all the way to Georgetown just to hop over to Howard any chance I could get in hopes of peeping a large butt or Cam’ron or some lesser-known MC? No, no, no, of course not—this wasn’t it.
CHAPTER SIX
You Can’t Go Home Again
You can’t go home again. From where I sat in the driver’s seat, Stacey to the right of me, there was a whole lot of truth in those five words. “Why did you buy those shoes?” she wanted to know. She was referring to the black leather Pradas I’d just exchanged a week’s salary for. “And them pants, those shits is so . . . tight.” I had begun dressing differently; buying new clothes with the money I was making doing temp work at KPMG in Short Hills, New Jersey. According to one of my brother’s friends I was beginning to resemble “a gay poet.”
“Do you know I’m actually a twenty-eight waist?” I asked Stacey. “All these years I’ve been wearing a thirty-six, I didn’t even know my right size.” I looked over at her. The most familiar face in the world. Somehow it was one of the strangest now, too. She was eighteen, all curves and ripe flesh with copper in it, fresh out of high school, no plans, hadn’t bothered to take the SAT, didn’t care. “I think we should take a trip to Italy or France or somewhere, see some shit, you know?” I said, really just to have something to say.
“Italy, nigga? Them white niggas at school got you buggin’,” she said.
I laughed. “Why not?”
She rolled her eyes.
Since the day I met her when I was fifteen, I wanted her anytime I saw her. Now was no different. My right hand rested on her left thigh. I pulled the car into an empty corner of Tamaques Park, took out the keys, and kissed her. She tasted like bubble gum. I probably tasted like San Pellegrino, which I’d started drinking all the time and which was harder to find in our part of Jersey than in Georgetown. We fucked in the backseat of the car, but she was gone, off in another world I couldn’t come to.
“What’s wrong?” I said when I finished.
“Nothing,” she said, looking into the distance, refastening the buttons on her fly. She could fill out a pair of Miss Sixtys like no one I had ever known. I flicked the condom out the window, put the car in reverse, turned the music all the way up.
It was just getting dark when we got to Pup’s crib in Maple-wood. I had a lot of trouble finding it, missed several turns, went back and forth on what turned out to be the correct road at least four times before breaking down and asking for directions at a Mobil station. “Don’t you know where you goin’?” Stacey said in a tone I found less than friendly.
“No, it’s been a minute since I’ve been out around this way,” I confessed. She sucked her teeth and drummed her acrylic nails against the wood grain in the armrest. It was a habit of hers, which up until then I hadn’t noticed drove me crazy. The attendant explained to me my error, and we were off.
Pup came downstairs, gave me a pound, and climbed into the backseat. He had grown up in Newark, not far from where we were, then got shipped in ninth grade to a little Christian boarding school somewhere in rural Pennsylvania, far from the Jupiterian pull of the corner, which his parents knew was powerful enough to drag brothers right out of their houses and into its orbit like tiny satellites. Pup told me once that his father drove taxis in Manhattan. I don’t know what his mother did. Somehow the two had managed to put all three of their sons through boarding school and college (his brothers were at Duke), which seemed to me like a kind of miracle.
At Georgetown, Pup and I lived across the bathroom from each other, the only black kids on our floor. We became fast friends over video games, pickup basketball, and midnight hero sandwiches. He was a different kind of black than I had ever known—first-generation, the son of Ghanaian immigrants, not the descendant of Southern slaves like Stacey and me. He had another culture, another point of reference; the images he saw here weren’t addressing him specifically. Which is to say, he hadn’t been taught to despise himself from the moment he could talk the way Stacey had been and the way I would have been were Pappy not so hell-bent on preventing that from happening. Which is also to say, he was African-American (in the literal sense) as much as he was black. The difference such an accident of time and birth can make, I was learning, is both subtle and difficult to overestimate.
Besides that, Pup was short and muscle-bound, bald, the color of a Hershey bar, and the owner of an infectious laugh. I’d seen him disarm the hardest brothers and the aloofest white boys with the same easy smile. His presence in the car, as the poet said, momentarily evaporated whatever disagreeables hung in the air between Stacey and me.The three of us sped up the Parkway toward Mary’s house in Glen Ridge.
All day I had ricocheted between fits of excitement and stark raving terror at the thought of bringing Stacey with me to a party full of college friends—all of whom, with the exception of Pup and some Indian kid named Raj, were white. “Do you want to meet some of my friends?” I’d asked her the day before, trying to sound mad casual, expecting she’d say no.
“I don’t care either way,” she told me.“If you want me to come, I’ll come.”
Shit went sour from the drop.“Would you like a beer or something to drink?” I heard a girl ask Stacey as we walked through the kitchen and out onto the back deck.
“No,” was all she replied, with no smile and disinclined to let the conversation proceed any further than it had, which was nowhere. There was even something belligerent about the way she said it.The girl flashed a sheepish grin and looked dejected or confused. Pup stepped in and made her laugh and I heard their laughter behind me as I shut the screen door.
“Why can’t you just chill and be nice, baby?” I whispered in Stacey’s ear as we went to a wooden bench and sat on it, overlooking the rolling green of the deep, landscaped lawn. I thought the lawn looked nice.
“The bitch asked me if I wanted a drink, I said no, what the fuck else do you want?” Stacey snapped. The look on her face—how many times have I seen that look; and on how many faces like Stacey’s? It was this wall of a look that said, among other things: I
’m not interested in you at all.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that night that my two worlds—what was left of my Union Catholic past and what looked like my Georgetown future—were about as easy to fit together as square pegs and triangular holes. The more I tried to coax Stacey into sociable conversation, the more she fortified her wall. I felt a mixture of embarrassment and resentment toward her. It wasn’t that she did or said any one specific thing I could pinpoint, or anything that taken on its own would constitute such an egregious affront. It was more like there was this air about her, a certain steez or way of carrying herself, an antisocial steez, which made her cold and hard, uncivil.
Like almost all of my old friends, Stacey was a paradox. She had grown up middle-class in a leafy section of Plainfield with two cars parked behind the motorized garage door and a refrigerator full of steak and Asti Spumante (a sparkling white wine of questionable taste, sure, but a sparkling white wine all the same!). An illiterate Chinese rice farmer in a paddy field or a São Paulo orphan in a favela scrap heap would be hard-pressed to differentiate Stacey’s lot from Mary’s. But economics doesn’t explain everything. It would be equally true to say that in Camden, Newark, or Harlem, Stacey was no interloper. She could blend into the most poverty-stricken black ghettos like a spotted leopard in the sub-Saharan brush—seamlessly—and not just owing to the color of her skin, but also because she possessed the requisite savoir faire to navigate that forbidding terrain. She had a very convincing street pose, a pose that she, like all of us at one point or another, had to learn and to master (no one’s born that way)—a pose that now she either wouldn’t or couldn’t turn off. Perhaps she’d been doing it so long it wasn’t even a pose anymore; that was also a possibility.
The way she was acting was as familiar to me as my face—how many times had I myself tried to be like this?—and at the same time it was new, new from this vantage, newly incomprehensible. The pose no longer seemed so irresistible to me; it was ridiculous or gratuitous all of a sudden, anything but cool. Observing her on the deck that night, far away from her usual habitat, I felt my nose close; her hold on me was broken. For the very first time since we had met, I could imagine myself without her. Whatever stamp of approval her presence on my arm had provided me in the past, I no longer felt I needed it. The rest of the party, as far as it involved Stacey and me, is a haze of forced smiles and awkward speechlessness.
Losing My Cool Page 10