After I dropped off Pup, I drove Stacey to her mother’s in Plainfield in what started as silence and escalated into shouts and screams. She hated what I was becoming—had already become. It was “wack” and I wasn’t “the same” anymore.There was “another nigga” in the picture now, too, she revealed. I had begun to expect that. Tell me something I don’t know, I thought. He was a thug, “real thorough,” she bragged. They had met at a cookout or a birthday party for her girlfriend in Roselle or someplace like that. He asked her number and she said what the hell. I was down in D.C. at the time, doing whatever it was that I did in college with fools like Playboy, she reasoned, and she was lonely or curious or bored— and what did I expect, really? Did I not see this coming while I was running around using “big-ass words” like life was some giant spelling bee, talking “that bullshit” and dressing “like a fag fresh out the Village”? It was my fault, not hers, she said. I didn’t say anything, just ground my teeth (nervous habit) and tried to keep the car steady on the road, which was no small task.
Then she told me something that I didn’t know: “I’m pregnant, nigga. I missed my period last month and an EPT test confirmed that shit.” My heart practically leaped onto the dashboard; Pappy’s worst fear made flesh, I thought, only thank Jesus or Jah or Allah I had been in another part of the country when it happened. It’s not yours, I told myself, but the revelation still caught me obliquely like a sucker punch to the side of the head. I was dazed.
“You’re what!” I screamed, hurling the car to a stop on the road’s shoulder and smacking the button for the hazards like it had stolen something from me. I cut the ignition and took a deep breath, trying with what might I could channel through my gaze to grip Stacey with my eyes and wring out any last droplet of familiarity from her defiant and unrecognizable face. There was none left. She was pregnant, she repeated matter-of-factly, as though she were telling me she had hay fever or oily skin, and there was contempt in her eyes, not remorse. She loved her baby’s father and had decided to keep the child and move to Newark, and that was that.
“You’re having the baby and moving to Newark. Are you serious?” I said, sounding more like a concerned parent than the lover I had been just hours ago. As my mind raced, my stomach felt like a tangle of drawstrings being pulled tighter from every direction. “You don’t work! How are you going to support a child? You’re only eighteen! What does this motherfucker even do?”
“Nigga, he sells crack!” she shrieked, and her voice and that wall she had so meticulously erected fractured. “He be on the block. What the fuck do you do, huh? You think you better than niggas ’cause you fucking go to college? Fuck you!”
I couldn’t tell whether she was telling me the truth or simply trying to amplify my pain, but I let the interrogation drop right there. How do I argue with that? What logical assertions do I posit against that? And what would be the point? “Well, I hope you’ll be very happy,” is all I could say, and the car plunged into a deep silence like the lull that precedes a tsunami, like the slow, peaceful quiet that comes over the ocean as it draws itself back and readies to devour. Soon, but not quite yet, the destruction would be total, and whatever we had shared would be wiped away; I knew that. For the moment, though, we sat there, Stacey and me, side by side, locked in a miserable stalemate or undeclared truce. The orangey light from a streetlamp filtered through the moon roof and glared off the wetness on her cheeks. It must have shone from mine, too.
I deposited Stacey in her mother’s driveway, and when she got out she slammed the door violently. The sound echoed with the ring of finality. I turned off my cell phone to prevent myself from calling after her, after the girl I had loved very imperfectly for four years, and pulled out of there—out of her driveway and out of that part of my life. I let the cool night air whip through the window and wash over my face as I drove. The air felt good, and I decided not to go straight home. I drove around for what seemed like hours, through Plainfield, through the black sides of Fanwood and Scotch Plains and Westfield, through the side streets we had driven together so many times before on the way to the mall or to the movies, past the familiar houses of all the boys and girls who only a year ago had defined my horizons for me and who now I knew I wouldn’t see again. I drove and I thought about Stacey.
I remembered when her brother was born and they took him home from the hospital and she held the little boy in her arms and looked happy and proud and nothing like a mother, but rather like a child herself—just a good-looking child—as she stroked the baby’s trembling little back and kissed his fat, flushed cheeks. I remembered when, after she had won some local beauty pageant in Rahway or Linden or someplace like that, her family and I piled into her mother’s red Tahoe and headed to the nearest Applebee’s to celebrate and Stacey put her arm around me in the backseat and said shyly, “See, I got some talent,” and this girl, this fucked-up girl who lived like tomorrow didn’t matter, seemed like the sweetest thing in the world to me right then.
I remembered, too, when Pappy tried in vain for nearly a month to get Stacey to be serious about school, convincing her skeptical mother to let him tutor her daughter in the evenings for free, after he had finished a full day with his paying clients. Why on earth did he assign himself that thankless task? It was in part an unspoken favor to me, but in part I also think it was simply because black girls like Stacey just break Pappy’s heart. I imagine on some level they must remind him of his own beautiful teenage mother. He had been too young to heal or protect her when she could have used a Pappy badly.
Every night after Stacey left our house, with Pappy’s pink and pastel green test-prep material nestled under her arm—which everyone including Stacey knew she would never use, and which Pappy photocopied and gave her anyway—Pappy would tap on my bedroom door. He’d ask if he could come in, and would shake his head, saying things like You know, Stacey’s eyes just light the whole room and She has such a smile when she wants to have one; she really is very smart, you know and She’s got a sharp memory, but I’m afraid that girl will never do the kind of work it takes to put that mind to any good use; she doesn’t want to do it, it’s that simple. And I remembered knowing how right he was and feeling sad and like I wanted to protect Stacey myself, but understanding full well, as my father must have understood about his mother, that what was coming for her was more powerful than anything I could summon against it.
This is how I would like to remember my girl Stacey, then—sweet, smart, and innocent like a child, with big bright eyes that lit the room and a smile that made Pappy smile—but I cannot. In a different context, maybe, but in the context we grew up in, all the noises inside her head and outside her door snuffed out her potential before she even had breasts or hair underneath her arms. By eighteen, she was a statistic: another undereducated, unwed black teen mother doing her small part to bolster the 70 percent single-mother birthrate everyone bemoans.
I doubt I would have realized all this that night in the car, but it’s true all the same: In the sixty-three years between the moment when my smart and talented grandmother had Pappy at seventeen, embarrassing her family and her church by doing so, and the moment when Stacey got pregnant at the turn of the millennium, becoming too cool for school and embarrassing no one, black life had changed in dramatic ways. Human and civil rights were in, hip-hop was in, nihilism was in, self-pity was in, the street was in, and pride and shame were out—two more cultural anachronisms confined to the African-American dustbins of history, like jazz music and zoot suits. Whether I knew all that then or not, I knew enough to sense that this was not the way things should be. When I got home in the middle of the night, I woke up my parents and let them know that I was safe.
That was the start of a strange and lonely summer for me. I often had difficulty sleeping that summer. At night I dreamed that I was losing my teeth. I would wake up startled, cupping my mouth and panting. During the day, I either went to work at my dismal data entry job or hid out at my parents’ house. Clarence wa
s living at home then, too, but he worked the graveyard shift doing tech support out in White Plains and our paths seldom seemed to cross.
Occasionally, I did see Charles, though not that often. Under Pappy’s guidance he and I had applied mostly to the same schools and pledged to each other that we would go wherever we both were admitted, regardless. When it became clear that I had gotten into better schools than Charles, I didn’t even hesitate to break the agreement (sometimes I think he would have done the same thing, other times I’m not so sure). We entered our respective schools both with an eye toward econ majors, the same vision of lavish Wall Street paychecks dancing in our heads like sweet sugarplums or thick video hoes. The similarities stopped there, however. He had done extraordinarily well that first year, much better than I had done, and the experience of going away hadn’t jarred him as it had me. When school let out, he slid back into his neighborhood and his old routines without friction—smoothly—almost like he’d never left. He knew how to turn it on and off, I guessed. Why couldn’t I?
The first few times we hung out were awful, stilted affairs. We were like two people who have run out of things to say to each other but who make a go at it anyway, either because it seems the right thing to do or because not to do so would extinguish the relationship outright, and that is frightening.We used to finish each other’s sentences in high school, but now it was as though he spoke Latin and I spoke Cantonese.The times he visited my house, it occurred to me he was really coming to see my father. This irritated me as much as it did when on the flimsiest pretext he used my computer to check his final grades (dean’s list). I was in no hurry to look up my own marks in front of him (academic probation). Charles and I were on two separate pages of perhaps two different books; I began to worry, which was true but not entirely. The truth is that when shit hit the fan with Stacey, it was Charles I called and it was Charles who took it upon himself to lift my spirits.
“First of all, she’s just a bitch,” he reminded me over the phone the day after my disastrous trip to Glen Ridge. He was eating some crunchy piece of fruit and talking with his mouth full, very calmly, very authoritatively.“Bitches are like yellow lights, son: You just run through them.”
“Yeah, I know, I know,” I said, “but the thing is—”
“You have to keep that in mind at all times, nigga, I’m serious!” he erupted, taking another bite and pausing to regain the composure he momentarily had lost. “OK, Thomas? You gotta do that, bro.”
“OK.”
“All right. Second of all, and this is for your own good, I’m taking you to a strip club tonight to prove to you once and for all that bitches are all the same. Trust me, I know this.”
He scooped me that evening in his mother’s navy blue Nautica minivan and we drove out to some far-flung shit hole in Sayreville or Perth Amboy, where it reeked of cigarettes and beer, as if a chain-smoking janitor had mopped the floors with buckets of Budweiser. Most of the dancers were Puerto Rican or ethnic white and most of the clientele were upward of forty and obese.
“See? All the same,” he said, motioning around him as we took seats at the horseshoed stage. On it, a gorgeous Latina with an I’m-not-even-in-this-room expression sank to her knees and transformed herself—like an X-rated Decepticon—from a woman into a receptacle for crumpled dollar bills and jeers. A bleach-blond waitress wearing a low-cut tank top asked us what we’d have to drink. I’m not sure what I ordered, but it must have been soft since I had never gotten around to getting a fake ID. We sat there for a while, swapping theories on how pretty women end up in such disgusting spots, nursing our Cokes or Sprites, laughing like old times. Then Charles said, “Pick a girl, any one; I’ll buy you a dance.” I excused myself to go to the bathroom and when I came back I said I wanted the snow white Boricua in the corner with the pillowy breasts and tongue ring. Charles called her over, whispered something in her ear, and she led me by the hand to a back room that was half-obscured from the main floor by a dusty black velvet curtain, which didn’t completely close.
Through the gap between the curtain and the wall I could make out Charles, silhouetted against the black light radiating from the stage. He was staring at me with a strange look on his face, I thought, though it was too dark to say for sure just what that look might mean. He must have told the girl I had gotten dumped, because the first thing she said to me was that she would make me forget whoever had broken my heart. “Thank you,” I said, and she straddled my legs and took off her top. She smiled at me sympathetically and it was impossible to tell how old she was.
As she gyrated, I neither forgot Stacey nor became convinced all bitches were the same. For example, this one’s chest, which she told me if I touched would cheer me up, was far larger and more beautiful than Stacey’s, but Stacey made me laugh in a way I used to think was priceless. That was a significant difference, I thought, and the truth is that I missed Stacey badly right then. I missed the real Stacey, not the hardened street chick I had brought with me to Mary’s party. The real Stacey, the shy girl with the talent, she was inhumed somewhere deep beneath layers and layers of hollow facades, like one of those Russian nesting dolls.
I tried to keep my thoughts off Stacey, though, and told the Puerto Rican on my lap that she was probably right. I cupped her in my hands and let her earn her money. She felt extremely soft, softer than a regular girl, with that invisible stripper film of baby powder, lotion, and sweat coating her freshly shaved skin and grinding into the fabric of my jeans. When the dance had ended, she stroked my face and asked if I was better now. “Yes,” I lied, and I decided to pay her myself instead of asking Charles for the money.
“Want to see something?” she said. I nodded and she pulled her bikini to the side and pointed to where her clitoris was pierced. The way she did it, with great care and even a little pride, was unspeakably sad, and I couldn’t tell whether she was just passing time between dances or revealing her deepest secret to me.
Did I learn anything tonight? I wondered after we had left. Yes, several things. I learned that women are more powerful than hangovers, and there is no sexual hair of the dog to numb the ache. I learned that no one—not bitches or niggas—is really the same. I learned that I was not Charles nor could I ever be, and though I loved him like a brother (I knew that, too), it would be in my interest to stop mimicking him—and sooner rather than later. I was fine with all of those things, it occurred to me.
“Oh, you know what, my dude?” Charles said to me once we had gotten back on Route 9,“Abyss is right over there.You remember that fucking place?” In My Lifetime Vol. 1 knocked on the car stereo. Charles had been rapping along to it as he drove, not doing whole verses, which he knew by heart, but improvisationally finishing lines here and there, like a hype man at a concert or an adlibber in the booth. “How real is this?” Jay-Z asked rhetorically through the speakers and Charles echoed from the driver’s seat. Jay’s pitch was high and Charles’s was low, but they both spoke with the same tone of assurance, a remarkable self-assurance, it seemed to me.
I could see the parking lot surrounding Club Abyss looming on the horizon and swarming with bumper-to-bumper traffic. We had to slow as we passed. Most of the cars and trucks pulling in were souped-up whips, with big chrome rims and low-profile tires. Some had miniature TV screens set into the backs of their headrests, which flashed changing colors or cast a consistent glow through the tinted rear windows. The ones that gave off a steady light had nothing playing on them; they were simply turned on. They had no function but to broadcast their own existence into the empty, indifferent night. Back in the day, I recalled, Club Abyss had seemed a kind of cathedral—a high church of ass and mystery and adventure—or some vague opportunity, a chance to test out how cool and down I was, to put to use the body language and slang I had been rehearsing in front of the mirror and at school. But from the road this night, it didn’t look like any of that. It just looked like a desperate box in the middle of nothing, a forgettable blemish on the side of an ugly tho
roughfare that connected one nowhere to the next.
“Should we go and check it out?” Charles asked.
“Nah, I’m too tired,” I said, looking out the window of his mother’s minivan at the neon lights creeping by.
“Well, do you at least feel better now?” he asked, and I could feel his eyes on me.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, and that was the truth.
As the summer wore down, I spent most of my free time taking walks with my mother—long, meandering, soul-searching walks through Fanwood and Scotch Plains, around the high school, around the elementary school where Clarence had been menaced, through the park—long, peaceful walks that weaved through streets so familiar I could close my eyes and get home were it not for the traffic. Or I played chess with my father, sometimes for hours on end, before taking my leave and digging through his vast library, reading, reading book after book after book until I fell asleep by myself in my room. I had lived in the midst of written treasure for nineteen years somehow without ever having noticed it, I realized that summer, as if the books in our house used to be wrapped in invisible dust jackets or hidden behind mirrors.
But that’s an exaggeration—of course I had seen them; they were everywhere. Startled friends would point them out to me when they came over, timidly, as if they thought Pappy was a sadist and this was his torture chamber. There were also those times when my brother and I joked that Pappy’s shelves were like a kind of fucked-up wallpaper (they completely blocked all the walls) or a cruel obstacle course through which we were forced to maneuver like clumsy gerbils (they partially blocked some of the doors).Why couldn’t we just have a normal living room with a home theater in it like so-and-so or so-and-so, we sometimes asked the gods to no discernible answer. Most of the time, though, we didn’t complain about the piles of books or pay them any mind. They were simply there, a physical reality that was not good or bad, just a fact, like a chandelier or a potted plant.
Losing My Cool Page 11