Losing My Cool

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

  Before taking me back to Georgetown, Pappy, who had noticed the change in the way I was dressing and must have been eager to encourage it, took me to the mall at Bridgewater Commons and bought me several pairs of slacks, three or four shirts, and a couple of pairs of shoes and shoe trees. He didn’t make a big fuss about it, just told me to try on what I liked and put his hand on my back, told me he was proud of me. When I got back home, I gathered together my old gear—Timberland boots, Sean John jeans and Iceberg sweats, oversized leather jackets, Polo and Enyce tops, North Face bubble coats—and asked my mother to give it all to Goodwill. I put away the gold chain that Stacey had bought for me in my dresser drawer and shut the drawer tight.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Beginning to See the Light

  Returning to Georgetown was nothing like arriving that first year as a freshman. For one thing, the neighborhood no longer seemed so intimidating or foreign as it once had. It felt good and comfortable to be back. I knew my way around and had some restaurants to hit up, like Basil Thai on Wisconsin Avenue, where I first ate Thai food; or Heritage India, further up Wisconsin, where I first had Indian (just about everything was a first for me back then). Those old cobblestone streets outside the front gates and the town houses that stretch along them like rows of colorful dominoes reminded me of home this time—my new home, the place where after a year of awkward acclimation and progress that came in small fits and starts, I would begin now to create and craft myself anew and in all seriousness, to work on myself the way Nietzsche said an artist works on a canvas: meticulously and deliberately. Plus I had friends to see and catch up with. Pup and Dee and I had gotten a high pick in the housing lottery the previous spring and we were going to be living together in Village A. Playboy, Rusty, Matt, and the rest of the Harbin crew were scattered nearby.

  I had a new strategy for handling my class work, too. I had been talking with my friend Paul, who was a straight-A student seemingly without breaking a sweat, and I asked him what I could do to get better grades. “How can I get on your level?” I asked.

  What he told me sounded simplistic, but he swore it was the secret to success: “Never miss class.”

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “I’ve never missed a class, and when I go I pay complete attention. That’s it. If you just do those two things, I guarantee that you will see an improvement in your grades,” he explained. Well, I’m going to do that, I thought.

  I added a third component to the plan: I resolved to dress for class every day. Not merely put on street clothes instead of pajamas, but really get dressed, as if I were going to work or to an important meeting, as though class mattered. I was halfway through my nineteenth year now and aware for the first time in my life that being a teenager was not some permanent state, but rather just a phase that ought and must give way to adulthood. When I was a child, Pappy had always stressed to me the need to pay attention to my looks, not to primp or to be vain, but to be diligent about simple things like brushing my hair and cleaning my ears. He was impeccable in his own right, and I grew up watching him shine his own shoes and carefully fold and put away his suits. Like so many older blacks I’ve known, he placed a high premium on what was called “looking sharp.”“How you dress, son, is the first and most immediate means you have of communicating with the world,” he would often say. What his clothes had always said to me was that Pappy was a man. What the clothes my friends and I wore, the clothes we saw on BET and on the older guys at the park—the baseball caps and basketball jerseys, the big soft velvety sweats and the unlaced sneakers—what these clothes said, I became convinced by the end of freshman year, was that we had not yet grown up.

  An appearance cryogenically frozen at age fifteen can be appealing for so many reasons, none more powerful than the fact that abusing sex, reeking of ignorance, using drugs, fighting, and flunking all appear more appropriate when—regardless of numerical age—you look like something less than an adult. I decided I was ready now to take responsibility as a man for my appearance. I would be vigilant about the messages I would let it send about me. I would never again show up to class dressed as if I were about to catch a touchdown or an alley-oop, or like I was about to stick up a 7-Eleven, like I had a Glock-9 tucked into my waistband. I would wear shoes to class and shirts and sweaters and trousers or jeans that fit. I would look like a man and not a kid. Some of my friends laughed at this sartorial one-eighty, it was so extreme, but I didn’t care: If it is true that it feels good to look good, then it is equally true that it can feel gangsta to look gangsta and it can feel thugged-out to look thugged-out, or, on the other hand, it can feel smart to look smart. I wanted to feel smart.

  My professors began to treat me differently, too, I noticed. It was as if I had stepped from beneath a shapeless burka or a paste-board mask and disclosed myself to them for the first time. They were seeing me and not just staring into a blank veil or a stereotype, somewhere beneath which, presumably, I was concealed. They looked me in the eye now, and I couldn’t help but see that their body language was somehow different, too, somehow more agreeable when they spoke to me. I noticed myself responding to the way that they were responding to me and I began to participate more in the classroom and to meet with them outside of class. The gains I was seeing were exponential and compounding; they reinforced one another. At home, studying became easier and my papers got more coherent and nuanced. My confidence grew almost overnight. Paul was right; my grades shot up—I made the dean’s list.

  At the same time, I met a girl. A different kind of girl from any I’d ever met before. She was black like Pup, but also black like me. Her father was from Nigeria and her mother came from Italy. She was this tiny little girl—a full foot shorter than me and two years older—who had grown up in Manhattan, way uptown, and had just returned to Georgetown from a year spent in Tokyo. She had a funny Welsh name and spoke Dominican-style Spanish, lopping off s’s from the ends of words (“bueno dia”), as well as Italian and Japanese. She could pass for just about anything in the world other than white. In Japan, people thought she was Brazilian or, sometimes, when her hair was blown out, Indian. In the States, people assumed she was Dominican, which I did, too, when we met. In part, this was because of her bronze complexion, loose, curly locks, and thick Inwood accent. In part, it was just because she rolled around with a clique of Dominican chicks. She had gone to the Bronx High School of Science and used to want to be a chemist. Her passport had crazy stamps in it. She didn’t know how to drive a car, but in New York she didn’t need to—her feet worked fine—plus she knew the map of the subway system too well, could tell you when the F train was running on the C line and why and, depending on where you needed to go, whether you should stay toward the back of the train or move up to the front when getting off at West 4th Street. Needless to say, she took shit from no one. “At my size, I can’t afford to,” she would say with a laugh, revealing a beautiful, off-kilter smile.

  She had a brown face, closer to my father’s than my own, and was proud to define herself as black (“from the diaspora, yo!”) but she also could use the kind of words I had started to use. The kind of words Pappy used. I didn’t have to front around her—in fact, I realized, if I tried to talk to her the way I used to talk with Stacey, it would dead things from the jump—and she liked the way I dressed. She had transferred to Georgetown from U-Mass as a sophomore, spent junior year abroad, and now, as a senior, lived somewhere on the periphery of the black community. Her off-campus apartment was across the river, outside gossip’s ambit. One night she and her girlfriends wanted to go dancing at George Washington. I had my parents’ car with me that weekend and I offered to drive them (the one thing the suburban boy could do that the city girl couldn’t!). As I pushed the car through traffic on M Street, I felt her small hands reach from the backseat and caress my shaved scalp. I don’t know what she saw in me or how, but we became inseparable.

  I would go over to her apartment in Alexandria and she would light the incense or
scented oils she sometimes brought back from the Arab stores in Brooklyn or the sidewalk vendors in Greenwich Village. There was always food there—good food, chicken cutlets, lasagna, Cornish hen, main dishes and sides—she knew what she was doing, had been taking care of her father and younger siblings since she was twelve. While she cooked, I’d rifle through her CDs looking for music to play. Her collection looked nothing like mine; there was lots of Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and James Brown—shit I’d scarcely paid attention to before. The hip-hop that she did have was different, too: the Roots, Black Star, Dead Prez—the kind of rappers you just never hear in the ’hood, the kind of rappers I thought only white cats listened to and that my boy Sam used to call “Starbucks niggas.” In high school my friends and I would have preferred to listen to hard white rappers than bump these black groups.“Throw your incense in the air and wave it all around like you just don’t care!” I used to tease her when I came over. And yet, jokes aside, I found myself admiring the fact that this girl had her own taste and didn’t just listen to whatever was on the radio and BET the way I did.

  One day over winter break, Charles and Pup and I drove out to New York and met Betrys and some of her friends at a cheap Tex-Mex restaurant in the West Village called Burrito Loco or something like that. It was the first time I had seen her outside of Georgetown. Sitting there at the table with Charles and Pup, I felt so proud that I was with such an intelligent girl, a girl who was as comfortable discussing Buddhism as my friends at Union Catholic had been puffing “buddha.” I sat there and realized that I liked smart girls—something I had not figured before, when I let my peers and certain entertainers talk me into thinking that a girl was the sum of appendages attached to a rear end and nothing else.

  Being with Betrys changed my romantic worldview totally, a personal paradigm shift as powerful and irreversible as the Copernican Revolution must have been for a diehard geocentrist. I was learning for the first time to treat a woman with respect, to approach her not as a sworn adversary, but as something more than that. Far from feeling like a buster or a terry-cloth nigga or a SUFLAN (“sucka-for-love-ass nigga”) or a herb or whatever it was I was supposed to feel like, I found that I actually wanted this, I was more comfortable being like this. I didn’t lie to Betrys and I didn’t worry that she would run game on me. I never wondered what she was up to when she wasn’t at my side the way I had with Stacey, and this kind of peace of mind I found invaluable and stimulating—stimulating because it freed me from distraction and permitted me to focus on my schoolwork and to flourish. I forgot what it was like always to feel sneaky or angry or jealous, constantly to be at war with your girl. Now I just felt good—good in a childlike way, innocently, in that way where you just like a girl and she likes you and the mere fact of being in each other’s presence is enough to make you feel safe.

  Of course this is the way that so many people experience dating and love, and it is normal, but to me it was revelatory. I doubt that Stacey or Ant have ever let themselves enjoy such tranquility, and that is sad to me. But I am sure that they would want to. I imagine that this is what all of my boys would choose were we not indoctrinated to preemptively sabotage our relationships with our girls, and were our girls not trained to expect nothing better from us.

  Still, I wasn’t beyond seeking Charles’s approval with regard to the matter. On the drive home that night I asked him what he thought about Betrys, did he think that she was hotter than Stacey, something transparently insecure like that.

  “Oh, nigga, please! Stop fishing for compliments,” he said emphatically and to Pup’s amusement, then added:“Seriously, that is a woman; Stacey is a bitch.”

  Apparently, not all bitches were the same for Charles anymore, and I just hadn’t received the memo. Well, that kind of flexibility was OK with me now. I was no longer worried about maintaining some foolish consistency, and I was relieved to hear this confirmation and to hear it coming from his lips. Charles was changing and growing, too, I could see, which, I reminded myself, was really not the case for some of our other acquaintances—like Ant, who hadn’t graduated high school or left the neighborhood, and who had offered a different view about Betrys to a mutual friend: “Aw, I heard that nigga Thomas went off to college and now he be running around with a booooooouuugie bitch; that’s waaaaaack!”

  My parents, for their part, were ecstatic when they came down to D.C. and met Betrys. I could only imagine what agony they had suffered the previous four years, silently, at night, and in each other’s confidence, as they braced themselves for the very worst every time I waltzed out of the house with their car keys or the phone rang and I wasn’t there.

  At the same time that my prefabricated notions of women were falling apart, so, too, were my assumptions about what I wanted to study and become over the next three years. I had entered school pre-declared as an economics major and took both micro- and macroeconomics my freshman year to equally disastrous effect. I hadn’t really understood what economics was when I chose the field on my application. All I knew was that you could get a job at an investment bank with a degree in economics and a minor in, say, finance—whatever that was. And what I knew about investment banking was that the bonuses were outlandish and the consensus was that this was the safest and fastest way to get rich legally. Of course I can see now that I had very different first-job concerns than Pappy had back in 1959—I didn’t worry about racial discrimination, I took for granted I could get decent work; I worried instead about how to amass and flaunt wealth. What shut Ant and anyone else up the summer before I left for school was the mere mention of owning a straight path to Wall Street, perhaps the only white-bread institution before which they all would bow their op-positional heads in quiet respect.“Oh, we’ve got a college nigga in the house now, so I’d better be on my best behavior,”Ant would say at the park, and everyone would laugh. But no one would laugh (or they would stop laughing) if I replied that this college nigga was about to pull down a $100,000 bonus in just four short years.

  The decision to study econ was as easy in its way for me as it had been for Pappy to take the crushing job at that insurance company. Economics gets you respect, I knew, because ultimately money is the only lingua franca. Of course, once I actually went to class, I found the subject matter so dry that I hated myself for having leaped blindly into it. But what were the alternatives? I had never considered the alternatives. Soon I would have to decide whether to stay with my decision—to stay in a field that I found uninspiring in the extreme but which others admired from a safe distance—or to switch majors completely. Playboy mentioned art history as a possible major I would enjoy, then he lost interest in school altogether and dropped out and we never spoke about it further. Pappy told me to study something honorable. My mother told me simply to study what made me happy. Charles told me to study econ and finance, as he was doing, and to fucking get paid and stop fretting. I heard them all out and continued to fret.

  There is a basic philosophy requirement in the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown, and every student has to enroll in two introductory courses in the department, one of which is ethics. Like just about everybody else I knew, with the exception of Playboy, I had loose preconceptions about philosophy and took it for a joke or a chore. Pappy had always told me that I should read philosophy, but up to this point I never really had. When I arrived in Ethics 101, I wasn’t sure what to expect, though the truth is that I didn’t expect very much. The classroom was a large semicircular lecture hall in Healy, jam-packed with students who would never wish to be philosophers. The professor was a middle-aged woman with frizzy brown hair, the size of a ballerina, who had studied at Harvard under John Rawls and must have mentioned that fact a half-dozen times at minimum. But she was smart and engaging as well as immodest. She began class not by lecturing but by asking questions:What does it mean to live ethically? What is the purpose of ethics? And what does it mean to live “the good life”—that is, “to flourish”? These questions are sill
y until you allow yourself to take them seriously, which to my surprise I did from the start.

  “Let’s say there is a train coming full speed ahead and four people are standing on the tracks and they cannot see the train,” the professor said.“You are on a bridge watching the scene unfold and next to you is one very obese man. You realize that if you just push the fatso over the bridge, you will surely sacrifice his life, but you will also stop the train.You would lose one life in exchange for four. What do you do? Does the good of the group supersede that of the individual? Is one life worth as much as many? Are some lives worth more than others? What are the individual’s rights? Are such rights inalienable? Are there times when one must choose?”

  What I liked most was that we were not being told to think anything; rather, we were being prodded to think something. These questions and others spurred me in a way that nothing in my economics classes ever had, and I found myself returning to them even outside of class. I found myself bending my thought back upon its source and subjecting my own life to a more rigorous examination than before. The way philosophy worked, it occurred to me at some point, was the exact opposite of the way the black, hip-hop-driven culture operated. Whereas the latter dealt strictly with the surfaces of things—possessions, poses, appearances, reactions—the former was nothing but the penetration of facades. The more I read in philosophy, the more I felt like that escaped slave from Plato’s cave. I had been mistaking shadows for reality all along. The fact that this was such a sophomoric, clichéd revelation to come to in light of all my father’s efforts to expose me to learning only illustrates the degree to which hip-hop culture—that invisible glue that stuck me with RaShawn—had placed a barrier between me and even the most universal aspects of intellectual life.