Losing My Cool

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

  Still, moved as I was by philosophy, I had deep reservations about giving up on econ and a shot at Wall Street and all that that implied. Like Weber’s hardworking Protestants and the rappers and ballers I had long idolized, I wanted the whole world to see and know that I was one of the elect.

  The truth is that most white students I knew couldn’t care less about the humanities or the liberal arts, the concept of a canonized Western literature and the idea of learning for learning’s sake being as antiquated and, at the end of the day, irrelevant to them as it is to most Americans. For the black students, however, it seemed less that there was indifference to the humanities than there was open hostility to the idea of spending time in subjects like philosophy or art history or literature—this was seen as bizarre or foolish, perhaps even irresponsible and decadent. It was an outlook I could understand. Everything I had learned outside the house, from TV and in the ’hood, told me that book learning for edification was something only touched white kids could afford or want to do. This prejudice existed on every social level I encountered in the black community. On the one hand, the cats back home who didn’t go to college, they weren’t about to be impressed by the cogito or the importance of the Italian Renaissance in the progression of representational painting—not because they weren’t smart, but simply because they didn’t care.They don’t give a damn about the noises in Raskolnikov’s head or whether niggas can or cannot step in the same river twice. What does any of this have to do with their reality? Food for thought, you say? What Heraclitus eats don’t make me shit, they retort.

  What they can and do respect is that almighty dollar. Like the Notorious B.I.G., they love the dough. It seems perfectly acceptable to them that you would study finance or management or even marketing or cosmetology, or that you would go to law school (although another three years does seem a bit excessive). But it doesn’t seem acceptable at all that you would contemplate the idea of personhood all day long and go to a fancy school just so that you can bring home a $35,000 paycheck and drive a used Toyota Camry (they can drive something hotter than that working at UPS, they point out, and they don’t have to waste four years in college to do it). The idea that there is something to be had from education that somehow goes beyond material compensation is foreign and naïve to them—education is a means to an end and no end itself. They do not phrase it like this, but that is exactly what they mean when they say: You be on that bullshit.

  That is what I saw in the black community back home. On the other hand, there were not nearly enough counterbalancing examples at the university to model myself on either. The overwhelming majority of the black students with status were either affirmative action recipients struggling mightily just to get by, or they were athletes on scholarship, or INROADS and Sponsors for Educational Opportunity all-stars charging full-speed ahead into high-powered corporate gigs. In the summers the latter went to intern at Gold-man Sachs and McKinsey & Company while cramming for the LSAT on the side. They were gifted and elite, sure, but they were street smart, too, they were quick to point out; they had no time to gaze at a Caravaggio or wax romantic about dropping madeleines into teacups.

  Some of these students would freely admit that they were anti-intellectuals: “I’m a hustler,” a classmate said with pride, “it just so happens that school is my hustle.” These black kids tended to want the same bourgeois material wealth that all the rappers and gangsters are dying trying to get; they just went about procuring it in a safer way. What drove them was the idea that they may one day buy back some of that legitimacy they mortgaged away over the years going to white schools and hitting the books. And how would they hope to do this? By going into entertainment law, for instance, and making seven figures representing actors and rappers. Or by going into commercial real-estate development or by working for a hedge fund or private-equity firm out in Connecticut and making so much paper that no one could begrudge them for it. Anything was possible, really—the sole unacceptable scenario was the one in which the material compensation would be less than ample enough to muffle all the player-hating.

  In no way was I immune to such thinking. It is rare that you meet a black student who is, even at the best schools—especially at the best schools. We see images of athletes and rappers 24/7, but most of us simply have never seen a black person devoted to that other form of wealth, the life of the mind, and so we do not imagine that this is a feasible—let alone a luxurious—way to live. I had seen my father strive to live this way, to live his life inside books, and still, it struck me as an impossible fate for me to win. Part of me could not relinquish the desire to be a banker. Wall Street was such an obvious destination for a black kid steeped in hip-hop culture to want to end up at. The same machismo, the same allegiance to material wealth, the same condescension toward reflective thought, the me-myself-and-I worldview that was so prized in the street was equally exalted in the world of finance.

  I used to lie awake at night, fantasizing about the day that, as a young hotshot director at Morgan Stanley or someplace like that, I would roll back to Plainfield, triumphantly, in a drop-top Modena or a tinted-up Geländewagen. I would be a black Caesar astride a six-figure chariot crammed full of booty and speeding toward Rome—victorious, chrome rims spinning, arm dangling out the window, gold Rolex Day-Date glistening in the sunlight, jealous jaws dropping in my glorious wake. I would show everyone I wasn’t a sucker for having gone off to college. These images of hip-hop largesse were so vivid, I could even hear the CD I would be playing—Baby’s “#1 Stunna.” I was longing to ball.

  For all my powers of projection, though, I failed to anticipate the extent to which daily exposure to serious ideas and methods of thinking would alter me. I didn’t realize that once you leave home and see new and more complex things, you might just lose the desire to measure yourself by the old, provincial standards; they cease to motivate you even when you want them to; you set your eyes on new and higher (though they used to seem lower) sights. More and more, even as I tried, even as I willed myself to do it, I couldn’t care what a Stacey or a Marion thought about me and my new lot in life, whether I would make more money than them or not. My points of reference had changed dramatically and definitively.

  Concepts such as time and independence and freedom began to strike me on an intuitive level as more luxurious and precious than foreign cars and necklaces of gold. The thought that I could make a living reading or thinking was inspiring and even humbling. Of course, this is a kind of success that you cannot wear on your sleeve. You cannot “floss” the fruits of intellectual labor, however sweet, in the ’hood the way you floss a Range Rover on dubs. But I came to realize that I didn’t really care about that, primarily because I no longer intended to be in the ’hood in the first place. I didn’t know where, but it had started to occur to me for the first time that there were other places I might want to go.

  Anthony Perry, the St. Anthony phenom, was also at Georgetown in those days. He was two years ahead of me and I used to see him around, though not very often. He wasn’t at the parties I went to, and neither were we in any of the same classes. From what I heard and could see, he played basketball and kept mainly to himself and his family. I think I recall he had children. He was not a huge campus personality. He was not loud and flashy like so many of his teammates (even the ones who had smaller names than his—especially the ones who had smaller names than his), but he stood out to me more so than the rest. He had a very New Jersey way of dressing, and his clothes—big T-shirts, big blue jeans draped over drooping Timberland tongues, leather Avirex jackets, knit skullies—reminded me of Michael’s back in the day. He was quiet, even shy-seeming, with dark skin and huge innocent-looking eyes that probably had seen a lot, and which seemed to me deceptively out of place on his muscular, six-foot-three-inch frame.

  I never said anything more than hello to him—and I doubt he had any recollection of those two awkward times we shared a court in Jersey City years ago, when he was considered the fourth best
player in the country and I was not—but I liked Perry. I rooted for Perry. He gave the impression of being beyond the petty bullshit with which most of the other players were consumed. Maybe it was the St. Anthony humility and drive that Hurley instilled as a rule in each of his players. Or maybe I simply projected all of this on him and he wasn’t like that at all. I don’t know. I do know that things had not turned out for him the way everyone had assumed they would and that his once-brilliant NBA prospects were like a slow-burning sunset gradually fading to black. If he couldn’t make it, I remember thinking, then I don’t know what the rest of us had been doing devoting ourselves to such fickle dreams.

  By the end of sophomore year, I declared my major in philosophy, and it felt like a tremendous weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I was trying to live as my mother had told me, no longer trying to be false or to be something other than myself—intellectually, athletically, sartorially, academically, or culturally speaking. Plus I was in love, and it was an innocent and good love, which, for the first time, I could share with my family. That summer, between sophomore and junior year, I spent every weekend with Betrys. She was still in D.C., but she would catch rides up to New Jersey with a girlfriend who was going to see her own boyfriend in Queens. I’d pick up Betrys at some pre-established point along the way—the Metropark parking lot or the Molly Pitcher rest stop, depending on her girlfriend’s mood and inclination to venture from the Turnpike—and we’d drive back to my parents’ house and throw hamburgers on the grill if it was early, or, if it was late, just hang out in the kitchen, talking with my parents and eating tortilla chips that we dipped in my mother’s homemade salsa. Later, we’d excuse ourselves and go to my room and watch DVDs or talk about the books we were reading and what we wanted to be.

  She wanted to put to use her considerable command of foreign languages, maybe get a JD and practice international law or work as a translator in a Japanese corporation or with the United Nations. I wanted to read and write and talk and think all day, so I supposed I wanted to be a philosopher or a writer, though I still didn’t know exactly what that might mean. When I confessed this to her, she didn’t laugh or bat an eye; she just encouraged me. We talked about making a life together. I would doze off dreaming about this life I had never before imagined could be mine but that I wanted now more than anything. In the morning we would have breakfast with my parents. She became like family.

  During the week, while Betrys was in D.C. and my mother was at work, I would help Pappy with his business, addressing, stuffing, and sealing the thousands of envelopes that contained the fliers that hopefully would bring more students into our house.We spent more time with each other that summer than probably at any other juncture in our lives, and while we were stuffing and sealing those envelopes, we were also getting to know each other again, now as men. The two of us would lose all track of time in conversation and debate about literature and philosophy and the various ways in which one might go about trying to make a meaningful life.

  One day, we had been talking about Oscar Wilde, which led to a discussion of the idea of art for art’s sake, an idea I had defended and Pappy had dismissed. “Art, really, like everything else, must always be put to use for another purpose, and preferably for the purpose of teaching one how to live,” Pappy said. I countered that to see art only as a tool is also to diminish it, to diminish the sense of joy that a work of art can elicit in relation to nothing other than itself. Pappy kind of raised his eyebrows at the word “joy” and told me to bring over the chessboard.

  As I was removing the work from his desk and bringing the chessboard along with some sodas from the kitchen, he smiled and told me that he wanted me to know that he was very pleased (“pleased” would be the word he used, not “happy”; he rarely if ever would use that word) that I was reading good and serious books and deriving such satisfaction from what I read. I felt a kind of pride as he told me this. And then his expression changed and he looked out the window into the street and confided to me that, although he had read plenty of novels in his life, he felt he had never read a novel—or a book of any sort, for that matter—for enjoyment. He felt he couldn’t afford to. He never had followed a narrative the way Wilde seemed to be in favor of doing or read a story simply because it was beautifully or skillfully crafted.“I have never read a story without a pen in hand, underlining,” he said,“and not because I love to underline, son, but because I felt that I had to derive knowledge, practical knowledge, that I could then somehow try and marshal in my own life to make my own life somehow better. There was just too much that I didn’t know, and nobody told me anything. I decided that everything I needed to know must be somewhere in these books, and if I just spent enough time with them, I could figure it out. So, no, I never did look at a book as just a piece of art.”

  Later, thinking back on this, I was for some reason reminded of all those St. Anthony players frantically playing a supposedly fun game whose joy, for them, was out of reach. The height of the stakes (perceived or real) rendered into a form of labor something from which others could simply derive pleasure. I realized that the only reason I was able to enjoy the books I read was precisely because Pappy hadn’t been able to enjoy those same books when he was my age. I felt ashamed at the pride that had come over me when Pappy had complimented my learning, as it struck me that all this was profoundly unfair—an accident of time, little else—and that I must owe my father something more than simply being well read. I could also see that I owed him something other than the professional status and superficial material well-being so many of my friends and classmates were chasing after. I owed him something else entirely.

  Pappy was very much on my mind later that summer when I bought and read a copy of The Brothers Karamazov (a very serious book of which I am not sure what Oscar Wilde would have thought). According to Borges, there is a special Islamic night, called the Night of Nights, in which the hidden doors to heaven are cast open wide and “the water in the water jars is sweeter than on other nights.” It was something like this that I felt when I encountered Dostoyevsky for the first time.

  I had decided a couple of months earlier that I had to read him, while sitting in the back of my Introduction to Modern Art class. The professor had put on the projector a slide of a small woodcut entitled “Two Men at a Table,” by the German artist Erich Heckel, of the Die Brücke expressionist school. “This is a scene from ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ section of The Brothers Karamazov,” the professor explained. “On the right is Ivan Karamazov, a metaphor for Intellect or Reason and Doubt, on the left, his brother Alyosha, a metaphor for Spirit or Faith. For those of you who have not read the Brothers K, Ivan has just delivered what many consider the single most damning refutation of Christianity in the history of ideas. It has been said that everything one needs to know about life is contained in this novel, so if you have not read it yet I highly suggest you go out and do so.” Then he gave us some more background on Heckel and moved on. I copied into my notebook what the professor said about Dostoyevsky, and well after the slides had switched, the impression of that woodcut remained etched in my mind.

  At first what drew me into Dostoyevsky—and against his will, I suppose, for he stood firmly with Alyosha—was this idea of the intellectual and of defiant reason, of the urgency of the struggle to be rational, of the pressing need to call into question received faiths by means of logical argumentation and critical thinking: in other words, the call to freedom. The superstitious Catholicism I had been spoon-fed for a decade and a half by drunken priests and wellintentioned nuns already had lost its grip on me. I didn’t need Dostoyevsky to turn me into an atheist or agnostic—but I did need Ivan Fyodorovich to articulate for me thoughts that had been stirring inside of me and for which I hadn’t previously had a vocabulary.

  Men would prefer anything rather than be free—I had long seen evidence of this all around me, in Stacey and in Ant and also, of course, in myself.We were sheep and lemmings, the vast majority of us. Very few o
f us had anything like a real desire to be ourselves, to create ourselves. It was so much easier to receive direction from “above,” and where I was from, above was the street, and the direction came from the rappers and thugs and hoes who were the grand inquisitors of the Real. They were the high priests and priestesses of hip-hop culture, which had become our religion and our opiate—really, our master, our new and terrible master. I had never known anyone my age and who looked like me who had read Dostoyevsky, but in his strange Russian world, I caught unmistakable glimpses of my own.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  To a Worm in a Horseradish, the World Is a Horseradish

  That fall, I moved into Kober Hall on Thirty-sixth and N Streets. I was still rooming with Pup and Dee, as well as Matt from Brooklyn, and a sophomore from New Rochelle named Achilles. Playboy had returned after having taken leave the previous semester and was living far off campus in a doorman building near Dupont Circle. He’d use our apartment as a home away from home between and after classes. There were always streams of people coming in and out, usually with sacks of sandwiches and sodas from Wise-miller’s, the beloved deli across the street. Our place was very large. We’d received a high pick in the housing lottery again and taken a three-bedroom duplex with exposed brick walls and three separate balconies, each of which opened onto an interior court-yard below. One of the first things we did upon moving in was purchase an aboveground Jacuzzi and set it up in a half-hidden corner of the flat, sandwiched between a protruding brick wall and one of the balconies. The Jacuzzi, besides being exceedingly difficult to keep sanitary and pH-balanced, wasn’t permitted in campus housing. Nor was it anything like lightweight, and I used to worry that one day it would crash through the floor into the apartment below or break apart and flood the entire living room.