Angry Black White Boy

by Adam Mansbach

  “It’s a dope book, man. Makes you realize how little anything has changed in this country.”

  “Is that right.” He hoped he sounded rhetorical enough to disperse the speech clouds massing over Macon’s head, dark and heavy and desperate to rain down transparent sheets of consciousness. Andre didn’t feel like listening to his roommate relieve himself. He’d already served his time in prep school as a cardboard self-affirmation cutout. Smile, Johnny. Put your arm around the African-American. Say cheese. A stoic , amiable receptacle into which fake-empathetic whiteboys dumped their views, a priest who heard confessions and smoked joints with the sinners to absolve them.

  Andre arced his brows into sardonic rainbows, and Macon’s blue eyes darted chastened to the rug and scanned a dark, Africa-shaped stain. When he was ten, a ski instructor with whom he’d shared a chairlift had told Macon how lucky he was to have the eyes he did. “You’ve got those speckled irises,” the guy had said, making a little circle with his finger. “Me, too. They’re very rare. Women love eyes like ours.”

  There was more to be said about the past, the weirdness of meeting, the blood spilled between them, but Andre had no idea what. Better to back away from all that for the moment and do the getting-to-know-you shuffle until some rhythms of cohabitation had been established. Or until he could make an appointment with the housing office.

  “Two grown men and they expect us to live in two hundred and sixty-six square feet all year.” Andre rocked back on his heels, hands pocketed, and bobbed his head at a silver tape measure lying next to several boxes marked Pimp Shit. “I measured.”

  “Two-seventy, if you count that little-ass closet,” Macon replied gratefully. He dropped onto a naked blue-and-white-striped canvas mattress and heard the metal bedframe moan beneath him. “Not that I brought much.” He threw a leg over his own half-unpacked suitcase and leaned back, then wondered if the posture was too comfortable too quick, a typical cavalier-whiteboy-lounging-cuzthe-world-is-my-domain move. He flashed on the three junior-high girls he’d seen on the train yesterday, spread out slumber-party style on the dirty floor at rush hour, snapping pictures of one another with disposable cameras, oblivious to the scowl-stares and headshake censures of sardine commuters and the D train floor grime because their sense of entitlement blurred everything beyond each other. Only white kids act like this, Macon had thought. He sat up. “I took the bus down.”

  “No big send-off from the fam?” asked Andre, flopping stomach-first onto the other bed and propping himself up, elbows under chest, hands folded. Macon, watching him, leaned back again.

  “My parents are on a two-month European cruise.” Disdain rimmed Macon’s voice, thought Andre, maybe embarrassment. Most likely, he assumed his roommate was poor—weren’t all black folks?—and shrunk from their presumed class difference. Kids at Princeton-Eastham Prep had always relaxed around him when they found out Andre wasn’t on scholarship like the rest of the school’s black population.

  “I haven’t lived at home in more than a year, though,” Macon continued. “I took some time off after high school and moved in with my boy Lajuan.”

  Estranged from parents, Andre noted. He bet they were still paying their baby boy’s tuition, though. Has a black friend. Slick how he’d slipped that in there. Unless the universe housed whiteboys named Lajuan.

  “You’re from where?” asked Andre.

  “Ten minutes outside Boston. Suburb called Newton. But don’t worry. We’re not gonna have any Bird-Magic, Bad Boy–Death Row coastal beef. Boston sucks.” He gestured at his roommate’s outfit. “Nice to see some hometown pride, though.”

  Andre pushed off the bed and stood up, laying an open hand against his gold-and-purple Lakers jersey. He dipped his fingers momentarily into the crinkly vinyl pocket of black Raiders track pants, then bent and pulled up his L.A. Kings socks. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Come on now.” Macon grinned and hunched forward, antsy with the suspicion that he was seconds away from planting his flag in a patch of common ground. “You’re talking to the only kid from the Bean who was up on L.A. hip hop before Straight Outta Compton. I used to get KDAY tapes from my man’s cousin.”

  “Word?” said Andre, eyebrows disappearing into the low-leaning forest of his hair. “KDAY, huh? That’s some O.G. shit.” The outlines of a context into which he could fit Macon were beginning to come into focus.

  “Man, I was out here talking about Mixmaster Spade and ‘can’t get enough of everlasting bass’ and cats were looking at me like I was stone crazy,” Macon recounted, pleased that he had found a pore in the conversation, however imaginary, that led to hip hop. If only the world were as simple as it had been back in the day, when a shared investment in the still-invisible culture had granted two people a rare, automatic intimacy, laid an immediate foundation for a friendship.

  They both smiled, and a moment of silence descended like a velvet stage curtain. Andre eye-checked his roommate and floated him some grudging props. Macon might be a lunatic, and his blood-lines were certainly polluted, but at least he was hip hop enough not to view black people as an alien species—even if he was the type to assume that any black kid he met was a rap head. Andre’s worst roommate fear had been averted: a ten-gallon-hat-wearing good ol’ boy who’d greet him with a “Howdy, pardner,” crank up some Garth Brooks, and start pinning his Confederate flag up next to Andre’s swap-meet African masks, explaining that he wasn’t racist, just proud.

  Macon used the lull in conversation to replay the robbery in his mind, and a new shudder of excitement suffused him. He felt rubbery with glee, almost flip now that he’d stumbled through the awkwardness of revealing his ancestry to Andre. “Okay,” he said, “enough with all this trivial cosmic-connection shit. You blaze or what?”

  Funny how green always brought black and white together, thought Andre. At least until the green was gone. “Hell yes,” he said, erasing that appointment with the housing office from his mental blackboard. Macon was a pothead: Things would be all right. “And not that dirt weed fools be smoking out here, neither. Strictly the California chronic.”

  He darted to his luggage, pulled a large shampoo bottle from the bottom of a full-stuffed duffel bag, unscrewed the cap, and extracted a gooey sandwich bag. He wiped it clean on a Dodgers towel, wrist-flicked it across the room for inspection, and sat back down. Macon pulled the closing strip apart, and the sudden pungency of Andre’s stash lit up their room like Little Amsterdam. It was insanely green, a joyous neon hue Macon had only seen in NationalGeographic photo essays about preserving the coral reefs. Tight saffron-haired buds and strong, thick stems and no seeds. No seeds?

  “Hydroponic,” Andre said. “Act like you know.” Macon stared at the herb, overcome with the bounty of nature’s blessings, and nodded respect. “Wait until you taste it, dude.” An orange pack of Zigzags flashed in Andre’s hand.

  A few moments later, Macon had to give the credit where it was due. What now burned evenly between his unmanicured fingertips didn’t even seem like the same plant as the shit he, in his Bostonian ignorance, had once called marijuana. Macon exhaled a slow plume and smoothed down his elation like a cowlick. Getting doe-eyed over ganja was for hippies with black-light posters who read fan ratings of Grateful Dead shows on the Internet, ratings that ranged from A+++++++ (Jerry’s spirit left his body and fellated me in the bleachers while his physical shell remained onstage playing “Turn On Your Love Light”) to A+ (the band didn’t show up and cops teargassed the parking lot). A fair number of the white kids he’d grown up with, Macon’s friends from the time when friends were defined as kids whose houses were close enough to bike to, had slid Deadward. They had racks of concert bootlegs and books of tour photos just like he had crates of vinyl and a shoe box stuffed with graff flicks.

  He’d hung with those kids occasionally through high school, although their entitlement and lack of chops—the rugged brain-mouth world-collaging quick wit that hip hop beat into you— bored him. Macon was
a product of the same white-collar suburb they were, but while he was nuzzling up against a world clenched tight in struggle, fly as fuck, hell-bent on schooling technology in its own backyard, these laconic stoners couldn’t even wrap their minds around the notion that a human being might not like Jerry and them. Macon had been forced to listen to the Branford Marsalis/Dead tape—what Deadheads played people who liked black music to prove the Dead were down—in more tapestry-sheathed bedrooms than he cared to recall. Deadheads always had better cheeba than hip hoppers, though—expensive aesthete bud stored in film cases and thumb-pressed into glass bongs imbued with personalities and christened with goofy names. Careful, dude. Oscar, like, sneaks up on you.

  Regular hip hop motherfuckers smoked like they did everything: repurposed something cheap, useless, and available to suit their needs, and turned the process into an art form along the way. They said, “Yo, kid, let’s burn this branch / twist this L / blaze these trees / hit this blunt / steam this broccoli / spark this lah / smoke this shit.” They split a fifty-cent Dutch Master cigar with two thumbnails, slid the cylindrical clump of cheap, stale tobacco to the pavement, dumped a brown-green stick-seed-and-shake-laced nick bag casually into the empty paper, picked out the unsmokables, twirled it up, dried it with a lighter, lit it, hit it, ashed it, passed it, and went about their business if they had some. Build and destroy.

  Andre’s chronic, though, knocked even Deadhead herb straight out the box, made you look at the City of Angels in a whole new light. Even made you understand their music better. This was some ol’ “diamond in the back / sunroof top / diggin’ the scene with a gangsta lean” shit, Macon reflected as he turned the tiny joint between two fingers, took a rich pull, and returned it to his roommate. Habit forced Macon to hit a spliff as hard as he could every time it touched his fingers; he was accustomed to smoking with three, four, five necks crowding the cipher and everybody trying to get as high as possible despite the rigorously enforced take-two-and-pass-so-the-blunt-will-last protocol.

  Andre sidelonged his roommate from beneath low-slung eyelids. “Kinda name is Macon for a whiteboy, anyway?” he drawled, holding his hit in as he spoke.

  Macon shrugged. Kinda whiteboy is Macon’d be a better question, he thought, one lip corner curling in a smug smile. “Macon, Georgia,” he said. “Where I was allegedly conceived. Parents drove cross-country in a VW bus for their honeymoon.” He shook his head. “I hate it.”

  “It’s not so bad. If they’d gotten it on a couple hours earlier, you woulda been Buckhead.”

  Macon steadied his eyes, which seemed to want to roll back in his head, and rubbed a palm against his stubbled chin. “Easy for you to say. Nobody called you Bacon in grade school.”

  “True,” said Andre. “Between all those seventies Black Power Back-to-Africa names—which I blame on drugs in the drinking water at Wattstax—and all that ghetto-fabulous eighties insanity, naming mufuckers Lexus and Guccina and Dom Pérignon and shit—black folks got kind of a dozens moratorium on names.” He felt a pang of guilt for making such jokes in front of a whiteboy, and winced as if the red-black-and-green Afropick of race pride had just flown across the room and jabbed him in the ass.

  Andre bent to ash the joint into a plastic garbage can, and missed the size-up glance his roommate threw at him. Macon was as attuned to signs of black acceptance as a dog was to the scraping of a can opener. Willingness to tweak the foibles of black people in front of him was a clear one; it implied that Macon was hip enough to get the joke and down enough to be unguarded around. The only thing better was when black folks started railing against the White Man in his presence, thus granting Macon transcendent status. When he felt needy or insecure, which was often, Macon resorted to initiating such discussions by ripping into his private stash of paper race tigers: Quentin Tarantino, Rudolph Giuliani, Elvis Presley. It usually got the wrecking ball rolling.

  Andre inhaled sharply, pulled back his lips, and offered the joint, almost gone now, to his roommate. It was an elegant pass, thumb pressed securely to fingertip, the handoff of two experienced smokers. “Yo,” said Macon, kicking his legs out as the toxicants streamed through him, thrashing like salmon, and settled in the cool underwater grotto of his stomach, “you ever seen—”

  A loud knock at the door wounded their buzzes and killed the conversation.

  “Hello?” Insistent, female, whiny. “It’s Olivia, your R.A.”

  Andre leaped to his feet and flicked the roach toward the open window. It hit the top ledge, showering sparks down the pane, and whipped out into the wind.

  “Shit.” He reached for a can of Right Guard and sprayed a loud, wide arc around the room. Macon, dazed by the whirlwind his roommate had become, grabbed his own deodorant, realized it was a roll-on, and felt stupid.

  “One second,” called Andre, wading through the knee-high detritus that had somehow managed to accumulate in just three hours. “Wonderful,” he muttered, “not even here a day and already I’ma be the stereotypical fire-up-the-spliff natty-dreadlockinna-Babylon Rastaman-vibration nigga and shit.”

  He yanked open the door and a short, mousy-haired girl stared up at him through fingerprint-smudged glasses. She looked like she wanted to come inside, but Andre blocked the entrance with his body. A lecture on Knowing Your Rights given by some haggard ex–Black Panther at a weekend retreat his mother had sent him on because she worried he wasn’t black enough came back to Andre: A cop can only come inside your house if you give him permission. The knowledge was intended to prevent the pigs from fucking with young revolutionary brothers, but he had only used it when the Santa Monica PD busted up the keg parties his football teammates threw when their parents were out of town.

  The girl crossed one slippered ankle over the other and pursed her downturned mouth to speak.

  “Hi!” Andre said before she could, pursuing a policy of jaunty innocence. He grinned, orthodontized teeth gleaming, and extended his hand, forearm swollen from a summer of weight lifting; Andre hoped she’d notice but she didn’t. Beyond offering his body for perusal, he never quite knew how to flirt. “Andre Walker. Wow, I— Those are really cool sweatpants.” Behind him, the sizzle of aerosol indicated that Macon was freshening the air with an entire semester’s worth of Right Guard.

  The Resident Adviser looked him over with authoritarian disdain and Andre’s arm fell to his side. “First floor meeting’s in ten minutes,” she said, then paused and frowned. “What’s that smell?”

  “We can’t make it,” Macon squawked, lunging to his roommate’s side and dropping a buddy-pal hand on Andre’s shoulder. “We’ve scheduled on-line appointments with Career Counseling.”

  She cast a doubtful squint at them, then reeled it in. “See me tonight to find out what you missed,” she relented. “And don’t let me smell that smell coming from your room again.” She padded off with nary a farewell.

  Andre closed the door. “Where the fuck did you come up with that?”

  Macon pointed to a blue booklet lying broken-spined on his desk. “ Columbia Guide to Living. An invaluable resource.”

  “Well, it’s definitely time to be out. I’m supposed to meet my man Nique downtown. You wanna roll?”

  “Sure. I was gonna hit this poetry slam at the Nuyorican later, anyway. Who’s Nique?”

  “My boy from high school. He’s a junior at NYU. Completely nuts. You’ll like him.”

  Andre yanked open a dresser drawer and plucked a folded red shirt. “Soon as I decided I was coming to New York, I went down to Blood In Blood Out on La Brea and scooped hella red gear.” He shucked the Lakers jersey and pulled on the polo. “I’m so sick of wearing neutral colors I could shoot somebody in the face. Preferably some mark ass set trippin’ buster ass fool.”

  Andre opened the door and he and Macon phased into public post-smoke mode, flipping up their cool like trench-coat collars. “Listen . . .” Andre said. He stopped talking as they passed the TV lounge housed in an alcove between their room and the elevator, alread
y full of lame kids killing the eight minutes before the floor meeting by soaking flaccidly in talk shows, then resumed as they reached the elevator bank.

  “. . . don’t mention this Cap Anson shit to anybody else, okay? Especially not Nique.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” said Macon, caught off-guard. “But why not?”

  “Because it’s fucking weird, dude. I hope you don’t need me to tell you that.” He’s already checked it off his list, Andre thought. A little weed, some hip hop, he thinks it’s all good. “Plus, I don’t wanna be known as the guy who’s rooming with his—” Andre broke off. “His whatever.”

  “Fair enough,” said Macon quietly. He jabbed at the down button for the second time. “You ever heard that story,” he asked after a moment, “about these Bloods who bailed into a gay S&M club in L.A. by mistake, rocking red flags?”

  “Nah,” said Andre. They stepped into the lift. “Do tell.”

  “Apparently, in that scene you rock flags to show what you’re into—yellow means piss on me, white lace means submissive, whatever. A red flag means beat my ass, make me bleed. So cats beat their asses silly. Supposedly.”

  “Sounds like bullshit to me,” said Andre.

  Macon nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” The doors closed.

  Chapter Three

  Peep game, Macon ordered the world, pushing the front door so hard it one-eighty slammed against the dorm’s facade. By the time it slow-swept backward, clicked and froze at a welcoming seventy degrees, he and Andre were in the wind, weak sunshine on their cheeks and the building’s long five o’clock shadow behind them like getaway music.

  “Campus or the streets?” asked Andre, posing what Macon took at first to be a philosophical conundrum, with whom you rollin’ when the comedown come down, edumacated shot-caller big-baller types or the untalented nine-tenths with unknockable hustles, unprintable résumés? But naw, fool, the question is which route to walk.