Not that streets versus campus connoted the old, traditional, good-natured, spite-filled townies-against-college-boys fair fight regardless. Columbia owned every damn thing in sight. Why be a mere institution of higher learning when you could also be Harlem’s number-one slumlord, second-largest landowner in moneymakin’ Manhattan after the Catholic Church? Andre hadn’t toured the campus yet, so they ignored the street exit and strolled down College Walk.
A domed building with the air of a state capitol, protected by a row of pillars, sat atop a long sprawl of shallow stone steps: Columbia’s gleaming white administrative black box. The steps sloped down for days, giving the building a distant, unapproachable aura, as if to say the road to knowledge is long, laborious, and gradual, or each one you climb represents a grand you owe us for your education,sucker. The steps bottomed into an open plaza, flanked by giant granite fountains. Outreach to the heavily encroached-upon community took its best-financed form on these few hundred square feet: biannual free concerts featuring mainstream bohemian rap acts and second-string alternative-rock bands, overseen by tripled security but open to neighborhood residents if they somehow managed to find out about them. Milking the college cash cow by rote, the performers usually kicked lackluster forty-minute sets in fulfillment of their contracts and bounced, forty thousand dollars richer and muttering about lame college audiences. The only exception had been when the Events Committee unwittingly booked the Boot Camp Clik, a camouflage-rocking bevy of lyrical gunclappers from Brooklyn. Macon had caught the concert as a high-school junior on the requisite college-road-trip-with-the-parents. It had influenced his choice of school as much as anything.
Half of Bucktown had journeyed uptown for the concert, and a sixteenth had made it past the rapidly retripled security in time to see the spot get blown. Grimy, reconstructed drums had boom-clacked through the rarefied air, gotten even non-heads nodding, and the next thing Macon knew, Boot Camp’s five-foot microphone don Buckshot was rocking his verse from atop an eight-foot vibrating speaker: How the fuck did money climb up there and how come I ain’t see it? Macon had snapped a flick of Buckshot’s cornrowed head sandwiched between the engraved names of Plato and Sophocles, etched into the stone above the columns on Butler Library across the plaza.
After Plato and Sophocles came Herodotus, Aristotle, and three or four more Western Thought All-Stars. As Macon had found out that weekend, Columbia shepherded all incoming students through two years of comprehensive Western literature and philosophy courses, the cornerstone of the famed Core Curriculum despite being taught largely by underqualified and overtired grad students while the actual professors labored over their forthcoming books in the well-heeled privacy of Riverside Drive faculty apartments. The courses, intended to allow young scholars to drop cocktail party references to Adam Smith’s economic theory and jest fraternally about Aristophanes’ sex comedies, bonded the university community by ensuring that all Columbia graduates forgot the same things.
Andre and Macon turned left onto a cobbled pathway and headed toward the high black iron gates that announced the street entrances and allowed Columbia to shut out interlopers and imprison residents in times of trouble, i.e., the student uprisings of the 1960s and more recently the ethnic studies protests of 1996. The University, as the administration was called, exercised a subtle yet totalitarian control over its population, low-key enough to convince naive students that threatening to sit in Hamilton Hall until they were allowed to study the contributions of people of color to American life might catalyze a conversation with the administration. Instead, the stunt prompted a call to the police, a series of arrests and unfavorable editorials, a tacit backpedaling compromise to drop the charges and develop a research committee, and finally the quiet dissolution of said committee once the attentions of the media had waned and the angriest students had left for the summer, graduated, or found girlfriends.
Andre and Macon passed through the gates and into Morningside Heights, a neighborhood semantically divorced from Harlem, rechristened to convince jumpy suburban parents that their children didn’t live in the Capital of Black America and would be as safe at college as they had been at their prep schools. It was a virtual bubble of safety, except for the occasional date-rapist football player. Even the bums, thought Andre as he and Macon descended into the cleanest subway station in Manhattan, seemed handpicked for their effusiveness.
They stepped off the train at West Fourth Street and crossed Washington Square Park, New York University’s no-campus-having answer to Columbia’s pristine, sequestered lawns. Students, locals, and outtatowners shared twilight space on the green wooden benches and around the central fountain. Backpacks nudged briefcases, and fresh-cut grass mingled airborne with pretzels and cigarettes. Rastafarians in red-green-and-gold tams leaned together over one chess table, gesturing at the wooden pieces with long fingers. A crew of high schoolers held down another, sneaker treads gripping the smooth marble as they chewed brown-bagged soda straws and girl-watched. Mutts and pedigrees sniffed each other’s asses with studious democracy inside the fenced dog run; the owners greeted each other’s dogs with enthusiasm and each other with indifference.
“So what kind of job did you find?” Andre asked.
Macon watched a yellow cab tear past the park, swerving to avoid pedestrians, and bang an illegal right turn as the traffic light clicked red. The driver conducted a symphony of angry horns with his middle finger as he caromed out of sight.
“I drive one of those,” Macon said with pride.
“Word? You must overhear some interesting shit. People probably assume you don’t speak English.”
“You’d think so, but so far it’s been pretty boring. Lot of single fares.” Macon fingered the wad of bills clogging his pocket and wondered what he was going to do with the money, nearly two hundred bucks. He considered buying Andre dinner, then worried his roommate would think he was trying to pay reparations.
“Huh,” mused Andre. “You didn’t want to wait and get a campus job?”
“I’m not work-study eligible. My grandfather put away dough for my education back in the day, so no student loans. I’m still broke on the day-to-day tip, though.”
“Parents won’t help you out?” asked Andre, wondering whether to take Macon’s stark financial portrait with a grain of salt or an entire pillar. Those suede Tims his roommate was rocking looked about a week out of the box.
“I won’t let them.” Self-reliance had been Macon’s economic policy since leaving home, and like communism it worked well in theory. In practice, he had shame-facedly accepted cash infusions twice so far: once just after bouncing to Lajuan’s crib, so he’d have weed throw-down scratch—the definition of a good houseguest in Macon’s circle being a cat who sponsored blunt sessions—and again only two weeks ago, when he’d wanted new gear for school. Macon soothed himself with the knowledge that Cuba had been surviving on handouts for damn near forty years now.
They made their way across the park, movements tracked by more than two thousand hidden security cameras installed by the City of New York for an amount of money that, had it been distributed amongst the ten to twenty drug dealers the cameras were intended to monitor, would have allowed all of them to retire in comfort.
It seemed to Andre that a different homeless cat approached them every few feet to request assistance, as if the park were sectioned into tiny, invisible fiefdoms. He brushed past each supplicant without bothering to slow his pace or eye-flicker an apology. Macon, meanwhile, threw on the brakes at every timid “Excuse me.” Three times, Andre realized he was walking alone and doubled back to gather up his roommate, only to find Macon listening with botanically enhanced patience to whatever involved plea or bogus medical history the guy was running down. Macon’s sidewalk manner was impeccable: constant eye contact, sympathetic head-nodding. He let the vagrants run through their whole spiels and make their requests before letting them know he had no money and wishing them well. Their eyes hardened with disappointment,
but each one left Macon with a “God bless you,” to which Macon responded, “You, too,” smiled a good-bye, and walked on secure in his compassion for his fellow man.
“It’s not like this in L.A.,” Andre explained as they exited the park, feeling like a callous asshole.
“Car culture,” Macon replied absently. He was busy trying to balance an internal triple-beam scale laid heavy with luck, greed, and pragmatism, calculating how much loot was clockable if he robbed motherfuckers for an entire shift.
Andre nodded. “Yeah. L.A.’s not too big on chance interaction. Or humanity. But we’ve got Shaq and Kobe.”
He double-checked the directions he’d scribbled on the back of a matchbook. They turned left and walked past hot-dog and hot-nut vendors, a sidewalk bookstand, knots of students sucking cancer sticks beneath the purple flags rippling from NYU’s main library. Nique’s high-rise was on the corner. Andre called his boy from the dorm’s cramped lobby, and seconds after he’d replaced the courtesy phone, a lanky, dark-skinned dude barreled down the side staircase, holding on to the rail bars like parallel beams and swinging himself down four steps at a time. He cleared the last set, landed clean on burgundy-and-black suede Pumas, pushed his metal-framed sunglasses up onto his forehead, and gangled an arm around Andre’s back as the two exchanged the standard shoulder-bang embrace.
“Wassup, fool,” Nique exclaimed, reverting to Left Coast slangisms in the presence of a Westside homey. He pulled away without unclasping Andre’s hand and ended the shake in a finger snap, gold bracelet sliding halfway up his arm as he recoiled from the motion.
“You know,” bayed Andre, voice plummeting two octaves on the final syllable. It was an expression seldom heard so far east; Macon knew from listening to old Mack 10 records that it was roughly equivalent to I’m chillin’ or, in the parlance of those old school enough to get away with sounding corny, livin’ large. “This my roommate,” said Andre, tapping him on the chest with the back of his hand, “Macon.” Their eyes met, and each one wondered whether Andre would appendix an endorsement. “He’s cool,” Andre finished at last.
“Whaddup, dude. Dominique Lavar.” Intelligence lit his long, smooth face powerfully from within as he offered Macon a thumb-topped fist and they exchanged a one-potato-two-potato pound. “Come on upstairs, y’all. The kid finally scored a single this year.” He tossed a head nod at the brother working security, and the man tossed one back, withdrew the sign-in sheet and pen he’d slid toward Macon, and gestured Go ahead. Andre smiled to himself: Leave it to Nique to get cool with the guard right off the muscle, thus deading the minor hassle of visitor sign-ins.
“Good lookin’ out, Felix,” Nique said over his shoulder. “California love,” he explained to Andre. “Homeboy’s from Inglewood.” He took the steps two at a time and pounded open the stairwell door.
Nique’s room was immaculate and tiny, smelled of clean bed linen. A portable refrigerator doubled as a nightstand for a low-slung bed that almost touched three walls. There was space for a desk, but Nique worked on the fly and so he’d marooned the extra furniture in the hall. “I haven’t finished freaking the place yet,” he apologized, leaving Macon to wonder what further freaking could be done. Every inch of wall space was covered; there were movie posters for Coffy, Truck Turner, and She’s Gotta Have It, and a reproduction of the famous photograph of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the ’68 Olympics with heads bowed and Black Power fists held high. Tupac Shakur gangster-squatted against the floor, shirtless, tattooed, and defiant, both hands twisted into W’s, and above Nique’s bed was framed a blurry black-and-white freeze-frame of a scene Macon had never forgotten: six of L.A.’s Finest, so murky that they might be figments of imagination, swinging billy clubs with pickax motions as if the huddled mass of Rodney King might be a craggy slab of granite or an arid patch of land.
“Nice picture.”
Nique turned and scowled. “Nice? Either you got a real limited vocabulary or a serious problem. Ain’t nothing nice about the shit.”
Macon shook his head. “No, I mean, of course not. I— What I meant was . . .” He gave up on speaking and pushed the left sleeve of his T-shirt to his shoulder. Tattooed on Macon’s biceps in small green characters was 4-29-92. It was the day the verdict had been handed down, the day Los Angeles had burned. Andre and Dominique peered in to read it, then looked up at Macon.
“A Jewish kid with numbers tattooed on his arm,” said Andre blankly, taking the beer Nique passed him. “Now I’ve seen it all.”
Macon lifted one mouth corner in a half-smile that looked more like a twitch. “That’s exactly what my mom said.” The numbers glistened slightly on his skin, bathed in the soft light of Nique’s halogen. “She started going off about the Holocaust. I was like, ‘Please. Nobody in this family has been inside a temple in three generations. How am I supposed to be Jewish enough to know better?’ ” Macon broke off, accepted a bottle from Nique, and plugged his mouth with it, swigging until he trusted himself not to speak.
I’m not Jewish, Andre thought, and I know better.
Nique looked from Andre to Macon and then back to Andre. He ran a hand over his smooth-shaved head. “Who is this dude, Dre?” he asked with cinematic incredulity and perfect comic timing, the results of an upbringing replete with four movie channels and unlimited TV privileges. “Mufucker got a Rodney King tattoo? Shit, I thought I was black.”
Macon walked over to the photo-still and stared at it. The night in question firecrackered through his mind. Without turning from the wall, he spoke. “It was an important day.”
“For niggas in L.A., no doubt,” said Nique. “But you gonna have to enlighten me as to why it was so crucial for a whiteboy from . . .”
“Massachusetts,” Macon said.
“Right.”
Macon shrugged. “Things changed.”
“Ain’t shit change, man.”
“Things changed for me.”
Nique looked at Andre. “Is he always like this?”
“I’ve known him for two hours, Nique.” A good old-fashioned race man, Andre thought suddenly. He smiled at the notion of his roommate decked out in Black Panther garb, and decided that living with this cat might prove to be the most exhausting task he’d ever undertaken.
“Fine,” said Nique. “We’ll play twenty questions. How did shit change for you?”
“I stopped believing in justice even a little bit. Any faith I had left in the system, or in white people, pretty much evaporated when I noticed that no one around me gave a fuck.”
Nique rested his chin on his thumb, drummed long fingers against his temple, and nodded. “Interesting.” Macon hoped it was enough. He didn’t intend to tell the story, no matter how hard Nique pressed him.
Andre tabled his empty bottle with a thud. He still drank to pacify an invisible throng of jocks chanting Chug, chug. “All right,” he said. “Enough. I been trying not to ask, dude, but I gotta. What’s up with all this ‘white people’ shit? You like an undercover brother or something?”
Nique rocked forward in anticipation, and Macon bounced his sonar off them, scanning for hostility. He was glad to find a trace. Black people’s friendship meant nothing unless they were suspicious of whites.
“Not at all,” he said plainly. “I don’t even have one of those grew-up-in-the-hood stories to justify myself.” I’m so real I don’t need one, read Macon’s intended subtext, Nique thought. The wigger goes poststructuralist. Could be his next term paper.
Below the subtext ran another meaning, one that Andre grasped immediately: I can have dough and still be down. Against his will, Dre sympathized; he was touched with a similar angst. Being black and middle class sometimes felt like a contradiction in terms, and only one of the two could be disguised. He’d had his comfort thrown in his face, punk Oreo cookie motherfucker, enough to know how to pretend, guiltily, that he was lower-bracketed.
Nique quick-plucked the cigarette from his mouth. “So you just don’t like white people,” he said
, hand blooming into gesture, elbow resting on his knee. Nique was made of angles, from the planar jut of his neck to the wide, cagey V of his smile. Macon’s stomach did a little fear-excitement flip-kick. Now we’re getting somewhere.
“I don’t like whiteness. And as a white person looking for some heroes, it’s lonely out here. The museum’s empty. Look at me, for instance. Sure, I might have missed a couple ferries back to Honky-town, but so what? They run every hour. I can sunbathe on the island of Blackness all summer. But when the seasons change, will I hunker down and spend the winter in my vacation spot?”
“Dunno, nigga, will you?”
Macon smiled, pleased with the mockery. “Everybody thinks they will,” he said, chest swelling with furtive superhero pride. “But there’s no way to tell who’s down, really, until we hit the crucial moment.” His hand twitched, remembering the feel of the gun, and Macon’s brain secreted an obedient montage of authenticating moments: late-night graffiti missions with Aura, the two of them smearing fame across the belly of the ghetto, and dinners presided over by regal black matriarchs, the mothers of his closest friends— Macon so black he used more hot sauce on his food than anybody, so much that little sisters with antenna-looking braids peered over the table at his plate wide-eyed.
Macon kept such snapshots on instant recall; they occupied a larger percentage of his memory than of his life. Their opposites, the times Macon had felt awkward and abandoned by blacks and whites alike, the awful moments he’d let nigger glide unchecked from his white friends’ mouths instead of punching them in the face— moments when vigilance had been too much of a hassle to disrupt the party for—were stored where Macon didn’t have to see them.
Nique slow-rolled the tip of his cigarette against the lip of a glass ashtray liberated from a restaurant. “Ah, yes.” He smirked. “The crucial moment. When rivers of blood gush through the streets and Uncle Tom’s ghost pulls white folks’ hearts out of their chests to balance them against a feather.”
Angry Black White Boy Page 5