Buck (4 page)

My parents send me to this school because it’s supposed to be better than the neighborhood schools in Olney that most of my boys go to. Better how? All we do is memorize stuff and spit it back like robots. It’s called Friends, but it should be called Foes. They act one way to your face, but behind closed doors it’s another story. Like how someone wrote
nigger
inside my locker when I was suspended. I have no idea who did it because nobody acts the part. I write back in my locker:
Say it to my face, bitch!

It’s like my pops says about racists from the North vs. the South: “I like my racism the way I like my whiskey—straight up,” even though he doesn’t really drink. “Down South they just come right out and call you a nigger, tell you they don’t want anything to do with you, and at least you know where you stand … and where they stand. But up North, hunh …” His blood boils when he talks about racism. “Up here they
pretend to be liberal but are some of the most racist white folks you’ll ever meet in your life.”

Word is bond. I like how Pops is always standing up for black people, how he don’t take no shit.

One day my basketball coach, Coach Z, pulls me to the side during practice.

“What’s up with you and the principal?” he asks. I shrug.
He doesn’t fuck with me. I don’t fuck with him. Nothing new
. “Be careful.” He lowers his tone. “I was getting some coffee in the teachers’ lounge and I overheard him say he hates you.”

“Hates me?”

I didn’t see that coming. Not the hate. The pain. Hates me? It feels like a punch in the gut. Coach searches my eyes.

“Fuck him. I hate him too.”

“Look, I know he’s a jerk. But be careful, he’s got it out for ya. I need you on my team come state tournament time. This is our year to win the division.”

I’m in eighth grade but I play on the high school varsity team. Coach is always looking out for me. He gives me a key to the gym. Tells me I can play ball during class. He says I’m the best player in the league.

“If it weren’t for me, you’d be long gone,” he always says. He looks out for me, but I know it’s only because I can dribble, dish, and dunk.

Roach’s hate for me started a while ago at Meeting for Worship. MFW is when you sit in silence in a big hollow room on
these cold wooden benches. It’s like church but with no preacher, no Bibles, no music, no emotion, no nothing, just hard silence. You just sit there smelling stinkers and listening to yourself swallow.

The only break in silence is when someone feels moved enough to stand up and say something. No one ever does, except this one girl, Rachel, who just sucks up.

“I like this school because it’s nice …”

“I like this school because the teachers are good …”

“I like this school because …”

Are you fucking serious?

So I responded one day. They say MFW is a time to let your voice be heard in the community, a time to share, a time to reflect on the school and what it means to you. I kept it real:

“I don’t like this school because this school don’t like me.”

My friends—Avi, Naeemah, Crystal, and Jesse—shoved their knuckles in their mouth, trying to choke back the crack-up. They couldn’t! Laughter gushed like fire hydrant water in the summer.

“Shushhh,” the teachers sprayed like spitting insects.

After that Roach said I can’t speak at MFW anymore. They want me to be silent. Silence is for dead people—I’m alive. Silence is betrayal to your thoughts—I’m thinking. I feel like screaming at the top of my lungs, so loud my ears pop like those little red M-80s from Chinatown that me and Uzi used to set off on July 4th.

My dad gets mad pissed at us for lighting fireworks on the Fourth. Not ’cause they can turn our fingers into knobs but because he doesn’t fuck with July 4th or Christmas or Easter or Presidents’ Day or any other holiday. Too white for Pops—white Christmas, all white on Easter, dead white presidents. He comes outside.

“Whose independence are you celebrating?” He pulls out a book and reads while the M-80 smoke swirls over our heads: “ ‘What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.’ ”

Roach tried to put me on meds: Ritalin, Adderall, Dexedrine, whatever.

“They are crazy if they think I’m going to let them give you Ritalin or whatever,” Mom said. “You’re just a boy. Boys are boys and will be boys.”

I asked my parents to send me to the public school.

“We make a lot of sacrifices to send you to a good school,” my parents said. “We can’t afford it but we find a way.” My dad told me how their parents, my grandparents, never made it past second grade and how black people need school like fish need water. How him and my mom were the first ones in their families to ever graduate from high school.

So I’m at this school for everyone in my family and all the black people who never got a chance to sit here. I know who I’m here for, but I still don’t know why I’m here in Roach’s office.

Finally he huffs in, mumbling something. Pushes the door shut. I know he wants to slam it, but he’s too puss.

“What’s your problem with authority?” he asks, gasping for air like he just ran a marathon even though all he did was plop down. He’s so fat he runs out of breath trying to catch his breath.

“What is it, huh?” His breath smells like burnt mayonnaise and spoiled scrapple on rotten rye. “What’s your problem with authority?” He’s got old food crumbs stuck in his red beard that look like little insect eggs in a crusty nest. I try not to look, try to look at something else. I see a poster of Elvis that says
The King Lives On
and keep looking.

“What’s your problem with me?” I say.

“Well, let’s see,” he says, making a church steeple with his fingers, then looking me up and down. “For starters, look at you.” I’m wearing jeans, Timbs, a red Phillies fitted hat, a white tee with a Tommy Hilfiger breakaway—fresh like Dougie. Him, on the other hand … He needs to dust-bust his face. He needs a redo. His clothes are filthy, so dirty I can see
the dirt on the inside from the outside like dead bugs in a lamp shade.

“Look at me,” I say.

“Where do you think you are? This is Friends—”

“Foes!”

“—not North Philly,” he says. I laugh. “Your personality and attitude are unacceptable.”

In the South, blacks can get close as long as they don’t get uppity
. I remember my dad’s words.
In the North, blacks can get uppity as long as they don’t get close
.

“My personality is who I am. My attitude depends on who you are.”

“What is your problem with the rules?” Roach asks.

“What rules? I don’t even know why I’m here, man.”

“Well, let’s see.” He laughs. “Which ones did you break today?” He writes something down. He’s always jotting notes on me.

“Your paper trail is growing.” He raises his notebook to his beady eyes.

“Take off your hat,” he says.

A few months ago my grandfather died. I didn’t know him that well, but I spent time with him in Valdosta, Georgia, before he passed. He was paralyzed from the waist down from an accident he had working on the Georgia Pacific Railway.
Loved sports, told me about Joe Louis whupping Max Schmeling’s ass, about Jesse Owens winning four medals in front of Hitler.

He tells me, “Don’t take yo hat off fo nobody … ’less you want to.”

“No,” I tell Roach, looking him right in the eyes.

“Off!”

“Why?”

“Because it’s against the rules,” he screams. That line right there—
because it’s against the rules
—is the number one sign of a bullshit rule. I pull my hat down even tighter, crank it hard to the side.

“Do you know what happens to people who can’t follow rules?”

I’m over this. “There should be a rule against your breath …”

“You’re skating on thin ice,” he shouts like we’re in the army.

“You shouldn’t be allowed to—”

“Thin ice!” He flashes his fangs. His teeth, like little rusty corkscrews, threatening. “I’m calling your parents!”

My face says every curse word to him.

“Stay put,” he says, and huffs out.

When he’s gone, I stand up and gaze out of the tall, thin window in his office. From here I can see Love Park. I can see the Valentine-red letters—thick and stacked like building blocks—that spell
LOVE
in the center of the action. Love is the mecca
for street skateboarding. Skaters from all over the world come to Philly just to skate the marble ledges, fountains, and stairs of Love. Being down the street from it is the best thing about my school.

Some days after school, or even during, me and my best friend, Amir, grab our boards and hit Love. Amir is tall and skinny with skin the color of my mom’s coffee—black, one cream, no sugar—and big, bright eyes shaped like sideways teardrops. We met playing ball at Fisher Park a couple of years ago and have been tight ever since. We chill even more these days because Uzi’s in Arizona. We eat together, share gear, and even holla at the same girls. We tell them we’re cousins. On the weekends we steal my mom’s car and hit up one of the under-twenty-one clubs like Dancers or Gotham. We always make it back uptown right before the sun comes up and my mom wakes up.

At Love, we skate and chill and joke and watch lil’ Stevie—this young buck with big lips and electric Ol’ Dirty Bastard hair—push through Love, riding, cruising, ollieing over trash cans clean, kick-flipping into ledges, grinding, spinning, catching wreck, arms dangling like empty shirtsleeves, landing sick trick after sick trick like it ain’t shit. Stevie’s so good he makes the suits cutting through the park on their lunch breaks stand speechless while their food gets cold. So good he makes the bums who sleep the days away on the benches wake up and clap.

The cops who patrol the park remind me of Roach. Every day they storm Love—scuffed nightsticks clenched above their heads like flagpoles—chasing us into 15th Street traffic. They say we can’t skate Love even though it’s public.

“This is the Philadelphia Police … leave the park immediately, leave the area immediately,” they yell over the bullhorn. If they catch somebody, they’ll break their board and take them to the station. Me and Amir never get caught, though. We see the paddy wagons as soon as they roll up and yell, “Jakes!”

Roach comes back with an index card with my last name on it and a whole bunch of notes and cross-outs. He lifts the horn and starts dialing …

“I’m having a difficult time trying to reach your parents.” His ear is to the phone and he’s shaking his head.

Join the club
.

“Where’s your dad?”

“I don’t know.” I never know where my dad is these days, just that he’s always gone. When he’s not gone, he’s getting gone.

“He’s a busy man,” I tell Roach. But no matter how mad I get at Pops for being gone all the time, as soon as I see him, I’m happy again, whole, like he never left.

“So I hear,” Roach says. “I saw his interview on
60 Minutes
.” I think about it—that was probably the last time I saw my pops too, on TV. I remember watching him tell the interviewer: “I can honestly say that I have never found a school
in the United States run by whites that adequately prepares black children to enter the world as sane human beings.”
So what the hell am I doing here in this white-ass school then?
Roach is glaring at me, probably wondering the same thing.

“What about your older sister?” he says.

I shrug. My sister is in a mental hospital. She sees and hears things we can’t.

She came to stay a weekend with us a while back.

“Be nice to your sister,” my dad told me before she arrived, not knowing what else to say. She lives with her mom in Anaheim, California. She’s a pretty girl with dark, glass-smooth skin. Her favorite hobby is family genealogy.

“We have a direct lineage from a king of Wales and a direct lineage to the Earl of Sunderland. We’re related to some other famous celebrities like actresses Lucille Ball and Carole Lombard; actor Vincent Leonard Price; first president of the American Red Cross, Clara Barton; forties sex symbol Rita Hayworth; actress Raquel Welch; and also the first president of Harvard, Henry Dunster.”

I was sitting with her on the bed in my room, smiling at her imagination. She kept going: “We’re Irish, Welsh, Hawaiian, Native American, German, French Canadian, Scottish, Spanish, Seminole Indian, Creole, Cherokee, Sioux Indian, Shaw-nee Indian, and Flamenco Gypsy from Madrid Spain.”