Losing My Cool (10 page)

“I'm sorry, yo, but Nate and Takira locked us out; this is the only place we can go,” he said. I either stared at him or shrugged or laughed, I can't remember which, but I know I didn't resist. What could I have said—that I was feeling tender toward Latitia and that now was not a good time to interrupt, that we had emotionally connected just now? Charles barged in. “Don't worry, nigga, you won't even know we're here,” he said as Candy—who at seventeen
was
shaped like an hourglass and built thick like a 2 Live Crew video dancer—met eyes with me, pursing her lips into a half-smile that landed in nebulous territory somewhere between babelike innocence and pure wickedness. I could have gladly bounced right then from the room, from the Shore, from the world, and I think Latitia could have, too, had things been different. But she said,“Fuck it, it's cool,” which surprised me, and I realized that I would have to stay. After all, what would it make me look like if I left? It would make me look like I had caught feelings over a bitch. It would make me look corny as hell.

“No doubt,” I said, and I slunk back over to Latitia.

Now and again I glanced over at the adjacent bed (I couldn't help it). Charles was pure business, focused, like he was about to beat a video game. Candy was wailing at the top of her lungs, saying she'd always wanted this, which even then struck me as one of the most preposterous declarations I had ever heard. I looked back down at Latitia, who had closed her eyes, perhaps also her ears. If any of this made Charles the least bit uncomfortable, he was able to conceal it.

I couldn't take it. Latitia and I went into the bathroom to take a shower. When we returned, Charles had lit a cigarette and put Biggie's “One More Chance” on the portable CD player. I flopped onto the bed with Latitia and tried to crack some jokes when Candy, visibly tipsy, got up and stumbled toward us, collapsing on top of me. She lay there, motionless, as Biggie slow-flowed about prophylactics and being “black and ugly as ever.” I watched Latitia get up and walk away as Candy started to kiss my neck.There were things that I had wanted to say to Latitia, I realized, things that I now knew would go unsaid. I looked over to the other bed and saw Charles on top of her; she was giggling, and I knew right then that I was powerless to treat her like anything other than a silly ho.

I wouldn't have been able to put it into words at the time, but the truth is that we had got caught up in one great big demeaning dance, all of us: Marion, Charles, Stacey, me, Latitia,Takira, Candy . . . , you could go on down the line. We all had memorized the steps to this number early on—and sometimes it was the girls who took the lead. A wave of sadness waxed over me then waned as quickly as it came. Candy had taken off her shirt and was telling me that she'd always wanted this.

 

 

 

 

Without fully realizing it, however, I already had begun the long process of unlearning the routine. At the very end of the school year, when a classmate, Jerry, who had felt provoked over some slight he thought I had given him—or maybe it was a slight I really had given him, the difference in these situations is semantic—challenged me (and Charles, indirectly) to an after-school fight that coming Friday, Charles started making arrangements to meet him. But I could find no good reason to fight Jerry, to want to fight Jerry, to waste my time dealing with Jerry, aside from that all-purpose issue of “respect,” of course.

“He's disrespecting,” Charles said. Who cares about Jerry's respect? I thought to myself. It was clear that this guy—a quick-tempered seller and user of drugs—was one step from getting stuffed away in one of those high schools for kids with emotional and behavioral disorders, two steps from jail, and uncountable steps removed from anything like a shot at a good college. Who cared what he thought—screw what he thought, I wanted to say, wanted to shout until I was hoarse—but “word up” was all I could muster.

Without the SATs to prepare for, Charles was no longer coming home with me every day after school. Most days it was just Pappy and me, sitting in his study, half-listening to Jenny Jones or Ricki Lake, playing chess and talking until my mother got home from work. We would play every day. Pappy always played black, which moves second and is therefore a perpetual step behind white, always on the defensive, like the receiving side in tennis. And just like in tennis, when good players play chess, it is assumed that the receiving side, the side to go second, will lose. Like breaking serve, a win or a draw for black is considered an upset.

“Why do you always want to be black?” I often asked him. “Don't you want to go first?”

His response never changed.“I prefer black because it's a realer representation of life, son,” he would say. And he would add: “The odds are stacked against you when you go second, which requires you to play smarter—you've got to think.”

Born left-handed, Pappy painstakingly taught himself as a child to write with his right hand and as a result it became the stronger of the two. The same way he had learned penmanship with his off hand, Pappy had made himself an even stronger chess player with black than with white. Most games, he beat me handily.

The afternoon after Jerry's challenge, I couldn't concentrate on chess at all. I was playing sloppily and Pappy could tell that something was wrong. I debated with myself whether I should tell him about Jerry or not. I fiercely admired the fact that Pappy was no coward. He wasn't like a lot of the white fathers I had known at Holy Trinity; he wasn't meek or passive-aggressive, and he didn't think that fighting was inherently wrong or some sort of sin. If Pappy had a problem with you or you had one with him, he would address you to your face, like a man. He was old-school like that. Turning the other cheek is foolishness, he would say. As he saw it, there were times when the right thing to do—the ethically right thing to do—was to resort to violence. Malcolm X had a metaphor that resonated with Pappy: If you step on my foot, then you've just surrendered your right to tell me how I ought to get you off it. Pappy hated bullies. Bullies step on other people's feet. A coward accepts the affront; a man defends himself.

Finally I just came out with it and asked him what he thought I should do about Jerry. Leaning back in his worn leather swiveling-chair, in one of his colorful Nike jogging suits, he pulled at the coiled hairs of his salt-and-pepper beard, which seemed to grow a pinch saltier by the day, and pondered my question. “You should come home from school one period early on Friday,” he said. “Just walk home instead of taking the bus.”

This was not the answer I had necessarily expected, but it was one that I knew I could trust. He didn't lecture me that day as he might have and as I had expected. Maybe he could tell that I was going through some things and that now was not the time to apply any more pressure. Or maybe he figured that it was pointless, that I was eighteen and impetuous, and that he couldn't protect me from everything anymore. Or maybe he was just tired of it all, himself. I promised him that I would do as he told me.

That Friday was hell. Everyone was talking shit back and forth, calling their boys and their big brothers to come through, psyching themselves up like child soldiers drunk off blood in some war-ravaged African province. Jerry had been calling me a faggot and a bitch all around town, which by extension reflected on Charles, which by extension somehow reflected on Charles's neighborhood. And that was serious, because Charles's neighborhood did not produce any faggots or bitches, as far as he and his boys were concerned. Over the course of the week, things had metastasized from an infinitesimal problem between Jerry and me (and, of course, by extension Charles), to a meta-problem between Jerry's Linden/Rahway hometown and Charles's Piscataway/ Plainfield neighborhood.

When I told him, Charles was deeply insulted that I was not going to show, but he stopped short of contradicting Pappy's advice.

“You shouldn't go either,” I said, but that was an exercise in futility; his boys were on their way and Charles was going to go.

“I ain't a pussy,” Charles replied. I shrugged and dapped him, telling him I understood, but I was going to do what my father had told me, and I'd see him later. As I walked out the side exit of the main building, bailing on Charles and his gathering crew, I knew I was making a decision that would carry real consequences. I knew that I was closing a door not only on Charles and Jerry and everyone else but on a part of myself, too.

 

 

 

 

When I got home, sweaty from the two-mile walk and the late-spring sun, Pappy, looking up from the paper, greeted me from his desk. Without mentioning what we both knew I had just avoided, he handed me three letters. I had been rejected by Stanford and admitted into Johns Hopkins and Georgetown on full-tuition academic scholarships.

I was beside myself. My brother had not gone to college and neither had any of his friends. Sometimes I overheard my father's white prep-school students talk about far-off places like Georgetown, but I didn't know anyone who looked like me—other than a handful of very tall and talented basketball players—who did that. I read the letters aloud. Pappy just stared at me with the hint of a smile curling up at the corners of his mouth.“You see?” he said when I had finished, then he returned to the
New York Times
spread out before him.

I was relieved and anxious at the same time. I went into my room, flopping onto the couch, the couch I sometimes snuck Stacey onto, and tried to imagine what college would be like. But I was unable to get Charles and Jerry out of my head. Like Tessie in “The Lottery,” I had been caught up in all the little games and rituals of my village for so long that I had no idea what life outside was like. Unlike Tessie, I had decided I wanted to go away before it was too late. Now I didn't know what to expect. I turned on BET, cut the volume up all the way, and braced myself for the phone to start ringing.

 

 

 

G
eorgetown University sits on a manicured hilltop campus in Washington, D.C. In one direction it overlooks the Potomac River and Rosslyn, Virginia; in the other it opens onto the North-west section of the capital, a residential area where preservation committees pulled a William F. Buckley Jr. maneuver, stood athwart history, and yelled Stop. The university grounds are covered with cherry blossom trees and dogwood, floral clusters, and heavy Flemish Romanesque architecture. Outside the main gates, the cobblestone streets are flanked with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century row houses and unattached mansions that come in pastels and boast prim lawns and price tags as long as telephone numbers. Madeleine Albright and John Kerry, John Edwards and the Kennedys—they all keep homes there. There are no Metro stops in Georgetown, a conspicuous fact that makes it a singularly difficult part of the city to get to or from without a car, and for which there are a variety of vague and contradictory explanations. The one told most often and convincingly is that the locals are trying to discourage the inward flow of out-of-town riffraff. Up and down M Street and Wisconsin Avenue, the neighborhood's two main thoroughfares, retail outlets of the Ralph Lauren and B&B Italia variety jostle for square footage. On the north side of campus, across from the university medical center, is the French embassy—so close, you can almost smell the smoke from the Gauloises. Day and night, schools of Porsches and Benzes swim beneath the trees and through the streets like German-engineered sharks. It is not uncommon to see a Bentley around. In the middle of one of the blackest metropolises in America—Chocolate City—Georgetown, the institution and the neighborhood, is an outpost of white and international privilege.

 

 

 

 

I arrived there in a backward New Era Yankees cap, Rocawear jeans as stiff as sheet metal, and a pair of brand-new yellow Timberland construction boots—all of which were worn in defiance of my new upscale environment and its sweltering heat. I brought with me stacks of Cash Money, Death Row, and Bad Boy albums, around twenty pairs of tennis shoes, a photo album's worth of pictures of Stacey, and something to prove. I imagined myself a kind of exiled representative of Union Catholic, of New Jersey, of hip-hop culture and blackness. When I settled into my room on the eighth floor of Harbin Hall, my white roommate's mother took one look at my closet and said: “Wow, it looks like Foot Locker in there!” I don't know why, but that made me feel proud. Pappy chuckled and said, “If only he'd worry about schoolwork as much as footwear.”

My roommate, Bryan, and his family we all found friendly, which relieved my parents, but my mind was on another planet. I was missing Stacey, missing Charles; I didn't put much effort into getting to know the white kids I was meeting (or the Koreans, Europeans, Arabs, Haitians, or South Asians, for that matter). Which is only to say, I didn't pay attention to anyone not black. That was all I saw or was looking for. I felt alone and cocooned myself within the squiggled chalk lines of life as BET and Power 105 FM defined it for me.

 

 

 

 

My first weekend on campus, I found myself at a house party at a black apartment down on Prospect Street.The tenants of the house were four sophomores, some of whom ran track, and they had a big duplex in the Village A complex. I don't know whether I came with anyone or if I went there by myself, but I do know that I should have worn contact lenses. So much heat was being generated in there, my eyeglasses fogged as soon as I stepped inside. Bodies writhed and grinded up against the walls and one another (and even on top of the couches and on chairs) as Juvenile's “Back That Azz Up” blared. The only light came from the streetlamps beaming through the windows. In the shadows girls gave gratuitous lap dances and guys rolled up things to smoke.