Losing My Cool (4 page)

I don't know what happened next or how the white boy recovered and got himself out of the park, because I didn't stick around long enough to find out. I gathered my things and left the courts as quickly and surreptitiously as I could, without waiting to speak to RaShawn and without drawing attention to myself and looking like a bitch in front of the older black boys. I was so preoccupied with the latter concern, in fact, that I forgot my new Nike Windbreaker on the grass. By the time I went back to search for it that evening, it had been stolen and there was no one left on the court to question either about the jacket's whereabouts or the fight that had taken place earlier. Back at home, however, my thoughts weren't dominated by what I had lost but by what I had seen. I was as in awe of RaShawn as I was terrified of him. In a certain way, I think that I was proud of him. He was as hard as Ice-T or NWA or Kool G Rap or any of those brothers I had seen on BET, and I was sure that no white kid would ever dream of calling
him
a monkey to his face or asking why his hair didn't move.

The more I reflected on RaShawn, the more I pulled apart the imagery of that day's events and melded it with memories of my own confrontation with Craig, the more I began to realize something: The loose jeans falling from our hips, the unlaced kicks adorning our feet, the slang encrypting our speech, the slow roll choreographing our strides, the funky-ass hairstyles embellishing our domes, the hip-hop soundtracking our days, the pigment darkening our skin (whether octoroon or fully black)—all these disparate elements congealed into a kind of glue that invisibly but definitively united people like RaShawn and me. As different as the two of us were, it was undeniable that we shared something with each other that neither of us had in common with either Craig or that white boy stretched out on the asphalt. What that meant, I suspected, was that I, too, could participate in some of the immense power that brothers like RaShawn wielded and exercised all over the place. It was a wicked genie that I, too, could summon if I chose, if I was just willing to play down the things I saw in my father's study—things that only put distance between RaShawn and me—and to play up the things I saw on BET, on the street, and on ESPN. It was easy enough to do that.

 

 

 

 

There were very few other black children at Holy Trinity with me, which meant that there existed scarcely any authority or context against which my evolving self could be measured or fact-checked. The more I channeled my inner RaShawn and aped whatever I saw on Rap City and SportsCenter, the more I noticed that the white kids I went to school with were willing to buy into the 'hood persona I was busy developing. They entered into our little social contract ready to enable my street fantasies and to cede me the physical sphere entirely. My classmates took for granted that I would beat them in the hundred-yard dash, hit them with killer crossovers, and pluck rebounds from up above their heads. The idea that I couldn't dance was met with incredulity, and in the locker room everybody operated on the assumption that black dicks were the biggest. The truth is that a brother can get used to such flattery, and quickly. The result was that I got a big head and allowed myself to sign this tacit agreement with all but my closest white friends. At first, it put some pep in my step. Before long, though, I couldn't help but realize that I was these white boys' superior—yes, perhaps, possibly—but I was not their equal. In the classroom and in terms of material well-being for example, their expectations of me tended to be much lower than of themselves and each other. The same Tina who had puzzled over the rigidity of my hair revealed herself to be equally perplexed when I caught a higher grade than she did on a history exam. My friend Mark, apropos of nothing, asked me one day whether I had ever seen a house as spacious as his before. When we went upstairs to dinner, a nice roast served with steamed vegetables, he wanted to know if I got to eat that way at home.

At first, these aspects of the deal were insulting to me—my natural proclivity was to take offense here: Why couldn't I be smart and middle-class, too, I thought (albeit with a wicked left hook and an enviably sized penis, of course)? But gradually, gradually, like a desert of sand sifting through a monstrous hourglass, after days and weeks and months and years of these constant asymmetric relations, fronting like I came from the ghetto when I was around kids like Mark and Tina seemed a small and even reasonable price to pay for the obeisance I could be granted in return. Anyway, none of the black kids I met in the barbershop and on the basketball courts had ever shown signs of giving a damn about being book smart or leading unadventurous middle-class lives.“I'ma be a nigga for life,” my ten-year-old friend Justin told me proudly. “All that other shit is for the crackers.” Like Justin, the rest of the black kids I knew just acted like ghetto fabulous street superstars, hurling themselves like Kamikazes into the world of hip-hop, sports, and gangster fantasy that we saw reflected around the 'hood and on TV, and that we heard on the radio.They had been defining themselves all along through their bodies and not their minds, which is something I had begun to do as well when I was out of my father's reach. It was a simple carrot-and-stick situation between the two groups—the whites had plenty of carrots to give an athletic wannabe thug, and I could still feel the lash of that thin black woman's stick. I was motivated, and from both sides, to keep shit as real as I possibly could. For very different reasons that in the end amounted to the same reason, it was hard to know for which side failure to do so would be worse.

 

 

 

 

My brother's problem with the white boys back in second grade, and probably the reason the other black boys didn't defend him, it struck me, was that he hadn't come across as
credibly black enough
when he was tested. I resolved to avoid that mistake. This meant that there were times when I would have to perform.

Late in the seventh grade, I remember walking out of Holy Trinity with Maria, an olive-complexioned girl who was blessed with a head of thick black tresses and a precocious junior high bosom. The two of us, flirting and laughing, came down the front walk to the main street and passed by a group of high school kids loitering on the corner, drinking ectoplasm-green Mountain Dews and smoking cigarettes. One of them, a handsome guy who looked like the singer Jon B. and who was dressed in an oversized Tommy Hilfiger rugby like a typical Jersey wigger, called out something to me. It was probably something designed to impress Maria at my expense (she looked that mature). It was a mild taunt I can't remember now, and one I could have easily brushed aside. But some of my classmates were standing there and heard it, and Maria heard it, and I had so much invested in my own black image at this point that to not respond in a tough manner would have cost me face in a way it would not have cost my white friends.“Why don't you go fuck yourself ?” I said to the boy, and kept walking.

Maria giggled, impressed with my bravado. It had been a couple of years since a white boy had asserted himself to me, and I had bought into the myth of my own invincibility around them so thoroughly, so completely, that frankly I didn't expect him to do or say anything further. Of course, he was three or four years older than me, and much stronger, and had ideas of his own. He flipped out and jumped at me.

“Bitch, I'll fuck you up right now!” he screamed, and I knew that if we fought, he would win decisively. His friends stepped between us and explained to him that I was just a kid and to leave it alone, but he was incensed.

“I'ma be here every day waiting for you,” he threatened as I moved on and his friends held him back.

The next day after school, to my shock, he really was standing there waiting for me, and when I saw this I went back inside the building and slipped out through the back exit. When I got home, I told Clarence what had happened. He said not to worry about it and that he and Michael, his best friend whom we called our cousin, would pick me up from school the next day.

With my heart in my throat, I watched the street go by from the window of my last-period music class. When the bell was about to ring, Clarence and Michael pulled up in Michael's old navy blue Buick and got out and sat on the hood and lit Black & Milds, from which they took long drags like philosophers and blew dark clouds. One of my classmates turned to me and said,
“Daaaamn.”
They were about seventeen years old, Clarence and Michael. Clarence, dressed in a Nike Air T-shirt, a pair of Air Flights with the plastic swoosh tag still attached, and loose baby blue jeans, looked like a bigger, better-built version of me. Michael, at six-foot-five and in full-on army fatigues,Timberland boots, and a forest green skully pulled down low over his eyes, looked like a punk white boy's worst nightmare.

I rushed out of the building with my head up high, searching the street for Jon B. and running up to my brother and my cousin, each of whom dapped me demonstratively as my white classmates gawked from a distance. The three of us waited there for at least a quarter hour as my classmates trickled off one by one. The boy didn't show. “Get in the car; we gonna find that ma'fucker,” Michael said.We drove first past the high school then all around downtown Westfield, windows down, knocking Smif-N-Wessun and the Originoo Gunn Clappaz, not talking. Just as I was losing hope that we would ever settle this score, I saw money emerge with a group of friends from a pizzeria across the street from the train station. Michael swerved to a stop.

“You go up to him,Thomas, and tell him you want to speak with him,” he said. “We'll be right behind you.”

I got out of the car and approached the boy from behind with a mouth so dry it was like I had sucked on a fistful of cotton balls. “Yo, let me talk to you,” I called to him in an unsteady, wildly pubescent voice. He turned around, and when he saw it was me, his face gave way to a theater of emotions—first surprise and then anger and then fear. Fear, ultimately, because he saw Michael and Clarence looming behind me. Before I could say anything further, Michael said, “Yo, are you the bitch that's been coming around fucking with my little man?”

The boy swallowed hard.

“I didn't do shit, he started popping off with me,” he said, trying to cop a plea as his friends came over to ask what was going on.

“Y'all might as well keep on walking home,” Michael said to them, “'cause y'all ain't about to do shit right here.” To my amazement and probably to the boy's, too, his friends turned around and left.

“What's your name?” Michael said to the boy.

“Bobby.”

“Bobby?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Walk over to my car, Bobby,” Michael said, and Bobby obeyed. Then Michael stepped around to the trunk and opened it, and inside there was a wooden Louisville Slugger and a big white tube sock. “Look into the trunk, bitch,” Michael said, and he picked up the sock by the open end and let it dangle from his hand. It had a large bulge weighting down the bottom, which Michael explained to Bobby was a padlock.“Which would you prefer,” Michael asked, “that I beat your faggot ass black-and-blue with this padlock or with that Louisville Slugger?” Bobby, alone on the corner with the three of us and deserted by his friends, didn't say anything, just started to cry—to sob, really, in big heaving breaths like he was hyperventilating or suffering from the severest case of hiccups. He looked as if his bowels might move.

“Oh, that's how it is, son? You want to cry now? You want to cry like a little pussy now, Bobby? I thought you was bad, I thought you was tough, I thought you was a gangsta, Bobby?” Michael said, cocking his head to the side, dwarfing Bobby and grilling him in the eyes.

Bobby was sniffling uncontrollably, his face bathed in tears.

“I tell you what, faggot,” Michael said, “you apologize to my nigga right now, you say you're sorry and that you fucked up, and I might not take your teeth home with me today.”

“I'm sorry, yo . . . , I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” Bobby said in between sniffles and wiping his face with the sleeve of his Nautica shirt.

“Tell him whether you accept his faggot-ass apology or not, Thomas,” Michael said, turning to me, then turning to Bobby: “Because if he don't accept it, Bobby, you just gonna have to try harder, bitch.”

“It's cool,” I said, almost feeling bad for the kid. Then Michael ordered Bobby to bounce, but not before warning him that if this conversation were to take place a second time, it wouldn't be verbal. As Bobby thanked Michael and turned to walk away, Clarence flicked the butt of his Black & Mild off the side of Bobby's head and an explosion of orange and gray ash burst from Bobby's hair like a tiny volcano.

 

 

 

 

The thing is, around other black kids, Clarence and Michael were not particularly tough. In fact, around other black kids like RaShawn, they weren't tough at all. They liked to play video games, play racing games, build radio-controlled cars, watch comedies, and day-dream about opening their own nightclub where they would play freestyle and house music and where Clarence would handle all the numbers and Michael would be the life of the party. They were typical suburban teenagers who ate at T.G.I. Friday's on Fridays and haunted the Woodbridge or Menlo Park malls on Saturdays, looking for fast food and fast girls to whom they might dole out their beeper numbers. They bagged groceries at ShopRite and Foodtown after school to put gas in their tanks. Neither of them had ever put a Louisville Slugger or anything approaching one upside another human body. In other words, they were not street kids in even the most liberal sense, but they were conversant (Michael more than Clarence) in their culture.