Losing My Cool (9 page)

Without missing a beat, Nate produced a flask-sized bottle of Hennessy from his hoodie, which either was half-full or half-empty depending on how you looked at it. He swigged on the thing like it was a Nantucket Nectar. Charles grabbed the remote control, flipping between a Lakers game and music videos on BET. I sank into Latitia's bed and let the alternating images of the young, black, and famous stream from the TV and trickle into my head. Fighting down Nate's cognac with a fruity cupful of Alizé, I heard Takira whisper in my ear, her breath a noxious perfume of weed and Frosted Flakes: We can do anything we want, she told me, wearing only her red Victoria's Secret underwear and an open bathrobe. The proposition repulsed me. In school, I never liked Takira, the B.I.G. mourner, but the previous night we had somehow become lovers. What am I doing here? I thought to myself. Right then I wanted nothing so much as just to be at home, eating my mother's bacon and eggs, feeling calm or perhaps just bored, watching the Lakers game with my father or shooting baskets in the driveway. I brushed Takira off with a lame excuse as I felt Latitia's leg move on top of mine beneath the bedspread. “Do you want to go down to your room?” she asked. I forgot about going home.

 

 

 

 

Besides the obvious, there was an additional draw to getting with Latitia: She was Marion's girlfriend. Just a few weeks earlier, I had been in the cafeteria with Charles, complaining over a lunch of French fries and chocolate milk that the Marion thing just wouldn't go away; that word about him and Stacey was rampant, spreading like an ink stain or a disease, even though I had made a show of parading around in the $400 silk shirt she had bought me as a sign of solidarity.“Fuck the Versace, nigga, you gotta step to him!” Charles said.“No matter what, you can't ever let anyone disrespect.”

Charles meant what he said. I knew that. He was one of those guys who, if he were to get mugged at gunpoint for his wallet, would say “fuck you” to the gunman and get shot putting up a fight. Not because he gave a damn about the wallet or anything like that, but because he couldn't stand the humiliation of it all. Death (or at least a vigorous ass-whooping) before dishonor was his modus operandi. Tupac was real, Charles once told me, for taking five shots in the attempted robbery that nearly killed him. “They took his Rolex anyway,” I said. “That's beside the point,” Charles said. “Pac stood his ground, which is what mattered.”

“True,” I said, and on a certain level I agreed with him—that
was
what mattered.

Still, on another level it was getting stupider and stupider for me to try to stand my own ground whenever it was contested. I posted some of the highest SAT and SAT II scores in the school that year, and Pappy explained to me that I could go places with them. Before that, I had only conceived of college in terms of the men's basketball rankings. Now all of a sudden, off the team and having done better than I ever imagined on standardized tests, I found myself putting together applications to fifteen of the best academic institutions in the country. Most eighteen-year-olds with ambitions of going where Pappy had shown me to apply would do anything in their power to avoid a fistfight.

Talking the matter over with Charles, though, it became clear that I would not be able to be like most of those other eighteen-year-olds. I was going to have to step to Marion, and that was that. However foolish it was and despite his own college dreams, Charles would back me up, too. He would back me up whether it was one-on-one or the two of us on twenty. Charles was loyal to a fault. But what dumbfounded him to no end, what pained him—his face looked like he had sipped rancid milk—was that I had even put myself in such a position in the first place, that I had let myself get so close to Stacey.“This should never happen over a bitch,” he said, shaking his head. All my boys echoed this sentiment at one time or another: Never trust a bitch; never love a bitch. Those were the rules, and they were beyond questioning. Why I couldn't just live by them was a mystery to us all.

The afternoon of the lunchroom chat, I boarded Marion's Irvington-bound bus with Charles in tow, my gold chain wrapped tightly around my fist, my back, so to speak, against the wall. We took our seats in the rear and when the driver pulled into the street I stood up, walked forward and smashed my chain, and the medallion attached to it, into Marion's jaw. Latitia screamed, but Charles made sure that no one broke us up.“Nigga, I've been dying for this,” Marion snarled.At well over six feet, he was a lithe kid who looked like a young Jay-Z with more refined features. He fought his way into a standing position and out into the aisle. Our classmates moved away, parting to both sides like the curtains in a theater. This seemed appropriate, we were on stage now, and I wanted everyone to see.

The bus driver slammed his brakes—which sent us flying forward, holding on to each other for stability with one hand while railing on each other with the free one—before making a beeline back to school and radioing in for help. The two of us spilled from the bus into the parking lot, partners in a furious tango, pausing to kick off our unlaced Wallabees so they wouldn't get scuffed, then lunging at each other like skinny, demented pit bulls. Our classmates hung from the windows, pumping their fists, roaring their approval. I knew how to box a little bit. Pappy, a man who even in old age could handle himself with his hands, had taught me the basics when I was a kid: how to bob and weave, parry a punch, take a punch. But this was not boxing, there was no grace to this, no artistry—Marion and I were swinging for the fences on each other's faces, dodging nothing, eating each other's knuckles in lumpy bites.

Outside, everything began to move in delirious slow motion. I saw my fist crawl past Marion's nose, missing the mark by inches. I saw his lanky arm cock back and felt my own nose grow hot. I felt my eyes get wet and blurred. I saw my fist connect with Marion's chest. I saw Marion lose his footing and fall backward. I saw myself on top of his ass in the bushes edging the walk. I saw him on his knees. I saw my fist come down on his head one, two, three, four times like a hammer beating a stubborn nail into submission. The damn nail would not submit. It felt like one of those nightmares where no matter how hard you swing, the decisive blow eludes you and your tormentor continues to taunt, undeterred. I kept trying to knock him out, no longer able to hear my classmates' cheers or see anything beyond Marion's close-cropped head in my hands. I didn't see myself go down. I felt my right shoulder pop loose from its socket before I saw my vice principal's flushed cheeks and terrified gaze hovering over me. I felt myself pinned to cement. I felt the pain in my nose, my eyes, my arm, my back, my bloodied feet—it hit me from both sides, top to bottom, like a supercollider.

Even though there were rules on the books against fighting, I didn't get suspended for this, partly because I was, compared to my peers, a much more promising student and partly because my father just gave more of a damn than most. At the faintest whiff of trouble concerning his boys, Pappy would sweep into the school's administrative offices with the severity of a man from another era, decked out in his finest worsted suit and tie, hair pomaded back, tortoiseshell glasses magnifying his gaze, wing tips shined to a mirror polish, and demand to speak with the principal.“The principal may be busy,” he would tell the nervous secretary whose unfortunate job it was to run interference, “but he's going to have to come out and see me.”

If on the occasion Clarence or I had done wrong, Pappy would not defend us or object to punishment, but there was nothing the school could do that would approach what awaited us at home. He made this so clear to all of us that there were times when the same teachers who had called him in reversed themselves and lobbied for clemency on our behalf. Pappy's point in these instances, then, was not to secure special treatment for his children. The point was that if the white administrators of the school were going to discipline his boys, his black boys, its head would have to justify this decision to Pappy's satisfaction—and also he would have to know that he would have to do so every single time. But Pappy didn't scream or shout; he argued—forcefully, rationally, carefully, and with an intellectual sophistication that was uncommon at the schools Clarence and I attended. With his gold Phi Kappa Phi tie bar and with his deep Texan voice, he was intensely formal and formidably intense. Everyone knew Dr. Williams at Union Catholic, and they dreaded an altercation with him.

“It sounds to me like this is a case of unrequited lust and that Thomas has been provoked by a would-be Lothario,” Pappy insisted. “My son isn't going to be punished for defending himself against a bully.” I sat there in silence. The truth is I had spared my father some of the less flattering details when presenting my side of the story. The principal and the vice principal—whose tackle I could still feel—were the kind of ethnic white men who had seen it all, racking up decades between them in the New Jersey interparochial school system. Each looked quizzically at the other and then with sympathy at Pappy. They had nothing but respect for my father, and they wanted to make that clear. It would be a shame, they said, for something like this to compromise my college applications, which was why they were going to be lenient this time. Without going into any particulars, however, what they both wanted to know was why a nice kid like me with such a nice family would be running around with a girl like
Stacey
in the first place. Didn't I know that she was trouble? Didn't my father know this? The split-second wince on Pappy's face hurt much more than Stacey's infidelity had.

I knew that my courtship of Stacey was an open, festering wound for Pappy, a source of lasting embarrassment against which he could not defend himself. Like Charles, honor meant everything to Pappy, though he had different ideas of what that word signified. Pappy couldn't give a damn about a street rep. He was self-schooled—a black, self-described bastard from the segregated South who had taught himself how to live from the beat-up copies of Plato's
Dialogues
and
Aesop's Fables
he'd managed to dig up in the meager colored library in Fort Worth and at the little Jewish synagogue in Galveston, where a stunned rabbi had invited him to study after Pappy had won a blind-entry essay competition with a piece on Maimonides.

All Pappy ever wanted to do in life was to distinguish himself, to be a man capable of commanding respect in a world that was madly hostile to anyone who looked like him. A world as unrecognizable to Charles and me as ours was to him. Pappy's word was his bond and his name was all he had, all that he could control. He didn't keep it real; he kept his name out of the street. I had brought shame home with Stacey. I was continuing to bring shame home, for he knew I had no intention of distancing myself from her and, powerful as he was, short of moving the family back across the country, he was powerless to keep me away from her.

For Pappy, it was all very simple. If life in fact was a chess game and I had taken Stacey as my queen, well, then my king was terrifically compromised. At best she was pure foolishness in his eyes, a street chick, five minutes with her amounted to a terrible price to pay for a piece of ass. At worst, there was the prospect of pregnancy, whether by me or by someone else—the difference was negligible to him and the potential for disaster incalculable. It kept him up at night. But Pappy and I saw the world through different lenses: What he found so troubling I found intoxicating—Stacey
was
street and that was what was so hot. She was 'hood, she was hip-hop, she was black, she was
real
. She had my nose open, Pappy told me. He was right.

I was propelled into bed with Latitia by the winds of my ego and by my hatred for Marion. Inside the motel room, however, with just the two of us together, my desire to keep it real, my thirst for revenge against Marion, it all faded away, receding like the ocean tide outside the crusted window. As her clothes piled up into a lace-capped mound on the floor, I noticed, as if for the first time, just how pretty Latitia was.With soft, wavy hair, sun-kissed caramel skin, and a body shaped more like a teardrop than an hourglass, she could have been a Brazilian exchange student or one of Gauguin's Tahitian nudes. I reminded myself that I'd had a crush on her since I was fourteen years old. I let myself get lost in her embrace and in the moment, forgetting about trying to be hard or
gangsta
or disrespectful. For a minute, I forgot that she was a bitch.

Suddenly there was a violent rapping at the door. I tried to ignore it, but it only grew louder. “Fuck, who is it?” I said.

“Nigga, it's Charles, open up!”

Latitia hopped under the covers as I threw on some basketball shorts and cracked the door. There was Charles holding Candy by the hand.