Losing My Cool (12 page)

“Yo, man, are you OK?” Matt, my hallmate, called from his room in his Brooklyn-Jewish stammer. He was up still, dressed in a METS SUCK T-shirt and loose Hoyas shorts, grooving to Coltrane—or maybe it was Miles or Bird, at the time I wouldn't have been able to tell—drinking bitter black coffee and scribbling his homework in between Napster downloads and trips to
ESPN.com
. The whole world was passed out except for him it seemed.

“I don't know what the fuck is going on with me,” I said, glad to have someone to talk to.

“Come in, come in, and let me put some tea on for you, man; it'll open your lungs and help you sleep.” Even though I had lived next door to Matt for months, I realized, we had never had a full conversation. I sipped the tea slowly and we politicked about a variety of topics I wouldn't have guessed I was interested in.

“You hear that backbeat right there, man?” he said, tapping his foot. “This shit is so sick.”

“What's a backbeat?”

“You don't listen to jazz?”

“Nah, I guess I never have.”

“Oh, man, I'll burn you some CDs.”

“Word, please do,” I said, aware all of a sudden that since I had been old enough to purchase my own records it had never occurred to me to listen to anything other than hip-hop.

We sat that way for a while, admiring the drummer's skill, then I thanked him for the Earl Grey, handed him his cup, and crawled back into bed as the sun was coming up. For a period of time—several days a week—this became our nightly ritual. Coughing, tea and talking, and listening to music—black music like Miles Davis and Nina Simone, which I was hearing for the first time. Eventually I had a coughing fit so tough, no amount of steam would suppress it. What I thought had been a passing fever had left me asthmatic. But even after Flovent and albuterol replaced my hot shower and tea routine, I continued dropping in on Matt and we became tight.

Matt and Rusty weren't flukes. Before long, I had a catholic assortment of heads with whom I would chill: African, Jewish, Hindu, WASP; East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, down-South; lower-class, middle-class, upper-middle-class, richer-than-God. I don't think I would have hung with most of them—in high school I would have called them busters—were we not forced by the random nature of the Georgetown housing system into such close proximity. But forced we were, and the friendships developed unexpectedly and organically.

At the same time, it wasn't nearly as simple as that. I couldn't help but notice that despite having been assigned to dormitories just as diverse as mine, many of my black friends and classmates nonetheless remained socially cordoned off. This was a conscious decision on their part, it occurred to me. During the week they ate and walked to class among themselves. On weekends they danced and partied together at house parties and at Howard. They were a self-selecting minority on campus, segregating themselves to the back of the bus or over to the coloreds-only table when, if they chose, the fact was they could sit anywhere they pleased. Most of the black people I knew were polite and friendly to non-blacks, but there was something that fundamentally made them uncomfortable around them, too.What was that something? At the time, I didn't know. All I knew was that I no longer felt what they were feeling. And though I still spent most of my days kicking it with them, I found myself, to my surprise and for the first time in a long time, resisting the urge to join them fully in their seclusion.

 

 

 

 

Despite an abysmal first semester, I still attended class sporadically at best in the spring. Plenty of mornings degenerated into afternoons and then early evenings as I lamped in bed, BET thumping, the Big Tymers popping yellow bottles of Cristal and flashing iced-out grimaces, glaring at the camera lens, imploring all the young black men tuning in across the nation not to get to class but to get our roll on. I was basking—or drowning—in my sudden freedom, shirking the rigorous course load my years at Union Catholic had ill-equipped me to deal with, not heeding Pappy's call to stay on top of things from the jump.

The floors of Harbin Hall were deserted at these hours.All those party-it-up white boys in popped-collar Polos and Reef sandals—the ones who, naïvely, I had assumed were not handling their academic business either—were in fact in class.All of them except for Playboy. He skipped a hell of a lot, too, and he would come through my room and order food and play NBA 2K on my Dream-cast or use my TV to watch AC Milan play “football” and we would crack jokes and talk. I think that we were both glad to have the company.

Playboy was this tall, handsome, impossibly entitled kid with a sweeping brown cowlick and sad, jaded eyes, who at eighteen was dripping with the kind of I've-seen/-had/-bought/-tasted-everything ennui it takes several consecutive lifetimes to cultivate. He was not unassuming. He would have described himself as looking something like the Dickie Greenleaf character in
The Talented Mr. Ripley
. I had never met anyone like him: He seemed to be above money—was unconcerned with it as I've come to learn only people who are very used to having money can be unconcerned with having money, the way that only people who've never been sick can be unconcerned with having health. He spoke breezily of his apartments and homes in Paris, Venice, and Greece; of backyard sculpture gardens and Schieles on the wall; of the Tupac-namechecked boulevard back in California that bears his family's name; of household staff and family friends with names of their own, such as Steel, Picasso, Galliano, and Dunne. While most of us—white, black, and everything in between—were happy just to sit down in front of a hot cheesesteak, he dined out nightly and expensively at places like Cafe Milano, Peacock Cafe, and Bistro Français—and he complained about the food. The word around the hall was that on top of his allowance—a generous stipend by any standard—Playboy had figured out a way to siphon off extra funds, a little at a time, from each of his dad's credit cards and into a PayPal account he had set up for himself. That was the type of cat Playboy was. Of course, I had never even heard of PayPal; that was the type of cat I was.

For whatever reasons two people might click at any given moment in time, Playboy and I clicked. Maybe it was because, whether we were aware of it or not, neither of us quite fit into our assigned roles. He was an awkward Georgetown aristocrat, too well read and frankly too dissatisfied ever to blend with the happy-go-lucky sons and daughters of Greenwich bankers and cocky scions of Middle Eastern oil fortunes. And I was slowly, ever so slowly, awakening to the sense, which I couldn't articulate at the time, that there was more and I wanted more and I could have more than what Dr. Dre and Robert L. Johnson and Russell Simmons and my classmates at Union Catholic and in the small black corner of Georgetown and across town at Howard would have me believe.

In other words, Playboy needed grounding at the same time I needed elevation. We met each other somewhere in the middle. Still, it was difficult to venture off my own turf and to engage people like Playboy on their terms.The ice-grill mask of black cool and default membership within a hip-hop culture predicated on street sensibilities, elaborate shape-concealing costumes, and esoteric 'hood vernacular had shielded my boys and me from ever having to face up to the fact that we were not invincible or always in control of things. Rather than know ourselves, we cloaked our ignorance—like the rappers and thugs that we adored—in the rags of self-importance and faux-empowerment. It was so much easier to mime stereotypes than to invent ourselves as individuals. Making hip-hop culture the be-all end-all, dismissing everyone and everything not young and black out of hand was to reconfigure the world in our own familiar image—however unlikely it was that this image might jibe with reality. To relinquish this reconfiguration is to open oneself to a shitstorm of pain and insecurity; it is to allow someone else, possibly someone who has done more and seen more and received more than you have, to participate in the setting of criteria, in the determination of what is and is not good; it is to strip your feet of a life's worth of callus and step willingly onto the scorching pavement. And that is scary.

 

 

 

 

The sun hung low as a hot-air balloon over the Potomac as Playboy and I ambled down Prospect Street in search of food and a way to waste time. He suggested we make a right on Bank and roll to Dean & Deluca. I had seen the fancy white shopping bags with the black block lettering littered around campus, but I had never ventured inside.

“Trust me, it's good,” Playboy said, and in we went. “What do you want to eat?”

“Whatever.”

“OK, I'll go get the cheese. Can you grab a baguette?”

“Sure,” I said, swiveling around only to realize as soon as he'd left that I didn't know what a baguette was.
Baguette
. . .
baguette
. . .
baguette
. . . I murmured to myself as if the steady repetition of the word might somehow conjure its hidden meaning. I had only heard the term used in reference to the diamonds encasing Puffy's Rolex or lodged in Mase's ear. I was at a loss now. I began to thread my way through aisle after pristine aisle of extra-virgin olive oils, colorful gelatos, and fine-ground espressos, confused and slightly embarrassed, in search of some hint or clue that might allow me yet to save face, but way too proud to ask any clerk for help. I had circled the whole store, making it all the way back to the front, when at last it hit me:
“Baguette” must just be French for “little bag.”
It made perfect sense. He wants something to put all the shit in, I told myself. Why couldn't he just say that? When I returned with a small plastic hand basket, Playboy said, “Where's the baguette, dude?” I stared at him.

“This isn't it?” I said, pointing to the basket. He looked at me, and for a split second I saw his face shift: his jaw lowered just so as his lips parted and his eyes narrowed; his nose kind of scrunched and one eyebrow arched.The expression, which was gone as soon as it came, surprised and touched me like a slap, a slap whose resounding sting left marks across my face that spelled out my own ignorance. Or, more precisely, his face became a kind of bulletin board or mirror on which I was able to read that ignorance of mine—it was legible. He reached over and grabbed a powdery, oblong loaf of bread from a heaping pile and passed it to me.

The truth is, as with jazz, I had never before even thought about bread. Charles and I, Stacey, Moe over at Howard, the basketball thugs who threw gang signs around the cafeteria like chest passes, the girls who fawned over and serviced them—we talked about mad shit, discussed all types of things we deemed earth-shattering, like Iceberg sweatsuits and the appropriate time and place to flaunt jewelry, for example. But, it occurred to me in Dean & Deluca, we never talked about bread. Why not? Why didn't we ever think or talk about bread—or cheese, for that matter? No one
ever
talked about cheese. And why not? We ate three times a day, too, right? But that didn't matter. Real niggas didn't talk about cheese because, for whatever the reason, cheese ain't
real
. To be straight up, cheese is corny. Sneakers are real, not cheese; cognac is real, not wine; rap is real, not jazz; expensive cars are real, not expensive educations. My entire life I intuited and honored these little distinctions, as did all my friends. Bread, cheese, wine, books—though I talked about books with Charles and Pappy, that was the exception and because Pappy made us—I would never in a million years broach these subjects with Stacey or Ant; I simply understood not to. But now, one-on-one with Playboy in search of provisions and humiliated by my own ignorance, I wondered why that was: Who says cheese ain't real? Who gets to tell me that?

It's difficult to put into words the incredible smallness I felt as the result of such an otherwise inconsequential misunderstanding. I don't think it's frivolous to dwell on it, though, because our attitudes toward food often speak volumes. If you can't or don't bother to think broadly or curiously about what you ingest, then what else is passing you by? For my boys and me the answer was: a whole lot. It probably occurred to me at the time, too, that Playboy would not remember this fleeting little exchange, but that I would—and I
do
. Somewhere in this discrepancy of recollection—far more than in the discrepancy between our bank accounts or complexions—resides all the significance in the world.

As humbled as I felt, though, the fact is that just like in grade school, I retained real power over the situation, and I knew it. I had a choice right then, standing in the prepared foods section of Dean & Deluca, holding what I now knew was a baguette—I could take this experience in one of two directions. On the one hand, and with great ease, I could say “Yo,
fuck
a baguette—that shit is
gaaaay
, kid! Don't nobody eat no fucking baguette over here.”And I could say it with a measure of bravado. I could play the whole thing off in a way that would make me look real and cool for not knowing about French breads and would put Playboy on the defensive for even having lived such an effete existence that he was so versed in such bitch-made-sounding baked goods. I could do that, I could strike that pose—and if I were with Charles or Ant and we could reinforce one another and make one big joke of the whole thing, that's probably exactly what I would do. That's the customary tack. On the other hand, I could try something new, new for me: I could swallow my pride and allow myself my curiosity and permit someone else to put me on to something unfamiliar.

That day, I realized I wanted more—to know more, taste more, see more, experience more. I was tired of trying to keep it real—real provincial—all the time. I dropped my guard, and the baguette, which we slathered with funky Brie and covered in fatty see-through-thin sheets of prosciutto di Parma, was delicious.