Losing My Cool (13 page)

 

 

 

 

I was with Playboy several days later, chilling on the main lawn, squirting Super Soakers and trying to evade the muggy afternoon heat that always reminded me that D.C. used to be swampland, when I spotted Ashley approaching from the periphery. Ashley was this tall, buxom, high-yellow girl from the South, who belonged to a clique of pretty, upper-middle-class black female freshmen whose weakness for thugs, athletes, and rappers became the stuff of legend in the greater metropolitan area. The daughter of a dentist, probably a debutante, very Jack and Jill of America style—she was the kind of bourgeois black girl who never really had black friends or dated black guys growing up.The kind of black girl who had fallen in love in high school with the sort of white guy who dyes his hair red with little packets of cherry Kool-Aid and who doesn't normally even notice black chicks. In other words, she was the kind of hot, naïve, Hilary-from-
The-Fresh-Prince-of-Bel-Air
black girl every black guy, but especially every thugged-out black guy, at an elite white college is dying to fuck.

It didn't take long for her to realize her status at Georgetown atop the black social pecking order, to lose the white boy back home with the Kool-Aid in his hair, and to start converting all that sexual capital into tangible nights out and “dates.” Maybe it took three months. What I know is that by the time she crossed my path on Copley Lawn that sweltering spring afternoon, she had been involved for some time with the Burkina Fasoian backup small forward on the basketball team to the chagrin of niggas everywhere. I didn't quite understand what all the fuss was about. Physically, Ashley was on point, and I would have counted myself among those aforementioned niggas who would gladly blaze. But personality-wise, she packed as much flavor as a bowl of white rice. At the time, I was nominally still with Stacey and, from where I stood, Ashley and her friends—dizzy broads with white accents and matching Bebe halter tops—literally and figuratively paled in comparison.

Maybe it was the hot sun glaring in my eyes. Maybe it was to impress Playboy or because I didn't think she could do anything about it that made me do it, I don't know. I only recall that as she strolled by and met my gaze I decided to unload nearly a full clip of Super Soaker fluid on her, turning her patterned summer dress into a thirsty sponge and reversing the powerful relaxing process in her hair like a stiff dose of black pride. She screamed: “You asshole!” I laughed so hard, the tears streamed as she stormed away, rattling off a string of pejoratives time or pride has not preserved for me.

“Dude, I can't believe you just did that,” Playboy said, his eyes wide with surprise. “You totally just humiliated that girl!”

“Fuck her,” I said, still laughing, and sat down on a bench nearby.

“Who is she even?” he asked, sitting down beside me and draping one long leg over the other.

“Man, she's nobody,” I said.

 

 

 

 

That night as usual I went to New South with Dee to grab some dinner. Dee was like my shadow back then. He was this sweet kid with yellow, almost Chinese skin and long cornrows, which he would tap instead of scratch when they itched so as not to disturb the careful weave coursing across his scalp. He came from a very rough part of D.C. (“the uhrea,” he called it in his accent) and sometimes, when I heard him on the phone with his mother, I would think it was his little sister or a neighborhood friend he was talking to. He lived below me in Harbin and buried himself in video games, slam poetry, hardcore hip-hop, and sentimental R & B. He had little to no money and mostly kept to himself. If I was at sea with schoolwork, Dee was like a man overboard being ravaged repeatedly against a wall of rock by the crashing surf. I liked Dee a lot and I made it a point to include him in anything I was doing, and I think he was grateful to me for that.

The two of us sauntered down the steps into the cafeteria, and I noticed three or four basketball players milling around the foyer in shower shoes and Hoyas sweats. I was friendly with two or three players on the team, older heads, but the rest of them I said what's up to and nothing more. These were what's-up guys. As I rolled past, I threw the usual head nod their way and kept it moving. Then I felt a tug on my arm. The Burkina Fasoian had my wrist locked in a vise grip; he wheeled me around. “Yo, the fuck is up?” I said.

“You know what is up, my nigger,” he said, sounding like a castrated Dikembe Mutombo in his melodic African-francophone English.

“Huh?”

“You cannot disrespect me like this, do you hear me?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You cannot disrespect me!”

I wrenched myself loose from his astonishing grip. “What are you even talking about?”

“Today. This afternoon. You spray my girl. You cannot disre - spect me like this.” All of a sudden I realized why he was so hot. I had forgotten all about that. Now I looked around; his boys all were watching me. Dee looked nervous, but he was loyal and stood with me. Burkina Fasoian Dude was tall, like six-foot-six, but not scary. I had a difficult time believing he would get violent, and decided there was no way I could let him scold me.

“Man, fuck that bitch,” I said with affected temerity and in a voice that sounded more like Charles's than mine. The Burkina Fasoian's eyes bulged, the vein on his neck popped like he was getting exercise, and before he could respond, one of his teammates, who up till that point had stayed off to the side, flew at me.

“Nigga, you better show some got'damn respect!” he said, with his Los Angeles inflection.

Now, this brother was enormous, played backup center—and if the Hoyas are known for anything at all, it is for their Herculean low-post. He was a legitimate seven feet, a jet-black Frankenstein—fearsome-looking, a brother you'd be seeing in your sleep. I didn't know this guy well, but some of the girls called him Free-to-Mess, because shortly after freshman orientation, he had told each of them individually that he was “free to mess.” With his chest in my face, Free-to-Mess towered over me, glowering, munching on a bowl of Kellogg's Corn Pops, of all things.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, this doesn't have nothing to do with you,” I said to him, aware I may have gotten a little exuberant a moment earlier and catching out of the corner of my eye a glimpse of Dee, who, I noticed now, was even smaller than me!

“Nigga, you heard my patna; don't be disrespecting him like that again, dig?” Free-to-Mess said, shoveling Pops into his mouth, high up over my head, even as he spoke. I didn't say anything, wasn't trying to escalate the situation. “He won't fight you, feel me? But I'm red-shirted this year, nigga, I will.”

The third player, who remained seated on the stairs, blue bandana tied neatly around his clean-shaven head, didn't say a word, looked at me. I scanned my brain for plausible options.What would Charles do? Charles might actually throw down, try to snuff the giant in the solar plexus and then play it as it came. Well, that was a universe of pain I wasn't trying to visit. What would Pappy do? Pappy never would be in this situation in the first place, fool! My heart plummeted through me like a cinder block.

“Nigga, say I won't just pour these Co'n Pops all on top of yo' head, patna? Then whatchu gonna do?” Free-to-Mess was egging me on now, and I knew enough about these things to know that it was time to leave.

“Man, whatever,” is all I could manage to mumble, and I broke toward the public space of the dining room, firing off one of those God-if-only-you-let-me-get-out-of-this-I'll-be-good-I-promise appeals, praying Free-to-Mess would let it drop and not follow me inside talking shit in front of everyone in the cafeteria. Meanwhile Dee, who had spent weeks with all these players in the extra-help summer session for black and Latino students on the edge, said something conciliatory on my behalf, and to my relief they walked off in the opposite direction.

 

 

 

 

I ate a quick, tasteless dinner, then excused myself from Dee's company and shut myself inside my room. My nerves were on fire, temples throbbing with anger and a lot of wounded pride. I had come to Georgetown thinking things like this couldn't happen anymore. That I would be tough and everyone else would be soft. Yet there I was, back in the same position I had been in a year earlier with Jerry, only now I was on my own. I snatched the cordless phone off my roommate's desk and dialed a fraction of Charles's number up in New England before slamming the receiver back down on its base. Charles was in school, too, and he had his own shit to deal with. He wasn't my keeper. I sat back down; I didn't know what to do.

What was I
supposed
to do? Was I supposed to call my boys back home who didn't go to college? Call Stacey and have her get one of her drug-dealing cousins to come down? Call my brother and see if any of his or Michael's peoples from the military—older dudes who smoked and drank hard and considered me a little brother—might come up? This was foolish as hell and I knew it; I was in college, not in the street. Why was I fronting like I was in the street? Why did I always front like I was in the street?

Of course Pappy was no longer at my side to guide me, and I missed him something awful right then. I wanted to sit across the chessboard from him and search his face for answers. As I sat in my room fuming, I thought about him and I could hear his voice inside my head:“Son, slow down and think. Remember Bismarck's balanced-alternatives approach? Always keep more than one arrow in your quiver.” Such lines never could hold a candle to Tupac's When-We-Ride-on-Our-Enemies philosophy in the mind of a black teen with raging hormones and sometimes-violent girl problems. Yet here I was, years later, recalling Pappy's words, not Pac's. They must have seeped in deeper than I had known. “You don't immediately have to respond to anyone, and sometimes your response can be not to respond at all,” I could hear him say. “You have an option A, an option B, an option C, an A-1, A-2, A-3, son; take your time, be cool. Don't react blindly; don't allow anyone to make you jump; keep your options open.” Pappy's Bismarckian flow spouted and welled in my head as though a stopper had been loosed. What if my option A was not to respond at all? I asked myself.

As the days went by and the calendar continued to flip, nothing further came of my confrontation with the bottom of the Hoya bench. None of the players stepped to me again or bothered me in any way. And yet I wasn't in the clear by any means. When I sat down at the black tables in the cafeteria, no one really looked me in the eye. I felt like my jokes drew less laughter than they used to. I received fewer and fewer invitations to chill. I swore I could detect eyes rolling in my direction and shit-talk rippling out from behind my back, lapping against my ears. More and more, it began to sink in: I had been excommunicated from the black community at Georgetown. Of course, I still had my boys: Pup, Dee, some upperclassmen and -women who were so close to graduating they no longer kept up with campus gossip. These were my black friends. But by and large, there were no two ways about it. I was an outcast, an untouchable, no longer at home or welcome in the only microcosm I had ever bothered to know.

When I had attacked Ashley with my water gun, I couldn't really say why I hated her so much; the feeling was far more visceral than it was rational. I acted on a whim, an unthinking desire. Had I been in the presence of another black friend, I am sure I would have suppressed it completely. But standing there with Playboy, an outsider, a guy who didn't and truly couldn't understand all the vagaries of the caste system I lived in, I felt all of a sudden moved to rebel against this hierarchy, not just to reject it but also to defile it. I think I felt compelled to reject and defile whatever part of myself there was that still believed in it.

Thrust into my new role as persona non grata in Georgetown black society, the more I marinated on the significance of this random, pathetically melodramatic turn of events in my life, the more the absurdity of the situation started to press its full weight upon me. For as far back as I could think, I had followed and tried to fit in with cats who seemed black, who seemed real, to the exclusion of all else. I had allowed these brothers on TV and on my block—the majority of whom did not have shit figured out—to participate in my own self-definition.As a child I worshiped what I saw on BET. In high school, I still worshiped what I saw on BET and I rolled with a posse of self-proclaimed “niggers” who were not going to make it and they knew it. Now, at an elite private college, I
still
worshiped what I saw on BET, and I had spent the majority of my first year barely getting by academically, killing myself to belong in a hierarchy whose ruling caste was made up of C-walking swing guards and forwards and their coed sycophants, some of whom could freestyle at house parties but could not read at grade level. Was any of this what Pappy had sent me to college to achieve: To watch and emulate BET all day? To clash with a seven-foot Southern Californian wielding a bowl of Corn Pops? To debate an enraged and rumored-to-be-impotent African, who, all things considered, was really a pretty nice guy but who was trying as hard as I was to fit in and be hard? Had I really come all the way to Georgetown just to hop over to Howard any chance I could get in hopes of peeping a large butt or Cam'ron or some lesser-known MC? No, no, no, of course not—this wasn't it.

 

 

 

Y
ou can't go home again. From where I sat in the driver's seat, Stacey to the right of me, there was a whole lot of truth in those five words. “Why did you buy those shoes?” she wanted to know. She was referring to the black leather Pradas I'd just exchanged a week's salary for. “And them pants, those shits is so . . . tight.” I had begun dressing differently; buying new clothes with the money I was making doing temp work at KPMG in Short Hills, New Jersey. According to one of my brother's friends I was beginning to resemble “a gay poet.”