Losing My Cool (15 page)

Every night after Stacey left our house, with Pappy's pink and pastel green test-prep material nestled under her arm—which everyone including Stacey knew she would never use, and which Pappy photocopied and gave her anyway—Pappy would tap on my bedroom door. He'd ask if he could come in, and would shake his head, saying things like
You know, Stacey's eyes just light the whole room
and
She has such a smile when she wants to have one; she really is very smart, you know
and
She's got a sharp memory, but I'm afraid that girl will never do the kind of work it takes to put that mind to any good use; she doesn't want to do it, it's that simple
. And I remembered knowing how right he was and feeling sad and like I wanted to protect Stacey myself, but understanding full well, as my father must have understood about his mother, that what was coming for her was more powerful than anything I could summon against it.

This is how I would like to remember my girl Stacey, then—sweet, smart, and innocent like a child, with big bright eyes that lit the room and a smile that made Pappy smile—but I cannot. In a different context, maybe, but in the context we grew up in, all the noises inside her head and outside her door snuffed out her potential before she even had breasts or hair underneath her arms. By eighteen, she was a statistic: another undereducated, unwed black teen mother doing her small part to bolster the 70 percent single-mother birthrate everyone bemoans.

I doubt I would have realized all this that night in the car, but it's true all the same: In the sixty-three years between the moment when my smart and talented grandmother had Pappy at seventeen, embarrassing her family and her church by doing so, and the moment when Stacey got pregnant at the turn of the millennium, becoming too cool for school and embarrassing no one, black life had changed in dramatic ways. Human and civil rights were in, hip-hop was in, nihilism was in, self-pity was in, the street was in, and pride and shame were out—two more cultural anachronisms confined to the African-American dustbins of history, like jazz music and zoot suits. Whether I knew all that then or not, I knew enough to sense that this was not the way things should be. When I got home in the middle of the night, I woke up my parents and let them know that I was safe.

 

 

 

 

That was the start of a strange and lonely summer for me. I often had difficulty sleeping that summer. At night I dreamed that I was losing my teeth. I would wake up startled, cupping my mouth and panting. During the day, I either went to work at my dismal data entry job or hid out at my parents' house. Clarence was living at home then, too, but he worked the graveyard shift doing tech support out in White Plains and our paths seldom seemed to cross.

Occasionally, I did see Charles, though not that often. Under Pappy's guidance he and I had applied mostly to the same schools and pledged to each other that we would go wherever we both were admitted, regardless. When it became clear that I had gotten into better schools than Charles, I didn't even hesitate to break the agreement (sometimes I think he would have done the same thing, other times I'm not so sure). We entered our respective schools both with an eye toward econ majors, the same vision of lavish Wall Street paychecks dancing in our heads like sweet sugarplums or thick video hoes. The similarities stopped there, however. He had done extraordinarily well that first year, much better than I had done, and the experience of going away hadn't jarred him as it had me. When school let out, he slid back into his neighborhood and his old routines without friction—smoothly—almost like he'd never left. He knew how to turn it on and off, I guessed. Why couldn't I?

The first few times we hung out were awful, stilted affairs. We were like two people who have run out of things to say to each other but who make a go at it anyway, either because it seems the right thing to do or because not to do so would extinguish the relationship outright, and that is frightening.We used to finish each other's sentences in high school, but now it was as though he spoke Latin and I spoke Cantonese.The times he visited my house, it occurred to me he was really coming to see my father. This irritated me as much as it did when on the flimsiest pretext he used my computer to check his final grades (dean's list). I was in no hurry to look up my own marks in front of him (academic probation). Charles and I were on two separate pages of perhaps two different books; I began to worry, which was true but not entirely. The truth is that when shit hit the fan with Stacey, it was Charles I called and it was Charles who took it upon himself to lift my spirits.

“First of all, she's just a bitch,” he reminded me over the phone the day after my disastrous trip to Glen Ridge. He was eating some crunchy piece of fruit and talking with his mouth full, very calmly, very authoritatively.“Bitches are like yellow lights, son: You just run through them.”

“Yeah, I know, I know,” I said, “but the thing is—”

“You
have
to keep that in mind at all times, nigga, I'm serious!” he erupted, taking another bite and pausing to regain the composure he momentarily had lost. “OK, Thomas? You gotta do that, bro.”

“OK.”

“All right. Second of all, and this is for your own good, I'm taking you to a strip club tonight to prove to you once and for all that bitches are all the same. Trust me, I know this.”

 

 

 

 

He scooped me that evening in his mother's navy blue Nautica minivan and we drove out to some far-flung shit hole in Sayreville or Perth Amboy, where it reeked of cigarettes and beer, as if a chain-smoking janitor had mopped the floors with buckets of Budweiser. Most of the dancers were Puerto Rican or ethnic white and most of the clientele were upward of forty and obese.

“See? All the same,” he said, motioning around him as we took seats at the horseshoed stage. On it, a gorgeous Latina with an I'm-not-even-in-this-room expression sank to her knees and transformed herself—like an X-rated Decepticon—from a woman into a receptacle for crumpled dollar bills and jeers. A bleach-blond waitress wearing a low-cut tank top asked us what we'd have to drink. I'm not sure what I ordered, but it must have been soft since I had never gotten around to getting a fake ID. We sat there for a while, swapping theories on how pretty women end up in such disgusting spots, nursing our Cokes or Sprites, laughing like old times. Then Charles said, “Pick a girl, any one; I'll buy you a dance.” I excused myself to go to the bathroom and when I came back I said I wanted the snow white Boricua in the corner with the pillowy breasts and tongue ring. Charles called her over, whispered something in her ear, and she led me by the hand to a back room that was half-obscured from the main floor by a dusty black velvet curtain, which didn't completely close.

Through the gap between the curtain and the wall I could make out Charles, silhouetted against the black light radiating from the stage. He was staring at me with a strange look on his face, I thought, though it was too dark to say for sure just what that look might mean. He must have told the girl I had gotten dumped, because the first thing she said to me was that she would make me forget whoever had broken my heart. “Thank you,” I said, and she straddled my legs and took off her top. She smiled at me sympathetically and it was impossible to tell how old she was.

As she gyrated, I neither forgot Stacey nor became convinced all bitches were the same. For example, this one's chest, which she told me if I touched would cheer me up, was far larger and more beautiful than Stacey's, but Stacey made me laugh in a way I used to think was priceless. That was a significant difference, I thought, and the truth is that I missed Stacey badly right then. I missed the real Stacey, not the hardened street chick I had brought with me to Mary's party. The real Stacey, the shy girl with the talent, she was inhumed somewhere deep beneath layers and layers of hollow facades, like one of those Russian nesting dolls.

I tried to keep my thoughts off Stacey, though, and told the Puerto Rican on my lap that she was probably right. I cupped her in my hands and let her earn her money. She felt extremely soft, softer than a regular girl, with that invisible stripper film of baby powder, lotion, and sweat coating her freshly shaved skin and grinding into the fabric of my jeans. When the dance had ended, she stroked my face and asked if I was better now. “Yes,” I lied, and I decided to pay her myself instead of asking Charles for the money.

“Want to see something?” she said. I nodded and she pulled her bikini to the side and pointed to where her clitoris was pierced. The way she did it, with great care and even a little pride, was unspeakably sad, and I couldn't tell whether she was just passing time between dances or revealing her deepest secret to me.

Did I learn anything tonight? I wondered after we had left. Yes, several things. I learned that women are more powerful than hangovers, and there is no sexual hair of the dog to numb the ache. I learned that no one—not bitches or niggas—is really the same. I learned that I was not Charles nor could I ever be, and though I loved him like a brother (I knew that, too), it would be in my interest to stop mimicking him—and sooner rather than later. I was fine with all of those things, it occurred to me.

“Oh, you know what, my dude?” Charles said to me once we had gotten back on Route 9,“Abyss is right over there.You remember that fucking place?”
In My Lifetime Vol. 1
knocked on the car stereo. Charles had been rapping along to it as he drove, not doing whole verses, which he knew by heart, but improvisationally finishing lines here and there, like a hype man at a concert or an adlibber in the booth. “How real is this?” Jay-Z asked rhetorically through the speakers and Charles echoed from the driver's seat. Jay's pitch was high and Charles's was low, but they both spoke with the same tone of assurance, a remarkable self-assurance, it seemed to me.

I could see the parking lot surrounding Club Abyss looming on the horizon and swarming with bumper-to-bumper traffic. We had to slow as we passed. Most of the cars and trucks pulling in were souped-up whips, with big chrome rims and low-profile tires. Some had miniature TV screens set into the backs of their headrests, which flashed changing colors or cast a consistent glow through the tinted rear windows. The ones that gave off a steady light had nothing playing on them; they were simply turned on. They had no function but to broadcast their own existence into the empty, indifferent night. Back in the day, I recalled, Club Abyss had seemed a kind of cathedral—a high church of ass and mystery and adventure—or some vague opportunity, a chance to test out how cool and down I was, to put to use the body language and slang I had been rehearsing in front of the mirror and at school. But from the road this night, it didn't look like any of that. It just looked like a desperate box in the middle of nothing, a forgettable blemish on the side of an ugly thoroughfare that connected one nowhere to the next.

“Should we go and check it out?” Charles asked.

“Nah, I'm too tired,” I said, looking out the window of his mother's minivan at the neon lights creeping by.

“Well, do you at least feel better now?” he asked, and I could feel his eyes on me.

“Yeah, I do,” I said, and that was the truth.

 

 

 

 

As the summer wore down, I spent most of my free time taking walks with my mother—long, meandering, soul-searching walks through Fanwood and Scotch Plains, around the high school, around the elementary school where Clarence had been menaced, through the park—long, peaceful walks that weaved through streets so familiar I could close my eyes and get home were it not for the traffic. Or I played chess with my father, sometimes for hours on end, before taking my leave and digging through his vast library, reading, reading book after book after book until I fell asleep by myself in my room. I had lived in the midst of written treasure for nineteen years somehow without ever having noticed it, I realized that summer, as if the books in our house used to be wrapped in invisible dust jackets or hidden behind mirrors.

But that's an exaggeration—of course I had seen them; they were everywhere. Startled friends would point them out to me when they came over, timidly, as if they thought Pappy was a sadist and this was his torture chamber. There were also those times when my brother and I joked that Pappy's shelves were like a kind of fucked-up wallpaper (they completely blocked all the walls) or a cruel obstacle course through which we were forced to maneuver like clumsy gerbils (they partially blocked some of the doors).Why couldn't we just have a normal living room with a home theater in it like so-and-so or so-and-so, we sometimes asked the gods to no discernible answer. Most of the time, though, we didn't complain about the piles of books or pay them any mind. They were simply there, a physical reality that was not good or bad, just a fact, like a chandelier or a potted plant.

As a child I lived with the sense that my aloofness toward his books didn't just bother Pappy—it hurt him deeply. I couldn't understand why, though. “Why does Pappy get so intense about the freaking reading?” I asked my mother when I was eleven or twelve. “I already do all the work he gives me, I'm not getting into trouble, my friends' fathers would be beyond happy!” I said with a sense of self-pity. At this, my mother, a gentle and easygoing woman, removed her glasses and fixed me with an intense look that took me by surprise:

“Honey, those books . . . Are. Your. Father's. Life. You have no idea how hard he had to work, what he had to go through, just to get his hands on them. What kind of hell he caught—his own family told him an educated nigger in the South was a dead nigger. Do you realize he hid himself in the closet with a flashlight in order to read? Baby, you cannot imagine the world he has lived in, and you should thank God that you can't.”