Losing My Cool (17 page)

Something struck me about this photo, and I lingered on it. Christ, I thought to myself the more I scrutinized the picture: I look like a giant-size toddler, ridiculous, like I've been swaddled in a pair of color-coordinated pajamas. I was in style, but whose style was I in? I looked like someone else. That's not me, I thought. And also, I wondered: Can a person who is dressed like this really ever be taken seriously? I was no longer so sure. I must have been staring at the picture hard right then because Sam motioned to it and asked, “Is it crazy seeing Stacey like that?”

Snatched from my thoughts, I looked up at him.“Huh? Oh, nah, man, it's crazy seeing
me
like that.” I stuck the picture back into the stack.

 

 

 

 

Because I was busy or because I was already mentally long gone, the days that summer shuffled past like the pages of a magazine held to the wind. On one of my last, I went for a workout at Forest Road Park, my old stomping grounds. It was nearing dusk, and the scent of honeysuckle infused the evening's humid breeze. The sky was a giant bowl of rainbow sherbet, all purples and oranges, and I had the main court to myself. I settled into my old routine: one thousand short-range jumpers, five hundred from the right elbow, five hundred from the left. When I finished, I felt a good kind of tired and sat down on the wooden bench behind the basket to get my breath. A rush of childhood memories came to life like mirages as I stared out over the deserted asphalt in front of me. Eventually, my mind wandered to RaShawn. I could see him grabbing on his crotch, sending a thin stream of saliva from the side of his mouth after slapping a finger roll into the parking lot; I could see him turning to me, handing over some singles for the Italian ice truck; I could see him pummeling that white boy in the Raiders jersey on the ground, after he was already down.

It was dark and the lightning bugs looking for mates and prey had started to glow when at last I got up off the bench. I took a few last shots before heading home. As I walked, I strung the ball back and forth through my legs with every step, trying to see if I could still make it all the way to my front porch like that. The last I heard of RaShawn, he had shot and killed a man. Murder was the case that they gave him.

 

 

 

 

The night before I left for school I took one last walk around the neighborhood with my mother. The two of us were quiet for a long time that night, comfortable like best friends in each other's presence and lost in our thoughts, when she turned to me and asked that I promise to do one thing for her.

“Will you promise you'll always stay true to yourself?”

“What do you mean, Mom?”

“Just be true to yourself, baby,” she said, paraphrasing Polonius, “and as sure as the night follows the day, you can be false to no one—always remember that for me, honey, OK?”

“OK, I promise,” I said, slipping my arm around her shoulders, and we were silent the rest of the way.

Before taking me back to Georgetown, Pappy, who had noticed the change in the way I was dressing and must have been eager to encourage it, took me to the mall at Bridgewater Commons and bought me several pairs of slacks, three or four shirts, and a couple of pairs of shoes and shoe trees. He didn't make a big fuss about it, just told me to try on what I liked and put his hand on my back, told me he was proud of me. When I got back home, I gathered together my old gear—Timberland boots, Sean John jeans and Iceberg sweats, oversized leather jackets, Polo and Enyce tops, North Face bubble coats—and asked my mother to give it all to Goodwill. I put away the gold chain that Stacey had bought for me in my dresser drawer and shut the drawer tight.

 

 

 

R
eturning to Georgetown was nothing like arriving that first year as a freshman. For one thing, the neighborhood no longer seemed so intimidating or foreign as it once had. It felt good and comfortable to be back. I knew my way around and had some restaurants to hit up, like Basil Thai on Wisconsin Avenue, where I first ate Thai food; or Heritage India, further up Wisconsin, where I first had Indian (just about everything was a first for me back then). Those old cobblestone streets outside the front gates and the town houses that stretch along them like rows of colorful dominoes reminded me of home this time—my new home, the place where after a year of awkward acclimation and progress that came in small fits and starts, I would begin now to create and craft myself anew and in all seriousness, to work on myself the way Nietzsche said an artist works on a canvas: meticulously and deliberately. Plus I had friends to see and catch up with. Pup and Dee and I had gotten a high pick in the housing lottery the previous spring and we were going to be living together in Village A. Playboy, Rusty, Matt, and the rest of the Harbin crew were scattered nearby.

I had a new strategy for handling my class work, too. I had been talking with my friend Paul, who was a straight-A student seemingly without breaking a sweat, and I asked him what I could do to get better grades. “How can I get on your level?” I asked.

What he told me sounded simplistic, but he swore it was the secret to success: “Never miss class.”

“That's it?” I said.

“I've never missed a class, and when I go I pay complete attention. That's it. If you just do those two things, I guarantee that you will see an improvement in your grades,” he explained. Well, I'm going to do that, I thought.

I added a third component to the plan: I resolved to dress for class every day. Not merely put on street clothes instead of pajamas, but really get dressed, as if I were going to work or to an important meeting, as though class mattered. I was halfway through my nineteenth year now and aware for the first time in my life that being a teenager was not some permanent state, but rather just a phase that ought and must give way to adulthood. When I was a child, Pappy had always stressed to me the need to pay attention to my looks, not to primp or to be vain, but to be diligent about simple things like brushing my hair and cleaning my ears. He was impeccable in his own right, and I grew up watching him shine his own shoes and carefully fold and put away his suits. Like so many older blacks I've known, he placed a high premium on what was called “looking sharp.”“How you dress, son, is the first and most immediate means you have of communicating with the world,” he would often say. What his clothes had always said to me was that Pappy was a man. What the clothes my friends and I wore, the clothes we saw on BET and on the older guys at the park—the baseball caps and basketball jerseys, the big soft velvety sweats and the unlaced sneakers—what these clothes said, I became convinced by the end of freshman year, was that we had not yet grown up.

An appearance cryogenically frozen at age fifteen can be appealing for so many reasons, none more powerful than the fact that abusing sex, reeking of ignorance, using drugs, fighting, and flunking all appear more appropriate when—regardless of numerical age—you look like something less than an adult. I decided I was ready now to take responsibility as a man for my appearance. I would be vigilant about the messages I would let it send about me. I would never again show up to class dressed as if I were about to catch a touchdown or an alley-oop, or like I was about to stick up a 7-Eleven, like I had a Glock-9 tucked into my waistband. I would wear shoes to class and shirts and sweaters and trousers or jeans that fit. I would look like a man and not a kid. Some of my friends laughed at this sartorial one-eighty, it was so extreme, but I didn't care: If it is true that it feels good to look good, then it is equally true that it can feel gangsta to look gangsta and it can feel thugged-out to look thugged-out, or, on the other hand, it can feel smart to look smart. I wanted to feel smart.

My professors began to treat me differently, too, I noticed. It was as if I had stepped from beneath a shapeless burka or a paste-board mask and disclosed myself to them for the first time. They were seeing
me
and not just staring into a blank veil or a stereotype, somewhere beneath which, presumably,
I
was concealed. They looked me in the eye now, and I couldn't help but see that their body language was somehow different, too, somehow more agreeable when they spoke to me. I noticed myself responding to the way that they were responding to me and I began to participate more in the classroom and to meet with them outside of class. The gains I was seeing were exponential and compounding; they reinforced one another. At home, studying became easier and my papers got more coherent and nuanced. My confidence grew almost overnight. Paul was right; my grades shot up—I made the dean's list.

At the same time, I met a girl. A different kind of girl from any I'd ever met before. She was black like Pup, but also black like me. Her father was from Nigeria and her mother came from Italy. She was this tiny little girl—a full foot shorter than me and two years older—who had grown up in Manhattan, way uptown, and had just returned to Georgetown from a year spent in Tokyo. She had a funny Welsh name and spoke Dominican-style Spanish, lopping off
s
's from the ends of words (
“bueno dia”
), as well as Italian and Japanese. She could pass for just about anything in the world other than white. In Japan, people thought she was Brazilian or, sometimes, when her hair was blown out, Indian. In the States, people assumed she was Dominican, which I did, too, when we met. In part, this was because of her bronze complexion, loose, curly locks, and thick Inwood accent. In part, it was just because she rolled around with a clique of Dominican chicks. She had gone to the Bronx High School of Science and used to want to be a chemist. Her passport had crazy stamps in it. She didn't know how to drive a car, but in New York she didn't need to—her feet worked fine—plus she knew the map of the subway system too well, could tell you when the F train was running on the C line and why and, depending on where you needed to go, whether you should stay toward the back of the train or move up to the front when getting off at West 4th Street. Needless to say, she took shit from no one. “At my size, I can't afford to,” she would say with a laugh, revealing a beautiful, off-kilter smile.

She had a brown face, closer to my father's than my own, and was proud to define herself as black (“from the diaspora, yo!”) but she also could use the kind of words I had started to use. The kind of words Pappy used. I didn't have to front around her—in fact, I realized, if I tried to talk to her the way I used to talk with Stacey, it would dead things from the jump—and she
liked
the way I dressed. She had transferred to Georgetown from U-Mass as a sophomore, spent junior year abroad, and now, as a senior, lived somewhere on the periphery of the black community. Her off-campus apartment was across the river, outside gossip's ambit. One night she and her girlfriends wanted to go dancing at George Washington. I had my parents' car with me that weekend and I offered to drive them (the one thing the suburban boy could do that the city girl couldn't!). As I pushed the car through traffic on M Street, I felt her small hands reach from the backseat and caress my shaved scalp. I don't know what she saw in me or how, but we became inseparable.

I would go over to her apartment in Alexandria and she would light the incense or scented oils she sometimes brought back from the Arab stores in Brooklyn or the sidewalk vendors in Greenwich Village. There was always food there—good food, chicken cutlets, lasagna, Cornish hen, main dishes and sides—she knew what she was doing, had been taking care of her father and younger siblings since she was twelve. While she cooked, I'd rifle through her CDs looking for music to play. Her collection looked nothing like mine; there was lots of Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and James Brown—shit I'd scarcely paid attention to before. The hip-hop that she did have was different, too: the Roots, Black Star, Dead Prez—the kind of rappers you just never hear in the 'hood, the kind of rappers I thought only white cats listened to and that my boy Sam used to call “Starbucks niggas.” In high school my friends and I would have preferred to listen to hard white rappers than bump these black groups.“Throw your incense in the air and wave it all around like you just don't care!” I used to tease her when I came over. And yet, jokes aside, I found myself admiring the fact that this girl had her own taste and didn't just listen to whatever was on the radio and BET the way I did.

 

 

 

 

One day over winter break, Charles and Pup and I drove out to New York and met Betrys and some of her friends at a cheap Tex-Mex restaurant in the West Village called Burrito Loco or something like that. It was the first time I had seen her outside of Georgetown. Sitting there at the table with Charles and Pup, I felt so proud that I was with such an intelligent girl, a girl who was as comfortable discussing Buddhism as my friends at Union Catholic had been puffing “buddha.” I sat there and realized that I
liked
smart girls—something I had not figured before, when I let my peers and certain entertainers talk me into thinking that a girl was the sum of appendages attached to a rear end and nothing else.

Being with Betrys changed my romantic worldview totally, a personal paradigm shift as powerful and irreversible as the Copernican Revolution must have been for a diehard geocentrist. I was learning for the first time to treat a woman with respect, to approach her not as a sworn adversary, but as something more than that. Far from feeling like a buster or a terry-cloth nigga or a SUFLAN (“sucka-for-love-ass nigga”) or a herb or whatever it was I was
supposed
to feel like, I found that I actually wanted this, I was more comfortable being like this. I didn't lie to Betrys and I didn't worry that she would run game on me. I never wondered what she was up to when she wasn't at my side the way I had with Stacey, and this kind of peace of mind I found invaluable and stimulating—stimulating because it freed me from distraction and permitted me to focus on my schoolwork and to flourish. I forgot what it was like always to feel sneaky or angry or jealous, constantly to be at war with your girl. Now I just felt good—good in a childlike way, innocently, in that way where you just like a girl and she likes you and the mere fact of being in each other's presence is enough to make you feel safe.