Losing My Cool (6 page)

There was nothing strange about Pappy taking in one of my friends this way. When he was young, Pappy had dreamed of becoming a physician. “I guess you could say I've always wanted to be a healer,” he would tell us. Over the years, he has reached out to almost all of Clarence's and my friends and tried to heal them in one way or another. That was how he was, willing to help and to teach, to heal and encourage anyone. One of my brother's foul Italian friends, Frankie, had come to the house once and Pappy asked him how he was doing in school. He told Pappy that he'd gotten an A on a test. I doubted that story, but Pappy reached into his pocket and took out what loose cash he had—a ten, a five, a couple of ones—and handed it over to Frankie, telling him that he was proud of his work and to keep it up.

We were never poor, but at the time, with both Clarence and me in private school and no health care (whenever one of us got sick, Pappy paid the doctor in cash), money could be so tight that ice cream was a luxury. “Why,” I said to Pappy after Frankie had left, “would you give that piece of trash a dime?” Pappy just removed his glasses, rubbing the area around his temples where the too-tight stems burrowed into his flesh, and looked at me with weary eyes, as if I'd asked him the simplest and most obvious question he'd heard in his life.

“Because, son, maybe no one else ever has,” he said. Then he looked into the kitchen: “Kathy, what do we have to eat for dinner?”

Pappy was nobody's fool; there's not a Panglossian bone in his body. He knew exactly what kind of kid Frankie was. It's just that he believed above all in the power of the will—that it is never too late to make a change if the will is in it. And who could know what encouragement might stick with whom and when? Certainly not him, he thought, and so he refused to discriminate. He tried to heal everyone the same. Charles was the only one of our friends who had ever been willing or up for it. The rest, including Frankie, just thought Pappy was a crazy old man or they acted like he was the dentist and kept their distance.

Anyway, Charles would come over to my house after school and the three of us would pull up chairs at Pappy's book-piled desk and gobble down foot-long submarine sandwiches, potato chips, and cans of Dr. Brown's black cherry soda before my mother came home from work and made dinner. We would laugh and shoot the shit about anything—women, basketball, God (Pappy had walked out of church when he was nine years old, and no amount of beatings from his aunt's belt could induce him back inside), truth, racism, the fries at McDonald's and Wendy's (whose were more flavorful?). When we had exhausted the topic at hand, whatever it was, Charles and I would clear away the remnants of the meal and study math, or analogical reasoning, or chess openings and defenses. Pappy saw life as one really long chess match, a series of veiled gambits; you needed a strategy, a plan. One wrong move meant
checkmate
—especially if your pieces happened to be black. Pappy still studied, too.While we did our assignments, he would read whatever book it was he was working on that day, which back then could have been anything from Foucault's discourses on power to the complete annotated history of the Byzantine Empire. Some days—these were my favorites—we just spent hours memorizing lists of vocabulary words like “eschatological” and “sesquipedalian,” quizzing each other at the kitchen table before Pappy drilled us on their antonymic meanings. The goal for me then—just as it had been when I was a teary-eyed seven-year-old—was not so much to learn as to impress and please Pappy. That was what mattered most. Charles adored Pappy, too, although like me he never dreamed of telling anybody back at school what it was we were up to in those afternoons and evenings in Fanwood. The other kids all assumed that we were playing video games or working out or doing jack shit. It was easier for us to let them think that.

One afternoon it happened to be a collection of Shirley Jack-son's short stories that Pappy was thumbing through. As Charles and I began to study, Pappy walked over to the Xerox machine in front of the wall that divided the study from the kitchen and started making copies. We always had an industrial-strength Xerox machine in the house. Pappy photocopied everything, from receipts to vocabulary lessons to important newspaper articles and poems; he photocopied copies of photocopies, which over the years began to accumulate in every room, like sawdust in a sawmill.

“Before you boys get into your work today,” he said,“I want you to read something for me and to think about it.” With that, he plopped down in front of us a handful of sharpened pencils (you can't read without underlining) and two stapled copies of Jack-son's “The Lottery,” reproduced on a pastel pink paper that had blurred toner marks along the edges.

This was not the first time I had seen the story. Along with Richard Connell's “The Most Dangerous Game,” O. Henry's “The Gift of the Magi,” and the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley, it belonged to a small idiosyncratic canon of works that Pappy adored and which, as a young boy, I treated with a dutiful if unthinking reverence. An extremely concise tale, “The Lottery” is straightforward enough for a small child to comprehend. The setting is the following: Each year in a mid-twentieth-century rural American village, residents of various adjoining towns conduct compulsory town-wide lotteries. This tradition stretches back as far as the history of the settlements themselves, and the residents have no memories of a time before lotteries. In fact, the ritual is such a natural part of life that they don't give it much thought outside of the two hours annually they devote to the practice. Participating in the lottery, like watching high school football or eating spicy food, is simply something that is done where these people are from.

On the morning of the drawing, a warm June day, the town children run around playing, gathering rocks into piles and stuffing their pockets with pebbles and stones, as their parents and grandparents congregate in the main square. The adults chat and gossip and rumors circulate that one or two neighboring towns have begun to float the idea of doing away with the lottery altogether. In fact, a woman says, some places have already gotten rid of the practice. This is craziness, everyone agrees—a betrayal; the lottery has been going on for as long as anyone can remember—to break with it would be to break with a part of themselves.

When the drawing begins, husbands from each family step forward and pull a folded slip of paper from a battered black box that is older than the oldest living resident. One of the husbands, a man named Bill Hutchinson, draws the winning ticket marked with a black circle, and his family now must participate in a second drawing to determine who of the five of them will be the ultimate winner. It is Bill's wife, Tessie, who pulls the marked slip this time. She becomes frantic and shouts and pleads for a redo—it isn't fair, she cries in vain. The townspeople, including her husband and children, form a circle around her and the first stone strikes her in the head.

“Oh, hell no!” Charles shouted. “I would
never
go for that—I'd go down swinging, or better yet, I'd have left that place ahead of time, moved to one of those other towns where they don't pull that stuff anymore.”

“You think so?” Pappy said from his desk. “Well, that can be hard to do when the time comes.”

If I wasn't in school or studying with Charles and Pappy, I often hung out and listened to rap music at my friend Sam's house. He was a year younger than me and from one of the two other black families on the white side of town. Naturally, we had been friends for years. Sam's mother was a worldly woman, from Manhattan not New Jersey. She was well educated, literary even, and hers was the only other black household I had ever visited with shelves of books in it. Sam was a quiet, strong, dark-skinned boy, with beautiful hazel eyes that had flecks of green in them. He was far more interested in riding bikes and deejaying than in reading, but books were a familiar sight to him and he didn't think they were dangerous like everyone else around us did. Sam and I were close, but he was something of a loner. He didn't much care for team sports or for the other boys I hung around with, and that put limits on the amount of time we spent together.

When I wasn't with Sam, I split my time between the basketball courts at the park and friends' homes on the black sides of Fanwood and Scotch Plains. I became tight with one of Sam's classmates, a boy named Antwan who lived a ten-minute walk from my house. Ant, as we called him, was handsome and well groomed, with ebony skin, a low-cut Caesar hairdo, and deep, brushed-out 360 waves, which he kept “spinning” beneath a black cut-off Calvin Klein stocking cap. He spent hours each day on the bench press fine-tuning his enviably muscular build. At fifteen, in Polo jeans, Timberland boots, and a white wife-beater tank top, he drew comparisons to Tyson Beckford, the male model with the Apollonian physique.

By age seventeen, Ant's torso was covered in tattoos like Tyson's, but it was Tupac Shakur who was his inspiration. “I wanna get that THUG LIFE tat across my stomach like Pac,” he used to say as we idled away hours at the park or on his front porch, shooting baskets and the breeze. On his pumped-up right biceps there was the image of two emerald-hued hands clasped in prayer, framed in negative-relief against a burst of light, with Tupac's famous dictum—ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME—inscribed below in an intricate Old English font. On his left, there was a portrait of his newborn baby sister. One forearm spelled-out A-N-T in block letters; the other inner-arm displayed a page from the Old Testament turned to Psalm 23:“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .” I don't know whether Ant was religious or not; the ink seemed more about being
chic
, and Psalm 23 especially, because it spoke to our generation's paranoid sense of oppression and persecution, of being in foreign territory surrounded by enemies yet anointed and special, had become a smart fashion accessory.

Sometimes Antwan would come over to my house to work out in the basement when Charles and I were finished studying. The three of us clicked, and from time to time we would go together to Sayreville for teen night at Club Abyss. Abyss was like a parent's worst nightmare on teen night. Fifteen-, sixteen-, and seventeen-year-old black, white, and what people who have never been to Spain call “Spanish” girls came there less to dance than to simulate sex to a hip-hop beat. As a black dude, if you could just look and sound like enough of a thug, you could approach one of them and do it, too. I spent hours in the mirror before we went, getting my pose just right.

Charles, who was a kind of virtuoso of teen night, didn't need any practice. He had what Ant called “the gift” and pulled a variety of females like a hamstring, without trying. Ant and I didn't have the gift, but we did have our types and we zeroed in on them accordingly. For Ant, there was nothing better than a girl with lighter skin and straighter hair than his own. By far the darkest one in the trio, he strictly approached white or Latina chicks, avoiding girls that resembled him as though he hated them. (In this way, and in this way alone, he was willing to break with the School of Pac.) I couldn't understand Ant's mind-set in any way, but I had met enough black guys with it to know it was not unusual. My attitude toward women, on the other hand, was a lot more like Henry Ford's toward automobiles: Give me any color so long as it's black. Ant and I used to argue about this all day. In the end, though, he would say, and Charles would agree, that it really didn't matter what type of ho you preferred—playing women was a hobby, and the bottom line was that each was as disposable and interchangeable as the next.

 

 

 

 

I had just gotten my permit and was whipping down the street toward home one hot summer afternoon. The windows were down and Tupac's “Picture Me Rollin'” pumped from the speakers. Out of the corner of my eye, I peeped a shirtless Antwan beating a hasty path down the side of the road, his black do-rag like a pirate flag in the wind, his tattoos glistening beneath beads of sweat. As I pulled over to the shoulder, honking, he jogged up to the car and hopped in.

“Nigga, that's good timing!” he panted.

“What the hell are you doing on the side of the road without a shirt?” I teased.

“This white bitch I'm tossing up was supposed to give me some sneaker paper, but she ain't have my money, and we got into it,” he explained.“Then her pops pulled up and I had to dip up out that winnnndooooow, nigg-uuuhhhhh! I barely got my shoes on.” (Ant had this hilarious way of speaking in undulating tones, drawing out certain syllables in the words he chose to stress; had he been born twenty years earlier he'd have been a soul singer or soapbox preacher for sure.) We both started cracking up.