Angry Black White Boy (11 page)

“You’d better,” added McGrath, “because white folks might have a bone or two to pick with you, son. Robbing them and calling them the devil and all.”

“Look, Macon.” Downing lowered his head and eyed Macon over his own brow. “Here’s the thing. I’m really not a racist guy. But if you’d seen what I’ve seen on this job, you might come to the conclusion that African-Americans—not all of them, mind you, but a hell of a lot—are permanently fucked as a species because they’re too stupid and self-destructive to stop killing each other and get their shit together, know what I mean? And I don’t want to believe that, Macon. I’d rather find some way to blame the white man myself, but for the life of me I just can’t figure out how. So I’m hoping maybe you can help me out here.” McGrath chortled into his palm, and Downing smiled despite himself. “Cut it out, Ray. I’m serious.”

“Fuck you,” spit Macon, seething. He tried to ball his fists, but the handcuffs cut even deeper into his hands when he clenched them.

Downing cocked his head sideways. “Now, why would you say that, Macon? I don’t understand. And I’m quite understanding. Aren’t I quite understanding, Ray?”

“He’s quite understanding, kid. We have to complete a lot of sensitivity training.”

“I’m trying to have a nice, friendly conversation with you, and you tell me to fuck myself. That Ivy League school’s gone to your head, man.”

“Like I told you, Dick.” McGrath lifted his hat and scratched viciously at the crown of his scalp. A dusting of dandruff fecundated the shoulders of his uniform. “He’s gonna feel unworthy if you don’t give him a couple trophies to remember us by. You know, martyrdom and all that.”

Downing sighed and reached back to fumble with his utility belt. “I suppose you’re right,” he said, Macing Macon in the face.

Macon howled, jerked blindly, tried to rub his eyes against the vinyl seatback. Snot bubbled from his nose; it felt as if he were crying hot sauce. Downing yanked him upright and jabbed Macon in the gut with the nightstick, acupressure-precise. Macon gasped, struggled to draw air into his lungs, tried in vain to twist away. There was nowhere to go.

Downing leaned back, red-faced with the effort of beating him. “There. I hope that’ll do, Macon, because quite frankly I’m exhausted, and it’s about all I can manage.” He palmed his chin and watched Macon thrash, eyes shut to fight the fire of the Mace.

“I’ll bet you’re from the suburbs, aren’t you?” Downing asked. He sheathed his nightstick and turned to gaze out his passenger-side window.

Chapter Two

Macon sat alone in a cement holding cell, rubbing his eyes and trying not to move as his stomach ripened with bruises. The unlidded toilet radiated a shit smell that infected most of the room, and the gray bunk bed marooned in the least pungent corner mocked him with its faint evocations of summer camp coziness and late-night secret-sharing. He’d stood dripping tears while McGrath and Downing filed an arrest report claiming Macon had sustained minor injuries due to a nasty spill on the way from the cop car to the precinct, then been escorted down a pair of long corridors and installed here.

Four hours and one cheese sandwich later, Macon had seen no one, had nothing explained to him, knew nothing of his fate but what he’d learned from the semi-mobile clot of muscle tissue squatting in the cell next door. Silk was a bald-headed white dude who spoke with the gruff, throaty voice of a professional wrestler. “I been here eight days, gettin’ skinny. I’ll give you five cigarettes for that sandwich.” Macon declined the smokes, but hit him off with half out of the goodness of his heart. Silk rammed the morsel into his gullet and, before falling into tugboat slumber, told Macon he could expect the chance to post bail tomorrow. Macon’s bank account housed less than two hundred dollars, and he’d known nobody in New York longer than three days; maybe Columbia would let him take his midterms from the slammer this semester.

There was no one in the Bean to call either, Macon admitted to himself, not for dough or even moral support. Self-pity was wrapping itself around him now, a thin shawl, and Macon forced himself to think about Lajuan and Aura and the trivial financial drama that had estranged him from his boys. How, he wondered, had the couple hundred bucks they owed him in past-due phone bills come to matter so much?

Because, he answered himself, you can’t let yourself get punked. All three of them knew Macon had access to money in ways they didn’t, though they’d never once discussed it. The phone debt wasn’t killing him. He should have told them to forget it, but they’d hardly apologized for jamming him up, never even given him ten bucks to show good faith, never seemed to fear that he’d step to them and demand it. Soon Macon’s resentment mounted— not just over the money, but the position they’d forced him into from the moment he’d put the account in his name. Macon didn’t want to play landlord, sniping at his boys for loot he knew they didn’t have. But the longer the debt went unresolved, the more Macon felt like he was paying for their friendship. He didn’t know what to do, so he just stopped hanging out.

Lajuan and Aura treated him the same as always, and that made it worse. Macon hated them for revealing his kindness as weakness, hated himself for sitting and scowling at everything they bought, smoked, drank, and ate with what should have been his money. He felt petty and glaringly white, and his last month at the crib had been as sour as the milk in the refrigerator. Finally, the night before Macon left, Lajuan had given him the gun as payment: an attempt to hand Macon back some of his manhood. They’d parted with a pound, as had Macon and Aura, but there was coldness there. They wouldn’t call him, Macon thought. Not even if they saw his face on the news.

A long scream sounded and Macon walked to the barred door to see what was going on. Six guards labored toward him, dragging a struggling black man by his hands and feet. They stopped directly before Macon’s cell and he backed away, taking refuge on the lower bunk as the man twisted and flailed, trying to free himself.

“Turn me loose,” he shouted again and again. “Turn me loose.” The guards heaved him inside, locked the door, and strode away. The prisoner lay on the ground for a moment, panting, then scrambled to his feet and grabbed hold of the bars.

“Give me back my papers,” he screamed, with such force that his entire body shook. “You won’t get away with this.”

“Say, man,” said Macon, venturing cautiously over. The cat turned and stared at him with eyes so crazed and bloodshot Macon jumped. “You all right?”

“No, I’m not all right,” the man raved, returning his attention to the long-gone guards. “I’ll report you to the president, you hear?” he shouted down the hall. “You want to destroy my evidence, but you can’t cover up your crimes! I’ll publish them to the whole world!”

“Make them take him outta your cell, kid,” advised Silk from next door. “He’ll kill ya. He went nuts from studying too much. Claims he’d gotten to the bottom of why black folks are treated so bad and he was gonna write a book and tell the president and have things changed, see? He says his professor had him locked up. They found him in his underwear in the lobby of some dot-com building down in Times Square, trying to get an appointment with the president.”

The lunatic turned and grabbed Macon’s hand. “You’ve got to help me,” he said. “You’ve got to call this number and tell them where I am.” He produced a crumpled page from his pocket and closed Macon’s fist around it. The man’s palms were slimed with sweat, and Macon jerked his hand back, looking the prisoner over with a blend of sympathy and fear. “They’ll know what to do,” the man insisted. “They’ll contact the president and tell him of my research. Promise me you’ll call.” He leaned in close and Macon saw white spittle clouding the corners of his mouth. “I know who really killed Tupac and Biggie Smalls,” he hissed, eyes bulging. “And Albert Van Horn and Geronimo Pratt and Len Bias.” He turned and threw himself once more against the bars. “You’ll never get away with this,” he screamed into the hall. “I know why you put me here!”

A group of white-jacketed men strode quickly toward the cell, wheeling a stretcher. They unlocked the door and grabbed the yelling man, laced him in a straitjacket, threw him on the stretcher, and carted him away. Macon sat back on the bunk and unballed his fist. The phone number was written on, of all things, a page torn from
Native Son.
The jagged sheet was smeared with dried blood, almost translucent with sweat. A single fragment was underlined faintly in yellow marker:
but Bigger, if I say you got the
right to hate me then that ought to make things a little different,
oughtn’t it?
Macon read it again and again.

“No,” he said aloud. “That doesn’t change shit.” He twisted on the narrow mattress, exhausted but restless, wishing he had enough information to draw the fear up from his stomach, where it lay dormant, or else to banish it outright. But he felt numb. Whatever happened happened. Macon tried to think forward to the pleasure he would derive from beginning sentences “When I was in jail . . .” It soothed him for a moment. He found a modicum of comfort lying on his side, hands pillowed underneath his head and shirt draped over his eyes to block the dull, humming fluorescence of the hall lights, and drifted to sleep cursing and blessing the timing that had placed his parents six thousand miles away, floating in the middle of the ocean, in his hour of need.

Macon dreamed that he was watching television in their living room, feet on the ottoman, remote control in hand. He flipped to
Beverly Hills 90210,
the show that had been his dirty little secret at fourteen, and watched as Luke Perry strutted through a crowded nightclub, made his way to the pool table, pouted, sank a bank shot. Luke turned to the bar to pick up a waiting beer, and when he swiveled back the club had become an Old West whorehouse. Hookers in frilly pink lingerie and garters lounged on wicker furniture, smoking cigarillos from delicate glass holders. The camera panned right, seeking the source of the raucous music, and revealed Thelonious Monk sitting at the house piano, dressed in a Nike track suit and a porkpie hat and banging out the head to Mingus’s “All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother.”

Luke sifted his lips, scanning the hookers. “Kel,” he said softly, “Kel, how could you do this to me?” He pulled a pair of John Woo silver handguns from his waist and cocked them back, but before he could waste a single lady of leisure, the saloon-style doors swung open and Ol’ Dirty Bastard sauntered in, a sheriff’s badge glinting on his ruffled pirate shirt and a pink bobbed wig tilted atop his sloppily cornrowed head. He walked straight up to Luke, thumbs hooked in his belt loops, and stuck his gold-front laced grill two and a half inches from the actor’s chiseled mug.

“We got a muthafuckin’ problem here, nigguh?” he asked, word-slurring, clearly angel-dusted. He swigged the dregs from a forty of St. Ides, flared his nose, and exhaled malt liquor fumes like a degenerate dragon. Luke blinked and turned away.

“Yuh see, deez hoes mah hoes,” Ol’ Dirty drawled, flinging the empty bottle behind him with a reckless backhand motion. Monk caught it without looking up and set it atop the piano, deftly quoting “Shame on a Nigga” as he did so. “So if you wanna blast my hoes, you gonna hafta pay the Ol’ Dirt Dawg, you unnerstan’? Cuz I’ll dunk yo’ ass in the moonshine and shit on yuh grave, mah nukka.” He sniffed elaborately, poked a finger into Luke’s chest, and gestured behind him with a wandering eye. “Thatcho ride parked out front, God?”

Luke tried to look past him, concern for his cherry-red Mustang convertible glinting in his soft, romantic-yet-rebellious eyes. He nodded, forehead wrinkling adorably.

“Well, not anymore, big homey, cuz my cousin-in-law Generic Assassin out there stealin’ that mufucker right now.” Ol’ Dirty lifted his face to the sky and laughed his ass off. Monk caught on, and soon everybody in the joint was howling. “Drinks for all mah niggas and mah niggarettes,” Ol’ Dirty shouted, pounding the bar. A wheeled robot bartender chirped in acquiescence. “And where the weed at? Somebody roll me a blunt up in this muthafucka! This yo’ sheriff talkin’, God, don’t make me buck my nine! It’s about to get all kindsa ugly!”

Inexplicably, Macon flipped the channel. He landed on an old
Seinfeld.
“I don’t know where Kramer went,” said Jerry, throwing up his hands and trying to hold back his ever-lurking look-at-me-I’m-acting smirk. George Costanza and Elaine Bennis lounged on Jerry’s couch and love seat, reading magazines, not listening. Elaine held an apple. Jerry minced across the kitchen in his white sneakers. “He just disappeared, and I think they’ve rented his apartment to somebody else.”

Just then, the front door flew open and Ol’ Dirty Bastard made a frenetic, sliding entrance, dressed in a bowling shirt and slacks, hair blown out in an electro-Afro and adorned with random pink bows. The studio audience went wild. He headed straight for Jerry’s refrigerator, removed a bottle of Cristal, and took a long, loud swig. “Uh, excuse me,” Jerry brayed, annoyed, “but who are you?” Elaine crinkled her nose; George lifted his head from the magazine, brow furrowed behind his glasses.

Ol’ Dirty wiped his mouth against his sleeve, spread his arms, and stared down at Jerry. “I’m your new neighbor, nigguh. Fuck you think, God?” He noticed Elaine and threw a head nod her way. “What up, shorty,” he said. “I see you holdin’ it down over there, girl. I’m sayin’, how you like to take a l’il ride with Big Baby Jesus? I plant seeds in fertile soil to popuh-late the earth, na’mean? God made Dirt, so this Dirt won’t hurt. Wu-Tang killa bees on a swarm, Jerry.” He poked his head into the fridge, crammed a carrot in his mouth, then straightened and pointed his chin at George. “Who this bitch-ass nigga, Jerry?”

George stood up, waddled over, and extended an obsequious hand. “George Costanza,” he said, smiling up at the rapper. “I really, really like what you’ve done with your hair.” He framed Ol’ Dirty’s head between his hands as if he were a movie director. “Sort of a
Mod Squad
meets Betty Boop thing.”

“Man, shut the fuck up before I smack fire out cho’ ass,” said Ol’ Dirty, slapping George’s hand away and strutting past him to join Elaine on the sofa.

“I’m sorry,” said Jerry, a shit-eating smile on his face, “I don’t believe I caught your name.”

“I’m the Osiris out this motherfucker, Jerry.” He threw an arm around Elaine, who touched her hand to her throat, blinked, and smiled politely. Jerry’s buzzer sounded and he walked over to answer it.

“Yeah?” he said, crossing his ankles and rolling his eyes.

“Yo, it’s the God, God,” a voice responded.

“Come on up,” Ol’ Dirty yelled over his shoulder, leaning in to nibble Elaine’s ear. She giggled coquettishly and slid her hand up his thigh. A moment later, Jerry opened the door and fifty Wu-Tang crimeys bailed in, each one giving Jerry a pound and saying, “Peace, God,” as he entered.

“Peace, God,” Jerry responded. “Make yourselves at home. No Wallabees on the coffee table, though, dogs.” His eyes jumped with panic, as if his brain had relinquished control of his mouth and he was shocked to hear what he was saying. “I’ve got forties and Hennessy in the fridge, and we’re about to make a weed run, ya heard?”

Macon turned the channel and eased back as the camera panned a quiet brownstone block and the
Cosby Show
theme played. But inside the familiar Huxtable household, things were amiss. The stately living room was filled with screaming children—shittydiapered infants wailing, swaggering toddlers opening mahogany desk drawers and flinging the contents behind them, teenagers in bubble-goose jackets and work boots ciphering in front of Claire Huxtable’s mantel-mounted Romare Bearden painting, a tuxedoed six-year-old with a propane lighter working to ignite the moldings, three bead-braided junior-high-school girls playing double Dutch in the foyer with a pair of live snakes as jump ropes. A massive drumbeat boomed from the stereo speakers and the vibrations knocked jazz records from the shelves onto the floor, where a pair of eight-year-olds in Rick James jumpsuits were flinging them at the chandelier. Ol’ Dirty Bastard lay supine on the couch, boots up on the hand-carved coffee table. Muddy footprints tracked his path from the front door.

“The God got thirteen beautiful mothafuckin’ black babies,” he drawled, patting one on the head as she crawled by clutching a throwing star. “Ten baby mamas, three platinum records, fourteen gun charges, six drug cases, two gunshot wounds, and no dough. But yo, I’m loungin’, God. Up in the plush crib, like whaaaaat?” He picked a framed photo of the Huxtable clan up off the floor and stared at it, slack-eyed. “Damn, Denise an’ Vanessa some fine-ass bitches.” He flung it behind him, and the glass shattered against the wall. “Shiii, y’all coulda stayed,” he mumbled, crossing his arms and closing his eyes. “We coulda hadda party.”