Angry Black White Boy (3 page)

Just then Omari had rounded the corner: Macon’s homeboy, Cartwright’s co-captain. Scott backed away, sheathed his hands in khaki pockets, watched Macon give Omari a pound and followed suit. As soon as the rapper/midfielder went on his way, Scott’s finger was right back in Macon’s face.

“You better watch your fuckin’ attitude, bro. I don’t care how tight you are with the niggers. I’ll kick your fuckin’ ass.”

The passenger on the left, Scott’s look-alike, was cursing at his cell phone. “I can’t get a fucking signal on this piece of shit,” he said, slapping it closed against his leg.

“Forget it, man.” Punctuality rapped twice on the partition. “Hey, turn that down, will you?” Macon reduced the music to a whisper. Every passenger but one had made the same request. “I gotta hear enough of this shit as it is,” Punctuality told Scott. “Two in the morning last night, these guys in their fuckin’ SUVs are rattling my windows three floors up.”

“What I want to know,” said Scott, “is how they can afford forty-thousand-dollar cars. With custom stereos.”

Punctuality laughed. “We’re in the wrong business, bro.”

“Seriously, dude. First thing tomorrow, I’m gonna go get an Adidas sweatsuit and find myself a nice street corner. Sell a little crack and buy myself a Lexus.”

Macon tightened his grip on the steering wheel and tried to concentrate on the road. The two passengers were silent for a minute. As Macon merged onto the FDR, Scott spoke.

“So who’s this girl tonight? Kim’s friend?”

“Her name is Kaliyah, Kalikah, something like that.”

“She hot?”

“Hope so.”

“Black chick?”

“Yeah.” Scott played with his phone and Macon couldn’t take it: He knew them too well, better than he knew himself, knew what they were thinking and everything they’d ever thought and it was vile, all of it, smug and oblivious. The eternal fear of waking up as one of these mix-and-matchable bar-hopping assholes kept Macon clenched with vigilance, tight as a fist. Loathing frothed within him, bubbled over the sides of its containment vat, and splattered onto Macon’s rational mind. It was corrosive. He jerked the wheel, hand crossing over hand. A vertebrae popped as Macon leaned into the turn; his biceps flared and he felt the tattoo there burn as if it had just been etched into his skin. A sweat-drip blotted in his armpit, horns blared past him, other drivers cursed him and their spittle flew against the insides of their windows. The cab cut right across two lanes and veered onto the shoulder of the highway. Macon mashed the brakes, and Cartwright and Punctuality careened forward, heads colliding with the scratched plastic partition, then fell back into their seats as the taxi recoiled. Macon’s shirt stuck to his skin, soaked; a few seconds of adrenaline was all it took.

In the backseat, terror turned to anger just as fast. “What the fuck?” Scott roared, bracing his arms and legs against the door, the walls, the floor. “What are you, some kind of maniac?”

Macon slapped a button and the silver door locks bulleted into their sheaths. Scott clawed with his thumb and index finger, trying to pull one of the little cylinders back up. His friend watched and mimicked, laying fumbling hands on his own panel. Macon’s face was as flushed as theirs were ashen, as if both their blood now flowed through his body, or he’d leaned for hours over fire. He fist-banged the glove box and the door dropped open with a squeak. Metal scraped plastic and Macon slid backward across the worn vinyl seat until the meter jabbed him in the back. With both hands clamped around it, he thrust a heavy, empty .38 caliber pistol into the small space in the partition and sighed hugely: a gust of human exhaust that filled whatever space was left in the small cabin. He could smell his air and both of theirs, all three mouths stale and disgusting, their breath meeting the gunmetal and the cab plastic and cab vinyl so that the car stank like a microphone in heavy freestyle rotation. Macon always sniffed the mic. A small perversion.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said, eyes darting from one to the other, other to the one, gun barrel following his glance, mind dancing just above the moment. Control flowed up from the gun and coursed through Macon’s body. He had to remind himself to keep his hands clenched as the rest of him relaxed. His toes laughed. Thighs, tingled. It was all Macon could do not to turn and sneak a peek in the rearview. He knew he looked heroic, and he knew he was invisible to them behind the mass of postings, stickers, and graffiti signatures that covered the partition. All Cartwright and Punctuality saw was a gun.

“Take out your wallets and leave them on the seat,” Macon commanded, giddiness mounting as he heard his own gruff, not-to-be-fucked-with voice. He wagged the gun a centimeter, pointing. “And your phone, Cartwright.” A final inspiration: “And both your neckties. Hurry. Look up and I’ll shoot you in the face.” Gun back-and-forth inclusive.

“Okay,” Punctuality stammered, awash in more sweat than Macon had ever seen except the time he went to Celtics pre-camp with his dad and Reggie Lewis—rest in peace—was taking a reporter’s question afterward and Macon, barely knowing why, reached out and touched Reggie’s huge forearm, slick and glinting with warm sweat. Macon had drawn back immediately, embarrassed at the wetness, and Reggie had looked at him and smiled, and Macon had grinned back, almost crying.

Punctuality flailed, words and limbs. “Just don’t hurt us,” he said again and again, hand shaking as he took the necktie from his jacket pocket and, Macon noted with amusement, folded it into a neat, even swath. Scott was faring better. His tie was jumbled in his hands and he stared into his lap with great focus, as if wanting his assailant to take special note of his willingness to cooperate. The thought of making them strip naked barreled through Macon’s mind, but he declined to detain it.

Two leather wallets, a flip-top StarTac cell phone, a Motorola pager, a Donna Karan tie, a Gianni Versace knockoff, and two silvery watches lay on the backseat between them.

“I didn’t ask for any watches,” Macon said. He buzzed down the right rear window. “Throw them out.” The wristwear hit the tarmac, and Macon sealed the portal.

“All right.” He turned back toward the road. “Now. Where were we going? Eighty-fifth and Fifth, was it?”

“Can-can’t you drop us off right here?” Scott’s voice was meek and shivery, a poverty-stricken cartoon rodent on the night before Christmas. “Please?” He threw his shoulder at the door again.

“You sure, homeboy? I wouldn’t want Kim and her black friend to think you’d stood them up.”

Macon’s gut clenched with suppressed laughter as he wondered what they’d say to that one. A few ticks passed in silence, and then Punctuality was hyperventilating, choking on huge droughts of air, eyes bulging to the blood-veins, too frenzied for caution. “Why are you doing this to me?” he brayed as tears blazed down his face.

Scott grabbed Punctuality by the scruff of the neck and pulled him down into his lap—a blow-me motion Macon was sure he’d executed many times before.

“Shut up, dude, get a hold of yourself.” Punctuality thrashed, pushed off of Scott’s thigh with his hand, and sat straight, dripping tears and snot. He tried to look at Macon, but Scott yoked him again, and this time Punctuality went limp. The sobs mounted and he mumbled words between them: “What”—
sob
—“do”—
sob
— “you”—
sob choke snot sob
—“want-from-me?”
Sob sob gulp-swallowrecap.
“Why me-he-hee?”

Macon considered the question for a moment, then turned to answer, his voice slicing through the slot in the partition. “Because you’re an ignorant white devil asshole, and you and everybody like you deserves to be robbed every day of your life,” he said. “Now get the fuck out of here. If I see you even halfway looking at my plates, I’ll back up and run your stupid asses over. Move.”

He hit the unlock button and they scrambled out onto the shoulder of the highway, Scott pulling Punctuality onto his feet. Macon peeled off, merged into the middle lane, and swerved so the door swung shut. He slumped low, steering with his right fist, gun wedged underneath his thigh. Shock, horror, and an absurd, spastic euphoria tussled for control of him, each one pushing the next off the podium.

By Fifty-ninth Street, euphoria had Macon’s ear.
The perfect
crime,
it hissed.
No photo up yet, no way those jokers saw your
plates or memorized the cab ID.
He started laughing when he thought of what he’d told them. This had been the first time, Macon was certain, that those guys ever regretted the color of their skin.

Chapter Two

The elevator doors began to open and Macon broke out like a racehorse before they’d finished their slow slide; he had a hunch his roommate had arrived today. Even without a reason, though, Macon tended to walk as fast as possible. He kept pace with the sounds spinning through him, and often arrived too early for dentist appointments, lunch dates, graffiti death missions. He wound up killing time, pacing meeting places in swift, sharklike sweeps as if stillness would suffocate and sink him.

The only thing Macon was ever late for was every English class of his high-school career, and those on principle, like,
What the
fuck you timid ofays gon’ teach
me
about language? Who you got
in your great Western Literary Canon who twiznist the King’s
English until it lies twitching broken-backed and screaming “I give
up”? Corny greyboy Jack Kerouac and his one-sided love affair
with jazz? Please. You ever heard a jazz cat holler back at him,
“You got it, Jack, you understand?” James Joyce? All right, okay,
J-Dub a bad mufucker, no doubt no question, but the British made
the Irish niggas at home and abroad so the White Man can’t have
him, he’s pitching for the oppressed team in today’s ballgame. The
real Bards of nineteen-ninety-now, the dudes slapping new words
and phrases onto the language on course to surpass Willie Shak’s
lifetime record of 3,400 innovations, all them cats are microphone
fiends and that’s who the fuck I’m rollin’ with, and if I pimpstrut
down the hall too slow and make it late to class, so be it. I’ma still
rock your dumbass midterm on freestyle chops alone and both of
us know it. And when I pull the milli-mac on Willie Shak, I’ll lay
you three-to-five uncompromising slave odds that he’ll roll over
like Chuck Berry’s Beethoven and scream loud enough to wake
Finnegan. Let Shak battle Rakim at the Parthenon and see who
moves the crowd.

Macon’s strides brushed up friction from the hallway rug; static metaphysical and otherwise followed everywhere he went like a storybook puppy, nipping at Macon’s heels.

This dorm looks like my junior high, he thought, kneeling to tie his shoelace and spotting dull, earth-toned linoleum squinting through the carpet fibers. For this kind of tuition it should be all chestnut paneling and Persian rugs up in this motherfucker. Yeah, right: long forty-watt fluorescent hallways, porous yellow-painted brick, the mildewed smell of institutionality . . . Déjà vu tickled Macon’s nose and he sneezed, loudly. A thin, moist spray of liberated germs joined billions of their cousins on the rug. Macon’s sneezes were always dramatic events, seldom stifled by a hand or tissue, as if the First Amendment were at stake.

He reached his room, found the door ajar, and gave it a halting push. Sure enough, a dude his own height—five-eight, five-nine, neither short nor tall, an elevation undistinguished enough to inspire ardent weight lifting—turned from the window and squared broad shoulders to Macon. The blue evening, slung mellow over brownstone rooftops, outlined the follicle-fingers dangling around the cat’s eyes: baby dreads too short to be tucked into the full-stuffed headband at the back of his neck. So this was Andre Walker. He was shorter and lighter than Macon had expected, and the locks were a surprise.

Macon raked a hand through his own cropped light-brown hair and meditated on the freedoms nobody but dreads had. Locks were fashion carte blanche. You could be Brooks Brothered down and get over on the contrast, or rock eccentric, idiotic shit: big butterfly-collared shirts with wide horizontal stripes, a dirty, pointless piece of string tied like a pageant sash, whatever. A dread was hip regardless, cooling nonchalant at the far end of the spectrum from where Macon huddled good-looking but not fly, forever struggling to hide the meticulousness in his cool like a bald spot, sporting the right gear and compensating for his hair by fucking with his facial growth. His sideburns flared into dramatic bell-bottoms, less stylish than aggressive—a half-successful hip hop remix of the only cross-racial revolutionary hairstyle to limp past Watergate.

Macon took a mother-may-I giant step across the threshold and Andre took two toward him on clopping Nike flip-flops and filled the space between them with his outstretched hand. Macon spoke first.

“Been wondering when you’d touch down.” A double-pump handshake. “Welcome to the crib. I’m Macon Detornay.”

“Andre Walker.” He crossed thick mocha arms over his chest and leaned against the knotty side of a pinewood bookshelf beached in the middle of the room, evidence of his roommate’s ongoing efforts to redecorate. Macon had smoked the crack of dawn on a five A.M. Bonzai Bus down from the Bean ten days ago, Columbia’s first move-in day, in what had turned out to be a highly overzealous bid for first-come, first-served primacy. Living in a freshman double was going to be hard enough, he’d reasoned; if there was a nicer side or plusher mattress, he needed it. Macon had been switching beds nightly, though, and he’d developed no real preference.

“How long have you been here?” asked Andre.

“I came down for the pre-orientation camping thing. But when I got here, I realized I’d rather just have a week by myself in the city to get settled, find a job, shit like that. So I skipped it.”

Andre nodded. “Yeah, me, too. I didn’t come to college to learn how to wipe my ass with leaves.”

Macon chuckled, mostly to cover the whirring of his brain. All summer he’d been fretting over this moment, afraid that when faced with his roommate in the physical, he’d chicken out and not say what he had promised himself he would. The full-disclosure Macon knew he owed Andre seemed so foolhardy; why drop a million pounds of cement history between the two of them before there was anything else? Macon had spent hours telling himself it would be a bridge, not a wall.

Now, at the crucial juncture, it seemed almost trivial. Macon’s feet still squished in his boots, adrenaline-soaked. His jaw still hummed with the violence, wit, and ideology of what he’d done. The robbery had been a giant step into himself, into the enormous suit of warrior’s armor he’d always felt it was his destiny to fill. New York was pushing him just like he’d known it would. What was history compared to destiny?

“There’s something you deserve to know,” Macon recited, snapping back into the moment. He interlaced his fingers, then extended his arms in a half-twist. Six knuckles popped in unison. “So here it is. First of all, I requested you as a roommate. And second, Cap Anson was my great-grandfather.”

Andre’s expression barely changed. “Okaaay,” he allowed, trying to buy himself some time to think, realizing the limited purchasing power of the two syllables he’d chosen, and giving up. “Wow. What am I supposed to do with that?”

Resentment tinged the question. Andre had been here what, three hours, and already his roommate was heaving a musty shroud of century-old savagery over the two of them and lighting candles inside? Why can’t I just do college like a normal motherfucker, he wondered, say,
What’s up dude?
to my boring roommate and buy some boring books and drink some beer and meet some girls and shit?

Macon shrugged, eyes pleading for an understanding he couldn’t quite pinpoint. “Honestly, man? I don’t know. I found you on the Net after I read Fleet’s book, and you were coming here and so was I and it just seemed cosmically, I don’t know . . . right for us to room together, so I called the housing office. The sins of the fathers and everything.”

“The sins of the fathers what, dude? Shall be forgiven if the great-grandsons share a dorm room?”

Macon shook his head. “Not forgiven. I don’t know, man.” He was beginning to recall why the anticipation of this conversation had filled him with worry. “Something to make Cap spin in his grave, I guess.”

“He’s not the only one,” said Andre. His mind’s eye saw his own great-grandfather’s caramel face turn into pale gray clay, crumple and crack, scatter in a slight wind. The headless body stood at home plate, arms swaying from shoulders. The striped cap rested for a moment in midair, hovering where Fleet’s head had been, then plopped softly to the ground, raising a whiff of baseball dust. Andre wondered what it was like to grow up knowing a man like Anson was your ancestor. Had Macon’s parents had a somber sitdown with their son and told him the deal, or had the recent re-publication of Fleet’s book transformed a family hero into a demagogue?

“I’m sorry,” said Macon. “I mean, not about Cap and Fleet— I’m not apologizing for that—I mean, I am sorry about that, but I’m apologizing for this.” His laugh misfired. The adrenaline was draining away. Macon could never keep hold of an emotion for long. He’d become so good at banishing his parents’ screaming indictments from his mind in the few seconds it took him to walk from the front door to the ride honking in the driveway that the process was now automatic. He poked the toe of his Timberland into a mound of plaster dandruff flaking from the bottom of the wall. He wasn’t used to elucidating his motives; most people focused on the bright-burning flame of Macon’s convictions, not the mass of melted-together wax from which they sprouted. “I guess the idea of living with someone I have some connection to is more appealing than life with a total stranger,” he offered at last.

Andre spoke over the clatter of warning bells filling his mind. “We are total strangers, Macon.” Even as he said it, Andre felt the first drop of truth melt away from the statement; there was a strange kinship between them, and he’d be lying to himself if he ignored it.

“Yeah, but we got history,” said Macon.

“So what? Are you anything like Anson? Do you hate black people? Can you even hit a curveball?”

“I’m nothing like him,” Macon said. “That’s kind of the point of my life.”

Andre swung his arms, tried to sound breezy. “Well, man, Fleet really has no bearing on my life. I haven’t even read his book.”

“For real? Why not? You can borrow mine.”

“Chill. Ever since that joint came back in print, my mom’s been on it nonstop: ‘Andre, why you watching that crap on TV? Go read your great-grandfather’s book.’ ‘Andre, stop running up my phone bill and go learn your goddamn history.’ I’m getting pretty tired of that dude, to be honest.”

“It’s a dope book, man. Makes you realize how little anything has changed in this country.”

“Is that right.” He hoped he sounded rhetorical enough to disperse the speech clouds massing over Macon’s head, dark and heavy and desperate to rain down transparent sheets of consciousness. Andre didn’t feel like listening to his roommate relieve himself. He’d already served his time in prep school as a cardboard self-affirmation cutout.
Smile, Johnny. Put your arm around the
African-American. Say cheese.
A stoic
,
amiable receptacle into which fake-empathetic whiteboys dumped their views, a priest who heard confessions and smoked joints with the sinners to absolve them.

Andre arced his brows into sardonic rainbows, and Macon’s blue eyes darted chastened to the rug and scanned a dark, Africa-shaped stain. When he was ten, a ski instructor with whom he’d shared a chairlift had told Macon how lucky he was to have the eyes he did. “You’ve got those speckled irises,” the guy had said, making a little circle with his finger. “Me, too. They’re very rare. Women love eyes like ours.”

There was more to be said about the past, the weirdness of meeting, the blood spilled between them, but Andre had no idea what. Better to back away from all that for the moment and do the getting-to-know-you shuffle until some rhythms of cohabitation had been established. Or until he could make an appointment with the housing office.

“Two grown men and they expect us to live in two hundred and sixty-six square feet all year.” Andre rocked back on his heels, hands pocketed, and bobbed his head at a silver tape measure lying next to several boxes marked
Pimp Shit.
“I measured.”

“Two-seventy, if you count that little-ass closet,” Macon replied gratefully. He dropped onto a naked blue-and-white-striped canvas mattress and heard the metal bedframe moan beneath him. “Not that I brought much.” He threw a leg over his own half-unpacked suitcase and leaned back, then wondered if the posture was too comfortable too quick, a typical cavalier-whiteboy-lounging-cuzthe-world-is-my-domain move. He flashed on the three junior-high girls he’d seen on the train yesterday, spread out slumber-party style on the dirty floor at rush hour, snapping pictures of one another with disposable cameras, oblivious to the scowl-stares and headshake censures of sardine commuters and the D train floor grime because their sense of entitlement blurred everything beyond each other. Only white kids act like this, Macon had thought. He sat up. “I took the bus down.”

“No big send-off from the fam?” asked Andre, flopping stomach-first onto the other bed and propping himself up, elbows under chest, hands folded. Macon, watching him, leaned back again.

“My parents are on a two-month European cruise.” Disdain rimmed Macon’s voice, thought Andre, maybe embarrassment. Most likely, he assumed his roommate was poor—weren’t all black folks?—and shrunk from their presumed class difference. Kids at Princeton-Eastham Prep had always relaxed around him when they found out Andre wasn’t on scholarship like the rest of the school’s black population.

“I haven’t lived at home in more than a year, though,” Macon continued. “I took some time off after high school and moved in with my boy Lajuan.”

Estranged from parents,
Andre noted. He bet they were still paying their baby boy’s tuition, though.
Has a black friend.
Slick how he’d slipped that in there. Unless the universe housed whiteboys named Lajuan.

“You’re from where?” asked Andre.

“Ten minutes outside Boston. Suburb called Newton. But don’t worry. We’re not gonna have any Bird-Magic, Bad Boy–Death Row coastal beef. Boston sucks.” He gestured at his roommate’s outfit. “Nice to see some hometown pride, though.”