Angry Black White Boy (6 page)

Dre stared back blankly. The eternal token-brother-at-a-prep-school question bobbed at him again: whether to explain, whether to educate, whether to even bother with these kids. Not for another year, when he would begin smoking pot in earnest, would Andre find even a toehold’s worth of common ground with the three hundred Jeremy Golds who comprised Princeton-Eastham’s student population.

“Stock market,” he said, and followed Dominique.

Halfway down the hall, he decided against catching up; better to leave Nique alone and let him come to his senses. Instead, Andre headed toward Harley’s homeroom, only to find him crumpled before his locker, face buried in his hands.

“Hey.” Harley glanced up and Dre winced; tear tracks ran from eyes that looked like they hadn’t rested in days.

“S’up, Dre,” he mumbled, letting his head fall again. “I can’t believe they let the fuckers off.” He shudder-sighed and swiped his wrist beneath his nose. “Got any drugs?”

“Sorry.”

“I mean, the fucking tape . . . It’s right there on the fucking tape.” A fresh drop dribbled down the worn runway of Harley’s cheek. He clenched his fist, then let it go limp. “My dad and the rest of them are having a fucking victory barbecue tonight. I mean . . .”

Andre crouched beside Harley, shoulder to shoulder, and tried to sound calm, comforting. “I know, Harley, I know. There’s nothing we can do. Listen, I came to warn you. Dominique is on some kind of crazy eye-for-an-eye trip, which will probably pass in half an hour, but for now he wants to kick your ass to teach your pops a lesson, so you’d better steer clear. Don’t take it personal. He’s in the parking lot.”

Harley’s mouth grew hard. He sprang to his feet and headed toward his car with heavy, swift steps. Andre followed, a pace behind, remembering the ride he, Nique, and Harley had taken to Fatburger last month when Harley got his license and gym class was canceled, Harley telling them how his dad had gotten the car for next to nothing at a police auction.

What kind of crappy drug dealer drives a Nissan Sentra? Nique had asked, his mouth crammed full of french fries.

When they reached the parking lot, Nique was pissing flamboyantly on Harley’s ride. A wide arc of urine glistened in the sunlight, spattering loudly on the metal hood.

“Hey!” shouted Harley. Nique looked up, tucked away his dick, and swaggered toward the cop’s son, glaring.

“I been waiting for you,” he said, hooking thumbs into belt loops and standing his ground, legs locked shoulders’ width apart. He glanced left and right as if expecting tumbleweeds to blow past.

“Dre says you want to kick my ass,” responded Harley, squinting rather than glaring. He sounded more inquisitive than angry. “So, uh, here I am. Beat the shit out of me.”

“What?” said Dre.

“Please,” said Harley. “It would make me feel a whole fucking lot better. Come on, Nique. Teach my father a lesson. Just, ah, watch the face.”

Nique walked toward him. “You ain’t gotta ask me twice,” he said, arm in motion even before he finished speaking, “and fuck the face.” He clocked Harley in the nose and knocked him back a pace. Nique was skinny, but he hit hard and he moved fast.

“Come on, Dre,” he shouted, landing a body blow that bent Harley in pain, “get some.”

Dre shifted his weight from foot to foot, wrinkled his brow, and shook his head.

Nique threw three more body blows, bouncing on his toes like a boxer, then dropped his hands to his knees and bent, panting. He saw Harley struggling to stand straight, and the realization that his adversary thought the fight was over spurred Nique back to action. He wiped his brow on his forearm, straightened, and pushed Harley with both hands, flicking them out from his chest as if he were passing a basketball. Harley stumbled, off-balance, and Nique kicked his legs out from under him, knocked Harley to the ground and brought his foot down on the kid’s arched back again and again. Harley flattened and then curled, knees tucked against his stomach, arms shielding his head.

“Okay,” he wheezed, voice muffled by his hands and thick with bloody saliva. “Stop. Please. That’s enough.”

“The hell it is,” Nique said, kicking him again. He was trying to wedge his foot in between Harley’s knees, catch him in the chest or throat. “No time-outs left, bitch.” He kicked again and stepped back. Hearing Harley speak had calmed him down a bit, thought Dre. He hoped Nique would yell for a while, tire himself out.

“The nerve of this fuckin’ cracker,” said Nique, glaring at Dre as he gestured to the crumpled body lying between them. He bent at the waist to shout in Harley’s ear, like a drill sergeant demanding push-ups. “This ain’t no fuckin’ confessional!” He reared his leg again and Dre winced at the flat slap of rubber against flesh. Harley groaned and wrenched. “That guilt kinda fades when motherfuckers are beating your punk ass, huh?”

“Okay, Nique, he’s had enough,” said Dre abruptly. Halfheartedly, he locked his arms around Nique from behind and pulled him a few paces away. Nique twisted backward, looking at him with wild eyes.

“You crazy, nigga? I’m just getting started. You hear me, Harley? Why don’t you try to get up like your boy Rodney? Try and make it to your car.”

“Nique, homeroom’s almost over. Somebody’s gonna come out here.”

“Do I look like I give a fuck? Come on, Dre, kick him. You’ll feel better.” Nique wriggled out of Dre’s arms, kicked Harley again and stood defiant, hands crossed over his heaving chest. “We’re not leaving here until you kick him.”

“Hell no.”

“Come on. How do you know you won’t like it till you try? Go for the face.”

Dre looked around. “If I kick him, we can go?”

“Deal.”

Dre swallowed, feeling sick, and kicked Harley in the back, harder than he’d planned to. Much harder. Disgust fought back against the surge of power rising in him and disgust lost quickly. Against his will, Dre understood what Nique had meant: If you blurred your eyes to things like friendship, troublesome notions of allegiance, you could find the coldness to do anything. He could pound all his rage into this body, this receptacle, and never see it. Dre unloaded again and a clipped yelp escaped the boy. It jolted Dre back to his senses and he stopped short, foot drawn back in midair. He looked down and it was Harley on the ground again, squirming in pain. Dre dropped his leg and felt his stomach bubble with nausea. He raised his hand to his forehead and touched the same warm sweat that covered him after football practice, a reminder of how hard he’d worked. A rivulet trickled past his ear, and Dre thought he’d vomit. Relief that he was back inside himself tangled with horror at the proof lying before him that he’d been out of control.

Nique looked at him and smiled; Dre refused to meet his eyes. They stood in silence and never heard Mr. Rossini, school lacrosse coach and disciplinarian, swagger over on his parking lot patrol.

“Hey! Walker, Lavar! What are you two doing out of homeroom? The bell doesn’t ring for another—” He shuffled sideways through a row of cars and saw Harley lying twisted and blood-streaked on the ground.

“Holy shit!” Rossini yelled, red-faced. He pointed at Harley with the lacrosse stick he always carried. “What the hell is this? What happened?”

Neither Andre nor Dominique had any words. They stood mute, guilty as hell, and finally it was Harley who spoke. He pulled himself up, leaned against his piss-soaked car, and said, “Coach Rossini, this . . . this isn’t what it looks like. I fell and hit my head, and Dre and Nique were just helping me up.”

Rossini didn’t buy it. “You fell and hit your head on what?” he said, staring down the parties he held responsible.

“On my car, I guess. I don’t remember.”

Rossini grabbed Nique’s arm and shook it at Harley. “Why’s Lavar covered in blood? You’re telling me he didn’t hit you? Don’t be afraid, son. Tell the truth.”

“They . . .” Harley coughed and clutched his stomach. “They didn’t do anything. They were just trying to help.”

Rossini looked from Harley to Dominique to Andre, his tiny Mesozoic brain thumping along as fast as it could go. “You two come with me,” he said, pointing meaty fingers at Nique and Dre. “And you, you’d better get yourself to Health Services before you ruin that nice shirt.”

Chapter Five

The world-renowned Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe was an inconspicuous little joint on East Third; from the street there was nothing to see but a bald man with neck rolls plugging a doorway with his ass. Macon walked past twice before he realized he’d found it. He paid the five-spot cover and stepped into a long, narrow room pungent with Egyptian Musk, Official Fragrance of the Underground.

Legions of backpack rap kids milled around him like hot atoms, and Macon eye-checked them with a chilled blend of amusement and scorn. The scene spawned such generic denizens these days. Jansports and cargo pants were everywhere, set off with overstated polos, rugbies, and sweatshirts blaring the logos of hip hop designers. Hip hop designers: The phrase echoed oxymoronic in his head. The fact that the world courted hip hoppers these days, tailored fashion and advertising to seduce and reflect them, was still a mindfuck. You could buy your jeans cut baggy at the Gap now, instead of buying a pair six sizes too big and cinching the waist with some crazy industrial-strength belt. The days of appropriation and self-modification were over: Just hit Macy’s and grab your b-boy outfit off the rack, slide through Rock & Soul and cop a set of turntables—or, God forbid, CD players—engineered for beat-matching and back-spinning. No need to refit your spray cans with oven-cleaner nozzles anymore; just jaunt over to your local graffiti boutique and pick up a ten-pack of fatcaps.

Macon cut his derision short, realizing how hackneyed the goddamned-kids-today flow sounded in his head. He was no older than these knucklehead new-jacks, but they were of a generation he despised—for their presumption and their ease, the way they’d sauntered into hip hop like it was their parents’ living room and thrown their legs up on the coffee table. Hip hop hadn’t extorted them for any dues in return for the right to claim it as their own; it had been too busy to make them cover their eyes and count to a hundred and then find the jam session unfolding behind the unmarked door. These kids were hip hop’s third generation. Not the pioneers who’d conceived it in an orgy of sacred doubled drum-breaks and presided over its birth in the asphalt schoolyards of the Bronx. Nor the inheritors who’d nurtured the culture through adolescence, studying its brief history compulsively and feeding it bolder sounds, bigger ideas. This was the desultory multitude who’d never known a world in which hip hop didn’t dangle from every corner street lamp.

When Macon had started listening—ten years ago, and a good four or five before most of these kids, he guessed as he watched them strut by in their headphones and Kangols
(I’m so
real I’ma wear my Walkman even in the club, son, just in case the
DJ plays some bullshit)
at a ratio of three males to every female— information had been precious, limited. New York radio tapes, Red Alert on KISS-FM and Special K and Teddy Ted on WBLS, were dubbed and redubbed, passed from hand to hand, brawled over if lost. Macon had trained himself to wake up five minutes before two A.M. on Sundays to tape Boston’s only radio show; he couldn’t set an alarm or his parents would hear. He’d sneak downstairs and sit in front of their living-room stereo, yoga posing before some ten-watt city lighthouse of a station, ear to the speaker, volume knob at one. Even at such tiny volume, the subsonic ripples strained his parents’ unfit speakers and nudged the dial into Spanish feminista talk shows. When Macon memorized the tape,
dime el problema con su esposo mi hermana
cut through breakbeat breathing space inside a static sheath, becoming una parte de la rhyme scheme for all time. Now those cassettes were a reminder that the music was a sliver once, a tiny shard of drum and hard-speak coded into shortwave binary and squatting at the low-rent end of the FM dial, at 90.3 and 89.1, significant degrees below normal body temperature. Those who listened then were arctic nomads, becoming friends for life when they converged on frozen roads to trade supplies.

How, Macon wondered as he cut a path toward the small stage at the back of the club, had the backpack rap set gotten so self-righteous so quickly? These kids were as dogmatic as the bitterest old-school has-beens, oozing with keep-it-realness and wistful reminiscences of a misimagined past in which hip hop hadn’t been shackled to capitalism. The backpackers scorned commercial success and radio airplay—
corrupting the culture, yo
—but spent all their money on niche-marketed hip hop accoutrements, from breakdance videos to old-school Pumas. They ordered water at the bar, not for fear of being carded or out of a desire to stay sharpwitted for the freestyle ciphers to come, but because their giddily professed pennilessness nudged them closer to the underground rappers they admired—rappers who for the most part would have traded all the adolescent-male dick-riding for a major-label advance check and used the money to move out of the projects.

This was hip hop’s whitest generation yet, the growth factor exponential—to the point where a white presence onstage or a white audience majority came as no surprise—and yet they never seemed to wonder what their proper place was, whether they were lounging at tables marked
Reserved.
Why should they? They were keeping it real. That was their only responsibility, not figuring out what real was, what it was, or for whom they were keeping it. They were masters of affect, strangers to cause—conspirators in a huge, fragile, hypnotic agreement of which Macon refused to believe he was a part:
Okay, easy . . . nobody call anybody
out . . . shhh . . . buy each other’s records . . . nod your head
like this . . . good . . . the important thing to remember is that
none of us is full of shit. . . .
He had only himself to blame for hip hop’s gentrification, Macon reflected. If people like him hadn’t fallen in love with the neighborhood and put down roots, these clowns never would have found the courage to move in and ruin it.

Macon scowled, a touch of claustrophobia tickling his neck as he pretended to scan the room for a friend. Fly women speckled the crowd, and he found a spot along the back wall, posted up and smoldered his eyes at them, hoping in vain to catch some rhythm in return. Macon consoled himself by imagining how his lot would change once he’d busted his poem; hours too late to sign up for the slam, he’d settled for the open mic to follow.

The DJ killed the beat and the hum of the room softened as the host took to the stage to start the show. The eight competing gladiators prepped themselves for battle in the front row, and the diminutive peroxide blonde standing to Macon’s left, apparently assuming all back-wall players to be as cynical as she, curled her cocktail to her chest and began a low-spoken commentary. The first competitor, a statuesque black woman, strode to the mic and Macon’s neighbor leaned back and crossed her ankles. “I’ve seen her before,” she murmured, turning her lip ring with her tongue in a way that Macon found repulsive and yet sexy. “This oughta be just great.”

“Staring into you as we move together as one,” the poet intoned, low and throaty, shutting her long-lashed lids and making a slinky, obscure gesture with her copper-bangled right arm as she drew out
one,
“pulsating with a single heartbeat as you come to life inside me . . .”

“Pussy poem,” hissed the blonde. “Chick stands up, talks about getting fucked, audience gets hard and eats it up. What bullshit.”

Macon smiled. “You a poet?”

She flicked her eyes at him. “No.” They clapped politely as the pussy poem climaxed to huge crowd noise and a serious-looking bald-headed brother in boots, baggy blue jeans, and a tight black T-shirt trooped onstage.

“Black Power poet,” said the girl. “Wanna bet he’ll make a ‘Revolution will not be televised’ reference?”

“You must come here a lot.”

“Just enough to remind myself why it sucks.”

“And why’s that?”

Without looking away from the stage, she gestured broadly, implicating the entire room. “They’re performers, not poets. Nobody deals with language. It’s about getting high scores from audience judges who wouldn’t know e. e. cummings from B. B. King.” Or CeCe Winans, thought Macon, his mind off and running along the random track she had prescribed. Or Dee Dee Bridgewater. He loved this kind of game. G. G. Allin. A. A. Milne. J. J. Johnson. LL Cool J. KK Rockwell. ZZ Top.

The poet, as predicted, was making emphatic use of such phrases as “no justice, just us,” and “each one, teach one.” Macon groaned, then squinted at the silver lining.

“This probably woulda been the bomb in, like, 1973.”

“I’m sure,” she responded, “considering he stole the rhyme scheme from the Watts Prophets.”

A fat, bearded white guy was up next. “Category three,” the blonde narrated. “The self-deprecating poem. Vaguely titillating, incredibly embarrassing, actually a cry for help. Poet looks for sympathy and courage points.”

“If you could get paid for jerking off,” opened the poet, rubbing one palm viciously against the other in what might have been either showmanship or an unconscious tic, “I’d be a millionaire. I am a master of masturbation, a sultan of self-abuse. If there were Onanism Olympics . . .”

“Three for three,” Macon congratulated her, offering his hand. She took it, pumped once, and held it for a few seconds before re-crossing her arms.

“I can’t take much more of this,” she hissed.

“Come on now, you gotta wait till I go on. I want to know which category I fit into.” Macon’s literary confidence, firm already, was engorging with each reading.

“You sure you want to know?”

“Positive. I’m lead-off on the open mic. What if I buy you a drink to ease the pain?”

“I’ll take a Cuervo with a beer back. Thanks.”

The Black Power poet, after vanquishing the pussy poet, went on to dispatch a Mohawked punk-rock poet who paced the club while screaming about the day he found his father with a shotgun in his mouth and his brains on the floor. In the finals, however, he was trumped by a woman whose “iron spears of oppression” poem, recited on her knees with eyes closed and hands clasped to her chest, managed to address both the violence of slavery and the politics of sucking dick. It cost Macon two more tequila shots to keep his homegirl around, but it was a small price to pay to have an ally in the house. He’d downed three rum-and-Cokes himself just to keep pace, and by the time the MC introduced him, mangling his last name, it was something of an effort for Macon to navigate the thinning crowd with his usual élan.

“Okay, uh, I’m Macon Detornay and this joint is called ‘Mouth to Mouth Resuscitation,’ ” he said, unfolding the quartered pages from his back pocket. “I wrote it last year, when I was visiting a friend of mine at USC. Sorry I haven’t memorized it. Next time, I promise. Okay:

shirtless in the first real day of LA heat
i can see poverty curling back
the edges of the campus
like burning newspaper
LA & fire wedged together forever for me in my mind
good cop bad cop shock drop bad cop
no rupture in the revolution of the loop
of the song
rap is on the microphone:
can’t we all just get a bong?
trade you my africa medallion
for the name of your weed spot
no audobon assassins
memphis snipers
or government conspiracies needed
hip hop was born
with a silver nine in its mouth
already cocked & just waiting
for hammer time
my man lajuan is down with single gun theory
claims that same dallas bullet
just been ricocheting around
for like 35 years now
flew thru saigon & the south bronx
moving like the old cartoon singalong dot
bounced thru south africa on a world tour
pit stops from bosnia to watts
caught scott la rock & kids on every block
hit john lennon bounced right off ronald reagan
struck the jackpot when it caught hip hop
but like that retarded kid on tv said
life goes on
meanwhile
i’m tryna deal with a down syndrome of my own
when i reminisce
it’s video clips
as baby pics
i feel like
bigger thomas’s mother or some shit
it never fails
when they map
rap’s family tree
invariably between staggerlee & leroi
some defender of the realm
like me
will invoke richard wright
as if that proves something
i mean hell
try getting my parents
to take responsibility for
some of the shit i’ve pulled lately
how you gonna be twentysomething years old &
let your great-granddaddy
fight your battles anyway?
looking for inspiration i
slide down the family tree
til i reach the last poets
umar bin hassan
afro aflame
chucking chinese throwing stars
thru white people’s spines
a stance later modified
see he ain’t talkin bout me
he means um
alright I might be a white devil but
i’m beginning to hate with love and love with hate
i’m down right
i can relate
watch me
cruisin stick n movin showin & provin
manchild in the promised band
hopin he’s groovin
if i were a jazz musician
i’d be wishin for an invite to sit in
legs wrapped round my horn case like a barbershop pole
but i’m not
this hip hop
act like you know
so i stay
strapped
with a symbolic list
of anti-colonialist accomplishments
for when somebody ask
who dis
potential brutus
judas iscariot
driving in place &
pumpin mix tapes to demonstrate
the unity of the proletariat
starting to sound like jesse at the convention in 88
my forefathers came here on slaveships
his forefathers came on immigrant ships
but whatever the original ships
we’re all in the same boat now
boom shocka lock
hip hop is not plymouth rock
any more than america’s the great melting pot
i could recite
a battleworn litany
of moments & events gasps of death
from the sugarhill gang’s
grandmaster caz
grand larceny creative
the borrowed notebook that made rap famous
to the train buff
graff’s chemical death bath
somebody said you could actually hear the colors shrieking
as they melted into welfare cutbacks
and all the way up to sprite ads
but nunadat is where it’s at
suffice to say the other day
the faded ghost of hip hop’s past
tiptoed to my side & grabbed my wrist
arms out pressed us sideways
fingertips to tips
we did the wave
b-boy vulcan mindmeld
b-boy energy ripples twist into infinity
but then i always been the type to get sentimental
over shit that might’ve never existed
so i can’t say for sure
if all this means
that hip hop’s not as raw
or that i ain’t twelve no more
then again check out some of these cats who are
leave it to a music that saturation mined
the backlog annals of recorded history
lookin for the perfect beat
to double back & diagnose itself
with advanced acute nostalgia
for its own barely vanished youth
you’d think hip hoppers
would be natural historians correct
but only for eight digital seconds at a time