Losing My Cool (18 page)

Of course this is the way that so many people experience dating and love, and it is normal, but to me it was revelatory. I doubt that Stacey or Ant have ever let themselves enjoy such tranquility, and that is sad to me. But I am sure that they would want to. I imagine that this is what all of my boys would choose were we not indoctrinated to preemptively sabotage our relationships with our girls, and were our girls not trained to expect nothing better from us.

Still, I wasn't beyond seeking Charles's approval with regard to the matter. On the drive home that night I asked him what he thought about Betrys, did he think that she was hotter than Stacey, something transparently insecure like that.

“Oh, nigga, please! Stop fishing for compliments,” he said emphatically and to Pup's amusement, then added:“Seriously, that is a
woman
; Stacey is a bitch.”

Apparently, not all bitches were the same for Charles anymore, and I just hadn't received the memo. Well, that kind of flexibility was OK with me now. I was no longer worried about maintaining some foolish consistency, and I was relieved to hear this confirmation and to hear it coming from his lips. Charles was changing and growing, too, I could see, which, I reminded myself, was really not the case for some of our other acquaintances—like Ant, who hadn't graduated high school or left the neighborhood, and who had offered a different view about Betrys to a mutual friend: “Aw, I heard that nigga Thomas went off to college and now he be running around with a booooooouuugie bitch; that's waaaaaack!”

My parents, for their part, were ecstatic when they came down to D.C. and met Betrys. I could only imagine what agony they had suffered the previous four years, silently, at night, and in each other's confidence, as they braced themselves for the very worst every time I waltzed out of the house with their car keys or the phone rang and I wasn't there.

 

 

 

 

At the same time that my prefabricated notions of women were falling apart, so, too, were my assumptions about what I wanted to study and become over the next three years. I had entered school pre-declared as an economics major and took both micro- and macroeconomics my freshman year to equally disastrous effect. I hadn't really understood what economics was when I chose the field on my application. All I knew was that you could get a job at an investment bank with a degree in economics and a minor in, say, finance—whatever that was. And what I knew about investment banking was that the bonuses were outlandish and the consensus was that this was the safest and fastest way to get rich legally. Of course I can see now that I had very different first-job concerns than Pappy had back in 1959—I didn't worry about racial discrimination, I took for granted I could get decent work; I worried instead about how to amass and flaunt wealth. What shut Ant and anyone else up the summer before I left for school was the mere mention of owning a straight path to Wall Street, perhaps the only white-bread institution before which they all would bow their op-positional heads in quiet respect.“Oh, we've got a college nigga in the house now, so I'd better be on my best behavior,”Ant would say at the park, and everyone would laugh. But no one would laugh (or they would stop laughing) if I replied that this college nigga was about to pull down a $100,000 bonus in just four short years.

The decision to study econ was as easy in its way for me as it had been for Pappy to take the crushing job at that insurance company. Economics gets you respect, I knew, because ultimately money is the only lingua franca. Of course, once I actually went to class, I found the subject matter so dry that I hated myself for having leaped blindly into it. But what were the alternatives? I had never considered the alternatives. Soon I would have to decide whether to stay with my decision—to stay in a field that I found uninspiring in the extreme but which others admired from a safe distance—or to switch majors completely. Playboy mentioned art history as a possible major I would enjoy, then he lost interest in school altogether and dropped out and we never spoke about it further. Pappy told me to study something honorable. My mother told me simply to study what made me happy. Charles told me to study econ and finance, as he was doing, and to fucking get paid and stop fretting. I heard them all out and continued to fret.

 

 

 

 

There is a basic philosophy requirement in the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown, and every student has to enroll in two introductory courses in the department, one of which is ethics. Like just about everybody else I knew, with the exception of Playboy, I had loose preconceptions about philosophy and took it for a joke or a chore. Pappy had always told me that I
should
read philosophy, but up to this point I never really had. When I arrived in Ethics 101, I wasn't sure what to expect, though the truth is that I didn't expect very much. The classroom was a large semicircular lecture hall in Healy, jam-packed with students who would never wish to be philosophers. The professor was a middle-aged woman with frizzy brown hair, the size of a ballerina, who had studied at Harvard under John Rawls and must have mentioned that fact a half-dozen times at minimum. But she was smart and engaging as well as immodest. She began class not by lecturing but by asking questions:What does it mean to live ethically? What is the purpose of ethics? And what does it mean to live “the good life”—that is, “to flourish”? These questions are silly until you allow yourself to take them seriously, which to my surprise I did from the start.

“Let's say there is a train coming full speed ahead and four people are standing on the tracks and they cannot see the train,” the professor said.“You are on a bridge watching the scene unfold and next to you is one very obese man. You realize that if you just push the fatso over the bridge, you will surely sacrifice his life, but you will also stop the train.You would lose one life in exchange for four. What do you do? Does the good of the group supersede that of the individual? Is one life worth as much as many? Are some lives worth more than others? What are the individual's rights? Are such rights inalienable? Are there times when one must choose?”

What I liked most was that we were not being told to think
anything
; rather, we were being prodded to think
something
. These questions and others spurred me in a way that nothing in my economics classes ever had, and I found myself returning to them even outside of class. I found myself bending my thought back upon its source and subjecting my own life to a more rigorous examination than before. The way philosophy worked, it occurred to me at some point, was the exact opposite of the way the black, hip-hop-driven culture operated. Whereas the latter dealt strictly with the surfaces of things—possessions, poses, appearances, reactions—the former was nothing but the penetration of facades. The more I read in philosophy, the more I felt like that escaped slave from Plato's cave. I had been mistaking shadows for reality all along. The fact that this was such a sophomoric, clichéd revelation to come to in light of all my father's efforts to expose me to learning only illustrates the degree to which hip-hop culture—that invisible glue that stuck me with RaShawn—had placed a barrier between me and even the most universal aspects of intellectual life.

Still, moved as I was by philosophy, I had deep reservations about giving up on econ and a shot at Wall Street and all that that implied. Like Weber's hardworking Protestants and the rappers and ballers I had long idolized, I wanted the whole world to see and know that I was one of the elect.

The truth is that most white students I knew couldn't care less about the humanities or the liberal arts, the concept of a canonized Western literature and the idea of learning for learning's sake being as antiquated and, at the end of the day, irrelevant to them as it is to most Americans. For the black students, however, it seemed less that there was indifference to the humanities than there was open hostility to the idea of spending time in subjects like philosophy or art history or literature—this was seen as bizarre or foolish, perhaps even irresponsible and decadent. It was an outlook I could understand. Everything I had learned outside the house, from TV and in the 'hood, told me that book learning for edification was something only touched white kids could afford or want to do. This prejudice existed on every social level I encountered in the black community. On the one hand, the cats back home who didn't go to college, they weren't about to be impressed by the cogito or the importance of the Italian Renaissance in the progression of representational painting—not because they weren't smart, but simply because they didn't care.They don't give a damn about the noises in Raskolnikov's head or whether niggas can or cannot step in the same river twice. What does any of this have to do with their reality? Food for thought, you say? What Heraclitus eats don't make me shit, they retort.

What they can and do respect is that almighty dollar. Like the Notorious B.I.G., they love the dough. It seems perfectly acceptable to them that you would study finance or management or even marketing or cosmetology, or that you would go to law school (although
another
three years does seem a bit excessive). But it doesn't seem acceptable at all that you would contemplate the idea of personhood all day long and go to a fancy school just so that you can bring home a $35,000 paycheck and drive a used Toyota Camry (they can drive something hotter than that working at UPS, they point out, and they don't have to waste four years in college to do it). The idea that there is something to be had from education that somehow goes beyond material compensation is foreign and naïve to them—education is a means to an end and no end itself. They do not phrase it like this, but that is exactly what they mean when they say: You be on that bullshit.

That is what I saw in the black community back home. On the other hand, there were not nearly enough counterbalancing examples at the university to model myself on either. The overwhelming majority of the black students with status were either affirmative action recipients struggling mightily just to get by, or they were athletes on scholarship, or INROADS and Sponsors for Educational Opportunity all-stars charging full-speed ahead into high-powered corporate gigs. In the summers the latter went to intern at Gold-man Sachs and McKinsey & Company while cramming for the LSAT on the side. They were gifted and elite, sure, but they were street smart, too, they were quick to point out; they had no time to gaze at a Caravaggio or wax romantic about dropping madeleines into teacups.

Some of these students would freely admit that they were anti-intellectuals: “I'm a hustler,” a classmate said with pride, “it just so happens that school is my hustle.” These black kids tended to want the same bourgeois material wealth that all the rappers and gangsters are dying trying to get; they just went about procuring it in a safer way. What drove them was the idea that they may one day buy back some of that legitimacy they mortgaged away over the years going to white schools and hitting the books. And how would they hope to do this? By going into entertainment law, for instance, and making seven figures representing actors and rappers. Or by going into commercial real-estate development or by working for a hedge fund or private-equity firm out in Connecticut and making so much paper that no one could begrudge them for it. Anything was possible, really—the sole unacceptable scenario was the one in which the material compensation would be less than ample enough to muffle all the player-hating.

In no way was I immune to such thinking. It is rare that you meet a black student who is, even at the best schools—especially at the best schools. We see images of athletes and rappers 24/7, but most of us simply have never seen a black person devoted to that other form of wealth, the life of the mind, and so we do not imagine that this is a feasible—let alone a luxurious—way to live. I had seen my father strive to live this way, to live his life inside books, and still, it struck me as an impossible fate for me to win. Part of me could not relinquish the desire to be a banker. Wall Street was such an obvious destination for a black kid steeped in hip-hop culture to want to end up at. The same machismo, the same allegiance to material wealth, the same condescension toward reflective thought, the me-myself-and-I worldview that was so prized in the street was equally exalted in the world of finance.

I used to lie awake at night, fantasizing about the day that, as a young hotshot director at Morgan Stanley or someplace like that, I would roll back to Plainfield, triumphantly, in a drop-top Modena or a tinted-up Geländewagen. I would be a black Caesar astride a six-figure chariot crammed full of booty and speeding toward Rome—victorious, chrome rims spinning, arm dangling out the window, gold Rolex Day-Date glistening in the sunlight, jealous jaws dropping in my glorious wake. I would show everyone I wasn't a sucker for having gone off to college. These images of hip-hop largesse were so vivid, I could even hear the CD I would be playing—Baby's “#1 Stunna.” I was longing to ball.