Losing My Cool (20 page)

“Huh?” I said, confused. “I mean, that's crazy, Mom, but did you really need to wake me up just to tell me that?” I mumbled into the phone, imagining some overambitious amateur clipping his Cessna by mistake.

“Well, we don't know if it was an accident or not. But I called because there are reports of smoke coming out of the Pentagon building, too.”

I couldn't get back to sleep after that and so I slipped on some flip-flops and went downstairs to the TV. I can't remember if I was the first one there or if Matt and Achilles were already sitting on the couch watching the news. I remember more and more people came in the door and down the stairs, crowding around the screen. None of us spoke; we sat in silence, staring at what looked like the trailer for a slickly produced feature film on narcotizing repeat. Both towers were smoldering. People were leaping out of windows. I felt my stomach turn. Then, all of a sudden, the south tower just swallowed itself up whole—one minute it was there, the next it was not—and someone in the room said, Oh, Fuck! and covered his mouth, and tears welled in our eyes as we sat there staring at the television screen.

Later that morning or early afternoon, I tried my mother back at work. All of the circuits were busy and I was forced to give it up. I couldn't reach Betrys in Brooklyn, either. In a kind of collective daze, Playboy, my friend Josh, and I climbed up onto the building's rooftop, where, just over the Potomac, we could see a slanted brown-gray column of smoke spilling out of the Pentagon and rising in what seemed like slow motion up into the pristine azure sky. Gazing out across the shimmering blue water and into northern Virginia, it began to occur to me that what I had heard before almost certainly was an explosion.

Now the city was silent except for the sirens and helicopters that polluted the otherwise perfect late-summer air. The four of us sat up there on the roof, scanning the panorama of monuments, the Kennedy Center and the Jefferson Memorial, the Key Bridge and the Capitol building, eyes darting this way and that, always drawn back to the blaze across the river. Someone got out a camera and took pictures, none of which would do the moment justice.After a while, none of us really wanting to be left alone, we went downstairs and out into the street together to try to get something to eat.

The city was deserted.There wasn't a solitary moving car on M Street—usually a rushing flood of traffic—save for the occasional black military Hummer or Metropolitan Police Department patroller. We walked in the middle of the road to a restaurant called Old Glory, which served big slabs of Southern-style ribs and which Pappy liked to frequent whenever he came to town. It was open and had a large TV turned to the news. We sat down and I can't remember what we ordered, probably sandwiches and beer.

Playboy, a guy of grand blanket statements (“capitalism is sick”; “I consume, therefore I am”) and brooding and depressive thoughts on an ordinary day, began holding forth at the table right away. He had a lot to say about the many ways in which the world was presently dying and how Fukuyama suddenly seemed a hell of a lot less prescient than Huntington. History, far from being concluded, was yielding itself to an apocalyptic clash of civilizations for which the Western world had long been asking, that sort of thing. It was clear that Josh knew who Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington were and was more or less acquainted with each man's respective lines of thought, though he professed degrees of cautious skepticism toward both. I had never heard of either of them before.

 

 

 

 

Feeling frustrated and powerless in general and ignorant and out of my league in this conversation in particular, as well as feeling a need to speak up and have a say, to leverage some kind of tenuous control over that day's events, I started saying whatever came to me. Really, I was just talking nonsense.“What we need to do,” I said, “is to do it like John Travolta in that movie
Swordfish
—we gotta terrorize the terrorists. And while we're at it, we also oughtta deal with the China threat, too, because what they do to us is nothing but a form of economic terrorism, pure and simple.” I used that phrase: “China threat.” I had seen a copy of Bill Gertz's book by that same name on Pappy's shelf once and it was the first thing that crossed my mind that afternoon at Old Glory.

“The China threat?” Josh asked.

“Yeah, the China threat. People are not paying enough attention to that,” I said.

“Can you even name the president of China?” Playboy asked.

“Mao Zedong?” I winced.

The conversation became ridiculous quickly. But this was the level at which all my old friends and classmates were accustomed to discussing the wider world, and I was only doing what I had grown up doing: talking shit. That is the way it works. Something happens and no one knows anything about it, or even tries to find out, yet everyone makes baseless claims, which we then proceed to wrap in the pretense of outrage or authority. The truth is that I was extremely confused about what was happening that day. Of course, the feeling wasn't mine alone by any stretch—the whole nation was caught unawares and forced to take a new look at a part of the world to which very few of us had ever paid serious attention, if any attention had been paid at all. Still, it is difficult to express the degree to which I was unprepared in matters of current events, foreign affairs, and the basic facets of twenty-first-century global reality.

I was especially ignorant for a student at a place like Georgetown and in comparison to my well-traveled and well-informed friends, people like Josh and Playboy. Until a much later age than either of them, I simply had never given much thought to what went on outside of my own very tight-knit demographic. I didn't watch the news, I watched Black Entertainment Television. For nineteen years, I had seldom ventured, mentally or physically, beyond the guarded borders of the only patria I really knew or cared for, which was the nation of hip-hop. Neither had very many of my fellow countrymen. It was as though we lived behind the old Iron Curtain, inundated with propaganda, forbidden to leave. Eventually most of us developed something like Stockholm syndrome: We loved our captors and hated the world outside.

Even though I was trying to do better now, and trying hard, the adverse effects of a childhood and adolescence spent in this stultifying landscape lingered. It was not just complex but also basic what we lacked. No one I hung with in high school had a passport or the interest in obtaining one. We understood places like Latin America and the Middle East by way of the rappers we grew up listening to, jokers with monikers like Noreaga [
sic
] and Escobar, Kaddafi [
sic
] and Fatal Hussein—high school dropouts who spun glib yarns of boat rides to narco-states, of getting tied up by Colombians, of dictating microphones with iron fists.

We didn't think very hard about places like Europe or Asia or even Africa. I don't think that traveling anywhere beyond Barbados would have been considered keeping it very real where I was from. The farthest I had been was Tijuana. Charles had been, I think, to Puerto Rico. It's true that I knew some people here and there who looked like me and who were not like this—Betrys had lived in Japan and Pappy had been as far east as Moscow and all the way to Senegal and Mali; Sam's mother had been in Europe and many places besides—but I chalked this up to their exceptionalness and eccentricity more than anything else. In any event, the knowledge that they had been to these places and had seen from other angles failed to impress me. Even as I read more philosophy and literature, I retained a small and limited conception of the world around me—a fact that was made clear to me that surreal and eerily beautiful morning in September.

 

 

 

 

There is a brief passage in
Anna Karenina
in which a fast-rising general named Serpukhovskoy discusses romantic love, comparing its pursuit from the perspective of a young, ambitious man to the act of carrying a
fardeau,
or burden. It's as if you're carrying a burden while also having to do something with your hands, Serpukhovskoy reasons. Doing something with your hands becomes impossible unless you tie that burden to your back.Tying that burden to your back is marriage; lugging it around without marriage is to prevent yourself from getting anything accomplished. Of course, I was not married and I knew plenty of successful single students in college, but the fact that Betrys and I were in such a serious relationship, combined with the reality that she was now living in New York while I was in D.C., had the effect of freeing me from the relentless pursuit of sex—an overwhelming diversion that had governed my life and mind while I was with Stacey. Now, for the first time—because I wasn't trying to play Betrys the way Stacey and I had played each other—I was no longer available to other women, and the woman whom I loved was no longer geographically available to me. I found myself able, finally, to sublimate all that loosed-up energy into intellectual momentum, and this in turn allowed me to work harder than I ever had before.

Outside of the classroom, embarrassed by my evident ignorance, I was determined to turn myself into something like an informed adult, though I was aware that I had a lot of ground to make up quickly and I wasn't entirely sure where to start. One day as I was studying in the library, Playboy, who never did work and only read magazines, mentioned offhandedly that there was a well-stocked periodicals archive on the second floor. “What do they have that's any good?” I said, looking up from my books.

“Well, they've got a ton of
Harper's
.”

“
Harper's
?” I said, snickering, thinking he was talking about the women's fashion rag and ready to start clowning on him.

“Not
Harper's Bazaar
,” he said preemptively. “It's a different magazine—you'd probably like it.” Then he went and found a copy for me. He told me if I liked that, I'd probably like the
Atlantic
, too. I took a long look at the cover, which seemed vaguely familiar, and realized I had seen the magazine on Pappy's desk many times before.

After that, I began to go to the library just to sift through the stacks of old
Harper's
and
Atlantic
issues. I used to go alone and on my free time. While Playboy and the others were out drinking and trying to get laid, I spent many Friday and Saturday nights by myself in the glass-backed reading room—me and the occasional janitor—overlooking the Potomac and Rosslyn's bright lights, spooning sugar into Styrofoam cups of coffee, making up for lost time.

Inside the classroom, I threw myself into philosophy. I gobbled up the existentialists. In them I thought I could sense traces of my father. As I delved into Nietzsche, I could make out Pappy's footprints. He had been here years before me, I was sure of it—little words and phrases, ideas I thought only he used, fragments, bits and pieces that he blended with his daily speech, which I had found so strange as a child—these were like clues now as I pursued him through the text. Like a detective, I began to map out swatches of intellectual terrain my father must have traveled as he attempted to make his way alone and make sense of that world he was forced to inhabit, a world that often must have struck him as excruciatingly absurd. I could envision Pappy's figure, alone and seated at his desk, scarcely older than me, rooming by himself because there weren't many other blacks to room with back then, coming across that passage in
On the Genealogy of Morals,
in which Nietzsche writes: “A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds included) as he digests his meals, even when he has to swallow some tough morsels.” I could see a line like that maybe providing Pappy a little comfort, another layer against the cold, and that made me as grateful to Nietzsche as to a friend.

But it wasn't only Pappy whom I found in these books. My old friends and I were there, too—everywhere I looked. Existentialism is the idea that existence precedes essence, which is only to say that our actions define us and we, in turn, are responsible for our actions. If, as Simone de Beauvoir believed, “one is not born a woman, but becomes one,” then it began to seem to me that one is not born a gangsta or a thug or a pimp—or, for that matter, a wannabe gangsta or a wannabe thug or a wannabe pimp. If we learn to be who we are, then we choose to be one way instead of another. RaShawn
chose
to become a murderer; Antwan
chose
to be cruel to women; I
chose
to look up to and emulate them both. It all could have been otherwise. The existentialists, I realized, were continuing the conversation about freedom that Ivan began with Alyosha: What does being free imply, really? I remember coming upon the passage in
Being and Nothingness
in which Sartre observes that quintessential Parisian
garçon
, or waiter, from his table at the Café de Flore: