Losing My Cool (21 page)

I was reminded in those days of a boy I knew at Georgetown. His name was Will. Will came from New England. He had gone to a good boarding school—in fact, to one of the best. He was on a tennis scholarship. He had pitch-dark skin, a slow easy gait, and a wardrobe stuffed with Abercrombie & Fitch. He wore a navy blue and red Boston Red Sox cap, flipped to the back. I don't think there were very many black students at his boarding school in New England, but at Georgetown, I can attest, he was popular in black circles. He would walk through Red Square, stop at one of the black-occupied benches, spot a friendly face or two and offer his hand, dipping his shoulder, perhaps a little too low, as he leaned into the dap. He would get drunk and blunted at night and talk tough, sometimes maybe a little too tough. There was the time he had a dispute with Achilles and he screamed some threats; perhaps he screamed them a little too loudly. There was also the time at the bar in Foggy Bottom, when it was so crowded that Rusty inadvertently bumped Will as he passed, and Will wheeled around, fists clenched, shouting, “Yo, what the fuck you wanna do, white boy?” His response, perhaps it was a little too angry. And then, just before his graduation, Will was expelled from school.

“Will the tennis player—why was he expelled?” I asked a friend.

“Dude bust into a white boy's dorm room with a gun!” my friend replied.

In a real-life enactment of what the comedian Dave Chappelle would call “when keeping it real goes wrong,” Will got arrested by the Metropolitan Police and kicked out of school.“He was dealing marijuana,” my friend told me, “and went looking for some money he was owed.” But Will had gone to prep school, I thought. Why would he get involved in this mess? It doesn't make any sense. The truth is he was playing. But what was he playing? I didn't need to reflect long before I could explain it: He was playing at
being
a black boy in the hip-hop era.

Will wasn't
essentially
a thug, or anything like that. Far from it. He became a thug—he
chose
that. And somewhere deep down inside, he must have known this wasn't him. This is what Sartre calls “bad faith,” or living in bad faith. One
deceives
oneself into playing a role. It wasn't just Will, though, it was all of us who strove to keep it real. What were any of us if not meticulous little French waiters, our poses a smidgeon too rehearsed? Except for us, unlike Sartre's unfortunate
garçon
, our choices tended to lead to far more punishing environments than the Café de Flore.

 

 

 

 

My father was born in 1937, in Longview, Texas, the segregated South and the place where that strange fruit used to hang and swing from the trees in the lazy summer heat. His great-grandfather, a man named Shadrach Jones, was a slave in Louisiana. His grandmother, a woman named Cora McLemore, never had the right to vote. Though she owned some land, Cora also bore witness to Reconstruction, which meant, among other things, that sometimes she hid underneath the porch with her children and grandchildren, huddled and trembling, while the Ku Klux Klan raided the black side of town on horseback. These were the days when blacks would go to the emergency room at the hospital and repeatedly be passed over by whites—rich and poor, old and young—who came in behind them and got served first. You would see a black patient wait in the waiting room until he literally died from waiting, Pappy told me. Pappy himself was twenty-seven years old before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forced his country to recognize him as a full citizen. His race, at least as much as his actions, defined him on the inside as well as on the outside.

For Sartre, of course, we all—every last one of us—are radically free, even Shadrach, for he had the choice, at least in theory, to revolt, to fight, to run away. He had the choice to commit suicide. He had the choice not to choose, to remain as he was. We are slaves, each of us, but only to our freedom, Sartre would have said. This idea reads well on the page. Perhaps it even is true on certain intellectual levels. I suspected, however, that on many other levels, on the level of lived experience for example, Will and I were far freer than Shadrach and Cora and Pappy and all those generations of blacks who came before us. That this was true seemed tough to deny, and the more I thought about it, the more the matter produced in me feelings that were not unlike guilt. Not the guilt you have when you do something wrong, but the guilt you have when you are given something you don't necessarily deserve or haven't earned by your own efforts.

 

 

 

 

Shortly before I was due to come home for Christmas break that year, I got an early Saturday morning phone call from Pappy. He tried to ask me how I was doing, but by his tone I could tell that he was not all right. What's going on, what's wrong? I asked him. He began to say what had happened at home the night before.

Clarence, who lived in the basement of the house, was coming back from his job at a law firm around ten or eleven p.m. As he parked his car in front of the driveway, a Fanwood Police Department patrol vehicle pulled up behind him, lights flashing, and two young officers of Irish and Italian stock hopped out. The policemen had been parked and waiting around the corner for who knows how long. They approached Clarence, who was still in his office clothes, and told him to stay right where he was. Because Fanwood is such a small town and because my brother had collected a lot of traffic violations in his day, he knew at least one of the officers by name, and the officer knew him as well.

“What's the problem, Officer?” Clarence said, lighting a cigarette and leaning against the side of his used silver Taurus.

“We have a warrant for your arrest here, Clarence,” one of the officers taunted.

“What for?”

“Looks like you have an outstanding traffic ticket and you forgot to show up for court,” the officer said.

“Ah, right, but there's been a misunderstanding,” Clarence explained. “I did have a mandatory court appearance back on September 12, but with all the confusion over 9/11, government agencies shut down that day. The courts were closed, but the thing is that their computers were still up and running and so everyone with a date for the twelfth—me included—was automatically issued a bench warrant for their arrest.When court reopened on the thirteenth, notices were sent out recalling those bench warrants. I have that paperwork inside; I can go and get it for you.”

“That's not necessary, you're going to have to come to the station and settle it there. But don't worry, you can spend the night,” the officer said, and laughed.

“But there's no need to go to the station,” Clarence said.“I have the paperwork right here—I'll go and get it.” Clarence began to walk up the short driveway towards the garage door. The officers told him to stop. Clarence flicked his cigarette, kept walking and opened the garage door. As he began to step inside the garage, one of the officers grabbed him.

“Let me go,” Clarence said,“I'm just going to get the paperwork, there's been a misunderstanding, I can show you.”

“There's no misunderstanding,” replied the officer.

“Fine, let me just call the station, then, and speak directly to a commanding officer,” Clarence said reaching for his cell phone.

“Put your phone away now!” the officer shouted. Sensing that something was off and beginning to feel afraid, Clarence panicked and tried to close the garage door between him and the two policemen. Both officers stepped up. As my brother pulled down the door, one of the officers shoved him; as he stumbled, the other took his steel Maglite, cocked back his arm, and in one heavy swing, relieved Clarence of two front teeth. They scattered across the oil-stained floor like dropped Chiclets. My brother, who always has had a frightening tolerance for pain, screamed for them to get the fuck up off him. Refusing to fall, he struggled with both officers who were intent on wrestling him to the ground and they pushed him through the door separating the garage from the basement proper.

Pappy, who had been dozing in his bedroom, was awakened by the commotion directly beneath him and rushed downstairs. What he saw as he descended the staircase were two white policemen on top of his defenseless black son, now stretched on his back on the cold basement floor and fully within his own home. One officer had Clarence pinned with a shin across the throat and was pounding his head against the cement floor; the other held his legs. Clarence, his mouth swollen, purple, and streaming blood, continued to rain curses on both of them.

“Now, you wait just a minute!” Pappy shouted as he entered. It is of the utmost importance to stress here that my father was sixty-five years old at the time—a senior citizen, with not only gray but also white hair—and he would have been dressed, like Clarence, in khaki pants or wool slacks, a dress shirt, a tie, glasses, and a sweater vest. But instead of calming down when an older man came in the room, one of those two heroes, the one who had Clarence by the legs, sprang up to his feet and drew his weapon.

“He put his gun in my face in my own goddamn home!” Pappy said into the phone, breathing hard enough that I became worried he would have a heart attack.“I've never broken the law in my life and this white boy pulls his gun on me.”

I tried to calm my father over the phone, but there was too much going on, too much baggage, too much symbolism involved in the exchange he was describing.

“And do you know, son,” Pappy said—in a tone of voice that I have not heard from him before or since, choking on his words—“I had a choice: I either watch these bastards beat my own son into the pavement or get killed slugging one of them and you and your mother are left in a hell of a fix . . . Son, I'd rather die . . .”

His voice broke, and for only the second time in my life, I heard my father cry. It is the most painful sound in the world, the sound of one's father's tears. Pappy's weeping lasted only a few seconds; he mastered himself as quickly as he had lost it. But those few seconds will echo through me for the rest of my life.

He began again, speaking calmly and under control.“Then your mother came downstairs, and she had the cordless phone in her hand; she had called the lawyer and the neighbors and they were calling the police station.”

“How did it end?” I asked.

Pappy told me many things that boiled down to the following: They put Clarence in cuffs and took him to the station, his teeth stayed behind on the floor. As for the relevant paperwork detailing the change of date, it was right there on the nightstand, about fifteen feet away. (The town where the warrant originated later confirmed to the Fanwood police that the warrant had been issued erroneously.)

 

 

 

 

Was it foolish of Clarence to speed and get a ticket in the first place? Yes, it was. And it was probably also exceedingly bad judgment on his part to attempt to enter the house—regardless of whether there was proof inside of a change of date—after the policemen instructed him not to. I cannot dispute that. But try as hard as I can—and I have tried—I fail to see any way that this could have happened to any of our white neighbors, in their own homes and over an infraction so venial as a traffic ticket. It is simply unimaginable.

I don't think I will ever be rid of the visceral contempt and disdain I feel for the police. I have never felt safe around these undereducated and overly armed men whose job, supposedly, is to protect and serve. And I've never sought to delude myself out of seeing the racism that exists all around me. It is there for the seeing. And yet, be all of that as it may, this experience affected me primarily as a family tragedy, as a personal grief, not as a racial one. It never did hit me the way it hit Pappy. What fucked up my head for days was my awareness of Pappy's pain, that these two pigs had tracked their dirt and mud into our home, had desecrated my father's personal space and force-fed him fresh morsels of white-on-black injustice—just the kind of morsels he has been struggling his entire life to digest.

I hated these bastards not because I felt powerless against them—on the contrary, I felt superior to the brutes—I knew what they were like and what they went home to and what kind of rent they paid just as well as I knew that at the age of twenty and with tanned skin and wooly hair, I could already go places where these white men could not go. I hated these uniformed thugs not because they had beat my brother (though I hated them for that, too)—but because they had made my father the victim. This experience hurt and infuriated Clarence—and we are thankful that he did not go and get a gun and try to avenge himself on one of those cowards, as my mother and I feared he might—but he told me that it never diminished his self-confidence or led him to conclude that as a black man this must be it. The truth here, the hard, inequitable truth, is that Clarence and I actually
are
freer than Pappy. Though we experience racism—sometimes even violently—it simply fails to define us as it might have had we been born just two or three decades sooner. This struck me as both deeply tragic and extremely hopeful.

 

 

 

 

When I returned to school in January, Playboy had dropped out for the second and final time, was living somewhere near the Assemblée Nationale in Paris, and most of my other friends were studying abroad, from Buenos Aires to New Zealand. I now understood the importance of getting out of one's backyard, understood it well, but because I had received such low marks my first year, I couldn't afford any semesters off from Georgetown. For all intents and purposes, I had already taken my leave as a freshman, and so I stayed in D.C. trying to pull up my GPA as high as mathematically was still possible.