Losing My Cool (5 page)

The way the Puerto Rican kids I knew growing up learned to sway their hips back and forth, the way the Jewish kids learned to recite the Torah, the way the Irish and Italian kids learned to talk like casual bigots, the way the Chinese kids learned to obliterate their schoolwork, that was the way we black kids learned to imitate thugs and gangsters. Around non-blacks, this made us seem hard. Around other blacks, it just made us seem normal.

 

 

 

 

About a year after my encounter with Bobby, during the summer before I went to high school, Pappy—by this time an older man with bad knees, a thick salt-and-pepper beard, and a powerful-looking bald head—took off from work, packed up our sedan, and drove me down Interstate 95 to Emmitsburg, Maryland, same as he did every year. There he dropped me off at Morgan Wootten's sleep-away basketball camp. Two weeks later, he was back early in the morning to catch the last day of league games and the awards ceremony that followed. My team had advanced to the championship game and, as the starting point guard, I was up for the Most Outstanding Player trophy in my age group.

As we formed layup lines and began to warm up for the game, Pappy made his way across the gym, limping slightly, a book tucked under his arm. He quietly took a seat in the bleachers close by and began to read, underlining as he went along, looking up over his bifocals at the court every now and again. Unlike some of the other dads at these games, Pappy was no yeller; he didn't cheer or even applaud. He also wasn't distracted, constantly checking a pager or stepping out of the gym to make phone calls. His focus was his son, and his thoughtful, stoic presence had the dual-edged effect of motivating and terrifying me. I had grown up understanding that my father—who hadn't known his own father and was the only son of an unwed and uneducated teenage mother who never really recovered from her fall from grace—had triumphed against daunting odds. At his “colored” high school in Galveston he had boxed, debated, played pitcher on the baseball team, played point guard on the basketball team, and played quarterback on the football team. He was his class's homecoming king
and
valedictorian. To him, life itself was competitive, and there was no consolation in placing second. Life was also incredibly fragile, and it only took one misstep to lose it all—that is what his mother's example had taught him—so from childhood on he took everything seriously and made it his mission to always be on point.

My parents told me a story that encapsulates Pappy's paternal psychology completely. As a baby, I was with my mother in our old home in Newark, crawling freely while she was trying to clean and watch after my very active five-year-old brother. We were upstairs, on the second floor of the house. At one end of the room, there was a door that led out into the hallway and down a long flight of carpeted stairs onto the parlor level, where my father had his study and received visitors. I was a quiet baby, and it wouldn't have been odd for me to not be making much noise as I crawled. Somehow, my mother had gotten distracted with my brother, and I made my way over to the door, which wasn't properly closed. I got out into the hallway and soon began tumbling down the staircase in a bright blue bundle of diapers and pajamas, rushing toward the hardwood floor below. As my mother gaped from the landing above, the door to my father's study flew open and out dove Pappy to catch me like a fly ball before I reached the ground. He had been in the middle of a meeting when suddenly he hopped up, told his guests to wait, and bolted to the door. He almost certainly saved my life that morning.

“How in the world did you even hear that?” one of the stunned guests asked him afterward.

“I've been listening for that sound from the moment we brought the baby home from the hospital,” Pappy said.

I grew up knowing that no matter where I was or what I was doing, Pappy never stopped listening for the sound of me falling.

As I glanced over at him from the court, I shifted back and forth in my box-fresh Air Jordans, adjusting my sagged-just-so mesh shorts for the twentieth time. I alternated between fussing with my headband and feigning an insouciant pose. When my turn came and I caught the ball on the right side of the key, I took two hard, deliberate dribbles and slashed to the basket, finger rolling the ball and slapping the glass with the same hand for effect. The ball hung on the rim and spun out. Pappy, looking over his book, shook his head and beckoned me over to the sideline.

“Son, just play your game,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Leave all that foolishness and showmanship behind, and don't let me or anyone else get you nervous. Stay cool, and listen to the sound of your own drummer. Tick, tick, tick, tick, count it out in your head; make your own rhythm.” He gave me nuggets of counsel like this whenever I had to compete, whether I was running track, playing basketball, or taking a test. This time, though, he added something else, something I did not understand: “If you're going to compete,” he said, locking onto my eyes for emphasis,“then do your best, son, always do your best, but remember that I really don't care if we
ever
have another black athlete or entertainer.”

 

 

 

 

I won that Most Outstanding Player trophy that year, and Pappy was pleased despite what he had said to me on the bleachers. On the ride home, he gave me a choice: I could either go to Delbarton, a lily-white and regionally prestigious boys' school far from our house and even farther from our price range, where he believed he could secure me a scholarship, or I could go down the street to Union Catholic, a not-prestigious-at-all parochial school, but one with a voluptuous brown student body. The decision was mine, Pappy said, because truth be told, he couldn't bring himself to force a boy to go to school without girls, simple as that.

Besides, it wasn't as if he trusted either institution to educate me as he saw fit. Wherever I went, in the evenings after school, on weekends, and in the summers I would still have to study one-on-one with him—same as I always had. I knew that I could make the team at either school, so I leaped at the opportunity, finally, to surround myself with other black kids—specifically black girls—and chose to go to Union Catholic.

 

 

 

I
was standing at my locker one morning when a tall, thickset girl named Takira came flying down the hallway like a whirling dervish. “Y'all, you know what day it is today, right?” she said, panting.

“No, what?” someone asked.

“It's the anniversary of Biggie's death, y'all,” she said.

“Oh, true,” someone else said.

“Word, throw down some ice for the nicest MC, yo,” said another with an air of solemnity.

“Make sure you remember to keep him in your prayers, everybody, for real,” Takira said as the bell rang for first period and we each went our separate ways. I think I heard someone say that they missed him.

Even as a teenager immersed in
Yo! MTV Raps,
the absurdity of this exchange nagged at me. Here we were, a bunch of young black private-school kids, not wealthy but also not poor, who were unable to identify the year (the decade?) that W.E.B. Du Bois or Thurgood Marshall died, and who could not say for certain the date of Martin Luther King's birth without the aid of a calendar—and this only because it was also a day off from school—yet here we were, serious as cancer when it came to things like sanctifying the anniversary of “the assassination of Biggie Smalls.” And like our parents' generation with Dr. King, we knew exactly where we were the moment we learned the rapper had died. (I was on the couch in my bedroom, talking on the phone.) Everybody assembled at this impromptu B.I.G. vigil could recite at will whole songs and interludes from
Ready to Die
and
Life After Death,
and I was no exception. I was just as besotted with Biggie as my classmates were. Yet I was also torn between allegiance to the fallen drug dealer and something else—something coming from deep in the back of my head or in my conscience. I knew for an irrefutable fact that none of the other kids I was looking at had ever managed to crease the spine of
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
or
The Souls of Black Folk
. I'd only creased them myself because Pappy made me. Toni Morrison, if anything, triggered some blurry image of Oprah Winfrey in our minds. No one, including me, could put a finger on the difference between a Miles Davis number and one by John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk. We were as ignorant of jazz as we were of the blues or black literature. Most of us could not say who the key figures of the Harlem Renaissance were.Thoughts like these flickered in my mind as I listened to Takira, and for a second—for the flash of a second, as I studied the gravity of expression playing across my classmates' faces—I felt a pang of shame as I heard Pappy's voice say,
Son, I don't care if we
ever
have another black entertainer.
In that moment I knew that he was right.

Most of the time, however, I did not question what I saw or heard. Hip-hop style and culture governed everything at Union Catholic, same as it did on the playground and in the barbershop, and by this point I didn't just do as the locals did—I was a proper Roman when in Rome. I ceased entirely to hang out with the white kids I knew from Holy Trinity and plunged myself like a diver into an all-black-and-Latino social circle. Some of my new friends were middle-class like me and some had parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles who busted their asses to get their children's asses bused out of the working-class and inner-city communities in which they lived. Most of these latter students came from places that were tougher than burlap, places that made the local news, such as Plainfield, Irvington, and Newark—small cities where the public school systems were failing and students entered their school buildings through metal detectors.

When the kids commuting from these areas arrived each morning in sleepy Scotch Plains, they assumed a prestigious role in my eyes: They were messengers of authenticity, ambassadors of blackness. One of the most popular, Jerome, was a short, well-barbered, and raspy-voiced boy with a strut, whose fourteen-year-old face wore a considerably older expression. His big brother belonged to a rap group that was down with the Fugees. Jerome was more of a lunch-table rapper, but he knew his role and played it well and got tons of props for the effort. He may have had to be shuttled away from the indignities of hard living back in Newark, but here he was aristocracy. He could punctuate a double-clutch handshake with a finger snap or greet you with a head nod followed by a nonchalant “Whatup, my nigga?” He smoked blunts and drank 40s in the ninth grade. His “chinky” eyes stayed bloodshot.

On the surface, it would seem that he and I had nothing in common: I had a stable, two-parent household where my biggest concern was not to let my father down; he could stay up until three or four in the morning on a weeknight and come and go from school sky-high, smelling like Indonesia, without a book bag on his shoulders. We had been raised differently, but what united us and the rest of our peers wasn't our home environments or even simply the color of our skin: It was our deep identification with the culture of hip-hop—it was that invisible glue.

At the end of school each day, I'd wish that I were on one of the all-black Newark-bound buses instead of being banished to the local bus or the passenger seat of my mother's car. When class let out, as the different buses idled in the parking lot—some destined for Piscataway and some for Rahway, Elizabeth, or East Orange, all filling with rowdy cargo—the boisterous sounds of Hot 97 FM leaked out of the half-ajar windows on the Newark-bound side. A perpetual party was happening over there; kids were dancing on their seats. It was a dance that I was unable to attend.

I doubt the students on those buses felt they were missing out on anything over on my end. I don't think Jerome, the self-styled “Brick City Representer,” or many of the others would have cared to switch places with me on the local bus. After all, there was nothing “real” about the way I kept my afternoons. I would be buried in a Barron's Test Prep book before Jerome's key would touch the latch. This was incompatible with the spirit of the environment we inhabited, where being black meant having lots of rhythm and chat, but nothing more than a passing interest in getting good marks.

There was, however, one boy who, to my surprise, did want to join me on that local bus. I had become best friends at UC with a boy named Charles. Charles was the most popular student in my class, a short kid, but tough. He had brown, laughing eyes and a head he kept bald as a baby's. In his clear, caramel skin there fraternized the Indian, the conquistador, and the slave. He was “cock-diesel,” my brother said, meaning he was strong as hell. I had never met a prouder or more magnetic person in my life. Charles began coming over to my house every day after school, and Pappy would treat him like another son. The two of us, Charles and I, came to depend on each other in a mutually beneficial way, though at the time I never would have put it in such terms. With me, and by that I mean with Pappy, Charles gained entrée into the SAT/college prep boot camp (“training” he called it) that was my homelife since the second grade; with Charles, I got an implicit endorsement from the coolest kid in school, a permanent seat at the Plainfield-, Irvington-, and Newark-occupied tables in the lunchroom as well as a vouchsafe against my sometimes too-proper diction and manners. Plus, having Charles around the house just made the work I already had to do less grueling, less of a chore.