Losing My Cool (11 page)

I had never been to a college party before, let alone a black college party, and I was astounded that at a school ranked on the
U.S. News & World Report
top 25 list, I could stumble into a scene resembling so much what I had known at Union Catholic. I thought that my black classmates here would be all a bunch of Carlton Bankses and Stacey Dash characters from
Clueless
—privileged Oreos who would be wowed and intrigued by my studied 'hood persona. I thought that everyone would be busy cramming for biology. I thought that everyone would be in bed by ten. I thought that no one would listen to Cash Money Records. I was wrong on all counts. The 'hood, however besieged and dispersed, was alive and kicking at Georgetown. A curvy girl with molasses skin and short curly hair took me by the hand and let me dance with her. I leaned against the wall and pushed my belt buckle into her substantial gluteus maximus. Outkast's “Rosa Parks” came on and the whole floor shook as the party stomped and cried out in unison:
“Bulldoggin' hoes like them GEORGETOWN HOYAS!”

 

 

 

 

The black world at Georgetown was only a microcosm of the wider black world outside the university gates, I discovered, but it was a world all the same, and one governed by its own rules and language, its own kings and queens, nobles and serfs. In many ways it was the negative of the surrounding white social order (a white order the likes of which I surely hadn't seen before): at the top of this obsidian pyramid were the students who remained closest to the street or on whom the scent of show business was most detectable. In roughly descending order this black Brahmin caste comprised: (a) the men's basketball team (especially those members who came from legitimate ghettos and who put the “athlete” in student-athlete), (b) the alpha females who hung out with, fought over, and fucked the men's basketball team, (c) the blossoming R&B singer Amerie and some of her friends (once it became clear she had a recording contract), (d ) certain members of the football team (you can't name a single NFL player from Georgetown), (e) one or two members of the track team (track is almost never televised), and (f ) the truly thugged-out non-athletes for whom affirmative action was either a godsend or a Sisyphean curse.

At the bottom of the heap were those—mostly males—who didn't rap or sing, who didn't walk and talk like they slung crack rock, who didn't have a wicked jump shot. Which is the same as saying, at the bottom of the pile were those of us who most resembled college students. I was terrified of winning such an ignoble fate. More than anything, I wanted to have some status; I wanted to be cool, which in turn led me to define myself in ludicrous opposition to the white world I was forced to move through. I became little more than a tourist in class and in my dormitory.

I was so frightened of the low status regular college guys enjoyed in the black community at Georgetown that I developed an antipathy for the classroom I hadn't even known in high school. I could count on one hand the number of microeconomics classes I attended during my first semester. One far from anomalous weekday morning, I found myself sitting in the cafeteria before class, eating breakfast, when I fell into a passionate conversation about gold chains with a guy from Philly.

“Why wasn't you rocking your chain at the club the other night, son?” he asked me.

“Because D.C. guys are wild,” I said.“To be honest, I didn't want to risk getting it snatched.”

“But nigga, that's the whole point! I
wish
a nigga would try and take my chain,” he screamed. “I'm fiending to fight.”

I didn't just miss that one morning econ class sitting there debating the wisdom of inviting an avoidable violent robbery. I ended up staying through lunch, dinner and, finally, even the late-night snack session. I bullshitted with successive waves of black diners—it was as if the cafeteria were my own personal drawing room—and missed an entire day's worth of school in the process. It didn't matter to me. The real drama of my new college life unfolded not in the classroom but in a handful of black friends' rooms, at the black bench in Red Square, and on the three or four designated black tabletops that cropped up at any given mealtime in the New South dining hall. These were little pockets of hip-hop reality within the larger white context, shriveled raisins afloat in vast seas of homogenized milk.

In addition to a masochistic attitude toward schoolwork, a closet full of very expensive clothes became both a necessity and a proxy for cool. I spent all of my spare money on gear and schemed on ways to get more. For every hour I spent at study, I squandered two worrying over my wardrobe. I was not alone or even that extreme in prioritizing things this way—I knew guys who put their clothes before even their personal health. My friend Maurice, a black boy from North Carolina on a scholarship, strutted onto the lawn one day after Thanksgiving break. He was dipped in costly layers of Iceberg apparel, brand-new Timberland boots, and a hefty Gucci link around his neck.

“Damn, that's fresh,” I said. “How'd you get all that?”

“Yo, dawg, I be signing up for these medical experiments whenever I go home,” he said.

“Medical experiments?”

“Dude, these Chapel Hill niggas'll give you like fifteen hundred a pop—I be volunteering for all types of shit!”

I was so isolated in this fiercely hierarchical black world, where the difference between being a winner and a loser often came down to the tag on your sweatpants; I was trying so hard to define myself as real and not to end up at the bottom of that status heap; I was so serious about all this, that what Maurice had told me that day did not immediately strike me as weird. In fact, I wondered if he might not be on to something. All I could think about was how to be cool.

For months I didn't even take the time to learn the names of the white kids I was living with. I gave them nicknames instead: the elegant, fey San Franciscan in the Helmut Lang pants, I called him Playboy; the neat Midwestern guy with the tousled red-brown hair, he became Rusty; Playboy's nondescript roommate from New Jersey, I called him Bruce, and when he dyed his hair blue I laughed and changed his name to Nigel. These white boys were not even like the fools my brother hung with back home. They were background décor, like all those silly-looking oil paintings hanging in Lauinger Library and Healy Hall—smug, smiling, self-satisfied faces that had nothing to do with my idea of interesting.

 

 

 

 

What was interesting, to me and to most of my black friends, was the promised land of Howard University. A half-hour bus ride away and a whole world apart, it was as close to the 'hood as college could get. At least once a week, I would leave Georgetown, take the G2 bus from Thirty-seventh and O Streets over to Bryant Street, and delve into the Real. Sometimes I went to get my hair cut. Other times I shopped for clothes or walked around aimlessly. It's not that I was unhappy or unthankful to be at Georgetown—on a certain level, I was aware that that was where I belonged. But on another less rational level I couldn't help but feel, when at Howard, like I was back in high school, staring at Jerome's Newark-bound bus pulling out of the parking lot—I wanted to get on.

The difference between Georgetown's black community and Howard's was not one of kind but of degree. The difference in degree, though, was titanic. Whereas at Georgetown there were a few scattered black girls holed up in Copley Hall or Village A, at Howard there was an entire Corbusian Radiant City of booty (booties stacked on top of booties on top of booties all the way into the sky!): a girls' dormitory tellingly dubbed the Ebony Sex Palace. Brothers who weren't even college students drove from all over town and out of state just to post up outside the entryway and let their rims spin. Whereas at Georgetown you may have spotted Kofi Annan or Condoleezza Rice scuttling around campus in sober business suits, Howard was inundated with the likes of Fabolous Sport and DJ Clue, Jay-Z and DMX—'hood superstars who flossed platinum chains and diamond-encrusted Rolexes. Whereas at Georgetown you may have palmed a cold brew and marveled at the football team's stunning come-from-in-front defeat on homecoming day, at Howard, football was irrelevant; the only game in town was whatever you happened to be spitting at the girl standing in front of you at that moment in space-time.

Homecoming at Howard was a force of nature, not a sporting event. It was Freaknik, Carnival, NBA All-Star Weekend, the Puerto Rican Day Parade (minus the Puerto Ricans), Hot 97 Summer Jam, an ancient Incan mating ritual, and a mystic pilgrimage all rolled into one. It was an imaginary player's wet dream come true. Strutting around campus, ogling everything that moved, and trying with steely focus to obtain telephone numbers, I stumbled into one of Ant's boys from back home, a kid I recognized by face but not by name. We met eyes and he reached out to give me a pound. “Are you in school down here?” I asked. No, he wasn't in college, he told me, but he damn sure wasn't about to miss homecoming.

But it wasn't just a dormitory or one special weekend every year that made Howard so seductive—life in general was more extreme there. The area to the north and south of the McDonald's on Georgia Avenue bustled like a hip-hop Bois de Boulogne:
tout le monde
came out to get their promenade on. It was like real-life BET. Inside the gates, any day of the week the main quad provided a grand venue for a kind of performance art, transforming itself into an amphitheater for the choreographed reenactment of various Hype Williams music videos. Walking the yard, it felt as though if you put your mind to it, you could major in hip-hop studies, minor in the streets, and stick around to cop a PhD in pimpology—and to a certain extent you
could
.

Cats brought the 'hood with them to Howard in all sorts of different and inventive ways. At my friend Moe's dorm, one student ran a full-scale bodega out of his bedroom. He had a working cash register and a glass display case that he kept fully stocked; where his desk should have been was a cache of goods ranging from Tastykakes and Newport Lights to UTZ potato chips and refrigerated Mystic fruit juices and quarter waters. The only thing missing was a bright green Lotto machine. Out in the halls, kids from New York hustled drugs, stationing themselves by the elevators, slinging nickel and dime bags of smoke. Every week, some nineteen-year-old paid his way through school promoting a party or club night on the side.This was no longer the place where Thurgood Marshall studied law; this was the place where Sean Combs became Puff Daddy.

Traipsing those halls, the staccato rhythm of hip-hop, the unmistakable odor of game, the overwhelming sense of black cool met you at every turn, seeping from underneath every closed door and lilting from every open mouth. I used to get the same feeling going to Howard that I got on trips to Plainfield or Newark as a child: It was bad. You had the vague sense that you were doing something bad when you were there, and that could be exhilarating. I am sure there is still a serious side to Howard, but I did not see it. I saw brothers in turquoise chinchillas and head-to-toe interlocking Gucci logos. I saw a giant masquerade ball, a gangsta party where middle-class college kids—the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers from suburban enclaves outside Atlanta and Chicago (north side)—as if just to prove that they were not middle-class, mingled and flirted with the street and everyone got dressed up as thugs and hustlers and hoes. And this vision corresponded neatly with the images I saw on television and in the D.C. clubs, with the way my friends got down back home in Jersey, with the way the faux-thugs and athletes carried themselves at Georgetown. This was
real
.

 

 

 

 

One night early in my first semester, as I was rifling through my closet, enveloping myself in a fog of Issey Miyake cologne, preparing to step with my friend Pup to catch the bus to Howard, my hallmate Rusty popped in my door and commented on my sweater in his nasally Midwestern monotone:“Rocking the Coogi, I see.” He smiled. “I almost bought one at Neiman's once, but I looked more Bobby Huggins in it than B.I.G.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, laughing—incredulous he knew what a Coogi was, that was how low my estimation was of these cats. “No shit, bro!” We bantered for a minute and I gave him a playful pat on the back and pushed past and out the door, not bothering to see what he was up to that night or to invite him out with me. It was a reflex reaction. Before that, I had never given a moment's consideration to Rusty—he was scenery. I would have assumed he felt the same about me. Pup and I continued on our way to Howard, but that night, once I had left, I remember thinking that it was kind of incredible that a white kid from Akron had got me, had reached out, had spoken my language and made me laugh—even if only on such a superficial level as a sweater. From then on Rusty and I began to talk when we passed each other in the halls and I found out that his name was John.

 

 

 

 

That first winter in Washington was difficult. I caught a cold that degenerated into a fever and, before long, a bronchial infection. It laid me out, wrapped in my leopard-print sheets sweating and coughing up lungs for a month. When I finally got back on my feet, I went to the cafeteria and it scared me to find the transition from frigid outdoor air into the heated indoor kind left my windpipe tight and me doubled-over hacking, struggling to inhale. I didn't know what was the matter, but that night after the cafeteria and every night that followed, whatever it was woke me up, gasping for breath, my face wet with the tears these fits induced.

One night, I stumbled from my bunk into the common bathroom to keep from tormenting my roommate.The deep, lacerating coughing wouldn't stop until I ran the shower scalding hot and stuck my face into the stall, sucking in the humid mist in greedy, desperate gulps. Slowly, my windpipe expanded and stopped whistling, and my heart stopped racing. It was around four in the morning when I left the showers.