Losing My Cool (25 page)

Though we were no longer as close as we had been, I was also extremely proud of Charles, who was graduating magna cum laude and at the top of his school's economics department. He would be starting as a trader at J. P. Morgan around the same time I would be leaving for Europe. We had developed very different ideas of what it means to make it in this world, Charles and I, and although I had myself lost the capacity to admire Wall Street, I also knew what he had overcome to get there, whom he had to muscle out of the way for the job. It was no small thing.

And when I reflected back on our post-prom trip to the Jersey Shore four years earlier, it occurred to me that some of the people who were there with us had since then gone to jail; some had sold and used drugs; most had drifted into lives of pure, unadulterated mediocrity; a few had babies they weren't prepared to raise; at least one had died. Charles and I were the only alumni from the group with our futures still intact, and that kind of bond doesn't easily unglue.

 

 

 

 

On one of the last evenings before I moved away, my friend Sam came to see me. Sam had decided a while ago that college wasn't for him and was working with his hands now. “The thing is, you just gotta know the consequences of your decisions,” he said to me once. “I've accepted the fact that I'll be doing some form of manual labor for the rest of my life, backaches and all that shit. I don't have a problem with that, because I chose it. That's the difference between me and a lot of these knuckleheads out here, running around thinking Jermaine Dupri is gonna call 'em up with a record deal, or that fucking Pat Riley's got a spot for them on the team.” Sam was a realist, and I always respected that about him.

That night, the two of us hopped into his old Cadillac Coupe de Ville and drove to the Kennedy Fried Chicken over in Plainfield. The last time I had been there was years ago with Stacey and, though I couldn't recall why now, I knew it had not been a good night. As I walked inside, it occurred to me that I didn't miss Stacey at all. When Sam and I had our food and got back into the car, he suggested we just ride around for a bit, for old times' sake. I said sure. Sam is a good driver to ride with, the kind of guy who is an expert on the area he grew up in, knows all the shortcuts and all the scenic routes. We drove all over Plainfield, zigzagging past Unisex Hair Creationz, past the few blocks of housing projects, and eventually past the park near Stacey's aunt's house where I had waited for my brother to come and get me.“Oh, I meant to tell you,” he said, “I ran into Stacey at the grocery store the other day—she had
another
child, yo!”

“Oh, yeah?” I said, shaking my head.

“Yeah, she hadn't gained a pound, though, still looked pretty good.”

“I'd expect that.”

We looped back into Scotch Plains, down Front Street and past Antwan's mother's house. His car was parked outside. “And what about Ant, have you seen him lately?”

“Mmhmm. That nigga's a cashier up at Kohl's, still trying to get with every white girl he sees.” We laughed. We passed RaShawn's family's house and neither of us had anything to say.

“And Larry?” I said, when we passed his.

“Still lives with his parents. He leased an Acura TL with a leather interior, put some nineteen-inch chrome rims on it, and now you can't tell him he's not on top of the world.”

“Did he ever get a scholarship to play college ball?”

“I don't think so.”

“He just hustles now?”

“I think so. Either that or he flips burgers at McDonald's and puts his entire paycheck on that car note.”

We headed back toward my house, lapsing into a silence that lasted until we pulled up to my driveway. Sam put the car in park and turned to me.“You know what, man?” he said.“Like everybody else, I used to really think you were crazy, Thomas.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, laughing.

“Hell yeah! All those times in the summer when it was nice as fuck out, and everyone was outside chilling, and you were just stuck inside studying. I used to feel bad for you and really wonder how you put up with that.”

“I know. I used to wonder the same thing.”

“Yeah, but all that studying paid off, man, and I'm proud of you.”

I thanked Sam for his kind words. I wasn't sure when I'd see him again, so I told him that I loved him. It was past midnight now and as I walked up to my house, I could see through the picture window that Pappy's reading lamp was still lit. He was at his desk when I opened the door, underlining some pages in a book.

“You know, I just keep returning to Barzun, over and over again,” he said, glancing up. He had taken an evening shower and looked fresh. “He really is a fine mind and you should read him.” I pulled up a chair at the desk and we spoke for a moment about
From Dawn to Decadence
.

“Well, you'll be heading off soon, I guess,” Pappy said, shifting gears.

“Yeah,” I said, “it's getting close now.” I didn't really know what to say. The truth is Pappy had not wanted me to go to France, and he had made that clear. His preference was for me to go straight through to graduate school and to get another degree before life had a chance to get in the way. I was defying him by going like this. But he had come to accept the fact that he taught me for years to think for myself and that this was the consequence. He had conceded the argument a long time ago.

“Well, let's play chess,” he said, pounding the desk with his fist and smiling.

“Yeah, sure, Babe,” I said, getting up to clear the desk for the board and looking at my father. Sometimes when he is sitting like this at his desk with a certain half-smile on his lips, and with his big, bald head and his hand balled tight into a fist, Pappy can look the way he does in certain pictures from his childhood. He looked that way to me right then, like a child. For a moment, I just watched him, and thoughts rushed through me. Just knowing where Pappy had come from, knowing from books and television a little bit about that period of the American century he had passed through with dark skin, standing there realizing that this man who looked like a child right then had never really gotten to be a child, had never had a father, I felt humbled and overwhelmed with pride in Pappy and I told him so.

“I'm so proud of you, Babe,” I said, and he looked at me kind of surprised. He couldn't have known what was going through my mind, and my comment must have seemed to come from out of the blue.

“Oh, well, you just make sure you tell your grandkids about me. Tell 'em their great-grandpappy wasn't such a terrible man after all,” he joked.

“Oh, I'll tell them about you!” I said.“I'll tell them you made me read books all day and play chess all night.” We both laughed. I set down the board and asked Pappy which color he wanted, though I already knew the answer.

“Black, Thomas Chatterton,” he said. “I've always wanted to be black.”

Y
o soy yo y mi circunstancia
(“I am myself and my circumstance”), José Ortega y Gasset wrote before being forced to flee Franco's Spain and enter into years of exile in Argentina. I encountered this deceptively simple sentence while living and working in France. It was a time, just after graduating college, when my own circumstances were diverging drastically from those I had known as a child growing up in New Jersey—a time when I was thinking seriously about that fact, about who I was and where I was headed. Those little epiphanies I had imagined and wished for while reading Shelby Steele's
Harper's
essay had begun to hit me and, like Eddie, I was understanding on an almost physical level that awesome boundlessness a black American can feel outside of America. I was also realizing that we simply do not often see ourselves very accurately on our own and it is only through other people that we glimpse or comprehend our own situations or selves. These others sometimes come to us in the form of wise authors and compelling characters (real or fictitious), and sometimes as ordinary people whom we meet and know in everyday life. When we are lucky, these different sources of revelation converge into one stream of truth and we really do see ourselves, as we are or have been. This convergence happened in a notable way for me on two separate occasions in France.

On the first, which took place soon after my arrival, as often happens in a foreign country I found myself hanging out at a perfect stranger's home. He was a literature student named Stéphane, with whom I had some friends in common. A couple of us ended up at his place one night after dinner. “What would you like to drink?” Stéphane asked me, playing some music on his CD player.

“What do you have?” I said.

“There is some beer, a little red wine, and I have a bit of Armagnac, as well.” Louis Armstrong's trumpet and raspy voice belted from the speakers, flooding the room with New Orleans.

“Armagnac, please,” I said, and he returned with a bottle and several glasses. We sipped the brandy slowly, enjoying the jazz. Everyone in the room—all Franco-French white kids, it occurred to me—knew their Louis Armstrong inside and out, knew the names of the songs, had their favorites. That is phenomenal, I thought.

“How do you guys know so much about black music?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” Stéphane, replied, assuming, I think, that I was implying only an American could be so well versed. “This is something the whole world knows. Practically everything except classical is black music!” I refilled my glass with the brandy, which, I noticed, tasted an awful lot like Hennessy—better, though.

It's strange, I began to think, None of the black kids I grew up with would have said something like that. “Practically everything except classical is black music.” I thought of the way we all referred to house music as white, or of the way no one even knew George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic were largely from Plainfield. It was a restricted way of understanding things—kind of like the way no one ever drank brandy that wasn't Hennessy. I explained to Stéphane that he had got me wrong: I was giving him props—it was not true that the whole world knew these things.

The second time such a convergence happened was near the end of my stay. My friends Shadik and Shadir, along with Josh, had come to visit, and I took them to Paris for the weekend. The twins had never left the country before and they were as awestruck as I had been when I first saw another part of the world. After a day spent crisscrossing the Seine, strolling Saint-Germain, staring at the Louvre—“That's where the kings used to live, right?”—sitting in the gardens, darting in and out of the bookstores, clothing stores, and pastry shops, the four of us decided to end the evening on the rue Saint-Honoré with a bottle of wine at Hôtel Costes.

We went inside and got a table in one of the back rooms next to what Josh thought was a well-known Brazilian Formula One race-car driver and across from a big party of celebrating Arabs. A statuesque black waitress, who looked a lot like Grace Jones but with long, straightened hair, brought a bottle of Bordeaux and some square plates of olives for us to pick at. Bossa nova and electronic tango music complemented the surroundings the way the cerignolas did the wine. All day the twins had been soaking up the city, wowed repeatedly by its splendor and grace. Now they were visibly tired.We sank into our seats and talked, with the certainty of young people who are just learning something, about the importance of getting out and seeing things. Everyone was in agreement about this. But the more we talked and the more the room filled with some rather entitled-looking people who appeared as if they had seen plenty of the world themselves, the more the strange and foreign sounds mixed with the strange and unfamiliar tastes, I noticed that the expressions on the twins' faces were changing, gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, from awe to uncertainty. “What is this music?” Shadir asked me. “Why have I never heard anything like this before?” We laughed, but he was serious.

“I've never even seen olives like these,” said Shadik. “Are they good?”

“Do you sometimes feel uncomfortable in spots like this?” Shadir asked, the questions coming one after the other.

“I never even knew spots like this existed,” Shadik said, staring at his drink.

After the initial everything-is-wonderful shock of the new had worn off, and wholly outside the range of their traditional points of reference, I could see that the twins were now beginning to feel like they were losing their footing. I knew exactly what that felt like, what they were going through right then. It wasn't that they had come to Paris and developed an inferiority complex, concluding—voilà!—that what they really wanted was to be French, to be white; that that would somehow be better. It wasn't anything close to that. In my experience, black people don't often actually want to be white.

No, I knew what they were feeling right then, and it was something else. If you're young and black today and lucky enough to get out and travel, see the world beyond your own little backyard, i nevitably it is going to strike you that you have been lied to. You have been straight-up lied to, and not just in the most obvious way—not just by Robert L. Johnson and the propaganda organ of BET or by the spokesmen for stereotypes, the Busta Rhymeses and the Gucci Manes. It's worse than that; the swindling has gone down far closer to home.You have been lied to by people you have known personally, people you have trusted, your friends and your neighbors, your older siblings and your classmates, your cousins and your lovers. Whether that lie is born of simple ignorance masquerading as arrogance—a seductive ignorance, yes, but still only ignorance—or, worse, actual malice, matters little at the moment of your realization. All that matters at that moment is the lie itself, this fiction that says that for you and your kind alone an authentic existence is a severely limited one. You have been lied to (and for how long?) and now you know that you have been lied to and you can't deny it and you are naked.