Losing My Cool (7 page)

In some far-off region of my mind I knew the way that Ant treated girls was wrong. But it didn't strike me as particularly bizarre. All of my friends who could do it, me included, got money out of bitches and professed to look down on them in the process. We called this “running game.” The better you could run or spit game, the more respect you could get from your boys. I sported a $1,500 gold chain on top of $500 hand-knit Coogi sweaters from Australia, which my girlfriend, Stacey, bought for me with cash.

My relationship with Stacey was in many ways the fulcrum upon which I hoisted up my sense of self. A year younger than me, she was the epitome of the black girl I had hoped to attract when I chose Union Catholic over Delbarton that day in the car with Pappy.Winning her attentions authenticated my blackness and justified my swagger. Stacey was sassy and flip, flashy like a pinky ring. She modeled when she could, appeared in black magazines like
Hype Hair
and local fashion shows and beauty pageants. She rolled her plaid skirt three times at the waist and wore her cotton blouse open a button lower than it should have been. I was by no means the only one who coveted Stacey, and this, for me, only magnified her allure. I treated the clothes and jewelry that she bought for me like trophies, advertisements for my prowess.

They were also body armor, defense against the lingering gossip. People always talked about the way Stacey got her money, what drug dealers she ran around with on the side—girls run game, too. I didn't like to think about that; I couldn't let myself think about that. The point here, I knew enough to know, was not whether you had a solid relationship, whether you were equipped to treat other people with respect—most of us were not. The point was whether you were getting over—whether you were getting something out of the exchange. You certainly didn't
care
about the girl.

Money, hoes, and clothes, that's all a brother knows; Fuck bitches, get money; Gs up, hoes down; All I've got for hoes is hard dick and bubble gum—this was the rhetoric that was drummed (literally) into our heads. It wasn't the way my father felt about my mother. But Jay-Z told us straight up: We don't love these hoes. Not if we're going to be cool by his book. And on these matters we listened to him and those like him. If for some reason you did end up caring, as I hopelessly cared for Stacey, well, that was something to be kept close to the chest. You got no respect—not even from the girls themselves—for wearing your feelings on your sleeve. We called the me-myself-and-I position that we adhered to many things; most commonly we called it pimpin'.

I tried my best to keep it pimpin' in all matters concerning Stacey. There were so many rumors floating around about her. An especially resilient one was that a boy in her class named Marion had slept with her. She denied it. It was not improbable, though; we were all players and pimps, nasty girls and freaks in our own minds. I tried to brush it off until one morning a classmate handed me a tennis ball container's worth of carefully folded loose-leaf correspondence between Stacey and Marion. It spanned an entire year. My first response to the letters was not what it might have been. I didn't break things off with Stacey or even acknowledge Marion. Rather, I went into full-on damage-control mode like a one-man public relations firm, seeking to protect my reputation by any means necessary, to release a calibrated statement, to let everyone know I had my ho in check. I stormed through the sophomore corridor on a warpath. I found Stacey standing at her locker with a group of girlfriends and confronted her.

“What the fuck are these?” I screamed.

“Nigga, I don't know—what the fuck do they look like?” she casually replied, rolling her eyes and resuming the conversation with her friends as though I were not there. It was the final provocation that I needed. It felt as if my body were functioning on autopilot. What I knew I had to do and what I knew I would do became one and the same. The crowds of other students in the hallway suddenly seemed to vanish and all the noise of their chatter went mute. It was just Stacey and me standing there, as far as I was concerned, and all I could hear was a chopped-and-screwed mishmash of hip-hop aphorisms playing through my head, telling me in metered rhyme exactly how to treat a bitch, how to reach a bitch, who thinks she's all that:
Bitch get out of line? Slap her; Punch that bitch, slap that ho
. . .
All you heard was Poppa don't hit me no' mo'!

I yanked Stacey by the arm and dragged her kicking and screaming out of the building, her friends staring in amazement. We marched through the parking lot and into the woods that surrounded a park down the street from the school. As soon as we were alone and before she could say a word, I brought the back of my hand down across the side of her cheek in one swift motion that would land her in the nurse's office. The sound reverberated off the trees with a sickening
thwack
. It sounded like an isolated high-hat from one of Puffy's drum machines. I threw the canister of notes at her head and lunged for her feet, trying to rip off the sneakers I had bought for her for Christmas that year. She grabbed my shoulder for balance and our eyes met. Her mascara ran, dissolving the steel veneer on her face as she whispered, “Thomas, Thomas, please stop.”

I felt myself suddenly emerge out of autopilot. I had been delusional with rage, envisioning myself some affronted suburban Iceberg Slim, but it was hard as hell to keep the act going now. Looking at her, at the fear and hurt in her eyes, the fear and hurt that I had put into her eyes, I no longer felt ice-cold. I wasn't pimpin'. I felt nauseated. More than anything, I felt terribly sorry. We both crumpled to the ground, huddled in each other's arms, sobbing.

As we slowly made our way out of the woods and back toward school, I glimpsed my brother's aquamarine Camaro fly by. “There they are!” I heard him shout, as he broke to the shoulder. It was a warm day, and the T-tops were in the trunk. Clarence put the car in park, hopped through the open roof, and ran across the street to where we stood. As I feared, I could see Pappy in the passenger seat, waiting. “Hey, Stacey,” Clarence said, nodding and lighting a cigarette. As scared as I was to see Pappy right then, I was equally grateful that my brother had come along for the ride. Clarence, in terms of disposition, was the polar opposite of our father. Whereas Pappy treated everything as a matter of life and death and sought to prevent even the minutest problems from ever arising, Clarence's theory of life was more like: Hey, shit happens. He accepted that premise as a given and didn't ask many questions or judge anyone else's motives or mistakes. In that way he was the yin to my yang, too, and he was far more generous with his view of me and my behavior than I was with him.

Just a few weeks earlier, he had rescued me from a situation with Stacey that could have gone terrifically wrong. It was a holiday from school and I had taken the train to her aunt's house to see her. To my horror, mid-coitus, I contorted my leg into an awkward position; my knee slid out of place, locked up, and remained bent at a neat right angle, suspended in the air. I couldn't walk. Stacey's aunt, a police officer who carried a loaded strap and did not appreciate boys even talking to her niece, was due home in no time. As we scrambled to get me dressed, I called Clarence in a delirium. “I'll be there in ten minutes,” he said, chuckling. “Just be ready when I pull up.”

I thanked him profusely, and with Stacey's aid, hopped on my good foot over to the park across the street, where I lay down in a field and waited for my brother's sweet chariot to come and steal me away. A few moments later, from out of a marigold sandstorm I saw Clarence's Camaro shoot across the baseball fields toward me. He spotted his baby brother lying prostrate in the grass, an upside-down Air Jordan perched atop a beige chicken leg sticking up from the ground like a flagstick on a golf course. He punched the brakes, fishtailing the back of the car like he was Axel Foley in
Beverly Hills Cop
. Without cutting the ignition, he jogged over to me, picked me up gently, and dropped me through the open roof into the backseat. We exchanged a quick pound, then he slammed the gas, hit off one more peel-out, and sped over the curb onto the street.

“Yo, thank you so much, Clarence!” I said once we were at a safe distance and I had caught my breath.

“Don't mention it, man,” he said, lighting a cigarette in the dashboard and shrugging. “I've been looking for an excuse to take this thing out on the grass for a while now.”

That was my brother, and I loved him. He wouldn't be able to save me this time, though—I knew that. When neither Stacey nor I had shown up to homeroom in the morning, the front office called Pappy at home, Clarence explained. Pappy, of course, had been waiting for that call all along.

When we got back to school, a shaken Stacey went inside to the nurse's office, where she claimed to have had a panic attack. Outside, Pappy wanted a word with me, he said. I braced myself for the deluge, but it didn't come. Very calmly he turned around in his seat.

“You know, Thomas, I never had a father growing up, so I'm learning how to be one as I go. That's the best I can do. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, Babe, I know that,” I said.

“Well, let me just ask you something, then, son, because I really don't have the answer.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If you had spent years of your life trying to do something, son, trying to rear a thoroughbred, say, a thoroughbred who would go on to run beautiful races and make you proud, if you had sacrificed everything for this thoroughbred, giving it everything you could, giving it the best you had to offer, if you hoped that this thoroughbred would represent the best that you and your people could achieve—well, after all this effort, after all this time and hard work and hope, after all that, would you be able to just sit back and let your thoroughbred run around in the mud with a herd of mules and donkeys? I mean, it might get hurt doing that, right? It might really get hurt. Or—and this would be even worse, in my opinion—it might somehow start to believe that it, too, was a donkey or a mule. Now, that would be tragic, wouldn't it?”

I just stared; there was not much I could say. Clarence leaned out of the window, dragging on a cigarette. Classmates going to their cars for lunch pretended not to look.

“Well, I know you can't just keep that thoroughbred locked away forever,” Pappy said, shaking his head slowly. “That ain't very realistic, is it, to keep it locked away?”

I went back into the building. I didn't feel like much of a thoroughbred right then, that was for sure. As for Stacey and her mysteriously welted cheek, she took an ice pack for the swelling and that was the end of it. No matter how many ways they put the question to her, she wouldn't snitch on me. For my part, I was a student of Biggie Smalls: I did not discuss my problems with my wife. I wouldn't talk about what had happened to anyone other than Charles; other students could speculate and make their own assessments. The result was that Stacey and I stayed together, people continued to gossip, Pappy continued to listen for the sound of me falling, and the very next week I came to school with a fresh new pair of Versace shades courtesy of my girlfriend.

In addition to my tabloidlike romantic life, I built up my reputation and stores of self-esteem at Union Catholic through my status as a basketball player. I was the starting point guard on the varsity team as a sophomore, beating out pissed-off juniors and seniors for the slot, and I grew haughty over the fact. I took it for a given that I would continue to improve and go on to play college ball. The game came easily to me, as it always had, and it seemed as if everything would simply fall into place.

One night at practice, Coach told me I wasn't getting my hands dirty enough on defense—that I was sitting back acting like a prima donna or something like that. By this time, I had developed a habit, along with Charles, of talking back to white teachers and authority figures at Union Catholic. The attitude was all Lil' Wayne: I do what I want, and you do what you can do about it. As a matter of reflex, I told Coach that he could take my defense and shove it. My teammates laughed. He went ballistic, face crimson, hurling abuse my way. I turned my back on him mid-tirade and walked out of the gym. Somehow, I thought that this would hurt him more than it would hurt me.

The next game on the schedule that week happened to be against Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School, against the kids I had grown up with and played with at the park since childhood. It was a game I had been waiting for all season. Besides the usual bragging rights, I had an unfriendly rivalry going with Scotch Plains's star, a boy named Larry, and we were both spoiling for a show-down. When I came out of the locker room and onto the court the afternoon of the game, there were a lot of familiar faces in the bleachers, including Ant's and Stacey's and Clarence's. I waved to them and started loosening up when Coach called me over to the sideline. I hadn't spoken to him since practice.