We’d be so baked by the time we got to Paulie’s that Donny, the owner’s son, would say, You clowns, in the back right now, pointing toward a dimly lit room reserved for parties and VIPs. It’s not that we were important; he just wanted to keep us away from the cops who frequented his business. We’d go back there and pound the cans of Guinness we’d smuggled in, smiling and laughing at nothing whatsoever. We felt so alive, that we knew so much more than everyone else about the world — more than the people on the news, our teachers, our parents. They were all living on the surface; we were down deep in the fucking marrow.
Ink would always have a word for us about that music that was playing in my car. He once said, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts. Now there’s something I can dig.
I remember being surprised that a young black guy listened to the Beatles. I remember being surprised that he even knew who the Beatles were. I’m not proud of my gerbil-brained perspectives. But you develop strange and distorted notions of black people when you grow up in a whiter-than-snow world. Especially when you’re the only brown kid there. Ink didn’t like the Grateful Dead. He called them a bunch of thieves. But he was impressed when I once had a Miles Davis CD playing on my portable Panasonic Discman.
The next time we came down, just two days later, he dropped a cassette on my lap with the words Bitches Brew on the label in neat, bubbly handwriting. He said, You fucking white boys gonna bust a nut for this shit. His gift made me smile, but what really had me pumped was that he kept on calling me white boy. I was so pleased that he couldn’t smell the curry wafting from my pores. That to him I was just another white kid from suburbia.
It’s been six whole days since I’ve written a single word. Thanks to Jenny. Fucking Jenny. She read my notebook, a gift she had supposedly given to me so that I could have a place to dispose of my most private and perturbed thoughts. What did I expect? Privacy is the purple unicorn of the land of long-term relationships. I walked into the kitchen, and there she was, gawking at my prose. I said, What the fuck are you doing? Nothing, she said. I knew her brain was going wild with opinions and criticism, so I told her to just come out and spill it. She said, Things seem to stop working when I say what I really think. And don’t swear at me. She was giving me that squinty-eyed glare to let me know I’d fucked up, and all I could think was: You read my private shit, and I’m supposed to be sorry?
She sighed, then told me she was proud that I’d picked up my pen. Relieved that I was finally opening up about the miscarriage. She said, If you want this marriage to last, you’re gonna have to start dealing with that. I slapped my hand against my forehead. Marriage? Miscarriage? Jenny, I said, I wrote something about James and Jimmy and how they’re a bunch of assholes.
For the next part of her speech, she switched into cold, condescending professor mode. She was impressed, she told me. Impressed that I was finally willing to take an honest look at my childhood. Impressed that I was — and here’s some classic Jenny bullshit — willing to finally look at the way being an immigrant exacerbated my feelings of teenage marginalization. And you did that with a nice touch of subtlety, she said. Her praise stopped there though. Surprise, surprise, she had big problems with Ink. She said, New Haven is filled with middle-class black families going about their business, trying to make ends meet. Why’d you choose to make your black character a drug dealer? Why do you have to perpetuate that stereotype? And there was more. Why did Ink have to be into music? Why did Ink have to teach you something about music? Can’t you see how you’re exoticizing him? Haven’t you ever heard of the magical Negro trope?
What the fuck?
I wanted to tell Jenny that this wasn’t a piece of fiction — it was the goddamned truth. Ink was real, so how could I change him? And if Ink being a drug dealer is a problem, it’s not my problem. It’s society’s problem. It’s a big bummer that the only way three well-heeled seventeen-year-olds from the suburbs can interact with a black kid from New Haven is through a financial transaction involving drugs. But at least the three of us — Josh, James, and me — we were pushing past our boundaries. Do you think the captain of our football team had anything to do with black kids from New Haven? Do you think our school’s honor society had any black members? We were integrating, I’d like to think. We were experiencing a form of multiculturalism that some pole-up-her-ass lit professor could only dream of.
Well, Jenny, there was this one time when we did try to take our relationship with Ink beyond the realm of commerce. One Friday that August, we drove down to Gilbert as usual, and it was nasty out. Humid, hazy air hanging over the asphalt, you couldn’t imagine that snow would coat these roads in just a few months. A couple of hydrants had been opened up, and all the city kids were jumping in and out of the spraying water. We’d only seen that in the movies, even though we lived six miles away; people cooled down in their pools out where we lived. Ink was at the corner with his hands on his wide hips and wearing a Red Sox cap. It was as if he was waiting for us, and he probably was — he definitely enjoyed the chitchat, and we were his best customers.
Once the day’s transaction was over, Ink said, So, ladies, any big plans this weekend? Josh said, Actually, there’s a party going on tonight, right here in New Haven. Ink said, A party? With actual people? I thought you guys just sat around getting high. Josh said, Yo, why don’t you join us, Ink? I’ll get you a little piece of blond pussy. As I write this, I remember being mortified by Josh’s statement — no, Jenny, not the fact that he had spoken about females in that despicable manner. But that he had so openly alluded to the race thing.
Later that night, we headed back to New Haven, to the East Rock section, an apartheid neighborhood mainly filled with Stalies. Close to a million bucks for a Victorian these days, and twenty thousand in taxes. Pay attention, Donald Trump: You don’t need real walls in postindustrial America. The economics of it all puts up perfectly suitable metaphoric ones. I should be honest though: I may mock those ponce East Rock phonies, but the second Jenny gets her tenure, I’m gonna use her raise to get us into a sweet two-family on the right side of Orange Street.
So this kid Fran — Greg Franford — was having a party, because his Stale professor parents were away for the weekend. Fran went to Snobkins, an ancient and prissy New Haven private school, and Josh knew him from Jewish camp. His dad was a real hotshot in the history department, and I actually read one of his books a couple of years ago — your basic justification for the righteousness of Euro-American rape, plunder, and pillaging, which is no surprise; that’s how academics earned their keep in the eighties. These days it’s the total opposite. You get promoted by talking about the undeniable awfulness of white people. Two sides of an elite and simplistic coin. I’m finding it harder and harder to fathom how Jenny can dedicate her life to all that drivel. Maybe that’s the problem. She still has faith in me, in what I do and who I can be. But I look at her and her colleagues and I see them for what they are — a bunch of conniving, careerist drones. They don’t care about art. About knowledge. They just care about grant money. About keeping their jobs and fertilizing their CVs.
So about twenty, twenty-five kids are smoking up and drinking down in Fran’s father’s mahogany-laden, enormous third-floor library, which has ornately framed paintings of dead white men on the walls. There’s also a painting of some natives near a bunch of huts, and someone tells me it’s a million-dollar painting by some guy named Gauguin. I don’t give a shit about art. I’m just worried that someone’s gonna see the link between my curried ass and those natives in the painting. Some cool dub music is playing, stuff that Fran probably picked up on a fancy teen tour in Paris or Amsterdam, stuff that me and my crew wouldn’t get our hands on for another decade or so. I’m sitting on an ancient Persian rug, rather awestruck by all these good-looking, cool, and precocious kids — boys and girls. Josh, James, and I have two friends who are girls — Caron and Olivia. They’re pretty, but total alcoholic waste products. Olivia, for example, thought she was pregnant in ninth grade — perhaps with Josh’s baby — so she drank an entire case of Natural Light to force a miscarriage. These girls here are different. They’re talking about French movies and punk concerts at underground clubs in New York City. James is next to me, packing bong hits for them, and they’re willing to talk to us so that they can ingest our free weed and learn how to work James’s TobaccoMaster. And then Josh walks in with Ink and a friend of Ink’s who I’ve never seen before.