Revolutionary Stan might not have had a job or a girlfriend, but he knew a few things about destroying cars. Orange started flaring out from underneath the body, quick flashes of flame, and then all of a moment the whole thing just blew and automotive shrapnel was twirling through the sky and rattling down onto the pavement and the smell of burning tires wafted past him. In thirty seconds the whole char-black thing was nothing but an arcane sculpture, almost unrecognizable. Macon walked over, close enough to hear it sizzle, and rubbed soot from the wreckage underneath his eyelids like warpaint.
He sat down in his underwear on the cold asphalt, brought his knees up underneath his chin, rocked back and forth, and watched the rubble smolder itself down to practically nothing. He didn’t so much feel better as less alone, as if the ashes stinging his cheeks and watering his eyes connected him to something. He’d unlocked a secret weapon in the cosmic game of Rock, Paper, Scissors: Law-book beats textbook, but matchbook beats them all. His former identity had been erased, like superheroes’ when they fall into vats of toxic waste and leave their mild-mannered ways behind, shouldering the mantle of power, unwanted though it may be.
“The Nigga You Love to Hate” ended, and Macon brought his taxi to a halt on Greenwich Avenue and allowed a middle-aged white man, casually dressed, to lumber into the backseat. Why this guy? Macon wondered, staring through the rearview as the man seat-belted himself in, palmed his chin, and stared placidly out the window. What’s he done?
“One Sixteenth and Broadway, Columbia University, please.”
Macon turned the music off and drove. He knows why, thought Macon. It doesn’t matter if I do. He knows.
Mr. Cavanaugh. That’s who he looked like. Something about the guy’s thin, flinty lips. Mr. Cavanaugh from the Brookline art store, who’d gotten jacked for hundreds of dollars’ worth of spray cans all because of his own mistrust, so many spray cans that he’d finally locked the aerosol section behind glass. Month after month, Lajuan and Aura had sauntered up and down the narrow aisles being black, hands pocketed, and while Mr. Cavanaugh followed surreptitious and suspicious, Macon crammed his knapsack full of fatcaps, cans of Krylon, Magnum 44s, felt-tipped markers for their blackbooks, even Rustoleum when it was still around, and slipped out the door while Mr. Cavanaugh was still trailing his decoys.
Or Mr. Andrews, Aura’s guidance counselor at Newton South, where Aura and a few dozen other black kids got bused to integrate the system and escape the crumbling Boston schools. Same bulging Adam’s apple, making him look as if he were perpetually lurching forward. Andrews had scheduled weekly meetings with Aura freshman year, taken a special interest in his studies, social life, and family. The meetings Aura hadn’t skipped he’d filled with fabricated drama, and Andrews had hunched toward him, wide-eyed, eager to digest the latest installment in the cramped, drug-infested welfare nightmare that Aura alleged was his life. By mid-October, Andrews had called in Aura’s mother to congratulate her on her son, taking her hand as he professed his sorrow at the violent ends met by her sons Raekwon (a promising basketball player gunned down over a Twix bar), Yusefalitis (his chitlins poisoned by a rival crack czar), and Shaka Yoohoo (a child preacher, also gunned down over a Twix bar). Aura had been grounded for a month behind that shit.
When Andrews took him out for breakfast near semester’s end, presented Aura with a copy of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
and told him that he was the subject of a paper Andrews had just had accepted by the
American Journal of Secondary Education
called “Teaching the Unteachable: Inroads to the Inner City,” Aura had demanded half the publication fee. Andrews had explained that that wouldn’t be ethical; he made a modest donation to the United Negro College Fund in Aura’s name instead.
Macon turned left at Ninety-sixth Street, passed Riverside Drive, and pulled over on an isolated stretch of road along the water. “Excuse me,” the man in the backseat ventured. Before he could further pursue his inquiry, an arm snaked through the small gap in the plastic and a gun was in his face. The man threw his hands up on instinct, staring transfixed into the round black hole from which death flew.
“Leave your wallet on the seat and walk, motherfucker,” Macon growled, ducking behind the partition. He could hardly see the cat. “Look back, I’ll bust a cap in your flabby white ass.” It occurred to him that this guy probably had no idea what that meant. But context ought to make it fairly clear.
“You people are a fucking plague on this planet,” Macon couldn’t resist adding as the man clambered—sweaty, weak, pathetic—for his wallet, mouth going jowly as he bobbed for breath. The epidemic flavorlessness of white men, their arthritis of the soul, sickened Macon; that oblivious lack of style was at the root, even, of his frustration with himself.
“Hurry up,” he prompted. “Get the fuck outta here.” The victim scurried. It wasn’t as exciting as it had been the first time; the rush was quieter but in its place was cold new confidence, a steely professionalism that gratified Macon almost as much. He wheeled the cab around and drove downtown. The shift had just begun.
Chapter Eight
Intro to Black Studies, Room 415 Hamilton Hall, 4:45 P.M., Associate Professor of American Studies Umamu Shaheed Alam presiding: three hundred plus two dime-sacks of esteemed chocolate-brown scholarship poured into an expertly tailored girth-streamlining double-breasted olive suit, accented with Armani eyewear and compromised by rubber-soled load-bearing loafers.
In the front row of the cavernous slant-seated lecture hall, Andre slouched next to a light-skinned honey in a headwrap. She’d smiled back at him, then unsnapped a leatherbound notepad and crossed her legs, pen poised, preparing to look busy instead of sideways until class started. The hall was full when Professor Alam entered, swinging his legs around his belly in an overweight pimp-shuffle. He strode directly to the podium and tapped the mic twice with a sausage forefinger, silencing the room.
“Good, ah, afternoon to you all.” He held up a shiny red-black-and-green hardback and gave a practiced smile. “I’m sure some of you have read my book,
Black to the Future. The New Yorker
called it a ‘much-needed guide to gangsta culture and black youth.’ If not, don’t worry, it’s on the syllabus. You’ll find it under my former name, Boyd Randow, which I changed two years ago. Umamu Shaheed Alam means ‘esteemed prince and wise leader.’ ”
Andre clicked his pen and opened his ratty notebook, the same one he’d used all through senior year at Princeton-Eastham Prep. He’d never been one of those back-to-school buy-new-supplies kids. A notebook was a notebook; you used it till you filled it.
Why is it,
he scribbled,
that fools always change their names to
some impossibly grandiose shit? How come you never meet a cat
whose junk means ‘midlevel bureaucrat’ or ‘lecherous drunken retard’?
“My book,” Alam was saying, “has met with considerable success. I’ve been very lucky. I was a poor young brother growing up, from the streets of Miami. Put myself through school. My mama was a factory worker all her life. Daddy drove a city bus until he left. Now, I drive a Range Rover.” He reached into his pocket and held up a shiny set of keys, dangling from a gold pendant reading
USA.
“I’ve been interviewed in
Vibe
and
Essence,
” Alam continued, “and I’m in negotiations with BET for my own show,
The
Rap on Rap.
And even though I’m a tenured professor now, I’m still true to the game. Ya heard? I still love my Black Queens.” He stopped and scanned the room, presumably for black queens. “As I argue in my book,” he went on, “the young African-American brothers and sisters who are making these songs need to be supported and celebrated, not silenced.”
Alam took a step back from the lectern. What’s he waiting for? Andre wondered. Applause? The professor pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his perspiring nose, eye-surfed the class, and paused momentarily on the swells of Andre’s neighbor’s chest. She crossed her arms and he resumed his lecture. “You see,” Alam explained, “a lot of my colleagues in the academy don’t understand that rappers are some of our most talented actors and storytellers. That’s why a brother like myself has got to get ’em in the ring and do a l’il boxing!” He stepped out from behind the podium and began rocking back and forth, from his heels to the balls of his feet, hands up around his shoulders, class rings flashing from both hands. “ ‘Murder was the case that they gave me,’ ” he recited, transposing the languid lyrics into an enthusiastic, preacherly refrain. “ ‘I can’t die, my boo’s about to have my baby.’ ” Alam looked around the room, trying to gauge how his shit was going over. Students seemed to be avoiding his eyes. “Snoop Doggy Dogg,” he enthused, “Dogg Pound Gangsta for life!”
“I consider myself the Academic Gangsta,” he went on, stepping back behind the podium. “Gangsta meaning Goal-Achieving Nigga Gonna Stay True Always. Nigga meaning Never-Ignorant Go-Getting Asiatic. I’ma continue to defend rap, brothers and sisters, no matter how the words of an educated black man, a best-selling author, might intimidate rap’s critics.”
“Everything about it?” The question, high-pitched and incredulous, came from the distant rear. Andre spun in his seat, grinning in recognition. Here we go.
“Pardon me?” asked Alam, his tone making it clear that what he meant was
shut the fuck up.
“I said, you wanna defend everything about hip hop? What about the violence? What about the misogyny?”
Alam squinted, but the recessed lights shaded his interlocutor’s face. He was debating a mystery man.
“As I argue in my book,” Alam said, hefting it again, “rappers are postmodern actors interrogating the dislocation of organic sensibilities. We don’t demand responsibility or predicate realism from the characters Arnold Schwarzenegger plays, so why should we insist that rappers conform to some notion of authenticity? So what if they claim to be real—that’s what actors do. Why can’t we just enjoy the fiction?”
Go ’head, Macon, slay this joker, thought Andre, and he turned, together with his classmates, toward the anticipated comeback.
“It’s easy to celebrate hip hop if you call it fiction, Professor. But if it’s fiction, nobody has to answer for anything—not rappers or the people responsible for the problems rap addresses. If it’s fiction, we’re just crying wolf.”
“If it’s fiction, it’s art!” Alam boomed into the podium mic, remembering that superior technology was at his disposal. “Rap’s critics are trying to dilute art with politics and denigrate the form.”
Macon tried to interrupt, but he couldn’t compete with the sound system and Alam knew it: rode roughshod over him and ignored the raised hands sprouting all around the room.
“As I argue in my book,” Alam continued, crossing his arms over his chest, “rap is here to stay, and it is what it is.” The hands began to waver, flutter, droop, and drop as students realized the moment had been contained, the space reclaimed. Andre kept his up, dying to ask, “How much respect can you have for something you refuse to criticize?” and “You call that an argument?” and wondering why the academic discourse on hip hop always boiled down to uninformed attacks versus overzealous defenses, both sides dipping from the binary debate in new Range Rovers.
Macon, livid at being silenced, leapt from his seat and disappeared through a rear exit, the door exclamation-point slamming behind him. A brown shopping bag containing twenty-two wallets, nineteen neckties, and more than four thousand dollars in cash pendulated from his clenched fist.
Chapter Nine
Macon flicked a switch and the off-duty sign lit up atop the cab. He was only driving as a way to think; the four grand he’d clocked yesterday was quit-while-you’re-ahead dough, and Macon intended to cruise through one final shift, park his cab at the garage, turn in his keys with nary a word of explanation, and stroll away without pushing New York City’s limits any further.
Fuck a culture, Professor Alam, he thought, jaw flexing to match his forearm on the wheel as he dipped and bobbed through the streets. Hip hop’s a superpower worn incognito by cats like me, who move with the venom of every rhyme ever spit, cleave courses with the cold-fusion speed-of-sound precision of every turntable cut scratch slice transform and crossfade, and think with the dexterity of every theatric unsolved b-boy battle tactic, from show-stop uprock down to linoleum headspins and impossible whirling-dervish cardboard axis chiropractics. I chew on gnarled roots, rock grimy sweatpants hoodies and boots, throw cold steel in motherfuckers’ unsuspecting faces and skate away unseen, muttering knockout punchlines in cartoon-bubble frozen breath. Then I dip into a phone booth and emerge jiggified, in tailored clothes with refined flows, my beard trimmed down to elegance, gesturing Shakespearian and quoting Machiavelli in a tone that makes the Western canon bawl.
So what if hip hop turned out not to be the Revolution like we hoped? So what if all my one-time idols are withered and ridiculous and KRS-One never learned to move objects with his mind and Chuck D’s black CNN is more like a satellite dish now, with two hundred channels of wack movies, cartoons, and home-shopping networks? It still made me the motherfucker that I am. He remembered what Lajuan had said the day he lopped off his shouder-length locks, buzzed his dome with the two-blade, and stuffed fistfuls of hair ropes in Dutch Master cigar boxes, as if they might come in handy in the future, in case he had to rappel his way up the castle tower to bone Rapunzel: “I don’t need ’em anymore,” he’d said, shrugging, scissors in hand, when Macon, mortified, entreated him to reconsider. “They’re growing on the inside now.”
Macon flicked his eyes at the rearview like a celebrity checking for paparazzi, then watched a clutter of pedestrians transverse the crosswalk before him. His gaze returned to the mirror and now he was an outlaw twisting backward on his horse, money sack in one hand, six-gun in the other, grinning at the distant cloud of dust that was the posse in cold pursuit.
The Fifty-ninth Street Bridge loomed on his left and Macon decided to visit Nique at his tollbooth and bum some weed: Why not? Kid Untouchable in full effect, full grown into the moves he’d rehearsed long and lean in his bedroom mirror and stashed inside some inside pocket of himself as he stepped catlike through a glossy suburbia that wasn’t ready for them.
Every stereotype had rubbed off on Macon; every handshake and shoulder-bang embrace had darkened him imperceptibly, and he’d welcomed the transfer of every myth: coolness, danger, sexual superiority. And reaped the benefits, played both sides against the middle on some
Fistful of Dollars
shit. As the closest thing to black that was still safe, he’d even scooped the occasional white girl looking for a cross-cultural experience but too timid to actually fuck a brother. He’d flipped hip hop attitudes in places where they’d gone unrecognized, aced high school just on the strength of intellectual aggression, the ability to cut and paste ideas with the democratic, genre-crossing dexterity of an old-school party DJ. He’d cloaked his swagger as he snuck through the sepia city, so that unknown brothers would not mistake it as ill-considered.
A hip hop motherfucker carried hip hop everywhere he went, thought Macon, knew when to hold it on his shoulders and when to hide it in his heart. He flashed on a memory of coming home to find his father planted in the center of Macon’s bedroom, clocking the walls as if it were a museum, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his khaki Dockers with the braided brown belt, 360 degrees of
Wordup!
magazine foldout poses boxing him in and Alan Detornay thinking, What? Who are these niggers? Who are these cultural bellwethers? Who is my son?
Your son is hip hop, Dad. Hip hop oozes from the way he half-closes one eye, like Big Daddy Kane did in those foldouts, when he’s propped up on an elbow looking at his lover. It’s hip hop that makes him hyperaware of personal movement in a way that enhances his cool rather than ruining it, hip hop that wrote up the tattered, stale, ghettonomics-of-crack black-people-don’t-own-no-boats conversation he had a thousand times at Aura’s crib last summer. Hip hop is the interplay between beautify and destroy when cats discuss bombing the city’s subway trains. Hip hop is not talking to your parents, but talking over their records. Hip hop means trying to knock your idols out the box, hearing a rumor that your favorite MC’s new record is wack and not even buying it to find out if it’s true, you fickle motherfucker. Hip hop moves so fast that new jams are outdated by the time the last snare snaps, but hip hop recycles everything, so it all evens out. Hip hop finishes your sentences for you because you talk too goddamn slow, and rolls its eyes at any and all attempts to define, explain, categorize, or even celebrate it. Hip hop knows what it is and who it’s in and has no problem with leaving all that shit unspoken, but secretly it wishes somebody would hit the nail right on the head and so it half-listens to everybody’s overwrought, emotional, esoteric, poetic, theoretic bullshit and is always disappointed.
Macon turned on the radio and “King of Rock” backspun the planet: 1985, the year Run-DMC broke MTV’s color line, busting through the doors of the Rock ’n’ Roll Museum in black bowlers and Adidas jumpsuits, fat gold-braided ropes swinging like pendulums to footfall rhythms. Kings not of rap but rock, as in we laying claim to your suddenly quite institutional and honkified decaying Woodstock rebel music; we some young, savvy motherfuckers hip enough to understand that if we throw guitar wails over the neck-snap drums, then rock ’n’ roll and thus Springsteen-age America will pay some mind and Jann Whatshisname and the burnout torchholders down at
Rolling Stone
will fall for it and canonize us with paternalistic goodwill, meaning we blow up and sell six million albums without changing out of our jailhouselaceless kicks or ungrabbing our nuts. Never mind that when you think rock, it’s Mick Jagger and Neil Young, and Hendrix for affirmative action, black but hippied out and fronting white bands, too extraterrestrial to be black militant, and for us rock is Big Mama Thorton, Chuck, Fats, and other motherfuckers who got beat-jacked by Elvis and Pat Boone, and that rock to us is nothing but a gimmick, the muscle-bound guitar riffs of uncredited studio musicians, just something else to fuck with.
And when hip hop finished sucking on rock’s power chords and moved on stronger, and Run, D, and Jay gave Aerosmith the soul-shake kiss-off and banked the proceeds, only then did Jann Whatshisname and the rest of America’s gray-ponytailed rock critics abandon their visions of black rap youth and young white rockers partying together, their desperate horny dreams of rock ’n’ roll rubbing rap supersperm into its crackly skin, absorbing it until the music moved again. The black bastards used us, they snarled, and went back to hating rap and
It’s not music
and
The culture of appropriation
and et cetera. Until the Beastie Boys emerged a year later, Run-DMC magically transformed into a trio of degenerate white brats through their mutual fairy godmother Rick Rubin’s gun-toting Blimpie-sandwich-eating fuck-you dirty cracker sleight of hand, a great white hope and a reason for rock critics to use words like
irreverent, fresh,
and
clever
where
thieving, irresponsible,
and
droning
once sufficed.
Macon had hated the Beastie Boys, or the B Boys, as ignorant suburbanites called them, not realizing that b-boy stands for beat boy or break boy and DJ Kool Herc made up the term to give some shine to the cats who waited until the hottest part of the record to flex ill kung fu capoeira snapneck acrobatics on the dance floor back when he used to throw parties in the parks of the Bronx, plugging his sound system into jimmied-open lamp posts and thus jacking postindustrial post–Cross Bronx Expressway post-budget-crisis New York City for a little bit of get-back in the form of pure energy, Marshall McLuhan eat your heart out. Years before Jimmy Carter stepped out of his limo just long enough to shake a dismayed, bucktoothed face across the charred blocks, cats were creating culture from spare parts in the tradition of lemonade when life rains ghetto citrus and soul food from unfit pig scraps.
Macon hated the Beastie Boys for bringing hip hop to kids who’d never heard of b-boying or Kool Herc or park jams, and who didn’t bother to find out; for flipping the game around so that instead of having to do extra work to be down, whiteboys could be dilettantes in hip hop, self-conscious clowns whose very presence was a joke that deprecated the culture even as it pretended to deprecate itself. The Beastie Boys made the white kids in his neighborhood think it was okay to start rapping, and the black kids who got bused into his junior high from Boston decide white rappers were automatically wack. They made white people ridiculous, tore down everything Macon had begun building, slashed his whole fantasy of being the only cracker cool enough to be up in this hip hop shit. He didn’t want any white role models, especially not three whiny-voiced, non-lyrical motherfuckers who dressed like bums and wasted dope beats and went triple platinum on some raunchy frat-boy mass-appeal shit. Yeah, okay, so they were Buddhists now. Too late. The damage had been done.
Macon was a few blocks from the bridge ramp, gas-brake-honking to the last echoes of “King of Rock” and remembering how many times he’d listened to its sequel at full volume in his room, manually censoring the songs by turning down the sound on DMC’s two curses. Thin walls in the Detornay household, no privacy. His mother didn’t have to read his journal; you could hear a telephone conversation damn near anyplace in the house. She shoulda gone back to work way sooner than she did, he thought. The bane of Macon’s mother’s generation of middle-class white women was the fact that they’d redirected all that well-nurtured, hard-won ambition toward their families instead of using it to fuel their own lives, thus driving their children fucking insane. Of course, Macon conceded, the angry-kid equivalent to Virginia Woolf’s five annual Benjamins and a room of one’s own had been knowing that no matter how long he spent over on the wrong side of the tracks, fighting the good fight and hating the hypocrisy of the system in which his entire community was so entrenched, when he came home teary-eyed and stoned or scarlet with outrage an hour past his curfew, there would still be leftover chicken in the fridge to sate his revolutionary hunger.
A tall white woman, twenty-five maybe, was bouncing on the balls of her feet, hand raised to Macon’s cab. A desperate look dampened her face, and Macon swerved instinctively to the rescue.
“Thank God,” she exhaled, leaning back into the seat, hands tucked beneath her thighs. “I thought I’d never find a white cabdriver.”
Macon’s body stiffened. “What?”
“I’m not taking any chances with that maniac on the loose.” Her eyebrows arched at his silence. “You haven’t heard? It’s all over the news. He’s some kind of black militant wacko or something. ” The woman shook her head. “I’m not a prejudiced person. But this guy . . . he robs white people and the cops can’t find him. Nobody knows what he looks like.” She shuddered. “I don’t want to get raped.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Macon heard himself respond. His brain was foaming, overflowing like an ill-poured draft. He’d done it: found some kind of worm hole in the white psyche, some uncharted reflex, and here he stood, divorced from his own color by the violence and conviction of his actions. Those fools hadn’t seen white knuckles gripping that gun. They couldn’t. Their brains weren’t wired to link whiteness to the words Macon had hurled at them, the fear he’d made them feel. It had to be a nigger. Macon was invisible. Shock fluttered his stomach.
“This city,” his fare said, shaking her head.
“Mmm.” Did the world merely call traitors to whiteness black? What was the turning point, the secret password, the moment when you were no longer recognized, the instant when your picture faded from the ferry pass and you had to stay on the island of Blackness forever or swim back on your own? How many of Macon’s victims had taken part in shaping this description of him? Had the first two or three declared him black and the others merely cosigned the police sketch? If the later ones had known about this enraged, dusky criminal—an image of the nonexistent man took shape in Macon’s mind, a blue-black Rastus with granite-hard veined forearms and a clenched mouth and stark pearl teeth and eye-whites, crazed deadly eyes—wouldn’t they have looked him over as this woman had, affirmed that he was safe before they strapped on their seat belts?
It had all happened too fast, perhaps. A flurry of robberies quicker than media saturation, faster than the leap from the back of the Metro section to page one. Hell, he didn’t watch the news himself, and he was the motherfucker on it. There were eight million people on this small, cramped island, and even the biggest news never reached some ears. Those were the ears that ended up on juries.
Macon massaged sudden fatigue from his eyes with a thumb knuckle and finger, and thought about all the black cabdrivers who had to be starving behind this shit, all the white people shaking their heads and adding another twig of anecdotal evidence to their bonfires. Cap Anson slid into second base, spikes high, laughing his ass off and spraying a stream of dirt in Macon’s face, then stood and smiled and extended a hand to his progeny. We’re wearing the same uniform now, Macon thought, appalled.
He pulled to the curb and the woman handed him the fare, along with a generous tip. He watched her swift calves and imagined the clunk of her heels until she disappeared into a doormanned building. Macon’s brain flopped like a dying fish on the floor of a rowboat and he banged a U-turn and headed back toward the highway, Queens-bound. Ten minutes later he was parked at Nique’s window, holding up traffic.