The songs started ten seconds in, the time it took NP to run across his bedroom, dodging mounds of dirty clothes and comic books, and press Record. The songs ended with the DJ's truncated explications: “Alright, that was the boombastic—” “That's for all you in the Queensbridge Houses, Boogie Down Bronx—”
“Doug E. Fresh stole my cousin's rhymes,” NP said, apropos of nothing.
“I thought you said Doug E. Fresh was your cousin,” I said. NP was a notorious “that's my cousin” -er. I certainly didn't remember him claiming Randy in his kinship group before Randy got wheels.
“What are you, high? Think I don't know who my own cousin is? No, he bit them, check it out, I was at this house party …” and he trailed off on one of his chronicles. I looked up at the sky and his words were sucked away by the wind. A small plane chuggered parallel to the shoreline, a banner slithering behind it:
VISIT BUZZ CHEW
.
I walked up to where the beach crumbled away into the ocean. Left Left faced the Atlantic, not that meager, lapping bay crap. Not big enough to surf in except in front of an advancing hurricane—you had to go up to Montauk for that, and none of us was so inclined. There were no houses beyond the waves, no slim spits of land, as on our turf. Just invisible continents. It was the Edge of Things, and the Edge liked to grab at you, pull you in. I wasn't even toe-deep in the water when I heard my mother's warning in my ears, “Watch out for the undertow!,” which wasn't a bad philosophy, really, applicable to most situations in a metaphorical sense, but I hated being so conditioned. I never went past where I could feel the bottom beneath my feet, so riptides and undertow weren't much of a concern. But you
could feel it, even in the shallows—the ravenous pull when the ocean sucked back into itself to gather for the next wave, the next volley in its siege against land and landlubbers—i.e., you. The ocean was kidnapping arms and a muffled voice that said, You ain't much at all, are you? Nope, not much at all. Sand beneath my feet, that was my rule.
“Aren't you hot in that shirt, man?” Clive asked when I sat back down.
“No. Why?”
“Black absorbs light,” he said. “So it heats up—that's why on a hot day you're more comfortable wearing light clothes.”
I didn't know that, but as I looked around, I didn't notice anyone wearing black. Maybe there was something to it.
“Hey! Hey! Yo!”
Marcus hot-footed it over the black sand. He'd made good time, but then he was putting in a lot of biking time to and from work. Marcus had only been out for a week and he was already on his second job. Every summer he went through a dozen, easy. He got his foot in the door no problem, spinning his dismissal from his last job to his new bosses the same way he spun them to us. “The day manager was out to get me,” he'd tell us, or, “I had a personality conflict with the cook.” “The owner was all coked-out,” he explained, pointing toward the realities of the mid-'8os resort-town restaurant business. Most of those people were coked-out, basic fact. If we knew that he got the ax for stealing booze—not a bottle or two but a whole crate—he trumped us with, “They were some straight-up racists.” Which always worked. In any sphere. Who among us could refute such a judgment? It was like saying “It's hot” during a heat wave. No dispute.
“Where's my towel?” Marcus asked.
We shaded our eyes with our hands and squinted up at him.
Randy said, “You said, can you bring it in the car, not can you lug it down the beach for me.” He gave Marcus the keys and Marcus returned to the dune.
“Dag,” Bobby said.
“That was cold,” Clive said.
Randy yawned and stretched. He turned over on his back, exposing his great mammaries. They bobbed on his stomach. “Ain't nothing but a thang,” he said.
“Why don't you put your shirt back on, Randy,” NP said. “You're going to scare the white people.”
“Yeah, Randy, shit,” I said.
“Sh-ee-it,” Randy said, slapping his chest vigorously. He was in a good mood, or else he would have thrown out “You want to walk home?,” his now-standard, signifying-ending response.
“Shit, I'll show them something to be scared of,” Bobby said.
“What are you going to show them, you fuckin' albino-lookin' bitch?” NP said.
Everybody cracked up except for Bobby, who growled, “Shut the fuck up,” and turned over to even up his tan. He was a fierce and aggressive tanner in the early part of the summer, to giddyap his skin to a level-playing-field brown. By late July, albino wouldn't apply as an insult, except in a retro kind of way when you couldn't think of anything else. It was always nice to have a spare.
These were the early stages of Bobby's transformation into that weird creature, the prep-schooled militant. We were made to think of ourselves as odd birds, right? According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were. What kind of bourgie sell-out Negroes were we, with BMWs in the driveway (Black Man's Wagon, in case you didn't know) and private schools to teach us how to use a knife and fork, sort
that
from
dat?
What about keeping it real? What about the news, statistics, the great narrative of black pathology? Just check out the newspapers, preferably in a movie-style montage sequence, the alarming headlines dropping in-frame with a thud, one after the other:
CRISIS IN THE INNER CITY!, WHITHER ALL THE BABY DADDIES, THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WELFARE STATE: THEY JUST DON'T WANT TO WORK, NOT LIKE IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS
. Hey, let's stop pussyfooting around and bring back slavery already, just look at these dishpan hands.
Black boys with beach houses. It could mess with your head sometimes, if you were the susceptible sort. And if it messed with your head, got under your brown skin, there were some typical and well-known remedies. You could embrace the beach part—revel in the luxury, the perception of status, wallow without care in what it meant to be born in America with money, or the appearance of money, as the case may be. No apologies. You could embrace the black part—take some idea you had about what real blackness was, and make theater of it, your 24-7 one-man show. Folks of this type could pick Bootstrapping Striver or Proud Pillar, but the most popular brands were Militant or Street, Militant being the opposite of bourgie capitulation to The Man, and Street being the antidote to Upper Middle Class emasculation. Street, ghetto. Act hard, act out, act in a way that would come to be called gangsterish, pulling petty crimes, a soft kind of tough, knowing there was someone to post bail if one of your grubby schemes fell apart.
Or you could embrace the contradiction, say, what you call paradox, I call
myself
. In theory. Those inclined to this remedy didn't have many obvious models.
In Bobby's case, his birthright, if we can call it that, made him a premature nationalist. The customary schedule for good middle-class boys and girls called for them to get Militant and fashionably Afrocentric the first semester of freshman year in college. Underlining key passages in
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
and that passed-around paperback of
Black Skin, White Masks
. Organize a march or two to protest the lack of tenure for that controversial professor in the Department of Black Studies. Organize a march or two to protest the lack of a Department of Black Studies. It passed the time until business school. Bobby got an early start on all that, returning to Sag from his sophomore year of high school with a new, clipped pronunciation of the word
whitey
, and a fondness for using the phrases “white-identified” and “false consciousness” while watching
The Cosby Show
. It caused problems as he fretted over his zip code (“Scarsdale ain't nothing but a high-class shantytown. It's a gilded lean-to”) and how changing his name might affect his Ivy
League prospects (“Your transcript says Bobby Grant, but you said your name was Sadat X”).
We used to make fun of him for being so light-skinned, and this probably contributed to some of his overcompensating. The joke was that if the KKK came pounding on Bobby's door and demanded, “Where the black people at?” (it's well known, the fondness of the KKK for ending sentences with a preposition), he'd say, “They went thataway!” with a minstrel eye-roll and vaudeville arm flourish. He rebelled against his genes, the Caucasian DNA in his veins square-dancing in there with strong African DNA. It's a tough battle, defending one flank against nature while nurture snuck in from the east with whole battalions. He directed most of his hostile talk at his mother, who worked on Wall Street. “My mom wouldn't give me twenty dollars for the weekend. She's sucking the white man's dick all day, Morgan Stanley cracker, and can't give me twenty dollars!” In two weeks, his parents were going to give him a used Saab for his birthday, generosity that created a whole new genre of bitterness. “My mother's so busy trying to get a pat on the head from Massa that she can't give me gas money. Telling me I should get a job—doing what, sucking the white man's dick?” His mother bore the brunt of his misguided rage, even though his father worked at Goldman Sachs, so it's not like he was dashiki-clad and running a community center somewhere. Get a bunch of teenage virgins together, and you're bound to rub up against some mother issues. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, cast the first plucked-out orb of Oedipal horror.
“Well,” NP said, “I think it's time for this Negro to get himself down the beach and see if he can check out some titties.”
“There's nothing down there, man,” I said. It was an old game, and rigged. Every summer we hiked off in search of that cloud-cloaked Shangri-la, the nude beach. Legends had circulated for years, in hushed tones delivered to wide eyes. Our mothers occasionally sniffed about “those French people lying around with their tops off,” and older kids wowed us with tales of long-limbed honeys sunbathing in little packs. If at long last you discovered their nesting
grounds, there was one last hurdle. They might be lying on their stomachs. Tough luck that. But maybe they were on their backs, and if the stars aligned you saw them turn over—in unison, glorious unison—to expose their gifts to the world. They were ambassadors of the international jet set, the kind of lovelies populating James Bond movies and Duran Duran videos. I heard “Watch out for the undertow!” when I looked at the water, and a voice cooing “Oh, James!” when I looked down the beach, in a kind of Madonna/Whore whiplash.
For years we told our moms that we were “going for a walk,” while visions of empty bottles of Bain de Soleil and supermassive fried-egg areolas danced in our heads. We walked and we walked and we never saw anything, returning, forever returning, with slumped shoulders and a faintly mumbled “Next time.” Some of us still held out hope. I knew better, my learned helplessness enjoying a banner year.
“I'm down,” Bobby said. He stood, holding up his arm and inspecting his skin for the slightest change in shade. He seemed pleased.
“That's what I'm talking about,” NP said, thrusting out his hand so that his jive-ass flutter smashed into Bobby's more aggressive pump-'n'-dump, the two quite different shake styles misfiring before finding common ground in the two-finger snap. As if their historic hand summit had come off magnificently, NP yelped, “Alright!” and turned to admonish us. “You'll see what happens when we get back and tell you about the monstrous, most bodacious tatas you missed. You'll be like, ‘Damn I shoulda gone!’”
That left me and Randy and Clive and Marcus. I think I dozed off for a while. I did not dream. I woke up, disoriented, to the sound of an alien spaceship landing. Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force's “Planet Rock” clanged out of Clive's radio.
“That's a classic joint right there,” Marcus said.
“I haven't heard this in a while,” Randy said. “We used to open up parties at my fraternity house with this.” Clive and I smirked at each other. Randy's constant references to his frat amused us,
frankly. The way he talked about it, it sounded like nonstop back rubs and “hey let's wrestle”–type horsing around. But he had a car.
“‘C'mon ladeezz!’” Marcus sang, his bobbing head loose on his neck.
“You know they bit that off Kraftwerk,” I said.
“Bit what off who?” Marcus asked.
“That part right there.” I hummed along. “Kraftwerk is this German band that pretended to be robots. They have this song, ‘Trans-Europe Express,’ that has that ‘Da Dah Da’ part.”
“Afrika Bambaataa didn't steal anything. This is their song.”
“I'm serious, it's true,” I said.
“This song came out first.”
Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force said, “Keep tickin' and tockin', work it all around the clock.”
“No,” I said, “‘Trans-Europe Express’ came out in the late '70s, I'm tellin' you. Elena had the eight-track.” Reggie and I inherited her old stereo when she went all high-tech and futuristic with cassettes, which was great, except that somehow we only ended up with two eight-track tapes:
Trans-Europe Express
by Kraftwerk, and
The Best of the Commodores
. It was a grueling couple of months, listening to those two albums over and over—so I knew I was right.
I didn't understand back then why Marcus was hassling me, but I get it now. A couple of years later, if someone said “I stole that off an old Lou Donaldson record,” and the sample kicked it, you got respect for your expertise and keen ear. Funk, free jazz, disco, cartoons, German synthesizer music—it didn't matter where it came from, the art was in converting it to new use. Manipulating what you had at your disposal for your own purposes, jerry-rigging your new creation. But before sampling became an art form with a philosophy, biting off somebody was a major crime, thuggery on an atrocious scale. Your style, your vibe, was all you had. It was toiled on, worried over, your latest tweak presented to the world each day for approval. Pull your pockets out so that they hung out of your pants in a classic broke-ass pose, and you still had your style. If someone was stealing your style, they were stealing your soul.