How Are You Going to Save Yourself

by JM Holmes

  ROLLS HAD SITUATED himself nicely into a blunt rotation. When I came up on the circle, the women were already asking him about his artwork. He said if they ever were near Boston, they should check out one of his shows. Then he hit the blunt and talked about how he could be Jain if weed counted as an acceptable vegetable. One of the girls told him that Jains practice abstinence. He leaned in and told her that he practiced Kama Sutra. I told him to stop lying—“The only yoga you know is the dude who sells bootleg DVDs on Central.”

  Dub came out of nowhere dragging a banker-looking type in a pink polo. “Listen to this,” Dub said.

  “What?” I said.

  “He thinks Pac is going to knock out Money Mayweather.”

  “Pacquiao throws more punches,” Pink Polo said.

  “So?” Dub looked at him sideways. “None of those punches are going to land. That slant-eyed motherfucker can’t see shit.”

  The Manhattanites held their collective breath. My chances of getting pussy diminished swiftly. The girls from the elevator were paying attention now. One with dark eyes dropped her jaw in disbelief. I looked to Rolls for help, but he loved it when Dub got going. Like the fake Buddhist he was, he always said the world needed pushing and pulling energy.

  “When’s the last time you heard of a Chink boxing champ?” Dub kept pushing.

  “Not cool, dude,” Pink Polo said.

  The group glanced back and forth between Dub and Polo.

  “Pacquiao is Filipino,” I tried.

  “Same shit,” Dub said.

  A blond girl asked if anyone had a lighter. No one answered. I felt people staring at me. Blake was all the way across the patio, surrounded by some kids we’d gone to college with. He was lounged back smoking a cigarette like the motherfucker could not be more comfortable. I turned to Rolls. He took a sip of his drink and grinned.

  “Plus, it’s better business if Pacquiao wins,” Polo finally said.

  “We talking about boxing, not business,” Dub said.

  “Sports are business. Don’t be naive,” Polo said.

  Dub sucked his teeth. “Man, you don’t know boxing,” he said. He was quiet a minute like he’d been made a fool. “It’d be like G over there, all skinny and slow and feeble, freshman-ass brain, trying to go rounds with me,” he said.

  I put my hands up and before any of the Manhattanites knew what the hell was happening, we were slap-boxing like back in high school. In a real fight, all bets would’ve been off, but Dub lunged too much and dropped his hands when he slap-boxed. Plus, my arms were a lot longer and I’d boxed for real when we were growing up. He was shorter, stockier, the football-build type. People backed away and gave us space on the deck. True to form, Dub kept lunging and I kept leaning back and hitting him with counters.

  “You guys do this for fun?” someone asked.

  Rolls said yeah. I started to hop in my step, just bounce a little, and it must’ve pissed Dub off ’cause he tagged me with a closed fist. I lost my balance a bit.

  “How that feel?” he said.

  I got back in my stance and hit him with a right so hard, the slap rang out loud.

  “Don’t get knocked out slap-boxing!” Rolls said.

  Dub always bragged that he’d never lost a fight. He lowered his shoulder and speared me backward. I felt his low center of gravity lift me off my feet for a second. My lower back hit the railing. I grabbed hold of him to try and weigh myself down.

  “Easy. Dub. Homie. Nigga. Easy!” I yelled.

  Rolls had come over quick and grabbed my shoulder. Dub relaxed and I eased back onto my feet. My tailbone felt warm—a bruise was forming. Most of the party had taken notice and were staring at the three of us huddled near the railing. My hands felt slick on the metal.

  “Damn, you sounded like a bitch,” Dub said.

  Blake approached us.

  “Why you gotta do that here?” he said. He looked us over while I turned to peer over the side of the railing.

  I couldn’t even see the street below, it was so high, just the lights, blurry and distant. I squatted with my hands above my head, gripping the guardrail. I kept breathing until my heart slowed down. I tried to survey the party, and the tight-dressed girls had already forgotten us.

  Blake put a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s get you high,” he said.

  COCAINE IS A drug that never gets saved. When someone has white around a bunch of people who do it, faces start popping out of closets and windows like a Disney musical. Rolls didn’t partake—no one did where we were from—but against all odds, Dub tried it and, like all human beings, loved it. So despite Rolls trying to talk me down from buying more, Blake and Dub had me walking to the ATM just after midnight. Four hundred of my pops’ death-dollars later, we were at another apartment surrounded by Duke sorority girls Blake knew.

  Rolls sat down on one of those black leather boxy couches that are better to look at than sit on. He flipped through a Vanity Fair. The rest of us sat around the kitchen table, and Blake clapped me on the shoulder. “Break it out, break it out,” he said.

  When I broke out the three bags, Rebecca, a girl Blake had introduced me to not five minutes back, put a soft hand around the base of my neck like I had whipped out an engagement ring. Her lips were covered in crimson. Against her milk-pale skin, the color made her look like a sexy vampire. Her hair smelled like lavender when she leaned close.

  Their bathroom was smaller. These girls were living on their parents’ dime, but not in their parents’ homes. All the blood vessels in me had tightened, making the closed space feel even smaller. I drank handfuls of water, splashed it on my face and neck. The money was still there, most of it. Including the gas and food I’d bought, it was down to $7,989.

  I thought about my pops’ old game stats. I used to look at them on the back of his playing cards and imagine what it cost his body. I read that he had an eight-sack season and I saw the hobbled stride he walked with on the rare occasions when I got up with him. Five pass-blocks left me with the image of the way his left arm drooped—a rotator-cuff tear that he played through. Back then the surgeries weren’t arthroscopic yet. His body was riddled with scars thick as butter knives. I figure my mom pictured those scars every time she went through his medical records. She knew the doctors by name—the good, the bad, the un-Hippocratic. She begged him to stop playing before he was ground down to nothing, but he never listened. Sometimes I think it was the celebrity, but it wasn’t. He was just a man doing what he was put on this earth to do and loving it. At the end of his life, the scars were nothing more than old decisions forgotten. My mom said it was never even an option for him to quit ’cause he was never about the fans or the money. He was about the game. He knew football and the Gospel. I never got to ask him much about either.

  At the table, Dub was talking a mile a minute, running his mouth like my aunts when they got excited in their preaching.

  Rolls got up from the couch and pulled me aside before I could sit down. “Yo, let’s dip,” he said. “Dub’s out his mind.” His eyes looked red-tinted, a little low. It was just after one.

  “Why don’t you try some? A little pickup.” My voice sounded tight.

  “You know I’m not touching that.” He looked at me sideways.

  I knew he was right. I wanted them to see New York like I did, but I had told myself I wouldn’t do white around them.

  “That shit’s gonna get you in trouble,” he said.

  “Thanks, Deepak.”

  “I’m not fucking with it,” Rolls said.

  “Dub tried it,” I said.

  “Yeah, and he looks like a fucking lame.”

  I looked over and almost on cue Dub yelled at me, “G, freestyle for these ladies!”

  Rolls raised his eyebrows and pulled his lips in. Dub was the type to get fucked up and tell us his secrets. Those were the only times he was in his feelings. Those were the only times he talked to Rolls and me about his family.

  “I told them you the nicest!” he said.
>
  “Please—” Rebecca held out the yay. “Freestyle for us.” Her body bent in a way that outlined her slender frame. That was enough for me. Rolls tried to whisper to me and Dub cut him off.

  “Stop being soft,” he said.

  My eyes moved between the two of them. If we were alone, Dub would’ve added “nigga.” He was learning. He looked like he was on an album cover—leaned back in his chair with girls passing a plate of coke around him. I thought about his girl, Simone, but they stayed on that on-and-off-again shit, so I decided not to think the worst. The dish and straw made the rounds. Sniffling sounded. I dragged Rolls over with me.

  “Blake, gimme a line and a beat,” I said.

  Blake started beat-boxing. Dub clapped. Rolls sandwiched himself between two brunettes and tried to hide a smile. Everyone leaned in as I ad-libbed early on to catch the rhythm.

  I rhymed about doing white-girl with white girls, about bringing some black boys into a white world. I rhymed about walls decked out like museums and how men from our station rarely see ’em. I rhymed about long nights and long weekends, about playing our roles so that they don’t sanction our per diems.

  At this point the girls had their phones out recording. The lights clicked on and the mechanical eyes pointed, poised to capture me. The plate of white clanked down to my left. Blake sped the beat up a little bit.

  I started kicking dumber party raps. I rhymed about drinking till we forget woes, about getting wild enough to throw blows. I probably rhymed it with more blow, then rhymed it with something stupid, like fresher than shell toes. I probably rhymed a cliché about having a dope flow and about how even the pope know.

  Then I started talking about Pops. I rhymed how he never heard a single punchline, about how them football lights musta felt brighter than sunshine, or maybe I rhymed about how he neglected to give his son time, about how he never heard a stanza, act, not one rhyme.

  Someone reached over and pulled the plate away.

  I kept rhyming about my family in hearses and curses and what a nigga worth is, if it’s all worth it, or if black skin make our legacies worthless.

  And then Blake stopped the beat. Rolls was staring at me. Dub looked like he wanted to slap me. The girls had put their phones down and Blake scraped his insurance card on the plate, lining up more white. He took a little and passed the plate.

  WHEN WE GOT stuffed into cabs to go downtown to Live, Rolls and I ended up in a car with two random Deltas. I tried to get into the cab with Rebecca, but her friend stiff-armed me out the way. Of their group, I voted her friend most likely to go through a white-girl-in-dreadlocks phase. I sat next to the driver, and Rolls tried to talk to me through the thick plastic.

  Rolls leaned forward to the gap in the divide. “Why the fuck we going to a club at one?” he said.

  “This ain’t home.” I smiled and bent my head toward the space so he could hear me better. “Little Rakim, you’re not in the Bucket anymore.”

  He didn’t laugh or even smile. The cab started taking us down the West Side Highway. The girls didn’t try to make conversation. They were on their phones. I’d taken another hundred out before we left and checked my account now—$7,889.

  “Be careful with that money, G,” Rolls said.

  The dark body of river ran outside the window, streaked by the orange glow of the city, the night here always shades lighter.

  “G?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For real, don’t blow that,” he said.

  “Miss me with that moral shit.”

  In the rearview, he twisted the small locks in his hair. The cab got off the highway.

  “Don’t act like a rich bitch,” he said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “This is just one night to them.”

  I turned back to face him. He was serious. Even in the dim, I could tell he was for real. The tiredness had left his eyes. I felt low from the coke blues.

  “I—”

  “You’re not a wise man,” I cut him off. “You’re just a nigga who takes pretty pictures.”

  Now the girls were paying attention to us. The driver even broke his autopilot to smirk, like he’d expected this from us.

  Rolls nodded. “Aight,” he said. He kept nodding.

  After my pops’ death, Rolls’ pops, Rev, hugged me when I came into his camera shop, right there in front of all the customers. We’d never hugged and I froze a bit. He felt small in my arms, same build as Rolls. That nigga would be skinny for life. In the back of the shop, neither he nor Rolls said sorry, but they let me talk about my pops for a long while. I remember Rev looking at his son intently, maybe thinking about how he’d raised Rakim. Finally, he said that he was going to give the shop to him if he wasn’t too busy being an artist. Rolls smiled. I did too. We were still too young to know who we’d become.

  AFTER THE CAB I was down to $7,866. We took a few more bumps then talked to the doorman outside of Live. He said the minimum for bottle service was a thousand. Otherwise, a group that large wasn’t getting in. The girls waited for us to make a move even though some of them could’ve paid the price a hundred times over before their parents noticed. But that wasn’t protocol for pretty women.

  I turned away from the girls toward Blake. “Split it with me?”

  Rolls went to speak, then turned back to the girls.

  “I’m in law school,” Blake said, as if somehow that took his family’s money out of the equation. Still, I knew his dad kept tight tabs on him.

  Some of the girls approached us. “B, we’re going to meet my friend inside,” one said.

  Blake said aight and turned to me. We go through too much bullshit, he sang. Just to fuck with these drunk and hot girls. He knew I liked that hook.

  Dub talked to the remaining ladies. I sized up the men dressed in the uniform, button-ups tucked into some smooth-looking jeans and blazers. Then I looked at my boys. Rolls was skinny-jeaned down like a weirdo rapper, and Dub had some colorful LRG on. We looked like artists. Too bad we didn’t have the kind of artist money you needed to get into a spot like Live. An upbeat mash-up cascaded out the door, and dance lights flashed behind the huge garage-type windows.

  Dub approached me all frantic. “They’re gonna leave if we don’t get a table,” he said.

  “Leave where?”

  “Some shit about friends. I ain’t listen,” he said.

  I cut my eyes at his high ass and thought about going home with Rebecca, thought about getting treated like I had fans, maybe just like I had money.

  “You’d still have plenty left,” Dub said.

  “It’s not your money,” Rolls said out of nowhere.

  “Go readjust your chakras,” Dub said.

  Rolls started to correct him, then paused.

  “Guys, we gotta make a decision,” Blake said, as if that nigga was pitching in.

  “You’re coked out,” Rolls said.

  “And you been acting like a bitch since we got here,” Dub said.

  “All right, guy,” Rolls said. He fought with words, was a de-escalator.

  The girls drifted away from us. I jogged over and tugged Rebecca’s dress.

  She leaned back. “Oh, hey. What’s up?” She glanced at her friends.

  I held my phone out. “Let’s meet up later.” I wondered how my pops had talked up women. It probably wasn’t like that. She put her number in my phone. Blake came over to corral the rest of the women and I bounced back to my boys. “You too thirsty,” Rolls said.

  “What’s good?” I said.

  Rolls and Dub both looked at me, then at the iceberg of white girls floating back to familiar waters.

  The doorman came over. “You guys gotta either buy a table, get in line, or get the fuck out of here,” he said.

  I recognized the next look that settled into Dub’s face. His eyes went dead, like his brain had shut off. He wasn’t the de-escalating type. He leaned his weight forward and got big. The bouncer stared him down, lights from inside flashing behind hi
m.

  I grabbed Dub quick and we were gone. As I pulled him away, I yelled to Blake, and he turned from the women to catch up with us. Dub wasn’t normally that easy to pull away, but he was busy trying to keep coke snot from coming out his nose and mumbling shit about the bouncer being bitch-made. Blake told him it was just how shit worked out here. Even high, Dub’s eyes flashed with recognition.

  I loosened my grip on Dub and asked Rolls if he wanted to go back to Blake’s. He didn’t even look at me. But when we passed a food stand that smelled like falafel, he perked up.

  “This could be you,” Rolls said.

  “You’re open,” I said.

  “What?” Rolls said.

  “I don’t fuck with halal. And, nigga, this is New York, eight grand doesn’t even buy a food stand.”

  Rolls was silent and I wished I’d said something nicer.

  After a few blocks, Blake ducked into a dive bar and we followed him. Behind the bar there were pitchers of Long Island iced tea for five bucks a pop. The floor, tiled and slick with mud and water, was packed with underage kids and old-timers who looked like they’d been growing from the bar stools for years. I bought my boys a round of the poison and left the tab open. We found a booth in the corner and squeezed together.

  A big-titted woman in a maroon dress slid around on the dance floor with a boy half her age. Nina Simone pumped on the busted speakers. Those people on the floor walked just like them horns played. Blossom on the tree, you know how I feel…It’s a new dawn. It’s a new day. I wandered away toward the bathroom on that voice. I was never much for the baptism my pops’ family preached, but I was all about blues and Gospel. Voices that made you believe they were telling the truth and nothing else.

  The bathroom was trashed. Garbage everywhere and overflowing the can. Graffiti covered every inch of the walls and covered it again. The toilet lid was ripped off so I stood right there at the sink with my phone out. Instead of checking the account, I began reading the walls. There were so many layers. It was hard to catch full statements. One line read, Go home, Mom, you’re drunk.