Two hours later I was sitting at my desk, working on a short story, when Lenny woke and inquired about the smell.
“Some guy peed on the recliner,” I said.
He rolled onto his back and wiggled his forefingers against his closed eyes. “You must have left the door unlocked.”
I noted that he’d come in after me, but then I remembered that at some point during the night I had gone to the men’s room across the hall. I apologized.
“That’s okay,” he responded. “But from now on, you’ll be wanting to remember to lock it.”
I turned my attention back to my short story, finally hitting a groove just before Lenny switched on his television. I shut down my word processor and gathered some toiletries for a shower. As I was about to leave the room, Lenny looked away from some game show and pointed toward my bare feet. “You’ll be wanting to get some flip-flops, like, immediately.”
“Why?”
“Trust me,” he said.
In addition to the private shower stalls, there was a communal bathing area, which could hold at least twenty people, the approximate number in there now. From what I could tell as I brushed my teeth nearby at the sink, these twenty naked people were having a normal conversation about normal things—classes they would be taking, the Hawkeyes’ chances in the Rose Bowl, what they’d done over winter break—as if they weren’t naked at all, or as if the university were actually a giant nudist colony. Or maybe this was just the kind of thing white males did. As I headed toward one of the private stalls, I remembered hearing something about how white boys coming of age would masturbate together, standing in a circle and betting on who would complete the deed first, and then I cursed myself once more for not finding off-campus housing. I would do so late in the spring. But I would get some flip-flops immediately.
I left my dorm a little after nine to attend one of two orientations, the first of which was for midyear transfer students. In my backpack was a map of the vast campus that, an hour later, as I struggled to find my way, I had not yet removed for fear of appearing lost. For the same reason, I also did not ask directions of any of the people I passed, and there were hundreds of them, it seemed, maybe thousands, as one might expect in downtown Chicago, except that in downtown Chicago you’d see some black faces now and then. If I hadn’t received the letter requiring me to attend a mandatory orientation for minorities, I might have concluded I was the only one. Or if I hadn’t first stopped in my dorm’s cafeteria.
There, in the center of the room, stranded among the sea of white faces, a dozen black students had sat crammed at a table designed for four. I’d wondered if they were all longtime friends, perhaps arriving from a single remote high school in the Deep South where Jim Crow was still the law of the land. What would happen, I wondered, if a white student tried to sit with them, or if a black student refused? I discovered the latter after I’d paid for my breakfast and found an empty table in the far corner. I was halfway finished with my omelet when four of the black students—two males, two females—came to recruit me.
“How you doing today, my brother?” one of the males asked.
“Been better,” I said. “Been worse.”
“We noticed you’re sitting here by yourself.”
“That’s true.”
“You waiting on anyone in particular?”
I shook my head and filled my mouth with egg and cheese.
“Well, you should come on over and join us then.”
I glanced at their table; three more black students had arrived. “What for?” I asked.
“What for? What for? Why do you think, brother?”
I hunched my shoulders. “To help break some sort of Guinness record?”
They exchanged smirks. One of the women put her hands on her hips as she spoke: “Obviously, you have something against your own people.” With that, the envoys went back to their table, where words were exchanged, followed by headshakes and rolled eyes. I finished my breakfast and left.
The building for transfer orientation eluded me for thirty more minutes, but at last I cornered it near the banks of the river that wound through campus. I went to the section where English majors were being advised, the most crowded section of all. It took me a while to find an adviser who was free, a thirty-something-year-old woman with dark circles under her eyes and a profound look of sadness. I got the sense that she had decided to stop smiling many years ago, though the urge seemed to have returned when I showed her my tentative schedule.
“Now, what possessed you,” she asked, emitting a faint chuckle, “to choose all English courses?”
Because I’m an English major, I thought, but, believing this to be a trick question, I didn’t reply. Instead, I tried to outsmile her, which was easy enough to do; after a few seconds of our clownish duel her lips flatlined again.
“Classes start tomorrow,” she continued, “which of course means that all of the English courses are full. You’ll have to choose something else.” She pushed my registration form across the table toward me.
I pushed it back. “You don’t understand,” I said. “I moved here from Chicago specifically in order to take English classes.”
“Sorry,” she said, pushing the paper toward me once more.
I pushed it back again before playing my ace card: “I came here to be a writer.”
Her smile returned for a brief second and then vanished. She slid my form to me a final time. “The bottom line is that our English courses always fill within hours of early registration. This is late registration.” My only option, she said, was to take some of my General Education requirements, like math, physical education, or a science, courses I could have taken at Loop Community College for less than a hundred dollars each. Here they were going to cost me thousands.
I stormed from the building feeling like I’d arrived in some unpleasant foreign country; that the idyllic, friendly campus I’d visited four months ago was a prop, staged and orchestrated to make me feel welcome, right down to the warmth and sun. At the moment it was cold and snowing. The first few flakes had begun soon after I left the cafeteria. Now they descended with such abundance that I didn’t see that the traffic light I passed wasn’t green. An SUV nearly hit me when I stepped off the curb, causing me to slip and fall as I hastily retreated. Three passersby came to my aid, helping me stand.
“That was a pretty nasty spill,” one of them said.
“Are you hurt?” asked another.
“No, I’m okay,” I responded, holding my throbbing wrist. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” I smiled at them as I had at the adviser, and they smiled back before leaving.
I took a quick peek at my map. It seemed that if I stayed on the street I was on, I wouldn’t miss the building I sought. And yet somehow I did. I found myself in a residential community with tattered couches on the porches and empty Bud Lite cans being buried in the snow. I retraced my steps, rechecked the map, saw that I’d read it upside down, and started out again. A short while later I gave up and asked someone for help. He pointed to the building next to where we stood.
Once inside I headed to the basement, where the room for the minority orientation was located. The forty or so students already there represented a variety of races, though they were uniformly young, probably no older than eighteen. They sat rigidly in their chairs, facing the unattended podium and poised to take notes. I flopped down in one of the seats in the rear, my frustrations piled high like a pyramid of kindling, waiting for a spark. As soon as an African American male in a three-piece suit approached the podium, I raised my hand. “Excuse me,” I said.
The man looked up; everyone else turned to face me. “A question already,” he said with a wide grin. “Please be patient, young man, until after my presentation.”
I lowered my hand and managed to keep it down through his introduction of his staff. Then I raised it again.
“Young man,” he said. “I promise we’ll get to you as so
on as the presentation is over.”
This time I was able to keep my hand down for a full ten minutes, even during his comments about how difficult life could be for minorities on a predominantly white campus. When he began talking about how isolated and inferior we might feel, I distracted myself by counting the ceiling panels. Humming song lyrics proved to be a pretty effective sound barrier, but somehow it was penetrated by the words disenfranchised and social outcasts.
I rose and cleared my throat.
The speaker stopped. Everyone looked at me again.
“Young man, what is the problem?”
I explained that I had not been able to get into any English classes, that I did not have a long-distance access code, and that I was in dire need of flip-flops. Judging from the fact that a member of the staff was suddenly ushering me from the room, I had aired my concerns with a considerable degree of hysteria. In the hall, the staff member spoke to me very soothingly for several minutes, promising to get me an access code and to do what she could to find me at least one English course. “And don’t you worry about those flip-flops,” she said, rubbing her hand up and down my arm. “We’ll get those for you too. Right now you just continue taking deep breaths, honey. You just breathe, nice and easy, and everything will be fine.”
Late that evening, with my new access code in hand, I called Professor Homewood, described how the day had gone, and told him I was leaving.
“By all means, you should,” he said. “I’d come get you myself, dear boy, if I had a car, or a space-traveling machine.” I heard a faint clink, ice cubes colliding, I knew, along a wave of scotch. I’d caught him at a bad time. I decided I would call him back in the morning, perhaps from the lobby of the Greyhound station. I hung up and was about to start packing when my roommate noted that it was 10:00 PM.
“And?”
“Tomorrow’s a school day,” he said.
“And?”
“Lights-out time.”
All signs pointed to a night in the medical center with bazooka-toting gang-bangers, and as soon as I fell asleep, there they were. I lapped the oncology ward twice with Vice Lords and Black Gangster Disciples on my heels before locking myself in a utility closet. Crouched in the corner, I waited for them to burst through the door, but all they did was knock politely, a faint rhythmic drumming that continued even after I’d forced myself awake. “Who could that be?” I heard my roommate grumble, and then I realized that the door being knocked on was ours. I looked at my clock; it was nearly midnight. After a brief pause, the knocking continued. I rose to see who it was, expecting to come face-to-face with the pisser, but instead there were two white males, one with a six-inch-long beard, the other with the hair and glasses of John Lennon.
Their names were Aaron and Charles. Like me, they had come to Iowa City because of the Writers’ Workshop. They had seen me at transfer orientation, overheard my conversation with the adviser, which had gone pretty much like theirs, and then spent the rest of the day going room-to-room, tracking me down to have a beer. That struck me as a bizarre thing to do, more than a little neurotic. So I accepted their offer.
We bought a six-pack and drank it in the laundry room, located in the basement of my dorm, which would become our frequent gathering place. When we weren’t there discussing the stories we were working on, we were attending readings of the famous and want-to-be-famous, imagining ourselves at the microphone sharing with the audience the prose that we shared with one another.
Our alliance continued until halfway through the semester, and then it abruptly ended when Charles’s girlfriend in Montana called to say she was pregnant with his child. He left on the next flight. But by then I felt at home. Aaron and I had met a few other budding writers. We attended all the local readings. We loitered in used-book stores. And in the late spring we found rooms to rent in a rustic commune for artists and hippies, a place where, instead of electric guitars, tambourines and love poems filled the night air.
I do not know where Aaron and Charles are now. I do not know what became of their lives. I have not seen either of them in fifteen long years, not even in one of my nightmares, where I would not be surprised if they arrived, in some terrible final scene, to save me.
REAL
Tim wanted us to try our hand at selling. We were in our garage, as usual, only this time a mountain of marijuana was before us on a newspaper. Some of it had been stuffed into little envelopes that would go for five or ten dollars. There were dozens of one-dollar joints, too; we were helping him roll those as he spoke about the big money there was to be made. He was making a lot of it at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and there was a lot of it to be made at South Shore High, which, after just a few days of being freshmen, Jimmy and I had discovered was full not only of thugs but also of potheads. But Jimmy wasn’t interested in being a dealer. I wasn’t either. So Tim changed the subject. “You boys have any pussy yet?” he asked.
Lately he was always asking us about pussy. It made me uncomfortable, because I had not had any yet, and Tim seemed to think it was important that we have some very soon, as if it were on the verge of all being gone. I don’t remember what I said—probably no, because lying was strictly prohibited by our church, too, and I wasn’t yet comfortable with multitasking sins. While we got high, Tim told us about all the different races of women he’d slept with at his college, an impressive variety due to the international appeal of the sciences. “And the Asian girls have pussies that slant sideways,” he said. “Squinty, like their eyes.” I made a mental note that, when I did at last lose my virginity, it should not be with an Asian girl. It never occurred to me that Tim was lying. I never doubted anything he said.
When all the weed had been packaged and rolled, Tim told us he had to make a delivery. Jimmy and I decided to go inside the house and trip out playing pool. We entered the back door, burst into giggles when it creaked, and went straight into the basement. We’d been playing for a few minutes when, from behind me, Jesus called us sinners. I whirled around and was relieved to see that I was mistaken; it was only Tommy, clutching his Bible and looking crazed. He accused us of being high. Jimmy told him to shut up. Tommy’s eyes widened before he lunged forward. Instantly they were fighting, fists and pool sticks swinging everywhere, creating such a commotion that it brought our father into the basement, moving toward the fracas with outstretched arms. Linda appeared at the top of the stairs with a hand over her mouth, and a second later our mother joined her, asking what was happening, what in God’s name was going on. Our father was yelling now and so were Jimmy and Tommy, who had finally separated. “I want to know who started this!” our father was saying. “He attacked me!” Jimmy was saying, and Tommy was saying, “They’re on drugs! Tim is getting them high! They’re on drugs!” Jimmy and I denied it, swore it wasn’t true. Our father believed us, or sided with us; I still don’t know which and I still don’t know why. All I know is that he ordered Tommy to pack his things and leave.
When Tim came home late that night, Jimmy told him what had happened.
“That’s what he gets,” I added, “for being a sissy.”
“Don’t say that,” Tim rebuked me. “Tommy’s your brother.”
“But … but,” I stammered.
Tim cut me off with a wave of his hand. “Tommy was just trying to look out for you,” he said, “but there’s some crazy stuff going on out there in those streets that he just doesn’t understand. But I do.” He put his arm around my shoulders. “I’ll look out for you now, little bro’. I’ll show you what’s real.”
And I believed that too.
CHAMELEONS
It was June 1991, and I was sitting outside in the quad at the University of Illinois at Chicago, reading a book on sadomasochistic porn. Five similar books were spread around me in the grass, their raunchy covers absorbing the midday sun. I’d glanced up from the one in my hands and she was standing over me, a girl I guessed to be sixteen. One of those AP high school students, I figured, taking a college c
lass, something in sociology that required her to conduct random interviews around campus. I decided that I would have a little fun with her, claim that I was a graduate student completing my PhD, since, at age twenty-seven, I was old enough for this to be true.
“You’re in the program, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yes indeed,” I said. “I am in the program.”
“I thought so.”
I smiled.
She smiled back and said, “I am too.”
My jaw dropped. “You’re … you’re getting your PhD?”
“That’s the plan.”
She was smarter than I thought. “How old are you?” I asked. “Fifteen? Sixteen?”
“Twenty-one, actually.”
I said I didn’t believe her. She laughed and set down her book bag and then reached inside it to remove a wallet. She showed me her driver’s license, pointing a glossy fingernail to her birth date. She was twenty-one, though I was less curious about her age now than the photo of the white woman next to her ID. She saw me looking at it. “Oh, that’s my mother,” she explained, and then, as if she’d been asked questions about her ethnicity a million times, she added in the same breath, “my father’s black. Or African. Zimbabwean, to be specific.” She paused and extended her hand. “Pardon my manners,” she said. “I’m Brenda Molife. And you’re Jerry Walker, right?”
“How … how did you know that?”
“I heard it when you were introduced yesterday at orientation.”
And then everything clicked. She, like me, was in the Summer Research Opportunity Program: a three-month-long internship designed to prepare minority undergraduates for the rigors of graduate school. Which meant that she was no more a doctoral student than I was. Which also meant that the two of us—along with a dozen other students—would be spending a lot of time together in the coming months. I looked at her again, really for the first time, and saw that she was quite pretty, beautiful, in fact. I asked her if she’d like to get lunch.
Street Shadows Page 5
