“We didn’t actually eat it,” I explained. “We tasted it.”
“Two pieces missing!” she said loudly, and I could hear the patrons’ voices falling away.
“Wait a minute. Are you suggesting I stole the sushi?”
“Two pieces missing!” she snapped. “Next time, don’t eat!”
“I didn’t eat the sushi!” I said, my voice rising to match hers. “I tasted it!”
“Don’t taste next time!”
“How will I know if it’s mushy if I don’t taste it?”
“Sushi is supposed to be mushy! If you don’t like mushy rice, don’t eat! Eat crispy noodles instead!”
The restaurant was quiet now. I looked toward the patrons. Everyone was looking in our direction, mouths agape. I looked at the chef. We stared at each other for an instant before she said, “Here new sushi! Take! Take! But don’t come back!” She sat the container on the counter. I left it there.
On the drive home, I thought of the civil rights workers who had staged protests at lunch counters, putting their dignity, if not their lives, on the line for the right to be served. And here I was, a mere generation later, in no physical danger, my dignity bruised but intact, and my life not in jeopardy. There is victory here, I told myself.
But it was no use. Victory wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted revenge. I would come back that night, I decided, dressed in an all-black outfit, my face hidden beneath a knit ski mask, and throw a brick through the goddamn window. I turned the car around, drove through the parking lot, considered the best escape route, and as I cruised home I decided to return at dawn and carry out the kind of act that would have made Malcolm X proud. Before Brenda or Adrian stirred, I would be back in bed, no worse for the wear. I thought of the cook’s expression when she would arrive to see their window smashed to pieces, a brick resting where I had stood listening to her rant. The image caused me to smile, and all the way home I broke out into wild fits of laughter.
But a short while later, after discovering, to my relief, that I did not own an all-black outfit or a knit ski mask, I wrote a letter instead.
Three mornings later, the restaurant’s owner called; he had received my complaint and wanted to talk in person at my earliest convenience. That moment, it seemed to me, was as convenient as any.
It was just after 3:00 PM. The restaurant was empty. Still, a waitress led Brenda, Adrian, and me to a far corner, where a screen had been placed near a table, shielding it from the rest of the room. Another waitress brought us ice water with lemon wedges. Brenda sat Adrian on her lap and began quietly reading Green Eggs and Ham. A moment later a pudgy white man approached us, followed closely by the chef. “Hello,” he said, smiling. “I’m Jack, and this is my wife, Masako.” They sat across from us. Jack was holding my letter. He looked at it for a long time before speaking. “This is very troubling,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Tell me, please, exactly what happened.”
I relayed the story. When I finished, his wife spoke. “I am not racist,” she said.
“I’m not saying that you are,” I responded. “I’m saying that I cannot think of a logical reason for your treatment of me. My race is a theory.”
“It was busy. I was very busy. I might have had short temper. I apologize if my temper was short.” That was all I needed to hear. I thanked her and started to rise, but stopped when she began speaking again. “I am not racist,” she repeated. “I cannot be. You see, I’m minority, too. Japanese.” I thought she would elaborate, but that was it, her complete defense summed up in her ethnicity. She grinned and went on the offensive. “You too sensitive. You came in very, very sensitive that night.”
“I get very, very sensitive,” I said, “when I am accused of stealing sushi.”
“Do you know how difficult restaurant business is?” she continued. “Bad customers all the time.” She described, then, some of the bad customer behavior, and the stories were amusing, until she singled out blacks. “They order takeout, bring it back half eaten, and demand refund.”
Jack reached over and put his hand on her wrist. “Whites do this, too.”
“But especially blacks,” Masako said.
“Everyone does it,” insisted Jack, now turning to scowl at her. He turned back to Brenda and me. “But that’s beside the point. The bottom line is that all of our customers mean a great deal to us, and we hope you will continue your patronage.” He reached into his breast pocket, removed a slip of paper, and placed it on the table between us. I leaned forward to see it better. It was a gift certificate for twenty-five dollars. When I picked it up, the chef nodded and smiled, confirming in her mind, perhaps, that this was what I’d wanted all along.
During the ride home I broke out into wild laughter again, as I sometimes would over the next few years when I thought of this incident, or happened upon the gift certificate. Even now I cannot help but chuckle as I imagine the chef, standing behind her kitchen’s double doors, her stern face framed in one of the oval windows, waiting for my return.
BREAK-OUT
The teacher patrolled the classroom looking over students’ shoulders, frowning, shaking his head, making his way in my direction. I was hard at work, too busy protracting and compassing to respond when he asked me if I’d been drinking. He asked me again. I pressed my lips tight against a Jim Beam exhale. And then I belched. A large white hand snagged my wrist, causing me to draw a line even more crooked than the others.
I was jerked to my feet and pulled into the storage room, and who knows what would have happened if someone hadn’t knocked on the half-closed door. We turned and saw a girl in a white blouse and a short blue skirt, bobby socks neatly folded on her greasy-looking shins. Her hand was raised and balled into a fist, poised to knock the door again but in the last instant was lowered and thrust forward, revealing two crumbled dollar bills. “Can I get some M&M’s?” she asked. “With nuts?”
The storage room was full of them; crates upon crates that would help fund the girls’ basketball team Mr. Harrison coached on the side. He opened one of the crates and removed a box of candy, exchanging it for the girl’s money. While this was taking place, I noticed a ring of keys on one of the boxes. I slipped it into my pocket. As the girl turned to leave, Mr. Harrison faced me and said with great pity, “You’re a fool.” Then he made me leave.
When I arrived home, my mother was in the kitchen, washing a mountain of dishes. She didn’t want to know why I was back from school so early. She didn’t want to know anything. All of her hope for me was gone, and with it her anger, vanished into thin air with my immense potential.
I made a turkey and spicy mustard sandwich before going to my room. For the next eight hours I thumbed through magazines, napped, and watched TV. It wasn’t until I was getting ready for bed that I remembered the keys. I glanced at my clock; it was almost eleven, not too late to call Tim, or anyone else, for that matter, whose livelihood was generated outside the law. He agreed to pick me up. A few minutes later, dressed in all-black and wearing a knit skullcap, I climbed out of my window and ran to his idling car. Motown thumped from the speakers as we drifted toward school.
He parked in back of the main building near a Dumpster overflowing with full garbage bags. Across the street, a fleet of bun galows loomed in the darkness. I opened my door. Tim didn’t open his. He lit a joint, exhaling in my direction as he talked about his sore left knee and suspicions of car thieves in the area.
“Maybe you should wait here,” I suggested.
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Got a flashlight?”
“It just so happens.”
There were four keys. The third one I tried unlocked a service entrance not far from where the car was parked. I went straight to the home economics room on the second floor. The same key fit. There were maybe forty typewriters, Smith Coronas with long black electrical cords nearly as thick as sailor’s rope. I spent the next half hour carrying twenty of them to the car. When I
brought out the last one, my arms were rubber. Sweat ran down my face and neck. By the dull glow of a streetlight, I could see that my shirt was streaked with dirt and oil and spicy mustard. Tim started the engine and put the car in drive. As we started to pull away from the building, I told him to stop.
“What for?”
“M&M’s.”
“M&M’s?”
“With nuts.”
There were probably a hundred crates. I figured there must be a safe. I didn’t mention the safe to Tim, only the candy, for which he said he had no use. As I climbed out of the car, we agreed to meet at his apartment in the morning.
The same key unlocked the door to the drafting room but not the storage room. None of the others worked either. There was an opened transom, though, and I climbed on a nearby table and squeezed my upper body through. A puff of musty air entered my nostrils, followed by the unlikely smell of perfume. I’d forgotten to bring the flashlight and it was too dark to see the floor, but without another thought I eased my legs over the transom, released my grip, and crashed down below. I lay still for a moment, stunned less from the fall than by the sudden realization that this would be my last day of high school.
When I tried to stand, my left ankle gave way in pain. It was broken, I figured, or at least severely sprained, and this knowledge fueled my determination the way a bloodied nose motivates a boxer. I struggled to one foot and rubbed my palms up and down the wall until I found and turned on the light switch. There were about fifty crates of the hard-shelled candy, many of them knocked over by my clumsy entry. I didn’t see a safe, but rather, sitting on a metal file cabinet off in a corner, a shoe box, its lid slightly open and revealing a pile of money.
But when I rushed forward, I saw that I was wrong; the shoe box contained mainly candy receipts and other slips of paper.
I hobbled into the drafting room and, in accordance with protocol, started dumping things. I overturned stools and tables, scattered T-squares, bowled a chair into the wall, sent tiny pencil erasers sailing through the air like pink shrapnel. I found a piece of chalk and stood panting and sweaty at the blackboard, wanting to write something dark and vicious, a phrase of such memorable contemptuousness that wayward students would adopt it as their creed. But I put the chalk down and left, because the only word that came to mind was fool.
BAIT
Ned was a classicist from the backwoods of Mississippi. He always dressed very casually, “fashionably poor” I think it is called, with ripped jeans and open-toed sandals; T-shirts frayed and unraveling at the sleeves. This was his exact outfit that October of 2002, merely a month into my academic career, when he poked his head into my office and said, “We shouldn’t have hired you.”
I offered him a chair.
“No thanks,” he said, stepping inside. He glanced at his watch and spoke quickly. “You clearly weren’t the most qualified of the candidates for the position.”
“So then tell me, Ned, why was I hired?”
“Your wife teaches here. And because of, well, another obvious reason.”
He did not state the obvious reason, but it was fair to assume he was referring to my race. The minority faculty at the college numbered somewhere around 1 percent. I was the only black person in our department. I was, in fact, only the second black person my department had ever hired in its 165-year history. I may also have been the most qualified candidate for the position, but as long as affirmative action exists, whether or not it is actually applied, “best” is a distinction blacks will rarely be allowed to claim.
“Anyway,” he went on, “the whole department knows you shouldn’t have been hired. I’m just the only person honest enough to tell you. That’s also why I’m the only person who didn’t vote for you.”
“Well, I can’t say that I blame you.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You agree that you aren’t qualified?”
“No,” I said, “but I do agree that there might have been better fits.”
“Really?”
“The ad expressed a preference for an Americanist. I’m an Interdisciplinarian.” I leaned forward and whispered, “I may not have voted for me either.” I sat back, loosening the knot of my tie. “Nevertheless, I’m here now, so we both may as well make the best of it. Besides, my students seem to enjoy my classes.”
“I’ve heard. We share some of the same kids. They like you. They think you’re great, actually.”
“Which,” I said, “raises an interesting question.” I sat on the edge of my chair. “Knowing what you know now, that I’m not an awful teacher, and that I do seem to have a handle on the mate rial, if you could do it all over again, would you vote for me?”
“No.” He snickered and looked at his watch before disappearing into the hall. I was left feeling a mixture of confusion and anger, with anger gaining ground. I couldn’t imagine what would motivate him to initiate such an exchange, particularly when a likely response would be a loss of temper. Now my conspiratorial mind was beginning to reel, and it didn’t take me long to conclude that perhaps his intention all along had been to provoke me to some foolish response. It was the oldest trick in the book, one that I had fallen for often. One incident in particular came to mind.
It was 1980, and I was sixteen, crying, and in the back of a squad car. The cop sitting next to me was large, white, and male, standard for black ghettos at the time, and it is a peculiar trick of memory that I see him now with Ned’s face. “You piece of shit!” he was yelling. “I could break your fucking neck!” It was a wonder he hadn’t already. His hand was so tight on my throat that I could barely breathe. The nose of his revolver was pressed against my ribs. We were parked behind a police station, as reasonable a place as any for my murder. The officer no doubt would have claimed I had made an attempt for his gun, when, in actuality, I had only insulted his mother.
We had just arrived at the police station when it occurred. I was sitting next to my best friend Steve, who, like me, had been arrested for drinking in public and for truancy—it was 10:00 AM on a Monday. We should have been in school. But school was of little interest to me in those days; I had dedicated my life to the pursuit of trouble. I found it that morning in the company of winos. Steve and I stood with them in an alley, huddled in the shade of tenement stairs as we shared lies and a quart of Wild Irish Rose. The police appeared out of nowhere. Everyone was searched, but only Steve and I were handcuffed. We watched the officers empty the bottle onto the curb before walking us to the car. Behind us, I could hear the winos complaining.
“So, were you two niggers drinking watermelon wine?” was what started it all. I do not recall which cop said it, only that the other one laughed and responded in kind. They went back and forth, raising the ante at my and Steve’s expense, and this was our entertainment during the entire fifteen-minute ride to the station, only I had found it less and less amusing so that, by the time we arrived, my anger was out of control. When one of the officers grabbed my arm and pulled me from the car, I looked him square in the eyes. “Your mother,” I said, “is a whore.” His face flashed red. He removed my handcuffs, pushed me back into the car, got in with me, and closed the door. It was not until he reached for his revolver that I understood what was happening.
And this is what saved me: Steve pounding his fists on the hood of the car, screaming like he was insane. The other cop grabbed his arms, trying to corral him, but Steve was too strong and kept breaking free. I could hear him yelling, “He didn’t mean it! He didn’t mean it!” and I wanted to join in, but I was being choked, and starting to cry. Police began to converge from all directions, nightsticks in hand, and while Steve was being clubbed into submission, the officer rammed his revolver into my gut before putting it away.
It is a vivid memory, its lesson clear, and yet I find myself too frequently that sixteen-year-old again, risking so much with so little to gain. I was lucky that day in the parking lot. And I was lucky that day in my office, that I did not take my colleague’s bait. But the tempt
ation was there, and that is what worries me. I have to be careful. I have to be smart. Steve can’t save me now.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
A guard came to the cell jangling keys and asked who had the blind father. The seven inmates looked around, fixing their attention on me when I raised my hand. “Get up!” the guard yelled. He inserted the key into the lock as I rose from where I’d sat on the floor. When I stood before him, he swung the gate open and asked, “So this is how you behave with a blind daddy?” It was a rhetorical question, apparently, because before I could answer he grabbed my arm and yanked me from the cell.
My father stood by the front desk holding his cane. The cane wasn’t necessary, because he was with Tim, and I realized later he’d brought it only to play on the sympathies of the police. He never wore dark glasses, but I can now imagine him wearing a pair; anything that might have helped get my latest brush with the law—this time for a few joints of marijuana—swept under the rug. But the cane seemed to be working. “It must be difficult,” the guard said, “being a handicapped parent, especially of a delinquent like this one.”
“Oh, it is,” my father replied, using a meek voice I’d never heard before. “It’s difficult for my wife as well, who is blind, too, by the way. And diabetic.”
My paperwork was discarded. I was released to my father’s custody.
We piled into Tim’s car with me in back. On the ride home, our father returned to being the man I’d expected, proud and stern, his voice straining with rage as he threatened to throw me out of the house, as he had Tim a year earlier, and Tommy a year before that. And in response I became the son he expected me to be, respectful of his authority, apologetic, my words barely above a whisper as I vowed to straighten up and get my life in order.
At home, I was sent to my room and told not to leave except for the kitchen or bathroom. It was only 2:00 PM. Eight hours later my father called me from the top of the stairs to make sure I was still there; after I responded I heard him lock the back door. Then there was creaking overhead as he moved through the living room to lock the front door too. I put away the magazine I held and got in bed with the full intention of sleeping, but when I was still awake an hour later I turned on my TV. There was nothing on I wanted to watch, so I dropped to the floor and did some pushups. After that I did sit-ups and jumping jacks. I was doing deep knee bends when Greg’s grinning face pressed against my window screen.
Street Shadows Page 14
