Angry Black White Boy

by Adam Mansbach

  The man stepped into a clearing and the noise of his footsteps abated. He crossed his arms and hulked, immobile. The woods were still save for the shallow sounds of Macon’s breath. Suddenly a flashlight blazed, and Macon realized he was surrounded by six large black men, all standing or copping cholo-squats, all dressed in black from skullies to boots.

  “Welcome to the People’s Cooperative Guerrilla Theatre,” boomed the sentry who had snared him, thrusting a paperback at Macon, “an aggressive, community-based literacy program head-quartered here in Morningside Park. We recruit randomly and don’t take no for an answer. Tonight’s reading is of Henrik Ibsen’s classic A Doll House. We would be honored to have you play the role of Nora. Are you familiar with the play?”

  “Uh, no, no I’m not,” stammered Macon. He blinked, befuddled, and almost wet his pants in relief. “And actually, I’m kind of tired. It’s two-thirty in the morning. Why do you perform so late? And in the woods?”

  A squatting man sprang to his feet and rushed at Macon. “Arms up,” he barked. Macon jumped back, then obeyed. The man bent and snaked a tape measure around Macon’s waist. “Size ten, size ten,” he muttered, and remerged with the shadows.

  “There isn’t a whole lot of support in the community,” explained the sentry. “Not since we expanded our focus beyond African-American playwrights. It’s hard enough getting black folks to come see theater to begin with, but do you know what it’s like trying to convince the Frederick Douglass Playhouse to let you do The Importance of Being Earnest or Rosencrantz and GuildensternAre Dead?”

  “I can imagine,” said Macon. “But what’s wrong with African-American playwrights? I think—”

  “We ain’t a monochromatic people!” shouted the sentry. “I got a lotta colors in my closet, you understand? Black man got a right to wear pink when he damn well pleases. Got a right to wear turquoise and chartreuse and motherfucking polka dots if we want to. I ain’t just a raisin in the sun. I’m a tomato in the rain forest.”

  “A cantaloupe in the desert!” someone bellowed.

  “A dandelion in a fine sea mist!”

  “I understand.” Macon nodded. Bereft of other options, he decided to be the best damn Nora the People’s Cooperative Guerrilla Theatre had ever seen.

  “Which only makes the work we do more vital,” resumed the sentry with an air of satisfaction. “Costume!” He clapped twice. “Chop-chop.”

  The man with the tape measure returned, a long floral-print dress laid across his arms. “This oughta fit just great,” he whispered. Macon stared at him, eyes wide, then at the sentry.

  “Over your clothes is fine,” the sentry said, to Macon’s continued relief. “Now let’s get started. Act One, Scene One. A small townhouse in the center of Oslo . . .” Macon stepped into the dress. The sentry zipped him up.

  Chapter Seven

  “What happened to you?” asked Andre over his shoulder, straightening the piles of folded T-shirts in his dresser drawer. “You get laid or something?”

  “Waylaid.” Macon rubbed his eyes. He’d taken his final bow at four in the morning, accepted a bouquet of black lillies from the People’s Cooperative Guerrilla Theatre, and stumbled home to nightmares.

  “How was the Nuyorican?”

  “Pretty wack. How was freshman orientation this morning?”

  “Very educational.”

  “How so?”

  “I learned there are a lot of stupid motherfuckers here.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Let’s see . . .” He tapped two fingers to his upper lip, then raised them in recollection. “Apparently, somebody in Housing decided to play a joke and make the fifth floor of John Jay the All Dave Floor. Most of the Daves are pretty pissed. What else . . .”

  Macon looked down at the bedsheets twisted around his frame. He was a violent sleeper. “When do classes start, anyway?”

  “Today, fool. They assigned us academic advisers; you’re supposed to meet with them before you register.”

  Macon threw off the covers, swung his legs onto the floor, and rifled through the untouched information packet on his desk. “Dr. Enzo Palermo-Wang, professor of biology. I’m sure he knows a shitload about which English classes I should take.”

  “Mine taught grad-level Farsi, dude. She didn’t even know we had a poli-sci department. Skip it.” Andre closed the last drawer and sat down.

  “It’s not like we have that many choices, anyway,” said Macon. “Gotta take Lit Hum, Art Hum, Music Hum.”

  “Put Deez Nuts in Your Mouth and Hum.”

  “Cute.” Macon flipped through his coursebook. “Here we go: Seminar in Black Fiction: Weldon Johnson to Baraka. Hell yeah. Professor A. Jenson. Ever heard of him?”

  “Her. She published a book called Why I Feel Like Bigger Thomas and Look Like Mary Dalton: Black Power and White Feminism. I read part of it in high school.”

  “First class is at six. Interested?”

  “Nah. I’ma chill, hit Intro to Black Studies at quarter to five, then try and holler at this Barnard chick I met last night. I love the fact that we’ve got this huge reservoir of women right across the street.”

  “They’re supposed to be chickenheads, though.”

  “Exactly, dude, exactly. You ain’t checking nothing out before six?”

  “Gotta work.”

  An hour later Macon was behind the wheel, unshowered, unshaven, and unsure. Duct tape covered every ID number in the cab, just in case. He steered aimlessly, meandering through Midtown and ignoring white passengers for their own good. The urge to rob them was too strong, and so for the first hour of his shift, Macon only picked up one fare: an old Asian woman whom he shuttled across Central Park to East Ninetieth without incident. There was a delicious pleasure in restraining himself, driving past these suits and knowing he could pick up and pick off any one of them; they’d stand shaking and dispossessed wherever he chose to leave them, with Macon’s castigations burning in their ears and their sense of privilege wrenched loose. How long would he hold out before he chose one? Who knew. He would make an art of it, let his instincts turn the wheel while his mind wandered.

  A little mood music, perhaps. He turned on Hot 97 but they were playing R&B and he flicked off the radio, disgusted, stewed for a moment and remembered he was in New York and turned it back on and pressed scan. The numbers gyrated across the dial and Macon passed through foreign regions: rock and jazz and Spanish music, more jazz and then, finally, at the tip of the dial, a whimsical college DJ, bless his heart, was rhythm-scratching a bass drop over the “Ain’t No Future in Your Frontin” instrumental, a funky, forgotten, painfully obvious blending of two classic breakbeats which had yielded MC Breed’s only hit and put his hometown of Flint, Michigan, on the map for a hot second. Macon nodded with bump-and-grind nostalgia, waiting for the DJ to stop teasing and drop whatever it was he kept hinting at with his limber left hand.

  And here it came. Oh, shit. “The Nigga You Love to Hate.” When word had trickled through Boston that Ice Cube had hooked up with the Bomb Squad, Public Enemy’s production team, for his solo record, the cross-coastal handshake had been an alliance of such magnitude, a got-your-back move of such potency, that it had filled Macon with surging uplift. It was a moment on par with Luke Skywalker’s Return of the Jedi back-flip-off-the-plank-catch-the-light-saber-from-R2-and-start-fucking-fools-up, or that chapter at the end of every Hardy Boys book when just as things are looking hopeless, their pops and two of his buddies bust down the door and double up their fists.

  And then the song was in full cacophonous rollick and it was April 29, 1992, again, and all Macon wanted to do was scream Rodney King! and kill every white person he saw, starting with his town and ending with himself. Macon walked out of his house that night and didn’t make it four blocks to the train stop. As he juked through the sleepy streets of suburbia, every quiet house was an affront. Lamps glowed pleasantly behind windows. Living rooms flickered with television, the white noise of laugh tracks f
izzing from open windows. Kids did algebra homework upstairs and Macon sat on the clean, grassy curb, three thousand geographic and racial and economic miles from ground zero and in no danger at all, and cried for the first time in years. He wanted to see some fucking flames, to make some if he had to. He peered into anonymous windows and ripped at blades of grass like a three-year-old and felt the violence race around inside him.

  What were they all watching in there? Macon’s mind composed a montage, quick-cuts from the greatest hits of U.S. entertainment: Amos ’n’ Andy blackface crooning, Ali roaring over Liston, Louis Armstrong knee-deep in soap bubbles, wearing a leopard-skin toga in some 1930s b-flick with his trumpet in his hand, the good Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable surrounded by his loving brood of bougie laughing children. Courthouse cameras capturing the wholesome grins and hearty handshakes of Emmett Till’s acquitted killers, fire hoses knocking folks across the block as Brooklyn turns to Birmingham in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Abernathy freeze-frame pointing at the skyline as King slumps dead onto the terrace floor, stage lights glinting off the highlights in Chuck Berry’s processed hairdo as he duckwalks down into forever, George Wallace all bad teeth and rigid fingers in the doorway of a Southern college, Big Jay McNeely blowing high notes on his back on the bar-top as frantic Marlboro-sleeved whiteboys pump their fists. And finally the gruesome dance of billy clubs, boots, and tazers across the prostrate, foggy form of Rodney King, a recital Macon had memorized.

  Outside, under the visible infinity of sky, was no place to be when you felt the world collapsing. Better to go somewhere with a ceiling, so you could pretend that elsewhere might be different. But this was the same sky they had in Los Angeles, and Macon felt like this moment, this hollowness, would stretch forever. Life could never untwist. He’d still be weeping, quietly, years from now as he took out the trash and fed the dog and checked his kids’ homework.

  He sucked down a deep, shuddery breath and wiped his nose against his wrist and stood up, knowing he wasn’t going downtown to meet Lajuan and bomb the outside of the warehouse in industrial Braintree they’d been scoping. He wondered how long Lajuan would wait before going home or hitting the spot by himself, and then it struck Macon that he wasn’t there at all. Why would he be? Lajuan was somewhere thinking fucked-up thoughts too, on his rooftop or the corner where the men stood, outside Giant Liquors.

  Part of Macon wanted to be there, the only whiteboy milling angrily about and pounding fists against mailboxes, trying to figure out how riots started, plotting what to loot. Part of him always wanted to be there, but tonight it was a different part. Tonight Macon wanted to be Whiteness Itself, not to blend in but to tear his shirt off and blind them with the paleness of his skin and let them claw it from him, make his contribution to the struggle by providing whiteness for the stomping. The part of him that wanted it was weak, though, too weak to act. And what it truly wanted, Macon knew now, was absolution, not abuse. To make its sacrificial gesture and be turned down, told Not All White People Are Like That.

  He walked the rest of the way to the T stop just to do something. The first train that pulled in was going outbound, deeper into the suburbs, but Macon didn’t care. He hunkered on the lurid orange seat with elbows on his knees, and at the next stop three white cops got on the train and stood together in the middle of the car: bulky, fleshy, uncomfortably stuffed into their uniforms. Avoiding people’s eyes, then giving them the once-over when they looked the other way. As eager to pick a fight as any high-school bully.

  Macon clenched his jaw until his cheeks rippled, and stared bloody murder at the sides of their heads: an imaginary act of courage. The way their meat hooks rested atop their service revolvers was grotesque. They felt good about being hated, it was clear; had learned to regard the hatred with contempt and the people who hated them as criminals, potential if not actual.

  Macon got off at the next stop. The station was the fulcrum of a small commercial district; next to the tracks lay a parking lot and across the street were stores: a post office, a barbershop, a deli. Everything closed promptly at six. You couldn’t get a bite to eat around here after dark, thanks to blue laws intended to preserve the burb’s Quaint Village Charm.

  For once Macon was thankful for the soulless, leafy quiet, so different from the crosscurrents of music and conversation that made him feel so recklessly alive when he hung on Aura’s treeless block. His all-black painting coveralls hung damp and baggy; he felt small and weak, malnourished, empty. It only took a few minutes to go from thinking the crying would never end to knowing he’d never cry again. Sadness dried and hardened, tightened on his face like sweat. Froze into salt and anger. Evaporated, turned to pain, then rained again.

  Waiting for the first new drops, Macon swiveled his head and saw a cop car squatting empty and alone in the parking lot, a regular cruiser just like the one Lajuan had been thrown up against last week. They’d stopped and searched him for no reason in front of the bodega on his block, twisted his arm behind his back so hard he’d thought it broken: a white and black duo who drove off covering their badges. The old men playing Beat the Champion timed chess across the street had looked over from their folding chairs, their eyes level with Lajuan’s as he lay facedown on the cop car, but they only met his stare for a moment. They were embarrassed to look too long, Lajuan told Macon the next day. Been playing chess on that same block since the days of Joe Louis and couldn’t do a thing but look away.

  Macon tried to remember what he’d seen first, sitting there at the train stop: the trash can or the newspaper bin. The moment when he took the lighter and the spray paint from his pocket was the one he’d never forgotten. Sometimes he and Aura practiced piecing in nasty, vermin-filled alleys, the better to be ignored in, and Aura had figured out that not even rats are stupid enough to keep fucking with you once you demonstrate the ability to shoot fire, so Macon always carried the ingredients for a flamethrower when he went painting at night.

  The trash can was solid metal, rusted on the inside from wet garbage. They’d already replaced them in the city with the grated kind—harder to start a fire in—but out here in the burbs they hadn’t bothered. The can was next to a recycling bin piled high with Boston Globes, artifacts from the commuter ritual of throwing out the day’s news at journey’s end to preserve the work/home dichotomy. Each late-edition paper was folded past the front-page flames consuming black Los Angeles and open to the sports section. The Red Sox win again!

  Newspaper burned too quickly, so Macon stepped out of his coveralls and threw them in the can, too, figuring they’d catch for sure because of all the aerosol fumes with which they were saturated. In Nikes, boxers, and his threadbare Welcome to the Terror-domeT-shirt, he lifted the trash can sideways to his chest and found it lighter than expected, carried it over and threw it clean through the windshield of the cop car. The glass collapsed around it with a beauty that reminded Macon of the way a wave will sometimes break, furling over itself and smacking the sand with a perfect circular sound. Even the shards, the tiny bitlets, glittered in the moonlight like a whole shitload of diamonds.

  The trash can rolled to a quiet stop on the front seat, half its contents spilling out, and even though he should have been concerned about the crash and acted quick, Macon was cool. There wasn’t another soul in the world right then, just Macon and the ghosts of a thousand cops, a million handcuffed kids, smoke drifting east across the continent. He stood for a good five minutes, staring at what he had done, not quite crying but breathing in big soblike gasps, before he clambered up the car’s hood like a little kid, as if this crippled monster were his jungle gym, flicked his lighter and aimed a blast of Krylon flat silver and brought the flames dancing in his head into the world.

  The coveralls flared up immediately. Macon made sure everything was burning good and strong, that the fuzzy cop floor mats themselves were thoroughly aflame, before he rolled down off the hood and ran across the parking lot and waited underneath a streetlight.

  If what he’
d heard was true, it wouldn’t take long for the fire to reach the gas line and spread to the fuel tank, and then kaboom. Lajuan had this uncle they called Revolutionary Stan, because all he talked about was When the Revolution Comes. His hobby was explosives. He wore army fatigues with a Black Panther Party button on the heart, and Macon liked him as soon as they met because Stan lifted his nappy, balding head up from the fridge and said, “Lajuan, get this whiteboy outta my kitchen before I tan your hide.” Every time Macon saw him after that he made sure to have something with him he knew Stan would like, a book like Soul on Ice or Seize the Time and once a Gil Scott-Heron tape, and soon Stan thought Macon was ridiculous and later they got cool. That was something most white folks didn’t get: “Fuck white people” was almost always a statement made of mesh, nothing absolute or personal. It was caution, logic, history. Not all snakes are poisonous, but only a crazy man runs around hugging every snake he sees until he finds a good one.

  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.