by Ron Suskind
It’s time to take stock. She needs to do something about the whole mess. A month ago, she felt like she was confronting the debt of back rent head on, and maybe even cutting a path to solid ground. On January 28, there was a hearing at Housing Court, a special subsidiary chamber of the civil courts system that mostly handles landlord-tenant disputes. It was a few days after Cedric went back to college, and Barbara was deeply thankful that she didn’t have to go while he was there; she’d managed to conceal her dire situation from him. Barac sent one of its men to lay it all out: how Ms. Barbara Jennings failed to make her $452 payment on December 1 and, on December 15, Barac initiated eviction proceedings. On the day of the hearing, Barbara was actually almost three months behind. The judge asked what happened, and she thought about going through it all, describing how she was just making her bills at the end of October but then needed to withdraw money for parents weekend. But instead she just said she’d “fallen behind on a few things, your honor, and I can get back on track.” The gavel slammed: she was ordered to make a two-month payment on February 1 and another on March 1 to get even. But a few days ago, on February 15, no check for $904 had arrived at Barac, and the landlord restarted the eviction clock.
Running through it all again puts her stomach in a knot. Not that the ticking of debt and disaster ever completely leaves her mind—it’s always running on some just audible track, continuous play. She can ignore it most times, as long as she keeps focused on the day-to-day matters of office politics or squabbles at church or a pair of shoes she’s been eyeing. But then there are nights like this, once every couple of weeks, triggered usually by a letter or a dunning call, when everything flips and the din of obligations is suddenly deafening.
She grabs the letter and opens it on her lap—$1,352 currently owed in back rent, plus $340 in late fees and court costs. Then she looks past the letterhead to her lovely maroon shoes. A swell of defensiveness rises in her, and she indulges it. After all, it’s not like she’s been living like a queen; an extra $100 a week or so in her pocket, rather than the landlord’s, has meant that her other bills are finally on time and that she can start paying off old debts—some of them years old. And, yes, there have been some shoes and dresses, and contributions, of course, to church, but nothing all that extravagant.
She drops the letter on the table and shuts her eyes, fighting the familiar urge to let herself off the hook, and then she rises with a groan. Her mouth feels parched, and she gets a drink of Coke from the refrigerator before collapsing onto the couch and propping the pillows. Lying back, eyes wide, she thinks of a phone conversation with Cedric a few weeks ago. He was going on about some of the problems with Rob. Having heard much about this during the first semester, Barbara had been thinking about what she might say to help him—and that night she got her chance.
“You know, Lavar,” she had said, “I think Rob is a test that God has put before you. That, even though he couldn’t be more different than you, you have to somehow see what’s godly in him. It’s a test all right.”
Cedric seemed to really listen, which made Barbara feel good for days afterward. Thinking about it now makes her smile and feel slightly strengthened. “Getting that back rent, that’s my test,” she whispers. “He’s got his test. I’ve got mine.”
And saying the words so God might hear them, too, is just enough to buy her some sleep.
Hey, you want to go to breakfast?” Rob asks, moving toward the door on his way to the showers.
Cedric, putting on his socks, looks up. “Ummm, sure. Why not?”
There has been a thaw. There had to be, or it would have ended with punches thrown. Both of them knew it.
So today it’s “Want to go to breakfast?” Just like that. Amazing, Cedric thinks, as he laces up his Reeboks.
Small calibrations were already occurring in their relationship in the last days before winter break, though Cedric didn’t realize it at the time. They talked one night during finals like regular roommates. It was late and the lights were out—that must have helped. It was real casual. Rob asked about Cedric’s high school, what it was like, and Cedric went through it, laying it all out simply—the gangs and the violence and how he was singled out—and Rob listened closely, asking a few thoughtful questions.
“I never had to deal with any of the kind of stuff you did,” he said quietly. “Must have been pretty rough.”
“Yeah, wasn’t too great,” Cedric said, fatigued by then from the conflict and ready for a temporary truce. He knew that a lot of tough finals were avalanching on Rob, who had been haggard and unshaven for days, his wool hat pulled half over his ears, looking like a smooth layer had been burned off of him. He seemed different, more open. So Cedric, looking up at the dark ceiling, ventured a bit further. “I guess we really make quite a pair. Huh?”
“No doubt,” Rob laughed softly. “You know, Cedric, we should have had a conversation like this the first week of school.”
In the month since their return from winter break, relations have been cordial, if not exactly warm. It’s not like they’re partying all night. But breakfast this morning goes well, just the two of them. They talk about classes this semester and goings-on around campus as Cedric downs a few bowls of Golden Grahams. Rob mentions the “Wall of Shame” scandal that’s getting ink in the Brown Daily Herald. Cedric says he doesn’t read the paper much, so Rob fills him in on the object of controversy: a wall in one of the boys’ bathrooms with graffiti listing the names of black guys who date white girls. It’s sparked a controversy about “keeping with your own and all that,” Rob says earnestly and adds, “It makes me really angry, a real outrage, you know?” Cedric smiles at this. “Yeah, makes me angry, too,” he says, appreciating Rob’s effort.
As Rob gets up to leave, he mentions that a couple of kids in the unit are getting together at Cafe Paragon at eight for his nineteenth birthday. “It’s just us,” he says, with a sort of studied casualness. “You should come by.”
Cedric, surprised by the invitation, can do little more than nod out a maybe. Sitting alone at the long table, he pours another bowl of Golden Grahams, thinks about Rob’s awkward description of the Wall of Shame, and realizes how far he and Zayd traveled in their dialogue. Yes, it was tiring to always be talking about race, about black views of this or white views of that, but at least it was talking. A few days after their edgy Thursday night exchange at the Gate, they had it out. It was the last Sunday in January, and Cedric stood in front of Zayd’s TV while he and Bear were trying to watch Zayd’s copy of Pulp Fiction. That got things started, and eventually there was screaming about disrespect and some money Cedric owed Zayd for the R. Kelly CD—all of it just an excuse to yell and go their separate ways.
They haven’t spoken since, and Cedric now realizes that the timing of the split was lousy. February is a bad time to be estranged from your best friend—a month when freshmen tend to distill and discard some of the unfamiliar, insecure elements of the first semester that kept them all holding on to each other, traveling in large, safe groups. Now that everyone has been through one round of finals and a revealing month at home, it’s time to make some choices about who your close friends will be and how you’ll define yourself under Brown’s implicit guidelines, as first laid out in the diversity workshop.
Though most of the Unit 15ers still have one foot planted in some tight, vetted clique on the hallway, plenty of them also have the other foot searching for solid ground elsewhere. Without Zayd, Cedric prowled around the campus through February, mostly by himself, observing the segregation. The white girls formed the feminist camp, boasting a force of numbers that make it Brown’s most formidable interest group. Along with rape crisis meetings and awareness sessions, there are the larger formal events, like evening lectures led by professors from the Women’s Studies Department or visiting feminist dignitaries.
One night, walking by an auditorium one floor above the Gate, Cedric peeked into one. A black woman was talking about “empowerment.” Had to b
e an audience of five hundred, all women as far as he could see, and he spotted a couple of girls from the unit. Eating breakfast alone the next morning, Cedric found an article about the speaker in the school paper, about her being a lesbian and all. There’s a big interest group overlap there—between the feminists who also happen to be lesbians or are experimenting with it and this other big crowd, the LGBTQA, or the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning Alliance. March begins their appreciation month, and there are posters everywhere about upcoming events. Cedric looked at one posted in the math building and shook his head. A Gala Leather Lunch, Queer Dress-up Day, gay porno movies—real stomach turners, for him, but not as shocking as when he first arrived. Actually knowing people who go in for this stuff has made it increasingly difficult to remain as judgmental as he once was.
For one, there’s John Crews, a black sophomore who’s the minority peer counselor for the unit. In an angry memo he slid under dorm room doors in November about poor attendance at some sexual preference outreach, he told everyone he was bisexual. Cedric and Zayd hooted about it for a while, saying they didn’t want to see him in the shower, but after that faded, Cedric had to admit that Crews wasn’t such a bad guy. And then there’s Molly Olsen, the bald girl that Cedric and Barbara passed at orientation and thought was undergoing chemotherapy. She and Cedric talk sometimes. Her head, of course, was shaved on purpose, she told Cedric, because she “didn’t want to be held captive by male notions of female beauty.” He sees a lot of girls with shaved heads. Cedric knows they don’t hang with guys and presumes they’re toying around with lesbian stuff, but he never bothers bringing it up with Molly.
Then, of course, there are the racial and ethnic groups. At lunch, right after President’s Day weekend, Sonya Garza, a Latino girl in the unit, talked about this class called Hispanics/Latinos in the United States that she said “completely changed my life.” There are mostly Latino kids in it, and she has been spending a lot of time with the Latin American Students Association lately, or La Fuerza Latina, or one of the other Latin groups. They have salsa dances and special dinners. The Asian kids in the unit, Cedric also notices, are suddenly spending more time with their various groups. There seem to be a million of them—Korean Students Association, one for the Japanese, one for students from Hong Kong. The list is endless. Even Zeina Mobassaleh, the hypergregarious girl from Holton-Arms School in D.C. who’s sort of like the unit’s social director, has vanished into something called the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, one of the big Arab groups. She may even be an officer.
Though there’s a group for every ethnicity—sometimes loosely presided over by a professor who teaches in that cultural discipline—Cedric has noticed that the black students have a special place in the firmament. For one thing, they have their own dorm, Harambee House, which offers a nucleus for activities. That’s where Chiniqua has disappeared to. She still asks Cedric to come, and he still holds back, feeling like going over there and disappearing into that huge clique would represent some sort of defeat, a retreat from what originally brought him to Brown. Lately, though, he just doesn’t see her around much and sometimes wonders if he should just go one day to Harambee, just to find her.
That leaves the mostly white, heterosexual guys—“the oppressor group,” Cedric remembers Kim Sherman saying at the diversity workshop—who have nowhere to go. They might branch off into little bands, like John Frank singing with the Brown Derbies, but basically they just wander about unlabeled, serving nicely as props for all the other groups.
Cedric figures a few of them will be wandering over to Cafe Paragon tonight for Rob’s birthday. All that’s left to do, as he strolls down to Thayer Street after dinner, is decide whether he’s going to go.
It’s been a strange, solitary month, different from the bitter isolation and ostracism of the fall, where he felt out of control. By now he realizes he’s learned plenty about how to mix with the other kids and about ways he’s slowly changing, discarding some of his fears and doubts and forming attachments.
All of which makes his current exile mostly self-imposed, a remnant, maybe, of long years when he became accustomed to being alone, convincing himself that it meant he was special—and maybe better in some fundamental, godly way—than the other kids on the street or at church or at Ballou. He had to tie his identity to that notion of separateness; it was the only way he could stay on course and keep his sanity, really, as they hurled insults at him about racial betrayal or insufficient maleness and foolhardy optimism. Here, no one is really hurling anything. They’re just all going about their business—everyone in their own little show—and he has to find some other way to feel special. Being alone doesn’t seem to be working.
He mulls over all this as he walks, haltingly, down Thayer, looking at his watch and realizing they’re probably all at Cafe Paragon already. It’s a cool but brilliantly clear evening, stars out, and he pulls closed the neck of his bulky green parka.
He sees Cafe Paragon a block down the street, bustling with people flowing in and out the door. It’s really a bar at night, with lots of noise and drinking and smoking, the kind of place he’s been warned against visiting his whole life—by Bishop and his mother—a licentious spot where anything might happen and the last place a holy person, a special person of God, ought to be.
Just a few feet away from the entrance, he hesitates and veers right into the College Hill Bookstore, grabbing a Billboard off the rack. He quickly flips through the top 40, top 20, Top Albums, Top Singles, total revenues, CD sales figures, and realizes he’s already memorized all of them from a Billboard he bought a week ago. He stops, gently closes the magazine, lays it back on the rack, and just stands there, feeling a sudden nostalgia for his shut-in’s life of television, CDs, and friendships with two-dimensional images. It’s clear (so achingly clear as he hovers, empty-handed, near the wall of glossy magazines) that he’ll need to start unfolding in some fresh and frightening ways to keep moving forward.
The inside of Cafe Paragon is smoky and as loud as a train station. Everyone hails a welcome as he plunks down in an empty chair at the end of a long row of pushed-together tables, conveniently near the door.
It feels fine to be in here, sort of energizing. Everyone except Cedric orders food—he’s already eaten and has no money, anyway—but the conversation, ricocheting across the table, offers plenty of sustenance. It’s mostly guys from the unit, six of them—plus Maura McLarty, Zeina Mobassaleh, and Corry Mascitelli—and Cedric doesn’t feel he needs to say much. His presence alone seems to be appreciated. Ira Volker, sitting cattycorner to Cedric’s left, eventually engages him in a heated discussion about the unavailability of Tupac Shakur’s latest CD single. Ira is digging in with the position that since it’s not being stocked at Sam Goody’s up the street, it can’t be bought. Cedric, grinning, slams him with knowledge about CD packaging and distribution, capping it with, “I study music, do you study music?” When he looks around, Cedric realizes everyone at the table is taking delight in his show, and he laughs airily. In this warm wash of ease, Cedric then listens intently to the talk of national politics and summer internships, even though he doesn’t care much about either subject.
As nine o’clock nears, everyone starts pulling out driver’s licenses or fake IDs to try to order beer, and Cedric feels an urge to go. He doesn’t have a driver’s license, something he’s embarrassed about, and drinking beer is definitely something he has no intention of doing. So he sings a verse of “Happy Birthday” to Rob and rises.
“Thanks for coming, Cedric,” Rob says.
And Cedric nods, “Thanks for asking me.”
Walking back to the dorm, he senses that he’s taken a step, albeit small, in an intriguing direction, and the brisk night air feels good on his face. Back in the dorm room, still feeling the bracing air in his nostrils, he sticks to his evening plan. The Grammy Awards are on tonight, a show Cedric watches every year. He flips on the TV and settles in. Despite a great gospel numb
er—where Shirley Caesar is joined by Whitney Houston, prompting Cedric to leap from his bed and sing lustily—the Grammies end up being a disappointment. Mariah Carey, one of his favorites, is aced out on best album, the second to last award, leaving her with no Grammies despite six nominations. Cedric watches her dispirited face flash across the screen and turns off the TV, not so much disgusted by her losing as with him being a person who would care so much.
He opens the door, pokes out his head, and then leans against the frame. Zayd walks by with Bear on their way to Zayd’s room. Neither looks his way. Sonya Garza and her white liberal Minnesotan roomie, Nicole, are on the carpet arguing, good-naturedly, about politics near where Evan, at the end of a phone line stretching from his room, is telling his girlfriend from Tufts that “we’re not really growing together.” Rob runs into the room for a moment, having just called home for his birthday from the third floor—respecting Cedric’s viewing privacy in a way Cedric suddenly wishes he wouldn’t—and mentions how his Dad “just thanked my Mom for that moment nineteen years ago” before he skips out into the hallway to wrestle with Abby over an ice cream cone, the two of them laughing flirtatiously.
Watching the whole circus, a smile plastered on his face, makes Cedric feel gloomy and, at the same moment, strikes him with an overpowering desire to break free from himself and dive into the flow, to not be so conscious, all the time, of how he looks and where he’s from, to get past whatever it is—anger or envy or just otherness—that seems to be holding him back.
