Black Buck

by Mateo Askaripour

  “Thanks, Ma.” I kissed her forehead.

  “Dar?”

  “Yeah, Ma?”

  “I’m proud of you, son. And I’m happy you’ve finally found somethin’ that makes you want more outta life. You have so much to give, and now’s the chance to show the world. I know your father would be happy too.”

  Pressure. That’s all I felt. Not happiness from making Ma happy. Not a rush of excitement about my first day. What if it didn’t work out? What if I wasn’t who people thought I was? Who did people even think I was?

  “Thanks, Ma. I’ll do my best,” I said, running out of the house.

  6:15 a.m. Forty-five minutes to make it. If everything went right, it was doable. I jumped down the stairs, jogged down the street, turned right, and saw Mr. Aziz unlocking his store’s roll-up gate.

  “Morning, Darren! Soraya tells me you’re starting a new job today,” he said, as I ran past him.

  “Na’am, Mr. Aziz! Running late!”

  “Go get ’em!”

  I saw the gargoyles on the corner and figured that even though I was late I could give them a minute total just to say what up. Jason gave me a quick nod before turning away.

  “No dap?” I asked, moving closer.

  He pulled his hood lower and pushed his hand out.

  “You good?”

  He nodded, but I got closer. Under his hoodie, his face was swollen, red and glossy like a cheap Halloween mask. I pulled his hood off, exposing a blown-up eye, puffy cheeks, and a split lip. “Yo, J, what happened, man?”

  “Get the fuck off me, B!” he yelled, shoving the shit out of me.

  I walked back toward him, my hands raised. “C’mon, Batman. It’s me, bro. Talk to me.”

  “Ain’ nothin’. Got robbed last night, so out here tryna make it back up for Malcolm.”

  “Damn, J. I didn’ know you were messin’ with Malcolm, man. Shit’s dangerous.”

  He hocked a loogie. You could hear it hitting the concrete.

  “Why you think I’m out here this early? Gotta push this weight.”

  “Weight? It used to jus’ be bud. Yo, you gotta get outta this shit ASAP. It’s only gonna end badly.”

  “Whatever. The less you know the better, son. And I don’ need you out here tellin’ me what to do like you’re my daddy. Jus’ ’cause you gotta new job don’ mean shit.”

  “Aight, man. But what’s your plan?”

  “What’s my plan? I’m out here tryna be a man and get my momma out the projects, nigga. Tha’s the plan. Now please get the fuck up out my face, drawin’ all this attention so the jakes scoop me up.”

  Jason was my best friend, my brother, and we knew each other better than anyone else. But in that moment, it felt like we were worlds apart. He was the type of person to laugh instead of cry—he pierced tension like a needle. As I stared into his broken face, I knew there was an interior world he was hiding, even from me. And to keep it real, it hurt.

  “Aight,” I said, grabbing his shoulder. Wally Cat waved me over, but he’d have to wait. There was no chance I’d risk being late.

  6:25 a.m. The train pulled up and I had thirty-five minutes left. I can do this. I hopped on, put my headphones in, and closed my eyes, listening to Nas’s “Hate Me Now.”

  6:35 a.m. I caught the L right before it took off. My heart was working overtime. Everything was happening so fast. Meeting Rhett, the office, Clyde grilling me. Stop thinking. The minute you slow down, you’re gonna get whiplash.

  6:50 a.m. By the grace of God, the 6 train was sitting with its doors open. I jumped the stairs two by two, just making it. Sweat ran down my forehead, and I gripped the cold metal pole so hard, I thought I’d dent it.

  “Hey, Darren.” I turned around. It was Brian. Wearing his green apron on the train. There’s no hope for this guy.

  “Heard you’re not working at Starbucks anymore?”

  “Uh, yeah, man. Sorry I wasn’t able to give you all a proper goodbye. Everything happened so quickly, and I ended up taking a job with that guy who came in the other day. Rhett Daniels.”

  “It’s okay. I knew you were meant for bigger things. Don’t get me wrong, you were the best boss we ever had, but you were sort of too smart to be a shift supervisor. That’s like, I dunno, Professor X teaching elementary school.”

  He was staring at one of those shitty poems on the wall instead of me. I couldn’t tell what he was feeling.

  “I appreciate that, Brian. Working with everyone was fun, man. I’m gonna miss you all. Is Jared taking over my shifts?”

  “Yeah, Nicole was crying when he told us, and Carlos was smiling, like he was proud of you or something. You’ll still stop by though, right?”

  I looked down at my phone. 6:56 a.m. and we were at Twenty-Eighth Street. One more stop. If I run, I’ll make it.

  “Of course,” I said. “Jared’s an asshole, so I’ll see you all around as much as—”

  The train jerked to a stop, throwing bodies into one another.

  A voice came over the intercom. “Apologies, ladies and gentlemen, but we are experiencing delays due to a sick passenger on the train ahead of us. We hope to be moving shortly.”

  Sick on the train ahead of us? Fuck! What they actually mean is someone threw themself on the tracks. Who would be so selfish to commit suicide on a Monday at 6:57 a.m. and make everyone else late? Kill yourself on your own time!

  “Hopefully they didn’t throw up all over the place,” Brian said, still staring at the poem.

  The train pulled into Thirty-Third Street at 7:01 a.m. I bolted up the stairs of 3 Park Avenue, through the revolving doors, and into an elevator right before it closed. I hit thirty-six, praying it wouldn’t stop on a lower floor.

  As the elevator climbed, all I heard were cables pulling, stretching, and shaking. No music. No mayhem.

  I jumped out and looked to the right, but saw no commotion beyond the frosted doors. When I looked left, my heart dropped. The conference room was packed, and everyone inside was staring at something.

  Me.

  * * *

  I stood in the elevator bay without a clue what to do. There I was in the plaid button-up, denim jeans, and Saucony running shoes Ma had picked out for me. I took a breath and opened the doors.

  The sharp-featured receptionist smirked and clicked her tongue. “Bad move, Buck.”

  Why the hell is she calling me Buck? But I had no time for questions. I was shaking worse than Jack at the end of Titanic. And there would be no one to save me either.

  I walked toward the heavy wooden door on the left. But before I opened it, Rhett shook his head, pointing to the other side of the room. I walked the length of the glass wall, everyone’s eyes still on me, and opened the other door.

  Every single leather-backed chair around the mahogany table had an ass in it. Every inch of the marble counter below the flat-screen TV was occupied. Every heater in front of the windows had someone on it. Some people smiled, others covered their mouths in horror, and a few seemed to be praying for me. And, I shit you not, every single person was white.

  I looked across the room at Rhett. Clyde sat next to him, beaming.

  “Why are you late?” Rhett asked.

  “This is going to be good,” one girl whispered to another.

  “Um, the train. Someone got sick on the one in front of me.” I looked around the room to see if it was an acceptable answer.

  He closed his eyes and nodded. “Ah. Got it. The train. No worries. Take a seat and we’ll begin.”

  I wiped the sweat off my forehead and sat on the floor.

  “Get the fuck up!” Rhett yelled, charging toward me.

  I shot up and braced for impact. What I knew even then was that this office was not a normal office, that this company was not a normal company, and that these people were not normal people.

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? We start at 7 a.m. sharp. Every single Monday of the year. Not thirty seconds late. Not one minute late. And sure as hell not three
minutes late. Where the fuck do you think you are? The first floor?”

  My mouth went dry. I couldn’t do anything except look at my feet.

  “Look at me!” Rhett shouted, red in the face with a vein jumping around his forehead and threatening to explode into an aneurysm.

  “If you are ever late to a Monday-morning meeting again, I mean point-two nanoseconds late, every single person in here, all fucking one hundred five of them, will have to do push-ups until their arms are so sore, they won’t be able to pick up their phones. And you’ll have to watch them until they collapse. And then, after that, I’m going to fire your ass. Understood?”

  I nodded so hard that I almost snapped my neck.

  “Now,” he said, straightening out his shirt and walking back to his chair. “Everyone, this is one of our four new SDRs, Darren Vender.”

  “Buck,” Clyde corrected, smug as hell.

  “Why Buck?” a pasty white girl across the room asked.

  “Because if he does his job, he’ll make us each a million bucks,” Clyde replied, winking at me.

  “Right,” Rhett said, nodding. “This is Buck. Are our other three SDRs here?”

  Three people seated on the floor below me, two white guys and a tall blonde girl, raised their hands.

  “You see?” Rhett said. “They made it on time. Did you three take the subway?”

  They all nodded.

  “And they took the subway! Just like you, Buck. Except they weren’t late. You three, stand up and join Buck.”

  They stood and looked around the room—nervous sheep who’d just seen one of their own slaughtered.

  “State your name and one fucking fun fact about you,” Rhett commanded.

  “I’m—” White Guy Number One’s voice cracked, and the room roared with laughter.

  “Did your balls just drop, kid?” Rhett asked. The room’s laughter shot up ten decibels, and he got red in the face and started clearing his throat over and over again like he’d swallowed a chicken bone. The laughter became louder and louder.

  “Go on, speak,” Rhett said.

  White Guy Number One’s shoulders folded, and he leaned over like he was going to puke. But instead of blowing grits all over the floor, he grabbed his bag, pushed me out of the way, and ran into the stairwell.

  Rhett laughed. “That’s going to be a long walk down.”

  White Guy Number Two, who’d just been promoted to White Guy Number One, puffed his chest out, and said, “I’m Arnold Bagini. I played D1 football at Notre Dame and came in third for two-hundred-twenty-five-pound reps at the NFL Scouting Combine.”

  “Third place?” someone shouted. “You suck ass, bro!”

  A blonde girl in front of us turned around, and said, “Bagini? Sounds like Bilbo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings!” Everyone erupted in laughter again, and someone yelled, “Frodo!” to which the whole room replied by chanting, “FRODO! FRODO! FRODO!”

  But Arnold Bagini didn’t sweat. He just closed his eyes and nodded in different directions, like he was listening to music. Eventually, he opened his eyes, and shouted, “My name . . . is Frodo!” The whole room clapped in approval.

  “Great, Frodo is here,” Rhett said. “Next.”

  “Claire Vanderbilt,” the tall blonde girl sporting a white dress and brown leather belt said, straight-faced, with determination in her eyes. “I’m from Darien, Connecticut. And I’m a Vanderbilt.”

  The room fell silent. Then someone shouted, “Dutchy!”

  “No,” someone else said. “The Duchess!” Everyone nodded in agreement at Claire’s new name, and she nodded before taking a seat.

  “And you, Buck,” Rhett said. “Your name is already Buck, so what’s your fun fact?”

  After being screamed at, then witnessing what happened to the original White Guy Number One, I tried to think of something good but couldn’t.

  “Um.” Seconds stretched into eternity. Someone loudly knocked on the table. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Fuck it. “I can freestyle.”

  Everyone’s eyes widened. Including Rhett’s. “Well, go on,” he said. “Give us a demonstration.”

  “Uh, I can’t.”

  It’s not that I couldn’t, but I didn’t want to start my career, especially as the only Black person in the room, as some wind-up monkey that would bang his cymbals whenever white people wanted him to.

  Sensing my hesitation, they all flung a series of boos at me as if they were throwing rotten apples, peanuts, and other circus trash.

  “It’s the least you can do for being late,” Clyde said.

  “Yeah,” a girl insisted. “C’mon, Buck.”

  “Buck, Buck, Buck,” everyone whispered, raising the volume until they were screaming. “BUCK, BUCK, BUCK!”

  Then I heard a tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap. Coming from the table. Tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap. All of them did it in unison.

  My mouth went dry again. I couldn’t breathe.

  “He’s going to choke like B-Rabbit in 8 Mile!” someone shouted.

  Fuck. There was no time to weigh the costs of being Flavor Flav versus the benefits of being Jesse Jackson. I’d already made a fool out of myself, and I couldn’t let it happen again. Thank God I wasn’t dressed like a Mormon. I took a breath and opened my mouth.

  “Aight I’m really sorry, for doin’ that thing you hate. I’m sayin’ comin’ in with excuses, jus’ a li’l late. Got two hundred and ten eyes on me, and nah, it don’ feel great, but it’s sure better than that guy who ran out barfin’ what he ate. It’s true I may be new, but I promise I got potential. Words and verbs coalescing into proverbs comin’ straight up at your mental. It’s my first day, but if there’s one thing I can say, it’s that my man Frodo, the Duchess, and me are gon’ kill it, like a turkey on Thanksgivin’ Day.”

  Silence. All two hundred and ten eyes stared at me.

  “Holy shit,” a girl said. “Buck can actually rap!”

  The room thundered with applause, pale hands surrounding me for high fives.

  Across the room, Rhett gave me a look that said, There he is. There’s the guy I hired.

  Reader: If you are a Black man, the key to any white person’s heart is the ability to shuck, jive, or freestyle. But use it wisely and sparingly. Otherwise you’re liable to turn into Steve Harvey.

  * * *

  Rhett raised his hand and slowly curled it into a fist until a dense silence fell. I sat on the floor next to the Duchess, who scooted as far away from me as possible.

  “What week is it?” Rhett asked.

  “DEALS WEEK!” everyone shouted.

  “That’s right. And for the uninitiated, can someone please explain what Deals Week is?”

  A blonde girl raised her hand.

  “Deals Week is the most important week of the month. It’s when every single member of the team is doing absolutely everything in their power to ensure we hit our MRR goal.”

  “And what’s MRR?” Rhett asked.

  “Oh,” she said, looking at us new hires. “Monthly recurring revenue. The amount of closed-won cash we assume will repeat every month after. It helps with the financial model and adjusting our CAC, which, of course, impacts the LTV of our customers.”

  Everyone in the room nodded, as if she had delivered some prophecy. To me, it just sounded like she was speaking in tongues.

  “Thank you, Tiffany. She’s right,” Rhett said, standing. “But she left out a few things. Can anyone tell the new folks why we have a Deals Week to begin with?”

  The girl with orange-red hair, the one I’d seen yesterday with the piglet in her arms, stood. She had this far-off look in her eyes, like she was peering into another dimension. “Because it’s a crazy fun time?”

  “It is that, Marissa,” Rhett said. “But that’s not why we have a Deals Week. Anyone else?”

  A stocky kid with a full beard who was sweating through a plaid button-up raised his hand.

  “Tell us why, Charlie,” Rhett said, walking the floor.

  “Beca
use we’ve achieved twenty-five percent month-over-month growth for the past eleven months, and if we don’t achieve our goals, our growth will suffer.”

  “And what happens if our growth suffers?”

  Charlie paused, surveying the room. “All this goes away. Everything we have, everything we are. We will no longer be the best.”

  “Fuck that!” someone yelled.

  “Yeah, fuck that!” another voice echoed.

  Rhett stopped in front of me, my eyes level with the backs of his knees; his denim jeans were obviously tailor-made, his suede Chelsea boots unblemished.

  “That’s exactly right, Charlie. Thank you. Now,” he said, rounding the back of the room, stepping over people, occasionally resting his hand on someone’s shoulder. “Are we going to let that happen?”

  “Hell no,” a few responded.

  “No? I thought I heard a few of you,” he said. “But I didn’t hear all of you. I said, Are we going to let that happen?”

  “No!” more people shouted; some of them proceeded to beat their white hands on the table until they turned red.

  “Not good enough. You call yourself Sumwunners? If you actually mean what you say, I need to hear it. So again. Are. We. Going. To. Let. That. Happen?”

  “NO!” the entire room screamed, banging on every surface they could get their hands on. Someone flung a Moleskine at the glass behind me. I ducked just in time.

  “FUCK NO! FUCK NO! FUCK NO!” they chanted. You could see the fire in their faces, the madness mixing like cement behind their eyes.

  Dozens of nonsales spectators formed a crowd outside the room, throwing their hands in the air, stomping their feet to a beat only they knew. These people, who I assumed were semi-intelligent and sane, were hooting and hollering like a pack of savages beating their chests as a herd of mastodons approached. I was waiting for them to take out whips branded with Sumwun’s logo for self-flagellation.

  “We have Deals Week because being the best means that we need”—Rhett thrust his finger into the air—“to crush our goals every month. And I’ll let you in on a little secret, it’s not just selling. It’s not just putting numbers on the board, because if we do our jobs this week, we will make history. Yes, history.