I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (22 page)

My counselor spotted what I had done. “You know you didn’t get those grades,” she told me. “But you know what?
You could have
. I’ll tell you what. When school starts next year, I’m going to put you in the accelerated classes. If you pass, I forget about this. If you fail, I’m going to tell your mother exactly what happened.”

That fall, I went to the accelerated class. The other students were people I never even knew went to my school. It was Nerd Central: the Japanese kids, the kids with braces—and me. I bet Obama was in that class. I had to work harder than I ever had in my life to simply pass. I even managed to get all B’s and C’s. The lesson
should
have been that I could do it. But the lesson
I
got was that being smart takes too much work. I was so exhausted by all that effort that I never went to that school again.

Eventually I transferred to Locke High, the classic urban, inner-city school. It was a school so bad that other schools were scared to play football there. Since Locke was only two miles from
my house, I showed up wearing red because I thought they were all Bloods.

They were not.

Sure enough, some Crip kids chased me up to a liquor store on Imperial and Avalon. This was not going to be a case of bullying: This was going to be a case of murder. I ran into the store, terrified, while they waited for me outside. The Korean lady who ran the place wasn’t interested in giving me sanctuary. “Get out of my store!” she yelled. “I call police!”

I was like, “Bitch, you
call
the police. I’m not going anywhere.”

I squatted down in the Hostess section behind all the SnoBalls—the pink ones
and
the white ones—and the Honey Buns. All I could smell was that honey icing and my fear. I didn’t know what to do, so I just prayed. “God, please help me. These guys are going to kill me. Please, God. Please deliver me.”

I looked up and saw my father walking into the store. He walked past me to get some pork rinds and a case of Lucky beer, the kind that had riddles underneath the bottle caps. Well, the lucky one was me and the riddle that I had solved was how to get the hell out of that motherfucking store and back home to safety.

Eventually my dad noticed me scrunched down there. “
Darryl
? What are you doing here?”

I didn’t know what to say to him. “I was … I was …”

“Get your ass out of here and get in the car! What the hell is wrong with you?” I walked past the guys with my dad, and nothing happened to me—except I never went back to Locke High. I knew they’d be waiting for me the next day, and the day after that.

After that I went to San Pedro High—until I got kicked out for fighting. I transferred to Gardenia Adult School—until I got kicked out for fighting some undercover police officers. Now I couldn’t go to school
anywhere
, even if I wanted to.

Eventually graduation day came around. All those people I was trying to be as dumb as, all those people I was trying to be with, got their diplomas. And me? All I had to show for myself was a nauseous feeling whenever I smelled Honey Buns.

That’s why I can see it when people feel like they have to act uneducated and play down to the lowest common denominator. I spent
years
trying to do just that. Look at all the professional athletes who speak poor English. They’ve gotten college educations from some of the greatest learning institutions in the world. Even if they can’t make it as an athlete, they’ve got a $200,000 degree behind them. Are they really going to speak the same way in the job interview as they do when the cameras are on them?

The way they talk speaks to how proud some people are of not knowing. Young black men are
proud
that they don’t speak well,
proud
that they don’t read. Forced illiteracy used to be the slave master’s greatest weapon to keep the slaves uneducated and in check. Now the adage is, “If you want to keep a black man from knowing something, put it in a book.” You don’t even need to go to college to get an education. If you read a newspaper every day, after three years you’ll have the equivalent of a bachelor of arts. Can’t afford it? Read it on the computer or even your cell phone.

There’s this mentality in the black community where, if you don’t think like everybody else, there’s something the matter with you. The shit that is ascribed to being black is silly to me. “You’re getting your ghetto pass revoked” is the expression. Where do you get a ghetto pass to begin with? Who do you pay your dues to? Do they take EBT? Who tells you when it’s been revoked? How can one pass cover a race that’s got both Barack Obama and Lil Wayne?

For a long time, I used to think in those terms myself. I hated
The Cosby Show
because I felt as if black people don’t live like that. I had this idea of what a black sitcom should be, with the characters having blue-collar jobs, having never gone to college. They definitely weren’t doctors and lawyers. But I was wrong and Bill Cosby was right. I was thinking like a pussy-now guy, and Bill Cosby was urging people to think in pussy-later terms. Cosby made it cool to go to college, or to aspire to be a yuppie—something that had previously been the whitest aspiration possible.

I came to realize that it all comes down to this: Why the fuck would anyone need or want a pass to get into the ghetto? It’s not like the ghetto has big impenetrable fences keeping people out. They’re falling down with holes.
Everybody’s
getting through them. Those fences aren’t to keep people out; they’re to keep people
in
.

The only pass you should want is the one that gets you
out
of the ghetto. When you’re in jail and you get a day pass, that’s to let you out—not to stay
in
! A hall pass is to leave the fucking classroom. You get a day pass, you can do whatever the fuck you want. You need a pass to go to Six Flags; you don’t need one to come
home
. A ghetto pass is permission to
leave
, motherfucker, not
stay
.

I think Tiger Woods is a great example of someone getting a ghetto pass, in my sense of the term. The only reason people are interested in Tiger Woods is because he’s a great
black
golfer. If you want to be a popular sports hero, both black and white people have to like you. People have to want to buy your jersey, or your shoes, or your golf clubs. The commercials said this explicitly: “I wanna be like Mike,” or, “I am Tiger Woods.” Black people didn’t care about golf until Tiger Woods came along. He gave us permission and made it okay to play a white dude’s sport. They did it, so now it’s cool for you to do it.

But my definition of the ghetto pass, unfortunately, is not the prevailing one. Black kids are taught to ignore the future, and getting an education is discouraged. There is another problem with not being educated:
You have no sense of what’s out there
. I can talk about any place in the world because I watch the news and read the paper. I can discuss astronomy, though I’m not going up in a spaceship. But an uneducated person is limited to the information provided by his senses. In a very real sense, these kids’ world consists entirely of their ghetto neighborhood.

Humans naturally define ourselves by borders. Even though a New Yorker has more in common with a Canadian than a Louisiana redneck, his group is defined by the 45th parallel. It could be Chicago or Brooklyn or Oakland or Rwanda or Haiti. It’s the same shit. That whole East Coast–West Coast thing? That’s not a joke to those cats. Wherever our mothers rented houses is what we decided was the most valuable land. The rest was enemy territory.

The thinking is completely tribal. Maybe you’re not the same religion, or you don’t speak the same language, or I’m Hutu and you’re Tutsi. If you’re from the east side, you’re not from the west side. You wear red and not blue. This is my small area, and if you don’t fit into it, then your life doesn’t mean
anything
.

This arbitrary us-them demarcation is not just a black thing. Everyone has some sports team they love, and they hate the rival team with a passion. It’s like a dude who says he can’t date some broad because she’s a Red Sox fan and he’s a Yankee fan. He truly believes that this difference will make a relationship between the two of them impossible. Same thing with someone going to a rival high school. Every group has some other group that they dislike for some silly reason, sometimes for literally
no
reason.

When I grew up, I could give less than a fuck about people
who didn’t live in my neighborhood. From my very first memories of it, it was always, “That nigger ain’t shit.”
My entire world had a four-mile radius
. If you didn’t live within that, I didn’t care what happened to you.
Nobody
around me did. You couldn’t break into somebody’s house in our neighborhood, but if you stepped outside the borders it was cool. Cats would brag about how many bodies they had, and you knew it was black people that they had killed. I remember being a kid and watching a dude get shot, and people laughing while he was dying. I said something; I knew it wasn’t right.

“Fuck that nigger, man!” was the response.

It was when I was in junior high that I had an experience that truly showed how deeply entrenched this tribal mentality was. We may have hated going to school during the school year, but we used to hang out there all the time during the summer when the school was officially closed. It was our school, we figured, so we could do whatever the fuck we wanted.

I came by the school one summer day to see what was going on. There was this older cat I knew, high school age, and he called me over. “Hey man,” he told me, “we’re running a train on this girl.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yeah, we gave her some Spanish fly.” I was still a virgin at the time so I wasn’t really sure what “running a train” entailed. I
did
know what Spanish fly was, because it was typical dumb schoolyard bullshit. Supposedly when you gave it to a broad, it made her hot. You had to be real careful not to give them too much or it’d make them blind.

I followed my friend and he took me out back where his partner
had this girl. I don’t know how old she was, probably their age, but I didn’t recognize her and so I knew she wasn’t from my neighborhood.

“Oh, man!” my buddy said. “We doin’ it!”

Like I said, I had never had sex before. Yet I still knew what it looked like when someone was upset—and this girl was
not
happy. Whatever was going on, she didn’t dig it. The two dudes were acting like it’s just a thing, and were about to go at her.

“This is not cool,” I said to them. “She’s not with this.”

I’m not going to pretend that I’m some sort of superhero who bravely came in to save the day. Those two guys were older than me and bigger than me; on some level I was afraid. I didn’t step in because I was trying to be an upstanding moral member of my community. I stepped in because on a visceral level it just felt
wrong
to see a female like that.

“Fuck that, man,” my buddy said. “She knows she’s with it.”

I didn’t start arguing or explaining because I didn’t need to say anything else. I knew they were mad, but I knew they were also ashamed on some level. They
knew
what they were doing wasn’t right, and that stopped them from doing anything to me. (Or maybe they
didn’t
know, and that would have been sad.)

I grabbed the girl by the hand and gave her her pants and her top. After she got dressed, I walked her out of the school. I asked her where she lived, and she managed to give me her address even though she was crying and shaking. I knew where that address was: enemy territory. She lived in a Blood neighborhood like me, but her people were a different kind of Bloods. It was a bit far, close to a mile, and I walked her the entire way not saying much of anything. What kind of small talk could I do, in that situation? And with a high school girl, from another neighborhood?

All I could fixate on was her smell. I’ll never forget the smell. It was a mix of pennies and sweat and fear. To my young mind, it was just
weird
. I didn’t know how she got to my school, and I didn’t know what happened before I showed up. I had no idea how many dudes had it with her. I guessed that some had, because her hair was so messed up and she just looked like she’d been through
something
.