An Accidental Sportswriter by Robert Lipsyte Page B

he was in the bedroom and could not be disturbed.
    I knocked and without waiting for an answer barged in. I introduced myself to a pudgy man in underwear curled into a fetal position on his bed. I sat down and asked him why he was crying.
    He slowly rolled over and looked up. “Don’t you read the papers?”
    â€œSure,” I said. “I work for one.”
    â€œDidn’t you read about the four little girls who were murdered yesterday in a Birmingham church?”
    â€œIt was terrible,” I said. “Now, about this book thing . . .”
    But he had rolled onto his back and was talking to the ceiling. “How can the white man be so evil to kill four little girls who weren’t even demonstrating for their civil rights?”
    He talked for hours, deep into the night, about the racial cancer destroying the nation and how most of the blame was on people who looked like me. You people stunt the lives of children and break up families, he said, you have the power to wound the innocent simply by calling them “nigger.” I took some notes because that’s what I did, but I mostly wondered what I was doing there. This man was not the cool, slangy hipster I had seen on nightclub stages, the Chris Rock–Dave Chappelle–Bill Cosby of his time whose humorous, rats-to-riches autobiography I was supposed to write.
    The man on the bed, alternately blubbering and ranting about the Birmingham bombing, was not funny or particularly insightful, I thought at first, just angry. I resented his making me the stand-in for all hateful white men. But something kept me there, and the more I listened the more I was engaged. As disturbing as it was, it began to make sense. I wondered if we could find a common ground. I began to wonder how I would feel right now if I were black. I’d never had a black friend. The only black person I knew was my parents’ cleaning lady. Gregory was taking me somewhere I had never been. I was open, and he must have sensed it. When I finally got up to leave, he asked me to come back the next day so we could start writing the book.
    It went badly. Greg was sometimes an hour or two late for an interview session, and when I complained, he’d say, “I can tell you been waitin’, baby, you sound colored.” He always called me “baby.” He didn’t remember my name.
    I began to envy the collaborators he had rejected. Once Greg and I started tape-recording, it got even worse, endless, unusable diatribes against white America. He had strong arguments and solid facts, but this was deadly speechifying, hardly the human stuff of autobiography.
    I took it for about two weeks of sporadic sessions before or after his nightclub appearances and my Times assignments. One day, I waited three hours for him with a prepared monologue. I told him that I didn’t need this jive job badly enough to put up with an irresponsible, selfish fool trying to hang me up in reverse prejudice. In fact, I declared pompously, the only thing I didn’t have against him was his color.
    I stood up, said good-bye, and marched out of his hotel room to the elevator. He followed me and got in. On the way down he said, “Bob Lipsyte, right?”
    â€œToo late,” I said.
    He said he was going to have a sandwich at the hotel coffee shop. Would I join him?
    While we ate, he kept repeating my name. When we finished, he said, “Let’s go back up. I think we’re ready to write a book. A real book, one they’re not expecting.”
    We went back up. The book that emerged was basically my editing of taped hours of emotional storytelling that my wife-to-be, Marjorie, transcribed when she got home from her Times job in the music department. She typed and cried, later laughed, along with Greg crying and laughing as he lay on his hotel bed like a patient in therapy. His stories were raw and unsentimental. The most poignant scenes for Margie and me were of