Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach Page B

wishing them well. Their eyes hardened with disappointment, but each one left Macon with a “God bless you,” to which Macon responded, “You, too,” smiled a good-bye, and walked on secure in his compassion for his fellow man.
    “It’s not like this in L.A.,” Andre explained as they exited the park, feeling like a callous asshole.
    “Car culture,” Macon replied absently. He was busy trying to balance an internal triple-beam scale laid heavy with luck, greed, and pragmatism, calculating how much loot was clockable if he robbed motherfuckers for an entire shift.
    Andre nodded. “Yeah. L.A.’s not too big on chance interaction. Or humanity. But we’ve got Shaq and Kobe.”
    He double-checked the directions he’d scribbled on the back of a matchbook. They turned left and walked past hot-dog and hot-nut vendors, a sidewalk bookstand, knots of students sucking cancer sticks beneath the purple flags rippling from NYU’s main library. Nique’s high-rise was on the corner. Andre called his boy from the dorm’s cramped lobby, and seconds after he’d replaced the courtesy phone, a lanky, dark-skinned dude barreled down the side staircase, holding on to the rail bars like parallel beams and swinging himself down four steps at a time. He cleared the last set, landed clean on burgundy-and-black suede Pumas, pushed his metal-framed sunglasses up onto his forehead, and gangled an arm around Andre’s back as the two exchanged the standard shoulder-bang embrace.
    “Wassup, fool,” Nique exclaimed, reverting to Left Coast slangisms in the presence of a Westside homey. He pulled away without unclasping Andre’s hand and ended the shake in a finger snap, gold bracelet sliding halfway up his arm as he recoiled from the motion.
    “You
know,
” bayed Andre, voice plummeting two octaves on the final syllable. It was an expression seldom heard so far east; Macon knew from listening to old Mack 10 records that it was roughly equivalent to
I’m chillin’
or, in the parlance of those old school enough to get away with sounding corny,
livin’ large.
“This my roommate,” said Andre, tapping him on the chest with the back of his hand, “Macon.” Their eyes met, and each one wondered whether Andre would appendix an endorsement. “He’s cool,” Andre finished at last.
    “Whaddup, dude. Dominique Lavar.” Intelligence lit his long, smooth face powerfully from within as he offered Macon a thumb-topped fist and they exchanged a one-potato-two-potato pound. “Come on upstairs, y’all. The kid finally scored a single this year.” He tossed a head nod at the brother working security, and the man tossed one back, withdrew the sign-in sheet and pen he’d slid toward Macon, and gestured
Go ahead.
Andre smiled to himself: Leave it to Nique to get cool with the guard right off the muscle, thus deading the minor hassle of visitor sign-ins.
    “Good lookin’ out, Felix,” Nique said over his shoulder. “California love,” he explained to Andre. “Homeboy’s from Inglewood.” He took the steps two at a time and pounded open the stairwell door.
    Nique’s room was immaculate and tiny, smelled of clean bed linen. A portable refrigerator doubled as a nightstand for a low-slung bed that almost touched three walls. There was space for a desk, but Nique worked on the fly and so he’d marooned the extra furniture in the hall. “I haven’t finished freaking the place yet,” he apologized, leaving Macon to wonder what further freaking could be done. Every inch of wall space was covered; there were movie posters for
Coffy, Truck Turner,
and
She’s Gotta Have It,
and a reproduction of the famous photograph of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the ’68 Olympics with heads bowed and Black Power fists held high. Tupac Shakur gangster-squatted against the floor, shirtless, tattooed, and defiant, both hands twisted into W’s, and above Nique’s bed was framed a blurry black-and-white freeze-frame of a scene Macon had never forgotten: