Chapter 1

Life is tough for us. That’s the most honest statement I can make at this point. Every morning I see all of these nicely-made cars traveling up and down the avenue while I patiently wait for the bus. The most luxurious of these cars have young teenagers and college students at the wheel - that or the young drug dealers who are easily manipulated by their older overlords. I’m not jealous of these young people, but when I see a couple of young brothers driving a Porsche or a BMW in the ghetto of all places, I get a little upset, because it is usually the honest and highly- principled laboring man who goes without.

I quit a lucrative job that I had at the local bank, and now I work in the mail-room of one of the city’s colleges. I was making all types of mistakes at the bank, so I just resigned, because I knew I was incompetent. The immediate executive above me wanted me to stay on, but wisely I quit, because I couldn’t function after a while with all of that pressure and stress tied to number-crunching, mortgage applications, and business loans. The mail-room suits me much better.

It’s a job that I can do.

My mother was disappointed about my leaving the bank. My father, on the other hand, left us a long time ago. I can hardly remember what my father looks like. We were a very poor family. There were no jobs, and we were always broke - and this is probably why he left. He told my mother that he’d be back after looking for jobs. He never returned. My mother was suddenly a single mother, and I was her only child.

I revere my mother as I would a saint. She went through back-breaking work to give me the gift of an education down the road from where we lived. She worked as a nurse’s assistant at the local hospital.

She cleaned operating rooms and cancer wards. She could have abandoned me, but she never did. And now my mother is disappointed, even though I feel much better working in the mail-room. The people treat me well.

I’m happy for once, and this happiness is all due to leaving the bank and latching on to work that I gain some sort of mental relief from. Besides, I like looking at all of the different stamps that are thrown my way, as well as all of the handwriting on the envelopes. When I’m out walking around town, I review the handwriting on the envelopes and imagine how rich or how poor the residents are as I come across their homes.

I am not fooled by delivering mail to the big and wealthy houses, by the way. Sure, I can easily see how wealthy they are, but at the same time I know that many of these people aren’t happy with their lives. I know this, because I used to live in a nice house, provided by the bank I worked for. But once a little while ago, my best friend, Reginald Meeks, told me that these rich people are always desperate and depressed. Not many are actually happy, even with their wealth. I would think that the statement, “more money, more problems,” would apply here.

I have some money that I’m saving, but in comparison to the people who own these nice mansions, I’m really small potatoes. The money that I do have isn’t enough to afford a family, and it would take plenty of suffering time to raise that kind of cash as a simple worker in a mail-room. I started working here after I left my job with the Postal Service.

I get plenty of benefits, but it’s just not enough.

I wouldn’t want a son of mine living without a father and relying on social security and food stamps like my mother had to. I don’t want my children to suffer or freak out while making ends meet as our cost of living becomes unbearably high. Sons or daughters who are worse off than I need to have a positive attitude and goals for the future. To some, this may not be possible. Children, after all, will one day have to pull their own weight, and I would have to rely on them as I’m carted away into retirement. They wouldn’t have the time or the tolerance to care for me. They’d lock me up in one of those homes for the elderly.

This is all far away. For some reason, I think about my own funeral routinely. Life here is both good and bad. The suffering is great, but I don’t feel I can do anything to help. It’s very frustrating, and it is equally difficult, at my age, to have a good time.

Getting drunk is a good time for me. Joining the mail- room staff the next morning with a nauseating hangover is something else. Nevertheless, I still come in on time even with the worst hangovers - the kind that last two or three days. Every swallow of water is an attempt to keep me from throwing up.

I have an reliable car that takes me to the mail- room. Once again, it came from working at the bank.

It’s a used Lincoln. No one knows the American roadways better than these domestic cars. I hop in, turn the ignition, and the engine gives off a quiet noise, almost like a cat purring when held the right way. I then pick up Reginald who’s working at the college as a professor. An adjunct he calls himself.

I usually get to his place about five minutes early. I try to smoke some refer before he gets in, and as usual, I never finish the full joint when Reginald, nervous as any paranoid rabbit, opens the door and slides into the soft leather passenger’s seat next to me.

“Must you do that here?” he asked.

“Nothing wrong with it,” I said.

“In the first place, marijuana is still illegal in this state. Secondly, the car is all stinky with the damn smell of it. My clothes now smell of that stuff.

My students smell it on me, and they think I’m some kind of drug addict.”

“Take it easy, alright Reggie? There’s no better time than the morning to smoke some reefer. Plus, you already smell like your family’s restaurant. At least I don’t smell like fish, onion, or garlic.”

“Just put it out, please.”

“Okay, okay.”

“That’s better.”

I put out my joint on my tongue, and then I swallow it for greater effect as I calmly drive Reginald to the college. He had a class at eight in the morning, and I had to be in the mail-room by nine. Carpooling was definitely a good idea, as Reginald usually paid for half the gas. And yet I felt sorry for him most of the time. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, he has to work at the restaurant and put up with his family, and he teaches a bunch of students who always question their grades after whatever assignment was graded. His job is a dead-end job. He’s forever a part of the temporary workers’ economy. He wants to get a doctorate in History, but for that he needs funding.

He asked me a very long time ago, probably when we were razor-bumped middle school clowns, if I could teach him about money. I didn’t offer him much advice except to say that the investors of the world are divided into money-spenders and money-savers. There is a time for each of those. I told him to save his money

–’a penny saved is a penny earned.’ I also tried to tell him about the Rockefellers.

I had pulled this out from a magazine: The Rockefellers say, spend %, save %, and keep % for charitable donations. It was that simple, but what Reginald most wanted out of money was the ability to haggle for what he wanted – to be a tough guy while bargaining and not a sorry sonofabitch crying into his glass of beer at an empty bar, hating himself because he didn’t reach that tough-guy level.

Reggie was always shy. He couldn’t be tough while negotiating. He had the deep-seeded suspicion that he was always getting ripped off by those who were prying their way into his wallet. He didn’t like handling money, but he knew how to spend it. He just never learned how to earn it.

I didn’t know that adjunct professors live so lowly, but Reggie filled me in on the particulars of the job.

At times, in front of the classroom, he ran out of things to say, especially when there were fifteen minutes left until the class officially ended. He also had a hard time waking up in the morning. There was a time when Reggie and I were dedicated night people. We couldn’t stand the day, and we went to sleep when we returned home early in the morning. All of that ended when Reggie had to prove that his mind was worth saving and learning from. He left me alone to investigate the perils of street-life without him as a partner.

It’s not easy getting an adjunct position either, as many people apply. Interestingly, the job itself is annoying. He didn’t mind teaching his classes, but he did mind when all the teachers had to use PowerPoint or clear slides for lectures. Reggie was definitely old- schooled, and when asked by the chairman of the history department to change his style of teaching to incorporate the new technology, he did it but grudgingly so. This was on top of grading student papers on the weekends. He hated changing his life when he saw no reason to change it. He hated having to adapt, even in the classroom. Nevertheless, he did what he could to add some of the new technology.

Reggie learned much more without going to his local high school as a teenager. His mother taught him everything he knew. As an adjunct, he wanted to have a famous presence, but a lot of this was simply too imaginary. When Reggie dreamed and then awakened, one always had to step away from him, because he would yank anyone in for one of his fierce debates on the dreams that visited him.

I get too tired when he wants to debate, but at times he does pull me in, and I get stuck arguing about historical figures I know nothing about. Reggie always bothered me about it, because I should at least know some of the major Black-American intellectuals besides the same old Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.

These were two great men, but there had to be a saturation point where their stories were rehashed over and over again for no real purpose. They belonged within the context of Black History, sure, but Reggie was sick of teaching his students about the two leaders, because the older Black generation forced them down our throats. Reggie wanted to learn something that involved his own generation and not someone else’s.

Reggie’s argument was that these two leaders represented the failure of older intellectuals who refused to hand the torch down to little-known others who had made their mark on Black history as well. If anything, he wanted to find different intellectuals who were unknown and flowered later on, after the Civil Rights Era. The graying mass of the elderly wanted to keep their ideas alive, mostly through pressure and coercion from the top. If one doesn’t include Dr. King or Malcolm X in a lesson plan, then good luck getting any shot at a permanent or tenure-track position. He had to kiss ass this way - to show the higher-ups that Dr. King and Malcolm X still mattered in a low-level course while he lied about it and quietly knew that he would only spend a few minutes of lecture time on each.

Too many black thinkers and academics had been ignored. Reggie wanted to take them out of hiding from the bookshelves in the college’s library. He presented the students with new heroes and not the ghosts within the black mainstream who championed popular ideas from sixty years ago. But he couldn’t do this on his own.

He needed me to tell him that it was alright how he changed the direction of Black History within the classroom. He was a visionary in this regard, but at the same time, no one in the academic world would do such a thing.

“You just have one class today, right?” I asked.

“Yeah. And then I have to return to the restaurant for the lunch shift.”

“You’re straddling two different worlds,” I said.

“I admire you for it, but you may face exhaustion because of it. Your mind will just stop working - all that hard labor you talk about. A mind does labor, which is why no one wants a job where he has to think.

Thinking is the enemy, Reggie.”

“Who told you that?”

“No one. I came across it myself.”

“It’s good advice. It’s something my father would say. He says that I have good heart but I’m gullible, a term that I don’t like. The longer he keeps me working at the restaurant, the dumber I’ll get. I need to be challenged, and the challenge is teaching my class this morning. The students have to take it as a requirement, and I’m going to make them interested in black intellectuals they’ve never heard of before.

They’ll learn about philosophies and theories that have been forgotten, kind of like old or used CDs or DVDs.

The university needs a washing and a scrubbing. It requires a puddle of old and tired history to swirl down the drainpipe of time without clogging.”

“Sounds like you’re doing this for vengeance. I’m sure if you just told your boss about it, she wouldn’t mind one bit, – but you should tell her first. Ask for advice on the issue. Judge the pros and the cons is what I’m saying.”

“Who’s going to know?” asked Reginald.

“That’s not the right attitude, Reggie. People will find out if you are basing the class on minor historical figures. You’ll always win with Malcolm X and that amazing book by Alex Haley. You’ll win big with Dr. King’s writings as well. I don’t know why you’re trying to mess with things. Just do what the head of your department asks of you.”

“I’m starting with me. If I want to see changes to in this world, then it is up to me to introduce them.”

“Whatever, man. Just don’t get into trouble.”

We had conversations like this for several days in a row. For some reason, Reginald wouldn’t bend. He talked only about the unknown leaders who carved a thin groove in Black American History. Sometimes I’d like to knock some sense into him.

On the car ride to the campus, the dazzling sunlight blinded us. I could only hope that Reggie made the right move. He even wanted me to sit in on one of his classes. It wasn’t because I was interested in these unknown Black Americans. I agreed to it mostly to check out the college girls, but I also wanted to criticize Reggie, as I have done time and again. I’m not that interested in the history of our own people. We learned all that stuff in Elementary school. Why do we have to learn the same things again?

So that history doesn’t repeat itself? By the time it takes to give a solid course in Black History, we’ll all be brainwashed and won’t know what our history is anyway. Permitting past mistakes would be the fascinating experiment of the day. We are doomed to forget as time marches on. Some call it cultural amnesia.

I’ll give Reggie a point for that one, because he at least steers away from boredom in favor of learning new things in the classroom. I tell him, though, that there is no such thing as an original thought in this country. Perhaps it could be found elsewhere.

Whatever the case may have been, I’m often surprised when Reggie says that the media can’t be trusted, since government and corporate control of the media push and mold us into stronger characters, without smarts on one end or into highly intelligent academic geniuses on the other end without strong character. Reggie said that he has achieved both.

His passivity, his ambivalence to the type of government we wanted, was Reggie’s way of telling us that it is not humanly possible to have everyone in the world follow the same bipolar system, but at least we can go with the flow and prosper from whatever events or crises come our way, no matter what side we’re on.

We move along a tightrope back and forth from one end to the other in our efforts to stay free and clear of making a decision. This is what he means by being ambivalent. It’s the idea of not caring about what the government or its people want. Events and crises are a product of a spiritual phenomenon rather than a corrupt media that overloads these opinions on the yokes of our backs. Hell, half the stuff he watches on television is about politics or government or the corporation in some way. I might as well watch the Cartoon Channel to get my daily diet of news. Sponge Bob anyone?

Seriously, though, he wanted me to visit one of his classes, and he must have had a good group of students for him to be showing it to me. Otherwise, he’d be the self-appointed leader of a class of street people featuring thugs, toughs, rough men, malt beer drinkers, and gangsters from a dangerous school. Although Reggie was a short guy with muscles and worked out at the college’s weight room and worked equally hard at his family’s restaurant, he wouldn’t fight these students.

He said his intellect wasn’t leading him that way. It was more a divine spirit and those internet blogs that were once in vogue but were now easily supplanted by other mediocre blogs. Compared to me, and compared to many of his peers, Reggie had everything figured out.

He seemed confident on how he viewed the world. For him, the world was one big scam, and then death. The only people who liked this world were those in the pharmaceutical commercials. And even they could be easily spotted as handsome actors, either drugged up with heroin or gay. It made him sick.

Although he is my best friend, sometimes I grow tired of hearing him complain. If it isn’t money one week, it’s classical painting the next. Now who the hell would accept The Birth of Venus in the ghetto?

After all, the competition in the ghetto was fierce and razor-sharp. People watched television, logged on to the internet, listened to new artists who hadn’t gotten a break yet. Now add the cars, their sub-woofer systems shaking apart the avenue and rattling windows. Brand new sounds were heard at the height of their notoriety, filling the streets with immense possibilities over what musicians deserve to become superstars. No one could hear much of anything when the sub-woofers went up and down the avenue. The drive to find one voice instead of many different ones forced young people in the ghetto to carry recordings of their favorite music in CD players, just so other ghetto-folk could hear them. They’d stash their music players in their bags or pockets and play them at full volume. They instilled their own sense of propaganda to anyone within range. Sonic warfare some have called it.

Sound was very important where Reggie lived.

Sometimes sound was a savior. At other times, these young people became a part of a crushed landscape that did, I admit, fight over what sounds to hear but at the same time always searched for more. Beyond the ghetto streets there were other worlds to explore, but somehow, and I’m guessing here, but somehow most people in the ghetto just couldn’t leave. They knew they couldn’t just enter a white neighborhood and expect to live there.

Reggie told me that in the mid-eighties the call for black unity and the call for giving back to one’s community became the black mantra and agenda.

Interestingly enough, the black unity and giving back to one’s community had already been achieved several years before, and the side-effect of this was cruel segregation among neighborhoods and pockets of poor, unschooled blacks with amazing potential wasted on the refuse of popular music and culture. Reggie pointed to a sign on a telephone pole that wanted homes for instant cash. Who knew who would give in to this process of gentrification, but sometimes it does have to occur to save a neighborhood from decay, to bring more money in, but not to push out a culture that had already been living there for years. People in the ‘hood wouldn’t pack up and be shipped off to a new location. Instead, blacks stayed on the front lines of elite liberal crusades.

I didn’t mind the idea of gentrification too much.

When I think about how these white and black neighborhoods live apart, I tend see the world as a rough place. There are still places where blacks won’t go, and they stay away from the white people - at least as their families and social lives outside of work are concerned. The same goes with whites. The two are happily divorced from each other, and for some people this works. Reggie, however, lives in the ghetto and apart from the college, but he figures he could learn quite a bit about other cultures if he spent the rest of his life as a teacher with the permission to appeal to whites as well.

For me, I no longer cared what Reggie thought.

It’s like he’s out there walking the streets preaching black and white unity. Sure, I hated it when I told him that he couldn’t possibly do such a thing, especially with everyone so busy now that summer closed in. In the neighborhood, everyone wanted to get along and not be concerned with these cable boxes and twenty- four hour news channels. It almost drove Reggie nuts why no one had any interest in his cross-cultural solutions. Reggie ended his push towards neighborhood integration when he learned that no one was interested in coming together.

For blacks, the men and women both had problems with overzealous cops. It had been a feud that kept on perpetuating itself every few years. Lucky the latest shooting of a young, black boy in the ‘hood garnered a lot of attention and protest mayhem. Only when white officers and their superiors witnessed a peaceful protest that soon turned to arson, looting, and violence, did they respond. Peaceful, nonviolent protests didn’t have a place in the reinvention of the country. Reggie tried to be a pacifist in high school, but hope ran out fairly quickly when he sneaked his way onto a team bus and talked to forty big and meaty college football players about integration and pacifism.

He had to be kicked out by one of the players, who had no interest living a pacific life.

When Reggie wiped off the dirt and mud-murky water from the road that these two linemen threw him into, he knew that he wanted to fight the whole busload of them.

Raw anger replaced his pacifism. Every year that he moved ahead in school, Reggie denounced his generation as horrendous, shallow, and irreparably narcissistic.

No one wanted non-violence, and so Reggie was bumped from the pacifist trough. He learned that maybe violence did more. It ruined properties in their own neighborhoods. The police contained the violent protesting with defenses of their own, but God forbid these angry blacks enter a white town and start killing their former masters. This was how things always used to be, and I, for one, didn’t want to rehash the past, even though it rented space at the center of my mind.

When Reggie explodes into his ideological rantings, I usually turn myself off and listen to the radio instead. I try to up the volume, but Reggie sees fit to lower the volume as though it were his car he rode in. Something told me that Reggie didn’t care where he lived or how he got by.

I heard that he couch-surfed for a month and that his father took him back for work in the restaurant.

Reggie was seen as a very lucky man, and yet I found him depressed all the time. He wanted to be a part of the free exchange of ideas - not bogged down washing dirty dishes in the old tub next to the sink. To be a part of the exchange of ideas, he suddenly took some initiative and championed the intellect at the core of his life. Nothing else mattered when he made the choice to pursue such a life.

Although he was thankful for his father’s letting him back in, he grew impatient again and escaped his father and the shop that paid his way for an advanced degree at the college. His father swore that never again would he give out money to his children, no matter what they wanted to pursue. They would learn from hard work and perseverance. As we now know, Reggie tried as hard as he could to avoid the restaurant and instead become a part of the infinite knowledge found in his classroom and at department meetings.

He was excited at department meetings. He saw the melding of a brainy collective that debated the college’s policies. But there is no such privilege with adjuncts. Reggie had too many ideas for those who were much more practical in their approach. The college even commanded his dreams. He dreamed – both day and night – of how the college could be a place that was famously known for Black History, and he spearheaded the campaign to put more effort into this curricular creation.

I was a little pissed about having to swallow the joint I smoked that morning, but I could tell that my friend Reggie wanted to turn his life around, and that what he offered his students came from a good and noble place. He knew how to avoid the same two overused leaders. He had the power of books at his side, and often times when I picked Reggie up, he’d come into the car groggy – the type of grogginess that necessitates the closing of his eyes and saying things like, “I’m just resting my eyes,” or even a better one, “I’m just meditating.” I know full well, however, that Reggie had no idea how to meditate, and if he did meditate he’d most likely fall asleep during it.

I knew he was burning the midnight oil again – reading or grading papers. He works hard. That I’ll give him. But this intellectual academic shit is way out there for any brother. I saw more of the dishwasher in him than a public intellectual. Only a few people are able to do that and get away with it without being collared for a full time job or even arrested. Reggie was part criminal anyway, like Tiger Woods.

“So are you coming to my class today?” he asked.

I had no desire to attend his class that morning.

I wanted to eat breakfast at the cafeteria before heading into the mail room by nine.

“I’m kind of busy today,” I said.

“Doing what?”

“I have shit to do.”

“Like what?”

“Shit.”

“Can you be a little more specific than that, please?”

“There’s some leftover mail I’ve got to sort through.”

“Don’t give me that,” he said. “Who do you think I am? An idiot or something?”

“Did I say that?”

“No.”

“Then why do you say I said that?”

“You obviously have an hour before you have to get to the mail-room. You have time to sit in my class.”

“Do I? Really?”

“Yes! You should feel proud that you know someone who teaches at this level.”

“What are you? Einstein already?”

“No. I’m being honest. You should jump at the opportunity to sit in.”

“Any good looking women in there?”

“Why does that matter?” he said.

“I just want to stare at a few. If you can guarantee they’ll be good-looking women in there, I’ll definitely come.”

“Black women?”

“Who else?”

“Yes, there are several really hot black women in there. White women too.”

“I don’t want that jungle fever shit. A good- looking black girl is all I need – hopefully with just the right amount of ass.”

“You’re fucking impossible, you know that?”

“Now you’re sounding like the Reggie I know.

Always cussing.”

“This is no longer the restaurant. Teaching at college is the way to go.”

“Fine. I’ll come to the class, but don’t ever ask me to go again. You’ll probably use me for approval when you explain it to your Dad.”

“I won’t say anything to him. It’s my business, and I guarantee he won’t interfere with my teaching.”

“You sure like punishment, don’t ya?”

“What do you mean?”

“Teaching and dish-washing are your two punishments.

You take the lowest-paying jobs and all you get is harassment.”

“It’s true. I’m not exactly made for living in a high-rise somewhere. I’ve seen it on television and in the movies, but the world and how we live it have nothing in common with the experiences they have in the movies.”

“You still take a lot of punishment.”

“Yeah. I know. But I really want to be a part of college life. That’s not punishment, Archie. College is the promised land. The utopia. First, you have to pay your dues. Once that’s done, I work my way towards becoming an assistant professor.”

“Let’s see what happens,” I said. “Just remember that we don’t control our own lives. There’s something out there that does. I was meant for the mail-room.

You were meant to teach black history to the kids.

What can I say?”

We went on like this for a little while until he finally made me attend his class that morning. He wouldn’t stop bugging me about it, and even though I didn’t want to go, Reggie’s insistence drove me bananas until I surrendered. I wouldn’t pay attention to him during class – only the young women who would be there.

They were technically adults anyway, but they looked like cherubs attending college, not only to learn some black history, but to mate with their own kind.

I followed him to the classroom. Already there were a few students sitting in the darkness with the room’s shades drawn. It smelled like disinfectant in the hallway. It was a sunny morning, and of course, Reggie approached each student who already arrived and asked them how they liked the latest reading in the book that he ordered for the class. The people who were there early were mostly adults and one elderly person. I could tell that Reggie loved teaching the adults, because they did everything he asked of them without complaint. These adults were good learners, and when they received their grades, they never had a single disagreement. For complaints about their grades, Reggie had to wait for the college’s hoodlums to enter.

They trickled in slowly about fifteen minutes before the class until there was a deluge of them about five minutes before the class.