“Not just his wife’s résumé.” Johnnie reached into his briefcase and pulled out another piece of paper,
waving it in the air. “Got his daughter’s, too! Tells me she’d make an ‘excellent’ counselor-”
“Naw-”
“I’m telling you, Barack, he had the whole thing figured out. And you know what? The whole time we’re talking, he’s
not batting an eye. Acting like what he’s doing is the most natural thing in the world. It was unbelievable.” Johnnie
shook his head, then suddenly shouted out like a preacher. “Yessuh! Doctah Lonnie King! Now there’s a brother with
some nerve! An enterprising brother! Program hasn’t even started yet, he’s already thinking ahead.”
I started to laugh.
“He don’t just want one job! He gotta have two! Go in to talk about some kids, he gonna hand you his whole goddamn
family’s résumé....”
I shouted out, catching the spirit. “Doctah Lonnie King!”
“Yessuh! Doctah Lonnie King!” Johnnie started to giggle, which made me laugh even harder, until soon we were
doubled over in loud guffaws, catching our breath only long enough to repeat that name again-“Doctah Lonnie King!”-
as if it now contained the most obvious truth, the most basic element in an elemental world. We laughed until our faces
were hot and our sides hurt, until tears came to our eyes, until we felt emptied out and couldn’t laugh anymore, and
decided to take the rest of the afternoon off and go find ourselves a beer.
That night, well past midnight, a car pulls up in front of my apartment building carrying a troop of teenage boys and a
set of stereo speakers so loud that the floor of my apartment begins to shake. I’ve learned to ignore such disturbances-
where else do they have to go? I say to myself. But on this particular evening I have someone staying over; I know that
my neighbors next door have just brought home their newborn child; and so I pull on some shorts and head downstairs
for a chat with our nighttime visitors. As I approach the car, the voices stop, the heads within all turn my way.
“Listen, people are trying to sleep around here. Why don’t y’all take it someplace else.”
The four boys inside say nothing, don’t even move. The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly
exposed, standing in a pair of shorts on the sidewalk in the middle of the night. I can’t see the faces inside the car; it’s
too dark to know how old they are, whether they’re sober or drunk, good boys or bad. One of them could be Kyle. One
of them could be Roy. One of them could be Johnnie.
One of them could be me. Standing there, I try to remember the days when I would have been sitting in a car like that,
full of inarticulate resentments and desperate to prove my place in the world. The feelings of righteous anger as I shout
at Gramps for some forgotten reason. The blood rush of a high school brawl. The swagger that carries me into a
classroom drunk or high, knowing that my teachers will smell beer or reefer on my breath, just daring them to say
something. I start picturing myself through the eyes of these boys, a figure of random authority, and know the
calculations they might now be making, that if one of them can’t take me out, the four of them certainly can.
That knotted, howling assertion of self-as I try to pierce the darkness and read the shadowed faces inside the car, I’m
thinking that while these boys may be weaker or stronger than I was at their age, the only difference that matters is this:
The world in which I spent those difficult times was far more forgiving. These boys have no margin for error; if they
carry guns, those guns will offer them no protection from that truth. And it is that truth, a truth that they surely sense