“Tooth and claw, Barack. Stop worrying about the rest of these bums out here and figure out how you’re going to
make some money out of this fancy degree you’ll be getting.”
When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize
that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he’d expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three
miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a
journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry. Whenever Sadik tried to talk me into hitting a bar, I’d beg off with
some tepid excuse, too much work or not enough cash. One day, before leaving the apartment in search of better
company, he turned to me and offered his most scathing indictment.
“You’re becoming a bore.”
I knew he was right, although I wasn’t sure myself what exactly had happened. In a way, I was confirming Sadik’s
estimation of the city’s allure, I suppose; its consequent power to corrupt. With the Wall Street boom, Manhattan was
humming, new developments cropping up everywhere; men and women barely out of their twenties already enjoying
ridiculous wealth, the fashion merchants fast on their heels. The beauty, the filth, the noise, and the excess, all of it
dazzled my senses; there seemed no constraints on originality of lifestyles or the manufacture of desire-a more
expensive restaurant, a finer suit of clothes, a more exclusive nightspot, a more beautiful woman, a more potent high.
Uncertain of my ability to steer a course of moderation, fearful of falling into old habits, I took on the temperament if
not the convictions of a street corner preacher, prepared to see temptation everywhere, ready to overrun a fragile will.
My reaction was more than just an attempt to curb an excessive appetite, though, or a response to sensory overload.
Beneath the hum, the motion, I was seeing the steady fracturing of the world taking place. I had seen worse poverty in
Indonesia and glimpsed the violent mood of inner-city kids in L.A.; I had grown accustomed, everywhere, to suspicion
between the races. But whether because of New York’s density or because of its scale, it was only now that I began to
grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity,
of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms
as well, where, no matter how many times the administration tried to paint them over, the walls remained scratched
with blunt correspondence between niggers and kikes.
It was as if all middle ground had collapsed, utterly. And nowhere, it seemed, was that collapse more apparent than in
the black community I had so lovingly imagined and within which I had hoped to find refuge. I might meet a black
friend at his Midtown law firm, and before heading to lunch at the MoMA, I would look out across the city toward the
East River from his high-rise office, imagining a satisfactory life for myself-a vocation, a family, a home. Until I
noticed that the only other blacks in the office were messengers or clerks, the only other blacks in the museum the blue-
jacketed security guards who counted the hours before they could catch their train home to Brooklyn or Queens.
I might wander through Harlem-to play on courts I’d once read about or to hear Jesse Jackson make a speech on
125th; or, on a rare Sunday morning, to sit in the back pews of Abyssinian Baptist Church, lifted by the gospel choir’s
sweet, sorrowful song-and catch a fleeting glimpse of that thing which I sought. But I had no guide that might show me
how to join this troubled world, and when I looked for an apartment there, I found Sugar Hill’s elegant brownstones
occupied and out of reach, the few decent rental buildings with ten-year-long waiting lists, so that all that remained
barré
(Barré)
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