“Don’t even start,” said Donnell. “Not today.”
He was referring to the Knicks. These were rough times for the team, coming off four seasons in the cellar and Spike Lee’s defection to the Milwaukee Bucks.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “At least your boys looked cute in those new uniforms. What would you call that color? Rust? Ocher?”
“Burnt sienna,” he said.
I considered sports expertise my Massachusetts birthright. In Mass, even dandies and high femmes could hold their own in discussions of the Patriots’ depth chart. I liked New York, where sports knowledge still suggested masculinity, and where I, a white-collar wuss, could penetrate the ranks of quote unquote real men by watching SportsCenter in bed. My discussions with Donnell were self-affirming, our easy banter supporting the delusion that I was not a snob looking down from his tower of privilege, but a streetwise code-shifter with working-class black friends. Or, at least, with one working-class black friend. That this friend had little choice in the matter of our friendship was something I willfully refused to acknowledge.
“Interesting choice of reading material,” I said, and lifted the book. I skimmed its pages, which were filled with notes and underlines.
“I have this theory,” he explained, “that one can trace the fall of the Knicks to 9/11.”
He was a man of theories, a writer who relished the challenge of selling difficult arguments, and who, with humor and insight, often managed to succeed. A recent post defended NBA salaries from a Marxist perspective. In Donnell’s hands, the league’s millionaires became labor incarnate, staffing the only industry that granted its workers just revenue share.
I admit that I was jealous of Donnell’s aptitude. His blog’s modulation between high and low registers was exactly what I was trying, and failing, to achieve with Eminem. For months, I’d been too embarrassed to bring up my own project during our weekly discussions. In part, the reason was obvious; Donnell was a writer, and I was a wannabe. But there was also a racial element to my reticence. I didn’t want to come across as a try-hard white guy whose scholarly knowledge of hip-hop betrayed a fetishistic aspect to his interest.
I was a Jewish teen in the nineteen-nineties, meaning hip-hop soundtracked my seminal years. It was pumped into malls, played at school dances, taped off the radio, and traded on mixtapes at camp. I got a shortwave radio for my bar mitzvah, and the first thing I did was search the airwaves for Hot 97, the mythological station of Summer Jam fame.
If hip-hop gave me an identity during those years, it also provided repeated reminders that it wasn’t intended for people like me. People, that is, with no experiential knowledge of the crack epidemic, or Section 8 housing, or mistreatment at the hands of trigger-happy police. People, that is, with no experiential knowledge of the racial injustice that, I gathered, was a defining component of many American lives. Even before being schooled at college in the language of political correctness, I understood my status as a cultural voyeur.
But while friends like Ricky found themselves reflected in, say, Phish’s maple syrup funk, part of hip-hop’s appeal was that it wasn’t a mirror, but a window into a foreign world. Which is to say: I loved hip-hop both in spite of and because of the fact that it wasn’t mine to love.
And then there he was, with his bleached hair and Kmart wardrobe, his pill-popping mom and lower-middle-class angst. I identified with Eminem so strongly it scared me, given his homophobia, misogyny, and nihilistic rage. I told myself that this was only a persona used for pushing boundaries, and that all that really mattered was Em’s level of skill. But even the latter was a controversial topic. To proselytize too hard for a white rapper’s talent was to risk promoting Caucasian exceptionalism. I worried that I’d have to face these questions if I ever wrote my book.
“So how does Carrie Bradshaw fit into your theory?” I asked Donnell.
“How doesn’t she fit, is what you should be asking.”
“Okay, how doesn’t she?”
“In no way doesn’t she.”
“I’m confused.”
“You’ll get it when you read the piece. That is, if I ever find time to write again. Jackie’s home on winter break, the other doorman’s on two-week vacation, and Verizon has a sick day policy to rival the Führer’s.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That sounds hard.”
Donnell released a puff of air in a manner that told me I couldn’t understand. It said that I, with my food grubbing and demand for banter, only added to his woes. I knew about Donnell’s money troubles from his blog: bank-breaking debt, a shitty mortgage on a money pit apartment. Our situations, I understood, were fundamentally different. For a moment, I wondered if he actually liked me, or whether I was just another asshole with whom he was forced to interact. Perhaps it’s testament to the triumph of self-deception, but I refused to accept that the latter was the case.
Wendy
Lillian’s email wasn’t urgent: a reminder to arrive promptly for the 10 a.m. pitch. I had a mostly sleepless night spent scratching my scabs and fighting the cat.
Monday morning—on what would be the day of Ricky’s murder—I missed both my alarm and my train. Michael was already gone. I hurried out the door, hoping I’d have time to stop by a boutique near my office that opened at nine. I’d practically run out of the few clothes I’d saved from quarantine, and my online purchases had yet to arrive. I was wearing a shirt of Michael’s that I’d found in his closet protected by a plastic membrane. In our old Manhattan apartment, I used to admonish him for refusing, out of laziness, to remove the plastic from his shirts when he brought them home from the dry cleaner’s. We shared a small closet. It rankled me to open it and see stray plastic sticking out. The plastic created static and took up
