Your Face in Mine: A Novel Page 5

  You might have thought that this atmosphere of social liberty (some might even call it neglect) would have led me to radically alter my appearance in the conventional ways, by dyeing my hair, for example, or getting piercings or tattoos. I never had any appetite for such things. In fact, I dressed in a monotonous, unimaginative way, barely keeping enough clothes around to make it from week to week. I lived inside a cocoon, one could say, poetically, I suppose, waiting for the real change to happen.

  It was the suicide of my best friend in the spring of 1993 that caused me to radically rethink the course of my life—

  I fold the pages back, quickly, abruptly, and replace them as they were in my bag. Martin is as he was, churning through his daily mile, flashing me the happy grimace of the endorphin addict. My ears fill up with the silence, the ambient non-noise, of all this empty space: lapping water, humming ventilation fans, low, indistinct Muzak, the attendant’s flip-flops slapping the tiles as she paces back and forth, waiting to hand out her second towel of the morning. Expensive silence. How much money, it occurs to me just now, we spend to create these sterile bubbles, these vacuums abhorred by nature. How much money Martin spent; and now he wants to be the first with the brick, the needle, to let the pressure out, to let the world come roaring in? It makes no sense; it makes perfect sense. Look what I’ve made, he’s saying to me, through the stinging chlorinated air. I made this. I made this.

  Why have I never had much entrepreneurial spirit, that competitive, world-defining, world-acquiring instinct, so identified with my kind? Wendy always used to find it amusing that young people in Wudeng would come to me for business tips, assuming, in those days, that as an American I would have absorbed supply-side economics in the womb. I had nothing to tell them. This silence, this anticipatory silence, gives me tremors. The future, you could say, gives me tremors. And there Martin is, reaching after it, claiming it, his muscled arms as classic as a Rodin sculpture, or a hood ornament. Pulling me, phaeton-like, with him.

  Why, I wonder, why does he even need a story at all? What does he need to explain? Look at his happiness: isn’t that reason enough?

  • • •

  You know what the girl’s name is? Finlayson. Finlarson. I think it’s Swedish. Anyway, she comes up to me and says, Mr. Perkins, I’ve got the records you requested now, follow me. And she actually opens up the counter and lets me walk back into the stacks with her. Starts taking down boxes and showing me things. Old deeds, lien records, structural assessments, for the whole area. I wish I’d had a camera, or a backpack; I would have just started squirreling stuff away while her back was turned. And then Vonetta comes around the corner and sees me there and says, excuse me! We are not allowed to have the public back in here for any reason! And this Finlayson girl says, this is the Office of Public Records, and I’m a state auditor. Can I have your name, please?

  I’m surprised Vonetta didn’t have a stroke.

  She turned purple like a goddamned grape. Get the hell out of my office! she says. Nobody talks to me like that in my office! I am a city of Baltimore employee and a shop steward of AFSCME Local 522! And Finlayson says, I don’t care if you’re the mayor, I’ve been instructed to open up these records pursuant to discovery in this case, and if I have to get a marshal in here to do it, I will.

  Lee, Martin says, I think you’ve shot your chances of ever getting anything out of that office ever again.

  That’s exactly what Vonetta said. She gave me this burning-up look and said, don’t bother coming in here no more, Lee Perkins, and I said to Karen, looks like I’m going to have to buy you a lot more tickets on that Baltimore–Annapolis bus. And she says, don’t bother, just get me a gas card; if I drive I’ll get here quicker.

  Girl got balls.

  She has no idea what she’s up against.

  Vonetta Harper’s going to take early retirement.

  Forget that. She’s got her little minions, and they’re just trained in the fine art of playing solitaire and ignoring requests.

  What I know so far: Lee Perkins, to my right, is a lawyer, an assistant district attorney, who works on property misuse and real estate fraud. Paul Delacroix, across the table, runs the ESPN office at Camden Yards. Marshall Haber, next to Martin, teaches history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. We call ourselves the Chamber of Commerce, Marshall said to me, as we were being introduced. That way we can expense the meal. We’re one another’s clients. On paper, that is. Or sources, in my case. I view this as research. Weekly research at the DAC. It’s on my calendar.

  For the most part it’s as if I wasn’t there at all. I sit back from the table, pad in my lap, clicking and unclicking my pen under the table, but writing only a few words, names, and phrases. When Martin explained what I was doing, they nodded, and Paul said, Martin Wilkinson, spokesman for the Talented Tenth, which produced a mild rumble of laughter.

  Kelly, Marshall says, turning to me now, what you need to know about Vonetta—I’ve tangled with her, too—is that she’s the most powerful woman in Baltimore. Hands down. God love her, she may be a tyrant, but she knows everything about everything. You can’t register a deed or file a property transfer or a zoning request without her. You know in that TV show, The Wire, they had all that stuff about drug dealers and property developers? That was all based on her office. She was pissed because they wouldn’t give her a walk-on part. Tried to revoke their filming permits.

  That was her one shot at the big time, Paul says. She’s too ugly for reality TV, God knows. Else she’d go on The Apprentice and be the Bad Black Lady, like that other one, the crazy one.

  Let’s change the subject, Martin says. We increase her power by talking about her, right? Everyone knows Vonetta’s all reputation. A dictatorship of one.

  Baltimore, the city of fiefs.

  It’s not like it’s so different other places. All politics is local, you know that saying? Anyway, people fight because the stakes are so low. If you had a proper city, you know, a working city, where landlords didn’t just walk away from whole blocks at a time, and the government wasn’t always going around declaring X property derelict and Y property uninhabitable—

  You’re saying if people actually wanted to live here.

  If people wanted to use the existing housing stock, and not knock everything down and build another ridiculous condo, or fill in the harbor so they can get a better view of the Domino’s sign—

  If we had a taxable tax base, and not fifty percent of cash flow in the city in the underground economy—

  If the government actually gave a shit, instead of just putting up Empowerment Zone this and School of Excellence that—

  Well, I guess that about sums it up, Marshall says. Y’all can go home now. I’ll just sit down and make sure Kelly here gets all that down on paper. Ninety-five theses on the future of Baltimore.

  That’s just boring as shit. No way The New Yorker’s going to print that. Am I right?

  I don’t know what they’ll print, I say. I’ll just write what I hear, and they can sort it out, one way or another.

  That’s a polite answer, Marshall says, but not a very convincing one. You’re saying you don’t have a slant?

  Not this early in the game.

  Well, you must have pitched them something.

  I wanted to write about black entrepreneurs, I say, because most people don’t know they exist. The culture doesn’t seem to allow for them.

  Which culture do you mean?

  Mainstream culture.

  Right, but that’s a tricky concept, isn’t it? Because you’re not just talking about numbers. Believe me. The numbers are on my side. People watch sports, the local news, maybe some talk radio, Rush, Howard Stern—

  Tom Joyner, Paul says.

  —but that’s not what you’re talking about. Even if you’re being as broad as possible, you’re still talking about the thinking person’s news.

  What you saying, Lee says, cracking a smile, black people don’t think?

&
nbsp; You’re talking about a minority to begin with, Paul continues, the people who think anything about black entrepreneurs, who even know for sure what the word entrepreneurs means.

  Yeah, Marshall says, but it’s a powerful minority.

  No doubt, Paul says. And that’s what The New Yorker is all about. Talking to the five percent of the population that makes decisions.

  My dad read The New Yorker, Lee says. Every week. Read it in the library. Then later my mom started bringing it home from one of the houses she cleaned. We had a stack of them in the bathroom. It all started with the guy who wrote about Arthur Ashe, what was his name, McPhee? My dad loved that book about Arthur Ashe. Even made me read it.

  It’s the exception that proves the rule.

  No, Marshall says, it’s not that simple, Paul. In a democracy, in an open society, anyone can have an intellectual life. We forget that. Yeah, it doesn’t show up in the Nielsen ratings. Those people don’t do Nielsen ratings. They’re not in the focus groups. You know, when I was a kid, when they started busing over on Greenmount, every day I was the first one at the bus stop, and this white lady bus driver—I’m talking about six-thirty in the morning—would be sitting there drinking her coffee and reading Das Kapital. I’m not kidding. I never forgot it.

  So is that like Huey P. Newton reading The Republic or what? Knowledge is power? Paul chortles, leans back in his padded chair, and nods gravely as the waitress sets an egg-salad sandwich in front of him. Listen, he says, biting the tip off his dill spear, I got a new one for you. Power is power, knowledge is, what do they call it? Edutainment.

  Tell that to the kids at Dunbar.

  No, Paul says, but look, I’m serious. You can talk all you want about the intellectual life, and you’re damn right, there’s thinking people everywhere, in every walk, but The New Yorker, I mean, pick it up, it’s like reading Playboy for the interviews, only in reverse, because the thing about The New Yorker is that the ads are the porn. You know those little tiny ads they have, like, for the desk that’s hand-carved by Shakers in Wisconsin, and costs five thousand dollars? It’s a lifestyle magazine for people who think they’re too good for a lifestyle magazine. That’s some subtle shit right there, but it’s the truth.

  So what’s he supposed to do? Marshall asks. Write for USA Today? You think they print fifteen-thousand-word articles about the black middle class?

  Kelly, Paul says, you know I’m not casting no aspersions, right? I’m just telling it like it is. We’re all in some kind of business. Shit, no, I think this article’s a great idea, it’s just, you know, don’t expect people to line up and start singing “Kumbaya.”

  They’re waiting for me to say something: there’s a pocket of silence over the table, the vacuum of a conversation bubble popping, the lid lifted off a foaming pot. Martin, who’s said nothing, busies himself with dressing his chicken Caesar, adding extra pepper, flicking a stray crouton off the tablecloth.

  I wish I’d brought my tape recorder, I say, lamely. This is all excellent. This is exactly what I was hoping for. An honest conversation.

  Just quote me off the record, Lee says. Please. I mean it. I don’t need any more flak from Weinblatt—that’s my DA. Anyway, I’m not authorized. You’ve got to put an official in the district attorney’s office speaking on background. Don’t even call me an ADA, or he’ll start doing process of elimination.

  Likewise for me, Paul says. I mean, you can use my name, just don’t put ESPN in there anywhere. They’ve got special search engines that find that stuff. If my name’s next to ESPN, I’m a company spokesperson. Which would mean my ass, in this case.

  You see, Kelly, Marshall says, this is what you’re going to get. No offense, people, but look at us, right, prominent pillars of the community and whatnot, and we still don’t want to be identified as what we are. Successful Black People. You know what my coach at City College used to say? A black man goes downtown and buys a suit at Jos. A. Bank, and you know what it comes with? A bull’s-eye on the back.

  Marshall, Martin says, finally, and every head turns to look at him. Marshall, he says, again, with a little dip of emphasis, let’s not do this.

  Do what?

  The whole victim thing.

  I’m not, Marshall says. I’m making a factual observation. Read the statistics if you don’t believe me. Psychologically, black people are less likely to feel secure. Financially, black people are less likely to feel secure. Sociologically—

  What I’m saying here is, let’s take that as understood, okay? Let’s treat that as the background. That’s what Kelly’s trying to do here.

  Marshall laughs, an unexpectedly shrill, reedy laugh. I don’t know, he says, are we there yet? Can we really treat that as background? What, because of Obama?

  No. Not because of Obama. Because it’s a much bigger world than it used to be. Because we have so much more power, globally, than we think we do.

  This is what you’re going to hear from him, Lee says to me. Blackness as a brand. As a strategy. I think that shit is stark crazy, but what do I know? I’m just a lawyer.

  Jay-Z’s doing it, Paul says. The whole global brand thing. You look at the numbers for Rocawear, sixty percent’s overseas.

  Yeah, Martin says. Jay-Z, that’s one model. But it’s so much more than that.

  He takes a long sip of iced tea, dabs his lips with a still-folded napkin.

  So? Marshall asks.

  So? You want me to give away all my trade secrets?

  Don’t be paranoid, Bill Gates, Paul says. We’re not in your business.

  Everyone’s going to be in my business eventually. But look, that’s beside the point. What I’m saying, now, is, we need more brothers looking overseas for opportunities. It’s a big world full of very small niches.

  You know what he does for a living? Marshall asks me. Has he told you what he sells?

  Martin exchanges a glance with me across the table.

  Electronics, I say. Specialized electronics. I’m not an expert—

  Oh, come on, he hasn’t given you the sales pitch yet? He sells unlocked cell phones. Open-platform computers. Self-replicating proxy servers. Isn’t that right? What do you call it, spyware?

  Not spyware. He shrugs. Geekware, maybe. Stuff people want so that they can get around Microsoft and Verizon. I don’t even understand some of it myself. I have a technical lady out in Mountainview who handles that. Me, I just do the buying and selling. It’s low-volume, big-margin sales. My customers are the kind of rich techies who want all the latest gadgets, prototypes, the stuff you can only get over in Asia, but they want it sold to them by somebody who speaks American, who operates with a friendly face. They want to have a guy. A hookup. Whatever. I’m not saying it’s easy money, but it’s not exactly the salt mines, either. Eventually, when the brand’s established, I’ll sell out and move on. I’m into business, not a business. If I could tell one thing to the kids at Dunbar, it’s that. Capital flows. Always be on the move.

  That Zig Ziglar shit, Lee says. Always be selling. You can get it off a motivational poster.

  No, Martin says, carefully, it’s not that. I’m not talking some self-esteem crap. And I’m not just talking about money. Success is more than money.

  Power, then. Influence.

  Connectedness, he says. To be intractable. Undismissable. Visible.

  You writing this down? Paul asks me. Or do you just have one of those automatic, photographic memories?

  Marshall fixes me with a newly interested look.

  You know, he says to Martin, it must be nice to have a Boswell. An amanuensis. That’s seriously old school. I should look into getting one myself.

  You lost me, Lee says. Ama-what?

  Amanuensis, Martin says. Someone who follows you around and writes down everything you say. I could sell you one, you know. A digital voice recorder. I’ve got one the size of a toothpick for a hundred ninety-nine.

  Hear that? Marshall turns to me. You’re superannuated, he says, with shini
ng eyes, a pretense of malice that is itself malicious. You’re fired. Go home.

  7.

  I’m going to say something here that should come as no surprise, at least not to those of my generation, born after the civil rights movement had shrunk to pages 263–67 of American Panoramas, and raised, for the most part, in the Eighties, watching Bill Cosby sell Pudding Pops on TV: my education in blackness, in the experience of black people in America, began one hot summer afternoon in 1989, in sticky-floored Theater C at the Chestnut Hill Mall 13, with Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.

  Of course I had heard rap before. I knew, in a kind of academic way, what a crack addict was, and I knew a great deal about Martin Luther King: my parents’ first date was at the March on Washington in 1963. But in the world I lived in before I moved to Baltimore—Newton, Massachusetts, not Boston, unless you count the occasional trip to the Aquarium or Faneuil Hall—the only black people I saw regularly were babysitters and maids. My parents were ardent Democrats, classic northeastern Waspy liberals, who nonetheless, characteristically, chose to live in a neighborhood populated with people exactly like themselves—plus a margin of Chinese, Indian, Thai, and garden-variety reform Ashkenazim—for the schools, the parks, the playgrounds, the excellent restaurants.

  Of course it wasn’t Alabama, it wasn’t 1955; there were always a few black kids, a photogenic sprinkling. Tiffany and Wesley Roberts, whose father was Duane Roberts, the Celtics point guard, were one year ahead of me at Passing Brook Elementary. Tiffany was grasshopper-legged, a natural sprinter, an indefatigable four-square champion; Wesley spent recesses under the pines at the far end of the soccer field, trading stickers, buttons, Garbage Pail Kids, baseball cards, Dungeons & Dragons imaginary weapons—whatever currency of the moment.

  That was where I came to know him, briefly, in third grade, before his dad was traded to the SuperSonics. He sat hunched over, legs folded, stretching out the hem of his long T-shirt like a table, displaying some treasure—a folder of Reggie Jackson cards from every season, a Don Mattingly rookie card, a mint Topps pack of the 1979 Pirates—and daring the rest of us to make an offer. It wasn’t fun, exactly, being so utterly outmatched, but Wesley knew how to work the margins, trading cards he didn’t need for the best we had to offer. He stared into space, over our shoulders, reciting statistics in a listless, deadpan voice, showing why his cards were always worth more, had more long-term potential; he used words like investment and dividends. Today we might give him a diagnosis—Asperger’s, mild autism, social anxiety disorder—but no one at the time, as far as I can recall, saw anything wrong. Never did anyone in that circle refer to him as black. Creatures of instinct, we didn’t care about the color of his skin, or the content of his character; we cared about his stuff. Only later did it occur to me that that was why he sought us out, and perhaps why he became—I Googled him once, in idle curiosity, a few years ago—a venture capitalist seeding start-ups and then selling them to Microsoft. He’s grown into his looks now; he and his father have a foundation together that runs after-school sports programs in Seattle.