Cobb

When I was a young brainy idiot who had boxes of college recruitment bulk mail in my bedroom, but had already dropped out of college, I started talking the vernacular. I had to in order to fit in, but I already did fit in. These people were, after all, the people I had grown up with. What was different was now I was spending all day with them instead of just playtime hours after school. I was working a place called Fedco - something special in the annals of black LA which nobody seems to be capturing except for me, Wanda Coleman and John Singleton. But I ain't loving them hoes.

The hardest thing about being a brother with a Jheri curl only happened when you opened your mouth and started to speak, that is if you speak out of character for a brother with a Jheri curl. There was a joke about that, that you could hear in the fake British accents of funk stars. Maybe you remember Rockwell. Maybe showers remind him of Psycho too much. He was 5 years late on the joke - we all knew Rick James could speak proper. Shit, he could mack like Teddy Pendergrass if he wanted. Like most black men in 1979, it was easier for me to surf the social waves in silence than to speak and rip perpendicular to the tides of expectations. In fact, I particularly liked the noise my motorcycle made for me when I removed the baffle from the aftermarket exhaust pipe. I was safer in the envelope of rowdy noise; people unable to handle my speed and maneuverability could at least hear me coming, curse and get out of the way.

"May I have this dance?" That's the way it was supposed to be done whether you were at a house party in Gardena or at a Cotillion at the Marina City Club. But the look I got at the Oakwood Gardens in Mid Wilshire, several blocks north of McArthur Park around the joints where who knows what white kids with money and clout started saying something deep about Ice-T back in the days when he was just another anonymous light-skinned nigga with a perm, that was the shit that did it. It made me realize that I couldn't keep wearing this Jheri Curl and roller discoing with the homegirls forever. Time was going to come when the skinny ghetto nigga look such as I was presenting wasn't hitting on shit. Sooner or later I had to be able to afford membership to Jack LaLannes in West LA because there ain't no college gym nearby. If you were going to get play, it had to be with the ghetto girls. There are sophisticated reasons for that, but it's fair enough to state flatly for now that the college freshmen babes were playing ghetto rules for the last time. That look in her eyes said all that, and she was pissed at me for making her think about which motherfucker I was going to be tonight. I reminded her of both places, neither a buff thug, nor a smooth Kappa with a shag haircut. Next time I'd know better, just grab the girl's arm and start slowdancing; make her pull away physically instead of waiting for a spoken reply.

Since it was still summer and there was still a Democrat in the White House, there was still big hipped girls from Eastern colleges, schoolboy glasses like Bernard and short afros and throaty voices taking CETA money. One of them just like that brought it to the Virginia Road playground. I don't know how I ended up there. Maybe I was sitting out a game while Suitcase and Boo and the rest of my boys were running the court. But I was there staring her down, her and her white friends who weren't saying anything at all. They were waiting for Act One. Right now was the prelude - the time the black woman gets to speak in front of a pile of children she pretends that she was once like. But none of us are like her but me, because I'm the only one who already knows what 'The Tempest' is all about in the inner-city playground production. She's going to talk all that yang about why black kids need to understand what Shakespeare knows about class and alienation and all that bullshit. I could be Caliban and jump in her face in front of her white friends. What would she say then? Fuck it. I'm going back to play some more basketball.

Let me throw in the final connection which gets back to the contempt of the pros I assume I am worthy of. I've dissed Kevin Powell so hard somewhere back in the archive that it must still hurt. But there are all these black writers who were supposed to be in New York when I was there looking for them. Except they were all trying to get their poetry published in the New Yorker. And then I read the B-Boys book complete with the misspellings, and I knew shit was fucked up. And then I went to the Upper East Side and listened to Shay Youngblood who was the only one out of her cohort with any talent. And then I watched my girl struggle with a third of a million dollars of debt birthing a magazine that would not be, and all the gang-sign thowing illiterates at the Source and Vibe were another third of the reason. I could tell you about the voice of the woman who wrote for the Lower East Side something rag who never returned my call on an answering machine which must have had audiophile quality tape recording features. There's no excuse. I could tell you about Sekou Sundiata sitting in the shadow of Five Guys Named Moe, but all that would reveal too much about a the broken heart of a broken writer looking for existential partners in the City that Never Weeps.

I read Drylongso and was released. Don't nobody need it bad enough. I could go out and get shot in the temple and see never a holy word drip through my lips, not a mumbling word. And babies will still be born with no further assistance from my typewritten serenades. Don't nobody need a 'voice'. Maybe they will because people will forget Wole Soyinka, and they'll need somebody to think about while in tomorrows Abu Ghraib. But I shouldn't presume to take God's job. I write and it's fine to be ignored, because people are still capable of making up reasons. Nobody pays enough attention to people's idiotic reasons. Only writers get that much attention, now ain't that a bitch?

Stop writing. I don't need to. I don't particularly want to. If I couldn't go dead off on the page, I'd pace the walls of my gilded cage and fly upside down like Woodstock. I've been unleashed too long and I'm known to break up fights. What would I do walking the streets and looking at humanity and expecting to interact with them directly based upon what they're doing? I'd have to be a soldier, a double-agent, a psychopath and a televangelist all wrapped up in a pimp suit to do in action what I would in writing. And that's just on Thursdays.

It's 5pm and I smell hotdogs. See ya.