Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach Page B

him out further, unearthed something horrible in him. You need to chill, he told himself, brushing back his hair as an excuse to squeegee the sweat from his forehead. She wouldn’t be talking to you if she didn’t like your poem.
    “Got me,” he admitted, going for rueful. Fuck did rueful sound like? He’d never tried rueful before. “I just say Boston because most people have never heard of Newton. I wasn’t trying to front.”
    “Yeah, sure,” Logan teased. “I’m from Cambridge,” she explained. “I went to Rindge and Latin.”
    “Really?” It meant he could name-drop Beantown graffiti artists, place himself inside a tradition of bad-man neon hand-skills, earn her respect that way. “I went bombing with a lot of Cambridge cats. Maybe you know my boy—”
    Logan cut him off. “Probably,” she said. “Listen, I’ll tell you what. Let’s skip the name game and just bond over candlepin bowling. You know there’s no such thing in this city?”
    “That’s horrible,” said Macon, affecting a look of playful dismay. He was pretty sure he nailed it, and fought the urge to raise his arms like a gymnast after dismount. He’d been bowling maybe three times in his life, all at grade-school birthday parties. What a weird thing to bring up, he thought. Maybe she didn’t like my poem because she’s deranged.
    The lights swaddling Logan chose that moment to swing elsewhere, and she and Macon were cast into shadows. “It is,” she said. “New York might have everything else over the Bean, but it’ll never be home to me until somebody builds some candlepin lanes.”
    “You might like big-ball bowling,” Macon said, sidestepping double-entendre landmines. “Maybe we could go sometime.” Logan smiled and flipped her tongue ring. Her eyes pulsed at him in the dark.
    “I doubt it,” she said. “But call me if you ever read again.”
    I’m a pimp, Macon told himself as he walked out the front a quarter clock-flip later, Logan’s number scribbled across the back of his poem and vague, out-of-focus sex-with-Logan movies playing in his mind. Forgotten were his tepid reception, his disappointment with the club, the strange panic that had bubbled up under the heat of Logan’s stare. Macon jogged to the subway station like a home-run hitter circling the bases, caught the R to Times Square, transferred to the 2 Express, and felt like a bona fide New Yorker until the train passed Ninety-sixth Street and began traveling east, a subway quirk that left him no choice but to exit not at 116th and Broadway, under the protective eyes of the fake Roman statues adorning Columbia’s main entrance, but across the park at 116th and Lenox, a sketchy neighborhood at two in the morning even if you knew your way around.

Chapter Six
    Shortest distance between two points is a straight line, Macon reminded himself, trudging resolutely toward the park that separated Columbia from Harlem. Besides, people always exaggerate these things. Can’t be afraid to walk in your own city. That’s the first step toward self-segregation.
    Broken glass crunched underneath his boots and Macon snapped into Indian hunter mode, super-alert and darting his head whenever a twig cracked, gauging the ramifications of each rat scurrying across his path and making the appropriate spiritual re-calibrations. He was testing himself, granting danger the opportunity to meet him without actually inviting it. He wanted to emerge unscathed and be able to say,
People are tripping. The park is fine
at night.
And then he’d never set foot there after dark again.
    Macon followed the left-leaning pathway to the top of the first hill. A notty-bearded black dude staggered into view around the next bend, waving a goose-down jacket as he approached Macon. Neither of them spoke in words. The cat mumbled something garbled and garrulous, jacket draped over his arm as if he were a wine steward and the filthy fucking thing a lace napkin, and Macon replied by putting sound