Fresh Off the Boat (17 page)

My search wasn’t over, though. My parents were bad Buddhists, but I wanted to really do it right so I read about Siddhartha, too. I got into it and fasted on just water for seven days, writing things in a diary just to see if it affected my thinking, but the notes were basically “Day 1: Mo-fuckers is hungry … Day 2: MOFUCKERS IS REAL EXTRA LIFE OR DEATH HANGRY.” I wasn’t about to go out eating vegetables, telling myself that life is suffering. To me, life wasn’t suffering, it was a game where you tried
to eliminate all the shitty days and live for the good ones. Buddhists seemed like a bunch of kale-eating losers accepting defeat to me. They were the soccer moms and dads with kids on the team that never won a game, yet wore Birkenstocks and hemp clothing to every game telling their uncoordinated kids that they were still winners.

That’s when I found Taoism and it made a lot of sense, ’cause it made no sense at all. This dude Lao Tzu was the original RZA writing cryptic shit you brought your own meaning to with mad double entendres and metaphysical language. For the same reasons I liked hip-hop, I liked the Tao Te Ching. You didn’t pray to anyone, you didn’t submit to anyone, and it was what you needed it to be. It wasn’t a religion, it was a philosophy. As basic as it seems now, that’s when I flipped the script and stopped reading anything religious. There isn’t a God in the sky that pulls the string. I told myself that there is something bigger than us but that it was egotistical and presumptuous to personify what that was. No one knows what’s on the other side, but I read anything and everything if it was founded on things we actually knew. I wanted to trade in reality and save up for the unknown. Maybe we die and we don’t take anything with us, but if there is a human spirit, wouldn’t the intangible things be the ones we get to keep? My memories, my knowledge, my know-how, my soul. All that shit, I didn’t know where it’d go, but whether it came with me or not, I listened to Nas and “stayed chiseled.”

Around this time, I turned sixteen. I was excited because I wanted to get a whip. Every weekend, I worked at Cattleman’s with Warren and Ben and was trying to get my dad to help me with a down payment on this used BMW Hatchback from 1990. It was only $20K and I could make the payments if he held me down on the down payment. I wasn’t totally confident it would happen; in fact, for two years I hadn’t gotten shit for my birthday, not even a cake, because my mom said I was a “bad kid.” That I understood, but I hoped they’d help with the car because I needed to get around.

The day of my birthday, my dad pulls up at home with a brand-new Benz SLK, the hard-roof drop-top roadster Benzo, the first year it came out. My heart sank. I knew that shit wasn’t for me.

“You like my new car?”

“Yeah, it’s cool … Does this mean you’re not helping me with the down payment?”

“No money, I just bought this car.”

What a dick. I understood him not helping me with the down payment, but he didn’t have to pull up on my birthday with a new Benz for himself. I didn’t understand. Even my mom and Emery thought it was kind of fucked-up. I mean, there’s stuntin’ and then there’s that. Looking back, I wish I never made a fuss because what happened after was worse. I should have just accepted that most kids don’t get cars. It’s one of those suburban privilege moments that I’ll be embarrassed about forever: feeling entitled to a car.

I made a stink about it so that weekend, he agreed to go to the used car lot and at least go look at the Bimmer hatchback with me. That’s when he went over the top.

“Fine, you can have the Benz.”

“But I don’t want the Benz.”

“You don’t even have your license yet and can’t drive for another six months anyway! We’ll just call it your car.”

I knew my dad was a Jedi, but this was the ill, Homer Simpson makes Bart smoke all the cigarettes at one time switcheroo. Like, “Oh, you want a car? Here’s a CAR!” See how much you like it now.

“Dad, I appreciate it, but that’s too much. I can’t drive that car. It’s O.D.”

“Look, I drive it for six months, then you drive it for a year and a half, and I’ll sell it when you go to college. No big deal.”

I like to think my pops meant well, but the car bugged me out.

Everywhere we went, he’d tell people about how he spoiled me and gave me the car like he was the World’s Best Dad, and it pissed me off. All those years getting whipped by five-pound Busch Gardens rubber alligators was wiped out and made right with one really fucking over-the-top car that I never should have got in. Kids from school all sweated that car when I pulled into the parking lot during summer school. I remember John Whitehead said something that really woke me up.

“Damn, son, you shinin’ so hard right now.”

“For real?”

“Kid, you just pulled into the parking lot, top down, bumpin’ ‘Picture Me Rollin’, you win!”

“That’s not winning, man. My dad bought this car. I didn’t do shit for it.”

“But own it! That’s you.”

“Naw, man, it’s not.”

People didn’t understand … or maybe they did and I didn’t. They were right. I could have owned the car, stayed in Orlando, worked for my dad, run his restaurants, and never had to worry about money ever again, but that wasn’t me. That’s not what life was about to me. I didn’t read the Koran, starve myself for two weeks, read the Tao Te Ching, and struggle for answers every day just to give up for a car. I remember not having money, I remember having money, and neither had a bearing on who I was as a person. It affected how others saw me, but not how I saw myself. Everyone talks about how they’d love to be ballin’ or how only rich people complain about having things; they’re right. You can’t possibly know until you have it, but trust me, it only means something if you earned it. If it’s truly yours. Otherwise, you’re just a punk-ass kid bumpin’ “Picture Me Rollin’.” I couldn’t even listen to that song for years.

I
hated the gifted program. The kids were cool and being treated like we were X-Men was really dope, but the teacher was horrible. Junior year, we had to take courses from this conservative Christian woman from FSU. Our curriculum was nontraditional, since we were “gifted,” so she broke the year into two semesters. The first semester she would choose one topic that we studied and explored for eighteen weeks. The second semester we would pick our own topic, study it, and give a fifteen-minute presentation at the end of the semester. The topic she picked was the Holocaust and everything seemed fine.

But the first day we started, I knew something was wrong. The first couple weeks, the lessons were taught based on photos from a summer vacation she spent going to Holocaust sites and museums. This was hipster irony before hipster irony. Every photo we saw was of her in some horrible Seminoles T-shirt and visor, white short Americana smiling, juxtaposed against the background of Holocaust sites. The tone of the photos was totally fucked and it became comedy, which no one wanted to admit because we knew it was wrong.

She’d tell us stories about what tour guides told her and for weeks,
there was no through line or message, just her own Christian guilt on display for thirty gifted English students. We had Jewish kids, white kids, black kids, and an Asian kid in class; to a man and woman, none of us thought the subject was being treated with the proper respect. The first project she gave us was to draw our feelings about the Holocaust on tiles. She wanted to mimic the AIDS quilt, but as a Holocaust tile mosaic to decorate the room with. I had no idea how to approach this shit, was worried if I’d offend someone, and we were also being graded on our “feelings.” It was totally fucked. I ended up drawing a picture of Hitler standing on a big pile of poop.

“Eddie! What is this?”

“Hitler on top of shit.”

“What does this mean? What are the feelings you are trying to convey?!?!”

“That Hitler and his ideas are a giant pile of shit.”

“This is not a feeling. You did not follow the assignment.”

“It is a feeling. I feel he’s a piece of shit. Don’t you?”

“Go to the office! I’m not putting this tile up.”

Literally, twice a week, she sent me to the office because I’d point out how ridiculous her photos and lesson plan were, but she really lost it this time. She was screaming, shouting, and pushed me out of the class like I had SARS. Usually she at least let me grab my bag, but I didn’t even get that courtesy this time. People in other classes heard the screaming, saw me standing outside, and knew something happened.

“Ha, ha, yo, E, what’d you do this time?”

“I drew Hitler standing on a pile of shit.”

“What?!?”

“Yeah, I gotta go to the office. See you later, man.”

While I was in the office, people from class started telling everyone about the tile I made. Other people drew Stars of David, people holding hands, doves and olive branches, but the one everyone wanted to see was Hitler on a Pile of Shit.

The last month of the semester, our project was to enter a national essay contest about crimes against humanity. She forced us to write about
how the Holocaust was the greatest crime against humanity ever committed. I didn’t disagree, but I felt it was an infringement on free speech and undue coercion. You can’t force someone to agree with your conclusion and then grade them on it! Especially not in a classroom full of Holocaust tiles juxtaposed with Seminoles paraphernalia.

“I agree with you. There isn’t another crime against humanity that I can objectively and definitively say is a ‘greater’ crime against humanity, but that’s not my point. We should come to decisions ourselves. You can’t MAKE us say it!”

“I’m not making you say anything, it’s true.”

“No, you can’t objectively say that. It’s unfair to Native Americans, victims from the Rape of Nanking, and pretty much any black person brought to America against their own free will! This is bullshit.”

“That’s it! Go to the office.”

“That’s all you have, the goddamn office and your Christian guilt!”

“Eddie! Go to the OFFICE NOW!”

I was right, the administrators couldn’t force me to agree with her, and I got to write an essay that did not conclude the Holocaust was the greatest crime against humanity. My essay ended up being about how it is unproductive for anyone to argue that there is one single greatest crime against humanity. There’s nothing “great” about any of them. The one productive thing that came of that semester, though, was an introduction to Jewish history. When it came to choosing law schools five years later, I chose Yeshiva without any hesitation.

GIFTED ENGLISH SUCKED
,
but during the summers, I took college courses at Davidson or Duke University in North Cack-a-lack. I’d fly into the Charlotte airport and see white rocking chairs with old white people kicking back in V-neck sweaters, flip-flops, digging into some vinegar pulled pork. I felt like I accidentally walked into a photo shoot for
Southern Living
. When I got out of the bus and onto the Davidson campus, I was hit by this ill wave of whiteness: green, dense, manicured grass, all khaki everything, shawties with headbands. I could smell the fucking mustard wafting
from the cafeteria. There was no way in hell they had Jamaican beef patties for lunch in that joint. I told myself the first thing I’d do was call Emery to ship me a case of Tower Isle Patties to hold me down.

Landing at Davidson was like hitting the reset button. The kids were all right. Even the nerdy prodigy-like ones were down-to-earth and just there to have a good time. I got into TIP (Talent Identification Program) because I scored in the top .25 percent of the nation on my PSATs in eighth grade. Of course, my math scores were ill but my verbal scores weren’t, so I enrolled in this class, Writing with Aristotle, taught by a professor from the University of Georgia. He was a dick, but he had good taste in books. Our first few lessons were on propaganda. He showed us the contrast between Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” and his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”—one an appeal to emotion, the other to logic. It was eye-opening. My whole life, I felt lied to by parents, society, the news, etc., but I could never explain why. All along, from the time I was a kid, people tried to satiate my inquisitiveness with propaganda, appealing to emotion or tradition or threats, instead of reason. I was just their pawn.

ONE DAY ABOUT
two weeks into the summer, the professor came in with packets of five pages stapled together and dropped them in front of us. I looked at the title: “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift. I remember the first time I heard Michael Jackson’s
Bad
, I remember the first time my cousin played “Fuck wit Dre Day,” and I remember the first time I read “A Modest Proposal.” It was like going to the gym early in the morning and hearing the first basketball hit the floor,
dumph
. From that first drop, you can feel that the game is on.

When I read Swift it was like I could hear this dead motherfucker. It wasn’t writing anymore, it was live. I could feel how he felt with someone standing over him his whole life. He was sick of it. There was some real hate behind his words. Swift was beyond “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

At a certain point, people don’t deserve “Letter from Birmingham
Jail.” All they get is hard dick and bubble gum. Swift reminded me of Ghostface on the intro to “Biscuits.”