Going to away to school would have been too much for me three months after Bip’s death. Campus housing, adjusting to life in another city, and late registration all while wearing my depression like an overcoat was a reality I couldn’t handle, so I decided to attend Loyola, a local school on the edge of Baltimore.
I always thought college would be like that show A Different World. Dimed-out Lisa Bonets and Jasmine Guys hanging by my dorm—young, pure, and making a difference. I’d be in Jordans and Jordan jerseys or Cosby sweaters like Ron and Dwayne Wayne, getting A’s and living. No row homes, hood-rats, housing police, or gunshots—just pizza, good girls, and opportunity.
Loyola was a GAP commercial—miles and miles of grass, new construction, and healthy smiles. I saw kickball and flag football and people holding hands. A universe of white and Asian faces smirked at me as I walked across campus the first day. This was a different world, but not the one I was looking for.
There were some other black guys there, but they weren’t black like me. They spoke proper English, called each other dude, wore pastel colored sweaters, Dockers, and boat shoes, carried credit cards, chased Ugg-booted-white girls, played sports other than basketball and talked about Degrassi—What the fuck is Degrassi?
I wore six braids like Iverson, real Gucci sweat suits like my brother, and about a fifteen-thousand-dollar mixture of my and Bip’s old jewelry. It was my first experience interacting with other races, and that, combined with my Rasta weed habit, made me paranoid so I talked Nick—who had dropped out of middle school long ago—into hanging around campus with me.
“Yo, Dee, if any of these people act dumb, even the da principal, tell me. Swear to God I’ll fuck ’em up for you, Yo.”
“Colleges have deans, Nick, not principals, but I guarantee I won’t have any problems here.”
Each day, I’d float through Loyola clean and high. Some of the students were racist—but not to my face, and it probably wasn’t their fault, most of their parents gave them racism as a first gift. A few of my professors looked at me as if I was speaking a different language when I answered questions. My philosophy teacher, a tweed coat–wearing dickhead was the worst; every class he’d say, “What sport did you play to get into here?” I honestly thought about having Nick pistol-whip him, but he was only a pedestrian on my road to bigger goals.
I started meeting people and even tried to adjust to the campus culture by attending basketball games and buying a gray Loyola hoodie. I bought Nick a black one. Together we’d sit through home games, underwhelmed by the basic style of play and unaffected by the school spirit that shook the gym. Loyola students get excited over made free throws and baseline jump shots. Hood dudes like us need to see thrills: dunks, spin moves, shit talking, finger pointing, and ankle-breaking crossovers.
Eventually, I met some cool white boys to smoke weed with. Tyler was a freshman like me but already had a hold on the campus. Girls giggled when he spoke, and most of the other freshmen lived and died for his approval. I saw him around a few times but initially we met in the Athletic Center. I was shooting jumpers and Nick was rebounding for me. Tyler walked up and said, “Nice shot. You guys gamble?”
“Shoot his head off, Dee! Shoot his head off, Dee!” chanted Nick. Tyler and I went five dollars a shot for an hour or so and I think he beat me out of two or three hundred dollars. I paid him and he gave me a hundred back.
“What’s this for?” I said, rejecting the money. He explained that he had gambled with black guys before and he noticed that the winners always give the losers a little something back. Then he said: “Besides, you guys smell like Jamaicans! Can I get some of that?” The three of us walked back to Nick’s Camry and smoked some joints. Tyler thought the bud was decent; Nick and I always had it so we exchanged numbers.
Sometimes we smoked and talked trash to girls together, or beat the shit out of the squares that hung around in the gym in basketball. Tyler even took me to his spot in Bolton Hill, a neighborhood filled beautiful brownstones that ran from $300K to almost a million.
Tyler liked Jay Z, 2Pac, and watched Above the Rim, just like me. I turned him on to chicken cheese steaks with hot sauce from Mama Mia’s. He exposed me to the richer parts of city like Mount Vernon and Guilford, where there wasn’t a black person in sight—places I didn’t even know existed.
I understood all of his white boy slang like puke or dude or riffle, which means to steal. White boy slang is easy. But I had to explain some language to him that he couldn’t pick up in context—like unk meaning uncle, everybody’s name is Yo or dummy, and how we say dug instead of dawg or dog and Vick. White people liked to buy eighths of weed but black people buy Vicks. A Vick is seven grams and we call them Vicks because Michael Vick wore number seven.
I really liked Tyler but most of his friends were hard to take. They’d invite me and Nick to campus parties. We’d walk in and the mood would change. They’d reference Dr. King and then Dr. Dre, and call us bro and brotha, and give us too many handshakes. They tried to imitate us so we felt more comfortable, but it just felt condescending. Luckily, we never got into any fights and the N-word never slipped out. The parties got old to us really quick so we stopped going.
My mother being super proud was the best part. She’d tell all of her church friends that I was doing well in School and hit me on the jack like “College man, you need anything?” I’d always say no, and pretended like everything was ok. An artificial front that I started believing myself.
I faked like doing homework and adjusting to this new world helped me deal with the loss of Bip, but in reality I still had sleepless nights where I sat in the park until the sun came up, wondering why I was alive, why Hurk had such a short temper, why couldn’t Nick study and be a student too, and why I didn’t get a chance to tell my bro what he meant to me. By mid-semester I was sick of school. The work wasn’t hard, but it was boring as that show MASH. I feel like anybody can listen to teacher, read a book, and then solve a problem. And trying to assimilate was even more exhausting.
What would my brother say if he saw me hanging around the cafeteria with Zack Morris and Carlton Banks, laughing at jokes I hated, listening to stories that bored me, going to wack basketball games, slowly conforming—being a good Negro. What would he say if he caught me referencing Degrassi? Bip didn’t want me in the streets, but I know he didn’t want this—we were raised by Biggie, Spike Lee, Pac, NWA, and Public Enemy, not this Wayne Brady shit.
So I said fuck it.