THAT NIGHT OF THE DINNER was a turning point in our relationship and marked a coming-out period for us both. I felt good about having let Zuk get close because he knew me so much better as a result. The gamble had paid off, and not just because Mom knew how to pour on her Southern charm. Zuk just turned out to be a decent person. He’d accepted the whole gamut of things he’d been confronted with with an open mind. He understood that being light enough to frequently be mistaken for a white person was something that I was sensitive about and did not go blabbing about it to everyone at school. In fact, it never came up again. Having lain bare the skeletons in my closet, there was nothing left for me to hide, and we were closer as a result. The frank and honest recognition of our differences only made our bond stronger. The fact that Zuk was willing to look past all my dirty little secrets nearly gave me faith in the basic goodness of everyone.
The brown baby Jesus came out of hiding, as did the mousetraps and roach motels and even Mom’s books—all of them except that autobiography that was so incendiary I thought the cover was made of flame retardant. The line about chickens having come home to roost was too much. The last thing someone like me needed was a race war. Otherwise, Zuk didn’t care. He knew the complete me. There were no more tests or examinations or inspections to perform. He’d seen the morass of who I was and seemed to approve—the result of which was that I experienced an inner peace I’d never known. With Zuk, I could listen to Johnny Cash or Jimi Hendrix. I could eat kidney beans or black-eyed peas. I could eat roast chicken or fried chicken. I could be attracted to white girls or colored girls. I could tan or burn. Everything was fair game, and none of it mattered. He never made me feel like a walking contradiction. He never expected me to conform to some fixed idea about how a given race is supposed to be. Consequently, I was free to be myself. It didn’t matter to him that I stuck out at Claremont like a cockatoo, or that there was no single box that I could easily be fit into. Zuk, as I came to call him, was a truly enlightened individual. A bona fide aesthete. A bon vivant. A free thinker, a gentleman scholar, a true philosopher in the Western liberal tradition, and as near to a free spirit as you can get in a place like Claremont. It was a breath of fresh air, like I could open my lungs and suck in all that they could hold. The stuff that I had been taught was supposed to happen actually happened. I suddenly understood what Mom had been saying all these years about me needing to get my head out of the sand and trust people. Looking back on it, it all seemed kind of silly. Quite frankly, I wasn’t sure what I’d been afraid of. It was through the blossoming of my friendship with Zuk that I at last felt that I had a place in this world. That one flowering bond was nothing short of magical. It seemed to validate my basic human connection to everyone.
Coming home alone after school and staying locked up by myself in the apartment, alone with my books and the TV, until Mom came home was a drag. It felt like the world outside had forgotten about me. But ever since Dinner at Peola’s, Zuk and I started taking the subway together after school. He’d get off at my stop because it was on his way home. We’d laugh and joke and horse around on our way past the broken-down cars parked in front of all the body shops, repair shops, and chop shops, with their iridescent pools of antifreeze shimmering over the buckled sidewalk out front, where axles to Cutlass Supremes, steering columns to Impalas, rear bumpers to Cadillacs, and tire after tire after tire lined my street and beside which some bum in an army jacket lay sprawled out cold.
We’d sidestep him on our way to the building that stood like a monolith in the foreground of the East River and Brooklyn in the distance. Jimmy would slap Zuk five and we’d talk baseball on our way up to the twenty-third floor, where we’d break out the soda we’d picked up on the way from our schoolbags. We’d sit around the kitchen table doing homework while listening to records. When we finished, we’d turn up the volume, raid the fridge, and compare fantasies of St. Michael’s girls. The old lady downstairs would eventually bang on her ceiling for us to cut it out. I’d remove the record from the turntable and return it to its sleeve and we’d throw ourselves on the sofa, pooped. When all the food was gone, Zuk would pack up, and I’d walk him downstairs, out past the conga circle cluttering the courtyard, down the sidewalk past the tattered awning above which some old hag in a nightgown, with rollers in her hair, would lean out of a window with a cigarillo stub drooping from her mouth and say, Hey Ringo. Yeah, you. The dark Beatle. I know you. Get over here. Catch. It’s a quarter. Now run along and get me a cigarillo from El Paradiso’s. Yeah, just one. And if Eddie’s out, go across the street to Siempre Feliz. Go on. Hey! Where are you going? Not that way!
I’d drop Zuk off at the Delancey Street subway station and watch him disappear down the stairs, then savor the walk back home. After all these years, I finally had a friend and confidant.