Dreams from My Father

my reaction, then smiled. “All right, maybe I don’t actually say all that. I just tell her okay, Monica, you know, we still tight. Next thing I know, she’s hooked up with Steve ‘No Neck’ Yamaguchi, the two of ’em all holding hands and shit, like a couple of lovebirds. So fine—I figure there’re more fish in the sea. I go ask Pamela out. She tells me she ain’t going to the dance. I say cool. Get to the dance, guess who’s standing there, got her arms around Rick Cook.
‘Hi, Ray,’
she says, like she don’t know what’s going down. Rick Cook! Now you know that guy ain’t shit. Sorry-assed motherfucker got nothing on me, right? Nothing.”
    He stuffed a handful of fries into his mouth. “It ain’t just me, by the way. I don’t see you doing any better in the booty department.”
    Because I’m shy, I thought to myself; but I would never admit that to him. Ray pressed the advantage.
    “So what happens when we go out to a party with some sisters, huh? What happens? I tell you what happens. Blam! They on us like there’s no tomorrow. High school chicks, university chicks—it don’t matter. They acting sweet, all smiles. ‘Sure you can have my number, baby.’ Bet.”
    “Well…”
    “Well what? Listen, why don’t you get more playing time on the basketball team, huh? At least two guys ahead of you ain’t nothing, and you know it, and they know it. I seen you tear ’em up on the playground, no contest. Why wasn’t I starting on the football squad this season, no matter how many passes the other guy dropped? Tell me we wouldn’t be treated different if we was white. Or Japanese. Or Hawaiian. Or fucking Eskimo.”
    “That’s not what I’m saying.”
    “So what are you saying?”
    “All right, here’s what I’m saying. I’m saying, yeah, it’s harder to get dates because there aren’t any black girls around here. But that don’t make the girls that are here all racist. Maybe they just want somebody that looks like their daddy, or their brother, or whatever, and we ain’t it. I’m saying yeah, I might not get the breaks on the team that some guys get, but they play like white boys do, and that’s the style the coach likes to play, and they’re winning the way they play. I don’t play that way.
    “As for your greasy-mouthed self,” I added, reaching for the last of his fries, “I’m saying the coaches may not like you ’cause you’re a smart-assed black man, but it might help if you stopped eating all them fries you eat, making you look six months pregnant. That’s what I’m saying.”
    “Man, I don’t know why you making excuses for these folks.” Ray got up and crumpled his trash into a tight ball. “Let’s get out of here. Your shit’s getting way too complicated for me.”
             
    Ray was right; things had gotten complicated. It had been five years since my father’s visit, and on the surface, at least, it had been a placid time marked by the usual rites and rituals that America expects from its children—marginal report cards and calls to the principal’s office, part-time jobs at the burger chain, acne and driving tests and turbulent desire. I’d made my share of friends at school, gone on the occasional awkward date; and if I sometimes puzzled over the mysterious realignments of status that took place among my classmates, as some rose and others fell depending on the whims of their bodies or the make of their cars, I took comfort in the knowledge that my own position had steadily improved. Rarely did I meet kids whose families had less than mine and might remind me of good fortune.
    My mother did her best to remind me. She had separated from Lolo and returned to Hawaii to pursue a master’s degree in anthropology shortly after my own arrival. For three years I lived with her and Maya in a small apartment a block away from Punahou, my mother’s student grants supporting the three of us. Sometimes, when I brought friends home after school, my mother would overhear them remark about the lack of food in the fridge or the less-than-perfect housekeeping, and she would pull me aside and let me know that she was a single mother going to school again and raising two kids, so that baking cookies wasn’t exactly at the top of her priority list, and while she appreciated the fine education I was receiving at Punahou, she wasn’t planning on putting up with any snotty attitudes from me or anyone else, was that understood?
    It was understood.