High Price

rats. Although I was much more interested in helping him with survey research he was then conducting on human sexuality, he was out of funding for that project. He convinced me that if I learned how to do rat research, I just might help unlock the secrets of the human brain, cure addiction, or at the very least, make a career for myself in science. I was flattered by the attention and wanted more such praise. I wasn’t sure at first, but over time I began to think I might be able to do it.
    Much of my confidence came from the fact that Rob was very clear with me that hard work was what mattered most. Because he kept reinforcing that idea, I wasn’t as intimidated by the subject matter and the actual brain surgery I had to do as I otherwise might have been.
    “There’s a place for people like you and me in science,” Rob would say, meaning for those who weren’t the obvious nerds and geeks, the ones whose persistence and diligence could allow them to overcome any educational deficits they had. My dismal high school education had left me without the science background and vocabulary expected of a researcher, but Rob saw that I was willing and able to do everything required to remedy the situation. I had already shown both him and myself that I wasn’t afraid of hard work, even if it meant going back into the maze repeatedly.
    I ’d had to run a labyrinth of my own before I found Rob and the two other mentors who guided me into science. When I first got out of the air force, it was not at all clear where my future lay. After leaving the service in 1988, I’d first gone home to Miami. I was about thirty credits short of a college degree and planned to finish my coursework at Bethune-Cookman College (now Bethune-Cookman University) in Daytona Beach. I’d saved up a few dollars and was feeling pretty good about myself.
    But having been in England and in the military, where I had considerable responsibilities, being back in the American South felt like stepping back in time. My old friends couldn’t even imagine having done many of the things I’d done in the air force; their visions of the future were stunted by their lack of education and inexperience with anything other than the small neighborhood where they’d spent virtually all of their lives. I could now see the limits of this point of view, rather than simply accepting it as “how it is.”
    Another experience further reinforced my sense that there had to be more than this for me. A few months after my discharge, I interviewed at the then-nascent Rent-A-Center company for a managerial job. The chain rents out furniture, computers, appliances, and other essentials to people with little money and/or bad credit, charging high interest rates and offering hope of eventual ownership if they can keep up the payments.
    By this point, I’d become worried that I would run through the money I’d saved up during my time in the service. I also wanted to save even more to use toward finishing my degree. The regional manager who interviewed me recognized my skills and talent. Indeed, he almost immediately suggested that I work at an existing store for a short time, just to get to know the trade so I could be prepared to manage my own new location in a few months.
    But the day I started turned out to be my last day at Rent-A-Center. The store was located in Carol City, on 183rd Street and Twenty-Seventh Avenue, an area I knew well. Its customers were overwhelmingly black. And yet I was the only black employee at the store. Worse, the local store manager treated me with disdain. He asked me to do tasks requiring physical labor and generally treated me like a short-term, dumb-ass minimum-wage drone, not a managerial candidate. He spoke down to the customers, making subtly patronizing remarks and refusing to play the radio station that broadcast the music that we liked. I quit at the end of the day. I simply couldn’t take being treated like that anymore. I knew I deserved more respect. And I began to see that I wasn’t going to get it working in my old neighborhood.
    People like my cousin James and MH thought I’d gone crazy. From their perspective, I’d quit a good job for no reason. I didn’t know how to explain it to them. I knew I couldn’t engage them in the type of intellectual discussions about the books and song lyrics and poetry that had helped raise my consciousness while I was in the service. I didn’t feel like I could reach them so I didn’t even