Adam Mansbach - Chapter One (Angry Black White Boy) lyrics

Macon Everett Detornay, a hundred and fifty two pounds and eight ounces of unrefined genius b-boy cynic taking malt liquor pisses in the sea of love and jackknifing his compact body over waves of romance like a dolphin, swung his new yellowcab downtown. Hip hop didn't raise no moon-eyed loverboys, and Macon would be dead before the thought of whittling down pa**ion from a blunt lump to a harpoon, something you could aim at a person, would take shape inside him. All the things he loved were too big, comical to throw your arms around like carnival prize teddy bears: truth, revolution, huge nonexistent sh** like that. Hip hop didn't know thing the first about building an adult relationship regardless. It was a little past rush hour now, and Macon flipped on his radio and relaxed as the venerable voice of Kool DJ Red Alert introduced an old school set on Hot 97 FM, the station whose tagline "where hip hop lives" had inspired more than one underground MC to declare himself dead. As the omnipotent what's-hot-what's-not market arbiter of the late nineties, Hot 97 had played matchmaker for hip hop and psychotic materialism, advising hip hop to stop returning phone calls from former lovers like Black Power and Social Responsibility, encouraging the couple to move in together, and finally, in an exclusive Aspen ceremony attended by three hundred CEOs and only a handful of artists and project housing thugs, to exchange diamond-flooded Rolexes and sign the merger deal in blood. When the honeymoon waned, the station placated hip hop's ornery elders, pissed and financially slighted, by paying periodic tribute to 'the pioneers of the old school' and airing five second announcements encouraging their audience of fourteen-year-old wannabe gangster macks to 'know their history.' None of which had jack to do with Red; the content of his drivetime show remained refreshingly untainted by payola, his very employment a paean to purer days. The crossfader glided clean across the mixer and into a cla**ic, dancing New York City's newest cab driver straight down memory lane. I useta roll up/this is a hold up, ain't nothin' funny/stop smilin'/don't nobody move but the money Rakim Allah intoned, smooth with the roughness, reflecting on the tax-free paper he had clocked before he learned to earn/cause I'm Righteous: before he joined the Nation of Gods and Earths and gained Knowledge of Self and realized that the Original Asiatic Black Man was the Maker, the Owner, the Cream of the Planet Earth, Father of Civilization and God of the Universe. Before he became part of the Five Percent of the population who overstood the Supreme Mathematics and threw off the shackles of mental slavery to become Poor Righteous Teachers. Macon knew their rules as well as any whiteboy could, first from listening to the lyrics of the Righteous and then from living at Lajuan's crib in Jamaica Plain for the last fifteen months, where black men who called themselves Gods sat around all day with quartermasted eyelids from smoking blunts and drinking ninety-nine cent twenty-two ounce Ballantines, talking about women whom they called not Earths, as doctrine dictated, but b**hes. The apartment was a sitcom of jokes, heated interlocking minutes of family therapy, Son, Son, listen interruptions, s** convo and chess games and rhymes and rhymes and beats to the rhymes and the every-occasion, rain sleet or pestilence query who's going to the weedspot; many long-a** conversations which flipped general to specific and then back again in an endless, alternately fascinating and pointless battle of verbs and philosophy, volume and religion, rhetoric and flowsk**s. Macon had learned the most from Jihad, the big-entrance-making uninvited drop-in neighbor whom the audience loved: a Newport-smoking monologue-spitting herbologist with matching Nikes for every rugby shirt he owned and a penchant for talking God Body Science from one mouthcorner and hustle ego watch-me as unfiltered as New York tap water out the other. Macon's star-vehicle spinoff, cats used to joke, would be a sitcom called Adopted Brother. They plotted episodes in the perennial backalley twilight which slashed in sideways from the streetlamp and gave the dust something to dance in besides the glow of the forever-on TV. Chinese takeout boxes filled the garbage can, and a ten pound bag of white rice lived a bachelor's life in the one uncorroded cabinet. Cats would go to the store for hot sauce, barbecue sauce, ranch dressing, go to McDonalds and jack three hundred little ketchup packets, whatever you could pour on rice for flavor. Only on Sunday afternoons did they sit down and really eat, and then only because when Macon moved in he'd instituted slash sponsored the ritual of family dinners. They'd make turkey lasagna, Jihad and Aura grating cheese into silver mixing bowls and making Sal's Pizzeria jokes from Do The Right Thing and Macon sitting in Lajuan's room, where he hid to do his writing, scribbling in a notebook and listening at the same time, overhearing and folding what was overheard into his thoughts like mushrooms into an omelette. Everything was always too much in that crib; the drinks too strong, the weed too harsh, the conversation too aggressive, the chess battles waged on the bootleg coffeetable too long and reckless, the music too loud. Dudes cut each other off, spoke fast and until interrupted, acted like the dilettante scientific and social an*logies they constructed were the perfect tools of proof -- which somehow they often were, like naah, son.... SON! Do the knowledge: boom, it's like magnetic attraction. The gravitation doesn't work unless the sh** is mutual, so love is blind's Now Cipher, God. It's like how some cats say that n***as can't be racist, you know, you know the science on that, you can't be racist unless you have the power to be racist, so boom, you can't say you in love unless you both in love; one person in love is like the sound of one hand clapping, God." Macon switched lanes without signaling, loving the order and chaos of Manhattan driving, and made an arbitrary right turn. He'd learned his way around already, before he'd even posed for his driver's ID; it had taken him all of a week. New York was simple, a grid: choices galore, traffic laws optional. Boston, by contrast, was a lunatic maze of deadends and one-ways, a city whose streets had evolved from cowpaths to highways with no sign of topological supervision. Macon had spent all twenty years of his life there, and even on his final day at the charter-car service, he'd gotten lost carting a vanful of Japanese businessmen to a suburban conference. Exhilaration filled him and he tightened his lefthanded grip on the wheel and turned the music up: f** racist-a**, provincial Boston. New York City, baby. Here at last. The center of the universe. The Ten Percent were bloods**ers of the poor. They had Knowledge of Self but were not Righteous, and they preyed on the ignorance of the Eighty-Five who were Deaf, Dumb and Blind to the truth. The Divine Alphabet allowed Gods and Earths to communicate in code -- when Sadat X from Brand Nubian rhymed " the born cipher cipher master/makes me think much faster," for instance, he meant the b-o-o-m, the boom, the weed. One hundred and twenty sacred Lessons awaited mastery; Jihad had sometimes disappeared behind a plywood bedroom door to study, or claim he was studying and smoke a blunt for dolo. Elijah Muhammad's old Caucasian creation myth -- the evil scientist Dr. Yacub grafts a barbaric white race from the Original Asiatic Black, a warlike people banished to the caves of cold, dark Europe but destined to rule the earth for sixty centuries -- was tacitly endorsed, and white folks were called devils. But were all white people devils? Could there be exceptions? What about that dude Paul C., who'd engineered Eric B. & Rakim's album? What about Macon, who built with the Gods morning noon and night, pa**ed out alongside them on perpendicular couches with his sneakers touching theirs, high off shared wack buddha? Macon had lost sleep looking for a loophole back in 1990, when the smoovest MC on the planet was Grand Puba Maxwell, asking Can a Devil fool a m**m? No, not nowadays bro, and declaring, It's time to drop the bomb and make the Devil pay the piper. From Macon's confusion had bubbled anger. How dare black people not see him as an ally, not recognize that he was down? He retaliated by studying their history, their culture: he was a fourteen-year-old whiteboy in a Malcolm X T-shirt, alone at the first annual Boston Hip Hop Conference, heart fluttering with intimidation and delight as scowling baldheaded old schoolers pointed at his chest, demanding whatchu know about that man?, which was exactly what he'd wanted, why he'd worn it. He told them what he'd read, accepted their revised expressions with inward elation, nodded studiously at their government-a**a**ination-theories, rhymed when the chance presented itself. Tagged other graffiti writers' blackbooks and wondered what it would take to be scratched from the devil list for good. And yet history was overwhelming, and down deep Macon knew the truth. Who but white folks, his folks, had been so brutal for so long? He'd retreated briefly into his own Judaism, Jewish-not-white, with its an*logous history of victimization and enslavement, but he couldn't make it fit, couldn't make himself feel Jewish, didn't know what being Jewish felt like. He tossed the Star-of-David medallion Grandma had given him back into the dresser after a day, reflecting that race pride was a fashion trend he'd been completely iced out of. The sterling necklace's drawermate was the red green and gold Increase the Peace medallion Macon had bought after Three Times Dope released their single of the same name; he'd copped it from a Downtown Crossing vendor as a less fly but more plausible alternative to the Africa medallions everybody was rocking post-Jungle Brothers. Macon never even wore it in his room. Instead he lay on his bed in his parents' house, music streaming past him low enough to go unheard in the kitchen below, and went to work constructing a rhetorical framework which would allow him to embrace the Five Percenters' truths without capitulating his soul: white people aren't evil, but evil is white people. There it was. Simple. Elegant. True. It bought Macon space to live in, to be special, angry, the exception, the crusader. The down whiteboy. You my n***a, Macon. You a'ight. The light clicked green and Red switched up the soundtrack, segueing into "Days of Outrage, Operation Snatchback," X-Clan's song about being a**aulted by cops at the Yusef Hawkins rally on the Brooklyn Bridge. Macon rolled down his window and dipped his elbow into the warm fall air, smiling. He remembered how when X-Clan's album dropped in 1990 -- damn, had it been eight years already? -- brothers in Boston had started wearing quasi-military African pimpgear just like them: nose rings, leather ahnk caps, red-black-and-green bead necklaces, knee high boots, carved wooden staffs. Macon had just scraped together the money to buy his first set of turntables that year, in the hopes of becoming a DJ -- hopes soon aborted by impatience, mediocre rhythm and the fact that he was surrounded by cats who actually caught rek on the decks, who brushed him aside and onto the mic so they could do so. Brothers would congregate at his crib after school to freestyle and make mixtapes, trooping through the kitchen en route to the basement wearing some outlandish sh** and baffling the hell out of his mother. Everyone was perfectly polite, Hello Mrs. Detornay, and his mother said Hi guys and smiled back. but if she had suspected before that she didn't understand her son, a legion of staff-wielding pro-black rappers marching through her kitchen and interrupting her People Magazine perusal certainly confirmed that sh**. A hand shot up on the west side of Wall Street, and Macon swerved to the man's side. The stiff-armed gesture people used to summon taxis was only a few degrees north of the Nazi salute, Macon reflected as he hit the unlock bu*ton, and especially reminiscent when performed by somber-suited young businessmen. The vapors of entitlement which steamed from these yuppies irked him; they were so f**ing sure the cab would stop for them. They'd never been snubbed in their lives, sized up and pa**ed by because the driver thought they wouldn't pay or that they wanted to be taken somewhere ghetto. Back home, Macon had flagged cabs while Lajuan and Aura stood discreetly down the block, pretending not to be with him, approaching only when Macon had the door open. It was another way, he thought with pride, that they had cheated racism. Two guys in their early thirties clambered into Macon's backseat. "Eighty-fifth and Fifth," commanded the one on the left, a wispy blond who didn't look up from the goldrimmed gla**es he was wiping with his necktie. "We're already f**ing late," the other one informed him. "The reservation was for six." Mister Punctuality's dark hair was thinning on top; razor-burn flared from his neck as he pulled off his tie with a meaty left fist and undid his top bu*ton. On the night of Macon's high school prom, when he had dropped by in his father's Camry to pick up Aura and his date, Aura's mother had told Macon to remember three things as she redid his necktie for him: nothing is s**ier than a man who wants to be wearing his suit, nothing is uns**ier than a man imprisoned by his suit, and a woman can always tell the difference. These jokers, Macon thought, were prisoners for sure. The one on the left, Mr. Eighty-fifth and Fifth, had the same rock-solid Roman nose as a guy Macon had known in high school, Scott Cartwright, a senior when Macon was a freshman. A frat-boy type; he'd been lacrosse captain back then. Out of the blue one day, Scott had stopped Macon in the hall outside the cafeteria and poked a thick finger into Macon's birdchest. You think you're pretty f**in' cool, huh dude? Sitting at the black table, kickin' it like you're Vanilla Ice or something? Cartwright turned his white baseball cap backward and bent into Macon's face. People laugh at you, dude. I don't even know you, and I sit there and laugh my f**in' a** off. Macon had stood for a moment staring back, tightroping the thread which ran between provocation and cowardice, then asked Are we finished? He'd been going for a kind of Sir, request dismissal tone, but Macon couldn't disguise his boredom and the words came out insolent instead. Scott slammed him up against a locker, mad corny, like they were characters in a John Hughes movie, and Macon wanted to want to laugh, but instead his ears burned and he wanted to k** Scott Cartwright, hated himself because at that moment he cared what Scott Cartwright thought of him -- felt ridiculous, ashamed, wished he'd never sat at the black table with his friends. And yet Macon knew he'd courted this. He wanted his defection from whiteness and his acceptance by black people to be public, the subject of wonder and envy, anger and scorn. Just then, Omari had sauntered into view: Macon's homeboy, Cartwright's co-captain. Scott backed away, sheathed his hands in khaki pockets, watched Macon give Omari a pound and followed suit. As soon as the rapper/midfielder rounded the corner, Scott's finger was right back in Macon's face. You better watch your f**in' attitude, bro. I don't care how tight you are with the n******gs. I'll kick your f**in' a**. The pa**enger on the left, Scott's look-alike, was cursing at his cell phone. "I can't get a f**ing signal on this piece of sh**," he said, slapping it closed against his leg. "Forget it, man." Punctuality rapped twice on the partition. "Hey, turn that down, will you?" Macon reduced the music to a whisper. Every pa**enger but one had made the same request. "I gotta hear enough of this sh** as it is," Punctuality told Scott. "Two in the morning last night, these guys in their f**in' SUVs are rattling my windows three floors up." "What I want to know," said Scott, "is how they can afford forty thousand dollar cars. With custom stereos." Punctuality laughed. "We're in the wrong business, bro." "Seriously, dude. First thing tomorrow, I'm gonna go get an Adidas sweatsuit and find myself a nice street corner. Sell a little crack and buy myself a Lexus." Macon tightened his grip on the steering wheel and tried to concentrate on the road. The two pa**engers were silent for a minute. As Macon turned onto the FDR, Scott spoke. "So who's this chick tonight? Kim's friend?" "Her name is Kaliyah, Kalikah, something like that." "She hot?" "Hope so." "Black?" "Yeah." Scott played with his phone and Macon couldn't take it: he knew them too well, better than he knew himself, knew what they were thinking and everything they'd ever thought and it was vile, all of it, smug and comfortable and oblivious, so f**ing white and so unquestioned. The eternal fear of waking up as one of these mix-and-matchable bar-hopping a**holes kept Macon clenched with vigilance, tight as a fist. Loathing frothed within him, bubbled over the sides of its containment vat and splattered onto Macon's rationality. It was corrosive. He jerked the wheel, hand crossing over hand, suddenly conscious of his hard lean shoulders. A vertebrae popped as Macon leaned into the turn; his biceps flared and he felt the tattoo there as if it had just been seared into his skin. A sweat-drip blotted in his armpit, horns blared past him, other drivers cursed him and their spittle flew against insides of their windows. The cab cut right across two lanes and veered onto the shoulder of the road and Macon slammed the brakes. Cartwright and Punctuality careened forward, heads colliding with the scratched plastic partition, then fell back into their seats as the taxi recoiled, stopped moving, sat panting. Macon's shirt stuck to his skin, soaked; a few seconds of reflex and adrenaline was all it took. In the backseat, terror turned to anger just as fast. "What the f**?" Scott roared, bracing his arms and legs against the door, the walls, the floor. "What are you, some kind of maniac?" Macon slapped a bu*ton and the silver doorlocks bulleted into their sheaths. Scott clawed with his thumb and firstfinger, trying to pull one of the little cylinders back up. His friend watched and mimicked, turning fumbling hands to his own door. Macon's face was just as flushed as theirs were ashen, as if both their blood had jumped into his body, or he'd leaned for hours over fire. He fist-banged the glove compartment and it dropped open with a submissive squeak. Metal scraped plastic and Macon spun around, sliding across the worn vinyl seat until the farecounter jabbed between his shoulders. With both hands clamped around it, Macon thrust a heavy, empty .38 caliber pistol into the small space in the partition and sighed hugely: a gust of human exhaust that filled whatever space was left in the small cabin. He could smell his air and both of theirs, all three mouths stale and disgusting, their breath meeting the gunmetal and the cab plastic and cab vinyl so that the car smelled like nothing so much as a microphone in heavy freestyle rotation. Macon always smelled the mic. A small perversion. "Shut the f** up," he said, eyes darting from one to the other, other to the one, gun barrel following his glance, mind dancing just above the moment. Control flowed up from the gun and coursed through Macon's body. He had to remind himself to keep his hands clenched as the rest of him loosened, relaxed. His toes laughed. Thighs: tingled. He had to resist turning to sneak a peek in the rearview. He knew he looked heroic, and he knew he was invisible behind the ma** of postings, stickers and graffiti signatures which covered the partition. All Cartwright and Punctuality saw was a gun. "Take out your wallets and leave them on the seat," Macon commanded, giddiness mounting as he heard his own gruff, not-to-be-f**ed-with voice. He wagged the gun a centimeter, pointing. "And your phone, Cartwright." A final inspiration: " And both your neckties. Hurry. Look up and I'll shoot you in the face." Gun back-and-forth inclusive. "Okay," Punctuality stammered, awash in more sweat than Macon had ever seen except the time he went to Celtics pre-camp with his dad and Reggie Lewis -- rest in peace -- had been taking a reporter's question afterward and Macon, barely knowing why, reached out and touched Reggie's huge forearm, slick and glinting with warm sweat. Macon had drawn back immediately, embarra**ed at the wetness, and Reggie had looked at him and smiled, and Macon had grinned back, almost crying, grateful that Reggie understood. Punctuality flailed, words and limbs. "Just don't hurt us," he said again and again, hand shaking as he took the necktie from his jacket pocket and, Macon noted with amusement, folded it into a neat, even swath. Scott was faring better. His tie was jumbled in his hands and he stared into his lap with great focus, as if wanting his a**ailant to take special note of his willingness to cooperate. The thought of making them strip naked barreled through Macon's mind, but he declined to yoke it. Two leather wallets, a fliptop StarTac cell phone, a Motorola pager, a Donna Karan tie, a Gianni Versace knockoff and two silvery watches lay on the backseat between them. "I didn't ask for any watches," Macon said. He buzzed down the right rear window. "Throw them out." The wristwear hit the dirt, and Macon sealed the portal. "Alright." He turned back toward the road. "Now. Where were we going? Eighty-fifth and Fifth, was it?" "Can-can't you drop us off right here?" Scott's voice was meek and shivery, a poverty-stricken cartoon rodent on the night before Christmas. "Please?" He threw his shoulder at the door again. "You sure, homeboy? I wouldn't want Kim and her black friend to think you'd stood them up." Macon's gut clenched with suppressed laughter as he wondered what they'd say to that one. A few ticks pa**ed in silence, and then Punctuality was hyperventilating, choking on huge droughts of air, eyes bulging to the bloodveins, too frenzied for caution. "Why are you doing this to me?" he brayed as tears blazed down his face. Scott grabbed Punctuality by the scruff of the neck and pulled him down into his lap -- a blow-me motion Macon was sure he'd executed many times before. "Shut up dude, get a hold of yourself." Punctuality thrashed, pushed off of Scott's thigh with his hand and sat straight, dripping tears and snot. He tried to look at Macon, but Scott pulled him down again, and this time Punctuality went limp. The sobs mounted and he mumbled words between them: "what" sob "do" sob "you" sob choke snot sob "want - from - me?" sob sob gulp-swallow recap "why me-he-hee?" Macon considered the question for a moment, then turned to answer. "Because you're a typical ignorant white devil a**hole, and you and everybody like you deserves to be robbed every day of your life," he said. "Now get the f** out of here. If I see you even halfway looking at my plates I'll back up and run your stupid a**es over. Move." He hit the unlock bu*ton and they scrambled out onto the shoulder of the highway, Scott pulling Punctuality onto his feet. Macon peeled off before they could even close the door, merged into the middle lane and swerved so that it swung shut. He slumped low, steering with his right fist, gun wedged underneath his thigh. Shock, horror, and an absurd, spastic euphoria tussled for control of him, each one pushing the next off the podium. By Fifty Ninth Street, euphoria had Macon's ear. The perfect crime, it hissed. No photo up yet, no way those jokers saw your plates or memorized the cab ID. He started laughing when he thought of what he'd told them. This had been the first time, Macon was certain, that those guys ever regretted the color of their skins.