“What’s good, E?” I said, giving him the chin-up nod while pushing my way into a stall. English and I have been close since we were kids, even though he was a year older than me. We were two pieces of a three-piece meal. Shannon Pushcart was the third wing, and the fries—the extra-salty add-on—was Carlos Greene. Carlos and Shannon were also in the bathroom, both leaning into the urinals but looking back at me, which, by the way, is a weird thing to do. Don’t ever look at someone else while you’re taking a piss. Doesn’t matter how well you know a person, it gets weird.
“You partying tonight at Jill’s, soldier-boy?” Carlos asked, clowning me about the ROTC thing.
“Of course I’m going. What about you? Or you got basketball practice?” I asked from inside the stall. Then I quickly followed with, “Oh, that’s right. You ain’t make the team. Again.”
“Ohhhhhhhhhhh!” Shannon gassed the joke up like he always did whenever it wasn’t about him. A urinal flushed and I knew it was him who flushed it, because Shannon was the only person who ever flushed the urinals. “I swear that’s never gonna get old,” Shannon said, laughter in his voice.
I unbuttoned my jacket—a polyester Christmas tree covered in ornaments—and threw it over the stall door.
“Whatever,” Carlos said.
“Yeah, whatever,” I shot back.
“Don’t y’all ever get tired of cracking the same jokes on each other every day?” English’s voice cut in.
“Don’t you ever get tired of stroking your own face in the mirror, English?” Carlos clapped back.
Shannon spit-laughed. “Got ’im!”
“Shut up, Shan,” English snapped. “And anyway, it’s called ‘stimulating the follicles.’ But y’all wouldn’t know nothin’ about that.”
“But E, seriously, it ain’t workin’!” from Shannon.
“Yeah, maybe your follicles just ain’t that into you!” Carlos came right behind him. By this point I was doubled over in the stall, laughing.
“But your girlfriend is,” English said, with impeccable timing. A snuff shot, straight to the gut.
“Ohhhhhhhh!” Of course, from Shannon again.
“I don’t even have no girlfriend,” Carlos said. But that didn’t matter. Cracking a joke about somebody’s girlfriend—real or imaginary—is just a great comeback. At all times. It’s just classic, like “your mother” jokes. Carlos sucked his teeth, then shook the joke off like a champ and continued, “That’s why we gotta get to this party, so I can see what these ladies lookin’ like.”
“I’m with you on that one,” English agreed. “Smartest thing you’ve said all day.”
Off went the greenish-blue, short-sleeved, button-up shirt, which I also flung across the top of the door.
“Exactly. That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout,” Shannon said, way too eager. “ ‘See what these ladies lookin’ like,’ ” he mimicked Carlos, the slightest bit of sarcasm still in his voice. If I picked up on it, I knew Carlos did too.
“I can’t tell you what they’ll be lookin’ like, but I can tell you who they won’t be lookin’ at . . . you!” Carlos razzed, still on get-back from Shannon being slick and for laughing at my basketball crack. It had been at least three minutes since I made that joke, and he was still holding on to it. So petty.
“Shut up, ’Los. Everybody in here know I got more game than you. In every way,” Shannon replied, totally serious.
I kicked my foot up onto the toilet to untie my patent leather shoes. Just so you know, patent leather shoes should only be for men who are getting married. Nothing about patent leather says “war.”
“Argue about all this at the party. Just make sure y’all there. It’s supposed to be live,” English said, the sound of his footsteps moving toward the door. He and Shannon didn’t have mandatory basketball practice like usual, but were still going to the gym to shoot around because, well, that’s what they did every day. For those guys, especially English, basketball was life. English knocked on my stall twice. “Look for me when you get there, dude.”
“Bet.”
“Later, ’Shad,” from Shannon.
“Aight, ’Shad, hit me when you on your way over,” Carlos called as the door closed behind them. Carlos grew up right down the street from me, and, like English, was a senior and therefore could drive, and therefore (again) was always my ride to the party. We smoked him with the jokes all the time because he’d tried out for the basketball team every single year, and got cut every single year, because he just wasn’t very good. But if you asked him, he was the nicest dude to ever touch a ball. What he actually was good at, though, was art, which is also why he and I got along. He wasn’t into drawing or painting, at least not in the traditional sense. He was into graffiti. A “writer.” His tag was LOS(T), and they were all over the school, and our neighborhood, and even the East Side. Whenever we were heading to a party, for him it was just another opportunity to speed around the city in his clunker, the backseat covered in paint markers and spray cans, while he pointed out some of his masterpieces.
Really they were more like our masterpieces, because I was the one who gave him some of the concepts for where and how to write his tag. For instance, on the side of the neighborhood bank, I told him he should bomb it in money-green block letters. And on the door of the homeless shelter I suggested gold regal letters. And on the backboard of a basketball hoop at the West Side court, I suggested he write it in gang script. I never had the heart to do any actual tagging. I mentioned how my father was, right? Right. Plus Carlos was a pro at it. He knew how to control the nozzle and minimize the drip to get clean tags. Like, perfect. I never really told him, just because that wasn’t something we did, but I loved them. All of them.
When I walked out of that stall a few minutes later, I was a different person. It was like the reverse of Clark Kent running into the phone booth and becoming Superman, and instead was like Superman running into the booth and becoming a hopefully much cooler Clark Kent, even though I guess Superman might’ve been more comfortable in the cape and tight-ass red underwear than an ROTC uniform. But not me. No cape (and for the record, no tight-ass red underwear). I stepped out as regular Rashad Butler: T-shirt, sneakers that I had to perform a quick spit-clean on, and jeans that I pulled up, then sagged down just low enough to complete the look. My brother had given me this sweet leather jacket that he had outgrown, so I threw that on, and bam! I was ready for whatever Friday had in store for me. Hopefully, a little rub-a-dub on Tiffany Watts, the baddest girl in the eleventh grade. At least to me. Carlos always said she looked like a cartoon character. Like he could ever get her. A cartoon character? Really? Please. A cartoon character from my dreams.
But before I could get to Jill’s and get all up on Tiffany, I had a few stops to make. It was still early, and I had a couple bucks, so I could get me some chips and a pack of gum to kill the chip-breath. Can’t get girls with the dragon in your mouth. But other than that I was flat broke, and it was never cool to party without cash, just because you always had to have something for the pizza spot—Mother’s Pizza—which everyone went to either after the party was over or when the party got shut down early, which happened most of the time. Plus, you had to have money to chip in for whoever’s gas tank was going to be getting you to and from the party, like, for instance, Carlos. So I caught a bus over to the West Side to first pick up my snacks, then meet Spoony at UPS, just a few blocks from home, so he could spot me a twenty.