On Becoming a Silhouette

“YOU WEREN’T MY ROLE MODEL,” A YOUNG BLACK MAN TELLS YOU LATE ONE NIGHT, at a bar after a game. A game your team lost, you with the basketball in your hands as time expired. “You were my alter ego. You were the guy I pretended to be when my boss told me I had to stay late. When I didn’t get a raise. When my woman left me for another man.”

Pensive—that’s the mood your personality coach says you are supposed to project in a situation like this. Your agent emails you a constant stream of buzzwords every day – contemplative, pondering, studious, thoughtful, introspective, considerate, industrious – like he’s trying to brainwash you, one text message at a time.

In the old days, you would have simply said, “Nigga, if you just shut the fuck up, I’ll buy yo’ ass a drink.” Now you sit and stare, wondering if your eyes are projecting the proper air of seriousness. The people from the marketing department of that investment firm were adamant at the last meeting about what they wanted to convey in the TV commercial you’re scheduled to shoot in a few days. “Defying gravity is harder than it looks” is all you have to say. You’ve repeated these seven words so many times they don’t even sound like English anymore. Not too much of a smile. Less inflection on the consonants…

To reduce yourself from three dimensions to two has required careful planning. In your case, it only took three hundred and sixty-five days before you began to enunciate polysyllabic words in their entirety while bright lights shined in your face. Just twenty-four months before you learned to appreciate custom tailoring and fine Italian wool in colors suitable for an Ivy League class reunion. Only three years to compress that fiery warrior spirit you once possessed into a demeanor whose lack of magnitude has become pleasing to the camera lens.

“How could you let them do this to you?” the anonymous man at the bar asks. “Remember your rookie year? Slam dunking over veterans almost twice your age. Back when you believed you were the baddest motherfucker on the planet.” You thought back three years ago. You’d had an orange Lamborghini. Braids down to your shoulders. Two nine millimeters in your gym bag. And then there were the parties. After game parties. Parties after parties. Three-of-your-boys-and-a-room-full-of-naked-chicks parties. Yeaaahh.

The black Escalade you drove tonight doesn’t even have spinning rims. You can’t remember the last time you wore a sweat suit in public. Your skull caps, the ones that used to hold your braids in place, are musty and stale, lying in the bottom of your locker. Your teammates call you “Rent-A-Nigga” behind your back in the locker room.

“You’re not just a basketball player,” your agent says. “You’re gonna be your own brand.” We’re gonna make you a brand new negro.  “You don’t even have to be just black anymore—isn’t your grandmother half Korean?” We’re going to sweep those arrests under the rug. “Who knows what one of those DNA tests might show up—Schusciki is a Polish name, but ten percent of my DNA is from Puerto Rico.” That weapons charge will be the hardest. But I’m envisioning you and a couple of gunshot victims in wheelchairs on an inner city asphalt court—grey sky, rusty chain link nets clinking in the breeze, a metro bus idling in the background while you explain how you used to think guns were really about protection too. They’ll zoom in for a close-up as you clasp their hands in yours, honing in on the hand with the championship ring on it while you call for a gun buyback program—or something about stop the violence…  Your silhouette, holding a ball against your hip, is bold yet ambiguous. “We can put you everywhere—project you against buildings, print you on cereal boxes, place cardboard cutouts of you in the shoe chains.”    

Is it really about the money? Your mother already has a new house and two cars. The amount of insurance you carry—disability, life, health, business continuation – is staggering.  Hell, you don’t even get upset about the child support anymore.

The armholes on this suit are cut too high to throw a good punch. You’re in a four-thousand-dollar straight jacket. The man next to you is slurring now. His eyes change when your sleeve inches up your wrist, revealing your custom watch by Jacob the Jeweler—one of the few pieces of bling you refused to give up. “Can’t you niggas see how ‘The Man’ owns you?” he says. “Them diamonds on your wrist is still shackles.”

The public, your people tell you, are to be handled a certain way at all times. Do not engage drunks. Do not throw things at hecklers. You have more to lose than this drunk does, but something is rising within your chest.

“You a nigga without an attitude,” the drunk says, spitting as he laughs, flecks of his saliva hitting the side of your face. My nigga is badder than your nigga.  From league offices to X – Boxes to sports bars, the debate rages. You feel vaguely bipolar—good nigger on the outside, bad nigga on the inside.

Now that something in your chest is more specific—it feels like molten lava rushing through your arteries to erupt in a way that will be both majestic and terrifying, a seismic degree of violence whose smoldering froth is threatening to incinerate all the cardboard, all the videotape, all the billboards which bear your hired likeness.

“Nobody don’t own me,” you say to the man, “including you.”  You slap a hundred-dollar bill on the counter the way you used to throw a punch. “Nig-guh.”

People start to whisper. Someone approaches you as you rise, unsure of your mood, but certain of their desire to obtain your autograph.