Free Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach

honest, gritty, and real despite their being largely imaginary. Mental saloon doors swung open and Macon sauntered past Priest from
Superfly
and Goldie from
The Mack
to bum a smoke off Butch Cassidy and sweep a waiting beer from the bartop. Never mind that Macon had hardly held a burner before last week—only the one time when the drug dealers who hung on Aura’s block got so drunk outside the liquor store that they’d started brazenly comparing pieces, passing them around and chatting about weight and range with the enthusiasm of longtime ruddy-faced sportsmen. In the dark thieves’ den of Macon’s mind, he’d always been a major mover. Pimps he’d crossed the street to walk past, drug dealers he’d lingered outside stores in Boston to observe—sipping soda with one leg cocked back against the wall and one knee jutting forward until his empty can and pointless loitering had embarrassed Macon into moving on—looked up from their billiards games to nod hello. Macon raised his bottle in solidarity.
    “Honest answer, Mr. Moves.” Nique’s hand swept toward him and Macon braved a familiar instant of panic before he caught it in a satisfyingly well-executed pound. Botched handshakes made him feel lastingly lame, the flustered white dude stumbling through the Negro Greeting Ritual. He checked his watch: 9:10. Time to get in the wind if he was gonna make the show.
    What you need to do is go someplace quiet, sit down, and think this robbery shit through, Macon’s brain chastised. But he wasn’t the type to break plans, even with himself, and he liked to do his thinking in stolen snatches of time: between songs, during conversations and commercials, while asleep. Besides, Macon had been waiting years to peep the Nuyorican, to be able to say he’d rocked the mic at America’s most famous poetry spot. He drained his brew, said his good-byes, and stepped.
    “Well,” said Nique, lifting his bottle to salute the door Macon had just closed behind him, “at least your boy there’s trying. More than you can say for most of them.”
    Andre shook his head. “Heroes. It’s always about heroes.”
    “Shit,” said Nique. “My new hero is this motherfucker they got on the news tonight. You seen this shit?”
    Andre shook his head. “Nah.”
    Nique waggled a finger. “This is why I love our people. Only niggas do some shit like this. My man’s a cabbie, right? And for whatever reason, he just flips. He’s put up with enough bullshit from white folks or whatever, and he just flips and robs these two yuppies at gunpoint. Dumps them on the FDR and skates. Channel Nine said he ‘unleashed a racial tirade’ while he jacked them.”
    “Macon drives a cab,” said Andre.
    “Word? Maybe he knows this guy. Course, the only description they have is that the dude is black. Narrows it down to like ten thousand cats. Then again, knowing Macon, they’re probably drinking buddies.”
    Andre jowled one cheek. “Please. Macon barely knows himself. Two words for you, Nique. Harley Koon.”

Chapter Four
    Dennis Lavar flicked his wrist and banished the live coverage of Rodney King’s desperate can’t-we-all-get-along news conference from his modest living room. He turned from the television slowly, ran his palm over the close-cropped bristles of his beard and the meat of his lips, and then dropped it to his side and let the gold-link bracelet slide and settle. For hours now, he’d been imagining he heard the riot rounding the corner of their quiet Compton block.
    “I know you think I’m being hard on you, Dominique, but it’s for your own good. Nothing but trouble out there.”
    Nique threw a leg across the leather sofa and settled himself for the lecture. He’d grown up on Pop’s politics like home cooking, ransacked his father’s bookshelves as a way to understand the old man and discovered Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown— found the entire movement wedged between the cinder-block bookends of his father’s workroom.