Free Bad to the Bone by Stephen Solomita Page A

industrial Queens, head into Brooklyn over the Pulaski Bridge, pick up the expressway at McGuiness Boulevard.
    “What do you think about a salad of escarole and arugula?” Betty asked. “With capers.”
    “I think it’s the real me,” Moodrow said, still thumbing through the small notebook.

SEVEN
    T HE FOOD AT MOODROW’S housewarming was so good that nobody noticed the house. Which was just as well, because the white cubicles with their two-inch plastic baseboards had about as much charm as the view of the tenements south of Houston Street, the view from the front window. The drinks helped, too. They made it easy for Jim Tilley to forget the mornings he’d spent in the kitchen of Moodrow’s old apartment, drinking coffee and talking shop. The kitchen in Moodrow’s new apartment was an elongated rectangle the size of a coffin. It would never be cozy and it was painted an even glossier white than the rest of the place.
    Moodrow had lost some furniture in the fire that forced him out of his old apartment, more to smoke than to flame, but what he managed to salvage easily filled the small rooms in his new home. Moodrow had bought his furniture in the fifties when the word mahogany meant more than a nearly transparent veneer. The table and chairs which had fit comfortably into Moodrow’s old kitchen, now crowded the sofa in his new living room. Moodrow, who was subletting the apartment, couldn’t believe that someone had paid more than a hundred thousand dollars for its 1250 square feet.
    But the food definitely made it better. Rose Tilley (formerly Greenwood, formerly Carillo) had been born into a family of Italian immigrants. Her mother had made ravioli by hand, carefully folding the homemade strips of dough over little piles of ricotta cheese. The result had been exquisite, but not better than the meal cooked by Betty and Moodrow. Rose couldn’t imagine what role Moodrow had played in the preparation of the meal, but he was still wearing his apron when he met them at the door. Rose’s oldest child, Lee, had been especially amused.
    Rose, a cup of espresso liberally dressed with anisette in her hands, was happy to see her son laughing again. The last few weeks had been very troubling, ever since he’d come home with the question she’d been dreading for years.
    “Mommy,” he’d asked, “what color am I?”
    Lee’s father had been very dark and both Lee and his sister, Jeanette, were a definite light brown. This would not be a problem if his mother and stepfather were black. It might even have been livable if one of them was black, but Rose’s skin was china-white and Tilley, the Irishman, was fair as well.
    Rose had been expecting the question. (In African-American families the question would have been, “Mommy, what’s a nigger?”) But she had no ready answer, only a series of linked understandings that were far too complex for a nine-year-old child who needed a simple concept to defend. Of course, both children would have to see themselves as black, because that’s the way America would see them. But to lock a child (her child) into a fixed, self-limiting category was heartbreaking for Rose. Like most parents, she instinctively wanted her children to reach a place she had never seen. A place not marked by concepts like African or Italian or any kind of hyphenated anything.
    Jim Tilley had been more practical. “What you wanna be,” he’d explained to Lee, “is your own color and not take a lot of shit from people who don’t like it.” Tilley had been a fighter. Over the course of a long amateur and a short professional career, he’d stopped caring what other people thought of him. He’d met his fear every time he went into the gym to spar and had beaten it down with courage. After a few years, he’d developed a rock-hard sense of his own personal value. Now he claimed that all fighters, from the flashiest champion to the most hapless ‘opponent,’ if they stick with their profession long