Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

Now that we had a free house, what did we do with it? Sit around and talk shit. That day it was me, NP, and Bobby. Reggie was working at Burger King. The smell of Reggie's grease-infused clothes crept from our bedroom, from the corner where he tossed his work duds, making us hungry whenever a breeze swept through.

“You want sprinkles with that Coke?” Bobby asked. NP had a job at Jonni Waffle, the new ice-cream joint in town, and when we went to visit him for freebies we taunted him over the stupid shit he had to say all day. Whip on top, waffle cone, slob your knob? NP had also been ribbing Bobby about his “Scarsdale mansion” lately, causing Bobby to push back a little.

“Shut up, you pleather Members Only — wearin' motherfucker,” NP said. Which might appear to be a non sequitur, as Bobby was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, but there was history there, context. It was a reference to some intel from Clive, who had informed us that he'd run into Bobby during the school year, and described how Bobby was wearing a Windbreaker that looked suspiciously like a knockoff Members Only jacket. No small misdemeanor, that, and Clive's alpha-dog status only magnified the dis.

The trend that summer, insult-wise, was toward grammatical acrobatics, the unlikely collage. One smashed a colorful and evocative noun or proper noun into a pejorative, gluing them together with an-in' verb. I'm not sure of the syntactical parentage of the-in' verbs, so I'll just call them the-in' verbs. Verbal noun, gerundlike creature, cog in the adjectival machine, who knew — as was the case with some of the people in my living room, there was a little uncertainty in the bloodlines. “Lookin'” was a common-in' verb. Like so:

“Wearin'” made the rounds as well:

You could also preface things with a throat-clearing “You fuckin',” as in “You fuckin' Cha-Ka from Land of the Lost —lookin' motherfucker,” directed at Bobby, for example, who had light brown skin, light brown hair, and indeed shared these characteristics with the hominid sidekick on the Saturday morning adventure show Land of the Lost . “You fuckin'” acted as a rhetorical pause, allowing the speaker a few extra seconds to pluck some splendid modifier out of the invective ether, and giving the listener a chance to gird himself for the top-notch put-down/splendid imagery to follow.

True masters of the style sometimes attached the nonsensical “with your monkey ass” as a kicker, to convey sincerity and depth of feeling. Hence, “You fuckin' Kunta Kinte — lookin' motherfucker … with your monkey ass.” You may have noticed that the-in' verbs were generally visual. The heart of the critique concerned what you were putting out into the world, the vibes you gave off. Which is what made them so devastating when executed well — this ordnance detonated in that area between you and the mirror, between you and what you thought everyone else was seeing.

There was a loud squeaking noise. “Hear that?” I asked. It was Marcus on that messed-up bike of his, you heard him changing gears two miles away.

We all sighed with relief. Marcus was a key player in that he reassured us that there was someone more unfortunate than ourselves. He possessed three primary mutant powers; we had all seen them in action: 1. He was able to attract to his person all the free-floating derision in the vicinity through a strange magnetism. 2. He bent light waves, rendering the rest of us invisible to bullies. When Marcus was present, the big kids were incapable of seeing us, picking on him exclusively, delivering noogies, knuckle punches, and Indian rope burns to his waiting flesh. Indian rope burns always put an end to the torture, because everybody got distracted while bonding over their smidgen of Indian blood, one-eighth, one-sixteenth Seminole whatever, and that was that. 3. Superior olfactory capability. We heard his bike from two miles away; he smelled barbecue from twice that distance, attaining such mastery that he could ascertain, with the faintest nostril quivering, if the stuff on the grill had just been thrown on or was about to come off, and acted accordingly. Like a knife and fork, he appeared around dinnertime. I think there was a summer or two when he ate over every night, guzzling Hi-C and waving a plastic-coated paper plate around for seconds, more, more. Not until later did I wonder why there was no dinner at his house, why no one missed him at twilight. Call him a mooch to hurt his feelings, and he'd just smile, wipe his mouth with his wrist, and snatch the last piece of chicken, probably a wing, damn him. He was always hungry, like we all were, but at least he had the good sense to eat.

Marcus pried open the glass doors. They were sticky. Decades of sand filled their tracks. “What's up?” He had his beach towel around his neck, and he wore dark-green-and-gray plaid shorts, and a T-shirt that read boy's harbor JULY 4 fireworks 1983. He extended his hand to Bobby and I witnessed a blur of choreography.

Yes, the new handshakes were out, shaming me with their permutations and slippery routines. Slam, grip, flutter, snap. Or was it slam, flutter, grip, snap? I was all thumbs when it came to shakes. Devised in the underground soul laboratories of Harlem, pounded out in the blacker-than-thou sweatshops of the South Bronx, the new handshakes always had me faltering in embarrassment. Like this? No, you didn't stick the landing: the judges give it 4.6. (The judge from Hollis, Queens, was a notorious dick, undermining everyone from the other boroughs.) No one ever commented on my fumbles, though, and I was grateful. I had all summer to get it right, unless someone went back to the city and returned with some new variation that spread like a virus, and which my strong dork constitution produced countless antibodies against.

NP slapped Marcus's hand. “Hey, Act—” NP began, before cutting himself off. He was about to use last year's nickname.

We used to call Marcus “Arthur Ashe.” Two summers ago, Marcus had suffered a dry patch — actually multiple dry patches, on his elbows, knees, in the webbing between his fingers and toes. “Why'd his mother let him out the house like that,” we'd all wonder, but never say aloud, because talking about someone's mother was, well, talking about someone's mother. Talking about someone's mother was talking about your own mother: it opened a door.

Obviously the nickname affected him deeply. Perhaps the sight of a tennis racket mortifying him, all those long months of the school year, or a chance encounter with someone dressed in crisp white clothing curdling his mood. All I know is that the next summer Marcus returned so profoundly moisturized that there was nary a flake of ash to be seen on his skin. In fact his skin was so lubed up that he glistened mightily whenever the sun hit his flesh, and even when it didn't. He had become, sadly, a living Jheri Curl.

“Hey, Activator!” NP called out one afternoon, while making little spritzing motions about his head, and Arthur Ashe was now Activator until Labor Day.

It was the last week of June, still early in the season, so there was no telling what kind of handle Marcus would get this year. Whatever nickname he got, it was likely to be of the kinder variety — he had grown four inches over the year and started lifting weights, or tied-together phone books, some kind of heavy object. Maybe he'd cast his disappointments in lead. No one had put him to the test yet, but powwows over the matter, even our diluted one-eighth or one-sixteenth powwows, decided that he could kick all our asses, and we had it coming.