Poor Me

The first thing you should know is that I was a kid from Queens attending a private school on Long Island. They gave me a scholarship because my mother couldn't afford a fraction of the tuition on her secretary's salary. Is there anything else? Oh yes. I'm black. In the game of suffering we call that a trifecta!

Each morning, starting in 9th grade, I stood on a corner waiting for a school bus. We were living out in Southeastern Queens by then. My mother had made that familiar Queens migration: start in the west and drag your ass east. First an apartment in Jackson Heights. Then another in Flushing. Now a house in Springfield Gardens. Maybe someday she'd own a place in Hempstead.

And, you know, God bless her. My mom, and folks like her, were working like mad just to get their kids to the starting line. With a few decades' distance I can appreciate this, but at fifteen I felt only shame. Starting with the morning commute in my big yellow buggy. My friend Cedric used to poke out his window and ask why I didn't just get a car. He wasn't serious though, how could he be? He and I used to trade jeans sometimes, just so it looked like we owned more pairs.

But at school such a question wasn't ridiculous. Hell, it wasn't even the proper one. Which car are you getting was the only thing anyone asked. And since it was a small school (only about thirty of us in the graduating class) you couldn't really disappear into a crowd when the conversation arose. So what do you do when such a thing is put to you casually in the lunchroom? You lie, of course. You never stop.

One of my best friends in school, a guy named Rob, came from circumstances like my own. His mother worked for the Transit Authority and they had an apartment out in Far Rockaway. We took different yellow buses to reach Woodmere Academy, but once we got there we felt pretty much the same. Staggeringly embarrassed. Soiled. I shouldn't really speak for him, but I certainly felt that way. And the funny part? These rich kids didn't give us hell about our circumstances. Most of them were pretty sweet. They never tried to make us feel bad about our status, but they didn't have to; we felt badly already.

So one night Rob and I sat in his bedroom talking about nothing, as you do at sixteen. Eventually we got around to the question of those cars everyone had coming. This must've been about junior year. We lamented our lack of legitimate prospects when we hit on a brilliant plan. Neither of our dads lived with us, neither of them were around at all. So who could possibly dispute us if we said they had promised us cars? As long as Rob and I validated each other's lies no one could catch us. Rob decided on a red Jeep Wrangler, with the hard top not the soft. And me? My dad, that princely provider, had promised me a black BMW 535i.

But why did this matter so much? More specifically, why did I have to inflict my insecurities on my fellow students, my absent dad, and most of all my hardworking mom? I can only return to that list of qualities I mentioned at the start. Also I was a fat kid. And, honestly, never a great student. And black. Let me list that one again because it also brought me shame.

The last troubles me most to admit, but what can I do? Pretend it's untrue? My mother emigrated from Uganda two decades earlier and dealing with white people for twenty years drove her crazy. Or, to be fair, crazier. She didn't show up perfect, but America had injected her with a new strain of self-loathing. I might have picked it up in utero.

Things turned around in senior year. I finally got my balance. My grades were a little better...