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It started with a plan, and the plan was all Tamba’s. But it’s probably better to tell you why that matters—it’s probably good to explain that Tamba taught us everything. We were a crew, and there were four of us: Tamba, me, Kyle, and Mike Esposito, whom everybody called Espo in those days, in that inflexible, unspoken order. Tamba was in charge. He was taller and skinnier and somehow more graceful than the rest of us, sure, but the most important thing was that he had a dad and none of the rest of us could really say that.

I mean: we started off with them, just like anyone else—no Incarnation; no virgin birth—but somewhere along the way we all shed them like the skin on some animal. Kyle and I each had one for a while, but by the time I’m trying to tell you about, they were already dead. They definitely didn’t count. Espo had one, alive, whose face he could barely remember; his mother said he was in Puerto Rico somewhere drinking beers and breaking promises. We talked it over a few times and decided he couldn’t possibly count either.

So Tamba’s dad was the only one worth even mentioning. He was both alive and around, and just as tall and skinny as Tamba, if in somewhat more imposing dimensions. He picked Tamba up from school every day at 5:30, always wearing a thick, hot turtleneck and glasses with gold frames and washed-out Wrangler jeans, and he was never late, not that I can remember. And as soon as he saw Tamba, he would yoke him up and deliver an uncountable frenzy of fake punches to his mid-section and shout, “Just look at this guy! Wouldja just look at this character?” as if his son were something brand new, as if he had just been born.

Tamba would fight a smile and say, “Dad, chill,” and move his long, skinny dreads back into their deliberately wild rows.

There was something—something indescribable—about the attention Tamba’s father paid him, something weirdly intertwined with the fact this was the same father who had given him a name so, well, so African-sounding, so authentic. It magnified him in our eyes. It made him so real. It was as if all other boys our age were together some unfinished mural, and Tamba the thing depicted.

He had a mom too, of course, but that was never a big thing; everybody we knew had one of those. When Tamba’s dad arrived at school at 5:30 sharp, he was always the only dad; he was a foam-speck of turtleneck and glasses and faded denim in a sea of long bubble coats and patent leather flats and headscarves hiding wash-and-sets done by all the Dominicans in Manhattan. We only saw Tamba’s mom twice a year, on parent-teacher nights, and she was tall and skinny, just like Tamba, just like Tamba’s dad. The first time the three of us saw them all together, Kyle said, “W-W-W-Well ain’t they some tall, sk-skinny motherfuckers?” and we all nodded and laughed; it was so true. Then we saw Tamba’s dad grab his mom’s face and kiss her on the lips, and we all got quiet, and I couldn’t tell you exactly why.

Tamba’s possession of a father, and the early self-actualization it had catalyzed in him, made him an expert on many topics—especially, and importantly, women. In those days, there was never too much talk about women, never close to enough. All Souls School was all boys, all pleated gray slacks, all rumpled, rough-dry sweater vests in various attempts at burgundy. And the faculty, mostly Jesuit, was similarly afflicted—the only woman teacher on staff was Ms. Anderson: Ms. Anderson of the yellow-brown skin; Ms. Anderson of the thin, blue dress; Ms. Anderson of the inconceivably vast behind. Ms. Anderson’s behind was a legend, a thing beyond reproach in our midst, a fixed...