Cartography

It seemed the problem of my adolescence was the yellow line. The Nubian God slapped the switch on the wall and peeled the quasi-converted space in half by light. Toward the end of the driveway, my skateboard lay on its side like a capsized tanker. Beyond that, the solid yellow line. Like the stripe down a coward’s back, it divided Twin Hills Drive, the sinuous main road bisecting Twin Hills Park, our subdivision in Willingboro, New Jersey, and established an unofficial border between two hoods: man and child.

He often cracked on me because I lived on the east side of Twin Hills. Nubie said that because I lived on the east side, I lived in the ghetto, the barrio, the favela. On the west side there are no sidewalks, the uninterrupted lawns giving the homes a bucolic, stately mien. Cross Twin Hills Drive—cross that solid yellow line—and in addition to the urban appurtenance of sidewalks, you’ll find a vague but discernible reduction in cachet.

For once he didn’t flaunt his status as he usually would by asking, for example, how my people were getting along, or if aid was getting through to our backward and “internecine villages” in the east. When Nube saw me eyeing the skateboard with a mix of emotions as if it were a stray that had been following me around, he asked if there was any news on my ride yet. Until recently, I had been the proud owner of a moped, make and model unknown. The seat was patched with black electrical tape, and I’d sprayed parts of the chrome with silver acrylic to cover the rust and cut out contact paper designs with stencils I got from the hobby shop to decorate the gas tank. I paid for the moped with money I earned, and I rode it, avoiding major thoroughfares—as I assured my mom—to the pool or the library or to my guitar teacher’s house. Or to play Ping-Pong with The Nubian God.

Over the previous Christmas break I worked at cvs in the Burlington Center Mall. What I hadn’t spent on cassette tapes and magazines, I was required to deposit in a passbook savings account. I was neither legal working age nor street legal for the moped, but I was being raised by a graphic designer whose ability to conjure documents would have suited her for life in some radical clandestine movement like the “People’s Front of Judea”—Monty Python’s Life of Brian offering my only understanding of insurrection at the time. Instead, she rescued our family from run-ins with bureaucracies that would only tell us what we didn’t want to hear. An inspection sticker, for example, to hold us until we could afford to replace the cracked windshield. She fabricated a pool badge when I lost the one I signed for on the last day of school. She changed dates on school forms and insurance cards. And she doctored my birth certificate when I needed to prove I was old enough for a work permit. That any one of these conveniences might constitute a felony was no deterrent. We weren’t strangers to confrontations with the g-men.

By 1982, a year after Reagan fired him along with 13,000 of his fellow air traffic controllers for engaging in an illegal strike against the federal government, my father was blackballed and seemed stuck in a daisy chain of shitty jobs. He dedicated himself to smoking weed, which anyone could have seen coming. I was an otherwise zealous imitator, but I had difficulty reconciling this new ethos of surrender with our (his) former occupation directing airplanes as if levitating from the palm of his hand (I was Luke, in this analogy, to his Yoda). Dad was hors de combat, and I was too young to imagine either rescuing my captain or assuming his command. I was dumb with resentment for feeling pressed to make a choice. I’m sure Nube had no inkling of this larger, existential dread, and connected my dark mood solely to the theft of...