Old friend
Ghost in the internet. One blurry image: a young man crouched in front of a car with gold rims, tying his fingers into gang signs. He was my friend. We spent a part of our childhood together riding around the neighborhood and playing basketball. He'd come to my house, politely say hi to my mother and eat her food. We'd go upstairs to play NBA Live, trade basketball cards, talk about cute girls from school and sexy women on tv, play-fight and clown. He was a year older and prone to exploit at least two of my many vulnerabilities: my weight and my status as a hooper. He never did so loudly, but like a surgeon of an asshole he belittled me with precision, causing me on at least one occasion (more, I'm sure) to go to the bathroom by the basketball court and cry my chubby eyes out. Although he had power over me, he was smaller, and several times I scared him out of picking on me by threatening him with violence. He was goofy and mostly harmless, often playing the fool by falling off his bike at odd moments and finishing-- even starting and interrupting-- almost every play in a game of basketball with some inane display of showmanship: a stupid face and a cocky pose, a lowering, or later, raising of the roof. We'd rarely visit his house. He was the only child of a tall yellowboned man and a short chocolate-brown woman. His father was imposing, but his mother was beautiful, with calm wet eyes and a mouth always on the edge of smiling. After middle school my friend was compelled to attend a high school we weren't zoned to. He could do so because the school, a new one, offered magnet programs consisting of more specialized curricula for good students from throughout the district aspiring to become professionals -- doctors, engineers, business men. However, most students attending the school were not there for the magnet programs, but were zoned to it. Most of these students were black. I know my friend wanted to go there to be around more black people. He told me so, and quite casually. Really, we (our group of friends consisting of kids born to parents from all parts of India, from Pakistan, from Nigeria, the Philippines, from Latin America (in my case), from the United States but black, from the United States but white) all believed that attending a 'black' school might be great mostly for what we imagined would be superior sports teams and hip-hop culture, and pretty girls with full lips and hips attracted to *all* boys. That was the dream and my friend pursued it. I saw him less often after he started high school. He didn't grow, and, not being a freak athlete, was limited to a year of B team basketball. His slang improved and a tattoo appeared on his right shoulder, followed by several more before graduating. By then his slang was loud and dense and no longer an occasional act but a mode of being. He would free-style whenever possible and smoke plenty of weed. Soon, I stopped seeing him altogether. It wasn't until I moved back home after marrying and finishing graduate school that I even thought about looking for him. I was compelled by a chance encounter: jogging with my wife along a path on which my friends and I would ride our bikes, I saw his mother walking toward us, still radiant. I said hi but suspecting she didn't recognize me and thinking that asking about her son might only bring pain, I decided to continue jogging. I searched for him a week later. He wasn't on Facebook, wasn't on Instagram, but he was on Twitter. His last post, ghetto gibberish in all caps, made 5 years ago. His profile picture was a blurry image of himself crouched in front of a blinged-out car I'm certain wasn't his making quasi-gang-signs belonging to a part of the country with which he has, to my knowledge, no association. Further searching showed he has a criminal record, and another similarly depressing profile on Blackplanet last used 7 years ago. Both profiles suggested he had given himself a pseudonym that was a subtly misspelt version of the name of a certain luxury car. I searched his pseudonym and found a music video on Youtube posted only months ago. The video was unsurprising apart from its high production quality and a shot made to look like late night footage from a security camera of 5 or 6 black men trying, and to some extent succeeding, to look threatening, one of whom was in a wheel chair-- and there, in the green light of that blurry shot, I saw a short body swaying that, although chubby, doubtless was my old friend... He was the third rapper to spit, his entire body framed by the camera and alone in a black space. He wore a white beater, red saggy pants, and white underwear. His dark fleshy torso and neck were covered in tattoos. He lazily moved to and fro, eyes avoiding the camera, and every so often drank something out of a large styrofoam cup. I can't remember what he rapped, only that it was shitty. That's my old friend-- the being who emerged from the child who shared so much with me: love of the outside, of basketball, of summers spent biking and swimming, of my mother's sandwiches; the tacit assumption of growing up to become *someone*-- a man of status, one with strong body and mind. But my old friend grew into something strongly divergent from that ideal, however dubious the notion of 'status'. He is bad at rapping, has named himself after a car, has let his body dissipate, and, I can only imagine, gone great lengths to ruin his mind. He was drawn into a violent whirlpool in the stream of culture that we make and that makes us... A vortex of symbols that rips limbs and mangles bodies. We began with similar models, conscious and unconscious, for who and what we thought we were and would become, but my friend's mind grew in a direction mine didn't. A direction determined by where and to what extent he saw his own image embodied in others. Images provided by his father, his mother, his teachers, his cousins and friends, his enemies, his neighbors, radio, television... anything and everything involving human beings within some uncomputable space forever in flux determined and not by history, ancestry, country of origin, individual demeanor, individual beauty... Maelstrom of culture: chaotic whirl of free will and destiny: entangled realities and unrealities, attractions and repulsions. My friend was sucked in and mangled. It didn't have to happen, but it did.