Eventually, the family beat it out the door. The guys behind the counter, and me in my waffle perch, began to relax. Martine emerged from the back and, observing my accomplishment, the stack of cones, said, “Great job, Benji, those are some real cones you got there,” and he patted me on the head. Two bounces.
I stiffened. I think I heard NP's jaw drop. Martine was out the door with his briefcase.
“What the,” I said.
NP came around the counter. “Yo, Martine just patted you on the head like you were a pickaninny.”
“I'm not his—” I started.
“White man patted me on the head like a pickaninny, I'd kick his ass, shit.”
“Martine is black,” Nick said. “He was just saying, ‘Good job, brotherman.’”
“That's some racist shit right there,” NP said. “Pat a black man on the head.”
There has been far too little research done in the area of what drives white people to touch black hair. What are the origins of the strange compulsion that forces them to reach out to smooth, squeeze, pet, pat, bounce their fingers in the soft, resilient exuberance of an Afro, a natural, a just-doin'-its-own-thing jumble of black hair? It's only hair—but try telling that to that specimen eyeing a seductive bonbon of black locks, as the sweat beads on their forehead and they tremble with the intensity of restraint, their fingers locked in a fist in their pocket: I cannot touch it, but I must. A black-hair fondler has a few favorite questions that they like to ask when they fondle. “How do you comb it?” “How do you make it do that?” “How do you wash it?” With a pick; just does it; shampoo. Jerkoff.
A good starting point for such a study might be a metropolitan preschool, where the races are forced to mix with each other. Let the camera roll. The hours of footage, capturing the white schoolteacher's pats of her charges' nappy heads—good-morning hello, after-recess howdy, end-of-day farewell—will be a fruitful avenue of research. It's an ancient curiosity, no doubt, one that finds its first full expression during slavery. The contact of the two races on a daily basis, on New World soil, as they breathe its strange air. Picture the slaveholder as he surveys his property, both animate and inanimate, walking between the rows of the slave shacks, the field niggers standing at attention. He passes a young boy with bright eyes, round cheeks … and an irresistible 'Fro, untamed, almost flirtatious. Is it … can it be … winking at him? He will pet his property and pet is the correct verb, for these are animals before him.
I had punched a white classmate or two or three, some boys and a girl, in the stomach or the eye, during my early elementary-school years for inappropriate 'Fro-touching. “I just wanted to see what it felt like.” I punched them according to my father's lessons. In each case, the principal called our house that evening, my mother answered, my father listened to one side of the conversation, came to a boil, asked for the phone, and then schooled Mr. Aletta in the finer points of black history, patiently, inexorably. That was a long time ago.
NP started a campaign. In slow moments he'd whisper, “It's like lamb's wool,” with a tone of wonder in his voice.
When I returned from my ten-minute break, he'd squeak excitedly, “I love its kinky texture.”
And also, “It springs back so fast.”
And merely “Nappy!” if he was feeling pithy.
Nick said, “He's black, I'm telling you,” and that's how things went for a time. What had been Martine's intent? Caught between NP's indictment that I'd been punked, and Nick's vision of racial solidarity. I was in the middle, bending as usual in the direction of whatever breeze was blowing through me that day. The day our electricity went out, I inclined toward NP and his vision of eternal, unending race warfare.
What are you going to do about it? What are you ever going to do about anything?
MARTINE DIDN'T STAY LONG after the delivery guys left, driving off to “check out the other stores,” leaving us in the care of Bert, our noble skipper. Bert made a good show of being upright when Martine was about, but once the boss left he spent half the shift in the bathroom, shivering in hangover. I didn't know much about hangovers at that point, so in the years since my Jonni Waffle time, Bert has stayed with me as Patient Zero of Morning-After Incapacitation. It was always nice when Bert came up on manager rotation. He made the tough shifts easier, too preoccupied with his nausea and that night's plans for him to get in a fever over refilling the carob chips or too-generous scoops.
The final member of the Thursday night shift joined us in the form of one of the Cousins, Meg, and I was immediately reminded of my shirt. Why did I have to stink today? “I thought Marsha was on today,” I said, then realized that it might appear as if I were overly familiar with her schedule. Which was true.
“We switched,” Meg explained. Marsha had a date with one of the boys, one of the Teds and Derricks and Sammys who populated the Cousins' lull-period conversation and hovered outside near closing time. The Cousins were fun. Marsha, a plump little thing with dyed red hair, lived up-island in Center Moriches, and Meg had come down from her home in Rhode Island somewhere to spend the summer with her kinfolk. Meg pushed my buttons, mostly due to her New Wave haircut, which sliced across her face in a nice, hard angle.
It was a couple of weeks before I noticed, as she bent over one day, that she cut it that way to cover her lazy eye. That I knew her secret made it even more exciting when her breast grazed my elbow, or my elbow grazed her breast, depending on your perspective, although I have my perspective and I'm sticking to it.
My elbow smooshed her breast at least once per shift. It was a tight fit, there in the vats. We reached past each other, leaning in, accumulating our little shavings from nearby or adjacent flavors, sometimes competing for the same flavor, trading scoops one after the other. Breathing each other's cooled breath. So there was plausible deniability vis-à-vis the tit collisions, between gravity working on her body, and my long, skinny arms. But the thing is, it never happened with Marsha or Arianna, the other girl I worked with sometimes. And it happened every shift, which was outside probability. I always murmured a quick “Sorry, sorry,” and Meg said, “No problem,” and we continued on our cones or sundaes.
One scoop dread, one scoop excitement—such was my portion when I worked with Meg. As a shift progressed without a tit collision, I'd think, the spell is broken, and then a few minutes later—smoosh, that soft inevitability. Sorry, sorry. All these years later, I can only come to the conclusion that she was steering her breasts into my elbow the whole time, as a joke or a thrill, I don't know, other people's kicks are as mysterious as my own. (Holding hands in the roller disco, a tit collision in the ice-cream vats—an arc seems to be shaping up here, or, given that there are only two points, a straight line of ascent, Team Man-Child coming from behind in the second half.) When I think about it, the memory calls up this odd mix of sensations—the heat of her breast and the cold gusts of the freezer, the latter overpowering the former so that desire was cooled off and extinguished the moment it came into being. Sounds about right.
The Cousins had a car, and a network of party tipsters, and were generally having a much better summer than I was. Meg invited me—or us, really, me and NP and Nick, so I can't say it was a personal invite—to join them at one of the parties they heard about every weekend, at some arcane West Hampton address or sinister-sounding East Hampton beach I'd never heard of, Plow-Buddy Bluffs, Sugar-Bang Drift. I wanted to go, but didn't want to go alone, and NP and Nick weren't interested in the Cousins' lifestyle. Of Marsha, they opined that she “need to shave her arms” and “got some booty,” and regarding Meg they offered that she was “too skinny,” had a “flat ass,” but was “okay in the face.” Imagine if they knew about the lazy eye! They weren't interested, but there was something else there, too, a fear of going off-map, of traveling to a part of the East End that we didn't know. Where we didn't know where the exits were in case something racial went down, that small radius of light created by a beach-party bonfire magnifying the deep mysteries
that lay beyond it, that greater darkness. Fuckin' rednecks.
Four to six was dead. Everyone at the beach or washing sand off their feet, tugging down the edge of a swimsuit to inspect tan progress. Nick was making batter in the back, and NP and Meg and I took turns with the few late-afternoon stragglers. I hadn't eaten all day, so I made lunch—a chocolate milk shake, heavy on the syrup. There was a hot-dog machine on-site, where the franks spun eternally like grisly grim planets, and occasionally I'd make a wretched feast of one, and every so often I'd grab a slice of pizza from Conca D'Oro or a burger from the Corner Bar, but most of the time I ate ice cream. Chocolate in a plastic cup with rainbow sprinkles, chocolate milk shakes, chocolate ice-cream sodas, chocolate twist dispensed by a lever into wavy, brown, short-lived peaks. I mean, it was free, and all you can eat, without limit, and it was nice to live like a glutton for a change, unchecked and unreserved. It was new for me. I was nauseous at the end of each day but that seemed a small price, and by the next shift I magically forgot how sick I'd been and started all over again.
“Your shirt smells kinda funky, Benji,” NP said.
“Yeah, I forgot to wash it.” I sneaked a peek at Meg. She was frowning at her fingernails, oblivious.
“Smells like … smells like …” As NP reached for the appropriate analogy, Bert staggered out front and put Nick on waffle duty.
“Dag,” Nick said.
“Better to get it now, than when all those people out there staring at you,” I said.
“Smells like the Funk of Forty Thousand Years,” NP said, finally.
I have not described the making of the waffle cones, I know. I've been putting it off. There was a bit of theater involved. “Look at what he's doing, Mommy!” You sat on a special perch in the front of the store for all to ogle as you ladled batter onto the four waffle grills, which were mounted together on a wheel. Spin the wheel, remove the cone, roll it up in the mold, spray on the nonstick cooking spray, add more batter, spin the wheel, and on to the next. “I want one, Mommy!” Sound easy? Go fuck yourself. Move too fast and the cones peeled off limp and useless, move too slow and they turned out as brittle as ashes and disintegrated at a glance. We wore thick gloves but often burned our forearms on the grills, hence the beat-up tube of vitamin-E ointment to prevent scarring, never far from reach. When the batter overflowed, squeezed out when the grill top came down, we scraped off the stalactites of batter with a paint scraper. Is a paint scraper a standard food-preparation utensil? You had become a living advertisement for the waffle cone, a cog in a Belgian dessert combine. “Smells so good!” The hungry ones watched your every move, a grubby mob eager for this spectacle.
The human epidermis is a wondrous thing. When you pulled waffle duty, a Plexiglas barrier separated you from the hordes, and this was no small boon, especially during the weekend rushes. By the end of the night, the accumulated swabbed-on oils from untold foreheads and forearms and hands covered the glass so thoroughly that our oppressors were lost in the fog of their own plenitude. “If I cannot see their faces, I will not have the nightmares,” I whispered to myself, as steam puffed out from the sizzling grills: Windex by the crate, you can imagine.
A tall man in a Hawaiian shirt came in, his face so red and peeling that he must have had sunburns on his sunburns. It was beginning, Thursday night in all its humanity. At the start of the shift, we played You're Up, trading off customers until the numbers made it impossible.
“All yours, Benji,” Meg said, looking up from that week's Dan's Papers. She was deep in the club pages, reconnoitering the weekend.
“Why am I up? You just got here.”
“I'm taking my break,” she said.
“Huh?”
“I'm taking my break at the start of the shift,” Meg said. “What? There's no law against it.”
I looked at the customer and knew he was one of those Rum Raisin Imbeciles. Of course over time you got to know what people were going to order as soon as they walked in the door—the inner was written on the outer. Rum Raisin Imbeciles looked like they were wilting. They had a distinctive sag to their postures, their faces slack and loose, as if their day-to-day had drained away something essential. One bite of Rum Raisin, though, and they instantly perked up, standing up straight, eyes a-sparkle. It was weird.
He took a number even though he was the only customer in the store. I waited for him to speak. Rum Raisin Imbeciles always made a show of considering other flavors—cooing “Oh, that looks good” and “I've been meaning to try that”—before settling on their favorite, the polyester of ice cream. Innovative in its time, perhaps, Rum Raisin was loud plaid shorts next to a fresh can of Double Mocha Bombasta.
“Rum Raisin, please.”
“In a waffle cone?” I asked in a pleasant chirp. Martine wanted us to push the waffle. At the peak of a rush, our collective In a waffle cone?s trilled throughout the store like beautiful chimes.
“I've been meaning to try one of those …”
I exhaled with impatience. I knew where this was going.
“A sugar cone is fine.”
I started scooping. One nice thing about Rum Raisin, it was soft. Especially after it had been in the vats for a while. A new container fresh out of the freezer was a horror. All you could scrape out were these tiny ribbons that made it look like you were peeling a carrot while parents lifted their whelps up to the vats so they could see us working away, the kids' noses dragging greasy smears across the glass. The shavings added up over time, but with those beady little eyes hawking you it was a real hassle.
I rang him up and he left the store, newly energized and licking thoughtfully. My shake had melted so I poured it out and made a chocolate ice-cream float, easy on the seltzer. Time disappeared into the service-industry void. You looked at the clock and saw twenty minutes had passed. What happened? I saw NP mashing some Oreo into a pint cup. He noticed me and said, “My mom wants some for this weekend.”
“Didn't you get a pint yesterday?” Which was true. Mrs. Collins's Rocky Road requests weighing on my mind, I took note of my friends' pint-making habits in hopes of figuring a way out of my problem.
“Dag, Benji. What are you, the Jonni Waffle police?”
I had a thing about stealing. I discovered this in fifth grade, the first time my white classmates started their daily swiping runs through the candy racks of the Gristedes next to school. Andy palmed a roll of Mint Certs and winked. I stood behind him with a grape Fruit Roll-Up I intended to pay for, according to social norms. He whispered, “Take something, man,” but before I could even think about it, I heard Sidney Poitier's voice in my head and in that crisp, familiar, so-dignified tone, he declared, “They think we steal, and because they think we steal, we must not steal.”
Andy paid for his sour pickle, the ill-gotten Certs secure in his coat pocket. I paid for my Fruit Roll-Up, half intoxicated with a new self-righteousness. The next couple of years, I shook my head in disapproval when one of my friends stole something. I spent my allowance on Starbursts and Jolly Ranchers, legit all the way.
Stealing, Sidney Poitier said, was for the white kids. Let them pull their petty crimes if they wanted—we were made of better material. There was no real harm in it, ripping off a candy bar or box of cough drops here and there unless, and everyone agreed on this point, you were one of the miserable, anonymous Klepto Kids, those unfortunate souls who channeled their home-turf dysfunction into schooltime acting out, rummaging through people's coats during recess, shaking down unsecured lockers at key moments of opportunity. (Bettina, Bettina.) It was easy to picture the forbidden troves underneath the Klepto Kid beds, twenty floors above Park Avenue—the shiny mound of Timex watches, Fiorucci sunglasses, electronic calculators, and bracelets engraved with the names of happier children.
So it went until high school, when the rules changed, as usual. Now the good boys of my Sag Harbor crew pulled the occasional crime—smuggling a Budweiser out of the South Hampton 7-Eleven under a sweatshirt, sticking a Penthouse into
a copy of OMNI for camouflage and walking out of the Ideal. I abstained, and Sidney Poitier, observing my peers' thievery, kept silent, merely clucking his tongue occasionally. I had only tried to steal something once. And I had learned my lesson.
THE GREAT COCA-COLA ROBBERY occurred in the spring of 1985, when I found myself in that most unlikely place, a party. I'd run into Bobby one afternoon at Tower Records on Sixty-sixth Street. I was looking for a Depeche Mode twelve-inch; he was down from Scars-dale to buy U.T.F.O.'s debut album. We rarely saw each other during the school year, but quickly picked things up again as if we'd ridden through the Hills the day before. As we were about to split, I removed all tagalong/mooch emanations from my voice and asked what he was up to that night. He said, “Going to a party. Wanna come?” And maybe that was a kind of theft, because with the finesse of picking a pocket I'd spared myself a night at home watching cable.
The party was a few blocks away from my house, on Ninety-eighth off West End Avenue. Bobby went to a prep school in River-dale that had a mix of city kids and Westchester kids. I met up with him in front of the McDonald's outside the subway. “Karen's parents fly away every weekend,” Bobby told me, “so she has a lot of parties.” I pictured weekend after weekend of parties, Friday to Sunday bacchanals where kids smoked weed and drank beer in full Kid with the Empty House liberation, a notion reinforced when we walked in and saw everyone lounging on couches, or leaning against walls in mellow affect. It seemed they had been there for days in a perfect habitat of cool poise. Bobby introduced me around, and I was greeted with genuine, nonjudgmental interest. New York private schools all drew from the same pool of well-scrubbed scion, but these people seemed nicer than the reliably dismissive brand at my school, like they'd make space for my tray and scooch over if I walked by their lunch table, or make fun of my clothes in a way that said, We're close enough that my joking reveals our human connection, as opposed to, You're a jerk and I'm an asshole. I thought to myself, I could get used to this. I went to look for a beer, and there I stumbled on the Fort Knox of carbonated beverages.