My new job and my new office is in Century City, well, my LA office. I have another one or two up in Washington, but I haven't seen them yet. But so far the new gig is going really great and I'm hearing exactly the kind of bad news and good news I expected to.
Since I'm still new, I'm trying to figure out the best route through West LA traffic which is a bitch and three quarters most hours of the day. Even Google Maps is stymied. I'm a scant 19 miles from my office. Depending on traffic, the trip costs anywhere between 30 and 90 minutes. I'm averaging 75. The good news is that I have good music to blast.
Today I took the route through Beverly Hills. On my way just past the Peninsula Hotel, scene of the joint where I began my quest to the China Deal several years ago, I espied a young black man in a convertible Porsche Carerra. What struck me about his profile was that he was wearing the exact bluetooth headset I have picked out for myself when I get my first check. It's was a silver Jawbone. Also, like me, he's right eared. Several things flew the old noggin at once. First, I asked myself if I might know him. Nahh. But why not?
One of those things is that I thought of an old friend that I knew in college that I lost track of. Two in fact. One we nicknamed 'E'. He was a tall but modest fellow who struggled through some of his advanced engineering classes. He had a silver Porsche and he dressed like a prep. E had a fondness for pullover sweater vests, and according to us (the BMOCs) E looked a lot cooler than he actually was. Of course we secretly just wanted to pull the chicks with his Porsche. I can still remember the first time he relented. We were heading to some club somewhere and we were heading south on the 405 between the 10 and the Marina Freeway. My roommate The Football Hero dropped it into 3rd gear and blam, before we knew it we hit 110. Exhilarating. E practically shit a brick.
The other guy, was actually very cool. He went to Long Beach State and he had actually already paid for his Porsche, unlike E whose was a gift from his father. Call him Derrick. He was already a macher in real estate, and if I wasn't such a stubborn ass I would have learned the biz back in the mid 80s with him. But I was convinced that Computers were the wave of the future and I wanted to change the world through technology, not be another dumbass rich real-estate agent. It wasn't the first time I was offered an alternative career and it wouldn't be the last time I turned one down for my digital geekery. Then again, at the time I was certain that I was on track to a Harvard MBA so I figured I'd catch him and everyone else on the downstroke.
A funny thing happened to me on the way to Harvard.
Whenever I see a brother who obviously has some ducats in the fridge and some actual international style, I think of them as another friend that I would have had but missed. Having been fairly well connected out here on the black collegiate West Coast (it is said that our pledge line helped revitalize interest in Alpha Phi Alpha) I had every intention of being a major connecting force among the Talented Tenth. I was chapter secretary of my campus frat, a national officer with NSBE, and a bunch of other stuff that it seems silly to go into at this point, other than to say that I think back to how tenuous those bonds could be. I never took them for granted and yet I had no idea how difficult they would be to sustain. One of my standard and continuing complaints stood against the fact that so many of us needed to travel far and wide across the nation to make our fortunes. I have, as have the great majority of my closest college pals, moved from here to there to make our way.
At once I am struck by the casual way we assured ourselves that we would keep in touch and the ease with which we drifted or broke apart. I can remember vividly the Sargeant Waters type politics and biases that bound us and separated us. We all pledged to be righteous for black America. I recall how impressed we were that we could share the company of Ivan Van Sertima, Naim Akbar, Haki Madbhuti, Guy Bluford, and a dozen others on the college speaking circuit. I recall the envy and wonder in the eyes of people in the streets of Boston when they realized that we had taken over the Copley Plaza Marriott and Jesse Jackson was here because of our conference. It was our time, and we were the center of our universe. And now it's 20 years later.
One old friend of mine is the CFO of Jackson State. One the top dog at GEM. Another old colleague, Gary May, is fated to be one of the last 'first blacks'. Which reminds me, I should add them to the Keeping It Right category. American life has been good to us. But still there's that disconnection, that diasporal distance. We're all pursuing different parts of a large dream. Where we were once a small young community all in one place, we are now distributed and it's hard to keep track of which direction everyone has gone.
It's a bittersweet irony to know that brother in the next lane is your brother and neither of you know it. But somehow you know despite all the myriad ways we've found a great deal more in life than many gave us the right to expect, we've lost something too: the intimacy of the links that kept us together back in the day. And I wonder were they ever that strong to begin with? Is that why we get so invested in the idea of unity, because deep down we know life will take us away from each other?
I've always been one to value the existential partnership of black men. I know that there is something we must be to each other. For me it has always come easily. I come from a large family of men, I was the oldest of four boys and in a cohort of male cousins fairly close in age. I was in all the cliques in my neighborhood, played every sport, climbed every tree. It made me independent enough to always speak my mind no matter what. I always knew that the easy friendship could be regained, I could always catch a brother on the downstroke. I still take that quality for granted, there is nothing that could make me doubt that I'm a righteous black man - even when I get on everybody's last nerve I can say that nobody has ever left me hanging.
For the next three months or so, I'll be spending a lot of time in Washington state. Priority is what it is. But soon thereafter, I'm going to be at my new HQ in West LA, just a mile or two from Beverly Hills. It puts me in the mind of where I'm supposed to be and opens the possibilities of doing locally what I've been unable to commit to for the past few years. The Brothers' Cup is a part of that and I know it's about my turn to pass it on as well as grow the circle. More than any time in the past decade, I'm feeling that I'm going to be settled here in LA. I'm going to check my degrees of separation. It's about that time.
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