23K

Tooley speculates on the role of luck in our fortunes. It's an interesting piece. Makes me think.

Back in the mid 80s when I was doing internships at Xerox, I can remember a particularly gorgeous sunny afternoon in El Segundo in which I had one of my interesting epiphanies. Because it was at that moment that I realized that I was in the American middle class, for real. I was listening to a radio commercial about a vacation or something that I grew up thinking was just 'for rich white people' and I realized that I had enough money to go. And then I suddenly started looking at a bunch of TV commercials for American Express and all other types of yuppie conveniences and I realized that I was that demographic. They were targeting me. I also smuch up that epiphany with another memory of vaguely the same period when I cashed a check for two weeks work or some such instead of putting it in the bank. I walked out of the credit union with over 700 dollars cash in my pocket. I felt like the richest dude in sight. And it took about 15 seconds for my ghetto senses to start tingling and tell me to get in my car quick. But I fought them and strolled for a while.

Well yesterday with the pile of bills I got my annual Social Security update, which is always fun for me because I get to look back on the days when I made $9,000 in a year and all the years (up to 1987) when I made less money in a year than I now pay in taxes.

Now I'm looking at 1987 in particular, and that year I made about 23K. In retrospect it seems like a very small amount of money as compared to what it felt like making it. And yet, my friend and I used to joke about the Southern California poverty line of 36K, under which you could not have a reasonable expectation of driving a reasonably safe automobile and buying a house in a reasonably safe neighborhood. I can recall my own despair at how I was living - below that line. But that was simply a blow to my ambition, not my actual life. I was 26 and had no plans on getting married any time soon. I looked to the black managers I knew as role models and dreamed of climbing the corporate ladder back in those Cosby Show days.

I can recall a dude who called my girl his 'friend'. He was already flipping houses in the real-estate business. Keepin' it real, he reminded me of all the white collar bullshit I was eating while getting paid next to nothing. I can recall the few brothers who could afford to tell me that Affirmative Action was a joke and that all my and my peers' Nordstrom wearing, proper talking, 94.7 The Wave listening, used BMW driving bullshit was... well bullshit. Somehow I managed to pay them no mind. I was thick and tight with my crew, engineers mostly, and we had our pride. But I understood the role I was playing.

It's a standard black cliche where I come from: "We didn't realize how poor we were." We didn't feel poor, we didn't act poor, although we probably should have after a manner of thinking. And of course I wouldn't trade those days for all the tea in China. But one thing I've always considered to be absolutely true and yet unknown, perhaps unspoken and generally unwritten was how confident it felt to be where we were. Call it whatever you like, there was a strong sense that things were not going to fall apart for us. We had social and cultural reinforcement from each other. A lot of that was and is deeply all about the kind of attention we paid to our social life - like Stuff Black People Like Item Number One - we liked black people, each other. We had our eyeballs out creating and maintaining our social space as the people we were, and that meant an elaborate set of values, styles, linguistic twists, dances, fashions, politics, habits and all that. There may not be, in the larger scheme of things, a whole lot to say about the society of black middle-class yuppy twentysomethings making 20-40K per year, but you couldn't convince us of that.

It was more than luck. It was a lot of experience with a lot of black success and an ability to get some social recognition amongst ourselves from that. Even if the only thing we could do was form social hierarchies between ourselves and those blacks we didn't wish to associate with, we had the power to let that distinction motivate us. Such practices go against the politics of racial unity, then again, our parents had certain expectations of us. Family trumps politics. No apologies. It was choice. All of us decided who we wanted to be to our fellow blackfolks. All of us knew what we could get away with, and we did it like we wanted to.

Our joint, The Golden Tale, was a leveling playing field. Because basically you either look like a fool on the dance floor or you don't. There's not much all those yuppie trappings can do for you. You cannot yell over the music what degree you have or what kind of car you drive without looking like Dork #5 from She's Gotta Have It. You either have the moves or you hold up the wall. Young black folks from all over the county came to the Tale. Was it us that drew them or was it them that drew us? It didn't much matter - that was the black single universe, white collar, blue collar, pro athlete, ex-con, players, haters, and everyone in between. Everybody knew what everybody's choices meant, and the social climbing still worked in the standard American way. No surprises whatsoever.

I call that Dancing in Suits, because back in those days, before Ice Cube changed the rules of the game, no matter how long you had been in the slam, even if you dared to take your pink rollers off in the parking lot, black men put on their best clothes on Friday night. Besides... we had bouncers. This para is from my never finished novel that I started writing back in 1990...

Claudia wanted to glide. At this moment on the 10 in slowing traffic she felt the apocalypse approaching. Why? Why now does civilization have to go down the fucking tubes just as we black professionals are taking our rightful place in America? Black people have more wealth than ever before so the banks fail. Blacks have more mayors in major cities but the cities are all going bankrupt. I have this great car and I'm stuck in gridlock, I might as well be on a pushcart in fuckin' Alabama. Where is my convertible? Where is my open road? Where is my freedom?

The line was the first step back through time. Claudia thought of lines. Everyplace people are starved for something, they form lines. Here stood Claudia at the door of one of the few sophisticated black clubs in Los Angeles, downtown LA. Hangout of attorneys, police officers, civil servants, accountants, engineers and military officers. The stock crowd of a middle class society anywhere in the Western world. Here in black, here in their element dancing in suits. America, is much like Russia in that sense, he we are starved for some middle class company, to prove still as we prove by our being and seeing that we are more than the sons and daughters of slaves. Starved still as we queue up to be inspected at the door by the arbitrators of our choices, bouncers. Embodiment of our secret fears of what white people might still see in us, the bouncers check the validity of dress, listen for accents in the voice, check the back of our necks for cuckabugs. Like a pledge line we are harassed and asked demeaning questions, searched and seized, frozen for the moment in the cultural fascism of our own creation. But we stand for it, moreover, we stand in line for it, for this is a monster we know. We know the rules for we created them. We push them and have no respect for them because we created them. We enforce them because more often then not we pass the velvet ropes and are invited in, for 15 dollars. The price we have set to set us apart, we hope from those lower class niggers and hoods, the likes of which never grow up to be anything more than security guards. Or bouncers.

Hair weaves, of course, jheri curls, one on a Hollywood looking brother with no tie who will not pass muster, so sorry homes but he does look fine. Heels and pumps becoming increasingly uncomfortable, it will be nice to get off my feet and enjoy a drink. Oh, but what I will have to go through to get just a drink. Good thing I have money. The LA attitude creeps in. The voice raises pitch, eyes eye dresses a bit tight, heels a bit high, makeup a bit thick, hips a bit swivelly. Too, too much harshness, minds in a critical frenzy. Here tonight are party people, those who seem to inhabit this place and would be churching here monthly Fridays. The queue shortened in front of her and she reached the door. Two women directly in front of her were gabbing about some movie yet as the line moved froward their words lost intelligibility in the beat echoing through the open red leather padded door. She produced her license to the bouncer, black shirt thin tie curled up mouth, bushy mustache. He nodded, mouth open gapped teeth, spotted tongue chapped lips. She moved inside and handed a 10 to the girl behind the glass. Red black and green 3 inch fingernails scissored the bill and plucked a pale blue ticket through the aperture. Claudia handled it as if it were dirty, turning away and trailing her arm and Arden gloss behind her, sliding the ticket across the counter as she moved into the joint. She eyed the crowd, full volume and handed the ticket to the smiling brother on the barstool on the far side of the entry vestibule, checkpoint number three. He rips the ticket and leans toward her ear, "Thank you for coming", and grins. He is mentally eating booties all night, just sitting there telling every woman that he is their personal friend, with his tight slacks and pointy boots. She looks back to see him play off his staring. It gave her a wonderful rush, yeah you know you want this... The swell of blackness gloved her and she wailed internally from the swoon. She was Fay Wray, diggin’ the moment, playing her pecuniarliy augmented femininity off the dark mirrors of the negro night club. This was her playground, cause funk is a thang she knows. And baby...

I highlighted we had bouncers because there has always, always, always been black on black social discrimination. We have always made sense of and enforced the rules of black society amongst ourselves. It's as old as slave and free, as old as field and house, as old as straight and nappy with 18 gradations in between every extreme. And we navigate the black world with abandon, and nobody can tell you otherwise. Whatever the larger world may or may not consider about the black world, it has always been our world and we always recognize the array of choices within it, and flying that coop has also always been part of the equation too.

It was twenty years ago this month that I met the Spousal Unit at The Golden Tale. The following week we went to a mutual friend's wedding. It's part an parcel of an old trope that tries to reduce the complexity of black life to some simpleminded economic or social choices, but there's millions of them and we understand them all. Luck all evens out in the long run.