Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach Read Free Book Online

black-light posters who read fan ratings of Grateful Dead shows on the Internet, ratings that ranged from A+++++++
(Jerry’s spirit left his body and fellated me
in the bleachers while his physical shell remained onstage playing
“Turn On Your Love Light”)
to A+
(the band didn’t show up and
cops teargassed the parking lot).
A fair number of the white kids he’d grown up with, Macon’s friends from the time when friends were defined as kids whose houses were close enough to bike to, had slid Deadward. They had racks of concert bootlegs and books of tour photos just like he had crates of vinyl and a shoe box stuffed with graff flicks.
    He’d hung with those kids occasionally through high school, although their entitlement and lack of chops—the rugged brain-mouth world-collaging quick wit that hip hop beat into you— bored him. Macon was a product of the same white-collar suburb they were, but while he was nuzzling up against a world clenched tight in struggle, fly as fuck, hell-bent on schooling technology in its own backyard, these laconic stoners couldn’t even wrap their minds around the notion that a human being might
not
like Jerry and them. Macon had been forced to listen to the Branford Marsalis/Dead tape—what Deadheads played people who liked black music to prove the Dead were down—in more tapestry-sheathed bedrooms than he cared to recall. Deadheads always had better cheeba than hip hoppers, though—expensive aesthete bud stored in film cases and thumb-pressed into glass bongs imbued with personalities and christened with goofy names.
Careful, dude.
Oscar, like, sneaks up on you.
    Regular hip hop motherfuckers smoked like they did everything: repurposed something cheap, useless, and available to suit their needs, and turned the process into an art form along the way. They said, “Yo, kid, let’s burn this branch / twist this L / blaze these trees / hit this blunt / steam this broccoli / spark this lah / smoke this shit.” They split a fifty-cent Dutch Master cigar with two thumbnails, slid the cylindrical clump of cheap, stale tobacco to the pavement, dumped a brown-green stick-seed-and-shake-laced nick bag casually into the empty paper, picked out the unsmokables, twirled it up, dried it with a lighter, lit it, hit it, ashed it, passed it, and went about their business if they had some. Build and destroy.
    Andre’s chronic, though, knocked even Deadhead herb straight out the box, made you look at the City of Angels in a whole new light. Even made you understand their music better. This was some ol’ “diamond in the back / sunroof top / diggin’ the scene with a gangsta lean” shit, Macon reflected as he turned the tiny joint between two fingers, took a rich pull, and returned it to his roommate. Habit forced Macon to hit a spliff as hard as he could every time it touched his fingers; he was accustomed to smoking with three, four, five necks crowding the cipher and everybody trying to get as high as possible despite the rigorously enforced take-two-and-pass-so-the-blunt-will-last protocol.
    Andre sidelonged his roommate from beneath low-slung eyelids. “Kinda name is Macon for a whiteboy, anyway?” he drawled, holding his hit in as he spoke.
    Macon shrugged. Kinda whiteboy is Macon’d be a better question, he thought, one lip corner curling in a smug smile. “Macon, Georgia,” he said. “Where I was allegedly conceived. Parents drove cross-country in a VW bus for their honeymoon.” He shook his head. “I hate it.”
    “It’s not so bad. If they’d gotten it on a couple hours earlier, you woulda been Buckhead.”
    Macon steadied his eyes, which seemed to want to roll back in his head, and rubbed a palm against his stubbled chin. “Easy for you to say. Nobody called you Bacon in grade school.”
    “True,” said Andre. “Between all those seventies Black Power Back-to-Africa names—which I blame on drugs in the drinking water at Wattstax—and all that ghetto-fabulous eighties