Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach Read Free Book Online Page A

insanity, naming mufuckers Lexus and Guccina and Dom Pérignon and shit—black folks got kind of a dozens moratorium on names.” He felt a pang of guilt for making such jokes in front of a whiteboy, and winced as if the red-black-and-green Afropick of race pride had just flown across the room and jabbed him in the ass.
    Andre bent to ash the joint into a plastic garbage can, and missed the size-up glance his roommate threw at him. Macon was as attuned to signs of black acceptance as a dog was to the scraping of a can opener. Willingness to tweak the foibles of black people in front of him was a clear one; it implied that Macon was hip enough to get the joke and down enough to be unguarded around. The only thing better was when black folks started railing against the White Man in his presence, thus granting Macon transcendent status. When he felt needy or insecure, which was often, Macon resorted to initiating such discussions by ripping into his private stash of paper race tigers: Quentin Tarantino, Rudolph Giuliani, Elvis Presley. It usually got the wrecking ball rolling.
    Andre inhaled sharply, pulled back his lips, and offered the joint, almost gone now, to his roommate. It was an elegant pass, thumb pressed securely to fingertip, the handoff of two experienced smokers. “Yo,” said Macon, kicking his legs out as the toxicants streamed through him, thrashing like salmon, and settled in the cool underwater grotto of his stomach, “you ever seen—”
    A loud knock at the door wounded their buzzes and killed the conversation.
    “Hello?” Insistent, female, whiny. “It’s Olivia, your R.A.”
    Andre leaped to his feet and flicked the roach toward the open window. It hit the top ledge, showering sparks down the pane, and whipped out into the wind.
    “Shit.” He reached for a can of Right Guard and sprayed a loud, wide arc around the room. Macon, dazed by the whirlwind his roommate had become, grabbed his own deodorant, realized it was a roll-on, and felt stupid.
    “One second,” called Andre, wading through the knee-high detritus that had somehow managed to accumulate in just three hours. “Wonderful,” he muttered, “not even here a day and already I’ma be the stereotypical fire-up-the-spliff natty-dreadlockinna-Babylon Rastaman-vibration nigga and shit.”
    He yanked open the door and a short, mousy-haired girl stared up at him through fingerprint-smudged glasses. She looked like she wanted to come inside, but Andre blocked the entrance with his body. A lecture on Knowing Your Rights given by some haggard ex–Black Panther at a weekend retreat his mother had sent him on because she worried he wasn’t black enough came back to Andre:
A cop can only come inside your house if you give him permission.
The knowledge was intended to prevent the pigs from fucking with young revolutionary brothers, but he had only used it when the Santa Monica PD busted up the keg parties his football teammates threw when their parents were out of town.
    The girl crossed one slippered ankle over the other and pursed her downturned mouth to speak.
    “Hi!” Andre said before she could, pursuing a policy of jaunty innocence. He grinned, orthodontized teeth gleaming, and extended his hand, forearm swollen from a summer of weight lifting; Andre hoped she’d notice but she didn’t. Beyond offering his body for perusal, he never quite knew how to flirt. “Andre Walker. Wow, I— Those are really cool sweatpants.” Behind him, the sizzle of aerosol indicated that Macon was freshening the air with an entire semester’s worth of Right Guard.
    The Resident Adviser looked him over with authoritarian disdain and Andre’s arm fell to his side. “First floor meeting’s in ten minutes,” she said, then paused and frowned. “What’s that smell?”
    “We can’t make it,” Macon squawked, lunging to his roommate’s side and dropping a buddy-pal hand on Andre’s shoulder. “We’ve scheduled on-line appointments with Career