“You see me hanging out with Lenny and trying to get into that middle-class thing—”

“You mean that semiwhitey thing?” I said.

“Hey, it ain’t about that. It’s about getting over, like I said before. You can run it into the ground, and maybe you can deal with who you are better than I can, but that’s the way it is.”

“Yeah, but you always been my man. How you get into these changes? One day you my ace boon and the next day I don’t know you.”

“One day my pops came around and asked me if I wanted to go downtown with him.” Paul took a deep breath and let it out hard. “I said okay. We went down where he works. It was his day off, and he just wanted to pick up some stuff from his gig. He works in this office building, doing maintenance, little odd jobs. So he went in and picked some stuff up, and his boss was sitting there with two other whiteys and this sister, and he told my father to go out and get some coffee for them. My father said he wasn’t working, and this whitey laughed and said he never was. Then he told him what kind of coffee they wanted. That got next to me, you know. I started to speak on it, and he said he used to catch an attitude when he was younger, but he started getting fired from gigs.

“You know what that was like to me? Seeing my father going for coffee and everything? Because you don’t think about going for coffee for nobody. You thinking about yourself fixing something or sitting in an office, that kind of thing. You don’t think about being a grown man and fetching coffee for nobody. It was like I was looking over a mountain and seeing where I was going for the first time. You want more soda?”

“No,” I said.

“I’m sorry about the fight, man,” Paul said.

“Go on about that other stuff,” I said.

“I ain’t much different than my pops. I kept on trying to tell myself that I was, you know, but I’m not. He’s no dummy, man. But he don’t have that piece of paper. Anyway, then I met Lenny and Joni, and they were like … what? Different, I guess. Yeah, they were la-di-da niggers, just like you said they were. But you know Lenny ain’t going to be going for nobody’s coffee, man. You just know that. And Joni’s going to be the chick sitting up with them whiteys telling somebody like me what kind of coffee they want. I know that. Anyway, I started to hang with them.

“Then one day I was over to Joni’s house and I was smoking some joints that Lenny had picked up. I fell off to sleep or something, and when I woke up, Joni and this chick she hangs with sometime—”

“Skinny chick?”

“No, a gray chick,” Paul said. “They’re out on the balcony—”