Metro made it to Harlem before I had a chance to go with him. He knew someone at work who had a place there. But Metro made it to Harlem by himself. He was in a hurry; he was anxious, as if there was something waiting for him there. But it had nothing to do with me. Nothing. Not even if Albany Avenue in Hartford had just as many fried-chicken stands and storefront churches as 125th Street. I knew where I came from, and I didn’t need any guilt-ridden white boy who had been to France telling me how to live. Or Ruella telling me which spaces to occupy. What did Metro know about hugging the rusting radiator for heat in our apartment, or finding our kitchen plumbing clogged with roach shit, or how my college dorm room and scholarship had already been paid for by all the summer jobs I could have had if I had been white, or by all the rent increases we were charged for the same four-room apartment where Charlie and I heard our parents screwing in the next room, or by my traveling south with my mother on a train steaming somewhere in South Carolina where I couldn’t pee until we found the Colored Toilet back in 1957? What did Metro know about that? What did he care when all he wanted to do was to call me a nigger to my face and say it was love talking that way, that excitement and abuse went together in sexual pleasure like cock and mouth or cock and ass or black and white when he was fucking not me but the image of me and black men like me that he had always dreamed about as he sat on his Louisiana gallery swatting mosquitoes and dragonflies.

Which is what I tried to tell Ruella: I was calling Metro just what he was—although I hadn’t even been that far underground when I met him or followed the stare from his angular face, which became a ladder out of the occupied classroom at Wesman straight into his waiting hands. Hands that held mine tentatively on a walk through the campus at midnight or led me away from the dance stage in Manhattan to some filthy abandoned warehouse where the single word “nigger” had already sealed his fate and was about to seal mine.