Lower East Side and the Johns.

John was absolutely NOT going downtown. It was just too far away, and by the time he would be coming home, nothing would be running regularly. He had once taken the M101 bus uptown to his apartment during the wee hours of the night; well he had tried to anyway. The bus hadn’t shown up, and he had had to trek laboriously through driving snow all the way from Chelsea, where he had been at party, to his apartment at Amsterdam and St. Nicholas Avenue, over 5 miles away. The prospect of going west to east via public transportation furthermore was extremely undesirable. Even during rush hour the cross-town busses were hardly functional…

Michael Thomas, known eponymously as “Buzz” both for his hair style and his low liquor tolerance, was insisting that they make a journey to the Lower East Side. “They’ll be lots of girls dude, come on,” he whined bibulously, burping out the last two words. Sean “Rocky” Taggart, son of Senator Harry Louis Taggart of Connecticut piggybacked on Buzz’s point. “Yea man, it’ll be fuckin’ perfect,” he said, his eyes glassily staring at the wall of the West Harlem apartment unseeingly.

John, Rocky and Buzz had been roommates at __________University, the most prestigious school in the land. They had rushed the same fraternity, dated girls from the same upper crust sorority, taken classes in the same Gothic buildings, snorted the same expensive cocaine, and obtained the same vaunted degree. They had lived life with such abandon during college that it was a wonder that disaster had never netted them in its snare.

Buzz and Rocky were childhood friends who had been raised in Fairfield County. They had attended Greenwich Country Day, and then Taft, up in Watertown. John, however was a prep- for-prep kid who had spent his formative years in the Manhattanville Projects. His 6th grade teacher had realized his potential had helped with his high school applications, and he had boarded at Choate. Still, John never forgot his roots despite many years of upper-curst living both at prep school and in college. He marveled that his best friends were rich white boys.

“They are so rich, they don’t know or care I’m a broke ass nigga,” John had mused to himself during his college years.

Now, in the second year after graduation from ____________, the economic disparity that existed between John and his college buddies was more pronounced than it had ever been. Unable to find a job in finance in the economic downturn, John had turned to a series of retail jobs, most recently starting as an assistant at the Upper West Side Apple computer store on 66th and Broadway. He had taken an apartment in Harlem, only a few blocks from the projects he had grown up in and where his beloved Nanna still lived.

Buzz and Rocky had also had difficulty finding work. In the first year out of school, they had each lived in studio apartments owned by their respective families on the Upper East Side. Together, they had taken a 15-week road trip across the county, a tour they had named “blastoff to blackout.” They had essentially spent an entire semester partying at every University across the country where their high school and college buddies were still enrolled. Buzz had subsequently been able to score a job as a junior analyst at Goldman Sachs, despite failing the mandatory drug test. His father was a vice president of operations at the bank. Rocky had a taken a job working for his Mother’s nationally known PR firm. Neither paid rent. Both had salaries that greatly trumped John’s, and largely spent their capital on every vice imaginable.

When John had invited them to his apartment, he had been surprised they had acquiesced. Indeed, the boys rarely traveled above street; they never had to. John hadn’t seen Buzz or Rocky since the summer, when Senator Taggart had hosted a party on his yacht and instructed his son to invite his friends.The party had been typically raucous, though John, hadn't been in the mood to go crazy. His time out of his school, his demanding schedule, and the low prospect of future employment had generated in him resentment and envy toward his friends, something he had never felt before. Still, for old times sake and a desire to reciprocate the summer soiree he had been invited to, he had decided to host his former roommates. He admitted to himself that in the depths of this heart, he hoped that one of his friends’ families would be able to find him a job.

Buzz and Rocky arrived promptly at 7:30, and brought exactly nothing. They inhaled the food John had prepared for them, and guzzled down all his liquor. They had accidentally opened a bottle of wine that belonged to one of John’s roommates, and had consumed that too. Well fed and appropriately wasted, they were ready to hit the town. The two had never partied in Harlem, and certainly didn’t plan on it that night; it was LES or bust.

John felt sick. He had been drinking to combat the growing disgust he was feeling for himself and his friends.  He bitterly observed that when he was with them, he felt like a carnival act or some sort of strange servant.  His hazy mind recalled the words his Nanna had said to him shortly before he had departed for Choate:

“Don’t let them white boys make a fool of you,” she had rasped between puffs of her Cools menthol cigarette. “Don’t git up there and get new. I didn’t raise no coon.” “Yes Nanna,” he had mumbled, embarrassed, by here old-fashioned notions.

Standing in his living room apartment with his schoolmates, he felt emotion rise up in him. Anger, scorching white, began to blaze as he realized he had become everything his Nanna had warned him against. Turning to the boys, he opened his mouth to tell them exactly how he felt about them. Buzz reached half-hazardly for an empty bottle of tequila, while Rocky yawned and farted grotesquely. Neither seemed to have a care in the world. “Sure guys,” John heard himself say with a vigor he did not possess, “Lets go downtown. I’ll grab my jacket." All through the cab ride, a single phrase pulsated in his brain with musical precision “…a nigger is a nigger is a nigger is a nigger…”