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The Unreliable Narrator Part Two: Starfucker

Joshua Copeland

    They bought a bug zapper and put it out on the porch. So we’d be out there, drinking, and every fifty seconds or so you’d hear the zap, another fried bug. The Zap ruined my conversation and concentration. It became like Chinese Water Torture. You’d be trying to explain something to someone, shaking in fear, waiting for the next buzz and jolt...
    I remember the party. It was The Party to End all Parties. My sister was there. She must’ve been sixteen at the time. The rest of us were nineteen, twenty, i.e. that keg in the basement should not have been there. The house was called The Zoo. I was best friends with the five roommates, Smooch, Bumsy, Hand Job (Will Handler), D, and Fly. The name “The Zoo” sounded too self conscious, but we were kids.
    The Young Black Males from Homewood kept the Pitt Campus in a constant state of fear. Stories of beatings became too numerous. “Oh, so they jumped you too,” became the common attitude. They’d invade the campus on weekends, looking to clobber any white student—male or female—that came their way. If they saw you walking towards them, they’d fan out in a V formation, open end towards you, so you’d walk right into the middle of them, and they’d collapse in on you, laughing while they beat the shit out of you. Or, instead of forming a V, they’d charge right by you, one of them stopping long enough to clock you. That’s what happened to Bumsy on Forbes. The black male in question had a thick ring on. As they ran away, one yelled back, “Now you can go back to all your white friends and talk about the niggers that whoomped your ass!”
    When I was a freshman I chatted with a senior at a party. He said, “Are you racist?”
    “Nope. Absolutely not. No way.”
    “By the time you graduate, you will be.”
    One Saturday night about five of us went to McDonald’s. it was chock full of Young Black Males, like the first episode of 2001. As we waited in line, one of them round housed Vargo, a girl we were with, so hard that he knocked her jaw out of place. She drooled blood, her mouth locked open. We went up to the security guard and yelled at him to do something, but he ignored us. It was justice we wanted. Justice. This wasn’t fair.
    Both my parents were professors, and they raised me to believe proponents of racism were fat, toothless, drawling lug heads spitting tobacco into spittoons. So when my best friends at Pitt—middle class, straight A, totally nonviolent, totally anti-machismo students—started to throw around the word “nigger” in grim response to the beatings and the violence, I at first didn’t know what to think. The whole situation confused me. I was always taught never to generalize sexual orientation, gender, religion, or skin color. But each and every one of us has a breaking point. Rage will stress any ingrained ideology. You collapse under the weight. You get angry. Emotion overcomes intellect, and you give up. And then there’s that release, like a baptism: No more guilt over your anger. You are now a righteous victim. On Friday and Saturday nights, once the kids had two or three beers in them, the racial slurs flew.
    One weekend my childhood friend came home on break from Yale and I took him to a Zoo party. My friends angered him. Uncharacteristic of him to get mad, but he did. He said, “These kids from Homewood are not representative of African Americans as a whole.” But our rage and hatred were animalistic; reason played no part. The kids were polite, but my friend didn’t make one convert, and soon he learned the skills the rest of the nonracial students had: Just smile, roll your eyes, and don’t preach. As we drove home he looked over at me and winced and said, “Ray, what has become of you.”
    My Deviance and Social Control prof told the class the weekend beatings were a tug of war between the haves and the have nots. He hinted we should take a bit of the blame for the violence, that it’s a tad our fault that the Young Black Males can’t get into, or don’t have the money for, college. Some of the class got up and left.
    Smooch dated a sixteen year old black girl named Sue. She would be at The Party to End all Parties. He called her “Chocolate” Sue or “Nigger” Sue when she wasn’t around. She had a model’s proportions, about five-foot-nine, leggy, with eyes that looked hurt and dark. I think she was insecure being around all the college students, and I’d guess she had a sixth sense Smooch disrespected her behind her back; she figured that while in singular she was wanted, the plurality of her race, her “kind,” was not.
    Smooch always said how “fuckable” she was, like she was a sandbag or a bean bag or a large, puffy, sofa pillow. Smooch’s parents lived back in Ohio. They were real racist. Smooch told me one night he was banging Sue, and he looked over at the clock. Let’s say it read 3:38 a.m. The next day his parents called him up, concerned and frightened. They said that last night they both woke up 3:38 a.m. with the awful feeling something terrible had happened to their son. And Smooch was as far from superstitious as one could get.
    Smitty would come around a lot. Black like Sue. He had been with us from the start, first semester freshman year at The Towers (Though we never considered him a full blooded member of our cult or click or cult or whatever you want to call it). He and the Caucasian Jen Harkless constantly left parties together. “Once black, you never go back,” we warned her. Not much of a relationship there, just sex. Smitty had a tough reputation, and he earned it. He was a brawler, and had been on the Pitt Wrestling Team. He was only five foot six, but built like a linebacker.
    In The Towers, Bumsy, D and Fly lived in the same dorm room. It was at one of their parties Smitty got in a fight. The Point Parkers had brought some geeky dude, he was white as they come: thick glasses, pens in his lapel, a tie from the age of Devo. He tried to put on a tough face to counter Smitty, he huffed and puffed, and bulged his eyes as much as he could, and he tried to fight back when Smitty wind milled him, but he got his ass kicked good and square before Smooch and Fly broke it up, trying to joke away the animosity.
    Bumsy and Smitty both took Geology in Booth Auditorium. Bumsy used to skip class and copy Smitty’s notes. This offended Smitty (“I can’t do this shit anymore, Bumsy. I can’t do it.”) and eventually Bums was forced to go to class. Smitty would be at the Party to End all Parties.
    The Zoo had a huge basement, a first floor with porch, and a second porch with a balcony. Smooch, Bumsy, D, and Fly owned the basement and first floor. Mike Smakoz and his two roommates (all three of them white) owned the second floor. Smakoz played for the Pitt Panthers. Rumor had it his spot was on the bench and that once he had held the ball for a punt, but that was as far as he got. He was a hick from Butler, and probably grew up racist.
    And he was an obnoxious drunk. He was the bouncer at Caleco’s. Some guy, I think it was Arab George—the Arab Mafia was prominent on the Pitt Campus—pulled a gun on him at the bar. All at once, all the patrons ducked below the bar. Smakoz bolted. What I want to stress is that he and Smitty were friends and, like Smitty, he was a brawler. Smakoz was huge with muscle, like something out of Grey’s Anatomy. The muscle looked natural. I shook the few times he stomped downstairs and called us faggots and threatened to squash us all if we didn’t turn the music down. (“I can feel the fucking bed vibrating!”) We didn’t know him that well, and we didn’t consider him as a true member. Mike Smakoz would make a violent appearance at the Party to End All Parties.
    As for Bumsy, Fly, D, Smooch, Hand Job (Greg Handler), Spacetaker (He never said much, just stood around), Oz, Lance, and the rest of us, the core of our gang, we had never been in a true fight in our lives. I hate that breast beating macho bullshit. Oz, a nerd who went to Duquesne, carried a dinky knife with him, and Smooch almost got beat up at the fat frat by some black belt. He had told the guy’s girlfriend he was going to kill her (not meaning it).
    ...In the end we were victims, dartboards for the Homewood gangs. One weekend night we walked to a party on Atwood Street: my crew, Smitty, and me. Around the Schenley Quad a gang of Young Black Males moved towards us and then they spotted Smitty and said, “Kick back. They’re with a brother.” You don’t know how mad that made me. Smitty looked at the sidewalk.
    So, the Party to End All Parties began with a bang. Amy went from just “Amy” to her nickname “Psycho” Amy. Both the first floor and the basement of The Zoo were jam packed. The place shook with bass; the entire house hummed. Per usual Smooch DJ’d in the basement, playing dated techno crap. I sat on the sofa upstairs trying to catch glimpses between party goers of a skinamax flick on the little black and white TV.
    Out of nowhere Amy bursts out of Fly’s room sobbing hysterically, “He tried to rape me! Oh God! He tried to rape me!” she ran down into the basement. Chris—after this event he was called, behind his back “Rapist” Chris, rushed out of the room after her, looking tense. A friendly guy, probably never punched a dude in his life. He sat down beside me, nervous but still cracking jokes. He said that Amy was a psycho, that he was playing Sega, and all of a sudden she began screaming and crying. It was impossible to believe he’d do what she accused him of.
    Bumsy, D, Fly, Smooch, and Oz with his dinky knife came charging upstairs from the basement. We all took Chris and Amy into Fly’s room and shut the door.
    We didn’t know what to think. Amy had no reason to lie. Yet Fly pulled out a bible and Chris placed his hand on it and said he didn’t try to rape her, and he said he didn’t even touch her. Fly asked Amy to swear on the bible Rapist Chris tried to rape her. She refused to do it. Then it became interesting. Was Chris telling the truth? We bugged her and bugged her, and finally she said, “Well maybe part of it was my imagination.”
    “Did Chris do it or didn’t he?” Smooch asked.
    “Um...he did not.”
    Holy shit! We all laughed and breathed a sigh of relief. But how could she fake cry like that? I mean, she was wheezing and sobbing. Man, that’s good acting. At a party a few weeks later she and I were alone in D’s room. I didn’t touch that skank, and she went and told D I made a pass at her. D said, “That’s sure proof she’s a liar.”
    I went and looked in the kitchen. I saw Smakoz, his two roommates, my sister, Hand Job, and Vargonaut. Hand Job was hitting on my sister. He was of questionable character, but I didn’t mind. I walked downstairs into the basement and saw a commotion at the basement door, the official entrance to every Zoo party. Smooch, Bumsy, D and Fly were having it out verbally with Young Black Males who wanted in. They didn’t dress like Homewooders, so they were probably real students. Still, you could never be too careful. I walked up to watch and listen, not to back anyone up. Smooch kept saying to them the party was packed full and no one was allowed in. A lie: Most parties on campus had a “Three nigger limit.” Everyone worried if you let in more than three, there would be trouble. I counted about six or seven of them out there.
    “Bullshit. You’re not letting us in cause we’re brothers.”
    “No, honesty,” Smooch raised his right hand. “Swear to God. Try back in two hours.”
    “You fed us the same bullshit two weeks ago.”
    “We are not trying to be racist,” D said.
    “Bi-Sexual” Christina walked over to the fracas. She always pleaded with us she was hetero, yet we know she had a relationship with “Catholic Girls School” Melissa. Katlin screamed when she caught them kissing in the hall outside a party one night. Add to that, when Bi-Chris was drunk, bedroom eyes and all, she’d lead into and slobber over the girls she mingled with, practically knocking them over. It appeared she knew one of the Young Black Males trying to get into the party.
    “Hey Christina!” he called to her. “They’re not letting us in. Tell your boys we don’t mean any trouble!”
    Bi-Chris made the mistake of walking out there.
    Soon all the Young Black Males were shouting. “You can take the Negro out of the jungle,” I read on the Google group alt.law.enforcement, “But you can’t take the jungle out of the Negro.” Other kids in the basement started to notice. Sue looked over, saw that blacks caused the commotion, and she looked down at the floor. At The Zoo, she had been in situations like this before. Just waiting for the N word to fly. Bi-Chris had walked out and was trying to tell them it wasn’t her party, that she had no say over who gets in, and that there was nothing she could do. Irony being she was the most nonracist out of all of us.
    I wasn’t backing my friends up. Let the whole thing blow up: a 3D movie, Widescreen, 70mm. I heard a girl shriek outside. I shouldered my way by the hubbub and made it out there. “Guys, we don’t want any trouble,” Fly pleaded. I saw one of The Young Black Males shaking Bi-Chris by the shoulders like a dishrag, yelling, “Why won’t you let us in!” each syllable in tandem with the shaking. It was iambic. She had been the one that screamed. I walked past them, down the driveway and turned the corner to the back of a house. That’s where guys went to take a leak. I hid there and peaked around the corner.
    The Young Black Males weren’t going anywhere. Smakoz walked out the kitchen door and up to the burgeoning melee. At first, he just watched. Then, maybe because he was a brawler, he went off, “Hey, this is their place. If they don’t want you in, they don’t want you in.”
    “Oh, you want some too?” one of the Young Black Males said to Smakoz, who was bigger than all of them. His girlfriend, pretty and thin and small, tried to pull him in.
    “You’re going to be calling us niggers as soon as you get inside.”
    D said, ‘no, dude, we’re not.”
    At the same moment Smakoz yelled, “So what if they do? It’s a free country. Go crash someone else’s party.”
    One of the Young Black Males punched him. Smakoz clocked him back and yelled for his two roommates. They came stumbling out. Smooch grabbed Bi-Chris and pulled her back into the house and slammed the door and locked it. This left Smakoz and his roommates and girlfriend out there alone. They could have gone in the kitchen entrance, but they chose to fight it out.
    I watched from behind the house as I pissed. It didn’t crawl back, just flowed freely. Screaming, grunting, blows being thrown, all I saw were silhouettes. I couldn’t tell who was who; “come on, bitch!” “I’ll knock your face off,” “fucking nigger,” all this along with the intermittent screams of Smakoz’s girlfriend. As I turned away and shook my dick I heard the splatter of breaking glass and a high pitched scream. I zipped up and peeked behind the corner. Everyone had vanished, save one. Smakoz’s girlfriend. I ran up to her. She was sobbing hysterically.
    “What happened? I asked. “Where did they all go?”
    She choked out, “they...were all...fighting...hit Smak...beer bottle.”
    I heard screaming and looked down the street. Smakoz and his two roommates were a block and a half down the street, charging after the Young Black Males, shouting racial slurs. “But there’s no catching a running black man,” as I wrote in my diary that night. I stood next to the girlfriend, not comforting her, just watching. Smakoz and his roommates stopped, turned around, and walked back. Enraged. Smakoz was coming, coming...oh shit. His roommates sat down on the curb in front of The Zoo, but Smakoz approached his girlfriend and me.
    The right side of Smakoz’s face was bloody in the moonlight. He huffed and puffed, extremely furious. I knew one word out of my mouth, a word of condolence, or sympathetic anger, and he’d leap all over me. Because...The Young Black Males had the last word, per usual. We were all left behind with that sense of anger and injustice. The Negroes had gotten the best of him. He looked ready to target anyone randomly. “You guys okay?” he asked his roommates. Then he went off, “Those niggers...I’ll kill them...break their heads open.”
    So for a few minutes it was just us. His girlfriend touched his temple.
    Then the basement door burst open and ten kids piled out with barbells, kitchen knives, mace, and other, sundry, white boy weaponry. Oz had his dinky pocket knife out.
    “Oh no,” Smooch said, when he saw the blood.
    “Thanks for slamming the door on me,” Smakoz yelled. I waited for him to lay into Smooch and Co. for leaving him out there, but he didn’t, he was just all over the place, just randomness and incoherence. His roommates began to shout that they should take a walk and try and find Young Black Males.
    I saw Sue quickly peek out and duck back in. Smart move. Smitty, however, came out. Bad move. It only took two seconds for Smakoz to notice him, and Smitty did not know the Young Black Males. The night was electric.
    Smakoz thundered, “Smitty! It was your brothers! Your nigger friends! That’s why I got to go the Presby ER! Your nigger pals hit me with a beer bottle and took off!” The crowd parted around Smitty. I was embarrassed for him. People quieted down. Smitty’s tough façade was gone. He looked flustered and stuttered a bit. He didn’t seem to know what to say. His lips twitched a bit. Smakoz was definitely the bigger of the two.
    Smitty started, “But Smak...” then Jen Harkless hooked her arm around Smitty’s and escorted him away. Smakoz’s roommates stood up, breathing deeply, eyes wide. “We’ll find them, Smack! I bet they come back! We got your guns! We’ll—”
    “No! No! They’re gone!” Smakoz’s girlfriend cried. I was with her. It was a sad fact of life on the Pitt Campus, but those Young Black Males were a mile away by now. What’s that supposed to mean, “They’ll come back.”? “They” never come back.” “They” had won. “They” had gotten the best of us. Bruised and battered, our side was. A powerful, powerful injustice. They left us wallowing in that anger that was becoming more familiar with each semester. The Young Black Males jump you and then they fade into the black, camouflaged, night encompassing a grin, a la the Cheshire Cat, never to be seen again.
    Smooch raised his voice. He didn’t want a crowd lingering. “Ray,” he told me, “Get inside. Everyone go their own way. Or else someone will call the cops.”
    As everyone dispersed, Smakoz’s roommates were going on. “They’ll be back, Smak! This isn’t over!” Smakoz got into his girlfriend’s car, and she drove him to the ER at Presby, leaving his two roommates muttering. The rest of us lumbered back into the basement, and Fly shut and locked the door. Smooch got back into his DJ booth, and said into the microphone, “Alright, let’s all relax and chill out and get back to dancing.”
    I had a front row seat to all that gore, all those tears. My journal entry was already writing itself.
    In the kitchen, Hand Job was all over my sister. She asked me if I was okay. Then she asked “Ray, is this what it’s like at these parties all the time?”
    “This is about as bad as it gets,” I said. Bumsy and a few others walked in to replace some of the kitchen knives.
    Hand Job explained to my sister, “You see what happened here, tonight? You see the trouble we have with the niggers and the nigglets? If I’d have known I was signing up for this when I applied here, I never would have applied here. Go somewhere else when you graduate high school. Don’t come here.”
    My sister said, “How can you be racist? A few bad apples. They don’t stand for the whole.”
    Then, from outside, three pops, like firecrackers going off.
    Hand Job froze. “Those are shots! Someone’s shooting!”
    Bums was like, “Oh no!”
    Smooch yelled, “Holy shit! They did come back!”
    No they didn’t, I thought. They won. They don’t have to return. “Guys, that’s just a car backfiring,” I said.
    I trailed behind, as Bums and D and Fly rammed their way out the kitchen door down out to the sidewalk, where we looked up at Smakoz’s balcony. Each roommate held a revolver. Smoke came out the barrels.
    One of them shot at the parked car in front of us. “Get out from behind the car!” the roommate yelled at someone. I had never heard guns fire in real life, just on TV and in movies, and man, are they loud.
    Who were they shooting at? Who was behind the car?
    The other roommate yelled, “You ain’t so brave, are you now, nigger? How does it feel to be scared? How does it feel to be bullied?”
    Then, a black dude stood up from behind the parked car and made a break for it. Shots kicked up the cement around him like splashing rain. He took one in the leg—it looked like someone yanked his leg at the foot—and screamed before he was safe in the alley across the street.
    Smakoz’s roommates yelled at us, “All of you, get inside right now!”
    I looked down the street. For blocks, it was utter chaos. College students out for a night of drinking on the weekends always packed these streets. Now they were diving for cover. The males dove on the females. I saw one guy who looked like a major jock dive on a girl he was with. She looked sorority. Everyone was out on balconies and porches for blocks down the street, and they’re all yelling, “Someone’s got a gun! Get down!” I watched students bolt between alleys or dive behind front yard bushes or duck behind parked cars. I read in the paper the next day that a panhandler down the street wielded a stick, waving it at students, yelling at them to keep away, and that someone had a gun.
    Again, Smakoz’s roommates screamed at us to get inside, so we dashed in, Fly locked and shut the door. Why would The Young Black Males come back?
    All we needed was an action movie soundtrack. We heard sirens. That spelled bad news for Bumsy and crew. So many of us underage with a keg in the basement. Bumsy went down there and grabbed the microphone from Smooch: “LOCK THE DOORS! ALL OF THEM! NO ONE GETS IN OR OUT!” I trailed Bums through the basement as he fought his way through the crowd (“MOVE MOVE MOVE!”) to the keg, and he put a cup over the nozzle, a sign its shut down. He screamed at the surrounding kids, “NO MORE BEER! GET AWAY FROM THE TAP!” I remember thinking, when I write about Bumsy’s rage, will I use just exclamation points, or ALL CAPS and exclamation points? I headed back upstairs to the kitchen, to my sister and Hand Job.
    My sister asked, “Ray, did someone get shot?”
    “In the leg. I think one of The Young Black Males came back.”
    Hand Job told my sister, “Okay, if cops come in here, if they want to know your age, they won’t ask you directly, that’d make it too easy for you to lie. Instead, they’ll ask you your birthdate. So you got to be ready to lie about your birthdate. So you were born, let’s see, today’s December 14^th, 1991....say you were born October 5^th, 1968.
    “Gotcha” my sister said.
    But my sister wasn’t worried. She had a casual, “Oh well” attitude towards the whole thing. “I just didn’t know all college parties were like this,” she said.
    “They’re not,” we all said at once. “
    “Only at Pitt,” I said. “Our clique, we’re victims, not brawlers.”
    We all made up appropriate birth dates, and just hoped the cops would not ask to see our driver’s licenses.
    “Borderline personality Disorder” Debbie said, “Someone hide me if the cops come. I’m only eighteen.
    D was fidgety. His ankle pumped up and down on the kitchen floor. “We are so fucked if the cops come in here,” he said. And they would be Pittsburgh Police—the worst of the worst, according to the DOJ—and not campus cops. Uh oh.
    D made everyone, including me, anxious. So I left back down to the basement and sat on their century old, grungy sofa. The crowd murmured nervously. Elizabitch came down and went up to the keg. Bumsy screamed, “NO BEER! GET AWAY FROM IT!” Elizabitch turned red with hurt. For many semesters after that she always brought her own beer to The Zoo. She never used a keg there again. Elizabitch walked back up to the kitchen, Bumsy followed.
    Someone banged like crazy on the basement door. None of the homeowners were there to forbid anyone to open it. Some girl shrugged, looked askance at her friends, and unlocked and opened it. Hatchet Face burst in, sobbing, and rushed up to Jen Harkless—she was still at the party—and fell into her arms, wild with tears. They just hugged and hugged. Tina was Hatchet’s real name. I tried to jostle my way over and get close enough to hear what she was saying, but she was too incoherent and panicky.
    So we waited out the aftermath of the shooting. The red of the siren flashed intermittently through the basement windows. Some of the kids were thrilled, others were apathetic. Rapist Chris kept bugging me, “She lied...The girl is psycho...Now I bet I’ll get a bad rep.”
    “No, no,” I assured him. “Everyone will forget.” Eventually the basement door was unlocked by the kids and the party slowly drained away. I headed upstairs. In the kitchen, Hand Job slobbered all over my sister. Bumsy sat next to him and Elizabitch leaned against the oven, looking mad. “They let someone in downstairs,” I said. “Hatchet Face. Tina. It wasn’t me who let her in. She ran in crying and hugged Harkless.”
    This irritated Elizabitch more. She frowned. “That’s all she does at parties,” Elizabitch said. “Cry and feel sorry for herself.” This was true, and the girls always complained about it. Hatchet Face knew she herself was Nasty with a capital N. When her last boyfriend dumped her—not so handsome himself—he told her straight to her face she was ugly, and wanted nothing more to do with her. Ever since, at many parties, she’d break down.
    One Zoo party, many a night ago, she was slumped into the antique sofa in the basement, eyes red and veiny. I was bored, so I sat down next to her and asked her what was wrong.
    “I’m ugly.”
    “No you’re not. Don’t say that about yourself.” I said it casually, and I think she picked up on that.
    “You’re lying, don’t lie to me, Ray. I’ve heard it from more than one person. I am ugly.”
    “No, no...”
    She got mad. “I don’t trust you. Get up and leave me alone.”
    “Cool, cool,” I walked over and sat down with Catholic Girls School Melissa and Borderline Personality Disorder Debbie.
    Then Doug “Pretty Boy” McKenzie sat down net to Hatchet Face. Looking back on it, Pretty Boy was the most mature out of all of us, so much so that we associated him with homosexuality. One night Smakoz almost killed him: “Don’t laugh at me, you faggot! I’ll knock your teeth down your throat!” He hadn’t been smiling at Smakoz, the latter misunderstood. Pretty Boy always told us the three nigger limit was wrong.
    He asked, “Tina, what’s the matter?”
    “I’m ugly. Todd said so.”
    “Well, you know, this is college. The older you get, the more you’ll be around men who are less concerned with looks and more concerned with personality.” That calmed her down. I envied him. How did he come up with an answer like that?
    That was Tina’s aka Hatchet Face’s dilemma in a nutshell. Back to the Party to End All Parties...Bums asked me to go outside and take a look and see if the cops were still around, to see if it was okay to start the party up again. I walked outside, expecting a SWAT team, sirens, yellow and black crime scene tape, but all the LE were gone. Hatchet Face stood outside, in front of The Zoo, more composed than she was before.
    “Hey, Tina, what happened before that you were all upset about?”
    “You know Knute and Crowder?
    “Yeah, they live right there, they come to a lot of Zoo parties.”
    I was in Knute’s bedroom, and we were making out, and Crowder’s his frat brother, and he came in and tried to get in on it, like make it a threesome. And I didn’t want to, and they got pretty rough.” She spoke with a bitter smile.
    I stifled a laugh. “Oh no,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
    She perked up. “Ray, here they come.” She hid behind me as Knute and Crowder left their apartment with their ZBT jackets on. They didn’t spot Hatchet Face, they just talked about that Edie Sedgwick song by The Cult. Hatchet Face stepped out from behind me. “Thank you, Ray.”
    I walked back into the kitchen. The overhead light was bright, and it brought out the grainy detail to the chunky brown stains atop the oven, the empty cups of beer and empty beer bottles, the multi-directional footprints of mud on the kitchen floor. Everyone was eating Pretty Boy’s specially made fries he cooked up to keep us there for a while, so no one drove home too drunk. I hated sticking around after parties to help clean up. “The coast is clear, guys,” I said. Hand Job got my sister’s phone number. The party started back up, but too many people had left, so it went from “party” to “gathering,” or “Sausage Fest” if you keep in mind those who stayed around were all male.
    The shooting made third page in the Sunday Edition of the Pittsburgh Press. However, it did not make the Campus newspaper, the Pitt News. Wesley Posfar, the president of Pitt, and his asslicking Director of Security, Robert Bosco, censored a lot of the crime on campus. Cracker-on-cracker violence, that got lip service, but nigger-on-cracker violence didn’t make the Pitt News. One night a student left the Cathedral of Learning at two a.m. Two Young Black Males hid behind the exit, and they jumped him. They got one punch in before he broke free and ran, screaming for help. They chased him.
    “Ain’t no one going to help you, white boy!”
    The kicker was the victim stopped at the Campus PD door, which should always be open and occupied, and banged for help. But no one was there. Laughable. The kid did get away, but Wesley Posfar and Robert Bosco had to spin it, so they referred to it as “simple assault,” totally ignoring the fact it would have been much more serious if the Young Black Males had caught the victim. We hated this. Not only were we human punching bags, but the Pres and his cronies muffled our cries.
    So did that gang of Young Black Males return later that night? Who got shot? Did we, the student body, finally get justice? Did someone finally hit back? Was the shooting victim one of the gang that beat down Smakoz?
    The Wedsnday night a few days after the party, Smooch and I stopped by his apartment above The Zoo. Smakoz said that while he was in the ER getting stitched up, his roommates had taken his guns and shot at a random black passer by. But the victim had nothing to do with the party or anything, just a black student walking down the street. So nope, there was no justice. No one hit back.
    “My roommates, I can’t believe they used my S and W’s. I was so mad at them for that. The cops confiscated both guns as evidence, so I know I’ll never get them back. I was so pissed at them. My grandfather gave them to me.”
    Then he went off about the blacks. “If I see those niggers again, they’re history!”
    I remembered Bi-Chris knew one of them. I debated whether or not to tell him. That’d put her in an awkward position because Smakoz would come down on her like a sledgehammer to find out who he was, and where he lived. But, I could gain favor with the redoubtable Smakzoz if I told him.
    “You know, Bi-Chris knew one of them.”
    “No way,” Smooch said.
    “Who’s Bi Chris?” Smakoz asked.
    “Christine Shautell,” I said. “I’ll show you her next party.” (And I did, but what happened as a result is another eighteen pager. Suffice it to say Smakoz didn’t get the revenge he was looking for, and Bi Chris never trusted me again).
    “What’d Smitty say about the whole thing,” Smakoz asked.
    “We haven’t heard from him since,” Smooch said.
    Smakoz gave an embarrassed smile. “Smitty didn’t have anything to do wth it. He didn’t know any of them,” he said. “I was just so mad. Like an hour after I went off on him, he came to my door to see if I was okay, and I slammed it in his face.”
    Smooch and I laughed. For real.
    But the more Smakoz talked, the more worked up he got. Soon his face was red. It wasn’t funny anymore. Smooch and I looked at each other. He was making us anxious and our giggles became forced and we tried to calm him down by laughing away his rage. It wasn’t working. “If I see them again I’ll beat their heads in.” but he never did. They were lost into a world we used to think of as ours. Smooch and I were happy to get out of the apartment.
    We rarely saw Smitty after that. He just stopped coming around. I saw him by Dexter Hall, and when he said hi to me he looked down at the sidewalk. Later, I talked with Jen Harkless in the Cathedral, and I asked her, “Why Smitty doesn’t come around anymore?”
    “Maybe he’s too smart,” she said.
    And...our gang moved on. Smakoz and The Zoo ended on a bad note because of the loud music. He stomped downstairs and came within a hair’s breadth of clocking Fly. We all graduated. For a while the crew stayed in Pittsburgh, but the job situation was so awful, so many moved out of state to find work. Girlfriends turned into wives and couples and they spent more and more evenings at home, together and alone, and not at a bar or a party. I moved to LA and became an advertising executive. There’s nothing left for me in Pittsburgh. Our clique is pretty much scattered about and belly up. I can’t find any of them on Facebook.
    But I’ve retained all my ideologies from my college days, and so...I owe to U of Pitt: Thank you for my education.

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