Black Buck(14)

“How old are you?” Clyde asked.

“Twenty-two.”

“Nice, I’m only two years older than you.”

I nodded.

“How did you end up at Starbucks?”

“I needed a job and applied four years ago. Been there ever since.”

“Christ, you’ve been slinging coffee for four years? Couldn’t you have gotten another job?”

“I guess, but it’s easy and leaves me time to do other things.”

“You guess,” he said, slowly turning the words in his mouth as if they were hard candies. “You guess. You keep saying you guess. Why do you keep saying that?”

“Um, I don’t know.”

“And those ‘uhs’ and ‘ums.’” He swung his feet off the table and pointed at me. “And the way you’re sitting, slumped over, twisting your hands under the table. I can see your wrists moving. Are you nervous?”

I hadn’t noticed I was twisting my hands, but when I looked down, I saw that I was. What the hell is going on?

“Uh, I don’t think so.”

“There it is again!” he said, like he’d found a stain on his favorite pair of Dockers. “The ‘uhs’ and you not being sure about yourself. How can you not know if you’re nervous? It’s your body, isn’t it? At twenty-two, do you not know your own body?”

“Well—”

“Well what? You’re not making coffee anymore, brother. Tell me what we do here.”

“You, uh—”

“Cut out the ‘uhs’ and ‘ums,’ brother. They make you sound retarded. You’re not retarded, are you?”

My knee was bouncing up and down so hard that I thought I was going to break through the floor. I curled my hand into a fist, ready to either knock this WASPy motherfucker out cold or just leave without looking back. But that’s what he wanted, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of getting it.

“You sell a vision,” I spat.

He rolled his eyes, waving his hand around. “Anyone can say that. You probably heard Rhett say that. But what is it, exactly, that we do here at Sumwun?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Then why the fuck are you sitting in front of me, taking up my precious time?”

“Because Rhett brought me up here,” I said, running out of air. “I didn’t even know I was going to be interviewed for something today. I’m supposed to be at work.”

“First off, this isn’t an interview, remember? Second, you’ll be back making me drinks in no time. Don’t worry about that, brother. I just have a few more questions, then we’re done. Tell me what you think Rhett sees in a kid from Bed-Stuy who sells coffee.”

“I don’t know,” I said, wondering the same thing. I didn’t belong there. I wasn’t one of those people, and I damn sure didn’t want to sit in front of this future white-collar criminal anymore.

“I’ll tell you what I do know, Darrone. Or rather, Buck. I’d call you Starbucks, but it’s too long, so Buck will have to do. You don’t mind, do you, Buck? No, I didn’t think so. So I’ll tell you what I do know. I know that Rhett likes to take a shot on people like him, hustlers, kids he thinks are doing nothing with their lives but just need a chance. Sometimes it works out; most of the time it doesn’t. You, Buck, would be one of the times it doesn’t. Trust me. So I’ll spare you the agony and walk you out.”

He stood and opened the heavy door of the conference room, waiting for me to leave.

But I didn’t get up. I stared down at the table, the knots of wood frozen in polyurethane coating like prehistoric bugs in amber. “You don’t fucking know me.” I was enraged.

It would’ve been easier to forget everything and go back down to Starbucks, but I couldn’t. This motherfucker had no idea who I was, anything about my life, and what I was and wasn’t capable of. In that moment, it wasn’t about proving anything to him; it was about proving everything to myself. That I could do more. That I didn’t have to be held down by my fear of the unknown and what-ifs.

He looked over his shoulder. “Excuse me?”

“I said”—I stared him in the face—“you don’t fucking know me. You have no idea who I am and what I can or can’t do. You sit up here on your precious thirty-sixth floor looking down on people like me, people who you think are hopeless and wasting the air you breathe. But you don’t know me. I can outwork you and anyone on this floor. It doesn’t matter if I don’t know what the company does or even what I’d have to sell. I know that I can do what you do and do it better. Because, Clyde, you probably never had to work for anything in your entire fucking life.

“You’re from Greenwich, one of the richest towns in America. I grew up in Bed-Stuy, brother, where most people fight, struggle, and claw to pay rent that’s rising because of trust-fund babies like you who want to buy bigger apartments at half the price. So don’t tell me you know me, because you don’t.”

He closed the door and I felt trapped, ready to swing on him if he tried anything slick.

“There it is,” he whispered, swinging around and grinning wider than when he first came in. “There it fucking is, Buck!”