Once upon a time, I was gonna be somebody.
Fast and Furious posters covered my wall. Steelers jerseys hung in the closet. Assassin’s Creed and Madden NFL 08 stacked next to the PlayStation. A leather-bound Bible lay open on the desk, words highlighted, margins scribbled in my ink.
“Wassup, Soli,” Mike said, coming through the door. A couple inches taller than me, dirty blonde hair, and all the girls loved him. Mike was planning to become a cop someday.
We went off to do something and I cannot remember what. Hang out with one of those girls, probably. Grab food at Sheetz. Show up unannounced at Coty’s house. Likely all three.
I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I knew it was going to be great. That was the sum of my plans.
At high school graduation in a ninety-seven percent white town in Pennsylvania, after Mike and I threw our hats up with the rest of the class, my physics teacher pulled me aside. Mr. Oldham knelt down in the grass to get level with me, which is what men of that generation did when they meant something.
“You can do anything you want to,” he said.
I carried that sentence to Pittsburgh like evidence that I had already arrived.
There, forty thousand students moved through a campus built for them, and I found the smallest available life inside it. A warped door. A screen. The blinds down in the afternoon because I had no use for the afternoon. That first semester I earned a 0.89 GPA. In case you are wondering, on a scale of 0 to 4.0, that is not very good.
I had stopped going to class. PlayStation was my reprieve. From what, I did not yet know.
One gray afternoon I peeled myself off the screen, put my shoulder to the door, and went down the hill at the pace of a man with nowhere to be. Hundreds of concrete steps. A cold rail under my hand the entire way. Thirty minutes to reach Forbes Avenue.
Inside the Starbucks, my English Composition professor waited—a lanky graduate student who had taught us in a musty classroom inside the Cathedral of Learning. He bought me a coffee. We sat by the window, next to the street I had just walked down.
He slid my essay across the table.
“It’s good,” he said. “It can be better. I see something in you. You can write.”
I was eighteen years old. And that was eighteen years ago.
Five summers later I came home for a weekend and met Mike at a bar. He had the haircut now, and guns for arms and one at his side. He had made good on the plan. Above the taps a television had been running the same footage for weeks, a verdict out of Florida, crowds filling streets in cities neither of us had visited. Trayvon Martin was dead.
“But, ya know,” Mike said. “All lives matter.”
I turned my glass a quarter turn on the wood. I said something about how it was complicated. I wanted the night to stay good.
It stayed good. Inside I was not good.
My first job out of university was teaching English at a court-adjudicated high school, meaning the students arrived by order of a judge.
The floor was waxed linoleum the color of weak tea. The windows were glass and some of that glass was broken.
There was a boy, fourteen. Thin, and he would holler “Ay Slickback” at me, on account of the gel in my hair. One day he got loud during an argument, and then louder, and then a supervisor crossed the room in three steps and took him down and put his full weight on him, a knee, a shoulder, two hundred fifty pounds of grown man, and the boy’s cheek went flat against the wax and his eyes traveled the row of desks looking for an adult.
They found me.
I was the adult.
I was standing at the whiteboard with a dry-erase marker in my hand.
It happened often there. It was policy, or close enough to policy that nobody bothered writing it down.
I could do anything I wanted to. And nothing in me was the size of what was in front of me.
I lasted another month. Then I left, and started writing a novel about a boy the system wants gone.
I wrote it in New Brunswick and in Orlando and in a village in Spain where the cathedral rang its bells every fifteen minutes, and at a desk in Colorado with a small dog asleep in my lap, through a marriage and out the far side of it, through money I did not have and the jobs I took in order to have it, four hundred evenings and then four hundred more, until the boy in the book had a name and a town and a mouth that got him into trouble, and people at the margins who kept him after the center let go.
The draft is finished1. A small circle of people have read it. A few hundred pages. It weighs about a pound.
I do not know the name of the boy on the floor. He would be near thirty now.
I haven’t talked to Mike in years. He is still a cop, and from what I hear a good one. I know what I should have said at that bar. I have had thirteen years to work it out.
Brother, I just want you to sit with why they had to say it at all.
Mr. Oldham told me I could do anything2. He knelt in the grass to say it, and he meant every word of it, and he was wrong. Anything turns out to be a synonym for nothing. I reached for the console.
The other man bought a coffee and told me to write the next draft.
Once upon a time, I was gonna be somebody.
I became a man who writes it down. Slowly. Too late for the boy on the floor.
It’s good. It can be better.
The Boy, the Truther, and the Looking Glass. Begun in 2014, finished in 2026. It is about a boy on the wrong side of a system, the people at the margins who keep him, and what it costs to see clearly. I am querying it now.
Years later I saw Mr. Oldham and thanked him for saying what he did. He had no memory of it at all. We laughed aloud. It had been twenty seconds for him. Half my life for me. Or perhaps my ego invented the kneeling.