They Come in All Colors by Malcolm Hansen

Author:Malcolm Hansen [Hansen, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XVIII

WHEN MOM ASKED WHY I hadn’t ever invited Zuk over, I told her that I wanted to wait for our circumstances to improve. When my second year at Claremont came and went and we were still living in the Jacob Riis Houses, she said that maybe it was time for me to swallow my pride and invite him over anyway.

The problem was that I was in the midst of creating a persona at Claremont that bore no resemblance to the reality of my life in the projects. Claremont was changing me: having been introduced to the possibilities that came with erudition, I began speaking, acting, and even dressing differently. In the short span of two years, I was hobnobbing with the distinguished alumni, colleagues, and friends in attendance at our quarterly meet and greets. There was the artist M. C. Escher and Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the new World Trade Center towers being built downtown. Even the secretary-general of the United Nations was there once. My favorite had been Professor Barnard, who had recently performed the world’s first successful heart transplant. He stopped by on a visit from South Africa, and stood beside the buffet table munching on cheese and crackers, telling me about how he’d hummed Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 to steady his hands during the procedure. He wiped his lips on the back of his hand, took a swig of wine, and said every surgeon did it. Not to that particular song, of course, but they all had their own personal please-God-help-me-not-fuck-up-this-one song. He chuckled. That was exactly what he called it. The acronym swooped over my head when he read it back to me, perhaps because I was thunderstruck. The whole idea of the world’s leading heart surgeon having someone’s heart pulsing in his hand as he hummed like a kid gluing his model plane together—fuck. That little piece of trivia felt like a gift. It brought the most historic medical procedure the world had ever known so close to me that I could practically smell it myself. For a second, that beating heart was right there in my hands and I knew deep down that maybe I could do something cool like that one day, too.

Of course, I brought every bit of insight I culled from those gatherings home with me. My newfound presumption of equal standing in my relationship with Mom was alternately troubling to her and the source of immense pride. What Dad had withheld from me, Claremont seemed to be holding out to me with an open hand. I seemed to be in store for something truly special, and the last thing I wanted to do was to let my guard down. So no, I wasn’t in a hurry to surrender my meticulously crafted persona only to become universally known, reductio ad ignominia, as the kid who schlepped in on the 6 train from the projects every day.

By my third year, I realized that something had to give. I told Mom that I was open to the idea of having Zuk over in principle.

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