Moments later, the door at the top of the stairs opened, and Ernie came down dressed in jeans, boots, and a button-down shirt.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“You want to hang out?”
I checked my watch. “Don’t you have a date?” Ernie had met a girl at a party the prior weekend and had been talking about how hot she was the entire week.
Ernie glared at me. “Do you want to hang out or not?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said and risked a glance at Mickie. She arched her eyebrows and shrugged.
“Then just rack the balls. Is that too much to ask?”
I’d never seen Ernie this upset. His eyes blazed. For a moment, I thought he might hit me. I racked the balls in silence. Mickie handed me her cue stick and backed away from the table, sitting on a bar stool near the paneled wall.
“I’ll break,” Ernie said. He hit the cue ball so hard it soared off the table and left a dent in the paneling less than a foot from where Mickie had retreated. Ernie snapped the pool cue over his knee and turned his back to us.
After a beat I said, “I’ve seen worse breaks.”
Mickie let out a snort and covered her mouth. Ernie didn’t immediately turn around, but I saw his shoulders begin to shake. When he turned he, too, was trying not to laugh. “You’re an idiot, you know that?”
“That seems to be the consensus this weekend.”
He put down the broken cue. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll buy a new one.”
“I do it all the time,” I said, then pretended to be unable to break a cue over my knee.
Ernie laughed more and sat on a bar stool.
I set my stick down on the table. “What happened?” I asked.
He took another moment to compose himself. “I went to pick her up, and her dad met me at the door. I put out my hand to greet him, and he stared at it like it had shit on it. Then he said, ‘My daughter does not date jungle bunnies.’”
“He didn’t,” Mickie said, getting off her bar stool. “That cocksucker.”
“Then he told me to get my black ass off his porch before he called the police and had me arrested for trespassing.”
“Son of a bitch,” Mickie said. “Let’s go egg his fucking house.”
Don’t get me wrong. Burlingame wasn’t Mississippi in the 1960s. People weren’t wearing hooded robes and burning crosses on lawns, but that was not to say racism didn’t exist. Ernie had been taunted with the N-word on the football field and during basketball games. Once as a child he was accused of stealing in a store because the store owner believed that’s what colored people did.
As we got older, Ernie and I both realized one of the reasons we spent so much time together was because we were the two kids in class most frequently discriminated against. The racism was hidden in high school because of Ernie’s athletic exploits, but only to an extent. At dances and parties, there was never a shortage of girls who wanted to dance and flirt with the great Ernie Cantwell, but I’d also started noticing a pattern, perhaps because I was all too familiar with it myself. If the girls were white—and most in Burlingame were—Ernie’s flirtations rarely progressed beyond the flirting. It was one thing to be friendly to a black kid; it was quite another to have him show up at your house to meet your parents and take you on a date. Girls made excuses not to give Ernie their phone numbers. Those who did usually met him someplace rather than have him come to their home, and those who did go out on a date with him usually had excuses why they couldn’t go out with him a second time.
“Let it go,” I said to Ernie, though it was Mickie who responded. Mickie never let anything go.