When I pulled over at a BP in Gahanna, Ohio so that the first black girl I would attempt to care for in five years could buy a pack of cigarettes, a six pack of beer, and a Swisher Sweet cigar, a black boy was working over a white girl in a car a few parking slots to the left of mine. Kayla, who I’d been romancing for a week, had already gone inside to make her purchases just before the whole thing went down. At first the boy and girl (they looked in their early twenties, like me) had just been sitting there: him in the passenger’s seat, her behind the wheel. Though I considered myself a racially progressive brother who had dated and loved a handful of white girls and succeeded in judging them not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, I still stared at this interracial pair.

Not in the way some gawk at such couples as if they were vagrants begging for change with upturned palms; not, too, in the manner some peer frighteningly at these kinds of lovers as though they were witnessing a bloody fist fight. I gazed at them perhaps like one does a raging blaze, and embraced the sudden, psychic joy that results from recognizing a common intimacy with strangers: that of lying naked in the light with a lover whose skin shade is opposite yours, gaping at the marvelous conflagration of two such bodies sown together in ecstasy.

The black boy had his back to me when it all began. I couldn’t see the white girl’s face as he struck her. Just the back of his head, his slender shoulders, and his elbow slapping the passenger’s window behind him before each time his arm snapped forward. The girl had long, finely crimped blonde hair that whipped about wildly as the boy attacked; after three quick blows, he stopped, and the strands floated back to her shoulders. The song I’d been listening to—DMX’s Crime Story, a funky, lyrically driven rap song with a kind of 70s bass and drum beat that harkens to Shaft—only distilled the boom of the boy’s voice as he turned away from the girl and slammed the dashboard with his fists.

Had I turned the music either down or off, I was certain the boy would sense me surveying his rage and turn it on me. So I just faced forward, caught what I could from my periphery, and listened to the dim roar of his voice, the octaves of which I was more intimate with than the naked dichotomy of their bodies huddled together in bed.

I recognized the force of his mania as the same I’d grown up with in the Bronx, the same that existed throughout the city as a whole, and the same that I’d first been introduced to in my own apartment. For most of my childhood, my parents battled like righteous, wild animals. They prided themselves as much on being articulate as they did having filthy mouths. At the height of a fight, my stepfather made fun of my mother being skinny and having a flat ass for a black woman. He mentioned these things as though he were telling a joke. My mother often laughed with him before slamming on the brakes and striking back with, better than being a no good-ass charcoal nigger! Usually a beat of silence passed before he’d cross the room and pin her against the wall by the throat, until either her eyes watered or her body went limp in his grip.

I ran away to college saddled with a honed enmity and self-devotion to be nothing like my folks. I promised myself to love properly and powerfully despite the dense, jagged rock beyond the flesh of chest that seemed to grow larger with every breath I took. As a sophomore at that upperclass institution, my girlfriend—who was white—purposely cheated on me with a redshirt freshman basketball player after she’d found out I’d cheated on her. When she deliberately came to my room to purposely confess, the mighty hand of Perpetuating Cycles squeezed me in its palm and I slapped her. The blow was firm, decisive, righteous, reckless, evil—possessed and packed with all the black masculine sickness (or masculine sickness that happened to be black) that, at first, I’d been born into, but which now I ran to and relied on because I’d been so long addicted to its flavor; a taste from which I believed I could extract sanity and control, but failed.

I came to forgive myself and my girl and the place I’d been raised and that upperclass school: An institution where so many of my brown friends and myself engaged in a near existential contemplation of the meaning of our brown skins in comparison to a block of the white majority that were addicted to the notion of themselves as only human beings.

I fell for the shunned, misfit white girls, ones who, among other evils, had been brainwashed to loathe their bulky bodies and, in turn, themselves. I fell for these white girls and not the platinum blonde, emaciated sea nymphs the culture glorified, for I too had been a misfit back in the Bronx. There, the “black boy god” had a beautiful head of hair: either curly and, thus more manageable than naps, or he kept it every day in a tight, clean fade like his daddy owned a barber shop; he wore designer jeans and polo shirts, double-lined windbreakers, and a rugged pair of Timberlands. He was quick with his tongue and deft with his fists.

Me: I liked Star Trek and Guns N’ Roses, two things which disqualified me from falling under the adoring gaze of pretty black girls.

The white girls I lunged toward in college, and who moved toward me with the same ferocity, could more readily imagine themselves drinking piss than either expecting or demanding sincere affection from those white-boy kings. Boys who’d been brainwashed themselves to prefer a girl who was both thin and willing and who kept her mouth shut until he was ready for her to open wide. Whatever sense I made out of who I was as a black kid and who I was as just a kid, there was a clear connection between the content of one’s skin—a palpable mixture of beauty and evil—and the potent color of one’s character.

Though profound, such an awareness was dead that night in the BP parking lot as the boy bounded from the car and slammed the door with both hands as though to drive it through the frame onto her body. One final, decisive, righteous, reckless and evil blow. Then he was gone.

The girl sat with her face in her hands, the edge of her forehead resting on the steering wheel. I stared at her for a minute, talking to her with my mind, hoping she’d look up and see me watching her, and then gesture me over. I would’ve climbed into her car and kissed her face, smoothed her hair back and reassured her that all black boys were not like him, and that I’d prove it to her if she could summon enough strength to give us another shot. When she lifted her head up, her face was full of freckles and tears. She wore thin-framed glasses. She dabbed fingers to her cheeks and lips like she was testing for swelling and blood. There was neither trickling red nor bruises from what I could tell. When our eyes met, I was relieved that she didn’t remind me of any of the misfit girls I had loved at that small, rich school. Instead of motioning me to come to her, she moved her arms and shoulders and made a face like, the fuck you looking at?

Even as she put the car in reverse, flipped me off, and pulled out into traffic, I continued to stare.

For those five years in college I’d spent suckling the progressive part of my humanity that allowed me to simultaneously appreciate and negate the importance of racial difference—in whatever sloppy, humble, blistering or glorious forms it presented itself—I couldn’t dodge a bewildering question: Where had all the black girls gone in my life? I couldn’t reconcile the fear that I had supplanted the power of brown flesh against brown flesh with that of brown against pale, just to prove to the stunted, dictatorial black people from back home that I was going to be the black person I wanted to be. It sounded like poisonous bullshit when folks remarked that one can take the boy from the city, but not the city from the boy, for in the five years I’d been away from New York, I’d done a damn good job scraping that cancer out of me with my bare hands and leaving it to rot to death on the curbs of that rich college. But still where, where had all the black girls gone?

Inside the BP, Kayla waited in line. Looking exasperated at the customers ahead of her, she clutched her cash and shook her head. I ogled her: It was her impatience, her sometimes unprovoked insolence and alpha-girl hypersensitivity which had initially attracted me to her. Besides being nineteen and from the suburbs, she had a body like a Barbie doll. As she made her way out of the store, carrying her purchases in a plastic bag, I admired how she simultaneously reminded me of those black beauty queens from the Bronx—ones who had never given my rock-and-roll black ass the time of day—and was nothing like them at all. I was digging how she flickered back and forth from being a black girl and a human female who happened to be black.

Man, I hate slow ass people, she said when she slipped into the car and placed the bag on the floor near her feet.

I said, I feel you.

On the highway, Kayla pulled a tiny knife from her purse and slit the Swisher Sweet cigar down its center and emptied the tobacco innards into the plastic bag between her calves. She tore off the curved mouth end of the blunt before inserting the weed; she looked like she was doing origami as she carefully worked the shell into the shape of a cigarette. Her meticulousness turned me on. We were heading back to my place and the closer we got there the more it seemed possible that after we smoked and had a few beers, we might lie in bed together and I would rediscover the traditional, pleasurable image of our multi-shaded brown skins pressed together. Maybe then I would mention to her the horror of what I’d seen back at the BP.

As it was, I mentioned that I’d seen a black boy beating on a white girl in the parking lot just as Kayla lit the blunt, puffed on it a few times and filled the space between us with a thick gust of smoke. Instead of responding, she reached for the CD player and began Crime Story over again. At first, I thought she hadn’t heard me, but after I hit the blunt, I was sure it was because she thought I was one of those brothers who only cared about race, who didn’t have it in him to realize that the only real thing that mattered was being human. The further we drove the more bothered I became that Kayla wasn’t appalled that two people who had understood the beauty of their difference could let their relationship reach such destruction. She just bopped her head and motioned with her gun-shaped fingers in sync with the thump of the bass beat.

Kayla, in the end, turned out to be uncomplicated. She liked her weed, her beer, and complaining about her shit job at Kroger supermarket. She wouldn’t fuck me that night because, she said, she didn’t know me that well. Though she’d dated a few white boys—but didn’t add they were boys who happened to be white—the only conversation we had about interracial dating ended with her saying that she didn’t see color, just the person. That didn’t stop her from using phrases like white trash or sketchy ass niggas in the short time we’d known one another, when either a white or black person, respectively, had crossed her.

The longer she refused to respond to the scene back at the BP, the more I knew it had nothing to do with her being a black girl. She had arrived at some place in herself as a person that was comfortable with the paradox of her racial philosophy. The more I saw this, the angrier I became at myself, at her, at the mesmerizing and undeniably black aggressiveness of DMX’s song—an aggressiveness that had been implanted within the deep, tangled forest of whatever human boy I’d been the moment I slipped from my mother’s womb into the world. I needed Kayla to be nothing but a black girl that night in the car. I needed her face to be a beacon beckoning me back to the mainland of my youth and origins, back to a time and place when there was no need to observe and then brood over the filthy, complicated equation that made up the color of one’s character in relation to the content of their skin. When there was only brown…

But it was too late, and had been for a long time. I’d been, for too many years, saddled with the intricate truth of who we are as people. For there was nothing I could’ve done to help that white and human girl that night in the parking lot of the Gahanna, Ohio BP. There was no sermon fiery enough I could’ve delivered to convince that black and human boy to reconsider his fists within the greater context of his obliterated heart. I didn’t know this white girl; I wasn’t that black boy. This was not my interracial love story. It was theirs.

As we took the stairs to my apartment, Kayla’s voice sounded at my back.

I see that kind of crazy, racist shit all the time.

And for a few long moments—the kind that stretch the vast terrain of a violent life—I had no idea what in God’s name this particular human girl was talking about.