One of my very best friends, Johnnie, is African American.  I’m not saying that to get cool points … I’ve already done that on this website here.  And here.  Instead, I want to tell you the story of the very first time (and last time) Johnnie went skiing.  The title of this same story as Johnnie has told it on numerous occasions is …

Why Black People Don’t Do Action Sports

Johnnie came from modest backgrounds, growing up in Oklahoma as a Chicago transplant with his Aunt Flo and an uncle from Nigeria.  We had a lot in common, the two of us growing up, so I felt more than our other friends we understood each other.  We weren’t the kids that grew up with a mini-van or weekend get-a-ways to the city or summer camp.  Instead, our free-time was spent squarely in front of an analogue TV with a massive pair of rabbit ears in houses without air conditioning.

We had the worst cars in the high school parking lot.  I drove a 1980 Mercury Capri.  It had a penchant for spewing out boiling, green slime each time I stopped at a traffic light … so much so that neighboring cars felt obliged to point it out to me.  Johnnie drove a 1980s something Ford Citation that smelled like its former owner was a chain-smoking, house cat with a leaky bladder.  Each time it was opened, the door squealed louder that a pig in a slaughter house.

As much as we were the same, there were marked differences in our lives to be sure.  I grew up with the Poor White Trash experience.  Which meant I had no parental supervision whatsoever.  I left the house when I pleased, did as I pleased, and spent every spare moment playing Dungeons & Dragons.  Johnnie on the other hand got the Poor Black experience, which meant the only time he was allowed out of the house was to go down to the park, where he’d play 21 or practice gymnastics off the playground equipment.  Nearly every other second of his life was strictly monitored and regimented by Aunt Flo.  And when she deemed that her code of behavior was broken, she’d call in her Nigerian husband to administer the punishment – which often involved holding encyclopedias on outstretched arms for hours on end.

She was a tough woman and she didn’t tolerate any misbehaving.  As Flo has told me on several occasions, “I spend all day getting my ass kicked by white people at work, I’m not about to come home and take any crap off these bad ass kids.”  In addition to her behavior expectations, Flo passed on the generational wisdom of African Americans to her children.  Wisdom that included the Dos and Don’ts of being black.

Needless to say neither of us ever went skiing.  Not with our families.  Not with our churches.  Never.  Ever ever.

Post College

I graduated from Oklahoma State University in the fall of 2000 with a History degree and a 3.3 GPA.  The value of that diploma is only slightly less worthwhile than the wallpaper of a Confederate brick, shit house.   With no job prospects, I immediately enrolled in grad school and actually started attending my classes for once.  Johnnie on the other hand graduated a year and a half earlier with a 4.0 GPA in Marketing.  I guess Flo’s way was better.

Anyway, he immediately picked up a job at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture).  And for the first time in his life, he started to have real money.  They flew him around the country for training, client visits, and more.  He went to trendy dance clubs with co-workers and as one of the few black people in the group, his rump shaker routines were quite a hit with the ladies.

The world was his oyster.

Well … not oyster.  You see Johnnie is deathly allergic to sea food.  A single drop of the stuff is like reverse Nutty Professor juice.  He’ll swell up to Fat Albert size while someone stabs him in the ass with an EpiPen.  Um.  How about another analogy …

He was on top of the world.

Yes!  Top the world, ma!  He bought a Jeep Cherokee.  He rented a posh apartment in Addison with another one of our mutual best friends, Mikey Mike.  All of the neighbors were blonde-haired, hot nurses who preferred to sun bathe just outside of his balcony.  He went down to Beltline and ate at all of hip restaurants.  He went to the white people mall in Plano and bought business suits and leather shoes.

Life was good, life was grand.  But always there lingered …

The Question

As he started mixing with more and more middle and upper class white people, the Question kept coming up.  It waited for him each holiday season like a lecherous Santa looking to cop a feel.  The Question:

Johnnie, would you like to go skiing with us?

And his answer was universally the same.  He’d cringe visibly and say, “Black people don’t ski.  We don’t snow ski.  We don’t water ski.”  But his roommate, the aforementioned Mikey Mike, was an avid snow skier.  He’d been skiing several times not only with his church, but with any church group or group home that drove within 150 miles of Boulder.  And Mikey Mike went to work on our poor friend, Johnnie.  He spun magical tales of hot girls, tired from a day on the slopes, getting drunk in hot tubs all over the resort.  He told him about the rush of alpine air cascading over your face and making you feel like a Viking jarl riding into battle.  It was magical, it was beautiful.  It was paradise.

Johnnie, would you like to go skiing with us?

His answer this time?  A small crack in the armor.  ”Man, if I went skiing, my grandma would kick my ass.  I’m telling you – black people don’t ski.”  And so it remained for more than a year.  Groups of sexy girls traveling to Colorado while Johnnie went on summer cruises with his cousins in the Gulf.  And each time the girls would come back with giggles and stories about their debauchery, while Johnnie remembered the smell of Baba’s farts after the rib buffet, stuck in their two-bed room cabin with a porthole that was jammed shut.

And all the while, Mikey Mike pouring soft honey into his ears about the mountains, the snow … just like Grima Wormtongue in Rohan.  (I told you … too much D&D as a kid).  And always, it remained:

Johnnie, would you like to go skiing with us?

He Broke

I got a call one day while I was in grad school.  It was Johnnie.  He had the sound of a man that was just about to do something that he knew would bring catastrophe.  Such as eat at the Still China buffet.  His voice was nearly apologetic … as if he was practicing for a conversation he’d have later when he tried to explain what he was intending to do to his disbelieving family.

“Man, I think I’m gonna try skiing.”

I was silent on the phone.  I knew that karma was listening in on our conversation just as assuredly as the Patriot Act.  Mikey Mike, that dastard, he was the culprit.  Johnnie was surrounded by white people.  Worse than that – he was surrounded by those types of white people.  The kind that do things without regard for bad luck or misfortune.  The type of white people that are so used to having everything go their way that they can’t hardly imagine a moment when it wouldn’t.  The kind that like to cliff dive.  Or ride mountain bikes in the desert.  Or climb steep rocks.  Or swim with sharks.

Those types of white people … the dangerous kind.

Maybe they had made him forget.  Maybe his new found affluence clouded his judgment.  Maybe the whispers of Mikey Mike led him astray and made him neglect the wisdom of his upbringing – all of the life lessons that he had vigilantly lived by his entire existence.  Such as how to deal with the police.  Or how to walk down a neighborhood street on the south side of Chicago and appear just confident enough that no one thinks you’re a punk, but not too confident to seem threatening.

He was challenging the order of the universe.  There were certain laws, laws that I didn’t write, laws that he didn’t write, that state the order of things.  And this law in particular Johnnie knew and the universe knew that he knew it, because Aunt Flo, his grandma  - his entire family – had told him a thousand times.  To question these cosmic rules was only to invite disaster of Biblical proportions upon your head.  What do you think happened to Jonah?  He tried to water ski!!!  And he got eaten by a WHALE!  What terrible fate awaited my good friend for his hubris?

All I could muster was …

“Dude … are you sure … ?”

“Yeah, Mike and I are going.  He’s gonna teach me.”

I KNEW IT!  Mike – that Judas!  That betrayer, foul tempter of fair souls from the straight and narrow.  What could I do?  The die was cast.  I simply wished him luck.  He promised to give me the full details of his trip to Colorado when I visited Dallas in a few weeks.

I said good bye.  I hung up.  I prayed.

The Visit

I visited Dallas two weeks later, just after Johnnie and Mike (the Devil!) returned from their ski trip.  Knock, knock.  Mike opened the door to their apartment and only shook his head, like he was the greeter at a wake.  I walked in, went straight to Johnnie’s room.  There he lay, in the darkness, in the silence, with bandages on his nose.  His eyes were slightly purplish and slightly swollen.  His soul … crushed.

I asked him what happened.  He managed with the gravity of a doomed man to respond:

“I fell off the mountain.”

He tried to shift in the bed, but his body was too weak.  After overcoming the surge of agony, he continued:

“I landed on my face and I was knocked out.  Thankfully, a doctor was there … otherwise … I don’t know what would have happened …”

What about his family?  Did they know?  What did they say?  I had to ask.

“They told me not to go.  I should have listened.”

I cast an angry eye back at Mikey Mike.  That’s right, Mike, he would have listened if not for … you.  Mike shifted at the door.  I could tell that he wanted to add something, but kept his thoughts to himself.  I asked Johnnie how he was doing.

“Day by day.  I’m making day by day at this point.”

It was probably best to let him have his rest, to recover from the grievous injuries he had yet to detail, so I got up and promised I’d come back soon.  Maybe with the best remedy I knew – Taco Bell.  But first I had to have words with Mikey Mike.  Strong words.  Man to man.  The call of scripture rang through my head as I approached him and ushered him out of the darkened room:

And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.

What the fuck, Mike?  I raged at him.  He shook his head with disappointment and slowly told me the events as he witnessed them.

Mike’s Story

Here is Mike’s story as he told it to me.  I have not altered a single word.  I promise.

It was a crisp winter’s morn.  I remember it well.  The whipping wind swept the forested mountain valleys with the vibrance of tranquil eternity.

Um.  Okay, so maybe he didn’t say that exactly.  Let me start again:

We were skiing together.  It was the very first day.  Johnnie was getting lessons.  I skied with him and I went down first and waited for him to catch up.  I turned to watch and there he is – snow plowing down a bunny slope – locked into position with every one of his muscles straining with dire concentration … like he’s defusing a bomb.

There are 6 years old buzzing past him – zoom, zoom – on either side.

He starts to lean forward, just slowly at first, but he doesn’t correct himself.  And just as slowly, still tightly locked into his slow plow form, he teeters forward and lands face first in the snow.  It was a little icy that day, but I didn’t think anything about it.  It was like he just fell over.  So I waited for him to get up and restart his power plowing.  Instead, he just goes limp and starts sliding down the bunny slope.

I thought he was just playing around at first, but I start to walk up there with my skis still on.  I realize that he’s completely knocked out.  Another guy skis over and grabs him, but I tell him not to move him because he might have a head injury.  The guy tells me he’s a doctor and expertly flips Johnnie onto his back while stabilizing his neck.  After a quick inspection, the doctor told me that Johnnie took a little bump on his head and will be completely fine.  If we’re worried, we can drive over to Denver and get another opinion.

What second?  Johnnie just told me that he ‘fell off a mountain.’  Something like this:

Mike continues:

He’s been saying that to everyone.  I … I don’t want to say anything … because I feel bad that he got hurt.  But he didn’t fall off a mountain … I’m actually still trying to figure out how he knocked himself out by just dipping forward like he did.  It’s the strangest thing …

Strange, Mike?  Or one of the unbreakable laws of the universe?

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