We were finishing the remains of a keg of craft beer and chain smoking rolled cigarettes on the roof of Matt’s apartment in Bed-Stuy when he got the call. Our dear friend Breezy, whose name was the unfortunate result of her mother’s discovery of eastern religion in the ‘80s (as many white people had), wanted us to attend her birthday party. It was to be held during ‘80s Night at Thunder Jacksons Urban Roadhouse, one of the country-themed bars that were all the rage in New York City in the summer of 2009. A handful had been kept open by our unmerciful creator for reasons none of us could begin to guess. The situation was so bathed in irony that we could hardly believe it was happening.

“I don’t want to go,” I said.

“Neither do I, but Breezy is our friend,” he said.

“We have become cartoons,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

Our vehement moral opposition to Crocodile Jack’s Country Playhouse stemmed primarily from our irrational hatred of hipsters, which we undeniably were ourselves. A bar with PBR drink specials, ‘80s nostalgia, and a mechanical bull was destined to be full to the brim with coke-skinny white twentysomethings in skinny jeans and cat sweaters. Add to that the fact that the hair of the dog was doing nothing for the disasters concurrently pounding in our heads. Everything was the worst.

It was around that time that Matt added one last rotten cherry to the sundae. “By the way,” he said, far too casually, “Regina’s going to be there.”

Whether it was that revelation, the hangover, or some combination thereof, my stomach clenched and kicked and I was fairly certain vomit was on its way. I asked him to repeat himself, thinking maybe I’d just heard him wrong.

“It’s not a big deal,” he said.

It was a big deal. I hadn’t seen her since Christmas Eve, when I found out that two of the bartenders at her job, Paco and Georg, had double-teamed her like a Chinese finger trap. This was before we met, but she had been spending a lot of time with Georg in the prior weeks and for the first time in our relationship, I was overcome with jealousy and suspicion. Matt and I dug the trampoline out of the brambles behind my house in Bushwick and bounced on it. The creaking of the rusty springs proved surprisingly comforting. But by the time I got back inside, I had a facebook message simply stating, “This isn’t working. Sorry.”

She’s been with Georg ever since.

Afterwards, everyone tried to comfort me by saying that women are crazy. I disagreed. Not all women—not even most women—would cheat on their partner and then end the relationship over the internet. Why blame every daughter, mother, or sister in the world because one of them decided to be an asshole? And besides, she was with someone when we started hooking up, so I should have seen it coming.

“I’m not going,” I told Matt, chugging the rest of my beer.

“Yes, you are,” he told me, taking my cup and walking to the keg to fill it back up. “You two will probably end up going home together.

“I’d rather lay down in front of the F train,” I said. “Fucking her would be like fucking a big bag of sadness. It would be like the opposite of Christmas. I would catch sexually-transmitted sociopathy.”

He laughed. “Five bucks says it happens.”

We had four more each before departing for Power Steve’s Rodeo Funland. We stopped at the bodega on the corner and bought PBR tallboys, which Mohammad always kept in stock just for us and occasionally let us get for a quarter off. We planned on drinking them on the train, but a pair of cops got on the G with us at Myrtle-Willoughby and didn’t get off until Broadway.

One of them reminded me of the cop who pulled us over when Matt, Regina, Breezy, and I went up to the Catskills for a weekend and, against our wishes, Regina decided to drink Kentucky Gentleman the whole ride. What would have been a five minute stop took nearly an hour as the cop, smelling the cloud of whiskey bellowing out of Matt’s company car, tried to prove that Matt was drunk and that the breathalyzer was conspiring with us. As soon as he let us go, she started drinking again.

When we transferred to the L at Metropolitan, we saw an old black woman in a shawl exit the train, finish off a Coors tallboy, crush it, and slam it to the ground as if celebrating a touchdown. We took this as a sign it was time to start ours. We finished them in the ten minutes it took us to get to the Village.

Regina wasn’t there when we entered Coconut Dave’s Disco Inferno. The bar was packed full of twentysomethings, almost exclusively white, in garish clothing, bright colors, sunglasses, and legwarmers. It was just like Brooklyn. We spotted Breezy in a booth with a few friends and a tray of empty shotglasses. As we walked over, she saw us and screeched happily in our general direction. She waved us over and we sat down.

“Hey, Breezy.” I looked at her as though over the rims of glasses and smiled.

“I’m so sorry. I ran into her at UP last week and my boyfriend mentioned it.” She took a sip of a bright blue drink. “Blue motorcycle. Want some?”

I grabbed the drink and took a sip. “You’re not off the hook yet.”

Breezy’s boyfriend, Michael, was nice to the point of inadvertently playing both sides. He felt guilty after Regina bragged about convincing me to do coke and told me. He was also the one who told me about her encounter with Paco and Georg in the walk-in freezer. I couldn’t be mad at him. Yeah, he had invited her, but he’d also been there to help me kick the habit when she’d left me alone with a broken heart and a large stash of chalky white blow.

Several shots later, I walked out to smoke a cigarette. I felt a great deal of contempt as I passed the mechanical bull and its mulleted, heroin-chic rider, but I swallowed it and stepped outside.

As soon as I lit my bogue, I saw her. She was still wearing my $400 Ambush necklace, which I had forgotten at her apartment a few nights before we broke up. It reminded me of the times growing up in Southside Jamaica when the electronic marquee in the subway station warned that the Christmas season was the most common time to get your chain snatched. I was tempted to snatch her chain—my chain—right off her pretty little neck.

But I wasn’t like the stick-up kids on my old block. I wasn’t a hood nigga at all. I never had been. And what’s more, I had escaped the hood. While they bought nickel bags of dirt weed from old heads who hung out in sheds, I had Cali weed delivered by clean-cut white dudes in spandex bike messenger uniforms. While they worked menial jobs for low wages or sold rocks to their neighbors, I did graphic design and went to loft parties. Still, when nobody was around, I’d turn off the chillwave, put on Reasonable Doubt, and wish for dead fuckin’ presidents to represent me.

I dated almost exclusively white girls, tall and coke-thin. Models. Actresses. I wanted to prove to everyone that I was an outlier. But as I drank Belgian trappist ales and condescendingly explained Dostoyevsky to models on fire escapes, I grew to hate myself. The niggas on my old block would call me a house nigger, and I didn’t even know how I would have responded. They had real problems. My problem was the model quickly approaching me in front of Crazy Eddie’s Draft Beer Emporium.

Hello, I tried to say. How have you been? Instead, I said, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

She laughed. “Let’s grab a beer.”

She laughed. She actually laughed. We hadn’t seen each other in six months. She broke up with me in the same way you ask a friend if they want to get drunk in the park between tending your virtual farm and making sure your Sims don’t die. And she had the audacity to laugh.

It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say I wished her dead. I wished her ugly. I wished her face matched her personality. I wished it was pockmarked and covered in patchy hair and open sores. I wished the corners of her lips suddenly drooped past her chin. I wished her nose bent sharply to the left. I hated her. I hated her right down to the center of my detestable being.

“Go home,” I said through gritted teeth. “Just give me my necklace and go home.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “If you need to get anything out of your system before we go inside, go ahead, but let me know if I’ll have time to smoke a cigarette.”

For half an hour, we argued calmly in front of Farmer John’s Starship of Love. She smiled a smile that told me none of this mattered to her, that this was just a way to pass the time and my enmity was more amusing than watching drunk hipsters dance to Men at Work. I seethed, trying unsuccessfully to burn a hole in her pretty little head with my eyes.

People hurried their pace as they walked past us on the sidewalk. Yelling, they may have stopped. Someone who’s yelling can usually be calmed down. They’re reacting strongly to one moment. As soon as they realize they’re overreacting, they can relax and move on. Someone who is calmly expressing hatred, however, cannot be reasoned with. It has incubated in his chest for a long time. It has grown and grown, and it’s finally coming out. It’s no longer a reaction. It’s a part of him. No amount of intervention from strangers will extract it from him, and those strangers don’t generally desire to find out what will happen if they get caught in the crossfire. Even the bouncer stepped inside so he could check IDs without having to witness whatever was about to happen.

“You know what your problem is?” I said, taking a drag from my fourth cigarette. I smiled.

“I have a feeling you’re about to tell me,” she said.

“You’re a bad person.” I knew there would be no reaction.

“Am I?” She raised an eyebrow and smirked. She had no idea that I had anticipated this. She had no idea I was doing this on purpose.

“See, you brush off the criticism you get because it’s usually just people calling you a slut. And who cares who you fuck, right? I sure as hell don’t,” I said.

“As well you shouldn’t,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter. But you don’t care about anyone but yourself. You’d sell your mother’s insulin for thirty seconds of attention, wouldn’t you?” I laughed. Her smile went away immediately.

“You would, wouldn’t you? You absolutely would. And as she died at your feet, you’d just give her that goddamn Han Solo smirk of yours, shrug your shoulders, and step over her toward the door.”

She reached to slap me, like I knew she would. I grabbed her arm. She pushed against me with all her weight, slamming me against the wall. My cigarette dropped to the sidewalk and rolled a few feet away. I gave her back the smile she gave me when she walked up earlier. She kissed me hard, biting my lower lip and wrapping her spindly fingers around my throat.

“Five minutes. Men’s room.” She stomped inside. I waited a few seconds and went in.

Five minutes later, I stood in the empty men’s room, rocking back and forth on my heels. I eyed the door, briefly considering ditching this ridiculous plan. But before I could, she slinked in and looked at me with anger I’d never seen from her, even when she had me against the wall outside. She locked the door.

She grabbed me by my shirt and dragged me into a stall. She pulled down my pants and the game commenced. Her body was smoother even than I remembered. It reminded me of a dream I had when I was fourteen about having sex with my then-girlfriend in the back of a chartered bus on a field trip, all the sensations a pubescent boy imagines he will experience during sex that will never be real. It pissed me clean off.

There was a knock on the door. I pulled out.

“Shit,” I said.

“What do we do?” she said.

“Stand on the toilet,” I said. “Wait for them to leave.”

“Are you crazy?” she said. “These shoes are not going on a bar toilet seat.”

Keys entered the lock and started turning. What I did next made no sense, but my fight or flight reflex falls heavily toward the latter when bar bouncers—generally much larger than I am—are involved. And we all know what they say about hindsight. I leaped up onto the seat, my boots making a surprisingly light click on the already-cracked plastic.

The door swung open. All this bouncer could see under the stall door of the men’s bathroom of Lightning Bob’s Jungle Playland was a pair of shiny black Louboutin heels. And all I could think about in that moment was the fact that I owed Matt five bucks.