“That’s how far the world is from where I am.  Just one bad day…” – the Joker, the Killing Joke

I had been biding my time for three years to get back to a point where I could follow my true ambition.  My grades were fine, I was in a grad school training program; as long as I avoided doing anything stupid, it was in God’s hands.  Going into my last year, the Frat had a nice nightclub, we won the big stepshow in April, we won Chapter of the Year.  We had a lot of momentum from anyone’s perspective.  Naive as it may sound, my plan for my senior year was to follow the lead of the oldheads who brought me into the Game:  show up at the Burge at 12:30, shake a few hands, maybe one stroll around the party.  Defend the stepshow title in April.  Pass the torch to the neos as it was passed to me.  The Greek version of the hip hop head I guess.

What happened next was entirely different.  A brother who didn’t pledge me (i.e, someone with no rank) decided I needed to be put in my place as far as the Frat was concerned, and me being apart of ‘their’ plans.  I was completely blindsided and frankly, extremely insulted.  But it raised a good question: In what ways did I need them?

• I had a Chapter of the Year plaque on my wall.  I was on multiple stepshow championship teams.  Did I really have anything left to prove as an Alpha?  (Nope.)

• I adopted my Islamic name since joining the Frat.  And I had also chosen my career path.  So even on the best of the days, the Frat was the third biggest part of my identity.  Was it irreplacable?  (Definitely not.)

• One thing I’ll always give KU credit for was making sure I had fun in the midst of whatever I was working on.  It was my senior year of college.  Did I have any interest in getting into a pissing contest?  (Hell no!)

The separation was clean and surgical: I didn’t wear paraphenalia on campus, I no longer went to the Burge, I didn’t show up at the nightclub (it would shut down anyway after what I’ve been told was one of the great club fights of the Jayhawk years).  If you were a freshman that year, you probably didn’t know I existed.  It would be the beginning of what has carried into adulthood: we’re all still friends to various degrees, but we’ve also all established distinctive individual identities, we’re all friends with different groups of people from Kansas, et cetera.  So I spent my whole senior year buried in textbooks right?  Hardly…

I focused on my other interests.  I was the last of my generation’s ‘hip hop’ Alphas.  The radio show had to go on: by the grace of God (literally) a couple of the Muslim brothers under me loved hip hop the way I do, and took the reins of the show.  I would still pop in once in a while to crack jokes and freestyle with them.  I made a couple guest appearances at house parties with my boys who weren’t Alphas; it would be the beginning of what would actually become my adult inner circle.  More on them in the next chapter.  I wanted to have fun my last year at KU, and I had a ball!  I really can’t complain. 

I ended up applying to the same schools I wanted to apply to out of high school.  It was an afternoon in the spring when I got a phone call from the Den Mother of the Peter Stark Producing Program.  Now I have no idea how someone looks when they win the lottery, but I know I woke up a neighbor or two that night.  I can still recall the acceptance letter I recieved: “…your classmates will be coming from Harvard, Yale, Boston College, Dartmouth, Kansas…”  I didn’t care.  I wasn’t intimidated at all.  I busted my ass for many years to create an opportunity, and I got it.

I wish I could tell you that after I got what I wanted, I chilled out.  But I didn’t.  I wasn’t at the point in my life where I could say ‘success is the best revenge.’  I felt I dealt with a lot of naysayers, a lot of haters, a lot of fake friends.  Just to put myself in a position where I could do what I love to do, live where I wanted to live with whoever I chose to live with.  My teenage ideals revolved in large part around putting black women on a pedestal that the mainstream rarely does, and showing black people the beauty of our culture.  Now idealism was meeting pragmatism for the first time.  It wasn’t some old white man in some ivory tower who was discounting me; it was much, much closer to home.  I came to Lawrence with the expectation I would make no lifelong friends, I wouldn’t meet my wife, and I proved myself right (granted in a completely Anakin Skywalker sort of way).

In time of course I would be proven wrong; we’ll get to the how and why of how that part of my life played out in time.  My next step was packing my car and heading to a place where I heard it never rained…