The bell clanged, ending another day at the penitentiary, and I headed toward the gym to get ready for a baseball game. Overhead in the hall, a fluorescent light crackled and blinked. Those bulbs always bugged me when they busted. Hoover High had a lot of those — the kind that just couldn't go off and stay off when they'd had it. They just had to flicker away, letting the world know I'm dying, I'm dying!

I looked up and thought, You ain't the only one having to eat it these days, brother man.

Behind me, I heard some hard leather heels hitting the hallway floor. "Hey, Dan, what's happenin', man?"

Eddie Kanegae grinned and slapped me five. He was decked out as usual in his gray fedora "brim" hat, black leather jacket, black high-heel boots, and polyester flared slacks with hems almost dragging on the ground. Eddie always complained how hard it was for small guys to find cool clothes. Thick strips of hair jutting down each cheek compensated for the sideburns he couldn't grow. Eddie was also on the baseball team and headed to the gym with me.

"Yeah, man," Eddie said as he strutted down the hall, clutching the handle of his alto sax case. "I'd rather be jammin' with the brothers in the band room, but, you know the deal — we gots to play us some ball so we can get out of gym class." "Yeah," I chucked. "I heard that."

Eddie sure had guts — no one else at Hoover tried so hard to e black. He had the rich older brother living on Mercer Island, the Shangri-la of suburban Seattle. Eddie's sisters were teachers, studing to become principals. Eddie, the youngest, was supposed to follow suit as a success story, so his parents jumped all over his case for trying to get in a band. WhileI had only one older sibling to be constantly compared with, Eddie had three. Which meant Eddie got three times more hassle from his parents than I did.

Music was just something to listen to while working — it could never be work, his parents told him. How would it look with a bum in the family who didn't have a real job? And they scolded him about his black trip — that he was embarrassing himself and the Kanegaes, that no good would come out of trying to be like them.

But I could understand Edddie's trip — it wasn't like us Asian guys made the cool music. We couldn't dance; we didn't' set the trends with the threads. We couldn't say anything loud like "I'm black and I'm proud."

Us Asians, we had nothing cool we could call our own. In fact, we were just getting used to calling ourselves "Asians" instead of "Orientals" like our parent did. And just being good kids with good grades so we could grow up to be like our good brothers and sisters didn't cut it as cool anymore....