Taken Out of Context by Paul Beatty
Paul Beatty
Unlike
the typical bluesy, earthy, folksy, denim-overalls,
noble-in-the-face-of-cracker-racism, aw-shucks Pulitzer Prize-winning
protagonist mojo magic black man, I am not the seventh son of a seventh son of
a seventh son. I wish I was, but fate shorted me by six brothers and three
uncles.
My name
is Kaufman, Gunnar Kaufman. Preordained by a set of weak-kneed DNA to shuffle
in the footsteps of a long, cowardly queue of coons, Uncle Toms and faithful
boogedy-boogedy retainers. I am the number-one son of a spineless colorstruck
son of a bitch who was the third son of an ass-kissing, sell-out house Negro.
From my birth until their divorce, my parents indoctrinated me with the idea
that the surreal escapades and ‘I’z a-comin” watermelon chicanery of my
forefathers was stuff for hero-worship.
What’s a
few nigger jokes among friends? We Kaufmans have always been the type of
niggers who can take a joke. I used to visit my father, the sketch artist at
the Wilshire Los Angeles Police Department precinct. His fellow officers would
stand around cluttered desks breaking themselves up by telling
‘how-many-niggers-does-it-take’ jokes, pounding each other on the back and
looking over their broad shoulders to see if me and Daddy was laughing. Dad
always was. The epaulettes on his shoulders raising up like inch worms as he
giggled. I never laughed until my father slapped me hard between the shoulder
blades. The heavy-handed blow bringing my weight to my tiptoes, raising my chin
from my chest, and I’d burp out a couple of titters of self-defilement. Even if
I didn’t get the joke. ‘What they mean, “Lick their lips and stick ’em to the
wall?”’ Later I’d watch my father draw composite sketches for victimized
citizens who used his face as a reference point. ‘He was thick-lipped, nose a
tad bit bigger than yours, with your nostril flare though.’ Daddy would bring
some felon to still life and without looking up from his measured strokes
admonish me that my face better not appear on any police officer’s sketchpad.
He’d send me home in a patrol car, black charcoal smudged all over my face, and
his patriotic wisdom ringing in my ears.
‘Remember,
Gunnar: God, country and laughter; the world’s best medicine.’
I
remember one day he came home drunk from the LAPD’s unofficial legal defense
fund-raiser for officers accused of brutality. (Dad later told me they showed Birth
of a Nation followed by two straight hours of Watts Riot highlights.)
He sat me on his lap and slurred war stories—Dad had joined the army three
hours after graduating from high school in 1968 and served two tours in
Vietnam. How his crazy Black-is-Beautiful platoon of citified troublemakers
used to ditch him in the middle of patrols, leaving him alone in some rice
paddy having to face the entire communist threat on his lonesome. Once he
stumbled on his men behind the DMZ cooling with the enemy. The sight of the
slant-eyed niggers and nigger niggers sharing K-rations and rice, enjoying a
crackling fire and the quiet Southeast Asian night flipped Pops the fuck out.
He berated his rebellious troops, shouting, ‘Ain’t this a bitch, the gorillas
snacking with the guerrillas. Hello! Don’t you baboons know that this is the
goddamn enemy? The fucking yellow peril and you fucking Benedict Leroy Robinson
Jefferson Arnolds are traitors to the democracy that weaned you apes from
primitivism. You know you’re probably eating dog.’ The VC saw the disconcerted
looks on the faces of the black American men, and a good colored boy from
Detroit raised his rifle and put a M-16 slug inches from my pop’s crotch. My
father’s men just sat there waiting for him to bleed to death. The Vietnamese
had to beg them to take my dad back to base.
My father
ended this confession with the non-sequitur wisdom that ended all our
conversations: ‘Son, don’t ever mess with no white women.’
On our
custody outings to the drag races in Pomona my father would tell me how he came
back from the war and met my mother at a stock-car race. They fell immediately
in love—the only two black folks in the world who knew the past five winners of
the Daytona 500 and would recognize Big Daddy Don Garlits in the street. Then
he’d put his arm around me and say, ‘Don’t you think black women are exotic?’
Mom
raised my sisters and me as the hard-won spoils of a vicious custody battle
that left the porcelain shrapnel of supper-dish grenades embedded in my
father’s neck. The divorce made Mama, Ms Brenda W. Kaufman, more determined to
make sure that her children knew their forebears. As a Brooklyn orphan who
never saw her parents or her birth certificate, Mom adopted my father’s patriarchal
family history for her misbegotten origins.
Kaufman
lore plays out like a self-pollinating men’s club. There are no comely Kaufman
black superwomen. No poetic heroines caped in kinte cloth stretching welfare
cheques from here to the moon. No nubile black women who could set a wayward
Negro straight with the snap of the head and stinging ‘niggah puh-leaze’. The
women who allied themselves to the Kaufman legacy are invisible. Every once in
a while a woman’s name tangentially floated from my mother’s lips as a footnote
to some fool’s parable only to dissipate with the vegetable steam. Aunt Joni’s
mean banana daiquiri. Meredith’s game-winning touchdown run versus Colin Powell
High. Giuseppe’s second wife Amy’s Perry Como record collection. Cousin Madge who
was the complexion of pound cake dipped in milk. These historical cameos were
always followed by my mother’s teeth-sucking disclaimers ‘but that’s not
important’ or ‘let’s not go there.’ I wondered where did my male predecessors
find black women with names like Joni, Meredith and Amy? Who were these women?
Were they weaker than their men or were they proverbial black family lynchpins?
I spent hours thumbing through photo albums fearful that I was destined to
marry a black Mormon Brigham Young University graduate named Mary Jo while I
became the spokesperson for the Coors Brewing Company. They say the fruit never
falls far from the tree, but I’ve tried to roll down the hill at least a little
bit.
My
earliest memories bodysurf the warm, comforting timelessness of the Santa Ana
winds, whipping me in and around the palm-tree-lined streets of Santa Monica.
Me and white boys sharing secrets and bubblegum. We were friends, but we didn’t
see ourselves as a unit. We had no enemies, no longstanding rivalries with the feared
Hermosa Beach Sand Castle Hellions or the Exclusive Brentwood Spoiled Brat
Millionaire Tycoon Killers. Our conflicts limited themselves to fighting with
our sisters and running from the Santa Monica Shore Patrol. I was an
ashy-legged black beach bum sporting a lopsided trapezoidal natural and living
in a hilltop two-storey townhouse on Sixth and Bay. After an exhausting morning
of bodysurfing and watching seagulls hover over the ocean expertly catching
french fries, I would spend the afternoon lounging on the rosewood balcony.
Sitting in a lawn chair, my spindly legs crossed at the ankles, I’d leaf
through the newest Time-Life mail-order installments to the family’s
coffee-table reference library: Predators of the Insect World, Air
War Over Europe,Gunfighters of the Old West. The baseball game would
crackle and spit from the cheap white transistor radio my father gave me for my
seventh birthday.
I was the
funny, cool black guy. In Santa Monica, like in most predominantly white
sanctuaries from urban blight, ‘cool black guy’ is a versatile identifier used
to distinguish the harmless male black from the Caucasian juvenile while
maintaining politically correct semiotics. I was the only ‘cool black guy’ at
Mestizo Mulatto Mongrel Elementary, Santa Monica’s all-white multicultural
school. My early education consisted of two types of multiculturalism:
classroom multiculturalism, which reduced race, sexual orientation and gender
to inconsequence; and schoolyard multiculturalism, where the kids who knew the
most polack, queer and farmer’s daughter jokes ruled.
Black was
hating fried chicken even before I knew I was supposed to like it. Black was
being a nigger who didn’t know any other niggers. Black was trying to figure
out ‘how black’ Tony Grimes, the local skate pro was. Tony, a freestyle hero
with a signature-model Dogtown board, was a hellacious skater and somehow
disembodied from blackness, even though he was darker than a lunar eclipse in
the Congo. Black was a suffocating bully that tied my mind behind my back and
shoved me into a walk-in closet. Black was my father on a weekend custody
drunken binge one summer, pushing me around as if I were a twelve-year-old,
seventy-five-pound bell-clapper clanging hard against the door, the wall, the
shoe tree.
That same
summer my sister Christina returned from a YMCA day camp field trip in tears.
My mother asked what was wrong, and between breathless wails Christina replied
that on the way home from the Museum of Natural History the campers cheered,
‘Yeah, white camp! Yeah, white camp!’ and she felt left out. I tried to console
her by explaining that the cheer was, ‘Yeah Y camp! Yeah Y camp!’, and that no
one was trying to leave her out of anything. Expressing unusual concern in our
affairs, Mom asked if we would feel better about going to an all-black camp. We
gave an insistent ‘Nooooo.’ She asked why, and we answered in three-part
sibling harmony, ‘Because they’re different from us.’ The way Mom arched her
left eyebrow at us we knew immediately we were in for a change. Sunday I was
hitching a U-Haul trailer to the back of the Volvo, and under the cover of
darkness we left halcyon Santa Monica for parts unknown.
I don’t
remember helping my mother unload the trailer but the next morning I awoke on
the floor of a strange house amid boxes and piles of heavy-duty garbage bags
jammed with clothes. The blinds were drawn, and although the sunlight peeked
between the slats, the house was dark. My mother let out a yell in that
distinct from-somewhere-in-the-kitchen timbre, ‘Gunnar, go into my purse and
buy some breakfast for everybody.’ Rummaging through my personal garbage bag I
found my blue Quicksilver shorts, a pair of worn-out dark grey Vans sneakers, a
long-sleeved clay-colored old school Santa Cruz shirt and, just in case the
morning chill was still happening, I wrapped a thick plaid flannel shirt around
my bony waist. I found the front door and like some lost intergalactic B-movie
spaceman who has crash-landed on a mysterious planet and is unsure about the
atmospheric content, I opened it slowly, contemplating the possibility of
encountering intelligent life. I stepped into a world that was a bustling
Italian intersection without Italians. Instead of little sheet-metal sedans
racing around the Fontana di Trevi, little kids on beat-up Big Wheels, and
bigger kids on creaky ten-speeds wove in and out of the water spray from a
sprinkler set in the middle of the street. It seemed there must have been a
fire drill at the hair salon because males and females in curlers and shower caps
crammed the sidewalks. I ventured forth into my new environs and approached a
boy about my age who wore an immaculately pressed, sparkling white T-shirt and
khakis and was slowly pacing one slew-footed black croker-sack shoe in front of
the other. I stopped him and asked for directions to the nearest store. He
squinted and leaned back and stifled a laugh. ‘What the fuck did you say?’
I
repeated my request, and the laugh he had suppressed came out gently. ‘Damn,
cuz. You talk proper like a motherfucker.’
Cuz?
Proper like a motherfucker?
My
guide’s bafflement turned to judgmental indignation at my appearance. ‘Damn,
fool, what’s up with your loud ass gear? Nigger got on so many colours look
like a walking paint sampler. Did you find the pot of gold at the end of that
rainbow? You not even close to matching. Take your jambalaya wardrobe down to
Cadillac Street make a right and the store is at the light.’
I walked
to the store, not believing some guy who ironed the sleeves on his T-shirt and
belted his pants somewhere near his testicles had the nerve to insult how I
dressed. I returned to the house, dropped the bag of groceries on the table and
shouted, ‘Ma, you done fucked up and moved to the ’hood!’
My black
magical mystery tour had ground to a halt in a West Los Angeles neighborhood
the locals call Hillside. Shaped like a giant cul-de-sac, Hillside is less a
community than a quarry of stucco homes built directly into the foothills of
the San Borrachos Mountains. Unlike most Californian communities that border mountain
ranges, in Hillside there are no gently sloping hillsides upon which children
climb trees, and overly friendly park rangers lead weekend flora and fauna
tours.
In the
late 1960s after the bloody but little-known
I’m-Tired-of-the-White-Man-Fuckin’-With-Us-and-What-Not Riots, the city decided
to pave over the neighboring mountainside, surrounding the community with a
great concrete wall that spans its entire curved perimeter save for an arched
gateway at the south-west entrance. At the bottom of this great wall live
hordes of impoverished American Mongols, hardrock niggers, Latinos and Asians
who, because of the wall’s immenseness, get only fifteen minutes of precious
sunshine in summer and a burst of solstice sunlight in the winter. If it wasn’t
always so hot it would be like living in a refrigerator.
After a
week in our new home—a pueblo-style house with a cracked and fissuring plaster
exterior—a black-and-white Welcome Wagon pulled up to help the newcomers settle
into the neighborhood. Two mustachioed officers got out of the patrol car and
knocked on our front door with well-practiced leather-gloved authority. Tossing
courtesy smiles at my mother, the cops shouldered their way past the threshold
and presented her with a pamphlet entitled How to Report Crime and
Suspicious Activity Whether the Suspects are Related to You or Not.
Mom was
not the kind of matriarch to let her brood hide up under her skirt, clutching
her knees, sheltered from the mean old Negroes outside. I walked the streets
comfortable in the knowledge that I was a freak. ‘Hurry! Hurry! Step right up!
All the way from the drifting sands of whitest Santa Monica, the whitest Negro
in captivity, Gunnar the Persnickety Zulu! He says “whom”, plays parchisi and,
folks, you won’t believe it, but he has absolutely no ass what-so-ever.’
In a
world where body and spoken language were currency, I was broke as hell.
Corporeally mute, I couldn’t saunter or bojangle my limbs with rubbery
nonchalance. I stiffly parade-marched around town with an embalmed soul, a
rheumatic heart and Frankenstein’s autonomic nervous system.
I learned
the hard way that social norms in Santa Monica were unforgivable breaches of
proper Hillside etiquette. I’d been taught to look people in the eye when
speaking to them. On the streets of Hillside even the briefest eye contact
wasn’t a simple faux pas, but an interpersonal trespass that merited
retaliation. Spotting a potential comrade I’d catch his eye with a raised
eyebrow that said, ‘Hey guy, what’s up?’, a glance I hoped would open the lines
of communication. These silent greetings were often returned in spades
accompanied by an angry rejoinder, ‘Nigger, what the fuck you looking at?’ and
a pimp slap that echoed in my ears for a week.
The
people of Hillside treat society the way society treats them. Strangers and
friends are suspect and guilty until proven innocent. Instant camaraderie past
familial ties doesn’t exist. It takes more than wearing the same uniform to be
accepted among one’s ghetto peers. I couldn’t just roll up on some folks and
say, ‘I know the Black National Anthem, a killer sweet-potato-pie recipe and
how to double-dutch blindfolded. Will you be my nigger?’ Dues had to be paid,
or you wasn’t joining the union. I walked the dark streets of Hillside with my
head down looking for loose change and signs that would place me on the path to
right-on soul-brother righteousness.
I arrived
forty-five minutes early for my first day of school at Manischewitz Junior
High. I walked through the metal detector and found a receptionist in the
dean’s office, who directed me to homeroom. I slunk over, imagining I was
wearing dark glasses and a trench coat. Pressing my back against the walls and
peeking coolly around corners, I managed to avoid detection and made it there
twenty minutes early.
Eventually
the hallways stopped echoing with the footsteps of the Oxford wing-tipped and
high-heeled administration. In their place was the sound of brand-new sneakers
squeaking on the waxed floors and the heavy clomp of unlaced hiking boots. Steadily
the students entered the classroom and slid into the empty seats around me.
First to arrive were the marsupial mama’s boys and girls. The reformed and
borderline students followed. Creeping into class carefully trying to avoid
last year’s repercussive behaviours, they sat upright at their desks, face
front and hands folded, mumbling their September resolutions to themselves:
‘This year will be different. I will do my homework. I will only bring my gun
to school.’ Two minutes before nine signalled the grand entrance of the fly
guys and starlets. Dressed in designer silk suits and dresses, accessorized in
ascots, feather boas and gold, the aloof adolescent pimps and dispassionate
divas strolled into homeroom smoking tiparillos and with a retinue of admirers
who carried their books and pulled chairs from tables with maître d’ suave.
I’d never
been in a room full of black people unrelated to me before. As my classmates
yelled out their schedules and passed contraband across the room I couldn’t
classify anyone by their dress or behaviour. The boisterous were just as likely
to be in the academically enriched classes as the silent. The clothes horses
stood as much chance of being on a remedial track as the bummy kids with
brown-bag lunches.
At nine
o’clock the bell rang, and Ms Schaefer stormed into the room. Dishevelled and
visibly nervous, she never bothered to introduce herself or say good morning.
She wrote her name on the board in shaky, wavering strokes and took attendance.
The class instantly interpreted her behaviour as a display of lack of trust and
concern. That day I learned another ghetto lesson: never let on that you don’t
trust someone. Even if he has bad intentions toward you, he will take offense
at your lack of trust. I’ve seen people stalk a victim, and when the victim
takes evasive measures—quickening his pace, pretending to tie his shoes,
crossing the street—the thief forgets the robbery motive and reacts to the
distrustful behaviour. ‘What? You think I’m going to mug you or some shit? You
better run, ’cause now I’m really going to kick your ass.’
‘Wardell
Adams?’
‘Here.’
‘Varnell
Alvarez?’
‘Aqui.’
‘Pellmell
Atkinson?’
‘Presentemente.’
‘Praise-the-Lord
Benson?’
‘Yupper.’
‘Lakeesha
Caldwell?’
‘What?’
‘Ayesha
Dunwiddy?’
‘Who
wants to know?’
‘Chocolate
Fondue Egerton?’
‘That’s
my name, ask me again and you’ll be walking with a cane.’
‘I don’t
know how to pronounce the next one.’
‘You
pronounce it like it sounds, bitch. Maritza Shakaleema Esperanza the goddess
Tlazotéotl Eladio.’
‘So
you’re here.’
‘Do crack
pipes get hot?’
Then the
gangsters trickled in, ten minutes late, tattooed and feisty. ‘Say man, woman,
teacher, whatever you call yourself. You better mark Hope-to-Die Ranford AKA
Pythagoras here and in the house. Nobody better be sitting at my desk. I had
the shit last year and I want it back for good luck.’
‘Mr
Pythagoras, take any available seat for now, OK? Who’s that with you?’
‘Why you
ask him? I can speak for my damn self. This is Velma the Ludicrous Mistress
Triple Bitch of Mischief Vinson.’
I sat
like a tiny bubble in a boiling cauldron of teenage blackness, wondering where
all the heat came from. I realized I was a cultural alloy, a mixture of
tin-hearted whiteness wrapped in blackened copperplating.
2
By high
school I was no longer the seaside bumpkin, clueless to the Byzantine ways of
the inner city. But I hadn’t completely assimilated into Hillside’s culture. I
still said ‘ant’ instead of ‘awwwnt’, ‘you guys’ rather than ‘y’all’ and wore
my pants a bit too tight, but these shortcomings were forgiven because I had
managed to attain ‘a look’. My sinewy basketball physique drew scads of
attention.
‘You play
ball? Don’t say no, you got that look. I can tell by your calves. Skinny,
powerful legs. And the way you walk. Pigeon-toed, small ass’n all. You ain’t
nothing but a ball player.’
In the
past three years, I had become part of a heroic trio of sorts: me, Nicholas
Scoby and Psycho Loco.
Scoby was
a thuggish ball player who never missed. I mean never. He sat in the back of
the class, ears sealed in a pair of top-of-the-line Stennhausen stereo
headphones and each of his twiggish limbs parked in a chair of its own. Rocking
back and forth in his seat, Nicholas Scoby seemed like an autistic hoodlum. His
pea-head lolled precariously on his wiry neck like a gyroscope, he snapped his
fingers in some haphazard pattern and muttered to himself in a beatnik
word-salad gibberish, ‘Dig it. This nigger’s tonality is wow. Like hep. It’s a
contrapuntal glissando phraseology to bopnetic postmodernism. Blow man blow.
Crazy.’ Much to the dismay of those who paid attention to the burnt-out
teachers, Scoby was a straight-A student.
Psycho
Loco’s real name was Juan Julio Sanchez. I knew all about him before I met him.
His mother used to tell me how Juan Julio’s voice was the best missionary
religion ever had. On Sundays he’d sing with the choir, and his baritone would
make the babies stop crying and the deacons start. Ms Sanchez would hold a
crucifix up to the sky and swear that drunks, bums, prostitutes, hoodlums, even
police officers would walk into the original First Ethiop Aztlan
Catholic-Baptist Church and Casa de Sanctified Holy Rolling Ecumenical
Sanctification, kneel at Juan Julio’s feet pleading forgiveness, renounce sin,
accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their saviour and put all the money they had in
the collection plate. When the service ended, the plate would be filled with
car keys, crack vials and stolen credit cards.
On the
street the angelic Juan Julio was Psycho Loco, leader of the local gang Gun Totin’
Hooligans. I’d heard how as a strong-arm man-child for a loan shark, when he
tired of a debtor’s sob story on why that week’s payment was late, he’d heat
his crucifix with a nickel-plated lighter and press the makeshift branding iron
into the victim’s cheek and scream, ‘Now you really have a cross to bear,
motherfucker!’
Psycho
Loco was my next-door neighbor and he decided he liked me. As Scoby said, ‘If
Psycho Loco says you’re his friend, there ain’t nothing you can do about it.
You’re friends ’cause he says so. Oh yeah, nigger, thirteen years old and you
involved now.’
At
Phillis Wheatley High the message was always the same. Stay in school. Don’t do
drugs. Treat our black queens with respect. I made decent money taking bets on
whether the distinguished speaker at our monthly ‘Young Black and Latino Men:
Endangered Species’ assembly would say, ‘Each one, teach one’ first or ‘There’s
an old African saying, “It takes an entire village to raise one child.”’ I
suppose I could afford to be snide. I had a personal motivational speaker,
Coach Motome Chijiwa Shimimoto. The stereotype is that most successful black
men raised by single mothers have a surrogate father who turns their life
around. A man who ‘saw their potential’, looked after them, taught them the
value of virtuous living and set them out on the path to glory with a resounding
slap on the butt. Coach Shimimoto didn’t do any of those things. He just paid
attention to me. The only time he ever told me what to do with my life was
during basketball practice. I can’t say that I learned any valuable lessons
from Coach Shimimoto. He never gave me any clichéd phrases to be repeated in
times of need, never showed me pictures of crippled kids to remind me how lucky
I was. The only thing I remember him teaching me was that as a left-hander I’d
have to draw from right to left to keep my charcoals from streaking—Coach
Shimimoto was also my art teacher.
I often
think the real reason Coach Shimimoto fêted me was to get inside Nicholas’s
head through me. Nicholas was his prized student, his ticket to high-school
coaching fame. Shimimoto knew that in thirty years reporters would call him at
home and ask what it was like to coach—if not the greatest, the most unusual
basketball player in the world. Coach had his answers all prepared; he would
tell them, ‘Nicholas doesn’t understand the game, but the game understands
him.’
Both
Nicholas and I entered tenth grade with solid basketball reputations. Nick was
the wizard and I the sorcerer’s apprentice. My duty was to get Scoby the ball
so he could score, play tough defense so the other team wouldn’t score and bow
reverentially after each dazzling feat. A collective self-esteem was at stake.
People who didn’t give a fuck about anything other than keeping their new shoes
unscuffed all of a sudden had meaning to their lives. They yelled at the referees,
sang fight songs, razzed the efforts of the other team.
Everywhere
Scoby and I went, we were Wheatley High’s main attraction. Teachers and
students treated us with unwanted reverence. The murmur of everyone clamoring
for our attention rang in my ears like a worshipping tinnitus. Girls slipped
phone numbers into my pockets and rubbed the tips of their angora nipples on my
shoulders. Boys bear-hugged us and enthusiastically replayed entire games for
our benefit.
To avoid
the incessant adulation the day before a game against South Erebus High, we
spent the lunch period in Coach Shimimoto’s art room. I doodled in Indian ink,
and Nicholas sat at the pottery wheel, shaping amorphous clay blobs. Toward the
end of the period Nicholas was pumping the pedal so fast he couldn’t get the
clay to stay on the spinning disc. ‘Fuck arts and crafts!’ he yelled as wet
slabs of clay flew across the room, flattening themselves on the walls and
windows. I’d never seen Scoby mad about anything. He was always the one who
dispensed advice and remained in control. Whenever the crew got stopped for
unjustified or justified police shakedowns, it was Scoby whispering, ‘Maintain,
maintain.’ I looked to Coach Shimimoto, but he was removing clay pancakes from
his face and motioning with his eyes for me to say something first.
‘Yo,
nigger, why you so upset? We got a game tomorrow, just cool out.’
‘Man, I’m
tired of these fanatics rubbing on me, pulling on my arms, wishing me luck. I
can’t take it. People have buttons with my face on ’em. They paint their faces
and stencil my number on their foreheads. One idiot showed me a tattoo on his
chest that said nick scoby is god.’
‘They’re
just trying to say how much they appreciate what you do. It’ll get better man,
they’ll get used to us winning.’
‘But
they’ll never get used to Scoby making every shot he takes,’ Coach Shimimoto
interrupted us.
‘Nicholas, you’re right, it’ll only get worse. You’ve got to
figure out how you can live with it.’
‘It’s not
fair. I wasn’t born to make them happy. What I look like, motherfucking Charlie
Chaplin?’
‘So miss
once in a while.’
‘I can’t.
I can’t even try. Something won’t let me.’
Scoby’s
eyes reddened and he started to sniffle. He was cracking under the pressure.
Watching Nicholas’s hands shake I realized that sometimes the worst thing a
nigger can do is perform well. Because then there is no turning back. We have
no place to hide, no Superman Fortresses of Solitude, no reclusive New England
hermitages for xenophobic geniuses like Bobby Fischer and J. D. Salinger.
Successful niggers can’t go back home and blithely disappear into the local
populace. American society reels you back into the fold: ‘Tote that barge,
shoot that basketball, lift that bale, nigger ain’t you ever heard of Dred
Scott?’
Nicholas
didn’t shoot much for the rest of the year. For us to win basketball games I
had to play like hell. Gradually I realized the decision Nicholas made was to
remove temporarily the burden of success from his shoulders and place it solely
on mine. The classroom, locker room and bathroom acclaim fell on me. When
Scoby’s name came up they all said, ‘Oh, that fool can shoot, but Gunnar has to
carry us.’ Nicholas loved the shift in fame and willingly played his part in
the role reversal, calling me ‘the Deity’ and asking me to forgive him his
sins.
There are
certain demands on a star athlete that I didn’t anticipate or enjoy. The most
arduous was having to participate in the social scene. Every weekend Scoby and
Psycho Loco pressured me to use my star status to get them retinue privileges
at the Paradise, La Cebolla Roja or the Black Lagoon. When a club manager
balked at admitting the volatile Psycho Loco into his establishment, I had to
agree to take complete responsibility for his actions, which was like asking a
dog collar to be responsible for a Rottweiler. Wringing their hands like mad
scientists they’d thank me for my kindness, ignoring the fact that I suffered
from what the American Psychiatric Association Manual of Mental
Disorders lists as Social Arrhythmia and Courtship Paralysis, meaning
I couldn’t dance and was deathly afraid of women.
I wasn’t
completely lacking in social skills. With practice I learned to serpentine
cool-as-hell through a crowded dance floor with the best of the high-school
snakes. I could hiss at young women but not much else. When the opening strains
of the latest jam crescendoed through the house, I would shout a perfunctory
‘Heeeyyy!’ showing the club-goers I was up for the downstroke and that any
moment there might be a ‘par-tay ovah heah’. Scoby and Psycho Loco would soon
abandon my hepster front for the chase; melding into the swirling mass of
bodies and leaving me to fend for myself.
Even
Psycho Loco could dance. He did this little gangster jig where he leaned back
into the cushy rhythms like he was reclining in an easy chair, kicking one foot
into the air, then the other, sipping from a bottle of contraband gin and
lemonade during the funky breakdown. Girls interested in dancing with me
propped themselves in front of me, a little closer than necessary, swayed to
the music and tried to catch my eye. I stared off in the opposite direction
pretending to be engrossed in an intricately woven bar napkin and praying she
wouldn’t be bold enough to ask for a dance. As an athlete I had a ready-made
excuse for the nervy women who did ask. ‘I can’t baby. Twisted my ankle dunking
on the Rogers brothers in last night’s game.’ I’d get a funny look in return,
and the rebuffed co-ed would return to her circle of friends. The whispers and
over-the-shoulder looks followed by phony smiles set off my social paranoia. My
auditory hallucinations cleared their throats: ‘Something wrong with that
nigger, he don’t never dance. Maybe he just shy. Maybe he’s shy? He ain’t shy
with Coach Shimimoto. That’s why Coach be sweating so much. Boy got some big
ol’ feets and hands that’s a waste of some good young nigger dick. Fucking an
old man.’ Soon Scoby and Psycho Loco would interrupt my neurotic musings. ‘Why
you ain’t dancing homes? Crazy honeys is checking you out.’
‘I don’t
feel like dancing.’
‘Are you
crazy? There some fine ladies in here. You just scared of women. Scared of
pussy.’
As the
evening wound down, the house lights dimmed to deep red haze, and the DJ began
to play the latest slow jams. I’d pray Psycho Loco would start a fight so I
could leave without having to support someone’s head on my shoulder and listen
to them warble inane love lyrics in my ear. Invariably Psycho Loco came
through, slugging some fool for stepping on his shadow or some equally petty
infraction. As the bouncers escorted us out, Psycho Loco and Scoby compared the
night’s harvest.
‘So
Gunnar, how’d you do?’
‘Do
people be staring at me when I’m out there dancing? It feels like everybody is
looking at me.’
‘First
off, you ain’t out there dancing. You out there having a brain aneurysm. You
move so crazy it looks like you caught the holy ghost. Second off, nobody is
paying any attention to your rhythmless behind ’cause they trying to get they
own mack on.’
‘Gunnar,
do you even like girls?’
‘Yes.’
Which was true, I just had yet to meet one who didn’t intimidate me into a
state of catatonia.
‘When you
gonna get a girlfriend?’
‘I had
one once in Santa Monica.’
‘What
some pasty white girl named Eileen? Please. That don’t count. Nigger, have you
ever seen any parts of the pussy?’
‘Of
course man. I’ve fucked . . . er, been fucked . . . um, been fucking . . . I is
fucking.’
‘Does the
line go up and down or from side to side?’
During
the ride home one evening Psycho Loco was leafing through a copy of Bow
and Arrow Outdoorsman, heading straight to the classified ads in the back.
‘Gunnar,
we’re gonna find you a wife.’
Somehow I
knew that Psycho Loco was right; I’d never start a romance on my own accord.
But it was difficult to accept sexual counsel from a pugnacious male who had to
be drunk to fuck and whose first rule of courtship was ‘Always make sure your
dick is out. That way no matter what happens you can say, “Well, I had my dick
out.”’
Changing
the subject, I snatched the magazine from Psycho Loco’s hands and said, ‘My
pops said Rodney King deserved that ass-kicking for resisting arrest and having
a Jehri Curl. He said some curl activator got into Officer Koon’s eyes and he
thought he’d been maced so he had to defend himself.’
I asked
Psycho Loco if the rumours about a gangland truce if the jury found the cops
innocent were true. He said that there already had been a big armistice at the
Tryst N’ Shout Motel. Bangers who had killed each other’s best friends shook
hands and hugged with unspoken apologies in their watery eyes.
‘Damn, I
hope they find those motherfuckers guilty,’ I said with surprising conviction.
‘Not me,’
said Psycho Loco. I hope those boys get off scot-free. One it’ll be good to
have a little peace in the streets, and besides, me and the fellas planning a
huge job. Going to take advantage of the civic unrest, know what I’m saying?
I
pictured Rodney King staggering in the Foothill Freeway’s breakdown lane like a
black Frankenstein; two Taser wires running fifty thousand volts of electric
democracy through his body. I wondered if the battery of the American nigger
was being recharged or drained.
3
For some
reason Coach Shimimoto was reluctant to end practice. Usually these post-season
workouts were light affairs, mostly intra-squad scrimmages followed by a
dunking contest. This one he kept prolonging with wind sprints and full-court
defensive drills. Shimimoto finally blew his whistle and motioned for the team
to gather around him. Exhausted, we flopped to the floor, sucking wind and hoping
that Coach Shimimoto would take pity on our fatigued bodies.
‘What
does concatenate mean? Tell me and you can go.’
Harriet
Montoya, the only person with strength enough to speak, raised her hand. I
didn’t have much faith she’d know the answer—yesterday she had defined ‘repeal’
as putting the skin back on an orange and peeling again, and we had to run
thirty laps backward. ‘Concatenate means together. Not like
all-in-the-same-boat together, but like connected, like a bicycle chain.’
‘Close
enough. Remember that definition, you soon-to-be revolutionaries.’
With
that, Coach dismissed us into a cool late-April afternoon.
On the
way home I was wondering what Coach meant by ‘soon-to-be revolutionaries’ when
I noticed a distant column of black smoke billowing into the dusk like a
tornado too tired to move.
‘What’s
that?’ I asked Scoby.
‘Eric
Dolphy,’ he replied, referring to the stop-and-go shrieking that was escaping
from his boom box.
‘No, I
mean that,’ I said, pointing to the noxious-looking cloud.
Scoby
didn’t know but he was more than willing to make up for his ignorance in smoke
formations by lecturing me on the relevance of Dolphy’s sonic turmoil to
teenage Negromites like ourselves. Midway through his seminar another silo of
smoke twisted into the dusk, this one closer. The driver of a run-down Nova
sped down Sawyer Drive leaning on her high-pitched horn for no apparent reason.
Scoby turned up the volume on the tape deck just a bit. Another car flew
through a stop sign then reversed. When the car drew parallel with us, the
driver flashed a gap-toothed smile, then shot a raised fist out of the window
and raced away. Soon every driver that passed was joyriding through the
streets, honking their horns and violating the traffic laws like Hollywood
stunt drivers in the big chase scene.
People
began spilling from their homes. They paced up and down the sidewalks looking
tense and unaware they’d left their front doors open. Something was wrong: no
Los Angeleno ever leaves his door open. I caught the eye of a middle-aged man
wearing white patent-leather shoes, ochre-coloured polyester pants and a Panama
hat who was standing on his front porch looking desperate for someone to talk
to.
‘What’s
happening?’ I asked.
‘Them
cracker motherfuckers did it again.’
The
Rodney King verdict; I’d completely forgotten.
‘They let
them racists go. I’m surprised the judge didn’t reprimand the peckerwood
so-called peace officers for not finishing the job.’
Let go?
What did that mean? The officers had to have been found guilty of something—obstruction
of traffic at least. Maybe if it was the maid’s day off in Simi Valley, and the
jury was in a bad mood, the most sadistic officer, Stacy Koon, would be found
guilty of all charges. I doubted the man in the patent-leather shoes. I could
hear the TV in his living room and I peeped into his doorway. The smirk on the
reporter’s face told me the man was right, even before I heard her say, ‘Not
guilty on all charges.’
I never
felt so worthless in my life. Uninvited, we walked into the man’s living room,
set our book bags on his coffee table and sat on the couch. I looked out the
window and saw a store-owner spray-paint black ownedacross her boarded-up
beauty salon. I wanted to dig out my heart and have her do the same to it,
certifying my identity in big block letters across both ventricles. I suddenly
understood why my father wore his badge so proudly. The badge protected him; in
uniform he was safe.
Sitting
on that couch watching the announcer gloat, the anger that resided in my
pacifist Negro chrysalis shed its innocuousness. I felt a glistening animosity
testing its wings. Right then I envied Psycho Loco. Psycho Loco dealt with his
rage by blaming and lashing out; there was no pretense of fairness and justice;
due process was his mood, or if he ran out of bullets while shooting at you.
Watching the acquitted officers shake hands with their attorneys and stroll
triumphantly into the April sun, I saw his brutality as a powerful, vitriolic
stimulant. I wanted to sip this effervescent bromo that cleared one’s head and
numbed the aches and pains of oppression. Psycho Loco had the satisfaction of
standing up to his enemies and listening to them scream, watching them close
their eyes for the last time. Psycho Loco had a semblance of closure and
accomplishment. He was a threat. I wanted to taste immediate vindication,
experience the rush of spitting in somebody’s, anybody’s face.
I looked
at Scoby and said, ‘Let’s break.’ We gathered our things, thanked the man for
his kindness and prepared to leave. We spent an awkward moment in silence, till
the man asked, ‘Is that Dolphy?’ Scoby nodded yes, and we made our way toward
the commotion listening to Dolphy play his horn like he was wringing a wash
rag. I couldn’t decide whether the music sounded like a death knell or the
cavalry charge for a ragtag army. We’d turned the corner on to Hoover and
Alvarado and walked into Carnival poor-people’s style. The niggers and spies
had decided to secede from the Union, armed with rifles, slingshots, bottles,
camcorders and songs of freedom. Problem was nobody knew where Fort Sumter was.
The next
afternoon Scoby and I sat in his basement watching the rest of the city burn on
television. A parade of relatives marched through his house hawking their
wares. ‘Look what I came up on.’ Holding up sweaters and jackets that smelt of
smoke for our perusal. ‘Gunnar you’d look good in this. Got a lamé collar. Bill
Cosby would wear this jammie. You Nick’s man, two dollars.’
‘Nigger
move, you in front of the TV.’
It was
hard not to be envious of anybody who had some free shit and a little crumb of
the California dream. I too wanted to ‘come up’ but I didn’t think I was a
thief. The television stations were airing live feeds from hot spots around the
city showing looters entering stores empty-handed and exiting carrying
furniture on their backs like worker ants carrying ten times their weight.
‘Hey
isn’t that the Montgomery Ward Plaza?’ The mall was about ten minutes away,
just outside the wall.
‘Yeah,
there go Technology Town.’
‘Oh shit,
fools coming up on free computers and shit.’
Scoby and
I looked each other in the eye for about a nanosecond then stormed out of the
house. Running down the streets we argued over the virtues of IBM-compatible
and Apple. ‘Dude, I’m looking for a Wizard Protean.’
‘What?
You can’t carry out a desktop. Go for a laptop. You get all the qualities of a
Protean, plus mobility. Your dumbass is trying to steal a whole mainframe.’
Coach
Shimimoto’s arduous workouts had served their purpose. We reached Technology
Town fresh and ready to celebrate Christmas in April. Leaping through the
broken windows we tumbled over a stack of plastic shopping baskets and landed
in a snowbank of styrofoam package filler. We were too late. All the presents
had been opened. The showroom was stripped bare. Broken shelving dangled from
the walls; overturned showcases spilt over on to the floor, serving as caskets
for dead batteries and the shells of busted stereo equipment. Unraveled
cassette tape hung from the overhead pipes like brown riot tinsel. Even the
ceiling fans and service phones were gone.
‘What happens
to a dream deferred?’ I said in my best classical recitation voice. Scoby
cursed and threw a nine-volt battery at my head.
‘Fuck
Langston Hughes. I bet when they rioted in Harlem, Langston got his.’
Kicking
our way through the piles of cardboard we left the store and stood in the
parking lot thinking of our next target. People were still ransacking Cribs N’
Bibs, the toddler shop, but rattles, powdered milk and designer diapers didn’t
interest us. Scoby snapped his fingers, shouted ‘What Did You Say?’ and
sprinted down toward the alley that ran behind the mall.
What Did
You Say? was a car-accessory emporium that specialized in deafeningly loud car
stereos and equally loud seat covers. I couldn’t figure out how Scoby planned
to get in the place; it was known to be impenetrable. A solid metal garage door
that had foiled the attempts of a Who’s Who of burglary specialists sealed the
front entrance. The famed barrier had withstood ramming from hijacked
semi-trucks, dynamite and every solvent from Paul Newman’s salad dressing to
150-proof rum mixed with corrosive black-hair products.
When we
got to What Did You Say? the steel door was still in place. Scoby and I put our
ears against it and heard what sounded like mice scurrying around inside. We
zipped around the back and found a small opening smashed into the cinder-block
wall, a guilty-looking sledgehammer lay atop a pile of rubble. Every ten
seconds or so a contortionist would squeeze through the hole bearing some sort
of electronic gadgetry. Standing nearby in tears was fat Reece Clinksdale.
Reece was bemoaning his girth because he was too big to fit in the hole and was
missing out on the rebellion. He wiped his eyes and stopped blubbering for a
bit.
‘You guys
going in?’
‘I guess
so,’ we answered.
‘Well you
better hurry up. I think most of the good stuff is gone.’
Reece was
right. The crawl space was starting to give birth to zoo animals. Guys were
popping head first through the hole wrapped in sheepskin and leopardskin seat
covers and looking like cuddly animals. I helped deliver a breech baby
alligator seat cover who’d decided to exit feet-first and had to be pulled
through the cement birth canal.
When the
traffic was light enough to make an entrance, Scoby and I slid through the
hole. The absolute lack of chaos was amazing. Instead of a horde of one-eyed
brigands pillaging and setting fires, the looters were very courteous, and the
plundering was orderly. Everyone waited patiently in a line that wound through
the aisles and into the storeroom. Once in the storeroom, a philanthropic soul
handed you a box off the shelf. You didn’t get your choice of goods, but no one
complained. If you wanted something else you just got in line again.
Looting
wasn’t as exciting as Scoby and I hoped it would be. Nicholas came up on a car
alarm, and I on a box of pine-tree-shaped air-fresheners. On the way back to
his neighborhood we saw Pookie Hamilton drive by in his convertible bug. I
whistled, and Pookie pulled over, waving for us to get in the back seat.
‘Where
you headed, Pook?’
‘I just
got a page from Psycho Loco. He needs some help.’
I hadn’t
forgotten about Psycho Loco’s planned big score, but the greedy look in his
eyes whenever he had talked about The Heist had told me that I didn’t want to
be involved.
‘Drop me
and Scoby off at my house.’
‘No time,
G.’
‘Well
where we going?’
‘Montgomery
Ward.’
When we
pulled into the parking lot there was Psycho Loco and his friends No M. O.
Clark and Joe Shenanigans. They were standing behind Psycho Loco’s van next to
a huge iron safe. Grimy, covered with sweat, the boys were overjoyed to see us.
This was The Heist.
‘What the
fuck? Are you motherfuckers crazy?’
‘Chill,
homes. We just want help lifting this thing in the van.’
‘How did
you get it out?’
‘Look,’
Scoby said, pointing to a set of rubber wheels attached to the bottom of the
strongbox.
I had two
thoughts. Why are all safes painted beige? And would my mother come visit me in
prison?
‘Dude, I
can’t be wearing no stonewashed prison outfit for the rest of my life. That
shit makes me itch.’
Scoby
tried to comfort me. ‘You can wear any kind of shirt you want, just no
rhinestones or metal buttons. Besides, I haven’t seen one police car the whole
day.’
He was
right. I hadn’t even noticed. The entire day had been an undeclared public
holiday. Los Angeles was a theme park, and we were spending the day in
Anarchyland. I calmed down. The safe was unbelievably heavy, which everyone but
me took as a positive sign. I thought the thing could just as easily be empty
or filled with employee time cards as stuffed with valuables.
On our
third try we almost had the safe inside the back of the van when we all heard
an extremely disheartening sound. ‘What’s that?’ everyone asked.
‘Uh, the
Doppler effect,’ I said.
‘Shit,
it’s the cops.’
With a
final strain we edged the safe on to the bumper of the van, but our knees
buckled under the weight, and the safe dropped to the ground with a heavy thud.
The sirens were getting closer. No one had the energy for another lift, but we
couldn’t leave the safe in the middle of the parking lot, not with visions of
Spanish gold doubloons dancing in our heads. I looked in the van and saw a
length of rope. How stupid we’d been. All we needed to do was tie one end to
the safe’s handle and the other end to the van’s bumper and we could drive
away, pulling the safe along behind us. I heard the cop car pull into the
parking lot. My back tightened in anticipation of hearing a gunshot or a
threatening, ‘Get your hands up and step away from the vehicle.’ What I did
hear was something I hadn’t heard in years, my father’s voice. ‘Gunnar!’ I told
the boys to keep going, that I’d distract him. I turned around to see my father
step out the car gripping a shotgun in one hand.
‘Dad.
Long time no see. Things must really be hectic if you’re out on the streets.’
I heard
the van slowly pull off, and I looked back to see the safe trailing behind it,
like a tin can tied to a car of newly-weds. When I turned to face my father,
the hard rubber butt of the shotgun crashed into my jaw. I saw a flash of white
and dropped to the pavement. His partner stepped on my ear, muffling my
father’s words. ‘You are not a Kaufman. I refuse to let you embarrass me with
your niggerish ways. And where did you get all these damn air-fresheners?’
Something
hard smacked the side of my neck, sending my tongue rolling out of my mouth
like a party favor. I could taste the salty ash on the pavement. Ash that had
drifted from fires set in anger from around the city. I remembered learning in
third grade that snakes ‘see’ and ‘hear’ with their sensitive tongues. I
imagined my tongue, almost bitten through, hearing the polyrhythms of my
father’s nightstick on my body. Through my tongue I saw my father transform
into a master Senegalese drummer beating a surrender code on a hollow log on
the banks of the muddy Gambia. A flash of white—the night of my conception, my
father twisting mama’s arm behind her back and ordering her to ‘assume the
position’. A flash of white—my father potty-training me with a slap across the
face and sticking my hand in my mushy excrement. Soon my body stopped bucking
with every blow; there was only white: no memories, no visions, only the sound
of voices.
4
Gunnar,
my young revolutionary, while you were in a coma, you got a letter from the
Nike Basketball Camp. You’ve been chosen as one of the hundred best ball
players in the nation. Actually you’re number one hundred. Coach Shimimoto
Son, your
father and I both think it’s best for you to transfer to another school. We’re
sending you to El Campesino Real in the Valley. Mom
Dude, you
got fucked up. Nicholas Scoby
You gots
to get better, cuz. We can’t figure out how to open the safe. Psycho Loco
The safe
sat in the middle of Psycho Loco’s den. Old Abuela Gloria, reportedly an expert
safecracker in Havana during Batista’s glory days, was wearing a stethoscope
and listening to the tumblers click as she spun the combination dial back and
forth.
‘Isn’t
Abuela Gloria deaf?’ I asked Ms Sanchez.
Abuela
removed the stethoscope from her ears and pulled on the latch. Nothing
happened.
Scoby was
calculating possible permutations of a combination lock numbered from zero to a
hundred. He’d already tried thirty-two thousand combinations while I was in
hospital. He knelt beside the safe flipping the dial from number to number and
shaking his cramped hands in frustration as his magic failed him.
‘Gunnar,
look at the safe, maybe you can figure out a way to open it.’
‘What I
know about opening a safe? That thing almost got me killed. I don’t give a fuck
if you never get it open.’
I was
lying, and Psycho Loco knew it. I hadn’t taken my eyes off the box since I’d
been there. I couldn’t shake the word ‘treasure’ from my head: rubies and gold
lanterns, ancient scrolls and taboo vestiges. I wanted to free the genie and
fuck up my three wishes.
I ran my
hands over the safe’s tapered edges, then stood back, waved my fingers and said
in a slow, spooky voice, ‘Open, sesame.’
‘We did
that shit already,’ said Psycho Loco. ‘Ala-kazam, hocus-pocus—we even paid that
voodoo lady on Normandie fifty dollars to open it with some of that ol’ time
Yoruba religion.’
‘What
happened?’
‘She got
chicken blood and pixie dust all over the fucking place. Damn near burnt the
house down with all the candles.’
I looked
closely at the safe. The tag dangling from the handle flapped in the current of
a draught. The tag read, montgomery ward duro-safe. this safe is
solid tungsten. airtight, fireproof, and guaranteed to withstand pressure up to 3500
points per square inch.
I knew
there had to be a way to open it; this was a Montgomery Ward product. Nothing
they made worked. Their television sets came with wire hangers and a pair of
pliers to turn the channel after the knobs fell off.
I had an
idea. I asked Abuela Gloria for her safe-cracking kit. I set the small metal
box about three feet behind the safe and asked Scoby, Ms Sanchez and Psycho
Loco to help it on to its back. There, on the bottom, on a dirty white label,
was written:
4 turns
to the right to 67
3 turns to the left to 23
2 turns to the right to 55
1 turn to the left to 63
3 turns to the left to 23
2 turns to the right to 55
1 turn to the left to 63
The best
thing about treasure is the assortment. I didn’t think gold bars really
existed. I thought they were a movie prop used to speed up the plot. Yet there
was a shoebox full of domino-sized ingots stamped montgomery ward 24K.
Stacks of dusty paper money sat in the back. Silver and platinum rings and
brooches, and tiaras inlaid with rubies, emeralds and diamonds glittered under
the lamplight.
It was
surreal to watch Psycho Loco divide the bounty. Tossing stacks of money and
gold bars around the room like so many paperweights. We played The
Price is Right for the jewelry. Whoever was closest to guessing the
stickered price won the bauble.
For a
while living in Hillside was like living in the Old West in a thriving
goldmining town’s bubble economy. Psycho Loco customized his van. Scoby bought
a car and every jazz CD on his extensive list. Joe Shenanigans moved to
Brooklyn and tried to join the Mafia. Ms Sanchez went door-to-door selling jewelry
at discount prices. No M. O. Clark got plastic surgery to remove his
fingerprints. His hands looked like they’d been steamrolled, sanded down then
varnished. He got a kick out of harassing the palm readers on Hollywood
Boulevard.
I refused
any payment for my part in The Heist. I had wanted only to satisfy my
curiosity, not fence gold bars and pray that the money I was spending was
untraceable.
I spent
the last two weeks of my sixteenth summer away at camp, not shooting rapids and
learning Indian folk songs, but shooting baskets and learning when to
double-down and give weak-side help.
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