The Sellout

One

I suppose that’s exactly the problem — I wasn’t raised to know any better. My father was (Carl Jung, rest his soul) a social scientist of some renown. As the founder and, to my knowledge, sole practitioner of the field of Liberation Psychology, he liked to walk around the house, aka “the Skinner box,” in a laboratory coat. Where I, his gangly, absentminded black lab rat was homeschooled in strict accordance with Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. I wasn’t fed; I was presented with lukewarm appetitive stimuli. I wasn’t punished, but broken of my unconditioned reflexes. I wasn’t loved, but brought up in an atmosphere of calculated intimacy and intense levels of commitment.

We lived in Dickens, a ghetto community on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, and as odd as it might sound, I grew up on a farm in the inner city. Founded in 1868, Dickens, like most California towns except for Irvine, which was established as a breeding ground for stupid, fat, ugly, white Republicans and the chihuahuas and East Asian refugees who love them, started out as an agrarian community. The city’s original charter stipulated that “Dickens shall remain free of Chinamen, Spanish of all shades, dialects, and hats, Frenchmen, redheads, city slickers, and unskilled Jews.” However, the founders, in their somewhat limited wisdom, also provided that the five hundred acres bordering the canal be forever zoned for something referred to as “residential agriculture,” and thus my neighborhood, a ten-square-block section of Dickens unofficially known as the Farms was born. You know when you’ve entered the Farms, because the city sidewalks, along with your rims, car stereo, nerve, and progressive voting record, will have vanished into air thick with the smell of cow manure and, if the wind is blowing the right direction — good weed. Grown men slowly pedal dirt bikes and fixies through streets clogged with gaggles and coveys of every type of farm bird from chickens to peacocks. They ride by with no hands, counting small stacks of bills, looking up just long enough to raise an inquisitive eyebrow and mouth: “Wassup? Q’vo?” Wagon wheels nailed to front-yard trees and fences lend the ranch-style houses a touch of pioneer authenticity that belies the fact that every window, entryway, and doggie door has more bars on it and padlocks than a prison commissary. Front porch senior citizens and eight-year-olds who’ve already seen it all sit on rickety lawn chairs whittling with switchblades, waiting for something to happen, as it always did.

For the twenty years I knew him, Dad had been the interim dean of the department of psychology at West Riverside Community College. For him, having grown up as a stable manager’s son on a small horse ranch in Lexington, Kentucky, farming was nostalgic. And when he came out west with a teaching position, the opportunity to live in a black community and breed horses was too good to pass up, even if he’d never really been able to afford the mortgage and the upkeep.

Maybe if he’d been a comparative psychologist, some of the horses and cows would’ve lived past the age of three and the tomatoes would’ve had fewer worms, but in his heart he was more interested in black liberty than in pest management and the well-being of the animal kingdom. And in his quest to unlock the keys to mental freedom, I was his Anna Freud, his little case study, and when he wasn’t teaching me how to ride, he was replicating famous social science experiments with me as both the control and the experimental group. Like any “primitive” Negro child lucky enough to reach the formal operational stage, I’ve come to realize that I had a shitty upbringing that I’ll never be able to live down.

I suppose if one takes into account the lack of an ethics committee to oversee my dad’s childrearing methodologies, the experiments started innocently enough. In the early part of the twentieth century, the behaviorists Watson and Rayner, in an attempt to prove that fear was a learned behavior, exposed nine-month-old “Little Albert” to neutral stimuli like white rats, monkeys, and sheaves of burned newsprint. Initially, the baby test subject was unperturbed by the series of simians, rodents, and flames, but after Watson repeatedly paired the rats with unconscionably loud noises, over time “Little Albert” developed a fear not only of white rats but of all things furry. When I was seven months, Pops placed objects like toy police cars, cold cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Richard Nixon campaign buttons, and a copy of The Economist in my bassinet, but instead of conditioning me with a deafening clang, I learned to be afraid of the presented stimuli because they were accompanied by him taking out the family.38 Special and firing several window-rattling rounds into the ceiling, while shouting, “Nigger, go back to Africa!” loud enough to make himself heard over the quadraphonic console stereo blasting “Sweet Home Alabama” in the living room. To this day I’ve never been able to sit through even the most mundane TV crime drama, I have a strange affinity for Neil Young, and whenever I have trouble sleeping, I don’t listen to recorded rainstorms or crashing waves but to the Watergate tapes.

Family lore has it that from ages one to four, he’d tied my right hand behind my back so I’d grow up to be left-handed, right-brained, and well-centered. I was eight when my father wanted to test the “bystander effect” as it applies to the “black community.” He replicated the infamous Kitty Genovese case with a prepubescent me standing in for the ill-fated Ms. Genovese, who, in 1964, was robbed, raped, and stabbed to death in the apathetic streets of New York, her plaintive Psychology 101 textbook cries for help ignored by dozens of onlookers and neighborhood residents. Hence, the “bystander effect”: the more people around to provide help, the less likely one is to receive help. Dad hypothesized that this didn’t apply to black people, a loving race whose very survival has been dependent on helping one another in times of need. So he made me stand on the busiest intersection in the neighborhood, dollar bills bursting from my pockets, the latest and shiniest electronic gadgetry jammed into my ear canals, a hip-hop heavy gold chain hanging from my neck, and, inexplicably, a set of custom-made carpeted Honda Civic floor mats draped over my forearm like a waiter’s towel, and as tears streamed from my eyes, my own father mugged me. He beat me down in front of a throng of bystanders, who didn’t stand by for long. The mugging wasn’t two punches to the face old when the people came, not to my aid, but to my father’s. Assisting him in my ass kicking, they happily joined in with flying elbows and television wrestling throws. One woman put me in a well-executed and, in retrospect, merciful, rear-naked chokehold. When I regained consciousness to see my father surveying her and the rest of my attackers, their faces still sweaty and chests still heaving from the efforts of their altruism, I imagined that, like mine, their ears were still ringing with my high-pitched screams and their frenzied laughter.

“How satisfied were you with your act of selflessness?”

Not at all Somewhat satisfied Very satisfied

1 2 3 4 5

On the way home, Pops put a consoling arm around my aching shoulders and delivered an apologetic lecture about his failure to take into account the “bandwagon effect.”

Then there was the time he wanted to test “Servility and Obedience in the Hip-hop Generation.” I must’ve been about ten when my father sat me down in front of a mirror, pulled a Ronald Reagan Halloween mask over his head, pinned a defunct pair of Trans World Airlines captain wings to his lab coat, and proclaimed himself a “white authority figure.” “The nigger in the mirror is a stupid nigger,” he explained to me in that screechy, cloying “white voice” comedians of color use, while attaching a set of electrodes to my temples. The wires led to a sinister-looking console filled with buttons, dials, and old-fashioned voltage gauges.

“You will ask the boy in the mirror a series of questions about his supposed nigger history from the sheet on the table. If he gets the question wrong or fails to answer in ten seconds, you will press the red button, delivering an electric shock that will increase in intensity with each wrong answer.”

I knew better than to beg for mercy, for mercy would be a rant about getting what I deserved for reading the one comic book I ever owned. Batman #203, Spectacular Secrets of the Batcave Revealed, a moldy, dog-eared back issue someone had thrown into the farmyard and I brought inside and nursed back to readability like a wounded piece of literature. It was the first thing I had ever read from the outside world, and when I whipped it out during a break in my homeschooling, my father confiscated it. From then on, whenever I didn’t know something or had a bad day in the neighborhood, he’d wave the comic’s half-torn cover in my face. “See, if you weren’t wasting your life reading this bullshit, you’d realize Batman ain’t coming to save your ass or your people!”

I read the first question.

“Prior to declaring independence in 1957, the West African nation of Ghana was comprised of what two colonies?”

I didn’t know the answer. I cocked my ears for the roar of the rocket-propelled Batmobile screeching around the corner, but could only hear my father’s stopwatch ticking down the seconds. I gritted my teeth, placed my finger over the red button, and waited for the time limit to expire.

“The answer is Togoland and the Gold Coast.”

Obediently, as my father predicted, I pressed the button. The needles on the dial and my spine both straightened, while I watched myself in the mirror jitterbug violently for a second or two.

Jesus.

“How many volts was that?” I asked, my hands shaking uncontrollably.

“The subject will ask only the questions that are listed on the sheet,” my dad said coldly, reaching past me to turn a black dial a few clicks to the right, so that the indicator now rested on XXX. “Now, please read the next question.”

I began to suffer from a blurring of vision I suspected was psychosomatic, but nonetheless everything was as out of focus as a five-dollar bootleg video on a swap-meet flat screen, and to read the next question I had to hold the quivering paper to my nose.

“Of the 23,000 eighth-grade students who took the entrance exam for admission into Stuyvesant High, New York’s most elite public high school, how many African-Americans scored high enough to qualify for admission?”

When I finished reading, my nose began to bleed, red droplets of blood trickling from my left nostril and plopping onto the table in perfect one-second intervals. Eschewing his stopwatch, my father started the countdown. I glanced suspiciously at him. The question was too topical. Obviously he’d been reading The New York Times at breakfast. Prepping for the day’s experiment by looking for racial fodder over a bowl of Rice Krispies. Flipping from page to page with a speed and rage that caused the paper’s sharp corners to snap, crackle, and pop in the morning air.

What would Batman do if he rushed into the kitchen right then and saw a father electrocuting his son for the good of science? Why, he’d open up his utility belt and bust out some of those tear-gas pellets, and while my dad was choking on the fumes, he’d finish asphyxiating him, assuming there was enough bat rope to tie around his fat-ass hot-dog neck; then he’d burn out his eyeballs with the laser torch, use the miniature camera to take some pictures for bat-posterity, then steal Pop’s classic, only-driven-on-trips-to-white-neighborhoods sky-blue Karmann Ghia convertible with the skeleton keys, and we’d bone the fuck out. That’s what Batman would’ve done. But me, cowardly batfag that I was and still am, I could only think to question the question’s shoddy methodology. For instance, how many black students had taken the admissions test? What was the average class size at this Stuyvesant High?

But this time, before the tenth drop of blood had landed on the table, and before my father could blurt out the answer (seven), I pressed the red button, self-administering a nerve-shattering, growth-stunting electric shock of a voltage that would’ve frightened Thor and lobotomized an already sedated educated class, because now I, too, was curious. I wanted to see what happens when you bequeath a ten-year-old black boy to science.

What I discovered was that the phrase “evacuate one’s bowels” is a misnomer, because the opposite was true, my bowels evacuated me. It was a feces retreat comparable to the great evacuations of history. Dunkirk. Saigon. New Orleans. But unlike the Brits, the Vietnamese capitalists, and flooded-out residents of the Ninth Ward, the occupants of my intestinal tract had nowhere to go. What runny parts of that fetid tidal wave of shit and urine that didn’t encamp itself about my buttocks and balls ran down my legs and pooled in and around my sneakers. Not wanting to hinder the integrity of his experiment, my father simply pinched his nose shut and motioned for me to proceed. Thank goodness, I knew the answer to the third question, “How many Chambers are in the Wu-Tang?” because if I hadn’t, my brain would be the ash-gray color and consistency of a barbecue briquette on the Fifth of July.

My crash course in childhood development ended two years later, when Dad tried to replicate Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s study of color consciousness in black children using white and black dolls. My father’s version, of course, was a little more revolutionary. A tad more modern. While the Clarks sat two cherubic, life-sized, saddle-shoe-shod dolls, one white and one colored, in front of schoolchildren and asked them to choose the one they preferred, my father placed two elaborate dollscapes in front of me and asked me, “With whom, with what social-cultural subtext are you down with, son?”

Dollscape I featured Ken and Malibu Barbie dressed in matching bathing suits, appropriately snorkeled and goggled, cooling by the Dream House pool. In Dollscape II, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, and a brown-skinned, egg-shaped Weeble toy were running (and wobbling) through a swampy thicket from a pack of plastic German shepherds leading an armed lynch party comprised of my G.I. Joes hooded in Ku Klux Klan sheets. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a small white Christmas ornament that spun slowly over the bog, glittering and sparkling like a disco ball in the afternoon sun.

“That’s the North Star. They’re running toward the North Star. Toward freedom.”

I picked up Martin, Malcolm, and Harriet, teasing my dad by asking, “What are these, inaction figures?” Martin Luther King, Jr., looked okay. Stylishly dressed in a glossy black tight-fitting suit, a copy of Gandhi’s autobiography glued to one hand and a microphone in the other. Malcolm was similarly outfitted, but was bespectacled and holding a burning Molotov cocktail that was slowly melting his hand. The smiling, racially ambiguous Weeble, which looked suspiciously like a boyhood version of my father, stayed true to its advertising slogan by wobbling and never falling down, whether balanced precariously in the palm of my hand or chased by the knights of white supremacy. There was something wrong with Ms. Tubman, though. She was outfitted in a form-fitting burlap sack, and I don’t remember any of my history primers describing the woman known as Moses as being statuesque with a 36–24–36 hourglass figure, long silky hair, plucked eyebrows, blue eyes, dick-sucking lips, and pointy titties.

“Dad, you painted Barbie black.”

“I wanted to maintain the beauty threshold. Establish a baseline of cuteness so that you couldn’t say one doll was prettier than the other.”

Plantation Barbie had a string coming out of her back. I pulled it. “Math is hard, let’s go shopping,” she said in a squeaky singsong voice. I set the black heroes back down in the kitchen table swamp, moving their limbs so that they resumed their runaway poses.

“I’m down with Ken and Barbie.”

My father lost his scientific objectivity and grabbed me by the shirt. “What? Why?” he yelled.

“Because the white people got better accessories. I mean, look. Harriet Tubman has a gas lantern, a walking stick, and a compass. Ken and Barbie have a dune buggy and speedboat! It’s really no contest.”

The next day my father burned his “findings” in the fireplace. Even at the junior college level it’s publish or perish. But more than the fact he’d never get a parking space with his name on it or a reduced course load, I was a failed social experiment. A statistically insignificant son who’d shattered his hopes for both me and the black race. He made me turn in my dream book. Stopped calling my allowance “positive reinforcement” and began referring to it as “restitution.” While he never stopped pushing the “book learning,” it wasn’t long after this that he bought my first spade, pitchfork, and sheep-shearing razor. Sending me into the fields with a pat on the tush and Booker T. Washington’s famous quote pinned to my denim overalls for encouragement, “Cast down your bucket where you are.”

* * *

If there is a heaven worth the effort that people make to get there, then I hope for my father’s sake there’s a celestial psychology journal. One that publishes the results of failed experiments, because acknowledging unsubstantiated theories and negative results is just as important as publishing studies proving red wine is the cure-all we’d always pretended it was.

My memories of my father aren’t all bad. Though technically I was an only child, Daddy, like many black men, had lots of kids. The citizens of Dickens were his progeny. While he wasn’t very good with horses, he was known around town as the Nigger Whisperer. Whenever some nigger who’d “done lost they motherfucking mind” needed to be talked down from a tree or freeway overpass precipice, the call would go out. My father would grab his social psychology bible, The Planning of Change, by Bennis, Benne, and Robert Chin, a woefully underappreciated Chinese-American psychologist my dad had never met but claimed as his mentor. Most kids got bedtime stories and fairy tales; I had to fall asleep to readings from chapters with titles like “The Utility of Models of the Environments of Systems for Practitioners.” My father was nothing if not a practitioner. I can’t remember a time when he didn’t bring me along on a nigger whisper. On the drive over he’d brag that the black community was a lot like him — ABD.

“All but dissertation?”

“All but defeated.”

When we arrived, he’d sit me on the roof of a nearby minivan or stand me atop an alleyway Dumpster, hand me a legal pad, and tell me to take notes. Among all the flashing sirens, the crying and broken glass crunching softly under his buckskin shoes, I’d be so scared for him. But Daddy had a way of approaching the unapproachable. His face sympathetic and sullen, palms turned up like a dashboard Jesus figurine, he’d walk toward some knife-wielding lunatic whose pupils were dilated to the size of atoms smashed by a quart of Hennessy XO and a twelve-pack light-beer chaser. Ignoring the bloodstained work uniform caked in brain and fecal matter, he’d hug the person like he was greeting an old friend. People thought it was his selflessness that allowed him to get so close, but to me it was his voice that got him over. Doo-wop bass deep, my father spoke in F-sharp. A resonant low-pitched tone that rooted you in place like a bobby-socked teenager listening to the Five Satins sing “In the Still of the Night.” It’s not music that soothes the savage beast but the systematic desensitization. And Father’s voice had a way of relaxing the enraged and allowing them to confront their fears anxiety-free.

When I was in grade school, I knew from how the taste of the pomegranates would bring you to tears, from the way the summer sun turned our Afros blood-orange red, and from how giddy my father would get whenever he talked about Dodger Stadium, white Zinfandel, and the latest green flash sunset he’d seen from the summit of Mount Wilson that California was a special place. And if you think about it, pretty much everything that made the twentieth century bearable was invented in a California garage: the Apple computer, the Boogie Board, and gangster rap. Thanks to my dad’s career in nigger-whispering, I was there for the birth of the latter, when at six o’clock on a cold, dark ghetto morning two blocks down from where I live, Carl “Kilo G” Garfield, hallucinating high on his own supply and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s brooding lyricism, burst out of his garage squinting into his Moleskin, a smoldering crack pipe dangling from fingertips. It was the height of the crack rock era. I was about ten when he clambered into the bed of his tricked-out, hot-rod yellow Toyota pickup truck, the TO and the TA buffed out and painted over so that the brand name on the tailgate read just YO, and began reciting his verse at the top of his lungs, the slurred iambic pentameter punctuated with gun claps from his nickel-plated.38 and pleas from his mama to take his naked ass inside.

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT-SKINNED SPADE

Half a liter, half a liter,

Half a liter onward

All in the alley of Death

Rode the Olde English Eight Hundred.

Forward, the Light-skinned Spade!

“Charge for the Bloods!” he said:

Into the alley of Death

Rode the Olde English Eight Hundred …

When the SWAT team finally arrived on the scene, taking cover behind patrol car doors and the sycamore trees, clutching their assault rifles to their chests, none of them could stop giggling long enough to take the kill shot.

Theirs not to reason what the fuck,

Theirs but to shoot and duck:

Niggers to the right of them

Niggers to the left of them,

Niggers in front of them

Partied and blundered

Bumrush’d at caps and hollow point shell

While hooptie and hoodlum fell

They that had banged so well

Came thro’ the jaws of Death

Back from the ho’s of Hell,

All that was left of them

Left of the Olde English Eight Hundred.

And when my father, the Nigger Whisperer — that beatific smile splashed across his face — eased his way past the police barricade, put a tweed-jacketed arm around the broken-down drug dealer, and spoke some whispered profundity into his ear, Kilo G blinked blankly like a stage-show volunteer struck dumb by an Indian casino hypnotist, then calmly handed over his gun and the keys to his heart. The police closed in for the arrest, but my father asked them to stay back, beckoning Kilo to finish his poem, even joining in at the end of each line, pretending he knew the words.

When can their shine and buzz fade?

Oh the buckwild charge they made!

All the motherfuckin’ world wondered.

Respect the charge they made

Respect the charge of the Light-skinned Spade

The noble now empty Olde English Eight Hundred.

The police vans and cruisers disappeared into the morning haze, leaving my father, godlike, alone in the middle of the street, reveling in his humanitarianism. Cockily, he turned toward me. “You know what I said to get that psychotic motherfucker to lower his gun?”

“What did you say, Daddy?”

“I said, ‘Brother, you have to ask yourself two questions, Who am I? And how may I become myself?’ That’s basic person-centered therapeutics. You want the client to feel important, to feel that he or she is in control of the healing process. Remember that shit.”

I wanted to ask him why he never spoke to me in the same reassuring tone that he used with his “clients,” but I knew, instead of an answer, I’d get the belt, and my healing process would involve Mercurochrome and, in place of being grounded, a sentence of five to no less than three weeks of Jungian active imagination. In the distance, hurtling away from me like some distant spiral galaxy, the red and blue sirens spun silently but brilliantly, lighting up the mist of the morning marine layer like some inner-city aurora borealis. I fingered a bullet hole in the tree bark, thinking that like the slug buried ten rings deep in the trunk, I’d never leave this neighborhood. That I’d go to the local high school. Graduate in the middle of my class, another Willie Lump Lump with a six-line résumé rife with spelling errors, trekking back and forth between the Job Center, the strip club parking lot, and the civil service exam tutorials. I’d marry, fuck, and kill Marpessa Delissa Dawson, the bitch next door and my one and only love. Have kids. Threaten them with military school and promises not to bail them out if they ever got arrested. I’d be the type of nigger who played pool at the titty bar and cheated on his wife with the blond cheese girl from the Trader Joe’s on National and Westwood Boulevards. I’d stop pestering my father about my missing mother, finally admitting to myself that motherhood, like the artistic trilogy, is overrated. After a lifetime of beating myself up for never having been breast-fed or finishing The Lord of the Rings, Paradise, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, eventually, like all lower-middle-class Californians, I’d die in the same bedroom I’d grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that’ve been there since the ’68 quake. So introspective questions like “Who am I? And how can I be that person?” didn’t pertain to me then, because I already knew the answer. Like the entire town of Dickens, I was my father’s child, a product of my environment, and nothing more. Dickens was me. And I was my father. Problem is, they both disappeared from my life, first my dad, and then my hometown, and suddenly I had no idea who I was, and no clue how to become myself.

Two

Westside, nigger! What?

Three

The three basic laws of ghetto physics are: Niggers in your face tend to stay in your face; no matter where the sun is in the sky, the time is always “Half past a monkey’s ass and a quarter to his balls”; and the third is that whenever someone you love has been shot, invariably you will be back home on winter break, halfway through your junior year of college, taking the horse on a little afternoon ride to rendezvous with your father for a meeting of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, the local think tank, where he and the rest of the neighborhood savants will ply you with cider, cinnamon rolls, and conversion therapy. (Not that your dad thinks that you’re gay, but he’s worried that you never stay out past eleven and the word “booty” doesn’t seem to be in your vocabulary.) It’s a cold night. You’re minding your own business, savoring the last of your vanilla shake, when you come upon a drove of detectives huddled around the body. You dismount. Step closer and recognize a shoe, or a shirtsleeve, or a piece of jewelry. My father was facedown in the intersection. I recognized him by his fist, cocked and knuckled up tight, the veins on the back of his hand still bulging and full. I compromised the crime scene by picking lint off his matted Afro, straightening the rumpled collar of his Oxford shirt, brushing the pebbles of gravel from his cheek, and, according to the police report, most egregiously by sticking my hand in the blood pooled around his body, which to my surprise was cold. Not hot, roiling with the black anger and lifelong frustration of a decent, albeit slightly crazy man who never became what he thought he was.

“You the son?”

The detective looked me up and down. His brow wrinkled, his eyes flicking back and forth from identifying feature to identifying feature. Behind the dismissive smirk I could almost see his brain cross-referencing my scars, height, and build with some database of wanted felons filed inside his head.

“Yes, I am.”

“You something special?”

“Huh?”

“The officers involved said that when he charged them, he shouted, and I quote, ‘I’m warning you, you anal-retentive, authoritarian archetypes, you don’t know who my son is!’ So, you someone special?”

Who am I? And how can I be that person?

“No, I’m no one special.”

You’re supposed to cry when your dad dies. Curse the system because your father has died at the hands of the police. Bemoan being lower-middle-class and colored in a police state that protects only rich white people and movie stars of all races, though I can’t think of any Asian-American ones. But I didn’t cry. I thought his death was a trick. Another one of his elaborate schemes to educate me on the plight of the black race and to inspire me to make something of myself, I half expected him to get up, brush himself off, and say, “See, nigger, if this could happen to the world’s smartest black man, just imagine what could happen to your dumb ass. Just because racism is dead don’t mean they still don’t shoot niggers on sight.”

Now, if I had my druthers, I couldn’t care less about being black. To this day, when the census form arrives in the mail, under the “RACE” question I check the box marked “Some other race” and proudly write in “Californian.” Of course, two months later, a census worker shows up at my door, takes one look at me, and says, “You foul nigger. As a black man, what do you have to say for yourself?” And as a black man, I never have anything to say for myself. Hence, the need for a motto, which, if we had, I’d raise my fist, shout it out, and slam the door in the government’s face. But we don’t. So I mumble Sorry and scribble my initials next to the box marked “Black, African-American, Negro, coward.”

No, what little inspiration I have in life comes not from any sense of racial pride. It stems from the same age-old yearning that has produced great presidents and great pretenders, birthed captains of industry and captains of football; that Oedipal yen that makes men do all sorts of shit we’d rather not do, like try out for basketball and fistfight the kid next door because in this family we don’t start shit but we damn sure finish it. I speak only of that most basic of needs, the child’s need to please the father.

Many fathers foster that need in their children through a wanton manipulation that starts in infancy. They dote on the kids with airplane spins, ice cream cones on cold days, and weekend custody trips to the Salton Sea and the science museum. The incessant magic tricks that produced dollar pieces out of thin air and the open-house mind games that made you think that the view from the second-floor Tudor-style miracle in the hills, if not the world, would soon be yours are designed to fool us into believing that without daddies and the fatherly guidance they provide, the rest of our lives will be futile Mickey Mouseless I-told-ya-so existences. But later in adolescence, after one too many accidental driveway basketball elbows, drunken midnight slaps to the upside of our heads, puffs of crystal meth exhaled in our faces, jalapeño peppers snapped in half and ground into our lips for saying “fuck” when you were only trying to be like Daddy, you come to realize that the frozen niceties and trips to the drive-thru car wash were bait-and-switch parenting. Ploys and cover-ups for their reduced sex drives, stagnant take-home pay, and their own inabilities to live up to their father’s expectations. The Oedipal yen to please Father is so powerful that it holds sway even in a neighborhood like mine, where fatherhood for the most part happens in absentia, yet nevertheless the kids sit dutifully by the window at night waiting for Daddy to come home. Of course, my problem was that Daddy was always home.

After all the evidence photos had been taken, the witnesses interviewed, and macabre homicide jokes cracked, without dropping my shake, I lifted my father’s bullet-riddled body up by the underarms and dragged his heels through the chalk outline, through the yellow numbered shell-casing markers, through the intersection, the parking lot, and the glass double doors. I sat my father down at his favorite table, ordered his “usual,” two chocolate frosteds and a large milk, and placed it in front of him. Since he had arrived thirty-five minutes late and dead, the meeting was already in progress, chaired by Foy Cheshire, fading TV personality, erstwhile friend of my father, and a man all too anxious to fill the void in leadership. There was a brief moment of awkwardness. The skeptical Dum Dums looking at the heavyset Foy like the nation must have looked to Andrew Johnson after Lincoln had been assassinated.

I loudly slurped up the dregs of my shake. The signal to carry on, because that’s the way my father would’ve wanted it.

The Dum Dum Donut revolution must go on.

My father founded the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals way back when, when he noticed that the local Dum Dum Donuts franchise was the only non-Latino or black-owned business that wasn’t burned and pillaged in the riots. In fact, looters, police officers, and firemen alike used the twenty-four-hour drive-thru window to fuel up on crullers, cinnamon twists, and the surprisingly good lemonade as they fought off the conflagration, the fatigue, and the pesky news crews who asked anyone within arm’s length of a microphone, “Do you think the riots will change anything?”

“Well, I’m on TV, ain’t I, bitch?”

In all its years of existence, Dum Dum Donuts has never been robbed, burglarized, egged, or vandalized. And to this day, the franchise’s art deco facade remains graffiti and piss-stain free. Customers don’t park in the handicapped spot. Bicyclists leave their vehicles unlocked and unattended, stuffed neatly into the rack like Dutch cruisers parked at an Amsterdam train station. There’s something tranquil, almost monastic, about the inner-city donut shop. It’s clean. Spotless. The employees are always sane and respectful. Maybe it’s the muted lighting or the bright decor, whose color scheme is designed to be emblematic of a maple frosted with rainbow sprinkles. Whatever it is, my father recognized the donut shop was the one place in Dickens where niggers knew how to act. People passed the non-dairy creamer. Strangers politely pointed to the tip of your nose and made the universal sign for “Brush the powdered sugar off your face.” In 7.81 square miles of vaunted black community, the 850 square feet of Dum Dum Donuts was the only place in the “community” where one could experience the Latin root of the word, where a citizen could revel in common togetherness. So one rainy Sunday afternoon, not long after the tanks and media attention had left, my father ordered his usual. He sat at the table nearest the ATM and said aloud, to no one in particular, “Do you know that the average household net worth for whites is $113,149 per year, Hispanics $6,325, and black folks $5,677?”

“For real?”

“What’s your source material, nigger?”

“The Pew Research Center.”

Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center, and hearing this, the concerned patrons turned around in their squeaky plastic seats as best they could, given that donut shop swivel chairs swivel only six degrees in either direction. Pops politely asked the manager to dim the lights. I switched on the overhead projector, slid a transparency over the glass, and together we craned our necks toward the ceiling, where a bar graph titled “Income Disparity as Determined by Race” hovered overhead like some dark, damning, statistical cumulonimbus cloud threatening to rain on our collective parades.

“I was wondering what that li’l nigger was doing in a donut shop with a damn overhead projector.”

Next thing the people knew, my father, interspersed with a macroeconomics circulation flowchart there, a sketch of Milton Friedman here, was facilitating an impromptu seminar about the evils of deregulation and institutional racism. How it wasn’t the Keynesian lapdogs so beloved by the banks and the media who predicted the most recent financial meltdown but the behavioral economists who knew that the market isn’t swayed by interest rates and fluctuations in GDP, rather by greed, fear, and fiscal illusion. The discussion grew animated. Their mouths stuffed with pastries, their lips flaked with coconut shavings, the Dum Dum Donuts patrons decried low-interest checking and the nerve of the goddamn cable company to charge late fees for not promptly paying ahead of time in July for services not rendered until August. One woman, her jowls filled to near bursting with macaroons, asked my father, “How much the Chinos make?”

“Well, Asian men earn more than any other demographic.”

“Even the faggots?” shouted the assistant manager. “You sure Asians make more than the faggots? ’Cause I hear faggots be making cash hand over fist.”

“Yes, even the homosexuals, but remember, Asian men have no power.”

“And what about the gay Asian males? Have you done a regression analysis controlling for race and sexual orientation?” That insightful comment came from Foy Cheshire, about ten years older than my dad, standing next to the water fountain, hands in his pockets, and wearing a wool sweater, even though it was 75 degrees outside. This was way before the money and fame. Back then he was an assistant professor in urban studies, at UC Brentwood, living in Larchmont with the rest of the L.A. intellectual class, and hanging out in Dickens doing field research for his first book, Blacktopolis: The Intransigence of African-American Urban Poverty and Baggy Clothes. “I think an examination of the confluence of independent variables on income could result in some interesting r coefficients. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised by p values in the.75 range.”

Despite the smug attitude, Pops took a liking to Foy right away. Though Foy was born and raised in Michigan, it wasn’t often Dad found somebody in Dickens who knew the difference between a t-test and an analysis of variance. After debriefing over a box of donut holes, everyone — locals and Foy included — agreed to meet on a regular basis, and the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals were born. But where my father saw an opportunity for information exchange, public advocacy, and communal counsel, Foy saw a midlife springboard to fame. Things between the two of them started amicably enough. They strategized and chased women together. But after a few years, Foy Cheshire got famous and my father never did. Foy was no deep thinker, but back then he was infinitely better organized than my dad, whose main strength was also his biggest weakness — he was way ahead of his time. While my dad was writing incomprehensible and unpublishable theories linking black oppression, game and social learning theory, Foy hosted a television talk show. Interviewing B-list celebrities and political figures, writing magazine articles, and taking meetings in Hollywood.

Once, while watching my father typing away at his desk, I asked him where his ideas came from. He turned around, his tongue thick with Scotch whiskey, and said, “The real question is not where do ideas come from but where do they go.”

“So where do they go?”

“Punk motherfuckers like Foy Cheshire steal them and make not-so-small fortunes off your shit and invite you to the launch party like nothing happened.”

The idea that Foy stole from my father was an award-winning Saturday-morning cartoon called The Black Cats ’n’ Jammin’ Kids, a show that had been syndicated around the world, dubbed into seven languages, and in the late mid-90s made Foy enough money to buy a dream house in the hills. My father never said anything in public. Never confronted Foy at the meetings, because, as he put it, “our people are in dire need of everything except acrimony.” And in later years, when L.A. had turned Foy out like the small-town runaway he was at heart, after he’d lost his bankroll to a drug habit and a series of freckle-faced Creole L.A. women, been cheated out of his residuals by the production company, and had everything but his house and car seized by the IRS for tax evasion, my father kept quiet. When, gun to temple, Foy, flat broke and embarrassed, called to ask my dad to nigger-whisper him out of his suicidal funk, my father maintained patient-doctor confidentiality. Kept silent about the night sweats, the voices, the narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis, and the three-week psychiatric hospitalization. And the night my devoutly atheist father died, Foy prayed and spoke over him, hugged his lifeless body to his chest, and then acted as if the blood on his sparkling white Hugo Boss shirt was his own. You could see in his face that, despite his speech and poignant words about my father’s death symbolizing black injustice, deep down he was happy my dad was gone. Because, with my dad’s death, his secrets were safe, and maybe his grandiose Robespierre pipe dreams about the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals being the black equivalent to the Jacobins might come true.

As the Dum Dums debated how to mete out a measure of revenge, I adjourned the meeting early by dragging my dad’s body past the drink cooler and placing his corpse on the rear end of my horse, facedown on the rump, like in the cowboy movies, his arms and legs dangling in the air. At first the members tried to stop me. Because how dare I remove the martyr before they had an opportunity for a photo op. Then the police took their turn, blocking the streets with their cars so that I couldn’t pass. I cried and cursed. Circled my mount in the intersection and threatened anyone who came near me with a horseshoe kick to the forehead. Eventually the call went out for the Nigger Whisperer, but the Nigger Whisperer was dead.

The crisis negotiator, Police Captain Murray Flores, was a man my dad had worked with on many a nigger-whispering. He knew his job well enough not to soft-soap the situation. And after raising my father’s head up to look him in face, he spat on the ground in disgust and said, “What can I say?”

“You can tell me how it happened.”

“It was ‘accidental.’”

“And ‘accidental’ means?”

“Off the record, it means your dad pulled up behind plain-clothes officers Orosco and Medina, who were stopped at a traffic light, talking to a homeless woman. After the light changed from green to red a couple of times, your dad zipped around them and, while making a louie, yelled something, whereupon Officer Orosco issued a traffic ticket and a stern warning. Your father said…”

“‘Either give me the ticket or the lecture, but you can’t give me both.’ He stole that from Bill Russell.”

“Exactly. You know your father. The officers took exception, pulled their guns, your dad ran like any sensible person would, they fired four shots into his back and left him for dead in the intersection. So now you know. You just have to allow me to do my job. You have to let the system hold the men responsible for this accountable. So just give me the body.”

I asked Captain Flores a question my father had asked me many times: “In the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, do you know how many officers have been convicted of murder while in the line of duty?”

“No.”

“The answer is none, so there is no accountability. I’m taking him.”

“Where?”

“I’m going to bury him in the backyard. You do what you have to do.”

I don’t think I’d ever seen a cop blow a whistle before. Not in real life. But Captain Flores blew his brass-plated whistle and waved the other officers, Foy, and the Dum Dum Donut protesters off. The blockade parted and I led a very slow-moving funeral procession to 205 Bernard Avenue.

It’d always been my father’s dream to own 205 Bernard Avenue outright. “The Ponderosa,” he called it. “Sharecropping, transracial adoption, and ‘renting to own’ is for suckers,” he liked to say while he pored through real estate and no-money-down investment books, punching imaginary mortgage scenarios into the calculator. “My memoir … that’ll be an easy twenty thousand upfront … We can pawn your mama’s jewelry for five, six thou … and even though there’s an early-withdrawal penalty on your college fund, if we cash that mug out now, home ownership will be right around the corner.”

There never was any memoir, only titles shouted out while he was in the shower fucking some nineteen-year-old bubble-gum-blowing “colleague from the university.” He’d stick his wet head out the door and, through the steam, ask what did I think about “The Interpretation of Niggers” or my favorite, “I’m Ai’ight. You’re Ai’ight.” And there was no jewelry. My mother, a former Jet magazine Beauty of the Week, had no baubles or trinkets on in the faded tearsheet pasted above my headboard. She was a modestly coiffed, curvy expanse of thighs and lip gloss lounging on a backyard diving board in a gold lamé bikini. All I knew about her was the extensive biographical information listed in the bottom right-hand corner of the photo. “Laurel Lescook is a student from Key Biscayne, Florida, who enjoys biking, photography, and poetry.” Later in life I would track Ms. Lescook down. She was a paralegal in Atlanta who remembered my father as a man whom she’d never met, but who, after her one photo pictorial came out in September of ’77, inundated her with marriage proposals, creepy poetry, and Kodak Instamatic photos of his erect penis. Given that my college savings amounted to $236.72, the total take from my sparsely attended black mitzvah, and that both my father’s manuscript and my mother’s jewelry collection were nonexistent, you’d think we’d never come to own that house, but as luck would have it, given my father’s wrongful death at the hands of the police, and the $2 million settlement I’d later received, in a sense he and I bought the farm on the same day.

At first blush, his purchase of the proverbial farm seems the more metaphorical of the two transactions. But as even the most cursory of those early annual inspections by the California Department of Food and Agriculture bore out, to call 205 Bernard Avenue, that two-acre, just-this-side-of-lunar-surface fertile parcel of land in the most infamous ghetto in Los Angeles County with its hollowed-out 1973 Winnebago Chieftain motor home for a barn, a dilapidated-overcrowded-Section-8-henhouse-topped-by-a-weathervane-so-rusted-in-place-that-the-Santa-Ana-winds-El-Niño-and-the-’83-tornado-couldn’t-move-it, medfly-infested-two-tree-lemon-grove, three horses, four pigs, a two-legged goat with shopping-cart wheels for back hooves, twelve stray cats, one cow herd of livestock, and the ever-present cumulonimbus cloud of flies that circled the inflatable “fishing” pond of liquefied swamp gas and fermented rat shit that I pulled out of foreclosure on the very same day my dad decided to tell the undercover police officer Edward Orosco to “move his piece o’ shit Ford Crown Victoria and stop blocking the goddamn intersection!” with funds borrowed against what the courts would later determine to be a $2 million settlement for gross miscarriage of justice, to call that unsubsidized tract of inner-city Afro-agrarian ineptitude a “farm” would be to push the limits of literality. Had me and Pops founded Jamestown instead of the Pilgrims, the Indians would have looked at our wilted, meandering, labyrinthlike rows of maize and kumquats and said, “Today’s corn planting seminar is canceled, because you niggers ain’t going to make it.”

When you grow up on a farm in the middle of the ghetto, you come to see that what your father always told you during morning chores was true: People eat the shit you shovel them. That like the pigs, we all have our heads in the trough. While the hogs don’t believe in God, the American dream, or the pen being mightier than the sword, they do believe in the feed in the same desperate way we believe in the Sunday paper, the Bible, black urban radio, and hot sauce. On his off days, he’d often invite the neighborhood over just to watch me work. Though the Farms was zoned for agriculture, most of the families had long abandoned the salt-of-the-earth farming lifestyle for backyard acreage that featured full-sized basketball and tennis courts and maybe a guest cottage in the corner. And although a few families still maintained chicken coops and maybe raised a cow, or ran an equestrian school for at-risk youth, we were the only family giving full-scale farming a go. Trying to cash in on some forgotten post — Civil War promise. Forty acres and a fool. “This little nigger not going be like the rest of you niggers,” my father would crow, one hand on his dick, the other pointing at me. “My son going to be a Renaissance nigger. A modern-day Galileo out this motherfucker!” Then he’d crack open a bottle of bumpy-face, hand out the paper cups, ice cubes, and splashes of lemon-lime soda, and from the back porch they’d watch me pick strawberries, snow peas, or whatever the fuck was in season. Cotton was the worst. Forget the stooping, the thorns, the droning Paul Robeson spirituals that he played loud enough to drown out the Lopezes’ ranchero music coming from next door, or that planting, watering, and harvesting cotton was a complete waste of time, because the only gin we had was the Styrofoam cup of Seagram’s in his hand, picking cotton sucked because it made Daddy nostalgic. A sentimental drunk and full of gin ’n’ juice pride, he’d brag to our black neighbors how I’d never spent a day in day care or had a sandbox play date. Instead, he swore up and down I was nannied and mammied by a sow named Suzy Q and was the loser in a sibling “piglet versus niglet” rivalry to a porcine genius named Savoir Faire.

Daddy’s friends would watch me expertly pluck cotton bolls from the dried stems, waiting for me to snort and overthrow the Orwellian social order, and thus confirm my hog-tied upbringing.

1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.

2. Whatever goes on four legs, or six wings and a biscuit, is a friend.

3. No Pigger shall wear shorts in the fall, much less the winter.

4. No Pigger shall be caught sleeping.

5. No Pigger shall drink presweetened Kool-Aid.

6. All Piggers are created equal, but some Piggers ain’t shit.

I don’t remember my father tying my right hand behind my back or being babysat in the pigpen, but I do remember pushing Savoir Faire, one hand on each prickly milk-fattened hindquarter, up the wooden ramp and into the trailer. The last driver on Earth to use hand signals, my father took the corners slowly, lecturing me on how fall was the best time to kill a pig because there were less flies and the meat would keep for a while outside, because once you freeze it, the quality starts to go down. Unbuckled, like any child raised before car seats and airbags, I knelt in the seat facing backward, looking out that tiny rear window at Savior Faire, the doomed, cloven-hoofed genius squealing like a four-hundred-pound bitch the whole way to the slaughterhouse. “You done won your last game of Connect Four, you fucking getting mucus on the pieces, ‘I sunk your battleship,’ ‘King me!’ son of a bitch.” At stoplights Daddy would stick his arm out of the window, bent at the elbow, hand toward the ground, palm facing the rear. “People eat the shit you shovel them!” he’d shout over the radio music, somehow shifting, steering, turning on the blinker, making the hand signal, a left turn, singing along to Ella Fitzgerald, and reading the L.A. Times bestseller list all at the same time.

People eat the shit you shovel them.

* * *

I’d like to say, “I buried my father in the backyard and that day I became a man,” or some other droll American bullshit, but all that happened was that day I became relieved. No more trying to look uninvolved as my own father fought for parking spaces at the Farmers Market. Shouting down Beverly Hills dowagers asserting their luxury sedan right of way by nosing their gigantic cars into spaces marked COMPACT ONLY. You stupid overmedicated bitch. If you don’t back that fucking jalopy out my space, I swear to God, I’m going to punch you in your anti-aging-cold-cream face and permanently reverse five hundred years of white privilege and five hundred thousand dollars of plastic surgery.

People eat the shit you shovel them. And sometimes, when I pull up to the drive-thru window on horseback or return the disbelieving stares of a convertible carload of out-of-town vatos pointing at the black vaquero grazing his livestock in the trash-strewn fields underneath the power lines that stretch Eiffel Tower — like alongside West Greenleaf Boulevard, I think about all the lines of ad infinitum bullshit my father shoveled down my throat, until his dreams became my dreams. Sometimes, while I’m sharpening the plowshare and shearing the sheep, I feel like every moment of my life isn’t mine but one of his “déjà vus.” No, I don’t miss my father. I just regret that I never had the nerve to ask him if it was really true that I’d spent the sensorimotor and preoperational stages of my life with one hand tied behind my back. Talk about starting life off with a handicap. Fuck being black. Try learning to crawl, ride a tricycle, cover both eyes while playing peek-a-boo, and constructing a meaningful theory of mind, all with one hand.

Four

You won’t find Dickens, California, on the map, because about five years after my father died, and a year after I graduated college, it, too, perished. There was no loud send-off. Dickens didn’t go out with a bang like Nagasaki, Sodom and Gomorrah, and my dad. It was quietly removed like those towns that vanished from maps of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, atomic accident by atomic accident. But the city of Dickens’s disappearance was no accident. It was part of a blatant conspiracy by the surrounding, increasingly affluent, two-car-garage communities to keep their property values up and blood pressures down. When the housing boom hit in the early part of the century, many moderate-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles County underwent real estate makeovers. Once pleasant working-class enclaves became rife with fake tits and fake graduation and crime rates, hair and tree transplants, lipo- and cholosuctions. In the wee hours of the night, after the community boards, homeowner associations, and real estate moguls banded together and coined descriptive names for nondescript neighborhoods, someone would bolt a large glittery Mediterranean-blue sign high up on a telephone pole. And when the fog lifted, the residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified blocks awoke to find out they lived in Crest View, La Cienega Heights, or Westdale. Even though there weren’t any topographical features like crests, views, heights, or dales to be found within ten miles. Nowadays Angelenos who used to see themselves as denizens of the west, east, and south sides wage protracted legal battles over whether their two-bedroom, charming country cottages reside within the confines of Beverlywood or Beverlywood Adjacent.

Dickens underwent a different type of transition. One clear South Central morning, we awoke to find that the city hadn’t been renamed but the signs that said WELCOME TO THE CITY OF DICKENS were gone. There was never an official announcement, an article in the paper, or a feature on the evening news. No one cared. In a way, most Dickensians were relieved to not be from anywhere. It saved them the embarrassment of having to answer the small-talk “Where are you from?” question with “Dickens,” then watching the person apologetically back away from you. “Sorry about that. Don’t kill me!” Rumor had it the county had revoked our charter because of the admittedly widespread local political corruption. The police and fire stations were closed down. You’d call what used to be city hall and a foul-mouthed teenager named Rebecca would answer, Don’t no niggers name Dickens live here, so don’t be calling here no more! The autonomous school board dismantled. Internet searches turned up only references to “Dickens, Charles John Huffam” and to a dust bowl county in Texas named after some unfortunate sap who may or may not have died at the Alamo.

In the years after my father died, the neighborhood looked to me to be the next Nigger Whisperer. I wish I could say that I answered the call to duty out of a sense of familial pride and communal concern, but the truth was, I did it because I had no social life. Nigger-whispering got me out of the house and away from the crops and the animals. I met interesting people and tried to convince them that no matter how much heroin and R. Kelly they had in their systems, they absolutely could not fly. When my father nigger-whispered, it didn’t look so hard. Unfortunately, I wasn’t blessed with my father’s sonorous, luxury-car-commercial voiceover bass profundo. I’m squeamishly shrill and possess all the speaking gravitas of the “shiest” member of your favorite boy band. The skinny, soft-spoken one who in the music video sits in the backseat of the convertible and never gets the girl, much less a solo, so I was issued a bullhorn. Ever try to whisper through a bullhorn?

Up until the city’s disappearance, the workload wasn’t so bad. I was an every-other-month crisis negotiator, a farmer doing a little nigger-whispering on the side. But since Dickens’s erasure I found myself in my pajamas, at least once a week, standing barefoot in an apartment complex courtyard, bullhorn in hand, staring up at some distraught, partially hotcombed-headed mother dangling her baby over a second-floor balcony ledge. When my father did the whispering, Friday nights were the busiest. Every payday he’d be inundated by teeming hordes of the bipolar poor, who having spent it all in one place, and grown tired and unsated from the night’s notoriously shitty prime-time television lineup, would unwedge themselves from between the couch-bound obese family members and the boxes of unsold Avon beauty products, turn off the kitchen radio pumping song after song extolling the virtues of Friday nights living it up at the club, popping bottles, niggers, and cherries in that order, then having canceled the next day’s appointment with their mental health care professional, the chatterbox cosmetologist, who after years doing heads, still knows only one hairstyle — fried, dyed, and laid to the side — they’d choose that Friday, “day of Venus,” goddess of love, beauty, and unpaid bills, to commit suicide, murder, or both. But under my watch people tend to snap on Wednesday. Hump day. And so sans juju, gris-gris, and the foggiest notion of what to say, I’ll press the trigger, and with a loud squeal of ear-piercing feedback, the bullhorn buzzes to staticky life. Half the unchosen tribe waiting for me to say the magic words and save the day; the other half waiting expectantly for a bathrobe to fly open and some milk-engorged titties to come popping out.

Sometimes I open with a little humor, remove a slip of paper from a large manila envelope, and in my best impersonation of a sensationalist afternoon-talk-show host announce, “When it comes to eight-month-old Kobe Jordan Kareem LeBron Mayweather III, I am not the father … but I wish I were,” and providing I don’t look too much like the baby’s real father, the mother will laugh and drop the little crumb-snatcher, shit-filled diaper and all, into my waiting arms.

Usually it isn’t so simple. Most times there’s so much Nina Simone “Mississippi Goddam” despondency in the night air it becomes hard to focus. The deep purple contusions about the face and arms. The terry-cloth robe finally falling seductively off the shoulders, revealing the woman to be a man; a man with hormonally induced breasts, shaved pubes, surprisingly shapely hips, and a tire-iron-brandishing significant other, who, underneath that bulky sweatshirt and baseball cap cocked to the side, might be a man, or just mannish, but either way is manically pacing the carport, threatening to bash in my skull if I say the wrong thing. The baby, swaddled in blue because blue is for Crip-centric boys, will be either too fat or too skinny, crying its little lungs out so loudly you’d wish it’d shut up, or even worse, so bone-chillingly quiet that under the circumstances you think it must already be dead. And invariably, softly in the background, billowing the curtains through the parted sliding glass doors, there’s always Nina Simone. These are the women my father warned me about. The drug-and-asshole-addled women who sit in the dark, hard up and lovesick, chain-smoking cigarettes, phones pressed to their ears, speed-dialing K-Earth 101 FM, the oldies station, so they can request Nina Simone or the Shirelles’ “This Is Dedicated to the One I Love,” aka “This Is Dedicated to Niggers That Beat Me Senseless and Leave.” “Stay away from bitches who love Nina Simone and have faggots for best friends,” he’d say. “They hate men.”

Swinging by its tiny heels, the baby carves giant, parabolic, fast-pitch softball, windmill circles in the air. And I stand there useless, a vacant look on my face, a nigger whisperer without secrets and sweet nothings to whisper. The crowd murmurs that I don’t know what I’m doing. And I don’t.

“You don’t stop fucking around, man, you gonna get that baby kilt.”

“Killed.”

“Whatever, nigger. Just say something.”

They all think that after my dad died I went away to college, majored in psychology, and returned to continue his good work. But I have no interest in psychoanalytic theory, ink splotches, the human condition, and in giving something back to the community. I went to the University of California at Riverside because it had a decent agricultural studies department. Majored in animal sciences with dreams of turning Daddy’s land into a hatchery where I could sell ostriches to all the early-nineties heavy rotation rappers, first-round draft choices, and big-budget movie sidekicks, eager to invest their “skrilla,” and who, after flying first-class for the first time in their lives, laid down the dog-eared financial section of the in-flight magazine in their laps and thought to themselves, “Shit, ostrich meat is indeed the future!” It sounds like a financial no-brainer. A nutritious FDA-approved ostrich steak sells for twenty dollars a pound, the feathers go for five dollars apiece, and those bumpy brown leather hides are worth two hundred bucks each. But the real money would be on my end in selling breeders to the nouveau-nigger-riche, because the average bird yields only about forty pounds of edible meat, because Oscar Wilde is dead and no one wears plumage and feathered hats anymore except for drag queens over forty, Bavarian tuba players, Marcus Garvey impersonators, and mint-julep-sipping-Kentucky-Derby-trifecta-betting southern belles, who wouldn’t buy black if you were selling the secret to ageless wrinkle-free skin and nine inches of dick. I knew full well the birds are impossible to raise, and I didn’t have the start-up capital, but let’s just say my sophomore year, the UC Riverside Small Farm Program was missing a few two-legged dissertations, because like the drug dealers say, “If I don’t do it, somebody else will.” And believe me when I tell you that, to this day, the cracked and abandoned nest eggs of many a bankrupt one-hit wonder run wild in the San Gabriel Mountains.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Didn’t you major in psychology like your daddy?”

“All I know is a little animal husbandry.”

“Shit, being married to these animals is what gets these bitches into trouble in the first place, so you best say something to this heifer.”

I minored in crop sciences and management, because Professor Farley, my intro to agronomy teacher, said that I was a natural horticulturist. That I could be the next George Washington Carver if I wanted to be. All I needed to do was apply myself and find my own equivalent to the peanut. A legume of my own, she joked, placing a single phaseolus vulgaris into my palm. But anyone who’d ever been to Tito’s Tacos and tasted a warm cupful of the greasy, creamy, refried frijole slop covered in a solid half-inch of melted cheddar cheese knew the bean had already reached genetic perfection. I remember wondering why George Washington Carver. Why couldn’t I have been the next Gregor Mendel, the next whoever it was that invented the Chia Pet, and even though nobody remembers Captain Kangaroo, the next Mr. Green Jeans? So I chose to specialize in the plant life that had the most cultural relevance to me — watermelon and weed. At best I’m a subsistence farmer, but three or four times a year, I’ll hitch a horse to the wagon and clomp through Dickens, hawking my wares, Mongo Santamaría’s “Watermelon Man” blasting from the boom box. That song pounding in the distance has been known to stop summer league basketball games mid — fast break, end many a ding-dong-ditch, double-Dutch marathon early, and force the women and children waiting at the intersection of Compton and Firestone for the last weekend visitation bus to the L.A. County Jail to make a difficult decision.

Although they’re not hard to grow, and I’ve been selling them for years, folks still go crazy at the sight of a square watermelon. And like that black president, you’d think that after two terms of looking at a dude in a suit deliver the State of the Union address, you’d get used to square watermelons, but somehow you never do. The pyramidal shapes are big sellers also, and around Easter I sell bunny rabbit — shaped ones that I’ve genetically altered so that if you squint, the dark lines in the rind spell out Jesus Saves. Those I can’t keep on the wagon. But it’s the taste that keeps them coming back. Think of the best watermelon you’ve ever had. Now add a hint of anise and brown sugar. Seeds that you’re reluctant to spit out because they cool your mouth like the last sweet remnants of a cola-covered ice cube melting on the tip of your tongue. I’ve never seen it, but they say people have bitten into my watermelon and fainted straightaway. That paramedics fresh from CPR rescues of customers nearly drowned in six inches of blue backyard plastic wading pool water don’t ask about heatstroke or a family history of heart disease. Their faces covered in sticky red remnants of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation nectar, their cheeks freckled with black seeds, they stop licking their lips only long enough to ask, “Where did you get the watermelon?” Sometimes, when I’m in an unfamiliar neighborhood, looking for a stray goat on the Latino side of Harris Avenue, a click of peewees, fresh out of cholo school, their newly shorn scalps gleaming in the sun, will step to me, grab me by the shoulders, and with a forceful reverence say, “Por la sandía … gracias.”

But even in sunny California you can’t grow watermelon year-round. The winter nights are colder than people think. Twenty-pound melons take forever to mature, and they suck nitrate out of the soil like it’s sodium crack. So it’s the marijuana that’s my mainstay. I rarely sell it. Weed isn’t a cash crop, but more like a gas money one, plus I don’t want motherfuckers running up on me in the middle of the night. Occasionally, I’ll pull out an eighth, and the unsuspecting homie who’s been weaned on the Chronic, and who now lies on my front lawn covered in dirt and grass, laughing his ass off, his legs entwined in the frame of the bicycle he’s forgotten how to ride, will proudly hold up the joint he never dropped and ask me, “What this shit called?”

“Ataxia,” I’ll say.

On the house party dance floor, when La Giggles, whom I’ve known since second grade, finally stops staring incessantly into her compact mirror at a face she likes but doesn’t quite recognize, she turns to me and asks three questions. Who am I? And who this nigger sticking his tongue in my ear grinding on my ass? And what the fuck am I smoking? The answers to her questions are: Bridget “La Giggles” Sanchez, your husband, and Prostopagnosia. Sometimes folks wonder why I always have the kine bud. But any suspicious curiosity can be allayed with a shrug of the shoulders and a deadpan “Oh, I know some white boys…”

Light up a joint. Exhale. Weed that smells bad is good. And a dank, wispy cloud of smoke that smells like red tide at Huntington Beach, dead fish, and seagulls roasting in the hot sun will make a woman stop twirling her baby. Offer her a hit, sloppy-end first. She’ll nod. It’s Anglophobia, a strain that I’ve just developed, but she doesn’t need to know that. Anything that will allow me to come closer is a good thing. Approach in peace, and climb the ivy-covered latticework or stand on some big nigger’s shoulders and put myself within arms’ reach, so that I can touch her. Stroke her with techniques that are basically the same ones I used on the thoroughbreds at school after a work-study day of galloping and breezing horses in the fields. Rub her ears. Blow gently into her nostrils. Work her joints. Brush her hair. Shotgun weed smoke into her pursed and needy lips. When she hands me the baby, and I descend the stairs into the applause of the waiting crowd, I’d like to think that Gregor Mendel, George Washington Carver, and even my father would be proud, and sometime while they’re being strapped to the gurney or consoled by a distraught grandmother, I’ll ask them, “Why Wednesday?”

Five

Dickens’s evanesce hit some folks harder than others, but the citizen who needed my services the most was old man Hominy Jenkins. Hominy had always been a little unstable, but my father never really dealt with him. I don’t think he thought losing a gray-haired relic to Uncle Toms past would be any great loss to the neighborhood, so it’d be up to me to “go get that fool nigger.” I guess, in a sense, Hominy was my first nigger whisperee. I can’t count how many times I had to wrap a blanket around him because he was trying to commit suicide-by-gangbanger by wearing red in the blue neighborhoods, blue in the red, or shouting, “¡Yo soy el gran pinche mayate! ¡Julio César Chávez es un puto!” in the brown. He used to climb palm trees and recite Tarzan lines to the natives, “Me Tarzan, you Shaniqua!” And I’d have to beg every woman in the neighborhood to lower her gun and coax Hominy down with a phony contract from a long-dead movie studio, front-loaded with beer and smokehouse almond signing bonuses. One Halloween he yanked the doorbell wires from his living room wall and attached them to his testes, so when the trick-or-treaters rang the buzzer, instead of candy and an autographed photo, they got blood-curdling screams that continued until I fought my way through the sadistic throng of fairy godmothers and superheroes and pulled She-Hulk’s green eight-year-old finger away from the ringer long enough for me to talk Hominy into pulling his pants up and the shades down.

As the supposed Murder Capital of the World, Dickens never got much tourist trade. Occasionally, a pack of college kids vacationing in Los Angeles for the first time would stop at a busy intersection just long enough to shoot twenty seconds of shaky handheld video of them jumping up and down, whooping like crazed savages, shouting, “Check us out! We’re in Dickens, California. What you know about that, fool?” then post the footage of their urban safari on the Internet. But when all the WELCOME TO DICKENS signs were removed, there was no Blarney Stone to kiss, the urban voyeurs stopped coming. Sometimes genuine sightseers did come through. Mostly old and pensioned, they’d troll the streets in their out-of-state license-plated RVs looking for the last link to their youths. Those halcyon days the campaign politicians always promise to take us back to when America was powerful and respected, a land of morals and virtue and cheap gas. And asking a local, “Excuse me, do you know where I can find Hominy?” was like asking some penny-ante lounge singer if they knew the way to San Jose.

Hominy Jenkins is the last surviving member of the Little Rascals, that madcap posse of street urchins who, from the Roaring Twenties until the Reaganomics eighties, flummoxed potbellied coppers, ditching school seven days a week and twice on Sundays on matinee movie screens and after-school televisions around the world. Signed by Hal Roach Studios in the mid-1930s at a reputed $350 a week to be Buckwheat Thomas’s understudy, Hominy cashed his checks and bided his time by playing minor roles: the silent little brother who had to be babysat while Mother was away visiting Papa in jail, the colored kid on the ass-end of the runaway mule. He made do delivering the occasional throwaway one-liner from the back of the one-room schoolhouse. Acknowledging talking babies, wild men from Borneo, and Alfalfa’s soap-bubble solos with an exaggerated roll of the eyeballs and his trademark “Yowza!” The underutilization of his sooty black cuteness made bearable with the knowledge that one day soon he’d step into the oversized, curly-toed genie shoes of the great pickaninnies that preceded him. Take his rightful place in the wisecracking pantheon of Farina, Stymie, and Buckwheat, and carry the legacy of bowler-hatted, ragamuffin racism well into the 1950s. But the era of the human golliwog and the one-reeler died before his turn came. Hollywood had all the blackness it needed in the demi-whiteness of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, the brooding Negritude of James Dean, and the broad, gravity-defying, Venus hot-to-trot roundness of Marilyn Monroe’s ass.

When they found his house, Hominy would greet his devotees with a wide Polident smile and an arthritic finger-wiggling high sign. Inviting them in for Hi-C Fruit Punch and, if they were lucky, slices of my watermelon. I doubt that he told his aging fan base the same stories he shared with us. It’s hard to say what started the love affair between me and Marpessa Delissa Dawson. She’s three years older than me and I’ve known her all my life. A lifelong resident of the Farms, her mother ran the Sun to Sun Equestrian and Polo School from their backyard. They used to call me whenever they were short a show jumper or a Number 4 on the Junior Spearchukkers. I wasn’t much good at either, because Appaloosas are shitty jumpers and using your left hand is illegal in polo. When we were younger, me, Marpessa, and the rest of the kids on the block would jet over to Hominy’s house after school, because what could be cooler than watching an hour of Little Rascals with a Little Rascal? In those days, when remote control television was your father screaming, “Shawn! Don! Mark! One of you motherfuckers come downstairs and change this goddamn channel,” fine-tuning a fickle ultra-high-frequency station like Channel 52, KBSC-TV Corona, Los Angeles, on a beat-up black-and-white portable missing one rabbit ear antenna and all its dials required a vascular surgeon’s touch. It took forever to finagle a set of plumbing pliers around the stubby metal knobs, looking for any angularity that might result in the weest bit of channel-changing torque or vertical and horizontal hold. But when the opening title sequence, accompanied by the drunken warbling horns in the Our Gang theme song, popped up on the TV, we’d settle in around gray-haired Hominy and those red-hot space heater coils like slave children gathered ’round ol’ Remus and his fire.

“Tell us another story, Uncle Remus, we means Hominy.”

“I ever tell you all about the time I fucked the shit out of Darla on the He Man Woman Hater’s Club set during our twentieth reunion?”

I didn’t realize it then, but Hominy, like any other child star still standing in the klieg light afterglow of a long-ago canceled career, was bat-shit crazy. We thought that he was being funny; dry humping the TV with every low-angle shot of Darla’s exposed lace panties. “In real life that bitch wasn’t as stingy with the pussy as she was in the movies.” Slamming his pelvis into the screen, shouting, “That’s for Alfalfa, Mickey, Porky, Chubby, Froggy, Butch, that stuck-up punk Wally, and the rest of the gang!” punctuating his blue-balls roll call with increasingly violent thrusts. Needless to say, there’s an anger to Hominy. One that comes from not being as famous as you think you should be.

When he wasn’t reminiscing about his sexual conquests, Hominy liked to brag about how he was fluent in four languages, because they shot each short four times, once in English, French, Spanish, and German. The first time he told us this, we laughed in his face, because all his mentor, Buckwheat, did was flash his greasy gap-toothed grin and say “O’tay, ’Panky,” in that marble-mouthed pickaninny pluperfect of his, and “Okay, Spanky” is “Okay, Spanky” in any fucking language.

Once, one of my favorites episodes, “Mush and Milk,” was on, and to prove his boast, Hominy turned down the volume just as the gang sat around the Bleak Hill Boarding School breakfast table. Kindly Old Cap was waiting on his back pension. The house mother, wrinkled and as temperamental as a dog pound shar-pei, spat and hissed at the kids, one of whom, having screwed up the morning chores, whispers into another urchin’s ear a line we didn’t need sound to hear, because we’d heard it a million times.

“Don’t drink the milk,” we said aloud.

“Why?” A towheaded white boy mouthed.

“It’s spoiled,” we whispered in unison.

Don’t drink the milk. Pass it on. And Hominy did just that, dubbing each waif’s warning to the next rascal down in a different language.

“No bebas la leche. ¿Porqué? Está mala.”

“Ne bois pas le lait. Pourquoi? C’est gate.”

“Trink die Milch nicht! Warum? Die ist schlecht.”

Don’t drink the milk. Why? It’s spoiled.

The milk was spoiled because in reality it was liquefied plaster of paris that hadn’t yet hardened into a sight gag, and child stardom spoiled Hominy. Sometimes after a particularly abrupt edit for the sake of political correctness, he’d stomp his feet and pout. “I was in that scene! They edited me out! Spanky finds Aladdin’s lamp, he rubs it and says, ‘I wish Hominy was a monkey. I wish Hominy was a monkey!’ And lo and motherfucking behold, I’m a motherfucking monkey.”

“A monkey?”

“A capuchin, to be exact, and my method-acting monkey-ass hit the streets running, baby! And I comes across a nigger soda jerk making time with his old lady, he closes his eyes, leans in for a little loving; she sees me, splits, and that fool plants a wet one right on my big pink simian lips. That had them rolling in the aisles. ‘A Lad in a Lamp,’ most screen time I ever had. I fought the whole damn police force, and by the end of the picture, me and Spanky eating cake ’n’ shit, and running the whole goddamn town. And let me tell you, Spanky was without question the coolest motherfuckering white boy ever. Yowza!”

It was hard to determine if he’d been turned into a real monkey or if Hal Roach Studios, never known for its extravagant special effects, just opened up the timeless cookbook of Classic American Stereotyping and turned to the one-step recipe for Negro Monkeyshines: 1. Just add tail. Whatever the case, as the celluloid snippets of censored slapstick racism piled up on the cutting room floor, it became apparent that Hominy was a sort of Little Rascals stunt coon. His film career was a compendium of unseen outtakes where he’s doused with all things white: sunny-side-up eggs, paint, and pancake flour avalanches. Eyeballs bulging with fear and hyperthyroidism, sometimes the sight of a ghost in an abandoned house or a congregation of newly baptized holy ghost Negroes speaking in tongues and somnambulating through the thick of the local forest, or a white nightshirt blowing eerily on a clothesline like a hoodoo ghost come to billowing life would scare the shit out of Hominy. Turn him albino white. Blow out his Afro to freakishly long, scared-straight proportions and send him running headlong into a swamp tree, through a wooden fence or a plate-glass window. And he was constantly being electrocuted, both by his own ineptitude and by acts of a God whose supposedly random lightning strikes somehow never failed to miss the crack of his suspender-pants-covered ass. In “Frankly, Ben Franklin,” after the prototype is chewed up by Petey the Pitbull, who else but Hominy would volunteer to be the bespectacled Spanky’s kite? Sewn spread-eagle onto a giant Betsy Ross flag, wearing nothing but a set of tattered slave britches, a tricorne hat with a metal rod sticking out of its crown, and a placard hanging from his neck that in runny ink reads THESE ARE THE TIMES THAT FRY MEN’S SOULS — NATHAN HAIL, he soars high in the sky, a flying black squirrel sailing through the stinging rain, gale-force winds, and a fusillade of lightning bolts. There’s a thunderclap, followed by a cloud of sparks, and Spanky examining a glowing, electrified skeleton key attached to the kite string. “Eureka,” he’s about to say, before he’s rudely interrupted from up above, where Hominy, stuck in the tree branches, a smoldering ashen heap, smoke billowing from every orifice, eyes and teeth forever phosphorescent, delivers the longest line of his career, “Yowza! I done discobered electbicidy.”

Over time, with the advent of cable television, home video games, and Melanie Price’s bodacious eighth-grade bosoms, which she liked to show off in bedroom window striptease acts that started at the exact same time the Little Rascals did, one by one the gang stopped visiting Hominy after school, until it was only me and Marpessa left. I’m not sure why she stayed. She had her own fifteen-year-old tube-top breasts to show off. Sometimes the older guys would come up to the door and ask her to come outside to talk. But she’d always wait until the Little Rascals was over. Leaving the homeboys on Hominy’s porch. I’d like to think that Marpessa liked me even then. But I know it was probably pity and a sense of safety that kept her around from three thirty to four. Munching on grapes and watching the gang put on extravagant backyard variety shows featuring raspy-voiced seven-year-olds and colored kids tap-dancing up a storm, what harm could a thirteen-year-old homeschooled farm boy and superannuated coon do?

“Marpessa?”

“Huh?”

“Wipe your chin, it’s wet.”

“Let me tell you, that’s not all that’s wet. That’s how good these goddamn grapes is. You really grow these yourself?”

“Yup.”

“Why?”

“Homework.”

“Your father’s fucking crazy.”

I suppose that’s what I first loved about Marpessa, her unabashed inappropriateness. I guess I loved her titties, too. Although, like she said whenever she caught me staring at them, I wouldn’t know what to do with them if I ever had half the chance. Eventually the lure of older boys with drug money and sperm counts outweighed the sonorous charms of Alfalfa in a cowboy hat singing “Home on the Range,” and for the longest time, it was just me, Hominy, and the grapes. I never regretted passing up the side-yard peepshows with my friends. I always figured that if Marpessa kept eating my grapes and drooling nectar down her ample chest, sooner or later those drill-bit hard nipples would bore through the wet spots on her shirt.

Sadly, I never saw a three-dimensional mammary until the eve of my sixteenth birthday, when I woke up one night to find Tasha, one of my dad’s “teaching assistants,” sitting on the edge of my bed, naked, reeking of postcoital must and muscatel, and reading Nancy Chodorow aloud: “Mothers are women, of course, because a mother is a female parent … We can talk about a man ‘mothering’ a child, if he is this child’s primary nurturing figure, or is acting in a nurturant manner. But we would never talk about a woman ‘fathering’ a child.” To this day, whenever I’m lonely, I touch myself, thinking about Tasha’s titty and about how Freudian hermeneutics doesn’t apply to Dickens. A place where, often as not, it’s the child who raises the parents, where the Oedipus and Electra complexes are simple, sons, daughters, stepparents, or play-cousins, it doesn’t matter, since everybody’s fucking each other over and penis envy doesn’t exist because sometimes niggers just got too much dick.

* * *

I don’t know exactly why, but I felt like I owed Hominy something for all those afternoons Marpessa and I spent at his house. That there’s something about the craziness that he had to go through that’s kept me relatively sane. And one blustery Wednesday morning, about three years ago, during a well-earned afternoon nap, I heard Marpessa’s voice in my sleep. “Hominy” was all she said. After scrambling outside, I found a hastily written sign Scotch-taped to Hominy’s screen door fluttering in the breeze. I’z in de back, it read, his penmanship typical Little Rascal, squiggly, yet surprisingly legible. The back was Hominy’s memorabilia room. A small fifteen-by-fifteen add-on that was once crammed with a treasure trove of Our Gang props, headshots, and costumes. There weren’t many memories left. Most, like the suit of armor from which Spanky recited Mark Antony’s soliloquy in “Shivering Shakespeare” under a barrage of peashooters, the lock of Alfalfa’s personality, the top hat and tails Buckwheat wore when he conducted the Club Spanky Big Band and made “hundreds and thousands of dollars” in the “Our Gang Follies of 1938,” the long-ass hook-’n’-ladder scrap-metal fire engine used to win Jane back from the rich kid with the real fire engine, and the kazoos, flutes, and spoons that made up the wind and rhythm sections of the International Silver String Band had been long pawned and auctioned off.

As advertised, Hominy was indeed “in de back,” buck naked and hanging by his neck from a wooden beam. Two feet away from him sat a folding chair marked RESERVED, and on its seat a photocopy playbill for “Curtain Call,” a one-act of desperation. The noose was a bungee cord stretched to its bike rack limit, so much so that if he’d worn anything bigger than a size-eight shoe, his toes would’ve touched the ground. His face turning a deep shade of blue, I watched him twist in the draft. I had half a mind to let him die.

“Cut my penis off and stuff it into my mouth,” he rasped with what air was left in his lungs.

Apparently, asphyxiation makes your penis hard, and his brown member sprouted like a twig from a frizzy snowball of shock-white pubic hair. Like an antique whirligig, he kicked about frantically as much from his simultaneous attempt to burn himself in effigy as from the paucity of oxygen reaching his already-Alzheimered brain. Fuck the White Man’s Burden, Hominy Jenkins was my burden, and I knocked the can of kerosene and the lighter from his hand. Walked, not ran, back home to look for the gardening shears and some skin lotion. Taking my sweet time, because I knew that racist Negro Archetypes, like Bebe’s Kids, don’t die. They multiply. Because the kerosene splashed on my shirt smelled like Zima, but mostly because my father said he never panicked when someone from the neighborhood tried to hang themselves, because, “for the life of them, black people can’t tie knots for shit.”

I cut the self-lynching drama queen down. Lowered him gently to the rayon-carpeted floor and coddled his scraggly head. He filled my armpit with snot and tears as I rubbed cortisone into his rope-chafed neck and flipped through the playbill. On page two was a publicity shot of our boy chilling with the Marx Brothers on the set of the unreleased sequel to A Day at the Races, called A Day Among the Races. The Marx Brothers sit in backward-facing director’s chairs labeled GROUCHO, CHICO, HARPO, and ZEPPO. At the lineup’s far end is a high chair whose back reads DEPRESSO. In it, sitting cross-legged, is six-year-old Hominy, a thick white Groucho mustache painted on his upper lip. The photo is signed To Hominy Jenkins, the Shvartze Sheep of the Family. Best Wishes from the Marxes — Groucho, Karl, Skid, et al. Below this was Hominy’s bio. A sad listing of his meager screen credits that read like a suicide note:

Hominy Jenkins (Hominy Jenkins) — Hominy’s happy to make both his theatrical debut and his swan song at the Back Room Repertory Theater. In 1933 Hominy first put his wild, unkempt Afro to good use when he debuted as the wailing, abandoned Native Baby Boy in the original King Kong. He went on to survive that near Skull Island stomping and has since specialized in portraying black boys from the ages of eight to eighty, including most notably in Black Beauty—Stable Boy (uncredited), War of the Worlds—Paper Boy (uncredited), Captain Blood—Cabin Boy (uncredited), Charlie Chan Joins the Klan—Bus Boy (uncredited). Every film shot in Los Angeles between 1937 and 1964—Shoeshine Boy (uncredited). Other credits include various roles as Messenger Boy, Bell Boy, Bus Boy, Pin Boy, Pool Boy, House Boy, Box Boy, Copy Boy, Delivery Boy, Boy Toy (stag film), Errand Boy, and token Aerospace Engineer Boy in the Academy Award — winning film Apollo 13. He wishes to thank his many fans who have supported him throughout the years. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

If that naked old man crying in my lap had been born elsewhere, say Edinburgh, maybe he’d be knighted by now. “Arise, Sir Hominy of Dickens. Sir Jig of Boo. Sir Bo of Zo.” If he were Japanese and had managed to survive the war, the economic bubble and Shonen Knife, then it’s quite possible he’d be one of those octogenarian Kabuki actors who, when he enters during the second act of Kyô Ningyô, the play comes to a reverential halt as the announcer introduces him to great fanfare and a government stipend. “Playing the role of Courtesan Oguruma, the Kyoto Doll, is Japanese Living National Treasure Hominy ‘Kokojin’ Jenkins VIII.” But he had the misfortune of being born in Dickens, California, and in America Hominy is no source of pride: he’s a Living National Embarrassment. A mark of shame on the African-American legacy, something to be eradicated, stricken from the racial record, like the hambone, Amos ’n’ Andy, Dave Chappelle’s meltdown, and people who say “Valentime’s Day.”

I placed my mouth to the waxy folds of Hominy’s ear.

“Why, Hominy?”

I couldn’t tell if he’d understood me. There was only that minstrel smile, pearly white, wide and servile, beaming blankly back at me. It’s crazy how, in a way, child actors never seem to age. There’s always one feature that refuses to grow old and marks them forever young, if not forgotten. Think Gary Coleman’s cheeks, Shirley Temple’s pug nose, Eddie Munster’s widow’s peak, Brooke Shields’s flat-chestedness, and Hominy Jenkins’s effervescent smile.

“Why, massa? Because when Dickens disappeared, I disappeared. I don’t get fan mail anymore. I haven’t had a visitor in ten years, ’cause don’t nobody know where to find me. I just want to feel relevant. Is that too much for an old coon to ask, massa? To feel relevant?”

I shook my head no, but I had one more question.

“And why Wednesdays?”

“You don’t know? You don’t remember? It was the last talk your father gave at the Dum Dum Donuts meetin’. He said that the vast majority of slave revolts took place on Wednesdays because traditionally Thursday was whippin’ day. The New York Slave Revolt, the L.A. riots, the Amistad, all them shits,” Hominy said, grinning woodenly from ear to ear like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Been this way ever since we first set foot in this country. Someone’s getting whipped or stopped and frisked, whether or not anyone done anything wrong. So why not make it worthwhile and act a fool Wednesday if you gonna get beat on Thursday, right, massa?”

“Hominy, you’re not a slave and I’m definitely not your master.”

“Massa,” he said, the smile evaporating from his face, and shaking his head in that pitiable way people who you think you’re better than do when they catch you thinking that you’re better than them, “sometimes we just have to accept who we are and act accordingly. I’m a slave. That’s who I am. It’s the role I was born to play. A slave who just also happens to be an actor. But being black ain’t method acting. Lee Strasberg could teach you how to be a tree, but he couldn’t teach you how to be a nigger. This is the ultimate nexus between craft and purpose, and we won’t be discussing this again. I’m your nigger for life, and that’s it.”

Unable to distinguish between himself and the corny “I owe you my life, I’ll be your slave” trope, Hominy had finally lost his mind, and I should’ve hospitalized him right then and there. Called the police and had him 5150’d. But once during an afternoon visit to the Cinematheque Hollywood Home for the Aged, Forgetful and Forgotten, he made me promise that I’d never institutionalize him, because he didn’t want to be exploited like his old friends Slicker Smith, Chattanooga Brown, and Beulah “Mammy” McQueenie. Who, chasing one last film credit before heading up to that green room in the sky, auditioned from their deathbeds for novice film students from the UCLA Extension Program, looking to attach a star, even a faded-out senile one, to their certificate-earning final projects.

The next morning, Thursday, I awoke to Hominy, standing in my front yard, shirtless and barefoot and lashed to the curbside mailbox, demanding that I whip him. I don’t know who tied his hands, but I do know that Hominy had tied mine.

“Massa.”

“Hominy, stop.”

“I want to thank you for saving my life.”

“You know I’d do anything for you. Your work with the Little Rascals made my childhood bearable.”

“You want to make me happy?”

“Yes, you know that.”

“Then beat me. Beat me to within an inch of my worthless black life. Beat me, but don’t kill me, massa. Beat me just enough so that I can feel what I’m missing.”

“Isn’t there another way? Isn’t there something else that would make you happy?”

“Bring back Dickens.”

“You know that’s impossible. When cities disappear, they don’t come back.”

“Then you know what to do.”

They say it took three sheriff’s deputies to pull me off his black ass, because I whipped the shit out of that nigger. Daddy would’ve said that I was suffering from “dissociative reaction.” That’s what he always attributed my beatings to. Opening up the DSM I, a holy book of mental disorders so old it defined homosexuality as “libidinal dylexsia,” he’d point to “Dissociative Reaction,” then clean his glasses and begin explaining himself slowly, “Dissociative reaction is like a psychic circuit breaker. When the mind experiences a power surge of stress and bullshit, it switches off, just shuts your cognition down and you blank out. You act but are unaware of your actions. So you see, even though I don’t remember dislocating your jaw…”

I’d love to say that I awoke from my own fugue state and remembered only the stinging fizz of my wounds as Hominy gently dabbed at my police-inflicted abrasions with cotton balls soaked in hydrogen peroxide. But as long as I live, I’ll never forget the sound of my leather belt against the Levi Strauss denim as I unsheathed it from my pants. The whistle of that brown-and-black reversible whip cutting through the air and raining down hard in loud skin-popping thunderclaps on Hominy’s back. The teary-eyed joy and the thankfulness he showed me as he crawled, not away from the beating, but into it; seeking closure for centuries of repressed anger and decades of unrequited subservience by hugging me at the knees and begging me to hit him harder, his black body welcoming the weight and sizzle of my whip with groveling groans of ecstasy. I’ll never forget Hominy bleeding in the street and, like every slave throughout history, refusing to press charges. I’ll never forget him walking me gently inside and asking those who’d gathered around not to judge me because, after all, who whispers in the Nigger Whisperer’s ear?

“Hominy.”

“Yes, massa.”

“What would you whisper in my ear?”

“I’d whisper that you’re thinking too small. That saving Dickens nigger by nigger with a bullhorn ain’t never going to work. That you have to think bigger than your father did. You know the phrase ‘You can’t see the forest for the trees’?”

“Of course.”

“Well, you have to stop seeing us as individuals, ’cause right now, massa, you ain’t seeing the plantation for the niggers.”

Six

They say “pimpin’ ain’t easy.” Well, neither is slaveholdin’. Like children, dogs, dice, and overpromising politicians, and apparently prostitutes, slaves don’t do what you tell them to do. And when your eighty-some-odd-year-old black thrall has maybe fifteen good minutes of work in him a day and enjoys the shit out of being punished, you don’t get many of the plantation perks you see in the movies either. No woe is me, “Go Down Moses” field singing. No pillowy soft black breasts to nuzzle up to. No feather dusters. No one says “by ’n’ by.” No fancy dinners replete with candelabra and endless helpings of glazed ham, heaping spoonfuls of mashed potatoes, and the healthiest-looking greens known to mankind. I never got to experience any of that unquestioned trust between master and bondman. I just owned a wizened old black man who knew only one thing — his place. Hominy couldn’t fix a wagon wheel. Hoe a fucking row. Tote barge or lift bale. But he could genuflect his ass off, and from 1:00 p.m. to 1:15 p.m., or thereabouts, hat in hand, he’d show up for work. Doing whatever he felt like doing. Sometimes work consisted of donning a shiny pair of emerald green and pink silks, holding a gas lamp at arm’s length, and posing in my front yard as a life-size lawn jockey. Other times, he liked to serve as a human footstool, and when the spirit of servitude moved him, he’d drop to all fours at the foot of my horse or the base of the pickup truck and stay there until I stepped on his back and took an unwanted trip to the liquor store or the Ontario livestock auction. But mostly Hominy’s work consisted of watching me work. Biting into Burbank plums whose tartness to sweetness to skin thickness ratios took me six years to get just right, and exclaiming, “Damn, massa, these plums sho’ am good. They Japanese you say? Well, you musta stuck yo’ hand up Godzilla’s asshole, cuz you gotta green thumb like a motherfucker.”

So believe me when I tell you human bondage is an especially frustrating undertaking. Not that I undertook anything, my dominion over this clinically depressed bondsman having been forced upon me. And let’s be clear: I tried to “free” Hominy countless times. Simply telling him he was free had no effect. And once, I swear, I almost ditched him in the San Bernadino Mountains like an unwanted dog, but I saw a stray ostrich with a Pharcyde promotional bumper sticker affixed to its tail feathers and I lost my nerve. I even had Hampton draw up some manumission papers written in industrial-age jargon and paid some scrivener $200 to write out a contract on antique parchment paper that I found at a Beverly Hills stationery store, because apparently rich people still have use for it. What for? Who knows. Maybe, with the state of the banking system, they’ve gone back to the treasure map.

“To Whom It May Concern,” the contract read. “With this deed I hereby emancipate, manumit, set free, permanently discharge, and dismiss my slave Hominy Jenkins, who’s been in my service for the past three weeks. Said Hominy is of medium build, complexion, and intelligence. To all who read this, Hominy Jenkins is now a free man of color. Witness my hand on this day, October 17th, the year of 1838.” The ruse didn’t work. Hominy simply pulled down his pants, shit on my geraniums, and wiped his ass with his freedom, then handed it back to me.

“Medium intelligence?” he asked, raising a gray eyebrow. “One, I know what year it is. Two, true freedom is having the right to be a slave.” He hiked up his pants and slipped into his Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer plantationese. “I know taint nobody forcin’ me, but dis here one slave you ain’t never gwine be rid of. Freedom can kiss my postbellum black ass.”

Slavery must have been profitable as hell for anybody to deal with all the mental anguish, but sometimes after a hot day of dehorning the goats and stringing barbed-wire fences, I’d be kicking back on the porch, watching the dusk scatter the smog red and heavy across the downtown sky, and Hominy would come outside with a pitcher of cold lemonade. There’d be something so satisfying about watching the condensation form and drip down the sides of the Tupperware as he slowly filled my glass, plop by painstaking ice cube plop, then fanned the horseflies and the heat from my face. In the cool air and ambient car stereo Tupac, I felt a refreshing hint of the dominion the landed Confederacy must have felt. Shit, if Hominy had always been so cooperative, I’d have fired on Fort Sumter, too.

On Thursdays, accidentally on purpose, Hominy would spill the refill in my lap. Sending me a not-so-subtle message, like a dog scratching at the screen door, that it was time for some action.

“Hominy.”

“Yes, massa?” he’d say hopefully. Rubbing his hindquarters in preparation.

“Did you choose a counselor?”

“I looked on the Internet, and the therapists are all white. Standing in the forest or in front of a bookshelf, promising career and sexual fulfillment, and healthy relationships. How come you never see photos of them with their overachieving kids or fucking their partners to satisfaction? Where’s the proof in the pudding?”

The wet patch on my pants would spread over my lap and toward my knees. “Okay, get in the truck,” I’d say.

Oddly, Hominy didn’t seem to mind that all the dominatrices at Sticks and Stones, the BDSM club on the Westside I contracted to dole out my punishments for me, were white women. The Bastille room was his favorite torture chamber. There, naked save for a Union Civil War cap, Mistress Dorothy, a pale brunette whose pouty Maybelline red lips put Scarlett O’Hara’s sneer to shame, strapped him to the wheel and whipped him silly. She’d clamp some contraption about his genitals and demand intel about Union Army troop movements and armament strength. Afterward Miss Dorothy would stick her head in the truck cab, plant a kiss on Hominy’s cheek, and hand me the receipt. At two hundred bucks an hour plus “racial incidentals,” the shit started to add up. The first five “coons,” “jigaboos,” “tar babies,” and “Sambos” were free. After that, it was three dollars an epithet. And “nigger,” in any of its varied forms, derivations, and pronunciations, was ten bucks a pop. Nonnegotiable. But after these sessions Hominy looked so happy it was almost worth it. Yet Hominy’s happiness wasn’t mine, it wasn’t the city’s, but I couldn’t think of a way of restoring Dickens until one unusually warm spring evening returning home from Sticks and Stones.

Hominy and I found ourselves stuck on the 110 freeway, impatiently weaving from lane to lane. We were making good progress until we hit the stretch between the 405 and 105 interchanges and traffic began to slow. My father had a theory that poor people are the best drivers because they can’t afford to carry car insurance and have to drive like they live, defensively. We were caught up in a slog of uninsured rust-bucket jalopies and compacts, all doing exactly fifty-five miles per hour, their trash bag windshields flapping in the wind. Hominy was beginning to come down from his masochistic high, the memories, if not the pain, of his session already beginning to fade away exit by exit. He poked at a bruise on his arm and asked himself where it came from. I snatched a joint from the glove compartment and offered him a medicinal hit.

“You know who was a pothead?” he said, refusing the doobage. “Little Scotty Beckett.”

Scotty was a big-eyed Rascal who used to run with Spanky. Wore a floppy knit sweater and his baseball cap to the side, but the white boy was all punim and no pathos and he didn’t last long. “Oh yeah? What about Spanky? Did he do drugs?”

“Spanky didn’t do shit but fuck bitches. That’s what Spanky did.”

I rolled down the window. We still weren’t moving very fast, and the stench of marijuana smoke hung guiltily in the air. The myth is that the Little Rascals, like a production of Macbeth, are cursed, that they all died horribly premature deaths.

GANG MEMBER

AGE

CAUSE OF DEATH

Alfalfa

42

Shot thirty times in the face (once for each freckle) in an argument over money

Buckwheat

49

Heart attack

Wheezer

19

Army training plane crash

Darla Hood

47

According to Hominy, he fucked her to death. In reality — hepatitis

Chubsy-Ubsy

21

Had something heavy on his heart. Unrequited love for Miss Crabtree and 300 lbs. of fat on a 5-foot frame

Froggy

16

Hit by truck

Pete the Pup

7

Swallowed alarm clock

Hominy squirmed in his seat, picking at the still-puffy red welts on his back, wondering why he was bleeding. Shit, maybe I was supposed to let him die. Maybe I should’ve just pushed him out of the car and onto the oily cracked asphalt of the Harbor Freeway. But what good would it do? Traffic came to a complete halt. A Jaguar, one of those ugly American-made models, was overturned in the fast lane. Its turtlenecked passenger unhurt, leaning against the median fence and reading a hardback novel you see only at airport bookstores. The rear-ended Honda sedan, with both its back end and its driver flattened and smoking, lay in the middle lane waiting to be carried to the junk- and graveyards, respectively. Jaguar model names sound like rockets: XJ — S, XJ8, E — Type. Hondas sound like cars designed by pacifists and humanitarian diplomats. The Accord, Civic, Insight. Hominy got out of the car to untangle the snarl. Waving his arms like the crazy man he was, he separated the cars by color, not that of the respective paint jobs, but by the hue of the motorists. “If you black, get back! White, to the right. Brown, go around. Yellow, follow the whites and let it mellow. Red, full speed ahead! Mulattos, full throttle!” If he couldn’t categorize by sight, he asked the drivers what color they were. “Chicano? What color is that? You just can’t make up a race, motherfucker. Puto? I got your puto right here, pendejo! You pick a lane, nigger, and stay in it! Get in where you fit in!”

With cops and flares arrived, and the traffic finally flowing freely, Hominy climbed back into the truck, dusting off his hands like he’d done something. “That’s how you do shit. Sunshine Sammy taught me that. He used to say, ‘Time waits on no man, but niggers wait on anybody with a twenty-five cent tip.’”

“Who the fuck is Sunshine Sammy?”

“Don’t you worry about who Sunshine Sammy is. You new niggers got black presidents and golfers. I got Sunshine Sammy. The original Little Rascal, and by original I mean the very first one. And let me tell you, when Sunshine Sammy rescued the gang from an impossible predicament, now that was nonpartisan leadership.”

Hominy slumped in his seat and clasped his hands behind his head and looked out the window and into his past. I flipped on the radio and let the Dodger game fill the silence. Hominy missed the good ol’ days and Sunshine Sammy. I missed Vin Scully, the dulcet voice of objectivity, calling the play-by-play. For a baseball puritan like myself, the good ol’ days were the days before the designated hitter, interleague play, steroids, and assholes in the outfield, baseball caps perched precariously atop their heads, flying off with every missed cut-off man and pop fly lost in the national pastime sun. They were me and Daddy, our mouths full of Dodger dogs and soda, two black bleacher and dharma bums sharing the June night heat with the moths, cursing a fifth-place team, and longing for the good ol’ days of Garvey, Cey, Koufax, Dusty, Drysdale, and Lasorda. For Hominy any day when he could personify American primitivism was a good ol’ day. It meant that he was still alive, and sometimes even the carnival coon in the dunk tank misses the attention. And this country, the latent high school homosexual that it is, the mulatto passing for white that it is, the Neanderthal incessantly plucking its unibrow that it is, needs people like him. It needs somebody to throw baseballs at, to fag-bash, to nigger-stomp, to invade, to embargo. Anything that, like baseball, keeps a country that’s constantly preening in the mirror from actually looking in the mirror and remembering where the bodies are buried. That night the Dodgers lost their third straight. Hominy sat up in his seat and rubbed a porthole into the suddenly fogged-up windshield.

“We home yet?” he asked.

We were midway between the El Segundo and Rosecrans Avenue off-ramps, and it hit me: there used to be a sign that read DICKENS — NEXT EXIT. Hominy missed the good ol’ days. I missed my father driving us back from the Pomona State Fair, elbowing me awake, the Dodger postgame on the radio as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes just in time to see that sign, DICKENS — NEXT EXIT, and know I was home. Shit, I missed that sign. And what are cities really, besides signs and arbitrary boundaries?

The green-and-white placard didn’t cost much: a sheet of aluminum the size of a queen-sized bed, two six-foot metal poles, some traffic cones and flares, two reflective orange vests, two cans of spray paint, a couple of hard hats, and that night’s sleep. Thanks to a downloaded copy of the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, I had the design specifications for everything from the proper shade of green (Pantone 342) to the exact dimensions (60'' x 36''), letter size (8''), and font (Highway Gothic). And after a long night of painting, cutting down the post to size, and stenciling SUNSHINE SAMMY CONSTRUCTION to the doors of the truck in removable paint, Hominy and I set back toward the freeway. Other than pouring and waiting for the cement foundation to dry, installing a traffic control device isn’t all that different from planting a tree, and in the light of the high beams I set to work. Cleared the ivy, dug the holes, and planted the sign, while Hominy passed out in the front seat, listening to jazz on KLON.

As the sun rose over the El Segundo Boulevard overpass, the morning commute was starting in earnest. And amid the car honking, the rotors of the traffic helicopters beating overhead, and the grinding of truck gears, Hominy and I sat in the breakdown lane appreciating what we’d done. The sign was a dead ringer for any of the other “traffic control devices” one sees during the daily commute. It’d taken only a few hours, but I felt like Michelangelo staring at the Sistine Chapel after four years of hard labor, like Banksy after spending six days searching the Internet for ideas to steal and three minutes of sidewalk vandalism to execute them.

“Massa, signs are powerful things. It almost feels like Dickens exists out there in the smog somewhere.”

“Hominy, what feels better, getting whipped or looking at that sign?”

Hominy thought a moment. “The whip feels good on the back, but the sign feels good in the heart.”

* * *

When we arrived home that morning, I popped open a kitchen-table beer, sent Hominy home, grabbed the latest edition of The Thomas Guide from the bookshelf. At 4,084 square miles, much of Los Angeles County, like the ocean floor, remains in large part unexplored. Even though you needed an advanced degree in geomatics to understand its 800+ pages, The Thomas Guide to Los Angeles County is the spiral-bound Sacagawea for any intrepid explorer trying to navigate this urban oasis-less sprawl. Even in the days of GPS devices and search engines, it sits on the front seat of every taxicab, tow truck, and company car, and no Sureño worth their rolling “California stop” would ever be caught dead without one. I flipped the book open. Every year my father used to bring the new Thomas Guide home, and the first thing I’d do was turn to pages 704–5 and approximate the location of the crib, 205 Bernard Avenue, on the map. Finding my house in that giant tome grounded me somehow. Made me feel loved by the world. But 205 Bernard Avenue sat on a nameless peach-colored section of gridiron streets bordered by freeways on each side. I wanted to cry. It hurt knowing that Dickens had been exiled to the netherworld of invisible L.A. communities. Top-secret minority bastions like the Dons and the Avenues that’ve never had or needed Thomas Guide listings, official boundaries, or cheesy billboards announcing, “You are now entering…” or “You are now leaving…” because when the voice inside your head (the one you swear up and down isn’t prejudice or racism) tells you to roll up the windows and lock the doors, you know you’ve entered the Jungle or Fruittown, and that when you start breathing again, you’ve exited. I dug up a blue marker, drew a crooked outline of my hometown as best as I could remember it, and scribbled DICKENS in big Dodger-blue letters across pages 704–5, and a little pictogram of the exit sign I’d just put up. If I ever raise the nerve, one day I’m going to erect two more signs. So if you find yourself hurtling southbound on the 110 freeway, speeding past two yellow-and-black blurs that read WATCH OUT FOR FALLING HOME PRICES and CAUTION — BLACK ON BLACK CRIME AHEAD, you’ll know whom to thank for the roadside warnings.