The Sellout

Seven

The Sunday after installing the roadside sign I wanted to make a formal announcement of my plan to reanimate the city of Dickens. And what better place to do so than the next meeting of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, the closest approximation we had to a representative government.

One of the many sad ironies of African-American life is that every banal dysfunctional social gathering is called a “function.” And black functions never start on time, so it’s impossible to gauge how to arrive fashionably late without taking a chance of missing the event altogether. Not wanting to have to sit through the reading of the minutes, I waited until the Raiders game reached halftime. Since my father’s death, the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals had devolved into a group of star-struck, middle-class black out-of-towners and academics who met bimonthly to fawn over the semifamous Foy Cheshire. As much as black America treasures its fallen heroes, it was hard to tell if they were more impressed with his resiliency or that despite all he’d been through he still drove a vintage 1956 Mercedes 300SL. Nevertheless, they hovered around, hoping to impress him with their insight into an indigent black community that, if they’d just taken their racial blinders off for one second, they’d realize was no longer black but predominantly Latino.

The meetings consisted mostly of the members who showed up every other week arguing with the ones who came every other month about what exactly “bimonthly” means. I entered the donut shop just as the last copies of The Ticker, an update of statistics related to Dickens, were being passed around. Standing in the back near the blueberry fritters, I held the handout to my nose and inhaled the sweet smell of fresh mimeograph ink before giving it a cursory glance. The Ticker was a societal measure my father had designed to look like a Dow Jones stock report. Except that commodities and blue chips were replaced with social ills and pitfalls. Everything that was always up — unemployment, poverty, lawlessness, infant mortality — was up. Everything that’s always down — graduation rates, literacy, life expectancy — was even further down.

Foy Cheshire stood underneath the clock. In ten years’ time, other than gaining seventy-five pounds, he hadn’t changed much. He wasn’t much younger than Hominy, but he’d never grayed and his face bore only a few laugh lines. On the wall behind him were two framed poster-sized photos, one of a variety box of insanely puffy and succulent-looking donuts that looked nothing like the shrivelled-up, lumpy, so-called fresh pastries hardening before my eyes in the display case behind me, the other a color portrait of Pops, proudly wearing his APA tie clasp, his hair shaped to billowy perfection. I played the back. Judging from the serious mood in the room, there was a lot on the agenda and it’d be a while before the Dum Dums got to “ancilliary bidness.”

Foy held two books, fanning them out in front of the group like a magician about to do a card trick. Pick a culture, any culture. He held one aloft, addressing his audience in an affected Southern Methodist drawl, even though he was from the Hollywood Hills by way of Grand Rapids. “One night, not long ago,” Foy said, “I tried to read this book, Huckleberry Finn, to my grandchildren, but I couldn’t get past page six because the book is fraught with the ‘n-word.’ And although they are the deepest-thinking, combat-ready eight- and ten-year-olds I know, I knew my babies weren’t ready to comprehend Huckleberry Finn on its own merits. That’s why I took the liberty to rewrite Mark Twain’s masterpiece. Where the repugnant ‘n-word’ occurs, I replaced it with ‘warrior’ and the word ‘slave’ with ‘dark-skinned volunteer.’”

“That’s right!” shouted the crowd.

“I also improved Jim’s diction, rejiggered the plotline a bit, and retitled the book The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.” Then Foy held up the copy of his revamped volume for examination. My eyesight isn’t the best, but I could’ve sworn the cover featured Huckleberry Finn piloting the raft down the mighty Mississippi, while Captain African-American Jim stood at the helm, hands on narrow hips, sporting a cheesy goatee and a tartan Burberry sport coat exactly like the one Foy happened to be wearing.

I never much liked going to the meetings, but after my father died, unless there was an emergency on the farm, I showed up. Before Foy’s appointment as lead thinker, there had been some talk of grooming me to step in as leader of the group. The Kim Jong-un of ghetto conceptualism. After all, I’d taken over the nigger-whispering duties. But I refused. Begging out by claiming I didn’t know enough about black culture. That the only certainties I had about the African-American condition were that we had no concept of the phrases “too sweet” and “too salty.” And in ten years, through countless California cruelties and slights against the blacks, the poor, the people of color, like Propositions 8 and 187, the disappearance of social welfare, David Cronenberg’s Crash, and Dave Eggers’s do-gooder condescension, I hadn’t spoken a single word. During roll call Foy never called me by my proper name, but simply yelled, “The Sellout!” Looked me in the face with a sly and perfunctory smile, said, “Here,” and placed a check mark next to my name.

Foy touched his fingertips together in front of his chest, the universal sign that the smartest person in the room is about to say something. He spoke loudly and quickly, his speech picking up in speed and intensity with every word. “I propose that we move to demand the inclusion of my politically respectful edition of Huckleberry Finn into every middle-school reading curriculum,” he said. “Because it’s a crime that generations of black folk come of age never having experienced this”—Foy snuck a peek at the original book’s back cover—“this hilariously picturesque American classic.”

“Is it ‘black folk’ or ‘black folks’?” My having not spoken for the first time in years caught both of us off guard. But I came with the intention of saying something, so why not warm up the vocal cords. I took a bite out of the batch of Oreo cookies I’d boldly snuck in. “Which one is grammatically correct? I never know.” Foy took a calming sip of cappuccino and ignored me. He and the rest of the non-Dickensian flock belonged to that scary subset of black lycanthropic thinkers I like to refer to as “wereniggers.” By day, wereniggers are erudite and urbane, but with every lunar cycle, fiscal quarter, and tenure review their hackles rise, and they slip into their floor-length fur coats and mink stoles, grow fangs, and schlep down from their ivory towers and corporate boardrooms to prowl the inner cities, so that they can howl at the full moon over drinks and mediocre blues music. Now that his fame, if not his fortune, has waned, werenigger Foy Cheshire’s foggy ghetto moor of choice is Dickens. Normally I try to avoid wereniggers at all costs. It’s not the fear of being intellectually ripped to shreds that frightens me most, it’s the cloying insistence on addressing everyone, especially people they can’t stand, as Brother So-and-so and Sister This-and-that. I used to bring Hominy to the meetings to alleviate the boredom. Plus, he’d say the shit I was thinking. “Why you niggers talk so black, dropping the g’s in your gerunds in here, but on your little public television appearances you motherfuckers sound like Kelsey Grammer with a stick up his ass.” But once he heard the widespread rumor that Foy Cheshire had used some of the millions in the royalties he’d earned over the years to purchase the rights to the most racist shorts in the Our Gang oeuvre, I had to ask Hominy to stop coming. He’d scream and stomp. Interrupt every motion with some histrionics. “Nigger, where are my Little Rascal movies!” Hominy swears his best work is on those reels. If the talk were true, it’d be impossible to forgive that self-righteous guardian of blackness for forever depriving the world of the best in American racial prejudice in Blu-ray and Dolby surround sound. But most everyone knows that, like alligators in the sewers, the lethality of Pop Rocks and soda, Foy Cheshire’s ownership of the most racist Little Rascal films is nothing more than urban legend.

Always fast on his feet, Foy countered my insolence and Oreos with a bag of gourmet cannoli. We were both too good to eat the crap Dum Dum Donuts served up.

“This is serious. Brother Mark Twain uses the ‘n-word’ 219 times. That’s.68 ‘n-words’ per page in toto.”

“If you ask me, Mark Twain didn’t use the word ‘nigger’ enough,” I mumbled. With my mouth filled with at least four of America’s favorite cookies, I don’t think anyone understood me. I wanted to say more. Like, why blame Mark Twain because you don’t have the patience and courage to explain to your children that the “n-word” exists and that during the course of their sheltered little lives they may one day be called a “nigger” or, even worse, deign to call somebody else a “nigger.” No one will ever refer to them as “little black euphemisms,” so welcome to the American lexicon — Nigger! But I’d forgotten to order any milk to wash the cookies down with. And I never got the chance to explain to Foy and his close-minded ilk that Mark Twain’s truth is that your average black nigger is morally and intellectually superior to the average white nigger, but no, those pompous Dum Dum niggers wanted to ban the word, disinvent the watermelon, snorting in the morning, washing your dick in the sink, and the eternal shame of having pubic hair the color and texture of unground pepper. That’s the difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity. We want someone like Foy Cheshire to present our case to the world with a set of instructions that the jury will disregard centuries of ridicule and stereotype and pretend the woebegone niggers in front of you are starting from scratch.

Foy continued his sales pitch: “The ‘n-word’ is the most vile and despicable word in the English language. I don’t believe anyone would argue that point.”

“I can think of a more despicable word than ‘nigger,’” I volunteered. Having finally swallowed my gooey chocolate-and-crème chaw, I closed one eye and held a half-bitten cookie so that the dark brown semicircle sat atop Foy’s gigantic head like a well-coiffed Nabisco Afro that read OREO at its center.

“Like what?”

“Like any word that ends in — ess: Negress. Jewess. Poetess. Actress. Adultress. Factchecktress. I’d rather be called ‘nigger’ than ‘giantess’ any day of the week.”

“Problematic,” someone muttered, invoking the code word black thinkers use to characterize anything or anybody that makes them feel uncomfortable, impotent, and painfully aware that they don’t have the answers to questions and assholes like me. “What the fuck you come here for, if you don’t have anything productive to say?”

Foy raised his hands, asking for calm. “The Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals respect all input. And for those who don’t know, this sellout is the son of our founder.” Then he turned to me with a look of pity on his face. “Go on, Sellout. Say what you came to say.”

Most times when someone presents before the Dum Dums you’re required to use EmpowerPoint, a slide presentation “African-American software” package developed by Foy Cheshire. Not much different from the Microsoft product except that the fonts have names like Timbuktu, Harlem Renaissance, and Pittsburgh Courier. I opened the store’s broom closet. Next to the mops and buckets, the old transparency projector was still there. Its glass top and lone sheet of transparency paper filthy as prison windows, but still usable.

I asked the assistant manager to dim the lights, then drew up and projected the following schematic onto the cork ceiling:

I explained that the boundary labels were to be spray-painted onto the sidewalks and that the lines of demarcation would be denoted by a configuration of mirrors and high-powered green pinpoint lasers, or if that proved to be cost prohibitive, I could simply circumnavigate the twelve miles of border with a three-inch strip of white paint. Hearing the words “circumnavigate” and “lines of demarcation” come out of my mouth made me realize that even though I was making this shit up on the spot, I was more serious about this than I thought I was. And yes, “I’m bringing back the city of Dickens.”

Laughter. Waves and peals of deep black laughter of the kind kindhearted plantation owners long for in movies like Gone with the Wind. Laughter like you hear in basketball locker rooms, backstage at rap concerts, and in the backrooms of Yale University’s all-white department of black studies after some fuzzy-hair-brained guest lecturer has dared to suggest that there’s a connection between Franz Fanon, existential thought, string theory, and bebop. When the chorus of ridicule finally died down, Foy wiped away the tears of hilarity from his eyes, finished the last of the cannoli, scooted in behind me, and turned my father’s photo toward the wall, thus saving Pops the embarrassment of having to witness his son desecrate the family intellect.

“You said you were going to bring back Dickens?” Foy asked, breaking the question-and-answer ice.

“Yes.”

“We, and I think I speak for most of the group, have only one question: Why?”

Hurt that I expected everyone to care and no one did, I returned to my seat and spaced out after that. Half-listening to the usual diatribes about the dissolution of the black family and the need for black business. Waiting for Foy to say “and things of that nature,” which is the “Roger. Over and out” of black intellectual communication.

“… and things of that nature.”

Finally. The meeting was over. And as the gathering broke up, I was twisting open my last Oreo cookie when, from out of nowhere, a callused black hand ganked it and popped it into a tight-lipped mouth.

“You bring enough for the whole race, nigger?”

With tufts of perm-straightened hair fastened to hot pink rollers stuffed underneath a see-through shower cap and giant hoop earrings dangling from both ears, the cookie snatcher looked more like a Blanche or a Madge than the notorious gangbanger known as King (pronounced “Kang”) Cuz. And silently, very silently, I cursed Cuz as he slid his tongue over his metal-rimmed teeth, clearing tiny flecks of chocolaty goodness from his bridgework.

“That’s what my teachers used to say to me if I was chewing gum and shit. ‘You bring enough for the whole class?’”

“No doubt, nigger.”

In all the time I’ve known Cuz, I’ve never had a real conversation with him beyond “No doubt, nigger.” No one has, because even in his middle age, he’s sensitive, and if you say the wrong thing, he’ll show the world just how sensitive he is by crying at your funeral. So no one engages him in conversation; whenever he speaks to you, no matter what he says, man, woman, or child, you put as much bass in your voice as you possibly can and reply, “No doubt, nigger.”

King Cuz has faithfully attended meetings of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals ever since my father nigger-whispered his mother off the Metro train tracks. Feet and hands bound in a jump rope, she had pitched herself onto the commuter rails screaming, “When a white bitch got problems, she’s a damsel in distress! When a black bitch got problems, she’s a welfare cheat and a burden on society. How come you never see any black damsels? Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your weave!” She was yelling so loud you could hear her suicidal protests over the ding-dong of the falling crossing gate and the blaring horn of the onrushing Blue Line. King Cuz was Curtis Baxter then, and I remember the windy wake of the passing train blowing young Curtis’s tears sideways on his face as my dad cradled his mother in his arms. I remember the railroad tracks, rusty and ringing and still hot to the touch.

So you bring enough for the whole race?

Curtis grew up to become King Cuz. A gangster well respected for his brain and his derring-do. His set, the Rollin’ Paper Chasers, was the first gang to have trained medics at their rumbles. A shoot-out would pop off at the swap meet and the stretcher-bearers would cart off the wounded to be treated in some field hospital set up behind the frontlines. You didn’t know whether to be sad or impressed. It wasn’t long after that innovation that he applied for membership to NATO. Everybody else is in NATO. Why not the Crips? You going to tell me we wouldn’t kick the shit out of Estonia?

No doubt, nigger.

“I need to talk to you about a couple of things.”

“No doubt, nigger.”

“But not in here.”

Cuz lifted me by the shirtsleeve and escorted me out the door and into the hazy Hound of the Baskervilles night. It’s always a shock to have the day turn to dark without you, and we both paused to let the warm wet mist and the silence settle on our faces. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s more interminable, prejudice and discrimination or the goddamn meetings. Cuz made half a fist, examined his long, manicured nails, then raised one heavily teased eyebrow and smiled.

“First thing is ‘bringing back Dickens.’ Fuck what the rest of them niggers who ain’t from the hood say, I’m thoroughly with that shit. It ain’t but a couple of us in there, but the Dum Dums who from Dickens wasn’t laughing. So set that off, cuz, because if you think about it, why can’t black people have their own Chinese restaurants?”

“No doubt, nigger.”

Then I did something I never thought I’d do. I engaged King Cuz in conversation, because I had to know, even if it cost me my life or, at the very least, what little cachet I had as the neighborhood’s resident “quiet motherfucker.”

“I have to ask you something, King Cuz.”

“Call me Cuz, cuz.”

“All right, Cuz. Why do you go to these meetings? Shouldn’t you be out slanging and banging?”

“It used to be I’d go to listen to your father. Rest in peace, that nigger ran deep, for real. But now I go just in case these Dum Dum niggers get the notion to actually set foot in the hood, blowing the spot up and all. That way I can at least give the homies some Paul Revere — like advance notice. One if by Land Cruiser. Two if by C-class Mercedes. The bougies are coming! The bougies are coming!”

“Who’s coming where?” It was Foy. Meeting over, he and the other wereniggers were piling into their cars. Making ready for a prowl on the town. Curtis “King Cuz” Baxter didn’t bother to answer Foy. He simply spun on his Converse heels and pimp-walked into the blurry night. Listing hard to the right like a drunken seaman with an inner ear infection. He shouted back at me, “Think about them black Chinese restaurants. And get some pussy. You’re too damn high-strung.”

“Don’t listen to that man, pussy is overrated.”

As I unhitched and mounted my horse, Foy thumbed open two bottles of prescription pills and spilled three white tablets into his hand.

“Point zero zero one,” he said, jiggling the tablets in his palm to make sure I’d see them. Zoloft and Lexapro.

“What, the dosage?”

“No, my fucking Nielsen ratings. Your dad used to think I was bipolar, but what I really am is by myself. Sounds like you are, too.”

He pretended to offer me the pills before placing them gently on his tongue and washing them down with a swig from an expensive-looking silver flask. Since his cartoons had stopped airing, Foy had had a series of morning talk shows. Each successive failure slotted at a time earlier and earlier in the morning. Just as Bloods don’t use the letter C because it’s the first letter in Crip (Cap’n Crunch Cereal is Kap’n Krunch Kereal), Foy shows his gang affiliation by replacing the word “fact” with “black.” And he has interviewed everyone from world leaders to dying musicians on programs titled Black and Fiction, Blacktotum. His latest installment was a nonsensical race forum on public access called Just the Blacks, Ma’am. It aired at five o’clock Sunday mornings. Ain’t but two niggers in the world awake at five o’clock, and that’s Foy Cheshire and his make-up artist.

It’s hard to describe a man wearing probably close to $5,000 in a suit, shoes, and accessories as disheveled, but up close in the streetlight that’s exactly what he was. All spit and no polish, his shirt wrinkled and losing its starch. The bottoms of his barely creased silk pants ringed brown with dirt and just starting to fray. His shoes were scuffed, and he reeked of crème de menthe. I once heard Mike Tyson say, “Only in America can you be bankrupt and live in a mansion.”

Foy recapped his flask and jammed it into his pocket. Now that no one was looking, I waited for him to make the full werenigger transformation. Grow fangs and claws. I wondered if the hair on black werewolves was nappy. It had to be, right?

“I know what you up to.”

“What am I up to?”

“You’re about the same age your father was when he died. And you ain’t said shit in a meeting for ten years. Why choose today to talk this nonsense about bringing Dickens back? Because you trying to reclaim the Dum Dums, take back what your father started.”

“I don’t think so. Any organization that holds lectures about the dangers of diabetes in a donut shop, you can keep.”

Maybe I should’ve seen it then. My father had a checklist to determine whether or not someone was losing his mind. He said there were telltale signs of a mental breakdown that people often mistake for force of personality. Aloofness. Mood swings. Delusions of grandeur. Apart from Hominy, who, like one of those giant redwood slices you see at the science museum, was an open book, I only know how to tell if a tree is dying on the inside, not a person. The tree sort of withdraws into itself. The leaves become splotchy. Sometimes there are cankers and fissures in the bark. The branches might be bone-dry or soft and spongy to the touch. But the best way is to look at the roots. The roots are what anchors a tree to the ground, holds it in place on this spinning ball of shit, and if those are cracked and covered in spores and fungi, well … I remember looking at Foy’s roots, a pair of expensive brown wingtips. They were scuffed and dusty. So, given the rumors about his wife filing for divorce, the bankruptcy, and his talk show’s nonexistent ratings, maybe I should’ve known.

“I’ve got my eye on you,” he said, sliding into his car. “The Dum Dum Donuts is all I have left. I will not let you fuck my shit up.” Two goodbye beeps of his horn and he was gone. Swooping his Benz down El Cielo Boulevard, reaching Mach speed as he flew past Cuz, whose slow-footed strut was unmistakable even from a distance. It doesn’t happen often, but once in a Crip blue moon, a member of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals says something ingenious like “black Chinese restaurants” and “pussy.”

“No doubt, nigger,” I said aloud.

And for the first time I meant it.

Eight

I went with the painted boundary. Not that the lasers cost so much, though the pointers that had the intensity I needed were a few hundred bucks apiece, it’s that I found the painting to be meditative. I’ve always liked rote. The formulaic repetitiveness of filing and stuffing envelopes appeals to me in some fundamental life-affirming way. I would’ve made a good factory worker, supply-room clerk, or Hollywood scriptwriter. In school, whenever I had to do something like memorize the periodic table, my father would say the key to doing boring tasks is to think about not so much what you’re doing but the importance of why you’re doing it. Though when I asked him if slavery wouldn’t have been less psychologically damaging if they’d thought of it as “gardening,” I got a vicious beating that would’ve made Kunta Kinte wince.

I bought a shitload of white spray paint and a line-marking machine, the kind used to paint yardage markers and foul lines on ball fields, and before my morning chores, when the traffic was light, I’d haul my ass to the designated location, set up shop in the middle of the road, and paint the line. Paying no attention to the line’s straightness or my attire, I laid down the border. It was a sign of the ineffectualness of the Dum Dum Donut think tank that no one had any idea what I was doing. Most folks who didn’t know me mistook me for a performance artist or a crazy person. I was cool with the latter designation.

But after a few thousand yards of squiggly white lines, it became obvious to any Dickensian over the age of ten what I was doing. Unsolicited, groups of truant teens and homeless would stand guard over the line. Plucking leaves and debris out of the wet paint. Shooing away bicyclists and jaywalkers to prevent them from smearing the border. Sometimes, after retiring for the day, I’d return the next morning, only to find that someone else had taken up where I’d left off. Extended my line with a line of their own, often in a different color. Sometimes the line wouldn’t be a line at all but drops of blood, or an uninterrupted string of graffiti signing off on my efforts, ____AceBoonakatheWest sideCrazy63rdStGangsta____, or, as in the case of the corner fronting the L.A. LGBTDL Crisis Center for Chicanos, Blacks, Non-Gays, and Anyone Else Who Feels Underserved, Unsupported, and Exploited by Hit Cable Television Shows, an arcing three-foot-wide, four-hundred-foot-long rainbow anchored with pots of gold condoms. Halfway down Victoria Boulevard where the El Harvard Bridge starts to cross the creek, someone bisected my line with 100 Smoots in purple print. I still have no idea what that means, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that, with all the help, it didn’t take long to finish painting the border. The police, many of whom knew me through my work and my watermelon, often escorted me from their patrol cars. Checking my boundary for accuracy against old editions of The Thomas Guide. I didn’t mind Officer Mendez’s good-natured teasing.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for the lost city of Dickens.”

“By painting a white line down the middle of a street that already has two yellow lines down the middle of it?”

“You love the mangy dog that shows up in your backyard as much as the puppy you got for your birthday.”

“Then you should put up a flyer,” she said, handing me a mock-up she’d hurriedly composed on the back of a wanted poster.

MISSING: HOMETOWN

Have you seen my city?

Description: Mostly Black and Brown. Some Samoan.

Friendly. Answers to the name of Dickens.

Reward Earned in Heaven.

If you have any information, please call this number 1-(800) DICKENS.

I appreciated the help and, using a wad of chewed gum, fastened the flyer to the nearest telephone post. For those looking to find the thing that you’ve lost, the decision of where to place your handbill is one of the toughest you’ll ever make in life. I chose a space at the bottom of the pole between a circular for an Uncle Jam’s Army concert at the Veterans Center. “Uncle Jam Wants You! To Serve and Funk in Los Afghanistan, California! Allah Ak-Open-Bar from 9–10 p.m.!” and a leaflet promoting a mysterious dream job that paid $1,000 a week, working from home. I hoped whoever posted that flyer had had a talk with human resources, because I seriously doubted they were making even $300 a week, and they definitely weren’t working from home.

It took about six weeks to finish painting the border and the labels, and in the end I wasn’t sure what I’d accomplished, but it was fun to see kids spend their Saturdays circumnavigating the city by carefully tracing their steps, walking heel-to-toe on the line, making sure they’d left not even an inch untrod upon. Sometimes I’d chance across an elderly member of the community standing in the middle of the street, unable to cross the single white line. Puzzled looks on their faces from asking themselves why they felt so strongly about the Dickens side of the line as opposed to the other side. When there was just as much uncurbed dog shit over there as here. When the grass, what little of it there was, sure in the fuck wasn’t any greener. When the niggers were just as trifling, but for some reason they felt like they belonged on this side. And why was that? When it was just a line.

I have to confess that, in the days after I painted it, I, too, was hesitant to cross the line, because the jagged way it surrounded the remnants of the city reminded me of the chalk outline the police had needlessly drawn around my father’s body. But I did like the line’s artifice. The implication of solidarity and community it represented. And while I hadn’t quite reestablished Dickens, I had managed to quarantine it. And community — cum — leper colony wasn’t a bad start.