The Sellout

Eleven

“Too many Mexicans,” Charisma Molina muttered. Speaking through her perfect French manicure so she wouldn’t be overheard. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the racist sentiment expressed in public. Ever since the Native Americans trod up and down El Camino Real in their moccasins, seeking the source of those annoying fucking bells that rang at daybreak every Sunday morning, scaring away the bighorn sheep and ruining many a mescaline-tripping spirit walk, Californians have been cursing the Mexicans. The Indians, who were looking for peace and quiet, ended up finding Jesus, forced labor, the whip, and the rhythm method. “Too many Mexicans,” they’d whisper to themselves in the wheat fields and back pews when nobody was looking.

White people, the type who never used to have anything to say to black people except “We have no vacancies,” “You missed a spot,” and “Rebound the basketball,” finally have something to say to us. And on hot 104-degree San Fernando Valley days, when we’re carrying their groceries to their cars or stuffing their mailboxes with bills, they turn and say, “Too many Mexicans,” a tacit agreement between aggrieved strangers that it’s neither the heat nor the humidity, but that the blame lies with our little brown brothers to the south and the north and next door, and at the Grove, and everywhere else in Califas.

For black people “too many Mexicans” is the excuse we, the historically most documented workers in history, give ourselves for attending racist rallies protesting the undocumented workers seeking better living conditions. “Too many Mexicans” is an oral rationalization to remain stuck in our ways. We like to dream over tea about relocating, finding better living conditions, while riffling through the real estate classifieds.

“What about Glendale, baby?”

“Too many Mexicans.”

“Downey?”

“Too many Mexicans.”

“Bellflower?”

“Too many Mexicans.”

Too many Mexicans. It’s a bromide for every unlicensed contractor tired of being underbid and refusing to blame their lack of employment on shoddy workmanship, nepotistic hiring practices, and a long list of shitty online references. Mexicans are to blame for everything. Someone in California sneezes, you don’t say “Gesundheit” but “Too many Mexicans.” Your horse in the fifth comes up lame in the backstretch at Santa Anita? Too many Mexicans. The donkey on the button rivers a third queen at Commerce Casino? Too many Mexicans. It’s a constant California refrain, but when Charisma Molina, assistant principal of Chaff Middle School and best friend to Marpessa (my girlfriend, no matter what the fuck she says), said it, it was both the first time I’d ever heard a Mexican-American say it and, though I didn’t know it then, the first time I’d heard anyone mean it. Literally.

Unlike the Little Rascals, whenever I played hooky from school, I never went fishin’—I went to school. I’d sneak out of the house while my dad had fallen asleep during Blackology class and jet over to Chaff to watch the kids play hand- and kickball through the chain-link fence. If I was lucky, I’d catch a glimpse of Marpessa, Charisma, and their homegirls holding court at the rear gate, sassy as a brass big band, hula-hooping their hips, chanting, Ah beep beep, walking down street, ten times a week … “Ungawa! Ungawa!” That means black power!.. I’m soul sister number nine, sock it to me one more time …

For the kids at Chaff, the annual Career Day, held about two weeks before the summer break, was enough to make most of them at least contemplate career suicide before they’d even taken an aptitude test or written a résumé. Held outdoors on the schoolyard blacktop, the assemblage of coal miners, driving-range golf-ball retrievers, basket weavers, ditch diggers, bookbinders, traumatized firefighters, and the world’s last astronaut never does much to inspire. Every year it was the same old thing. We’d carry on about how indispensable and fulfilling our jobs were, but no one ever had answers for the questions from the back row. If you’re so fucking important and the world can’t run without you, then why are you here boring us to tears? Why do you look so unhappy? How come there aren’t any female firemen? How come nurses move so motherfucking slow? The only question ever answered to the children’s satisfaction was directed to the last astronaut, an elderly black gentleman, so feeble he moved like he was experiencing weightlessness here on Earth. How do astronauts go to the bathroom? Well, I don’t know about now, but in my day they taped a plastic bag to your ass.

Nobody wants to be a farmer, but about a month after Hominy’s birthday celebration, Charisma asked me to do something different. We sat on my front porch puffing gage, while she goaded me by saying she was tired of watching the Lopezes, or the “Stetson Mexicans next door,” as she called them, their horses draped and saddled in glitzy vaquero finery, embarrass me year after year with their brocaded, crushed-velvet cowboy suits and fancy rope tricks. “Nobody cares about the subtle differences between manure and fertilizer or sustainable disease management in the butternut squash. These kids have short attention spans. You have to grab them immediately and never let go. I can’t imagine anything worse than last year, when your presentation was so fucking boring the kids threw your own organic tomatoes at you.”

“That’s why I’m not coming. I don’t need the abuse.”

Charisma closed one eye and peered into the bowl, then handed it back to me.

“This shit’s cashed.”

“You want some more?”

Charisma nodded her head.

“I do, and I also want to know what the fuck this weed’s called, and why does the stock market and all the shit I read in my graduate English lit seminar suddenly make sense to me?”

“I call it Perspicacity.”

“Well, that’s how good this shit is, I know what ‘perspicacity,’ a word I’ve never heard, means.”

A dog barked. A cock crowed. A cow mooed. The din of the Harbor Freeway went E-I-E-I-O. Charisma flung back her long straight black hair from her face and took a hit that illuminated the mysteries of the Internet, Ulysses, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and the American fascination with cooking shows. She also understood how to get me to participate in Career Day.

“Marpessa’s going to be there.”

I didn’t need any more smoke to know that I’d never stop loving that woman.

* * *

With a bank of storm clouds rolling in from the west, it looked like rain. But nothing could dissuade Charisma from making sure her students would have the benefit of discovering the tens of career opportunities available to indigent minority youth in today’s America. After the garbage men, parole officers, DJs, and hype men had their say, it was time for some action. Marpessa, representing the transportation industry, who hadn’t even so much as looked my way the entire day, put on a stunt-driving demonstration that would’ve made the Fast and Furious movie franchise proud as she expertly slalomed her thirteen-ton bus between traffic cones, spun tire-smoke-billowing donuts over the four-square courts, and, after hitting a makeshift ramp constructed of lunch benches and tables, circled the schoolyard on two wheels. When the fancy driving was over, she invited the children for a tour of her bus. Loud and head-slappingly happy when they boarded, after ten minutes or so they filed off the bus in a quiet, orderly manner, somberly thanking Marpessa as they exited. One educator, a young white man, the sole white teacher in the school, was sobbing into his hands. After one last mournful look at the bus, he wandered away from the rest of the group and sank against the ball box, trying to get his shit together. I could never have imagined that an explanation of the transfer system and fare hikes could be so depressing. A light rain began to fall.

Charisma announced it was time for the more pastoral portions of the program. Nestor Lopez was up. From Jalisco, by way of Las Cruces, the Lopezes were the first Mexican family to integrate the Farms. I was about seven when they moved in. My father used to complain about the music and all the cockfighting. The only homeschool lesson in Mexican-American history I’d ever received was “Don’t you ever fight a Mexican. Because if you fight a Mexican, you have to kill a Mexican,” but Nestor, even though he was four years older than me and I might one day have to kill him over an unreturned Hot Wheels car or some shit, was crazy cool. On Sunday afternoons, when he came home from catechism, we’d watch charro movies and shaky videotapes of ersatz small-town rodeos. We’d drink porcelain cups of hot and cinnamony ponche his mom had made for us, and spend the rest of the afternoon recoiling from macabre videos with titles like 300 porrazos sangrientos, 101 muertes del jaripeo, 1,000 litros de sangre, and Si chingas al toro, te llevas los cuernos. And yet, even though I saw most of the action through the cracks of my fingers, I’ve never been able to erase the images of those hard-luck cowboys riding bulls with no hands, no rodeo clowns, no medics, and no fear, as massive toros destructores bucked them into hatless invertebrate rag dolls. We’d bellow in vicarious pain as the incredibly pointy bullhorns punctured their rhinestoned shirts and aortas. High-five when a fallen rider’s jawbone and skull got stomped into the blood-caked dirt. In time, as black and Latin boys are wont to do, we drifted apart. Socialized victims of prison gang edicts that had nothing to do with us but stipulated the separation of niggers and spics. Now, other than the occasional block party, I see Nestor only on Career Day, when, to the accompaniment of the William Tell Overture, he comes tearing out from behind the defunct metal shop, trick-riding and bronco-busting his ass off.

I’ve never been able to figure exactly what career path Nestor represents—“show-off,” I suppose — but at the end of his rodeo sideshow, he doffed his ball-and-tasseled sombrero to the raucous applause of the crowd and stared me down with a “top that” sneer as he paraded past, doing a no-hand headstand in the saddle. Charisma then introduced me to a collective yawn so loud it could be heard throughout Dickens.

“What’s that sound, an airplane taking off?”

“No, it’s the nigger farmer. Must be Career Day at the middle school again.”

I led a jittery brown-eyed calf onto home plate of a baseball diamond backstopped with a rickety chain-link fence. Some of the braver children ignored their rumbling stomachs and vitamin deficiencies to break rank and approach the animal. Cautiously, afraid they might catch a disease or fall in love, they petted the calf, speaking the syntax of the damned.

“His skin soft.”

“Them eyes look like Milk Duds. I wants to eat them shits.”

“Way this cow nigger be licking his lips, mooin’ and droolin’ ’n’ shit, remind me of your retarted mother.”

“Fuck you. You retarted!”

“All y’all retarted. Don’t you know cows human, too?”

The irony of mispronouncing “retarded” notwithstanding, I knew that I was a hit, or at least the calf was. Charisma folded her tongue between her teeth and split the air with a sharp football-coach whistle. The same whistle she used to warn me and Marpessa that my father was making his way up the walkway. Two hundred kids quieted instantly and turned their attention deficit disorders toward me.

“Hello, everybody,” I said, spitting on the ground, because that’s what farmers do. “Like you guys, I’m from Dickens…”

“Where?” a bunch of students shouted. I might as well have said I was from Atlantis. The children weren’t from “no Dickens.” And they stood, throwing up gang signs and telling me where they were from: Southside Joslyn Park Crip Gang. Varrio Trescientos y Cinco. Bedrock Stoner Avenue Bloods.

In retaliation I tossed up the closest thing the agricultural world has to a gang sign and slid my hand across my throat — the universal sign for Cut the Engine — and announced, “Well, I’m from the Farms, which like all those places you’ve named, whether you know it or not, is in Dickens, and Assistant Principal Molina asked me to demonstrate what the average day for a farmer is like, and since today is this calf’s eight-week anniversary, I thought I’d talk about castration. There are three methods of castration…”

“What’s ‘castration,’ maestro?”

“It’s a way of preventing male animals from fathering any children.”

“Don’t they got cow rubbers?”

“That’s not a bad idea, but cows don’t have hands and, like the Republican Party, any regard for a female’s reproductive rights, so this is a way to control the population. It also makes them more docile. Anyone know what ‘docile’ means?”

After passing it under her runny nose, a skinny chalk-colored girl raised a hand so disgustingly ashy, so white and dry-skinned, that it could only be black.

“It means bitchlike,” she said, volunteering to assist me by stepping to the calf and flicking his downy ears with her fingers.

“Yes, I guess you could say that it does.”

At either the mention of “bitch” or the misguided notion they were going to learn something about sex, the children closed in and tightened the circle. The ones who weren’t in the first two rows were ducking and scooting around for better vantage points. A few kids climbed to the top of the backstop’s rafters and peered down on the procedure like med students in an operating theater. I body-slammed the calf on its side and kneeled down on his neck and rib cage, then directed my unlotioned cowhand to grab and spread his hind legs until the little dogie’s genitals were exposed to the elements. Seeing that I had their attention, I noticed Charisma checking on her still-whimpering employee, then tiptoeing back aboard Marpessa’s bus. “As I was saying, there are three methods of castration: surgical, elastic, and bloodless. In elastic you place a rubber band right here, preventing any blood flow going to the testicles. That way they’ll eventually shrivel up and fall off.” I grabbed the animal at the base of his scrotum and squeezed so hard the calf and the schoolchildren jumped in unison. “For bloodless castration, you crush the spermatic cords here and here.” Two firm pinches of his vas deferens glans sent the calf into whimpering convulsions of pain and embarrassment, and the students into spasms of sadistic laughter. I whipped out a jackknife and held it up high, twisting my hand in the air, expecting the blade to glint dramatically in the sunlight, but it was too cloudy. “For surgery…”

“I want to do it.” It was the little black girl, her clear brown eyes fixed on the calf’s scrotum and bulging with scientific curiosity.

“I think you need a permission slip from your parents.”

“What parents? I live at El Nido,” she said, referring to the group home on Wilmington, which in the neighborhood was tantamount to name-dropping Sing Sing in a James Cagney movie.

“What’s your name?”

“Sheila. Sheila Clark.”

Sheila and I changed places, clambering over and under one another without taking any weight off the hapless calf. When I got to the back end, I handed her the knife and the emasculator, which, like the garden shears they resembled, and any other good tool, does exactly what its name says it’s going to do. Two pints of blood, a surprisingly deft removal of the top half of the scrotum, an artful yank of the testes into the open air, an audible crunching severing of the spermatic cord, a schoolyard full of shrieking pupils, teachers, and one permanently sexually frustrated calf later, I was finishing up my lecture for the benefit of Sheila Clark and three other grade-schoolers intrigued enough to wade into the spreading pool of blood to get a better look at the wound, while I wrestled with the still squirming calf. “When the bull is lying here helpless on his side, we in the farming industry like to call this the ‘recumbent position,’ and now isn’t a bad time to inflict other painful procedures on the animal, like dehorning, vaccinations, branding, and marking the ears…”

The rain fell harder. The drops, big and warm, kicked up small clouds of dust as they pelted the hard, dry pavement. In the middle of the schoolyard the janitorial staff was hurriedly unloading a Dumpster. They tossed the broken wooden desks, cracked blackboards, and shards of a termite-ridden handball wall into a big pile, then stuffed the crevices with newspaper. Normally Career Day ended with a giant marshmallow roast. The skies were getting even darker. I had the feeling the kids would be disappointed. In the growing wetness the teachers, save for the crybaby staring into the flat basketball as if his world had come to an end, and other careerists tried to round up the kids, snatching them off the broken-down swings, rusted-out monkey bar and jungle gym sets, while Nestor galloped around the frightened herd, steering them away from the gates. Marpessa had started the bus, and Charisma climbed out just as the calf started to recover from the shock. I looked for my assistant, Sheila Clark, but she was too busy holding up the pair of bloody testicles by their stringy entrails, dangling them in the air and slamming them into one other like a pair of twenty-five-cent vending machine clacker balls to be of any use.

As I slipped the animal into a headlock, turning on my back and digging my boot heels into his crotch to keep him from kicking me in the face, Marpessa U-turned the bus around and headed out the side gate and onto Shenandoah Street without so much as a goodbye wave. Fuck her. Charisma stood over me smiling, reading the hurt in my eyes.

“You two were so meant for each other.”

“Do me a favor? In my bag there’s some antiseptic and a little jar of goop that says Fliegenschutz.” Assistant Principal Molina did what she’s always done since she was a little girl: she got her hands dirty, spraying the writhing animal with disinfectant and slathering on the sticky Fliegenschutz over the gaping wound where his testicles used to be.

When she finished, the white teacher, his face streaked with tears, tapped his boss on the shoulder, and like a television cop handing in his badge and gun, he solemnly removed the shiny new Teach for America button fastened to his sweater vest, placed it in Charisma’s palm, and walked off into the squall.

“What was that about?”

“When we were on the bus, your skinny farmhand, Sheila here, stood up, pointed to the PRIORITY SEATING FOR WHITES sign, and told young Mr. Edmunds he could have her seat. And that idiot takes her up on her offer, sits down, realizes what he’s done, and fucking loses it.”

“Wait, the signs are still up?”

“You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“You talk a lot of shit about the hood, but you don’t know what’s going on in the hood. Ever since you put those signs up, Marpessa’s bus has been the safest place in the city. She’d forgotten all about them, too, until her shift supervisor pointed out she hadn’t had an incident report since Hominy’s birthday party. But then she started thinking about it. How people were treating each other with respect. Saying hello when they got on, thank you when they got off. There’s no gang fighting. Crip, Blood, or cholo, they press the Stop Request button one time and one fucking time only. You know where the kids go do their homework? Not home, not the library, but the bus. That’s how safe it is.”

“Crime is cyclical.”

“It’s the signs. People grouse at first, but the racism takes them back. Makes them humble. Makes them realize how far we’ve come and, more important, how far we have to go. On that bus it’s like the specter of segregation has brought Dickens together.”

“What about that crybaby teacher?”

“Mr. Edmunds is a good math specialist, but obviously he can’t teach the kids anything about themselves, so fuck him.”

More or less healed, the calf scrambled to its feet. Sheila, his little emasculator, leaned teasingly in his face, holding his testes from her earlobes like costume jewelry. One last goodbye sniff of his manhood and he ambled off to commiserate with the ball-less tetherball poles that stood bent and useless next to the cafeteria. Charisma rubbed her tired eyes. “Now, if I get these little motherfuckers to behave in school like they do on the bus, we’d be on to something.”

Led by Nestor Lopez, who was ten lengths ahead of the pack, galloping in for his reward money, Sheila’s classmates were being shepherded over the concrete plains, marched through the drizzle and past the rows of thatch tarpaper-roofed bungalows, windows glassed with newsprint and colored construction paper. Buildings in such disrepair they made the one-room African schoolhouses on late-night television fundraisers damn near look like college lecture halls in comparison. It was a modern-day Trail of Tears. The kids were circled around the mound of broken school furniture. Their excitement undeterred despite the crackle of the raindrops on the giant bags of marshmallows and the steadily darkening pile of wood and damp newsprint. Behind them was the school’s auditorium, the roof of which had collapsed in the Northridge quake of ’94 and had never been rebuilt. Charisma ran her hand down the length of Nestor’s Rose Parade saddle bells. The jingle-jangle made the kids smile. Just then Sheila Clark, tearfully rubbing her shoulder, ran up. “Ms. Molina, that white boy stole one of my balls!” she wailed, pointing at the chubby Latino kid, three shades darker than her, vainly trying to superball the testis against the wet ground. Charisma gently stroked Sheila’s braided head, soothing her feelings. That was a new one on me. Black kids referring to their Latino peers as white. When I was their age, back when we used to scream “Not it!” before games of Kick the Can and Red Light, Green Light, back before the violence, the poverty, and the infighting had reduced our indigenous land rights from all of Dickens to isolated city blocks of gang turf, everyone in Dickens, regardless of race, was black and you determined someone’s degree of blackness not by skin color or hair texture but by whether they said “For all intents and purposes” or “For all intensive purposes.” Marpessa used to say that despite the fall of straight black hair that cascaded down to her butt and her horchata complexion, she didn’t know Charisma wasn’t black until the day Charisma’s mother stopped by to pick her up from school. Her walk and talk so different from her daughter’s. Stunned, she turned to her best friend. “You Mexican?” Thinking her homegirl was tripping, Charisma blanched, about to exclaim, “I ain’t Mexican,” when, as if seeing her for the first time, she took a good look at her own mother in the after-school context of the surrounding black faces and rhythms, and was like “Oh fuck, I am Mexican! ¡Hijo de puta!” That was a long time ago.

Before lighting the bonfire, Assistant Principal Molina addressed her troops. It was obvious in the seriousness in her face and the tone of her voice that she was a general at the end of her rope. Resigned to the fate that the black and brown troops she was sending out into the world didn’t have much of a chance. Cada día de carreras profesionales yo pienso la misma cosa. De estos doscientos cincuenta niños, ¿cuántos terminarán la escuela secundaria? ¿Cuarenta pinche por ciento? Órale, y de esos cien con suerte, ¿cuántos irán a la universidad? ¿Online, junior, clown college, o lo que sea? About five, más o menos. ¿Y cuántos graduarán? Two, maybe. Qué lástima. Estamos chingados.

And although like most black males raised in Los Angeles, I’m bilingual only to the extent that I can sexually harass women of all ethnicities in their native languages, I understood the gist of the message. Those kids were fucked.

I was surprised how many of the children carried lighters, but no matter how many attempts were made to start the bonfire, the water-soaked wood wouldn’t catch. Charisma ordered a group of students to the storage shed. They returned bearing cardboard boxes, the contents of which they dumped on the ground. Soon there was a pyramid of books about five feet wide and three feet high and rising.

“Well, what the fuck are you waiting for?”

She didn’t have to ask twice. The books caught like kindling, and the flames of a good-sized bonfire licked the sky as the students happily roasted marshmallows on number two pencils.

I pulled Charisma aside. I couldn’t believe she was burning books. “I thought school supplies were in short supply.”

“Those aren’t books. Those came from Foy Cheshire. He has a whole curriculum called ‘Fire the Canon!’ featuring such rewritten classics as Uncle Tom’s Condo and The Point Guard in the Rye that he’s pushing on the school board. Look, we’ve tried everything: smaller classrooms, longer hours, bilingual, monolingual, and sublingual educations, Ebonics, phonics, and hypnotics. Color schemes designed to promote the optimum learning environment. But no matter what warm-to-medium-cool hues you paint the walls, when it all comes down to it, it’s white teachers talking white methodology and drinking white wine and some wannabe white administrator threatening to put your school into receivership because he knows Foy Cheshire. Nothing works. But I’ll be damned if the Chaff Middle School will hand out copies of The Dopeman Cometh to its students.”

I kicked a partially burned tome away from the fire. The cover was charred but still readable, The Great Blacksby, page one of which was:

Real talk. When I was young, dumb, and full of cum, my omnipresent, good to my mother, non-stereotypical African-American daddy dropped some knowledge on me that I been trippin’ off of ever since.

Using my lighter, I finished torching the book myself and held its flaming pages under the marshmallow on a wooden ruler that Sheila had kindly offered me. She had fashioned a leash from a jump rope and was stroking the calf on the head, while the Latino was trying to surgically reattach his testicles with Elmer’s glue and a paper clip, until Charisma grabbed him by the neck and stood him up.

“You kids have a good Career Day?”

“I want to be a veterinarian!” Sheila answered.

“That’s gay,” countered her Latino nemesis, who was juggling the gonads with one hand.

“Juggling is gay!”

“Calling people who call you ‘gay’ just because you called them ‘gay’ is gay!”

“Okay, that’s enough.” Charisma scolded. “My God, is there anything you kids don’t think is gay?”

The fat boy thought for a long moment. “You know what’s not gay … being gay.”

Laughing through her tears, Charisma collapsed on a beige fiberglass bench as the three o’clock bell rang; it’d been a long day. I sidled in next to her. The clouds finally caved in and the drizzle turned into a steady downpour. The students and faculty ran to their cars, the bus stop, and the waiting arms of their parents, while we sat there in the shower like good Southern Californians, umbrellaless and listening to the raindrops sizzle in the slowly dying fire.

“Charisma, I thought of a way to get the kids to behave and respect each other like they do on the bus.”

“How?”

“Segregate the school.” As soon as I said it, I realized that segregation would be the key to bringing Dickens back. The communal feeling of the bus would spread to the school and then permeate the rest of the city. Apartheid united black South Africa, why couldn’t it do the same for Dickens?

“By race? You want to segregate the school by color?”

Charisma looked at me like I was one of her students. Not stupid, but clueless. But if you asked me, Chaff Middle School had already been segregated and re-segregated many times over, maybe not by color, but certainly by reading level and behavior problem. The English as a Second Language speakers were on a different learning track than the English When and Only If I Feel Like It speakers. During Black History Month, my father used to watch the nightly television footage of the Freedom buses burning, the dogs snarling and snapping, and say to me, “You can’t force integration, boy. The people who want to integrate will integrate.” I’ve never figured out to what extent, if at all, I agree or disagree with him, but it’s an observation that’s stayed with me. Made me realize that for many people integration is a finite concept. Here, in America, “integration” can be a cover-up. “I’m not racist. My prom date, second cousin, my president is black (or whatever).” The problem is that we don’t know whether integration is a natural or an unnatural state. Is integration, forced or otherwise, social entropy or social order? No one’s ever defined the concept. Charisma was giving segregation some thought, though, as she slowly rotated the last of the marshmallows in the flame. I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking about how her middle-school alma mater was now 75 percent Latino, when in her day it was 80 percent black. Thinking about listening to her mother, Sally Molina, tell stories about growing up in segregated small-town Arizona in the 1940s and ’50s. Having to sit on the hot side of the church, the farthest away from Jesus and the fire exits. Having to go to the Mexican schools and bury her parents and her baby brother at the Mexican cemetery outside of town on Highway 60. How when the family moved to Los Angeles in 1954, the racial discrimination was more or less the same. Except that unlike the black Angelenos, they could at least use the public beaches.

“You want to segregate the school by race?”

“Yeah.”

“If you think you can do it, go ahead. But I’m telling you, there’s too many Mexicans.”

I can’t speak for the children, but driving home, the newly castrated calf in the front seat of the pickup, his head out the window catching raindrops on his tongue, I left Career Day as inspired as I’d ever been and with renewed focus. What was it Charisma said, “It’s like the specter of segregation has brought the city of Dickens back together again.” I decided to give my new career as City Planner in Charge of Restoration and Segregation another six months. If things didn’t work out, I could always fall back on being black.

Twelve

It rained buckets that summer after Career Day. The white boys at the beach called it “bummer,” as in the “Bummer of ’42.” The weather reports were nothing but nonstop references to record rainfall and continuous cloud cover. Every day, at around nine thirty, a low-pressure system settled over the coastline and it’d pour off and on until early evening. Some folks won’t surf in the rain, even more refuse go out after a storm, worried about contracting hepatitis from the sludge and all the polluted runoff that flows into the Pacific after a heavy downpour. Personally, I like catching waves in the rain, fewer fuckers in the lineup, no windsurfers. Stay away from the arroyos near Malibu and Rincon, which tend to overflow with septic waste, and you’ll be fine. So that summer I didn’t worry about fecal matter and microbes. I agonized over my satsumas and segregation. How do you grow the world’s most water-sensitive citrus tree under monsoon conditions? How do you racially segregate an already segregated school?

Hominy, the race reactionary, was no help. He loved the idea of bringing back segregated education, because he thought the idea would make Dickens more attractive to white resettlement. That the city would return to being the thriving white suburb of his youth. Cars with tail fins. Straw hats and sock hops. Episcopalians and ice cream socials. It would be the opposite of white flight, he said. “The Ku Klux influx.” But when I’d ask him how, he’d just shrug and, like a conservative senator without any ideas, filibuster me with unrelated stories about the good ol’ days. “Once, in an episode called ‘Pop Quisling,’ Stymie tried to avoid taking a history test he hadn’t studied for by setting his desk on fire, but of course he ended up burning down the entire school and the gang had to take the test on top of a fire truck ’cause Miss Crabtree didn’t play that shit.” Then there was the guilt that comes along with being a segregationist. I stayed up nights trying to convince Funshine Bear, whose fur over the years had mottled and turned from sun-ray yellow to toe-jam brown, that the reintroduction of segregation would be a good thing. That like Paris has the Eiffel Tower, St. Louis the Arch, and New York an insanely huge income disparity, Dickens would have segregated schools. If nothing else, the Chamber of Commerce brochure would look attractive. Welcome to the Glorious City of Dickens: The Urban Paradise on the Banks of the Los Angeles River. Home to Roving Bands of Youth Groups, a Retired Movie Star, and Segregated Schools!

Lots of people claim to get their best ideas in water. The shower. Floating in the pool. Waiting for a wave. Something about negative ions, white noise, and being in isolation. So you’d think that surfing in the rain would be the equivalent of a one-man brainstorm — but not me. I get my good ideas not while surfing but while driving home from surfing. So sitting in traffic, after a nice rainy-day July session, reeking of sewage and seaweed, I watched the remedial rich kids pour out of summer school at Intersection Academy, a prestigious oceanfront private “learning fulcrum.” As they crossed the street to their waiting limousines and luxury cars, they’d flash me “hang loose” and gang signs, stick their shaggy heads into my cab, and say, “Bro, you got any weed? Hang ten, African-American waverider!”

Despite the steady downpour, the students never seemed to get wet. Mostly because valets and scullery maids chased after their rambunctious wards holding umbrellas over their heads, but some kids were just too white to get wet. Try to imagine Winston Churchill, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice, or the Lone Ranger, soaked from head to toe and you’ll get the idea.

For a hot second, when I was eight, Pops flirted with enrolling my intellectually lazy ass in a fancy prep school. He stood over me while I was shin-deep in the rice paddy, planting stalks into the mud. He muttered something about choosing between Jews in Santa Monica and Gentiles in Holmby Hills, then began citing research that black kids who go to school with white kids of any religion “do better,” while also positing some not-so-credible research that black people were “better off” during segregation. I don’t remember his definition of “better off” or why I didn’t go to Interchange or Haverford-Meadowbrook. The commute, maybe. Too expensive. But watching those kids, the sons and daughters of music and movie industry moguls, file out of that state-of-the-art building, it dawned on me that, as the sole student of Daddy’s K thru Forever Home School, I had been the beneficiary of a most segregated education, one with thankfully little exposure to infinity pools, homemade foie gras, and American ballet. And while I was no closer to figuring out how to save my satsuma crop, I did have an idea how to racially segregate what, for all intents and purposes and Latinos, was an all-black school. I drove home, my father’s voice swimming in my head.

When I got back home, Hominy was waiting for me out in the yard, standing under a large green-and-white golf umbrella, his bare feet making a deep hammer-toed impression in the wet grass. Ever since I’d agreed to segregate the middle school, he’d become a much better worker. He was no fucking John Henry by any stretch, but if he took an interest in something on the farm, he’d at least show some self-initiative. Lately he’d been very protective of the satsuma tree. Sometimes he’d stand next to it for hours, shooing away birds and bugs. The satsumas reminded him of the camaraderie of studio life. Thumb-wrestling with Wheezer. Slapping Fatty Arbuckle upside the head. Truth or Dare games where the loser would have to streak through the Laurel and Hardy set. It was during a long break between shots on “I See Paris, I See France” that Hominy discovered the satsuma mandarin. Most of the gang had gathered around the craft services table, downing cupcakes and cream soda. But there were some southern theater owners on the set that day, and the studio, wanting to make nice with a caste system that refused to show their movies because they featured colored and white kids playing together, asked Hominy and Buckwheat to eat with some Japanese extras who, during the immigration roundup of ’36, had been drafted to play Mexican bandits. The extras offered them some nonunion soba noodles and satsumas imported from the Land of the Rising Sun. The black boys found the fruit’s perfectly balanced bittersweet flavor to be the only thing that removed the nasty taste of comic-relief watermelon from their mouths. Eventually, he and Buckwheat had riders put in their contracts: only satsumas were allowed on set. No clementines, tangerines, or tangelos. Because nothing restored one’s dignity like a sweet juicy satsuma orange after a hard day of cooning.

Hominy still thinks I tend the tree to suit his needs, he doesn’t know that I planted it the same day me and Marpessa officially split. I’d finished freshman year midterms and driven home, flying west on CA-91, spurred on by what I thought would be the awaiting congratulatory fuck and not a note pinned through the sow’s ear that simply read, Naw, nigger.

He pulled desperately on the sleeve of my wetsuit. “Massa, you told me to tell you when the satsumas were the size of Ping-Pong balls.” Like a golf caddy who refuses to give up on an employer’s woeful round, Hominy held the umbrella over my head. Handed me the refractometer and urged me into the backyard, where we tramped through the mud to the waterlogged tree. “Please, massa, hurry. I don’t think they going to make it.”

Most citrus fruits require frequent watering, but the inverse is true for satsumas. They turn water into piss, and no matter how much pruning I did, that year’s crop hung heavy and mean on the branches. If I couldn’t figure out a way to decrease the water intake, the yield would be shit and I’d have wasted ten years and fifty pounds of imported Japanese fertilizer. I clipped a mandarin off the nearest tree. Snipping it a quarter inch above the navel, I dug my thumb into the bumpy flesh, ripping it open and squeezing a few drops into the refractometer, the small, overpriced, Japanese-made machine that measures the percentage of sucrose in the juice.

“What’s it say?” he asked desperately.

“Two point three.”

“What’s that on the sweetness scale?”

“Somewhere between Eva Braun and a South African salt mine.”

I never nigger-whispered to my plants. I don’t believe that plants are sentient beings, but after Hominy went home I talked to those trees for an hour. Read them poetry and sang them the blues.

Thirteen

I’ve experienced direct discrimination based on race only once in my life. One day I foolishly said to my father that there was no racism in America. Only equal opportunity that black people kick aside because we don’t want to take responsibility for ourselves. Later that very same day, in the middle of the night, he snatched me up out of bed, and together we took an ill-prepared cross-country trip into deepest, whitest America. After three days of nonstop driving, we ended up in a nameless Mississippi town that was nothing more than a dusty intersection of searing heat, crows, cotton fields, and, judging by the excited look of anticipation on my father’s face, unadulterated racism.

“There it is,” he said, pointing toward a run-down general store so out of date the pinball machine blinking happily in the window took only dimes and displayed a mind-numbing high current score of 5,637. I looked around for the racism. Out front, three burly white men with those sun-baked crow’s-foot visages that make age an indeterminate number sat on wooden Coca-Cola crates, loudly talking shit about an upcoming stock-car race. We pulled into the gas station across the street. A bell rang, startling both the black attendant and me. Reluctantly, he broke away from the video chess game he was playing with a friend on the television.

“Fill ’er up, please.”

“Sure thing. Check the oil?” My father nodded, never taking his eyes off the store. The attendant, Clyde, if the name fancily stitched in red cursive on the white patch on his blue coveralls was to be trusted, jumped to his duties. He checked the oil, the tire pressure, and slid his grease rag over the front and back windshields. I don’t think I’d ever seen service with a smile before. And whatever was in that spray bottle, the windows had never been so clean. When the tank was full, my father asked Clyde, “You think me and the boy could sit here a mite?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

A mite? I hung my head in embarrassment. I hate when people get all folksy around black people they think they’re superior to. What was next? Fixin’? Sho’ ’nuff? A chorus of “Who Let the Dogs Out”?

“Dad, what are we doing here?” I mumbled, my mouth full of the saltine crackers I’d been stuffing down my gullet since Memphis. Anything to take my mind off the heat, the endless cotton fields, and the thought of how bad slavery must have been for someone to convince themselves that Canada wasn’t that far away. Although he never spoke about it, like his runaway ancestors, my father, too, fled to Canada, dodging the draft and the Vietnam War. If black people ever do get slave reparations, I know plenty of motherfuckers who owe Canada some rent money and back taxes.

“Dad, what are we doing here?”

“We’re reckless eyeballing,” he said, removing a pair of 500x General Patton binoculars from a fancy leather case, placing the black metal monstrosities to his eyes, and turning toward me, his eyes big as billiard balls through the thick lenses. “And I do mean reckless!”

Thanks to years of my father’s black vernacular pop quizzes and an Ishmael Reed book he kept on top of the toilet for years, I knew that “reckless eyeballing” was the act of a black male deigning to look at a southern white female. And there was my dad staring through his binoculars at a storefront no more than thirty feet away, the Mississippi sun glinting off the massive spectacles like two halogen beacons. A woman stepped out onto the porch, an apron tied around her gingham dress, a wicker broom in her hand. Shielding her eyes from the glare, she began to sweep. The white men sat open-legged and open-mouthed, aghast at the sheer fucking nigger audacity.

“Look at those tits!” my father shouted, loud enough for the entire cracker county to hear. Her chest wasn’t all that, but I imagine that through the portable equivalent of the Hubble Space Telescope her B-cup breasts looked like the Hindenburg and the Goodyear blimp, respectively. “Now, boy, now!”

“Now what?”

“Go out there and whistle at the white woman.”

He shoved me out the door, and kicking up a blinding cloud of red delta dust, I crossed a two-lane highway covered with so much rock-hard clay I couldn’t tell if the road had ever been paved. Obligingly, I stood in front of the white lady and began to whistle. Or at least tried to. What my father didn’t know is that I didn’t know how to whistle. Whistling is one of the few things you learn at public school. I was homeschooled, so my lunch hours were spent standing in the backyard cotton patch reciting all the Negro Reconstruction congressmen from memory: Blanche Bruce, Hiram Rhodes, John R. Lynch, Josiah T. Walls … so although it sounds simple, I didn’t know how to just put my lips together and blow. And for that matter, I can’t split my fingers into the Vulcan high-sign, burp the alphabet on command, or flip someone the bird without folding down the non-insulting fingers with my free hand. Having a mouthful of crackers didn’t help either, and the end result was an arrhythmic spewing of pre-chewed oats all over her pretty pink apron.

“What’s this crazy fool doing?” the white men asked each other between eye rolls and tobacco expectorations. The most taciturn member of the trio stood up and straightened out his No Niggers in NASCAR T-shirt. Slowly removing the toothpick from his mouth, he said, “It’s the ‘Boléro.’ The little nigger is whistling ‘Boléro.’”

I jumped up and down and pumped his hand in excitement. He was right, of course, I was trying to re-create Ravel’s masterpiece. I may not know how to whistle, but I could always carry a tune.

“The ‘Boléro’? Why, you stupid motherfucker!”

It was Pops. Storming out of the car and moving so fast his dust cloud kicked up its own dust cloud. He wasn’t happy, because apparently not only did I not know how to whistle, I didn’t know what to whistle. “You’re supposed to wolf whistle! Like this…” Recklessly eyeballing her the whole way, he pursed his lips and let go a wolf whistle so lecherous and libidinous it curled both the white woman’s pretty painted toes and the dainty red ribbon in her blond hair. Now it was her turn. And my father stood there, lustful and black, as she just as defiantly not only recklessly eyeballed him back but recklessly rubbed his dick through his pants. Kneading his crotch like pizza dough for all she was worth.

Dad quickly whispered something in her ear, handed me a five-dollar bill, said I’ll be back, and together they hurried into the car and tore out down some dirt road. Leaving me to be lynched for his crimes.

“Is there a black buck Rebecca ain’t fucked from here to Natchez?”

“Well, least she knows what she likes. Your dumb peckerwood ass still ain’t decided whether you like men or not.”

“I’m bisexual. I likes both.”

“Ain’t no such thing. You either is or you ain’t. Man crush on Dale Earnhardt, my ass.”

While the good old boys argued the merits and manifestations of sexuality, I, thankful to be alive, went inside the store for a soda. They carried only one brand and one size, Coca-Cola in the classic seven-ounce bottle. I twisted one open and watched the effervescent sprites of carbon dioxide dance in the sun rays. I can’t tell you how good that Coke tasted, but there’s an old joke that I never understood until that bubbling brown elixir slid soothingly down my throat.

Bubba the redneck, a nigger, and a Mexican are sitting at the same bus stop when BAM! a genie appears out of nowhere in a cloud of smoke. “You each get one wish,” says the genie, adjusting his turban and his ruby rings. So the nigger says, “I wish for all my black brothers and sisters to be in Africa, where the land will nourish us and all Africans can prosper.” The genie waved his hands, and BAM! all the blacks left America and went to Africa. The Mexican then said, “Órale, that sounds good to me. I want all my Mexican peoples to be in Me-hee-co where we can live well and have yobs and drink from glorious pools of tequila.” BAM! They all went to Mexico and left America. Then the genie turns to Bubba the redneck and says, “And what is it you desire, Sahib? Your wish is my command.” Bubba looks at the genie and says, “So you’re telling me that all the Mexicans are in Mexico and all the niggers are in Africa?”

“Yes, Sahib.”

“Well, it’s kinda hot today, I guess I’ll have a Coke.”

That’s how good that Coke was.

“That’ll cost seven cents. Just leave it on the counter, boy. Your new mommy be back in no time.”

Ten sodas and seventy cents later, neither my new mother nor my old father had returned and I had to take a wicked piss. The fellows at the gas station were still playing chess, the attendant’s cursor hovering hesitatingly over a cornered piece as if his next decision decided the fate of the world. The attendant slammed a knight onto a square. “You ain’t fooling nobody with that Sicilian gambit chicanery. Your diagonals is vulnerable as shit.”

My bladder about to burst, I asked black Kasparov where the bathroom was located.

“Restrooms are for customers only.”

“But my dad just purchased some gas…”

“And your father can shit here until his heart’s content. You, on the other hand, are drinking the white man’s Coke like his ice is colder than ours.”

I pointed to the row of seven-ounce sodas in the cooler. “How much?”

“Dollar-fifty.”

“But they’re seven cents across the street.”

“Buy black or piss off. Literally.”

Feeling sorry for me, and winning on points, black Bobby Fischer pointed into the distance at an old bus station.

“See that abandoned bus station next to the cotton gin?”

I sprinted down the road. Although the building was no longer operational, balls of cottonseed still blew in the wind like itchy snowflakes. I made my way to the back, past the gin, the empty pallets, a rusted forklift, and the ghost of Eli Whitney. The filthy one-toilet bathroom buzzed with flies. The floors and the seat were flypaper sticky. Glazed to a dull matte yellow by four generations of good ol’ boys with bottomless bladders, pissing countless gallons of drunk-on-the-job clear urine. The acrid stink of unflushed racism and shit shriveled my face and put goosebumps on my arms. Slowly I backed out. Underneath the faded WHITES ONLY stenciled on the grimy lavatory door, I ran my finger through the grit and wrote THANK GOD, then peed on an anthill. Because apparently the rest of the planet was “Colored Only.”

Fourteen

At first glance the Dons, the hilly neighborhood about ten miles north of Dickens that Marpessa moved to after she married MC Panache, looks like any well-to-do African-American enclave. The tree-lined streets are twisting. The houses are fronted with immaculate Japanese-style gardens. The wind chimes somehow coerce the air currents into Stevie Wonder songs. American flags and campaign signs supporting crooked politicians are displayed proudly in the front yard. When we were dating, sometimes after a night out, me and Marpessa would cruise the neighborhood, wheeling Daddy’s pickup truck through streets with Spanish names like Don Lugo, Don Marino, and Don Felipe. We used to refer to the modern but smallish homes with their pools, plate-glass windows, stone facades, and weatherproofed balconies overlooking downtown Los Angeles as “Brady Bunch houses.” As in “The motherfucking Wilcoxes came up, dude. Them niggers kicking it in a Brady Bunch house off Don Quixote.” We hoped one day to live in one of these homes and have a barrel of children. The worst thing that could happen to us was that we’d falsely accuse our oldest son of smoking, a poorly thrown football would break our daughter’s nose, and our slightly slutty maid would constantly throw herself at the mailman. Then we’d die and go into worldwide syndication like all good American families.

For ten years, ever since our breakup, I’d periodically park outside her crib, wait until the lights went out, then through the binoculars and a sliver of open bay window curtain, I’d take in the life I should’ve been living, a life of sushi and Scrabble, kids studying in the living room and playing with the dog. After the children went to bed, I’d watch Nosferatu and Metropolis with her, crying like a baby because the way Paulette Goddard and Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times circle around each like two dogs in heat reminded me of us. Sometimes I’d sneak up to the porch and, in the screen door, leave a snapshot of the growing satsuma tree on her porch with Our son, Kazuo, says hello written on the back.

There isn’t much you can do about segregating a school when school isn’t in session, and that summer I spent more time outside her house than for legal reasons I care to admit, until one warm August night, the forty-foot Metro bus parked in Marpessa’s driveway forced me to abort my stalker protocol. Like their white-collar comrades, it’s not unusual for black blue-collar employees like Marpessa to take their work home with them. Regardless of your income level, the old adage of having to be twice as good as the white man, half as good as the Chinese guy, and four times as good as the last Negro the supervisor hired before you still holds true. Nevertheless, I was surprised as hell to see the #125 bus sitting in her driveway, its back end blocking the sidewalk, its right-side tires ruining a once-perfect lawn.

Tree photo in hand, I crept past the gardenias and the Westec security sign. Rising to my tippy-toes, I peered into a side window, cupping my hands around my eyes. Even in the cool of the midnight air, the vehicle was still warm and thick with the scent of gasoline and the sweat of the working class. It’d been four months since Hominy’s birthday party and the PRIORITY SEATING FOR SENIORS, DISABLED, AND WHITES signs were still up. I wondered aloud how she got away with them.

“She says it’s an art project, nigger.”

The barrel of the snub-nosed.38 boring into my cheekbone was cold and impersonal, but the voice behind the gun was the exact opposite, warm and friendly. Familiar. “Dude, if I hadn’t recognized the smell of cow shit on your ass, you’d be dead as good black music.”

Stevie Dawson, Marpessa’s younger brother, spun me around and, gun in hand, gave me a bear hug. Behind him stood a red-eyed Cuz, a tipsy grin happily cutting across his mug. His boy Stevie was out of jail. I was glad to see him, too; it’d been at least ten years. Stevie’s rep was even more dastardly than Cuz’s. Gang-unaffiliated only because he was too crazy for the Crip sets and too mean for the Bloods. Stevie hates nicknames, because he feels real bad motherfuckers don’t need one. And although there are a few hardheads around the way who answer to their Christian names, when niggers say Stevie, it’s like a Chinese homophone. If you’ve been around, you know exactly who they mean. In California you get three strikes. If you’re convicted of two felonies, the next guilty verdict, no matter how minor, can mean life in prison. Somewhere along the line the catcher must have dropped Stevie’s third strike, because the system had sent him back to the plate.

“How did you get out?”

“Panache sprung him,” Cuz answered, offering me a sip of Tanqueray that was almost as nasty as its diet grapefruit soda chaser.

“What, he performed one of his shitty benefit concerts and snuck you out in a speaker?”

“Power of the pen. Between his TV cop gig and the beer commercials, Panache knows some big-time white people. Letters were written, and here I am. Conditionally paroled like a motherfucker.”

“What conditions?”

“The condition that I don’t get caught. What else?”

One of the dogs began to bark. The kitchen curtains parted, spilling light onto the driveway. I flinched, even though we were out of sight.

“No need to be scared. Panache ain’t here.”

“I know. He’s never here.”

“And how you know that, you been stalking my sister again?”

“Who’s out there?” It was Marpessa, saving me from further embarrassment. I mouthed to Stevie that I wasn’t there.

“It’s just me and Cuz.”

“Well, bring your asses inside before something happens.”

“All right, we’ll be in in a second.”

The first time I met Stevie, back when he and his sister lived in Dickens, there was a limousine parked in front of their house. Except for prom night, you don’t see many limos in the ghetto. And that black stretch Cadillac — crammed from mini bar to back window with roughnecks, light and dark, tall and short, smart and stupid — held Stevie’s boys. Boys who over the years disappeared in ones and twos and, on really bloody days — threes. Bank robberies. Food truck holdups. Assassinations. Panache and King Cuz were the only homies he had left. And though Stevie and Panache really liked each other, it was a relationship that profited both parties. Panache wasn’t no punk, but Stevie gave him real street cred in the rap scene, and for Stevie, Panache’s success reminded him that all things are possible if one can get the right white people on your side. Back then Panache fancied himself a pimp. Sure, he had women doing shit for him, but what nigger didn’t? I remember Panache in the living room staring Marpessa down, rapping what would become his first gold record, while Stevie DJ’d for him.

Three in the afternoon, Mormons at my pad

Need new croaker sacks and feelin’ bad

Promising salvation to a nigger like me

Brigham Young must be stupid and high on PCP

If Stevie had a Latin motto, it’d be Cogito, ergo Boogieum. I think, therefore I jam.

* * *

“How come Marpessa’s bus is parked here?” I asked him.

“Nigger, how come you here?” he barked back.

“I wanted to leave this for your sister.” I showed him the photo of the satsuma tree, which he snatched from my hand. I wanted to ask him if he’d received all the fruit I’d sent him over the years: the papayas, kiwis, apples, and blueberries, but I could tell from the suppleness of his skin, the whiteness of his eyes, the sheen in his ponytail, and the relaxed way he leaned on my shoulder that he had.

“She told me about you leaving these pictures.”

“Is she mad?”

Stevie shrugged and continued to stare at the Polaroid. “The bus here because they lost Rosa Parks’s bus.”

“Who lost Rosa Parks’s bus?”

“White people. Who the fuck else? Supposedly, every February when schoolkids visit the Rosa Parks Museum, or wherever the fuck the bus is at, the bus they tell the kids is the birthplace of the civil rights movement is a phony. Just some old Birmingham city bus they found in some junkyard. That’s what my sister says, anyway.”

“I don’t know.”

Cuz took two deep swallows of gin. “What you mean, ‘You don’t know’? You think that after Rosa Parks bitch-slapped white America, some white rednecks going to go out of their way to save the original bus? That’d be like the Celtics hanging Magic Johnson’s jersey in the rafters of the Boston Garden. No fucking way.

“Anyway, she thinks what you did with the bus, with the stickers and shit, is special. That it makes niggers think. In her way, she’s proud of you.”

“Really?”

I looked at the bus. Tried to see it in a different light. As something more than forty sheet-metal feet of trivial rights iconography dripping transmission fluid onto the driveway. Tried to picture it hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian, a tour guide pointing up to it and saying, “This is the very bus from which Hominy Jenkins, the last Little Rascal, asserted that the rights of African-Americans were neither God-given nor constitutional, but immaterial.”

Stevie held the photo under his nose, took a deep breath, and asked, “When these oranges going to be ready?”

I wanted to point to the greenish-orange balls and brag about how I’d figured out that if I covered the ground around the tree with white waterproof sheeting, not only would I be able to keep moisture from seeping into the soil, the whiteness would reflect the sunlight back into the tree and improve the color of the fruit. But all I could manage was “Soon. They’ll be ripe soon.”

Stevie took one last sniff of the picture, and then passed it under King Cuz’s cavernous nostrils.

“Smell that citrus, nigger? That’s what freedom smells like.”

Then he grabbed me by the shoulders. “And what’s this I hear about black Chinese restaurants?”

Fifteen

It was the smell that brung ’em. At about six in the morning, I found the first boy curled up in my driveway, breathing heavily, pressing his nose under the gate like a horny dog. He looked happy. He wasn’t in the way, so I left him alone and went to milk the cows. Los Angeles, for whatever reason, is chock-full of autistic children and I thought he was one of the afflicted. But later in the day he had company. By noontime, nearly every child on the block had crammed into my front yard. They spent the last day of summer vacation playing Uno on the grass and trying to see who could hit the softest. They plucked needles from the cacti and stuck each other in the behind, they popped my rose petals and scratched their names into the driveway with rock salt. Even the Lopez kids, Lori, Dori, Jerry, and Charlie, who lived next door and had two pristine acres of backyard and a decent-sized pool to play in, were circled around little brother Billy, laughing hysterically as he noshed on a peanut butter sandwich. Then a little girl I didn’t recognize staggered over to the elm tree and drowned a column of ants in vomit.

“Okay, what the fuck?”

“The Stank,” Billy said, after swallowing a mouthful of a peanut butter — and judging from what appeared to be bug legs on his tongue — and flies sandwich. I didn’t smell anything, so Billy dragged me out into the street. It wasn’t hard to see why the young girl retched; the stench was overwhelming. The Stank had rolled in overnight and settled over the neighborhood like some celestial flatulence. Jesus. But why hadn’t I noticed it earlier? I stood in the middle of Bernard Avenue, the kids beckoning me over, waving frantically like World War I soldiers urging a wounded comrade out of the mustard gas and back into the relative safety of the trenches. As soon as I reached the curb, it hit me, the refreshing pungency of citrus. No wonder the kids refused to stray from my property, the satsuma tree was perfuming the grounds like some ten-foot-tall air freshener.

Billy yanked my pant leg. “When those oranges going to be ready?”

I wanted to tell him tomorrow, but I was too busy pushing the little girl aside so I could throw up on the elm, gagging not from the smell but because Billy had two red fly eyes stuck in his teeth.

The next morning, the first day of school, the neighbor kids and their parents were gathered at the driveway gate. The youngsters, shiny and clean in brand-new school clothes, pawed at the wooden fence, trying to catch glimpses of the farm animals through the wooden slats. The adults, some still in their pajamas, yawned, looked at their watches, and adjusted their bathrobe belts as they placed milk money — twenty-five cents for a pint of my unpasteurized — in their children’s hands. I sympathized with the parents, because after being up all night in the lingering remnants of the Stank, building an imaginary all-white school, I was tired, too.

It’s hard to determine when satsumas are ripe. Color isn’t a very good indicator. Neither is rind texture. Smell is good, but the best way to tell is simply to taste them. However, I trust the refractometer more than my taste buds.

“What’s the reading, massa?”

“Sixteen point eight.”

“Is that good?”

I tossed Hominy an orange. When satsumas are ready to eat, the skin is so supple, they damn near peel themselves. He popped a wedge into his satchel mouth and pretended to faint dead away in a pratfall so well executed the rooster stopped crowing for fear the old man was dead.

“Oh shit.”

The kids thought he was hurt. I did, too, until he flashed a wide “Yes sir, boss. Dat’s good eatin’!” smile as bright and warm as the rising sun. He stood up in sections, then soft-shoed and somersaulted his way to the fence, showing that there was some of both the old vaudevillian and the stunt coon still left in him. “I sees white people!” he exclaimed in faux horror.

“Let them in, Hominy.”

Hominy opened the gate partway, as if he were peering through a Chitlin’ Circuit curtain: “A little black boy is in the kitchen watching his mother fry up some chicken. Seeing the flour, he dabs some on his face. ‘Look at me, Ma,’ he says, ‘I’m white!’ ‘What’d you say?’ says his mama, and the boy says, ‘Look at me, I’m white!’ WHAP! His mama slaps the shit out of him. ‘Don’t you ever say that!’ she says, then tells him to go tell his father what he said to her. Crying hard as Niagara Falls, the boy goes up to his father. ‘What’s wrong, son?’ ‘M-M-Mommy sl-sl-slapped me!’ ‘Why she do that, son?’ his father asks. ‘B-b-because I–I said I was w-w-white.’ ‘What?’ BLAAAAM! His father slaps him even harder than his mama did. ‘Now go tell your grandmother what you said! She’ll teach you!’ So the boy’s crying and shaking and all confused. He approaches his grandmother. ‘Why, baby, what’s wrong?’ she asks. And the boy says, ‘Th-th-they sl-slapped me.’ ‘Why, baby — why they’d do that?’ He tells her his story and when he gets to the end, PIE-YOW! His grandmamma slaps him so hard she almost knocks him down. ‘Don’t you ever say that,’ she says. ‘Now what did you learn?’ The boy starts rubbing his cheek and says, ‘I learned that I’ve been white for only ten minutes and I hate you niggers already!’”

The kids couldn’t tell whether he was joking or just ranting, but they laughed anyway, each finding something funny in his expressions, his inflections, the cognitive dissonance in hearing the word “nigger” coming from the mouth of a man as old as the slur itself. Most of them had never seen his work. They just knew he was a star. That’s the beauty of minstrelsy — its timelessness. The soothing foreverness in the languid bojangle of his limbs, the rhythm of his juba, the sublime profundity of his jive as he ushered the kids into the farm, retelling his joke in Spanish to an uncaptive audience running past him, cups and thermoses in hand, scattering the damn chickens.

Un negrito está en la cocina mirando a su mamá freír un poco de pollo … ¡Aprendí que he sido blanco por solo diez minutos y ya los odio a ustedes mayates!

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and for some of those kids it might be their only meal, so in addition to the milk, I offered, children and adults alike, a fresh satsuma mandarin. I used to hand out candy canes and horsy rides on the first day of school. Mount them three to a saddle and pony the little shits to campus. Not anymore. Not when two years ago, the sixth-grader Cipriano “Candy” Martínez, a half-Salvadoran, half-black boy who lived over on Prescott Place, tried to Lone Ranger and Hi-yo, Silver! Away! his ass out of an abusive household. Following the steaming piles of horseshit, I had to go all the way to Panorama City to track him down.

I picked up two kids straying near the stalls by their elbows and hoisted them into the air.

“Stay away from the fucking horses!”

“What about the orange tree, mister?”

Unable to resist the enticing smell of the satsumas and hold off until recess or the soap operas for their midday snacks, my customers were huddled under the mandarin tree, guiltily standing in piles of peeled skin, their lips wet with fructose.

“Take as many as you want,” I said.

My father used to say, “Give a nigger an inch and he’ll take an ell.” I never knew what an “ell” was, but in this case it meant the stripping of my precious satsuma tree bare. Hominy, holding his lumpy stomach in both hands because he was five months’ pregnant with about twenty citrus fruit babies, ambled up to me.

“These greedy niggers gon to take all your oranges, massa!”

“That’s all right, I only need a couple.”

And to prove my point, a plump blue-ribbon satsuma, trying its best to escape the feeding frenzy, rolled right up to my feet.

* * *

An ebullient Hominy, with sun on his face and the sweet taste of satsumas on his minstrel-pink tongue, pied-pipered the children to their dooms. Followed by their doting, overprotective parents and me, the biggest rat of them all, bringing up the rear. Kristina Davis, a tall little girl, whose lanky bones and white teeth owed their growth and strength to years of consumption of my unpasteurized milk, sidled up to me and clasped my hand with a solid grip.

“Where’s your mother?” I asked.

Kristina put her fingers to her lips and inhaled.

In neighborhoods like Dickens, before concerned parents with secret service earpieces stuffed into their auditory canals marshaled your every move, you used to learn more on your way to and from school than you did in school. My father was aware of this, and to further my extracurricular education, every so often he’d drop me off in a strange neighborhood and make me walk to the local place of learning. It was a lesson in social orienteering, except that I didn’t have a map, a compass, a mess kit, or a slang-to-slang dictionary. Thankfully, for the most part, in L.A. County you can gauge the threat level of a community by the color of its street signs. In Los Angeles proper the signs are a hollowed-out metallic midnight blue. If a bird’s nest constructed of pine needles was tucked inside the sign, it meant evergreen trees and a nearby golf course. Mostly white public-school kids whose parents lived above their means in upper-middle-class neighborhoods like Cheviot Hills, Silver Lake, and the Palisades. Bullet holes and a stolen car wrapped around the post signified kids about my hair texture, allowance level, and clothing style in neighborhoods like Watts, Boyle Heights, and Highland Park. Sky blue signified kickback cool bedroom communities like Santa Monica, Rancho Palos Verdes, and Manhattan Beach. Chill dudes commuting to school by any means necessary from skateboard to hang glider, the goodbye lipstick prints from their trophy-wife mothers still on their cheeks. Carson, Hawthorne, Culver City, South Gate, and Torrance are all designated by a working-class cactus green; there the little homies are independent, familiar, and multilingual. Fluent in Hispanic, black, and Samoan gang signs. In Hermosa Beach, La Mirada, and Duarte the street signs are the bland brown of cheap blended malt whiskey. The boys and girls mope their way to school, depressed and drowsy, past the hacienda-style tract housing. The sparkling white signs denote Beverly Hills, of course. Exceedingly wide hilly streets lined with rich kids unthreatened by my appearance. Assuming that if I was there I belonged. Asking me about the tension of my tennis racquets. Schooling me on the blues, the history of hip-hop, Rastafarianism, the Coptic Church, jazz, gospel, and the myriad of ways in which a sweet potato can be prepared.

I wanted to release Kristina into the wild. Urge her to take the most circuitous route to school possible. Let her run unchaperoned under the jet-black street signs of Dickens and take an honors class in snail trails. Audit a seminar in watching your friend walk into Bob’s Big Boy and steal the breakfast tips from the counter. Formulate an independent study on the poetics of the rainbows in sprinkler water and the call of the early-bird-purple-sequined halter-top-prostitute caterwauling to potential johns on Long Beach Boulevard. I was about to let Kristina loose, but we’d reached the school just as the nine o’clock bell rang.

“Hurry up, you’re going to be late.”

“Everybody’s already late,” she said, running off to join her friends.

Everyone was late. Students, staff, faculty, parents, legal guardians, all were congregated in front of Chaff Middle School, ignoring the bell and taking the measure of their newly minted crosstown rivals from across the street.

The Wheaton Academy Charter Magnet School of the Arts, Science, Humanities, Business, Fashion, and Everything Else was a sleek, state-of-the-art plate-glass building that looked more like a death star than a place of learning. Its student body was white and larger-than-life. None of this was real, of course, as the Wheaton Academy was a phony construction site. A vacant lot now, surrounded by a plywood fence painted blue, with small rectangle cutouts through which passersby could watch building that would never take place. The school was nothing more than a five-by-five watercolor artist’s rendition of the Center of Marine Sciences at the University of Eastern Maine that I downloaded, had blown up, mounted under plastic, and attached to a gate bolted with a chain lock. The pupils were ballet dancers, platform divers, violinists, fencers, volleyball players, and pottery makers whose black-and-white photos I hijacked from the Intersection Academy and Haverford-Meadowbrook websites, had enlarged, and pasted onto the fence. If anyone had been paying attention, they would’ve noticed that in reality the Wheaton Academy would be ten times the size of the lot it was supposed to be built upon. But if the red letters stenciled underneath the drawing were to be believed, then by all indications the Wheaton Academy was indeed “Coming Soon!”

Not soon enough for Dickens, of course, whose concerned but suspicious parents, eager for their children to join the ranks of the giant Anglo kids, whose metal braces brightened not only their impossibly white smiles but their futures. An overzealous mother, pointing demonstrably at a studious child and an attentive teacher poring over the results of a spectrograph pointed at the stars, asked Charisma the question on everyone’s mind.

“Assistant Principal Molina, what my kids have to do to go to that school? Take a test?”

“Of sorts.”

“What that mean?”

“What do those students in the photo all have in common?”

“They white.”

“Well, there’s your answer. Your child can pass that test, they’re in. But you didn’t hear it from me. All right, the show’s over. Anybody who’s ready to learn, let’s go, because I’m locking the doors behind me. Vámonos, people.”

By the time the 9:49 westbound arrived at Rosecrans and Long Beach in a noxious but punctual cloud of exhaust fumes, the crowd had long since dissipated, and I sat at the bus stop next to Hominy, smoking a doobie and cradling my last two satsuma mandarins. Marpessa opened the bus doors, a sinister look somewhere between disregard and disgust stitched onto her face like an angry black woman Halloween mask. A look that might scare off her co-workers and the niggers on the corner, but not me. I tossed her the oranges, and she sped off without even a thank you.

After five hundred feet or so, the #125 bus, its brakes invariably as worn out as a bum’s shoes, slammed to an ear-splitting halt, reversed, and made a sharp right turn. The only real fights Marpessa and I ever had were about whether three rights made a left. She insisted they did. I believed that after three pointless right turns, you might be traveling left but you’d be one block behind your original starting point. By the time the bus made its way back to me, having proved, if nothing else, that a couple of illegal U-turns puts you right back where you started from, the 9:49 was now the 9:57.

The doors opened, Marpessa still at the wheel. This time her face was slathered with satsuma juice and an irrepressible smile. I always liked the sound of seat belts unbuckling. That emancipating click and whir of the belt recoiling to wherever it goes never ceases to give me pleasure. Marpessa brushed away the peels in her lap and stepped off the bus.

“Okay, Bonbon, you win,” she said, plucking the joint from my mouth and marching her perfectly plump behind back onto the bus, apologizing for the delay but not the smell as she buckled in and slipped into traffic, blowing smoke out of the narrow driver’s-side window, her pink fingernails coolly flicking ashes onto the street. She didn’t know it, but she was smoking Aphasia. So I knew that between us bygones would be bygones. Or as we say in Dickens, “It be like that sometimes … Is exsisto amo ut interdum.”

Sixteen

Later that day, like any good social pyromaniac worth their accelerant, I returned to the scene of the crime. The only arson investigator on site was Foy Cheshire. It was the first time in twenty-some-odd years I’d ever seen him venture outside Dum Dum Donuts, his feet on actual Dickens terra firma. And there he stood in front of the blue clapboards of the would-be Wheaton Academy, his Mercedes half-parked on the sidewalk, taking photographs with an expensive-looking camera. From atop my horse, on the Chaff side of the street, I watched him snap a picture, then jot something down in his notebook. Above me a student opened a second-story window, looked up from a school-issued microscope so old Leeuwenhoek would’ve called it antiquated, and stuck her processed head into the air to gaze out at the Godzilla-sized child prodigy of the Wheaton Academy peering into an electron microscope so advanced it’d make Cal Tech envious.

From the other side of the street Foy spotted me. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, the traffic speeding loudly up and down Rosecrans Avenue forcing me to play peek-a-boo with both his image and his words.

“You see this shit, Sellout? You know who did this?”

“Yeah, I know!”

“Damn right, you know. Only the forces of evil would stick an all-white school in the middle of the ghetto.”

“Like who, the North Koreans or somebody?”

“What the North Koreans care about Foy Cheshire? This is without doubt a CIA conspiracy, or maybe even bigger, like a secret HBO documentary about me! Some nefarious shit is afoot! Which if you’d been to a meeting in the past couple of months … Did you know some racist asshole put a sign on a public bus…”

It used to be that when some fools did a drive-by, an oncoming car slowing down for no apparent reason was fair warning. The throaty belch of a V-6 engine losing rpm and slipping into first gear was the urban equivalent of the crack of a hunter snapping a twig and startling his prey. But with these new hybrid, silent-running, energy-saving automobiles, you don’t hear shit. By the time you realize what’s going on, a bullet has slammed into the back quarter panel of your iridium-silver Benz and your assailants have already quietly sped off, yelling, “Take your black ass back to white America, nigger!” while getting fifty-five miles to the gallon. I thought I recognized the laugh that belonged to the thin black arm holding the familiar-looking revolver that looked a lot like the gun Marpessa’s brother, Stevie, had held to my head two weeks prior. And the stealth gangsterism of an electric car drive-by had all the earmarks of King Cuz’s battlefield generalship. As I made my way across the street to see if Foy was okay, I definitely recognized the scent of the orange that one of the assailants had thrown upside Foy’s head — that was one of my satsumas.

“Foy, you okay?”

“Don’t touch me! This is war, and I know whose side you’re on!”

I backed away as Foy dusted himself off, muttering about conspiracies and defiantly marching toward his car like he was leaving the Philippines under siege. The gull-wing door to his classic sports car opened up, and before getting in, Foy paused to put on his aviator sunglasses and, in his best General BlackArthur, announced, “I shall return, motherfucker. Believe that shit!”

Behind us, the student on the second floor closed her window and returned to her microscope, blinking rapidly as she readjusted the focus, moved the slide around, and scribbled her findings in her notebook. Unlike Foy and me, she was resigned to her situation, because she knows that in Dickens it be like that sometimes, even when it doesn’t have to be.