The Sellout

Seventeen

I’m frigid. Not in the sense that I don’t have any sexual desire, but in the obnoxious way men in the free-love seventies projected their own sexual inadequacies onto women by referring to them as “frigid” and “dead fish.” I’m the deadest of fish. I fuck like an overturned guppy. A plate of day-old sashimi has more “motion of the ocean” than I do. So on the day of the shooting and drive-by orange-ing, when Marpessa stuck a tongue suspiciously tangy with satsuma tartness into my mouth and ground her pudenda into my pelvic bone, I lay there on my bed — motionless. My hands covering my face in shame, because fucking me is like fucking Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus. If my sexual ineptitude was a problem, she never let on. She simply boxed my ears and worked my beached-whale carcass over like a Saturday-night wrestler looking for revenge in a grudge match I didn’t want to end.

“Does this mean we’re back together?”

“It means I’m thinking about it.”

“Can you think about it a little faster, and maybe a little more to the right? Yeah, that’s it.”

Marpessa’s the only person to ever diagnose me. Not even my father could figure me out. I’d make a mistake, like, say, misidentify Mary McLeod Bethune for Gwendolyn Brooks, it’d be “Nigger, I have no fucking idea what the fuck is wrong is with you!” Followed by all 943 pages of the BDSM IV (Black Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition) flying at my head.

Marpessa sorted me out, though. I was eighteen. Two weeks from finishing up my first semester of college. We were in the guesthouse. She — thumbing through the bloodstained BDSM IV. Me — in my usual postcoital position, rolled up into a ball like a frightened teenage armadillo, and crying my eyes out for no earthly reason.

“Here, I finally figured out what’s wrong with you,” she said, snuggling up to me. “This is what you have, Attachment Disorder.” Why do people have to tap the page when they know they’re right? A quick read-aloud will suffice. You don’t have to rub it in with all the smug finger tapping.

“Attachment Disorder — Markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate social relatedness in most contexts, scenes, and happenings. Beginning before age five and continuing into adulthood as evidenced by either 1. and/or 2.:

1. persistent failure to initiate or respond in a developmentally appropriate fashion to most social interactions (e.g., the child or adult responds to caregivers and black lovers with a mixture of approach, avoidance, and resistance to comforting. May exhibit frozen watchfulness). Hoi Polloi Translation — The nigger flinches or jumps whenever you touch him. Runs hot and cold, and has no friends to speak of. And when he isn’t staring at you like you just got off the banana boat, he’s crying like a little bitch.

2. diffuse attachments as manifested by indiscriminate sociability with marked inability to exhibit appropriate selective attachments to black people and things (e.g., excessive familiarity with relative strangers or lack of selectivity in choice of attachment figures). Hoi Polloi Translation — The nigger fucking white hos out there at UC Riverside.

It was a miracle we lasted as long as we did.

I stared at her blurry silhouette for a long time before she poked her head from behind the chessboard-patterned shower curtain. I’d forgotten how brown she was. How good she looked, her stringy hair clumped to the side of her face. Sometimes the sweetest kisses are the shortest. We could discuss the clean-shaven pubes later.

“Bonbon, what’s the time frame?”

“For us, from now until. For the segregation thing, I’m thinking I want to be done by Hood Day. That gives me another six months.”

Marpessa pulled me in and handed me a tube of apricot scrub that hadn’t been opened since the last time she showered off here. I rubbed the exfoliant into her back and scratched a message into the grainy, supposedly skin-softening swirls. She always could read my writing.

“Because between that nigger Foy and the rest of world, this shit’s going to catch up with you sooner or later. Forget the racial segregation, you know motherfuckers wasn’t too keen on Dickens even when it did exist.”

“You were in that car today, weren’t you?”

“Shit, when Cuz and my brother picked me up from work and we drove back here, soon as we crossed that white line you painted, it was like, you know, when you enter a banging-ass house party and shit’s bumping, and you get that thump in your chest and you be like, if I were to die right now, I wouldn’t give a fuck. It was like that. Crossing the threshold.”

“You threw that fucking orange. I knew it.”

“Hit that stupid motherfucker square in the face.”

Marpessa pressed the crack of her shapely rear end into my groin. She had to get back to the kids, we wouldn’t have much time, and knowing me, we wouldn’t need much time.

Despite that initial scratch of her seventeen-year itch, Marpessa insisted we start slow. Since she worked weekends and put in crazy overtime, we had to date on Mondays and Tuesdays. Our nights on the town were trips to the mall, coffee shop poetry readings, and, most bothersome for me, open-mike nights at the Plethora Comedy Club. Marpessa hated my Wheaton-Chaff segregation joke and insisted that I improve my sense of humor by learning to tell a joke. When I protested, she’d say, “Look, now you ain’t the only black man in the world that can’t fuck, but I refuse to go out with the only one with absolutely no sense of humor.”

From the music clubs to the jailhouses to the fact that you can find Korean taco trucks only in white neighborhoods, L.A. is a mind-numbingly racially segregated city. But the epicenter of social apartheid is the stand-up comedy scene. The city of Dickens’s paltry contribution to the long-running tradition of black funnymen is an open-mike night, sponsored by the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, that on the second Tuesday of the month transforms the shop into a twenty-table club called the Comedy Act and Forum for the Freedom of Afro-American Witticism and Mannerisms That Showcase the Plethora of Afro-American Humorists for Whom … there’s more, but I’ve never managed to finish reading the temporary marquee they hang over the giant donut sign that hovers over the parking lot. I just call the place the Plethora for short, because despite Marpessa’s insistence that I had no sense of humor, there were a plethora of unfunny black guys who, like every black sports analyst trying to sound intelligent, use and misuse the word “plethora” at every opportunity.

As in:

Q: How many white boys does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: A plethora! Because they stole it from a black man! Lewis Latimer, a black man who invented the lightbulb and a plethora of other smart-ass shit!

And believe me, jokes like that would get a plethora of applause. Every black male, I don’t care what shade or political persuasion he is, secretly thinks he can do one of three things better than anyone in the world: play basketball, rap, or tell jokes.

If Marpessa thinks that I’m not funny, she never heard my father. Back in the heyday of black stand-up comedy, he also dragged me to the Tuesday-night open mikes. In the history of American black people, there have been only two with the complete inability to tell a joke: Martin Luther King, Jr., and my father. Even at the Plethora the “comedians” would occasionally lapse into unintentional humor. “I’m auditioning for a role in Tom Cruise’s newest movie. Tom Cruise plays a retarded judge…” The problem with open-mike night at the Plethora was that there was no time limit, because “time” is a white concept, which was fitting, because the problem with my father’s comedy was that he had no sense of timing. At least Dr. King had the good sense to never try to tell a joke. Daddy told his jokes the same way he’d ordered pizza, written poetry, and written his doctoral thesis — in APA format. Following the standards of the American Psychological Association, he’d toddle onstage and open up with the oral equivalent of a Title Page. Stating his name and the title of the joke. Yes, his jokes had titles. “This joke is called ‘Racial and Religious Differences in Drinking Establishment Patronage.’” Then he’d deliver the Abstract of the joke. So instead of simply saying, “A rabbi, a priest, and a black guy walk into a bar,” he’d say, “The subjects of this joke are three males, two of whom are clergymen, one of the Jewish faith, the other an ordained Catholic minister. The religion of the African-American respondent is undetermined, as is his educational level. The setting for the joke is a licensed establishment where alcohol is served. No, wait. It’s a plane. I’m sorry, my mistake. They are going parachuting.” Finally, he’d clear his throat, stand too close to the mike, and deliver what he liked to call “The Main Body” of the joke. Comedy is war. When a comedian’s routine works, they’ve killed; if the bits fall flat, they refer to it as dying. My father didn’t die onstage. He martyred himself for that other unrecognized completely unfunny black man who, just as there must be extraterrestrial life, is out there somewhere. I’ve seen self-immolations that were funnier than my father’s routine, but there were no gongs to ring or oversized canes with which to pull him offstage. He’d just ignore the booing and segue from the punch line to the Conclusion. The Results of the joke were a smattering of coughing. A chorus of vocalized disapproval and a plethora of yawning found to be significant. He’d end with the joke’s Reference Section:

“Jolson, Al (1918). ‘Sambo and Mammy Cleared for Takeoff on Runaway 5,’ Ziegfeld Follies.

“Williams, Bert (1917). ‘If Niggers Could Fly,’ The Circuitous Chitterling Tour.

“The Unknown Minstrel (circa 1899). ‘Dem Vaudeville Peckerwoods Sho’ Am Stealing My Shit,’ The Semi-Freemason Hall, Cleveland, Ohio.

“And don’t forget to tip your waitress.”

Even though she’d be exhausted from a long day transporting the masses, Marpessa would make sure we arrived early, volunteering me for comic duty by putting my name at the top of the sign-up sheet. I can’t tell you how much I dreaded hearing the emcee introduce me. “Now put your hands together for Bonbon.”

I would stand on that stage feeling as if I were having an out-of-body experience. Staring out into the audience and seeing myself in the front row prepping rotten tomatoes, eggs, and spoiled lettuce heads to throw at the droll motherfucker telling every ripped-off, antiquated Richard Pryor joke he could remember from his father’s record collection. But every Tuesday night Marpessa forced me to take the stage, saying that she would continue withholding sex until I made her laugh. Usually after my so-called routine, I’d return to the table to find her fast asleep, unable to tell if she was exhausted from work or from boredom. One night I finally managed to tell an original joke, that in homage to my father had a title, albeit a rather long one:

Why All That Abbott and Costello Vaudeville Mess Doesn’t Work in the Black Community

Who’s on first?

I don’t know, your mama.

Marpessa cracked the fuck up, rolling in the thin space between the folding chairs that passed for an aisle. I knew the sex drought would end that night.

They say never laugh at your own jokes, but all the best comics do, and as soon as the open mike was closed, I sprinted outside and hopped aboard bus #125, which was parked right outside the club, because Marpessa was using it as the family car, afraid to let the rolling memorial out of her sight. Before she could even think about releasing the parking brake, I was already lying naked on the backseat ready for a tinted-window quickie. Marpessa reached under the driver’s seat, pulled out a large cardboard box, dragged it down the aisle, and dumped the contents in my lap. Burying my aching erection in two inches of report cards, computer printouts, and progress reports.

“What the fuck’s all this?” I asked. Sifting through the paperwork so my dick could get some air.

“I’m acting as Charisma’s go-between. It’s early yet. It’s only been six weeks, but she thinks the segregated schooling is already working. Grades are up and behavioral problems are down, but she wants you to confirm those results with some statistical analysis.”

“Goddamn it, Marpessa! It’s going to take just as long to put all this shit back in the box as it will to do the math.”

Marpessa grabbed the base of my penis and squeezed.

“Bonbon, are you ashamed of my being a bus driver?”

“What? Where’s this coming from?”

“Nowhere.”

No amount of my amateur ear nuzzling was able to erase the wistful look on her face or make her nipples erect. Bored at my attempts at foreplay, she slipped a progress report into my pee hole and twisted my dickhead around so that I could read it like it was the Early Bird dinner menu. A sixth-grader named Michael Gallegos was taking subjects I didn’t understand and getting grades I couldn’t decipher. But according to the teacher’s comments, he was showing marked improvement in something called number sense and operations.

“What the hell kind of grade is a ‘PR’?”

“PR means shows proficiency.”

Charisma had intuitively grasped the psychological subtleties of my plan even as it was just starting to make sense to me. She understood the colored person’s desire for the domineering white presence, which the Wheaton Academy represented. Because she knew that even in these times of racial equality, when someone whiter than us, richer than us, blacker than us, Chineser than us, better than us, whatever than us, comes around throwing their equality in our faces, it brings out our need to impress, to behave, to tuck in our shirts, do our homework, show up on time, make our free throws, teach, and prove our self-worth in hopes that we won’t be fired, arrested, or trucked away and shot. In essence, Wheaton Academy is saying to her students what Booker T. Washington, the Great Educator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute, once told his uneducated people: “Cast down your buckets where you are.” While I’ll never understand why it had to be a bucket, why the shortsighted Booker T. couldn’t recommend that we cast down our books, slide rules, or laptops, I did sympathize with his and Charisma’s need for an on-call Caucasian panopticon. Believe me, it’s no coincidence that Jesus, the commissioners of the NBA and NFL, and the voices on your GPS (even the Japanese one) are white.

There are no greater anaphrodisiacs than racism and a report card in one’s urethra, and when a half-naked Marpessa clambered on top of me, both she and my penis laid their sleepy heads down in the vicinity of my belly button, she still clutching my phallus, having gone to wherever it is bus drivers go to dream. Flight school probably, because in Marpessa’s dreams buses can fly. They arrive on time and never break down. They use rainbows for bridges and clouds for docking bays, and wheelchair riders roll and yaw alongside like fighters protecting a bomber wing. When she reaches cruising altitude, she clears flocks of seagulls and niggers migrating south for the rest of their lives with a horn that doesn’t beep but plays Roxy Music, Bon Iver, Sunny Levine, and Nico’s “These Days.” And all her passengers make a living wage. And Booker T. Washington is a regular rider who, when he boards the bus, tells her, “When you see Bonbon, the Cosmic Sellout and your one true love, cast down your panties where you are.”

Eighteen

Come November, about six weeks after the shooting, I was making good progress with Marpessa, but less headway on what were, since I was now having sex on a semiregular basis, the two more immediate goals in my life, segregating Dickens and raising a successful potato crop in Southern California. I knew why I couldn’t get the potatoes to grow, because the climate’s too warm. But when it came to thinking of good ideas for separating the races by race, all of a sudden I had racism block, and Hood Day was only a few months away. Maybe I was like every other contemporary artist, I had only one good book, one album, one despicable act of large-scale self-hatred in me.

Hominy and I were in the row I’d dedicated to the tubers. Me on my hands and knees, checking the compost mixture, the soil density, and shoving russet seed potatoes in the ground, while he brainstormed suggestions for citywide discrimination and fucked up the one job he had, which was to lay the garden hose with the holes I punctured into it face up.

“Massa, what if we gave everybody we don’t like a badge and assigned them to camps?”

“That’s been done.”

“Okay, how about this? Designate people into three groups: black, colored, and godlike. Institute some curfew laws and a pass system…”

“Old hat, kaffir boy.”

“This’ll work in Dickens, cause everybody — Mexican, Samoan, or black — is basically a shade of brown.” He dropped the hose on the wrong side of the trench and dug into his pocket. “Now, at the bottom we’ll have the Untouchables. These are the people who are completely useless. Clippers fans, traffic cops, and people who have dirty jobs where they work with human and animal waste, like yourself.”

“So if I’m an Untouchable, and you’re my slave, what does that make you?”

“As a talented artist and thespian. I’z a Brahmin. After I die, I get nirvana. You come back exactly to where you are now, wallowing in cow shit.”

I appreciated the help, but as Hominy rattled on about the varnas and delineating his version of the Indian caste system as it might apply to Dickens, I began to figure out what my mental block was. I was feeling guilty. Realizing I was the Arschloch at the Wannsee Conference, the Afrikaner parliamentarian in Johannesburg in ’48, the wannabe hipster on the Grammy committee who in an effort to make the award more inclusive comes up with meaningless categories like Best R&B Performance by Duo or Group with Vocals and Best Rock Instrumental by a Soloist Who Knows How to Program But Can’t Play Any Instruments. I was the fool who, as topics like railroad car allotments, bantu stands, and alternative music were raised, was too cowardly to stand up and say, “Do you motherfuckers realize how ridiculous we sound right now?”

With the potatoes planted, the compost spread, and the hose finally in the correct furrow, it was time to test my makeshift irrigation system. I opened the water spigot and watched one hundred feet of unpunctured green garden hose swell as it wound its way through the string beans, past the Spanish onions, and around the cabbage, until six jets of water squirted into the sky, arcing high over but not onto the potatoes, turning a small barren patch of land near the back fence into a mini flood plain. Either the holes were too small or the water pressure was too high; in any case, there’d be no homegrown spuds this year. Next week’s forecast was for 80 degrees. Way too warm to get any kind of root vegetables started.

“Massa, you not going to turn it off? You wastin’ water.”

“I know.”

“Well, then maybe next time you plant the potatoes in the dirt where the water’s landing.”

“I can’t. That’s where my dad’s buried.”

Motherfuckers don’t believe I buried him in the backyard. But I did. Had my lawyer, Hampton Fiske, backdate some forms and planted him in the far corner where the stagnant pond used to be. Nothing ever grows over that square of land. Not before he died or since. There’s no headstone. Before Marpessa’s satsuma tree I tried to plant an apple tree for a cenotaph. Dad used to like apples. He ate them all the time. People who didn’t know him thought he was really healthy, because you’d rarely see him in public without a Macintosh and a can of V-8. Pops loved the Braeburns and the Galas, but the Honeycrisps were his favorites. Offer him a bland-ass Red Delicious and he’d look at you like you were talking bad about his mama. I regret that I never checked the pocket of his sports coat when he died. I’m certain there was an apple in there. He always brought one to nibble on after the meetings were over. If I had to guess, I’d say it was a Golden Russet, those keep well during winter. We never grew apple trees, though. Much as he complained about the pretentious white people on the Westside, I think he secretly liked to drive over to Gelson’s whenever they had Opalescents on sale for $4.50/lb., or to the Farmers Market if some Enterprises were in. I drove all the way to Santa Paula looking for a tree to plant. Something special. Since the late 1890s, Cornell University has been breeding the world’s best apples. The school used to be chill. If you asked nicely and paid the shipping and handling, they’d send you a box of late-season Jonagolds just to spread the gospel. But in recent years, for whatever reason, Cornell has taken to licensing the new varietals to local farmers, and unless you own a farm in upstate New York, you’re shit out of luck and have to make do with the occasional imported Florina. So now the university orchards in Geneva, New York, are to the black market apple trade what Medellín, Colombia, is to cocaine. My connect was Oscar Zocalo, my lab partner at Riverside, who was doing his postgrad at Cornell. We met in the airport parking lot during an air show. Yahoos flying biplanes, putting Sopwith Camels and Curtisses through their paces. Oscar insisted we do the “deal” car window to car window, crime-movie-style. The sample was so delicious that I scooped up the excess juice running down my chin and rubbed it into my gums. I don’t know if this is irony or not, but the best fucking apples taste like peaches. I drove home with a ready-for-ground Velvet Scrumptious tree, the crack of the apple world, insane yield, perfect snap, chock-full of vitamin C. I planted the tree about two feet from where I buried Daddy. I thought it would be nice if he had some shade. Two days later it was dead. And the apples tasted like mentholated cigarettes, liver and onions, and cheap fucking rum.

I was standing on my father’s grave, in the mud, underneath the water spray meant for the potatoes. From there I could see the whole farm from front to back. The rows of fruit trees. Separated by color. Light to dark. Lemons. Apricots. Pomegranates. Plums. Satsumas. Figs. Pineapples. Avocados. The fields, which rotate from corn to wheat, then to Japanese rice, if I feel like paying the water bill. The greenhouse sits in the middle. Backed by leafy processions of cabbage, lettuce, legumes, and cucumbers. The grapes on vines along the south fence, tomatoes on the northern, then the white blanket of cotton. Cotton that I haven’t touched since my father died. What was it Hominy said to me when I first started popping off about bringing back Dickens? You heard the saying, you can’t see the forest for the trees? Well, you can’t see the niggers for the plantation. Who was I kidding? I’m a farmer, and farmers are natural segregationists. We separate the wheat from the chaff. I’m not Rudolf Hess, P. W. Botha, Capitol Records, or present-day U.S. of A. Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I’m a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe.

“Hominy!”

“Yes, massa?”

“What day is it?”

“Sunday. Why, you going down to Dum Dum’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Then ask that bitch-nigger where my fucking Little Rascals movies at!”

Nineteen

Attendance was light, maybe ten people. Foy, unshaven and draped in a wrinkled suit, stood in the corner twitching and blinking uncontrollably. Foy had been in the news lately. His out-of-wedlock children so numerous, they’d filed a class-action suit against him for the emotional distress he’d caused by sticking his face in front of a camera or microphone at every opportunity. At this point it was only the smooth Euclidean planar perfection of his box cut and his Rolodex that was holding both him and the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals together. Hard to lose faith in a man who even at the worst of times can keep his hair on point and call upon friends like Jon McJones, a black conservative who’d recently added the “Mc” to his slave name. McJones read from his latest book, Mick, Please: The Black Irish Journey from Ghetto to Gaelic. The author was a good get for Foy, and with the free Bushmills, there should have been more people, but there was no doubt the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals were dying. Maybe the notion of a cabal of stupid black thinkers had finally outlived its usefulness. “I’m in Sligo, a small artist hamlet on the northern coast of the Emerald Isle,” McJones was reading. His lisp and faux-white enunciation made me want to punch him in the face. “The all-Ireland hurling championship is on the telly. Kilkenny versus Galway. Men with sticks chasing a small white ball. A round-shouldered bloke in a fisherman’s sweater stands behind me gently tapping the butt end of a shillelagh into the palm of his hand. I’ve never felt more at home.”

I copped a seat near King Cuz, who was playing the back as usual, munching on a maple bar and leafing through a stray issue of Lowrider magazine. When Foy Cheshire spotted me, he tapped his Patek Philippe like I was a deacon walking in late to church. Something wasn’t right about Foy. He kept interrupting McJones with meaningless questions.

“So hurling, that’s also college slang for vomiting, am I right?”

Seeing as he wasn’t using it, I borrowed Cuz’s copy of The Ticker. In the fiscal quarter since the Wheaton Academy’s inception, employment in Dickens was up an eighth. Housing prices had risen three-eighths. Even graduation rates were up a quarter. Finally, black people were in the black. And though it was still early in the social experiment and the sample size was relatively small, the numbers didn’t lie. For the past three months, since the Wheaton Academy went up, the students at Chaff Middle School were performing considerably better. Not that anyone was going to be skipping any grades or putting in an appearance on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire anytime soon, but on average, the scores on the state proficiency exams were approaching, if not mastery, a promising competency. And as near as I could make out from the state guidelines, the improvement was such that, in all likelihood, the school would not be going into receivership, at least not anytime soon.

After the reading was over, Foy strode to the front of the room, clapping like an enthusiastic child at his first puppet show. “I’d like to thank Mr. McJones for that stimulating reading, but before we get into this afternoon’s subject matter, I have an announcement. The first is that my latest public-access show, Black Checker, has been canceled. The second is that, as many of you may know, a new battle has begun, and the enemy dreadnought is right here offshore in the form of the Wheaton Academy, which is an all-white school. Now, I have friends in high places, and they all deny the existence of the Wheaton Academy. But fret not, I have developed a secret weapon.” Foy dumped the contents of his attaché case onto the nearest table, a new book. Two people immediately got up and left. I wanted to join them, but remembered I was there for a reason, and part of me was insanely curious as to what American classic Foy would bastardize next. Before passing it around the room, Foy coyly showed the book to Jon McJones, who shot back a look that said, “Nigger, you sure you want to unleash this shit on the world?” When it reached the back, King Cuz handed it off to me without even looking at it, and as soon as I read the title, I didn’t want to let go. The Adventures of Tom Soarer. It dawned on me that Foy’s written works were Black Folk(s) Art and were going to be worth something one day. I was beginning to regret the book burning thing and that I hadn’t started a collection, because I’d spent the past ten years looking down my broad black nose at probably now-impossible-to-find first-and-only-edition titles like The Old Black Man and the Inflatable Winnie the Pooh Swimming Pool, Measured Expectations, Middlemarch Middle of April, I’ll Have Your Money — I Swear. On the cover of Tom Soarer, a preppy black boy, wearing penny loafers and argyle socks exposed by a pair of flooding whale-print lime-green pants, and armed with a bucket of whitewash, stood bravely in front of a wall splashed in gang graffiti, while a pack of ragamuffin hoodlums looked on menacingly.

When Foy snatched Tom Soarer from my hands, it felt like I’d fumbled away a game-winning touchdown catch. “This book, I’m not ashamed to say, is a WME, a Weapon of Mass Education!” Unable to contain his excitement, Foy’s voice rose two octaves and took on a Hitlerian fervor. “And just as he inspired me, the character of Tom Soarer will galvanize a nation to whitewash that fence! To cover up those frightful images of racial segregation that the Wheaton Academy represents. Who’s with me?” Foy pointed at the front door. “I know these great African-American heroes are down with the cause…” Legally, I’m not allowed to say who Foy name-dropped, because when I turned my head toward what I thought would be Foy’s invisible hallucinations, standing in the Dum Dum Donuts doorway were three of the world’s most famous living African-Americans, the noted TV family man _ i _ _ _ _ _ b _ and the Negro diplomats _ o _ _ _ _ o _ _ _ and _ _ n _ _ _ e e _ _ _ _ _ c _. Sensing the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals were dying, Foy had pulled out all the stops and called in who knows what favors. Somewhat surprised the crowd was so small, the three superstars cautiously sat down and, to their credit, ordered coffee and bear claws and participated in the meeting, most of which was spent with Jon McJones regurgitating the usual Republican Party bullshit that a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised in a two-parent household than was a baby born after the election of the U.S.A.’s first African-American president. McJones was a snobby Negro who covered up his self-hatred with libertarianism; I at least had the good sense to wear mine on my sleeve. He went on to cite statistics that, even if true, were completely meaningless when you consider the simple fact that slaves were slaves. That a two-parent antebellum household wasn’t necessarily a bond of love but a forced coupling. He didn’t mention that some two-parent slave marriages were between sister and brother, mother and son. Or that, during slavery, divorce wasn’t really an option. There was no “I’m going out for cigarettes” and never coming back. What about all the two-parent households that were childless because their kids had been sold off to who knows where? As a modern-day slave owner, I was insulted that the venerated institution of slavery was not given the viciousness and cruelty which it was due.

“What a load of crap,” I said, interrupting McJones with a schoolboy raise of the hand.

“Like you wouldn’t rather be born here than in Africa?” C _ _ _ n _ _ w _ _ _ snapped back with a streetwise inflection that belied his curriculum vitae and his V-neck sweater.

“What, here?” I pointed at the floor. “Like in Dickens?”

“Well, maybe not a hellhole like Dickens,” McJones said, giving the other guests a “Don’t even bother, I got this” glance. “Nobody wants to live here, but you can’t even pretend to tell me that you’d rather be born in Africa than anywhere else in America.”

You’d rather be here than in Africa. The trump card all narrow-minded nativists play. If you put a cupcake to my head, of course, I’d rather be here than any place in Africa, though I hear Johannesburg ain’t that bad and the surf on the Cape Verdean beaches is incredible. However, I’m not so selfish as to believe that my relative happiness, including, but not limited to, twenty-four-hour access to chili burgers, Blu-ray, and Aeron office chairs is worth generations of suffering. I seriously doubt that some slave ship ancestor, in those idle moments between being raped and beaten, was standing knee-deep in their own feces rationalizing that, in the end, the generations of murder, unbearable pain and suffering, mental anguish, and rampant disease will all be worth it because someday my great-great-great-great-grandson will have Wi-Fi, no matter how slow and intermittent the signal is.

I said nothing and let King Cuz do my fighting for me. In twenty years, I’d never heard him say anything in a meeting more substantive than acknowledging the fact that the iced tea could use more sugar, but there he was, facing off with a man with four advanced degrees who spoke ten languages, none of them black except French.

“Nigger, I refuse to let you impugn Dickens like that!” Cuz said sharply, standing up and pointing a freshly manicured nail at McJones. “This is a city, not a hellhole!”

Impugn? Maybe twenty years of Dum Dum Donuts rhetoric hadn’t all gone to waste. To his credit, McJones, despite Cuz’s tone and size, didn’t back down. “I may have misspoken. But I must take exception to your implication that Dickens is a city, when it’s clearly a locale, nothing more than an American shantytown. A post-black, post-racial, post-soul flashback, if you will, to a time of romanticized black ignorance…”

“Hey, look, fool, save that post-soul, post-black bullshit for somebody who gives a fuck, ’cause all I know is that I’m pre-black. Dickens born and raised. Homo sapiens OG Crip from the goddamn primordial giddy-up, nigger.”

King Cuz’s little soliloquy seemed to impress Ms. R _ _ _, because she uncrossed her ankles, opened her legs just enough to show off some right-wing inner thigh, and then tapped me on the shoulder.

“That big motherfucker play any football?”

“A little running back in high school.”

“Мои трусики мокрые,” she said in lip-licking Russian.

I’m no linguist, but my best guess is that it meant Cuz could penetrate her secondary anytime he wanted. The old veterano strode into the middle of the donut shop, the rubber soles of his canvas sneakers squeaking with every step. “This, you proudly uncool motherfucker, this is Dickens,” and to some beat that only he could hear, he broke into the complex gangster soft shoe known as the Crip Walk. Never turning his back to the crowd, he pivoted on the balls and heels of his feet. His knees together and his hands free, he skipped around the room in tight concentric circles that collapsed upon themselves as quickly as they expanded. It was as if the floor was heated, and too hot for him to stop in one spot for even a second. King Cuz was debating with McJones the best way he knew how.

Want some, get some, bad enough, take some …

Velis aliquam, acquīris aliquam, canīnus satis, capīs aliquam.

As the sparse crowd gathered around the two foes, I did what I’d come to do. I removed my daddy’s picture from the wall and tucked it under my arm. Segregating the city with his photo up would be like having sex in the room next to your parents’ bedroom. Not being able to concentrate. Not being able to be as loud as you wanted to be. I quietly dipped out as King Cuz was teaching McJones, _ _ _ l C _ _ _ y, _ _ _ _ n P _ _ _ _ _, and a dreamy-eyed _ o n d _ _ _ _ z z _ _ _ _ e the Crip Walk. And they were picking it up like pros. Strutting around like old-school bangers. It figures, because passed down from the Masai and stolen from the Cherokee war dances you see on old Westerns, the C-Walk is an ancient warrior dance. One that designates its baggy-pants danseur noble as target. It’s a dance that says, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.” And any nigger in the limelight, even those conservative shills, knows what it’s like to have the bull’s-eye placed squarely on your back.

I was untying my horse when Foy placed a father-figure arm around my shoulder. There was an uptight and nervous look to his goatee that I’d never seen before. His neck was caked with dirt, and a deep stench of body odor wafted over me.

“You riding off into the sunset, Sellout?”

“I am.”

“Long day.”

“That crap about being better off under slavery is too much even for you, isn’t it, Foy?”

“At least McJones cares.”

“Come on, he cares about black people like a seven-footer cares about basketball. He has to care because what else would he be good at.”

Knowing I was never coming back to the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, Foy gave me the same sorrowful look the missionaries must’ve given the jungle heathen. A look that said, It doesn’t matter if you’re too stupid to understand God’s love. He loves you regardless, just hand over the women, the distance runners, and the natural resources.

“You’re not worried about that all-white school?”

“Naw, white kids need learnin’, too.”

“But white kids aren’t going to buy my books. Speaking of which—” Foy handed me a copy of Tom Soarer, then signed it without me asking him to.

“Foy, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“I know it’s probably urban myth, but is it true that you own the really racist Little Rascals movies? Because if you do, I can make you an offer.”

Apparently I touched a nerve. Foy shook his head, pointed to his book, then lumbered back inside. As the glass doors opened, I could hear King Cuz, the nation’s wealthiest black man, and two legendary Negro ministers plenipotentiary rapping the lyrics to NWA’s “Fuck tha Police” at the top of their lungs. Before placing Tom Soarer in the saddlebag, I read the inscription, which I found vaguely threatening.

To the Sellout,

Like father, like son …

Foy Cheshire

Fuck him. I galloped home. Drove the horse hard down Guthrie Boulevard, inventing some inner-city dressage along the way as I ignored the traffic cop and ran the horse through a series of figure eights by dashing in and out of the orange construction barrels in the shut-down center lane. On Chariton Drive, I latched onto a tiring skateboarder and, with one hand on the reins, pulled her along like a long board cabriolet from Airdrome to Sawyer, whipping her into a sharp turn onto Burnside. I don’t know what I expected from trying to restore Dickens to a glory that never existed. Even if Dickens were to one day be officially recognized, there’d be no fanfare or fireworks. No one would ever bother to erect a statue of me in the park or name an elementary school after me. There’d be none of the head rush Jean Baptiste Point du Sable and William Overton must’ve felt when they planted their flags in Chicago and Portland. After all, it wouldn’t be like I founded or discovered anything. I was just brushing the dirt off an artifact that had never really been buried, so when I arrived home to Hominy, he excitedly unsaddled my horse. Eager to show me some newly disambiguated entry in an online encyclopedia written by some anonymous scholar:

Dickens is an unincorporated city in southwest Los Angeles County. Used to be all black, now there’s hella Mexicans. Once known as the murder capital of the world, shit ain’t as bad as it used to be, but don’t trip.

Yes, if Dickens ever became a real place again, in all likelihood Hominy’s wide smile would be all the reward I’d ever receive.

Twenty

Keep this under your hat, but over the next few months the resegregation of Dickens was kind of fun. Unlike Hominy, I’ve never had a real job, and even though it didn’t pay, driving around town with Hominy as the African-American Igor to my evil social scientist was sort of empowering, even though we were mocking the notion of being powerless. Monday through Friday at exactly one o’clock he’d be out front standing next to the truck.

“Hominy, you ready to segregate?”

“Yes, master.”

We started small, Hominy’s local fame and adoration proving invaluable. He’d soft-shoe his way inside, bust out an insanely intricate song-and-dance routine from old Chitlin’ Circuit days that would’ve made the Nicholas Brothers, Honi Coles, and Buck and Bubbles green with blackface envy:

’Cause my hair is curly

Just because my teeth are pearly

Just because I always wear a smile

Like to dress up in the latest style

’Cause I’m glad I’m livin’

I take these troubles all with a smile

Just because my color’s shady

Makes no difference, maybe

Why they call me “Shine”

Then, as if it were part of the act, he’d stick a COLORED ONLY sign in the storefront window of a restaurant or beauty shop. No one ever took them down, at least not in front of us; he’d worked too hard for it.

* * *

Sometimes in homage to my father, if Hominy was on his lunch break or asleep in the truck, I’d enter wearing Dad’s white lab coat and carrying a clipboard. I’d hand the owner my card and explain that I was with the Federal Department of Racial Injustice, and was conducting a monthlong study on the effects of “racial segregation on the normative behaviors of the racially segregated.” I’d offer them a flat fifty-dollar fee and three signs to choose from: BLACK, ASIAN, AND LATINO ONLY; LATINO, ASIAN, AND BLACK ONLY; and NO WHITES ALLOWED. I was surprised how many small-business people offered to pay me to display the NO WHITES ALLOWED sign. And like most social experiments, I never did the promised follow-up, but after the month was up, it wasn’t unusual to get calls from the proprietors asking Dr. Bonbon if they could keep the signs in the windows because they made their clientele feel special. “The customers love it. It’s like they belong to a private club that’s public!”

It didn’t take long to convince the manager of the Meralta, the only movie theater in town, that he could cut his complaints in half if he designated floor seating as WHITE AND NON-TALKERS ONLY, while reserving the balcony for BLACKS, LATINOS, AND THE HEARING IMPAIRED. We didn’t always ask permission; with paint and brush we changed the opening hours of the Wanda Coleman Public Library from “Sun — Tue: Closed, Wed — Sat: 10–5:30” to “Sun — Tue: Whites Only, Wed — Sat: Colored Only.” As word started to spread of the success Charisma was having at Chaff Middle School, every now and then an organization would seek me out for a little personalized segregation. In looking to reduce the youth crime rate in the neighborhood, the local chapter of Un Millar de Muchachos Mexicanos (o Los Emes) wanted to do something other than midnight basketball. “Something a little more conducive to the Mexican and Native American stature,” a sporting endeavor that didn’t require a lot of space where the kids could compete on equal footing. Name-dropping the hoop success of Eduardo Nájera, Tahnee Robinson, Earl Watson, Shoni Schimmel, and Orlando Méndez-Valdez did nothing to dissuade them.

The meeting was brief, consisting of two questions on my part.

First: “Do you have any money?”

“We just got a $100,000 grant from Wish Upon a Star.”

Second: “I thought they only did things for dying kids?”

“Exactly.”

During the height of the government enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, some segregated townships filled in their municipal pools rather than let nonwhite kids share in the perverse joy of peeing in the water. But in an inspired act of reverse segregation, we used the money to hire a lifeguard who posed as a homeless person and built a “Whites Only” swimming pool surrounded by a chain-link fence that the kids loved to hop, so they could play Marco Polo and hold their collective breaths underwater whenever they spotted a patrol car passing by.

When Charisma felt that her students needed a counterbalance to the onslaught of disingenuous pride and niche marketing that took place during Black History and Hispanic Heritage Months, I came up with the one-off idea for Whitey Week. Contrary to the appellation, Whitey Week was actually a thirty-minute celebration of the wonders and contributions of the mysterious Caucasian race to the world of leisure. A moment of respite for children forced to participate in classroom reenactments of stories of migrant labor, illegal immigration, and the Middle Passage. Weary and stuffed from being force-fed the falsehood that when one of your kind makes it, it means that you’ve all made it. It took about two days to convert the long-out-of-business brushless car wash on Robertson Boulevard into a tunnel of whiteness. We altered the signs so that the children of Dickens could line up and choose from several race wash options:

Regular Whiteness:

Benefit of the Doubt

Higher Life Expectancy

Lower Insurance Premiums

Deluxe Whiteness:

Regular Whiteness Plus

Warnings Instead of Arrests from the Police

Decent Seats at Concerts and Sporting Events

World Revolves Around You and Your Concerns

Super Deluxe Whiteness:

Deluxe Whiteness Plus

Jobs with Annual Bonuses

Military Service Is for Suckers

Legacy Admission to College of Your Choice

Therapists That Listen

Boats That You Never Use

All Vices and Bad Habits Referred to as “Phases”

Not Responsible for Scratches, Dents, and Items Left in the Subconscious

To the whitest music we could think of (Madonna, The Clash, and Hootie & the Blowfish), the kids, dressed in bathing suits and cutoffs, danced and laughed in the hot water and suds. Ignoring the amber siren light, they ran under the waterfall of the not-so Hot Carnauba Wax. We handed them candy and soda pop and let them stand in front of the drying blast of the hot-air blowers for as long as they wanted. Reminding them that having a warm wind blowing in your face was what it felt like to be white and rich. That life for the fortunate few was like being in the front seat of a convertible twenty-four hours a day.

It wasn’t necessarily a case of saving the best for last, but as Hood Day approached, Hominy and I had managed to install some form of segregation in nearly every section and public facility in Dickens except for the Martin Luther “Killer” King, Jr., Hospital, which is paradoxically located in Polynesian Gardens. Polynesian Gardens, aka P.G., being a majority-Latino neighborhood that carried a rumored reputation for being hostile toward African-Americans. In fact, local legend had it that the injuries black Dickensians suffered while driving through P.G. to the hospital were often more severe than the afflictions that had caused them to seek medical attention in the first place. Between the police and the gangs, navigating the streets of any neighborhood in L.A. County, especially any section not familiar with you, can be dangerous. You just never know when you’re going to get rolled up on for being or wearing the wrong color. I’d never had any problems in Polynesian Gardens, but if I were to be honest, I never went there at night. And the evening before our planned action on the hospital, there’d been a shoot-out between Varrio Polynesian Gardens and Barrio Polynesian Gardens, two gangs with a longstanding blood feud over spelling and pronunciation. So to ensure Hominy and I got in and out with our asses intact, I attached two small purple-and-gold Lakers pennants to the front fenders of my pickup truck and, for good measure, flew a giant Iwo Jima — sized, 1987 Championship Lakers flag from the roof. Everybody, and I mean everybody in Los Angeles, loves the Lakers. And driving down Centennial Avenue, even behind slow-moving lowriders that refused to go faster than ten miles an hour, the Lakers flags billowed majestically in the night wind, giving the pickup truck an ambassadorial vibe that allowed us to cruise through with a temporary diplomatic immunity.

The director of Martin Luther “Killer” King, Jr., Hospital, Dr. Wilberforce Mingo, was an old friend of my father’s and had given me permission to segregate the place when I explained to him that it’d been me who painted the borderlines, put up the exit sign, and conceived the Wheaton Academy. He leaned back in his chair and said that for two pounds of cherries I could segregate his hospital in any way I saw fit. And under the cover of “no one gives a fuck” darkness, Hominy and I painted the words The Bessie Smith Trauma Center in thick, drippy, blood-red horror-movie-poster letters on what was until then a nameless glass-door emergency entrance to King Hospital. Then we drilled a plain black-and-white metal placard into the middlemost concrete pillar. It read, WHITE-OWNED AMBULANCE UNITS ONLY.

I can’t say I did this without trepidation. The hospital was the one large-scale place I’d segregated where there was a decent likelihood that outsiders would see my work. Scared to proceed inside, I asked Hominy to hand me one of the fresh carrots I’d picked the night before.

“What’s up, Doc?” I teased, nibbling on the carrot tip.

“You know, massa, Bugs Bunny wasn’t nothing but Br’er Rabbit with a better agent.”

“Did the fox ever catch Br’er Rabbit, because I’m pretty sure the white boys going to catch us after this one.”

Hominy straightened the Sunshine Sammy Construction sign on the side of the truck, then grabbed the paint cans and two brushes from the back.

“Massa, if any white people do come through here and see this shit, they going to think what they always think, These niggers crazy, and carry on about they business.”

A few years ago, before the Internet, before the hip-hop, the spoken-word poetry, the Kara Walker silhouettes, I’d have been inclined to agree with him. But being black ain’t what it used to be. The black experience used to come with lots of bullshit, but at least there was some fucking privacy. Our slang and debased fashion sense didn’t cross over until years after the fact. We even had our own set of top-secret sex techniques. A Negro kama sutra that got passed down on the playground, the stoop, and by drunken parents intentionally leaving the door open just a crack so “the little niggers might learn something.” But the Internet proliferation of black pornography has given anybody with a twenty-five-dollar-a-month membership pass, or a lack of regard for intellectual property rights, access to our once-idiosyncratic sexual techniques. And now, not just white women, but women of all creeds, colors, and sexual orientations, have to suffer through their partners humping them at a mile a minute and yelling, “Who owns the pussy?” every two strokes. And even though they’ve never fully appreciated Basquiat, Kathleen Battle, and Patrick Ewing — and still haven’t discovered Killer of Sheep, Lee Morgan, talcum powder, Fran Ross, or Johnny Otis — these days mainstream America’s nose is all up in our business, and I knew eventually I was fucking going to jail.

Hominy pushed me through the automatic doors. “Massa, no one gives a fuck about the hood until they give a fuck.”

* * *

Hospitals don’t have the rainbow of directional lines anymore. In the days of butterfly bandages, sutures that didn’t dissolve, and nurses without accents, the admitting nurse would hand you a manila folder and you’d follow the Red Line to Radiology, the Orange to Oncology, the Purple to Pediatrics. But at Killer King, sometimes an emergency room patient tired of waiting to be seen by a system that never seems to care, and holding a plastic cup with a severed finger swimming in long-since-melted ice or staunching the bleeding with a kitchen sponge, sometimes out of sheer boredom they’ll slip over to the glass partition and ask the triage nurse, Where does that brackish-colored line lead to? The nurse will shrug. And unable to ignore the curiosity, they set out to follow a line that took Hominy and me all night to paint, and half the next day to make sure everyone obeyed the WET PAINT signs. It’s a line that’s as close to the Yellow Brick Road as the patients will ever get.

Though there’s a touch of cornflower blue in the shade, Pantone 426 C is a strange, mysterious color. I chose it because it looks either black or brown, depending on the light, one’s height, and one’s mood. And if you follow the three-inch-wide stripe out of the waiting room, you’ll crash through two sets of double doors, make a series of sharp lefts and rights through a maze of patient-strewn corridors, and then down three flights of filthy unswept stairs until you come to a dingy inner vestibule lit by a dim red bulb. There, the painted line pitchforks into three prongs, each tine leading to the threshold of a pair of unmarked, identical double doors. The first set of doors leads to a back alley, the second to the morgue, and the third to a bank of soda pop and junk-food vending machines. I didn’t solve the racial and class inequalities in health care, but I’m told patients who travel down the brown-black road are more proactive. That when their names are finally called, the first thing they say to the attending physician is “Doctor, before you treat me, I need to know one thing. Do you give a fuck about me? I mean, do you really give a fuck?”

Twenty-one

It used to be that to celebrate Hood Day, King Cuz and his latest crew, the Colosseum Blvd et Tu, Brute Gangster Munificent Neighborhood Crips ’n’ Shit, would roll into the territory of their archenemies, the Venice Seaside Boys, caravanning down Broadway Street, four cars and twenty fools deep, the sun at their backs, looking for action. For most of them, unless they were being carted off to jail, it was the one time during the year they left the neighborhood. But since the advent of the variable-rate home loan, most of the VSBs have been priced out of their turf by wine bars, holistic medicine shops, and edgy movie stars who’ve erected fifteen-foot-high cherrywood walls around quarter-acre bungalows turned into $2 million compounds. Now, whenever the vast majority of the Venice Seaside Boys want to “put in work” and defend their turf, they have to commute from faraway places like Palmdale and Moreno Valley. And it’s no fun anymore when your enemy refuses to fight back. Not for lack of bravery or ammunition, but from fatigue. Too tired from fighting three hours of freeway traffic and road closures to pull the trigger. So now the two once-rival hoods celebrate Hood Day by staging their version of a Civil War reenactment. They meet at the sites of the great battles of the past, fire blanks and Roman candles at each other while innocent sidewalk café civilians duck and run for cover. They pile out of their hot rods and hoopties, and like frat boys playing a rough game of two-hand touch in the mud, the misbegotten sons of the Westside chase each other up and down the Venice Beach boardwalk, paying homage to the rumbles of old by “squabbing,” throwing blows from the shoulder, as they act out and relive the gang fights that changed history: the Battle of Shenandoah Street, the Lincoln Boulevard Skirmish, and the infamous Massacre at Los Amigos Park. Afterward they meet up with friends and family at the rec center, a demilitarized softball field in the middle of town, and reaffirm the peace over a barbecue and beer.

Unlike all the police departments who credit “zero tolerance” policies for every dip in the crime rate, I don’t want to simply assume my six-month campaign of localized apartheid had everything to do with the relative calm Dickens experienced that spring, but that year Hood Day was different. As Marpessa, Hominy, Stevie, and I plied our trade from the visitors’ dugout, we were running out of fruit slices much quicker than usual. People were overpaying for eighths. Normally each gang, each hood, uses the park on the day designated to rep their “hood.” For instance, the Six-Trey Street Sniper City Killers reserve the park for June 3, because June is the sixth month of the year, and trey means three. Los Osos Negros Doce y Ocho have dibs not on December 8, like you might expect, but on August 12, because contrary to popular belief, California is cold as fuck in winter. I was at the rec center on that balmy March 15, because for the Colosseum Blvd et Tu, Brute Crips, Hood Day is the same day as the Ides of March. When else would it be?

Back in the late eighties, before the word “hood” had been appropriated to refer to any location from the upscale enclaves of the Calabasas Hills, Shaker Heights, and the Upper East Side to the student zoo at your state university, when a Los Angeleno mentioned the hood, as in “I’d watch that motherfucker if I were you. He or she’s from the hood!” or “I know I didn’t visit Abuela Silvia on her deathbed, but what’d you expect me to do? She lives in the hood!” it referred to one place and one place only — Dickens. And there, on the rec-center baseball field, congregated under the Hood Day banner slung over the home team dugout, were gang and family members of all colors and stripes. Since the riots, Dickens, a once-united neighborhood, had balkanized into countless smaller hoods, and now, like Yugoslavia in reverse, King Cuz and Panache, the erstwhile Tito and Slobodan Milošević of the city, were celebrating the reunification by tromping across the makeshift stage in their Oakley sunglasses, their Doris Day perm curls bouncing off their broad shoulders as they rapped fiendishly to the beat.

I hadn’t seen Panache in years. I didn’t know if he knew Marpessa and I were sleeping together. I never asked for permission. But seeing him do his signature stage tricks with Lulu Belle, his pump-action twelve-gauge equivalent to B. B. King’s guitar, which, considering that like some criminal-minded baton twirler he could throw high in the air, catch, reload, and blast a hubcap out of the air like a clay pigeon, all with one hand, maybe I should’ve. King Cuz yelled into the microphone, “I know at least one you niggers had to have brought some Chinese food!”

Two dudes, whom the police, and anyone else with a Street Smart IQ of 50, might refer to as “suspicious Hispanic males,” stood at the first-base line just outside the festivities, their arms folded across their chests. Although they looked, more or less, like everyone else at the park, from the way they eyed everyone with such disdain, it was hard to tell if they were from Dickens. Like Nazis at a Ku Klux Klan rally, they were comfortable ideologically, but not in terms of corporate culture. Word spread that they were from Polynesian Gardens. Nevertheless, the irresistible smell of hickory-smoked barbecue and the cloud of dank billowed over them, drawing the duo farther and farther into the infield. When the men arrived at the on-deck circle, Stevie, who was slicing the pineapples with a machete, asked, “You know them niggers?” Never taking his eyes off the two homies as they made their way down the dugout steps. Both dudes wore khakis whose baggy leggings spilled over two pairs of Nike Cortez sneakers so fucking new that if they had taken one shoe off and placed it to their ear like a conch shell, they’d hear the roar of an ocean of sweatshop labor. Stevie exchanged prison stares with the guy in the bucket hat, football jersey, and Stomper stenciled along his jawline. In the hood men don’t wear sporting-club jerseys because they’re fans of a certain team. The color, the logo, the jersey numbers all mean something gang-related.

When you’re fresh out of lockup everything is racial. It’s not like there aren’t Mexicans in predominantly black Crip and Blood sets, and blacks in mostly Latino cliques. After all, on the street it’s all proximity and propinquity. Your alliance is to the homies and to the hood, regardless of race. Something happens to the identity politics in prison. Maybe it’s like movies where it’s white versus black versus Mexican versus white, no ifs, ands, or buts, and I do hear tell of some hardcore, color-blind thugs who roll into lockup and dance with the niggers or the vatos who brung ’em. Fuck La Raza. Chinga black power. This nigger’s mother used to feed me when I was hungry, so later for the stupid shit.

The fool in the ice-cap-white T-shirt and Puppet tattooed vertically down his gullet nodded to me first.

“¿Qué te pasa, pelón?”

Us fellow baldheads don’t share in all the racial animosity. We’ve come to accept that, regardless of race, all newborn babies look Mexican, and all baldheaded men look black, more or less. I offered him a hit of my joint. His ears turned deep red and his eyes glazed over like Japanese lacquerware.

“What the fuck is this, dog?” Puppet coughed.

“I call it Carpal Tunnel. Go ahead, try to make a fist.”

Puppet tried to ball his hand, but failed. Stomper looked at him like he was crazy, then angrily took the joint from his hand. I didn’t need a program to tell me that despite appearances, Puppet and Stomper weren’t on the same side. After a long puff, Stomper twisted his fingers into all sorts of dexterous gang signs, but he couldn’t knuckle up no matter how hard he tried. He removed his nickel-plated gat from his waistband. He could barely grip the gun, much less pull the trigger. Stevie laughed, and it was cold pineapple slices all around. The homeboys took bites, and the unexpected surge of sweetness with a slightly minty finish caused them to wince and giggle like little kids. Then to the hard glares of the other hoodlums, the two cholos walked into deep center field, calmly scarfing down pineapple and sharing the last of the marijuana.

“You know that NK on Johnny Unitas’s neck don’t stand for ‘Nice Kid’?”

“I know what it stands for.”

“Stands for Nigger Killer. Both them niggers from different sets, though. Barrio P.G. and Varrio P.G. Not like them to be chilling like that.”

Hominy and I shared a smile. Maybe the signs that we’d posted in Polynesian Gardens on the way home from the hospital job were working. We’d made two signs. Hammered them into two telephone poles on opposites sides of Baker Street, where the rusted train tracks divided the neighborhood between Varrio and Barrio P.G. We placed them in such a way that if folks on one side of the street wanted to know what the sign on their side said, they’d have to cross the tracks to read it. So they had to venture into enemy territory, only to discover that the sign on the north side of the street was exactly the same as the one on the south; they both read THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE TRACKS.

Marpessa pulled me out of the dugout and toward home plate. King Cuz and a delegation of aging thugs and wannabes were standing in the batter boxes, grubbing on ribs and pineapple. Panache was chewing his pineapple slice down to the rind, telling stories about a musician’s life on the road, when Marpessa interrupted him.

“I just want you to know I’m fucking Bonbon.”

Oblivious to the thorns, Panache stuck what remained of the pineapple, skin and all, into his mouth, slurping and sucking out every last drop of juice. When the fruit was dry as a desert bone, he walked up to me, tapped my chest with the tip of Lulu Belle’s barrel, and said, “Shit, if I could get some of this pineapple every morning, I’d fuck the nigger, too.”

A gunshot rang out. In center field, Stomper, apparently still feeling the effects of the Carpal Tunnel, was barefoot, lying on his back, aiming the gun with his feet, laughing his ass off and shooting with his toes at the clouds. It looked like fun, so most of the men and a few women went to join him, puffing on their joints, weapons out, and hopping through the dirt infield, one shoe on, one shoe off, hoping to spark a few rounds before the cops came.

Twenty-two

Black people pop. “Pop” being Hollywood slang for having a dynamic camera presence, for being almost too photogenic. Hominy says it’s why they rarely shoot black and white buddy movies anymore; the bigger stars get washed out. Tony Curtis. Nick Nolte. Ethan Hawke does a film with some African-American and it becomes a screen test to see who’s really the Invisible Man. And has there ever been a buddy movie featuring a black woman and anyone? The only ones with the cinematic magnetism to hang were Gene Wilder and Spanky McFarland. Anyone else — Tommy Lee Jones, Mark Wahlberg, Tim Robbins — is just hanging on to the mane of a runaway horse.

Watching Hominy at the L.A. Festival of Forbidden Cinema and Unabashedly Racist Animation, on the Nuart big screen, trading one-liners with Spanky, it wasn’t hard to see why back then all the trades thought he’d be the next big pickaninny. The sparkle in his eyes, the gleam in his cherubic cheeks were magnetic. His hair was so kinky and dry it looked as if it might spontaneously combust. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. Dressed in raggedy overalls, wearing black high-top sneakers ten sizes too big, he was the ultimate prepubescent straight man. No one could take it like Hominy. It amazed me how he withstood the onslaught of uncensored and unforgiving watermelon and my-daddy-in-jail jokes. Welcoming each insult with a heartfelt and throaty “Yowza!” It was hard to tell whether he was demonstrating cowardice or grace under fire, because he’d perfected that bug-eyed, slack-jawed dumbfounded look that to this day passes for black comedic acting chops. But the modern-day black entertainer has to do it only once or twice a movie. Poor Hominy had to pull off the coon reaction shot three times a reel and always in extreme close-up.

When the lights went up, the host announced that the last living Little Rascal was in the house and invited Hominy onstage. After a standing ovation, he wiped his eyes and took a few questions. When talking about Alfalfa and the gang, Hominy’s incredibly lucid. He explained the shooting schedule. How the tutoring worked. Who got along with whom. Who was the funniest off camera. The meanest. He lamented how no one ever notices Buckwheat’s emotional range and rhapsodized about how much his mentor’s speech and diction improved in the MGM days. I kept my fingers crossed that no one would ask about Darla, so I wouldn’t have to hear about a take-five reverse cowgirl under the bleachers in “Football Romeo.”

“We have time for one more question.”

From the back, directly across the aisle from me, a group of blackfaced coeds stood in unison. Dressed in Victorian bloomers with the Greek letters Ν Ι Γ stitched across their chests, and their hair haphazardly set in thick plaits with wooden clothespins, the women of Nu Iota Gamma looked like dolls you’d see at an antiques auction. In unison they tried to ask a question.

“We wanted to know…”

But they were beaten back by a chorus of boos and a hail of paper cups and popcorn containers. Hominy hushed the audience. The room grew silent, and as it turned its self-righteous attention back to him, I noticed the woman closest to me was African-American, the tininess of her ears giving her ethnicity away. It was a rare sighting on Sunday afternoon, a true female coon, black as seventies funk, black as a C+ in organic chemistry, black as me.

“What’s the problem?” Hominy asked the crowd.

A tall, bearded white boy in a fedora a couple of rows in front of me stood up and pointed a finger at the line of sorority Topsies. “They are in non-ironic blackface,” he said defiantly. “That’s not cool.”

Hominy shielded his eyes with his hand and peered blindly into the audience and asked, “Blackface? What’s blackface?”

At first the audience laughed. But when Hominy didn’t crack a smile, the guy stared back at him with a doltish wide-eyed look of bewilderment not seen since the days of great buffoons like Stepin Fetchit and George W. Bush, the first coon president.

The white dude respectfully called Hominy’s attention to some of the films we’d just seen. “Sambonctious,” where Spanky pours ink on his face and pretends to be Hominy so his dusky friend can pass the spelling test and join the gang on the school trip to the amusement park. “Black Rascallion,” where Alfalfa dinges up so that he can audition to be the lead banjo picker in an all-Negro jug band. “Jigga-Boo!” where Froggy turns the tables on a ghost by stripping down to his skivvies and covering himself from head to toe in fireplace soot, shouting “Boo-ga! Boo-ga! Booooo!” Hominy nodded his head, laced his thumbs in his suspenders, and rocked back on his heels. Then proceeded to light and smoke an invisible cigar, which he switched from one side of his mouth to the other. “Oh, we didn’t call it blackface. We called it acting.”

He had the audience eating out of his hand again. They thought he was being funny, but he was dead serious. For Hominy blackface isn’t racism. It’s just common sense. Black skin looks better. Looks healthier. Looks prettier. Looks powerful. It’s why bodybuilders and international Latin dance contestants blacken themselves up. Why Berliners, New Yorkers, and businessmen, Nazis, cops, scuba divers, Panthers, bad guys, and Kabuki stagehands wear black. Because if imitation is indeed the highest form of flattery, then white minstrelsy is a compliment, it’s a reluctant acknowledgment that unless you happen to really be black, being “black” is the closest a person can get to true freedom. Just ask Al Jolson or the slew of Asian comedians who earn their livings by acting “black.” Just ask those sorority girls, who were settling back into their seats, leaving the lone black member to fend for herself.

“Mr. Hominy, is it true? Does Foy Cheshire really own the rights to the really racist Little Rascals movies?”

Damn, don’t get this nigger started about that Foy Cheshire bullshit.

I stared at the black-faced woman in blackface, wondering if she, too, was acting, if she felt free. If she was aware that the natural color of her skin was actually blacker than her “blackface.” Meaning technically she was in somewhat-lighter-than-blackface. Hominy pointed me out in the crowd, and when he introduced me as his “master,” a few heads turned around to see what a real live slave owner looked like. I was tempted to tell them that Hominy meant to say “manager” and not “master,” but I realized that in Hollywood the two words amounted to the same thing. “I believe it to be true. And I believe my master’s going to get them back for me, so that one day the world will see my best and most demeaning and emasculating work.” Thankfully, the houselights began to dim. The racist cartoons were starting.

I like Betty Boop. She has a nice body, is free-spirited, loves jazz, and apparently opium, too, because in a hallucinogenic short titled “Ups and Downs,” the moon is auctioning off a Depression-era Earth to the other planets. Saturn, an old, bespectacled Jewish orb complete with bad teeth and a heavy Yiddish accent, wins and rubs his hands greedily. “I gottum. I gottum da whole vorld. Mein Gott,” he gloats, before removing gravity from the Earth’s core. It’s 1932 and Max Fleischer’s metaphorical Jew is making an already chaotic global situation even worse. Not that Betty cares, because in a world where cats and cows fly, and the rain falls up, priority number one is to keep your skirt line from ascending to the heavens and exposing your form-fitting panties. And who’s to say that Ms. Boop isn’t a member of the tribe? For the next sixty minutes a few drunken, droopy-feathered Native Americans fail to catch the Warner Bros. rabbit, much less assimilate. A Mexican mouse tries to outwit the gringo pussycat, so he can sneak across the border and steal the queso. A seemingly endless lineup of African-American cats, crows, bullfrogs, maids, crap shooters, cotton pickers, and cannibals act a gravelly-voiced Looney Tunes fool to the strains of “Swanee River” and Duke Ellington’s “Jungle Nights in Harlem.” Sometimes a shotgun blast or dynamite explosion turns a nominally white character like Porky Pig into a gunpowder-colored minstrel. Bestowing upon him honorary-nigger status, which allows him to sing merry melodies like “Camptown Races” over the closing credits with impunity. The program ends with Popeye and Bugs Bunny taking turns single-handedly winning World War II by flummoxing bucktoothed, four-eyed, gibberish-speaking Japanese soldiers with giant mallets and geisha subterfuge. Finally, after Superman, supported by gongs and a cheering audience, pulverizes the Imperial Navy into complete submission, the lights come back on. After two hours of sitting in the dark laughing at unmitigated racism, in the brightness the guilt sets in. Everyone can see your face, and you feel like your mother caught you masturbating.

Three rows in front of me a black guy, a white guy, and an Asian guy prepared to leave, gathering their jackets and trying to shake off the hatred. The black kid, embarrassed at having been debased and ridiculed in cartoon classics like “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarves,” and still hiding behind Superman’s cape, playfully attacks his Asian homeboy. Shouting, “Get Patrick! He’s the enemy!” as Patrick raises his hands in self-defense, protesting, “I’m not the enemy. I’m Chinese,” Bugs Bunny’s Jap, monkey, slant-eyes slurs still ringing in his ears. The white kid, unscathed and unfazed from the skirmish, laughs and flips a cigarette into his mouth. Smoke ’em, if you got ’em. It’s crazy how quickly an evening of Little Rascals shorts and Technicolor cartoons, some nearly a century old, can raise the ire of racial antipathy and shame. I couldn’t imagine anything being more racist than the “entertainment” I’d just witnessed, that’s why I knew the rumors about Foy owning a portion of the Our Gang catalogue had to be false. What could be more racist than what we’d just witnessed?

I found Hominy in the lobby signing memorabilia, much of it having nothing to with the Little Rascals. But old movie posters, Uncle Remus collectibles, and Jackie Robinson memorabilia, anything dating to before 1960, would do. Sometimes I forget how funny Hominy is. Back in the day, to avoid the succession of booby traps laid by the white man, black people had to constantly be thinking on their feet. You had to be ready with an impromptu quip or a down-home bromide that would disarm and humble a white provocateur. Maybe if your sense of humor reminded him there was a semblance of humanity underneath that burrhead, you might avoid a beating, get some of that back pay you were owed. Shit, one day of being black in the forties was equal to three hundred years of improv training with the Groundlings and Second City. All it takes is fifteen minutes of Saturday-night television to see that there aren’t many funny black people left and that overt racism ain’t what it used to be.

Hominy posed for a group photo with the blackfaced women of Nu Iota Gamma. “Do the curtains match the naps?” Hominy said dryly, before delivering a wide smile. Only the real darkie in the group got the joke, and try as she might, she couldn’t stop smiling. I sidled up to her. She answered my questions before I could ask them.

“I’m pre-med. And why? Because these white bitches got the hookup, that’s why. The old girls’ network exists, too, now, and it’s no fucking joke. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. That’s what my mama says, because racism’s everywhere.”

“It can’t be everywhere,” I insisted.

The future Dr. Topsy thought a moment, twisting a runaway plait around her finger. “You know the only place where there’s no racism?” She looked around to make sure her sorority sisters weren’t within earshot and whispered, “Remember those photos of the black president and his family walking across the White House lawn arm-in-arm. Within those fucking frames at that instant, and in only that instant, there’s no fucking racism.”

But there was more than enough racism in the theater lobby to go around. A stoop-shouldered white cat flipped the bill of his baseball cap over his right ear, and then slung his arm around Hominy, bussed him on the cheek, and exchanged skin. The two did everything but call each other Tambo and Bones.

“I just want to say, all those rappers running off at the mouth about being ‘last of the real niggers,’ don’t have jack shit on you, because you, my man, are more than the last Little Rascal, you’re the last real nigger. And I mean ‘nigger’ with the hard r.”

“Why, thank you, white man.”

“And do you know why there aren’t any more niggers?”

“No, sir. I don’t.”

“Because white people are the new niggers. We’re just too full of ourselves to realize it.”

“The ‘new niggers,’ you say?”

“That’s right, both me and you — niggers to the last. Disenfranchised equals ready to fight back against the motherfucking system.”

“Except that you’ll get half the jail time.”

Topsy was waiting for us out in the Nuart parking lot, still in costume and blackface, but wearing a pair of designer sunglasses and excitedly digging through her book bag. I tried to rush Hominy into the truck before he could see her, but she cut us off.

“Mr. Jenkins, I want to show you something.” She took out an oversized three-ring binder and opened it on the hood of the pickup. “These are copies I made of the ledgers for all the Our Gang and Little Rascals movies shot at Hal Roach Studios and MGM.”

“Holy shit.”

Before Hominy could look at them, I snatched the notebook and scanned the columned entries. It was all there. The titles, dates of principal photography, cast and crew, shooting days and total production costs, the profits and losses for all 227 films. Wait, 227?

“I thought there were only 221 movies?”

Topsy smiled and flipped to the second-to-last page. Six consecutive entries for films shot in late 1944 were completely blacked out. Which meant that two hours of prepubescent hijinks that I’d never seen might still exist somewhere. I felt like I was looking at some top-secret FBI report about the Kennedy assassination. I yanked open the binder and held the sheet up to the sun, trying to see through the redaction’s blackness and back into time.

“Who do you think did this?” I asked her.

From her book bag Topsy took out another photocopy. This one listed everyone who’d checked out the ledger since 1963. There were four names on it: Mason Reese, Leonard Maltin, Foy Cheshire, and Butterfly Davis, which I presumed was Topsy’s real name. Before I lifted my eyes from the paper, Hominy and Butterfly were sitting in the cab. He had one arm around her and was leaning on the horn.

“That nigger got my movies! Let’s be out!”

From West L.A. the drive to Foy’s Hollywood Hills abode took longer than it should have. When my father used to force me to accompany him to his black brainiac confabs with Foy, no one knew about the north — south shortcuts from the basin into the hills. Back then Crescent Heights and Rossmore used to be side streets and smooth sailing; now they’re two-lane, bumper-to-bumper major thoroughfares. Man, I used to swim in Foy’s pool while they talked politics and race. Not once did my father ever show any bitterness toward the fact that Foy had paid for that estate with money he earned from “The Black Cats ’n’ Jammin Kids,” the original storyboards of which still hang on my bedroom wall. “Dry off, motherfucker!” Dad would say. “You’re dripping water on the man’s Brazilian cherrywood floors!”

Most of the ride up, Butterfly and Hominy bonded over photos of her and her sorority sisters celebrating the joys of multiculturalism. Denigrating the city of Los Angeles ethnicity by ethnicity, neighborhood by neighborhood. In violation of every traffic law and social taboo, she sat in his lap, their seat belts unbuckled. “This is me at the Compton Cookout … I’m the third ‘ghetto chick’ from the right.” I stole a glance at the snapshot. The women and their dates blackened and Afro-wigged, toting forties and basketballs, smoking blunts. Their mouths filled with gold teeth and chicken drumsticks. It wasn’t so much the racist ridicule as the lack of imagination that I found insulting. Where were the zip coons? The hep cats? The mammies? The bucks? The janitors? The dual-threat quarterbacks? The weekend weather forecasters? The front-desk receptionists that greet you at every single movie studio and talent agency in the city? Mr. Witherspoon will be down in a minute. Can I get you a water? That’s the problem with this generation; they don’t know their history.

“This was the Bingo sin Gringos night we held for Cinco de Mayo…” As opposed to the Compton Cookout, it wasn’t hard to spot Butterfly in that one: this time she sat next to an Asian woman, the two of them, like the other sisters, wearing gigantic sombreros, ponchos, bandoleras, and droopy foot-long Pancho Villa mustaches, while drinking tequila and daubing their cards. Be-ocho … ¡Bingo! Butterfly flicked through her photos. The titles of each bash a dress code unto itself: Das Bunker: The Pure Gene Pool Pool Party. The Shabu Shabu Sleepover! The Trail of Beers — Hiking and Peyote Trip.

Sitting just off Mulholland Drive, on the crest overlooking the San Fernando Valley, Foy’s house was bigger than I remembered. A massive Tudor estate with a circular driveway, it looked more like an English finishing school than a home, despite the giant foreclosure sign bolted to the entrance gate. We piled out of the car. The mountain air was brisk and clean. I took in a deep breath and held it, while Hominy and Butterfly sauntered up to the gate.

“I can smell my movies in there.”

“Hominy, the place is empty.”

“They in there. I know it.”

“What, you going to dig up the yard like in ‘Unexpected Riches’?” I asked, invoking Spanky’s Our Gang swan song into the mix.

Hominy rattled the fence. And then I remembered the code like you remember your best friend’s childhood phone number. I punched 1-8-6-5 into the security box. The gate buzzed, the roller chain tightened and slowly pulled the gate open. 1865, black people are so fucking obvious.

“Massa, you coming?”

“Naw, you two have at it.”

Across Mulholland was a scenic overlook.

Facing north, I timed my run and sprinted between a speeding Maserati and two teenagers in a birthday BMW convertible. A dirt trail peeled down the mountainside and through the chaparral for about a mile or so, eventually leading to a side street and Crystalwater Canyon Park, a small but immaculately kept recreation area featuring a few picnic tables, some shade trees, and a basketball court. Ignoring the sap dripping down its trunk, I sat underneath a thick fir tree. The ballplayers limbered up for an after-work run or two before the sun set. A lone black man, in his mid-thirties, light-skinned and shirtless, paced at center court. He was one of those semiskilled hoopsters who frequented the white courts in ritzy neighborhoods like Brentwood and Laguna, looking for a decent game, an opportunity to dominate, and who knows, maybe even a job prospect.

“Any niggers out here for the attention, get the fuck off the court,” the brother yelled to the delight of the white boys.

The philosophy professor on sabbatical inbounded the ball. A personal-injury lawyer hit a corner jumper. Displaying a surprisingly good handle, a fat pharmacist crossovered a pediatrician, but bricked the layup. The day trader air-balled a shot that sailed out of bounds and rolled toward the parking lot. Even in L.A., where luxury cars, like shopping carts at the supermarket, are everywhere you look, Foy’s ’56 300SL was unmistakable. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred left on the planet. Near the front fender, Foy sat in a small lawn chair, dressed in only his boxers, a T-shirt, and sandals, chatting into his phone and typing on a laptop almost as old as his car. He was drying his clothes. His shirts and pants hanging from hangers hooked onto the car’s gull-wing doors, which were in full flight and hovering above like wings on a silver dragon. I had to ask. I got up and walked past the basketball game. Two players vying for a loose ball tumbled by. Arguing over possession before they got to their feet.

“Who’s that off of?” a player in beat-up sneakers asked me, his outstretched arms a silent plea for mercy. I recognized the guy. The mustachioed lead detective in a long-canceled but still-in-syndication cop show — big in Ukraine. “That’s off the dude with the hairy chest.” The movie star disagreed. But it was the right call.

Foy looked up at me from his chair, but didn’t stop talking or typing. Speaking in rapid-fire, unintelligible word salad into the phone, he wasn’t making much sense, something about high-speed rail and the return of the Pullman porter. The Mercedes coupe’s Pirelli whitewall tires were bald. Yellow foam oozed from the cracked and blistered leather seats like pus. Foy was probably homeless, but he refused to sell his watch, or a car that, at auction, even in its fucked-up condition, was worth several hundred thousand dollars. I had to ask.

“What are you writing?” Foy dropped the phone to his shoulder.

“A book of essays called Me Talk White One Day.”

“Foy, when’s the last time you had an original idea?”

Absolutely unoffended, Foy thought for a second, then said, “Probably not since your dad died,” before returning to his phone call.

* * *

I returned to Foy’s old house to find Hominy and Butterfly skinny-dipping in the pool, a little surprised that no nosy neighbors had bothered to call the police. One old black man looks like all the rest, I suppose. Night fell, and the underwater light flicked on automatically and quietly. The soft light-blue of a pool lit up at night is my favorite color. Hominy, pretending he couldn’t swim, was in the deep end, holding on to Butterfly’s ample flotation devices for all he was worth. He hadn’t found what he was looking for, his movies, but what he had managed to secure seemed to tide him over. I stripped down and slid into the water. No wonder Foy was broke, the temperature had to have been at least 90 degrees.

Floating on my back, I saw the North Star flicker through the steam rising from the water, pointing to a freedom that I didn’t even know if I needed. I thought of my father, whose ideas paid for that bank-owned property. I turned over into a dead man’s float and tried to position my body in the posture he was in when I found him dead in the street. What were my dad’s last words before they shot him? You don’t know who my son is. All this work, Dickens, the segregation, Marpessa, the farming, and I still don’t even know who I am.

You have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? and How may I become myself?

I was as lost as I ever was, thinking seriously about tearing out the farmland, uprooting the crops, selling off the livestock, and putting in a big-ass wave pool. Because how cool would it be to surf in the backyard?

Twenty-three

About two weeks after seeking the Lost Film Treasure of Laurel Canyon, the secret was out. The New-ish Republic magazine, which hadn’t had a child on its cover since the Lindbergh baby, broke the story. Above the caption “The New Jim Crow: Has Public Education Clipped the Wings of the White Child?” was a twelve-year-old white boy, posed as the pint-sized symbol of reverse racism. The new Jim Crow stood on the steps of Chaff Middle School wearing a heavy gold chain. Unruly tufts of dirty blond hair peeked out from under his wave cap and noise-reduction headphones. He toted an Ebonics textbook in one hand and a basketball in the other. Gold metal braces flashed through a lip-curling snarl, and the XXXL T-shirt he wore read Energy = an Emcee2.

A long time ago, my father taught me that whenever you see a question on the cover of a news magazine, the answer is always “No,” because the editorial staff knows that questions with “Yes” answers would, like graphic cigarette warnings and close-ups of pus-oozing genitalia that tend not to deter but encourage smoking and unsafe sex, scare the reader off. So you get yellow journalism like: O. J. Simpson and Race: Will the Verdict Split America? No. Has TV Gone Too Far? No. Is Anti-Semitism on the March Again? No, because it never halted. Has Public Education Clipped the Wings of the White Child? No, because a week after that issue hit the newsstands, five white kids, their backpacks filled with books, rape whistles, and mace, hopped off a rented school bus and attempted to reintegrate Chaff Middle School, where Assistant Principal Charisma Molina stood in the doorway, barring entrance to her quasi-segregated institution.

Even if Charisma hadn’t counted on all the publicity about how if Chaff continued to improve at its current rate, it would become the fourth-highest-ranked public school in the county within the next year, she should’ve known that while 250 poor colored kids getting inferior educations will never be front-page news, the denial of even one white student access to a decent education would create a media shit storm. What no one could’ve foreseen, however, was a coalition of fed-up white parents listening to the advice of Foy Cheshire and pulling their children from underperforming public schools and overpriced private ones. And calling for a return to the forced busing many of their parents had so vehemently protested against a generation prior.

Too broke and embarrassed to provide an armed escort, the state of California watched idly as the sacrificial lambs of reintegration, Suzy Holland, Hannah Nater, Robby Haley, Keagan Goodrich, and Melonie Vandeweghe, exited the bus under the protection of not the National Guard but the magic of live television and the loud mouth of Foy Cheshire. It had been a couple of weeks since I’d seen him living out of his car, and from what I’d heard, no one showed up for the last Dum Dum meeting, even though the noted community organizer _ _ r _ _ _ O _ _ _ _ was scheduled to speak.

Shoulders hunched and arms held up protectively in front of their faces, the Dickens Five, as the quintet would come to be known, braced themselves for the pillory of rocks and bottles as they ran the gauntlet and into history. But unlike Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 3, 1957, the city of Dickens didn’t spit in their faces and hurl racial epithets; rather, it begged them for autographs, asked if they already had dates for the junior prom. Yet when the would-be enrollees reached the top of the stairs, there stood Assistant Principal Charisma doing her best Governor Faubus, refusing to budge, her arm ramrod straight against the doorjamb. Hannah, the tallest of the bunch, tried to step around her, but Charisma held firm.

“No Anglos allowed.”

Hominy and I were on the other side of the fray. Standing behind Charisma, and like anyone else apart from the custodial and food services staff at Little Rock Central High School or the University of Mississippi in 1962, on the wrong side of history. Hominy was in school that day to tutor Jim Crow. Charisma had summoned me to read the business letter that accompanied the mailed edition of Foy Cheshire’s latest reimagined multicultural text, Of Rice and Yen, an all-Chinese adaptation of Steinbeck’s classic set in the days of the railroad coolie. The book was a carbon copy of the original text sans articles and with all the ls and rs transposed. Maybe evelybody in whore damn wolrd scaled, aflaid each other. I’ll never understand why after over a half century of Charlie Chan’s Number One Son, the dude in Smashing Pumpkins, dope-ass music producers, skateboarders, and docile Asian wives married to white guys in hardware store commercials, people like Foy Cheshire still think the yen is Chinese currency and that Asian-Americans can’t pronounce their fucking ls, but there was something unnerving about the message’s hurried scrawl:

Dear Pawn of the Liberal Agenda,

I know that you won’t implement this backbreaking work of swaggering cleverness, but that’s your loss. This book will place me firmly in the autodidactic tradition of authors such as Virginia Woolf, Kawabata, Mishima, Mayakovsky, and DFW. See you this Monday for the first day of school. Class may be on your campus, but you will be auditing my world. Bring a pen, paper, and the nigger-whispering Sellout.

Yours truly,

Foy “Did you know Gandhi beat his wife?” Cheshire

When Charisma asked me why he cited those specific writers, I told her I didn’t know, but neglected to mention that the list was composed solely of novelists who had taken their lives. It was hard to say if the statement was some sort of suicidal ideation, but one could hope. There aren’t many black firsts left these days, and as much as Foy would be a good a candidate for the position of “first black writer to off themselves,” I had to be prepared. If he was indeed an “autodidact,” there’s no doubt he had the world’s shittiest teacher.

Foy stepped to the head of the pack to take over the negotiations, magically producing a small stack of DNA results. Flapping them, not in Charisma’s face, but directly into the lens of the nearest TV camera. “I have here in my hand a list of results that show each one of these children has maternal roots tracing their ancestries back thousands of years to Kenya’s Great Rift Valley.”

“Nigger, whose side you on?”

From inside the unhallowed halls of the school I couldn’t see who was making the inquiry, but it was a good question and, judging from the silence, one for which Foy didn’t have an answer. Not that I knew what side I was on, either. All I knew was that the Bible, conscious rappers, and Foy Cheshire weren’t on my side. Charisma, however, knew where she stood, and with two hands to his chest, she shoved Foy and the children back down the stairs like so many bowling pins. I looked around at the faces on my side of the threshold: Hominy, the teachers, Sheila Clark, each a little bit frightened but full of resolve. Shit, maybe I was on the right side of history, after all.

“I suggest if you want to go to school in Dickens so badly, you wait for that school across the street to open up.”

The prospective white students picked themselves up and turned around to gaze at their forebears, the proud pioneers of the mythical Wheaton Academy. With its pristine facilities, effective teachers, sprawling green campus, there was something undeniably attractive about Wheaton, and the youngsters began gravitating longingly toward their scholastic heaven like angels drawn by lute music and decent cafeteria food, until Foy stepped in front of them. “Don’t be fooled by that graven image,” he yelled. “That school is the root of all evil. It’s a slap in the face of anyone who’s ever stood for equality and justice. It’s a racist joke that mocks the hardworking people of this and all communities by placing a carrot on a stick and holding it up in front of old horses too tired to run. And besides, it doesn’t exist.”

“But it looks so real.”

“Those are the best dreams, the ones that feel real.”

Disappointed but not defeated, the group settled on the patch of grass near the flagpole. It was a multicultural Mexican standoff, black-ass Foy and the white kids in the middle, Charisma and the utopian specter of the Wheaton Academy on either side of them.

They say that during their weekend skin games, young Tiger Woods’s father, in a cheap attempt to rattle his son, would jingle the change in his pocket while his boy was standing over a six-foot putt for the win. The end result was a duffer who’s rarely distracted. I, on the other hand, am easily distracted. Permanently sidetracked, because my father liked to play a game he called After the Fact, where in the middle of whatever I was doing, he’d show me a well-known historical photo and ask, “So what happened next?” We’d be at the Bruins game, and during an important time-out he’d flip the snapshot of Neil Armstrong’s footprint in the lunar dust in front of my face. So what happened next? I’d shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know. He did those Chrysler commercials on television.”

“Wrong. He became an alcoholic.”

“Dad, I think that was Buzz Aldrin…”

“In fact, many historians think he was wasted when he first set foot on the moon. ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ What the fuck does that even mean?”

In the middle of my first Little League game at bat, Mark Torres, a lanky fireballer whose stuff was hard as a teenage erection and, like that first sexual encounter, preternaturally fast, threw me an 0–2 fastball that neither I nor the umpire saw and only presumed to be high and inside because of the windburn across my forehead. My father came storming out of the dugout. Not to impart any batting advice, but to hand me the famous photo of the American and Russian soldiers meeting at the Elbe River, shaking hands and celebrating the de facto end of World War II in the European theater. So what happened next?

“America and the Soviet Union would go on to fight a Cold War lasting nearly fifty years and forcing each country to spend trillions of dollars on self-defense in a pyramid scheme Dwight D. Eisenhower would term the Military Industrial Complex.”

“Partial credit. Stalin had every Russian soldier in this photograph shot for fraternizing with the enemy.”

Depending upon how much of a science-fiction geek you are, it’s either Star Wars II or V. But whichever one it is, in the middle of the climactic light-saber duel between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, right after the Dark Lord cuts off Luke’s arm, my dad snatched the flashlight from an usher’s hand, then slammed a black-and-white photo into my chest. So what happened next? In the fuzzy circle of light, a young black woman in an exquisitely ironed white blouse and tablecloth-patterned skirt protectively clutched a three-ring binder to her still-developing chest and psyche. She wore thick dark black shades, but stared past both me and the screaming white women tormenting her from behind.

“She’s one of the Little Rock Nine. They sent in federal troops. She went to school. And things ended happily ever after.”

“What happened next was that the following year the governor, rather than continuing to integrate the school system as required by law, shut down every high school in the city. If niggers wanted to learn, then no one was going to learn. And speaking of learning, notice they don’t teach you that part in school.” I never said anything about “they” being teachers like my father. I just remember wondering why Luke Skywalker was tumbling headlong into the starlit abyss for no apparent reason.

Sometimes I wish Darth Vader had been my father. I’d have been better off. I wouldn’t have a right hand, but I definitely wouldn’t have the burden of being black and constantly having to decide when and if I gave a shit about it. Plus, I’m left-handed.

So there everybody was, stubborn as grass stains, waiting for someone to intervene. The government. God. Color-safe bleach. The Force. Whoever.

Exasperated, Charisma looked over at me. “When does shit ever end?”

“It doesn’t,” I muttered, and stepped into the breezy perfection that is the springtime California morning. Foy had prepped his troops for a boisterous chorus of “We Shall Overcome.” They were joined together arm-in-arm, swaying and humming slowly to the beat. Most folks think “We Shall Overcome” is still in the public domain. That through the generosity of the black struggle, its empowering refrains are free to be sung by anyone anytime one feels the stings of injustice and betrayal, which is how it should be. But if you stood outside the U.S. Copyright Office and protested people profiting from a stolen song by singing “We Shall Overcome,” you’d owe the estate of Pete Seeger a nickel for every rendition. And even though Foy, singing for all he was worth, had seen fit to change the poignant “someday” lyric to a screaming “Right Now!” I dropped ten cents on the pavement as a precaution.

Foy lifted his hands high overhead, his sweater popping over his potbelly and exposing a gun handle sticking out of his Italian-leather beltline. That explained the lyric change, his impatience, the letter, and the desperate look in his eyes. And why didn’t I recognize it sooner, the absence of angularity in his normally pristine box-cut toupee.

“Charisma, call the police.”

No one other than college hippies, Negro jubilee singers, Cubs fans, and other assorted idealists knows verses two through six of “We Shall Overcome,” and when his flock started stumbling over the next verse, Foy pulled his weapon and waved it like a.45 caliber cue card. Exhorting his choir through the rough patches, even though their backs were turned to him, and flying past me and Hominy toward the school’s entrance, which remained closed to them because Charisma had shut the doors behind her.

Dickens doesn’t scatter very easily. Neither does a local media used to gangland slayings and a seemingly endless supply of psycho killers. So when Foy clacked two shots at the back end of his Mercedes crookedly parked on Rosecrans, the crowd only parted wide enough to create a fire lane through which the white kids could reach the relative safety of their school bus, where they lowered themselves into their seats. Desegregation is never easy in any direction, and after Foy fired two more rounds into their civil rights movement, progress would be even slower, because the Freedom Bus had a couple of flat tires.

Foy pumped another shot into the Mercedes-Benz logo. This time the trunk popped open in that slow, majestic way that only Mercedes trunks do, and he grabbed an old bucket of whitewash out of the back. But before I, or anyone else, could reach him, he spun around, warding us off with his strap and his off-key singing. He’d made another lyric change. This time personalizing the tune by changing the refrain to “I shall overcome.” What’s that the judges always say on those televised singing competitions? You really made the song your own.

The pop of a can of paint opening is always a most satisfying sound. And justifiably pleased with himself and his car keys, Foy, still singing at the top of his lungs, rose to his feet and, with his back to the street, aimed his pistol directly at my chest. “I seen it a million times,” my father used to say. “Professional niggers that just snap because the charade is over.” The blackness that had consumed them suddenly evaporates like window grit washed away in the rain. All that’s left is the transparency of the human condition, and everybody sees right through you. The lie on the résumé has finally been discovered. The reason it takes them so long to write their reports has been unearthed, and the tardiness isn’t due to a painstaking attention to detail, but to dyslexia. The suspicions confirmed that the ever-present bottle of mouthwash on the colored man’s desk in the corner, near the restroom, isn’t filled with “a liquid designed to kill bad breath and provide twenty-four-hour protection against germs that cause gum disease and gingivitis,” but peppermint schnapps. A liquid designed to kill bad dreams and provide a false sense of security that your Listerine smile is killing them softly. “Seen it a million times,” he’d say. “At least niggers on the East Coast have the Vineyard and Sag Harbor. What we got? Las Vegas and fucking El Pollo Loco.” Personally, I love El Pollo, and not that I was totally convinced that Foy was a danger to me or anyone else, but if I got out of this alive, the first thing I’d do was visit the one over on Vermont and 58th Street. Order me a three-piece combo — dark, with flame-grilled corn and mashed potatoes, and one of those delicious red fruit punches that taste like my eight-year-old birthday party.

The sirens were half a town away. Even when the county was flush with property tax revenue on overvalued homes, Dickens never received its fair share of civil services. And now, with the cutbacks and graft, the response time is measured in eons, the same switchboard operators who took the calls from the Holocaust, Rwanda, Wounded Knee, and Pompeii still at their posts. Foy turned the gun away from me and raised it to his ear, then with his free hand dumped the pail of unstirred and semi-hardened stain over his head. In clumpy folds, the paint oozed over the left half of his face and down the length of that side of his body, until one eye, one nostril, one shirtsleeve, one pant leg, and one Patek Philippe watch were washed completely white. Foy was no Tree of Knowledge, at most he was a Bush of Opinion, but in any case, it was obvious that, publicity stunt or not, he was dying on the inside. I looked down at his roots. One brown shoe splattered with paint from the milky waterfall that sluiced through his goatee and fell from his chin. This time there was no doubt that he’d lost it, because if there’s one thing a successful black man like Foy loves more than God, country, and his ham-hock-limbed mama, it’s his shoes.

I stepped to him. My arms raised and my hands open. Foy pressed the gun barrel even deeper into his misshapen Afro, holding himself hostage. Suicide by cop or cop-out, I didn’t much care, but I was glad he’d finally stopped singing.

“Foy,” I said, sounding surprisingly like my father, “you have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? and How may I become myself?”

I waited for the expected “I do and do for you niggers, and this is the thanks I get” diatribe about how no one was buying his books. How even though he was the producer, director, editor, caterer, and star of a television talk show that’s been syndicated on two continents and brought a droll homogenized and romanticized version of black intellectual thought into tens of homes in over six countries, nothing has changed about how the world sees us, much less how we see ourselves. How he was directly responsible for getting a black man elected president and nothing changed. How last week a nigger won $75,000 on Teen Jeopardy and nothing changed. How in fact things have gotten worse. And how you can tell things are getting worse. Because “poverty” has disappeared from the vernacular and our consciousness. Because there’s white boys working at the car wash. Because the women in porn are better-looking than ever and it’s the handsome gay men who are “straight for pay.” Because famous actors do commercials extolling the virtues of the phone companies and the United States Army. You know how you can tell shit is fucked up? Because someone thinks it’s still 1950 and sees fit to reintroduce segregation to the American ethos. That someone wouldn’t be you, would it, Sellout? Putting up signs? Erecting fake schools like the ghetto was some sort of phony Paris complete with railway stations, Arc de Triomphes, and Eiffel Towers built during World War I to fool the German bombers. Like the Germans, who, in turn, in the next war, built fake stores, theaters, and parks in Theresienstadt to dupe the Red Cross into believing that no atrocities were taking place, when the entire war was a series of fucking atrocities — one bullet, one illegal detention, one sterilization, one atom bomb at a time. You can’t fool me. I’m not the Luftwaffe or the Red Cross. I didn’t grow up in this hellhole … Like father, like son …

* * *

When it’s your blood running through your fingers, the amount can only be described as “copious.” But writhing in the gutter, clutching at my innards, I began to feel something akin to closure. I never heard the shot, but for the first time in my life I had something in common with my father — we’d both been shot in the gut by gutless motherfuckers. And there was a certain satisfaction in that. I felt as if I’d finally paid my debt to him and his fucked-up notions of blackness and childhood. Daddy never believed in closure. He said it was a false psychological concept. Something invented by therapists to assuage white Western guilt. In all his years of study and practice, he’d never heard a patient of color talk of needing “closure.” They needed revenge. They needed distance. Forgiveness and a good lawyer maybe, but never closure. He said people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping for closure, when in reality what they’ve achieved is erasure.

The problem with closure is that once you have a taste of it, you want it in every little aspect of your life. Especially when you’re bleeding to death, and your slave, who is in full rebellion, is screaming, “Give me back my Little Rascals movies, motherfucker!” and pummeling your assailant with such knobby-knuckled fury that it takes half the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department to pull him off, while you attempt to stanch the bleeding with a waterlogged copy of Vibe magazine someone has left in the gutter, you don’t have time to let anything slide. Kanye West has announced, “I am rap!” Jay-Z thinks he’s Picasso. And life is fucking fleeting.

“The ambulance will be here soon.”

Things had finally settled down. Hominy, who couldn’t stop crying, had taken off his T-shirt, rolled it into a pillow, and cradled my head in his lap. A sheriff’s deputy squatted over me, poking gently at my wound with the butt end of her flashlight. “That was a fucking brave thing you did, Nigger Whisperer. Can I get you anything in the meantime?”

“Closure.”

“I don’t think you’ll need stitches. It doesn’t look like a belly shot; it’s more like you’ve been hit in the love handle. It’s superficial, really.”

Anyone who’s ever described a bullet wound as being superficial has never been shot. But I wasn’t about to let a little lack of empathy get in the way of total closure.

“It’s illegal to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?”

“It is.”

“Well, I’ve whispered ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.”

I told her about my efforts to restore Dickens and how I thought building the school would give the town a sense of identity. She patted me sympathetically on the shoulder and raised her supervisor on the radio, and while we waited for the ambulance, the three of us haggled about the severity of the crime. The county reluctant to cite me with anything more than vandalism of state property and me trying to convince them that even if crime had gone down in the neighborhood since the Wheaton Academy went up, what I did was still a violation of the First Amendment, the Civil Rights Code, and, unless there’s been an armistice in the War on Poverty, at least four articles of the Geneva Convention.

The paramedics arrived. Once I’d been stabilized with gauze and a few kind words, the EMTs went through the standard assessment protocol.

“Next of kin?”

As I lay, not exactly dying but close enough, I thought about Marpessa. Who, if the position of the sun high in the gorgeous blue sky was any indication, was at the far end of this very same street taking her lunch break. Her bus parked facing the ocean. Her bare feet on the dashboard, nose buried in Camus, listening to the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place.”

“I have a girlfriend, but she’s married.”

“What about this guy?” she asked, pointing a ballpoint pen at a shirtless Hominy, standing just off to the side, giving his statement to a sheriff’s deputy, who was writing in a notepad and shaking her head incredulously. “Is he family?”

“Family?” Hominy, overhearing the paramedic and somewhat insulted, wiped down his wrinkly underarms with his T-shirt and came over to see how I was doing. “Why I is something closer than family.”

“He says he’s his slave,” the deputy chimed in, reading from her notes. “Been working for him, according to this crazy fucker, the last four hundred years.”

The EMT nodded, running her powdered rubber-gloved hands down the length of Hominy’s saggy-skinned back.

“How did you get these welts?”

“I was whupped. How else a no-account, shiftless nigger like me going to get whip marks on his back?”

Having handcuffed me to the stretcher board, the sheriff’s deputies knew they finally had something to charge me with, though we still couldn’t agree on the crime as they carried me through the crowd and to the ambulance.

“Human trafficking?”

“Nah, he’s never been bought or sold. What about involuntary servitude?”

“Maybe, but it’s not like you’re forcing him to work.”

“It’s not like he’s working.”

“Did you really whip him?”

“Not directly. I pay some people … It’s a long story.”

One of the EMTs had to tie her shoes. They set me down on a wooden bus stop bench while she adjusted her laces. From the seat-back a photo of a familiar face comforted me with a soothing smile and a red power tie.

“You got a good lawyer?” the deputy asked.

“Just call this nigger right here.” I knocked on the advertisement. It said:

Hampton Fiske—Attorney at Law

Remember, there are four steps to acquittal:

1. Don’t say shit! 2. Don’t run! 3. Don’t resist arrest!

4. Don’t say shit!

1-800-FREEDOM Se Habla Español

* * *

He showed up late to the grand jury indictment, but Hampton’s services were worth every dime. I told him I couldn’t afford to do jail time. I had crops coming in and one of the mares was scheduled to foal in about two days. With this knowledge in tow, he strolled into the hearing, brushing leaves off his suit jacket and flicking twigs from his perm, carrying a bowl of fruit and talking about “As a farmer, my client is an indispensable member of a minority community well documented for being malnourished and underfed. He’s never left the state of California, owns a twenty-year-old pickup truck that runs on fucking ethanol, which is next to impossible to find in this city, and thus he’s not a flight risk…”

The California attorney general, flown in from Sacramento just to prosecute my case, leaped to her Prada-shod feet. “Objection! This defendant, evil genius that he is, has through his abhorrent actions managed to racially discriminate against every race all at the same time, to say nothing of his unabashed slaveholding. The state of California feels that it has more than enough evidence to prove that the defendant is in abject violation of the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, 1957, 1964, and 1968, the Equal Rights Act of 1963, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, and at least six of the goddamn Ten Commandments. If it were within my power, I’d charge him with crimes against humanity!”

“This is an example of my client’s humanity,” Hampton countered calmly, gently setting the fruit bowl on the judge’s bench, then backing away with a deep bow. “Freshly picked from my client’s farm, your honor.”

Judge Nguyen rubbed his tired eyes. He selected a nectarine from the offering and rolled it in his fingers as he spoke. “The irony is not lost on me that we sit here in this courtroom — a female state’s attorney general of black and Asian lineage, a black defendant, a black defense counselor, a Latina bailiff, and me, a Vietnamese-American district judge — setting the parameters for what is essentially a judicial argument about the applicability, the efficacy, and the very existence of white supremacy as expressed through our system of law. And while no one in this room would deny the basic premise of ‘civil rights,’ we’d argue forever and a day about what constitutes ‘equal treatment under the law’ as defined by the very articles of the Constitution this defendant is accused of violating. In attempting to restore his community through reintroducing precepts, namely segregation and slavery, that, given his cultural history, have come to define his community despite the supposed unconstitutionality and nonexistence of these concepts, he’s pointed out a fundamental flaw in how we as Americans claim we see equality. ‘I don’t care if you’re black, white, brown, yellow, red, green, or purple.’ We’ve all said it. Posited as proof of our nonprejudicial ways, but if you painted any one of us purple or green, we’d be mad as hell. And that’s what he’s doing. He’s painting everybody over, painting this community purple and green, and seeing who still believes in equality. I don’t know if what he’s done is legal or not, but the one civil right I can guarantee this defendant is the right to due process, the right to a speedy trial. We convene tomorrow morning at nine. But buckle up, people, no matter the verdict, innocent or guilty, this is going to the Supreme Court, so I hope you ain’t got nothing scheduled for the next five years. Bail is set”—Judge Nguyen took a big bite out the nectarine, then kissed his crucifix—“Bail is set at a cantaloupe and two kumquats.”