The White Boy Shuffle

one

UNLIKE THE TYPICAL bluesy earthy folksy denim-overalls noble-in-the-face-of-cracker-racism aw shucks Pulitzer-Prize-winning protagonist mojo magic black man, I am not the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son. I wish I were, but fate shorted me by six brothers and three uncles. The chieftains and queens who sit on top of old Mount Kilimanjaro left me out of the will. They bequeathed me nothing, stingy bastards. Cruelly cheating me of my mythological inheritance, my aboriginal superpowers. I never possessed the god-given ability to strike down race politic evildoers with a tribal chant, the wave of a beaded whammy stick, and a mean glance. Maybe some family fool fucked up and slighted the ancients. Pissed off the gods, too much mumbo in the jumbo perhaps, and so the sons must suffer the sins of the father.

My name is Kaufman, Gunnar Kaufman. I’m black Orestes in the cursed House of Atreus. Preordained by a set of weak-kneed DNA to shuffle in the footsteps of a long cowardly queue of coons, Uncle Toms, and faithful boogedy-boogedy retainers. I am the number-one son of a spineless colorstruck son of a bitch who was the third son of an ass-kissing sell-out house Negro who was indeed a seventh son but only by default. (Grandpa Giuseppi Kaufman rolled over his older twin brother Johann in his sleep, smothering him and staking claim to the cherished seventh sonship.) From birth my parents indoctrinated me with the idea that the surreal escapades and “I’s a-comin’” watermelon chicanery of my forefathers was the stuff of hero worship. Their resolute deeds and Uncle Tom exploits were passed down by my mother’s dinner table macaroni-and-cheese oral history lessons. There is nothing worse than a loud griot, and my mother was the loudest.

Mom raised my sisters and me as the hard-won spoils of a vicious custody battle that left the porcelain shrapnel of supper-dish grenades embedded in my father’s neck. The divorce made Mama, Ms. Brenda W. Kaufman, determined to make sure that her children knew their forebears. As a Brooklyn orphan who had never seen her parents or her birth certificate, Mom adopted my father’s patriarchal family history for her misbegotten origins.

On summer afternoons Nicole, Christina, and I sat at my mother’s feet, tracing our bloodlines by running our fingers over the bulging veins that tunneled in her ashy legs. She’d place her hideous pedal extremities on a throw pillow and we would conduct our ancestral investigation while filing down the rock-hard bunions and other dermal crustaceans on her feet.

We started with the basics. Danger, Kids at Work. Nicole, my youngest sister, whom I nicknamed the Incredible Eternal Wailing Baby, would open up the questioning in her self-centered style, all the while scraping the mound of dead skin that was my mother’s left heel.

“Maw, am I adopted?”

“No, you are not adopted. I showed you the stretch marks last week. Put some elbow grease into it, goddammit. Pull the skin off with your fingers if you have to, shit.”

Then Christina, middle child, whom I lovingly rechristened with the Native American appellation Fingers-in-Both-Nostrils-Thumb-in-Mouth-and-Snot-All-Over-the-Fucking-Place, would pull on the heartstrings to tighten the filial ties.

“What about me and Gunnar?”

“No.”

“Can you prove it?” Christina would ask, anxious and unconvinced, her heavy breathing blowing mucus bubbles from her nose.

“Which ones those crinkly lines on your stomach is mines?”

“Chrissy, if anyone is fool enough to tell you that they your parents, believe them. Okay?”

“Maw.”

“What, Gunnar?”

“Your feet stank.”

“Shut up before I make you fill out that application to military school.”

The advanced course in Kaufman genealogy didn’t start until Mom returned home from earning our livings by testing the unlucky poor for VD at a free clinic in East Los Angeles. I remember she enjoyed bringing the sharp stainless-steel tools of her trade and glossy Polaroids of the most advanced cases to the dinner table. Spit-shining the speculums and catheters, she’d tell her awful jokes about “pricking the pricks and hunting the cunts.” I swear somewhere in her unknown past traveling minstrels cakewalked across candlelit theater stages.

The seven o’clock suppers were carnival sideshows, featuring Mom the Amazing Crazy Lady. She’d wipe our greasy lips, lecturing us about the horrors of sexually transmitted disease while passing mashed potatoes and photos of pussy lesions around the table. For the coup de grâce she’d open a prophylactic package, remove and unroll a blue sheath, and stuff the receptacle end into a nostril. Then she’d sit there lecturing us about the joys of safe sex with a crumpled condom swinging from her nose and bouncing off her chin with each syllable. Suddenly she’d press the open nostril closed with her finger and with a snort snake the unlubricated rubber up her nose. She’d open her mouth and produce a soggy piece of latex, holding it up for all to see with a gloating “Ta-dah. Let’s eat.”

The festivities continued throughout the meal. Though her designation as world’s loudest griot cannot be substantiated, the Guinness Book of World Records lists her as having the world’s loudest swallow.

SWALLOW. Ms. Brenda W. Kaufman (b. 1955) of Los Angeles recorded unamplified swallows at 47 db (busy street = 70 db, jet engine = 130) while guesting on the David Letterman show drinking New York City tap water on May 3, 1985.

On her birthdays I watch the videotape of her performance. A man with an English accent holds a microphone to her throat while she enthusiastically drinks a clear glass of water. In the bottom righthand corner of the screen is a VU meter with a needle that jumps wildly with every booming swallow. My sisters and I yelled our heads off every time the needle moved into the red zone.

When she returned, we proudly took turns placing our fingers on her bobbing Adam’s apple as she drank her milk. Between swallows Mom would ask about our schoolwork and bemoan our miseducations. Slamming down an empty glass of milk, she’d run her tongue over her top lip and bellow, “See, there isn’t anything a Kaufman can’t do. Those history books say anything about your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather on your father’s side, Euripides Kaufman? Betcha they don’t. Pass the fucking dinner buns and let Mama tell you about a colonial Negro who would’ve pulled himself up by the bootstraps had he had boots. The first of a legacy of colored men who forged their own way in the world. Gunnar, you listenin’?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Mom could tell a motherfucking story. She’d start in with Euripides Kaufman, the youngest slave in history to buy his freedom. I heard the chains shackled to the spirits of Kaufman Negroes past slink and rattle up to the dining room windows. Dead niggers who smacked their arid lips and held their rumbling vacuous stomachs while they stared at the fried chicken, waiting for Mom to tell their tales.

Too small to smelt and work iron in his master’s Boston blacksmith shop, Euripides spent his bondage doing donkey work. After running barefoot errands over the downtown cobblestones, he’d look for ways to fill his idle time. Sitting on the grassy banks of the Charles River, he’d watch the jongleurs woo money from the pockets of sentimental passersby. At age seven Euripides saw a means of income. The baby entrepreneur ran home, spread globs of lamp oil over sooty black skin, and parked himself outside the busiest entrance to the Boston Common. Every promenading Bostonian who passed him by answered Euripides’s toothy obsequious grin and gleaming complexion with a concerned “Can I help you, son?” To which Euripides replied, “Would you like to rub me head for good luck? Cost a sixpence.”

Soon Euripides had a steady clientele of Brahmins and Tories, redcoats and militiamen paying to pass their palms over his bristly head for luck and a guaranteed afterlife. Six months later he decided to shave his skull to heighten the tactile pleasure, and business boomed. Word quickly got back to his owner and eponym Chauncy Kaufman about the little tar baby’s ingenuity in bringing a small measure of fame to his shop. Soon customers came into the shop to have their horses shod and to pat the “l’il black bastard’s” head. Customers rode up, tied their horses to the hitching post, and proclaimed, “Four new shoes, Chauncy. Where’s Euripides? Last week I forgot to palm his stubbly skull and the missus caught me buggering the Negro lass in the attic. Come ’ere, you baldheaded good-luck charm, you.”

One mild spring day the nine-year-old Euripides puzzled out how much to charge for a “He’s so cute” grab ’n’ twist of the cheek. He looked up to see a black boy about his age auctioned off next to a fruit stand for fifteen pounds. “Snookums, on your way back from getting the wig powdered at the coiffeur’s, would you please pick up some tomatoes, a head of lettuce, and a little nigger child?” Ever the shrewd businesskid and eager to appraise his own worth, Euripides asked his sweaty coal-faced owner if he was worth fifteen pounds on the open market. Master Kaufman assured Euripides that a clever pickaninny such as himself was worth twice that amount. Euripides then reached into his satchel and plonked down thirty pounds in savings from his head-rubbing business on the anvil. Euripides Kaufman walked out of the shop a nine-year-old freeman, never giving a second thought to buying a hat. He went on to become a merchant sailor who attained unheralded fame for being, in Mama’s words, “the brains behind the Boston Massacre.”

Familial legend has it that on March 5, 1770, Euripides Kaufman artfully dodged a redcoat’s musket shot with his name on it and Crispus Attucks woke up in nigger heaven a martyr. That historic afternoon Euripides and Crispus, his ace boon coon since childhood, sat in a Boston pub drinking drafts of Samuel Adam’s pale ale. Oh to be free, black, and twenty-one, drunk on home-brewed hops and the mascot-like acceptance of his fellow white merchant seafarers. The only drawback to Euripides’s freedom was that he couldn’t charge when the locals rubbed his head with vigorous patronization. “Euripides, you dusky halyard-knot — headed black bloke, how old were you when you started to shed your monkey fur? Maybe you still sleep in it to keep warm at night?”

What’re a few nigger jokes among friends? We Kaufmans have always been the type of niggers who can take a joke. I used to visit my father, the sketch artist at the Wilshire LAPD precinct. His fellow officers would stand around cluttered desks breaking themselves up by telling how-many-niggers-does-it-take jokes, pounding each other on the back and looking over their broad shoulders to see if me and Daddy were laughing. Dad always was. The epaulets on his shoulders raising up like inchworms as he giggled. I never laughed until my father slapped me hard between the shoulder blades. The heavy-handed blow bringing my weight to my tiptoes, raising my chin from my chest, and I’d burp out a couple of titters of self-defilement. Even if I didn’t get the joke. “What they mean, ‘Lick their lips and stick ’em to the wall’?” Later I’d watch my father draw composite sketches for victimized citizens who used his face as reference point. “He was thick-lipped, nose a tad bigger than yours, with your nostril flare though.” Daddy would bring some felon to still life and without looking up from his measured strokes admonish me that my face better not appear on any police officer’s sketchpad. He’d send me home in a patrol car, black charcoal smudged all over my face and his patriotic wisdom ringing in my ears: “Remember, Gunnar, God, country, and laughter, the world’s best medicine. Did your mother get the check?”

It figures a sell-out Kaufman helped jump-start the American Revolution.

Liver-lipped Euripides Kaufman, pint full, whistle and lips wet, deftly redirected the scorn of his colonial rabble-rousing shipmates from him onto a lone adolescent redcoat sentinel stationed in front of the House of Commons just outside the tavern. “Hey, blokes. Isn’t that lobster-backed scoundrel the Brit scalawag who cheated the barber Jack Milton out of the coinage for a fair-priced trimming ’n’ shave yesterday past?” With Euripides and Crispus leading the way, the drunken mob scampered outside for a closer look. Mugs in hand, they surrounded the nervous guard and peppered him with insults. Euripides stood about a yard away from the redcoat, looked him up and down, turned to his mates, and said, “Verily, that’s the tea-and-crumpet-eating-scofflaw. Crispus will support me claim, won’t you, big boy?”

Crispus’s eyes, like my father’s, like Euripides’s, were eager to please, but his mouth was empty of revolutionary dozens. Pining for white America’s affection, Crispus Attucks looked toward my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandad for guidance. Then he parroted Euripides Kaufman’s caustic sentiments into the face of the lone attaché of England’s New World venture capitalism. “Aye, a Cockney chimpanzee with his sparkling flushed pink arse a bit distant from the rest of the pack. Where’s your scone-colored missus? Snuggling up to King George, rubbing his pasty paunch and counting our taxes? Squawk! Crispus Attucks wants a cracker! Squawk!”

How could two nominally free niggers be more libertine? Inciting the colony’s whine for independence, black booster engines to the forthcoming rocket’s red glare. At some point during the famous imbroglio, Euripides, emboldened and bloated with beer, took out his penis and produced a pool of piss in front of the brigade of British reinforcements. Sensing that the armed platoon had reached its saturation point, he shouted, “Tax this!” and smartly marched to the rear of the now uproarious crowd. Leaving an inky, drunken Crispus Attucks fronting the overwhelmingly white mob, blathering unintelligible insults to the throne, threatening the entire British empire with his wooden nigger-beater. Then the now famous volley of shoots and thud of bodies flopping onto the dusty cobblestones.

American history found Crispus Attucks dead on a Boston street, but has yet to find Euripides Kaufman’s contribution. At the subsequent trial a witness for the prosecution recounted that he heard the soldier who deposited the ball of lead in Crispus’s heart regretfully say, “Damn, I shot the wrong bloody nigger.” Good thing too, because had that British soldier shot the right nigger, my seventh-grade class at Manischewitz Junior High would never have gotten to laugh at the ridiculous sons and daughters of the confederacy’s servant class. All fathered by my great-to-the-seventh-power granddad Euripides Kaufman.

It was in Ms. Murphy’s class that for the first time anyone outside my immediate family heard the tales of the groveling Kaufman male birthright. During Black History Month, to put a class of rootless urchins in touch with our disparate niggerhoods, Ms. Murphy assigned us to make family trees. Although most kids could only go back as far as their grandparents, it was with unabashed pride that we gave oral encapsulations of our caricature American ancestries. No one knew enough to be embarrassed at not knowing our own histories, much less those of any of the posterboard Negro heroes on the walls.

I sat midway up the first row of seats in from the door, bored with kids holding up their family trees and giving the same speech: “Ummmmm, the boys are the circles and the girls have the triangle heads. This is me. My six sisters. My brother, he dead. My other brother, he dead too. My mom. My dad. And here go my grandparents. My grandfather was in Vietnam and he crazy. Any questions? Where was my mother born? She was born in Arkansas and she met my father on the Greyhound bus. They fell in love in San Antonio and he touched her in the restrooms in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Then I came. Fuck you, Denise, I wasn’t born in no nickel pay toilet.”

Finally Ms. Murphy called my name. I tucked my family tree under my arm and made my way to the front of the classroom, slapping my boy Jimmy Lopez upside his noggin for good measure. Lifting one hand high above my head, I unfurled my gigantic family tree. It rolled well past my knees and the class ooohed the generations of crinkled stick nigger couples holding stick hands.

I started at the top, with Euripides Kaufman, and went from there. With my mother’s hand in my back, her words pouring from my mouth, I stiffly yapped on like a skinny ventriloquist’s dummy. I told the class how the Kaufmans migrated south when Swen Kaufman, Euripides’s well-traveled grandson, left Boston, unintentionally becoming the only person ever to run away into slavery. Being persona non anglo-saxon, Swen was unable to fulfill his uppity dreams of becoming a serious dancer. He was unwelcome in serious dance circles, and the local variety shows couldn’t use his “Frenchified royal court body syncopations” in their coony-coony minstrel productions. “Take the crown off your head, jigaboo. Show some teeth,” they said. Swen would stoop and bow under any other circumstances, but when it came to dance he refused to compromise. So on a windy night he packed his ballet slippers and stowed away on a merchant ship bound for the Cotton Belt.

Debarking in coastal North Carolina, Swen set out on a sojourn, seeking artistic freedom. He traipsed the tobacco roads, using his New England blue-blood diction to put off the curiosities of those concerned with his freeman status. When he ran across lynch mobs, hound dogs, and defenseless parasol-toting Southern belles, he’d simultaneously gaze at their feet and hold his nose just high enough to suggest a hint of breeding. Answering their inquiries, Swen rolled his r’s in polite deference.

“You ain’t from ’round here, is you, bwoy?”

“No sir. Do the leotards give me away, sir?”

“Mind if we ask youin a few questions?”

“Why no, I fully understand your rrrreasons for rrrrrousting me under suspicion of my being a rrrrrunaway Negrrrrrro. Please rrrrrrresume your interrogation forrrthwith.”

“You ain’t Scottish, iz ya, bwoy?”

After three days on the road, Swen found himself on the outskirts of a small farming town called Mercy, North Carolina. There he came upon the fields of the Tannenberry plantation, where some slave hands were turning up rows of tobacco. The rise-and-fall rhythm of the hoes and pickaxes and the austere urgency of the work songs gave him an idea for a “groundbreaking” dance opera. A renegade piece that intertwined the stoic movement of forced labor with the casual assuredness of the aristocratic lyric. Entranced with the possibilities, Swen impetuously hopped the wooden fence that separated the slave from the free. Picking up a tool, he smiled at the bewildered nigger next to him and churned feudal earth until sundown, determined to learn the ways of the field slaves. I suppose the niggers warned him, but Swen wouldn’t have understood their pidgin drawl. “Fool, I don’t know who you is, but whoebba you is, if you gwine slave in this heah tobacky row, you bettuh stop scatterin’ the top serl in the wind. ’Cuz if de Tannenberrys don’t eat, den you knows the pigs and chickens gwine watch the niggers die.” Swen headed back to Marse Tom Tannenberry’s sleeping quarters happy with his first day of slavery. He went to bed that night on a stomach full of pig ears and corn leaves, and from every daybreak until his death he woke up an unindentured servant.

Initially, upon seeing a free extra hand in the cabins, Marse Tom Tannenberry smiled at his good fortune, recalling poorer days when family members outnumbered the slaves. A precocious Confederate tyke, he’d pulled on Grandma Verona’s billowing yellow whalebone dress, pleading and pouting for a nigger of his own. Marse Tom recalled the spittle and scorn in her voice when she replied with something about darkies not growing on trees.

In the chill of a just-breaking morning, Swen Kaufman danced to work. Giddily in rehearsal for his magnum opus, his lanky frame spun “jump, ball, change” in the lifting dark North Carolinian mist. The slaves hated him. Marse Tom grew to hate him. Swen returned from the fields happier than he’d ever been in Boston. He considered himself dancer-in-residence at the Tannenberry plantation, free room and board and plenty of rehearsal space. Come sundown the dirty energetic primo cotton picker pranced home, back straight, chin up, a Yankee clipper lost at sea, pointing his toes in the wind.

Marse Tom decided Swen’s cultured Boston manners and skip-to-my-lou verve were bad for morale. Worse yet was the fascination in Missus Courtney Tannenberry’s lit-up cheeky countenance as she sat around listening to Swen’s stories of his carefree European escapades as a fashionable valet noir for a French choreographer. Raised in northern Virginia, Missus Tannenberry considered herself a balletomane and aficionado of high art. She’d sit under the bighouse portico fanning herself and aching for culture not based on agrarian harvest cycles. Swen was eager to play raconteur. Excused by the missus from fieldwork, he’d fill her swooning head with stories of dining in seaport bistros in Marseilles and witnessing the exquisite nascence of modern dance at the Paris Opera, the Royal Theater in Copenhagen, and London’s renowned King Theater. They discussed Swen’s theories on how the rigid daring obstinate Russian psyche would push ballet to the heights of expressionistic art. Punctuating his points with leaps and sashays around the gazebo, Swen conducted ironic lectures on how the tradition of European patrician gloating and African tribal rituals influenced the Southern cotillions. In wishful reenactments of performances staged hundreds of times in his head, he’d spin and lift Missus Tannenberry’s toddling daughters to the clouds. Marse Tom wasn’t havin’ it and demanded that Swen leave the grounds. Swen refused. How could he leave midway through choreographing a hand dance based on the dexterity needed to remove cotton balls cleanly from the stem and the intricacies of the Missus’s crocheting techniques?

Didn’t a whole lot of niggers get whipped on Tom Tannenberry’s plantation, but Marse Tom whipped Swen Kaufman. Demi-plié — five lashes. Second position — ten lashes. Pirouette over the cotton seedlings — fifteen lashes; rock salt and scotch in the wounds. A performance of Swen’s “Dance of the Discreet Glance” behind the stables merited a beating that started the dogs barking and kept slaves and masters up through the night listening to Swen’s skin sizzle. Eventually the slaves came to admire Swen’s persistence and to appreciate his art, but not before Tom Tannenberry beat the classic romanticism out of Swen’s feet and slapped the worldly effluvium from his mouth. Crumpled and broken on the ground, lips painted with blood, face powdered with red clay dust, Swen was told he could nigger jig to his heart’s content.

He healed and did, soon falling in love with his favorite partner, Clocinda Didion. Swen and Clocinda’s wedding was his final performance. Under the guise of rehearsing an elaborate wedding ceremony, he used every slave on the plantation in a glorious swirling production. On the wedding day they danced. To the accompaniment of body drums and fiddles, maids of honor, bridegroom, and guests swooped across the fields. They tightroped the tops of fences many had never even dared look at, much less touch. For most it was the first time they’d been within twenty yards of the fences. The audience consisted of the pregnant Missus Tannenberry and her four daughters, trailing the action as it traversed the grounds, applauding at the appropriate intervals. In the middle of the ceremony the Tannenberry women held the broom, cheering as the happy helot couple jumped over it, kissing in midair, landing in matrimony. In the last movement the adults passed unlit torches to the children, then lay in the slaves’ graveyard next to the mounds of earth and rotted tombstones. The children peered into the windows of the bighouse, the still unlit torches resting on their bony shoulders. Then they too went to the graveyard and lay down next to their parents. Missus Tannenberry cried for a month afterward and on every anniversary of Clocinda and Swen’s regal wedding visited the graveyard.

All this before recess. Over coffeecake and chocolate milk, kids who normally spent the respite from math teasing me about the length of my pants and placing bets on which of two shirts I would wear tomorrow begged me to continue my story.

“What happened next?”

“Why didn’t they light the torches?”

“How much is a sixpence in American money?”

“Did Euripides Kaufman know George Washington?”

“What happened next, motherfucker?”

The bell rang and they rushed back to the classroom to find Ms. Murphy sitting on the edge of her desk. The students sat in little plastic orange chairs and leaned over the tabletops. All ears and big eyes. I continued my presentation, swelling with a strange pride.

Swen and Clocinda Kaufman begat some astoundingly servile niggers. One of whom, Franz von Kaufman, was exceedingly bootlicking even for a slave. Franz von Kaufman was born looking like the quintessential Mathew Brady 1857 nigger daguerreotype. Though fresh out of Clocinda’s womb, Franz von’s glossy dark black skin was fissured by creased and starched wrinkles. A shock of wispy gray hair capped a sunken face, tight lips, and sullen yellow watery suffering eyes. Everyone called him “Old Franz von.” Missus Tannenberry delivered Compton Benjamin Quentin, the Tannenberry’s youngest and only male child, within days of Franz von. The two boys shared the same crib and nipples. Even in infancy Franz von’s subservience was evident. If baby Marse Compton wanted the nipple Franz von suckled, he’d nudge Franz von, whine, and drool in his ear, and Franz von would move without complaint. No whining, no whimpering. Clocinda soon figured out that the little Tannenberry devil was born greedy and nearly blind.

The stubborn Compton fancied himself a brave explorer and refused to let his poor sight handicap him. One nose-to-nose close-up look at his dusky running buddy Old Franz von and young Marse Compton knew intuitively that to realize his lofty goals, he’d need a loyal manservant. He asked his father that Franz von be given to him, and Tom Tannenberry, remembering his longing for a “nigger of his own,” quickly agreed. While Franz von was still a pup, Marse Tom handed his leash over to Compton Tannenberry. “Remember, son, you promised to take care of it.”

In years to come Old Franz von served as Compton’s Seeing Eye dog, constant companion, and best friend. Franz von and Compton could be found playing Inquisition in the walnut groves. This game was a degenerate version of hide-and-seek where Franz von would roll in a honeysuckle patch and then play the heathen. Bathed in young Marse Compton’s favorite smell, Franz von would hide among the walnut trees, awaiting discovery and salvation. The sightless erstwhile Torquemada would seek Franz von out, nose open for the unique scent of honeysuckle and unwashed infidel. His ears honing in on Franz von’s faux heretic war cries and blasphemes. “The creek’s burble ’n’ gurgle, the rustle in the leaves, are the boogers, sniffles, and breeze of the sneezing gods of Dixie.” Compton would find Franz von, tie him to a tree, trade his spit for Franz von’s land and soul, pelt him with walnuts, and convert the swarthy pagan by reciting biblical verse.

Time aged Marse Compton more than it did Franz von. At twenty-five Old Franz von remained a taller version of the tame Negro he’d always been; only the wrinkles circling his eyes and lips had deepened. He hadn’t grown wiser, more worldly, or even bitter about his servitude. Newfangled ideas confused him. Franz von the young adult didn’t understand the nigger talk about abolition, or the white folks’ pride in their metal gunboats. Those Braille books Marse Compton got with increasing frequency in the mail frightened him. How could he read Marse Compton the poems of Ovid and Homer if the great myths were transformed to raised dots? “Can’t teach an old nigger new tricks,” the Tannenberrys teased him. Old Franz von laughed at their perceptiveness and stayed by Compton’s side, safely leading him past the few pitfalls faced by a spoiled Southern aristocrat.

Compton Tannenberry slipped just as easily into his destined adulthood. The denizens of Mercy marveled at the contrast of his princely smooth upright blind gait to Franz von’s sighted slumped-over shuffle. In Compton’s presence the white folks could often be heard saying how he’d aged gracefully, gone from barley malt to fine scotch whisky. When Marse Compton wasn’t around, the niggers who toiled under the sun and his Confederate shogunate would say that Marse Compton hadn’t aged but curdled like stagnant milk. His white arrogance had piled and thickened, casting its sour odor wherever he went.

Sundays were for church ’n’ cards. In the afternoon Franz von sat in an unvarnished pew in the farthest corner of the Anglican Saxon Triple Baptist Church. From there he watched the good Reverend William Dern deliver sermons that alternated between damnation and salvation. Compton Tannenberry allowed no one but Franz von to shepherd him down the aisle to partake in the communion. He held Franz von tightly at the elbow while receiving the vintage spirit and the cracker body of Christ. Nights were spent in the sacrosanct parlors of the Mercy Socialite Club for Genteel Gentlemen. During the high-stakes poker games Franz von sat at Compton’s side, placing Compton’s bets for him, tapping out their secret code on Compton’s arm to let him know the cards in his hand. Compton quickly calculated his odds, and Franz von humbly reeled in the winnings from the astonished stately Tar Heel gentry. Once safely away from the gaming tables, Franz von and Compton would tell their running joke that they had the advantage because no one could read a blind man’s eyes and no one could read a nigger’s mind.

When the Civil War broke out, Compton enthusiastically went to enlist, knowing that he’d be turned away but hoping to serve the South in some capacity. As expected, the draft board told Compton he was unfit for combat, though his breeding, poker face, and guile could be used in other ways. The Confederacy asked him to be the chief negotiator in the top-secret trading of surplus bales of Southern cotton for the Union opium the Rebels desperately needed to treat their wounded. This job required Compton to take a train from Durham to Washington, D.C., every two weeks to meet with the penny-pinching Yankees. The catch was that Franz von couldn’t accompany his master on these missions, since a crafty nigra, even one as outwardly dutiful as Franz von, would be an unnecessary breach of security.

Franz von spent the first two years of his war fighting separation anxiety and faithfully awaiting the 6:15 P.M. arrival of the Hootenanny Choo-Choo from Washington, D.C. Franz von was never happier than serving as his friend’s footstool into the carriage that carried them back to the Tannenberry plantation.

Sunday, March 27, 1864. The 6:15 pulled in and Marse Compton Tannenberry’s cane never made its exploratory pokes from the first-class car. Compton’s whiny yell of “Where’s my nigger?” failed to travel down the length of the platform. Franz von waited for hours, then drove the empty buggy back to the plantation. Why won’t the Tannenberrys look him in the eye when he tells them Marse Tom wasn’t on the train? Franz von returns to the station at 6:15 the next night and every night for the rest of his life, looking every passenger that gets off the train dead in the face. No one ever had the nerve to tell Franz von that his comrade and owner died when he accidentally swallowed a piece of opium he was transporting, mistaking it for one of the sugar cubes he brought back for Old Franz von and the unrequisitioned horses.

I wish that my shameful history had stopped with pitiful Franz von, that I could say that after years of obedience my forefathers embraced the twentieth century’s waves of black pride. The seventh-graders ate quiet lunches in the school cafeteria. I told the story of Wolfgang Kaufman to the rustle of brown paper bags and the muffled crunches of mouthfuls of potato chips. Wolfgang Kaufman was my great-great-uncle who once held the highest appointed municipal position a Negro in Nashville, Tennessee, could aspire to in the 1920s, chief of the Department of Visual Segregation. With Jim Crow as his muse, he spent muggy afternoons under a splotchy painter’s cap, painting and hanging the FOR WHITES ONLY and FOR COLORED ONLY signs that hung over quasi-public places throughout Nashville. At five dollars an hour, not many Nashville blacks were doing much better, and Wolfgang took pride in his stenciled artistry. A fit of absentmindedness caused him to lose the precious contract when he was spotted exiting from the men’s room after taking a satisfying early-morning number two in the whites-only toilet. The sight of a dark black man zipping up his fly and pulling underwear from the crack of his ass was too much for any virtuous white woman, especially the one passed out in horror at his feet. Ms. O’Dwyer came to with Wolfgang hovering over her face, apologetically jabbering something about there being no toilet paper in the colored washroom. Quickly regaining her faculties and privileged sensibilities, Ms. O’Dwyer slapped Wolfgang across his pleading lips and reported him to the mayor’s office. Some benevolent civic official commuted his lynching, and soon after the nigger moved to Chicago and was polishing floors at WGN radio with a huge “Thank ya, Lawd” smile on his face.

One sunny Tuesday morning a tacky fat-and-skinny twosome barreled into the station to rehearse scenarios for a new radio show. Wolfgang briefly stopped squeegeeing the soundstage windows to listen to the duo, Freeman F. Gosden and Charles J. Correll, run through their stale repertoire. “Funny thing happened to me on the way to the station today.” Along with the station managers, Wolfgang groaned and covered his ears, remembering hearing their baritone voices when he was hightailing through New Orleans. They were good mimics, but their material was awful. Wolfgang decided to help the boys out. During a break in rehearsal, he popped his derby-topped head into the studio, removed the stubby cigar from his mouth, and suggested to the worried-looking Gosden and Correll that they join him for lunch. “Y’all gonna hear some real comedic genius.” Having nothing to lose, the white boys followed Wolfgang to the Chicago Circle Cab Company, where a group of cabbies on their lunch breaks sat inside the dispatch booth talking about each other’s shortcomings and women and telling hilarious, if only slightly exaggerated, stories of black life in a big city. The bashful peckerwoods sat dumbfounded on the fender of a broken-down cab. Neither man had ever contemplated the existence of a black society beyond elevator operators and occasional snapshots of well-to-do Negroes in the Sun-Times. Here were men talking in a myriad of dialects about a vivacious life which to most of America was invisible. The butt of most of the jokes was an understated college-educated cabdriver named Enos. The loudest and most rambunctious of the Negro storytellers was a plump unemployed dandy named Sandy. Wolfgang smiled as the similarities in physique and personality dawned on the struggling radio personalities. Wolfgang stood up and sang a slow rendition of “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginny,” and Gosden and Correll raced back to the station, their heads buzzing with ideas for a weekly show called Amos ’n’ Andy. Soulless white American radio was destined for droll hours of Fibber McGee and Molly till Wolfgang Kaufman shucked ’n’ jived to its rescue. America got a pair of stumbling jitterbugging icons; Wolfgang Kaufman got a ten-cent raise.

Ms. Murphy’s seventh-grade history class, still in rapt attention, unanimously voted to skip watching Eyes on the Prize so they could hear the tale of Ludwig Kaufman. Son of Wolfgang, Cousin Ludwig used his father’s tenuous mop-bucket industry connections to become a manager of white acts that ripped off the Motown rhythm-and-blues hysteria. Some of his more popular acts were Gladys White and the Waitress Tips and the Stevedores, whose melodic hit, “Three Times a Longshoreman,” made a little noise on the eastern seaboard. Ludwig was proudest of his project the Four Cops, a Los Angeles — based quartet who charted with a ballad entitled “Reach Out and I’ll Be There Hittin’ You Upside the Head with a Nightstick.”

Lost in Chicago’s South Side, the dapper Ludwig Kaufman stumbled into Mosque 27 looking for directions to a club that had booked his sequined law enforcement officers. Playing the rear in a metal folding chair, Uncle Kaufman was fascinated with the temple’s rhythmical rhetoric and style, and the potential in a group called the Blond Muhammadettes intrigued him. He quickly asked how he could join and where he could get some of those bow ties and shiny shoes. Knowing a mark when they saw one, the Black Muslims and the FBI trained Ludwig to be the Judas to black nationalism’s Jesus. It was Cousin Ludwig who on February 21, 1965, stood up in the middle of the Audubon Ballroom moments before Malcolm X was to give his last speech and shouted, “Hey man! Get your hands out of my pocket.” Eight months later the police found him in Tin Pan Alley, dead and sans shiny shoes.

After school I held court near the kickball diamond, leaning against the metal backstop, rambling on about my cousin Solveig Kaufman. Newsweek magazine assigned Cousin Solveig to report on the press conference announcing the results of the reinvestigation of Martin Luther King’s assassination. The panel opened up the questioning by choosing an affirmative action baby who’d benefited from King’s movement. On national television Solveig repaid the civil rights movement. He stood up, pen and pad in hand, and said, “Never mind James Earl Ray and FBI intervention, inquiring minds want to know who’s fucking Coretta Scott King?” The aging eternal widow’s next public appearance was her funeral four months later. Some say natural causes, some say suicide, some death by public embarrassment.

These schoolyard chronicles never included my father’s misdeeds. I could distance myself from the fuckups of the previous generations, but his weakness shadowed my shame from sun to sun. His history was my history. A reprobate ancestry that snuggled up to me and tucked me in at night. In the morning it kissed me on the back of the neck, plopped its dick in my hands, and asked me to blow reveille. Front and center, nigger.

The racist campestral doctrine of Yeehaw, Mississippi, raised Mr. Rölf Kaufman, a.k.a. Daddy. Instead of pumping property taxes into neighborhood schools, the town stuck its tongue out at Brown v. Board of Education and satisfied the Supreme Court’s integrationist stipulations by busing the dark-skinned niggers and the light-skinned niggers to Dred Scott High. Living in the only black household within walking distance of exclusively white and predominantly redneck Jefferson Davis High, my father didn’t even know about the colored bus. He showed up for the first day of high school dressed in cuffed Levis, a flannel shirt, a Daniel Boone coonskin hat, and a Captain Midnight decoder ring. He was such a docile and meek nonthreat that the principal let him register for classes.

My father fondly recalled the laughs and cold celebratory summer vacation Dixie beers he shared with the good ol’ boy senior class after their macabre reenactment of the Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney murders. Rölf played Chaney, two Down syndrome kids from the special-ed class reprised the roles of the hapless miscreant Jews, and three carloads of football players acted as the vigilante sheriffs. My father and the two “Jewish” boys drove down Route 17 toward Meridian with the ersatz peace officers right behind them. After a few miles of horn-blaring, bumper-to-bumper tailgating and beer cans sounding off the windows like tin hailstones, Yeehaw’s phony finest grew bored and forced my father’s car to a stop. My father smiled weakly as the starting quarterback, Plessy “Go Deep” Ferguson, purposefully approached the driver’s side. The strong-armed wishbone navigator par excellence opened the door with his scholarship hands and asked my father, “What are you SNCCering about? Get it, fellas? SNCC — snickering?” The rest of the team burst out in laughter and proceeded to pull the scared “student activists” out of the car, taking turns cuffing my dad and the retarded kids about the face, swinging them by the ankles into the muddy bog that ran alongside the highway. Later that night all the players in the living theater met in the glade behind the courthouse for a few wrap-party beers. A campfire’s glowing flames lit up a keg placed next to a thick-trunked Southern pine known as a swing-low tree. Shadows of the strong-limbed branches flickered across soused contemplative faces. My father drank so much he passed out. He came to naked, his entire body spray-painted white, his face drool-glued against the trunk of the swing-low tree. He ran home under the sinking Mississippi moon, his white skin tingling with assimilation.

Three hours after graduating from high school in 1968, Dad joined the army. He served two tours in Vietnam. His commanding officer, elated with my father’s patriotism, placed him in charge of a crazy Black Is Beautiful platoon of citified troublemakers. He led them on search-and-destroy missions through the sharpened thickets, eyes out for snipers, listening to his men gripe about the precipitation, the white man this and the white man that. After he joined the Los Angeles Police Department, he’d complain that he’d left the Indonesian jungle for the Iznocohesion jungle — “gone from fighting Viet Cong to King Kong.” I remember one day he came home drunk from the LAPD’s unofficial legal defense fundraiser for officers accused of brutality. (Dad later told me they showed Birth of a Nation followed by two straight hours of Watts riot highlights.) He sat me on his lap and slurred war stories. How his all-black platoon used to ditch him in the middle of patrols, leaving him alone in some rice paddy having to face the entire Communist threat by his lonesome. Once he stumbled on his men behind the DMZ, cooling with the enemy. The sight of the slant-eyed niggers and nigger niggers sharing K-rations and rice, enjoying a crackling fire and the quiet Southeast Asian night, flipped Pops the fuck out. He berated his rebellious troops, shouting, “Ain’t this a bitch, the gorillas snacking with the guerrillas. Hello! Don’t you fucking baboons know that this is the goddamn enemy? The fucking yellow peril and you fucking Benedict Leroy Robinson Jefferson Arnolds are traitors to the democracy that weaned you apes from primitivism. You know, you’re probably eating dog.” The VC saw the disconcerted looks on the faces of the black American men, and a good colored boy from Detroit raised his rifle and put an M-16 slug inches from my pop’s crotch. My father’s men just sat there waiting for him to bleed to death. The Vietnamese had to beg them to take my dad back to the base. My father ended this confessional with the non sequitur wisdom that ended all our conversations: “Son, don’t ever mess with no white women.”

To my knowledge no male Kaufman had ever slept with a white woman, not out of lack of jungle hunger or for preservation of racial purity but out of fear. I’d watch my dad talk to white women, drowning them with “Yes, ma’ams,” his darting eyes looking just past their ears. If the First Lady were to walk past my father naked with the original Constitution taped to her back like a “Kick Me” sign, my dad wouldn’t even crane his neck. The last thing he’d want to see was some flabby butt and a hooded mob chasing him back to Niggertown.

On our custody outings to the drag races in Pomona, my father would tell me how he came back from the war and met my mother at a stock car race. They fell immediately in love — the only two black folks in the world who knew the past five winners of the Daytona 500 and would recognize Big Daddy Don Garlits in the street. Then he’d put his arm around me and say, “Don’t you think black women are exotic?”

Kaufman lore plays out like an autogamous self-pollinating men’s club. There are no comely Kaufman superwomen. No poetic heroines caped in Kinte cloth stretching welfare checks from here to the moon. No nubile black women who could set a wayward Negro straight with a snap of the head and a stinging “Nigger, puh-leeze.” The women who allied themselves to the Kaufman legacy are invisible. Their existence and contributions cut off like the Sphinx’s broad nose, subsumed by the mystic of an astronomical impotency. Every once in a while a woman’s name tangentially floated from my mother’s lips as a footnote to some fool’s parable, only to dissipate with the vegetable steam. Aunt Joni’s mean banana daiquiri. Meredith’s game-winning touchdown run vs. Madame C. J. Walker High. Giuseppe’s second wife Amy’s Perry Como record collection. Cousin Madge, who was the complexion of pound cake dipped in milk. These historical cameos were always followed by my mother’s teeth-sucking disclaimers, “But that’s not important” or “Let’s not go there.” I wondered, where did my male predecessors find black women with names like Joni, Meredith, and Amy? Who were these women? Were they weaker than their men, or were they proverbial black family linchpins? I spent hours thumbing through photo albums, fearful that I was destined to marry a black Mormon Brigham Young University graduate named Mary Jo and become the spokesperson for the Coors Brewing Company. They say the fruit never falls far from the tree, but I’ve tried to roll down the hill at least a little bit.

two

MY EARLIEST MEMORIES bodysurf the warm comforting timelessness of the Santa Ana winds, whipping me in and around the palm-tree — lined streets of Santa Monica. Me and white boys Steven Pierce, Ryan Foggerty, and David Schoenfeld sharing secrets and bubble gum. Our friendship was a buoyant one based on proximity, easy-to-remember phone numbers, and the fact that Ryan always had enough money for everybody. We were friends, but didn’t see ourselves as a unit. We had no enemies, no longstanding rivalries with the feared Hermosa Beach Sandcastle Hellions or the Exclusive Brentwood Spoiled Brat Millionaire Tycoon Killers. Our conflicts limited themselves to fighting with our sisters and running from the Santa Monica Shore Patrol. My co-conspirators in beach terrorism and I suffered through countless admonishments from overzealous officers lucky enough to grab one of us in some act of mischief that was always a precursor to a lifetime of incarceration bunking with society’s undesirables. “Young man, try to imagine a future behind bars.”

“What you in for, young buck?”

“I garnished the potato salad of this obese family of Orange County sea cows with sand crabs.”

“Premeditated?”

“Hell, yeah! The entire clan beached themselves fully clothed twenty feet from the water. Tourists. Fucked up the local vibe.”

“Hey, that’s worth a couple of years, easy. Chow’s at six o’clock.”

After I was escorted home by the police “one too many times,” my mother made me join Cub Scout Pack #251, starting me on the socialization treadmill toward group initiation and ceremonial induction. I was kicked out after three meetings for failing to learn the pledge, but the experience stayed with me. It was as if somebody assigned a den mother to point out the significance of campy blue uniforms with buttons in every imaginable place, flags, and oaths. My salt-air world began to subdivide into a series of increasingly complicated dichotomous relationships. Thankfully, I still remember when my worldview wasn’t “us against them” or “me vs. the world” but “me and the world.”

I was an ashy-legged black beach bum sporting a lopsided trapezoidal natural and living in a hilltop two-story townhouse on Sixth and Bay. After an exhausting morning of bodyboarding and watching seagulls hovering over the ocean expertly catching french fries, I would spend the afternoon lounging on the rosewood balcony. Sitting in a lawn chair, my spindly legs crossed at the ankles, I’d leaf through the newest Time-Life mail-order installments of the family’s coffee-table reference library. Predators of the Insect World, Air War Over Europe, Gunfighters of the Old West; I loved reading about red ant — black ant wars, dogfights at fifteen thousand feet, and any cowboy “who was so mean he once shot a man for snoring.” The baseball game would crackle and spit from the cheap white transistor radio my father gave me for my seventh birthday. The tiny tweeter damp with drool from Dodger play-by-play man Chip Parker salivating over Rusty Lanahan’s agility around the bag and how despite allegations of spousal abuse the first baseman with the All-American punim remained a shining role model for the city’s youth. If I still swore on my mother, I’d swear that between pitches I could hear the fizzing of the sun setting behind me, cooling down with a well-earned bedtime dip in the Pacific. I liked to twist the glossy Time-Life photos in the fading yellow light. When the praying mantis’s chalky lime green changed to ghostly white and a B-26 Marauder bomber’s drab army olive melted away into a muddy dark brown, it was time for dinner. The call of the irate mother could be heard over the roar of the airplanes flying off the page.

“Gunnar, set the fucking table.”

“’kay, Ma.”

Before making my way to the silverware drawer, I’d lean over the balcony, squinting into the dusk, and look out toward the nearly empty waterfront six blocks away. The elongated shadows of beachcombers and their metal detectors skimmed across the dimpled and paper-cup — laden sand in hopes of finding lost sandwich baggies full of quarters stolen long ago from the bottom of parents’ dresser drawers. Lifeguard Station 26 is boarded up and shut down for the evening. The sandy-colored hairy-legged lifeguard walks quickly toward his classic convertible VW Beetle, his cherry-red vinyl shorts and windbreaker barking, “Caution! Dangerous riptide!” and fluttering in the strong sea breeze. Two shimmering wetsuit-clad surfers straddle fiberglass Day-Glo boards bobbing offshore, waiting for the last good wave of the day to take them home. The sandpipers play tag with the receding tide, scampering just outside the stretching reach of the waves dying at their knobby feet. Every once in a while the birds call time out to take water breaks, sticking their thin beaks into the moist sand. The sun stops fizzing, though Chip Parker remains excited, haranguing the listening audience about leftfielder Nathaniel Galloway’s powerful Negroid hindquarters and seguing smoothly into the ad copy for Farmer John’s ham, “hickory smoked just the way you like it.”

The lights at Dodger Stadium and the streetlamps flicker on, and throughout Santa Monica the obedient kids wave goodnight to their delinquent friends as the community goes into the seventh-inning stretch. “Jesse Stewart retires the side in order, one, two, three. And after six it’s the Dodgers three, the Mets one.” Life was full of Cracker Jacks, root-root-rooting for the home team, and fucking with my mother.

“Gunnar! Set the table!”

“Ma? You know what?”

“What?”

“That’s what.”

“Very funny. Set the table or I’ll wash your sharp-tongued mouth out with the whetstone.”

I was very funny, in a sophomoric autodidactic knock-knock-who’s-there sort of way. I learned timing, Zen and the art of self-deprecation from the glut of Jewish standup comics on cable TV, who served as living Chinese acupuncture charts of comedic pressure points: dating-yin, parents-yin, daily absurdities-yang. The ancient texts of Bennett Cerf and the humorous anecdotes from Grandma’s waterlogged Reader’s Digests were, if not the I Ching, at least Confucian hymnals.

I was the funny, cool black guy. In Santa Monica, like most predominantly white sanctuaries from urban blight, “cool black guy” is a versatile identifier used to distinguish the harmless black male from the Caucasian juvenile while maintaining politically correct semiotics. If someone was planning a birthday party, the potential invitees always asked, “Who’s going to be there?” The conversation would go:

“Shaun, Lance, Gunnar…”

“Gunnar? Who’s that?”

“You know, the funny, cool black guy.”

Some kids had reps for shredding on skateboards or eating ear wax. My forte was the ability to hold a straight face and pull off the nervy prank. I learned early that white kids will believe anything anybody a shade darker than chocolate milk says. So I’d tell the gullible Paddys that I was part Gypsy and had the innate ability to tell fortunes. Waving my left index finger like a pendulum over their sticky palms, I’d forecast long lifetimes of health and prosperity. “You’ll have a big house in the hills. Over here on the love line is your tennis court. Right here by the life line is your heliport. Now where do you want your pool?” The unsuspecting dupe would point to a spot usually midway between the mystic cross and the creative line, and I’d spit a wad of saliva somewhere near the designated area. “There’s your pool.”

I was the only cool black guy at Mestizo Mulatto Mongrel Elementary, Santa Monica’s all-white multicultural school. My early education consisted of two types of multiculturalism: classroom multiculturalism, which reduced race, sexual orientation, and gender to inconsequence, and schoolyard multiculturalism, where the kids who knew the most Polack, queer, and farmer’s daughter jokes ruled. The classroom cross-cultural teachings couldn’t compete with the playground blacktop lessons, which were cruel but at least humorous. Like most aspects of regimented pop-quiz pedagogy, the classroom multiculturalism was contradictory, though its intentions were good.

My third-grade teacher, Ms. Cegeny, liked to wear a shirt that read:

Whenever she wore it she seemed to pay special attention to me, Salvador Aguacaliente (the silent Latin kid who got to go home early on Cinco de Mayo), and Sheila Watanabe (the loudest Pledge of Allegiance sayer in the history of American education), taking care to point out the multiculturalist propaganda posted above the blackboard next to the printed and cursive letters of the alphabet: “Eracism — The sun doesn’t care what color you are.”

On hot stage-three smog-alert California days Ms. Cegeny would announce, “Okay, class, put away your pencils and take out your science books. Turn to page eighty-eight. Melissa, please read starting from ‘Fun with Sunshine and Thermodynamics.’” Melissa Schoopmann would begin in her deliberate relentless monotone. “This may sound funny … to the novice … third-grade scientist,… but sunshine is cool.… Without it … the earth … would be … as lifeless as a … Catholic funeral on a … rainy, dreary day.” I’d try to fall asleep, but it was too hot even to daydream. My sweat-soaked Suicidal Tendencies You Can’t Bring Me Down tour shirt clung to the inversion layer of grit on my skin. Melissa droned on. “Dark colors … such as … black absorb sunlight … and light colors … such as … white reflect sunlight.” I looked up and down my skinny dark brown arms and turned to my lab partner, Cecilia Peetemeyer, the palest kid in school. Cecilia’s skin was so transparent that one week during health Ms. Cegeny used Cecilia’s see-through skim-milk-white limbs to show the difference between arteries, capillaries, and veins.

“Cecilia, are you hot?” I asked.

“No.”

“Shit.”

“Gunnar, what was the last thing Melissa read?”

“Uh, she said um. She said dark colors soak up the sun’s rays through processes called conduction and convection and the lighter colors of the spectrum tend to alter the path of the radiation through reflection and refraction.”

“Good, I thought you weren’t paying attention. Melissa, please continue.”

Everything was multicultural, but nothing was multicultural. The class studied Asian styles of calculation by learning to add and subtract on an abacus and we then applied the same mathematical principles on Seiko calculators. Prompting my hand to go up and me to ask naively, “Isn’t the Seiko XL-126 from the same culture as the abacus?” Ms. Cegeny’s response was “No, we gave this technology to the Japanese after World War II. Modern technology is a Western construct.” Oh. To put me in my place further, Sheila Watanabe hummed “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty” loud enough for the whole class to hear.

One year during Wellness Week a MASH unit of city health workers set up camp in the gymnasium to ensure that America would have an able-bodied supply of future midlevel managers ready to lead the reinforcement brigades of minimum-wage foot soldiers to their capitalistic battle stations. A free-enterprise penologist was a physically fit one. We answered the patriotic call one girl and boy at a time. Allison Abramowitz and Aaron Aaronson were the first to go. Brave warriors, they left with no send-off party save the frightened faces of their classmates. Ten minutes later Allison returned unharmed. She skipped over to her desk, sat down, and covered a sly I-know-something-you-don’t smile with her hand. Kent Munson quickly asked for permission to sharpen his pencil. He dropped the pencil next to Allison and asked her what happened. She hissed, “None of your beeswax,” sending Kent slinking back to his seat defeated. When copycat and cootie-infested Katie Swickler tried the same technique, Allison greeted her with a message whispered in her ear. Then girls throughout the classroom giggled and smiled at Katie, thanking her for the reassurance. It was as if they were communicating through gender-specific telepathy, leaving us guys looking more confused than usual.

Then Aaron Aaronson walked in, his face drained of color, his arms stuck tightly to his sides, and a newly acquired tic violently tossing his head back at a sickeningly acute angle every two seconds. Zombiefied, he walked a few steps into the classroom, stopped, and shouted, “Oh shit, you guys. They touched my balls and made me cough.”

Ms. Cegeny ignored Aaron’s pederastic pronouncements, called two more names, and continued her lecture on the importance of living in a colorblind society. “Does anyone have an example of colorblind processes in American society?”

Ed Wismer raised his hand and said, “Justice.”

“Good. Anything else?”

Millicent Offerman, who as teacher’s pet spoke without raising her hand, shouted out, “The president sure seems to like people of color.”

“Anyone else think of anything that’s colorblind? Gunnar?”

“Dogs.”

“I believe that dogs are truly colorblind, but they’re born that way. Class, it’s important that we judge people for what?”

“Their minds!”

“And not their what?”

“Color!”

The response to Ms. Cegeny’s call was mostly soprano. I know none of the boy altos were into it — too busy cursing ourselves for wearing the same drawers two days in a row. Colorblind? I hoped the doctor would be totally blind, or he might pull down my underwear, see the brown skid marks on my white Montgomery Ward cotton briefs, and recommend me for placement in special education.

Eventually Ms. Cegeny called my name and I left to be examined by a quiet nurse and a doctor so old he may have cowritten the Hippocratic oath. I was weighed and measured. The doctor banged on my knees with a rubber tomahawk, then asked me to pull down my drawers. Ignoring my stains, he wrapped his trembling and wrinkled hand around my equally wrinkled scrotum. I didn’t flinch. Which surprised him.

“Anyone ever do this to you before, son?”

“No.”

“Do you know what I am doing, son?”

“Touching my balls.”

“Do you know why? Cough.”

“Ah-hem. To practice your juggling?”

“Oh, you’re one of those funny cool black guys, aren’t you. No, I’m testing you for a hernia. Cough.”

“Ah-hem! How do you test the girls?”

“I pinch their nipples and ask them to whistle. Pull up your pants and we’ll test your sight.”

I sat on a stool and read the eye chart with no problems. The nurse placed an open book on my lap and asked if I saw any numbers in the pattern of colored dots. I pointed out the yellow-orange eight-six in the sea of gray dots and asked the nurse what I was being tested for. The doctor stopped shaking long enough to interrupt the nurse and answer, “Colorblindness.”

“Our teacher says we’re supposed to be colorblind. That’s hard to do if you can see color, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I’d say so, but I think your teacher means don’t make any assumptions based on color.”

“Cross on the green and not in between.”

“They’re talking about human color.”

“So?”

“So just pretend that you don’t see color. Don’t say things like ‘Black people are lecherous, violent, natural-born criminals.’”

“But I’m black.”

“Oh, I hadn’t noticed.”

I went back to class and told the still-nervous boys in the back rows whose last names began with the letters L through Z that the physical wasn’t too bad other than when the doctor measures your dick with a ruler and calls out to the nurse, “Penis size normal,” or “teeny-weeny,” or “fucking humungous.” Ann Kurowski, who was twice as blind as Helen Keller but determined to go through life without wearing glasses, asked me if I remembered the letters on the bottom of the eye chart. I told her “F-E-C-E-S” and opened my primer to the story about a war between a herd of black elephants and a herd of white elephants.

I don’t remember what the elephants were fighting about — something about hating each other for the colors of their sponge-rubbery skins. It wasn’t as if the black elephants had to use the mosquito-infested watering hole and rely on white elephant welfare for their quinine. After heavy casualties on both sides, a cease-tusking was called. The elephants, as wounded and bedraggled as elephants could possibly be, headed off into the hills, only to return to the plains years later as a harmonious and homogeneous herd of gray elephants.

I never could figure out why that story was so disquieting. Maybe it was the unsettling way Eileen Litmus would loudly slam shut her reader and stare at me from across the room as we completed the assignment at the end of the story.

1. Why did the elephants not get along? A folded note would soon find my hand under the desk.

2. How come the elephants came back gray? I’d open the note, trying my best not to rustle the paper. The scrawl read:

Fuck the stupid elephants. I like the tortoise and the hare story much more better. I challenge you to a race. Meet me after school for a race from the baseball diamond to the handball courts and back. Do you accept the challenge or are you a pigeon-toed wuss? P.S. You have big ears so you must be an African elephant.

3. Can we apply this story to real life? I’d look up and see Eileen’s hand raised high in the air, her eyes’ radar locked on mine. “Ms. Cegeny! Ms. Cegeny! Gunnar’s passing notes!” Ms. Cegeny would squeak her pudgy sandal-shod feet over to my desk and read the entire note to the shrieking delight of the class. As punishment for my misdemeanor, I’d have to stand up and read aloud my answer to the last question regarding the elephant story.

4. What do you think will happen to the elephants in the future? “Just like some human babies are born with tails or scales, some unfortunate baby elephants are going to be genetic flashbacks and come out albino white and summer’s nap black. Then the whole monochrome utopia is going to be all messed up.”

* * *

My first crush was on Stan “the Man” Musial, an old first baseman with a corkscrew batting stance who played for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1940s and 1950s. Eileen Litmus was my second love. She had a vindictive sense of humor, power to left-center, and was faster than winter vacation, three qualities I admired in a third grader. Despite our age, Eileen and I were easily the fastest kids in the school. Kids would bet movie money on who would win our Friday marathons around the schoolyard backstops. The “Ready, get set, go!” often caught me flatfooted, staring at her lean figure, my arms frozen in prerace Tiberian Olympic-statue readiness. The sudden whoosh of Eileen’s departure would roust me from my trance, her thick dirty-blond hair streaming behind her like jet vapor, denim hip-huggers blurring past the tetherball courts. Pumping my arms and puffing my cheeks like I’d seen the track stars do on TV, I’d try to make up ground just so I could catch a glimpse of her round tan tomboyish face. If the grass near the hopscotch boxes was soggy and she wore the heavier Nike Cortezes, not the lighter Adidas running shoes, I stood a chance of catching her near the handball court, the inner thighs of my corduroys rubbing and buzzing down the stretch. Usually Eileen crossed the finish line first, wading into a welcoming committee of high fives and hugs from the girls. The boys wreathed me with humiliation. “Dude, why did you let her win? I lost four grape Pixie Stix. What the fuck is wrong with you, man? You’re supposed to be fast. When’s the last time a white sprinter won a race? Would you bowl with a white bowling ball? No, you wouldn’t.”

After a long schoolday of moralistic bombardment with the aphorisms of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Pocahontas, and a herd of pacifist pachyderms, my friends and I were ready to think about color on our own terms. We’d make plans to spend the weekend at the beach, sunning in the shoreline’s warm chromatics and filling in childhood’s abstract impressionism coloring books with our own definitions of color, trying our hardest not to stay inside the lines.

Blue

Those without bikes rode on the handlebars. We pedaled side by side in wobbly tandems, yelling our blue profanities, sharing our blue fantasies. We bombarded the windows on the Big Blue municipal bus with wet baby-blue toilet-paper grenades. We splashed in the postcard blue of the ocean and stuck out our Slurpee blue tongues at the girls two towels over. Eileen’s light-saber blue eyes cut through me like lighthouse beacons lancing the midnight.

Psychedelic

When you’re young, psychedelic is a primary color and a most mesmerizing high. Santa Monica was full of free multihued trips. The color-burst free-love murals on Main Street seemed to come to vibrant cartoon life when I passed them. The whales and dolphins frolicked in the clouds and the sea lions and merry-go-round horsies turned cartwheels in the street. The spray-any-color-paint-on-the-spin-art creations at the pier were fifty-cent Jackson Pollock rainbow heroin hits that made your skin tingle and the grains of sand swell up and rise to the sky like helium balloons. Looking into the kaleidoscopic eyes of a scruffy Bukowski barfly sitting in the lotus position along the bike trails fractured your soul into hundreds of disconnected psychedelic shards. Each sharp piece of your mind begging for sobriety.

White

Santa Monica whiteness was Tennessee Williams’s Delta summer seersucker-suit blinding. The patchy clouds, the salty foams of the cresting waves, my friends, my style — all zinc oxide nose-cream white. My language was three-foot swells that broke left to right. “No waaaay, duuuude. Tuuubular biiitchin’ to the max. Tooootalllyyy fucking raaad.” White Gunnar ran teasingly tight circles around the recovering hollowed-out Narc Anon addicts till they spun like dreidels and dropped dizzily to the ground. White Gunnar was a broken-stringed kite leaning into the sea breeze, expertly maneuvering in the gusty gales. White Gunnar stabbed beached jellyfish with driftwood spears and let sand crabs send him into a disco frenzy by doing the hustle on his forehead. White was walking to school in the fog. White was ignoring the crossing guards and trying to outrun the morning moon. White was exhaling crystallized plumes of carbon dioxide and knowing it was the frozen exhaust of our excited minds. White wasn’t the textbook “mixture of radiations from the visible spectrum”; it was the opposite. White was the expulsion of colors encumbered by self-awareness and pigment.

Black

Black was an unwanted dog abandoned in the forest who finds its way home by fording flooded rivers and hitchhiking in the beds of pickup trucks and arrives at its destination only to be taken for a car ride to the desert. Black was hating fried chicken even before I knew I was supposed to like it. Black was being a nigger who didn’t know any other niggers. The only black folks whose names I knew were musicians and athletes: Jimi Hendrix, Slash from Guns n’ Roses, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the Beastie Boys, and Melody the drummer from Josie and the Pussycats.

Black was trying to figure out “how black” Tony Grimes, the local skate pro, was. Tony, a freestyle hero with a signature model Dogtown board, was a hellacious skater and somehow disembodied from blackness, even though he was darker than a lunar eclipse in the Congo. The interviews in Shredder, Rollerbladers Suck, and Stoked magazines never mentioned his color.

Stoked: So, dude?

Tony: Yeah.

Stoked: Gnarly frontside ollie 180 fakie at the Laguna Pro-Am.

Tony: Nailed it, bro, want another hit?

Now and then we’d see Tony Grimes, our deracinated hero, in Coping ’n’ Doping Skateshop on Ocean Street next to the Tommy Burger. “What’s up, Tony?” we’d all ask coolly, yet with genuine concern in our voices. We’d receive an over-the-shoulder “What’s shakin’, dude?” and fight over who he’d acknowledged. “He called me dude. Not you, you nimrod.”

Tony Grimes strolled around the shop, a baseball cap magnetically attached at some crazy angle to his unkempt thick clumpy Afro. His lean muscular legs loped from clothes rack to clothes rack as he eyed the free shit he would take home after he got through rapping to the manager’s girlfriend.

Black was a suffocating bully that tied my mind behind my back and shoved me into a walk-in closet. Black was my father on a weekend custody drunken binge, pushing me around as if I were a twelve-year-old, seventy-five-pound bell clapper clanging hard against the door, the wall, the shoe tree. Black is a repressed memory of a sandpapery hand rubbing abrasive circles into the small of my back, my face rising and falling in time with a hairy heaving chest. Black is the sound of metal hangers sliding away in fear, my shirt halfway off, hula-hooping around my neck.

* * *

That summer of my molestation, my sister Christina returned from a YMCA day camp field trip in tears. My mother asked what was wrong, and between breathless wails Christina replied that on the way home from the Museum of Natural History the campers had cheered, “Yeah, white camp! Yeah, white camp!” and she had felt left out. I tried to console her by explaining the cheer was, “Yeah, Y camp! Yeah, Y camp!” and no one was trying to leave her out of anything. Expressing unusual concern in our affairs, Mom asked if we would feel better about going to an all-black camp. We gave an insistent “Noooooo.” She asked why and we answered in three-part sibling harmony, “Because they’re different from us.” The way Mom arched her left eyebrow at us, we knew immediately we were in for a change. Sunday I was hitching a U-Haul trailer to the back of the Volvo, and under cover of darkness we left halcyon Santa Monica for parts unknown. Ma driving, singing a medley of Temptations hits, my sisters passed out in the back seat, twitching in exhaustion from moving and packing.

Ma’s voice dropped a couple of octaves as she segued from “My Girl” into “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” I rolled down the window, trying to capture the last vestiges of the nighttime salt air, and began writing mental letters to friends I knew I’d never see again.

* * *

Dear Ryan Foggerty,

Later, man. Thanks for the ticket to the Henry Rollins/Anthrax show at the Civic Auditorium and for lending me your Slidemaster trucks and the Profane Insane Urethane wheels, I’ll send ’em back to you. Rock and roll will never die.

Be cool,

Gunnar

* * *

Dear Steven Pierce,

I’ll miss the weekend speedboat outings with your red-haired ex — Playboy Bunny mom and her loaded boyfriend who always wore the stupid Skipper from Gilligan’s Island hats. I remember how you hated the way he winked at you, one hand on the steering wheel, the other stroking your mother’s behind. We did the right thing by pissing in the gas tank, so what if his engine stalled and he nearly died of exposure off the coast of Mexico. I’m sorry, but Larry, not Shemp or Curly or Moe, was the funniest Stooge. “Susquehanna Hat Company”?

Slowly I turn,

step by step,

Gunnar

* * *

Dear Eileen,

I never told anyone. I know you didn’t.

XXOXOXX,

Gunnar

* * *

Of all my laidback Santa Monican friends, I miss David Joshua Schoenfeld the most. He was off-white and closest to me in hue and temperament. Strangers would come up to him and ask if he was Mediterranean. David would shake his head, his dollar-bill-green eyes trying to convey that he was a tanned Jewish kid originally from Phoenix and perpetually late for the Hebrew school bus. Every Tuesday and Thursday after bar mitzvah classes we’d meet at the public library and pore through the WWII picture books, doing our best to fight the bewitching allure of Fascist cool. Our obsession wasn’t a clear-cut Simon Wiesenthal Dudley Do-Right always-get-your-war-criminal fixation. We concerned ourselves with whether it would be more fun to fantasize about world domination attired in crushed Gestapo black velvet with red trim or in crumpled green Third Army gum-chewing schleppiness.

Himmler is wearing the Aryan autocrat’s summer ensemble, designed for maximum military foreboding with a hint of patrician civility. Ideal for a morning jaunt through the death camps or planning an autumn assault on the Russian front.

By sixth grade we’d read the junior warmongers’ canon: Mein Kampf, Boys from Brazil, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, and Anne Frank, and our allegiances were muddled. On the way to Laker games we’d talk about the atrocities at Buchenwald and Auschwitz. David’s father, looking for a parking space, would ask us whether he should feel guilty about playing the serial numbers branded onto his father’s forearm in the state lottery. During time-outs we’d test each other on the design specifications and flight capabilities of the Luftwaffe arsenal.

“The blitzkrieg clarion the Polish heard whistling out of the clouds in 1939?”

“Please, the Stuka dive-bombers.”

“Top speed for the Messerschmitt 109 K-model.”

“Easy, 452 miles per hour, climb rate 4,880 feet per minute.”

“Someone’s been studying.”

“Knock this out. Give me the wingspan and ceiling for the Focke-Wulf 190 D-series.”

“You know that’s my favorite plane of all time. Wingspan 33 feet and 5 inches, ceiling 32,800 feet. Don’t Focke with me, man. Chu wanna go to war? Okay, we go to war.”

Later that night, with permission to sleep over at David’s house, we went to war. On our last reconnaissance sortie before bedtime we found a trail of ants on a Bataan death march to underground bunkers beneath his front porch. After five passes with the aerosol deodorant, we applied the matches and watched the soldier ants burn, shouting, “Dresden! Dunkirk! Banzai!” and strafing their shriveling exoskeletons with plastic scale-model airplanes. Then it was inside to watch our favorite video, Tora, Tora, Tora, stuffing handfuls of Jiffy Pop popcorn in our mouths and cheering for the Japanese.

When David’s parents were asleep we played Hiroshima-Nagasaki in the bedroom. In our astronaut pj’s with the crinkly plastic soles we moved the armoire into the hall and cleared enough space for Little Boy and Fat Man to land. Fake radio transmissions from the backs of our throats: “Come in, Los Alamos kkksssk. Come in, this is the Enola Gay, do you read? Kkksssk.”

“Loud and clear, this is Oppenheimer, copy.”

“Oppy baby, is this thing goin’ to work?”

“Oh yeah, equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT. Do you copy?”

“Roger, ten-four, over and out.”

We’d simulate the atomic flash by switching the bedroom light on and off as fast as we could, catching strobe glimpses of ourselves as nuclear shadows. Frozen in our positions, we mimicked death, writing letters home, pruning bonsai trees, playing with Hot Wheels, bent over mid butt-wipe.

Before going to bed, we brushed our teeth in the cramped bathroom. I noticed that David put the toothpaste on his brush before passing it under the cold water. I, like most folks, wet my brush, then put on the toothpaste, but I copied him because he was white and I figured maybe I was doing it wrong.

The only time race entered our war was when we sat over a basket of french fries drinking root beer and debating who Hitler would kill first, David the diabolical Jew or me the subhuman Negroid. It was on our excursions to the library that I stumbled across my first black heroes: the Tuskegee airmen, the Redball Express, some WAC nurses from Chicago, Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., Jesse Owens, and the mess cook who shot down a couple of Japanese Zeros from the sinking deck of the Arizona. I kept these discoveries to myself. I didn’t think David would find it as juicy as when I told him that Hitler had only half a package.

* * *

Dear David Schoenfeld,

I’m still high from the model airplane glue-sniffing session in the alleyway behind Pic ’n’ Save. Remember the waterfalls of vomit rushing down our chins and our contest to see who could find the largest chunks of undigested potato chips in their pool of throw-up? Fuckin’ cool. David, somehow through being with you I learned I was black and that being black meant something, though I’ve never learned exactly what. Barukh atah Adonai.

Shalom, motherfucker,

Gunnar

* * *

I don’t remember helping my mother unload the trailer, but the next morning I awoke on the floor of a strange house amid boxes and piles of heavy-duty garbage bags jammed with clothes. The venetian blinds were drawn, and although the sunlight peeked between the slats, the house was dark. My mother let out a yell in that distinct-from-somewhere-in-the-kitchen timbre: “Gunnar, go into my purse and buy some breakfast for everybody.” I acknowledged my orders and got dressed. Rummaging through my personal garbage bag, I found my blue Quicksilver shorts, a pair of worn-out dark gray Vans sneakers, a long-sleeved clay-colored old school Santa Cruz shirt, and just in case the morning chill was still happening, I wrapped a thick plaid flannel shirt around my skinny waist. I found the front door, and like some lost intergalactic B-movie spaceman who has crash-landed on a mysterious planet and is unsure about the atmospheric content, I opened it slowly, contemplating the possibility of encountering intelligent life.

I stepped into a world that was a bustling Italian intersection without Italians. Instead of little sheet-metal sedans racing around the fontana di Trevi, little kids on beat-up Big Wheels and bigger kids on creaky ten-speeds weaved in and out of the water spray from a sprinkler set in the middle of the street. It seemed there must have been a fire drill at the hair salon, because males and females in curlers and shower caps crammed the sidewalks.

I ventured forth into my new environs and approached a boy about my age who wore an immaculately pressed sparkling white T-shirt and khakis and was slowly placing one slue-footed black croker-sack shoe in front of the other. I stopped him and asked for directions to the nearest store. He squinted his eyes and leaned back and stifled a laugh. “What the fuck did you say?” I repeated my request, and the laugh he suppressed came out gently. “Damn, cuz. You talk proper like a motherfucker.” Cuz? Proper like a motherfucker? It wasn’t as if I had said, “Pardon me, old bean, could you perchance direct a new indigene to the nearest corner emporium.” My guide’s bafflement turned to judgmental indignation at my appearance. “Damn, fool, what’s up with your loud-ass gear? Nigger got on so many colors, look like a walking paint sampler. Did you find the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow? You not even close to matching. Take your jambalaya wardrobe down to Cadillac Street, make a right, and the store is at the light.”

I walked to the store, not believing that some guy who ironed the sleeves on his T-shirt and belted his pants somewhere near his testicles had the nerve to insult me over how I dressed. I returned to the house, dropped the bag of groceries on the table, and shouted, “Ma, you done fucked up and moved to the ’hood!”