The White Boy Shuffle

three

MY MAGICAL mystery tour ground to a halt in a West Los Angeles neighborhood the locals call Hillside. Shaped like a giant cul-de-sac, Hillside is less a community than a quarry of stucco homes built directly into the foothills of the San Borrachos Mountains. Unlike most California communities that border mountain ranges, Hillside has no gentle slopes upon which children climb trees and overly friendly park rangers lead weekend flora-and-fauna tours.

In the late 1960s, after the bloody but little known I’m-Tired-of-the-White-Man-Fuckin’-with-Us-and-Whatnot riots, the city decided to pave over the neighboring mountainside, surrounding the community with a great concrete wall that spans its entire curved perimeter save for an arched gateway at the southwest entrance. At the summit of this cement precipice wealthy families live in an upper-middle-class hamlet known as Cheviot Heights. At the bottom of this great wall live hordes of impoverished American Mongols. Hardrock niggers, Latinos, and Asians, who because of the wall’s immenseness get only fifteen minutes of precious sunshine in summer and a burst of solstice sunlight in the winter. If it weren’t always so hot it would be like living in a refrigerator.

We lived in a pueblo-style home with a cracked and fissuring plaster exterior my mother said provided an Old Mexico flavor. Even she had to laugh when I walked up to a peeling section of the house, broke off a yellow paint chip, popped it into my mouth, rubbed my tummy, and said, “Mmmmmm, nacho cheese.” Our back yard nestled right up against the infamous wall. I often marveled at the unique photosynthesis that allowed the fig, peach, and lemon trees to thrive in a dim climate where it often rained dead cats and dogs, rotted fish, and droplets of piss. Apparently rich folks have an acerbic sense of humor.

After a week in our new home, a black-and-white Welcome Wagon pulled up in front of the house to help the newcomers settle into the neighborhood. Two mustachioed officers got out of the patrol car and knocked on our front door with well-practiced leather-gloved authority. Tossing courtesy smiles at my mother, the cops shouldered their way past the threshold and presented her with a pamphlet entitled “How to Report Crime and Suspicious Activity Whether the Suspects Are Related to You or Not.” It wasn’t the day-old macaroni casserole she’d been expecting. My sisters and I sat in the living room, half listening to the news on the radio, half listening to the cops asking Mama questions to which they already knew the answers.

“Kids, Ms. Kaufman?”

“Yes, three.”

“Two girls, ten and eleven, and a boy, thirteen, all of them left-handed, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Ma’am, may we speak to the boy, Gunnar?”

My mother turned around and waved me over with the hated come-hither crooked index finger. I lifted my sheepish carcass off the couch and shuffled like a reluctant butler toward the interrogation. The cop with gold stripes on his sleeves cut Mama a look and said, “Alone, Ms. Kaufman,” and she deserted me with a satisfied smirk, happy that I was finally getting a bitter taste of her vaunted “traditional black experience.”

I stood there, perched directly under the doorjamb, as I’d learned to do when your earth quaked. My slumping shoulders trembled. My kneecaps shook. These weren’t some Santa Monica cops sporting Conflict Resolution ribbons, riding powder-blue bicycles, this was the LAPD, dressed to oppress, their hands calmly poised over open holsters like seasoned gunfighters’. I tried to distance myself from the rumbling in my ears, clamoring for one of those out-of-body experiences only white folks in midlife crises seem to have. I felt the gases rising from my queasy stomach to inflate my body. My arms and legs began to swell, and slowly I began to float away. I was just getting off the ground when I let out a long silent fart. Apparently, my escape fantasy had a slow leak.

“Son, you smell something?”

“Nope.”

“Well, something reeks.”

“Oh, that’s the chitlins.”

My would-be out-of-body experience hovered there, wafting in the flatulent fumes. I wasn’t going anywhere; I felt like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon — tethered, and grounded to reality by fishing lines looped through my nose and eyeballs. I was a helium distraction until the arrival of Santa Claus. “Look, Daddy, Snoopy with an Afro.”

The squat grayish-blond officer removed his cap and introduced himself and his partner as officers Frank Russo and Neal Salty.

“Gunnar, we know you had some problems with the Santa Monica police department. Son, here in” — the officer took a deep breath — “Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, we practice what we like to call ‘preventative police enforcement.’ Whereby, we prefer to deter habitual criminals before they cause irreparable damage to the citizenry and/or its property.”

“You mean you put people who haven’t done anything in the back seat of your squad car and beat the shit out of ’em so you don’t have to do any paperwork. Thereby preventing any probable felonious assaults on the citizenry.”

“And/or its property.”

“And/or it is. You know, my father is a sketch artist down at Wilshire Division. Does that carry any weight?”

“Yeah, he gets to visit your ass in jail without being strip-searched.”

Taking out a small notebook from his supercop utility belt, he continued the inquest. “What’s your gang affiliation?”

“Gang affiliation?”

“Who do you run with? Who are your crimeys, your homies, your posse? You know, yo’ niggers.”

“Oh, I see. Well, on weekends I’m down with the Gang of Four.”

“Who?” To his partner, “Geez, these fucking turds are incredible, there’s a new gang every frigging week.” Then he turned back to me. “So, Gunnar, who you banging with in this Gang of Four?”

“You know, it’s me, my homegirl Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chuqiao, and my nigger even if he don’t get no bigger Yao Wenyuan. Sheeeeit, we runnin’ thangs from Shanghai to Compton.”

Although I had only lived in Hillside for a few days, it was impossible not to pick up a few local catchphrases while running errands for Mother. Language was everywhere. Smoldering embers of charcoal etymology so permeated the air that whenever someone opened his mouth it smelled like smoke. Double-check the mailbox to see if your letters had fallen through and the lid shrieked, “Dumb-ass motherfucker, have you ever looked and letters were still there? No! Shut the goddamn lid.” Press the crossing button at the intersection and the signal blinked a furious “Hurry the fuck up!” Call information and the operator answered the phone with a throaty “Who dis?” Nothing infuriated my mother more than me lounging on one elbow at the dinner table slinging my introductory slang with a mouth full of mashed potatoes: “Sheeeeit, Ma, I’m running thangs, fuck the dumb.”

“Seriously, son, judging by your previous nefarious history, we feel that you have a proclivity for gang activity. Do us all a favor and come clean.”

“Okay, fuck the dumb. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and odd-numbered Fridays when my mother lets me stay out late, I be down with the Our Gang He-man Woman Haters Club. Matter of fact, we have a rumble with the Bowery Boys next week. If you see that schmuck Muggs, tell da bum I’m gonna kick his ass.”

“Okay, we’re going to put you down as unaffiliated. For now keep your big black nose clean.”

Gang affiliation? I didn’t even have any friends yet. My sisters and I had no idea how to navigate our way around this hardscrabble dystopia. Each of us had already been beaten up at least once just for trying to make friends. Deciding there was safety in numbers, we took to traveling in a pack. Nervously, traipsing through the minefield, we tiptoed past the suspected ruffians and kept on the lookout for snipers. Shots would ring out from nowhere, forcing us into sacrificial heroics, diving onto verbal grenades to save the others.

“Say, bitch-ass, com’ere!”

“Who, me?”

“Must be you, you looked.”

“You guys, go on without me. Get away while there’s still time. Tell Mama I love her. I regret that I have only one life to give for my family.”

By day six of the ghetto hostage crisis my sibling captives and I were avoiding the dangers of the unexplored territory along the banks of the Harbor Freeway by sitting in the den playing Minutiae Pursuance, substituting our own questions for the inane ones on the cards.

“Sports and Leisure, for the pie.”

“Oh, this one’s a toughie. How many dimples on a golf ball?”

“Four hundred sixty-three. Give me my piece.”

Mom was not the kind of matriarch to let her brood hide up under her skirt, clutching her knees, sheltered from the mean old Negroes outside. Under the guise that she was worried about our deteriorating social skills, she suggested we go to Reynier Park and play with the other kids in the neighborhood. She might as well have told us to play in the prison yard at Attica. Reynier Park was an overgrown inner-city rain forest that some Brazilian lumber company needed to uproot. You needed a machete to clear a path to the playground. The sandbox was an uninhabitable breeding ground for tetanus and typhus. Shards of broken glass and spent bullet shells outnumbered grains of sand by a ratio of four to one. Hypodermic needles nosed through this shimmering sinkhole like rusted punji sticks.

Despite our pleas for a pardon, Mom invoked the death penalty and sentenced us to an afternoon at the park. For the record, the condemned ate last meals of liverwurst and mustard on white bread and drank grape Kool-Aid (extra scoop of sugar) before departing. We were somberly alternating turns on the only working swing when two girls about ten years old, smoking cigarettes and sharing sips from a canned piña colada, approached us. The taller of the two was wearing denim overalls and had so many pink and blue barrettes clipped to the thinning patches of braided hair on her head it looked as though she was under attack by a swarm of plastic moths. The other girl had on orange polyester hot pants and a matching polka dot halter top that was so small it barely succeeded in halting her two BB-sized nipples. Her hair was heavily greased into a rigid elliptical disk that sat precariously on the crown of her head. Every few seconds she’d stoop down to pick up a discarded needle and deposit it in her little red Naugahyde purse. She resembled a Vietnamese woman wearing a straw hat and toiling in a paddy. I listened for bleating water buffalo but heard only the bigger one’s mouth.

“Get out of our swing now!” she shouted at Nicole. Nicole wanted to get off the swing, but she was catatonic with fear. It didn’t help that out of sheer nervousness Christina and I kept pushing, propelling her stiff frame higher and faster.

Kicking off their dime store flip-flops, the two badly coiffed bullies marched through the sandbox without a flinch or grimace. A little diaper-clad boy waddled up, blew a kazoo tribunal, and heralded the dyspeptic duo: “That my sister Fas’ Betty and her bestest friend Vamp a Nigger on the Regular Veronica. They fixin’ to kick y’all’s ass.” Betty and Veronica went into a loud hands-on-hips, call-and-response, head-bobbing tirade on how they owned the entire park from the calcified jungle gym to the busted teeter-totter. Betty’s braids stood on end as she demanded that Nicole get off the swing before she heated up every piece of broken glass in the sandbox, affixed them to the end of one of those pointy 7-Eleven Slurpee straws, and blew glass bubbles in her tight black bourgeoise booty.

The thought of this snake-haired demon shoving molten glass in her rectum gorgonized Nicole even further. Her sphincter tightened and her rock-hard butt sat heavy in the swing. Betty picked up a piece of broken glass, lit a Bic lighter, and teasingly passed the piece of glass through the flame, her fireproof fingers impervious to the heat. Nicole’s hands fastened themselves to the chains; her legs spread out in front of her and locked at the knees. Mistaking our silent petrification for hincty insolence, Betty and Veronica tried to rush us. The alcohol must have affected their bullying judgments, because they charged into Nicole chin first just as her legs were in the high kicking upstroke of a swing filled with panic-stricken kinetics. Fas’ Betty caught a sneaker in the trachea and Veronica Vamp a Nigger something-or-the-other got kicked in the solar plexus.

Wiggling in spasmodic waves like dying fish on the filthy playground, the girls somehow managed to find enough air to moan raspy Miles Davis “motherfuckers” and threats that every ex-con cousin, pyromaniac auntie, serial killer uncle, and pit bull in the neighborhood would soon be coming to “put that head out” and “peel our caps.” Within moments, as if some silent gangster medical alert alarm had gone off, a small army of nepotistic enforcers magically appeared at the entrance near the basketball courts, parting the underbrush and yelling, “Y’all fucking with my cousins?” The three of us instantaneously burst into a waterfall of tears. Begging for a sympathetic détente, Christina and I mindlessly continued to push Nicole’s swing. Her whooshing arc through the air, accompanied by the rusty swing set’s rhythmic creak, became a foreboding, metronomic pendulum counting down our deaths. “We didn’t know! We didn’t know! Please leave us alone.” A screaming vortex of punches and kicks answered our pleas with a firm ignorantia juris neminem excusat.

The ghetto intelligentsia had kindly provided the young Kaufmans with our first lesson in street smartology: never, ever cry in public — it only makes it worse. If we hadn’t bawled we might have been let off with a polite cursory thrashing, just to maintain protective appearances. Since we sobbed like wailing refugee babies, we received a full-scale beatdown designed to toughen us up for the inevitable cataclysmic Italian opera ending of black tragedy. Usually when the fat lady sings in a black community, it’s at a funeral. I’ve seen kids get hit by cars, ice cream trucks, bullets, billyclubs, and not even whimper. The only time it’s permissible to cry is when you miss the lottery by one number or someone close to you passes away. Then you can cry once, but only once. There is no brooding; niggers got to get up and go to work tomorrow.

My sisters and I walked home routed, picking bits of gravel out of one another’s tattered Afros and holding our heads back to stanch our nosebleeds. I thought about Betty’s flecked bouffant, Veronica’s flying-saucer-like do, and the oily Jheri curls, rock-hard pomade cold waves, and horsehair weaves of our attackers, and I realized that every day for the black American is a bad hair day.

“We haven’t seen Daddy since we moved.”

“Mommy told me he knows where we live, but he won’t come by.”

“Fuck that nigger.”

“Listen to you. So, tough guy, I think Betty and Veronica kind of like you. Did you notice the tender look in their eyes when they stomped on your head? Which one you gonna choose, Archiekins?”

“Oh, be quiet. I could swear that little baby knee-dropped me in the balls.”

The night of the Reynier Park beating I slept with a cold pack on the left side of my face and dreamed I lived in a museum diorama with the Hottentot Venus and Ishi, Last of the Yahi. Surrounded by stuffed mastodons and saber-toothed tigers, we played dominoes on a small round table in front of a hastily oil-painted backdrop of the Hollywood Hills. All the dominoes were blank, and inexplicably I spent long periods of time considering my next play. Ish and Hottie would scream at me in Z-talk to hurry up. “Plizzay dizza fizzucking dizzzominoes!” As I pulled dominos from the pile, I tried to explain that it wasn’t a matter of playing a blank domino, it was a matter of playing the right blank domino. “Dizzumb bizzastard.” At feeding time the caretaker would give me a pack of Oreos and the visitors would yell “Cannibal” and throw their yellow metal visitor buttons at me. The buttons turned to snow as they passed through the glass partition.

I woke up comfortable in the knowledge that I was a freak. If I had walked the streets with a carnival barker to promote my one-boy sideshow, I could have made some money. “Hurry! Hurry! Step right up! All the way from the drifting sands of whitest Santa Monica, the whitest Negro in captivity, Gunnar the Persnickety Zulu. He says ‘whom,’ plays Parcheesi, and folks, you won’t believe it, but he has absolutely no ass what-so-ever.”

My inability to walk the walk or talk the talk led to a series of almost daily drubbings. In a world where body and spoken language were currency, I was broke as hell. Corporeally mute, I couldn’t saunter or bojangle my limbs with rubbery nonchalance. I stiffly parade-marched around town with an embalmed soul, a rheumatic heart, and Frankenstein’s autonomic nervous system. Puberty wasn’t supposed to be like this. The textbooks said something about a little acne, some chest hair, and that I could use this special time in life to grow closer to my parents by discussing my nocturnal emissions with them. “Mom! Dad! Six cc’s of jizz last night. Am I a man or what?” Instead, my adolescence was like going to clown college. I found myself clumsily walking on a set of size thirteen feet, bumbling through the streets of Hillside and ricocheting off inanimate objects and into the pathways of hypertensive and equally embattled pedestrians. I constantly found myself cowering under raised umbrellas and fists, hurriedly apologizing and kowtowing for forgiveness for stepping on someone’s heel.

I learned the hard way that social norms in Santa Monica were unforgivable breaches of proper Hillside etiquette. I’d been taught to look someone in the eye when speaking to them. On the streets of Hillside, even the briefest eye contact wasn’t a simple faux pas but an interpersonal trespass that merited retaliation. Spotting a potential comrade, I’d catch his eye with a raised eyebrow that said, “Hey, guy, what’s up?” — a glance I hoped would open the lines of communication. These silent greetings were often returned in spades, accompanied by the angry rejoinder “Nigger, what the fuck you looking at?” and a pimp slap that echoed in my ears for a week. I’d rub my stinging cheek, dumbfounded, and find myself staring into a pair of dark sullen eyes that read, “Verboten! Stressed-out ghetto child at work. Keep out.”

The people of Hillside treat society the way society treats them. Strangers and friends are suspect and guilty until proven innocent. Instant camaraderie beyond familial ties doesn’t exist. It takes more than wearing the same uniform to be accepted among one’s ghetto peers. The German spies in those late-night World War II movies who tried to infiltrate U.S. Army units by memorizing baseball trivia and learning to chew gum with a certain snappy American flair had it easier than I did. I couldn’t just roll up on some folks and say, “I know the Black National Anthem, a killer sweet-potato pie recipe, and how to double-dutch blindfolded. Will you be my nigger?” Dues had to be paid, or you wasn’t joining the union.

I had my overbite corrected and an impacted molar removed when I approached a crew of kids sitting on the fender of a metallic gold 1976 Monte Carlo with white interior. The boys were playing the dozens, snapping on each other’s mothers; I walked directly up to the fattest kid, playfully punched him in his doughy shoulder, and said, “Hey, I don’t even know your name, but your mother soooooo black she sneezes chimney soot and pisses Yoo-Hoo.” The family dentist said she couldn’t have done a better job herself.

The Hillside tribe wasn’t going for no ghetto fakery. If I wanted to come correct, I’d have to complete some unspecified warrior vision quest. The gods of blackness would let me know when I was black enough to be trusted. I walked the dark streets of Hillside with my head down, looking for loose change and signs that would place me on the path to right-on soul brother righteousness.

In early September, bruised and toothless, I realized that my search for companionship was becoming too painful. Trying to foist myself on these people wasn’t going to work; I needed a more transcendental approach to locating my soul. To achieve this soulful enlightenment, I started playing Thoreau in the Montgomery Ward department store over in the La Cienega Mall, turning its desolate sporting goods department into a makeshift Walden. I moved the pond, a flimsy dark blue plastic wading pool decaled with big-eyed, absurdly happy black and yellow ducks, next to the eight-man tent tucked away in the wilds of the camping section. The tent was pitched in a four-tree forest of plastic redwoods and dead nylon leaves in various states of factory decomposition. A phalanx of cuddly foam forest creatures, née archery targets, roamed the grounds: a whitetail deer with its nose in a Kodiak bear’s ass, and a wild turkey propped against a Ping-Pong paddle so it wouldn’t fall over on its side. A few passes of aerosol mosquito repellent and I had all the scents and sounds of the wild. “Ms. Palazzo, you’re wanted in shipping.”

Fun Facts for Department Store Campers

Did you know that you can tell the temperature by counting the number of high-pitched department store dings in a minute, then dividing that number by five?

I spent entire days in the tent, snuggled up in a down sleeping bag reading Kant, Hegel, and the Greek tragedies by flashlight. Whenever I felt the need to stretch my legs, I’d break out my Cub Scout compass and go orienteering around the store. Grabbing a fishing pole, I’d blaze trails from the glacier-white kitchen appliances up the steep back stairwells and traverse the lawn furniture outback until I reached the bluffs of television sets that overlooked the pet store. From the balcony I’d cast my line into the aquariums below, sip a cream soda, and commune with nature, waiting patiently for a bite. The end of a good day’s fishing would yield a cooler filled with angelfish, oscars, and tiger barbs, but since I wasn’t much of an angler, it was usually guppies, guppies, and more guppies.

The day after Labor Day I was sitting in the tent reading Homer when I overheard some voices outside excitedly commenting on the nearby display of hunting rifles and bows and arrows. Ahh, intrepid explorers! Cautiously, I peeked my nappy head out from between the tent flaps and saw a group of black and Mexican boys a little older than I assembled in Household Weaponry. The glass case was broken and most of the guys were peering down the barrels of shotguns. One was passing a sharp Bowie knife under the nose of the terrified salesperson and asking if he could slash some prices. If I planned to trade pelts for foodstuffs and form a working relationship with this barbarous bunch, I’d have to try the avuncular approach.

I placed both hands in my pockets and sauntered over to the group in as nonthreatening a manner as possible. Each kid was dressed from head to toe in various shades of blue. Baby blue baseball caps, navy blue scarfs, and from the back pockets of those loose-fitting midnight blue chinos, Dodger blue handkerchiefs bloomed like cottony autumn delphiniums. What did the Venice Beach queers say about dark blue hankies in the right rear pocket — was it dominant or submissive?

While I tried to remember, a dwarf-sized freckle-faced big-headed redbone kid the others called Pumpkin nocked an arrow into a powerful compound bow. He took aim at a smug-looking mannequin who was standing up in an aluminum dingy, holding a rod and reel and modeling a black-and-red checkerboard lumberjack jacket with a matching hat, the kind with wool earflaps. One of Pumpkin’s cronies gently placed an apple on the dummy’s head and stepped back. Pumpkin lifted the bow, pulled back on the string till his hand touched his ear, shot an arrow that pierced the mannequin’s forehead and exited through the back of his plaster skull, landing somewhere in the young miss section.

“I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to the earth I know not where,” I said by way of introducing myself. The pint-sized William Tell looked in my direction and twisted his hands in some arthritic gesticulation. I interpreted his double-jointed gesture as a sign of welcome and replied in kind with the only high sign I knew. I raised the back of my left hand to my chin and wiggled my fingers, giving him the high sign popularized by Stymie and Alfalfa in the Our Gang comedies. I felt I was speaking a sort of gangland Esperanto, but Pumpkin stiffened, pursed his lips, and scrunched his face in displeasure. To dampen his anger, I commented on the expensive sheepskin quiver strapped across his chest.

“Nice quiver.”

“Quiver? You saying I’m scared of your ass?”

“No, I’m talking about the holder for arrow shafts.”

“You saying you Shaft? Oh, you that cat, that baaaad mother … shutyourmouth, but I’m talkin’ about Shaft. Oh, I can dig it, motherfucker.”

Not knowing what to say next in a game of who’s on first that was becoming increasingly hostile, I said nothing and looked longingly back at the tent, but his stare hadn’t yet given me permission to go anywhere. Pumpkin and each of his merry men in turn threw up the hand signal again, waiting for me to acknowledge it. I knew better than to give the Little Rascal high sign again, so I stalled.

“That thing you do with your hands is awfully cryptic.”

“Damn straight, nigger, because I’m a goddamn Crip. Where from, punk? Represent, fool, fo’ me and my potnahs break you off something proper-like.”

I felt someone place that apple that had once been on top of the mannequin’s head on my head. Pumpkin furrowed his brow, nocked a shiny brass-tipped arrow in his bow, and said, “Wuddup, fool? You Cuz or Blood?”

My shiftless free will leaned lazily against my brain stem and flipped a coin onto its clammy palm, whistling a chorus of “eeny, meany, miney, moe, catch a nigger by the toe.” From somewhere inside my head a game show host with a majestic voice welcomed me to Final Jeopardy. “What is Blood?” I answered.

The Little Lord Fauntleroys stopped shuffling in place, clenched their teeth, and stood up straight. Their fists knuckled into iron black ballpeens.

“Ennnhhh,” a tall, crazy-looking Mexican boy in the rear said.

“Wink, tell the boy what he’s won as a consolation prize.”

The circle of boys tightened.

“Okay, Bob. Our contestant has won a matching set of contusions and bruises with possibly some lacerations of his internal organs courtesy of that infamous gang, the” — my eyes closed and someone rolled his tongue in a mock drumroll — “Gun Totin’ Hooligans.”

The quills of an arrow brushed past my ear and I turned just fast enough to see it plow into the foam head of the deer with its nose nuzzled in the bear’s ass. The deer wobbled, then fell on its side, dead. The bear looked relieved and the blows crackled and crunched on my head, rearranging my already lumpy phrenological topography. Steel-toed boots explored the depths of my rib cage and waves of pain rapelled up and down my spine. Periodically, my persecutors would rest and step back from my bloodied carcass, share bites of the apple, and admire their handiwork. “Yo, Joe, how do you get both eyes to swell with such symmetry and purple robustness?” Then they’d swallow, spit the seeds in my general direction, and resume whipping my ass. Between thumpings I remained optimistic, hopeful that this would be the beatdown that certified my worthiness, stamped me with the ghetto seal of approval.

Maybe this was one of those jumping-in rituals I’d seen on the PBS documentaries titled Our Youth at Risk or something equally forlorn. My mother would watch these melodramatic shows, angrily addressing the screen. “What they talking about, ‘our youth’? Those aren’t my kids, and if they were, they’d damn sure be at risk. At risk of me putting some euthanasia shotgun pellets in their bellies.” I’d never thought that one day I would be in the center of a maelstrom of “our youth,” pacifying myself with thoughts of possible acceptance into their world. Maybe the Gun Totin’ Hooligans would beat me senseless, then revive me with dousing buckets of water, welcoming me into the fold with snappy French Foreign Legion kisses on both cheeks and Leo Buscaglia gangster bear hugs. “My nigger. What it be like, black? Gimme some love, dawg.” The secret password would be whispered in my ear, and the sacred soul shake taught. I’d raise off the linoleum floor with swollen lips and a gang affiliation, pumping my fist in the air, screaming to the gods, “That’s right, motherfuckers, you don’t know who you fucking with, I’m down with the Gun Totin’ Hooligans. Get back, Jack. Up your milk money before I regulate you and all your punk-ass disciples.”

I was squirming on the ground, contorted into a bloody fetal mess, too sore even to groan when they rifled my pockets. Finding nothing but the book I had been reading, one of the fistic coterie bemusedly read the title. “The Odyssey? Ain’t that some club over on Slauson and Normandie?” He carelessly flung it back at me, and the book fluttered through the air like a teal-colored paperback butterfly and landed lightly on my chest, face down and open somewhere in the middle. I picked it up, looked at the triumphant, swaggering backs of my conquerors, and read aloud:

Athena, gray-eyed goddess, then replied:

Take heart: you need not fear such things.

But now, in the recess of that beguiling cave,

let’s set your treasures, there they will be safe.

Not the ironic profundity I hoped for, but it portended better times. Junior high started in a week; I couldn’t wait. I wondered what the nurse’s name would be and if she disinfected cuts and slashes with Mercurochrome or the wimpy ouchless spray. I’d have to remember to ask my mother to call the office to ensure they knew how to make butterfly bandages out of those “flesh”-colored Band-Aids.

four

I ARRIVED forty-five minutes early for my first day of school at Manischewitz Junior High. A tattered and faded U.S. flag snapped solidly in the wind, full of bluster despite bearing only half its original fifty stars. The stars that remained hung on to the blue field by only one or two points. The putrid pink, dirty gray, and filthy baby blue of Old Glory had seen better days.

I opened the steel front door and stepped into the deserted vestibule, looking for some middle school guidance. There was none to be found. No smiling faces welcomed me to the smelting factory of young widgethood. No signs directed me toward fall registration. I walked through the metal detector and went looking for the dean’s office to pick up my schedule. Walking through the halls, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the glossy panorama photographs of Manischewitz graduating classes past that adorned the walls.

CLASS OF ’23: Scads of white students and teachers dressed in pleated flannel skirts and pants. A young colored custodian with a mop in his hand stands next to a metal bucket. The name tag on his overalls reads “Melvin Samuels.” A close examination of the principal reveals the outline of a flask in the breast pocket of his suit jacket.

CLASS OF ’41: Other than the smattering of Asian faces lousing up the Anglo homogeneity, very similar to the previous photograph. A student in the front row holds a sign that reads, “Get out of jail soon, Melvin. The wastebaskets miss you.”

CLASS OF ’42: There are only two male teachers, one of whom has his arms wrapped around the waists of two female teachers. The other stands in the middle of the nursing staff, holding a stethoscope and smiling from ear to ear. There are no Asian students.

In the years following 1944 the staff gets fatter and there are always three or four black and Chicano faces dotting the photos like grease smudges. Each year’s colored faces bear a striking resemblance to those from the previous year. Unless there is a change in sex, it’s hard to tell if the minority kids are the progeny of single families passing through the school system or the same kids repeating ninth grade year after year.

CLASS OF ’67: The first class photo in color. The student population is still overwhelmingly white, but they no longer wear staid plain white shirts and blouses to school. Instead they sport groovy colorful tartans, stripes, and paisleys. One teacher in the front row is wearing an African dashiki and giving the peace sign. Standing in the back next to a metal bucket and holding a mop is a graying janitor outfitted in a blue jumpsuit. His name tag reads “Melvin Samuels.”

CLASS OF ’68: If it weren’t for the same crew-cut gym teacher and bifocaled principal standing like bookends in both photographs, this picture could be a negative of the Class of ’67’s portrait. The faces of these graduating ninth-graders are dark and overwhelmingly Latino and black. Mr. Samuels is standing in the back, dressed in a bright orange leisure suit and smoking a cigarette, with a mop slung over his shoulder like a rifle. The teacher with the dashiki has a black eye and his arm in a sling.

CLASS OF ’86: The last photograph in the series. The number of students in the picture is smaller than ever before. The faces, including those of most of the staff, are Latino and black, with a sprinkling of Asians. A man in gray overalls whose name tag reads “Mr. Samuels, Jr.” is standing in the back, mopless and sharing a joint with a couple of kids. Every boy in the front row has his penis sticking out of his button-fly jeans. Close inspection reveals the outline of a flask in the breast pocket of the principal’s suit.

* * *

The dean’s office was just around the corner. The receptionist awoke when he heard the heavy wooden door slam shut. Wiping the sleep from his eyes, he looked up at the clock.

“Damn, you early.” He asked my name and retrieved my schedule from a thick leather binder with “Gunnar Kaufman — Records” embossed on it in shiny gold flake. I’d never seen my records. Supposedly filled with my black marks, accolades, test scores, and aptitude results, this fabled folder was preordained to follow me throughout my entire life, passing from school to university to employer to jailer and finally ending in the hands of Saint Peter or the Devil.

“You’re the first one here. The principal hasn’t even arrived yet. Is there some trouble at home?”

“No.”

The receptionist skimmed my file, using his tie as a reading ruler. He glanced up at me, shook his head, returned his gaze to the file, and spoke.

“You’re not from around here, are you?”

“Nope.”

Handing me my schedule, he grabbed my wrist and, in the sympathetic voice adults use to raise money for handicapped and troubled kids on late-night television, said, “Boy, you know if you find yourself having trouble getting to and from class, the school provides an escort service and you can be placed in protective custody.”

“No thanks,” I said. I couldn’t stop smiling at the irony. The police thought I was a potential criminal mastermind and the school district thought I was an easy target for junior high hit men in training. Seeing that I’d touched a protective nerve, I pointed toward my records and asked the receptionist, in the helpless voice teens use to ask adults for a favor, “What’s the aptitude part say?”

“I’m not allowed to reveal that without state and parental consent.”

“Come on, man. Be cool. I won’t tell. You can trust me. Look, I’m the first kid in school on the first day of school — is there anything less intimidating than that?”

He opened the eternal dossier, placed his glittery synthetic tie on the page, and started reading. “Okay, it says, ‘Despite his race, subject possesses remarkable intelligence and excellent reasoning and analytical skills. His superb yet raw athletic ability exceeds even the heightened expectations normally accorded those of his ethnicity. Family background is exemplary, and with the proper patriotic encouragement Gunnar Kaufman will make an excellent undercover CIA agent. At a young age he already shows a proclivity for making friends with domestic subversives and betraying them at the drop of a hat.’ Satisfied, Double-O Seven? Your homeroom is on the first floor of the Science Building, next to the vineyard. You’ll see a sign saying Vitis vinifera on your left.”

Amazed at what the government can glean from a few timed tests and laps around the track, I slunk to homeroom imagining I was wearing dark glasses and a trench coat. The halls began to fill with Manischewitz Junior High’s administrative and security personnel, and my best espionage moves served me well. Pressing my back against the walls and peeking coolly around corners, I managed to avoid detection and made it to homeroom twenty minutes early. I opened the door slowly, index fingers loaded and ready to blast holes into any purveyors of injustice not taken in by my stealth. To my disappointment, there were no enemy agents wearing headsets and minding computer consoles.

Homeroom was an antiseptic classroom buzzing not with hostile anti-imperialist activity but with humming overhead fluorescent lights. A pair of dingy felt banners hung at both ends of the room. The purple-on-gold one at the back of the room read, “Karibuni! Bienvenidos! Welcome!” Its obverse gold-on-purple cousin at the front read, “Conceive It! Believe It! Achieve It! Imagina! Cree! Realiza!” I took the middle seat in the middle row. The desk looked like a modern Rosetta stone, etched with penknifed legacies that begged to be deciphered.

Kathleen y Flaco para siempre con alma

Pythagoras the Congruent Truant —

A

²

+B

²

=C square punk busters get killed

Eventually the hallways stopped echoing with the footsteps of the Oxford wingtipped and high-heeled administration. In their place was the sound of brand-new sneakers squeaking on the waxed floors and the heavy clomp of unlaced hiking boots. The walkie-talkie communiqués were soon drowned out by the FM stereo meta-bass of the Barrio Brothers’ morning show on KTTS. Steadily, the students entered the classroom and slid into the empty seats around me. First to arrive were the marsupial mama’s boys and girls. These sheltered kids had spent the entire summer sequestered indoors by overprotective parents. They entered the classroom with pale complexions and squinting like possums to adjust their eyes to the light.

The reformed and borderline students followed. They crept into class, carefully trying to avoid last year’s repercussive behaviors, and sat upright at their desks, face front and hands folded, mumbling their September resolutions to themselves. “This year will be different. I will do my homework. I will not slap Mr. Ellsworth when he calls me a loser. I will only bring my gun to school.” I admired the determination they showed in ignoring their corruptive friends, standing in the doorway and egging them on to join the excursion to McDonald’s for breakfast McMuffins, orange juice, and a joint.

Two minutes before nine o’clock signaled the grand entrance of the fly guys and starlets. Dressed in designer silk suits and dresses, accessorized in ascots, feather boas, and gold, the aloof adolescent pimps and dispassionate divas strolled into homeroom smoking Tiparillos and with a retinue of admirers who carried their books and pulled chairs from desks with maitre d’ suaveness.

I’d never been in a room full of black people unrelated to me before, and as the classroom filled, the growing din was unlike anything I’d ever heard. I sat like a tiny bubble in a boiling cauldron of teenage blackness, wondering where all the heat came from. Kids popped up out of their chairs to shout, whispered, tugged at each other. Homeroom was a raucous orchestral concerto conducted by some unseen maestro. In the middle of this unadulterated realness I realized I was a cultural alloy, tin-hearted whiteness wrapped in blackened copper plating. As my classmates yelled out their schedules and passed contraband across the room, I couldn’t classify anyone by dress or behavior. The boisterous were just as likely to be in the academically enriched classes as the silent. The clotheshorses stood as much chance of being on a remedial track as the bummy kids with brown bag lunches. Many kids, no matter how well dressed, didn’t have notebooks.

At exactly nine o’clock the bell rang and Ms. Schaefer stormed into the room. Disheveled and visibly nervous, she never bothered to introduce herself or say good morning. She wrote her name on the board in shaky, wavering strokes and took attendance. The class instantly interpreted her behavior as a display of lack of trust and concern. That day I learned my second ghetto lesson: never let on that you don’t trust someone. Even if that person has bad intentions toward you, he will take offense at your lack of trust.

Ms. Schaefer spat off the names like salted peanut shells.

“Wardell Adams?”

“Here.”

“Varnell Alvarez.”

“Aquí.”

“Pellmell Atkinson?”

“Presentemente.”

“Praise-the-Lord Benson?”

“Yupper.”

“Lakeesha Caldwell?”

“What?”

“Ayesha Dunwiddy?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Chocolate Fondue Edgerton.”

“That’s my name, ask me again and you’ll be walking with a cane.”

“I don’t know how to pronounce the next one.”

“You pronounce it like it sounds, bitch. Maritza Shakaleema Esperanza the goddess Tlazotéotl Eladio.”

“So you’re here.”

“Do crack pipes get hot?”

Then the gangsters trickled in, ten minutes late, tattooed and feisty. “Say man, woman, teacher, whatever you call yourself. You had better mark Hope-to-Die Ranford a.k.a. Pythagoras here and in the house. Nobody better be sitting at my desk. I had the shit last year and I want it back for good luck.”

“Mr. Pythagoras, take any available seat for now, okay? Who’s that with you?”

“Why you ask him I can speak for my damn self? This is Velma the Ludicrous Mistress Triple Bitch of Mischief Vinson.”

Ms. Schaefer’s unfazed approach to maintaining classroom comportment didn’t last long. By the end of the year we called her Ms. Sally Ride, because she was always blowing up at us.

After growing accustomed to police officers pulling students out of class for impromptu interrogations, bomb scares, and locker searches, I started to make friends, mostly with the nerdier students. We’d meet after school at the designated neighborhood safe houses on the ghetto geeks’ underground railroad: the library, the fire station’s milk-and-cookie open houses. The safest place was the basement of the Canaan Church of Christ Almighty God Our Savior You Betcha Inc. Pretending to be engrossed in Bible study, we traded shareware porn samplers downloaded onto our home computers. The computer was the only place where we had true freedom of assembly. Electronic mail allowed us shut-in sissies to talk our dorkian language uncensored by bullies who shoved paper towels soaked in urine down our throats and teachers who awoke from their catnaps only long enough to tell us to shut up. I tried to appreciate Spock’s draconian logic, Asimov’s automaton utopias, and the metaphysical excitement of fighting undead ghouls and hobgoblins in Dungeons and Dragons, but to me Star Trek was little more than the Federalist Papers with warp drives and phasers. “Set Democracy on stun. One alien, one vote.” I was cooler than this, I had to be — I just didn’t know how to show my latent hipness to the world.

The change in semesters brought new electives and a chance to make new friends. All the exciting choices, like Print and Electric and Wine-making Shop, were gang member bastions and closed to insouciant seventh-graders such as myself. During spring registration I stood in line behind sloe-eyed bangers and listened to kind liberal guidance counselors derail their dreams. “Buster, I know you want to take Graphic Design, but I’m placing you in Metal Shop. Mr. Buck Smith will know how to handle you, and it’ll be a good prerequisite for license plate pressing. You’ve got to plan for the future, Buster, ol’ boy. Can’t be too shortsighted, Mr. Brown. Remember, the longest jail sentence starts with one day.”

I was left with a pitiable choice between sycophant havens: Home Economics II and Drama. A memory of last semester’s beginning home ec, where Lizard Higgins’s contorted, charred, and smoldering body was lifted into the ambulance and then sped toward the burn unit, was fresh in my mind. Drunk from sneaking sips of cooking sherry behind Ms. Giggscombe’s back, Lizard spilled some libations on his clothes and absently leaned too close to his peach flambé assignment. Using his alcohol-soaked Washington Redskins football jersey as kindling, the fire crept up Lizard’s torso and enveloped him in an eerie blue flame. (Ms. Kramer, the science teacher, said it was the kirsch and slivovitz distillates that accounted for the blue flame.) In a panic, Lizard ran, somersaulted, and cartwheeled down the hall, desperately trying to extinguish his blazing body by trying to drop, roll, and cover all at the same time. Ms. Giggscombe extinguished him with a flying body tackle and an old army blanket.

I showed up for Drama with a blithesome smile on my face and greeted my computer geek friends with cheery hellos and Shakespearean “How now, nuncles.” The citywide Shakespearean Soliloquy Championship was in two weeks. Our teacher, Ms. Cantrell, determined to show that her impoverished Negro thespians could compete with kids at the well-funded oceanfront and Valley schools, entered us and notified the media that her domesticated niggers would soon be on parade. In a predictable attempt to inject some cultural relevance, she decided to do Othello and assigned parts by having the class draw roles from a hat. There weren’t enough characters to go around, so each monologue would be learned by two students. The girls drew from a church bonnet and the boys from a bowler. Gretchen and Ursula, the bespectacled stone foxes of dweebdom, each drew Desdemona and pleaded with Ms. Cantrell to cast me in the lead role as the noble but paranoid blackamoor. Thankfully, Osiris, god of shy little black boys, fated me to play Iago, the scheming Venetian puppeteer, sparing me from having to place any necromantic kisses on Gretchen’s or Ursula’s cheek.

My dramatic confrere was Nicholas Scoby, a thuggish boy who sat in the back of the class, ears sealed in a pair of top-of-the-line Sennheiser stereo headphones and each of his twiggish limbs parked in a chair of its own. Rocking back and forth in his seat and seemingly oblivious to Ms. Cantrell and life’s lesson plan, Nicholas Scoby seemed like an autistic hoodlum. His pea head lolled precariously on his wiry neck like a gyroscope; he snapped his fingers in some haphazard pattern and muttered to himself in a beatnik word-salad jibberish. “Dig it. This nigger’s tonality is wow. Like hep. Like hepnotic. It’s contrapuntal glissando phraseology to bopnetic postmodernism. Blow, man, blow. Crazy.” Much to the dismay of those who paid attention to the burned-out teachers, Scoby was a straight-A student.

Ms. Cantrell divided the class into study groups. I reluctantly approached my partner, his eyes closed, a stream of guttural pablum escaping from his mouth accompanied by a barrage of spittle: “Bleeeet eet eeeet raaaaant dit dit dent ting ting. Send me, Jackson, send me. Oop-pop-a-da.” Tapping Nicholas on the shoulder, I interrupted. “Hey man, what you listening to?”

Apparently able to read lips, he arched his eyebrows to the highest regions of his forehead and answered, “Cannonball Adderley.”

“Who?”

“Jazz, daddio, jazz.” Then carefully removing his headphones, he continued, his pallid ears clashing with his brown-veneer skin. “You don’t listen to jazz? The only truly American art form other than the sit-com.”

“I listen to jazz. David Sanborn, Al Di Meola, and Spyro Gyra. Jeff Lorber is funky.”

“Funky? Fool, that ain’t jazz any more than Al Jolson and Pat Boone is soul. That shit is fusion. A superficial fusion at that. A little black style with weepy bland white sedative sensibilities. White boys with the blues tinged with some Caribbean high-end percussiveness.”

“So what should I listen to?”

“Do like me, start at the beginning.”

“With what, the New Orleans Rhythm Jazz Kings?”

“No fool, with a. My plan is to listen to everything recorded before 1975 in alphabetical order. No white band leaders, sidemen cool. No faux African back-to-the-bush bullshit recorded post-1965. Though I’m going to have to make an exception for Anita O’Day, she could pipe. What’s your name, cuz?”

“Gunnar. Gunnar Kaufman.”

“You dark as fuck for someone with Teutonic blood.”

“Naw, strictly Negro hemoglobins.”

Nicholas introduced himself with a grin. “Nicholas Scoby.”

“I know.”

“Do I have a cool-ass name or what? Sounds like I’m on some old secret agent cloak ’n’ dagger type shit. I should get a card to hand out to motherfuckers, ‘Nick Scoby — Espionage.’”

“You wanna learn the monologue together?”

“Wouldn’t it be cool to be the most famous spy in the world? Makes no practical sense, everybody’d know I’m spying on them, but I’d be appealing to the inflated superego of the evildoer. Be a bad motherfucker, CIA needs to get with me. Yeah, nigger, let’s get together later this week. Cool? Later.”

He called me “nigger.” My euphoria was as palpable as the loud clap of our hands colliding in my first soul shake. My transitional slide into step two was a little stiff, but I made up for it with a loud finger snap as our hands parted. Scoby gently placed his headphones over his ears and I skated away cool, dipped my right shoulder toward the ground, and with some dapper spinal curvature pimp-daddied back to my seat. I picked up the mimeographed Shakespearean sonnets Ms. Cantrell had handed out at the start of class, pressed my nose against the damp page, and inhaled the delirium of blue-inked love poems and newfound friendship. I’d have to remember to ask Nicholas Scoby about the blues. I stood up to read.

That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect,

For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair;

The ornament of beauty is suspect,

A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air.

“More erudition,” Ms. Cantrell said, “more erudition.”

Scoby and I rehearsed in his bedroom while his mom sat in the basement den watching old tapes of her roller derby days at the Shrine Auditorium. The Scobys relocated from Chicago’s West Side when the Windy City Tornados traded their star jammer, Beleeta “Queen Nairobi” Scoby, to the Los Angeles Thunderbirds for Skeets McNeely, Fat Jasper Perkins, and fifty sets of brake pads. During study breaks we’d join her on the couch, munching cheese puffs and directing muffled cheers at the television set.

I never understood the game, but invariably with time running out and the Thunderbirds down by five points, a plump man in a garish burgundy three-piece suit waved Ms. Scoby off the bench. Queen Nairobi skated around the ring in long slow strides to the roar of the small but rambunctious crowd of drunks, kids in tattered T-shirts, and wheelchair-bound senior citizens. Measuring her opposition and plotting her offensive strategy, she’d fasten the chin strap to a shiny yellow helmet that sat on her beachball-sized Afro like a plastic yarmulke. Picking up speed in the banked turn, Scoby’s mom would extend a skinny arm to Big Dan Party Hardy, who’d whip her into a gauntlet of obese bearded and big-tittied enemy buffalos on wheels. Arms cocked at the elbows for combat, she wriggled and scratched her way to hero worship, scoring points by ducking under the legs of the St. Louis Gateways, dodging the sucker punches of the Pennsylvania Black Lung Sputums, and sailing over the body blocks of the Bay Area Seismics. Skating on one leg, arms flailing like windmills, Ms. Scoby was so athletic that she sent the opposition hurtling over the rails and into the ringside seats, where crazed fans pelted them with fistfuls of stale popcorn, cups of flat beer, and metal folding chairs. As Nicholas’s mother rolled off the track, bent at hips and unsmiling, the PA announcer would yell, “Six big T-bird points!” and the big man in the burgundy suit would greet the winded Queen Nairobi with a kiss. They were oblivious to the flying aluminum walkers and whisky bottles that zipped past their intertwined bodies, and flashes of sweet pink tongue victory darted from their lips.

Nicholas and I returned to our studies.

“Yo, is that mauve-suited kumquat your father?”

“I think so. Mama won’t say. They call him Gene ‘the Dream’ Beasley.”

“You got any dreams, yo?”

“Yeah, I have a dream. Dream and a half, really. You ever hear of a Brocken specter?”

“Who?”

Nicholas put down his monologue. “A Brocken specter. If you stand on real high ground, say Mount Everest, with your back to the sun and look down, you’ll see your shadow on top of a fogbank or a cloud. That shadow is a Brocken specter.”

“Oh snap, your shadow on a cloud? That’s cool as hell.”

“But wait, there’s more. As an added bonus for those who act early, you get your very own glory.”

“Your own what?”

“Your own glory. As you look down at your shadow, there’s a corona around your head. Even if you’re standing next to a gang a niggers looking at they own Brocken specters, you can only see the glory around the shadow of your head.”

“That’s deep.”

“Gunnar, do you have any dreams?”

“Nope, but listening to you carry on, I’m working on one now. I once heard about some shit called a Flächenblitz.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s lightning in reverse. A Flächenblitz strikes up from the top of a cumulonimbus cloud and ends in clear air.”

“You’re a fucking reincarnated Prussian Hun Bohemian. No doubt in my mind, homeboy.”

* * *

The city Shakespearean soliloquy finals were held at Anita Bryant Junior High in the Valley. First to arrive, Ms. Cantrell’s third-period drama class entered the plush auditorium and sat in the back, testing the incredible acoustics with ghetto whoops and urban yodels. “Hey yo! Awwwight! Manischewitz Drama Club in the house, y’all! Yo mama-mama-ma-ma-aaa!” We were prepared to do well; we had all memorized our monologues, and our Old English diction was popping with sexual innuendo and abba rhyme schemes. What we weren’t prepared for was the lily-white cocksureness of the students from the Valley and the ritzy L.A. County woods: Brentwood, Westwood, and Woodland Hills. The auditorium filled with suburbanites costumed in Renaissance finery. The white kids had metamorphosed from surfers, stoners, and student council members into medieval gold-digging courtesans and horny lords. We picked the wrong day to wear our “Don’t ask me 4 shit” shirts. The white girls glided onto the stage in towering hairstyles and billowy velvet gowns, and the white boys wore ruffled silk shirts, skintight pants, peacock-feathered hats, and pointy suede Robin Hood shoes. It didn’t seem to matter much when they flubbed their lines; their parents and housekeepers stood and applauded, and the judges murmured among themselves in low voices and nodded approvingly.

Whenever Manischewitz Junior High trundled onstage, our hiking boots clomped between deliveries and our baggy jeans hindered our emotive histrionics. When we stumbled over a line of Shakespearean blather, the judges looked down at their score sheets with self-satisfied smirks, tapped their pencils, and stared at us with bored expressions masquerading as smug impartiality. Paul Robeson was turning over in his grave.

By the time Scoby’s turn to recite came, we had managed to cultivate an atmosphere of good-natured white liberal pity among the audience. Scoby shakily introduced his monologue; “Othello, act one, scene three. After plotting with Cassio to kill Othello, Iago…” Then Nicholas, choking on the patronizing sympathy, began. “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse … ummm…” He froze. Gathering his wits, he waved his arm majestically across his chest. “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse … fuck.”

The crowd started cheering him on as if he were one of those kids stricken with cystic fibrosis taking his first baby steps on a telethon at two o’clock in the morning: “Come on, guy, you can do it.” Two white girls, one of whom had just nailed Desdemona minutes earlier, boldly strode onstage and massaged Scoby’s rock-hard hypertensive shoulders and whispered honey-voiced encouragement in his ear: “You can do it, big boy.” Nicholas blurted out a spiritless “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse…” that died as soon as it left his lips. He slunk off the stage, his face hidden in his hands, his ears ringing with a deafening applause for failing. The defeated Manischewitz Drama Club sank in our seats and drowned under a tidal wave of shame.

A booming announcement from the emcee jolted the crowd from its collective condescension. “Next up, Manischewitz’s Gunnar Kaufman as Iago, Othello, act two, scene one.” I sauntered onto the stage and squinted into the spotlight, never feeling more misplaced, more burdenish, mo’ niggerish. I found it difficult to breathe. I was growing allergic to the powdery mask of Elizabethan whiteface. I could hear Scoby whimpering in the back as I cleared my throat.

“I’m junking Iago’s envy-laden ‘What a stupid moor-ronic nigger this Othello is’ speech for a less traditional bit from King Lear, act two, scene two. Note how the fusion of Goneril’s vile lackey Oswald and the loyal Kent’s lines give the monologue a self-hating and introspective spin.” Gazing directly at the judges, I grabbed my dick and ripped into my makeshift monologue. “What dost thou know me for? A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking whoreson … one-trunk-inheriting slave … beggar, Nigger … I will beat you into clamorous whining if thou deny’st the least syllable of thy addition.” I walked off the stage into a stunned auditorium of dazed crash dummies adrift in post-car-accident silence. At the top of my voice I yelled, “Is everyone all right? Anyone hurt?”

On the ride home Scoby saved me a seat in the back of the bus. I sat next to him, and like two shock absorbers we bounced up and down in the initial stages of lifelong friendship.

“Gunnar, you a crazy nigger.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Nick, where you be at lunchtime? I be looking for your ass, but I can never find you.”

“Monday meet me at the wine vats near the back gate.”

When Monday’s lunch bell rang I tore out of class and ran to the back gate to meet Scoby. He was already there with nine boys and one girl silently huddled about a tape deck. Those who weren’t lacing their sneakers and adjusting sweatbands were whipping a basketball around with a sharp crispness that seemed to singe the hands of whoever was on the receiving end. One boy was pulling on tube sock after tube sock until his feet looked as if they were encased in plaster casts. He winced as he placed his padded feet in a pair of hightop sneakers. I turned to the kid and said, “How many pairs of socks do you have on?”

“Seven.”

“Why?”

“For good luck, stupid.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Sure. My bad, I should’ve known.”

Nicholas Scoby peeked around the corner of the wine vats and said, “Okay, Mr. Uyeshima isn’t looking, let’s go.” The chainlink fence groaned and sagged under the weight of ten kids scaling it like boot camp Marines. From the other side Scoby looked back at me with a pained expression. “Yo, cuz, the radio.” I tossed the radio over and began climbing, catching my pants leg in the barbs at the top of the fence. None of the kids had bothered to wait for me; they were running down Airdrome Avenue, heading for the park.

“Kaufman!” It was Mr. Uyeshima, the dean of boys, yelling and blowing his whistle. He marched toward me, swinging his paddle. I flung myself onto the sidewalk, ripping my pants in the process, and ran after the rest of the gang.

I caught up with them at the park. There wasn’t much time and they were in a hurry to get started, kissing their talismans and pleading with Nicholas, “Scoby, fuck that nigger, let’s play.”

“Chill.” Nick Scoby turned toward me, whisking the ball behind his back and through his legs and looking me in the eye. “C’mon, Gunnar. It’s us five. Me, you” — he quickly pointed out three other boys — “Dontévius, Snooky, and Spoon.”

The kid who had painstakingly put on all those socks whined, “What about me? That’s fucked up. That skinny mark motherfucker can’t even play no ball.”

“Look, Patrick, sub for Spoon every six baskets.”

Patrick was right, of course. I’d never played a game of basketball in my life and told Nick so.

“Nick, I ain’t no ballplayer.”

“I know you ain’t. I seen you looking at those sonnets, drool dripping out your mouth. You either a poet or a homosexual.”

“Oh shit, that’s fucked up. Why can’t I be both?”

“True. Well, you can be a ballplayer too. If you want to hang with me, you’re gonna have to play ball. Awwright? Press the play button.”

I pressed the tape deck’s play button and a deep bass line rumbled over the blacktop. The music set the tempo and provided the ballplayers with a grooveline around which to improvise. They spun, twisted, lunged, and chased each other from pole to pole as I ran in circles, determined to stay as far away from the ball as possible and still look busy.

The Santa Monica school district didn’t have a physical education curriculum. Participation in organized sports was looked down on as the taboo dominion of society’s underprivileged. During Proletarian Pastimes Week, instead of playing sports we learned the rules. Ms. Cegeny had a nephew who was the UCLA basketball team’s manager. After he explained to us the intricacies of handing out towels to sweaty giants and the importance of liquid electrolyte replacement, he taught us the game, using two wastepaper baskets and a globe.

I jogged near the sidelines, trying to recall the nephew’s lessons. The other kids ran purposefully up and down the court. Adrianna Carros put Scoby on her hip, pump faked, spun left, and smartly banked the ball in the basket.

1. Double Dribble — No dribbling with two hands.

2. Foul — Touching an opposing player with ball results in a defensive foul.

3. Traveling —?

I remembered the UCLA team manager had had trouble explaining traveling, saying it was a vague rule that was often dependent on the referee’s interpretation. Deciding that visual demonstration would best explain the ambiguous violation, Ms. Cegeny’s nephew grabbed the globe firmly between two hands and ran about the room feigning a dribbling motion. Suddenly he stopped and jumped high in the air without shooting the metallic earth into the trash basket. When he landed he said, “If you do that, you’ve traveled.”

Perplexed, I asked him, “Traveled where?”

The college boy got indignant and tried to bluff his rulebook mastery across. “If a player in possession of the ball leaves the playing surface with the ball and lands at a location other than the original takeoff still in possession of the ball and without having dribbled the ball, said player has created an unfair advantage and ‘traveled’.”

“What if you come down in the exact same spot? Then you haven’t gained an advantage, you’re right back where you started.”

“Impossible.”

The student manager must have been a physics major, because he jumped up and down a few more times to prove that landing in the same spot was an impossibility.

“But, what if?”

“Traveling, you little fuck.”

As the game wore on, I began to notice that whenever anybody on my team rebounded a missed shot, everyone ran at top speed toward our basket. I got cocky and decided to take an active role in the game. I began by playing defense. It looked easy enough; you just stood in front of whoever had the ball and wiggled your body until you exasperated your opponent to the point of distraction. A boy named Weasel Torres dribbled toward me and I leapt out in front of him, placing my lanky frame between him and the basket. Weasel’s feints and pivots couldn’t shake my unorthodox jumping-jack defense, and for good measure I burped in his face, causing Weasel to shoot a wild shot that clanged off the rim like a cannonball.

Scoby rebounded and I took off down the court, my speed boosting me ahead of the pack. With a devilish look in his eyes, Scoby fired a bullet pass that hit me right in the hands about fifteen feet from our team’s basket. I caught the ball, took the one dribble my coordination allowed, then jumped as hard as I could, my eyes closed tight. I could hear Ms. Cegeny’s testy nephew: “You land with the ball, traveling!” I must have stopped breathing, because I could feel my legs kicking in midair as if I were suspended from an invisible noose. What the fuck was I doing with a basketball in my hands? I opened my eyes and saw that my momentum was hurtling my fragile body toward the basket and the steel rim was closing in on the bridge of my nose. I raised my arms in self-defense and crashed into the basket, the ball slamming through the hoop with an authoritative boom. Instinctively, I grabbed onto the rim to stop myself from flying into the pole. When I slowed to a gentle sway, I let go and dropped to the ground with a soft thud, just as the bell ending the lunch period sounded in the distance.

The game stopped. The other players looked at each other, perplexed, for a brief second and then burst out in a frenzy of high-pitched whooping, high fives, and high-stepping jigs.

“Oh shit.”

“Yo, that nigger had legs akimbo.”

“Oh shit.”

“Scoby, your boy’s got like crazy hops.”

“Ain’t no seventh-grade bailers in the city dunking.”

“This nigger has high-flying kung fu triple-feature you-killed-my-teacher-you-dirty-bastard rise.”

“Oh shit.”

On the walk back to school, Scoby looked at me as if he knew something I didn’t. Mr. Uyeshima met us at the gate. He sent the rest of the boys and the lone girl to class. I had a swat coming to me because I had ignored a direct order. As Mr. Uyeshima marched me over to the wine vats for corporal enlightenment, Patrick turned around, cupped his hands to his mouth, and shouted, “Uyeshima, don’t hit Gunnar too hard, he dunking with two hands nasty-like pow.”

Bent over in the musty shed catching heat with my pants puddled in a denim heap about my ankles and my elbows dug into my knees, I’d received three of the prescribed five swats when Mr. Uyeshima asked me did I really dunk. I said yes and he sent me back to class with a stinging pat on my tender behind.

“Way to go,” he said.

“Way to go where?” I snapped back.

I sat in Spanish class, my warm ass simmering in the seat of my pants, trying to concentrate on the infinite conjugations of the verb “escribir” scribbled on the board. I thought of Swen Kaufman taking lashes for his farcical dreams of being a dancer and realized I had taken my swats for the sake of friendship. Not for some orchestrated semper fi cultish fraternal bonding or a Huck Finn Nigger Jim “love the one you’re with” friendship, but because I’d met a special motherfucker whose companionship was easily worth a middle-school beating.

“Gunnar, haz una oración utilizando la palabra ‘escribir,’ por favor.”

“Yo voy a escribir poemas como Octavio Paz y Kid Frost.”

“Quienes?”

“Octavio Paz era un poeta gordiflón y activista de Mexico.”

“Y Kid Frost?”

“El es un poetastro hip-hop de la vieja guardia, de la vieja escuela quien vivo en Pomona o en la este.”

“Vieja escuela?”

“Si, de la old school.”

“Bueno.”

“Mata a los pinché gringos. No hablo este lingo y yo quiero jugar bingo. Ya estuvo, time to show and prove-oh.”

“Bastante, Gunnar.”

I spent the next Saturday perched on the front steps, lazily watering the lawn, waiting for a poem to descend from the midday Los Angeles haze. Paying special attention to the dry patches, I slowly turned the front yard into a grassy swamp, forcing the ants and beetles to scramble over one another as they sought higher ground on the aluminum Montgomery Ward fence that surrounded the yard.

There was a different vibrancy to 24th Street that day. The decibel level was the same, but a grating Hollywood hullabaloo replaced the normal Hillside barking dog and nigger cacophony. The newest rap phenoms, the Stoic Undertakers, were filming a video for their latest album, Closed Casket Eulogies in F Major. Earlier in the day I had wandered into the production tent to audition for a part as an extra. The casting director blew one expanding smoke ring in my direction and dismissed me with a curt “Too studious. Next! I told you I want menacing or despondent and you send me these bookworm junior high larvae.”

Moribund Videoworks was on safari through the L.A. jungle. A caravan of film trucks and RVs lurched through the streets like sheet-metal elephants swaggering through the ghetto Serengeti. Local strong-armed youth bore the director over the crowds in a canopied sedan chair, his seconds shouting out commands through a bullhorn. “Bwana wants to shoot this scene through an orange filter to make it seem like the sun’s been stabbed and the heavens are bleeding onto the streets.” “Special effects, can you make the flames shoot farther out from the barrel of the Uzi? Mr. Edgar Barley Burrows wants the guns to spit death. More blood! You call this carnage! More blood.” My street was a soundstage and its machinations of poverty and neglect were Congo cinema verité. “Quiet on the set. Camera. Roll sound. Speed. Action!”

Carloads of sybaritic rappers and hired concubines cruised down the street in ghetto palanquins, mint condition 1964 Impala lowriders, reciting their lyrics and leaning into the camera with gnarled intimidating scowls.

“Cut!”

The curled lips snapped back into watermelon grins like fleshy rubber bands. “How was that, massa? Menacing enough fo’ ya?”

“You got ’em pissing their pants in Peoria. Now one more take, and this time make sure they defecate their dungarees in Dubuque.”

Our local councilman, Pete “Hush Money” Brocklington, walked past my house wringing his hands and bragging to the passersby about the loads of money pouring into the neighborhood coffers. I only saw the bulge in his pocket. When the civic carpetbagger ventured into firing range, I pressed my thumb into the nozzle and sprayed him with a water jet from my Montgomery Ward Birmingham Special garden hose. He was about to chastise me when my mother, obviously of voting age, opened the screen door. “Gunnar, stop playing with the hose!” Councilman Brocklington waved to her. My mother ignored him and sloshed across the lawn to inspect my job, then joined me on the steps. I looked down at her sopping wet feet; as she wiggled her toes, tiny bubbles squeezed through her canvas sneakers.

“Mom, I need some new tennis shoes.”

“What’s wrong with the ones you have on now? They’re damn near new.”

“These are skateboard sneakers. I can’t play basketball in these.”

“What, you stopped skateboarding?”

“I played basketball for the first time the other day, and I think I’m gonna be pretty good. Besides, the streets out here are all fucked up — cracks, potholes, broken glass. You can’t skate on that. Every time I fall, I get cut to ribbons and my wheels get all thrashed.”

“Well, what kind of shoes do you need?”

“I don’t know, something like the ones they advertise on television, I guess. Something expensive, I suppose.”

“Don’t people get shot for wearing those shoes?”

“Ma, it’s not the shoes, people get shot because someone decides to shoot ’em. Anyway, I’ll get Nick to go with me to the store.”

“Okay, I’ll give you the money tomorrow.”

A member of the film crew yelled “Sound!” and the beats to the Stoic Undertakers’ latest single, “Exhume the Dearly Departed and Take Their Watches,” kicked in. Reflexively, my eyes closed halfway, my shoulders hunched toward the ground, my right foot tapped softly on the stair, and my head began a faintly perceptible bob.

“Your taste in music sure has changed.”

“How can you tell? I thought you were tone-deaf.”

“When you used to listen to that rock ’n’ roll, your head used to bang so hard I thought it was going to snap off and roll into the street. Now you look like you’re strung out on heroin. Your body just teeters from side to side like you have an inner ear infection — reminds me of Gene Kelly in those sailor movies. Gunnar, why don’t you buy some tap-dancing shoes instead? It’ll be safer — no one would shoot you for your tap-dancing shoes.”

“Gene Kelly, Ma? Tap dance? Vaudeville is dead. You want me to change my name to Bubbles and start singing them ‘Call me Shine’ songs? No one would have to shoot me, I’d die of shame.”

“Geez, you’re sensitive. What topics of importance are these hoodlums singing about, anyway?”

“The spoils of war, I guess.”

My mother and I stopped to watch lead rapper MC Smarty-Pants wave his flamethrower over his head and recite his frenzied verse.

Aaaahhh yeah, I’m the ghetto fascist,

inner-city black Mussolini.

The cruel druid dousing your dick in lighter fluid

then eating it up like roast wienie.

Oh what the fuck, ketchup, mustard, relish;

I bar-b-cue niggers so why embellish the hellish

Full of hate, casting my fate with Satan I’m the

devil’s prime mate …

“What’s with all the homoeroticism? People talk about the white man’s penis envy. The white man ain’t got nothing on these genital-obsessed hip-hoppers.”

“I know, Ma. You should hear the guys at school. ‘Suck my dick, slob on the knob, lick my stick,’ non-fucking-stop. There’s this one boy whose nickname is Big Dick Black, and if someone asks him, ‘How big is it?’ he yells back, ‘Three fists and tip!’”

“I don’t get it.”

“Never mind.” I paused. “Mama?”

“Hmmm.”

“Where do poems come from?”

“Why? You a poet too?”

“Soon as I write a poem I will be.”

“It’s corny, but I think poems are echos of the voices in your head and from your past. Your sisters, your father, your ancestors talking to you and through you. Some of it is primal, some of it is hallucinatory bullshit. That madness those boys rapping ain’t nothing but urban folklore. They retelling stories passed down from chicken coop to apartment stoop to Ford coupe. Hear that rhyme, boy. Shit, I could get down and rap if I had to. MC Big Mama Osteoporosis in the house.”

“That reminds me, I did the family tree in Ms. Murphy’s class last week and everyone believed me. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Gunnar, what kind of poet do you plan to be?”

“I don’t know, the cool tantric type. Shaolin monk style. Lao Tsu, but with rhythm.”

“You’ll do the Kaufman legacy proud, I’m sure.”

The bullhorn crackled — “Okay, that’s a wrap” — and the video shoot was over. Hillside’s indigenous population stopped clamoring for attention. The Hollywood ethnographers were no longer examining the traditional native dances, and the dancers’ hands slowly dropped down to their sides, their rumps stopped shaking. Like photogenic Riefenstahl Nubians watching the white god’s helicopter pull away, the Hillside denizens watched the film crew coil the cables, load the trucks, and hustle off, leaving us to fight over the blessed remnants of Western civilization they left behind. My tribe wrestled for the rights to broken doughnuts and oily ham ’n’ cheese croissants, then scattered back to our hovels, triumphant from a good day’s hunt. Plastic cups clattered in the gutter; paper napkins and signed release forms fluttered about the village like lost leaves.

It occurred to me that maybe poems are like colds. Maybe I would feel a poem coming on. My chest would grow heavier, my eyes watery; my body temperature would fluctuate, and a ringing in my ears would herald the coming of a timeless verse.

Betty and Veronica sashayed up to my front gate, their faces powdered white with doughnut dust. This time Betty’s hair was in two ponytails that stood straight up and then branched off at right angles like antelope antlers. Veronica’s flapper-style pageboy was dyed silver and sprinkled with blue flakes. Betty slipped a pair of brass knuckles onto her right hand, tossed lightning-fast jabs at the fence post, and started cooing, “So Gunnar, I know you want to play hide-and-go-get-it with us.” Ping. The clang of Betty’s fist slamming against the fence sounded like a navy radar honing in on an enemy submarine. Ping. Ping.

“No.”

Ding. Ping. Ping. Pang. A hook and two jabs followed by a stiff right uppercut put a small dent in the post, and sparks flew off the aluminum. I could smell the tangy scent of charred metal.

“But I’m the only boy. That’s not fair, two against one.”

Ping. Ping. Bing. Veronica removed a lead blackjack from her back pocket. “Look, motherfucker, either you play or I gives you some bruise tattoos.” She whipped the satchel at the gate and it gonged against the Montgomery Ward “quality” insignia, sending the fence’s lattice into rattling waves. When the aluminum convulsions died down, Betty and Veronica about-faced with military abruptness and loudly began to count backward from one hundred. I clicked my heels and gave the girls one of those casual halfhearted Sieg Heil salutes and hurdled over the fence. I sped down the street like an escaped convict, trying not to panic and running through the list of hackneyed movie tricks for outwitting the search party.

Ninety-six, ninety-five, ninety-four

Rule Number One — Change your appearance.

I zipped through the Willoughbys’ back yard and ripped a burgundy-and-gold USC sweatshirt from the clothesline. Their bull mastiff, Thor, began to bark, but I pacified him with a scratch between the ears and a stomach rub. Then it was over the back fence, through the alley, and past the Thrifttown liquor store.

Seventy-three, seventy-two, seventy-one

Rule Number Two — Make an effort to disguise your scent.

Despite California’s water conservation laws and a completely inorganic front yard consisting of a small patch of Astroturf, a porcelain turtle, and a plastic pink flamingo, weird Mr. Quigley’s sprinklers were on full blast twenty-four hours a day. I ran under the makeshift waterfall and, soaking wet, made my way around the corner and into the courtyard of the Piccadilly Arms apartments.

Forty-nine, forty-eight

Rule Number Three — Convince a member of the local populace that you are worthy of his or her assistance by recounting your tale of false imprisonment and the brutality you’ve suffered at the hands of the guards.

Dexter Sandiford was playing jacks in front of the laundry room, wearing only a pair of loose-fitting white polyester Montgomery Ward briefs. Sitting on his rump, tossing a bright orange ball in the air, and sweeping the jacks into the palm of his chubby little hand, he looked like Cupid. I talked fast.

“Hey Dex, you waiting for your clothes to dry?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What you on?”

“Sixies.”

“Oh, sixies is tough. Your hands big enough to pick up six jacks scattered from here to Koreatown?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know Betty and Veronica, them two wild banshees who live on Corning Street in the yellow apartments?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They chasing me. They’re going to kill me. Here’s two dollars. I’m going to hide in the laundry room. If they come by, don’t tell ’em where I’m at. Okay? Say you seen me run through here headed for Al’s Sandwich Shop. My life is in your chubby hands, don’t drop it.”

“Uh-huh.”

Ready or not, here we come!

I slipped into the cramped laundry room. Dexter’s clothes were spinning in the dryer. The sound of his size five P.F. Flyers caroming around the steel drum drowned out my heavy breathing. Confident that Betty and Veronica would never find me, I stripped down to my soggy size 26 white polyester briefs and tossed my wet clothes in the dryer. Dexter sat outside the door playing jacks and I sat on top of the washing machine playing with my dick.

“Dexter, you seen Gunnar?”

Damn.

“Uh-huh.”

“Where is he?”

“He gave me two wet dollar bills and said to tell you he was running over there near Al’s Sandwich Shop.”

“Dexter, tell you what I’m not gonna do. I’m not gonna take your two dollars out your hand. I’m not gonna tear them dirty drawers off your little pitch-black behind, shove the stupid two dollars in the crack of your ass, insert one of them jacks in your wee-wee pee hole, and toss you butt-naked into the fucking street if you tell me where Gunnar is.”

The silence told me that Dexter was breaching our contract with a cherubic pout and a point of his finger toward the laundry-room door.

Seeing my scrawny near-nakedness, Betty and Veronica licked their lips and shut the door behind them. “Mmmmmm, tap-tap on the fine nigger sittin’ on top of the washing machine.”

Veronica cradled my limp body in her arms and placed me gently on the floor. The dryer gave off a strange half-buzzing, half-ringing sound and continued to rumble. Betty’s teeth clamped down on my nipples and sucked the chill from the damp concrete out of my body. Warm rivulets of her spit meandered past my abdominal muscles and pooled in my bellybutton. Veronica crept around my body, teasingly snapping the elastic band on my underwear and grinding her crotch on my thigh, my shin, and begging to tickle her love button with my big toe. At some point during the torturous fury of this menage à trois noir, my undies slid down to my ankles and shackled me into complete submission. The horny furies took tag-team turns squeezing my genitals. Betty’s cold hands ran against the grain of my prickly pubic hair, then cupped and kneaded my balls into a shriveled sack of testosterone mush. Veronica stretched my limp dick with one hand, plucked it like a bass string, and the girls broke into a dueling chorus of gospel double-entendre. Veronica opened with “Go down, Moses, waaaay down to Egypt’s land,” forcing my face between her legs. Betty sidestepped and countered in an Easter Sunday vibrato of “Touch me, Lord Jesus, mmmmmmm, with thy hand of mercy,” ramming my hand into her crotch. Veronica, reeling from Betty’s blows, pointed at my flaccid member and slid into a storefront Pentecostal soprano: “Fix it, Lord Jesus, you fixed it for my mother, now fix it for me.” Betty reached into my mouth, grabbed my tongue and placed its pointy tip on her knee, and started singing Mahalia Jackson’s subliminal hit, “Move On Up a Little Higher.” Feeling left out, Veronica snatched me by the Afro, smothered my lips with kisses, and forced her long tongue down my throat until it tickled my larynx. Betty extracted her spongy plumber’s helper from my ear and whispered, “Why don’t you sing, Gunnar? Give your frigid spirit wings and just imagine if niggers could fly.”

There was a knock on the laundry-room door. It was little Dexter’s mother come to collect her clothes and wanting to know what all the moaning was about.

“If y’all in there fucking, you better save some for me. I’ll give a motherfucker a shot of life.”

“Just a minute, Ms. Sandiford.”

Rescued at last. As I removed my clothes from the dryer, Betty and Veronica took one last hunk of buttcheek and then started arguing on the appropriate term for a boy’s losing his virginity.

“Deboned.”

“Spit-shined.”

“Bitch-dipped.”

I walked home basking in the warmth of newly tumble-dried clothes, singing “Oh Happy Day” at the top of my lungs. I was still singing when I got home.

A musclebound shirtless boy of about sixteen covered in soapsuds was in Ms. Sanchez’s driveway, washing the hell out of her Buick LeSabre. He heard me singing and stopped rubbing the caked-on bird shit long enough to greet me.

“What’s up, little man?”

“Cooling.”

The wind blew a cloudbank of suds across his chest, revealing a shiny gold crucifix that seemed imbedded in his massive brown torso. It was Ms. Sanchez’s son, Juan Julio, known around the neighborhood as Psycho Loco. I’d never seen him before, but knew all about him. His mother used to tell me how Juan Julio’s voice was the best missionary religion ever had. On Sundays he’d sing with the choir and his baritone would make the babies stop crying and the deacons start. Ms. Sanchez would hold a crucifix exactly like his up to the sky and swear that drunks, bums, prostitutes, hoodlums, even police officers, people who’d never been in church a day in their lives, would walk into the original First Ethiop Azatlán Catholic-Baptist Church and Casa de Sanctified Holy Rolling Ecumenical Sanctification, kneel at Juan Julio’s feet to plead forgiveness, renounce sin, accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior, and put all the money they had in the collection plate. When the service ended, the collection plate would be filled with car keys, crack vials, and stolen credit cards.

The neighborhood kids told me the story of Juan Julio’s life outside the House of God. On the street the angelic Juan Julio was Psycho Loco, leader of the local gang the Gun Totin’ Hooligans. I’d heard how as a strong-arm man-child for a loan shark, when he tired of a debtor’s sob story on why that week’s payments were late, he’d heat his crucifix with a nickel-plated lighter and press the makeshift branding iron into the victim’s cheek and scream, “Now you really have a cross to bear, motherfucker!”

One day I asked Snooky how come his Uncle Kahlil always wore earmuffs, even in the summer. He told me that his uncle and Psycho Loco got into a tussle over who was going to get to smash the jewelry cases at Declerk’s Discount Diamonds during a robbery they were planning. Juan Julio grabbed Uncle Kahlil by the ears and pulled like he was opening a bag of potato chips. The pop of his ears being snatched off the sides of his head was the last thing Uncle Kahlil ever heard. Out of pity, Juan Julio let him break the glass during the robbery, but Snooky’s uncle got caught, because he couldn’t hear Juan Julio telling him the cops were coming.

Here was Psycho Loco, home on parole for killing a paramedic who refused to give his piranha Esta Lleno mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after the fish choked on a family of sea monkeys.

“What you singing, cuz?”

“Some song.”

“That’s more than some song. That song got me through four years in the Oliver Twist Institute for Little Wanderers and Wayward Minority Males. I sang that shit from lights on to lights out. Oh happy day, oh happy day, when Jesus washed, when Jesus washed, he washed my sins away.”

Psycho Loco was still singing and putting a shine on the LeSabre’s chrome bumpers when I went inside. It took me eight hours and two boxes of frosted flakes to write my first poem. It was a fitting end to a long day.

Negro Misappropriation of Greek Mythology

or, I know Niggers That’ll Kick Hercules’s Ass

i lift the smoggy Los Angeles

death shroud

searching for ghetto muses

anyone seen Calliope?

heard she emigrated to the San Fernando Valley

fulfills her ranch-styled dreams

with epic afternoon soap operas

and bong water bubble baths

outside, listening for voices,

i hear nothing

the leaves are silent

and the chichi birds look at me

like i’m crazy

you tell that dime-dropper Clio

she better not

leave her witness protection program

i seen some stone killers passing her picture

down by the 7–Eleven

on the sloped banks of the L.A. River

i sit cross-legged

classical guru pose;

my 50-cent Bic pen taut with possibilities

Thalia’s bloated body

floats by, zigzaggin’ between Firestone radials

finally catching itself on the rusted barbs

of a shopping cart

seriously lost at sea

Euterpe is at the talent show

begging entrance into the church basement

permission to sing her Patti Labelle covers

promising a big record label she won’t

smoke up the production money like last time

on my knees

I place my ear to the concrete

I hear nothing

no thundering cavalry hooves

kicking up dust

no war whoops

not even the ghost-town winds of massacre

i have a notion

that if i could translate

the slobbering bellows of Ray-Ray

the ubiquitous retarded boy’s

swollen-tongued incantations

i’d find Melpomene reciting the day’s obituaries

anyone here speak Down syndrome or crack baby?

running my hands over tree-bark Braille,

swashbuckling with palm tree leaves

nothing, paper cuts

en garde,

motherfucker

ham radio signals

s. o.s. a.p.b. 911 electronic prayers

to the goddess Urania’s voicemail

go unanswered

late last night my man picked up a jailhouse phone

“Yo, nigger, you got to come down and get me out.”

and i was inspired

* * *

The next morning I rummaged through the attic and found a can of black spray paint and the stencils my great-great-uncle Wolfgang used to do his Jim Crow handiwork. I painted the poem on the wall that surrounds Hillside. Surprisingly, my still-wet verse didn’t look out of place between the specious rest-in-peace calligraphic elegies and the fading Übermensch graffiti already splashed on the wall.

I was eating cereal and watching the Sunday morning TV journalists discussing the prospect of substantive black rule in South Africa when Nick Scoby knocked on the door. He had his headphones on and his arms were filled with a Montgomery Ward trimline steam iron that dripped water, an ironing board, a can of starch, and a pile of brand-new white T-shirts. He walked in, propped up the board with a loud squeak, and plugged the iron into a nearby socket.

“What you listening to?”

“Toshiko Akiyoshi.”

“Who?”

“A piano player. You met Psycho Loco last night, I heard.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Listen to you — ‘Yeah, so?’ Can you imagine the Indians meeting Christopher Columbus and saying, ‘Big deal, some midget with syphilis and a bad cold, so fucking what? Pass the buffalo meat’? You’re Psycho Loco’s next-door neighbor and he likes you.”

“Likes me how?”

“He likes you. Ever had a murderer like you before? Psycho Loco is going to come over to your house and ask you for favors. Borrow a cup of sugar, hold on to his gun, put your sister in a headlock and ask you to kindly tell the police he spent the night at your house playing Scrabble, shit like that. You’re involved, homes. You’re gonna have to respect something more than yourself. You know that saying, ‘Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends’?”

“Malheur et Pitié, canto one, 1803.”

“Well, here in the street, that shit works in reverse. Fate picks your friends, and you choose your family. Everybody starts out an orphan in this hole. Gunnar, you gonna have to respect Psycho Loco, the neighborhood, and the way things get done here. Psycho Loco and the Gun Totin’ Hooligans try to kill people. People their perception of fate has slated as the enemy. This ain’t Hatfields and McCoys, nobody’s birth certificate says Joe Crip, Sam Piru, and I definitely don’t know no niggers surnamed Hooligan — some Irish homies, maybe. If Psycho Loco says you’re his friend, there ain’t nothing you can do about it. You’re friends ’cause he says so. Now there might be some fool who lives on the other side of town who thinks you’re his archenemy simply because Psycho Loco likes you. That is fate, black. Maybe people with money can skew fate in their favor, but that ain’t us. I seen that poem you wrote on the way over here. There was a gang of motherfuckers reading it like a wanted poster. Oh yeah, nigger, thirteen years old and you involved now.”

Scoby ripped open a plastic bag, pulled out a T-shirt, and stretched it over the pointy end of the ironing board. He sprayed the starch over the shirt, licked his finger, pressed it to the bottom of the iron, and listened to the sizzle. “Watch,” he said. The iron cackled and spit as it glided over the shirt. When Scoby got to one of the factory wrinkles, he pressed the steam button and the iron exhaled plumes of vapor and the wrinkles vanished. After ironing the front and back of the shirt, he snatched it off the end and laid the sleeves on the board. Carefully aligning the hems, he dug the iron into the material, putting a stiletto-sharp crease in each sleeve. “Don’t put no creases anywhere else. No crease down the back, that’s the east side. No military double creases down the front from the collar to the end of the sleeve like them buster-ass niggers from XXY Chromosome Recidivists. Now go get a pair of pants.”

“I don’t care what happens, I will never put a fucking crease in my Levi’s. No fucking way, man. I will never be that involved.”

Scoby laughed and asked if my mother had given me enough money for basketball shoes. I pulled two hundred dollars from an envelope marked “Basketball Paraphernalia” and fanned the crisp twenty-dollar bills, wondering if it was enough to change my fate.

The Shoes

Buying basketball shoes was much harder than I thought. Unlike the skate shop, where there are only three different brands and maybe ten styles to choose from, Tennies from Heaven was the footwear equivalent of an automobile showroom. A sneaker emporium where the walls were lined with hundreds of shoes and salesmen dressed in silk sweatsuits patrolled the floor, handing out brochures, shaking hands, and checking credit ratings.

The basketball section took up the entire third floor. An eighty-dollar sneaker caught my eye and I hefted it in my hand as if its weight might tell something about its quality. I was about to call for a salesperson when I heard Scoby snickering behind my back and singing, “Buddies, they cost a dollar ninety-nine. Buddies, they make your feet feel fine.” I put the shoe down and Nicholas pushed me through a sliding glass door into an area of the store called the Proving Grounds. A section of the store where the state-of-the art, more expensive models were on display. Before the staff allowed me to try on any shoes, I had to sign a release stating that if my new sneakers were forcibly removed from my feet and the crime received any media attention, I would blame the theft on the current administration and not on niche marketing.

Even with all the paperwork I could only try on one shoe at a time, since I wasn’t accompanied by a bonded legal guardian or a basketball coach. Whenever I slipped my foot into a new shoe I’d hobble over to the mirror like Tiny Tim Cratchit and blink really fast, trying to create an optical illusion so I could imagine what wearing both sneakers at the same time would look like. After some eyestrain I managed to convince the guy to let me try a different shoe on each foot and teetered over to Nicholas to ask his opinions. He vetoed the sporty Barbarian on my left foot because they were sewn by eight-year-old Sri Lankans who worked in open-air factories, received no lunch breaks, and were paid in candy bars. The Air Idi Amin Fire Walker on my right foot, a colorful suede high-top designed to look like a traditional African mask, was nixed because although the shoes performed well on asphalt, they tended to slip on gym floors, and besides, the kids chanted “Coup d’état, coup d’état!” at anyone who wore them. Nick suggested the high-tech Adidas Forum II’s, an outrageously expensive pair of plain white basketball shoes, computer-designed for maximum support, something called “wearability,” and exactly like the pair he was wearing.

The salesperson, smelling commission, closed the deal with a spiel about French cowhide hand-sewn with French thread by French seamsters who were paid by French entrepreneurs who donated a percentage of every shoe sold to help build basketball courts in ghettos throughout the world. I wanted to comment on how building more basketball courts just created a demand for more sneakers, but instead gimped around the store, hopped up and down on one foot, and put one hundred and seventy-five dollars on the counter. The salesman smiled and handed me the other shoe and the carbon copy of my release form.

The Haircut

I had twenty-five dollars left and felt that my next purchase should be a basketball, but Nicholas insisted that having the proper haircut was more important than having a basketball. He recommended Manny’s Barbershop and Chiropractic Offices on the corner of 24th Street and Robertson Boulevard. Manny Montoya was a tall curly-haired Chicano whose mission in life was to improve the posture of every hunchbacked ex — farm laborer, swaybacked prostitute, and stoop-shouldered hoodlum in the neighborhood. Manny only offered one haircut, the “Sunkist Special,” which was a concentration-camp baldy with a hint of stubble. Ballplayers and bangers lined up for haircuts, sharing copies of Jet, Pocho, and Guns & Ammo till a barber called their names.

“Hey bro’, peep this firmé cuete. Air-cooled, magnesium-plated, single-action Gepetto Pinnochio long-nosed.22 caliber.”

“Naw, cuz, you want one of these fingerprint-resistant Buger GAT polymer ten-millimeters with the emerald handle.”

“Well, I think we can both agree that this centerfold jaina del mes is fine.”

“What’s her hobbies?”

“The usual — scuba diving, horseback riding, and skiing.”

“Where in fuck does Jet magazine find all these colored cowgirls who ski?”

On the other side of the room, near the plastic skeleton, lowriders who’d gotten whiplash from taking corners on two wheels and thrown their backs out because they’d spent last night bunny-hopping their Oldsmobile Cutlasses down Crenshaw Boulevard waited patiently for adjustments, pretending the cricks in their necks didn’t hurt. Manny excitedly pointed out the window and exclaimed, “Hey look, there’s Gilbert Suavecito’s cherry ’45 DeSoto convertible and Iris Chacon riding on the hood in a bikini.” The hot-rodders’ heads spun around for a look at Gilbert’s champion lowrider and the Mesopotamian-but-tocked televison star Ms. Chacon. A chorus of agony rang throughout the shop as the men rewrenched their necks for nothing more than a glimpse of Rafael Muñoz giving a ride to Gina “Scullybones” Sanders on the handlebars of his custom Schwinn Stingray five-speed.

Manny laughed and dug his thumb into the nape of my neck. The pain forced my head down and he sheared long furrows down the middle of my scalp.

In the far corner of the shop, a circle of old men, Indios and Africans, played electronic poker games and swapped migration stories. I sat in the barber chair concentrating on keeping my head still and straining to hear the stories of how their families ended up in Los Angeles, far from their ramshackle southwestern and southern roots.

One man, Mr. Tillis Everett, the attendant at Zoom Zoom Gas, chewed on beef jerky and talked about how one day in Biloxi his father came home with blood on his shirtsleeve. “It was a Tuesday, and Daddy walked in the door, kissed Grandma on the cheek, and said, ‘Momma, I have to go.’ Grandma said, ‘I’ll have your stuff ready in five minutes.’” The mechanic spit out a wad of unchewable gristle, picked his teeth with a thumbnail, and continued. “Things was understood down south. If you made a decision to hit a white man, you made the choice to kill him and relocate. Wasn’t no left, right, left, ‘Don’t fuck with me no more,’ shake hands and let’s be friends. They used to say, ‘Hope the man with the rope ain’t got no telescope.’ It wasn’t no running in the water to throw the dogs off your scent. They bring the hounds round to the other side and pick you up soon enough. You had to get to a chicken coop and rub handfuls of chicken shit on your shoes real thick-like. Dogs would get tired of smellin’ that shit and they’d refuse to follow the scent. My daddy arrived in Los Angeles smelling like a henhouse toilet. Niggers out here is out of luck. Ain’t no chicken shit in Los Angeles. Lots o’ chickenshit niggers, no real chicken shit. Couldn’t run away from Los Angeles if you wanted to.”

I couldn’t keep my hand off my newly shorn skull. It sprinkled on the way home and the droplets of rain soothed my tender scalp. When I got home my mom pressed my noggin into her breasts and sobbed that I looked as if I were on a hunger strike. My sisters were taking turns doing bongo solos on my head when the phone rang. It was my father.

The Ball

“Boy, you see my portrait of the Northbrook Necrophiliac in yesterday’s paper?”

“Yup. Looks a little bit like Dwight Eisenhower. Is it true this guy goes round fucking skeletons and shit?”

“Yeah, some janitor at the medical school caught him sticking his dick in an eyesocket.”

“What a numskull.”

“Very funny. Your mother tells me you’ve started playing basketball.”

“Yeah, me and some of the fellas…”

“Just don’t get one of those Jack-Johnson-black-buck-hey-look-at-me-I’m-an-athlete baldheads, you hear me.”

“Dad, I need a basketball.”

“Only scrubs buy basketballs.”

“Dad!”

“I’ll see what I can do. Put your mama on the phone.”

About two hours later a police cruiser drove by the front of the house and chirped the siren. I looked out the window and saw a hairy white arm fling a brand-new basketball into the front yard. As I ran out to retrieve the ball, a book landed at my feet. The book was a thin paperback entitled Heaven Is a Playground. From what I could glean from the back cover, it was a sports journalist’s treatise on a pack of inner-city Brooklynites who spent the better part of their days scampering around a basketball court known as the Hole. Inside my father had scribbled a note: “Read this and remember you’re a Kaufman, and not one of the black misfits sociologically detailed herein.”

* * *

Soon it was time to try out my new sneakers, new basketball, and new haircut. Scoby and I sauntered into the park and he pointed out some of the aging local legends seated under the trees, sipping from crinkled brown bags. Ben “Yoda” Morales reputedly was so quick that when he changed directions, the sneaker-to-concrete friction caused his shoes to spontaneously combust. Over the years he’d lost a step and all anyone ever saw was puffs of smoke wafting from his soles as he slithered to the basket. In his prime, Nathan “Sadhu” Ng could go up for a rebound and leave a dirty footprint on the backboard. Now he was a shoeless stumblebum begging dimes from the younger kids. Scoby too had a rep. Blind Melissa “Sonar” Kilmartin, who could do anything on the court but chase the ball when it went out of bounds, turned in our direction and raised her beer to him. “What’s up, Scoby, you gonna serve niggers today like I used to, baby? Who that with you?”

That first day Nick and I went to the park, about fifty players were standing in the hot sun, waiting their turn to play. When the game in progress ended, Scoby walked onto the court, touched his toes, alternately lifted his feet by the insteps until his heels touched his butt, and waited for whoever had winners to tell him who else was on his team. There was some unspoken protocol at work, and Nicholas apparently had diplomatic status. Soon a huge crowd gathered around the sidelines. Right from the start there was an intensity on the court that hadn’t been present in the previous game. Players who usually spent most of their precious court time arguing and disputing every call were silent and stealing glances at Scoby whenever they made a shot or did something particularly impressive. Scoby’s pregame announcement — “Niggers who come here for the attention best to leave now” — seemed to have had some effect.

I watched Nicholas play a few games and tried to figure what the big deal was. His team always won, but it wasn’t like he was out there performing superhuman feats. He didn’t sprout wings and fly, he didn’t seem to have eyes in the back of his head. There was always someone who jumped higher than he could, handled the ball better. Nick would make five or six baskets and that was it.

After winning his fourth straight game, he told me to walk over to the basket and dunk the ball.

“Huh?”

“Do what you did at school the other day.”

I walked under the basket with my brand-new ball cradled under my arm and flushed the electric orange orb through the hoop with two hands. A tall boy wearing a dark gray T-shirt that read “Wheatley High Varsity Basketball” in faded green letters sauntered over to me and started to small-talk.

“You know Scoby?”

“We go to Manischewitz together.”

“Your name Gunnar Kaufman?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You wrote that poem?”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“You wanna run?”

In as low a voice as I could muster, I said, “Yeah.” I had a rep before I ever played a game at the park, although I wasn’t sure exactly what for.

We played until nightfall. During what was shaping up to be the last game of the evening, it became impossible to see the basket farthest away from the streetlight. It was as if we were playing at the lunar surface during the half-moon. One side of the court was in complete darkness and the other fairly well lit. The score was tied at ten-ten and someone suggested we call the game a draw on account of darkness before someone got hurt. Scoby said, “Next basket wins.” My team had the ball and we were shooting at the visible basket. The high schooler in the gray shirt took a short shot that circled around the rim and fell out, right into Nick’s hands. Scoby took two speed dribbles, losing the man who was guarding him, and headed upcourt. When he crossed half-court he disappeared into the darkness, then quickly reappeared in the light without the ball. A second later you heard the crashing of the chain net as the ball arced through it.

“Game.”

Skipping the ball through my legs, imitating the moves I’d seen during the course of the day, I rounded the corner onto Sherbourne Drive and realized what Scoby’s rep was for: he never missed. I mean never.

five

SUMMER BEFORE my first year of high school was the summer niggers stopped sitting next to each other in the movies. We jaywalked, spit on the sidewalk, broke curfew, but strictly abided by the unwritten law prohibiting black boys over fifteen from sitting next to each other in the dark. One yawning unoccupied chair always belied our closeness, separating us like a velvet moat filled with homophobic alligators and popcorn as we solved cinematic mysteries with deductive street-smart reasoning.

“The pockmarked motherfucker from the country club gots to be the killer.”

“Nigger-ro, is you crazy? It’s the lefthanded honey with the juicy Maybelline lips and the fucked-up German accent. It’s always the foreigner. Kill again, you sexy thing, you.”

“Both you Sherlock Holmes cokeheads are wrong, it’s the Doberman pinscher. The mutt is hypnotized by the psychologist to kill on his say-so. Didn’t you see the bloody paw prints?”

In the past three years me, Nicholas, and Psycho Loco had become a heroic trio of sorts. We were the Three Musketeers, all for one and one for all, sipping watery lemon-lime soda from the same straw, galavanting in the streets, sounding off like wind chimes in the city breeze. By high school I was no longer the seaside bumpkin, clueless to the Byzantine ways of the inner city. But I hadn’t completely assimilated into Hillside’s culture. I still said “ant” instead of “awwwnt” and “you guys” rather than “y’all,” and wore my pants a bit too tight, but these shortcomings were forgiven because I had managed to attain a look. My sinewy physique drew scads of attention. I’d be on the bus or standing in line at the store and strangers would come up to me and knowingly nod their heads as if we shared some secret. The more straightforward ones would speak up and interpret my dreams for me.

“You play ball? Don’t say no, you got that look. I can tell by your calves. Skinny, powerful legs and the way you walk. Pigeon-toed, small ass ’n’ all. You ain’t nothing but a ballplayer.”

Despite the pigeonholing, it was fun to answer the inquiries and watch the populace swoon.

“How tall are you?”

“Six-five, baby, six-five.” I’d exaggerate by an inch and a half.

Not everyone was enamored of my height and athletic ability. There were those who didn’t care that I’d spent hours in the city’s gyms and parks perfecting my game. Not that I had ever asked anyone to care, but to some ghetto subcultures I was nothing more than a tall wise-ass punk who deserved a serious comeuppance.

Whenever I stopped to listen to the street-corner sermons of the all-albino brothers and sisters of NAPPY (New African Politicized Pedantic Yahoos), the speakers always singled me out as a traitor to my race, the dreaded heretic of the nation of sun people. After prophesying the founding of New Africa, a glorious day when the United States government would turn over five southern states to legions of turbaned pink-eyed heliocentrists, their leader, Tasha Rhodesia, would defiantly ask, “Any questions from the unbelievers?”

I’d raise my hand with a puzzled look on my face. A look that differed from my basketball mien, a look that said, “Maybe if I heard the right syllogism I’d make a worthy convert?”

Tasha Rhodesia would wave a light-skinned arm lined with copper bracelets cast from precious African metals ceremoniously over the crowd. “You, the proud young warrior, obviously of Watusi stock — what white propaganda infests your fertile African mind?”

“How can a bunch of people such as yourselves, who give themselves names like Wise Intelligent, P-Knowledge, and Erudite Judicious, be so fucking stupid?”

In Afrocentric slapstick, an offended neophyte would smush a bean pie in my face and banish me from the promised land.

Then there were the bands of bored Bedouins who roamed Hillside, silently testing my resolve by lifting their T-shirts, revealing a bellybutton and a handgun tucked in their waistband. “S’up, nigger?”

In response I’d lift my T-shirt and flash my weapons: a paperback copy of Audre Lorde or Sterling Brown and a checkerboard set of abdominal muscles. “You niggers ain’t hard — calculus is hard.”

“All right, Gunnar, you keep talking smack. Psycho Loco ain’t going to be around forever.”

My friendship with Psycho Loco did have its perks, but Scoby was right, Psycho Loco asked for a lot of favors. My back yard became a burial ground for missing evidence; warm guns and blood-rusted knives rested in unmarked graves under little mounds of dirt. I had nightmares about the ghosts of convenience-store clerks and ice-cream-truck drivers floating among the fruit trees, stuffing their puncture wounds with rotted fruit poultices.

One Halloween night Psycho Loco rang the doorbell in a black knit whodunnit mask and with a nickel-plated nine-millimeter in his hand. I opened the door with a mocking “Trick or treat?” and put a candy bar in his flannel shirt pocket. “Look at you, nineteen years old out here knocking on doors begging candy. Why you ain’t bag snatchin’, homie?”

Psycho Loco walked past me, snatched off his mask, and asked in a shaky voice if he could take a shower.

“Ma, can Juan Julio take a shower?”

“Yes, long as he cleans the tub afterward.”

After a few minutes I noticed clouds of steam drifting down the hallway and into the living room. He must’ve forgotten to close the door, I thought, and walked to the bathroom. Psyco Loco was standing naked, looking at himself in the mirror. Eye to eye with his demons and crying so hard he had tears on his knees. I pulled back the shower curtain and handed him a bar of soap. He stepped into the mist and slipped a hand into my mom’s loofah mitt and said, “Don’t go nowhere, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, trying not to embarrass either of us by acknowledging Psycho Loco’s pain. “Just don’t use my mom’s Australian chamomile shampoo. Use the red jojoba extract.”

I sat on the toilet and turned on the radio so I wouldn’t have to listen to Psycho Loco’s cathartic wailing while he scoured his skin raw through two weather reports and three traffic updates. When he finally got out of the shower, he told me to get dressed and meet him at the wall in ten minutes. I rinsed the tub clean of slivers of skin and curlicue body hairs swimming in rivulets of his blood like microscopic bacteria.

When I arrived at the wall, the Gun Totin’ Hooligans were waiting for me, their raffish frames casting impatient shadows in the moonlight. Smoking generic cigarettes, cradling unopened quart-size bottles of Carta Blanca like brown glass-skinned babies, they raised their eyebrows to say hello and cavalierly tossed up gang signs. Those who weren’t propped up against the wall in gangster leans squatted on the ground, flat-footed, perfectly balanced in the refugee tuck. The squat was a difficult position that most yoga teachers have problems assuming, but the disenfranchised in all societies do it with ease. I knew better than to assume the poor indigene pose. I always ended up on my tippy-toes, my wobbly equilibrium betraying my privileged upbringing.

Joe Shenanigans waved me over and I braced myself against the wall next to him. I folded my arms and wondered why Psycho Loco had invited me to the party. Joe offered me a sip of pink swill from a pint of Mad Dog 20/20, which I declined. It was tempting, but I heard that after drinking that shit you glowed the next morning.

“Thought you stopped drinking, Joe?”

“Only on special occasions.”

“Like what, sundown?”

“Watch your back, the paint is wet.”

I looked over my shoulder and saw a dripping scrawl that read,

Pumpkin raising hell in hell

October 31 R.I.P.

Happy Halloween

Pumpkin was dead. I tried to conjure up some grief, but it was hard to feel any sympathy for the pudgy redbone devil who had almost pierced my ear with an arrow in the Montgomery Ward sporting goods department.

“Who killed him?”

“Not for nuthin’, but him and Psycho Loco was trying to fuckin’ rob the fuckin’ Koreans.”

Joe Shenanigans was a skinny boy, black as a penny loafer, who claimed he was a Sicilian from a long line of mafiosi. He had a cheesy wisp of a mustache, and his skin sagged at the joints because his diet consisted entirely of frozen Italian foods like turkey tetrazzini, fettuccini alfredo, and chicken parmigiana with linguini. Holding a conversation with Joe was like talking to someone who was simultaneously channeling Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino, and Mama Celeste.

“Badda bing, badda bam, badda boom, Psycho Loco and Pumpkin, the gun to Ms. Kim’s chin, ‘Open the register.’ But Mama mia, Ms. Kim ain’t listenin’.”

Ms. Kim was the half-black, half-Korean owner of the corner store. Fathered by a black GI, she was born in Korea and at age seventeen was adopted by a black family and raised in Fresno. To us, when she was behind the counter in her store, Ms. Kim was Korean. When she was out on the streets walking her dogs, she was black. Ms. Kim and I used to kid each other as to who had the flattest rear end.

“Ms. Kim busy cussin’ Psycho Loco out. You know how she be talking Korean and black broken English at the same time. ‘First you steal my eggs and now you’re gonna steal money? Naw, motherfucker. How you be so cold-blood? I feed you kim-chee when you baby. Break north befo’ I call mother.’ So Psycho Loco fires a warning shot to get her attention, and he hits one o’ dem huge inflatable Maelstrom 500 malt liquor bottles. The fucking ting falls on Pumpkin’s ass and suffocates him. Fugettabodit. Fucking jay.”

“You mean A.”

“Yeah, fucking A. Hey, where your boy Nick Scoby?”

“He’s listening to Miles Davis and refuses to come outside. Maybe tomorrow, he says.”

Psycho Loco situated himself in the epicenter of the gathering, looked over his incompetent troops, and spoke in a soft voice.

“Do we have a quorum?” he asked.

“Hell naw!” the boys responded.

With that Psycho Loco theatrically twisted the cap off his beer bottle. Most groups of boys pay homage to a slew of dead homies by saying, “This is for the brothers who ain’t here,” spilling a swallow of drink onto the sidewalk. Not the delinquents from the Gun Totin’ Hooligans. Though less elaborate than a Japanese tea ceremony, the GTH drinking ritual was equally reverent and definitely longer.

The Gun Totin’ Hooligans started out as a local dance troupe called the Body Eccentric. When Los Angeles’s funk music scene was in its heyday, kids from different neighborhoods met at the nightclubs and outdoor jams to dance against one another in “breakin’” or “poppin’” contests. After losing battles to companies known as the Flex-o-twists and the Invertebrates, the kids from Hillside often limped home with sprained ankles and broken bones from botching a complicated move. The citywide ridicule became unbearable when, after a humiliating defeat by the Lindy Poppers, a one-legged Hillside boy named Peg-Leg Greg beat a contestant to death with his artificial limb. To ensure the survival of the species, the dance troupes evolved into gangs and the war was on. Countless drive-bys and handkerchief purchases later, the Gun Totin’ Hooligans were the bravest but most inept gang in Los Angeles. Suffering more casualties than the rest of the city’s gangs combined, the Hooligans had developed a tradition that required that the thirsts of every parched and perished comrade be quenched. Thus the endless beer ceremony.

“Riff-raff, rest in peace.” Pour.

“Tank-tank, sweet dreams.” Dribble.

“Weebles, six feet under.” Splash.

“L’il Weebles, smoking weed with the angels.” Spatter.

“Baby Weebles, dozin’ and decomposin’.” Bloop. Bloop.

When GTH finally finished honoring their dead, they’d gone through six containers of beer and Psycho Loco was standing ankle-deep in a pool of beer foam.

The main reason for GTH’s high death rate was that initially the gang didn’t tote guns. They fought their enemies with antiquated weaponry such as blow darts, tomahawks, and spears. The founding members thought the moniker would be a good subterfuge. Who’d suspect a gang called Gun Totin’ Hooligans in a vicious gangland lassoing?

The gang owed its formidable notoriety to Psycho Loco’s ruthlessness. Tattooed with naked women and adorned with a chain of paper doll figurines, Psycho Loco’s arms resembled the kill tally on the cowling of a World War II airplane. The red Swiss cross on his right forearm represented the paramedic whose death had resulted in the bid upstate.

The mourning party for Pumpkin heated up into a war dance; the boys got antsy and began sloshing beer on one another and hollering hoodlum apothegms. “What we gonna do when a GTH Crip takes the final dip? Take a set trip, load the clip, cruise the strip, give a punk-ass buster a hellified fat lip. Nothing is even steven till everybody’s bleedin’. Pumpkin, we love you! We’ll make ’em pay!”

Psycho Loco yelled for everyone to shut up and grabbed a boy named Butane by his eyelids. Everyone flinched in vicarious pain and uttered a barely audible but collective “Ow.” Psycho Loco went into his proud drunken warrior tirade. “What do you mean, we? Every time one of us gets capped, who does the revenge killing? My ass. When I first moved here, you motherfuckers was scared of every vato on the block, especially Raymond Keniston. ‘Juan Julio, Juan Julio, Raymond took my money. Raymond threw my bike off the roof. Raymond threw my father into the garbage truck.’ Punk-ass yellow rat bastards. Joe Shenanigans, when Raymond stepped on your pet frog Kermie on purpose, didn’t I make him eat it and every fly that landed on your screen door for two weeks?”

“That’s ’cause you my gumba. My main molan-yan from the old country.”

“Fuck it, I’m tired of doing y’all’s dirty work. After the payback for Pumpkin, that’s it, I quit bangin’.”

Every gangster in GTH dropped to his knees and started kowtowing. “You can’t quit, Psycho Loco. We need you.” They knew if Psycho Loco quit, there would be a mini-pogrom on GTH members.

Psycho Loco laughed, released Butane’s eyelids, and plopped down next to me. We drank some beers, and eventually a few of us made a foray through Cheviot Heights in Psycho Loco’s van. We celebrated Halloween and tried to forget about Pumpkin by taking turns smashing car windows with a crowbar. The BMWs and Mercedes Benzes were all small fish when we saw our Moby Dick, a thirty-five-foot motor home parked in front of a huge three-story house complete with marble portico and a set of tall wooden doors. While Captain Ahab and the rest of the crew harpooned and skinned the mobile home, this sailor, drunk with jealousy and resentment, crept across the lawn and uprooted a small metal sign that read THIS PROPERTY GUARDED BY CHEV-TEC SECURITY.

After an hour of crippling cars, we weaved down Nalgas Drive back home. Psycho Loco made a left onto Wiltern Boulevard, reached under his seat, and pulled out his nine-millimeter. The boys passed the gun around, commented on its weight, barrel length, muzzle velocity, then stuck their arms out the window and into the humid air. With a pop the streetlights flashed, then burst into incandescent amber mini-novas, the plate-glass windows collapsing like families.

“Shoot this shit, Kaufman.”

I didn’t hesitate. Grabbing the gun in two hands, I squeezed off a three-shot sound poem that slapped a complacent hot southern California night to attention.

“Aim, nigger.”

“I am.”

“What you shooting at?”

“God, motherfucker.”

Nothing goes faster than fifteen bullets. In need of another fix, we stopped by Lettie’s, Psycho Loco’s girlfriend, for more ammunition. Hopping back into the car with a sly look on his face, Psycho Loco showed us a handful of bullets and put the car in gear. As we sped away, he announced with a hint of contriteness in his voice, “You should have seen the look on the old girl’s face. ‘Where you going?’ Like I know.”

Riding in the back seat of the car, I felt as if I were circling the neighborhood on some R-rated carousel. Familiar landmarks blurred into the sunrise, the stupid merry-go-round music refusing to go away. When I arrived home, I planted the metal Chev-Tec flag in the crab grass, threw up on my mother’s lone flowering rosebush, and tried to tear a set of unwanted chevrons from my memory.

“Gunnar, Pumpkin’s funeral is at four-thirty tomorrow afternoon.”

“I’ll be there.” I slammed the front door a little too loudly, distracting my mother from her morning eggs and crossword puzzle.

“Gunnar, where you been?”

“Shooting up the neighborhood. Ma, I’m becoming so black it’s a shame.” I wanted to explain to her that living out there was like being in a never-ending log-rolling contest. You never asked why the log was rolling or who was rolling the log. You just spread your arms and kept your feet moving, doing your best not to fall off. Spent all your time trying to anticipate how fast and in what direction the log would spin next. I wanted to take a seat next to my mother and use this lumberjack metaphor to express how tired I was. I wanted to chew my runny eggs and talk with my mouth full. Tell her how much I missed the calm equipoise of my old life but how I had grown accustomed to running in place, knowing nothing mattered as long as I kept moving. I wanted to say these things to her, but my breath smelled like wet dog shit with a hint of sulfur.

That morning I dreamed of chasing a brown-haired white boy down a flight of stairs and into the normally busy but now empty intersection. The boy and I used to be friends, but he had wronged me somehow, though I couldn’t say exactly how, and he and I both knew that the transgression merited death. The streets looked as if they’d been evacuated because of a nuclear threat or a hurricane gathering momentum off the coast. I chased the boy past a row of abandoned cars and caught him in the middle of the street under a traffic light stanchion that was swaying wildly in the wind. I shot him twice in the chest and he fell in the crosswalk. When I inspected the body, there were no bullet wounds, no blood, just two frayed holes in his yellow oxford shirt. Bending down, gun in hand, I opened his closed eyes as the noise of sirens and bystanders filled the streets. Was I hero or criminal? Psycho Loco ran over and wrested the gun from my hands, saying that he’d take the fall so I could go to college. I awoke recalling that it hadn’t been long ago when I was the only black person in my dreams; now I was shooting white kids in the street.

At church I slumped in a pew worn smooth by restless rear ends shifting from side to side trying to keep their owners awake through another young-black-man-done-gone sermon. Scoby, Psycho Loco, and the gang had heard this speech so often they called out the biblical passages before the reverend: Corinthians 7:13, Leviticus 2:10, Peter 4:25, Book of Job 1:17. The reverend gripped the sides of his podium and tried to outshout his hecklers and impress upon the rowdies how Orwell “Pumpkin” Ferguson had wasted his precious youth. “If the young man had only spent more of his time in church, he might have spent a little less time in that box.” I picked up a Bible and attempted to follow along with the reverend’s eschatological harangue, but I didn’t know where the books of Corinthians, Peter, and Job were. Flipping back and forth between Old and New Testaments, I ripped the book’s thin pages to shreds.

As the mourners prepared to file past the corpse, the minister asked the aged organist to play some sorrowful hymn the family had requested to accompany their son’s soul to the hereafter. The organist’s knobby fingers methodically pounded out a lifeless tune, halted every two bars by violent coughing attacks and sticky organ keys that required a butter knife to pop them back up into position. Pumpkin’s sendoff dirge was more like one long emphysemic wheeze. His parents started to cry, and I imagined Pumpkin sitting up in his coffin saying, “Get me to the fucking hearse, already” and disassociating himself from the fiasco.

Scoby removed a tape from his portable cassette player and popped it into the church’s sound system. The mewling strains of Miles Davis echoed off the panelled walls. The grateful organ player stopped sweating and lit a cigarette. The Hooligans strolled past the open casket, tossing bullets, shotgun shells, joints, switchblades, and cans of beer into it. If Pumpkin found himself in need of money, he could open a general store in the afterlife.

When it was my turn to pay my respects, his diminutive Creole-colored parents shook my hand with tearful solemnity. “It’s mighty nice of you to stop by. Our son used to tell us how he beat you to a pulp when you first moved into the neighborhood. Good luck with the basketball and the poetry.” I looked into Pumpkin’s brittle face and tried to hide my indifference. Propped on one knee, I placed my elbows on the edge of his box and started to utter a phony prayer. Then I noticed a black-light painting of a black Jesus bathed in purple light hanging over Pumpkin’s body like a guardian angel, a lime-green crown of thorns imbedded in his fuzzy crushed-velvet Afro. Clearly Pumpkin was in reliable company. I asked Jesus if, after he’d taken care of Pumpkin’s wounds, he could help him clear customs and grant him permission to enter the afterworld despite the armaments, marijuana, and alcoholic beverages laid across his chest. I ended my request with an earnest “Amen,” loud enough for everyone to hear.

During the eulogy at Immaculate Lawns Cemetery, I was absentmindedly shooting imaginary jump shots into the empty grave when Psycho Loco told the reverend to shut up and asked me to recite a poem before they laid Pumpkin in the ground. I composed the following poem.

Elegy for a Vicious Midget

Pumpkin, his homunculus casket

only big enough for four pallbearers,

is lowered into earth

next to his grandfather

a diminutive light-skinned black man

who passed for white Munchkin

in the Wizard of Oz

offered a lollipop to Dorothy

then drank himself to death

with pint-size blended whiskey residuals

a squat family cries

and shakes pudgy fingers

at the wicked witch

of the West Side

The reading signified my unofficial ascension to poète maudit for the Gun Totin’ Hooligans and by extension the neighborhood. My duties were similar to those of a Li Po or Lu Chao-lin in the employ of a Tang dynasty warlord: immortalize the rulers and say enough scholarly bullshit to keep from getting my head chopped off. It wasn’t all bad. As word spread of my lyrical prowess, I earned movie money as a human Hallmark card, reading sappy epithalamiums at weddings and dour elegies at funerals.

Once in a while a poet from another fiefdom seeking to challenge my reputation would swagger into the neighborhood demanding a poetic showdown. We’d duel in impromptu verse; tankas at seven paces or sestinas at noon, no use of the words “love,” “heart,” and “soul.” I sent many bards home in shame. Their employers carried them out on stretchers as they frantically thumbed through their rhyming dictionaries wondering how they had fucked up a rondeau so badly. I heard that one quixotic laureate I defeated has taken an eternal vow of silence and crisscrosses the country playing the bongos at the graves of famous poets for food.

Home Grown

young G puts down his joint for a moment

and through red-slitted eyes

checks out his burned-out homies

sprawled all over mama’s burgundy leatherette corner group

asleep under a blanket of smoke

tucked in by the slow jams on the radio

who are these men

he’s grown up with

traded comic books with

been tested for VD with

what are they really like when none of the others are around

do they …

take bubble baths?

stop and stare at the setting sun?

like to vacuum?

watch the MacNeil/Lehrer hour on the sly?

the young G rousts his boys. “Hey!

All I know about you motherfuckers

is that y’all are niggers who care.”

one of his boys lifts his groggy head and shouts back,

“And that’s all you need to know.”

* * *

Two days after Pumpkin’s funeral I was in Psycho Loco’s living room helping him choose an appropriate eye shadow to go with his molé brown skin and the tight blue chiffon dress he was wearing. We’d narrowed it down to the chartreuse cinnamon and the peccadillo plum. Admiring his lusty visage in his compact, Psycho Loco flapped his false eyelashes, blew himself a kiss, and went with the peccadillo.

Today was the day the Gun Totin’ Hooligans would avenge Pumpkin’s ignominious death. Most of the boys wanted to dismember Ms. Kim, the owner of the corner store where Pumpkin died, but Psycho Loco talked them out of it, astutely pointing out that the families of every fool in the room would starve to death, because Ms. Kim carried them on credit for two weeks out of the month. It wasn’t very hard to find a scapegoat. The obvious choice was the Ghost Town Black Shadows from the Bilkenson Gardens Projects. The Shadows had been GTH’s arch-enemies for so long that gang members on both sides termed the animosities “the Crusades,” and here was the GTH strike force, dressed in drag and primping in preparation to go “Ghost-busting.” All the homeboys were “Hooliganed down,” flaunting their colors like rhesus monkeys in heat showing off their blue asses. They fought over who would have the largest breasts and who would wear the expensive Wanton perfume. They stuffed halter tops with blue toilet paper, daintily knotted blue scarves about their necks, smoothed pleated blue skirts, cringed as they slipped their blue-painted toenails into blue high heels and blue-steeled.25 pistols into blue leather handbags.

The idea was to roll into Ghost Town and take their hideouts by surprise. I wished the homies luck and was headed home when out of nowhere Psycho Loco grabbed me by my throat and planted a sticky kiss on my cheek.

“Where you going, Gunnar?”

“I’m going home.”

“You not coming on our little sortie?”

“Hell naw, not unless you got a bulletproof brassiere in the closet.”

“Look, just come. You play ball and write, this is what I do. I shoot motherfuckers. You know I’m going to be at every one of your games this year cheering your ass, so you come and cheer mine. You’ll be our date.”

I sat in the back seat of a convertible Volkswagen Rabbit, squeezed between Joe Shenanigans, who looked stunning in a Liz Claiborne pantsuit, and fat No M.O. Clark, who wore a Macy’s pregnancy jumpsuit set off nicely with silver hoop earrings. Pookie Hamilton drove and Psycho Loco rode shotgun. We went into battle, a three-car armada of horsehair-wigged corsairs sailing over the open concrete, sipping rum and listening to Pookie Hamilton tell sailor stories.

Pookie was something of a neighborhood celebrity. He had an unwanted cameo in Peace Officer, a nationally syndicated live-action video docudrama. In Pookie’s episode, a clean-cut white cop is driving down a dark street, quickly glancing from the road to the camera and explaining what it’s like to patrol the streets of West Los Angeles. A drop-top Volkswagen exactly like the one we were riding in speeds past the officer’s patrol car. The cop looks into the camera as if he’s talking to his partner and says, “See that. That nig … uh, turd … uh, guy is probably intoxicated.” The camera pans to the windshield; you see the Volkswagen swerving in and out of its lane. Every five seconds or so, a fountain of vomit spews out of the driver’s window. The police car’s red and white lights turn the freeway into a disco. The police officer requests to see Pookie’s license and registration. Pookie hands the officer his papers and accidentally drops a beer can onto the street. The officer asks Pookie to step out of his car and tells him that he is being stopped for suspicion of driving while intoxicated. Pookie willingly but unsteadily steps out of the car to take the sobriety test. The cop says, “Sir, will you please count backward from a hundred?” Smiling into the camera, Pookie agrees and says, “Drednuh eno, enin-ytenin, thgie-ytenin, neves-ytenin…” The next scene shows Pookie handcuffed in the back seat of a patrol car and on his way to waking up with a hangover in jail.

The whole ride over, I watched No M.O. Clark dig his fingernails into the palms of his thick hands, peel off layers of skin, roll them into tiny flesh balls, and pop them into his mouth. No M.O.’s goal in life was to be a criminal mastermind. He thought if he could remove his fingerprints, he’d be the bane of the FBI, a mystery thief slipping in and out of the Federal Reserve, leaving nothing behind but greasy smudges. The drawback to No M.O.’s plan was that all the sandpapering and scraping had turned his hands into a blistery mass of flesh so tender he got paper cuts from counting money. Unable to hold silverware, No M.O. ate nothing but marshmallows, cotton candy, and white bread. When feeling brave, he bought large bags of french fries and waited for the hot morsels to cool so he could eat them without scalding himself. A favorite GTH parlor trick was to get No M.O. so excited about his grandiose dreams he’d want to slap hands with someone in celebration of his genius. The sound of a No M.O. high five was a sickening splat not unlike the scrunch of a family of snails being stepped on. No M.O. came away from these handclasps alternately screaming in pain and blowing on his hand to take away the sting.

Cruising down Central Avenue in the old business district, we were plainly behind enemy lines. The rusty alarm boxes over the barred doors to the pawnshops and soul-food kitchens all read, “Sears, Roebuck and Co. Alarm System” in lightning-bolt quotation marks. Mountains of Sears all-weather radial tires snow-capped with white Sears Kenmore appliances in disrepair filled the vacant lots. Feeling a little homesick and hoping to motivate the troops, Psycho Loco stood up and yelled, “Sears sucks. Montgomery Ward’s rules.” Following his lead, shouts rang from every car in the convoy. “Ward’s! Ward’s!” The outburst triggered a small avalanche of Sears Diehard batteries, which rumbled down a vulcanized slope, crushing a toaster oven, to the joy of the transvestite soldiers.

After we had driven for about fifteen minutes, No M.O. slowly removed his hand from the seat, green ooze momentarily clinging to Pookie’s vinyl upholstery, and pointed to a metal archway. “There go Bilkenson Gardens,” he said. We drove up to the main entrance. Psycho Loco pursed his lips and winked at the security guard. The guard smiled, removed a rubber from his wallet, opened the wrought-iron electric gate, then turned his attention back to a small black-and-white Sears television.

Bilkenson Gardens was a slight misnomer. There were no bee-pollinated flowering fields or lush meadows populated by butterflies and snapdragons. Just stagnant and algae-laden ponds formed by the runoff of leaky fire hydrants and clogged sewers, serving as landing pads for mosquitoes and flies.

“Let’s be on da lookout for dese friggin’ calzones,” warned Joe Shenanigans. “I don’t know about youse guys, but I wanna whack dese fucking strombolis.”

The caravan broke up into search-and-destroy teams. Our platoon drove west, easing past rows of rundown bungalows till we saw five guys dressed in white Lacoste shirts and white golf hats standing on the porch of a small brick cabana. They looked like golf pros sipping lemonade at the nineteenth hole, leisurely rehashing the last round of play. As we got closer, Psycho Loco straightened his tits and whispered their names — “Casper, L’il Spooky, C-Thru, Opaque Nate, and the Invisible Nigger,” all of whom were staring lustily at the “females” in the car. With a flirtatious squint in his eyes, Joe Shenanigans lasciviously ran his tongue over his top lip, sending the Ghost Town gangsters into a frenzy. The courtship ritual began with the sugary sweet words of budding love.

“Set that shit out, baby!”

“Goddamn, girl, your breastesses is big. A sandwich is a sandwich, but your titties is a meal.”

“Hey, ho, com’ere and let me put a little something on your chin.”

Pookie played coy and piloted the car around the block, the hardons of every Ghostbuster following us like dowsing rods.

“Damn, Joe, if you was a girl you’d be a fucking slut. You was looking at them niggers like you wanted some dick bad.”

“Aw, nigger, fuck you, I bet we pull that skirt off your ass, your panties be wet as a motherfucker, stank bitch.”

Psycho Loco put a cassette into the deck, barraging Bilkenson Gardens with a screeching aria. Mood music, he called it. The boys quieted themselves and made ready. I expected guns, but Psycho Loco and Joe Shenanigans removed fancy crossbows and arrows from under the seat. No M.O. was filling balloons with liquid drain opener.

“What about the guns?” I pleaded. “You do know that the Second Amendment gives you the right to form a militia and bear arms? By the fear invested in me, I hereby proclaim the Gun Totin’ Hooligans a militia. So bear some goddamn arms.”

Psycho Loco turned around in his seat, shook his head disapprovingly in my direction, and told me that whenever the Gun Totin’ Hooligans acted vengefully, they stuck to the old ways, and tradition meant no guns unless absolutely necessary. The car wheeled around the last corner and I cowered in my seat as No M.O. knotted the end of his last liquid drain opener balloon and Psycho Loco and Joe Shenanigans wet their arrowheads with aerosol deodorant.

A fool from Ghost Town called out from the street, struggling to be heard over the wailing French contralto, “I knew you fine bitches would be back. Why don’t you all come inside, drink a little Riunite on ice, and get busy?” The car braked to a slow glide; Psycho Loco and Joe lit a lighter, and the tips of their arrows flamed like giant aluminum matches. The boy in the white hat cupped his hands to his mouth. “Hey what’s up with that music?” With a war whoop, Psycho Loco, No M.O., and Joe stood up, and a salvo of flaming arrows and balloons zipped through the air. The stunned homeboys from Ghost Town dove for cover, their hats flying off their cornrowed heads and parachuting down to earth as the arrows bounced harmlessly off the brick bungalow onto the concrete, where the fires petered out like dud Fourth of July fireworks. One projectile found a home in the rear tire of a Buick Supersport, causing the car to howl and list to one side. They wouldn’t be chasing us.

No M.O. had the best aim; one of his balloons exploded on one boy’s chest. Succumbing to the fumes, the kid dropped to the sidewalk, gurgling and clawing at his burning eyes. A hyped-up No M.O. hopped out of the car and yelled in the wounded boy’s face, “Induce vomiting, motherfucker,” and hustled back to the car.

Eventually Ghost Town rallied and rushed the car as we pulled away. The fastest boy pulled a sawed-off shotgun out of nowhere like an outlaw magician, and a knot of buckshot danced on the car’s rear end like water droplets on hot oil. The opera singer sang on, her voice blowing past my ears as Pookie sped out the main entrance and toward the freeway.

“Psycho Loco, what are we listening to?”

“Delibes’ Lakmé. It’s from act two — the lovers declare their undying devotion, then they die.”

I noticed none of the boys bothered to remove their wigs or makeup. I placed one hand over my heart and raised the other high in the air and celebrated life by hitting the high notes with the rest of the fellows. Somehow I knew the words.

six

IT WAS MANDATORY for every male student at Phillis Wheatley High to attend the monthly “Young Black and Latino Men: Endangered Species” assembly. Principal Henrietta Newcombe opened the meetings by reminding us that despite the portrayal of inner-city youth in the media (she didn’t mention the name of the assembly), we weren’t animals. These hour-long deprogramming sessions were supposed to liberate us from a cult of self-destructiveness and brainwash us into joining the sect of benevolent middle-class American normalcy. Once, before we listened to the motivational speeches, Principal Newcombe conducted an extemporaneous Gallup poll in hopes of uniting us against something other than ourselves.

“Raise your hand if

… you are on welfare.

… you don’t live with your parents.

… you’re a father.

… you’ve ever been handcuffed.”

I raised my hand, much to everyone’s surprise, especially that of Ms. Newcombe, who invited me to tell my story. “You all see how any colored boy, no matter how academically and athletically gifted, is a target? What happened, child?”

I was reluctant to testify, so Principal Newcombe prompted me in her gentle manner. “How old were you when the white man shackled you like a captured African animal?”

“Eight.”

“You got arrested at age eight?”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly arrested. When I was in third grade, this cop visited our class to talk about his job and shit.”

“Young man!”

“Sorry. Then he started explaining what each item on his belt was for. When he gets to the handcuffs, he asks for a volunteer to help demonstrate how they work and chooses me, although I didn’t have my hand raised. Anyway, the cop asks me to pretend I’m the bad guy and he handcuffs me, both hands. In the middle of reading me my rights, he asks me if I can get out of the handcuffs. I was so skinny I lowered my arms and the cuffs slid to the floor. The whole class is laughing. Then the cop says, ‘Don’t worry, in a few years they’ll stay on.’”

Principal Newcombe nodded compassionately. “See how they do a young nigger? Now I’d like to introduce this month’s distinguished speaker.”

The monthly orator was usually a local businessman, community activist, obscure athlete, or ex-con. He’d bound up onstage with lots of nervous energy, wave, and say a hearty “Wassup, fellas?” to prove he was hip and could speak our language. Some speakers tried to rouse us with scare tactics. The ex-con showed off his scars and told butt-fucking stories. During the question-and-answer session the kids only wanted to know how many bodies did he have, did the tattoos hurt, and did he know so-and-so’s brother. The mortician from Greystone Bros. spoke about how business was good and asked us if we could kill a few more niggers this week because his twins were starting college in the fall. Other community leaders tried to sway our self-destructive sensibilities with the flashy, superbad, black businessman-pimp approach to empowerment. Great Nate Shaw, who owned Great Nate’s Veal ’n’ French Toast over on Centinela, made a grand entrance in a purple stretch limousine. Dressed in a tuxedo, cape, and top hat, twirling a pearl-handled walking stick, Great Nate strode down the auditorium’s center aisle looking like a lost member of the Darktown Follies just bursting to sing “That Ol’ Black Magic.” His chauffeur trailed obediently behind him, carrying the shoeshine box that had catapulted “the black Ronald McDonald” to tacky affluence. Two weeks later some boys from Wheatley High in cahoots with his chauffeur followed Great Nate home, robbed his house, and kidnapped his wife. I heard they got more money from the Hollywood wardrobe agency they sold his clothes to than from the ransom Nate paid for his wife. The ex — football player scored points by passing around pictures of himself arm in arm on Caribbean beaches with bikini-clad white women. After his presentation, hands shot up, and Principal Newcombe looked so pleased, figuring she’d finally made a breakthrough. The first boy held up a Polaroid and asked the former jock, “Did you fuck this one?”

No matter who the delivery boy, the message was always the same. Stay in school. Don’t do drugs. Treat our black queens with respect. I made decent money taking bets on whether the distinguished speaker-of-the-month would say, “Each one, teach one” first or “There’s an old African saying, ‘It takes an entire village to raise one child.’”

I suppose I could afford to be snide. I had a personal motivational speaker, Coach Motome Chijiiwa Shimimoto. The stereotype is that most successful black men raised by single mothers had a surrogate father figure who turned their lives around. A man who “saw their potential,” looked after them, taught them the value of virtuous living, and sent them out on the path to glory with a resounding slap on the butt. Coach Shimimoto didn’t do any of those things. He just paid attention to me. The only time he ever told me what to do with my life was during basketball practice. There he constantly pulled and pushed me around the court. I was a skinny six-foot-four-inch pawn in the chess game unfolding inside his head. “Kaufman, where are you supposed to be?” Looking into his small hamster-brown eyes, which through his thick Buddy Holly glasses looked absolutely minuscule, I’d say, “I don’t know, Coach.” Coach Shimimoto, his face covered in perspiration, would snatch the bottom of my shorts and drag me to wherever it was I was supposed to be, droplets of sweat dripping off his nose and trailing behind us. “You’re here, Gunnar,” raising his hands and demonstrating the proper technique for denying the basketball. “If Roderick Overton gets the ball on the box, we lose, weak-side help. Comprende, stupido?” I can’t say that I learned any valuable lessons from Coach Shimimoto. He never gave me any clichéed phrases to be repeated in times of need, never showed me pictures of crippled kids to remind me how lucky I was. The only thing I remember him teaching me was that as a left-hander I’d have to draw from right to left to keep my charcoals from streaking. Coach Shimimoto was also my art teacher, and even there he was always looking over my shoulder, beads of his sweat splattering my watercolors.

Other than Scoby, there was no one I talked to more than Coach. After practice he’d try to fatten me up on churritos and chimichangas, while he told stories of how the GIs had taught him to play ball in the internment camp during World War II. He was never very good, but he was a hustler. It was his pluckiness and a front line comprising the Asazawa triplets, Ruth, Ruby, and Roy, that enabled his team to win the Internment Youth Championships in 1945. The prize was the team’s picture in the camp newspaper and a Caesar salad made with lettuce picked from his family’s repossessed farm.

Coach Shimimoto loved the “purity” of athletics, but the provincial protocol made him uncomfortable. Being a coach was tantamount to being knighted or elected president; the appellation and its circumscriptions stuck with you for life. Even Shimimoto’s wife called him Coach. Shimimoto often pleaded with me to call him something else. “Gunnar, we’re friends. Come up with a clever nickname for me, like Chi-whiz or Moto-scooter.”

“Coach, if you’re going to be an authority figure, you’ve got to live with the dehumanizing consequences.”

I often think the real reason Coach Shimimoto feted me was to get inside Nicholas’s head through me. Nicholas was his prize student, his ticket to high school coaching fame. Shimimoto knew that in thirty years reporters would call him at home and ask what it was like to coach, if not the greatest, the most unique basketball player in the world. Coach had his answer all prepared; he would tell them, “Nicholas doesn’t understand the game, but the game understands him.”

Both Nicholas and I entered tenth grade with solid basketball reputations. Nick was the wizard and I the sorcerer’s apprentice. My duties were to get Scoby the ball so he could score, play tough defense so the other team wouldn’t score, and bow reverentially after each dazzling feat. The first game went as expected. We played our archrivals, the Aeronautic High Wind Shears, in our first home game of the season. Aeronautic ranked fifth in the city, but Scoby made seventeen straight baskets to lead the Phillis Wheatley Mythopoets to their first basketball victory in four years. He made shots from all over the floor. He kissed one thirty-five-foot bank shot off the glass so sweetly that the shot left lip prints on the backboard. After each successive basket, the legend of Nicholas Scoby documented itself shot by improbable shot; what was once urban lore was now irrefutable public knowledge.

At one point Scoby shot a jumper from deep in the corner over the outstretched arms of three Wind Shears. The ball splashed through the net and the opposing coach turned red, stomped his feet, and yelled at his players to stop Scoby at all costs. One of the coach’s obedient henchmen planted an elbow in Scoby’s temple, which sent him into the stands head first. As he staggered dazedly back to the bench, Psycho Loco walked onto the floor and paced back and forth in front of the Aeronautic High bench, repeatedly slapping his thigh and challenging the team. “You fools see this two-and-half-inch thick length of pipe from my crotch to my knee? That’s not my dick, it’s a Remington twelve-gauge sawed-off. The next motherfucker to touch Scoby is going to be performing shotgun fellatio and become a victim of some seriously unsafe sex.”

Unlike at the playground, here a collective self-esteem was at stake. People who didn’t give a fuck about anything other than keeping their new shoes unscuffed all of a sudden had meaning to their lives. They yelled at the referees, sang fight songs, razzed the efforts of the other team. With the outcome of the game still in doubt, I was at the free-throw line going through my routine. Three dribbles, eye the front of the rim, deep breath. A voice barrel-rolled out of the stands, demanding attention. “Come on, Gunnar, we need these.” We? I didn’t even need these free throws. I missed the first one on purpose. The crowd moaned and spit, instantly stricken with psychosomatic bellyaches. “Please, make this next one, please, goddammit.” They were hypnotized and didn’t even know it, and I was the hypnotist. I had the power to make them cry or send them home happy, clucking like chickens. I sank the next one and fans stormed the court, and before I could look up at the scoreboard I was buried under a pile of exulting bodies. “We won! We won!” When I was finally exhumed by Coach Shimimoto, he asked me how did I feel, and I shrugged my shoulders with indifference. “What a competitor. What self-control. That hold on your emotions will take you far, wait and see, Gunnar.” When he freed me from a playful headlock, I wanted to shout, “But Coach, I really don’t give a fuck.” But why spoil his joy?

It was Nicholas’s and my first organized game, and afterward over the phone we joked about how we didn’t know to wear jockstraps instead of underwear, when the referee needed to touch the ball, what to say when the team huddled around Coach Shimimoto and clasped hands.

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘One-two-three, eat me.’”

“You’re supposed to say, ‘One-two-three, Wheatley.’”

The next morning at school everyone was still in a trancelike state. Principal Newcombe, the district supervisor, and a photographer from the daily paper met us at the front entrance. We gathered around Phillis Wheatley’s gigantic cast-iron bust and posed stiffly for the photographer. The district supervisor tried to shake Scoby’s hand, but Nicholas yanked it away at the last second. He had more trouble wriggling free of Principal Newcombe’s cheek-to-cheek embrace. I stood off to the side, propped up by an elbow, leaning on the crown of Phillis Wheatley’s brass cranium. The caption in the next day’s paper read, “Wheatley’s Nicholas Scoby and Gunnar Kaufman, ace students, ace athletes, and ace boon coons.”

Everywhere we went we were Wheatley High’s main attraction. Teachers and students treated us with unwanted reverence. The murmur of everyone clamoring for our attention rang in my ears like a worshipful tinnitus. Girls slipped phone numbers into my pockets and rubbed the tips of their angora nipples on my shoulders. Boys bear-hugged us and enthusiastically replayed the entire game for our benefit. “You niggers is bad. Money, when it was four minutes left in the half and you went baseline with that crossover and boofed, boom! on that gorilla Aero High nigger, I swear my dick got hard.” Mr. Dillard, the math analysis teacher, lectured on parabolas and hyperboles by using video excerpts of Scoby and me shooting jump shots at practice. Figuring we must be Newtonian geniuses to calculate the required force and proper trajectory to shoot a twenty-ounce sphere through a metal ring only eighteen inches in diameter while running and chewing gum, Mr. Dillard exempted us from homework for the rest of the semester.

To avoid the incessant adulation the day before a game against South Erebus High, we spent the lunch period in Coach Shimimoto’s art room. I doodled in India ink and Nicholas sat at the pottery wheel, shaping amorphous clay blobs. Toward the end of the period, Nicholas was pumping the pedal so fast he couldn’t get the clay to stay on the spinning disk. “Fuck arts ’n’ crafts!” he yelled as wet slabs of clay flew across the room, flattening themselves on the walls and windows.

I’d never seen Scoby mad about anything. I knew he was agitated about the upcoming game, but I didn’t know what to say to him. He was always the one who dispensed advice and remained in control. Whenever the crew got stopped for unjustified or justified police shakedowns, it was Scoby whispering, “Maintain, maintain.” I looked to Coach Shimimoto, but he was removing clay pancakes from his face and motioning with his eyes for me to say something first. I picked up Scoby’s latest masterpiece, a still soggy, pockmarked, nondescript lump of clay, and turned it over tenderly in my hands.

“Nice work. This really captivates the frustrations of the underclass in an abstract yet immediate way. You should send this to the art museum — call it Gog and Magog White House Lawn Defecation.”

“It’s an ashtray, you moron.”

“Yo nigger, why you so upset? We got a game tomorrow, just cool out.”

“Man, I’m tired of these fanatics rubbing on me, pulling on my arms, wishing me luck. I can’t take it. People have buttons with my face on ’em. They paint their faces and stencil my number on their foreheads. One idiot showed me a tattoo on his chest that said, ‘Nick Scoby is God.’”

“Maybe you are God. You’ll just have to accept the responsibility and let the clowns pay homage.”

“I’m not no fucking Tiki doll, no fucking icon. Don’t folks have anything better to do with their lives than pay attention to what I’m doing?”

“They’re just trying to say how much they appreciate what you do. It’ll get better, man, they’ll get used to us winning.”

“But they’ll never get used to Scoby making every shot he takes,” Coach Shimimoto interrupted. He sat down next to us, so overheated that steam rose from his body as if he were a giant humidifier. “Nicholas, you’re right, it’ll only get worse. You’ve got to figure out how can you live with it.”

“It’s not fair. I wasn’t born to make them happy. What I look like, motherfucking Charlie Chaplin?”

“So miss once in a while.”

“I can’t. I can’t even try. Something won’t let me.”

Scoby’s eyes reddened and he started to sniffle. He was cracking under the pressure. Watching his hands shake, I realized that sometimes the worst thing a nigger can do is perform well. Because then there is no turning back. We have no place to hide, no Superman Fortress of Solitude, no reclusive New England hermitages for xenophobic geniuses like Bobby Fischer and J. D. Salinger. Successful niggers can’t go back home and blithely disappear into the local populace. American society reels you back to the fold. “Tote that barge, shoot that basketball, lift that bale, nigger ain’t you ever heard of Dred Scott?”

I’d never asked Nick Scoby about his gifts. I say gifts because Nicholas had other talents besides shooting a basketball, none of which had any real social value. He could read UPC codes at a glance. He’d look at the series of thin and thick black lines on an unpriced bag of pork rinds or a bottle of seltzer water and immediately call out the price. He also had the power to tell if someone had a drop of Negro blood in his gene pool. Nicholas claimed he could smell a passing octoroon from a block away. Whenever we went on junkets out of the neighborhood to the Beverly Hills Pavilion or the county fair, Scoby loved to approach unsuspecting Negroes living carefree in the white world and blow their consanguine but secret identities. “Say, we missed you at the family reunion! Aunt Tessy wanted to know if you was still passing for Armenian.”

Nicholas could never explain any of his talents. If anyone asked about his hardwood perfection, he said that he’d hurt his elbow falling out of a tree when he was little, and that when he cocked his arm he heard a little click telling him when to release the ball. Then he’d snap his arm for effect. His elbow cracked loudly, popping just as he said. But his weak explanation didn’t account for distance or the various shots I had seen him make right-handed.

“Nicholas, why don’t you just quit?”

“Do what you do best. That’s what I’ve heard my whole life. First it was hopscotch and now it’s basketball.”

“Hopscotch?” Coach and I asked in unison.

“Yeah, when I first moved out here from Chicago I didn’t know nobody, so me and the other outcasts — the ESL kids, the deaf kids — played hopscotch to pass the time. I really liked the game. The sound of your keys sliding into the box, trying to lean from nines to pick up your marker in fours. Jumping from two to eights and clicking over sixes. Shit was a challenge. Anyway, the untraumatized boys chased me home every day. Since I used my house keys as a hopscotch marker, I always had trouble opening the lock. Usually I got the door open moments before the boys hunted me down. One day the key was so worn the lock wouldn’t open, and these niggers waxed my shit right on my front porch. When my mother got home she made me wash the dried blood off the stairs and explain what happened. Then she yanked me over to the basketball courts.”

“Don’t tell me you had to fight every boy who beat you up?” I asked, anticipating a common parental method used to turn squeamish young boys into men.

“No, she made every kid who beat me up play hopscotch with me. They had a good time, too. We was friends after that. Once I was accepted by the cool pack, I started playing basketball and stopped playing hopscotch with the retards.”

“What happened to the hopscotch kids?”

“They sit in the stands and scream like everybody else whenever I shoot the basketball.”

When the lunch bell rang, Scoby was feeling better. He smiled as if he had had a revelation and told Coach he’d be at practice.

After a light practice, Coach Shimimoto divided the team into two squads for a scrimmage. Usually he divided us using some arbitrary criterion. White sneakers vs. black sneakers, kids who’d never been to the dentist vs. those who had. That day it was dark lips vs. red lips. My upper lip is dark and the bottom one is cranberry red, so I was a bit confused and asked Coach which team I should play for. Coach Shimimoto said that it was a blessing to be able to play for both sides and made me substitute for whoever was tired. It was strange playing for both teams, scoring for one squad, then reversing my jersey and doing the same thing with the other.

I was standing on the sidelines catching my breath when Coach blew a jet of sweat from his brownish upper lip and said, “Gunnar, you know in Japan they play tie baseball games.”

“Coach, I could give a fuck if I win or lose as long as both sides have a fair chance to play as hard as they want to play. Do the Japanese have tie basketball games?”

“No. Go in for Adrianna, smartass.”

Nicholas didn’t shoot much during that scrimmage or for the rest of the year. For us to win basketball games, I had to play like hell. Gradually, I realized that the decision Nicholas had made was to remove the burden of success temporarily from his shoulders and place it solely on mine. The classroom, locker room, and bathroom acclaim fell on me. I’d thrust my hips at a urinal and two cats on either side would glance up from their drippy glans and gleefully let out the interminable catcall, “Guuunnnnnarr Kaaawwwfffmaaaan.” When kids discussed the team’s prospects in the city playoffs, washing down mouthfuls of doughy burritos with fruit punch, it was “Gunnar has held every all-city ballplayer we’ve played to fewer than four points. Gunnar is averaging twenty-six points, nine rebounds, and twelve assists a game.” When Scoby’s name came up, they all said, “Oh yeah, that fool can shoot, but Gunnar has to carry us.” Nicholas loved the shift in fame and willingly played his part in the role reversal, calling me “the Deity” and asking me to forgive him for his sins.

There are certain demands on a star athlete that I didn’t anticipate or enjoy. The most arduous of which was having to participate in the social scene. Every weekend Scoby and Psycho Loco pressured me to use my star status to get them retinue privileges at the Paradise, the Rojo Cebolla, or the Black Lagoon. When a club manager balked at admitting the volatile Psycho Loco into the establishment, I had to agree to take complete responsibility for his actions, which was like asking a dog collar to be responsible for a rottweiler. Wringing their hands like mad scientists, he and Scoby’d thank me for my kindness, ignoring the fact that I suffered from what the American Psychiatric Association Manual of Mental Disorders lists as social arrhythmia and courtship paralysis, meaning I couldn’t dance and was deathly afraid of women.

I wasn’t completely lacking in social skills. With practice I learned to serpentine cool as hell through a crowded dance floor with the best of the high school snakes. I could hiss at the young women, but not much else. When the opening strains of the latest jam crescendoed through the house, I would shout a perfunctory “Heeeyyy!” showing the clubgoers that I was up for the downstroke and that at any moment there might be a “partay ovah heah.” Scoby and Psycho Loco would soon abandon my hepster front for the chase, melding into the swirling mass of bodies and leaving me to fend for myself. I’d watch Nicholas gyrate with Gwen Cummings or Tyesa Hammonds, sometimes both, their bodies one large ball-and-socket joint floating in the same soul sonic waves. Even Psycho Loco could dance. He did this little gangster jig where he leaned back into the cushy rhythms like he was reclining in an easy chair, kicking one foot into the air, then the other, sipping from a bottle of contraband gin and lemonade during the funky breakdown.

Girls interested in dancing with me propped themselves in front of me, a little closer than necessary, swayed to the music, and tried to catch my eye. I stared off in the opposite direction, pretending to be engrossed in an intricately woven bar napkin and praying the girl wouldn’t be bold enough to ask for a dance. As an athlete, I had a ready-made excuse for the nervy women who did ask: “I can’t, baby. Twisted my ankle dunking on the Rogers brothers in last night’s game.” I’d get a funny look in return, and the rebuffed coed would return to her circle of friends. The whispers and over-the-shoulder looks followed by phony smiles set off my social paranoia. My auditory hallucinations cleared their throats. “Something wrong with that nigger, he don’t never dance. Maybe he just shy. Maybe he’s shy? He ain’t shy with Coach Shimimoto. I think he fucking Coach Shimimoto. That’s why Coach be sweating so much. Boy got some big ol’ feets and hands, that’s a waste of some good young nigger dick. Fucking an old man.”

Soon Scoby and Psycho Loco would interrupt my neurotic musings. “Why you ain’t dancing, homes? Crazy honeys is checking you out.”

“I don’t feel like dancing.”

“Are you crazy? There some fine ladies in here. You just scared of women. Scared of pussy.”

On cue, Betty and Veronica would march over and demand the next dance, their tresses interlocked in a geodesic dome hairstyle that roofed their heads like an I. M. Pei nightmare. I would mumble yes and they’d lead me onto the crowded dance floor. I’d stand still for a few seconds, vainly snapping my fingers with as much hope of catching the beat as a quadriplegic hobo latching on to a moving boxcar. “Do what we do,” Betty and Veronica would say reassuringly. I’d try to mirror my partners’ undulating moves, but my body would fail to respond. I was stiffer than a mummified Gumby left out in the sun too long. Instead of bones, my skeletal structure was high-tension wire, and I plodded from side to side with all the mobility of a rusted tin man.

Seeing my distress, Psycho Loco would bebop over to my rescue, force a couple of swigs of his liquid rhythm down my throat, then cruise the floors barking like the Alpine St. Bernard he was. Even with the lubrication of my joints and the steadying of my nerves, the quest for the beat wasn’t over. Now I had to fight the urge to be too loose-limbed, prevent my arms from flaying about my body uncontrollably in an epileptic paroxysm. After a few moments I’d relax and settle into a barely acceptable, simple side-to-side step, dubbed by the locals the white boy shuffle. I wasn’t funky, but I was no longer disrupting the groove.

As the evening wound down, the house lights dimmed to a deep red haze and the DJ began to play the latest slow jams. Boys and girls floated across the floor superglued at the crotch, grinding each other’s privates into powder in a mortar-and-pestle figure-eight motion. Unattached boys tried to look as if they had something better to do, and unattached women looked longingly in my direction, wiggling their hips in the vain hope of tantalizing me into action. I’d pray that Psycho Loco would start a fight so I could leave without having to support someone’s head on my shoulder and listen to them warble inane love lyrics in my ear. Invariably, Psycho Loco came through, slugging some fool for stepping on his shadow or some equally petty infraction.

As the bouncers escorted us out, Psycho Loco and Scoby compared the night’s harvest.

“I got three phone numbers and Kenyana Huff pinched my butt twice.”

“I only got one phone number.”

“One number?”

“Ah, but it was Natalie Nuñez’s number.”

“Oh, you was talking to that? Damn, what did you say to get over?”

“I told her that I’d get her a date with Gunnar if she let me take her to the UCLA Mardi Gras this Saturday. So Gunnar, how’d you do?”

“Do people be staring at me when I’m out there dancing? It feels like everybody is looking at me.”

“First off, you ain’t you out there dancing. You out there having a brain aneurysm. You move so crazy it looks like you caught the Holy Ghost. Second off, nobody is paying any attention to your rhythmless behind ’cause they trying they own mack on.”

“Gunnar, do you even like girls?”

“Yes.” Which was true. I just had yet to meet one who didn’t intimidate me into a state of catatonia.

“When you gonna get a girlfriend?”

“I had one once in Santa Monica.”

“What, some pasty white girl named Eileen, please? That don’t count. Nigger, have you ever seen any parts of the pussy?”

“Of course, man. I’ve fucked … er, been fucked … um, been fucking … I is fucking.”

“Does the line go up and down or from side to side?”

During the ride home Psycho Loco would leaf through a copy of Bow and Arrow Outdoorsman, passing over pictures of grizzled white men snuggling with dead animals and articles entitled “Ancient Hunting Tricks of the Mighty Neanderthal” or “101 Tick Repellents that Don’t Smell like Grandma” and heading straight to the classified ads in the back.

“Gunnar, we’re gonna find you a wife. Here we go. Listen to this:

Hot Mama-Sans of the Orient

Seeking Dates or Seoulmates

Inscrutable, Demure, and Pure by Day

Insatiable, Mature, and Impure by Night

For Color Brochure send 50¢ to:

Mail Order Asian Geishas and Dragon Ladies

Box 900, Sacramento, CA 16504.”

“You’re sick, you know that, right?”

“Dude, I’ve never seen you voluntarily speak to a girl. This is the only way. Tried and true, in defunct monarchies the world over. I’m serious now, say I won’t.”

“You won’t.”

“Two more years, bro. Soon as you turn eighteen I’m marrying your frigid ass off.”

Somehow I knew that Psycho Loco was right, I’d never start a romance of my own accord. But it was difficult to accept sexual counsel from a pugnacious male who had to be drunk to fuck and whose first rule of courtship was “Always make sure your dick is out. That way, no matter what happens you can say, ‘Well, I had my dick out.’” Maybe there was an advantage to arranged romance — no dates consisting of gauche attempts to be unceasingly clever and sensitive. Never having to deal with the living-room interrogations from incestuously overprotective brothers and fathers. And I’d never have to put down the evening paper and say, “Listen, honey, they’re playing our song.” Still, I stuck to the Judeo-Christian ethics I’d picked up from American television and the English romantics, Ozzie and Harriet, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

“You crazy? How could anyone do that shit? Don’t even think about it. It’s like slavery or something.” Changing the subject, I snatched the magazine from Psycho Loco’s hands and said, “My pops said Rodney King deserved that ass-kicking for resisting arrest and having a Jheri curl. He said some curl activator got into Officer Koon’s eyes and he thought he’d been maced, so he had to defend himself.”

The rest of the way home we talked about our experiences with police harassment: being frisked in front of our parents, forced to pull our pants down near the day-care center, made to wait face down in the street with our hands interlocked behind our heads and feet crossed at the ankles, gritty footprints on the nape of our necks. Scoby said in county jail the guards call the cells Skinner boxes and have nicknames like the Neuterer, Babe Ruth, and Curtains written on their batons and riot helmets. Psycho Loco theorized that the guards beat on the inmates because they were afraid of them. He talked about how he once ran into a prison guard and his family at a Hamburger Haven. The guard was so nervous he pulled his off-duty revolver on Psycho Loco and accidentally shot Hamburger Harry, the mascot. The bullet passed through the lettuce, ricocheted off the pickle, and came to a stop in the mascot’s brain.

I asked Psycho Loco if the rumors about a gangland truce if the jury found the cops innocent was true. He said that there already had been a big armistice at the Tryst ’n’ Shout Motel. Bangers who had killed each other’s best friends shook hands and hugged with unspoken apologies in their watery eyes.

“Damn, I hope they find those motherfuckers guilty,” I said with surprising conviction.

“Not me,” said Psycho Loco. “I hope those boys get off scot-free. One, it’ll be good to have a little peace in the streets, and besides, me and the fellas planning a huge job. Going to take advantage of the civic unrest, know what I’m saying?”

I pictured Rodney King staggering in the Foothill Freeway’s breakdown lane like a black Frankenstein, two Taser wires running 50,000 volts of electric democracy through his body. I wondered if the battery of the American nigger was being recharged or drained.