The White Boy Shuffle

eight

IN RETURN for my father’s not pressing charges against me and my friends for stealing the safe, I agreed to go quietly to El Campesino Real High, an elite public high school in the San Fernando Valley. It was hoped that the reinfusion of white upper-class values would decrease the likelihood of my committing another felony, but the two miserable years I spent at El Campesino had the opposite effect. If you want to raise the consciousness of an inner-city colored child, send him to an all-white high school. Five days a week I woke at 5:30 A.M. for the hour-and-a-half bus ride from our shtetl to the pristine San Fernando Valley. The migrant student-workers and I trudged off the bus like a weary chain gang, fighting to stay awake and trying not to be intimidated by the luxury cars in the student parking lot, the self-assurance of everyone from the students to the cafeteria workers. I often found myself short of breath from the change in economic and cultural altitude. Gasping for air, I almost took the remedial schedule and the weeks’ worth of lunch money my counselor, Ms. Baumgarten, offered me, but my pride got the better of me.

“Ms. Baumgarten, I appreciate your eleemosynary concern, but have you checked my records?”

“My elemen … elmo … my what?”

“Just stop patronizing me and do your job. Treat me as an individual, not like some stray cat that you feed once a day.”

It had been a long time since I’d communicated with white people who weren’t athletes or police officers, and here were goo-gobs of them yammering in the halls and blowing wispy bangs off their foreheads. I meshed in well. It was like swimming; you never forget how to raise your voice a couple of octaves, harden your r’s, and diphthong the vowels: “Deeeewwuuuude. Maaaaiin. No waaaaaeeey.” Whether they slouched or walked upright like proud Homo erectus cutouts from the encyclopedia, these kids were so casual. Most of them never had to look over their shoulders a day in their lives until they saw us get off the bus. I was envious. When no one was looking, I found myself trying to blow puffs of air past my wrinkled brow or emulating that quivering headshake, freeing imaginary blond locks from my eyes.

It was sad to watch us troll through the halls, a conga line of burlesque self-parody, all of us affecting our white-society persona of the day. Most days we morphed into waxen African-Americans. Perpetually smiling scholastic lawn jockeys, repeating verbatim the prosaic commandments of domesticity:

Thou shalt worship no god other than whiteness.

Thou shalt not disagree with anything a white person says.

When traveling in the company of a white person, thou shalt always maintain a respectful distance of two paces to the rear.

If traveling by car for lunch at McDonald’s with three or more white human deities, thou shalt never ride in the front seat nor request to change the radio station.

Those niggers most afflicted by white supremacyosis changed their names from Raymond to Kelly or Winifred to Megan. They walked around campus shunning the uncivilized niggers and talking in bad Cockney accents. Listening to teens who’ve been no closer to England than the Monty Python show saying, “Blimey, Oy-ive gowht a blooming ’edache” will bring any Negro with a shred of self-respect to tears.

Some situations called not for ethnic obfuscation but for rubbing burnt cork over our already dusky features and taking the stage as the blackest niggers in captivity. We pleaded for academic leniency: “Mistah Boss, sir. I’z couldenst dues my homework ’cause welfare came and took my baby brudder to the home and he had all the crayons.” We performed with vaudevillian panache, like adolescent interlocutors entertaining the troops back from the Rhine. We gave goofy white kids the soul shake, caught footballs, and sang in the hallways.

On weekends Mom forced me to pal around with the Valley bon vivants. “Gunnar, I want you to hang out with those nice boys from school today.”

I bristled. “Ma, make up your mind. You moved us out here. Later for those peckerwoods.”

“What’s the statute of limitations for safecracking, seven years?”

“That’s fucked up, Ma.”

I’d go into my “Hey, guy” mode and meet my Caucasian crew in neutral areas like Venice Beach or Melrose Avenue and hang out on the strip, eating cheeseburgers and window shopping.

“Stay black, nigger,” Scoby would call out as I boarded the bus. Scoby had a standing invitation to come along, but he always declined. Psycho Loco also refused, unless I agreed to set the white boys up for a robbery.

“And what exactly does ‘stay black’ mean, Nick?”

“It means be yourself, what else could it possibly mean?”

The arrogance of the white kids was enervating and I soon tired of their unspoken noblesse oblige, the subtle one-upsmanship. For instance, Danny Kraft was always bragging that he could name the capital of any country in the world.

“Test me, Gunnar, test me.”

“Portugal?”

“Lisbon.”

“Poland?”

“Warsaw.”

“Luxembourg?”

“Luxembourg, ha.”

“Djibouti?”

“What?”

“Djibouti? Little spot near Ethiopia and Somalia.”

“Isn’t the capital Abu Dhabi?”

“Nope. How about Kiribati?”

“That one’s Abu Dhabi.”

“You’re a dumb fuck. I thought white people were supposed to be smart.”

“Well, ask me some real countries.”

“What are ‘real countries’? Places where real people live? White people? What’s the capital of the Maldives? Guinea? Burkina Faso? Laos? Well, motherfucker, what are the capitals? Goddamn jingoistic jerk.”

The most important lesson I learned at El Campesino was that I wasn’t in arrears to the white race. No matter how much I felt indebted to white folks, I owed them nothing. My attitude changed. I began treating the bus ride out to the Valley as a daily vacation. The school’s library rivaled most college libraries and I turned it into my personal athenaeum. I buried myself in Senghor, Céline, Baraka, Dos Passos, decompressing and reacclimating myself to myself, like a diver just returned from a deep-sea sojourn. In the library I could avoid white boys asking me if I thought blacks were closer to gorillas while tufts of unruly chest hair crept past their collars like weeds starving for sunlight. I could hide from smarmy college basketball recruiters who’d never think to look for a black athlete in the library. Ditch classes where the teachers talked past me, saying things like “It’s not hard to be a millionaire. What are your parents’ houses worth, five hundred thousand dollars? See, that’s a half mill right there.”

I couldn’t escape basketball practice. At two o’clock every afternoon Coach Logan’s assistant, Mr. Wurlitz, went around to all the classes I missed and gathered my assignments. At two-thirty he kowtowed and politely asked if I would like to join the rest of the team for practice.

I wasn’t the basketball team’s only hired gun. In hopes of dominating Valley basketball, the El Campesino Real Conquistadores brought in Anthony Price from Gardena, Anita Appleby from Torrance, and Tommy Mendoza from Echo Park. A few white players would get giddy on bus rides to games, confiding in me that playing with black players was a dream come true. Singing in the shower and jiving in the gym — what more could there be to life?

* * *

Early in my senior year I sat down for my weekly career-planning session with Ms. Baumgarten. This time she didn’t pester me about applying to the DeVry School of Technology but looked up from her desk, shaking her head as if I’d done something wrong. “I think they might have made a mistake,” she said, handing me an opened envelope. My SAT scores had arrived. According to the tables, my verbal score was in the ninety-eighth percentile and my math score in the eighty-seventh.

“What you mean, mistake?”

“Gunnar, you haven’t been to calculus once in the past two months, and Mr. Kissio says you wrote an English Lit. composition called ‘Machisma Hermeneutics — Hemingway and the Hacienda Gringolust, An Obsession with the Latino Male.’ There’s no way you could get these kinds of scores.”

Soon letters from colleges addressed “Dear Scholar” instead of “Waddup to the best guard in the nation” began arriving. Now academic recruiters from various schools across the nation called me at home or visited me at school during lunch. The armed forces academies, Harvard, and Boston University were the most aggressive pursuers. I had a good time with the stuffy admirals and majors. After giving me the standard make-the-world-safe-for-democracy spiel, they’d ask what interested me. Removing a picture of Oliver North from my wallet, I’d say in a hushed tone, “Covert ops. Not your average banana republic puppet government stuff — I want to form a rebel army of Laplanders and overthrow all those neutral Scandinavian wussy socialists.” I soon stopped getting letters and visits from West Point and Annapolis.

The Harvard recruiter was a marginally known bespectacled public intellectual who had moved west to Los Angeles to set up a think tank of mulatto social scientists called High Yellow Fever. We had dinner at a chic Hawaiian restaurant in Marina del Rey. The regality of the Harvard man’s pinkies was hypnotic. Encased in gold rings, these majestic fingers never touched any part of the pu-pu platter, coolly avoided the stem of the wineglass, and punctuated his points on affirmative action with a bombastic vigor unseen since Frederick Douglass. He popped open his pocket watch and suggested we drive to his house for a nightcap. I was mesmerized; this was the first nigger I’d ever seen who owned a pocket watch and the only one I’ve heard say “nightcap.” On the drive over I held his timepiece to my ear, listening to its spring works as if I were an eighteenth-century Pacific islander hoping to trade beads for a metal cricket.

The ersatz egghead lived in Cheviot Heights, in what I swore was the same house I’d stolen the security sign from a couple of years before. Over dessert he gave me a copy of his latest book, Antebellum Cerebellums: A History of Negro Super-Genius, and showed me his prized collection of Peggy Lee records. After one listen to “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” I’d pretty much decided I wasn’t going to Harvard, but I didn’t say anything, because the French pastry was humming.

“Gunnar, why do you want to attend Harvard?”

“It seems like Harvard wants me to attend Harvard. I could give a shit. Harvard, Princeton, Howard, Cornell, Fisk — I’m just determined to get out of Los Angeles. My mom keeps saying Ivy League, Ivy League, Ivy League.”

“Look, Gunnar, I understand your reticence, but you’re being offered a rare opportunity to sit in the lap of academe and suckle from the teat of wisdom.”

“Yeah, yeah. I prefer formula milk, your shit doesn’t stink as much.”

Sensing he was losing me, he called to his wife. “Honey, come and meet this fine young man I was telling you about.”

A white woman in a see-through chiffon gown sashayed into the dining room like a fashion model.

“Baby, this is Gunnar Kaufman. The boy genius projected to do wonderful things with his life. Gunnar, this is my wife, Mindy. You may recognize her — she was the down clue girl on Crosswords for Cash.”

“Glad to meet you, Gunnar.” She grabbed my hand and kissed me lightly on the knuckles, then locked her hazel eyes on my crotch. “You’re bigger, I mean different from the other boys. No tie, no tweed jacket. Muscles. I like you. What’s a four-letter word for a Russian mountain range?”

“Ural.”

“Smart, too.” She touched the tip of my nose with her finger and skipped back to wherever she had come from, rubbing her rear end as if it pained her.

“Gunnar, there are fringe benefits to going to Harvard. Corporeal hors d’oeuvres, if you will.”

I snickered as the recruiter’s sales pitch grew more desperate.

“I’m going to be frank with you. If I get you to attend Harvard, I get seventy-five thousand dollars, exactly enough to buy a new motor home.”

“Motor home?” I asked.

“Couple of years back, some demonic rowdies from down there” — he jabbed his finger angrily toward the ground — “destroyed the old one. They smashed the windows, slashed the tires, urinated on the engine, set fire to the interior. We haven’t gone rappelling in the sierras since Lord knows when.”

I couldn’t believe it was this cat’s house me and Psycho Loco had rampaged the night Pumpkin died. “From down where?” I asked.

“Down there!” he repeated, pointing over the stone slope of the San Borrachos Mountains and apparently growing agitated from having to recall the memory.

“Hell, you mean?”

“No, I mean Hillside. The entire community is a Petri dish for criminal vermin.”

“So I should go to Harvard and learn to become a gentrified robber baron instead?”

“Yes, you should. I got mine, you get yours. Those poor people are beyond help, you must know that. The only reason I and others of my illustrious ilk pretend to help those folks is to reinforce the difference between them and us. There’s a psychological advantage to being the helper and not the helpee. You know the phrase ‘Each one, teach one’?”

“Yup.”

“Well my motto is ‘Each one, leech one.’”

I stopped listening and went out by the pool. The view of Los Angeles, including Hillside, was magnificent. The web of amber streetlights looked like a constellation fallen to earth, awaiting some astronomer to connect the glowing dots to give form to its oracularity. From the sundecks of Cheviot Heights I imagined dimes falling from a stumblebum’s Styrofoam cup as shooting stars streaking the night. I heard the nervous laughter of the Seven Sisters standing in doorways, deciding whether to study or hang out. I felt sorry for the night laborers on the moons, selling roses from a bucket and bags of oranges to the comets.

The public intellectual excused himself and then returned with a bundle of black nylon rope and rappelling equipment. “When you go to Harvard, we’ll go mountain climbing on your weekends. Let me show you how.” He wrapped a belt around my waist, then threaded the rope through its metal loop. Anchoring one end around the pool’s stepladder, he pulled the rope tight to make sure it was secure. “Hold the rope loosely with your left hand and use your right to control your speed. When you want to brake, pull back. That’s it — now lean back, get your butt down. There you go.”

I stepped over the pile of rope and tossed the coil over the fence. It tumbled down the wall until the knotted end was dangling about ten feet from the streets of Hillside.

“What in the hell are you doing? Now you have to recoil the goddamn thing.”

Ignoring his admonitions, I scaled the fence, planted my feet firmly against the wall, lowered my butt, and leaned into space.

“Gunnar, where do you think you’re going?”

“Home.”

“Don’t you live in the Valley?”

“Nope, I live in Hillside, the depths of hell.”

“You’re no Sir Edmund Hillary. Get back here.”

“And you’re no Lionel Trilling. Later.”

I lowered myself into the night.

Mom was disappointed that I wasn’t going to Harvard; she thought the public intellectual sounded like a decent man.

“There’s a note on the table for you. The recruiter from Boston University stopped by the house.”

“He came by the house?”

“She came by the house, and she said she’ll be back tomorrow.”

* * *

Ms. Jenkins sat at the kitchen table playing spades with me, Scoby, and Psycho Loco and fielding our questions, my mother hovering over us like a pit boss.

“Would you like another brew, Ms. Jenkins?” I asked.

“Sure, I likes these Carta Blancas — smoother than a motherfucker. Boston doesn’t have nothing like this.”

I fetched her another beer, making sure Scoby and Psycho Loco didn’t peek at my cards. Ms. Jenkins and I were trying to set those fools.

“What does Boston have?” Scoby asked, spinning a king of hearts across the table. “Not much. No black radio. No black clubs. No black political power base. No drive-thru fast food.”

“So why would I want to go there?” I asked, trying to emphasize to Nick that this was my interview.

“You told me that you wanted to get as far out of L.A. as possible. That’s either Orono, Maine, or Boston, Massachusetts, and I know you not no goddamn moose lover. Besides, Gunnar, I’ve seen your poetry in all the literary journals. I didn’t make the connection until I saw the same poems scrawled on the walls in the neighborhood. You probably don’t know it, but you already have a following on the East Coast.” Ms. Jenkins covered Nicholas’s king with a six of hearts.

“This our trick, nigger poet with a bourgeois following on the East Coast,” Scoby crowed.

“Nicholas, be quiet,” my mother broke in. She liked Ms. Jenkins, but she wasn’t about to sell me down the river to any second-rate institution. “Now you said Boston University is Ivy League, but I don’t recall its being an Ivy school.”

“Well, BU is not an original member, but we recently paid to join the Ivy League.”

“What?” said Psycho Loco incredulously, laying a three of hearts on the growing stack of cards and staring me in the eye. “You can’t buy your way into the Ivy League.”

“You know how colleges have endowments that they invest in the stock market and futures, right? A couple of months back, the Massachusetts lottery was up to five hundred million dollars. The trustees of BU decided to buy thirteen million dollars’ worth of lottery tickets, figuring if they covered every possible number combination they would win at least their money back, if not more. As luck would have it, BU was the sole winner. A little hush money in the right pockets, a few well-publicized millions to each member school, and Boston University is in the Ivy League. Of course, we had to offer tuition remission to all the students with IQ’s under 125 we kicked out, but they’ll get into other schools, if they don’t snort it all away.”

“Oh shit,” I said and slapped down a five of spades.

Ms. Jenkins picked up the book. “‘Oh shit’ is right. So we’re looking for some black students who are going to turn shit out. You down, Gunnar?”

My mother broke in. “Sounds good to me.”

“Ma!”

“What about me? Can I go?” asked Nicholas, handing Ms. Jenkins a copy of his transcript and SAT scores.

“Scoby!” I whined.

“With grades and test scores like these, Nicholas, you’re a shoo-in, full ride and all.”

“What about married couples’ housing?”

“Psycho Loco, what you talking about? Married housing!” I shouted, throwing down a jack of clubs.

“When you turn eighteen, Gunnar?”

“June twenty-seventh.”

“Then you’ll be married, nigger.” Psycho Loco stood and flung down a queen of spades with such force it landed on the table with a loud pop. “Get up on that, Ms. Jenkins. You know a dirty bastard such as meself is cutting clubs.”

Ms. Jenkins laughed. “Fool, you ain’t said shit if an ace of spades has yet to be played,” and she blanketed Psycho Loco’s queen with the ace of spades, followed reluctantly by Scoby’s nine of clubs. “We have married housing. Gunnar, you and the missus can live in one of our luxury on-campus condominiums.”

“I’m not getting married!”

“Gunnar, I like the sound of your going back to Boston and following in the footsteps of your great-great-great-great-great-greatgrandfather Euripides. It’s as if the Kaufman legacy has come full circle.”

“Ma!”

“So it’s settled, Gunnar’s going to BU. Mr. Loco, why don’t you attend Boston U? I’m sure I could get you admitted under the auspices of our Unique Quality Life Experience Program.”

“Naw, I don’t think college is for me. I’d get in there and have to shoot the entire history department. ‘What you mean, remember the Alamo?’ Blam! Blam! Blam! That be some multiculturalism for yo’ ass.”

“I’m not getting married.”

* * *

With my immediate future assured, I stopped going to class and steadily began to lose interest in playing basketball. During games, when I wasn’t playing I sat on the bench reading. Coach Logan threatened to fail me if I didn’t commit myself to basketball. Psycho Loco suggested I take the GED and forget school, which I did. I decided my last day of school at El Campesino would be the playoff game at Phillis Wheatley. The papers tried to create a civil war atmosphere by depicting Nicholas and me as best friends fighting on enemy sides. There were ugly undertones to the whole affair. The headlines read “Kaufman Seeks to Demystify B-ball Prestidigitator.”

By now Coach Shimimoto had convinced Scoby not to be ashamed of his talents and to play hard, not to please others but to please himself. In the past two years Scoby had scored over a thousand straight baskets, and a local media usually clamoring for perfection from its athletes couldn’t accept the perfect athlete. Instead of appreciating Nicholas’s gift, they treated Scoby as an evil spirit, an idiot savant with a bone through his nose who made the basketball sail through the hoop by invoking African gods. Scoby denied that he was a demigod and told his falling-out-of-the-tree story, but the rumors persisted. One report had him drinking chicken blood and kissing shrunken heads before games. Another had him commiserating with a witch doctor and practicing in a grass skirt. In a failed attempt to inject some humor into the situation, Coach Shimimoto told the news services that during a trip to Africa he had found Nicholas throwing coconuts into a hollowed-out tree trunk from seventy-five feet away and that at age four Nicholas could thread a needle in one try every time. I was portrayed as the Golden Child, white society’s mercenary come to teach the pagans a lesson. “Starting at guard for El Campesino Real Conquistadores, Hernán Cortés-Kaufman.”

On the morning of the big game, the El Campesino cheerleaders rousted all the white players out of bed for a unity breakfast at a diner in the Valley. They called me from the restaurant to say they wished I could be there eating pancakes with the rest of the team but I lived so far away. While the whities pep-rallied over banana pancakes, I planned my first rebellious act.

During the pregame shoot-around, I walked over to the scorer’s table and made some changes to the starting lineup sheet. The horn sounded to signal the start of the game, and as the team huddled around Coach Logan for instructions I stood on the outskirts, slipped on a pair of white gloves, smeared my lips with cold cream, and hid my head under my warmup jacket. The crowd quieted as they announced the starting lineups.

“And now the visiting El Campesino Real Conquistadores. At center, Lawrence O’Shaughnessy.” Larry, the lone white starter, ran out to center court, nervously clapping his hands and jumping up and down waiting to greet the rest of the starting team. “At a forward, Anthony ‘Rastus’ Price.” A few people in the crowd laughed as Anthony jogged to his spot with a quizzical look on his face. The announcer continued, “At the other forward, Anita ‘Aunt Jemima’ Appleby. At guard, Tommy ‘Nigger T’ Mendoza.” Anita and Tommy peeled off and ran to their stations, red-faced but chortling with the crowd. The laughter died down as the fans strained to hear what the announcer would say next.

The band went into an extended drumroll as I sat alone on the bench, my head down and hands folded under my armpits. “At guard, first team all-city, second team all-American, Hillside’s own Gunnar ‘Hambone, Hambone, Have You Heard’ Kaufman.” I lurched from the sideline, shuffling through the gauntlet of astonished teammates as slowly as I could, my big feet flopping in front of me, my back bent into a drooping question mark. My gloved hands slid along the floor, trailing behind like minstrel landing gear. The gymnasium erupted. People rolled in the aisles with laughter; light bulbs popped. I don’t suppose they could hear me whistling “The Ol’ Gray Mare” through the powdered doughnut that was my slack-jawed mouth. I stood at center court and gave a hearty “Howdy, y’all.”

Coach Logan tried to get me replaced, but it was too late. The scorebook listed me as a starter, and the referees could find nothing in the rulebook about playing with white shit on your face, and I successfully argued that if you could play in a wrist brace, you could play in cotton gloves. Larry won the opening tip-off and out of force of habit passed the ball to me. I streaked past everyone and threw down a thunderous slam-dunk. Someone called a time out and Coach Logan substituted for me. I shuffled off the court in a somnambulant gait and headed straight to the locker room to cheers of “Gunnar! Gunnar!”

When I returned, fresh-faced and dressed in street clothes, Logan ordered me to sit and shut my monkey ass up. Oblivious to his ranting, I threw my uniform in a pile at his feet, set it afire, and sat next to Coach Shimimoto for the rest of game, which Wheatley won by sixty points. My mother didn’t seem too displeased; she and Psycho Loco were in the stands making summer wedding plans.

nine

MY WEDDING was a small outdoor affair held in my front yard and catered only by the bag of cheese puffs Nicholas Scoby passed around in celebration of his best friend’s betrothal. Psycho Loco was spinning in circles singing “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match,” like a Mexican understudy for Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. He had fulfilled his promise and repaid his debt by finding me a mail-order bride through the services of Hot Mama-sans of the Orient. I sulked in the driveway, refusing to look at my bride, my back to the stalled nuptials. Psycho Loco approached me with fake trepidation, rattling the bag of cheese puffs at me and asking why I was so upset.

“Oh nothing, just that you’ve arranged for me to marry a woman I don’t even know without my permission.”

“What, I fucked up the plans for the rest of your life? Gunnar, you don’t even have an alarm clock, so don’t give me no bullshit that I’ve altered your destiny.” Twisting my arm behind my back, Psycho Loco marched me toward the wedding party. “Besides, you should feel honored. Yoshiko chose you over hundreds of potential husbands.”

“I’m sure that was difficult. I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life in Olympia, Washington, cleaning rifles, gutting deer, and drinking Coors Light down at the American Legion Post either. Can you remove the gun from my kidneys? I’ll go through with it.”

The UPS driver conducted the ceremony. Dressed in tree-bark brown from head to toe like a misplaced Yosemite National Park ranger, he looked at my license, then back at me. “Today’s your eighteenth birthday, huh, kid?” He tipped his brown baseball cap at the bride. “Nice present.”

Yoshiko Katsu stood next to a stack of designer luggage, only slightly rumpled from the transpacific trip and the ride from the repository. Tall and thickly built, she stood stiffly, her arms straight down at her sides, smiling at everything that moved but never really taking her eyes off me. My mother and my baby-laden sisters sidled up to her, skeptical and unimpressed. Christina’s baby pulled on the invoice stapled to Yoshiko’s blouse. Nicole pinched a silky sleeve. “Dior?” Yoshiko nodded and bowed for no apparent reason.

“Sign here.” The delivery man shoved a clipboard in my face.

“What happens if I don’t sign?”

“Then she goes back to the warehouse and collects dust for three days till we send her back to Japan fourth class, which probably will mean three weeks in the hot cargo bay of a transport ship.”

I penned my name and shoved the yellow copy in my back pocket. “Ain’t she got to sign nothing?”

“Nope, she’s just like a package. She came with instructions, but it’s all in Japanese. Oh I forgot, you may kiss the bride.”

“And you can get your maple-syrup-looking ass in that truck now and go, before I kiss you with a foot so far up your ass you’ll be spitting toenails for a week.”

Christina saucily sucked her teeth and hissed in Yoshiko’s direction, “Girl, I know that’s my brother, but you got to watch these niggers. After they get married, they change.”

“Mmm-hmm, like streetlights and diapers. You seen what happen to Daddy,” Nicole echoed, slapping Christina’s palm. “That’s why I kicked my baby’s father to the curb. What I look like, Sigmund Freud?”

“Carl Jung?”

“Erik Erikson?”

Yoshiko bowed in appreciation of their sisterly sagacity. “So desu ka? Domo arigato gozaimasu.”

Psycho Loco tossed me two tarnished gold bands. “Ignore these spinsters. Step up, cuz, and be a man.”

I ripped off the price tag and boldly approached Yoshiko. There were no jitters. My hands didn’t shake. My underarms were TV-commercial dry. Sometimes the inevitable just seems right. “Kon’ban wa. Ichi, ni, san, chi,” I said, exhausting my karate school Japanese and handing her a ring. She laughed, shook her head, and corrected my greeting — “Kon’nichi wa” — pointing at the hazy midday sun. We slipped the rings on our fingers and kissed each other lightly on the cheek. She smelled like cardboard. As I stepped off, I noticed that some UPS jokester had stamped “Fragile” on her forehead.

“Who dat heifer Gunnar with?” I could hear the china shop’s bulls coming around the corner. “Naw, bitch, that’s our nigger! Don’t even feel it. You think you can come here playing Yokohama Hootchie Mama and steal our man, you got another thought coming.”

Yoshiko turned to face her tormenters, Betty and Veronica, crashing the wedding in a vain Dustin Hoffman showdown for my affections. Betty’s hair was styled into a gold-flaked gramophone horn with a little hairpin crank just over the right ear. Veronica had so many extensions in her hair that the wavy locks cascaded down her body like a horsehair waterfall. Yoshiko looked confused; I think she was looking for Lady Godiva’s white horse.

I stepped in to help, but Scoby held me back. “Hold up a sec. She’s going to have to learn to cope. Let’s see what happens.”

Betty and Veronica squared off and prepared to battle, thumbing their noses and bobbing up and down like amateur boxers looking for an opening. Veronica snapped a jab that stopped an inch from Yoshiko’s nose. Yoshiko didn’t flinch; she just bowed and said something in a terse Japanese. Veronica froze.

“What she say, Gunnar?”

“She said that if you persist with your puerile inner-city antics, she gonna take out her samurai sword, invoke her ancestral clan of warriors, and chop you into a Negro roll, inside out with salmon roe.”

“You don’t speak Japanese. How you know that’s what she said?”

“Why you ask then, shit? Maybe she said, ‘If I act like I know some karate, I can scare these stupid niggers senseless. They sure don’t act like they do on television.’ Or maybe she was admiring your hair.”

“Think so? Can she show us some of those crazy Japanese hairstyles? We could be the first ones on the block to wear topknots and shit. Maybe I’ll dye my teeth black. I seen that on the late-night kabuki plays. That shit would be fresh, nobody got a black teeth thing happening.”

Betty and Veronica lowered their fists and returned Yoshiko’s bow and then clamored over her wedding ring. Mom, beaming like a lottery winner, wrapped a proud arm around Yoshiko and demanded that Scoby take a photograph of her and her new daughter-in-law.

“Gunnar, I like Yoshiko. I believe she’ll make an excellent Kaufman. She got spirit, escaping from a repressive society to seek her fortune in a strange world.”

“Ma, Japan ain’t some feudalistic country. I mean, they got travel agents.”

“Don’t matter, I approve.”

“I can’t believe it. Thought you’d never approve of me marrying a woman who isn’t black.”

“Yes, but Yoshiko is black at heart. You can tell. She got soul like … who’s that actor I like always play the Japanese nigger in them shogun movies?”

“Toshiro Mifune.”

Hearing a familiar name, Yoshiko nudged my mother in the ribs, put a bewildered look on her face, and started scratching the back of her head and her underarms, impersonating the famous actor.

“That’s exactly who I’m talking about. Yoshiko, did you know Mifune was born in China? True, true. His first big part was the bandit in Rashomon. Then…” Mom ushered Yoshiko into the house, lecturing her on Mifune’s oeuvre and smoothly seguing from his role as a doctor suffering from syphilis in The Quiet Duel to the types of birth control available in the United States.

Scoby, the do-nothing best man, admonished me for not carrying my bride over the threshold. I kicked him in the shin and told him the only thing I was carrying was a grudge against him for not buying any wedding presents. “What, no blender, some bath towels, nothing? Cheap bastard. C’mon, help me with these bags.”

We held the reception in the back yard. Psycho Loco played chef and showed impressive culinary skills: barbecued spareribs, deviled eggs, and to make Yoshiko feel at home, he even threw together a jamming udon noodle soup.

“So, man, how you like your wife?” Nicholas asked from across the table, sucking on a bone and sizing up Yoshiko, who was sitting next to me.

“She all right, I guess. She bow too goddamn much.”

“That shit throws you off, don’t it. I got leery and put my hand on my wallet, then I started bowing with my eyes closed, and when I opened them she was long gone, grubbing on corn on the cob. And your wife is looking fine picking that shit out her teeth, if I do say so myself.”

How did I like Yoshiko? I watched her loudly slurp her udon soup with such powerful suction a noodle bounced off her forehead, slithered down the bridge of her nose, and slunk into her mouth with a loud pop. I could see why my mom liked her; they had the same table manners — none. I remembered how when I showed Yoshiko our room she had carefully unpacked her books, put the titles in my face until I nodded and said “hmmm,” as if I could read the bold-stroke Japanese. Psycho Loco once told me that in prison when two men fall in love, they have to be careful not to relax and give in to the passion, because just when you let yourself go, your lover slips his finger into your anus and you’re punked for life. I squeezed my sphincter shut as Yoshiko lowered the empty plate from her face, wiped her mouth, and let out a healthy belch.

It wasn’t difficult to tell that Yoshiko was equally enamored with me. No one had looked at me the way she did since Eileen Litmus back in the third grade, and I knew what that look meant.

“Gunnar, I don’t think that Yoshiko trusts you. She staring at you like you General MacArthur.”

As we sat around the table eating dessert and drinking beers, everyone took the opportunity to raise glasses and congratulate the newlyweds. Soon the guests demanded that the couple belatedly exchange their vows.

I stood and raised my beer can in Yoshiko’s direction, placed my hand over my heart, and said, “Till death do us part.”

“That’s it, nigger?”

“I can’t make no promises other than that.”

“What about ‘in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer’?”

“Look, all I know is we’re going to die. And when we do, we’ll be apart.”

“What about if you two die at the same time?”

“That’s a good point. Okay, I amend my vow. Till death kills us.”

“Now Yoshiko’s turn.”

“Mom, she doesn’t even speak English.”

“English?” Yoshiko stood up sharply, a little redfaced and wobbly from all the beer she’d drunk. “Me speak English.” To wild applause, Yoshiko pecked me on the lips, then climbed onto the tabletop, chugging her beer until she reached the summit. My bride, literally on a pedestal, was going to pledge her life to me. You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face with a blowtorch.

Yoshiko cleared her throat and threw her hands in the air. “Brmmphh boomp ba-boom bip. I’m the king of rock — there is none higher! Sucker MC’s must call me sire!”

“Hoooo!”

“Anyone know how to say ‘I love you’ in Japanese?”

Mom paid for the honeymoon. She lent me the car, and Yoshiko and I drove to Six Pennants Mystic Mount, an amusement park in the Antelope Valley. We listened to the radio and communicated with nods and exaggerated facial expressions, pretending to understand our improvised sign language. As we coasted into the Mystic Mount parking lot, the wooden white lattice of Leviathan Loops, the world’s largest roller coaster, loomed in the distance. Yoshiko screamed and hugged me, moving her hand over imaginary hill and dale. We skipped through the entrance, and for the first time in my life I waited in the endless line snuggling with a lover. I wasn’t the odd one out, a car to myself, constantly having to crane my neck backward at my friends and their dates to see how much fun I was having.

On the flume ride I sat between Yoshiko’s legs in a fiberglass canoe while we sloshed through the dark tunnels, her chin resting on the nape of my neck, her fingertips cupping my chest. Before that first drop after the s-turn through the eucalyptus branches, I didn’t even know I had nipples. Now I was hyperventilating, struggling for air, dangerously rocking the canoe, and splashing the German tourists in front of us as Yoshiko continued to tweak my nipples. “Gott im Himmel.” Will the passenger in boat 37 please remain seated!

After a day filled with centrifugal spins and free-falls, it was hard to tell whether I was dizzy with love or with motion sickness. We drove home in a weary silence punctuated only by Yoshiko calling out the names of familiar places. San Kreyón Rompido Cribrillo, Rio Califas, Zuma Beach. The Pacific Coast Highway’s sharp curves dropped off into foggy banks of nothingness. I felt like Columbus teetering on the edge of the world. “Malibu! Malibu!” Yoshiko, doing her Amerigo Vespucci land ho, tugging at my shirtsleeve, and pointing toward a small promontory overlooking the ocean.

It had been a long time since I’d been to the beach at night. On Santa Monica nights when I was having trouble sleeping, I would sneak out and play D-Day on the empty beaches, advancing toward the Normandy beachhead with a battalion of waves. “Stay down, man, stay down.” Sometimes I would play dead and let the tide spit up my limp body onto the shore. “Tell Mother I love … uhh.” While I went to get the blankets and the radio from the trunk, Yoshiko sprinted down the bluff, tossing her clothes to the sand and motioning for me to join her. Hand in hand, we walked into the onrushing Pacific in our underwear. The waves breaking around our shins, then slamming against our chests. Like drunken seal pups, we splashed about in the surf, riding the dark waves into the cold sand, young lovers run aground. Using the stuffed elephants we had won pitching dimes at pillows, we pressed our backs against the wind-shorn bluffs and gave each other language lessons beside a fire of driftwood and the remains of a synthetic log.

I tried to teach her useful American phrases such as “consummate the marriage,” “nookie,” and “Let’s get busy.” Yoshiko’s instruction was more practical. We played a game of phonetic charades in which she would say a Japanese word and I’d have to guess its English homophone.

“Bii-ru.”

“That’s easy, beer.”

“Okay, se-ro-ri.”

“Celery. C’mon, I thought Japanese was supposed to be hard.”

“E-bu-ra-ha-mu Ri-n-kaan.”

“Four score and twenty years ago, our forefathers — Abraham Lincoln.”

“Ro-san-ze-ru-su.”

“What?”

Yoshiko threw a pile of sand in the air, stamped her feet, and waved her hands across the sky. “Ro-san-ze-ru-su.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Frustrated, my sensei jumped me from behind and rubbed my nose into the sand. “Ro-san-ze-ru-su.”

“Oh, I get it — Los Angeles. Ro-san-ze-ru-su.”

With the stars as chaperones and Al Green as the R & B mariachi, we courted each other with our life stories and dreams. I couldn’t understand her, but I listened intently and let the Suntory whiskey Yoshiko pulled from her purse interpret.

After one swig, I surmised that Yoshiko was a poor farmer running away from a lifetime of toil shucking wheat and paying homage to countless Shinto and Buddhist agrarian gods. Her hands, callus-free on my cheeks, dismissed that theory.

After two swigs she was a famous pop star with writer’s block, hoping to regain her soulful edge by soaking up the African-American aesthetic. Singing alongside Al Green, Yoshiko sounded like a lisping crow with laryngitis.

Here I am, baby, come and take me.

Here I am, baby, come and take me.

After half the bottle I was writing haiku on her bare back with my index finger;

wife’s rib cage expanding

contracting, fanning virgin fires

carnal bellows, mmmmm.

Somewhere near the backwash end of the bottle, I’d guessed that Yoshiko was a rebellious teen whose parents couldn’t afford the cost of an American university, so she decided that marrying an eligible bachelor would be the easiest way to get a free education. The final choice was between me and an Iowa grad student named Stanley. On the day she’d been suspended from school for maiming the kendo teacher, she was in detention passing the time reading an alternative Japanese magazine called Phlegm when she came across one of my poems.

Your Problem Is

how can …

the jehovah’s witness, the scientologist,

the political scientist, the social scientist,

the mad scientist, the editorial page,

the 11 o’clock news, the talk radio host,

the urban planner, the school superintendent,

the special assistant to the president,

the psychologist, the televangelist, the homeless crazy,

the pontiff, the sales clerk, the bus driver,

the late-night cable access fuck,

claim to know my problem

when they don’t even know my name

Stanley was quickly forgotten. Under the half-moon gangster leaning over the horizon, I fell asleep to Al Green singing on a belly full of cornbread and fruit punch

I want to settle down and stop fooling around

Let’s get married, let’s get married today

and Yoshiko’s finger tapping on my anus. “Anaru zeme,” she whispered.

I dreamed I was a flying, fire-breathing foam stegosaurus starring in a schlocky Japanese film called Destroy All Negroes. I stomped high-rise projects into rubble, turned out concerts by whipping my armored tail across the stage, and chewed on slow black folks like licorice sticks. The world government sent a green-Afroed Godzilla to defeat me and we agreed to a death match in the Los Angeles Coliseum. The winner would be crowned Reptile of the Nuclear Epoch. I was beating Godzilla into the sea with a powerful stream of radioactive turtle piss when I awoke to find Yoshiko’s index finger worming its way toward my prostate. Punked for life.