The White Boy Shuffle

ten

DURING MY STAY at Boston University I went to one class. My one hour of higher education consisted of Professor Oscar Edelstein’s poetry workshop, Creative Writing 104. As the next generation of great American poets stood up and introduced themselves with bohemian haughtiness, I drummed my fingers, trying to remember why I was going to college in the first place.

A thin white woman with a badly scarred face was talking. “Ciao bella, ciao bella. My name is Peyote Chandler, of the Greenwich, Connecticut, Chandlers. Let’s see, now. I graduated from Londonderry Academy with honors. My favorite poet is Sylvia Plath. My mother is the ambassador to Pakistan, and my father now owns a carpet factory in north Asia. The factory employs hundreds of starving children at what I believe is a respectable living wage of seven rupees a week. I believe in Third World mysticism, animism, extraterrestrial life, and —”

“What the fuck happened to your mug?” I interrupted, chin in my hand and bored with her Mayflower pedigree.

Peyote was eager to explain. “When I was twelve, my boyfriend, Skip Pettibone Helmsford, broke up with me, so I tried to kill myself by sticking my head in the oven like Sylvia Plath did. Only I forgot to blow out the pilot light and I stuck my head into a preheated four-hundred-and-fifty-degree inferno.”

A chubby bearded boy in khakis a size too small and a rumpled Oxford shirt moved his elephantine mass to the front of the class, licking the edges of his Drum cigarette. “Greetings, my name is Chadwick Osterdorf III. I graduated from Choate with high honors and I think the only true poet ever to walk the earth was Rimbaud.” Some parliamentary “hear, hears” rang out from the back of the class. “It was in his footsteps that I spent this past summer selling guns to downtrodden ghetto youth to defend themselves against the oppressive system.”

This time I lifted my head off the desk to interrupt. “Come on, Rimbaud wasn’t no gun-running revolutionary. What he really wanted to sell was slaves, black African niggers, but he was too stupid to catch any, so he sold weapons to some king who ripped him off. Some dissident. If you was really a Rimbaudite, you’d amputate those two cellulite-filled legs of yours so the downtrodden ghetto youth wouldn’t have to worry about you kicking ’em in the ass.”

Professor Edelstein pulled the sleeves of his tweed jacket and pressed his wire-rimmed glasses into his tanned forehead, raising the nerve to confront the boisterous black kid. “And who might you be, young man?”

“My name is Gunnar Kaufman.”

“Gunnar Kaufman? Gunnar Kaufman from Los Angeles?”

“Yeah.”

Edelstein popped out of his seat. “I heard you might be attending BU, but I never dreamed you’d take my class. I saw your poem ‘If Niggers Could Fly’ in the latest issue of Locution. I’ve been thinking about it all week.” Edelstein took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling. “‘If niggers could fly, where would we alight? We orbit a treeless world, nest on eaveless clouds, unable to stop flapping our wings for even a second, in constant migration to nowhere.’ If niggers could fly. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. How old were you when you wrote that?”

“Thirteen. I was attempting to —”

The Rimbaud wannabe removed a copy of Inkstone from his knapsack. “Here’s a haiku you wrote.”

the full May moon,

Christopher Walken’s forehead

finally has competition

Sylvia Plath picked at her scars and said, “I have pictures of your poems.”

“What you mean, you have pictures of my poems?”

She produced a coffee-table book of photographs entitled Ghettotopia: An Anthropological Rending of the Ghetto through the Street Poems of an Unknown Street Poet Named Gunnar Kaufman.

“What they mean by ‘an unknown street poet named Gunnar Kaufman?’ More to the point, what the hell is a street poet?”

“Gunnar, the urban piquancy of your work is so resonant, so resplendent, so resounding … you make the destitution of your environs leap off the page. You’re my inspiration.”

“What about Sylvia Plath?”

“Well, it’s really you. I thought that if I mentioned a black poet, I wouldn’t be taken seriously by the rest of the class.”

A white woman dressed in a tie-dyed sundress, her hair knotted in blond cornrow braids, slid her fleshy rear end onto my desk and announced herself, kicking her thick ankles high in the air. “Hi, my name is Negritude.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“My parents named me that so I would be a reminder of the hagiocratic innocence possessed by black peoples around the world.”

“Visceral sainthood — I see. And the braids?”

“I feel more powerful with my hair like this, really Nubian. You must know what I mean. Your scalp pulled so tight you can hear the howls of the jackals, the bellows of the hippopotami. Oh, I could properly welcome home an Ashanti warrior returned from the hunt with a fresh kill. Would you like to hear me ululate?”

“Not really.”

“Alilililililililili!”

I panicked and dashed out of the room, with my classmates and Professor Edelstein close behind. “I can’t believe it — Gunnar Kaufman, the underground neologist, the poet’s poet, right here in my poetry workshop. Only in America.” I felt like I’d been outed and exposed by my worst enemies, white kids who were embarrassingly like myself but with whom somehow I had nothing in common. To prove it I walked through the center of campus and slowly began to undress. Near the School of Engineering I released my sweater to the Boston winds. It sailed like a magic carpet past the trolleys and over the heads and outstretched hands of Professor Edelstein and the students of Creative Writing 104. My shirt, shorts, and underwear followed, sucked into a mini-tornado near the College of Liberal Arts. The clothes spiraled at a dizzying speed with dead leaves and crushed milk cartons. Soon the twister died and they fell to the ground, only to be pounced on like piñata candy by the class.

I continued down Commonwealth Avenue, naked save for sneakers and socks. My black lower-middle-class penis fluttered stiffly in the wind like a weather vane, first to the left, then suddenly to the right. When I reached the vestibule of my apartment building, the campus police closed in on me. I heard Professor Edelstein shout, “It’s okay, he’s a poet. Matter of fact, the best black … the best poet writing today.” The cops instantly backed off. I was protected by poetic immunity. I had permission to act crazy.

I pulled off an officer’s hat and mussed his hair, then skipped up the stairs to my apartment and plopped face down on the couch, my head on Yoshiko’s lap. She rested her textbook on my cheek and with her left hand cleaved the crack of my ass like a hacksaw.

“You all right, baby?”

“Fine. What you reading?”

“Macroeconomics.”

“You don’t mind me here?”

“Nope, just don’t move too much. How was your first class?”

There was a timid knock at the door. “Judge for yourself.” Edelstein entered, followed by Rimbaud, Plath, Ginsberg, Eliot, and the rest of the poetry canon, bashfully trying to avert their eyes by gazing at Coach Shimimoto’s watercolor prints on the walls.

“Yoshiko, this is my creative writing class. Class, this is my wife, Yoshiko.” Shy hellos, then whispers all around.

“He’s married? Oh, fucking cool. I’m in Gunnar Kaufman’s pad and he’s naked, intense.”

“Gunnar, a few of your classmates want to know if they can keep your clothes as mementos. You know, they might be worth something one day.”

“I don’t think one sleeve of a torn T-shirt is going to be worth much.”

“What we really came by to say was that we feel you have to publish a collection of your work. Why don’t you compile a manuscript, and I’ll take care of the publishing end? I know some big-wig Yalies in New York, and you should have a decent advance in a week and a book by spring. The people, your people, need to see your work.”

Yoshiko tapped her macroeconomics book on my head, which I interpreted to mean “Say yes.”

“Okay, I’ll give you some things.”

“What about a title?”

“How about, ummm, Watermelanin.”

“Gunnar, you know, this is going to change your life.”

The door burst open, then quickly slammed shut.

“Damn, nigger, every time I come over, Yoshiko got her hand halfway up your ass. But you know what they say — ‘Once you go Asian, there’s no other persuasion.’” It was Scoby, not bothering to knock, standing in the middle of the living room oblivious to the other uninvited guests and talking loudly to make himself heard over his stereo headphones. “What this shit about your life going to change?”

“He’s going to publish a book of poems.”

“I can speak for myself, Yoshiko. She’s right, I’m going to publish a book of poems.” Yoshiko subtly plucked a hair from my anus. “Ow.”

Professor Edelstein motioned for his class to open their notebooks and take notes. My visitors cleared some space, and Scoby sat on the floor Indian-style, playing an imaginary vibraphone. I guessed he was still listening to Lionel Hampton.

“Publishing a book of poems don’t change your life as much as it changes everyone else’s life. Sad as your shit is, fools going to be jumping off roofs and shit. I heard if you commit suicide your freshman year, your roommate automatically gets a perfect grade-point average. That true?”

“You thinking of committing suicide?”

“I don’t know, maybe. Depends on what your poems say.”

“What you doing tonight?”

“I don’t know. Ain’t shit to do in this town.”

“What do you mean, Boston’s a great party town,” Negritude broke in, looking up from her notes and batting her eyelashes in my direction.

Yoshiko threw her macro book at the interloper, hitting her squarely in the jaw. “Get your slothful, fey, hippy behinds out of our apartment, now!”

The class hustled out of the room, a stream of Japanese curse words escorting them to the door.

“Gunnar, don’t make me have to hurt one of these stupid white bitches.”

“Slothful, fey? Honey, your English is getting really good. What are we going to do tonight?”

* * *

There wasn’t a whole lot of nigger nightlife in Boston, much less any fun spots for Japanese nationals. When we first arrived, we cruised the local bars, garish nightspots crammed with white people sloshing beer on one another and singing corny white pop hits from the 1980s. Yoshiko must have punched a hundred guys who tried to pick her up with the line from the Vapors’ big hit, “I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so.” Looking for a more austere environment, we tried the gay spots in the South End. Our favorite hangout was Club Tribadism, a gay/lesbian bar with the best jazz jukebox in the city. The patrons tolerated us until one night Nicholas and another patron got into a fight over whether Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” could be deciphered as a paean to a mentally ill queer. After a little sword fighting with pool cues, we were driven into the street and banished from Club Tribadism forever. Scoby got in the last word when he proclaimed that Mel Torme was the ugliest dyke he’d ever seen.

By October we had finally figured out that the colored folks lived in Roxbury. Roxbury was an old, hilly community practically inaccessible by public transportation. For the most part it was a desolate place, with little to offer except decent basketball competition and a few juke joints. Our regular spot was Oscar’s Onyx, a musty blues bar at the top of the hill on Mission Avenue. Friday nights brothers in platform shoes would get into knife fights, slashing the air with their eyes closed like orchestra conductors. Scoby’s barbs always roused the crowd, “You stupid hick-ass bean-eating stiletto-carrying Cooley High niggers is still wearing leather jackets and talking about ‘Stand back, sucker, fo’ I cut cha.’ Niggers probably think the Black Panthers is still active.” Later on male and female strippers with names like Chocolate and Brutus walked from table to table, soliciting dollar bills in exchange for a feel. Yoshiko and Scoby had a thing for a potbellied she-male stripper named Smattering of Applause. Smattering of Applause rolled his hips and fondled his tits, and when she bent over to claim her hard-earned tips, hairy butt to the audience, Yoshiko and Scoby would pelt her rear end with balled-up dollar bills. I liked the place because the bartenders wrapped napkins around the beer bottles before they handed them to you and could never adequately explain why. “Habit,” they said. The problem was that every night wasn’t Friday night. On weekdays, while Scoby and Yoshiko did their homework, I had nothing to do. Scoby suggested I join a club.

I called Dexter Waverly, president of the citywide black student union, and asked when the next Ambrosia meeting was. The black student union was originally called Umoja, but the name was changed because of the whites’ inability to pronounce the Swahili word for unity. Dexter cleared his throat. “Mhotep, son of Africa. The next meeting is Monday night at eight in the School of Management basement. Come early and we’ll fit you for a dashiki. You can play a talking drum, can’t you?”

I purposely arrived late at the gathering. Harvard, BU, MIT Negroes were wearing loud African garb over their Oxford shirts and red suspenders, drinking ginger beer, and using their advertising skills to plan how best to package the white man’s burden. “No alcohol, brother,” someone shouted. I chugged my real beer, burped, and took a seat in the back, picking up a discarded agenda from the floor. At the top of the sheet was the Ambrosia motto, “The happy slave has a right to be a slave, but is still a slave nonetheless.” I could hear my mother on the phone: “Join, Gunnar, sounds like an intelligent bunch of young people.”

The Ambrosia members outshouting one another about how brave they’d be fighting on the front lines of America’s race war reminded me of a small-town volunteer fire department shining an already shiny engine and bragging about how brave they’d be if they ever fought a real fire. “But are you ready to die and kill for your people?” said chief firefighter Dexter Waverly. Dexter wore a red dashiki trimmed with miniature elephant tusks and tightly gripped the sides of the lectern with both hands. Rallymaster, they called him: able to form a coalition at a moment’s notice, knows the copy center with the cheapest rates, media friendly, dynamic speaker.

Bored with the racial braggadocio, Dexter raised a hand for quiet, and the muttering stopped. I wanted to dislike Dexter — it was obvious he was a charlatan — but I was awestruck at how such an ugly motherfucker, with an eczema condition so severe that when he furrowed his brow tiny flakes of skin fell to the lectern, could hold an audience spellbound with a single gesture. I could hear his eyeballs crinkle as he looked up from the one-item agenda and scanned his audience. He seemed so angst-ridden I wanted to throw him a dog biscuit.

“Brothers and sisters” — uh-oh — “Comrade Essie Brooks’s combination fashion show and literacy program is a wonderful idea. A stroke of genius, of black feminine genius, of rump-rolling, look-at-that-butter, greasy, you-know-how-we-do, big-black-titty genius. Praise due to Sister Essie Brooks and all sisters like her.”

The men barked and stamped their feet. The women swooned and said loud amens, raising their hands in the air like castaways trying to flag down an ocean liner. I sat transfixed, trying to figure out how Dexter, a man whom I was seeing for the first time not in the cuddly company of a white woman, was the Emperor Jones of the Ivy League. Usually dating exclusively white was, for a black person, the equivalent of multiplying a lifetime of accomplishments by zero. It didn’t matter what your previous accomplishments were; abolitionist, Motown diva, Olympic figure-skater, inventor of the sky hook, you had zilch stature amongst the folks. Dexter managed to be the school Mandingo and maintain his race loyalty.

Sometimes I’d catch him in the back alleys with the white woman of the moment. He’d greet me with a hearty “Hey, black,” and place a reverent fist over his heart. If I looked quizzically at his date, he’d flash the “I know it’s hard to tell” smile and say, “No cause for alarm, brother. Sister Cindy Zwittledorf is of Brazilian descent. Third World solidarity, my brother.” To validate his claim further, Dexter would wave a small parade flag representing the woman’s supposed place of origin in tiny circles. “Viva Uruguay! Tres hurras por Argentina! Oyé como va Bolivia!”

I admit I admired his chutzpah and ingenuity. When Yoshiko and I walked the campus, I sometimes wilted under the evil stares, cowering behind Yoshiko’s back and covering my face in a fit of fake sneezes or forced yawns.

“Why you always sneeze when black people are around?”

“I’m allergic, baby.”

“Go ’head, Dexter,” a woman in front shouted. Dexter nodded in appreciation and continued.

“The fashion show — literacy program will use the Afro-chic to uplift the Afro-weak. What we propose is not a marriage — marriage, if you’re lucky, only lasts a lifetime. What we propose is an intellectual inheritance, an eternal trust fund for minds yet unborn. Young, black, not-yet-tainted-by-the-toxic-dyes-of-self-hatred minds. We talking tabula vivé la rasa. Nowadays, when you talk to the teachers of our youth, they say, ‘The young bastards and bastardettes can’t learn. They have short attention spans.’ Well, then you need to lengthen the attention span. If the river widens, you extend the bridge. When man invented the jet, did they say, ‘No, man, you cannot fly these supersonic jets, the runway is too short — you can’t take off, and if you manage to get the plane off the ground, you can’t land’? No, they lengthened the runway. And we gonna lengthen the fashion runway for our little black jets. Stretch their attention spans with fine black folks modeling black clothes. Each model male and fee-male — I say fee-male ’cause it cost to be a black woman — each model will carry a sign with a grammar lesson on it. I can see the enthusiasm on the children’s faces now. Imagine with me, if you will, the fine and sexy premed major light-skinned Linda Rucker, in a little one-piece bathing suit carrying a sign that reads ‘i before e except after c.’ There’ll be booty and learning for days. You think when the boys go to the bathroom and start beating off they going to be saying, ‘Goddamn, that bitch was fine’? No. They gone be pulling on their growing black manhood saying, “I before e except after c.” Now you know we not going to cheat our young African women out of their thrill. We’ll have the bronze god and star running back Thor Haverlock in bikini briefs thunder down the runway with a sign reading “A sentence is a complete thought” balanced on his bulge. When the girls get those hot flashes that accompany puberty, you better believe they’re gonna be fantasizing in complete sentences. ‘Jesus Christ, that boy is fine as hell.’ Anybody have any other ideas for grammatical phrases we can use? Gunnar Kaufman, esteemed poet, first-time Ambrosia attendee, what about you, my brother?”

“How about ‘In general, singular subjects connected by or, nor, either/or, or neither/nor take a singular verb if both subjects are singular, a plural verb if subjects are plural’?”

I left to a scattering of sotto voce insults: “Nigger crazy, he trying to confuse the youth”; “Smart-alecky fool need to be playing basketball, that’s what he need to be doing.”

When I reached the door, Jamal Vickers handed me a manila-colored flier and sneered, “Why don’t you join Concoction? You think you better than everyone else.” Concoction was an organization of mixed-race kids who felt ostracized by both white and colored students.

CONCOCTION — THE HUMAN STUDENT UNION

The primordial soup’s on! Tired of being stewed because of your biracial heritage?

The jambalaya of ethnic duplicity too complicated for your “black” friends?

The reality of the American melting pot too hot for your “white” amigos?

Come and be a part of Concoction’s goulash and celebrate your ethnic hybridization.

Future Topics of Discussion:

• How to check African-American/Latino/Asian on your job application and rise above your employer’s stereotypes by asserting your biraciality in the workplace in a nonethnic manner.

• Why jazz musicians tend to date “white” women.

• How to prove you are

not

a nigger.

• How to explain that you’re basically white despite having Lopez as a surname.

• Jane Paleface, renowned Indian rights activist, explains how to claim one sixty-fourth Native American heritage and get your oil and casino kickback checks without having to live on the reservation.

• Plebiscite on admitting full-blooded Puerto Ricans into the Concoction ranks.

Jamal stood there, hands on hips, waiting for a response. I wanted to explain that I’d already tried to join Concoction under the guise that I was a Rwandan exchange student of Hutu and Tutsi descent but was refused admission on the grounds that its bylaws didn’t consider African exogamy dual ethnicity. I decided it was pointless to talk to someone who believed a fashion show would save the black race. Folding the flier into an origami turtle, I handed it to Jamal as a symbol of the progress of his struggle.

My next foray into student activism was with SWAPO, Spoiled Whities Against Political Obsequiousness. SWAPO’s main concern was the school administration’s support of the National Party’s forces in the South African civil war. The best thing about the SWAPO meetings was that I was allowed to drink beer while they wrote the latest act of an ongoing guerrilla theater production, an interminable piece called Black Consciousness Is a Sovereign State of Mind.

“Okay, here’s the part where we hammer home the point of the play, that white liberalism is the bane of black South Africa. Gunnar, will you be the ghost of Steve Biko?”

“Fuck, no.”

“How about the pacifist mediocre tennis player who deserts the revolutionary army, marries a white debutante from Nashville, writes a bestseller on how he found true love in the arms of a white woman and true freedom in the American South.”

“You must be high.”

“But you’re our only black member.”

“I wonder why that is?”

“Why aren’t there more black people at these SWAPO meetings? We’ve reached out to all the black organizations, the frats and sororities, the track team. We play classic soul music at the parties. Don’t they care?”

“Remove your hand from my shoulder and I’ll tell you. See, it’s like this — no one could possibly care enough to be treated like a baby seal. Colored people aren’t mascots for your political attitudes.”

“Then why do you come to the meetings?”

“Because y’all got the best weed on campus.”

“What can I, as a progressive white male, do?”

“If it’s at all possible, shed the fucking John Brown vibe. I don’t need no crackers kissing me on the forehead like I’m a swaddling infant and leading me out of slavery. Did you know that the first person killed in the raid on Harper’s Ferry was the town baggage master, a free black man?”

“No.”

“There are no John Browns. Thank goodness.”

The white boy burst into tears, soaking his shirtsleeves.

“Come on, guy, why are you crying?”

“My name is John Brown.”

My last SWAPO event was a teach-in on civil disobedience in preparation for Boston University’s gala welcoming of the South African politician M’m’mofo Gottobelezi, the Zulu puppet of the National Party rebels. A graying man in a Grateful Dead T-shirt was singing Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Find the Cost of Freedom” and taking extended bong hits between choruses. I looked around for a young Rosa Parks, a gold-toothed Ralph Abernathy, but as usual I was the only black there. A grungy imitation Abbie Hoffman offered me a Che Guevara LSD tab: “Power to the people, my brother.” When the radical hippie stopped staring at all the braless coeds, he taught us how to form human chains by linking our arms and ankles, how to double our body weight by exhaling and letting our bodies go limp as the fascist pigs carted us off the paddy wagon, and how our parents could use the bail money as a small tax shelter.

As the session wound down, someone asked about the specter of police brutality. The glassy-eyed facilitator ground his joint into an ashtray and for the first time looked me in the eye. “When things get rough, I’ve found that the police treat us longhairs much more violently than they do our black and Hispanic hermanos y hermanas.” I passed my hand over my lumpy scalp and heard my father tapping his billy club on the cement. “So, mis compadres, when things get bleak, remember to sing and sing loud.”

A stale version of “We Shall Overcome” chased my shivering body through the snowy streets of Boston, catching me near a statue of Abraham Lincoln lightly touching the head of a kneeling slave. The slave’s pleading expression seemed to say, “Free me, boss. You ain’t got to free nobody else, just me.” I leaned into the slave’s brass ear and whispered, “Tag, you’re it.”

The next night Yoshiko and I woke up with soggy pillows and tear-stained cheeks.

“What was your dream about?”

“What was your dream about?”

“I asked you first.”

“I dreamed me, Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Cinque, and Didi Lancaster were fighting alongside the Irish Republican Army, driving through the streets of Belfast in a station wagon, shooting at the British troops, and singing ‘Find the Cost of Freedom.’ ‘F-i-ind the c-o-o-st o-of fr-e-e-e-dom buried in the gr-ound.’ After a while we got tired of the British machine-gunning us, so we tied a baby to the back of the station wagon. We’d buzz the Brits and they’d turn to shoot but wouldn’t fire when they saw a wailing kid lashed to the rear door. But one day they said fuck it and shot back, killed Nat, Gabriel, Didi, and the baby. I ended up teaching at a hearse-driving school.”

“Who’s Didi Lancaster?”

“This girl I knew in the eighth grade. One day in front of the whole class, Ms. Hanger, the social studies teacher, said she was stupid and would never amount to anything. Didi beat Ms. Hanger to a pulp and threw her out a window. Broke her jaw and cracked three ribs. The whole time she was kicking her ass, Didi was screaming, “Just because you a teacher don’t make you innocent.” What’s funny is Didi’s grades improved after that.”

“Whose baby did you tie to the car?”

“Ours.”

“Good.”

“What was your dream about, Yoshiko?”

“We had a kid and we were tucking her into bed, telling her bedtime stories.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

“The stories went like this. ‘This story is called “The Little Fuck Who Cried Wolf.” Once upon a time there was this shepherd boy who always screaming wolf like a little bitch…’”

“Oh shit, you got to stop hanging out with them Onyx niggers.” I put my head back on the pillow. “Yoshiko, you pregnant?”

“I think so.”

“Good.”

* * *

Having failed to find a stimulating extracurricular activity, I soon found myself in familiar surroundings: the basketball gym, my sneakers squeaking, yelling “help right” and “switch,” and watching Coach Slick Palomino shout and throw chairs at the white kids. Despite playing well and enjoying Scoby’s company on the court, I became depressed with my purposeless life; sad-eyed, I’d toe the free-throw line in an arena filled with screaming maniacs, pondering the worthlessness of my existence.

“Two shots, gentlemen. Relax on the first.” The referee would hand me the ball with a stern look, trying to talk with the whistle in his mouth. “Kaufman, you look glum. What’s wrong — having a poetic moment?”

“I don’t know. Been reading Schopenhauer and I can’t figure out my raison d’etre.”

“Your purpose in life is to make these free throws, then run back and play defense.”

“Fuck that.”

Scoby, his chest heaving up and down, would chime in. “Your purpose is to take care of your pregnant wife and raise your kid.”

“That ain’t no purpose, that’s a responsibility. If I had the money, I could pay someone to do that.”

“Kaufman, shoot the ball.”

“Yassuh, massa.”

Swish. Swish.

My only comforts were the boxes of Japanese literature Yoshiko would send me on the road trips. Returning to the hotel exhausted from another game, I’d find carefully wrapped copies of the love-suicide plays of Chikamatsu, the biographies of Yukio Mishima and Sakai Saburo, the diaries of Heian ladies-in-waiting on the bed. My favorites were the autobiographical tales of Osamu Dazai, the heavy-hearted writer who wandered the back roads of Japan struggling to raise the nerve to commit suicide in the Tamagawa River. In return I would send Yoshiko rocks, seashells, and fossils from riverbeds and oceans across America. Sparkling checkered periwinkles and smooth pismo clams from tidepools in Monterey, California. Hideous skeletons of trilobites and dalmanites embedded in sandstone from the Black Hills in the Dakotas. Purple fluorite cubes, emerald-green malachite, sharp clear spears of gypsum from the Utah flats, toast-black slabs of slate from Vermont, tenderly wrapped in love letters.

* * *

Dear Yoshiko,

I’m writing this letter during halftime of the Cornell game. Coach Palomino is foaming at the mouth, kicking lockers and shit, screaming like Fay Wray. “This is a must-win game! I know you boys — excuse me, Gunnar, my apologies — I know you men are trying to be winners…” Every game is a “must win” game. The shinos and the other coco-jin (not including Nicholas, of course) are looking shameful and nodding at every word Coach says, like they’ve done something wrong. Most of these stupid clowns don’t even play. I can’t understand why they give a fuck. Oh shit, Coach just slapped Isaac Gottlieb for missing a lay-up during the pregame warmup.

Yoshiko, I miss you so much it hurts. Sabishi kunaru-yo. I really don’t have anyone to talk to. Scoby is losing his mind. Hold on a moment, Coach Palomino is going into the teamwork speech, I don’t want to miss this. Two days ago against Dartmouth he pulled down his pants and stroked his penis. “Now I’m going to shoot my wad. Then we’ll be on equal terms.” Tonight’s exhortation looks more conventional — it’s the hackneyed “There is no ‘I’ in team!” speech. There’s no ‘U’ either, but I guess that’s immaterial when you’re getting paid thousands of dollars to teach young athletes how to navigate the perils of life and hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure that these same athletes wear a certain brand of sneaker. I still won’t wear the shoes. Slick offered me a thousand dollars a game, but I told him to get fucked. He realizes that if he wins, it doesn’t matter what shoes I wear. Did I tell you I refuse to stand for the national anthem? Pissed off everybody. I guess Coach has been telling the media I’m a Jehovah’s Witness, because during a postgame interview a reporter asked me did I think the United States was in cahoots with Satan. I went into some diatribe on how America is Satan. Some shit about how the United States of America anagrammed was “Foes in death tear. I cum. Taste.” The media pretty much leaves me alone now.

All this talk about teamwork and self-sacrifice is making me think about the books you sent me. Mishima said that to reach a level of consciousness that permits one to peek at the divine, one must sacrifice individual idealism. I’m like “Nigger, please.” What in hell is the divine? Some bright light with a walking cane and a beard? A state of being so enlightened that you know everything worth knowing? I can pay a drug dealer ten bucks and achieve that level of consciousness, at least for an hour or so. Mishima goes on to say that “only bodies placed under the same circumstance can experience a common suffering … Through the suffering of the group the body can reach the height of existence that the individual alone can never attain.” I agree, but this “height of existence” trip doesn’t have much value on the open market. I think that 6 million gassed Jews, 15 million dead Africans, their lungs filled with saltwater, 436 Champawat Indians eaten by a single tiger in 1907, might agree with me. And what is “the group”? You can’t put numbered uniforms on people and say this is “the group” or say everyone born on this side of the fence is “the group.” And not everyone experiences pain and suffering in the same way. I can see some masochistic slave fucking up on purpose just for a few precious licks of rawhide.

Speaking of suffering, I think Scoby is going insane. The scrutiny he is undergoing is unbelievable, ten times worse than in high school. What seems like every sportswriter in America, the entire Boston University Philosophy, African-American Studies, Religion, Biology, Mathematics, and Physics Departments, and a horde of German and Japanese scientists are following him twenty-four hours a day. Keeping track of his meals, sleeping habits, shit like that. Once a day some Nobel Prize — winning professor has a press conference to announce a new asinine theory on Nicholas’s uncanny ability to put a ball in a basket. The philosophers are easily the most despicable of the lot. I suppose they have the most to lose. Every other scientist can say, “Well, it is at least possible” (they haven’t really accepted that he is never, ever going to miss), but Socrates never said nothing about a motherfucker like Scoby. Nick’s thrown every theory, every formula, every philosophical dogma out of whack; he’s like a living disclaimer. “I am perfection; everything else is bullshit. Your life is meaningless.” So the philosophers show up at the games, full of anticipatory schadenfreude, armed with computer printouts calculating the odds of Scoby’s missing his next shot. Praying that Nick’s next attempt will roll in and out of the rim and the universe will return to normal. Invariably, Scoby goes six for six and leaves them in tears, ripping their papers to shreds and cursing epistemology. They would be a lot better off if they simply called Scoby a god and left it at that, but no way they’ll proclaim a skinny black man God.

The scariest part is the team introduction. Silence for everybody except me and Scoby. I’m the preliminary booee — I run out to a smattering of boos, dodge a few paper cups, and try to ignore the catcalls. “Communist sonofabitch. Love it or leave it, you black bastard.” Scoby’s introduction is communal catharsis. Within moments the court is covered with bananas, coconuts, nooses, headless dolls, and shit. I’m into it, but Scoby gets shook. The few black fans in the house, mostly boosters from the Onyx and the black kids from whatever campus we’re at, stand and applaud, but they’re quickly shouted down by whites. After Scoby hits his first basket, fights break out; it’s sick, there’s so much scorn in the world. Usually when you dive into the crowd for a loose ball, the fans try to catch you, help break your fall. When Nick goes headlong in the stands, the reporters scatter, picking up their coffee cups and laptops and letting Scoby crash into the table. They don’t even help the nigger to his feet. Assholes. Funny thing happened the other day in Michigan, though. Nicholas was running full-tilt toward the basket and did a swan dive into the crowd for absolutely no reason. His form was perfect; chest out, arms spread, feet together, toes pointed. The fans flew out of harm’s way like parking-lot pigeons. In the center of the vacated section stood a small black girl forming a basket with her spindly arms, poised to catch the airborne Scoby. Wouldn’t you know it, Scoby landed right on top of her, but she caught his ass. His feet didn’t touch down till she lowered him to the ground. The crowd booed her, but it was the first time I’d seen Nick smile in two weeks.

It’s not all bad though; sometimes the crowd is on our side. “Our” meaning down with me and Scoby. When we played Columbia, I swear, all of Harlem was in the gym. They were quiet except when one of us scored; they could give less than a care who won. Remember at the Harvard game, black folk from as far away as Peabody and Scituite were in the house. I bet the Harvard kids didn’t even know so many niggers existed. It was good to see you in the stands, and hearing you scream, “Take the motherfucker to the hole, Gunnar!” I could feel your eyes on me wherever I went. Did I tell you how mad Coach got when you came to sit next to me on the bench? He thinks it sets a bad example for his best player to hold hands with his wife during the game. Now I pretend you’re always there right next to me — Florida, Colorado, wherever. Sometimes if I need to talk to you I’ll commit a stupid foul on purpose so Slick will take me out of the game and I’ll get a chance to talk to you on the bench. Do you hear me? Ikaga desu ka? Mai asa nani o shimasu? Asahan ni sakana o tabemasu ka? Senakao sasurishoka? Sometimes I’ll be dribbling up-court and I’ll hear your voice: “Take that motherfucker to the hole, Gunnar!”

Coach is still rambling on; Scoby is sitting on a stool listening to Sarah Vaughan. That’s all he listens to now. I hear you, last time you saw him he was all Bud fucking Powell this, Bud Powell that, what happened to q through u? I asked him the same thing and he goes, “I ain’t missed shit — Quinichette, Rollins, Sanders, Shepp, Silver, Simone, Taylor, and any fools whose names start with u; niggers is too sappy. I ain’t got time for that free love ‘we’re all human beings’ saccharine jazz.” So I ask what’s so special about Sarah. “Sarah’s not one those tragic niggers white folks like so much. Sarah a nigger’s nigger, she be black coffee. Not no mocha peppermint kissy-kissy butter rum do-you-have-any-heroin caffè lattè.” The boy’s crazy. “She be black coffee” — what the fuck does that mean?

Scoby’s into the stuff you sent me; at the hotel or on the plane we’ll be listening to Sarah and Nicholas will make me read him a Chikamatsu play. Whenever the saké dealer and the loyal courtesan cross the bridge and start looking among the cherry blossoms for a place to kill themselves, Nicholas weeps with the star-crossed lovers. “I know what it feels like to live in a world where you can’t live your dreams. I’d rather die too. Why won’t they leave us alone? They fuck up your dream. They fuck up your dream.” The melodrama goes well with Sarah’s sultry-ass voice, though.

I’m beginning to see the sheer casual genius of Chikamatsu writing for the puppet theater. If I blur my eyes I can see the black strings attached to my joints and stretching to the skies. Ah, the freedom of fatalism. Now I can do what the fuck I want and blame it on the puppet-master. Watakushi wa nodo ga kawakimashita. Biru o ni hon maraimasho. Nicholas sees the strings, but he spends all his time looking for a pair of scissors. Every now and then the puppet-master hands him a pair of wooden scissors — Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, an open jump shot — and Scoby thinks he’s free, thinks he’s clipped his strings. The slack string is just a slack string.

I hear the bands starting up — I have to go now. Yoshiko, can you do me a favor? Please make an appointment for Scoby to see someone at the counseling office. I asked the coach to do it, but he thinks if Scoby is averaging nineteen points a game he’s fine. We get back next Monday. Thanks. I love you. Here is another handprint in ballpoint-pen ink. Please, rub it over your stomach and give the fetus my love.

The second-best part of the inkprint is that eventually the ink gets all over the basketball and all over everyone else’s hands and uniforms. Shit’s hilarious. Maybe you should make an appointment for me too. Aishiteru. See you soon.

Your husband,

Gunnar

eleven

AFTER THE BASKETBALL season ended, the members of SWAPO and Ambrosia and my publicist from Gatekeeper Press asked me to speak at a rally protesting Boston University’s conferment of an honorary degree and a check for one hundred million dollars to M’m’mofo Gottobelezi, the African statesman with all the political foresight of Neville Chamberlain. I was to be the drawing card, the liberal, libertine, and literary nigger stamp of approval. I agreed to speak as long as no one put my grainy mug shot on the fliers.

Things looked different from the dais, behind a microphone, squinting into the spring sun. I was struck by how unaccustomed I was to looking down at people. Growing up in southwest Los Angeles, coming off a season of playing in places known as the Pit and the Hell Hole, I was always at the bottom, the spectacle, the fighting cock looking up. Looking up not out of any sense of great admiration, but because from the bottom there is nowhere else to look. On this earthly stratum we’re all dirt; I just happen to be Precambrian dust buried under layers of Cretaceous, Tertiary, and Quaternary snobs. Some things are always on the top shelf, like paper towels in the supermarket.

I stood at the mountaintop, enjoying the view and waiting for my turn to speak. Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza burst with color and protest, an outdoor arboretum where the faces below bloomed like flowers in a meadow. Red and orange revolutionary spring annuals smoked joints, waved signs, and chanted. The yellow and cream-brown daffodils clung stubbornly to their alpaca sweaters and said “Excuse me” when the boisterous Puerto Rican and black townie snapdragons stepped on their Hush Puppies. Communist worker bees with propaganda pollinated minds made penetrable by eighty-degree weather; boom mikes swayed in the breeze like marshland cattails.

“If Boston University persists in lionizing and supporting killers and Uncle Toms like M’m’mofo Gottobelezi, we will not stand idly by and do nothing. This administration’s megadollar investment in oligarchical government is…” John Brown was trying to fire up the demonstrators. Spittle sprayed from his mouth, his tussled hair hung over one eye, his fist pounded the rostrum. He reminded me so much of Hitler at a Nuremberg party rally that I had to look behind me to check the stage for bunting with swastikas and steamrolled black eagles. “Uncle Toms like Gottobelezi must be…” There was that phrase again, “Uncle Tom” — the white liberal euphemism for “nigger.” No matter how apropos the label, I always wondered how come there are never any white Uncle Toms. How come the secretary of state is never an Uncle Tom? The director of the CIA is never a traitor to the white race or any other race? Only niggers can be subversives to the cause; everyone else is the “real enemy.” As if white folk understand the pressures on the African Bantu, the American nigger, to sell his soul in hopes of being untied from the whipping post.

John Brown said something about unity and looked over at me for confirmation; I spat on the ground, mouthed an obvious “Fuck you,” and gazed at the clouds. A silent act of dissension from the keynote speaker not unnoticed by the crowd. John Brown began to falter. He fumbled over his words, and his solidarity rhetoric began to fail him.

The crowd grew edgy and started pushing toward the platform. A middle-aged white man clutching a pen and a copy of my just-published book attempted to scale the platform, grabbing at my ankles: “Mr. Kaufman! Please sign my book — I understand now. I understand.” Scoby moved me back, pressed the sole of his shoe against the man’s sweaty skull, and booted him off the stage like Walter Slezak kicking the one-legged amputee into the sea in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. A white woman protested, exclaiming, “Hey, what about nonviolence?” To which Nicholas replied, “Who said anything about nonviolence?”

John Brown bailed out gracefully with an “I’d like to introduce the next speaker, Dexter Waverly, president of Ambrosia, the black student union.” Dexter strode to the podium, pandering to the crowd with stale slogans. “Power to the people!” he said. The crowd snapped back, “Power to the people!” and back and forth they went in a huge game of Simon says.

“Free South Africa!”

“Free South Africa!”

“M’m’mofo Gottobelezi sucks!”

“M’m’mofo Gottobelezi sucks!”

With the crowd roused to a frenzy, Dexter held up my book. “I’d like you to take your copy of Gunnar Kaufman’s phenomenal volume of verse, Watermelanin, and turn to page 133. Now read aloud with me from ‘Dead Niggers Don’t Hokum.’”

Every demonstrator from Boston local to university homesteader seemed to have a copy of the book. They read silently to themselves as Dexter read aloud.

… I am the lifelessness of the party,

the spade who won’t put on the lampshade …

I couldn’t hear the recitation very well because Nicholas was hugging me so tight my vertebrae popped like a string of firecrackers. When he released me, his wet cheek stuck to my face. “I’m proud of you, nigger.” I heard my name crackle from the loudspeakers and made my way to the podium. “Now it is with great pride I introduce star athlete, accomplished poet, black man extraordinaire, voice of a nation, Gunnar Kaufman. Remember, America, Boston University, the world is watching.”

A camera mounted on a crane swung down and bobbed in my face like a giant metal hummingbird. I looked directly into the lens. “Don’t do that,” the cameraperson whispered. I continued to look directly into the lens. When I was seven years old, my favorite television personality was Transient Tammy. Sporting patchwork overalls and a floppy hat, Transient Tammy welcomed me home after school with a hearty “Howdy, vagrants.” Before introducing the last cartoon, she’d put on a pair of enormous sunglasses. These magic glasses gave Transient Tammy the power to see her bummy friends in television-land. She’d steal toward the camera, dirty knees bursting through her jeans. “I see Suzette in Arcadia, Ingrid in Alhambra, Anthony in Inglewood.” I peered into the camera, looking for my mom and Psycho Loco in Hillside, my father, but I didn’t see anyone, just my wall-eyed reflection in the lens.

The applause died down, leaving a hum in the air, and I nervously cleared my throat. I wanted to address the crowd like a seasoned revolutionary, open with a smooth activist adage, “There’s an old Chinese saying…,” but I didn’t know any Chinese sayings, old or new. My hesitancy grew embarrassing. Yoshiko waddled over and ran my hand over the circumference of her bloated belly. I rubbed and smiled but still said nothing. I thought, If I were down there down among the mob, what would I want to hear?

Scoby broke the silence, shouting, “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse.” I laughed. The gathering laughed because I laughed. I decided I’d want to hear candor.

In the middle of the throng stood a commemorative sculpture. A slightly abstract cast-iron flock of birds in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., who received his doctorate in theology from Boston University. “Do you see that sculpture?” I asked, pointing to this commissioned piece of artwork, which did not dedicate a small piece of the earth and time to Reverend King so much as it took partial credit for his success. “Notice them steel birds are migrating south — that’s BU’s way of telling you they don’t want you here.” The black people began to elbow their way to the front. I was speaking to the Negroes, but the white folks were listening in, their ears pressed to my breast, listening to my heart. “Who knows what it says on the plaque at the base of the sculpture?” No one spoke. “You motherfuckers pass by that ugly-ass sculpture every day. You hang your coats on it, open beer bottles on it, meet your hot Friday night dates there, now here you are talking about freedom this and whitey putting-shit-in-the-game that and you don’t even know what the plaque says? Shit could say ‘Sieg Heil! Kill All Niggers! Auslander Raus!’ for all you know, stupid motherfuckers. African-Americans, my ass. Middle minorities caught between racial polarities, please. Caring, class-conscious progressive crackers, shit. Selfish apathetic humans like everybody else.”

The crowd gave a resounding roar of approval. Here I was denigrating them and the people urged me forward. Candor, I reminded myself, candor.

“Now I’m not going to front, act like the first thing I did when I got to Boston University was proceed directly to the Martin Luther King Memorial and see what the goddamn plaque says. Only reason I know what it says is that I was coming out of Taco Bell on my way to basketball practice when I dropped my burrito deluxe at the base of the monument. When I bent down to wipe the three zesty cheeses, refried beans, and secret hot sauce off my sneakers, I saw what the plaque said. It says, ‘If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. Martin Luther King, Jr.’ How many of you motherfuckers are ready to die for black rule in South Africa — and I mean black rule, not black superintendence?”

Yells and whistles shot through the air.

“You lying motherfuckers. I talked to Harriet Velakazi, the ANC lieutenant you heard speak earlier, and she’s willing to die for South Africa. She don’t give a fuck about King’s sexist language, she ready to kill her daddy and if need be kill her mama for South Africa. Now don’t get me wrong, I want them niggers to get theirs, but I am not willing to die for South Africa, and you ain’t either.”

The audience hushed, their Good Samaritan opportunism checkmated. There was nothing they could say. “I’m willing to die for South Africa, where do I sign”?

I rubbed my tired eyes, licked my lips, and leaned into the microphone. “So I asked myself, what am I willing to die for? The day when white people treat me with respect and see my life as equally valuable to theirs? No, I ain’t willing to die for that, because if they don’t know that by now, then they ain’t never going to know it. Matter of fact, I ain’t ready to die for anything, so I guess I’m just not fit to live. In other words, I’m just ready to die. I’m just ready to die.”

I realized I’d made a public suicide pact with myself and stole a glance toward Scoby and Yoshiko. Scoby was nodding his head in agreement, while Yoshiko was pointing to her stomach and yelling, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

I swallowed and continued. “That’s why today’s black leadership isn’t worth shit, these telegenic niggers not willing to die. Back in the old days, if someone spoke up against the white man, he or she was willing to die. Today’s housebroken niggers travel the country talking themselves hoarse about barbarous white devils, knowing that those devils aren’t going to send them to a black hell. And if Uncle Sam even lights a fire under their asses, they backtrack in front of the media — ‘What I meant to say was … The quote was taken out of context…’ What we need is some new leaders. Leaders who won’t apostatize like cowards. Some niggers who are ready to die!”

The crowd’s response startled me. “You! You! You!” they chanted, pointing their fingers in the air, proclaiming me king of the blacks.

Seizing the moment, Dexter Waverly snatched the microphone, put a warm arm around my shoulder. “Our new black leader, Gunnar Kaufman.” All I could think was What, no scepter? Don’t I at least get a scepter?

The next morning the annoyingly perky hosts of Good Morning, America and its sister shows around the globe — Buenas Dias, Venezuela, Guten Morgen, Deutschland, among others — took over my living room, asking questions from leather swivel chairs.

“Buon giorno, Italia. Signore Kaufman, did you know that during last night’s reception for M’m’mofo Gottobelezi, Dexter Waverly killed himself in the college president’s office?”

“No.”

“Si, si, he held a knife to his throat and demanded that President Filbey rip up the hundred-million-dollar check and spit in Gottobelezi’s champagne or he’d slash his throat.”

“And what happened?”

“Filbey ripped up the check and spit in the Zulu’s champagne. Signore Waverly apologized for the interruption, read a death poem dedicated to you, then plunged the knife into his throat.”

“Wow.”

“Don’t you feel responsible, Signore Kaufman? After all, it was your speech that inspired Signore Waverly.”

“I don’t know. What did the poem say?”

Death Poem for Gunnar Kaufman

Abandoning all concern

my larynx bobs,

enlightenment is a bitch.

“That’s not a bad poem. But I don’t feel responsible for anything anyone else does. I have enough trouble being responsible for myself. Besides, it looks like Dexter’s death prevented one hundred million dollars from being deposited in the National Party’s coffers.”

“Bonjour, France. Monsieur Kaufman, but what about your endorsement of freedom through suicide?”

“My suicide, no one else’s.”

“Yes, but people are following your example. There are reports of black people killing themselves indiscriminately across the United States. Don’t you have anything to say?”

“Yes, send me your death poems.”

“Hyuää huomenta, Finland. Mr. Kaufman, isn’t suicide a way of saying that you’ve — that black people have given up? Surrendered unconditionally to the racial status quo?”

“That’s the Western idea of suicide — the sense of the defeated self. ‘Oh, the dysfunctional people couldn’t adjust to our great system, so they killed themselves.’ Now when a patriotic American — a soldier, for example — jumps on a grenade to save his buddies, that’s the ultimate sacrifice. They drape a flag on your coffin, play taps, and your mama gets a Congressional Medal of Honor to put on the mantelpiece.”

“So you see yourself as a hero?”

“No. It is as Mishima once said: ‘Sometimes hara-kiri makes you win.’ I just want to win one time.”

“Last laugh?”

“I don’t see anyone laughing.”

“This is Namasté, India. And when do you plan to commit suicide, Mr. Kaufman?”

“When I’m good and goddamn ready.”

twelve

DURING THE READING PERIOD before finals, Scoby’s behavior became increasingly bizarre. The school psychologist’s diagnosis was acute homesickness, and she recommended that Nick move in with Yoshiko and me. At first I too thought he missed the old neighborhood. Scoby tried to recreate Los Angeles in Boston. He plastered most of the walls at school with poems torn from my book. He planted palm trees along Commonwealth Avenue, got run out of Roxbury when he tried to pay some Puerto Ricans to act Mexican for a day. He brought home exhaust from the public buses, which he’d bottled in five-gallon water containers, and released the noxious gases in the apartment. We took day trips to gloomy Revere Beach, sitting under the concrete veranda, complaining about the sun’s setting behind us. “Gunnar, I hate this place. Everything is ass-backward out here, man. Here we are in May, fully clothed at a beach with no waves. The best pro basketball player in the city’s history is white. The women like meek niggers. People eat thick soup, drink green beer. The cops are fat. The fire trucks are green. If I see one more fucking shamrock … It’s getting so bad I thought I saw a leprechaun near the river the other day.”

The obvious solution was for Nicholas to go home, but there was no home for him to go to; the man in the mauve suit had returned and convinced his mother to sell the house and travel the country, skating in an old-timer roller derby league. My mom offered to put him up, but he was too proud.

He often called himself the forty-eighth ronin. Nicholas Scoby was a masterless samurai who missed out on the revenge at Kira’s castle in the winter of 1702 and the mass seppuku two weeks later. “Gunnar, what would the forty-eighth ronin do if he was stuck out here in Boston, Massachusetts, home of the frappe and the grinder, masterless and alone?”

“He would kneel at the end of the Freedom Trail and stick a sword in his belly.”

“Exactly. Gunnar?”

“Yeah.”

“You serious about this whole death trip, winning by straight taking yourself out?”

“I guess so. I meant everything I said, but that don’t mean shit, you know. Don’t mean I’m right, wrong. The poems, the magazine interviews are just words, man. I’m just saying, Look, I’m outta here, all you motherfuckers who act like you give a shit — stop me, you care so much.”

“To kill yourself you don’t need a permit or anything like that, do you?”

“Naw, I don’t think so.”

Nick stared past the coastline, and my eyes followed his. The only thing barely visible in the foggy night was Boston’s pathetic skyline. The top of the glassy Hancock Building poked through a cloudbank that covered its lower floors in a vapory trenchcoat.

“Tallest building in Boston, right?”

“Fifty some-odd stories, the Sunday brunch from the top supposed to be the move. You can see to Newfoundland or some shit.”

“They don’t have no nighttime dinner thing?”

“Nope. Closed up.”

“What’s the second tallest building?”

“The Prudential Building, but I think BU’s law school is the third.”

“Can you get in there at night?”

“Yeah, during finals week the law library is open all night.”

We finished our beers, arguing over the finiteness of music. I rationalized that there are only so many notes and therefore only so many combinations of notes, so it stood to reason that there are only so many songs.

Scoby stood up, preparing to leave, wrapping his belongings in a towel. “Look, cuz, you not accounting for time. Time is what makes music infinite. Bip, bip, bap, tid, dit, tap is different from bipbip baaaaaap … tid daaat tap. See, if Charlie Parker had played Dixie, it would be like colorizing Birth of a Nation. It’d be a different tune but the same tune. You dig? You’d be hearing it differently and its meaning would change. Because a musician has they own sense of time and experience of time. For Parker, time was a bitch. He wouldn’t play Dixie as no happy-go-lucky darkie anthem. He’d play it as a ‘I’m mad and I know them cotton-picking niggers was mad,’ piss-on-their-graves dirge. You follow? That’s why your poems can never be no more than descriptions of life. The page is finite. Once you put the words down on paper, you’ve fossilized your thought. Bugs in amber, nigger. But music is life itself. Music is time. Played live, played at seventy-eight rpms, thirty-three and a third, backwards, looped, whatever. There’s no need for translation. You understand or you don’t.”

Scoby gave me a shake and a hug and left the beach, leaving his cassette player on my towel. I put the headphones on and drank beer, listening to Sarah Vaughan until the batteries started dying. Her voice slowed and garbled, deepened and faltered. I took a sip of beer and gurgled it in my throat. The sound was inside out, between my ears instead of outside them. Nothing was making sense. On the train home I wrote a reminder to myself to return the cassette player in the morning, then jotted down notes for a poem.

Dixie/“I wish I was in the land o’ cotton,

old time dar am not forgotten —

look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.”

Is this song/tune/anthem inherently racist?

How in the hell do I know the words to this shit?

If “Dixie” is racist, what makes it so? The title, the lyrics, the historical context, the fact the South lost the war? If the lyrics were outlawed, banned forever, would the music, that gnawing fucking refrain, the sequence of notes themselves, be racist instrumental? Is opera classist? Does the letter

r

discriminate against Bostonians?

Haaaymaahket Square next stap. Chainge heah fa de Ahhborway. The Bahston Transit Authawity thanks you for yourah patronage.

Early the next morning Coach Palomino woke me up and handed me a rubber camping flashlight. He told me that Nicholas had jumped off the roof of the law school. A custodian found him in the courtyard; he’d landed on his side, curled in a fetal position, one arm twisted behind him so violently the tips of his fingers touched the crown of his head. The rubber flashlight was in the bushes nearby. The suicide note was on the roof, taped to a case of Carta Blanca.

* * *

To my dearest nigger Gunnar Kaufman,

I’ve just climbed nineteen flights of stairs lugging a case of beers and whistling “Dixie.” I shouldn’t, but I blame you. Sitting on this ledge, my feet dangling in midair, two hundred feet off the ground, I find my thoughts going back to Tokubei, the soy sauce dealer, and the unbelievably codependent courtesan Ohatsu in Chikamatsu’s Love Suicides at Sonezaki, the doomed lovers under the fronds of a palm tree binding their wrists, preparing for noble deaths.

I’m on my feet now, looking down into the cloudy quadrangle, my toes hanging ten into the void. I can feel hands on my back, gently pushing. It’s funny I want to write a poem.

i step into the void

bravely,

aaa

aa

a

a

ahhhhh

Not bad for an amateur. Before I go, I forgot to tell you the reason the bartenders wrap napkins around the beer bottles is so clumsy fools like yourself won’t drop them. You know the glass gets slippery, the condensation — never mind. These brews are for you. I asked your mom to send them from home so we could celebrate the publication of your book. Cheers. Think of me.

G.K., tell Yoshiko and Psycho Loco I’ll miss them. If there’s a great beyond, I’ll see you all when you get there. Homes, there’s a cloudbank floating this way. Dude, I can see the halo around my head, but I’m no angel. I’m ghost, the afterlife is just a lay-up away.

Late,

Nicholas Scoby

* * *

That night I leaned out over the ledge of the law school’s roof and poured off the top of my beer. The liquid splattering on the ground made me wonder what Scoby’s body had sounded like when it hit the pavement. It was a hazy night, just like the previous one. A thick cloud of fog surrounded the building. I placed the flashlight on the ventilator behind me and stood on the edge. I could see my silhouette on the surface of the cloud below. I looked like gray smoke; it was a low-budget Brocken specter, and without the halo, the glory. I folded the note into a paper airplane and watched it spiral into the fog like a weightless kamikaze diving out of the sun. The next morning the letter was on the front page of the late edition of every paper in the country.

When Yoshiko and I landed in Los Angeles the following week, an army of reporters besieged us outside the terminal. Psycho Loco sped up to the curb, stretched out over the front seat of his car, one hand on the steering wheel, the other popping open the passenger door. I didn’t know Toyota made a Dunkirk rescue dinghy.

“Psycho Loco, like a motherfucker.”

“Where to, my liege?”

“Home.”

“Can’t go home. LAPD wants to speak to your ass. You like Hannibal in this hole.”

“Beach, then — it’ll be like closure.”

Psycho Loco and Yoshiko sat in the front seat. I sat in the back and put my hand on the dent in the upholstery where Nicholas should have been. I caught Psycho Loco’s eye in the rearview mirror.

“Shit fucked up, right?”

“Isn’t it always. How his mother?”

“She broke up, like everybody else. Went back to Mexico after the funeral though, something about a match against the Jalisco Jaquecas. You know, in a lot of ways, Scoby was Hillside. Nobody from the neighborhood ain’t never come up like y’all. You two the first.”

I pressed Psycho Loco to stop, but he waved me off, insisting that I quit with the false modesty. I needed to hear what he had to say.

“We used to watch you and Scobe bust niggers’ asses on television every weekend. Cuz, clowns who dropped out of school in the eighth grade sporting Boston University sweatshirts and shit. Then your book came out. Oh man, we went berserk. Nobody would read it at first. Too scared. I just carried it everywhere I went, proud as hell, throwing it in people faces. ‘You better buy this book. Compralo, ese. My boy wrote this, so next time I see you, best to have it on you.’ Fools bought your shit too, because I was your number-one publicist in the ’hood. Gave your shit street credibility.”

“Right.”

“Then one day we was kicking it at Reynier Park, lounging, you know how we do. I just pulled the book out and started reading it aloud. Read the shit cover to cover, twice. Who was there? Me, Hi-Life, Pookie of course, Shamu, L’il Annie Borden, buncha heads, everybody crying. Niggers was happy, but upset at the same time, you know. Then the rally. Nicholas. Nobody asked why, we just understood. Peep my new tattoo.”

Psycho Loco held out his right arm for me to examine. On his wrist was a tattooed watch. The face of the watch was an exact likeness of a smiling Nick. In cursive letters along the edge of the thick black band was “Nick Scoby, a nigger who always knew what time it was.”

I lay down in the back seat and let the car’s motion and the who’s who of neighborhood gossip rock me to sleep. I dreamed I was in a squad of black kamikaze pilots. We were ambivalent about the kamikaze label because we thought “divine wind” sounded like a fart that smelled like perfume. We flew planes constructed of balsawood and powered by rubber bands that you twisted before takeoff by turning red plastic propellors. I flew thousands of missions, all failures, because I always came back alive. I crashed into the sides of oil tankers toting fifty-gallon drums of nitroglycerine and swam back to shore, unscathed save for a pair of singed eyebrows. I divebombed the Pentagon, a bucket of turpentine and gasoline between my legs, a grenade in each hand, a methane-farting cow strapped to my back, and firework sparklers clenched heroically in my teeth. Nothing. In shame I walked away from the flaming polygon and caught a bus back to headquarters. In disgrace I became the only kamikaze pilot ever to receive a promotion. Every night I sprinted down the tarmac toward my waiting balsawood plane, hoping tonight would be my last mission.

The numbing cold of a beer can pressed against my temple woke me up. A twelve-pack of reminiscing later, night had fallen, and Psycho Loco was ready to get down to the nitty-gritty. “So when you going to die?” he asked. I’d heard that tone in his voice before; it was the same sarcastic timbre he had used when he goaded Buzzard into shooting a rookie Harlem Globetrotter, who in botching the confetti-in-the-water-bucket trick had accidentally doused Buzzard with water. No one can instigate like Psycho Loco. “You know, Gunnar, for all that shit you talk about killing yourself, you really ain’t the suicidal type. Masochistic, yes, suicidal no. So when you going to it, suicide-boy?”

I bored the beer can into the sand and stood up ramrod straight. “Sir, right now, sir, I will kill myself now, sir! Right face, huuh!” Calling my own cadence, I goosestepped toward the ocean while Yoshiko beat out a drum march on her skintight belly and Psycho Loco whistled “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” They thought I was kidding, but when I was thirty yards from shore, splitting waves with my forehead, I heard Psycho Loco yelling for help.

It’s very hard for a strong swimmer to drown on purpose. Once my feet no longer touched the sea floor, I felt myself instinctively floating toward the surface, thinking about catching one last wave. Palms up, I flapped my arms and forced myself to submerge into the depths. The ocean was very dark. I curled into a tight tuck and let the tide bob and roll me around like an undersea tumbleweed. The muffled roar of the waves rolling overhead was comforting, and I popped my thumb in my mouth, pretending I was an embryo suspended in amniotic fluid. I began to hear Yoshiko in the shower, talking to our child as she scrubbed her stomach. Telling the child how crazy its parents were. How we were waiting for its birth so we could rent a motor home and drive to Brazil and have a baptism in the rushing waters of the Amazon. What the fuck, I thought, it took Osamu Dazai three or four times to get this suicide thing right. I swam back to shore, surfacing yards south of Psycho Loco and Yoshiko, knee-deep in the water and screaming at the horizon.

“Gunnar, you come back here and be a father to your child, you sonofabitch. My mother warned me. She said, ‘If you marry a Negro hoodlum, he’ll impregnate you and leave you for a white girl.’ You better not be out there fucking no mermaid.”

Psycho Loco dropped to his knees, pounding the surf with his fists. “I loved him. I loved him.”

I crept up behind the distraught mourners. “Boo.”

They jumped out of their skins, happy to see me alive and pissed off that I wasn’t dead.

“Motherfucker! I knew you couldn’t do it.”

“You didn’t know shit. You thought I was in Atlantis by now. Wipe your face, you big baby.”

Yoshiko crossed her arms and grudgingly brushed the sand off my face. “You okay?”

“Yeah, except for the mermaid scales on my dick.”

Yoshiko hit me in the stomach so hard she scraped her knuckles on my spine. They made me drive home.

It was two in the morning when we arrived in Hillside, and I looked for my mother on every corner, examining every liquor store clique for her tight-lipped smile. Glanced at every passing car looking for a gray-haired woman hunched over the steering wheel, wiping the windshield with her forearm and cursing the defogger. On Robertson Boulevard, near the car wash, the outline of what looked to be an old Bonneville came sailing down the hill with its headlights off. Always the courteous driver, I flicked our lights off and on. In a panic, Psycho Loco drew his gun, opened his door, and leapt out of the car. The Bonneville turned on its headlights and sailed past with a honk of appreciation. Psycho Loco climbed back into the front seat and put a relieved hand to his still rapidly beating heart.

“Shit. Motherfucker, are you crazy?”

“What? I just flashed the headlights. You the one flying through streets with the greatest of ease.”

“Ghost Town been driving around the ’hood with their headlights off.”

“So?”

“It’s an initiation. They creep around with no lights and some gangbanger apprentice in the back seat has to shoot the first fool who flashes their headlights.”

It was good to be home.

Because of the police stakeout at my house, Yoshiko and I checked in at the La Cienega Motor Lodge and Laundromat. Toting our luggage, we elbowed our way through the passel of giggly prom couples tossing their room keys to the night clerk as they headed for the parking lot, smoothing their dresses and spit-cleaning the stains on their tuxedos. We liked the cheap American coziness of our new home, Suite 206. I swept insect carcasses, chicken bones, and dust balls into neat piles while Yoshiko sat at the rickety kitchen table shellacking the backs of live roaches with nail polish and giving them color-coded names: a coat of Sea Urchin Hyacinth for Walter, Sugar-Cone Browntium for Abigail, and Lullaby Lilac for Tatsuo. There was a scream from the room next door. Moments later a radio ad for the La Cienega Motor Lodge and Laundromat came on the combination TV/radio — “We’ll leave the light on for ya” — to which Yoshiko added, “So the burglars think you’re home.”

We were under constant surveillance, so we didn’t go out much except to buy beer and TV dinners. During the day we’d open the creaky windows and eavesdrop on the rehab meetings in the community center next door. The crackheads and heroin addicts engaged in acrimonious debate over who constituted the lowest life form. “Ah nigger, don’t lie. I seen you lick a dog’s dick for five dollars, then when the niggers only gave you three, you offered to fuck the telephone pole. So what I share needles with pus-covered faggots. I am a pus-covered faggot, motherfucker. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

Yoshiko and I engaged in our own great debates. I was Du Bois arguing vociferously for a continuation of our comprehensive overpriced Ivy League educations. I suggested that we attend each Ivy League school for one semester, gleaning the best bullshit from the best bullshitters, and emerge as learned scholars prepared to unravel the intricacies of the world or at least work as Wall Street market analysts. Yoshiko was Booker T. Washington fighting passionately for a more proletarian edification, one involving a practicum in the crafts and technical vocations. And what better tutelage than that offered by America’s renowned correspondence colleges? Waving our grades from Boston University, four-point-ohs for each of us on account of Scoby’s suicide, Yoshiko asked, “Don’t you want to earn your way? Aren’t you tired of having things handed to you on a silver platter, black man?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Of course. Look, it’ll be fun. Besides, fuck all that snow.”

So we enrolled at Redwood State, a college located in a post office box in the hinterlands of Chicago, Illinois. In two months’ time I received a bachelor’s degree in earth auguries with an emphasis in meteorology, star-gazing, and horse-race analysis. Yoshiko quadruple-majored in jet engine mechanics, urban forestry, auctioneering for fun and profit, and three-card monte.

Between exams we read the stacks of death poems and obituaries that arrived in the afternoon mail.

CARLTON MALTHUS

Carlton Malthus, thirty-one-year-old brewmeister at the Cascades Malts microbrewery, located in Klamath Falls, Oregon, drank himself to death yesterday in Piss Shivers, a tavern in downtown Klamath Falls. Malthus entered the bar and ordered a Crater Lake Blue, the popular sparkling blue pilsner that he developed. He was refused service and then forcibly removed from the establishment for what one bar patron characterized as being “too black to appreciate ‘the Blue.’” Returning with a keg of Crater Lake Blue, Malthus vowed to drink until his eyes turned blue or he was given a stool at the bar. Sticking the tap spout in his mouth, he drank continuously for five hours, emptying the ten-gallon keg. Removing the tap, he wrote a short poem, loudly eructated, and died. Malthus is survived by his wife Julie, son Barley, and daughter Ethanol. The poem he wrote moments before his death is below.

This drunken belch

leaves the last bitter

taste of life in my mouth.

CAROL YANCY

Ms. Yancy died when she impaled herself with a turkey thermometer after the checkout clerk at Buy ’n’ Buy Supermarket refused to place the change in her hand. After a lengthy argument with store management, Ms. Yancy, ignoring the store’s no-smoking policy, lit a cigarette, then stabbed herself in the frozen foods section. Age ninety-four years.

Both cheeks caved in with age,

I pull on a Newport menthol

one last time.

FALASHA NOONAN

Ms. Noonan, distinguished pianist and leader of the world-famous free jazz big band Infernal Racket, gathered her band members for one last rehearsal. During a piano solo, she scribbled this poem on her sheet music, then leaned into the strings and smashed the piano lid on her head. Age fifty-five years.

Having annotated the sunset

I double-time to heaven,

talking whiskey and waltz with Monk.

MERVA KILGORE

Ms. Kilgore, a prolific writer from Philadelphia, published seventeen volumes of poetry, including her most highly regarded work,

Ancestral Hogwash: Songs and Slurs for My No-Account Daddy.

Ms. Kilgore was giving a poetry reading at an elementary school in the Philadelphia suburbs when the school’s white principal asked if she’d mind singing “one of those old Negro spirituals.” Hearing this, Ms. Kilgore recited the poem below, then, with her hand in the water pitcher, bit through the microphone cord, electrocuting herself. She was sixty-nine years old.

Imagine this poem

is cluttered with references to obscure

figures of Greek mythology,

antique birchwood bureaus,

and a quaint New England bed-and-breakfast;

then send it to The New Yorker

* * *

At night Yoshiko and I made soapsud sculptures in the heart-shaped Jacuzzi or wrote critiques of the free porno movies. Sometimes we’d have Psycho Loco drive us to cafés in the Venice and Wilshire districts for the multicultural poetry scene. Packed with mostly white poetry devotees fawning over poets of color, the readings were ribald contests where the audience judged the poetry for political correctness, the amount of white guilt evoked, and sexual bawdiness. All the poets received belittling introductions equating them to canonical bards: “Next up is UFO, the Unbelievable Funky One, or as we like to call him, the Flying Chaucer.”

One night a poet known as Kwasi Moto, the Hunch in the Back of Your Mind, read a poem entitled “Uncle Sam I Am.” The Dr. Seussesque ballad was an account of how the poet’s rough upbringing was responsible for transmogrifying him into a red, white, and blue animal that raped white women and hunted down “nigras and Messicans.”

Uncle Sam I am,

do you like black niggers and white chicks named Pam?

Yes, I could beat a nigger in the park,

and eat a pussy in the dark.

Would you stab a Mexican in a tree

and blame the ghetto on TV?

Psycho Loco looked on in amazement and loudly remarked, “I know they ain’t paying this motherfucker for this phony bullshit,” then unabashedly placed his silvery nine-millimeter on the table with a heavy thunk. The poet, visibly shaken, began to rush his lines and rattle his text.

Because of the Anglo-Saxon

I’ve no time for relaxin’

shooting jigaboos and honkies named Sue

for satisfaction.

Unable to take any more cutthroat drivel, Psycho Loco snatched his gun, walked up to the poet, and stuck the barrel into his ear canal. “You so bad, read, you buster-ass mark!”

In a sobbing fit, the poor bard continued.

Uncle Sam I am,

scared of no man,

white, black, Klan, or tan.

By the end of the poem, Kwasi Moto had shriveled to the floor, groveling and begging Psycho Loco not to shoot him. Freeing himself from the poet’s clutches with a jackbooted kick to the head, Psycho Loco leaned into the poet’s bloodied face. “You know what’s wrong with you? Your line breaks are all fucked up.” With a self-satisfied smirk, Psycho Loco returned to his seat and scanned the stunned crowd. “Well, who’s next? On with the goddamn show. Gunnar, you want a beer?”

“Yeah.”

“And somebody get my nigger another beer.”

Yoshiko laughed for two days straight, but mostly she and I stayed at home listening to the real L.A. street soldiers receive radio therapy.

Station KQBK Sidewalk Talk recognize caller … This is Wilfredo from Pacoima … I want to say … I want to say … I’ve killed, and been killed, entiendes? But leaving mis vatos, it’s hard, ese … Kamila Parks aka K-Down … I’m tired of these triflin’ niggers … These mens today don’t respect theyselves, much less anyone else … Hey, yo Lace Love the Mad Body Slammer on the check-in … I’m calling to defend myself against the false accusations and prefabrications of the previous caller … I respect all womens of the world … So I hit the ho once or twice, y’ know, no big deal … Waddup, I’m Flip-out the Filipino Str-8 Player Baller from Artesia … I wanna say more attention needs to be paid to Asian gangsterism … The missionary school system be fronting on a yellow brother … They ain’t out to teach nobody nothing … Thanks to our guests … Father Glenn Fernandez, Dr. Stacy Ortiz, and ex-banger now community activist Chino “Ojo Negro” Aquadilla, this your host, Ras Vroom Vroom Nkrumah, signing off, and remember, all peoples of color need to come together and en español “color no equal dolor” …

We chased sleep, our limbs interlocked under the Lysol-scented quilts, our fingertips playfully hiking up and down our bodies, trying to ignore the fold-out bed’s pointy prongs and rib cage — jarring metal bars by whispering potential names for the baby: Jessica, Aldo, Althea, Rosie, Hiroko, Marc, Doreen, Dallas, Octavia, Hiroshi, Joaquim, Corinthian, Marpessa, Sunday, Mamadou, Quo Vadis …

On a Tuesday night late in her last trimester Yoshiko had her first craving: animal crackers (only giraffes, bears, and tigers), a blueberry slushie, and salted soybeans. Not too bad. I threw on some clothes and went out into the neon-lit night. Wary of being out alone and on foot, I decided to take the back streets to the 7-Eleven, which was a good two miles away. I darted past the ice machine and eased onto Arroyo Drive, hoping Yoshiko wouldn’t mind if I substituted pumpkin seeds for the soybeans, which would be impossible to find in the middle of the ghetto at one-thirty in the morning.

Ten minutes into my mission I heard the sound of helicopter blades churning the hot air. Niggers must be fucking up, I thought, remembering the fun we used to have outwitting the police copters by crawling underneath parked cars until we reached safety. I turned onto Whitworth Avenue and suddenly found myself engulfed in a blinding waterfall of blue-white light. Instinctively, my hands shot above my head as I waited for the standard drill — “Face down on the ground, hands behind your head, ankles crossed. Move!” But no instructions were forthcoming. I waited a minute or two and looked for a police cruiser; nothing. No beat cops, only the helicopter hovering overhead and me standing in a fifty-foot circle of light, becoming more appreciative of the moon. What the fuck?

I slowly eased down the street, and the tractor beam kept me at its center. If I moved two feet to the left, the spotlight moved two feet to the left, as if I were wearing a luminous Victorian whalebone dress that hula-hooped around my hips. I entered the 7-Eleven bathed in the eerie extraterrestrial light, and the clerk backed off a bit. I further terrorized him with a robotic “Take me to your leader,” and he shot out the back door. Gathering what I came for, I poured myself a blueberry slushie, left a five-dollar bill on the counter, and walked back to the motel.

Yoshiko asked why her slushie was so warm and I told her about being followed by the police helicopter. She rolled her eyes. I motioned for her to follow me. Outside, we stood in the middle of Arroyo and waited in the dark. Nothing happened and Yoshiko grew impatient, sipping on her tepid slushie and whining, “What? What?”

“Wait a minute. You hear that?”

I cupped my ears and in the distance could hear the rotor blades. Then a loud click and we were standing in the world’s biggest spotlight.

“Cool.” Yoshiko smiled and handed me the lions and rhinos from the box of animal crackers. We sat at the bus stop, chewing off the ears of shortbread circus animals and enacting an urban version of Waiting for Godot.

“You’re sure you don’t mind the pumpkin seeds?”

“That depends. Do you want to grow carrots?”

“Do we need carrots?”

“Yes, carrots are good.”

“Good as gold.”

“There’s nothing better than a good smoke.”

“Phlegm.”

“Now there was a professional.”

And so on until the helicopter peeled away with the dawn.

* * *

Yoshiko and I took midnight strolls through Hillside, our path lit by the huge flashlight in the sky. Yoshiko liked to pretend she was a newly discovered blues musician fresh from the Mississippi Delta cotton fields, on her first major tour. “Newport 1961.” She didn’t sing; she introduced herself, the band, and the song. “My name is Lipless Citrus Lime; and dese heah boys is the Dickless Wonders. We gonna play a country blues called, ‘We Gonna Play a Country Blues.’” She would close her eyes and hum and moan for about a minute, then bow to the invisible crowd, basking in the spotlight, saying, “Thank ye, thank ye” for another ten minutes. Once a week or so she’d march through the neighborhood carrying a sign updating the status of the baby. “When am I due? Five more days. Come to the natural birthing of the child. Reynier Park — free admission if you bring a clean towel.”

Sometimes Psycho Loco would join us on our walks, dispensing his opinions with every swallow of his Carta Blanca. “What kind of black man would let his wife give birth in the park?”

“You know, I think she’s doing it as a way of replacing Scoby. Giving something back to the community.”

At first the light (and maybe Yoshiko’s odd behavior and Psycho Loco’s presence) scared everyone away. We’d come strolling down the street, lit up like circus clowns under the big top, and the crowd would scatter like kitchen roaches. Eventually, emboldened by our regularity, folks joined us in the circle, and invariably they stared straight into the light source. “Don’t look directly into it, you’ll go blind.”

We induced labor, making love with the purple and gold dusk beaming through the grimy motel windows. I carried Yoshiko down the stairs and propped her in a wheelchair I’d stolen from the hospital and wheeled her through the streets of Hillside. It was like a one-float parade. Yoshiko’s sign read “When am I due? Now. Come to Reynier Park. Admission free if you don’t say, ‘Oh, look at all the blood,’” and she waved weakly at the people who lined the streets, shaking hands with those who came to the wheelchair to bestow flowers. The searchlight seemed especially bright that warm Friday night.

When we arrived at the park, the neighborhood welcomed Yoshiko with a huge ovation. The stoical Gun Totin’ Hooligans provided security, Manny and Sally Montoya supplied clean towels and rubber gloves from the barbershop, and Ms. Kim brought refreshments from her new store. My mom was the midwife, and her obstetric skills were in evidence as she led Yoshiko to a small section of grass turned into a birthing theme park. There my mother had constructed an outdoor maternity ward out of tarpaulins, beanbags, and throw pillows. Next to this was a small bathing pool and a table lined with shiny medical supplies: sutures, scissors, a clamp, and a cellular phone in case of emergency.

Yoshiko undressed and slipped into the pool, flopping around with each twinge of labor pain as my mom checked her blood pressure and timed the contractions. The locals filed by, shouting encouragement and wishing Yoshiko luck. After a few hours it was time; Yoshiko clambered onto the cushy mountain and squatted on the ridge of beanbags. My job was to massage her feet, feed her salted soybeans, and wipe her down with cold sponges. When my mother commanded her to push, Yoshiko looked me in the eye and squeezed my biceps to mush. I returned her gaze, trying to think of something reassuring to say, but all that came out was “Beautiful, beautiful.”

Yoshiko stopped grimacing, and my mother placed a slimy guck-covered infant on her chest. It laid its teeny head on her breast; the mother smiled, and the baby made a gargoyle face that I called a smile. Naomi Katsu Kaufman was welcomed into the world with kisses. There was cheering, the blasts of car horns, and bottle rockets bursting in the night sky. A box of cigars attached to a small parachute landed next to the newborn. The card read, “Congratulations from the Los Angeles Police Department. Maybe this one will grow up with a respect for authority.” I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like my father’s hand.

I lit a stogie and put an arm around my wife and child. “Ewwww. She looks like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.”

“Gunnar.”

“I’m just saying.”

My mom put a cereal bowl in my hands and shoved me into the hallowed junction of Yoshiko’s spread legs.

“Squat.”

I did as ordered, hunkered in front of my wife’s swollen vulva and gently kissed her bloody perineum, and awaited the afterbirth. “Ma, this is fucked up. You know, this is my favorite cereal bowl.” Yoshiko reached between her legs and condescendingly patted my forehead. The placenta dropped into the bowl, a quivering bloody mass of now useless organ. Someone in the crowd asked when we were going to do this again. I answered, “Next week” and lifted the pulpy organ in the direction of the officers in the helicopter. “Thus behold the only thing mightier than yourself.”

Yoshiko laughed and said, “Roots, right? Come over here and cut the cord, then give me a beer and a kiss.”

* * *

Every Friday night we held outdoor open mikes, called the Black Bacchanalian MiseryFests, under the LAPD’s simple but effective stage lighting. We jerryrigged a sound system using car stereos loud enough to drown out the noise from the helicopter. I was the emcee, Yoshiko the stage manager, and Psycho Loco did everything else. The shows lasted all night, and the neighborhood players read poetry, held car shows, sang, danced, ad-libbed harangues about everything from why there are no Latino baseball umpires to the practicality of sustaining human life on Mars. Sometimes troupes of children simply counted to a hundred for hours at a time.

Every week there was at least one hour of Community Stigmas. Community Stigmas was a loosely run part of the MiseryFest where the neighborhood’s stigmatized groups got a chance to kvetch and defend their actions to the rest of the neighborhood. I’d call the registered voters to the stage to explain why they bothered, request that all the welfare cheats step forward and share their fraudulent scams, ask the panhandlers to say what they really thought of their spare-change benefactors, offer fifty dollars to any Muslim who’d eat a fatty slab of bacon. The most poignant nights were the ones when the recovered addicts stepped into the light to soak up the warm applause and address the crowd. “I want to thank all my cool outs who stood by me, but mostly I want to thank self for not giving up on self.” Then I’d ask all the current users to step up into the ring of light and speak out. The bold users would swagger into the circle, smoking their pipes, needles dangling from their arms, playing up to the boos like villainous wrestlers. The invitations weren’t always voluntarily accepted, and a few reluctant baseheads would be forced into the spotlight by disgruntled friends and family. No one could leave until he’d said something, anything from “I promise on my grandmama’s grave to stop” to “I don’t give a fuck. I’ll smoke till white people have feelings.” The drug dealers also got their say. Every third Friday we’d have Psycho’s Analysis, where Psycho Loco conducted these heartwrenching gangbanger tribunals. Some hoodlums would volunteer to bare their souls. They’d sit on wooden stools, speaking thoughtfully into microphones, unburdening themselves like war criminals, black gunny-sacks stretched over the heads of the wanted ones to prevent the police from using an overhead skycam to identify them.

Soon the Bacchanalian MiseryFests became gala events; colored folks from all over Los Angeles crashed Hillside to take part in the spectacle. To ensure that the Friday nights didn’t turn into a trendy happening for whities bold enough to spelunk into the depths of the ghetto, Psycho Loco stationed armed guards at the gate to keep out the blue-eyed soulsters. Questioning anyone who looked to be of Caucasian descent, the sentries showed those of dubious ancestry a photograph of a radial-tire-colored black man, then asked, “What’s darker than this man’s face?” Anyone who didn’t answer “His butt” or “His nipples” didn’t get in.

The networks caught wind of the MiseryFest’s popularity and offered a bundle of money for the rights to broadcast weekly installments. We accepted the best offer and divvied it up among all the households in Hillside, and the television station agreed to the following conditions.

• Build the Reynier Park Amphitheater and pay for its maintenance.

• Build huge video screens throughout the neighborhood.

• Use only colored camerapersons and support staff.

• All broadcasts must be live and unedited.

• Stay the fuck out of the way.

The next scheduled broadcast was on the two-year anniversary of Scoby’s death. There were widespread rumors that I would use the national forum to immolate myself Buddhist-monk style and skewer my daughter Naomi on a barbecue spit rotating over my pyre. Niggers jammed the theater and filled the streets of Hillside to pay their last respects. Television expected the rest of the bloodthirsty world to tune in for the first live broadcast of a suicide.

The fest opened with an hour of silence followed by a parade of local residents declaring their undying love for Nicholas, most of the tearful reminiscences starting with “I remember when that nigger wasn’t but about yea big…” But it was my show — I was his best friend, obliged to use the belles-lettres to fortify Scoby’s status as a sainted martyr.

I opened with a powerful two-hour raga-ode to Nicholas entitled “Barrio Bangladesh,” throughout which the audience rocked in their seats, wailing with my rhythmic recitation. When I finished, I looked into twenty thousand faces in stone silence. The audience was anesthetized, unable to move. A review of the night’s festivities stated that the poem brought every listener in the house to “the zenith of comprehension. Not since the New Testament has the death of morality been so eloquently eulogized.” I announced my next poem, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Crib Death.” After I read the last few stanzas —

Remorse lies

not in the consciousness

of a murderous parent

who rocks a child born into slavery

to divine sleep

with jugular lullaby

sung by sharp blade

and suffocating love

applied with pillow and pressure

Remorse lies

in the slave owner’s anguished cries

upon discovering

his property permanently damaged;

a bloody hieroglyph carved into flesh

the smiling lips swollen and blue with asphyxiation

after he calculates his losses

forecasts the impact on this year’s crop

he will notice the textual eyes of murder/suicide

read “caveat emptor”

let the buyer beware

— Hillside erupted. Niggers lost their fucking minds. When the huzzas reached their climax, I prepared for my encore, a small sacrifice and show of appreciation to Nick Scoby, to any niggers who cared.

I launched into a solemn monologue explaining how through painstaking research I’d unearthed proof that President Truman’s threat to drop a third atomic bomb on Japan was not, as he later claimed, merely an idle boast to intimidate the Land of the Rising Sun into a speedy surrender. Elongated cries of disbelief rang out from the bleachers: “Noooo.” “Yessssss,” I replied, holding up photos of grinning Manhattan Project scientists casually leaning and squatting around three bombs, Fat Man, Little Boy, and the newly discovered Svelte Guy, each with cute slogans like “Flatten Japan” and “Sorry for stepping on your toe, Joe” chalked on the metallic hull. “You may pass these photographs around. I have the negatives.”

As the photos circulated through the audience, I produced a white handkerchief and a shiny carving knife from my back pocket and placed them on the rostrum. Carefully smoothing the hanky out toward the corners, I issued a challenge to the United States government. “When I was a child, my dad — before he left us, the fuck — whenever I did something wrong, he used to say, ‘I brought you into this world and I’ll take you out.’ Well, Big Daddy, Uncle Sam, oh Great White Father, you brought me here, so I’m asking you to take me out. Finish the job. Pass the ultimate death penalty. Authorize the carrying out of directive 1609, ‘Kill All Niggers.’ Don’t let Svelte Guy lie dormant in the basement of the Smithsonian. Drop the bomb. Drop the bomb on me! Drop the bomb on Hillside!”

I placed the pinky of my right hand on the handkerchief. With my left hand I picked up the knife and sterilized it with a couple of passes over my pants leg. Before someone could ask, “What the hell are you doing?” I brought the knife down over my finger and hacked it off with one strike.

I’d prepared myself for the pain, but I wasn’t ready for the amplified sound that pounded out of the monitors. One hundred thousand crunching watts of stainless steel cleaving through bone followed by the solid kachunk of the knife into the mahogany lectern, followed by my gasp, the audience’s gasp, and my deep inhalation in shock. The first thing I heard was the familiar voice of Coach Shimimoto yelling from the front row, “Suck it up, Kaufman!”

I reeled for a moment, then meticulously wrapped the speckled red-and-white handkerchief around the severed finger, exactly as I’d seen Robert Mitchum do in some American yakuza movie. Staring at the space where my finger used to be, I held my hand high above my head. The blood ran down my arm, and what didn’t pool in my armpit puddled next to my sneakers. I lowered my head, then exited stage left, the soles of my blood-soaked shoes sticking to the floorboards as if I were walking in yesterday’s spilled soda.

* * *

That night cemented my status as savior of the blacks. The distraught minions interpreted my masochistic act as sincerity, the media as lunacy. The more I tried to deny my ascendency, the more beloved I became. Spiteful black folk and likeminded others from across the nation continue to immigrate to Hillside, seeking mass martyrdom. They refurbish the abandoned houses and erect tent cities on the vacant lots, transforming the neighborhood into a hospice.

The government’s reluctant confirmation of the existence of Svelte Guy spurred a massive letter-writing campaign asking the government not to waste the uranium and to test the antiquated A-bomb by dropping it on “those ungrateful passive-aggressive L.A. niggers.” Ignoring the Japanese claim of dibs to the bomb as a keepsake of war, Congress passed a motion to quell our insurrection by issuing an ultimatum: rejoin the rest of America or celebrate Kwanzaa in hell. The response was to paint white concentric circles on the roofs of the neighborhood, so that from the air Hillside looks like one big target, with La Cienega Motor Lodge and Laundromat as the fifty-point bull’s-eye.