Give My Love to the Savages

by Chris Stuck

  I was so occupied with those thoughts that I didn’t see the other Black guy coming down the disembarkation line until it was too late. He was wheeling his suitcase behind him, happy as can be. Like a politician, he gave people high fives. He shook their hands. He kissed their babies. His name evidently was Ronald. People kept saying, “See you next year, Ronald.” “Had a ball, Ronald. You’re the best.”

  As he approached me, my first thought was to hide, to look the other way, but he’d already spied me. To ignore him would’ve been mean, stuck-up, things I usually had no problem with. In good faith, I waited for him. When he came into view, I looked him right in the eye. He stopped for a moment. His smile changed to wonder. Like long-lost twins, we studied each other’s faces. I offered my hand, and he shook it firmly, slowly. “Right on, brother.” Summoning something dormant deep inside, I said, “Right on,” too. I meant to add “brother” to that. It was only right that I reciprocate. But Ronald had already moved past me, down the line. He was smiling, shaking hands, kissing cheeks. He was so happy to have one last moment with all those people.

  Give My Love to the Savages

  It was spring break, the riots had broken out, and I’d just flown into LA to visit my father. He picked me up from the airport in a new Porsche drop-top, and before I could even get my seat belt on, he was yelling, “Status report, Junie,” right in my ear. No “Hi, Junie,” “I missed you, Junie,” “Hey, how you been, Junie boy?” I hadn’t seen him in a year. All I got was, “That crackerjack jury just let the cops off. It’s a goddamn uprising.”

  We were ripping east down the 105 by then, breaking away from traffic, and we could barely hear a thing. Pop refused to ride with the top up on any of his convertibles—it was California, for shit’s sake—so whenever we got on the freeway we had to shout just to be heard over the wind.

  He leaned in close, as he always did, and said, “Hey, dummy? You hear me?”

  I leaned in close and said, “Yes, dummy. I heard you.”

  “Good. Because it’s a goddamn rebellion, Junie. It’s a fucking revolt.”

  I was twenty-one at the time and admittedly kind of a turd. When I was around my father, sarcasm was my mother tongue. “Really?” I said. “A revolt? You sure someone’s not just having a really big barbecue, Pop?” I grinned at him, pleased with myself, but he never took kindly to my mouth. He looked at me like I was a mental patient. His face shriveled into a scowl. “No one likes a smart-ass, smart-ass. Watch yourself.”

  As we curled onto the 405 interchange and a new tangle of cars appeared up ahead, I told him to save the riot talk. The flight attendants had told everyone on the plane before we landed. But he didn’t want to hear it. He was still in a mood. A few of his businesses had screwed the pooch earlier that year, and he’d nearly lost his ass. The possibility of losing more in a riot probably had his sphincter knotted up good. He kept making the same face as when he’d broken his ankle two years before, when the painkillers he was on made him ferociously constipated.

  “So, the flight attendants told you about the riots, did they? Well, that’s just fucking awesome. Did they tell you what it’s really like down here, too? People looting and setting fires and shit?”

  “No,” I shouted. “But isn’t that what people usually do when they riot, Pop? Loot and set fires and shit?”

  He turned his head slowly and gave me the look, the icy gaze of ill intent he reserved just for me. He shouted, “Hey, smart-ass? What did I just tell you about being a smart-ass?” Naturally, when I opened my mouth to answer, he lifted his hand and said, “Shut it.”

  * * *

  He’d called me right before spring break, talking like a loan shark, as usual. Just under the wind, through the crackling connection of his car phone, I could barely hear him say, “You owe me a visit, Junie,” “owe” being the operative word. Pop always liked his favors returned to him one way or another, and clearly, he thought he’d done me a solid by “bumping pelvises” with my mother in the first place. I spent every spring break working as cheap labor at one of his car dealerships: answering phones, changing toner in the Xerox, and generally acting like I was working without actually doing any work, which, at that point in my life, was a talent of mine. He was always quick to remind me that he, not my mother, was paying for my East Coast education. In his mind, I had to repay him with the only valuable thing I had at the time: the best days of my youth.

  Though I hadn’t seen him in a year, much less talked to him, I didn’t see any change in him whatsoever. He didn’t look any older. He didn’t look any wiser. He didn’t look any less tan. If anything, he looked more like himself than he ever had. His hair was still long, bound into a glistening ponytail. He still preferred mercury-colored suits and white dress shirts open at the collar. And his jewelry—a pinky ring, a left earring, and a single gold chain—all sparkled as blindingly as ever, even in the haze-choked sun.

  The only thing different about this visit was what Pop was now calling “the mutiny.” It’d started around three that afternoon, a Wednesday, while I was flying somewhere over the Southwest. From the air, during my plane’s descent, LA didn’t look any different. It was the same sprawling mess I’d always known, the motherboard of downtown barely visible through the clouds. Everything seemed fine until we pierced the smog. I could see packs of tiny fire trucks and police cars in the streets, the odd blaze just beginning to grow. Something wasn’t quite right, even for LA. And of course, now Pop’s sneaky ass was driving us right into it without any explanation.

  * * *

  He rocketed us onto the 405 North, zipping us in and out of traffic, cutting off practically every car on the highway. After the interchange, though, he miscalculated and got us stuck behind a bus of schoolkids. He cursed, swerved out onto the shoulder to MacGyver around them. Then he got neck and neck with the driver and gave him the finger. Pop saluted the guy so long the kids on the bus laughed and waved their middle fingers back at us. He flipped them off, too.

  At the Manchester Avenue exit near Inglewood, he aimed the Porsche to the right, saying, “Get ready,” but mostly to himself.

  Naturally, I asked what for.

  He reached under his seat for his Walther PPK, checking the clip and then popping it back in. “Assailants,” he said. “And before you ask, this is so they’ll think twice about fucking with us.”

  I nodded, since getting fucked with in Inglewood was always a possibility, even without a riot going on.

  We shot off the freeway and turned onto Manchester and ran straight into a wild mob. Every car in front of us immediately tried to pull a U-ey and get back on the freeway, but all they did was clog the street like cattle in a chute. “Geniuses,” Pop said, as he kamikazed us into oncoming lanes. At Inglewood Avenue, we were met by an even bigger hive of people.

  Everyone was pissed off and confused, an odd mix of anger and exhilaration hot on their faces. Some ran from one side of the street to the other and then decided they didn’t like it there and ran back. Some held bricks and rocks in their hands, just waiting for a worthy target, like us. As we weaved through, their white-people radar must’ve gone off, because they all stopped rioting, turned around, and watched Pop and me like we had horns growing out of our heads. I wanted to tell them we were the good guys, or at least that I was. Something like, “Hey, my mother’s Black. Like, really Black. I’m one of you.”

  But Pop took a different approach. “You don’t have bumpers on your Black asses. Get out of the street, numbnuts.”

  I elbowed him and said that probably wasn’t the best thing to say right then.

  “Yeah? Why not?”

  “Because your ass isn’t Black. If your ass isn’t Black, you can’t call their asses Black. That’s kind of the rule.”

  Pop shook his head as we threaded through another gang of looters. He laid on the horn, parting the crowd, and one of the harder-looking guys smiled at us. “Damn, white man. You got some nuts on you, you know that? Don’t you know where you are
?”

  “Yeah,” Pop said. “I’m in America. Where are you?”

  “Hell!” someone shouted.

  Given our present surroundings, right then seemed like a good time to ask what the fuck we were doing there.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Pop said. “How about driving around this town making sure none of my dealerships have been torched yet. Fine with you?”

  After he picked me up from the airport each spring, he usually took me to a bar or, if I was lucky, a strip club. By one or two in the morning, we’d end up at his house in Malibu, drunk and stewing away in his Jacuzzi. At that moment, however, flying down the road, I was in no position to complain, because, really, I never was. He was liable to say, “You want some cheese with that whine?” and then leave me there on the side of the road. He’d done it before.

  * * *

  At the Inglewood car lot, we were greeted by Pop’s fleshy face. It was pasted on a large billboard over a double-wide that served as the dealership office. His image was so gargantuan that his pores were as large as divots, his nose the size of a car door. Like most of his other lots, this one spanned an entire block, nothing but an asphalt parcel of clunkers, a neon price tag plastered on each windshield. Most of the inventory had been in accidents, fires, floods, or other cataclysmic events. Knowing Pop, there was always at least one that’d been sheared in half in a wreck and then welded back together.

  We pulled inside the gates, and on the office roof, Burger, one of Pop’s guys, was doing the cabbage patch to a soul song blasting from a boom box. Behind his lumbering silhouette, a helix of smoke twined in the air. “Look at him,” Pop said. “The roof’s on fire, and he’s dancing up there like a circus bear.”

  The roof wasn’t on fire. Burger was just grilling, albeit in an odd place. I pointed out the grill and the bag of charcoal, the pair of tongs in Burger’s hand, but Pop still sprang out of the car like someone tossed a tarantula in his lap. “Hey, I’m paying you to make sure the place doesn’t catch fire, not help it along.”

  “What you mean?” Burger said.

  “Grilling on the roof doesn’t seem like a fire hazard to you?”

  “Maybe.” Burger considered the situation now, apparently for the first time. “But everybody’s on their roofs. Plus, I got hungry.”

  I checked the surrounding buildings, and, sure enough, there was a person atop each one, armed with a gun or a fire hose or both. Across a side street, a young Korean man patrolled the front of a small grocery with a pistol, while another watched from the roof like a tower guard, an AK-47 cradled in one arm and what was big enough to be a rocket launcher in the other.

  “We’re turning bad rioters into good ones. Ain’t that right?” Burger raised his fist in solidarity. The Koreans gave a salute and then returned to duty. “Y’all wanna get your stink on while you’re here?” Burger held up two cans of Schlitz.

  “Of course,” I said. “When have I ever turned down a beer?”

  He pointed at Pop with his tongs. “What about you, ballerina?”

  Pop was still pissed, but he took one, too. He’d never turned down a beer either.

  We went back a long way with Burger, Pop’s longest-serving employee. He was one of those Black guys who always seemed at ease with his place in the world, even if deep down he really wasn’t. I admired him for it. As a kid, when Pop wasn’t around, I used to tell people that Burger was my real father. It was our little game. But for some reason, no one ever believed me.

  “Goddamn, youngblood,” Burger said. “You sure picked a hell of a time to visit.”

  I cracked my beer. “Hey, I was cursed with bad timing and a rotten father. What am I gonna do?” I smiled at Pop as he guzzled his beer. In return, he gave me the finger.

  “Well, what’ve you been up to?”

  “No good,” Pop chimed in. “What do you think he’s been up to? This is Junie you’re talking to.”

  “Shit, I guess that makes two of us,” Burger said. “I just got out of jail.”

  I asked what he was in for, and he gave his usual answer: “Various things.”

  Pop took a long pull and finished his beer, his eyes darting around as though he expected the lot to spontaneously combust. “Enough chitchat. Burger, tell me nothing’s happened yet.”

  “Nothing’s happened yet.”

  “Nobody’s tried to steal or burn anything down?”

  Burger removed a revolver from his waistline and sat on the edge of the roof. He balanced the gun next to him and let his legs dangle as if he were sitting at the end of a dock. “Hell no. Ain’t no niggas messing with this place. I told you. With me here, you can count on that.” He shouted the last part loud enough for the gangbangers on Manchester to hear. They were my age, maybe a little younger, and veterans at mean-mugging. As I watched them, a light-skinned Blood with a red bandanna around his neck waved at me. I nodded at him, and he mouthed, “Fuck you, white boy.”

  I envisioned walking over there and telling him I was only half-white. But then I envisioned him kicking my ass. I slowly turned back to Pop.

  “We’re counting on you, big man.”

  “I know,” Burger said.

  “Only shoot if you’re absolutely threatened. You hear me? Absolutely.” Pop always put extra emphasis on “absolutely.” According to him, ex-cons couldn’t understand instructions without this word, and ex-cons made up the majority of his workforce.

  “Only if I’m absolutely threatened,” Burger said. “I got it.”

  That was it. I told Burger to stay out of trouble. He said, “Ditto.” Pop and I got back in the Porsche and sped off like criminals making a getaway.

  * * *

  I was used to this. I’d been dividing time between Pop in LA and my mother in Boston since I was ten, when my parents went splitsville for good. I spent every spring break of my childhood with Pop, running endless errands around LA and the surrounding counties. Whatever he did, I did: lounging at the bar of Sam’s Hofbrau while he flirted with dancers who fawned over me. Shooting at the LA Gun Club with my own Browning Hi-Power 9mm. Smoking Humboldt because Pop thought I should choke on the good stuff with him in a controlled environment. How I hadn’t been maimed or killed yet was beyond me.

  From what I could glean as a child, my parents met during the height of their checkered pasts. Pop had connections to some crooked characters in Boston, owners of an establishment that my mother worked at called the Peephole. What her work actually entailed I never wanted to know. Regardless, my parents became a couple almost instantly. My white father had, at the time of meeting my mother, an exclusive thing for nonwhite women. My Black mother, conversely, could never shake her attraction to moneyed men of the pale-faced variety. That being their only criteria for love, it was a wonder the marriage lasted long enough to produce light-skinned, curly-haired, bony-assed me.

  For as long as I could remember, every time my mother packed me off for my cross-country jaunts, she’d say, “You can’t change the fact that you got some white in you, Junie, but it doesn’t mean you gotta act like your father’s white ass.”

  Sadly, up to that point in my life, I’d failed her.

  Back at school, everyone called me June the Goon. Like my father, I’d cultivated a reputation as one of those guys. I was fairly smart, but I tended to do fairly dumb things. Not quite a troublemaker. Not quite a fuckup. That fall and winter, though, I’d found myself sinking into trouble, having barely avoided jail time for an unfortunate incident. I was starting to look a lot like Pop, who’d found himself in the clink once or twice around my age. I knew if I kept it up, I’d quit school in a year, start selling cars, and, like him, date a series of shady women. I’d grow a ridiculous ponytail and start driving a Porsche. It was my biggest fear, one that produced a recurring nightmare: me not living my life but reliving his. Afterward, I’d always wake up in a sweat and reach for the jug of antacids I kept by my bed, crunching them as I tried to fall back asleep.

  * * *

  By eight p.m
., the entire proceedings were, in Pop’s scholarly opinion, a shit circus. We were back on the 405, heading north again, and in the distance, more plumes of smoke snaked above the skyline. Even though the freeways, each an orgy of brake lights, were as still as paintings, Pop didn’t let it stop us. He used every piece of pavement he could find—shoulders, medians, off-ramps—to zip us around the city. We’d checked on three more dealerships by then, Carson, Long Beach, and East LA. Each lot was being guarded by new hires, guys I’d never met before. All three were Black. All three had Jheri curls. And all three were named, oddly enough, Doozie. At each lot, it was the same as with Burger. Pop made sure they were armed. They were keeping the gates locked. Everything was tip-top. We moved on.

  At the Huntington Park exit, he dumped us off the freeway, and we trolled down Pacific Boulevard. I asked where we were going, and he just patted his potbelly and grunted, “Food.” I said, “Who gets hungry at a time like this?” But we both knew it was a stupid question. Pop’s appetites could be described only as gluttonous. We passed a few restaurants, and they all seemed to be closing or getting plundered. So we skated a little farther down Pacific until we stumbled on an open but deserted In-N-Out. We pulled up to the drive-through, and they took our order as if it were any old day. When we pulled around to pay, though, the Latina cashier didn’t take our money. She just tossed the food at us, locked the window, and immediately put up the CLOSED sign. We pulled around and parked by a dumpster. Behind us, all the employees burst out of the restaurant like someone had tossed a bomb into the place. Pop looked back, softly biting a Swisher Sweet with his teeth. “Well, that sure was interesting.” Then he just stabbed a straw into his drink and started to eat.