by Paul Beatty
“Gunnar, set the fucking table.”
“’kay, Ma.”
Before making my way to the silverware drawer, I’d lean over the balcony, squinting into the dusk, and look out toward the nearly empty waterfront six blocks away. The elongated shadows of beachcombers and their metal detectors skimmed across the dimpled and paper-cup-laden sand in hopes of finding lost sandwich baggies full of quarters stolen long ago from the bottom of parents’ dresser drawers. Lifeguard Station 26 is boarded up and shut down for the evening. The sandy-colored hairy-legged lifeguard walks quickly toward his classic convertible VW Beetle, his cherry-red vinyl shorts and windbreaker barking, “Caution! Dangerous riptide!” and fluttering in the strong sea breeze. Two shimmering wetsuit-clad surfers straddle fiberglass Day-Glo boards bobbing offshore, waiting for the last good wave of the day to take them home. The sandpipers play tag with the receding tide, scampering just outside the stretching reach of the waves dying at their knobby feet. Every once in a while the birds call time out to take water breaks, sticking their thin beaks into the moist sand. The sun stops fizzing, though Chip Parker remains excited, haranguing the listening audience about leftfielder Nathaniel Galloway’s powerful Negroid hindquarters and seguing smoothly into the ad copy for Farmer John’s ham, “hickory smoked just the way you like it.”
The lights at Dodger Stadium and the streetlamps flicker on, and throughout Santa Monica the obedient kids wave goodnight to their delinquent friends as the community goes into the seventh-inning stretch. “Jesse Stewart retires the side in order, one, two, three. And after six it’s the Dodgers three, the Mets one.” Life was full of Cracker Jacks, root-root-rooting for the home team, and fucking with my mother.
“Gunnar! Set the table!”
“Ma? You know what?”
“What?”
“That’s what.”
“Very funny. Set the table or I’ll wash your sharp-tongued mouth out with the whetstone.”
I was very funny, in a sophomoric autodidactic knock-knock-who’s-there sort of way. I learned timing, Zen and the art of self-deprecation from the glut of Jewish standup comics on cable TV, who served as living Chinese acupuncture charts of comedic pressure points: dating-yin, parents-yin, daily absurdities-yang. The ancient texts of Bennett Cerf and the humorous anecdotes from Grandma’s waterlogged Reader’s Digests were, if not the I Ching, at least Confucian hymnals.
I was the funny, cool black guy. In Santa Monica, like most predominantly white sanctuaries from urban blight, “cool black guy” is a versatile identifier used to distinguish the harmless black male from the Caucasian juvenile while maintaining politically correct semiotics. If someone was planning a birthday party, the potential invitees always asked, “Who’s going to be there?” The conversation would go:
“Shaun, Lance, Gunnar …”
“Gunnar? Who’s that?”
“You know, the funny, cool black guy.”
Some kids had reps for shredding on skateboards or eating ear wax. My forte was the ability to hold a straight face and pull off the nervy prank. I learned early that white kids will believe anything anybody a shade darker than chocolate milk says. So I’d tell the gullible Paddys that I was part Gypsy and had the innate ability to tell fortunes. Waving my left index finger like a pendulum over their sticky palms, I’d forecast long lifetimes of health and prosperity. “You’ll have a big house in the hills. Over here on the love line is your tennis court. Right here by the life line is your heliport. Now where do you want your pool?” The unsuspecting dupe would point to a spot usually midway between the mystic cross and the creative line, and I’d spit a wad of saliva somewhere near the designated area. “There’s your pool.”
I was the only cool black guy at Mestizo Mulatto Mongrel Elementary, Santa Monica’s all-white multicultural school. My early education consisted of two types of multiculturalism: classroom multiculturalism, which reduced race, sexual orientation, and gender to inconsequence, and schoolyard multiculturalism, where the kids who knew the most Polack, queer, and farmer’s daughter jokes ruled. The classroom cross-cultural teachings couldn’t compete with the playground blacktop lessons, which were cruel but at least humorous. Like most aspects of regimented pop-quiz pedagogy, the classroom multiculturalism was contradictory, though its intentions were good.
My third-grade teacher, Ms. Cegeny, liked to wear a shirt that read:
Whenever she wore it she seemed to pay special attention to me, Salvador Aguacaliente (the silent Latin kid who got to go home early on Cinco de Mayo), and Sheila Watanabe (the loudest Pledge of Allegiance sayer in the history of American education), taking care to point out the multiculturalist propaganda posted above the blackboard next to the printed and cursive letters of the alphabet: “Eracism—The sun doesn’t care what color you are.”
On hot stage-three smog-alert California days Ms. Cegeny would announce, “Okay, class, put away your pencils and take out your science books. Turn to page eighty-eight. Melissa, please read starting from ‘Fun with Sunshine and Thermodynamics.’” Melissa Schoopmann would begin in her deliberate relentless monotone. “This may sound funny … to the novice … third-grade scientist, … but sunshine is cool. … Without it … the earth … would be … as lifeless as a … Catholic funeral on a … rainy, dreary day.” I’d try to fall asleep, but it was too hot even to daydream. My sweat-soaked Suicidal Tendencies You Can’t Bring Me Down tour shirt clung to the inversion layer of grit on my skin. Melissa droned on. “Dark colors … such as … black absorb sunlight … and light colors … such as … white reflect sunlight.” I looked up and down my skinny dark brown arms and turned to my lab partner, Cecilia Peetemeyer, the palest kid in school. Cecilia’s skin was so transparent that one week during health Ms. Cegeny used Cecilia’s see-through skim-milk-white limbs to show the difference between arteries, capillaries, and veins.
“Cecilia, are you hot?” I asked.
“No.”
“Shit.”
“Gunnar, what was the last thing Melissa read?”
“Uh, she said um. She said dark colors soak up the sun’s rays through processes called conduction and convection and the lighter colors of the spectrum tend to alter the path of the radiation through reflection and refraction.”
“Good, I thought you weren’t paying attention. Melissa, please continue.”
Everything was multicultural, but nothing was multicultural. The class studied Asian styles of calculation by learning to add and subtract on an abacus and we then applied the same mathematical principles on Seiko calculators. Prompting my hand to go up and me to ask naively, “Isn’t the Seiko XL-126 from the same culture as the abacus?” Ms. Cegeny’s response was “No, we gave this technology to the Japanese after World War II. Modern technology is a Western construct.” Oh. To put me in my place further, Sheila Watanabe hummed “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty” loud enough for the whole class to hear.
One year during Wellness Week a MASH unit of city health workers set up camp in the gymnasium to ensure that America would have an able-bodied supply of future midlevel managers ready to lead the reinforcement brigades of minimum-wage foot soldiers to their capitalistic battle stations. A free-enterprise penologist was a physically fit one. We answered the patriotic call one girl and boy at a time. Allison Abramowitz and Aaron Aaronson were the first to go. Brave warriors, they left with no send-off party save the frightened faces of their classmates. Ten minutes later Allison returned unharmed. She skipped over to her desk, sat down, and covered a sly I-know-some-thing-you-don’t smile with her hand. Kent Munson quickly asked for permission to sharpen his pencil. He dropped the pencil next to Allison and asked her what happened. She hissed, “None of your beeswax,” sending Kent slinking back to his seat defeated. When copycat and cootie-infested Katie Swickler tried the same technique, Allison greeted her with a message whispered in her ear. Then girls throughout the classroom giggled and smiled at Katie, thanking her for the reassurance. It was as if they were commun
icating through gender-specific telepathy, leaving us guys looking more confused than usual.
Then Aaron Aaronson walked in, his face drained of color, his arms stuck tightly to his sides, and a newly acquired tic violently tossing his head back at a sickeningly acute angle every two seconds. Zombiefied, he walked a few steps into the classroom, stopped, and shouted, “Oh shit, you guys. They touched my balls and made me cough.”
Ms. Cegeny ignored Aaron’s pederastic pronouncements, called two more names, and continued her lecture on the importance of living in a colorblind society. “Does anyone have an example of colorblind processes in American society?”
Ed Wismer raised his hand and said, “Justice.”
“Good. Anything else?”
Millicent Offerman, who as teacher’s pet spoke without raising her hand, shouted out, “The president sure seems to like people of color.”
“Anyone else think of anything that’s colorblind? Gunnar?”
“Dogs.”
“I believe that dogs are truly colorblind, but they’re born that way. Class, it’s important that we judge people for what?”
“Their minds!”
“And not their what?”
“Color!”
The response to Ms. Cegeny’s call was mostly soprano. I know none of the boy altos were into it—too busy cursing ourselves for wearing the same drawers two days in a row. Colorblind? I hoped the doctor would be totally blind, or he might pull down my underwear, see the brown skid marks on my white Montgomery Ward cotton briefs, and recommend me for placement in special education.
Eventually Ms. Cegeny called my name and I left to be examined by a quiet nurse and a doctor so old he may have cowritten the Hippocratic oath. I was weighed and measured. The doctor banged on my knees with a rubber tomahawk, then asked me to pull down my drawers. Ignoring my stains, he wrapped his trembling and wrinkled hand around my equally wrinkled scrotum. I didn’t flinch. Which surprised him.
“Anyone ever do this to you before, son?”
“No.”
“Do you know what I am doing, son?”
“Touching my balls.”
“Do you know why? Cough.”
“Ah-hem. To practice your juggling?”
“Oh, you’re one of those funny cool black guys, aren’t you. No, I’m testing you for a hernia. Cough.”
“Ah-hem! How do you test the girls?”
“I pinch their nipples and ask them to whistle. Pull up your pants and we’ll test your sight.”
I sat on a stool and read the eye chart with no problems. The nurse placed an open book on my lap and asked if I saw any numbers in the pattern of colored dots. I pointed out the yellow-orange eight-six in the sea of gray dots and asked the nurse what I was being tested for. The doctor stopped shaking long enough to interrupt the nurse and answer, “Colorblindness.”
“Our teacher says we’re supposed to be colorblind. That’s hard to do if you can see color, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I’d say so, but I think your teacher means don’t make any assumptions based on color.”
“Cross on the green and not in between.”
“They’re talking about human color.”
“So?”
“So just pretend that you don’t see color. Don’t say things like ‘Black people are lecherous, violent, natural-born criminals.’”
“But I’m black.”
“Oh, I hadn’t noticed.”
I went back to class and told the still-nervous boys in the back rows whose last names began with the letters L through Z that the physical wasn’t too bad other than when the doctor measures your dick with a ruler and calls out to the nurse, “Penis size normal,” or “teeny-weeny,” or “fucking humungous.” Ann Kurowski, who was twice as blind as Helen Keller but determined to go through life without wearing glasses, asked me if I remembered the letters on the bottom of the eye chart. I told her “F-E-C-E-S” and opened my primer to the story about a war between a herd of black elephants and a herd of white elephants.
I don’t remember what the elephants were fighting about—something about hating each other for the colors of their sponge-rubbery skins. It wasn’t as if the black elephants had to use the mosquito-infested watering hole and rely on white elephant welfare for their quinine. After heavy casualties on both sides, a cease-tusking was called. The elephants, as wounded and bedraggled as elephants could possibly be, headed off into the hills, only to return to the plains years later as a harmonious and homogeneous herd of gray elephants.
I never could figure out why that story was so disquieting. Maybe it was the unsettling way Eileen Litmus would loudly slam shut her reader and stare at me from across the room as we completed the assignment at the end of the story.
1. Why did the elephants not get along? A folded note would soon find my hand under the desk.
2. How come the elephants came back gray? I’d open the note, trying my best not to rustle the paper. The scrawl read:
Fuck the stupid elephants. I like the tortoise and the hare story much more better. I challenge you to a race. Meet me after school for a race from the baseball diamond to the handball courts and back. Do you accept the challenge or are you a pigeon-toed wuss? P.S. You have big ears so you must be an African elephant.
3. Can we apply this story to real life? I’d look up and see Eileen’s hand raised high in the air, her eyes’ radar locked on mine. “Ms. Cegeny! Ms. Cegeny! Gunnar’s passing notes!” Ms. Cegeny would squeak her pudgy sandal-shod feet over to my desk and read the entire note to the shrieking delight of the class. As punishment for my misdemeanor, I’d have to stand up and read aloud my answer to the last question regarding the elephant story.
4. What do you think will happen to the elephants in the future? “Just like some human babies are born with tails or scales, some unfortunate baby elephants are going to be genetic flashbacks and come out albino white and summer’s nap black. Then the whole monochrome utopia is going to be all messed up.”
*
My first crush was on Stan “the Man” Musial, an old first baseman with a corkscrew batting stance who played for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1940s and 1950s. Eileen Litmus was my second love. She had a vindictive sense of humor, power to left-center, and was faster than winter vacation, three qualities I admired in a third grader. Despite our age, Eileen and I were easily the fastest kids in the school. Kids would bet movie money on who would win our Friday marathons around the schoolyard backstops. The “Ready, get set, go!” often caught me flatfooted, staring at her lean figure, my arms frozen in prerace Tiberian Olympic-statue readiness. The sudden whoosh of Eileen’s departure would roust me from my trance, her thick dirty-blond hair streaming behind her like jet vapor, denim hip-huggers blurring past the tetherball courts. Pumping my arms and puffing my cheeks like I’d seen the track stars do on TV, I’d try to make up ground just so I could catch a glimpse of her round tan tomboyish face. If the grass near the hopscotch boxes was soggy and she wore the heavier Nike Cortezes, not the lighter Adidas running shoes, I stood a chance of catching her near the handball court, the inner thighs of my corduroys rubbing and buzzing down the stretch. Usually Eileen crossed the finish line first, wading into a welcoming committee of high fives and hugs from the girls. The boys wreathed me with humiliation. “Dude, why did you let her win? I lost four grape Pixie Stix. What the fuck is wrong with you, man? You’re supposed to be fast. When’s the last time a white sprinter won a race? Would you bowl with a white bowling ball? No, you wouldn’t.”
After a long schoolday of moralistic bombardment with the aphorisms of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Pocahontas, and a herd of pacifist pachyderms, my friends and I were ready to think about color on our own terms. We’d make plans to spend the weekend at the beach, sunning in the shoreline’s warm chromatics and filling in childhood’s abstract impressionism coloring books with our own definitions of color, trying our hardest not to stay inside the lines.
Blue
&
nbsp; Those without bikes rode on the handlebars. We pedaled side by side in wobbly tandems, yelling our blue profanities, sharing our blue fantasies. We bombarded the windows on the Big Blue municipal bus with wet baby-blue toilet-paper grenades. We splashed in the postcard blue of the ocean and stuck out our Slurpee blue tongues at the girls two towels over. Eileen’s light-saber blue eyes cut through me like lighthouse beacons lancing the midnight.
Psychedelic
When you’re young, psychedelic is a primary color and a most mesmerizing high. Santa Monica was full of free multihued trips. The color-burst free-love murals on Main Street seemed to come to vibrant cartoon life when I passed them. The whales and dolphins frolicked in the clouds and the sea lions and merry-go-round horsies turned cartwheels in the street. The spray-any-color-paint-on-the-spin-art creations at the pier were fifty-cent Jackson Pollock rainbow heroin hits that made your skin tingle and the grains of sand swell up and rise to the sky like helium balloons. Looking into the kaleidoscopic eyes of a scruffy Bukowski barfly sitting in the lotus position along the bike trails fractured your soul into hundreds of disconnected psychedelic shards. Each sharp piece of your mind begging for sobriety.
White
Santa Monica whiteness was Tennessee Williams’s Delta summer seersucker-suit blinding. The patchy clouds, the salty foams of the cresting waves, my friends, my style—all zinc oxide nose-cream white. My language was three-foot swells that broke left to right. “No waaaay, duuuude. Tuuubular biiitchin’ to the mxx. Tooootalllyyy fucking raaad.” White Gunnar ran teasingly tight circles around the recovering hollowed-out Narc Anon addicts till they spun like dreidels and dropped dizzily to the ground. White Gunnar was a broken-stringed kite leaning into the sea breeze, expertly maneuvering in the gusty gales. White Gunnar stabbed beached jellyfish with driftwood spears and let sand crabs send him into a disco frenzy by doing the hustle on his forehead. White was walking to school in the fog. White was ignoring the crossing guards and trying to outrun the morning moon. White was exhaling crystallized plumes of carbon dioxide and knowing it was the frozen exhaust of our excited minds. White wasn’t the textbook “mixture of radiations from the visible spectrum”; it was the opposite. White was the expulsion of colors encumbered by self-awareness and pigment.