by Paul Beatty
Black
Black was an unwanted dog abandoned in the forest who finds its way home by fording flooded rivers and hitchhiking in the beds of pickup trucks and arrives at its destination only to be taken for a car ride to the desert. Black was hating fried chicken even before I knew I was supposed to like it. Black was being a nigger who didn’t know any other niggers. The only black folks whose names I knew were musicians and athletes: Jimi Hendrix, Slash from Guns n’ Roses, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the Beastie Boys, and Melody the drummer from Josie and the Pussycats.
Black was trying to figure out “how black” Tony Grimes, the local skate pro, was. Tony, a freestyle hero with a signature model Dogtown board, was a hellacious skater and somehow disembodied from blackness, even though he was darker than a lunar eclipse in the Congo. The interviews in Shredder, Rollerbladers Suck, and Stoked magazines never mentioned his color.
Stoked: So, dude?
Tony: Yeah.
Stoked: Gnarly frontside ollie 180 fakie at the Laguna Pro-Am.
Tony: Nailed it, bro, want another hit?
Now and then we’d see Tony Grimes, our deracinated hero, in Coping ’n’ Doping Skateshop on Ocean Street next to the Tommy Burger. “What’s up, Tony?” we’d all ask coolly, yet with genuine concern in our voices. We’d receive an over-the-shoulder “What’s shakin’, dude?” and fight over who he’d acknowledged. “He called me dude. Not you, you nimrod.”
Tony Grimes strolled around the shop, a baseball cap magnetically attached at some crazy angle to his unkempt thick clumpy Afro. His lean muscular legs loped from clothes rack to clothes rack as he eyed the free shit he would take home after he got through rapping to the manager’s girlfriend.
Black was a suffocating bully that tied my mind behind my back and shoved me into a walk-in closet. Black was my father on a weekend custody drunken binge, pushing me around as if I were a twelve-year-old, seventy-five-pound bell clapper clanging hard against the door, the wall, the shoe tree. Black is a repressed memory of a sandpapery hand rubbing abrasive circles into the small of my back, my face rising and falling in time with a hairy heaving chest. Black is the sound of metal hangers sliding away in fear, my shirt halfway off, hula-hooping around my neck.
*
That summer of my molestation, my sister Christina returned from a YMCA day camp field trip in tears. My mother asked what was wrong, and between breathless wails Christina replied that on the way home from the Museum of Natural History the campers had cheered, “Yeah, white camp! Yeah, white camp!” and she had felt left out. I tried to console her by explaining the cheer was, “Yeah, Y camp! Yeah, Y camp!” and no one was trying to leave her out of anything. Expressing unusual concern in our affairs, Mom asked if we would feel better about going to an all-black camp. We gave an insistent “Noooooo.” She asked why and we answered in three-part sibling harmony, “Because they’re different from us.” The way Mom arched her left eyebrow at us, we knew immediately we were in for a change. Sunday I was hitching a U-Haul trailer to the back of the Volvo, and under cover of darkness we left halcyon Santa Monica for parts unknown. Ma driving, singing a medley of Temptations hits, my sisters passed out in the back seat, twitching in exhaustion from moving and packing.
Ma’s voice dropped a couple of octaves as she segued from “My Girl” into “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” I rolled down the window, trying to capture the last vestiges of the nighttime salt air, and began writing mental letters to friends I knew I’d never see again.
*
Dear Ryan Foggerty,
Later, man. Thanks for the ticket to the Henry Rollins/Anthrax show at the Civic Auditorium and for lending me your Slidemaster trucks and the Profane Insane Urethane wheels, I’ll send ’em back to you. Rock and roll will never die.
Be cool,
Gunnar
*
Dear Steven Pierce,
I’ll miss the weekend speedboat outings with your red-haired ex-Playboy Bunny mom and her loaded boyfriend who always wore the stupid Skipper from Gilligan’s Island hats. I remember how you hated the way he winked at you, one hand on the steering wheel, the other stroking your mother’s behind. We did the right thing by pissing in the gas tank, so what if his engine stalled and he nearly died of exposure off the coast of Mexico. I’m sorry, but Larry, not Shemp or Curly or Moe, was the funniest Stooge. “Susquehanna Hat Company”?
Slowly I turn,
step by step,
Gunnar
*
Dear Eileen,
I never told anyone. I know you didn’t.
XXOXOXX,
Gunnar
*
Of all my laidback Santa Monican friends, I miss David Joshua Schoenfeld the most. He was off-white and closest to me in hue and temperament. Strangers would come up to him and ask if he was Mediterranean. David would shake his head, his dollar-bill-green eyes trying to convey that he was a tanned Jewish kid originally from Phoenix and perpetually late for the Hebrew school bus. Every Tuesday and Thursday after bar mitzvah classes we’d meet at the public library and pore through the WWII picture books, doing our best to fight the bewitching allure of Fascist cool. Our obsession wasn’t a clear-cut Simon Wiesenthal Dudley Do-Right always-get-your-war-criminal fixation. We concerned ourselves with whether it would be more fun to fantasize about world domination attired in crushed Gestapo black velvet with red trim or in crumpled green Third Army gum-chewing schleppiness.
Himmler is wearing the Aryan autocrat’s summer ensemble, designed for maximum military foreboding with a hint of patrician civility. Ideal for a morning jaunt through the death camps or planning an autumn assault on the Russian front.
By sixth grade we’d read the junior warmongers’ canon: Mein Kampf, Boys from Brazil, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, and Anne Frank, and our allegiances were muddled. On the way to Laker games we’d talk about the atrocities at Buchenwald and Auschwitz. David’s father, looking for a parking space, would ask us whether he should feel guilty about playing the serial numbers branded onto his father’s forearm in the state lottery. During time-outs we’d test each other on the design specifications and flight capabilities of the Luftwaffe arsenal.
“The blitzkrieg clarion the Polish heard whistling out of the clouds in 1939?”
“Please, the Stuka dive-bombers.”
“Top speed for the Messerschmitt 109 K-model.”
“Easy, 452 miles per hour, climb rate 4,880 feet per minute.”
“Someone’s been studying.”
“Knock this out. Give me the wingspan and ceiling for the Focke-Wulf 190 D-series.”
“You know that’s my favorite plane of all time. Wingspan 33 feet and 5 inches, ceiling 32,800 feet. Don’t Focke with me, man. Chu wanna go to war? Okay, we go to war.”
Later that night, with permission to sleep over at David’s house, we went to war. On our last reconnaissance sortie before bedtime we found a trail of ants on a Bataan death march to underground bunkers beneath his front porch. After five passes with the aerosol deodorant, we applied the matches and watched the soldier ants burn, shouting, “Dresden! Dunkirk! Banzai!” and strafing their shriveling exoskeletons with plastic scale-model airplanes. Then it was inside to watch our favorite video, Tora, Tora, Tora, stuffing handfuls of Jiffy Pop popcorn in our mouths and cheering for the Japanese.
When David’s parents were asleep we played Hiroshima-Nagasaki in the bedroom. In our astronaut pj’s with the crinkly plastic soles we moved the armoire into the hall and cleared enough space for Little Boy and Fat Man to land. Fake radio transmissions from the backs of our throats: “Come in, Los Alamos kkksssk. Come in, this is the Enola Gay, do you read? Kkksssk.”
“Loud and clear, this is Oppenheimer, copy.”
“Oppy baby, is this thing goin’ to work?”
“Oh yeah, equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT. Do you copy?”
“Roger, ten-four, over and out.”
We’d simulate the atomic flash by switching the bedroom light on and off as f
ast as we could, catching strobe glimpses of ourselves as nuclear shadows. Frozen in our positions, we mimicked death, writing letters home, pruning bonsai trees, playing with Hot Wheels, bent over mid butt-wipe.
Before going to bed, we brushed our teeth in the cramped bathroom. I noticed that David put the toothpaste on his brush before passing it under the cold water. I, like most folks, wet my brush, then put on the toothpaste, but I copied him because he was white and I figured maybe I was doing it wrong.
The only time race entered our war was when we sat over a basket of french fries drinking root beer and debating who Hitler would kill first, David the diabolical Jew or me the subhuman Negroid. It was on our excursions to the library that I stumbled across my first black heroes: the Tuskegee airmen, the Redball Express, some WAC nurses from Chicago, Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., Jesse Owens, and the mess cook who shot down a couple of Japanese Zeros from the sinking deck of the Arizona. I kept these discoveries to myself. I didn’t think David would find it as juicy as when I told him that Hitler had only half a package.
*
Dear David Schoenfeld,
I’m still high from the model airplane glue-sniffing session in the alleyway behind Pic ’n’ Save. Remember the waterfalls of vomit rushing down our chins and our contest to see who could find the largest chunks of undigested potato chips in their pool of throw-up? Fuckin’ cool. David, somehow through being with you I learned I was black and that being black meant something, though I’ve never learned exactly what. Barukh atah Adonai.
Shalom, motherfucker,
Gunnar
*
I don’t remember helping my mother unload the trailer, but the next morning I awoke on the floor of a strange house amid boxes and piles of heavy-duty garbage bags jammed with clothes. The Venetian blinds were drawn, and although the sunlight peeked between the slats, the house was dark. My mother let out a yell in that distinct-from-some-where-in-the-kitchen timbre: “Gunnar, go into my purse and buy some breakfast for everybody.” I acknowledged my orders and got dressed. Rummaging through my personal garbage bag, I found my blue Quicksilver shorts, a pair of worn-out dark gray Vans sneakers, a long-sleeved clay-colored old school Santa Cruz shirt, and just in case the morning chill was still happening, I wrapped a thick plaid flannel shirt around my skinny waist. I found the front door, and like some lost intergalactic B-movie spaceman who has crash-landed on a mysterious planet and is unsure about the atmospheric content, I opened it slowly, contemplating the possibility of encountering intelligent life.
I stepped into a world that was a bustling Italian intersection without Italians. Instead of little sheet-metal sedans racing around the fontana di Trevi, little kids on beat-up Big Wheels and bigger kids on creaky ten-speeds weaved in and out of the water spray from a sprinkler set in the middle of the street. It seemed there must have been a fire drill at the hair salon, because males and females in curlers and shower caps crammed the sidewalks.
I ventured forth into my new environs and approached a boy about my age who wore an immaculately pressed sparkling white T-shirt and khakis and was slowly placing one slue-footed black croker-sack shoe in front of the other. I stopped him and asked for directions to the nearest store. He squinted his eyes and leaned back and stifled a laugh. “What the fuck did you say?” I repeated my request, and the laugh he suppressed came out gently. “Damn, cuz. You talk proper like a motherfucker.” Cuz? Proper like a motherfucker? It wasn’t as if I had said, “Pardon me, old bean, could you perchance direct a new indigene to the nearest corner emporium.” My guide’s bafflement turned to judgmental indignation at my appearance. “Damn, fool, what’s up with your loud-ass gear? Nigger got on so many colors, look like a walking paint sampler. Did you find the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow? You not even close to matching. Take your jambalaya wardrobe down to Cadillac Street, make a right, and the store is at the light.”
I walked to the store, not believing that some guy who ironed the sleeves on his T-shirt and belted his pants somewhere near his testicles had the nerve to insult me over how I dressed. I returned to the house, dropped the bag of groceries on the table, and shouted, “Ma, you done fucked up and moved to the ’hood!”
“YOUNG, DUMB, AND FULL OF CUM”
Three
My magical mystery tour ground to a halt in a West Los Angeles neighborhood the locals call Hillside. Shaped like a giant cul-de-sac, Hillside is less a community than a quarry of stucco homes built directly into the foothills of the San Borrachos Mountains. Unlike most California communities that border mountain ranges, Hillside has no gentle slopes upon which children climb trees and overly friendly park rangers lead weekend flora-and-fauna tours.
In the late 1960s, after the bloody but little known I’m-Tired-of-the-White-Man-Fuckin’-with-Us-and-Whatnot riots, the city decided to pave over the neighboring mountainside, surrounding the community with a great concrete wall that spans its entire curved perimeter save for an arched gateway at the southwest entrance. At the summit of this cement precipice wealthy families live in an upper-middle-class hamlet known as Cheviot Heights. At the bottom of this great wall live hordes of impoverished American Mongols. Hardrock niggers, Latinos, and Asians, who because of the wall’s immenseness get only fifteen minutes of precious sunshine in summer and a burst of solstice sunlight in the winter. If it weren’t always so hot it would be like living in a refrigerator.
We lived in a pueblo-style home with a cracked and fissuring plaster exterior my mother said provided an Old Mexico flavor. Even she had to laugh when I walked up to a peeling section of the house, broke off a yellow paint chip, popped it into my mouth, rubbed my tummy, and said, “Mmmmmm, nacho cheese.” Our back yard nestled right up against the infamous wall. I often marveled at the unique photosynthesis that allowed the fig, peach, and lemon trees to thrive in a dim climate where it often rained dead cats and dogs, rotted fish, and droplets of piss. Apparently rich folks have an acerbic sense of humor.
After a week in our new home, a black-and-white Welcome Wagon pulled up in front of the house to help the newcomers settle into the neighborhood. Two mustachioed officers got out of the patrol car and knocked on our front door with well-practiced leather-gloved authority. Tossing courtesy smiles at my mother, the cops shouldered their way past the threshold and presented her with a pamphlet entitled “How to Report Crime and Suspicious Activity Whether the Suspects Are Related to You or Not.” It wasn’t the day-old macaroni casserole she’d been expecting. My sisters and I sat in the living room, half listening to the news on the radio, half listening to the cops asking Mama questions to which they already knew the answers.
“Kids, Ms. Kaufman?”
“Yes, three.”
“Two girls, ten and eleven, and a boy, thirteen, all of them left-handed, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“Ma’am, may we speak to the boy, Gunnar?”
My mother turned around and waved me over with the hated come-hither crooked index finger. I lifted my sheepish carcass off the couch and shuffled like a reluctant butler toward the interrogation. The cop with gold stripes on his sleeves cut Mama a look and said, “Alone, Ms. Kaufman,” and she deserted me with a satisfied smirk, happy that I was finally getting a bitter taste of her vaunted “traditional black experience.”
I stood there, perched directly under the doorjamb, as I’d learned to do when your earth quaked. My slumping shoulders trembled. My kneecaps shook. These weren’t some Santa Monica cops sporting Conflict Resolution ribbons, riding powder-blue bicycles, this was the LAPD, dressed to oppress, their hands calmly poised over open holsters like seasoned gunfighters’. I tried to distance myself from the rumbling in my ears, clamoring for one of those out-of-body experiences only white folks in midlife crises seem to have. I felt the gases rising from my queasy stomach to inflate my body. My arms and legs began to swell, and slowly I began to float away. I was just getting off the ground when I let out a long silent fart. Apparently, my escape f
antasy had a slow leak.
“Son, you smell something?”
“Nope.”
“Well, something reeks.”
“Oh, that’s the chitlins.”
My would-be out-of-body experience hovered there, wafting in the flatulent fumes. I wasn’t going anywhere; I felt like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon—tethered, and grounded to reality by fishing lines looped through my nose and eyeballs. I was a helium distraction until the arrival of Santa Claus. “Look, Daddy, Snoopy with an Afro.”
The squat grayish-blond officer removed his cap and introduced himself and his partner as officers Frank Russo and Neal Salty.
“Gunnar, we know you had some problems with the Santa Monica police department. Son, here in”—the officer took a deep breath—“Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, we practice what we like to call ‘preventative police enforcement.’ Whereby, we prefer to deter habitual criminals before they cause irreparable damage to the citizenry and/or its property.”