by Paul Beatty
“I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to the earth I know not where,” I said by way of introducing myself. The pint-sized William Tell looked in my direction and twisted his hands in some arthritic gesticulation. I interpreted his double-jointed gesture as a sign of welcome and replied in kind with the only high sign I knew. I raised the back of my left hand to my chin and wiggled my fingers, giving him the high sign popularized by Stymie and Alfalfa in the Our Gang comedies. I felt I was speaking a sort of gangland Esperanto, but Pumpkin stiffened, pursed his lips, and scrunched his face in displeasure. To dampen his anger, I commented on the expensive sheepskin quiver strapped across his chest.
“Nice quiver.”
“Quiver? You saying I’m scared of your ass?”
“No, I’m talking about the holder for arrow shafts.”
“You saying you Shaft? Oh, you that cat, that baaaad mother … shutyourmouth, but I’m talkin’ about Shaft. Oh, I can dig it, motherfucker.”
Not knowing what to say next in a game of who’s on first that was becoming increasingly hostile, I said nothing and looked longingly back at the tent, but his stare hadn’t yet given me permission to go anywhere. Pumpkin and each of his merry men in turn threw up the hand signal again, waiting for me to acknowledge it. I knew better than to give the Little Rascal high sign again, so I stalled.
“That thing you do with your hands is awfully cryptic.”
“Damn straight, nigger, because I’m a goddamn Crip. Where from, punk? Represent, fool, fo’ me and my potnahs break you off something proper-like.”
I felt someone place that apple that had once been on top of the mannequin’s head on my head. Pumpkin furrowed his brow, nocked a shiny brass-tipped arrow in his bow, and said, “Wuddup, fool? You Cuz or Blood?”
My shiftless free will leaned lazily against my brain stem and flipped a coin onto its clammy palm, whistling a chorus of “eeny, meany, miney, moe, catch a nigger by the toe.” From somewhere inside my head a game show host with a majestic voice welcomed me to Final Jeopardy. “What is Blood?” I answered.
The Little Lord Fauntleroys stopped shuffling in place, clenched their teeth, and stood up straight. Their fists knuckled into iron black ballpeens.
“Ennnhhh,” a tall, crazy-looking Mexican boy in the rear said.
“Wink, tell the boy what he’s won as a consolation prize.”
The circle of boys tightened.
“Okay, Bob. Our contestant has won a matching set of contusions and bruises with possibly some lacerations of his internal organs courtesy of that infamous gang, the”—my eyes closed and someone rolled his tongue in a mock drumroll—“Gun Totin’ Hooligans.”
The quills of an arrow brushed past my ear and I turned just fast enough to see it plow into the foam head of the deer with its nose nuzzled in the bear’s ass. The deer wobbled, then fell on its side, dead. The bear looked relieved and the blows crackled and crunched on my head, rearranging my already lumpy phrenological topography. Steel-toed boots explored the depths of my rib cage and waves of pain rapelled up and down my spine. Periodically, my persecutors would rest and step back from my bloodied carcass, share bites of the apple, and admire their handiwork. “Yo, Joe, how do you get both eyes to swell with such symmetry and purple robustness?” Then they’d swallow, spit the seeds in my general direction, and resume whipping my ass. Between thumpings I remained optimistic, hopeful that this would be the beatdown that certified my worthiness, stamped me with the ghetto seal of approval.
Maybe this was one of those jumping-in rituals I’d seen on the PBS documentaries titled Our Youth at Risk or something equally forlorn. My mother would watch these melodramatic shows, angrily addressing the screen. “What they talking about, our youth’? Those aren’t my kids, and if they were, they’d damn sure be at risk. At risk of me putting some euthanasia shotgun pellets in their bellies.” I’d never thought that one day I would be in the center of a maelstrom of “our youth,” pacifying myself with thoughts of possible acceptance into their world. Maybe the Gun Totin’ Hooligans would beat me senseless, then revive me with dousing buckets of water, welcoming me into the fold with snappy French Foreign Legion kisses on both cheeks and Leo Buscaglia gangster bear hugs. “My nigger. What it be like, black? Gimme some love, dawg.” The secret password would be whispered in my ear, and the sacred soul shake taught. I’d raise off the linoleum floor with swollen lips and a gang affiliation, pumping my fist in the air, screaming to the gods, “That’s right, motherfuckers, you don’t know who you fucking with, I’m down with the Gun Totin’ Hooligans. Get back, Jack. Up your milk money before I regulate you and all your punk-ass disciples.”
I was squirming on the ground, contorted into a bloody fetal mess, too sore even to groan when they rifled my pockets. Finding nothing but the book I had been reading, one of the fistic coterie bemusedly read the title. “The Odyssey? Ain’t that some club over on Slauson and Normandie?” He carelessly flung it back at me, and the book fluttered through the air like a teal-colored paperback butterfly and landed lightly on my chest, face down and open somewhere in the middle. I picked it up, looked at the triumphant, swaggering backs of my conquerors, and read aloud:
Athena, gray-eyed goddess, then replied:
Take heart: you need not fear such things.
But now, in the recess of that beguiling cave,
let’s set your treasures, there they will be safe.
Not the ironic profundity I hoped for, but it portended better times. Junior high started in a week; I couldn’t wait. I wondered what the nurse’s name would be and if she disinfected cuts and slashes with Mercurochrome or the wimpy ouchless spray. I’d have to remember to ask my mother to call the office to ensure they knew how to make butterfly bandages out of those “flesh”-colored Band-Aids.
Four
I arrived forty-five minutes early for my first day of school at Manischewitz Junior High. A tattered and faded U.S. flag snapped solidly in the wind, full of bluster despite bearing only half its original fifty stars. The stars that remained hung on to the blue field by only one or two points. The putrid pink, dirty gray, and filthy baby blue of Old Glory had seen better days.
I opened the steel front door and stepped into the deserted vestibule, looking for some middle school guidance. There was none to be found. No smiling faces welcomed me to the smelting factory of young widgethood. No signs directed me toward fall registration. I walked through the metal detector and went looking for the dean’s office to pick up my schedule. Walking through the halls, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the glossy panorama photographs of Manischewitz graduating classes past that adorned the walls.
CLASS OF ’23: Scads of white students and teachers dressed in pleated flannel skirts and pants. A young colored custodian with a mop in his hand stands next to a metal bucket. The name tag on his overalls reads “Melvin Samuels.” A close examination of the principal reveals the outline of a flask in the breast pocket of his suit jacket.
CLASS OF ’41: Other than the smattering of Asian faces lousing up the Anglo homogeneity, very similar to the previous photograph. A student in the front row holds a sign that reads, “Get out of jail soon, Melvin. The wastebaskets miss you.”
CLASS OF ’42: There are only two male teachers, one of whom has his arms wrapped around the waists of two female teachers. The other stands in the middle of the nursing staff, holding a stethoscope and smiling from ear to ear. There are no Asian students.
In the years following 1944 the staff gets fatter and there are always three or four black and Chicano faces dotting the photos like grease smudges. Each year’s colored faces bear a striking resemblance to those from the previous year. Unless there is a change in sex, it’s hard to tell if the minority kids are the progeny of single families passing through the school system or the same kids repeating ninth grade year after year.
CLASS OF ’67: The first class photo in color. The student population is still overwhelmingly white, but they no longer wear staid plain white shirts
and blouses to school. Instead they sport groovy colorful tartans, stripes, and paisleys. One teacher in the front row is wearing an African dashiki and giving the peace sign. Standing in the back next to a metal bucket and holding a mop is a graying janitor outfitted in a blue jumpsuit. His name tag reads “Melvin Samuels.”
CLASS OF ’68: If it weren’t for the same crew-cut gym teacher and bifocaled principal standing like bookends in both photographs, this picture could be a negative of the Class of ’67’s portrait. The faces of these graduating ninth-graders are dark and overwhelmingly Latino and black. Mr. Samuels is standing in the back, dressed in a bright orange leisure suit and smoking a cigarette, with a mop slung over his shoulder like a rifle. The teacher with the dashiki has a black eye and his arm in a sling.
CLASS OF ’86: The last photograph in the series. The number of students in the picture is smaller than ever before. The faces, including those of most of the staff, are Latino and black, with a sprinkling of Asians. A man in gray overalls whose name tag reads “Mr. Samuels, Jr.” is standing in the back, mopless and sharing a joint with a couple of kids. Every boy in the front row has his penis sticking out of his button-fly jeans. Close inspection reveals the outline of a flask in the breast pocket of the principal’s suit.
*
The dean’s office was just around the corner. The receptionist awoke when he heard the heavy wooden door slam shut. Wiping the sleep from his eyes, he looked up at the clock.
“Damn, you early.” He asked my name and retrieved my schedule from a thick leather binder with “Gunnar Kaufman—Records” embossed on it in shiny gold flake. I’d never seen my records. Supposedly filled with my black marks, accolades, test scores, and aptitude results, this fabled folder was preordained to follow me throughout my entire life, passing from school to university to employer to jailer and finally ending in the hands of Saint Peter or the Devil.
“You’re the first one here. The principal hasn’t even arrived yet. Is there some trouble at home?”
“No.”
The receptionist skimmed my file, using his tie as a reading ruler. He glanced up at me, shook his head, returned his gaze to the file, and spoke.
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
“Nope.”
Handing me my schedule, he grabbed my wrist and, in the sympathetic voice adults use to raise money for handicapped and troubled kids on late-night television, said, “Boy, you know if you find yourself having trouble getting to and from class, the school provides an escort service and you can be placed in protective custody.”
“No thanks,” I said. I couldn’t stop smiling at the irony. The police thought I was a potential criminal mastermind and the school district thought I was an easy target for junior high hit men in training. Seeing that I’d touched a protective nerve, I pointed toward my records and asked the receptionist, in the helpless voice teens use to ask adults for a favor, “What’s the aptitude part say?”
“I’m not allowed to reveal that without state and parental consent.”
“Come on, man. Be cool. I won’t tell. You can trust me. Look, I’m the first kid in school on the first day of school—is there anything less intimidating than that?”
He opened the eternal dossier, placed his glittery synthetic tie on the page, and started reading. “Okay, it says, ‘Despite his race, subject possesses remarkable intelligence and excellent reasoning and analytical skills. His superb yet raw athletic ability exceeds even the heightened expectations normally accorded those of his ethnicity. Family background is exemplary, and with the proper patriotic encouragement Gunnar Kaufman will make an excellent undercover CIA agent. At a young age he already shows a proclivity for making friends with domestic subversives and betraying them at the drop of a hat.’ Satisfied, Double-O Seven? Your homeroom is on the first floor of the Science Building, next to the vineyard. You’ll see a sign saying Vitis vinifera on your left.”
Amazed at what the government can glean from a few timed tests and laps around the track, I slunk to homeroom imagining I was wearing dark glasses and a trench coat. The halls began to fill with Manischewitz Junior High’s administrative and security personnel, and my best espionage moves served me well. Pressing my back against the walls and peeking coolly around corners, I managed to avoid detection and made it to homeroom twenty minutes early. I opened the door slowly, index fingers loaded and ready to blast holes into any purveyors of injustice not taken in by my stealth. To my disappointment, there were no enemy agents wearing headsets and minding computer consoles.
Homeroom was an antiseptic classroom buzzing not with hostile anti-imperialist activity but with humming overhead fluorescent lights. A pair of dingy felt banners hung at both ends of the room. The purple-on-gold one at the back of the room read, “Karibuni! Bienvenidos! Welcome!” Its obverse gold-on-purple cousin at the front read, “Conceive It! Believe It! Achieve It! Imagina! Cree! Realiza!” I took the middle seat in the middle row. The desk looked like a modern Rosetta stone, etched with penknifed legacies that begged to be deciphered.
Kathleen y Flaco para siempre con alma
Pythagoras the Congruent Truant—
A2 + B2 = C square punk busters get killed
Eventually the hallways stopped echoing with the footsteps of the Oxford wingtipped and high-heeled administration. In their place was the sound of brand-new sneakers squeaking on the waxed floors and the heavy clomp of unlaced hiking boots. The walkie-talkie communiqués were soon drowned out by the FM stereo meta-bass of the Barrio Brothers’ morning show on KTTS. Steadily, the students entered the classroom and slid into the empty seats around me. First to arrive were the marsupial mama’s boys and girls. These sheltered kids had spent the entire summer sequestered indoors by overprotective parents. They entered the classroom with pale complexions and squinting like possums to adjust their eyes to the light.
The reformed and borderline students followed. They crept into class, carefully trying to avoid last year’s repercussive behaviors, and sat upright at their desks, face front and hands folded, mumbling their September resolutions to themselves. “This year will be different. I will do my homework. I will not slap Mr. Ellsworth when he calls me a loser. I will only bring my gun to school.” I admired the determination they showed in ignoring their corruptive friends, standing in the doorway and egging them on to join the excursion to McDonald’s for breakfast McMuffins, orange juice, and a joint.
Two minutes before nine o’clock signaled the grand entrance of the fly guys and starlets. Dressed in designer silk suits and dresses, accessorized in ascots, feather boas, and gold, the aloof adolescent pimps and dispassionate divas strolled into homeroom smoking Tiparillos and with a retinue of admirers who carried their books and pulled chairs from desks with maitre d’ suaveness.
I’d never been in a room full of black people unrelated to me before, and as the classroom filled, the growing din was unlike anything I’d ever heard. I sat like a tiny bubble in a boiling cauldron of teenage blackness, wondering where all the heat came from. Kids popped up out of their chairs to shout, whispered, tugged at each other. Homeroom was a raucous orchestral concerto conducted by some unseen maestro. In the middle of this unadulterated realness I realized I was a cultural alloy, tin-hearted whiteness wrapped in blackened copper plating. As my classmates yelled out their schedules and passed contraband across the room, I couldn’t classify anyone by dress or behavior. The boisterous were just as likely to be in the academically enriched classes as the silent. The clotheshorses stood as much chance of being on a remedial track as the bummy kids with brown bag lunches. Many kids, no matter how well dressed, didn’t have notebooks.
At exactly nine o’clock the bell rang and Ms. Schaefer stormed into the room. Disheveled and visibly nervous, she never bothered to introduce herself or say good morning. She wrote her name on the board in shaky, wavering strokes and took attendance. The class instantly interpreted her behavior as a display of lack of trust and concern. That day I learned my s
econd ghetto lesson: never let on that you don’t trust someone. Even if that person has bad intentions toward you, he will take offense at your lack of trust.
Ms. Schaefer spat off the names like salted peanut shells.
“Wardell Adams?”
“Here.”
“Varnell Alvarez.”
“Aquí.”
“Pellmell Atkinson?”
“Presentemente.”
“Praise-the-Lord Benson?”
“Yupper.”
“Lakeesha Caldwell?”
“What?”
“Ayesha Dunwiddy?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Chocolate Fondue Edgerton.”
“That’s my name, ask me again and you’ll be walking with a cane.”
“I don’t know how to pronounce the next one.”
“You pronounce it like it sounds, bitch. Maritza Shakaleema Esperanza the goddess Tlazotéotl Eladio.”
“So you’re here.”
“Do crack pipes get hot?”
Then the gangsters trickled in, ten minutes late, tattooed and feisty. “Say man, woman, teacher, whatever you call yourself. You had better mark Hope-to-Die Ranford a.k.a. Pythagoras here and in the house. Nobody better be sitting at my desk. I had the shit last year and I want it back for good luck.”
“Mr. Pythagoras, take any available seat for now, okay? Who’s that with you?”
“Why you ask him I can speak for my damn self? This is Velma the Ludicrous Mistress Triple Bitch of Mischief Vinson.”
Ms. Schaefer’s unfazed approach to maintaining classroom comportment didn’t last long. By the end of the year we called her Ms. Sally Ride, because she was always blowing up at us.
After growing accustomed to police officers pulling students out of class for impromptu interrogations, bomb scares, and locker searches, I started to make friends, mostly with the nerdier students. We’d meet after school at the designated neighborhood safe houses on the ghetto geeks’ underground railroad: the library, the fire station’s milk-and-cookie open houses. The safest place was the basement of the Canaan Church of Christ Almighty God Our Savior You Betcha Inc. Pretending to be engrossed in Bible study, we traded shareware porn samplers downloaded onto our home computers. The computer was the only place where we had true freedom of assembly. Electronic mail allowed us shut-in sissies to talk our dorkian language uncensored by bullies who shoved paper towels soaked in urine down our throats and teachers who awoke from their catnaps only long enough to tell us to shut up. I tried to appreciate Spock’s draconian logic, Asimov’s automaton Utopias, and the metaphysical excitement of fighting undead ghouls and hobgoblins in Dungeons and Dragons, but to me Star Trek was little more than the Federalist Papers with warp drives and phasers. “Set Democracy on stun. One alien, one vote.” I was cooler than this, I had to be—I just didn’t know how to show my latent hipness to the world.