by Paul Beatty
“Hey Dex, you waiting for your clothes to dry?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What you on?”
“Sixies.”
“Oh, sixies is tough. Your hands big enough to pick up six jacks scattered from here to Koreatown?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know Betty and Veronica, them two wild banshees who live on Corning Street in the yellow apartments?”
“Uh-huh.”
“They chasing me. They’re going to kill me. Here’s two dollars. I’m going to hide in the laundry room. If they come by, don’t tell ’em where I’m at. Okay? Say you seen me run through here headed for Al’s Sandwich Shop. My life is in your chubby hands, don’t drop it.”
“Uh-huh.”
Ready or not, here we come!
I slipped into the cramped laundry room. Dexter’s clothes were spinning in the dryer. The sound of his size five P.F. Flyers caroming around the steel drum drowned out my heavy breathing. Confident that Betty and Veronica would never find me, I stripped down to my soggy size 26 white polyester briefs and tossed my wet clothes in the dryer. Dexter sat outside the door playing jacks and I sat on top of the washing machine playing with my dick.
“Dexter, you seen Gunnar?”
Damn.
“Uh-huh.”
“Where is he?”
“He gave me two wet dollar bills and said to tell you he was running over there near Al’s Sandwich Shop.”
“Dexter, tell you what I’m not gonna do. I’m not gonna take your two dollars out your hand. I’m not gonna tear them dirty drawers off your little pitch-black behind, shove the stupid two dollars in the crack of your ass, insert one of them jacks in your wee-wee pee hole, and toss you butt-naked into the fucking street if you tell me where Gunnar is.”
The silence told me that Dexter was breaching our contract with a cherubic pout and a point of his finger toward the laundry-room door.
Seeing my scrawny near-nakedness, Betty and Veronica licked their lips and shut the door behind them. “Mmmmmm, tap-tap on the fine nigger sittin’ on top of the washing machine.”
Veronica cradled my limp body in her arms and placed me gently on the floor. The dryer gave off a strange half-buzzing, half-ringing sound and continued to rumble. Betty’s teeth clamped down on my nipples and sucked the chill from the damp concrete out of my body. Warm rivulets of her spit meandered past my abdominal muscles and pooled in my belly-button. Veronica crept around my body, teasingly snapping the elastic band on my underwear and grinding her crotch on my thigh, my shin, and begging to tickle her love button with my big toe. At some point during the torturous fury of this menage à trois noir, my undies slid down to my ankles and shackled me into complete submission. The horny furies took tag-team turns squeezing my genitals. Betty’s cold hands ran against the grain of my prickly pubic hair, then cupped and kneaded my balls into a shriveled sack of testosterone mush. Veronica stretched my limp dick with one hand, plucked it like a bass string, and the girls broke into a dueling chorus of gospel double-entendre. Veronica opened with “Go down, Moses, waaaay down to Egypt’s land,” forcing my face between her legs. Betty sidestepped and countered in an Easter Sunday vibrato of “Touch me, Lord Jesus, mmmmmmm, with thy hand of mercy,” ramming my hand into her crotch. Veronica, reeling from Betty’s blows, pointed at my flaccid member and slid into a storefront Pentecostal soprano: “Fix it, Lord Jesus, you fixed it for my mother, now fix it for me.” Betty reached into my mouth, grabbed my tongue and placed its pointy tip on her knee, and started singing Mahalia Jackson’s subliminal hit, “Move On Up a Little Higher.” Feeling left out, Veronica snatched me by the Afro, smothered my lips with kisses, and forced her long tongue down my throat until it tickled my larynx. Betty extracted her spongy plumber’s helper from my ear and whispered, “Why don’t you sing, Gunnar? Give your frigid spirit wings and just imagine if niggers could fly.”
There was a knock on the laundry-room door. It was little Dexter’s mother come to collect her clothes and wanting to know what all the moaning was about.
“If y’all in there fucking, you better save some for me. I’ll give a motherfucker a shot of life.”
“Just a minute, Ms. Sandiford.”
Rescued at last. As I removed my clothes from the dryer, Betty and Veronica took one last hunk of buttcheek and then started arguing on the appropriate term for a boy’s losing his virginity.
“Deboned.”
“Spit-shined.”
“Bitch-dipped.”
I walked home basking in the warmth of newly tumble-dried clothes, singing “Oh Happy Day” at the top of my lungs. I was still singing when I got home.
A musclebound shirtless boy of about sixteen covered in soapsuds was in Ms. Sanchez’s driveway, washing the hell out of her Buick LeSabre. He heard me singing and stopped rubbing the caked-on bird shit long enough to greet me.
“What’s up, little man?”
“Cooling.”
The wind blew a cloudbank of suds across his chest, revealing a shiny gold crucifix that seemed imbedded in his massive brown torso. It was Ms. Sanchez’s son, Juan Julio, known around the neighborhood as Psycho Loco. I’d never seen him before, but knew all about him. His mother used to tell me how Juan Julio’s voice was the best missionary religion ever had. On Sundays he’d sing with the choir and his baritone would make the babies stop crying and the deacons start. Ms. Sanchez would hold a crucifix exactly like his up to the sky and swear that drunks, bums, prostitutes, hoodlums, even police officers, people who’d never been in church a day in their lives, would walk into the original First Ethiop Azatlán Catholic-Baptist Church and Casa de Sanctified Holy Rolling Ecumenical Sanctification, kneel at Juan Julio’s feet to plead forgiveness, renounce sin, accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior, and put all the money they had in the collection plate. When the service ended, the collection plate would be filled with car keys, crack vials, and stolen credit cards.
The neighborhood kids told me the story of Juan Julio’s life outside the House of God. On the street the angelic Juan Julio was Psycho Loco, leader of the local gang the Gun Totin’ Hooligans. I’d heard how as a strong-arm man-child for a loan shark, when he tired of a debtor’s sob story on why that week’s payments were late, he’d heat his crucifix with a nickel-plated lighter and press the makeshift branding iron into the victim’s cheek and scream, “Now you really have a cross to bear, motherfucker!”
One day I asked Snooky how come his Uncle Kahlil always wore earmuffs, even in the summer. He told me that his uncle and Psycho Loco got into a tussle over who was going to get to smash the jewelry cases at Declerk’s Discount Diamonds during a robbery they were planning. Juan Julio grabbed Uncle Kahlil by the ears and pulled like he was opening a bag of potato chips. The pop of his ears being snatched off the sides of his head was the last thing Uncle Kahlil ever heard. Out of pity, Juan Julio let him break the glass during the robbery, but Snooky’s uncle got caught, because he couldn’t hear Juan Julio telling him the cops were coming.
Here was Psycho Loco, home on parole for killing a para-medic who refused to give his piranha Esta Lleno mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after the fish choked on a family of sea monkeys.
“What you singing, cuz?”
“Some song.”
“That’s more than some song. That song got me through four years in the Oliver Twist Institute for Little Wanderers and Wayward Minority Males. I sang that shit from lights on to lights out. Oh happy day, oh happy day, when Jesus washed, when Jesus washed, he washed my sins away.”
Psycho Loco was still singing and putting a shine on the LeSabre’s chrome bumpers when I went inside. It took me eight hours and two boxes of frosted flakes to write my first poem. It was a fitting end to a long day.
Negro Misappropriation of Greek Mythology
or, I know Niggers That’ll Kick Hercules’s Ass
i lift the smoggy Los Angeles
death shroud
searching for ghetto muses
> anyone seen Calliope?
heard she emigrated to the San Fernando Valley
fulfills her ranch-styled dreams
with epic afternoon soap operas
and bong water bubble baths
outside, listening for voices,
i hear nothing
the leaves are silent
and the chichi birds look at me
like i’m crazy
you tell that dime-dropper Clio
she better not
leave her witness protection program
i seen some stone killers passing her picture
down by the 7-Eleven
on the sloped banks of the L.A. River
i sit cross-legged
classical guru pose;
my 50-cent Bic pen taut with possibilities
Thalia’s bloated body
floats by, zigzaggin’ between Firestone radials
finally catching itself on the rusted barbs
of a shopping cart
seriously lost at sea
Euterpe is at the talent show
begging entrance into the church basement
permission to sing her Patti Labelle covers
promising a big record label she won’t
smoke up the production money like last time
on my knees
I place my ear to the concrete
I hear nothing
no thundering cavalry hooves
kicking up dust
no war whoops
not even the ghost-town winds of massacre
i have a notion
that if i could translate
the slobbering bellows of Ray-Ray
the ubiquitous retarded boy’s
swollen-tongued incantations
i’d find Melpomene reciting the day’s obituaries
anyone here speak Down syndrome or crack baby?
running my hands over tree-bark Braille,
swashbuckling with palm tree leaves
nothing, paper cuts
en garde, motherfucker
ham radio signals
s.o.s. a.p.b. 911 electronic prayers
to the goddess Urania’s voicemail
go unanswered
late last night my man picked up a jailhouse phone
“Yo, nigger, you got to come down and get me out.”
and i was inspired
*
The next morning I rummaged through the attic and found a can of black spray paint and the stencils my great-great-uncle Wolfgang used to do his Jim Crow handiwork. I painted the poem on the wall that surrounds Hillside. Surprisingly, my still-wet verse didn’t look out of place between the specious rest-in-peace calligraphic elegies and the fading Übermensch graffiti already splashed on the wall.
I was eating cereal and watching the Sunday morning TV journalists discussing the prospect of substantive black rule in South Africa when Nick Scoby knocked on the door. He had his headphones on and his arms were filled with a Montgomery Ward trimline steam iron that dripped water, an ironing board, a can of starch, and a pile of brand-new white T-shirts. He walked in, propped up the board with a loud squeak, and plugged the iron into a nearby socket.
“What you listening to?”
“Toshiko Akiyoshi.”
“Who?”
“A piano player. You met Psycho Loco last night, I heard.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Listen to you—‘Yeah, so?’ Can you imagine the Indians meeting Christopher Columbus and saying, ‘Big deal, some midget with syphilis and a bad cold, so fucking what? Pass the buffalo meat’? You’re Psycho Loco’s next-door neighbor and he likes you.”
“Likes me how?”
“He likes you. Ever had a murderer like you before? Psycho Loco is going to come over to your house and ask you for favors. Borrow a cup of sugar, hold on to his gun, put your sister in a headlock and ask you to kindly tell the police he spent the night at your house playing Scrabble, shit like that. You’re involved, homes. You’re gonna have to respect something more than yourself. You know that saying, ‘Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends’?”
“Malheur et Pitié, canto one, 1803.”
“Well, here in the street, that shit works in reverse. Fate picks your friends, and you choose your family. Everybody starts out an orphan in this hole. Gunnar, you gonna have to respect Psycho Loco, the neighborhood, and the way things get done here. Psycho Loco and the Gun Totin’ Hooligans try to kill people. People their perception of fate has slated as the enemy. This ain’t Hatfields and McCoys, nobody’s birth certificate says Joe Crip, Sam Piru, and I definitely don’t know no niggers surnamed Hooligan—some Irish homies, maybe. If Psycho Loco says you’re his friend, there ain’t nothing you can do about it. You’re friends ’cause he says so. Now there might be some fool who lives on the other side of town who thinks you’re his archenemy simply because Psycho Loco likes you. That is fate, black. Maybe people with money can skew fate in their favor, but that ain’t us. I seen that poem you wrote on the way over here. There was a gang of motherfuckers reading it like a wanted poster. Oh yeah, nigger, thirteen years old and you involved now.”
Scoby ripped open a plastic bag, pulled out a T-shirt, and stretched it over the pointy end of the ironing board. He sprayed the starch over the shirt, licked his finger, pressed it to the bottom of the iron, and listened to the sizzle. “Watch,” he said. The iron cackled and spit as it glided over the shirt. When Scoby got to one of the factory wrinkles, he pressed the steam button and the iron exhaled plumes of vapor and the wrinkles vanished. After ironing the front and back of the shirt, he snatched it off the end and laid the sleeves on the board. Carefully aligning the hems, he dug the iron into the material, putting a stiletto-sharp crease in each sleeve. “Don’t put no creases anywhere else. No crease down the back, that’s the east side. No military double creases down the front from the collar to the end of the sleeve like them buster-ass niggers from XXY Chromosome Recidivists. Now go get a pair of pants.”
“I don’t care what happens, I will never put a fucking crease in my Levi’s. No fucking way, man. I will never be that involved.”
Scoby laughed and asked if my mother had given me enough money for basketball shoes. I pulled two hundred dollars from an envelope marked “Basketball Paraphernalia” and fanned the crisp twenty-dollar bills, wondering if it was enough to change my fate.
The Shoes
Buying basketball shoes was much harder than I thought. Unlike the skate shop, where there are only three different brands and maybe ten styles to choose from, Tennies from Heaven was the footwear equivalent of an automobile showroom. A sneaker emporium where the walls were lined with hundreds of shoes and salesmen dressed in silk sweatsuits patrolled the floor, handing out brochures, shaking hands, and checking credit ratings.
The basketball section took up the entire third floor. An eighty-dollar sneaker caught my eye and I hefted it in my hand as if its weight might tell something about its quality. I was about to call for a salesperson when I heard Scoby snickering behind my back and singing, “Buddies, they cost a dollar ninety-nine. Buddies, they make your feet feel fine.” I put the shoe down and Nicholas pushed me through a sliding glass door into an area of the store called the Proving Grounds. A section of the store where the state-of-the art, more expensive models were on display. Before the staff allowed me to try on any shoes, I had to sign a release stating that if my new sneakers were forcibly removed from my feet and the crime received any media attention, I would blame the theft on the current administration and not on niche marketing.
Even with all the paperwork I could only try on one shoe at a time, since I wasn’t accompanied by a bonded legal guardian or a basketball coach. Whenever I slipped my foot into a new shoe I’d hobble over to the mirror like Tiny Tim Cratchit and blink really fast, trying to create an optical illusion so I could imagine what wearing both sneakers at the same time would look like. After some eyestrain I managed to convince the guy to
let me try a different shoe on each foot and teetered over to Nicholas to ask his opinions. He vetoed the sporty Barbarian on my left foot because they were sewn by eight-year-old Sri Lankans who worked in open-air factories, received no lunch breaks, and were paid in candy bars. The Air Idi Amin Fire Walker on my right foot, a colorful suede high-top designed to look like a traditional African mask, was nixed because although the shoes performed well on asphalt, they tended to slip on gym floors, and besides, the kids chanted “Coup d’état, coup d’état!” at anyone who wore them. Nick suggested the high-tech Adidas Forum II’s, an outrageously expensive pair of plain white basketball shoes, computer-designed for maximum support, something called “wearability,” and exactly like the pair he was wearing.
The salesperson, smelling commission, closed the deal with a spiel about French cowhide hand-sewn with French thread by French seamsters who were paid by French entrepreneurs who donated a percentage of every shoe sold to help build basketball courts in ghettos throughout the world. I wanted to comment on how building more basketball courts just created a demand for more sneakers, but instead gimped around the store, hopped up and down on one foot, and put one hundred and seventy-five dollars on the counter. The salesman smiled and handed me the other shoe and the carbon copy of my release form.
The Haircut
I had twenty-five dollars left and felt that my next purchase should be a basketball, but Nicholas insisted that having the proper haircut was more important than having a basketball. He recommended Manny’s Barbershop and Chiropractic Offices on the corner of 24th Street and Robertson Boulevard. Manny Montoya was a tall curly-haired Chicano whose mission in life was to improve the posture of every hunchbacked ex-farm laborer, swaybacked prostitute, and stoop-shouldered hoodlum in the neighborhood. Manny only offered one haircut, the “Sunkist Special,” which was a concentration-camp baldy with a hint of stubble. Ballplayers and bangers lined up for haircuts, sharing copies of Jet, Pocho, and Guns & Ammo till a barber called their names.
“Hey bro’, peep this firmé cuete. Air-cooled, magnesium-plated, single-action Gepetto Pinnochio long-nosed .22 caliber.”