by Paul Beatty
“Naw, cuz, you want one of these fingerprint-resistant Buger GAT polymer ten-millimeters with the emerald handle.”
“Well, I think we can both agree that this centerfold jaina del mes is fine.”
“What’s her hobbies?”
“The usual—scuba diving, horseback riding, and skiing.”
“Where in fuck does Jet magazine find all these colored cowgirls who ski?”
On the other side of the room, near the plastic skeleton, lowriders who’d gotten whiplash from taking corners on two wheels and thrown their backs out because they’d spent last night bunny-hopping their Oldsmobile Cutlasses down Crenshaw Boulevard waited patiently for adjustments, pretending the cricks in their necks didn’t hurt. Manny excitedly pointed out the window and exclaimed, “Hey look, there’s Gilbert Suavecito’s cherry ’45 DeSoto convertible and Iris Chacon riding on the hood in a bikini.” The hot-rodders’ heads spun around for a look at Gilbert’s champion lowrider and the Mesopotamian-buttocked televison star Ms. Chacon. A chorus of agony rang throughout the shop as the men rewrenched their necks for nothing more than a glimpse of Rafael Muñoz giving a ride to Gina “Scullybones” Sanders on the handlebars of his custom Schwinn Stingray five-speed.
Manny laughed and dug his thumb into the nape of my neck. The pain forced my head down and he sheared long furrows down the middle of my scalp.
In the far corner of the shop, a circle of old men, Indios and Africans, played electronic poker games and swapped migration stories. I sat in the barber chair concentrating on keeping my head still and straining to hear the stories of how their families ended up in Los Angeles, far from their ramshackle southwestern and southern roots.
One man, Mr. Tillis Everett, the attendant at Zoom Zoom Gas, chewed on beef jerky and talked about how one day in Biloxi his father came home with blood on his shirtsleeve. “It was a Tuesday, and Daddy walked in the door, kissed Grandma on the cheek, and said, ‘Momma, I have to go.’ Grandma said, ‘I’ll have your stuff ready in five minutes.’” The mechanic spit out a wad of unchewable gristle, picked his teeth with a thumbnail, and continued. “Things was understood down south. If you made a decision to hit a white man, you made the choice to kill him and relocate. Wasn’t no left, right, left, ‘Don’t fuck with me no more,’ shake hands and let’s be friends. They used to say, ‘Hope the man with the rope ain’t got no telescope.’ It wasn’t no running in the water to throw the dogs off your scent. They bring the hounds round to the other side and pick you up soon enough. You had to get to a chicken coop and rub handfuls of chicken shit on your shoes real thick-like. Dogs would get tired of smellin’ that shit and they’d refuse to follow the scent. My daddy arrived in Los Angeles smelling like a henhouse toilet. Niggers out here is out of luck. Ain’t no chicken shit in Los Angeles. Lots o’ chickenshit niggers, no real chicken shit. Couldn’t run away from Los Angeles if you wanted to.”
I couldn’t keep my hand off my newly shorn skull. It sprinkled on the way home and the droplets of rain soothed my tender scalp. When I got home my mom pressed my noggin into her breasts and sobbed that I looked as if I were on a hunger strike. My sisters were taking turns doing bongo solos on my head when the phone rang. It was my father.
The Ball
“Boy, you see my portrait of the Northbrook Necrophiliac in yesterday’s paper?”
“Yup. Looks a little bit like Dwight Eisenhower. Is it true this guy goes round fucking skeletons and shit?”
“Yeah, some janitor at the medical school caught him sticking his dick in an eyesocket.”
“What a numskull.”
“Very funny. Your mother tells me you’ve started playing basketball.”
“Yeah, me and some of the fellas …”
“Just don’t get one of those Jack-Johnson-black-buck-hey-look-at-me-I’m-an-athlete baldheads, you hear me.”
“Dad, I need a basketball.”
“Only scrubs buy basketballs.”
“Dad!”
“I’ll see what I can do. Put your mama on the phone.”
About two hours later a police cruiser drove by the front of the house and chirped the siren. I looked out the window and saw a hairy white arm fling a brand-new basketball into the front yard. As I ran out to retrieve the ball, a book landed at my feet. The book was a thin paperback entitled Heaven Is a Playground. From what I could glean from the back cover, it was a sports journalist’s treatise on a pack of inner-city Brooklynites who spent the better part of their days scampering around a basketball court known as the Hole. Inside my father had scribbled a note: “Read this and remember you’re a Kaufman, and not one of the black misfits sociologically detailed herein.”
*
Soon it was time to try out my new sneakers, new basketball, and new haircut. Scoby and I sauntered into the park and he pointed out some of the aging local legends seated under the trees, sipping from crinkled brown bags. Ben “Yoda” Morales reputedly was so quick that when he changed directions, the sneaker-to-concrete friction caused his shoes to spontaneously combust. Over the years he’d lost a step and all anyone ever saw was puffs of smoke wafting from his soles as he slithered to the basket. In his prime, Nathan “Sadhu” Ng could go up for a rebound and leave a dirty footprint on the backboard. Now he was a shoeless stumblebum begging dimes from the younger kids. Scoby too had a rep. Blind Melissa “Sonar” Kilmartin, who could do anything on the court but chase the ball when it went out of bounds, turned in our direction and raised her beer to him. “What’s up, Scoby, you gonna serve niggers today like I used to, baby? Who that with you?”
That first day Nick and I went to the park, about fifty players were standing in the hot sun, waiting their turn to play. When the game in progress ended, Scoby walked onto the court, touched his toes, alternately lifted his feet by the insteps until his heels touched his butt, and waited for whoever had winners to tell him who else was on his team. There was some unspoken protocol at work, and Nicholas apparently had diplomatic status. Soon a huge crowd gathered around the sidelines. Right from the start there was an intensity on the court that hadn’t been present in the previous game. Players who usually spent most of their precious court time arguing and disputing every call were silent and stealing glances at Scoby whenever they made a shot or did something particularly impressive. Scoby’s pregame announcement—“Niggers who come here for the attention best to leave now”—seemed to have had some effect.
I watched Nicholas play a few games and tried to figure what the big deal was. His team always won, but it wasn’t like he was out there performing superhuman feats. He didn’t sprout wings and fly, he didn’t seem to have eyes in the back of his head. There was always someone who jumped higher than he could, handled the ball better. Nick would make five or six baskets and that was it.
After winning his fourth straight game, he told me to walk over to the basket and dunk the ball.
“Huh?”
“Do what you did at school the other day.”
I walked under the basket with my brand-new ball cradled under my arm and flushed the electric orange orb through the hoop with two hands. A tall boy wearing a dark gray T-shirt that read “Wheatley High Varsity Basketball” in faded green letters sauntered over to me and started to small-talk.
“You know Scoby?”
“We go to Manischewitz together.”
“Your name Gunnar Kaufman?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You wrote that poem?”
“Mmmm-hmmm.”
“You wanna run?”
In as low a voice as I could muster, I said, “Yeah.” I had a rep before I ever played a game at the park, although I wasn’t sure exactly what for.
We played until nightfall. During what was shaping up to be the last game of the evening, it became impossible to see the basket farthest away from the streetlight. It was as if we were playing at the lunar surface during the half-moon. One side of the court was in complete darkness and the other fairly well lit. The score was tied at ten-te
n and someone suggested we call the game a draw on account of darkness before someone got hurt. Scoby said, “Next basket wins.” My team had the ball and we were shooting at the visible basket. The high schooler in the gray shirt took a short shot that circled around the rim and fell out, right into Nick’s hands. Scoby took two speed dribbles, losing the man who was guarding him, and headed upcourt. When he crossed half-court he disappeared into the darkness, then quickly reappeared in the light without the ball. A second later you heard the crashing of the chain net as the ball arced through it.
“Game.”
Skipping the ball through my legs, imitating the moves I’d seen during the course of the day, I rounded the corner onto Sherbourne Drive and realized what Scoby’s rep was for: he never missed. I mean never.
Five
Summer before my first year of high school was the summer niggers stopped sitting next to each other in the movies. We jaywalked, spit on the sidewalk, broke curfew, but strictly abided by the unwritten law prohibiting black boys over fifteen from sitting next to each other in the dark. One yawning unoccupied chair always belied our closeness, separating us like a velvet moat filled with homophobic alligators and popcorn as we solved cinematic mysteries with deductive street-smart reasoning.
“The pockmarked motherfucker from the country club gots to be the killer.”
“Nigger-ro, is you crazy? It’s the lefthanded honey with the juicy Maybelline lips and the fucked-up German accent. It’s always the foreigner. Kill again, you sexy thing, you.”
“Both you Sherlock Holmes cokeheads are wrong, it’s the Doberman pinscher. The mutt is hypnotized by the psychologist to kill on his say-so. Didn’t you see the bloody paw prints?”
In the past three years me, Nicholas, and Psycho Loco had become a heroic trio of sorts. We were the Three Musketeers, all for one and one for all, sipping watery lemon-lime soda from the same straw, galavanting in the streets, sounding off like wind chimes in the city breeze. By high school I was no longer the seaside bumpkin, clueless to the Byzantine ways of the inner city. But I hadn’t completely assimilated into Hillside’s culture. I still said “ant” instead of “awwwnt” and “you guys” rather than “y’all,” and wore my pants a bit too tight, but these shortcomings were forgiven because I had managed to attain a look. My sinewy physique drew scads of attention. I’d be on the bus or standing in line at the store and strangers would come up to me and knowingly nod their heads as if we shared some secret. The more straightforward ones would speak up and interpret my dreams for me.
“You play ball? Don’t say no, you got that look. I can tell by your calves. Skinny, powerful legs and the way you walk. Pigeon-toed, small ass ’n’ all. You ain’t nothing but a ballplayer.”
Despite the pigeonholing, it was fun to answer the inquiries and watch the populace swoon.
“How tall are you?”
“Six-five, baby, six-five.” I’d exaggerate by an inch and a half.
Not everyone was enamored of my height and athletic ability. There were those who didn’t care that I’d spent hours in the city’s gyms and parks perfecting my game. Not that I had ever asked anyone to care, but to some ghetto subcultures I was nothing more than a tall wise-ass punk who deserved a serious comeuppance.
Whenever I stopped to listen to the street-corner sermons of the all-albino brothers and sisters of NAPPY (New African Politicized Pedantic Yahoos), the speakers always singled me out as a traitor to my race, the dreaded heretic of the nation of sun people. After prophesying the founding of New Africa, a glorious day when the United States government would turn over five southern states to legions of turbaned pink-eyed heliocentrists, their leader, Tasha Rhodesia, would defiantly ask, “Any questions from the unbelievers?”
I’d raise my hand with a puzzled look on my face. A look that differed from my basketball mien, a look that said, “Maybe if I heard the right syllogism I’d make a worthy convert?”
Tasha Rhodesia would wave a light-skinned arm lined with copper bracelets cast from precious African metals ceremoniously over the crowd. “You, the proud young warrior, obviously of Watusi stock—what white propaganda infests your fertile African mind?”
“How can a bunch of people such as yourselves, who give themselves names like Wise Intelligent, P-Knowledge, and Erudite Judicious, be so fucking stupid?”
In Afrocentric slapstick, an offended neophyte would smush a bean pie in my face and banish me from the promised land.
Then there were the bands of bored Bedouins who roamed Hillside, silently testing my resolve by lifting their T-shirts, revealing a bellybutton and a handgun tucked in their waistband. “S’up, nigger?”
In response I’d lift my T-shirt and flash my weapons: a paperback copy of Audre Lorde or Sterling Brown and a checkerboard set of abdominal muscles. “You niggers ain’t hard—calculus is hard.”
“All right, Gunnar, you keep talking smack. Psycho Loco ain’t going to be around forever.”
My friendship with Psycho Loco did have its perks, but Scoby was right, Psycho Loco asked for a lot of favors. My back yard became a burial ground for missing evidence; warm guns and blood-rusted knives rested in unmarked graves under little mounds of dirt. I had nightmares about the ghosts of convenience-store clerks and ice-cream-truck drivers floating among the fruit trees, stuffing their puncture wounds with rotted fruit poultices.
One Halloween night Psycho Loco rang the doorbell in a black knit whodunnit mask and with a nickel-plated nine-millimeter in his hand. I opened the door with a mocking “Trick or treat?” and put a candy bar in his flannel shirt pocket. “Look at you, nineteen years old out here knocking on doors begging candy. Why you ain’t bag snatchin’, homie?”
Psycho Loco walked past me, snatched off his mask, and asked in a shaky voice if he could take a shower.
“Ma, can Juan Julio take a shower?”
“Yes, long as he cleans the tub afterward.”
After a few minutes I noticed clouds of steam drifting down the hallway and into the living room. He must’ve forgotten to close the door, I thought, and walked to the bathroom. Psyco Loco was standing naked, looking at himself in the mirror. Eye to eye with his demons and crying so hard he had tears on his knees. I pulled back the shower curtain and handed him a bar of soap. He stepped into the mist and slipped a hand into my mom’s loofah mitt and said, “Don’t go nowhere, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, trying not to embarrass either of us by acknowledging Psycho Loco’s pain. “Just don’t use my mom’s Australian chamomile shampoo. Use the red jojoba extract.”
I sat on the toilet and turned on the radio so I wouldn’t have to listen to Psycho Loco’s cathartic wailing while he scoured his skin raw through two weather reports and three traffic updates. When he finally got out of the shower, he told me to get dressed and meet him at the wall in ten minutes. I rinsed the tub clean of slivers of skin and curlicue body hairs swimming in rivulets of his blood like microscopic bacteria.
When I arrived at the wall, the Gun Totin’ Hooligans were waiting for me, their raffish frames casting impatient shadows in the moonlight. Smoking generic cigarettes, cradling unopened quart-size bottles of Carta Blanca like brown glass-skinned babies, they raised their eyebrows to say hello and cavalierly tossed up gang signs. Those who weren’t propped up against the wall in gangster leans squatted on the ground, flat-footed, perfectly balanced in the refugee tuck. The squat was a difficult position that most yoga teachers have problems assuming, but the disenfranchised in all societies do it with ease. I knew better than to assume the poor indigene pose. I always ended up on my tippy-toes, my wobbly equilibrium betraying my privileged upbringing.
Joe Shenanigans waved me over and I braced myself against the wall next to him. I folded my arms and wondered why Psycho Loco had invited me to the party. Joe offered me a sip of pink swill from a pint of Mad Dog 20/20, which I declined. It was tempting, but I heard that after drinking that shit you glowed the next morning.
“Thought you
stopped drinking, Joe?”
“Only on special occasions.”
“Like what, sundown?”
“Watch your back, the paint is wet.”
I looked over my shoulder and saw a dripping scrawl that read,
Pumpkin raising hell in hell
October 31 R.I.P.
Happy Halloween
Pumpkin was dead. I tried to conjure up some grief, but it was hard to feel any sympathy for the pudgy redbone devil who had almost pierced my ear with an arrow in the Montgomery Ward sporting goods department.
“Who killed him?”
“Not for nuthin’, but him and Psycho Loco was trying to fuckin’ rob the fuckin’ Koreans.”
Joe Shenanigans was a skinny boy, black as a penny loafer, who claimed he was a Sicilian from a long line of mafiosi. He had a cheesy wisp of a mustache, and his skin sagged at the joints because his diet consisted entirely of frozen Italian foods like turkey tetrazzini, fettuccini alfredo, and chicken parmigiana with linguini. Holding a conversation with Joe was like talking to someone who was simultaneously channeling Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino, and Mama Celeste.
“Badda bing, badda bam, badda boom, Psycho Loco and Pumpkin, the gun to Ms. Kim’s chin, ‘Open the register.’ But Mama mia, Ms. Kim ain’t listenin’.”
Ms. Kim was the half-black, half-Korean owner of the corner store. Fathered by a black GI, she was born in Korea and at age seventeen was adopted by a black family and raised in Fresno. To us, when she was behind the counter in her store, Ms. Kim was Korean. When she was out on the streets walking her dogs, she was black. Ms. Kim and I used to kid each other as to who had the flattest rear end.
“Ms. Kim busy cussin’ Psycho Loco out. You know how she be talking Korean and black broken English at the same time. ‘First you steal my eggs and now you’re gonna steal money? Naw, motherfucker. How you be so cold-blood? I feed you kim-chee when you baby. Break north befo’ I call mother.’ So Psycho Loco fires a warning shot to get her attention, and he hits one o’ dem huge inflatable Maelstrom 500 malt liquor bottles. The fucking ting falls on Pumpkin’s ass and suffocates him. Fugettabodit. Fucking jay.”