The White Boy Shuffle

by Paul Beatty

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘One-two-three, eat me.’”

  “You’re supposed to say, ‘One-two-three, Wheatley.’”

  The next morning at school everyone was still in a trancelike state. Principal Newcombe, the district supervisor, and a photographer from the daily paper met us at the front entrance. We gathered around Phillis Wheatley’s gigantic cast-iron bust and posed stiffly for the photographer. The district supervisor tried to shake Scoby’s hand, but Nicholas yanked it away at the last second. He had more trouble wriggling free of Principal Newcombe’s cheek-to-cheek embrace. I stood off to the side, propped up by an elbow, leaning on the crown of Phillis Wheatley’s brass cranium. The caption in the next day’s paper read, “Wheatley’s Nicholas Scoby and Gunnar Kaufman, ace students, ace athletes, and ace boon coons.”

  Everywhere we went we were Wheatley High’s main attraction. Teachers and students treated us with unwanted reverence. The murmur of everyone clamoring for our attention rang in my ears like a worshipful tinnitus. Girls slipped phone numbers into my pockets and rubbed the tips of their angora nipples on my shoulders. Boys bear-hugged us and enthusiastically replayed the entire game for our benefit. “You niggers is bad. Money, when it was four minutes left in the half and you went baseline with that crossover and boofed, boom!, on that gorilla Aero High nigger, I swear my dick got hard.” Mr. Dillard, the math analysis teacher, lectured on parabolas and hyperboles by using video excerpts of Scoby and me shooting jump shots at practice. Figuring we must be Newtonian geniuses to calculate the required force and proper trajectory to shoot a twenty-ounce sphere through a metal ring only eighteen inches in diameter while running and chewing gum, Mr. Dillard exempted us from homework for the rest of the semester.

  To avoid the incessant adulation the day before a game against South Erebus High, we spent the lunch period in Coach Shimimoto’s art room. I doodled in India ink and Nicholas sat at the pottery wheel, shaping amorphous clay blobs. Toward the end of the period, Nicholas was pumping the pedal so fast he couldn’t get the clay to stay on the spinning disk. “Fuck arts ’n’ crafts!” he yelled as wet slabs of clay flew across the room, flattening themselves on the walls and windows.

  I’d never seen Scoby mad about anything. I knew he was agitated about the upcoming game, but I didn’t know what to say to him. He was always the one who dispensed advice and remained in control. Whenever the crew got stopped for unjustified or justified police shakedowns, it was Scoby whispering, “Maintain, maintain.” I looked to Coach Shimimoto, but he was removing clay pancakes from his face and motioning with his eyes for me to say something first. I picked up Scoby’s latest masterpiece, a still soggy, pockmarked, nondescript lump of clay, and turned it over tenderly in my hands.

  “Nice work. This really captivates the frustrations of the underclass in an abstract yet immediate way. You should send this to the art museum—call it Gog and Magog White House Lawn Defecation.”

  “It’s an ashtray, you moron.”

  “Yo nigger, why you so upset? We got a game tomorrow, just cool out.”

  “Man, I’m tired of these fanatics rubbing on me, pulling on my arms, wishing me luck. I can’t take it. People have buttons with my face on ’em. They paint their faces and stencil my number on their foreheads. One idiot showed me a tattoo on his chest that said, ‘Nick Scoby is God.’”

  “Maybe you are God. You’ll just have to accept the responsibility and let the clowns pay homage.”

  “I’m not no fucking Tiki doll, no fucking icon. Don’t folks have anything better to do with their lives than pay attention to what I’m doing?”

  “They’re just trying to say how much they appreciate what you do. It’ll get better, man, they’ll get used to us winning.”

  “But they’ll never get used to Scoby making every shot he takes,” Coach Shimimoto interrupted. He sat down next to us, so overheated that steam rose from his body as if he were a giant humidifier. “Nicholas, you’re right, it’ll only get worse. You’ve got to figure out how can you live with it.”

  “It’s not fair. I wasn’t born to make them happy. What I look like, motherfucking Charlie Chaplin?”

  “So miss once in a while.”

  “I can’t. I can’t even try. Something won’t let me.”

  Scoby’s eyes reddened and he started to sniffle. He was cracking under the pressure. Watching his hands shake, I realized that sometimes the worst thing a nigger can do is perform well. Because then there is no turning back. We have no place to hide, no Superman Fortress of Solitude, no reclusive New England hermitages for xenophobic geniuses like Bobby Fischer and J. D. Salinger. Successful niggers can’t go back home and blithely disappear into the local populace. American society reels you back to the fold. “Tote that barge, shoot that basketball, lift that bale, nigger ain’t you ever heard of Dred Scott?”

  I’d never asked Nick Scoby about his gifts. I say gifts because Nicholas had other talents besides shooting a basketball, none of which had any real social value. He could read UPC codes at a glance. He’d look at the series of thin and thick black lines on an unpriced bag of pork rinds or a bottle of seltzer water and immediately call out the price. He also had the power to tell if someone had a drop of Negro blood in his gene pool. Nicholas claimed he could smell a passing octoroon from a block away. Whenever we went on junkets out of the neighborhood to the Beverly Hills Pavilion or the county fair, Scoby loved to approach unsuspecting Negroes living carefree in the white world and blow their consanguine but secret identities. “Say, we missed you at the family reunion! Aunt Tessy wanted to know if you was still passing for Armenian.”

  Nicholas could never explain any of his talents. If anyone asked about his hardwood perfection, he said that he’d hurt his elbow falling out of a tree when he was little, and that when he cocked his arm he heard a little click telling him when to release the ball. Then he’d snap his arm for effect. His elbow cracked loudly, popping just as he said. But his weak explanation didn’t account for distance or the various shots I had seen him make right-handed.

  “Nicholas, why don’t you just quit?”

  “Do what you do best. That’s what I’ve heard my whole life. First it was hopscotch and now it’s basketball.”

  “Hopscotch?” Coach and I asked in unison.

  “Yeah, when I first moved out here from Chicago I didn’t know nobody, so me and the other outcasts—the ESL kids, the deaf kids—played hopscotch to pass the time. I really liked the game. The sound of your keys sliding into the box, trying to lean from nines to pick up your marker in fours. Jumping from two to eights and clicking over sixes. Shit was a challenge. Anyway, the untraumatized boys chased me home every day. Since I used my house keys as a hopscotch marker, I always had trouble opening the lock. Usually I got the door open moments before the boys hunted me down. One day the key was so worn the lock wouldn’t open, and these niggers waxed my shit right on my front porch. When my mother got home she made me wash the dried blood off the stairs and explain what happened. Then she yanked me over to the basketball courts.”

  “Don’t tell me you had to fight every boy who beat you up?” I asked, anticipating a common parental method used to turn squeamish young boys into men.

  “No, she made every kid who beat me up play hopscotch with me. They had a good time, too. We was friends after that. Once I was accepted by the cool pack, I started playing basketball and stopped playing hopscotch with the retards.”

  “What happened to the hopscotch kids?”

  “They sit in the stands and scream like everybody else whenever I shoot the basketball.”

  When the lunch bell rang, Scoby was feeling better. He smiled as if he had had a revelation and told Coach he’d be at practice.

  After a light practice, Coach Shimimoto divided the team into two squads for a scrimmage. Usually he divided us using some arbitrary criterion. White sneakers vs. black sneakers, kids who’d never been to the dentist vs. those who had. That day it was d
ark lips vs. red lips. My upper lip is dark and the bottom one is cranberry red, so I was a bit confused and asked Coach which team I should play for. Coach Shimimoto said that it was a blessing to be able to play for both sides and made me substitute for whoever was tired. It was strange playing for both teams, scoring for one squad, then reversing my jersey and doing the same thing with the other.

  I was standing on the sidelines catching my breath when Coach blew a jet of sweat from his brownish upper lip and said, “Gunnar, you know in Japan they play tie baseball games.”

  “Coach, I could give a fuck if I win or lose as long as both sides have a fair chance to play as hard as they want to play. Do the Japanese have tie basketball games?”

  “No. Go in for Adrianna, smartass.”

  Nicholas didn’t shoot much during that scrimmage or for the rest of the year. For us to win basketball games, I had to play like hell. Gradually, I realized that the decision Nicholas had made was to remove the burden of success temporarily from his shoulders and place it solely on mine. The classroom, locker room, and bathroom acclaim fell on me. I’d thrust my hips at a urinal and two cats on either side would glance up from their drippy glans and gleefully let out the interminable catcall, “Guuunnnnnarr Kaaawwwfffmaaaan.” When kids discussed the team’s prospects in the city playoffs, washing down mouthfuls of doughy burritos with fruit punch, it was “Gunnar has held every all-city ballplayer we’ve played to fewer than four points. Gunnar is averaging twenty-six points, nine rebounds, and twelve assists a game.” When Scoby’s name came up, they all said, “Oh yeah, that fool can shoot, but Gunnar has to carry us.” Nicholas loved the shift in fame and willingly played his part in the role reversal, calling me “the Deity” and asking me to forgive him for his sins.

  There are certain demands on a star athlete that I didn’t anticipate or enjoy. The most arduous of which was having to participate in the social scene. Every weekend Scoby and Psycho Loco pressured me to use my star status to get them retinue privileges at the Paradise, the Rojo Cebolla, or the Black Lagoon. When a club manager balked at admitting the volatile Psycho Loco into the establishment, I had to agree to take complete responsibility for his actions, which was like asking a dog collar to be responsible for a rottweiler. Wringing their hands like mad scientists, he and Scoby’d thank me for my kindness, ignoring the fact that I suffered from what the American Psychiatric Association Manual of Mental Disorders lists as social arrhythmia and courtship paralysis, meaning I couldn’t dance and was deathly afraid of women.

  I wasn’t completely lacking in social skills. With practice I learned to serpentine cool as hell through a crowded dance floor with the best of the high school snakes. I could hiss at the young women, but not much else. When the opening strains of the latest jam crescendoed through the house, I would shout a perfunctory “Heeeyyy!” showing the clubgoers that I was up for the downstroke and that at any moment there might be a “partay ovah heah.” Scoby and Psycho Loco would soon abandon my hepster front for the chase, melding into the swirling mass of bodies and leaving me to fend for myself. I’d watch Nicholas gyrate with Gwen Cummings or Tyesa Hammonds, sometimes both, their bodies one large ball-and-socket joint floating in the same soul sonic waves. Even Psycho Loco could dance. He did this little gangster jig where he leaned back into the cushy rhythms like he was reclining in an easy chair, kicking one foot into the air, then the other, sipping from a bottle of contraband gin and lemonade during the funky breakdown.

  Girls interested in dancing with me propped themselves in front of me, a little closer than necessary, swayed to the music, and tried to catch my eye. I stared off in the opposite direction, pretending to be engrossed in an intricately woven bar napkin and praying the girl wouldn’t be bold enough to ask for a dance. As an athlete, I had a ready-made excuse for the nervy women who did ask: “I can’t, baby. Twisted my ankle dunking on the Rogers brothers in last night’s game.” I’d get a funny look in return, and the rebuffed coed would return to her circle of friends. The whispers and over-the-shoulder looks followed by phony smiles set off my social paranoia. My auditory hallucinations cleared their throats. “Something wrong with that nigger, he don’t never dance. Maybe he just shy. Maybe he’s shy? He ain’t shy with Coach Shimimoto. I think he fucking Coach Shimimoto. That’s why Coach be sweating so much. Boy got some big ol’ feets and hands, that’s a waste of some good young nigger dick. Fucking an old man.”

  Soon Scoby and Psycho Loco would interrupt my neurotic musings. “Why you ain’t dancing, homes? Crazy honeys is checking you out.”

  “I don’t feel like dancing.”

  “Are you crazy? There some fine ladies in here. You just scared of women. Scared of pussy.”

  On cue, Betty and Veronica would march over and demand the next dance, their tresses interlocked in a geodesic dome hairstyle that roofed their heads like an I. M. Pei nightmare. I would mumble yes and they’d lead me onto the crowded dance floor. I’d stand still for a few seconds, vainly snapping my fingers with as much hope of catching the beat as a quadriplegic hobo latching on to a moving boxcar. “Do what we do,” Betty and Veronica would say reassuringly. I’d try to mirror my partners’ undulating moves, but my body would fail to respond. I was stiffer than a mummified Gumby left out in the sun too long. Instead of bones, my skeletal structure was high-tension wire, and I plodded from side to side with all the mobility of a rusted tin man.

  Seeing my distress, Psycho Loco would bebop over to my rescue, force a couple of swigs of his liquid rhythm down my throat, then cruise the floors barking like the Alpine St. Bernard he was. Even with the lubrication of my joints and the steadying of my nerves, the quest for the beat wasn’t over. Now I had to fight the urge to be too loose-limbed, prevent my arms from flaying about my body uncontrollably in an epileptic paroxysm. After a few moments I’d relax and settle into a barely acceptable, simple side-to-side step, dubbed by the locals the white boy shuffle. I wasn’t funky, but I was no longer disrupting the groove.

  As the evening wound down, the house lights dimmed to a deep red haze and the DJ began to play the latest slow jams. Boys and girls floated across the floor superglued at the crotch, grinding each other’s privates into powder in a mortar-and-pestle figure-eight motion. Unattached boys tried to look as if they had something better to do, and unattached women looked longingly in my direction, wiggling their hips in the vain hope of tantalizing me into action. I’d pray that Psycho Loco would start a fight so I could leave without having to support someone’s head on my shoulder and listen to them warble inane love lyrics in my ear. Invariably, Psycho Loco came through, slugging some fool for stepping on his shadow or some equally petty infraction.

  As the bouncers escorted us out, Psycho Loco and Scoby compared the night’s harvest.

  “I got three phone numbers and Kenyana Huff pinched my butt twice.”

  “I only got one phone number.”

  “One number?”

  “Ah, but it was Natalie Nuñez’s number.”

  “Oh, you was talking to that? Damn, what did you say to get over?”

  “I told her that I’d get her a date with Gunnar if she let me take her to the UCLA Mardi Gras this Saturday. So Gunnar, how’d you do?”

  “Do people be staring at me when I’m out there dancing? It feels like everybody is looking at me.”

  “First off, you ain’t you out there dancing. You out there having a brain aneurysm. You move so crazy it looks like you caught the Holy Ghost. Second off, nobody is paying any attention to your rhythmless behind ’cause they trying they own mack on.”

  “Gunnar, do you even like girls?”

  “Yes.” Which was true. I just had yet to meet one who didn’t intimidate me into a state of catatonia.

  “When you gonna get a girlfriend?”

  “I had one once in Santa Monica.”

  “What, some pasty white girl named Eileen, please? That don’t count. Nigger, have you ever seen any parts of the pussy?”

  “Of course,
man. I’ve fucked … er, been fucked … um, been fucking … I is fucking.”

  “Does the line go up and down or from side to side?”

  During the ride home Psycho Loco would leaf through a copy of Bow and Arrow Outdoorsman, passing over pictures of grizzled white men snuggling with dead animals and articles entitled “Ancient Hunting Tricks of the Mighty Neanderthal” or “101 Tick Repellents that Don’t Smell like Grandma” and heading straight to the classified ads in the back.

  “Gunnar, we’re gonna find you a wife. Here we go. Listen to this:

  Hot Mama-Sans of the Orient

  Seeking Dates or Seoulmates

  Inscrutable, Demure, and Pure by Day

  Insatiable, Mature, and Impure by Night

  For Color Brochure send 50¢ to:

  Mail Order Asian Geishas and Dragon Ladies

  Box 900, Sacramento, CA 16504.”

  “You’re sick, you know that, right?”

  “Dude, I’ve never seen you voluntarily speak to a girl. This is the only way. Tried and true, in defunct monarchies the world over. I’m serious now, say I won’t.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Two more years, bro. Soon as you turn eighteen I’m marrying your frigid ass off.”

  Somehow I knew that Psycho Loco was right, I’d never start a romance of my own accord. But it was difficult to accept sexual counsel from a pugnacious male who had to be drunk to fuck and whose first rule of courtship was “Always make sure your dick is out. That way, no matter what happens you can say, ‘Well, I had my dick out.’” Maybe there was an advantage to arranged romance—no dates consisting of gauche attempts to be unceasingly clever and sensitive. Never having to deal with the living-room interrogations from incestuously overprotective brothers and fathers. And I’d never have to put down the evening paper and say, “Listen, honey, they’re playing our song.” Still, I stuck to the Judeo-Christian ethics I’d picked up from American television and the English romantics, Ozzie and Harriet, Wordsworth and Coleridge.