The White Boy Shuffle

by Paul Beatty

  “You crazy? How could anyone do that shit? Don’t even think about it. It’s like slavery or something.” Changing the subject, I snatched the magazine from Psycho Loco’s hands and said, “My pops said Rodney King deserved that ass-kicking for resisting arrest and having a Jheri curl. He said some curl activator got into Officer Koon’s eyes and he thought he’d been maced, so he had to defend himself.”

  The rest of the way home we talked about our experiences with police harassment: being frisked in front of our parents, forced to pull our pants down near the day-care center, made to wait face down in the street with our hands interlocked behind our heads and feet crossed at the ankles, gritty footprints on the nape of our necks. Scoby said in county jail the guards call the cells Skinner boxes and have nicknames like the Neuterer, Babe Ruth, and Curtains written on their batons and riot helmets. Psycho Loco theorized that the guards beat on the inmates because they were afraid of them. He talked about how he once ran into a prison guard and his family at a Hamburger Haven. The guard was so nervous he pulled his off-duty revolver on Psycho Loco and accidentally shot Hamburger Harry, the mascot. The bullet passed through the lettuce, ricocheted off the pickle, and came to a stop in the mascot’s brain.

  I asked Psycho Loco if the rumors about a gangland truce if the jury found the cops innocent was true. He said that there already had been a big armistice at the Tryst ’n’ Shout Motel. Bangers who had killed each other’s best friends shook hands and hugged with unspoken apologies in their watery eyes.

  “Damn, I hope they find those motherfuckers guilty,” I said with surprising conviction.

  “Not me,” said Psycho Loco. “I hope those boys get off scot-free. One, it’ll be good to have a little peace in the streets, and besides, me and the fellas planning a huge job. Going to take advantage of the civic unrest, know what I’m saying?”

  I pictured Rodney King staggering in the Foothill Freeway’s breakdown lane like a black Frankenstein, two Taser wires running 50,000 volts of electric democracy through his body. I wondered if the battery of the American nigger was being recharged or drained.

  FIVE-FINGER DISCOUNTS

  Seven

  For some reason Coach Shimimoto was reluctant to end practice. Usually these postseason workouts were light affairs, mostly intrasquad scrimmages followed by a dunking contest. This one he kept prolonging with wind sprints and full-court defensive drills. He finally blew his whistle and motioned for the team to gather around him. Exhausted, we flopped to the floor, sucking wind and hoping Coach Shimimoto would take pity on our fatigued bodies.

  “What does ‘concatenate’ mean? Tell me, and you can go.”

  Harriet Montoya, the only person with strength enough to speak, raised her hand. I didn’t have much faith she’d know the answer; the day before she had defined “repeal” as putting the skin back on an orange and peeling again, and we had had to run thirty laps backward. “Concatenate means together. Not like all-in-the-same-boat together, but like connected, like a bicycle chain.”

  “Close enough. Remember that definition, you soon-to-be revolutionaries.” With that, Coach dismissed us into a cool late April afternoon.

  On the way home I was wondering what Coach meant by “soon-to-be revolutionaries” when I noticed a distant column of black smoke billowing into the dusk like a tornado too tired to move. “What’s that?” I asked Scoby. “Eric Dolphy,” he replied, referring to the stop-and-go shrieking that was escaping from his boom box. “No, I mean that,” I said, pointing to the noxious-looking cloud. Scoby didn’t know, but he was more than willing to make up for his ignorance in smoke formations by lecturing me on the relevance of Dolphy’s sonic turmoil to teenage Negromites like ourselves.

  Midway through the seminar in music appreciation another silo of smoke twisted into the dusk, this one closer to us. The driver of a rundown Nova sped down Sawyer Drive, leaning on her high-pitched horn for no apparent reason. Scoby turned up the volume on the tape deck just a bit. Another car flew through a stop sign, then reversed its direction. When the car drew parallel to us, the driver flashed a gap-toothed smile, then shot a raised fist out the window and raced away. Soon every driver that passed was joyriding through the streets, honking the horn and violating the traffic laws like a Hollywood stunt driver in the big chase scene. The driver of a Wonder Bread delivery truck pulled a B-movie U-turn, hopped on the sidewalk, then peeled out down an alley. Dolphy’s horn matched the curbside cacophony flutter for flutter, screech for screech.

  “How does the music make you feel, man?”

  “I feel like I’m dry heaving while free-falling from fifteen thousand feet.”

  “That’s it, man, you getting it. Feel, Gunnar, feel. Let the jazz seep into your pores.”

  People began spilling from their homes. They paced up and down the sidewalks, looking tense and unaware they’d left their front doors wide open. Something was wrong; no Angeleno ever leaves the door open. I caught the eye of a middle-aged man wearing white patent leather shoes, ochre-colored polyester pants, and a Panama hat and standing on his front porch looking desperate for someone to talk to. “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “Them cracker motherfuckers did it again.” The Rodney King verdict; I’d completely forgotten. “They let them racists go. I’m surprised the judge didn’t reprimand the peckerwood so-called peace officers for not finishing the job.”

  Let go? What did that mean? The officers had to be found guilty of something—obstruction of traffic, at least. I doubted the man in the patent leather shoes’ version. I could hear the TV in his living room, and I peeped through his doorway. The smirk on the reporter’s face told me the man was right, even before I heard her say, “Not guilty on all charges.”

  I never felt so worthless in my life. Uninvited, Scoby and I walked into the man’s living room, set our bookbags on his coffee table, and sat on the couch. I looked out the window and saw a store owner spray-paint BLACK OWNED across her boarded-up beauty salon. I wanted to dig out my heart and have her do the same to it, certifying my identity in big block letters across both ventricles. I suddenly understood why my father wore his badge so proudly. The badge protected him; in uniform he was safe.

  Sitting on that couch watching the announcer gloat, my pacifist Negro chrysalis peeled away, and a glistening anger began to test its wings. A rage that couldn’t be dealt with in a poem or soothed with the glass of milk and glazed doughnut offered by our kind host.

  “There’s a poem in there somewhere,” the man said. He and Scoby must have been talking about me. I wanted to slap Scoby; he sat there giggling, egging the man on with a fling of his hand. “What do you write about?” the man asked.

  “I write about whatever.” I envied Psycho Loco. Strangers never asked him, “What kind of people do you kill? Could you do a little killing right now, just for me?” Psycho Loco dealt with his rage by blaming and lashing out; there was no pretense of fairness and justice, due process was whatever mood he was in, clemency was his running out of bullets while shooting at you.

  “Have you ever published anything?”

  “Yeah, back in Hillside he writes his poems on the wall.”

  “I been published in a few magazines too. There’s a company in New York that wants to publish a book of my shit.”

  Even at its most reflective or its angriest, my poetry was little more than an opiate devoted to pacifying my cynicism. Poetry was a sixteen-year-old’s Valium: write a couple of haikus and stay away from fatty foods. I now know that Psycho Loco’s violence was no less a psychological placebo than my poetry, but watching the acquitted officers shake hands with their attorneys and stroll triumphantly into the April sun, I saw his brutality as a powerful vitriolic stimulant. I wanted to sip this effervescent bromo that cleared one’s head and numbed the aches and pains of oppression. Psycho Loco had the satisfaction of standing up to his enemies and listening to them scream, watching them close their eyes for the last time. Psycho Loco had a semblance of closure and accom
plishment. He was threat. The American poet was a tattletale, a whiner, at best an instigator. You write about blowing up the White House and they tap your phone, but only when you buy some dynamite will they tap you on the shoulder and say, “Come with me.”

  “Nigger, you ain’t never said nothing about no book.”

  “Nigger, you ain’t never asked.”

  I wanted to taste immediate vindication, experience the rush of spitting in somebody’s, anybody’s, face. The day of the L.A. riots I learned that it meant nothing to be a poet. One had to be a poet and a farmer, a poet and a roustabout, a poet and a soon-to-be revolutionary.

  I looked at Scoby and said, “Let’s break.” We gathered our things, thanked the man for his kindness, and prepared to leave. We spent an awkward moment in silence till the man asked, “Is that Dolphy?” Scoby nodded, and we made our way toward the commotion, listening to Dolphy play his horn like he was wringing a washrag. I couldn’t decide whether the music sounded like a death knell or the cavalry charge for a ragtag army. We turned the corner onto Hoover and Alvarado and walked into Carnaval, poor people’s style. The niggers and spies had decided to secede from the union, armed with rifles, slingshots, bottles, camcorders, and songs of freedom. Problem was, nobody knew where Fort Sumter was.

  In the middle of the intersection, the Wonder Bread truck we’d seen before was careening in circles, trying to find a path through the labyrinth of flaming dumpsters and rioters. Another stranded teamster in a beer truck crashed into a barrier and broadsided the Wonder Bread man, sending both vehicles sprawling on their sides. The Wonder Bread truck slid to a stop ten feet in front of Scoby and me like a huge shuffleboard disk, its engine sputtering and wheels spinning. The driver scrambled out of the cab. Before he could bolt into the street, I slammed him against the side of the truck. Bug-eyed with fear, he babbled something about having “never done nothing to nobody.” I’d never seen anyone afraid of me. I wondered what my face looked like. Were my nostrils flaring, my eyes pulsing red? I was about to shout “Ooga-booga” and give the guy a heart attack when Scoby clambered from the rear of the truck, chewing on a cupcake and holding loaves of bread. Our captive dropped to his knees, begging for mercy. He took out his wallet and showed us pictures of his kids, as if they were for sale. I took a doughy satchel and swung it at his face, striking him solidly in the cheek. I know it didn’t hurt, but the man whimpered in shame and resigned himself to the beating. Nicholas and I pummeled him silly with pillows of white bread until it snowed breadcrumbs.

  Hillside was surprisingly quiet. There were no roving bands of looters, no brushfires. Hillside seemed to be biding its time till morning. Manny Montoya and his wife Sally opened the Barbershop and Chiropractic Offices and turned it into a way station for weary rioters coming back from the festivities on the other side of the wall. Handing out free tamales and steaming bowls of ponchi soup, Sally proudly told stories about how Hillsiders had historically acquitted themselves well in Los Angeles’ riots. Beating back an armada of drunken sailors in the zoot-suit riots in the summer of ’43, blowing up four police cars and poisoning six police dogs with cyanide-laced chitterlings and chorizo in the Watts riots of ’65, torturing and killing an entire squad of National Guardsmen from Pacoima in the infamous Hillside death march during the I’m-Tired-of-the-White-Man-Fucking-with-Us-and-Whatnot riots of ’68. Manny smiled at his wife’s recounting and predicted that La Insurrección de ’92 would be the biggest of them all.

  The tamales made me thirsty and I headed over to Ms. Kim’s store to buy something to drink. When I got there, she was yelling in Korean and pressing Molotov cocktails into the hands of a small group of bystanders, pleading with them to burn down her store.

  “Loot, goddamn it. You saw video. Remember Latasha Harlins. Burn my fucking store down. I feel better. Rod-ney King! Rod-ney King! Rod-ney King!”

  The crowd refused. Ms. Kim was too well liked. Maybe if she had been one hundred percent Korean they’d have busted a few windows just for appearance’s sake.

  Holding one of her makeshift grenades, Ms. Kim lit the oil-rag fuse and strode to the front of the store. The crowd surged to stop her, and she held them at bay by waving the torch in their stunned faces. Then she wheeled and sent the bomb hurling through the glass doors. The flames slowly crawled across the floor, whipping through the aisles, then scaling the counter. Ms. Kim silently hook-shot another cocktail onto the roof and watched her store burn with a satisfied smile. A few folks tried to douse the flames with garden hoses, but Ms. Kim cut their hoses in half with a Swiss Army knife, then went looking for the police to place herself under arrest.

  The next afternoon Scoby and I sat in his basement watching the rest of the city burn on television. A parade of relatives marched through his house hawking their wares. “Look what I came up on.” Holding up sweaters and jackets that smelled like smoke for our perusal. “Gunnar, you’d look good in this. Got a lamé collar. Bill Cosby would wear this jammie. You Nick’s man, two dollars.”

  “Nigger, move, you in front of the TV.”

  It was hard not to be envious of somebody who had some free shit and a little crumb of the California dream. I too wanted to “come up,” but I didn’t think I was a thief. The television stations were airing live feeds from hot spots around the city, showing looters entering stores empty-handed and exiting carrying furniture on their backs like worker ants carrying ten times their weight.

  “Hey, isn’t that the Montgomery Ward Plaza?” The mall was about ten minutes away, just outside the wall.

  “Yeah, there go Technology Town.”

  “Oh shit, fools coming up on free computers and shit.”

  Scoby and I looked each other in the eye for about a nanosecond, then stormed out of the house. Running down the streets, we argued over the merits of an IBM-compatible versus an Apple.

  “Dude, I’m looking for a Wizard Protean.”

  “What? You can’t carry out a desktop. Go for a laptop. You get all the qualities of a Protean, plus mobility. Your dumb ass is trying to steal a whole mainframe.”

  Coach Shimimoto’s arduous workouts had served their purpose. We reached Technology Town fresh and ready to celebrate Christmas in April. Leaping through the broken windows, we tumbled over a stack of plastic shopping baskets and landed in a snowbank of Styrofoam package filler. We were too late. All the presents had been opened. The showroom was stripped bare. Broken shelving dangled from the walls; overturned showcases spilled over onto the floor, serving as caskets for dead batteries and the shells of broken stereo equipment. Unraveled cassette tape hung from the overhead pipes like brown riot tinsel. Even the ceiling fans and service phones were gone.

  “What happens to a dream deferred?” I said in my best classical recitation voice. Scoby cursed and threw a nine-volt battery at my head.

  “Fuck Langston Hughes. I bet when they rioted in Harlem, Langston got his.”

  “Does it dry up like a wino in rehab? Or gesture like a whore, reeling from the pimp’s left jab?”

  Kicking our way through the piles of cardboard, we left the store and stood in the parking lot thinking of our next target. People were still ransacking Cribs ’n’ Bibs, the toddler shop, but rattles, powdered milk, and designer diapers didn’t interest us. Scoby snapped his fingers, shouted, “What Did You Say?” and sprinted toward the alley that ran behind the mall.

  What Did You Say? was a car accessory emporium that specialized in deafeningly loud car stereos and equally loud seat covers. I couldn’t figure out how Scoby planned to get in the place. What Did You Say? was known to be impenetrable. A solid metal garage door that had foiled the attempts of a Who’s Who of burglary specialists sealed the front entrance. The famed barrier had withstood ramming from hijacked semitrucks, dynamite, and every solvent from hot sauce for Lucy’s Burritos to 150-proof rum mixed with corrosive black hair products.

  When we got to What Did You Say?, the steel door was still in place. Scoby and I put our ears against the door and heard
what sounded like mice scurrying around inside. We zipped around the back and found a small opening smashed into the cinder-block wall, a guilty-looking sledgehammer lying atop a pile of rubble. Every ten seconds or so a contortionist would squeeze through the hole, bearing some sort of electronic gadgetry. Standing nearby in tears was fat Reece Clinksdale. Reece was bemoaning his girth, because he was too big to fit in the hole and was missing out on the rebellion. He wiped his eyes and stopped blubbering for a bit.

  “You guys going in?”

  “I guess so,” we answered.

  “Well, you better hurry up. I think most of the good stuff is gone.”

  Reece was right. The crawlspace was starting to give birth to zoo animals. Guys were popping headfirst through the hole wrapped in sheepskin and leopard-skin seat covers and looking like cuddly animals at the petting zoo. I helped deliver a breech baby alligator seat cover who’d decided to exit feet first and had to be pulled through the cement birth canal.

  When the traffic was light enough to make an entrance, Scoby and I slid through the hole. The absolute lack of chaos was amazing. Instead of a horde of one-eyed brigands pillaging and setting fires, the looters were very courteous and the plundering was orderly. Everyone waited patiently in a line that wound through the aisles and into the storeroom. Once you were in the storeroom, a philanthropic soul handed you a box off the shelf. You didn’t get your choice of goods, but no one complained. If you wanted something else, you just got in line again.

  Looting wasn’t as exciting as Scoby and I had hoped it would be. Nicholas came up on a car alarm and I on a box of pine-tree-shaped air fresheners.

  On the way back to the neighborhood, we saw Pookie Hamilton drive by in his convertible bug. I whistled and Pookie pulled over to the curb, waving for us to get in the back seat.