by Paul Beatty
“He would kneel at the end of the Freedom Trail and stick a sword in his belly.”
“Exactly. Gunnar?”
“Yeah.”
“You serious about this whole death trip, winning by straight taking yourself out?”
“I guess so. I meant everything I said, but that don’t mean shit, you know. Don’t mean I’m right, wrong. The poems, the magazine interviews are just words, man. I’m just saying, Look, I’m outta here, all you motherfuckers who act like you give a shit—stop me, you care so much.”
“To kill yourself you don’t need a permit or anything like that, do you?”
“Naw, I don’t think so.”
Nick stared past the coastline, and my eyes followed his. The only thing barely visible in the foggy night was Boston’s pathetic skyline. The top of the glassy Hancock Building poked through a cloudbank that covered its lower floors in a vapory trenchcoat.
“Tallest building in Boston, right?”
“Fifty some-odd stories, the Sunday brunch from the top supposed to be the move. You can see to Newfoundland or some shit.”
“They don’t have no nighttime dinner thing?”
“Nope. Closed up.”
“What’s the second tallest building?”
“The Prudential Building, but I think BU’s law school is the third.”
“Can you get in there at night?”
“Yeah, during finals week the law library is open all night.”
We finished our beers, arguing over the finiteness of music. I rationalized that there are only so many notes and therefore only so many combinations of notes, so it stood to reason that there are only so many songs.
Scoby stood up, preparing to leave, wrapping his belongings in a towel. “Look, cuz, you not accounting for time. Time is what makes music infinite. Bίp, bip, bap, tid, dit, tap is different from bipbip baaaaaap … tid daaat tap. See, if Charlie Parker had played Dixie, it would be like colorizing Birth of a Nation. It’d be a different tune but the same tune. You dig? You’d be hearing it differently and its meaning would change. Because a musician has they own sense of time and experience of time. For Parker, time was a bitch. He wouldn’t play Dixie as no happy-go-lucky darkie anthem. He’d play it as a ‘I’m mad and I know them cotton-picking niggers was mad,’ piss-on-their-graves dirge. You follow? That’s why your poems can never be no more than descriptions of life. The page is finite. Once you put the words down on paper, you’ve fossilized your thought. Bugs in amber, nigger. But music is life itself. Music is time. Played live, played at seventy-eight rpms, thirty-three and a third, backwards, looped, whatever. There’s no need for translation. You understand or you don’t.”
Scoby gave me a shake and a hug and left the beach, leaving his cassette player on my towel. I put the headphones on and drank beer, listening to Sarah Vaughan until the batteries started dying. Her voice slowed and garbled, deepened and faltered. I took a sip of beer and gurgled it in my throat. The sound was inside out, between my ears instead of outside them. Nothing was making sense. On the train home I wrote a reminder to myself to return the cassette player in the morning, then jotted down notes for a poem.
Dixie/“I wish I was in the land o’ cotton,
old time dar am not forgotten—
look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.”
Is this song/tune/anthem inherently racist?
How in the hell do I know the words to this shit?
If “Dixie” is racist, what makes it so? The title, the lyrics, the historical context, the fact the South lost the war? If the lyrics were outlawed, banned forever, would the music, that gnawing fucking refrain, the sequence of notes themselves, be racist instrumental? Is opera classist? Does the letter r discriminate against Bostonians?
Haaaymaahket Square next stap. Chainge heah fa de Ahhborway. The Bahston Transit Authawity thanks you for yourah patronage.
Early the next morning Coach Palomino woke me up and handed me a rubber camping flashlight. He told me that Nicholas had jumped off the roof of the law school. A custodian found him in the courtyard; he’d landed on his side, curled in a fetal position, one arm twisted behind him so violently the tips of his fingers touched the crown of his head. The rubber flashlight was in the bushes nearby. The suicide note was on the roof, taped to a case of Carta Blanca.
*
To my dearest nigger Gunnar Kaufman,
I’ve just climbed nineteen flights of stairs lugging a case of beers and whistling “Dixie.” I shouldn’t, but I blame you. Sitting on this ledge, my feet dangling in midair, two hundred feet off the ground, I find my thoughts going back to Tokubei, the soy sauce dealer, and the unbelievably codependent courtesan Ohatsu in Chikamatsu’s Love Suicides at Sonezaki, the doomed lovers under the fronds of a palm tree binding their wrists, preparing for noble deaths.
I’m on my feet now, looking down into the cloudy quadrangle, my toes hanging ten into the void. I can feel hands on my back, gently pushing. It’s funny I want to write a poem.
i step into the void
bravely,
aaa
aa
a
a
ahhhhh
Not bad for an amateur. Before I go, I forgot to tell you the reason the bartenders wrap napkins around the beer bottles is so clumsy fools like yourself won’t drop them. You know the glass gets slippery, the condensation—never mind. These brews are for you. I asked your mom to send them from home so we could celebrate the publication of your book. Cheers. Think of me.
G.K., tell Yoshiko and Psycho Loco I’ll miss them. If there’s a great beyond, I’ll see you all when you get there. Homes, there’s a cloudbank floating this way. Dude, I can see the halo around my head, but I’m no angel. I’m ghost, the afterlife is just a lay-up away.
Late,
Nicholas Scoby
*
That night I leaned out over the ledge of the law school’s roof and poured off the top of my beer. The liquid splattering on the ground made me wonder what Scoby’s body had sounded like when it hit the pavement. It was a hazy night, just like the previous one. A thick cloud of fog surrounded the building. I placed the flashlight on the ventilator behind me and stood on the edge. I could see my silhouette on the surface of the cloud below. I looked like gray smoke; it was a low-budget Brocken specter, and without the halo, the glory. I folded the note into a paper airplane and watched it spiral into the fog like a weightless kamikaze diving out of the sun. The next morning the letter was on the front page of the late edition of every paper in the country.
When Yoshiko and I landed in Los Angeles the following week, an army of reporters besieged us outside the terminal. Psycho Loco sped up to the curb, stretched out over the front seat of his car, one hand on the steering wheel, the other popping open the passenger door. I didn’t know Toyota made a Dunkirk rescue dinghy.
“Psycho Loco, like a motherfucker.”
“Where to, my liege?”
“Home.”
“Can’t go home. LAPD wants to speak to your ass. You like Hannibal in this hole.”
“Beach, then—it’ll be like closure.”
Psycho Loco and Yoshiko sat in the front seat. I sat in the back and put my hand on the dent in the upholstery where Nicholas should have been. I caught Psycho Loco’s eye in the rearview mirror.
“Shit fucked up, right?”
“Isn’t it always. How his mother?”
“She broke up, like everybody else. Went back to Mexico after the funeral though, something about a match against the Jalisco Jaquecas. You know, in a lot of ways, Scoby was Hillside. Nobody from the neighborhood ain’t never come up like y’all. You two the first.”
I pressed Psycho Loco to stop, but he waved me off, insisting that I quit with the false modesty. I needed to hear what he had to say.
“We used to watch you and Scobe bust niggers’ asses on television every weekend. Cuz, clowns who dropped out of school in the eighth grade sporting Boston University sweatshirts and shit
. Then your book came out. Oh man, we went berserk. Nobody would read it at first. Too scared. I just carried it everywhere I went, proud as hell, throwing it in people faces. ‘You better buy this book. Compralo, ese. My boy wrote this, so next time I see you, best to have it on you.’ Fools bought your shit too, because I was your number-one publicist in the ’hood. Gave your shit street credibility.”
“Right.”
“Then one day we was kicking it at Reynier Park, lounging, you know how we do. I just pulled the book out and started reading it aloud. Read the shit cover to cover, twice. Who was there? Me, Hi-Life, Pookie of course, Shamu, L’il Annie Borden, buncha heads, everybody crying. Niggers was happy, but upset at the same time, you know. Then the rally. Nicholas. Nobody asked why, we just understood. Peep my new tattoo.”
Psycho Loco held out his right arm for me to examine. On his wrist was a tattooed watch. The face of the watch was an exact likeness of a smiling Nick. In cursive letters along the edge of the thick black band was “Nick Scoby, a nigger who always knew what time it was.”
I lay down in the back seat and let the car’s motion and the who’s who of neighborhood gossip rock me to sleep. I dreamed I was in a squad of black kamikaze pilots. We were ambivalent about the kamikaze label because we thought “divine wind” sounded like a fart that smelled like perfume. We flew planes constructed of balsawood and powered by rubber bands that you twisted before takeoff by turning red plastic propellors. I flew thousands of missions, all failures, because I always came back alive. I crashed into the sides of oil tankers toting fifty-gallon drums of nitroglycerine and swam back to shore, unscathed save for a pair of singed eyebrows. I divebombed the Pentagon, a bucket of turpentine and gasoline between my legs, a grenade in each hand, a methane-farting cow strapped to my back, and firework sparklers clenched heroically in my teeth. Nothing. In shame I walked away from the flaming polygon and caught a bus back to headquarters. In disgrace I became the only kamikaze pilot ever to receive a promotion. Every night I sprinted down the tarmac toward my waiting balsawood plane, hoping tonight would be my last mission.
The numbing cold of a beer can pressed against my temple woke me up. A twelve-pack of reminiscing later, night had fallen, and Psycho Loco was ready to get down to the nitty-gritty. “So when you going to die?” he asked. I’d heard that tone in his voice before; it was the same sarcastic timbre he had used when he goaded Buzzard into shooting a rookie Harlem Globetrotter, who in botching the confetti-in-the-water-bucket trick had accidentally doused Buzzard with water. No one can instigate like Psycho Loco. “You know, Gunnar, for all that shit you talk about killing yourself, you really ain’t the suicidal type. Masochistic, yes, suicidal no. So when you going to it, suicide-boy?”
I bored the beer can into the sand and stood up ramrod straight. “Sir, right now, sir, I will kill myself now, sir! Right face, huuh!” Calling my own cadence, I goosestepped toward the ocean while Yoshiko beat out a drum march on her skintight belly and Psycho Loco whistled “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” They thought I was kidding, but when I was thirty yards from shore, splitting waves with my forehead, I heard Psycho Loco yelling for help.
It’s very hard for a strong swimmer to drown on purpose. Once my feet no longer touched the sea floor, I felt myself instinctively floating toward the surface, thinking about catching one last wave. Palms up, I flapped my arms and forced myself to submerge into the depths. The ocean was very dark. I curled into a tight tuck and let the tide bob and roll me around like an undersea tumbleweed. The muffled roar of the waves rolling overhead was comforting, and I popped my thumb in my mouth, pretending I was an embryo suspended in amniotic fluid. I began to hear Yoshiko in the shower, talking to our child as she scrubbed her stomach. Telling the child how crazy its parents were. How we were waiting for its birth so we could rent a motor home and drive to Brazil and have a baptism in the rushing waters of the Amazon. What the fuck, I thought, it took Osamu Dazai three or four times to get this suicide thing right. I swam back to shore, surfacing yards south of Psycho Loco and Yoshiko, knee-deep in the water and screaming at the horizon.
“Gunnar, you come back here and be a father to your child, you sonofabitch. My mother warned me. She said, ‘If you marry a Negro hoodlum, he’ll impregnate you and leave you for a white girl.’ You better not be out there fucking no mermaid.”
Psycho Loco dropped to his knees, pounding the surf with his fists. “I loved him. I loved him.”
I crept up behind the distraught mourners. “Boo.”
They jumped out of their skins, happy to see me alive and pissed off that I wasn’t dead.
“Motherfucker! I knew you couldn’t do it.”
“You didn’t know shit. You thought I was in Atlantis by now. Wipe your face, you big baby.”
Yoshiko crossed her arms and grudgingly brushed the sand off my face. “You okay?”
“Yeah, except for the mermaid scales on my dick.”
Yoshiko hit me in the stomach so hard she scraped her knuckles on my spine. They made me drive home.
It was two in the morning when we arrived in Hillside, and I looked for my mother on every corner, examining every liquor store clique for her tight-lipped smile. Glanced at every passing car looking for a gray-haired woman hunched over the steering wheel, wiping the windshield with her forearm and cursing the defogger. On Robertson Boulevard, near the car wash, the outline of what looked to be an old Bonneville came sailing down the hill with its headlights off. Always the courteous driver, I flicked our lights off and on. In a panic, Psycho Loco drew his gun, opened his door, and leapt out of the car. The Bonneville turned on its headlights and sailed past with a honk of appreciation. Psycho Loco climbed back into the front seat and put a relieved hand to his still rapidly beating heart.
“Shit. Motherfucker, are you crazy?”
“What? I just flashed the headlights. You the one flying through streets with the greatest of ease.”
“Ghost Town been driving around the ’hood with their headlights off.”
“So?”
“It’s an initiation. They creep around with no lights and some gangbanger apprentice in the back seat has to shoot the first fool who flashes their headlights.”
It was good to be home.
Because of the police stakeout at my house, Yoshiko and I checked in at the La Cienega Motor Lodge and Laundromat. Toting our luggage, we elbowed our way through the passel of giggly prom couples tossing their room keys to the night clerk as they headed for the parking lot, smoothing their dresses and spit-cleaning the stains on their tuxedos. We liked the cheap American coziness of our new home, Suite 206. I swept insect carcasses, chicken bones, and dust balls into neat piles while Yoshiko sat at the rickety kitchen table shellacking the backs of live roaches with nail polish and giving them color-coded names: a coat of Sea Urchin Hyacinth for Walter, Sugar-Cone Browntium for Abigail, and Lullaby Lilac for Tatsuo. There was a scream from the room next door. Moments later a radio ad for the La Cienega Motor Lodge and Laundromat came on the combination TV/radio—“We’ll leave the light on for ya”—to which Yoshiko added, “So the burglars think you’re home.”
We were under constant surveillance, so we didn’t go out much except to buy beer and TV dinners. During the day we’d open the creaky windows and eavesdrop on the rehab meetings in the community center next door. The crackheads and heroin addicts engaged in acrimonious debate over who constituted the lowest life form. “Ah nigger, don’t lie. I seen you lick a dog’s dick for five dollars, then when the niggers only gave you three, you offered to fuck the telephone pole. So what I share needles with pus-covered faggots. I am a pus-covered faggot, motherfucker. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
Yoshiko and I engaged in our own great debates. I was Du Bois arguing vociferously for a continuation of our comprehensive overpriced Ivy League educations. I suggested that we attend each Ivy League school for one semester, gleaning the best bullshit from the best bullshitters, and emerge as learned scholars prepared to unrav
el the intricacies of the world or at least work as Wall Street market analysts. Yoshiko was Booker T. Washington fighting passionately for a more proletarian edification, one involving a practicum in the crafts and technical vocations. And what better tutelage than that offered by America’s renowned correspondence colleges? Waving our grades from Boston University, four-point-ohs for each of us on account of Scoby’s suicide, Yoshiko asked, “Don’t you want to earn your way? Aren’t you tired of having things handed to you on a silver platter, black man?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Of course. Look, it’ll be fun. Besides, fuck all that snow.”
So we enrolled at Redwood State, a college located in a post office box in the hinterlands of Chicago, Illinois. In two months’ time I received a bachelor’s degree in earth auguries with an emphasis in meteorology, star-gazing, and horse-race analysis. Yoshiko quadruple-majored in jet engine mechanics, urban forestry, auctioneering for fun and profit, and three-card monte.
Between exams we read the stacks of death poems and obituaries that arrived in the afternoon mail.
CARLTON MALTHUS
Carlton Malthus, thirty-one-year-old brewmeister at the Cascades Malts microbrewery, located in Klamath Falls, Oregon, drank himself to death yesterday in Piss Shivers, a tavern in downtown Klamath Falls. Malthus entered the bar and ordered a Crater Lake Blue, the popular sparkling blue pilsner that he developed. He was refused service and then forcibly removed from the establishment for what one bar patron characterized as being “too black to appreciate ‘the Blue.’” Returning with a keg of Crater Lake Blue, Malthus vowed to drink until his eyes turned blue or he was given a stool at the bar. Sticking the tap spout in his mouth, he drank continuously for five hours, emptying the ten-gallon keg. Removing the tap, he wrote a short poem, loudly eructated, and died. Malthus is survived by his wife Julie, son Barley, and daughter Ethanol. The poem he wrote moments before his death is below.