The White Boy Shuffle

by Paul Beatty

  “You mean you put people who haven’t done anything in the back seat of your squad car and beat the shit out of ’em so you don’t have to do any paperwork. Thereby preventing any probable felonious assaults on the citizenry.”

  “And/or its property.”

  “And/or it is. You know, my father is a sketch artist down at Wilshire Division. Does that carry any weight?”

  “Yeah, he gets to visit your ass in jail without being strip-searched.”

  Taking out a small notebook from his supercop utility belt, he continued the inquest. “What’s your gang affiliation?”

  “Gang affiliation?”

  “Who do you run with? Who are your crimeys, your homies, your posse? You know, yo’ niggers.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, on weekends I’m down with the Gang of Four.”

  “Who?” To his partner, “Geez, these fucking turds are incredible, there’s a new gang every frigging week.” Then he turned back to me. “So, Gunnar, who you banging with in this Gang of Four?”

  “You know, it’s me, my homegirl Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chuqiao, and my nigger even if he don’t get no bigger Yao Wenyuan. Sheeeeit, we runnin’ thangs from Shanghai to Compton.”

  Although I had only lived in Hillside for a few days, it was impossible not to pick up a few local catchphrases while running errands for Mother. Language was everywhere. Smoldering embers of charcoal etymology so permeated the air that whenever someone opened his mouth it smelled like smoke. Double-check the mailbox to see if your letters had fallen through and the lid shrieked, “Dumb-ass motherfucker, have you ever looked and letters were still there? No! Shut the goddamn lid.” Press the crossing button at the intersection and the signal blinked a furious “Hurry the fuck up!” Call information and the operator answered the phone with a throaty “Who dis?” Nothing infuriated my mother more than me lounging on one elbow at the dinner table slinging my introductory slang with a mouth full of mashed potatoes: “Sheeeeit, Ma, I’m running thangs, fuck the dumb.”

  “Seriously, son, judging by your previous nefarious history, we feel that you have a proclivity for gang activity. Do us all a favor and come clean.”

  “Okay, fuck the dumb. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and odd-numbered Fridays when my mother lets me stay out late, I be down with the Our Gang He-man Woman Haters Club. Matter of fact, we have a rumble with the Bowery Boys next week. If you see that schmuck Muggs, tell da bum I’m gonna kick his ass.”

  “Okay, we’re going to put you down as unaffiliated. For now keep your big black nose clean.”

  Gang affiliation? I didn’t even have any friends yet. My sisters and I had no idea how to navigate our way around this hardscrabble dystopia. Each of us had already been beaten up at least once just for trying to make friends. Deciding there was safety in numbers, we took to traveling in a pack. Nervously, traipsing through the minefield, we tiptoed past the suspected ruffians and kept on the lookout for snipers. Shots would ring out from nowhere, forcing us into sacrificial heroics, diving onto verbal grenades to save the others.

  “Say, bitch-ass, com’ere!”

  “Who, me?”

  “Must be you, you looked.”

  “You guys, go on without me. Get away while there’s still time. Tell Mama I love her. I regret that I have only one life to give for my family.”

  By day six of the ghetto hostage crisis my sibling captives and I were avoiding the dangers of the unexplored territory along the banks of the Harbor Freeway by sitting in the den playing Minutiae Pursuance, substituting our own questions for the inane ones on the cards.

  “Sports and Leisure, for the pie.”

  “Oh, this one’s a toughie. How many dimples on a golf ball?”

  “Four hundred sixty-three. Give me my piece.”

  Mom was not the kind of matriarch to let her brood hide up under her skirt, clutching her knees, sheltered from the mean old Negroes outside. Under the guise that she was worried about our deteriorating social skills, she suggested we go to Reynier Park and play with the other kids in the neighborhood. She might as well have told us to play in the prison yard at Attica. Reynier Park was an overgrown inner-city rain forest that some Brazilian lumber company needed to uproot. You needed a machete to clear a path to the playground. The sandbox was an uninhabitable breeding ground for tetanus and typhus. Shards of broken glass and spent bullet shells outnumbered grains of sand by a ratio of four to one. Hypodermic needles nosed through this shimmering sinkhole like rusted punji sticks.

  Despite our pleas for a pardon, Mom invoked the death penalty and sentenced us to an afternoon at the park. For the record, the condemned ate last meals of liverwurst and mustard on white bread and drank grape Kool-Aid (extra scoop of sugar) before departing. We were somberly alternating turns on the only working swing when two girls about ten years old, smoking cigarettes and sharing sips from a canned piña colada, approached us. The taller of the two was wearing denim overalls and had so many pink and blue barrettes clipped to the thinning patches of braided hair on her head it looked as though she was under attack by a swarm of plastic moths. The other girl had on orange polyester hot pants and a matching polka dot halter top that was so small it barely succeeded in halting her two BB-sized nipples. Her hair was heavily greased into a rigid elliptical disk that sat precariously on the crown of her head. Every few seconds she’d stoop down to pick up a discarded needle and deposit it in her little red Naugahyde purse. She resembled a Vietnamese woman wearing a straw hat and toiling in a paddy. I listened for bleating water buffalo but heard only the bigger one’s mouth.

  “Get out of our swing now!” she shouted at Nicole. Nicole wanted to get off the swing, but she was catatonic with fear. It didn’t help that out of sheer nervousness Christina and I kept pushing, propelling her stiff frame higher and faster.

  Kicking off their dime store flip-flops, the two badly coiffed bullies marched through the sandbox without a flinch or grimace. A little diaper-clad boy waddled up, blew a kazoo tribunal, and heralded the dyspeptic duo: “That my sister Fas’ Betty and her bestest friend Vamp a Nigger on the Regular Veronica. They fixin’ to kick y’all’s ass.” Betty and Veronica went into a loud hands-on-hips, call-and-response, head-bobbing tirade on how they owned the entire park from the calcified jungle gym to the busted teeter-totter. Betty’s braids stood on end as she demanded that Nicole get off the swing before she heated up every piece of broken glass in the sandbox, affixed them to the end of one of those pointy 7-Eleven Slurpee straws, and blew glass bubbles in her tight black bourgeoise booty.

  The thought of this snake-haired demon shoving molten glass in her rectum gorgonized Nicole even further. Her sphincter tightened and her rock-hard butt sat heavy in the swing. Betty picked up a piece of broken glass, lit a Bic lighter, and teasingly passed the piece of glass through the flame, her fireproof fingers impervious to the heat. Nicole’s hands fastened themselves to the chains; her legs spread out in front of her and locked at the knees. Mistaking our silent petrification for hincty insolence, Betty and Veronica tried to rush us. The alcohol must have affected their bullying judgments, because they charged into Nicole chin first just as her legs were in the high kicking upstroke of a swing filled with panic-stricken kinetics. Fas’ Betty caught a sneaker in the trachea and Veronica Vamp a Nigger something-or-the-other got kicked in the solar plexus.

  Wiggling in spasmodic waves like dying fish on the filthy playground, the girls somehow managed to find enough air to moan raspy Miles Davis “motherfuckers” and threats that every ex-con cousin, pyromaniac auntie, serial killer uncle, and pit bull in the neighborhood would soon be coming to “put that head out” and “peel our caps.” Within moments, as if some silent gangster medical alert alarm had gone off, a small army of nepotistic enforcers magically appeared at the entrance near the basketball courts, parting the underbrush and yelling, “Y’all fucking with my cousins?” The three of us instantaneously burst into a waterfall of tears. Begging for a sympathetic détente, Christina and I mindles
sly continued to push Nicole’s swing. Her whooshing arc through the air, accompanied by the rusty swing set’s rhythmic creak, became a foreboding, metronomic pendulum counting down our deaths. “We didn’t know! We didn’t know! Please leave us alone.” A screaming vortex of punches and kicks answered our pleas with a firm ignorantia juris neminem excusat.

  The ghetto intelligentsia had kindly provided the young Kaufmans with our first lesson in street smartology: never, ever cry in public—it only makes it worse. If we hadn’t bawled we might have been let off with a polite cursory thrashing, just to maintain protective appearances. Since we sobbed like wailing refugee babies, we received a full-scale beatdown designed to toughen us up for the inevitable cataclysmic Italian opera ending of black tragedy. Usually when the fat lady sings in a black community, it’s at a funeral. I’ve seen kids get hit by cars, ice cream trucks, bullets, billyclubs, and not even whimper. The only time it’s permissible to cry is when you miss the lottery by one number or someone close to you passes away. Then you can cry once, but only once. There is no brooding; niggers got to get up and go to work tomorrow.

  My sisters and I walked home routed, picking bits of gravel out of one another’s tattered Afros and holding our heads back to stanch our nosebleeds. I thought about Betty’s flecked bouffant, Veronica’s flying-saucer-like do, and the oily Jheri curls, rock-hard pomade cold waves, and horsehair weaves of our attackers, and I realized that every day for the black American is a bad hair day.

  “We haven’t seen Daddy since we moved.”

  “Mommy told me he knows where we live, but he won’t come by.”

  “Fuck that nigger.”

  “Listen to you. So, tough guy, I think Betty and Veronica kind of like you. Did you notice the tender look in their eyes when they stomped on your head? Which one you gonna choose, Archiekins?”

  “Oh, be quiet. I could swear that little baby knee-dropped me in the balls.”

  The night of the Reynier Park beating I slept with a cold pack on the left side of my face and dreamed I lived in a museum diorama with the Hottentot Venus and Ishi, Last of the Yahi. Surrounded by stuffed mastodons and saber-toothed tigers, we played dominoes on a small round table in front of a hastily oil-painted backdrop of the Hollywood Hills. All the dominoes were blank, and inexplicably I spent long periods of time considering my next play. Ish and Hottie would scream at me in Z-talk to hurry up. “Plizzay dizza fizzucking dizzzominoes!” As I pulled dominos from the pile, I tried to explain that it wasn’t a matter of playing a blank domino, it was a matter of playing the right blank domino. “Dizzumb bizzastard.” At feeding time the caretaker would give me a pack of Oreos and the visitors would yell “Cannibal” and throw their yellow metal visitor buttons at me. The buttons turned to snow as they passed through the glass partition.

  I woke up comfortable in the knowledge that I was a freak. If I had walked the streets with a carnival barker to promote my one-boy sideshow, I could have made some money. “Hurry! Hurry! Step right up! All the way from the drifting sands of whitest Santa Monica, the whitest Negro in captivity, Gunnar the Persnickety Zulu. He says ‘whom,’ plays Parcheesi, and folks, you won’t believe it, but he has absolutely no ass what-so-ever.”

  My inability to walk the walk or talk the talk led to a series of almost daily drubbings. In a world where body and spoken language were currency, I was broke as hell. Corporeally mute, I couldn’t saunter or bojangle my limbs with rubbery nonchalance. I stiffly parade-marched around town with an embalmed soul, a rheumatic heart, and Frankenstein’s autonomic nervous system. Puberty wasn’t supposed to be like this. The textbooks said something about a little acne, some chest hair, and that I could use this special time in life to grow closer to my parents by discussing my nocturnal emissions with them. “Mom! Dad! Six cc’s of jizz last night. Am I a man or what?” Instead, my adolescence was like going to clown college. I found myself clumsily walking on a set of size thirteen feet, bumbling through the streets of Hillside and ricocheting off inanimate objects and into the pathways of hypertensive and equally embattled pedestrians. I constantly found myself cowering under raised umbrellas and fists, hurriedly apologizing and kowtowing for forgiveness for stepping on someone’s heel.

  I learned the hard way that social norms in Santa Monica were unforgivable breaches of proper Hillside etiquette. I’d been taught to look someone in the eye when speaking to them. On the streets of Hillside, even the briefest eye contact wasn’t a simple faux pas but an interpersonal trespass that merited retaliation. Spotting a potential comrade, I’d catch his eye with a raised eyebrow that said, “Hey, guy, what’s up?”—a glance I hoped would open the lines of communication. These silent greetings were often returned in spades, accompanied by the angry rejoinder “Nigger, what the fuck you looking at?” and a pimp slap that echoed in my ears for a week. I’d rub my stinging cheek, dumbfounded, and find myself staring into a pair of dark sullen eyes that read, “Verboten! Stressed-out ghetto child at work. Keep out.”

  The people of Hillside treat society the way society treats them. Strangers and friends are suspect and guilty until proven innocent. Instant camaraderie beyond familial ties doesn’t exist. It takes more than wearing the same uniform to be accepted among one’s ghetto peers. The German spies in those late-night World War II movies who tried to infiltrate U.S. Army units by memorizing baseball trivia and learning to chew gum with a certain snappy American flair had it easier than I did. I couldn’t just roll up on some folks and say, “I know the Black National Anthem, a killer sweet-potato pie recipe, and how to double-dutch blindfolded. Will you be my nigger?” Dues had to be paid, or you wasn’t joining the union.

  I had my overbite corrected and an impacted molar removed when I approached a crew of kids sitting on the fender of a metallic gold 1976 Monte Carlo with white interior. The boys were playing the dozens, snapping on each other’s mothers; I walked directly up to the fattest kid, playfully punched him in his doughy shoulder, and said, “Hey, I don’t even know your name, but your mother soooooo black she sneezes chimney soot and pisses Yoo-Hoo.” The family dentist said she couldn’t have done a better job herself.

  The Hillside tribe wasn’t going for no ghetto fakery. If I wanted to come correct, I’d have to complete some unspecified warrior vision quest. The gods of blackness would let me know when I was black enough to be trusted. I walked the dark streets of Hillside with my head down, looking for loose change and signs that would place me on the path to right-on soul brother righteousness.

  In early September, bruised and toothless, I realized that my search for companionship was becoming too painful. Trying to foist myself on these people wasn’t going to work; I needed a more transcendental approach to locating my soul. To achieve this soulful enlightenment, I started playing Thoreau in the Montgomery Ward department store over in the La Cienega Mall, turning its desolate sporting goods department into a makeshift Walden. I moved the pond, a flimsy dark blue plastic wading pool decaled with big-eyed, absurdly happy black and yellow ducks, next to the eight-man tent tucked away in the wilds of the camping section. The tent was pitched in a four-tree forest of plastic redwoods and dead nylon leaves in various states of factory decomposition. A phalanx of cuddly foam forest creatures, née archery targets, roamed the grounds: a whitetail deer with its nose in a Kodiak bears ass, and a wild turkey propped against a Ping-Pong paddle so it wouldn’t fall over on its side. A few passes of aerosol mosquito repellent and I had all the scents and sounds of the wild. “Ms. Palazzo, you’re wanted in shipping.”

  Fun Facts for Department Store Campers

  Did you know that you can tell the temperature by counting the number of high-pitched department store dings in a minute, then dividing that number by five?

  I spent entire days in the tent, snuggled up in a down sleeping bag reading Kant, Hegel, and the Greek tragedies by flashlight. Whenever I felt the need to stretch my legs, I’d break out my Cub Scout compass and go orienteering around the store. Grabbing a fishing pole, I
’d blaze trails from the glacier-white kitchen appliances up the steep back stairwells and traverse the lawn furniture outback until I reached the bluffs of television sets that overlooked the pet store. From the balcony I’d cast my line into the aquariums below, sip a cream soda, and commune with nature, waiting patiently for a bite. The end of a good day’s fishing would yield a cooler filled with angelfish, oscars, and tiger barbs, but since I wasn’t much of an angler, it was usually guppies, guppies, and more guppies.

  The day after Labor Day I was sitting in the tent reading Homer when I overheard some voices outside excitedly commenting on the nearby display of hunting rifles and bows and arrows. Ahh, intrepid explorers! Cautiously, I peeked my nappy head out from between the tent flaps and saw a group of black and Mexican boys a little older than I assembled in Household Weaponry. The glass case was broken and most of the guys were peering down the barrels of shotguns. One was passing a sharp Bowie knife under the nose of the terrified salesperson and asking if he could slash some prices. If I planned to trade pelts for foodstuffs and form a working relationship with this barbarous bunch, I’d have to try the avuncular approach.

  I placed both hands in my pockets and sauntered over to the group in as nonthreatening a manner as possible. Each kid was dressed from head to toe in various shades of blue. Baby blue baseball caps, navy blue scarfs, and from the back pockets of those loose-fitting midnight blue chinos, Dodger blue handkerchiefs bloomed like cottony autumn delphiniums. What did the Venice Beach queers say about dark blue hankies in the right rear pocket—was it dominant or submissive?

  While I tried to remember, a dwarf-sized freckle-faced big-headed redbone kid the others called Pumpkin nocked an arrow into a powerful compound bow. He took aim at a smug-looking mannequin who was standing up in an aluminum dingy, holding a rod and reel and modeling a black-and-red checkerboard lumberjack jacket with a matching hat, the kind with wool earflaps. One of Pumpkin’s cronies gently placed an apple on the dummy’s head and stepped back. Pumpkin lifted the bow, pulled back on the string till his hand touched his ear, shot an arrow that pierced the mannequin’s forehead and exited through the back of his plaster skull, landing somewhere in the young miss section.