by Paul Beatty
The change in semesters brought new electives and a chance to make new friends. All the exciting choices, like Print and Electric and Wine-making Shop, were gang member bastions and closed to insouciant seventh-graders such as myself. During spring registration I stood in line behind sloe-eyed bangers and listened to kind liberal guidance counselors derail their dreams. “Buster, I know you want to take Graphic Design, but I’m placing you in Metal Shop. Mr. Buck Smith will know how to handle you, and it’ll be a good prerequisite for license plate pressing. You’ve got to plan for the future, Buster, ol’ boy. Can’t be too shortsighted, Mr. Brown. Remember, the longest jail sentence starts with one day.”
I was left with a pitiable choice between sycophant havens: Home Economics II and Drama. A memory of last semester’s beginning home ec, where Lizard Higgins’s contorted, charred, and smoldering body was lifted into the ambulance and then sped toward the burn unit, was fresh in my mind. Drunk from sneaking sips of cooking sherry behind Ms. Giggscombe’s back, Lizard spilled some libations on his clothes and absently leaned too close to his peach flambé assignment. Using his alcohol-soaked Washington Redskins football jersey as kindling, the fire crept up Lizard’s torso and enveloped him in an eerie blue flame. (Ms. Kramer, the science teacher, said it was the kirsch and slivovitz distillates that accounted for the blue flame.) In a panic, Lizard ran, somersaulted, and cartwheeled down the hall, desperately trying to extinguish his blazing body by trying to drop, roll, and cover all at the same time. Ms. Giggscombe extinguished him with a flying body tackle and an old army blanket.
I showed up for Drama with a blithesome smile on my face and greeted my computer geek friends with cheery hellos and Shakespearean “How now, nuncles.” The citywide Shakespearean Soliloquy Championship was in two weeks. Our teacher, Ms. Cantrell, determined to show that her impoverished Negro thespians could compete with kids at the well-funded oceanfront and Valley schools, entered us and notified the media that her domesticated niggers would soon be on parade. In a predictable attempt to inject some cultural relevance, she decided to do Othello and assigned parts by having the class draw roles from a hat. There weren’t enough characters to go around, so each monologue would be learned by two students. The girls drew from a church bonnet and the boys from a bowler. Gretchen and Ursula, the bespectacled stone foxes of dweebdom, each drew Desdemona and pleaded with Ms. Cantrell to cast me in the lead role as the noble but paranoid blackamoor. Thankfully, Osiris, god of shy little black boys, fated me to play Iago, the scheming Venetian puppeteer, sparing me from having to place any necromantic kisses on Gretchen’s or Ursula’s cheek.
My dramatic confrere was Nicholas Scoby, a thuggish boy who sat in the back of the class, ears sealed in a pair of top-of-the-line Sennheiser stereo headphones and each of his twiggish limbs parked in a chair of its own. Rocking back and forth in his seat and seemingly oblivious to Ms. Cantrell and life’s lesson plan, Nicholas Scoby seemed like an autistic hoodlum. His pea head lolled precariously on his wiry neck like a gyroscope; he snapped his fingers in some haphazard pattern and muttered to himself in a beatnik word-salad jibberish. “Dig it. This nigger’s tonality is wow. Like hep. Like hepnotic. It’s contrapuntal glissando phraseology to bopnetic postmodernism. Blow, man, blow. Crazy.” Much to the dismay of those who paid attention to the burned-out teachers, Scoby was a straight-A student.
Ms. Cantrell divided the class into study groups. I reluctantly approached my partner, his eyes closed, a stream of guttural pablum escaping from his mouth accompanied by a barrage of spittle: “Bleeeet eet eeeet raaaaant dit dit dent ting ting. Send me, Jackson, send me. Oop-pop-a-da.” Tapping Nicholas on the shoulder, I interrupted. “Hey man, what you listening to?”
Apparently able to read lips, he arched his eyebrows to the highest regions of his forehead and answered, “Cannonball Adderley.”
“Who?”
“Jazz, daddio, jazz.” Then carefully removing his headphones, he continued, his pallid ears clashing with his brown-veneer skin. “You don’t listen to jazz? The only truly American art form other than the sit-com.”
“I listen to jazz. David Sanborn, Al Di Meola, and Spyro Gyra. Jeff Lorber is funky.”
“Funky? Fool, that ain’t jazz any more than Al Jolson and Pat Boone is soul. That shit is fusion. A superficial fusion at that. A little black style with weepy bland white sedative sensibilities. White boys with the blues tinged with some Caribbean high-end percussiveness.”
“So what should I listen to?”
“Do like me, start at the beginning.”
“With what, the New Orleans Rhythm Jazz Kings?”
“No fool, with a. My plan is to listen to everything recorded before 1975 in alphabetical order. No white band leaders, sidemen cool. No faux African back-to-the-bush bullshit recorded post-1965. Though I’m going to have to make an exception for Anita O’Day, she could pipe. What’s your name, cuz?”
“Gunnar. Gunnar Kaufman.”
“You dark as fuck for someone with Teutonic blood.”
“Naw, strictly Negro hemoglobins.”
Nicholas introduced himself with a grin. “Nicholas Scoby.”
“I know.”
“Do I have a cool-ass name or what? Sounds like I’m on some old secret agent cloak ’n’ dagger type shit. I should get a card to hand out to motherfuckers, ‘Nick Scoby—Espionage.’”
“You wanna learn the monologue together?”
“Wouldn’t it be cool to be the most famous spy in the world? Makes no practical sense, everybody’d know I’m spying on them, but I’d be appealing to the inflated superego of the evildoer. Be a bad motherfucker, CIA needs to get with me. Yeah, nigger, let’s get together later this week. Cool? Later.”
He called me “nigger.” My euphoria was as palpable as the loud clap of our hands colliding in my first soul shake. My transitional slide into step two was a little stiff, but I made up for it with a loud finger snap as our hands parted. Scoby gently placed his headphones over his ears and I skated away cool, dipped my right shoulder toward the ground, and with some dapper spinal curvature pimp-daddied back to my seat. I picked up the mimeographed Shakespearean sonnets Ms. Cantrell had handed out at the start of class, pressed my nose against the damp page, and inhaled the delirium of blue-inked love poems and newfound friendship. I’d have to remember to ask Nicholas Scoby about the blues. I stood up to read.
That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect,
For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair;
The ornament of beauty is suspect,
A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air.
“More erudition,” Ms. Cantrell said, “more erudition.”
Scoby and I rehearsed in his bedroom while his mom sat in the basement den watching old tapes of her roller derby days at the Shrine Auditorium. The Scobys relocated from Chicago’s West Side when the Windy City Tornados traded their star jammer, Beleeta “Queen Nairobi” Scoby, to the Los Angeles Thunderbirds for Skeets McNeely, Fat Jasper Perkins, and fifty sets of brake pads. During study breaks we’d join her on the couch, munching cheese puffs and directing muffled cheers at the television set.
I never understood the game, but invariably with time running out and the Thunderbirds down by five points, a plump man in a garish burgundy three-piece suit waved Ms. Scoby off the bench. Queen Nairobi skated around the ring in long slow strides to the roar of the small but rambunctious crowd of drunks, kids in tattered T-shirts, and wheelchair-bound senior citizens. Measuring her opposition and plotting her offensive strategy, she’d fasten the chin strap to a shiny yellow helmet that sat on her beachball-sized Afro like a plastic yarmulke. Picking up speed in the banked turn, Scoby’s mom would extend a skinny arm to Big Dan Party Hardy, who’d whip her into a gauntlet of obese bearded and big-tittied enemy buffalos on wheels. Arms cocked at the elbows for combat, she wriggled and scratched her way to hero worship, scoring points by ducking under the legs of the St. Louis Gateways, dodging the sucker punches of the Pennsylvani
a Black Lung Sputums, and sailing over the body blocks of the Bay Area Seismics. Skating on one leg, arms flailing like windmills, Ms. Scoby was so athletic that she sent the opposition hurtling over the rails and into the ringside seats, where crazed fans pelted them with fistfuls of stale popcorn, cups of flat beer, and metal folding chairs. As Nicholas’s mother rolled off the track, bent at hips and unsmiling, the PA announcer would yell, “Six big T-bird points!” and the big man in the burgundy suit would greet the winded Queen Nairobi with a kiss. They were oblivious to the flying aluminum walkers and whisky bottles that zipped past their intertwined bodies, and flashes of sweet pink tongue victory darted from their lips.
Nicholas and I returned to our studies.
“Yo, is that mauve-suited kumquat your father?”
“I think so. Mama won’t say. They call him Gene ‘the Dream’ Beasley.”
“You got any dreams, yo?”
“Yeah, I have a dream. Dream and a half, really. You ever hear of a Brocken specter?”
“Who?”
Nicholas put down his monologue. “A Brocken specter. If you stand on real high ground, say Mount Everest, with your back to the sun and look down, you’ll see your shadow on top of a fogbank or a cloud. That shadow is a Brocken specter.”
“Oh snap, your shadow on a cloud? That’s cool as hell.”
“But wait, there’s more. As an added bonus for those who act early, you get your very own glory.”
“Your own what?”
“Your own glory. As you look down at your shadow, there’s a corona around your head. Even if you’re standing next to a gang a niggers looking at they own Brocken specters, you can only see the glory around the shadow of your head.”
“That’s deep.”
“Gunnar, do you have any dreams?”
“Nope, but listening to you carry on, I’m working on one now. I once heard about some shit called a Flächenblitz.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s lightning in reverse. A Flächenblitz strikes up from the top of a cumulonimbus cloud and ends in clear air.”
“You’re a fucking reincarnated Prussian Hun Bohemian. No doubt in my mind, homeboy.”
*
The city Shakespearean soliloquy finals were held at Anita Bryant Junior High in the Valley. First to arrive, Ms. Cantrell’s third-period drama class entered the plush auditorium and sat in the back, testing the incredible acoustics with ghetto whoops and urban yodels. “Hey yo! Awwwight! Manischewitz Drama Club in the house, y’all! Yo mama-mama-ma-ma-aaa!” We were prepared to do well; we had all memorized our monologues, and our Old English diction was popping with sexual innuendo and abba rhyme schemes. What we weren’t prepared for was the lily-white cocksureness of the students from the Valley and the ritzy L.A. County woods: Brentwood, Westwood, and Woodland Hills. The auditorium filled with suburbanites costumed in Renaissance finery. The white kids had metamorphosed from surfers, stoners, and student council members into medieval gold-digging courtesans and horny lords. We picked the wrong day to wear our “Don’t ask me 4 shit” shirts. The white girls glided onto the stage in towering hairstyles and billowy velvet gowns, and the white boys wore ruffled silk shirts, skintight pants, peacock-feathered hats, and pointy suede Robin Hood shoes. It didn’t seem to matter much when they flubbed their lines; their parents and housekeepers stood and applauded, and the judges murmured among themselves in low voices and nodded approvingly.
Whenever Manischewitz Junior High trundled onstage, our hiking boots clomped between deliveries and our baggy jeans hindered our emotive histrionics. When we stumbled over a line of Shakespearean blather, the judges looked down at their score sheets with self-satisfied smirks, tapped their pencils, and stared at us with bored expressions masquerading as smug impartiality. Paul Robeson was turning over in his grave.
By the time Scoby’s turn to recite came, we had managed to cultivate an atmosphere of good-natured white liberal pity among the audience. Scoby shakily introduced his monologue; “Othello, act one, scene three. After plotting with Cassio to kill Othello, Iago …” Then Nicholas, choking on the patronizing sympathy, began. “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse … ummm …” He froze. Gathering his wits, he waved his arm majestically across his chest. “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse … fuck.”
The crowd started cheering him on as if he were one of those kids stricken with cystic fibrosis taking his first baby steps on a telethon at two o’clock in the morning: “Come on, guy, you can do it.” Two white girls, one of whom had just nailed Desdemona minutes earlier, boldly strode onstage and massaged Scoby’s rock-hard hypertensive shoulders and whispered honey-voiced encouragement in his ear: “You can do it, big boy.” Nicholas blurted out a spiritless “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse …” that died as soon as it left his lips. He slunk off the stage, his face hidden in his hands, his ears ringing with a deafening applause for failing. The defeated Manischewitz Drama Club sank in our seats and drowned under a tidal wave of shame.
A booming announcement from the emcee jolted the crowd from its collective condescension. “Next up, Manischewitz’s Gunnar Kaufman as Iago, Othello, act two, scene one.” I sauntered onto the stage and squinted into the spotlight, never feeling more misplaced, more burdenish, mo’ niggerish. I found it difficult to breathe. I was growing allergic to the powdery mask of Elizabethan whiteface. I could hear Scoby whimpering in the back as I cleared my throat.
“I’m junking Iago’s envy-laden ‘What a stupid moor-ronic nigger this Othello is’ speech for a less traditional bit from King Lear, act two, scene two. Note how the fusion of Goneril’s vile lackey Oswald and the loyal Kent’s lines give the monologue a self-hating and introspective spin.” Gazing directly at the judges, I grabbed my dick and ripped into my makeshift monologue. “What dost thou know me for? A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking whoreson … one-trunk-inheriting slave … beggar, Nigger … I will beat you into clamorous whining if thou deny’st the least syllable of thy addition.” I walked off the stage into a stunned auditorium of dazed crash dummies adrift in post-car-accident silence. At the top of my voice I yelled, “Is everyone all right? Anyone hurt?”
On the ride home Scoby saved me a seat in the back of the bus. I sat next to him, and like two shock absorbers we bounced up and down in the initial stages of lifelong friendship.
“Gunnar, you a crazy nigger.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Nick, where you be at lunchtime? I be looking for your ass, but I can never find you.”
“Monday meet me at the wine vats near the back gate.”
When Monday’s lunch bell rang I tore out of class and ran to the back gate to meet Scoby. He was already there with nine boys and one girl silently huddled about a tape deck. Those who weren’t lacing their sneakers and adjusting sweatbands were whipping a basketball around with a sharp crispness that seemed to singe the hands of whoever was on the receiving end. One boy was pulling on tube sock after tube sock until his feet looked as if they were encased in plaster casts. He winced as he placed his padded feet in a pair of hightop sneakers. I turned to the kid and said, “How many pairs of socks do you have on?”
“Seven.”
“Why?”
“For good luck, stupid.”
“Oh, yeah, right. Sure. My bad, I should’ve known.”
Nicholas Scoby peeked around the corner of the wine vats and said, “Okay, Mr. Uyeshima isn’t looking, let’s go.” The chainlink fence groaned and sagged under the weight of ten kids scaling it like boot camp Marines. From the other side Scoby looked back at me with a pained expression. “Yo, cuz, the radio.” I tossed the radio over and began climbing, catching my pants leg in the barbs at the top of the fence. None of the kids had bothered to wait for me; they were running down Airdrome Avenue, heading for the park.
“Kaufman!” It was Mr. Uyeshima, the dean of boys, yelling and blowing his whistle. He marched toward me, swinging his paddle. I
flung myself onto the sidewalk, ripping my pants in the process, and ran after the rest of the gang.
I caught up with them at the park. There wasn’t much time and they were in a hurry to get started, kissing their talismans and pleading with Nicholas, “Scoby, fuck that nigger, let’s play.”
“Chill.” Nick Scoby turned toward me, whisking the ball behind his back and through his legs and looking me in the eye. “C’mon, Gunnar. It’s us five. Me, you”—he quickly pointed out three other boys—“Dontévius, Snooky, and Spoon.”
The kid who had painstakingly put on all those socks whined, “What about me? That’s fucked up. That skinny mark motherfucker can’t even play no ball.”
“Look, Patrick, sub for Spoon every six baskets.”
Patrick was right, of course. I’d never played a game of basketball in my life and told Nick so.
“Nick, I ain’t no ballplayer.”
