by Paul Beatty
“I know you ain’t. I seen you looking at those sonnets, drool dripping out your mouth. You either a poet or a homosexual.”
“Oh shit, that’s fucked up. Why can’t I be both?”
“True. Well, you can be a ballplayer too. If you want to hang with me, you’re gonna have to play ball. Awwright? Press the play button.”
I pressed the tape deck’s play button and a deep bass line rambled over the blacktop. The music set the tempo and provided the ballplayers with a grooveline around which to improvise. They spun, twisted, lunged, and chased each other from pole to pole as I ran in circles, determined to stay as far away from the ball as possible and still look busy.
The Santa Monica school district didn’t have a physical education curriculum. Participation in organized sports was looked down on as the taboo dominion of society’s underprivileged. During Proletarian Pastimes Week, instead of playing sports we learned the rules. Ms. Cegeny had a nephew who was the UCLA basketball team’s manager. After he explained to us the intricacies of handing out towels to sweaty giants and the importance of liquid electrolyte replacement, he taught us the game, using two wastepaper baskets and a globe.
I jogged near the sidelines, trying to recall the nephew’s lessons. The other kids ran purposefully up and down the court. Adrianna Carros put Scoby on her hip, pump faked, spun left, and smartly banked the ball in the basket.
1. Double Dribble—No dribbling with two hands.
2. Foul—Touching an opposing player with ball results in a defensive foul.
3. Traveling—?
I remembered the UCLA team manager had had trouble explaining traveling, saying it was a vague rule that was often dependent on the referee’s interpretation. Deciding that visual demonstration would best explain the ambiguous violation, Ms. Cegeny’s nephew grabbed the globe firmly between two hands and ran about the room feigning a dribbling motion. Suddenly he stopped and jumped high in the air without shooting the metallic earth into the trash basket. When he landed he said, “If you do that, you’ve traveled.”
Perplexed, I asked him, “Traveled where?”
The college boy got indignant and tried to bluff his rulebook mastery across. “If a player in possession of the ball leaves the playing surface with the ball and lands at a location other than the original takeoff still in possession of the ball and without having dribbled the ball, said player has created an unfair advantage and ‘traveled’.”
“What if you come down in the exact same spot? Then you haven’t gained an advantage, you’re right back where you started.”
“Impossible.”
The student manager must have been a physics major, because he jumped up and down a few more times to prove that landing in the same spot was an impossibility.
“But, what if?”
“Traveling, you little fuck.”
As the game wore on, I began to notice that whenever anybody on my team rebounded a missed shot, everyone ran at top speed toward our basket. I got cocky and decided to take an active role in the game. I began by playing defense. It looked easy enough; you just stood in front of whoever had the ball and wiggled your body until you exasperated your opponent to the point of distraction. A boy named Weasel Torres dribbled toward me and I leapt out in front of him, placing my lanky frame between him and the basket. Weasel’s feints and pivots couldn’t shake my unorthodox jumping-jack defense, and for good measure I burped in his face, causing Weasel to shoot a wild shot that clanged off the rim like a cannonball.
Scoby rebounded and I took off down the court, my speed boosting me ahead of the pack. With a devilish look in his eyes, Scoby fired a bullet pass that hit me right in the hands about fifteen feet from our team’s basket. I caught the ball, took the one dribble my coordination allowed, then jumped as hard as I could, my eyes closed tight. I could hear Ms. Cegeny’s testy nephew: “You land with the ball, traveling!” I must have stopped breathing, because I could feel my legs kicking in midair as if I were suspended from an invisible noose. What the fuck was I doing with a basketball in my hands? I opened my eyes and saw that my momentum was hurtling my fragile body toward the basket and the steel rim was closing in on the bridge of my nose. I raised my arms in self-defense and crashed into the basket, the ball slamming through the hoop with an authoritative boom. Instinctively, I grabbed onto the rim to stop myself from flying into the pole. When I slowed to a gentle sway, I let go and dropped to the ground with a soft thud, just as the bell ending the lunch period sounded in the distance.
The game stopped. The other players looked at each other, perplexed, for a brief second and then burst out in a frenzy of high-pitched whooping, high fives, and high-stepping jigs.
“Oh shit.”
“Yo, that nigger had legs akimbo.”
“Oh shit.”
“Scoby, your boy’s got like crazy hops.”
“Ain’t no seventh-grade bailers in the city dunking.”
“This nigger has high-flying kung fu triple-feature you-killed-my-teacher-you-dirty-bastard rise.”
“Oh shit.”
On the walk back to school, Scoby looked at me as if he knew something I didn’t. Mr. Uyeshima met us at the gate. He sent the rest of the boys and the lone girl to class. I had a swat coming to me because I had ignored a direct order. As Mr. Uyeshima marched me over to the wine vats for corporal enlightenment, Patrick turned around, cupped his hands to his mouth, and shouted, “Uyeshima, don’t hit Gunnar too hard, he dunking with two hands nasty-like pow.”
Bent over in the musty shed catching heat with my pants puddled in a denim heap about my ankles and my elbows dug into my knees, I’d received three of the prescribed five swats when Mr. Uyeshima asked me did I really dunk. I said yes and he sent me back to class with a stinging pat on my tender behind.
“Way to go,” he said.
“Way to go where?” I snapped back.
I sat in Spanish class, my warm ass simmering in the seat of my pants, trying to concentrate on the infinite conjugations of the verb “escribir” scribbled on the board. I thought of Swen Kaufman taking lashes for his farcical dreams of being a dancer and realized I had taken my swats for the sake of friendship. Not for some orchestrated semper fi cultish fraternal bonding or a Huck Finn Nigger Jim “love the one you’re with” friendship, but because I’d met a special motherfucker whose companionship was easily worth a middle-school beating.
“Gunnar, haz una oración utilizando la palabra ‘escribir,’ por favor.”
“Yo voy a escribir poemas como Octavio Paz y Kid Frost.”
“Quienes?”
“Octavio Paz era un poeta gordiflón y activista de Mexico.”
“Y Kid Frost?”
“El es un poetastro hip-hop de la vieja guardia, de la vieja escuela quien vivo en Pomona o en la este.”
“Vieja escuela?”
“Si, de la old school.”
“Bueno.”
“Mata a los pinché gringos. No hablo este lingo y yo quiero jugar bingo. Ya estuvo, time to show and prove-oh.”
“Bastante, Gunnar.”
I spent the next Saturday perched on the front steps, lazily watering the lawn, waiting for a poem to descend from the midday Los Angeles haze. Paying special attention to the dry patches, I slowly turned the front yard into a grassy swamp, forcing the ants and beetles to scramble over one another as they sought higher ground on the aluminum Montgomery Ward fence that surrounded the yard.
There was a different vibrancy to 24th Street that day. The decibel level was the same, but a grating Hollywood hullabaloo replaced the normal Hillside barking dog and nigger cacophony. The newest rap phenoms, the Stoic Undertakers, were filming a video for their latest album, Closed Casket Eulogies in F Major. Earlier in the day I had wandered into the production tent to audition for a part as an extra. The casting director blew one expanding smoke ring in my direction and dismissed me with a curt “Too studious. Next! I told you I want menacing or despondent and you send me these bookworm junior high la
rvae.”
Moribund Videoworks was on safari through the L.A. jungle. A caravan of film trucks and RVs lurched through the streets like sheet-metal elephants swaggering through the ghetto Serengeti. Local strong-armed youth bore the director over the crowds in a canopied sedan chair, his seconds shouting out commands through a bullhorn. “Bwana wants to shoot this scene through an orange filter to make it seem like the sun’s been stabbed and the heavens are bleeding onto the streets.” “Special effects, can you make the flames shoot farther out from the barrel of the Uzi? Mr. Edgar Barley Burrows wants the guns to spit death. More blood! You call this carnage! More blood.” My street was a soundstage and its machinations of poverty and neglect were Congo cinema verité. “Quiet on the set. Camera. Roll sound. Speed. Action!”
Carloads of sybaritic rappers and hired concubines cruised down the street in ghetto palanquins, mint condition 1964 Impala lowriders, reciting their lyrics and leaning into the camera with gnarled intimidating scowls.
“Cut!”
The curled lips snapped back into watermelon grins like fleshy rubber bands. “How was that, massa? Menacing enough fo’ ya?”
“You got ’em pissing their pants in Peoria. Now one more take, and this time make sure they defecate their dungarees in Dubuque.”
Our local councilman, Pete “Hush Money” Brocklington, walked past my house wringing his hands and bragging to the passersby about the loads of money pouring into the neighborhood coffers. I only saw the bulge in his pocket. When the civic carpetbagger ventured into firing range, I pressed my thumb into the nozzle and sprayed him with a water jet from my Montgomery Ward Birmingham Special garden hose. He was about to chastise me when my mother, obviously of voting age, opened the screen door. “Gunnar, stop playing with the hose!” Councilman Brocklington waved to her. My mother ignored him and sloshed across the lawn to inspect my job, then joined me on the steps. I looked down at her sopping wet feet; as she wiggled her toes, tiny bubbles squeezed through her canvas sneakers.
“Mom, I need some new tennis shoes.”
“What’s wrong with the ones you have on now? They’re damn near new.”
“These are skateboard sneakers. I can’t play basketball in these.”
“What, you stopped skateboarding?”
“I played basketball for the first time the other day, and I think I’m gonna be pretty good. Besides, the streets out here are all fucked up—cracks, potholes, broken glass. You can’t skate on that. Every time I fall, I get cut to ribbons and my wheels get all thrashed.”
“Well, what kind of shoes do you need?”
“I don’t know, something like the ones they advertise on television, I guess. Something expensive, I suppose.”
“Don’t people get shot for wearing those shoes?”
“Ma, it’s not the shoes, people get shot because someone decides to shoot ’em. Anyway, I’ll get Nick to go with me to the store.”
“Okay, I’ll give you the money tomorrow.”
A member of the film crew yelled “Sound!” and the beats to the Stoic Undertakers’ latest single, “Exhume the Dearly Departed and Take Their Watches,” kicked in. Reflexively, my eyes closed halfway, my shoulders hunched toward the ground, my right foot tapped softly on the stair, and my head began a faintly perceptible bob.
“Your taste in music sure has changed.”
“How can you tell? I thought you were tone-deaf.”
“When you used to listen to that rock ’n’ roll, your head used to bang so hard I thought it was going to snap off and roll into the street. Now you look like you’re strung out on heroin. Your body just teeters from side to side like you have an inner ear infection—reminds me of Gene Kelly in those sailor movies. Gunnar, why don’t you buy some tap-dancing shoes instead? It’ll be safer—no one would shoot you for your tap-dancing shoes.”
“Gene Kelly, Ma? Tap dance? Vaudeville is dead. You want me to change my name to Bubbles and start singing them ‘Call me Shine’ songs? No one would have to shoot me, I’d die of shame.”
“Geez, you’re sensitive. What topics of importance are these hoodlums singing about, anyway?”
“The spoils of war, I guess.”
My mother and I stopped to watch lead rapper MC Smarty-Pants wave his flamethrower over his head and recite his frenzied verse.
Aaaahhh yeah, I’m the ghetto fascist,
inner-city black Mussolini.
The cruel druid dousing your dick in lighter fluid
then eating it up like roast wienie.
Oh what the fuck, ketchup, mustard, relish;
I bar-b-cue niggers so why embellish the hellish
Full of hate, casting my fate with Satan I’m the
devil’s prime mate …
“What’s with all the homoeroticism? People talk about the white man’s penis envy. The white man ain’t got nothing on these genital-obsessed hip-hoppers.”
“I know, Ma. You should hear the guys at school. ‘Suck my dick, slob on the knob, lick my stick,’ non-fucking-stop. There’s this one boy whose nickname is Big Dick Black, and if someone asks him, ‘How big is it?’ he yells back, ‘Three fists and tip!’”
“I don’t get it.”
“Never mind.” I paused. “Mama?”
“Hmmm.”
“Where do poems come from?”
“Why? You a poet too?”
“Soon as I write a poem I will be.”
“It’s corny, but I think poems are echos of the voices in your head and from your past. Your sisters, your father, your ancestors talking to you and through you. Some of it is primal, some of it is hallucinatory bullshit. That madness those boys rapping ain’t nothing but urban folklore. They retelling stories passed down from chicken coop to apartment stoop to Ford coupe. Hear that rhyme, boy. Shit, I could get down and rap if I had to. MC Big Mama Osteoporosis in the house.”
“That reminds me, I did the family tree in Ms. Murphy’s class last week and everyone believed me. I couldn’t believe it.”
“Gunnar, what kind of poet do you plan to be?”
“I don’t know, the cool tantric type. Shaolin monk style. Lao Tsu, but with rhythm.”
“You’ll do the Kaufman legacy proud, I’m sure.”
The bullhorn crackled—“Okay, that’s a wrap”—and the video shoot was over. Hillside’s indigenous population stopped clamoring for attention. The Hollywood ethnographers were no longer examining the traditional native dances, and the dancers’ hands slowly dropped down to their sides, their rumps stopped shaking. Like photogenic Riefenstahl Nubians watching the white god’s helicopter pull away, the Hillside denizens watched the film crew coil the cables, load the trucks, and hustle off, leaving us to fight over the blessed remnants of Western civilization they left behind. My tribe wrestled for the rights to broken doughnuts and oily ham ’n’ cheese croissants, then scattered back to our hovels, triumphant from a good day’s hunt. Plastic cups clattered in the gutter; paper napkins and signed release forms fluttered about the village like lost leaves.
It occurred to me that maybe poems are like colds. Maybe I would feel a poem coming on. My chest would grow heavier, my eyes watery; my body temperature would fluctuate, and a ringing in my ears would herald the coming of a timeless verse.
Betty and Veronica sashayed up to my front gate, their faces powdered white with doughnut dust. This time Betty’s hair was in two ponytails that stood straight up and then branched off at right angles like antelope antlers. Veronica’s flapper-style pageboy was dyed silver and sprinkled with blue flakes. Betty slipped a pair of brass knuckles onto her right hand, tossed lightning-fast jabs at the fence post, and started cooing, “So Gunnar, I know you want to play hide-and-go-get-it with us.” Ping. The clang of Betty’s fist slamming against the fence sounded like a navy radar honing in on an enemy submarine. Ping. Ping.
“No.”
Ding. Ping. Ping. Pang. A hook and two jabs followed by a stiff right uppercut put a small dent in the post, and sparks flew off the al
uminum. I could smell the tangy scent of charred metal.
“But I’m the only boy. That’s not fair, two against one.”
Ping. Ping. Bing. Veronica removed a lead blackjack from her back pocket. “Look, motherfucker, either you play or I gives you some bruise tattoos.” She whipped the satchel at the gate and it gonged against the Montgomery Ward “quality” insignia, sending the fence’s lattice into rattling waves. When the aluminum convulsions died down, Betty and Veronica about-faced with military abruptness and loudly began to count backward from one hundred. I clicked my heels and gave the girls one of those casual halfhearted Sieg Heil salutes and hurdled over the fence. I sped down the street like an escaped convict, trying not to panic and running through the list of hackneyed movie tricks for outwitting the search party.
Ninety-six, ninety-five, ninety-four
Rule Number One—Change your appearance.
I zipped through the Willoughbys’ back yard and ripped a burgundy-and-gold USC sweatshirt from the clothesline. Their bull mastiff, Thor, began to bark, but I pacified him with a scratch between the ears and a stomach rub. Then it was over the back fence, through the alley, and past the Thrifttown liquor store.
Seventy-three, seventy-two, seventy-one
Rule Number Two—Make an effort to disguise your scent.
Despite California’s water conservation laws and a completely inorganic front yard consisting of a small patch of Astroturf, a porcelain turtle, and a plastic pink flamingo, weird Mr. Quigley’s sprinklers were on full blast twenty-four hours a day. I ran under the makeshift waterfall and, soaking wet, made my way around the corner and into the courtyard of the Piccadilly Arms apartments.
Forty-nine, forty-eight
Rule Number Three—Convince a member of the local populace that you are worthy of his or her assistance by recounting your tale of false imprisonment and the brutality you’ve suffered at the hands of the guards.
Dexter Sandiford was playing jacks in front of the laundry room, wearing only a pair of loose-fitting white polyester Montgomery Ward briefs. Sitting on his rump, tossing a bright orange ball in the air, and sweeping the jacks into the palm of his chubby little hand, he looked like Cupid. I talked fast.
