by Paul Beatty
“You mean A.”
“Yeah, fucking A. Hey, where your boy Nick Scoby?”
“He’s listening to Miles Davis and refuses to come outside. Maybe tomorrow, he says.”
Psycho Loco situated himself in the epicenter of the gathering, looked over his incompetent troops, and spoke in a soft voice.
“Do we have a quorum?” he asked.
“Hell naw!” the boys responded.
With that Psycho Loco theatrically twisted the cap off his beer bottle. Most groups of boys pay homage to a slew of dead homies by saying, “This is for the brothers who ain’t here,” spilling a swallow of drink onto the sidewalk. Not the delinquents from the Gun Totin’ Hooligans. Though less elaborate than a Japanese tea ceremony, the GTH drinking ritual was equally reverent and definitely longer.
The Gun Totin’ Hooligans started out as a local dance troupe called the Body Eccentric. When Los Angeles’s funk music scene was in its heyday, kids from different neighborhoods met at the nightclubs and outdoor jams to dance against one another in “breakin’” or “poppin’” contests. After losing battles to companies known as the Flex-o-twists and the Invertebrates, the kids from Hillside often limped home with sprained ankles and broken bones from botching a complicated move. The city-wide ridicule became unbearable when, after a humiliating defeat by the Lindy Poppers, a one-legged Hillside boy named Peg-Leg Greg beat a contestant to death with his artificial limb. To ensure the survival of the species, the dance troupes evolved into gangs and the war was on. Countless drive-bys and handkerchief purchases later, the Gun Totin’ Hooligans were the bravest but most inept gang in Los Angeles. Suffering more casualties than the rest of the city’s gangs combined, the Hooligans had developed a tradition that required that the thirsts of every parched and perished comrade be quenched. Thus the endless beer ceremony.
“Riff-raff, rest in peace.” Pour.
“Tank-tank, sweet dreams.” Dribble.
“Weebles, six feet under.” Splash.
“L’il Weebles, smoking weed with the angels.” Spatter.
“Baby Weebles, dozin’ and decomposin’,” Bloop. Bloop.
When GTH finally finished honoring their dead, they’d gone through six containers of beer and Psycho Loco was standing ankle-deep in a pool of beer foam.
The main reason for GTH’s high death rate was that initially the gang didn’t tote guns. They fought their enemies with antiquated weaponry such as blow darts, tomahawks, and spears. The founding members thought the moniker would be a good subterfuge. Who’d suspect a gang called Gun Totin’ Hooligans in a vicious gangland lassoing?
The gang owed its formidable notoriety to Psycho Loco’s ruthlessness. Tattooed with naked women and adorned with a chain of paper doll figurines, Psycho Loco’s arms resembled the kill tally on the cowling of a World War II airplane. The red Swiss cross on his right forearm represented the paramedic whose death had resulted in the bid upstate.
The mourning party for Pumpkin heated up into a war dance; the boys got antsy and began sloshing beer on one another and hollering hoodlum apothegms. “What we gonna do when a GTH Crip takes the final dip? Take a set trip, load the clip, cruise the strip, give a punk-ass buster a hellified fat lip. Nothing is even steven till everybody’s bleedin’. Pumpkin, we love you! We’ll make ’em pay!”
Psycho Loco yelled for everyone to shut up and grabbed a boy named Butane by his eyelids. Everyone flinched in vicarious pain and uttered a barely audible but collective “Ow.” Psycho Loco went into his proud drunken warrior tirade. “What do you mean, we? Every time one of us gets capped, who does the revenge killing? My ass. When I first moved here, you motherfuckers was scared of every vato on the block, especially Raymond Keniston. ‘Juan Julio, Juan Julio, Raymond took my money. Raymond threw my bike off the roof. Raymond threw my father into the garbage truck.’ Punk-ass yellow rat bastards. Joe Shenanigans, when Raymond stepped on your pet frog Kermie on purpose, didn’t I make him eat it and every fly that landed on your screen door for two weeks?”
“That’s ’cause you my gumba. My main molan-yan from the old country.”
“Fuck it, I’m tired of doing y’all’s dirty work. After the payback for Pumpkin, that’s it, I quit bangin’.”
Every gangster in GTH dropped to his knees and started kowtowing. “You can’t quit, Psycho Loco. We need you.” They knew if Psycho Loco quit, there would be a mini-pogrom on GTH members.
Psycho Loco laughed, released Butane’s eyelids, and plopped down next to me. We drank some beers, and eventually a few of us made a foray through Cheviot Heights in Psycho Loco’s van. We celebrated Halloween and tried to forget about Pumpkin by taking turns smashing car windows with a crowbar. The BMWs and Mercedes Benzes were all small fish when we saw our Moby Dick, a thirty-fíve-foot motor home parked in front of a huge three-story house complete with marble portico and a set of tall wooden doors. While Captain Ahab and the rest of the crew harpooned and skinned the mobile home, this sailor, drunk with jealousy and resentment, crept across the lawn and uprooted a small metal sign that read THIS PROPERTY GUARDED BY CHEV-TEC SECURITY.
After an hour of crippling cars, we weaved down Nalgas Drive back home. Psycho Loco made a left onto Wiltern Boulevard, reached under his seat, and pulled out his nine-millimeter. The boys passed the gun around, commented on its weight, barrel length, muzzle velocity, then stuck their arms out the window and into the humid air. With a pop the streetlights flashed, then burst into incandescent amber mini-novas, the plate-glass windows collapsing like families.
“Shoot this shit, Kaufman.”
I didn’t hesitate. Grabbing the gun in two hands, I squeezed off a three-shot sound poem that slapped a complacent hot southern California night to attention.
“Aim, nigger.”
“I am.”
“What you shooting at?”
“God, motherfucker.”
Nothing goes faster than fifteen bullets. In need of another fix, we stopped by Lettie’s, Psycho Loco’s girlfriend, for more ammunition. Hopping back into the car with a sly look on his face, Psycho Loco showed us a handful of bullets and put the car in gear. As we sped away, he announced with a hint of contriteness in his voice, “You should have seen the look on the old girl’s face. ‘Where you going?’ Like I know.”
Riding in the back seat of the car, I felt as if I were circling the neighborhood on some R-rated carousel. Familiar landmarks blurred into the sunrise, the stupid merry-go-round music refusing to go away. When I arrived home, I planted the metal Chev-Tec flag in the crab grass, threw up on my mother’s lone flowering rosebush, and tried to tear a set of unwanted chevrons from my memory.
“Gunnar, Pumpkin’s funeral is at four-thirty tomorrow afternoon.”
“I’ll be there.” I slammed the front door a little too loudly, distracting my mother from her morning eggs and crossword puzzle.
“Gunnar, where you been?”
“Shooting up the neighborhood. Ma, I’m becoming so black it’s a shame.” I wanted to explain to her that living out there was like being in a never-ending log-rolling contest. You never asked why the log was rolling or who was rolling the log. You just spread your arms and kept your feet moving, doing your best not to fall off. Spent all your time trying to anticipate how fast and in what direction the log would spin next. I wanted to take a seat next to my mother and use this lumberjack metaphor to express how tired I was. I wanted to chew my runny eggs and talk with my mouth full. Tell her how much I missed the calm equipoise of my old life but how I had grown accustomed to running in place, knowing nothing mattered as long as I kept moving. I wanted to say these things to her, but my breath smelled like wet dog shit with a hint of sulfur.
That morning I dreamed of chasing a brown-haired white boy down a flight of stairs and into the normally busy but now empty intersection. The boy and I used to be friends, but he had wronged me somehow, though I couldn’t say exactly how, and he and I both knew that the transgression merited death. The streets looked as i
f they’d been evacuated because of a nuclear threat or a hurricane gathering momentum off the coast. I chased the boy past a row of abandoned cars and caught him in the middle of the street under a traffic light stanchion that was swaying wildly in the wind. I shot him twice in the chest and he fell in the crosswalk. When I inspected the body, there were no bullet wounds, no blood, just two frayed holes in his yellow oxford shirt. Bending down, gun in hand, I opened his closed eyes as the noise of sirens and bystanders filled the streets. Was I hero or criminal? Psycho Loco ran over and wrested the gun from my hands, saying that he’d take the fall so I could go to college. I awoke recalling that it hadn’t been long ago when I was the only black person in my dreams; now I was shooting white kids in the street.
At church I slumped in a pew worn smooth by restless rear ends shifting from side to side trying to keep their owners awake through another young-black-man-done-gone sermon. Scoby, Psycho Loco, and the gang had heard this speech so often they called out the biblical passages before the reverend: Corinthians 7:13, Leviticus 2:10, Peter 4:25, Book of Job 1:17. The reverend gripped the sides of his podium and tried to outshout his hecklers and impress upon the rowdies how Orwell “Pumpkin” Ferguson had wasted his precious youth. “If the young man had only spent more of his time in church, he might have spent a little less time in that box.” I picked up a Bible and attempted to follow along with the reverend’s eschatological harangue, but I didn’t know where the books of Corinthians, Peter, and Job were. Flipping back and forth between Old and New Testaments, I ripped the book’s thin pages to shreds.
As the mourners prepared to file past the corpse, the minister asked the aged organist to play some sorrowful hymn the family had requested to accompany their son’s soul to the hereafter. The organist’s knobby fingers methodically pounded out a lifeless tune, halted every two bars by violent coughing attacks and sticky organ keys that required a butter knife to pop them back up into position. Pumpkins sendoff dirge was more like one long emphysemic wheeze. His parents started to cry, and I imagined Pumpkin sitting up in his coffin saying, “Get me to the fucking hearse, already” and disassociating himself from the fiasco.
Scoby removed a tape from his portable cassette player and popped it into the church’s sound system. The mewling strains of Miles Davis echoed off the panelled walls. The grateful organ player stopped sweating and lit a cigarette. The Hooligans strolled past the open casket, tossing bullets, shotgun shells, joints, switchblades, and cans of beer into it. If Pumpkin found himself in need of money, he could open a general store in the afterlife.
When it was my turn to pay my respects, his diminutive Creole-colored parents shook my hand with tearful solemnity. “It’s mighty nice of you to stop by. Our son used to tell us how he beat you to a pulp when you first moved into the neighborhood. Good luck with the basketball and the poetry.” I looked into Pumpkin’s brittle face and tried to hide my indifference. Propped on one knee, I placed my elbows on the edge of his box and started to utter a phony prayer. Then I noticed a black-light painting of a black Jesus bathed in purple light hanging over Pumpkin’s body like a guardian angel, a lime-green crown of thorns imbedded in his fuzzy crushed-velvet Afro. Clearly Pumpkin was in reliable company. I asked Jesus if, after he’d taken care of Pumpkin’s wounds, he could help him clear customs and grant him permission to enter the afterworld despite the armaments, marijuana, and alcoholic beverages laid across his chest. I ended my request with an earnest “Amen,” loud enough for everyone to hear.
During the eulogy at Immaculate Lawns Cemetery, I was absent-mindedly shooting imaginary jump shots into the empty grave when Psycho Loco told the reverend to shut up and asked me to recite a poem before they laid Pumpkin in the ground. I composed the following poem.
Elegy for a Vicious Midget
Pumpkin, his homunculus casket
only big enough for four pallbearers,
is lowered into earth
next to his grandfather
a diminutive light-skinned black man
who passed for white Munchkin
in the Wizard of Oz
offered a lollipop to Dorothy
then drank himself to death
with pint-size blended whiskey residuals
a squat family cries
and shakes pudgy fingers
at the wicked witch
of the West Side
The reading signified my unofficial ascension to poète maudit for the Gun Totin’ Hooligans and by extension the neighborhood. My duties were similar to those of a Li Po or Lu Chao-lin in the employ of a Tang dynasty warlord: immortalize the rulers and say enough scholarly bullshit to keep from getting my head chopped off. It wasn’t all bad. As word spread of my lyrical prowess, I earned movie money as a human Hallmark card, reading sappy epithalamiums at weddings and dour elegies at funerals.
Once in a while a poet from another fiefdom seeking to challenge my reputation would swagger into the neighborhood demanding a poetic showdown. We’d duel in impromptu verse; tankas at seven paces or sestinas at noon, no use of the words “love,” “heart,” and “soul.” I sent many bards home in shame. Their employers carried them out on stretchers as they frantically thumbed through their rhyming dictionaries wondering how they had fucked up a rondeau so badly. I heard that one quixotic laureate I defeated has taken an eternal vow of silence and crisscrosses the country playing the bongos at the graves of famous poets for food.
Home Grown
young G puts down his joint for a moment
and through red-slitted eyes
checks out his burned-out homies
sprawled all over mama’s burgundy leatherette corner group
asleep under a blanket of smoke
tucked in by the slow jams on the radio
who are these men
he’s grown up with
traded comic books with
been tested for VD with
what are they really like when none of the others are around
do they …
take bubble baths?
stop and stare at the setting sun?
like to vacuum?
watch the MacNeil/Lehrer hour on the sly?
the young G rousts his boys. “Hey!
All I know about you motherfuckers
is that y’all are niggers who care.”
one of his boys lifts his groggy head and shouts back,
“And that’s all you need to know.”
*
Two days after Pumpkin’s funeral I was in Psycho Loco’s living room helping him choose an appropriate eye shadow to go with his molé brown skin and the tight blue chiffon dress he was wearing. We’d narrowed it down to the chartreuse cinnamon and the peccadillo plum. Admiring his lusty visage in his compact, Psycho Loco flapped his false eyelashes, blew himself a kiss, and went with the peccadillo.
Today was the day the Gun Totin’ Hooligans would avenge Pumpkin’s ignominious death. Most of the boys wanted to dismember Ms. Kim, the owner of the corner store where Pumpkin died, but Psycho Loco talked them out of it, astutely pointing out that the families of every fool in the room would starve to death, because Ms. Kim carried them on credit for two weeks out of the month. It wasn’t very hard to find a scapegoat. The obvious choice was the Ghost Town Black Shadows from the Bilkenson Gardens Projects. The Shadows had been GTH’s arch-enemies for so long that gang members on both sides termed the animosities “the Crusades,” and here was the GTH strike force, dressed in drag and primping in preparation to go “Ghost-busting.” All the homeboys were “Hooliganed down,” flaunting their colors like rhesus monkeys in heat showing off their blue asses. They fought over who would have the largest breasts and who would wear the expensive Wanton perfume. They stuffed halter tops with blue toilet paper, daintily knotted blue scarves about their necks, smoothed pleated blue skirts, cringed as they slipped their blue-painted toenails into blue high heels and blue-steeled .25 pistols into blue leather handbags.
The idea was to roll in
to Ghost Town and take their hideouts by surprise. I wished the homies luck and was headed home when out of nowhere Psycho Loco grabbed me by my throat and planted a sticky kiss on my cheek.
“Where you going, Gunnar?”
“I’m going home.”
“You not coming on our little sortie?”
“Hell naw, not unless you got a bulletproof brassiere in the closet.”
“Look, just come. You play ball and write, this is what I do. I shoot motherfuckers. You know I’m going to be at every one of your games this year cheering your ass, so you come and cheer mine. You’ll be our date.”
I sat in the back seat of a convertible Volkswagen Rabbit, squeezed between Joe Shenanigans, who looked stunning in a Liz Claiborne pantsuit, and fat No M.O. Clark, who wore a Macy’s pregnancy jumpsuit set off nicely with silver hoop earrings. Pookie Hamilton drove and Psycho Loco rode shotgun. We went into battle, a three-car armada of horsehair-wigged corsairs sailing over the open concrete, sipping rum and listening to Pookie Hamilton tell sailor stories.
Pookie was something of a neighborhood celebrity. He had an unwanted cameo in Peace Officer, a nationally syndicated live-action video docudrama. In Pookie’s episode, a clean-cut white cop is driving down a dark street, quickly glancing from the road to the camera and explaining what it’s like to patrol the streets of West Los Angeles. A drop-top Volkswagen exactly like the one we were riding in speeds past the officer’s patrol car. The cop looks into the camera as if he’s talking to his partner and says, “See that. That nig … uh, turd … uh, guy is probably intoxicated.” The camera pans to the windshield; you see the Volkswagen swerving in and out of its lane. Every five seconds or so, a fountain of vomit spews out of the driver’s window. The police car’s red and white lights turn the freeway into a disco. The police officer requests to see Pookie’s license and registration. Pookie hands the officer his papers and accidentally drops a beer can onto the street. The officer asks Pookie to step out of his car and tells him that he is being stopped for suspicion of driving while intoxicated. Pookie willingly but unsteadily steps out of the car to take the sobriety test. The cop says, “Sir, will you please count backward from a hundred?” Smiling into the camera, Pookie agrees and says, “Dred-nuh eno, enin-ytenin, thgie-ytenin, neves-ytenin …” The next scene shows Pookie handcuffed in the back seat of a patrol car and on his way to waking up with a hangover in jail.
