by Paul Beatty
A thin white woman with a badly scarred face was talking. “Ciao bella, ciao bella. My name is Peyote Chandler, of the Greenwich, Connecticut, Chandlers. Let’s see, now. I graduated from Londonderry Academy with honors. My favorite poet is Sylvia Plath. My mother is the ambassador to Pakistan, and my father now owns a carpet factory in north Asia. The factory employs hundreds of starving children at what I believe is a respectable living wage of seven rupees a week. I believe in Third World mysticism, animism, extraterrestrial life, and—”
“What the fuck happened to your mug?” I interrupted, chin in my hand and bored with her Mayflower pedigree.
Peyote was eager to explain. “When I was twelve, my boyfriend, Skip Pettibone Helmsford, broke up with me, so I tried to kill myself by sticking my head in the oven like Sylvia Plath did. Only I forgot to blow out the pilot light and I stuck my head into a preheated four-hundred-and-fifty-degree inferno.”
A chubby bearded boy in khakis a size too small and a rumpled Oxford shirt moved his elephantine mass to the front of the class, licking the edges of his Drum cigarette. “Greetings, my name is Chadwick Osterdorf III. I graduated from Choate with high honors and I think the only true poet ever to walk the earth was Rimbaud.” Some parliamentary “hear, hears” rang out from the back of the class. “It was in his footsteps that I spent this past summer selling guns to downtrodden ghetto youth to defend themselves against the oppressive system.”
This time I lifted my head off the desk to interrupt. “Come on, Rimbaud wasn’t no gun-running revolutionary. What he really wanted to sell was slaves, black African niggers, but he was too stupid to catch any, so he sold weapons to some king who ripped him off. Some dissident. If you was really a Rimbaudite, you’d amputate those two cellulite-filled legs of yours so the downtrodden ghetto youth wouldn’t have to worry about you kicking ’em in the ass.”
Professor Edelstein pulled the sleeves of his tweed jacket and pressed his wire-rimmed glasses into his tanned forehead, raising the nerve to confront the boisterous black kid. “And who might you be, young man?”
“My name is Gunnar Kaufman.”
“Gunnar Kaufman? Gunnar Kaufman from Los Angeles?”
“Yeah.”
Edelstein popped out of his seat. “I heard you might be attending BU, but I never dreamed you’d take my class. I saw your poem ‘If Niggers Could Fly’ in the latest issue of Locution. I’ve been thinking about it all week.” Edelstein took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling. “‘If niggers could fly, where would we alight? We orbit a treeless world, nest on eaveless clouds, unable to stop flapping our wings for even a second, in constant migration to nowhere.’ If niggers could fly. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. How old were you when you wrote that?”
“Thirteen. I was attempting to—”
The Rimbaud wannabe removed a copy of Inkstone from his knapsack. “Here’s a haiku you wrote.”
the full May moon,
Christopher Walken’s forehead
finally has competition
Sylvia Plath picked at her scars and said, “I have pictures of your poems.”
“What you mean, you have pictures of my poems?”
She produced a coffee-table book of photographs entitled Ghettotopia: An Anthropological Rending of the Ghetto through the Street Poems of an Unknown Street Poet Named Gunnar Kaufman.
“What they mean by ‘an unknown street poet named Gunnar Kaufman?’ More to the point, what the hell is a street poet?”
“Gunnar, the urban piquancy of your work is so resonant, so resplendent, so resounding … you make the destitution of your environs leap off the page. You’re my inspiration.”
“What about Sylvia Plath?”
“Well, it’s really you. I thought that if I mentioned a black poet, I wouldn’t be taken seriously by the rest of the class.”
A white woman dressed in a tie-dyed sundress, her hair knotted in blond cornrow braids, slid her fleshy rear end onto my desk and announced herself, kicking her thick ankles high in the air. “Hi, my name is Negritude.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“My parents named me that so I would be a reminder of the hagiocratic innocence possessed by black peoples around the world.”
“Visceral sainthood—I see. And the braids?”
“I feel more powerful with my hair like this, really Nubian. You must know what I mean. Your scalp pulled so tight you can hear the howls of the jackals, the bellows of the hippopotami. Oh, I could properly welcome home an Ashanti warrior returned from the hunt with a fresh kill. Would you like to hear me ululate?”
“Not really.”
“Alilililililililili!”
I panicked and dashed out of the room, with my classmates and Professor Edelstein close behind. “I can’t believe it—Gunnar Kaufman, the underground neologist, the poet’s poet, right here in my poetry workshop. Only in America.” I felt like I’d been outed and exposed by my worst enemies, white kids who were embarrassingly like myself but with whom somehow I had nothing in common. To prove it I walked through the center of campus and slowly began to undress. Near the School of Engineering I released my sweater to the Boston winds. It sailed like a magic carpet past the trolleys and over the heads and outstretched hands of Professor Edelstein and the students of Creative Writing 104. My shirt, shorts, and underwear followed, sucked into a mini-tornado near the College of Liberal Arts. The clothes spiraled at a dizzying speed with dead leaves and crushed milk cartons. Soon the twister died and they fell to the ground, only to be pounced on like piñata candy by the class.
I continued down Commonwealth Avenue, naked save for sneakers and socks. My black lower-middle-class penis fluttered stiffly in the wind like a weather vane, first to the left, then suddenly to the right. When I reached the vestibule of my apartment building, the campus police closed in on me. I heard Professor Edelstein shout, “It’s okay, he’s a poet. Matter of fact, the best black … the best poet writing today.” The cops instantly backed off. I was protected by poetic immunity. I had permission to act crazy.
I pulled off an officer’s hat and mussed his hair, then skipped up the stairs to my apartment and plopped face down on the couch, my head on Yoshiko’s lap. She rested her textbook on my cheek and with her left hand cleaved the crack of my ass like a hacksaw.
“You all right, baby?”
“Fine. What you reading?”
“Macroeconomics.”
“You don’t mind me here?”
“Nope, just don’t move too much. How was your first class?”
There was a timid knock at the door. “Judge for yourself.” Edelstein entered, followed by Rimbaud, Plath, Ginsberg, Eliot, and the rest of the poetry canon, bashfully trying to avert their eyes by gazing at Coach Shimimoto’s watercolor prints on the walls.
“Yoshiko, this is my creative writing class. Class, this is my wife, Yoshiko.” Shy hellos, then whispers all around.
“He’s married? Oh, fucking cool. I’m in Gunnar Kaufman’s pad and he’s naked, intense.”
“Gunnar, a few of your classmates want to know if they can keep your clothes as mementos. You know, they might be worth something one day.”
“I don’t think one sleeve of a torn T-shirt is going to be worth much.”
“What we really came by to say was that we feel you have to publish a collection of your work. Why don’t you compile a manuscript, and I’ll take care of the publishing end? I know some big-wig Yalies in New York, and you should have a decent advance in a week and a book by spring. The people, your people, need to see your work.”
Yoshiko tapped her macroeconomics book on my head, which I interpreted to mean “Say yes.”
“Okay, I’ll give you some things.”
“What about a title?”
“How about, ummm, Watermelanin.”
“Gunnar, you know, this is going to change your life.”
The door burst open, then quickly slammed shut.
“Damn, nigger, every time I come over, Y
oshiko got her hand halfway up your ass. But you know what they say—‘Once you go Asian, there’s no other persuasion.’” It was Scoby, not bothering to knock, standing in the middle of the living room oblivious to the other uninvited guests and talking loudly to make himself heard over his stereo headphones. “What this shit about your life going to change?”
“He’s going to publish a book of poems.”
“I can speak for myself, Yoshiko. She’s right, I’m going to publish a book of poems.” Yoshiko subtly plucked a hair from my anus. “Ow.”
Professor Edelstein motioned for his class to open their notebooks and take notes. My visitors cleared some space, and Scoby sat on the floor Indian-style, playing an imaginary vibraphone. I guessed he was still listening to Lionel Hampton.
“Publishing a book of poems don’t change your life as much as it changes everyone else’s life. Sad as your shit is, fools going to be jumping off roofs and shit. I heard if you commit suicide your freshman year, your roommate automatically gets a perfect grade-point average. That true?”
“You thinking of committing suicide?”
“I don’t know, maybe. Depends on what your poems say.”
“What you doing tonight?”
“I don’t know. Ain’t shit to do in this town.”
“What do you mean, Boston’s a great party town,” Negritude broke in, looking up from her notes and batting her eyelashes in my direction.
Yoshiko threw her macro book at the interloper, hitting her squarely in the jaw. “Get your slothful, fey, hippy behinds out of our apartment, now!”
The class hustled out of the room, a stream of Japanese curse words escorting them to the door.
“Gunnar, don’t make me have to hurt one of these stupid white bitches.”
“Slothful, fey? Honey, your English is getting really good. What are we going to do tonight?”
*
There wasn’t a whole lot of nigger nightlife in Boston, much less any fun spots for Japanese nationals. When we first arrived, we cruised the local bars, garish nightspots crammed with white people sloshing beer on one another and singing corny white pop hits from the 1980s. Yoshiko must have punched a hundred guys who tried to pick her up with the line from the Vapors’ big hit, “I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so.” Looking for a more austere environment, we tried the gay spots in the South End. Our favorite hangout was Club Tribadism, a gay/lesbian bar with the best jazz jukebox in the city. The patrons tolerated us until one night Nicholas and another patron got into a fight over whether Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” could be deciphered as a paean to a mentally ill queer. After a little sword fighting with pool cues, we were driven into the street and banished from Club Tribadism forever. Scoby got in the last word when he proclaimed that Mel Torme was the ugliest dyke he’d ever seen.
By October we had finally figured out that the colored folks lived in Roxbury. Roxbury was an old, hilly community practically inaccessible by public transportation. For the most part it was a desolate place, with little to offer except decent basketball competition and a few juke joints. Our regular spot was Oscar’s Onyx, a musty blues bar at the top of the hill on Mission Avenue. Friday nights brothers in platform shoes would get into knife fights, slashing the air with their eyes closed like orchestra conductors. Scoby’s barbs always roused the crowd, “You stupid hick-ass bean-eating stiletto-carrying Cooley High niggers is still wearing leather jackets and talking about ‘Stand back, sucker, fo’ I cut cha.’ Niggers probably think the Black Panthers is still active.” Later on male and female strippers with names like Chocolate and Brutus walked from table to table, soliciting dollar bills in exchange for a feel. Yoshiko and Scoby had a thing for a potbellied she-male stripper named Smattering of Applause. Smattering of Applause rolled his hips and fondled his tits, and when she bent over to claim her hard-earned tips, hairy butt to the audience, Yoshiko and Scoby would pelt her rear end with balled-up dollar bills. I liked the place because the bartenders wrapped napkins around the beer bottles before they handed them to you and could never adequately explain why. “Habit,” they said. The problem was that every night wasn’t Friday night. On weekdays, while Scoby and Yoshiko did their homework, I had nothing to do. Scoby suggested I join a club.
I called Dexter Waverly, president of the citywide black student union, and asked when the next Ambrosia meeting was. The black student union was originally called Umoja, but the name was changed because of the whites’ inability to pronounce the Swahili word for unity. Dexter cleared his throat. “Mhotep, son of Africa. The next meeting is Monday night at eight in the School of Management basement. Come early and we’ll fit you for a dashiki. You can play a talking drum, can’t you?”
I purposely arrived late at the gathering. Harvard, BU, MIT Negroes were wearing loud African garb over their Oxford shirts and red suspenders, drinking ginger beer, and using their advertising skills to plan how best to package the white man’s burden. “No alcohol, brother,” someone shouted. I chugged my real beer, burped, and took a seat in the back, picking up a discarded agenda from the floor. At the top of the sheet was the Ambrosia motto, “The happy slave has a right to be a slave, but is still a slave nonetheless.” I could hear my mother on the phone: “Join, Gunnar, sounds like an intelligent bunch of young people.”
The Ambrosia members outshouting one another about how brave they’d be fighting on the front lines of America’s race war reminded me of a small-town volunteer fire department shining an already shiny engine and bragging about how brave they’d be if they ever fought a real fire. “But are you ready to die and kill for your people?” said chief firefighter Dexter Waverly. Dexter wore a red dashiki trimmed with miniature elephant tusks and tightly gripped the sides of the lectern with both hands. Rallymaster, they called him: able to form a coalition at a moment’s notice, knows the copy center with the cheapest rates, media friendly, dynamic speaker.
Bored with the racial braggadocio, Dexter raised a hand for quiet, and the muttering stopped. I wanted to dislike Dexter—it was obvious he was a charlatan—but I was awestruck at how such an ugly motherfucker, with an eczema condition so severe that when he furrowed his brow tiny flakes of skin fell to the lectern, could hold an audience spellbound with a single gesture. I could hear his eyeballs crinkle as he looked up from the one-item agenda and scanned his audience. He seemed so angst-ridden I wanted to throw him a dog biscuit.
“Brothers and sisters”—uh-oh—“Comrade Essie Brooks’s combination fashion show and literacy program is a wonderful idea. A stroke of genius, of black feminine genius, of rump-rolling, look-at-that-butter, greasy, you-know-how-we-do, big-black-titty genius. Praise due to Sister Essie Brooks and all sisters like her.”
The men barked and stamped their feet. The women swooned and said loud amens, raising their hands in the air like castaways trying to flag down an ocean liner. I sat transfixed, trying to figure out how Dexter, a man whom I was seeing for the first time not in the cuddly company of a white woman, was the Emperor Jones of the Ivy League. Usually dating exclusively white was, for a black person, the equivalent of multiplying a lifetime of accomplishments by zero. It didn’t matter what your previous accomplishments were; abolitionist, Motown diva, Olympic figure-skater, inventor of the sky hook, you had zilch stature amongst the folks. Dexter managed to be the school Mandingo and maintain his race loyalty.
Sometimes I’d catch him in the back alleys with the white woman of the moment. He’d greet me with a hearty “Hey, black,” and place a reverent fist over his heart. If I looked quizzically at his date, he’d flash the “I know it’s hard to tell” smile and say, “No cause for alarm, brother. Sister Cindy Zwittledorf is of Brazilian descent. Third World solidarity, my brother.” To validate his claim further, Dexter would wave a small parade flag representing the woman’s supposed place of origin in tiny circles. “Viva Uruguay! Tres hurras por Argentina! Oyé como va Bolivia!”
I admit I admired his chutzpah and ingenuity. When Yoshiko a
nd I walked the campus, I sometimes wilted under the evil stares, cowering behind Yoshiko’s back and covering my face in a fit of fake sneezes or forced yawns.
“Why you always sneeze when black people are around?”
“I’m allergic, baby.”
“Go ’head, Dexter,” a woman in front shouted. Dexter nodded in appreciation and continued.
“The fashion show-literacy program will use the Afro-chic to uplift the Afro-weak. What we propose is not a marriage—marriage, if you’re lucky, only lasts a lifetime. What we propose is an intellectual inheritance, an eternal trust fund for minds yet unborn. Young, black, not-yet-tainted-by-the-toxic-dyes-of-self-hatred minds. We talking tabula vivé la rasa. Nowadays, when you talk to the teachers of our youth, they say, ‘The young bastards and bastardettes can’t learn. They have short attention spans.’ Well, then you need to lengthen the attention span. If the river widens, you extend the bridge. When man invented the jet, did they say, ‘No, man, you cannot fly these supersonic jets, the runway is too short—you can’t take off, and if you manage to get the plane off the ground, you can’t land’? No, they lengthened the runway. And we gonna lengthen the fashion runway for our little black jets. Stretch their attention spans with fine black folks modeling black clothes. Each model male and fee-male—I say fee-male ’cause it cost to be a black woman—each model will carry a sign with a grammar lesson on it. I can see the enthusiasm on the children’s faces now. Imagine with me, if you will, the fine and sexy premed major light-skinned Linda Rucker, in a little one-piece bathing suit carrying a sign that reads ‘i before e except after c.’ There’ll be booty and learning for days. You think when the boys go to the bathroom and start beating off they going to be saying, ‘Goddamn, that bitch was fine’? No. They gone be pulling on their growing black manhood saying, “I before e except after c.” Now you know we not going to cheat our young African women out of their thrill. We’ll have the bronze god and star running back Thor Haverlock in bikini briefs thunder down the runway with a sign reading “A sentence is a complete thought” balanced on his bulge. When the girls get those hot flashes that accompany puberty, you better believe they’re gonna be fantasizing in complete sentences. ‘Jesus Christ, that boy is fine as hell.’ Anybody have any other ideas for grammatical phrases we can use? Gunnar Kaufman, esteemed poet, first-time Ambrosia attendee, what about you, my brother?”
