Paul Beatty - The Sellout

“Where’d he find you?” Marpessa asked Laura Jane, her eyes still fixed on the Milky Way.

“He hired me.”

“You a prostitute?”

“Damn near. Actress. Part-time submissive to pay the bills.”

“Parts must be hard to come by if you have to do this shit.” Marpessa cut her eyes at Laura Jane, bit her bottom lip, and turned her attention back to the celestial night.

“Have I ever seen you in anything?”

“I do mostly television commercials, but it’s tough. Whenever I’m up for a part, the producers look at me like you just did and say, ‘Not suburban enough,’ which in the industry is code for ‘too Jewish.’”

Sensing that Marpessa hadn’t quite cleared her chakras during her L.A. moment of silence, Laura Jane pressed her pretty face cheek-to-cheek with Marpessa’s jealous mug and together they studied themselves in the rearview mirror, looking like a pair of mismatched conjoined twins attached at the head. One middle-aged and black, the other young and white, sharing the same brain but not the same thought process. “Makes me wish I was black,” the white twin said, smiling and running her hands over her darker sister’s burning cheeks. “Black people get all the jobs.”

Marpessa must’ve put the bus on autopilot, because her hands were off the steering wheel and around Laura Jane’s neck. Not choking her, but pointedly straightening the collar of her dress, letting her evil twin know she was ready to pounce as soon as her side of the brain gave the okay. “Look, I doubt that black people ‘get all the jobs.’ But even if they do, it’s because Madison Avenue knows niggers spend a dollar and twenty cents of every dollar they earn on the crap they see on television. Let’s take the standard luxury car commercial…”

Laura Jane nodded as if she were really listening, slyly slipping her arms around Marpessa and onto the steering wheel. For a second we veered across the double yellow lines, but she made a deft correction and gently guided the bus back into the passing lane.

“Luxury cars. You were saying?”

“The subtle message of the luxury car commercial is ‘We here at Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Lexus, Cadillac, or whatever the fuck, are an equal-opportunity opportunist. See this handsome African-American male model behind the wheel? We’d like you, o holy, highly sought after white male consumer between the ages of thirty and forty-five, sitting in your recliner, we’d like you to spend your money and join our happy, carefree, prejudice-free world. A world where black men drive sitting straight up in their seats and not sunk so low and to the side you can see only the tops of their gleaming ball-peen heads.’”

“And what’s so wrong with that?”

“But the subliminal message is ‘Look, you lazy, fat, susceptible-to-marketing, poor excuse for a white man. You’ve indulged this thirty-second fantasy of a nigger dandy commuting from his Tudor castle in an aerodynamically designed piece of precision German engineering, so you’d better get your act together, bro, and stop letting these rack-and-pinion-steering, moon-roof, manufacturer’s-suggested-retail-price-paying monkeys show you up and steal your piece of the American dream!’”

At mention of the American dream, Laura Jane stiffened and returned the conn to Marpessa. “I’m offended,” she said.

“Because I used the word ‘nigger’?”

“No, because you’re a beautiful woman who just happens to be black, and you’re far too smart not to know that it isn’t race that’s the problem but class.”

Laura Jane planted a loud, wet smack on Marpessa’s forehead, and spun on her Louboutin heels to go back to work. I grabbed my love’s arm in mid swing, saving Laura Jane from a rabbit punch she never saw coming.

“You know why white people don’t ever just happen to be white? Because they all think they’ve just happened to have been touched by God, that’s why!”

I thumbed the lipstick print off Marpessa’s angry forehead.

“And tell that class oppression garbage to the fucking Indians and the dodo birds. Talking about I should ‘know better.’ She’s Jewish. She should know better.”

“She didn’t say she was Jewish. She said people think she looks Jewish.”

“You are a fucking sellout. That’s why I fucking dumped your ass. You never stick up for yourself. You’re probably on her side.”

Godard approached filmmaking as criticism, the same way Marpessa approached bus driving, but in any case, I thought Laura Jane had a point. Whatever Jewish people supposedly look like, from Barbra Streisand to the nominally Jewish-ish Whoopie Goldberg, you never see people in commercials that look “Jewish,” just as you never see black people that come off as “urban” and hence “scary,” or handsome Asian men, or dark-skinned Latinos. I’m sure those groups spend a disproportionate amount of their incomes on shit they don’t need. And, of course, in the idyllic world of television advertisement, homosexuals are mythical beings, but you see more ads featuring unicorns and leprechauns than you do gay men and women. And maybe nonthreatening African-American actors are overrepresented on television. Their master’s degrees from the Yale School of Drama and Shakespearean training having gone to waste, as they stand around barbecue pits delivering lines like “Prithee, homeboy. Forsooth, thou knowest that Budweiser is the King of Beers. Uneasy lies the frothy head that wears the crown.” But if you really think about it, the only thing you absolutely never see in car commercials isn’t Jewish people, homosexuals, or urban Negroes, it’s traffic.

The bus slowed as Marpessa leaned into a left turn that took us off the highway and down a hidden, winding service road. We crept past a limestone outcropping, a set of rickety wooden coastal access stairs, and through an unused parking lot. From there, she downshifted, threw the bus in gear, and dune-buggied the vehicle directly onto the sand, where she parallel-parked with the horizon and, since the tide was up, in about a foot and a half of seawater.

“Don’t worry, these things are like all-terrain vehicles and damn near amphibious. Between the mudslides and L.A.’s shitty sewage system, a bus has to be able to slog through anything. If we’d used Metro buses to land on the beaches of Normandy on D-day, World War II would’ve ended two years earlier.”

The doors, both back and front, flew open, and the Pacific lapped lovingly at the bottom stairs, turning the bus into one of those Bora-Bora hotel rooms that sit on pylons fifty yards out to sea. I half expected to see a Jack in the Box service rep pull up on a Jet Ski delivering towels and a second round of sourdough burgers and vanilla shakes.

Al Green was singing about love and happiness. Laura Jane stripped naked. In the dim interior light her thin, smooth, pale skin was as iridescent as the nacre interior of an abalone shell. She strutted passed us. “I played a mermaid in a tuna commercial once. However, I have to say there was no black talent on that shoot. How come there aren’t any African-American mermaids?”

“Because black women hate to get their hair wet.”

“Oh.” And with that, using the bus’s aluminum latticework like a stripper working the pole, she flung herself into the water. Followed by the Jack in the Box crew, also naked, except for their paper hats.

Hominy sidled up to the front and looked longingly at the water.

“Master, are we still in Dickens?”

“No, Hominy, we aren’t.”

“Well, where is Dickens, then? Out there past the water?”

“Dickens exists in our heads. Real cities have borders. And signs. And sister cities.”

“Will we have all that soon?”