Paul Beatty - The Sellout

Marpessa sorted me out, though. I was eighteen. Two weeks from finishing up my first semester of college. We were in the guesthouse. She — thumbing through the bloodstained BDSM IV . Me — in my usual postcoital position, rolled up into a ball like a frightened teenage armadillo, and crying my eyes out for no earthly reason.

“Here, I finally figured out what’s wrong with you,” she said, snuggling up to me. “This is what you have, Attachment Disorder.” Why do people have to tap the page when they know they’re right? A quick read-aloud will suffice. You don’t have to rub it in with all the smug finger tapping.

“Attachment Disorder — Markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate social relatedness in most contexts, scenes, and happenings. Beginning before age five and continuing into adulthood as evidenced by either 1. and/or 2.:

1. persistent failure to initiate or respond in a developmentally appropriate fashion to most social interactions (e.g., the child or adult responds to caregivers and black lovers with a mixture of approach, avoidance, and resistance to comforting. May exhibit frozen watchfulness) . Hoi Polloi Translation — The nigger flinches or jumps whenever you touch him. Runs hot and cold, and has no friends to speak of. And when he isn’t staring at you like you just got off the banana boat, he’s crying like a little bitch.

2. diffuse attachments as manifested by indiscriminate sociability with marked inability to exhibit appropriate selective attachments to black people and things (e.g., excessive familiarity with relative strangers or lack of selectivity in choice of attachment figures). Hoi Polloi Translation — The nigger fucking white hos out there at UC Riverside.

It was a miracle we lasted as long as we did.

I stared at her blurry silhouette for a long time before she poked her head from behind the chessboard-patterned shower curtain. I’d forgotten how brown she was. How good she looked, her stringy hair clumped to the side of her face. Sometimes the sweetest kisses are the shortest. We could discuss the clean-shaven pubes later.

“Bonbon, what’s the time frame?”

“For us, from now until. For the segregation thing, I’m thinking I want to be done by Hood Day. That gives me another six months.”

Marpessa pulled me in and handed me a tube of apricot scrub that hadn’t been opened since the last time she showered off here. I rubbed the exfoliant into her back and scratched a message into the grainy, supposedly skin-softening swirls. She always could read my writing.

“Because between that nigger Foy and the rest of world, this shit’s going to catch up with you sooner or later. Forget the racial segregation, you know motherfuckers wasn’t too keen on Dickens even when it did exist.”

“You were in that car today, weren’t you?”

“Shit, when Cuz and my brother picked me up from work and we drove back here, soon as we crossed that white line you painted, it was like, you know, when you enter a banging-ass house party and shit’s bumping, and you get that thump in your chest and you be like, if I were to die right now, I wouldn’t give a fuck . It was like that. Crossing the threshold.”

“You threw that fucking orange. I knew it.”

“Hit that stupid motherfucker square in the face.”

Marpessa pressed the crack of her shapely rear end into my groin. She had to get back to the kids, we wouldn’t have much time, and knowing me, we wouldn’t need much time.

Despite that initial scratch of her seventeen-year itch, Marpessa insisted we start slow. Since she worked weekends and put in crazy overtime, we had to date on Mondays and Tuesdays. Our nights on the town were trips to the mall, coffee shop poetry readings, and, most bothersome for me, open-mike nights at the Plethora Comedy Club. Marpessa hated my Wheaton-Chaff segregation joke and insisted that I improve my sense of humor by learning to tell a joke. When I protested, she’d say, “Look, now you ain’t the only black man in the world that can’t fuck, but I refuse to go out with the only one with absolutely no sense of humor.”

From the music clubs to the jailhouses to the fact that you can find Korean taco trucks only in white neighborhoods, L.A. is a mind-numbingly racially segregated city. But the epicenter of social apartheid is the stand-up comedy scene. The city of Dickens’s paltry contribution to the long-running tradition of black funnymen is an open-mike night, sponsored by the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, that on the second Tuesday of the month transforms the shop into a twenty-table club called the Comedy Act and Forum for the Freedom of Afro-American Witticism and Mannerisms That Showcase the Plethora of Afro-American Humorists for Whom … there’s more, but I’ve never managed to finish reading the temporary marquee they hang over the giant donut sign that hovers over the parking lot. I just call the place the Plethora for short, because despite Marpessa’s insistence that I had no sense of humor, there were a plethora of unfunny black guys who, like every black sports analyst trying to sound intelligent, use and misuse the word “plethora” at every opportunity.

As in:

Q: How many white boys does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: A plethora! Because they stole it from a black man! Lewis Latimer, a black man who invented the lightbulb and a plethora of other smart-ass shit!

And believe me, jokes like that would get a plethora of applause. Every black male, I don’t care what shade or political persuasion he is, secretly thinks he can do one of three things better than anyone in the world: play basketball, rap, or tell jokes.

If Marpessa thinks that I’m not funny, she never heard my father. Back in the heyday of black stand-up comedy, he also dragged me to the Tuesday-night open mikes. In the history of American black people, there have been only two with the complete inability to tell a joke: Martin Luther King, Jr., and my father. Even at the Plethora the “comedians” would occasionally lapse into unintentional humor. “I’m auditioning for a role in Tom Cruise’s newest movie. Tom Cruise plays a retarded judge…” The problem with open-mike night at the Plethora was that there was no time limit, because “time” is a white concept, which was fitting, because the problem with my father’s comedy was that he had no sense of timing. At least Dr. King had the good sense to never try to tell a joke. Daddy told his jokes the same way he’d ordered pizza, written poetry, and written his doctoral thesis — in APA format. Following the standards of the American Psychological Association, he’d toddle onstage and open up with the oral equivalent of a Title Page. Stating his name and the title of the joke. Yes, his jokes had titles. “This joke is called ‘Racial and Religious Differences in Drinking Establishment Patronage.’” Then he’d deliver the Abstract of the joke. So instead of simply saying, “A rabbi, a priest, and a black guy walk into a bar,” he’d say, “The subjects of this joke are three males, two of whom are clergymen, one of the Jewish faith, the other an ordained Catholic minister. The religion of the African-American respondent is undetermined, as is his educational level. The setting for the joke is a licensed establishment where alcohol is served. No, wait. It’s a plane. I’m sorry, my mistake. They are going parachuting.” Finally, he’d clear his throat, stand too close to the mike, and deliver what he liked to call “The Main Body” of the joke. Comedy is war. When a comedian’s routine works, they’ve killed; if the bits fall flat, they refer to it as dying. My father didn’t die onstage. He martyred himself for that other unrecognized completely unfunny black man who, just as there must be extraterrestrial life, is out there somewhere. I’ve seen self-immolations that were funnier than my father’s routine, but there were no gongs to ring or oversized canes with which to pull him offstage. He’d just ignore the booing and segue from the punch line to the Conclusion. The Results of the joke were a smattering of coughing. A chorus of vocalized disapproval and a plethora of yawning found to be significant. He’d end with the joke’s Reference Section: