Paul Beatty - The Sellout

“Jolson, Al (1918). ‘Sambo and Mammy Cleared for Takeoff on Runaway 5,’ Ziegfeld Follies.

“Williams, Bert (1917). ‘If Niggers Could Fly,’ The Circuitous Chitterling Tour.

“The Unknown Minstrel (circa 1899). ‘Dem Vaudeville Peckerwoods Sho’ Am Stealing My Shit,’ The Semi-Freemason Hall, Cleveland, Ohio.

“And don’t forget to tip your waitress.”

Even though she’d be exhausted from a long day transporting the masses, Marpessa would make sure we arrived early, volunteering me for comic duty by putting my name at the top of the sign-up sheet. I can’t tell you how much I dreaded hearing the emcee introduce me. “Now put your hands together for Bonbon.”

I would stand on that stage feeling as if I were having an out-of-body experience. Staring out into the audience and seeing myself in the front row prepping rotten tomatoes, eggs, and spoiled lettuce heads to throw at the droll motherfucker telling every ripped-off, antiquated Richard Pryor joke he could remember from his father’s record collection. But every Tuesday night Marpessa forced me to take the stage, saying that she would continue withholding sex until I made her laugh. Usually after my so-called routine, I’d return to the table to find her fast asleep, unable to tell if she was exhausted from work or from boredom. One night I finally managed to tell an original joke, that in homage to my father had a title, albeit a rather long one:

Why All That Abbott and Costello Vaudeville Mess Doesn’t Work in the Black Community

Who’s on first?

I don’t know, your mama.

Marpessa cracked the fuck up, rolling in the thin space between the folding chairs that passed for an aisle. I knew the sex drought would end that night.

They say never laugh at your own jokes, but all the best comics do, and as soon as the open mike was closed, I sprinted outside and hopped aboard bus #125, which was parked right outside the club, because Marpessa was using it as the family car, afraid to let the rolling memorial out of her sight. Before she could even think about releasing the parking brake, I was already lying naked on the backseat ready for a tinted-window quickie. Marpessa reached under the driver’s seat, pulled out a large cardboard box, dragged it down the aisle, and dumped the contents in my lap. Burying my aching erection in two inches of report cards, computer printouts, and progress reports.

“What the fuck’s all this?” I asked. Sifting through the paperwork so my dick could get some air.

“I’m acting as Charisma’s go-between. It’s early yet. It’s only been six weeks, but she thinks the segregated schooling is already working. Grades are up and behavioral problems are down, but she wants you to confirm those results with some statistical analysis.”

“Goddamn it, Marpessa! It’s going to take just as long to put all this shit back in the box as it will to do the math.”

Marpessa grabbed the base of my penis and squeezed.

“Bonbon, are you ashamed of my being a bus driver?”

“What? Where’s this coming from?”

“Nowhere.”

No amount of my amateur ear nuzzling was able to erase the wistful look on her face or make her nipples erect. Bored at my attempts at foreplay, she slipped a progress report into my pee hole and twisted my dickhead around so that I could read it like it was the Early Bird dinner menu. A sixth-grader named Michael Gallegos was taking subjects I didn’t understand and getting grades I couldn’t decipher. But according to the teacher’s comments, he was showing marked improvement in something called number sense and operations.

“What the hell kind of grade is a ‘PR’?”

“PR means shows proficiency.”

Charisma had intuitively grasped the psychological subtleties of my plan even as it was just starting to make sense to me. She understood the colored person’s desire for the domineering white presence, which the Wheaton Academy represented. Because she knew that even in these times of racial equality, when someone whiter than us, richer than us, blacker than us, Chineser than us, better than us, whatever than us, comes around throwing their equality in our faces, it brings out our need to impress, to behave, to tuck in our shirts, do our homework, show up on time, make our free throws, teach, and prove our self-worth in hopes that we won’t be fired, arrested, or trucked away and shot. In essence, Wheaton Academy is saying to her students what Booker T. Washington, the Great Educator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute, once told his uneducated people: “Cast down your buckets where you are.” While I’ll never understand why it had to be a bucket, why the shortsighted Booker T. couldn’t recommend that we cast down our books, slide rules, or laptops, I did sympathize with his and Charisma’s need for an on-call Caucasian panopticon. Believe me, it’s no coincidence that Jesus, the commissioners of the NBA and NFL, and the voices on your GPS (even the Japanese one) are white.

There are no greater anaphrodisiacs than racism and a report card in one’s urethra, and when a half-naked Marpessa clambered on top of me, both she and my penis laid their sleepy heads down in the vicinity of my belly button, she still clutching my phallus, having gone to wherever it is bus drivers go to dream. Flight school probably, because in Marpessa’s dreams buses can fly. They arrive on time and never break down. They use rainbows for bridges and clouds for docking bays, and wheelchair riders roll and yaw alongside like fighters protecting a bomber wing. When she reaches cruising altitude, she clears flocks of seagulls and niggers migrating south for the rest of their lives with a horn that doesn’t beep but plays Roxy Music, Bon Iver, Sunny Levine, and Nico’s “These Days.” And all her passengers make a living wage. And Booker T. Washington is a regular rider who, when he boards the bus, tells her, “When you see Bonbon, the Cosmic Sellout and your one true love, cast down your panties where you are.”

Come November, about six weeks after the shooting, I was making good progress with Marpessa, but less headway on what were, since I was now having sex on a semiregular basis, the two more immediate goals in my life, segregating Dickens and raising a successful potato crop in Southern California. I knew why I couldn’t get the potatoes to grow, because the climate’s too warm. But when it came to thinking of good ideas for separating the races by race, all of a sudden I had racism block, and Hood Day was only a few months away. Maybe I was like every other contemporary artist, I had only one good book, one album, one despicable act of large-scale self-hatred in me.

Hominy and I were in the row I’d dedicated to the tubers. Me on my hands and knees, checking the compost mixture, the soil density, and shoving russet seed potatoes in the ground, while he brainstormed suggestions for citywide discrimination and fucked up the one job he had, which was to lay the garden hose with the holes I punctured into it face up.

“Massa, what if we gave everybody we don’t like a badge and assigned them to camps?”

“That’s been done.”

“Okay, how about this? Designate people into three groups: black, colored, and godlike. Institute some curfew laws and a pass system…”

“Old hat, kaffir boy.”

“This’ll work in Dickens, cause everybody — Mexican, Samoan, or black — is basically a shade of brown.” He dropped the hose on the wrong side of the trench and dug into his pocket. “Now, at the bottom we’ll have the Untouchables. These are the people who are completely useless. Clippers fans, traffic cops, and people who have dirty jobs where they work with human and animal waste, like yourself.”