Paul Beatty: Slumberland

“Who is this?”

“The Magnum Opus.”*

They’re Southern California, sprawling, hazy, fickle, as underground as a rock group that sold twenty thousand records could be. The critics hail groups like the Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam as the purveyors of the new rock ’n’ roll, choosing heroin vapidity over depth, haircuts over musicianship, head-to-toe white-boy pallor over a Mexican/black/American/ guapo —politic band whose music has nothing to do with being Mexican, American, black, or handsome. High-pitched and just this side of screechy and that side of cogent, the vocals hydroplane over the melody.

“They’re good,” the Nigerian says.

“They are good,” I wanted to say, “but two nights ago, not so far from where you’re standing now, me and the greatest musician you’ve never heard of played two minutes and forty-seven seconds of musical perfection as timeless as the hydrogen atom and Saturday Night Live . A beat so perfect as to render musical labels null and void. A melody so transcendental that blackness has officially been declared passé. Finally, us colored folk will be looked upon with blithe indifference, not erotized pity or the disgust of Freudian projection. It’s what we’ve claimed we always wanted, isn’t it? To be judged ‘not by the color of our skins, but by the content of our character’? Dude, but what we threw down was the content not of character, but out of character. It just happened to be of indeterminate blackness and funkier than a motherfucker.”

I MISS LOS ANGELES, the place where the sounds in my head started. I miss the midday smog; I liked the way my lungs pained after chasing my dog around the backyard fig and lemon trees, the dog, nearly as winded as I, licking the grit off my face, the sting from my eyes. I miss my day job at Trader Joe’s, a convenience store for rich folks on gluten-free diets who, while I hand-pressed oranges into fresh-squeezed orange juice, would come up to me carrying two bottles of wine and ask which one would I recommend with light Indonesian fare, the Chianti or the Beaujolais? That was one of the good things about the job: You got to say “Beaujolais,” “Gouda,” and “Reblochon.” I miss saying “Reblochon.” I miss the landslides and the brush fires. For those of us who lived below the poverty line, which in Los Angeles is below five hundred feet above sea level, Mother Nature was the poor flatlanders’ great equalizer. Lo, the guilt-free schadenfreude of watching a Coldwater Canyon dowager on the nightly news standing on the rooftop shingles of her ranch house armed with a garden hose, dodging embers and fighting back flames fanned by the high winds and my cynicism. I miss the Malibu mansions tumbling down rain-soaked mountainsides. Their owners tromping through the mud in Italian rain slickers, their beachfront dream homes now five-million-dollar piles of driftwood. In Los Angeles memorable nights are as countless as the Fatburger double-king-chili-cheese permutations. They’re warm and prevailing as the Santa Ana winds that announce them and they play out like student films, scratchy, nonlinear, experimental, self-indulgent, and overexposed. Nights lubricated with stolen Volnay, Bordeaux, and magnums of Louis Roederer. Nights that dismissed themselves when the psilocybin-induced cartoon characters stopped frolicking on the shag carpet and climbed back into the television to become men with generic American drawls asking, “Has God touched you today?”

I miss those nights, but what I don’t miss is the fear. In Los Angeles my fear was audible. What up, cuz? Was happenin’, blood? Pinche mayate, what are you doing in this neighborhood , ese? Hands behind your head, face on the ground! Are you sure you can afford to pay for this? What with all the posturing, the slam dunk scowls, the hip-hop bravura, the What, me worry? middle-class nonchalance, and the condomless B-boy fucking on the down low, you’d never guess that we black men are afraid of many things, among them the police, water, and the math section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test; however, what we fear above all else is that out there among the 450 million other black men who inhabit this planet is an unapprehended habitual offender, a man twice as bad as Stagolee and half as sympathetic, a freeze-motherfuckeror-I’ll-blow-your-head-off nigger on the lam who looks exactly like us.

Moving to Berlin reduced the fear of being mistaken for someone else to almost nothing. I stopped having the recurring nightmare of being at the post office and seeing a poster tacked to a bulletin board that read, WANTED FOR GRAND LARCENY, WHITE SLAVERY, AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY. The profile and face-front mug shots didn’t resemble me, but were me. Albeit a me I didn’t know. A hard, slit-eyed, sneering me who went by an assortment of dead giveaway aliases, Pol Pot Johnson, Steve Mussolini, Mugabe von Quisling. Underneath the background information would be the rules of engagement and the amount of civic recompense. “This man is considered armed, ugly, and nuclear-meltdown dangerous. If you have any information concerning the whereabouts of this person, please notify the appropriate authorities immediately! Reward: $500,000 and the Eternal Gratitude of Your Government and Fellow Citizens.”

But that fear of myself was who I was. It was all I and a lot of other little Los Angelenos had. I waited to be picked out of the crowd, actualized by white America, and if not by her, then a kiss from Velma Reinhardt, the big-bosomed, blonde-neighborhood vixen would do. However, as luck would have it, America beat Velma to the punch.

When I was fifteen I got a letter from the Los Angeles Unified School District notifying me that I was to report to the University of California Los Angeles for “special testing.” I’d finally been identified, picked out of the crowd. This letter frightened my parents and me to no end, for there was a time not too long ago when colored men were purposely infected with syphilis, forced to ingest large doses of LSD, and timed in the forty-yard dash all under the guise of “special testing.” His voice cracking, Daddy called the school board. “Yes, sir. I fully understand, sir.” He muffled the receiver with his palm and whispered, “It’s a math test. There’ll be three other Negroes, two Chicanos, and an Eskimo boy there.” Mother removed her eyeglasses and mouthed, “White boys too?”

“Yes,” Father nodded. The dog scratched at the back door. My mother cried and turned her pages. I didn’t think anyone could read E. L. Doctorow that fast.

I was one of those kids who liked to be first, and I made sure, without looking too rascally, that I was the first one in that classroom, pretending that I was the first black non-athletic-scholarship student to reintegrate UCLA since the death of affirmative action. I took a seat near the open windows overlooking the quadrangle and stuck my head out of the ivory tower, a nappy-headed Rapunzel. White people’s air more refreshing , I thought to myself. The wind brisker, more invigorating. The shade shadier. The squirrels squirrelier . The proctor called my name— Hey! — then thumbed me to the back row, a row now occupied by two Sunday-suited black boys and a colored girl in what must have been her mother’s cut-down wedding dress. The Eskimo kid, his bottom lip swollen with a tobacco chaw, was the last to arrive.

“Uukkarnit Kennedy?” the proctor asked.

Without skipping a beat Uukkarnit said in a deep, hickory-smoked, filtered drawl, “It sure ain’t Ladies Love Cool James.” Everyone laughed, as we West Coasters hated the sappy LL Cool J, much preferring Too Short’s perverse rap limericks.

“Sit anywhere you like, Mr. Kennedy,” he was told, and though the white section had plenty of open seats, Uukkarnit sat with us. He nodded hello in the chin-up Negro fashion. After coolly depositing a glob of brown drivel into his spit cup, he set it on the corner of the desk. His sitting with us was an act of solidarity. A late-twentieth-century equivalent to a lunch counter sit-in; and up to that point in my life, his placing that Styrofoam spittoon on that desk in full view of those white kids was the bravest thing I’d ever seen. Sometimes just making yourself at home is revolutionary.