Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

Tony: Nailed it, bro, want another hit?

Now and then we’d see Tony Grimes, our deracinated hero, in Coping ’n’ Doping Skateshop on Ocean Street next to the Tommy Burger. “What’s up, Tony?” we’d all ask coolly, yet with genuine concern in our voices. We’d receive an over-the-shoulder “What’s shakin’, dude?” and fight over who he’d acknowledged. “He called me dude. Not you, you nimrod.”

Tony Grimes strolled around the shop, a baseball cap magnetically attached at some crazy angle to his unkempt thick clumpy Afro. His lean muscular legs loped from clothes rack to clothes rack as he eyed the free shit he would take home after he got through rapping to the manager’s girlfriend.

Black was a suffocating bully that tied my mind behind my back and shoved me into a walk-in closet. Black was my father on a weekend custody drunken binge, pushing me around as if I were a twelve-year-old, seventy-five-pound bell clapper clanging hard against the door, the wall, the shoe tree. Black is a repressed memory of a sandpapery hand rubbing abrasive circles into the small of my back, my face rising and falling in time with a hairy heaving chest. Black is the sound of metal hangers sliding away in fear, my shirt halfway off, hula-hooping around my neck.

* * *

That summer of my molestation, my sister Christina returned from a YMCA day camp field trip in tears. My mother asked what was wrong, and between breathless wails Christina replied that on the way home from the Museum of Natural History the campers had cheered, “Yeah, white camp! Yeah, white camp!” and she had felt left out. I tried to console her by explaining the cheer was, “Yeah, Y camp! Yeah, Y camp!” and no one was trying to leave her out of anything. Expressing unusual concern in our affairs, Mom asked if we would feel better about going to an all-black camp. We gave an insistent “Noooooo.” She asked why and we answered in three-part sibling harmony, “Because they’re different from us.” The way Mom arched her left eyebrow at us, we knew immediately we were in for a change. Sunday I was hitching a U-Haul trailer to the back of the Volvo, and under cover of darkness we left halcyon Santa Monica for parts unknown. Ma driving, singing a medley of Temptations hits, my sisters passed out in the back seat, twitching in exhaustion from moving and packing.

Ma’s voice dropped a couple of octaves as she segued from “My Girl” into “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” I rolled down the window, trying to capture the last vestiges of the nighttime salt air, and began writing mental letters to friends I knew I’d never see again.

* * *

Dear Ryan Foggerty,

Later, man. Thanks for the ticket to the Henry Rollins/Anthrax show at the Civic Auditorium and for lending me your Slidemaster trucks and the Profane Insane Urethane wheels, I’ll send ’em back to you. Rock and roll will never die.

Be cool,

Gunnar

* * *

Dear Steven Pierce,

I’ll miss the weekend speedboat outings with your red-haired ex — Playboy Bunny mom and her loaded boyfriend who always wore the stupid Skipper from Gilligan’s Island hats. I remember how you hated the way he winked at you, one hand on the steering wheel, the other stroking your mother’s behind. We did the right thing by pissing in the gas tank, so what if his engine stalled and he nearly died of exposure off the coast of Mexico. I’m sorry, but Larry, not Shemp or Curly or Moe, was the funniest Stooge. “Susquehanna Hat Company”?

Slowly I turn,

step by step,

Gunnar

* * *

Dear Eileen,

I never told anyone. I know you didn’t.

XXOXOXX,

Gunnar

* * *

Of all my laidback Santa Monican friends, I miss David Joshua Schoenfeld the most. He was off-white and closest to me in hue and temperament. Strangers would come up to him and ask if he was Mediterranean. David would shake his head, his dollar-bill-green eyes trying to convey that he was a tanned Jewish kid originally from Phoenix and perpetually late for the Hebrew school bus. Every Tuesday and Thursday after bar mitzvah classes we’d meet at the public library and pore through the WWII picture books, doing our best to fight the bewitching allure of Fascist cool. Our obsession wasn’t a clear-cut Simon Wiesenthal Dudley Do-Right always-get-your-war-criminal fixation. We concerned ourselves with whether it would be more fun to fantasize about world domination attired in crushed Gestapo black velvet with red trim or in crumpled green Third Army gum-chewing schleppiness.

Himmler is wearing the Aryan autocrat’s summer ensemble, designed for maximum military foreboding with a hint of patrician civility. Ideal for a morning jaunt through the death camps or planning an autumn assault on the Russian front.

By sixth grade we’d read the junior warmongers’ canon: Mein Kampf, Boys from Brazil, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, and Anne Frank, and our allegiances were muddled. On the way to Laker games we’d talk about the atrocities at Buchenwald and Auschwitz. David’s father, looking for a parking space, would ask us whether he should feel guilty about playing the serial numbers branded onto his father’s forearm in the state lottery. During time-outs we’d test each other on the design specifications and flight capabilities of the Luftwaffe arsenal.

“The blitzkrieg clarion the Polish heard whistling out of the clouds in 1939?”

“Please, the Stuka dive-bombers.”

“Top speed for the Messerschmitt 109 K-model.”

“Easy, 452 miles per hour, climb rate 4,880 feet per minute.”

“Someone’s been studying.”

“Knock this out. Give me the wingspan and ceiling for the Focke-Wulf 190 D-series.”

“You know that’s my favorite plane of all time. Wingspan 33 feet and 5 inches, ceiling 32,800 feet. Don’t Focke with me, man. Chu wanna go to war? Okay, we go to war.”

Later that night, with permission to sleep over at David’s house, we went to war. On our last reconnaissance sortie before bedtime we found a trail of ants on a Bataan death march to underground bunkers beneath his front porch. After five passes with the aerosol deodorant, we applied the matches and watched the soldier ants burn, shouting, “Dresden! Dunkirk! Banzai!” and strafing their shriveling exoskeletons with plastic scale-model airplanes. Then it was inside to watch our favorite video, Tora, Tora, Tora, stuffing handfuls of Jiffy Pop popcorn in our mouths and cheering for the Japanese.

When David’s parents were asleep we played Hiroshima-Nagasaki in the bedroom. In our astronaut pj’s with the crinkly plastic soles we moved the armoire into the hall and cleared enough space for Little Boy and Fat Man to land. Fake radio transmissions from the backs of our throats: “Come in, Los Alamos kkksssk. Come in, this is the Enola Gay, do you read? Kkksssk.”

“Loud and clear, this is Oppenheimer, copy.”

“Oppy baby, is this thing goin’ to work?”

“Oh yeah, equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT. Do you copy?”

“Roger, ten-four, over and out.”

We’d simulate the atomic flash by switching the bedroom light on and off as fast as we could, catching strobe glimpses of ourselves as nuclear shadows. Frozen in our positions, we mimicked death, writing letters home, pruning bonsai trees, playing with Hot Wheels, bent over mid butt-wipe.

Before going to bed, we brushed our teeth in the cramped bathroom. I noticed that David put the toothpaste on his brush before passing it under the cold water. I, like most folks, wet my brush, then put on the toothpaste, but I copied him because he was white and I figured maybe I was doing it wrong.

The only time race entered our war was when we sat over a basket of french fries drinking root beer and debating who Hitler would kill first, David the diabolical Jew or me the subhuman Negroid. It was on our excursions to the library that I stumbled across my first black heroes: the Tuskegee airmen, the Redball Express, some WAC nurses from Chicago, Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., Jesse Owens, and the mess cook who shot down a couple of Japanese Zeros from the sinking deck of the Arizona. I kept these discoveries to myself. I didn’t think David would find it as juicy as when I told him that Hitler had only half a package.