Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

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Dear David Schoenfeld,

I’m still high from the model airplane glue-sniffing session in the alleyway behind Pic ’n’ Save. Remember the waterfalls of vomit rushing down our chins and our contest to see who could find the largest chunks of undigested potato chips in their pool of throw-up? Fuckin’ cool. David, somehow through being with you I learned I was black and that being black meant something, though I’ve never learned exactly what. Barukh atah Adonai.

Shalom, motherfucker,

Gunnar

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I don’t remember helping my mother unload the trailer, but the next morning I awoke on the floor of a strange house amid boxes and piles of heavy-duty garbage bags jammed with clothes. The venetian blinds were drawn, and although the sunlight peeked between the slats, the house was dark. My mother let out a yell in that distinct-from-somewhere-in-the-kitchen timbre: “Gunnar, go into my purse and buy some breakfast for everybody.” I acknowledged my orders and got dressed. Rummaging through my personal garbage bag, I found my blue Quicksilver shorts, a pair of worn-out dark gray Vans sneakers, a long-sleeved clay-colored old school Santa Cruz shirt, and just in case the morning chill was still happening, I wrapped a thick plaid flannel shirt around my skinny waist. I found the front door, and like some lost intergalactic B-movie spaceman who has crash-landed on a mysterious planet and is unsure about the atmospheric content, I opened it slowly, contemplating the possibility of encountering intelligent life.

I stepped into a world that was a bustling Italian intersection without Italians. Instead of little sheet-metal sedans racing around the fontana di Trevi, little kids on beat-up Big Wheels and bigger kids on creaky ten-speeds weaved in and out of the water spray from a sprinkler set in the middle of the street. It seemed there must have been a fire drill at the hair salon, because males and females in curlers and shower caps crammed the sidewalks.

I ventured forth into my new environs and approached a boy about my age who wore an immaculately pressed sparkling white T-shirt and khakis and was slowly placing one slue-footed black croker-sack shoe in front of the other. I stopped him and asked for directions to the nearest store. He squinted his eyes and leaned back and stifled a laugh. “What the fuck did you say?” I repeated my request, and the laugh he suppressed came out gently. “Damn, cuz. You talk proper like a motherfucker.” Cuz? Proper like a motherfucker? It wasn’t as if I had said, “Pardon me, old bean, could you perchance direct a new indigene to the nearest corner emporium.” My guide’s bafflement turned to judgmental indignation at my appearance. “Damn, fool, what’s up with your loud-ass gear? Nigger got on so many colors, look like a walking paint sampler. Did you find the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow? You not even close to matching. Take your jambalaya wardrobe down to Cadillac Street, make a right, and the store is at the light.”

I walked to the store, not believing that some guy who ironed the sleeves on his T-shirt and belted his pants somewhere near his testicles had the nerve to insult me over how I dressed. I returned to the house, dropped the bag of groceries on the table, and shouted, “Ma, you done fucked up and moved to the ’hood!”

MY MAGICAL mystery tour ground to a halt in a West Los Angeles neighborhood the locals call Hillside. Shaped like a giant cul-de-sac, Hillside is less a community than a quarry of stucco homes built directly into the foothills of the San Borrachos Mountains. Unlike most California communities that border mountain ranges, Hillside has no gentle slopes upon which children climb trees and overly friendly park rangers lead weekend flora-and-fauna tours.

In the late 1960s, after the bloody but little known I’m-Tired-of-the-White-Man-Fuckin’-with-Us-and-Whatnot riots, the city decided to pave over the neighboring mountainside, surrounding the community with a great concrete wall that spans its entire curved perimeter save for an arched gateway at the southwest entrance. At the summit of this cement precipice wealthy families live in an upper-middle-class hamlet known as Cheviot Heights. At the bottom of this great wall live hordes of impoverished American Mongols. Hardrock niggers, Latinos, and Asians, who because of the wall’s immenseness get only fifteen minutes of precious sunshine in summer and a burst of solstice sunlight in the winter. If it weren’t always so hot it would be like living in a refrigerator.

We lived in a pueblo-style home with a cracked and fissuring plaster exterior my mother said provided an Old Mexico flavor. Even she had to laugh when I walked up to a peeling section of the house, broke off a yellow paint chip, popped it into my mouth, rubbed my tummy, and said, “Mmmmmm, nacho cheese.” Our back yard nestled right up against the infamous wall. I often marveled at the unique photosynthesis that allowed the fig, peach, and lemon trees to thrive in a dim climate where it often rained dead cats and dogs, rotted fish, and droplets of piss. Apparently rich folks have an acerbic sense of humor.

After a week in our new home, a black-and-white Welcome Wagon pulled up in front of the house to help the newcomers settle into the neighborhood. Two mustachioed officers got out of the patrol car and knocked on our front door with well-practiced leather-gloved authority. Tossing courtesy smiles at my mother, the cops shouldered their way past the threshold and presented her with a pamphlet entitled “How to Report Crime and Suspicious Activity Whether the Suspects Are Related to You or Not.” It wasn’t the day-old macaroni casserole she’d been expecting. My sisters and I sat in the living room, half listening to the news on the radio, half listening to the cops asking Mama questions to which they already knew the answers.

“Kids, Ms. Kaufman?”

“Yes, three.”

“Two girls, ten and eleven, and a boy, thirteen, all of them left-handed, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Ma’am, may we speak to the boy, Gunnar?”

My mother turned around and waved me over with the hated come-hither crooked index finger. I lifted my sheepish carcass off the couch and shuffled like a reluctant butler toward the interrogation. The cop with gold stripes on his sleeves cut Mama a look and said, “Alone, Ms. Kaufman,” and she deserted me with a satisfied smirk, happy that I was finally getting a bitter taste of her vaunted “traditional black experience.”

I stood there, perched directly under the doorjamb, as I’d learned to do when your earth quaked. My slumping shoulders trembled. My kneecaps shook. These weren’t some Santa Monica cops sporting Conflict Resolution ribbons, riding powder-blue bicycles, this was the LAPD, dressed to oppress, their hands calmly poised over open holsters like seasoned gunfighters’. I tried to distance myself from the rumbling in my ears, clamoring for one of those out-of-body experiences only white folks in midlife crises seem to have. I felt the gases rising from my queasy stomach to inflate my body. My arms and legs began to swell, and slowly I began to float away. I was just getting off the ground when I let out a long silent fart. Apparently, my escape fantasy had a slow leak.

“Son, you smell something?”

“Nope.”

“Well, something reeks.”

“Oh, that’s the chitlins.”

My would-be out-of-body experience hovered there, wafting in the flatulent fumes. I wasn’t going anywhere; I felt like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon — tethered, and grounded to reality by fishing lines looped through my nose and eyeballs. I was a helium distraction until the arrival of Santa Claus. “Look, Daddy, Snoopy with an Afro.”