Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

The squat grayish-blond officer removed his cap and introduced himself and his partner as officers Frank Russo and Neal Salty.

“Gunnar, we know you had some problems with the Santa Monica police department. Son, here in” — the officer took a deep breath — “Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, we practice what we like to call ‘preventative police enforcement.’ Whereby, we prefer to deter habitual criminals before they cause irreparable damage to the citizenry and/or its property.”

“You mean you put people who haven’t done anything in the back seat of your squad car and beat the shit out of ’em so you don’t have to do any paperwork. Thereby preventing any probable felonious assaults on the citizenry.”

“And/or its property.”

“And/or it is. You know, my father is a sketch artist down at Wilshire Division. Does that carry any weight?”

“Yeah, he gets to visit your ass in jail without being strip-searched.”

Taking out a small notebook from his supercop utility belt, he continued the inquest. “What’s your gang affiliation?”

“Gang affiliation?”

“Who do you run with? Who are your crimeys, your homies, your posse? You know, yo’ niggers.”

“Oh, I see. Well, on weekends I’m down with the Gang of Four.”

“Who?” To his partner, “Geez, these fucking turds are incredible, there’s a new gang every frigging week.” Then he turned back to me. “So, Gunnar, who you banging with in this Gang of Four?”

“You know, it’s me, my homegirl Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chuqiao, and my nigger even if he don’t get no bigger Yao Wenyuan. Sheeeeit, we runnin’ thangs from Shanghai to Compton.”

Although I had only lived in Hillside for a few days, it was impossible not to pick up a few local catchphrases while running errands for Mother. Language was everywhere. Smoldering embers of charcoal etymology so permeated the air that whenever someone opened his mouth it smelled like smoke. Double-check the mailbox to see if your letters had fallen through and the lid shrieked, “Dumb-ass motherfucker, have you ever looked and letters were still there? No! Shut the goddamn lid.” Press the crossing button at the intersection and the signal blinked a furious “Hurry the fuck up!” Call information and the operator answered the phone with a throaty “Who dis?” Nothing infuriated my mother more than me lounging on one elbow at the dinner table slinging my introductory slang with a mouth full of mashed potatoes: “Sheeeeit, Ma, I’m running thangs, fuck the dumb.”

“Seriously, son, judging by your previous nefarious history, we feel that you have a proclivity for gang activity. Do us all a favor and come clean.”

“Okay, fuck the dumb. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and odd-numbered Fridays when my mother lets me stay out late, I be down with the Our Gang He-man Woman Haters Club. Matter of fact, we have a rumble with the Bowery Boys next week. If you see that schmuck Muggs, tell da bum I’m gonna kick his ass.”

“Okay, we’re going to put you down as unaffiliated. For now keep your big black nose clean.”

Gang affiliation? I didn’t even have any friends yet. My sisters and I had no idea how to navigate our way around this hardscrabble dystopia. Each of us had already been beaten up at least once just for trying to make friends. Deciding there was safety in numbers, we took to traveling in a pack. Nervously, traipsing through the minefield, we tiptoed past the suspected ruffians and kept on the lookout for snipers. Shots would ring out from nowhere, forcing us into sacrificial heroics, diving onto verbal grenades to save the others.

“Say, bitch-ass, com’ere!”

“Who, me?”

“Must be you, you looked.”

“You guys, go on without me. Get away while there’s still time. Tell Mama I love her. I regret that I have only one life to give for my family.”

By day six of the ghetto hostage crisis my sibling captives and I were avoiding the dangers of the unexplored territory along the banks of the Harbor Freeway by sitting in the den playing Minutiae Pursuance, substituting our own questions for the inane ones on the cards.

“Sports and Leisure, for the pie.”

“Oh, this one’s a toughie. How many dimples on a golf ball?”

“Four hundred sixty-three. Give me my piece.”

Mom was not the kind of matriarch to let her brood hide up under her skirt, clutching her knees, sheltered from the mean old Negroes outside. Under the guise that she was worried about our deteriorating social skills, she suggested we go to Reynier Park and play with the other kids in the neighborhood. She might as well have told us to play in the prison yard at Attica. Reynier Park was an overgrown inner-city rain forest that some Brazilian lumber company needed to uproot. You needed a machete to clear a path to the playground. The sandbox was an uninhabitable breeding ground for tetanus and typhus. Shards of broken glass and spent bullet shells outnumbered grains of sand by a ratio of four to one. Hypodermic needles nosed through this shimmering sinkhole like rusted punji sticks.

Despite our pleas for a pardon, Mom invoked the death penalty and sentenced us to an afternoon at the park. For the record, the condemned ate last meals of liverwurst and mustard on white bread and drank grape Kool-Aid (extra scoop of sugar) before departing. We were somberly alternating turns on the only working swing when two girls about ten years old, smoking cigarettes and sharing sips from a canned piña colada, approached us. The taller of the two was wearing denim overalls and had so many pink and blue barrettes clipped to the thinning patches of braided hair on her head it looked as though she was under attack by a swarm of plastic moths. The other girl had on orange polyester hot pants and a matching polka dot halter top that was so small it barely succeeded in halting her two BB-sized nipples. Her hair was heavily greased into a rigid elliptical disk that sat precariously on the crown of her head. Every few seconds she’d stoop down to pick up a discarded needle and deposit it in her little red Naugahyde purse. She resembled a Vietnamese woman wearing a straw hat and toiling in a paddy. I listened for bleating water buffalo but heard only the bigger one’s mouth.

“Get out of our swing now!” she shouted at Nicole. Nicole wanted to get off the swing, but she was catatonic with fear. It didn’t help that out of sheer nervousness Christina and I kept pushing, propelling her stiff frame higher and faster.

Kicking off their dime store flip-flops, the two badly coiffed bullies marched through the sandbox without a flinch or grimace. A little diaper-clad boy waddled up, blew a kazoo tribunal, and heralded the dyspeptic duo: “That my sister Fas’ Betty and her bestest friend Vamp a Nigger on the Regular Veronica. They fixin’ to kick y’all’s ass.” Betty and Veronica went into a loud hands-on-hips, call-and-response, head-bobbing tirade on how they owned the entire park from the calcified jungle gym to the busted teeter-totter. Betty’s braids stood on end as she demanded that Nicole get off the swing before she heated up every piece of broken glass in the sandbox, affixed them to the end of one of those pointy 7-Eleven Slurpee straws, and blew glass bubbles in her tight black bourgeoise booty.

The thought of this snake-haired demon shoving molten glass in her rectum gorgonized Nicole even further. Her sphincter tightened and her rock-hard butt sat heavy in the swing. Betty picked up a piece of broken glass, lit a Bic lighter, and teasingly passed the piece of glass through the flame, her fireproof fingers impervious to the heat. Nicole’s hands fastened themselves to the chains; her legs spread out in front of her and locked at the knees. Mistaking our silent petrification for hincty insolence, Betty and Veronica tried to rush us. The alcohol must have affected their bullying judgments, because they charged into Nicole chin first just as her legs were in the high kicking upstroke of a swing filled with panic-stricken kinetics. Fas’ Betty caught a sneaker in the trachea and Veronica Vamp a Nigger something-or-the-other got kicked in the solar plexus.