Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

Wiggling in spasmodic waves like dying fish on the filthy playground, the girls somehow managed to find enough air to moan raspy Miles Davis “motherfuckers” and threats that every ex-con cousin, pyromaniac auntie, serial killer uncle, and pit bull in the neighborhood would soon be coming to “put that head out” and “peel our caps.” Within moments, as if some silent gangster medical alert alarm had gone off, a small army of nepotistic enforcers magically appeared at the entrance near the basketball courts, parting the underbrush and yelling, “Y’all fucking with my cousins?” The three of us instantaneously burst into a waterfall of tears. Begging for a sympathetic détente, Christina and I mindlessly continued to push Nicole’s swing. Her whooshing arc through the air, accompanied by the rusty swing set’s rhythmic creak, became a foreboding, metronomic pendulum counting down our deaths. “We didn’t know! We didn’t know! Please leave us alone.” A screaming vortex of punches and kicks answered our pleas with a firm ignorantia juris neminem excusat.

The ghetto intelligentsia had kindly provided the young Kaufmans with our first lesson in street smartology: never, ever cry in public — it only makes it worse. If we hadn’t bawled we might have been let off with a polite cursory thrashing, just to maintain protective appearances. Since we sobbed like wailing refugee babies, we received a full-scale beatdown designed to toughen us up for the inevitable cataclysmic Italian opera ending of black tragedy. Usually when the fat lady sings in a black community, it’s at a funeral. I’ve seen kids get hit by cars, ice cream trucks, bullets, billyclubs, and not even whimper. The only time it’s permissible to cry is when you miss the lottery by one number or someone close to you passes away. Then you can cry once, but only once. There is no brooding; niggers got to get up and go to work tomorrow.

My sisters and I walked home routed, picking bits of gravel out of one another’s tattered Afros and holding our heads back to stanch our nosebleeds. I thought about Betty’s flecked bouffant, Veronica’s flying-saucer-like do, and the oily Jheri curls, rock-hard pomade cold waves, and horsehair weaves of our attackers, and I realized that every day for the black American is a bad hair day.

“We haven’t seen Daddy since we moved.”

“Mommy told me he knows where we live, but he won’t come by.”

“Fuck that nigger.”

“Listen to you. So, tough guy, I think Betty and Veronica kind of like you. Did you notice the tender look in their eyes when they stomped on your head? Which one you gonna choose, Archiekins?”

“Oh, be quiet. I could swear that little baby knee-dropped me in the balls.”

The night of the Reynier Park beating I slept with a cold pack on the left side of my face and dreamed I lived in a museum diorama with the Hottentot Venus and Ishi, Last of the Yahi. Surrounded by stuffed mastodons and saber-toothed tigers, we played dominoes on a small round table in front of a hastily oil-painted backdrop of the Hollywood Hills. All the dominoes were blank, and inexplicably I spent long periods of time considering my next play. Ish and Hottie would scream at me in Z-talk to hurry up. “Plizzay dizza fizzucking dizzzominoes!” As I pulled dominos from the pile, I tried to explain that it wasn’t a matter of playing a blank domino, it was a matter of playing the right blank domino. “Dizzumb bizzastard.” At feeding time the caretaker would give me a pack of Oreos and the visitors would yell “Cannibal” and throw their yellow metal visitor buttons at me. The buttons turned to snow as they passed through the glass partition.

I woke up comfortable in the knowledge that I was a freak. If I had walked the streets with a carnival barker to promote my one-boy sideshow, I could have made some money. “Hurry! Hurry! Step right up! All the way from the drifting sands of whitest Santa Monica, the whitest Negro in captivity, Gunnar the Persnickety Zulu. He says ‘whom,’ plays Parcheesi, and folks, you won’t believe it, but he has absolutely no ass what-so-ever.”

My inability to walk the walk or talk the talk led to a series of almost daily drubbings. In a world where body and spoken language were currency, I was broke as hell. Corporeally mute, I couldn’t saunter or bojangle my limbs with rubbery nonchalance. I stiffly parade-marched around town with an embalmed soul, a rheumatic heart, and Frankenstein’s autonomic nervous system. Puberty wasn’t supposed to be like this. The textbooks said something about a little acne, some chest hair, and that I could use this special time in life to grow closer to my parents by discussing my nocturnal emissions with them. “Mom! Dad! Six cc’s of jizz last night. Am I a man or what?” Instead, my adolescence was like going to clown college. I found myself clumsily walking on a set of size thirteen feet, bumbling through the streets of Hillside and ricocheting off inanimate objects and into the pathways of hypertensive and equally embattled pedestrians. I constantly found myself cowering under raised umbrellas and fists, hurriedly apologizing and kowtowing for forgiveness for stepping on someone’s heel.

I learned the hard way that social norms in Santa Monica were unforgivable breaches of proper Hillside etiquette. I’d been taught to look someone in the eye when speaking to them. On the streets of Hillside, even the briefest eye contact wasn’t a simple faux pas but an interpersonal trespass that merited retaliation. Spotting a potential comrade, I’d catch his eye with a raised eyebrow that said, “Hey, guy, what’s up?” — a glance I hoped would open the lines of communication. These silent greetings were often returned in spades, accompanied by the angry rejoinder “Nigger, what the fuck you looking at?” and a pimp slap that echoed in my ears for a week. I’d rub my stinging cheek, dumbfounded, and find myself staring into a pair of dark sullen eyes that read, “Verboten! Stressed-out ghetto child at work. Keep out.”

The people of Hillside treat society the way society treats them. Strangers and friends are suspect and guilty until proven innocent. Instant camaraderie beyond familial ties doesn’t exist. It takes more than wearing the same uniform to be accepted among one’s ghetto peers. The German spies in those late-night World War II movies who tried to infiltrate U.S. Army units by memorizing baseball trivia and learning to chew gum with a certain snappy American flair had it easier than I did. I couldn’t just roll up on some folks and say, “I know the Black National Anthem, a killer sweet-potato pie recipe, and how to double-dutch blindfolded. Will you be my nigger?” Dues had to be paid, or you wasn’t joining the union.

I had my overbite corrected and an impacted molar removed when I approached a crew of kids sitting on the fender of a metallic gold 1976 Monte Carlo with white interior. The boys were playing the dozens, snapping on each other’s mothers; I walked directly up to the fattest kid, playfully punched him in his doughy shoulder, and said, “Hey, I don’t even know your name, but your mother soooooo black she sneezes chimney soot and pisses Yoo-Hoo.” The family dentist said she couldn’t have done a better job herself.

The Hillside tribe wasn’t going for no ghetto fakery. If I wanted to come correct, I’d have to complete some unspecified warrior vision quest. The gods of blackness would let me know when I was black enough to be trusted. I walked the dark streets of Hillside with my head down, looking for loose change and signs that would place me on the path to right-on soul brother righteousness.

In early September, bruised and toothless, I realized that my search for companionship was becoming too painful. Trying to foist myself on these people wasn’t going to work; I needed a more transcendental approach to locating my soul. To achieve this soulful enlightenment, I started playing Thoreau in the Montgomery Ward department store over in the La Cienega Mall, turning its desolate sporting goods department into a makeshift Walden. I moved the pond, a flimsy dark blue plastic wading pool decaled with big-eyed, absurdly happy black and yellow ducks, next to the eight-man tent tucked away in the wilds of the camping section. The tent was pitched in a four-tree forest of plastic redwoods and dead nylon leaves in various states of factory decomposition. A phalanx of cuddly foam forest creatures, née archery targets, roamed the grounds: a whitetail deer with its nose in a Kodiak bear’s ass, and a wild turkey propped against a Ping-Pong paddle so it wouldn’t fall over on its side. A few passes of aerosol mosquito repellent and I had all the scents and sounds of the wild. “Ms. Palazzo, you’re wanted in shipping.”