Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

Kathleen y Flaco para siempre con alma

Pythagoras the Congruent Truant —

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=C square punk busters get killed

Eventually the hallways stopped echoing with the footsteps of the Oxford wingtipped and high-heeled administration. In their place was the sound of brand-new sneakers squeaking on the waxed floors and the heavy clomp of unlaced hiking boots. The walkie-talkie communiqués were soon drowned out by the FM stereo meta-bass of the Barrio Brothers’ morning show on KTTS. Steadily, the students entered the classroom and slid into the empty seats around me. First to arrive were the marsupial mama’s boys and girls. These sheltered kids had spent the entire summer sequestered indoors by overprotective parents. They entered the classroom with pale complexions and squinting like possums to adjust their eyes to the light.

The reformed and borderline students followed. They crept into class, carefully trying to avoid last year’s repercussive behaviors, and sat upright at their desks, face front and hands folded, mumbling their September resolutions to themselves. “This year will be different. I will do my homework. I will not slap Mr. Ellsworth when he calls me a loser. I will only bring my gun to school.” I admired the determination they showed in ignoring their corruptive friends, standing in the doorway and egging them on to join the excursion to McDonald’s for breakfast McMuffins, orange juice, and a joint.

Two minutes before nine o’clock signaled the grand entrance of the fly guys and starlets. Dressed in designer silk suits and dresses, accessorized in ascots, feather boas, and gold, the aloof adolescent pimps and dispassionate divas strolled into homeroom smoking Tiparillos and with a retinue of admirers who carried their books and pulled chairs from desks with maitre d’ suaveness.

I’d never been in a room full of black people unrelated to me before, and as the classroom filled, the growing din was unlike anything I’d ever heard. I sat like a tiny bubble in a boiling cauldron of teenage blackness, wondering where all the heat came from. Kids popped up out of their chairs to shout, whispered, tugged at each other. Homeroom was a raucous orchestral concerto conducted by some unseen maestro. In the middle of this unadulterated realness I realized I was a cultural alloy, tin-hearted whiteness wrapped in blackened copper plating. As my classmates yelled out their schedules and passed contraband across the room, I couldn’t classify anyone by dress or behavior. The boisterous were just as likely to be in the academically enriched classes as the silent. The clotheshorses stood as much chance of being on a remedial track as the bummy kids with brown bag lunches. Many kids, no matter how well dressed, didn’t have notebooks.

At exactly nine o’clock the bell rang and Ms. Schaefer stormed into the room. Disheveled and visibly nervous, she never bothered to introduce herself or say good morning. She wrote her name on the board in shaky, wavering strokes and took attendance. The class instantly interpreted her behavior as a display of lack of trust and concern. That day I learned my second ghetto lesson: never let on that you don’t trust someone. Even if that person has bad intentions toward you, he will take offense at your lack of trust.

Ms. Schaefer spat off the names like salted peanut shells.

“Wardell Adams?”

“Here.”

“Varnell Alvarez.”

“Aquí.”

“Pellmell Atkinson?”

“Presentemente.”

“Praise-the-Lord Benson?”

“Yupper.”

“Lakeesha Caldwell?”

“What?”

“Ayesha Dunwiddy?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Chocolate Fondue Edgerton.”

“That’s my name, ask me again and you’ll be walking with a cane.”

“I don’t know how to pronounce the next one.”

“You pronounce it like it sounds, bitch. Maritza Shakaleema Esperanza the goddess Tlazotéotl Eladio.”

“So you’re here.”

“Do crack pipes get hot?”

Then the gangsters trickled in, ten minutes late, tattooed and feisty. “Say man, woman, teacher, whatever you call yourself. You had better mark Hope-to-Die Ranford a.k.a. Pythagoras here and in the house. Nobody better be sitting at my desk. I had the shit last year and I want it back for good luck.”

“Mr. Pythagoras, take any available seat for now, okay? Who’s that with you?”

“Why you ask him I can speak for my damn self? This is Velma the Ludicrous Mistress Triple Bitch of Mischief Vinson.”

Ms. Schaefer’s unfazed approach to maintaining classroom comportment didn’t last long. By the end of the year we called her Ms. Sally Ride, because she was always blowing up at us.

After growing accustomed to police officers pulling students out of class for impromptu interrogations, bomb scares, and locker searches, I started to make friends, mostly with the nerdier students. We’d meet after school at the designated neighborhood safe houses on the ghetto geeks’ underground railroad: the library, the fire station’s milk-and-cookie open houses. The safest place was the basement of the Canaan Church of Christ Almighty God Our Savior You Betcha Inc. Pretending to be engrossed in Bible study, we traded shareware porn samplers downloaded onto our home computers. The computer was the only place where we had true freedom of assembly. Electronic mail allowed us shut-in sissies to talk our dorkian language uncensored by bullies who shoved paper towels soaked in urine down our throats and teachers who awoke from their catnaps only long enough to tell us to shut up. I tried to appreciate Spock’s draconian logic, Asimov’s automaton utopias, and the metaphysical excitement of fighting undead ghouls and hobgoblins in Dungeons and Dragons, but to me Star Trek was little more than the Federalist Papers with warp drives and phasers. “Set Democracy on stun. One alien, one vote.” I was cooler than this, I had to be — I just didn’t know how to show my latent hipness to the world.

The change in semesters brought new electives and a chance to make new friends. All the exciting choices, like Print and Electric and Wine-making Shop, were gang member bastions and closed to insouciant seventh-graders such as myself. During spring registration I stood in line behind sloe-eyed bangers and listened to kind liberal guidance counselors derail their dreams. “Buster, I know you want to take Graphic Design, but I’m placing you in Metal Shop. Mr. Buck Smith will know how to handle you, and it’ll be a good prerequisite for license plate pressing. You’ve got to plan for the future, Buster, ol’ boy. Can’t be too shortsighted, Mr. Brown. Remember, the longest jail sentence starts with one day.”

I was left with a pitiable choice between sycophant havens: Home Economics II and Drama. A memory of last semester’s beginning home ec, where Lizard Higgins’s contorted, charred, and smoldering body was lifted into the ambulance and then sped toward the burn unit, was fresh in my mind. Drunk from sneaking sips of cooking sherry behind Ms. Giggscombe’s back, Lizard spilled some libations on his clothes and absently leaned too close to his peach flambé assignment. Using his alcohol-soaked Washington Redskins football jersey as kindling, the fire crept up Lizard’s torso and enveloped him in an eerie blue flame. (Ms. Kramer, the science teacher, said it was the kirsch and slivovitz distillates that accounted for the blue flame.) In a panic, Lizard ran, somersaulted, and cartwheeled down the hall, desperately trying to extinguish his blazing body by trying to drop, roll, and cover all at the same time. Ms. Giggscombe extinguished him with a flying body tackle and an old army blanket.

I showed up for Drama with a blithesome smile on my face and greeted my computer geek friends with cheery hellos and Shakespearean “How now, nuncles.” The citywide Shakespearean Soliloquy Championship was in two weeks. Our teacher, Ms. Cantrell, determined to show that her impoverished Negro thespians could compete with kids at the well-funded oceanfront and Valley schools, entered us and notified the media that her domesticated niggers would soon be on parade. In a predictable attempt to inject some cultural relevance, she decided to do Othello and assigned parts by having the class draw roles from a hat. There weren’t enough characters to go around, so each monologue would be learned by two students. The girls drew from a church bonnet and the boys from a bowler. Gretchen and Ursula, the bespectacled stone foxes of dweebdom, each drew Desdemona and pleaded with Ms. Cantrell to cast me in the lead role as the noble but paranoid blackamoor. Thankfully, Osiris, god of shy little black boys, fated me to play Iago, the scheming Venetian puppeteer, sparing me from having to place any necromantic kisses on Gretchen’s or Ursula’s cheek.