Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

My dramatic confrere was Nicholas Scoby, a thuggish boy who sat in the back of the class, ears sealed in a pair of top-of-the-line Sennheiser stereo headphones and each of his twiggish limbs parked in a chair of its own. Rocking back and forth in his seat and seemingly oblivious to Ms. Cantrell and life’s lesson plan, Nicholas Scoby seemed like an autistic hoodlum. His pea head lolled precariously on his wiry neck like a gyroscope; he snapped his fingers in some haphazard pattern and muttered to himself in a beatnik word-salad jibberish. “Dig it. This nigger’s tonality is wow. Like hep. Like hepnotic. It’s contrapuntal glissando phraseology to bopnetic postmodernism. Blow, man, blow. Crazy.” Much to the dismay of those who paid attention to the burned-out teachers, Scoby was a straight-A student.

Ms. Cantrell divided the class into study groups. I reluctantly approached my partner, his eyes closed, a stream of guttural pablum escaping from his mouth accompanied by a barrage of spittle: “Bleeeet eet eeeet raaaaant dit dit dent ting ting. Send me, Jackson, send me. Oop-pop-a-da.” Tapping Nicholas on the shoulder, I interrupted. “Hey man, what you listening to?”

Apparently able to read lips, he arched his eyebrows to the highest regions of his forehead and answered, “Cannonball Adderley.”

“Who?”

“Jazz, daddio, jazz.” Then carefully removing his headphones, he continued, his pallid ears clashing with his brown-veneer skin. “You don’t listen to jazz? The only truly American art form other than the sit-com.”

“I listen to jazz. David Sanborn, Al Di Meola, and Spyro Gyra. Jeff Lorber is funky.”

“Funky? Fool, that ain’t jazz any more than Al Jolson and Pat Boone is soul. That shit is fusion. A superficial fusion at that. A little black style with weepy bland white sedative sensibilities. White boys with the blues tinged with some Caribbean high-end percussiveness.”

“So what should I listen to?”

“Do like me, start at the beginning.”

“With what, the New Orleans Rhythm Jazz Kings?”

“No fool, with a. My plan is to listen to everything recorded before 1975 in alphabetical order. No white band leaders, sidemen cool. No faux African back-to-the-bush bullshit recorded post-1965. Though I’m going to have to make an exception for Anita O’Day, she could pipe. What’s your name, cuz?”

“Gunnar. Gunnar Kaufman.”

“You dark as fuck for someone with Teutonic blood.”

“Naw, strictly Negro hemoglobins.”

Nicholas introduced himself with a grin. “Nicholas Scoby.”

“I know.”

“Do I have a cool-ass name or what? Sounds like I’m on some old secret agent cloak ’n’ dagger type shit. I should get a card to hand out to motherfuckers, ‘Nick Scoby — Espionage.’”

“You wanna learn the monologue together?”

“Wouldn’t it be cool to be the most famous spy in the world? Makes no practical sense, everybody’d know I’m spying on them, but I’d be appealing to the inflated superego of the evildoer. Be a bad motherfucker, CIA needs to get with me. Yeah, nigger, let’s get together later this week. Cool? Later.”

He called me “nigger.” My euphoria was as palpable as the loud clap of our hands colliding in my first soul shake. My transitional slide into step two was a little stiff, but I made up for it with a loud finger snap as our hands parted. Scoby gently placed his headphones over his ears and I skated away cool, dipped my right shoulder toward the ground, and with some dapper spinal curvature pimp-daddied back to my seat. I picked up the mimeographed Shakespearean sonnets Ms. Cantrell had handed out at the start of class, pressed my nose against the damp page, and inhaled the delirium of blue-inked love poems and newfound friendship. I’d have to remember to ask Nicholas Scoby about the blues. I stood up to read.

That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect,

For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair;

The ornament of beauty is suspect,

A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air.

“More erudition,” Ms. Cantrell said, “more erudition.”

Scoby and I rehearsed in his bedroom while his mom sat in the basement den watching old tapes of her roller derby days at the Shrine Auditorium. The Scobys relocated from Chicago’s West Side when the Windy City Tornados traded their star jammer, Beleeta “Queen Nairobi” Scoby, to the Los Angeles Thunderbirds for Skeets McNeely, Fat Jasper Perkins, and fifty sets of brake pads. During study breaks we’d join her on the couch, munching cheese puffs and directing muffled cheers at the television set.

I never understood the game, but invariably with time running out and the Thunderbirds down by five points, a plump man in a garish burgundy three-piece suit waved Ms. Scoby off the bench. Queen Nairobi skated around the ring in long slow strides to the roar of the small but rambunctious crowd of drunks, kids in tattered T-shirts, and wheelchair-bound senior citizens. Measuring her opposition and plotting her offensive strategy, she’d fasten the chin strap to a shiny yellow helmet that sat on her beachball-sized Afro like a plastic yarmulke. Picking up speed in the banked turn, Scoby’s mom would extend a skinny arm to Big Dan Party Hardy, who’d whip her into a gauntlet of obese bearded and big-tittied enemy buffalos on wheels. Arms cocked at the elbows for combat, she wriggled and scratched her way to hero worship, scoring points by ducking under the legs of the St. Louis Gateways, dodging the sucker punches of the Pennsylvania Black Lung Sputums, and sailing over the body blocks of the Bay Area Seismics. Skating on one leg, arms flailing like windmills, Ms. Scoby was so athletic that she sent the opposition hurtling over the rails and into the ringside seats, where crazed fans pelted them with fistfuls of stale popcorn, cups of flat beer, and metal folding chairs. As Nicholas’s mother rolled off the track, bent at hips and unsmiling, the PA announcer would yell, “Six big T-bird points!” and the big man in the burgundy suit would greet the winded Queen Nairobi with a kiss. They were oblivious to the flying aluminum walkers and whisky bottles that zipped past their intertwined bodies, and flashes of sweet pink tongue victory darted from their lips.

Nicholas and I returned to our studies.

“Yo, is that mauve-suited kumquat your father?”

“I think so. Mama won’t say. They call him Gene ‘the Dream’ Beasley.”

“You got any dreams, yo?”

“Yeah, I have a dream. Dream and a half, really. You ever hear of a Brocken specter?”

“Who?”

Nicholas put down his monologue. “A Brocken specter. If you stand on real high ground, say Mount Everest, with your back to the sun and look down, you’ll see your shadow on top of a fogbank or a cloud. That shadow is a Brocken specter.”

“Oh snap, your shadow on a cloud? That’s cool as hell.”

“But wait, there’s more. As an added bonus for those who act early, you get your very own glory.”

“Your own what?”

“Your own glory. As you look down at your shadow, there’s a corona around your head. Even if you’re standing next to a gang a niggers looking at they own Brocken specters, you can only see the glory around the shadow of your head.”

“That’s deep.”

“Gunnar, do you have any dreams?”

“Nope, but listening to you carry on, I’m working on one now. I once heard about some shit called a Flächenblitz.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s lightning in reverse. A Flächenblitz strikes up from the top of a cumulonimbus cloud and ends in clear air.”

“You’re a fucking reincarnated Prussian Hun Bohemian. No doubt in my mind, homeboy.”

* * *

The city Shakespearean soliloquy finals were held at Anita Bryant Junior High in the Valley. First to arrive, Ms. Cantrell’s third-period drama class entered the plush auditorium and sat in the back, testing the incredible acoustics with ghetto whoops and urban yodels. “Hey yo! Awwwight! Manischewitz Drama Club in the house, y’all! Yo mama-mama-ma-ma-aaa!” We were prepared to do well; we had all memorized our monologues, and our Old English diction was popping with sexual innuendo and abba rhyme schemes. What we weren’t prepared for was the lily-white cocksureness of the students from the Valley and the ritzy L.A. County woods: Brentwood, Westwood, and Woodland Hills. The auditorium filled with suburbanites costumed in Renaissance finery. The white kids had metamorphosed from surfers, stoners, and student council members into medieval gold-digging courtesans and horny lords. We picked the wrong day to wear our “Don’t ask me 4 shit” shirts. The white girls glided onto the stage in towering hairstyles and billowy velvet gowns, and the white boys wore ruffled silk shirts, skintight pants, peacock-feathered hats, and pointy suede Robin Hood shoes. It didn’t seem to matter much when they flubbed their lines; their parents and housekeepers stood and applauded, and the judges murmured among themselves in low voices and nodded approvingly.