Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

Perplexed, I asked him, “Traveled where?”

The college boy got indignant and tried to bluff his rulebook mastery across. “If a player in possession of the ball leaves the playing surface with the ball and lands at a location other than the original takeoff still in possession of the ball and without having dribbled the ball, said player has created an unfair advantage and ‘traveled’.”

“What if you come down in the exact same spot? Then you haven’t gained an advantage, you’re right back where you started.”

“Impossible.”

The student manager must have been a physics major, because he jumped up and down a few more times to prove that landing in the same spot was an impossibility.

“But, what if?”

“Traveling, you little fuck.”

As the game wore on, I began to notice that whenever anybody on my team rebounded a missed shot, everyone ran at top speed toward our basket. I got cocky and decided to take an active role in the game. I began by playing defense. It looked easy enough; you just stood in front of whoever had the ball and wiggled your body until you exasperated your opponent to the point of distraction. A boy named Weasel Torres dribbled toward me and I leapt out in front of him, placing my lanky frame between him and the basket. Weasel’s feints and pivots couldn’t shake my unorthodox jumping-jack defense, and for good measure I burped in his face, causing Weasel to shoot a wild shot that clanged off the rim like a cannonball.

Scoby rebounded and I took off down the court, my speed boosting me ahead of the pack. With a devilish look in his eyes, Scoby fired a bullet pass that hit me right in the hands about fifteen feet from our team’s basket. I caught the ball, took the one dribble my coordination allowed, then jumped as hard as I could, my eyes closed tight. I could hear Ms. Cegeny’s testy nephew: “You land with the ball, traveling!” I must have stopped breathing, because I could feel my legs kicking in midair as if I were suspended from an invisible noose. What the fuck was I doing with a basketball in my hands? I opened my eyes and saw that my momentum was hurtling my fragile body toward the basket and the steel rim was closing in on the bridge of my nose. I raised my arms in self-defense and crashed into the basket, the ball slamming through the hoop with an authoritative boom. Instinctively, I grabbed onto the rim to stop myself from flying into the pole. When I slowed to a gentle sway, I let go and dropped to the ground with a soft thud, just as the bell ending the lunch period sounded in the distance.

The game stopped. The other players looked at each other, perplexed, for a brief second and then burst out in a frenzy of high-pitched whooping, high fives, and high-stepping jigs.

“Oh shit. ”

“Yo, that nigger had legs akimbo.”

“Oh shit. ”

“Scoby, your boy’s got like crazy hops.”

“Ain’t no seventh-grade bailers in the city dunking.”

“This nigger has high-flying kung fu triple-feature you-killed-my-teacher-you-dirty-bastard rise.”

“Oh shit. ”

On the walk back to school, Scoby looked at me as if he knew something I didn’t. Mr. Uyeshima met us at the gate. He sent the rest of the boys and the lone girl to class. I had a swat coming to me because I had ignored a direct order. As Mr. Uyeshima marched me over to the wine vats for corporal enlightenment, Patrick turned around, cupped his hands to his mouth, and shouted, “Uyeshima, don’t hit Gunnar too hard, he dunking with two hands nasty-like pow.”

Bent over in the musty shed catching heat with my pants puddled in a denim heap about my ankles and my elbows dug into my knees, I’d received three of the prescribed five swats when Mr. Uyeshima asked me did I really dunk. I said yes and he sent me back to class with a stinging pat on my tender behind.

“Way to go,” he said.

“Way to go where?” I snapped back.

I sat in Spanish class, my warm ass simmering in the seat of my pants, trying to concentrate on the infinite conjugations of the verb “escribir” scribbled on the board. I thought of Swen Kaufman taking lashes for his farcical dreams of being a dancer and realized I had taken my swats for the sake of friendship. Not for some orchestrated semper fi cultish fraternal bonding or a Huck Finn Nigger Jim “love the one you’re with” friendship, but because I’d met a special motherfucker whose companionship was easily worth a middle-school beating.

“Gunnar, haz una oración utilizando la palabra ‘escribir,’ por favor.”

“Yo voy a escribir poemas como Octavio Paz y Kid Frost.”

“Quienes?”

“Octavio Paz era un poeta gordiflón y activista de Mexico.”

“Y Kid Frost?”

“El es un poetastro hip-hop de la vieja guardia, de la vieja escuela quien vivo en Pomona o en la este.”

“Vieja escuela?”

“Si, de la old school. ”

“Bueno.”

“Mata a los pinché gringos. No hablo este lingo y yo quiero jugar bingo. Ya estuvo, time to show and prove-oh.”

“Bastante, Gunnar.”

I spent the next Saturday perched on the front steps, lazily watering the lawn, waiting for a poem to descend from the midday Los Angeles haze. Paying special attention to the dry patches, I slowly turned the front yard into a grassy swamp, forcing the ants and beetles to scramble over one another as they sought higher ground on the aluminum Montgomery Ward fence that surrounded the yard.

There was a different vibrancy to 24th Street that day. The decibel level was the same, but a grating Hollywood hullabaloo replaced the normal Hillside barking dog and nigger cacophony. The newest rap phenoms, the Stoic Undertakers, were filming a video for their latest album, Closed Casket Eulogies in F Major. Earlier in the day I had wandered into the production tent to audition for a part as an extra. The casting director blew one expanding smoke ring in my direction and dismissed me with a curt “Too studious. Next! I told you I want menacing or despondent and you send me these bookworm junior high larvae.”

Moribund Videoworks was on safari through the L.A. jungle. A caravan of film trucks and RVs lurched through the streets like sheet-metal elephants swaggering through the ghetto Serengeti. Local strong-armed youth bore the director over the crowds in a canopied sedan chair, his seconds shouting out commands through a bullhorn. “Bwana wants to shoot this scene through an orange filter to make it seem like the sun’s been stabbed and the heavens are bleeding onto the streets.” “Special effects, can you make the flames shoot farther out from the barrel of the Uzi? Mr. Edgar Barley Burrows wants the guns to spit death. More blood! You call this carnage! More blood.” My street was a soundstage and its machinations of poverty and neglect were Congo cinema verité. “Quiet on the set. Camera. Roll sound. Speed. Action!”

Carloads of sybaritic rappers and hired concubines cruised down the street in ghetto palanquins, mint condition 1964 Impala lowriders, reciting their lyrics and leaning into the camera with gnarled intimidating scowls.

“Cut!”

The curled lips snapped back into watermelon grins like fleshy rubber bands. “How was that, massa? Menacing enough fo’ ya?”

“You got ’em pissing their pants in Peoria. Now one more take, and this time make sure they defecate their dungarees in Dubuque.”

Our local councilman, Pete “Hush Money” Brocklington, walked past my house wringing his hands and bragging to the passersby about the loads of money pouring into the neighborhood coffers. I only saw the bulge in his pocket. When the civic carpetbagger ventured into firing range, I pressed my thumb into the nozzle and sprayed him with a water jet from my Montgomery Ward Birmingham Special garden hose. He was about to chastise me when my mother, obviously of voting age, opened the screen door. “Gunnar, stop playing with the hose!” Councilman Brocklington waved to her. My mother ignored him and sloshed across the lawn to inspect my job, then joined me on the steps. I looked down at her sopping wet feet; as she wiggled her toes, tiny bubbles squeezed through her canvas sneakers.