Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

Forty-nine, forty-eight

Rule Number Three — Convince a member of the local populace that you are worthy of his or her assistance by recounting your tale of false imprisonment and the brutality you’ve suffered at the hands of the guards.

Dexter Sandiford was playing jacks in front of the laundry room, wearing only a pair of loose-fitting white polyester Montgomery Ward briefs. Sitting on his rump, tossing a bright orange ball in the air, and sweeping the jacks into the palm of his chubby little hand, he looked like Cupid. I talked fast.

“Hey Dex, you waiting for your clothes to dry?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What you on?”

“Sixies.”

“Oh, sixies is tough. Your hands big enough to pick up six jacks scattered from here to Koreatown?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know Betty and Veronica, them two wild banshees who live on Corning Street in the yellow apartments?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They chasing me. They’re going to kill me. Here’s two dollars. I’m going to hide in the laundry room. If they come by, don’t tell ’em where I’m at. Okay? Say you seen me run through here headed for Al’s Sandwich Shop. My life is in your chubby hands, don’t drop it.”

“Uh-huh.”

Ready or not, here we come!

I slipped into the cramped laundry room. Dexter’s clothes were spinning in the dryer. The sound of his size five P.F. Flyers caroming around the steel drum drowned out my heavy breathing. Confident that Betty and Veronica would never find me, I stripped down to my soggy size 26 white polyester briefs and tossed my wet clothes in the dryer. Dexter sat outside the door playing jacks and I sat on top of the washing machine playing with my dick.

“Dexter, you seen Gunnar?”

Damn.

“Uh-huh.”

“Where is he?”

“He gave me two wet dollar bills and said to tell you he was running over there near Al’s Sandwich Shop.”

“Dexter, tell you what I’m not gonna do. I’m not gonna take your two dollars out your hand. I’m not gonna tear them dirty drawers off your little pitch-black behind, shove the stupid two dollars in the crack of your ass, insert one of them jacks in your wee-wee pee hole, and toss you butt-naked into the fucking street if you tell me where Gunnar is.”

The silence told me that Dexter was breaching our contract with a cherubic pout and a point of his finger toward the laundry-room door.

Seeing my scrawny near-nakedness, Betty and Veronica licked their lips and shut the door behind them. “Mmmmmm, tap-tap on the fine nigger sittin’ on top of the washing machine.”

Veronica cradled my limp body in her arms and placed me gently on the floor. The dryer gave off a strange half-buzzing, half-ringing sound and continued to rumble. Betty’s teeth clamped down on my nipples and sucked the chill from the damp concrete out of my body. Warm rivulets of her spit meandered past my abdominal muscles and pooled in my bellybutton. Veronica crept around my body, teasingly snapping the elastic band on my underwear and grinding her crotch on my thigh, my shin, and begging to tickle her love button with my big toe. At some point during the torturous fury of this menage à trois noir, my undies slid down to my ankles and shackled me into complete submission. The horny furies took tag-team turns squeezing my genitals. Betty’s cold hands ran against the grain of my prickly pubic hair, then cupped and kneaded my balls into a shriveled sack of testosterone mush. Veronica stretched my limp dick with one hand, plucked it like a bass string, and the girls broke into a dueling chorus of gospel double-entendre. Veronica opened with “Go down, Moses, waaaay down to Egypt’s land,” forcing my face between her legs. Betty sidestepped and countered in an Easter Sunday vibrato of “Touch me, Lord Jesus, mmmmmmm, with thy hand of mercy,” ramming my hand into her crotch. Veronica, reeling from Betty’s blows, pointed at my flaccid member and slid into a storefront Pentecostal soprano: “Fix it, Lord Jesus, you fixed it for my mother, now fix it for me.” Betty reached into my mouth, grabbed my tongue and placed its pointy tip on her knee, and started singing Mahalia Jackson’s subliminal hit, “Move On Up a Little Higher.” Feeling left out, Veronica snatched me by the Afro, smothered my lips with kisses, and forced her long tongue down my throat until it tickled my larynx. Betty extracted her spongy plumber’s helper from my ear and whispered, “Why don’t you sing, Gunnar? Give your frigid spirit wings and just imagine if niggers could fly.”

There was a knock on the laundry-room door. It was little Dexter’s mother come to collect her clothes and wanting to know what all the moaning was about.

“If y’all in there fucking, you better save some for me. I’ll give a motherfucker a shot of life.”

“Just a minute, Ms. Sandiford.”

Rescued at last. As I removed my clothes from the dryer, Betty and Veronica took one last hunk of buttcheek and then started arguing on the appropriate term for a boy’s losing his virginity.

“Deboned.”

“Spit-shined.”

“Bitch-dipped.”

I walked home basking in the warmth of newly tumble-dried clothes, singing “Oh Happy Day” at the top of my lungs. I was still singing when I got home.

A musclebound shirtless boy of about sixteen covered in soapsuds was in Ms. Sanchez’s driveway, washing the hell out of her Buick LeSabre. He heard me singing and stopped rubbing the caked-on bird shit long enough to greet me.

“What’s up, little man?”

“Cooling.”

The wind blew a cloudbank of suds across his chest, revealing a shiny gold crucifix that seemed imbedded in his massive brown torso. It was Ms. Sanchez’s son, Juan Julio, known around the neighborhood as Psycho Loco. I’d never seen him before, but knew all about him. His mother used to tell me how Juan Julio’s voice was the best missionary religion ever had. On Sundays he’d sing with the choir and his baritone would make the babies stop crying and the deacons start. Ms. Sanchez would hold a crucifix exactly like his up to the sky and swear that drunks, bums, prostitutes, hoodlums, even police officers, people who’d never been in church a day in their lives, would walk into the original First Ethiop Azatlán Catholic-Baptist Church and Casa de Sanctified Holy Rolling Ecumenical Sanctification, kneel at Juan Julio’s feet to plead forgiveness, renounce sin, accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior, and put all the money they had in the collection plate. When the service ended, the collection plate would be filled with car keys, crack vials, and stolen credit cards.

The neighborhood kids told me the story of Juan Julio’s life outside the House of God. On the street the angelic Juan Julio was Psycho Loco, leader of the local gang the Gun Totin’ Hooligans. I’d heard how as a strong-arm man-child for a loan shark, when he tired of a debtor’s sob story on why that week’s payments were late, he’d heat his crucifix with a nickel-plated lighter and press the makeshift branding iron into the victim’s cheek and scream, “Now you really have a cross to bear, motherfucker!”

One day I asked Snooky how come his Uncle Kahlil always wore earmuffs, even in the summer. He told me that his uncle and Psycho Loco got into a tussle over who was going to get to smash the jewelry cases at Declerk’s Discount Diamonds during a robbery they were planning. Juan Julio grabbed Uncle Kahlil by the ears and pulled like he was opening a bag of potato chips. The pop of his ears being snatched off the sides of his head was the last thing Uncle Kahlil ever heard. Out of pity, Juan Julio let him break the glass during the robbery, but Snooky’s uncle got caught, because he couldn’t hear Juan Julio telling him the cops were coming.