Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

Here was Psycho Loco, home on parole for killing a paramedic who refused to give his piranha Esta Lleno mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after the fish choked on a family of sea monkeys.

“What you singing, cuz?”

“Some song.”

“That’s more than some song. That song got me through four years in the Oliver Twist Institute for Little Wanderers and Wayward Minority Males. I sang that shit from lights on to lights out. Oh happy day, oh happy day, when Jesus washed, when Jesus washed, he washed my sins away.”

Psycho Loco was still singing and putting a shine on the LeSabre’s chrome bumpers when I went inside. It took me eight hours and two boxes of frosted flakes to write my first poem. It was a fitting end to a long day.

Negro Misappropriation of Greek Mythology

or, I know Niggers That’ll Kick Hercules’s Ass

i lift the smoggy Los Angeles

death shroud

searching for ghetto muses

anyone seen Calliope?

heard she emigrated to the San Fernando Valley

fulfills her ranch-styled dreams

with epic afternoon soap operas

and bong water bubble baths

outside, listening for voices,

i hear nothing

the leaves are silent

and the chichi birds look at me

like i’m crazy

you tell that dime-dropper Clio

she better not

leave her witness protection program

i seen some stone killers passing her picture

down by the 7–Eleven

on the sloped banks of the L.A. River

i sit cross-legged

classical guru pose;

my 50-cent Bic pen taut with possibilities

Thalia’s bloated body

floats by, zigzaggin’ between Firestone radials

finally catching itself on the rusted barbs

of a shopping cart

seriously lost at sea

Euterpe is at the talent show

begging entrance into the church basement

permission to sing her Patti Labelle covers

promising a big record label she won’t

smoke up the production money like last time

on my knees

I place my ear to the concrete

I hear nothing

no thundering cavalry hooves

kicking up dust

no war whoops

not even the ghost-town winds of massacre

i have a notion

that if i could translate

the slobbering bellows of Ray-Ray

the ubiquitous retarded boy’s

swollen-tongued incantations

i’d find Melpomene reciting the day’s obituaries

anyone here speak Down syndrome or crack baby?

running my hands over tree-bark Braille,

swashbuckling with palm tree leaves

nothing, paper cuts

en garde,

motherfucker

ham radio signals

s. o.s. a.p.b. 911 electronic prayers

to the goddess Urania’s voicemail

go unanswered

late last night my man picked up a jailhouse phone

“Yo, nigger, you got to come down and get me out.”

and i was inspired

* * *

The next morning I rummaged through the attic and found a can of black spray paint and the stencils my great-great-uncle Wolfgang used to do his Jim Crow handiwork. I painted the poem on the wall that surrounds Hillside. Surprisingly, my still-wet verse didn’t look out of place between the specious rest-in-peace calligraphic elegies and the fading Übermensch graffiti already splashed on the wall.

I was eating cereal and watching the Sunday morning TV journalists discussing the prospect of substantive black rule in South Africa when Nick Scoby knocked on the door. He had his headphones on and his arms were filled with a Montgomery Ward trimline steam iron that dripped water, an ironing board, a can of starch, and a pile of brand-new white T-shirts. He walked in, propped up the board with a loud squeak, and plugged the iron into a nearby socket.

“What you listening to?”

“Toshiko Akiyoshi.”

“Who?”

“A piano player. You met Psycho Loco last night, I heard.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Listen to you — ‘Yeah, so?’ Can you imagine the Indians meeting Christopher Columbus and saying, ‘Big deal, some midget with syphilis and a bad cold, so fucking what? Pass the buffalo meat’? You’re Psycho Loco’s next-door neighbor and he likes you.”

“Likes me how?”

“He likes you. Ever had a murderer like you before? Psycho Loco is going to come over to your house and ask you for favors. Borrow a cup of sugar, hold on to his gun, put your sister in a headlock and ask you to kindly tell the police he spent the night at your house playing Scrabble, shit like that. You’re involved, homes. You’re gonna have to respect something more than yourself. You know that saying, ‘Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends’?”

“ Malheur et Pitié, canto one, 1803.”

“Well, here in the street, that shit works in reverse. Fate picks your friends, and you choose your family. Everybody starts out an orphan in this hole. Gunnar, you gonna have to respect Psycho Loco, the neighborhood, and the way things get done here. Psycho Loco and the Gun Totin’ Hooligans try to kill people. People their perception of fate has slated as the enemy. This ain’t Hatfields and McCoys, nobody’s birth certificate says Joe Crip, Sam Piru, and I definitely don’t know no niggers surnamed Hooligan — some Irish homies, maybe. If Psycho Loco says you’re his friend, there ain’t nothing you can do about it. You’re friends ’cause he says so. Now there might be some fool who lives on the other side of town who thinks you’re his archenemy simply because Psycho Loco likes you. That is fate, black. Maybe people with money can skew fate in their favor, but that ain’t us. I seen that poem you wrote on the way over here. There was a gang of motherfuckers reading it like a wanted poster. Oh yeah, nigger, thirteen years old and you involved now.”

Scoby ripped open a plastic bag, pulled out a T-shirt, and stretched it over the pointy end of the ironing board. He sprayed the starch over the shirt, licked his finger, pressed it to the bottom of the iron, and listened to the sizzle. “Watch,” he said. The iron cackled and spit as it glided over the shirt. When Scoby got to one of the factory wrinkles, he pressed the steam button and the iron exhaled plumes of vapor and the wrinkles vanished. After ironing the front and back of the shirt, he snatched it off the end and laid the sleeves on the board. Carefully aligning the hems, he dug the iron into the material, putting a stiletto-sharp crease in each sleeve. “Don’t put no creases anywhere else. No crease down the back, that’s the east side. No military double creases down the front from the collar to the end of the sleeve like them buster-ass niggers from XXY Chromosome Recidivists. Now go get a pair of pants.”

“I don’t care what happens, I will never put a fucking crease in my Levi’s. No fucking way, man. I will never be that involved.”

Scoby laughed and asked if my mother had given me enough money for basketball shoes. I pulled two hundred dollars from an envelope marked “Basketball Paraphernalia” and fanned the crisp twenty-dollar bills, wondering if it was enough to change my fate.

The Shoes

Buying basketball shoes was much harder than I thought. Unlike the skate shop, where there are only three different brands and maybe ten styles to choose from, Tennies from Heaven was the footwear equivalent of an automobile showroom. A sneaker emporium where the walls were lined with hundreds of shoes and salesmen dressed in silk sweatsuits patrolled the floor, handing out brochures, shaking hands, and checking credit ratings.

The basketball section took up the entire third floor. An eighty-dollar sneaker caught my eye and I hefted it in my hand as if its weight might tell something about its quality. I was about to call for a salesperson when I heard Scoby snickering behind my back and singing, “Buddies, they cost a dollar ninety-nine. Buddies, they make your feet feel fine.” I put the shoe down and Nicholas pushed me through a sliding glass door into an area of the store called the Proving Grounds. A section of the store where the state-of-the art, more expensive models were on display. Before the staff allowed me to try on any shoes, I had to sign a release stating that if my new sneakers were forcibly removed from my feet and the crime received any media attention, I would blame the theft on the current administration and not on niche marketing.