Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

Even with all the paperwork I could only try on one shoe at a time, since I wasn’t accompanied by a bonded legal guardian or a basketball coach. Whenever I slipped my foot into a new shoe I’d hobble over to the mirror like Tiny Tim Cratchit and blink really fast, trying to create an optical illusion so I could imagine what wearing both sneakers at the same time would look like. After some eyestrain I managed to convince the guy to let me try a different shoe on each foot and teetered over to Nicholas to ask his opinions. He vetoed the sporty Barbarian on my left foot because they were sewn by eight-year-old Sri Lankans who worked in open-air factories, received no lunch breaks, and were paid in candy bars. The Air Idi Amin Fire Walker on my right foot, a colorful suede high-top designed to look like a traditional African mask, was nixed because although the shoes performed well on asphalt, they tended to slip on gym floors, and besides, the kids chanted “Coup d’état, coup d’état!” at anyone who wore them. Nick suggested the high-tech Adidas Forum II’s, an outrageously expensive pair of plain white basketball shoes, computer-designed for maximum support, something called “wearability,” and exactly like the pair he was wearing.

The salesperson, smelling commission, closed the deal with a spiel about French cowhide hand-sewn with French thread by French seamsters who were paid by French entrepreneurs who donated a percentage of every shoe sold to help build basketball courts in ghettos throughout the world. I wanted to comment on how building more basketball courts just created a demand for more sneakers, but instead gimped around the store, hopped up and down on one foot, and put one hundred and seventy-five dollars on the counter. The salesman smiled and handed me the other shoe and the carbon copy of my release form.

The Haircut

I had twenty-five dollars left and felt that my next purchase should be a basketball, but Nicholas insisted that having the proper haircut was more important than having a basketball. He recommended Manny’s Barbershop and Chiropractic Offices on the corner of 24th Street and Robertson Boulevard. Manny Montoya was a tall curly-haired Chicano whose mission in life was to improve the posture of every hunchbacked ex — farm laborer, swaybacked prostitute, and stoop-shouldered hoodlum in the neighborhood. Manny only offered one haircut, the “Sunkist Special,” which was a concentration-camp baldy with a hint of stubble. Ballplayers and bangers lined up for haircuts, sharing copies of Jet, Pocho, and Guns & Ammo till a barber called their names.

“Hey bro’, peep this firmé cuete. Air-cooled, magnesium-plated, single-action Gepetto Pinnochio long-nosed.22 caliber.”

“Naw, cuz, you want one of these fingerprint-resistant Buger GAT polymer ten-millimeters with the emerald handle.”

“Well, I think we can both agree that this centerfold jaina del mes is fine.”

“What’s her hobbies?”

“The usual — scuba diving, horseback riding, and skiing.”

“Where in fuck does Jet magazine find all these colored cowgirls who ski?”

On the other side of the room, near the plastic skeleton, lowriders who’d gotten whiplash from taking corners on two wheels and thrown their backs out because they’d spent last night bunny-hopping their Oldsmobile Cutlasses down Crenshaw Boulevard waited patiently for adjustments, pretending the cricks in their necks didn’t hurt. Manny excitedly pointed out the window and exclaimed, “Hey look, there’s Gilbert Suavecito’s cherry ’45 DeSoto convertible and Iris Chacon riding on the hood in a bikini.” The hot-rodders’ heads spun around for a look at Gilbert’s champion lowrider and the Mesopotamian-but-tocked televison star Ms. Chacon. A chorus of agony rang throughout the shop as the men rewrenched their necks for nothing more than a glimpse of Rafael Muñoz giving a ride to Gina “Scullybones” Sanders on the handlebars of his custom Schwinn Stingray five-speed.

Manny laughed and dug his thumb into the nape of my neck. The pain forced my head down and he sheared long furrows down the middle of my scalp.

In the far corner of the shop, a circle of old men, Indios and Africans, played electronic poker games and swapped migration stories. I sat in the barber chair concentrating on keeping my head still and straining to hear the stories of how their families ended up in Los Angeles, far from their ramshackle southwestern and southern roots.

One man, Mr. Tillis Everett, the attendant at Zoom Zoom Gas, chewed on beef jerky and talked about how one day in Biloxi his father came home with blood on his shirtsleeve. “It was a Tuesday, and Daddy walked in the door, kissed Grandma on the cheek, and said, ‘Momma, I have to go.’ Grandma said, ‘I’ll have your stuff ready in five minutes.’” The mechanic spit out a wad of unchewable gristle, picked his teeth with a thumbnail, and continued. “Things was understood down south. If you made a decision to hit a white man, you made the choice to kill him and relocate. Wasn’t no left, right, left, ‘Don’t fuck with me no more,’ shake hands and let’s be friends. They used to say, ‘Hope the man with the rope ain’t got no telescope.’ It wasn’t no running in the water to throw the dogs off your scent. They bring the hounds round to the other side and pick you up soon enough. You had to get to a chicken coop and rub handfuls of chicken shit on your shoes real thick-like. Dogs would get tired of smellin’ that shit and they’d refuse to follow the scent. My daddy arrived in Los Angeles smelling like a henhouse toilet. Niggers out here is out of luck. Ain’t no chicken shit in Los Angeles. Lots o’ chickenshit niggers, no real chicken shit. Couldn’t run away from Los Angeles if you wanted to.”

I couldn’t keep my hand off my newly shorn skull. It sprinkled on the way home and the droplets of rain soothed my tender scalp. When I got home my mom pressed my noggin into her breasts and sobbed that I looked as if I were on a hunger strike. My sisters were taking turns doing bongo solos on my head when the phone rang. It was my father.

The Ball

“Boy, you see my portrait of the Northbrook Necrophiliac in yesterday’s paper?”

“Yup. Looks a little bit like Dwight Eisenhower. Is it true this guy goes round fucking skeletons and shit?”

“Yeah, some janitor at the medical school caught him sticking his dick in an eyesocket.”

“What a numskull.”

“Very funny. Your mother tells me you’ve started playing basketball.”

“Yeah, me and some of the fellas…”

“Just don’t get one of those Jack-Johnson-black-buck-hey-look-at-me-I’m-an-athlete baldheads, you hear me.”

“Dad, I need a basketball.”

“Only scrubs buy basketballs.”

“Dad!”

“I’ll see what I can do. Put your mama on the phone.”

About two hours later a police cruiser drove by the front of the house and chirped the siren. I looked out the window and saw a hairy white arm fling a brand-new basketball into the front yard. As I ran out to retrieve the ball, a book landed at my feet. The book was a thin paperback entitled Heaven Is a Playground. From what I could glean from the back cover, it was a sports journalist’s treatise on a pack of inner-city Brooklynites who spent the better part of their days scampering around a basketball court known as the Hole. Inside my father had scribbled a note: “Read this and remember you’re a Kaufman, and not one of the black misfits sociologically detailed herein.”

* * *

Soon it was time to try out my new sneakers, new basketball, and new haircut. Scoby and I sauntered into the park and he pointed out some of the aging local legends seated under the trees, sipping from crinkled brown bags. Ben “Yoda” Morales reputedly was so quick that when he changed directions, the sneaker-to-concrete friction caused his shoes to spontaneously combust. Over the years he’d lost a step and all anyone ever saw was puffs of smoke wafting from his soles as he slithered to the basket. In his prime, Nathan “Sadhu” Ng could go up for a rebound and leave a dirty footprint on the backboard. Now he was a shoeless stumblebum begging dimes from the younger kids. Scoby too had a rep. Blind Melissa “Sonar” Kilmartin, who could do anything on the court but chase the ball when it went out of bounds, turned in our direction and raised her beer to him. “What’s up, Scoby, you gonna serve niggers today like I used to, baby? Who that with you?”