Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

The mourning party for Pumpkin heated up into a war dance; the boys got antsy and began sloshing beer on one another and hollering hoodlum apothegms. “What we gonna do when a GTH Crip takes the final dip? Take a set trip, load the clip, cruise the strip, give a punk-ass buster a hellified fat lip. Nothing is even steven till everybody’s bleedin’. Pumpkin, we love you! We’ll make ’em pay!”

Psycho Loco yelled for everyone to shut up and grabbed a boy named Butane by his eyelids. Everyone flinched in vicarious pain and uttered a barely audible but collective “Ow.” Psycho Loco went into his proud drunken warrior tirade. “What do you mean, we? Every time one of us gets capped, who does the revenge killing? My ass. When I first moved here, you motherfuckers was scared of every vato on the block, especially Raymond Keniston. ‘Juan Julio, Juan Julio, Raymond took my money. Raymond threw my bike off the roof. Raymond threw my father into the garbage truck.’ Punk-ass yellow rat bastards. Joe Shenanigans, when Raymond stepped on your pet frog Kermie on purpose, didn’t I make him eat it and every fly that landed on your screen door for two weeks?”

“That’s ’cause you my gumba. My main molan-yan from the old country.”

“Fuck it, I’m tired of doing y’all’s dirty work. After the payback for Pumpkin, that’s it, I quit bangin’.”

Every gangster in GTH dropped to his knees and started kowtowing. “You can’t quit, Psycho Loco. We need you.” They knew if Psycho Loco quit, there would be a mini-pogrom on GTH members.

Psycho Loco laughed, released Butane’s eyelids, and plopped down next to me. We drank some beers, and eventually a few of us made a foray through Cheviot Heights in Psycho Loco’s van. We celebrated Halloween and tried to forget about Pumpkin by taking turns smashing car windows with a crowbar. The BMWs and Mercedes Benzes were all small fish when we saw our Moby Dick, a thirty-five-foot motor home parked in front of a huge three-story house complete with marble portico and a set of tall wooden doors. While Captain Ahab and the rest of the crew harpooned and skinned the mobile home, this sailor, drunk with jealousy and resentment, crept across the lawn and uprooted a small metal sign that read THIS PROPERTY GUARDED BY CHEV-TEC SECURITY.

After an hour of crippling cars, we weaved down Nalgas Drive back home. Psycho Loco made a left onto Wiltern Boulevard, reached under his seat, and pulled out his nine-millimeter. The boys passed the gun around, commented on its weight, barrel length, muzzle velocity, then stuck their arms out the window and into the humid air. With a pop the streetlights flashed, then burst into incandescent amber mini-novas, the plate-glass windows collapsing like families.

“Shoot this shit, Kaufman.”

I didn’t hesitate. Grabbing the gun in two hands, I squeezed off a three-shot sound poem that slapped a complacent hot southern California night to attention.

“Aim, nigger.”

“I am.”

“What you shooting at?”

“God, motherfucker.”

Nothing goes faster than fifteen bullets. In need of another fix, we stopped by Lettie’s, Psycho Loco’s girlfriend, for more ammunition. Hopping back into the car with a sly look on his face, Psycho Loco showed us a handful of bullets and put the car in gear. As we sped away, he announced with a hint of contriteness in his voice, “You should have seen the look on the old girl’s face. ‘Where you going?’ Like I know.”

Riding in the back seat of the car, I felt as if I were circling the neighborhood on some R-rated carousel. Familiar landmarks blurred into the sunrise, the stupid merry-go-round music refusing to go away. When I arrived home, I planted the metal Chev-Tec flag in the crab grass, threw up on my mother’s lone flowering rosebush, and tried to tear a set of unwanted chevrons from my memory.

“Gunnar, Pumpkin’s funeral is at four-thirty tomorrow afternoon.”

“I’ll be there.” I slammed the front door a little too loudly, distracting my mother from her morning eggs and crossword puzzle.

“Gunnar, where you been?”

“Shooting up the neighborhood. Ma, I’m becoming so black it’s a shame.” I wanted to explain to her that living out there was like being in a never-ending log-rolling contest. You never asked why the log was rolling or who was rolling the log. You just spread your arms and kept your feet moving, doing your best not to fall off. Spent all your time trying to anticipate how fast and in what direction the log would spin next. I wanted to take a seat next to my mother and use this lumberjack metaphor to express how tired I was. I wanted to chew my runny eggs and talk with my mouth full. Tell her how much I missed the calm equipoise of my old life but how I had grown accustomed to running in place, knowing nothing mattered as long as I kept moving. I wanted to say these things to her, but my breath smelled like wet dog shit with a hint of sulfur.

That morning I dreamed of chasing a brown-haired white boy down a flight of stairs and into the normally busy but now empty intersection. The boy and I used to be friends, but he had wronged me somehow, though I couldn’t say exactly how, and he and I both knew that the transgression merited death. The streets looked as if they’d been evacuated because of a nuclear threat or a hurricane gathering momentum off the coast. I chased the boy past a row of abandoned cars and caught him in the middle of the street under a traffic light stanchion that was swaying wildly in the wind. I shot him twice in the chest and he fell in the crosswalk. When I inspected the body, there were no bullet wounds, no blood, just two frayed holes in his yellow oxford shirt. Bending down, gun in hand, I opened his closed eyes as the noise of sirens and bystanders filled the streets. Was I hero or criminal? Psycho Loco ran over and wrested the gun from my hands, saying that he’d take the fall so I could go to college. I awoke recalling that it hadn’t been long ago when I was the only black person in my dreams; now I was shooting white kids in the street.

At church I slumped in a pew worn smooth by restless rear ends shifting from side to side trying to keep their owners awake through another young-black-man-done-gone sermon. Scoby, Psycho Loco, and the gang had heard this speech so often they called out the biblical passages before the reverend: Corinthians 7:13, Leviticus 2:10, Peter 4:25, Book of Job 1:17. The reverend gripped the sides of his podium and tried to outshout his hecklers and impress upon the rowdies how Orwell “Pumpkin” Ferguson had wasted his precious youth. “If the young man had only spent more of his time in church, he might have spent a little less time in that box.” I picked up a Bible and attempted to follow along with the reverend’s eschatological harangue, but I didn’t know where the books of Corinthians, Peter, and Job were. Flipping back and forth between Old and New Testaments, I ripped the book’s thin pages to shreds.

As the mourners prepared to file past the corpse, the minister asked the aged organist to play some sorrowful hymn the family had requested to accompany their son’s soul to the hereafter. The organist’s knobby fingers methodically pounded out a lifeless tune, halted every two bars by violent coughing attacks and sticky organ keys that required a butter knife to pop them back up into position. Pumpkin’s sendoff dirge was more like one long emphysemic wheeze. His parents started to cry, and I imagined Pumpkin sitting up in his coffin saying, “Get me to the fucking hearse, already” and disassociating himself from the fiasco.

Scoby removed a tape from his portable cassette player and popped it into the church’s sound system. The mewling strains of Miles Davis echoed off the panelled walls. The grateful organ player stopped sweating and lit a cigarette. The Hooligans strolled past the open casket, tossing bullets, shotgun shells, joints, switchblades, and cans of beer into it. If Pumpkin found himself in need of money, he could open a general store in the afterlife.