Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

At one point Scoby shot a jumper from deep in the corner over the outstretched arms of three Wind Shears. The ball splashed through the net and the opposing coach turned red, stomped his feet, and yelled at his players to stop Scoby at all costs. One of the coach’s obedient henchmen planted an elbow in Scoby’s temple, which sent him into the stands head first. As he staggered dazedly back to the bench, Psycho Loco walked onto the floor and paced back and forth in front of the Aeronautic High bench, repeatedly slapping his thigh and challenging the team. “You fools see this two-and-half-inch thick length of pipe from my crotch to my knee? That’s not my dick, it’s a Remington twelve-gauge sawed-off. The next motherfucker to touch Scoby is going to be performing shotgun fellatio and become a victim of some seriously unsafe sex.”

Unlike at the playground, here a collective self-esteem was at stake. People who didn’t give a fuck about anything other than keeping their new shoes unscuffed all of a sudden had meaning to their lives. They yelled at the referees, sang fight songs, razzed the efforts of the other team. With the outcome of the game still in doubt, I was at the free-throw line going through my routine. Three dribbles, eye the front of the rim, deep breath. A voice barrel-rolled out of the stands, demanding attention. “Come on, Gunnar, we need these.” We? I didn’t even need these free throws. I missed the first one on purpose. The crowd moaned and spit, instantly stricken with psychosomatic bellyaches. “Please, make this next one, please, goddammit.” They were hypnotized and didn’t even know it, and I was the hypnotist. I had the power to make them cry or send them home happy, clucking like chickens. I sank the next one and fans stormed the court, and before I could look up at the scoreboard I was buried under a pile of exulting bodies. “We won! We won!” When I was finally exhumed by Coach Shimimoto, he asked me how did I feel, and I shrugged my shoulders with indifference. “What a competitor. What self-control. That hold on your emotions will take you far, wait and see, Gunnar.” When he freed me from a playful headlock, I wanted to shout, “But Coach, I really don’t give a fuck.” But why spoil his joy?

It was Nicholas’s and my first organized game, and afterward over the phone we joked about how we didn’t know to wear jockstraps instead of underwear, when the referee needed to touch the ball, what to say when the team huddled around Coach Shimimoto and clasped hands.

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘One-two-three, eat me.’”

“You’re supposed to say, ‘One-two-three, Wheatley.’”

The next morning at school everyone was still in a trancelike state. Principal Newcombe, the district supervisor, and a photographer from the daily paper met us at the front entrance. We gathered around Phillis Wheatley’s gigantic cast-iron bust and posed stiffly for the photographer. The district supervisor tried to shake Scoby’s hand, but Nicholas yanked it away at the last second. He had more trouble wriggling free of Principal Newcombe’s cheek-to-cheek embrace. I stood off to the side, propped up by an elbow, leaning on the crown of Phillis Wheatley’s brass cranium. The caption in the next day’s paper read, “Wheatley’s Nicholas Scoby and Gunnar Kaufman, ace students, ace athletes, and ace boon coons.”

Everywhere we went we were Wheatley High’s main attraction. Teachers and students treated us with unwanted reverence. The murmur of everyone clamoring for our attention rang in my ears like a worshipful tinnitus. Girls slipped phone numbers into my pockets and rubbed the tips of their angora nipples on my shoulders. Boys bear-hugged us and enthusiastically replayed the entire game for our benefit. “You niggers is bad. Money, when it was four minutes left in the half and you went baseline with that crossover and boofed, boom! on that gorilla Aero High nigger, I swear my dick got hard.” Mr. Dillard, the math analysis teacher, lectured on parabolas and hyperboles by using video excerpts of Scoby and me shooting jump shots at practice. Figuring we must be Newtonian geniuses to calculate the required force and proper trajectory to shoot a twenty-ounce sphere through a metal ring only eighteen inches in diameter while running and chewing gum, Mr. Dillard exempted us from homework for the rest of the semester.

To avoid the incessant adulation the day before a game against South Erebus High, we spent the lunch period in Coach Shimimoto’s art room. I doodled in India ink and Nicholas sat at the pottery wheel, shaping amorphous clay blobs. Toward the end of the period, Nicholas was pumping the pedal so fast he couldn’t get the clay to stay on the spinning disk. “Fuck arts ’n’ crafts!” he yelled as wet slabs of clay flew across the room, flattening themselves on the walls and windows.

I’d never seen Scoby mad about anything. I knew he was agitated about the upcoming game, but I didn’t know what to say to him. He was always the one who dispensed advice and remained in control. Whenever the crew got stopped for unjustified or justified police shakedowns, it was Scoby whispering, “Maintain, maintain.” I looked to Coach Shimimoto, but he was removing clay pancakes from his face and motioning with his eyes for me to say something first. I picked up Scoby’s latest masterpiece, a still soggy, pockmarked, nondescript lump of clay, and turned it over tenderly in my hands.

“Nice work. This really captivates the frustrations of the underclass in an abstract yet immediate way. You should send this to the art museum — call it Gog and Magog White House Lawn Defecation.”

“It’s an ashtray, you moron.”

“Yo nigger, why you so upset? We got a game tomorrow, just cool out.”

“Man, I’m tired of these fanatics rubbing on me, pulling on my arms, wishing me luck. I can’t take it. People have buttons with my face on ’em. They paint their faces and stencil my number on their foreheads. One idiot showed me a tattoo on his chest that said, ‘Nick Scoby is God.’”

“Maybe you are God. You’ll just have to accept the responsibility and let the clowns pay homage.”

“I’m not no fucking Tiki doll, no fucking icon. Don’t folks have anything better to do with their lives than pay attention to what I’m doing?”

“They’re just trying to say how much they appreciate what you do. It’ll get better, man, they’ll get used to us winning.”

“But they’ll never get used to Scoby making every shot he takes,” Coach Shimimoto interrupted. He sat down next to us, so overheated that steam rose from his body as if he were a giant humidifier. “Nicholas, you’re right, it’ll only get worse. You’ve got to figure out how can you live with it.”

“It’s not fair. I wasn’t born to make them happy. What I look like, motherfucking Charlie Chaplin?”

“So miss once in a while.”

“I can’t. I can’t even try. Something won’t let me.”

Scoby’s eyes reddened and he started to sniffle. He was cracking under the pressure. Watching his hands shake, I realized that sometimes the worst thing a nigger can do is perform well. Because then there is no turning back. We have no place to hide, no Superman Fortress of Solitude, no reclusive New England hermitages for xenophobic geniuses like Bobby Fischer and J. D. Salinger. Successful niggers can’t go back home and blithely disappear into the local populace. American society reels you back to the fold. “Tote that barge, shoot that basketball, lift that bale, nigger ain’t you ever heard of Dred Scott?”

I’d never asked Nick Scoby about his gifts. I say gifts because Nicholas had other talents besides shooting a basketball, none of which had any real social value. He could read UPC codes at a glance. He’d look at the series of thin and thick black lines on an unpriced bag of pork rinds or a bottle of seltzer water and immediately call out the price. He also had the power to tell if someone had a drop of Negro blood in his gene pool. Nicholas claimed he could smell a passing octoroon from a block away. Whenever we went on junkets out of the neighborhood to the Beverly Hills Pavilion or the county fair, Scoby loved to approach unsuspecting Negroes living carefree in the white world and blow their consanguine but secret identities. “Say, we missed you at the family reunion! Aunt Tessy wanted to know if you was still passing for Armenian.”