Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

Seeing my distress, Psycho Loco would bebop over to my rescue, force a couple of swigs of his liquid rhythm down my throat, then cruise the floors barking like the Alpine St. Bernard he was. Even with the lubrication of my joints and the steadying of my nerves, the quest for the beat wasn’t over. Now I had to fight the urge to be too loose-limbed, prevent my arms from flaying about my body uncontrollably in an epileptic paroxysm. After a few moments I’d relax and settle into a barely acceptable, simple side-to-side step, dubbed by the locals the white boy shuffle. I wasn’t funky, but I was no longer disrupting the groove.

As the evening wound down, the house lights dimmed to a deep red haze and the DJ began to play the latest slow jams. Boys and girls floated across the floor superglued at the crotch, grinding each other’s privates into powder in a mortar-and-pestle figure-eight motion. Unattached boys tried to look as if they had something better to do, and unattached women looked longingly in my direction, wiggling their hips in the vain hope of tantalizing me into action. I’d pray that Psycho Loco would start a fight so I could leave without having to support someone’s head on my shoulder and listen to them warble inane love lyrics in my ear. Invariably, Psycho Loco came through, slugging some fool for stepping on his shadow or some equally petty infraction.

As the bouncers escorted us out, Psycho Loco and Scoby compared the night’s harvest.

“I got three phone numbers and Kenyana Huff pinched my butt twice.”

“I only got one phone number.”

“One number?”

“Ah, but it was Natalie Nuñez’s number.”

“Oh, you was talking to that? Damn, what did you say to get over?”

“I told her that I’d get her a date with Gunnar if she let me take her to the UCLA Mardi Gras this Saturday. So Gunnar, how’d you do?”

“Do people be staring at me when I’m out there dancing? It feels like everybody is looking at me.”

“First off, you ain’t you out there dancing. You out there having a brain aneurysm. You move so crazy it looks like you caught the Holy Ghost. Second off, nobody is paying any attention to your rhythmless behind ’cause they trying they own mack on.”

“Gunnar, do you even like girls?”

“Yes.” Which was true. I just had yet to meet one who didn’t intimidate me into a state of catatonia.

“When you gonna get a girlfriend?”

“I had one once in Santa Monica.”

“What, some pasty white girl named Eileen, please? That don’t count. Nigger, have you ever seen any parts of the pussy?”

“Of course, man. I’ve fucked … er, been fucked … um, been fucking … I is fucking.”

“Does the line go up and down or from side to side?”

During the ride home Psycho Loco would leaf through a copy of Bow and Arrow Outdoorsman, passing over pictures of grizzled white men snuggling with dead animals and articles entitled “Ancient Hunting Tricks of the Mighty Neanderthal” or “101 Tick Repellents that Don’t Smell like Grandma” and heading straight to the classified ads in the back.

“Gunnar, we’re gonna find you a wife. Here we go. Listen to this:

Hot Mama-Sans of the Orient

Seeking Dates or Seoulmates

Inscrutable, Demure, and Pure by Day

Insatiable, Mature, and Impure by Night

For Color Brochure send 50¢ to:

Mail Order Asian Geishas and Dragon Ladies

Box 900, Sacramento, CA 16504.”

“You’re sick, you know that, right?”

“Dude, I’ve never seen you voluntarily speak to a girl. This is the only way. Tried and true, in defunct monarchies the world over. I’m serious now, say I won’t.”

“You won’t.”

“Two more years, bro. Soon as you turn eighteen I’m marrying your frigid ass off.”

Somehow I knew that Psycho Loco was right, I’d never start a romance of my own accord. But it was difficult to accept sexual counsel from a pugnacious male who had to be drunk to fuck and whose first rule of courtship was “Always make sure your dick is out. That way, no matter what happens you can say, ‘Well, I had my dick out.’” Maybe there was an advantage to arranged romance — no dates consisting of gauche attempts to be unceasingly clever and sensitive. Never having to deal with the living-room interrogations from incestuously overprotective brothers and fathers. And I’d never have to put down the evening paper and say, “Listen, honey, they’re playing our song.” Still, I stuck to the Judeo-Christian ethics I’d picked up from American television and the English romantics, Ozzie and Harriet, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

“You crazy? How could anyone do that shit? Don’t even think about it. It’s like slavery or something.” Changing the subject, I snatched the magazine from Psycho Loco’s hands and said, “My pops said Rodney King deserved that ass-kicking for resisting arrest and having a Jheri curl. He said some curl activator got into Officer Koon’s eyes and he thought he’d been maced, so he had to defend himself.”

The rest of the way home we talked about our experiences with police harassment: being frisked in front of our parents, forced to pull our pants down near the day-care center, made to wait face down in the street with our hands interlocked behind our heads and feet crossed at the ankles, gritty footprints on the nape of our necks. Scoby said in county jail the guards call the cells Skinner boxes and have nicknames like the Neuterer, Babe Ruth, and Curtains written on their batons and riot helmets. Psycho Loco theorized that the guards beat on the inmates because they were afraid of them. He talked about how he once ran into a prison guard and his family at a Hamburger Haven. The guard was so nervous he pulled his off-duty revolver on Psycho Loco and accidentally shot Hamburger Harry, the mascot. The bullet passed through the lettuce, ricocheted off the pickle, and came to a stop in the mascot’s brain.

I asked Psycho Loco if the rumors about a gangland truce if the jury found the cops innocent was true. He said that there already had been a big armistice at the Tryst ’n’ Shout Motel. Bangers who had killed each other’s best friends shook hands and hugged with unspoken apologies in their watery eyes.

“Damn, I hope they find those motherfuckers guilty,” I said with surprising conviction.

“Not me,” said Psycho Loco. “I hope those boys get off scot-free. One, it’ll be good to have a little peace in the streets, and besides, me and the fellas planning a huge job. Going to take advantage of the civic unrest, know what I’m saying?”

I pictured Rodney King staggering in the Foothill Freeway’s breakdown lane like a black Frankenstein, two Taser wires running 50,000 volts of electric democracy through his body. I wondered if the battery of the American nigger was being recharged or drained.

FOR SOME REASON Coach Shimimoto was reluctant to end practice. Usually these postseason workouts were light affairs, mostly intrasquad scrimmages followed by a dunking contest. This one he kept prolonging with wind sprints and full-court defensive drills. He finally blew his whistle and motioned for the team to gather around him. Exhausted, we flopped to the floor, sucking wind and hoping Coach Shimimoto would take pity on our fatigued bodies.

“What does ‘concatenate’ mean? Tell me, and you can go.”

Harriet Montoya, the only person with strength enough to speak, raised her hand. I didn’t have much faith she’d know the answer; the day before she had defined “repeal” as putting the skin back on an orange and peeling again, and we had had to run thirty laps backward. “Concatenate means together. Not like all-in-the-same-boat together, but like connected, like a bicycle chain.”