Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

Hillside was surprisingly quiet. There were no roving bands of looters, no brushfires. Hillside seemed to be biding its time till morning. Manny Montoya and his wife Sally opened the Barbershop and Chiropractic Offices and turned it into a way station for weary rioters coming back from the festivities on the other side of the wall. Handing out free tamales and steaming bowls of ponchi soup, Sally proudly told stories about how Hillsiders had historically acquitted themselves well in Los Angeles’ riots. Beating back an armada of drunken sailors in the zoot-suit riots in the summer of ’43, blowing up four police cars and poisoning six police dogs with cyanide-laced chitterlings and chorizo in the Watts riots of ’65, torturing and killing an entire squad of National Guardsmen from Pacoima in the infamous Hillside death march during the I’m-Tired-of-the-White-Man-Fucking-with-Us-and-Whatnot riots of ’68. Manny smiled at his wife’s recounting and predicted that La Insurrección de ’92 would be the biggest of them all.

The tamales made me thirsty and I headed over to Ms. Kim’s store to buy something to drink. When I got there, she was yelling in Korean and pressing Molotov cocktails into the hands of a small group of bystanders, pleading with them to burn down her store.

“Loot, goddamn it. You saw video. Remember Latasha Harlins. Burn my fucking store down. I feel better. Rod-ney King! Rod-ney King! Rod-ney King!”

The crowd refused. Ms. Kim was too well liked. Maybe if she had been one hundred percent Korean they’d have busted a few windows just for appearance’s sake.

Holding one of her makeshift grenades, Ms. Kim lit the oil-rag fuse and strode to the front of the store. The crowd surged to stop her, and she held them at bay by waving the torch in their stunned faces. Then she wheeled and sent the bomb hurling through the glass doors. The flames slowly crawled across the floor, whipping through the aisles, then scaling the counter. Ms. Kim silently hook-shot another cocktail onto the roof and watched her store burn with a satisfied smile. A few folks tried to douse the flames with garden hoses, but Ms. Kim cut their hoses in half with a Swiss Army knife, then went looking for the police to place herself under arrest.

The next afternoon Scoby and I sat in his basement watching the rest of the city burn on television. A parade of relatives marched through his house hawking their wares. “Look what I came up on.” Holding up sweaters and jackets that smelled like smoke for our perusal. “Gunnar, you’d look good in this. Got a lamé collar. Bill Cosby would wear this jammie. You Nick’s man, two dollars.”

“Nigger, move, you in front of the TV.”

It was hard not to be envious of somebody who had some free shit and a little crumb of the California dream. I too wanted to “come up,” but I didn’t think I was a thief. The television stations were airing live feeds from hot spots around the city, showing looters entering stores empty-handed and exiting carrying furniture on their backs like worker ants carrying ten times their weight.

“Hey, isn’t that the Montgomery Ward Plaza?” The mall was about ten minutes away, just outside the wall.

“Yeah, there go Technology Town.”

“Oh shit, fools coming up on free computers and shit.”

Scoby and I looked each other in the eye for about a nanosecond, then stormed out of the house. Running down the streets, we argued over the merits of an IBM-compatible versus an Apple.

“Dude, I’m looking for a Wizard Protean.”

“What? You can’t carry out a desktop. Go for a laptop. You get all the qualities of a Protean, plus mobility. Your dumb ass is trying to steal a whole mainframe.”

Coach Shimimoto’s arduous workouts had served their purpose. We reached Technology Town fresh and ready to celebrate Christmas in April. Leaping through the broken windows, we tumbled over a stack of plastic shopping baskets and landed in a snowbank of Styrofoam package filler. We were too late. All the presents had been opened. The showroom was stripped bare. Broken shelving dangled from the walls; overturned showcases spilled over onto the floor, serving as caskets for dead batteries and the shells of broken stereo equipment. Unraveled cassette tape hung from the overhead pipes like brown riot tinsel. Even the ceiling fans and service phones were gone.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” I said in my best classical recitation voice. Scoby cursed and threw a nine-volt battery at my head.

“Fuck Langston Hughes. I bet when they rioted in Harlem, Langston got his.”

“Does it dry up like a wino in rehab? Or gesture like a whore, reeling from the pimp’s left jab?”

Kicking our way through the piles of cardboard, we left the store and stood in the parking lot thinking of our next target. People were still ransacking Cribs ’n’ Bibs, the toddler shop, but rattles, powdered milk, and designer diapers didn’t interest us. Scoby snapped his fingers, shouted, “What Did You Say?” and sprinted toward the alley that ran behind the mall.

What Did You Say? was a car accessory emporium that specialized in deafeningly loud car stereos and equally loud seat covers. I couldn’t figure out how Scoby planned to get in the place. What Did You Say? was known to be impenetrable. A solid metal garage door that had foiled the attempts of a Who’s Who of burglary specialists sealed the front entrance. The famed barrier had withstood ramming from hijacked semitrucks, dynamite, and every solvent from hot sauce for Lucy’s Burritos to 150-proof rum mixed with corrosive black hair products.

When we got to What Did You Say? the steel door was still in place. Scoby and I put our ears against the door and heard what sounded like mice scurrying around inside. We zipped around the back and found a small opening smashed into the cinder-block wall, a guilty-looking sledgehammer lying atop a pile of rubble. Every ten seconds or so a contortionist would squeeze through the hole, bearing some sort of electronic gadgetry. Standing nearby in tears was fat Reece Clinksdale. Reece was bemoaning his girth, because he was too big to fit in the hole and was missing out on the rebellion. He wiped his eyes and stopped blubbering for a bit.

“You guys going in?”

“I guess so,” we answered.

“Well, you better hurry up. I think most of the good stuff is gone.”

Reece was right. The crawlspace was starting to give birth to zoo animals. Guys were popping headfirst through the hole wrapped in sheepskin and leopard-skin seat covers and looking like cuddly animals at the petting zoo. I helped deliver a breech baby alligator seat cover who’d decided to exit feet first and had to be pulled through the cement birth canal.

When the traffic was light enough to make an entrance, Scoby and I slid through the hole. The absolute lack of chaos was amazing. Instead of a horde of one-eyed brigands pillaging and setting fires, the looters were very courteous and the plundering was orderly. Everyone waited patiently in a line that wound through the aisles and into the storeroom. Once you were in the storeroom, a philanthropic soul handed you a box off the shelf. You didn’t get your choice of goods, but no one complained. If you wanted something else, you just got in line again.

Looting wasn’t as exciting as Scoby and I had hoped it would be. Nicholas came up on a car alarm and I on a box of pine-tree-shaped air fresheners.

On the way back to the neighborhood, we saw Pookie Hamilton drive by in his convertible bug. I whistled and Pookie pulled over to the curb, waving for us to get in the back seat.

“Where you headed, Pook?”

“I just got a page from Psycho Loco. He needs some help.”

I hadn’t forgotten about Psycho Loco’s planned big score, but the greedy look in his eyes whenever he talked about “the heist” told me that I didn’t want to be involved.