Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

The Harvard recruiter was a marginally known bespectacled public intellectual who had moved west to Los Angeles to set up a think tank of mulatto social scientists called High Yellow Fever. We had dinner at a chic Hawaiian restaurant in Marina del Rey. The regality of the Harvard man’s pinkies was hypnotic. Encased in gold rings, these majestic fingers never touched any part of the pu-pu platter, coolly avoided the stem of the wineglass, and punctuated his points on affirmative action with a bombastic vigor unseen since Frederick Douglass. He popped open his pocket watch and suggested we drive to his house for a nightcap. I was mesmerized; this was the first nigger I’d ever seen who owned a pocket watch and the only one I’ve heard say “nightcap.” On the drive over I held his timepiece to my ear, listening to its spring works as if I were an eighteenth-century Pacific islander hoping to trade beads for a metal cricket.

The ersatz egghead lived in Cheviot Heights, in what I swore was the same house I’d stolen the security sign from a couple of years before. Over dessert he gave me a copy of his latest book, Antebellum Cerebellums: A History of Negro Super-Genius, and showed me his prized collection of Peggy Lee records. After one listen to “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” I’d pretty much decided I wasn’t going to Harvard, but I didn’t say anything, because the French pastry was humming.

“Gunnar, why do you want to attend Harvard?”

“It seems like Harvard wants me to attend Harvard. I could give a shit. Harvard, Princeton, Howard, Cornell, Fisk — I’m just determined to get out of Los Angeles. My mom keeps saying Ivy League, Ivy League, Ivy League.”

“Look, Gunnar, I understand your reticence, but you’re being offered a rare opportunity to sit in the lap of academe and suckle from the teat of wisdom.”

“Yeah, yeah. I prefer formula milk, your shit doesn’t stink as much.”

Sensing he was losing me, he called to his wife. “Honey, come and meet this fine young man I was telling you about.”

A white woman in a see-through chiffon gown sashayed into the dining room like a fashion model.

“Baby, this is Gunnar Kaufman. The boy genius projected to do wonderful things with his life. Gunnar, this is my wife, Mindy. You may recognize her — she was the down clue girl on Crosswords for Cash. ”

“Glad to meet you, Gunnar.” She grabbed my hand and kissed me lightly on the knuckles, then locked her hazel eyes on my crotch. “You’re bigger, I mean different from the other boys. No tie, no tweed jacket. Muscles. I like you. What’s a four-letter word for a Russian mountain range?”

“Ural.”

“Smart, too.” She touched the tip of my nose with her finger and skipped back to wherever she had come from, rubbing her rear end as if it pained her.

“Gunnar, there are fringe benefits to going to Harvard. Corporeal hors d’oeuvres, if you will.”

I snickered as the recruiter’s sales pitch grew more desperate.

“I’m going to be frank with you. If I get you to attend Harvard, I get seventy-five thousand dollars, exactly enough to buy a new motor home.”

“Motor home?” I asked.

“Couple of years back, some demonic rowdies from down there” — he jabbed his finger angrily toward the ground — “destroyed the old one. They smashed the windows, slashed the tires, urinated on the engine, set fire to the interior. We haven’t gone rappelling in the sierras since Lord knows when.”

I couldn’t believe it was this cat’s house me and Psycho Loco had rampaged the night Pumpkin died. “From down where?” I asked.

“Down there!” he repeated, pointing over the stone slope of the San Borrachos Mountains and apparently growing agitated from having to recall the memory.

“Hell, you mean?”

“No, I mean Hillside. The entire community is a Petri dish for criminal vermin.”

“So I should go to Harvard and learn to become a gentrified robber baron instead?”

“Yes, you should. I got mine, you get yours. Those poor people are beyond help, you must know that. The only reason I and others of my illustrious ilk pretend to help those folks is to reinforce the difference between them and us. There’s a psychological advantage to being the helper and not the helpee. You know the phrase ‘Each one, teach one’?”

“Yup.”

“Well my motto is ‘Each one, leech one.’”

I stopped listening and went out by the pool. The view of Los Angeles, including Hillside, was magnificent. The web of amber streetlights looked like a constellation fallen to earth, awaiting some astronomer to connect the glowing dots to give form to its oracularity. From the sundecks of Cheviot Heights I imagined dimes falling from a stumblebum’s Styrofoam cup as shooting stars streaking the night. I heard the nervous laughter of the Seven Sisters standing in doorways, deciding whether to study or hang out. I felt sorry for the night laborers on the moons, selling roses from a bucket and bags of oranges to the comets.

The public intellectual excused himself and then returned with a bundle of black nylon rope and rappelling equipment. “When you go to Harvard, we’ll go mountain climbing on your weekends. Let me show you how.” He wrapped a belt around my waist, then threaded the rope through its metal loop. Anchoring one end around the pool’s stepladder, he pulled the rope tight to make sure it was secure. “Hold the rope loosely with your left hand and use your right to control your speed. When you want to brake, pull back. That’s it — now lean back, get your butt down. There you go.”

I stepped over the pile of rope and tossed the coil over the fence. It tumbled down the wall until the knotted end was dangling about ten feet from the streets of Hillside.

“What in the hell are you doing? Now you have to recoil the goddamn thing.”

Ignoring his admonitions, I scaled the fence, planted my feet firmly against the wall, lowered my butt, and leaned into space.

“Gunnar, where do you think you’re going?”

“Home.”

“Don’t you live in the Valley?”

“Nope, I live in Hillside, the depths of hell.”

“You’re no Sir Edmund Hillary. Get back here.”

“And you’re no Lionel Trilling. Later.”

I lowered myself into the night.

Mom was disappointed that I wasn’t going to Harvard; she thought the public intellectual sounded like a decent man.

“There’s a note on the table for you. The recruiter from Boston University stopped by the house.”

“He came by the house?”

“ She came by the house, and she said she’ll be back tomorrow.”

* * *

Ms. Jenkins sat at the kitchen table playing spades with me, Scoby, and Psycho Loco and fielding our questions, my mother hovering over us like a pit boss.

“Would you like another brew, Ms. Jenkins?” I asked.

“Sure, I likes these Carta Blancas — smoother than a motherfucker. Boston doesn’t have nothing like this.”

I fetched her another beer, making sure Scoby and Psycho Loco didn’t peek at my cards. Ms. Jenkins and I were trying to set those fools.

“What does Boston have?” Scoby asked, spinning a king of hearts across the table. “Not much. No black radio. No black clubs. No black political power base. No drive-thru fast food.”

“So why would I want to go there?” I asked, trying to emphasize to Nick that this was my interview.

“You told me that you wanted to get as far out of L.A. as possible. That’s either Orono, Maine, or Boston, Massachusetts, and I know you not no goddamn moose lover. Besides, Gunnar, I’ve seen your poetry in all the literary journals. I didn’t make the connection until I saw the same poems scrawled on the walls in the neighborhood. You probably don’t know it, but you already have a following on the East Coast.” Ms. Jenkins covered Nicholas’s king with a six of hearts.