Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

When I returned, fresh-faced and dressed in street clothes, Logan ordered me to sit and shut my monkey ass up. Oblivious to his ranting, I threw my uniform in a pile at his feet, set it afire, and sat next to Coach Shimimoto for the rest of game, which Wheatley won by sixty points. My mother didn’t seem too displeased; she and Psycho Loco were in the stands making summer wedding plans.

MY WEDDING was a small outdoor affair held in my front yard and catered only by the bag of cheese puffs Nicholas Scoby passed around in celebration of his best friend’s betrothal. Psycho Loco was spinning in circles singing “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match,” like a Mexican understudy for Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. He had fulfilled his promise and repaid his debt by finding me a mail-order bride through the services of Hot Mama-sans of the Orient. I sulked in the driveway, refusing to look at my bride, my back to the stalled nuptials. Psycho Loco approached me with fake trepidation, rattling the bag of cheese puffs at me and asking why I was so upset.

“Oh nothing, just that you’ve arranged for me to marry a woman I don’t even know without my permission.”

“What, I fucked up the plans for the rest of your life? Gunnar, you don’t even have an alarm clock, so don’t give me no bullshit that I’ve altered your destiny.” Twisting my arm behind my back, Psycho Loco marched me toward the wedding party. “Besides, you should feel honored. Yoshiko chose you over hundreds of potential husbands.”

“I’m sure that was difficult. I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life in Olympia, Washington, cleaning rifles, gutting deer, and drinking Coors Light down at the American Legion Post either. Can you remove the gun from my kidneys? I’ll go through with it.”

The UPS driver conducted the ceremony. Dressed in tree-bark brown from head to toe like a misplaced Yosemite National Park ranger, he looked at my license, then back at me. “Today’s your eighteenth birthday, huh, kid?” He tipped his brown baseball cap at the bride. “Nice present.”

Yoshiko Katsu stood next to a stack of designer luggage, only slightly rumpled from the transpacific trip and the ride from the repository. Tall and thickly built, she stood stiffly, her arms straight down at her sides, smiling at everything that moved but never really taking her eyes off me. My mother and my baby-laden sisters sidled up to her, skeptical and unimpressed. Christina’s baby pulled on the invoice stapled to Yoshiko’s blouse. Nicole pinched a silky sleeve. “Dior?” Yoshiko nodded and bowed for no apparent reason.

“Sign here.” The delivery man shoved a clipboard in my face.

“What happens if I don’t sign?”

“Then she goes back to the warehouse and collects dust for three days till we send her back to Japan fourth class, which probably will mean three weeks in the hot cargo bay of a transport ship.”

I penned my name and shoved the yellow copy in my back pocket. “Ain’t she got to sign nothing?”

“Nope, she’s just like a package. She came with instructions, but it’s all in Japanese. Oh I forgot, you may kiss the bride.”

“And you can get your maple-syrup-looking ass in that truck now and go, before I kiss you with a foot so far up your ass you’ll be spitting toenails for a week.”

Christina saucily sucked her teeth and hissed in Yoshiko’s direction, “Girl, I know that’s my brother, but you got to watch these niggers. After they get married, they change.”

“Mmm-hmm, like streetlights and diapers. You seen what happen to Daddy,” Nicole echoed, slapping Christina’s palm. “That’s why I kicked my baby’s father to the curb. What I look like, Sigmund Freud?”

“Carl Jung?”

“Erik Erikson?”

Yoshiko bowed in appreciation of their sisterly sagacity. “So desu ka? Domo arigato gozaimasu.”

Psycho Loco tossed me two tarnished gold bands. “Ignore these spinsters. Step up, cuz, and be a man.”

I ripped off the price tag and boldly approached Yoshiko. There were no jitters. My hands didn’t shake. My underarms were TV-commercial dry. Sometimes the inevitable just seems right. “Kon’ban wa. Ichi, ni, san, chi,” I said, exhausting my karate school Japanese and handing her a ring. She laughed, shook her head, and corrected my greeting — “Kon’nichi wa” — pointing at the hazy midday sun. We slipped the rings on our fingers and kissed each other lightly on the cheek. She smelled like cardboard. As I stepped off, I noticed that some UPS jokester had stamped “Fragile” on her forehead.

“Who dat heifer Gunnar with?” I could hear the china shop’s bulls coming around the corner. “Naw, bitch, that’s our nigger! Don’t even feel it. You think you can come here playing Yokohama Hootchie Mama and steal our man, you got another thought coming.”

Yoshiko turned to face her tormenters, Betty and Veronica, crashing the wedding in a vain Dustin Hoffman showdown for my affections. Betty’s hair was styled into a gold-flaked gramophone horn with a little hairpin crank just over the right ear. Veronica had so many extensions in her hair that the wavy locks cascaded down her body like a horsehair waterfall. Yoshiko looked confused; I think she was looking for Lady Godiva’s white horse.

I stepped in to help, but Scoby held me back. “Hold up a sec. She’s going to have to learn to cope. Let’s see what happens.”

Betty and Veronica squared off and prepared to battle, thumbing their noses and bobbing up and down like amateur boxers looking for an opening. Veronica snapped a jab that stopped an inch from Yoshiko’s nose. Yoshiko didn’t flinch; she just bowed and said something in a terse Japanese. Veronica froze.

“What she say, Gunnar?”

“She said that if you persist with your puerile inner-city antics, she gonna take out her samurai sword, invoke her ancestral clan of warriors, and chop you into a Negro roll, inside out with salmon roe.”

“You don’t speak Japanese. How you know that’s what she said?”

“Why you ask then, shit? Maybe she said, ‘If I act like I know some karate, I can scare these stupid niggers senseless. They sure don’t act like they do on television.’ Or maybe she was admiring your hair.”

“Think so? Can she show us some of those crazy Japanese hairstyles? We could be the first ones on the block to wear topknots and shit. Maybe I’ll dye my teeth black. I seen that on the late-night kabuki plays. That shit would be fresh, nobody got a black teeth thing happening.”

Betty and Veronica lowered their fists and returned Yoshiko’s bow and then clamored over her wedding ring. Mom, beaming like a lottery winner, wrapped a proud arm around Yoshiko and demanded that Scoby take a photograph of her and her new daughter-in-law.

“Gunnar, I like Yoshiko. I believe she’ll make an excellent Kaufman. She got spirit, escaping from a repressive society to seek her fortune in a strange world.”

“Ma, Japan ain’t some feudalistic country. I mean, they got travel agents.”

“Don’t matter, I approve.”

“I can’t believe it. Thought you’d never approve of me marrying a woman who isn’t black.”

“Yes, but Yoshiko is black at heart. You can tell. She got soul like … who’s that actor I like always play the Japanese nigger in them shogun movies?”

“Toshiro Mifune.”

Hearing a familiar name, Yoshiko nudged my mother in the ribs, put a bewildered look on her face, and started scratching the back of her head and her underarms, impersonating the famous actor.

“That’s exactly who I’m talking about. Yoshiko, did you know Mifune was born in China? True, true. His first big part was the bandit in Rashomon. Then…” Mom ushered Yoshiko into the house, lecturing her on Mifune’s oeuvre and smoothly seguing from his role as a doctor suffering from syphilis in The Quiet Duel to the types of birth control available in the United States.