Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

Scoby, the do-nothing best man, admonished me for not carrying my bride over the threshold. I kicked him in the shin and told him the only thing I was carrying was a grudge against him for not buying any wedding presents. “What, no blender, some bath towels, nothing? Cheap bastard. C’mon, help me with these bags.”

We held the reception in the back yard. Psycho Loco played chef and showed impressive culinary skills: barbecued spareribs, deviled eggs, and to make Yoshiko feel at home, he even threw together a jamming udon noodle soup.

“So, man, how you like your wife?” Nicholas asked from across the table, sucking on a bone and sizing up Yoshiko, who was sitting next to me.

“She all right, I guess. She bow too goddamn much.”

“That shit throws you off, don’t it. I got leery and put my hand on my wallet, then I started bowing with my eyes closed, and when I opened them she was long gone, grubbing on corn on the cob. And your wife is looking fine picking that shit out her teeth, if I do say so myself.”

How did I like Yoshiko? I watched her loudly slurp her udon soup with such powerful suction a noodle bounced off her forehead, slithered down the bridge of her nose, and slunk into her mouth with a loud pop. I could see why my mom liked her; they had the same table manners — none. I remembered how when I showed Yoshiko our room she had carefully unpacked her books, put the titles in my face until I nodded and said “hmmm,” as if I could read the bold-stroke Japanese. Psycho Loco once told me that in prison when two men fall in love, they have to be careful not to relax and give in to the passion, because just when you let yourself go, your lover slips his finger into your anus and you’re punked for life. I squeezed my sphincter shut as Yoshiko lowered the empty plate from her face, wiped her mouth, and let out a healthy belch.

It wasn’t difficult to tell that Yoshiko was equally enamored with me. No one had looked at me the way she did since Eileen Litmus back in the third grade, and I knew what that look meant.

“Gunnar, I don’t think that Yoshiko trusts you. She staring at you like you General MacArthur.”

As we sat around the table eating dessert and drinking beers, everyone took the opportunity to raise glasses and congratulate the newlyweds. Soon the guests demanded that the couple belatedly exchange their vows.

I stood and raised my beer can in Yoshiko’s direction, placed my hand over my heart, and said, “Till death do us part.”

“That’s it, nigger?”

“I can’t make no promises other than that.”

“What about ‘in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer’?”

“Look, all I know is we’re going to die. And when we do, we’ll be apart.”

“What about if you two die at the same time?”

“That’s a good point. Okay, I amend my vow. Till death kills us.”

“Now Yoshiko’s turn.”

“Mom, she doesn’t even speak English.”

“English?” Yoshiko stood up sharply, a little redfaced and wobbly from all the beer she’d drunk. “Me speak English.” To wild applause, Yoshiko pecked me on the lips, then climbed onto the tabletop, chugging her beer until she reached the summit. My bride, literally on a pedestal, was going to pledge her life to me. You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face with a blowtorch.

Yoshiko cleared her throat and threw her hands in the air. “Brmmphh boomp ba-boom bip. I’m the king of rock — there is none higher! Sucker MC’s must call me sire!”

“Hoooo!”

“Anyone know how to say ‘I love you’ in Japanese?”

Mom paid for the honeymoon. She lent me the car, and Yoshiko and I drove to Six Pennants Mystic Mount, an amusement park in the Antelope Valley. We listened to the radio and communicated with nods and exaggerated facial expressions, pretending to understand our improvised sign language. As we coasted into the Mystic Mount parking lot, the wooden white lattice of Leviathan Loops, the world’s largest roller coaster, loomed in the distance. Yoshiko screamed and hugged me, moving her hand over imaginary hill and dale. We skipped through the entrance, and for the first time in my life I waited in the endless line snuggling with a lover. I wasn’t the odd one out, a car to myself, constantly having to crane my neck backward at my friends and their dates to see how much fun I was having.

On the flume ride I sat between Yoshiko’s legs in a fiberglass canoe while we sloshed through the dark tunnels, her chin resting on the nape of my neck, her fingertips cupping my chest. Before that first drop after the s-turn through the eucalyptus branches, I didn’t even know I had nipples. Now I was hyperventilating, struggling for air, dangerously rocking the canoe, and splashing the German tourists in front of us as Yoshiko continued to tweak my nipples. “Gott im Himmel.” Will the passenger in boat 37 please remain seated!

After a day filled with centrifugal spins and free-falls, it was hard to tell whether I was dizzy with love or with motion sickness. We drove home in a weary silence punctuated only by Yoshiko calling out the names of familiar places. San Kreyón Rompido Cribrillo, Rio Califas, Zuma Beach. The Pacific Coast Highway’s sharp curves dropped off into foggy banks of nothingness. I felt like Columbus teetering on the edge of the world. “Malibu! Malibu!” Yoshiko, doing her Amerigo Vespucci land ho, tugging at my shirtsleeve, and pointing toward a small promontory overlooking the ocean.

It had been a long time since I’d been to the beach at night. On Santa Monica nights when I was having trouble sleeping, I would sneak out and play D-Day on the empty beaches, advancing toward the Normandy beachhead with a battalion of waves. “Stay down, man, stay down.” Sometimes I would play dead and let the tide spit up my limp body onto the shore. “Tell Mother I love … uhh.” While I went to get the blankets and the radio from the trunk, Yoshiko sprinted down the bluff, tossing her clothes to the sand and motioning for me to join her. Hand in hand, we walked into the onrushing Pacific in our underwear. The waves breaking around our shins, then slamming against our chests. Like drunken seal pups, we splashed about in the surf, riding the dark waves into the cold sand, young lovers run aground. Using the stuffed elephants we had won pitching dimes at pillows, we pressed our backs against the wind-shorn bluffs and gave each other language lessons beside a fire of driftwood and the remains of a synthetic log.

I tried to teach her useful American phrases such as “consummate the marriage,” “nookie,” and “Let’s get busy.” Yoshiko’s instruction was more practical. We played a game of phonetic charades in which she would say a Japanese word and I’d have to guess its English homophone.

“Bii-ru.”

“That’s easy, beer.”

“Okay, se-ro-ri. ”

“Celery. C’mon, I thought Japanese was supposed to be hard.”

“E-bu-ra-ha-mu Ri-n-kaan.”

“Four score and twenty years ago, our forefathers — Abraham Lincoln.”

“Ro-san-ze-ru-su.”

“What?”

Yoshiko threw a pile of sand in the air, stamped her feet, and waved her hands across the sky. “Ro-san-ze-ru-su.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Frustrated, my sensei jumped me from behind and rubbed my nose into the sand. “Ro-san-ze-ru-su.”

“Oh, I get it — Los Angeles. Ro-san-ze-ru-su. ”

With the stars as chaperones and Al Green as the R & B mariachi, we courted each other with our life stories and dreams. I couldn’t understand her, but I listened intently and let the Suntory whiskey Yoshiko pulled from her purse interpret.

After one swig, I surmised that Yoshiko was a poor farmer running away from a lifetime of toil shucking wheat and paying homage to countless Shinto and Buddhist agrarian gods. Her hands, callus-free on my cheeks, dismissed that theory.