Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

After two swigs she was a famous pop star with writer’s block, hoping to regain her soulful edge by soaking up the African-American aesthetic. Singing alongside Al Green, Yoshiko sounded like a lisping crow with laryngitis.

Here I am, baby, come and take me.

Here I am, baby, come and take me.

After half the bottle I was writing haiku on her bare back with my index finger;

wife’s rib cage expanding

contracting, fanning virgin fires

carnal bellows, mmmmm.

Somewhere near the backwash end of the bottle, I’d guessed that Yoshiko was a rebellious teen whose parents couldn’t afford the cost of an American university, so she decided that marrying an eligible bachelor would be the easiest way to get a free education. The final choice was between me and an Iowa grad student named Stanley. On the day she’d been suspended from school for maiming the kendo teacher, she was in detention passing the time reading an alternative Japanese magazine called Phlegm when she came across one of my poems.

Your Problem Is

how can …

the jehovah’s witness, the scientologist,

the political scientist, the social scientist,

the mad scientist, the editorial page,

the 11 o’clock news, the talk radio host,

the urban planner, the school superintendent,

the special assistant to the president,

the psychologist, the televangelist, the homeless crazy,

the pontiff, the sales clerk, the bus driver,

the late-night cable access fuck,

claim to know my problem

when they don’t even know my name

Stanley was quickly forgotten. Under the half-moon gangster leaning over the horizon, I fell asleep to Al Green singing on a belly full of cornbread and fruit punch

I want to settle down and stop fooling around

Let’s get married, let’s get married today

and Yoshiko’s finger tapping on my anus. “Anaru zeme,” she whispered.

I dreamed I was a flying, fire-breathing foam stegosaurus starring in a schlocky Japanese film called Destroy All Negroes. I stomped high-rise projects into rubble, turned out concerts by whipping my armored tail across the stage, and chewed on slow black folks like licorice sticks. The world government sent a green-Afroed Godzilla to defeat me and we agreed to a death match in the Los Angeles Coliseum. The winner would be crowned Reptile of the Nuclear Epoch. I was beating Godzilla into the sea with a powerful stream of radioactive turtle piss when I awoke to find Yoshiko’s index finger worming its way toward my prostate. Punked for life.

DURING MY STAY at Boston University I went to one class. My one hour of higher education consisted of Professor Oscar Edelstein’s poetry workshop, Creative Writing 104. As the next generation of great American poets stood up and introduced themselves with bohemian haughtiness, I drummed my fingers, trying to remember why I was going to college in the first place.

A thin white woman with a badly scarred face was talking. “Ciao bella, ciao bella. My name is Peyote Chandler, of the Greenwich, Connecticut, Chandlers. Let’s see, now. I graduated from Londonderry Academy with honors. My favorite poet is Sylvia Plath. My mother is the ambassador to Pakistan, and my father now owns a carpet factory in north Asia. The factory employs hundreds of starving children at what I believe is a respectable living wage of seven rupees a week. I believe in Third World mysticism, animism, extraterrestrial life, and —”

“What the fuck happened to your mug?” I interrupted, chin in my hand and bored with her Mayflower pedigree.

Peyote was eager to explain. “When I was twelve, my boyfriend, Skip Pettibone Helmsford, broke up with me, so I tried to kill myself by sticking my head in the oven like Sylvia Plath did. Only I forgot to blow out the pilot light and I stuck my head into a preheated four-hundred-and-fifty-degree inferno.”

A chubby bearded boy in khakis a size too small and a rumpled Oxford shirt moved his elephantine mass to the front of the class, licking the edges of his Drum cigarette. “Greetings, my name is Chadwick Osterdorf III. I graduated from Choate with high honors and I think the only true poet ever to walk the earth was Rimbaud.” Some parliamentary “hear, hears” rang out from the back of the class. “It was in his footsteps that I spent this past summer selling guns to downtrodden ghetto youth to defend themselves against the oppressive system.”

This time I lifted my head off the desk to interrupt. “Come on, Rimbaud wasn’t no gun-running revolutionary. What he really wanted to sell was slaves, black African niggers, but he was too stupid to catch any, so he sold weapons to some king who ripped him off. Some dissident. If you was really a Rimbaudite, you’d amputate those two cellulite-filled legs of yours so the downtrodden ghetto youth wouldn’t have to worry about you kicking ’em in the ass.”

Professor Edelstein pulled the sleeves of his tweed jacket and pressed his wire-rimmed glasses into his tanned forehead, raising the nerve to confront the boisterous black kid. “And who might you be, young man?”

“My name is Gunnar Kaufman.”

“Gunnar Kaufman? Gunnar Kaufman from Los Angeles?”

“Yeah.”

Edelstein popped out of his seat. “I heard you might be attending BU, but I never dreamed you’d take my class. I saw your poem ‘If Niggers Could Fly’ in the latest issue of Locution. I’ve been thinking about it all week.” Edelstein took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling. “‘If niggers could fly, where would we alight? We orbit a treeless world, nest on eaveless clouds, unable to stop flapping our wings for even a second, in constant migration to nowhere.’ If niggers could fly. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. How old were you when you wrote that?”

“Thirteen. I was attempting to —”

The Rimbaud wannabe removed a copy of Inkstone from his knapsack. “Here’s a haiku you wrote.”

the full May moon,

Christopher Walken’s forehead

finally has competition

Sylvia Plath picked at her scars and said, “I have pictures of your poems.”

“What you mean, you have pictures of my poems?”

She produced a coffee-table book of photographs entitled Ghettotopia: An Anthropological Rending of the Ghetto through the Street Poems of an Unknown Street Poet Named Gunnar Kaufman.

“What they mean by ‘an unknown street poet named Gunnar Kaufman?’ More to the point, what the hell is a street poet?”

“Gunnar, the urban piquancy of your work is so resonant, so resplendent, so resounding … you make the destitution of your environs leap off the page. You’re my inspiration.”

“What about Sylvia Plath?”

“Well, it’s really you. I thought that if I mentioned a black poet, I wouldn’t be taken seriously by the rest of the class.”

A white woman dressed in a tie-dyed sundress, her hair knotted in blond cornrow braids, slid her fleshy rear end onto my desk and announced herself, kicking her thick ankles high in the air. “Hi, my name is Negritude.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“My parents named me that so I would be a reminder of the hagiocratic innocence possessed by black peoples around the world.”

“Visceral sainthood — I see. And the braids?”

“I feel more powerful with my hair like this, really Nubian. You must know what I mean. Your scalp pulled so tight you can hear the howls of the jackals, the bellows of the hippopotami. Oh, I could properly welcome home an Ashanti warrior returned from the hunt with a fresh kill. Would you like to hear me ululate?”