Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

“Fuck that.”

Scoby, his chest heaving up and down, would chime in. “Your purpose is to take care of your pregnant wife and raise your kid.”

“That ain’t no purpose, that’s a responsibility. If I had the money, I could pay someone to do that.”

“Kaufman, shoot the ball.”

“Yassuh, massa.”

Swish. Swish.

My only comforts were the boxes of Japanese literature Yoshiko would send me on the road trips. Returning to the hotel exhausted from another game, I’d find carefully wrapped copies of the love-suicide plays of Chikamatsu, the biographies of Yukio Mishima and Sakai Saburo, the diaries of Heian ladies-in-waiting on the bed. My favorites were the autobiographical tales of Osamu Dazai, the heavy-hearted writer who wandered the back roads of Japan struggling to raise the nerve to commit suicide in the Tamagawa River. In return I would send Yoshiko rocks, seashells, and fossils from riverbeds and oceans across America. Sparkling checkered periwinkles and smooth pismo clams from tidepools in Monterey, California. Hideous skeletons of trilobites and dalmanites embedded in sandstone from the Black Hills in the Dakotas. Purple fluorite cubes, emerald-green malachite, sharp clear spears of gypsum from the Utah flats, toast-black slabs of slate from Vermont, tenderly wrapped in love letters.

* * *

Dear Yoshiko,

I’m writing this letter during halftime of the Cornell game. Coach Palomino is foaming at the mouth, kicking lockers and shit, screaming like Fay Wray. “This is a must-win game! I know you boys — excuse me, Gunnar, my apologies — I know you men are trying to be winners…” Every game is a “must win” game. The shinos and the other coco-jin (not including Nicholas, of course) are looking shameful and nodding at every word Coach says, like they’ve done something wrong. Most of these stupid clowns don’t even play. I can’t understand why they give a fuck. Oh shit, Coach just slapped Isaac Gottlieb for missing a lay-up during the pregame warmup.

Yoshiko, I miss you so much it hurts. Sabishi kunaru-yo. I really don’t have anyone to talk to. Scoby is losing his mind. Hold on a moment, Coach Palomino is going into the teamwork speech, I don’t want to miss this. Two days ago against Dartmouth he pulled down his pants and stroked his penis. “Now I’m going to shoot my wad. Then we’ll be on equal terms.” Tonight’s exhortation looks more conventional — it’s the hackneyed “There is no ‘I’ in team!” speech. There’s no ‘U’ either, but I guess that’s immaterial when you’re getting paid thousands of dollars to teach young athletes how to navigate the perils of life and hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure that these same athletes wear a certain brand of sneaker. I still won’t wear the shoes. Slick offered me a thousand dollars a game, but I told him to get fucked. He realizes that if he wins, it doesn’t matter what shoes I wear. Did I tell you I refuse to stand for the national anthem? Pissed off everybody. I guess Coach has been telling the media I’m a Jehovah’s Witness, because during a postgame interview a reporter asked me did I think the United States was in cahoots with Satan. I went into some diatribe on how America is Satan. Some shit about how the United States of America anagrammed was “Foes in death tear. I cum. Taste.” The media pretty much leaves me alone now.

All this talk about teamwork and self-sacrifice is making me think about the books you sent me. Mishima said that to reach a level of consciousness that permits one to peek at the divine, one must sacrifice individual idealism. I’m like “Nigger, please.” What in hell is the divine? Some bright light with a walking cane and a beard? A state of being so enlightened that you know everything worth knowing? I can pay a drug dealer ten bucks and achieve that level of consciousness, at least for an hour or so. Mishima goes on to say that “only bodies placed under the same circumstance can experience a common suffering … Through the suffering of the group the body can reach the height of existence that the individual alone can never attain.” I agree, but this “height of existence” trip doesn’t have much value on the open market. I think that 6 million gassed Jews, 15 million dead Africans, their lungs filled with saltwater, 436 Champawat Indians eaten by a single tiger in 1907, might agree with me. And what is “the group”? You can’t put numbered uniforms on people and say this is “the group” or say everyone born on this side of the fence is “the group.” And not everyone experiences pain and suffering in the same way. I can see some masochistic slave fucking up on purpose just for a few precious licks of rawhide.

Speaking of suffering, I think Scoby is going insane. The scrutiny he is undergoing is unbelievable, ten times worse than in high school. What seems like every sportswriter in America, the entire Boston University Philosophy, African-American Studies, Religion, Biology, Mathematics, and Physics Departments, and a horde of German and Japanese scientists are following him twenty-four hours a day. Keeping track of his meals, sleeping habits, shit like that. Once a day some Nobel Prize — winning professor has a press conference to announce a new asinine theory on Nicholas’s uncanny ability to put a ball in a basket. The philosophers are easily the most despicable of the lot. I suppose they have the most to lose. Every other scientist can say, “Well, it is at least possible” (they haven’t really accepted that he is never, ever going to miss), but Socrates never said nothing about a motherfucker like Scoby. Nick’s thrown every theory, every formula, every philosophical dogma out of whack; he’s like a living disclaimer. “I am perfection; everything else is bullshit. Your life is meaningless.” So the philosophers show up at the games, full of anticipatory schadenfreude, armed with computer printouts calculating the odds of Scoby’s missing his next shot. Praying that Nick’s next attempt will roll in and out of the rim and the universe will return to normal. Invariably, Scoby goes six for six and leaves them in tears, ripping their papers to shreds and cursing epistemology. They would be a lot better off if they simply called Scoby a god and left it at that, but no way they’ll proclaim a skinny black man God.

The scariest part is the team introduction. Silence for everybody except me and Scoby. I’m the preliminary booee — I run out to a smattering of boos, dodge a few paper cups, and try to ignore the catcalls. “Communist sonofabitch. Love it or leave it, you black bastard.” Scoby’s introduction is communal catharsis. Within moments the court is covered with bananas, coconuts, nooses, headless dolls, and shit. I’m into it, but Scoby gets shook. The few black fans in the house, mostly boosters from the Onyx and the black kids from whatever campus we’re at, stand and applaud, but they’re quickly shouted down by whites. After Scoby hits his first basket, fights break out; it’s sick, there’s so much scorn in the world. Usually when you dive into the crowd for a loose ball, the fans try to catch you, help break your fall. When Nick goes headlong in the stands, the reporters scatter, picking up their coffee cups and laptops and letting Scoby crash into the table. They don’t even help the nigger to his feet. Assholes. Funny thing happened the other day in Michigan, though. Nicholas was running full-tilt toward the basket and did a swan dive into the crowd for absolutely no reason. His form was perfect; chest out, arms spread, feet together, toes pointed. The fans flew out of harm’s way like parking-lot pigeons. In the center of the vacated section stood a small black girl forming a basket with her spindly arms, poised to catch the airborne Scoby. Wouldn’t you know it, Scoby landed right on top of her, but she caught his ass. His feet didn’t touch down till she lowered him to the ground. The crowd booed her, but it was the first time I’d seen Nick smile in two weeks.