Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

It’s not all bad though; sometimes the crowd is on our side. “Our” meaning down with me and Scoby. When we played Columbia, I swear, all of Harlem was in the gym. They were quiet except when one of us scored; they could give less than a care who won. Remember at the Harvard game, black folk from as far away as Peabody and Scituite were in the house. I bet the Harvard kids didn’t even know so many niggers existed. It was good to see you in the stands, and hearing you scream, “Take the motherfucker to the hole, Gunnar!” I could feel your eyes on me wherever I went. Did I tell you how mad Coach got when you came to sit next to me on the bench? He thinks it sets a bad example for his best player to hold hands with his wife during the game. Now I pretend you’re always there right next to me — Florida, Colorado, wherever. Sometimes if I need to talk to you I’ll commit a stupid foul on purpose so Slick will take me out of the game and I’ll get a chance to talk to you on the bench. Do you hear me? Ikaga desu ka? Mai asa nani o shimasu? Asahan ni sakana o tabemasu ka? Senakao sasurishoka? Sometimes I’ll be dribbling up-court and I’ll hear your voice: “Take that motherfucker to the hole, Gunnar!”

Coach is still rambling on; Scoby is sitting on a stool listening to Sarah Vaughan. That’s all he listens to now. I hear you, last time you saw him he was all Bud fucking Powell this, Bud Powell that, what happened to q through u? I asked him the same thing and he goes, “I ain’t missed shit — Quinichette, Rollins, Sanders, Shepp, Silver, Simone, Taylor, and any fools whose names start with u; niggers is too sappy. I ain’t got time for that free love ‘we’re all human beings’ saccharine jazz.” So I ask what’s so special about Sarah. “Sarah’s not one those tragic niggers white folks like so much. Sarah a nigger’s nigger, she be black coffee. Not no mocha peppermint kissy-kissy butter rum do-you-have-any-heroin caffè lattè.” The boy’s crazy. “She be black coffee” — what the fuck does that mean?

Scoby’s into the stuff you sent me; at the hotel or on the plane we’ll be listening to Sarah and Nicholas will make me read him a Chikamatsu play. Whenever the saké dealer and the loyal courtesan cross the bridge and start looking among the cherry blossoms for a place to kill themselves, Nicholas weeps with the star-crossed lovers. “I know what it feels like to live in a world where you can’t live your dreams. I’d rather die too. Why won’t they leave us alone? They fuck up your dream. They fuck up your dream.” The melodrama goes well with Sarah’s sultry-ass voice, though.

I’m beginning to see the sheer casual genius of Chikamatsu writing for the puppet theater. If I blur my eyes I can see the black strings attached to my joints and stretching to the skies. Ah, the freedom of fatalism. Now I can do what the fuck I want and blame it on the puppet-master. Watakushi wa nodo ga kawakimashita. Biru o ni hon maraimasho. Nicholas sees the strings, but he spends all his time looking for a pair of scissors. Every now and then the puppet-master hands him a pair of wooden scissors — Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, an open jump shot — and Scoby thinks he’s free, thinks he’s clipped his strings. The slack string is just a slack string.

I hear the bands starting up — I have to go now. Yoshiko, can you do me a favor? Please make an appointment for Scoby to see someone at the counseling office. I asked the coach to do it, but he thinks if Scoby is averaging nineteen points a game he’s fine. We get back next Monday. Thanks. I love you. Here is another handprint in ballpoint-pen ink. Please, rub it over your stomach and give the fetus my love.

The second-best part of the inkprint is that eventually the ink gets all over the basketball and all over everyone else’s hands and uniforms. Shit’s hilarious. Maybe you should make an appointment for me too. Aishiteru. See you soon.

Your husband,

Gunnar

AFTER THE BASKETBALL season ended, the members of SWAPO and Ambrosia and my publicist from Gatekeeper Press asked me to speak at a rally protesting Boston University’s conferment of an honorary degree and a check for one hundred million dollars to M’m’mofo Gottobelezi, the African statesman with all the political foresight of Neville Chamberlain. I was to be the drawing card, the liberal, libertine, and literary nigger stamp of approval. I agreed to speak as long as no one put my grainy mug shot on the fliers.

Things looked different from the dais, behind a microphone, squinting into the spring sun. I was struck by how unaccustomed I was to looking down at people. Growing up in southwest Los Angeles, coming off a season of playing in places known as the Pit and the Hell Hole, I was always at the bottom, the spectacle, the fighting cock looking up. Looking up not out of any sense of great admiration, but because from the bottom there is nowhere else to look. On this earthly stratum we’re all dirt; I just happen to be Precambrian dust buried under layers of Cretaceous, Tertiary, and Quaternary snobs. Some things are always on the top shelf, like paper towels in the supermarket.

I stood at the mountaintop, enjoying the view and waiting for my turn to speak. Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza burst with color and protest, an outdoor arboretum where the faces below bloomed like flowers in a meadow. Red and orange revolutionary spring annuals smoked joints, waved signs, and chanted. The yellow and cream-brown daffodils clung stubbornly to their alpaca sweaters and said “Excuse me” when the boisterous Puerto Rican and black townie snapdragons stepped on their Hush Puppies. Communist worker bees with propaganda pollinated minds made penetrable by eighty-degree weather; boom mikes swayed in the breeze like marshland cattails.

“If Boston University persists in lionizing and supporting killers and Uncle Toms like M’m’mofo Gottobelezi, we will not stand idly by and do nothing. This administration’s megadollar investment in oligarchical government is…” John Brown was trying to fire up the demonstrators. Spittle sprayed from his mouth, his tussled hair hung over one eye, his fist pounded the rostrum. He reminded me so much of Hitler at a Nuremberg party rally that I had to look behind me to check the stage for bunting with swastikas and steamrolled black eagles. “Uncle Toms like Gottobelezi must be…” There was that phrase again, “Uncle Tom” — the white liberal euphemism for “nigger.” No matter how apropos the label, I always wondered how come there are never any white Uncle Toms. How come the secretary of state is never an Uncle Tom? The director of the CIA is never a traitor to the white race or any other race? Only niggers can be subversives to the cause; everyone else is the “real enemy.” As if white folk understand the pressures on the African Bantu, the American nigger, to sell his soul in hopes of being untied from the whipping post.

John Brown said something about unity and looked over at me for confirmation; I spat on the ground, mouthed an obvious “Fuck you,” and gazed at the clouds. A silent act of dissension from the keynote speaker not unnoticed by the crowd. John Brown began to falter. He fumbled over his words, and his solidarity rhetoric began to fail him.

The crowd grew edgy and started pushing toward the platform. A middle-aged white man clutching a pen and a copy of my just-published book attempted to scale the platform, grabbing at my ankles: “Mr. Kaufman! Please sign my book — I understand now. I understand.” Scoby moved me back, pressed the sole of his shoe against the man’s sweaty skull, and booted him off the stage like Walter Slezak kicking the one-legged amputee into the sea in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. A white woman protested, exclaiming, “Hey, what about nonviolence?” To which Nicholas replied, “Who said anything about nonviolence?”