Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

old time dar am not forgotten —

look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.”

Is this song/tune/anthem inherently racist?

How in the hell do I know the words to this shit?

If “Dixie” is racist, what makes it so? The title, the lyrics, the historical context, the fact the South lost the war? If the lyrics were outlawed, banned forever, would the music, that gnawing fucking refrain, the sequence of notes themselves, be racist instrumental? Is opera classist? Does the letter

r

discriminate against Bostonians?

Haaaymaahket Square next stap. Chainge heah fa de Ahhborway. The Bahston Transit Authawity thanks you for yourah patronage.

Early the next morning Coach Palomino woke me up and handed me a rubber camping flashlight. He told me that Nicholas had jumped off the roof of the law school. A custodian found him in the courtyard; he’d landed on his side, curled in a fetal position, one arm twisted behind him so violently the tips of his fingers touched the crown of his head. The rubber flashlight was in the bushes nearby. The suicide note was on the roof, taped to a case of Carta Blanca.

* * *

To my dearest nigger Gunnar Kaufman,

I’ve just climbed nineteen flights of stairs lugging a case of beers and whistling “Dixie.” I shouldn’t, but I blame you. Sitting on this ledge, my feet dangling in midair, two hundred feet off the ground, I find my thoughts going back to Tokubei, the soy sauce dealer, and the unbelievably codependent courtesan Ohatsu in Chikamatsu’s Love Suicides at Sonezaki, the doomed lovers under the fronds of a palm tree binding their wrists, preparing for noble deaths.

I’m on my feet now, looking down into the cloudy quadrangle, my toes hanging ten into the void. I can feel hands on my back, gently pushing. It’s funny I want to write a poem.

i step into the void

bravely,

aaa

aa

a

a

ahhhhh

Not bad for an amateur. Before I go, I forgot to tell you the reason the bartenders wrap napkins around the beer bottles is so clumsy fools like yourself won’t drop them. You know the glass gets slippery, the condensation — never mind. These brews are for you. I asked your mom to send them from home so we could celebrate the publication of your book. Cheers. Think of me.

G.K., tell Yoshiko and Psycho Loco I’ll miss them. If there’s a great beyond, I’ll see you all when you get there. Homes, there’s a cloudbank floating this way. Dude, I can see the halo around my head, but I’m no angel. I’m ghost, the afterlife is just a lay-up away.

Late,

Nicholas Scoby

* * *

That night I leaned out over the ledge of the law school’s roof and poured off the top of my beer. The liquid splattering on the ground made me wonder what Scoby’s body had sounded like when it hit the pavement. It was a hazy night, just like the previous one. A thick cloud of fog surrounded the building. I placed the flashlight on the ventilator behind me and stood on the edge. I could see my silhouette on the surface of the cloud below. I looked like gray smoke; it was a low-budget Brocken specter, and without the halo, the glory. I folded the note into a paper airplane and watched it spiral into the fog like a weightless kamikaze diving out of the sun. The next morning the letter was on the front page of the late edition of every paper in the country.

When Yoshiko and I landed in Los Angeles the following week, an army of reporters besieged us outside the terminal. Psycho Loco sped up to the curb, stretched out over the front seat of his car, one hand on the steering wheel, the other popping open the passenger door. I didn’t know Toyota made a Dunkirk rescue dinghy.

“Psycho Loco, like a motherfucker.”

“Where to, my liege?”

“Home.”

“Can’t go home. LAPD wants to speak to your ass. You like Hannibal in this hole.”

“Beach, then — it’ll be like closure.”

Psycho Loco and Yoshiko sat in the front seat. I sat in the back and put my hand on the dent in the upholstery where Nicholas should have been. I caught Psycho Loco’s eye in the rearview mirror.

“Shit fucked up, right?”

“Isn’t it always. How his mother?”

“She broke up, like everybody else. Went back to Mexico after the funeral though, something about a match against the Jalisco Jaquecas. You know, in a lot of ways, Scoby was Hillside. Nobody from the neighborhood ain’t never come up like y’all. You two the first.”

I pressed Psycho Loco to stop, but he waved me off, insisting that I quit with the false modesty. I needed to hear what he had to say.

“We used to watch you and Scobe bust niggers’ asses on television every weekend. Cuz, clowns who dropped out of school in the eighth grade sporting Boston University sweatshirts and shit. Then your book came out. Oh man, we went berserk. Nobody would read it at first. Too scared. I just carried it everywhere I went, proud as hell, throwing it in people faces. ‘You better buy this book. Compralo, ese. My boy wrote this, so next time I see you, best to have it on you.’ Fools bought your shit too, because I was your number-one publicist in the ’hood. Gave your shit street credibility.”

“Right.”

“Then one day we was kicking it at Reynier Park, lounging, you know how we do. I just pulled the book out and started reading it aloud. Read the shit cover to cover, twice. Who was there? Me, Hi-Life, Pookie of course, Shamu, L’il Annie Borden, buncha heads, everybody crying. Niggers was happy, but upset at the same time, you know. Then the rally. Nicholas. Nobody asked why, we just understood. Peep my new tattoo.”

Psycho Loco held out his right arm for me to examine. On his wrist was a tattooed watch. The face of the watch was an exact likeness of a smiling Nick. In cursive letters along the edge of the thick black band was “Nick Scoby, a nigger who always knew what time it was.”

I lay down in the back seat and let the car’s motion and the who’s who of neighborhood gossip rock me to sleep. I dreamed I was in a squad of black kamikaze pilots. We were ambivalent about the kamikaze label because we thought “divine wind” sounded like a fart that smelled like perfume. We flew planes constructed of balsawood and powered by rubber bands that you twisted before takeoff by turning red plastic propellors. I flew thousands of missions, all failures, because I always came back alive. I crashed into the sides of oil tankers toting fifty-gallon drums of nitroglycerine and swam back to shore, unscathed save for a pair of singed eyebrows. I divebombed the Pentagon, a bucket of turpentine and gasoline between my legs, a grenade in each hand, a methane-farting cow strapped to my back, and firework sparklers clenched heroically in my teeth. Nothing. In shame I walked away from the flaming polygon and caught a bus back to headquarters. In disgrace I became the only kamikaze pilot ever to receive a promotion. Every night I sprinted down the tarmac toward my waiting balsawood plane, hoping tonight would be my last mission.

The numbing cold of a beer can pressed against my temple woke me up. A twelve-pack of reminiscing later, night had fallen, and Psycho Loco was ready to get down to the nitty-gritty. “So when you going to die?” he asked. I’d heard that tone in his voice before; it was the same sarcastic timbre he had used when he goaded Buzzard into shooting a rookie Harlem Globetrotter, who in botching the confetti-in-the-water-bucket trick had accidentally doused Buzzard with water. No one can instigate like Psycho Loco. “You know, Gunnar, for all that shit you talk about killing yourself, you really ain’t the suicidal type. Masochistic, yes, suicidal no. So when you going to it, suicide-boy?”

I bored the beer can into the sand and stood up ramrod straight. “Sir, right now, sir, I will kill myself now, sir! Right face, huuh!” Calling my own cadence, I goosestepped toward the ocean while Yoshiko beat out a drum march on her skintight belly and Psycho Loco whistled “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” They thought I was kidding, but when I was thirty yards from shore, splitting waves with my forehead, I heard Psycho Loco yelling for help.