Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

It’s very hard for a strong swimmer to drown on purpose. Once my feet no longer touched the sea floor, I felt myself instinctively floating toward the surface, thinking about catching one last wave. Palms up, I flapped my arms and forced myself to submerge into the depths. The ocean was very dark. I curled into a tight tuck and let the tide bob and roll me around like an undersea tumbleweed. The muffled roar of the waves rolling overhead was comforting, and I popped my thumb in my mouth, pretending I was an embryo suspended in amniotic fluid. I began to hear Yoshiko in the shower, talking to our child as she scrubbed her stomach. Telling the child how crazy its parents were. How we were waiting for its birth so we could rent a motor home and drive to Brazil and have a baptism in the rushing waters of the Amazon. What the fuck, I thought, it took Osamu Dazai three or four times to get this suicide thing right. I swam back to shore, surfacing yards south of Psycho Loco and Yoshiko, knee-deep in the water and screaming at the horizon.

“Gunnar, you come back here and be a father to your child, you sonofabitch. My mother warned me. She said, ‘If you marry a Negro hoodlum, he’ll impregnate you and leave you for a white girl.’ You better not be out there fucking no mermaid.”

Psycho Loco dropped to his knees, pounding the surf with his fists. “I loved him. I loved him.”

I crept up behind the distraught mourners. “Boo.”

They jumped out of their skins, happy to see me alive and pissed off that I wasn’t dead.

“Motherfucker! I knew you couldn’t do it.”

“You didn’t know shit. You thought I was in Atlantis by now. Wipe your face, you big baby.”

Yoshiko crossed her arms and grudgingly brushed the sand off my face. “You okay?”

“Yeah, except for the mermaid scales on my dick.”

Yoshiko hit me in the stomach so hard she scraped her knuckles on my spine. They made me drive home.

It was two in the morning when we arrived in Hillside, and I looked for my mother on every corner, examining every liquor store clique for her tight-lipped smile. Glanced at every passing car looking for a gray-haired woman hunched over the steering wheel, wiping the windshield with her forearm and cursing the defogger. On Robertson Boulevard, near the car wash, the outline of what looked to be an old Bonneville came sailing down the hill with its headlights off. Always the courteous driver, I flicked our lights off and on. In a panic, Psycho Loco drew his gun, opened his door, and leapt out of the car. The Bonneville turned on its headlights and sailed past with a honk of appreciation. Psycho Loco climbed back into the front seat and put a relieved hand to his still rapidly beating heart.

“Shit. Motherfucker, are you crazy?”

“What? I just flashed the headlights. You the one flying through streets with the greatest of ease.”

“Ghost Town been driving around the ’hood with their headlights off.”

“So?”

“It’s an initiation. They creep around with no lights and some gangbanger apprentice in the back seat has to shoot the first fool who flashes their headlights.”

It was good to be home.

Because of the police stakeout at my house, Yoshiko and I checked in at the La Cienega Motor Lodge and Laundromat. Toting our luggage, we elbowed our way through the passel of giggly prom couples tossing their room keys to the night clerk as they headed for the parking lot, smoothing their dresses and spit-cleaning the stains on their tuxedos. We liked the cheap American coziness of our new home, Suite 206. I swept insect carcasses, chicken bones, and dust balls into neat piles while Yoshiko sat at the rickety kitchen table shellacking the backs of live roaches with nail polish and giving them color-coded names: a coat of Sea Urchin Hyacinth for Walter, Sugar-Cone Browntium for Abigail, and Lullaby Lilac for Tatsuo. There was a scream from the room next door. Moments later a radio ad for the La Cienega Motor Lodge and Laundromat came on the combination TV/radio — “We’ll leave the light on for ya” — to which Yoshiko added, “So the burglars think you’re home.”

We were under constant surveillance, so we didn’t go out much except to buy beer and TV dinners. During the day we’d open the creaky windows and eavesdrop on the rehab meetings in the community center next door. The crackheads and heroin addicts engaged in acrimonious debate over who constituted the lowest life form. “Ah nigger, don’t lie. I seen you lick a dog’s dick for five dollars, then when the niggers only gave you three, you offered to fuck the telephone pole. So what I share needles with pus-covered faggots. I am a pus-covered faggot, motherfucker. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

Yoshiko and I engaged in our own great debates. I was Du Bois arguing vociferously for a continuation of our comprehensive overpriced Ivy League educations. I suggested that we attend each Ivy League school for one semester, gleaning the best bullshit from the best bullshitters, and emerge as learned scholars prepared to unravel the intricacies of the world or at least work as Wall Street market analysts. Yoshiko was Booker T. Washington fighting passionately for a more proletarian edification, one involving a practicum in the crafts and technical vocations. And what better tutelage than that offered by America’s renowned correspondence colleges? Waving our grades from Boston University, four-point-ohs for each of us on account of Scoby’s suicide, Yoshiko asked, “Don’t you want to earn your way? Aren’t you tired of having things handed to you on a silver platter, black man?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Of course. Look, it’ll be fun. Besides, fuck all that snow.”

So we enrolled at Redwood State, a college located in a post office box in the hinterlands of Chicago, Illinois. In two months’ time I received a bachelor’s degree in earth auguries with an emphasis in meteorology, star-gazing, and horse-race analysis. Yoshiko quadruple-majored in jet engine mechanics, urban forestry, auctioneering for fun and profit, and three-card monte.

Between exams we read the stacks of death poems and obituaries that arrived in the afternoon mail.

CARLTON MALTHUS

Carlton Malthus, thirty-one-year-old brewmeister at the Cascades Malts microbrewery, located in Klamath Falls, Oregon, drank himself to death yesterday in Piss Shivers, a tavern in downtown Klamath Falls. Malthus entered the bar and ordered a Crater Lake Blue, the popular sparkling blue pilsner that he developed. He was refused service and then forcibly removed from the establishment for what one bar patron characterized as being “too black to appreciate ‘the Blue.’” Returning with a keg of Crater Lake Blue, Malthus vowed to drink until his eyes turned blue or he was given a stool at the bar. Sticking the tap spout in his mouth, he drank continuously for five hours, emptying the ten-gallon keg. Removing the tap, he wrote a short poem, loudly eructated, and died. Malthus is survived by his wife Julie, son Barley, and daughter Ethanol. The poem he wrote moments before his death is below.

This drunken belch

leaves the last bitter

taste of life in my mouth.

CAROL YANCY

Ms. Yancy died when she impaled herself with a turkey thermometer after the checkout clerk at Buy ’n’ Buy Supermarket refused to place the change in her hand. After a lengthy argument with store management, Ms. Yancy, ignoring the store’s no-smoking policy, lit a cigarette, then stabbed herself in the frozen foods section. Age ninety-four years.

Both cheeks caved in with age,

I pull on a Newport menthol

one last time.

FALASHA NOONAN

Ms. Noonan, distinguished pianist and leader of the world-famous free jazz big band Infernal Racket, gathered her band members for one last rehearsal. During a piano solo, she scribbled this poem on her sheet music, then leaned into the strings and smashed the piano lid on her head. Age fifty-five years.