Paul Beatty: The White Boy Shuffle

Past movements in the black struggle seem to have had the staying power of an asthmatic marathoner with no sense of direction, so I suppose as movements go, this one is better than most. No more pleading for our promised forty acres and a mule only to have some hayseed Dixiecrat respond, “These people wouldn’t know a switchback from a switchblade.” No futile attempts at organization. No “Help fold, staple, and label” parties. No one asks for donations. You never hear words and phrases such as “grass roots,” “mobilize,” “subcommittee,” “Who has the phone tree?” and “COINTELPRO” bandied about with counterinsurgent smugness. Best of all, in my humble opinion, I’m not the type of leader to promote self-help and self-love with put-downs and vituperation. You’ll never hear me say, “Scientology is a gutter religion.” I didn’t satiate our sweet-tooth cravings for respect and vengeance like a Sunday-school teacher rewarding good behavior with Uncle Tom White Chocolate, Sneaky Hebrew Butterscotch, and Empowerment Peppermints.

Who can take a rainbow, drop it in a sigh,

soak it in the sun and make a groovy lemon pie?

The candy man, the candy man can.

Mostly I stay at home, Suite 206, the La Cienega Motor Lodge and Laundromat, bathing Naomi while Yoshiko and my mother watch Zatoichi movies, the blind swordsman plowing through his unlucky foes like a wheat thresher. Sometimes Psycho Loco comes to visit, wearing his silver radiation suit, just in case the feds decide to annihilate us ahead of schedule. I dip Naomi in the Jacuzzi and rub baby oil into the creases in her arms, and my best friend and I talk, death-row prisoner to visitor.

“You know, Gunnar, with all this suicidal madness, you taking the easy way out. Why don’t you fight back? Go out like a hero. Dirt on your face, guns blazing.”

“Psycho Loco, everyone who’s ever challenged you, what have you done to ’em?”

“I waxed that ass.”

“So it’s useless for an enemy to challenge you, right?”

“Si, claro.”

“Might as well kill myself, right? Why give you the satisfaction. The trippy part is that when you really think about it, me and America aren’t even enemies. I’m the horse pulling the stagecoach, the donkey in the levee who’s stumbled in the mud and come up lame. You may love me, but I’m tired of thrashing around in the muck and not getting anywhere, so put a nigger out his misery.”

I pile the suds high on Naomi’s head like a wobbly Ku Klux Klan hood and tell her the Kaufman history. I begin with the end — Rölf Kaufman, her grandfather, my dad, who died last week. The only officer in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department to commit suicide by eating his gun, choking on the firing pin and leaving the following poem in his locker.

Like the good Reverend King

I too “have a dream,”

but when I wake up

I forget it and

remember I’m running late for work.