Paul Beatty: The White Boy Shuffle

MY EARLIEST MEMORIES bodysurf the warm comforting timelessness of the Santa Ana winds, whipping me in and around the palm-tree — lined streets of Santa Monica. Me and white boys Steven Pierce, Ryan Foggerty, and David Schoenfeld sharing secrets and bubble gum. Our friendship was a buoyant one based on proximity, easy-to-remember phone numbers, and the fact that Ryan always had enough money for everybody. We were friends, but didn’t see ourselves as a unit. We had no enemies, no longstanding rivalries with the feared Hermosa Beach Sandcastle Hellions or the Exclusive Brentwood Spoiled Brat Millionaire Tycoon Killers. Our conflicts limited themselves to fighting with our sisters and running from the Santa Monica Shore Patrol. My co-conspirators in beach terrorism and I suffered through countless admonishments from overzealous officers lucky enough to grab one of us in some act of mischief that was always a precursor to a lifetime of incarceration bunking with society’s undesirables. “Young man, try to imagine a future behind bars.”

“What you in for, young buck?”

“I garnished the potato salad of this obese family of Orange County sea cows with sand crabs.”

“Premeditated?”

“Hell, yeah! The entire clan beached themselves fully clothed twenty feet from the water. Tourists. Fucked up the local vibe.”

“Hey, that’s worth a couple of years, easy. Chow’s at six o’clock.”

After I was escorted home by the police “one too many times,” my mother made me join Cub Scout Pack #251, starting me on the socialization treadmill toward group initiation and ceremonial induction. I was kicked out after three meetings for failing to learn the pledge, but the experience stayed with me. It was as if somebody assigned a den mother to point out the significance of campy blue uniforms with buttons in every imaginable place, flags, and oaths. My salt-air world began to subdivide into a series of increasingly complicated dichotomous relationships. Thankfully, I still remember when my worldview wasn’t “us against them” or “me vs. the world” but “me and the world.”

I was an ashy-legged black beach bum sporting a lopsided trapezoidal natural and living in a hilltop two-story townhouse on Sixth and Bay. After an exhausting morning of bodyboarding and watching seagulls hovering over the ocean expertly catching french fries, I would spend the afternoon lounging on the rosewood balcony. Sitting in a lawn chair, my spindly legs crossed at the ankles, I’d leaf through the newest Time-Life mail-order installments of the family’s coffee-table reference library. Predators of the Insect World, Air War Over Europe, Gunfighters of the Old West; I loved reading about red ant — black ant wars, dogfights at fifteen thousand feet, and any cowboy “who was so mean he once shot a man for snoring.” The baseball game would crackle and spit from the cheap white transistor radio my father gave me for my seventh birthday. The tiny tweeter damp with drool from Dodger play-by-play man Chip Parker salivating over Rusty Lanahan’s agility around the bag and how despite allegations of spousal abuse the first baseman with the All-American punim remained a shining role model for the city’s youth. If I still swore on my mother, I’d swear that between pitches I could hear the fizzing of the sun setting behind me, cooling down with a well-earned bedtime dip in the Pacific. I liked to twist the glossy Time-Life photos in the fading yellow light. When the praying mantis’s chalky lime green changed to ghostly white and a B-26 Marauder bomber’s drab army olive melted away into a muddy dark brown, it was time for dinner. The call of the irate mother could be heard over the roar of the airplanes flying off the page.

“Gunnar, set the fucking table.”

“’kay, Ma.”

Before making my way to the silverware drawer, I’d lean over the balcony, squinting into the dusk, and look out toward the nearly empty waterfront six blocks away. The elongated shadows of beachcombers and their metal detectors skimmed across the dimpled and paper-cup — laden sand in hopes of finding lost sandwich baggies full of quarters stolen long ago from the bottom of parents’ dresser drawers. Lifeguard Station 26 is boarded up and shut down for the evening. The sandy-colored hairy-legged lifeguard walks quickly toward his classic convertible VW Beetle, his cherry-red vinyl shorts and windbreaker barking, “Caution! Dangerous riptide!” and fluttering in the strong sea breeze. Two shimmering wetsuit-clad surfers straddle fiberglass Day-Glo boards bobbing offshore, waiting for the last good wave of the day to take them home. The sandpipers play tag with the receding tide, scampering just outside the stretching reach of the waves dying at their knobby feet. Every once in a while the birds call time out to take water breaks, sticking their thin beaks into the moist sand. The sun stops fizzing, though Chip Parker remains excited, haranguing the listening audience about leftfielder Nathaniel Galloway’s powerful Negroid hindquarters and seguing smoothly into the ad copy for Farmer John’s ham, “hickory smoked just the way you like it.”

The lights at Dodger Stadium and the streetlamps flicker on, and throughout Santa Monica the obedient kids wave goodnight to their delinquent friends as the community goes into the seventh-inning stretch. “Jesse Stewart retires the side in order, one, two, three. And after six it’s the Dodgers three, the Mets one.” Life was full of Cracker Jacks, root-root-rooting for the home team, and fucking with my mother.

“Gunnar! Set the table!”

“Ma? You know what?”

“What?”

“That’s what.”

“Very funny. Set the table or I’ll wash your sharp-tongued mouth out with the whetstone.”

I was very funny, in a sophomoric autodidactic knock-knock-who’s-there sort of way. I learned timing, Zen and the art of self-deprecation from the glut of Jewish standup comics on cable TV, who served as living Chinese acupuncture charts of comedic pressure points: dating-yin, parents-yin, daily absurdities-yang. The ancient texts of Bennett Cerf and the humorous anecdotes from Grandma’s waterlogged Reader’s Digests were, if not the I Ching, at least Confucian hymnals.

I was the funny, cool black guy. In Santa Monica, like most predominantly white sanctuaries from urban blight, “cool black guy” is a versatile identifier used to distinguish the harmless black male from the Caucasian juvenile while maintaining politically correct semiotics. If someone was planning a birthday party, the potential invitees always asked, “Who’s going to be there?” The conversation would go:

“Shaun, Lance, Gunnar…”

“Gunnar? Who’s that?”

“You know, the funny, cool black guy.”

Some kids had reps for shredding on skateboards or eating ear wax. My forte was the ability to hold a straight face and pull off the nervy prank. I learned early that white kids will believe anything anybody a shade darker than chocolate milk says. So I’d tell the gullible Paddys that I was part Gypsy and had the innate ability to tell fortunes. Waving my left index finger like a pendulum over their sticky palms, I’d forecast long lifetimes of health and prosperity. “You’ll have a big house in the hills. Over here on the love line is your tennis court. Right here by the life line is your heliport. Now where do you want your pool?” The unsuspecting dupe would point to a spot usually midway between the mystic cross and the creative line, and I’d spit a wad of saliva somewhere near the designated area. “There’s your pool.”

I was the only cool black guy at Mestizo Mulatto Mongrel Elementary, Santa Monica’s all-white multicultural school. My early education consisted of two types of multiculturalism: classroom multiculturalism, which reduced race, sexual orientation, and gender to inconsequence, and schoolyard multiculturalism, where the kids who knew the most Polack, queer, and farmer’s daughter jokes ruled. The classroom cross-cultural teachings couldn’t compete with the playground blacktop lessons, which were cruel but at least humorous. Like most aspects of regimented pop-quiz pedagogy, the classroom multiculturalism was contradictory, though its intentions were good.