The Sellout (11 page)
Hominy squirmed in his seat, picking at the still-puffy red welts on his back, wondering why he was bleeding. Shit, maybe I was supposed to let him die. Maybe I should’ve just pushed him out of the car and onto the oily cracked asphalt of the Harbor Freeway. But what good would it do? Traffic came to a complete halt. A Jaguar, one of those ugly American-made models, was overturned in the fast lane. Its turtlenecked passenger unhurt, leaning against the median fence and reading a hardback novel you see only at airport bookstores. The rear-ended Honda sedan, with both its back end and its driver flattened and smoking, lay in the middle lane waiting to be carried to the junk- and graveyards, respectively. Jaguar model names sound like rockets: XJ–S, XJ8, E–Type. Hondas sound like cars designed by pacifists and humanitarian diplomats. The Accord, Civic, Insight. Hominy got out of the car to untangle the snarl. Waving his arms like the crazy man he was, he separated the cars by color, not that of the respective paint jobs, but by the hue of the motorists. “If you black, get back! White, to the right. Brown, go around. Yellow, follow the whites and let it mellow. Red, full speed ahead! Mulattos, full throttle!” If he couldn’t categorize by sight, he asked the drivers what color they were. “Chicano? What color is that? You just can’t make up a race, motherfucker.
Puto?
I got your
puto
right here,
pendejo
! You pick a lane, nigger, and stay in it! Get in where you fit in!”
With cops and flares arrived, and the traffic finally flowing freely, Hominy climbed back into the truck, dusting off his hands like he’d done something. “That’s how you do shit. Sunshine Sammy taught me that. He used to say, ‘Time waits on no man, but niggers wait on anybody with a twenty-five cent tip.’”
“Who the fuck is Sunshine Sammy?”
“Don’t you worry about who Sunshine Sammy is. You new niggers got black presidents and golfers. I got Sunshine Sammy. The original Little Rascal, and by original I mean the very first one. And let me tell you, when Sunshine Sammy rescued the gang from an impossible predicament, now that was nonpartisan leadership.”
Hominy slumped in his seat and clasped his hands behind his head and looked out the window and into his past. I flipped on the radio and let the Dodger game fill the silence. Hominy missed the good ol’ days and Sunshine Sammy. I missed Vin Scully, the dulcet voice of objectivity, calling the play-by-play. For a baseball puritan like myself, the good ol’ days were the days before the designated hitter, interleague play, steroids, and assholes in the outfield, baseball caps perched precariously atop their heads, flying off with every missed cut-off man and pop fly lost in the national pastime sun. They were me and Daddy, our mouths full of Dodger dogs and soda, two black bleacher and dharma bums sharing the June night heat with the moths, cursing a fifth-place team, and longing for the good ol’ days of Garvey, Cey, Koufax, Dusty, Drysdale, and Lasorda. For Hominy any day when he could personify American primitivism was a good ol’ day. It meant that he was still alive, and sometimes even the carnival coon in the dunk tank misses the attention. And this country, the latent high school homosexual that it is, the mulatto passing for white that it is, the Neanderthal incessantly plucking its unibrow that it is, needs people like him. It needs somebody to throw baseballs at, to fag-bash, to nigger-stomp, to invade, to embargo. Anything that, like baseball, keeps a country that’s constantly preening in the mirror from actually looking in the mirror and remembering where the bodies are buried. That night the Dodgers lost their third straight. Hominy sat up in his seat and rubbed a porthole into the suddenly fogged-up windshield.
“We home yet?” he asked.
We were midway between the El Segundo and Rosecrans Avenue off-ramps, and it hit me: there used to be a sign that read
DICKENS—NEXT EXIT.
Hominy missed the good ol’ days. I missed my father driving us back from the Pomona State Fair, elbowing me awake, the Dodger postgame on the radio as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes just in time to see that sign,
DICKENS—NEXT EXIT,
and know I was home. Shit, I missed that sign. And what are cities really, besides signs and arbitrary boundaries?
The green-and-white placard didn’t cost much: a sheet of aluminum the size of a queen-sized bed, two six-foot metal poles, some traffic cones and flares, two reflective orange vests, two cans of spray paint, a couple of hard hats, and that night’s sleep. Thanks to a downloaded copy of the
Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices,
I had the design specifications for everything from the proper shade of green (Pantone 342) to the exact dimensions (60'' x 36''), letter size (8''), and font (Highway Gothic). And after a long night of painting, cutting down the post to size, and stenciling
SUNSHINE SAMMY CONSTRUCTION
to the doors of the truck in removable paint, Hominy and I set back toward the freeway. Other than pouring and waiting for the cement foundation to dry, installing a traffic control device isn’t all that different from planting a tree, and in the light of the high beams I set to work. Cleared the ivy, dug the holes, and planted the sign, while Hominy passed out in the front seat, listening to jazz on KLON.
As the sun rose over the El Segundo Boulevard overpass, the morning commute was starting in earnest. And amid the car honking, the rotors of the traffic helicopters beating overhead, and the grinding of truck gears, Hominy and I sat in the breakdown lane appreciating what we’d done. The sign was a dead ringer for any of the other “traffic control devices” one sees during the daily commute. It’d taken only a few hours, but I felt like Michelangelo staring at the Sistine Chapel after four years of hard labor, like Banksy after spending six days searching the Internet for ideas to steal and three minutes of sidewalk vandalism to execute them.
“Massa, signs are powerful things. It almost feels like Dickens exists out there in the smog somewhere.”
“Hominy, what feels better, getting whipped or looking at that sign?”
Hominy thought a moment. “The whip feels good on the back, but the sign feels good in the heart.”
* * *
When we arrived home that morning, I popped open a kitchen-table beer, sent Hominy home, grabbed the latest edition of
The Thomas Guide
from the bookshelf. At 4,084 square miles, much of Los Angeles County, like the ocean floor, remains in large part unexplored. Even though you needed an advanced degree in geomatics to understand its 800
+
pages,
The Thomas Guide to Los Angeles County
is the spiral-bound Sacagawea for any intrepid explorer trying to navigate this urban oasis-less sprawl. Even in the days of GPS devices and search engines, it sits on the front seat of every taxicab, tow truck, and company car, and no Sureño worth their rolling “California stop” would ever be caught dead without one. I flipped the book open. Every year my father used to bring the new
Thomas Guide
home, and the first thing I’d do was turn to pages 704–5 and approximate the location of the crib, 205 Bernard Avenue, on the map. Finding my house in that giant tome grounded me somehow. Made me feel loved by the world. But 205 Bernard Avenue sat on a nameless peach-colored section of gridiron streets bordered by freeways on each side. I wanted to cry. It hurt knowing that Dickens had been exiled to the netherworld of invisible L.A. communities. Top-secret minority bastions like the Dons and the Avenues that’ve never had or needed
Thomas Guide
listings, official boundaries, or cheesy billboards announcing, “You are now entering…” or “You are now leaving…” because when the voice inside your head (the one you swear up and down isn’t prejudice or racism) tells you to roll up the windows and lock the doors, you know you’ve entered the Jungle or Fruittown, and that when you start breathing again, you’ve exited. I dug up a blue marker, drew a crooked outline of my hometown as best as I could remember it, and scribbled
DICKENS
in big Dodger-blue letters across pages 704–5, and a little pictogram of the exit sign I’d just put up. If I ever raise the nerve, one day I’m going to erect two more signs. So if you find yourself hurtling southbound on the 110 freeway, speeding past two yellow-and-black blurs that read
WATCH OUT FOR FALLING HOME PRICES
and
CAUTION—BLACK ON BLACK CRIME AHEAD,
you’ll know whom to thank for the roadside warnings.
THE DUM DUM DONUT INTELLECTUALS
The Sunday after installing the roadside sign I wanted to make a formal announcement of my plan to reanimate the city of Dickens. And what better place to do so than the next meeting of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, the closest approximation we had to a representative government.
One of the many sad ironies of African-American life is that every banal dysfunctional social gathering is called a “function.” And black functions never start on time, so it’s impossible to gauge how to arrive fashionably late without taking a chance of missing the event altogether. Not wanting to have to sit through the reading of the minutes, I waited until the Raiders game reached halftime. Since my father’s death, the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals had devolved into a group of star-struck, middle-class black out-of-towners and academics who met bimonthly to fawn over the semifamous Foy Cheshire. As much as black America treasures its fallen heroes, it was hard to tell if they were more impressed with his resiliency or that despite all he’d been through he still drove a vintage 1956 Mercedes 300SL. Nevertheless, they hovered around, hoping to impress him with their insight into an indigent black community that, if they’d just taken their racial blinders off for one second, they’d realize was no longer black but predominantly Latino.
The meetings consisted mostly of the members who showed up every other week arguing with the ones who came every other month about what exactly “bimonthly” means. I entered the donut shop just as the last copies of
The Ticker
, an update of statistics related to Dickens, were being passed around. Standing in the back near the blueberry fritters, I held the handout to my nose and inhaled the sweet smell of fresh mimeograph ink before giving it a cursory glance.
The Ticker
was a societal measure my father had designed to look like a Dow Jones stock report. Except that commodities and blue chips were replaced with social ills and pitfalls. Everything that was always up—unemployment, poverty, lawlessness, infant mortality—was up. Everything that’s always down—graduation rates, literacy, life expectancy—was even further down.
Foy Cheshire stood underneath the clock. In ten years’ time, other than gaining seventy-five pounds, he hadn’t changed much. He wasn’t much younger than Hominy, but he’d never grayed and his face bore only a few laugh lines. On the wall behind him were two framed poster-sized photos, one of a variety box of insanely puffy and succulent-looking donuts that looked nothing like the shrivelled-up, lumpy, so-called fresh pastries hardening before my eyes in the display case behind me, the other a color portrait of Pops, proudly wearing his APA tie clasp, his hair shaped to billowy perfection. I played the back. Judging from the serious mood in the room, there was a lot on the agenda and it’d be a while before the Dum Dums got to “ancilliary bidness.”
Foy held two books, fanning them out in front of the group like a magician about to do a card trick.
Pick a culture, any culture.
He held one aloft, addressing his audience in an affected Southern Methodist drawl, even though he was from the Hollywood Hills by way of Grand Rapids. “One night, not long ago,” Foy said, “I tried to read this book,
Huckleberry Finn
, to my grandchildren, but I couldn’t get past page six because the book is fraught with the ‘n-word.’ And although they are the deepest-thinking, combat-ready eight- and ten-year-olds I know, I knew my babies weren’t ready to comprehend
Huckleberry Finn
on its own merits. That’s why I took the liberty to rewrite Mark Twain’s masterpiece. Where the repugnant ‘n-word’ occurs, I replaced it with ‘warrior’ and the word ‘slave’ with ‘dark-skinned volunteer.’”
“That’s right!” shouted the crowd.
“I also improved Jim’s diction, rejiggered the plotline a bit, and retitled the book
The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.
” Then Foy held up the copy of his revamped volume for examination. My eyesight isn’t the best, but I could’ve sworn the cover featured Huckleberry Finn piloting the raft down the mighty Mississippi, while Captain African-American Jim stood at the helm, hands on narrow hips, sporting a cheesy goatee and a tartan Burberry sport coat exactly like the one Foy happened to be wearing.
I never much liked going to the meetings, but after my father died, unless there was an emergency on the farm, I showed up. Before Foy’s appointment as lead thinker, there had been some talk of grooming me to step in as leader of the group. The Kim Jong-un of ghetto conceptualism. After all, I’d taken over the nigger-whispering duties. But I refused. Begging out by claiming I didn’t know enough about black culture. That the only certainties I had about the African-American condition were that we had no concept of the phrases “too sweet” and “too salty.” And in ten years, through countless California cruelties and slights against the blacks, the poor, the people of color, like Propositions 8 and 187, the disappearance of social welfare, David Cronenberg’s
Crash
, and Dave Eggers’s do-gooder condescension, I hadn’t spoken a single word. During roll call Foy never called me by my proper name, but simply yelled, “The Sellout!” Looked me in the face with a sly and perfunctory smile, said, “Here,” and placed a check mark next to my name.
Foy touched his fingertips together in front of his chest, the universal sign that the smartest person in the room is about to say something. He spoke loudly and quickly, his speech picking up in speed and intensity with every word. “I propose that we move to demand the inclusion of my politically respectful edition of
Huckleberry Finn
into every middle-school reading curriculum,” he said. “Because it’s a crime that generations of black folk come of age never having experienced this”—Foy snuck a peek at the original book’s back cover—“this hilariously picturesque American classic.”