The Sellout (13 page)
He pretended to offer me the pills before placing them gently on his tongue and washing them down with a swig from an expensive-looking silver flask. Since his cartoons had stopped airing, Foy had had a series of morning talk shows. Each successive failure slotted at a time earlier and earlier in the morning. Just as Bloods don’t use the letter
C
because it’s the first letter in Crip (Cap’n Crunch Cereal is Kap’n Krunch Kereal), Foy shows his gang affiliation by replacing the word “fact” with “black.” And he has interviewed everyone from world leaders to dying musicians on programs titled
Black
and
Fiction, Blacktotum.
His latest installment was a nonsensical race forum on public access called
Just the Blacks, Ma’am.
It aired at five o’clock Sunday mornings. Ain’t but two niggers in the world awake at five o’clock, and that’s Foy Cheshire and his make-up artist.
It’s hard to describe a man wearing probably close to $5,000 in a suit, shoes, and accessories as disheveled, but up close in the streetlight that’s exactly what he was. All spit and no polish, his shirt wrinkled and losing its starch. The bottoms of his barely creased silk pants ringed brown with dirt and just starting to fray. His shoes were scuffed, and he reeked of crème de menthe. I once heard Mike Tyson say, “Only in America can you be bankrupt and live in a mansion.”
Foy recapped his flask and jammed it into his pocket. Now that no one was looking, I waited for him to make the full werenigger transformation. Grow fangs and claws. I wondered if the hair on black werewolves was nappy. It had to be, right?
“I know what you up to.”
“What am I up to?”
“You’re about the same age your father was when he died. And you ain’t said shit in a meeting for ten years. Why choose today to talk this nonsense about bringing Dickens back? Because you trying to reclaim the Dum Dums, take back what your father started.”
“I don’t think so. Any organization that holds lectures about the dangers of diabetes in a donut shop, you can keep.”
Maybe I should’ve seen it then. My father had a checklist to determine whether or not someone was losing his mind. He said there were telltale signs of a mental breakdown that people often mistake for force of personality. Aloofness. Mood swings. Delusions of grandeur. Apart from Hominy, who, like one of those giant redwood slices you see at the science museum, was an open book, I only know how to tell if a tree is dying on the inside, not a person. The tree sort of withdraws into itself. The leaves become splotchy. Sometimes there are cankers and fissures in the bark. The branches might be bone-dry or soft and spongy to the touch. But the best way is to look at the roots. The roots are what anchors a tree to the ground, holds it in place on this spinning ball of shit, and if those are cracked and covered in spores and fungi, well … I remember looking at Foy’s roots, a pair of expensive brown wingtips. They were scuffed and dusty. So, given the rumors about his wife filing for divorce, the bankruptcy, and his talk show’s nonexistent ratings, maybe I should’ve known.
“I’ve got my eye on you,” he said, sliding into his car. “The Dum Dum Donuts is all I have left. I will not let you fuck my shit up.” Two goodbye beeps of his horn and he was gone. Swooping his Benz down El Cielo Boulevard, reaching Mach speed as he flew past Cuz, whose slow-footed strut was unmistakable even from a distance. It doesn’t happen often, but once in a Crip blue moon, a member of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals says something ingenious like “black Chinese restaurants” and “pussy.”
“No doubt, nigger,” I said aloud.
And for the first time I meant it.
I went with the painted boundary. Not that the lasers cost so much, though the pointers that had the intensity I needed were a few hundred bucks apiece, it’s that I found the painting to be meditative. I’ve always liked rote. The formulaic repetitiveness of filing and stuffing envelopes appeals to me in some fundamental life-affirming way. I would’ve made a good factory worker, supply-room clerk, or Hollywood scriptwriter. In school, whenever I had to do something like memorize the periodic table, my father would say the key to doing boring tasks is to think about not so much what you’re doing but the importance of why you’re doing it. Though when I asked him if slavery wouldn’t have been less psychologically damaging if they’d thought of it as “gardening,” I got a vicious beating that would’ve made Kunta Kinte wince.
I bought a shitload of white spray paint and a line-marking machine, the kind used to paint yardage markers and foul lines on ball fields, and before my morning chores, when the traffic was light, I’d haul my ass to the designated location, set up shop in the middle of the road, and paint the line. Paying no attention to the line’s straightness or my attire, I laid down the border. It was a sign of the ineffectualness of the Dum Dum Donut think tank that no one had any idea what I was doing. Most folks who didn’t know me mistook me for a performance artist or a crazy person. I was cool with the latter designation.
But after a few thousand yards of squiggly white lines, it became obvious to any Dickensian over the age of ten what I was doing. Unsolicited, groups of truant teens and homeless would stand guard over the line. Plucking leaves and debris out of the wet paint. Shooing away bicyclists and jaywalkers to prevent them from smearing the border. Sometimes, after retiring for the day, I’d return the next morning, only to find that someone else had taken up where I’d left off. Extended my line with a line of their own, often in a different color. Sometimes the line wouldn’t be a line at all but drops of blood, or an uninterrupted string of graffiti signing off on my efforts, ____
AceBoonakatheWest sideCrazy63rdStGangsta
____, or, as in the case of the corner fronting the L.A. LGBTDL Crisis Center for Chicanos, Blacks, Non-Gays, and Anyone Else Who Feels Underserved, Unsupported, and Exploited by Hit Cable Television Shows, an arcing three-foot-wide, four-hundred-foot-long rainbow anchored with pots of gold condoms. Halfway down Victoria Boulevard where the El Harvard Bridge starts to cross the creek, someone bisected my line with
100 Smoots
in purple print. I still have no idea what that means, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that, with all the help, it didn’t take long to finish painting the border. The police, many of whom knew me through my work and my watermelon, often escorted me from their patrol cars. Checking my boundary for accuracy against old editions of
The Thomas Guide.
I didn’t mind Officer Mendez’s good-natured teasing.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for the lost city of Dickens.”
“By painting a white line down the middle of a street that already has two yellow lines down the middle of it?”
“You love the mangy dog that shows up in your backyard as much as the puppy you got for your birthday.”
“Then you should put up a flyer,” she said, handing me a mock-up she’d hurriedly composed on the back of a wanted poster.
MISSING: HOMETOWN
Have you seen my city?
Description: Mostly Black and Brown. Some Samoan.
Friendly. Answers to the name of Dickens.
Reward Earned in Heaven.
If you have any information, please call this number 1-(800) DICKENS.
I appreciated the help and, using a wad of chewed gum, fastened the flyer to the nearest telephone post. For those looking to find the thing that you’ve lost, the decision of where to place your handbill is one of the toughest you’ll ever make in life. I chose a space at the bottom of the pole between a circular for an Uncle Jam’s Army concert at the Veterans Center. “Uncle Jam Wants You! To Serve and Funk in Los Afghanistan, California! Allah Ak-Open-Bar from 9–10 p.m.!” and a leaflet promoting a mysterious dream job that paid $1,000 a week, working from home. I hoped whoever posted that flyer had had a talk with human resources, because I seriously doubted they were making even $300 a week, and they definitely weren’t working from home.
It took about six weeks to finish painting the border and the labels, and in the end I wasn’t sure what I’d accomplished, but it was fun to see kids spend their Saturdays circumnavigating the city by carefully tracing their steps, walking heel-to-toe on the line, making sure they’d left not even an inch untrod upon. Sometimes I’d chance across an elderly member of the community standing in the middle of the street, unable to cross the single white line. Puzzled looks on their faces from asking themselves why they felt so strongly about the Dickens side of the line as opposed to the other side. When there was just as much uncurbed dog shit over there as here. When the grass, what little of it there was, sure in the fuck wasn’t any greener. When the niggers were just as trifling, but for some reason they felt like they belonged on this side. And why was that? When it was just a line.
I have to confess that, in the days after I painted it, I, too, was hesitant to cross the line, because the jagged way it surrounded the remnants of the city reminded me of the chalk outline the police had needlessly drawn around my father’s body. But I did like the line’s artifice. The implication of solidarity and community it represented. And while I hadn’t quite reestablished Dickens, I had managed to quarantine it. And community–cum–leper colony wasn’t a bad start.
EXACT CHANGE, OR ZEN AND THE ART OF BUS RIDING AND RELATIONSHIP REPAIR
Sometimes the smell wakes you up in the middle of the night. Chicago has the Hawk, and Dickens, despite its newly painted barrier, has the Stank, an eye-burning, colorless miasma of sulfur and shit birthed in the Wilmington oil refineries and the Long Beach sewage treatment plant. Carried inland by the prevailing winds, the Stank gathers up a steamy pungency as the fumes combine with the stench of the lounge lizards returning home from partying in Newport Beach, drenched in sweat, tequila shooter runoff, and gallons of overapplied Drakkar Noir cologne. They say the Stank drops the crime rate by 90 percent, but when the smell slaps you awake at three in the morning, the first thing you want to do is kill Guy Laroche.
It was a night about two weeks after I’d painted the border, the stench was especially strong, and I was unable to get back to sleep. I tried cleaning the stables, hoping the smell of fresh horse manure would remove the sting from my nostrils. It didn’t work and I had to resort to covering my face with a dishrag soaked in vinegar to kill the fumes. Hominy walked in with my wet suit draped over one arm and a bowl in the other hand. He was dressed like a British manservant, complete with coat and tails and a vacillating BBC
Masterpiece Theatre
accent.
“What are you doing here?”
“I saw the lights and thought maybe Master would like the black hash and a little fresh air this evening.”
“Hominy, it’s four o’clock in the morning. Why aren’t you in bed?”
“Same reason you aren’t. It smells like a bum’s asshole outside.”
“Where’d you get the tux?”
“Back in the fifties every black actor had one. Show up for a casting call for butler or headwaiter and the studio would be like ‘Boy, you just saved us fifty bucks. You’re hired!’”
A little wake ’n’ bake and some surfing wasn’t a bad idea. I’d be too high to drive to the beach, but that would give me an excuse to see my girl for the first time in months. Catching some waves and a whiff of my baby? That’d be like killing two burdens with one stoner, so to speak. Hominy walked me into the living room, spun Daddy’s recliner around, and patted the armrest.
“Sit.”
The gas fireplace roared to life, and I stuck a punk into the flames, sparked the bowl, and took a long, smooth pull and was high before I could exhale. I must’ve left the back door open, because one of the newborn calves, shiny, black, barely a week old, and not yet used to the sounds and smells of Dickens, wandered in and stared me down with his big brown eyes. I blew a puff of hashish into his face, and together we could feel the stress leave our bodies. As the blackness peeled from our hides, the melanin fizzing and dissipating into nothingness like antacids dissolving in tap water.
They say a cigarette takes three minutes off your life, but good hashish makes dying seem so far away.
The distant staccato of gunfire sounded in the air. The last shoot-out of the night followed by the beating rotors of the police helicopter. The calf and I split a double of single malt to take the edge off. Hominy pitched himself by the door. A parade of ambulances sped down the street, and he handed me my surfboard like a butler hands an English gentleman his coat. Feigned or not, sometimes I’m jealous of Hominy’s obliviousness, because he, unlike America, has turned the page. That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.
“Master, I just thought you should know, my birthday’s next week.”
I knew something was up. He was being too attentive. But what do you get the slave who doesn’t even want his freedom?
“Well, that’s cool. We’ll take a trip or something. In the meantime, could you do me a favor and put the calf out back?”
“I don’t do farm animals.”
* * *
Even when the air doesn’t smell, when you walk the ghetto streets in a spring suit, board tucked under one arm, no one really fucks with you. Maybe once in a while a curious stick-up kid might take the measure, look me up and down, and make a guess as to how much the pawn shop would give him for an antique Town & Country tri fin. Sometimes they stop me in front of the Laundromat, stare in amazement at the homie wearing open-toe flip-flops, and pinch my outer layer of black polyurethane skin.
“Check it out, cuz.”
“S’up?”
“Where you keep your keys at?”
The 5:43 a.m. #125 westbound to El Segundo rolled in on time. The pneumatic doors swung open with that strong, hissing efficiency that I love, and the driver welcomed me aboard with a friendly “Hurry up, motherfucker, you letting the stink in.” Bus Operator #632 thought we were broken up just because years ago she married that has-been gangster rapper (now semifamous television cop and malt liquor pitchman), MC Panache, had four kids, and had a restraining order requiring me to stay five hundred feet away from her and the children, because I would follow them home from school screaming, “Your daddy doesn’t know his assonance from his elegy! And he calls himself a poet.”