The Sellout (18 page)
There was a bit of a silent bidding war from ghost towns around the world for the honor of being Dickens’s third sister city. The abandoned Varosha district, a once-vibrant high-rise section of Famagusta, Cyprus, evacuated during the Turkish invasion and never demolished or repopulated, made an exciting pitch. We also received a stunning bid from Bokor Hill Station, the unsettled French resort settlement whose rococo ruins continue to this day to rot in the Cambodian jungle. After an impressive presentation, Krakatoa, East of Java, was a frontrunner. War-torn and evacuated towns like Oradour-sur-Vayres in France, Paoua and Goroumo in the Central African Republic, all made strong pushes for civic sisterhood. But in the end we found it impossible to ignore the impassioned pleas of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolaño’s prose. That the popularity of the spicy tuna roll and a black American president were to white male domination what the smallpox blankets were to Native American existence. Those inclined to believe in free will and the free market argue that the Lost City of White Male Privilege was responsible for its own demise, that the constant stream of contradictory religious and secular edicts from on high confused the highly impressionable white male. Reduced him to a state of such severe social and psychic anxiety that he stopped fucking. Stopped voting. Stopped reading. And, most important, stopped thinking that he was the end-all, be-all, or at least knew enough to pretend not to be so in public. But in any case, it became impossible to walk the streets of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, feeding your ego by reciting mythological truisms like “We built this country!” when all around you brown men were constantly hammering and nailing, cooking world-class French meals, and repairing your cars. You couldn’t shout “America, love it or leave it!” when deep down inside you longed to live in Toronto. A city you told others was “so cosmopolitan,” by which you really meant “not too cosmopolitan.” How could you call or think someone a “nigger” when your own kids, lily-white and proper, called you “nigger” when you refused them the keys to the car? When everyday “niggers” were doing things that they aren’t supposed to able to do, like swimming in the Olympics and landscaping their yards. My goodness, if this nonsense keeps up, one day a nigger is going to, God forbid, direct a good movie. But not to worry, Lost City of White Male Privilege, real or imagined, me and Hominy had your backs and were proud to make you a sister city of Dickens, aka the Last Bastion of Blackness.
“Too many Mexicans,” Charisma Molina muttered. Speaking through her perfect French manicure so she wouldn’t be overheard. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the racist sentiment expressed in public. Ever since the Native Americans trod up and down El Camino Real in their moccasins, seeking the source of those annoying fucking bells that rang at daybreak every Sunday morning, scaring away the bighorn sheep and ruining many a mescaline-tripping spirit walk, Californians have been cursing the Mexicans. The Indians, who were looking for peace and quiet, ended up finding Jesus, forced labor, the whip, and the rhythm method. “Too many Mexicans,” they’d whisper to themselves in the wheat fields and back pews when nobody was looking.
White people, the type who never used to have anything to say to black people except “We have no vacancies,” “You missed a spot,” and “Rebound the basketball,” finally have something to say to us. And on hot 104-degree San Fernando Valley days, when we’re carrying their groceries to their cars or stuffing their mailboxes with bills, they turn and say, “Too many Mexicans,” a tacit agreement between aggrieved strangers that it’s neither the heat nor the humidity, but that the blame lies with our little brown brothers to the south and the north and next door, and at the Grove, and everywhere else in Califas.
For black people “too many Mexicans” is the excuse we, the historically most documented workers in history, give ourselves for attending racist rallies protesting the undocumented workers seeking better living conditions. “Too many Mexicans” is an oral rationalization to remain stuck in our ways. We like to dream over tea about relocating, finding better living conditions, while riffling through the real estate classifieds.
“What about Glendale, baby?”
“Too many Mexicans.”
“Downey?”
“Too many Mexicans.”
“Bellflower?”
“Too many Mexicans.”
Too many Mexicans. It’s a bromide for every unlicensed contractor tired of being underbid and refusing to blame their lack of employment on shoddy workmanship, nepotistic hiring practices, and a long list of shitty online references. Mexicans are to blame for everything. Someone in California sneezes, you don’t say “Gesundheit” but “Too many Mexicans.” Your horse in the fifth comes up lame in the backstretch at Santa Anita?
Too many Mexicans
. The donkey on the button rivers a third queen at Commerce Casino?
Too many Mexicans
. It’s a constant California refrain, but when Charisma Molina, assistant principal of Chaff Middle School and best friend to Marpessa (my girlfriend, no matter what the fuck she says), said it, it was both the first time I’d ever heard a Mexican-American say it and, though I didn’t know it then, the first time I’d heard anyone mean it. Literally.
Unlike the Little Rascals, whenever I played hooky from school, I never went fishin’—I went to school. I’d sneak out of the house while my dad had fallen asleep during Blackology class and jet over to Chaff to watch the kids play hand- and kickball through the chain-link fence. If I was lucky, I’d catch a glimpse of Marpessa, Charisma, and their homegirls holding court at the rear gate, sassy as a brass big band, hula-hooping their hips, chanting,
Ah beep beep, walking down street, ten times a week … “Ungawa! Ungawa!” That means black power!… I’m soul sister number nine, sock it to me one more time …
For the kids at Chaff, the annual Career Day, held about two weeks before the summer break, was enough to make most of them at least contemplate career suicide before they’d even taken an aptitude test or written a résumé. Held outdoors on the schoolyard blacktop, the assemblage of coal miners, driving-range golf-ball retrievers, basket weavers, ditch diggers, bookbinders, traumatized firefighters, and the world’s last astronaut never does much to inspire. Every year it was the same old thing. We’d carry on about how indispensable and fulfilling our jobs were, but no one ever had answers for the questions from the back row. If you’re so fucking important and the world can’t run without you, then why are you here boring us to tears? Why do you look so unhappy? How come there aren’t any female firemen? How come nurses move so motherfucking slow? The only question ever answered to the children’s satisfaction was directed to the last astronaut, an elderly black gentleman, so feeble he moved like he was experiencing weightlessness here on Earth. How do astronauts go to the bathroom?
Well, I don’t know about now, but in my day they taped a plastic bag to your ass.
Nobody wants to be a farmer, but about a month after Hominy’s birthday celebration, Charisma asked me to do something different. We sat on my front porch puffing gage, while she goaded me by saying she was tired of watching the Lopezes, or the “Stetson Mexicans next door,” as she called them, their horses draped and saddled in glitzy
vaquero
finery, embarrass me year after year with their brocaded, crushed-velvet cowboy suits and fancy rope tricks. “Nobody cares about the subtle differences between manure and fertilizer or sustainable disease management in the butternut squash. These kids have short attention spans. You have to grab them immediately and never let go. I can’t imagine anything worse than last year, when your presentation was so fucking boring the kids threw your own organic tomatoes at you.”
“That’s why I’m not coming. I don’t need the abuse.”
Charisma closed one eye and peered into the bowl, then handed it back to me.
“This shit’s cashed.”
“You want some more?”
Charisma nodded her head.
“I do, and I also want to know what the fuck this weed’s called, and why does the stock market and all the shit I read in my graduate English lit seminar suddenly make sense to me?”
“I call it Perspicacity.”
“Well, that’s how good this shit is, I know what ‘perspicacity,’ a word I’ve never heard, means.”
A dog barked. A cock crowed. A cow mooed. The din of the Harbor Freeway went E-I-E-I-O. Charisma flung back her long straight black hair from her face and took a hit that illuminated the mysteries of the Internet,
Ulysses
, Jean Toomer’s
Cane
, and the American fascination with cooking shows. She also understood how to get me to participate in Career Day.
“Marpessa’s going to be there.”
I didn’t need any more smoke to know that I’d never stop loving that woman.
* * *
With a bank of storm clouds rolling in from the west, it looked like rain. But nothing could dissuade Charisma from making sure her students would have the benefit of discovering the tens of career opportunities available to indigent minority youth in today’s America. After the garbage men, parole officers, DJs, and hype men had their say, it was time for some action. Marpessa, representing the transportation industry, who hadn’t even so much as looked my way the entire day, put on a stunt-driving demonstration that would’ve made the
Fast and Furious
movie franchise proud as she expertly slalomed her thirteen-ton bus between traffic cones, spun tire-smoke-billowing donuts over the four-square courts, and, after hitting a makeshift ramp constructed of lunch benches and tables, circled the schoolyard on two wheels. When the fancy driving was over, she invited the children for a tour of her bus. Loud and head-slappingly happy when they boarded, after ten minutes or so they filed off the bus in a quiet, orderly manner, somberly thanking Marpessa as they exited. One educator, a young white man, the sole white teacher in the school, was sobbing into his hands. After one last mournful look at the bus, he wandered away from the rest of the group and sank against the ball box, trying to get his shit together. I could never have imagined that an explanation of the transfer system and fare hikes could be so depressing. A light rain began to fall.
Charisma announced it was time for the more pastoral portions of the program. Nestor Lopez was up. From Jalisco, by way of Las Cruces, the Lopezes were the first Mexican family to integrate the Farms. I was about seven when they moved in. My father used to complain about the music and all the cockfighting. The only homeschool lesson in Mexican-American history I’d ever received was “Don’t you ever fight a Mexican. Because if you fight a Mexican, you have to kill a Mexican,” but Nestor, even though he was four years older than me and I might one day have to kill him over an unreturned Hot Wheels car or some shit, was crazy cool. On Sunday afternoons, when he came home from catechism, we’d watch
charro
movies and shaky videotapes of ersatz small-town rodeos. We’d drink porcelain cups of hot and cinnamony
ponche
his mom had made for us, and spend the rest of the afternoon recoiling from macabre videos with titles like
300 porrazos sangrientos
,
101 muertes del jaripeo
,
1,000 litros de sangre
, and
Si chingas al toro, te llevas los cuernos.
And yet, even though I saw most of the action through the cracks of my fingers, I’ve never been able to erase the images of those hard-luck cowboys riding bulls with no hands, no rodeo clowns, no medics, and no fear, as massive
toros destructores
bucked them into hatless invertebrate rag dolls. We’d bellow in vicarious pain as the incredibly pointy bullhorns punctured their rhinestoned shirts and aortas. High-five when a fallen rider’s jawbone and skull got stomped into the blood-caked dirt. In time, as black and Latin boys are wont to do, we drifted apart. Socialized victims of prison gang edicts that had nothing to do with us but stipulated the separation of niggers and spics. Now, other than the occasional block party, I see Nestor only on Career Day, when, to the accompaniment of the
William Tell Overture
, he comes tearing out from behind the defunct metal shop, trick-riding and bronco-busting his ass off.
I’ve never been able to figure exactly what career path Nestor represents—“show-off,” I suppose—but at the end of his rodeo sideshow, he doffed his ball-and-tasseled sombrero to the raucous applause of the crowd and stared me down with a “top that” sneer as he paraded past, doing a no-hand headstand in the saddle. Charisma then introduced me to a collective yawn so loud it could be heard throughout Dickens.
“What’s that sound, an airplane taking off?”
“No, it’s the nigger farmer. Must be Career Day at the middle school again.”
I led a jittery brown-eyed calf onto home plate of a baseball diamond backstopped with a rickety chain-link fence. Some of the braver children ignored their rumbling stomachs and vitamin deficiencies to break rank and approach the animal. Cautiously, afraid they might catch a disease or fall in love, they petted the calf, speaking the syntax of the damned.
“His skin soft.”
“Them eyes look like Milk Duds. I wants to eat them shits.”
“Way this cow nigger be licking his lips, mooin’ and droolin’ ’n’ shit, remind me of your retarted mother.”
“Fuck you. You retarted!”
“All y’all retarted. Don’t you know cows human, too?”
The irony of mispronouncing “retarded” notwithstanding, I knew that I was a hit, or at least the calf was. Charisma folded her tongue between her teeth and split the air with a sharp football-coach whistle. The same whistle she used to warn me and Marpessa that my father was making his way up the walkway. Two hundred kids quieted instantly and turned their attention deficit disorders toward me.