The Sellout (22 page)

“All right, we’ll be in in a second.”

The first time I met Stevie, back when he and his sister lived in Dickens, there was a limousine parked in front of their house. Except for prom night, you don’t see many limos in the ghetto. And that black stretch Cadillac—crammed from mini bar to back window with roughnecks, light and dark, tall and short, smart and stupid—held Stevie’s boys. Boys who over the years disappeared in ones and twos and, on really bloody days—threes. Bank robberies. Food truck holdups. Assassinations. Panache and King Cuz were the only homies he had left. And though Stevie and Panache really liked each other, it was a relationship that profited both parties. Panache wasn’t no punk, but Stevie gave him real street cred in the rap scene, and for Stevie, Panache’s success reminded him that all things are possible if one can get the right white people on your side. Back then Panache fancied himself a pimp. Sure, he had women doing shit for him, but what nigger didn’t? I remember Panache in the living room staring Marpessa down, rapping what would become his first gold record, while Stevie DJ’d for him.

Three in the afternoon, Mormons at my pad

Need new croaker sacks and feelin’ bad

Promising salvation to a nigger like me

Brigham Young must be stupid and high on PCP

If Stevie had a Latin motto, it’d be
Cogito, ergo Boogieum.
I think, therefore I jam.

*   *   *

“How come Marpessa’s bus is parked here?” I asked him.

“Nigger, how come
you
here?” he barked back.

“I wanted to leave this for your sister.” I showed him the photo of the satsuma tree, which he snatched from my hand. I wanted to ask him if he’d received all the fruit I’d sent him over the years: the papayas, kiwis, apples, and blueberries, but I could tell from the suppleness of his skin, the whiteness of his eyes, the sheen in his ponytail, and the relaxed way he leaned on my shoulder that he had.

“She told me about you leaving these pictures.”

“Is she mad?”

Stevie shrugged and continued to stare at the Polaroid. “The bus here because they lost Rosa Parks’s bus.”

“Who lost Rosa Parks’s bus?”

“White people. Who the fuck else? Supposedly, every February when schoolkids visit the Rosa Parks Museum, or wherever the fuck the bus is at, the bus they tell the kids is the birthplace of the civil rights movement is a phony. Just some old Birmingham city bus they found in some junkyard. That’s what my sister says, anyway.”

“I don’t know.”

Cuz took two deep swallows of gin. “What you mean, ‘You don’t know’? You think that after Rosa Parks bitch-slapped white America, some white rednecks going to go out of their way to save the original bus? That’d be like the Celtics hanging Magic Johnson’s jersey in the rafters of the Boston Garden. No fucking way.

“Anyway, she thinks what you did with the bus, with the stickers and shit, is special. That it makes niggers think. In her way, she’s proud of you.”

“Really?”

I looked at the bus. Tried to see it in a different light. As something more than forty sheet-metal feet of trivial rights iconography dripping transmission fluid onto the driveway. Tried to picture it hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian, a tour guide pointing up to it and saying, “This is the very bus from which Hominy Jenkins, the last Little Rascal, asserted that the rights of African-Americans were neither God-given nor constitutional, but immaterial.”

Stevie held the photo under his nose, took a deep breath, and asked, “When these oranges going to be ready?”

I wanted to point to the greenish-orange balls and brag about how I’d figured out that if I covered the ground around the tree with white waterproof sheeting, not only would I be able to keep moisture from seeping into the soil, the whiteness would reflect the sunlight back into the tree and improve the color of the fruit. But all I could manage was “Soon. They’ll be ripe soon.”

Stevie took one last sniff of the picture, and then passed it under King Cuz’s cavernous nostrils.

“Smell that citrus, nigger? That’s what freedom smells like.”

Then he grabbed me by the shoulders. “And what’s this I hear about black Chinese restaurants?”

Fifteen

It was the smell that brung ’em. At about six in the morning, I found the first boy curled up in my driveway, breathing heavily, pressing his nose under the gate like a horny dog. He looked happy. He wasn’t in the way, so I left him alone and went to milk the cows. Los Angeles, for whatever reason, is chock-full of autistic children and I thought he was one of the afflicted. But later in the day he had company. By noontime, nearly every child on the block had crammed into my front yard. They spent the last day of summer vacation playing Uno on the grass and trying to see who could hit the softest. They plucked needles from the cacti and stuck each other in the behind, they popped my rose petals and scratched their names into the driveway with rock salt. Even the Lopez kids, Lori, Dori, Jerry, and Charlie, who lived next door and had two pristine acres of backyard and a decent-sized pool to play in, were circled around little brother Billy, laughing hysterically as he noshed on a peanut butter sandwich. Then a little girl I didn’t recognize staggered over to the elm tree and drowned a column of ants in vomit.

“Okay, what the fuck?”

“The Stank,” Billy said, after swallowing a mouthful of a peanut butter—and judging from what appeared to be bug legs on his tongue—and flies sandwich. I didn’t smell anything, so Billy dragged me out into the street. It wasn’t hard to see why the young girl retched; the stench was overwhelming. The Stank had rolled in overnight and settled over the neighborhood like some celestial flatulence. Jesus. But why hadn’t I noticed it earlier? I stood in the middle of Bernard Avenue, the kids beckoning me over, waving frantically like World War I soldiers urging a wounded comrade out of the mustard gas and back into the relative safety of the trenches. As soon as I reached the curb, it hit me, the refreshing pungency of citrus. No wonder the kids refused to stray from my property, the satsuma tree was perfuming the grounds like some ten-foot-tall air freshener.

Billy yanked my pant leg. “When those oranges going to be ready?”

I wanted to tell him tomorrow, but I was too busy pushing the little girl aside so I could throw up on the elm, gagging not from the smell but because Billy had two red fly eyes stuck in his teeth.

The next morning, the first day of school, the neighbor kids and their parents were gathered at the driveway gate. The youngsters, shiny and clean in brand-new school clothes, pawed at the wooden fence, trying to catch glimpses of the farm animals through the wooden slats. The adults, some still in their pajamas, yawned, looked at their watches, and adjusted their bathrobe belts as they placed milk money—twenty-five cents for a pint of my unpasteurized—in their children’s hands. I sympathized with the parents, because after being up all night in the lingering remnants of the Stank, building an imaginary all-white school, I was tired, too.

It’s hard to determine when satsumas are ripe. Color isn’t a very good indicator. Neither is rind texture. Smell is good, but the best way to tell is simply to taste them. However, I trust the refractometer more than my taste buds.

“What’s the reading, massa?”

“Sixteen point eight.”

“Is that good?”

I tossed Hominy an orange. When satsumas are ready to eat, the skin is so supple, they damn near peel themselves. He popped a wedge into his satchel mouth and pretended to faint dead away in a pratfall so well executed the rooster stopped crowing for fear the old man was dead.

“Oh shit.”

The kids thought he was hurt. I did, too, until he flashed a wide “Yes sir, boss. Dat’s good eatin’!” smile as bright and warm as the rising sun. He stood up in sections, then soft-shoed and somersaulted his way to the fence, showing that there was some of both the old vaudevillian and the stunt coon still left in him. “I sees white people!” he exclaimed in faux horror.

“Let them in, Hominy.”

Hominy opened the gate partway, as if he were peering through a Chitlin’ Circuit curtain: “A little black boy is in the kitchen watching his mother fry up some chicken. Seeing the flour, he dabs some on his face. ‘Look at me, Ma,’ he says, ‘I’m white!’ ‘What’d you say?’ says his mama, and the boy says, ‘Look at me, I’m white!’ WHAP! His mama slaps the shit out of him. ‘Don’t you ever say that!’ she says, then tells him to go tell his father what he said to her. Crying hard as Niagara Falls, the boy goes up to his father. ‘What’s wrong, son?’ ‘M-M-Mommy sl-sl-slapped me!’ ‘Why she do that, son?’ his father asks. ‘B-b-because I-I said I was w-w-white.’ ‘What?’ BLAAAAM! His father slaps him even harder than his mama did. ‘Now go tell your grandmother what you said! She’ll teach you!’ So the boy’s crying and shaking and all confused. He approaches his grandmother. ‘Why, baby, what’s wrong?’ she asks. And the boy says, ‘Th-th-they sl-slapped me.’ ‘Why, baby—why they’d do that?’ He tells her his story and when he gets to the end, PIE-YOW! His grandmamma slaps him so hard she almost knocks him down. ‘Don’t you ever say that,’ she says. ‘Now what did you learn?’ The boy starts rubbing his cheek and says, ‘I learned that I’ve been white for only ten minutes and I hate you niggers already!’”

The kids couldn’t tell whether he was joking or just ranting, but they laughed anyway, each finding something funny in his expressions, his inflections, the cognitive dissonance in hearing the word “nigger” coming from the mouth of a man as old as the slur itself. Most of them had never seen his work. They just knew he was a star. That’s the beauty of minstrelsy—its timelessness. The soothing foreverness in the languid bojangle of his limbs, the rhythm of his juba, the sublime profundity of his jive as he ushered the kids into the farm, retelling his joke in Spanish to an uncaptive audience running past him, cups and thermoses in hand, scattering the damn chickens.

Un negrito está en la cocina mirando a su mamá freír un poco de pollo … ¡Aprendí que he sido blanco por solo diez minutos y ya los odio a ustedes mayates!

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and for some of those kids it might be their only meal, so in addition to the milk, I offered, children and adults alike, a fresh satsuma mandarin. I used to hand out candy canes and horsy rides on the first day of school. Mount them three to a saddle and pony the little shits to campus. Not anymore. Not when two years ago, the sixth-grader Cipriano “Candy” Martínez, a half-Salvadoran, half-black boy who lived over on Prescott Place, tried to Lone Ranger and Hi-yo, Silver! Away! his ass out of an abusive household. Following the steaming piles of horseshit, I had to go all the way to Panorama City to track him down.

I picked up two kids straying near the stalls by their elbows and hoisted them into the air.

“Stay away from the fucking horses!”

“What about the orange tree, mister?”

Unable to resist the enticing smell of the satsumas and hold off until recess or the soap operas for their midday snacks, my customers were huddled under the mandarin tree, guiltily standing in piles of peeled skin, their lips wet with fructose.

“Take as many as you want,” I said.

My father used to say, “Give a nigger an inch and he’ll take an ell.” I never knew what an “ell” was, but in this case it meant the stripping of my precious satsuma tree bare. Hominy, holding his lumpy stomach in both hands because he was five months’ pregnant with about twenty citrus fruit babies, ambled up to me.

“These greedy niggers gon to take all your oranges, massa!”

“That’s all right, I only need a couple.”

And to prove my point, a plump blue-ribbon satsuma, trying its best to escape the feeding frenzy, rolled right up to my feet.

*   *   *

An ebullient Hominy, with sun on his face and the sweet taste of satsumas on his minstrel-pink tongue, pied-pipered the children to their dooms. Followed by their doting, overprotective parents and me, the biggest rat of them all, bringing up the rear. Kristina Davis, a tall little girl, whose lanky bones and white teeth owed their growth and strength to years of consumption of my unpasteurized milk, sidled up to me and clasped my hand with a solid grip.

“Where’s your mother?” I asked.

Kristina put her fingers to her lips and inhaled.

In neighborhoods like Dickens, before concerned parents with secret service earpieces stuffed into their auditory canals marshaled your every move, you used to learn more on your way to and from school than you did in school. My father was aware of this, and to further my extracurricular education, every so often he’d drop me off in a strange neighborhood and make me walk to the local place of learning. It was a lesson in social orienteering, except that I didn’t have a map, a compass, a mess kit, or a slang-to-slang dictionary. Thankfully, for the most part, in L.A. County you can gauge the threat level of a community by the color of its street signs. In Los Angeles proper the signs are a hollowed-out metallic midnight blue. If a bird’s nest constructed of pine needles was tucked inside the sign, it meant evergreen trees and a nearby golf course. Mostly white public-school kids whose parents lived above their means in upper-middle-class neighborhoods like Cheviot Hills, Silver Lake, and the Palisades. Bullet holes and a stolen car wrapped around the post signified kids about my hair texture, allowance level, and clothing style in neighborhoods like Watts, Boyle Heights, and Highland Park. Sky blue signified kickback cool bedroom communities like Santa Monica, Rancho Palos Verdes, and Manhattan Beach. Chill dudes commuting to school by any means necessary from skateboard to hang glider, the goodbye lipstick prints from their trophy-wife mothers still on their cheeks. Carson, Hawthorne, Culver City, South Gate, and Torrance are all designated by a working-class cactus green; there the little homies are independent, familiar, and multilingual. Fluent in Hispanic, black, and Samoan gang signs. In Hermosa Beach, La Mirada, and Duarte the street signs are the bland brown of cheap blended malt whiskey. The boys and girls mope their way to school, depressed and drowsy, past the hacienda-style tract housing. The sparkling white signs denote Beverly Hills, of course. Exceedingly wide hilly streets lined with rich kids unthreatened by my appearance. Assuming that if I was there I belonged. Asking me about the tension of my tennis racquets. Schooling me on the blues, the history of hip-hop, Rastafarianism, the Coptic Church, jazz, gospel, and the myriad of ways in which a sweet potato can be prepared.