The Sellout (27 page)
Hominy pushed me through the automatic doors. “Massa, no one gives a fuck about the hood until they give a fuck.”
* * *
Hospitals don’t have the rainbow of directional lines anymore. In the days of butterfly bandages, sutures that didn’t dissolve, and nurses without accents, the admitting nurse would hand you a manila folder and you’d follow the Red Line to Radiology, the Orange to Oncology, the Purple to Pediatrics. But at Killer King, sometimes an emergency room patient tired of waiting to be seen by a system that never seems to care, and holding a plastic cup with a severed finger swimming in long-since-melted ice or staunching the bleeding with a kitchen sponge, sometimes out of sheer boredom they’ll slip over to the glass partition and ask the triage nurse, Where does that brackish-colored line lead to? The nurse will shrug. And unable to ignore the curiosity, they set out to follow a line that took Hominy and me all night to paint, and half the next day to make sure everyone obeyed the
WET PAINT
signs. It’s a line that’s as close to the Yellow Brick Road as the patients will ever get.
Though there’s a touch of cornflower blue in the shade, Pantone 426 C is a strange, mysterious color. I chose it because it looks either black or brown, depending on the light, one’s height, and one’s mood. And if you follow the three-inch-wide stripe out of the waiting room, you’ll crash through two sets of double doors, make a series of sharp lefts and rights through a maze of patient-strewn corridors, and then down three flights of filthy unswept stairs until you come to a dingy inner vestibule lit by a dim red bulb. There, the painted line pitchforks into three prongs, each tine leading to the threshold of a pair of unmarked, identical double doors. The first set of doors leads to a back alley, the second to the morgue, and the third to a bank of soda pop and junk-food vending machines. I didn’t solve the racial and class inequalities in health care, but I’m told patients who travel down the brown-black road are more proactive. That when their names are finally called, the first thing they say to the attending physician is “Doctor, before you treat me, I need to know one thing. Do you give a fuck about me? I mean, do you really give a fuck?”
It used to be that to celebrate Hood Day, King Cuz and his latest crew, the Colosseum Blvd et Tu, Brute Gangster Munificent Neighborhood Crips ’n’ Shit, would roll into the territory of their archenemies, the Venice Seaside Boys, caravanning down Broadway Street, four cars and twenty fools deep, the sun at their backs, looking for action. For most of them, unless they were being carted off to jail, it was the one time during the year they left the neighborhood. But since the advent of the variable-rate home loan, most of the VSBs have been priced out of their turf by wine bars, holistic medicine shops, and edgy movie stars who’ve erected fifteen-foot-high cherrywood walls around quarter-acre bungalows turned into $2 million compounds. Now, whenever the vast majority of the Venice Seaside Boys want to “put in work” and defend their turf, they have to commute from faraway places like Palmdale and Moreno Valley. And it’s no fun anymore when your enemy refuses to fight back. Not for lack of bravery or ammunition, but from fatigue. Too tired from fighting three hours of freeway traffic and road closures to pull the trigger. So now the two once-rival hoods celebrate Hood Day by staging their version of a Civil War reenactment. They meet at the sites of the great battles of the past, fire blanks and Roman candles at each other while innocent sidewalk café civilians duck and run for cover. They pile out of their hot rods and hoopties, and like frat boys playing a rough game of two-hand touch in the mud, the misbegotten sons of the Westside chase each other up and down the Venice Beach boardwalk, paying homage to the rumbles of old by “squabbing,” throwing blows from the shoulder, as they act out and relive the gang fights that changed history: the Battle of Shenandoah Street, the Lincoln Boulevard Skirmish, and the infamous Massacre at Los Amigos Park. Afterward they meet up with friends and family at the rec center, a demilitarized softball field in the middle of town, and reaffirm the peace over a barbecue and beer.
Unlike all the police departments who credit “zero tolerance” policies for every dip in the crime rate, I don’t want to simply assume my six-month campaign of localized apartheid had everything to do with the relative calm Dickens experienced that spring, but that year Hood Day was different. As Marpessa, Hominy, Stevie, and I plied our trade from the visitors’ dugout, we were running out of fruit slices much quicker than usual. People were overpaying for eighths. Normally each gang, each hood, uses the park on the day designated to rep their “hood.” For instance, the Six-Trey Street Sniper City Killers reserve the park for June 3, because June is the sixth month of the year, and trey means three. Los Osos Negros Doce y Ocho have dibs not on December 8, like you might expect, but on August 12, because contrary to popular belief, California is cold as fuck in winter. I was at the rec center on that balmy March 15, because for the Colosseum Blvd et Tu, Brute Crips, Hood Day is the same day as the Ides of March. When else would it be?
Back in the late eighties, before the word “hood” had been appropriated to refer to any location from the upscale enclaves of the Calabasas Hills, Shaker Heights, and the Upper East Side to the student zoo at your state university, when a Los Angeleno mentioned the hood, as in “I’d watch that motherfucker if I were you. He or she’s from the hood!” or “I know I didn’t visit Abuela Silvia on her deathbed, but what’d you expect me to do? She lives in the hood!” it referred to one place and one place only—Dickens. And there, on the rec-center baseball field, congregated under the Hood Day banner slung over the home team dugout, were gang and family members of all colors and stripes. Since the riots, Dickens, a once-united neighborhood, had balkanized into countless smaller hoods, and now, like Yugoslavia in reverse, King Cuz and Panache, the erstwhile Tito and Slobodan Milo
š
evi
ć
of the city, were celebrating the reunification by tromping across the makeshift stage in their Oakley sunglasses, their Doris Day perm curls bouncing off their broad shoulders as they rapped fiendishly to the beat.
I hadn’t seen Panache in years. I didn’t know if he knew Marpessa and I were sleeping together. I never asked for permission. But seeing him do his signature stage tricks with Lulu Belle, his pump-action twelve-gauge equivalent to B. B. King’s guitar, which, considering that like some criminal-minded baton twirler he could throw high in the air, catch, reload, and blast a hubcap out of the air like a clay pigeon, all with one hand, maybe I should’ve. King Cuz yelled into the microphone, “I know at least one you niggers had to have brought some Chinese food!”
Two dudes, whom the police, and anyone else with a Street Smart IQ of 50, might refer to as “suspicious Hispanic males,” stood at the first-base line just outside the festivities, their arms folded across their chests. Although they looked, more or less, like everyone else at the park, from the way they eyed everyone with such disdain, it was hard to tell if they were from Dickens. Like Nazis at a Ku Klux Klan rally, they were comfortable ideologically, but not in terms of corporate culture. Word spread that they were from Polynesian Gardens. Nevertheless, the irresistible smell of hickory-smoked barbecue and the cloud of dank billowed over them, drawing the duo farther and farther into the infield. When the men arrived at the on-deck circle, Stevie, who was slicing the pineapples with a machete, asked, “You know them niggers?” Never taking his eyes off the two homies as they made their way down the dugout steps. Both dudes wore khakis whose baggy leggings spilled over two pairs of Nike Cortez sneakers so fucking new that if they had taken one shoe off and placed it to their ear like a conch shell, they’d hear the roar of an ocean of sweatshop labor. Stevie exchanged prison stares with the guy in the bucket hat, football jersey, and
Stomper
stenciled along his jawline. In the hood men don’t wear sporting-club jerseys because they’re fans of a certain team. The color, the logo, the jersey numbers all mean something gang-related.
When you’re fresh out of lockup everything is racial. It’s not like there aren’t Mexicans in predominantly black Crip and Blood sets, and blacks in mostly Latino cliques. After all, on the street it’s all proximity and propinquity. Your alliance is to the homies and to the hood, regardless of race. Something happens to the identity politics in prison. Maybe it’s like movies where it’s white versus black versus Mexican versus white, no ifs, ands, or buts, and I do hear tell of some hardcore, color-blind thugs who roll into lockup and dance with the niggers or the vatos who brung ’em.
Fuck La Raza. Chinga black power. This nigger’s mother used to feed me when I was hungry, so later for the stupid shit.
The fool in the ice-cap-white T-shirt and
Puppet
tattooed vertically down his gullet nodded to me first.
“¿Qué te pasa, pelón?”
Us fellow baldheads don’t share in all the racial animosity. We’ve come to accept that, regardless of race, all newborn babies look Mexican, and all baldheaded men look black, more or less. I offered him a hit of my joint. His ears turned deep red and his eyes glazed over like Japanese lacquerware.
“What the fuck is this, dog?” Puppet coughed.
“I call it Carpal Tunnel. Go ahead, try to make a fist.”
Puppet tried to ball his hand, but failed. Stomper looked at him like he was crazy, then angrily took the joint from his hand. I didn’t need a program to tell me that despite appearances, Puppet and Stomper weren’t on the same side. After a long puff, Stomper twisted his fingers into all sorts of dexterous gang signs, but he couldn’t knuckle up no matter how hard he tried. He removed his nickel-plated gat from his waistband. He could barely grip the gun, much less pull the trigger. Stevie laughed, and it was cold pineapple slices all around. The homeboys took bites, and the unexpected surge of sweetness with a slightly minty finish caused them to wince and giggle like little kids. Then to the hard glares of the other hoodlums, the two cholos walked into deep center field, calmly scarfing down pineapple and sharing the last of the marijuana.
“You know that NK on Johnny Unitas’s neck don’t stand for ‘Nice Kid’?”
“I know what it stands for.”
“Stands for Nigger Killer. Both them niggers from different sets, though. Barrio P.G. and Varrio P.G. Not like them to be chilling like that.”
Hominy and I shared a smile. Maybe the signs that we’d posted in Polynesian Gardens on the way home from the hospital job were working. We’d made two signs. Hammered them into two telephone poles on opposites sides of Baker Street, where the rusted train tracks divided the neighborhood between Varrio and Barrio P.G. We placed them in such a way that if folks on one side of the street wanted to know what the sign on their side said, they’d have to cross the tracks to read it. So they had to venture into enemy territory, only to discover that the sign on the north side of the street was exactly the same as the one on the south; they both read
THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE TRACKS.
Marpessa pulled me out of the dugout and toward home plate. King Cuz and a delegation of aging thugs and wannabes were standing in the batter boxes, grubbing on ribs and pineapple. Panache was chewing his pineapple slice down to the rind, telling stories about a musician’s life on the road, when Marpessa interrupted him.
“I just want you to know I’m fucking Bonbon.”
Oblivious to the thorns, Panache stuck what remained of the pineapple, skin and all, into his mouth, slurping and sucking out every last drop of juice. When the fruit was dry as a desert bone, he walked up to me, tapped my chest with the tip of Lulu Belle’s barrel, and said, “Shit, if I could get some of this pineapple every morning, I’d fuck the nigger, too.”
A gunshot rang out. In center field, Stomper, apparently still feeling the effects of the Carpal Tunnel, was barefoot, lying on his back, aiming the gun with his feet, laughing his ass off and shooting with his toes at the clouds. It looked like fun, so most of the men and a few women went to join him, puffing on their joints, weapons out, and hopping through the dirt infield, one shoe on, one shoe off, hoping to spark a few rounds before the cops came.
Black people pop. “Pop” being Hollywood slang for having a dynamic camera presence, for being almost too photogenic. Hominy says it’s why they rarely shoot black and white buddy movies anymore; the bigger stars get washed out. Tony Curtis. Nick Nolte. Ethan Hawke does a film with some African-American and it becomes a screen test to see who’s really the Invisible Man. And has there ever been a buddy movie featuring a black woman and anyone? The only ones with the cinematic magnetism to hang were Gene Wilder and Spanky McFarland. Anyone else—Tommy Lee Jones, Mark Wahlberg, Tim Robbins—is just hanging on to the mane of a runaway horse.
Watching Hominy at the L.A. Festival of Forbidden Cinema and Unabashedly Racist Animation, on the Nuart big screen, trading one-liners with Spanky, it wasn’t hard to see why back then all the trades thought he’d be the next big pickaninny. The sparkle in his eyes, the gleam in his cherubic cheeks were magnetic. His hair was so kinky and dry it looked as if it might spontaneously combust. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. Dressed in raggedy overalls, wearing black high-top sneakers ten sizes too big, he was the ultimate prepubescent straight man. No one could take it like Hominy. It amazed me how he withstood the onslaught of uncensored and unforgiving watermelon and my-daddy-in-jail jokes. Welcoming each insult with a heartfelt and throaty “Yowza!” It was hard to tell whether he was demonstrating cowardice or grace under fire, because he’d perfected that bug-eyed, slack-jawed dumbfounded look that to this day passes for black comedic acting chops. But the modern-day black entertainer has to do it only once or twice a movie. Poor Hominy had to pull off the coon reaction shot three times a reel and always in extreme close-up.