The Sellout (33 page)
Finally King Cuz breaks the silence. “Now I know why that fool Foy went crazy. I’d go nutty, too, if I had some shit like that on my conscience. And I make my livelihood shooting motherfuckers for no reason.”
Stevie, a hardcore gangster as ruthless as the free market and unemotional as a Vulcan with Asperger’s, has a tear running down one cheek. He lifts a can of beer to Hominy and offers a toast. “I’m not sure how I mean this, but ‘To Hominy. You’re a better man than I.’ I swear the Oscars need to give a Lifetime Achievement Award to the black actor, because you guys had it hard.”
“Still do,” says Panache, who I didn’t even know was here and I supposed must be back from a long day on the set of
Hip-hop Cop.
“I know what Hominy’s gone through. I’ve had directors tell me, ‘We need more black in this scene. Can you black it up? Then you say, ‘Fuck you, you racist motherfucker!’ And they go, ‘Exactly, don’t lose that intensity!’”
Nestor Lopez stands up sharply, swaying for a moment as the vodka and weed rush to his head. “At least you people have a Hollywood history. What we got? Speedy Gonzales, a woman with bananas on her head, ‘We don’t need no stinking badges,’ and some prison movies!”
“But they’re some great prison movies, homes!”
“At least there were some black Little Rascals. Where was fucking little Chorizo or Bok Choy?”
Though Nestor has a point about there not being a Chorizo, I don’t mention anything about Sing Joy and Edward Soo Hoo, two Asian Rascals who, though by no means stars, had better runs than many a snot-nosed brat the studios trotted out in front of the cameras. I’m headed toward the barn to check on my newly purchased Swedish sheep. My baby Roslags are huddled under the persimmon tree; it’s their first night in the ghetto and they’re afraid the goats and the pigs are going to jack them. One lamb’s a scruffy white, the other’s a mottled grayish color. They’re shaking. I hug them both and plant kisses on their snouts.
Hominy’s standing behind me, I hadn’t noticed him, and, monkey see, monkey do, he plants a chapped liver-lipped kiss on my mouth.
“What the fuck, Hominy?”
“I quit.”
“Quit what?”
“Slavery. We’ll talk reparations in the morning.”
The sheep are still shivering in fear. “
Vara modig
,” I whisper in their quivering ears. I don’t know what it means, but that’s what the brochure said to say to them at least three times a day during the first week. I shouldn’t have bought them, but they’re endangered, and an old husbandry professor saw me on the news and thought I’d be a good caretaker. I’m scared, too. What if I do go to jail? Who’s going to take care of them then? If the First, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendment violations don’t stick, there’s talk of an International Criminal Court trial and charging me with apartheid. They never prosecuted a single South African for apartheid and they’re going to arrest me? A harmless South Central African-American? Amandla awethu!
“Come inside when you’re done out there,” Marpessa calls from the bedroom.
There’s urgency in her voice. I know she means now; I’ll bottle-feed the sheep later.
Eyewitness News
is on. My girlfriend of five years lies facedown on the bed, her pretty head in her hands, watching the weather on the television atop the dresser. Charisma sits next to her. Leaning against the headboard, her stocking feet crossed and resting on Marpessa’s ass. I find what little mattress space is left and climb into my dream ménage à trois.
“Marpessa, what if I have to go to jail?”
“Shut up and just look at the TV.”
“Hampton made a good point in court when he said that if Hominy’s ‘servitude’ was tantamount to human bondage, then corporate America better be ready to fight a hell of a class-action lawsuit filed by generations of uncompensated interns.”
“Will you stop talking? You’re going to miss it.”
“But what if I go to jail?”
“Then I’ll just have to find another nigger to have unimaginative sex with.”
The rest of the party is huddled around the bedroom door. Looking in. Marpessa reaches back, grabs my chin, and forces my head to look at the screen. “Watch.”
Weatherperson Chantal Mattingly is waving her hands over the L.A. Basin. It’s hot.
There’s a surge of moisture moving in from the south. The excessive heat warning is still in effect for the Santa Clarita Valley and the interior valleys of Ventura County. For other areas expect seasonal temperatures with cooling until about midnight. For the most part, skies will be clear to partly cloudy, temperatures mild to moderate
[whatever that means]
along the coast from Santa Barbara to Orange Counties and much warmer inland. Now for the local forecasts. Not expecting any major changes from now till late evening.
I always like weather maps. The 3-D effect of the topographical coastline map rotating and shifting as the forecast moves south and inland. The gradations in the colors of the mountain ranges and low-lying plains, they never fail to impress me.
Current temperatures …
Palmdale 103°/88° … Oxnard 77°/70° … Santa Clarita 108°/107° … Thousand Oaks 77°/69° … Santa Monica 79°/66° … Van Nuys 105/82° … Glendale … 95°/79° … Dickens 88°/74° … Long Beach 82°/75° …
“Wait, does that say Dickens?”
Marpessa laughs maniacally. I shoulder my way past the homies and Marpessa’s kids, whose names I refuse to say. I run outside. The frog thermometer hanging from the back porch reads exactly 88 degrees. I can’t stop crying. Dickens is back on the map.
One night, on the anniversary of my father’s death, Marpessa and I drove down to Dum Dum Donuts for open-mike night. We took our usual seats, the far side of the stage, near the bathrooms and the fire extinguisher, bathed in the red haze of the
EXIT
sign. I located and pointed out the other exits to her just in case.
“Just in case of what? By some miracle somebody actually tells a funny joke and we have to run outside, dig up Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle, and make sure their corpses are still in the fucking ground and it’s not black Easter? These fucking micro-Negro comedians they have today make me fucking sick. There’s a reason there ain’t no black Jonathan Winters, John Candy, W. C. Fields, John Belushi, Jackie Gleason, and Roseanne Barr out this motherfucker, because a large truly funny black person would scare the bejeezus out of America.”
“There aren’t many fat white comedians these days, either. And Dave Chappelle isn’t dead.”
“You believe what you want to believe about Dave. The nigger’s dead. They had to kill him.”
Someone at the club did make me laugh once. One time my father and I were there together when a stumpy black man, the new host, bounded onstage. He was unpaid-electricity-bill dark and looked like a crazed bullfrog. His eyes protruded wildly from his head like they were trying to escape the mental madness therein. And come to think of it, he was rather fat. We were sitting in our usual spot. Normally, except for when my dad was onstage, I’d read my book and let the sexual jokes and white people/black people bits wash over me like so much background noise. But this man-frog opened with a joke that had me crying. “Your mama been on welfare so long,” he bellowed, blithely holding the silver microphone like he didn’t need it and was there only because someone handed it to him backstage. “Your mama been on welfare so long, her face is on the food stamp.” Anybody who could make me put down
Catch-22
had to be funny. After that, it was me who dragged Pops to open-mike night. If we wanted our usual seats, we had to get there earlier and earlier, because word was spreading throughout black L.A. that a funny motherfucker was hosting the open-mike nights. The donut shop would fill with black belly laughter from 8 p.m.–until.
This traffic-court jester did more than tell jokes; he plucked out your subconscious and beat you silly with it, not until you were unrecognizable, but until you were recognizable. One night a white couple strolled into the club, two hours after “doors open,” sat front and center, and joined in the frivolity. Sometimes they laughed loudly. Sometimes they snickered knowingly like they’d been black all their lives. I don’t know what caught his attention, his perfectly spherical head drenched in houselight sweat. Maybe their laughter was a pitch too high. Heeing when they should’ve been hawing. Maybe they were too close to the stage. Maybe if white people didn’t feel the need to sit up front all the damn time it never would’ve happened. “What the fuck you honkies laughing at?” he shouted. More chuckling from the audience. The white couple howling the loudest. Slapping the table. Happy to be noticed. Happy to be accepted. “I ain’t bullshitting! What the fuck are you interloping motherfuckers laughing at? Get the fuck out!”
There’s nothing funny about nervous laughter. The forced way it slogs through a room with the stop-and-start undulations of bad jazz brunch jazz. The black folks and the round table of Latinas out for a night on the town knew when to stop laughing. The couple didn’t. The rest of us silently sipped our canned beer and sodas, determined to stay out of the fray. They were laughing solo because this had to be part of the show, right?
“Do I look like I’m fucking joking with you? This shit ain’t for you. Understand? Now get the fuck out! This is our thing!”
No more laughter. Only pleading, unanswered looks for assistance, then the soft scrape of two chairs being backed, quietly as possible, away from the table. The blast of cold December air and the sounds of the street. The night manager shutting the doors behind them, leaving little evidence that the white people had ever been there except for an unfulfilled two-drink, three-donut minimum.
“Now where the fuck was I before I was so rudely interrupted? Oh yeah, your mama, that bald-headed…”
When I think about that night, the black comedian chasing the white couple into the night, their tails and assumed histories between their legs, I don’t think about right or wrong. No, when my thoughts go back to that evening, I think about my own silence. Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear. I guess that’s why I’m so quiet and such a good whisperer, nigger and otherwise. It’s because I’m always afraid. Afraid of what I might say. What promises and threats I might make and have to keep. That’s what I liked about the man, although I didn’t agree with him when he said, “Get out. This is our thing.” I respected that he didn’t give a fuck. But I wish I hadn’t been so scared, that I had had the nerve to stand in protest. Not to castigate him for what he did or to stick up for the aggrieved white people. After all, they could’ve stood up for themselves, called in the authorities or their God, and smote everybody in the place, but I wish I’d stood up to the man and asked him a question: “So what exactly is
our thing
?”
I remember the day after the black dude was inaugurated, Foy Cheshire, proud as punch, driving around town in his coupe, honking his horn and waving an American flag. He wasn’t the only one celebrating; the neighborhood glee wasn’t O. J. Simpson getting acquitted or the Lakers winning the 2002 championship, but it was close. Foy drove past the crib and I happened to be sitting in the front yard husking corn. “Why are you waving the flag?” I asked him. “Why now? I’ve never seen you wave it before.” He said that he felt like the country, the United States of America, had finally paid off its debts. “And what about the Native Americans? What about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, the poor, the forests, the water, the air, the fucking California condor? When do they collect?” I asked him.
He just shook his head at me. Said something to the effect that my father would be ashamed of me and that I’d never understand. And he’s right. I never will.
Thank you to Sarah Chalfant, Jin Auh, and Colin Dickerman.
And a special thank you to Kemi Ilesanmi and Creative Capital. This book wouldn’t have happened without your faith and support.
Big hugs to Lou Asekoff, Sheila Maldonado, and Lydia Offord.
Shout-out to my family: Ma, Anna, Sharon, and Ainka. Much love.
Much respect, appreciation, and inspiration is owed to William E. Cross, Jr., whose groundbreaking work in black identity development, particularly his paper “The Negro-to-Black Conversion Experience” in
Black World
20 (July 1971), I read in grad school and has stayed with me ever since.
PAUL BEATTY
is the author of the novels
Slumberland
,
Tuff
, and
The White Boy Shuffle
, and two books of poetry,
Big Bank Take Little Bank
and
Joker, Joker, Deuce
. He is the editor of
Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor
. He lives in New York City. Sign up for email updates
here
.
ALSO BY
PAUL BEATTY
FICTION
Slumberland
Tuff