The Sellout (16 page)

If a smile is just a frown turned upside down, then the look of contentment on Hominy’s face as he shuffled to the back of the bus was a pout turned inside out. I think that in part it’s why no one protested his actions. We recognized the face he was wearing as a mask from our own collections. The happy mask we carry in our back pockets, and like bank robbers whip out when we want to steal some privacy or make an emotional getaway. It took all my self-control not to beg the woman to do me the honor of sitting in my seat. Sometimes I think that inert, cigar-store Indian wooden smirk is the result of natural selection. That it’s “survival of the witless,” and we’re the black moths in that classic evolution photo, clinging to the dark, soot-covered tree, invisible to our predators and yet somehow still vulnerable. The job of the swarthy moth is to keep the white moth occupied. Glued to the tree with bad poetry, jazz, and corny stand-up routines about the difference between white moths and black moths. “Why do white moths always be flying toward lights, slamming into screen doors, and shit? You never see black moths do that. Stupid fluttering motherfuckers.” Anything to keep the white moth next to us and thereby reducing our chances of being targets for birds of prey, the volunteer army, or Cirque de Soleil. It always bothered me that in those photos, the white moth was invariably higher up the tree trunk. What were those textbooks trying to imply? That despite supposedly being more at risk, the white moth was still higher up the evolutionary and social ladder? Regardless, I suppose that black moth wore the same face Hominy did, that subservient countenance inherent in all black lepidoptera and people. That autonomic eager-to-please response that’s triggered anytime you’re approached in a store and asked, “Do you work here?” The face worn every moment you’re on the job and not in the bathroom stall, the face flashed to the white person who saunters by and patronizingly pats you on the shoulder and says, “You’re doing a fine job. Keep up the good work.” The face that feigns acknowledgment that the better man got the promotion, even though deep down you and they both know that you really are the better man and that the best man is the woman on the second floor.

So when Hominy, the stoop-shouldered epitome of obsequiousness, stood up and made that face, everyone on board felt like they, too, had a white person next to them baring their forearms and wanting to compare tans after they’ve returned from a Caribbean vacation. Felt like Asians being asked, “No, where are you from originally?” Like Latinos being asked for proof of residency and big-chested women being asked, “So are those real?”

It wasn’t until Marpessa noticed that the unknown white woman completed the three-hour round-trip from El Segundo Plaza to Norwalk and back again that she began to get suspicious, but by then it was too late. The bus was nearly empty and her shift was almost over.

“You know her, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“And I don’t believe you.” Marpessa popped her gum and picked up the in-dash microphone, filling the bus with amplified derision. “Miss. Excuse me, would the lady with the strawberry-blond hair who was preternaturally comfortable with a literal busload of niggers and Mexicans (and by ‘Mexicans’ I mean all people. Central, South, North, and whatever Americas have you, native-born and otherwise), please approach the front of the bus. Thank you.”

The dusk lowered itself onto El Porto Harbor, and as the white woman sauntered down the aisle, the sunlight decanted itself through the front windshield and into the bus in blinding streaks of overlapping purple and orange hues, lighting her up like a beauty pageant winner. I hadn’t noticed how pretty she was. Too pretty. It wouldn’t be hard to argue that Hominy gave up his seat, not because she was white, but because she was so fucking fine, and that notion had me reassessing the entire civil rights movement. Maybe race had nothing to do with it. Maybe Rosa Parks didn’t give up her seat because she knew the guy to be unapologetically gassy or one of those annoying people who insists on asking what you’re reading, then without prompting tells you what he’s reading, what he wants to read, what he regrets having read, what he tells people he’s read but really hasn’t read. So like those high school white girls who have after-school sex with the burly black athlete in the wood shop, and then cry rape when their fathers find out, maybe Rosa Parks, after the arrest, the endless church rallies, and all the press, had to cry racism, because what was she going to say: “I refused to move because the man asked me what I was reading”? Negroes would’ve lynched her.

Marpessa looked at me, then at her lone white passenger, then back at me, and stopped the bus in the middle of a busy intersection, flinging open the doors with all the civil servant courtesy she could muster. “Everybody who I don’t know personally, get the fuck off the bus.” “Everybody” being a lazy skateboarder and two kids who’d spent the past hour necking like twisted rubber bands in the back, who quickly found themselves in the middle of Rosecrans Avenue holding free transfer tickets that flapped uselessly in the sea breeze. Miss Freedom Rider was about to join them when Marpessa blocked her passage like Governor Wallace blocked the entrance to the University of Alabama in 1963.

In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

“What’s your name?” Marpessa asked as she cajoled the bus northbound onto Las Mesas.

“Laura Jane.”

“Well, Laura Jane, I don’t know how you know this fertilizer-smelling fool right here, but I hope you like to party.”

Unlike those expensive, staid, day-trip excursions to Catalina Island, the impromptu four-wheel birthday party cruise up the Pacific Coast Highway was free and jumping like a motherfucker. Our highway-next-to-the-ocean-liner had all the amenities: Open bar. Stomped-on aluminum can, whisk-broom shuffleboard. Casino gambling, which consisted of pitching pennies, dominoes. A coin-flip game called Get Like Me, and a disco lounge. Captain Marpessa womaned the helm, drinking and cursing like a pissed-off pirate. I filled in as First Mate, Purser, Deck Hand, Bartender, and DJ. We’d picked up some more passengers on the way when the bus pulled into the Jack in the Box drive-thru across the street from Malibu pier, cranking Whodini’s “Five Minutes of Funk,” and when we ordered fifty tacos and a shitload of sauce, the entire night shift quit on the spot and climbed aboard, aprons, paper hats, and all. If I had pen and paper and the bus had a bathroom, I would’ve posted another sign—
ALL EMPLOYEES MUST WASH THEIR HANDS AND THEIR MINDS BEFORE RETURNING TO THEIR LIVES.

After night falls, once past Pepperdine University, where the highway narrows into a two-lane hill that stretches like a skate ramp to the stars, there isn’t much light. Just the occasional flash of oncoming high beams, and, if you’re lucky, a lonely bonfire on the sand, and the sheets of moonlight give the Pacific Ocean a glassy black obsidian sheen. It was on this same stretch of winding road that I first courted Marpessa. I bussed her on the cheek. She didn’t flinch, which I interpreted as a good sign.

Although the bus cruise was bumping, Hominy had spent most of the ride standing in the middle of the dance floor, stubbornly holding on to the overhead bar and, by proxy, the history of American discrimination, but around Puerco Beach, Laura Jane had managed to coax him out of his ancient mindset by grinding her pelvic bone rhythmically against his backside and playing with his ears. “Freaking,” we used to call it, and she pranced around Hominy, her hands overhead, caressing the beat. When the song ended, she shouldered her way toward the bow, the fuzz on her upper lip beaded with sweat. Goddamn, she was fine.

“Wicked party.”

The radio buzzed to life, and a dispatcher said the word “whereabouts” in a concerned voice. Marpessa turned down the music, said something I couldn’t hear, then blew a kiss into the receiver and switched off the radio. If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That’s Always Passed Out on the Couch. Once past Leo Carrillo, PCH begins to smooth out, and when the moon disappears behind the Santa Monica Mountains, painting the night sky pitch-black, if you listen closely you can hear two faint pops in fairly quick succession. The first is the sound of four million living-room television sets flickering off in unison, and the second is the sound of four million bedroom ones being powered on. Moviemakers and photographers often speak of the uniqueness of L.A. sunlight, the ways it pours itself across the sky, golden and sweet, like Vermeer, Monet, and breakfast honey all rolled into one. But the L.A. moonlight, or lack thereof rather, is just as special. When night falls, I mean really falls, the temperature drops twenty degrees and a total amniotic blackness blankets and comforts you like a lover making the bed while you’re still in it, and that brief moment between television sets popping off and back on is the calm before the after-hours strip clubs in Inglewood open, before the cacophony of New Year’s Eve gunshots rings out, before Santa Monica, Hollywood, Whittier, and Crenshaw Boulevards come slowly cruising to life, is when Angelenos take time to pause and reflect. To give thanks to the late-night joints in Koreatown. To Mariachi Square. To chili burgers and pastrami dip sandwiches. To Marpessa, peering through the windshield and squinting at the stars, driving by dead reckoning rather than simply following the road. The tires ground assuredly over the asphalt, the bus rolling through the stratosphere, and when she heard the second pop, Marpessa gave the go-ahead for more music, and before long, Hominy and the rest of the Jack in the Box ballet were again pirouetting in the aisle, singing out loud to Tom Petty.

“Where’d he find you?” Marpessa asked Laura Jane, her eyes still fixed on the Milky Way.

“He hired me.”

“You a prostitute?”

“Damn near. Actress. Part-time submissive to pay the bills.”

“Parts must be hard to come by if you have to do this shit.” Marpessa cut her eyes at Laura Jane, bit her bottom lip, and turned her attention back to the celestial night.

“Have I ever seen you in anything?”

“I do mostly television commercials, but it’s tough. Whenever I’m up for a part, the producers look at me like you just did and say, ‘Not suburban enough,’ which in the industry is code for ‘too Jewish.’”

Sensing that Marpessa hadn’t quite cleared her chakras during her L.A. moment of silence, Laura Jane pressed her pretty face cheek-to-cheek with Marpessa’s jealous mug and together they studied themselves in the rearview mirror, looking like a pair of mismatched conjoined twins attached at the head. One middle-aged and black, the other young and white, sharing the same brain but not the same thought process. “Makes me wish I was black,” the white twin said, smiling and running her hands over her darker sister’s burning cheeks. “Black people get all the jobs.”

Marpessa must’ve put the bus on autopilot, because her hands were off the steering wheel and around Laura Jane’s neck. Not choking her, but pointedly straightening the collar of her dress, letting her evil twin know she was ready to pounce as soon as her side of the brain gave the okay. “Look, I doubt that black people ‘get
all
the jobs.’ But even if they do, it’s because Madison Avenue knows niggers spend a dollar and twenty cents of every dollar they earn on the crap they see on television. Let’s take the standard luxury car commercial…”

Laura Jane nodded as if she were really listening, slyly slipping her arms around Marpessa and onto the steering wheel. For a second we veered across the double yellow lines, but she made a deft correction and gently guided the bus back into the passing lane.

“Luxury cars. You were saying?”

“The subtle message of the luxury car commercial is ‘We here at Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Lexus, Cadillac, or whatever the fuck, are an equal-opportunity opportunist. See this handsome African-American male model behind the wheel? We’d like you, o holy, highly sought after white male consumer between the ages of thirty and forty-five, sitting in your recliner, we’d like you to spend your money and join our happy, carefree, prejudice-free world. A world where black men drive sitting straight up in their seats and not sunk so low and to the side you can see only the tops of their gleaming ball-peen heads.’”

“And what’s so wrong with that?”

“But the subliminal message is ‘Look, you lazy, fat, susceptible-to-marketing, poor excuse for a white man. You’ve indulged this thirty-second fantasy of a nigger dandy commuting from his Tudor castle in an aerodynamically designed piece of precision German engineering, so you’d better get your act together, bro, and stop letting these rack-and-pinion-steering, moon-roof, manufacturer’s-suggested-retail-price-paying monkeys show you up and steal your piece of the American dream!’”

At mention of the American dream, Laura Jane stiffened and returned the conn to Marpessa. “I’m offended,” she said.

“Because I used the word ‘nigger’?”

“No, because you’re a beautiful woman who just happens to be black, and you’re far too smart not to know that it isn’t race that’s the problem but class.”

Laura Jane planted a loud, wet smack on Marpessa’s forehead, and spun on her Louboutin heels to go back to work. I grabbed my love’s arm in mid swing, saving Laura Jane from a rabbit punch she never saw coming.

“You know why white people don’t ever just happen to be white? Because they all think they’ve just happened to have been touched by God, that’s why!”

I thumbed the lipstick print off Marpessa’s angry forehead.

“And tell that class oppression garbage to the fucking Indians and the dodo birds. Talking about I should ‘know better.’ She’s Jewish.
She
should know better.”

“She didn’t say she was Jewish. She said people
think
she looks Jewish.”

“You are a fucking sellout. That’s why I fucking dumped your ass. You never stick up for yourself. You’re probably on her side.”

Godard approached filmmaking as criticism, the same way Marpessa approached bus driving, but in any case, I thought Laura Jane had a point. Whatever Jewish people supposedly look like, from Barbra Streisand to the nominally Jewish-ish Whoopie Goldberg, you never see people in commercials that look “Jewish,” just as you never see black people that come off as “urban” and hence “scary,” or handsome Asian men, or dark-skinned Latinos. I’m sure those groups spend a disproportionate amount of their incomes on shit they don’t need. And, of course, in the idyllic world of television advertisement, homosexuals are mythical beings, but you see more ads featuring unicorns and leprechauns than you do gay men and women. And maybe nonthreatening African-American actors are overrepresented on television. Their master’s degrees from the Yale School of Drama and Shakespearean training having gone to waste, as they stand around barbecue pits delivering lines like “Prithee, homeboy. Forsooth, thou knowest that Budweiser is the King of Beers. Uneasy lies the frothy head that wears the crown.” But if you really think about it, the only thing you absolutely never see in car commercials isn’t Jewish people, homosexuals, or urban Negroes, it’s traffic.