The Sellout (2 page)

I didn’t always feel this way. Growing up, I used to think all of black America’s problems could be solved if we only had a motto. A pithy
Liberté, egalité, fraternité
we could post over squeaky wrought-iron gateways, embroider onto kitchen wall hangings and ceremonial bunting. It, like the best of African-American folklore and hairstyles, would have to be simple, yet profound. Noble, and yet somehow egalitarian. A calling card for an entire race that was raceless on the surface, but quietly understood by those in the know to be very, very black. I don’t know where young boys come up with such notions, but when your friends all refer to their parents by their first names, there’s the sense that something isn’t quite right. And wouldn’t it be nice, in these times of constant conniption and crisis, for broken Negro families to gather around the hearth, gaze upon the mantelpiece, and take comfort in the uplifting words inscribed on a set of lovingly handcrafted commemorative plates or limited-edition gold coins purchased from a late-night infomercial on an already maxed-out credit card?

Other ethnicities have mottos. “Unconquered and unconquerable” is the calling card of the Chickasaw nation, though it doesn’t apply to the casino gaming tables or having fought with Confederates in the Civil War.
Allahu Akbar. Shikata ga nai. Never again. Harvard class of ’96. To Protect and to Serve.
These are more than just greetings and trite sayings. They are reenergizing codes. Linguistic chi that strengthens our life force and bonds us to other like-minded, like-skinned, like-shoe-wearing human beings. What is that they say in the Mediterranean?
Stessa faccia, stessa razza.
Same face, same race. Every race has a motto. Don’t believe me? You know that dark-haired guy in human resources? The one who acts white, talks white, but doesn’t quite look right? Go up to him. Ask him why Mexican goalkeepers play so recklessly or if the food at the taco truck parked outside is really safe to eat. Go ahead. Ask him. Prod him. Rub the back of his flat
indio
skull and see if he doesn’t turn around with the
pronunciamiento ¡Por La Raza—todo! ¡Fuera de La Raza—nada!
(For the race, everything! Outside the race, nothing!)

When I was ten, I spent a long night burrowed under my comforter, cuddled up with Funshine Bear, who, filled with a foamy enigmatic sense of language and a Bloomian dogmatism, was the most literary of the Care Bears and my harshest critic. In the musty darkness of that rayon bat cave, his stubby, all-but-immobile yellow arms struggled to hold the flashlight steady as together we tried to save the black race in eight words or less. Putting my homeschool Latin to good use, I’d crank out a motto, then shove it under his heart-shaped plastic nose for approval. My first effort,
Black America: Veni, vidi, vici—Fried Chicken!
peeled back Funshine’s ears and closed his hard plastic eyes in disappointment.
Semper Fi, Semper Funky
raised his polyester hackles, and when he began to paw the mattress in anger and reared up on his stubby yellow legs, baring his ursine fangs and claws, I tried to remember what the Cub Scout manual said to do when confronted by an angry stuffed cartoon bear drunk on stolen credenza wine and editorial power. “If you meet an angry bear—remain calm. Speak in gentle tones, stand your ground, get large, and write in clear, simple, uplifting Latin sentences.”

Unum corpus, una mens, una cor, unum amor.

One body, one mind, one heart, one love.

Not bad. It had a nice license plate ring to it. I could see it in cursive, circumnavigating the rim of a race war medal of honor. Funshine didn’t hate it, but from the way he wrinkled his nose right before falling asleep that night, I could tell he felt my slogan implied a certain groupthink, and weren’t black people always complaining about being labeled as monolithic? I didn’t ruin his dreams by telling him that black people do all think alike. They won’t admit it, but every black person thinks they’re better than every other black person. I never heard back from the NAACP or the Urban League, so the black credo exists only in my head, impatiently waiting on a movement, a nation, and, I suppose, since nowadays branding is everything, a logo.

Maybe we don’t need a motto. How many times have I heard someone say, “Nigger, you know me, my motto is…”? If I were smart, I’d put my Latin to use. Charge ten dollars a word. Fifteen if they aren’t from the neighborhood or want me to translate “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” If it’s true that one’s body is one’s temple, I could make good money. Open up a little shop on the boulevard and have a long line of tattooed customers who’ve transformed themselves into nondenominational places of worship: ankhs, sankofas, and crucifixes fighting for abdominal space with Aztec sun gods and one-star Star of David galaxies. Chinese characters running down shaved calves and spinal columns. Sinological shout-outs to dead loved ones that they think means “Rest in peace, Grandma Beverly,” but in reality reads “No tickee! No Bilateral Trade Agreement!” Man, it’d be a goldmine. High as the price of cigarettes, they’d come at all hours of the night. I could sit behind a thick Plexiglas window and have one of those sliding metal drop boxes that the gas station attendants use. I’d slide out the drawer, and like prisoners passing jailhouse kites, my clientele would surreptitiously hand me their affirmations. The harder the man, the neater the handwriting. The more softhearted the woman, the more pugnacious the phrase. “You know me,” they’d say, “my motto is…” and drop the cash and quotations from Shakespeare and
Scarface
, biblical passages, schoolyard aphorisms, and hoodlum truisms written in every medium from blood to eyeliner into the drawer. And whether it was scribbled on a crumpled-up bar napkin, a paper plate stained with BBQ sauce and potato salad, or was a page carefully torn from a secret diary kept since a stir in juvenile hall that if I tell anyone about it’ll be my ass,
Ya estuvo
(whatever that means), I’d take the job seriously. For these are a people for whom the phrase “Well, if you put a gun to my head…” isn’t theoretical, and when someone has pressed a cold metal muzzle to the yin and yang symbol tattooed on your temple and you’ve lived to tell about it, you don’t need to have read the
I Ching
to appreciate the cosmic balance of the universe and the power of the tramp stamp. Because what else could your motto possibly be but “What goes around, comes around …
Quod circumvehitur, revehitur
.”

When business is slow, they’ll come by to show me my handiwork. The olde English lettering glistening in the streetlight, its orthography parsed on their sweaty tank- and tube-topped musculatures. Money talks, bullshit walks …
Pecunia sermo, somnium ambulo.
Dative and accusative clauses burnished onto their jugulars, there’s something special about having the language of science and romance surf the tidal waves of a homegirl’s body fat. Strictly dickly …
Austerus verpa
. The shaky noun declension that would ticker-tape across their foreheads would be the closest most of them ever get to being white, to reading white.
Crip up or grip up … Criptum vexo vel carpo vex.
It’s nonessential essentialism. Blood in, blood out …
Minuo in, minuo sicco
. It’s the satisfaction of looking at your motto in the mirror and thinking, Any nigger who isn’t paranoid is crazy …
Ullus niger vir quisnam est non insanus ist rabidus
is something Julius Caesar would’ve said if he were black. Act your age, not your shoe size …
Factio vestri aevum, non vestri calceus amplitudo
. And if an increasingly pluralistic America ever decides to commission a new motto, I’m open for business, because I’ve got a better one than
E pluribus unum
.

Tu dormis, tu perdis
 … You snooze, you lose.

Someone takes the pipe from my hand. “C’mon, man. That shit is cashed. It’s time to make the donuts, homie.” Hampton Fiske, my lawyer and old friend, calmly wafts away the last of the pot smoke, then engulfs me in an antifungal cloud of spray-can air freshener. I’m too high to speak, so we greet each other with chin-up, what’s-up nods, and share a knowing smile, because we both recognize the scent. Tropic Breeze—same shit we used to hide the evidence from our parents because it smelled like angel dust. If moms came home, kicked off the espadrilles, and found the crib redolent of Apple Cinnamon or Strawberries and Cream, she’d know we’d been smoking, but if the crib smelled like PCP, then the stench could be blamed on “Uncle Rick and them,” or alternatively, she could say nothing, too tired to deal with the possibility that her only child was addicted to sherm, and hope the problem would simply go away.

Arguing cases in front of the Supreme Court isn’t Hamp’s bailiwick. He’s an old-school criminal defense attorney. When you call his office, you invariably get put on hold. Not because he’s busy or there’s no receptionist, or you’ve called at the same time as some other sap who saw his ad on a bus stop bench or the 800 number (1-800-FREEDOM) scratched by paid transients onto metal holding-cell mirrors and backseat police car Plexiglas. It’s because he likes to listen to his answering machine, a ten-minute recitation of his legal triumphs and mistrials.

“You have reached the Fiske Group—Any Firm Can List the Charges, We Can Beat the Charges. Not Guilty—Murder. Not Guilty—DUI. Not Guilty—Assault of a Police Officer. Not Guilty—Sexual Abuse. Not Guilty—Child Abuse. Not Guilty—Elderly Abuse. Dismissed—Theft. Dismissed—Forgery. Dismissed—Domestic Violence (more than one thousand cases). Dismissed—Sexual Conduct with a Minor. Dismissed—Involving a Child in Drug Activity. Dismissed—Kidnapping…”

Hamp knows that only the most desperate of the accused will have the patience to sit through that litany of damn near every criminal statute in the Los Angeles County penal code, first in English, then in Spanish, then in Tagalog. And those are the people he likes to represent. The wretched of the Earth, he calls us. People too poor to afford cable and too stupid to know that they aren’t missing anything. “If Jean Valjean had me representing him,” he likes to say, “then
Les Misérables
would’ve only been six pages long. Dismissed—Loaf of Bread Pilfery.”

My crimes aren’t listed on the answering machine. At the arraignment in district court right before the judge asked me to enter a plea, he read the list of felonious charges against me. Allegations that in summation accused me of everything from desecration of the Homeland to conspiracy to upset the apple cart just when things were going so well. Dumbfounded, I stood before the court, trying to figure out if there was a state of being between “guilty” and “innocent.” Why were those my only alternatives? I thought. Why couldn’t I be “neither” or “both”?

After a long pause, I finally faced the bench and said, “Your Honor, I plead human.” For this I received an understanding snicker from the judge and a citation for contempt of court, which Hamp instantly got reduced to time served, right before making an innocent plea on my behalf and half-jokingly requesting a change of venue, suggesting Nuremburg or Salem, Massachusetts, as possible locales given the serious nature of the charges. And while he never said anything to me, my guess is that the ramifications of what he’d previously thought would be a simple case of standard black inner-city absurdity suddenly struck him, and he applied for admission to the Supreme Court bar the very next day.

But that’s old news. For now, I’m here in Washington, D.C., dangling at the end of my legal rope, stoned on memory and marijuana. My mouth bone-dry and feeling like I’ve just woken up on the #7 bus, drunk as fuck after a long futile night of carousing and chasing Mexican babes at the Santa Monica pier, looking out the window and coming to the slow, marijuana-impaired realization that I’ve missed my stop and have no idea where I am or why everybody is looking at me. Like this woman in the Court’s front row, leaning over the wooden banister, her face a knotted and twisted burl of anger as she flips her long, slender, manicured, press-on-nailed middle fingers in my direction. Black women have beautiful hands, and with every “fuck you” cocoa-butter stab of the air, her hands become more and more elegant. They’re the hands of a poet, one of those natural-haired, brass-bangled teacher-poets whose elegiac verse compares everything to jazz. Childbirth is like jazz. Muhammad Ali is like jazz. Philadelphia is like jazz. Jazz is like jazz. Everything is like jazz except for me. To her I’m like a remixed Anglo-Saxon appropriation of black music. I’m Pat Boone in blackface singing a watered-down version of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame.” I’m every note of nonpunk British rock ’n’ roll plucked and strummed since the Beatles hit that mind-reverberating chord that opens “A Hard Day’s Night.” But what about Bobby “What You Won’t Do for Love” Caldwell, Gerry Mulligan, Third Bass, and Janis Joplin? I want to shout back at her. What about Eric Clapton? Wait, I take that back. Fuck Eric Clapton. Ample bosoms first, she hops the rail, bogarts her way past the cops, and bolts toward me, her thumb-sucking charges clinging desperately to her “Don’t You See How Insanely Long, Soft, Shiny, and Expensive This Is? Motherfucker,
YOU WILL
Treat Me Like a Queen!” Toni Morrison signature model pashmina shawl trailing behind her like a cashmere kite tail.

Now she’s in my face, mumbling calmly but incoherently about black pride, the slave ships, the three-fifths clause, Ronald Reagan, the poll tax, the March on Washington, the myth of the drop-back quarterback, how even the white-robed horses of the Ku Klux Klan were racist, and, most emphatically, how the malleable minds of the ever-increasingly redundant “
young
black
youth
” must be protected. And lo, the mind of the little waterheaded boy with both arms wrapped about his teacher’s hips, his face buried in her crotch, definitely needs a bodyguard, or at least a mental prophylactic. He comes up for air looking expectantly to me for an explanation as to why his teacher hates me so. Not getting one, the pupil returns to the warm moistness of his happy place, oblivious to the stereotype that black males don’t go down there. What could I have said to him? “You know how when you play Chutes and Ladders and you’re almost at the finish line, but you spin a six and land on that long, really curvy red slide that takes you from square sixty-seven all the way back to number twenty-four?”