The Sellout (23 page)
I wanted to release Kristina into the wild. Urge her to take the most circuitous route to school possible. Let her run unchaperoned under the jet-black street signs of Dickens and take an honors class in snail trails. Audit a seminar in watching your friend walk into Bob’s Big Boy and steal the breakfast tips from the counter. Formulate an independent study on the poetics of the rainbows in sprinkler water and the call of the early-bird-purple-sequined halter-top-prostitute caterwauling to potential johns on Long Beach Boulevard. I was about to let Kristina loose, but we’d reached the school just as the nine o’clock bell rang.
“Hurry up, you’re going to be late.”
“Everybody’s already late,” she said, running off to join her friends.
Everyone was late. Students, staff, faculty, parents, legal guardians, all were congregated in front of Chaff Middle School, ignoring the bell and taking the measure of their newly minted crosstown rivals from across the street.
The Wheaton Academy Charter Magnet School of the Arts, Science, Humanities, Business, Fashion, and Everything Else was a sleek, state-of-the-art plate-glass building that looked more like a death star than a place of learning. Its student body was white and larger-than-life. None of this was real, of course, as the Wheaton Academy was a phony construction site. A vacant lot now, surrounded by a plywood fence painted blue, with small rectangle cutouts through which passersby could watch building that would never take place. The school was nothing more than a five-by-five watercolor artist’s rendition of the Center of Marine Sciences at the University of Eastern Maine that I downloaded, had blown up, mounted under plastic, and attached to a gate bolted with a chain lock. The pupils were ballet dancers, platform divers, violinists, fencers, volleyball players, and pottery makers whose black-and-white photos I hijacked from the Intersection Academy and Haverford-Meadowbrook websites, had enlarged, and pasted onto the fence. If anyone had been paying attention, they would’ve noticed that in reality the Wheaton Academy would be ten times the size of the lot it was supposed to be built upon. But if the red letters stenciled underneath the drawing were to be believed, then by all indications the Wheaton Academy was indeed “Coming Soon!”
Not soon enough for Dickens, of course, whose concerned but suspicious parents, eager for their children to join the ranks of the giant Anglo kids, whose metal braces brightened not only their impossibly white smiles but their futures. An overzealous mother, pointing demonstrably at a studious child and an attentive teacher poring over the results of a spectrograph pointed at the stars, asked Charisma the question on everyone’s mind.
“Assistant Principal Molina, what my kids have to do to go to that school? Take a test?”
“Of sorts.”
“What that mean?”
“What do those students in the photo all have in common?”
“They white.”
“Well, there’s your answer. Your child can pass that test, they’re in. But you didn’t hear it from me. All right, the show’s over. Anybody who’s ready to learn, let’s go, because I’m locking the doors behind me.
Vámonos
, people.”
By the time the 9:49 westbound arrived at Rosecrans and Long Beach in a noxious but punctual cloud of exhaust fumes, the crowd had long since dissipated, and I sat at the bus stop next to Hominy, smoking a doobie and cradling my last two satsuma mandarins. Marpessa opened the bus doors, a sinister look somewhere between disregard and disgust stitched onto her face like an angry black woman Halloween mask. A look that might scare off her co-workers and the niggers on the corner, but not me. I tossed her the oranges, and she sped off without even a thank you.
After five hundred feet or so, the #125 bus, its brakes invariably as worn out as a bum’s shoes, slammed to an ear-splitting halt, reversed, and made a sharp right turn. The only real fights Marpessa and I ever had were about whether three rights made a left. She insisted they did. I believed that after three pointless right turns, you might be traveling left but you’d be one block behind your original starting point. By the time the bus made its way back to me, having proved, if nothing else, that a couple of illegal U-turns puts you right back where you started from, the 9:49 was now the 9:57.
The doors opened, Marpessa still at the wheel. This time her face was slathered with satsuma juice and an irrepressible smile. I always liked the sound of seat belts unbuckling. That emancipating click and whir of the belt recoiling to wherever it goes never ceases to give me pleasure. Marpessa brushed away the peels in her lap and stepped off the bus.
“Okay, Bonbon, you win,” she said, plucking the joint from my mouth and marching her perfectly plump behind back onto the bus, apologizing for the delay but not the smell as she buckled in and slipped into traffic, blowing smoke out of the narrow driver’s-side window, her pink fingernails coolly flicking ashes onto the street. She didn’t know it, but she was smoking Aphasia. So I knew that between us bygones would be bygones. Or as we say in Dickens, “It be like that sometimes …
Is exsisto amo ut interdum.
”
Later that day, like any good social pyromaniac worth their accelerant, I returned to the scene of the crime. The only arson investigator on site was Foy Cheshire. It was the first time in twenty-some-odd years I’d ever seen him venture outside Dum Dum Donuts, his feet on actual Dickens terra firma. And there he stood in front of the blue clapboards of the would-be Wheaton Academy, his Mercedes half-parked on the sidewalk, taking photographs with an expensive-looking camera. From atop my horse, on the Chaff side of the street, I watched him snap a picture, then jot something down in his notebook. Above me a student opened a second-story window, looked up from a school-issued microscope so old Leeuwenhoek would’ve called it antiquated, and stuck her processed head into the air to gaze out at the Godzilla-sized child prodigy of the Wheaton Academy peering into an electron microscope so advanced it’d make Cal Tech envious.
From the other side of the street Foy spotted me. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, the traffic speeding loudly up and down Rosecrans Avenue forcing me to play peek-a-boo with both his image and his words.
“You see this shit, Sellout? You know who did this?”
“Yeah, I know!”
“Damn right, you know. Only the forces of evil would stick an all-white school in the middle of the ghetto.”
“Like who, the North Koreans or somebody?”
“What the North Koreans care about Foy Cheshire? This is without doubt a CIA conspiracy, or maybe even bigger, like a secret HBO documentary about me! Some nefarious shit is afoot! Which if you’d been to a meeting in the past couple of months … Did you know some racist asshole put a sign on a public bus…”
It used to be that when some fools did a drive-by, an oncoming car slowing down for no apparent reason was fair warning. The throaty belch of a V-6 engine losing rpm and slipping into first gear was the urban equivalent of the crack of a hunter snapping a twig and startling his prey. But with these new hybrid, silent-running, energy-saving automobiles, you don’t hear shit. By the time you realize what’s going on, a bullet has slammed into the back quarter panel of your iridium-silver Benz and your assailants have already quietly sped off, yelling, “Take your black ass back to white America, nigger!” while getting fifty-five miles to the gallon. I thought I recognized the laugh that belonged to the thin black arm holding the familiar-looking revolver that looked a lot like the gun Marpessa’s brother, Stevie, had held to my head two weeks prior. And the stealth gangsterism of an electric car drive-by had all the earmarks of King Cuz’s battlefield generalship. As I made my way across the street to see if Foy was okay, I definitely recognized the scent of the orange that one of the assailants had thrown upside Foy’s head—that was one of my satsumas.
“Foy, you okay?”
“Don’t touch me! This is war, and I know whose side you’re on!”
I backed away as Foy dusted himself off, muttering about conspiracies and defiantly marching toward his car like he was leaving the Philippines under siege. The gull-wing door to his classic sports car opened up, and before getting in, Foy paused to put on his aviator sunglasses and, in his best General BlackArthur, announced, “I shall return, motherfucker. Believe that shit!”
Behind us, the student on the second floor closed her window and returned to her microscope, blinking rapidly as she readjusted the focus, moved the slide around, and scribbled her findings in her notebook. Unlike Foy and me, she was resigned to her situation, because she knows that in Dickens it be like that sometimes, even when it doesn’t have to be.
I’m frigid. Not in the sense that I don’t have any sexual desire, but in the obnoxious way men in the free-love seventies projected their own sexual inadequacies onto women by referring to them as “frigid” and “dead fish.” I’m the deadest of fish. I fuck like an overturned guppy. A plate of day-old sashimi has more “motion of the ocean” than I do. So on the day of the shooting and drive-by orange-ing, when Marpessa stuck a tongue suspiciously tangy with satsuma tartness into my mouth and ground her pudenda into my pelvic bone, I lay there on my bed—motionless. My hands covering my face in shame, because fucking me is like fucking Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus. If my sexual ineptitude was a problem, she never let on. She simply boxed my ears and worked my beached-whale carcass over like a Saturday-night wrestler looking for revenge in a grudge match I didn’t want to end.
“Does this mean we’re back together?”
“It means I’m thinking about it.”
“Can you think about it a little faster, and maybe a little more to the right? Yeah, that’s it.”
Marpessa’s the only person to ever diagnose me. Not even my father could figure me out. I’d make a mistake, like, say, misidentify Mary McLeod Bethune for Gwendolyn Brooks, it’d be “Nigger, I have no fucking idea what the fuck is wrong is with you!” Followed by all 943 pages of the
BDSM IV
(
Black Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, fourth edition) flying at my head.
Marpessa sorted me out, though. I was eighteen. Two weeks from finishing up my first semester of college. We were in the guesthouse. She—thumbing through the bloodstained
BDSM
IV
. Me—in my usual postcoital position, rolled up into a ball like a frightened teenage armadillo, and crying my eyes out for no earthly reason.
“Here, I finally figured out what’s wrong with you,” she said, snuggling up to me. “This is what you have, Attachment Disorder.” Why do people have to tap the page when they know they’re right? A quick read-aloud will suffice. You don’t have to rub it in with all the smug finger tapping.
“Attachment Disorder—Markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate social relatedness in most contexts, scenes, and happenings. Beginning before age five and continuing into adulthood as evidenced by either 1. and/or 2.:
1.
persistent failure to initiate or respond in a developmentally appropriate fashion to most social interactions (e.g., the child or adult responds to caregivers and black lovers with a mixture of approach, avoidance, and resistance to comforting. May exhibit frozen watchfulness)
. Hoi Polloi Translation—The nigger flinches or jumps whenever you touch him. Runs hot and cold, and has no friends to speak of. And when he isn’t staring at you like you just got off the banana boat, he’s crying like a little bitch.
2.
diffuse attachments as manifested by indiscriminate sociability with marked inability to exhibit appropriate selective attachments to black people and things (e.g., excessive familiarity with relative strangers or lack of selectivity in choice of attachment figures).
Hoi Polloi Translation—The nigger fucking white hos out there at UC Riverside.
It was a miracle we lasted as long as we did.
I stared at her blurry silhouette for a long time before she poked her head from behind the chessboard-patterned shower curtain. I’d forgotten how brown she was. How good she looked, her stringy hair clumped to the side of her face. Sometimes the sweetest kisses are the shortest. We could discuss the clean-shaven pubes later.
“Bonbon, what’s the time frame?”
“For us, from now until. For the segregation thing, I’m thinking I want to be done by Hood Day. That gives me another six months.”
Marpessa pulled me in and handed me a tube of apricot scrub that hadn’t been opened since the last time she showered off here. I rubbed the exfoliant into her back and scratched a message into the grainy, supposedly skin-softening swirls. She always could read my writing.
“Because between that nigger Foy and the rest of world, this shit’s going to catch up with you sooner or later. Forget the racial segregation, you know motherfuckers wasn’t too keen on Dickens even when it did exist.”
“You were in that car today, weren’t you?”
“Shit, when Cuz and my brother picked me up from work and we drove back here, soon as we crossed that white line you painted, it was like, you know, when you enter a banging-ass house party and shit’s bumping, and you get that thump in your chest and you be like, if I were to die right now, I wouldn’t
give a fuck
. It was like that. Crossing the threshold.”
“You threw that fucking orange. I knew it.”
“Hit that stupid motherfucker square in the face.”
Marpessa pressed the crack of her shapely rear end into my groin. She had to get back to the kids, we wouldn’t have much time, and knowing me, we wouldn’t need much time.
Despite that initial scratch of her seventeen-year itch, Marpessa insisted we start slow. Since she worked weekends and put in crazy overtime, we had to date on Mondays and Tuesdays. Our nights on the town were trips to the mall, coffee shop poetry readings, and, most bothersome for me, open-mike nights at the Plethora Comedy Club. Marpessa hated my Wheaton-Chaff segregation joke and insisted that I improve my sense of humor by learning to tell a joke. When I protested, she’d say, “Look, now you ain’t the only black man in the world that can’t fuck, but I refuse to go out with the only one with absolutely no sense of humor.”
