The Sellout (29 page)
“This was the Bingo
sin
Gringos night we held for Cinco de Mayo…” As opposed to the Compton Cookout, it wasn’t hard to spot Butterfly in that one: this time she sat next to an Asian woman, the two of them, like the other sisters, wearing gigantic sombreros, ponchos,
bandoleras
, and droopy foot-long Pancho Villa mustaches, while drinking tequila and daubing their cards.
Be-ocho … ¡Bingo!
Butterfly flicked through her photos. The titles of each bash a dress code unto itself: Das Bunker: The Pure Gene Pool Pool Party. The Shabu Shabu Sleepover! The Trail of Beers—Hiking and Peyote Trip.
Sitting just off Mulholland Drive, on the crest overlooking the San Fernando Valley, Foy’s house was bigger than I remembered. A massive Tudor estate with a circular driveway, it looked more like an English finishing school than a home, despite the giant foreclosure sign bolted to the entrance gate. We piled out of the car. The mountain air was brisk and clean. I took in a deep breath and held it, while Hominy and Butterfly sauntered up to the gate.
“I can smell my movies in there.”
“Hominy, the place is empty.”
“They in there. I know it.”
“What, you going to dig up the yard like in ‘Unexpected Riches’?” I asked, invoking Spanky’s
Our Gang
swan song into the mix.
Hominy rattled the fence. And then I remembered the code like you remember your best friend’s childhood phone number. I punched 1-8-6-5 into the security box. The gate buzzed, the roller chain tightened and slowly pulled the gate open. 1865, black people are so fucking obvious.
“Massa, you coming?”
“Naw, you two have at it.”
Across Mulholland was a scenic overlook.
Facing north, I timed my run and sprinted between a speeding Maserati and two teenagers in a birthday BMW convertible. A dirt trail peeled down the mountainside and through the chaparral for about a mile or so, eventually leading to a side street and Crystalwater Canyon Park, a small but immaculately kept recreation area featuring a few picnic tables, some shade trees, and a basketball court. Ignoring the sap dripping down its trunk, I sat underneath a thick fir tree. The ballplayers limbered up for an after-work run or two before the sun set. A lone black man, in his mid-thirties, light-skinned and shirtless, paced at center court. He was one of those semiskilled hoopsters who frequented the white courts in ritzy neighborhoods like Brentwood and Laguna, looking for a decent game, an opportunity to dominate, and who knows, maybe even a job prospect.
“Any niggers out here for the attention, get the fuck off the court,” the brother yelled to the delight of the white boys.
The philosophy professor on sabbatical inbounded the ball. A personal-injury lawyer hit a corner jumper. Displaying a surprisingly good handle, a fat pharmacist crossovered a pediatrician, but bricked the layup. The day trader air-balled a shot that sailed out of bounds and rolled toward the parking lot. Even in L.A., where luxury cars, like shopping carts at the supermarket, are everywhere you look, Foy’s ’56 300SL was unmistakable. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred left on the planet. Near the front fender, Foy sat in a small lawn chair, dressed in only his boxers, a T-shirt, and sandals, chatting into his phone and typing on a laptop almost as old as his car. He was drying his clothes. His shirts and pants hanging from hangers hooked onto the car’s gull-wing doors, which were in full flight and hovering above like wings on a silver dragon. I had to ask. I got up and walked past the basketball game. Two players vying for a loose ball tumbled by. Arguing over possession before they got to their feet.
“Who’s that off of?” a player in beat-up sneakers asked me, his outstretched arms a silent plea for mercy. I recognized the guy. The mustachioed lead detective in a long-canceled but still-in-syndication cop show—big in Ukraine. “That’s off the dude with the hairy chest.” The movie star disagreed. But it was the right call.
Foy looked up at me from his chair, but didn’t stop talking or typing. Speaking in rapid-fire, unintelligible word salad into the phone, he wasn’t making much sense, something about high-speed rail and the return of the Pullman porter. The Mercedes coupe’s Pirelli whitewall tires were bald. Yellow foam oozed from the cracked and blistered leather seats like pus. Foy was probably homeless, but he refused to sell his watch, or a car that, at auction, even in its fucked-up condition, was worth several hundred thousand dollars. I had to ask.
“What are you writing?” Foy dropped the phone to his shoulder.
“A book of essays called
Me Talk White One Day
.”
“Foy, when’s the last time you had an original idea?”
Absolutely unoffended, Foy thought for a second, then said, “Probably not since your dad died,” before returning to his phone call.
* * *
I returned to Foy’s old house to find Hominy and Butterfly skinny-dipping in the pool, a little surprised that no nosy neighbors had bothered to call the police. One old black man looks like all the rest, I suppose. Night fell, and the underwater light flicked on automatically and quietly. The soft light-blue of a pool lit up at night is my favorite color. Hominy, pretending he couldn’t swim, was in the deep end, holding on to Butterfly’s ample flotation devices for all he was worth. He hadn’t found what he was looking for, his movies, but what he had managed to secure seemed to tide him over. I stripped down and slid into the water. No wonder Foy was broke, the temperature had to have been at least 90 degrees.
Floating on my back, I saw the North Star flicker through the steam rising from the water, pointing to a freedom that I didn’t even know if I needed. I thought of my father, whose ideas paid for that bank-owned property. I turned over into a dead man’s float and tried to position my body in the posture he was in when I found him dead in the street. What were my dad’s last words before they shot him?
You don’t know who my son is.
All this work, Dickens, the segregation, Marpessa, the farming, and I still don’t even know who I am.
You have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? and How may I become myself?
I was as lost as I ever was, thinking seriously about tearing out the farmland, uprooting the crops, selling off the livestock, and putting in a big-ass wave pool. Because how cool would it be to surf in the backyard?
About two weeks after seeking the Lost Film Treasure of Laurel Canyon, the secret was out. The
New
-ish
Republic
magazine, which hadn’t had a child on its cover since the Lindbergh baby, broke the story. Above the caption “The New Jim Crow: Has Public Education Clipped the Wings of the White Child?” was a twelve-year-old white boy, posed as the pint-sized symbol of reverse racism. The new Jim Crow stood on the steps of Chaff Middle School wearing a heavy gold chain. Unruly tufts of dirty blond hair peeked out from under his wave cap and noise-reduction headphones. He toted an Ebonics textbook in one hand and a basketball in the other. Gold metal braces flashed through a lip-curling snarl, and the XXXL T-shirt he wore read
Energy = an Emcee
2
.
A long time ago, my father taught me that whenever you see a question on the cover of a news magazine, the answer is always “No,” because the editorial staff knows that questions with “Yes” answers would, like graphic cigarette warnings and close-ups of pus-oozing genitalia that tend not to deter but encourage smoking and unsafe sex, scare the reader off. So you get yellow journalism like:
O. J. Simpson and Race: Will the Verdict Split America?
No.
Has TV Gone Too Far?
No.
Is Anti-Semitism on the March Again?
No, because it never halted.
Has Public Education Clipped the Wings of the White Child?
No, because a week after that issue hit the newsstands, five white kids, their backpacks filled with books, rape whistles, and mace, hopped off a rented school bus and attempted to reintegrate Chaff Middle School, where Assistant Principal Charisma Molina stood in the doorway, barring entrance to her quasi-segregated institution.
Even if Charisma hadn’t counted on all the publicity about how if Chaff continued to improve at its current rate, it would become the fourth-highest-ranked public school in the county within the next year, she should’ve known that while 250 poor colored kids getting inferior educations will never be front-page news, the denial of even one white student access to a decent education would create a media shit storm. What no one could’ve foreseen, however, was a coalition of fed-up white parents listening to the advice of Foy Cheshire and pulling their children from underperforming public schools and overpriced private ones. And calling for a return to the forced busing many of their parents had so vehemently protested against a generation prior.
Too broke and embarrassed to provide an armed escort, the state of California watched idly as the sacrificial lambs of reintegration, Suzy Holland, Hannah Nater, Robby Haley, Keagan Goodrich, and Melonie Vandeweghe, exited the bus under the protection of not the National Guard but the magic of live television and the loud mouth of Foy Cheshire. It had been a couple of weeks since I’d seen him living out of his car, and from what I’d heard, no one showed up for the last Dum Dum meeting, even though the noted community organizer _ _ r _ _ _ O _ _ _ _ was scheduled to speak.
Shoulders hunched and arms held up protectively in front of their faces, the Dickens Five, as the quintet would come to be known, braced themselves for the pillory of rocks and bottles as they ran the gauntlet and into history. But unlike Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 3, 1957, the city of Dickens didn’t spit in their faces and hurl racial epithets; rather, it begged them for autographs, asked if they already had dates for the junior prom. Yet when the would-be enrollees reached the top of the stairs, there stood Assistant Principal Charisma doing her best Governor Faubus, refusing to budge, her arm ramrod straight against the doorjamb. Hannah, the tallest of the bunch, tried to step around her, but Charisma held firm.
“No Anglos allowed.”
Hominy and I were on the other side of the fray. Standing behind Charisma, and like anyone else apart from the custodial and food services staff at Little Rock Central High School or the University of Mississippi in 1962, on the wrong side of history. Hominy was in school that day to tutor Jim Crow. Charisma had summoned me to read the business letter that accompanied the mailed edition of Foy Cheshire’s latest reimagined multicultural text,
Of Rice and Yen
, an all-Chinese adaptation of Steinbeck’s classic set in the days of the railroad coolie. The book was a carbon copy of the original text sans articles and with all the
l
s and
r
s transposed.
Maybe evelybody in whore damn wolrd scaled, aflaid each other.
I’ll never understand why after over a half century of Charlie Chan’s Number One Son, the dude in Smashing Pumpkins, dope-ass music producers, skateboarders, and docile Asian wives married to white guys in hardware store commercials, people like Foy Cheshire still think the yen is Chinese currency and that Asian-Americans can’t pronounce their fucking
l
s, but there was something unnerving about the message’s hurried scrawl:
Dear Pawn of the Liberal Agenda,
I know that you won’t implement this backbreaking work of swaggering cleverness, but that’s your loss. This book will place me firmly in the autodidactic tradition of authors such as Virginia Woolf, Kawabata, Mishima, Mayakovsky, and DFW. See you this Monday for the first day of school. Class may be on your campus, but you will be auditing my world. Bring a pen, paper, and the nigger-whispering Sellout.
Yours truly,
Foy “Did you know Gandhi beat his wife?” Cheshire
When Charisma asked me why he cited those specific writers, I told her I didn’t know, but neglected to mention that the list was composed solely of novelists who had taken their lives. It was hard to say if the statement was some sort of suicidal ideation, but one could hope. There aren’t many black firsts left these days, and as much as Foy would be a good a candidate for the position of “first black writer to off themselves,” I had to be prepared. If he was indeed an “autodidact,” there’s no doubt he had the world’s shittiest teacher.
Foy stepped to the head of the pack to take over the negotiations, magically producing a small stack of DNA results. Flapping them, not in Charisma’s face, but directly into the lens of the nearest TV camera. “I have here in my hand a list of results that show each one of these children has maternal roots tracing their ancestries back thousands of years to Kenya’s Great Rift Valley.”
“Nigger, whose side you on?”
From inside the unhallowed halls of the school I couldn’t see who was making the inquiry, but it was a good question and, judging from the silence, one for which Foy didn’t have an answer. Not that I knew what side I was on, either. All I knew was that the Bible, conscious rappers, and Foy Cheshire weren’t on my side. Charisma, however, knew where she stood, and with two hands to his chest, she shoved Foy and the children back down the stairs like so many bowling pins. I looked around at the faces on my side of the threshold: Hominy, the teachers, Sheila Clark, each a little bit frightened but full of resolve. Shit, maybe I was on the right side of history, after all.
“I suggest if you want to go to school in Dickens so badly, you wait for that school across the street to open up.”
The prospective white students picked themselves up and turned around to gaze at their forebears, the proud pioneers of the mythical Wheaton Academy. With its pristine facilities, effective teachers, sprawling green campus, there was something undeniably attractive about Wheaton, and the youngsters began gravitating longingly toward their scholastic heaven like angels drawn by lute music and decent cafeteria food, until Foy stepped in front of them. “Don’t be fooled by that graven image,” he yelled. “That school is the root of all evil. It’s a slap in the face of anyone who’s ever stood for equality and justice. It’s a racist joke that mocks the hardworking people of this and all communities by placing a carrot on a stick and holding it up in front of old horses too tired to run. And besides, it doesn’t exist.”
