The Sellout (7 page)
It’d always been my father’s dream to own 205 Bernard Avenue outright. “The Ponderosa,” he called it. “Sharecropping, transracial adoption, and ‘renting to own’ is for suckers,” he liked to say while he pored through real estate and no-money-down investment books, punching imaginary mortgage scenarios into the calculator. “My memoir … that’ll be an easy twenty thousand upfront … We can pawn your mama’s jewelry for five, six thou … and even though there’s an early-withdrawal penalty on your college fund, if we cash that mug out now, home ownership will be right around the corner.”
There never was any memoir, only titles shouted out while he was in the shower fucking some nineteen-year-old bubble-gum-blowing “colleague from the university.” He’d stick his wet head out the door and, through the steam, ask what did I think about “The Interpretation of Niggers” or my favorite, “I’m Ai’ight. You’re Ai’ight.” And there was no jewelry. My mother, a former
Jet
magazine Beauty of the Week, had no baubles or trinkets on in the faded tearsheet pasted above my headboard. She was a modestly coiffed, curvy expanse of thighs and lip gloss lounging on a backyard diving board in a gold lamé bikini. All I knew about her was the extensive biographical information listed in the bottom right-hand corner of the photo. “Laurel Lescook is a student from Key Biscayne, Florida, who enjoys biking, photography, and poetry.” Later in life I would track Ms. Lescook down. She was a paralegal in Atlanta who remembered my father as a man whom she’d never met, but who, after her one photo pictorial came out in September of ’77, inundated her with marriage proposals, creepy poetry, and Kodak Instamatic photos of his erect penis. Given that my college savings amounted to $236.72, the total take from my sparsely attended black mitzvah, and that both my father’s manuscript and my mother’s jewelry collection were nonexistent, you’d think we’d never come to own that house, but as luck would have it, given my father’s wrongful death at the hands of the police, and the $2 million settlement I’d later received, in a sense he and I bought the farm on the same day.
At first blush, his purchase of the proverbial farm seems the more metaphorical of the two transactions. But as even the most cursory of those early annual inspections by the California Department of Food and Agriculture bore out, to call 205 Bernard Avenue, that two-acre, just-this-side-of-lunar-surface fertile parcel of land in the most infamous ghetto in Los Angeles County with its hollowed-out 1973 Winnebago Chieftain motor home for a barn, a dilapidated-overcrowded-Section-8-henhouse-topped-by-a-weathervane-so-rusted-in-place-that-the-Santa-Ana-winds-El-Niño-and-the-’83-tornado-couldn’t-move-it, medfly-infested-two-tree-lemon-grove, three horses, four pigs, a two-legged goat with shopping-cart wheels for back hooves, twelve stray cats, one cow herd of livestock, and the ever-present cumulonimbus cloud of flies that circled the inflatable “fishing” pond of liquefied swamp gas and fermented rat shit that I pulled out of foreclosure on the very same day my dad decided to tell the undercover police officer Edward Orosco to “move his piece o’ shit Ford Crown Victoria and stop blocking the goddamn intersection!” with funds borrowed against what the courts would later determine to be a $2 million settlement for gross miscarriage of justice, to call that unsubsidized tract of inner-city Afro-agrarian ineptitude a “farm” would be to push the limits of literality. Had me and Pops founded Jamestown instead of the Pilgrims, the Indians would have looked at our wilted, meandering, labyrinthlike rows of maize and kumquats and said, “Today’s corn planting seminar is canceled, because you niggers ain’t going to make it.”
When you grow up on a farm in the middle of the ghetto, you come to see that what your father always told you during morning chores was true: People eat the shit you shovel them. That like the pigs, we all have our heads in the trough. While the hogs don’t believe in God, the American dream, or the pen being mightier than the sword, they do believe in the feed in the same desperate way we believe in the Sunday paper, the Bible, black urban radio, and hot sauce. On his off days, he’d often invite the neighborhood over just to watch me work. Though the Farms was zoned for agriculture, most of the families had long abandoned the salt-of-the-earth farming lifestyle for backyard acreage that featured full-sized basketball and tennis courts and maybe a guest cottage in the corner. And although a few families still maintained chicken coops and maybe raised a cow, or ran an equestrian school for at-risk youth, we were the only family giving full-scale farming a go. Trying to cash in on some forgotten post–Civil War promise. Forty acres and a fool. “This little nigger not going be like the rest of you niggers,” my father would crow, one hand on his dick, the other pointing at me. “My son going to be a Renaissance nigger. A modern-day Galileo out this motherfucker!” Then he’d crack open a bottle of bumpy-face, hand out the paper cups, ice cubes, and splashes of lemon-lime soda, and from the back porch they’d watch me pick strawberries, snow peas, or whatever the fuck was in season. Cotton was the worst. Forget the stooping, the thorns, the droning Paul Robeson spirituals that he played loud enough to drown out the Lopezes’ ranchero music coming from next door, or that planting, watering, and harvesting cotton was a complete waste of time, because the only gin we had was the Styrofoam cup of Seagram’s in his hand, picking cotton sucked because it made Daddy nostalgic. A sentimental drunk and full of gin ’n’ juice pride, he’d brag to our black neighbors how I’d never spent a day in day care or had a sandbox play date. Instead, he swore up and down I was nannied and mammied by a sow named Suzy Q and was the loser in a sibling “piglet versus niglet” rivalry to a porcine genius named Savoir Faire.
Daddy’s friends would watch me expertly pluck cotton bolls from the dried stems, waiting for me to snort and overthrow the Orwellian social order, and thus confirm my hog-tied upbringing.
1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes on four legs, or six wings and a biscuit, is a friend.
3. No Pigger shall wear shorts in the fall, much less the winter.
4. No Pigger shall be caught sleeping.
5. No Pigger shall drink presweetened Kool-Aid.
6. All Piggers are created equal, but some Piggers ain’t shit.
I don’t remember my father tying my right hand behind my back or being babysat in the pigpen, but I do remember pushing Savoir Faire, one hand on each prickly milk-fattened hindquarter, up the wooden ramp and into the trailer. The last driver on Earth to use hand signals, my father took the corners slowly, lecturing me on how fall was the best time to kill a pig because there were less flies and the meat would keep for a while outside, because once you freeze it, the quality starts to go down. Unbuckled, like any child raised before car seats and airbags, I knelt in the seat facing backward, looking out that tiny rear window at Savior Faire, the doomed, cloven-hoofed genius squealing like a four-hundred-pound bitch the whole way to the slaughterhouse. “You done won your last game of Connect Four, you fucking getting mucus on the pieces, ‘I sunk your battleship,’ ‘King me!’ son of a bitch.” At stoplights Daddy would stick his arm out of the window, bent at the elbow, hand toward the ground, palm facing the rear. “People eat the shit you shovel them!” he’d shout over the radio music, somehow shifting, steering, turning on the blinker, making the hand signal, a left turn, singing along to Ella Fitzgerald, and reading the
L.A. Times
bestseller list all at the same time.
People eat the shit you shovel them.
* * *
I’d like to say, “I buried my father in the backyard and that day I became a man,” or some other droll American bullshit, but all that happened was that day I became relieved. No more trying to look uninvolved as my own father fought for parking spaces at the Farmers Market. Shouting down Beverly Hills dowagers asserting their luxury sedan right of way by nosing their gigantic cars into spaces marked
COMPACT ONLY
.
You stupid overmedicated bitch. If you don’t back that fucking jalopy out my space, I swear to God, I’m going to punch you in your anti-aging-cold-cream face and permanently reverse five hundred years of white privilege and five hundred thousand dollars of plastic surgery.
People eat the shit you shovel them. And sometimes, when I pull up to the drive-thru window on horseback or return the disbelieving stares of a convertible carload of out-of-town
vatos
pointing at the black
vaquero
grazing his livestock in the trash-strewn fields underneath the power lines that stretch Eiffel Tower–like alongside West Greenleaf Boulevard, I think about all the lines of ad infinitum bullshit my father shoveled down my throat, until his dreams became my dreams. Sometimes, while I’m sharpening the plowshare and shearing the sheep, I feel like every moment of my life isn’t mine but one of his “déjà vus.” No, I don’t miss my father. I just regret that I never had the nerve to ask him if it was really true that I’d spent the sensorimotor and preoperational stages of my life with one hand tied behind my back. Talk about starting life off with a handicap. Fuck being black. Try learning to crawl, ride a tricycle, cover both eyes while playing peek-a-boo, and constructing a meaningful theory of mind, all with one hand.
You won’t find Dickens, California, on the map, because about five years after my father died, and a year after I graduated college, it, too, perished. There was no loud send-off. Dickens didn’t go out with a bang like Nagasaki, Sodom and Gomorrah, and my dad. It was quietly removed like those towns that vanished from maps of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, atomic accident by atomic accident. But the city of Dickens’s disappearance was no accident. It was part of a blatant conspiracy by the surrounding, increasingly affluent, two-car-garage communities to keep their property values up and blood pressures down. When the housing boom hit in the early part of the century, many moderate-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles County underwent real estate makeovers. Once pleasant working-class enclaves became rife with fake tits and fake graduation and crime rates, hair and tree transplants, lipo- and cholosuctions. In the wee hours of the night, after the community boards, homeowner associations, and real estate moguls banded together and coined descriptive names for nondescript neighborhoods, someone would bolt a large glittery Mediterranean-blue sign high up on a telephone pole. And when the fog lifted, the residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified blocks awoke to find out they lived in Crest View, La Cienega Heights, or Westdale. Even though there weren’t any topographical features like crests, views, heights, or dales to be found within ten miles. Nowadays Angelenos who used to see themselves as denizens of the west, east, and south sides wage protracted legal battles over whether their two-bedroom, charming country cottages reside within the confines of Beverlywood or Beverlywood Adjacent.
Dickens underwent a different type of transition. One clear South Central morning, we awoke to find that the city hadn’t been renamed but the signs that said
WELCOME TO THE CITY OF DICKENS
were gone. There was never an official announcement, an article in the paper, or a feature on the evening news. No one cared. In a way, most Dickensians were relieved to not be from anywhere. It saved them the embarrassment of having to answer the small-talk “Where are you from?” question with “Dickens,” then watching the person apologetically back away from you. “Sorry about that. Don’t kill me!” Rumor had it the county had revoked our charter because of the admittedly widespread local political corruption. The police and fire stations were closed down. You’d call what used to be city hall and a foul-mouthed teenager named Rebecca would answer,
Don’t no niggers name Dickens live here, so don’t be calling here no more!
The autonomous school board dismantled. Internet searches turned up only references to “Dickens, Charles John Huffam” and to a dust bowl county in Texas named after some unfortunate sap who may or may not have died at the Alamo.
In the years after my father died, the neighborhood looked to me to be the next Nigger Whisperer. I wish I could say that I answered the call to duty out of a sense of familial pride and communal concern, but the truth was, I did it because I had no social life. Nigger-whispering got me out of the house and away from the crops and the animals. I met interesting people and tried to convince them that no matter how much heroin and R. Kelly they had in their systems, they absolutely could not fly. When my father nigger-whispered, it didn’t look so hard. Unfortunately, I wasn’t blessed with my father’s sonorous, luxury-car-commercial voiceover bass profundo. I’m squeamishly shrill and possess all the speaking gravitas of the “shiest” member of your favorite boy band. The skinny, soft-spoken one who in the music video sits in the backseat of the convertible and never gets the girl, much less a solo, so I was issued a bullhorn. Ever try to whisper through a bullhorn?
Up until the city’s disappearance, the workload wasn’t so bad. I was an every-other-month crisis negotiator, a farmer doing a little nigger-whispering on the side. But since Dickens’s erasure I found myself in my pajamas, at least once a week, standing barefoot in an apartment complex courtyard, bullhorn in hand, staring up at some distraught, partially hotcombed-headed mother dangling her baby over a second-floor balcony ledge. When my father did the whispering, Friday nights were the busiest. Every payday he’d be inundated by teeming hordes of the bipolar poor, who having spent it all in one place, and grown tired and unsated from the night’s notoriously shitty prime-time television lineup, would unwedge themselves from between the couch-bound obese family members and the boxes of unsold Avon beauty products, turn off the kitchen radio pumping song after song extolling the virtues of Friday nights living it up at the club, popping bottles, niggers, and cherries in that order, then having canceled the next day’s appointment with their mental health care professional, the chatterbox cosmetologist, who after years doing heads, still knows only one hairstyle—fried, dyed, and laid to the side—they’d choose that Friday, “day of Venus,” goddess of love, beauty, and unpaid bills, to commit suicide, murder, or both. But under my watch people tend to snap on Wednesday. Hump day. And so sans juju, gris-gris, and the foggiest notion of what to say, I’ll press the trigger, and with a loud squeal of ear-piercing feedback, the bullhorn buzzes to staticky life. Half the unchosen tribe waiting for me to say the magic words and save the day; the other half waiting expectantly for a bathrobe to fly open and some milk-engorged titties to come popping out.
