The Sellout Page 2

  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?”

  “Yes, sir,” he’d say politely.

  “Well,” I’d say, rubbing his ball-peen-hammer head, “I’m that long red slide.”

  The teacher-poet slaps me hard across the face. And I know why. She, like most everyone here, wants me to feel guilty. Wants me to show some contrition, to break down in tears, to save the state some money and her the embarrassment of sharing my blackness. I, too, keep waiting for that familiar, overwhelming sense of black guilt to drop me to my knees. Knock
me down peg by meaningless idiomatic peg, until I’m bent over in total supplication to America, tearfully confessing my sins against color and country, begging my proud black history for forgiveness. But there’s nothing. Only the buzz of the air conditioner and my high, and as security escorts her back to her seat, the little boy trailing behind her, holding on to her scarf for dear life, the sting in my cheek that she hopes will smart in perpetuity has already faded and I find myself unable to conjure up a single guilty pang.

  That’s the bitch of it, to be on trial for my life, and for the first time ever not feel guilty. That omnipresent guilt that’s as black as fast-food apple pie and prison basketball is finally gone, and it feels almost white to be unburdened from the racial shame that makes a bespectacled college freshman dread Fried Chicken Fridays at the dining hall. I was the “diversity” the school trumpeted so loudly in its glossy literature, but there wasn’t enough financial aid in the world to get me to suck the gristle from a leg bone in front of the entire freshman class. I’m no longer party to that collective guilt that keeps the third-chair cellist, the administrative secretary, the stock clerk, the not-really-all-that-attractive-but-she’s-black beauty pageant winner from showing up for work Monday morning and shooting every white motherfucker in the place. It’s a guilt that has obligated me to mutter “My bad” for every misplaced bounce pass, politician under federal investigation, every bug-eyed and Rastus-voiced comedian, and every black film made since 1968. But I don’t feel responsible anymore. I understand now that the only time black people don’t feel guilty is when we’ve actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief. In the way that cooning is a relief, voting Republican is a relief, marrying white is a relief—albeit a temporary one.

  Uncomfortable with being so comfortable, I make one last attempt to be at one with my people. I close my eyes, place my head on the table, and bury my broad nose in the crook of my arm. I focus on my breathing, shutting out the flags and the fanfare, and cull through my vast repository of daydream blackness until I dredge up the scratchy archival footage of the civil rights struggle. Handling it carefully by its sensitive edges, I remove it from its sacred canister, thread it through mental sprockets and psychological gates, and past the bulb in my head that flickers with the occasional decent idea. I flip on the projector. There’s no need to focus. Human carnage is always filmed and remembered in the highest definition. The images are crystal-clear, permanently burned into our memories and plasma television screens. That incessant Black History Month loop of barking dogs, gushing fire hoses, and carbuncles oozing blood through two-dollar haircuts, colorless blood spilling down faces shiny with sweat and the light of the evening news, these are the pictures that form our collective 16 mm superego. But today I’m all medulla oblongata and I can’t concentrate. The film inside my head begins to skip and sputter. The sound cuts out, and protesters falling like dominoes in Selma, Alabama, begin to look like Keystone Negroes slipping en masse on an affirmative-action banana peel and tumbling to the street, a tangled mess of legs and dreams akimbo. The marchers on Washington become civil rights zombies, one hundred thousand strong, somnambulating lockstep onto the mall, stretching out their stiff, needy fingers for their pound of flesh. The head zombie looks exhausted from being raised from the dead every time someone wants to make a point about what black people should and shouldn’t do, can and cannot have. He doesn’t know the mic is on, and under his breath he confesses that if he’d only tasted that unsweetened swill that passed for iced tea at the segregated lunch counters in the South he would’ve called the whole civil rights thing off. Before the boycotts, the beatings, and the killings. He places a can of diet soda on the podium. “Things go better with Coke,” he says. “It’s the real thing!”

  Still, I don’t feel guilty. If I’m indeed moving backward and dragging all of black America down with me, I couldn’t care less. Is it my fault that the only tangible benefit to come out of the civil rights movement is that black people aren’t as afraid of dogs as they used to be? No, it isn’t.

  The Marshal of the Court rises, pounds her gavel, and begins to incant the Court’s invocation: “The honorable, the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.”

  Hampton lifts me shakily to my feet, and we, along with all those in attendance, rise in ministerial solemnity as the Justices enter the courtroom, trying their level best to look impartial, with their Eisenhower-era hairstyles and “another day, another dollar” blank workaday expressions. Too bad it’s impossible not to come off as pompous when you’re wearing a silk black robe and the Negro Justice has absentmindedly forgotten to take off his $50,000 platinum Rolex. I suppose if I had better job security than Father Time, I’d be smug as a motherfucker, too.

  Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!

  At this point, after five years of endless decisions, reversals, appeals, postponements, and pretrial hearings, I don’t even know if I’m the plaintiff or the defendant. All I know is that the sour-faced Justice with the post-racial chronometer won’t stop looking at me. His beady eyes fixed in this unblinking and unforgiving stare, he’s angry that I’ve fucked up his political expediency. Blown up his spot like a little kid visiting the city zoo for the first time and, frustrated at having walked past cage after seemingly empty reptile cage, finally stops at an enclosure and shouts, “There he is!”

  There he is, Chamaeleo africanus tokenus hidden way in the back among all the shrubbery, his slimy feet gripped tightly around the judicial branch in a cool torpor, silently gnawing on the leaves of injustice. “Out of sight, out of mind” is the black workingman’s motto, but now the entire country can see this one, our collective noses pressed to the glass in amazement that he’s been able to camouflage his Alabama jet-black ass against the red, white, and blue of the American flag for so long.

  “All persons having business before the honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this honorable Court!”

  Hamp kneads my shoulder, a reminder not to sweat the nappy-headed magistrate or the republic for which he stands. This is the Supreme Court, not the People’s Court. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t need copies of dry cleaner receipts, police reports, or a photograph of a dented bumper. Here the lawyers argue, the judges question, and I get to simply kick back and enjoy my high.

  The Chief Justice enters the case. His dispassionate midwestern demeanor goes a long way toward easing the tension in the room. “We’ll hear argument first this morning in case 09-2606…” He pauses, rubs his eyes, then composes himself. “In case 09-2606, Me v. the United States of America.” There’s no outburst. Only giggling and eye rolling accompanied by some loud “Who this motherfucker think he is?” teeth sucking. I admit it, Me v. the United States sounds a little self-aggrandizing, but what can I say? I’m Me. Literally. A not-so-proud descendant of the Kentucky Mees, one of the first black families to settle in southwest Los Angeles, I can trace my roots all the way back to that first vessel to escape state-sanctioned southern repression—the Greyhound bus. But when I was born, my father, in the twisted tradition of Jewish entertainers who change their names and the uptight, underachieving black men who envy them, decided to truncate the family name, dropping that last unwieldy e like Jack Benny dropped Benjamin Kubelsky, Kirk Douglas—Danielovitch, like Jerry Lewis dropped Dean Martin, Max Baer dropped Schmeling, Third Bass dropped science, and Sammy Davis, Jr., dropped Judaism all together. He wasn’t going to let that extra vowel hold me back like it did him. Pops liked to say that he didn’t Anglicize or Africanize my surname, but actualized it, that I was born having reached my full potential and could skip Maslow, third grade, and Jesus.