The Sellout Read online

  Dollscape I featured Ken and Malibu Barbie dressed in matching bathing suits, appropriately snorkeled and goggled, cooling by the Dream House pool. In Dollscape II, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, and a brown-skinned, egg-shaped Weeble toy were running (and wobbling) through a swampy thicket from a pack of plastic German shepherds leading an armed lynch party comprised of my G.I. Joes hooded in Ku Klux Klan sheets. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a small white Christmas ornament that spun slowly over the bog, glittering and sparkling like a disco ball in the afternoon sun.

  “That’s the North Star. They’re running toward the North Star. Toward freedom.”

  I picked up Martin, Malcolm, and Harriet, teasing my dad by asking, “What are these, inaction figures?” Martin Luther King, Jr., looked okay. Stylishly dressed in a glossy black tight-fitting suit, a copy of Gandhi’s autobiography glued to one hand and a microphone in the other. Malcolm was similarly outfitted, but was bespectacled and holding a burning Molotov cocktail that was slowly melting his hand. The smiling, racially ambiguous Weeble, which looked suspiciously like a boyhood version of my father, stayed true to its advertising slogan by wobbling and never falling down, whether balanced precariously in the palm of my hand or chased by the knights of white supremacy. There was something wrong with Ms. Tubman, though. She was outfitted in a form-fitting burlap sack, and I don’t remember any of my history primers describing the woman known as Moses as being statuesque with a 36–24–36 hourglass figure, long silky hair, plucked eyebrows, blue eyes, dick-sucking lips, and pointy titties.

  “Dad, you painted Barbie black.”

  “I wanted to maintain the beauty threshold. Establish a baseline of cuteness so that you couldn’t say one doll was prettier than the other.”

  Plantation Barbie had a string coming out of her back. I pulled it. “Math is hard, let’s go shopping,” she said in a squeaky singsong voice. I set the black heroes back down in the kitchen table swamp, moving their limbs so that they resumed their runaway poses.

  “I’m down with Ken and Barbie.”

  My father lost his scientific objectivity and grabbed me by the shirt. “What? Why?” he yelled.

  “Because the white people got better accessories. I mean, look. Harriet Tubman has a gas lantern, a walking stick, and a compass. Ken and Barbie have a dune buggy and speedboat! It’s really no contest.”

  The next day my father burned his “findings” in the fireplace. Even at the junior college level it’s publish or perish. But more than the fact he’d never get a parking space with his name on it or a reduced course load, I was a failed social experiment. A statistically insignificant son who’d shattered his hopes for both me and the black race. He made me turn in my dream book. Stopped calling my allowance “positive reinforcement” and began referring to it as “restitution.” While he never stopped pushing the “book learning,” it wasn’t long after this that he bought my first spade, pitchfork, and sheep-shearing razor. Sending me into the fields with a pat on the tush and Booker T. Washington’s famous quote pinned to my denim overalls for encouragement, “Cast down your bucket where you are.”

  * * *

  If there is a heaven worth the effort that people make to get there, then I hope for my father’s sake there’s a celestial psychology journal. One that publishes the results of failed experiments, because acknowledging unsubstantiated theories and negative results is just as important as publishing studies proving red wine is the cure-all we’d always pretended it was.

  My memories of my father aren’t all bad. Though technically I was an only child, Daddy, like many black men, had lots of kids. The citizens of Dickens were his progeny. While he wasn’t very good with horses, he was known around town as the Nigger Whisperer. Whenever some nigger who’d “done lost they motherfucking mind” needed to be talked down from a tree or freeway overpass precipice, the call would go out. My father would grab his social psychology bible, The Planning of Change, by Bennis, Benne, and Robert Chin, a woefully underappreciated Chinese-American psychologist my dad had never met but claimed as his mentor. Most kids got bedtime stories and fairy tales; I had to fall asleep to readings from chapters with titles like “The Utility of Models of the Environments of Systems for Practitioners.” My father was nothing if not a practitioner. I can’t remember a time when he didn’t bring me along on a nigger whisper. On the drive over he’d brag that the black community was a lot like him—ABD.

  “All but dissertation?”

  “All but defeated.”

  When we arrived, he’d sit me on the roof of a nearby minivan or stand me atop an alleyway Dumpster, hand me a legal pad, and tell me to take notes. Among all the flashing sirens, the crying and broken glass crunching softly under his buckskin shoes, I’d be so scared for him. But Daddy had a way of approaching the unapproachable. His face sympathetic and sullen, palms turned up like a dashboard Jesus figurine, he’d walk toward some knife-wielding lunatic whose pupils were dilated to the size of atoms smashed by a quart of Hennessy XO and a twelve-pack light-beer chaser. Ignoring the bloodstained work uniform caked in brain and fecal matter, he’d hug the person like he was greeting an old friend. People thought it was his selflessness that allowed him to get so close, but to me it was his voice that got him over. Doo-wop bass deep, my father spoke in F-sharp. A resonant low-pitched tone that rooted you in place like a bobby-socked teenager listening to the Five Satins sing “In the Still of the Night.” It’s not music that soothes the savage beast but the systematic desensitization. And Father’s voice had a way of relaxing the enraged and allowing them to confront their fears anxiety-free.

  When I was in grade school, I knew from how the taste of the pomegranates would bring you to tears, from the way the summer sun turned our Afros blood-orange red, and from how giddy my father would get whenever he talked about Dodger Stadium, white Zinfandel, and the latest green flash sunset he’d seen from the summit of Mount Wilson that California was a special place. And if you think about it, pretty much everything that made the twentieth century bearable was invented in a California garage: the Apple computer, the Boogie Board, and gangster rap. Thanks to my dad’s career in nigger-whispering, I was there for the birth of the latter, when at six o’clock on a cold, dark ghetto morning two blocks down from where I live, Carl “Kilo G” Garfield, hallucinating high on his own supply and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s brooding lyricism, burst out of his garage squinting into his Moleskin, a smoldering crack pipe dangling from fingertips. It was the height of the crack rock era. I was about ten when he clambered into the bed of his tricked-out, hot-rod yellow Toyota pickup truck, the TO and the TA buffed out and painted over so that the brand name on the tailgate read just YO, and began reciting his verse at the top of his lungs, the slurred iambic pentameter punctuated with gun claps from his nickel-plated .38 and pleas from his mama to take his naked ass inside.

  THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT-SKINNED SPADE

  Half a liter, half a liter,

  Half a liter onward

  All in the alley of Death

  Rode the Olde English Eight Hundred.

  Forward, the Light-skinned Spade!

  “Charge for the Bloods!” he said:

  Into the alley of Death

  Rode the Olde English Eight Hundred …

  When the SWAT team finally arrived on the scene, taking cover behind patrol car doors and the sycamore trees, clutching their assault rifles to their chests, none of them could stop giggling long enough to take the kill shot.

  Theirs not to reason what the fuck,

  Theirs but to shoot and duck:

  Niggers to the right of them

  Niggers to the left of them,

  Niggers in front of them

  Partied and blundered

  Bumrush’d at caps and hollow point shell

  While hooptie and hoodlum fell

  They that had banged so well

  Came thro’ the jaws of Death

  Back from the ho’s of Hell,

&n
bsp; All that was left of them

  Left of the Olde English Eight Hundred.

  And when my father, the Nigger Whisperer—that beatific smile splashed across his face—eased his way past the police barricade, put a tweed-jacketed arm around the broken-down drug dealer, and spoke some whispered profundity into his ear, Kilo G blinked blankly like a stage-show volunteer struck dumb by an Indian casino hypnotist, then calmly handed over his gun and the keys to his heart. The police closed in for the arrest, but my father asked them to stay back, beckoning Kilo to finish his poem, even joining in at the end of each line, pretending he knew the words.

  When can their shine and buzz fade?

  Oh the buckwild charge they made!

  All the motherfuckin’ world wondered.

  Respect the charge they made

  Respect the charge of the Light-skinned Spade

  The noble now empty Olde English Eight Hundred.

  The police vans and cruisers disappeared into the morning haze, leaving my father, godlike, alone in the middle of the street, reveling in his humanitarianism. Cockily, he turned toward me. “You know what I said to get that psychotic motherfucker to lower his gun?”

  “What did you say, Daddy?”

  “I said, ‘Brother, you have to ask yourself two questions, Who am I? And how may I become myself?’ That’s basic person-centered therapeutics. You want the client to feel important, to feel that he or she is in control of the healing process. Remember that shit.”

  I wanted to ask him why he never spoke to me in the same reassuring tone that he used with his “clients,” but I knew, instead of an answer, I’d get the belt, and my healing process would involve Mercurochrome and, in place of being grounded, a sentence of five to no less than three weeks of Jungian active imagination. In the distance, hurtling away from me like some distant spiral galaxy, the red and blue sirens spun silently but brilliantly, lighting up the mist of the morning marine layer like some inner-city aurora borealis. I fingered a bullet hole in the tree bark, thinking that like the slug buried ten rings deep in the trunk, I’d never leave this neighborhood. That I’d go to the local high school. Graduate in the middle of my class, another Willie Lump Lump with a six-line résumé rife with spelling errors, trekking back and forth between the Job Center, the strip club parking lot, and the civil service exam tutorials. I’d marry, fuck, and kill Marpessa Delissa Dawson, the bitch next door and my one and only love. Have kids. Threaten them with military school and promises not to bail them out if they ever got arrested. I’d be the type of nigger who played pool at the titty bar and cheated on his wife with the blond cheese girl from the Trader Joe’s on National and Westwood Boulevards. I’d stop pestering my father about my missing mother, finally admitting to myself that motherhood, like the artistic trilogy, is overrated. After a lifetime of beating myself up for never having been breast-fed or finishing The Lord of the Rings, Paradise, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, eventually, like all lower-middle-class Californians, I’d die in the same bedroom I’d grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that’ve been there since the ’68 quake. So introspective questions like “Who am I? And how can I be that person?” didn’t pertain to me then, because I already knew the answer. Like the entire town of Dickens, I was my father’s child, a product of my environment, and nothing more. Dickens was me. And I was my father. Problem is, they both disappeared from my life, first my dad, and then my hometown, and suddenly I had no idea who I was, and no clue how to become myself.

  Two

  Westside, nigger! What?

  Three

  The three basic laws of ghetto physics are: Niggers in your face tend to stay in your face; no matter where the sun is in the sky, the time is always “Half past a monkey’s ass and a quarter to his balls”; and the third is that whenever someone you love has been shot, invariably you will be back home on winter break, halfway through your junior year of college, taking the horse on a little afternoon ride to rendezvous with your father for a meeting of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, the local think tank, where he and the rest of the neighborhood savants will ply you with cider, cinnamon rolls, and conversion therapy. (Not that your dad thinks that you’re gay, but he’s worried that you never stay out past eleven and the word “booty” doesn’t seem to be in your vocabulary.) It’s a cold night. You’re minding your own business, savoring the last of your vanilla shake, when you come upon a drove of detectives huddled around the body. You dismount. Step closer and recognize a shoe, or a shirtsleeve, or a piece of jewelry. My father was facedown in the intersection. I recognized him by his fist, cocked and knuckled up tight, the veins on the back of his hand still bulging and full. I compromised the crime scene by picking lint off his matted Afro, straightening the rumpled collar of his Oxford shirt, brushing the pebbles of gravel from his cheek, and, according to the police report, most egregiously by sticking my hand in the blood pooled around his body, which to my surprise was cold. Not hot, roiling with the black anger and lifelong frustration of a decent, albeit slightly crazy man who never became what he thought he was.

  “You the son?”

  The detective looked me up and down. His brow wrinkled, his eyes flicking back and forth from identifying feature to identifying feature. Behind the dismissive smirk I could almost see his brain cross-referencing my scars, height, and build with some database of wanted felons filed inside his head.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You something special?”

  “Huh?”

  “The officers involved said that when he charged them, he shouted, and I quote, ‘I’m warning you, you anal-retentive, authoritarian archetypes, you don’t know who my son is!’ So, you someone special?”

  Who am I? And how can I be that person?

  “No, I’m no one special.”

  You’re supposed to cry when your dad dies. Curse the system because your father has died at the hands of the police. Bemoan being lower-middle-class and colored in a police state that protects only rich white people and movie stars of all races, though I can’t think of any Asian-American ones. But I didn’t cry. I thought his death was a trick. Another one of his elaborate schemes to educate me on the plight of the black race and to inspire me to make something of myself, I half expected him to get up, brush himself off, and say, “See, nigger, if this could happen to the world’s smartest black man, just imagine what could happen to your dumb ass. Just because racism is dead don’t mean they still don’t shoot niggers on sight.”

  Now, if I had my druthers, I couldn’t care less about being black. To this day, when the census form arrives in the mail, under the “RACE” question I check the box marked “Some other race” and proudly write in “Californian.” Of course, two months later, a census worker shows up at my door, takes one look at me, and says, “You foul nigger. As a black man, what do you have to say for yourself?” And as a black man, I never have anything to say for myself. Hence, the need for a motto, which, if we had, I’d raise my fist, shout it out, and slam the door in the government’s face. But we don’t. So I mumble Sorry and scribble my initials next to the box marked “Black, African-American, Negro, coward.”

  No, what little inspiration I have in life comes not from any sense of racial pride. It stems from the same age-old yearning that has produced great presidents and great pretenders, birthed captains of industry and captains of football; that Oedipal yen that makes men do all sorts of shit we’d rather not do, like try out for basketball and fistfight the kid next door because in this family we don’t start shit but we damn sure finish it. I speak only of that most basic of needs, the child’s need to please the father.

  Many fathers foster that need in their children through a wanton manipulation that starts in infancy. They dote on the kids with airplane spins, ice cream cones on cold days, and weekend custody trips to the Salton Sea and the science museum. The incessant magic tricks that produced dollar pieces out of thin air and the open-house mind games that made you think that the
view from the second-floor Tudor-style miracle in the hills, if not the world, would soon be yours are designed to fool us into believing that without daddies and the fatherly guidance they provide, the rest of our lives will be futile Mickey Mouseless I-told-ya-so existences. But later in adolescence, after one too many accidental driveway basketball elbows, drunken midnight slaps to the upside of our heads, puffs of crystal meth exhaled in our faces, jalapeño peppers snapped in half and ground into our lips for saying “fuck” when you were only trying to be like Daddy, you come to realize that the frozen niceties and trips to the drive-thru car wash were bait-and-switch parenting. Ploys and cover-ups for their reduced sex drives, stagnant take-home pay, and their own inabilities to live up to their father’s expectations. The Oedipal yen to please Father is so powerful that it holds sway even in a neighborhood like mine, where fatherhood for the most part happens in absentia, yet nevertheless the kids sit dutifully by the window at night waiting for Daddy to come home. Of course, my problem was that Daddy was always home.

  After all the evidence photos had been taken, the witnesses interviewed, and macabre homicide jokes cracked, without dropping my shake, I lifted my father’s bullet-riddled body up by the underarms and dragged his heels through the chalk outline, through the yellow numbered shell-casing markers, through the intersection, the parking lot, and the glass double doors. I sat my father down at his favorite table, ordered his “usual,” two chocolate frosteds and a large milk, and placed it in front of him. Since he had arrived thirty-five minutes late and dead, the meeting was already in progress, chaired by Foy Cheshire, fading TV personality, erstwhile friend of my father, and a man all too anxious to fill the void in leadership. There was a brief moment of awkwardness. The skeptical Dum Dums looking at the heavyset Foy like the nation must have looked to Andrew Johnson after Lincoln had been assassinated.