The Sellout Read online

  As the supposed Murder Capital of the World, Dickens never got much tourist trade. Occasionally, a pack of college kids vacationing in Los Angeles for the first time would stop at a busy intersection just long enough to shoot twenty seconds of shaky handheld video of them jumping up and down, whooping like crazed savages, shouting, “Check us out! We’re in Dickens, California. What you know about that, fool?” then post the footage of their urban safari on the Internet. But when all the WELCOME TO DICKENS signs were removed, there was no Blarney Stone to kiss, the urban voyeurs stopped coming. Sometimes genuine sightseers did come through. Mostly old and pensioned, they’d troll the streets in their out-of-state license-plated RVs looking for the last link to their youths. Those halcyon days the campaign politicians always promise to take us back to when America was powerful and respected, a land of morals and virtue and cheap gas. And asking a local, “Excuse me, do you know where I can find Hominy?” was like asking some penny-ante lounge singer if they knew the way to San Jose.

  Hominy Jenkins is the last surviving member of the Little Rascals, that madcap posse of street urchins who, from the Roaring Twenties until the Reaganomics eighties, flummoxed potbellied coppers, ditching school seven days a week and twice on Sundays on matinee movie screens and after-school televisions around the world. Signed by Hal Roach Studios in the mid-1930s at a reputed $350 a week to be Buckwheat Thomas’s understudy, Hominy cashed his checks and bided his time by playing minor roles: the silent little brother who had to be babysat while Mother was away visiting Papa in jail, the colored kid on the ass-end of the runaway mule. He made do delivering the occasional throwaway one-liner from the back of the one-room schoolhouse. Acknowledging talking babies, wild men from Borneo, and Alfalfa’s soap-bubble solos with an exaggerated roll of the eyeballs and his trademark “Yowza!” The underutilization of his sooty black cuteness made bearable with the knowledge that one day soon he’d step into the oversized, curly-toed genie shoes of the great pickaninnies that preceded him. Take his rightful place in the wisecracking pantheon of Farina, Stymie, and Buckwheat, and carry the legacy of bowler-hatted, ragamuffin racism well into the 1950s. But the era of the human golliwog and the one-reeler died before his turn came. Hollywood had all the blackness it needed in the demi-whiteness of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, the brooding Negritude of James Dean, and the broad, gravity-defying, Venus hot-to-trot roundness of Marilyn Monroe’s ass.

  When they found his house, Hominy would greet his devotees with a wide Polident smile and an arthritic finger-wiggling high sign. Inviting them in for Hi-C Fruit Punch and, if they were lucky, slices of my watermelon. I doubt that he told his aging fan base the same stories he shared with us. It’s hard to say what started the love affair between me and Marpessa Delissa Dawson. She’s three years older than me and I’ve known her all my life. A lifelong resident of the Farms, her mother ran the Sun to Sun Equestrian and Polo School from their backyard. They used to call me whenever they were short a show jumper or a Number 4 on the Junior Spearchukkers. I wasn’t much good at either, because Appaloosas are shitty jumpers and using your left hand is illegal in polo. When we were younger, me, Marpessa, and the rest of the kids on the block would jet over to Hominy’s house after school, because what could be cooler than watching an hour of Little Rascals with a Little Rascal? In those days, when remote control television was your father screaming, “Shawn! Don! Mark! One of you motherfuckers come downstairs and change this goddamn channel,” fine-tuning a fickle ultra-high-frequency station like Channel 52, KBSC-TV Corona, Los Angeles, on a beat-up black-and-white portable missing one rabbit ear antenna and all its dials required a vascular surgeon’s touch. It took forever to finagle a set of plumbing pliers around the stubby metal knobs, looking for any angularity that might result in the weest bit of channel-changing torque or vertical and horizontal hold. But when the opening title sequence, accompanied by the drunken warbling horns in the Our Gang theme song, popped up on the TV, we’d settle in around gray-haired Hominy and those red-hot space heater coils like slave children gathered ’round ol’ Remus and his fire.

  “Tell us another story, Uncle Remus, we means Hominy.”

  “I ever tell you all about the time I fucked the shit out of Darla on the He Man Woman Hater’s Club set during our twentieth reunion?”

  I didn’t realize it then, but Hominy, like any other child star still standing in the klieg light afterglow of a long-ago canceled career, was bat-shit crazy. We thought that he was being funny; dry humping the TV with every low-angle shot of Darla’s exposed lace panties. “In real life that bitch wasn’t as stingy with the pussy as she was in the movies.” Slamming his pelvis into the screen, shouting, “That’s for Alfalfa, Mickey, Porky, Chubby, Froggy, Butch, that stuck-up punk Wally, and the rest of the gang!” punctuating his blue-balls roll call with increasingly violent thrusts. Needless to say, there’s an anger to Hominy. One that comes from not being as famous as you think you should be.

  When he wasn’t reminiscing about his sexual conquests, Hominy liked to brag about how he was fluent in four languages, because they shot each short four times, once in English, French, Spanish, and German. The first time he told us this, we laughed in his face, because all his mentor, Buckwheat, did was flash his greasy gap-toothed grin and say “O’tay, ’Panky,” in that marble-mouthed pickaninny pluperfect of his, and “Okay, Spanky” is “Okay, Spanky” in any fucking language.

  Once, one of my favorites episodes, “Mush and Milk,” was on, and to prove his boast, Hominy turned down the volume just as the gang sat around the Bleak Hill Boarding School breakfast table. Kindly Old Cap was waiting on his back pension. The house mother, wrinkled and as temperamental as a dog pound shar-pei, spat and hissed at the kids, one of whom, having screwed up the morning chores, whispers into another urchin’s ear a line we didn’t need sound to hear, because we’d heard it a million times.

  “Don’t drink the milk,” we said aloud.

  “Why?” A towheaded white boy mouthed.

  “It’s spoiled,” we whispered in unison.

  Don’t drink the milk. Pass it on. And Hominy did just that, dubbing each waif’s warning to the next rascal down in a different language.

  “No bebas la leche. ¿Porqué? Está mala.”

  “Ne bois pas le lait. Pourquoi? C’est gate.”

  “Trink die Milch nicht! Warum? Die ist schlecht.”

  Don’t drink the milk. Why? It’s spoiled.

  The milk was spoiled because in reality it was liquefied plaster of paris that hadn’t yet hardened into a sight gag, and child stardom spoiled Hominy. Sometimes after a particularly abrupt edit for the sake of political correctness, he’d stomp his feet and pout. “I was in that scene! They edited me out! Spanky finds Aladdin’s lamp, he rubs it and says, ‘I wish Hominy was a monkey. I wish Hominy was a monkey!’ And lo and motherfucking behold, I’m a motherfucking monkey.”

  “A monkey?”

  “A capuchin, to be exact, and my method-acting monkey-ass hit the streets running, baby! And I comes across a nigger soda jerk making time with his old lady, he closes his eyes, leans in for a little loving; she sees me, splits, and that fool plants a wet one right on my big pink simian lips. That had them rolling in the aisles. ‘A Lad in a Lamp,’ most screen time I ever had. I fought the whole damn police force, and by the end of the picture, me and Spanky eating cake ’n’ shit, and running the whole goddamn town. And let me tell you, Spanky was without question the coolest motherfuckering white boy ever. Yowza!”

  It was hard to determine if he’d been turned into a real monkey or if Hal Roach Studios, never known for its extravagant special effects, just opened up the timeless cookbook of Classic American Stereotyping and turned to the one-step recipe for Negro Monkeyshines: 1. Just add tail. Whatever the case, as the celluloid snippets of censored slapstick racism piled up on the cutting room floor, it became apparent that Hominy was a sort of Little Rascals stunt coon. His film career was a compendium of unseen outtakes where he’s
doused with all things white: sunny-side-up eggs, paint, and pancake flour avalanches. Eyeballs bulging with fear and hyperthyroidism, sometimes the sight of a ghost in an abandoned house or a congregation of newly baptized holy ghost Negroes speaking in tongues and somnambulating through the thick of the local forest, or a white nightshirt blowing eerily on a clothesline like a hoodoo ghost come to billowing life would scare the shit out of Hominy. Turn him albino white. Blow out his Afro to freakishly long, scared-straight proportions and send him running headlong into a swamp tree, through a wooden fence or a plate-glass window. And he was constantly being electrocuted, both by his own ineptitude and by acts of a God whose supposedly random lightning strikes somehow never failed to miss the crack of his suspender-pants-covered ass. In “Frankly, Ben Franklin,” after the prototype is chewed up by Petey the Pitbull, who else but Hominy would volunteer to be the bespectacled Spanky’s kite? Sewn spread-eagle onto a giant Betsy Ross flag, wearing nothing but a set of tattered slave britches, a tricorne hat with a metal rod sticking out of its crown, and a placard hanging from his neck that in runny ink reads THESE ARE THE TIMES THAT FRY MEN’S SOULS—NATHAN HAIL, he soars high in the sky, a flying black squirrel sailing through the stinging rain, gale-force winds, and a fusillade of lightning bolts. There’s a thunderclap, followed by a cloud of sparks, and Spanky examining a glowing, electrified skeleton key attached to the kite string. “Eureka,” he’s about to say, before he’s rudely interrupted from up above, where Hominy, stuck in the tree branches, a smoldering ashen heap, smoke billowing from every orifice, eyes and teeth forever phosphorescent, delivers the longest line of his career, “Yowza! I done discobered electbicidy.”

  Over time, with the advent of cable television, home video games, and Melanie Price’s bodacious eighth-grade bosoms, which she liked to show off in bedroom window striptease acts that started at the exact same time the Little Rascals did, one by one the gang stopped visiting Hominy after school, until it was only me and Marpessa left. I’m not sure why she stayed. She had her own fifteen-year-old tube-top breasts to show off. Sometimes the older guys would come up to the door and ask her to come outside to talk. But she’d always wait until the Little Rascals was over. Leaving the homeboys on Hominy’s porch. I’d like to think that Marpessa liked me even then. But I know it was probably pity and a sense of safety that kept her around from three thirty to four. Munching on grapes and watching the gang put on extravagant backyard variety shows featuring raspy-voiced seven-year-olds and colored kids tap-dancing up a storm, what harm could a thirteen-year-old homeschooled farm boy and superannuated coon do?

  “Marpessa?”

  “Huh?”

  “Wipe your chin, it’s wet.”

  “Let me tell you, that’s not all that’s wet. That’s how good these goddamn grapes is. You really grow these yourself?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why?”

  “Homework.”

  “Your father’s fucking crazy.”

  I suppose that’s what I first loved about Marpessa, her unabashed inappropriateness. I guess I loved her titties, too. Although, like she said whenever she caught me staring at them, I wouldn’t know what to do with them if I ever had half the chance. Eventually the lure of older boys with drug money and sperm counts outweighed the sonorous charms of Alfalfa in a cowboy hat singing “Home on the Range,” and for the longest time, it was just me, Hominy, and the grapes. I never regretted passing up the side-yard peepshows with my friends. I always figured that if Marpessa kept eating my grapes and drooling nectar down her ample chest, sooner or later those drill-bit hard nipples would bore through the wet spots on her shirt.

  Sadly, I never saw a three-dimensional mammary until the eve of my sixteenth birthday, when I woke up one night to find Tasha, one of my dad’s “teaching assistants,” sitting on the edge of my bed, naked, reeking of postcoital must and muscatel, and reading Nancy Chodorow aloud: “Mothers are women, of course, because a mother is a female parent … We can talk about a man ‘mothering’ a child, if he is this child’s primary nurturing figure, or is acting in a nurturant manner. But we would never talk about a woman ‘fathering’ a child.” To this day, whenever I’m lonely, I touch myself, thinking about Tasha’s titty and about how Freudian hermeneutics doesn’t apply to Dickens. A place where, often as not, it’s the child who raises the parents, where the Oedipus and Electra complexes are simple, sons, daughters, stepparents, or play-cousins, it doesn’t matter, since everybody’s fucking each other over and penis envy doesn’t exist because sometimes niggers just got too much dick.

  * * *

  I don’t know exactly why, but I felt like I owed Hominy something for all those afternoons Marpessa and I spent at his house. That there’s something about the craziness that he had to go through that’s kept me relatively sane. And one blustery Wednesday morning, about three years ago, during a well-earned afternoon nap, I heard Marpessa’s voice in my sleep. “Hominy” was all she said. After scrambling outside, I found a hastily written sign Scotch-taped to Hominy’s screen door fluttering in the breeze. I’z in de back, it read, his penmanship typical Little Rascal, squiggly, yet surprisingly legible. The back was Hominy’s memorabilia room. A small fifteen-by-fifteen add-on that was once crammed with a treasure trove of Our Gang props, headshots, and costumes. There weren’t many memories left. Most, like the suit of armor from which Spanky recited Mark Antony’s soliloquy in “Shivering Shakespeare” under a barrage of peashooters, the lock of Alfalfa’s personality, the top hat and tails Buckwheat wore when he conducted the Club Spanky Big Band and made “hundreds and thousands of dollars” in the “Our Gang Follies of 1938,” the long-ass hook-’n’-ladder scrap-metal fire engine used to win Jane back from the rich kid with the real fire engine, and the kazoos, flutes, and spoons that made up the wind and rhythm sections of the International Silver String Band had been long pawned and auctioned off.

  As advertised, Hominy was indeed “in de back,” buck naked and hanging by his neck from a wooden beam. Two feet away from him sat a folding chair marked RESERVED, and on its seat a photocopy playbill for “Curtain Call,” a one-act of desperation. The noose was a bungee cord stretched to its bike rack limit, so much so that if he’d worn anything bigger than a size-eight shoe, his toes would’ve touched the ground. His face turning a deep shade of blue, I watched him twist in the draft. I had half a mind to let him die.

  “Cut my penis off and stuff it into my mouth,” he rasped with what air was left in his lungs.

  Apparently, asphyxiation makes your penis hard, and his brown member sprouted like a twig from a frizzy snowball of shock-white pubic hair. Like an antique whirligig, he kicked about frantically as much from his simultaneous attempt to burn himself in effigy as from the paucity of oxygen reaching his already-Alzheimered brain. Fuck the White Man’s Burden, Hominy Jenkins was my burden, and I knocked the can of kerosene and the lighter from his hand. Walked, not ran, back home to look for the gardening shears and some skin lotion. Taking my sweet time, because I knew that racist Negro Archetypes, like Bebe’s Kids, don’t die. They multiply. Because the kerosene splashed on my shirt smelled like Zima, but mostly because my father said he never panicked when someone from the neighborhood tried to hang themselves, because, “for the life of them, black people can’t tie knots for shit.”

  I cut the self-lynching drama queen down. Lowered him gently to the rayon-carpeted floor and coddled his scraggly head. He filled my armpit with snot and tears as I rubbed cortisone into his rope-chafed neck and flipped through the playbill. On page two was a publicity shot of our boy chilling with the Marx Brothers on the set of the unreleased sequel to A Day at the Races, called A Day Among the Races. The Marx Brothers sit in backward-facing director’s chairs labeled GROUCHO, CHICO, HARPO, and ZEPPO. At the lineup’s far end is a high chair whose back reads DEPRESSO. In it, sitting cross-legged, is six-year-old Hominy, a thick white Groucho mustache painted on his upper lip. The photo is signed To Hominy Jenkins, the Shvartze Sheep of the
Family. Best Wishes from the Marxes—Groucho, Karl, Skid, et al. Below this was Hominy’s bio. A sad listing of his meager screen credits that read like a suicide note:

  Hominy Jenkins (Hominy Jenkins)—Hominy’s happy to make both his theatrical debut and his swan song at the Back Room Repertory Theater. In 1933 Hominy first put his wild, unkempt Afro to good use when he debuted as the wailing, abandoned Native Baby Boy in the original King Kong. He went on to survive that near Skull Island stomping and has since specialized in portraying black boys from the ages of eight to eighty, including most notably in Black Beauty—Stable Boy (uncredited), War of the Worlds—Paper Boy (uncredited), Captain Blood—Cabin Boy (uncredited), Charlie Chan Joins the Klan—Bus Boy (uncredited). Every film shot in Los Angeles between 1937 and 1964—Shoeshine Boy (uncredited). Other credits include various roles as Messenger Boy, Bell Boy, Bus Boy, Pin Boy, Pool Boy, House Boy, Box Boy, Copy Boy, Delivery Boy, Boy Toy (stag film), Errand Boy, and token Aerospace Engineer Boy in the Academy Award–winning film Apollo 13. He wishes to thank his many fans who have supported him throughout the years. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

  If that naked old man crying in my lap had been born elsewhere, say Edinburgh, maybe he’d be knighted by now. “Arise, Sir Hominy of Dickens. Sir Jig of Boo. Sir Bo of Zo.” If he were Japanese and had managed to survive the war, the economic bubble and Shonen Knife, then it’s quite possible he’d be one of those octogenarian Kabuki actors who, when he enters during the second act of Kyô Ningyô, the play comes to a reverential halt as the announcer introduces him to great fanfare and a government stipend. “Playing the role of Courtesan Oguruma, the Kyoto Doll, is Japanese Living National Treasure Hominy ‘Kokojin’ Jenkins VIII.” But he had the misfortune of being born in Dickens, California, and in America Hominy is no source of pride: he’s a Living National Embarrassment. A mark of shame on the African-American legacy, something to be eradicated, stricken from the racial record, like the hambone, Amos ’n’ Andy, Dave Chappelle’s meltdown, and people who say “Valentime’s Day.”