The Sellout (20 page)
Using my lighter, I finished torching the book myself and held its flaming pages under the marshmallow on a wooden ruler that Sheila had kindly offered me. She had fashioned a leash from a jump rope and was stroking the calf on the head, while the Latino was trying to surgically reattach his testicles with Elmer’s glue and a paper clip, until Charisma grabbed him by the neck and stood him up.
“You kids have a good Career Day?”
“I want to be a veterinarian!” Sheila answered.
“That’s gay,” countered her Latino nemesis, who was juggling the gonads with one hand.
“Juggling is gay!”
“Calling people who call you ‘gay’ just because you called them ‘gay’ is gay!”
“Okay, that’s enough.” Charisma scolded. “My God, is there anything you kids don’t think is gay?”
The fat boy thought for a long moment. “You know what’s not gay … being gay.”
Laughing through her tears, Charisma collapsed on a beige fiberglass bench as the three o’clock bell rang; it’d been a long day. I sidled in next to her. The clouds finally caved in and the drizzle turned into a steady downpour. The students and faculty ran to their cars, the bus stop, and the waiting arms of their parents, while we sat there in the shower like good Southern Californians, umbrellaless and listening to the raindrops sizzle in the slowly dying fire.
“Charisma, I thought of a way to get the kids to behave and respect each other like they do on the bus.”
“How?”
“Segregate the school.” As soon as I said it, I realized that segregation would be the key to bringing Dickens back. The communal feeling of the bus would spread to the school and then permeate the rest of the city. Apartheid united black South Africa, why couldn’t it do the same for Dickens?
“By race? You want to segregate the school by color?”
Charisma looked at me like I was one of her students. Not stupid, but clueless. But if you asked me, Chaff Middle School had already been segregated and re-segregated many times over, maybe not by color, but certainly by reading level and behavior problem. The English as a Second Language speakers were on a different learning track than the English When and Only If I Feel Like It speakers. During Black History Month, my father used to watch the nightly television footage of the Freedom buses burning, the dogs snarling and snapping, and say to me, “You can’t force integration, boy. The people who want to integrate will integrate.” I’ve never figured out to what extent, if at all, I agree or disagree with him, but it’s an observation that’s stayed with me. Made me realize that for many people integration is a finite concept. Here, in America, “integration” can be a cover-up. “I’m not racist. My prom date, second cousin, my president is black (or whatever).” The problem is that we don’t know whether integration is a natural or an unnatural state. Is integration, forced or otherwise, social entropy or social order? No one’s ever defined the concept. Charisma was giving segregation some thought, though, as she slowly rotated the last of the marshmallows in the flame. I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking about how her middle-school alma mater was now 75 percent Latino, when in her day it was 80 percent black. Thinking about listening to her mother, Sally Molina, tell stories about growing up in segregated small-town Arizona in the 1940s and ’50s. Having to sit on the hot side of the church, the farthest away from Jesus and the fire exits. Having to go to the Mexican schools and bury her parents and her baby brother at the Mexican cemetery outside of town on Highway 60. How when the family moved to Los Angeles in 1954, the racial discrimination was more or less the same. Except that unlike the black Angelenos, they could at least use the public beaches.
“You want to segregate the school by race?”
“Yeah.”
“If you think you can do it, go ahead. But I’m telling you, there’s too many Mexicans.”
I can’t speak for the children, but driving home, the newly castrated calf in the front seat of the pickup, his head out the window catching raindrops on his tongue, I left Career Day as inspired as I’d ever been and with renewed focus. What was it Charisma said, “It’s like the specter of segregation has brought the city of Dickens back together again.” I decided to give my new career as City Planner in Charge of Restoration and Segregation another six months. If things didn’t work out, I could always fall back on being black.
It rained buckets that summer after Career Day. The white boys at the beach called it “bummer,” as in the “Bummer of ’42.” The weather reports were nothing but nonstop references to record rainfall and continuous cloud cover. Every day, at around nine thirty, a low-pressure system settled over the coastline and it’d pour off and on until early evening. Some folks won’t surf in the rain, even more refuse go out after a storm, worried about contracting hepatitis from the sludge and all the polluted runoff that flows into the Pacific after a heavy downpour. Personally, I like catching waves in the rain, fewer fuckers in the lineup, no windsurfers. Stay away from the arroyos near Malibu and Rincon, which tend to overflow with septic waste, and you’ll be fine. So that summer I didn’t worry about fecal matter and microbes. I agonized over my satsumas and segregation. How do you grow the world’s most water-sensitive citrus tree under monsoon conditions? How do you racially segregate an already segregated school?
Hominy, the race reactionary, was no help. He loved the idea of bringing back segregated education, because he thought the idea would make Dickens more attractive to white resettlement. That the city would return to being the thriving white suburb of his youth. Cars with tail fins. Straw hats and sock hops. Episcopalians and ice cream socials. It would be the opposite of white flight, he said. “The Ku Klux influx.” But when I’d ask him how, he’d just shrug and, like a conservative senator without any ideas, filibuster me with unrelated stories about the good ol’ days. “Once, in an episode called ‘Pop Quisling,’ Stymie tried to avoid taking a history test he hadn’t studied for by setting his desk on fire, but of course he ended up burning down the entire school and the gang had to take the test on top of a fire truck ’cause Miss Crabtree didn’t play that shit.” Then there was the guilt that comes along with being a segregationist. I stayed up nights trying to convince Funshine Bear, whose fur over the years had mottled and turned from sun-ray yellow to toe-jam brown, that the reintroduction of segregation would be a good thing. That like Paris has the Eiffel Tower, St. Louis the Arch, and New York an insanely huge income disparity, Dickens would have segregated schools. If nothing else, the Chamber of Commerce brochure would look attractive.
Welcome to the Glorious City of Dickens: The Urban Paradise on the Banks of the Los Angeles River. Home to Roving Bands of Youth Groups, a Retired Movie Star, and Segregated Schools!
Lots of people claim to get their best ideas in water. The shower. Floating in the pool. Waiting for a wave. Something about negative ions, white noise, and being in isolation. So you’d think that surfing in the rain would be the equivalent of a one-man brainstorm—but not me. I get my good ideas not while surfing but while driving home from surfing. So sitting in traffic, after a nice rainy-day July session, reeking of sewage and seaweed, I watched the remedial rich kids pour out of summer school at Intersection Academy, a prestigious oceanfront private “learning fulcrum.” As they crossed the street to their waiting limousines and luxury cars, they’d flash me “hang loose” and gang signs, stick their shaggy heads into my cab, and say, “Bro, you got any weed? Hang ten, African-American waverider!”
Despite the steady downpour, the students never seemed to get wet. Mostly because valets and scullery maids chased after their rambunctious wards holding umbrellas over their heads, but some kids were just too white to get wet. Try to imagine Winston Churchill, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice, or the Lone Ranger, soaked from head to toe and you’ll get the idea.
For a hot second, when I was eight, Pops flirted with enrolling my intellectually lazy ass in a fancy prep school. He stood over me while I was shin-deep in the rice paddy, planting stalks into the mud. He muttered something about choosing between Jews in Santa Monica and Gentiles in Holmby Hills, then began citing research that black kids who go to school with white kids of any religion “do better,” while also positing some not-so-credible research that black people were “better off” during segregation. I don’t remember his definition of “better off” or why I didn’t go to Interchange or Haverford-Meadowbrook. The commute, maybe. Too expensive. But watching those kids, the sons and daughters of music and movie industry moguls, file out of that state-of-the-art building, it dawned on me that, as the sole student of Daddy’s K thru Forever Home School, I had been the beneficiary of a most segregated education, one with thankfully little exposure to infinity pools, homemade foie gras, and American ballet. And while I was no closer to figuring out how to save my satsuma crop, I did have an idea how to racially segregate what, for all intents and purposes and Latinos, was an all-black school. I drove home, my father’s voice swimming in my head.
When I got back home, Hominy was waiting for me out in the yard, standing under a large green-and-white golf umbrella, his bare feet making a deep hammer-toed impression in the wet grass. Ever since I’d agreed to segregate the middle school, he’d become a much better worker. He was no fucking John Henry by any stretch, but if he took an interest in something on the farm, he’d at least show some self-initiative. Lately he’d been very protective of the satsuma tree. Sometimes he’d stand next to it for hours, shooing away birds and bugs. The satsumas reminded him of the camaraderie of studio life. Thumb-wrestling with Wheezer. Slapping Fatty Arbuckle upside the head. Truth or Dare games where the loser would have to streak through the Laurel and Hardy set. It was during a long break between shots on “I See Paris, I See France” that Hominy discovered the satsuma mandarin. Most of the gang had gathered around the craft services table, downing cupcakes and cream soda. But there were some southern theater owners on the set that day, and the studio, wanting to make nice with a caste system that refused to show their movies because they featured colored and white kids playing together, asked Hominy and Buckwheat to eat with some Japanese extras who, during the immigration roundup of ’36, had been drafted to play Mexican bandits. The extras offered them some nonunion soba noodles and satsumas imported from the Land of the Rising Sun. The black boys found the fruit’s perfectly balanced bittersweet flavor to be the only thing that removed the nasty taste of comic-relief watermelon from their mouths. Eventually, he and Buckwheat had riders put in their contracts: only satsumas were allowed on set. No clementines, tangerines, or tangelos. Because nothing restored one’s dignity like a sweet juicy satsuma orange after a hard day of cooning.
Hominy still thinks I tend the tree to suit his needs, he doesn’t know that I planted it the same day me and Marpessa officially split. I’d finished freshman year midterms and driven home, flying west on CA-91, spurred on by what I thought would be the awaiting congratulatory fuck and not a note pinned through the sow’s ear that simply read,
Naw, nigger.
He pulled desperately on the sleeve of my wetsuit. “Massa, you told me to tell you when the satsumas were the size of Ping-Pong balls.” Like a golf caddy who refuses to give up on an employer’s woeful round, Hominy held the umbrella over my head. Handed me the refractometer and urged me into the backyard, where we tramped through the mud to the waterlogged tree. “Please, massa, hurry. I don’t think they going to make it.”
Most citrus fruits require frequent watering, but the inverse is true for satsumas. They turn water into piss, and no matter how much pruning I did, that year’s crop hung heavy and mean on the branches. If I couldn’t figure out a way to decrease the water intake, the yield would be shit and I’d have wasted ten years and fifty pounds of imported Japanese fertilizer. I clipped a mandarin off the nearest tree. Snipping it a quarter inch above the navel, I dug my thumb into the bumpy flesh, ripping it open and squeezing a few drops into the refractometer, the small, overpriced, Japanese-made machine that measures the percentage of sucrose in the juice.
“What’s it say?” he asked desperately.
“Two point three.”
“What’s that on the sweetness scale?”
“Somewhere between Eva Braun and a South African salt mine.”
I never nigger-whispered to my plants. I don’t believe that plants are sentient beings, but after Hominy went home I talked to those trees for an hour. Read them poetry and sang them the blues.
I’ve experienced direct discrimination based on race only once in my life. One day I foolishly said to my father that there was no racism in America. Only equal opportunity that black people kick aside because we don’t want to take responsibility for ourselves. Later that very same day, in the middle of the night, he snatched me up out of bed, and together we took an ill-prepared cross-country trip into deepest, whitest America. After three days of nonstop driving, we ended up in a nameless Mississippi town that was nothing more than a dusty intersection of searing heat, crows, cotton fields, and, judging by the excited look of anticipation on my father’s face, unadulterated racism.
“There it is,” he said, pointing toward a run-down general store so out of date the pinball machine blinking happily in the window took only dimes and displayed a mind-numbing high current score of 5,637. I looked around for the racism. Out front, three burly white men with those sun-baked crow’s-foot visages that make age an indeterminate number sat on wooden Coca-Cola crates, loudly talking shit about an upcoming stock-car race. We pulled into the gas station across the street. A bell rang, startling both the black attendant and me. Reluctantly, he broke away from the video chess game he was playing with a friend on the television.
“Fill ’er up, please.”
“Sure thing. Check the oil?” My father nodded, never taking his eyes off the store. The attendant, Clyde, if the name fancily stitched in red cursive on the white patch on his blue coveralls was to be trusted, jumped to his duties. He checked the oil, the tire pressure, and slid his grease rag over the front and back windshields. I don’t think I’d ever seen service with a smile before. And whatever was in that spray bottle, the windows had never been so clean. When the tank was full, my father asked Clyde, “You think me and the boy could sit here a mite?”
