“Yes.”
“We, and I think I speak for most of the group, have only one question: Why?”
Hurt that I expected everyone to care and no one did, I returned to my seat and spaced out after that. Half-listening to the usual diatribes about the dissolution of the black family and the need for black business. Waiting for Foy to say “and things of that nature,” which is the “Roger. Over and out” of black intellectual communication.
“… and things of that nature.”
Finally. The meeting was over. And as the gathering broke up, I was twisting open my last Oreo cookie when, from out of nowhere, a callused black hand ganked it and popped it into a tight-lipped mouth.
“You bring enough for the whole race, nigger?”
With tufts of perm-straightened hair fastened to hot pink rollers stuffed underneath a see-through shower cap and giant hoop earrings dangling from both ears, the cookie snatcher looked more like a Blanche or a Madge than the notorious gangbanger known as King (pronounced “Kang”) Cuz. And silently, very silently, I cursed Cuz as he slid his tongue over his metal-rimmed teeth, clearing tiny flecks of chocolaty goodness from his bridgework.
“That’s what my teachers used to say to me if I was chewing gum and shit. ‘You bring enough for the whole class?’”
“No doubt, nigger.”
In all the time I’ve known Cuz, I’ve never had a real conversation with him beyond “No doubt, nigger.” No one has, because even in his middle age, he’s sensitive, and if you say the wrong thing, he’ll show the world just how sensitive he is by crying at your funeral. So no one engages him in conversation; whenever he speaks to you, no matter what he says, man, woman, or child, you put as much bass in your voice as you possibly can and reply, “No doubt, nigger.”
King Cuz has faithfully attended meetings of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals ever since my father nigger-whispered his mother off the Metro train tracks. Feet and hands bound in a jump rope, she had pitched herself onto the commuter rails screaming, “When a white bitch got problems, she’s a damsel in distress! When a black bitch got problems, she’s a welfare cheat and a burden on society. How come you never see any black damsels? Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your weave!” She was yelling so loud you could hear her suicidal protests over the ding-dong of the falling crossing gate and the blaring horn of the onrushing Blue Line. King Cuz was Curtis Baxter then, and I remember the windy wake of the passing train blowing young Curtis’s tears sideways on his face as my dad cradled his mother in his arms. I remember the railroad tracks, rusty and ringing and still hot to the touch.
So you bring enough for the whole race?
Curtis grew up to become King Cuz. A gangster well respected for his brain and his derring-do. His set, the Rollin’ Paper Chasers, was the first gang to have trained medics at their rumbles. A shoot-out would pop off at the swap meet and the stretcher-bearers would cart off the wounded to be treated in some field hospital set up behind the frontlines. You didn’t know whether to be sad or impressed. It wasn’t long after that innovation that he applied for membership to NATO. Everybody else is in NATO. Why not the Crips? You going to tell me we wouldn’t kick the shit out of Estonia?
No doubt, nigger.
“I need to talk to you about a couple of things.”
“No doubt, nigger.”
“But not in here.”
Cuz lifted me by the shirtsleeve and escorted me out the door and into the hazy Hound of the Baskervilles night. It’s always a shock to have the day turn to dark without you, and we both paused to let the warm wet mist and the silence settle on our faces. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s more interminable, prejudice and discrimination or the goddamn meetings. Cuz made half a fist, examined his long, manicured nails, then raised one heavily teased eyebrow and smiled.
“First thing is ‘bringing back Dickens.’ Fuck what the rest of them niggers who ain’t from the hood say, I’m thoroughly with that shit. It ain’t but a couple of us in there, but the Dum Dums who from Dickens wasn’t laughing. So set that off, cuz, because if you think about it, why can’t black people have their own Chinese restaurants?”
“No doubt, nigger.”
Then I did something I never thought I’d do. I engaged King Cuz in conversation, because I had to know, even if it cost me my life or, at the very least, what little cachet I had as the neighborhood’s resident “quiet motherfucker.”
“I have to ask you something, King Cuz.”
“Call me Cuz, cuz.”
“All right, Cuz. Why do you go to these meetings? Shouldn’t you be out slanging and banging?”
“It used to be I’d go to listen to your father. Rest in peace, that nigger ran deep, for real. But now I go just in case these Dum Dum niggers get the notion to actually set foot in the hood, blowing the spot up and all. That way I can at least give the homies some Paul Revere–like advance notice. One if by Land Cruiser. Two if by C-class Mercedes. The bougies are coming! The bougies are coming!”
“Who’s coming where?” It was Foy. Meeting over, he and the other wereniggers were piling into their cars. Making ready for a prowl on the town. Curtis “King Cuz” Baxter didn’t bother to answer Foy. He simply spun on his Converse heels and pimp-walked into the blurry night. Listing hard to the right like a drunken seaman with an inner ear infection. He shouted back at me, “Think about them black Chinese restaurants. And get some pussy. You’re too damn high-strung.”
“Don’t listen to that man, pussy is overrated.”
As I unhitched and mounted my horse, Foy thumbed open two bottles of prescription pills and spilled three white tablets into his hand.
“Point zero zero one,” he said, jiggling the tablets in his palm to make sure I’d see them. Zoloft and Lexapro.
“What, the dosage?”
“No, my fucking Nielsen ratings. Your dad used to think I was bipolar, but what I really am is by myself. Sounds like you are, too.”
He pretended to offer me the pills before placing them gently on his tongue and washing them down with a swig from an expensive-looking silver flask. Since his cartoons had stopped airing, Foy had had a series of morning talk shows. Each successive failure slotted at a time earlier and earlier in the morning. Just as Bloods don’t use the letter C because it’s the first letter in Crip (Cap’n Crunch Cereal is Kap’n Krunch Kereal), Foy shows his gang affiliation by replacing the word “fact” with “black.” And he has interviewed everyone from world leaders to dying musicians on programs titled Black and Fiction, Blacktotum. His latest installment was a nonsensical race forum on public access called Just the Blacks, Ma’am. It aired at five o’clock Sunday mornings. Ain’t but two niggers in the world awake at five o’clock, and that’s Foy Cheshire and his make-up artist.
It’s hard to describe a man wearing probably close to $5,000 in a suit, shoes, and accessories as disheveled, but up close in the streetlight that’s exactly what he was. All spit and no polish, his shirt wrinkled and losing its starch. The bottoms of his barely creased silk pants ringed brown with dirt and just starting to fray. His shoes were scuffed, and he reeked of crème de menthe. I once heard Mike Tyson say, “Only in America can you be bankrupt and live in a mansion.”
Foy recapped his flask and jammed it into his pocket. Now that no one was looking, I waited for him to make the full werenigger transformation. Grow fangs and claws. I wondered if the hair on black werewolves was nappy. It had to be, right?
“I know what you up to.”
“What am I up to?”
“You’re about the same age your father was when he died. And you ain’t said shit in a meeting for ten years. Why choose today to talk this nonsense about bringing Dickens back? Because you trying to reclaim the Dum Dums, take back what your father started.”
“I don’t think so. Any organization that holds lectures about the dangers of diabetes in a donut shop, you can keep.”
Maybe I should’ve seen it then. My father had a checklist to determine whether or not someo
ne was losing his mind. He said there were telltale signs of a mental breakdown that people often mistake for force of personality. Aloofness. Mood swings. Delusions of grandeur. Apart from Hominy, who, like one of those giant redwood slices you see at the science museum, was an open book, I only know how to tell if a tree is dying on the inside, not a person. The tree sort of withdraws into itself. The leaves become splotchy. Sometimes there are cankers and fissures in the bark. The branches might be bone-dry or soft and spongy to the touch. But the best way is to look at the roots. The roots are what anchors a tree to the ground, holds it in place on this spinning ball of shit, and if those are cracked and covered in spores and fungi, well … I remember looking at Foy’s roots, a pair of expensive brown wingtips. They were scuffed and dusty. So, given the rumors about his wife filing for divorce, the bankruptcy, and his talk show’s nonexistent ratings, maybe I should’ve known.
“I’ve got my eye on you,” he said, sliding into his car. “The Dum Dum Donuts is all I have left. I will not let you fuck my shit up.” Two goodbye beeps of his horn and he was gone. Swooping his Benz down El Cielo Boulevard, reaching Mach speed as he flew past Cuz, whose slow-footed strut was unmistakable even from a distance. It doesn’t happen often, but once in a Crip blue moon, a member of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals says something ingenious like “black Chinese restaurants” and “pussy.”
“No doubt, nigger,” I said aloud.
And for the first time I meant it.
Eight
I went with the painted boundary. Not that the lasers cost so much, though the pointers that had the intensity I needed were a few hundred bucks apiece, it’s that I found the painting to be meditative. I’ve always liked rote. The formulaic repetitiveness of filing and stuffing envelopes appeals to me in some fundamental life-affirming way. I would’ve made a good factory worker, supply-room clerk, or Hollywood scriptwriter. In school, whenever I had to do something like memorize the periodic table, my father would say the key to doing boring tasks is to think about not so much what you’re doing but the importance of why you’re doing it. Though when I asked him if slavery wouldn’t have been less psychologically damaging if they’d thought of it as “gardening,” I got a vicious beating that would’ve made Kunta Kinte wince.
I bought a shitload of white spray paint and a line-marking machine, the kind used to paint yardage markers and foul lines on ball fields, and before my morning chores, when the traffic was light, I’d haul my ass to the designated location, set up shop in the middle of the road, and paint the line. Paying no attention to the line’s straightness or my attire, I laid down the border. It was a sign of the ineffectualness of the Dum Dum Donut think tank that no one had any idea what I was doing. Most folks who didn’t know me mistook me for a performance artist or a crazy person. I was cool with the latter designation.
But after a few thousand yards of squiggly white lines, it became obvious to any Dickensian over the age of ten what I was doing. Unsolicited, groups of truant teens and homeless would stand guard over the line. Plucking leaves and debris out of the wet paint. Shooing away bicyclists and jaywalkers to prevent them from smearing the border. Sometimes, after retiring for the day, I’d return the next morning, only to find that someone else had taken up where I’d left off. Extended my line with a line of their own, often in a different color. Sometimes the line wouldn’t be a line at all but drops of blood, or an uninterrupted string of graffiti signing off on my efforts, ____AceBoonakatheWest sideCrazy63rdStGangsta____, or, as in the case of the corner fronting the L.A. LGBTDL Crisis Center for Chicanos, Blacks, Non-Gays, and Anyone Else Who Feels Underserved, Unsupported, and Exploited by Hit Cable Television Shows, an arcing three-foot-wide, four-hundred-foot-long rainbow anchored with pots of gold condoms. Halfway down Victoria Boulevard where the El Harvard Bridge starts to cross the creek, someone bisected my line with 100 Smoots in purple print. I still have no idea what that means, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that, with all the help, it didn’t take long to finish painting the border. The police, many of whom knew me through my work and my watermelon, often escorted me from their patrol cars. Checking my boundary for accuracy against old editions of The Thomas Guide. I didn’t mind Officer Mendez’s good-natured teasing.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for the lost city of Dickens.”
“By painting a white line down the middle of a street that already has two yellow lines down the middle of it?”
“You love the mangy dog that shows up in your backyard as much as the puppy you got for your birthday.”
“Then you should put up a flyer,” she said, handing me a mock-up she’d hurriedly composed on the back of a wanted poster.
MISSING: HOMETOWN
Have you seen my city?
Description: Mostly Black and Brown. Some Samoan.
Friendly. Answers to the name of Dickens.
Reward Earned in Heaven.
If you have any information, please call this number 1-(800) DICKENS.
I appreciated the help and, using a wad of chewed gum, fastened the flyer to the nearest telephone post. For those looking to find the thing that you’ve lost, the decision of where to place your handbill is one of the toughest you’ll ever make in life. I chose a space at the bottom of the pole between a circular for an Uncle Jam’s Army concert at the Veterans Center. “Uncle Jam Wants You! To Serve and Funk in Los Afghanistan, California! Allah Ak-Open-Bar from 9–10 p.m.!” and a leaflet promoting a mysterious dream job that paid $1,000 a week, working from home. I hoped whoever posted that flyer had had a talk with human resources, because I seriously doubted they were making even $300 a week, and they definitely weren’t working from home.
It took about six weeks to finish painting the border and the labels, and in the end I wasn’t sure what I’d accomplished, but it was fun to see kids spend their Saturdays circumnavigating the city by carefully tracing their steps, walking heel-to-toe on the line, making sure they’d left not even an inch untrod upon. Sometimes I’d chance across an elderly member of the community standing in the middle of the street, unable to cross the single white line. Puzzled looks on their faces from asking themselves why they felt so strongly about the Dickens side of the line as opposed to the other side. When there was just as much uncurbed dog shit over there as here. When the grass, what little of it there was, sure in the fuck wasn’t any greener. When the niggers were just as trifling, but for some reason they felt like they belonged on this side. And why was that? When it was just a line.
I have to confess that, in the days after I painted it, I, too, was hesitant to cross the line, because the jagged way it surrounded the remnants of the city reminded me of the chalk outline the police had needlessly drawn around my father’s body. But I did like the line’s artifice. The implication of solidarity and community it represented. And while I hadn’t quite reestablished Dickens, I had managed to quarantine it. And community–cum–leper colony wasn’t a bad start.
EXACT CHANGE, OR ZEN AND THE ART OF BUS RIDING AND RELATIONSHIP REPAIR
Nine
Sometimes the smell wakes you up in the middle of the night. Chicago has the Hawk, and Dickens, despite its newly painted barrier, has the Stank, an eye-burning, colorless miasma of sulfur and shit birthed in the Wilmington oil refineries and the Long Beach sewage treatment plant. Carried inland by the prevailing winds, the Stank gathers up a steamy pungency as the fumes combine with the stench of the lounge lizards returning home from partying in Newport Beach, drenched in sweat, tequila shooter runoff, and gallons of overapplied Drakkar Noir cologne. They say the Stank drops the crime rate by 90 percent, but when the smell slaps you awake at three in the morning, the first thing you want to do is kill Guy Laroche.
It was a night about two weeks after I’d painted the border, the stench was especially strong, and I was unable to get back to sleep. I tried cleaning the stables, hoping the smell of fresh horse manure would remove the sting from my nostrils. It didn’t work and
I had to resort to covering my face with a dishrag soaked in vinegar to kill the fumes. Hominy walked in with my wet suit draped over one arm and a bowl in the other hand. He was dressed like a British manservant, complete with coat and tails and a vacillating BBC Masterpiece Theatre accent.
“What are you doing here?”
“I saw the lights and thought maybe Master would like the black hash and a little fresh air this evening.”
“Hominy, it’s four o’clock in the morning. Why aren’t you in bed?”
“Same reason you aren’t. It smells like a bum’s asshole outside.”
“Where’d you get the tux?”
“Back in the fifties every black actor had one. Show up for a casting call for butler or headwaiter and the studio would be like ‘Boy, you just saved us fifty bucks. You’re hired!’”
A little wake ’n’ bake and some surfing wasn’t a bad idea. I’d be too high to drive to the beach, but that would give me an excuse to see my girl for the first time in months. Catching some waves and a whiff of my baby? That’d be like killing two burdens with one stoner, so to speak. Hominy walked me into the living room, spun Daddy’s recliner around, and patted the armrest.
“Sit.”
The gas fireplace roared to life, and I stuck a punk into the flames, sparked the bowl, and took a long, smooth pull and was high before I could exhale. I must’ve left the back door open, because one of the newborn calves, shiny, black, barely a week old, and not yet used to the sounds and smells of Dickens, wandered in and stared me down with his big brown eyes. I blew a puff of hashish into his face, and together we could feel the stress leave our bodies. As the blackness peeled from our hides, the melanin fizzing and dissipating into nothingness like antacids dissolving in tap water.
They say a cigarette takes three minutes off your life, but good hashish makes dying seem so far away.
The distant staccato of gunfire sounded in the air. The last shoot-out of the night followed by the beating rotors of the police helicopter. The calf and I split a double of single malt to take the edge off. Hominy pitched himself by the door. A parade of ambulances sped down the street, and he handed me my surfboard like a butler hands an English gentleman his coat. Feigned or not, sometimes I’m jealous of Hominy’s obliviousness, because he, unlike America, has turned the page. That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.