The Sellout

  “Master, I just thought you should know, my birthday’s next week.”

  I knew something was up. He was being too attentive. But what do you get the slave who doesn’t even want his freedom?

  “Well, that’s cool. We’ll take a trip or something. In the meantime, could you do me a favor and put the calf out back?”

  “I don’t do farm animals.”

  * * *

  Even when the air doesn’t smell, when you walk the ghetto streets in a spring suit, board tucked under one arm, no one really fucks with you. Maybe once in a while a curious stick-up kid might take the measure, look me up and down, and make a guess as to how much the pawn shop would give him for an antique Town & Country tri fin. Sometimes they stop me in front of the Laundromat, stare in amazement at the homie wearing open-toe flip-flops, and pinch my outer layer of black polyurethane skin.

  “Check it out, cuz.”

  “S’up?”

  “Where you keep your keys at?”

  The 5:43 a.m. #125 westbound to El Segundo rolled in on time. The pneumatic doors swung open with that strong, hissing efficiency that I love, and the driver welcomed me aboard with a friendly “Hurry up, motherfucker, you letting the stink in.” Bus Operator #632 thought we were broken up just because years ago she married that has-been gangster rapper (now semifamous television cop and malt liquor pitchman), MC Panache, had four kids, and had a restraining order requiring me to stay five hundred feet away from her and the children, because I would follow them home from school screaming, “Your daddy doesn’t know his assonance from his elegy! And he calls himself a poet.”

  I took my usual seat, the one closest to the stairwell, kicked back, and stretched my feet into the aisle, wielding the board like a fiberglass African shield, deflecting the spitting barrage of pollyseed shells and insults as best I could.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Banished and hurt, I scuttled to the back of the bus, deposited my surfboard on the rear seat, and lay down on it like a heartbroken fakir sleeping on a bed of nails, trying to displace the emotional pain with the physical. The bus lumbered down Rosecrans, the unrequited love of my life, Marpessa Delissa Dawson, calling out stops like a Buddhist timekeeper, while a crazy man three rows in front of me recited the morning mantra: I’m going to fuck that black bitch up. I’m going to fuck that black bitch up. I’m going to fuck that black bitch up. I’m going to fuck that black bitch up.

  There are more cars in Los Angeles County than in any other city in the world. But what no one ever talks about is that half those cars sit on cinder blocks in dirt patches passing for front yards from Lancaster to Long Beach. These not-so-mobile automobiles, along with the Hollywood sign, the Watts Towers, and Aaron Spelling’s 56,500-square-foot estate, are the closest L.A. gets to approximating the ancient marvels of engineering like the Parthenon, Angkor Wat, the great pyramids, and the ancient shrines of Timbuktu. Those two- and four-door rusted pieces of antiquity stand impervious to the winds and acid rains of time, and like Stonehenge, we have no idea what purpose these steel monuments serve. Are they testaments to the bitchin’ and firme hot rods and lowriders that grace the covers of custom-car magazines? Maybe the hood ornaments and tail fins are aligned with the stars and the winter solstice. Maybe they’re mausoleums, the resting places of backseat lovers and drivers. All I know is that each of these metallic carcasses means one less car on the road and one more rider on the bus of shame. Shame because L.A. is about space, and here one’s self-worth comes from how one chooses to navigate that space. Walking is akin to begging in the streets. Taxicabs are for foreigners and prostitutes. Bicycles, skateboards, and Rollerblades are for health nuts and kids, people with nowhere to go. And all cars, from the luxury import to the classified-ad jalopy, are status symbols, because no matter how shoddy the upholstery, how bouncy the ride, how fucked-up the paint job, the car, any car, is better than riding the bus.

  “Alameda!” Marpessa shouted, and a woman scurried aboard, toting one too many plastic shopping bags and pinning her purse tightly to her side with her elbow. She made her way down the aisle scanning for vacancies. I can spot an L.A. newcomer a mile away. They’re the ones who board the bus smiling and greeting the other passengers, because they believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that having to take mass transportation is only a temporary setback. They’re the ones sitting under the Safe Sex ads, looking up quizzically from their Bret Easton Ellis novels, trying to figure out why the assholes surrounding them aren’t all white and opulent like the assholes in the book. They’re the ones who jump up and down like game show prizewinners when they discover that In-N-Out Burger has both a secret menu and a double-top-secret menu. “Mustard grilled patties? Get the fuck out of here!” They sign up for open mikes at the Laugh Factory. Jog along the boardwalk, trying to convince themselves that the double penetration scene they shot in Reseda last week is only a stepping-stone to bigger and better things. La pornographie est la nouvelle nouvelle vague.

  Many parents brag about their kid’s first words. Mommy. Daddy. I love you. Stop. No. That’s inappropriate. My father, on the other hand, liked to boast about his first words to me. They weren’t “Hello,” or a prayer, but a sentiment found in the first chapter of every Intro to Social Psych textbook ever written: We are all social scientists. And I suppose my first field research was conducted on the bus.

  When I was young, the municipal bus system was called the RTD. Officially, the acronym stood for Rapid Transit District, but to Angelenos who lived in hellholes like Watts, La Puente, and South Central, too young or too poor to drive, it stood for Rough Tough and Dangerous. My first scientific paper, written at age seven, was “Passenger Seating Tendencies by Race and Gender: Controlling for Class, Age, Crowdedness, and Body Odor.” The conclusion was readily obvious. If forced to sit next to someone, people violated the personal space of women first and black people last. If you were a black male, then no one, including other black males, sat next to you unless they absolutely had to. Whereupon they’d reluctantly plop down next to me and invariably greet me with one of three security questions designed to assess my threat level.

  1. Where do you live?

  2. Did you see (insert sporting event or black-themed movie)?

  3. I don’t know where you from, homie. But you see this knife/gun/contagious skin rash? You don’t fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you, cool?

  I could tell from the way they pulled her arms into the ground that the bags were getting heavy, that she was barely holding on to her groceries and dreams. Even though she was exhausted and growing more and more despondent with each bumpy rise and fall of the worn-out suspension, she preferred to stand rather than to sit next to me. They come to L.A. aspiring to be white. Even the ones who are biologically white aren’t white white. Laguna Beach volleyball white. Bel Air white. Omakaze white. Spicolli white. Brett Easton Ellis white. Three first names white. Valet parking white. Brag about your Native American, Argentinian, Portuguese ancestry white. Pho white. Paparazzi white. I once got fired from a telemarketing job, now look at me, I’m famous white. Calabazas white. I love L.A. It’s the only place where you can go skiing, to the beach and to the desert all in one day white.

  She held on to her vision rather than sit next to me, not that I blamed her, because by the time the bus hit Figueroa Boulevard, there were a number of people on board whom I wouldn’t have chosen to sit next to, either. Like the insane fucker who repeatedly pressed the “Stop Requested” button. “Stop this bus, goddammit! I want to get off! Where the fuck you going?” Even that early in the day, stopping a bus between designated stops was the same as asking the flight crew of an Apollo rocket to the moon to stop at the liquor store on the way—impossible.

  “I said, Stop the motherfucking bus. I’m late for work, you fat fucking cow!”

  Drivers, wardens, and concentration-camp commandants all have their own management style. Some like to sing to the passengers. Placating them with u
plifting jazz age ditties like “Tea for Two” and “My Funny Valentine.” Others like to hide, sit low in their seats, and let the inmates run the asylum and the aisles, seat belts unfastened in case the need for a quick getaway arises. Marpessa was no disciplinarian, but she wasn’t a pushover either. Her average workday was filled with fights, purse snatchings, fare beaters, molestations, public intoxication, child endangerment, pandering, niggers constantly standing on the wrong side of the yellow line while the bus was in motion, and kicking game, to say nothing of the occasional attempted murder. Her union rep said a bus driver in this country is assaulted once every three days, and there were two things in the world Marpessa had long since decided she’d never be: a statistic and somebody’s “fat cow.” I don’t know how she resolved the problem—with a kind word or the threatening wave of the metal nigger beater she kept behind her seat—because I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until we reached El Segundo. Her call of “Last stop” echoing throughout the empty bus.

  I know she hoped that I’d exit out the back, but even in that hideous Commie-gray Metro uniform, thirty pounds heavier, she was still unbearably cute. On the freeway you can’t stop looking at a dog sticking its head out of a car window, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  “Close your mouth, you’re catching flies.”

  “You miss me?”

  “Miss you? I haven’t missed nobody since Mandela died.”

  “Is Mandela dead? Seems like he’s going to live forever.”

  “Well, either way, there you go.”

  “See, you do miss me.”

  “I miss your fucking plums. I swear to God, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night dreaming about your fucking plums and the juicy-ass pomegranates. I almost didn’t break up with you because I kept thinking, Where am I going to get fucking cantaloupes that taste like a multiple orgasm?”

  We’d rekindled our childhood friendship on the bus. I was seventeen, carless and clueless. She was twenty-one and fine enough to make that ill-fitting seaweed-brown RTD uniform look like haute-couture fashion. Except for the badge. No one, not even John Wayne, can pull off a badge. Back then she drove the #434—downtown to Zuma Beach. A route that once you got past the Santa Monica pier was mostly riderless, except for the burnouts, bums, and maids who serviced the Malibu estates and oceanfront bungalows. I surfed Venice and Santa Monica. Mostly Station 24. Sometimes 20. No real reason. The waves were shit. Crowded. Except that every now and then I’d see another surfer of color. As opposed to Hermosa, Redondo, and Newport, which were much closer to Dickens, but the breaks were dominated by straight-edge Jesus freaks who kissed their crucifixes before every set and listened to conservative talk radio after the sessions. Up the coast, along Marpessa’s route, it was more laid-back. The Westside. AC/DC, Slayer, and KLOS–FM. The wave riders’ crack- and hophead skeletons, tweaked on sunrise and the English Beat, cleansing their systems and their acne with cutbacks and bumpy floaters on the mushy breaks. But no matter where you surf, motherfuckers hog the sandbar.

  The west end of Rosecrans Avenue, where the street dead-ends with the sand, is the 42nd Parallel between the kickback and uptight hemispheres of the L.A. County coastline. From Manhattan Beach down to Cabrillo, they called you nigger and expected you to run. El Porto north to Santa Monica, they called you nigger and expected you to fight. Malibu and beyond, they called the police. I started to take the bus farther and farther up the coast, so that I could spend more time chatting up Marpessa. We hadn’t really seen each other since she started dating older boys and stopped hanging out at Hominy’s. After two hours of swapping stories about slum life in Dickens and what Hominy was up to, I’d find myself miles from home, surfing with seals and dolphins at increasingly remote spots like Topanga, Las Tunas, Amarillo, Blocker, Escondido, and Zuma. Drifting onto private beachfronts where, soaking wet, the billionaire locals would stare at me as if I were a talking walrus with a willow-tree Afro when I’d walk through their sandy backyards, knock on the glass sliding doors, and ask to use the phone and the bathroom. But for some reason nonsurfing white folk trust a barefoot nigger carrying a board. Maybe they thought to themselves, His arms are too full to make off with the TV, and besides, where’s he going to run to?

  After a springtime’s worth of weekend surfing, Marpessa trusted me enough to accompany me to my high school prom. With a graduating class of one, it was an intimate two-person affair, chaperoned and chauffeured by my father. We went dancing at Dillons, an under-twenty-one pagoda tower of a disco as segregated as anything else in L.A. The first floor—New Wave. Second floor—Top-40 soul. Third floor—watered-down reggae. Fourth floor—banda, salsa, merengue, and a touch of bachata in a vain attempt to steal Latino clientele from Florentine Gardens on Hollywood Boulevard. My father refused to go above the second floor. Me and Marpessa took the opportunity to ditch him, hiking up the smelly stairwell to the third floor, where we shimmied to Jimmy Cliff and the I-Threes, and camped out in back behind speakers, downing mai tais and standing as close to Kristy McNichol’s crew as possible so that security wouldn’t fuck with us, thinking we were the teenage movie star’s token black friends. Then it was on to Coconut Teazers to see the Bangles, where Marpessa slurred whispered rumors that some guy named Prince was fucking the lead singer.

  My ignorance of His Royal Badness almost got my ass kicked. And nearly postponed my first kiss until who knows when, but an early-morning Denny’s Grand Slam Breakfast later, we were in the back of the pickup, speeding down the 10 freeway, doing eighty miles per hour in the fast lane, using the bags of feed and seed for pillows as we alternated wrestling with our tongues and thumbs. Played Who Can Hit the Softest. Kissed. Puked. Then kissed again. “Don’t say ‘French,’” she cautioned. “Say swap spit or bust a slob. Otherwise, you sound inexperienced.”

  My father, instead of keeping his eyes on the road, kept turning around, peering nosily through the little cab window, rolling his eyes at my breast-fondling technique, mocking the spastic way my head lolled uncontrollably when I kissed, and making the universal sign for “Fuck her already” by taking his hands off the wheel, forming a circular vagina with one hand, and sticking his index finger into it over and over again. For a man whose only evidence that he’d ever had sex with someone not enrolled in his class is possibly me, he sure was talking a lot of shit.

  Between the bus and rides, the back of the pickup, the trips on horseback to the Baldwin Theater, it’s crazy how much of our relationship was spent in motion. Marpessa put her feet on the steering wheel and covered her face in a tattered copy of Kafka’s The Trial. Though I can’t say for sure, I’d like to think she was hiding a smile. Most couples have songs they call their own. We had books. Authors. Artists. Silent movies. On weekends we used to lie naked in the hayloft, flicking chicken feathers off one another’s back and leafing through L.A. Weekly. There’d be a retrospective of Gerhard Richter, David Hammons, Elizabeth Murray, or Basquiat at LACMA, and we’d tap the ad and say, “Hey, they’re exhibiting our oil on canvas.” We’d spend hours picking through the used-film bins at Amoeba Records on Sunset, hold up a copy of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and say, “Hey, they’re digitally remastering our movie,” then dry-hump in the Hong Kong movie section. But Kafka was our genius. We’d take turns reading Amerika and Parables out loud. Sometimes we’d read the books in incomprehensible German and do free-association translations. Sometimes we’d set the text to music and break-dance to the The Metamorphosis, slow-dance to Letters to Milena.

  “Remember how you used to say I reminded you of Kafka?”

  “Just because you burned some of your shitty poems doesn’t mean I thought you were anything like Kafka. People tried to stop Kafka from destroying his work, I struck the matches for you.”

  Touché. The doors opened and the salty smell of the ocean, oil deposits, and seagull droppings wafted into the bus. I hesitated at the bottom stair, fumbling with the board like I was having trouble getting it through the
doors.

  “How’s Hominy?”

  “He’s all right. Tried to kill himself a while back.”

  “He’s so fucking crazy.”

  “Yeah. Still is. You know, his birthday is coming up. I got an idea you can help me with.” Marpessa leaned back and rested her book on a second-trimester-sized paunch.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “Bonbon, don’t play yourself.”

  Mad as she was at me, I couldn’t stop smiling, because I couldn’t remember the last time she’d called me Bonbon. While not the roughest sobriquet, it’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a street name. When I was young I had a reputation for being extremely lucky. I never suffered from the typical ghetto maladies. I was never baby-shook. Never contracted rickets, ringworm, sickle-cell trait, lockjaw, early-onset diabetes, or the “’itis.” Hoodlums would jump my friends but leave me alone. The cops somehow never got around to putting my name on a scare card or my neck in a choke hold. I never had to live in the car for a week. No one ever mistook me for that punk who shot, raped, snitched on, impregnated, molested, welched, disrespected, neglected, or fucked over someone’s peoples. Rabbit’s Foot, Starchild, Four-Leaf-Lucky-Motherfucker, none of the nicknames stuck until, at eleven years old, I was involuntarily entered by my father in the citywide spelling bee sponsored by the now-defunct Dickens Bulletin, a paper so black the newsprint/ink color scheme was reversed, as in: