After night falls, once past Pepperdine University, where the highway narrows into a two-lane hill that stretches like a skate ramp to the stars, there isn’t much light. Just the occasional flash of oncoming high beams, and, if you’re lucky, a lonely bonfire on the sand, and the sheets of moonlight give the Pacific Ocean a glassy black obsidian sheen. It was on this same stretch of winding road that I first courted Marpessa. I bussed her on the cheek. She didn’t flinch, which I interpreted as a good sign.
Although the bus cruise was bumping, Hominy had spent most of the ride standing in the middle of the dance floor, stubbornly holding on to the overhead bar and, by proxy, the history of American discrimination, but around Puerco Beach, Laura Jane had managed to coax him out of his ancient mindset by grinding her pelvic bone rhythmically against his backside and playing with his ears. “Freaking,” we used to call it, and she pranced around Hominy, her hands overhead, caressing the beat. When the song ended, she shouldered her way toward the bow, the fuzz on her upper lip beaded with sweat. Goddamn, she was fine.
“Wicked party.”
The radio buzzed to life, and a dispatcher said the word “whereabouts” in a concerned voice. Marpessa turned down the music, said something I couldn’t hear, then blew a kiss into the receiver and switched off the radio. If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That’s Always Passed Out on the Couch. Once past Leo Carrillo, PCH begins to smooth out, and when the moon disappears behind the Santa Monica Mountains, painting the night sky pitch-black, if you listen closely you can hear two faint pops in fairly quick succession. The first is the sound of four million living-room television sets flickering off in unison, and the second is the sound of four million bedroom ones being powered on. Moviemakers and photographers often speak of the uniqueness of L.A. sunlight, the ways it pours itself across the sky, golden and sweet, like Vermeer, Monet, and breakfast honey all rolled into one. But the L.A. moonlight, or lack thereof rather, is just as special. When night falls, I mean really falls, the temperature drops twenty degrees and a total amniotic blackness blankets and comforts you like a lover making the bed while you’re still in it, and that brief moment between television sets popping off and back on is the calm before the after-hours strip clubs in Inglewood open, before the cacophony of New Year’s Eve gunshots rings out, before Santa Monica, Hollywood, Whittier, and Crenshaw Boulevards come slowly cruising to life, is when Angelenos take time to pause and reflect. To give thanks to the late-night joints in Koreatown. To Mariachi Square. To chili burgers and pastrami dip sandwiches. To Marpessa, peering through the windshield and squinting at the stars, driving by dead reckoning rather than simply following the road. The tires ground assuredly over the asphalt, the bus rolling through the stratosphere, and when she heard the second pop, Marpessa gave the go-ahead for more music, and before long, Hominy and the rest of the Jack in the Box ballet were again pirouetting in the aisle, singing out loud to Tom Petty.
“Where’d he find you?” Marpessa asked Laura Jane, her eyes still fixed on the Milky Way.
“He hired me.”
“You a prostitute?”
“Damn near. Actress. Part-time submissive to pay the bills.”
“Parts must be hard to come by if you have to do this shit.” Marpessa cut her eyes at Laura Jane, bit her bottom lip, and turned her attention back to the celestial night.
“Have I ever seen you in anything?”
“I do mostly television commercials, but it’s tough. Whenever I’m up for a part, the producers look at me like you just did and say, ‘Not suburban enough,’ which in the industry is code for ‘too Jewish.’”
Sensing that Marpessa hadn’t quite cleared her chakras during her L.A. moment of silence, Laura Jane pressed her pretty face cheek-to-cheek with Marpessa’s jealous mug and together they studied themselves in the rearview mirror, looking like a pair of mismatched conjoined twins attached at the head. One middle-aged and black, the other young and white, sharing the same brain but not the same thought process. “Makes me wish I was black,” the white twin said, smiling and running her hands over her darker sister’s burning cheeks. “Black people get all the jobs.”
Marpessa must’ve put the bus on autopilot, because her hands were off the steering wheel and around Laura Jane’s neck. Not choking her, but pointedly straightening the collar of her dress, letting her evil twin know she was ready to pounce as soon as her side of the brain gave the okay. “Look, I doubt that black people ‘get all the jobs.’ But even if they do, it’s because Madison Avenue knows niggers spend a dollar and twenty cents of every dollar they earn on the crap they see on television. Let’s take the standard luxury car commercial…”
Laura Jane nodded as if she were really listening, slyly slipping her arms around Marpessa and onto the steering wheel. For a second we veered across the double yellow lines, but she made a deft correction and gently guided the bus back into the passing lane.
“Luxury cars. You were saying?”
“The subtle message of the luxury car commercial is ‘We here at Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Lexus, Cadillac, or whatever the fuck, are an equal-opportunity opportunist. See this handsome African-American male model behind the wheel? We’d like you, o holy, highly sought after white male consumer between the ages of thirty and forty-five, sitting in your recliner, we’d like you to spend your money and join our happy, carefree, prejudice-free world. A world where black men drive sitting straight up in their seats and not sunk so low and to the side you can see only the tops of their gleaming ball-peen heads.’”
“And what’s so wrong with that?”
“But the subliminal message is ‘Look, you lazy, fat, susceptible-to-marketing, poor excuse for a white man. You’ve indulged this thirty-second fantasy of a nigger dandy commuting from his Tudor castle in an aerodynamically designed piece of precision German engineering, so you’d better get your act together, bro, and stop letting these rack-and-pinion-steering, moon-roof, manufacturer’s-suggested-retail-price-paying monkeys show you up and steal your piece of the American dream!’”
At mention of the American dream, Laura Jane stiffened and returned the conn to Marpessa. “I’m offended,” she said.
“Because I used the word ‘nigger’?”
“No, because you’re a beautiful woman who just happens to be black, and you’re far too smart not to know that it isn’t race that’s the problem but class.”
Laura Jane planted a loud, wet smack on Marpessa’s forehead, and spun on her Louboutin heels to go back to work. I grabbed my love’s arm in mid swing, saving Laura Jane from a rabbit punch she never saw coming.
“You know why white people don’t ever just happen to be white? Because they all think they’ve just happened to have been touched by God, that’s why!”
I thumbed the lipstick print off Marpessa’s angry forehead.
“And tell that class oppression garbage to the fucking Indians and the dodo birds. Talking about I should ‘know better.’ She’s Jewish. She should know better.”
“She didn’t say she was Jewish. She said people think she looks Jewish.”
“You are a fucking sellout. That’s why I fucking dumped your ass. You never stick up for yourself. You’re probably on her side.”
Godard approached filmmaking as criticism, the same way Marpessa approached bus driving, but in any case, I thought Laura Jane had a point. Whatever Jewish people supposedly look like, from Barbra Streisand to the nominally Jewish-ish Whoopie Goldberg, you never see people in commercials that look “Jewish,” just as you never see black people that come off as “urban” and hence “scary,” or handsome Asian men, or dark-skinned Latinos. I’m sure those groups spend a disproportionate amount of their incomes on shit they don’t need. And, of course, in the idyllic world of television advertisement, homosexuals are mythical beings, but you see more ads featuring unicorns and leprechauns than you do gay men and women. And maybe nonthreatening African-American actors are overrepresented on television. Their
master’s degrees from the Yale School of Drama and Shakespearean training having gone to waste, as they stand around barbecue pits delivering lines like “Prithee, homeboy. Forsooth, thou knowest that Budweiser is the King of Beers. Uneasy lies the frothy head that wears the crown.” But if you really think about it, the only thing you absolutely never see in car commercials isn’t Jewish people, homosexuals, or urban Negroes, it’s traffic.
The bus slowed as Marpessa leaned into a left turn that took us off the highway and down a hidden, winding service road. We crept past a limestone outcropping, a set of rickety wooden coastal access stairs, and through an unused parking lot. From there, she downshifted, threw the bus in gear, and dune-buggied the vehicle directly onto the sand, where she parallel-parked with the horizon and, since the tide was up, in about a foot and a half of seawater.
“Don’t worry, these things are like all-terrain vehicles and damn near amphibious. Between the mudslides and L.A.’s shitty sewage system, a bus has to be able to slog through anything. If we’d used Metro buses to land on the beaches of Normandy on D-day, World War II would’ve ended two years earlier.”
The doors, both back and front, flew open, and the Pacific lapped lovingly at the bottom stairs, turning the bus into one of those Bora-Bora hotel rooms that sit on pylons fifty yards out to sea. I half expected to see a Jack in the Box service rep pull up on a Jet Ski delivering towels and a second round of sourdough burgers and vanilla shakes.
Al Green was singing about love and happiness. Laura Jane stripped naked. In the dim interior light her thin, smooth, pale skin was as iridescent as the nacre interior of an abalone shell. She strutted passed us. “I played a mermaid in a tuna commercial once. However, I have to say there was no black talent on that shoot. How come there aren’t any African-American mermaids?”
“Because black women hate to get their hair wet.”
“Oh.” And with that, using the bus’s aluminum latticework like a stripper working the pole, she flung herself into the water. Followed by the Jack in the Box crew, also naked, except for their paper hats.
Hominy sidled up to the front and looked longingly at the water.
“Master, are we still in Dickens?”
“No, Hominy, we aren’t.”
“Well, where is Dickens, then? Out there past the water?”
“Dickens exists in our heads. Real cities have borders. And signs. And sister cities.”
“Will we have all that soon?”
“I hope so.”
“And, massa, when we going to get my movies from Foy Cheshire?”
“Soon as we reestablish Dickens. We’ll see if he has them. I promise.”
Hominy paused at the doorway and, fully clothed, tested the water with the toe of his brogans.
“You know how to swim?”
“Uh-huh. Don’t you remember ‘Gon’ Deep Sea Fishin’?’”
I’d forgotten about that macabre Little Rascals classic. The gang plays hooky from school and ends up on a fishing trawl sent out to catch a shark that’s been terrorizing the waterfront. Since Pete the Pup has eaten the bait, they smear little Hominy in cod-liver oil, prick his finger, and hook his belt loop to the end of a fishing rod, lower him into the water, and use him as shark chum. While underwater he has to suck the air out of a school of puffer fish to keep from drowning. An electric eel repeatedly zaps him in the groin. The episode ends with a giant octopus showing its appreciation for the Little Rascals, ridding the sea of the fanged menace (turns out Alfalfa’s singing voice is so shrill he can carry a shark-repellant note underwater) by spraying the boys in black ink. When the dinge-colored bunch return home to a jetty full of concerned parents, Hominy and Buckwheat’s doo-ragged mammy blurts out, “Buckwheat, I dun tol’ yo’ pappy, I ain’t takin’ care uh nun ob hiz odder chil’ren!”
Marpessa fell asleep in my lap, and I stared out into the ocean, listening to the breaking surf and the peals of laughter. But mostly I was transfixed by Laura Jane’s shimmering pink coral nakedness backstroking through the ocean, nipples pointing to the stars, pubic hair sashaying in the clear water like a ginger tuft of silken sea grass. A scissor kick, a teasing glimpse, and she was underwater. Marpessa socked me hard in the ribs. It took all my willpower not to give her the satisfaction of rubbing out the pain.
“Look at you, fiending after some white bitch like every other L.A. nigger.”
“White babes don’t do nothing for me. You know that.”
“Bullshit, your fucking hard-on woke me up.”
“Aversion therapy.”
“What’s that?”
I balked at telling her about my father locking my head into the tachistoscope and for three hours flashing split-second images of the forbidden fruit of his era, pinups and Playboy centerfolds, in my face. Bettie Page, Betty Grable, Barbra Streisand, Twiggy, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn, Sophia Loren; then he’d force ipecac and okra smoothies down my throat. I’d vomit my guts out while he blasted Buffy Sainte-Marie and Linda Ronstadt on the stereo. The visual stimuli worked, but the auditory stuff didn’t take. To this day, whenever I’m feeling down and troubled, I crank Rickie Lee Jones, Joni Mitchell, and Carole King from the stereo, all of who were shouting-out California way before Biggie, Tupac, or any of the Ice Coons. But if you look carefully, and the light is just right, you can see the afterimages of Barbi Benton’s naked centerfold burned into my pupils as if they were discount plasma TVs.
“It’s nothing. I just don’t like white girls is all.”
Marpessa sat up and nestled her head into the crook of my neck. “Bonbon?” She smelled like she always did—of baby powder and designer shampoo. It was all she needed. “When did you fall in love with me?”
“The Color of Burnt Toast,” I said, naming the bestselling memoir about the guy from Detroit with a “crazy” white mother who didn’t want her biracial children to be traumatized by the word “black,” so she raised them as brown, called them beigeoloids, celebrated Brown History Month, and, until he was ten years old, grew up believing that the reason he was so dark was because his absentee father was the lightning-scorched magnolia tree in the housing project courtyard. “You let my father convince you to join the Dum Dum Donuts book club. Everybody else loved the book, but during the question-and-answer session you went off on dude. ‘I’m so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren’t there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That’s why black literature sucks!’”
“I said ‘Black literature sucks’?”
“Yup, and I was head over heels.”
“Shit, white people got complexions, too.”
A surprisingly strong swell rocked the bus from side to side. In the glow of the headlights I spotted an outsider forming to the left. I kicked off my sneakers and socks, tore off my shirt, and swam out to meet it. Marpessa stood in the doorway, shin-deep in the rising tide, her hands cupped around her mouth so that she could be heard above the crashing waves and the howl of a steadily increasing south-by-southwest wind. “Don’t you want to know when I fell in love with you?”
As if she were ever in love with me.
“I fell in love with you every time we went out to eat! I’d say to myself, ‘Thank God, a black man who doesn’t insist on sitting facing the door! Finally, a nigger who doesn’t have to pretend that he’s a big man! That has to be on guard at all times because somebody might be after him because he’s so fucking bad!’ How could I not fall in love with you?”
The key to bodysurfing a good wave is timing. Wait for the exact moment the tide drops the pit of your stomach into your groin. Swim two strokes ahead of the curl, and as soon as the current makes you feel weightless, make two more hard strokes, lift yo
ur chin, throw one arm tight to your side and the other straight out in front, palm down, and slightly bent at the elbow, then just ride to shore.
City Lites: An Interlude
I never understood the concept of the sister city, but I’d always been fascinated by it. The way that these twin towns, as they’re sometimes known, choose and court each other seems more incestuous than adoptive. Some unions, like that of Tel Aviv and Berlin, Paris and Algiers, Honolulu and Hiroshima, are designed to signal an end to hostilities and the beginning of peace and prosperity; arranged marriages in which the cities learn to love one another over time. Others are shotgun weddings, because one city, (e.g., Atlanta) impregnated the other (e.g., Lagos) on a first date that spun violently out of control centuries ago. Some cities marry up for money and prestige; others marry down to piss off their mother countries. Guess who’s coming to dinner? Kabul! Every now and then, two cities meet and fall in love out of mutual respect and a love for hiking, thunderstorms, and classic rock ’n’ roll. Think Amsterdam and Istanbul. Buenos Aires and Seoul. But in the modern age, where your average town is too busy trying to balance budgets and keep the infrastructure from crumbling, most cities have a hard time finding a soul mate, so they turn to Sister City Global, an international matchmaking organization that finds love partners for lonely municipalities. It was two days after Hominy’s birthday party and although I—and the rest of Dickens—was still hungover, when Ms. Susan Silverman, City Match Consultant, called about my application, I couldn’t have been more excited.