The Sellout

  “What’s that sound, an airplane taking off?”

  “No, it’s the nigger farmer. Must be Career Day at the middle school again.”

  I led a jittery brown-eyed calf onto home plate of a baseball diamond backstopped with a rickety chain-link fence. Some of the braver children ignored their rumbling stomachs and vitamin deficiencies to break rank and approach the animal. Cautiously, afraid they might catch a disease or fall in love, they petted the calf, speaking the syntax of the damned.

  “His skin soft.”

  “Them eyes look like Milk Duds. I wants to eat them shits.”

  “Way this cow nigger be licking his lips, mooin’ and droolin’ ’n’ shit, remind me of your retarted mother.”

  “Fuck you. You retarted!”

  “All y’all retarted. Don’t you know cows human, too?”

  The irony of mispronouncing “retarded” notwithstanding, I knew that I was a hit, or at least the calf was. Charisma folded her tongue between her teeth and split the air with a sharp football-coach whistle. The same whistle she used to warn me and Marpessa that my father was making his way up the walkway. Two hundred kids quieted instantly and turned their attention deficit disorders toward me.

  “Hello, everybody,” I said, spitting on the ground, because that’s what farmers do. “Like you guys, I’m from Dickens…”

  “Where?” a bunch of students shouted. I might as well have said I was from Atlantis. The children weren’t from “no Dickens.” And they stood, throwing up gang signs and telling me where they were from: Southside Joslyn Park Crip Gang. Varrio Trescientos y Cinco. Bedrock Stoner Avenue Bloods.

  In retaliation I tossed up the closest thing the agricultural world has to a gang sign and slid my hand across my throat—the universal sign for Cut the Engine—and announced, “Well, I’m from the Farms, which like all those places you’ve named, whether you know it or not, is in Dickens, and Assistant Principal Molina asked me to demonstrate what the average day for a farmer is like, and since today is this calf’s eight-week anniversary, I thought I’d talk about castration. There are three methods of castration…”

  “What’s ‘castration,’ maestro?”

  “It’s a way of preventing male animals from fathering any children.”

  “Don’t they got cow rubbers?”

  “That’s not a bad idea, but cows don’t have hands and, like the Republican Party, any regard for a female’s reproductive rights, so this is a way to control the population. It also makes them more docile. Anyone know what ‘docile’ means?”

  After passing it under her runny nose, a skinny chalk-colored girl raised a hand so disgustingly ashy, so white and dry-skinned, that it could only be black.

  “It means bitchlike,” she said, volunteering to assist me by stepping to the calf and flicking his downy ears with her fingers.

  “Yes, I guess you could say that it does.”

  At either the mention of “bitch” or the misguided notion they were going to learn something about sex, the children closed in and tightened the circle. The ones who weren’t in the first two rows were ducking and scooting around for better vantage points. A few kids climbed to the top of the backstop’s rafters and peered down on the procedure like med students in an operating theater. I body-slammed the calf on its side and kneeled down on his neck and rib cage, then directed my unlotioned cowhand to grab and spread his hind legs until the little dogie’s genitals were exposed to the elements. Seeing that I had their attention, I noticed Charisma checking on her still-whimpering employee, then tiptoeing back aboard Marpessa’s bus. “As I was saying, there are three methods of castration: surgical, elastic, and bloodless. In elastic you place a rubber band right here, preventing any blood flow going to the testicles. That way they’ll eventually shrivel up and fall off.” I grabbed the animal at the base of his scrotum and squeezed so hard the calf and the schoolchildren jumped in unison. “For bloodless castration, you crush the spermatic cords here and here.” Two firm pinches of his vas deferens glans sent the calf into whimpering convulsions of pain and embarrassment, and the students into spasms of sadistic laughter. I whipped out a jackknife and held it up high, twisting my hand in the air, expecting the blade to glint dramatically in the sunlight, but it was too cloudy. “For surgery…”

  “I want to do it.” It was the little black girl, her clear brown eyes fixed on the calf’s scrotum and bulging with scientific curiosity.

  “I think you need a permission slip from your parents.”

  “What parents? I live at El Nido,” she said, referring to the group home on Wilmington, which in the neighborhood was tantamount to name-dropping Sing Sing in a James Cagney movie.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sheila. Sheila Clark.”

  Sheila and I changed places, clambering over and under one another without taking any weight off the hapless calf. When I got to the back end, I handed her the knife and the emasculator, which, like the garden shears they resembled, and any other good tool, does exactly what its name says it’s going to do. Two pints of blood, a surprisingly deft removal of the top half of the scrotum, an artful yank of the testes into the open air, an audible crunching severing of the spermatic cord, a schoolyard full of shrieking pupils, teachers, and one permanently sexually frustrated calf later, I was finishing up my lecture for the benefit of Sheila Clark and three other grade-schoolers intrigued enough to wade into the spreading pool of blood to get a better look at the wound, while I wrestled with the still squirming calf. “When the bull is lying here helpless on his side, we in the farming industry like to call this the ‘recumbent position,’ and now isn’t a bad time to inflict other painful procedures on the animal, like dehorning, vaccinations, branding, and marking the ears…”

  The rain fell harder. The drops, big and warm, kicked up small clouds of dust as they pelted the hard, dry pavement. In the middle of the schoolyard the janitorial staff was hurriedly unloading a Dumpster. They tossed the broken wooden desks, cracked blackboards, and shards of a termite-ridden handball wall into a big pile, then stuffed the crevices with newspaper. Normally Career Day ended with a giant marshmallow roast. The skies were getting even darker. I had the feeling the kids would be disappointed. In the growing wetness the teachers, save for the crybaby staring into the flat basketball as if his world had come to an end, and other careerists tried to round up the kids, snatching them off the broken-down swings, rusted-out monkey bar and jungle gym sets, while Nestor galloped around the frightened herd, steering them away from the gates. Marpessa had started the bus, and Charisma climbed out just as the calf started to recover from the shock. I looked for my assistant, Sheila Clark, but she was too busy holding up the pair of bloody testicles by their stringy entrails, dangling them in the air and slamming them into one other like a pair of twenty-five-cent vending machine clacker balls to be of any use.

  As I slipped the animal into a headlock, turning on my back and digging my boot heels into his crotch to keep him from kicking me in the face, Marpessa U-turned the bus around and headed out the side gate and onto Shenandoah Street without so much as a goodbye wave. Fuck her. Charisma stood over me smiling, reading the hurt in my eyes.

  “You two were so meant for each other.”

  “Do me a favor? In my bag there’s some antiseptic and a little jar of goop that says Fliegenschutz.” Assistant Principal Molina did what she’s always done since she was a little girl: she got her hands dirty, spraying the writhing animal with disinfectant and slathering on the sticky Fliegenschutz over the gaping wound where his testicles used to be.

  When she finished, the white teacher, his face streaked with tears, tapped his boss on the shoulder, and like a television cop handing in his badge and gun, he solemnly removed the shiny new Teach for America button fastened to his sweater vest, placed it in Charisma’s palm, and walked off into the squall.

  “What was that about?”

  “When we were on the bus, your skinny farmhand, Sheila here, stood up, poi
nted to the PRIORITY SEATING FOR WHITES sign, and told young Mr. Edmunds he could have her seat. And that idiot takes her up on her offer, sits down, realizes what he’s done, and fucking loses it.”

  “Wait, the signs are still up?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “You talk a lot of shit about the hood, but you don’t know what’s going on in the hood. Ever since you put those signs up, Marpessa’s bus has been the safest place in the city. She’d forgotten all about them, too, until her shift supervisor pointed out she hadn’t had an incident report since Hominy’s birthday party. But then she started thinking about it. How people were treating each other with respect. Saying hello when they got on, thank you when they got off. There’s no gang fighting. Crip, Blood, or cholo, they press the Stop Request button one time and one fucking time only. You know where the kids go do their homework? Not home, not the library, but the bus. That’s how safe it is.”

  “Crime is cyclical.”

  “It’s the signs. People grouse at first, but the racism takes them back. Makes them humble. Makes them realize how far we’ve come and, more important, how far we have to go. On that bus it’s like the specter of segregation has brought Dickens together.”

  “What about that crybaby teacher?”

  “Mr. Edmunds is a good math specialist, but obviously he can’t teach the kids anything about themselves, so fuck him.”

  More or less healed, the calf scrambled to its feet. Sheila, his little emasculator, leaned teasingly in his face, holding his testes from her earlobes like costume jewelry. One last goodbye sniff of his manhood and he ambled off to commiserate with the ball-less tetherball poles that stood bent and useless next to the cafeteria. Charisma rubbed her tired eyes. “Now, if I get these little motherfuckers to behave in school like they do on the bus, we’d be on to something.”

  Led by Nestor Lopez, who was ten lengths ahead of the pack, galloping in for his reward money, Sheila’s classmates were being shepherded over the concrete plains, marched through the drizzle and past the rows of thatch tarpaper-roofed bungalows, windows glassed with newsprint and colored construction paper. Buildings in such disrepair they made the one-room African schoolhouses on late-night television fundraisers damn near look like college lecture halls in comparison. It was a modern-day Trail of Tears. The kids were circled around the mound of broken school furniture. Their excitement undeterred despite the crackle of the raindrops on the giant bags of marshmallows and the steadily darkening pile of wood and damp newsprint. Behind them was the school’s auditorium, the roof of which had collapsed in the Northridge quake of ’94 and had never been rebuilt. Charisma ran her hand down the length of Nestor’s Rose Parade saddle bells. The jingle-jangle made the kids smile. Just then Sheila Clark, tearfully rubbing her shoulder, ran up. “Ms. Molina, that white boy stole one of my balls!” she wailed, pointing at the chubby Latino kid, three shades darker than her, vainly trying to superball the testis against the wet ground. Charisma gently stroked Sheila’s braided head, soothing her feelings. That was a new one on me. Black kids referring to their Latino peers as white. When I was their age, back when we used to scream “Not it!” before games of Kick the Can and Red Light, Green Light, back before the violence, the poverty, and the infighting had reduced our indigenous land rights from all of Dickens to isolated city blocks of gang turf, everyone in Dickens, regardless of race, was black and you determined someone’s degree of blackness not by skin color or hair texture but by whether they said “For all intents and purposes” or “For all intensive purposes.” Marpessa used to say that despite the fall of straight black hair that cascaded down to her butt and her horchata complexion, she didn’t know Charisma wasn’t black until the day Charisma’s mother stopped by to pick her up from school. Her walk and talk so different from her daughter’s. Stunned, she turned to her best friend. “You Mexican?” Thinking her homegirl was tripping, Charisma blanched, about to exclaim, “I ain’t Mexican,” when, as if seeing her for the first time, she took a good look at her own mother in the after-school context of the surrounding black faces and rhythms, and was like “Oh fuck, I am Mexican! ¡Hijo de puta!” That was a long time ago.

  Before lighting the bonfire, Assistant Principal Molina addressed her troops. It was obvious in the seriousness in her face and the tone of her voice that she was a general at the end of her rope. Resigned to the fate that the black and brown troops she was sending out into the world didn’t have much of a chance. Cada día de carreras profesionales yo pienso la misma cosa. De estos doscientos cincuenta niños, ¿cuántos terminarán la escuela secundaria? ¿Cuarenta pinche por ciento? Órale, y de esos cien con suerte, ¿cuántos irán a la universidad? ¿Online, junior, clown college, o lo que sea? About five, más o menos. ¿Y cuántos graduarán? Two, maybe. Qué lástima. Estamos chingados.

  And although like most black males raised in Los Angeles, I’m bilingual only to the extent that I can sexually harass women of all ethnicities in their native languages, I understood the gist of the message. Those kids were fucked.

  I was surprised how many of the children carried lighters, but no matter how many attempts were made to start the bonfire, the water-soaked wood wouldn’t catch. Charisma ordered a group of students to the storage shed. They returned bearing cardboard boxes, the contents of which they dumped on the ground. Soon there was a pyramid of books about five feet wide and three feet high and rising.

  “Well, what the fuck are you waiting for?”

  She didn’t have to ask twice. The books caught like kindling, and the flames of a good-sized bonfire licked the sky as the students happily roasted marshmallows on number two pencils.

  I pulled Charisma aside. I couldn’t believe she was burning books. “I thought school supplies were in short supply.”

  “Those aren’t books. Those came from Foy Cheshire. He has a whole curriculum called ‘Fire the Canon!’ featuring such rewritten classics as Uncle Tom’s Condo and The Point Guard in the Rye that he’s pushing on the school board. Look, we’ve tried everything: smaller classrooms, longer hours, bilingual, monolingual, and sublingual educations, Ebonics, phonics, and hypnotics. Color schemes designed to promote the optimum learning environment. But no matter what warm-to-medium-cool hues you paint the walls, when it all comes down to it, it’s white teachers talking white methodology and drinking white wine and some wannabe white administrator threatening to put your school into receivership because he knows Foy Cheshire. Nothing works. But I’ll be damned if the Chaff Middle School will hand out copies of The Dopeman Cometh to its students.”

  I kicked a partially burned tome away from the fire. The cover was charred but still readable, The Great Blacksby, page one of which was:

  Real talk. When I was young, dumb, and full of cum, my omnipresent, good to my mother, non-stereotypical African-American daddy dropped some knowledge on me that I been trippin’ off of ever since.

  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 n
ext 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.