As in:
Q: How many white boys does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: A plethora! Because they stole it from a black man! Lewis Latimer, a black man who invented the lightbulb and a plethora of other smart-ass shit!
And believe me, jokes like that would get a plethora of applause. Every black male, I don’t care what shade or political persuasion he is, secretly thinks he can do one of three things better than anyone in the world: play basketball, rap, or tell jokes.
If Marpessa thinks that I’m not funny, she never heard my father. Back in the heyday of black stand-up comedy, he also dragged me to the Tuesday-night open mikes. In the history of American black people, there have been only two with the complete inability to tell a joke: Martin Luther King, Jr., and my father. Even at the Plethora the “comedians” would occasionally lapse into unintentional humor. “I’m auditioning for a role in Tom Cruise’s newest movie. Tom Cruise plays a retarded judge…” The problem with open-mike night at the Plethora was that there was no time limit, because “time” is a white concept, which was fitting, because the problem with my father’s comedy was that he had no sense of timing. At least Dr. King had the good sense to never try to tell a joke. Daddy told his jokes the same way he’d ordered pizza, written poetry, and written his doctoral thesis—in APA format. Following the standards of the American Psychological Association, he’d toddle onstage and open up with the oral equivalent of a Title Page. Stating his name and the title of the joke. Yes, his jokes had titles. “This joke is called ‘Racial and Religious Differences in Drinking Establishment Patronage.’” Then he’d deliver the Abstract of the joke. So instead of simply saying, “A rabbi, a priest, and a black guy walk into a bar,” he’d say, “The subjects of this joke are three males, two of whom are clergymen, one of the Jewish faith, the other an ordained Catholic minister. The religion of the African-American respondent is undetermined, as is his educational level. The setting for the joke is a licensed establishment where alcohol is served. No, wait. It’s a plane. I’m sorry, my mistake. They are going parachuting.” Finally, he’d clear his throat, stand too close to the mike, and deliver what he liked to call “The Main Body” of the joke. Comedy is war. When a comedian’s routine works, they’ve killed; if the bits fall flat, they refer to it as dying. My father didn’t die onstage. He martyred himself for that other unrecognized completely unfunny black man who, just as there must be extraterrestrial life, is out there somewhere. I’ve seen self-immolations that were funnier than my father’s routine, but there were no gongs to ring or oversized canes with which to pull him offstage. He’d just ignore the booing and segue from the punch line to the Conclusion. The Results of the joke were a smattering of coughing. A chorus of vocalized disapproval and a plethora of yawning found to be significant. He’d end with the joke’s Reference Section:
“Jolson, Al (1918). ‘Sambo and Mammy Cleared for Takeoff on Runaway 5,’ Ziegfeld Follies.
“Williams, Bert (1917). ‘If Niggers Could Fly,’ The Circuitous Chitterling Tour.
“The Unknown Minstrel (circa 1899). ‘Dem Vaudeville Peckerwoods Sho’ Am Stealing My Shit,’ The Semi-Freemason Hall, Cleveland, Ohio.
“And don’t forget to tip your waitress.”
Even though she’d be exhausted from a long day transporting the masses, Marpessa would make sure we arrived early, volunteering me for comic duty by putting my name at the top of the sign-up sheet. I can’t tell you how much I dreaded hearing the emcee introduce me. “Now put your hands together for Bonbon.”
I would stand on that stage feeling as if I were having an out-of-body experience. Staring out into the audience and seeing myself in the front row prepping rotten tomatoes, eggs, and spoiled lettuce heads to throw at the droll motherfucker telling every ripped-off, antiquated Richard Pryor joke he could remember from his father’s record collection. But every Tuesday night Marpessa forced me to take the stage, saying that she would continue withholding sex until I made her laugh. Usually after my so-called routine, I’d return to the table to find her fast asleep, unable to tell if she was exhausted from work or from boredom. One night I finally managed to tell an original joke, that in homage to my father had a title, albeit a rather long one:
Why All That Abbott and Costello Vaudeville Mess Doesn’t Work in the Black Community
Who’s on first?
I don’t know, your mama.
Marpessa cracked the fuck up, rolling in the thin space between the folding chairs that passed for an aisle. I knew the sex drought would end that night.
They say never laugh at your own jokes, but all the best comics do, and as soon as the open mike was closed, I sprinted outside and hopped aboard bus #125, which was parked right outside the club, because Marpessa was using it as the family car, afraid to let the rolling memorial out of her sight. Before she could even think about releasing the parking brake, I was already lying naked on the backseat ready for a tinted-window quickie. Marpessa reached under the driver’s seat, pulled out a large cardboard box, dragged it down the aisle, and dumped the contents in my lap. Burying my aching erection in two inches of report cards, computer printouts, and progress reports.
“What the fuck’s all this?” I asked. Sifting through the paperwork so my dick could get some air.
“I’m acting as Charisma’s go-between. It’s early yet. It’s only been six weeks, but she thinks the segregated schooling is already working. Grades are up and behavioral problems are down, but she wants you to confirm those results with some statistical analysis.”
“Goddamn it, Marpessa! It’s going to take just as long to put all this shit back in the box as it will to do the math.”
Marpessa grabbed the base of my penis and squeezed.
“Bonbon, are you ashamed of my being a bus driver?”
“What? Where’s this coming from?”
“Nowhere.”
No amount of my amateur ear nuzzling was able to erase the wistful look on her face or make her nipples erect. Bored at my attempts at foreplay, she slipped a progress report into my pee hole and twisted my dickhead around so that I could read it like it was the Early Bird dinner menu. A sixth-grader named Michael Gallegos was taking subjects I didn’t understand and getting grades I couldn’t decipher. But according to the teacher’s comments, he was showing marked improvement in something called number sense and operations.
“What the hell kind of grade is a ‘PR’?”
“PR means shows proficiency.”
Charisma had intuitively grasped the psychological subtleties of my plan even as it was just starting to make sense to me. She understood the colored person’s desire for the domineering white presence, which the Wheaton Academy represented. Because she knew that even in these times of racial equality, when someone whiter than us, richer than us, blacker than us, Chineser than us, better than us, whatever than us, comes around throwing their equality in our faces, it brings out our need to impress, to behave, to tuck in our shirts, do our homework, show up on time, make our free throws, teach, and prove our self-worth in hopes that we won’t be fired, arrested, or trucked away and shot. In essence, Wheaton Academy is saying to her students what Booker T. Washington, the Great Educator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute, once told his uneducated people: “Cast down your buckets where you are.” While I’ll never understand why it had to be a bucket, why the shortsighted Booker T. couldn’t recommend that we cast down our books, slide rules, or laptops, I did sympathize with his and Charisma’s need for an on-call Caucasian panopticon. Believe me, it’s no coincidence that Jesus, the commissioners of the NBA and NFL, and the voices on your GPS (even the Japanese one) are white.
There are no greater anaphrodisiacs than racism and a report card in one’s urethra, and when a half-naked Marpessa clambered on top of me, both she and my penis laid their sleepy heads down in the vicinity of my belly button, she still clutching my phallus, having gone to wherever it is bus drivers go to dream. Flight school probably, because in Marpes
sa’s dreams buses can fly. They arrive on time and never break down. They use rainbows for bridges and clouds for docking bays, and wheelchair riders roll and yaw alongside like fighters protecting a bomber wing. When she reaches cruising altitude, she clears flocks of seagulls and niggers migrating south for the rest of their lives with a horn that doesn’t beep but plays Roxy Music, Bon Iver, Sunny Levine, and Nico’s “These Days.” And all her passengers make a living wage. And Booker T. Washington is a regular rider who, when he boards the bus, tells her, “When you see Bonbon, the Cosmic Sellout and your one true love, cast down your panties where you are.”
Eighteen
Come November, about six weeks after the shooting, I was making good progress with Marpessa, but less headway on what were, since I was now having sex on a semiregular basis, the two more immediate goals in my life, segregating Dickens and raising a successful potato crop in Southern California. I knew why I couldn’t get the potatoes to grow, because the climate’s too warm. But when it came to thinking of good ideas for separating the races by race, all of a sudden I had racism block, and Hood Day was only a few months away. Maybe I was like every other contemporary artist, I had only one good book, one album, one despicable act of large-scale self-hatred in me.
Hominy and I were in the row I’d dedicated to the tubers. Me on my hands and knees, checking the compost mixture, the soil density, and shoving russet seed potatoes in the ground, while he brainstormed suggestions for citywide discrimination and fucked up the one job he had, which was to lay the garden hose with the holes I punctured into it face up.
“Massa, what if we gave everybody we don’t like a badge and assigned them to camps?”
“That’s been done.”
“Okay, how about this? Designate people into three groups: black, colored, and godlike. Institute some curfew laws and a pass system…”
“Old hat, kaffir boy.”
“This’ll work in Dickens, cause everybody—Mexican, Samoan, or black—is basically a shade of brown.” He dropped the hose on the wrong side of the trench and dug into his pocket. “Now, at the bottom we’ll have the Untouchables. These are the people who are completely useless. Clippers fans, traffic cops, and people who have dirty jobs where they work with human and animal waste, like yourself.”
“So if I’m an Untouchable, and you’re my slave, what does that make you?”
“As a talented artist and thespian. I’z a Brahmin. After I die, I get nirvana. You come back exactly to where you are now, wallowing in cow shit.”
I appreciated the help, but as Hominy rattled on about the varnas and delineating his version of the Indian caste system as it might apply to Dickens, I began to figure out what my mental block was. I was feeling guilty. Realizing I was the Arschloch at the Wannsee Conference, the Afrikaner parliamentarian in Johannesburg in ’48, the wannabe hipster on the Grammy committee who in an effort to make the award more inclusive comes up with meaningless categories like Best R&B Performance by Duo or Group with Vocals and Best Rock Instrumental by a Soloist Who Knows How to Program But Can’t Play Any Instruments. I was the fool who, as topics like railroad car allotments, bantu stands, and alternative music were raised, was too cowardly to stand up and say, “Do you motherfuckers realize how ridiculous we sound right now?”
With the potatoes planted, the compost spread, and the hose finally in the correct furrow, it was time to test my makeshift irrigation system. I opened the water spigot and watched one hundred feet of unpunctured green garden hose swell as it wound its way through the string beans, past the Spanish onions, and around the cabbage, until six jets of water squirted into the sky, arcing high over but not onto the potatoes, turning a small barren patch of land near the back fence into a mini flood plain. Either the holes were too small or the water pressure was too high; in any case, there’d be no homegrown spuds this year. Next week’s forecast was for 80 degrees. Way too warm to get any kind of root vegetables started.
“Massa, you not going to turn it off? You wastin’ water.”
“I know.”
“Well, then maybe next time you plant the potatoes in the dirt where the water’s landing.”
“I can’t. That’s where my dad’s buried.”
Motherfuckers don’t believe I buried him in the backyard. But I did. Had my lawyer, Hampton Fiske, backdate some forms and planted him in the far corner where the stagnant pond used to be. Nothing ever grows over that square of land. Not before he died or since. There’s no headstone. Before Marpessa’s satsuma tree I tried to plant an apple tree for a cenotaph. Dad used to like apples. He ate them all the time. People who didn’t know him thought he was really healthy, because you’d rarely see him in public without a Macintosh and a can of V-8. Pops loved the Braeburns and the Galas, but the Honeycrisps were his favorites. Offer him a bland-ass Red Delicious and he’d look at you like you were talking bad about his mama. I regret that I never checked the pocket of his sports coat when he died. I’m certain there was an apple in there. He always brought one to nibble on after the meetings were over. If I had to guess, I’d say it was a Golden Russet, those keep well during winter. We never grew apple trees, though. Much as he complained about the pretentious white people on the Westside, I think he secretly liked to drive over to Gelson’s whenever they had Opalescents on sale for $4.50/lb., or to the Farmers Market if some Enterprises were in. I drove all the way to Santa Paula looking for a tree to plant. Something special. Since the late 1890s, Cornell University has been breeding the world’s best apples. The school used to be chill. If you asked nicely and paid the shipping and handling, they’d send you a box of late-season Jonagolds just to spread the gospel. But in recent years, for whatever reason, Cornell has taken to licensing the new varietals to local farmers, and unless you own a farm in upstate New York, you’re shit out of luck and have to make do with the occasional imported Florina. So now the university orchards in Geneva, New York, are to the black market apple trade what Medellín, Colombia, is to cocaine. My connect was Oscar Zocalo, my lab partner at Riverside, who was doing his postgrad at Cornell. We met in the airport parking lot during an air show. Yahoos flying biplanes, putting Sopwith Camels and Curtisses through their paces. Oscar insisted we do the “deal” car window to car window, crime-movie-style. The sample was so delicious that I scooped up the excess juice running down my chin and rubbed it into my gums. I don’t know if this is irony or not, but the best fucking apples taste like peaches. I drove home with a ready-for-ground Velvet Scrumptious tree, the crack of the apple world, insane yield, perfect snap, chock-full of vitamin C. I planted the tree about two feet from where I buried Daddy. I thought it would be nice if he had some shade. Two days later it was dead. And the apples tasted like mentholated cigarettes, liver and onions, and cheap fucking rum.
I was standing on my father’s grave, in the mud, underneath the water spray meant for the potatoes. From there I could see the whole farm from front to back. The rows of fruit trees. Separated by color. Light to dark. Lemons. Apricots. Pomegranates. Plums. Satsumas. Figs. Pineapples. Avocados. The fields, which rotate from corn to wheat, then to Japanese rice, if I feel like paying the water bill. The greenhouse sits in the middle. Backed by leafy processions of cabbage, lettuce, legumes, and cucumbers. The grapes on vines along the south fence, tomatoes on the northern, then the white blanket of cotton. Cotton that I haven’t touched since my father died. What was it Hominy said to me when I first started popping off about bringing back Dickens? You heard the saying, you can’t see the forest for the trees? Well, you can’t see the niggers for the plantation. Who was I kidding? I’m a farmer, and farmers are natural segregationists. We separate the wheat from the chaff. I’m not Rudolf Hess, P. W. Botha, Capitol Records, or present-day U.S. of A. Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I’m a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to br
eathe.
“Hominy!”
“Yes, massa?”
“What day is it?”
“Sunday. Why, you going down to Dum Dum’s?”
“Yeah.”
“Then ask that bitch-nigger where my fucking Little Rascals movies at!”
Nineteen
Attendance was light, maybe ten people. Foy, unshaven and draped in a wrinkled suit, stood in the corner twitching and blinking uncontrollably. Foy had been in the news lately. His out-of-wedlock children so numerous, they’d filed a class-action suit against him for the emotional distress he’d caused by sticking his face in front of a camera or microphone at every opportunity. At this point it was only the smooth Euclidean planar perfection of his box cut and his Rolodex that was holding both him and the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals together. Hard to lose faith in a man who even at the worst of times can keep his hair on point and call upon friends like Jon McJones, a black conservative who’d recently added the “Mc” to his slave name. McJones read from his latest book, Mick, Please: The Black Irish Journey from Ghetto to Gaelic. The author was a good get for Foy, and with the free Bushmills, there should have been more people, but there was no doubt the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals were dying. Maybe the notion of a cabal of stupid black thinkers had finally outlived its usefulness. “I’m in Sligo, a small artist hamlet on the northern coast of the Emerald Isle,” McJones was reading. His lisp and faux-white enunciation made me want to punch him in the face. “The all-Ireland hurling championship is on the telly. Kilkenny versus Galway. Men with sticks chasing a small white ball. A round-shouldered bloke in a fisherman’s sweater stands behind me gently tapping the butt end of a shillelagh into the palm of his hand. I’ve never felt more at home.”