The Sellout

  Marpessa pulled me out of the dugout and toward home plate. King Cuz and a delegation of aging thugs and wannabes were standing in the batter boxes, grubbing on ribs and pineapple. Panache was chewing his pineapple slice down to the rind, telling stories about a musician’s life on the road, when Marpessa interrupted him.

  “I just want you to know I’m fucking Bonbon.”

  Oblivious to the thorns, Panache stuck what remained of the pineapple, skin and all, into his mouth, slurping and sucking out every last drop of juice. When the fruit was dry as a desert bone, he walked up to me, tapped my chest with the tip of Lulu Belle’s barrel, and said, “Shit, if I could get some of this pineapple every morning, I’d fuck the nigger, too.”

  A gunshot rang out. In center field, Stomper, apparently still feeling the effects of the Carpal Tunnel, was barefoot, lying on his back, aiming the gun with his feet, laughing his ass off and shooting with his toes at the clouds. It looked like fun, so most of the men and a few women went to join him, puffing on their joints, weapons out, and hopping through the dirt infield, one shoe on, one shoe off, hoping to spark a few rounds before the cops came.

  Twenty-two

  Black people pop. “Pop” being Hollywood slang for having a dynamic camera presence, for being almost too photogenic. Hominy says it’s why they rarely shoot black and white buddy movies anymore; the bigger stars get washed out. Tony Curtis. Nick Nolte. Ethan Hawke does a film with some African-American and it becomes a screen test to see who’s really the Invisible Man. And has there ever been a buddy movie featuring a black woman and anyone? The only ones with the cinematic magnetism to hang were Gene Wilder and Spanky McFarland. Anyone else—Tommy Lee Jones, Mark Wahlberg, Tim Robbins—is just hanging on to the mane of a runaway horse.

  Watching Hominy at the L.A. Festival of Forbidden Cinema and Unabashedly Racist Animation, on the Nuart big screen, trading one-liners with Spanky, it wasn’t hard to see why back then all the trades thought he’d be the next big pickaninny. The sparkle in his eyes, the gleam in his cherubic cheeks were magnetic. His hair was so kinky and dry it looked as if it might spontaneously combust. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. Dressed in raggedy overalls, wearing black high-top sneakers ten sizes too big, he was the ultimate prepubescent straight man. No one could take it like Hominy. It amazed me how he withstood the onslaught of uncensored and unforgiving watermelon and my-daddy-in-jail jokes. Welcoming each insult with a heartfelt and throaty “Yowza!” It was hard to tell whether he was demonstrating cowardice or grace under fire, because he’d perfected that bug-eyed, slack-jawed dumbfounded look that to this day passes for black comedic acting chops. But the modern-day black entertainer has to do it only once or twice a movie. Poor Hominy had to pull off the coon reaction shot three times a reel and always in extreme close-up.

  When the lights went up, the host announced that the last living Little Rascal was in the house and invited Hominy onstage. After a standing ovation, he wiped his eyes and took a few questions. When talking about Alfalfa and the gang, Hominy’s incredibly lucid. He explained the shooting schedule. How the tutoring worked. Who got along with whom. Who was the funniest off camera. The meanest. He lamented how no one ever notices Buckwheat’s emotional range and rhapsodized about how much his mentor’s speech and diction improved in the MGM days. I kept my fingers crossed that no one would ask about Darla, so I wouldn’t have to hear about a take-five reverse cowgirl under the bleachers in “Football Romeo.”

  “We have time for one more question.”

  From the back, directly across the aisle from me, a group of blackfaced coeds stood in unison. Dressed in Victorian bloomers with the Greek letters Ν Ι Γ stitched across their chests, and their hair haphazardly set in thick plaits with wooden clothespins, the women of Nu Iota Gamma looked like dolls you’d see at an antiques auction. In unison they tried to ask a question.

  “We wanted to know…”

  But they were beaten back by a chorus of boos and a hail of paper cups and popcorn containers. Hominy hushed the audience. The room grew silent, and as it turned its self-righteous attention back to him, I noticed the woman closest to me was African-American, the tininess of her ears giving her ethnicity away. It was a rare sighting on Sunday afternoon, a true female coon, black as seventies funk, black as a C+ in organic chemistry, black as me.

  “What’s the problem?” Hominy asked the crowd.

  A tall, bearded white boy in a fedora a couple of rows in front of me stood up and pointed a finger at the line of sorority Topsies. “They are in non-ironic blackface,” he said defiantly. “That’s not cool.”

  Hominy shielded his eyes with his hand and peered blindly into the audience and asked, “Blackface? What’s blackface?”

  At first the audience laughed. But when Hominy didn’t crack a smile, the guy stared back at him with a doltish wide-eyed look of bewilderment not seen since the days of great buffoons like Stepin Fetchit and George W. Bush, the first coon president.

  The white dude respectfully called Hominy’s attention to some of the films we’d just seen. “Sambonctious,” where Spanky pours ink on his face and pretends to be Hominy so his dusky friend can pass the spelling test and join the gang on the school trip to the amusement park. “Black Rascallion,” where Alfalfa dinges up so that he can audition to be the lead banjo picker in an all-Negro jug band. “Jigga-Boo!” where Froggy turns the tables on a ghost by stripping down to his skivvies and covering himself from head to toe in fireplace soot, shouting “Boo-ga! Boo-ga! Booooo!” Hominy nodded his head, laced his thumbs in his suspenders, and rocked back on his heels. Then proceeded to light and smoke an invisible cigar, which he switched from one side of his mouth to the other. “Oh, we didn’t call it blackface. We called it acting.”

  He had the audience eating out of his hand again. They thought he was being funny, but he was dead serious. For Hominy blackface isn’t racism. It’s just common sense. Black skin looks better. Looks healthier. Looks prettier. Looks powerful. It’s why bodybuilders and international Latin dance contestants blacken themselves up. Why Berliners, New Yorkers, and businessmen, Nazis, cops, scuba divers, Panthers, bad guys, and Kabuki stagehands wear black. Because if imitation is indeed the highest form of flattery, then white minstrelsy is a compliment, it’s a reluctant acknowledgment that unless you happen to really be black, being “black” is the closest a person can get to true freedom. Just ask Al Jolson or the slew of Asian comedians who earn their livings by acting “black.” Just ask those sorority girls, who were settling back into their seats, leaving the lone black member to fend for herself.

  “Mr. Hominy, is it true? Does Foy Cheshire really own the rights to the really racist Little Rascals movies?”

  Damn, don’t get this nigger started about that Foy Cheshire bullshit.

  I stared at the black-faced woman in blackface, wondering if she, too, was acting, if she felt free. If she was aware that the natural color of her skin was actually blacker than her “blackface.” Meaning technically she was in somewhat-lighter-than-blackface. Hominy pointed me out in the crowd, and when he introduced me as his “master,” a few heads turned around to see what a real live slave owner looked like. I was tempted to tell them that Hominy meant to say “manager” and not “master,” but I realized that in Hollywood the two words amounted to the same thing. “I believe it to be true. And I believe my master’s going to get them back for me, so that one day the world will see my best and most demeaning and emasculating work.” Thankfully, the houselights began to dim. The racist cartoons were starting.

  I like Betty Boop. She has a nice body, is free-spirited, loves jazz, and apparently opium, too, because in a hallucinogenic short titled “Ups and Downs,” the moon is auctioning off a Depression-era Earth to the other planets. Saturn, an old, bespectacled Jewish orb complete with bad teeth and a heavy Yiddish accent, wins and rubs his hands greedily. “I gottum. I gottum da whole vorld. Mein Gott,” he gloats, before removing gravity from the Earth’s core. It’s 193
2 and Max Fleischer’s metaphorical Jew is making an already chaotic global situation even worse. Not that Betty cares, because in a world where cats and cows fly, and the rain falls up, priority number one is to keep your skirt line from ascending to the heavens and exposing your form-fitting panties. And who’s to say that Ms. Boop isn’t a member of the tribe? For the next sixty minutes a few drunken, droopy-feathered Native Americans fail to catch the Warner Bros. rabbit, much less assimilate. A Mexican mouse tries to outwit the gringo pussycat, so he can sneak across the border and steal the queso. A seemingly endless lineup of African-American cats, crows, bullfrogs, maids, crap shooters, cotton pickers, and cannibals act a gravelly-voiced Looney Tunes fool to the strains of “Swanee River” and Duke Ellington’s “Jungle Nights in Harlem.” Sometimes a shotgun blast or dynamite explosion turns a nominally white character like Porky Pig into a gunpowder-colored minstrel. Bestowing upon him honorary-nigger status, which allows him to sing merry melodies like “Camptown Races” over the closing credits with impunity. The program ends with Popeye and Bugs Bunny taking turns single-handedly winning World War II by flummoxing bucktoothed, four-eyed, gibberish-speaking Japanese soldiers with giant mallets and geisha subterfuge. Finally, after Superman, supported by gongs and a cheering audience, pulverizes the Imperial Navy into complete submission, the lights come back on. After two hours of sitting in the dark laughing at unmitigated racism, in the brightness the guilt sets in. Everyone can see your face, and you feel like your mother caught you masturbating.

  Three rows in front of me a black guy, a white guy, and an Asian guy prepared to leave, gathering their jackets and trying to shake off the hatred. The black kid, embarrassed at having been debased and ridiculed in cartoon classics like “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarves,” and still hiding behind Superman’s cape, playfully attacks his Asian homeboy. Shouting, “Get Patrick! He’s the enemy!” as Patrick raises his hands in self-defense, protesting, “I’m not the enemy. I’m Chinese,” Bugs Bunny’s Jap, monkey, slant-eyes slurs still ringing in his ears. The white kid, unscathed and unfazed from the skirmish, laughs and flips a cigarette into his mouth. Smoke ’em, if you got ’em. It’s crazy how quickly an evening of Little Rascals shorts and Technicolor cartoons, some nearly a century old, can raise the ire of racial antipathy and shame. I couldn’t imagine anything being more racist than the “entertainment” I’d just witnessed, that’s why I knew the rumors about Foy owning a portion of the Our Gang catalogue had to be false. What could be more racist than what we’d just witnessed?

  I found Hominy in the lobby signing memorabilia, much of it having nothing to with the Little Rascals. But old movie posters, Uncle Remus collectibles, and Jackie Robinson memorabilia, anything dating to before 1960, would do. Sometimes I forget how funny Hominy is. Back in the day, to avoid the succession of booby traps laid by the white man, black people had to constantly be thinking on their feet. You had to be ready with an impromptu quip or a down-home bromide that would disarm and humble a white provocateur. Maybe if your sense of humor reminded him there was a semblance of humanity underneath that burrhead, you might avoid a beating, get some of that back pay you were owed. Shit, one day of being black in the forties was equal to three hundred years of improv training with the Groundlings and Second City. All it takes is fifteen minutes of Saturday-night television to see that there aren’t many funny black people left and that overt racism ain’t what it used to be.

  Hominy posed for a group photo with the blackfaced women of Nu Iota Gamma. “Do the curtains match the naps?” Hominy said dryly, before delivering a wide smile. Only the real darkie in the group got the joke, and try as she might, she couldn’t stop smiling. I sidled up to her. She answered my questions before I could ask them.

  “I’m pre-med. And why? Because these white bitches got the hookup, that’s why. The old girls’ network exists, too, now, and it’s no fucking joke. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. That’s what my mama says, because racism’s everywhere.”

  “It can’t be everywhere,” I insisted.

  The future Dr. Topsy thought a moment, twisting a runaway plait around her finger. “You know the only place where there’s no racism?” She looked around to make sure her sorority sisters weren’t within earshot and whispered, “Remember those photos of the black president and his family walking across the White House lawn arm-in-arm. Within those fucking frames at that instant, and in only that instant, there’s no fucking racism.”

  But there was more than enough racism in the theater lobby to go around. A stoop-shouldered white cat flipped the bill of his baseball cap over his right ear, and then slung his arm around Hominy, bussed him on the cheek, and exchanged skin. The two did everything but call each other Tambo and Bones.

  “I just want to say, all those rappers running off at the mouth about being ‘last of the real niggers,’ don’t have jack shit on you, because you, my man, are more than the last Little Rascal, you’re the last real nigger. And I mean ‘nigger’ with the hard r.”

  “Why, thank you, white man.”

  “And do you know why there aren’t any more niggers?”

  “No, sir. I don’t.”

  “Because white people are the new niggers. We’re just too full of ourselves to realize it.”

  “The ‘new niggers,’ you say?”

  “That’s right, both me and you—niggers to the last. Disenfranchised equals ready to fight back against the motherfucking system.”

  “Except that you’ll get half the jail time.”

  Topsy was waiting for us out in the Nuart parking lot, still in costume and blackface, but wearing a pair of designer sunglasses and excitedly digging through her book bag. I tried to rush Hominy into the truck before he could see her, but she cut us off.

  “Mr. Jenkins, I want to show you something.” She took out an oversized three-ring binder and opened it on the hood of the pickup. “These are copies I made of the ledgers for all the Our Gang and Little Rascals movies shot at Hal Roach Studios and MGM.”

  “Holy shit.”

  Before Hominy could look at them, I snatched the notebook and scanned the columned entries. It was all there. The titles, dates of principal photography, cast and crew, shooting days and total production costs, the profits and losses for all 227 films. Wait, 227?

  “I thought there were only 221 movies?”

  Topsy smiled and flipped to the second-to-last page. Six consecutive entries for films shot in late 1944 were completely blacked out. Which meant that two hours of prepubescent hijinks that I’d never seen might still exist somewhere. I felt like I was looking at some top-secret FBI report about the Kennedy assassination. I yanked open the binder and held the sheet up to the sun, trying to see through the redaction’s blackness and back into time.

  “Who do you think did this?” I asked her.

  From her book bag Topsy took out another photocopy. This one listed everyone who’d checked out the ledger since 1963. There were four names on it: Mason Reese, Leonard Maltin, Foy Cheshire, and Butterfly Davis, which I presumed was Topsy’s real name. Before I lifted my eyes from the paper, Hominy and Butterfly were sitting in the cab. He had one arm around her and was leaning on the horn.

  “That nigger got my movies! Let’s be out!”

  From West L.A. the drive to Foy’s Hollywood Hills abode took longer than it should have. When my father used to force me to accompany him to his black brainiac confabs with Foy, no one knew about the north–south shortcuts from the basin into the hills. Back then Crescent Heights and Rossmore used to be side streets and smooth sailing; now they’re two-lane, bumper-to-bumper major thoroughfares. Man, I used to swim in Foy’s pool while they talked politics and race. Not once did my father ever show any bitterness toward the fact that Foy had paid for that estate with money he earned from “The Black Cats ’n’ Jammin Kids,” the original storyboards of which still hang on my bedroom wall. “Dry off, motherfucker!” Dad would say. “You’re dripping water on the man’s Brazilian cherrywood flo
ors!”

  Most of the ride up, Butterfly and Hominy bonded over photos of her and her sorority sisters celebrating the joys of multiculturalism. Denigrating the city of Los Angeles ethnicity by ethnicity, neighborhood by neighborhood. In violation of every traffic law and social taboo, she sat in his lap, their seat belts unbuckled. “This is me at the Compton Cookout … I’m the third ‘ghetto chick’ from the right.” I stole a glance at the snapshot. The women and their dates blackened and Afro-wigged, toting forties and basketballs, smoking blunts. Their mouths filled with gold teeth and chicken drumsticks. It wasn’t so much the racist ridicule as the lack of imagination that I found insulting. Where were the zip coons? The hep cats? The mammies? The bucks? The janitors? The dual-threat quarterbacks? The weekend weather forecasters? The front-desk receptionists that greet you at every single movie studio and talent agency in the city? Mr. Witherspoon will be down in a minute. Can I get you a water? That’s the problem with this generation; they don’t know their history.

  “This was the Bingo sin Gringos night we held for Cinco de Mayo…” As opposed to the Compton Cookout, it wasn’t hard to spot Butterfly in that one: this time she sat next to an Asian woman, the two of them, like the other sisters, wearing gigantic sombreros, ponchos, bandoleras, and droopy foot-long Pancho Villa mustaches, while drinking tequila and daubing their cards. Be-ocho … ¡Bingo! Butterfly flicked through her photos. The titles of each bash a dress code unto itself: Das Bunker: The Pure Gene Pool Pool Party. The Shabu Shabu Sleepover! The Trail of Beers—Hiking and Peyote Trip.

  Sitting just off Mulholland Drive, on the crest overlooking the San Fernando Valley, Foy’s house was bigger than I remembered. A massive Tudor estate with a circular driveway, it looked more like an English finishing school than a home, despite the giant foreclosure sign bolted to the entrance gate. We piled out of the car. The mountain air was brisk and clean. I took in a deep breath and held it, while Hominy and Butterfly sauntered up to the gate.