“Charisma, call the police.”
No one other than college hippies, Negro jubilee singers, Cubs fans, and other assorted idealists knows verses two through six of “We Shall Overcome,” and when his flock started stumbling over the next verse, Foy pulled his weapon and waved it like a .45 caliber cue card. Exhorting his choir through the rough patches, even though their backs were turned to him, and flying past me and Hominy toward the school’s entrance, which remained closed to them because Charisma had shut the doors behind her.
Dickens doesn’t scatter very easily. Neither does a local media used to gangland slayings and a seemingly endless supply of psycho killers. So when Foy clacked two shots at the back end of his Mercedes crookedly parked on Rosecrans, the crowd only parted wide enough to create a fire lane through which the white kids could reach the relative safety of their school bus, where they lowered themselves into their seats. Desegregation is never easy in any direction, and after Foy fired two more rounds into their civil rights movement, progress would be even slower, because the Freedom Bus had a couple of flat tires.
Foy pumped another shot into the Mercedes-Benz logo. This time the trunk popped open in that slow, majestic way that only Mercedes trunks do, and he grabbed an old bucket of whitewash out of the back. But before I, or anyone else, could reach him, he spun around, warding us off with his strap and his off-key singing. He’d made another lyric change. This time personalizing the tune by changing the refrain to “I shall overcome.” What’s that the judges always say on those televised singing competitions? You really made the song your own.
The pop of a can of paint opening is always a most satisfying sound. And justifiably pleased with himself and his car keys, Foy, still singing at the top of his lungs, rose to his feet and, with his back to the street, aimed his pistol directly at my chest. “I seen it a million times,” my father used to say. “Professional niggers that just snap because the charade is over.” The blackness that had consumed them suddenly evaporates like window grit washed away in the rain. All that’s left is the transparency of the human condition, and everybody sees right through you. The lie on the résumé has finally been discovered. The reason it takes them so long to write their reports has been unearthed, and the tardiness isn’t due to a painstaking attention to detail, but to dyslexia. The suspicions confirmed that the ever-present bottle of mouthwash on the colored man’s desk in the corner, near the restroom, isn’t filled with “a liquid designed to kill bad breath and provide twenty-four-hour protection against germs that cause gum disease and gingivitis,” but peppermint schnapps. A liquid designed to kill bad dreams and provide a false sense of security that your Listerine smile is killing them softly. “Seen it a million times,” he’d say. “At least niggers on the East Coast have the Vineyard and Sag Harbor. What we got? Las Vegas and fucking El Pollo Loco.” Personally, I love El Pollo, and not that I was totally convinced that Foy was a danger to me or anyone else, but if I got out of this alive, the first thing I’d do was visit the one over on Vermont and 58th Street. Order me a three-piece combo—dark, with flame-grilled corn and mashed potatoes, and one of those delicious red fruit punches that taste like my eight-year-old birthday party.
The sirens were half a town away. Even when the county was flush with property tax revenue on overvalued homes, Dickens never received its fair share of civil services. And now, with the cutbacks and graft, the response time is measured in eons, the same switchboard operators who took the calls from the Holocaust, Rwanda, Wounded Knee, and Pompeii still at their posts. Foy turned the gun away from me and raised it to his ear, then with his free hand dumped the pail of unstirred and semi-hardened stain over his head. In clumpy folds, the paint oozed over the left half of his face and down the length of that side of his body, until one eye, one nostril, one shirtsleeve, one pant leg, and one Patek Philippe watch were washed completely white. Foy was no Tree of Knowledge, at most he was a Bush of Opinion, but in any case, it was obvious that, publicity stunt or not, he was dying on the inside. I looked down at his roots. One brown shoe splattered with paint from the milky waterfall that sluiced through his goatee and fell from his chin. This time there was no doubt that he’d lost it, because if there’s one thing a successful black man like Foy loves more than God, country, and his ham-hock-limbed mama, it’s his shoes.
I stepped to him. My arms raised and my hands open. Foy pressed the gun barrel even deeper into his misshapen Afro, holding himself hostage. Suicide by cop or cop-out, I didn’t much care, but I was glad he’d finally stopped singing.
“Foy,” I said, sounding surprisingly like my father, “you have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? and How may I become myself?”
I waited for the expected “I do and do for you niggers, and this is the thanks I get” diatribe about how no one was buying his books. How even though he was the producer, director, editor, caterer, and star of a television talk show that’s been syndicated on two continents and brought a droll homogenized and romanticized version of black intellectual thought into tens of homes in over six countries, nothing has changed about how the world sees us, much less how we see ourselves. How he was directly responsible for getting a black man elected president and nothing changed. How last week a nigger won $75,000 on Teen Jeopardy and nothing changed. How in fact things have gotten worse. And how you can tell things are getting worse. Because “poverty” has disappeared from the vernacular and our consciousness. Because there’s white boys working at the car wash. Because the women in porn are better-looking than ever and it’s the handsome gay men who are “straight for pay.” Because famous actors do commercials extolling the virtues of the phone companies and the United States Army. You know how you can tell shit is fucked up? Because someone thinks it’s still 1950 and sees fit to reintroduce segregation to the American ethos. That someone wouldn’t be you, would it, Sellout? Putting up signs? Erecting fake schools like the ghetto was some sort of phony Paris complete with railway stations, Arc de Triomphes, and Eiffel Towers built during World War I to fool the German bombers. Like the Germans, who, in turn, in the next war, built fake stores, theaters, and parks in Theresienstadt to dupe the Red Cross into believing that no atrocities were taking place, when the entire war was a series of fucking atrocities—one bullet, one illegal detention, one sterilization, one atom bomb at a time. You can’t fool me. I’m not the Luftwaffe or the Red Cross. I didn’t grow up in this hellhole … Like father, like son …
* * *
When it’s your blood running through your fingers, the amount can only be described as “copious.” But writhing in the gutter, clutching at my innards, I began to feel something akin to closure. I never heard the shot, but for the first time in my life I had something in common with my father—we’d both been shot in the gut by gutless motherfuckers. And there was a certain satisfaction in that. I felt as if I’d finally paid my debt to him and his fucked-up notions of blackness and childhood. Daddy never believed in closure. He said it was a false psychological concept. Something invented by therapists to assuage white Western guilt. In all his years of study and practice, he’d never heard a patient of color talk of needing “closure.” They needed revenge. They needed distance. Forgiveness and a good lawyer maybe, but never closure. He said people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping for closure, when in reality what they’ve achieved is erasure.
The problem with closure is that once you have a taste of it, you want it in every little aspect of your life. Especially when you’re bleeding to death, and your slave, who is in full rebellion, is screaming, “Give me back my Little Rascals movies, motherfucker!” and pummeling your assailant with such knobby-knuckled fury that it takes half the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department to pull him off, while you attempt to stanch the bleeding with a waterlogged copy of Vibe magazine someone has left in the gutter, you don’t have time to let anything slide. Kanye West has announced, “I am rap!” Jay-Z thinks he’s Picasso. And life is fucking fleet
ing.
“The ambulance will be here soon.”
Things had finally settled down. Hominy, who couldn’t stop crying, had taken off his T-shirt, rolled it into a pillow, and cradled my head in his lap. A sheriff’s deputy squatted over me, poking gently at my wound with the butt end of her flashlight. “That was a fucking brave thing you did, Nigger Whisperer. Can I get you anything in the meantime?”
“Closure.”
“I don’t think you’ll need stitches. It doesn’t look like a belly shot; it’s more like you’ve been hit in the love handle. It’s superficial, really.”
Anyone who’s ever described a bullet wound as being superficial has never been shot. But I wasn’t about to let a little lack of empathy get in the way of total closure.
“It’s illegal to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?”
“It is.”
“Well, I’ve whispered ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.”
I told her about my efforts to restore Dickens and how I thought building the school would give the town a sense of identity. She patted me sympathetically on the shoulder and raised her supervisor on the radio, and while we waited for the ambulance, the three of us haggled about the severity of the crime. The county reluctant to cite me with anything more than vandalism of state property and me trying to convince them that even if crime had gone down in the neighborhood since the Wheaton Academy went up, what I did was still a violation of the First Amendment, the Civil Rights Code, and, unless there’s been an armistice in the War on Poverty, at least four articles of the Geneva Convention.
The paramedics arrived. Once I’d been stabilized with gauze and a few kind words, the EMTs went through the standard assessment protocol.
“Next of kin?”
As I lay, not exactly dying but close enough, I thought about Marpessa. Who, if the position of the sun high in the gorgeous blue sky was any indication, was at the far end of this very same street taking her lunch break. Her bus parked facing the ocean. Her bare feet on the dashboard, nose buried in Camus, listening to the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place.”
“I have a girlfriend, but she’s married.”
“What about this guy?” she asked, pointing a ballpoint pen at a shirtless Hominy, standing just off to the side, giving his statement to a sheriff’s deputy, who was writing in a notepad and shaking her head incredulously. “Is he family?”
“Family?” Hominy, overhearing the paramedic and somewhat insulted, wiped down his wrinkly underarms with his T-shirt and came over to see how I was doing. “Why I is something closer than family.”
“He says he’s his slave,” the deputy chimed in, reading from her notes. “Been working for him, according to this crazy fucker, the last four hundred years.”
The EMT nodded, running her powdered rubber-gloved hands down the length of Hominy’s saggy-skinned back.
“How did you get these welts?”
“I was whupped. How else a no-account, shiftless nigger like me going to get whip marks on his back?”
Having handcuffed me to the stretcher board, the sheriff’s deputies knew they finally had something to charge me with, though we still couldn’t agree on the crime as they carried me through the crowd and to the ambulance.
“Human trafficking?”
“Nah, he’s never been bought or sold. What about involuntary servitude?”
“Maybe, but it’s not like you’re forcing him to work.”
“It’s not like he’s working.”
“Did you really whip him?”
“Not directly. I pay some people … It’s a long story.”
One of the EMTs had to tie her shoes. They set me down on a wooden bus stop bench while she adjusted her laces. From the seat-back a photo of a familiar face comforted me with a soothing smile and a red power tie.
“You got a good lawyer?” the deputy asked.
“Just call this nigger right here.” I knocked on the advertisement. It said:
Hampton Fiske—Attorney at Law
Remember, there are four steps to acquittal:
1. Don’t say shit! 2. Don’t run! 3. Don’t resist arrest!
4. Don’t say shit!
1-800-FREEDOM Se Habla Español
* * *
He showed up late to the grand jury indictment, but Hampton’s services were worth every dime. I told him I couldn’t afford to do jail time. I had crops coming in and one of the mares was scheduled to foal in about two days. With this knowledge in tow, he strolled into the hearing, brushing leaves off his suit jacket and flicking twigs from his perm, carrying a bowl of fruit and talking about “As a farmer, my client is an indispensable member of a minority community well documented for being malnourished and underfed. He’s never left the state of California, owns a twenty-year-old pickup truck that runs on fucking ethanol, which is next to impossible to find in this city, and thus he’s not a flight risk…”
The California attorney general, flown in from Sacramento just to prosecute my case, leaped to her Prada-shod feet. “Objection! This defendant, evil genius that he is, has through his abhorrent actions managed to racially discriminate against every race all at the same time, to say nothing of his unabashed slaveholding. The state of California feels that it has more than enough evidence to prove that the defendant is in abject violation of the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, 1957, 1964, and 1968, the Equal Rights Act of 1963, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, and at least six of the goddamn Ten Commandments. If it were within my power, I’d charge him with crimes against humanity!”
“This is an example of my client’s humanity,” Hampton countered calmly, gently setting the fruit bowl on the judge’s bench, then backing away with a deep bow. “Freshly picked from my client’s farm, your honor.”
Judge Nguyen rubbed his tired eyes. He selected a nectarine from the offering and rolled it in his fingers as he spoke. “The irony is not lost on me that we sit here in this courtroom—a female state’s attorney general of black and Asian lineage, a black defendant, a black defense counselor, a Latina bailiff, and me, a Vietnamese-American district judge—setting the parameters for what is essentially a judicial argument about the applicability, the efficacy, and the very existence of white supremacy as expressed through our system of law. And while no one in this room would deny the basic premise of ‘civil rights,’ we’d argue forever and a day about what constitutes ‘equal treatment under the law’ as defined by the very articles of the Constitution this defendant is accused of violating. In attempting to restore his community through reintroducing precepts, namely segregation and slavery, that, given his cultural history, have come to define his community despite the supposed unconstitutionality and nonexistence of these concepts, he’s pointed out a fundamental flaw in how we as Americans claim we see equality. ‘I don’t care if you’re black, white, brown, yellow, red, green, or purple.’ We’ve all said it. Posited as proof of our nonprejudicial ways, but if you painted any one of us purple or green, we’d be mad as hell. And that’s what he’s doing. He’s painting everybody over, painting this community purple and green, and seeing who still believes in equality. I don’t know if what he’s done is legal or not, but the one civil right I can guarantee this defendant is the right to due process, the right to a speedy trial. We convene tomorrow morning at nine. But buckle up, people, no matter the verdict, innocent or guilty, this is going to the Supreme Court, so I hope you ain’t got nothing scheduled for the next five years. Bail is set”—Judge Nguyen took a big bite out the nectarine, then kissed his crucifix—“Bail is set at a cantaloupe and two kumquats.”
UNMITIGATED BLACKNESS
Twenty-four
I expected the air-conditioning in the Supreme Court to be for shit, like it is in all the good courtroom movies: Twelve Angry Men and To Kill a Mockingbird. Movie trials always take place in humid locales in the heat of summer, because the psych books say crime goes up with the temperature. Tempers run short. Perspiring witnesses and trial attorney
s start yelling at each other. The jurors fan themselves, then open four-paned windows looking for escape and a breath of fresh air. Washington, D.C., is fairly muggy this time of year, but it’s mild, damn near frigid, inside the courthouse, yet I have to open a window anyway—to let out all the smoke and five years of judicial system frustration.
“You can’t handle the weed!” I shout at Fred Manne, courtroom artist extraordinaire and film buff. It’s the dinner break to what has amounted to the longest Supreme Court case in history. We’re sitting in a nameless antechamber passing time and a joint back and forth, butchering the climax of A Few Good Men, which isn’t a great movie, but Jack Nicholson’s disdain for the actors and the script and the way he delivers that last monologue carry the film.
“Did you order the Code Red?”
“I might have. I’m so fucking high right now…”
“Did you order the Code Red?”
“You’re goddamn right I did! And I’d do it again, because this pot is fucking unbelievable.” Fred’s breaking character. “What’s it called?” It being the joint he’s holding in his hand.
“It doesn’t have a name yet, but Code Red sounds pretty good.”
Fred has sketched all the important cases: same-sex marriage, the end of the Voting Rights Act, and the demise of affirmative action in higher education and, by extension, everywhere else. He says that in his thirty years of courtroom artistry, this is the first time he’s ever seen the court adjourn for dinner. First time he’s ever seen the Justices raise their voices and stare each other down. He shows me an artist’s rendering of today’s session. In it a conservative Catholic Justice flips off a liberal Catholic Justice from the Bronx with a surreptitious cheek scratch.
“What does ‘coño’ mean?”
“What?”
“That’s what she whispered under her breath, followed by ‘Chupa mi verga, cabrón.’”