“We home yet?” he asked.
We were midway between the El Segundo and Rosecrans Avenue off-ramps, and it hit me: there used to be a sign that read DICKENS—NEXT EXIT. Hominy missed the good ol’ days. I missed my father driving us back from the Pomona State Fair, elbowing me awake, the Dodger postgame on the radio as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes just in time to see that sign, DICKENS—NEXT EXIT, and know I was home. Shit, I missed that sign. And what are cities really, besides signs and arbitrary boundaries?
The green-and-white placard didn’t cost much: a sheet of aluminum the size of a queen-sized bed, two six-foot metal poles, some traffic cones and flares, two reflective orange vests, two cans of spray paint, a couple of hard hats, and that night’s sleep. Thanks to a downloaded copy of the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, I had the design specifications for everything from the proper shade of green (Pantone 342) to the exact dimensions (60'' x 36''), letter size (8''), and font (Highway Gothic). And after a long night of painting, cutting down the post to size, and stenciling SUNSHINE SAMMY CONSTRUCTION to the doors of the truck in removable paint, Hominy and I set back toward the freeway. Other than pouring and waiting for the cement foundation to dry, installing a traffic control device isn’t all that different from planting a tree, and in the light of the high beams I set to work. Cleared the ivy, dug the holes, and planted the sign, while Hominy passed out in the front seat, listening to jazz on KLON.
As the sun rose over the El Segundo Boulevard overpass, the morning commute was starting in earnest. And amid the car honking, the rotors of the traffic helicopters beating overhead, and the grinding of truck gears, Hominy and I sat in the breakdown lane appreciating what we’d done. The sign was a dead ringer for any of the other “traffic control devices” one sees during the daily commute. It’d taken only a few hours, but I felt like Michelangelo staring at the Sistine Chapel after four years of hard labor, like Banksy after spending six days searching the Internet for ideas to steal and three minutes of sidewalk vandalism to execute them.
“Massa, signs are powerful things. It almost feels like Dickens exists out there in the smog somewhere.”
“Hominy, what feels better, getting whipped or looking at that sign?”
Hominy thought a moment. “The whip feels good on the back, but the sign feels good in the heart.”
* * *
When we arrived home that morning, I popped open a kitchen-table beer, sent Hominy home, grabbed the latest edition of The Thomas Guide from the bookshelf. At 4,084 square miles, much of Los Angeles County, like the ocean floor, remains in large part unexplored. Even though you needed an advanced degree in geomatics to understand its 800+ pages, The Thomas Guide to Los Angeles County is the spiral-bound Sacagawea for any intrepid explorer trying to navigate this urban oasis-less sprawl. Even in the days of GPS devices and search engines, it sits on the front seat of every taxicab, tow truck, and company car, and no Sureño worth their rolling “California stop” would ever be caught dead without one. I flipped the book open. Every year my father used to bring the new Thomas Guide home, and the first thing I’d do was turn to pages 704–5 and approximate the location of the crib, 205 Bernard Avenue, on the map. Finding my house in that giant tome grounded me somehow. Made me feel loved by the world. But 205 Bernard Avenue sat on a nameless peach-colored section of gridiron streets bordered by freeways on each side. I wanted to cry. It hurt knowing that Dickens had been exiled to the netherworld of invisible L.A. communities. Top-secret minority bastions like the Dons and the Avenues that’ve never had or needed Thomas Guide listings, official boundaries, or cheesy billboards announcing, “You are now entering…” or “You are now leaving…” because when the voice inside your head (the one you swear up and down isn’t prejudice or racism) tells you to roll up the windows and lock the doors, you know you’ve entered the Jungle or Fruittown, and that when you start breathing again, you’ve exited. I dug up a blue marker, drew a crooked outline of my hometown as best as I could remember it, and scribbled DICKENS in big Dodger-blue letters across pages 704–5, and a little pictogram of the exit sign I’d just put up. If I ever raise the nerve, one day I’m going to erect two more signs. So if you find yourself hurtling southbound on the 110 freeway, speeding past two yellow-and-black blurs that read WATCH OUT FOR FALLING HOME PRICES and CAUTION—BLACK ON BLACK CRIME AHEAD, you’ll know whom to thank for the roadside warnings.
THE DUM DUM DONUT INTELLECTUALS
Seven
The Sunday after installing the roadside sign I wanted to make a formal announcement of my plan to reanimate the city of Dickens. And what better place to do so than the next meeting of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, the closest approximation we had to a representative government.
One of the many sad ironies of African-American life is that every banal dysfunctional social gathering is called a “function.” And black functions never start on time, so it’s impossible to gauge how to arrive fashionably late without taking a chance of missing the event altogether. Not wanting to have to sit through the reading of the minutes, I waited until the Raiders game reached halftime. Since my father’s death, the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals had devolved into a group of star-struck, middle-class black out-of-towners and academics who met bimonthly to fawn over the semifamous Foy Cheshire. As much as black America treasures its fallen heroes, it was hard to tell if they were more impressed with his resiliency or that despite all he’d been through he still drove a vintage 1956 Mercedes 300SL. Nevertheless, they hovered around, hoping to impress him with their insight into an indigent black community that, if they’d just taken their racial blinders off for one second, they’d realize was no longer black but predominantly Latino.
The meetings consisted mostly of the members who showed up every other week arguing with the ones who came every other month about what exactly “bimonthly” means. I entered the donut shop just as the last copies of The Ticker, an update of statistics related to Dickens, were being passed around. Standing in the back near the blueberry fritters, I held the handout to my nose and inhaled the sweet smell of fresh mimeograph ink before giving it a cursory glance. The Ticker was a societal measure my father had designed to look like a Dow Jones stock report. Except that commodities and blue chips were replaced with social ills and pitfalls. Everything that was always up—unemployment, poverty, lawlessness, infant mortality—was up. Everything that’s always down—graduation rates, literacy, life expectancy—was even further down.
Foy Cheshire stood underneath the clock. In ten years’ time, other than gaining seventy-five pounds, he hadn’t changed much. He wasn’t much younger than Hominy, but he’d never grayed and his face bore only a few laugh lines. On the wall behind him were two framed poster-sized photos, one of a variety box of insanely puffy and succulent-looking donuts that looked nothing like the shrivelled-up, lumpy, so-called fresh pastries hardening before my eyes in the display case behind me, the other a color portrait of Pops, proudly wearing his APA tie clasp, his hair shaped to billowy perfection. I played the back. Judging from the serious mood in the room, there was a lot on the agenda and it’d be a while before the Dum Dums got to “ancilliary bidness.”
Foy held two books, fanning them out in front of the group like a magician about to do a card trick. Pick a culture, any culture. He held one aloft, addressing his audience in an affected Southern Methodist drawl, even though he was from the Hollywood Hills by way of Grand Rapids. “One night, not long ago,” Foy said, “I tried to read this book, Huckleberry Finn, to my grandchildren, but I couldn’t get past page six because the book is fraught with the ‘n-word.’ And although they are the deepest-thinking, combat-ready eight- and ten-year-olds I know, I knew my babies weren’t ready to comprehend Huckleberry Finn on its own merits. That’s why I took the liberty to rewrite Mark Twain’s masterpiece. Where the repugnant ‘n-word’ occurs, I replaced it with ‘warrior’ and the word ‘slave’ with ‘dark-skinned volunteer.’”
“That’s right!” shouted t
he crowd.
“I also improved Jim’s diction, rejiggered the plotline a bit, and retitled the book The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.” Then Foy held up the copy of his revamped volume for examination. My eyesight isn’t the best, but I could’ve sworn the cover featured Huckleberry Finn piloting the raft down the mighty Mississippi, while Captain African-American Jim stood at the helm, hands on narrow hips, sporting a cheesy goatee and a tartan Burberry sport coat exactly like the one Foy happened to be wearing.
I never much liked going to the meetings, but after my father died, unless there was an emergency on the farm, I showed up. Before Foy’s appointment as lead thinker, there had been some talk of grooming me to step in as leader of the group. The Kim Jong-un of ghetto conceptualism. After all, I’d taken over the nigger-whispering duties. But I refused. Begging out by claiming I didn’t know enough about black culture. That the only certainties I had about the African-American condition were that we had no concept of the phrases “too sweet” and “too salty.” And in ten years, through countless California cruelties and slights against the blacks, the poor, the people of color, like Propositions 8 and 187, the disappearance of social welfare, David Cronenberg’s Crash, and Dave Eggers’s do-gooder condescension, I hadn’t spoken a single word. During roll call Foy never called me by my proper name, but simply yelled, “The Sellout!” Looked me in the face with a sly and perfunctory smile, said, “Here,” and placed a check mark next to my name.
Foy touched his fingertips together in front of his chest, the universal sign that the smartest person in the room is about to say something. He spoke loudly and quickly, his speech picking up in speed and intensity with every word. “I propose that we move to demand the inclusion of my politically respectful edition of Huckleberry Finn into every middle-school reading curriculum,” he said. “Because it’s a crime that generations of black folk come of age never having experienced this”—Foy snuck a peek at the original book’s back cover—“this hilariously picturesque American classic.”
“Is it ‘black folk’ or ‘black folks’?” My having not spoken for the first time in years caught both of us off guard. But I came with the intention of saying something, so why not warm up the vocal cords. I took a bite out of the batch of Oreo cookies I’d boldly snuck in. “Which one is grammatically correct? I never know.” Foy took a calming sip of cappuccino and ignored me. He and the rest of the non-Dickensian flock belonged to that scary subset of black lycanthropic thinkers I like to refer to as “wereniggers.” By day, wereniggers are erudite and urbane, but with every lunar cycle, fiscal quarter, and tenure review their hackles rise, and they slip into their floor-length fur coats and mink stoles, grow fangs, and schlep down from their ivory towers and corporate boardrooms to prowl the inner cities, so that they can howl at the full moon over drinks and mediocre blues music. Now that his fame, if not his fortune, has waned, werenigger Foy Cheshire’s foggy ghetto moor of choice is Dickens. Normally I try to avoid wereniggers at all costs. It’s not the fear of being intellectually ripped to shreds that frightens me most, it’s the cloying insistence on addressing everyone, especially people they can’t stand, as Brother So-and-so and Sister This-and-that. I used to bring Hominy to the meetings to alleviate the boredom. Plus, he’d say the shit I was thinking. “Why you niggers talk so black, dropping the g’s in your gerunds in here, but on your little public television appearances you motherfuckers sound like Kelsey Grammer with a stick up his ass.” But once he heard the widespread rumor that Foy Cheshire had used some of the millions in the royalties he’d earned over the years to purchase the rights to the most racist shorts in the Our Gang oeuvre, I had to ask Hominy to stop coming. He’d scream and stomp. Interrupt every motion with some histrionics. “Nigger, where are my Little Rascal movies!” Hominy swears his best work is on those reels. If the talk were true, it’d be impossible to forgive that self-righteous guardian of blackness for forever depriving the world of the best in American racial prejudice in Blu-ray and Dolby surround sound. But most everyone knows that, like alligators in the sewers, the lethality of Pop Rocks and soda, Foy Cheshire’s ownership of the most racist Little Rascal films is nothing more than urban legend.
Always fast on his feet, Foy countered my insolence and Oreos with a bag of gourmet cannoli. We were both too good to eat the crap Dum Dum Donuts served up.
“This is serious. Brother Mark Twain uses the ‘n-word’ 219 times. That’s .68 ‘n-words’ per page in toto.”
“If you ask me, Mark Twain didn’t use the word ‘nigger’ enough,” I mumbled. With my mouth filled with at least four of America’s favorite cookies, I don’t think anyone understood me. I wanted to say more. Like, why blame Mark Twain because you don’t have the patience and courage to explain to your children that the “n-word” exists and that during the course of their sheltered little lives they may one day be called a “nigger” or, even worse, deign to call somebody else a “nigger.” No one will ever refer to them as “little black euphemisms,” so welcome to the American lexicon—Nigger! But I’d forgotten to order any milk to wash the cookies down with. And I never got the chance to explain to Foy and his close-minded ilk that Mark Twain’s truth is that your average black nigger is morally and intellectually superior to the average white nigger, but no, those pompous Dum Dum niggers wanted to ban the word, disinvent the watermelon, snorting in the morning, washing your dick in the sink, and the eternal shame of having pubic hair the color and texture of unground pepper. That’s the difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity. We want someone like Foy Cheshire to present our case to the world with a set of instructions that the jury will disregard centuries of ridicule and stereotype and pretend the woebegone niggers in front of you are starting from scratch.
Foy continued his sales pitch: “The ‘n-word’ is the most vile and despicable word in the English language. I don’t believe anyone would argue that point.”
“I can think of a more despicable word than ‘nigger,’” I volunteered. Having finally swallowed my gooey chocolate-and-crème chaw, I closed one eye and held a half-bitten cookie so that the dark brown semicircle sat atop Foy’s gigantic head like a well-coiffed Nabisco Afro that read OREO at its center.
“Like what?”
“Like any word that ends in —ess: Negress. Jewess. Poetess. Actress. Adultress. Factchecktress. I’d rather be called ‘nigger’ than ‘giantess’ any day of the week.”
“Problematic,” someone muttered, invoking the code word black thinkers use to characterize anything or anybody that makes them feel uncomfortable, impotent, and painfully aware that they don’t have the answers to questions and assholes like me. “What the fuck you come here for, if you don’t have anything productive to say?”
Foy raised his hands, asking for calm. “The Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals respect all input. And for those who don’t know, this sellout is the son of our founder.” Then he turned to me with a look of pity on his face. “Go on, Sellout. Say what you came to say.”
Most times when someone presents before the Dum Dums you’re required to use EmpowerPoint, a slide presentation “African-American software” package developed by Foy Cheshire. Not much different from the Microsoft product except that the fonts have names like Timbuktu, Harlem Renaissance, and Pittsburgh Courier. I opened the store’s broom closet. Next to the mops and buckets, the old transparency projector was still there. Its glass top and lone sheet of transparency paper filthy as prison windows, but still usable.
I asked the assistant manager to dim the lights, then drew up and projected the following schematic onto the cork ceiling:
I explained that the boundary labels were to be spray-painted onto the sidewalks and that the lines of demarcation would be de
noted by a configuration of mirrors and high-powered green pinpoint lasers, or if that proved to be cost prohibitive, I could simply circumnavigate the twelve miles of border with a three-inch strip of white paint. Hearing the words “circumnavigate” and “lines of demarcation” come out of my mouth made me realize that even though I was making this shit up on the spot, I was more serious about this than I thought I was. And yes, “I’m bringing back the city of Dickens.”
Laughter. Waves and peals of deep black laughter of the kind kindhearted plantation owners long for in movies like Gone with the Wind. Laughter like you hear in basketball locker rooms, backstage at rap concerts, and in the backrooms of Yale University’s all-white department of black studies after some fuzzy-hair-brained guest lecturer has dared to suggest that there’s a connection between Franz Fanon, existential thought, string theory, and bebop. When the chorus of ridicule finally died down, Foy wiped away the tears of hilarity from his eyes, finished the last of the cannoli, scooted in behind me, and turned my father’s photo toward the wall, thus saving Pops the embarrassment of having to witness his son desecrate the family intellect.
“You said you were going to bring back Dickens?” Foy asked, breaking the question-and-answer ice.