The White Boy Shuffle
Nine
My wedding was a small outdoor affair held in my front yard and catered only by the bag of cheese puffs Nicholas Scoby passed around in celebration of his best friend’s betrothal. Psycho Loco was spinning in circles singing “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match,” like a Mexican understudy for Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. He had fulfilled his promise and repaid his debt by finding me a mail-order bride through the services of Hot Mama-sans of the Orient. I sulked in the driveway, refusing to look at my bride, my back to the stalled nuptials. Psycho Loco approached me with fake trepidation, rattling the bag of cheese puffs at me and asking why I was so upset.
“Oh nothing, just that you’ve arranged for me to marry a woman I don’t even know without my permission.”
“What, I fucked up the plans for the rest of your life? Gunnar, you don’t even have an alarm clock, so don’t give me no bullshit that I’ve altered your destiny.” Twisting my arm behind my back, Psycho Loco marched me toward the wedding party. “Besides, you should feel honored. Yoshiko chose you over hundreds of potential husbands.”
“I’m sure that was difficult. I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life in Olympia, Washington, cleaning rifles, gutting deer, and drinking Coors Light down at the American Legion Post either. Can you remove the gun from my kidneys? I’ll go through with it.”
The UPS driver conducted the ceremony. Dressed in tree-bark brown from head to toe like a misplaced Yosemite National Park ranger, he looked at my license, then back at me. “Today’s your eighteenth birthday, huh, kid?” He tipped his brown baseball cap at the bride. “Nice present.”
Yoshiko Katsu stood next to a stack of designer luggage, only slightly rumpled from the transpacific trip and the ride from the repository. Tall and thickly built, she stood stiffly, her arms straight down at her sides, smiling at everything that moved but never really taking her eyes off me. My mother and my baby-laden sisters sidled up to her, skeptical and unimpressed. Christina’s baby pulled on the invoice stapled to Yoshiko’s blouse. Nicole pinched a silky sleeve. “Dior?” Yoshiko nodded and bowed for no apparent reason.
“Sign here.” The delivery man shoved a clipboard in my face.
“What happens if I don’t sign?”
“Then she goes back to the warehouse and collects dust for three days till we send her back to Japan fourth class, which probably will mean three weeks in the hot cargo bay of a transport ship.”
I penned my name and shoved the yellow copy in my back pocket. “Ain’t she got to sign nothing?”
“Nope, she’s just like a package. She came with instructions, but it’s all in Japanese. Oh I forgot, you may kiss the bride.”
“And you can get your maple-syrup-looking ass in that truck now and go, before I kiss you with a foot so far up your ass you’ll be spitting toenails for a week.”
Christina saucily sucked her teeth and hissed in Yoshiko’s direction, “Girl, I know that’s my brother, but you got to watch these niggers. After they get married, they change.”
“Mmm-hmm, like streetlights and diapers. You seen what happen to Daddy,” Nicole echoed, slapping Christina’s palm. “That’s why I kicked my baby’s father to the curb. What I look like, Sigmund Freud?”
“Carl Jung?”
“Erik Erikson?”
Yoshiko bowed in appreciation of their sisterly sagacity. “So desu ka? Domo arigato gozaimasu.”
Psycho Loco tossed me two tarnished gold bands. “Ignore these spinsters. Step up, cuz, and be a man.”
I ripped off the price tag and boldly approached Yoshiko. There were no jitters. My hands didn’t shake. My underarms were TV-commercial dry. Sometimes the inevitable just seems right. “Kon’ban wa. Ichi, ni, san, chi,” I said, exhausting my karate school Japanese and handing her a ring. She laughed, shook her head, and corrected my greeting—“Kon’nichi wa”—pointing at the hazy midday sun. We slipped the rings on our fingers and kissed each other lightly on the cheek. She smelled like cardboard. As I stepped off, I noticed that some UPS jokester had stamped “Fragile” on her forehead.
“Who dat heifer Gunnar with?” I could hear the china shop’s bulls coming around the corner. “Naw, bitch, that’s our nigger! Don’t even feel it. You think you can come here playing Yokohama Hootchie Mama and steal our man, you got another thought coming.”
Yoshiko turned to face her tormenters, Betty and Veronica, crashing the wedding in a vain Dustin Hoffman showdown for my affections. Betty’s hair was styled into a gold-flaked gramophone horn with a little hairpin crank just over the right ear. Veronica had so many extensions in her hair that the wavy locks cascaded down her body like a horsehair waterfall. Yoshiko looked confused; I think she was looking for Lady Godiva’s white horse.
I stepped in to help, but Scoby held me back. “Hold up a sec. She’s going to have to learn to cope. Let’s see what happens.”
Betty and Veronica squared off and prepared to battle, thumbing their noses and bobbing up and down like amateur boxers looking for an opening. Veronica snapped a jab that stopped an inch from Yoshiko’s nose. Yoshiko didn’t flinch; she just bowed and said something in a terse Japanese. Veronica froze.
“What she say, Gunnar?”
“She said that if you persist with your puerile inner-city antics, she gonna take out her samurai sword, invoke her ancestral clan of warriors, and chop you into a Negro roll, inside out with salmon roe.”
“You don’t speak Japanese. How you know that’s what she said?”
“Why you ask then, shit? Maybe she said, ‘If I act like I know some karate, I can scare these stupid niggers senseless. They sure don’t act like they do on television.’ Or maybe she was admiring your hair.”
“Think so? Can she show us some of those crazy Japanese hairstyles? We could be the first ones on the block to wear topknots and shit. Maybe I’ll dye my teeth black. I seen that on the late-night kabuki plays. That shit would be fresh, nobody got a black teeth thing happening.”
Betty and Veronica lowered their fists and returned Yoshiko’s bow and then clamored over her wedding ring. Mom, beaming like a lottery winner, wrapped a proud arm around Yoshiko and demanded that Scoby take a photograph of her and her new daughter-in-law.
“Gunnar, I like Yoshiko. I believe she’ll make an excellent Kaufman. She got spirit, escaping from a repressive society to seek her fortune in a strange world.”
“Ma, Japan ain’t some feudalistic country. I mean, they got travel agents.”
“Don’t matter, I approve.”
“I can’t believe it. Thought you’d never approve of me marrying a woman who isn’t black.”
“Yes, but Yoshiko is black at heart. You can tell. She got soul like … who’s that actor I like always play the Japanese nigger in them shogun movies?”
“Toshiro Mifune.”
Hearing a familiar name, Yoshiko nudged my mother in the ribs, put a bewildered look on her face, and started scratching the back of her head and her underarms, impersonating the famous actor.
“That’s exactly who I’m talking about. Yoshiko, did you know Mifune was born in China? True, true. His first big part was the bandit in Rashomon. Then …” Mom ushered Yoshiko into the house, lecturing her on Mifune’s oeuvre and smoothly seguing from his role as a doctor suffering from syphilis in The Quiet Duel to the types of birth control available in the United States.
Scoby, the do-nothing best man, admonished me for not carrying my bride over the threshold. I kicked him in the shin and told him the only thing I was carrying was a grudge against him for not buying any wedding presents. “What, no blender, some bath towels, nothing? Cheap bastard. C’mon, help me with these bags.”
We held the reception in the back yard. Psycho Loco played chef and showed impressive culinary skills: barbecued spareribs, deviled eggs, and to make Yoshiko feel at home, he even threw together a jamming udon noodle soup.
“So, man, how you like your wife?” Nicholas asked from across the table, sucking on a bone and sizing up
Yoshiko, who was sitting next to me.
“She all right, I guess. She bow too goddamn much.”
“That shit throws you off, don’t it. I got leery and put my hand on my wallet, then I started bowing with my eyes closed, and when I opened them she was long gone, grubbing on corn on the cob. And your wife is looking fine picking that shit out her teeth, if I do say so myself.”
How did I like Yoshiko? I watched her loudly slurp her udon soup with such powerful suction a noodle bounced off her forehead, slithered down the bridge of her nose, and slunk into her mouth with a loud pop. I could see why my mom liked her; they had the same table manners—none. I remembered how when I showed Yoshiko our room she had carefully unpacked her books, put the titles in my face until I nodded and said “hmmm,” as if I could read the bold-stroke Japanese. Psycho Loco once told me that in prison when two men fall in love, they have to be careful not to relax and give in to the passion, because just when you let yourself go, your lover slips his finger into your anus and you’re punked for life. I squeezed my sphincter shut as Yoshiko lowered the empty plate from her face, wiped her mouth, and let out a healthy belch.
It wasn’t difficult to tell that Yoshiko was equally enamored with me. No one had looked at me the way she did since Eileen Litmus back in the third grade, and I knew what that look meant.
“Gunnar, I don’t think that Yoshiko trusts you. She staring at you like you General MacArthur.”
As we sat around the table eating dessert and drinking beers, everyone took the opportunity to raise glasses and congratulate the newlyweds. Soon the guests demanded that the couple belatedly exchange their vows.
I stood and raised my beer can in Yoshiko’s direction, placed my hand over my heart, and said, “Till death do us part.”
“That’s it, nigger?”
“I can’t make no promises other than that.”
“What about ‘in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer’?”
“Look, all I know is we’re going to die. And when we do, we’ll be apart.”
“What about if you two die at the same time?”
“That’s a good point. Okay, I amend my vow. Till death kills us.”
“Now Yoshiko’s turn.”
“Mom, she doesn’t even speak English.”
“English?” Yoshiko stood up sharply, a little redfaced and wobbly from all the beer she’d drunk. “Me speak English.” To wild applause, Yoshiko pecked me on the lips, then climbed onto the tabletop, chugging her beer until she reached the summit. My bride, literally on a pedestal, was going to pledge her life to me. You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face with a blowtorch.
Yoshiko cleared her throat and threw her hands in the air. “Brmmphh boomp ba-boom bip. I’m the king of rock—there is none higher! Sucker MC’s must call me sire!”
“Hoooo!”
“Anyone know how to say ‘I love you’ in Japanese?”
Mom paid for the honeymoon. She lent me the car, and Yoshiko and I drove to Six Pennants Mystic Mount, an amusement park in the Antelope Valley. We listened to the radio and communicated with nods and exaggerated facial expressions, pretending to understand our improvised sign language. As we coasted into the Mystic Mount parking lot, the wooden white lattice of Leviathan Loops, the world’s largest roller coaster, loomed in the distance. Yoshiko screamed and hugged me, moving her hand over imaginary hill and dale. We skipped through the entrance, and for the first time in my life I waited in the endless line snuggling with a lover. I wasn’t the odd one out, a car to myself, constantly having to crane my neck backward at my friends and their dates to see how much fun I was having.
On the flume ride I sat between Yoshiko’s legs in a fiberglass canoe while we sloshed through the dark tunnels, her chin resting on the nape of my neck, her fingertips cupping my chest. Before that first drop after the s-turn through the eucalyptus branches, I didn’t even know I had nipples. Now I was hyperventilating, struggling for air, dangerously rocking the canoe, and splashing the German tourists in front of us as Yoshiko continued to tweak my nipples. “Gott im Himmel.” Will the passenger in boat 37 please remain seated!
After a day filled with centrifugal spins and free-falls, it was hard to tell whether I was dizzy with love or with motion sickness. We drove home in a weary silence punctuated only by Yoshiko calling out the names of familiar places. San Kreyón Rompido Cribrillo, Rio Califas, Zuma Beach. The Pacific Coast Highway’s sharp curves dropped off into foggy banks of nothingness. I felt like Columbus teetering on the edge of the world. “Malibu! Malibu!” Yoshiko, doing her Amerigo Vespucci land ho, tugging at my shirtsleeve, and pointing toward a small promontory overlooking the ocean.
It had been a long time since I’d been to the beach at night. On Santa Monica nights when I was having trouble sleeping, I would sneak out and play D-Day on the empty beaches, advancing toward the Normandy beachhead with a battalion of waves. “Stay down, man, stay down.” Sometimes I would play dead and let the tide spit up my limp body onto the shore. “Tell Mother I love … uhh.” While I went to get the blankets and the radio from the trunk, Yoshiko sprinted down the bluff, tossing her clothes to the sand and motioning for me to join her. Hand in hand, we walked into the onrushing Pacific in our underwear. The waves breaking around our shins, then slamming against our chests. Like drunken seal pups, we splashed about in the surf, riding the dark waves into the cold sand, young lovers run aground. Using the stuffed elephants we had won pitching dimes at pillows, we pressed our backs against the wind-shorn bluffs and gave each other language lessons beside a fire of driftwood and the remains of a synthetic log.
I tried to teach her useful American phrases such as “consummate the marriage,” “nookie,” and “Let’s get busy.” Yoshiko’s instruction was more practical. We played a game of phonetic charades in which she would say a Japanese word and I’d have to guess its English homophone.
“Bii-ru.”
“That’s easy, beer.”
“Okay, se-ro-ri.”
“Celery. C’mon, I thought Japanese was supposed to be hard.”
“E-bu-ra-ha-mu Ri-n-kaan.”
“Four score and twenty years ago, our forefathers—Abraham Lincoln.”
“Ro-san-ze-ru-su.”
“What?”
Yoshiko threw a pile of sand in the air, stamped her feet, and waved her hands across the sky. “Ro-san-ze-ru-su.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Frustrated, my sensei jumped me from behind and rubbed my nose into the sand. “Ro-san-ze-ru-su.”
“Oh, I get it—Los Angeles. Ro-san-ze-ru-su.”
With the stars as chaperones and Al Green as the R & B mariachi, we courted each other with our life stories and dreams. I couldn’t understand her, but I listened intently and let the Suntory whiskey Yoshiko pulled from her purse interpret.
After one swig, I surmised that Yoshiko was a poor farmer running away from a lifetime of toil shucking wheat and paying homage to countless Shinto and Buddhist agrarian gods. Her hands, callus-free on my cheeks, dismissed that theory.
After two swigs she was a famous pop star with writer’s block, hoping to regain her soulful edge by soaking up the African-American aesthetic. Singing alongside Al Green, Yoshiko sounded like a lisping crow with laryngitis.
Here I am, baby, come and take me.
Here I am, baby, come and take me.
After half the bottle I was writing haiku on her bare back with my index finger;
wife’s rib cage expanding
contracting, fanning virgin fires
carnal bellows, mmmmm.
Somewhere near the backwash end of the bottle, I’d guessed that Yoshiko was a rebellious teen whose parents couldn’t afford the cost of an American university, so she decided that marrying an eligible bachelor would be the easiest way to get a free education. The final choice was between me and an Iowa grad student named Stanley. On the day she’d been suspended from school for maiming the kendo teacher, she was in d
etention passing the time reading an alternative Japanese magazine called Phlegm when she came across one of my poems.
Your Problem Is
how can …
the jehovah’s witness, the scientologist,
the political scientist, the social scientist,
the mad scientist, the editorial page,
the 11 o’clock news, the talk radio host,
the urban planner, the school superintendent,
the special assistant to the president,
the psychologist, the televangelist, the homeless crazy,
the pontiff, the sales clerk, the bus driver,
the late-night cable access fuck,
claim to know my problem
when they don’t even know my name
Stanley was quickly forgotten. Under the half-moon gangster leaning over the horizon, I fell asleep to Al Green singing on a belly full of cornbread and fruit punch
I want to settle down and stop fooling around
Let’s get married, let’s get married today
and Yoshiko’s finger tapping on my anus. “Anaru zeme,” she whispered.
I dreamed I was a flying, fire-breathing foam stegosaurus starring in a schlocky Japanese film called Destroy All Negroes. I stomped high-rise projects into rubble, turned out concerts by whipping my armored tail across the stage, and chewed on slow black folks like licorice sticks. The world government sent a green-Afroed Godzilla to defeat me and we agreed to a death match in the Los Angeles Coliseum. The winner would be crowned Reptile of the Nuclear Epoch. I was beating Godzilla into the sea with a powerful stream of radioactive turtle piss when I awoke to find Yoshiko’s index finger worming its way toward my prostate. Punked for life.
“… STAY BLACK, AND DIE”
Ten
During my stay at Boston University I went to one class. My one hour of higher education consisted of Professor Oscar Edelstein’s poetry workshop, Creative Writing 104. As the next generation of great American poets stood up and introduced themselves with bohemian haughtiness, I drummed my fingers, trying to remember why I was going to college in the first place.