THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT-SKINNED SPADE
Half a liter, half a liter,
Half a liter onward
All in the alley of Death
Rode the Olde English Eight Hundred.
Forward, the Light-skinned Spade!
“Charge for the Bloods!” he said:
Into the alley of Death
Rode the Olde English Eight Hundred …
When the SWAT team finally arrived on the scene, taking cover behind patrol car doors and the sycamore trees, clutching their assault rifles to their chests, none of them could stop giggling long enough to take the kill shot.
Theirs not to reason what the fuck,
Theirs but to shoot and duck:
Niggers to the right of them
Niggers to the left of them,
Niggers in front of them
Partied and blundered
Bumrush’d at caps and hollow point shell
While hooptie and hoodlum fell
They that had banged so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death
Back from the ho’s of Hell,
All that was left of them
Left of the Olde English Eight Hundred.
And when my father, the Nigger Whisperer — that beatific smile splashed across his face — eased his way past the police barricade, put a tweed-jacketed arm around the broken-down drug dealer, and spoke some whispered profundity into his ear, Kilo G blinked blankly like a stage-show volunteer struck dumb by an Indian casino hypnotist, then calmly handed over his gun and the keys to his heart. The police closed in for the arrest, but my father asked them to stay back, beckoning Kilo to finish his poem, even joining in at the end of each line, pretending he knew the words.
When can their shine and buzz fade?
Oh the buckwild charge they made!
All the motherfuckin’ world wondered.
Respect the charge they made
Respect the charge of the Light-skinned Spade
The noble now empty Olde English Eight Hundred.
The police vans and cruisers disappeared into the morning haze, leaving my father, godlike, alone in the middle of the street, reveling in his humanitarianism. Cockily, he turned toward me. “You know what I said to get that psychotic motherfucker to lower his gun?”
“What did you say, Daddy?”
“I said, ‘Brother, you have to ask yourself two questions, Who am I? And how may I become myself?’ That’s basic person-centered therapeutics. You want the client to feel important, to feel that he or she is in control of the healing process. Remember that shit.”
I wanted to ask him why he never spoke to me in the same reassuring tone that he used with his “clients,” but I knew, instead of an answer, I’d get the belt, and my healing process would involve Mercurochrome and, in place of being grounded, a sentence of five to no less than three weeks of Jungian active imagination. In the distance, hurtling away from me like some distant spiral galaxy, the red and blue sirens spun silently but brilliantly, lighting up the mist of the morning marine layer like some inner-city aurora borealis. I fingered a bullet hole in the tree bark, thinking that like the slug buried ten rings deep in the trunk, I’d never leave this neighborhood. That I’d go to the local high school. Graduate in the middle of my class, another Willie Lump Lump with a six-line résumé rife with spelling errors, trekking back and forth between the Job Center, the strip club parking lot, and the civil service exam tutorials. I’d marry, fuck, and kill Marpessa Delissa Dawson, the bitch next door and my one and only love. Have kids. Threaten them with military school and promises not to bail them out if they ever got arrested. I’d be the type of nigger who played pool at the titty bar and cheated on his wife with the blond cheese girl from the Trader Joe’s on National and Westwood Boulevards. I’d stop pestering my father about my missing mother, finally admitting to myself that motherhood, like the artistic trilogy, is overrated. After a lifetime of beating myself up for never having been breast-fed or finishing The Lord of the Rings, Paradise, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, eventually, like all lower-middle-class Californians, I’d die in the same bedroom I’d grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that’ve been there since the ’68 quake. So introspective questions like “Who am I? And how can I be that person?” didn’t pertain to me then, because I already knew the answer. Like the entire town of Dickens, I was my father’s child, a product of my environment, and nothing more. Dickens was me. And I was my father. Problem is, they both disappeared from my life, first my dad, and then my hometown, and suddenly I had no idea who I was, and no clue how to become myself.
Two
Westside, nigger! What?
Three
The three basic laws of ghetto physics are: Niggers in your face tend to stay in your face; no matter where the sun is in the sky, the time is always “Half past a monkey’s ass and a quarter to his balls”; and the third is that whenever someone you love has been shot, invariably you will be back home on winter break, halfway through your junior year of college, taking the horse on a little afternoon ride to rendezvous with your father for a meeting of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, the local think tank, where he and the rest of the neighborhood savants will ply you with cider, cinnamon rolls, and conversion therapy. (Not that your dad thinks that you’re gay, but he’s worried that you never stay out past eleven and the word “booty” doesn’t seem to be in your vocabulary.) It’s a cold night. You’re minding your own business, savoring the last of your vanilla shake, when you come upon a drove of detectives huddled around the body. You dismount. Step closer and recognize a shoe, or a shirtsleeve, or a piece of jewelry. My father was facedown in the intersection. I recognized him by his fist, cocked and knuckled up tight, the veins on the back of his hand still bulging and full. I compromised the crime scene by picking lint off his matted Afro, straightening the rumpled collar of his Oxford shirt, brushing the pebbles of gravel from his cheek, and, according to the police report, most egregiously by sticking my hand in the blood pooled around his body, which to my surprise was cold. Not hot, roiling with the black anger and lifelong frustration of a decent, albeit slightly crazy man who never became what he thought he was.
“You the son?”
The detective looked me up and down. His brow wrinkled, his eyes flicking back and forth from identifying feature to identifying feature. Behind the dismissive smirk I could almost see his brain cross-referencing my scars, height, and build with some database of wanted felons filed inside his head.
“Yes, I am.”
“You something special?”
“Huh?”
“The officers involved said that when he charged them, he shouted, and I quote, ‘I’m warning you, you anal-retentive, authoritarian archetypes, you don’t know who my son is!’ So, you someone special?”
Who am I? And how can I be that person?
“No, I’m no one special.”
You’re supposed to cry when your dad dies. Curse the system because your father has died at the hands of the police. Bemoan being lower-middle-class and colored in a police state that protects only rich white people and movie stars of all races, though I can’t think of any Asian-American ones. But I didn’t cry. I thought his death was a trick. Another one of his elaborate schemes to educate me on the plight of the black race and to inspire me to make something of myself, I half expected him to get up, brush himself off, and say, “See, nigger, if this could happen to the world’s smartest black man, just imagine what could happen to your dumb ass. Just because racism is dead don’t mean they still don’t shoot niggers on sight.”