“Well, Asian men earn more than any other demographic.”
“Even the faggots?” shouted the assistant manager. “You sure Asians make more than the faggots? ’Cause I hear faggots be making cash hand over fist.”
“Yes, even the homosexuals, but remember, Asian men have no power.”
“And what about the gay Asian males? Have you done a regression analysis controlling for race and sexual orientation?” That insightful comment came from Foy Cheshire, about ten years older than my dad, standing next to the water fountain, hands in his pockets, and wearing a wool sweater, even though it was 75 degrees outside. This was way before the money and fame. Back then he was an assistant professor in urban studies, at UC Brentwood, living in Larchmont with the rest of the L.A. intellectual class, and hanging out in Dickens doing field research for his first book, Blacktopolis: The Intransigence of African-American Urban Poverty and Baggy Clothes. “I think an examination of the confluence of independent variables on income could result in some interesting r coefficients. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised by p values in the.75 range.”
Despite the smug attitude, Pops took a liking to Foy right away. Though Foy was born and raised in Michigan, it wasn’t often Dad found somebody in Dickens who knew the difference between a t-test and an analysis of variance. After debriefing over a box of donut holes, everyone — locals and Foy included — agreed to meet on a regular basis, and the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals were born. But where my father saw an opportunity for information exchange, public advocacy, and communal counsel, Foy saw a midlife springboard to fame. Things between the two of them started amicably enough. They strategized and chased women together. But after a few years, Foy Cheshire got famous and my father never did. Foy was no deep thinker, but back then he was infinitely better organized than my dad, whose main strength was also his biggest weakness — he was way ahead of his time. While my dad was writing incomprehensible and unpublishable theories linking black oppression, game and social learning theory, Foy hosted a television talk show. Interviewing B-list celebrities and political figures, writing magazine articles, and taking meetings in Hollywood.
Once, while watching my father typing away at his desk, I asked him where his ideas came from. He turned around, his tongue thick with Scotch whiskey, and said, “The real question is not where do ideas come from but where do they go.”
“So where do they go?”
“Punk motherfuckers like Foy Cheshire steal them and make not-so-small fortunes off your shit and invite you to the launch party like nothing happened.”
The idea that Foy stole from my father was an award-winning Saturday-morning cartoon called The Black Cats ’n’ Jammin’ Kids, a show that had been syndicated around the world, dubbed into seven languages, and in the late mid-90s made Foy enough money to buy a dream house in the hills. My father never said anything in public. Never confronted Foy at the meetings, because, as he put it, “our people are in dire need of everything except acrimony.” And in later years, when L.A. had turned Foy out like the small-town runaway he was at heart, after he’d lost his bankroll to a drug habit and a series of freckle-faced Creole L.A. women, been cheated out of his residuals by the production company, and had everything but his house and car seized by the IRS for tax evasion, my father kept quiet. When, gun to temple, Foy, flat broke and embarrassed, called to ask my dad to nigger-whisper him out of his suicidal funk, my father maintained patient-doctor confidentiality. Kept silent about the night sweats, the voices, the narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis, and the three-week psychiatric hospitalization. And the night my devoutly atheist father died, Foy prayed and spoke over him, hugged his lifeless body to his chest, and then acted as if the blood on his sparkling white Hugo Boss shirt was his own. You could see in his face that, despite his speech and poignant words about my father’s death symbolizing black injustice, deep down he was happy my dad was gone. Because, with my dad’s death, his secrets were safe, and maybe his grandiose Robespierre pipe dreams about the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals being the black equivalent to the Jacobins might come true.
As the Dum Dums debated how to mete out a measure of revenge, I adjourned the meeting early by dragging my dad’s body past the drink cooler and placing his corpse on the rear end of my horse, facedown on the rump, like in the cowboy movies, his arms and legs dangling in the air. At first the members tried to stop me. Because how dare I remove the martyr before they had an opportunity for a photo op. Then the police took their turn, blocking the streets with their cars so that I couldn’t pass. I cried and cursed. Circled my mount in the intersection and threatened anyone who came near me with a horseshoe kick to the forehead. Eventually the call went out for the Nigger Whisperer, but the Nigger Whisperer was dead.
The crisis negotiator, Police Captain Murray Flores, was a man my dad had worked with on many a nigger-whispering. He knew his job well enough not to soft-soap the situation. And after raising my father’s head up to look him in face, he spat on the ground in disgust and said, “What can I say?”
“You can tell me how it happened.”
“It was ‘accidental.’”
“And ‘accidental’ means?”
“Off the record, it means your dad pulled up behind plain-clothes officers Orosco and Medina, who were stopped at a traffic light, talking to a homeless woman. After the light changed from green to red a couple of times, your dad zipped around them and, while making a louie, yelled something, whereupon Officer Orosco issued a traffic ticket and a stern warning. Your father said…”
“‘Either give me the ticket or the lecture, but you can’t give me both.’ He stole that from Bill Russell.”
“Exactly. You know your father. The officers took exception, pulled their guns, your dad ran like any sensible person would, they fired four shots into his back and left him for dead in the intersection. So now you know. You just have to allow me to do my job. You have to let the system hold the men responsible for this accountable. So just give me the body.”
I asked Captain Flores a question my father had asked me many times: “In the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, do you know how many officers have been convicted of murder while in the line of duty?”
“No.”
“The answer is none, so there is no accountability. I’m taking him.”
“Where?”
“I’m going to bury him in the backyard. You do what you have to do.”
I don’t think I’d ever seen a cop blow a whistle before. Not in real life. But Captain Flores blew his brass-plated whistle and waved the other officers, Foy, and the Dum Dum Donut protesters off. The blockade parted and I led a very slow-moving funeral procession to 205 Bernard Avenue.
It’d always been my father’s dream to own 205 Bernard Avenue outright. “The Ponderosa,” he called it. “Sharecropping, transracial adoption, and ‘renting to own’ is for suckers,” he liked to say while he pored through real estate and no-money-down investment books, punching imaginary mortgage scenarios into the calculator. “My memoir … that’ll be an easy twenty thousand upfront … We can pawn your mama’s jewelry for five, six thou … and even though there’s an early-withdrawal penalty on your college fund, if we cash that mug out now, home ownership will be right around the corner.”
There never was any memoir, only titles shouted out while he was in the shower fucking some nineteen-year-old bubble-gum-blowing “colleague from the university.” He’d stick his wet head out the door and, through the steam, ask what did I think about “The Interpretation of Niggers” or my favorite, “I’m Ai’ight. You’re Ai’ight.” And there was no jewelry. My mother, a former Jet magazine Beauty of the Week, had no baubles or trinkets on in the faded tearsheet pasted above my headboard. She was a modestly coiffed, curvy expanse of thighs and lip gloss lounging on a backyard diving board in a gold lamé bikini. All I knew about her was the extensive biographical information listed in the bottom right-hand corner of the photo. “Laurel Lescook is a student from Key Biscayne, Florida, who enjoys biking, photography, and poetry.” Later in life I would track Ms. Lescook down. She was a paralegal in Atlanta who remembered my father as a man whom she’d never met, but who, after her one photo pictorial came out in September of ’77, inundated her with marriage proposals, creepy poetry, and Kodak Instamatic photos of his erect penis. Given that my college savings amounted to $236.72, the total take from my sparsely attended black mitzvah, and that both my father’s manuscript and my mother’s jewelry collection were nonexistent, you’d think we’d never come to own that house, but as luck would have it, given my father’s wrongful death at the hands of the police, and the $2 million settlement I’d later received, in a sense he and I bought the farm on the same day.