Four
You won’t find Dickens, California, on the map, because about five years after my father died, and a year after I graduated college, it, too, perished. There was no loud send-off. Dickens didn’t go out with a bang like Nagasaki, Sodom and Gomorrah, and my dad. It was quietly removed like those towns that vanished from maps of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, atomic accident by atomic accident. But the city of Dickens’s disappearance was no accident. It was part of a blatant conspiracy by the surrounding, increasingly affluent, two-car-garage communities to keep their property values up and blood pressures down. When the housing boom hit in the early part of the century, many moderate-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles County underwent real estate makeovers. Once pleasant working-class enclaves became rife with fake tits and fake graduation and crime rates, hair and tree transplants, lipo- and cholosuctions. In the wee hours of the night, after the community boards, homeowner associations, and real estate moguls banded together and coined descriptive names for nondescript neighborhoods, someone would bolt a large glittery Mediterranean-blue sign high up on a telephone pole. And when the fog lifted, the residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified blocks awoke to find out they lived in Crest View, La Cienega Heights, or Westdale. Even though there weren’t any topographical features like crests, views, heights, or dales to be found within ten miles. Nowadays Angelenos who used to see themselves as denizens of the west, east, and south sides wage protracted legal battles over whether their two-bedroom, charming country cottages reside within the confines of Beverlywood or Beverlywood Adjacent.
Dickens underwent a different type of transition. One clear South Central morning, we awoke to find that the city hadn’t been renamed but the signs that said WELCOME TO THE CITY OF DICKENS were gone. There was never an official announcement, an article in the paper, or a feature on the evening news. No one cared. In a way, most Dickensians were relieved to not be from anywhere. It saved them the embarrassment of having to answer the small-talk “Where are you from?” question with “Dickens,” then watching the person apologetically back away from you. “Sorry about that. Don’t kill me!” Rumor had it the county had revoked our charter because of the admittedly widespread local political corruption. The police and fire stations were closed down. You’d call what used to be city hall and a foul-mouthed teenager named Rebecca would answer, Don’t no niggers name Dickens live here, so don’t be calling here no more! The autonomous school board dismantled. Internet searches turned up only references to “Dickens, Charles John Huffam” and to a dust bowl county in Texas named after some unfortunate sap who may or may not have died at the Alamo.
In the years after my father died, the neighborhood looked to me to be the next Nigger Whisperer. I wish I could say that I answered the call to duty out of a sense of familial pride and communal concern, but the truth was, I did it because I had no social life. Nigger-whispering got me out of the house and away from the crops and the animals. I met interesting people and tried to convince them that no matter how much heroin and R. Kelly they had in their systems, they absolutely could not fly. When my father nigger-whispered, it didn’t look so hard. Unfortunately, I wasn’t blessed with my father’s sonorous, luxury-car-commercial voiceover bass profundo. I’m squeamishly shrill and possess all the speaking gravitas of the “shiest” member of your favorite boy band. The skinny, soft-spoken one who in the music video sits in the backseat of the convertible and never gets the girl, much less a solo, so I was issued a bullhorn. Ever try to whisper through a bullhorn?
Up until the city’s disappearance, the workload wasn’t so bad. I was an every-other-month crisis negotiator, a farmer doing a little nigger-whispering on the side. But since Dickens’s erasure I found myself in my pajamas, at least once a week, standing barefoot in an apartment complex courtyard, bullhorn in hand, staring up at some distraught, partially hotcombed-headed mother dangling her baby over a second-floor balcony ledge. When my father did the whispering, Friday nights were the busiest. Every payday he’d be inundated by teeming hordes of the bipolar poor, who having spent it all in one place, and grown tired and unsated from the night’s notoriously shitty prime-time television lineup, would unwedge themselves from between the couch-bound obese family members and the boxes of unsold Avon beauty products, turn off the kitchen radio pumping song after song extolling the virtues of Friday nights living it up at the club, popping bottles, niggers, and cherries in that order, then having canceled the next day’s appointment with their mental health care professional, the chatterbox cosmetologist, who after years doing heads, still knows only one hairstyle — fried, dyed, and laid to the side — they’d choose that Friday, “day of Venus,” goddess of love, beauty, and unpaid bills, to commit suicide, murder, or both. But under my watch people tend to snap on Wednesday. Hump day. And so sans juju, gris-gris, and the foggiest notion of what to say, I’ll press the trigger, and with a loud squeal of ear-piercing feedback, the bullhorn buzzes to staticky life. Half the unchosen tribe waiting for me to say the magic words and save the day; the other half waiting expectantly for a bathrobe to fly open and some milk-engorged titties to come popping out.
Sometimes I open with a little humor, remove a slip of paper from a large manila envelope, and in my best impersonation of a sensationalist afternoon-talk-show host announce, “When it comes to eight-month-old Kobe Jordan Kareem LeBron Mayweather III, I am not the father … but I wish I were,” and providing I don’t look too much like the baby’s real father, the mother will laugh and drop the little crumb-snatcher, shit-filled diaper and all, into my waiting arms.
Usually it isn’t so simple. Most times there’s so much Nina Simone “Mississippi Goddam” despondency in the night air it becomes hard to focus. The deep purple contusions about the face and arms. The terry-cloth robe finally falling seductively off the shoulders, revealing the woman to be a man; a man with hormonally induced breasts, shaved pubes, surprisingly shapely hips, and a tire-iron-brandishing significant other, who, underneath that bulky sweatshirt and baseball cap cocked to the side, might be a man, or just mannish, but either way is manically pacing the carport, threatening to bash in my skull if I say the wrong thing. The baby, swaddled in blue because blue is for Crip-centric boys, will be either too fat or too skinny, crying its little lungs out so loudly you’d wish it’d shut up, or even worse, so bone-chillingly quiet that under the circumstances you think it must already be dead. And invariably, softly in the background, billowing the curtains through the parted sliding glass doors, there’s always Nina Simone. These are the women my father warned me about. The drug-and-asshole-addled women who sit in the dark, hard up and lovesick, chain-smoking cigarettes, phones pressed to their ears, speed-dialing K-Earth 101 FM, the oldies station, so they can request Nina Simone or the Shirelles’ “This Is Dedicated to the One I Love,” aka “This Is Dedicated to Niggers That Beat Me Senseless and Leave.” “Stay away from bitches who love Nina Simone and have faggots for best friends,” he’d say. “They hate men.”