Once, one of my favorites episodes, “Mush and Milk,” was on, and to prove his boast, Hominy turned down the volume just as the gang sat around the Bleak Hill Boarding School breakfast table. Kindly Old Cap was waiting on his back pension. The house mother, wrinkled and as temperamental as a dog pound shar-pei, spat and hissed at the kids, one of whom, having screwed up the morning chores, whispers into another urchin’s ear a line we didn’t need sound to hear, because we’d heard it a million times.
“Don’t drink the milk,” we said aloud.
“Why?” A towheaded white boy mouthed.
“It’s spoiled,” we whispered in unison.
Don’t drink the milk. Pass it on. And Hominy did just that, dubbing each waif’s warning to the next rascal down in a different language.
“No bebas la leche. ¿Porqué? Está mala.”
“Ne bois pas le lait. Pourquoi? C’est gate.”
“Trink die Milch nicht! Warum? Die ist schlecht.”
Don’t drink the milk. Why? It’s spoiled.
The milk was spoiled because in reality it was liquefied plaster of paris that hadn’t yet hardened into a sight gag, and child stardom spoiled Hominy. Sometimes after a particularly abrupt edit for the sake of political correctness, he’d stomp his feet and pout. “I was in that scene! They edited me out! Spanky finds Aladdin’s lamp, he rubs it and says, ‘I wish Hominy was a monkey. I wish Hominy was a monkey!’ And lo and motherfucking behold, I’m a motherfucking monkey.”
“A monkey?”
“A capuchin, to be exact, and my method-acting monkey-ass hit the streets running, baby! And I comes across a nigger soda jerk making time with his old lady, he closes his eyes, leans in for a little loving; she sees me, splits, and that fool plants a wet one right on my big pink simian lips. That had them rolling in the aisles. ‘A Lad in a Lamp,’ most screen time I ever had. I fought the whole damn police force, and by the end of the picture, me and Spanky eating cake ’n’ shit, and running the whole goddamn town. And let me tell you, Spanky was without question the coolest motherfuckering white boy ever. Yowza!”
It was hard to determine if he’d been turned into a real monkey or if Hal Roach Studios, never known for its extravagant special effects, just opened up the timeless cookbook of Classic American Stereotyping and turned to the one-step recipe for Negro Monkeyshines: 1. Just add tail. Whatever the case, as the celluloid snippets of censored slapstick racism piled up on the cutting room floor, it became apparent that Hominy was a sort of Little Rascals stunt coon. His film career was a compendium of unseen outtakes where he’s doused with all things white: sunny-side-up eggs, paint, and pancake flour avalanches. Eyeballs bulging with fear and hyperthyroidism, sometimes the sight of a ghost in an abandoned house or a congregation of newly baptized holy ghost Negroes speaking in tongues and somnambulating through the thick of the local forest, or a white nightshirt blowing eerily on a clothesline like a hoodoo ghost come to billowing life would scare the shit out of Hominy. Turn him albino white. Blow out his Afro to freakishly long, scared-straight proportions and send him running headlong into a swamp tree, through a wooden fence or a plate-glass window. And he was constantly being electrocuted, both by his own ineptitude and by acts of a God whose supposedly random lightning strikes somehow never failed to miss the crack of his suspender-pants-covered ass. In “Frankly, Ben Franklin,” after the prototype is chewed up by Petey the Pitbull, who else but Hominy would volunteer to be the bespectacled Spanky’s kite? Sewn spread-eagle onto a giant Betsy Ross flag, wearing nothing but a set of tattered slave britches, a tricorne hat with a metal rod sticking out of its crown, and a placard hanging from his neck that in runny ink reads THESE ARE THE TIMES THAT FRY MEN’S SOULS — NATHAN HAIL, he soars high in the sky, a flying black squirrel sailing through the stinging rain, gale-force winds, and a fusillade of lightning bolts. There’s a thunderclap, followed by a cloud of sparks, and Spanky examining a glowing, electrified skeleton key attached to the kite string. “Eureka,” he’s about to say, before he’s rudely interrupted from up above, where Hominy, stuck in the tree branches, a smoldering ashen heap, smoke billowing from every orifice, eyes and teeth forever phosphorescent, delivers the longest line of his career, “Yowza! I done discobered electbicidy.”
Over time, with the advent of cable television, home video games, and Melanie Price’s bodacious eighth-grade bosoms, which she liked to show off in bedroom window striptease acts that started at the exact same time the Little Rascals did, one by one the gang stopped visiting Hominy after school, until it was only me and Marpessa left. I’m not sure why she stayed. She had her own fifteen-year-old tube-top breasts to show off. Sometimes the older guys would come up to the door and ask her to come outside to talk. But she’d always wait until the Little Rascals was over. Leaving the homeboys on Hominy’s porch. I’d like to think that Marpessa liked me even then. But I know it was probably pity and a sense of safety that kept her around from three thirty to four. Munching on grapes and watching the gang put on extravagant backyard variety shows featuring raspy-voiced seven-year-olds and colored kids tap-dancing up a storm, what harm could a thirteen-year-old homeschooled farm boy and superannuated coon do?
“Marpessa?”
“Huh?”
“Wipe your chin, it’s wet.”
“Let me tell you, that’s not all that’s wet. That’s how good these goddamn grapes is. You really grow these yourself?”
“Yup.”
“Why?”
“Homework.”
“Your father’s fucking crazy.”
I suppose that’s what I first loved about Marpessa, her unabashed inappropriateness. I guess I loved her titties, too. Although, like she said whenever she caught me staring at them, I wouldn’t know what to do with them if I ever had half the chance. Eventually the lure of older boys with drug money and sperm counts outweighed the sonorous charms of Alfalfa in a cowboy hat singing “Home on the Range,” and for the longest time, it was just me, Hominy, and the grapes. I never regretted passing up the side-yard peepshows with my friends. I always figured that if Marpessa kept eating my grapes and drooling nectar down her ample chest, sooner or later those drill-bit hard nipples would bore through the wet spots on her shirt.
Sadly, I never saw a three-dimensional mammary until the eve of my sixteenth birthday, when I woke up one night to find Tasha, one of my dad’s “teaching assistants,” sitting on the edge of my bed, naked, reeking of postcoital must and muscatel, and reading Nancy Chodorow aloud: “Mothers are women, of course, because a mother is a female parent … We can talk about a man ‘mothering’ a child, if he is this child’s primary nurturing figure, or is acting in a nurturant manner. But we would never talk about a woman ‘fathering’ a child.” To this day, whenever I’m lonely, I touch myself, thinking about Tasha’s titty and about how Freudian hermeneutics doesn’t apply to Dickens. A place where, often as not, it’s the child who raises the parents, where the Oedipus and Electra complexes are simple, sons, daughters, stepparents, or play-cousins, it doesn’t matter, since everybody’s fucking each other over and penis envy doesn’t exist because sometimes niggers just got too much dick.
* * *
I don’t know exactly why, but I felt like I owed Hominy something for all those afternoons Marpessa and I spent at his house. That there’s something about the craziness that he had to go through that’s kept me relatively sane. And one blustery Wednesday morning, about three years ago, during a well-earned afternoon nap, I heard Marpessa’s voice in my sleep. “Hominy” was all she said. After scrambling outside, I found a hastily written sign Scotch-taped to Hominy’s screen door fluttering in the breeze. I’z in de back, it read, his penmanship typical Little Rascal, squiggly, yet surprisingly legible. The back was Hominy’s memorabilia room. A small fifteen-by-fifteen add-on that was once crammed with a treasure trove of Our Gang props, headshots, and costumes. There weren’t many memories left. Most, like the suit of armor from which Spanky recited Mark Antony’s soliloquy in “Shivering Shakespeare” under a barrage of peashooters, the lock of Alfalfa’s personality, the top hat and tails Buckwheat wore when he conducted the Club Spanky Big Band and made “hundreds and thousands of dollars” in the “Our Gang Follies of 1938,” the long-ass hook-’n’-ladder scrap-metal fire engine used to win Jane back from the rich kid with the real fire engine, and the kazoos, flutes, and spoons that made up the wind and rhythm sections of the International Silver String Band had been long pawned and auctioned off.