Unum corpus, una mens, una cor, unum amor.
One body, one mind, one heart, one love.
Not bad. It had a nice license plate ring to it. I could see it in cursive, circumnavigating the rim of a race war medal of honor. Funshine didn’t hate it, but from the way he wrinkled his nose right before falling asleep that night, I could tell he felt my slogan implied a certain groupthink, and weren’t black people always complaining about being labeled as monolithic? I didn’t ruin his dreams by telling him that black people do all think alike. They won’t admit it, but every black person thinks they’re better than every other black person. I never heard back from the NAACP or the Urban League, so the black credo exists only in my head, impatiently waiting on a movement, a nation, and, I suppose, since nowadays branding is everything, a logo.
Maybe we don’t need a motto. How many times have I heard someone say, “Nigger, you know me, my motto is…”? If I were smart, I’d put my Latin to use. Charge ten dollars a word. Fifteen if they aren’t from the neighborhood or want me to translate “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” If it’s true that one’s body is one’s temple, I could make good money. Open up a little shop on the boulevard and have a long line of tattooed customers who’ve transformed themselves into nondenominational places of worship: ankhs, sankofas, and crucifixes fighting for abdominal space with Aztec sun gods and one-star Star of David galaxies. Chinese characters running down shaved calves and spinal columns. Sinological shout-outs to dead loved ones that they think means “Rest in peace, Grandma Beverly,” but in reality reads “No tickee! No Bilateral Trade Agreement!” Man, it’d be a goldmine. High as the price of cigarettes, they’d come at all hours of the night. I could sit behind a thick Plexiglas window and have one of those sliding metal drop boxes that the gas station attendants use. I’d slide out the drawer, and like prisoners passing jailhouse kites, my clientele would surreptitiously hand me their affirmations. The harder the man, the neater the handwriting. The more softhearted the woman, the more pugnacious the phrase. “You know me,” they’d say, “my motto is…” and drop the cash and quotations from Shakespeare and Scarface, biblical passages, schoolyard aphorisms, and hoodlum truisms written in every medium from blood to eyeliner into the drawer. And whether it was scribbled on a crumpled-up bar napkin, a paper plate stained with BBQ sauce and potato salad, or was a page carefully torn from a secret diary kept since a stir in juvenile hall that if I tell anyone about it’ll be my ass, Ya estuvo (whatever that means), I’d take the job seriously. For these are a people for whom the phrase “Well, if you put a gun to my head…” isn’t theoretical, and when someone has pressed a cold metal muzzle to the yin and yang symbol tattooed on your temple and you’ve lived to tell about it, you don’t need to have read the I Ching to appreciate the cosmic balance of the universe and the power of the tramp stamp. Because what else could your motto possibly be but “What goes around, comes around … Quod circumvehitur, revehitur.”
When business is slow, they’ll come by to show me my handiwork. The olde English lettering glistening in the streetlight, its orthography parsed on their sweaty tank- and tube-topped musculatures. Money talks, bullshit walks … Pecunia sermo, somnium ambulo. Dative and accusative clauses burnished onto their jugulars, there’s something special about having the language of science and romance surf the tidal waves of a homegirl’s body fat. Strictly dickly … Austerus verpa. The shaky noun declension that would ticker-tape across their foreheads would be the closest most of them ever get to being white, to reading white. Crip up or grip up … Criptum vexo vel carpo vex. It’s nonessential essentialism. Blood in, blood out … Minuo in, minuo sicco. It’s the satisfaction of looking at your motto in the mirror and thinking, Any nigger who isn’t paranoid is crazy … Ullus niger vir quisnam est non insanus ist rabidus is something Julius Caesar would’ve said if he were black. Act your age, not your shoe size … Factio vestri aevum, non vestri calceus amplitudo. And if an increasingly pluralistic America ever decides to commission a new motto, I’m open for business, because I’ve got a better one than E pluribus unum.
Tu dormis, tu perdis … You snooze, you lose.
Someone takes the pipe from my hand. “C’mon, man. That shit is cashed. It’s time to make the donuts, homie.” Hampton Fiske, my lawyer and old friend, calmly wafts away the last of the pot smoke, then engulfs me in an antifungal cloud of spray-can air freshener. I’m too high to speak, so we greet each other with chin-up, what’s-up nods, and share a knowing smile, because we both recognize the scent. Tropic Breeze — same shit we used to hide the evidence from our parents because it smelled like angel dust. If moms came home, kicked off the espadrilles, and found the crib redolent of Apple Cinnamon or Strawberries and Cream, she’d know we’d been smoking, but if the crib smelled like PCP, then the stench could be blamed on “Uncle Rick and them,” or alternatively, she could say nothing, too tired to deal with the possibility that her only child was addicted to sherm, and hope the problem would simply go away.
Arguing cases in front of the Supreme Court isn’t Hamp’s bailiwick. He’s an old-school criminal defense attorney. When you call his office, you invariably get put on hold. Not because he’s busy or there’s no receptionist, or you’ve called at the same time as some other sap who saw his ad on a bus stop bench or the 800 number (1-800-FREEDOM) scratched by paid transients onto metal holding-cell mirrors and backseat police car Plexiglas. It’s because he likes to listen to his answering machine, a ten-minute recitation of his legal triumphs and mistrials.
“You have reached the Fiske Group — Any Firm Can List the Charges, We Can Beat the Charges. Not Guilty — Murder. Not Guilty — DUI. Not Guilty — Assault of a Police Officer. Not Guilty — Sexual Abuse. Not Guilty — Child Abuse. Not Guilty — Elderly Abuse. Dismissed — Theft. Dismissed — Forgery. Dismissed — Domestic Violence (more than one thousand cases). Dismissed — Sexual Conduct with a Minor. Dismissed — Involving a Child in Drug Activity. Dismissed — Kidnapping…”
Hamp knows that only the most desperate of the accused will have the patience to sit through that litany of damn near every criminal statute in the Los Angeles County penal code, first in English, then in Spanish, then in Tagalog. And those are the people he likes to represent. The wretched of the Earth, he calls us. People too poor to afford cable and too stupid to know that they aren’t missing anything. “If Jean Valjean had me representing him,” he likes to say, “then Les Misérables would’ve only been six pages long. Dismissed — Loaf of Bread Pilfery.”