Al Green was singing about love and happiness. Laura Jane stripped naked. In the dim interior light her thin, smooth, pale skin was as iridescent as the nacre interior of an abalone shell. She strutted passed us. “I played a mermaid in a tuna commercial once. However, I have to say there was no black talent on that shoot. How come there aren’t any African-American mermaids?”
“Because black women hate to get their hair wet.”
“Oh.” And with that, using the bus’s aluminum latticework like a stripper working the pole, she flung herself into the water. Followed by the Jack in the Box crew, also naked, except for their paper hats.
Hominy sidled up to the front and looked longingly at the water.
“Master, are we still in Dickens?”
“No, Hominy, we aren’t.”
“Well, where is Dickens, then? Out there past the water?”
“Dickens exists in our heads. Real cities have borders. And signs. And sister cities.”
“Will we have all that soon?”
“I hope so.”
“And, massa, when we going to get my movies from Foy Cheshire?”
“Soon as we reestablish Dickens. We’ll see if he has them. I promise.”
Hominy paused at the doorway and, fully clothed, tested the water with the toe of his brogans.
“You know how to swim?”
“Uh-huh. Don’t you remember ‘Gon’ Deep Sea Fishin’?’”
I’d forgotten about that macabre Little Rascals classic. The gang plays hooky from school and ends up on a fishing trawl sent out to catch a shark that’s been terrorizing the waterfront. Since Pete the Pup has eaten the bait, they smear little Hominy in cod-liver oil, prick his finger, and hook his belt loop to the end of a fishing rod, lower him into the water, and use him as shark chum. While underwater he has to suck the air out of a school of puffer fish to keep from drowning. An electric eel repeatedly zaps him in the groin. The episode ends with a giant octopus showing its appreciation for the Little Rascals, ridding the sea of the fanged menace (turns out Alfalfa’s singing voice is so shrill he can carry a shark-repellant note underwater) by spraying the boys in black ink. When the dinge-colored bunch return home to a jetty full of concerned parents, Hominy and Buckwheat’s doo-ragged mammy blurts out, “Buckwheat, I dun tol’ yo’ pappy, I ain’t takin’ care uh nun ob hiz odder chil’ren!”
Marpessa fell asleep in my lap, and I stared out into the ocean, listening to the breaking surf and the peals of laughter. But mostly I was transfixed by Laura Jane’s shimmering pink coral nakedness backstroking through the ocean, nipples pointing to the stars, pubic hair sashaying in the clear water like a ginger tuft of silken sea grass. A scissor kick, a teasing glimpse, and she was underwater. Marpessa socked me hard in the ribs. It took all my willpower not to give her the satisfaction of rubbing out the pain.
“Look at you, fiending after some white bitch like every other L.A. nigger.”
“White babes don’t do nothing for me. You know that.”
“Bullshit, your fucking hard-on woke me up.”
“Aversion therapy.”
“What’s that?”
I balked at telling her about my father locking my head into the tachistoscope and for three hours flashing split-second images of the forbidden fruit of his era, pinups and Playboy centerfolds, in my face. Bettie Page, Betty Grable, Barbra Streisand, Twiggy, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn, Sophia Loren; then he’d force ipecac and okra smoothies down my throat. I’d vomit my guts out while he blasted Buffy Sainte-Marie and Linda Ronstadt on the stereo. The visual stimuli worked, but the auditory stuff didn’t take. To this day, whenever I’m feeling down and troubled, I crank Rickie Lee Jones, Joni Mitchell, and Carole King from the stereo, all of who were shouting-out California way before Biggie, Tupac, or any of the Ice Coons. But if you look carefully, and the light is just right, you can see the afterimages of Barbi Benton’s naked centerfold burned into my pupils as if they were discount plasma TVs.
“It’s nothing. I just don’t like white girls is all.”
Marpessa sat up and nestled her head into the crook of my neck. “Bonbon?” She smelled like she always did — of baby powder and designer shampoo. It was all she needed. “When did you fall in love with me?”
“The Color of Burnt Toast,” I said, naming the bestselling memoir about the guy from Detroit with a “crazy” white mother who didn’t want her biracial children to be traumatized by the word “black,” so she raised them as brown, called them beigeoloids, celebrated Brown History Month, and, until he was ten years old, grew up believing that the reason he was so dark was because his absentee father was the lightning-scorched magnolia tree in the housing project courtyard. “You let my father convince you to join the Dum Dum Donuts book club. Everybody else loved the book, but during the question-and-answer session you went off on dude. ‘I’m so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren’t there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That’s why black literature sucks!’”
“I said ‘Black literature sucks’?”
“Yup, and I was head over heels.”
“Shit, white people got complexions, too.”
A surprisingly strong swell rocked the bus from side to side. In the glow of the headlights I spotted an outsider forming to the left. I kicked off my sneakers and socks, tore off my shirt, and swam out to meet it. Marpessa stood in the doorway, shin-deep in the rising tide, her hands cupped around her mouth so that she could be heard above the crashing waves and the howl of a steadily increasing south-by-southwest wind. “Don’t you want to know when I fell in love with you?”
As if she were ever in love with me.
“I fell in love with you every time we went out to eat! I’d say to myself, ‘Thank God, a black man who doesn’t insist on sitting facing the door! Finally, a nigger who doesn’t have to pretend that he’s a big man! That has to be on guard at all times because somebody might be after him because he’s so fucking bad!’ How could I not fall in love with you?”
The key to bodysurfing a good wave is timing. Wait for the exact moment the tide drops the pit of your stomach into your groin. Swim two strokes ahead of the curl, and as soon as the current makes you feel weightless, make two more hard strokes, lift your chin, throw one arm tight to your side and the other straight out in front, palm down, and slightly bent at the elbow, then just ride to shore.
City Lites: An Interlude
I never understood the concept of the sister city, but I’d always been fascinated by it. The way that these twin towns, as they’re sometimes known, choose and court each other seems more incestuous than adoptive. Some unions, like that of Tel Aviv and Berlin, Paris and Algiers, Honolulu and Hiroshima, are designed to signal an end to hostilities and the beginning of peace and prosperity; arranged marriages in which the cities learn to love one another over time. Others are shotgun weddings, because one city, (e.g., Atlanta) impregnated the other (e.g., Lagos) on a first date that spun violently out of control centuries ago. Some cities marry up for money and prestige; others marry down to piss off their mother countries. Guess who’s coming to dinner? Kabul! Every now and then, two cities meet and fall in love out of mutual respect and a love for hiking, thunderstorms, and classic rock ’n’ roll. Think Amsterdam and Istanbul. Buenos Aires and Seoul. But in the modern age, where your average town is too busy trying to balance budgets and keep the infrastructure from crumbling, most cities have a hard time finding a soul mate, so they turn to Sister City Global, an international matchmaking organization that finds love partners for lonely municipalities. It was two days after Hominy’s birthday party and although I — and the rest of Dickens — was still hungover, when Ms. Susan Silverman, City Match Consultant, called about my application, I couldn’t have been more excited.