“Niggar you better get your ass out here in this hallway!”
“Who is that?”
“Niggar don’t make me ask twice! Sheth Jones, first row, nappy headed Negro! Sheth Jones. Ape-headed Niggar with the big dick!”
Sheth looks around at me.
Recognition.
He closes his tablet and comes into the hall.
“How’d you get that?”
“Huh?”
“Your tablet. How’d you afford it?”
“It’s provided by the school.”
“Oh, I thought only Oakwood schools provided those.”
“You can’t do your work without it,” Sheth says.
I put my hand on his shoulder. Clamp down.
“I want you to come on a walk with me,” I say. “I want you to show me your classes.”
“I was in one of my classes. Right now.”
“Oh you was in it? Was, is, in, on. You learn to speak properly you’ll avoid most run-ins with people like me.”
“I was speaking properly. I said I was in one of my classes—what’s wrong with that?”
“Look it up in that tablet of yours. Where do you start the day?”
“American History. 316. Mrs Tedesco.”
“What is she, French? I’m just kidding, boy. Take me to Mrs Tedesco’s class, 316. Show me where you start the day.”
“Well before that.”
“Before that what?”
“Before that I start in homeroom. But I didn’t figure you wanted to—“
“Don’t figure what I want! What I want is beyond the likes of you. It’s a mystery within a mystery. A bauble within a bauble. Do you even know what a goddamn bauble is?”
“I know it, sir. We learned it in the fifth grade. With a book called The Once and Future King. Do you know it?”
“I’m not gonna know every single reference to every little book your school requires you to read. How does it work for you, having Whites and Blacks in the same classroom?”
“Fine.”
“I don’t mean to be too suggestive, but you might try answering me in a complete sentence.”
I put my hand on my gun.
“It works out fine, sir.”
I unbutton the safety.
“Having Blacks and Whites in the same classroom. It works out fine, sir.”
“It works out fine for you! How ‘bout all those Jennifer Lawrences you drool over, liking to bone with your disgustingly huge Black cock, slipping it to them in the lunchroom when your teachers are barely looking!”
“What about them.”
“What about them??”
“I asked you—“
“But I asked you first!”
I re-snap my safety and put my hands on Sheth’s shoulders.
“Would you like to come to church with me sometime?”
“Pardon? I mean—pardon, sir?”
“You look like a kid could use some guidance—isn’t that right? Your father doesn’t seem to be around. Where is he?”
“He’s dead, sir.”
Sheth looks straight into my eyes. He is neither angry nor sad.
“How is that for you? I mean, that’s gotta be tough—is that tough? It’s gotta be tough, man. I’m not gonna ask you how he passed. He prob’ly passed by some police officer’s hand. Is that right? Cut down in a gunfight when you were young? Caught selling drugs or something?”
“My father didn’t sell drugs.”
“That you know of.”
“Excuse me, sir—“
“Lotta kids growing up, their parents sell drugs, do drugs, the kids have no idea. Houses in your neighborhood—it’s all drugs there.”
“I know it is,” Sheth says. “But my father didn’t sell no drugs.”
“But how do you know?”
“Are you gonna tell me you have some record of my dad doing drugs? You have some open case where my dad got killed by your fellow officer in a drug raid? My dad was an engineer. A civil engineer. He graduated from University of Dayton.”
“Not Sinclair?” I laugh.
Sheth doesn’t say anything.
“What are you gonna be when you grow up?”
“I’m going to be an electrical engineer. Sir!”
“Quit with the sir.”
“Do you want to see my homeroom, officer?”
“That depends. Are there any tasty little White bitches in it?”
I laugh.
Sheth doesn’t find it funny.
“The thing about me asking you to church,” I say, “is that it’s one of the oldest churches in Dayton. First Baptist, on Monument. Do you know it?”
“Yeah.”
I look at him.
“Yes,” he says.
“Have you ever been inside?”
“Nah, man. I gotta get back to class.”
“Wait wait wait—“
“Are you gonna charge me with something or—“
“Charge you!? Charge you?? I can charge you anytime I want! I want you to show me your classroom and before that I want you to stand here and tell me why you won’t go to church with me!!”
“Why I won’t go to church with you? Why is you harrassin’ me at school, man! This ain’t no joke! This is my SATs! This is college! And me getting out of that neighborhood that I don’t want to be in as bad as you!! Does you want to see my homeroom or what?”
There you go again, flippity flop. One minute formal (working on your SATs) and the next it’s does this and do that and every form mixed until it can’t tell its head for its tail. Is that you?—Is that you, Sheth? A stranger to your own neighborhood, your own home. Even a family has its limits when it comes to those who don’t belong. Even a formal fam can only accept so much of you, little Shethy. Little Sheth Jones. Baby even to his own mother gangster. Walk ahead of me, Shethy Boy—let me see that fine ass. Grown ass. Not a boy, there—no. But yeah Sheth is prob’ly the typa boy who’s a stranger in his own town, like my nephew, smart as a whip but useless motherfuckers—idiots, really. Sheth stumbling upon his dead parents (however they got whacked), growing up in a neighborhood of thugs while he’s doing Calculus—that’s my man, Sheth! You can run a dog to death but he’ll never escape the yard. Get me on that one? Cunnilingus. Cunnilingus on your ass. Licking that butthole. Charlie—Sheth! See it’s like the last one, less of a hole than an envelope. Fold it. Unfold it. Lick you like a stamp. You’re my buffin’ muffin’ stuffin’ bumpkin? Say that five times fast. Put your shit in rewind. I am coming to you on a frequency somewhere between time and pi. Just hit you with a constant like that—bam! Right up the middle, between those legs and boop!—booped you on the head! When can only songs and memories of cigarettes make me know I’m losing cosmic weight. Let’s go somewhere and fucking laugh! Just you and me. You and me, Shethy. Hands up my legs touch my inner thighs your fingernails scraping me my wife will see my wife will see! Stop dead henchman, you would turn and propose to me. Sheth, this is how I imagine us. Your head. My hands. Your chest. My ass. Rough ropes, turning and punching. We all slide down together. It is the topology of human sacrifice (that’s what you’re saying now). No, that’s what you were just saying just now. This is what you are saying right now. With a quiver and a glove. With stove top stuffing. And yes you can have a seat at Thanksgiving and yes you can boff my sister and yes, yes of course you can hold my daughter’s hand. The two of y’all off to marriage in the hay. Come on down to my churchin’, Carolina. You and I could have been brothers if not for your fatal flaw. We could have boffed ole’ Carolina. From through the window, it’s apple pie. It’s fuckin’ Fiona Apple. It’s Apple Fucking Pie. It’s your mom’s holy vagina.
Bzzzft. Bizzt!
I’ve got to stop doing this. Buzzing out like this. I mean you’re here, and we’re trying to complete the story, and I’m in the middle of fagging out as my police officer ego when then I come in with a straight razor, like, whuut the fuck is this skinny little Negro coming in here for?
There’s the straight me (I guess you’ve seen) and that’s the real me, who wants to burn down my map room and sometimes spy my daughter but whose real lunch in this life is the random Negro concubine, not far different from our slave owners of yore. Necking their slave girls for a tuck ‘n’ rub. What is wrong, if a master wants to go home, after a long day at the auction block, and when he finds his wife unwilling, he makes his way to his woman in the slave quarters. Does he hate her? Hate her because she is Black? Hardly. It might not please him. Just as one White girl’s skin may please me more than another’s, I may not abhor my Black girl’s skin—that doesn’t mean it is perfect in my eye! And certainly it does not mean that Blacks and Whites should not intermix—it simply means that they should not interbreed. No one wants to keep me from my Negra hunny—to wipe her lips with my seed—we jest want ta keep tha breeds clean! That’s all—that’s the whole thing. So this faggot before me is nothing but a clean, clean version of myself. They teach you that everyone’s just a mirror of yourself. Maybe this youngling down in front can take all four inches of my White cock suck it gulp it down! This is the straight me.
Then there’s the cop me. I’m a bad cop.
I didn’t start a bad cop. You start out green. Idealistic. Then you go out on the street. Things change then. ‘Cause there’s only so many times you can go to a Black neighborhood and see a sidewalk full of grannies and there’s only so many times you can walk into a drug house and see Ethiopian-looking motherfuckers—skinny as a bone!—looking up at you like, “What the fuck did I just do to my entire life my family my kids my job my whole fucking race? Can you help me, mister? Can you help me live?”
And why am I “racist?”
Because for all the affirmative action and all the poor people subsidies, when is one time I saw shit like that in a White neighborhood?
Never.