Free The Sellout by Paul Beatty Page A

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.”
    Swinging by its tiny heels, the baby carves giant, parabolic, fast-pitch softball, windmill circles in the air. And I stand there useless, a vacant look on my face, a nigger whisperer without secrets and sweet nothings to whisper. The crowd murmurs that I don’t know what I’m doing. And I don’t.
    “You don’t stop fucking around, man, you gonna get that baby kilt.”
    “Killed.”
    “Whatever, nigger. Just say something.”
    They all think that after my dad died I went away to college, majored in psychology, and returned to continue his good work. But I have no interest in psychoanalytic theory, ink splotches, the human condition, and in giving something back to the community. I went to the University of California at Riverside because it had a decent agricultural studies department. Majored in animal sciences with dreams of turning Daddy’s land into a hatchery where I could sell ostriches to all the early-nineties heavy rotation rappers, first-round draft choices, and big-budget movie sidekicks, eager to invest their “skrilla,” and who, after flying first-class for the first time in their lives, laid down the dog-eared financial section of the in-flight magazine in their laps and thought to themselves, “Shit, ostrich meat is indeed the future!” It sounds like a financial no-brainer. A nutritious FDA-approved ostrich steak sells for twenty dollars a pound, the feathers go for five dollars apiece, and those bumpy brown leather hides are worth two hundred bucks each. But the real money would be on my end in selling breeders to the nouveau-nigger-riche, because the average bird yields only about forty pounds of edible meat, because Oscar Wilde is dead and no one wears plumage and feathered hats anymore except for drag queens over forty, Bavarian tuba players, Marcus Garvey impersonators, and mint-julep-sipping-Kentucky-Derby-trifecta-betting southern belles, who wouldn’t buy black if you were selling the secret to ageless wrinkle-free skin and nine inches of dick. I knew full well the birds are