Guess Who's Coming to My Blog

The closest I got to black people as a child was as an avid Dodgers fan. I thought when I was an adult that I would like to have centerfielder Willie Davis’s long, lean physique. (And just missed. Willie stood 6-2 and weighed 180. Johnny, 2010: 6-1, 182.) I had a black (I realized later) classmate in fifth and sixth grades, Sandra Lucas, who claimed to be Spanish, and was really beautiful, so the alpha boys intent on wooing her would have bloodied the nose of anyone who gave her shit. Not so the lone black kid at Orville Wright Junior High School, Walter Daniels, who might have had it really bad but for the presence of the spastic Billy Snyder, whose neurological problems the school’s sadists seems to find more offensive than even Walter’s negritude.

The segregation at Santa Monica High School in my day was de facto. White kids, automatically assumed to be bright and ambitious, were put in college preparatory classes, while kids of color were consigned, along with white trash from the wrong side of Olympic Blvd., to normal or remedial classes. Aside from chipper Chris Allen, who I understand went on to own his own janitorial business, my only black classmates were in PE. They never passed me the basketball; I wouldn’t have either.

(Blacks were generally perceived as a cut above Mexicans, we anglos’ contempt for whom was perfectly understandable. They’d had the courage and resolve to leave their own country to try to better themselves in ours, where they worked very hard for rotten pay, doing jobs for which we were too good. Of course we disdained ‘em!)

The summer before junior year, I worked at Zuma Beach, collecting 50¢ from people seeking access to the parking lot. My fellow employees’ favorite recreation was bitching about the man they referred to only as Martin Luther Coon. Billy Davis thought he really had me cornered rhetorically when he demanded, “Well, how would you like to live next door to one?” Better that, I mused, than him, and the boss, a Malibu sheriff who bragged about pulling over and ticketing any [black person] who dared drive on Pacific Coast Highway during his shift, had to step — reluctantly! — between us.

The summer before senior year, I got a job as a busboy. To the infinite chagrin of the redneck existing cook at Ted’s Rancho Restaurant, dishwasher Collins Hall was promoted to cook beside him, and then had the effrontery to work really hard. He was the first black person with whom I'd ever chatted at length. I liked him, and worked up the courage to try to ingratiate myself by revealing that I didn’t hate him because of his color. Only years later did I realize he’d been mocking me when he replied, with the utmost earnestness, “Well, thank you, suh.” I'd deserved to be mocked.

The night after the Watts riots broke out, their apoplectic next door neighbor burst into my girlfriend's parents’ house wanting to know if her dad wanted to go shoot a few of the uppity [black] bastards with him. Meanwhile, at lunchtime in the outdoor free speech area of my university, young black student rabble-rousers were forever bellowing lists of non-negotiable demands. I honestly suspect their primary ambition was the same as every male student’s — to get laid. It seemed to work.

Over time in adulthood, I came to have a couple of short-term black girlfriends, the more beautiful of whom was my worst lover ever, and some black bosses, and lots of black coworkers. Some, in about the same proportion as whites, were assholes, and others angels.

Billy Davis at Zuma Beach had wanted to know how I’d feel living next door to black people. I live next door to black people now. We and Deborah and her adult daughter don’t have worlds in common — Deborah’s a committed Christian, and Claire and I equally committed pantheists — but we have no complaints with each other. It isn’t as though they’re Republicans.

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