Author: Paul Beatty
Category: Fiction
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"I may have smoked too much weed, but I wasn't taking drugs or anything."—after losing to Lennox Lewis
"You're [Razor Ruddock] sweet. I'm going to make sure you kiss me good with those big lips. I'm gonna make you my girlfriend."
Family
"Her mother is beautiful, but she [daughter Rayna] is so gorgeous she makes her mother look like a junkyard dog."
"No one gives a fuck about me. No one cares if my children starve, if they're on welfare. I have to support my children. I need more money."— commenting on purse for Frank Bruno fight
The Public
"I don't feel love from them because there's no love. They don't know me as an individual; they know me for what I actually do. Because they pay to see me smash anybody. If they're white they pay, [it's] because the only thing they have respect for is my ability as an athlete. But if I was in court and I had to use them to testify against me on my character, they wouldn't testify positively against me and they would think I'm a cad . . ."
"There are nine million people who see me in the ring and hate my guts. Most of them are white. That's okay. Just spell my name right."
"I think the average person thinks I'm a fucking nut and I deserve whatever happens to me. That's what I believe."
"When you see me smash somebody's skull, you enjoy it."
The Competition
"You have to understand, Frank Bruno would not have been champion if I had not been in prison. Oliver McCall would not have been champion if I had not been in prison. A lot of these guys would not have been champion. Michael Moorer would not have been champion. Those guys would not have been champion if I had been around. They would have had no legacy. None of those guys would have had a legacy . . . But you really have to look at the science of the situation. You guys come here to talk and report but you don't actually look at the facts of what this business is all about. The best thing that happened to those guys and they should stand on their mother's shoulders and kiss my ass because I went to prison or they would not be existing right now. They'd be a flash in the pan and would have made some money and opened up a restaurant or bar somewhere where they live at."
The Sweet Science
"They all have a plan until they get hit."
"How dare these boxers challenge me with their primitive skills?"— after a fifth round KO of Frank Bruno
"My power is discombobulatingly devastating. I could feel his muscle tissues collapse under my force. It's ludicrous these mortals even attempt to enter my realm."
"I try to catch him right on the tip of the nose, because I try to push the bone into the brain."
"It's interesting that you put me in the league with those illustrious fighters [Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Jack Johnson], but I've proved since my career I've surpassed them as far as my popularity. I'm the biggest fighter in the history of the sport. If you don't believe it, check the cash register."
"The knee feels fine, I've been training Confuciously."
The Media
"I wish that you guys had children so I could kick them in the fucking head or stomp on their testicles so you could feel my pain because that's the pain I have waking up every day."
[Addressing a female reporter] "It's no doubt I am going to win this fight and I feel confident about winning this fight. I normally don't do interviews with women unless I fornicate with them. So you shouldn't talk anymore . . . unless you want to, you know."
"[He] called me a 'rapist' and a 'recluse.' I'm not a recluse."—referring to New York Post sports writer Wallace Matthews
"Sometimes you guys have no pride, so no matter what I say, you guys . . . it doesn't affect you because you don't care about nothing but money. So every now and then I kick your fucking ass and stomp on you and put some kind of pain and inflict some of the pain on you because you deserve to feel the pain that I feel."—ESPN interview, Maui, Hawaii
"If I take this camera and put it in your face for twenty years, I don't know what you might be. You might be a homosexual if I put that camera on you since you were thirteen years old. I've been on that camera since I was thirteen years old."
Religion
"All praise is to Allah, I'll fight any man, any animal, if Jesus were here I'd fight him too."
*"I feel like sometimes that I was born, that I'm not meant for this society because everyone here is a fucking hypocrite. Everybody says they believe in God but they don't do God's work. Everybody counteracts what God is really about. If Jesus was here, do you think Jesus would show me any love? Do you think Jesus would love me? I'm a Muslim, but do you think Jesus would love me . . . I think Jesus would have a drink with me and discuss . . . why you acting like that?"
"Now, he would be cool. He would talk to me. No Christian ever did that and said in the name of Jesus even . . . They'd throw me in jail and write bad articles about me and then go to church on Sunday and say Jesus is a wonderful man and he's coming back to save us. But they don't understand that when he comes back, that these crazy greedy capitalistic men are gonna kill him again."
Mike Tyson on Mike Tyson
"The one thing I know, everyone respects the true person and everyone's not true with themselves. All of these people who are heroes, these guys who have been lily white and clean all their lives, if they went through what I went through, they would commit suicide. They don't have the heart that I have. I've lived places they can't defecate in."
"I'm not Mother Teresa and I'm not Charles Manson."—Testifying before the Nevada State Athletic Commission
"Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy. It's like fire. If you can control it, it can cook for you; it can heat your house. If you can't control it, it will burn everything around you and destroy you. If you can control your fear, it makes you more alert, like a deer coming across the lawn."
"I'm just like you. I enjoy the forbidden fruits in life, too. I think it's unAmerican not to go out with a woman, not to be with a beautiful woman, not to get my dick sucked . . . It's just what I said before, everybody in this country is a big fucking liar. [The media] tells people . . . that this person did this and this person did that and then we find out that we're just human and we find out that Michael Jordan cheats on his wife just like everybody else and that we all cheat on our fucking wife in one way or another either emotionally, physically or sexually or one way."
"There's no one perfect. We're always gonna do that. Jimmy Swaggart is lascivious, Mike Tyson is lascivious—but we're not criminally, at least I'm not, criminally lascivious. You know what I mean. I may like to fornicate more than other people—it's just who I am. I sacrifice so much of my life, can I at least get laid? I mean, I been robbed of most of my money, can I at least get [oral sex] without the people wanting to harass me and wanting to throw me in jail?"
"That's just who I am. I want to have a nice career for my children. I want them to have a great education. I want to fly my birds. I want to live my life. I want to have a drink every now and then. I want to have a charity event every now and then. And every now and then, I want to fornicate and that's just being a human being."
"At times, I come across as crude or crass. That irritates you when I come across like a Neanderthal or a babbling idiot, but I like to be that person. I like to show you all that person, because that's who you come to see."—press conference, Maui, Hawaii
"I'm the most irresponsible person in the world. The reason I'm like that is because, at twenty-one, you all gave me fifty or a hundred million dollars and I didn't know what to do. I'm from the ghetto. I don't know how to act. One day I'm in a dope house robbing somebody. The next thing I know, 'You're the heavyweight champion of the world.' I'm twenty years old. I'm the heavyweight champion of the world. Most of my girlfriends are fifteen, sixteen years old. I'm twenty years old with a lot of money. Who am I? What am I? I don't even know who I am. I'm just a dumb child. I'm being abused. I'm being robbed by lawyers. I think I have more money than I do. I'm just a dumb pugnacious fool. I'm just a fool who thinks I
'm someone. And you tell me I should be responsible?"
"Well, that feeling [suicide] goes through everyone's mind, I'm sure, and if it doesn't I really must be crazy. Everyone thinks about that because sometimes, you know what I mean, it's just tough being a nigger and it's tough being a bad nigger."
"I'm just a dark guy from a den of iniquity. A dark shadowy figure from the bowels of iniquity. I wish I could be Mike who gets an endorsement deal. But you can't make a lie and a truth go together."
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
"Look at my life, I've been embarrassed, humiliation, degradation and other t-i-o-n you can name."
(nothing serious) just buggin'
Back in the day before people said "back in the day," before "def' was in the dictionary and only vegetables, ideas, and office managers were "fresh," it was hard to be black. These days, all you have to do is put on a baseball cap, slide the bill over one ear, and wah-la, you're black. Having renounced my blackness after Toni Morrison announced Bill Clinton's, I can only suppose being black is as hard now as it was then. However, reliable sources (black folk whose renouncement paperwork hasn't come through) inform me people don't talk about black hardship as much as they used to. Whites know better than to approach them at the company Christmas party asking "So is it hard being black?" which lessens the oppressed Negro's workload appreciably. This "progress" leaves more social heavy lifting for the Asians, of course: "No, I mean where are you from originally?"
Growing up, there used to be lots of pressure to take blackness seriously. Public blackness had to be kept groomed, polished, well creased, and well greased. The risk of running into a white person, police officer, member of Grandma's parish, or one of the paragons of good blackness, Sidney Potier, Rosa Parks, and Frederick Douglass, was not to be taken lightly, even if Frederick had been dead for hundred years.
Being black then was like growing up in East Germany. The sloganeering. The uplifting songs. No electricity. No long-distance phone service. The insufferable, hopelessly vague daily admonishments to "grow up and be somebody." Any youth with the temerity to stand up and say, "But according the almighty irrefutable Fiihrer of furor the Reverend Jesse Jackson, I am somebody," was sent to the DAP, work camp (the Deputy Auxiliary Police—an urban Young Pioneers), given a blue windbreaker and a list of things not be. Though the What Not to Be list tended to accentuate the negative, its specifics were most welcome. Don't be no nigger. Don't be a junkie. Don't be talkin' about my mama. And, first and foremost, don't be no fool. "But if it's first and foremost, shouldn't 'Don't be no fool' come at the beginning of the list?" Unfortunately, I was an inveterate fool, and a wry one at that. While admittedly there was some leeway for foolishness in the black community, there was no room for wryness.
Despite numerous beatings, detentions, and dunce-capped public self-criticisms, my ign'ant foolhardy ways proved to be incurable and I suffered in private, never quite able to snuff out my snide castigations with a loud and crisp "Yes, sir" or "No, ma'am." Then, in the mid-eighties, when deconstruction reached its apotheosis and revisionist histories abounded, the fool—along with segregation, pornography, child molesters, and unabashed corporate greed—received a quasi-reprieve. Fools were cool.
I'd attend readings where, between poems, Amiri Baraka would cite the Stepin Fetchits, Mantan Morelands, and Lightnings for wartime heroics, explaining how these slow-moving, slow-thinking show business coons were in actuality subversives, members of a colored resistance, because only an insane person would hop to and up 'n' at 'em for a heartless bossman who paid them little heed, no money, and even less respect. Shit, according to Baraka and Derrida, I was a revolutionary.
With the advent of rap, my joker antics garnered street credibility. From the West Coast the thuggish King Tee was fittin' to "Act a Fool" and "Just Clownin'." On the Eastern Seaboard, Whistle released the single that serves as the namesake for this section, "(Nothing Serious) Just Buggin'." I finally had a diagnosis. I was buggin'. Folks used to say I was trippin', but trippin' had drug and schizophrenic connotations. Trip out and you might never come back. Bug out and, well, aren't we all entitled to a moment of frivolity? Who knows, maybe the real purpose of the trickster's public histrionics is to clear enough head space to allow for some wry, American, backstage blackness.
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
when de co'n pone's hot
1895
Dey is times in life when Nature
Seems to slip a cog an' go,
Jes' a-rattlin' down creation,
Lak an ocean's overflow;
When de worl' jes' stahts a-spinnin'
Lak a picaninny's top,
An' yo' cup o' joy is brimmin'
Twell it seems about to slop,
An' you feel jes' lak a racah,
Dat is trainin' fu' to trot—
When yo' mammy says de blessin',
An' de co'n pone's hot.
When you set down at de table,
Kin' o' weary lak an' sad,
An' you 'se jes' a little tiahed
An' purhaps a little mad;
How yo' gloom tu'ns into gladness,
How yo' joy drives out de
doubt
When de oven do' is opened,
An' de smell comes po'in' out;
Why, de 'lectric light o' Heaven
Seems to settle on de spot,
When yo' mammy says de blessin'
An' de co'n pone's hot.
When de cabbage pot is steamin'
An' de bacon good an' fat,
When de chittlins is a-sputter'n'
So's to show you whah dey's at;
Tek away yo' sody biscuit,
Tek away yo' cake an' pie,
Fu' de glory time is comin',
An' it's 'proachin' mighty nigh,
An' you want to jump an' hollah,
Dough you know you'd bettah not,
When yo' mammy says de blessin'
An' de co'n pone's hot.
I have hyeahd o' lots o' sermons,
An' I've hyeahd o' lots o'
prayers,
An' I've listened to some singin'
Dat has tuck me up de stairs
Of de Glory-Lan' an' set me
Jes' below de Mastah's th'one,
An' have lef my hea't a-singin'
In a happy aftah tone;
But dem wu'ds so sweetly murmured
Seem to tech de softes' spot,
When my mammy says de blessin',
An' de co'n pone's hot.
BERT WILLIAMS
how fried?
1913
Uncle benjamin, who lived right close to us, had the most marvelous memory of any man I'd ever seen in my life. Never seen a man who could remember so much, no matter what happened, anytime, anyplace, he knew all about it.
One day he sittin' down out on his porch and I asked him how he come to have such a memory, and he told us this, says, "Well," he says, "see my great-great-grandfather had the most marvelous memory of any man in the state of Kentucky. And the Colonel who owned him used to carry him with him to court and put him in the chair in back of him and he would remember so good that six m o n t h s . . . a year after that time he could ask you, 'What did so and so say, Sam?' Sam could tell him! That's how I comes to have my memory. Why, don't you know my great-greatgrandfather had such a marvelous memory they had a fuss ovah him? The devil comes to his master and says, 'Colonel, I want that coon.'
"Master says, 'Well I'm very sorry, but you can't have him. 'Cuz I ain't got nobody to help me out, I ain't got nobody to write my reports or nuthin' and I have to depend on him all the time.'
"They argued for over an hour about it. At the finish of the argument the Colonel says, 'Well, if you can catch Sam where he don't remember, why, take him!'
"Well, suh, of course you know Sam didn't have nuthin' to do around the plantation, he was one of the favored few. 'Cept go out every mornin' and rake the dead offen the lawn where the gentle zep
hyrs had blowed 'em the evening befo'. He was out raking the leaves off the lawn one mornin' when all of sudden the devil appeared before him . . . sudden, like that, in the guise of a man. Well, the devil asked him, 'Do you like eggs?'
"Sam looked at him for a minute and said, 'Yes, suh!'
" 'Hmm mmm,' and the devil was gone.
"Well, lemme see now that was . . . ten years before the war! Well, after the war, let me see, 'bout twenty years after the war, why, Uncle Samuel was out plowing a little field the Colonel had give him so he could take care of his family. He was out plowin' amongst his corn on this mornin', now, remember now, this is thirty years since the war, while he was plowing along singin' his favorite hymn, 'Didn't de Walls of Jericho Fall When de Bugle Sounded?'
"Didn't de wa-a-l-l-s of Jericho, didn't de wa-a-l-l-s of Jericho . . . giddiyup Sukey . . . Didn't de wa-a-l-l-s ofJericho fall when de bugle sounded?"
"And just like that the devil appeared before him again and said, 'How?'
"Uncle Sam said, 'Fried!'
"Ha-ha yaaa ha."
assorted jokes compiled by alex rogers
1918
I remember the first time I went on visit to a big city. It was A Chattanoogy. I sported 'round and spent money so fast that when I got ready to go back home I found myself with one lone two-dollar bill. The railroad fare back home was three dollars. Well, I figgered and worried and worried and figgered and finally somehow or 'nother a thought come to me, so I takes the two-dollar bill 'round to a pawn shop and pawns it for a dollar and a half. Then I takes and sells the pawn ticket to a man for a dollar and a half and that made me have the three dollars I needed. Now the question in my mind is: who loses that dollar?
"Look here, Spruce," I said to him recently, "what's this I see in the paper about your advertising to give a reward of fifteen dollars for that cat of yours?"
"I jes done dat to please my ole ooman," answered Spruce.