The Sellout

To bring back Dickens, Me uses white spray paint and a line-marking machine, and teens and homeless people keep the lines visible. He uses the Thomas Guide to check the accuracy of his borders. Sometimes, people add to Me’s lines with their lines, blood, graffiti, or a rainbow. The police assist Me, and an officer gives him a missing flier to put up for Dickens. After six weeks, Me finishes the borders.

Due to the sulfur and excrement from the Wilmington oil refineries and the Long Beach sewage plant, Dickens sometimes has a distinct smell, one Me refers to as “the Stank.” Due to “the Stank,” Me can’t sleep, and Hominy, noticing the lights on, enters his house in a tuxedo and tells Me his birthday is next week.

Me takes the bus to go surfing. The bus driver is Marpessa Delissa Dawson. She’s married to the former rapper and current TV cop MC Panache. They have four children and a restraining order against Me for following the kids and insulting their dad’s knowledge of poetry. Me muses on the unwritten rules of bus decorum—no one sits next to a Black man unless they must.

Someone screams at Marpessa to stop the bus, and Marpessa resolves the problem without Me noticing. Marpessa is a competent bus driver—though she’s wearing an ugly gray uniform and is 30 pounds heavier than she was when she and Me dated, Me remains attracted to her. She doesn’t miss him, but she misses his fruit.

Me remembers going to prom with Marpessa. As Me was the only graduating student, it was just him, Marpessa, and his dad, with his dad pressuring him to have sex with her. He also remembers how they would take turns reading the work of the enigmatic 20th-century Czech author Franz Kafka. Me asks Marpessa if she remembers telling him that he reminded her of Kafka, and Marpessa reminds Me that people tried to stop Kafka from burning his work, but Marpessa offered to help Me burn his lackluster poetry.

Marpessa calls Me by his nickname, Bonbon—the word he had to spell when his father forced him to enter the Dickens spelling bee when he was 11. Me reflects on how Marpessa ended up in a comparatively menial job despite her exceptional intelligence. She didn’t want to attend college to work in a corporate setting where Black women, in her view, can never rise beyond the middle ranks. She was in an abusive relationship and became pregnant. Her child—to whom she gave the middle name Bonbon—forced her to find a stable job, and she found that driving takes her mind off her troubles.

Hominy shares the same birthday as Rodney King, whose brutal beating at the hands of a group of police officers touched off the 1991 Los Angeles uprising, and people in Dickens used to mark Hominy’s birthday as a community. People rang his doorbell and threw food at his face. Overjoyed, Hominy cleaned his face, changed his clothes, and waited for the next well-wishers.

This year for Hominy’s birthday, Me convinces Marpessa to convert the city bus into a rolling party puts a “PRIORITY SEATING FOR SENIORS, DISABLED, AND WHITES” (128) on Marpessa’s bus. A man claims to be offended, which prompts Me to reflect on what he views as the meaningless of that word—as it describes no discernible emotion. Marpessa and Me debate the motives for segregating the bus, and Me wonders whether Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus because the man was gassy or asked her annoying questions—perhaps racism had nothing to do with it.

A white woman with strawberry-blond hair, Laura Jane, is on the bus, and she makes Hominy scream in fear. As the party gets going, Marpessa kicks off the strangers but allows Laura Jane to stay, and she dances with Hominy. She’s a struggling actress and part-time sex worker hired to be a part of Hominy’s birthday. Indirectly, people tell her she looks too Jewish for acting parts, and Laura Jane wishes she were Black—Black people get all the jobs, she says. Marpessa doesn’t think Black people get all the jobs, but if they do, it’s because they spend too much money on what they see on TV. Marpessa explains the hidden messages behind a luxury car commercial featuring a Black man, and Laura Jane tells her the problem isn’t race but class.

Marpessa drives the bus to the Pacific Coast, and Hominy asks Me when Dickens will get borders and sister cities. He also wants to know when they’ll get the racist Our Gang films from Foy. Me tells Hominy that he hopes it will happen soon.

As Laura Jane swims naked in the water, Me becomes aroused and wakes up Marpessa, who’s sleeping in his lap. Me claims he isn’t sexually attracted to white women, and he tells Marpessa he fell in love with her when she criticized a memoir by a biracial author, The Color of Burnt Toast, during his dad’s book club and she said Black literature “sucked.” Marpessa said she fell in love with Me when they went out to eat, and he didn’t insist on facing the door as if he was so dangerous that someone might try to attack him at any moment.

Me tries to find sister cities for Dickens through Susan Silverman, who works for City Match Consultant. Me’s first three choices: Juarez (a Mexican border city marked by violence), Chernobyl (an abandoned city in Ukraine contaminated by radioactive materials due to a mishap at a nuclear power station), and Kinshasa (the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) decline his invitation. Embarrassed, Me finds other options, including Thebes (not an actual city but the gigantic movie set for Cecil B. Demille’s 1923 silent film The Ten Commandments) and Dollersheim (the Austrian town where Adolf Hitler’s grandfather was born). In the end, The Lost City of White Male Privilege—a place that may or may not exist—becomes Dickens’s sister city.