With Friends Like This

The ending of White Boy Shuffle was strange, very strange.  The saddest part for me was Chapter 12 when Scoby goes over the edge and kills himself.  While reading those five or so pages where we see Scoby go from "bizarre" (203) behavior to killing himself, I couldn't help but yell at Gunnar in my head.  What was he doing when his best friend was all but telling him flat out that he wanted to kill himself?  Scoby asks him, "To kill yourself you don't need a permit or anything like that, do you?" (204) then leaves his cassette player on the beach with Sarah Vaughan still playing.  Every reader at this point has to know that Scoby is going to jump off the law school building, and Gunnar certainly has to know, but instead of going to stop his friend, he drinks beer, listens to jazz, and writes a poem on the train ride home.

At first I didn't blame Gunnar, I figured he was probably in denial that Scoby would even consider killing himself.  But now that I think about it, my theory is that Gunnar wanted Scoby to commit suicide.  He makes the statement that, "I ain't ready to die for anything, so I guess I'm just not fit to live.  In other words, I'm just ready to die.  I'm just ready to die" (200), but after saying that, he's receives huge cheers calling for him to become the leader.  Later, when he returns to Hillside, he is the unofficial leader of Hillside (with Physco Loco's help) and the budding leader of angry people everywhere.  He knows, while he is still in Boston, that he can't kill himself, he means to much to too many people.  Then the only way for his suicide pact to not look totally hypocritical is for him to lose someone close to him, and Scoby is perfect for that role.  People know about Scoby, the perfect basketball player, and they know that he and Gunnar have been best friends for years, so for Gunnar to lose someone so close to him to suicide shows that he's all in, saying these things from a leadership position isn't a game to him, he means every word because it's real to him.  Though in fact, he doesn't take being a leader so seriously, his public actions (like cutting off his finger) keep up his serious leader persona, and make Scoby's death seem all the more convenient.

Rooting for Bangers

In almost every other book I've read I've known who to root against, or at least not to really pull for.  In a lot of these books I find myself rooting against gang members, as in these books they normally terrorize the main characters or kill innocent people.  But in White Boy Shuffle that's who Gunnar is turning into, and certainly who Psycho Loco is.  He is introduced to us as the leader of the Gun Totin' Hooligans, and as being, "home on parole for killing a paramedic who refused to give his piranha Esta Lleno mouth-to-mouth resuscitation" (Beatty 84).  Later we hear that a big part of Gunnar's favors to Psycho Loco consists of "My backyard became a burial ground for missing evidence; warm guns and blood-rusted knives" (Beatty 97).  In real life Psycho Loco, or Gunnar, is not the kind of random stranger I would walk up to and start talking to on the street.

Even with their less than legal and nice behavior at some points, I can't help but root for them.  When they went to attack the rival gang (who didn't do anything wrong this time) I was rooting for No M.O's balloons to find their mark, and when one of the Ghost Town guys shoots at them with a shotgun I feared one of them would be hit.  I laughed when they were rolling through a nice neighborhood smashing cars indiscriminately.  Maybe the reason I like these characters so much is because of how outrageous some of their actions are, like killing a paramedic for not reviving a fish, or maybe it's because of how human they are.  When Physco Loco is in Gunnar's bathroom crying hysterically I saw a side of him I haven't ever seen before, normally the calm and calculated leader, his actions seem more like the Gunnar we saw fresh out of the car from Santa Monica.  So far it seems to me that Paul Beatty does such a successful job showing people like us who live in a largely protected small town (compared to LA) what it was like to grow up an African-American male in the inner city in large part due to this humor and compassion that he brings out in seemingly hardened main characters.