Out of Body Experience
The narrator describes his first encounter with actual, genuine, now-you-know-what-it-means-to-be-black cops. The LAPD “dressed to oppress” and the result is a most unusual out-body-experience experience that only metaphor is equipped to deliver:
“I felt like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon — tethered, and grounded to reality by fishing lines looped through my nose and eyeballs. I was a helium distraction until the arrival of Santa Claus.”
Hillside
Quite quickly, the young narrator is thrust from Santa Monica to the Hillside neighborhood of West Los Angeles. Much of the action takes place in the decidedly more “urban” Hillside and thus it is the subject of some of the book’s most illustrative figurative language:
“For a while living in Hillside was like living in the Old West in a thriving goldmining town’s bubble economy.”
Second Love
The narrator confesses that his first love was baseball legenda Stan “the Man” Musial. But it is his second love for which he reserves a metaphor so unexpected as to almost verge on the questionable side of taste. Fortunately, the description goes on to clarify the exact connotation of "fast."
“Eileen Litmus was my second love. She had a vindictive sense of humor, power to left-center, and was faster than winter vacation, three qualities I admired in a third grader.”
Blackness
Growing in Santa Monica, the black kid named Gunnar skateboards, listens to hard rock, and debates with friends over which was the funniest of the Three Stooges. The concept of blackness is significantly altered from that of those who have grown in Hillside:
“Black was an unwanted dog abandoned in the forest who finds its way home by fording flooded rivers and hitchhiking in the beds of pickup trucks and arrives at its destination only to be taken for a car ride to the desert.”
Time to Move On
Almost the last metaphorical image in the book is a complex metaphor that takes as its subject the entirety of the five-hundred-year-long history of the African experience in America. It is a summing up of the story of its black narrator but also of the larger aspect of the black narrative:
“It’s been a lovely five hundred years, but it’s time to go. We’re abandoning this sinking ship America, lightening its load by tossing our histories overboard, jettisoning the present, and drydocking our future. Black America has relinquished its needs in a world where expectations are illusion, has refused to develop ideals and mores in a society that applies principles without principle.”
