Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Mon, 28 Sep 1992 12:30:06 MST
From:         Dan Lester <ALILESTE@IDBSU.IDBSU.EDU>
Subject:      nussa bussa
Comments: To: All fellow wordslers <words-l@uga.cc.uga.edu>

following is transcribed from Voice Literary Supplement, Sept. 1992,
pp.13-14, without permission.....but for scholarly purposes, etc, of
course.   It is called Nussa Bussa, and is by Paul Beatty.
Underlines indicate italics in original.

   Growing up in Los Angeles, I couldn't help noticing that language was
closely tied to skin color, but there were some intra-ethnic tomato-
_tomahtoes_.  Black folks was either "fittin" or "fixin" to go to
Taco Bell.  Surfer white paddies said, "Oh wow" and Valley white paddies
said, "Oh Gaawd."  White English didn't have any of the TV East Coast
ethnic dialects.  We didn't even have Italians.  The only Italian I knew
was Honduran.  Except for Maclovio Perez, the rapid-fire weatherman, the
Mexicans had the most laid-back speech.  Their English was very breathy,
like barroom poetry.  They didn't talk as slow as they do in the movies,
where they come off sounding like the mad scientist chasing Bugs Bunny
through a cloud of ether: "I'm gooooiiiing toooo geeeet you raaabbbbbit."
The four Asian kids I knew talked black.

   Had my mother known that Asian kids didn't talk like her favorite
kung fu star, Jimmy Wang Yu, she wouldn't have turned our living room
into a marial-arts studio.  Speaking karate-school Japanese, she ran
the house with dojo decorum.  Me and my sisters bowed before entering and
exiting the front door, threw salt on the grass before mowing the lawn,
and conducted a bastardized version of the tea ceremony, substituting
Nestle's chocolate milk for oolong.

   When I started writing, I realized that me and my friends had difficulty
processing language.  We felt like foreigners because no one understood
us.  We were a gang of verbal mulattos.  Black kids with black brains
but white mouths and pseudo-Japanese manners, inbred with some cognitively
dissonant Mexicans who didn't speak Spanish and looked crazy at anyone who
thought they did.  Because my house was the color of a lime green Christmas
souffle', I was rarely home.  I spent most of my time at Al and Ronald's or
at the Chacons'.  I ate lots of chorizo and chitlins under constant reminders
to "Stop leaning back in the chair."  Al and Ronald taught me the language
of frustration.  They grew up in a prime-time Partridge Family suburb, then
like the television Jeffersons in reverse, they moved on down.  No more
"Kill the Carrier" football games in their front yard.  Now they played
in alleys.  Running from trashcan to trashcan on the lookout for the
Westside's own Buthelezi Inkatha henchmen, Byron and Rocky.  Neighborhood
terrorists, Byron and Rocky went around playing "Kill the Carrier" whether
you had the football or not.  Biding time until their impending Crip
initiations.

   Despite attending Black Muslim school, Al and Ronald had a hard time
with the praxis side of Black Brotherhood.  Apparently Haki Madhubuti's
lesson plans never covered "How To Deal With Violent Niggas With Lots of
Cousins."  Victims must process the language of victimizers.  You quickly
learn that if you decide to plead with some golf cap-wearing peewee
hoodlums not to cave your chest in, you say, "Stall me out _cuz_."
Because if you cried, "Stall me out _blood_"--that was your ass.  Gangster
etiquette wasn't always learned through physical pedantry.  Sometimes
a Bedford boy was interested in your sister or in a good mood you could
declare a de'tente and be temporarily cool with Gangster So and So.
Enjoying a breather from running from brothers in hair nets.

   The Chacons had a unique yet ineffective way of dealing with the
neighborhood fuckheads.  Ond day this local bully ran up on Jerry Chacon
talking about, "Empty your pockets motherfucker this is a jack."  Jerry
innocently asked, "Who's Jack?"  This query was  followed by a terse
"What motherfucker?"  Pow!

   The Chacons, five talented, eccentrically spiritual Mexican-Americans
who don't speak any Spanish past _cholo_ and "Frijoles, medium Coke," are
products of parents who, in the words of Cheech Marin, "went to junior
college, took Spanish, and got a 'B.'"  They developed a rash tongue that
extrapolated the base phonics and rules of black English  and meshed it with
the staccato flow of jumbled Mexican morphemes.  Creating a shibboleth of
wordplay refined through incessant teasing.  Our childhood games of freeze
tag and kick-the-can were a jabberwock of call-and-response torment.  A
cappella symphonies filled with taunting "Eetoebee," "Jarp," and "nussa
bussa" choruses.

   A Chacon bagged on you from head to toe and you stayed bagged on.
To this day, Charlie Chacon is still called an "Ayatolla beanbag Iranian
Persian Jew albino legs bongo lips five inch brow dandruff eyes."
When you get busted on like that, you fight or keep quiet.  I didn't
fight so I listened to the embarrassing silence of being debased by
O.G.s and the Chacons, and started processing language.


An ethnographic glossary of the 24th Street subculture between Robertson
Blvd. and Shenandoah.

bolla: (n.) An out-of-control tuft of hair.

chibolla eyeball: (n. or adj.) An unexplainable derivative of bolla.

das col blassa: (adj.) cold-blooded.

nussa bussa: (double adv.) Fuck no and kiss my ass.  Often used in
conjunction with a stupid face and some nonsensical onomatopoeia.  e.g.,
Can I ride your bike?  Nussa Bussa.  Aawwrooo.

jarp: (adv.)  Yes.

shitted: (adj.)  Fucked.

shitteddeedarp: (adj.)  Really fucked.  e.g., Byron and Rocky took my
money and threw my new dirt bike off the third level of the Montgomery
Ward parking lot.  Oooh you're shitteddeedarp.





transcribed by dan
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU