The Sellout: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Sometimes a terrible smell known as the Stank, which comes from a nearby oil refinery, descends on Dickens. Two weeks after the border is finished, both the narrator and Hominy are woken up at 4 am by the Stank. Hominy offers the narrator some hash, and the narrator decides to ride the bus to the beach in order to escape the Stank and see Marpessa. A calf wanders in through the open door, also hoping to escape the smell. Hominy tells the narrator that his birthday is next week, and the narrator wonders “what to get the slave who doesn’t even want his freedom.” The narrator asks Hominy to take the calf back out, but Hominy refuses.

The narrator catches the 5:43 am #125 westbound bus, driven by Marpessa. Years ago, Marpessa marred a “has-been gangster rapper” named MC Panache, which makes her assume—in the narrator’s eyes, wrongly—that she and the narrator have broken up. The narrator tries to sit near Marpessa, but after she tells him “Fuck you” he goes to the back of the bus. The narrator reflects on the shame associated with riding the bus in Los Angeles, a city where “walking is akin to begging in the streets.”

The municipal bus system is called the RTD, which is supposed to stand for Rapid Transit District, but to people like the narrator it stands for “Rough Tough and Dangerous.” When the narrator was seven, he wrote a scientific paper about whose personal space was invaded the most quickly on the bus, concluding that the answer was women. Black men were the least likely to have anyone sit next to them. The narrator watches a newcomer to LA, thinking about all the people who move to the city “aspiring to be white.”

A passenger who keeps pressing the stop button calls Marpessa a “fat fucking cow,” which the narrator knows she will not tolerate. However, he does not see what happens because he falls asleep until the last stop. Getting up, he asks Marpessa if she misses him, and she replies that she misses his plums. The narrator remembers when they “rekindled [their] childhood friendship on the bus” when he was 17 and Marpessa 21. They caught each other up on their lives over the two-hour bus route. Eventually, Marpessa agreed to letting the narrator take her to his high school prom. He was in a graduating class of one, making him and Marpessa the only attendees.

Early the next morning, the narrator had his first kiss in the back of a pick-up truck his father was driving. His father kept turning around and signing “fuck her already” with his hands. While they were dating, Marpessa and the narrator declared books, authors, artists, and silent movies “theirs.” They especially loved Kafka. Back in the present, Marpessa opens the bus doors and asks after Hominy. The narrator tells her that he has an idea that he needs her help with. Then he sees that she has what looks like a pregnant belly and asks if she is pregnant, to which she replies: “Bonbon, don’t play yourself.”

The narrator is thrilled that Marpessa has called him by his childhood nickname. She apologizes for treating him rudely before, blaming it on the stress of her job. Years before, Marpessa had a baby, whom she gave the middle name Bonbon. When the narrator asks about Hominy’s birthday present, Marpessa tells him to “get the fuck off the bus.” The narrator boasts that it was he who painted the line around Dickens. He declares that he’s “bringing the city back. Bringing you back, too!” Marpessa wishes him luck and drives away. The narrator lights his blunt and a nearby white boy asks where he got it. He replies: “I know some Dutch coffee shop owners.”