Chapter 5: The Penguin
Before he became the Penguin, he was plain old Otis Cleaver.
Well, maybe he wasn't exactly
plain
. No one
ever
called Otis plain.
For you see, Otis was born with a certain deformity.
The left half of his body was white.
The right half of his body was black.
The coloration went down the exact middle of his body. The left side of his nose was white; the right side was black. His left arm and left leg were white; his right arm and right leg were black. The left side of his chest was white, the right side black. It even extended to his genitals. The left half of his penis and testicles was white, while the remainder was black.
Otis's mother, who was white, blamed Otis's father, who was black. He in turned blamed her for Otis's unusual complexion.
Elridge Cleaver was a unionized longshoreman for the Port of Los Angeles. He was paid 400,000 credits a year to watch robots load and unload cargo ships. It was a very lucrative and much sought after job, one Elridge inherited from his late Uncle, who had a lot of influence in the Union and even more with organized crime and the Democratic Party, which was not quite as organized.
Murna Goldbaum, on the other hand, was an Unsocial Worker for the World Government. Her job was to go to assisted living facilities and to see to the emotional needs of the elderly population. Specifically, she was tasked with giving senior citizens awards for having solid bowel movements. The awards came in three varieties--gold, silver, and bronze, depending on the quantity and quality produced, but in the "everyone's a winner" philosophy of the World Government, all were entitled to an award, even if the best they could produce was tiny droplets no bigger than a pea.
Murna was active in social causes, in the
White Lives Don't Matter Alliance
; the
Penis to Ass Coalition
, the
Loving Friends of Laquinta Smallgroup,
as well as the
Lady Cat Friends who Smoke Weed Justice League
. When Murna met Elridge at one of the weekly World Government sponsored
White People Are So Racist
marches, it was love at first sight. He was tall and handsome and full of virtue, and she had a brilliant smile and heavy breasts which looked like overcooked apple dumplings which sagged a bit but were still a joy to the touch. They performed the ritual of reproduction, bonding emotionally and biologically, and then got married. Elridge impregnated Murna on their wedding night, and nine months later Otis slid out of Murna's outrageously untrimmed bush.
Murna had hoped the baby would be born black. To her, being black was so virtuous! She cursed her whiteness and all the white privilege that came with it. To be born white was to wear the skin of an oppressor, an unconscious racist. But neither she nor Elridge were prepared for what she actually gave birth to, a baby who was precisely half white, and half black.
Of course, they had no choice but to love Otis; at least Murna did, Elridge preferred not to be seen in public with his son, who he once referred to as a "freak of nature."
Otis developed a lot of emotional memories at a young age, none of them good. He remembered crying on Murna's lap at a very young age. He remembered overhearing his parents blaming each other's genes for Otis's predicament; he remembered being picked on and ostracized by kids in school, he remembered using makeup to try to make his right side look as white as his left side, he remembered being kicked out of the Black Student's Union in college, but above all he remembered one word, a word which stuck with him his entire life ever since Joey Madelva pointed a crooked finger at him in First Grade and uttered it.
"Penguin".
The kids tagged him with it relentlessly, even through high school. In college they became tactful enough to say it behind his back. And after that, they simply thought it.
Otis had no friends, and certainly never had a chance with girls. White girls were normally attracted to men who were black, or half black. But Otis was the wrong kind of half black; Otis wasn't virtuous, in their eyes. He was a
freak
.
After college, Otis got a job with the World Government as a Junior Diversity Analyst in the Encouraged Resettlement Division. The World Government was very disturbed by the racial, ethnic and religious segregation in the world. 95% of the world's black people were in Africa, and 84% of the followers of Laquinta not on Ramada were concentrated in the Middle East. This was
de facto
evidence of discrimination, and the World Government had allocated funds to relocate populations en masse to Europe and the Americas to encourage desegregation on a continental scale.
It was there that he met Shoshanna Gronstein. Shoshanna had gotten a B.S. in Social Justice from Yale University, and worked in the World Government's prestigious Department of Social Re-Engineering. Shoshanna had a well rounded bosom and an even more well rounded face, perfectly framed by her bushy Jewfro which practically hummed with energy and positivity.
When she saw Otis, Shoshanna didn't see a freak, or an object of scorn or pity; she saw a man, full of virtue. For her entire life, she had been attracted to oppressed people: especially to followers of Laquinta, who suffered from persecution and Laquintaphobia, the highly irrational fear white people had that they would be beaten to death or beheaded by followers of Laquinta, and so on. Shoshanna had fantasized about championing their causes, and confronting her fellow white racists and reeducating them, and receiving fantastic awards for bringing about dramatic social change.
But when she saw poor Otis, she got a Virtuegasm just by looking at him. Otis was an entirely new class of oppressed people, a class of one! Shoshanna's clitoris throbbed with joy and her nipples tingled with excitement as she realized that she could be ten times more virtuous than those who helped minorities, a hundred times more than those who helped Laquintans!.
Otis was puzzled at first by the effort lavished on him by the friendly woman with the wide smile and sexy Jewfro, but he was so lonely that he accepted attention from any quarter, regardless of the intent. And soon enough they were engaged in the ritual of reproduction. As Otis thrusted into Shoshanna and stared into her face, the image of those heavy chipmunk cheeks, the meandering nose, and those thick black eyebrows framed by her Jewfro became imprinted on him as a source of pleasure, just as his half white and half black face did for her.
Soon they were a couple, and marriage was inevitable. Shoshanna brought Otis home to meet her mother Idah and her father Ross. Both had been warned about Otis's special needs, but being told was one thing and seeing was another. Idah looked startled, but gave a kindly smile and invited Otis into her home; but Ross had another reaction entirely.
Over dinner Ross asked Otis a series of probing questions about his complexion which made him uncomfortable. Had he been born like that?
Yes
. Had he seen a doctor for it?
Many.
Was it a treatable condition?
At that point Shoshanna burst out and said, "Dad, you're treating Otis like he has a sickness! This is just the way he is! We're all perfectly wonderful, just the way we are!"
Otis was looking down at the table, not eating his food. He had lost his appetite.
Shoshanna glared at her father.
"Of course," Ross said woodenly.
Somehow the topic of marriage, which was supposed to come up that night, didn't.
Instead, Shoshanna raised the subject with her parents two days later. Her father exploded.
"You're going to marry that freak!" he said.
