Tales of the Out & the Gone (14 page)

To get it out, the water to drink requires we be at that place to dip it.

The rhythm is the dialectic that creates description. Everything is a story. Rhythm is the most basic, the shortest of all stories, the Be & At.

To separate these together, looking, is the open story. The tale. Time & place. Together as flow is the rhythm, the endless story.

So the story wants to make sense. The poetry is what sense is made out of.

Like Pres sd. His solos, the greatest of the players, did all tell a story. They were a story. Pres was the
Djali
, and
Djeli Ya,
Djeli Ya, Djeli Ya!

Poetry
wants
, short story wants something. Something is what poetry is. Short story gives it a name.

June 5,
1994
Rome to NYC (post-Feroni)

THE NEW RECREATION PROGRAM

Joe stopped me on Broad Street. He reminded me we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Laughter was the punch line to all the stories, like it was a moral judgment.

But one wasn’t, and it had a tale attached to it—a death ad.

Feeling, we know, is death’s fundamental opposition. Joe looked like he was some kind of salesman. He had a vest w/rolled-up points. The large triangles, a J.C. Penney tattersall, thin and dingy.

“Listen to this, man. I saw a car turning the corner last week. My mother was driving. I mean, she was wheeling, too. Speeding around the corner, laughing to beat the band. I called out to her, and at first she didn’t see me. She zoomed off. I mean,
zoomed
, dude, like fast as hell.”

Joe laughed again. He was patting me on the shoulder. It was genuinely funny, too.

“But yr mother …” I heard myself say, trying to edge in with some inquiry.

“You knew she was dead, right?”

“Dead? No. Oh, man. I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.” I don’t know what I was thinking or about to say, except I didn’t think his mother would be whizzing through town laughing. “Dead?”

“Yeh, she died a couple of months ago. The middle of the summer.”

“What?” I didn’t want to crack the thing open, like ask some reality, you know. Not to be unfeeling, I guess.

“Look at you, man. You just heard me.” His laughing was thinner now. Like I had missed the punch line.

“But what you mean? I’m sorry, man. I didn’t hear that about your mother. But you … saw her?”

He had more in this. It was like chuckling. But appreciative, you know.

“Yeh, now you get to that! And no, I ain’t crazy. So don’t fix your face to look at me like I am!”

“Hey, Joe … What you saying, man? I just want to hear it.”

He was a big arc of teeth, tongue, and wet amusement.

“Yeh, I buried her.” He took a piece of newspaper from the address book he fished out of his pocket. “See?”

Reading his mother’s obituary, I knew, was like a chord, a drumroll for the cruncher. But it
was
something interesting. I’d been thinking about domestic problems, struggles at the job, you know, trying to get priorities focused. Walking downtown to confirm I could still feel anonymous and in motion. Breathing in fall and looking at the faces and colors, measuring all the steps and turns that pressed me, remembering task and ideal.

“Well, what about it?”

“You got me, man. What’s the story?”

Now Joe put his arms out, as if steadying me. It was emphasis for the punch line, I thought. “Yeh, I buried her. People prayed and sang. Then there she was.”

“Really? Come on, man. It was somebody who looked like her.”

“Hey, man. You telling me I don’t know my own mother?”

“Yeh, yeh. But you told me she died. You had a funeral …”

“Yeh, that’s true.”

“I don’t believe in no ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” He took a dramatic step back. “Hey, man. My mother wouldn’t be no ghost. That was her!”

“Yeh, really …”

“But dig this.” He stuck his head up and forward toward me now. The smile had been replaced with a TV monitor. “She zoomed right back around the corner, stopped, and spoke to me. She waved at me. She shouted at me.” I looked at him and shook my head like I believed him, but reserved the right. “Yeh, dig this. She said she was on the way to cuss you out for not showing up at the funeral. Not even the wake.”

“I didn’t know. Hey, man … You know if I knew, I woulda been there.”

“She said she was going to your house.” He was laughing. “You didn’t see her, did you?”

Now I started laughing.

And Joe, at this point, turned abruptly, waving as he continued down the street.

“If you see her, call me. Alright?”

I had stopped laughing. I nodded yes as he kept walking. I had got to the corner, Broad and Market, looking over my shoulder every once and again to watch Joe, but he had crossed the street and skipped up the block.

What is it that drives people to this kind of whack-out, I thought. Maybe he was just putting me on, but it didn’t seem like it.

But then, as I waited for the light to change, I saw a maroon Buick pushing like hell up Market Street. Yeh, it was Joe’s mother. And she saw me. She was waving, more like shaking her finger at me. Like at some naughty child. But what was wild was that
my
mother was riding with her in the front seat. She was peeking around Joe’s mother, and the whole thing seemed to crack her up, too.

I walked out into the street, but they didn’t stop. I started calling as they drove away. I had to dance to keep from getting bashed by cars.

I’m sure it was his mother. No shit. For real. It looked exactly like his mother. And I’m sure it was mine as well. I know what my own mother looks like. And we buried her three years ago.

November 1988

MCHAWI

Roger Oz was a slender, dark, toothy-mouthed happy dude. When we was in grammar school together, he was always walking by you, coolin’ somewhere. “Hey,” was all he said. And we, in turn, “Hey’d” him back.

He was always moving forward or back off a laugh. Most shit, it seemed, cracked R.O. out. He never made sure you knew what tickled him. It didn’t really matter. When he cracked, we felt funny was happening and cracked up too.

One time, when we did slow to half-hang on the way to what he was heading for, he said he’d invent some shit that would get people happy and make them stay happy as long as they was in the neighborhood.

The only difference when I saw him today is that he said he
had
invented it. But it wasn’t happy his invention would get you, but high. “High as a Georgia Pine.”

I had heard stories about Roger stumbling all over the Midwest. His high-getting ways were pumped periodically across our alumni vine, graping him very high over the years. Fragmented by time, enhancing the tone of the image into antique warmth. As if, looking back, everything was part of our education to some subjective angelhood.

But this afternoon, arriving on a cloud of laughing-story, the real punch line from that aging joke—like it was just three seconds later. He turned to hip us to his zigzag, past us across the playground.

“But dope got here first, Rog. You invented your shit too late.”

He dug that when he laughed like this—full out—it woke up in you, wanting to make you dance. Sort of touching you, like his laugh had hands that could reach out and shake you.

“Dope?” he spun around and bent in gales of syncopation. “Naw, man—I’m into nigger Martians and invisible houses. But dope did make me perfect my invention.”

He had a shopping bag and reached into it suddenly, like punctuation for the howl he shredded through his teeth.

It was a pair of sneakers. Black with a red button, like Air Jordans. He held them out for me to check, I guess. I reached tentatively and barely touched the soft metallic kicks. He plopped into a chair, pulling his shoes off his feet, shoving them into the sneakers.

“What’s this, man?” I didn’t know Rog had left us. “Some sneakers?”

He stood very suddenly, bent, pushed both buttons, and rose steadily and smoothly off the floor. Doing the lone part of “The Boston Monkey,” like he did back when we walked the Hill late nights, looking for the party. Then he would leave in the middle. Only a couple times when he got hooked up with some girl would he stay longer, and then he’d get in a hassle taking her out there with no car and evil intentions.

So he’s sailing and floating slowly, about four then six feet off the floor, idling around the room. He started singing “Moody’s Mood” and gyrated with it, easing back and forth across the room, while my open mouth made the place acoustically innovative.

“Hey, man!” he was singing—signifying, really. “Hey, man!” laughing like he could fall. “Hey, man!”

“What the fuck?” It was really out. We know we’re ready for anything. But anything got more going for it than our half-used brains.

“Hey! What the fuck? You … you invented that? What the fuck is it, some kind of air column? How does it do that?”

“I got a hundred of them already!” He was dancing a twist, waving and sailing, cackling like an advertising stunt.

“Hey, man!” I was really shot out—Roger in these wild, crazy-ass flying Reeboks.

He spun around, and at the back were some tiny whirling propellers glowing jade green. Spinning like mechanical bird equipment.

“Hey, man! How the hell did you do that?” I didn’t know what else to say. Like when the invader enthralled us with a cigarette lighter, he flicked on/off with his thumb to let us know our rulers’ omnipotence.

“Getting people high,” he whirled. “Hey, man! These things don’t even use no fuel. No
fuel!”

“What? Jeezus!”

“Naw. I invented them, so I made them the way I wanted. They run on thought waves.”

“What?”

“Yeh, yeh! You just focus on rising up, and
zip
, you rise. You focus on splitting—you split!”

He drifted close to me.

“So what you gonna do with it?” I was getting frantic in a breathless way.

“You call Jesse Jackson over here. And Minister Farrakhan. I know you know them guys.”

“What?”

“Yeh, I want the top black leaders to dig this shit.” He spaced the words like a hipster checking Monk.

“Oh, man! Yeh.” (Yeh, I thought.) “It would be out to lunch.” (Oh, wow!) “Yeh, OK. OK.” And I called them.

September 14, 1990

Author’s Note

The shoes turned problem quick. 1st everybody who bought em cdnt make em work. Though when those who cd got those same shoes, they wd fly right away.

Then people who sd they was going one place & thought about another cdnt steer them & often cracked up. There were even fatalities.

Rog was even sued by the Civil Rights Commission for reverse discrimination & lost.

But the dirtiest tragedy of all was when the Federal Aviation Administration & Lockheed hired & conspired to frame the brother & got him locked up in Atlanta for life.

1990–91

THE REJECTED BUPPIE

History & Science are outlawed

persons guilty of possession

of these

are brought before

a council

of cannibals

verdicts

of red

       
Slobber

L. moved out to Elklock, a suburb of Chocolate City, an all-white upper-middle-class neighborhood close to the big city, encircled and all but hidden by giant oaks. Halfway up a mountain. But then I saw him a few days ago, in White Castle. He looked a hundred years old and fixed all who passed him in a maniac stare that seemed almost electric, yet dull, blank.

As I approached him, he turned suddenly. “Amiri … Yeh, I’m back and I don’t look good. I know.”

He was sad and tired, but he pierced me with this magnetic knife his eyes pushed. He put out his hand to shake, and at the same time took a frayed clipping out of his pocket and shoved it at me.

“See?”

The clipping was from the
Elklock Call
. It showed L. on the front page. His mouth was open and crude fangs were drawn in his mouth, a tail curled over his shoulder. He seemed to have on a red and black plastic space suit. A bloody hatchet hung from his hand casually. The picture’s caption read,
Fiend at Large!

I didn’t know whether to laugh or back up. But it was funny. L. was not a fiend the last time I saw him. And he looked even less fiendlike now, sheepishly peeping at the newspaper in my hand.

“Fiend?”

“Yeh. They say I used spells to remain black in spite of their kindness. They say I was observed dancing a black ritual, trying to evoke the evil James Brown spirit. And that I conspired with the forces of darkness to remain emotional.

“They say I chanted madness and was transformed into a huge black genital of flame. And that I terrorized the citizens by appearing just anywhere suddenly, reeking of nigger spy rhythm. That I had tried to preach the evil cynicism of history and science. That I acted lewdly and illegally in doing this, and exhibited all the characteristics of a serial coon resister. That I chewed the heads off white fetish symbols and spat blood like a judge in a black pointed hat and mask. That I hated what they loved and loved what they hated.”

“What?” I didn’t think it was a joke. Just stretched out past clock or calendar. “Is this real? It’s some nut shit?”

“No. They formed a lynch mob. It was legal. The sheriff headed it. He had a writ, a subpoena, a machine gun, a rope. A head full of drooping tissue, wet with spider shit.”

“What? What shit is this? What happened, really?”

“They ran me out of my new house. They set the gingerbread on fire. They tore up the treaties that made us tolerated vomit.

“A little ol’ lady shit in the middle of the floor in intriguing patterns. Some of the mob took pictures and scooped up the shit, sucking their fingers as they destroyed the house. They arrived in garbage cans with wheels made of Indian skulls.”

The brother was running it like some kind of priest or preacher, like destroyed history could erupt as a slanted colored structure, flowing hot beneath an arctic veil. Experience sounds deadly.

“But it’s not the mob. Crazy white people rushing into your house—I could accept all that. Like a statue given to someone as a reward.”