The Last Days of Louisiana Red (3 page)

It was a strange day for Chorus too. He had come to this bucolic sleepy town hoping for some action; as soon as he arrived he could tell that the Berkeley projected to the nation comprised only a score or so blocks surrounding the south campus of the University where the students would go on trashing sprees from time to time. It was merely a small town which reminded him of the sketches of university towns in his high-school German textbook. The
Berkeley Gazette
was a more accurate representation of the town than the
Berkeley Barb
. Actually the town had lost much of the excitement of the early days of the 1890s when cattlemen, Asians and free negroes frequented the twenty or so saloons in rip-roaring West Berkeley.

Berkeleyans were proud of their Greek Theatre, designed by John Galen Howard, where Kreisler, Bernhardt and somebody called “Nordica” had once performed. Douglas Turner Ward, an eminent man of the theatre and leader of The Negro Ensemble Co., was surprised at his shabby treatment by the managers of Berkeley's Greek Theatre when he brought Lonnie Elder's
Ceremonies in Dark Old Men
there in 1971. Being a sophisticated New Yorker he didn't realize that the old citizens of Berkeley didn't want any niggers tampering with their theatre. They wanted to keep negroes in the psychological as well as physical “Flats.”

Chorus had failed miserably in the East. He had made what one critic called a “valiant” attempt to restore the Chorus to its rightful role. They shut down his act even though it was receiving rave reviews. A profession—a Royal Profession once subsidized by the great Pharaohs—was now being controlled by Pyramid Rock Toters, whose only interest was the box office.

Of course, there were some roles still open to him, but they were mostly commercial. Plugging things he didn't believe in. Puffing nobodies. Rather than play understudy to eastern charlatans and stagemen who had no presence he had come to Berkeley, seeking his natural diction between reading writing and watching television.

Sometimes he would put on his white tuxedo and saunter over to Harry's or the Toulouse for a drink or two or three or … People snickered at his white tuxedo, a habit he had cultivated in the east. Westerners went about informally and didn't care that much about the theatre. Some of his eastern friends referred to everything west of the Rockies as “boony” for Boondocks.

Berkeley's major streets were named after obscure University Presidents: Durant, LeConte, Gilman, white-bearded men who looked out sternly from blemished, sepia photographs. The majority of the citizens' ages fell between 18 and 29. For someone like Chorus, who was in his middle thirties, the tavern and nightclub audiences looked like the ones on American Bandstand.

But Chorus kept his optimism, even though nobody wanted to buy his scripts.

Many said that he wasn't relevant and was in fact archaic. Chorus was getting ready. He was doing his intellectual dugout work like a mental New York Met, and, like the 1973 New York Mets, he would come from the bottom of the league, enter the World Series and give the A's a run for their money.

He was sparring well. Rope dancing too. Jabbing, ducking and feinting; his legs were still holding up. Man, did he have a roundhouse. So he wasn't surprised when his agent sent him that telegram informing him that there had been two maybe three offers from Recital Halls requesting he sign a contract with them. He was so exuberant after receiving the telegram that he made himself a stiff highball and it was only 10:00
A.M.
This was certainly out of character. He felt like boasting. Why not? He wasn't meek. After all, the Chorus predates Christianity, which removed the dance and life from Greek Drama/-Religion (in early plans for the Greek Amphitheatre there was included a seat for the Priest of Dionysius). He could brag if he wanted, not being one of these simpering emotionally mooching Moochers (“That's o.k. I'll go on a hunger strike. Don't mind me, I'll just lie here in the street; roll a truck over me if you wish”).

He was more like the Egyptian boatman who made a form out of jiving the crocodiles, if I may give a very loose translation: “Get back, M.F. Don't You Know Who I Am: I'll whip your ass, crocodile, if you mess with me, why my brother is the baddest nigger in Memphis. What? What? You bet not put your snozzle up here on my boat, I'll stomp the do-do out of it.” Chorus went out into the streets and told everybody of his comeback from the trauma. The next day he didn't remember anything. Not even the dream that came after 10 highballs:

(White-tuxedoed Chorus sits in the middle of a vaudeville stage, the backdrop of which is reminiscent of those scenes in the old photo shops honeymooners used to pose before, but instead of Niagara Falls we see a backdrop of slanted piano keyboards, musical notes, a zoot-suited trumpet section standing up while the rest of the band is seated.)

“Thought you got rid of me, eh? I know a lot of you lobsters thought when they replaced me with second-rate actors, who didn't know their entrances, that I was through. I know that a lot of you thought I was washed up when they removed my last word from the script. You thought I'd be satisfied with a couple of walk-ons; that I was all over when my programs were cut back there in the early seventies; that this ‘troublesome presence,' as your scenarist called me, had been cut out like a ‘cancerous sore.' A fad. Yes, that's the way you used to describe me, and in language even worse than that. ‘Black Problem.' Well, I'll have you know, Daddy, that things are looking up. If you go to the end of the universe, you'll come up behind yourself, so to speak. The course of history once again proves to be fickle, unpredictable, like one of the moons, thought to be artificial, circling Saturn. Here I am again, advising the King, butting in, singing and dancing my head off. Knocking them over, turning the tables on my critics.

“In the 1960s I was the stand-up comic who didn't have a nightclub. Now I have all the nightclubs I need, and do you know how I did it? (flicks ashes from his cigar, inhales) Do you know how I fell from protagonist to humiliation, hung around for throwaway parts, kissed the lead's ass to stay in business, and now look at me, so powerful that this morning I closed down the actors' lobby.

“What I did was to go back to see where I went wrong. It started with plays like
Antigone
.”

“Antigone. The archaic story treated by 18 prose writers, dramatists, poets and even the musician Felix Mendelssohn. It closely parallels the Egyptian story of Osiris and Isis, so there were probably Egyptian writers who had a hand at it first. The Greeks were in Africa long before the plays were written on Egyptian papyri, and there are references to Africa in the Oedipus plays, as in
Oedipus at Colonus
when Oedipus remarks of his sons Eteocles and Polynices: ‘O true image of the ways of Egypt that they show in their spirit and their life! For there the men sit weaving in the house, but the wives go forth to win the daily bread.' In Alexandria, the Greeks worshipped Osiris.

“Oedipus, Antigone's father, was banished from Thebes because he had committed an awful deed. ‘Get away from me, wretch, you will kill your father and marry your mother,' a hideous hag oracle once told him, according to Robert Craves.

“He gouged out his eyes some say because he wanted to be wise like Teiresias the soothsayer, who informed Oedipus of the taboo he had committed. Others say this is a mutilation which occurred because
Oedipus desired to restore the patrilineal succession to Thebes!

“It could also have been the revenge of the Ethiopian Sphinx who had come to punish Thebes because Laius, Oedipus' father, had kidnapped his homosexual lover Chrysippus, from Ethiopia.

“When Oedipus left Thebes to go to Colonus for the purpose of sacrificing himself to the sea god Poseidon, his sons Eteocles and Polynices agreed to rule Thebes in alternate years, but when it became Polynices' turn to rule, Eteocles refused to yield the throne. Polynices went to Argus for 7 recruits and returned to Thebes, sending a forerunner to warn Eteocles to resign.

“Eteocles refused, and the two, like bucking antlered creatures, met on the battlefield and slew each other. Their uncle, Creon, the new king, decreed that Eteocles be given a hero's funeral while Polynices, in Creon's eyes a traitor, be left to rot, unburied. Antigone, Oedipus' faithful daughter who went into exile with Oedipus until Creon came to Colonus and arrested her and her sister Ismene, violated this order and ritualistically buried her brother, Polynices.

“The stern tough-minded Creon punished her by having her buried alive in Polynices' tomb. She took her lover Haemon, Creon's son, with her to Hades, her lover, her King.

“Antigone comes down through the ages as the epitome of the free spirit against the forces of tyranny. However, some say she went too far. I say she went too far; not only because she opposed a good and just authority, but because she was the beginning of my end. It was in plays like
Antigone
that I, the Chorus, declined until I was cast out, off the scene altogether, but now I'm bouncing back. I say that Antigone got what she deserved.

“I went back and read that play to see where I failed, and do you know what? I figured it out. Antigone was so cunning, so wily, the girl was so beautiful, that we were dumbstruck by her—her strength and her intelligence—and we lost our objectivity. She was able to crowd out my lines, and do you know when I saw that—it was then and there I decided that I deserved to fall and from that day on made up my mind that never again would Antigone crowd me out, take me off the scene and then, sarcastically, remark, ‘Why don't you sit in the audience? Maybe the camera will flash on you from time to time.'”

Wolf was in Santa Barbara when he began to feel a tingle at the nape of his neck which all Workers knew to be a sign. He became worried. He took the next flight out and rushed to the family home in the Berkeley Hills. The house was swarming with police and neighbors. Minnie was being comforted by T Feeler and Max Kasavubu. Nanny was hysterical, screaming and hollering in the back yard; nurses were trying to make sense out of her.

Sister was on the sofa in the other room being given sedation by the family doctor. The police came downstairs. Wolf had been racing around and couldn't find out what was what.

“What's going on?” he asked a Berkeley policeman.

“There's been a murder… Ed Yellings.”

Wolf was shocked.

“According to the Nanny, she heard Ed groaning upstairs. She ran up, and there he was, lying on the floor, bleeding heavily from stab wounds. Said she saw two negro men, a short one and a tall one, racing across the lawn below the window.”

“Did she get a complete description?”

“It all happened too fast. The men maybe thought that Ed was away at the Solid Gumbo Works and used it as an opportunity to rob him. They didn't take any money but rifled his papers.”

“Industrial spies.”

“What?”

“Industrial spies,” Wolf repeated. “We've had a lot of snooping about the place since that cancer cure. Government agencies too. You'd think they'd be glad to have a cancer cure; I don't know how their mind works.”

Wolf wasn't ready for Ed's death. The Workers had had a meeting in which they discussed the possible reprisals for curing cancer, but nothing was done.

Amos Jones, Ed's driver, wanted to give him extra protection, but Ed refused it.

Wolf told the Nanny he still wanted her to stay on, and she thanked him. She said she would pray for Ed's soul so that it wouldn't enter the torment of those who died a violent death. And then she crossed herself. Sweet old soul, Wolf thought. Such childlike commitment.

In order to keep the Gumbo from going under, strong security was needed. Wolf called upon the Board of Directors of the Ancient Co. for instructions. They in turn would dispatch one of their topnotch troubleshooters.

“You won't be coming around for a long time, LaBas.”

“I don't follow you.”

“It's true. You'll see.”

“Well, I haven't known you to be wrong. Explain.”

“I won't go into it completely. You see, there's a man in a small town that thinks it's radical: Berkeley, California.”

“Stop speaking in riddles.”

“It is a small town of the west, not the international experimental social and political laboratory it pretends to be. It's the same town it was a hundred years ago when they drove cattle over its north and south hills. There's a man out there. An inventor. He is on the brink of one of the great discoveries of all time, but he won't live to see it. I don't understand all of it. Our powers are not as keen as they were centuries ago when we were worshipped and consulted by the Golden Kings. I know that in a few hours he'll be dead.”

“Well, I could use a little detective job. Outside of the class at the Ted Cunningham Institute, which will be ending in a few days, I haven't had anything planned for the summer except continuing my investigation on Minnie the emotional and psychic thief.”

“Minnie?”

“Yes, Minnie the Moocher. She's a special type of psychic crook we want to find a cure for, but first we have to get her details on file so that we'll be able to spot her whenever she victimizes someone.”

“What's her horoscope?”

“I'm trying to find out by using the lyrics of a song popularized and co-authored by Cab Calloway. You know. It begins with the lines (sings): ‘Now here's a story 'bout Minnie the Moocher/She was a low-down hoochy coocher
^*
/She messed around wid a bloke named Smokey/She loved him tho' he was a ‘cokey.'

“This is the first clue: a strong, glamorous female with hustling powers whose old man is her inferior, a ‘cokey' who has a drug problem. A classical emotional vamp who conned the King of Sweden into providing her with riches: ‘gold and steel home,' ‘a platinum car with diamond-studded wheels,' a ‘town-house and racing horses,' until the authorities arrested her and her accomplice, for pimping and prostitution. The scandal would have embarrassed the royal family, and so Minnie and Smokey were quietly deported to the United States.”

“I'll be a monkey's uncle,” LaBas' companion said.

LaBas gave his companion a pear and began to pace up and down in front of his cage. He was dressed in his characteristic black woolen overcoat of many years and his glossy black “Old Doctor” shoes; a touch of grey showed here and there on the bare bushy head of hair towering above his million-year-old Olmec negro face. He was the same, except that his 1914 Locomobile had been replaced long ago by an inconspicuous foreign car. He had learned the hard way that it pays to be inconspicuous. A man who brags of his wealth attracts moochers like bait on a wet piece of cardboard attracts slugs.

“Well, they weren't even wanted in the United States, and so they were extradited to New Jersey, where Minnie feigned religion; she was still hard as nails. She seduced an A.M.E. Zion bishop who was won over by her sexual prowess—‘praise the Lord'—turned on by her you-got-what-it-takes, until she was exposed by a supernatural bunko squad. You will notice in one line it reads: ‘They took her where they put the crazies.'”

“What do you need from me, LaBas?”

“A translation of the line, ‘Skid a ma rinky dee, Ho de ho de ho.' In those lines lies the key to Minnie-detection. You see, it has been held that her problems originated from outside of her, suggested in the liberal-social worker lines, ‘just a good gal but they done her wrong.' This means the lines were tampered with. You see, if I can prove that she was no helpless object swept away by forces beyond her control but a dedicated agent of the sphinx's jinx, an acolyte of an ugly cause, if I can interpret her through African Witchcraft, then a lot of people's eyes will be opened and they will be on the lookout for this character posing as a victim of history while all the time she is a cruel jinx with her zombie companion, Smokey. Who do you think gave him the coke and took care of his habit? Before you knew it, his brains were scrambled and his nose blown. That way she had him where she wanted him. She was sent to destroy the patriarchy—notice how her victims are connected with Royalty and the Theocracy.”

“You know too much to be in your young seventies, LaBas. Don't let nobody know you know these things. You know how primitive people hate those who know too much.”

“I don't worry; they say I'm crazy. As long as I'm crazy, they'll see me as harmless and will leave me alone so that I can continue my Work. Our time in this life is so short.”

“Don't worry, LaBas. Your race and mine have been here for a million years or more. Somebody will turn up and continue your Work …” Hamadryas the scorpion-catcher and leopard-pounder began to gaze into the distance. This meant that he was about to receive some new data. The quadruped had a great royal grey mane, a long sad face and red eyes deeply set.

“I just received some more information on your trip. I got a flash of sync when I said somebody else will carry on your Work. This man in California. He was carrying on somebody else's Work. Somebody from New Orleans.”

“I'm beginning to get the picture.”

“Leave the lines you want me to translate.”

LaBas pushed a piece of paper with the lines in question written on it through the bars. Hamadryas held it in his hand.

“What else do you know about this Minnie?”

“She's the worst of tyrants. Like the Black Widow spider that draws its prey, loves it, then drains it. Only she doesn't drain it physically, she drains it emotionally. She deprives her victim of the ability to express itself. The victim becomes a hollow zombie thing, enlisted into her ranks of slaves. She takes the energy of her subjects and lives off of it.”

A slight breeze came up. LaBas pulled his white silk scarf around his neck and turned to go.

“I hope it's not a long time before you return.”

“Hey, Bombo, get back here.”

LaBas' companion turned to see the white zoo attendant in his white slacks and white shirt. The zoo attendant despised the animal, because the animal, for some reason, was one of the Central Park Zoo's main attractions. He didn't understand it—why people from all over the world had come to gaze at this particular baboon. LaBas and others had spent many afternoons at its cage. Some even seemed to be talking to it.

“I'd like to tear him limb from limb, but for now I will say goodbye, LaBas.” Hamadryas turned and shambled off to the corner of the cage.

LaBas walked out of the New York Central Park Zoo and headed towards the subway. He had to go to the Ted Cunningham Institute, a non-profit foundation for special students. He was teaching a course in the Occult Criminology Department, lecturing on that special criminal who leaves no fingerprints, works alone, but you can smell out its spirit. LaBas cracked the toughest of cases.

He got out of the subway station in Brooklyn and before entering the brownstone gazed at the plaque which bore Ted Cunningham's face and his words:

Every Moment Brings a New Day

He had come down today as he had every Thursday to lecture a Business seminar on “Curses,” or Telepathic Malice, as it was being called nowadays. When he entered the outer office, the secretaries rose out of respect for the master. LaBas was still going strong. He left the package of Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong records with the lady receptionist.

The whole operation of T.C. Institute was Booker-T.-Washington spit and polish. I mean, you didn't have students throwing their teachers out of the window or turning the bathroom into a shooting gallery. They had had it out with Louisiana Red: insolence, sloppiness, attitude, sounds from the reptilian brain, dejection and nay-saying had been brought under control.

He entered the classroom where his students were going over the assignments he had given them.

“What's the latest report?” LaBas asked one of the students who was zeroing in on a man they had decided was bad for Business and meant them no good.

“Public support for him has dropped to 25% but like the abomination he is, he has shown remarkable resiliency. Last night he said something incoherent to the Rumanian Ambassador's wife and had to be whisked away by aides.”

“Well, keep working on him. Haunt him day and night, with the cries of those who died on the crossing. Lay one on him from Brazil's ‘Old Black Slave,' toss him and turn him and give his Bethesda doctors the same thing you gave him.”

LaBas thought of how things had changed since his heyday in the twenties. They'd come a long way from pins and needles, not to mention “viruses.” Even the Grossinger circle at Goddard College was beginning to accept the African theory of disease. Now, that was something.

He walked to the front of the class to begin the lecture when the messenger came into the room and handed him the note. He excused himself and hurried from the room. It was a long-distance phone call. When he picked up the hallway phone, he heard the ancient graveled voice spewing out arcane cusswords while giving him the assignment. LaBas had never met Blue Coal, Chairman of the Board, but he had heard a lot about him. This case must have been important to him; seldom did Blue Coal, “The Chairman,” issue orders personally.