Tales of the Out & the Gone Page 13

  Pirates was not minerals, you found out (later), but they wanted to be. Brains was not edible (but they was) and spendable. So we changed the laws and slavery was actually a religion. Didn’t your father dig it first and set himself up as invisible except for De Toad (Dutch for “murder victim”)? Jesus! Yeh, him. With blond hair, and the deity Schwarzenegger, after you lost your warmth and came back looking like you had lost your skin to your limping kin.

  Dude lost in a forest as a baby with a twin named Flawed Operator. Backwards, he wasn’t no baby either. With Wolf Mama, the white blues singer. Janis, you dig? When it was us, she could see out both sides of the world, the past and the future. Now she’s dead to confirm a lie, and a Dutch banker married her and sent her OD’d to paradise, which is an arrestable offense. Surround it. Don’t let it sweeten the world. Don’t let them be happy. Take the p out and give them a God that makes noise and flies, a woman that lives in Halloween with Homo Locus Subsidere, the bent-over junior Tarzan who bathes in toilets so he still think he bad. That mean bath. Remember Isabella, the transvestite Edgar Allan Poe of Middle America? Still pretending. That’s why they get killed when now comes.

  Stop getting High. This is what the initials told you. A message. The calendar’s genius. Changed it. Julius and Augustus get in it, so with Paul that’s 13, which is really unlucky. That mean dark, not like us, but like they mind which says when he stuck Cane in his eyes, it was to improve the Armed Forces. Especially the semen, which was dry since he left the best of it in his mama, then denied you was his one-drop overseas sun. Called you Moon, the Bob Marley of Ireland. That’s where that mystery shit came in. Stonehenge. And the nigger nodding on the corner where you left him when you went to get fire, and where you dropped, everybody turned into new. Could sing like you. And dance. And was gone so long. Got so high, you forgot the you of I. And the time grew into a prison, the destination into a villain you looking for, and come was embarrassing if it was mentioned; go was half a vulgar job description.

  I know the treble clef. From Thought, them Egyptians, your man who went further east. Your man. All them guys and dolls, I read about them niggers. Got outta here. When the band broke up and your arrival turned to stone and you couldn’t understand yourself and started arguing with your own eyes. Like you could see what never will exist.

  I remember your father told you your mother got here first. And you went with this karate muh-fuh. The blue was cool. The idea that there could be light, you couldn’t dig. That was hard, since when we went up in the skyscraper and shit on the government, they thought they could turn to butter by circling our triple-hip outness, howling like they deserved to eat us.

  But the Negro was run out of India. I saw a picture of him in the papers, blue. He went for it and made the lie a game, and the agony of the waiting room a country where money talked in consonants. A job. Remember when you was asking questions about that? Jesus! Come out the john, tricked by the Times. His accountant killed himself. His johnson betrayed him and told stories about his life that neglected to say he was impotent with fear. He was the 1st one at the tomb after the murder. Claimed the nigger had come back and told him that God wanted him at the Audubon, wanted him murdered to prove he could be the weatherman.

  Got a job as a mystic in a candy factory, a private dick, hooked up with the scary quiet of delusion, a rock star, and made the big time before they hung him, ancient Mussolini style. Father Christmas was St. Nicholas of the normal. Like a white lie, which is like a circle around knowing. “Contain it,” speaks the Yellow Submarine, which is where your man went before they exposed him and put him on a cross to invent television and candy.

  Stay out the mountains. That was a dumb statement. After the world broke up, there was a middle made of water. And your singing got large and you wanted to get in something and get away from your responsibilities as dead man—you was the Johnny Ray of being digested. You was Ahab later as an autobiography of your photograph, but disguised as Trane, high as the 1st father tripping out at the prison picnic.

  Tender. The runner. The money. The soft of yourself before you was tricked. The pretender was your man, the goat lady, the ram of snot. Stay out the mountains. Here they come. Your boy was saying you a mulatto. Jacub, I knew him in his later years before he got to Chicago, when he was still building the mother ship, but he was so high it come out the father ship and could only fly to Rome. Your mama wasn’t in it. He couldn’t get no leg. That’s why he called the sisters “nun.” He wanted to be Elvis Presley once his man told him he could go north and start a newspaper for the little people. His gig had run out in other as jackleg—was this you or him? Oh, I see. When you took up singing, and he was copping your stuff as a shadow of the coming, which was cold when it went all the way out the way. The way they wanted out was north, not south.

  That frown should have told you the city was not the town. They were in the future, like Dis, like Capital, like Hades when it was Havies. It’s heavy. It’s still Havies. Not you swimming with the woman. You the havie-not, the heavy knot on your past. The gas from your non-answerable prayer. An invisible invoice. You will not get paid.

  Father Sex. You created Europeans from chains. You was Jacub before Hollywood. You created Hollywood because you didn’t want to talk. You made the woman feline so you could teach philosophy while you was asleep.

  So you created yourself as the answer to what you shouldn’t have asked. It was perfect. Each drop of shit has something to say. Pray you ain’t being talked about by what you create as waste. Haste, like we say, but tie up your camel and quit playing jazz. Use a rubber.

  You ain’t a pretender but sometimes I wonder why you pretend. You ain’t the only mother that went, but you is the only father they sent. Your destiny has become an inverted design. Your future is smaller than Babel. So you be quiet and eat the questions as answers to your religion.

  They killed the pretenders, I’m telling you. The animals who thought the world was endless feces. The runs. The races. Told you death was real, an advertisement for insect mercy-killing. Meditate while you head for the closet. Blue glass like your changed flick when they ran you out of contemplation with straight hair, the 1st cowboy.

  Who could forget your lies about who was Mr. Hyde as you sped to that position as green thumb of the specific? I know you invented place so you could rest. That sign, the wave, as a picture of stopping. That tricked a lot of people. What about clef for the split in the stone? The G for the heaven, the top of your head where you thought light was a person, an owned creation necessary to go to your body, which you thought could be white stone.

  Caste the first stone. Remember that? Dizzy with travel. Your songs stain your skin like the future candle of No. You censored us by leaving. Heard you was not the shepherd but the cow. You was not a woman but a number 3 on the hit parade, a ghost, which meant you wanted people to remember you when.

  That’s your brother, Sulumoor, whose mouth was always full of the wolf’s tittie, whose milk ran through his veins, when Ali Baba was the future of his own past, where his skin had become trigonometry, and exile where he lived. A small piece of reality outside reality. So he was not the King of Is, and he couldn’t take it. He had to get a job as a martial arts teacher and dreamt Ahab up to bolster the knock-out business. Looking at everybody crazy-eyed, called himself the night, love music, funk, storyteller. They called him Nunile and he left the sun home, but still he wanted to be known as Shine. Kicking people in the head for their own good. And when the writer showed, the end of the flow. Where the rain stopped and the bottom was the top and the top was the bottom and they were both opposite and the same and he was not normal—he had never been. His ease was now a thing to be described as grinning. He could be fertilizer for money.

  You could be fertilizer for money. And you didn’t understand. I told you that lame meant you no good and you left anyway, after you had kicked this Oriental in the face, talked about race so you could cop and not stop. You was sick, you know, like you
found yourself, and you wouldn’t correct yourself. You wouldn’t read the proof of what was rite and write. And here the symbol magicians came and got your secrets as you left to go up in the mountains and become half-crazy.

  Said you never was yourself, but you was. You wasn’t your mother’s son but her lover. Or was that you? No, you had changed, come out the mountains with a four-legged body and Abbey Lincoln’s mind. But the rest of you was north and south and east and west, going to where they came from. Ignorant, they had been there as themselves before they became the self they didn’t even know.

  The fetish and the party, the maker and the doo-doo. You was talking about money and the goat you fucked. And here you come as your half-brother. Where was the sister, I asked. It wasn’t just I, but I & I, but you was only half of you. And if you flew, you would a donut be. And when you copped, the middle dropped out of the world. You went—or was that the Arab?—the blessing of good, which is natural. Like your house high among the leaves, and your laughter, your face invisible to the animals. They was the ones who started that Mr. Hyde shit, so they could say they was doctors. They was jackals and looked up at your laughing ass, and sucked the bone of your solid waste and imitated your laughter and got on the hit parade and turned love into sex and revelation into a club, a balloon over a cartoon’s head.

  They learned the gibberish of your drunkenness and became the wizards, the old beings you left dead and bleached by not standing under the sun. The offed, the un-on. Laugh. They offered you a job as Othello, the distant greeting. A cry we thought was the fart of what does not exist. But you could get paid. The father of feeling? But that became religion. The entrance of the zoo became money. And charge was not the teaching of energy, but teeth.

  You laughed so long your vision of prayer was walking away calling you dumb, because your droppings fertilized their resistance to being with you. They wanted to know why you wouldn’t let them eat you, and you wouldn’t tell them— couldn’t tell them—because you was high, and began to lie that you was the closest thing to what you didn’t understand, and started to say you was in charge, as well as out charge.

  You wouldn’t eat meat because it made you bad company, which was OK, but you couldn’t hang with everybody because you made them mad by being where they couldn’t see you, up in a tree laughing. And the doo-doo you dropped they copped and ate, and became warlike with starvation since you left their world and made them a church of getting and having, a heaven of menus, a fixed paradise where your self is the loser and the bank where they come out when they left. Your boy Remus was with them—oh, that’s you, the werewolf. I dig. Where you is a delicacy. Brain food. And the mind is under the ground, where they left you. The south, where darkies laugh and beat on wood. And confuse happiness with morality.

  And how and when did the pretenders get wasted? And who, be specific, was they? If you tend, you the on-maker (pardon me, officer), then you are the ever and the 1 added to 3—a 2 beat, New Orleans sound.

  You hard to get along with because you know you too well and don’t understand your self. But I heard your music. I see you laughing like you was still in a tree. I seen you dancing one night. Your body, somebody said, was made of dark metal.

  You are the animal stories, the descendant of the answer. Yeh, it is a trip, a question. Your mother is what is relevant, on forever, and where you go, Daddy-O, is where anything will be when it gets, changes my you into your me, or before it splits again. The boat rocking in rhythm near the dock, the blue waves like yourself upstairs, hiding inside your name.

  I would have stopped us from killing the pretenders. But animals have no use for boats (except them ants who was trying to eat Charlton Heston, and that shit is understandable). But I was doing something else. And before I could say stop, they was gone. And the voice of me that would have saved them was gone before it even got here.

  July 1996

  Trancespoken by A.B. from the tongue of the X-rated “Bible”

  Brick City, New Ark

  DREAM COMICS

  He was sitting on the porch scribbling on an envelope.

  “What’s happening, captain?”

  “You mean, why am I sitting here scribbling and grinning?”

  “Yeh, you ready to give out answers this early in the a.m.?”

  “Yeh, listen to this!”

  I put one foot on the bottom step of the little orange wooden porch. There were only three steps. The house: an old, wooden, orange, whipped-looking one-family house. Well, not quite a one-family house—maybe a half-family house. My man was grinning even wilder now.

  “Hey, what’s with you? You saw the one-armed man who killed Richard Kemble’s wife on TV singing Sam & Dave’s greatest hits?”

  “Yeh, wasn’t that a trip? I mean, he can walk around without getting arrested, and even run for public office.”

  “So that’s why you smiling?”

  “No, funnier than that. Just before I went to sleep I came to understand that Tarzan and Schwarzenegger got the same meaning.”

  “What?”

  “Yeh, they both mean black-black. Like black-squared.” This cracked him up. “Yeh, like double-black. Super black. Dig it … Tar, from Ptah, the 1st ancestor, which means black. And Zan, from Zanj, also meaning black.”

  “Huh?”

  “And Schwarz, which also means black. And I know you know what Negger means, however they want to mess around with it. Yeh, Negger. Us in the funny papers. See, black-black, double-black, super black, black to the second power.” He cracked up again.

  It broke me up too. “Yeh, wow—”

  “Hey, did you know the word wow is an ancient black war cry? It went all the way into the British Isles—Ireland, Scotland, Wales. There was Bloods up there too. Man, these people always … But that black-black business. You see they need a white Negro, like Norman Mailer said. Remember that, Mailer’s hype back in the ’50s? The White Negro. So they got one. You know, like Paul Muni or Paul Newman on the chain gang. Travolta getting down like he one of the Copasetics. Then he came back a hip angel. Shit.”

  “Yeh, I see what you’re saying. That’s wild. That’ll make you smile alright, even laugh straight out, if it wasn’t for all the papal bull that go with that.”

  “Hmm …” He looked distracted from a moment. “Yeh, that’s something. A bull. The Pope, John Bull, bull market, bullshit—the most precise. Picasso’s monster bull in that labyrinth with that weird lantern. Then all them fools in Spain running them bulls every year. Isabella got the Inquisition coming in—they better run.”

  I was full up laughing so hard at the very thought of how this brother gets into this stuff. Words are one of his things. He’s always breaking shit on you. Like he told me, jazz is really jism or jasm. Like it’s come music. Or On was the name of a city in Africa where the Bloods kept track of the sun. Turn On, dig?

  “Hey, man. You a funny dude.”

  He looked up from his bull thoughts. “What?”

  “That’s why you was smiling?”

  “No, no. Well that too, but something even funnier.”

  “You got more? Well give it up.”

  “I had a dream last night about Mick Jagger.”

  “Mick Jagger! That corny, no-dancing, no-singing motherfucker?”

  “That’s right. First time I ever had a dream about Mick Jagger.”

  “I hope so. Mick Jagger. Man, you wasting your dream space on that clown. What was it about?”

  “I dreamed Mick Jagger stopped me in a bar—”

  “A bar? Man, you don’t even drink. Since when you hanging out in bars?”

  “Hey, man, don’t interrupt. That is weird though, ain’t it? But anyway, I was in this bar and Mick Jagger comes up to me and starts talking shit about how great he is. And how the Rolling Stones was the greatest rock and roll band in the world.”

  “Damn, what kinda shit is that? Man, you musta had some all-the-way-out shit to eat before you went to bed.”

  “Naw, naw. I don�
��t eat nothing before I go to bed.”

  “OK, OK. So what happened?”

  “Well, he come up to me talking shit and it pissed me off. So I killed him! Killed him dead. And left him there in the bar with drunk people pointing at him, wondering if they should call the police. That’s why I was smiling. That’s why I was scribbling too, so I could remember the dream.”

  “What? Jesus Christ! You all the way out, partner.” And we both started to laugh so hard we doubled over.

  “But look at this.” He shoved the Star-Liar at me. The headline read, Corny-Ass Mick Jagger Gets Wasted.

  Yeh, it was true. No, not right now. This was my man’s future laughter. That newspaper ain’t out yet either.

  February 1997

  A LETER

  I didn’t want to see it or hear it but wanted it. Things are themselves, & like us, resist being anything else. Ready or not, can you imagine hearing that from a parking meter?

  Who are you? the cars asked, but I ignored them. I sd it’s raining, but didn’t speak so the shop windows smirked.

  They refused to carry my reflection. So what? Miles Davis fed that through my inner ear. The streetlights explained, Hard Edge. The Museum left its names tapping on the bldgs to remind me of dead friends.

  I don’t believe in ghosts. Because they don’t believe in themselves. That’s why they don’t exist. Suppose you were so fixed on the dirt you cdnt get away when the box car visibled.

  When I turned the corner, there were two more. I smiled as if I was going to acknowledge them. Ha. So that’s what that murmur Fat chance! meant. It was a billboard being nasty. Like a beggar w/credit cards. The thought pissed me off. I stopped & stared at the dumb camel. The poison gadget in its mouth.

  Bill Cosby lived around the corner. A marquee was spitting up. It looked like sparks to the lovers trailing me with one eye.