Tales of the Out & the Gone Read online

  “It’s the Baroness.” “Monk” was half-whispering and half-snorting.

  “The Baroness?” It was not possible. But it was her. Rica. The wealthy groupie in whose apartment Bird died and where the other(?) Monk occasionally hung out. The woman in fact was, despite the hype, not a favorite of a lot of people who saw her as an Anne Rice character created specially to suck jazz masters’ blood.

  “You mean you know the Baroness too?”

  “Aw, man. Why don’t you stop that double-doubting denial and dig reality? I’m not dead, Rica’s not dead.”

  He was doing one of his steps to some scat in his head. “I’m ducking her!” Monk was back in the doorway grooving now.

  “When that other dude died and they treated Nellie like that, reading Rica’s shit in the church—that shit drugged me. That’s why I’m ducking her. And will be.” He stared at me like conversation.

  2000

  RETROSPECTION

  Erwin bounced flatly in the gutter, not himself flat, sitting upright, but the way his bottom “splatted” w/o resonating up life, was, like flat.

  What? That is the word that lays ready to up. What? As if he you didn’t, &c.

  This time it was the electricity. The whole house now turned into a shifting shadow.

  In the ersatz modernism, most things, even ourselves, are tied to electricity. So w/o it everything decamps & sits, flat, like a tire or a debunked idea.

  Of which he was his own, as we suppose “others” (his idea) must be. So we say, sometimes, if we are social naturally & thoughtful, however.

  Flat. Like they say, “Kicked to the curb.” But now, even worse, to roll, or been thrust off & flattened. Not flat across the street, arms akimbo, like the imaginary dead.

  “On yr ass,” the Blood wd say. Or, “On yr ass.” OK.

  I guess we all know that, or that is the disposition.

  Why? How? And them. My man Morris wd say, “And then, so what?” A challenge.

  The question remains. Remains, like stays, longer a verb. Hold to that. (Can that be a verb? That? That it sticks—what about Thating?) Yeh, he was down there Thating.

  Why is a long, wrinkled & circular Thating—to get to that—yeh, “Get to That!” Monk had another flatting for Thating.

  So How always the trail. Without yr self out front, like if you got reversed, the self after the “I,” then that’s a woe—a woeing. (Read here, Trial.)

  Since Woe, if it is not tossed out like a leaflet, is simply where.

  The gutter or rolled off the curb Dig Dog, is to only that is-ing is stopped.

  A dog off the sidewalk is that it where the dog be. Curb. Stop. If it was deeper you’d just slide around w/o necessarily that finger on the string that nots. Knots.

  Bird sd, “You’ve hurt my friend, you cur!” & what did the Nabs “think”?

  “What is that African-American gentleman referring to?”

  That’s why Bird cd be inside his stomach, like on the earth, itself cooking. And cooked, sadly.

  He never got busted, you dig, of all of his “worthy constituents,” except for that guile, of which the leaders’ guidon speaks (given open dimension to guide).

  But his life took no fifth, except the notes, & his curb was early extinction from the death ray of Jimmy Dorsey on television. (They say The Ed Sullivan Show massacred many unsuspecting artists, whose hearts were swallowed by cathode poisoning, made lethal with electronic corn!)

  I was a He then, when looking at you flat—like the end of a page. The over the edge & following a shape.

  How is you? meant silence, intent on misty mind condiment & edgeless afternoon in skull notation.

  So woe is the number cd not tell you the dagger of they ugly was to waste them now.

  My where from life wear as if this low that was my ware. Ob cos. Distress is a number.

  Bipolar pain. Cold Bread. How the substance of the inside feeds. Go out, oh blowing Sun. Find the each of all the unending circle of is.

  And him, still flat, trying to remember the touching interior of why he before was other than this Thating flat. A search. A quest lit with reality—terrible name, this place. Sound thrown as chance, head beat ing of under standing. Get up then. Blow that note. Be its endless substance. An us.

  Listening to what is an image you won’t look at, doing this inside. OK, glance & the thin wire of revulsion familiar, common as laughter, runs through yr attention.

  Jesus, for instance, we’d say. The Negro babbling or cobabbling w/the host.

  2000

  THE PIG DETECTOR

  “Hey, you know that dude I told you about?”

  “The dude with the Rhythm Travel machine?”

  “Yeh, yeh. Well, he invented a police exposure light ray, or something. You shine it on a person, and if they the police, the machine lights up and plays the first chords of ‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You.’”

  “Yeh?” was me responding.

  “Yeh.” Then we went out to a meeting so he could prove it.

  “Yeh, no kidding, man.” What weird otherness this brother comes up with. Can you remember the parade of Outechnology my man came up with? And let me tell you, all that dooba-dooba is somewhere out here operating.

  “So what you gonna do with it? I wish you’d tell me what you did with the other whatnot.”

  “Hey, I’m thinking. But I sure ain’t giving away what don’t need to be gove away.”

  “Then why you tell me? Why you bring me here and almost lay this shit out?”

  “You the Under-On community-relations mouth. La Boca Grande Negra.”

  “You speak Spanish?”

  “I could.”

  “You wanna give it to some black organizations?”

  “Probably to a few. Those that’ll keep it under. You know, there’s an Over and an Under.”

  “Legal and illegal.”

  “Yeabo! And you got to keep the connections quiet, the Who-Do, even if you running the existence. Because I take that as propaganda that let people know there’s an Ultra Blue technology out here getting ready to Bop.”

  This dude laugh like Billy Eckstine’s Big Band. “Yeh, Under- On. But—” Was he pausing or did he leave the room?

  “But what?”

  “Well, I’m always into another wrinkle of the out, the further out, and the gone.”

  “Dig that, the gone.” That “gone” sound like James Brown screaming!

  “I’m getting ready to add a mental disorientator or a body disorientator.” He sound like Stevie now. “Put some doo-doo in the game.”

  That last riff had a tune to it too. Can’t remember it. Maybe like “Pastime Paradise.”

  “What you mean?”

  “The mental D.O. makes them start dropping dimes on each other. Get the real uglies busted. Taping each other, killer cops getting flicks, phone conversations. Suddenly confessing and throwing the evidence on the table in the middle of trials. Divulging police murders, beatings, scams, and shams.” Now he was laughing like Marvin on “Mickey’s Monkey.”

  “Yeh, yeh.” You know me, I was dancing to the conversation. “What the other thing gonna do? The body-jammy?”

  “Well …” he got a kind of sheepish look, maybe like the dude on What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? “First …” This was drawn out like a game-show host. Furrrst! Like that. “First, I was just gonna deconstruct they bodies and send them to expensive restaurants, but my conscience got in it.”

  “Oh yeah, what it tell you?” He was handing me my coat.

  “Well, it ain’t told me nothing yet. I just got a head-ring. The channel ain’t come all the way in yet.”

  He was laughing when I split. Bending over his heebiejeebie with a cold blue passion. Expensive restaurants, what that mean? We got to go down the street to Dick & Judy’s every day?

  December 2000

  POST- AND PRE-MORTEM DIALOGUE

  Suppose, I said to someone who I am close to, that the Saudis were the handled in th
is 9/11 business.

  Oh?

  And suppose, since most of the so-called terrorists were alleged to be Saudis—except for the ones who were never there, given the Identity Theft, like the dudes in Pakistan and Saudi who never left.

  Yeh.

  And suppose, as a quid pro from the Yanks moving out of Saudi, since it was getting a bit too hot, with the real Muslims chafing at Israel and the penetration of the Infidel all up in Saudi. The Seven Sisters. The deep crème-filled corruption of the Saudi Royal House.

  Uh-huh. Like the stories about them 400 princes and no princesses and how they still dig boy, not scag either.

  I’m gonna laugh before I tell you.

  Tell me about the thirty-percent ownership of New York— at least the Plaza Hotel. The dude offered how many Negroes to 666, Giuliani, who refused on top cause under was sweeter?

  Uh-huh.

  And we know about how they all was in San Diego (living in La Jolla, Nixon’s Disneyland for tiring mice & ducks). The airplane lessons. Just take-off and banking, no landing.

  Yeh.

  And the obvious dung smell, like finding a terrorist passport in the ashes in front of the Twin Towers.

  To where? Out?

  And the rest of the BS. Change flight plans, no challenge from radio, no radio contact, no interceptors, Boston to World Trade Center to Pentagon.

  The most carefully guarded strip of land on the planet.

  Yeh.

  And the weird stock-tinkering pullouts from American and United a month before.

  The Israelis booking, the warnings. Sharon’s un-visit. Your boy, Night Fighter Brown from Frisco.

  By Way of Deception, the dude from the Mossad’s book. About the 1st little 9/11 in the garage where the Palestinian went for the nooky and got popped instead of the Mossad nookyteer.

  Yeh, I dig. But what?

  Suppose the Saudis, in exchange for yr savage uncle booking. They in Qatar now. And with the Israeli thing. The promise to clean out Afghanistan, Palestine.

  Transfer, they call it.

  Saddam.

  Yeh. Bush’s old man gave him the stuff. They coulda checked the receipts.

  Yeh.

  Bush, the father, was Osama’s roadie in the black gold trade. Cowboy baptized the Taliban to waste the Pink Afghan number.

  What you saying?

  Saying the Cowboy need a Pearl Harbor like his man Schicklgruber need the Reichstag, so they let the dogs out. Ate commies, union people, most heavy on the Jews!

  Yeh, yeh. Reichstag Enablement Act, where yr man Asscraft come down. I see a big pink hiney sailing through the air, doing number one and number two on the whole world.

  They think if they can doo-doo on everybody or get the E.P.A. to declare pee-pee-heavy weather, they can turn everybody into niggers!

  Oh yeh. You mean, they be able to sing and dance and get fucked with on the highway?

  Oh, there you come.

  That’s some out shit.

  But this, if it was the Saudis playing Hitrabs for the Cowboy, the Cowboy can put on them black suits they got in the back of they closet.

  And nut out on the whole whirl. Even change French fries to O’Reilly spuds. Get little Colon to take everything off the air. Let Murdoch do his no-place-to-go routine. It’s all evil, except who telling you and I been converted to heathen!

  You mean, on 9/11 the cops really did come?

  And going to cop, everybody! Down on yr hands and needs new and old Negroes, we is gonna teach you about the rapture. Like they be sailing through the air with Jesus on the lead horse, just like in Birth of a Nation with a World War One.

  Naw, updated. World War Two helmet.

  You dig?

  Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Then Iran, Syria. Then a deep breath—it’s off to see the Wizard.

  The Yellow Brick Road. Right up to where the Key Maker in Matrix Deuce be hanging with the Keys to the entrance into meta-super-master. All y’all world is niggers now, and it ain’t gonna be quitting time (like in Gone with the Wind) for a long never …

  China.

  Shit, do Cowboy know a billion motherfuckers up there? A bunch of which wd love his ass to ride up there so that they can turn that motherfucker into chopsticks.

  And North Korea, the practice?

  Shit, that ain’t practice. That’s nonsense.

  It ain’t to a fool. A fool think foolishness is good sense.

  Anyway, if the Saudis was the hit nigras, so the Cowboy can move his doo-doo out. And give the boy-poppers a little room in they money.

  Florida, San Diego, Koran in Boston airport. All of them Saudis & Bush and Israel and the Brits, who is always down for ugly.

  Ain’t that where the Devil first hit when he left the Pole?

  So you saying the Cowboy, the Saudis, the Israel, and John Bull’s one-nut kin is the actual doo-doo?

  Straight out of the Cowboy Bible. With Jesus sailing down through the clouds to ice the Jews as soon as Israel free from the Colored.

  Dig that. You don’t believe FDR pulled a choo-choo with Pearl Harbor too?

  Hey, I didn’t see the movie.

  But I saw Matrix Deuce where they living in Zion.

  Do that make them Zionists?

  I saw where the French dude was the villain and was keeping the Chinaman locked up cause he had the key.

  The French-Chinese trade.

  Historic. I seen that weird flick where the same dude in Matrix—his name ain’t Kneel or Neil—it’s Neo.

  You mean they left the “GR” out?

  Yeh, like you leave the Are out in yr man’s title, he is then suddenly a fiend!

  Gotcha. OK, OK.

  So.

  I suppose to say, “So.” So?

  They coming back another gin. New World Order. Homeland Security. Shock and Awe! Like the Concentration Camps was just Slave Plantations for Jews and other uncools.

  So the Arab is the Jew this twirl?

  Yeh, but dig, brother. You look like an Arab. Yr boy say he an original Jew, and we all know all y’all very colored.

  Yeh. So what we supposed to do?

  Get busy, is what. All us need to get busy.

  Very busy!

  (All leave.)

  June 12, 2003

  Brick City, New Ark