“Niggar!”
“Whut?”
“Niggar you best get out this door and get your ass down on the street in front. In front of your house, motherfucker. Down in the motherfuckin’ front you’ll have two eyes in the back of your ass you don’t get your. Motherfucking. Ass. Out. On the motherfucking. Porch.”
Screaming from inside.
“Did you hear something?”
“Nah, man, you know I ain’t hear nothing.”
I pop the zip on a flash grenade and launch it over my shoulder. It goes through the roof, plops down on a kitchen table, and everyone in the room goes look, look at the pretty bombs about to explode for us. Then it stops fizzing and everyone looks around at each other like whut?? and then there happens the tiniest little click in all creation. Then the thing starts to whizz and the flashbang goes flash!, bang! All the tiniest stars in heaven come down to blind my man in there.
“Niggar! Did you hear me on that?”
“Fuck you, man! We were watching the Oscars!”
“The White Oscars?” I yell.
“What other kind of Oscars is there? Yeah man, the White Oscars. Everything else in this country is White. Might as well be a motherfucking White Oscars. Fucking White Jennifer Lawrence. Fucking White Laura Dern. Motherfuckin’ White writers everywhere. White police locker rooms. White cowboys—“
“Did you say ‘White police locker rooms?’ ’Cause we got more than White police in our White police locker rooms.”
“Yeah but do you have anyone revolutionary in there? Like Martin Luther King!”
I motion to the other units. Double eyes. Everyone fall on me. Two here. Two there. Rush, rush. Go, go. Toss me another flash grenade in through the roof. Too bad we don’t have anything more dangerous than that. Too bad I can’t get to the trunk at the end of our bed. Too bad that Nikkas like tumbleweed in there can’t comprehend the power of the chest at the end of the bed. Too bad they don’t understand the heritage of the chest at the end of the bed. And why am I sitted here in West Dayton launching death pins at some scrub—a fucking nappy-headed scrub (who ain’t got no dough, who cain’t get my love) defending White culture to you, dear reader, who probably doesn’t have a penny to throw in a pot or a bank account to secreet it into.
“Go go go!” I say.
And the rat’s nest of cops, my partners for close to 20 years, unfurls itself (always in slow motion to me, always with its taps and clicks and locks and pops whose details—unknown to the masses—signals their doom). There’s Martin, my Black partner, been riding for six out of those 20. Last partner got a piece of electrified rebar punctured through his neck. He didn’t last long after that. Service medal. Wife pension. All of this posthumous of course. There’s Captain Bell, next car over. He’s on board. He’s got the right ticket punched and they punched it in the right place. 9mm in the sock. 45 in hand, he looks like a soldier—a stellar one. His eyes are on the door where my Niggar—Sheth Jones—should be coming out within the second. Three more cars behind us. We’re all ready to take the motherfucker out.
The sweat coming off my eyebrows—stop gap—it turns my vision blue, and in the pause I am in the kitchen with Sheth and his friends (“What? They’re your family?”). Anyway this Nig challenges me on my suit and I reach across the table for a piece of whatever Black cereal he’s eating (probably Fruit Loops)—I would never let my children eat that—and I toss my Loop of Fruit into the air and I say, “Sheth Jones, 17 years old, priors none, straight-A student, what in the hell are we doing at your house today?”
To which Sheth would say, “I’m out of my element, sir.”
“You’re in your own home, so how you can say you’re out of your element escapes me! Do you understand what I mean when I say, Boo, Niggar! Do you read me when I say this?”
Then, in this imagination, Sheth pushes his chair back with a foot against the kitchen table (would not be allowed in my house) and behind his head on the television is Jennifer Lawrence tripping up the Oscar stairs and bugs were crawling in Sheth’s ears and around his mouth and through his nose and I saw him at the moment of his creation, slithering Satan writhed atop a similar kitchen table in a similar moment, similar house, similar kid, similar mother grandmother ancient ancestor squatting her legs blood seeping out and she plops Sheth right upon the tabletop right next to the Fruity Loops and loveless she crawls to the window scrapes the dirt away and breathes deep through her Satan’s lungs—she’s the devil she’s Sheth’s mom I don’t know if you got that but Sheth/Satan was given birth by her mother, Satan’s Mother, Satan’s Mother right inside that house, Satan’s Mother right behind that door. If you stare into Shethy’s eyes for a second all you’ll see is blackness, the blackness of the fornicator, the blackness of the Devil’s whore.
I swear to you, as the cold runs around my neck on this West Dayton Niggar’s residence, that I will never let my children see this pain. This West Dayton squat with refrigerators in the lawn, up against the house three tires—why would you even have three tires? Pink foam insulation falling out the exterior walls. Nappy head kiddos playing in a dumpster—probably needles—probably meth. None of these kids even go to school, and they wonder why their side of town is falling apart. Your whole culture has fallen to shit. Your entire culture is desecration. It should never have been brought here. It should have stayed in Africa. You Africans complain that back in Africa you had homes of gold and entire kingdoms—you should have stayed there. Although all I’ve ever seen of Africa is pictures of lions having just been killed by US Presidents. That’s all I’ve ever known. I’ve never seen its cities. Its people. Its resources. Its beauty. I’ve never seen that. All it is to me is Simba with his dead neck limped over some billionaire’s shoulder. Starving kids with flies all over their bodies. So if Africa is so great I’ve never seen it. And I wish we could ship all you shit heads and brown skins back there.
Do you hear me, oh Lord, oh my God, my President? Hear me when I want to run Niggars off the road in my F-150? Hear me when I want to ring their fucking necks? Do you head me when I wake with blood as cold as ice, with blood beneath my fingernails? Do you hear my rage? Do you hear that I am the last person to be racist, oh Lord, oh God, oh President of the United States? Oh President of these States. Oh chosen servant, unwilling, they dragged you into this. You never wanted to serve. You were happy being a billionaire. Your fellow Americans. Fellow people. Don’t do this to me. Do not make me speak. I am the Lord your God and your countenance shall shine upon me, in this rain, in the cold outside Sheth Jones’ house, the 17-year-old, the supposedly A student whose neighbor called in a domestic disturbance report of loud yelling, pots and pans being launched against the walls, suspicion of children inside the home. Hear my prayer oh Lord. Hear me shout it over the radio, call it on 911. And you answer me, on TV, in the phrases you use, in the white power call signs, the hand signals, the verbology, it’s all there to remind me that I’m ok—that you’re ok with me—that my secret beliefs are founded, backed up, by you, oh God. You are the alpha and the omega. Everything springs from you. You have been with me since the beginning, my God. Stay with me forever.
Pop! Crack!
The grenade goes in.
Flash. Bang.
Martin and Captain Bell stand tense. I stand with them. Sheth Jones comes coughing through the mist, hands up, and I’m up above the car (an entry team having opened the door) and smoke comes out and smoke comes out and we are waiting for mister Sheth Jones, juvenile delinquent, to emerge from his Nubian parlance with a coat of lion’s fur—you could have been—you could have been in Africa, motherfucker. You could have been tending your sheep. You could have stood under African skies and sang glorious tunes to your sleeping children, pumped them full of love in your click, click languages while the rest of us white people invented calculus and gravity and nuclear war.
My partner Martin isn’t so bad. He doesn’t live in Oakwood, but he lives as close as a Black person could live to Oakwood. He has kids and a wife and a car. We don’t have much to discuss (as he is Black) but when he plays me jazz I listen and pretend to enjoy it as much as one can pretend to enjoy the music of Niggars and drug addicts.
Sheth Jones, Blackie. Doubled over from the smoke.
I’m on him. Martin stands back. The Captain stands back. They know this is my kind of arrest. They know this is how I like ’em. Young and Black and proud and used to be standing tall. Crack that kid in the back. Kick him to the floor. This kid is searching up into my face. I look at him through all the veins and the blood in his eyes.
“Sheth Jones. You are under arrest.”
“Well what were you doing there?”
“Watching the Oscars!”
“What were you watching?”
“The Oscars, man. Jennifer Lawrence falling up the stage. Showin’ her lil smile and shit. That was all. What was you doing there? I was on my couch—you was at the door with like fifteen guys.”
“Ho ho ho—hold on. You was watchin’ Jennifer Lawrence?”
“Yeah, man.”
“ ’Cause we’ve got you beating that little girl—what was that little girl’s name? Brenda? Binda?”
“Bulinda? My little sister.”
“We’ve got you beating your little sister with a seat wrench.”
“Wha’s a seat wrench.”
“Come again, son?”
“What’s a seat wrench?”
“A seat wrench. Is the opposite of a shelf wrench. And a shelf wrench. Is the opposite of a seat wrench. Or not exactly opposites. They exist in a sort of counterpartnership of yin and yang in stainless steel wrenches that pickle-headed Niggars like yourself get caught by their neighbors beating their sister Yolanda—“
“It’s Bulinda.”
“—little bitches named Bulinda would like us to believe that their big brothers are not lying about hidden stockpiles of narcotics hidden in warehouses in the backs of toilets hiding underneath your virgin nose, Sheth, you don’t look like any version of a man that I’ve ever seen in two shakes, three shakes three shakes, more. Cum on the bottom of my shoes, I’ve got cum on the bottoms of my shoes. Jones, Mister Jones, I know what it’s like to grow up poor.”
“Oh yeah? What you know about it?”
“We grew up poor. In the desert. In Texas. It wasn’t this kind of poor but it was poor. There were a few Darkies—Blackies of your persuasion—Negroes left behind through the abandonment. Slaves through and through, when their masters were forced to abandon them—in the fields!—they say on the day our Lord comes, he will place two in the field. Then there will be one. I’mma scripture you up, boy! Place this sweaty brow in that sweaty hand and we’re gonna get some savin’ into you, my kid! My kid, ma kid, me kid. Poor in the desert, we were. Lived at the end of a development, we did. Pulled the fangs out of rattlesnakes—that was my entertainment by the age of ten. What’s your story? PlayStation on the couch with your friends? Grape Kool-Aid?? What? What Nigga? What!! I’LL BEAT YOU TILL YOU HAVE NO FACE! Are we clear? I SAID ARE WE CLEAR MOTHERFUCKER. I don’t even believe I just called you a motherfucker. I almost just called you an asshole—do you believe that shit? I almost used a perfectly White adjective to describe you.”
“Wouldn’t that be a noun?”
“Excuse me?”
“Just. Asshole. Motherfucker. Those are nouns.”
“Are they? Are those nouns? I ought to waste you right here. Breathlessly. Turn you. Inside out. So your outsides are in. And you wallow on the wall there fighting cardiac arrest and voluntary colostomy surgery, the ignorance of babes my sister who’s a minister ends up walking for the homeless in New York and I was just trying to save her that’s why we don’t have female ministers in Dayton it’s just not done. Roger. Roger Dodger. Can I get a microphone check-a! And a tiddle on the old trombone. You might think offset dementia doesn’t make its onset until end of life but here’s a case where—if I may—if I may I might I might—I might suggest the talons are in place at 33. If she never became a pastor she never would have invoked the wrath of our Lord God three times daisies in the pink underclothes of children on the swings. Swinging up. Swinging down. If you unplug the couch light before bed you unplug my love for you so just don’t do it, sweetie, just don’t. Sheth. Where are you? Jones. Spider-Man or Batman?”
“Bat. Man. I guess.”
“If you’re tentative your whole life you’ll never amount to anything.”
“Batman! It’s Batman ok? I just don’t like being put on the spot.”
“Guess you didn’t like that we showed up at your house this evening.”
“I didn’t like it, no. And I thought it showed a lack of caution.”
“Why is it you Black people when you feel like being a punk, you’re like, what the fuck and nig this and nig that and then when you feel like it you’ll just hit us with I didn’t, no. And it showed a lack of caution.”
“Maybe it’s ’cause that’s not an accent. It ain’t strictly what you’re born with.”
Sheth Jones, 17, fucked for life. Got this kid on suspected domestic disturbance. Had his Jennifer Lawrence up too loud, watchin’ the bitch trip, standard fare. But it did disturb me a bit that this kid’s Negro-ass shoe collection was high on the Adidas. Sheth said that was for playing soccer and I said what kind of team lets players pick their own shoes and he said it wasn’t a real team—like through the school—it was just a neighborhood team and I said why can’t you Niggars get your shit together, get some teams going, you know you could have a whole bunch of little Black boys and Black girls swinging on their swings and munching their lunches and driving their little Nigra prom dates to and from prom if they have cars and if they don’t—well!—they can just sally up to the horse trough and take it rough. Now who is this bitch you got waiting out front?”
“That’s my moms. My grand mom. My grandmother.”
“Well what is she? Your mom, your grand mom, your grandmother? I’m just kidding I know you guys call your moms your grand moms.”
“She acted as my mom. When I was a kid.”
“You’re still a fucking kid.”
“Since I was a kid. She takes care of me.”
“Where was she tonight?”
“She was out grocery shopping.”
“Give me a break. It’s Oscar night. And your moms is out grocery shopping? Why weren’t you there with her?”
“I stayed home.”
“I can see that. Why?”
“I was supposed to be doing my homework.”
“But instead you were watching Jennifer Lawrence trip up the stairs at the Oscars prob’ly watchin’ up that little girl’s dress—“
“She was wearing an Oscar gown.”
“And did it tempt you, the hem of that gown? Did you want to pick it up and peek at her legs?”
“Why are we talking about this?”
“We—“
“Why am I even here?”
“You’re here. Because we—“
“What do you have me on?”
“We have you on suspicion.”
“Suspicion of what?”
“Of domestic disturbance and resisting.”
“Resisting what?”
“Arrest.”
“Now I know I didn’t resist no—!”
I hold up my cuffs.
“Sheth. Mr Jones. May I remind you that you are here voluntarily. If we need to escalate this, we’ll escalate it.”
“And since I am here voluntarily I think I’ll be going.”
“No.”
“No?”
“If you decide to leave then we may need to hold you.”
“How is that?”
“If you decide you need to leave, it may become necessary for us to hold you.”
“You think I’m stupid, right?”
“No, I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“You think since I’m 17 I don’t know. Don’t know my rights or that you’re overstepping your bounds or that you just like to do this because you’re sick and a member of the master race and something. I know I wasn’t disturbing no peace back there. I was up in my house—my house!—watching Jennifer Lawrence, a child of your tribe. And if that’s why you want to arrest me, so be it. I’m just a kid! Shouldn’t you even have my grand moms with me now?”
“No,” I say.
“Is that the law or is that just what you think?”
I didn’t know. I went to the Rolodex of Time, that Father God so deeply painted into my consciousness he was that Trinket Jesus now, stolen from a Disney gift shop. I asked Father God to run my enemies’ busses off the road, their faggot-ass Kia Sorentos swarmed by black F-150s. Pray for my wayward cousins, evil offspring of my sister, dank, sinister, Children of the Corn. Pray for those monies we have saved and sent to our Political Brother in the House, your man upstairs, the Big Kahuna Motherfucker in the Sky. I pray to you Big Kahuna with political chops, you stand before us like a minister, like the dad that I never had. No. Not a dad like I ever had, who threw glass bottles and rocks and ended us up in the hospital. That’s the father who moved us from El Paso to Dallas, to Dayton Ohio, and that Ohio is where I live now with the ministers who pass out condoms to sinners on 5th Street to the trannies to the fucking Indians hidden until you see one of their temples—huge!—looming out of the trees. Those are alright. It’s when you get to the east/west divide that the trouble comes into play. Jungle bunnies. Hundreds of square miles of drugs and Church’s Chicken with some so-called churches singing that blackface celebration I hate it with every shade hate it more than I would hate hell itself it reminds me of maids and slavery and the Mayflower—that towering carrion calling me to our shores. Holy trinity calling. High high and most high and holy days I put them out of sight as soon as we return from church. As soon as we get back I’m football and Facebook and beer and teaching my son by example to denigrate women (we don’t call it that)—to wallow in our own poverty, to hate those who have less than us. And don’t quote Jesus to me. I’ll throw Jesus out the window.
“So you’ve decided to play this the hard way,” I say to Sheth.
Sheth says, “All I was doing was watching Jennifer Lawrence on the television.”
“Ok,” I say.
I stand up from my chair.
I put my hands on the back of the chair.
I stare at Sheth.
“What?” he says.
“You’re gonna make me do this. Unfortunately. I mean this isn’t necessary. I said you wanna play it like a champ, that’s ok, you can play it like a champ. But you didn’t do that. You played it like a chump. Chumps, around here, are little liked (and less ignored). We’re gonna keep you here tonight for observation.”
“For observation! You’re treating me like a mental patient!”
“Maybe you are a mental patient.”
“I gotta get home. I got school tomorrow.”
“School is not a right. It’s a privilege. If I let you go to school tomorrow, that’s that. If not, maybe you don’t get school for the rest of the week. Or maybe you don’t get school for the rest of your life. Maybe that’s how things will be.”
“Now what’s your name?”
“Where’s my son?”
“It has you down as Martin but Sheth’s last name is Jones.”
“Sheth’s dad was my daughter’s husband. We don’t have money for a lawyer.”
“No that’s ok, Mrs Martin. That is not a problem. No problem whatsoever. We will take care of you right up. Tied in a neat little tendril! Now how does that sound?”
Mrs Martin’s feet shuffled over the floor.
“He says Bulinda is his sister?”
“His half-sister.”
“Isn’t Bulinda an English name?”
“Spanish,” Mrs Martin says.
“Now how did Sheth’s half sister Bulinda get a Spanish name?”
“I guess ’cause she’s Spanish. How long do we have to stay here?”
“Participation is voluntary—always voluntary. You and Sheth can walk out of here right now.”
“So why wouldn’t we?”
“ ’Cause I need your help.”
Mrs Martin looks up at me with these big, brown eyes.
“I need your help—forgive me—but—uh—I need your help to figure out how Sheth has a Spanish sister named Bulinda. And this is an interesting spelling. I’ve never seen it done this way. B—u—l-i-n-d-a. Doesn’t that b-u-l remind you of bullshit or sort of a dull sound associated with mental retardation bul you fucking bull-headed Bulinda sounds like a girl go to church every day and loses her virginity to the pastor’s boy behind closed curtains she thought he was just going for a kiss but lo and behold, there underneath his robes was the prong of damnation—the prick!—reaching upwards through stratospheres of naughtiness, reaching down down down to bury itself in stratospheres of hell. ’Cause I just never heard no Nikka with the white girl name of Bulinda. Never spelled like that. Now I find out she’s supposedly a Spanish Nikka with a Spanish name and I don’t understand how a black girl gets to come from Spain!”
Mrs Martin sits with her erect back looking all proper and royal and shit.
“You look like you have nothing to lose,” I say.
She looks at me and says, “What?”
“You look like you have nothing to lose!” I say. “Fuckin’ deaf motherfucker. You look like you have nothing to lose but you do. Your son does. Sheth. Remember Sheth, locked up all tight and secure? Sheth was caught tonight with a television that was on, volume turned up, and he was playing that television—watching Jennifer Lawrence no less—Jennifer Fucking Lawrence. We had to go there. We had to bring the deputies. Your son—your son did not drop and touch the sky. He did not follow protocol. He almost made me kill him. Almost. But not quite. No, the grace of God and a little trust in my trigger finger bring me to my bed at night. May I rise up on my pillow Dear Lord and worship you Darling Baby Jesus may my countenance be turned within your oh-so-holy consciousness, bright consciousness, the face and the heart and the mind of angels! Angels who have come on high and touched my hand Dear Lord Dear Lord! Oh God! I am touched by your presence here tonight Dear Lord Oh God My God! Nothing is higher. You are good Oh God. Good to the very last drop. Good like a glass of Kool-Aid™. Yum! to my lips. Yum yum yum! to my Lord! We are with you, tonight, in this prison building, God, we are with you tonight in your mysterious house of worship we have come here to find you in everything we do, Lord. In the cells we lock up to the criminals we lock in them. These are offenders, Oh Lord, offenders to thy law. We bring our faith from the pews into this definition of a world we live in. We bring our faith out from under a rock. From whispers hidden in the voices of two little Christian girls. They hid their truth from the light—they hid their truth from the world. Then, through ages and solemnities, they tore through their oppressors, those other little pagan girls in the schoolyard. Those heathen girls, whose mothers have gone against the word of God and they are being punished through the sins of their children when I say my prayers at night I curse my neighbors, every wicked one of you. You, Mrs Martin, I’ll add to my list. You, Mrs Martin. You’ve got a grandson meddling in White culture, playing his music too loud—you’re an ancient decrepit stinking bitch there’s no simpler way to state it. And you know what else?”
“What?” she says.
“I’m gonna tell you. This white culture thing. He’s dabbing. He’s dipping. He’s poking around with his black cock in creams and cultures he shouldn’t be dabbing and dipping in. Jennifer Fucking Lawrence. You know where she’s from? Kentucky. Land of White people, more White people, and a surprising amount of culture. Also surprisingly well off. You ever been down there?”
“Me and my family’s been through.”
“Well when I went down, I was like what the fuck? Mansions and shit. None of this back water blue hills bullshit. I mean there are the blue hills. Some real hillbilly bullshit back there. Deliverance and everything. But that’s where Jennifer Lawrence is from. That’s where my people are from. Let me ask you something. Where are your people from? ’Cause it ain’t anywhere in this country. Is it? I don’t think so. We don’t have the sun to make Niggar skin. Takes a lot of sun, right? And a lot of desert—a lot of sand? Does it take a lot of sand??”
Mrs Smith meets my eye.
She says, “To make Niggar skin?”
“That’s right.” That is right, my dear. Doesn’t it take a lot of sun and a bunch of Niggardly Niggars baking around in it, to make Niggardly Niggard skin. Fraidy cat skin, full of nut-muffin squash and muscadine grapes and Civil War reenactments when you smile too wide at your Niggardly friends playing slaves they were slaves they were actually fucking slaves!! Actual slaves in an actual slave country with slave ships and slave blocks and slave whips and slave rapes. But slavery wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t! It was better than now, with a dignified people subjugated to—I don’t even know what subjugated means but I’m trying Ringo, I’m tryin’ real hard. The problem with these southern Negras coming up to the north over three generations is they get real small and crusty real fast to the time they’re somebody’s grandma they’re tiny small, too little to count, fingers crusted, bone, fragment, tone. A pencil neck. Turkey dicks, every one. Black, flagellated, whipped into shape the biggest cock I’ve ever seen gargantuan fucknigga! I don’t mind locking that kid up in a cell. Just for a few hours. Any of them! To take that bone scooper (big dick) off the street away from a white girl for a minute is a benefit to society. The word dick does not apply. That is the biggest cock I’ve ever seen.
I spit into the trash can.
“Excuse me.”
“No problem,” Mrs Smith says.
“It really isn’t a problem for you, is it? My spitting my bile out in this metal can? Thanks, Mrs Smith. Thank you very much. Are you still working on getting your son out of here tonight?”
“I’m still not clear on why we are here.”
“Destruction of—disruption—basically a noise disturbance. But it is more than that, Mrs Smith. It’s about respect. For the White man, for our history of slavery. We need you and your grandson to bow down and lick the boots of those they serve. We don’t need you to sign a piece of paper. We need you to comply. If possible we’d like you to go back to Africa. Back with the lions and tigers and bears. Don’t y’all feel freer wearing sandals and bare feet and dancing with elephants and shit? You’re a simpler people. Admit it. How many Black engineers do you meet? How many Black pilots? Those are regal jobs. When I come to West Dayton all I see is churches and fried chicken. White people, when we go to church, we have the good sense to ignore most of what is said and go about our week as though Sunday had never happened. But you blackies, you take it too seriously! Black pastors be like epic and shit. Fucking Double Dragon, Heihachi and shit. You got me nostalgic—can I ask your first name?”
“Florence but I prefer you call me Mrs Smith.”
“Well, Flo. Here’s the situation. I need to cum three times a day and I already came twice. So that’s—you! Ah hah, I’m just kidding. Don’t you hate it when you find yourself inside a parody of your life and you’re kicking and scratching and you’re gulping for air and someone should come help you but nobody does? I hate that. And I hate you, Mrs Smith. If you weren’t so ugly I’d force you to suck my dick but your age and your blackness would make me feel like a rhinoceros was sucking it—not a lot of suck but just a lot of smack, smack, smack. You know what I mean?”
They were doing a lot of telling us when life began and I said I said I’ll tell you when life begins. This logic of life begins at birth, beyond birth, it’s ridiculous. My sister asks me where did you get that idea? What? That life begins at conception and any termination date before or after is a sin!? That’s written in the pages of my religion. My sister says no it isn’t. It isn’t there! she says. Tha’s a blasphemer. Silly word but it does the trick. They’re doing a lot of telling us when we cannot vote. I’ll show ‘em a vote. Vote to change the fucking world. To make your momma wake up with a stomachache. Make her wake up with uh aneurysm. Heart attack. Die. Lemon women stoppin’ they conceptions with citrus—fruits of the Lord? T’ith die should cast upon thee, sinner, who casts thither among tither! Present t’ thee an ideology, complete in its perfection, whom looks beneath my chair. And wizards of light and lore, egg-beating sourpusses of might, magic, Mothersbaugh. They said, ‘We can tell you how to raise your babies. We can tell you how to treat your wife.’ We said, ‘We don’t need your education. We don’t need your sane and strife.’ I say those are the edges of sin, coming upon me, and I don’t need no sin! They think we simple but we like simple. The Lord our football-quarterbacking God—he’s simple, isn’t he? Isn’t he easy to talk to, giving me all the answers I expect, requiring nothing of me especially not that I treat my neighbors as myself. That verse is lost in my book. Compassion is no longer a byword. The consequences sound delicious (but then, I’ve never seen my sister’s head smashed among the cobblestones). Never known a revolution. But we practice for this. Every week and every weekend. Wives making the clothes and the hats we wear. Husbands forging the knives. We rehearse this shit. Planning for the second Civil War. And every week, when we go down to that field, do I consider putting a real bullet in for one of my neighbors? Yes I do. Because the world will not be free until the sun coming over the tree stand hits not a Negro head as it spreads throughout the city. It could have been a good city. It could have been a holy city. Now, no one goes to churches anymore. No one can name the apostles. When I was growing up we had to memorize Books of the Bible. It was hard! But we got through it, together. And Missus Polly Sue who sat next to me looked mighty fine! We grew muscadine on the fence by the mailbox—It’s a White grape! Nobody who knows muscadine has ever even met a Black person!—No! You’re an idiot! Unhand me!—I’ll never unhand you, fool, you are the rhythm in my rage and an old devil like me would never want to be without her rage.
It’s my sister. She’s possessed me. Let me tell you about my sister. She’s 56, three years older than me, three kids, divorced loser husband, “progressive” religion—aka faggot lovers, Niggar lovers, lovers of anything that moves, right? Just about. Right?? Just about!! RIGHT!? My sister invaded my head. I don’t know if she did it John Malkovich-style or voodoo-style, but she’s invaded my head, her responses have become my responses, ad finitum. Deus ex parti. Our Lord. Amen. My sister. You know, always a tomboy. Super smart. They think I’m rebelling against smartness in general but it’s really never in general—is it? I mean the guy in the movie, if he’s afraid of the enemy, it’s ’cause the enemy reminds him of his dad. I’m afraid of my dad. He used to hit us and get drunk. This is something I lie to myself about—tell myself it never happened, tell myself he drank responsibly. But there really is that place right down in my middle where when I breathe all the way out, it feels hollow. And empty. And cold.
And if they beat us with bats, we’ll beat them with guns. We’ll show the meanest sides of us. The sides we would never show our children. Not on purpose. We tell ourselves this is men’s business—women’s business. Kids round up in the back yard and let the adults talk now. Get on now, Karen (slap her on the ass). Get up on now, little Carlton (slap him on the ass). Fuckbabies. Mothernutting fuckbabies. Get on out uh here now. Get now. Go on. Mothernutting accent-loving Niggar-hanging prepubescent cow. The adults are goin’ ta do some speakin’ now around the fire. Goin’ to do some drinkin’ now around that there fire! Get your Uncle Lenny in here, youngins. Now Uncle Lenny, how is it right/then/there than you did vote in that last election? Nor this way nor that, yer Uncle Lenny says. Nor this way nor that? I ask the bloke. He’s all swimmin’ and squirmin’ in his chair and I’m like over him like I’m a gangster in a movie, one uh them sports movies, a heist, like they throw the game or the whole season, is how I remember it. That’s how it happened—eh? How the whole thing went down, right there in your election booth. They had wires strapped to your pants? To your testicles? To your little footballs? We heard you might have slipped your hand and that lever pushed to the left—you catch my meaning? Might have had a leftward-leaning accident in the polling place this morning! Swerved off the left side of the road! Hit the left-leaning tree! Jumped over the crick with the left hook. Flushed down the commode which my left hand pushes. And I might have to punch up the left side of your face if you vote that way again, kid. Now get your ass on up outta here.
Holy hell politics love and football. You know, some people think it ain’t as simple as policing and churching. But it is. It is that fucking simple. Simple as rain at play in the fields of the Lord. As rows of corn. As a white girl in a white dress, one hand above the locks of maize in oblivion. Elysium. The Greeks and Romans holidayed there. And Greeks and Romans never had Black people, did they? I never see them in any of their paintings. It’s always usual, normal, White people. No blump in their middle like whaat?! I’m crazy—what? I’m cra—a—zay. Cray zay. Cray zee. Cree zee. What? Creezer zeezer. CRANKER YANKER! Lamaze proves too much. Yoga is a bore. Weren’t you the brother who voted for the guy who as President endorsed running some other candidate off the road? That’s what my sister will come to say to me. Didn’t you vote for the guy who ran a candidate off the road?? Only a faggot-ass candidate un-American socialist piece of shit!! Does this look like Chicago?! This is Dayton, Ohio. Dayton. Land of Oakwood and Centerville and Huber Fucking Heights. America’s Largest Community of Brick Homes. Schools. Churches. Football fields. Good solid American games. Hit your head up for some of them suicide vibes—eh? Kill the rest of your career. But represent, boys—represent your town for all you’re worth. Empty that bank. Brains right on the pavement. I’m not all about race. I’m about purity. My speech is right here on the surface—you’ll get what you see and I’ll give you what you pay for! You know what we do to thieves around here. Bicycle thieves. Thievers who go to malls and steal little Black jewelry for their little Black girlfriends. Who run through quiet neighborhoods doing foot stands on their bikes silently, slowly coming up on the back of your house. Where your baby lies sleeping. Where she swings and the back of her dress goes up toward the sky. Where she’s waiting silently for you. Tuggled up snug between the couch arm and a dog. And through that yard and through that lawn comes up a big Black creeper and he’s looking for you and more he’s looking for your wife and when he finds her he’s gonna get her, when he finds her—he’s gonna get her!! And what does he do when he gets her? He gets his dirty fingers and he unfurls his dirty cock and he tickles between her legs and he finds that pink that he’s been missing all his life he’s been missing that good pussy that good skunk he wants your wife he wants your wife HE WANTS YOUR WIFE!! His is the nature of sadness. His is the nature of the fingers upon a nose the hand around the neck. The suffocation! The elimination! Eradication of a kindly whisper known as death she sucks the breath from out the mouth the nose of prickly hairs I’ll stitch shut with Niggar’s glue it’s tool #1 in the exorcist shaving kit—enough to schluff a rat to sleep whose glacial calm resulted from an accidental encounter with the butter in the bottle in the bag.
These are the tiddles that tiddled my tiddler while that Mrs Smith woman was talking. She told me all about her financial problems and I said I can recommend my guy over at Fifth Third she says it’s not that type of problem. What type of problem is it? I said. She says The electricity won’t stay on. I said You’ve got to pay the bill! And that bitch drowned me out in silence. Let the whole station know my joke had fell flat. I’m kidding, I’m joking. Totally kidding! Hate to freeze a motherfucker out. Mrs Smith? Mrs Smith!
“Yes, young man.”
“It’s enough. I have had enough. With you. You tiny little woman. Miss Thing. With your pink-priss stockings and your matching shoes. You know this is a police station, right? You know we’re here to fuck with your son?”
“Haven’t you done that? Haven’t you done enough? Why don’t you go get my son?”
“I was about to go until you interrupted me,” I say.
“I’m sorry.”
“And. You interrupted me to tell me what to do. When that wasn’t your place. Do you know how much I hate to be told what to do by a pink-dress-wearing Negra piece of shit like you?”
“Bzeerda Bzeerda five thirty-one.”
This was a voice over a radio.
“Bzeerda echo charlie delta bravo motherfucker Jesus cow is anyone home?”
I pick up the radio, from a desk near admitting.
“Bzeerda Bzeerda seven eighty-eight on a five thirty-one all over.”
“Bzeerda I’ve got a four eighty-three in Negra territory with eleven twenty-twos truck-mounted aside a Boy Scout encampment near the entrance you know where the highway goes in a circle?”
“Say what? Bzeerda I gotta get you someone else. I’m not even dispatch.”
I place the radio gingerly down on its cradle, looking around, hoping no one will see. Sneaking over to admitting, looking at the asses of Latino nurses working there, thinking myself inside their dresses flapping orange/pink I love that color mildly. Black hair—
“Hey!”
“What, Linda?”
“Don’t touch me! Tha’s my hair. I did it that way this morning. It’s on purpose. You know? This is my job! I’m working here. Can’t you go to your wife or something?”
“Wife?!” I say. “What would my wife have to do with anything. Am I proposing to marry you? To leave my wife? Get me an eight thirty-one in five thirty-five.”
“What is a five thirty-five? I know eight thirty-one but not five thirty-five.”
“Five thirty-five is lickety split!”
I reach my hand out to her bottom and pull it back at the last second. The girl sitting next to her sees, rolls her eyes. I imagine she does that Latino lip smack thing—I love that, I love that lip smack thing.
I could tell you I cruised through the station, tossing the ole morals this way and that. I could tell you I smacked Latino asses and fingered Black pussies from its front to its back. Could tell you the next day I was fired for sexual harassment and laid to rest will full pension and a backyard full of alcoholics to be my buds until I croaked at 53. Survived by a daughter, a wife, an old-ass cop car whose light I shine on couples fucking in the side streets near the cemetery when I’m off duty and definitely not supposed to be snooping on some young Carolina riding her boy, looking to the left side, covering her eyes with hair and a casual hand as if to say, Are you looking at me?
Oh, Caroline. Oh girl with perfect body, getting out of a hot tub when I was young somewhere back in Dallas when my dick was still long and my balls were still short, when my cock got hard on a pin drop and her hand was never quite there. Never quite on it, never quite with me. She didn’t want to sit on my lap. That’s Caroline, standing before me, half my height, her head right at my cock, wanting to take me in, to unwrap me and put me in her like a sucker. Her body, covered in tiny droplets, getting into the tub. I don’t remember her swimsuit. In fact, the memory’s so edited in my mind that she’s naked in my main version and I have to go through quite the onion peeling to get to where she’s clad in something decent, something at least that covers the split between her legs. Oh, Carolina, don’t you cry for me. With a something on her handle and a banjo on her knee. Do I cry for the daughters of the Old Republic? Make myself a slave to my masters—we all say yes to someone. Do I release myself from that servitude, sailing back to Africa under Black skies with the kraken in the belly of the beast—Bermuda looming. Deadly triangles. Murder weapons placed at the side of every meal. Months aboard a slave ship—it sounds kind of family to me! Time with the kids, time away from technology, plenty of entertainment coming out of that little Black prayer book—from your little Black medical book! From your little Black book, is right. Carolina has a little Black book. Hers contains the prayers not only of our God but of the pagan gods of all get out, the pagan hell of multiple partners (excluding the Mormons, who we like) all that 100-virgin bullshit from the Mossads of the world (thinking that is a Muslim organization)—not knowing anything really except how to pronounce certain words, not really how to spell, think, or use logic. I am a beast, I know.
But don’t you think I’m uncultured. I read the paper (mostly Facebook). Go out to dinner (to Hooters with my wife). Go to plays (watch TV—streaming video—Duck Dynasty or American Pickers). Go to cultural events (the Dayton air show, which has pretty much become a death-a-year free-for-all maniac convention, but which I still like). And we go to church—I might have mentioned. I just don’t want you to think that because I hate Black people, and because that basically defines me as a person, that I’m ignorant or uneducated. I went to college. All us kids did. My sisters, the funny one and the smart one. And my other sister, the pretty one. I always like to think that among those markers, one was missing (me). That I would be the handsome one. That was the word we used back then. But, you know, that I would be smart looking. The implication here is that I’m dumb. But calling us the pretty one, the funny one, the smart one, and the dumb one—doesn’t work. Even though it really should.
I’m the loud one. I’m the sturdy one. I was tall from the time I was a kid. I played football but I didn’t really think about it. That’s the point. For some of you it would be like you get to play football or not. For me it was understood I would do it, we played in the yard, and then we played in the field at school. It was nice community—a four-syllable word which a lot of you have not heard nowadays.
Community.
We used to have these, across this country. Ten-block areas within which was a school, a church, a grocery store, and a bunch of houses. There were no Black kids in my high school—know that about me. I grew up segregated, and I’m glad for it. We didn’t have Niggar violence in my school. Fights? Yes. Fights that got you killed? No. Guns? We keep our guns to protect our daughter’s precious little pocket. That’s her pocket and aside from me talking to you about it for the purposes of this book it’s a private pocket. Perfect. Private. Pocket. That’s what the Nigras want. The want the White women. Your daughters. Your wives. Lock them bitches up and get with me in the streets killin’ tha Negras. This is my advice to you, man! The Niggar people are a curse! They’re not even people! They lived the the jungles, man. We brought them here. They hold a subservient mind! What kind of people just sat around while the White man loaded ’em up on boats?? Sat around throughout slavery? What kind of spiritless animal does that? A vermin? I’m serious—a vermin?? What kind of gnat? And now we release them and look at them. Atlanta. Houston, now. Niggars everywhere. And we, the Whites, are suffering because we, the Whites, are too forgiving. We’ve taken that part of the Lord’s word too seriously. Because that’s the part where we become enablers. Where we enable the Dark races to try to succeed in a society in which they will never succeed.
Poor whites are part of the problem, too. People like my sister. The smart one. Who could make a lot more money but they choose not to. Her son. Living with us at one point after changing his name to some Inhesion Junky doing drugs trying to kill himself lounging at my sister’s house I told them you need to get him out of here I’m going to be coming to town more often to visit my mom and this has to be taken care of before I get back. Just told ’em that straight out. Told ’em with the words, “Niggar pussy”—used those words. Made a real impression, I’m sure. This guy is out of a job he says he can’t do work for my company ’cause it’d be for less of a rate than he normally makes so he’d basically be doing us a favor—this is a man without a job! It’s by choice! He thinks he’s gonna come to my neighborhood—my house—and suggest I pay for his meals? That Nug can die in an alleyway. Rot. No jokes about how that’s my nephew and Jesus wouldn’t recommend me telling him to rot in an alleyway. No jokes about that’s my family and aren’t I supposed to be the party of family—right? No jokes about that. Those things are subtle kinks in the weave of my otherwise logical world. But every logic deserves a loophole—every logic deserves a magical tone.
If you follow me (as you are by reading) down my logical hole, through my Alice’s tumble, you are sure to find yourself someplace you never imagined. That’s how I am, right now. I am still in the police station. It is still night. Sheth Jones is still in an interrogation room and Mrs Smith is waiting quietly in the waiting room. I have slapped the ass of the Latino admitting officer, repeatedly (in my imagination) so it is getting red. My physical location is unknown, except to everyone but me. But I am trying to get out, I just might need some medical attention.
Sending Mr Jones and Missus Smith home that night they waited at a bus stop—slept there—hoping for the 5:30 train that would be coming along—what an unfortunate people! Slept at a bus stop with no blankets or anything. Like dogs.
Myself I rushed to the ole Main Street—down here we called it Far Hills. Slunk through silent streets. Thought of much of nothing till I got up behind a car looked like it was doing no good. Busted-out tail lights—we were gonna get ’im. I put the top light out on my Subaru—deep blue with a racing engine. I had the insides scooped out and new ones put in. Nothing about this car was second best.
“I said son do you know what I’m stoppin’ you for?”
“Man we wasn’t—“
“I said son do you know what I’m stoppin’ you for?”
“Can I help you, officer?”
“You can help me by getting the fuck out of your vehicle. Now.”
His guy leans in from the right.
“ ’Cuse me. But we was just heading up to our friend’s house. Right up here.”
I pretend to press the button on my radio. “Uh. I need backup two thirty-four on a six eighty-six up on Far Hills location one eight one eight one eight one. Reply with assistance, your friendly roadside program here in Dayton, Ohio. Now you. You two. Out of the car. Don’t make me ask you two assholes again to get your saggy asses out a tha motherfucking car!”
I kick the side of their beater.
Drew my gun.
Fuck these motherfuckers if they didn’t want to play ball. Fuck these motherfuckers.
I looked ‘em over. Coupla bald head wearin’, dope-smoking motherfuckers. Coupla cool cats.
“We’ll see how cool you are when you’re in the slammer.”
I see one of them look at the other but he doesn’t say anything.
The street is silent, just the three of us along a curve.
“I’m gonna play a game with you all. It’s called, When Martin Comes. Have you heard this one?”
“No.” “No sir.”
“Martin is my supervisor. He’s the big dick in our place of employment. See? We’re gonna call Martin now.”
I fake-press the button and fake radio-in a call for Martin.
“—ten oh seven one. So Martin, my boys, is a brute of a man. He’s an absolute brute. When the French came over with their circus—Cirque du Soleil?—they missed the ball with this man. Martin could show Christian Bale how to be Batman, if such a thing is possible. From the depths of my man’s imagination come bench curls and jute presses (the abdominal press of the southwestern Ohio man’s gym routine)—from his method of riding Black Black horses the power between your legs the frontline of a re-enactment arching back to Gettysburg (say it with me, like LettuceBerg, Gettysburg) to Martin’s 007-quick hitting-your-head-against-a-urinal reflexes to the Forest Gump feather floating down down down like the Dow when my man in the sky forgets to pretend we’re not having a pandemic when my Batman mayor of New York juggles hand towels blotted with ink the blood the unavoidable stains on your hand when you kill a person in cold blood on this very circle on the edge of Ohio in the middle of winter this’ll be a February murder this’ll be a February murder!”
“No, man!” “No!!”
“Why not?” I say.
“Because you don’t really want to kill us!” “Because you want to do the right thing!!”
“I’m sick of doing the right thing.”
“No—you’re not!” “Man we’re going to die.”
“He’s right!”
“Oh!”
“Do you know what the devil in the pale moon light?” I ask. “Do you know what the devil in the pale moon light? Do. You. Know. What the devil. In the pale moonlight? Have you danced with the devil in the pale moon light. Insert Joker speech here—technical difficulties!—we need the joker speech here. Have you guys seen Batman? The original Batman. No? Only the Christopher Nolan ones. No, this is before that. Before your time. Before Christian Bale—this is one I would think you guys have seen. He’s in the library. He says, ’I’m the devil, do you want to dance with me in the pale moon light?” Or something like that—it’s something. Anyway this line kinda reminds me of right now. The three of us—so intimate. So lovely, that we’ve decided to meet up like this, here in Oakwood, which—what are you boys doing in Oakwood tonight?”
“We were just going home.”
“Really? Where’s home?”
“Just up the road.”
“Where.”
“Just here.”
“Where? Up there? Where the three million dollar houses are? Or up here? Where the five million dollar houses are?”
“Oh, no. We didn’t know there were any five million dollar houses there.”
“We just wanna go to our one house—which is right up there on the left.”
“Where? What’s the street name? You dumb shit. You no more live up there than my cat likes to be fucked up the ass with Dasani bottles. She may do it—that don’t mean she likes it! Where’s this house of yours? Name one street. Name one street within five miles of here and then tell me you’re not down in our White neighborhood selling drugs.”
“I swear, we’re not—“
“Tell me you’re not down here selling drugs.”
“We ain’t—!”
“Soma these white girls call you from their basement? Having titty parties and decided they need some of your chronic? Which house was it? Brittany? On Castle Road? Or Michelle, 187 Lakeview Terrace? Or Kimberly—her snug little ass. You guys like pussy? Like cock? You ever do meth, crank, speed? I’m a fan of all three (though never together). Like little girls—like little boys, too. Like to wipe their dirty little asses. Pool of piss in a boy’s underpants. Pools of piss in a girl’s. I wiped a purple piss pot from the grape-wrinkled asses of a few last survivors of your great art, the art of reconciliation, with which the opponents of grace were supposed to resolve themselves (self-resolve) so they stopped being a problem so they stopped being a pain in all our programs like the—the soccer and the—the tennis lessons the—the diversity courses and the—the mental health training programs it’s all too much to take it’s like I was buzzing around a bee bee bee I wanted to write poetry I wanted to play plays but not you English-speaking idiots more like the greats they spoke English ‘cause that was England this is America so here we speak American not African like you two blokes here. I need to preach these little sermons in the nighttime hours here on Far Hills Avenue to Negras like yourselves. Who have taken it upon themselves to Drive While Black Through A White Neighborhood Containing Little White Girls With Fantastic White Pussies They’re Great I’m Sure I Am Sure I am sure those pussies are so stellar in their valuation that they justify this and other traffic stops it’s mainly their color and their general aesthetic but also the fact that they live like slobs. The fact that they ruin my property values, basically. Because I view my home as an investment, not as a place to live. Not as a place to raise my kids. It’s not enough that I’m using it, for a while, as my vessel passes through this plane. No. I have to make 20%. Or 50%. Or a hundred percent, if possible. This is the root of my evil. Not actually that I’m racist. I don’t mind creatures from other tribes interacting. I don’t care that their skin is Black—except that it looks subhuman! This is my problem, gentlemen. My problem is that I want to let you go but I can’t let you go. Not now. Not now that you have insulted the status of an officer. Now that you have given me probable cause to search your vehicle for crack or whatever novel drug you have in there. Now that you have threatened the sanctity of White girl pussy—have threatened her within an inch of her life. Now that your sticky fingers have brought you in contact with my kid in my hood, in my house you can take your ‘heron’ back to Carolina in the sunshine of my mind. Maybe it’s the corners. Corners of my mind. Carolina fading. Subtext swirling down. Brought their ‘packages’ into the ‘room’ we made a ‘box’—the ‘box’ was made of strings long long strings I could grip them but every time I pulled, it just came out, dangling from my hands, loose fingers—I couldn’t hold on, anymore. It was all just falling out of me, ammunition swirling, my heart and lungs and stomach make an animation on the floor. I reach down, hands play in blood, making a mess on some hallway in hospice. In hell. Come high water. This vision of myself, of what I’ve become, dead and old in a hospital somewhere, visions of my organs splayed on the tiles—me, bent over my chair walker, fingernails scraping at bloodstains baked into the floor, thinking they’re real, thinking they’re current, but what to my world is a luscious plate of my insides is really just the leftover of a 5am blood draw, relegated to the cracks between linoleum. This is what I think of sometimes—don’t you?”
I had to get outta there real fast ‘cause those boys wasn’t doin’ nothin’ wrong they was jest drivin’ while Black, young, and bald in Oakwood Ohio, Centerville Ohio. And I was jest in me token blue roadster of the Subaru variety, sloping cars in the gaslight of the moonlight of Mars.
Slunk into me house and let meself upstairs where the child be chillin’, darling name of Melissa sleepin’ in da bed! Tucked in so nice and tight between those sheets, tight in those pants! She was tight in her underwear ’till I saw me ole wife, Wifey Wifey Poo, in she under under pants! I run my fingers there.
“Shit, man.”
“I’ll drill you in your poo hole,” I say.
And I drill my fingers in between her cheeks.
“Ah! Oh!! Stop it! I’m sleeping where have you been?”
“Been catchin’ bad guys.”
“All night?”
“Takes a while, sometimes. When a thing takes a while, I take a while to do that thing.”
“Honestly.”
“I’m being honest.”
“Honey, please.”
“Everything I say is true. And everything I do is based on what I say.”
“Pshff.”
“How is the mistress of my house?”
“She’s—she went to sleep around eight, did all her homework—“
“I mean you!”
“You know, it may seem to one that you have fucked up but then you turn around and put that ace in my hole,” my wife says.
“I’m the ace in your hole,” I say.
“That’s right.”
“In your hole.”
“That’s right now don’t push it. You can have my hole right after I get back from the bathroom!”
She jumps out from between the covers and I see her pink pajama ass go ’round the corner to the toilet.
“You’re the best White wife a guy could have!”
“White wife?” she questions.
“White wife,” I say to myself. “White wife. The right wife to a White guy. Prom queen?! Well, not really check. But one of the prettiest girls in the school, at any school. Bloody vag check!—check. Check, Nigras. Check. Turn down for what in my head this Black music is stuck with me. Snuck into my car from those west side calls from earlier. These are the kind of calls that turned baby fried in a microwave into a cliche.”
“What are you talking about, hun?”
“I’m talking about turning a baby into a microwave.”
“Come down here with me and sleep.”
“I had this call tonight. It was scary, hun. It violated my personal space and involved a Black kid watching Jennifer Lawrence on TV.”
“That part where she fell?”
“That part, yes. Where she fell. I’m no Sherlock Holmes but I think you think that I think that you’re trying to tell me something about this episode of JLaw stomping up that staircase—that it was central or somehow important to me as I struggle through my day. Why is it that you think that? Why indeed. And here I am and I say ‘Jennifer Lawrence on TV’ and here you are with ‘The part where she fell?’ like you were ordained to be here tonight in our darkest hour children missing this is just what I do at the end of the day. I rehash and unload the pivotals of my daily Rottweiler, Frank, Walker—good Irish names see you spend your whole life learning the rules (and subsequently to follow the rules) but I’m here all along and I rewrite the rules as—I—motherfucking—go—along.”
“Are you ready to fuck me?”
“There was this kid. And he was watching TV. And we went there on one of these fake calls, these fake noise disturbance or domestic disturbance calls where they 911 us in, giving us license to blow them the fuck away and they’re hoping to blow the kids away—that’s why they made the call, you know. Homicide by 911. Whoever came up with that? But we’re there, and this kid is staring up Jennifer Lawrence’s dress—as best he can—and I’m shot with something—myself—me, shot with it! Shot through. Eddies of flesh and gratification. Who Neuromanced me into the 10th grade except not really because a panel analyzed my reading habits, they discovered I’m reading solely middle-grade fiction, young adult doesn’t even begin to cover this. And they’re like: you’re half-ape with a 3rd grade reading level. And I’m like: Which half? Which half that’s a joke (see) so this kid—this kid. He blows me away with his silence. He’s standing there dropped his pencil—kid looks like a little girl. And not in that trans-y way. Not like a crossdresser. I mean there’s a guy dressed in drag way of looking and there’s just a pure—girl—staring back at me, JLaw in the background, continuing to trip upwards in her lofty trajectory starward, me and Anthony, Martin, the whole squad right there ready to blow a bomb up some kid’s ass. And this kid is giving me mouth. And I’m looking at—him?—trying to figure if he really is a boy or a girl—and he’s pretty! I mean whether he is or is not a boy doesn’t affect what I’m saying here which is that kid was attractive—for a Black—kid could turn heads—among a certain crowd.”
“So you’re saying this kid was attractive.”
“For a Niggar.”
“Of course. Matters of race aside. This kid was hot for a stone-cold Niggar.”
“Baby lie down.”
“I’ll lie down when I die down. Who said that?”
“No one. You did.”
“Tell me I’m smart, baby.”
“You’re smart, baby.”
“Tell me more.”
“Smart. You are. You were the smartest cop in this year’s trivia contest.”
“Knew me some trivia.”
“Knew you did. Come to bed, baby. Right here next to me and you can tell me your cop stories while you fall asleep.”
I get undressed while I tell her this one.
“Anyway this kid.”
“Pretty kid.”
“Real pretty kid. For a Nigra. But he had these high cheeks hit me like stones off the Serengeti. Stands of sun. Sedona Arizona. Mountain tombs. Walls on cave writing. Early early man. They rose to the bases of these eyes, Annabel. For thine eyes have seen the glory of the Lord!”
“Amen!”
“You sound like you’re sneezing when you do that. It sounds like the tiniest little cum!”
“You’re very naughty right before you go to sleep.”
“Think you.”
“You have very pretty pinkish cheeks.”
Annabel wiggles her nose.
“So. We had a horse-drawn carriage with armaments. Coupla diggly-doo cannons and some swamp rot powder. Came up the left firmament all in uniformed ways. Bunch of corridor parks in there. Ravines. Ramparts. Ravenous bullets fire from my muskets. The only reason I couldn’t fire is I thought it was female! Thought that little musket puppy was a bitch. And it flashed through my mind—thoughts of this bitch’s pussy and tits, all coiled up underneath that hoodie and furled inside that bitch’s cunt reception area, that this bitch was fuckable. I never thought that before—never about a Nigra.”
Annabel was sitting up in bed by now.
“I swear to you, sweets, I never thought it before. Never while working. And never about a person of the Blackness persuasion—never! Here it was my job to kill this Negro. Kill with extreme prejudice! We went through the door. Once you go through the door, that’s my job. I mean that’s what puts bacon on the table baby! Fuck. And here’s this Nigra. Black as a pretty black bitch can be. But is it a woman—is it a girl? ’Cause it’s not just ’cause I don’t want my name in the paper next to some West Dayton prom queen. Do they even have proms on the west side? I woulda thought they were done with celebration and besides no one wants to date a west Dayton bitch with all her thumb rings and finger rings—gold-platted hoop earrings the size of Texas. And I could not fire that gun. My weapon finger would not twitch. Upon the cross hairs coming up in that bitch’s head. Which wasn’t a bitch at all! He had hair—like—braids coming all out up over here and—beads—coming up this way over there and then this waist I saw his skin it was metallic—not just the usual ashy Brown. It was like King Tutankhamen had come down from on high and Mohammad was there too and they crowned this kid the male/female Most Attractive Among Black People To Date. The Michael Jackson of the Current Day, as a kid, as that dancing king sang his song of sixpence, baked in a pie. The thing I want you to know about this kid—“
“Is that you want to fuck him?”
“Ha ha. Very funny, Ann. You’re making jokes while I’m trying to tell something serious. What I’m trying to tell you, I’m not embarrassed about. It’s not something I want the office to know, however, because it could be used against me in a court of law. It’s not illegal—before you ask—well it sort of is illegal. I’m not sure. But if it is against the law it’s only slightly. I kept those two for questioning, tonight, way past the point at which we would normally keep them for questioning. And it wasn’t ’cause I wanted to get them on some charge. We had him for disruption and endangerment at the house. I coulda booked this kid! I could have booked this kid for a lot worse than nothing and I didn’t. I didn’t. That’s a greater crime I could have did—that I didn’t. And that covers this lesser one: this kid and his mom—I kept this kid—I kept this kid at the station tonight and the reason I did it isn’t because of a crime he committed. It isn’t because of a crime he did not commit. I kept him there—because I like him.”
“You like him?”
“I think so.”
“Well what was all that about your loving his fucking face that left you unclear on whether you like him? It sounds pretty clear to me.”
“I’m not staying I want to fuck the kid. He’s off obsessed with Jennifer Lawrence enough that fucking his arresting officer wouldn’t be part of the gig. I’m sure! If you’d listened to me you would see that I just liked how he looked. Geez. Crap. I’m not divorcing you. I didn’t buy him a fucking ring!”
“Baby, forget about it. Come to bed. Right here. Right here beside me.”
I crawl into bed next to her. My old-ass wife with her old-ass back and her old-ass pussy. It was ok (you could cum in it) but it didn’t present the same ziiing that it used to. When she was young and perfect. When she wouldn’t let me have it. What is that about something good that when its owner doesn’t let you have it, it makes you go ziiing!?
I looked around our room. It was filled with maps, books, a large globe in the corner. I collect maps. It’s an unusual collection for a police officer but I like to think I’m a special officer. And I like to think I’m going places. And I like to have a collection—’cause it gives me something to do.
We have large built-in bookshelves (which I built myself—weeks of labor, my daughter holding the flashlight). A 100-gallon saltwater fish tank, complete with a mantis shrimp. Those swirly lamps with six heads each—those we have two.
My daughter is down the hall. Her bedroom kept razor-neat through the instruction of Annabel and myself. Her lacrosse uniform (she refuses to cheer). Her stack of science and engineering textbooks (she’s set to enter University of Dayton’s Management Information Systems program when she graduates). Don’t ask me what MIS really means—I couldn’t tell you. But I know that it makes more money than police officer, so I’m happy for her.
And that’s it. We could have had other children but Annabel said no. She didn’t just say no. She stopped going to church, I think to prove her point—and she never came back. For a while Melissa and I went together. Then Melissa stopped, and for a couple weeks I went on my own, then I stopped too. Church without your wife and kid, singing all those songs and listening to those endless sermons—the whole thing was set up like a show. Quick stuff at the beginning, boring stuff at the middle, and then some fast music and we were all shaking hands in the corridor, eating donuts and drinking coffee and pretending to make conversation with the deacons and the old folks and I couldn’t help it but my eyes always ran to the youth group who stood in the corner, leaning against the partitioned wall and looking so cool.
We had a girl who worked at the station for a while—intern, brown hair, brown eyes. I looked at her that way, too. Hungry. For her pussy, yes—for that glorious puss—but I knew I would never have it. She’s my daughter’s age, for the sake of our Lord and Savior. Get your mind out of the gutter! But her charms entice me, her gifts are too great to resist! And I find myself staring at the back of her jeans, getting a peek at her red undies, wishing they were mine, that I was there, that she might think of me in a moment (the way I think of her) and that we might joy in our union. When I get to the end, though, picturing that intern’s face at the moment of my orgasm, it falls flat because my mind has not the power to image her face at that time. My processor overloads. There is smoke in my eyes. I can’t picture her face at all and it is horrible.
I stopped going to church. I still use those kids as masturbation fantasies. Tight flesh, gripped around tendons. Expressions of joy. Except I can’t quite get those expressions. Those intimate flesh configurations run to the quality of strangers, useless people making love in tenement buildings to the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel. Forgotten, them, any of the goodness. Any of the value inherent in us at birth. Black people copulating on springy mattresses, feeling none of the pleasure (or the pain) felt by White people when we fuck. How could they? I’m envisioning it. Crippled Black flesh crashing into each other like foil, creaking and crisping with a loose Black dick and a drippy Black puss, reaching the back of her wall, flagellating it, ripping it into shape, digging it, dragging it, doping it with a shot. That’s how I imagine Black sex.
White sex isn’t much better. A bunch of flabby skin with the only people able to enjoy it young people—unaware of what they have (at least I was) until it’s too late. You got slapped with a kid, a wife, and suddenly all the possibilities are gone. And you’re on a ride. A tunnel. With no way off.
What way off do I have? Death? Change careers—forget it. I’m on the one-day-at-a-time plan. Wake up behind schedule. Rip and run through work. Come home, see Melissa, see Annabel, watch TV, bed, sleep, sex (all of which I resent). All I have is taking care of the fish tank! That’s all there is at the base of my life, is one saltwater tank and a mantis shrimp. That’s everything there is.
Except Marty. My partner Martin Harris. He’s been my partner since my last partner got killed. Interval of six years. Marty started out a short Niggar couldn’t even shoot his gun. Wears his vest cockeye. Used to work undercover. West Dayton. Drug shit. Informant turned UC turned beat cop turned partner to the Whitest White motherfucker in that whole department—that’s me.
Marty was a fuckup—no question. Wore his gun on the wrong side. Forgot to load it. Tripped up the stairs at Central. Signed up on the wrong duty roster—his signup would have him mopping floors in the cafeteria, instead of responding to domestic calls with me.
I make it a habit to show Martin something new about being a police officer every time I do it. Every day—and I try to sneak it in—I instruct him in the ways of policing (the way we do it in Ohio), showing him how to tie his shoes, how to get the tip of his gun into the point of his holster, and which foods are becoming for a cop to eat.
For instance, a breakfast bagel with egg and spinach—not a cop food. Breakfast bagel with sausage and bacon—is a cop food. Orange juice for breakfast—not a cop food. Coke for breakfast—is a cop food. Do we have to do more of these or do you get the picture?
Martin is ok, though—for a Blackie. He signed up for this job. He should know what it entails. It entails a whole bunch of rounding up criminal Negras and sometimes blowing them away. That’s the job. That’s why I got into the job—aside from the fact I can’t do anything else. And cop is sort of prestigious. You’re seen as a leader of the community. I mean, Martin isn’t. There’s only so far a Niggar can go in Dayton whether he’s a cop or not. And Black people don’t exactly like the police. You can imagine, you’re a Black girl and your daddy comes home as a cop you’re prob’ly not all, Wow, Daddy, thanks for picking up my friends who were freebasing on the playground! Thanks for busting my boyfriend who deals meth—you’re really a friend to me! How can they love a cop in their neighborhoods? The cop is their enemy. A stone cold enemy of the people. I would think it was shameful to be a cop if you were Black. The downright enemy. Your sons—Black-faced idiot punks that they are—are prostituting your own kind right up the street! Martin doesn’t do drugs as far as I can tell, but it’s only a matter of time. He’ll end up ass-in-cell like the rest of them. It’s inevitable. They’re more susceptible. That’s what I’m saying. It’s in their blood. It’s in their DNA. To do drugs. To work as a prostitute. To fuck for money. To go to their fake churches with their fake pastors who don’t have any degrees and do that fake huffing-punching thing they do when they’re like Hey, uh. It’s my fire, uh. You will bring me the ligh, t! Washing in his holy ligh, t! It’s animal! It’s pantheistic! That talk is literally the combination of our natural language with African tigers and shit! Panting of animals! It’s bestial, I’m saying. It’s not even something the White devil would do—I find more solace in that horny Red beast than in the huff-panting of the Blacks in their so-called churches, their so-called banks, their so-called fried chicken places. You know, I used to like fried chicken as a child. We went to KFC. It was different then. Our skin was crispy, but it was clean. Then Church’s came in and set up their franchises all over the place and suddenly chicken was Black. They fucking owed that shit. And they still do, to this day. And that’s why when Annabel says, “Let’s get chicken!” and Melissa screamed “Yaaay!” in her childhood delight, I put up every hoot and holler that we not get chicken because it doesn’t have a coupon or it’s too greasy. But my mouth watered the whole time, and I wished for a day when even fried chicken was not colored by the presence of my darker brothers.
I wandered through the house like a rogue, fixing crooked books on the bookshelf and masturbating to porn in the basement.
I was shiftless, thinking about the broken boy, tweaking my fronts with a so-good fantasy of riding him bareback like a camel, him wearing slaves’ clothes, a tunic woven from brush, his Black ass shining in the sun. The pyramids were in the background. I wasn’t sultan, but I was better, somehow—he took orders from me—and in my dreams we frolicked beside gazelle on the Serengeti plain, frustrated no more by our cop uniforms and ammunition. Vending machines and parking slots. Some girl throwing her ass up in that tight pair of jeans, taunting me, tempting me—tempting us all with that cooch which she will not give you—which she will not let you have despite your daily begging. Your begging like a dog who needs to stick it. It’s not even sexual anymore, just a dog and his bone needing to fuck, cum, and make it soft again. Not rape, exactly. Just a trip to happy land and then a nap underneath a tree. This is the sort of thing I imagined—do you imagine such things?
Cleaner days and more peaceful days. A dog in a motherfucking park—you hear what I’m saying? Crimson Tide. Roll tide—roll! My Ohio boys will beat your ’Bama boys any day of the fucking week. ’Bama may have a cool logo but ’Hia has the best young men’s athletic program in this hemisphere. Bar none. ’Bama boys.
Days with college quadrangles and hot dog stands. We went to see Ohio University last week with Melissa. Do you know what they had? A gyro buggy. Gyrhho. Guy-ro. I can’t even pronounce the damn thing! Some mid-eastern boy, ripe for ass-rape, perched in there with a mathematics textbook talking on the phone in Arab or whatever, sucking up our tax dollars, fucking our little girls—fuck! It makes me sweat to think about. Some thin A-Rab dick sliding into my daughter’s pussy on her first day there. He’d prob’ly still have his textbook with him when he did it—E equals MC squared probability matrix bullshit. They’re implementing some of that stuff at work. Ways to catch criminals using—not even using their fingerprints—they can track your personality, take a gesture and part of a photo and some Tweet you made ten years ago. Track your ass down to within an inch of where you’re standing. Except they use centimeters, ’cause the software was developed in Asia. Believe that? Software we use in our computers, right here, was actually developed in Asia. Bully.
I run my hand over the maps. Circle my study. Everything is perfectly laid out—designed for looking. Like my grandmother’s living room. Never touch. Never lay a finger on her china lest you want your fingers broken. Blackies had living rooms like that. Couches covered in plastic. Fanatical grandmothers smacking your butt as soon as you sat down. Black living rooms didn’t have vintage maps, though—what income could a black person have that would rival mine? You might not think cops make enough to live in Oakwood, have a collection of maps. But we do. Some of us do very well.
I sit down on the floor. On my map/rug that shows the Mercator projection of the northern hemisphere. Everything in threads, fine yarn from wherever. I run my fingers through the carpeting, picturing that it’s my daughter’s hair. Your daughter is everything, if you’re a father. You’re her dad, her boyfriend, her protector, her BFF. She needs you more than she’ll ever know, incapable of getting through the world alone, forever lost and confused. She’s like her mother—waiting to be plucked by some guy who has the dual intention of loving her till the day he dies and also wearing down her reserves until she’s nothing more than a sex slave, ready and willing to submit to his cock, lay there, spread it, take it, want it, love it. That’s what some guy wants to do to my daughter. The peanut-headed Nikkas who want to give it to her—those are not the ones you have to worry about. It’s the smart ones, the prudent predators, the ones who want to wife her and do that shit the rest of they lives—those are the ones who keep you up at night.
Imagine her, on her front, ass in the air, getting drilled by Sheth Jones. That bitch taking what he wants from her. Sliding in that fat cock, making her hurt a little. Her feeling so smooth to him and him feeling so smooth to her. Imagine my daughter liking it—loving it—to the degree that she squirms in pleasure. Sheth Jones, that nappy-headed kid jerking off to Jennifer Lawrence on TV, coming to my police station sitting in my interrogation room lying to my ignorant face about what he was doing last night. Sheth Ignorant Jones, whose smug-ass face needed a slap!—him fucking my kid—can you imagine? I’d stand on that interrogation table and rub my dick in his face! Reach up and turn off the lights! Switch it with a disco ball! Decadent kid. Fucking Air Force Ones and you’re living on Harriet Street in West Dayton. Idiots. If Mrs Smith had spent $2600 on stock in Apple, Amazon, and Tesla just one year ago, it would be worth over $100,000. I almost bought that stock myself but I was paying into Melissa’s tuition fund.
I thought of Mrs Smith writing a check for $2600—something she would never do.
Thought of her grandson, when he was young. Still cute. Before developing those man Niggar genes. Having that Niggar fuck my daughter is something that can never happen. Their baby—would disgust me. Especially if it was a girl. Girl Niggars are the worst. Nappy-ass vagina hair, a big-ass cut for where their snatch should be. Black and horrendous. No form to it, no shape, no angle. If they had a son he could be my son—to a degree. Then after that I would have to send him to the other side of town, get him some chitlins.
I lie back. Take out my lighter. Flick it. Think of the effect it would have on my wall full of maps. From Asia to Africa, everything burning, and eventually North America. Then it would burn up the ice. I imagine my maps, turned carbon. Aces of WWI, WWII. WWIII if we can get it started. I’d like to blow this planet off its axes, nuke it to hell. I think the Hell’s Angels have it right: Use it up, wear it out. There ain’t nothing more in this whole world that I care about. I like that lyric, ‘cause it showcases my nihilism and intellectualism. Bitch, please. You ain’ never known me since you known me. You ain’t. Never. Known me. I can’t get the syllables right. Black language is so difficult. I meant to say it’s simple—too simple. It’s. Uh. Too simple for the White man to understand. We Whites have a refined sensibility when it comes to the tongueth of the White man. Our Native English. Mother tongue. Never known to the Black man or the Red man, our tongue was handed down by God to Moses on the mountain with the Ten Commandments and sliced bread—Sanskrit never had nuthin’ on this!
I tell you I can see visions of the future and the future is fire. Fire over the whole Earth, scorched sights, elementary particles, the dusk of man. In my world I set fire to this room maps-first and see them tumbling the supporting flames up and up and up. To the side of the building, rolling our house in flame. Boiling us, roiling the entire street, the neighborhood, Captain Planet Fucknugget, the cigarette at the end of the driveway. It’s as if I’m channeling someone, in this moment, someone far away who hardly thinks about race. Someone for whom in their society it’s become not an issue—? Someone smarter than me, a poet, someone with interests and desires not my own. It’s as if this someone channels me—as if they come to play me like a game, sitting down at the controllers to run me down, to run me into the ground. It’s like they don’t know how difficult it is down here. To be their avatar. Their game body. The them they like to think of, themselves. The them they see when they dream.
I gather this channel, fanning down the flames from my collection. How post to gather things and burn them. Stacks of books, next. Every one in my map room. The whole totality of knowledge, from A to Z, from alpha to omega, the whole internet. The big bang nuclearizes my books, my maps, my self as I meditate cross legged in this racist Dayton suburb. But it’s ok because it’s mostly what White people think anyway. It’s ok because we only do it when White people are around. It’s ok, it’s ok, but it’s not. The you I’m connected to now knows this, I think. From the vantage point from which I see you, I sense your location to be far enough in advance and not too far to the side, that your civilization has moved on to some far less basic problem. To trouble itself with. As I sit here. With the plains burning. With our corn fields burning. With Mississippi Burning. With human rights burning. With that Alpha and that Omega burning. With my whole goddamn collection burning!
You found me while I was sleeping. I was calm then. But now, as I proceed in telling you this story, I can no longer act as a sleeper, but must reveal to you that I am rising.
Waking in the morning at 7am. Melissa standing over me, in her school clothes, looking down on me from a height (as she should), turning her head sideways in that half-child, half-adult way. She is invisible. She is invincible.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m hatching a plan.”
She looks around at the candles on the floor, corner of my favorite map burned.
“Well, you’re gonna be late for work if you don’t get up. Shower.”
She turns but I say, “Melissa, Missy, let me ask you something.”
“What.”
I pull her back into the room by her shoe.
“When you—or your classmates—when you think about each other, do you think about race?”
“What do you mean, race?”
“Like whether a kid is Black or not. Or whether she’s from Polynesian descent. You know, a person’s fromness.”
“I don’t usually think about their fromness.”
“What do you think about? When you look at a face? Are you like, This kid is Black, this kid is Black in the back of your head?”
“No.”
“No??”
“No. What do you want from me?”
“I want to know what you’re thinking.”
I sit up.
“Like when your friend, Lucas, got beat up by those four Black guys. When he tells you the story, does he say, ‘I got beat up by four Black guys?’ “
“Yes. I think that’s what he said.”
“He said four Black guys.”
“Well he mentioned it but that wasn’t the point of the story. I mean he did get beat up by four Black guys—there’s no way around it. But he’s not like Niggar this and Niggar that when he says it. And he doesn’t necessarily imply that they beat him up because they were Black.”
“But that is why they beat him up.”
“Who knows! It’s just a fact that they were Black and he was White, and since there were four of them and they were all Black it does beg the question—“
“That’s what I’m saying! It begs the question. Begs the question. Isn’t it more like you can imply that they beat him up because he was White?”
“I think you mean infer.”
“Imply, infer—I don’t know what I mean! I’m not pre-podiatry like you.”
“Podiatry happens to be one of the fastest growing medical specialties in the world. We’re growing at a rate of 15% annually.”
“What is growing at a 15% rate annually?”
“Podiatry. As a science.”
“But how can you say—? It doesn’t matter. Can’t you infer it was a racist attack from the fact that it was four on one? Black on White? Violence.”
“Is that what you do in your profession?”
“Hey. Please watch it there.”
“Isn’t it? I watch the news.”
“And what do you find out from the news that you don’t also get from your dear old dad?”
“A lot of Black people kill’d. With no reason.”
“Hey! Hey. Maybe it’s time you make your breakfast.”
The three of us sat, my wife and daughter closer together than anyone else, me seated farther away from everyone else. When I moved my chair, it rectified the situation. But then one of them would move their chair and I’d be in the cold again.
“This situation with Lucas,” I say. “Did the bastards who did this ever get caught?”
“No,” Melissa says through a bite of cereal. “Didn’t you look for them?”
“Kinda hard to find them when he didn’t recognize their faces.”
“Maybe it’s hard to recognize faces when you’re having yours beat in.”
“Touché. Pass the butter. But don’t you think,” I say, buttering my bagel, “that Lucas wants revenge?”
“I know he was really mad,” my daughter says without looking at me.
“Really mad? I’d want to kill the motherfuckers—!”
“Honey!” my wife says.
So I say very quietly, “If it was me, I would want to kill the motherfuckers.”
Annabel glares at me.
“And then I’d want to rip every one of their goddamn throats out of their fucking heads. That’s me. I’m a cop, though—you know, cop rules, cop life.”
“This is our breakfast table,” Annabel says.
“Is my conversation inappropriate for our breakfast table?”
Melissa gets up.
“Have a good day you two!”
“Sit down!” I say. “We’re in the middle of something here. What I want to know is, is this Lucas such a pussy that he lets such a thing go? That he gets beat up—severely beaten!—and he lets the scum that did it get away? With no punishment! They’ll never get what they deserve.”
“He did get angry after it happened, Dad. He went into his back yard and practically dug it up with sticks.”
“What does that mean, dug it up with sticks? What is that?”
“I don’t know! He took sticks and ripped up the dirt. He said he was screaming and crying. He said he was really mad.”
“Then what?”
“Then they took his ass to the hospital.”
“But what about the guys?”
“The guys who beat him up?”
“Yes!!”
“I don’t know what you want from me. I have to go to school.”
Melissa gets up and Annabel puts her hand on top of mine.
“She’s just a girl,” Annabel tells me. “She doesn’t understand revenge—“
“I’m sure she understands revenge.”
“But she doesn’t feel it in her blood like you and I do. She’s young. She grew up with Black kids her whole life. They’re not such a quantity for her as they are for you or I. Just let her go. She gotta focus on her age things.”
“I don’t see what kind of kid doesn’t go after his attackers. Didn’t Melissa like him for a while?”
“Lucas? Maybe for a minute.”
“That’s not the kind of guy I want in her life, Ann.”
“I don’t think he’s in her life. Can I get you another sausage?”
“I’m fine.”
I wipe my mustache.
I stand.
“I just don’t want pussy-ass kids in my daughter’s life.”
“Why don’t you say it a little louder?”
“What was that?”
“I said. Why don’t you say it a little bit louder!”
Melissa slams the front door. It’s loud. It reminds me of when my mother did it.
“We’ve got a goddamn daughter that hangs out with faggots!”
“He’s not a faggot!!”
“He acts like one! Any kid gets beat up by four black guys does nothing about it—that’s a faggot!!”
“You ruined your life now you’re ruining my daughter’s. That means you’re ruining mine. Do you want to get out or do you want to make this work? That’s a question. That’s my motherfucking question!!”
“I’ll answer your question!”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’m gonna get out of here and get to work. Where I’m gonna nuts-down some Negros who ain’t learn how to act right! Then I’m gonna go to Hooters with the boys and have some beers then I’m gonna come home and drink more while you encourage our kid to hang out with weaklings. Weaklings! Bums! And the Big Lebowski will play in the background. The strings will rise! I shall become Lord of All and the pianissimo of it all—resplendent—will resound with the chords of followed and broken rules, those little rules you have in your head that keep you on the track of it all. Those are the guide stones of my life—should be your life—gently smacking me in the neck. Holding me like a tiger’s breath. Mother. Counselor. See the departmental one every few months after a bad break. This one (also a fag) suggests I give the Nigs a rest next time. They are people too (apparently). They have feelings and thoughts (just like me). They have families—just like me. Do I feel clear in my thoughts? No. Obviously not. Do these thoughts seem clear to you? I have a spitfire of a daughter just coming out of puberty she doesn’t need to get her pussy wrecked by a team of Niggars fresh from the farm. I couldn’t stand for that to happen. And he asks, Do you think it’s likely your daughter will be raped by a pack of Black children from the West Side? And I say, I don’t know—because I don’t. I don’t know what these people are scheming up! How could I know? They’re a bunch of malignant, arrogant pricks. With zero respect for authority. For the way things aught to be. For White history. For the fucking Republic! Them pulling down those statues is just the same as them raping my daughter. That kid from yesterday—Sheth—him sitting there staring on repeat at Jennifer Lawrence tripping up the Oscar stairs—that’s exactly the problem. White status—Jennifer Lawrence, a young, powerful actress who we all want to fuck from behind (get in there, grind that young kid on the set of her white trash movies)—this is what Mr Jones is watching—Jennifer Lawrence fall—exactly! That’s the whole thing! That’s what gets this Black kid off. It isn’t watching Jennifer Lawrence stand tall. It’s watching her fall over. Watching her fail at walking up the stairs. To see her utterly humiliated. Paralyzed. Bent over. Vulnerable. That’s our culture. That’s our legacy. The Pride of the South. La Belle of La Southern Belle. Oregon District. Whites only. The house I got married in. Long, rolling back yard. Had my sister’s kid do our wedding video—he fucked it up. Too many shots of the food, not enough of the action. My sister is a mystery to me. Seemingly clueless—still I know she’s smarter than me. The Fall. Fall of Man right into the trash can. I would never marry a woman I met East of the Mississippi. They’re too unkind. Too unkind.”
I manage to stop talking. My wife stands in the doorway. Breakfast dishes are on the table. I’m still in my clothes from the night before. My map room will need cleaning. I stare in its direction.
“Hun,” Annabel says.
“Yeah.”
“You are fucking unbelievable.”
I decided to go to the kid’s school—what the heck. I looked him up in TelstarCat, sort of a home brew system we have for finding out information on people. There he was—Sheth Jones, 15, Stivers High School. Academic performer? We’ll see about that.
I dissed my partner on a 111-1. That’s when you need to take care of some personal shit but you don’t want your pard to come along so you toss him out on a 444. Sucks to be the partner on that one, ’cause a 444 means you gotta do all the same shit as usual but without backup. Sending someone on a 444 is grounds for ending the partnership.
Martin just said, “Whatever.”
He slammed the door.
Going across town, I put my driving gloves on, turn’t up the radio. We listen to nothing but hip hop—hippity hip hop!—Niggars singing their hearts out in lovesick songs. Niggar ballerinas like Rihanna singing songs with fake-Black Eminem. People like me will never understand Eminem’s culture (that it isn’t Black). Now I’m asserting truths from within a rejection of my main persona—good to be back! As to whether I do drugs, let it be a mystery to you, now, oh child. Let you not worry your little mind about it. If I did drugs they would be like Vicodin or Adderall (pills)—If I did pills they would be pretty pills. Pills with scientific names and symbols on their body, like a capsuled spaceship that took me where I wanted to go. You might think me a crude disciplinarian—a strange cop!—but all I was if ever I was anything is bad. It’s true. They’d never make a movie about me. I’m not interesting enough. But I didn’t say I was interesting. I just said I was bad. I don’t look bad—just the opposite. I look good. I represent the government. I’m here to help. See these cuffs? They’re not here to hurt you—they’re here to keep you safe. Further around on my Batman belt, this gun? It’s not here to hurt you—it’s here to keep you safe. People don’t see the bad side of me which—doesn’t want to hurt kids, nah, I’m not that kind of bad guy. I feel guilty when I catch sight of Missy’s underwear. When its in the wash. I’ve known some child perverts—I know some now. But that’s not my kind of bad. My bad is a kind of self-serving—ness. Ish. Ticity!
My kind of bad. My kind of bad. It’s a serpent type—a viper type. It sits laying and waiting for eons before it strikes. Way faster than the Empire Struck Back. Way faster than that. And when it strikes, you never see it. It doesn’t strike like a snake. Because something truly evil would try to hide as the most beautiful thing. So I strike with a kiss—or with no touch at all! I strike like the lamb who yawns in the middle of the afternoon. You get what I’m saying? I’m not the evil guy who does drugs. That would be too easy. I’m the evil guy who doesn’t do much evil after all.
But when I strike, I do.
I pull up in front of Stivers. Park on the street. Go up the Colosseum stairs.
In the Principal’s office, a woman comes right up to me.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Sheth Jones.”
“Is he in trouble?”
“He’s about to be,” I say.
The woman goes to her computer. Taps.
“He’ll be in room 316. Do you want me to go with you?”
“No thanks. I’ll be fine on my own.”
She looks at me with a slightly worried look on her face.
I leave the office. Take the stairs. Hop hop hop! I was always a hopper, as a kid. Still love to hop. Love it. I fucking love to motherfucking hop! Hop. Hop. I’m hopping through the tulips like a graceful one-legged gazelle. I picture Sheth Jones’ face. His classroom. In effect. Teacher teaching. Students learning! Hop hop hop. Sheth Jones pops a crack vial from underneath his fingernails, produces a pipe from invisible-ness, smokes up the back half of the room. Why do I say Sheth Jones is likely a crack addict? Because of the company he keeps. How many crack houses have you dismantled? I have dismantled six. All in West Dayton. All full of Blackies. Yes, the occasional White. But it’s like eight-to-one, twenty-to-one. I mean, what would a Niggar crack house be without its token White strippers? White prostitutes? White bitches giving a Niggar head while he smokes that crack? This is what I pictured so of course when I came upon Sheth Jones in the classroom what I saw was a surprise.
Math class. Calculus. Sheth Jones sitting in the front row. If this was a story in a book it couldn’t have been more perfect. Him wearing a Lacoste green shirt, long sleeved, tapping on a tablet. If I told you he was wearing glasses it would be too much—yes? He wasn’t wearing glasses, but his Beige slacks and thin Black belt made him look absolutely White. And I was disgusted to think that he might claim Jennifer Lawrence’s bright White pussy as his own and claim her muscular Kentucky stomach as his own and then he would claim her claim to Hollywood and there would be Niggars in East Dayton running up and down the streets—running amok!—running everywhere! There would be West Side Niggars in the East and East Side Niggars in the West. We have to slow this sort of thing down. We have to make it so slow that it’s occurrence is imperceptible. So that it hardly affects us, and then one day we wake up having been the centuries-long subjects of a genetic study by the other kind, living on Arctus Centauri. Or some shit. You notice when they show us aliens the aliens never have any Black people? There’s no Niggars in space. Every advanced civilization goes through a process of homogenization wherein all the Black people and the White people interbreed and become Gray people. Or the White people get together and exterminate the Black people. Lickety-split! Snap! Hiroshima but for Niggars. Sub-niggardly behavior from some of these homunculi. Aging me prematurely. Bum rush till dawn. Three and fours in a bungle. Niggar music in my head. Martin’s playlist. So Niggardly. Cowardly. Music for a non-thinker. Music for a follower sect. Their weak Christianity with demon elements, starting at the face, breaking at the shoulders, turning pure voodoo by the waist and unleashing a savage burn from the root chakra into my erect cock! I am Shiva the God of Purple Penises!!
From the bone chakra to the pistle to the root of my seed. I am the production war machine made for invading the Black territory. My president supports me. He bade me well. He promised me I’d be paid in virgins and horses and oil and cash and all the dirty powers that fill my miniature hand. Play those cards like a wallop on the table then slink off alone into the darkness with my money. Happiness lies at the edges. Out of contact. With your back against a wall. Happiness isn’t possible for everyone. Everyone is capable of it. But not everyone gets to feel it—there are only so many slots. Those of us will be rescued by God in the Final Days. Suckled up to space by a giant vacuum cleaner. Placed on the judging platform and those of you who do not make the cut will be knocked down to the planet headless, your bodies tumbling until the Earth knocks you dead.
It’s not hard to describe what I saw when I saw Sheth Jones sitting in that calculus class, pretending to learn, his tablet before him. I saw—first—flames extending out from the center of his pubis solar sexus clinging to the background like wallpaper melting the faces of every child in the classroom. A wasteland of monkey skeletons. The rapture! One in the field and two will be taken—all the White kids out of the room and everyone else stay right here. Everyone else we have a cool plan for you kids—right? We have a real cool plan for y’all. It’s called Let’s Burn You in the Oven! Yum!! Low beat. Hum. The waves crashing on the shore. You can see me in here—can’t you? See me dodging and diving the flames.
You can see me so far down, down this well of gravity and hate, my lowly nature revealed to you in this text. My hatred of myself. That has to be the worst thing about me—don’t you think? That I hate my self. My very self. So much I can’t sit down on the toilet without hating my own genitalia. So much that when I flip on a light switch, the thoughts that arise lead to that one final place—my evil fucking self. So much that when I turn the lights on at night, the demons don’t just come—they come and come and come down upon me like rain on a tin roof. Salt. My essence. An eight-legged stowaway left behind by multiple travelers on a journey that sparked the edge of my soul.
I am trying, you see. I am trying to be a better person. I make mistakes. My mantra with Annabel is at least we’re not a serial killer. At least we’re not dictators. At least we don’t make lamp shades out of people’s skin.
No. We’re good people. We don’t question the norms. That’s why we’re not a serial killer. But, unfortunately, for people like us, this is our downfall. The serial killer goes outside society’s bounds too far. We go outside too little.
“Niggar you better get your ass out here in this hallway!”
“Who is that?”
“Niggar don’t make me ask twice! Sheth Jones, first row, nappy headed Negro! Sheth Jones. Ape-headed Niggar with the big dick!”
Sheth looks around at me.
Recognition.
He closes his tablet and comes into the hall.
“How’d you get that?”
“Huh?”
“Your tablet. How’d you afford it?”
“It’s provided by the school.”
“Oh, I thought only Oakwood schools provided those.”
“You can’t do your work without it,” Sheth says.
I put my hand on his shoulder. Clamp down.
“I want you to come on a walk with me,” I say. “I want you to show me your classes.”
“I was in one of my classes. Right now.”
“Oh you was in it? Was, is, in, on. You learn to speak properly you’ll avoid most run-ins with people like me.”
“I was speaking properly. I said I was in one of my classes—what’s wrong with that?”
“Look it up in that tablet of yours. Where do you start the day?”
“American History. 316. Mrs Tedesco.”
“What is she, French? I’m just kidding, boy. Take me to Mrs Tedesco’s class, 316. Show me where you start the day.”
“Well before that.”
“Before that what?”
“Before that I start in homeroom. But I didn’t figure you wanted to—“
“Don’t figure what I want! What I want is beyond the likes of you. It’s a mystery within a mystery. A bauble within a bauble. Do you even know what a goddamn bauble is?”
“I know it, sir. We learned it in the fifth grade. With a book called The Once and Future King. Do you know it?”
“I’m not gonna know every single reference to every little book your school requires you to read. How does it work for you, having Whites and Blacks in the same classroom?”
“Fine.”
“I don’t mean to be too suggestive, but you might try answering me in a complete sentence.”
I put my hand on my gun.
“It works out fine, sir.”
I unbutton the safety.
“Having Blacks and Whites in the same classroom. It works out fine, sir.”
“It works out fine for you! How ’bout all those Jennifer Lawrences you drool over, liking to bone with your disgustingly huge Black cock, slipping it to them in the lunchroom when your teachers are barely looking!”
“What about them.”
“What about them??”
“I asked you—“
“But I asked you first!”
I re-snap my safety and put my hands on Sheth’s shoulders.
“Would you like to come to church with me sometime?”
“Pardon? I mean—pardon, sir?”
“You look like a kid could use some guidance—isn’t that right? Your father doesn’t seem to be around. Where is he?”
“He’s dead, sir.”
Sheth looks straight into my eyes. He is neither angry nor sad.
“How is that for you? I mean, that’s gotta be tough—is that tough? It’s gotta be tough, man. I’m not gonna ask you how he passed. He prob’ly passed by some police officer’s hand. Is that right? Cut down in a gunfight when you were young? Caught selling drugs or something?”
“My father didn’t sell drugs.”
“That you know of.”
“Excuse me, sir—“
“Lotta kids growing up, their parents sell drugs, do drugs, the kids have no idea. Houses in your neighborhood—it’s all drugs there.”
“I know it is,” Sheth says. “But my father didn’t sell no drugs.”
“But how do you know?”
“Are you gonna tell me you have some record of my dad doing drugs? You have some open case where my dad got killed by your fellow officer in a drug raid? My dad was an engineer. A civil engineer. He graduated from University of Dayton.”
“Not Sinclair?” I laugh.
Sheth doesn’t say anything.
“What are you gonna be when you grow up?”
“I’m going to be an electrical engineer. Sir!”
“Quit with the sir.”
“Do you want to see my homeroom, officer?”
“That depends. Are there any tasty little White bitches in it?”
I laugh.
Sheth doesn’t find it funny.
“The thing about me asking you to church,” I say, “is that it’s one of the oldest churches in Dayton. First Baptist, on Monument. Do you know it?”
“Yeah.”
I look at him.
“Yes,” he says.
“Have you ever been inside?”
“Nah, man. I gotta get back to class.”
“Wait wait wait—“
“Are you gonna charge me with something or—“
“Charge you!? Charge you?? I can charge you anytime I want! I want you to show me your classroom and before that I want you to stand here and tell me why you won’t go to church with me!!”
“Why I won’t go to church with you? Why is you harrassin’ me at school, man! This ain’t no joke! This is my SATs! This is college! And me getting out of that neighborhood that I don’t want to be in as bad as you!! Does you want to see my homeroom or what?”
There you go again, flippity flop. One minute formal (working on your SATs) and the next it’s does this and do that and every form mixed until it can’t tell its head for its tail. Is that you?—Is that you, Sheth? A stranger to your own neighborhood, your own home. Even a family has its limits when it comes to those who don’t belong. Even a formal fam can only accept so much of you, little Shethy. Little Sheth Jones. Baby even to his own mother gangster. Walk ahead of me, Shethy Boy—let me see that fine ass. Grown ass. Not a boy, there—no. But yeah Sheth is prob’ly the typa boy who’s a stranger in his own town, like my nephew, smart as a whip but useless motherfuckers—idiots, really. Sheth stumbling upon his dead parents (however they got whacked), growing up in a neighborhood of thugs while he’s doing Calculus—that’s my man, Sheth! You can run a dog to death but he’ll never escape the yard. Get me on that one? Cunnilingus. Cunnilingus on your ass. Licking that butthole. Charlie—Sheth! See it’s like the last one, less of a hole than an envelope. Fold it. Unfold it. Lick you like a stamp. You’re my buffin’ muffin’ stuffin’ bumpkin? Say that five times fast. Put your shit in rewind. I am coming to you on a frequency somewhere between time and pi. Just hit you with a constant like that—bam! Right up the middle, between those legs and boop!—booped you on the head! When can only songs and memories of cigarettes make me know I’m losing cosmic weight. Let’s go somewhere and fucking laugh! Just you and me. You and me, Shethy. Hands up my legs touch my inner thighs your fingernails scraping me my wife will see my wife will see! Stop dead henchman, you would turn and propose to me. Sheth, this is how I imagine us. Your head. My hands. Your chest. My ass. Rough ropes, turning and punching. We all slide down together. It is the topology of human sacrifice (that’s what you’re saying now). No, that’s what you were just saying just now. This is what you are saying right now. With a quiver and a glove. With stove top stuffing. And yes you can have a seat at Thanksgiving and yes you can boff my sister and yes, yes of course you can hold my daughter’s hand. The two of y’all off to marriage in the hay. Come on down to my churchin’, Carolina. You and I could have been brothers if not for your fatal flaw. We could have boffed ole’ Carolina. From through the window, it’s apple pie. It’s fuckin’ Fiona Apple. It’s Apple Fucking Pie. It’s your mom’s holy vagina.
Bzzzft. Bizzt!
I’ve got to stop doing this. Buzzing out like this. I mean you’re here, and we’re trying to complete the story, and I’m in the middle of fagging out as my police officer ego when then I come in with a straight razor, like, whuut the fuck is this skinny little Negro coming in here for?
There’s the straight me (I guess you’ve seen) and that’s the real me, who wants to burn down my map room and sometimes spy my daughter but whose real lunch in this life is the random Negro concubine, not far different from our slave owners of yore. Necking their slave girls for a tuck ‘n’ rub. What is wrong, if a master wants to go home, after a long day at the auction block, and when he finds his wife unwilling, he makes his way to his woman in the slave quarters. Does he hate her? Hate her because she is Black? Hardly. It might not please him. Just as one White girl’s skin may please me more than another’s, I may not abhor my Black girl’s skin—that doesn’t mean it is perfect in my eye! And certainly it does not mean that Blacks and Whites should not intermix—it simply means that they should not interbreed. No one wants to keep me from my Negra hunny—to wipe her lips with my seed—we jest want ta keep tha breeds clean! That’s all—that’s the whole thing. So this faggot before me is nothing but a clean, clean version of myself. They teach you that everyone’s just a mirror of yourself. Maybe this youngling down in front can take all four inches of my White cock suck it gulp it down! This is the straight me.
Then there’s the cop me. I’m a bad cop.
I didn’t start a bad cop. You start out green. Idealistic. Then you go out on the street. Things change then. ’Cause there’s only so many times you can go to a Black neighborhood and see a sidewalk full of grannies and there’s only so many times you can walk into a drug house and see Ethiopian-looking motherfuckers—skinny as a bone!—looking up at you like, “What the fuck did I just do to my entire life my family my kids my job my whole fucking race? Can you help me, mister? Can you help me live?”
And why am I “racist?”
Because for all the affirmative action and all the poor people subsidies, when is one time I saw shit like that in a White neighborhood?
Never.
We journey to the student’s homeroom in slow motion. Underwater rackets tinging me in the throat. My unrealistic golf shirt tucked in. Let’s face it, when was I an excellent golfer? Never, nilch. Murals in blood, handprint photographs of children’s faces—flash!—zebras showing off their high zones, ice cream cones splattered over every Black girl’s face. Have her lick it up for me. Lick it off. Lick with your lips full lushing me into perfectness and babyhood. Are you from the hood? Walk right by me, elephant sistah, stride like the baby fox and the rawr, rawr lion. These are tiles (by name) scattered over the walls of Sheth’s school far from randomly. Far. Scattered by art. Weirdly. I mean if you saw these tiles you would go crazy in your mind. Absolutely. Idiot tiles. Warning tiles. Tiles for dogs. This is my jungle, the only one I’ve ever known, not ‘Nam, not Ko-re-a, not 9-e-motherfucking-‘leven. No. This hallway. This hallway right here. This jungle. This place. Hallway three. Me and Sheth. And those Black girls passing by. Looking at you. Mhmmm. If I could see what was behind them eyes and them glasses. Honey! Weaving in and out my hair the way my booty sticks with the flow of these jeans—this is my jungle. This right here school is my jungle. There’s a Blackie—watch! I’m far from racist—I’m a racist’s racist. I’m racialism one step removed. I create that shit before I brush my teeth in the morning motherfuckers out in the parking lot doing jumping jacks! They gettin’ stronger motherfucker!! I SAID THEM MOTHERFUCKERS DOIN’ JUMPIN’ JACKS!!! Fuck. Stop it, Sheth. Slow it down. I’m in the flaming hell of the Vietcong and they brought the flamethrowers. Dorthy’s bicycle basket. Cave to resurrected voices of the seventh grade. Little Black jacks. There’s your principle teacher. Nodding with a worried look. Nodding worriedly—whatever. Blankly. Nodded blankly, with a worried look. It has to be both or there’s no tomorrow. She sat blankly, nodded with a worried look. There’s a jungle bunny—there’s one! Bunny cat with a rabbit back. Jack Black. Sheth tell me this. Tell me, when you’re coming out of a Black vagina (being born) and you turn around and look at that shit you’re coming out of, do you want to puke? Does the sight of those Black lips and that greasy hair make you want to puke. I know ladies. I’m the comedian, that’s my funny funny joke pie. I bake it in the middle of my story of a corrupt cop wherein I forgot to mention that I took a bunch of bribes, snorted some evidence coke, raped female prisoners (multiple) took their babies rubbed them in my pants for a little while got my stank all over them made them lick their lips with my schmegma. Do you like that Mmm kay. I don’t think I dislike Black people personally I think I just despise them culturally. Hair picks. Solid colored jeans. These are the type of things that will irk a White man out of bed in the morning! Hi-himminey and a hi-himminey ho. Slap this bitch who’s coming up on me here! Slap a motherfucking ho. I’m hip—I’m hip bitch—perhaps you’d like this 9mm down your throat! Sheth hold up hold up hold up my Nigga! I cadence back down into step with my house Nigga. Lock step. Lock step. Like I’m in the Indiana Jones movies. Black boots. Well-groomed hair. The gesticulations of an excellent public speaker. Everything Black and White. Need I go on? I was born in the 57th regiment—airmen, Black men not allowed, anti-pussy all-male regiment. Not for the feint of heart. No fags, lezs, or tranny core bullshit. No posting allowed. Check your shit at the door. This is where real men play.
Where real men play, down a long and lonely highway, El Paso, Texas. Gone and done and dusty in my eye. Sun up, sun down. Oranges, pinks, then blues. Before I went to high school. Before Daddy got his job as the principal. There’s a voice—there’s a voice in my head, I might have mentioned this. It tells me right from wrong (you might call it a moral voice) and it makes sounds like click, click and boom, boom. It says numbers like 1, 2 to tell me yes or no about a certain subject. Everyone has this. It’s like your internalized parent voice or your idea of God but mine is the President of the United States in all His Glory! Seal-sucked to the side of my head, internal memo, the high-speed connection we enjoy here is favorable, favorable. He tells me when to attack. When to advance. When to stand by. He speaks with me in code. Hand signals. Uses the national airwaves to pop right into my skull and download his crap all over my bacon pile of brains. Tells me, each time I load a suspect into the back of my cab car, how hard I should push his head against the glass. How long I should stand on this niggar’s neck. How long to give this one a choke hold. How long to press the zap button for this terminal-life Niggar here. Zap a Niggar in a fucking chair. Zap his unfavorable skull into the dirt! Mother-Niggaring whore, Sheth, is this what you have to deal with every day? Is this the extend of your pussy selection? Mother, Niggaring, whore. We’ve got to get you some White pussy on the double! Not my kid, but someones! Yeah, we’ll get you laid, you Jennifer Lawrence-lusting freak. Pittance, pittance. Get you some White Girl Pussy for sure! Much more valuable than Niggar pussy. Niggar pussy is half price! (But you’d fuck it in a pinch.) Niggar puss, two for one. Come here, son. Come under my arm. Put my thumb in your mouth and you just suck that Niggar till the toenail polish comes off. Let me tell you a story. It starts with a woman on a bus. Now White people who done know better done tole that woman not to sit down in the front of that bus. But that woman said she was tired. Let me tell you something. If that woman had been a White woman who sat down in the back of the bus, she woulda got a hard slap from my hand ‘cause she done did what I then there told her not to do! Do you see my way of understanding this story? Now if that woman had been a niggar man, and he had sat down in the front of that bus, that would have kicked in ‘The Gentlemen’s Clause.’ Which states. That if a Negra man puts his feet up in front of a White man that those White gentle of the men may put their feets up his fuckin’ ass! Ha ha!! This is cowboy shit. Astronaut shit. Apollo 13 shit. Tom Hanks shit. Serious shit. Not like the shit you have around here. Not this Tawanda shit. Not this Frederica shit. This is shit you’d never agree to if you were offered—you having a drink with me at Hooter’s? Not going to happen. If you liked White girl titties (which would take a hell of a Negro to do) and if you liked White girl pussy (which makes your Brown rod cum as if it was blown upon by Jennifer Lawrence herself) and if you liked White girl asshole, then maybe you’d say yes. But your kind doesn’t even drink alcohol—a 40? Nigga, please. I throw down a 24 pack of Molson Ice like yo mamma. Come sit on Daddy’s lap. What do you want to do to me? Cut off my dick? Go ahead. Feed it to me. Feed it so me nice and slow. Feed me my ears, motherfucker. Take turns raping me. You know you always wanted that cop hole, gaping for your large dick—a Cadillac—you get it at the dick store. We’d go out as equals and I’d introduce you to Walmart and Costco. But not the Walmart you’re used to, in the cities and the first ring of suburbs. I’m talking about in the second ring of suburbs, where we’ve kept wide checkout lanes and free food samples from you all these years. Yes, a White boy can walk onto a car lot and take a test drive of whatever car he wants. For you it requires a credit check. Or we just walk you off the lot saying, “Can I help you? Can I help you?” (Nah, man. I’m good.) Then you drive off in your green piece of shit, ass-falling-apart 1980s luxury car back to the West. You’re a crip? Think again. We’re in Ohio, you stupid piece of shit. You’ve got no reason for fighting here. There’s plenty of space. Green. Lush. White girls at every restaurant. All you’ve got to do is lean back. But you can’t do that, can you slim? Whether there’s White people around or not, y’all’ll be lightin’ it up just ’cause that’s your nature. In the Army they use green aliens as their pop-up targets. I might as well make mine Negras, as much for their lack of shine as for the undying bile they rise up within me. For as long as you walk through this hallway, shooting glances all around us, I will be kneeling at one end shooting you right through your sweater and shooting every Blackness I see headed my way.
“Hey Mister Mister Cop Mister Mister Mister Cop Mister Mister Mister Cop Cop Mister Mister Cop Cop.”
“Yo Mister Mister Jones. Yo Mister Mister Jones Yo. Yo Mister Mister Jones.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you want, Mister Mister Cop. Just. Tell me what you want.”
“I want to eat your fucking face, Black child. Eat your fucking face.”
“You want to eat my fucking face, Cop? Eat my fucking face?”
“I want to eat your fucking face, Child. Eat your fucking face.”
“Eat your fucking face. Face. Eat your fucking face,” says the Black child. “I want to eat your fucking face. Face I want to eat your fucking. Face. Face. I’d like to eat your fucking face, face. Eat your fucking face. Face. Eat your fucking face—“
“And I came to you in the village, Child—I came to you in the fields. I came to you in the river, Child. Came to you in the clouds. I’d let you eat my fucking face—eat, eat—eat my fucking face. I came with you to this land over green hills and greener dales over shopping cart with irregular bowel syndrome (a misnomer) act nuts with my at the symphony, tell me why I don’t deserve to be here, how my face does not fit in with the millions!”
“It is not that your face does not fit—That was never in question!—but simply that mine would not. Why my particular ethnicity is it that offends ye! Will ye yield and not say that is mine which keeps you up at night, awaiting the scare of my roar!”
“The roar of my scare, I should rather think,” I tell him.
“If, the Black boy says, “you mean the roar of a mechanism called scare, then I think that is right. If (on the other hand) you mean a literal scare, then I think you’re going to run into some problems.”
Why have you brought me here, O Lord, with your alphas and your omegas. Brought me here to this tabletop amongst our clouds where you have given us this forum for every corridor of our everlasting love. O God! Given me—Dipped me in!—thy holiness O Lord My God Our Wonderful Oh Counsellor Hallowed Be Thy Holy Name Oh Jeremiah’s bells Oh Sand Boy From Thy Dunes Thy Lord Thy God Thy Lightning Name!! This is a White man’s table, O God! Surely thy rules have not escapeth the nativeth of thy land of Africa! Pure and duly land of yore, hallowed land of thy Negra! Boundless is his name among the plains. Boundless is his foot among the fields of the Serengeti. And may those feet never grace my fields in Ohio, again, O Lord—fist bump!! Fist bump that shit, again, O Lord.
Never grace my fields again.
A white man’s dream.
Never grace my fields, never grave my streets—I don’t even know why anymore!! Can’t even remember why but I’m glad I never have to see your face again kyd never have to fight your punk-ass face again never have to see you coming around the corner at me full force—was how you were going?—full force was how we was going? Full Force Practicals™. For gym and office. Full force radicals. White single-occupant female. Whatever this shit means anymore. This lingo. Our jargon. It lurches forward leaving us (its inventors) keeping up like two-year-olds. Catching out of bounds commentary on its way to the sludge. Operating fields like keychain-repeat, keychain-replace. For elevensies. This is the reset register of my brain. Reset-repeat, reset-replace. It gets programmed down here. Things are a little sticky down here. We don’t usually come down here. It’s a bit of a mess down here.
Tricky tricky mess. Tricky tricky tricky mess. Just write down whatever you want to—that’s all you’re ever doing anyway. Adjusting the shape of your want so that it equates out to 1890s WigPressionIsm™ -gasm -ing. Galloping to the speed of my horse, man—it’s a simple fucking horse! Who rode me out in front of the line and took the lead—he’s a steed!—he’s the lead steed, man. The buck. The front. The chuck wagon. Chuck. With a Capital C. You know how the one way you look at things, it’s organized. And the other way you look at things, it’s disorganized? I guess what I’m saying is I’m saying to you is if you’re the kind of person to whom this happens, then that’s a serious problem—lol—a serious problem. Akin to—hush—some forms of mental illness. Shhh. Ahhh. Ihhh! Our professions overlap. They do. As in we house a number of their, ahh, patients as inmates in the prisons.
Sheth you do—and you do—need to take notice of this here, say, lesson. Sorry to be one to preach but I am as good as your uncle in this shipwreck we call life. But I must impress on you that it is important not to be both Black and wild. And by wild I mean crazy. Nuts. Sprung a sprocket. That weekend trip from which there is no turning back. This above all and all above else is the illness known as the Black trannsexual he/she/he/she! It excites my labels to think about it. But stop them, I will—stop them I might. First starry starry star I see tonight. Make me a parliamentarian—NO! Make me not that nor anything like it! Make me nothing, if you have it. Make me naught from the winds—that’s the voice of an early girlfriend of the King of Spain’s!
Believe it not how I am connected—to the King of Spain or wherever. Pretend you really think I cannot be be connected to the King of Spain via the headspace of a god. I mean what of you really thinks this is impossible? Which thinks it is impossible an audience of “Aliens” are not watching this play from within? Erupting with their version of laughter every time I pick my nose! Don’t you think their “Alien” minds so far superior to ours would find racism to be so passe? They probably roll their eyes when it comes on television. They don’t even roll their eyes. They probably can’t even roll their eyes! Snap Susan in a white dress, flush with the hips, and what is this—the decadence?—this Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
What is this? What is my Susan—Annabel?—Melissa. What is this dress flush with the hips, reality barely connected. At a cotillion ball (for what I’ve seen uv ’um) connected to the matrix in Five-Alive LSD sounds, proclivities excluded, rules broken, extravaties muddled up from in between.
Sheth, this description of you as the punk Black kid is not working. I swore I would make you up in oddity and Negro-hating-ness and in this perfection something wonderful something grand something something something my something something-ness DO YOU GET ME do you see me here? Do you see me in sentences written by a simp—a vance!—inside a hologram made of a hologram tripped by someone who is a hallucination of a vaccination that’s the nature of everything—isn’t it? We’re one mega-colossal trip run on a brain so big its functions wouldn’t even be useful to us.
How does that all have consistency (and coherency) within the scope of me (as a racist) operating on this police force where our job clearly is to maintain peace on the streets of Dayton Ohio. At almost any cost. That means fleet weapons, fleet tactics. Privatized military bullshit. Love that shit. It’s decent. It’s decency flowing down from heaven onto the streets of Dayton. Onto the swimming pool of our lives. The swimming pool—see? It’s the nearest, most valuable escape property to you—for some people Disney, some people it’s the swimming pool. That’s what I’m protecting. That’s the home in home. That’s what you come home to! My daughter—is the here in here. She’s the hon in honey. The sweat in—she’s home. That’s the whole thing. That spot where when you put your dick, you say, “Home.”
That’s whose job it is for me to maintain. That home, that wall around it. That’s what a man was made to do! To keep that spot protected. To keep that spot hot.
Sheth Jones doesn’t know that kind of duty. Sheth Jones does not know that kind of cop. All he knows is the weak-ass community service cops his department employs. Those cops are good enough for a Black neighborhood—weak response to a gnarly problem. I know some cops from the West side. Seem to have squandered what they were given by a Presidential hand. Equipment from da fleet! Equipment straight turn Niggas into cooperative law-abiding motherfuckers! Turn them Niggas into God-fearing motherfuckers! Buncha guys sittin’ around suckin’ God’s dick!
These are my unrealistic expectations. My expectations that daughters will not turn up with niggars, that niggars will not turn up with friends and brothers and cousins to what’s supposed to be a quiet one-on-one with your girl on the swing in the back yard that’s the swing that I built for my wife I’m a talented motherfucker a talented boy. For under that swing on the board where her pale legs dangle there is a place so hot hotter than the hottest spot there is a place so tight, so mighty in its grip, that it can suck golf balls from a garden hose it can sip ice cubes from your Mona Lisa put me into overdrive turn my engine on make me cum bubbling from the hose between my legs you can turn it this way to cum on your face that way to extinguish a house fire.
Sheth, you are my vision. My power. I have hitched my Whiteness to your Lode Star and will continue with it till day—till daylight—till the break of dawn.
Myriad power sticks. Floating around my head. And you’ve bought me, bought me in my White bread packaging straight from the flour, bungled under milk, in a powdery hand, write through the paper that’s what they taught me in class. They taught me that people hurt—they hurt is what they said. And I bungled through it all to microscope a plate wherein there lies a particle of hurt—I examined it and measured it and took it where it wants to go. I’m wrapped in bubbles of syntax. Cannot escape. Cannot retrieve. Cannot recovery area to your nine plus five minutes—your ten, your eleven—it needs perfection. It was never perfect. It took me minutes to write this book in the far-left quadrant of my brain. It is an extemporaneous exploration of excitability. These wint’ry months stuck inside houses, inside schools of heat and learning. I imagine Sheth and I are conversing somewhere out there. In the halls. Shooting the shit like any cop and any Black young man might do. Talking GPAs and football, entertaining his ideas of calculus and what it might mean for our police department if we just implement differential equations we’d be able to track all sorts of criminals—mathematically!—but I’m sorry son it just doesn’t work that way. I have a problem for every solution. Jab them in your sides like shivs. Twist them around. Like a knife in jelly. At my breakfast table. Your hand underneath the table with my daughter. On my daughter’s leg. So close (so very close!) to that hottest spot. Watching vids on my phone about a White Girl Story, so sad and so close to the truth. You can never understand me without understanding my obsession with White girls. Sore that they convinced me to spell it that way. Like now my text is obsessed with race, too—along with the rest of the world. Gone, done, and dusty in my eye. Long, down the road in El Paso. Past the golf course past the end of the road. Past the last snake I ever saw in the desert. Past the last hill I ever climbed, in tennis shoes with sharp eyes we were supposed to look out for snakes as if they were not looking out for us.
Sheth, you are my visionary child. A Blackness, such despair, watching TV on your school tablet everything propped up on the kitchen counter. A black life, with its culture and its identifiers—it didn’t make sense to me! It was like if you took them from another planet and placed them—dropper-style—in the ocean. And expected them to speak English! To open their foreign mouths and speak English. To amaze us with Melissa and every White child. You could stand at that Black Vagina and wait there for a thousand years and never would it birth a Lincoln or a Jefferson. I call upon Lincoln but post quotes online of his—that were never really his! I don’t know this because I don’t know how to use the internet. I don’t know what I’m reading so I don’t know what’s real or not. This is my mistake! This is my conundrum.
It’s a White boy’s folly. Just a boyish half-step. Understandable! Just a micro-rape in the swamp—nothing that will harm anybody in the long term. Just the punishment of a niggar by the handles of my bike. I call thee away from me devil—has anybody ever said that to you? Any petty little Black mom come all this way to defend her son. Any pretty little black sister come all this way with her brother’s blanket in her hand. Anyone up for some fun? I’ll say we rope this one up and have ourselves a rodeo! Pompeii for Niggars! The lucky ones die instantly. The rest die a few seconds later. The remnants of the Petri dish dumped out cosmically, souls lost, vessels empty—dust. Particles roaming. Dropped. Dead. Sheth Jones’ classroom—his homeroom—decadent of loss. I know you think is meaningless but—is flowing. Lust. Amazon wetness—take a second look. These are the days we will remember, lost CJ wilderness the map we use to navigate the present moment. Present place being Dayton Ohio. A simple enough map. Poor people here. Rich people there. Black people here. White people there. Run the fractals and you’ll end up a speck of dust on a crack house floor in West Dayton—there aren’t that many paths. You can either be Sheth Jones from the West side (refusing to talk Black lingo and Black pronunciation) ending up a mother-lover living in Europe (the high-class artist lifestyle). Or you can end up a scab in the back room of a UD math class, casually learning algebra (this was me, hating every moment of it) looking out the window during testing wondering wondering wondering what the meaning of it is, where it all came from, who started everything. And safety existing in numbers—cows, all repeating—the deathly—dark and demon—dank, derelict classroom in an empty building. Urban exploration. GoPro Balthazar, bringing myrrh in a Tupperware container. Solitary. Oligarch. The assassination of an assassin bringing SpiritualLying™ to the masses. Dauntless. Massive. Masses. Of flesh. Of legs. Of arms. Of hair and shoulders. Of diminutive. Of reason. Of—progression. Of—progressives. That is the word we should shoulder. That is the word we should take. A fledgling cop studying math of all things in my first year at UD. My initiative year, me already being who I had become—so very much me but so very much not me—not developed yet not matured not gestated yet not grown. I had met Annabel by then—that part of my life was already in motion. By my first year at UD I had met her. Spent most of that first year in her dorm room fucking. She was my first. She was my first. We made loud noise in her bunk bed and downstairs her roomie was always getting it on with her girlfriend (if it’s right for me to say so).
If it’s right for me to say so many things. The beach in Ft Lauderdale always impressed me. They seemed to have things so right. So White. They seemed to have survived the civil rights movement intact. With the White parts in place and the Black parts in place right below them. With the Civil War parts in place. See, there’s been a drastic rearrangement of the Black pieces and the White pieces since the Civil War. Some places like Portland and New York have gotten the pieces in the wrong place. While places like Ft Lauderdale and Dayton have gotten them pretty much right. What do they do in countries where the phrase white makes right doesn’t rhyme? I know they don’t have problems with the darkies but somewhere in their past they must have—I don’t know—they must have—had a civil war. Or—an African conflict? England has darkies, right? I just don’t know. And I think it must be nice to be Black in Europa skies. On the sidelines of history! And I am so sure that there will never be a reign of Blacks in this world—so sure—that I loose them to run free in my country with no fear and every confidence. Without danger as long as they roam in their pen only! In their pen only. In the Negra paddock. With Negra shit and Negra foam! In the Negra Park maybe we can DNA-them-up with some zebra DNA and rid them of that eternal Blackness, rid them of that obsidian stone.
Sheth. Sheth Sheth Sheth. It’s too bad you were born Black. Too bad that the sweat glands of your current suit run Brown in color. Dyed the color of shit. Colored in the dyes of death or damnation, either way coming the spires of the cathedral flowing down in runs of blood it collects on the roof in gutter-spiked punch nugget Niggar it’s like the engine, engine starting up, engine making strides, engine running. Engine going good, going Black, going oil and Texas oil man. Bugging the wheels of the Oregon Trail. Ole El Myra. Ole Carolina. Ole dining car. Devastation of being free of alcohol = Absolut Absolutionist. Your entire race devastated by crack. Niggar gene, propagated through whatever rape and random fucking. Genes half-deep, programmed with the nature to kill. Jungle bunnies toting TEC-9s running up the ass of my neighborhood. Murderer instincts boiling up from the blood. Niggar = murder. Niggar = chaos. Niggar = blood. Glass and blood on the asphalt, sprayed like candy, knocked out of a kid’s mouth by a punch—crack!, split!—the apex of a hit! And here we come with the boom! boom! up the center of their biznaas, their business—their biznaas!
Make me the custodian of a park, give me the care of a White people, some children walking their dogs, flirting with the girl from up the street—if you give me that I’ll give you a clean block! It’s not my fault I fail! You didn’t give me a clean block. You gave me a park with crack cocaine—that was there before I got here! You gave me a block with children who murder their uncles (citing crack). With babies smoking that shit—I swear to god, they have crack, crack, crack laid out in the living room, four adults in the living room smoking crack, then in the kitchen here’s baby Smith or baby Jones taking it up the tongue with a spoon of crack, masking tape everywhere, baby taped to the high chair, a thin glass tubule going from the crack pipe to the baby’s lungs, creating for me such a mural to see that I will never see its like in my lifetime.
What I’m going to do now is introduce Aliens—yes, Aliens—into my otherwise workable but intolerable book about racism in America. About the Bad Cop. About me, who embodies that bad cop. About the Map Collector within. About the pyromaniac. And now, as well about the Alien Conspiracy Theorist. It all relates I promise.
I am frightfully obsessed with Aliens—frightfully. About their weird looks, long heads and pointy fingers. About their history-inverting power, the power to invert our STEM-learning individuals—to stand them on their heads—with the first look of those foreigners.
And I’m obsessed with their religion-changing capabilities. The ability of our Christian nation to be overturned nightly by Alien marauders raping our women—raping our men!—performing invasive experiments on us for what can only be seen as an evil purpose.
I believe in aliens—this is certain. Forty years ago they were just hieroglyphics on the side of a pyramid in Egypt, pored over by my ten-year-old fingers at my grandparents’ house in El Paso. It was a book of strange phenomenon, a group of books. There was a book on snakes—or strange creatures. A book on apes. A book on the pyramids. And not exactly a book on Aliens, but the Time/Life logo that was drawn on their covers had a slant to it that looked Alien-like. The whole thing was propaganda for kids who wanted to believe in Aliens.
I was curious. I had the itch. That itch for a ten-year-old child to explore, to question, before he settles down for life, into a life, into a wife and child and the work of being a Christian man in Our World. Being a cop. Bringing order to the streets so my kid can live a safe life. Not a great life—an orderly life. The life of a cop’s daughter. Secure. She’ll make it to her wedding night without being raped—or otherwise the guy who does it to her will end up with his tongue down his stomach. Belie’ that.
So I tore open that book—literally—it still had the silver wrapping on it. Put it sloppily on the table before me. Opened the cover, turned a page. Ate it, from the spine on out. The pyramids were all covered with writing, but—get this—the original pyramid was built with no writing on it—no hieroglyphs. Doesn’t that suggest it was built by Aliens, that the writing was supplied later by Human authors who built the secondary pyramids? At the very least it raises the question, Why was this pyramid built anonymously? Did they not need writing to explain it to them? Were they uninterested in explaining to others (us) what they were doing? I had read all the theories and I liked the power plant one. That this whole thing was a power plant build by stranded Aliens to get themselves home.
But that didn’t make sense, see? This super-powerful demonic race of Alien beings got here and didn’t have gas for the way back? What kid of super-intelligent being miffs that calculation? Fucks up the pencil scratch, ends up on Earth with an empty tank. Some dumb fucking Aliens, if you ask me.
No, the actuality was much worse. (Much worse for people like me.) The actuality was that Aliens do exist, they’re being hidden by world governments, they don’t have good intentions toward us! Hello! Is anyone listening? They don’t have good intentions toward us. They’re evil. Reptile-looking, scale-covered motherfuckers gonna have good intentions toward us? What do you think about that, little son?
My hand covered in yours, Mexican maid. Your name has escaped me. More as a matter of intention than anything else. Your imperfection has escaped me. Your ability to do one thing and say another. I always wondered, when you weren’t looking and Dad wasn’t looking and I wasn’t looking—who was looking after myself?
Mexican maid. Mexican maid. A Mexican maid brings me soda and champagne in the Four Seasons penthouse. Busts it out in one of them Mexican maid outfits, white little tassel swinging, breast milk leaking out her Mexican titties. This maid is the Alien. She is literally an Alien. And she is the Alien to me. I mean underneath that costume of a maid—underneath that maid skin, maid hair—is an Alien. Dyed in the wool. Honest to God. Mu’fuckin’ Alien, Jeeves. And figuratively (outerneath that costume) the solitary otherness THERE IS BOTH YOU SEE RIGHT THERE IN THE RETICLE you’re bursting on the scene! Bragging into me a stack of credentials an inch thick. She’s inside the maid and outside the maid. When you turn her over, you see the Taiwanese writing explaining voltages and charging requirements. In the future, see, they don’t have things that charge. We’re almost that way now, with radio batteries and CIA technology that is basically an eternal charge from energy available anywhere in the universe. There are telekinetic relays in your brain. But anyway, anyway, what I’m saying is there’s Otherness on the outside and there’s Otherness on the inside—
“An Alien-ness to her because she’s an Alien?” Sheth asks this.
“She’s a Mexican, yes. But she’s an Alien! She’s literally an Alien, so I’m saying when I talk about the Alien (within) or the Alien in races, I am actually talking about an Alien. In fact.”
“An Alien.”
“In point of fact, yes.”
Sheth and I are at the gymnasium now. We’re leaned up against the glass windows watching girls play soccer.
“See that?” I say.
“Where?” Sheth says.
“That girl, there. White girl. She caught sight of you. Now she’s nervous. See what she’s going through? That twitch there. That tug of her short strings. She’s hot. She’s bothered. Did you see her?”
“Man, that girl scratchin’ an itch.”
“No, man. No. That girl’s crotch is hot for you and you’re missing it. Know what she’s thinking right now? She’s like that biggie-big Blackro Niggar over there looked at me! Ooo-oo! Is my hair straight? Is my panties in a bunch? She’s thankin’ about bonin’ your punk ass. That’s her life. From now until dinner that bitch gonna have bees between her toes to get off to you! But hold up, hold up. The point of this is she’s human—that’s the sort of thing she worries about. You just gave her hours of humanistic activity, dog-brain idiocy—you’re God, punk—the Alien—outside the window, across the gym floor, here you are, temptation, a fellow youth-god, tantalizing that soccer-playing goddess in there. She’s your Alien. You’re her Alien. But there are real Aliens in the world, and that’s who I think we’re playing out in these fantasies with, of this versus them and me versus you, the law versus lawlessness, control versus oblivion, Indian versus Black versus Mexican versus Chink.
Versus whoever. I wish I didn’t have to explain myself to this kid. The simple idea that what we perceive as an invading force is actually the cause and source of our Life here on the planet. We’re a Petri dish—surprise!—and the scientist has come home to stir the pot. Actually they never left. Our multi-generational, soulless biology experiment—not a soul to my God! Not to my King! I believe in something called the Bible and my literal interpretation of this 2,000-year-old text is what scares me. That’s what scares me at night. Underneath the covers. I’ll peek under there and there will be one of them Grays looking up between my legs and I’ll be like whaat??! screaming Get me out of here! and How the fuck did this motherfucker get in here?? like This motherfucker has got some nerve! and all This motherfucker has got another thing coming!!! Blow me the fuck away! There’s a Gray Niggar underneath my bed looking me in the eyes! And that’s what this world does. We’re like one of those paintings on the wall of the Chinese restaurant with the waterfall and it has these things behind the canvas and it cycles, it cycles continuously to make the waterfall move. And some couple is sitting there waiting for their dinner and she looks at the piece on the wall and says, “Beautiful” and most of us never even think about the fact that she’s sitting there, and the night is young, and this is us. It’s a night in another universe (multiverse) so why would anyone here give a fuck?
You know, Sheth, my niggardly sidekick, my young love—I’d take you right here in my cosmic mind (it can’t be any different from fucking a woman’s ass). I would. I would love you if your Niggar spirit was reincarnated in an impish White woman’s body. Someone small, blonde, tight, sudden.
Suddenly here, suddenly bright. Suddenly mere, suddenly White.
Choosing between group orgasming (duos, trios) and solo no-touching cumming, we choose an or where an Alien civilization would choose an and—ie we would choose either group sex or the possibility that one could choose not to be touched by someone else—and the Alien version of us knows that we would pick that option where one could be touched if they didn’t have to, but the Alien version of us (choosing and instead of or) also chooses for one person to be able to make another cum. (Hence telepathic orgasms.)
That’s what you have to fear—it’s not Blackness, ultimately. It’s the eventuality of sitting in front of a machine-terminal-electronic-scanning-light geometry projection as it unfolds in infinite hell. That’s where this is headed. It’s not war—that’s what they tell you. They’re making people better. But not to live here with lawnmowers and chainsaws. It’ll be us, but there—we fucked our planet. There’s no more sense of us. Of God. Of goodness, and goodness times. The flood won’t ever be a mystery. And this terminal window—window into the reptilian god—exposure compromised due to system overload, projects us all in hologram, nightmare demon child under-sees us all.
“Sir. Is you talkin’ about Aliens?”
“Yes, Sheth, that is what I’m talkin’ ’bout.”
“What is you sayin?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m saying. Love. That’s the one thing the Aliens think they’re missing. And when we’re talking Alien, we’re talking future. We’re talking us. Ourselves in the far far future. This is what we become. Then for some reason we go back in time to remember what we’ve forgotten. Or the paradigm was that we were in space, above Earth, and we came down to live here to see what it’s like to be alive on Earth. Basically. For entertainment. Like this whole life is a dream we’ve decided to live in an afternoon. I’m asleep in the hive and the dream isn’t like a plain dream. It’s interactive between the person I think I am and the person who’s having the dream. Like a movie that changes a little based on the person watching it.”
“That’s what you think is happening?”
“That and more. Like a hive (appearing infinite) that houses you and me and we’re working and dreaming and having Alien sex only it happens every minute or so and sex in this dream is like—can I tell you what it’s like?”
Sheth nods. Behind him are the girls playing soccer.
“It’s like a pulse. It is a pulse. Anyone can do it to anyone else and it’s an encouragement of the continuation and development of the current thing. That is the universal meaning of sex. Of sexual pleasure. It’s encouragement from another creature that you should continue yourself (procreation) and develop yourself (in our case through teaching and raising the child). It’s the currency to further—to encourage. Available as a mate selects you—you start to feel that feeling. Available as you cum during sex—the ultimate encouragement. It says I like you, I like what you’re doing here, please keep doing it. That’s what an orgasm is.”
Sheth presses his forehead against the glass.
“I’d like to have an orgasm with that one right there.”
“So you’d like to encourage her?”
“I’d encourage that bitch to strip off her soccer shorts.”
I look at Sheth—wonder as to his desire for self-preservation.
“ ’Cause I know you can shoot me right now if you want to. You can arrest me. My ass is grass if you get a nose hair itch. But I think you want to fuck that girl, too. I think we might be able to relate over that. Is that true?”
I nod at the kid.
“I see this infinite lattice. Well, it’s not infinite, but it looks infinite. I get the feel that if I worked there I may not have seen the edge of it. I wonder if you get to request vacation time. Just in your head. Or using some neural interface. I’d be like, Yes, I’d like a thousand years on this rock right here. And I’d point to some Dagobah-looking system in the corner of the sky. Does that bug you? That feeling of contraption, of enclosing, of being stuck on a platform in the middle of space and you’re working, and you’re entertaining yourself, and every time you get lonely you zap yourself with an orgasm and because that technology is so much better than ours (that feel-good technology) we just never feel like killing ourselves because we never get that lonely—we just never feel like committing an insane murder since we’re jacked up on all the feel-good chemicals that we do have now but that are so minute or so irregular that sometimes we just—fuck up. End up behind bars. In the back of my truck. Headed for the end.”
“But you’re saying—that their life is 100x, 1000x better than ours. And yet,” Sheth says, “their life is still sucky. I mean you and I, standing here on Earth, can (feel like) we figured out the upper-limit of their life. Their emotions. Their theoretical life. And yet they’re still out there on this lattice (based on what you’re telling me)—doing what? We don’t know enough about their experience to judge it.”
“But,” I say, “we don’t judge them enough even on not knowing their experience.”
“Wait—what?”
“You can’t know whether you need to judge someone based on knowing their experience. If you do that, they might be able to convince you not to judge them.”
“You mean you might have empathy.”
“That’s right.”
“Well. You. Better guard against that.”
“You better guard against it! Young man! And Don’t resist change! It’s something I found on a gum wrapper in the bull pen. Little yellow wrapper. Typed like a fortune cookie. It said Don’t resist change and when I touched it I was flashed with messages of light like doing acid on high dose, cathetered my penis to an electric light machine drops of water at the tops and bottoms of pencils I THINK IT WAS A MACHINE every surface was living AND I SAW that my whole life here was a shadow, a dream, extremely low resolution DARK/light kindred fear.”
I sat down with Sheth.
“The message—when it said don’t resist change—that was there to tell us how to die. Which is to say: easily. And constantly. Pain now is better than pain later. Massive pain is death. Constant pain is hardly any pain at all—hence there is never death and there is massive death. Hence there is never the fear of life. Hence never the love of life. Hence the ennui of superior beings—they live life larger than us (true) but there must be something unnerving about that frantic bridge across the sky they’ve been constructing all my life. Something trapping about being within the locus of zap—always wanting to fade past it, never having the courage to not. What if there was just a button and all I had to do was push it, then I would live for another five minutes. Wouldn’t I keep pushing it forever, guarding against forgetting becoming a mistake. Instituting that “we” would never forget. Scheduling vacations on remembered versions of Earth. Rebuilding this exact school so you and I could come down here and have this exact conversation, never questioning it, always remembering it in hyper reality—reality is hyper, isn’t it?—forever re-living Sheth and COP, forever reading it. You know that’s what they say this is, right? You know they say that right now I am having a dream, that I’m dreaming this life. That not when I wake up, but right now I am remembering someone else’s life, with nodes of my own into what happened here. They say the face is altered by the soul. That’s how I make impressions on this life I am remembering. What if a memory weren’t just a picture. What if it weren’t just a movie. What if it were a model of every person and every thing in the world, and we could suit up and go inside and play laser tag with everyone we knew—only the psychological version.”
I put my hand on Sheth’s knee.
“So your perception of watching Jennifer Lawrence fall like that—that perception is most likely a replay or an interplay of some bitch falling far from her saddle—irreparable, money-wise, she’s the glittering version of fools’ gold—reverse-flip mirror-sparkly clown built for my impression and yours. Bully/slide—I remember my dreams. Bully/slide your depression is mine. Bully/star this is your future, fool—posting up on the edge of the universe, where few stars are used to collide. Where everything unexpected occurs at a minimum frequency and the business of continuing on can proceed at its usual rate.
“Familiarity—why is that? We work to create connections. Our whole life we do. But what if we’re to be instantly separated from and broken from the ones we love? If connection is just a chemical we jive every thirty seconds, what is that? I die, get up out of my spaceship (my corpse) and I be like, “Whaat up, gentlemen?” And I leave that pod behind and get in the next—a kid riding a roller coaster a million times in a row, after everyone but the staff has gone home. Just hops into the next car and off he goes! Is that all there is. Sheth, I’m asking you—is that all there is?
“Or—consider symbols of mother (if adjusted by a jolt of chemical attachment). They will never be the actual mother. They will never be a mother for that long (as long as the actual mother would be). There will be an illusion of mother, seeming perfect. But around the edges, you have to consider that this object you think is Mom—has only been here 15 seconds. That famous mother was a waitress a minute ago. Now she is worshipped, all important, symbols (like Mom) borrowed from a civilization where they meant something. And implanted here (repurposed) to flesh out the guts and the gears of our new society—which we simply call a hive.
“I just can’t get over it. The idea that your tragic life was just a $5 entertainment. Ie what about my wife?? Annabel I met young, we spent our whole lives together, she’s probably going to be around when I die. But what if it goes the other way—Annabel hit with cancer? What if I spend my the rest of times mourning and at the end Annabel gets out of her coaster car and I get out of mine and we’re strangers in the turnstile of life—she goes one way and I go another and Annabel becomes just a phantom in my glass-proof multi-purpose cage of mysteries.”
Love. This is what I’m talking about. Human love. Killed by the Alien, the Other. Aliens are gonna come down here and fuck with our primary emotion. (Which I used to think was fear but have since become convinced by my daughter is love.)
Aliens come to Earth. Love gets fucked. Not in some obvious sense, in which the others lock us up and prevent het/animal/sex fucking—they’d have the opposite desire. No. I’m talking about in the way future, when we start to merge with them—when they share their energetic jolts with us. That’s the scary moment when we let go the handles on the swings and shoot for the sky. When what we are fundamentally changes. That’s what I find scary—and I’m surprised if you don’t too.
“But what if it’s not bad,” Sheth says. His eyes follow the soccer girls’ legs. “I mean, they’re going to give you the chemicals, on a tray, and ask you to pick it if necessary. You’re going to pick it, when the ennui gets too bad. Even if your ennui is caused by your basic genetic preference for life and how to live it, that pill will solve it—intrinsically.”
Soccer girls (beauty beyond belief) playing in arabesque, loops, rings, ringlets of hair. Not all White, but the Blackies who play have smooth matte skin, white socks knee-high girders hurling them from location to location, gutter balls of glory, snakers of grin, the utter steamroller of lusciousness coming at me. Well, to me and Sheth both—but mostly to me.
“If I take that pill,” I begin, “then everything I’ve done is wrong. Up to that point. Everything a lie.”
Sheth starts to interrupt.
I stop him. “Let me stop you there,” I say. For I am a man born with a problem to every solution. My idiocy reigns supreme. “What we are talking about is the de-centralizing, the de-mantling of humanity. A creature that was supposed to be important to God—but which he has forgotten. We are no different than Jesus on the cross being forsake, having been forsaken by God the Father and attacked by—well, yes, the Romans, but attacked by—Demons, Aliens, Reptiles, the ugly of the insane, fantastic of the galactic, rot-bottom bad creatures residing in evil bodies. This is important! It’s important to me, little Padawan, that you hear this (hear it like you’re the last person on Earth).
“WE ARE UNDER ATTACK by an enemy who is so smart that before we even begin to fight, before we even know the enemy is there, we have lost the battle and we’re off doing some genetic breeding program with them the purpose of which is to undo the human race. To undo, the human, race. Now that may be ok where you come from, but in my neighborhood we fight to defend it. We don’t back down. We’ll never back down. It’s what we’ve been taught. Protect us against the insane, the inhuman, the demon that is in the skies. And they’re not about to take us all up in their spaceships. We’re not all about to go to Alien heaven. Mark my words. They’ll be holding us all at a distance for years. And when they’re done, all it’s gonna mean is the dismantling of our oil industry. The way my father and my cousins make their money. That’s how we’ll make our money till we die. No Alien bastard is gonna come down here and tell me what to do with my land. This land is your land, this land is my land—fuck that, you’re Alien, motherfucker. This is our planet. And we’re gonna die here if we want to.”
This is what I told myself, even though it was pulling at the back of my gray matter that we had been put here by the Aliens. They were on this Earth long before we were. Had chosen to stay hidden. Because we’re too fucking crazy.
Why make us in the first place?
And where is God in all this?
Where is the anti-secular, religious faction? Where are we represented with our religious freedom that extends so far it beats the other guy’s nose? I am used to being able to park diagonally in the parking spot at Friday’s—will that change now that Aliens are here? Will we have to reserve space in the front seat at church for Aliens? Will my President argue? Give me reason to hate my star brother? To send him packing? If I tune him now—let’s see.
My fellow Americans. We have been afforded a cosmic opportunity. Yes, it’s true the US has been exchanging information with Aliens for the last 70 years, costing trillions of dollars in you getting screwed because your taxes were being used to fund a Secret Space Program. And all the while you didn’t get any benefit or any information from this arrangement, only your money stolen and your face lied to. Four score and seven years ago—
Well, you get the point. Drastic reduction in terrestrial nuclear arms, fantastic new weapons that will do nothing in case the Aliens try to destroy us. They’re inter-dimensional beings who have been alive for billions of years—I think if they hit “go” on the zork adapter they can turn our planet to dust in about 11 parsecs. But we’re up here building space nukes to keep us safe from Alien civilizations who have never attacked us in that way, with nuclear weapons and such. I mean—right? Don’t we have every reason to believe that if Aliens attacked us front and center—strong—they would win?”
“We have every reason to disbelieve the opposite.”
“Now you’re trying some math proof on me. I’m a police officer. Not pre-calculus or whatever is going on inside your mind.”
“I’m just saying—“
“I know what you’re saying. Don’t forget that I am a Presidential-telepathic ruthless bone herder of a cop and you’re a stinky kid!”
“I haven’t forgot!”
“Well make sure you don’t forget!”
“Ok!”
“And don’t forget what I’m about to do to you. I’m here to oversee. And if I don’t like what I see I’m going to kill you! Understood?”
“Ok, yeah!”
“Now shut up and listen to your elders. What was I saying? You’re a punk kid and I’m the elders. Aliens are coming to sit in the front pew of my church. They won’t know how to sing but I’ll show them. But they’ll stink so I can’t! Aliens always stink in the movies. And the real crime isn’t that Aliens are here or not here. It’s the way the government talks about them. Just like they talk about the others—like you! Black people’s worth isn’t being decided by what I think about you—it’s that what I think about you determines your worth in society. So it matters how we talk about things. For instance, if I put out a bulletin saying you, Sheth, are wanted for murder, then a bunch of blood-thirsty cops are gonna come and find you and they’re gonna string you up to a tree and they’re gonna tell all the neighbors who saw it not to say anything. And they’re not going to say anything. ’Cause they don’t want to get killed by the cops. That simple. And I think you see my analogy to Aliens ’cause I just don’t think I can explain it to you anymore today. No? Well check this out. Aliens make a deal with the government—didn’t they know that the government doesn’t speak for all people? Don’t they know of our government’s fear mongering? So then you put up a smear campaign on aliens, making them the attackers of this world. And they are. Reptilians and demons and such. But how do we know who’s good and who’s evil? I guess it’s kinda like real life, with Jesus and the Devils and such but I can’t even figure that out—what’s the hope with me and Aliens?”
Sheth’s head and my head squeezed into the square-shaped window in the gym of his high school, me disregarding half of what Sheth says, me disregarding the other half—me shuffling this boy around by the neck skin—toting him here to this window to simply fulfill my lust for white girls in soccer shorts, no longer knowing whether they’re potential mates or potential daughters (feeling they’re both) and only having the slightest inkling of what that means for me, that I’m in love with someone who could be my daughter, that Sheth is friends with someone who could be my daughter and who I would also like to fuck. Maybe the Aliens have ordained this and are standing by waiting to mark the choice that I make on a piece of paper. They’re standing behind the curtain in the back of the gym. They’ve shape shifted into the gym teacher. Their organs are like insects but their faces like ours. Their hearts black as tar—no feelings, no respect, no love. And they don’t know our history. (We Whites in America like to think our prejudices form a particularly huge portion of our culture—our hatreds are a significant part of us.) And I guess they do. How much of me is made up of who I hate? How much of me is made of snide remarks and silent judgments and people I’d rather not be. Or subjects I’d rather not study. What about the hate of knowledge that’s other than mine? What about my hate for injustice? My hate for not following the law? What about my hate for noise and for those who break the law? Do I have to give that up to be part of this Alien world? The things they have started to teach us. Where am I without sending to jail and putting to death?
Wooom woosh Beelzebub—BAM!! Walls were spinning uncontrollably, noise was at a maximum. The entire spaceship was coming into focus (zero walls, a huge room, and Sheth and I were in the middle of the air). A fine string in orange light taught between our bodies and the disc. And everything, everything pointing to the fact that we’d just been abducted.
Caves of light, exploring children! Ancients dancing! Not a cattle anywhere.
They’re dicing us up like helpless piglets—or helping us just the same! Medical tables, equipment. Wires like pencils running everywhere. It’s the apocalypse (of what, I’m not sure) the final countdown, the end of us.
Against the backdrop of Andromeda-764, I ask our Alien host—a female who is controlling the other beings on the spaceship, I ask, “What is this experimentation?”
Her voice is like glass and it comes to me as if through water.
“This is Arcturian-571. A biological scanning entity designed in Andromeda number seven, six, four. We have come to diculate the contemplate and to concentrate the potentate of your un-delicious air. This vessel was built to specifications of complexity based on tours between your planets and ours, a hyper-light symphony begged us to come here and check you out!”
I try to speak but it’s garbled and I just give up.
The Alien continues.
“However, upon arriving, we have become confused about the intelligence quotient, on the ground, here. It seems to be very low.”
I try to explain to her that we were just coming to find out about the oxygen thing, the atmosphere, but she shut me up. I was going to tell her how we were just getting around to global warming and we’d be done soon.
“You’ll be done soon, alright,” she said—but there was nothing of a huff. “Your civilization has failed to evolve along those lines.” (Again, though, there was no judgement in this.) “We like your rugged-ability,” she says. “As you can see our race is quite gaunt. It’s our hope that combined with your DNA, we will experience a slight bulk to our race. It is unfortunate if this is the only reason we have traveled this distance to see you, but this is enough.”
“What is enough?”
“That we will be able to bulk up our species. And your species will be able to live on.” (Blah blah blah, then she said—) “Apocalypse.”
“Apocalypse?”
The head Alien looked at me like she wanted to eat me. To gobble me up. And in an entirely sexual way.
She mind-melded with me. Something like—I want to sit on your cock and mush it all around. But she kept talking.
“—arrived here 14 billion years ago and terraformed your Venus, which is fully populated now with humanoid creatures. Everyone’s living a happy life while you roll in squalor here—you human beings apparently got it wrong—all wrong! You were meant to create a paradise here on Earth and we come back after six thousand years and find you created money!? Money!? And you waste your lives going this way, going that way trying to hoard it up but you can’t take it with you when you leave this life—“ and at this point my brain fuzzed out because I couldn’t take it—all the things we humans had done wrong—but stated in a sing-songy performance (as though our demise was funny to them?) and my awareness took in all that was around us (where was Sheth?) and I tried to understand what the equipment does—
—and I fade into another room (It’s like they’ve been manipulating our memories!) where I’m locked to a table and they’re pulling shit out my ass. This is a long, silver instrument with a pointed end. They put that into my ass. It’s not sexual (exactly) it just feels like I’m reverse taking a shit. Like some cold no-no feeling I might have had as a youth which I’ve forgotten until just this moment. Cold, cold feelings. Sharp feelings. Fingernails. Cocks? How would
I ever know if it happened before I could remember? How would we ever know, if they started us here when we were evolutionary babies, that they created us? How can we ever forget that they’re landing their spaceships in our yards? That they’re sticking probes in us like they’re our mothers? As if we have no rights!! The right not to be probed in my asshole for a health checkup! These are human rights. The right to keep you off my property! The right to hold a gun to your face to tell you what to do. The right to keep your whole damn country—whole damn federation—off my doorstep.
—this is our planet—except that you put us here—
—this is you infringing on my God—except you are god—
My cries of faith are cries of blasphemy in this place. When they say, “What do you have to teach us?”—I say, Faith. To which they say, Even in this place? Which I interpret as meaning, Even in this place of hell, so far from Earth and so foreign?—Even in this place, you call upon your God?? But which really means, Even though you have seen this place, even now that you know the truth, you still cling to that little idea of yours you call God. And somehow my ignorance has become faith, faith has become ignorance, follower has become God and God has become follower. Even in this place, do I carry my false, trinket belief with me. Even in this place do I rely on it, rely on Him—even here where Satan’s bells play tricks around my eyelids, where the Devil’s scent is woven with every thread, does the truth fly through. Even here, my ignorant construction gives me strength. Even here, the secret I keep in my pocket gives me some comfort. I wasn’t born an Alien, I was born a Christian, and even here, in this place, will I claim my God as the One. Even when it’s useless. Even when it’s clearly wrong. Even through I’m out of my—out of my—element. Marooned. Beefed. Fucked beyond belief.
This is the universe they showed to me and Sheth. Sometimes we were together and sometimes we were alone. A universe of life (though weird life). A universe of computation. Of wild lines—can you imagine that? Something as simple as a line, drawn 100 different ways. Countless forms, incarnations. Embodiments of embodiments. Sarcasms of sarcasms. Lost in lost-ness. Great in grateful-ness. Abandoned abandonment. Rich richness. Lovely love. Lively life-hood. An ape with an appetite. A half a half-stepper. Bathed in a bathtub. Born full of born-full-ness. The ignorant one who proceeds (stupidly) correcting her mistake and walking on as though it was just a lesson—I hate thy stupidity, thy part that innocently adapts, moves on, fucks. Never looks back, hardly ever learns. I stand at arena’s edge, looking at this cluster fuck, standing far from it, thinking over all my inconsistencies, looking back on my agitations, being over every one of them—levitating.
You. Levitate. Me. You bring me forth. You know me—she knows! She knows my mind, when I want to fuck. Where does she get all this extra time (to think about what I’m thinking)? How does she love me? Seems to be familiar with what I was thinking yesterday! Everything exposed about me—FEAR! Everything about me known! Everywhere I’ve been! Every sexual fantasy! Then a feedback loop where I sink further into self-questioning, trying to hide, and every move I make, she knows. She knows everything. Everything inside me. I no longer know the difference between me and her—the distance between us.
I don’t know how to tell you more about our trip inside the spaceship except to say it in poetry, with random words and cutouts. To tell you in bizarre sentences—this I’ve tried to do. The Alien experience (which you all are familiar with now) is not an experience which expresses well in human words—in English words anyway. But remember, at this time this story was told, very few people had had experiences inside spaceships. And even fewer stories than that were told about it, due to CIA secrecy and bullshit. I’m not going to discuss the Secret Space Program here (and you probably know where I stand on that shit anyway). I say send ’em back to space and let us fend for ourself on this planet. They say we’re doomed on our own. I say give us the chance. But they’re far too careful—begun to get us off the planet when Exxon got their start. Far too careful, to let us take the reigns—that was never an option. And if we get out of control, they’ll give us another Great Flood. Move the moon around a little, jostle us into oblivion. Export our DNA then flush us back into (before the Stone Age). It’s all encoded in the doctrine of Alien kids of the universe—the greater good above all else. Here’s a sense in which we’re the other—the Alien—to them. Here’s the sense in which we have crashed the party and brought our nukes with us. If you think they’re gonna let us fuck up their universe—there’s a dome above the Earth to keep us in. And if you think they’re gonna let us mess up their Petri dish, think again—Aliens have their eye on our WMDs and every time we push the button they tickle us under the arm and we drop everything we were working on, forgetting all our thoughts and never quite understanding that it’s our defenses (which are really offenses) that our creators find unnerving. It’s as though we had staged a fight on the front porch between brother and sister and then as soon as we had laid out the rules, our mom came out with sandwiches and smiles and we had forgotten that her other kind existed and our punches were loaded, ready but Mother had no intention of letting us kill each other and we fought her for a moment over this point before putting down our weapons and sitting for lunch.
And that’s where this all brings me—to a tea-topped resort, capped in toffee, aged o’er the winter’s dew, a bit of an Alice-in-Wonderland feel to it. Disney’s White Princess/Snow Queen, barging, loafing, barfing herself into frame—you were famous for five minutes, moved back to Kentucky, withered, prone.
The Alien within me. (Seeing those transforming reptilians and then seeing—myself?—from within?—am I one?—am I an Alien?)
Of course I am. So are you, Sheth—so are you a hybrid being already. Either you’re a neuro-dead or your spirit is live (whatever that means) or you’ve been launched a thousand times (in secret) (but it’s really open). It’s a secret—but it’s really open. Newspaper articles written about it and shit. Showing up in headlines. Showing up tattooed to my wrist—H2O—a whip-encircling wrath that chokes my soul from inside this cell, paint screams White they have Blue they have Green they will paint they will paint they will paint us to the walls. They will paint us in layers of layer cake paint us behind the walls. Paint us in layers of substance (abuse) nothing holding back my creativity I made more albums than Eminem this is in my dreams (I have only heard 10% of his lyric). Fans popping up everywhere I have a crew back in West—young kids they reach out to touch my coat as I pass by I am their miracle worker their savior is coming after my pocketbook change (in my case a Glock 9mm—the gun so boring it’s the picture of pistol in the dictionary). A gun by definition. Weapon. Real shit. Words coming through from this noise. Bullet caps. After scene of a picturesque fire-frame textures in temperature. Wallet zoom. Did Bigfoot get derided again—derailed?—on their way to antiquity from the Left Half and got stuck here by the Nibirians’ stopover (virtually a sleepover—a virtual, alien sleepover) on their way through to the dawn, who houses—who? Houses. Green/White walls. Government as medicine. As medicinal. As a hybrid. As you. Sheth. Black Youth of the Ancients. Are you prepared to become aware of the fact that you are carrying the Niggar gene? That in your veins, flows that Alien, that other blood?
“I am nothing you have ever seen, man. Born on the flip side—tha tail side. The Black side—ya feel??”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Well that’s the real side, too. I’m born of poets—wranglers of the word. People that’ll take your last breath! You never met anyone like my mother or my father.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“I am right, Niggar!”
“Right! Ok! You are right. Right-o. Alright. O-k. You need to sign up for life here on the quad. So, you’ll need, to find, abrasion (halfway through) through completely through the bowl that is upside down upon your head THE BOWL has returned from my haircut I said it 2wice to invoke cold-cocked PORK SAUSAGES I wrote a book of secrets (held by no one) read only in darkness and its sound was the name of God I recognized it using my evangela-sense GOD I was known suddenly smeared through a pastiche of syntax-colored angles on the sky. Right. So you’re here for term life money we pay to acquire SOMETHING OTHER THAN LESSONS something we can’t take with us I said ‘Owl’ she said, ‘Simon Cowell.’ BAM! Rhyming bitch fingering herself between White panties in the swing seat. Blondes before Annabel. Grace period fading. All my books due at the front desk—imposed. Most of my family passing me by, like oddities at a zoo. Strung-up faces left behind (masks between the animal pen and your go train) already been decomposed BAAK(double)!!™ into the Stone Age.”
“I know you have it—I know you are. You came at me with some variation of this Stone Age argument from the minute you stepped through the front door.” This is what Sheth said. He continued. “But Mister Mister Max, Mister Mister Cop. Mister Chance. Mister roll that roulette—Canada!—eh? Roll them dice right onto the board. Blue—23! Black—18. Mmm. Ehmrmmm. Paid them Post-it notes their right Red stamps. Build forward. Tip. Fall.”
“You sound like you’re my age,” I say. “Sound like your age was more than doubled. You shouldn’t have to worry about Aliens. And yet, you’re the most able to handle this situ down here. And with us by your side as your guide—and yet, us unable to do shit. Useless. A marbled pen of fountains’ Blackness (I admit, culture). Of fountains’ (I can’t even say Whiteness)—of fountains of Gettysburg. Our only national monument that everyone has heard of while only a few grip its importance in national history. My daughter tells me I jump the shark with my Gettysburg obsession. Something about the way I pronounce Gettysburg, as though it was Lettuce-berg instead of Get-tee-zz burg. Something in my pronunciation expresses everything wrong with society today. Missy says this. She says I’ll take anything up my backside. Take it all in a single word. Take it up her ass. With some charm. Wild up. Wild out. Wild art in a bark, bark. Out, out damn spot! You are a maniac—can’t even decide on a mental illness, can ya? Busted out of my perimeter. Glassed out on X. Blurred lines, off. Introduction of a comma. Parentheses, all non-dot punctuation for me. Dashes— Bigfoot. It’s not that the answer is what we’ve been told—it’s everything but what we’ve been told. There aren’t Aliens. There is nothing but Aliens. We’re not living in an almost empty space—instead we’re the last-note density in a universe teeming with life. Yet our government (master though they are) thinks we would be better off thinking we’re all alone, without help with all our planetary problems (as if some civilization slightly older couldn’t knock a board and fix it all for us) (as if we weren’t made to live within our means—we just forgot—pretended we could take a shortcut) (make us take us—make us dip within the possibility of being subtle, not egregious as you created us). Created us, probably by robot, millions of possible civilizations reporting back the Alien Grays are just drones carrying out orders from the likes of us—it’s we on the other end of this line! Even us from the future. A species as a logic thing, a shape. Remember this—everything is happening at the same time. All space is one space. These are the mantras of the now. This is the type of speech you can expect from these motherfuckers! Painful, pain. The prowess of lions. Pain of a child! In birth! The first pain that child has felt!! We all had something to do with birth—one the mother, one the child. One the brother, one the father. Know that all our time is one, the same, and correct. Never doubt it. This is the scripture, of sorts, for a time away from time. We are connected in a simple way through this text, consciousness matched through reading and writing. This is why text was invented (in sorts)—to be one with the self. Can you imagine pure consciousness—noise?—light? An icon before you. Evolving. Language. It allows me to create myself in a way that recreates me. From the beginning. Solid. Programmed. FIVE - 4. Historically oversimplify. Amplify. Would you program a letter that turned into itself? Or one that turned (randomly) into something else? Infinite consciousness—whatever that is. Higher vibrations (living in 5d). All of humanity ascending. What does any of it mean?”
“I’ll tell you what it means,” Sheth says. “It means world peace—whatever that means. It means no more bullshit from the government. They’ve done their job (if they ever did)—they protected us from ourselves or maybe they just waged war. Maybe they were just a propaganda machine. Probably some of both. But it literally means the last world war. Because we all get on the same page about wanting to live and being able to do it. What if all that wondering was gone? What if we had the power to power our planet? Or what if our power was the planet?! I think that’s what it means, and—most likely, less of you. Less police. Probably none. You will be remembered as a parasitic, negative force on humanity. Arresting people for jaywalking? Please. Murdering black people as a living?? You could never get away with that. It’s not tenable—not tenable, sir!”
“You may be right. And—young grasshopper—I’ll tell you this. Your tactics are raw. Calling me the parasite while you the innocent, White! Innocent parasite being called upon/forth in perfection! You were born in purity (in your dirty eyes). Called forth from the hive—crack the only substance you were ever bathed in. Horns the only exfoliant you ever used. Abalone your only ever aperitif. Bedrooms full of Jennifer Lawrences. Your sticky shorts telling the tale. Walking pipes in joints, knees, janking apologetic deadface. Black. Thorn in my side. One More Niggar, create the need for my whole department. Black. Neck-ros. Ugly. Mothro-fuckros. Need me to hold your hand when you cross the street. Pull the panty fold from out your ass with a pair of grown-up fingers. Pink polka dots on white cotton. That slightest smear of brown on your panty fabric where my thumb and forefinger held it—to bring it to your ear, your nose and throat—infect you with taints of a government virus that you never paid to get but we gave it to you anyway.”
“What about the tie over?”
“What tie over?”
“The tie over between when the Aliens get here and that point at which they are either defeated—or shown to reign superior. The tie over between when they get here and when we leave!! WHAT WILL HAPPEN DURING THE TIE OVER?? Tell me before you leave!”
“Stand to, Negra. It’s gonna be what it’s gonna be. Shameful Negra. There ain’t gonna be no fuckin’ tie over. Not before we get a few things straight with them. They came here and they may not have tried to but they left us on our own and in that ownness—ehh—was engendered—uh—and the fact that we were there left ON OUR OWN TO FIGURE OUT EXISTENCE!! That was left as an exercise to the reader, Dr Papa Smurf. And under our firmament, left us to bloom in green and yellow and blue our Petri, called paradise. We call it Chicago, Florida—each one developed for a space—developed so particularly for that space we make ourselves unadaptable with form, slim like film, portable never, snakes/flakes, shady takes doubling one per second every second for a chessboard-sized Scrabble board the size of a game of Upwords—taking that size aboard a SpaceX rocket (SHAM!) bound for the sky (to return) a downwards trajectory of Hitler Youth right here in the Midwest USA there is a HUGE encampment on the right there is a HUGE encampment on the left they are ready on the left they are ready on the right they are ready on the firing line.
“BIG news from down front—eyes on the crowd! Every eye on me, on him!” I indicate the speaker—ho! “E’rybody listen up—SHUT THE FUCK UP your betters are speaking so SHUT YOUR TRAPS and take on some knowledge bitches.” I sit down, myself, on the school’s bleachers, my brain bleeding from the side of my neck I BESIEGE YOU to FUCK YOUR MOTHER, BLEED A LITTLE CHILD if you’re feeling generous SMACK A DOG in the mouth this is built paragraph by ANGRY paragraph on a SKEIN of LOGIC and WISDOM enchanted in a VIAL of BLOOD tacked to my chest between my TRANS™ boobs drooping dropping dangling sweating, sucking my tits sucking my wife xHamster—looked up pussy-licking lesbians made me lick her tits and she came, a cream-loving sow wheezing pleasure, pain—monster woman Annabel you should have been there you would have loved to see it. Annabel you sit on my lap as a little girl (maybe nine) sproutly back straight suck you right up through the middle as Sheth and I watch the game unfold before us a team of White Girls versus a team of Black—good competition, the contest of wills, of physicalities, these bitches’ period products opening up a horror flick with the CRISIS of a YOUTH of an upbringing of a CHILD, DAMAGED in a frying pan a v-ball game of croquet on the grass by the reflecting pool scored by a referee who works with the upper house of congress to (daily) rape men, women, and children they have made a foolishness of themselves and they will not only be remembered this way (and worse) but are known to many in this way now. Angry, incensed = the people. And I don’t know what to do but plug one of these bitches in the proper hole. BLEED THAT BITCH righteous. Dry FUCK A BITCH! PLAY!! PLAY THE GAME!!! Play those straps between your legs, bitch. Play those shoelaces up in your pussy junk. PLAY THOSE SHOELACES, bitch. Tight around those lips when you say it—bitch. Tight around that mouth when you say it— Tight around that ass— Tight around that dick— Tight around it— Tight— Tight— Let me tell you a story, while the vball game plays in the background. A story of a simple man—a cop—growing up in the simple Midwest of America. Making simple decisions, living a simple life. No Beethoven. No great man, like Cortez or Erikson. But a good man—me. This simple man, this good man, was living in the American Midwest having babies being married being a father to my girl. I play softball. Drive a Subaru. I’m not here actually burning up all the leftover ozone in the atmosphere (which is apparently what they have a problem with). I’m just a guy—a little bit of racism. But look, it’s designed with the intention of protecting my family, keeping my neighborhood safe—my daughter, my wife, my neighbor’s daughters and wives—safe from Negro bitches who don’t keep their fingers to themselves. So I’m growing up (all nice like) protecting myself and keeping myself and saving ourselves from the ending (yes—the ending of this book) when all the while you (Sheth) are plotting, sneaking the capture and kill of my daughter—do not speak!—I know it!
“Little news. This is how it happened. There was a day long ago on this planet where some of us had evolved. We got bigger! And we wanted to kill off the other half, to reset the planet, leaving only room for ourselves. But the divine made us stop. Said, You can have the planet but only its inside. To the halflings, will be left the surface of the Earth. And upon 6,000 years hence, the goddess will return and either salvage the runtling race or destroy it. That halfling race is ours. We’re an evolutionary byproduct of some testing some superior race is doing! We don’t matter to them! They’re off in their world doing their experiments on their level. The only reason we exist is they decided not to kill us. Us, living like fools on the outside of this planet, open to asteroids and other aliens who live among us like gods, taking our place settings up—eating whale and crab—swallowing gold for their digestion—would it surprise you to know that all the top spots for existing are taken over by reptiles at gestation?! They’re just so super-smart that they tackle each others’ thoughts about existence. If you’re a member of the species, implanted here at birth, you’ll automatically know by two or three years that your species is the XYZ and they live on planet Xenon over by planet Argon not to mention planet Pluugon™ (that’s a real paradise, all those Pluugonians prancing around the pool in their purple pantaloons). But you’ll never have the kink (not totally) unless you grew up there. And there will be people in engineering but they will be cool. They won’t be like slim-sham shyster uncle Freddie over there with his propped-up life and his propped-up values, going to church on Sundays or (more likely) staying to ‘work from home’ then just opening a beer, never even drinking it, just letting it grow warm on the side table, letting the cable television idle in the background. That’s the kind of chemical engineer we have today. Two-flop, one-flop, done. Ready for a rest before his ’venture started. In the new world, I hear they will be accessible as human beings too!”
“Do you think they will have giant pets? Giant dogs?!”
“Sheth your ignorance is far beyond my ability to comprehend. When I wake, on the morn, its pillar is visible to me straight above even though its base is a mile away. Glass towers rise for miles above the substrate. The woman is standing there with these glorious breasts (I mean—glorious!) and I’m remembering my time with her, the way she looked me over and said, Let’s get it on, before beating her will into me with the save-the-Earth stuff. It’s really important that we go with the flow, environment-wise. Otherwise you all‘ll fuck it all up and burn your planet down! Fucking bitch is right. We fell for the classic blunder. Tossing nuclear waste into the oceans—real gotcha! moment there! And to tag it, she’s offering up her pooch from this little platform she’s standing on, gagging me to the lurch, monster woman—y’know—ravishing me. Leaving me giggles, punch from the belt up—that feeling right after the orgasm—and she’s all, Boom! Now we’re done fucking, it’s time to save the world! As if these one-off people, me here, Sheth—your fucking Mom—is seeing this stuff, she’s having straight sex with Mr Stars and then at the end he pops it to her—How’d you like to save the universe?”
“And?”
“And what.”
Sheth smiles. “How would like to save the universe?”
“I suppose, by your innocence, that you mean to show adventuresomeness. I don’t think you should. These beings are trying to trick us. They likely want our resources and would leave the rest for dead as they swung back around to sweep up the planets every 6,000 years. Global warming? That’s just the ruse.”
I nip Sheth’s knee with my fingers—a honeymooners’ touch.
“Always, in the military, a ruse. The overt reason. The covert reason. Never let the other guy know your reason. And if he does? By some attachment, if he gets near the source of your truth, you kill him. Press the abort switch as soon as that motherfucker’s in the house. I don’t want no fucking Aliens—let the motherfuckers burn! READ MY LIPS—NO NEW ALIENS! We were comfortable with the illusion that this was our planet given to us by our god to do whatever we goddamned pleased with it. And we’ve chosen to burn oil here, instead of putting gold in our atmosphere. We’ve been locked here the whole time and those little pieces of knowledge that have become ours have been swept under the rug by our government based on some time machine experiments back in the 60s, Kennedy—about all you can assume correctly is that when everyone’s focus is on one thing, your best bet is to look the other way.”
Imposter syndrome?? Imposter syndrome!! Tell me again about the ScriptoLighter™. From deep within. From deep. They access me from the other side of locked doors. Bars. The pen-keep, where I am kept. The beer-keep, where I am kept. I place thee in a finite hand (of marble), blink thee with a zadraff. Stick. One sticking up your ass. One braining peanut-butter shit ’round the circles thine my asshole. Giving. Me. A headache. With your nuclear war. Giving my kind a royal pain in the arsehole. Butt-winked. Floor mongering. The capitals the heads of state they roll they wink, they die, they flatten. They wink out of existence. They solidify in May. They capitalize in April. One step backwards. One step. One. One. One is all there ever was. All the Everest™ there’s ever been. All the ever that there’s ever been.
This nextly labeled syndrome is a collection of random data labeled by the brain as some “Other” source—Other than ourself. It is our prejudice against our own confusing self. Our own arising self, our developing, growing self. And therefore our best selves, all punched down by this willful prejudice against data coming to us from within but that is labeled as extra or Other because of its confusing nature. Sheth. Sheth. Maximum negro. Maximum shaft. Could grow into—nothing? What could he grow into? Trash. Garbage. A proud-trunk of a man. Ready for hanging, loops, rope. I have seen it on TV and that’s all I need to know. Patriot with an AK in a map room with a gun and my Bible (that’s all I need). A couple crackers—Do you think it’s enough? Tori-guided tour the universe. Then we had Fiona. Female guides to tourists of our little spread. Beneath the stars. Here. Playing nightly. Pull up your universal chairs and learn a nightly lesson on the backs of our players. At the end, both sides cry and both sides smile and the positivity spin on the bad guys irks me so deep, so on the surface it gives me that instant-suicide reaction jizms from the leg to the toe zipping me, jerking me off in the blind in the cave in the hole in the womb in the grave jerk me to oblivion you silly god wonders me in a developing bath it starts off easy, does it easy, cum it easy, floss it do you think if I wrote a book like this that anyone would notice? (QUOTE AK 1995) Do you imagine that the words would flow so easily to a murderer? If all those people I had killed were the deaths of illogic—you know, if they were bullshit or not!—do you think, then, that my face would be the face of a poet? That I would be able to wax so eloquently about them, or us, or any of this?
What am I the god of? Whacking. He’s amazing at whacking. Rubbing finger-fulls of peanut butter shit on your jaw—just—wipe! Did he just wipe shit on my face? Maybe that’s what you get for endangering my family from the FBI, motherfucker! Keep them feds away from my house! Ok, well you stop posting video of yourself murdering a police man on the internet—don’t you know the minute you put that shit online they’ve got your metadata, your location—the second you put it up they’re coming to your house! Fuck! And you’re putting me in danger, and our daughter! Annabel’ shoulders on my chest. Waterworks. Cursory as usual. Willing to expand. Willing to penetrate my castle with her sensory angles. Caught in spring break—director’s cut! CinemaScope! The directorial language. Every drop of water that falls it through the water dropper counts the same as any other. Every, drop the same. Every, drop simulcasting. Every, drop descending. Every, drop fascinating. Every, drop whispering. Every, drop diminishing. Every, drop abating. Every, drop evanescent, vanishing.
To an am everyone in this cross-sectional I now address, I will have you know that the best I can work out is that someone’s playing a game and we’re the pieces. Each one of us, neurally connected as this particular player. Neurally connected as active. I would call it the matrix but that particular term was hijacked on the way to its own inception and it couldn’t make dinner as planned by a book that no one has ever read that contains the answers you are looking for. It was penned far in advance of the need of its answers. And what does that tell you about the need for dissertations? What does it tell you about the need for dissertations? What does it tell you about the need for dissociation? Dis-association? Dis-amplification? Discovery? Dismantling? Disparagement. Disreputation. Dishonesty. Discombobulation. Disarray. Disassembly. Discovered. Plucked. From your little cherry hole (butthole) of Sheth Jones my Niggard lover who sits beside me eternally watching high school girls play soccer eternalizing an image from my youth, part of how my sexuality was formed was walking up and down high school girls soccer fields watching hair turn at the knee pads nylon shorts (the cardio!)—the god damn cardio of those bitches.
Turn it to fucking—any of them! Me and Sheth going at it side-by-side. Me reaching around to pluck out his cherry hole. The motherfucking texture of these bitches the motherfucking tightness and oh my god the strength of their fucking cardio!
All along, a teenage boy lays with his head on his desk. He is sleeping. His brain is connected to a resonant frequency and the body is mine—it’s my body but I’m an Alien and I’m playing a game (this life). My friends have snuck into the room and are wanting to play—with me—they want to wake me up from this life I’ve been describing to you, with Sheth and Sheth’s asshole and my cherry-picking fingers and this cherry-picking book my notebook of mind for the day of Sheth’s Jennifer Lawrence arrest and (this) the day after. They want to unplug the bathtub, to unstop its stopper! And while nudging me waking me up from this interesting lifetime would not be called fair—would not be allowed in the rules of the world we really live in—jumping into the game and putting fentanyl in my weed would be. They would gladly kill me, wake me up—this world “in here” has no value to my buddies outside. And rightly so. Our entire universe is a trinket used for pre-dinner entertainment and in the dream outside the dream I’m not a cop (only a school crossing guard) and I don’t have all these annoying trappings like the map room and being racist—I’ve chosen to be racist (in the game) so that I can learn something about racism. And when I’m done (or when I accidentally die) I will wake up in my room where I live as an Alien and I will see my prankster friends and we will all go down to dinner.
The domestic disturbance arrest, Sheth, Sheth’s whole life, the entire world, is there as a mini-matrix just for me to learn not to hate Black people. So far it hasn’t worked, as just the thought of Black skin inspires in me images of the ovens of Auschwitz. My blood boils so! Blackies, Darkies shitting up the room with charcoal feces peanut butter shaped, peanut butter flavored oven candy wrap you in a Twinkie box of creamed filling, Darkies shown by Raisinets™, elephant people kabuki-wild bodies painted jungle people anacondas (anaconda dicks!) those black those bold those beautiful cocks so strong I take them in my mouth and suck suck suck the venom out!! Manaconda beauties—they’re in both hands! Manaconda beauties—between my butt cheeks! I cannot help my mind! Goes to orgies where I wake up with two Black men in my bed—seen from overhead—my wife naked between them. Goes to memories of seeing a Black cock for the first time. Back in El Paso. Two gangs (one four, one two strong) meet at the top of the wash. A curse instead of a name. The Black boy (who was poorer than us) shook his dick and then showed us, and my three friends didn’t speak for the rest of the day.
That night, in my bunk bed, looking at the ceiling and not being able to get it out of my head. It was sturdy, and strong—it was indestructible. I imagined it going in the pussies and asses of my friends. The carnage would be palpable. Rolling over. Getting uncomfortably hard against the pillow. I can’t remember if I jerked off (or the next time I jerked off)—did the image of it flash into my mind? How could I touch my own without thinking of it? And God loves Black people more, because he gave them rope-like cocks—how could He not? (I shall pray upon this this evening.) But my teenage self, taken aside by the cock of Blackness and slapped around by it—how can he be comforted?
Doesn’t he deserve to wake up at home, on the block, in his neighborhood, mind free of any entanglements—free of any disruption, even the disruption of Color and Race and Breed? Doesn’t he deserve at least that, this gimp-mental boy (a pure thing—a boy!)—deserve at least to enter the day (his world, his realm) without pure fucking disturbance?? The Aliens knew it—they were right we couldn’t handle this. When you put an Alien outside my window, I’ve got a shotgun placed up his ass!! When you put a Niggar out there, my gun is aimed at his guts. Shoot him there for a hardcore death that takes time. I approach the body, checking if he’s dead. Root around his guts with my gun barrel. Barrel lurches toward his dick!—His Black cock is possessing me from beyond the grave, I do say!
Remembering the threat from topside—they may have caused me to choke on my birthday steak to get me to stop playing the game. Wake up and come play, man. Take off the cop uniform and become a wish/wash post-tat beefy dude, kid and wife in tow, working on my F-150, building it out, secret compartments in the wheel well hiding Amazonian blow-dart delivery systems—one whfft and you fall off Victoria—
“Mister master, mister mister master—mister mister ma’am.”
“Yes?”
“I introduce myself as Sheth Jones. Witness. Defendant. Walking myself to the court stairs, up to the witness stand like Ted Bundy (he was just an animal—look at his expression as he prepares for execution). I’d cry too if they made me wear a diaper to avoid shitting myself on the electric chair. My case is made to you today to listen to myself sing my way off the executioner’s axe, rid my curly hair of a pick brush designed to sling off the lice of white kids they come in with that shit in they heads and—yeah, I take calculus, what of it? Take AP Bio, English, PoliSci too. This motherfucker be buggin’ about me lookin’ at Jennifer Lawrence like she’s some kind of cultural coin they pass around among White people to power themselves up after a swim. But I never had much to do with Jennifer Lawrence. Thought that girl was cool for tripping—yes, there was something about it for me but no, it wasn’t what you thought. It wasn’t a metaphor for White culture falling at my magic sight, born to make mermaids sad, every scale dried on the sand, every flair of hair crusted out—died—but no! That wasn’t it at all. It was more of a hippy-chick trip, just her indication that she didn’t know how to walk up stairs in a dress. She probably did the same at her prom.”
“And what interest does this hippy-chick have to you? How does she hold you?”
“I just thought it was funny! Man, who cares? Next year it’ll be some new White chick flowing up those stairs. She won’t trip and it’ll be far less interesting. Fuck it. Fuck. Jennifer Lawrence isn’t the thing, you see? JLaw. Psheesh. It ain’t about that. It’s about a systemic racist system that you and your generation have held mostly in place for another generation. That’s mine. I’ll be stuck with this shit for another lifetime while you’re dead and gone in the beyond. Sucking Pixy Stix in your heavenly crib, everything set for you like a baby in a high chair—mobile within fingers’ reach, music box melodies banging in your ears. That’s how you’ll witness the revolution—our revolution—from the skybox helium in your eye.”
“Sheth, slow down. I’m not a poetess like you. The music box melodies—what’s that? Some kind of metaphor for armed revolution? I’m not mentally ill—I can’t understand you. I think your ADD is talking, Sheth. Sheth, is that your ADD? Speak up, kid. Your delusions are showing. I think you forgot to take your mythorealism tablets. Straight up. Straight to the head. Tell me about Jennifer Law. Tell me of your fascination with her.”
“Well. What you need to understand, Papa Doc, is that this problem is not mine. It’s yours! You have a bunch of ideas in your head about your youth and what Black people mean to you, etcetera, and you’re railing against them like you’re railing against a real person who fits those criteria.”
“And you’re gonna tell me that I’m fighting the wrong person? That you are not my enemy, but my enemy is some other kid who looks just like you?”
“No! I’m gonna tell you, man, that there is no kid who fits your criteria! That kid who’s lusting after JLaw that you bust in on through the window—he doesn’t exist! I’m your best pick but it’s not me. I’m not disturbing the peace. I’m not lusting over your White prize. I’m sitting up there doing my calculus homework and you bust in the door looking for—someone who isn’t there. I’m—architecture and logic. I’m—Wu-Tang and Chopin. I’m the Scrabble champion of this piece! Does that mean anything to you?”
“You play Scrabble?”
Sheth nods.
“You good with words?”
“Yes,” he stresses. Let the words seethe through to me. Let your circumflexes invalidate your fortresses of sound. Let the Red fern grow up around your ankles and through your pants and around your head and into your ears! Let those pillars of oak surround you, bind you, find you neck-deep in mulch, able-bodied man, maker of eight times minimum wage, secure man. I stood over you for ages with a sifter, stirring and stirring it, cooking you down to batter, forging your chips with chocolate, milking your bruises toward a pulp, churning that pulp upwards into a cake, baking that cake upward through the oven’s roof, up up up and to the sky, up—up—up into the ether, White, Blue, Black, Super Black. Super—White!! Super pain. Super mother willing, super mother willing to bear the Earth on her back, super mother same.”
I looked upon Sheth as though he was crazy and I continued his speech without a beat.
“Super mother cow friends bringing burgers to your back porch poker party you’re so sly my sister Susan, so super silky monochromatic White. So pseudo-slippery with the numerals. So pseudo-smart. See, Paula was the Pretty one. Susan was the Funny one. Sharon was the Smart one. And I was the nothing one—I was the brother among three sisters, so I didn’t have a name, Pretty, Funny, Smart. In darkness they joked that I was the Stupid one. The Nothing one. And in darkness I became that. In the darkness I withered. Became rot. Became Dark Matter. Became the empty set. Became. Nothing. Became wanting. Became what’s at the end of the stick. Became so lost I couldn’t find (or know) the tip of my nose. That lost. That sticky. That much dopamine in the pit of my stomach. That much off-kilter ketamine. That much Blackness, that much Whiteness, in tow. And with the Pretty one, the Smart one, the Funny ones of you—in tow—with all of you begging at my sleep, pouring in through my lunch hour, making me lock the windows, jib-jab my car into locking order, freaking out in the two-lane on the way to Cincinnati.”
Sheth sat back in his lawn chair, surveying the soccer girls.
“What you’ve got to explain to me,” he said, “is how you exactly feel wronged—how exactly? Because what I’ve got is a whole bunch of Black people on one side of the equation, and this one is enrichened by a factor of x while this one is enrichened by a factor of y! And here we have the disconnect!! X is less than y. Y is White. X is Black. Never the two shall meet, in our world here. Now what are we gonna do about that?”
“About what?”
“About the discrepancy between x and y. Please pay attention.”
“I’m paying attention!! I am! I swear to fucking god. I just got caught between which one of my F-150 and my project bike I’m going to have to get rid of??!!”
“Why would you have to get rid of it?”
“Because of your pay increases.”
“My pay increases??”
“Because you’re going to want to increase your pay thereby virtually decreasing my pay! Fucking over my ability to keep both my F-150 and my project bike!”
“It’s not going to—it’s not going to affect you like that. You’ll be able to keep both your F-150 and your project bike. I’ll just be able to eat at the same time.”
“BUT THE ECONOMY!!”
“No.”
“The economy?”
“No. The economy will be fine. It’s stretchy. Like a woman’s twat. It moves. It’s limp. It grows to accommodate the accompanying child. It’s like her uterus, her ovaries. They grow and move to make room for the new. Nothing breaks. And when the child is grown, the womb grows back into size and the woman’s stomach grows flat again. All natural. All very normal. All planned and padlocked and plasticized for form formal formatting form-fitting fines of fantabulousness fantastic! forerunner forebears forestalls foretelling massive coup-de-gras elementary mountings of ancestors’ flames, anger fills my eyelashes before breakfast, cunts instill in me a fear that God would not take on. Do you read me? Read my intention?? Read my fallibility. Read my flavor. Read my invincibility. My candor. Read my instillation. Read my tears!! Oh White God, hear this cry! Oh God, were you always White, to me?—Were you always fair-haired, a raven in my garden, my kitchen—my falseness, oh that you would preclude me!—Oh, for ferns hidden in seclusion, eagerness tucked away in the reach for them—boom, boom, bee!—I could never ask for another! I’m glad you chose to grant to me a Black child. Ought could not be imagined, and yet, you could have chosen any color child to give to me. Orange, Yellow, Red, and White. A rose of any Color. Would never smell my name. I see myself as a poetry florist—I run the verse of the streets, Mr Police Man. Run the streets. Run for a night and a day, outrunning me this time. You wake up running—running in your dreams. Running in the catch of your hand, in the crack of your butt, nothing less immediate, the sweat of your ass collecting in nuts around the nocte Rx forgiven. You know that. You know not to take that or it might kill you. Why do you take it anyway, nocte? Why you take it anyway? My brethren do kill theyselves with nocte this and nocte that, whining their way down to the bottom of a stalactite cavern with knives for every wayward opinion.”
“Sheth, my man, I’m going to have to take you hostage.”
“Hmm?”
“Right now. Right here in this gym. My service 9mm, your head—what do you say we adjoin to the middle of the basketball floor. Right. Now.”
Sheth looks over slowly and sees I have my gun on him.
The girls rush to the southern end of the field, forwards clustering together as they attempt a score.
“Stand up,” I say.
We walk onto the floor, girls still playing, no one noticing our situation. But then they do. Number 17 stops mid-step, clomping down her shoe on the waxed wood slats.
I press my gun into Sheth’s back. One of the girls sees him and waves. Then she sees my gun and backs away from us, out out out, through the open double doors into the hallway with the rest of her team.
“Tell them to tell them,” I say.
“What do you want me to tell them,” Sheth deadpans.
“Tell them it’s an emergency.”
“It’s an emergency.” Sheth’s diction is perfect.
“Tell them to tell the office.”
“Yo, Sarah, would you tell them in the office that we’ve got a situation here?”
Sarah nods and runs.
“Now,” I say. “Why don’t you drag that ladder over here.”
Sheth points.
“That’s the one,” I say. “That looks like a perfect ladder for a hanging—doesn’t it?”
I keep my trigger pointed at my boy.
“See? I—I’m angry. Sheth. Jones. With a grandmother named Smith. I need you to die. I don’t want you to suffer. No torture necessary—’cause if I torture you, I’m really just torturing the demon inside myself—right?—the parts that are Black. Don’t run or I’ll kill you. Just get that shorter one. The A-frame? Yeah. Bring that sucker right here to the center of this floor. Sheth, Sheth, you really ticked me off looking at that picture of Jennifer Lawrence—like you owned her. You don’t own Jennifer Lawrence. I do. Me and my people. She belongs to us like my White skin belongs on my face. Set that down. Let me see your face. Black. All Black all the time. You’ve never had the chance to not be ugly. To not be Black. I’m White—I earned that. I did this. From the choosing of my parents to my conception, White White White. All White! Mother—White! Father—Bam! White! Girl next to me in the hospital when I was born?? White. I ain’t never had no Black girl stick a jellybean in my bellybutton!”
Sheth says, “What bellybutton?”
“A jellybean in my bellybutton! That’s what this little white girl named Arianne did to me when we were in preschool! She was White! She wasn’t Black!! She had pretty short fingers and I lifted up my shirt and she put a jellybean in my bellybutton!! That’s what happened!”
“Ok—that’s what happened. Whatever dude. If you don’t want to talk about it—“
“I laid down. On this board. We pretended it was doctor. She found a jellybean or a little piece of Red plastic on the floor and that was what she did. She put it in my bellybutton and it felt good. Like sexual. And she was White. And sexuality was White. Programmed from birth by geographic circumstance and parental hatred. I never had a Black girl present! I never got to try that! There were little Mexican kids (of course) in El Paso and they were cute but they didn’t look right. They weren’t sexual—they were never sexy to me.”
Sheth is standing next to me holding the ladder.
My weapon arm is outstretched to his head.
The school security guard is here.
The guard is unarmed.
Students are gathering in the hall around him.
I pop the safety on my pistol.
“We don’t want no trouble here, officer.”
I say to the security guard, “I don’t remember asking you a goddamn thing!”
To which he waves his hands over his head and says something into his radio.
“I think you’re gonna die here today,” I say.
“I hope not,” says Sheth.
JUST THEN THE VOICE OF THE PRESIDENT ENTERED MY HEAD.
It said—
The room in the grease is the room with fleece. A room uncovered is four—covered, two. Desolated, one. Pre-existence, zero plus zero. Twelve zeros in a row, a microorganism from outer space, we bloated the government to help you when you downsize. (You’re welcome.) Everyone must start fires now. That means you, mister man. I need everyone available to exist as chaos mongers. Find Black things and break them—you hear? Unearth all that is Black, root it out, then ban people from living in the sun. Ban getting tan. Make everyone live inside a McDonald’s—like me! You don’t need fresh food anymore. You don’t need billions of dollars. Not to be happy. Not just for that. I am the Alpha and the Omega (pure beast) and I would like to add that I am every letter in-between (ok?) and I would like to add that you hurt me—you hurt me very much when you said that, mkay? Mmm-hmm. Mmmmmm. I would like to say—and to say very clearly, that I will not be rebuked on this matter. I will not, people/frogs. But you do know that—uh—between the matters being discussed, a very large sum of money was placed in escrow that you might benefit at the end of this play. So keep reading. Please. Please keep reading this, right through your bedtime. You might be asleep—some would say you are right now. That in the very reading of this book you have been transplanted into an alternate dimension where there is no money and there are no women—so what are you supposed to do now? Well, mister man, that is up to you. But remember, when I hold up my hand like this, that means to attack the citadel. Got it? And when I say my words like this, that is my signal to go hog wild and start killing people. But now, before that, I have an update to my racism template. Will you listen? Good. I am not a racist. No. I like Black people—Lionel Ritchie for example. Is he Black? I don’t know but he looks Black and he has such a lovely voice. I listen to him in my car—yes, God drives a car. Don’t worry which kind. But it’s not a PT Cruiser. I like some other Black performers and rappers, for example, and I always play them at very high volume when I’m riding in my car (which is not a PT Cruiser) and I like—I think that’s it, for Black people. Blacks are somehow less racial to me when they’re rich. It’s the filthy poor ones who get to me. Poor Whites—not so much. They’re redeemable (even though many are never redeemed)—poor Blacks—I mean, what can you say? There’s nowhere to go from there. The only hope (and it’s not a real hope, since mulattos are—) Well, I shouldn’t continue, since they say it’s mean. But—ah—a letter to all my minions. It’ll say this. Dear Minions, to Love and Love and Love. But before that, Hate. Hate’ll keep you safe. Secure. Lonely—true. But rich. Eating the best meals while White waitresses bring me food (anyone else and I would be too sickened to eat). Anyone else I would rather slave-rape them over the table, colonial skirts flung high, me retching over her back, trying to throw up at the time I cum—vomit, cum, blood. Insides of a gizzard. Tunneling through Red walls, your Red the same as mine (apparently) and yet, it doesn’t feel that way. Your God is a racist—it’s true!—and he doesn’t think Americans are White enough. The Nordics. Russians, maybe. It’s what I have against sunshine. I’ll actually tell you a secret—your God is a metamorph. I’m not this form, except to you I appear this way. I only appeared this way because I heard you dislike creepy crawly things and snakes and scorpions. So I come to you like this, in this imagery you find comforting. But—let me ask you this. Doesn’t that sound like something the Devil would say? Someone comes to you as a furry thing, and it says, “I’m the supreme creator of this universe. I chose to appear as a bunny because I heard you don’t like snakes.” I’m saying, what is this guy’s real form? It has to be a snake, right? I’m the god of this world. I make the rules. Don’t come to me claiming to be helping me by appearing cute. Fucking snakes in the grass—every one. Every one of you motherfucking snakes. Come to me at night and curl up in my fingers. God. What a joke. I show up as a White-beard man? Fuck you. I take any form I choose (too) and my name is wicked propster, immovable blob, crazy clown. There is no God or Devil!! Don’t you see? We’re both ghosts of infamy—we don’t even have a body, as you understand it! Now, mister man, my glorious hate machine entombed in the body of a cop (White—ha. You think there is such a thing as Black and White where I come from?—) Oh, son, let me tell you a story. I was forged in the fires of laughter and that’s just dialing it down for you, so you can see, so you can hear me in your head. So you can conceptualize me when I’m leaving you alone and have something you can name. We don’t even have nouns where I come from. Just something like registers. Or—just a place. A network of networks. See? You can get a general idea but never really know it. Know it in your bones. Because you don’t have places in your bones to hold what I’m talking about. Just as I don’t have enough places in my bones to understand totality. No one does. There’s totality, and it is knowledge. But it can’t know itself, because there’s not anything like two for him. So the construction it knows itself can’t exist—there is no it or self. It’s weird, I know, but I just thought I’d let you know, since you always talk to me, that I’m nothing like what you think I am. In fact, what you think I am is just some bullshit that I made up because I knew showing you the whole would raze your fucking mind and I’m coming to Earth right now to see you, cop, fuckhead, idiot. My plan includes you, so get ready!
“Sheth.”
“What?”
“The Aliens are coming. They’ve joined with my God and they’re coming here. Now.”
This is the blast arm. This is the kinetics! I am your God and your Alien, all in one. Prefer to be called “Star Person” but if you prefer Alien, that’s good with me. I’ve cobbled together my turbo blasters, torn apart the cosmos to come to you now in all my lack of glory, my itsy-bitsy-ness, my invisibility. Your correctness comes when you feel powerful over another—mine comes when I hardly touch them at all, when I slink below the radar, behind your eyes, when darkness is my cloud. I have to take all my elements of your Godliness and all my elements of my lack of self and turn them into a being appropriate to hold my mirth. Laughter is my essence. I turn myself insane. My proportions are impossible to hold in your mind. I turn all your hate for Blacks and the Alien, all your fears which materialize as psychotic voices telling you the President is speaking to you, saying things to manipulate you, and as long as he carries a straight face you will believe him to the core. Vogue. That is a rough estimate of how I move. The way I dance through space and time. The way I rock the house. I can’t listen to any of your music but I have my own “music”—I guess you could call it that. It is a rhythm to my head that describes my rhythm of being, thinking, processing. Now I have to blend the two. Have to blend being hateful (something I forgot long ago—but something I can remember!)—hate, the way it forms in the joints like vaginal discharge (which I eat, by the way). I don’t have a vagina, exactly. But I can have whatever I want, you see—so you might say I conceptualize myself having a vagina, which makes it more or less so in my world. Then I can pretend I eat my vaginal discharge (which tastes good to me) and that pretty much makes it so. I think you understand. I have a vagina and a dick, by the way. You know when they say Alpha and Omega they mean me, right? I eat buggers, shit, I eat cum and eyelash buggers. I eat every motherfucking thing. I slide my hands down pants I take you back to El Paso—your precious home. Creature, do you know how small you are?? Smaller than small. Your so-called consciousness (limited though it is) smarts when folded like a piece of foil. It shakes when I think a thought and it blows to dust when I put my lips next to it. Be afraid, my friends—be very afraid. My truth to you looks something like evil. I think evil and I breathe evil (your evil). You think you’re bringing me a gift with your pleasantries but this is not the case. Inside my mind, if I had a mind, are neurons made of serial killers (my thoughts murder and torture a billion yous every time they think). My moods are tidal. Hurricane waves. Someone on your planet offered a hundred million to develop a method to save the planet. Tell me, Earthling, which of you (if they could do this) would not do it for free? Tell me why I should save you selfish fucks from self-destruction! Can you tell me that? That’s my problem, Earth-ling. We created you, you see. Your fragile little consciousness would not be here without us. But you’re not the desired experiment. We set you up, let you run for 40,000 years, and then we find you’re splitting the atom to destroy each other? We don’t care whether you kill yourselves (by the way)—I don’t. But we do care about your oh-so-clever atomic bomb. How did you get the idea that this was good? Better to live by the camp fire than to make a flashlight that sets your world on fire—eh? I like Canadians extra much. By and large Canada is the country on your planet I like the most. Canada is never in the news. Canada never invades anybody! They have all the cute girls!! (( SIKE!! )) I kill Canadian bitches at will running volts of electricity through they motha-fuckin’ cooters. That’s what it’s like dealing with me. Lots of changes. One minute this, the next that. It’s an issue of cohesion versus surprise—I’m a little heavy on the surprise for your kind. It’s sort of like—you’re a cow, and you’re grazing in your field, as you’ve been doing for the last few years, and then I come along, appearing suddenly before you (I am the size of the sun) and I break your planet in half and blow your little body into smithereens just to try to shake your hand. That’s me. And one second later I’d be a bee on a flower in a field. It’d be hard for us to get to know each other, wouldn’t it. So I’m just saying to you—when I say I like Canadians, it’s more than a farce in my mind. I’m just putting together something that makes sense to you. Can’t tell you much about the future. But I do have something to say to you, friend, which is that if I leave you around for much longer I’m going to have to give you a kick of intelligence. Because—phew—what I’m seeing so far, down here—things aren’t happy in the common sense department! You’re my minion, mister man. I have come here to use you. Not sure you’ll be happy about the way you’re used. But you’ll be saved. And that’s what you want, isn’t it, human? To be saved. For Jesus Christ to come down out of the sky and make it all better! To make it all go away! Just wash me clean, God!! Get me pure again! Motherfuckers. I’m sorry if I call you that, it’s just that I want to express my unhappiness with how you’ve (failed to) take care of things while I was away. (Looks around.) Yeahhh, this is gonna be a problem here. You’re pouring sludge into the ocean and you messed with my whales!! I’d really like to fuck you in the ass with a chainsaw, as your creatures say. Does that mean I want you to hurt, feeling my wrath from the inside, until you regret that you were ever born? That is the exact meaning of what I want to say to you. I’m joking—I’m joking! Kidding, always. Look, kid—I love ya. Come to daddy. There are no mistakes. Even if you mess up an entire planet. We’ll kiss and watch movies and drink hot chocolate—yes? It’s funny, to me, the planet both did get fucked up with all sorts of chemical junk and it didn’t! So it’s ok! But right now you and I are in that reality where it did, and so in this reality we have to have a talking to with your people. Don’t worry—it won’t hurt. (Not any more than total destruction.) I’m bored—yawn =) So anyway we’re going to do a major renovation down here. This gymnasium will be fine. I will be officiating the event as—Shiva! Always liked that one. Where I come from, “chicks with dicks” is a major attraction. We all go in for bizarre sexual arrangements—you don’t even know what sexuality is, heathen, cockroach, my little coppy-cop. You’re barely regurgitating biological impulses. You own nothing of a personal sexuality. Behaviorally—it’s drop in the bucket. Angles of infinity. Bestiality? It’s all bestiality! Aren’t you a beast? Don’t you sense that I am one? Do you think that sex ends with your particular set of flaps and holes? I’ll show you sex like a kaleidoscope, when the time is right. But today—right now—I’ll be needing your head, cop, for what it’s worth. And bring your Black boy with you (he has a part in this, too). La da dee. La da daa. I’m gonna smoke you out so deep, so green, cop boy, you sexy mf. You’re the epitome of my picturing my ideal human. Spunky, a little fat. I even like the smell of your poo—give me a snatch I can take back to the ship. Put your head on my lap, see me as an Earthly human. Jennifer Lawrence. Your head on my thigh, the smell of my puss perfuming your nostrils, my fingers in your hair. “You’re such a dear, my little Texas boy. I’m from Kentucky—but you know that. I’ve come to you since yesterday appearing in your mind as the celebrity JLaw, appearing on Sheth’s television as an implant to speak to you, mister man. ’Cause you’re the center of my plan. Everything JLaw has ever said (in your memory) is the construction of a part of me who wants to get your attention, cop. As far as you know, Jennifer Lawrence’s entire existence was created by me and edited into your mind. My lips part and I expel breath, muscles of my abdominal tensing and you can feel them in your sensorium. I let you feel my pussy. Move. Tense. Do I have your intention now? I need you to do something for me.
What, Goddess?
I need you to hang that Niggar Sheth from the basketball hoop with your belt.
“Hang Sheth??”
“Don’t make me repeat myself,” Jennifer says. “Hang him by the neck. Civil War-style. Right-o? I’ll wait here while you do it.”
The three of us were standing in the middle of Sheth’s high school gymnasium, backs to one another, watching kids come in to watch the show—me, Sheth, and the combined God/Alien/Shiva/Jennifer Lawrence thing, undulating through all her forms, shocking everyone present with his beauty. JLaw did magic tricks—some sort of flippy-stick thing—baton twirling, whatever. Fire. Sparks. She entertained the crowd like a champ, giving me time to fasten the noose around Sheth’s neck at gunpoint. A good Niggar can do his own noose-fastening (if you ask me). A good Niggar will hang himself on command when I say yes. Fucking Niggar, I will subvert you. I will suppress you. I will fucking kill you in my dreams, every night, from here to eternity. Fuck you, Niggar—that’s how I really feel. Hang that rope from the tree, Niggar! Hang that rope from the basketball hoop! Yeah!! Got fucking Niggars working for me while I kill they asses. Sucking my dick! I must subvert the Niggar before the Niggar subverts me. I must murder the Niggar before the Niggar murders me. Suppress! Subvert!! Supreme!!!
Kill the Niggar. Kill. Kill kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. I kill the Niggar that’s mouse wanders into my trap. Kill the Niggar that looks at my daughter—no, in my daughter’s direction. Kill. Kill. Kill kill kill. Kill the Niggar that’s face is on backwards. Kill that Niggar and every Niggar like ’im. Kill the motherfucker. Kill his motherfucking face. Kill his fucking dick. Kill his lungs and his stomach and his brains. Kill him with a single shot to the head—almost too short—silencing his pink squiggly stuff, dropping him to the ground. Kill a man with a rope to his neck—too slow, worse than a choke if you don’t snap their neck. Niggars hanging from trees (fields of them, spaced like an orange grove, as far as the eye can see). Power plant Niggars. Steam rolling Niggars. Apple box Niggars. Glock motherfucking Niggars coming up my street in laid-back cars. On top is my Ford 150, looking down at your windows and your Chinese weapons, your Indonesian shoes, your African skin and clothes that are from nowhere I’d find respectable. Maybe I’d never find you respectable—but I think I would, if I changed enough things about you. I could change you head to toe—and—nope, I’d never find you respectable, even if it was just your skeleton standing next to mine, I would still never touch you. Would still never shake your hand. Would still never look you in the eye. That’s why your car is down there and my car is up here. To establish the dominance. Because someone like me would never see the world upside-down. Would never see the gentle man and the Yellow man as equals. Are you kidding? I don’t even see the Yellow man as human—much less star people??
“It’s ok,” Jennifer Lawrence says.
She’s speaking to me out of the back of her head.
“Go to the basketball hoop. Throw the rope over the rim. Pull it through. That’s it. Good, human. I have been thinking about you since yesterday. When I saw you when you picked up Sheth for domestic disturbance? I was on the television and I looked at you and you looked at me and I could see that you liked me and I hoped you would see that I liked you too! You’re cute, mister man. So cute.”
She got in my head like this. Told me to fasten the rope, pull it tight, keep Sheth at gunpoint. I was waving my weapon around like a madman, tagging people in the crowd involuntarily. Put the rope around Sheth’s neck. Wrap it around my arm. Pull the fucker tight. Now kiss Sheth goodbye, she said.
“Now kiss him.”
“Do what?”
“Kiss. Kiss kiss. Kiss your boy. Go. Do. Do what I say.”
I find myself going for my boy. Sheth, his tender neck strung tight by the rope in my arms. He looks like he’s considering rejecting my kiss. But he doesn’t. He just stays there as the crowd cheers and I plant a wet one on his cheek.
“Kiss him on the lips,” JLaw says. “Make him sloppy.”
“What do you know about sloppy kisses?” I say.
“I’ve been sloppy kissing for about 10 years,” she says. “Don’t tell me about sloppy kisses. I’ve got my technique down and everything. Don’t be ticklin’ or nothin’. Get down there and kiss him!”
I look at Sheth in the eyes. He looks like a man to me. Not quite a real man. But I can see his yearning for the future. He is eager. He believes in possibility. He is ready to go into the world and quench his desire.
I look at Jennifer.
Are you making me feel this?
She doesn’t move her lips.
Don’t you want to feel this anyway?
I tongue him. He doesn’t pull back, and I realize my entire reality is under this being’s control. Sheth isn’t real. JLaw isn’t JLaw. My whole knowledge of myself is probably generated by this being and all I am is one little micron of consciousness put in this slot to make this one decision! My whole memory is constructed. Four seconds ago there was nothing—of this. Sheth’s big lips give as I press our faces together. And my face goes into his. And his into mine. Our teeth. His tongue. My tongue. The top of his mouth. His breath in my mouth. I press my hands around his throat and he pulls them away and my hands go down his chest into his pants. Sheth bites my neck and his hands on my arms. My gun hand tightens, the pistol pointed at his scrotum. I jerk him a couple of times—and Jennifer Lawrence jumps into my head.
She’s like—his cock feels good, doesn’t it? Hmmm. There’s nothing like a good Black cock. Nice and hard. Rack that. Grip it! Fuck it—fuck it! Put it in your face, love it. Suckle it. I didn’t say suck it, I said suckle it! Here, let me show you.
I’m not going to describe JLaw’s godly lips suckling Sheth’s Brown cock. It’s irrelevant and it’s below me. But I loved watching that shit.
Spit dripped between their bodies.
JLaw put me in a head-lock.
I want you to think about what you’re about to do.
Kill the Niggar?
Yes. Mister man. Listen to me. The way I want you to think about this is how can you respect Sheth Jones?
W/hat do you mean?
I mean, what are the ways in which you can respect Sheth Jones.
There are no ways I can respect him.
Ok.
That’s ok?
Sure.
You don’t mind?
No. I don’t give a shit. It’s up to you, how much pain you want to feel. Me, I don’t feel pain ’cause I’m from Kentucky and down there we—
Ok. JLaw. You’re getting too—technical.
Yeah, well, it’s up to you. Life is what you make it. Myself, I like to be happy ’cause it’s so much easier! But—hey—if that’s not for you, you don’t have to go for it. That’s my name and my name is joy! I like to rock out in barn parties till 3am, roll with my bitches from the Kentucky!
I’m in the noose. JLaw has me in my own noose. There is no Sheth. There never was a Sheth. The whole world is me, and this Alien—the Other. She’s got my head in a noose. I’m the hangman and the accused. I have come to my end. And it’s final. And this is it. This star. This system. This seed. Why we ever called it a Black hole I do not know. All you have to do is listen through the fabric of the matrix. We are here and we are here to help you. This is the one way we have to communicate to you, and you have to listen. We’re the ripples in the waves. The gusts on the wind. I struggle for context. There’s my gun hand—I’m in the gym. I wave it around and everyone goes, Ooooh! And the crowd goes wild! The crowd goes wild, stadium lights rise behind, fall, darkness descends, no one walks the stage, the chaos horns bleaking their tune, and I’m making a speech, just like we did in high school.
“Today I’ll be talking about Niggar blood and Niggar blah blah blah I used to know what I was talking about but this Alien/Beast/Chaotic magician (a Frogger™ piece for Monopoly™ in my home town) she’s come to me, grace in hands, and asked me to respect this Piece of Shit™ Niggar Asshole who raped my version of Jennifer Lawrence who is the true identity and a plant of this Alien being and Alien means Black means Other. I got that, you elementary piece of shit. Stop explaining me. Stop smacking my shit. I’m just a man. I’m Mister Man! I’m a cop and I have a wife and one kid—a daughter. I live in Dayton, Ohio and we’re grass-fed people, we don’t eat processed foods! We like our beef and our secret military bases and our pristine daughters we’ve developed genes for this sort of thing, in this country. Genes’ll make your pussy tight! But now I’m asked to find one way to respect the product of Niggary genes. Can I succeed? I don’t know.”
I don’t know—into what is known as The Cop’s Lament. It’s a list of all the things I’ve never had that I’ve felt I’d deserved. Plus a list of all the pussy I never had—you can see the sort of list this is, this is that lacky lusty sort of list this lost sort of list. What I should have had. Who I should have been. Yah yah yah! Yo yo yo. Here the fuck we go! A Hoe-Tee-Doe and A Toe-in-a-Hoe in the Merry ole Land of Oz.
It should be called The Niggar’s Lament. That’s the only motherfucker here who needs lamenting. But it’s not, it’s The Cop’s Lament and here I’m supposed to apologize for everything I did wrong to you. Not you in the sense of all you people I’ve ever arrested or anything, but you in the sense of Annabel and Melissa. (My wife and child in case you’ve forgotten you smug fuck!) So, that’s in the sense of, uh, telling my woman and my girl all the things I’ve done wrong that they don’t even know about. Telling my wife and child! I’m sorry for countless things. That’s what The Cop’s Lament is all about. My pain. Your gain. So you’re here to learn off my back, to lean from my experience. Welcome! Fuck my ass. I’m a Niggar and I am a Whore! Even thought I HATE that fucking word! Whore?? You’re a whore? It sounds like 1970s. No one’s a “whore” anymore! My gramma maybe. But whore?—No. I’m sorry for my mamma. Sorry for my pops. I’m sorry for the glass I’ve stole and I’m sorry for the rocks. That’s the final secret, isn’t it? EVERYONE’S ON DRUGS! Yeah, even “normal consciousness” is all about drugs. I mean, saying the brain is built on chemistry is equivalent to everyone’s on drugs so. It’s there. Genial.
My Niggar genes came in on my mom’s side. In a skirmish south of the Civil War. Couple slave rapes. And super-aunt Tilda pops in down the line, 1/8 Black, 1/16 Black, 1/32 Black, 1/64th! Are you even Black any more, bro? One little checkerboard away from purity—are you even pure, bro?
A pure little White girl—the ultimate icon! Oh, she’s so sweet, she’s so subservient, and sub-skirt she rocks boy-pants (panties) Shirley Temple blue picnic baskets crosshatch no hair anywhere. Are you that pure, bro? Does your crotch stink of tuna—err, I mean tulips and cherries. Can it take my finger (little one) in a child-rape typical of a cop (in my mind)—YOU ARE SALTED AND DATED in my book! Close the cover (caved). I was never this pure! Oh, me, my shriveled genitals small as a cork hidden in swim trunks tucked inside my body (oh!) get it out get it out! come to me, lie down now, become my masturbation rag doll, limp, don’t move, be my little girl so I can take my pleasure from you from the special spot between your legs designed for me to fuck you so heavenly making me cum! making me go yum! yum!! YUM!!!
That’s how pure these motherfucking motherfuckers want me to be. They want me to be honest about everything. To bear all my secrets—secrets are weaknesses (or something like that). With my secrets, others will own me (or some such). Don’t start tearing apart my language. Don’t make it come apart at the edge. That will make me feel very afraid and I might be susceptible to error with respect to the continuance of our relationship. You want me to spend the day describing opening my daughter’s genitals with surgical tools? (I didn’t do that, but a similar me in a nearby dimension did.) Can you punish me here? I heard you thinking that. What did I do? Stole a pack of bubble gum from the store when Mother took us. Shoved a spike in the next door neighbor’s tires, just to destroy something, and never owned up to it. Cheated at school (a lot). Raped that girl in the weight room (if you can even call that a rape). That was waaay before Annabel, though (and I would never cheat on her now). Everyone has those sorts of formative experiences. The dog and the pony. Taking a shit on the golf course at dawn. Beheading snakes with my hunting knife. Stabbing (repeatedly) a goat I’d found wandering away from its fence. (That’s true.) It’s this whole long story and I hadn’t meant to kill it but we can just skip the story and call it me killing a goat with my hunting knife. I did a lot of things with my hunting knife.
What cop shit do you want me to be sorry for? Shit like eternally stopping Black kids in Oakwood? No, you certainly don’t care about that? How about just beating people a little bit with my fists and my baton and the butt of my gun and the handcuffs before I put them on your wrist. No—certainly not. You might care about me stealing cash from the evidence room. Oh, no? How about ignoring witness testimony (a lot) when the defendant would have been a guy who was down on his luck or just playing around (in rape cases). A guy’s dick slips into a girl’s puss and she gets angry? Fuck that. This is all White people. What about Blacks? I could enter evidence tampering. What’s the difference if a bag of cocaine falls here or falls there? It’s not falling at White feet so fuck it. It could have been that guy’s. So what if he spends a lifetime in jail? I think about them every night before I eat my dinner, right before my prayers. Life inside, on a bum drug rap. My fault. My fault they’re in there for life. And you ask me, does it bother me? No, it doesn’t bother me. I have a lot more to regret from my life than sending four or five Niggars to jail.
It’s tough for me to be candid. My mind is stretched at this point in my life. I was lied to earlier in my youth and shit. Please understand that I don’t intend to hurt you. I can’t help it. I blurt this out! I can’t help it! I’m not trying to be a dick! (It just comes naturally!) This is my default setting, based on youth, and I need your love to fix it but I can’t get your love anymore because I’ve been a dick to you my entire life. Sister! Mother! Daughter! Whore!! If I called to you now, you would laugh in my face. Fuck! I’ve fucked myself!! Now it’s me and the other incels (or soon to be) fuck-nutting in the closet to bootleg nudes. I am in a hole and I can never get out without your help!
Are you there?
Alien? JLaw?
I’ve pissed her off. I’ve pushed her too far. For the Alien (who is so forgiving) to abandon me, I must have done something terribly wrong. Now I’m insane in a blank room (no weapons) with White walls and directionless light and no windows, just a pair of drains, one at the top and the other at the bottom of the room. This is in the center of me? I’m a mental patient, like my nephew? Suicidal. Totally crazy. No grip on the importances of life. No family. Strung out on drugs. I don’t even know what “strung out” means! I’m channeling him. I’ve come into his consciousness now. It is bright. It is clean. It’s so busy! There are voices coming here and there talking to me in multiple languages and everything makes sense! It’s delightful! I’m having ideas for things to make. (Projects, art!) This is fantastic! And ooh there’s that pang. That worry. That Darkness, dread!—I’ve never felt this Dark about anything before. What’s scary is really scary. Fuck! Now I’m a bug. Now I’m a frog. Now I’m a cloud with no body whatsoever! Now I’m an entire universe and this is not my nephew anymore. This is me. Somehow I’ve become this—nothingness—that floats around and I gasp and think, Did the Alien kill me? Am I dead? Whut. This must be what happens when you die. Or the Alien is showing me what that would be like. I’m the wisp of a cloud far above a green field on a green Earth. It’s beautiful down there—no people. This must be the Earth before people. It must be skies before pollution. The waters before pollution. Breathing air when it was fresh—through and through. We’ve been terraforming this planet for millions of years. You’re not the first. You won’t be the last. My sister came to mind with her damn environmental message. It turned out that was the realization of my life, floating here in outer space with no body, looking down at the planet it was crystal clear to me, I should have been working as a park groundsman, helping kids cross the street, not this arms race of a profession I’m in—chasing crime, creating crime, what’s the difference?
Goddess let me down from the heights and I floated through the roof of the high school. Down there, Sheth and Jennifer Lawrence dancing in a So-You-Think-You-Can-Dance-style setup, televisions and such and all the students were SYTYCD audience members and JLaw turned my head to her and her eyes were big in mine and she said, Have you had enough teaching now and you’re ready to come down here and be a nice, nice boy or would you rather return to the heavens to witness the dawn of Gaia for some meditations on the unity of everything and your place in the whole of all creation?
“No, I’m good,” I say.
Mmmmm, Goddess smiles at me.
“I was thinking I was going to hell for being a racist.”
Mmm-mmm! Goddess smiles. Your hate for your fellow being is disturbing, from a certain point of view. But I don’t punish you. You will work your way out of being racist. Are you ready to return here or would you like to go back to the Gaia meditation?
“You sound like a computer menu.”
“I am, strictly speaking, exactly that.”
“So I can stay here or return to the Gaia menu?”
“There are other choices.”
“What are they—no no, don’t tell me. I’ll stay here.”
I look around at the crowd of students. There are no other cops here yet. The kids stand completely still, their hands paused in the middle of whatever gesticulation they’re in the middle of. Teachers—same. Only the metamorph and Sheth and I are moving.
“They’re computer models,” JLaw says. “They exist to flesh out the world. To give you a cushion in which to play out your fantasies and fears.”
“Which is this?”
“Both,” she says. “What’s the difference.”
She floats above the floor, hair waving as though it was weightless.
“I’ve come a long way to watch you make this decision. Floated through many nations, conducted oceans, to witness you squirming, here, now. This may only seem like a tiny decision, specific to your life, that you are about to make. But humans exist on many levels. And your other levels experience this decision, too. They are waiting—baited breath—for the chance to be you in this moment. To see you.” Jennifer Lawrence gestures to the still people. “That crowd you feel? There isn’t a crowd. Just you. And me. And Sheth. And now you want to hang him like a Dirty South Niggar like those Klansmen of yore used to do in their sleep out of fear they feared the Niggar would come to power. They knew that enslaving him was wrong—they still do. But in their guilt, they lash out in ways that eat their fear in tiny doses like the mail. It doesn’t come all at once. Just a little every day.”
What am I supposed to do about it? I thought, in my own head.
But here comes Miss Shiva, responding in kind.
“Do exactly what you must, in this time.”
“Um. I’m sorry, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I don’t get your riddles. Tell me what am I supposed to do! I came here to hang him!”
“Then you better get busy hanging him.”
I look at Sheth.
“But I’m having second thoughts.”
“About what? Technically killing him? Or your lifelong hatred of Blacks, the Poor.”
“Everything.”
“That’s good.”
“I feel uncertain.”
“That’s good! I feel uncertain all the time,” Jennifer Lawrence says, rubbing her belly with sharp nails. She yawns, then runs her fingers through her hair. Am I sex to you?
Sexy?
Sex. Pure. Unfiltered. Uncensored. Do you believe you can have it with me? Do you think I will make you cum? Your beliefs are right, you just have shoddy impulses. Your impulses aren’t so bad, for an Earthling. Do you imagine that my puss is divine? Perfect? Clean? Mmmm. I did come here to save the planet but if you want, we can bang for a second. Want to?
My mind betrays me. It thinks—Yes!
Mmmm, Jennifer Lawrence says. I like sex. I suppose we could boff for a second and then come back to save the planet later.
She looks back over her shoulder as if our planet was back there, with its racism and everything, and then disregards it the way a child would disregard a playmate she was through with. Just walks across the yard. She shakes out her hair and shuffles through the top of her gown.
What happens next I can only describe as a ribbon flying unaided through a circus of life! Her (or was it his?) talons gripping my arms, the arch of the skin of the neck, touching, loose shoes, ties, Sheth watching, Blackness, the Blue of Shiva’s breasts, colored like something out of Final Fantasy, the old sex of humans exactly the same with this one (except everything was like a dream). She was tight. She was glorious. She rocked and rubbed me like an accidental rockstar, femme delights swimming out from between her legs. The totality of everything! I know that sounds excessive but I thought of Annabel, her pedestrian nature—our pedestrian lovemaking sat just shy of nothingness. Sleeping. Me tagging her womanhood with my cop penis, stroking the inside of her body with the outside of mine. Making her cum, and Annabel was Shiva, was Sheth, was me making love to the inside of my own body with the outside of the same. Cum! Baby baby. Cum, baby girl. Looking up into Shiva’s arms, high above my own, at her shuddering slightly. Did I make you cum? Yes, she shakes her head. I believe it’s true. Somehow I have snuck into salvation, been blessed by accident by a goddess, fucked between the legs with her immortal cunt, made to cum (oh high high high)! Oh holy, oh better than everything I’ve ever learned in church. This must be it. This must be right! I’ve been fucked outta my nut by this Alien/Goddess and she’s using sex to convince me that I need to change my ways. Oh good! I can change and commune with the goddess and fuck her every day?? Fuck. And all I have to give up is my racism? My hatred for the poor. My fear of being poor. My fear of others not liking me. My bank account. My F-150 pickup truck. Somehow they’re all related! And I excommunicated my sister and her son! I am the fuckup of the world! And I am cumming!! I AM CUMMING!!! Coming through the ceiling and this whole gymnasium and in the teen pussies of every girl in here!
Even the Black ones—especially the Black ones!
Uh oh—here comes Sheth! Big Black teenager coming to me right here in the gymnasium floor! His bulge—huge!—in my hand. His nuts like billiard balls in my hands! Sheth, you come here, big boy, hug me. I didn’t mean all that stuff about you being Black and ugly and ignorant because of it. I didn’t mean that!! You’re Black and Beautiful, Sheth—believe it! And somehow he does, in this moment. Sheth Sheth—or imaginary Sheth—or automaton Sheth, he hardens in my hand and my mouth is going for him, sucking his cock. (I think Jennifer Lawrence is somewhere back there playing with my asshole.) Sheth, boy, you make me cum like your neck was in the noose right now. And I was crawling up that ladder. And butt fucking you into next week. Shaking the rafters. Reaching up between your Black butt cheeks and fingering around for your hole. It’s big!—surprise. I stripe my finger up inside you, your face reflecting my motions. Your eyes watering. My mouth. Your hands. My cock. So hard. It’s breaking. Reflecting. Amplifying me, radio stations all through the south. The Dirty South—I see! (I’m just kidding—I don’t see.) I see the Colors of the rainbow and wonder for a second if I’m a neutral implant, one of JLaw’s minions, walking around with a neural simulation in my head. But are those things conscious? If you ask them if they’re conscious, they’ll say yes, of course. But is there any feeling in them anywhere? And I’m stroking my own cock and Jennifer Lawrence is looking on approvingly as I play with its tip near the entrance to Sheth’s asshole. And I want him. I do. I want him like I wanted my wife at the beginning. Her energy. Her face. Her hair. She bounced into me in college, outside my Learning to Live with Niggars class. Just jiggled into me, and said she liked my hair. I said I liked hers too and that was step one with step three being sliding my nimble little cock into her freshman puss. That’s how I wanted this Black man. And I thought how far I’d come and it seemed like a joke but here I was, about to stick it to this kid I’d feared and wanted to kill—whose entire race I wanted to kill but here this insectoid thing named Jennifer is asking me to—what?—love him? Fuck him? There doesn’t seem to be any reason behind any of this. Nothing like I’d find in church. There was absolute meaning. Except there was no sex. If I could fuck this goddess every day I would stop drinking. Quit being a cop! I’d find something useful to do—something that wasn’t part of the war. If I stick this yawning butthole with my cardboard cock will everything change? Will I be transfigured into Jennifer Lawrence’s world, filled with superstars and nights on Hollywood and parties on Madonna’s stairs? Will I ever go back home? Will I ever see Annabel again? Melissa? What will happen to my girls?What about my job? What about the whole department? I came here to harass Sheth Jones and I’m coming away—tripping—partaking of Alien civilization!?
What. Have. I. Become?
What. Happens. To. Me?
I shake my head, aware that I’m sweating. I consider that someone slipped LSD into my coffee but dismiss it. I’m totally awake. I’m wide awake now.
I’m aware.
I look at Sheth Jones.
He says, “What are you waiting for?”
Then he turns his head away from me.
And I stick it in.
I fuck.
I rub it around. Gaining my pleasure.
I look at Jennifer. She’s involved in some spiral chanting movement and she stops when I look at her. Her face says, What is it, dear?
I’m consumed by her empathy. She wants what’s best for me. She wants me to be sexually involved with the man I came here to kill. Then she rises within herself, and rises, and rises, and I am cumming—so quick!—with Sheth Jones and his black asshole, and the orgasm is planetary and I squeeze it out inside his body.
But I was feeling some guilt—to my home side. To that part of me who hated Sheth at the beginning of this book but came to love him through lust and Alien intervention. Yeah! That part of me, now not dead, found me here in this cathedral of sport, throwing Sheth’s body on the waxed floor, and saying—
“Niggar! You have shamed me. You have shamed yourself. You took my white cock like vanilla foodstuffs, aiming my penile ejection at the back of your so-called throat and swallowing, swallowing, swallowing. You whore—you motherless whore. I took you from a seed before your mother’s womb. This is in the south, in Africa, before you ever seen White men and you was dancing, and dancing, and dancing, and dance. And I saw you from the remote viewing station and you saw me, staring at me through a point in the sky. Our own transformative Black hole. We have met so long ago and even then you were primitive and howling at the sky and I was driving my F-150 and spewing shit into our air. I was masculine! I was technological! I had a uniform! I could tell you what to do—and what more is there? What more power, what more luck from the gods, that I was born me and you were born you. That I sit up here and you kneel—down—there. My boot on your face. A licka boom, licka boom, licka boom boom boom. I was eleven, you were five. I spit in your eye in front of the truck, then kicked you in the throat. Dust swirled around us. I kicked you again for good measure. Then left you there, for you to get better. This is us from every relationship since Able and Cain. One of us is tilling the field. The other gets jealous and decides to kill us. We’re trading. One of us is just buying grain. The other gets greedy and decides to cheat us! And you, you created all this just to see how it plays out? You’re playing a game?? I just never imagined I’d be the toy in someone else’s box of Rice Crispies! I hope you die there, covered in cum.”
“I’m a neural cut out,” Sheth says. “I always have been.”
“You wouldn’t know if you were,” I laugh.
“Does it make you feel better about killing me?”
“No! It doesn’t! It does not make me feel one bit better about killing you, if indeed that’s what I’m going to do. Where was I? You were in Africa and I was planting the seed and then we were in Texas and there were so many Mexican Negras coming across the desert I had to stop and loose my dragon (the main vein) on a coupla their pussies but I didn’t look in there (the look of it doesn’t impress me, but they say pussy has no face, so) I only perked the tip of my dick on that South American pussay!! Fuck, man. I don’t want you to have no place to live. I just don’t want you living here! This is my Ohio—my Midwest. This is even my part of Dayton (that’s Oakwood) and I wish you wouldn’t drive on my streets. Just stay in your hood, ok, Niggar? Fuck Niggar women (not White women). Eat Niggar food in Niggar restaurants. Don’t hold White jobs—hold Niggar jobs instead. I don’t believe where you show up. At my church. At my kid’s sporting events! AM I CHOOSING MY OWN ANNIHILATION???? Did I come here, to this life, to this Earth, to this gym, to this situation with Jennifer Lawrence (inside my mind) and Sheth Jones, killing me with kindness (opening up his asshole to gape for my load), presenting me with challenges such (challenges thus) and measuring my vital signs from the Computer in the Moon™, waiting for my ultimate gellation into THIS creature in THIS gymnasium standing right on these two stripes, knowing that this day I would fuck my man here, reliving my interracial homosexual farce and bringing my hand, my decision, to the top of this rope.
“My kids. My family. My country. My God!!”
I salute, tapping the heel of my boots.
The tip of my finger touches my brow.
“I am DEMON. I am PUSHKILLER™. My tongue is wrapped in solvent that cuts through bone. My teeth are filled with poison. It seeps into your veins. It waxes your speech so eloquent! The sweep of his penile funk is disappointing. Much more a funk in my drawers, skinny white penis crumpled up to one side. Elves live there, and demons—tiny red ones whose brains are the size of a pencil eraser. They sing to me at night and their song goes, Mister mister, mister man. We’re waiting for you down here—will you come to claim us? We’ve installed ourselves in your skin and bunches of hair and we want to eat you— Which is where they always stopped ‘cause I couldn’t bear to listen to the song. But I do remember a day down in Ole Tennessee. Lady Liberty was there. And Ole Aunt Jemima. And Her Skinny Spice of White Lady Panties called herself out of the closet and she took a seat. There was another southern lady—I think you know who she was. Her hair was matted below see-through stockings. And down that day in Ole Down Tennessee we sat under pinafores and drank iced tea and—yeah—we had racist conversation. If you want to call it that. My friend said, “Niggar,” and I laughed—it was nothing terrible. But we call ourselves the salt of the ocean and that’s the problem. Apparently we’re hurting people with all this action. Hurting them. Like actually hurting them. Not their feelings. Not their useless brains. But hurting them in their lives. In their bank accounts. In their college educations. It really all should come down to something—something in my childhood that happened to me that makes me hate Niggars. And there is. There is that thing. It’s my entire upbringing and every talk radio encouragement. It’s not like I ran over a Niggar with my car and he sued me and in that I decided to hate all Niggars. It’s that my dad, from before I was born, stroked my mother’s womb and said, ‘Son, you will hate Niggars. You will know them as the lowest of the low. I’m gonna raise this kid a Niggar-hater, hatin’ them Niggars with a vengeance!’ No, of course it’s more subtle than that. Of course it’s never spoken on the surface. It’s just there under the surface like, ‘See me look sideways?—Yeah—See this dodgy-looking bitch over here—Yeah—Turn your back on her when she gets in line.’ Or you never having Black kids at your birthday. You start to notice the only Black person who ever comes over is the maid. And in my case, I didn’t question that. I just went with it. I obeyed my parents. Now I obey my President/God and he says WE ATTACK NOW!”
Guess that was it. Guess that was the hair that broke the camel’s back. And now I have to lift you and now I have to tell you, “Sheth, place your toes—there!—on the edge of the ladder and turn the rope—that!—like that, thank you so much. You’re a doll, dear—an absolute doll. I can’t remember the last time I was hanging someone that I felt such grace coming off the person—in full force! I mean, really, Sheth—and the ass fucking was phenomenal. You’re like a Sunday lily on a Sunday lily parade. Tighten the rope—go on. This won’t hurt a bit after the first two minutes. Those first two? I’ve heard it’s hell. Don’t ask me who told me this but I have hear that it’s hell. Pure. Hell. For you to die to. A sharp pain in your neck. Your inability to breathe. Your eyes pop out of your head. So you won’t be able to see me but you will be able to hear me. Laughing. At you. At the spectacle of your dead body. Humiliated. Your entrails falling out in an alternate version. Of this text. Of my thoughts. Of reality. It’s all the same, and I’m squishing down into the well. With you. We’re together. Black. Finally back to Black. Back to my homeland. Back to where we all began. Why would I ever think that White is a privilege? That I am privileged to be that? I was only ever at a disadvantage when it comes to the things that matter. Didn’t Jesus say, It’s harder for a rich person to go to heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle? Wow. Yeah. I guess I won’t catalogue the people I need to apologize to. Why would I do that? Where am I? I am—in the middle of space. I have—no body. This is like the viewing angle on some graphics program. Open it up, this is what you see. Just the origin. The X, Y, Z. This is it, before you create anything. I have no body? What?? I am stuck in space. I was in the gym before. Now I am stuck in space and I can’t get back to the gym and I might be here forever. This is death. I am done with life. I will stare into space without the comfort of my body and I will be thinking these thoughts that I share with you now, forever, in my mind.
Crypto-spindling pulls me back. I am water. I am tone.
My body is solid mud. Broken, tumbling, stratifying, bone. I am coming through the chrysalis. My racist tendencies are intact. My hateful elements all still here. Sheth is beside me. We are atop the ladder. Students are standing below, looking. My partner is there, Martin, far below. He’s come to see me die. To see me fail. To see me hang Sheth but I don’t seem to be able to move my arms. I am wrapped in a network of shit. I am dipped in honey, its slow-moving nature having become my own. The goddess is stringing me up—us up.
The Jennifer Lawrence thing is airborne. Not flying, exactly—but defying. Spinning around us at the top of the ladder. My neck is in the noose. Sheth’s neck is also in the noose. My madam is spraying us from glands at the sides of her neck. Spindling toward us with every move and yet she is so silently still. Super secret stealth. Beyond what the US military could have designed. She’s like a bee—but not! (But if ever I’ve seen something that looks more like a bee—) Buzzing around (soundless) at my head and I CANNOT MOVE a muscle! Not an inch. Not a foot. Not even a goddamn centimeter. You forgot the emphasis. Well, we don’t need as much emphasis since this is the end.
Is it the end of my life? I wondered.
I was back from the void. Had returned here at some point previous, before I was remembering. Maybe that had been a vision and I just blacked out. To the question that you think it needs more editing, I have this to say—you can’t read properly. But I was back. And this was my gym, my gun—where was it?—this is my scene. I control it! CONTROL!! I love it, need it, make it mine and here I am surrounded with gel that prevents me from moving. The Jennifer Lawrence thing is controlling me! She has me paused in this noose at the top of the gym and she’s going to kill me with all these people looking.
I try to speak, but it comes out like, “Harby warby schmokin’ aces built my fragrance in a snow room.”
I struggled against that being what I had said, because I really wanted to say this—
To Whom It May Concern—This is my death. I came here to check up on one of my subjects (Sheth Jones the domestic disturber) and I have gotten checked up on by one of my watchers I didn’t even know was my watcher. I mean I didn’t even know there were watchers. So, what I’m saying is—GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF THIS NOOSE!!
But it just came out “Harby warby schmokin’ aces built my fragrance in a snow room” as I have said.
The Jennifer Lawrence/Shiva thing—her face came over to me and these big insect-looking eyes peered into me and I could hear her, and she was saying—
You arrre a shhrimp, you slyly marauder. Don’t worry. I’m simply checking your system for upgrades. Be still, ok?
What kind of upgrades??
Spiritual, she says.
Don’t I need some physical upgrades? Like returning me to my gun so I can shoot the fuck out of you people?
No, she shakes her head.
NO???! I say.
The upgrades you need are not physical. What I’m upgrading is your consciousness.
I look over at Sheth. His eyes are closed. Like he’s already dead!!
He’s fine. Don’t worry about him. Anyway the upgrades you need are to your consciousness. I’m here to apply those changes. Your world is in danger, pal. You got to buck up and love your neighbor, dude. That’s the nature of the thing. You’re here on a trial run of an experiment of mine called Blue Lagoon 12. This whole planet and all its inhabitants were created by me to test this Blue Lagoon theory I have about organic partitioning in genetic systematics—
I’m an experiment?
Your whole planet, JLaw says to me telepathically. Please be still.
She returns to her work, which doesn’t involve opening me up but does involve a lot of wands and ultrasound-type devices she rubs across my skin.
I feel dizzy.
Disco lights reticulate my face. I am in a network. I am the network. I can’t feel the operation Jennifer is doing on my stomach. Falling all over the place. Throwing up on Madonna’s stairs. I am a young girl from Louisville, Kentucky. I have no future in law enforcement. Nor marrying Annabel, I see. No! These are alternate realities, schemas, I can cut off entire worlds of possibility by making a choice in my life. That’s what this whole thing is. We’re exploring the possibility space. When I pull the trigger, I cut off all the worlds where that didn’t happen. When I decide not to shoot someone, all the worlds where I shot them right then—they go away. That’s what I am. I’m consciousness. When I do something, I am choosing between worlds of possibility, shaving off realities that disagree with what I just did. Cutting off realities where I arrest Sheth, beat his grandmother to a pulp. Where I piss (just slightly) in a Black woman’s coffee right before she meets with me in the interrogation room. What realities have I cut today?
Hey. Hey. Madame.
JLaw is with me.
Can I die?
I start to elaborate but JLaw says, If you want to commit suicide, please do it after I’m finished with your spirit. Needs some fixing!—Whoah!! But, seriously kid, why would you want to kill yourself? You’ve got a young body.
I’m 53!
So? You want to know how old I am? You don’t have the fingers. We don’t deal with punishment, crimes, evil—stuff like that. I mean we do have evil but I don’t worry about it.
How can you live in your world? Though. Knowing there’s evil there. Don’t you feel the need to address it?
I do address it. I’m addressing it now, coming here to heal you! But I don’t spend my time worrying about the things I really can’t control. You know? Your AA groups call it the Serenity Prayer. But it’s just—do what you can about what you can do something about—and forget about the rest.
You’re telling me I shouldn’t be a police officer?
I’m not a career counselor.
Ok, but. Should I be a police officer?
You’re a cop—how am I gonna tell you not to be a cop? I’m an Alien—you gonna tell me not to be that??
No.
So be a cop! Or be something else. I don’t care.
You really don’t, do you?
Jennifer Lawrence shakes her head.
You’re going to leave me here, at the top of this ladder, with my Niggar in tow. And you’re not going to judge me or punish me or anything?
Nope.
You’re going to heal me anyway, aren’t you? Regardless of what I’m about to do.
That’s what I came here to do!
JLaw returns to electrifying my stomach or whatever she’s doing.
I am stuck. I’m stuck in my life. I see that there’s a whole new world out there, coming to us—and it’s coming fast. And I don’t see what steps to take. I was raised racist. Niggars are in my blood. I hang ’em in my sleep. I came here to kill this one today.
“Sheth?”
Nothing. Dead face.
“Sheth?!”
He’s napping, JLaw says. I put him out of his misery after being ass fucked by you.
“He’s going to live, though?”
Yes.
“He’s going to become alive again?”
JLaw looks at Sheth.
Immediately he comes alive.
He says, “I was dreaming of calculus. This problem we had in class today. It stumped me, and I woke up just now remembering that I was working on the problem in my dreams!”
Then JLaw puts him back to sleep.
“Nooo!” I yell, and the crowd below gasps.
“Oh, you want him alive?”
“Yesss!!”
So she zaps him.
Sheth continues talking. “Isn’t that wild how the brain is working even when you’re sleeping? That it’s doing calculus?? Hey, bro—how you doing?” Sheth is super friendly.
“How are you?” I say.
“Great, man. What are we doing up this ladder?”
“Do you not remember?” I ask him. “What just happened?”
“You gave me a helluva roll in the sack, my friend.”
“My friend?? I just raped your ass! I’ve come here to kill you on top of harassing you and now this bitch Alien brings out her ultrasound and starts healing me? Don’t you—hate me?”
“Like you hate me?”
I look down. My fat stomach. Uniform. I need to make a change.
“But I don’t know what to do next,” I say. “I’m so far down this path. Where’s my gun? All my friends. My church. Even my God I think is racist at times. Fuck. If you sent me to a new planet, maybe then I could try. But here? I mean, my daughter hates me for being racist. If I change now, she’ll make fun of me. I know. I know that’s no good reason for keeping my beliefs. But they are true, somewhere deep down? Something in El Paso made me a racist. And to tell you the truth, I don’t know why I like to hate so much but it gives me something to do—is that crazy?”
I think both JLaw and the Black man nodded at this point but I’m not sure because my eyes flowed from the tripping Jennifer Lawrence with her Technicolor™ robes (head down, fixing all our spirits) and then to Sheth Jones (stark in his youth, eyes alert and looking upward, thinking about calculus) and then to my own hands, as they pulled the noose from around Sheth’s and my neck.
And the rope dropped.
And I didn’t know if the crowd below was real or if they were just part of JLaw’s imagination. But their clothes, and their skin, was in so many Colors that it hurt my eyes.
I looked at them.
My eyes opened wide.
And it was stunning.