text:
DOES THIS TINFOIL MAKE YOU LOOK FAT?
THE SAD STUFF/ THE BAD STUFF/ THE MAD STUFF and MORE
JESUS in VEGAS: an Excerpt*
March 18, 2019 June 8, 2019
My favorite Allegory in which "Western Culture" is embodied by a schizy serial killer with daddy issues and a trendy identity crisis. Not that any of that is blatantly obvious in the text. Which one is the killer…?
(*as found in the collection 3POSTMODERN MURDER MYSTERY NOVELLAS)
2 The Early Days of Television (Part One)
The first time Benny saw her was in the produce aisle of the Decatur Blvd Von's in Vegas and the first thing he said to her was "You look like you come from the stars, sister." A meteorite-black Nefertiti in white.
Who, me? she pantomimed.
Wearing a flowing white caftan and a miter-like head-wrap, also white, and affecting a bewildered foreign air, she smiled her dimpled, dazzling smile and considered both the intent and merit of Benny's effort. Bemused, and finished with her own "shopping", she followed him up and down several aisles as he tossed various processed, animal fat, refined white sugar and bleached flour products into his cart and pushed it towards the check-out line, trying his blarney on her.
Benny was clean-shaven at the time and dressed in the hip square look of a man trying to break into the upper reaches of the hip square world of writing for Television: the Timex, the turtle neck, the khakis, the loafers. She mistook him for a swarthy honky talking black but let him rap on for the reasons that he was tall and handsome and would provide an excellent cover as she exited the Von's with thirty pounds of shoplifted produce concealed upon her person, pressed tight upon her naked flesh. The cashier, a bleach-blonde leather-tanned cracker, fingernails chipped and bitten to the pork-pink quick, gave Benny a look of uncomplicated racial disgust as he paid for his purchases with that Negress in tow, signing a cheque that required three pieces of picture ID before she, the lipless cashier, would accept it. The striking black lady took Benny by the arm as they promenaded with some pomp through the double-electric-door airlock of the supermarket.
Beyond the protection of the arctic bubble of the supermarket's air conditioning and prior to the bubble of Benny's '68 Mercury Cougar, the asphalt on which the car was parked pushed back at the sky with its black, impacted heat. It felt like walking behind a pre-takeoff F-15 as Benny slipped his Foster Grants on, a climatic extreme his East Coast blood never got used to. He popped the lid on his trunk and offered her a ride. She bent over to climb in and he noticed her belly, her hips and thighs were bulging and jutting and lumping out at various stresspoints along the seams of the caftan, and perhaps white wasn't the most fortuitous color for her to have wrapped such a voluminous body in.
He stole boyishly furtive glances as he steered the Cougar, talking his head off. He was talking his head off in hopes that the right sequence of words might click and open the lock (if lock there was) on the young lady's alpha and omega, which he intuited would be as restorative to his sexual powers as a dip in a rain barrel at Lourdes. Six months on MetraCal or some other modern dietary supplement and she'd be just about perfect.
Just as the brothers were dreaming of "dating" those incandescent peppermint blondes one saw on billboards all over the country hawking Virginia Slims and Miss Clairol: Only Her Hairdresser Knows For Sure, the preppy masterminds responsible for those very billboards were in turn lusting horribly after the brothers' sisters, and Benny, perhaps, would have been shocked to be informed that in lusting after this black beauty his sexual proclivities were closer to a white man's than to a brother's that year.
"The thing to remember about the industry," he heard himself saying, "it's a medium in its infancy. It's still what you call protean… everything's up for grabs, you see what I'm saying? What you want is to be in on the ground level at the next paradigm shift and how do you achieve that? You just need that one solid hit… a bona fide hit that seems to contradict everything that came before it. See, I plan on having that hit, sister. I bank on it."
If there was one thing in 1972 that she was sick of, it was white men calling her 'sister'. Especially a white man trying to talk black. Still, he was cute.
"Take something like The Name of the Game. It's the kind of television that successful people between the ages of 27 and 33 stay home to watch… they'll turn down a cocktail party or a night out at the movies to watch this show and yet it defies all conventional wisdom. Each episode is 90 minutes long… 90 minutes! It's really three shows, with three leads, wrapped into one. The leads rotate. Each episode is like a feature-length film, if you can ignore the commercials… a feature-length film for free. That's what television means…that's the meaning of television. The destiny of television. Never having to leave your own home for entertainment! One day, sister, there won't be any commercials, either. What you'll have then is an uninterrupted experience of your favorite shows, and, believe me, by then, everything on the tube will be your favorite. You'll never want to leave that spot in front of the picture tube. You'll never need to."
"They're working on that already. As things are now, what you're seeing, listen, an advertiser pays a very large fee for the right to interrupt the show to talk a little about his product. A little song and dance about ketchup. They call it a break like it's some kind of relief but the fact is it's an interruption. But what if they could work the product into the show? You could charge the advertiser more for that because the product could end up with longer screen time but, see, there'd be no interruption. Okay, between shows you'd need a pause so people could… you know. So they could go to the, uh… to the bathroom…" Benny blushed.
"Anyway, I'm just talking now. I know I talk too much. What about you? Where are you from? Some exotic location. Let me guess. Port Au Prince? Cairo? Madagascar?"
Precious lifted her chin and shut him up with her Nefertiti profile. How should she play this? Would he be disappointed to learn that she wasn't a foreigner? That she was born in North Carolina?
"I hope you don't think there's anything wrong," she said, with exactly the kind of voice a Siamese cat would if one knew a human worth speaking to, "with a girl just being a common-ass Negro."
"Common-ass you are not, sister," said Benny.
"Maybe you don't know enough Negroes."
"Maybe you don't know enough light-skinned brothers passing for white."
"Well I'll be damned," she said. "Why didn't you say so?" She reached down the front of her dress and extracted a mango. "You hungry?"
Benny said he was starving.
His immediate higher-up at The Studio went by the name of Gray, or Grayson, Parker, an affected anti-affectation meant to call attention to the fact that he was calling attention away from the fact that his actual name was much longer and stamped with pedigrees as old as the thirteen original Colonies. Parker was standing half-crouched on his desk, back to Benny, facing the enormous sixth floor picture window that guests in the chair in front of his desk usually faced (stunned by the view of The Strip which filled it precisely for that purpose, dormant and raw as the bottom of the Dead Sea, during working hours, and spectacular as a Con Edison-powered vision of a Kansan's idea of a first class purgatory, at night).
It was late-lunch time on a Thursday afternoon and The Studio was meticulously emptied of higher-ups, most of them over at Sarno's Circus Circus sucking radium-colored Margaritas through glass straws at the white-leather bar where Sean Connery had only months-prior filmed a scene for Diamonds Are Forever. Circus Circus wasn't visible from Parker's office but the north face, upper level, corner suite of the Satellite Motor Lodge was. Parker reached back without looking, and said, with a surgeon's urgency, "Bushnells." As Parker handed Benny the old Steiner spy glass in exchange, he took the Bushnells, adjusted them, and emitted an admiring groan that could easily have been taken for a song of pain.
"Son of a bitch," he grinned.
An hour later they were waiting for seafood platters over bottomless glasses of so-so wine at the street-level bar of the relatively-rundown Stardust. As everyone who actually knew Vegas knew, each of the major casino/hotels was calibrated to appeal to visitors from a specific region of the greater Midwest, with The Sands aimed at Kansas, The Tropicana keyed to Oklahoma, and The Frontier designed specifically to rope in tourists from North and South Dakota, and so on. Or something like that. Benny could never remember the exact formula. Elements of the Stardust felt like an homage towards the blue-collar, redlight ambiance of near-Northside Chicago; the shocking abundance of colored waitresses (two) couldn't have been a coincidence. The fact that Parker preferred the Stardust over the garishly swanky Circus Circus couldn't have been a coincidence, either. As the waitress, a Benin bronze in a polyester wig, marched towards the kitchen, her red satin hotpants sucked so hard on Parker's eyes that his optic nerves twanged like a banjo.
Parker had a habit, especially when he was feeling rose-lit by the grape-light, of calling Benny Pierre, due to Benny's French-sounding surname, probably, and the only thing that kept Benny from taking umbrage at this was his knowing that Parker didn't know he was a Negro. It was okay, in other words, because he was being denigrated as a man but not as a human. Most Negroes would never know how good that could feel, or even that an inexplicable appetite for such abuse (first to receive it, later to dole it out) was the key to success in business.
"Looks are everything, Pierre," said Parker, checking the time, "…why do you suppose my watch is worth more than your monthly salary and yet yours costs less than this lunch? Does one keep better time than the other? I think not. Look," he mimed drawing a diagram on the bar with his finger, "there's an atomic clock with an IBM brain buried a mile under a mountain in Colorado in a top-secret room that cost the tax payers eighty five million dollars to build and a million a year to maintain… " He raked his fingers through a haircut the color and texture of doll hair. He had a phenomenally small face. He looked bewildered, briefly, and started again.
"Pierre, I know you appreciate frankness. So I'm going to be frank. Why do you think the old guy hired you, despite your somewhat, shall we say, skimpy qualifications? Two years of art school on the G.I. Bill? Six months in the mail room of an AM radio station in Philly? Good grades in High School? I think not. We took you on because you look the part. The sideburns, the cheekbones, the suede jacket and turtleneck sweater. You beat out a guy who graduated near the top of his class from Harvard."
It hit Benny that he was either about to be promoted to junior executive or fired with less ceremony than Parker had ordered their drinks with and his posture changed accordingly. With almost imperceptible stealth, he shifted back up off his elbows. He tasted a deep swallow of the bar's stale layer-cake of old smoke and gambler's fearsweat and became lucid as hell, clear as a tall glass of lunar vacuum, ready for whatever Parker was about to throw at him. His mouth was as dry as all that encroaching desert out there, only a three minute walk in any direction from any point on The Strip, tumbleweeds blowing down Sahara Avenue. He was ready for death.
Hamilton Gold entered the bar with an exaggerated tip-toe pantomime made all the more would-be comical by his briefcase, sneaking up on Parker with a wink at Benny, who was far from in the mood to play along. Gold loomed behind Parker for what felt like a solid minute, obviously stuck on what to do next, unable to think of anything hysterically funny. He took a seat at the bar and nodded defeated hellos. He caught the waitress's eye and asked Parker,
"Have you, uh…?"
"Not yet. I was just getting to it."
Gold turned to Benny and, making that face he made when he meant to make it clear that the face he was making meant he wasn't beating around the bush, said, "We were interested in knowing whether you know any Negroes."
"He means qualified."
Parker leaned forward for emphasis. "We thought you might know, or might know someone who knows someone who is or knows…"
"See, you're a bit younger than we are, LaFontaine, despite our official ages… " Gold winked and turned to the waitress to order whatever the other two were having, then joked, as she sashayed towards a table of leisured-suited Missourians who were waving hundred dollar bills to get her attention, with a jerk of his big chin at her back,"Hey, I know, maybe we should ask… ?"
Parker made his in-point-of-fact-we're-being-quite-serious-despite-Gold's-tiresome-japes face and said, "Pierre, ever hear of a colored guy with the unforgettable name of Thaddeus Mumford?" When Benny shook his head, reaching for the steaming plate a Malaysian busboy was lifting shakily over Parker's shoulder, Gold said,
"Talented kid… sings, acts, writes… I even hear he can direct. Clean-cut, well-spoken, sweet as a hundred eighty pound Hershey Bar…"
"Million-watt smile… sexy as hell… "
"Not mad at anyone…"
"We want a Negro like that, Pierre, and we figure you can help us find one. Can't you go to one of those parties we hear you go to… ?"
"There must be a couple of colored college types… "
"Or Jewish girls who… no offense, Gold… they usually…"
Gold watched Parker pop a fried scallop in his mouth with a well-fed dog's bored envy and said, in a neutral tone, "None taken, Gray. Maybe we should tell LaFontaine… "
"Why we're in desperate need of a Negro?" Parker frowned at Benny, chewing. "Think he can be trusted?"
"I think so. He's one of us now, Gray," said Gold, though his eyes darted to Parker to check for any notable reaction to the word us. "I think LaFontaine," he toyed with the sound of the word, "needs to be aware of the gravity of the situation."
Parker fixed Benny with a blinkless this-goes-no-further-than-this-conversation stare and said, "Remember that guy I was telling you about, before, the way-better-qualified guy you cheated out of a job…? The Harvard grad? Well," Parker smiled pleasurelessly and Gold smiled back, "word has it his lawyers are about to hit us with a multi-million dollar lawsuit… discrimination… "
"And it looks like they've got a pretty tight case."
Benny drove directly home after the meeting, steering as straight as he could, though it felt like the Cougar, or the road, or the earth itself, was zig-zagging. Not just right and left but up and down and back and forth, too. And he tried his best to ignore the roadrunner, which resembled so much the famous cartoon…the long-necked bird pacing the car for a mile in a cloud of dust before loping off on a side-road towards North Las Vegas… he tried to ignore the tumbleweeds blowing into traffic in the middle of the city or the redneck sheriff's deputy that zoomed past doing ninety wearing aviator sunglasses on the Tonopah Highway… or the billboard out there advertising The Chicken Ranch which featured a blonde, a brunette, a redhead like an Attack of the 50 Foot Whores and everything else conspiring at that moment to make him scream what the fuck am I doing here?
He spoke to himself, he spoke aloud, he declared in a firm, clear voice that he should go grocery shopping to secure provisions for the long weekend he predicted would see him reverting to the bunker mentality he'd perfected at his all-white Art School alma mater, where he flirted with and then fucked his first white women, experiences he only found exciting because they could get him killed, theoretically, though only if he confessed he wasn't white. But still. He decided he needed a shower to clear his head before going grocery shopping. On top of everything else, he was very tired.
When he parked the Cougar he sat in it for a while and almost nodded off listening to the very weak signal of an AM radio station from L.A. playing rhythm and blues records from his adolescence… what they called jump blues back then…ladies and gentlemen Mr. Wynonie Harris… those old shellac 78s so heavy you could break windows with them… he would've preferred jazz for his mood but only one station featured one weekly show with jazz of any value and that was late in the evening on Saturdays… until he noticed there was mail waiting in the bank of aluminum boxes under the stairs curving up to his second-level apartment. A Stargazer's Monthly magazine and other items visible through the slot. He got out of the car and fetched the mail, his mind still zonked on various Alexander-Dumas-grade ironies as he gripped the hot handrail and laid a tasseled loafer on each consecutive concrete step as the almost patronizingly helpful geometry of the spiral led him to his unlocked door.
He kicked off his loafers and treated his delicate feet to the carpet. He gazed upon the totem of his alphabetized collection of jazz LPs, seven thousand records in row upon row on shelf upon shelf along the wall leading out of the living room emitting the delicious perfume of time and cardboard. On the top shelf, beside the book-ended collection of miscellaneous 45s, was the painted wood and wire scale-model of the solar system that used to sit on his father's desk, the only thing he got (by stealing it) when the old man migrated to the afterlife.
In the bundle of mail was a letter from a person with a name he suddenly remembered he'd forgotten years ago, a buddy from art school, Ricky Lang, a white boy with a Quaker background who'd been more or less indifferent towards Benny until discovering Benny was a Negro, which had seemed to make all the difference. This was before Benny had learned to dissemble on the topic. Parting the curtain of glass beads and standing in the arched passage between his modern white kitchen and the earthtone living room, Benny opened the letter first, before the bills, or even the latest issue of Stargazer, featuring a ten-page cover story on black holes, with its lurid artist's renderings of stars being eaten alive, stars and their screams of light, destruction on a scale that made the continent-clearing whims of the Old Testament's Jehovah seem childishly cute and extremely local. Clearly, Jehovah Himself answered to an even supremer being, and whatever It was, It was not to be fucked with.
Friend Benny,
I hope this finds you in good health and cheerful as ever.
Tomorrow, I start that weird occasional job again that I couldn't expect you to know about, since we haven't kept in contact much since our time together at the Franklin Academy, where we both planned to be world-famous artists. I was going to be Matisse and you were going to be Picasso, if I recall it right (wink).
Well, for a year now my job is standing naked before the art students. I swear, there are probably 300 drawings of me in student's portfolios, trying to get them into the best colleges. Skinny guy, small dick, pot belly, gawky neck, womanly breasts, pointy nose. You can imagine. It's at least SOME money (6 dollars per hour unless they've upped it again) and I just can't say no, since I know that no one else in this whole fucking town of 3500 people wants to (or in some cases, would be allowed to) stand naked before our children. Did I tell you already that I moved upstate after my divorce? Anyway, I'm up in the sticks now.
It's a funny fantasy. Do you ever have dreams that you show up in highschool and you're partly or completely naked? Many people do have that dream. I do sometimes — and I'm the guy who's actually doing it for real. I stand there in some pose and I think, hey, I really AM NAKED in front of the eyes of these people. I see these teenagers on the street and say Hi, and I think, wow, that person usually sees me naked.
But I think my more frequent dream is that I'm walking on the street at night, naked. I dreamed that the other night, and it was so real, I was thinking to myself in the dream, yes, I do this often actually, and no, it's not a dream. After I woke up, I actually scanned my memory to clarify for myself whether I actually do go walking naked at night or not … and I don't … but I have this nagging almost-memory, like yes, it does seem familiar.
I guess I should go do something productive now. Or just curl up.
Keep in touch,
Your old friend,
Benny lifted the wall-mounted white Trimline receiver from the kitchen wall and dialed Sheila Silver's number, auditioning a variety of salutations (so wide in range that he realized he hadn't a clue as to the proper general tone to adopt with her, and this after nearly screwing, and then eating, her twice) before she answered. When she finally fumbled the phone and drawled a very weak Yes?, sounding something like someone wearing a blindfold in bed in a dark room in the middle of the afternoon you've only managed to rouse at all because she just took the sleeping pill; sounding, in fact, exactly like that; Benny hung up. Sheila was a depressive jazz-head with big tits who often slept in the middle of the afternoon. There was just no way Benny was seriously going to ask Sheila Silver if she knew of any parties this weekend at which there might be college-educated Negroes present, though he knew that there was no logical reason for him not to. Which is why he rang Sheila Silver's number again, immediately after hanging up, rolling his eyes at his own squeamishness, his own lack of business acumen, before hanging up again the moment she answered again (this time a lot less drowsy, annoyed, even) while Benny mused on how telephones were less useful for talking than for not talking. What middle-late 20th century man accomplished by slamming a phone in its cradle could only have been achieved as thoroughly, in the time of Louis XVl, with a guillotine. And that was progress.
3 The Early Days of Television (Part Two)
When he pulled up into the lot in front of the Von's on Decatur Blvd he expected to come walking out of the store again, in under fifteen minutes, with nothing more earthshaking than cinnamon buns. Certainly not a Nubian Queen. He patrolled the numbingly long and relatively empty-of-shoppers aisles, aisles gently Muzaked (Yesterday, Cherish, Ramblin' Rose, Moon River) yet astringent in their chill. Something about the modern supermarket epitomized, for Benny, when Benny was in a certain mood, neither quite despondent nor truly mellow, the European mind. The orderly-yet-somehow-borderline-psychotic nature of these cold white right-angled corridors. The soul's abattoir. How many more thousands of years, if left on their own, would Africans have needed before they came up with a Vons Supermarket? And to what end, if then? The thought was more a twinge of disquiet than the rudiments of a manifesto at that point in Benny's life. It passed, he pushed, and the visible spectrum of Smucker's preserves rolled by.
There was still water in his ears, his left ear, from the shower. In his right ear was Moon River but in his left ear he could hear his breathing, his heartbeat, regular intervals of swallowing, the weight of his bones as he walked. His inner auteur imagined a voice-over on top of the left channel of his bodily sound effects saying blank-eyed he gazed upon the bounty of civilization. He searched but he did not find. He cruised the produce department and the meat department and glimpsed a marbled flank of beef swinging on its cold steel hook. He glimpsed the bloody mass through a round window in the stainless steel door behind the man in the white smock arranging neat little packages of ground cow on the astroturfed bottom of the frosted display case and he thought of Ricky Lang, naked in front of those art students. He saw Ricky on a serving platter carved into fatty pink flaps and slathered with his own blood's gravy because he was old and would never be famous and he needed the pocket money. He saw Ricky's bodiless head dictating a letter making light of the situation. Dear Friends, the letter would start, I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving…
-I must find a qualified Negro, whispered Benny, as he rounded the corner of the carbonated beverages aisle.
A qualified Negro. Wouldn't that be a home run? He'd be promoted. He'd be invited for golf and cocktails with the Hamilton Golds in Palm Desert and flirt with Gold's pretty Argentine Jew of a wife named Isolde and chuckle with Gold to country club bossa nova about Parker behind Parker's back, an activity Parker himself subtly encouraged, since to be mocked enviously is to be powerful. Later, a purely mechanical affair with Gold's wife as an unspoken favor to Gold so Gold could take his stupendous-looking quadrilingual Japanese secretary on ski trips without feeling guilty. One of the boys. Gold had said He's one of us, now, Gray, but what he'd meant by that was that Benny could be if he passed this test.
Even if having a qualified Negro on the team couldn't save The Studio from losing the lawsuit, everyone would know that Benny had delivered, under fire, on D-Day. They'd know he'd tried. The only gesture more effective than being seen to try would be going to jail on the company's behalf on charges of discrimination himself. A possibility he wouldn't rule out.
When he circled back around through Produce he saw her. And what was his first thought. Before even that romantic jolt her beauty chased through him like nausea. His very first thought, about which he was immediately ashamed, while Moon River swooned through the air on strings, as she turned to him as he rolled his cart past and she gave him that dimpled smile and time seemed to speed up and slow down simultaneously (even as it was happening, he seemed to be looking back on it, going over it as a series of stills and scribbled memos approximating the initial sensations):
I'll bet she knows a qualified Negro.
It's clear that all straight men want to fuck all women all the time (though not necessarily twice); that's a given; but what happens in the mind of a man the first time he sees the woman he was more or less made to love? In Benny's case, shame and self-pity both preceded a wave of the above-mentioned quasi-nausea, reddening his face, clearing the field for awe. He didn't notice her slightly puffy eyelid. The still (slightly) discolored cheek.
"You look like you come from the stars, sister."
Hers was the face of the First Woman, though Benny didn't flatter himself that he was Adam. He wasn't even Cain. But he knew he was fated to be her man. He knew he was her qualified Negro.
His penis knew it, too. He was astonished to feel it stirring in its cotton shroud, inflating from the tip down, already harder than any number of Sheila Silvers had managed to get it after hours (or so it always felt) of digital, then oral, than oral-digital, then verbal, then verbal-digital-oral-digital attention. He'd once had a worldly Sally Kellerman lookalike shove two fingers up his anus as what in some cases was probably The Secret Weapon but which only achieved, for Benny, the added complaint that he couldn't masturbate (or defecate normally) for a week afterward. No: a peace sign up his ass was not the solution.
The solution was seated in the passenger seat of his Cougar, offering him a mango.
The Compound was out, way out, on the Tonopah Highway, beyond a cluster of mirage-like apartment complexes so new there were no flags on the flag poles yet, and many of the factory-fresh aluminum-frame windows were still wrapped in billowing plastic. The Compound was beyond, even, the skeletal shopping center (a concrete house of cards) that was going up in response to the sudden apartment complexes. Past all that, east on Mercury Road, which stretched straight back to the Sunrise Mountains, a black seam of fresh tarmac in the brushed suede of the desert, a zipper straight back to the huge rock bosom the sun rose over at the end of every working day.
Eating the proffered mango, Benny realized how hungry he'd been, back-handing his sticky chin and grinning at her. Benny's groceries, including a pint of Neapolitan ice cream he'd forgotten about, were in a slumped sack on the back seat, but she extracted hers from the opening in the front of her caftan. She handed him a peach salted with the healthy odor of her perspiration and he did not hesitate to eat it. In fact he relished the sensation. How could Benny not be intrigued when he'd asked his new lady friend exactly where to drop her off and she'd answered, in the most matter-of-fact tone, or even perhaps with a tincture of affected modesty, as in –it's really not a big deal, but–
"The Compound."
"Excuse me, sister. The what?"
"The Compound?"
"You haven't heard of The Compound? Don't you watch the Evening News?"
But Benny hadn't come to Vegas yet when all that happened. The fifteen-hour standoff with the Clark County Sheriff's department and so on. Two long low stucco structures appeared on either side of a fifteen foot sun-blasted camper on a gravel lot protected by a hurricane fence, the gravel decorated in three of the four corners of the fence by dead brown Yucca trees. Benny expected snarling dogs to crawl out of camouflaged pits in the gravel but none were forthcoming. Where were the cable-armed brothers with their muscle t-shirts, lopsided Afros and Kalashnikovs?
"Is that it? What is it? It looks like a motel with a hurricane fence around it."
"It was a motel. Once upon a time. Now it's a deconsecrated Satellite Motor Lodge."
He was taken aback at the unexpected glimpse of an unexpected vocabulary.
"Park across the street and leave the motor running," she said. "I'll be back soon." She pulled on the door lock and added, "But if I don't come out in fifteen minutes, just go. Do not step inside that fence and try to get me, okay? You understand? Just go."
Benny understood, though it pained him to agree to it. He executed a tight u-turn and gunned the engine and put the car in park. She said, "Say yes, My African Queen, I understand."
"Yes, My African Queen, I understand."
She pecked his cheek and hopped out of the car and hurried across the road and let herself in through a silently swinging gate. She disappeared around back of one of the long low stucco structures. After waiting a few minutes he shut off the engine. He paged through the new issue of Stargazer, humming along with some oldies, reading about black holes, the trendiest topic in space.
One esteemed astrophysicist (dressed like a tennis instructor in the little photo beside his contribution) propounded the theory that nothing exists yet, and that Time as we experience it is a futuristic effect obtaining in the million billion trillionth of a second elapsing as the Super Black Hole of Reality (smaller than a neutron; comprised of the total mass of the Universe) collapses further before exploding to create Everything. And when Time finally does begin, it won't be anything like what we think we're experiencing in this infinitesimal moment.
Another even more esteemed astrophysicist (goatee'd Viennese) claimed that everything that has ever happened will happen again, exactly as it has always happened, oscillating like a perpetual motion machine between the perfectly balanced space/time forces of every perfectly-placed black hole in space.
The only female astrophysicist pictured (suspiciously young; an amateur watercolorist with some talent) likened black holes to tumors…the cancers of space/time…and predicted an epoch in mankind's distant future when we'll be able to treat these monster malignancies like surgeons with precisely detonated, super-compact nuclear weapons, many times more powerful than our sun.
Benny kept thinking: but how do they know all this?
And The Voice said: Believing is Knowing.
And Benny said: But what are we to believe, O Lord?
And The Voice said nothing. Or "nothing". Or nothing. Benny couldn't be sure.
When he awoke, the sky was being eaten by stars.
The dome of the overhead swarmed and seethed and he saw, half-dreaming, vast shapes with perforated edges fluttering upon the desert, papering it over in black. The domesticated nightsky as seen from his patio was one thing but the cosmos as revealed from where he lay at that moment was of another order of magnitude entirely and he realized that for the first time ever he was gazing upon the irrefutable Truth, groggy as he was, head still wedged between the headrest and the door. His neck was stiff and from his wiped-dry mouth he knew he'd been snoring in the face of All That.
Only the weakest light was visible from somewhere towards the back of The Compound, a gray blur like a stresspoint in black acetate, that and the green glimmer from the radio dial in his dashboard. And through the speaker-holes in the fiberboard shelf behind the back seat, what at first sounded like weak flies fucking under waxpaper revealed itself as a virtually inaudible version of Duke of Earl, Gene Chandler, 1957, and he knew without trying that his battery was too dead to turn the ignition and that he was stranded, twelve miles from home, like the fool he was, straining to hear the corpse of his battery channeling a heartbreaking Duke of Earl. Stranded across the street from The Compound late at night, hungry and cold. He'd rolled the window down and reclined in the bucket seat at dusk and that was all he remembered. He remembered being tired. He turned the radio off.
He remembered dreaming.
He'd dreamt he was married to that amazing black girl now curled up asleep in The Compound and that he'd traveled back East with her, incredibly, to introduce her to the family, but not his family, a dream family, with members he seemed to recognize within the dream with the accumulated confirmation of all of his childhood memories, and, yet, very strangely, the fading recollections of whom were alien to him less than two minutes after waking. What master-forger lived in his head, capable of counterfeiting recognitions he would have bet his life (in the dream) were forty years in the making?
Out of the Cougar, careful to ease the door shut, he went around to the back of the car, the wooden heels of his hundred dollar Joe Namath Dingo boots going clop clop clop, the irony of the ad copy for the boots coming to him like the stinging memory of a serious gambling loss: he knows when to wear them. And if the night had seemed unreal until that point it was real enough now as he was out in it, chilled by it, moving horizontally through a vertical vastness, a kind of elevator shaft, the walls of which receded as you approached them, the mockery it made of the infinitesimal scale of private thought and effort. He looked and found her reclining, over his shoulder, the constellation about ten feet above the horizon, the one he'd known and prayed to since childhood. Cassiopeia, with her incongruously-named constituent stars… Shedir, Caph, Ruchbah, Segin, Achird, Marfak. It had always bothered him that they were in her, part of her, these Arabs with their ugly names.
He popped the trunk of the car and found an Aztec-patterned beach blanket from Tijuana, a beach-blanket he'd never used because the beach wasn't part of his cultural inheritance, whatever he pretended, however fair-skinned or straight-haired he was, the blanket was still folded in eighths and packaged in its scuffed plastic. Around he went again through the driver's-side window and leaned over to the sack of groceries in the back, the sack with its dark spots of melted and spoiling foods, and he extracted a box of frosted strawberry ToasTarts. He rolled up the window and locked all the doors and, thus equipped, and with the unpackaged Aztec-patterned beach blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a serape, he began the twelve mile walk up the road.
He'd only been walking five minutes when nothing… his car, The Compound… was any longer visible behind him. He experienced the convincing illusion that he was walking towards it all rather than away from it. Or on a treadmill or in a hamster wheel. He realized that this was the point in the story during which the protagonist, of a certain age, at a certain point in his life, being by nature a seeker… has his Desert Epiphany.
It's always in the desert. Bushes don't burn in the suburbs, or, if and when they do, the burning doesn't mean anything more philosophical than having to replace insured topiary. The desert is where it all happens, as far as revelations go, and the Native Americans and the antediluvian Semites and the Aboriginal Australians all had plenty of desert to wander around in and there to unearth their shallowly-buried epiphanies, epiphanies like golden statues lodged in the sand and becoming the roots of their cultural wisdoms, cultural wisdoms they've since shared with a grateful, spiritually hungry world, the keys to the cosmos handed down to us in popular movies and songs and best-selling novels. He thought of Kahlil Gibran. And now it was his turn to have his spirituality improved by nothingness. Or nothingness.
He followed the sound of his boot heels, swaddled in the Aztec-patterned beach blanket, with its very faint odor of petrol, and when not paying close attention he walked off the tarmac accidentally, twice, stumbling on scrabbly hard scallops of sand and the occasional low prickle of tumbleweed, hurrying back to the reassuring surface of the road, a symbol of progress since before the Romans, probably. A symbol for everything, actually, when he thought of it.
Further he walked, counting his boot clicks, tearing open the box of ToasTarts and into each of the three foil wrappers (each, in turn, containing two frosted strawberry ToasTarts) every quarter hour or so, suffused with an intensely private pleasure in the threatening face of the cold infinite as the plasticky dough of the mass-produced pastry accumulated between the rills of his gums and the inner pockets of his cheeks in a slow-dissolving infusion of sugar-heavy cud.
In the woolly blanket of the below-sea-level darkness he thought he glimpsed lumbering forms in his peripheral vision, the desert remembering its dinosaur dead. Brilliant as the sky was (like a vertiginous view of The Strip from a space ship) the light failed to trickle to anything lower than a hundred feet above the sand, half-illuminating the occasional bat or swallow or buzzard tumbling headlong overhead like ripples in spacetime and crying out.
Benny pretended he was entering an African village on foot. Where the village is exactly doesn't matter. A sentry at the village gate; a fearsome sentry brandishing a scimitar and a necklace of yellow molars, a sentry big as Roosevelt Grier; poses a riddle the correct answer to which will allow Benny entry to the village. A wrong answer, on the other hand, will see Benny's head rolling around in the sand. The sentry speaks English with the camp elocution of a mad Shakespearean actor.
"Interloper!" says the sentry. "I pose to Thee a riddle."
"I say I say I say," says Benny, in this fantasy, imitating Alan Alda imitating Groucho Marx, chomping on a mimed cigar in a manic stoop, "Pose away, Mr. Bones!"
"What creature is it," booms the sentry, molar necklace chattering as he gestures violently to paint a picture of fable immemorial in the middle distance, "that travels on all fours in the morning, on two legs in the afternoon, and on three in the evening?"
"That's an easy one, chief," says Benny. "The secret word," he pronounces "word" as woid, "is lush. A lush crawls around on all fours with a hangover in the morning, staggers on two legs in search of his next drink after a business lunch in the afternoon, and totters on a three-legged bar stool in the evening!"
With a grunt of respect the sentry grants passage into the village, with its neat little roads and thatched huts, and, to make a long fantasy short, the king of the village, looking suspiciously like Benny's father, wearing Benny's father's tuxedo jacket and Benny's father top hat along with a grass skirt instead of his pants, presents Benny with a harem to service as part two of the trials he must endure before becoming the chief of the village (freeing the old man to enjoy his sunset years collecting stamps, and freshwater fishing).
The harem with which Benny is presented, he recognizes: every single girlfriend he ever had in grade school, starting with Beverly Huff, moon-faced, chubby and shiny brown. Beverly is five, smells like a pickle, and can punch harder than Benny, who is considered to be prettier than any of the girls in kindergarten. Beside Beverly is the girl Benny replaced her with, the same year, an older woman from second grade named Tamara, with root beer-colored eyes.
Looking cosmi-comically displaced amongst the little schoolgirls is the woman to whom he'd actually lost his virginity in a very nearly meaningless act (though orchestrating it probably took some doing on her part) at the age of thirteen: Gracie Barnes. The proprietress of the corner store at which Benny did all his after-school shopping. Bosomy black Gracie with her feline eyeglasses and her helmet of conked gray hair and her impotent, cigar-chomping husband named… Jimmy. Benny went in that shop one day and Gracie put the OUT TO LUNCH sign up and locked the door and that's all he remembers about it except the ecstasy of walking out again ten minutes later clutching a fat roll of free comic books. Plastic man was his favorite.
Gracie, Beverly, Tamara, Verlene… Benny isn't particularly enthralled until he gets to Karenna Beauchamp, sixteen years old in the tenth grade, held back a year due to being distracted from her school work by problems at home. Karenna's mother was a paranoid schizophrenic, a very unusual complaint for a black woman to have in those days; so unusual, that the family tended to brag about it: she got her a white lady's disease! My mama she got her a white lady disease, is how Karenna had broken the ice at a dance, in fact, as Benny remembers it. Maybe he's making that up. Karenna is tall, slender, wide-hipped but nearly titless, with the kind of face that would have been used to sell face cream if she hadn't been so incredibly, deliciously, blasphemously black. He singles out Karenna Beauchamp and she steps out of her vaguely native-ish, sarong-or-sari-like, drapey kind of clothing and reclines on a soft soft pile of ostrich feathers, pipe-cleaner legs spread, her hairless wrinkled blue-black cunt (like an elephant's eye, squinting at him, crying its tear of vaginal moisture) cocked at the perfect angle of reception. A lion roars. Monkeys gibber in the trees and the ceremonial drums commence throbbing as Benny kicks out of his safari trunks and the king stares with kingly dispassion.
The problem Benny often has with his fantasies, especially the sexual ones, is their uncontrollability. At the very moment they become most persuasive, they tend to get away from him (stuck in a meeting, late for lunch, stomach growling for mercy while Gold or Parker drone on, for example, he'll visualize a perfect plate of spaghetti, only to see a turd plop on it). Karenna Beauchamp is on that pile of ostrich feathers with her blank expression and her legs spread and her pussy ready to receive and all the other little black girls from Benny's romantic history plus Gracie Barnes in a circle around the altar, chattering with school-girlish excitement like at the Saturday Matinee and Benny ready to mount when who should push through the crowd in a fury but his most painful memory, his half-sister Jolene, the illegitimate product of his father's most famous affair?
Exactly (to the day) Benny's age, Jolene was his eerie black twin, his dark mirror, the sister he didn't even know existed until his father unwisely orchestrated a meeting on the occasion of the annual barbecue of the Greater Masonic Negro Tradesmen Association of West Philly, 1947, taking Benny aside with, "Son, you're seventeen now, which is a man by any means of reckoning, and it's time for you to know the things a man knows about the things a man will do, the things of the world beyond arithmetic or spelling or the pretty Bible tales your mother fills your head with."
The whole terrible business. A very very painful thing. Benny hadn't thought about it or Jolene for years and now she was filling him with her hot prickles of shame, grief, regret. The look on Benny's father's face when he found out, clutching that letter and shrieking at Benny from the other side of the kitchen although his face seemed just an inch away, filling Benny's vision, the spit on his lips and the hate in his eyes and the look on everyone else's face at the breakfast table, the detail of every expression Benny managed to absorb without taking his own eyes off of his father's Old Testament Jehovah mask as he cast Benny out of the bosom of the family. Benny's wailing, red-faced, innocently terrified mother and sisters… the toast burning… the Korean war… art school on the GI bill…
He stood cactus-still with the last ToasTart in one hand and the serape clutched in the other. And his socks were soggy with blood because his boots had never walked more than thirty unpunctuated steps since he'd bought them and it is amazing how far you can walk on bloody feet… the body must secrete some kind of natural anesthetic. Until you stop. And try to start again. How could he do this? But he had to: he couldn't sleep in the desert. But his right foot was unbearably swollen. However long it had taken Benny to walk away from his car, it took him three times longer to walk back again, gasping and cursing and hobbling in this unexpected Jesus pain.
He cried out.
The sleek dead car in its cold dark sleep. He'd bought it with his first big check from television. The Compound. The silently swinging gate gave way. The gravel crunched. Ominously, the door to the lobby was not locked.
There was only just the floor lamp on, severely dimmed. He found himself standing in what had obviously been the '50s-style, modernist lobby of the front desk of the deconsecrated motel, listening to his own heavy breathing. Geometric patterns in aquatints and white all darkened by the dimness of that one sad floor lamp.
Frankly he'd rather be in a meeting with Parker.
There was no longer a front desk, but two dozen or so folding chairs, not in rows, but strewn in clusters across the carpet. The walls were darkly paneled and a patched screen for an 8mm movie projector…no wider than Benny's outstretched arms… hung on the wall behind what had once been the spot upon which the front desk had rested. He could see that the pool-colored carpet with its geometric swirls was cleaner in that spot, a clean-spot of bright blue shaped like a giant's thumbnail and grooved by pressure points. There was the pebbled glass of the outer wall behind him and the dim floor lamp before him and the outline of a man on the swinging door of the men's room to the right of the phantom desk, half-illuminated by the light, and, further, a dark corner around which there'd be a hall or a storage room, probably.
A very large man with bushy gray hair and a hooked nose slipped into the lobby from around that corner. The man's skin was the color and texture of a football Benny had owned as a child. Benny was tall but the man was taller and two of Benny wide. He struck Benny as being merely the visible aspect of a much larger creature or force. He was definitely not the qualified Negro, though he was obviously capable of giving either Gog or Magog a run for the money in the Destroyer of Worlds category. The whites of the man's eyes were dark and he was dressed in his bathrobe and his bedroom slippers and when he spoke there was an amplified, over-articulated quality to his voice; a pressure you'd need to blow out the glass walls of the lobby to release. He spoke with the majestic belligerence of a voice-over in a PSA about street crime. It was too dark outside for the way he spoke, which was fully awake.
"What do you want here, white man?"
Benny didn't know what to say.
"I repeat: what do you want here at three o'clock in the morning, whitey?"
"I'm not white."
"I'm Negro. I admit I don't look it but I'm a Negro. Like you."
"Like me. Is that so?" The man laughed, but not too loudly. "What's a Negro if a Negro's not a thing that answers to the Negro description?"
Benny touched his chest and said "In here," although the look on the man's face was powerful enough to give Benny doubts.
"Really? Gosh, that's good news, because in that case I'm T.S. Eliot," said the man, who also touched his chest, "in here. You care for a spot of tea and some crumpets, whitey?"
"My battery's dead." He looked at his boots, near to fainting. "My feet…"
The man, hands on his hips, his chest exposed, eyebrows high, seemed ready to laugh again. His chest hairs were scant and curly white. "Your feet."
"I'm parked across the street."
"In front of my property."
"Oh, just, you know, star gazing. Yeah?"
Benny shook his head.
"Butterfly hunting?"
Benny lowered his head and shook it.
"Okay. I see." The big man nodded. "Keeping us under surveillance." He smiled with unexpected warmth. "I'm still that important?"
The smile faded. Or pretended to. A comedic possibility. Would have to be one dedicated undercover cop.
"I mean," added Benny, quickly, pointing towards the road again. "I gave your lady friend…"
"Careful now."
"…I gave her a ride…"
The man pulled a folding chair to his side and sat in it, arms folded over his chest, head cocked. He looked at Benny a good long time and it was clear to Benny that the man was deciding upon how much energy to expend on dealing with him. How much trouble to go to or get into. He leaned back in the chair, which whimpered under his weight, and he shifted his huge clasped hands to the belly of his bathrobe and yawned, turning it into language.
"You agree I have a dilemma on my hands here?"
"Only if you think I've come to… "
"Haven't you?"
Benny's right foot was so swollen in his Dingoes that he imagined having to cut the boot off, peeling the leather away from the delicate white bones of his foot along with a sopping roll of flesh.
"You're from back East."
"You talk like it."
Benny winced. He needed to get off of that foot.
"A high yellow sort of fellow from… "
"Philly," said Benny, after a groan.
"Good old Philly," said the man. "I killed a guy in Philly, once," he added, "a yellow Nigger who looked too white for my tastes, I hope I haven't upset you," but he winked to show he was joking. He said he knew quite a few high yellow Negro girls from back East in Chicago because he used to have money and he used to be somewhat famous in what you would call a notorious way. He asked Benny if Benny had any sisters and Benny said yes, three, and the man stood and said maybe you'll introduce me someday and gestured for Benny to follow him and Benny, in agony on his swollen foot, did so.
Benny awoke, fully clothed and wearing his boots, under the crisp clean sheet of a motel bed, the hard dry sun of the deep desert parting the drawn curtains like a sword. Benny's first thought was that there must be a woman in the bathroom, freshening up, but he heard no water running, no flushing or spritzing or fussing with a purse or car keys or spray-on deodorant. But why would he have been sleeping in a motel room alone? Why was there a framed portrait of JFK on the wall to his right, above the television? What year was it and why wasn't he sure? Behind every "why" was another "why", and any particular procession of whys he could think of telescoped backwards by only a dozen or so degrees before butting up against the creation of the universe.
The throb in his right foot clarified and asserted itself as a terrible pain as he remembered where he was and how, to some extent, he'd come to be there. Still, his dreams lingered; the dream tastes and smells and emotions. Closing his eyes he saw, or felt, the fading trace of the people he'd known and loved in the other life he'd lived through the troubled hours of his recent unconsciousness, and losing them to daylight was like losing them to death. Or to life, maybe.
When Benny opened his eyes again, the man was standing at the foot of the bed. He was wearing the overalls of an auto mechanic, with a wide-brimmed sun hat and a solemnly curious expression, smelling powerfully of hard physical labor. The door was open brightly behind his massive silhouette and the fading wash of an airforce jet's passing gave a great depth to the afternoon.
"What time is it, please?" asked Benny.
"It's quarter after five, white man. Would you care for some breakfast?"
"A half a grapefruit would be nice."
The man laughed. "Watching your weight, white man?"
Benny smiled. "Why do you keep calling me white man?"
"Well, for one thing, because your driver's license says 'Caucasian' on it."
Benny could feel his wallet still bulging in his back right pocket, clearly one of the two main causes of his troubled sleep. Still, he panicked. "How do you know that?"
The man laughed again. A surprisingly robust and good-natured laughter, for all its brevity. "Call it an educated guess. Why don't you wash up while I prepare your grapefruit? You remember how? All the soap and water you'll ever need is right in that little room. Some disposable razors and a can of shaving cream, too, if you're feeling ambitious."
Benny waited a few extra minutes after the man's exit into the cauterizing sunlight, then lifted the sheet and pulled off his serape and rolled out of bed, discovering that things were as bad as he had feared when he tried to put some weight on his right foot. With a jolting pain like shattering glass with a nervous system he hopped the distance to the toilet and landed against the sink, leaning heavily on it, afraid to look in the mirror. Afraid of the thing in it.
He eased himself down on the toilet seat by clutching the shower curtain and spent a good long time contemplating his boots. They would have to come off, if only in order for him to undress fully so as to bathe, though of course the real issue was the confronting of the condition of his right foot, which no longer even felt like one, but was transmitting sensations that caused him to visualize a bloody fork of bone pronged out of his leg, jabbing into a raw chunk of meat with toes at the end of it.
Seated on the toilet he was able to remove a drawer in the cabinet the sink was built into and laid it upon his lap, fingering through several little bottles of aspirin, loose papers, ballpoint pens, rolls of gauze, a tampon or two and a sewing kit. Out of the sewing kit he removed a small pair of scissors and with these scissors he cut the smooth-heeled soles off each boot, beginning with the left, a not entirely difficult job, being as each boot was tattered and stitch-blown and road-blasted with holes. The soles hit the clean tiles of the bathroom with an earthy density, along with the remaining bits of each boot, including curled tongues and bitty laces, and he thought of Napoleon's army, or the German infantry stranded in Stalingrad, boiling their footwear for dinner. The debris plopped into a black pile and while his left foot was merely stained indigo from the old coloration of the lived-in boot, the right foot was a vivid thing of purple and yellow and orange and red, glowing in the half-dark of the bathroom. He wanted to faint but he didn't.
The over-shirts he unbuttoned and removed, one at a time, still seated, and then the t-shirts came off, ripping as he tugged them, exposing his chest and belly to the tingle and itch of air. After this phase he rested, steadying himself, avoiding the tableaux (though not the odor; impossible) of his neon foot, which dangled in a bulbous throb from the leg he'd crossed over the knee of the other.
Reaching over he managed to stopper the tub and turn on the water. Watching water so pure it was nearly blue gush into the Platonic form of a clean white bathtub was so fascinating that the tub was nearly full before he snapped out of the reverie and twisted the tap off. Hoisting himself on the shower curtain he managed to get to an upright position again, all of his weight on his left foot. He dug his wallet out of the back pocket and placed it on the edge of the sink, and, after a strength-gathering pause, he ripped his unzipped pants from the crotch down, tearing the rotted cloth from his legs in four strokes, and he ripped off the shreds of his underwear, which were a complicated color, and he sat himself groaning on the edge of the bathtub before falling sideways into it, splashing the floor tiles. He screamed when the parched wound of his macerated foot hit the hot water.
"You alright in there?" came the man's deep voice.
When he got no answer he stepped into the bathroom, switching on the lights, and found the white man breathing, but semi-conscious, or pretending to be, in the bathtub, the blind fish of his little white dick floating in the bushy red kelp of his public hair, the bathwater pink. The bathroom floor tiles were covered in a quarter inch of water and he was careful to avoid the puddled filth of the white man's clothing, which would have to be disposed of if ever he could find a fire hot enough. There was a wallet on the edge of the sink and he looked through it, finding a typewritten letter folded into eighths, a ticket stub for dry cleaning, and a long-expired driver's license that claimed that the white man was a 42-year-old citizen of the state of New Jersey by the name of Ricky Lang.
When the white man came to consciousness again, he'd been summoned by the not entirely unpleasant pain of having his right foot cleaned and bandaged. He lay naked on the motel room bed he'd spent the previous night and morning in, his long hair and beard still damp but drying rapidly in the zero-moisture Vegas heat. The large black man who was tending to his foot said, "Someone tried to get into my car last night. There were scratch marks on the door. Was that you?"
"I've been sick for a while."
The black man nodded, seeming to accept this for an answer. But then he added,
"I was about to throw away what was left of your pants when I found these." He jingled a full set of house keys. "Why have you been living outside for so long? Where's your home?"
The white man looked genuinely puzzled, and not a little pained, by the question. The black man stood with a graceful weariness and gestured at the bandaged foot and said, "I can't guarantee you won't get gangrene and die, but maybe this'll help. Here's a bathrobe you can wear. You can follow me if you're hungry."
They hobbled outside, the one helping the other to walk. There was a café-style table under a sunshade umbrella on the gravel between the two long, low stucco buildings of the old motel. Some distance behind them was a Jetstream motor home of dented and polished aluminum, parked beside a flagless flag pole and looking like a gargantuan kitchen appliance of the 1950s, its side door open and the unarticulated murmur of news radio at a low volume leaking out. The sun was still hours from setting but depleted and forgiving and the wind finished drying the white man's shoulder-length hair and chest-length beard before he took his place at the table, lowered into the seat, wearing, with comical inadequacy, the very bathrobe he'd first seen the black man in.
"Help yourself," said the black man. He nodded at a serving plate of cold scrambled eggs, a cold plate of sausages and potatoes, a stack of cold pancakes and a pitcher of warm orange juice.
The white man took a surprisingly petite forkful of the eggs and said, "I'm wondering what you might have found in my wallet."
"Wasn't much to find."
"That's what I'm thinking."
"Want it?" The black man held it up.
"May I?"
The white man reached and took the wallet and placed it on the table beside the plate he was eating from. Something was in the air. It was different between the two of them now. The confrontational energy of the evening prior had evaporated. The black man scratched his chin and said, "And it wasn't you I've been getting all those letters from?"
The white man, he shrugged and he chewed.
The black man said, "I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that you are what you appear to be."
The white man asked, without looking up from his plate, "Which is?"
"Somebody with an interesting story to tell."
There was a good long silence. The black man sneezed and the white man said god bless you.
The white man looked up, finally, and said, "Why don't you tell yours first?"
novels i'm putting out there
DOES THIS TINFOIL MAKE YOU LOOK FAT? Previous
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