by Darius James
SHIRLEY TEMPLE–CURLED LITTLE GIRL
My daddy shot smack with Bird!
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
We smoked up my parents’ expensive Hawaiian reefer, stole booze from their liquor cabinet, listened to James Brown at chandelier-shaking volume, finger-fucked in my bedroom, and laughed at Richard Pryor on the VCR.
INT.—Upper Westside Brownstone—Bedroom—Day.
The Scarlet Nymphet pets with the Shirley Temple–Curled Little Girl on the heart-shaped bed. James Brown screams and sweats on the screen of the TV set.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
Who else was I gonna laugh at? Amos ’n’ Andy were dead.
As James Brown sings “Make It Funky,” his face contorts into a frightful leer.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
But, in our minds, we weren’t the culprits. How could we be? Those weren’t our faces. Those weren’t our bodies. We would never put our mouths down there! We were white and well-bred.
It was those black children from the welfare projects! They did it! Those moon-headed, Kool-Aid-drinking, doo-doo-colored Tar babies in ragamuffin hand-me-downs!
They smoked the reefer! They stole the booze! It was niggers! Not us! Niggers! It was niggers poking their greasy, fried-chicken-pickin’ fingers into our wet, underaged pussies! Not us! Niggers!
The Shirley Temple–Curled Little Girl straddles the Scarlet Nymphet and rubs the glistening halves of her painted black ass in the Scarlet Nymphet’s ecstatic face. Her rectum dilates.
SHIRLEY TEMPLE–CURLED LITTLE GIRL
Throw yo’ ass in the air like you don’t care!
And a moist, corn-studded turd spills from her ruffled hole. The turd slides into the Scarlet Nymphet’s puckered mouth, smearing across her lips soft and fudgy.
James Brown grins and sweats on the TV set.
INT.—Image chamber.
Bubbles rubs her clitoris in agitation as she regains consciousness.
The ever-changing symmetries of the Cyborg’s floor dissolve like crystals of frosty window breath and fade to glass transparency. Blighted cityscapes travel at blurred velocities below Bubbles’ feet.
The Talking Dreads decelerates speed.
Coasting above the city’s rooftops, the Cyborg’s floor magnifies Manhattan in detail, surveying semen-spattered buildings frondescent with reeds, vines, palms, and dense tropical undergrowth.
Bubbles swoons in a spell of stomach-dropping vertigo.
A swell of VOMIT cascades from her mouth in a fan of Day-Glo fluorescence. It scuttles into a corner—green and crab-legged with round, tentacled eyes.
Grinning, the Talking Dreads bends over and lifts the multi-legged Vomitoid into his arms. He strokes the creature with affection.
TALKING DREADS
Your company has been most amusing, Ms. Brazil, but I’m afraid it’s time for you to go.
Smiling amicably, the Talking Dreads’ eyes flash with silver light. And Bubbles disappears in a cloud of vapors.
Poof!
EXT.—Harlem Skies—Day.
The Cyborg fades into the sunlit horizon. Bubbles falls fast and far—
BUBBLES
W
h
a
t
a
m
I
g
o
n
n
a
d
o
.
.
.
—and plunges into the feculent waters of the Harlem River.
Splash!
INT.—Harlem River.
As a school of harelipped FISH with phosphorescent scales nibbles clusters of floating feces, Bubbles sinks through the river’s hazy brown waters with her jacket billowing in a wreath above her head. Muffled words pop from her mouth in a cloud of rising air bubbles.
BUBBLES
. . . in this stinking shitpool?!
Bubbles’ behind bounces on the river bottom, finally landing on a carpet of rotted jellyfish. Wincing with disgust, she peels the mucusy clumps from her rump, averting her eyes in distaste.
Suddenly, her eyeballs distend in horror. Air bubbles spume from her throat in a burble of muted screams. Her uvula swings from side to side.
Encircled by a wall of rusted automobiles standing upright in the mud, the ragged CORPSE OF A PIMP flaps in the polluted currents like a scarecrow in an evening breeze, its feet encased in cement, a gold tooth gleaming in its ravaged skull.
Adrenalized by fear, Bubbles swims through the murk with the motions of a bullfrog, colliding with the CORPSE OF A WELFARE MOTHER seated on the stoop of a sunken brownstone. The corpse topples on impact. Bubbles splatters in the mud.
As the corpse’s bloated husk sinks into the soft, dark silt, with a brightly capped crack vial in the fist of its swollen hand, Bubbles slowly rises through the water toward the surface of the river.
In her ascent, she floats past a brood of ringworm-stricken BLACK CHILDREN sitting in rigid death pose on the brownstone’s stairs. Clothed only in “TEENAGE MUTANT RASTA ROACH” T-shirts, the children hold glass-stemmed crack pipes between their lips, gazing absently with bloodshot Walter Keane eyes.
Bubbles sails by an unanchored subway car adrift in the rivers’ excremental silence. Rotund CHEFS in puffed plug hats and aproned kitchen whites stand motionless in the subway’s windows, holding porcelain plates stacked high with buttered pancakes.
A shark-finned sedan with bulbous chrome bumpers floats aimlessly in the distance. Impeded by a congealed clump of remaindered paperbacks, Bubbles swims in the sedan’s direction, slogging her way through the soggy, shit-stained pulp of The System of Dante’s Hell. Suddenly, the sedan rockets through the water at demon speed, churning up a backwash of foam and feces.
Bubbles flips out of its path. The sedan whirls clockwise in the water and again plows in her direction. Zomboid CRACKHEADS man the wheel.
With the sedan on her tail, Bubbles heads for the brownstone and disappears through its doorway. The sedan crashes into the stoop, crushing the corpses on the stairs. The mangled remains float away in bloated chunks.
Bubbles drifts into the hall, through schools of phosphorescent fish, and swims toward the stairwell. When her fingers reach the railing, she pulls herself hand over hand up the stairs, her body floating in horizontal extension.
At the top of the stairs, Bubbles wades in the water of the second floor’s door-lined corridor.
On the floor below, the sedanload of zombied B-BOYS slog into the brownstone and trudge toward the stairs in clumsy Frankenstein slo-mo.
A pork-bellied WHITE MAN in traditional Quaker wear floats through an open door on the second floor, his eyes shining with the hard glitter of fool’s gold. His knees are bent as if knelt in prayer, and his arms are stretched in front of him. His hands hang limp in the water.
With a chain of dung orbiting him, the Quaker Man drifts in Bubbles’ direction. Clusters of laugh bubbles pop from his mouth.
Bubbles turns to escape. But barnacled B-Boys block the stairs.
Circling the Quaker Man with quick and nimble movements, Bubbles darts through the water and shoves open the nearest door.
She swims into the room.
Inside, fragments of a blood-stained mirror are scattered on the floor. A pair of pouty lips are painted on the wall. A table is caked with candle wax. And hundreds of obscene chocolate figurines swirl in the water’s diarrhetic hues.
Bubbled laughter burbles behind her. Bubbles twirls around to face the source of the sound.
The Quaker Man bobs in the doorway, his dead rodent hands hanging before him. His laughter shakes his lumpy, white face like a small sack of potatoes, his mouth springing open and closed like a wooden dummy.
The Quaker Man’s face foams in the water like crystals of bromide, dissolving into a froth the color of diluted milk.
Dead rodent hands wipe away the grayish film.
&nb
sp; Luminous, psychotic eyes stare back at Bubbles.
Familiar psychotic eyes in a familiar black face. The familiar black face of the family Maid.
As the Maid grins, baring her canary-yellow teeth, Bubbles turns her head in horror and stares down at the floor.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
Fading from one world into another, my surroundings melted like Dali’s watches in a sandblown dreamscape.
Upon seeing her reflection multiplied in the fragments of mirror, Bubbles pops into a wisp of ghostly invisibility.
INT.—Brownstone—Upper Westside Manhattan—Bedroom—Dawn.
EXTREME CLOSE-UP ON:
With serpentine ribbons of smoke curling from its hot, orange embers, a joint is cradled in the groove of an ashtray’s rim. It is the color of beach-bleached bone and looks like a mummified cock stained by a ring of red lipstick.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
When I first gazed at my reflection in the bedroom mirror with the silver ovals marked on my face, there was no way to calculate the dimensions of my disease, the degree of my negrophobia.
Roiling with the tumultuous effect of a storm cloud, curls of smoke rush toward the ceiling and condense into the APPARITION of a nude teenage girl. Her thatch of pubic hair is trimmed into a fuzzy, heart-shaped valentine.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
I formed spheres of light and color on the screen of my mind’s eye, which I then projected on the surface of the glass.
Scaled to pixie proportions, the apparition swims through the air and hovers before an oval mirror set inside an ornate bronze frame. An enlarged lynxlike eye dominates the reflection in the glass.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
The glass swirled with smoke and flickered with luminous, multicolored flames. The ovals began to undulate and change shape, transforming into a silver-scaled serpent swallowing its tail.
The apparition jackknifes into the reflected eye’s dilated pupil. The pupil contracts, and the eye refracts light in colors from pale green to ice silver.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
The serpent hissed and slithered in a continuous cycle of self-cannibalization, regurgitating old skins and regenerating new, exuding trails of metallic red and blue light shot through with needles of gold. Then my face changed, folding and refolding with the geometric precision of an origami sculpture’s leaves.
In the reversed colors of a photographic negative, on the opposite side of the image reflected in the glass, Bubbles’ face looms at a towering height with a molting snake slithering around it in the pattern of a figure eight.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
These transformations were not the faces of lives past, as I had thought, or the beginnings of a protective astral shell, as I had hoped, but portents, foreshadowings of my fears.
The snake burrows under the surface of Bubbles’ skin, distorting the shape of her skull, her face folding into a fudge-colored square with leering, froggish features. Pink leafy patches blossom on her face, and a pair of mascara lobster-claws frame her incandescent eyes. The spiked blond thorns crowning her chocolate skull transform into a dried-out, hightop Little Richard conk. Her incandescent eyes turn rabbit pink, redden, and glaze over with cocaine intoxication. The Little Richard conk grows into a Medusa nest of blond dreads, and the chocolate face fattens, blackens, and blisters. Ribbons of flesh flap against exposed bone. The blistered flesh knits into a large black breast and filed yellow teeth protrude from its nipple. The breast snaps its teeth and extends its tongue. The tongue swells into a large, throbbing penis. The penis sprouts a pair of bulging lemon-shaped eyes, and glow-in-the-dark dreads bloom on top of its goggle-eyed head. The penis disappears. And the lemon-shaped eyes float above a bleached nose-bone and a gold-toothed grin. Boiling like a sheet of burning plastic, the inversed reflection bleeds into a smear of colors.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
Pulled on a current of a fine etheric substance, I passed through the glass, and found myself swathed in velveteen blackness. The blackness was thick and heavy, like syrup, and shimmered with an oil-on-water iridescence, reflecting a full spectrum of refracted light. Its tributaries of color converged into a black light of satanic brilliance, instantly absorbing the whiteness of my skin.
Bubbles evaporates into the combustive void, reappearing on the opposite side of the glass in black-lighted outlines.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
Without the vampiric beauty of my whiteness, without the definition of my skin, without my emblematic significance, I was presence without appearance, a being without basis, a creature without context—an invisible—a colorless network of organs and entrails in translucent casing.
Dropping through a series of concentric black disks, Bubbles falls through the void as radiant and iridescent as the blackness that surrounds her.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
Like a sleeper losing consciousness to dreams, I dropped through concentric, ever-widening circles of darkness, transcending all corporal restrictions, turning intangible, into the pure substance of thought. Not only was I thought, I’d become the very process of that thought—an idea permutating in the web of my own capricious thinking.
Bubbles shimmers into a polychromatic blur, her shape shifting with symmetrical diversity.
BUBBLES
(v.o.)
As those black, hypnotic disks spun larger and darker in the abyss, the farther and farther I fell, confronting the contents of my own mind in full, vivid, and animated relief, not knowing what waited in the wellsprings of my psyche, not knowing how I might transmogrify.
The polychromatic blur contracts into a narrow beam of light, passing through the surface of the glass.
INT.—Brownstone—Bedroom—Dawn.
In CLOSE-UP, the camera follows a ray of light cast by the reflection of the candle guttering in the mirror’s left-hand corner. Fine dust particles float in the beam. Slanting at a downward angle, the beam of light falls on a full-color, two-page photo in an open copy of International Vogue.
A shaded FINGER, pressed against the page, points to a fresh-faced BLONDE with a pair of interlocking ovals painted on her face in silver paint. Standing between TWO FEATHERED ABORIGINES in bright bodypaints, the silver-ovaled blonde models black Wayfarer shades; a studded, black leather jacket; and a spotted leopardskin bikini. Her abundant lemon-cream curls are tinted cotton-candy pink. The three figures stand in the cupped cotton-gloved hands of a smiling ULTRAVIOLET BLACK MAN WITH GHASTLY GREEN DREADLOCKS.
Over-the-shoulder shot of the mirror.
The color of the FACE seen in the glass is the warm cinnamon hue of a fresh-baked banana cake’s crisp, sugary crust. The eyes are wildcat green. The lips are ripe and full, like pulpy citrus swollen with pungent juice. The burnished, copper-colored hair hangs in long, ropy dreadlocks, which rest on ample, upturned breasts.
As the back of her head swivels in confusion between the cinnamon-colored face in the mirror and the white face in the ad, Bubbles’ face is obscured by shadow. The magazine drops to the floor, opening to:
THE UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON
A CHOIR sings in eerie tremolo offscreen. The motes of dust whirling in the beam of light reflecting off the magazine’s glossy pages funnel into a spiral of cyclonic force and condense into the six-foot-tall figure of a BLACK MAN in kitchen whites, a chef’s hat, and black Wayfarer shades.
With an elegant bow, the smiling Chef offers Bubbles a bowl of hot Cream of Wheat.
CREAM OF WHEAT CHEF
Is ya hongry, chile?
Close-up on Bubbles’ face. There is no face. It’s been replaced by a silken mesh of shadows.
Freeze-frame Cream of Wheat Chef. As the credits roll over the freeze-framed image, offscreen sounds are heard. A crowd roars in an outdoor stadium. A voice announces over the loudspeakers:
ANNOUNCER
(v.o.)
It’s
“Independence Day” here at Yankee Stadium. And to play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” our national anthem, we present an authentic Yankee Doodle Dandy, born on the Fourth of July—Mr. Louis Armstrong!
The CROWD cheers. Footsteps approach the microphone. A trumpet blows the opening bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then the music degenerates into a wall of abrasive, Hendrix-style feedback. The music stops and a hoarse voice says:
LOUIS ARMSTRONG
(v.o.)
Ever since I was a little boy in the streets of Orleans, I’ve wanted to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the Yankees’ ballpark on my birthday. And I was refused my whole life! Now that I been dead and buried for umpteen somethin’ years, you people come along, dig six feet down, pull me up out of the ground, and ask me, a dead man, if I’d liked to show some patriotism for my country. Guess what you can do?
The Cream of Wheat Chef’s mouth forms Louis Armstrong’s last words:
CREAM OF WHEAT CHEF
French-kiss my black New Orleans ass. DEEP.
The camera pulls back. The Cream of Wheat Chef turns around, bends over, and drops his trousers. His ashen black ass is whitewashed with the words:
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Through the years, many have sustained me with their love, money, and couch space:
Rita Breese, Noah Seaman, Carrie Howell, Kaye Lynn Anderson, Alan Drogan, Janet Ford, Rachel Weissman, Stacye Leanza, Peter Conte, Carmine D’Intino, Lisa Blauschild, Tina Carstenson, Maria Chomentowski, Jo Ann Chapin, Gygi Jennings, Colleen Wasner, Libby Averill, Patrice Walker-Powell, Randy Boyd, Jean Bleich, and Mary Hope Lee.
Khu Cen Aton Shu Amon, Jameel Moondoc, John Farris, Rick Van Valkenberg, Emily Carter, Norman Douglas, Bernard Meisler, Patricia Winters, Tim Winkels, Mark Netter, Sabine Heredeckian, Jean J. T. Eckhoff, Josh Whalen, Debra Bergman, Butch McAdden, Tenesh Weber, Mike Zwicky, Doug McMullen, The Snow Devils, Mark Zero, Ed Morales, Erl “Dirty Ernie” Kimmich, Pam Dewey, Snoopy Best, Sheila Urbanowski, and anyone who has ever gotten me drunk in Vazac’s.