by Lewis Shiner
He moved on to Congressman Randy Fogg and pieced his story together from various sites. Fogg had been born in 1930 in Pine Level, North Carolina, a small town east of Smithfield. He graduated in 1953 from what was then still North Carolina State College in Raleigh, the alma mater of Michael’s father, with a degree in Journalism. That got him a job at the Durham Herald, and later at the Herald’s radio affiliate, WDNC, where he covered sports and did occasional pro-segregation editorials. In 1960 he moved to the more powerful WRAL in Raleigh, with its chain of stations in the so-called Tobacco News Network. From then until 1968, when he won his first election to the US Congress, Fogg did a five-minute editorial every day, railing against “the University of Negroes and Communists” in Chapel Hill, the “disgusting, filthy abominations” of homosexuals, the “socialist welfare state,” and the part of “Yankee neo-carpetbaggers” in the “Communist miscegenation conspiracy.”
The last quote stopped Michael cold. He double-checked it against the NRC site, then searched the rest of the Web. Those were the only two places it occurred.
He got up and stood in front of a rack of books, not seeing anything on the shelves. It wasn’t proof, he told himself. Whoever created the NRC probably admired Fogg, probably studied all his speeches. That was what Sgt. Bishop would say.
In his heart Michael knew that Fogg had written the content for the NRC. It walked the same line that Fogg himself did, trumpeting law and order at the same time that it flouted the principles of equality and tolerance behind the Constitution. And, Michael noted, both Fogg and the NRC demanded puritanical sexual conduct in spite of persistent rumors of Fogg’s own adulterous, bisexual, interracial misconduct.
The rest of Fogg’s career was in the public eye. He’d taken advantage of the arrival of C-SPAN in 1979 to regularly deliver long harangues to an empty House after the day’s session was finished. Because the single camera remained focused on Fogg, viewers didn’t know that the Representatives he was charging with Communist and homosexual sympathies weren’t even present.
It was the birth of a new era of right-wing dirty politics, and the party rewarded Fogg well for it. By 1989 he was party whip and would probably have been elected Speaker of the House if he’d been willing to take the job. He claimed to prefer working behind the scenes; insiders said the party didn’t want to provoke a serious investigation into Fogg’s private life.
Rumors circulated every election that Fogg was planning to retire, and every two years he ran again, and won the 4th district hands down. And part of his appeal, Michael had to admit, was his refusal to be intimidated by rich corporate interests. “Nobody owns Randy Fogg,” was his constant refrain. He attacked big business as viciously as he attacked big government, and he worked hard to get jobs and a better standard of living for the poor whites of North Carolina, even if poor blacks happened to benefit along the way.
The afternoon was gone. Michael bought the two books the store had on Hayti, one a collection of black and white photos and the other an informal history by Dorothy Jones, Denise’s predecessor. The pictures gave him a feeling he found hard to explain, a painful nostalgia for a time and place he’d never known.
*
He ran, showered, ate, and called Denise. There was a lot of noise in the background: whistles, squeaking, yelling, as she waited for Rachid’s basketball practice to finish. She didn’t know how long she’d have; she went outside so she could talk to him in peace.
Rachid was still not done by the time they’d made their arrangements, so they kept talking. Denise was hyper from work and the night of chauffeuring Rachid that lay ahead of her. It made her easy to talk to. She was like a standup comic, impersonating Rachid’s friends, riffing on the upcoming election, making fun of her own ineptitude at household tasks. Michael sensed she was trying to charm him, and that only made her all the more successful.
He was a bit hyper himself after they finally hung up. He channeled the energy into work, finishing five pages that had been in various stages of completion. In the middle of it, Helen Silberman called to see how it was going.
He never knew how to respond to her. She was younger than Michael but seemed much older—MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, self-possessed, with a highly personal and expensive fashion sense that involved vintage stores, western wear, and Japanese designers. Her husband was a broker type, and they had a daughter who was less than a year old. Her hair was an unnatural shade of blonde, she was thin to the point of brittleness, and she burned cigarettes like incense, without ever seeming to inhale.
On the other hand, she had an easy laugh and had always been sweet to Michael. Even now, nagging him gently for being late, she was apologetic. Once he assured her there were pages coming, she was relieved and funny about it.
It was after 1 a.m. when he finished. He got a FedEx box ready and lay down with Dorothy Jones’ book. Her attitude was relentlessly positive and left him feeling shortchanged. When he finally fell asleep, his dreams were filled with strange three-dimensional rotating puzzles that he twisted and turned and never quite managed to solve.
Saturday, October 23
He drove to Denise’s apartment with half his attention. The other half mulled and anticipated and worried. He wore khakis, a carefully pressed white dress shirt, no tie, a corded silk jacket, black leather lace-up shoes.
Denise lived close to the Duke Medical Center, in an enclave of student and professional apartments. It wasn’t until he got off the freeway that he realized the same headlights had been behind him since he left the hotel. At that moment the lights moved in, almost touching his rear bumper.
He was on Morreen Road, heading the opposite direction from Tommy Coleman’s apartment, back toward Duke and the city. The Millennium Hotel was on his left and the road was well lighted, but he was suddenly afraid. When he eased his foot off the gas, hoping the car would pass, it slowed with him. He heard the throbbing bass of giant speakers.
He signaled and turned left onto Campus Walk, a long stretch of apartment complexes. The car followed. As it turned he saw that it was an oversized SUV, maybe a Ford Expedition. North Carolina, unlike Texas, didn’t require a front license plate—not that he could have read it anyway, as close as the SUV was. He couldn’t see anything beyond the glare of its headlights.
He noticed the address for Denise’s complex and drove past, heart thudding. Campus Walk ended in a T intersection, and Michael turned left, remembering a strip center a few blocks away with a grocery and a video store. At least there would be witnesses there.
Suddenly, on his right, he saw the entrance to a gated community. There was no guard, but there would be a phone, he thought, and he could push buttons until somebody answered and then yell for the cops.
As soon as he pulled into the drive, the SUV hesitated, then roared away, speakers still pounding. The windows were tinted to a mirror blackness, and Michael caught himself in the automatic assumption that the occupants were black as well.
Don’t do that, he told himself. Not tonight.
Lightheaded with relief and residual nerves, he looked both ways and then backed out into the street. The road behind him stayed clear. He drove straight to Denise’s building and parked on the far side, where his car was invisible from the street.
Denise answered the door in black pants and a black sweater with a swirling gold design. Michael thought she looked elegant and utterly desirable.
“Whoa,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. Let me get my breath.”
She brought him in and sat him on the couch. The overstuffed furniture and the dark orange walls made the room seem smaller than it was. There were piles of schoolbooks and papers, a pair of congas, two lovebirds in a cage, basketball trophies, pieces of a couple of different computers, a TV, a stereo, and shelf of records and CDs.
“I apologize for everything to do with this apartment in advance,” she said. “I take full responsibility for everything, even though a lesser person
would try to pass the blame to Rachid. Except the birds. Rachid is totally to blame for the birds.” As if in response, the birds twittered briefly and hopped around the cage.
“I like birds,” Michael said.
“Tell me what happened.”
Michael told her, as plainly as possible.
“Why would somebody follow you?” she asked, sitting at the other end of the couch.
“I’m sure it was just some kids screwing around with me. I’m being paranoid, that’s all. It’s because I’ve been going around asking all these questions. About that tattoo. About Mitch Antree.”
“Do you want a drink?”
“I don’t drink, actually.”
“Good, because I was bluffing. If I have anything at all, it’s a bottle of Frangelico in the back of one of the cabinets that’s older than Rachid. I wouldn’t want to try it.”
Michael’s nerves had quieted. He liked the life and clutter of the room. He found he was able to very clearly picture himself kissing Denise. Before the thought could build to critical mass, Denise said, “We should get going. Who’s driving?”
“I don’t mind,” Michael said. “It’s a rental, we might as well take advantage of it.” He paused. “Unless you’re worried about my friends in the SUV.”
“I’ll risk it. My car is even more of a mess than the apartment.”
On the drive to the restaurant they talked about painting. They had in common their regard for some of the artists at the Hayti Center and their contemporaries: Biggers, Gwathmey, Bearden. “I can see Klimt and some of the other Symbolists in Biggers,” Denise said. Michael glanced at her; her smile bordered on a smirk. “Also Thomas Hart Benton. But the artists he reminds me of most are Leo and Diane Dillon.”
“I love the Dillons,” Michael said. “How the hell do you know all that? I thought you were a programmer.”
“I read the Dillons’ picture books to Rachid when he was little. The rest comes from being a fine arts minor.”
“You didn’t tell me.” He looked again. She was definitely gloating. A memory popped into his head of his father, in a rare comic moment, telling a joke that he credited to Mitch Antree. The punchline, in black dialect, was, “I believe I is temporarily in love.”
There seemed to be no end of racist garbage clogging his brain. And I’m supposed to be one of the good guys, Michael thought. Is there any hope at all?
“Do you paint?” Denise asked.
“Not yet,” Michael said. “I mean, I have, and I do, but I feel like I’m working up to it. I’m still trying to get black and white right, still learning to draw lines.”
“I want to see what you’re working on now.”
Michael reached into the back seat. There was a bundle of full-sized photocopies he’d made that morning before shipping the new pages off to New York. He handed it to Denise. “You can bring that in the restaurant with us if you want.”
They were on a stretch of southbound freeway lit by periodic streetlights. She unfolded the bundle and Michael caught glimpses of the top page in the flashes of illumination, enough to see it as an abstract, something he’d found only partly successful techniques to do on purpose. It looked okay.
“Michael, this is beautiful. This is art.”
“There have always been classically trained illustrators doing comics, guys like Alex Raymond, who did Flash Gordon in the thirties, or Hal Foster, who did Tarzan and Prince Valiant. And lots of people better than me doing it now.” He stopped himself. “Um, I guess what I meant to say was, ‘thank you.’ ”
“Stay left here, and take the exit all the way around and go north again, by where the mall used to be. So you’re making a living at it?”
“Yeah, a pretty good one. More than my dad ever made.”
“I don’t know that many people who get real money for doing what they love.”
“I’m lucky,” Michael said. “I try not to lose sight of that. What about you? Do you miss programming?”
“It was a mixed blessing. When you build it and it goes out and does something useful, it’s really satisfying. When it crashes and you can’t figure out why, it can drive you crazy. And you always end up working too many hours.”
“What about now?”
“I love the work. I’m not making enough money, is all, for somebody with a kid to put through college. From one month to the next they don’t know if they’re going to be able to keep me on. I’m trying to get as much oral history on tape as I can, while there’s still a budget for it and these people are still around and talking. I hate having to put it on hold for all this ATC business, important as it may be.”
“They must all hate my father.”
“Not so much. There’s plenty of blame to go around. It was the black community leaders who sold them on the whole redevelopment idea, and I think a lot of people are still angry at them. Then there’s the Durham Select Committee, which was pushing for the freeway to get people to RTP easily, RTP being their big goldmine. I don’t think your father’s name has ever come up, though I could search the transcripts for it. Not this light, but the next one, turn right.”
“Transcripts?”
“We don’t have that many. It’s what I do nights and weekends instead of watching TV.”
“Can I look at them?”
“That’s why they’re there. Do you have a laptop? They’re all on CD-ROM and you can go through them in my office. Left at the next light. It’s in that strip center, past the Kroger. Sitar India Palace.”
The restaurant featured an upscale buffet of Southern Indian cuisine. Michael couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a proper meal, and the smell of the food made him realize how hungry he was. He ended up making three trips through the line.
As they ate they made first-date conversation: tentative circling around previous relationships, lists of favorite movies and albums, rough sketches of childhood. Denise’s father still ran a plumbing business in Queens, and was part owner of his own apartment building as well as two others. Her mother did substitute teaching at the elementary level. Denise had been “wild” in high school and college, until a DWI in a borrowed car—trying to get an even drunker friend home—put an end to that. Within two months of her night in jail, she met her ex in her Russian literature class at Hunter College.
“Russian literature?” Michael asked.
“I took a bunch of Russian classes for a while, until I had to admit I had no aptitude. I was looking for something dependable that I could make a living at while I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. I thought there would always be a market for Russian translators. Then I discovered programming. Fortunately.”
She married Joseph Brown the month they graduated, and Rachid was born a year later. She thought of herself as a romantic. Joseph was the only long-term relationship she’d ever had.
For his part Michael talked about why he was in Durham and about the dead ends he’d hit in search of his past. Then somehow he found himself telling Denise about his father’s record collection.
He’d hadn’t thought of it in years. His father had a shelf three feet long of jazz LPs, all in beautiful condition, with special plastic-lined inner sleeves he’d bought from a library supply company. They started with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and went all the way up to a complete run of Coltrane’s Impulse albums. In between were all the Miles Davis Columbia releases from Miles Ahead to In a Silent Way; Art Blakey with Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter; Cannonball Adderley’s quintet with brother Nat on trumpet and cornet; and on and on.
His father kept them to himself. Michael would find him sometimes late at night, listening to his old Harmon Kardon stereo with the tubes that glowed in the dark and the headphones so massive that as a child Michael couldn’t bear their weight.
A handful of times, times that he remembered individually, his father had called him over and played him a solo or a song, and he’d listened dutifully, trying to understand what he was supposed to hear. Even as he was reachi
ng out, in a way, his father seemed impossibly distant, withdrawn into a private and unassailable place.
Michael couldn’t remember ever telling anyone the story before. Afterwards he felt more exposed than he wanted to. He tried to shift over into the relationship topic, where there was little to be said. After the plates were cleared away, Denise read the Luna pages more slowly, and he told her about Roger and the series.
They’d talked for two and a half hours, and there was only one other couple left. The waiters were lined up near the kitchen, watching them.
“So where do you see yourself in twenty years?” Denise asked. “Still doing comics?”
“I guess in twenty years I’d hope to be painting. I would love to do something like Biggers did, after he went to Africa and everything started clicking for him, the shotgun houses and the pots and the mythology. First I’d have to have something of my own to say.”
“Everybody’s got a story to tell.”
“Maybe. I’m not even sure of that. Certainly not everybody is a storyteller. There are too many artists in my business who started writing their own stuff when they shouldn’t have, because you can make a lot more money that way.
“Roger convinced me that it’s not something you should dabble in. He’s always talking about narrative as a double-edged sword. How it’s got this kind of function that the shamans used to have in society, to explain and heal and preserve. But at the same time it also distorts and simplifies. It’s always at least a little bit of a lie.” He listened to his own words echoing in his head and said, “Sorry. Where are you going to be in twenty years?”
“I knew you were going to ask me that. I don’t know. There are a thousand things I want to do. Collect and edit oral histories of places like Hayti. Get a master’s in history. Get an MFA in art. Travel the world. It’s just that when I try and think about twenty years from now, I keep coming back to Rachid. Where is he going to be in twenty years? Apart from the trouble he’s going to have because of being black—increased risk of violence, of drugs, of going to prison—there’s the everyday stuff that all of us have to face. AIDS, global warming, fundamentalist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians. I know I sound like my parents did in the seventies, but it seems like everything is going to hell—Presidents stealing elections, Enron, plagiarism, ‘reality’ TV—what kind of a world have we made? How much worse is it going to get in twenty years?”