By 9:15 AM the conference room should have been filled; if not then how about 9:30? The television was on, but I’d stopped watching. I wished I was a smoker to pass time. I wanted to ask the server if I’d come to the wrong room, but that guy was gone.
I walked out to the front desk, but the clerk must have been in the bathroom because I heard water running from behind a door marked ‘Employees Only.’ I waited, but after the water stopped going there was nine minutes’ silence and nothing more.
I took a pen from the front and walked back to the conference room; the television screening had been turned off. Breakfast was still warming at the rear. I made a plate of eggs and one banana. A cup of apple juice, too.
Besides the flyer that had survived the f looding in my room I had ten others, taken off my car. They said the same thing, only their colors changed. ‘Goodness Girls.’ ‘Haven’t you always wanted to win?’
Lumpkin wasn’t hosting one beauty pageant, but two. Miss Innocence was regional, but the other was a local show. If the Miss Innocence festivities didn’t start until this evening there was still a place for young ladies to compete. And there was no fee to participate. ‘Come down this afternoon and get involved.’ ‘Reputable Prizes.’
On Braddock St. In downtown Lumpkin. The typewritten instructions at the bottom of the handbill were very easy to understand. I would even have offered to take Nabisase, but I had a movie to write. I used the blank backs of each handout.
I tried to scribble out a screenplay in twenty minutes. Apparently it takes longer than that. Everything I wrote was counterfeit. Just versions of movies I’d already seen, but in mine the characters were black or from Queens. A guy in a hockey mask killing geeks of the Ivy League. A demon possesses a girl in Southeast Queens and a troubled young minister has to cast the evil out. That’s how badly it went.
Eventually I gave up on creating something new and wrote down capsule synopses of monster movies I’d seen. So I’d know what to avoid. Pretty quickly I understood I had no talent for invention, but a decent memory instead. I recalled actors, directors, approximate running times and even the production companies. Soon I had pages of these catalog entries.
Gurgle Freaks
Feldspar Pictures American, 1985; 64 minutes
Director: Herman Shipley
Starring: Veronica Groober, Paige Pelham, Joe Stat
Veronica Groober stars as the villainess, a saleswoman of cosmetics who kills housewives by filling the throats of her victims with a bilious liquid which she regurgitates into their mouths. The special effects are actually quite gruesome. The villainess is on the prowl because she was disfigured in a boating accident and has, ever since, borne a terrible hatred against all fair females upon whom fate has shined.
Jains, Jains, Jains
Montu Films, 1986; 83 minutes
Director: Ezra Washington
Starring: Manfred Owens, Manil Oswati,
Helena and Bascom Hughes
Jains, Jains, Jains, despite the title and subject matter, is an American-made film. A Jain priest’s (a yati’s) dead body is mistakenly delivered to America to a quiet, decent childless family. (Helena and Bascom Huz). The woman pries the box open while her husband is at work and when she removes a shroud from his face the yati is brought back from the dead. The yati grants her one wish. (This has nothing to do with any aspect of the Jain religion.) She wishes her husband would return to the amorous ways of their youth. Then the yati kills her.
He commences slaughtering many of the neighborhood wives as the day continues and as he does he frees their many pets. Dogs, birds, turtles; the yati releases them all. The final murder is of the local cat lady who keeps about a hundred.
At the end of the film the viewer is supposed to understand, accept might be the better word, that this Jain priest has come to America to kill its unrighteous human beings and leave the nation to its holier, more innocent, creatures.
The final shot is of the unnamed yati (who is played by an obvious black American, Owens, who doesn’t even try an accent—this when there is actually an Indian cast member, Oswati, whose sole job is to explain why Jains are a threat to the United States) getting on a Greyhound bus in only his white robe and coming, presumably, to your town next.
This film might have been underwritten by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or, perhaps, Pakistan.
After two hours I had nine of these on the table, but still no good ideas of my own.
I never saw another diner while I had my head down working, but when I stopped writing there were 199 plates on the tables, the remains of breakfast on most. Fingerprint-smudged glasses of juice beside them. I got lonely, so I left.
At one of the tan in-house phones I tried Mom and Grandma’s room, but there was no answer. My sister was staying on a separate floor for contestants, but that number was blocked. Each time I dialed her room the phone buzzed defensively. A person couldn’t even speak to those girls. Corruption entering through the ear.
As I left the Comfort Inn I passed the front desk, where a clerk’s dark brown blazer had been placed on top of the service bell. I didn’t bother to ring it because I expected no help.
14
The nut-shaped town of Lumpkin was broken into thirds and in ascending order. Starting low, between I-81 and Pleasant Valley Road; near the Hampton and Comfort Inns and Chili’s restaurant; the only movie theater; the Asian eateries. A tourist quadrant. European toilets aren’t like American, did you know that? I didn’t until I read about it. They’re designed so the shit doesn’t fall right in the water, but gets caught on a little shelf until you flush it away. That layout saves gallons of water, but the human surplus just sits there to be seen. Lumpkin’s tourist section resembled a European toilet; we were left there near the bottom to stew until the day we dropped and departed on the rushing interstate.
Four-lane Pleasant Valley Road split the tourists from downtown Lumpkin, the center of local business and historic landmarks. Some of the one-family private homes here suffered leans. Downtown was the fulcrum of this city’s poor, because every agency to feed or clothe the broke was there on Cameron Street.
And at Fairmont Avenue I reached the final checkpoint between downtown and uptown; this third was as nice as Jamaica Estates. The houses were larger than in the poorer section, but not by that much. The real difference was in architectural flourish. Porticos; Doric columns like a bastard.
Walking from my hotel to Fairmont Avenue at the other end of Lumpkin took only thirty minutes, and my pace was tame. There were gates around the homes in the poorer section, but in the nicest part of town there were none.
I spent a while on the sidewalks, but how long I couldn’t say. My armpits and stomach itched because I hadn’t showered yet. Sometimes I stood still in front of a home, but I was only thinking of how to reach my family, who weren’t in their rooms. The forsaken quality of the Comfort Inn had saturated the town; I didn’t pass any human beings.
I walked into a little ripple of a coffee store even though no one was inside. I opened the door and tried the pay phone before I realized the place should’ve been locked up. My calls to Mom’s room went unanswered. It wasn’t that the store was closed: the lights were on and the coffee machine brewed quietly. More like the owner had stepped out the room, maybe quick around the corner.
I poured myself some apple cider from the jug in a fridge behind the counter. To relax I untied my shoes, took them off. My feet appreciated the gesture. I allowed Ahmed Abdel into my life once again.
Even I was mildly worried about how much this guy bothered me. It wasn’t just for Lorraine. My freedom seemed constricted compared to the expansive life offered him through incarceration. On page two of the pamphlet there was a brief question-and-answer conducted by the same windswept young journalist at BU.
Q: What is the greatest threat to freedom today, Mr. Abdel?
A: The elite business oligarchies of the Western World.
Q: What question would
you like the people who read this to consider?
A: We know who watches us. The police. The military. The mediacracy. But ask yourself who watches the watchmen?
What a twit. What an ultramaroon. This was the man Lorraine would get arrested for? A guy who quoted comic books? With a pen, notepad and my stationary anger I wrote the guy a letter on my last Goodness Girls flyer.
Mr. Abdel,
How is prison? They call it the gray bar hotel sometimes. A friend gave me the pamphlet with your photo on the back with your interview. You have a lot of admirers.
From your ‘watchmen’ comment I think you have been reading the funnies well into adulthood. Socialism’s overrated anyway. I’ll bet you couldn’t spell Muhammad before starting your prison bid.
I noticed that you wear dreadlocks, but you are Japanese. Is it that you think you’re black? Do you wish that you were black? It’s silly to use the name you do. Why is it that other minorities pretend they’re black to fight the system? You aren’t black.
Yours,
Anthony
I signed only my first name, but put the full return address at the top. Of course I wanted a response; that’s why I wrote it. Short, quick and sure to sting. Cracked my toes and set my feet flat to enjoy the cold store floor through my thin socks.
After resting I looked at the clock, but the time was wrong. –It’s three? I asked myself.
– It took me two hours to do this little bit?
Which made me think of the work I’d done in the conference room. I lay the sheets on my table in the coffee shop. Read the movie entries so quickly that I had time to do it again. Read them out loud. If I compare the feeling with anything it would be to my mother when she was listening to the tapes of our family speaking into a microphone. Both were just a form of preservation.
I touched the pages gently to my fingertips and considered the next month, the next year. They were in my lousy handwriting; that made them more cherishable. I needed to think impartially about my family and myself. Where the others had been stricken, how would I survive. The first time my mother didn’t recognize me I remember I was ten. It lasted a week and the whole time she was trapped on a hospital bed. When Uncle Isaac refused to go to sleep for so many days that he only got rest when he fainted.
In a way it was good luck that I’d sat there so long feeling sorry for myself. If I hadn’t I might have put on my shoes and walked out of the coffee store. If I walked out I might have left Piccadilly Road. And if I left Piccadilly Road I wouldn’t have seen Nabisase and Grandma running away.
They had fashioned a papoose like the one we’d made with my jacket the night before. Theirs was made of bed sheets. My sister carried Grandma on her back. A thirteen-year-old girl tottering down the road holding her ninety-three-year-old grandmother in a satchel.
They went down Piccadilly, past where I could see them from my chair, so I put on my shoes, left four dollars on the register and one dollar in the tip cup. Followed them with my eyes until they reached a big library two blocks down. My sister made a right.
I walked to Braddock Street, where Nabisase had gone. On the corner there was a marble library too flamboyant for this modest town; a man wearing crisp, new overall dungarees and a nice white long-sleeved shirt washed scuff marks off the fronts steps. He looked spiffier than I did and I was wearing my brown suit.
Judging by numbers the town’s missing populace was all on Braddock Street. Though it was a crowd they seemed to take up less space than the same number of people would in New York. Eventually I realized this was because no one was dramatically announcing their hurry with sighs or pushing.
Three circus tents were pitched in the road; each was as tall as the surrounding two-story homes. They were staggered, one tent after the next, and swaying to the right or left depending on the impulse of the wind.
That first tent had teenage girls inside. I saw a few walk in, but not my sister.
Yellow balloons were tied to sedentary objects. To light posts, to trees, car antennas and front gates. A boy in a wheelchair had five tied to his handlebars. This old woman, sitting in a lawn chair on the sidewalk, wore balloons looped around each ear. Her jewelry bobbing up above her hair.
A traveling band was at the far end of the block and when they reached the corner of Braddock, at Louden, turned right to make a circuit through the downtown area. It was brassy music except for one bass drum.
People wandered down the block, mixing around the three tents. Middle-aged women stood together in U-shaped groups, each one’s children visible constantly this way.
Christianity was common. I bet my sister was pretending she fit right in. I watched as a minister and two preachers were greeted sweetly; each one mingling on his own. Old women that I passed sang absently of Jesus.
There were black people and white, but I was confused by both. Being from New York, I was used to telling the difference between the two with only my sense of sound. It was just disconcerting to hear a man drawling sweetly with his wife and when I looked the guy was as likely to be blond as he was a brother. I was disoriented watching so many people act politely across the races. In New York there was no courtesy, only parallel worlds. We worked hard at ignoring each other. But down here black people and white people shook hands, greeted each other, and generally hid their mutual contempt.
Women sold meat they’d prepared at home from folding tables set on the sidewalk; pork and a lot of chicken. Besides the booths others walked around with Tupperware serving trays of Brown Betty’s, pumpkin pie and malapees (warm walnut cookies dipped in honey then powdered with brown sugar; the woman who sold them told me the recipe, belched and apologized many times). I bought ten for three dollars ate four and put the others in my jacket pocket. I needed the energy. Oh, shut up.
I tried to walk into the first tent with the teenage girls inside, but a small woman wouldn’t let me through. She smoked and checked her watch. Since she was shorter than me I looked in, but that was no way to find Nabisase.
At least thirty girls were in there. A Polaroid flashed in the back, many many times.
–You go to the second tent and sit, said the woman in front of me, but I wasn’t listening.
–Nabisase! I yelled.
Maybe four of the girls looked at me, but the rest were too busy. About a third of the girls were in scuffed jeans and boring T-shirts. The rest wore long dresses and makeup. I assumed that I knew which ones were involved in this pageant, but found out later that I was wrong.
–You go to the second tent and sit, the woman said one last time, cigarette out of her mouth. She spoke firmly once her slab of husband had joined us.
I looked him up, down, all around, trying to decide if I should rush past him.
At the entrance of the second tent I ate two more malapees. Undid my jacket to straighten my ocher tie. A small boy was there holding a plastic jar, collecting money for another boy who’d been burned plenty. There was a picture taped to the jar. Talk about veal cutlets. I gave a dollar.
I wasn’t the only one going into the second tent and I sure hadn’t been the first. One hundred folding chairs were filled and many other people already stood along the sides of the tent. But it was still cool inside. Not only because it was November, but a pair of oscillating fans at the far end.
They were propped at both ends of a small elevated stage. In the foreground of the stage there was a standing microphone, but no speaker yet.
I tried to get out of the entranceway, but it was hard. Soon people would have to sneak up under the flaps of the tent, along the sides, if they were going to get a view. If they did who cared? There wasn’t any entry charge.
When a tiny Negro walked onto the stage I knew we had begun. I know the word ‘Negro’ doesn’t fit anymore, but he was transported in from a previous century. Dressed like a buggy driver in weathered tails and white spats. The man even wore a derby. If he’d been holding a tiny lantern he might have found work on many lawns.
He was as lig
ht as wheat, but obviously black, and half the people here knew him. A few called out when he appeared, – Hey Uncle! or, Yes now, Uncle!
The ones who yelled were the most enthusiastic. Four guys who stood and clapped.
No one else applauded, not the black or the white, the fat or the chubby. Other than his cheering quartet most people just casually watched.
The little man touched the microphone with his thumb so the first microphone broadcast was of a nail scratched across the equipment. The second was his voice, squeaky as a bee sting.
–Dis is many mo’ folks dan I eber hoped ta see, yes suh.
That made us applaud if only for the vague way he seemed to be saying something positive about us.
I’ll say it, his dialect sure stymied me. Slaves of the antebellum South would have mocked his poor English.
–Why ar we heah? he asked. Why ar we heah?! he repeated.
– For you, Uncle!
–I know that’s right!
Already I’d spotted those four guys as the worst kind of audience plant. If they were in there to get us more excited their outbursts had the opposite effect. He hadn’t actually done anything yet, so why the ecstasy?
–Awlraght, he muttered. At’s enuff a dat.
After a pause the old man began again. –Iss not fo’ me that youse heah. Iss fo yo lertle chilrens. Iss fo yo specel gurls. Yawl brung em roun our way fer de chance ta be a booty queen. Em ah raht? Well? Em ah?
Sure he was, but many of us needed time to translate his sentences. And I’m including most of the good people of Lumpkin. I don’t want to say this man had a Southern accent, this guy’s diction was warped well beyond questions of geography. Backwoods white folks used to be called hill apes by the wealthy planter class; this black man was making hill ape sound refined.
– Gurls. Wimens. Thas whut we talkin about. When ya had ’em dey was but so big, but nah dey is mow grown. An’ ya want ’em ta start laff on de good foot. Ya come ta luvlee Lumpkeen hopin dey win dat Miss Inn-oh-sins booty contess an’ take home scowlarships.
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