A Changed Man

by Francine Prose

  THE LINE IS A PROBLEM FOR RAYMOND. Is he really supposed to fall in with these mongrelized mutants loitering out on the street, begging to watch some eggplant dandy chat with Cousin Vincent? How grateful is Raymond supposed to be for this public disgrace, the chance to join the other race traitors waiting to see Chandler, to be herded into the studio with the mud-race crowd, rubbing up against them and catching all their diseases?

  Raymond should be an invited guest, like one of those experts they get to gas about global warming and the Middle East and Tim McVeigh. Raymond’s field of expertise is ARM and Vincent Nolan. They should have sent him a ticket. In fact, the tickets were free. Raymond called and ordered his as soon as Lucy told him that his cousin was going to be on Chandler. He probably should have brought Lucy. At least he’d have someone to talk to. Raymond and Lucy should both be here as special guests of Chandler.

  But there were plenty of reasons he didn’t bring Lucy, most obviously the fact that he doesn’t have a clue about what he’s going to do when he finally sees Vincent. He knows what he plans not to do. He’s not going to come out swinging, which is what the Jewish media expects from guys like Raymond. Certainly that’s the media’s line on the white-power movement, ever since all those years ago, when the Aryan brothers went off on Geraldo Rivera. Raymond won’t play into their hands. He’ll stay focused and say what he has to say about ARM in general and Vincent in particular.

  Raymond’s glad that Lucy isn’t here to see him wait in line like some jerk taking directions from the hot tamale in the Chandler T-shirt who thinks a pair of headphones clipped to her woolly head makes her superior to the white men she’s bossing around. But of course, señorita! Your wish is my command! He often fears that Lucy will stop being on his side, stop believing what he believes, as soon as she figures out how he stands in relation to all the people who don’t need to work their nuts off, twenty-four/seven. Lucy might split, like Vincent did. Any smart person would.

  Raymond hasn’t been in Manhattan for five, six years. It wasn’t all that easy to drive into the city, which seems ten times more crowded, noisy, polluted, and crime-ridden than it was the last time he was here. He deserves the Purple Heart just for finding a parking garage, and for getting here by eleven, like they said. The taping starts at noon.

  And where is Vincent now? Backstage with his head tilted back and his mouth open, sucking down the streams of champagne and scarfing the caviar that gorgeous chicks in spangled swimsuits keep bringing out for the guests. Which, when you get right down to it, is the truth about Vincent. He sold out the white race for pricier booze and food.

  Raymond should get paid to be on this show. He should get compensated for the hours he has put in, the days he’s taken off from work to moonlight as Vincent’s stalker and the agent of retribution by which a traitor will be brought to justice. Tracking down Vincent has become Raymond’s second job. Those trips to the pay phones to call Vincent’s new family were fun, like being a kid again, making crank calls to strangers just to screw with their heads. Still, there were the phone bills, the coins wasted on broken machines, plus the sick day he had to take in order to stake out that house in Clairmont and give that kid the message. He’d wanted to tell the kid that Vincent stole his truck and money and medication, but he couldn’t predict how that would play. Some kids might think it was cool. That’s how kids are being raised these days. With no morals to speak of. When the truth is, regardless of what you might think about Raymond and ARM, doing something like that is wrong. People should know about it.

  It was better not to act hastily, better to have waited for this chance to tell a national audience that their so-called hero is a punk shithead thief. Raymond wishes, as he often has, that his little band of ARM brothers had, just once, put their asses on the line, that they’d at least seen how it felt to fuck somebody up badly. Found some Paki working late at the convenience mart and whaled on him. Whaled on him good. Maybe they would have enjoyed it. Who knows? It would have been a bonding experience. Vincent would have got into it. Raymond always felt that if you told Vincent, Kick this scum, Vincent would have kicked. Vincent, not Raymond, is the one who got sent to anger management, the one who dumped that old lady into the swimming pool. Now Vincent is famous for having ditched his supposedly violent pals and gone to work for peace and love. But it was always Vincent who was the real loose cannon.

  Let’s say they’d all lost it one night when the Paki convenience-store clerk told them to please not handle the petrified doughnut if they weren’t going to buy it. Let’s say Vincent was into it, just like everyone else. That would have given Raymond a little something extra to offer the Chandler audience. But Chandler’s people would never let Raymond tell the truth. It might interfere with Chandler telling white Americans how to live and what to think and how to turn their kids into homosexuals and abortionists.

  Raymond lets his gaze mosey down the line of Chandler ticket holders, the fat Rican teen, the welfare mothers with zip to do but take their snot-nosed kids to TV shows for the free air-conditioning, plus the unenlightened white citizens who, under the illusion that this is wholesome family entertainment, are helping the darker races climb up on the white man’s back. Raymond’s been working on an article for the ARM Web site about how the Jews control the media. Just the facts, the list of CEOs, who works where, and what they do. He’s written seven pages, and he’s going strong. So he should have known better than to imagine that the Zionist media moguls are going to give him free airtime.

  Raymond needs to locate the Chandler robot in the T-shirt and earphones who knows what today’s show is about and will grasp the potential of Raymond’s contribution. In which case there’s a good chance that Raymond might be let in early and get the semi-VP treatment, if not the full monty Vincent’s getting. Isn’t today’s program about changing Raymond into Vincent? That’s why Chandler needs them both. Together they form a walking, talking Before and After.

  Raymond’s body decides for him. He’s jumping out of his skin. He would rather get his ego whomped and his ass kicked around the block than stand here one more second. He susses out the station employee most likely to be persuaded, a Jewish kid, real hustler, his hair brilliantined in spikes, as if every brain cell is discharging an idea so hot it’s making his hair stand up. Not like that pathetic bar mitzvah boy in the house where Vincent is staying, the kid who just wants to get high and jerk off, or give drugs to innocent white girls so they’ll let him feel their tits.

  Media Boy is a Take-Charge Jew who knows that Raymond’s input might make for some first-rate TV. Probably he’s heard about that brawl on Geraldo. He’ll be the one to get credit for having ushered Raymond inside. Even if the kid sees Raymond’s swastika, which he probably will, race loyalty will mean less to him than personal ambition.

  Raymond leaves his place in line. It’s a gamble. But he can’t bring himself to ask the woman behind him—a skinny black grandma with ashy skin and a gray shock of straightened hair—to please save his place. The woman’s got a baby in her arms. A kid who could vomit on Raymond. Raymond glares at them both, then goes to the door where the future Michael Eisner lurks, sleek as a lizard in the sun.

  Raymond says, “Excuse me, good afternoon. I’m Mister Mumble Mumble. I’m a friend of Vincent Nolan’s? He’s going to be on the mumble mumble today?” No need to speak intelligibly. The kid’s focused on Raymond’s tattoo. The tattoo is Raymond’s credential. Having it on his hand for so long has earned him the right to use it. And it works. The fire lighting up in the kid’s eyes is the rocket’s red glare of his career blasting off.

  Certainly, Mr. Mumble Mumble. Come right this way.

  He gives his coworkers meaningful looks, like they’ll know what he’s doing, and ushers Raymond past a few yuppie slackers with enough power to inquire, with their raised eyebrows, who the hell is Raymond. It’s just like the military: everything ranked by strict tiny gradations of clout. Raymond’s a friend of today’s guest. Barriers fall, one by one
.

  On TV, Chandler’s fake living room has always looked vaguely normal. In person, it’s psychedelic, a funhouse video arcade. The studio’s dark except for the purple, red, and green lights on the set and the control board. Rows of seats rise up from the sloppy tangle of cable and wires passing for a stage. Onstage are Chandler’s famous armchairs, the Chandler chairs, three of them today, the leather chairs—Chandler’s trademark—suggesting that Chandler’s family has belonged to the Harvard Club for ten generations. Which it probably has. It’s been centuries since the darker races began conspiring to use the white man’s institutions against him.

  Raymond spots Vincent being led out to sit in one of the chairs. The sight of him takes Raymond’s breath away. It’s too early. He’s not ready for the gunfight at the OK Corral. Though he knows not to get excited. This is just the sound check.

  Vincent has let his hair grow in. The fucker’s got a two-hundred-dollar haircut. He’s wearing an expensive suit, a white shirt, and a tie. He looks like some snotball you’d ask for a bank loan, and the guy would turn you down. Raymond’s first impulse is to grab that powder puff from the makeup girl and ram it down Vincent’s throat. In the other seat is the little old Jew whom Raymond saw in People. The Holocaust hero and fund-raiser for the New World Order and the Zionist fifth column. Both men are being fussed over by a crew of girls painting their faces. They look like two corpses getting a two-for-one special from the embalmer.

  First Vincent and then the old Jew squirm as the techies run cords up their backs. If it was up to Raymond, he’d run those cords up their asses.

  When Nielsen Boy motions for him to climb the bleachers and take a seat, Raymond is paralyzed, half wanting to crawl up there and settle into the warm sheltering darkness and half sensibly paranoid that the house lights could come up at any minute, and leave him—the only guy in the peanut gallery—face-to-face with Vincent. That would spoil the surprise that, in Raymond’s scenario, will not happen until after the audience is seated and the cameras are rolling.

  “Is there a restroom?” Raymond says.

  “A restroom?” Is this iguana mocking him? Why not pop the kid and step over his limp body and keep going till he’s popped the tech crew and Vincent and Maslow? The makeup girl, if she gets in his way. Because that’s not what Raymond wants. His plan involves hanging out in the bathroom until the audience arrives. Then he’ll slip in with the others. He’ll listen, he’ll wait, he’ll control himself until that part of the show when they take questions from the crowd.

  For one awful second, Raymond’s afraid that the kid is going to follow him into the can so they—the cut and the uncut—can bond over the urinal. But no, the kid’s got a job to do. Bye-bye, see ya later. Unlike Raymond, who can take his own sweet time in the Chandler toilet.

  “You know how to get back?” Lizard Boy says.

  “I think I can find my way,” says Raymond. “How long till showtime?”

  “Twenty minutes.” The kid’s an idiot. No intelligent person would bring in a guy like Raymond and let him loose in the studio. If anyone finds out about this, the kid will lose his job.

  Raymond locks himself in a stall. Someone comes in and pisses. Someone takes a shit, two stalls over. Raymond cannot believe that Vincent has betrayed him and robbed him, that Raymond is sitting on the public john inhaling a stranger’s farts while Vincent is backstage drinking mimosas and spearing boiled jumbo shrimp. If Raymond could only be sure of that, he could go back and sit in the bleachers.

  The Klonopin he took seems to be doing the opposite of what it’s supposed to. So he’s wasting two pills—pills it took him considerable effort to get after Vincent’s raid on his stash—in a TV-studio toilet. The meds are supposed to cool him out. But his temperature’s rising.

  If only this were the men’s room scene from The Godfather. He wishes he had a gun taped to the tank so he could come out shooting. But Raymond isn’t armed. For one thing, all he has at home is his deer-hunting rifle, which he’s hardly about to smuggle past Chandler’s army of bodyguards. And as for a little handgun, getting one—legal or illegal—would have been so expensive and such a pain in the ass that he would have felt compelled to use it. Raymond’s not going to kill Vincent. He’s known that all along. Raymond’s promise to his dying mother did not include shooting her nephew on afternoon TV. No matter what the guy did.

  After a while Raymond takes a chance and leaves the toilet stall and goes back to the studio.

  Vincent and Maslow are gone. In their place are two tech-crew grunts making small adjustments. The first two rows are marked “Reserved,” which is where—if there were any justice in this world—Raymond would be sitting. He takes a seat in the next row up, close enough to the stage so that when Vincent sits in the Chandler chair, Vincent can see Raymond—but only if and when Raymond chooses to be seen. Also he can easily make his way to the stage if Chandler decides, as he sometimes does, to invite an audience member to sit with the guests. You don’t want a lot of steps to fall down with the whole world watching.

  Eventually, the crowd rushes in, like animals driven to slaughter, grabbing for the best seats, musical chairs for adults. You’d think they were going to some stadium-seating headbanger rock concert instead of a dull prime-time blabfest.

  Raymond looks up to see one of Chandler’s yuppie slaves ushering the same black woman who was standing behind him in line to one of the reserved seats, directly in front of his. They must have a special place set aside for the Welfare Queen for a Day. As she sits down, the old woman smiles at Raymond, who puts all his creativity into giving her an even dirtier look than before. Does she think they’re old friends? Even the baby seems to recognize him, and twists around in the old lady’s arms, trying to crawl back and fling herself into Raymond’s lap. Naturally it’s the white man who’s got to make himself small, to assume the fetal position to keep from having his jeans drooled on by the infant, whose name—Dineesha—Grandma says over and over. You be still, Dineesha, you mind, Dineesha, you watch and see what happens, baby.

  No wonder Dineesha’s squirming. Raymond’s writhing, too, when a girl comedian comes out and does a round of lame stand-up and then starts working the crowd to change a motley group of individuals into a Chandler audience. You’ve come here to see Chandler, right? Yo! We come to see Chandler. Raymond’s drawing the line here. He will not be part of any such group. It’s Communist media mind control, sending its octopus tentacles out to strangle the white race, beginning with these fools who have shown up in person so Chandler can personally brainwash them into mud-race thinking.

  “And now let’s hear it for Chandler.” Everyone applauds. The rainbow family gives it up for this Hershey bar with a law degree who wants to get down, get real. So he becomes a TV star and gets paid millions to put on thousand-dollar suits and tell white men how to change their lives.

  Raymond knows better than to applaud. He needs his hands free in case all this makes him start puking. At the same time he can’t not applaud. Some cameraman will pick up on Raymond’s resistance and broadcast his sour puss on the monitor backstage, where Vincent will be watching. Which will spoil Raymond’s surprise.

  There’s nothing to do but fake it. Raymond claps like a trained seal.

  Shiny and scrubbed, Chandler bounds onstage. The studio lights wink merrily off his brown egg of a head.

  “Brothers and sisters,” Chandler begins, with that famous Chandler look, that phony eye contact deep enough to make a strong individual connection with each member of the studio and home audience.

  “Brothers and sisters,” he repeats. That’s the first lie right there. Raymond isn’t his brother. That’s an insult to Raymond’s mother.

  “First of all, I’d like to say we have someone special with us today—”

  You sure do, thinks Raymond. But you don’t know it yet.

  “—My great-aunt Brenda from Cincinnati and my baby niece Dineesha.” The crowd loves it that Chandler’s got family, a baby niece Dine
esha. The camera finds them. They’re on the monitor. Of all the people for Raymond to be sitting directly behind!

  Raymond lowers his head and puts his hand behind his neck as if it needs scratching. Once again the white man must duck and cover in the land that his ancestors defended with their blood.

  As he turns to survey the crowd of welfare queens, pimps, and slackers, Raymond’s gaze snags on a kid who looks familiar. After a moment he recognizes the boy from the driveway in Clairmont. Vincent’s roommate. How nice. The whole family’s here to support Cousin Vincent. Obviously, that’s the kid’s mom, the uptight chick from People, that broad so ready to explode that probably not even Vincent could bring himself to fuck her. And there’s a younger boy with them. Have these people no decency, bringing tender young minds to get a faceful of the hot air that Chandler’s about to start spewing?

  “Brothers and sisters,” Chandler says. “It makes me extremely happy that a child—my baby niece Dineesha—should be with us today to witness. Brothers and sisters, how many times have you thought about how much better the world would be if we could all live in peace and love, harmony and freedom? How many people have died for that? Brother Martin Luther King, Brother Mahatma Gandhi. And how many times have you wished that you knew what to do to bring it on, to change the world, to usher in the kingdom of heaven right here on our great green earth.”

  The kingdom of nigger heaven, thinks Raymond. The earth hasn’t been green for fifty years. Where’s this city boy been? And what’s heaven doing on network TV? Wasn’t the American democratic system built on the separation of church and state?

  “Today’s show,” says Chandler, “will introduce us to two men on the forefront of the battle to do good. Two men involved in the daily struggle for the rights of men and women and children who are not as lucky as we are. Human beings who don’t have our American freedoms to say what we like and go where we please.”