Tales of the Out & the Gone

by Imamu Amiri Baraka

Everybody was now sufficiently impressed. On the real side.

  I pressed. You mean everybody in that joint got their own elevators?

  I dunno. She says she dunno either. But she has.

  Wow.

  So we slide right in and up. The elevator door opens right into her apartment.

  Yeh?

  And it’s laid out gorgeous. Rugs everywhere. Not the wall-to-wall, but different Indian and Persian rugs. Oriental rugs in different parts of a hardwood floor. She’s got modern furniture in some rooms, old antiques in others. Glass and leather and plastic shit some places. Wood and easy-chairs other places. The living room is modern. She’s got paintings everywhere.

  Any of yours?

  Yeh, yeh. She had a big orange painting that Castelli sold last year. It’s called Orange Laughter. But she had a Kline, a Guston, a big De Kooning woman. A fuckin Larry Rivers naked woman.

  Like the one he did of Frank with the dangling pecker?

  No—it was more modest. Norman was being ironic. Hey, she had a Frankenthaler. A goddamn Rauschenberg. A Jasper Johns.

  What the hell is this woman, a goddamn art buyer? Basil.

  She’s just got money, fool. White.

  Art buyers got money.

  I said, She told you she saved money? Ho ho ho!

  No, she’s loaded. It’s maybe an eight-room apartment. A couple bedrooms, guest room, full kitchen. Books. Records. Big Fisher components. Speakers in all the rooms. She pushed a button and there’s a goddamn Morty Feldman piano concerto on.

  Fat-ass Morty!

  So what happens, man? Shaddup, you guys!

  We listen to Morty. We listen to Earl Brown. John Tudor and John Cage. Monk. We drink. We talk. The view is great—great! We lay in front of her goddamn fireplace. She even played some Basie and we danced. We talked and talked. And then we got undressed on the floor. What a body!

  Everybody was pushed forward now, heads thrust at Norman like they could see the big pretty breasts and round peachlike behind. The long blond hair draped around her when she let it down, cushioning her head and neck and back, and the downstairs hair yellow too, and the odor coming out of her. Norman almost sung about her like some goose-pimpling eau de cologne called Fuck Me Now Immediately Daddy Do Not Dally Any Further!

  So we did it first on the floor. She undressed like her clothes were burning her. But it was sexy, mate, I tell you. And there she was. And in a few seconds—

  There were you, I shot in.

  Yeh.

  Laughter.

  And what is there to say about big thighs pulling open of their own accord? And eyes hot as a weird blue stove?

  Wow.

  A couple hours later, we go again. She’s quieter now, but clings real tight. She even dug her nails in my back just a little when the whistle blew.

  Yeh, yeh, yeh! We whistled and beat on the chairs.

  Yeh, Norman. Tell it. White wobbled.

  And then just before we go to sleep—it’s about 2 now— she tells me a little saying her mother told her. It went: No matter how much you might get hurt, there’s love that can heal you.

  Was it good, Norman? Basil smirked.

  It was very, very good. Exquisite body. And she knew what she was doing. She knew all the right spots.

  No matter how much you might hurt, I repeated, there’s love that can heal you.

  Yeh, I felt good. Hey, it was heavenly. Heavenly. And then she sang a little song. Some kind of folk tune. Maybe it was European, I dunno. I thought it was Mother Goose or something. No words, just humming and a kind of refrain she repeated.

  Hey, man, that sounds great. White had stood up straight to speak. Getting as sober as he could for the official congratulations.

  Heavy stuff, young Norman, I added.

  Hooray for Norman! Basil sputtered. Not only do people buy his paintings, but he gets to fuck beautiful girls that sing, for Christ’s sake! This tickled Domenick.

  But then Norman looked at us with another thing in his face and voice. Yeh, it was good. I thought it was beautiful, the fire and all. I even picked her up and carried her and laid her in the big bed.

  Hey, that’s a line from Frank Yerby, I kibitzed him, admiringly so. Frank Yerby.

  Yeh. Norman puffed and puffed on the cigarette now. And John had a big smile, pulling his head up and down slowly, affirming the reality of the tale.

  But then I went to the window, finished another bourbon and smoked a Gauloise, and looked down at 4th Avenue.

  It was that cool, huh?

  Yeh. And after that, I went and lay down beside her. In the little night light, I could still see how beautiful she was, and I thought, Shit, it’s my fuckin lucky period. Goddamn. So I lay out. I was painting pretty good. Another show in a couple months. A couple bucks in my pocket. And this fantastic sweet thing next to me in the half-dark.

  Wow.

  Norman got another drink and pulled himself straight.

  Wow.

  Yeh, wow, he said, his eyes clouding over like a windshield without a defroster on a suddenly frosty day. And then, about an hour or so later, I guess—I was sleeping—and I dunno, I just felt … Something just got in me. Something woke me up.

  Uh-huh.

  And I open my eyes, raise up a little in bed. My eyes had to get used to the half-dark. But I notice too that Monica is also raised up in bed. Full up. My eyes focus and I can suddenly see her. She’s sitting there, man, straight up in bed … And she’s got a pair of scissors held up in the air! And now she can see that I see her, and our eyes meet.

  What? It came from all of us at once, and the word just hung a second in the whistling smoke, half-crumpled and half-floated to the floor.

  But I could tell—I could see—that Norman wasn’t lying. He wasn’t. And now he was repeating the last part again, so it could really penetrate.

  Yeh, she was sitting there in the dark with a pair of fuckin scissors.

  Why? Basil finally asked, almost sober now.

  We looked at each other and at Norman.

  Norman coughed from the smoke in his face, the cigarette still dangling. His eyes playing over us, convincing us without the least opposition. What you mean, Why? he was saying. How the fuck would I know? I sure as hell wasn’t staying around to find out.

  We all finally let it go, the caged-up air—the surrogate terror in it, and even an inch of curious delight. Norman’s eyes glowed a little and he grinned the grin of the escaped hunter.

  A cold glaze replaced his living eyes, and the ice of death came into his face. The cigarette should have dropped, but it was stuck to his bottom lip, even with his mouth hung open.

  What’s happening? I, the rest of us, looked at Norman, then turned to look over our shoulders. There was a blond woman now standing just inside the bar’s entrance.

  She began to walk toward us. I thought, Hey, now Nor-man’s slip-up is coming right straight out with the lying shit. But Norman looked ashen. I didn’t think a mere lie could do that. We were all starting to grin. I guess it had also occurred to the others too that what Norman had told us was a really well-told lie. And now, here was the chick in person to uncover the lie.

  But before our smiles could tumble into place and replace our quizzical stares, Norman’s ashen silence transmitted a howl of deep fear to us all. Not lightweight bullshit. So when we looked at the woman striding straight toward us, unnoticed by the rest of the raucous barflies, what we saw made us all believers. Believers forever in all the unknown spaces of terror, the blankness between the stars.

  The bitch still had a pair of scissors in her hand. And as she came toward us, she held them up and waved them slowly back and forth, like a wand. But they were covered, even dripping, with very fresh blood.

  1981–82

  (Originally published in Playboy, July 1983)

  FROM WAR STORIES

  Back before the jogging thing got to be a “craze,” during the late ’60s or so, I used to go out every couple of days and run around the half-mile track
at Wake-wake Park. In those days, and to my mind, the body was what the mind was, and so I was out all the time, flying around the track. Also, I’d take off at least once a week and go zooming around the lake itself, about three miles or so. It brought back my high school cross country days. The wind in your face, talking to yourself, and thinking great, out of breath, slightly agonized thoughts.

  The funny part of this regimen was that at the time I weighed about 120 pounds, soaked in lead allegory. I ate no meat—the result of a bout with the Air Force in which I was served bleeding chicken on Sunday afternoons. From then on, I used to trade my chicken, a weekly affair, for salad or dessert or just straight-out gave it away. It carried over into real life, life after the error farce, so that now even in my thirtieth year, I still shudderingly refrained from eating meat.

  So early mornings I’d dash around Wake-wake, named after Indians who’d been bested in a land deal. Its name seemed to be both a command and a solemn gathering.

  I was also a member of a political action committee in Noah at the time. Noah, New Jersey, population 300,000, mostly colored. Quite a few Negroes, a few black people, plus significant numbers of Italians, Puerto Ricans, and Portuguese. I’m telling you this not only to help accurately portray my general state of mind, but to tell you that at least one day a week, usually Saturday, a whole bunch of us in the PAC would be running, staying in shape. A few of us believed that democracy for the assorted groups of colored, Negroes, and blacks could be won by refraining from eating meat and jogging, plus karate. An even smaller group of us thought that it might take more than that—maybe a little Malcolm, a little Che, a little Mao, some Ron Karenga, Carmichael, and pinches of some other folk, living and dead. Hey, there was even a smaller group that didn’t care at all. And you know, I later found out that there was a group larger than all of the above who figured it would take even more than that.

  At any rate, running through the park, not during the Saturday mass sessions but alone, with the leaves’ shadows visibly crossing your hands and arms; the sun streaming through the green overgrowth to get to you; the air thin and delicious, being sucked in desperately as you came up that series of dead man’s hills before the long downhill straightaway that brought you in past the school stadium and to the finish—that was something else. You felt strong and somehow motivated. You had to succeed because you were succeeding already. Running free, so to speak.

  The Saturday sessions were regulated mass affairs. We might run—not might, did run—around the same lake. And that was great: catching up to people, being passed by the jocks and a few sworn killers who had to win to prove their absolute sincerity to the cause of the people. The camaraderie and exchanged strength of that was alone worth the whole experience. Afterwards, we might play ringaleerio or touch-football or basketball or baseball. It was full-out physicality we wanted on those Saturdays. The women went out together while we were doing this—a group of young men, mostly single, but many like myself were married, already with children, and some growing sense of ourselves.

  The pattern was the weekly mass outings for the collective swelling and growing we were trying to do. Plus, I’d go out a few times a week by myself, because I liked to run. I’d run two and a half for the cross country team in high school and college. Actually, it was a form of meditation, a way for me to get into myself, to let my mind go out and bring back whatever it could. A light wind against my face.

  That could be all in passing. I mean, I could relate that running to the later fad or craze and we could speculate as to how that came about. I guess that period of the late ’60s and early ’70s was a period of people pushing themselves, of ideals, of holding oneself up to measure against any number of arbitrary goals or models, convincing oneself, with small difficulty, that the world was the way we wanted it to be. That no matter how horrible it appeared, it was the way we wanted it to be, and we could change it with the assorted words and images we tried to retain inside our otherwise very healthy heads. That itself would be an interesting conversation—limited, but still interesting. But this is not it. This is about something else, perhaps something much simpler.

  During this period of running, there was a lot going on. I can’t get into all of that here—it’d scare some people and bore others. But let’s say that while I was running—at the moment of, but also when I went away from Wake-wake, which was most of the time—there was a whole lot going on in Noah. A whole lot going on around the country and throughout the world. You remember the ’60s, don’t you? Well at any rate, you can read about it and whatnot.

  Our political action committee was formed to elect black politicians to office. That’s what it really was for. Some of us had more grandiose ideas, either vaguer or more specific, but if there was a consensus, it could be focused on that. We wanted to elect black politicians to office because there weren’t any in Noah. Well, there was one guy, sort of the Jackie Robinson of black politicians. John Walker was his real name. Some of us called him Johnnie Walker Black, after the Scotch. Plus, he’d always have a few glasses of that running around in his system somewhere. He was a good guy—he had been a good guy. When I was a kid, he was a real hero. The first black councilman and whatnot. He knew my parents, and everybody in those days supported him. But he’d stayed around too long. He’d gotten to be too well known for his real self, or the self that had come to be seen by everybody. He’d had a couple of unsuccessful marriages, one to a friend of my mother’s who was a nurse and didn’t want to let go of her job, even back then in the early ’50s. They’d split. He’d started to become a noticeable drinker and an even more noticeable drunk. Sometimes (most times), he’d inhabit a kind of twilight zone between the living and the dead, his eyes rolling open every so often, his dry cracked lips poking open momentarily to suck up some trifling air, and then he’d roll over and go deep off into a primordial ancient pygmy sleep. This would be while sitting in his First Negro Councilman Chair, under a portrait of him as the First Negro Councilman, in front of everybody—white folks too.

  Plus, blacks or Negroes or colored were a majority (all of the aforementioned, together) in Noah. The gray industrial countercharm of Noah, which I’d grown up in, had by the ’60s lost most of its hold on anybody who had options, mainly the socially mobile, mostly white middle class, and they’d gotten in the wind. Any other colors of middle class had got in the wind too, mostly, though it must be clear that there were some of us still around pouting that now that we were here almost by ourselves, we still didn’t have any power or control over anything. (I remember shouting at Mr. French, the curator of the museum, that while I like the internationally famous Tibetan collection—I’d grown up on it, snaking around those masks and vases, still in elementary school, trying to sniff out my own essence—that, damn! couldn’t there be something that more resembled myself? The Hudson River School paintings were great—I’d grown up on them too—but damn, what about a picture of Headlight, Bubbles, Roggie, Kenny, and me coming down Belmont Avenue, sharp as African mythology, heading to the Graham Auditorium for the Sunday night “Canteen”? Like where was that, my man?)

  The tremors of those years? The rush of trying to be resolved frustrations. The hungers and thirsts. One stretch, I actually thought I was carrying the slave ship around in my head. I kept hearing the drums and screams, the savage slash of the whips. And the ship was nearing the shore, and it was the middle of winter. I kept peering out of a hole in the ship, just about the waterline, I guess, and saw this icy, snowy land draw near. Johnnie Walker Black seemed to be slumped against Plymouth Rock with a red cap on his head, grinning but drunk as a mojo.

  But this is not a tale of frustration, per se. This is perception and rationale. We did what we set out to do, our political action committee. Yessiree! We pulled a convention together and selected candidates and actually elected most of them. No shit! We organized and educated and worked our asses off. Our committee got larger and larger as people began to understand clearly what we were about, witho
ut being put off by the media.

  And the committee was right in the middle of it too. We had a hand in screening candidates, setting up the entire convention, putting out the publicity, mobilizing people to show up, and then the follow-through for the election.

  We brought in all kinds of celebrities and leaders from all over the country—Bill Cosby, Dustin Hoffman, James Brown. Raised money for the candidates that came out of the convention, and goddamnit, got them elected too. Not all of them, but out of the seven we ran, four got elected, even a goddamn mayor! Yeh, it was fantastic. You don’t remember that? It was in all the papers, across the country. It was like the first black mayor of a major northeastern city! Yeh, that’s right. Right!

  A great night that was too. People came out in the streets and danced up and down, holding hands and laughing. There was a band on top of a bus, sitting in the middle of Broad Street, and black folks and Puerto Ricans and our allies flowed downtown from all parts of the city to have the great moment in Robert Treat Hall (named after the gentleman who’d actually pulled off the Indian deal). That was the height of something. The pinnacle, the goal, whatever. A thousand times heavier than making that last dead man hill and trudging but floating at the same time toward the stadium finish. A thousand-thousand times. Hey, for a minute it seemed like I was brothers with all the people I could see. Like maybe even all the life and color that was inside me, that I carry (and you carry too), could come on out, just like how we all flowed together toward Robert Treat. That what was inside me could flow on out and mingle with all the other insides that could flow out. Because, I don’t know, it was amidst all the screaming and jumping up and down, absolutely safe to reveal your feelings. You know?

  I feel like laughing now. No, I am laughing. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! No, it’s nothing. I just thought of something. Not thought of something. The park, the running. We’ve gotten so far away from that, it seems. Wake-wake Park. Gee, I think of old Henry Deel, who just died. He was almost the mayor, but we thought … There was some kind of minor scandal or something. I don’t even remember. And “Sweets” Towne, that old Democratic hustler, was always in it. He even threatened me specifically one night for talking bad about Johnnie Walker Black and trying to rip off his own meal ticket. But he was alright too, actually. Boy, did we talk bad to and about white folks in those days. I saw this one dopey woman recently that we put out of the theatre. She was trying to pass then as a Russian Indian. A sister told her she had to leave the Russian outside. I saw her, that same woman, walking down the street with a guy who actually looked like a Russian Indian, just a couple of days ago.