by Odie Hawkins
Leo glared at the hand Taco had dealt him and winked across to his partner, Harry, to let him know it was all on him.
“Chili? shit! Chili got some lil’ ol’ insane white chick out north stuffin’ his pockets, buyin’ ’im lil’ ol’ funny cars, sendin’ ’im to school ’n I don’t know what all.”
“Think I’m gon’ have to pay that brother a visit,” Jake slapped a card down, following suit.
“If you can find ’im,” Harry trumped the suit and winked maliciously at his partner.
“Oh, you see him in the neighborhood every now ’n then, flashin’, … he don’t want nobody to know where he’s stayin’,” Taco added.
They played serious cards for a few hands, slipping up and down the scales of what they had been into over the preceding months.
Jake the Fake, the most recently released from a short stay in the county jail, took advantage of a lull in the game to make a proposal. “Now, dig … I know we all been goin’ through a bunch o’ changes since that bust over on Bowen, but that was a long time ago. I got a surefire scheme that a dude laid on me just before I got out dynamite! and all it needs is fine players.”
Slick Rina winked conspiratorially to Taco and asked, “How would we split the take, Jake?”
“Even Steven, baby even steven.”
Leo startled them by popping up from the table as though he’d been pricked. “Hey! what time is it?!”
Jake glared at the interruption. “Damn, man! don’t be doin’ shit like that!”
“It’s seven,” Leo announced.
“Father Love is on television tonight.”
“Really?”
“You got to be jivin’!”
“No bullshit! They call ’im the Honorable Reverend Father Love these days.”
“Yeah, that’s right, I read somethin’ last week about that jiveass motherfucker.”
Taco hurried to the television set in their sparsely furnished front room. “What channel is he on?”
“Two, I think, check the guide,” Leo advised her as the small group slid away from the table with their glasses, the card game forgotten, intent on seeing a master player at work.
“What about my thang?” Jake pulled at the group, following them to the front room.
“We can get back to it, Jake be cool,” Taco spoke soothingly to him.
They settled themselves comfortably around the room, watching the t.v. flicker into life.
“Rina, y’all got any smokes?” Harry asked as Father Love strode to the podium behind the opening credits.
Rina reached down under the side of the sofa and pulled out a shoe box lid of seeded, stem scattered weed, her eyes glued to the picture.
“Wait! Lemme make sure the door is locked,” Jake said, forcing them all to remember another time, long ago.
“Right on!” Harry encouraged him with a dry smile as they gave the Honorable Reverend Father Love, their undivided attention.
The Honorable Reverend Father Love, a self-styled divinity with an ear for hip sounding titles, stood, holding onto the edges of the podium, very much aware that he was playing super-con for Slick Rina Dorsey, Taco McNeal, Jake the Fake, Harry Mathews, Leo Terry and their ilk. He nodded his fashionably coiffeured noggin in time to the choir’s closing notes, a dreamy spiritual number he had written, called “Father’s Love.”
“Lookit that motherfucker style!” Jake the Fake called out with pure admiration, a critic of the highest order.
“Yeah, ain’t he somethin’?” Slick Rina responded from across the room.
Everyone in the room leaned forward a bit as Father Love opened his mouth to spiel.
“Sisters sisters ’n brothers,” he began, surveying his docile, responsive audience, grabbing hold of the flight of nerves that the cocaine he had snorted just before showtime took him on. “Sisters ’n brothers the Lawwwd works in mysterious ways,” he announced grandly, jutting his chin out with Mussolinian cockiness. The chorus of amens! and right ons! that greeted his announcement caused Leo Terry to spill his wine, laughing.
“Hahhh hah hahhh ha ha ha … mannnnn! will you listen to that shit! That motherfucker ain’t even changed his rap for t.v.! Wowwww!”
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
“Yes, sisters ’n brothers, the Lawd works in mysterious ways, there are times when some of us don’t even think that He’s workin’ at all, but I, the Honorable Reverend Father Love, can assure you that He is.”
Harry stood and made a little Flip Wilson-Geraldine movement in affirmation, “What you see is not what you get wowwweeee!”
“Sit yo’ ass down, Harry ’n behave,” Taco cautioned him, “watchin’ one fool at a time is enough.”
Rina continued rolling the dope and passing it out.
“There are many reasons why I can assure you of the Lawd’s workin’s, but,” and here Father Love turned his well-shaped mustache toward camera number two, a close shot, “I shall only use one example, due to the lack of time we have here on television.”
He paused theatrically, to let it fully seep into the minds of his followers that he and, by extension, they were on television.
“Uhhh huhhh, nice, Father, nice,” Jake mumbled.
“Five years ago, or a little less, I was uhhh … what some folks would call down ’n out. I say, hah hah some folks would call it down ’n out, I never would. At that time, I was lackin’ many of the necessities one needs to do the work of the Lawd. I must confess to you here in the audience, sisters ’n brothers, and to those of you out there in video land, that I was becomin’ depressed, blue, saddened by the adversities that life was layin’ on me.”
“Play, Daddy Love! play!”
“But!” he stabbed a glittering, diamond decked forefinger, “I knew I had the Lawd’s work to do, so therefore nothin’ I say, nothin’! was goin’ to keep me feelin’ low for very long. We’ll pause right here for a couple commercial messages, and then I’ll tell y’all what pulled me through.”
Taco moved quickly to turn the sound of the commercials off and looked around at the group, bubbling with sarcasm and admiration.
“You believe that!?” Slick Rina looked around her with a dry curl to her mouth.
“Motherfuckin’ right, I believe it,” Leo responded. “He’s gettin’ over, ain’t he?”
“What’s his money pitch?” Jake asked, a professional’s interest drowning out emotional considerations.
“Let’s listen ’n see.”
Taco turned the sound back up and slumped down in front of the set, toking up meditatively.
“Now then, as I was sayin’, just before the commercial break, money may or may not be the root of all evil, but it certainly can be the cause of a lot of hardship if you don’t have any.”
Jake and Harry, verbal switcheroo artists from wayyy back, exchanged looks and silently slapped each other’s palms in recognition of where the Father had taken things to.
“When I didn’t have the church I have now, the physical manifestation of God’s presence, when I didn’t have the nursin’ home for the aged, that uhhh … we have now, when I didn’t have the money to pay for prime time to get the message out to the greatest number of people, I was sad. That, sisters ’n brothers, and y’all out there in video land, is what made me sad … not my own personal problems, no sir, no m’am, they never counted, my concern has always been, how am I goin’ to find the way to spread the Lawd’s Word? Prices being what they are today.
“A lot of people don’t think we’re supposed to talk about earthly things in religion, in sermons, … they’d like to keep everything in the clouds. Well, all I can say to them is this, what ye reap, so shall ye sow, and vice versa. If you want a lot, you have to give a lot, that’s both heavenly and earthly.”
“Dig ’im! dig ’im!” Jake pointed excitedly at Father Love’s eye-rolling to the sky.
“We see ’im, Jake, shit! be cool!”
“The main purpose of my program,” Father Love continued, having unsettled most of
his audience with his deliberately contrived detour, a trick used to make them wander a bit and accept his exit sign … this way, please “is to help all of us who can believe in the Lawd and my work, by that I mean this, it means givin’ up those petty concerns for personal problems, we have the answers for those problems. Yes, sisters ’n brothers, we do. Don’t worry about those anymore.
“The concern that we should have is not for those petty things but for other things, such as … how can I make this a better world? Or if I can’t do it, or I don’t know how to begin, how can I help that individual who does know?”
Father Love disguised his frown of irritation at the sound of the choir backing him up a paragraph too soon. They had been told not to drown his request for donations out with a bunch of tambourines shaking.
“You, you, and especially you, can help make this a better world,” he intoned solemnly, pointing his finger at the television audience. “Send whatever you can afford to: The Honorable Reverend Father Love’s Better World Foundation, Box 369, Chicago, Illinois, zip code 60011. I will leave you now, to return to your homes and your hearts this same time next week, the Lawd willing. To those of you who tuned in late, I would like to repeat, donations should be sent to the Honorable Reverend Father Love’s Better World Foundation, Box 369, Chicago, Illinois zip 60011.”
He placed his palms together, the slender, bejeweled fingers pointing heavenward, and repeated, “That address, once again, is the Honorable Reverend Father Love’s Better World Foundation, Box 369, Chicago, Illinois zip code 60011 We are a non-sectarian organization, dedicated to the ideal of peace on earth and good will toward all men, black and white. I thank you for havin’ allowed me to come into your homes and hopefully your hearts this evenin’, to bring you my understandin’ of the Lawd’s Words. I leave you with this last message This can be a better world, with love.”
Slick Rina, Taco, Harry, Leo and Jake the Fake stared at the television as though they were hypnotized.
Leo whistled as an announcer, voice over the credits, requested again, “Donations should be sent to the Honorable Reverend Father Love’s Better World Foundation, Box 369, Chicago, Illinois zip code 60011 that’s the Honorable Reverend Father Love’s Better World Foundation, Box 369, Chicago, Illinois, zip code 60011 Thank you and remember this can be a better world, with love.”
Slick Rina shook her head from side to side, making a profound gesture of disbelief. “You mean to tell me that this … this … this monkey time, pootbutt, jiveass motherfucker is gettin’ away with that?”
“Clean as a whistle.”
“Well, I’ll be goddamned.”
“Ain’t but one thing wrong with his thang,” Jake shot in professorially.
“What’s that, professor Fake?” Harry punned on his nickname.
“His organization’s name is too long.”
“Yeahhh, you got a point there,” Harry conceded, backing off from the fun thing.
“He’s gettin’ away with that?” Rina spoke out again, in something akin to absolute wonder.
“Honey,” Taco purred to her roommate, “if you don’t know how gullible people can be, nobody knows.”
“I can dig where you comin’ from but goddamn! you mean to tell me that all you have to do is rent some television time, make up a meaningless, bullshit talk and then ask people to send you money? Is that all?”
“I know an easier way to do it, and you don’t even have to get on t.v.,” Jake slid in smoothly, certain of everyone’s attention now.
The other people in the room, the larceny in their blood stirred up by Father Love’s charlatanism on the tube, looked at him expectantly.
Chapter 4
Forks in the Road
Chester L. Simmons, alias the Great Lawd Buddha, stood off by himself in a corner of the exercise yard, warming his cold bones in the bright autumn sun and reading a letter, over and over, from Billy Woods, an ex-member of the Afro-Lords. He smiled at Billy’s description of his first child, “a rubber facced, brown bouncer of a baby boy.”
The Great Lawd Buddha finished the letter finally and tilted his face up toward the sun, slanted eyes closed, soaking in the warmth. Life in the joint wasn’t so bad, he rationalized for a moment, the sun’s rays tripping him out, not if you had three squares a day, few hassles and a chance to write as much as you wanted.
He slowly lowered his head, his prison issued baseball cap shrouding his face with shadows. No, he scratched his earlier thought, no, that’s not right … being in jail is pure idee hell. He looked out across the yard, his eyes sweeping across a panorama of misery, self hate, inhumane cruelty, dumb rage, social fiction and human degradation.
Chester L. Simmons, the Great Lawd Buddha, Mississippian, Black brotherman, poet, dramatist, world spieler, artist, speculator, murderer.
His thoughts twisted away from the snake pit scene in front of him, back in time, to his life with Josie “Heatwave” Masterson, the one-time apple of his eye, the lady who made him blow his cool six times into her body with a German luger.
Why did it have to be Josie? Why Josie? he’d asked himself a dozen profound times, behind a terrible day under a sadistic bull, or after a dismal night dreaming of the flavor of her body’s juices, the warmth of her eyes, her nose, her lips, her neck, her beautiful titties, her stomach, her hips, the lovely grizzled pussy between her thighs, her magnificent ass thoughts that took him beyond momentary unpleasantries, like doing twenty to life.
But, life being what it is, he philosophized, it had to be Josie c’est la vie.
He plunged his hands deeper into his pockets, the anguish of five-thousand hours of remorse tilting his face back up into the sun, seeking warmth, oblivion from haunted memories.
They were on him before he was aware of their presence.
“Whass happenin’, bruh Buddha?” the boldest of the trio entree’d.
He pinned all three lazily. Tough, hip, literate, now-type young niggers, into books ’n politics. Good.
“Nothin’ to it, lil’ brothers, a baby could do it.”
He leaned against the cement wall at his back and crossed his legs. Which one would it be?
“Buddha, what’s this shit I hear ’bout you being a white man in South Africa?” Marcus, the bank robber, asked point blank, and knelt to hear the full story.
“Ohhh, that,” Buddha super-casually tossed off and folded himself down slowly into his sumo wrestling rest stance, glad to talk a lil’ shit to open minds.
“That … hah hah … that was the result of a most weird set of circumstances, most weird. If I could possibly bum a cigarette from one of you three golden brothers, I would be most happy to run the whole thing down to you.”
Marcus held the pack of Benson and Hedges out to him immediately, pleased to be able to supply his need. One could never tell, one day it might be candy, one day nutmeg, snuff or cocaine, but most often, Benson and Hedges.
“It all started after I had to make my European break, behind my heroin thang; I told you all about that, didn’t I? being hounded by those Algerian mafia dudes over that kilo?”
The three men nodded solemnly, one of their favorites.
“O.k., there I was, once again, on a freighter I used to go a lotta places on freighters, this time as a common seaman. I had stolen a Malay seaman’s documents, on my way to wherever the brute that I was treadin’ water on was headed. Now why we had to wind up in Capetown, South Africa, is something that only God above and the captain of the sleazy bitch we was sailin’ on could answer.
“Cape-town, South Af-ri-ca,” he enunciated syllable by syllable, as though grinding his teeth on something bitter.
“I’ll never know why, what it was that caused me to jump ship in a place like that, but there I was, on my ass in Capetown. In many ways I can say to you, unequivocally, that it was one of the grooviest black places I’ve ever been in this world. I mean, like sho’ ’nuff groovy gut bucket black. Everybody underneath white, that is to say, the Coloreds, Cape Malays, In
dians, Zulus, Xosas, Basuto, everybody else after white helped everybody else. I had some dudes help put together all the documents I needed, just to walk the streets. I had people feed me, pass me around like I was a cookie that might crumble up in their hands.” His voice rumbled dramatically. “I was a soul brother from the U-nited States who had decided to stay with them in their locations, share their oppression. Beautiful people, gentlemen, beautiful people, carved out of love.” He accepted the pre-offered cigarette and carried on, caught up by his story.
“I had three families slip me around in their location for two months, just ahead of the state police, the Gestapo is really what they were.
“Now dig it! I feel I must elaborate on this point because it is most important. I was a potentially dangerous, slick-minded U-nited States nigger who had jumped ship for subversive reasons, and was known to do my share of dirt, that is, if the truth be known.”
Donnell, Marcus and Brian all held their hands out to be slapped, their common sense of wrongdoing embroidered for them in a way that they had never heard it before.
“The South African police, brothers,” he continued more slowly, deeply, “the South African police could bring pee to a chump’s eyes, if they caught you gettin’ down wrong, missin’ a step or doin’ any other such shit as they could misconstrue being against their regime. And there I was, young, foolish, wild, so crazy that I didn’t even know why I had jumped ship.
“Some of the militant brothers thought I had come over secretly as a black Che Guevara, but actually, if y’all want to hear the truth, what happened was this: I had gotten off into a thang with a bitch who was part Kalahari Bushwoman and part Cape Malay, and she was so fine that I decided to stay with her, no matter what. Nobody had told me too much about the racial setup, nobody had told me that the Afrikaners discriminated against everybody, even they own mommas.”
The trio laughed indulgently, pulling their collars up against the deepening chill.
“Yeahhh, thass right! Even they own mommas! There was a case, while I was there, of a police inspector who caught his momma with the yard ‘boy’ and was so outraged that he had the Racial Classification Board declare his mother one piece nigger, shifted her away from him, had the Re-classification Board bypass him as a nigger and kept on livin’ happily ever after with his snow white wife. Helluva country! I’m tellin’ ya! Helluva country!”