by Odie Hawkins
“The ladies of my summer in life, the Circassians, the Navajos, the hundreds of hours of glamorous sorrow I suffered, taking my grizzled lovebone into and out of their holy slits, putting my mind into the position of being given something more precious than all the cunt they could possibly lay on me. Back and forth I’ve gone, across these United States, this cold-blooded America, from the east to the west, from north to south, tripping into Mexican villages, near Detroit, or raiding the striped tents of rival Bedouins because that’s what one did, just this side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
“The moments I’ve had. The exquisite flavors of ten-thousand make-do stews in a thousand hobo jungles, the glistening stories recited by shattered men with hearts of tempered steel, the little fires, the rivers of wine.”
He let the pencil slip out of his fingers and leaned back against the wall, wishing he had a cigarette.
Maybe Rank has one.
He peered across at Ranklin C. Jones, at the smile slicing his brown face in sleep, dreaming of Pam Grier’s titties, checked out the area surrounding him and spotted a half-smoked cigar in a jar lid under the edge of his bunk.
Oh well what the hell
He skirted the edge of his table, stooped for the half-done stogie, found a match and lit up frowning from the first puff guess beggars can’t be choosy.
He remounted his seat behind the table, the smoke from the cheap cigar, held down too long, giving him a cheap high. He looked closely at the last words he had written, “rivers of wine, rivers of wine, days and nights of frustration, illness, suffering, a lifetime of dismal failure.
“How hard it is to tell the truth. A lifetime of failure. To be able, after all these years, to say that. To say that I’ve never been to Europe, Africa, Asia, or any other fucking place outside my country ’tis of thee.”
He dropped the smouldering cigar butt on the floor, feeling angry. “Making it up as I went along, that’s what I did. I made it all up, the windblown feasts on the Mongolian steppes with Kurdish tribesmen, here’s yogurt in your eye!
“The Japanese penis worshipping society, the Great Lawd Buddha, President down, girls! down!
“The voodoo thang in Papa Doc’s Haiti, Erzulie’s ride on my back, my career as a nudist photographer on the French Riviera, the kisses I exchanged with the princesses of twelve nations, including that cold-blooded young English bitch who loved horses more than she liked men.
“The rackets, the games, the schemes, the hustles all lies! Yes, all lies!”
He looked up, surprised to see the sky streaked by the first signs of another day, in this instance, Thursday, but no matter, and hurried on, writing as though the full day would destroy everything he had written.
“My life has been one glorious lie from beginning to end. A lie that deviated from time to time but still remained a lie, or perhaps I should put it another way, where other men have habitually told the truth and lied sometimes, I have always lied and told the truth as seldom as possible For me a lie.…”
“What is it, Buddhaman?” Ranklin yawwwned across at him, ending his story for the moment.
Buddha nodded his head neutrally, plastering his opaque look on.
“You been writin’ all night, Buddhaman?”
“That’s right, brother, all night long.”
Ranklin stepped onto the floor gingerly, popped over to the unenclosed stool for his morning piss. “Mannnnn, I don’t see how you do it. I have a helluva time tryin’ to scribble my woman a few lines every now ’n then.”
Buddha smiled and, along with the rest of the inmates, prepaied to deal with another jailhouse day.
“Buddha?” the guard spoke through the bars.
“Yeah, what can I do for you, Smitty?” Buddha turned to him casually, folding his blankets on his bunk, looking forward already to the nap he was preparing to steal later in the day.
“Warden wants to see you.”
Buddha straightened up, a shrewd gleam spooling the possible reasons around in his mind. “What’s he want, Smitty?”
“Ooohhh, I don’t rightly know.”
Ranklin winked at Buddha, turned to the guard, working sour against Buddha’s sweet. “What the fuck you mean, you don’t know! You the motherfuckin’ polease here, ain’t you?!”
“Mind your own business, Rank. When I got something to say to you, I’ll call your name and number, o.k.?”
Ranklin C. Jones, having spent a night dreaming of freedom and ladies, started to bristle up at the guard. Buddha, cool, cooled him out. “It’s cool, Rank, it’s cool, probably needs my help to figure somethin’ out. I’ll be ready in a minute, Smitty.”
Buddha changed into his prison denims, brushed his teeth and shot a natural comb through his receding hairline a few times. “O.k., let’s be gettin’ on.”
Smitty signaled to the gateman to release the current on Buddha’s cell, manually unlocked it and glared at Ranklin C. Jones. “Better watch your step, Rank,” he warned as he fumbled with his keys.
“Shhhiii-it! if you know what’s good for you, you better watch your own fuckin’ step This is our prison, not yours.”
Buddha and the guard fell into step on the way to the warden’s office, Buddha reviewing his sins of the past week. Wonder what the fuck he wants to see me about? That cocaine deal? Nawww, he wouldn’t have any way of knowing about that. The prostitution ring? Nawww, it wouldn’t be about that, what the hell do they care about punks setting up a union? The moonshine still in the kitchen? Nawww, not that either, that’s been there for years. What?
He maintained a poker face through all the checkpoints, began to feel slightly nervous as they stood in front of the huge paneled door of the warden’s office.
Smitty knocked politely, twice.
“Come in!” a big bass voice boomed out.
“The Great uhhh, Chester Simmons, sir,” Smitty announced, ushering him in.
“Come in! Come in! Come in Buddha! Thank you, Smitty That’ll be all.”
The guard reluctantly departed, certain that this man he guarded every day, this passive storyteller, was going to harm his warden in some way.
Buddha stood in the center of the floor, holding his cap behind his back, taking the warden’s measure. Big, bluff, bleary-eyed beer drinker, three months in the Chair, tough.
“Sit down, Buddha! Sit down!… I know you’re wonderin’ why I wanted to see you. Coffee?”
“Yes, thank you, sir.”
The warden bounced over to his intercom. “Pasquale, two espressos, please.”
The Great Lawd Buddha relaxed, placed his cap on his knee espresso, shit! Things couldn’t be too bad, not if he was going to be treated to Italian coffee beforehand.
The telephone buzzed twice before the warden snatched it up. Trouble with a couple members of the population.
“Sock both of the bastards in the Hole!” the warden growled, looking at Buddha as though he were a fellow warden, someone who understood the problems of managing the Big House.
Pasquale, the warden’s personal servant, knocked lightly and popped in balancing a tray of coffee cups and a pot of coffee like the good Italian-European waiter he had been, once upon a time.
“Pasquale, I don’t wanna be disturbed for the next half hour,” the warden warned him as he pulled his swiveling armchair around to the front of his desk to sip with Buddha. He handed him a demitasse, poured one for himself and settled his beefy frame into his seat opposite Buddha.
“Now then,” he growled jovially, “lemme hear this story about you ruling the city of Tel Aviv for a week without anybody knowing about it. Anybody who can put anything over on them goddamn Jew bastards has got to have a helluva lot on the ball! Hahhhhahhahhahhh!”
The Great Lawd Buddha settled back in his seat, balancing his coffee cup on his thigh, an enigmatic smile on his face. Uhh huhh, so this is what this motherfucker wants, a Scheherazade session, huh? Oh well, espresso is a helluva lot tastier than that chicory dishwater in the mess hall. Guess I better tear that shit
up I wrote last night, no one would believe it anyway.
He suavely held his cup out for a refill. “Well, Warden, you see, it was like this. I had copped a ride on this ol’ freighter, deliverin’ coffee from Brazil to Haifa and.…”
Chapter 8
The Proposal
“Awright, there it is, The Proposal,” Chili announced after reading the last page of the twenty-five pages Cynthia had devoted all of her liberal energies to, day and night, for a solid month.
Jake the Fake let out a long, low whistle … “Woww! Bruh Chili, that’s a helluva piece o’ work you got there, I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“Uhh, well, I had a lil’ help,” he replied slyly.
The members of the group looked cautiously at each other, reluctant to give any wholesale endorsement to anything.
“Heyyy mannnn, that’s a motherfucker of a proposal, and I ain’t just bullshittin’ neither,” Leo Terry opened up the group.
“Yeah, Chili it’s clean outta sight!”
“Right on!”
Chili flashed the group an arrogant smile and toked up on the joint going around.
“Awright everybody, pull in close and listen up,” Jake folded his hands pontifically on Taco and Rina’s kitchen table and waited for absolute quiet. “Awright now, we got the proposal. Chili, you got copies for everybody?”
Chili, on his job, reached down into his attache case and pulled out xeroxed copies, passed them around.
“O.k.,” Jake continued, “I don’t have to tell anybody here that we operatin’ in Tricky Dick’s land, so beware, be cool, be together.”
“Awww com’ on, man,” Harry growled at him. “We don’t need no fuckin’ pep talks, git down!”
Jake rolled his eyes malevolently at Harry, cancelled out the urge to say something nasty.
“Uhh huh, o.k. then, here we go. I want it to be understood from the git-go that this is my plan but … but, if anyone has anything they feel they can add to the basic plan as we go ’long, feel free. What we want is as perfect a thing as we can git together.”
He looked deeply into each pair of eyes around the table. “Now then, here is the thang, in steps. Step number one, everybody study that proposal like you’ve never studied anything in your whole life.”
Taco interrupted, staring at her copy of the proposal. “Why you have to have so goddamned many bigass words in this motherfucker?”
“’Cause that’s what the white boy digs,” Chili answered smoothly, remembering Cynthia’s advice. “Bureaucrats just love to read stuff they find impossible to make any sense of.”
“Chili’s right,” Harry seconded the notion.
“Study the proposal,” Jake moved on as though the interruption had never occurred, “know and understand each paragraph of it, especially those money sections. Make damn certain you know and understand all of the reasons why this Mental Energy Encounter Therapy Group, M.E.E.T.G., is necessary. We gon’ have classes on it as we go along. The important thing is preparation.”
Chili clicked his eyes around at the group, snapping up their rapt expressions. Yeahhh, this shit just might work … first time I’ve ever seen these niggers really into something this deep.
“As well we all know, the proposal was the big, big thang Chili got that for us, the second thing was a location to run the game from. I got that.” Jake the Fake held up a real estate lease.
“I got a piece of legal paper that says we’ve been holdin’ Mental Energy Encounter Therapy sessions in this here storefront for the last two years.”
“You really cookin’, Jake!” Leo exclaimed.
“This paper is strictly legit too. Now then, what we gonna have to do is pull our shit out from under wraps. Our thang is that we been doin’ the very best we could on our very own, not askin’ anybody for a single bit of help of any kind, doin’ maximum good for the community, but now, with times the way they are, we’ve reached the please-throw-us-a-bone stage.”
“With plenny meat on it,” Leo added.
“Right on! brother It’ll take a lil’ work to set things up, but we can do it if we all pull together with no negative vibes.”
“Where we gon’ get the right kind o’ whiteys for this thing?” Rina asked.
“What do you mean, the right kind?”
“Well,” she answered petulantly, “you know, the kind that don’t need a lot o’ whippin’ ’n shit. I ain’t about to get off into the business of solvin’ no honkie’s problems, dig it? I mean, like, this is supposed to be an interracial setup, right?”
“I hear ya, baby I hear ya,” Jake con-smiled at her brightly. “Nawww, dig, we ain’t about to become a legit group, under no circumstances. What we’ll have, on the white meat side, is a few ol’ jive liberal nuns, some o’ those do-good protestant ministers, a few unitarian Jews, a few long-hairs, if we can keep ’em from being loaded all the time, three or four ‘sensitive’ niggers with no prison records and ourselves. Each of us will be like a a counselor.”
“I just thought I’d lay it out beforehand. I got too much on my own head to be havin’ some ol’ white broad lay her problems on me too.”
“Hey, don’t worry “bout it, Rina baby. We can fake it clean through. Any other questions before we go through our first drill uhh rehearsal?”
“Yeah, I got a few,” Harry eased in.
“Spill it out, man, ’cause once we go off into this, any doubts, any bad vibes at all will fuck our whole thang up.”
“O.k.,” Harry began slowly, ticking off points on his fingers. “We got a proposal here that would make me dig down into my pocket for a few coins, if I had any.” He paused to lean over to slap Chili’s outstretched palm appreciatively. “You got the front we need and we make up the people to pull the sting off. Now then, what I wanna know is this, how can you be so damned certain that we can put this thing into the works and not have it come up a lemon?”
Jake the Fake smiled slightly, his forty years of minor cons having prepared him for such skepticism. He stood and leaned his knuckles on the table. “Brother Mathews, I’m sho’ ’nuff glad you asked that there question,” he continued, using a Kingfish approach before going on to the serious. “I was gonna save a lil’ bit, just in case we had a dropout or two, but seein’ as how everybody is deeply involved.”
His eyes spun around the group, probing for dropouts, “Since everyone is committed and involved with the project, I see no reason to hold back the most vital part of what guarantees the success of this plan.”
He paused to take a couple hits on one of the three joints circling the table, enjoying the play of it all.
“Through one of my contacts, a well-placed black executive in the Minority Groups Development Office, I found out that they have $150,000 in excess monies. This is dough that was placed in a fund to aid in the development of an interracial group therapy program, somethin’ that was supposed to help the races see eye to eye.
“O.k., now here’s the kicker. The money is, was goin’ to revert back to the government if such a program was not established.”
He paused, checking out the gleaming eyes around him. “Of course, the Development Office couldn’t openly broadcast the fact, so this is how it got to me. My well-placed black executive friend, along with a buddy of his, knew they couldn’t rip off the whole one-five-oh grand. So, they put a wire out for yours truly.
“The deal we make is this; they get the small end, fifty grand, and we get the big end.”
“You still ain’t got into why this won’t come up a lemon,” Harry cut back in, more decisively.
“It won’t come up a lemon, brother Harry, because my well-placed black executive friend and his friend are the one-two guys of the organization, and all they needed was an airtight proposal to approve of, to justify their approval to the Great White Father, and we got a helluva one!”
He held up the Cynthia-Chili document to clench his point. The house was suddenly bubbling over with good spirits.
Leo pulled
out a pencil and began to calculate the split six ways. “Jake, why did you come up with that bullshit about mau-mauing the poverty offices ’n shit, awhile back, when we first started into this?”
“That was my side tracker, baby sweets. My other thang was still in the negotiations stage, and I didn’t want to breed any false hopes in the wrong directions.”
“Heyyy man,” Leo called out to Jake, his lips pursed, “a hundred grand between six people ain’t.…”
“Ein is a helluva lot better than nein,” Jake answered foxy quick. “A hundred grand between us may not be a fortune, but it sho’ as hell beats workin’.”
“How long will it take?”
“Sixty days,” Jake answered promptly. “Within sixty days, we got to be lookin’ like a bunch of well-established, minor league psychologists, addicted to sittin’ in a circle and talkin’ all the latest jargon just like the rest o’ them jiveass groupsters.
“My friend ran the whole scam down to me, exactly who has to write the check out ’n everything but just to be on the safe side, we got to have stationery ’n cards printed, a telephone, you know, stuff like that.”
The group fell silent for a minute, thinking of the work to be done. Rina slowly raised her fist in the air and shouted, “All power to the Tricky Six!”
The other five people, completely in tune, responded boisterously, “All power to the Tricky Six!”
Chili mumbled under his breath … and my rich educated white bitch.
Kwendi and Lubertha sat looking at each other tenderly, across the glass-paneled partition. Exchanging looks and a thousand profoundly felt feelings was the way each of their visits started and ended.
“You really lookin’ good, baby,” Kwendi started the flow, unable to bear the weight of what the deep silence between them was saying.
“You lookin’ pretty good yourself,” Lubertha replied softly, wishing that her spirit or some part of her being could fly across the artifical barrier between them.
The silence fell between them again, interrupted by announcements over the visiting room loudspeakers, frenetic conversations to the left and right of them, anxious people trying to say everything possible in an hour the guards roving back and forth behind the seats of the visitors and prisoners.