by John Okas
Trouble in paradise. Say goodbye to our base at Coral Bay on the Aloha Islands. Between that devil Reichmann’s troops storming around the Old World and now the Kimrakazis carrying on in the Deep Blue Sea, the Freeway has nowhere to go but to war.
“Now we have nothing to lose but loss itself,” says the voice over the radio.
‘Over My Dead Body’
The following Friday night when the Nussbaum irregulars show up to discuss what they are going to do now that Lord Bharavi is off the air, Sarah, dressed in a beaded black satin smoking jacket and trousettes, comes down to meet them, but Laudette, brandishing a rolling pin, gets one step ahead of her to answer the door.
“There’s no witch meeting tonight or any other night, ever again,” the big woman says firmly.
“Sister Laudette,” says Keinar, well-apprised of the situation through her own inner channels, “as you well know, all along I was against Sister Bharani-Sarah calling the Leader of the Pack directly without the Irregulars present. But this was a test of Bharani-Sarah’s own mediumistic gift. Now, as her Sisters, we must close ranks and get behind her all the way.”
“I would say ‘over my dead body’ if I didn’t know what you witches are capable of. But anybody who dares come in this house is going to find herself with a broken head, and I mean it!” Laudette waves the rolling pin menacingly in the air.
What is Sarah to do? Have Miss Lord arrested?
Never. The meeting is cancelled. It is never going to be the same again anyway. The sisters know it is now time for each to listen to her heart alone.
Sarah turns to go back to her bedroom, but Laudette blocks the stairs. Ever since last Sunday, Laudette has been so disturbed that she has a hard time even facing Sarah. She addresses Sarah in the third person, with her eyes scanning the big room from floor to walls to ceiling as if she were talking to someone who might come in any way, shape, or form.
“Even though once upon a time someone was worth more to Sir Harry dead than alive, he was watching out for her and worrying about her. And now I think that poor sweet man is gone because someone was messing with something she oughtn’t. Oh, I’m burned up sick about it, while she’s la-di-da, paying extra attention to the way she’s dressed. What gets into some people?
“And it’s too bad someone got the wrong impression of Emanual X from her father. He’s the Good Shepherd, the Bread of Life, the Salt of the Earth, the Vine of Righteousness. What more could someone want? And I’m not saying that everybody should eat it exactly as I do, someone can worship what Y or Z gods she wants so long as they have good morals to their stories, and not be putting her up to pulling crazy stunts, talking in little voices, telling her to kill people for a joke as if this life were some kind of fruity Boombotzi Brothers movie …”
In the past five days Sarah has done a lifetime of growing up. Never has the fact of impermanence been more clear to her. She tries to explain to Laudette that her dressing in her finest feathers, while perhaps perverse in its origins, is now in loving memory of her husband, a fond tribute to him, her way of saying goodbye and come back soon. “When I pray for him I wish him all the best, all the Light there is in heaven. At the same time I think of how Harry enjoyed himself on this earth and I’m calling him to come back again, and have all he wants.”
“Well, isn’t that good of someone! Just dandy! Well I suppose it’s an improvement over the last time this happened when someone tried to the keep the dear departed away from the Light, when someone tried to keep the man she loved tied to her stinky little hell hole that she thinks the whole universe revolves around!”
Certainly, Sarah made mistakes mourning for Corn Dog she never will with Harry. She tries again to defend herself, saying that what happened was fate, but the big woman bulldozes her down, deploring her lack of remorse. Sarah is patient, she accepts Laudette’s condemnation. She brushes it off as she would lint from her bedjacket. A thought has become clear in her mind: soon she too will be leaving everything she knows behind.
The Slave Drivers’ God
With her Daddy-o dead, Uncle Sam at war, her Mummy locked up in the bedroom doing her mumbo-jumbo, and her baby-sitter muttering to herself, Gloria sticks to her music guns and takes refuge in them. She practices diligently and improves, not fast enough to be any sort of prodigy, yet Mrs Melanzano seems pleased. Were only her Daddy-o alive to hear it! Yet Gloria finds that the sound of the piano sweetens the grief she feels from losing her stepfather.
On Friday, the nineteenth night after Harry’s stroke, the day after Xmas, the tension is so thick in the air between Laudette and Sarah nothing can cut it. The sitter asks Gloria if she’d like to take a trip uptown for some jazz. Would she ever!
Once more Apollo Cotton and his Orchestra are on stage at the Cootie Club, and tonight Laudette is in no hurry to get Gloria home. After the first set they go backstage. Apollo breaks open a bottle of gin and wishes Merry Xmas to all and to all a good night. Everyone toasts one another and says a prayer for world peace. Gloria makes herself comfortable on a case of gin and sips a soda. She is delighted when her Uncle Early plunks down on the carton next to her. Earl, usually gleeful, in the holiday spirit tonight, is a little more so. The cat’s high on reefer, sailing, but he still can keep a lid on his head for proper respects.
“I’m truly sorry to hear about your stepfather, Mademoiselle.”
“Oh, Uncle, I’m very sad about it,” Gloria says plaintively, with a sigh. “But, well, what’s done is done. And Mrs Melanzano says that it’s not the length of someone’s life that matters as much as what he or she accomplishes. She’s always pointing to Kreuszer, who died in his mid-thirties, you know, and wrote over six hundred full-length musical works. Mrs Melanzano worships him as if he were Emanual X himself …”
“Who’s this Melanzano?”
“She’s my music teacher. After I heard you all on my birthday, I was so lifted up I decided to take lessons myself. Just to see if I could do it.” Tan, multiracial Gloria, concerned about where her allegiance should lie, hesitates for a moment, then says, “I can’t for the life of me understand why Melanzano says that white people’s music is better than black’s.”
“Ha ha ho ho. Oh my good gosh, Mademoiselle, yes, I’m hip. Hee hee. No need to explain any further. Your Melanzano is race prejudiced, nothing less.”
“She says discipline is what’s most important, that freedom without discipline is slavery.”
“Uh, oh. I’ll give her that. You need discipline to play music of any kind. Music lessons are a short cut. I wish I had taken more myself. Like my brother Bonesy I learned to play in church. Now, ho ho ho, no doubt Kreuszer and his buddies were geniuses and well worth your while studying—our jazz wouldn’t have half the harmony without them—but, I always get to thinking, at the same time white folks made this music the kings and queens who commissioned it for were sending out ships doing what they call ‘colonizing’, and you can bet your boots they assumed they knew it all. Like, if they saw a black man beating a drum for hours on end, and they were real connoisseurs, they’d say, ‘Jolly good! Let’s sit here and dig this chap, he’s got these polyrhythms down to a science.’ But no, instead they said, ‘I guess the poor savage must not have much to do; let’s put his idle hands to use picking our cotton, cutting our cane, shining our shoes.’ Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s about the sorry size of it, Mademoiselle.”
“All right, Uncle Early, now excuse me for saying so, but just because black people suffered that doesn’t make them all pure and perfect either. At least there’s something that makes me think they may not be very smart.”
“And what’s that?”
“It’s one thing to be led off into slavery but another for slaves to follow the slave drivers’ god. Why on earth, on Sundays, when work is done, do so many Jujuban-Freewayfarers get on the Xist bandwagon, and how can they celebrate Xmas the same as whites, even though, from what I can see on every greeting card and store display, Father Xmas, the jolly old elf, is white as the
Great White Father in Heaven.”
“Ooh la la, Mademoiselle, you’re a smart one, aren’t you! Nobody’s going to slant you in the wrong direction. Tee, hee, ha ha, ho, ho! I’ve wondered about why slaves would worship their master’s god myself. The best answer I can think of is that they just get honestly mixed-up, being treated like property and all. You see, back home, they worshipped the earth, but a year of picking cotton for The Man, you lose track of your mind. After a generation, you lose track of your roots.”
“Since my stepfather’s death, Laudette has been trying to put the fear of God in me. She says someday as his child I’ll have to stand naked and alone, judged in his all-knowing eyes for whether I’ve been naughty or nice. Imagine! What kind of Supreme Being is that? If that’s heaven, I’m sure it’s not where I want to go.”
“Yes, dust my broom, it sounds like The Man to me. Just the kind of lick some old cracker might cotton to. I’ll meet you down there, Mademoiselle. And if Emanual is really worth his salt, he’ll be in that number too!”
“Early McCoy!” Ever-vigilant of what her baby might be picking up by hanging around musicians, Laudette’s voice snaps like thunder from behind a stack of beer cases.
“Oops!”
“Don’t you think, in front of Baby, you ought to be having more respect when you speak the name of God? Emanual said it would be better if you were tossed into the sea with a milestone tied to your neck than if you sandalized little ones. Color doesn’t matter to God, only stupid people think about it. Black sheep, brown sheep, white sheep, the Good Shepherd tends us all. Emanual preached salvation for all people. If some don’t live up to it, don’t want to be saved, that’s their problem. In death all men are created equal.”
“Why, Laudette, since when are you a preacher woman? But hey, I can dig it. It’s beautiful, ha ha,” says Earl. “Your babysitter is probably dead right, Mademoiselle, listen to her. She’s the smartest white women I ever met. In fact when I think of her, I never even think of her as white.”
The Glory Bee knows she knows better about God than Laudette. (“Well, Lawdy,” she says,) “tell me what color you think the Father in Heaven is?”
“It says in the Good Book that God made the first man and woman, that handsome couple in the garden of paradise, in his image and likeness. Now I figure if people are in paradise, that’s like a vacation, and if people have a good vacation they must be tan, tan, like you, Baby, so Our Father must be tan too.”
“And his Only Begotten Son?”
“Tan, I guess, probably.”
Earl wants to point out to Gloria that most non-whites don’t go on vacations to get tan—in fact, by and large, they don’t get to go on vacations at all—but he reasons it wise not to get in the way of her sitter’s explanations, or for that matter, her music teacher’s. It’s plain to him that Gloria can tell the difference between shit and shoe polish.
The Player and the Listener
With her uncle’s blessing, Gloria continues her lessons. For the remainder of the winter she follows the dreary rhythms her teacher points out with her slender wooden baton, and her life becomes an undivided circle of listening and practicing. She finally gets a grip with her left hand that can play chords as well as notes, and she manages to pull all the stops out of her stop-and-go triplets. The progress she makes warrants her increasing her lessons to four times a week. She spends all the time she’s not at school in the back parlor, playing. Laudette grants she’s becoming a passable pianist, but thinks there’s more to life than music. It makes the fretful sitter sick at heart that her Gloria is a social retard, a self-made outcast. What is a person without friends?
With Sugar already gone mentally as she has, hearing voices that give her license to kill, somebody’s got to try to stop Baby from following the same morbid bent for being alone.
“Baby, now that you’re going on thirteen,” she nags, “you’d think you’d have a girlfriend or two, and, with your gift of good looks, a whole herd of boyfriends. It isn’t normal for someone to want to spend so much time alone. You don’t even want to talk to me anymore! It’s not healthy not to need other people.”
Gloria takes her sitter’s harangues in stride. She breaks into The Down-Home Ramble. Partial to the tune, the sitter hums along.
For all the time she puts in on the piano, the Bee takes special, extra-curricular music tests. She sits under Saint Bernard’s proverb and plays the Kreuszer theme like a moderately gifted amateur, well-roundedly, and certainly with quite a bit more heart than when it comes from the teacher’s own hands. Melanzano overall is quite pleased.
“Bravo, Miss Black, not half-bad. Oh, yes, I think your interest could actually amount to something. Time off undoes progress. I expect to see you here next week even though it is spring break, and, of course, we will continue all summer.”
Praise from an obstinate teacher might motivate the average child, but Glory is not average. She has heard it said, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” She knows Irene Melanzano is right, talent is not enough, but she knows she is wrong too, discipline and talent are not enough either. To Gloria, real music is not the same as playing the instrument well or getting the part down perfectly. She knows there is something else to it. Before it can really go around, music needs to be needed. Her listening experience tells her that great music is made in a void, and both the player and the listener need to hear that void, and dig it, a goldmine together. She is certain she has no aspiration to be “perfect” in the different ways her mother, Emanual X, or the Kirschelmeister exemplify. Imitation is the sincerest form of mourning. She is more than content to take after her stepfather, the dabbler, the dilettante, the lover at large, the amateur. To play is the thing. She is satisfied to make “not half-bad”, and leave it at that, tinkering at her leisure. By not being too polished herself, she leaves herself open to the possibility of taking pleasure in the more exacting efforts of someone else. Longing is the way to go, she figures, being just over halfway to paradise.
The muse never looks up when she tells her teacher. “I’m sorry, Mrs Melanzano, I’m not going to be coming for lessons any more. Yes, I think I’d like to stop them for a while.”
“Staying the same is the same as going backwards,” Melanzano warns. “If you don’t practice all your skills more and more, you’ll cease to improve, and, my dear, for a true musician not to improve is to get worse.”
“Yes, Ma’am, thank you. I’m prepared for that.”
Gloria is not afraid she’ll be missing something. On the inside the cool kitten knows what a real connoisseur is.
Busting Out
The end of Gloria’s childhood coincides with the Saint Bernard School’s spring break. On the Friday that marks the nineteen hundred and forty-second anniversary of Emanual’s passion, Gloria burgeons into adolescence. She wakes up to find she has stained her bedcovers with blood flowers. After that the seed of the Rabbit Clan is off to a running start. Not especially an early bloomer, but once she shows blood her lucky stars look down on her and see to it that the change happens swiftly and that she experiences it with minimum awkwardness.
She is reincarnated. The messages of fertility appear: an extra-oily luster to her tan and new thickness in the dappled jet and hazel waves of her hair. Although, after her father, she retains hairless, baby-smooth skin on her arms and legs, she grows a second head between her legs. Variegation applies to all her body hair. Like an iris, the little flower has streaks in her beard, silver and gold waves that glow in the dark of her purple-black cat nap. Under her arms and down in her vee there breeds a musty, fruity body odor, like rainy season in the tropics. Most noticeable is the change in her face. Those qualities of balance of feature and evenness of line are enhanced, raised to higher power. She wakes up one morning and her face has become timeless, with all the grace and sweetness of a child. But at the same time, with the right clothes, she could pass for twenty-seven.
By the time that June is busting out, the bombshell ha
s shot up tall, full, and graceful as a rosebud on long legs. She’s head and shoulders above stalwart Miss Lord, a brow over her statuesque mother and just a hair from six-foot Harry, were he standing instead of six feet under, may his soul rest in peace.
“Look at you!” says everyone who sees her. “Aren’t you an eyeful!”
In the past, at school no matter what she did to appear to fit in, she was the oddball out. Now the developments which make her the first full-grown woman in her class are all too clear to her classmates. Seemingly overnight, she has outgrown the uniform that she purchased the previous September and with two weeks of the term left there is no time to order a new one. Her breasts fill out her jersey, her racy legs show. Most of all, the seasoning in her face makes her seem one to be looked up to and respected.
Now she becomes the school cool one. She takes up smoking and drinking black coffee in the Kronos Coffee Shop across the street from Saint Bernard’s, before and after class. Last to follow the gang at school, come final exam time for the seventh grade, the other girls are all at their wooden desks perspiring in their undershirts writing their essays while Gloria puts her answers down with offhanded calmness. Undergoing a revolution themselves, a rebirth in their bodies, her classmates appreciate her for the way she handles the passage. Her adult style and sophisticated attitude make them feel older to know her. On the morning of the history final, first Thalia Windrow, then Regina Robbins and Charlotte Becker, and finally Mary Ella Grenville, all come to sit in Glory’s booth at the Kronos and bask in her coolness.
Never one to look to other worlds for salvation, the feel of physical height and fullness gives Glory a sense of power in this one and a hell of a superiority complex. She’s been uptown and likes to show it. On the last day of the year, when the girls clean out their lockers and say goodbye to one another, Gloria comes in wearing a red silk tunic over black tights and eye makeup. “Why, with my kick, and the way I know how to use it, I have a good mind to chuck it all this summer, go uptown to the Cootie Club and join the Lush Life Revue as a show girl,” she brags, and they believe she’s just the one to do it.