The Man Who Cried I Am

by John A. Williams

  “You ever had any trouble like that?” Shea asked.

  Kill him, Max thought, kill ’im. Tell him never, not once in your life. Max studied his man, measured him. Should he decline the role of God or accept it? Shea worked hard to be honest and to do that you had to ask shallow questions, not questions at all, but make statements about yourself. If he suspected that Max and Regina had been lovers and Max had not had the problem getting it up, then Shea was going to hate him not only for hearing the confession but for having a harder cock. Harder and up longer. “Doesn’t everybody?” Max said, tossing down his drink.

  “Really?”

  “Come on. You know it.”

  Shea brightened a bit. “I thought that might be the case … ah, Max, I’m screwed up and you know it and I know it.”

  Max shrugged. He felt bone weary now. Something very old was starting all over again. After the operation he was staying out of complications, and he wasn’t going to make any. Jesus, two operations on a man’s ass. “Look, man,” he said to Shea, “You’re going to be all right. Talk to a headshrinker, maybe. But I’ll lay ten to one that you’re going to wind up with one of the stiffest pricks in the city, maybe the whole Eastern seaboard. You won’t be able to get enough pussy; your reputation will spread from here south to Washington and from here north to Boston. You are going to wear chicks out. You are going to tear trim up. When you walk down Madison Avenue, the guys in the Look Building are going to say, “There’s goes a cocksman’s cocksman!”

  The series on Jackie Robinson completed, Zutkin’s articles finished, Max checked into the hospital so he could be out in time for Christmas, give in to the season, the celebration of the impossible occasion, the rich man’s chance to dissipate the image of Scrooge; celebrate the lie and in consequence celebrate the massacre of the babes (while one escaped, that one—with his mother, Miriamne, made Mary by the goyim, secret bride to Antipater—victim of his father’s wrath for striving for his father’s throne through Herodian power and the Hebrew law of succession through Mother; and Joseph and an ass. Lies again.) Celebrate the named and unnamed wars, the heroes and cowards in them, the cruelties of them, drink to the civilizations brought crashing together in hate and being civilized no more, toast the miseries of the naked, starving, illiterate poor; pay homage to the squadrons of cherubic young faces wrapped in swaddling collars, loosing soprano Christmas chords upon the world; celebrate the millions upon millions of acres of trees ripped screaming from the skin of the earth to molder in corners under costumes of glass and metal junk; and, sadly, celebrate Handel and Bach, the sopranos, tenors and basso profundos who sing the lie as though they believed it, and in fact, make it believable; celebrate the unsmiling jingle of hard coins and the surreptitious rustle of dollar notes; celebrate the choruses of the Reginas shrieking in depthless anguish; drink to the unloved who haunt the high places and galloping winds with only water or asphalt below, or drink to the pill-takers who leave electric lights and radios and television sets on to ease their going. Yes, all of that, but he wanted to be home for Christmas.

  In the hospital, smelling of wax and starched sheets and rubbing alcohol, they took his temperature, pulse and blood pressure. Up from the lab a cutie with pipette and tube for the complete blood count. The intern asked him questions in his most bored bedside manner. They did not feed him. The next day they gave him pills and shaved his buttocks. And after, through the swinging door, they rolled a stretcher. For him. Then he was on an elevator filled with sweet-smelling nurses, young, and even the starched rustle of their uniforms made them somehow more alluring. The whiteness, the purity of white did it. It made him want to scatter some dirty old semen all over it, the whiteness, make it more human. OR. Lights overhead, faces darting in over him. I am not going to die from shock or some jerk’s stupidity, he told himself. Gently they held his arm, pushed the needle into the big vein and slipped in the sodium pentothal. Max went over the precipice.

  He was depressed. People whittling gleefully away at your flesh. Did they flush it away to join the shit and cloudy condoms floating in the rivers? Did fish nibble at it, a delicacy? Look, man, here’s a piece of Max Reddick! Have a taste! Just what did they do with the flesh? It was a little bit of dying, already, faster. Even with their clean sheets, drugs, voluptuous nurses, flowers, diets, stainless steel tools, you were dying. But you knew that—piece of flesh, massed calcium, hunk of gristle, haphazard bit of matter, product of warm, ancient seas, still steaming lands wracked by unimaginable diastrophisms; the dark, dark memories of that time (and the puzzle—reptile and fowl related—love them birds, have snake fever????) contained where, in the blood, the very atoms of the bone? Why remember more than most the vast laboring distance so filled with internecine horror and commonplace death, the gift of that raving bitch, evolution, nature, now made gentle with the title, Mother, and keep crying I Am?

  You am whut, Max Reddick, you piece of crap? Turd, Lost a small hunk of asshole. Big deal. You am whut?

  The end of the line, as far as it’s come.

  Whut fuckin’ line?

  Man.

  Man? You tougher than rats, bedbugs, roaches; angleworms, bluebottles, houseflies?

  Yes. I kill them all.

  Tee, hee, yeah, but you don’t breed as fast, and whut you breed, man, sometimes, I just don’t know.

  That is not the same and you know it; an insect or a rodent can never be a king. I am. I am a man. I am a king.

  A whut?!

  A king.

  You am a fool. Look around you. You ain’t related to these other fools?

  Yes, and we are kings.

  O, Max, whut a king look like with maggots crawling out his eye sockets?

  I don’t mean then. I mean now. Nobody counts then. It’s all over.

  It’s all over now. It was over when you were born. Youse a fool. Got chick nor child. Whut you king of or over or under?

  I told you. The line as far as it’s come.

  Youse ain’t no king. Know whut youse is? Wanna know? Youse a stone blackass nigger. Hee, hee, hee. Say sumpin’. I’m right, ain’t I? Tongue fell off, nigger?

  Your momma’s a nigger.

  Oops! The dozens, is it? I made you salty, eh? Now you slip me in the dozens, just like that. I told you, you was a nigger.

  Your mother’s a nigger.

  Hee, hee, well, your mother don’t wear no drawers.

  How could she, when she was giving birth to you—my son.

  Ha! So you know your mother don’t wear no drawers. How’s that? Youse a motherfuckin’ motherfucker, Oedipus Rex. Thass how come you knows so much.

  I know so much because I’m your daddy.

  Lissen to old king crap.

  I am. I am a king.

  Youse an ass. This ain’t nuthin’; this ain’t shit and needer is you.

  I Am, I told you, damn it, I Am.

  Fresh flowers surrounded him and their scent filled the room. Granville Bryant, sitting in a chair, smiled at him. Beside him was another boy, a very pretty one, with violet eyes and flaxen hair and the tan of a youth always in the sun.

  Granville said, “Well now, Max, how are you feeling?”

  Max nodded his head slowly.

  “Now you can’t get away, can you? You can’t avoid lunches or slip away from parties, can you, Max?”

  “Cigarette,” Max said.

  Bryant made a slight, almost unseen gesture and the youth glided forward, a glittering, golden cigarette case opening in his hand. In the other there appeared, magically, a lighter. After Max had taken a pull on the cigarette, Bryant said, “They tell me that’s just like having a baby.” He laughed softly and smiled at his boy. “Never had one of those. One of my friends did though. He was very careful after that. Sailors and writers—oh, they can be so sadistic!” Bryant crossed a leg—elegantly—and leaned back as if preparing to tell Max something important. Or a story.

  Once upon a time, and it seemed to Max that just recently he had been having silly dialog
ues with someone, an object was seen hurtling down from an Eastern sky. When the nearest townspeople arrived, they found the object, curiously, large enough to have contained people, but no one was in it. First, it was thought that Buddha had cast sinners from the heavens and the sinners had evaporated in transit. Many, many years later, centuries, it was thought that the object was a part of the original Black Stone hidden away by the evil Qarmata in the Far East. Then the object was forgotten altogether; it was covered by swells of the earth, the dirt and rock. The truth, however, was that the object was a craft from another planet and the creatures in it, who looked very much like humans, their planet having the same makeup as ours, were stranded here. Looking very much like humans, they mixed with the populace without attracting attention to themselves. Being of superior natures, they soon mastered the skills of the earthmen, then went on to become their betters. These were men who did not know women. By our standards the first group were extraordinarily handsome. On their planet females were used only to keep the population constant. These men knew each other. But, in order to appear as genuine earthmen, they came to know earthwomen, and their handsomeness was altered in their offspring, some of which were like them and some just like other earthmen. They traveled across the earth and across the five seas, the succeeding generations of these men from space, and in due course they became stevedores and bankers, philosophers and hoodlums, musicians and clerks, writers and actors, unskilled laborers and atomic scientists; they became soldiers and sailors, warriors and generals. They were of all conditions, high, low and in between, and they were all colors; no discrimination existed between them. They could tell their own from an arch of the brow, a vocal inflection, a bend of the wrist, the pelvic walk. Slowly, over the centuries, they came to control many of man’s efforts on earth, but they did it secretly. They were laughed at, hated, legislated against, harrassed, made vulnerable, all of which made them band together more quickly for protection. They were always aided by the ability of the earth people to rationalize them as persons with an inherently ill nature; earth men traced that nature through legend, literature, art, business and rumor. During this time, the most brilliant made their way into the offices of ministers, kings and presidents with the purpose of serving whatever nation they found themselves in loyally and to the full. Some were found out and dismissed. Others continued on, trying to improve the earth. Slowly, ever so slowly, with the power well within their grasp, they will improve the earth. Women will be defeminized by them, made nude, and the mystery of their bodies will exist no more. Or, if they are clothed, their breasts will be flattened, their hips squared, their mouths and hair painted in outlandish colors. They will, these men from out there and their descendants, design men’s clothes, make them more feminine. There will be no other styles available. They will continue to work with the languages. In polite company, few people will say aloud, “gay,” “queer,” “faggot,” “fruit,” “queen”—they will say homosexual or nothing at all and they will make works by homosexuals more and more acceptable. They will seek in the legislatures of the world surcease from police and other social harrassment. However, with all these things against them, they have taken on the burdens of the races of which they are now a part. There are small problems: some who do not belong try to in the most ostentatious fashion. And some who do are always fighting it. Max, I know that secretly I am called the Great White Father because I help young Negro writers get started. I did not help you, Max, so you have no cause to be grateful to me on that score. I don’t even want your gratitude for the job; you deserved it. I have told you our story. Be tolerant. We too are outcasts. We have a natural empathy for your people. How well we understand your impatience!

  You don’t understand nuthin’! Max was thinking. He saw that the chair beside his bed was empty. Where the hell is he? Where’s that kid? That cigarette! Max floundered in bed looking for it, until he thought to look in the ashtray. There was one cigarette butt in it. Max rang for the nurse.

  “Yes, Mr. Reddick?” Her voice came out through a loudspeaker.

  “What time did Mr. Bryant leave?”

  “Mr. Bryant? There was no Mr. Bryant here to—”

  “An old man and a young fellow.”

  “There was a Mr. Wilkinson here.”

  There was a Mr. Wilkinson here.

  There was a Mr. Wilkinson here.

  The voice was no longer female, nor was it really male either. A voice without body. The words spiraled down Max’s consciousness and he remembered that as a child he had had to make spirals between the two blue ruled lines on his paper during the penmanship lessons; the white circles where he started and ended the exercise looked like the entrance and exit of a tunnel. Max’s eyes shot open in fear and his heart raced like a slipped clutch of a car. He remembered the words, the last line of the last of a series of crazy dreams, dreams which slipped with envious ease back and forth in time: There was a Mr. Wilkinson here.

  Max stared at the beams in the ceiling of Michelle’s house in Leiden. Why ever in the hell was his heart racing because of a dream about Roger? Did it know something? Was it recalling the pieces? Was it blackjack now? Gin? Where else had he been? At the table in Paris where Max, Harry and a few others had had their morning coffees, listening mostly to Harry talk against the roar of traffic rushing down Boulevard Raspail. Roger again, saying that he had gone to one of those Catholic colleges that specializes in prelaw courses and which was always being visited by people from the FBI and the CIA to recruit personnel from among the student body. (“Man, they talked to me, once.”) There had been laughter, stomach-bursting laughter. Talk to a clown like Roger? Desperate, those CIA cats; had to be desperate. Max saw images of Roger: Paris, laughing over coffee, talking his French jam up, beret hung down over one eye. Roger in Rome: standing on the Via Veneto talking Italian to the Italian hippies with their shades, thick heels and eight inches of shirt collar open at the neck. Roger: sauntering down Leidsestraat shouting hip phrases in Dutch to the Dutch hippies cooling past in shades with sticks of pot in their mouths. Roger everywhere. Smiling, laughing loudly, mimicking. Roger: enough to crack your ribs with laughter. Clown. But why, Max wondered, am I thinking of him now? Guilt, maybe. Bad scene last night with that check. Very bad. The only other time he had been sharp with Roger was when he was stalking Regina; Regina now married, kids, their friendship over because she knew as Max knew that there were not too many white American husbands who would not lose sleep if their wives took from the attic a sambo toy from the past. It was, as far as Max knew, a good marriage.

  After Shea, Regina had floundered a little through the spring, giving off strong scents of her weakness, which was to be loved, wanted, forgiven for surviving, and Roger, like a dog sniffing the crotch of a woman during her menses, was there. There had been something wrong with it—what, exactly, Max hadn’t known—but he made it clear to Roger that he was to stay away from her. Roger had smiled, of course, wisely, Like, okay, man, the smile seemed to have said, I dig she’s yours no matter how much you say she’s not. If she’s yours, well, boss. You the best, baby.

  After that summer, in a way, maybe she had been his, but not in the way Roger meant. In a different way, a bigger way Roger could never understand. Max felt himself relaxing when he thought of Regina, and going back to that summer …

  “… and get the hell out of Korea,” Arthur Godfrey had said.

  His radio audience had applauded.

  Had it been hotter than usual that summer, Max wondered, or had it just been Korea? He had had the postoperative itch bad and the heat had sent him running back to the doctor for a soothing massage and a careful look-see. He had climbed on the table, lowered his chest and raised his rear, waiting for the rubber-coated finger. The doctor had been good; his single failing was that he liked to listen to Arthur Godfrey. But Max had depended on the doctor’s finger, the expert massage it gave, the immediate relief from inner torment. “Steady,” the doctor always said. “Relax. Make like you’re making
a stool.”

  Max went to an air-conditioned movie when he left the doctor’s office. The movie would cool him off, make the afternoon’s work at the paper a little more bearable. The movie was about Paris, and some wrinkled little old guy with the hots for a skinny little librarian. In a way the movie was about incest too. These old guys, Max thought, loving it up, taking on generation after generation of broads. Gable, Grant, Cooper and the rest. What the hell was going on? There was a new crop coming up: “The Toothies,” the film critic on the Century called them, and many were Jewish guys who had changed their names. More freedom to be any kind of racial member now, yes, but, Jeez, Mac, don’t bring me the Abie Finklestein bit, okay, baby? Soon “The Toothies” would be the old guys, and they’d take on the chippies for another three generations. No wonder everyone was so screwed up.

  But Paris was some place. It made Max think of Harry. New York hadn’t been the same since he had left. Max had learned that Harry had been to Africa to see Jaja Enzkwu, then to China, then back to Africa. He was resting in Paris now, awaiting the publication of his collection of articles on Franco Spain, two of which Max had read. It seemed that Harry was spreading out, taking on the world instead of just white America. Oppression was oppression, Max and Harry had once agreed, and there was a relationship between the oppressed Negroes of America, the oppressed Spaniards, the oppressed brown peoples of Asia and the oppressed black peoples of Africa. But Harry’s books, which did not deal specifically in fiction or nonfiction form with Negroes, were not well received in the United States. Yet, old Harry had been around the world and was now telling of the Spanish mystique, the extent of police power, the lack of religious freedom, the toppling of the Spanish people from the peak of pride down into doltish stupidity. The Republic had been their last chance and they had blown it. Now there was little else except to trap as much foreign currency as one could and to become, whenever possible, as corrupt as the next caballero.