Reckless Eyeballing

by Ishmael Reed

  He could understand Clotel, getting it from both sides, neither black nor white but Anne and Coretha in one. And what about Anne? What if women were harming themselves, mutilating themselves, and risking bad health to look like you? The black ones, ninety percent of whom risked baldness by straightening their hair? The Asian ones having the slants removed from their eyes by plastic surgery, and the doctors rearranging the bones of the Jewish women’s noses with mallets. No wonder Becky was so haughty, so demanding, and so full of herself. People were undergoing torture in order to look like her. He could understand the women, Ball could, and Tre had taught him to communicate to a woman without having to devise tedious strategies for getting them into bed. Tre had taught him that there was more to a woman than a cunt. Much more.

  But on the other hand, suppose Cecil Brown was right when he said that there are probably more female Hitlers than male. That got Ball to thinking. Weren’t women the ones who were always interested in what was going on in their neighbors’ intimate existence, like the Mouth Almighties in Their Eyes Were Watching God? Weren’t they the ones who rummaged their children’s possessions, and went through their husband’s pockets? Weren’t they the gossips? Hadn’t some of the feminists said that what went on in your house was also political? Suppose they gain power. Would they send people into your house to see what you were doing in there? Go through your pockets, spy on your children? Were women more fascistic than men? Was this why men wanted to get away, like a prisoner escaping from some domestic Devil’s Island? The North, Ball decided, was one hell of a complicated mess. That’s why it fascinated him so; his mother complained that he was trying to become more northern than the Northerners, with his video cassettes, comic books, Coca-Cola, rock-and-roll records, baseball. Ball called the airlines to reconfirm his reservation that afternoon. He would pick up the reviews in the airport. He couldn’t wait to get South.

  23

  The commissioner pinned the medal on O’Reedy’s chest to the sound of enthusiastic applause. A few people got up from their seats, and soon the entire gathering of police was on its feet applauding “Loathesome” O’Reedy, who was retiring from the police force after thirty years’ service. Somebody had placed pots of yellow flowers on each side of the lectern and alongside the place where the dignitaries sat was a large American flag. Larry’s wife was standing next to him. She was in tears. She wore a large corsage and had her hair tinted blue for the occasion. She wore white gloves. She was dressed in what some irreverents dubbed Mamie Eisenhower pink. As soon as the applause subsided some rookies in the rear of the auditorium began to chant: “Give me something to write home to Mother about, Give me something to write home to Mother about,” the line O’Reedy had always shouted before giving some creep his Kingdom Come. O’Reedy put out his hand, a signal for the rookies to stop. The only noise that remained was made by the shuffling of feet and some coughing. O’Reedy approached the speaker’s stand. “I’ve been thinking about this day for thirty years now. What I would say on the occasion of my retirement. You all know how hard it is to be a cop. People don’t know how hard it is. The murder and the mayhem we see. We see human beings behaving like animals, and it’s tough to take. After a while you get to thinking that maybe that’s what we are. I’m not saying that we’re apes or nothin’ like that.” His line was interrupted by a flurry of giggles. “Well, you know what I mean. It’s just that in this business you learn that there’s no difference between man and the lowliest beast you find in the jungle. You try to do your best.” A lone voice yelled, “Give me something to write home to Mother about.” The shout was followed by more giggles, then the entire room was chanting again, “Give me something to write home to Mother about.” O’Reedy quieted the audience again. “But seriously, folks, animal or no animal, we showed these punks that they can’t take the streets from us, and though our methods were a little unorthodox”—the audience rose as one and applauded wildly for about two minutes. After the applause died down this time, the audience spent some more seconds agreeing with O’Reedy’s statement and nodding their heads in approval, “I guess I’m a lucky guy. I have a good wife.” Mrs. O’Reedy was hesitant to stand but the audience’s applause was so unstinting that the police commissioner encouraged her to stand and take a bow. O’Reedy walked over and kissed his wife, as the audience continued its applause and whistled. “Got a great kid, too, has a head on his shoulders, not like this dumb cop you see standing before you; he’s going to study Irish-Americans…ah…you know, that’s about how great we Irishmen are, which a lot of you bozos don’t appreciate. Stand up, son.” Sean rose and bowed all around. “Well, I thought—what the hell—back there a few months ago that my retirement would be uneventful, but I guess you all read the papers last night about what happened.” The audience went ape. They started laughing and some cried, and people were chanting, “Give me something to write home to Mother about.” “And I tell you what,” he said after they finished, “I would have been a goner had it not been for Lieutenant Brown. Stand up, Lieutenant.” Another huge ovation, and some of Brown’s colleagues razzed him with “Way to go, Brown.” “The women of this city can wake up this morning with the knowledge that at least one creep won’t be around to make their lives miserable and cause them to live in a state of fear. I was against Brown, the other blacks, the Hispanics, and the women coming on the force. You know how hard it is for an old guy like me to change, but you know, now that they’re here I’m wondering, hey, how did we get along without them all these years,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. The Hispanics and blacks and women cheered, and about ten percent of the white males applauded too. “Well, you guys won’t have Larry O’Reedy to kick around anymore, me and the missus are leaving for Vero Beach tomorrow, and I’m not going to do anything for the rest of my life but fish and sit on my can and watch the ball game.” O’Reedy smiled at the new round of applause that he was getting.

  He looked at the domed ceiling. He stepped back. Stopped talking. People in the audience began to whisper. The ceiling was blank but he saw an ascension mural with a lot of browns reds blues and whites. His eyes were wide open as he stood there, fascinated by what he saw. The black jogger was floating in his black and red jogging suit, his hands thrust in front of him floating toward heaven—and all of the other people were off their feet, floating also, all of them ascending behind the jogger, and there was the Amazon who had laid down her sword and removed her helmet and she was ascending, and his relatives; his Mom and Dad, they were folding their hands and they were ascending together, and everybody was looking heavenward, and there were people in chariots pulled by snorting horses, and he recognized dead aunts and uncles, his grandparents rising, and those three Spanish guys, don’t forget the three Spanish guys, they were also in robes and wore wings, and some kind of Mexican hats, and one of them was playing the saxophone. And there they were, also ascending, and some little black and Puerto Rican babies with puffy cheeks and diapers and wings were blowing little trumpets.

  He started running toward the ceiling and he was flying toward the others who were leaving him behind and he was shouting “Wait for me, wait for me.” He staggered across the stage, and as he did he saw his wife’s mouth open and the police commissioner show a frown of concern, and his hands went up as he staggered across the stage floating in slow motion, and trying to grab on to the American flagpole, but he missed it and fell off the stage. He heard the screams.

  He came to momentarily. Sean, his son, was lifting his head. Somebody was giving him a glass of water. The police commissioner was on his feet telling others to “Get back! Get back!”

  “I—did you see.”

  “Don’t try to talk, dear,” his wife said. She was kneeling next to him. He took her hand.

  “I guess I won’t be gettin’ to Vero Beach.”

  “Dad, take it easy, they’ve sent for an ambulance.”

  “Yeah.” He smiled. He tried to rise, but he couldn’t. He looked up at his wife. “You’ve
been so great to me, and I’ve been like a—a—I stink—I had my whores.”

  “Please, dear, we’ll talk about it, try to keep still.”

  He looked at Sean. “I’m sorry about that…tell me about this guy James T. Farrell, you say he could write, huh.”

  “The best. He wrote a novel about an Irish-American guy named Studs Lonigan. A real loser.”

  “Kind of like me, huh. Studs Lonigan.”

  “No, Dad. Studs was a victim of change.”

  “The insurance is all paid,” O’Reedy said, interrupting his son and turning to his wife. “It’s in the chest I keep in the closet, it…” A sharp pain hit O’Reedy in the abdomen. He groaned. He could hear the ambulance in the distance.

  “Sean, you’re right…I was their errand boy—I didn’t have nothin’ against niggers and Puerto Ricans. Those were evil men, Sean. It’s not the old days…. If we don’t stop them, Sean…They’re having babies. Sean, you don’t understand. You have to see some of the stuff I’ve seen, Sean, I’m right there at the front lines and it ain’t pretty—maybe that black guy who was running…Sean, sometimes you can’t tell them apart, just a lot of faces staring at you, hating you…. Sean, we’re doing this for you, we’re in the trenches, you’ll see.” O’Reedy looked up. He saw clouds, the bottom of the feet and the skirts of the people in the mural, flying, heading toward the sky like the murals in churches overseas, ascending, like the cathedral at Köln looming over the city like some kind of regal but ragged, nasty and dirty pigeon, flying. But a figure was heading toward him. It was O’Reedy, the black jogger who had the same name as his; he was coming back, and he hovered above the people standing around O’Reedy, his wings connected to the black and red jogging suit, and O’Reedy lifted himself and touched the jogger’s outstretched finger with his.

  24

  He was a passenger in one of those Air France hot rods and they were rattling into New Oyo, about two hours from leaving St. Thomas in the Bahamas. When they landed he saw from the plane’s window a huge banner in front of the building that housed the control tower. “Ian Ball, Welcome Home, Our Own,” written in the language of the island. The other passengers stared at him as he walked down the steps of the plane. A small brass band was there to welcome him. They played the New Oyo anthem. They were dressed in white uniforms with gold trimmings. His fellow passengers had to go through customs to have their passports checked and their luggage searched. Two officers from the government introduced themselves and escorted him through customs and toward the car the president of New Oyo had sent. Later he learned that his mother had requested this greeting from the president of New Oyo, who was one of her best customers. He believed in soothsaying and the other services his mother provided to well-placed people. The president always credited his mother with having saved his life after she had warned him of an assassination plot against him.

  He and the escorts headed toward the outside of the airport; they were carrying his bags. There was a disturbance. He wheeled to the source of the loud, drunken singing. His escorts froze. There were some Americans, Club Med types who were doing a conga line at the ticket counter as they checked in for the trip back to the States. They were wearing shorts and had the usual obnoxious, know-it-all attitude one associates with American travelers. They were singing the tune to “God Bless America,” but without the usual lines: “No more roosters/crowing all night/no more cockroaches/in the bread. God Bless America/all the mosquitoes there are dead/God Bless America, I’m going home, to bed.”

  He and his escorts exited through the doors. He saw vending machines containing the nation’s newspapers. His face was on their covers. One headline said: I. BALL TO BROADWAY. Some people driving by in their Fiats and B.M.W.s and Mercedes honked. News traveled fast down here.

  He’d picked up the reviews of the play at J.F.K. and read them on the plane. The sex list with his name crossed out must have made the rounds, because the feminist critic for the New York Exegesis, the big paper, had given it a rave review. She called it “riveting,” “brilliant,” and one of the most “memorable” plays of the season. He received only two paragraphs less than Eva’s Honeymoon in the Downtown Mandarin. Near the bottom of the second page was a head that read: SHOBOATER’S VIEW. His review was carried way in the back. Page sixty-eight.

  “Reckless Eyeballing is marred by flat characters, but that’s not the worst offense that Ian Ball has committed in this piece of rubbish. Mr. Ball has a way of talking out of both sides of his mouth, as though he were of two heads or of two minds. When misogyny was in, he wrote Suzanna, the play about the sugar cane worker who regularly took the cutters into the fields in order to pay her gambling debts and buy rum. Although the women were outraged by this slut, at least Ball knew what he was writing about. Reckless Eyeballing is an obvious attempt to distance himself from the misogynistic attitudes that have ruined the work of some of his contemporaries. It’s all things for all women. He gives the black women the good debating points; he gives the white women the victory by having the all-female jury (the only male character in the entire play is Ham Hill’s skeleton) return a verdict against the corpse, Ham Hill, who was lynched twenty years before for allegedly gazing too long at Cora Mae, a white woman. Ball even lets the corpse off by having the judge sentence him to death already served. If Ian Ball was as good a playwright as he is a cunning opportunist, and a flexible equivocating and ambitious knave, maybe he would deserve the overpraise that this play is bound to receive.”

  He ignored the review by Paul Shoboater, and doubted whether many readers would accept his view, that is, if they could locate it in the newspaper. What counted was the review he’d received from the feminist critic on the front page. A letter from Tremonisha had arrived, just as he was leaving his apartment for the airport.

  “Dear Ian,” it began. “Greetings from Yuba City, California. I was looking for the worst town in the United States. This is it. I’m sorry I left you stranded, Ian, but I think that if I had remained in New York, I would have lost my mind. I just couldn’t be a party to what Becky did to your play. She reminds me of “that woman in Hampstead,” you know, that conniving spidery creature in Paula Marshall’s novel. Attempting to control those around her by dangling the golden apple of artistic success. Did I ever tell you that I saw Johnnie Kranshaw a couple of weeks before she disappeared? She had been up for a week and had so much coke in a bowl that I mistook it for sugar and started to put it into my coffee. She was haggard and smelly. She looked eighty years old. Becky had sucked her insides out. I’ve gotten three thousand miles between me and that whole New York scene and I don’t miss a thing.

  “Dred Creme is with me. He’s been off junk for about five weeks now. Next I’m going to get him to work on those other bad habits of his. Sucking his thumb and holding this blanket next to his head all the time. He’s practicing his scales. He says that he knew he was playing bullshit and drowning in clichés in New York. He’s listening to Jelly Roll Morton and says he wishes that he’d heard of him and King Oliver when he was in his late thirties.

  “The sun is doing wonders for him. We’re happy and we’re thinking about getting married and raising some kids. New York was no place to raise kids. Anyway, remember that night I just about talked your ears off about the Jew in Jud Süss? I’ve been thinking a lot lately of what happened in one scene. You see, this Jew gets rid of his caftan and his beard, and shows up at this party, see, and he thinks that because he has the Amadeus look, that the Germans will accept him; but no, a blond stereotype of the heroic German says, pointing to him, ‘You a Jew ain’t you.’ And so maybe that’s what’s happened to me. I thought that by getting rid of the caftan and beard of my experience, the people I admired would accept me. As a result, I became something I’m not.

  “You know, we didn’t get into this black thing until late. When I was a kid my sisters and I told everybody that we were Cuban; black was ugly. Then when black came in I became that, and when the feminist thing was the hip lick I joi
ned that and then the womanist fad. I was trying to please the sisterhood, and even attended these seminars where people discussed whether the clitoral orgasm would be replaced by the vaginal kind. That is, when they were not talking about the Grafenberg spot. Back here in Yuba City I’m trying to get back to where I started from. I grew up in a town like this. I went to the best schools, came out, belonged to the Jack and Jills and went away to college to be accepted as the first black girl in one of the most exclusive sororities.

  “One of my teachers encouraged me to write plays and some of them were staged by the college drama department. Then I won that national playwrighting contest. After that it was off to New York, and, well, the rest is, as they say, history. I staged my play Wrong-Headed Man in one of the East Village bars. Becky saw it and got me the Mountbatten. The success of Wrong-Headed Man turned into my curse. You know what those brothers said about me, and even some of the black women were hostile. I didn’t care. What money or influence did they have? Besides, no matter how vanguard they thought they were—those intellectuals and artists downtown—they were still impressed by somebody who made it big. Got their picture in People magazine. I was whisked away into the Broadway lights, I was wide-eyed like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, everything was so unreal; the parties, the interviews, being in the same room with people you’d only read about, people who were legends, people telling me how much they liked my play. Then the questions. Some of the questions they asked were, well, sick. They didn’t bother me at first because I had convinced myself that their praise was genuine. But they kept asking these questions.

  “I was writing about some brutal black guys who I knew in my life who beat women, abandoned their children, cynical, ignorant, and arrogant, you know these types, but my critics and the people who praised me took some of these characters and made them out to be all black men. That hurt me. The black ones who hated me and the white ones who loved me were both unfair to me. Nobody takes the crude and hateful white men like Hoss and Crow in Sam Shepard’s plays and says that these men represent all white men. Has anybody ever said that Richard III represented all white men? That all white men craved to lock children in a tower somewhere for perverse reasons? Nobody ever said Lady MacBeth or Medea represented all white women. That all white women manipulated their husbands into committing acts of murder or desired to murder their children. I thought they were my fans, those feminists, but some of them would have drinks and ask me about the ‘raw sex’ and how black men were, you know. Others used my black male characters as an excuse to hate all black men, especially some of these white women. Then they wouldn’t feel so guilty for taking their jobs. I was making this money and getting all of this praise when in reality I was no better than one of those panderers you see in the live sex shows up in North Beach. I was like a proprietor of one of those nasty adult movie houses you find in the rude sections of Cleveland and Rochester, where for a quarter you can go see a woman fuck a dog. With the feminists on my side and the support of those white males who had some strange passion for black men, I could have stayed in New York, but I left. Like Frank Sinatra says, I was at ‘the top of the heap,’ but the heap stinks, and I left before they could toss me into the shit. I think I’m just going to stay here in Yuba City. It doesn’t even have bus service. There is no airport. No colleges, universities, no theaters or symphonies. The average household income is under thirty thousand dollars. It doesn’t even have a bowling lane, but all I need at this point are my memories and a library. Yuba City has twelve. I’m just going to get fat, have babies, and write write write.