by Paul Beatty
She asked him his alias and his m.o. Perry recounted how he had gone into a hardware store and asked for a copper rod. The proprietor brought it to him, saying they were having a special on copper rods that day and that he was entitled to a fifteen percent discount. Perry, caviling emptor, who had read in the papers that the discount was supposed to be twenty percent, took the rod and racked up the storekeeper's head with it. He paid not a copper but, rather, copped the copper before the coppers came and he had to cop a plea. He had taken the rod home, sheathed it in wood, crooked one end, and brazenly decorated the other end with a brass ferrule. With this cupreous cudgel and a fake limp, he had been lurking in the subway concourse, preying on unwary commuters, rampaging up and down the passageway.
"So why haven't I read about this in the papers?" Oreo asked. "We're only a stone's throw from the Bulletin building."
"Oh, I just started fifteen minutes ago. You were my first victim, not counting the hardware guy."
Oreo helped Perry up off the ground, advising him that better he should be home waiting for his social security check. She confiscated his cane and admonished him that the way of the cutpurse was hard and drear. He wasn't convinced. Then she said, "I can sum up your ability as a gonif in one word."
"What's that?"
"Feh!"
He was convinced.
Oreo in the waiting room of Thirtieth Street Station
The trials of Getting a Ticket, Checking Departure Time, Finding the Track, and Waiting for the Late Train are too typical to chronicle here. While Oreo was in the state of Waiting for the Late Train, she decided to cross "Three legs" off her list. If Perry's cane, now her walking stick, was not the third leg of the Sphinx's hoary riddle about old age, she did not care what it was. She also decided that since this was, after all, her quest (so far a matter of low emprise), she would cross all the other clues off her list whenever she felt justified in doing so. This was not logical, but tough syll. For instance, number 4 on the list was "Sow." Did this pig in a poke indeed refer to something piglike or to something seedlike? To a pork chop or to a Burpee catalog? If her father was going to give such dumb clues, she was going to prove she was her father's daughter. When necessary, she could outdumb any scrock this side of Jimmie C. The arrival of the Silver Gimp—two hours and twelve minutes late—interrupted her smug assessment of how dumb she could be if given half a chance.
Oreo on the train
She had passed through the Finding a Seat phase and was now in the state of Hoping to Have the Seat All to Myself. She took off her backpack and put it on the overhead rack. As each potential seatmate came down the aisle, Oreo gave a hacking cough or made her cheek go into a rapid tic or talked animatedly to herself or tried to look fat, then she laid her handbag and walking stick on the adjoining seat and put a this-isn't-mine expression on her face. But these were seasoned travelers. They knew what she was up to. Since most of them were in the pre-Hoping to Have the Seat All to Myself phase, they passed on down the aisle, avoiding the eyes of the shlemiels who were Hoping to Have Someone Nice to Talk to All the Way to New York. As the train filled, the hardened travelers knew that it was pie-in-the-sky to hold out for a double seat, and each of them settled down to the bread-and-butter business of Hoping My Seatmate Will Keep His/Her Trap Shut and Let Me Read the Paper and the even more fervent Hoping No Mewling Brats Are Aboard.
One young blond had been traipsing up and down the aisles for five minutes. Oreo's first thought when she saw him was that he was almost as good-looking as she was, and she enjoyed watching the other passengers watch him. On this trip, the young man stopped in front of her with arms akimbo, resigned, and said, "All right, honey, I've checked, and next to me you're the prettiest thing on this train, so we might as well sit together. Give these Poor Pitiful Pearls something to look at."
Oreo smiled appreciatively at his chutzpah and moved her handbag and cane off the seat.
Before he sat down, he put a black case, about the size of a typewriter, on the overhead rack. He tried to move Oreo's backpack over, but it wouldn't budge. "Is this yours?" he asked.
Oreo nodded.
"What's in it—a piece of Jupiter?"
Oreo laughed. "No, my lunch. On Jupiter it would weigh more than twice as much—between skatey-eight and fifty-'leven pounds."
"Good, good. I see I can talk to you."
By the time the train pulled into North Philadelphia, Waverley Honor—"Can you believe that name?" he said. "In this case Honor is a place, not a code, thank God!"—knew eight things about Oreo. "Okay, that's enough about you. Now, go ahead, ask me what I do."
"What do you do, Waverley?" Oreo said dutifully.
"Are you ready for this?" He paused. "I'm a traveling executioner."
Oreo did the obligatory take.
"See that black case?" Waverley pointed to the overhead rack.
Oreo nodded. "It looks like a typewriter case."
"Guess what's in it."
"A small electric chair," Oreo said, playing straight.
"Good guess. No, a typewriter."
"Oh, shit," said Oreo.
Waverley placated her. "But it was a good guess. It's my Remington electric. Carry it with me on special jobs. It's a Quiet-Riter."
"So tell me, already, and cut the crap," said Oreo.
Waverley explained that he was a Kelly Girl, the fastest shift key in the East among office temporaries. Whenever a big corporation was having a major shake-up anywhere on the eastern seaboard, Waverley got the call to pack his Remington.
"Yes, but what exactly do you do?" asked Oreo.
"I thought you'd never ask." He moved closer to Oreo so that their conversation could not be overhead. "My last job was typical. I get the call from Kelly, right? They say, 'So-and-so Corporation needs you.' So-and-so Corporation shall be nameless, because, after all, a boy can't tell everything he knows." He paused for the laugh. "But believe me, honey, this is a biggie. I mean, you can't fart without their having something to do with it. Anyway, I show up at the building—one of those all-glass mothers. I flash my special pass at the guard. I wish I could use that identification card on all my jobs—absolutely adorable picture of me. Anyway, I take the back elevator to the fifty-second floor. The receptionist shows me to my cubicle. A man comes in a minute later with a locked brief-case. He opens it and explains the job. It's straight copy work. What I am doing is typing the termination notices of four hundred top executives. Off with their heads! That's why I call myself the traveling executioner. I mean, honey, most of those guys had been with that company since 1910, and they don't know what the fuck is going to hit them in their next pay check." He raised his eyebrows, an intricate maneuver involving a series of infinitesimal ascensions until the brows reached a plateau that, above all, tokened a pause for a rhetorical question. "Can you believe that? Well, my dear, the work was so mechanical and so boring that I insisted on having a radio the second day. So while I was decapitating these mothers from Scarsdale and Stamford and Darien, I was digging Aretha and Tina Turner and James Brown. Talk about ironic! While Tina is doing her thing on 'I Want to Take You Higher,' I'm lowering the boom on these forty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year men. Made me feel just terrible! I really sympathize with upper-income people, honey. They're my kind of minority."
While Waverley went to get a drink of water, Oreo stared at the dirty cardboard on the back of the seat in front of her:
Thanks for riding Penn Central Have a pleasant trip
She looked out the window as the train passed a small station and saw another sign that, for an instant, made her think she was in a foreign country, until she realized that some letters were missing:
TRA
OCATION 5
As the train pulled into Trenton, Oreo got hungry. She hauled her backpack from the overhead rack and was about to start in, when she realized she was being selfish—besides, it wouldn't hurt to have a carload of travelers in her debt. Reserving only a few choice bundles, she enlisted Waverley's ai
d and distributed the rest to the other passengers. In a few minutes, groans and moans were heard amidst all the fressing.
Between bites, Waverley kept saying, "Oh my God, it's so good I'm coming in my pants."
The whole car broke into applause when Oreo went to get a cup of water. She bowed this way and that as she came back to her seat. She sat there for a while digesting Louise's Apollonian stuffed grape leaves, her revolutionary piroshki. She was trying to decide what shade of blue the sky was. It was the recycled blue of a pair of fifty-dollar French jeans (or jeannettes) that had been deliberately faded. She decided that from now on, she would call that shade jive blue. Douglas Floors would approve.
Waverley was looking over her shoulder. Suddenly he sat back and sighed. "You're the first nice person I've talked to in a long time. Can I drop my beads?"
"Sure, go ahead."
He confided that he was not only a traveling executioner, but also a gay traveling executioner.
"Nu, so vot else is new?" she said, doing one of her mother's voices.
He made a stage swishy gesture. "I'm beginning to think the whole world is." He then gave a list of movie stars, past and present, who were "that way"; it included everyone except Rin-Tin-Tin and John Wayne. "Even though the Duke's real name is Marion and he has that funny walk, we're pretty sure he's straight, but we're not all that definite about Rinty. Lassie, of course, is a drag queen from way back."
Waverley said that he had been very depressed since he and his last lover had split up. At first he had just sat around feeling sony for himself, typing by day and jerking off by night. "Then I decided, the hell with that. I did something I've never done before. I went out cruising in all the bars. Did all the things I've always wanted to do. I felt justified because I was tired of living like a vegetable."
"You wanted to live like a piece of meat," Oreo said.
Waverley nodded appreciatively. "Oh, you are evil, e-vil! Anyway, I had all kinds of guys. In the third week, I had my first Oriental."
"Is it true what they say about Oriental men?"
"What?"
"That their balls are like this"—she placed one fist on top of the other—"instead of side by side?"
Another nod, another "Evil, e-vil!" He said he would top that by starting a rumor that Castilian fags had a double lisp. Then he opened his wallet. "Let me show you some pictures." He smiled as he looked at the first one. "These are two of my best friends, Phyllis and Billie."
Oreo nodded. "Phyllis looks like Ava Gardner."
"That's Billie, with an i-e. Phyllis is the one who looks like a truck driver. But that just goes to show you looks are deceiving. Phyllis doesn't drive trucks. She fixes them. My mother got hold of this one—she's always popping in on me, snooping around, but that's another story. Anyway, when she saw this, I had to tell her Phyll was Billie's boyfriend. But if you look close, you can see her bra strap through the tee shirt. I showed it to Phyll's ex-husband. I thought he would wet his drawers, he laughed so hard. He's gay, too. A real swish, honey. He's Filipino and they were going to send him back to the islands. He wanted to stay here and he and Phyll were good buddies, so she married him." He shook his head, remembering. "You should have seen her at the wedding. She let her hair grow long and looked pretty good, for her. Joe, that's the guy she married, had to buy her a girdle and stockings and show her how to walk in heels. When she walked, it was a complete panic." He stood up and did a hoarse, deep-voiced cowhand on stilts. " 'By God, when I get out of these damn things, I'll never put them on again.' This was years ago, when girls used to wear dresses to work. But old Phyll would always wear her overalls. Of course, she was a mechanic. If her bosses knew she was a girl, they weren't saying. She was a damn good mechanic."
"She looks tough," said Oreo. "Does she give Billie a hard way to go?"
Waverley looked genuinely shocked. "Of course not. Billie's the butch. Phyll's the sweetest girl you'd ever want to meet. She taught me how to knit. Gives cooking lessons to anyone who asks her. She didn't have to marry Joe. And then there was the baby—"
"The baby?"
"Sure. Joe said he always wanted one, so Phyll said okay. She made the right decision too. Joe's the best mother a baby could want. But that Billie—she'd break your balls as soon as look at you."
"Or twist your tits," Oreo said.
"What?"
"Never mind—a failure of empathy."
Waverley went on with his adventures. All his talk of cocks he had known and loved reminded Oreo that she had forgotten to pack the gift she had for her father. It was a plaster of Paris mold of Jimmie C.'s uncircumcised penis. Helen had refused to let the hospital take a hem in her son's decoration, saying that she considered it mutilation and that when he was old enough, she would let him decide whether he wanted to have it done. He had not decided because Helen had not put the question to him. Helen had not brought it out in the open because she still did not consider Jimmie C. old enough to decide. Jimmie C. brought it out in the open only to go to the bathroom and to conform to Oreo's special request—no, threat—for a mold. He conformed to her special request because he loved his sister and because she threatened to tell him one of the "suppose" lines that she had been saving up to make him faint.
He, in turn, had a special request, which he sang with a hauntingly sweet melodic line: "Nevertheless and winnie-the-pooh, whatever you do, don't paint it green." For one fiendish moment, Oreo had contemplated doing just that, but she contented herself with deciding which of two questions she would put to Samuel when she gave him the mold: "How do you like that putz?" or "How do you like that, putz?" She had been leaning toward the second, but now all that was moot, since she had forgotten the putz in question.
As the train approached the next stop, Waverley said, "Well, this is it. Today Newark, tomorrow Rahway. Could you stand such excitement?" They exchanged addresses, and he pulled his black case down from the overhead rack. "Ooo, do I have to pee—the first bar I come to gets the gold," he said piss elegantly.
"Any pot in the storm," said Oreo. She had no shame. She watched Honor bound for a tearoom.
FRANKLYN AJAYE
be black, brother, be black
1977
Be black, brother, be black. My name is an African name, but it's real, see. I had it before it was worthwhile to have it, see. I struggled with it for years. You know what I mean? Because before it was hip to have an African name it was a disgrace to have it. Shit, I had to carry the burden on my ass, you know? But then it got hip, see, and brothers started changing their names, which I didn't mind except they wouldn't give me no warning. Overnight they'd just become another person, you know?
You say, "Hey Willie, what's happenin'?"
"My name ain't Willie."
"Goddamn, you sure do look like that dude."
Can't be two dudes that ugly in America.
"Willie, why you bullshittin'?"
"My name ain't Willie, it's Mbutu Yata. Got meaning. I got a name with meaning. I got it out the book last night I was just reading."
"Oh yeah, what does it mean?"
"It means Warrior with Good Jump Shot. Got meaning, man. It's about my people. I ain't going to answer to that slave shit 'Willie' no more, you dig?"
Then a chick would go by, "Hi Willie. How are you?"
"Oh, I'm all right. Looking good, looking good, baby."
I took black history, hardest class in the school, learned a lot of interesting facts though . . . found out that a black man, Matthew Henson, was actually the first man to actually set foot on the North Pole. A black man, you all didn't know that, nyeah, nyeah. Learn that, man. But you got to take that with a grain of salt, you know, because you got to know that the only reason Matt Henson was the first one allowed to set foot on the North Pole was because Admiral Peary went, "Hmm, that ice looks a little thin up there, doesn't it? Naw, keep the dogs back. Hey Matthew, come here! Put the skillet down, Matthew, and come on up here."
disneyland high 1977
&nb
sp; Went to disneyland high. You know, that was hip. Went on psilocybin. Dropped psilocybin. One time. Never will do it again. Too weird, man. Too weird, brother. Mushrooms. Too weird, know what I mean? Me and Tre we went. When you're on psilocybin you really be trippin', you'd be thinking really strange things. We came to the conclusion that everybody at Disneyland was ugly but us, okay? We agreed. We said, "Right!" You know, 'cause we was looking at cats.
"Man, check that out over there, man. They better not ever have no kids."
"Who you tellin', jack? That'd be illegal, man."
"Ah man, to the left, to the left! Don't look long, man. Don't look long, all right? It's bad for the eyes! Bad for your eyes."
We was trippin', man. We was having a good time, man. We was freaking and everything was mellow until this giant mouse came up to us, okay? We just holding on to reality anyway just by a thin thread, okay? Just holding on to what's really going on, you know? And this giant mouse just went, "Snip! Snip!" and cut that thread. 'Cause he just came up, "Haaa-ah Haaa-ah! Hoooeeeee!," skippin', "Wooooo wooooo! Wooooo!"