by Jake Packard
“You amuse me Marcus, but you don’t fool people around here. If it’s a question of who’s got the goods and who’s got the guns, I win.” Gregor’s stani lilt made a nursery rhyme out of a deadly threat. “But if you got something to say, boy, this is the time; so make me laugh.”
“My people have been here for centuries,” Marcus replied, “to me you are an intruder. We were conceived in slavery, weaned on Jim Crow, subjected to lynching, harsh segregation, and police brutality. But now, dude, we run this city. We run the show. I, for one, am personally disgusted by your illegal alien ass terrorizing my prople. You should be honoring us.”
There were murmurs of assent and a few shouted affirmations from the black people behind him in the crowd. Gregor’s face grimaced and snarled, showing his diseased teeth. He shouted back at them, “Shut the fuck up!”
The Shantypark people cringed backwards in fear, leaving Marcus exposed against the invader horde.
“That’s the trouble with you Americans. Everything was so free and easy,” Gregor began revving himself up. “That’s why all this shit happened to you. A fucking open society can’t exist forever without a backbone. You assholes had it made and you let it go to shit. Your morality sucked, you all acted like sick fuckin’ pimps and whores. And what do you know about honor, Marcus, when all you ever cared about before was yourself, what kind of fancy car you drove, and what kind of running shoes you wore?”
“There are good people in Shantypark, Gregor, who, given the opportunity, would work for a living, earn their dignity in a society of law. Not like animals, not like you.”
“Laws! You call those fucking things you lived by laws? Don’t make me laugh too hard, shithead. The only law I saw in America allowed killers to walk free and child fuckers to work in kindergartens. Your law let oil companies start world wars and pollute my planet. Your law let the Internet be filled with your sister’s faces covered with cum. And your leaders, the fuckin’ lawmakers who made these fuckin’ laws, they lie openly to you. They were liars. Actors speaking words not their own. Prostitutes who injected their bodies with silicone and steroids to be beautiful enough on the screen to convince you to buy shit you didn’t need or believe in. While men and woman who rhyme, and can shake their hips steal the money out of your children’s pockets while they stuck drugs up their veins because hey could never live the lives they saw on TV. And you treated them like gods in your full-color glossy world. America’s laws, fuck that bullshit!
“But you know what Marcus? Where I came from was no fuckin’ better. My people once were proud. We lived on our land in dignity and were taught to protect widows and orphans and give charity to the poor. Men from my village were honored for their strength and their willingness to submit to a merciful all-knowing Allah. That got totally fucked-up. Now my brother’s sons are trained to kill themselves in the name of some new vengeful Allah invented by assholes calling themselves the true protectors of the faith. These pretenders sucked the real wealth out of our country, our children, while leaving grandmothers and widows to starve like pigs in shit-strewn streets.
“Bad enough got worse after the bombs. Now this fucking lousy world locks me in behind walls with you rotten infected scumbags. So, fuck that! Now wherever I go in Shantypark, I make my own rules. For you see Marcus, I am the law here! I am the lawgiver! Do you savvy? Whether you like it or not, these are my rules and Shantypark will live by them because I say so. This little nigger stole from me, and my rules say, ‘thou shall not steal from Gregor.’”
“He’s just a little boy, Gregor,” Marcus said. “He was lost and frightened. He was cold and starving.”
“Kiss my ass! For breaking into my tent and stealing my apple he will be made an example for you all, cause soon he will be dead, and that will be one less thieving nigger kid to look out for.” He pointed to the executioner, who on command pulled his well-oiled sword from an ornate sheath. “And Marcus, there ain’t nothing you or anyone else here can do about it.”
The crowd’s thickened hush resonated like a metal gong in reverse, sucking in the nearby energy like a black hole on earth.
Jamal lay on the chopping block, his life in Gregor’s grimy hands, which at the moment were busy picking his weather-beaten nose as he stared down Marcus with creepy-calm, raptor eyes. Taking his time, making sure he got it all, he flicked some green mucous on to the ground.
With a smirk, Gregor swiped his filthy, scabby fingers across his neck like a knife slicing a throat. “Kill him.”
The crowd tensed; the moment upon them. The executioner raised the sword high in the air, every muscle in his powerful body coordinated into a ceremonial position that ended lives. Reaching the apex of his mighty back swing, he poised over Jamal’s outstretched throat like the textbook cover of Terrorism 101.
In that perfect moment, as the dark hooded legion of apparitions waited for blood, and the Shantypark crowd held their breath, a strong but soft voice called out from the wilderness of the mob. “Woe unto you for this monstrosity.”
The swordsman froze, unable to move a muscle. He stood shivering, stuck in his horrid posture, his grisly face in deep and dreadful panic.
“Enough of this evil,” said the lean young man in the middle of the crowd, which stepped back to reveal him. He glared at Gregor with steadfast strength, and then pointed at him. “You must give the boy to me.”
The young man’s dark curly hair edged over the collar of his long brown trench coat as he took several steps towards the imminent atrocity before him. The people in the crowd stepped away as he moved through, but those standing close felt their fear turn into a curious wonder. The executioner backed down and lowered his sword, unable to face Gregor.
“What the hell are you doing? You fuckin’ asshole! Kill the kid! Kill that fucking kid!” Gregor screamed, but the trained assassin stood petrified, his body quaking, unable to move a muscle. The great arrogance in his killer eyes now became great fear, which sent shivers of panic running through the skin of the stanis.
Someone in the mass of people whispered, “Is it Salem? And someone else answered. “It must be, it must be.” And the entire crowd began to vibrate. A feeling of great reckoning arose before them.
Gregor’s muscles and veins strained to break out of his skin when he realized he too could not move. He could only manage muffled screams, hellish and grating, like mummies emerging from ancient crypts. “Ibrahim! You! You take that sword and kill that fuckin’ kid.” Ibrahim, unsure of what was going on, made a stumbling move for the sword.
“Become like the child, Ibrahim, and you too will see salvation.” Salem said to Ibrahim, as he moved closer to the stani stronghold. “Then you will have nothing to fear.”
Ibrahim froze like a vile and helpless serpent.
“What are you waiting for, you fuckin’ idiot?” Gregor fumed. He still could not move, but his insides were on fire. “Kill him. Kill the boy. Kill the fuckin’ nigger kid.”
Everyone in Reginald froze, stunned, suspended in a slice of elastic time that stood still while stretching itself out to the farthest reaches.
In the center of Reginald, upon a primitive wooden altar, Jamal’s little body trembled.
“Ibrahim,” Salem said “bring the boy to me.”
Gregor, convulsed in an internal seizure, but could not countermand this sublime, soft force that superseded his power.
Ibrahim, as if summoned, untied the leather straps that bound Jamal’s wrists, and heedless of Gregor’s ranting, lifted the boy off the chopping block and carried him towards the wavy-haired man in the crowd.
Jamal, looking into his savior’s eyes, will never forget that instant of depthless light.
“What is this bullshit? Ibrahim, you asshole, kill that fucking nigger kid, now! Do what I say, for I am the fucking law.” Gregor shouted.
But incapable to resist Salem’s easy command, Ibrahim stepped down from the altar and carried Jamal to him.
A black hooded apparition slipped away from
the crowd as if in a hurry to make a report.
Ibrahim stopped before Salem Jones and gazed up at him. He looked like any ordinary Shantypark youth in jeans and work boots, except for his eyes.
Salem looked down upon Ibrahim with a tender mercy. “Ibrahim. You must free yourself. The evil that howls deep inside your heart strangles your good soul.”
Salem Jones extended his arms and Ibrahim gently placed Jamal into them. Jamal looked up once again into the radiance in Salem’s eyes, then curled his head against Salem’s shoulder, exhausted, spent, in full submission, exposing the telltale AIDS-7 melanomas behind his ears.
Gregor’s baleful laugh echoed in the approaching dawn. “Whaddaya gonna do with that little shit nigger now, big fuckin’ shot? Can’t you see his blood is all fucked up, man? He’s gonna die in a few days, ya know!”
Salem smiled at the boy, patted his head and stroked his hair, ears, and face. Jamal looked back up at him in wonderment as his body fully absorbed the depth of this contact. No one had ever touched him with such incredible warmth.
Salem looked upon Gregor with the calm of a desert sunset and said to him, “Even you, Gregor, have time to turn from these shameful and evil ways. Then maybe you will have a chance to live.”
“Are you threatening me, asshole?” Gregor screamed out at Salem, his gang impotent behind him. “Are you threatening me? I am Gregor! I am the law! Who the fuck are you?”
Salem Jones smiled at Gregor turned his back on the angry stani horde. He walked away carrying Jamal through the large gathering of astonished people, all dazed and amazed, eyes filled with tears and mouths dropped in awe.
As Salem passed through the multitude, a great movement swelled and followed him as he walked away through the garbage strewn desolation of Shantypark.
As if on signal, the first rays of the rising sun broke through the clouds. It sliced through the twenty-first century smog and lowered upon Reginald Square. An incandescent glow appeared, like an umbrella, like a golden shield, bringing shelter to this haggard city, filled with so many human afflictions inside so many troubled tents.
* * * * *
The World Traveler
Bullmoose fancied himself a world traveler. He first got the calling years ago while driving taxicabs in Boston when he should have enrolled in M.I.T. Sitting in the taxi pool at Logan Airport, instead of solving complex equations that could determine the age of the universe or the diameter of an electron, he figured he should give into this calling now, while young, before he became tied down to a successful rock-star career.
One fine morning, after driving cabs all night, snorting whiteys and smoking pot, Bullmoose dropped in at the passport office in Government Center with his birth certificate. Grandma, Bullmoose’s perpetual yet unattached squeeze, received it from Bullmoose’s family right before their son who was destined to be Herbie’s father was born. Grandma had asked Bullmoose’s mom to send it soon after Bullmoose started mumbling about his newfound wanderlust. Grandma thought that in case he never came back she would have some kind of proof to show her infant son about his father. Rule number two kicked in; everything is interconnected, and often in ways that most of us can’t understand. Although he absolutely needed his passport to get out of his country and into another, Bullmoose never even thought about it until he saw it sitting in the pile of mail on Grandma’s kitchen table. Then it dawned on him. Grandma and he were a good team that way, interconnected, and that’s how they got things done.
After several weeks of amphetamines and Coors Light, driving cabs all day and night, he saved up enough money for a round trip airplane ticket to Bombay, Mumbai’s name back then. In vogue for the early 1970’s, Bullmoose wanted to go to India and find himself.
For the first time ever on an airplane, Bullmoose picked just about the longest ride possible for his maiden voyage, a trip halfway around the lonely planet. But, of course, Bullmoose went prepared. When the stewardess came around with the drink cart, he washed down a couple of valiums with a few airplane bottles of vodka. He popped another couple when she came back around again with more vodka. He would have bought even more but he couldn’t believe how little money he had left, and he hadn’t even left the airplane yet.
At one significant point, on his way back from a much-needed trip to the toilet. he became fixated on a shapely young lady, about nineteen years old. Bullmoose admired her perfect backside tucked into a pair of tight blue denim bell bottoms as she wiggled up the aisle in front of him. She sat down in the middle of the wide body jet with some friends equally scintillatingly female. Bullmoose stopped in the aisle, introduced himself, and began to entertain them with his you-really-wanna-let-me-into-your-pants kind of charm that came by him naturally in situations like this. The stewardess rolled through again with the drink cart and he found himself buying those very expensive but tiny bottles of vodka for her and all her libidinous friends. Everybody laughed harder as the party grew louder. Soon Bullmoose started staggering and falling into people seated in the surrounding rows. He remembered the chuckling sounds as someone very kind and gentle guided him back to his seat.
Before he knew it he stood alone in a customs line in the Bombay airport handing his singular, unique proof of existence to the Indian customs man, whose eyes kept darting from the sleepy young man in front of him with only a knapsack and a guitar, to the passport picture of a ponytailed hippie, eyes black and widely dilated from speed, staring at him off the document. To the government official Bullmoose looked like a twentieth century suburban Buddha, daring his karma to take him, and bring him back to, wherever he thought he deserved to go. Which couldn’t be much further since he spent most of his money on tiny bottles of Smirnoff while trying to pry the panties off of some random honey in row 37 so that he could gain entry into the exclusive mile-high club. Of course, Bullmoose had never even heard about the notorious club at that point, and nobody knew if it had even been invented yet, but assuredly Bullmoose would not have minded being one of its first and founding members.
The poor customs man, not knowing what to think, believed that Herschel J. Lipton from the Bronx, New York, smiling cockily before him under his Boston Red Sox cap, was just another modern-day would-be white shaman backed by lots of American cash, rather than the hung-over, horny, and almost broke pothead he really was. Because of Bullmoose’s well-concealed self-doubts about his outward presentation and personal intentions, the agent actually let him into India.
Elated yet confused, psyched but insecure, Bullmoose drifted out of the terminal into the halogen Hindu night without the vaguest idea of where he was and what he was going to do. The first things he noticed stepping outside the terminal building were the jumbo mosquitoes and other ravenous flying insects. They buzzed with a fearful droning around the few electric lights in the passenger pick up area in anticipation of their blitz upon unprotected human flesh.
In the distance by the taxi stand, he saw proud but idle sons of the Raj hanging around and talking. They disregarded him and his motley appearance. Their native intuition knew who could afford to pay them for a ride into the city and who could not, so Bullmoose recognized he could not look to them for any help.
Then came the inevitable hordes of bedraggled beggars. Omnipresent upon the Indian landscape, they advanced, led by their children, many maimed and with missing limbs. Each clamored to be the first to receive alms from the newly arrived foreigner. Little did they realize that his financial status suggested he should have been joining them in begging for money from those who actually had some. They spilled into his breathing space, quickly filling it up, reaching out, touching him, pulling on his shirt sleeves, soliciting in human sounds that as unintelligible as their smells. Their cluster behavior began choking off his air supply; he felt weak, shaken, fatigued. He feared a double frontal attack by bugs that resembled the Nazi air force, and people who acted like a throng of bugs.
There he stood at the beckoning portal of the exotic and intriguing Far East, the beacon of light
during the short spiritual reawakening in America in the early 1970s due to the popularity of LSD, mescaline, peyote, and all the other psychedelic drugs in fashion at the time. Alone, just about broke, and halfway around the world in a time before iPhones and emails, Bullmoose wavered. He forgot all about the count-on-able rules he had followed with all his heart to the other side of the world. He wanted to turn around and run as fast as he could back onto that airplane and head his ass right back home to Boston.
But there, at his darkest hour, a vision hit him that reaffirmed number four; there is no limit to the glory and grace of God. At that crucial moment, the pair of faded denim jeans painted onto that nineteen-year-old nymphet that so beguiled him on the airplane exited out the terminal. She happened to be attached to a group of other American college kids traveling on a semester abroad, who flew into India on the same aircraft as Bullmoose. They must have told him that fact earlier when he partied with them in the airplane, but he probably didn’t hear them because he was just too high.
Following his natural instincts, he sidled up alongside her once again. She looked like she actually enjoyed the attention, probably because of that talented I’m-so-cute-you-want-to-get-naked-with-me sensitive rap he laid on her before he fell on his face in the airplane aisle. He followed her towards an antediluvian school bus that pulled up with a groaning screech. Without much thought, the guitar case strapped to his back, Bullmoose mingled in. And, just like that, and without a word, they oozed him onto the bus like another American college kid on a semester abroad in India. The kids immediately accepted him as one of their own and nobody asked questions all the way across the country for several days on a whirlwind tour of India’s holiest sights. When they arrived at Madras and registered at the dorm, the administrators at the school realized the fraud.
After a few less-than-friendly handshakes and some firm nudging by the faculty, Bullmoose found himself hitchhiking on the only road going south of town. He headed to a coastal area where rumor had it he would find a nine-hundred-year-old temple on the beach, and where he could score dope and buy beer. Bullmoose could lie in the sand all day long and do what he did best, just get a huge buzz on and try to get his head together.
