Philadelphia Fire

by John Edgar Wideman

  They snatched back the car keys, the house keys. We got slogans and T-shirts and funny haircuts. And AIDS. Make love not war. Grateful Dead. Woodstock. Black Power. Sheeit.

  Cudjoe is tired. He’s been sitting too long in the restaurant, the car. His muscles are stiff. Timbo rapping nonstop about something else now: South Africa, the PLO. Vietnam War, civil rights, marches and protests, he’d dealt with that time of their lives in five minutes. How could Cudjoe have thought it would fill novels?

  Cudjoe closes his eyes, listens to Timbo the way he listens to music. Timbo’s voice could bring back the feeling of those years they were in school together. A particular succession of notes created a tune. Certain notes started it, you recognized them but the music immediately carried you someplace else, behind the notes, between them. The meaning of the notes was where they took you and how it felt to be there, behind them, feeling again what you felt another time when you heard the notes played. A fast, jumpy tune makes you sad. A slow song thumps you between the shoulder blades and you remember the wings folded back there and they open and fly you away.

  Greed’s got the deepest pocket, cause see Greed scheming full-time to keep that pocket full. When you want something you go to Greed’s pocket. It stinks, it’s pukey down in there. Dead babies and disease and children starving with flies and maggots in the pus draining out their sores and assholes. You know Greed got to dig down deep in the shit to give you what you asking for, but you need it and where else you gon get it? Yes. I’ll take it. Thank you kindly.

  You hate to watch Old Greed stirring around down in his ugly pocket and you damned sure avoid looking at his fingers when he draws out the little piece of change you’re begging for. You know good and well the nasty place it’s coming from but you ain’t hardly refusing what he holds out, blood, vomit, shit, piss, pus and all.

  Answer’s always yes. Yes, I’ll take the money. Don’t care how much blood’s on it Don’t care if it’s my blood. Yours. I wasn’t the one responsible. I’d prefer clean money but till clean drops down from heaven this will do. Yes. I’ll take it. Somebody will take it. Mize well be me. Money’s money. None of it’s clean.

  See, to me, man, that’s the bottom line. No matter how you cut it, human nature gets down to a simple fact. You want yours and I want mine, don’t matter whose blood on the money, yes, we’ll take it. World operates the way it does because that’s the bottom line. Survival’s the bottom line. Looking out for number one.

  How you gon convince somebody democracy’s good or socialism or communism or King and his nouveau Rousseau or whatever the fuckism, how you gon preach the morality of one system over another system when all anybody concerned about is the goodies the system delivers to their door? Everybody wants a piece of the rock. What’s it matter whose bones broken hacking the rock out the earth, who’s dying pushing the rock up the hill, who’s ground up underneath it?

  Timbo off mankind now, ranking on particular friends and acquaintances. Whatever happened to thus and so? Whichamacallit? What’s his name? You know who I mean. The guy. The chick. C’mon. You know who I’m talking about. What’s the cat’s name? A shooting gallery of faces as Timbo ticks off their signs: bad breath, big tits, the stuttering, dickhead motherfucker. Mr. Prim and Proper, Miss Fine Ass, Woody Woodpecker square-headed no dancing turkey. The Crab Lady. The Dog Man. Finger-painted in the air, pantomimed, noises in his throat, a giggle, finger pops, silences, bat of his eyelashes, face after face flickers across the screen of Timbo’s rap. Cudjoe thinks up a god so prodigal it can’t help creating everything it thinks. Runaway creation, people spilling from its orifices as it laughs and farts and slaps its thigh and marvels at the perversity, the fecundity of its mind, the permutations and combinations it can spin off the basic human clay. One leg, three legs, no legs at all. Legs where arms should be. A phantom leg after the real one blown off by a land mine. Legs tangled, twisted, one shorter than the other, legs like flippers, perfect deadly legs, legs undersized and elephantized, suppurating and skin flaking away, black ones on red people, green ones on white, and as fast as the god dreams them, here they come pouring from a cornucopia, flooding the earth, a rickety, crooked, misshapen pair, a joke, a whim, the only set of legs some sorrowful motherfucker will own all the days of his life.

  You remember people, Timbo. I have places, almost like stage sets, in my mind. I’ve been trying to find them since I’ve been back but they’re gone. Buildings, streets, trees. Stores I used to shop, bars where we partied. The Carousel. I can picture it perfectly. But there’s no Carousel anymore.

  Been gone for days, bro. Guess you have been away for a while. Lemme see. It was the Carousel when we were in school, then the Sunset Grill, then the Hi Hat Lounge, then it didn’t have a name. Just a trifling little corner joint. Back part where we boogied torn down. By then most the shit around it torn down, too. They were building those high-rise dorms across on Chestnut and everything north was being urban-removed. Driving down to City Hall and I pass this busted sign, two or three tubes of neon kinda sputtering, red, bright red cause it was a crisp, winter night and nothing else around in there so these squiggle-squaggles of red caught my attention spelling out a message looked like Arabic or Chinese characters, didn’t make any sense, then I noticed where I was, between Fortieth and Thirty-ninth on Market so I thought to myself, Yeah. That must have been the Carousel—whatever name it went by then—still holding out on that lonely-ass corner. Thought of you, old buddy, and the rest of the crew used to always be hanging out in there. The good ole days. That sign with the blood barely squeaking through its veins was sure enough pitiful and I was long gone on my way downtown but I could picture the joint jumping again. Ray Charles on the Box. What D’ye Say. Folks wall to wall Saturday night and I just got paid. Hey. Timbo rolling along in his big car courtesy of the City, pocketful of money, the mayor’s boy, the city cocking up her big legs for him. Timbo on top the world, but man, I can tell you, and you’ll understand. I’d have given it all up in a minute for them old days. Timbo missing the Carousel. Timbo shedding a big, sloppy tear for them golden olden days and all us fools carousing at the Carousel.

  Let’s go cop us a taste, brother Cudjoe. I want to hear about your life.

  *

  I lived on an island. Learned another language. Almost like a new life. Born again before born again was big business. When Caroline and I split up, she took the kids and moved in with her parents. She eventually married again, lives in Haiti. After we broke up, nothing made sense to me. I knew I’d fucked up. Felt dirty, contaminated. And contagious. Yeah. I didn’t want to have anything to do with other people. Afraid I’d give them what I had. Or that they’d know on sight how sick I was and shun me. That was an even greater fear. Being found out. Being punished. The man who’d been encouraging me to write died. But not before saying, No, not yet, twice to the book I was struggling with. Nothing here for me so I crossed the ocean. Bummed around a year. South of France, Spain, North Africa. Then I found my island. Mykonos. Wound up staying away ten years.

  Ten years. That’s a lot of years.

  One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten. Ten dead Indians. Count em.

  What’d you do?

  The island was beautiful. I stayed because it was beautiful and I wasn’t required to do a goddamn thing. Cool out. Day after day of nothing and nobody gave a fuck. I became an institution. Only splib in the permanent colony of foreigners. Worked at a bar. You could find me there regular as rain. Black face behind the bar at Spiros. A fixture. Part of the island. Like naked beaches and caves and cliffs. Everybody loved me. Then forgot me. Invisible man. Bartending my day job, and sometimes at night I wrote.

  Living the life of the expatriate, huh. Beachcomber and pussy-hound and artiste. Sounds good to me, homeboy.

  I was lonely lots of the time, Timbo. But shit, I was lonely living with a wife and two kids in a goddamn matchbox apartment you can’t turn around in. Missed music and playing ball and the funny stuff you Negroes ov
er here got into, sitting in, occupying buildings, Mau-Mauing the Man. Missed it and missed my family. For a while didn’t care if I lived or died. Played it day by day. Minute at a time. I’d read about what was happening over here. Seemed like the whole world was going to explode. Then nothing happened. Don’t know today if that made me feel better or worse but I survived. Mad plenty of days. Mad weeks at a stretch. Did lots of drinking and hiding and running. Wrote a lot of bullshit poems and unfinished essays. Letters to Caroline and the boys I never sent. A boring life really. Like a spectator from a distance watching my country kill itself. Watching and waiting for my old life to disappear. And take me with it. Some things never change, I guess.

  Hey. Some things do. Ten years is ten years. We grown-ups, good buddy. Middle-age motherfuckers. Wish I’d stole me five or ten years to do nothing.

  Never finished the novel about us.

  Too bad.

  But I can tell you something about it. You were one of the stars.

  Would have been some book, then.

  Maybe what I’m writing about the fire will make up for the other one. You’re in it, too.

  Oh yeah. You ain’t intending to get me fired, are you? Or strung up?

  I need help. The boy who survived is the key. I have to find him.

  Write your sixties novel. Make old Timbo a literary hero. Let me play the part in the movies. Forget the fire. Play with fire you know what happens. You’ll get burnt like the rest of us. Tell the story about trying to change the world. Fire ain’t going nowhere. Be right here when you get back from Hollywood.

  Kids Krusade. Kaliban’s Kiddie Korps. Cudjoe saw the graffiti everywhere. Triple K’s. MPT. Double K’s. Money Power Things. Anywhere and everywhere. Man-high letters. The words spelled entire. Where did all the spray paint come from? Who was splashing every wall in Philadelphia with these messages? Like a new season. Instead of last-ditch autumn brightness or summer green or gray-white winter this was a season of garish primary colors dashed and slooshed and spilled over the city, rainbow signs signifying things were changing, a new day on its way, breaking out, taking over, a rash of MPTs and K’s transforming the city like the stigmata of a galloping disease.

  And like a natural season, these messages blasting from every surface struck him as inevitable, not new, just not remembered, the way a blinding snowstorm and freezing temperature are unreal when you’re sweating through a T-shirt on a muggy August day. Heat rises up at you from the asphalt and you can’t believe the hawk ruled here, just yesterday, his chilled wings flapping through these canyons, his icy talons lifting your shivering ass clean off the ground as you scurry cross Market, humping for the steaming subway entrance. The spray-painted messages defaced or decorated the city, depending on your point of view. Vandalism or tribal art or handwriting on the wall. Whatever the signs meant, they were a transforming presence. For a while, as long as they reigned in plain view, it was their season, and their season was different.

  War paint, Cudjoe thought. Gearing up for battle. Kids priming the city with a war face. MPT. KK. A ritual mask summoning power; a dream, a revelation as the features of the city change before our eyes. Does anyone besides him recognize what’s happening? Did it happen too quickly? Nobody paying attention to walls, billboards, sidewalks, fences and then one morning, boom, the signs had appeared. Second nature instantly. Blending into the cityscape nobody ever sees. Kids Krusade. Money Power Things. Kaliban’s Kiddie Korps. Unnoticed. Like dead trees, dead rivers, poisonous air, dying blocks of stone.

  He knew. He saw. He was afraid.

  In the restaurant he had asked Timbo if Timbo knew what to make of the signs. Of course Timbo had an answer.

  Kids today are a bitch. Worst problem used to be gang warring. Maiming and killing each other like flies cause they didn’t have nothing better to do. Now they kill anybody. Anything. Cold-blooded little devils. You wouldn’t believe juvenile court. Not no lightweight run away from home and stealing candy bars and cars shit. Huh uh. Dope dealing and contract killing and robbing and beating people in the neighborhood for drug money and full-scale turf wars with weapons like in Nam. Gangsters, man. Ice water in their veins. And ain’t this high yet, ain’t twelve years old yet.

  I’ll send you copies of some stuff the undercover dudes from the Civil Disobedience Unit been collecting. Check it out. You won’t believe it. Kids is crazy these days. And cold. Mean and cold. Smart too. Capable of any damned thing. We looking at a cockeyed kiddie insurrection brewing.

  They want to take over, man. Little runty-assed no-hair-on-their-dicks neophytes want to run the city. Yeah. Money Power Things. MPT. What you see on the signs is saying they want their share. Claim the only difference between them and grown-ups is grown-ups hold the money, power and things. Funny, ain’t it? Same shit we wanted back in the sixties. Only these kids bolder than us. They don’t want to be something else. They don’t want to be white or shareholders or grown-up. They want it all, everything adults have, the MPT. Then they’ll run the world their way. Run it better than we do. So they say. And I halfway believe they could. Know what I mean, Cudjoe? Be hard to fuck up worse than we’re fucking up. You know what I mean. They got a point there.

  Bottom line is this, though. Get this. When the kids in control of MPT, they gon ship old motherfuckers like you and me away. Old Islands, bro. Ship us off to these elephant graveyards where we spozed to die. See, getting old is getting greedy and useless. So everybody over twenty-one got to hat up. Live in adult concentration camps is what it comes down to. It’s written down in their pamphlets and posters. We’ll be sent off to work and grow old and die. Shut away so we don’t crowd their space. Everything for the young. Shit end of the stick for the old. It’s fair, they say, because everybody’s young once. And nobody has to grow old if they don’t want to. Hint. Hint. You dig? They say it’s just birth control in reverse. Fairer, they say. Cause at least the olds have their chance to be young.

  One more piece of this madness we’ve learned about. Fixers. Fixers are these goddamned cute-little-kid-next-door death squads. Free of charge they’ll take out troublesome adults. You know, abusers, pimps, dealers, derelicts, unreasonable teachers and parents. Fix up problems for other kiddies. Half-pint assassins. Fixers. And these juvenile delinquents think they’re going to change the world.

  Who writes the pamphlets?

  Pamphlets, leaflets, posters. Some are like comic books. Pictures tell the story for kids who can’t read. Recruiting brochures are what they are. That and inflammatory propaganda. Spreading the word. You know. A battle for the hearts and minds of kids. Of course that rapping music’s in it. And the stuff on the walls part of it too. A big part. Putting out the message every way they can.

  But who’s the they? Kids doing it all?

  There’s one long pamphlet. Can’t see a kid writing it. It’s a manifesto, carefully thought out, cleverly worded, organized. Wish I had somebody in my office who could turn out copy like that. Possibly an older kid could have written it. But it’s not kid style. Reads like the prose we used to hammer out in those all-night emergency meetings. Our demands, our grievances, all the bullshit we wasn’t gon accept from the Man no more. What I believe is someone’s using the kids.

  Outside agitators?

  What you grinning at? I know what you’re thinking but sometimes it’s true. Outsiders come in, stir up trouble. A fact. Don’t care how dry the straw is and how high it’s heaped in the bam, you still need a match.

  To light the fire.

  Light the fire.

  Timbo. Has anyone downtown heard anything about the boy who was saved?

  We always talking about the fire, ain’t we? No matter what I think we talking about, it comes down to the fire. Well, the answer’s no. When you read what I send you, though, you’re going to get a shock. The fire’s in it. In a list of atrocities that prove adults don’t give a fuck about kids. The lousy school system, abortion, lack of legal rights, child abuse, kiddie porn, kids’ bodies used to sell
shit on TV, kids on death row, high infant mortality. In that list as one of the latest signs. Cause the fire burned up mostly kids. And also because a kid managed to survive. Survived bullets and flames and flood and bombs. Superkid, dig. City used everything in its arsenal but the little mothafucker got away. Simba, right? He’s a symbol of kid power. He’s a hero, magic, they say. Went through hell to show the others they can do it. Do anything.

  Olds are Vampires. They suck youngs’ blood.

  Schools teach you the 3 Ds. Kids are Dirty, Dumb, Dependent. Schools treat you like beasts who must be tamed. The truth is we are perfect. Our bodies are perfect and clean. Our thoughts make perfect sense. We have a perfect right to Money, Power, and Things.

  Being born is good. Growing old is bad.

  Play not work.

  This truth can set you free.

  I don’t know, man. Don’t know how seriously to take any of this. But something’s out there. And it ain’t pretty. You ready for a long walk off a short pier, Cudjoe? You ready to be fixed? You ready to slave in a salt mine on an Old Island so some little jitterbug can party?

  Cudjoe remembers Timbo’s answer. He remembers a waiter clearing the table. Mr. Maurice cruising by one last time to stroke and be stroked. Recalls thoughts that rose in him. All this ceremony, this help, squads of saucers, plates, glasses, cups and silverware, the dirty pots and pans back in the kitchen that had cooked what they’d eaten. How many hands, how much time and trouble required to fill the stomachs of two black men who probably weren’t that hungry in the first place? A wave of shame and humiliation. Where are his children? Caroline? What would any of the people living and dead whose opinions he values think of this lunchtime debacle? What could he say to a starving person about this meal, this restaurant, this possibility of excess made real by the city? Why did he sit still for it? Accumulating. Bloating. Smiling and chattering while piles of bones, hunks of fat, discarded gristle and cores, skins and decorative greens and sculpted peels, corks, cans, bottles, grease, soiled linen, soggy napkins, crumbs on the floor, shells, what was unconsumed and unconsumable, waste and rot and persiflage heaped up, the garbage outweighing him, taller than he was, usurping his place. Eaten by refuse faster than he can cram it down his throat. He’d lunched with his old pal Timbo and whatever it was destroying the city gorged itself upon them and shit them out even as ice cubes dinged in crystal goblets and silver coffee spoons chimed against the edges of bone-china cups. Not so much a thought as a sensation. The experience of being swallowed. Used and abused. Slipping and sliding down into a stinking, slithy darkness. Lost, lost and almost enjoying the ride, the plunge, but sickened too, helpless and pitiful and exhausted. Finally expelled.