I’m not looking to give you consolation. I wish I was able. What I’m trying to do is share my way of thinking about some things that are basically unthinkable. I cannot separate myself from you. Yet I understand we’re different. I will try to accept and deal with whatever shape your life takes. I know it’s not my life and try as I might I can’t ease what’s happening to you, can’t exchange places or take some of the weight for you. But I believe you have the power in your hands to do what no one can do for you. Live your life strongly, fully, moment by moment. Make do. Hold on. Each day will be slightly different. Some will surprise you. Pleasantly or unpleasantly. We don’t know what the future will bring. We do have a chance to unfold our days one by one and piece together a story that shapes us. It’s the only life anyone ever has. Hold on.
PART III
The old town’s dying behind J.B.’s back. Rats and fat cats fleeing. City in flames crackling against the horizon. Tuba-doo. You were beautiful when you smiled, child. My baby. My opp-poop-a-doop. A blind man know you’re burning now. Don’t have to see nothing. Don’t have to touch. You smoking, darling. Smoky-doo. Halfway up my goodness nose. Nose wide open. Oo wheee. Shake a hand. Strike a match.
One foot after tother. Shuffle with that store on your back, man. It’s your mama told you better be home fore dark, better be here long long before the band starts playing. Dinner be ready bout half past eight you better be on time. Don’t be stoppin nowhere for nothing. Ain’t slaving in this kitchen for my health. Pots boiling. Greens burping. Set yo foot in the paff. Liff it. Tote it. Motivate it, old man. J.B. remembers her voice, her meaty arms, but there’s no home no more. And he stares where the city should be. Hurts like his own eyelash on fire. Blazing away, a roof of tar and feathers crumples, the ridge above his eyepit disintegrates, turns to ash. His name is James. James Brown. They teased him forever when the singer stole his thunder. The jokes got old, but it’s still please, please, please, don’t go his name. Him and no other turning his J.B. back on the famous flaming city and walking away like shit, it ain’t nothing to me. Petroleum wigged singers, signifying niggers, burning cities, his own scorched, black ass. Don’t mean a thing. Don’t mean a thing.
At dawn there be another one. Always nother one. Nother city, nother name, nother woman. He misses his Big Mama rising on her elbow a second as she’s turning, her bone a cleaver and she’s chopping their soft mattress in two. For a second there as she pivots away from him, raised up on one elbow, she looks like she might sink. Her droopy titty. Her sleepy eyes. All her brown weight on the point of her crusty bow turning, pivoting toward him or away from him, God only knows, in the bed. Be another morning tomorrow morning. If he lives that long.
He remembers all the smoke from burning cities he’s ever sucked up the four-lane blues highway of his nose. The stink and putrefaction. The flies. He’ll miss this city. He always misses them. It hurts to just walk away. Leaving everything behind. Nothing. A vacant lot where he picked a flower for his lady’s pompadoured hair.
It’s almost finished now. Loud pops of automatic weapons fire scything down naked bodies lined up against walls and fences. Like taking down wash. Only these bodies are dirty and make dirty heaps where they crumple, drawing flies, dogs, crows, stirring in the hot wind of fire storms smashing whole city blocks like bowling balls scoring strikes. The figure wavers. Like a highway in heat. Many, many pekel falling down, falling down. Blown away because they don’t suit somebody’s purposes, cut down because this is the last morning of the last day and they are victims of terminal boredom, somebody’s needing something to do.
This job, like God’s, of making a city had wearied J.B. Light every morning to tame. Playing father son and holocaust to the kids running wild in streets and vacant lots.
Who’s zooming who? The mayor born in Georgia? The Old South. Red mud country, slow-talking roots. Rumor has it the paddy-boy director of public safety a cracker, too. Imported from Bull Connorsville, given a voice lift, a polyester leisure suit, a slinky, retarded teenage mistress from an Italian slum in South Philly (why can’t we write about these things—they’re not true, are they?) and carte-blanche, white power to whip whatever heads needed to roll. Carte blanche and the black mayor’s dark blessing, chocolate oreo cookie above the director’s vanilla brow, so who’s gonna get in their way? Zooming whom?
This is an irresponsible way of looking at things. There may be survivors in the bar-b-qued city who require assistance. Better to light one little candle than to sit on one’s ass and write clever, irresponsible, fanciful accounts of what never happened, never will. Lend a hand. Set down your bucket. A siren screams. We should stop in our tracks. Walls are tumbling, burning-hot walls on tender babies. And you sit here moaning cause your welfare check’s late. Talking about the mailman’s a racist, likes to watch you squirm thirtieth of the month. Mama’s Day every month, when your body’s flayed and you’re so broke flies won’t even light on you.
What should open now in response to the tragedy of a city burning is the vista of your heart. But you run away every time. You’ll turn your back every time. Philadelphia’s on fire. You worry about your chest burning. Wonder if smoke’s bubbling out your ears. J.B., you’ve got to get up off your ass. World’s out there and it’s begging for your attention. What we need is realism, the naturalistic panorama of a cityscape unfolding. Demographics, statistics, objectivity. Perhaps a view of the city from on high, the fish-eye lens catching everything within its distortion, skyscraper heads together, rising like sucked up through a straw. If we could arrange the building blocks, the rivers, boulevards, bridges, harbor, etc. etc. into some semblance of order, of reality, then we could begin disentangling ourselves from this miasma, this fever of shakes and jitters, of self-defeating selfishness called urbanization. In time a separation (spelled in case you ever forgot, with a rat) between your own sorry self and the sorrows of the city could be effected. If you loved yourself less, J.B. If you loved your city more. Especially now as it dreams this incinerated, smoking vision of itself. Realism: the stolid arbitrariness of the paltry wares we set out each morning in the market square to make a living.
I love you truly. Truly I do. Like a brother.
J.B. thinks of drops of blood on the pavement. What passes for pavement between these houses owned by pests. He remembers the trading post where you could collect a bounty for rat scalps. Bonus if you brought them in alive. He thinks of young black boys shotgunning other black boys, black girl babies raising black girl babies and the streets thick with love and honor and duty and angry songs running along broken curbs, love and honor and duty and nobody understands because nobody listens, can’t hear in the bloody current that courses and slops dark splashes on the cracked cement, how desperate things have become. How straight the choices, noble the deeds.
This is your rap-rap-rap-rapcity rapper on the dial
So just cool out and lissen awhile
Cause if you don’t dig what I’m rappin bout
They’ll pull your skin off, turn you inside out
They’ll pull your skin off, turn you inside out
It’s a new trickeration, a hip sensation, divine inspiration blowing cross the nation
They peel your skin then you’re in like Flynn
Drain your brain so ain’t no pain
Makes you feel so real, it’s a helluva deal
No money down, easy credit
Skin’s gone, you can just forget it.
Dippy-do, dippy-do, rip a dip rip rip
Rippy-dip, rippy-dip do-rip dip
Put their hands in your heart
Rip it all apart
Keep on peeling
For a righteous feeling
You got to die one day
Mize well go this way
You’re a separate nation
Under their domination
Takes you for a ride
Peel away your pride
When your skin’s gone, children
Are you black insid
e.
Best to let it burn. All of it burn. Flame at the inmost heart. The conflagration blooming, expanding outward, like ripples from a stone to the corners of the universe. One little candle. The scab above Twanda’s eyelid burns and festers and grows concentrically as she picks at it, sworls of white-speckled soreness on her black forehead and it leaps from her brow suddenly as a siren in the middle of the night and we know instantly it’s coming for us, we’re implicated as its light arcs and flashes in circles, we are infected, finished in the feral swoop of its dirty-fingered stab into the town houses where we are hiding. The gem in her forehead explodes slowly as a rose blooming, dying simultaneously because we neglect to tend it, adore it, praise it as our own.
These ruins. This Black Camelot and its cracked Liberty Bell burn, lit by the same match ignited two blocks of Osage Avenue. Street named for an Indian tribe. Haunted by Indian ghosts— Schuylkill, Manayunk, Wissahickon, Susquehanna, Moyamensing, Wingohocking, Tioga—the rivers bronzed in memory of their copper, flame-colored bodies, the tinsel of their names gilding the ruined city. Oh, it must have been beautiful once. Walking barefoot in green grass, the sky a blue haven, the deep woods full of life. Now the grit of old dogshit ground into the soil lodges in our children’s toes when they play in the park. Poison works its way through their veins to their brains. They play cowboys and Indians. Colored and white with real guns. Shots exchanged over Cobbs Creek and one player falls down forever. Real bullets bridging the racial gap, hurtling over the scrufty water and trees that separate two warring villages. The Book of Life exchanges hands. Who will read it next, kill for it next? A red ghost thin as conviction giggles its last laugh. No one rescues the victim. He’s shot, drowns, waits for fire. Water turns rusty with old blood. Old, old thirteen-year-old blood, old the instant it begins seeping into another container. Cobbs Creek named for somebody named Cobb who was named Cobb because somebody else was. Named. Cobbs Creek. Where you can always bleed twice in the same place.
Images of years past dog James Brown as he trudges toward the suburbs. He thinks he was at the Salvation Army shelter last New Year’s Eve. Like maybe on a folding chair watching with a bunch of other celebrants on folding chairs, what else, TV usher in the new year with lists. Top tens, top one hundreds. Everybody who’s able constructs a list. Ten somethings. Lists of ten most popular because that’s how many fingers and toes. Little piggies we can wiggle, name. Lists of lists. Lists listing. Lists passing in the night. Lists while I woo thee. J.B. can’t recall the items or the lists listing the items. Only flashes of commercials, of blood. News reviews of massacres. A year of terror. Us versus Them. Who’s zooming who? Shattered, bloodstained glass strewn in an airport lounge. Mile after square mile of broken glass littering the countryside. Lebanon Soweto West Bank Belfast San Salvador Kabul Kampuchea. Spin the globe and touch it wherever it stops. You’ll get blood on your finger. A gigantic jigsaw sheet of glass smashed to smithereens and fragments spattered everywhere nobody can put it back together again. And even if a someone came along with infinite patience and began to gather the grains, the small bits into a heap and chose one speck and began to seek its mate, its match from among miles of wounded glass, if such a patient one and such a rare passion to mend revealed itself, even with the bad luck and patience to live and die a million times moving barefoot through the barbed-wire sea of glass, so what? Don’t mean a thing. Even that one couldn’t knit it back together.
Smoke gets in your eyes. Smoky-doo. Bye, bye, baby. Good-bye.
Hey—hey, youall, this rapcity here
Got a tale to tell make you shed a tear
Bout some dreadlocked bloods trying to do their thing
And a evil Empire with a evil King
Not the kind of story I like to tell
Dreads was seeking heaven, all they caught was hell
Didn’t eat no meat, let their kids run naked
Got the Emperor uptight, he just couldn’t take it
Called his army, his navy, his flying corps
Said: This shit’s gone too far, I can’t stand it no more
Got to play by my rules if you live in my city
Fuck with the piper, don’t expect no pity.
Shame if babies have to burn
But life is hard, they got to learn
Give them primitives five minutes to leave the premises
If they don’t comply, come down like Nemesis
When the smoke clears, don’t want nary a one
Left standing to tell me how my city should be run
Left standing to tell me how my city should be run
How can I rule with equanimity
When every day them monkeys making a monkey out of me.
You wouldn’t believe the ordinance brought to bear
To drive them Rastas out their lair
Dreads didn’t falter, they fought toe to toe
But the odds were too heavy, they had to go
It was like Tyson throwing on a little kid
The kid was doomed whatever he did
Down they went in bullets, water and flame
It was Murder One by another name
Murder One by any name
Uh—uh. Uh—uh, uh—uh, uh—uh
Spleeby—spleeby, spleeby—spleeby, spleeby do duh
I—I—I—I’m the—the—the rapper, the dapper, the last backslapper
Wit you on my team we the cream de cream
Don’t cry, don’t moan, don’t pine away
Them Dreadys be back another day
Remember what you heard rapcity say
Them Dreads coming back another day
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey—hey, hey
Them Dreads coming back, somebody’s got to pay
Dreads coming back
Somebody’s gotta pay
Gotta pay, gotta pay
Somebody’s gotta pay.
When they pee in the weeds sounds like a fire. Weeds kneehigh and crackling brown sometimes Alphonso fancied himself trucking through hog hair. Making tracks on a big piggy’s bristle back. On another planet, one with hair for grass and seven snout-pussed green moons. A sky with something always in its eye. No fingers to rub shit out. You can shortcut anywhere in the city through these dark empty overgrown lots. Sent by Vator, king of the universe. You go in a phony, stiff-legged, cartoon run like Vator’s boys across these raggedy fields and the weeds sound like death brushing your jeans. You are a comb, a pick, a razor styling through this no-man’s-land of stinking weeds.
Bunch of us in Old Vats nothing-can-harm-you magic armor. If we bumped into each other be loud as garbage cans falling in the alley. A whole little army of motherfucking bad dudes pissing in the weeds behind the Jew’s store. Whizzing he heard a white boy call it once in Clark Park. Take me whiz, Mommy. Watering the weeds, scalding them and maybe he hears you pissing, maybe it’s him, or the ghost of him outside the ghost of his store, old four-eyed Jew above you in the black sky who psyches you into looking up a minute so he can look down on you and say, Shame, shame, on you, boys. His bald helicopter head. Light on steel rims of his specs rotoring, Roto-Rooter round and round the blades of the chopper silently chuck chuck spinning, keeping him up there on patrol in the air over top of where his store used to be.
We run him away from the neighborhood. Getting Uzis next week but didn’t need guns to stick up ole Markey. Stole the whole cash register when we couldn’t make the sucker work right in the store. Snatched it up off the counter and split. Mark the Shark knew exactly who we was. Who else it gon be? No ski masks or stocking caps. What difference that shit make? He knew. The Jew knew. So we bust in broad daylight. Told him, We got to have it, today, old man. Give it up, hymie.
Snatched the motherfucker right off the counter. Broad daylight. All us together. Like we so black and bad nobody could see us less we want them seeing us. No lie. That’s the way it went down. Markowitz ain’t said a mumbling word. Knows it’s his ass if he calls the cops. Like taking lunch money from
chumps at school. You got to come back here tomorrow, sucker, so you bet not say shit, you hear. This where you be tomorrow and we be here too. So give it up and keep your mouth shut.
All kinda mess in the weeds. Piece of bicycle, cat bones, cashbox, shoes, a mattress the nastiest thing melting down like a dead body with ugly shit inside when the skin rots. Wonder who been laying up on that thing so many nasty spots look like measles or some spattery diarrhea disease all over it. Jump on it and bounce till one them rusty springs pop through tear up Lester’s leg. Gash him from knee to ankle and he howls like a stuck pig. Leave it alone then. Stuffing rot out get wet stink like pus. Be your mama’s bed. Be where she sell her pussy. Roaches and water bugs and spiders be crawling in there too. One them slimy black bugs be your daddy. See, you ain’t cool you cut your whole damn leg off running through here be glass and shit and a stove, a Cadillac fender, a kitchen sink. Dog dukie, junkie puke, soft banana kinda mess you slip in and fall. Wasn’t there five minutes ago. These warriors pissing a river. Nuff pee pee drown you you come running through here when we finish. Wasn’t nothing a minute ago then you come flying cross the lot be knee-deep in piss, you be drowned before you know it.
Pee creeping like fire through a jungle. Every animal scared, hollering its holler. Haul-assing out the way. Big ones stepping on little ones. Little ones mashing their babies trying to get out the way.
Like fire. Or rain when it drops all the sudden big as eggs. Drops hurt you if they hit you. Bombs. That big, brother. I ain’t lying. So big sound like bricks hitting the cement.
Philadelphia Fire Page 17
