Philadelphia Fire

by John Edgar Wideman

  Tomorrow night we taking over downtown again. Wait till the movies let out. Charge them chumps while they still half blind. Cop a feel. Run your hand up the bitches’ clothes. Anywhere you can grab a handful. Grab ass. Grab pussy. Squeeze some tit. Off the dudes’ money. Be on they ass so fast ain’t time to holler. We gone before they catch their breath. Long gone. Biff. Bam. Thank you, ma’am. Cop and blow.

  Wish them people was a wall. So you could spray them with your mark. Those paddy-girls girls’ thighs. Those screams. The tough guy you punch in the face just cause he ain’t acting scared enough. Cause he’s calling you nigger before you rob him or touch his ole lady. Be nice to leave your mark so you could go back next day and see it still there, show the fellas you ain’t lying.

  You swoop down. You the blade, they the grass. Got your hands all in they clothes, under they clothes. No secrets. You take what you want, got it and gone before they know it’s took. You hear them squealing behind you. Your legs never get tired cause you’re one of Vator’s boys. Trick’s over that quick. Be nice if you could rewind it. Study it up close. Your mark big as life right where you left it, right where it ain’t spozed to be. Girls wearing nothing under them see-through, peek-a-boo tops. A handful of that, sure enough. A stinky finger you steal away and write her name in the air with it all the way home. Be nice to go back and play it over and over. That was you and me, babe. Remember? Member what we did? Member all the fun we had?

  My army stuffs them chumps. Right up the gut. Down to the bone. Jam city. They squeal and scatter like they the rack, we the cue. Bomb them motherfuckers. Set a fire under they asses. We the fist. Rammed up their giggies. The hard black fist. Hit them hard, real hard. Knock some on the ground. Take everything they got. Wave your piece in the faces of the ones left standing. Back. Get the fuck back, while you strip the ones on the ground. Stand shoulder to shoulder. Hard black brothers. Swoop in like Apaches, like Vietcong, hit for the middle. Grab a few. Knock a few down. You know how to pick the good ones. You know the chubby wallets, chubby bums and titties. They on the ground cause ain’t nowhere else to go. Got em trapped and we on they asses tight as white on rice. My army swoop down like thunder. Like a storm and nowhere to go but down on that hard cement. Then we on top, taking what we want, what we came for, what we find. They belong to us the minute we close down. Give it up. Give it up. Nothing you got is yours anyway. You know you stole it. Know you ain’t spozed to have it. You lied and cheat and steal to get it. Mine now. My fingers in her silky hair and silky panties. My hand in your money box, Mr. Markowitz, hymie motherfucker. Oh yeah. I be here. Where I always be. Today. Tomorrow. Wind in the weeds. Fire. In your pocket. In your ass.

  Talk to me. Lion.

  In the park called Clark we rule the dark

  Live like Noah in his ark

  They tried to shoot us, bomb us

  Drown us burn us

  They brought us here, but they can’t return us.

  We the youth, the truth

  You better learn us

  You know we’re right, don’t start no fight

  Any chump can tell we was born in hell

  Cooked lean and mean in the fiery furnace

  Lean and mean in the fiery furnace

  Don’t boss us, cross, throw us no bone

  Git the fuck out the way, leave us the fuck alone

  We own the night, gonna rule the day

  You brought us here and we’re here to stay

  here to stay

  here to stay

  A kite flutters blocks away over the low compacted roofs of my suburb. A jack-in-the-box, free at last, free at last, the kite jiggles and shimmers like a neon message. From this distance it’s one thing, then just as quickly another and the first thing again as I watch it cavort. I test my memory of its history, the bodies it cycles, swaps, retrieves, recycles, forgets. Yes. Just seconds ago it was a watermelon-headed, octopusarmed minstrel man, his torso a snake, his giant hands, white-gloved like Mickey Mouse’s, flapping and waving, a three-headed dragon, a fish, a beanstalk bearing three seedpods swaying in the air to sweet melodies only it hears. The long tail shakes, rattles, roils. There must be a string anchoring the beast because it sails horizontally without rising, reversing itself, whipping back and forth along the same path like a typewriter carriage. Farther east, beyond the last housetops, below the chimerical kite, there are hills deeply greened by trees. I think, when I need to think, of the peace those low hills might contain, if this world were other than it is, if it were a pet you could tame and diminish, if you could teach it your name and its name and teach it to come when you called with your slippers in its mouth to your easy chair beside the picture window where you’re sipping your three fingers of Cutty Sark after work.

  I am alone in the house. Nothing new. The usual in fact. Mine eyes have seen nothing more exciting lately than the coming of the kite. Wavering, flickering, silly, ominous, blowing in the wind.

  Invisible, three or four stories below the kite, there must be a hand holding the kite’s string. Whose hand, I wonder. Whose toy? Whose game? A child perhaps. An adult entertaining, instructing children. No matter. The hand, whosever, moves back and forth, back and forth, short, jerky tugs that translate into the kite’s broad rippling sallies, writing the lines of its life then erasing them as it tacks in the opposite direction. Wiping the slate clean. A slate it dirties with each line of fiction. Then removes. I can almost hear the old-fashioned banging chime as it shifts. The story appears, letter by letter, then’s gone. No-fault divorce. A film run backward to its conclusion, which is its beginning now and perfect end.

  Here is the story it writes: I am an informer. I tell tales on my friends. Who become my enemies. Because I am a snitch. I squealed on my former soul mates, my comrades huddled in the arms of the Tree of Life. Squealed to the pigs. Revealed all our good hiding places, secret springs of potable water, the edible roots and berries. Translated our secrets, stored in the sacred Book of Life, into the grunting, rooting, snarly pig tongue. Stood by aiding, abetting as Porky Pig snouts bulldozed and leveled and angry pointy Porky Pig hooves stomped.

  I betrayed our good mother Earth. Betrayed her anointed, dreadlocked King. Switched allegiance, planted incriminating evidence, stranded my good brown brothers out on a limb, high and dry.

  I feel terrible. Together, black and white and yellow and red and brown together, all the rainbow children of Life, all born to Life’s bounty, Life’s sacred trusts and duties, together we learned the message of the Book. To read it and pass on the teachings and keep the Tree alive. So when I turned, when I shifted loyalties, the most hurtful twist was the knife in my own guts, the disemboweling hari-kari wrench of my own self exposed inside out and stinking to high heaven.

  Forgive me, brothers. I didn’t know what I was doing. Still don’t. Never will. Forgive me.

  When the fires blaze highest at noon, smoke rolls in from the west, till it’s dammed by that upthrust of green hills. Smoke thickens to a wall, then slowly disintegrates during these long summer afternoons. A dusky kingdom suddenly risen then gone to rags and tatters which night swallows. I watch it intently. Read the smoke again and again for what it says about me, my fate. The only truly interesting, engaging story anyone can tell me, after all. My fate.

  My friend the mayor is expected for cocktails. Somewhere. Perhaps here. Perhaps we will watch the smoke dying together. At this window, drinks in hand, the perfect couple.

  If I see him again, it won’t be in his inner city after dark. Not for all the snow in Chinatown. My last trip into the nighttime city was definitely my last. I didn’t believe anyone remained who’d recognize me. After that trial, life sentences, the fire. So in I went for drinks, dinner, a movie. Cynthia accompanied me. We saw Hud. I fell in love again. With Newman not Cynthia. Mind love. Perfect because unrequited, impossible. The idea of him ravished me, though of course I preferred nights with Cynthia. It’s just that one needs a friend these days. Gender bonding. A gang. And Newman would
make an irresistible kingpin. Other studs would be attracted. Enough for a softball team and beers afterward in our favorite hangout and once, after we capture second place in the park league slow-pitch tourney, an evening of stag videos. Donkeys and dogs and Rhine maidens all in a row. I know he’s that kind of class guy and I miss him so much, even as Cynthia’s hand rubs mine in the box of popcorn we’re sharing in the theater. She reaches farther down into the pit between us and strokes my leg. My trousers are fawn colored, pressed and clean as driven snow. I hope there’s no butter on her fingers. But I like it. I like it, her fingers kneading my fleshy thigh, and the evening of love I anticipate begins to play across the private screen of my mind, her big, teddy-bear body naked as a pea as we romp to exhaustion; her hot sweet hungry mouth closing on my pecker, my first four fingers up to their ears in her sopping wet twat. She lets me know she’s ready too in that millisecond concupiscent caress of our fingers in the burbly box of hot buttered popcorn. She’s a good girl. In the dark she’ll lick her fingers clean before squeezing my thigh. The smell of popcorn is the smell of semen, don’t you think, after you’ve been at it awhile and the first juicy waves have dried on the sheets, starting that palimpsest you build layer by layer and you hate to shower hate to wash your linens because it smells good to the last popcorny stale drop, your smell you suddenly recall and connect as you reach in the box and pop a handful of popped kernels in the dark.

  Image a city called the City of Brotherly Love. Consider the pretension of that greeky compound, tinker with the sound till it becomes brothel-ly, City of Brothelly Love. Imagine old tumbleweed, tumbledown James Brown, J.B., living there. What was the name of the first city? At this very moment someone at the University is achieving academic prominence puzzling out the answer to that question. Was it Jericho? Our professor gathers shards of pottery. His computer swallows every bit of evidence—telexed phoned mailed modemed cabled punched faxed—from across the globe, evidence it will digest and excrete in graphs, plots, statistical tables, colored projections, Mercator maps, holograms, laser-printed bulletins, updates, summaries, reports, inching forward the known in a shorthand that is tolerated as an acceptable translation of the unknown, because nothing ever stops happening, pieces of information, sources of information proliferate, crossbreed, cyberneticize, competing claims from every corner of the earth, track the birth of the first city, keep the blessed event happening, Mama’s baby, Daddy’s maybe. The first citizen passes out cigars on the first street corner in the first city anyone ever dreamed. Jericho lives, but its crackling imminence, its buzzing persistence in the birth canal of computer tapes, relays and flashing lights has little to do with J.B. today because now his town is definitely Philadelphia, last time he looked anyway, and it’s neither first nor last but it’s all he’s got, and he must feed body and soul so he’s on his way to work but there is no work so he stops in the middle of Market Street, three blocks from City Hall, and decides since the mayor’s black, blacker by far than dreadlocked coffee-colored J.B., he, Mr. J.B., ought not to be out on the street, desperate as he is, nowhere to turn, on a flimsy day like today and people passing him like there’s no mayor in an office in City Hall blacker than J.B. Like white people still think they own everything they see and still don’t give a fuck about none of it. Least of all J.B.

  For the record, J.B. wears army fatigues, camouflage issue, big thigh pockets, pocketed also in the rear, buttons, snaps, elastic waistband, funky, filthy from six months in the field. His sweat, piss, shit, the miscellaneous stains earned from encounters with the ubiquitous sludge of the city blend into brown green black tan swirls designed to render him invisible to his enemies. On land. Who cruise the air. A T-shirt which may have been olive drab but now the colorless color of an oil slick complements his baggy trousers. He searches for a job that will pay his bills, feed his wife and kiddies, even though for years now he’s ceased believing his kidnapped family could be alive. Inside bamboo compounds guarded by brothers in creased khaki, pitiful hordes of women and children are spoiling like raw meat left out in the sun. Guards plug their ears and noses and wear thick black shades. What you don’t know, don’t hurt you. Death rules on the other side of the electrified, poisonstaked stockade where J.B.’s people are detained. Enlisted men wear tiny transistor radios stuffed in their ears. A dance boogie shuffle, a distant attentiveness separates them from officers who stand rigidly surveying the compound, thinking whatever they think about behind their gold-rimmed everlasting dark glasses.

  Nothing much to do. The men, whose women and children are captives, refuse to return from the jungle and work the rubber plantations. That means their families remain as hostages behind the bamboo walls. Rules say guards must not feed or water the hostages unless their men surrender and milk the rubber trees. So it makes for long days. Women and children dying of thirst and starvation inside the compound, you dying of boredom out here in the stubbled clearing. Except once a week it’s your duty to retrieve and bury the dead, and once every two weeks you must cut back the encroaching bush. Hours in the sun swinging machetes. Nigger work in the fields again. No one feels like singing. Stripped to the waist, fighting back the jungle that never sleeps, that circles the compound where you’ve been exiled to preside over the slow death of babies and their mamas and old folks not worth saving to cultivate the rubber trees.

  Always a threat their men may return to rescue the hostages. Rumors of camps overrun, guards impaled on bamboo stakes and roasted alive. They bullshit you with such tall tales to keep you alert. The missing men, the ones who claim they want freedom, who dress like bush natives, who call themselves rebels, are, as they’ve always been, cowards and fools. Enemies of your tribe a thousand years. Tall tales about all that too. Stories of better times when your enemies were worthy enemies and you met them in pitched battles, thousands of warriors a side, to gain honor and captives. Long ago when the land belonged to gods and the gods loved those who were fearless and steadfast and right living. A time when our clan spoke with one voice and followed the ancient ways. When drumbeat and the ululations of our women filled our hearts with the Lion’s blood, when our flesh was a fit vessel for the ancestral spirits, when the invisible ones rode us and we leaped over rivers, galloped across plains, stepped over valleys, when our splendid headdresses scraped the clouds. Old sad stories because now we are fallen, laid low. Not as lazy and worthless and low as the missing men of our captives. Not offal, not flies who circle the death stink of this camp, moaning and buzzing and pleading when darkness shrouds the forest. Not slugs who hide under rocks in daylight, pretending their women and children are not baking in the pitiless heat, no shelter, no water, their tender, naked bodies raked by the sun’s claws.

  No, we are not fallen as low as our enemies, but this guard duty drives you down. The stars grow more distant each night. It hurts to crank up my neck to view them. Muscles whine all day, supporting the weight of East German helmets, Israeli arms, British uniforms. Not much, you say, but all day every day, the weight accumulates, a certain weighty bitterness tangible in the slightest exercise of our duties. You may say the heat is getting to my brain but I swear, pulling this uniform off and on is like undressing a fresh wound. I lose skin and scabs, my blood runs every time. I would sleep in my uniform if regulations did not require crispness, creases each morning at parade. Perhaps it is truly as they preach to us: spit and polish, the crispness of our shorts and tunics, our weapons polished and oiled are all that separate us from our degraded enemies, all that protect our dear, distant women and children from the fate of those we guard.

  1ST MAYOR (WHITE): How many dissidents fit on the end of a pin?

  2ND MAYOR (BLACK): Depends on the size of the pinhead.

  1ST MAYOR: You twist everything into a racial issue.

  2ND MAYOR: No, you do.

  1ST MAYOR: The color of dissidents don’t faze me. Dissidents is dissidents. They all gotta go.

  2ND MAYOR (who’s disguised himself as 1st Mayor): Then it’s the size
of the pin.

  1ST MAYOR: It’s the man behind the pin.

  2ND MAYOR: There you go playing racial politics again.

  1ST MAYOR: And there you go playing me.

  2ND MAYOR: Let’s put the past behind us. It’s a new day. We must ask new questions. How many dissidents fit on the end of a match?

  They say Jericho’s mighty walls brought down by trumpets. They say this Republic’s built to last, blood of twenty million slaves mixed into the cement of its foundations, make it strong, brother, plenty, plenty strong. They say there are veterans’ benefits available. J.B.’s not a vet, his name not scratched on some goddamn cold-ass black-marble slab in DC, but half his crew who went to war killed over there in the jungle and half the survivors came home juiced, junkied, armless, legless, crazy as bedbugs. Fucked over good in Asian jungles whiles this Philly jungle fucking over J.B. and the brothers left here to run it. Casualties just as heavy here in the streets as cross the pond in Nam. So J.B. figures. Shit, he’s entitled to something.

  He totters toward the first official he sees, a white man, late thirties, business suit, striped silk tie, Clark Kent glasses, just in off the Chestnut Hill local for a day at the office. J.B. doesn’t know this man’s name is Richard Corey today, that the pitiful sonbitch intends a swan dive at noon from the nineteenth floor of the spanking new Penn Mutual Savings and Loan Building that’s taller than Billy Penn’s hat. So at this juncture of his last morning, what Mr. John Doe, A.K.A. Corey, sees is not bright cityscape exfoliating around him as he rises from the dark subway cavern. He is silently weeping and hot tears have fogged his specs. He is regretting a movie, a wall of smoke, a mugging. As J.B.’s scruffy, African-American mug looms closer, unseen but felt, like all the pedestrian traffic rushing this way and that around Mr. Corey, as J.B.’s shadow detaches itself from the crowd and J.B. thrusts his meal ticket—I am a vet. Lost voice in war. Please help.—into the low-riding clump of somber fog enclosing Richard Corey, Corey’s lank fingers grip his briefcase tighter. He considers the pistol inside. A Walther automatic, chosen because some hero or another, he can’t remember the movie, they all look alike, carried this particular weapon to shoot discouraging holes in teenage subway predators. A caution after the horror of the movie-queue mugging. His wallet ripped away. Cynthia’s unladylike panty show as she squirmed on the sidewalk. Could a woman be raped in ten seconds? Why was she bawling? Why didn’t she bounce up and cover herself after her assailants fled? Boo hoo, boo-hooing, her skirt hiked up, her orange frilly underwear showing as the crowd of curious citizens gathered around her where she lay. C’mon, honey. Are you OK? Did they hurt you? Here, let me help you up. But she just lay where they pushed her down, pinned in the yellow spotlight of the marquee, crying her eyes out like a big boo-hoo baby, like she didn’t understand a word he was saying or see his helping hand, like she didn’t mind showing her orange bloomers to anyone who cared to look.