The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories

by Steve Almond

  DOUGLASS LIES IN the crook of Lincoln’s arm. From above, where the night clouds puff like whipping cream, their two forms compose a chain link.

  “Tad plays a sort of theater game in his closet,” Lincoln says.

  “He is your third?”

  “Fourth.”

  “And the others?”

  “Eddie died at three. And Willie, Mary’s favorite, just last year. Tad will die too, just before his eighteenth birthday. Sometimes, it seems everything I touch dies.”

  Douglass lays his hand across Lincoln’s chest. “I am not dead.”

  “No. There is that.”

  “IT SEEMS STRANGE how dreams fill the Bible. I can not say that I believe in them, but I had the other night an episode which has haunted me ever since. Afterwards, I opened the Bible to the 28th chapter of Genesis, Jacob’s wonderful dream. I turned to another page, then another, and at every turn encountered some reference to a dream or vision.” Lincoln rubs his eyes. “Saul. Nebuchadnezzar.”

  He is standing at the window behind his desk, facing away from his wife, who has entered in her elaborate bedclothes.

  “Come away from there, Abraham.”

  Lincoln can see her reflection in the glass, her mouth set in a line.

  “Come to bed. You are talking in riddles again.”

  “Not riddles, dear. Dreams.”

  “What is the difference?”

  Lincoln glances about. The lamps are dimmed, the brownish light best suited to a séance. Stacks of papers rise around him. “Have you noticed how this office has come to resemble a crypt?”

  Mary yawns. “If you would simply keep your affairs in order.”

  PASSING INTO GREENVILLE, Douglass tosses in his bedclothes. His head aches miserably. Night lends the willows on either bank the appearance of hunched croppers. From behind them, a figure drifts forward, an apparition in gray muslin. Husks of corn lay gnarled in his hair. He stops short of the water, hovering, and moans.

  A fury, Douglass thinks. I shall ignore him.

  “Yes. I’ve no business with you, nigger. You are just a fat mouth, a chest full of dull powder. I have come for him. He is mine, now.”

  “Yours?”

  “Surely you don’t imagine him to be yours?”

  The fury opens his black mouth and shivers with laughter.

  Douglass shakes Lincoln, thinking to secret him to the other bank. “Lincoln. Arise, Lincoln.”

  Lincoln lies perfectly still, swaddled in his blanket. The night smells sticky and wrongly sweet.

  “Please, Lincoln, arise!”

  “ABOUT TEN DAYS ago I retired late, Mary. I was awaiting word from Appomattox. Do you remember the night? I fell into a slumber, standing right here, on this very spot.”

  “Abraham. Please.”

  “Soon I began to dream. I felt a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a great number of people were mourning. I wandered downstairs. There, the silence was broken by the same sobbing. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same sounds of distress met me as I passed along. The rooms were lit and every object familiar to me, but where were all the people?”

  “I am leaving—”

  “I was puzzled and alarmed. I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments.”

  “Stop this! I will not hear another word.”

  Lincoln hears her footsteps retreating.

  “Around this corpse were stationed soldiers acting as guards and a throng of people gazing upon the corpse, whose face was covered. Others wept pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The president’ was his answer. ‘He was killed by an assassin!’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream.”

  He is still at the window, regarding the night. “Well, it is only a dream, Mary. Let us say no more about it, and try to forget it.”

  Douglass, perched behind a telescope on his hillside, watches Lincoln’s lips, at last, grow still.

  THE FLATBOAT GLIDES along toward the Gulf of Mexico. On the far bank, a group of Negroes circles a modest grave. A preacher, his robe frayed and torn, shovels dirt into the pit. A woman cries out. The dawn has made everything wet.

  Lincoln climbs groggily to his feet. “My God,” he says. “My head feels like a rifle tamped to fire.” He rubs his temples and surveys the scene. “Who are they mourning, Douglass?”

  Douglass shakes his head.

  “Speak man.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Perhaps we can offer a prayer.” Lincoln directs the flatboat toward the shore.

  “It is too late, sir.”

  “Have you no compassion, Douglass? Stay a minute and offer condolences. Perhaps the slain—”

  “Please, Lincoln, let us pass along.”

  “They are mourning, friend. We shall exhibit some grace. We must not deaden ourselves to grace.”

  The preacher pats a final scoop of dirt. The mourners turn, begin to file away from the bier. With a start, Douglass notes a single white face among them: the president’s wife, in a plain silk kerchief. Lincoln seems to notice nothing. He presses condolences onto the preacher, whose eyes bug in astonishment.

  Returning to the boat, Lincoln draws a breath and slowly exhales. He sets his hand on Douglass’s shoulder, steadies himself against a fainting spell. “I am reminded here of a story—”

  “Damn you, Lincoln! It is all story with you. Do you not see what is happening?” Douglass shrugs the hand away. He has begun to weep.

  Lincoln gazes at the gray morning and lowers himself to a sitting position. His legs dangle, so that his feet are dragged along in the water. To Douglass, they look like a pair of fish struggling exquisitely against the current.

  “We are not far from New Orleans,” Lincoln says. “We are close now.”

  “THERE ONCE WAS a man who found no happiness in his life. He was sad every moment of the day. His duties were many and without mercy. Senators ran to him in anger. Common men blackened their hearts on his behalf. A nation of mothers cursed his name. He hoped to make himself content through an adherence to God’s will, but when he examined his beliefs found he held none. His wife went insane, Douglass. His children died like flies. His one love perished.” Lincoln’s voice deepens and curls, assumes the timbre of dream. “He behaved nobly, but for reasons he could not fathom. His faults were but the shadows his virtues cast. He saw himself grimly advancing on history, but came to understand it was the other way around. He grew bored of his own stories and savored none of his achievements. His single respite was sleep. And then that left him too. Hold me, Douglass. All the strange checkered past seems to crowd now upon my mind.”

  “DO YOU HEAR ME, Mary? I am speaking of a strange dream.”

  “Damn your dreams. Dress yourself properly. I shan’t be made the object of ridicule in a full theater.”

  “YOU WILL UNDERSTAND,” Lincoln says. “You are the one man among all of them who must, by needs, understand.” He stares at Douglass and Douglass stares back. Each man can hear the other’s breath. They are so close they might embrace.

  Instead, Lincoln takes up his long pole and pushes off from the bank. Douglass stands on the shore, watching, until the figure is but a gangly figment, dead to duty, dead to memoranda, dead to the human struggle and to the wickedness of blood, alive only to himself and the green of the gulf.

  ON HIS OWN DEATHBED, thirty years later, Douglass will consider a singular vision of Lincoln, his long body laid along the flatboat, his legs dangling, feet cutting through the glassy water, the water washing his glassy feet, the flatboat floating through a city still asleep, floating wakelessly.

  THE IDEA OF MICHAEL JACKSON’S DICK

  BRAMBLE WAS TALKING about Michael Jackson again. “What I think he’s done is he’s bleached his dick. He’s tried to turn his dick white.”

  “You can’t
turn your dick white,” I said.

  Bramble poured himself another vodka. “Are you Michael Jackson?” he asked. “If the answer is ‘No, I’m not Michael Jackson,’ then I don’t know why you’re talking about his dick.”

  “You’re talking about his dick,” I said.

  “Has he even got a dick?” said Delk.

  “Oh, he’s got a dick,” Bramble said. “He’s got a dick alright.”

  We were on Delk’s porch, watching the sun flame out over our neat little southern city, where we’d come to cash in on the emerging field of Cultural Studies. None of us belonged here. That was totally obvious. But they’d let us in and our department chair, being a southerner, was too polite to do the decent thing and rescind our funding.

  Every now and again, an undergraduate would stumble past, hungry for some kind of dope. It was a Friday in spring. They were just waiting for sundown to jump on one another.

  “You sound pretty confident,” I said.

  “Photos,” Bramble said. “I’ve seen photos.”

  “I don’t want to hear about this,” I said.

  “Long and thin and pale.” Bramble leered. “Think: albino garter snake.”

  “How about if we stop talking about Michael Jackson’s dick?” I said.

  Delk started to sing “Beat It” in a pinched falsetto.

  But it was no use trying to stop Bramble. He was like weather in that way—broad and incontrovertible.

  “Let me tell you boys a little story. When Jacko was about fifteen years old, he went over to Paris for a special appearance. This was after the Jackson 5 had fizzled out, but before the big solo push. A fallow period, if you will. Anyway, he was over there, when is this, like, late seventies, for a benefit, a benefit for the child victims of land mines.”

  “Child victims,” Delk said. “Perfect.”

  Bramble waved his cigarette.

  “They wheeled all these mangled up kids into this grand ballroom to watch Michael do a little lip-synch and dance thing, these kids from, like, Kurdistan and Latvia, bobbing their heads and blinking at all the flashbulbs from the photographers trying to capture the moment for PR purposes. Suddenly, there’s this big commotion at the back of the room. Who should appear but Princess Diana? This is in the early days of the marriage, before the bulimia burned out her throat. She was a huge fan of Jacko. A documented fan. They arranged this backstage meeting, very hush-hush. Michael’s kind of shaken up, though, seeing all those kids. He starts to cry. Diana starts to cry. They start talking about all the pressure they have to deal with, you know, being famous, the fans, the press, and so forth. This is what the super famous talk about. It’s like their shared story, this aggrandized sense of grief, no one understands. Lady Di is smitten. She gets her security detail to smuggle her upstairs to where he’s staying and what happens is, they spend the night together. As in, together.” Bramble settled back in his chair and took a puff of his cigarette. It was lewd how much he enjoyed smoking.

  “That is such fucking bullshit,” Delk said.

  “Check the files.”

  Bramble did have files. He had read all the literature on Michael Jackson, the semiotic work out of Berkeley, the race-gender surveys undertaken at Michigan, every one of the 67 unauthorized biographies. He had also amassed an archive of video footage. To Bramble, Michael Jackson marked the apotheosis of psycho-sexual/racial celebrity confusion. He had explained all of this in a lengthy paper (forthcoming in The International Journal on Pop Culture and Its Discontents) titled “Pretty Young Thing: The Making of a PostModern Frankenstein.”

  He had no compunction about lying when it came to Jackson either, because Jackson had, in his view, placed himself beyond traditional categories of truth. Whatever vestige of authentic personhood might have existed had long since been scraped away.

  “Michael Jackson is over,” Delk said. “Nobody gives a shit about him anymore. He was a big deal, like, 20 years ago. Thriller and all that. You know who cares about him now? The French. I don’t know anyone in the United States who gives a shit about him.”

  “Why is his trial front-page news?”

  Bramble had a point. All week long, the local paper had been running stories about Jackson’s lawsuit against his plastic surgeon. They’d run a photo on the front page, showing Jackson swathed in bandages. He looked like a delicate mummy.

  “That’s just, like, the whole media sell-shit mentality. They put him on TV because he’s a freak. There’s no deeper meaning,” Delk said. “Why do you always assume there’s some deeper meaning to Michael Jackson?”

  I was afraid Delk might ask this. Bramble took a long, leisurely sip of his vodka. He drank the stuff from plastic bottles, which meant his breath often carried a hint of isopropyl. I knew this because I lived with Bramble.

  “Michael is everything we could ever hope to learn about self-contempt. This is a black man with all the fame and money in the world, a tremendous talent, who despises the conditions of his birthright. So he sets about trying to reverse all of them. Rather than adult women, he seeks out boys. Rather than accept his masculine Negroid features, he attempts to re-create himself as Elizabeth Taylor from her National Velvet days. That’s really what he’s trying to do. He’s even attempted to shave his own bones down. That’s why his face is collapsing now. The cartilage is starting to poke through. It’s a total genetic self-renunciation. When he went to Africa, he wore a mask the entire time. They brought oxygen over there for him, so he wouldn’t have to breathe the air. He was scared to breathe the air that other black people breathe.”

  Delk swigged at his vodka. “RuPaul should beat his ass. I’d pay good money to see that.”

  “What would be the point?” Bramble said. “Michael already hates himself more than anyone else could.”

  “Just tell me this,” Delk said. “Does he fuck those little boys or what?”

  “No no no,” Bramble said. “He’s scared to death of germs. What he wants, actually, is to be welcomed by these little boys into their world. He’s revisiting the trauma of his own boyhood.”

  “What trauma?” Delk said. “He was a fucking rock star. Or whatever, before that, Motown.”

  “His dad beat him,” Bramble said. “His brothers despised him. His mother was in denial. No one ever made him feel loved as a child. He was just this little performing monkey. It was a kind of slavery. And all the desperation. Do you know where he grew up? Gary, Indiana. Have you guys ever been to Gary? It’s a graveyard.”

  “When were you in Gary?” I said.

  “I’ve driven through,” Bramble said. “A couple of times.”

  There was a nice little silence, which made me hopeful that we could stop talking about Michael Jackson. It was a downer topic, one that made me think of America as a terrible disease.

  Living in the South didn’t help. Race wasn’t something you discussed here, unless you were in a classroom, and most towns were really two towns, the black part and the white part, and people might spend time in the other town (usually blacks who made the trip over for work), but aside from that, no one wanted to mess with the karma. There was too much history, the blood of a native war, and all these elaborate manners had sprung up to make sure the dead stayed buried.

  “I’d fuck Janet,” Delk said finally.

  “I’d fuck Tito,” I said. This was not true. I would not fuck Tito. But I was hoping to throw Bramble off the scent.

  “What you have to realize about Michael is that he’s become dependent on his own mortification. This is what’s known as the Fame–Flagellation Nexus. Think of it as a more sophisticated version of the Negative Attention Syndrome. The subject attempts to use an external source of adulation to counteract a sense of worthlessness. This naturally causes an internal conflict, guilt over his success, invariably subconscious, which spurs a set of behaviors aimed at undercutting the adulation. Virtually everything Michael does is engineered to humiliate him. The sham marriages, the shitty records, the bizarre surgeries, the dangling
babies—”

  “I don’t think that monkey did much for him,” Delk said.

  “Bubbles,” Bramble said. “He was a chimp.”

  Bramble had devoted an entire section of his paper to Bubbles. It was called “Bubbles: An Object Lesson in Totemic Identification.”

  “The point is, the tide of fame turns against him. He becomes the object of derision. But even this, you see, is preferable to his internal state, which is one of abnegation, of deadness. He comes to need the abuse in order to exist. Most celebrities suffer from the same affliction, though you’ll notice it’s more exaggerated among black men, because they are simultaneously loathed and fetishized by the popular culture. Other examples would include Mike Tyson, O. J. Simpson, and Gary Coleman.”

  I got up and went around back to take a piss on the fig tree. This was something Delk encouraged. He was a meaty fellow with frat-boy tendencies. How he’d wound up in cultural studies was beyond us. My own theory was that an ex-girlfriend had slipped him some kind of Mickey.

  Bramble was still buzzing away. I heard the phrases freak signifier and collateral sexualization. I heard Bramble lighting up another cigarette. I watched myself pissing on the fig tree and wondered if Bramble would ever shut up.

  I liked the guy. He was relentless in a way I admired, and totally, annoyingly earnest. But there was something desperate in his tone, which made me suspect he hadn’t really decided who he was, that he hoped all his ideas might make him someone. I’m not saying I was so different; a bit less obvious, maybe.

  I zipped up and turned around and was startled to find a little girl, maybe about five, watching me from the second-story window of the house behind Delk’s. She hadn’t seen anything vital, I was pretty sure. But she knew I’d been taking a piss and that it was probably wrong for an adult to be pissing on a fig tree.

  She smiled, like she was a little bit embarrassed, because she herself had been caught doing something naughty before and knew that it felt good, as well as bad.

  I waved at her. She lifted one hand from her thigh and returned the wave. Then she did a little pirouette, some kind of ballet move, which made her blond hair float through the air.