The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

  8.

  An hour’s bus ride later and the sun still hot and high in the June sky, the boys were back in Kush, walking along 111th Avenue over to 96th Street.

  Passing pawn shops, a Burger Baron, Norwood School, the rainbow-flagged Pride Centre, a car wash with a dozen bays, a run-down body shop.

  From the south bank of 111th they saw the yellow police tape on Bootays, a ribbon wrapped around the worst birthday present the community’d gotten in years.

  Dodging cabs, cars and buses, they landed in front of the Hyper-Market and its OPENING SOON sign.

  “Well?” asked JC. “Aren’t we going in?”

  Rap glared at him. “Don’t rush me. Wanna think what I’m gonna say, first.”

  JC pushed on the glass door, but it was locked. He knocked loud and long.

  Finally the forty-something man in the goatee and black-and-gold skullcap came to the door.

  “Hello?”

  Up close they saw what the Band-Aids failed to cover: bruises, scrapes, and the gut-puckering purple-brown ghost from a fading black eye.

  “Uh . . . we’re . . . we’re the, uh,” fumbled Rap.

  The man stepped forward into the doorway, blocking it.

  “Kot-tam!” he snapped. “You’re those two kids!”

  “Yeah,” said JC. “Look, our bad, the other night—f’real. But man, the way you absolutely Bruce Lee’d them boys. You went Abu Ghraib on they asses! Think you could teach us that shit?”

  “Jamal!” snapped Rap. This wasn’t in the plan. And jazzing about a mass murder that almost included all of them, as if it were a movie trailer or something—was he nuts?

  “You got a hell of a nerve,” growled the man.

  Rap glared at JC.

  “Look, look, look, man,” spluttered JC, “I know, I know we shoulda—”

  “‘Man?’” he spat. “I took a beating and an arrest from the cops and stayed in jail overnight because I stepped in to save your lives! And you two little shits ran off and didn’t say word-one which coulda saved me from all that.

  “And now you show up here expecting me to train you like I owe you something . . . and you call me ‘man’?”

  Rap: “Sir. Sir, we’re—we’re sorry. But honest, we were just terrified!”

  “You were terrified? How do you think I felt when the police had their guns out and were kicking the shit outta me?”

  Jackie Chan: “We thought we were gonna die—”

  “I thought I was gonna die! Thanks to you! Now get the hell outta here!”

  Shoved himself back inside, leaned on the glass door’s metal frame till the hydraulic hissed shut. Then he latched all three clanking latches and stormed off to the back room.

  Music blasted to life: extremely loud jazz. Battering cymbals and sobbing saxophones, like someone using a wrench to beat a robot to death.

  Standing on the street, Jackie Chan had already given up. “Dude hates us, man.”

  Rap’s burn: as bad as ever.

  9.

  The next day during a lull in their English class’s review of To Kill a Mockingbird, Rap argued in whispers to convince JC (who’d begun sitting next to him) to go back to the man’s store.

  The way Rap figured it, his burn’d gone up fifty degrees from guilt alone. Maybe if he could apologise proper . . . .

  “After your brilliant ‘Train us in your Snake-and-Crane style, dude,’ now we owe the man two apologies. And this time, let me do the talking?”

  “Aiight,” conceded JC. “My bad, my bad….”

  “Oh, god,” said the man at 4:33 pm on Thursday afternoon, the day after the funeral. “You two

  again?”

  “Look, Mr. Ani,” said Rap, “I know we screwed up. And my friend here shouldn’t’ve come around asking for any favours. But seriously—”

  “We just wanna say thank you,” said JC, oblivious to Rap’s immediate glare. “And, like, we’ll work here.”

  Rap: “What?”

  “You expect me to hire you?” he laughed. Angrily.

  “He means—”

  “—we’ll volunteer, y’know?” said JC. Sounded thrilled with his own improv. “You can work us like slaves!”

  “Slaves,” sneered the man. “Do you even hear yourself?”

  Rap: “We owe you our lives, Mr. Ani. At least let us try to pay you back a little.”

  “Like I’m gonna let two carjackers into my business!”

  “We aint carjackers—we just car thieves!”

  “Jackie Chan, would you let me—! We’re not car thieves. He’s a joy-rider. His friend, the one who died, was the thief. And this idiot, look, I just know him from school. He offered me a ride and didn’t bother telling me the car was stolen—”

  “That’s true!” enthused Jackie Chan, as if he were helping.

  “So you’re saying,” said the man, as if he were laying out the plot of a particularly bad movie, “that I should let a joy-rider . . . and a kid who climbs into cars with sketchy almost-strangers . . . inside my business, handle my cash, learn the intimate details of how I make a living, and have access to all my equipment and merchandise? Have I, have I got that right?”

  JC: “Well, when yall put it like that—”

  “Okay,” said Rap, his shoulders falling, “I get it. But.”

  The man shook his head. “Stand there.” He pointed at a tile on the sidewalk. “No. Not there.There.” They moved over two steps. “There!”

  They moved back one step.

  He retreated into his store.

  Through the window they saw him sitting at his computer, typing for a furious sixty seconds hard enough to break most keyboards.

  Stood up, grabbed something out of the printer, marched back to the door.

  “Here!”

  They each took a sheet. Rap scanned it quickly:

  World’s Great Men of Colour

  by J.A. Rogers

  The Autobiography of Malcolm X

  Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

  by Walter Mosley

  Allah is Not Obliged

  by Ahmoudou Kourouma

  Live from Death Row

  by Mumia Abu Jamal

  An Autobiography

  by Angela Davis

  Brown Girl in the Ring

  by Nalo Hopkinson

  Black Girl Talk

  by the Black Girls

  Thomas Sankara Speaks

  Black Spark, White Fire

  by Richard Poe

  Rap looked up at him with eyes that must’ve said, What.

  “Read,” he sighed. “All you hafta do is read one of them. And you,” he said, glaring at Jackie Chan, “read a different one. Then teach em to each other so between the two of you, you know two books. Do that, and then come talk to me.

  “And if you don’t,” he said, his lower lip a receding drawbridge, his hand forming a fist whose fingers actually crackled as they closed, “don’t ever come back here again. And I freaking mean it!”

  10.

  The door jangled as the man leaned on the door to shut it.

  Click.

  Jackie Chan: “Damn, bwoi, we just got served.”

  “No, we just got owned.”

  “That guy for real? Expects us to read a book just so we have permission to say sorry?”

  “Look, JC, he saved our lives. What, we gonna just drip away? I mean, obviously it matters to this guy that we do this. You can’t even read one lousy book? What’s it gonna hurt? What’re you afraid of?”

  “What’re you, Oprah? Analysin me an shit?”

  “Naw, I’m Dr. Phil. ‘Joy-riding. How’s that working for ya?’ How much worse could one book be than almost getting killed for kicks?”

  “Where we even gonna get all these? Ten books or whatever? That’d cost like fifty bucks!”

  “You don’t hafta get em all. Just one. And ever hear of a library?”

  “Library?” The word blasted out of JC’s mouth like Rap’d just said they should get advanced pl
astic surgery to turn themselves into fully operational Transformers.

  “Yeah. The library.”

  “Man, what’s he care what books we’re readin? Got enough reading to do for school, an I aint even doin that To Cook a Mockingbird an whatever.”

  “Well, look at this list. Look at these titles. You ever have a teacher get you to read books with these kinda names? There’s even a Muslim one here.”

  JC glanced at the list, then eyed him.

  “Well I’ont even have a library card anymore. I owed like two hunnid dollars for some CDs my lil brother destroyed.”

  Rap tried shaking the disgust out of his head. Couldn’t imagine not having an active card—the library was his best and only source for DVDs, and he couldn’t afford renting them at five bucks a piece.

  If he ran up a bill like JC’s he’d never get to watch anything. And his mother’d lecture him about irresponsibility and money-wasting until two weeks after he died of old age.

  Rap: “You done making excuses?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then I’ll take em out.”

  “F’real?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, get me suh’m unner a hunnid pages, aiight? I got things t’do.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Dude, figure of speech. Damn.”

  “And you’re coming with me.”

  Jackie Chan put his palms up, shoulders high, horrified. “Man!”

  Rap walked away. JC drooped his head and followed him like they were hoofing it to the electric chair.

  But that would’ve been too short a walk. Instead they soled it ten blocks south to downtown and the biggest library in the city where, without realising it, they were about to begin their revolution.

  11.

  Exactly one week later, the two boys stood at the front door of the Hyper-Market.

  The man glared back at them through the glass silently. The look on his face suggested he was waiting for a tornado to suck them into the sky and be rid of them permanently.

  When they didn’t step off (and when JC’s toothy smile didn’t budge one tooth), the man opened the door and swept them with his eyes.

  Each youth was holding a book.

  “You kids just don’t give up, do you?”

  “Nope,” they both said.

  “You actually each read a book?”

  “Yeah!” cheered Jackie Chan, shocking Rap.

  “Prove it.”

  Rap took a breath to start but JC beat him to it.

  “I read this one,” said JC, pointing to his book and its cover: beneath a crudely-drawn red star, a young man in silhouette hefting an AK-47.

  “It’s about, like, this child soldier,” said JC. “Boy’s name is Birahima. Starts off as this little kid in like Ivory Coast, and gets y’know recruited into fighting in a civil war in like Sierra Leone. And these adults, right? They give these kids drugs to make em kill their parents or other kids just so they can like totally mess with their heads and basically own them.

  “An you think, right, he’s gon become good or improve or suh’m but he doesn’t. He just fights in a bunch of wars and gets like seriously corrupt.

  “It’s depressing, but great, y’know? Like The Wire or Menace II Society or, or, or a NWA song.”

  “You listen to NWA?” said the man. “Those songs’re older’n you are.”

  “A man has got to know the classics!” said JC. And then, without any irony, “How’d I do?”

  The man chewed his lip, nodded once. Then he turned to Rap. “So’d he teach you about his book?”

  “Yeah,” said Rap. “Anyway, I already knew about that kinda stuff.”

  “Really? You read about it?”

  “ . . . Yeah. The kid, Birahima—pretty much got screwed over by everyone, just cuz it wasn’t safe where he was born and so he got sent to live in Liberia. That’s why it all happened.”

  “How so?”

  “Liberia’s full of stupid and vicious people,” said Rap.

  He felt Jackie Chan take a step away from him.

  The older man’s eyebrow: a round being jacked into a chamber.

  “There’s lead-headed people everywhere, making violence everywhere,” said the man. “But we can’t be making generalizations like that about one county. Especially not about our own people.”

  Rap shrugged.

  “Anyway,” said the man, “what about your book?”

  Rap held his up. The cover: close-up of a man’s huge hands, gripping a towel tightly enough to strangle somebody. Or maybe holding onto it that hard so he wouldn’t.

  “Mine was about an ex-convict. He was a murderer. You think, you know, if it’s like all the other clichéd stories—”

  (When Rap said the word clichéd, the man’s eyes flickered, like he was suddenly paying attention to them for the first time. Rap smiled to himself.)

  “—that the man went to prison ‘for a crime he didn’t commit.’ But he did commit crimes. Appalling ones. Even heinous ones. Killed his friend when he was drunk, and then raped his friend’s girlfriend, and killed her.

  “When the story opens, it’s twenty-seven years later, and he’s angrier than ever. His name’s Socrates, just like the philosopher, and he’s always asking everybody questions in the story so he can figure out or even teach them right and wrong. You know, the Socratic method , right—the use of questions to get a student to learn, instead of just lecturing? So the book’s basically his quest for redemption.”

  He’d worked on that closer all day, and it’d paid off: the man was double-eyebrow impressed.

  And to prove he wasn’t just sucking up, Rap added a criticism: “But there was one chapter where I just couldn’t buy the whole premise.”

  “Oh really?” said the man, leaning against his doorjamb while the two youth stood in the street below him like Mormon missionaries on the porch of an agnostic.

  Rap felt his own internal smile growing. He used to talk books with his mother, but that was years ago. Sometimes he used to talk comics with the smartest guy at the comic store, a university student, but that guy hadn’t been around in a while. But no English teacher’d ever given him anything interesting to read or asked him real questions, anyway.

  So under this true attention, Rap’s senses crackled open under like flowers anticipating bees:

  The afternoon air. Hot. No dust. Smooth. Scrubbed clean by a mid-afternoon shower. Tasted sweet, like a block away someone’d torn open an orange and the breeze had blessed it over to his nose.

  The chrome of a sideview mirror on a black sportscar. On a storefront, a window trim mosaic made of quartz and copper. The green glass of a bottle of Ting in the gutter, refracting rainbows.

  In that moment, everything on 111th Ave sparkled.

  “Yeah, in this one chapter,” said Rap, gleaming inside and for the first time neither ashamed nor afraid to face the moustacheless man in the goatee, “Socrates brought this injured dog to a White woman who was a vet. And she even offered to let Socrates stay with her. In her actual house. I mean, he’s this huge Black guy, an ex-con. He scares everyone, not just White people. No way would any White woman ever do that!”

  The man shifted in his door frame, chewing his lip. “Well, you know, there are women who go for bad boys.”

  “Yeah, but come on, I mean, he’s gotta be thirty years older than she is.”

  “There are even women,” said the man, his mouth smudging into an almost detectable grin, “who write to prisoners, lifers, death row convicts, even serial killers, trying to convince these guys to marry em. Cuz they wanna save em. And there are men like that, too. Lots of em. Trying to rescue women who ultimately drag em down to drown in the swamps of death.”

  The swamps of death?

  Sounded like he was quoting from something. Sampling. From some unknown, unfound, unbound, underground wax pressed back in the golden age of righteous lyricalising and thunderous 88-beats. Rap liked the phrase, the echo on it. The reverb.


  “Never,” said the man to Rap’s silent consideration, “underestimate the stupidity of anybody who wants to be a saviour.”

  “You underestimated us , didn’t you?”

  The man glowered. Rap’s burn increased.

  But then Rap realised the man was actually working double-time just not to smirk.

  He stepped aside.

  The boys walked in slowly past him, flashing each other smiles reading Mission Accomplished.

  12.

  “Okay, you wanna make it up to me?” he said.

  Wasn’t really a question, so they shut up waiting for the catch.

  “Clean up. Then help paint. Then help move furniture and put up the decorations. You come every day after school for a couple of weeks, a few hours on the weekends, we’ll be done.”

  Looked at each other neutrally, picked up broom and mop and got to work.

  After sorting through a box of busted electronics including iPods, Zunes and digital cameras, the man went into the back. Hadn’t exactly been chatty.

  Jackie Chan whispered, “Man, this is some serious wax on, wax off -type shit, isn’t it?”

  “I don’know. Maybe.”

  “When you think he’s gon lay summa them whip-whap moves on us?” He threw down a decent Bruce Lee wa-aa! and Rap laughed. “Cuz if a sucker MC make a move on me,” he rhymed, “I’ma lay im out for the E-M-T!” Rap laughed again.

  They worked for three hours until Mr. Yimunhotep Ani told them to go home.

  But when they came back the next day, Friday, Mr. Ani looked like he hadn’t forgiven them one bit. Like they’d lost all the ground they’d gained by book-reporting.

  “So you’re back,” he said. “Fine. Mops are over there.”

  When he was out of the room, Jackie Chan muttered, “More wax on. More wax off.”