You hungry, man. You want me to get you something from the machines.
They changed the rules. We can put in quarters now. Same ole shit in the machines, but they changed the rules about inmates handling money. Always changing the rules, you know, so guys fuck up and they can take away privileges.
Mom, let Rob wheel you over so you can pick out something to eat.
No, no. Fine right here. You two go on.
Want us to bring you anything.
Huh-uh. Thank you, baby. Not hungry right now.
Ima bring you a soda. You know you can't sit empty-handed and watch us eat.
Don't have the appetite I once did. Appetite gets old and tired like everything else.
She didn't have any trouble last night with the smothered chicken, gravy, greens, and yams I brought from the soul-food joint across the street.
G'wan out of here boy and get your food. Good days and bad days for my bones and my appetite. Today not a good one for neither.
Bringing you a pop and a bag of Fritos. Know you like Pepsi but Coke's the kind of Pepsi here so Coke will have to do, okay.
At the row of vending machines I wind up with two bags of popcorn I don't want because I'm too vain to put on my glasses to read the tiny printed instructions. Seventy-five cents apiece for two little bags of air, salt, and grease probably cost five cents to produce. Rob notices me squinting and bashing on a machine, stops me before I commit the same mistake a third time. He's grinning when he says the popcorn won't go to waste, he's always hungry he tells me and popcorn a good snack after his two packages of chicken wings, two orange juices, two packets of fries. Motherfuckers brought in a private company for the food service, Rob had said once. They hired nutrition experts they say to figure how much a grown man needs to eat to stay alive. Of course the company's paying them so-called experts and you better believe rations round here got real slim real fast. Little stuff you hustle from the canteen—you know, peanut butter and crackers, candy bars, cookies and shit—used to be extra. A treat, you know. Now on a good day hardly nothing on the canteen shelves and you got to bid for it to keep yourself from starving. Ain't nobody I know starved to death yet, but they keeping us lean, bro, mighty lean.
The two of us, my brother and I, make good use of the table that owns the spot in front of our bench. Wings ain't half bad, Rob tells us. My mother manages—corn chips open in her lap, a can of Coke steadied by her hand on the arm of the bench.
Your oldest son about to be jammed up in here with me, Mom. Ready to tear up the man's machine cause he wouldn't put on his glasses to see which button for Fritos.
Do youall remember Miss Morris. Esther Morris from over on Kelly Street. An old friend of mine. You would have seen her at church when you were children. Her kids about youall's age. I bet you know the kids if you don't know Esther. Anyway, you've heard me say her name I'm sure. A nice woman. Not one of my close friends but I liked Esther and she was always nice with me. Her kids, Laureen and Catherine, Tank and another boy, Lawrence they called Sonny, I think, Sonny, it doesn't matter, they were near youall's ages so you must remember them. Doesn't matter one way or the other, does it. Nothing to do with the point I'm trying to make about Esther Morris and Fritos. Esther loved fried pork rinds with hot sauce. Every time I see a bag of pork rinds, or Fritos cause they remind me of pork rinds, first thing I think of is poor Esther Morris dead with her hand in an open bag of pork rinds. Found her sitting dead in her chair just like that, after the doctor warned her with her pressure she better leave fried, salty things alone. Pork rinds not salty enough for Esther. Huh-uh. She'd salt them down and sprinkle on salty red hot sauce. Couldn't help herself, you know what I mean. Had a stroke year after her husband Earl died. Crippled up in a wheelchair just like your mother is now, and the doctor warned poor Esther, told her, Esther you're gon kill yourself if you don't stop eating pork rinds. But pork rinds all she had at the end. Earl gone. No children at home. Couldn't go nowhere unless a kind soul drove her. Found her dead doing what she couldn't help herself from doing. I think of poor Esther Morris every time I see a pork rind or corn curl. Esther dead and reaching for more. Wonder who kept bringing those things to her.
Mom, that's a helluva tale to tell while you're munching on Fritos. I won't be supplying you any more. Huh-uh.
Don't get too smart for your britches. I'm not Esther Morris. Esther barely seventy when she passed. Had her children young. A young woman. She just overdid it. I'm way past killing myself with bacon rinds and hot sauce. With everything that's wrong with me, a few Fritos more or less no big thing. Won't touch a pork rind, though. Haven't touched one in years, not since I heard about Esther with her dead hand in a bagful.
If I said to my mother, There's a war going on, a war being waged against people like us all over the world and this prison visiting room one of the battlefields and Esther Morris one of its millions of casualties, my mother who gives human beings the benefit of the doubt would say, Didn't I just tell you the doctor warned Esther she better leave those things alone. My mother would point out the doctor's warning as evidence of no war waged on Esther Morris, proof Esther Morris to blame for her own death, use that fact and other facts, the hand of god for instance, to dismiss my idea of a war waged by an enemy most of us don't think of as an enemy, a total war waged by an implacable foe. Invisible war, an unseen enemy with Esther Morris's hand in its grip, dipping her grasping fingers again and again into poison, the ghost hand of the enemy guiding Esther's hand wrapped in its unseen hand, the brown hand rising again and again full of poison to the old woman's mouth.
My mother's catnapping when Rob asks, How's your Fanon book coming. Can't wait to read it, he says. Been reading the Black Skin, White Mask book you sent, bro. Wow. Some deep shit. Soon's I finish, be ready for another one his books. You don't know this, but I kinda looked at one of his books way back when I was a junior-high militant. Didn't read it, but I stole it, carried it around with his name sticking up in my back pocket. You still writing about him. Or is it the other one about the head.
I assure Rob it's Fanon. Assure myself. Oh, yeah, Fanon for sure. Slowly, and not as surely as I'd like, but I'm working at the Fanon book just about every day. I don't mention the dead head project. Thomas's project. Thomas's head.
Guess what. Your mother over there claims she met Fanon during one of her stays in the hospital.
What.
Told me she got to know him a little bit. Friends in a way.
Naw, man. That's too much. Mom's flipping. When was Fanon in Pittsburgh. You never told me nothing about Fanon coming to Pittsburgh and I know damn well Mom ain't never crossed no ocean.
Well, I hadn't heard anything about a meeting either, till Mom told me the other day.
I thought Fanon died a long time ago.
He did. In 1961, according to the books. But Mom's Mom. She doesn't lie. So who knows.
You jiving me, bro. Is we talking about Mom getting to know a real sure-nuff live guy or a dead man.
She got indignant real quick when I asked her the same question. Said the man sure wasn't dead when she talked to him. And I sure wasn't going to try to tell her he was. No. No. What I said was, Mom, tell me about meeting Frantz Fanon, please. And she did and it's going in the book.
Bro, I got to hand it to you, man. You keep writing those buggy books. Always fussing cause you say nobody reads them, but you keep writing them. I dig it.
Being locked up, you know, I got nothing but time, plenty of time to read. Pick up your weird shit and whoa, sometimes it makes perfect sense to me. Probably because you're my brother. Plenty times I don't agree with them knucklehead ideas I been hearing from you my whole life, but I like to hear your bullshit anyway. Funny, you know, the craziest shit's what I like best. When you get off on words and get to rapping and signifying and shit. Getting off on shit like we do in the yard. Just to hear our ownselves talking sometimes, just to say goddamn words we ain't gon hear less we say em. Guys hanging in the yard talking crazy s
tories. Know what I mean.
Mom's the storyteller in the family. Wish I had half her gift. I said you're the best storyteller in the family, Mom, and I see you over there pretending to sleep so you can eavesdrop and get more stories to tell on us.
Those words or those words more or less are what I address to my mother, raising my voice louder when I say them than it had been while I spoke with Robby. My mother doesn't take the bait, her ears may be pricked but I believe her eyelids remain shut, hard to see from here with her head slightly bowed the way it is and it's the softness of her pale skin I think of, the freckles I can't see from this distance with my failing-fast eyesight, and strangely it stops there, the map of her face I'm trying to draw, familiar as I am with her face I can't sharpen the image of it, of her, can't bring her more clearly into focus than to think the words softness, freckles, pale and I know better than to worry her image past the peace offered by these few words said to myself into the space between us, the peace for this moment in these brutal, war-torn surroundings.
NEW YORK
It has been raining this morning. They are working on a rooftop nearby. Stop. Not it, not they. It and they are me. I am the weather, the workers. I drive the toy cars nine floors below, gliding silently past on Essex Street. I am the guy wearing a silver-and-black Oakland Raiders jacket, a baseball cap assbackwards, and climbing a scaffold to add a new story to a building across the way. I am diffuse, saturate everything, like the grayness coloring the sky, gray weather passing that will leave behind no mark, a mood hanging over the city, using the city to paint itself, a painting gradually unpainting itself, the city colored while the gray presence lasts, disguising the city as something else it might be or could be. Streets dark-skinned from rain last night. The familiar clutter of tall buildings out my window fades as the buildings recede, row after row, last row a silhouette framed against gray distance, pale through a curtain of mist. If I let my eyes follow one of the rain-slick parallel streets running toward the skyline—Hester, for instance—it appears to slant upward and narrow before it disappears, squeezed to death between rows of buildings it no longer can hold apart. Hester and the other streets like it are exposed strips of a giant carpet, soaked and ruined, upon which a roomful of ponderous furniture rests. Hidden below the horizon are hands tugging the carpet inch by inch, lifting its edge slowly, carefully, without prematurely destabilizing the buildings balanced on the black rug, allowing them to tilt without dumping them until the final grand yank that will remove the ruined rug, send the whole city tumbling down or leave it standing magically intact.
Does a fine rain still fall. Rain would chase workers off the rooftop, wouldn't it. Or would wet weather concern them any more than the fact today is a Sunday, the day of rest. I pilot a helicopter across the sky. I push a shopping cart heaped with everything I possess past steel-shuttered, graffitied storefronts on Essex. If all the above is true, shouldn't I be able to decide whether it's raining or not. Maybe none of the above's true. I give myself too much credit when I announce that I am everything, create everything I look around myself and see. But if what's out there is not me, not inside me, where is it, they. Where am I. Everything one thing, everything one and the same thing only and always, the world I make of myself, the self the world makes of me. What else could be outside my window this morning pretending to be a city.
After I write and read for several hours in the morning, my habit most mornings, I turn on the news channel for five minutes, precisely at the hour or half-hour when major events are recycled. In the company of other viewers I'm reminded how narrowly we've escaped disaster. Only a few minutes of viewing required to learn that many others on the crowded planet didn't get through the night. I need the encouragement imparted by the bright yellow lines the news draws between victims and survivors, oppressed and oppressors, jailers and prisoners, executioners and executed, right and wrong. Without the yellow lines how would I keep track of who's who. Who I am. Who I'm not. Unless the lines are clearly demarcated and I can stand tall on the side I'm told I occupy, unless I belong squarely in one group so I can speak confidently on behalf of my group or speak against the other group, nothing transpiring in the big world of affairs makes much sense. When I watch headline news, I'm not forced to sort out endless conflicts and overwhelming ambiguities. East is East and West is West and the rest consists of reams of details I needn't concern myself about—plus an occasional human interest feature to remind us viewers we're human—details the news represents and summarizes with numbers, graphs, polls, statistics. After all, the point of watching the news is to verify the single fact that counts: survival. The flood, car bombing, drought, AIDS, train wreck, cancer, death in all its menacing, spectacularly repeatable forms didn't zap me. Those terrible things happen to other people. I'm still safely sealed in my citadel, a viewer above, beyond the fray. Not immune, of course, I'm not dumb enough to think that, but who knows. I'm still peering through my window, still watching the news. For a minute or two after 9/11, my viewing habits, along with my fellow countrymen's viewing habits, may have altered a bit, but we've settled back onto our sofas, watch like NASCAR fans numbed by the noise and power of super turbo-charged cars racing around and around an oval track, secretly hoping against hope a fiery crash will lift us out of our seats again.
COUNTING
After the earthquake and tsunami in Southeast Asia, the number of dead uncountable. We understand this simple fact, but count anyway. New totals hourly, daily, weekly, counting though we know that sooner or later the count must include the one counting.
It's almost funny, Thomas thinks. Counting up the countless number of chickens humankind has consumed. In that war of attrition between species, we must be way, way ahead of the birds. No contest, he guesses. How many chickens wiped out just yesterday by the smiling Colonel's legions or troops marching under the banner of the fabulously rich chicken farmer who ran for president a couple campaigns ago. Birds may never even the score. But they keep on pecking. If chickens destroy every single human person this time around with the flu arrows grasped in their scaly feet, will the birds still be far behind. Who's counting. Who keeps score. What's funny or almost funny anyway is that we know and knew all along no matter how many battles won, how many we fried roasted broiled plucked eviscerated boiled chopped penned in coops fricasseed barbecued crushed and pulped for sausages or ground into mealie meal so they could make a Happy Meal of themselves, no matter how many of their eggs we sunny-sided up or scrambled or sucked or deviled or painted on Easter, we know that sooner or later, just as Malcolm X famously warned—though Malcolm's words were quoted out of context to seem as if he approved of the president's murder—we know those motherfucking chickens are coming home to roost.
On counting days like this one Thomas keeps looking up, Chicken Little searching for signs the sky's falling. Not exactly hoping for his life to be over. Just ready for the relief of the end. Not scared exactly, not exactly paranoid either because he's not making shit up. He distinctly recalls the flutter of something he saw out of the corner of his left eye, something drifting down, white, ruffled, what could it be if not a speck of sky, the ceiling cracking, plaster starting to leak, a dusty trickle before tons and tons let go and the weight of the entire universe collapses on our heads. How long can a thin blue partition keep all that heaviness at bay. And why. No good reason or perhaps a very good reason beyond his understanding, the same reason Thomas understands he won't understand any better when the dike fails.
I'm walking the Williamsburg Bridge with Thomas, end to end, from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Brooklyn and back again. We spy on the sky through crossties overhead that stabilize the two sidewalls of the pedestrian ramp. Peering straight up you see boundless blue sky between one steel beam and the next. If you lower your eyes and look ahead, perspective gradually erases gaps between the red girders and they fit together snugly, a seamless roof you assume you will pass beneath if you continue to advance. Illusion of open sky above. An illusion
of red tunnel ahead. One certainty exchanged for the other as your gaze shifts. Illusions like the illusion of peace with the birds. The illusion of victory and dominion. The illusion doom's not always on its way.
Some say if the birds had not manufactured the scourge of flu with their bodies, humans would have invented it. To correct miscalculations. Crop an explosively expanding human population. Like the precaution of not curing AIDS until it removes swarming undesirables. Or experiments to develop toxins that spare one race and obliterate another. Humans toying with science fictions, refining the power of words, word byword, to inflict suffering, death, extinction. At a vast distance an observer from another planet might mistake us for a nasty species of bird, Thomas thinks. Our birdlike insouciance. Chirping at daybreak. Serenading night. Our bird brains. Our chicken-shit schemes. Our easily ruffled feathers. Restless flocks and flocks of us. Stinking islands of guano wherever we land and roost. The predictable patterns and destinations of our migrations. Predators of our own kind. Clipping each other's wings. Shitting in our nests. How many omelets would a woman need to consume before she lays an egg. What kind of creature would emerge when the shell cracks.
Was she loved at first sight, Thomas wonders on the bridge when a pigeon-toed Chinese woman passes slowly in the opposite direction. Eyes lowered, she keeps to her far edge of the pedestrian ramp though the walkway relatively empty at this early morning hour. Thomas flashes on chicken egg foo yung, his favorite from a neighborhood takeout joint. Accepts a pang of guilt. Chicken and eggs. Eggs and chicken. Chickens and Chinese. The woman supports a very pregnant belly by tilting slightly backward, weight on the heels of her tiny canvas shoes so the baby rides more comfortably on her pelvis. The ostrich-sized egg bulges under her short-sleeved shirt that's a drab style and color no young sister of Thomas or mine willingly would wear in public. The count never ceases. More always on the way. More and more others to account for and worry about. Chinese. Chickens. Chinese. He envies them. Their busy sex lives. Boundless fertility. What else is there to do cooped up all day in their ghettos. Thomas knows better. Apologizes. Suffers another bite of guilt. Egg foo yung. Why do chickens crinkly-lidded eyes blink incessantly. Do they tilt their little heads so their beaks don't block the view of what's in front of them. We twist, twist the night away, twist their necks, scald off their feathers, chop off their heads, toss them naked in piles. Creatures not us. Never, never us. How long does the image of the killer remain frozen in their dead eyes. Thomas counts on love to swoop down one day and seize him in her beak. Tear him with her talons and feed him to her scrawny-necked, beady-eyed, nappy-head chicks who cheep-cheep-cheep, jostling for position in the nest like rebounders under the hoop.
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