Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  “Don’t fuck up and OD,” they said. That was the unspoken rule. Handle your shit. We ain’t fuckin’ ‘round wid’ no po’ leese. So if you fuck up, kiss your sorry ass goodbye. Ain’t gonna be no last-minute miracles in the emergency room. We just gonna dump your ass in a lot and let you die. It’s your last dance, pardner. Party over. The D.J. has left the building.”

  “Latex Skin Glows in the Dark”

  I sat alone at a corner table, unnoticed by the others in the bar. I preferred anonymity. Generally, I was ignored by the average German. I was both a stranger and an American. We were the equivalent of “Euro trash” in New York. Trust-fund backpackers and off-the-rack hipsters—all with the ridiculous claim they would never set foot on U.S. soil until Bush was removed from presidential office—had turned the idea of an “American Expat” into a grotesque joke.

  Those people were awful. They needed to die in New York. They needed to die in Berlin. I once tried to beat this long-haired vegan hippie to death who thought I was his art-commune’s “Kitchen Nigger.” Young post-everything muthafucka schooled in the wrong-headed P.C. era. Missed real hippies. Missed punks. Missed the eighties. And he had the nerve to complain about the pieces of chicken in the Asian-Caribbean stew I had spent two days preparing.

  “There’s meat in it, you asshole….”

  I popped that stupid white dreadlocked muthafucka in the forehead with a soup ladle.

  However, these were unusual circumstances. It was the holidays. I was alone in a foreign country. I missed my family. I missed the warmth of human friendship. And I especially missed moist holly-wreathed XXX-Mass pussy ribboned under my Christmas tree.

  “Tom of Finland Travels by Transparent Escalator”

  I dozed off after my fourth glass of wine. Or maybe I blacked out. It’s impossible to say. I was sipping a glass of putrid red one moment. And he was sitting across the table the next. I don’t remember closing my eyes.

  I was sitting quietly with my thoughts, lost in some Grosz-inspired jangle of vibrating lines, obviously influenced by the drunkards crowding the bar, when suddenly, after a momentary sensation of vertigo, there he was—a hawk-faced leprechaun with reddened jowls and two wisps of hair jutting over his brow like the dying tendrils of a dehydrated house-plant. His shirt was an eye-aching yellow spotted with gobbling green PacMen. I recovered consciousness during the tail end of some jabber about waiting tables in New York.

  “I’d go down to Christopher Street after work,” he said, sounding like Don Knotts (with a brogue) in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken; “and have a beer at the Ramrod. You’re an American. You look like a New Yorker. Ever been to the Ramrod?”

  Did they dig this guy up from under the Paradise Garage and pull him out of a pink time-capsule stamped with a nineteen-seventies’ smiley face?

  I knew the Ramrod. I used to live on Grove Street in those days. The apartment was a block over from Christopher. I’d come out of the subway station at Sheridan Square and Seventh Avenue would be mobbed with protesters disrupting principal photography on Cruising. Stonewall was still fresh in people’s minds.

  At the time, I was friends with a woman who was an off-Broadway actor. Her acting, so she claimed, was guided by the voices of a Semitic demon named Lilith. Lilith, she said, was the first woman; created out of the same earth as Adam. God told her she was Adam’s “help mate.” She was supposed to “obey,” but Lilith wasn’t havin’ it.

  “Fuck you and your daddy!” she told Adam. “Why should I help a punk-ass muthafucka like you who can’t even find my G spot? Take out one of your ribs and make you a dumb bitch to pluck your apples!”

  And split. That’s why she’s a demon. She was the first “Badd Nigga” of record. My friend was a dynamic if frightening performer. She was the sort who enjoyed covering herself in clay and blood and brandishing kitchen knives. She was really smart, too, but clearly unhinged. Maybe this was because she was rich and white and her family belittled her efforts. Anyway, she used to fuck Al Pacino in his trailer during the long waits between set-ups. This was done so he wouldn’t lose his mind playing a troubled stud-cop in campy leather gear with a yellow snot-rag hanging out of his back pocket.

  “Kiss and tell …” I asked, but she wouldn’t.

  Once Pacino ended the affair in the bathroom of his customized and very expensive trailer, she began cross-dressing in leatherboy drag and hanging out on the West Side docks. She’d always come back to my apartment with raccooned eyes, begging for food or drugs, banged up and bruised, smelling really bad. Little did I realize she was the prototype for a succession of sociopathic girlfriends I would have later in life.

  The Ramrod, too, was off the West Side Highway, across from the piers along the Hudson River. The building looked like it was once a drive-through burger joint in the fifties; the kind that serviced long-distance truckers. Apparently, it still did. The lot surrounding it was filled with motorcycles: all looking like the boudoir of an expensive whorehouse—pink upholstery, rhinestone studding and flashing neon tubing. Not the kind of stripped-down putt-putts parked in front of the Angels’ clubhouse on East Third Street.

  The Ramrod was like Charlottenberg’s scatological funhouse, Klo; but without the obnoxious drunken heterosexuals or infantile sense of humor. It was just infantile. What it was was a gigantic urinal with a bar in the middle. Literally. Gangs of Tom of Finland leatherboys quaffing drafts at the rail until their bladders filled to bursting; then after cracking an ampule under their noses, whiffing a delirious mix of amyl-nitrate, Lysol and ammonia-pungent piss, they would charge en-mass to the porcelain trough built along the walls for some real mouth-opened-wide fun and games. Glurk. Glurk. Glurk.

  “Ruby Slippers My Dear: Or Black People Before The Invention of Hiphop”

  I lied and told the leprechaun I was a Canadian.

  “Really? Where’re you from? Vancouver? Toronto? Montreal?”

  “Saskatoon.” Saskatoon is Canada’s answer to the wheat fields of Kansas; all flatlands and infinite sky.

  “I’m from Dublin” he said. “I didn’t know they had black people in Canada.”

  “After pickin’ cotton for all them white folks, we had to go somewhere. Couldn’t very well walk back to Africa, could we? So it was Little Negroes on the Prairie. That’s a Saskatoon joke.”

  I made that up, too. I can’t even blame my gay Canadian friend, Micheal, for that one. It’s called Jeffin’. That’s what you do to foolish white folks; like the dubious dinge queens like leprechaun in front of me. Willie Best made plenty of crinkly Jeffin’ whitey in Hollywood.

  Actually, I’m not from New York, either. I grew up in Connecticut, state of the now generally ignored U.S. Constitution. Black people populate that place, too—the obstreperous kind, with crack pipes and guns.

  “There must be black people in Ireland,” I told him. “Otherwise, Sammy Davis, Jr., wouldn’t know how to tap dance. Cromwell’s European niggas clog-dancin’ in Jamaica, y’know? Black people are everywhere. I even met a Black Czech chick once. Didn’t speak a word of English. Only spoke Czech and Russian. Took me on a tour of Theresienstadt. Besides, my great grandfather was an Irishman.”

  “No!”

  “Yes! Except he was white. Said to himself, there are no potatoes in Ireland, sailed to Saskatoon, married a black woman and bought a farm. I grew up just like Dorothy before she spun off to Oz and found those ruby slippers.”

  “You’re a Black-Canadian farm boy!?! Oh, this is too much!”

  “Why not? Haven’t you ever listened to Negro spirituals? The ones sung in the fields? Those songs were code for fuck the white man, throw down your hoe and chase that star to Canada. Check it out. Go Down Moses, Let My People Go: ‘Harriett Tubman, hurry and get your black ass down to Alabama so these niggas can go pick snowflakes up in Canada!’ My grandmother told me that.”

  “Topography of a Phantom Shopping Mall”

  Tito Puente and his orchestra followed Heino on the jukebox. That’s what I loved about B
erliners. Even they knew you couldn’t get drunk without Puerto Rican music. I wondered if Puerto Ricans would listen to Schlager?

  “What brings you to Berlin?” I asked the leprechaun. “Rotkohl with the family?”

  “God, no! What on earth is ‘rotkohl’?”

  “Red cabbage. It’s a German Christmas favorite. Mit ganz und kartoffeln.”

  Frankly, I didn’t get it. Bondage, rubber and chunks of metal rumbling in a throbbing orifice I got. But wallowing in steaming piss!?! That was beyond me.

  My roommate on Grove, however, swore by it. He loved the leather freakazoids in dives like The Ramrod and The Toilet. That’s why I’m familiar with those places. He told me about it.

  Usually, in the morning. Over breakfast. In gruesome detail.

  I used to see these characters all the time in the West Village. The air in Smiler’s deli was rank with the odor of soggy pee-queens at 4:00 a.m.; forlornly ribboned Judy Garlands all pressed against the cashier’s counter under the weight of multiple six-packs.

  But that’s a Christopher Street of an erased New York. That Christopher Street—the Christopher Street of Stonewall and Marsha P. Johnson, of Cruising and The Ramrod—disappeared along with Times Square, its peepshows, its hustlers and its tricks. How can a TV set and DVD player ever replace the lapstiffening grandeur of Vanessa Del Rio’s muscular vagina on the screen of a Forty-Second Street grind house?

  The New York I knew was a co-mingling, a transcultural hybrid, of classes, races, religions, genders and generations. It was an open space without borders. A place of possibility. That space has been erased. Avarice has turned the heart and mind of Manhattan into a simulacrum of itself. It has become a phantom city replicated on the Broadway stage—the Theater of No Surprise. It was no longer a matter of recognizing the shifting planes and queer angles in the urban sprawl—the flâneur turning corners in the psychic cityscape; discovering strange new worlds. Those worlds—those psychic worlds—don’t exist in Manhattan anymore. There are only ghosts. Ghosts on the landscape. Ghosts fishhooked in the mind. This is why I left the U.S. My house was haunted. Money dissolved in my mouth.

  The odd thing is I’ve become a ghost here, too….

  For Maresa Lippolis

  Othello Pop

  Andaiye Reeves

  Deter clomped into the recovery room. “We need this kid outta here ASAP! Shields are comin’!”

  “Aw, shit! You heard him, take him back to the break room. And lock the door!”

  Deter’s son Malik picked up the teenage boy, listless and drowsy. Damn, he was heavy! Malik ran as fast as he could to the small break room in the back of the old Game Stop storefront and locked the makeshift but sturdy succession of seven bolts on the door.

  Sam and Deter knew the drill. The microchips were already stashed where the Shields would never look—in the syringe left on the old service counter. It was legal for Black men to get high in 2032, but if the Shields ever found out they were running a free library for Blacks, Browns, Reds and Yellows—also known as those infected with melanin—there would be hell to pay.

  Both men relaxed as the Shields approached the front door. One Shield entered while the other, a Yellow, stood outside and kept watch over the other infecteds wandering the streets in search of food and shelter.

  Deter had unlocked the front door and taken position on the antique recliner, feigning a junkie nod complete with dripping saliva and glossy eyes. Sam took position by leaning back on the dusty counter.

  “’Sup?”

  “Just checking things out, Mr. Samuels. We good here?”

  “Oh, we good Shield. We so good, we fuckin’ nice widdit, ain’t that right, D?”

  Deter didn’t respond.

  The Shield flashed a look of contempt at Deter. He recovered and smiled tightly at Sam. “What y’all got there?” He motioned toward the syringe.

  “Aw man, you know, a li’l weed. You want some?”

  “Never touched the stuff, legal or not. Keeps you infecteds in line though, and makes my job a helluva lot easier, Mr. Sam.”

  “Man, whatever. So, what you want then, some video games? We fresh out. Might get a new shipment in later.” Sam laughed at his own joke. Video games and other electronic recreation were banned in 2027 in a last-ditch effort to conserve energy and natural resources.

  The Shield grimaced again as though it pained him to be in Sam and Deter’s presence. He silently prayed for the midday siren announcing the end of his shift. He needed to be at home with that sweet little Yellow girl he’d found in the trash five years earlier. Shield law declared that all infected females were to be assassinated at birth, but he had never been able to bring himself to do it.

  He brought his attention back to Sam and Deter, and he briefly wondered what it was like to be infected. The Shield looked at Sam as though he wanted to ask him something, but he shrugged, put his hands in his pockets, and approached the counter where Sam stood. “All right Mr. Samuels, y’all have a good day now.” He patted Sam on the shoulder and left.

  Sam held up the counter a moment and watched the two Shields walk away. Deter opened his eyes, stretched, and wiped his mouth. “Let’s go get Malik and the boy from the break room. I gotta finish injectin’ the last two scenes of Othello.”

  “Comin’,” Sam said as he picked up the crumpled piece of paper the Shield left on the counter. “’ey, D, we got any more of those Dr. Seuss injections? We got a little girl comin’ in after midday ….”

  A Brief History of Nonduality Studies

  Sofia Samatar

  The study of nonduality as we know it can be traced to the sixth century A.H., when the griot Balla Fasseke, the Bard Without Longing, adjured his pupils to “study the After which is not after the Before.” The melodic information service of the griot’s apprentices carried this doctrine into the most far-flung reaches of the Sahel, until even the bats of Khufu, as reported by Ibn Abu Hamran, the Stretched Scribe, could repeat it with perfect clarity, although in Dyula. The bat-speech, which took place in a curious register, so that it made a sound like a thousand knights simultaneously scratching under their greaves, was interpreted for Ibn Abu Hamran by a lone traveler called Aminata, who was making her way eastward in the company of her goats. “Knifed by the winds,” wrote the scribe in his compendious work, The Anklets of Obsolescence, “dried to a husk, glittering with forty layers of sand, this indomitable shaykha delivered me from separation and initiated me into the Before of After.” Overcome with gratitude, he offered to spend what little he had—a sleeping-mat and two plates of beans a day at the door of a mosque—to reunite the elderly oracle with her family. Aminata recoiled in horror. “God save you! I’ve come all this way to escape those sons of bitches.”

  The Stretched Scribe, so called because his striking emaciation made him a familiar figure in the streets of Cairo, was responsible for the growth of the eastern branch of Nonduality Studies, a school preoccupied with the problem of time. “Was time created before or after creation, or simultaneously with it?” was the question he most often put to his students. The relentless heat or cold of the porch where he sat and the empty bellies of those he addressed ensured that their answers were listless and few. (I am reminded of poor Sylvia’s lectures, conducted in a graveyard.) Without the patronage of a certain Ibn Barzakh, known to his intimates as Frog-Eyes, it is doubtful whether the Eastern School would have survived the scribe’s premature death of the hacking cough known as “the Claw.” Fortunately, Ibn Barzakh was the son of a wealthy merchant. His elegant topknot was decorated with pendants of green jasper, and his waistcoat had been so thickly embroidered by his sister Radwa, “the Snub-Nosed Beauty,” that it could stand up by itself. Ibn Barzakh opened his home to students of nonduality theory, and his sister served cakes soaked in enough honey to make a buffalo dizzy. If only they had known that some two months’ journey to the south, Deng Machar Deng had solved all their problems with the dictum: “Creation is Time!”

  It was in the mars
hy country of Deng Machar Deng and in the forests south of it that Nonduality Studies flourished most vigorously. (We would argue about this later: you maintained that the Eastern School was more inventive and lively, while I cited the vast gains of the Southern School. Our sincerity was equal; the shop windows reflected us both.) Deng Machar Deng, who encouraged his disciples to fish while he lectured, was most often to be found in water up to his lanky thigh, perhaps bending down to retrieve his net, perhaps singing, at all times carrying in his eyes the reflected radiance of the wetlands. Adherents of the philosophy spread by the griots traveled for months to hear him speak. “Creation is Time” was repeated as far as the Maghrebi coast. In the Congo River forests the musician class habitually inserted his lyrics into their songs, which made the trees grow faster. At his death, he was mourned all the way to Zimbabwe. A group of forest musicians appeared at his funeral, bearing a straw litter on their shoulders. On this conveyance tossed an old man, lashed by fevers and grotesquely swollen with mosquito bites. It was Ibn Barzakh, who had come too late.

  (Later, you would weep over this tragic misstep of history. A single tear, like a tapioca bead. Afterward you laughed. I was proud of your fortitude: Sylvia had taught us to suspect that such accidents, failures and losses composed our true field of inquiry.)

  Now came the golden age of Nonduality Studies, a period of such richness that it could not be fully explored in a single lifetime. In Cairo, Radwa bint Barzakh, “the Snub-Nosed Beauty,” now over eighty years old, continued to support the Eastern School. She reportedly slept on a copy of The Anklets of Obsolescence, which she kept in a padded case covered with her inimitable embroidery. Tita, King of the Azande, sent her leather bottles of shea butter by carrier pigeon, and she sent him philosophical lyrics in exchange. These notes were interpreted for him by an Arabic-speaking retainer, known as the Lost Turk, who was neither. Scores of Azande youth, fired by the promise of Radwa’s wisdom, traveled north in hopes of gaining an audience with her. At the end of her life her skin became so fragile that she had to be turned over every half hour, like a bird in the oven. This service was performed by her lifelong companion, a woman called Khayriyyeh, who could slice offending glances to pieces with her steel-colored eyebrows. Although few of Khayriyyeh’s sayings have been preserved, she is credited with the words that secured Radwa’s immortality on earth.