Soul City

by Touré

  In the Sunflower family the ability to fly went back to their African ancestors from flying tribes that ate fruit from the tops of the trees, spoke with birds, and buried their dead in caves in the mountains. When Europeans arrived they chained down the flying people and carted them to America, only to find that the moment the chains came off, they escaped into the air.

  Others in Soul City could read minds, or travel to Heaven and talk to God, or enjoy eternal life. In the late 1800s there was a woman named Madame Dearly Beloved whose posterior produced a meaty, uncut diamond after sufficiently passionate lovemaking. The day she turned eighteen she married Casanova Negro, Fulcrum’s brother, had twenty-one kids, cut a deal with DeBeers, and became Soul City’s first multimillionaire. Her philanthropy helped build the city.

  Not everyone in Soul City had a gift, and some had a gift they wished they could lose. For example, Ecstasy Jackson could never get a date because everyone knew her love was explosive. But sadder than the world of Ecstasy was the story of a seventeen-year-old named Unicorn Johnson, who, right around this time, tragically lost his life in Paris.

  Now, how this poor boy from the streets of Soul City made it to the legendary Ritz Paris on Place Vendôme is a long story with something quite big in the middle of it. You see, Unicorn had a Hope Diamond in his pants. That’s right. Unicorn Johnson had the world’s biggest dick.

  Once upon a time, on a long, hot night in south central Mississippi, smack-dab in the middle of slavery, a slave owner named Cotton Fitzsimmons organized the world’s first Cockfoster. Any idea that speaks so perfectly to so much of what is felt by so many cannot be kept a secret long, so it took no time at all for word of Fitzsimmons’s invention to spread. Within weeks the Cockfoster had become all the rage among upper-class southern gambling gentlemen. Today, over a century and a half after the end of de jure slavery, the Cockfoster persists as part of an international underground subculture that’s swimming around the far edges of the modern zeitgeist like a prehistoric fish that’s still alive because nature has not yet decided its day is done. The Cockfoster will run out of relevance the day the leisure class finds a more socially acceptable way of publicly interacting with naked Black male phalli. Ergo, never.

  According to the sport’s most respected historians, the Cockfoster hasn’t changed a bit since Fitzsimmons’s day. Around midnight, when people start getting around to real truths if they ever do, ten or so Black males are brought to a private room. They are paraded, fully clothed, in front of a gang of cigar-clutching white men who look them over, then place wagers on which of the Negroes will turn out to have the biggest dick.

  Once all bets are cast a white woman comes out to dance for the boys, to make them hot. Then they pull down their pants so the blue bloods can see who’s the biggest. No one ever thought of it as a homosexual experience. It was just a penile battle royale.

  One long, hot afternoon not long before Unicorn’s tragic death, a Cockfoster recruiter named Clarence Strider came rumbling into the outskirts of Soul City driving a Ford pickup filled with Negroes, lookin for jus one mo. Just round the hour the sun was bout to be gone Strider spied a six-foot-three, rail-thin, burnt-toast-black bwoy and screeched the Ford pickup filled with Negroes to a halt, nearly spilling some of his cargo.

  “Wanna make five bucks, kid?”

  Unicorn said sure and the journey began.

  An hour before midnight on Friday, Jake’s Gentlemen’s Club in Ofay City began to fill up with white men wearing white double-breasted suits with gold pocket watches or seersucker suits with those little blue stripes, sucking Jack Daniel’s or puffing Cubans, all of them senators, judges, tycoons: the local nobility. As the boys lined up backstage, nervousness pulsed through them like an electric current. Those Black boys were understandably afraid of getting naked in a roomful of massas. But when prodded by Strider, they hit the stage. The men turned wild and placed their bets. Very few went for string-beany Unicorn. And then out pranced young blond Miss Heidi Snowflake.

  Heidi sashayed out, faced the boys, eased open her shirt, cut her eyes, licked her lips, winked, and teased until ten Black tongues were on the ground. Then she zipped offstage and the boys, screamed at by Strider standing in the wings, pulled down their pants and revealed themselves.

  Before that moment Unicorn had never seen another man’s penis, and, since he was a virgin, no one had ever seen his. He’d long wondered why the penises they had in the movies were always so small, but he’d really never thought much about his penis, outside of when he masturbated. He thought it was normal that when your dick got hard it sort of exploded out of your pants like a little tree growing up toward your face. He thought every man could push open doors, throw covers off the bed, or dial a phone with his dick. He ripped his pants down, having no idea he was no normal boy. But after a quick glance around, he realized he was more than four times as big as everyone else.

  The monument between his legs was about three and a half feet long, with the circumference of a fist. It was a semi-arm. Everything about it was giant: His balls were like two apples, his hair made a big funky fro, his skin was so deeply wrinkled that the dick looked like a black baby shar-pei, and his hole was so large that a thumb could fit neatly inside of it, so large it seemed to be an eye, and men found themselves turning away when the eye looked at them.

  The room fell into shocked silence, a deep, deafening antisound that allowed the sound of cricket chirping to invade the private club. Unicorn felt a hundred eyes on his dick, heard cigars hitting the floor, saw hats falling, jaws drooping, drool dropping. He smelled fear. The boys with him onstage backed away as if his monster had the power to hurt them by osmosis.

  The other boys were hustled off the stage and Unicorn was escorted through the crowd by Heidi, who took his arm and whispered that Strider had said he wouldn’t get his winner’s $20 if he didn’t leave it out. Unicorn never did get his $20, but he was introduced to the local nobility with his dick hanging hard in front of him, bursting from above his pants, which were open enough that the base of his dick could lie on them, creating the impression of a thick fire-hose blast of frozen black water pumped outward from a little fountain of fro. When they came to the 375-pound Senator B. Wary O’Wigglesworth, the Rubenesque representative stood to shake Unicorn’s hand.

  “That’s a hell of a member there, bwoy!” O’Wigglesworth said, setting agreeing guffaws throughout the assembly.

  “Thank ya, suh,” he said shyly. He wasn’t used to talking to white men with his dick hanging out.

  “Where’d ya git it?” the corpulent lawmaker said, joking, and inferring, Can I git one, too? The caucus laughed harder.

  “How’ya like to go to the regional championships?” O’Wigglesworth said. He turned to face the crowd. “Would he blow ’em away or what, boys!” A loud cheer rose up. He was a single, naked Black boy in a roomful of powerful whiteness. They could’ve tied him to the top of a tree right then and there and never felt the repercussions. How could he say no? And so, amid the cheering gentry and the Cheshire-cat-grinning roly-poly power broker, with his monstrous member hanging freely from his pants, Unicorn pushed past the extreme embarrassment of baring himself for a mob of men and agreed to debase himself yet another time.

  Two Fridays later, a few minutes past midnight, Unicorn walked into a gentlemen’s club and discovered his reputation was already there. The club was packed triple what it would normally have been for a Cockfoster. The cream of the region was already in the dressing room lotioning their jewels so they would glisten and shine under the lights. There was Kid Chocolate, Crazy Leg Hopkins, and, from Nawlins, Mordecai “Loch Ness” Moriale. This time, Unicorn noticed, no one was nervous. They strutted onstage, walking all cock-centered, staring menacingly at one another like arrogant champion sprinters before a race. They’d more than embraced their station and reveled in the small-time fame their bodies had bought them. The crowd screamed to bet, the white woman came out, the men pulled ’em down. Once again it was a
ll Unicorn, a full foot longer than the next man, so intimidatingly elephantine that one contestant screamed like a bitch as he ran from the stage.

  At the evening’s end two men in slick suits came and told him of the national championships in The City. They offered to put him up at the new Trump Hotel and pay him a princely sum just to show up. He arrived two weeks before the event, and though the hotel was beautiful, the check never came, meaning he had not a dime of his own and couldn’t afford to do anything but walk around. The new Trump quickly became a golden cage.

  Yet the Cockfoster community was burning up over Unicorn, and suddenly the skinny boy from Soul City was giving an interview for the cover of Nutcracker magazine. They asked how it feels to lug this giant thing around with him all the time, what its name is, how he takes care of it, and what it would mean to him to be crowned the Cockfoster Champion of America. Unicorn had never had any deep feelings about his dick before his whole Cockfoster career started, had never named it, and couldn’t have cared less about becoming the Cockfoster Champion of America. He’d just wanted to see The City. But he thought it’d be funny to muck around with the reporter. So he told Nutcracker it’s quite a hardship to have a boa constrictor in your pants all the time, but I’m happy to bear the burden. Its name is Excalibur. I have a special drink called the Nigga Jigga, which I’ll soon be bottling to sell, that I take the night before a Cockfoster to get me ready to get hard. And being the Cockfoster Champion of America would be the greatest achievement of my life!

  But extreme fame in a secret community is a funny thing. He could walk the streets of The City by himself for hours, just wandering around. And then he’d bump into someone who knew him from the Cockfosters, a Nutcracker subscriber who invariably was a captain of industry for whom Unicorn was the new king in a secret royal family, and suddenly this captain of industry was in the middle of The City all but bowing to Unicorn right in front of his completely perplexed personal assistants. Unicorn moved from quotidian to sovereign and back in seconds. He started to wonder, What am I doing? But he was living at the Trump on someone else’s dime in perhaps the most expensive stable in the world. When they gave him food he ate. When they put him onstage he shined.

  Unicorn easily won the national championship, a full eight inches longer than Jim Browski from Brooklyn. As he pulled down the diamond-studded Versace jeans given to him for the night, his first serious girlfriend was hanging in the wings: Mellifluous Superfluous. They ran into the night together, danced on tables, sped in her BMW with the top down, talked about her modeling career, and kissed with the fury of people on a deadline. But, no matter how they tried, in bed they simply couldn’t come together. Sweet Melly was six-foot-four in three-inch heels, extremely courageous and sexually ambitious, but she could take in so little of Unicorn’s johnson that it was like sticking a finger in a keyhole. Ah, but Melly fellated his massiveness worshipfully, like the chocolate sculpture it was, and with her eyes always open to study the beast. Throughout their entire relationship, all three weeks of it, they were not able to keep the bed made, but despite that famous phallus, Unicorn remained carnally ignorant.

  One morning the phone rang and someone with a French accent was talking about the international championships that were to be held in three weeks in the heart of Paris. He knew there’d be stiff competition from the reigning champ, India’s legendary Piloo Armitraj, who they said could touch his nose with it, but all he cared about was seeing Paris. Melly insisted on going. She wasn’t nearly enough woman for him and she didn’t love all of him, but she couldn’t live without his penis. She called it the steeple of the Church of the Miraculous Negro Phallus because that was where she kneeled down to pray every single day.

  On the twenty-first and final day of their relationship, a Sunday, Unicorn left Melly in the Ritz and walked through Paris, taking it all in. The smell of croissants. The police siren, that slow, melodic two-tone whine. The goddesses who walked the streets trailing a wake of broken male necks with their long hair, balletic carriage, slit skirts, nylons, heels—fireballs with inch-long hairs that lay flat in their pits and nipples that popped out to greet you. Then somehow he stumbled into a museum where he saw the Hottentot Venus. There was the actual skeleton of the South African woman with the gargantuan posterior who was paraded throughout Europe in a cage in the 1700s like a curious wild beast or a circus sidefreak. And he could not help but think they were brother and sister. There was an implosion in his mind then, a reality attack, but it dawned on him slowly, washing down from the crown of his skull to his toenails, a dawning he felt as if he were ice cream being drenched in hot syrup. He walked back to his hotel room, dialed room service, and ordered a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, four aspirins, and a large chef’s chopping knife. The strange request from the giant star brought a manager and two Cockfoster promoters to his door. Unicorn, is everything alright? He said, “It’s about to be.” He drank a third of the Jack, gulped half the pills, then, in full view of the crowd, he dropped his pants, plopped his dick on the table, and with a single, furious motion chopped his massiveness into a nub. With the blood flowing as freely from his crotch as it had from van Gogh’s ear, he ran from the room and down the streets, screaming like a madman, and dove headfirst into the Seine. The great river soaked up his blood, turned red for a day, then went back to its normal green. His body was swallowed by the river and never seen again. Hours after his death Melly was still in the hotel room, on the floor, mascara streaming down her face, hysterically praying at the Church of the Miraculous Negro Phallus.

  14

  _____

  EMPEROR JONES was dismayed. He and his aides had counted the ballots three times, and every time they’d gotten the same answer. It was Soul City election tradition that Wednesday at ten a.m. the old mayor’s music would stop, the new mayor would be announced, and right then he would start DJing. But this Wednesday, ten a.m. came and went without a word from Emperor Jones, even though thousands were crowded on the lawn outside the mayor’s mansion with collective bated breath. Inside the mansion, after many tense hours of vote counting, there was a clear margin of victory for one candidate, but Emperor Jones ordered that the ballots be recounted yet again. “This cannot be!” he yelled.

  Soul City had made a grave mistake. Emperor shut the windows, locked the doors, and launched a fourth recount as the music stopped and Soul City was engulfed in silence. In order to let the people know he was still alive and working on an answer, he burned some paper, making white smoke emerge from his chimney. Each hour more smoke appeared, but for the Soulful the silence was like fingernails on a chalkboard. People began singing and clapping and playing homemade guitars, but it wasn’t the same. The music that defined Soul City had stopped. The town shut down. Everyone came out from stores and restaurants, stopped doing laundry and playing basketball. A siren of silence had enveloped them in confusion. They had no idea what to do without some sort of music to underscore their lives. For five days the city stood in limbo, watching the hourly puffs of white smoke, waiting desperately for the killer silence to end, while Emperor Jones pulled the last hairs from his head as the seventh full recount yielded the same result as all the others, and he was forced to come out and announce the dreaded winner.

  On Sunday at four p.m. the chimney produced black smoke. Emperor Jones put on his best suit and his fakest smile and opened the front doors wide. He tried to be happy, but it was just too hard. Soul City had truly disappointed him this time. The wrong choice had been made, the dunce of the group had won, and he knew that soon all of Soul City would be paying for it. “The next mayor of Soul City . . .” he said lifelessly, “is Cool Spreadlove.”

  Pandemonium ensued. The Soul Music masses leaped for joy as if they’d won the lottery. The Jazz people and the Hiphop Nation began citywide sulking. Spreadlove’s campaign manager, Lovely Brown, ran up three flights of stairs, pulled him off of Sera Serendipity, and told him the good news. Spreadlove finished off Sera, then threw on his mink and hightailed
it over to his new crib, the mayor’s mansion in Honeypot Hill. As he walked up people were standing outside the mansion, drenched in silence, their eyes as vacant as drugless addicts. “We need some music, man,” they said. “We’re gonna die!”

  Spreadlove looked them in the eyes and said, “I feel your pain.”

  He strolled inside and had one of his women pull a record from the stacks, put it on the turntable, and introduce the vinyl to the needle. After 102 hours of eerie quiet, the first record of his administration was on its way to the people. The Soulful smiled when they heard the snap, crackle, and pop of vinyl silence, and then, all over Soul City they heard Marvin Gaye and that honey-sweet, pimp-smooth falsetto, talkin bout let’s get it on. “We gon be one city under a groove,” Spreadlove told them, and he wasn’t lying.

  Spreadlove went directly for Soul City’s libido, wanting the entire city to have as much sex as he did. All day and night he played records meant to induce sex and lust. Within a week the city had changed.

  Spreadlove had the mansion’s speakers put in the windows so the sound boomed out over the Great Lawn, and soon it was a place to picnic and party. The mansion became a twenty-four-hour house party, a carnival of free drugs and free sex with new panties constantly hanging from the chandeliers and the smell of sex oozing out onto the Great Lawn. An air of carnality gripped the city and the sound of bass-driven funk and soul was thumping day and night, and during the first two weeks of his administration, at any given moment you could open any window in Soul City and catch at least two people engaged in sexual congress. Spreadlove’s soul and funk onslaught pushed the civic sexual tension to the limit and launched a citywide saturnalian fuckfest. In one corner of town Hueynewton and Precious were having sex so hard they fractured their pelvic bones. In a darkroom somewhere, Zeitgeist Jones, fully recovered from his whuppin by his grandmother, was suffering through a vicious spanking from slutty little Sera Serendipity. Over at Lolita innocent Erendira was making love for fifty pesos a turn with any man willing to wait in the hours-long line minded by her heartless grandmother. And down at the church, in Revren Lil’ Mo Love’s office, all standards were lost as the Revren was devoured and deflowered by Miss Birdsong, Mrs. Lovejoy, and Miss Delicate Chocolate.