by Mat Johnson
The Piper and the Pope
On Monday, a week after Mrs Hutton arrived, fifteen thousand postcards, red and yellow with a cartoon of a white guy with a big nose and scarf hugging himself above the sentence Are You Ready for the Cold?, went out in the mail. Two days later the phone started ringing hard. I handled a hundred and twenty calls each day, telling every person the same thing: how to get the government to pay their electric bills. Each call lasted an average of three minutes and I could handle fifteen an hour. I helped them through their applications, asked them all the financial information needed, then put their applications to the side to be sent to them. The phone was never not ringing; often I was cleaning up the last call with the new caller on the line. Nobody in the office talked to each other. We came in and went straight to work, took lunch at different times, and at the end of the day we were tired. Nobody brought the newspaper anymore.
After a few weeks, I could identify types of customers even before I got the information out of them. I could recognize the welfare voice that sounded as if the person was so tired they couldn’t even move their jaw or lips to talk, that they couldn’t even stand up, that they were lying flat on their beds, their arms at their sides, the phone rested upon the tops of their faces because they were too tired to hold it to their mouths. Most welfare voices didn’t sound like this, but everyone who did was on welfare. The only energy that could be heard in the room was the sound of children and television in the background.
Some of the callers spoke Spanish or Polish or Russian or Korean or Vietnamese, and I figured out how to get a translator on the line. Those were good calls because they were always confusing and took a long time and even with Mrs Hutton eavesdropping I could get away with staying on for a while. In her office she had two lights for every employee, a green one if we were taking a call and a red one if we’d been on that call for more than five minutes. Clive insisted that you could tell if she was checking your line because you could hear a slight clicking, but Clive was a moron.
At night I dreamed I was answering phones perpetually. I tried to censor my thoughts, because I knew that I had callers on hold, inside my mind. When Alex rang and I answered, ‘Customer service, how may I help you?’ it fueled her ‘Chris, what in God’s name is going on with you’ line. But I didn’t want help, I didn’t want to come over and talk about it, I didn’t want to go visit a good counselor her friend used. I just wanted to sleep. I wanted more but that’s the only thing I seemed prepared to accomplish.
When Mrs Hutton realized we were losing calls because of the half-hour wait just to get through, she brought in some new people. One girl named Angela was real sexy, and she sat in an empty seat between Reggie and me. Clive kept trying to poke his head over and get in our conversation. She had a short brown ’fro and earrings like silver tears. She listened to me talk with people all day. At night I lay in my bed with my hand on my dick staring up at the ceiling, thinking about her. I planned a whole future. I would take her back to England with me. She would be surprised to see how much more I was. I dreamed of coming home from work and us trying to make babies on my lunch hour. Unlike Fionna, she would love me, and if I ever fell she would catch me, too. The next day I went in to the job wearing the polished black three-quarters shoes I had bought in Camden Market, my stone thin-cut khakis and rust velveteen long sleeve gull-wing collar Armani shirt. The chair was empty: Angela was gone. Cindy saw my clothes and said, ‘The bitch failed the drug test, you sorry muthafucka.’
The next day, in Angela’s place, we got this tall skinny guy who wore patterned socks as thin as panty hose. His name was Lynol. He was supposed to be listening to Reggie’s phone calls but, even though he had the headphones on, he spent the day reading a book. I couldn’t see the cover so I asked him what it was about. Lynol said, ‘An inspirational novel based on the life of Jesus,’ saying the first syllable of Jesus like it was a declaration. The next day I came to work and he was sitting in the chair next to Reggie again, so I sat over in Clive’s.
Clive was gone for three days. Apparently he didn’t call because Mrs Hutton pulled me aside and asked if I had heard from him (since I was the other complete wreck in the office, she assumed that I knew Clive intimately). While he was absent, Natalie sat in his chair. On the phone her voice was a whisper she hid in her hand over her microphone. I sat on the side of her bad arm and had to be careful not to bump it. She had fallen on her apartment building’s front walk; it hadn’t healed right; the lawyers were still talking. She swallowed painkillers with chocolate milk.
When Clive did show up he looked crusty and dirty, like someone had used him to wash dishes, leaving him to dry without rinsing him out. He came back for two days then disappeared for one more.
‘You know that nigger’s on crack,’ Reggie told me.
‘You’re bugging.’
‘For real. I seen that shit too many times not to know. My cuz was on crack. My old girlfriend from high school, she’s a piper now.’
‘Your girl’s a crack ho?’
‘My old girl, my old girl. Way back. Old school. She wasn’t even my girl: I just kissed her.’
‘You think Clive’s on the pipe?’
‘Shit, can’t you smell that stuff on him?’
‘That’s his cologne.’
‘Not unless he’s wearing Eau de Crack.’
‘Nigger, stop lying.’
‘That muthafucka is smoking rock. Watch. Watch. Smell that muthafucka.’
‘I don’t have to smell him. Stop lying on the man.’
‘He’s all skinny too.’
‘And his nails were burnt,’ I remembered.
‘For real?’ Reggie asked.
‘Yup. I saw them when he was on the phone, they were all brown and shit like he’d been smoking.’
‘Damn. Now I know. That nigger is on crack.’
‘Clive’s smoking rock, huh?’
We told basehead jokes the rest of the day. When anybody asked where Clive was, we said, ‘Smoking crack.’ Some woman called for him and after she hung up Reggie said to the dead receiver, ‘I’m sorry, Clive’s currently sucking the glass bone. Can I have him call you back between rocks?’ Natalie actually whispered for us to shut up, but the word ‘crack’ was too funny not to keep saying. Immediately, Clive rose beyond my original estimation. Crack cocaine. None of this succumbing to the ebb of destiny and letting life do its inevitable damage for Clive. He was diving right into it, gloriously! Head first and smiling, stoned, all the way down. Clive had conquered his instinct for self-preservation. I didn’t even have the endurance to get a halfway decent alcohol dependency off the ground.
When Clive, my crack hero, reappeared, his clothes were dirty and he smelled like clear plastic burnt to black bubbles. He was sitting in his own seat, so I had to kick Natalie out and sit next to Lynol. At the end of every call Lynol said, ‘God bless you’, even though Mrs Hutton had already specifically asked him not to. I wanted to go rat on him, but I was too busy and lazy to get up from my chair, so I said, ‘Hey man, you still saying it.’
Lynol chuckled. ‘Well, I do believe I am!’
‘She might hear you. She listens in on the lines.’
‘Thank you. The spirit must have come over me.’
‘She fires people. She fired my girlfriend.’
‘Fool, stop lying, you never got nowhere with her,’ Reggie piped in, hand covering his microphone.
‘Oh, don’t worry. The Lord protects his sheep,’ Lynol smiled. Reggie was looking at me from the other side, wagging his head as if I was doing something wrong. When preacher man went to lunch Reggie leaned in. ‘You shouldn’t mess with that dude.’
‘I didn’t do anything to him.’
‘It just ain’t right.’
‘So you got religion now?’
‘I been had religion,’ Reggie said, unbuttoning his shirt and showing me a thick three-dimensional little man on a cross. ‘See.’
‘How much did that cost?’
�
�Three hundred ones.’
‘You go to church?’
‘How am I going to afford church after I spent three hundred ones on this time-saver?’
‘You don’t like him either, you’re just afraid of going to hell.’
‘So?’
On the mornings when Lynol came late and I asked him why, Lynol would tell me that Satan messed up his alarm clock. How? He tricked Lynol into setting it to 6:00 P.M. instead of 6:00 A.M. Or the devil would have made him miss the express sub by misplacing Lynol’s transpass. Or the devil would have simply plagued him with sloth. But then he would get happy and make a fist in the air and say, ‘But I have conquered him this morn!’ and I would root for the devil just as I had rooted for the bad guys as a kid watching Batman or James Bond.
Once, at around two in the afternoon, the peak time for calls, when customers usually had a forty-minute wait, Lynol just put down his head set, unhooked his phone, stretched out his arms, and yawned. Me: going call to call, looking when I could as he casually lifted his backpack to his lap, unzipped it, and removed an apple, browsing some of the loose papers in the sack before zipping it up. Lynol wiped the apple with a napkin he’d stolen from Reggie and then bit into it with a loud crack. I was on the line with a welfare woman whose depression had slowed her vocal cords down to a bored fog and all I could hear was crisp treble of Lynol chewing through my earphones.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked him. Lynol smiled.
‘Having my silent communion-with-God time.’ Lynol took another bite and I could feel juice or spittle spritz my arm.
‘You’re chewing an apple, not talking to God. You’re chewing a fucking green apple. You might as well shove a carrot up your ass.’ I didn’t know what it meant, but I had the fire of the righteous. Staring at me, Lynol put the apple down on the desk, slowly ground the contents in his mouth, then swallowed it down.
‘I love you, black man, just like God does. And it’s obvious you suffering like a sinner. The question is, are you gonna change your ways before you plummet down to hell?’
I started giggling, because wasn’t it a bit late for that?
The next morning I came in early to trade seats with Natalie so I didn’t have to deal with Lynol any more. Clive came in right after I did. We were the only ones in our row. He sat down next to me. His fingernails were clean again, well trimmed, but his clothes were the same ones he’d worn the day before.
‘You see, don’t you?’ Clive asked me.
‘No.’
‘Boy, I see you looking. The clothes. They’re the same ones I wore yesterday, right?’ Clive said smiling.
‘They are?’
‘Yup,’ he confirmed. I smiled and nodded my approval.
‘You want to know why?’ Because you sold the rest of your wardrobe to pack your pipe.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘You know.’
‘No.’ Yes. Because you’re on crack, and this is your new uniform.
‘Cindy,’ Clive said, lowering his tone but enunciating every syllable and looking over in her direction of the room, as if she could see his lips moving through the cubicle walls.
‘You did that?’
‘All night, brother,’ Clive laughed. ‘That was me.’
‘Damn.’
‘Let me tell you, that’s a lot of woman too. I climbed that mountain.’ Clive went to slap my hand and I let him even though I thought he was going to get Cindy juices on me. Between my eyes and his smiling image I saw a picture of Cindy’s inhumanely large pecan butt, naked and aimed towards the moon. Clive would be tense and gritting, banging away from behind like a chimp in a nature film as she snacked on pork rinds and watched Martin on the black-and-white on the other side of the cluttered room. Children would be playing too loud in the hall and Cindy would yell at them to calm down or she would kill them, and Clive wouldn’t notice any of it; his only concern in the world would be keeping his rhythm and controlling his load.
Cindy walked by a few minutes later, and when she passed she was giving an honest smile. For that moment I knew I could love her, that I could lay naked on a bed cupped in her arms, listening to her hum. She was wearing a new blouse today, a blue one; after three months I knew her whole wardrobe. Next to me Clive smiled big again and held up a plastic container of food the size of a shoebox.
‘And that bitch can cook, too,’ he added.
Philly.
Outcall
‘Come on, we’ll go down the Art Museum. It’s Sunday; it’s free till one.’
Nope.
‘Then we’ll swing down to Penn’s Landing. They’re having music today, this afternoon.’
I shrugged that away from me.
‘Then what? It’s a pretty day and you’re in a rut. You should really get out of the house.’
Why the hell should I do some dumb shit like that? America is TV and I’m sitting right in front of the damn thing already. Nothing exists that isn’t held within its cathode eye. Like Philly could offer anything to distract from its brilliance. Channel to channel click-clicking.
‘Aren’t you going to stop on anything?’ Why stop – 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 – when the next image might be better and yet no sight is worth settling on? When the chance to forget your self, your guilt, your pain, lies just one button away?
‘Al, you know what we need on TV?’
‘What?’ she asked me.
‘More obese black matriarchs.’
‘Chris, why don’t you go for a walk?’
‘You just never see them on TV, do you? I mean, in real life we’re surrounded by them, these rotund sassy black mamas who break everything down to a wisecrack and a baked-potato hand on a turkey-loaf hip. How come there aren’t any of them on TV? They should have a sitcom with one. That’s a novel idea – they should have a sitcom centered around a loud, asexual negress, she could yell at her family every week, roll her eyes, you know how they do.’
‘Sure.’
‘Don’t laugh, it’s true – there hasn’t been a good chocolate mammy on TV since Tom and Jerry, and then they just showed her feet.’
‘Are you trying to piss me off? You know, you can go home. It’s not raining any more.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Not the woman thing. I was just telling funnies. It’s not just mammies, what about the coons? How are all the spades going to support themselves? Used to be when a brother could bug his eyes out a bit that was worth something. How about this – check this out – I got a brilliant idea: why not put a coon in a fish-out-of-water comedy? Like this: take a jigaboo and put him on a set surrounded by literate white people not hip to his negro ways. He could jump around like a confused monkey for a bit, then they could all come to some mutual understanding. How about, for example: me. I could be that coon, fair lady. That could be my new job. Fuck advertising. Maybe that’s how I’ll get out of here.’ I turned the TV off. I wanted to throw the remote against the wall, watch the black plastic crack and see the batteries roll across the floor. It wasn’t my remote to throw, or even my wall, so I just sat there, hoping maybe Alex would wrap her arms around my neck, explain away my suffering and tell me how everything was going to turn out fine. Instead, after silence retook the room, she walked over to the window and adjusted a tear in the screen.
‘So you’ve just given up then. You’re not going to let me help,’ Alex said.
‘I wish I could tell you what to help with.’
‘You get any work done yet, Chris? Any progress on your portfolio? Any movement towards anything that’s going to get you out of this place you’re in?’
‘No. I can’t think.’
‘Well, when you going to start thinking? I talked to Saul, the guy who works for the tourist bureau. You could get on him about doing some work.’
‘Alex, I can’t.’ I can’t even explain myself. All day I think about getting out of here, and then, by the time I get off, I’m starving because I can’t afford to buy a big lunch. Then once I get the food
in me, all I can do is lie down. All I’m good for is sleeping. When I get up, it’s time for work again.
This morning was to be different. Mrs Hutton was sending us out into the community to sign people up for assistance. Me and Cindy were to be the ambassadors. Cindy was chosen because she was fast and she wouldn’t take shit from anyone. I was chosen because Mrs Hutton considered my presence generally disruptive and she needed the break. ‘The only reason you ain’t been fired is ‘cause you sound like white folks on the phone’ was how Cindy put it. So we had two days going around the ghetto in a mobile unit seeing what the folks we talked to on the phone really looked like. Like we couldn’t just look around the office.
Eight A.M. was me standing in front of the electric company building with my too-light jacket on, my hands in my pants trying to steal heat from my balls. Cindy stood next to me, bobbing up and down holding herself to fight the last of the spring cold. When she pulled out her cigarettes I asked for one. She said, ‘A quarter.’ All my pockets had was three nickels and ten pennies, which I counted out in front of her.
‘Don’t you have a dime?’
‘Nope.’ I pushed my change closer to her.
‘I don’t want your dirty-ass pennies,’ Cindy said, but she gave me a cigarette anyway, taking the nickels from my palm. I sucked on that thing hard, hoping I could get cancer before noon, cut short my tour of the land I was trapped in. Stealing its opportunity to gloat.
