The DJ killed the beat and the hum of the room softened as the host took to the stage to start the show. The eight competing gladiators prepped themselves for battle in the front row, and the diminutive peroxide blonde standing to Macon’s left, apparently assuming all back-wall players to be as cynical as she, curled her cocktail to her chest and began a low-spoken commentary. The first competitor, a statuesque black woman, strode to the mic and Macon’s neighbor leaned back and crossed her ankles. “I’ve seen her before,” she murmured, turning her lip ring with her tongue in a way that Macon found repulsive and yet sexy. “This oughta be just great.”
“Staring into you as we move together as one,” the poet intoned, low and throaty, shutting her long-lashed lids and making a slinky, obscure gesture with her copper-bangled right arm as she drew out one, “pulsating with a single heartbeat as you come to life inside me . . .”
“Pussy poem,” hissed the blonde. “Chick stands up, talks about getting fucked, audience gets hard and eats it up. What bullshit.”
Macon smiled. “You a poet?”
She flicked her eyes at him. “No.” They clapped politely as the pussy poem climaxed to huge crowd noise and a serious-looking bald-headed brother in boots, baggy blue jeans, and a tight black T-shirt trooped onstage.
“Black Power poet,” said the girl. “Wanna bet he’ll make a ‘Revolution will not be televised’ reference?”
“You must come here a lot.”
“Just enough to remind myself why it sucks.”
“And why’s that?”
Without looking away from the stage, she gestured broadly, implicating the entire room. “They’re performers, not poets. Nobody deals with language. It’s about getting high scores from audience judges who wouldn’t know e. e. cummings from B. B. King.” Or CeCe Winans, thought Macon, his mind off and running along the random track she had prescribed. Or Dee Dee Bridgewater. He loved this kind of game. G. G. Allin. A. A. Milne. J. J. Johnson. LL Cool J. KK Rockwell. ZZ Top.
The poet, as predicted, was making emphatic use of such phrases as “no justice, just us,” and “each one, teach one.” Macon groaned, then squinted at the silver lining.
“This probably woulda been the bomb in, like, 1973.”
“I’m sure,” she responded, “considering he stole the rhyme scheme from the Watts Prophets.”
A fat, bearded white guy was up next. “Category three,” the blonde narrated. “The self-deprecating poem. Vaguely titillating, incredibly embarrassing, actually a cry for help. Poet looks for sympathy and courage points.”
“If you could get paid for jerking off,” opened the poet, rubbing one palm viciously against the other in what might have been either showmanship or an unconscious tic, “I’d be a millionaire. I am a master of masturbation, a sultan of self-abuse. If there were Onanism Olympics . . .”
“Three for three,” Macon congratulated her, offering his hand. She took it, pumped once, and held it for a few seconds before re-crossing her arms.
“I can’t take much more of this,” she hissed.
“Come on now, you gotta wait till I go on. I want to know which category I fit into.” Macon’s literary confidence, firm already, was engorging with each reading.
“You sure you want to know?”
“Positive. I’m lead-off on the open mic. What if I buy you a drink to ease the pain?”
“I’ll take a Cuervo with a beer back. Thanks.”
The Black Power poet, after vanquishing the pussy poet, went on to dispatch a Mohawked punk-rock poet who paced the club while screaming about the day he found his father with a shotgun in his mouth and his brains on the floor. In the finals, however, he was trumped by a woman whose “iron spears of oppression” poem, recited on her knees with eyes closed and hands clasped to her chest, managed to address both the violence of slavery and the politics of sucking dick. It cost Macon two more tequila shots to keep his homegirl around, but it was a small price to pay to have an ally in the house. He’d downed three rum-and-Cokes himself just to keep pace, and by the time the MC introduced him, mangling his last name, it was something of an effort for Macon to navigate the thinning crowd with his usual élan.
“Okay, uh, I’m Macon Detornay and this joint is called ‘Mouth to Mouth Resuscitation,’ ” he said, unfolding the quartered pages from his back pocket. “I wrote it last year, when I was visiting a friend of mine at USC. Sorry I haven’t memorized it. Next time, I promise. Okay:
shirtless in the first real day of LA heat
i can see poverty curling back
the edges of the campus
like burning newspaper
LA & fire wedged together forever for me in my mind
good cop bad cop shock drop bad cop
no rupture in the revolution of the loop
of the song
rap is on the microphone:
can’t we all just get a bong?
trade you my africa medallion
for the name of your weed spot
no audobon assassins
memphis snipers
or government conspiracies needed
hip hop was born
with a silver nine in its mouth
already cocked & just waiting
for hammer time
my man lajuan is down with single gun theory
claims that same dallas bullet
just been ricocheting around
for like 35 years now
flew thru saigon & the south bronx
moving like the old cartoon singalong dot
bounced thru south africa on a world tour
pit stops from bosnia to watts
caught scott la rock & kids on every block
hit john lennon bounced right off ronald reagan
struck the jackpot when it caught hip hop
but like that retarded kid on tv said
life goes on
meanwhile
i’m tryna deal with a down syndrome of my own
when i reminisce
it’s video clips
as baby pics
i feel like
bigger thomas’s mother or some shit
it never fails
when they map
rap’s family tree
invariably between staggerlee & leroi
some defender of the realm
like me
will invoke richard wright
as if that proves something
i mean hell
try getting my parents
to take responsibility for
some of the shit i’ve pulled lately
how you gonna be twentysomething years old &
let your great-granddaddy
fight your battles anyway?
looking for inspiration i
slide down the family tree
til i reach the last poets
umar bin hassan
afro aflame
chucking chinese throwing stars
thru white people’s spines
a stance later modified
see he ain’t talkin bout me
he means um
alright I might be a white devil but
i’m beginning to hate with love and love with hate
i’m down right
i can relate
watch me
cruisin stick n movin showin & provin
manchild in the promised band
hopin he’s groovin
if i were a jazz musician
i’d be wishin for an invite to sit in
legs wrapped round my horn case like a barbershop pole
but i’m not
this hip hop
act like you know
so i stay
strapped
with a symbolic list
of anti-colonialist accomplishments
for when somebody ask
who dis
potential brutus
judas iscariot
driving in place &
pumpin mix tapes to demonstrate
the unity of the proletariat
starting to sound like jesse at the convention in 88
my forefathers came here on slaveships
his forefathers came on immigrant ships
but whatever the original ships
we’re all in the same boat now
boom shocka lock
hip hop is not plymouth rock
any more than america’s the great melting pot
i could recite
a battleworn litany
of moments & events gasps of death
from the sugarhill gang’s
grandmaster caz
grand larceny creative
the borrowed notebook that made rap famous
to the train buff
graff’s chemical death bath
somebody said you could actually hear the colors shrieking
as they melted into welfare cutbacks
and all the way up to sprite ads
but nunadat is where it’s at
suffice to say the other day
the faded ghost of hip hop’s past
tiptoed to my side & grabbed my wrist
arms out pressed us sideways
fingertips to tips
we did the wave
b-boy vulcan mindmeld
b-boy energy ripples twist into infinity
but then i always been the type to get sentimental
over shit that might’ve never existed
so i can’t say for sure
if all this means
that hip hop’s not as raw
or that i ain’t twelve no more
then again check out some of these cats who are
leave it to a music that saturation mined
the backlog annals of recorded history
lookin for the perfect beat
to double back & diagnose itself
with advanced acute nostalgia
for its own barely vanished youth
you’d think hip hoppers
would be natural historians correct
but only for eight digital seconds at a time
Macon refolded the paper slowly, drawing out his face time, and nodded humbly at the floor as the audience accorded him a smattering of applause. He looked up to realize that the room had half-drained during his reading, but he told himself it was to be expected; folks only came for the slam. The sliver of Macon that had expected to be mobbed by newborn fans was disillusioned, as usual, and as usual his ego swooped gracefully to the rescue, catching his self-image on the first bounce. Fuck all that theatrical bullshit, he thought as he returned to his spot against the wall, I hit motherfuckers with some content and if they’re not ready for it, then fuck them. This place is wack, anyhow. Another ten years, hip hop’ll be like jazz: The only black folks in the club’ll be onstage.
“So what’s the verdict?” Macon asked, hoping he sounded like he didn’t care. The blonde smiled at him, and Macon chose to interpret the sight of her gleaming upper teeth, the front two endearingly crooked, with a liberal dose of self-aggrandizement.
“Not bad at all.” He tried not to hear pity in her voice.
“Yeah? It was okay?”
“I’m willing to go with okay. Now stop fishing for compliments. That’s not my style.” Her style—it was a loophole, and Macon squeezed himself through it: It isn’t that my poem wasn’t dope, it’s that she doesn’t want to say so. Macon scoped her when she looked away and told himself she was playing it cool because she liked him, but he didn’t believe it. New York loomed large and menacing, and for a moment Macon felt inconsequential, mortal, a yellow leaf spiral-flitting to the ground only to be taken up by the current of rainwater in the gutter and whisked down the street and gone. The suburbanity of the image disturbed him.
The blonde stuck out her hand. “I’m Logan.” A roving stage light lit up her aquamarine eyes and they pinned Macon like a butterfly. He went limp with strange embarrassment, as if she’d caught him doing something nasty, glimpsed some hidden lameness. Macon felt awkward in his clothes—hot, itchy, smelly—and wondered if the backpackers’ uniforms shielded them from some pernicious radiation to which he wasn’t hip.
“Macon. This is my first time reading in New York.” It sounded like an apology. “I’m from Boston.”
“Really?” She cocked her head. “Where’d you go to high school?”
“Newton South?”
Logan frowned. “That’s not Boston. That’s the suburbs. Birth-place of the Fig Newton.”
Macon’s heart punctuated her line with a rim shot; he felt himself begin to perspire and wanted to bolt then and there, before Logan called him out further, unearthed something horrible in him. You need to chill, he told himself, brushing back his hair as an excuse to squeegee the sweat from his forehead. She wouldn’t be talking to you if she didn’t like your poem.
“Got me,” he admitted, going for rueful. Fuck did rueful sound like? He’d never tried rueful before. “I just say Boston because most people have never heard of Newton. I wasn’t trying to front.”
“Yeah, sure,” Logan teased. “I’m from Cambridge,” she explained. “I went to Rindge and Latin.”
“Really?” It meant he could name-drop Beantown graffiti artists, place himself inside a tradition of bad-man neon hand-skills, earn her respect that way. “I went bombing with a lot of Cambridge cats. Maybe you know my boy—”
Logan cut him off. “Probably,” she said. “Listen, I’ll tell you what. Let’s skip the name game and just bond over candlepin bowling. You know there’s no such thing in this city?”
“That’s horrible,” said Macon, affecting a look of playful dismay. He was pretty sure he nailed it, and fought the urge to raise his arms like a gymnast after dismount. He’d been bowling maybe three times in his life, all at grade-school birthday parties. What a weird thing to bring up, he thought. Maybe she didn’t like my poem because she’s deranged.
The lights swaddling Logan chose that moment to swing elsewhere, and she and Macon were cast into shadows. “It is,” she said. “New York might have everything else over the Bean, but it’ll never be home to me until somebody builds some candlepin lanes.”
“You might like big-ball bowling,” Macon said, sidestepping double-entendre landmines. “Maybe we could go sometime.” Logan smiled and flipped her tongue ring. Her eyes pulsed at him in the dark.
“I doubt it,” she said. “But call me if you ever read again.”
I’m a pimp, Macon told himself as he walked out the front a quarter clock-flip later, Logan’s number scribbled across the back of his poem and vague, out-of-focus sex-with-Logan movies playing in his mind. Forgotten were his tepid reception, his disappointment with the club, the strange panic that had bubbled up under the heat of Logan’s stare. Macon jogged to the subway station like a home-run hitter circling the bases, caught the R to Times Square, transferred to the 2 Express, and felt like a bona fide New Yorker until the train passed Ninety-sixth Street and began traveling east, a subway quirk that left him no choice but to exit not at 116th and Broadway, under the protective eyes of the fake Roman statues adorning Columbia’s main entrance, but across the park at 116th and Lenox, a sketchy neighborhood at two in the morning even if you knew your way around.
Chapter Six
Shortest distance between two points is a straight line, Macon reminded himself, trudging resolutely toward the park that separated Columbia from Harlem. Besides, people always exaggerate these things. Can’t be afraid to walk in your own city. That’s the first step toward self-segregation.
Broken glass crunched underneath his boots and Macon snapped into Indian hunter mode, super-alert and darting his head whenever a twig cracked, gauging the ramifications of each rat scurrying across his path and making the appropriate spiritual re-calibrations. He was testing himself, granting danger the opportunity to meet him without actually inviting it. He wanted to emerge unscathed and be able to say, People are tripping. The
park is fine at night. And then he’d never set foot there after dark again.
Macon followed the left-leaning pathway to the top of the first hill. A notty-bearded black dude staggered into view around the next bend, waving a goose-down jacket as he approached Macon. Neither of them spoke in words. The cat mumbled something garbled and garrulous, jacket draped over his arm as if he were a wine steward and the filthy fucking thing a lace napkin, and Macon replied by putting sound into his exhalation, making a noise like nuhh as he walked by. “Not even the season for that shit,” he muttered, wiping sweat from his forehead and shaking it from his hand onto the pavement. Macon turned his head sideways, checking out his shadow underneath the streetlights and the scant moon, hoping to see a Classic American Profile. Instead, his face was stretched flat against the ground, pale and distorted.
He made another turn, emboldened by the success with which he’d navigated past the crackhead, glanced up and saw the huge frame of a man in front of him, outlined against the moonlight.
“Yo.” A deep voice, bouncing off the trees. “Ayo. C’mere a second. You.” A tall, thick brother in a black skull cap walked into the light, massive arms dangling loosely from his shoulders. Macon froze. “C’mere,” the man said. “I ain’t gonna hurt you.” He turned and hollered back behind him. “I found somebody. Let’s do it.” The distant response sounded like hand slaps. “I said come here,” the man demanded again, flaring the nostrils of his wide nose. Macon gangled toward him.
“Follow me.” The brother ambled off the road, into the darkness, and Macon did as he was told, scared witless, too afraid to run. He saw nothing but the man’s broad back in front of him, gliding boldly through the underbrush. Sticks broke underneath the man’s feet with a violence that made Macon’s heart beat even faster. He didn’t turn around to look at Macon once, as if the thought that his captive might turn and run had never crossed his mind. Or as if the man were hoping he would make a move.
Clammy sweat pasted Macon’s clothing to his skin, but he didn’t dare to lift his shirt and let his skin breathe. Any suspicious motion might provoke his captor to whirl around and slap him to the ground.
Angry Black White Boy Page 8
