The People's Police

by Norman Spinrad

  A nice little round of laughter at that one.

  “But how do we get her to do it, J. B.?”

  “How do we persuade the slowly fading TV star of a show going south from its formerly hot ratings to take back the limelight?” I said. “Well, I suppose we could horsewhip her into doing it with a wet noodle if we had to.”

  Relieved belly laughs that time.

  “So no sweat, right, J. B.?” Charlie purred. “Seems like you’re the one to sell this to Mama Legba, like you say, about as hard as, uh, peddling pussy to a shipload of horny sailors. And you’re an expert at that, now ain’tcha?”

  Charlie Devereau, the bastard, did have a way with words, now didn’t he? I swallowed it like … uh, a big-mouthed bass taking the tackle baited with a nice fresh little crawdad, hook, line, and sinker. Wouldn’t you?

  19

  “Are you crazy, babes, you’ve gotta do it!” Harry Klein told MaryLou, and of course by so doing was telling Erzuli too, and Erzuli was also all for it, and then some.

  He’s right, hon’, what do we have to lose, what’s not to like, just about the whole krewe is for it, and that’s as close to being unanimous as we ever get.

  But MaryLou still didn’t like it. She really didn’t think it was because running for governor was crazy, after all a girl with a whole passel of ectoplasmic loas in her head working her body and her mouth whenever they felt like it could hardly complain that anything was too crazy. Nor was it that she was totally unqualified to be governor and didn’t even have an idea of what the job entailed, since she wasn’t going to be elected anyway, besides which, this was, after all, Louisiana, where incompetence had never exactly disqualified anyone for high office.

  Still, there was a swampy whiff about it beyond the usual show biz sleaze even for an ex-street busker, something vaguely, well, actually immoral, that MaryLou couldn’t quite get a handle on.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Lafitte,” MaryLou said hesitantly, “there’s just something about the whole idea that doesn’t seem right.…”

  “Oh for Chrissakes, MaryLou—”

  But J. B. Lafitte cut Harry off. “That’s understandable, Miz Boudreau,” he said calmly. “Truth be told it sounded kinda over the top at first to me too.”

  “It did?”

  “Well, sure it did,” Lafitte told her with a little shrug, which she couldn’t tell was sincere or show-biz bullshit, just as she had been unable to decide whether Lafitte himself was really the charming rogue he seemed to be the moment he sashayed into Harry Klein’s office or whether he was just perfect at playing the part. Or whether there was really a difference.

  “But then I started asking myself who wins and who loses, which, after all is always the right question to ask if you want to do what’s right too, not just what’s gonna do your own sweet self good, and what’s right is what you feel good after, don’t you agree, Miz Boudreau?”

  “I suppose so.…”

  “So who wins is you, big-time, your ratings recover, your show gets subsidized by the Chamber of Commerce and the Tourist Board. And New Orleans wins, okay maybe not as big-time as you do, but the tourist industry, upon which you as a former street act should know this city depends, gets a sorely needed lift. Now ain’tcha gonna feel good after that?”

  Lafitte looked at her strangely while she had it out with Erzuli inside her head, or rather, she supposed, he was looking at her staring at him strangely for what must have seemed like a long time, as Harry Klein drummed his fingers impatiently on his desktop.

  Come on, MaryLou, what’s your problem? Erzuli demanded crossly and perhaps even a little threateningly, an attitude she had never turned on her before.

  It’s phony! MaryLou blurted, finally realizing what was bothering her.

  It’s show biz, hon’, it’s all an act, so how can it be more phony than for instance our show itself? Ain’t Mama Legba the biggest phony of all seein’ as how what people see on TV don’t exactly exist at all? How can it be more phony than Mama Legba herself … itself … we all?

  It’s … it’s unpatriotic!

  It’s WHAT?

  It’s … it’s unpatriotic!

  Unpatriotic? You’ll pardon me for having to ask what that word means.

  It’s turning a democratic election into a farce!

  Lafitte rose dramatically from his chair with a fixed smile on his face. “Tell you what, Miz Boudreau,” he said. “You tell me one person who loses and I’ll walk right out of here and never come back.”

  You tryin’ to tell us it isn’t a farce already?

  The next thing MaryLou knew, Harry Klein was smiling at her in relief and she was smiling at a satisfied-looking J. B. Lafitte on his way out the door.

  * * *

  Did I really believe in loas before I closed a deal with them in Harry Klein’s office?

  I suppose it depends on what you mean by believe. Everybody in New Orleans, in the Delta, as far west as Lafayette, as far north as Baton Rouge, certainly knows that there’s a voodoo tradition in southern Louisiana that goes all the way back to the African slave trade. You hear it in the music, you can smell it in the air, see it all over the tourist souvenir shops, even if you’ve never heard a thing about Marie Laveau, loas, chicken sacrifices, and trance dances, and most folks here, including yours truly certainly have. And that was before Mama Legba and Her Supernatural Krewe went on the air.

  Do I believe in Jesus? Do I believe in Mohammed? Do I believe in Buddha? Do I believe in Krishna?

  Not in the sense that the various flavors of Holy Rollers believe, after all, they can’t all be right about the way Big Daddy in the Sky set up the game, since some of them don’t even believe there’s only one of Him and some of them do.

  But I have to believe that Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and all, exist, now don’t I? So if they exist, so does voodoo. It must exist because you see it on television.

  Loas? Split personalities like the shrinks would call it? What the theater folks call Method Acting?

  If Harry Klein had power of attorney, no sweat, done deal as soon as I walk in the door. But Mama Legba, I mean this former busker, MaryLou Boudreau, has her doubts. So I make with the sweet reason.

  “… who wins is you, big-time, your ratings recover, your show gets subsidized by the Chamber of Commerce and the Tourist Board. And New Orleans wins, okay maybe not as big-time as you do, but the tourist industry, upon which you as a former street act should know this city depends, gets a sorely needed lift. Now ain’tcha gonna feel good after that…?”

  And she freezes. She goes blank. Like a wax museum dummy of herself. I’m looking her in the eyes and I’m not seeing anything looking back.

  I can hear Klein drumming on the desktop and by the beat of it I can tell that it only lasted a minute or two but let me tell you it felt like forever at the time. What am I supposed to do with this poster girl for a poker face staring at me with dead eyes like a corpse?

  Well, it is a poker face. Maybe she’s hiding her hand behind that mask, and if this was a poker game, what I’d have to do, like it or not, is call.

  “Tell you what, Miz Boudreau,” I tell her, getting up out of my chair real slowly. “You tell me one person who loses and I’ll walk right out of here and never come back.” And even more slowly, I turn to leave.

  And that’s when it happens.

  “Come on, hon’, sit your sweet ass back down, we just gotta a few little details to work out,” she tells me, not only soft and warm as a wet pussy, but with another voice so sexy I want to hire her to answer the phone in my Garden District bordello. And even her eyes are lookin’ back at me with the cock-teasing come-hither smile of a top-dollar whore.

  I sit back down trying to hide the hard-on in my pants. “Such as…?”

  “Such as the format,” she tells me.

  I glance at Klein who looks like he’s shitting pickles. “That’s y’all’s end of the deal, not mine,” I tell her. “The folks who I represent just want you to run for gover
nor, is all their askin’, they’re not sponsors trying to grab some creative control.”

  “They have the power,” says a male voice that sounds like he’s got a lot more of it than the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, Montrose, and Brown put together.

  “What power?”

  “The power to keep the Mama Legba show on the air while we run for governor,” purrs Mama Legba. It’s the voice of Miz Pussy Cat again, but I gotta think of her as Mama Legba because this is what happens on the show all the time, and while I didn’t watch it much then, I was beginning to recognize this voice from hearing it on television.

  No way around it, if loas existed, I was talking to them. Whether I was talking to their ventriloquist’s dummy, or a schizo or a real good vaudeville act didn’t matter. I was talking to Mama Legba, and my mission, which I had accepted, was to close this deal.

  “No problem,” I say, remembering I was the guy who said the same thing to Charlie and the rest of the Bitching and Moaning Society in my own saloon.

  “No matter what?” says another male voice, this one kinda fruity and insinuating, like a star interior decorator to whom the customer is never right. “Anything goes?”

  “Complete control?” demands the voice that sounds like he’s got it already and always has.

  Well, maybe I don’t like the sound of that, like what would happen if Mama Legba does a geek act on the air or starts speaking in four-letter tongues or turning the show triple X, but I’m there to close the deal, so I do.

  “Complete creative control,” I more or less agree, but the more or less is good enough.

  “The compact is sealed,” says Mr. Complete Control, and Mama Legba shakes my hand.

  “A pleasure dealin’ with ya, hon’,” says Mama Legba, blowing me a kiss as I get up to leave. And she’s MaryLou Boudreau again before I’m out the door.

  So if you ask ol’ J. B. whether I believed in loas after I closed a deal with them in Harry Klein’s office, all I can really say is that I sure closed a deal with something or some things inside the head of MaryLou—loas, schizos, Method Acting characters, whatever, just call she, it, or them Mama Legba.

  Now, I was never a fan of Mama Legba and Her Supernatural Krewe, I don’t believe in being a fan of anything, but now I not only had a business interest in watching every episode as someone making the best part of his living off the tourist trade, but it had become kinda personal.

  So yes, I was watching when Mama Legba or whatever was talking through MaryLou Boudreau at the time threw her hat in the ring, live and unexpected on television.

  MaryLou Boudreau usually stayed in Mama Legba’s catbird seat and did the talking through the introduction, and the call for sad stories from the studio audience, none of the whining stories they told had seemed to be scripted except Luke Martin’s now famous “People’s Police” speech and MaryLou would stick around till Mama Legba’s choice of who would get to meet their fairy godmother loa was made.

  But this time the audience was obviously full of ringers and all of them seemed scripted. Many of them were just about commercials for the Supernatural Krewe, praise for saving New Orleans from the Hurricane Season in the form of man-in-the-street stories of how by so doing the loas had saved their personal asses, others were pleas to make the supernatural salvation permanent, or to make Mama Legba’s Mad Mardi Gras the eternal format for the annual carnal carnival, or both.

  And this time around MaryLou picked one after the other for the whole damn show, one after the other without any guest appearance by a loa, boring television on the one hand, but building and building anticipatory tension on the other, until the capper.

  With the show close to the end, Mama Legba tossed away her shotgun mike dramatically, and cake-walked closer to the camera and Miz Pussy Cat did the talking.

  “We have an announcement to make, and y’all gonna love it! You love the Mad Mardi Gras and so do we. And we all love you all! We love New Orleans! We love Louisiana! We proved it during the Hurricane Season, and now we’re gonna prove it again! And you … are … gonna … love it!”

  On came a male voice, sly and smart-ass sounding. “We somehow got dragooned here with slaves from Africa and we’ve been here ever since. We’ve answered your calls for help when we liked your style, and you’ve been our faithful horses when we felt like a ride, and together we’ve had a great time boogying together through the Mad Mardi Gras—”

  And then there was a sudden voice change, and what came on was a booming male opera singer bass with a scat-man edge, and Mama Legba’s face turned into a mask of power, and it was hard to convince yourself that the eyes burning into the camera were, well, merely human.

  “And we’re not gonna let anyone take all that away now are we!” it roared, sounding a lot more like a command than a question. “We’re not gonna let anyone or anything bring back the Hurricane Season and take away the Mad Mardi Gras! I am Baron Samedi and I am running for governor of Louisiana and you all are going to vote for me, now aren’t you?”

  “I’m Erzuli,” said the voice of Miz Pussy Cat, “and I’m running for governor of Louisiana.”

  “I’m Agau and I’m running for governor of Louisiana.”

  “I’m Bade and I’m running for governor of Louisiana.”

  On and on through the changes, bang, bang, bang, one after the other.

  “I’m Sogbo and I’m running for governor of Louisiana.”

  “I’m Dumballah and I’m running for governor of Louisiana!”

  And then came a voice I knew, a voice I had dickered with, a voice that made it sound like he was final. “I’m Papa Legba, and I’m running for governor of Louisiana.”

  Well, not exactly, because what spoke next was like Mama Legba and Her Supernatural Krewe doing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

  “I’m Mama Legba and I’m running for governor of Louisiana.”

  “For a long time now this state has been laid low by what someone once dared to call voodoo economics,” said Papa Legba. “Well, that’s not us. That’s not voodoo anything. We are the real thing. We are voodoo. We have the power. We’ve used it for you before and we’ll use it for you again when you elect Mama Legba governor of the state of Louisiana. I am Papa Legba, I am the guardian of crossroads, the gatekeeper of luck and destiny, and Mama Legba is the doorway I’m opening for you to walk through. The choice is yours. Voodoo economics or the real deal.”

  “I’m not from Hollywood, so I’m not telling you to trust us,” drawled Miz Pussy Cat, Erzuli as she had called herself.

  “We’re from Louisiana just like you,” said Papa Legba, and Mama Legba wrist-flipped a pair of phantom dice across an invisible table. “And all we’re telling you all is you gotta roll the bones, or the bones roll you. Vote for Mama Legba for governor!”

  And with a tip of a phantom hat, a little bow, and a big fat smile for the camera, Mama Legba turned and waltzed off-stage just as time ran out.

  20

  It had gotten to the point where MaryLou Boudreau only knew what happened on her own show by looking at the recordings of it afterward.

  Her own show? Had Mama Legba and Her Supernatural Krewe ever really been her show? If it ever had been, it certainly wasn’t now. It was Mama Legba’s show now, and likewise, if “Mama Legba” had ever been primarily her, “she” certainly wasn’t now.

  The loas had taken over most of the airtime, and MaryLou wasn’t even consciously aware of what they were doing except when Erzuli was the one riding her. And what they were doing behind the back of her head when she wasn’t there was turning Mama Legba into a puppet show parody of a phony politician.

  MaryLou herself was reduced to being the impotent ringmaster at this one-ring circus, pointing the shotgun mike here and there, listening to the praises of the Mad Mardi Gras and the loas who had “saved New Orleans,” and pleas for salvation from everything from hurricanes to herpes, from eviction notices and foreclosures to unlovable spouses and diarrhea. To which Mama Legba always promised she
would grant when she was elected governor and set everything right.

  Was this satire of an election campaign funny? Was it even supposed to be funny? If so, it wasn’t to MaryLou Boudreau, it didn’t seem to be to the live audiences, and the latest polls were showing that 17 percent of the voters in Louisiana who were being projected as actually voting for Mama Legba would seem to be taking it seriously.

  What was the Supernatural Krewe really trying to do? Or for that matter did they even know, let alone understand, what they were doing?

  MaryLou knew plenty about voodoo even before there was a Mama Legba and had probably been ridden by loas more than anyone else ever, and knew more about the experience than any other “horse,” since other “horses” never actually experienced the ride at all.

  But just what were loas anyway? MaryLou found it hard to buy Africans gods or supernatural spirits, evil or otherwise, and Erzuli claimed neither was what they really were. She did some reading and googling and came up with any number of crackpot theories and theological mumbo-jumbos, most of which didn’t make any sense to her.

  One that seemed to make a little sense was on a flying saucer site that featured plenty of fuzzy photos and videos of the cavorting lights in the sky, but claimed that they were “natural creatures of the planetary magnetosphere,” an entire ecology of organized energy rather than aliens from outer space. Could the loas be the most highly evolved form of “energy entities”?

  Another was that they were creatures of another reality that existed independent of flesh or even regular matter because it was the realm of “dark matter” and “dark energy,” which physics had proven was really there but which scientists had been unable to detect, which sounded like the same thing.

  Erzuli herself never gave her a straight answer. Because, or so she claimed, she didn’t have any.

  What makes you think we know, hon’? We don’t remember ever being not here, but what makes you think we know where here is or what it is? Especially seeing as how it doesn’t seem to be a here like what y’all have. What we know is we each have our powers, and none of us have bodies, and just like you, what we like, and what we don’t.