Reckless Eyeballing

by Ishmael Reed

  Tremonisha Smarts opened the door upon the detective who’d come to investigate. She’d called after the intruder left. She’d freed herself from the ropes with which he’d tied her into a chair. The detective was breathing heavily. He was a medium-sized man, and was wearing a brown hat with a band of darker brown. He wore a starched white shirt and plain, dull tie. His black shoes had been shined. His lower lip protruded and some of the membrane was exposed. His jaws were slack, and he had a nose that was crooked in the center as though it had been repaired. He identified himself as Detective Lawrence O’Reedy of the New York Police Department. He tipped his hat and smiled at the woman, who was dressed in a manner that revealed much “eye candy,” as people in advertising said. Her head was covered with some white cloth made of what appeared to be a rich fabric. She wore some earrings and bracelets. Tremonisha Smarts. His wife had insisted that he see her play, Wrong-Headed Man. She thought that he’d fall asleep, but it turned out that he rather enjoyed it. Especially the scene where the big black ape throws his missionary wife down the stairs. Tremonisha was sobbing. She said something like, “I’m glad you came,” and said it in such a manner that got him excited. She guided him into the living room of the large, high-ceilinged apartment and led him to a seat. O’Reedy slowly lowered his huge bottom into a chair and removed his notebook and pen. “Would you like a drink?” she asked.

  “Scotch,” he said. She disappeared into the kitchen. There were some paintings on the wall, and some posters from her play Wrong-Headed Man that depicted the controversial scene where Mose, the lead character, stands at the top of the stairs, arms folded and a cigarette dangling from his lips, while at the bottom his missionary wife, whom he has pushed down the stairs, lies sprawled and sobbing, her dress up around her waist. Throughout Wrong-Headed Man, Mose goes on a spree of woman-bashing rape and incest. A pain shot through O’Reedy’s kidneys. He grimaced. “Is anything wrong?” Tremonisha asked, his drink in her hand. O’Reedy didn’t acknowledge the remark. “Could you give me a description of the man?” he asked.

  Sometimes O’Reedy went for days without evacuating his wastes and when stools did show up, they were dark and pasty. His wrists were always in pain. Yet it seemed like only yesterday that he calmly drove through the car dealer’s showcase window to capture some niggers who were inside, holding a white woman as hostage. That was the day he became a legend. He had pulled his pet heat Nancy on the niggers, and before pasting their insides to the wall he said: “Give me something to write home to Mother about,” the line that became immortal, even quoted by politicians. Hey, he was even mentioned on one of the syndicated shows. “In the news recently, there was an incident involving three hoodlums and a New York City detective. What did the detective say before shooting all three?” The lady answered the question correctly and won fifteen thousand dollars. When O’Reedy had lifted the hysterical woman hostage to her feet and led her outside, the noonday crowd had applauded. That was the year the public, making its wishes known through the polls, had pleaded with him to run for mayor.

  “He was a large man. He wore a raincoat, white scarf, and beret. He wore dark glasses. He had the cheekbones of a well-fed cat, and, and…” Tremonisha began to cry. O’Reedy looked up from his notepad. She was wearing silk pajama–type pants, white blouse, and a white turban to cover the damage that her assailant had wrought. She had big eyes and long, dark eyelashes.

  “He said all sorts of political things. Said that I was giving the black man a bad name.” (O’Reedy offered her a handkerchief. She declined and took some fancy department store tissue that rested in a pink box on the table next to the chair. She blew her nose.) O’Reedy felt like taking her into his arms, comforting her, and saying things like, “Now, now.”

  “Probably some psycho with wounded masculine pride,” O’Reedy said, writing down his observations in his notebook. A political nut. “Outside of the hair…did he harm you in any other way?”

  “No, as a matter of fact he left me this.” She showed the detective a chrysanthemum. The detective took it from her and put a handkerchief about it.

  “I’ll take it down to the lab. He must have some kind of obsession with hair. Why would he cut your hair?”

  “He said that the hair was cut because that’s what the French did to the women who collaborated with the Nazis during the war.”

  “Looks like we have a real lunatic here.” He leaned over and clasped her moist hand. He felt some nerves stirring in his left hand. The hand that had gone numb many years before.

  “It’s a shame that he did this to you.” He looked up at the turban; he felt like patting her head, but he restrained himself. She smiled and blushed. “Don’t worry, Ms. Smarts. I’ll get the bastard if it’s the last thing that I do.” The phone rang. She walked over to pick it up. The detective glanced at her serendipitous buttocks moving beneath her silk pants. His eyes moved from left to right.

  “I can’t talk to you now. Tomorrow, Towers. It’ll have to be a late flight. You’ll arrange it? Why do you keep asking that question? It’s fiction, I told you—you keep asking me did it really happen? No, I never had incest with my father. I’m becoming annoyed, Towers. Yes, I’ll have dinner with you tomorrow.” She hung up and nervously plucked a cigarette from a box on the table. O’Reedy lit the cigarette. “They’re doing a film of Wrong-Headed Man,” she said finally, blowing out smoke.

  Ian Ball’s friends, the black male writers whom he referred to as the fellas, had observed that since the film version of Wrong-Headed Man was being produced, directed, and written by white males, that they, the fellas, could look forward to a good media head-whipping just about the time the film came out. They imagined that the white feminist critics were already lining up to review it, queuing up like those people who wait all night for the opportunity to buy a ticket to a Prince concert, even feuding about which one was going to be the first to drub old Mose. Skin Mose—the American black man—alive.

  “My wife and I saw it,” O’Reedy said. “That scene—you know the one where the huge black brute throws this mulatress down the stairs, but not before—you know where she is lying there begging for mercy when he—I started to run up on the stage, it was so realistic. All I could think to do was rescue that woman—ever since I saw that, I was wondering, Ms. Smarts, did that really happen? I mean, did some black brute take you—I mean, how was it?”

  “Mr. O’Reedy, I really have to be packing. I’m flying to Hollywood tomorrow. I still have to do revisions on the script. Will you be needing me?”

  “I think I have enough information. Please call me when you return. We might have some additional clues. We’ll do everything we can to stop this creep.”

  “Thank you, Detective O’Reedy.” He rose and wobbled to the door, placing the notebook into the pocket of his gray gabardine overcoat. He tipped his brown hat and smiled.

  4

  “Good grief, look at the tits on that one,” Jim said.

  “Jesus. Would you look at that. I’d like to take that one for a horseback ride all night long. Yeeeeooowww.” Ball and Jim had just finished their work on the play and were looking at the photos of some of the women who had been cast.

  “So as I was saying, the guy from the outer office, you know, Ickey, he comes rushing in—was he livid. He looked like he wanted to fight, but she told him it was all right. They had this big, beefy-looking guy with a crew cut there. Bluest eyes I ever saw. He’s the old broad’s chauffeur and bodyguard. His name is Otto. I thought he was going to jump into it, but he didn’t say anything. Anyway, I’m screaming at this broad and she’s just standing there.”

  “Man. I would have loved to see the expression on Ickey’s face. He is one bigoted bastard. He called my stuff crude. I’d like to crude him.” Ian took another hit of the joint and passed it to Minsk. Ian did an imitation of Ickey that wasn’t too complimentary. They both laughed. Minsk leaned back and almost fell out of the kitchen chair.

  “Imagine that twat. Thought she could
get away with it. Do this Eva Braun play at the Mountbatten and give you the Queen Mother.”

  “How did you hear that she was going to try it?”

  “I was sitting in a café around the corner from the theater and I heard these two broads talking about it. They were excited about the Eva Braun thing. They said that you were…are you ready for this? A notorious sexist.”

  “I can see why they would say that about my first play, Suzanna, but they’ll have to change their minds after they see Reckless Eyeballing. They’re going to have to like Cora Mae’s monologue.”

  “Man, are the sisters going to get you for that,” Minsk said. Ball thought for a moment.

  “I know. But I figure if I can win these white broads to my side, the sisters will follow. The few who think the way they do are dependent upon them. You know how Becky first promoted Johnnie Kranshaw, and then when Johnnie Kranshaw disappeared after a falling out with Becky and her friends, they brought in Tremonisha, and last word I got was that they’re tired of the black American women because they feel they can’t be trusted and are ‘surly,’ and so they’re going to start importing some black women from the Caribbean who’ll be more agreeable and do their bidding for them. Deputize them to go out and smear black men. At least that’s what Brashford said.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re hard on us white males, too.” Ball stared at Minsk for a moment.

  “Brashford says that you’re not a white male, you’re Jewish, that white men and Jewish men have been fighting for centuries and for you to call yourself a white man is strange. He says that just because you know about Wallace Stevens and Chekhov doesn’t mean that these people are going to accept you as white, no way.”

  They’d been through this before. Minsk used to argue about universality and the minimal importance of ethnicity, but that would only encourage Ball to quote more of Brashford’s ranting and raving.

  “He reminds me of my father. He’s paranoid too.”

  “Yeah. Brashford does go off the deep end from time to time. How’s your father doing?”

  “The President’s visit to Bitburg really upset him. First it was the Nativity Decision, you know where the Supreme Court ruled that the display of Christian symbols is a legitimate part of the American Christmas. He said that every Jew was going to find his exit and he’d find his in death. He thinks that the Christians are going to make Jews convert or leave the United States.”

  “Well, maybe he has a point.”

  Minsk got up and went to the small refrigerator in his bachelor’s kitchen and got a bottle of beer. He was about five-foot-nine-inches and weighed 150 pounds. He went about his house in a jumpsuit and ate 100 percent bran every morning. There were fern plants in his bathroom and health food store soaps.

  “I don’t think so,” he said to Ball when he returned to the living room. “He was in some pogrom. This whole town was murdered by the Cossacks.”

  “Pogrom? What are you talking about?”

  “The Europeans were massacring Jews before they went into Africa after the blacks. Ancient Christians hated the Jews. They were suspicious of them because they wouldn’t mingle with them or worship their gods. At least that’s one theory. In Russia, where my folks came from, discrimination against the Jews was especially virulent, though sometimes they were tolerated; depended upon which czar was in power.”

  “Well, all of the Jews over here seem to be eating good. Nobody’s herding them into ghettos. What was wrong with your old man?”

  “It happens to old people. They get disoriented. You know. My uncle, his younger brother, says that Pop always acted old. He’d go down to the deli or the automat where some of these old-timers would read and discuss the newspapers and talk about the old days in Russia. He’d spend hours there. Or he’d have his head buried in some books. He wrote poetry in Yiddish. He clung to the old ways while everybody else became assimilated, including my uncle, who used to be a gangster. You can’t get any more assimilated than that.”

  “I didn’t even know you had an uncle,” Ball replied.

  “Guy was in the mobs, up until before World War Two. Went to St. Louis and opened up a chain of carpet stores.”

  “A gangster. In your family?”

  “Surprised me too. I thought all of the gangsters were Irish or Italian. But there was some guy named Dutchman. He was a Jew. He ripped off Harlem for millions of dollars. Rigged the numbers so that he was always guaranteed a hefty take.”

  “Jewish gangsters. I thought all the Jews were slumlords.” Ball grinned.

  “Sure. Einstein, Trotsky, Chagall—slumlords. Fuck you, Ball.”

  “Hey, look, man. You’re the one who says he doesn’t affiliate,” Ball said. “So what are you so sore about? Gimme a break.”

  “I just hate misinformation, Ian. The Jews own the media, the Jews own the garment district, the Jews own this, the Jews own that. They just libel Jews with that shit so’s to take their minds off of those who really own it. That’s the same shit they used against you blacks. Like the black welfare queen with the fur coats and two homes and diamonds.”

  “Okay. Okay. Jim, look, man, I take it back.”

  They were silent for a minute, both of their heads buried in the script.

  “I’m surprised that we got Cora’s monologue past Becky. She suggested that Cora Mae’s line here on page forty-one read something about her victimization by both the Reckless Eyeballer, Ham Hill, and by her husband. She said that because he leered at Cora the black was just as guilty as the white men who murdered him,” Jim said.

  They broke up and the joint they smoked made them laugh even harder.

  “She wanted to—I can’t believe it. What a screwy bitch. The man who reckless eyeballed the woman, so she claims, is just as guilty as the men who murdered him. That has got to be the most outrageous crap. Where do broads like that get off?” Ball said. They both laughed until they cried.

  “Hear about Tremonisha?” Minsk asked.

  “Yeah, it’s all in the newspapers and on TV. Man, the fellas are very bitter. They’re not going to stand for it, according to Brashford. I mean, they just about fought that Vietnam War single-handedly, them and some poor whites, while these middle-class white guys were backing them up in some kind of moving country club at Cam Ranh Bay. These broads should know that the only thing standing between them and these gooks and things that want to strangle them in their sleep is the fellas. At least that’s the way Brashford sees it.”

  “She said that rapists ought to be castrated,” Minsk said, his eyes probing Ball’s for a response.

  “Half the white boys in the country would be walking around with no dicks if it came to that. They the champs at date rapes and trains. Look at these white boys knocking over these nursery schools left and right—fucking little children in the butt—how sick can you get, fucking pineapples and dead people. You should hear Brashford talk about it.”

  “He didn’t see it that way. The Flower Phantom took it personally,” Jim answered. Ball tried to restrain his grudging admiration for the man who had accosted Tremonisha, the man the media was calling the Flower Phantom for his habit of leaving a chrysanthemum with his victim.

  “Sounds like a real screwball. My mom always taught me to respect women,” Ball said.

  “Yeah, I admire that bond you have with your mother. I was never that close to mine. She was always speaking in Yiddish. Feeding the poor. I was afraid to bring friends home. Afraid she would embarrass me. You say your mother’s clairvoyant?”

  “Yeah, a couple of scientists checked her out. Physicists.”

  “What?”

  “I kid you not, man. These guys came out from some school and did tests on her. She’s got it. When I was a kid, I couldn’t get away with a damned thing. I always wondered how did she know that. Man, did I get a lot of spankings. She’d spank me before I’d even do anything. She’d get all dressed up in black and just appear with a switch in a room where I was into some mischief. Like I’d look up and ther
e she’d be. Gave me the creeps. Anyway, these two dudes say that they are beginning to understand the behavior of particles that communicate with each other faster than the speed of sound, and if you’re close to someone like a family or a wife or something, the particles are familiar and communicate even faster. It’s possible that you could experience an event before it even happens. They call it precognition. They say that’s the way telepathy works. Some people’s particles communicate quicker than others, because there is less debris surrounding their auras, they have clean auras, or something like that.

  “Anyway, I used to didn’t listen to her, me having gone to college and all, but now when she says something, I listen. She said that in the 1970s there’d be a deep recession, and she was right. See, the Africans are into guardian spirits. These spirits of the deceased seem to be central to African psychology, that the world is peopled by spirits of the dead, millions of them, and they intrude into man’s experience. Give him advice, on how to hit the numbers. Some people are just born conductors. My mother is one.”

  “Yeah,” Minsk chuckled. “We call them dybbuks.”

  “Dybbuks, huh. Well, maybe that’s what happened to your old man. Your old man was listening to some dybbuk. Maybe he’s right. Maybe these white people are going to tighten the screws on the Jews. Brashford says he keeps his passport renewed, because the way the country is moving, he wouldn’t be surprised if they started up slavery again. He said that they’re pushing the clock back to the pre-Civil War period. Right now we’re in the 1880s.”