by Ishmael Reed
“Everything okay, sir?”
22
He got up and went into the kitchen. The actress he’d brought home was still there. She was drinking some coffee. On the counter were two shopping bags with the name of the gourmet shop located around the corner from the hotel. Ball’s postcoital manners were bad. He’d like whoever he’d balled the night before to clear out before dawn.
She looked good and probably went through tormenting exercises to remain that way. She looked to be about thirty-five. All of that gin. Her box was snug and fit him tight, and he kept saying O Jesus, and he wasn’t even a religious man. She had sweet eyes set in a sweet face. She pushed a copy of Hurry, the weekly news magazine, across the table. He yawned. He looked at the picture on the cover. A man with long, black hair, the sort of forehead cut favored by writers Tom Wolfe and Frederick Douglass, and a frankfurter nose. He had a head like a California condor’s. He resembled a young Charles Laughton—a young Charles Laughton in drag. He was standing next to a camera. The story read; CEZANNE OF THE CINEMA, and underneath in small letters was his quote: “Wrong-Headed Man Made Me Weep.” She smiled as he looked over the cover.
“Towers Bradshaw, my husband,” she said.
“The producer of Wrong-Headed Man?”
“Yeah,” she said, sighing. “Only for him it’s not just a movie. It has become a way of life. The Jews have their book, the Germans have their cathedral at Köln, the Egyptians their sphinx, he has his Wrong-Headed Man.” She was smart. He now liked that in women. Tremonisha had really changed him. He turned to the magazine inside where the story began. It showed another photo of him. She was standing behind him, of course. They were standing in front of a twenty-five-room Bel Air mansion, and five or six big cars were in the background. Wrong-Headed Man was getting to him all right. His eyes were glassy and he had about five days’ growth on his chin. He appeared as though he hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in some time.
“The picture was taken on the day that I decided to leave him.” In the photo she looked as though she’d already left. “He’d been up for a week reading Wrong-Headed Man. He’d wake me in the middle of the night, he’d be sweating and panting and he’d want me to read some lurid and sick passage from the book. During the session with the photographer he went into one of those crazy fits, you know, kind of like Jerry Lewis, and they had to call his mother to calm him down.” He looked over at the basket on the kitchen table. It held what looked like French rolls. He walked over to the table, and yawned again. He hadn’t bothered to put on a shirt. He wore only a pair of jeans and sneakers. No socks, and no underpants. She stared at him for a moment. “I like your body,” she said. “How do you keep in such good shape?”
“I used to play soccer back home. I keep in shape over at the Y. I swim.” He sat down to a plate of different kinds of cold cuts, some preserves, cheese, and coffee. There was something curled up on the plate. He didn’t like its looks.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Schmalz.” It looked disgusting.
“This is a German breakfast, kind of like the kind we have back at home in Freiburg,” she said. So she was German. He wondered why she kept saying what sounded like kommen, bitte, kommen, bitte, all night long. She told him that she was from Freiburg, a university town, and that in her twenties she went to Berlin, where she hung out with filmmakers in Kreuzburg, the Turkish section. She’d met Wrong-Head’s producer at the Munich Film Festival where he’d come to be honored for his first film, Little Green Men. She came to the States with him. They were married. Since she left him she’d been getting small parts in the New York theater. Before that she’d appeared in her husband’s films. She was always getting mutilated or decapitated. In one, she was dismembered by a chainsaw.
“I still don’t know what he saw in the film. It was so unlike him to take on a project like that.” He did science fiction plots that were so embellished with special effects that you forgot the weak story lines and the bad acting. “I mean, I agreed with the main character’s point of view, I think, but I thought that some of the situations were, well, morbid. She doesn’t seem to offer any alternative to fucking men, and that lesbian business seemed to be really a tease. But, of course, I’m white.” She was dark and Mediterranean looking, probably from Bavaria, he thought. A G.I. had told him that he’d seen Italians with black faces and kinky hair in Frankfurt, and in the German south the people looked like mulattoes.
“What do you think of Wrong-Headed Man?” she asked.
“In my opinion, a woman who puts urine and spit into her guests’ drinks deserves what happens to her.” They laughed.
“Do you want some more coffee?” She started for the counter where the sterling silver coffeemaker—a gift from his mom—stood. When she came by him he pulled her to him. She sat on his lap. She was wearing a thin dress and he could feel her in his lap. She kissed him for a long time. He put his hand inside her dress and felt her ass. She pulled away and headed toward the counter for the coffee.
“He and Tremonisha have had a falling out, I hear,” she said.
“First she dragged this actress in to play the missionary who had no acting ability at all, but Tremonisha insisted. She got the role over all of the other talented black actresses.” He looked at the schmalz. He decided that he wasn’t going to have any of it. He could see the stuff lying all fat and sluggish in his arteries.
“Do you know the actress?” she asked. No, he didn’t know her, but the fellas had said that to compare her with Butterfly McQueen would be an insult to Ms. McQueen.
“Then he threw out her script.”
“Yeah, I heard about that,” he said.
“She threatened him with a lawsuit.”
“What did he do?” She came back and set the coffee next to his plate. She walked back to her chair at the other end of the small table. She sat down and cut a roll in two and spread some jam on one half. He looked up at his poster of Bugs Bunny, his favorite cartoon character.
“He owned the film and so he cut off all contact with her. He forgot that Tremonisha even wrote it. Kept calling it his play. His film. He’s been working on it for a year now. He’ll never finish it.” The magazine called the film his greatest challenge. “I hear that when he’s not working on it he dresses up in that adventurer’s suit and makes believe that he’s Joe Beowulf. He spends the day tooting up his nose and playing computer games,” she said. Joe Beowulf was a swashbuckling white man that he’d created. He went about the world slapping women left and right and bringing Third World people to their knees. He remembered the ad carried in the newspapers. It showed Joe Beowulf in a camouflage suit and a machine gun in hand. Lurking in the background were the illustrator’s version of black muggers. The illustrator thought that blacks still wore Afros. “Fighting the Grendels of this World,” said the copy that accompanied the photo.
“Guy sounds like he has a lot of problems. Why did you marry him?”
She paused, and shifted her weight before saying, “Guilty, I guess.”
“Let’s go down to McDonald’s,” he said.
“But you just—”
“Yeah. I like your German breakfast, but I lost a lot of protein last night, I need some food.”
“Let me get my coat.” She went into the bedroom. He finished his cup of coffee. German coffee tasted like Maxwell House. He turned to the article again. The one about the filming of Wrong-Headed Man. The magazine said that the film had something to do with “incest, sexual brutality, and Sapphic love.” He looked up the word, Sapphic. The dictionary said that it had something to do with dykes.
After breakfast, he went back to his apartment to read the newspaper. He was still a little woozy from the gin and exhausted from fucking all night.
The morning’s headline hit him in the face like Boom Boom Mancini. “FLOWER PHANTOM SLAIN.” He scanned the column, trying to focus upon the important details. A man identified as Randy Shank was slain a few blocks from the apartment of Becky F
rench, after the suspect attempted to enter her apartment from a fire escape, located next to her window. Randy Shank was a black playwright who had achieved some notoriety in the 1960s. Detective Lawrence O’Reedy pursued the man through the East Village and foiled his attempt to make good on his threat to “get” Becky French for her support of Tremonisha Smarts’ stand on castration for perpetrators of rape. Ms. Smarts, whose play Wrong-Headed Man received international recognition, was Shank’s first victim. At the time, the suspect told Ms. Smarts that he was patterning his actions after those of the French Resistance who shaved the heads of women who collaborated with the Nazis. Experts claimed that Mr. Shank, who became known as the Flower Phantom for his bizarre habit of leaving a chrysanthemum with his victims, was suffering from a paranoid fantasy and that instead of being the political hero he desired to be was actually a hair fetishist. This was shocking to Ball. He had to regain his composure. The phone rang. It was Becky French. He asked her was she all right. She said her only regret was that she’d used a .22 instead of a .44. She said that if she’d used a .44 they’d still be cleaning up his intestines. Ball cleared his throat.
“The reason I called is because I have some good news. We’re taking your play to Broadway. Several producers have expressed interest. We have to see which one will give us the best deal. Perhaps you realize now why it was important to change the play so that Cora Mae’s viewpoint condemned both Ham and his lynchers. That one can be murdered by reckless eyeballing just as easily as with a weapon. It’s the same thing. Congratulations, Ian. I never told you this, but after Jim came up missing I wasn’t even going to give you a workshop, but Tremonisha argued on your behalf. You owe her one, Ball. You’ll be pleased to know that now you’ll be able to work anywhere in this town.” Ball jumped up from the table where he was having breakfast. Broadway. People in mink coats arriving from the suburbs. Chartered buses in front of the theater. Interviews. Women. Gol-lee, he said to himself. He was becoming “bankable.” Producers would be lining up. Three-hour lunches. Talk shows. People magazine. Parties. If only Chester Himes and Jake Brashford were less controversial, more amiable, more toned down. If only they had cooled it. They could have had all of this too.
He dialed Brashford’s number. He wanted to tell him the good news. He was sure that Brashford had gotten over his hangover by now. He identified himself to the speaker on the other end. A woman.
“Oh, yes. I saw you last night. I was with my husband.” So the woman with what James Fenimore Cooper called “tartar cheeks” was Brashford’s wife. “He’s really sorry for the way he behaved. He said that he will make it up to you somehow. He was really not himself. The lawyers have gone down to bail him out of jail.”
“Jail?”
“Yes. After the security guard took him outside, Jake managed to get free. He knocked the security guard cold with one punch. Then the police arrived. He got into a slugging match with the officers. I’ve never seen him like that. It all started at dinner. He went through three bottles of wine. The reason we were only able to catch the last act of your play is because he spilled the wine on his pants in the restaurant and then had to go home and change. When he got to his studio he started to drink again and went into some anti-Semitic tirade, which is what always happens when he’s drunk or feeling sorry himself. It’s crazy because I’m Jewish and he has a Jewish son. I think it’s the play that’s making him this way. He’s trying to write a play of universal values, but everywhere he turns, he runs into ethnicity. For twenty years he’s been hopping from group to group. He must have tons of discarded drafts in his closet. For the last year it’s been the Armenians, now he’s talking about doing the Jews. He’s so depressed these days, Ian. He’s so lonely. He’s like the trumpet player in that movie Young Man with a Horn who was seeking the ultimate high note. For Brashford that high note is universality. It keeps eluding him. The blacks of his generation avoid him and the younger generation has never heard of him.” I’m hip to that, Ball thought.
“Of course, Ms. Brashford—”
“You can call me Delilah.”
“And you can call me Ian, Ms. Brashford. Don’t you worry about my abandoning Jake. Why, he’s my Immamu, my guide, my shaman, and my guru. Ms. Brashford, Jake is, well, like a father to me. Everything I know, I learned from him. He taught me how to survive in this city, me, a poor country boy. I’ll always be grateful, and Delilah, where I come from the saying goes you love your friends and you hate your enemies.”
“That’s so sweet of you, Ian. Jake always told me that you were his best friend.”
“Did he say that, Delilah?”
“He says it all the time. He’ll probably talk to you when he returns from abroad, Ian. We’re leaving as soon as he’s out of jail. I think that we need a vacation. We both agree that he needs a change of scenery. He says that on some days he just feels like taking his four volumes of Malraux, his Duke Ellington records, his Motherwells, and his Complete Plays of O’Neill and going to live in a coal bin.”
“Where do you plan to go?”
“We’re leaving tomorrow for Tel Aviv.”
It had been a dense morning for Ian.
Jim, Randy Shank, and now Brashford. Jim thought that the whole country was like New York and as soon as he left Manhattan he wandered into an obeah zone. The wrong neighborhood. Lost in the night. Randy Shank, appropriate that his ending came as it did. Sometimes he was the son of a gun, a loud, belligerent, talking hot dog, but his real bullet was a flower, as evidenced in his early poetry, lyrical, tender. Driven from Europe by Tremonisha and Johnnie Kranshaw’s bad-mouthing, marked as a man who would go to any lengths for sex. Brashford, isolated, yammering about the theft of black culture by the Jews, condemned to wander from ethnicity to ethnicity until he was left with the very group he roiled against. Maybe these city guys were right about him, Ball thought. Maybe he was acceptable because he was from the South and therefore viewed as a genteel and “slow-to-anger” person. Those northern blacks had reputations all over the hemisphere as those who would stand for no gunk. But no one was listening to them anymore. The people in the United States were tired of hearing about their apartheid and so imported the apartheid from abroad. They sent relief money to Africa without so much as a glance at the thirty million or so who went to bed at night hungry in the U.S. So audiences applauded Master Harold and the Boys because this was about somebody else’s apartheid and they could laugh and attend matinees because nobody was pointing the finger at them. Maybe he was just another insouciant import. Maybe they felt that as a Southerner he would look back to the old days when the darkies articulated their words very slowly and carefully. How did that ad for Jamaica put it: “Come back to the way things used to be,” uttered by an old black man, beckoning. It didn’t bother Ball what reasons were given for pushing him, he just wanted success, as his second-sighted mother used to say, “Boy, your eyes are bigger than your belly.” And what about Tre, and the rest of America’s black sisters? He could understand their bitterness, and their hurt. Extras in a land where Anne—the American white woman—had the leading role, her smiling face on the products, the covers of magazines, the ubiquitous face (it was the 1980s and the demand for black models was now on the decrease, while that for Swedish types was on the increase). It was miraculous that so many were able to maintain their poise and their sanity and not go off the deep end like Toni Case Bambara’s Velma, who had to “undergo a riding.” Velma, who got so fed up with the boy-men in her life that she growled. The black women were objects of scorn and desire, like Toni Morrison’s Sula, who wanted to be free as any man, in a time when a woman who smoked cigarettes or sat in bars was regarded as a witch. If sometimes the fellas viewed some of them as hostile, perhaps their hostility was merely a defense mechanism.9
