Dead Stars

by Bruce Wagner

  As if the filmmakers were trying to tell him

  Yes! Even though domestic hell is your world, the only one you know, the only one you will ever know, take ! Because all of Hell belongs to no one man or boy, it belongs to the world at large, not just the pukey smallness of your world within the bigger pukey world, but to the Universe & infinitude of undiscovered universes beyond, each mirroring the hell of the other

  As if to say————

  this “entertainment” was concocted to show you there are infinitudes of mirrored, shitty Hells you will be forced to visit should you ever break free of this one, that which resides in the creepy stink-den where you wallow, friendless, unpopcorned, watching the Hell of your own reflection thrown back from the screen . . . your hero Antwone portrays you! He got out, yes! He escaped from the carcasstink rot of the borrowed living room couch, from the mouth of the caretaker, to the carcasstink rot of onscreen Hell you now see him cavort in on the Samsungscreen one hellboy watching another, until over it starts again, on some stained stinky shitty couch, in some other universe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Rikki gettin hella hyphy! He be swisher trippin———

  He saw Antwone Fisher countless times tho only recently made the connection that not only was the film ’d in but directed by Denzel——Rikki wanted to be like those men, the creators, the doers, the actors & activists, if he tried hard enough he thought he maybe could, knew he could, he wanted to be like Denzel w/a Best Actor, Denz knew how to direct too, how the fuck could he do all that shit, he could do anything & could just go & do whatever he wanted, if it popped into his head he could just go mutherfuckin do it; he wanted to be like Jamie Foxx collabin’ with the players, w/Ye&Ludakris&big boi, you know, Jamie could sing, Jamie was funny, he fuckin created In Living Color, & Jamie had his own Best Actor just like Denzel, Rikki wanted to be out there being somebody, like all “Lil Wayne featuring Jamie Foxx, Rikki, Drake, Nicki and whomever,” Rikki wanted to be like Don Cheadle, like Will Smith, like Wesley, like Affion, like Tyler, the Creator———————

  ———————hey don’t be greedy dude, don’t get sacrilege. You know the true one to aspire to, that’s your real shot, more than anybody, & that’s still Fish (he needed to aspire to be his own version of Fish, because he had to keep his individuality)—Antwone Fisher, stalwart unflashy boy of ambition (just like me), boy who broke free, boy become a man, a manchild who wrote & directed, wrote books too, dignified man & boychild who could do it all.

  He never told Tom-Tom about any of that, never told anyone, because a person didn’t have to share everything.

  . . .

  She put him in the shower, dressed him in levi’s & a t-shirt that said YSL, they did more coke, swallowed some roxys & were good to go. Tom-Tom stood behind the camera, she’d moved the whole operation to the bathroom which had a tiny skylight & told Rikki to begin by giving his name, age, what school he went to, how he was in a few school plays/productions like Rent & House of Blue Leaves. (All bullshit) She thought it was a good idea to prompt him by asking questions O.C. She got to the meat of it right away because she knew he had to get their attention, about 10,000 other vids were probably being uploaded right now so his audition needed to stand out from the gate.

  She made Rikki introduce himself, the key factoid being that in real life he actually was a foster child (just like Antwone F & the boy pretending to be the child soldier in the movie), but who differs from that character because of his very loving relationship with his fosterparents & their imminent plans to legally adopt him, a ceremony that was mere months away. Tom-Tom had concerns that whoever was watching the tape might think he was making this part up, so she took pains to have Rikki dwell on it, to inform directly to the camera that he would be doing some improvising but the shit he said about his upcoming adoption was not a part of it. That shit was true. Occasionally, when he froze up or got self-conscious, Tom-Tom turned off the camera to loosen him up, maybe give him more blow, tiny bit of H, once she even brained him which for some reason made him laugh inside while she was doing it, tripping on how she could really suck a dick straight up, deepthroating till his balls disappeared in her mouth, that’s why they call him gutsy. When Tom-Tom turned the camera back on, she did some off-cam freestylin herself, like reading some of the dialog of a socialite in the movie who gets duped into believing the runaway’s story of ex-childsoldierdom, the Miami Beach toryburch of her being titillated to the core whilst in the presence of this very attractive negro monster/killing machine who laid claim to being redeemed viz the help of loving dad Fishburne & intrepid U.N. worker-turned-NGO founder Douglas, parts of the script reminding Tom-Tom of that movie where Will Smith pretends to be Sidney Poitier’s son. She’d have shown it to Rikki but they didn’t have time.

  He soon found his own cadence. He talked about being a student at John Crowe Ransom Middleschool, ordinary kid who did ordinary stuff, even mentioned his g.f. Reeyonna, Tom-Tom thought that was tight. In one part of the charming (she hoped) “novelty interview,” she even had him lay out the strange co-inky-dink of Ishmael Beah coming to speak at his school assembly last year, it was too karmic not to mention, plus how A Long Way Gone had been on Rikki’s iPod for like, a year already. Co-inky-dink? I think not. She was beguiled/captivated just filming/watching Rikki glide from middleschool plainspeak to cagey hustler to ruminatively remorseful, childsoldier-Beahspeak, patois-riffing freestylin monologues off the e-purloined script. She hoped the producers wouldn’t take offense, because the screenplay wasn’t supposed to be out there, tho Tom-Tom was 100% certain the prod co had already just shrugged its shoulders, everyone knew you couldn’t keep anything off the internet, the world as we know it was now pure LeakiLeaks, all leaks all the time, & no one expected the genie to ever get back in the bottle. Tom-Tom was certain too that Rikki wouldn’t be the only auditioner openly using it as source.

  Then Tom-Tom said (prearranged), “I understand you & Ishmael were friends,” so as to trigger/cue Rikki to rev up his patois freestylin & Rikki said

  Yes . . . tiss is true. We trahvill’d to-get-hur in duh teek [thick] forest, duh moon was hangin like a bloody banahna in duh black saffire pool of duh sky. Dat day I saw duh rebels snatch duh imam from deh mosk & tie heem to a pole & set heem on fie-uhr . . . we covered r ears from duh screemin. Duh rebels made me & Ishmael do many terrible tings, you know, like chop off duh arms & legs of duh moms & dads and duh cats & dogs [Tom-Tom almost lost it right there]. Dere were many daze when we hodd to go wid-out duh use of anti-perspirant. Sum times, before day sent me & Ishmael out to rape and to pillage duh village, duh nasty-ass rebels day feed us speedy dope & to make us angry, day force us to watch duh Justin Beeber cone-surt feelm——————

  Tom-Tom laughed, wondering if Rikki went too far. She decided it was perfect. I mean hey! it’s a frickin comedy, right?

  Around noon of the 2nd day, she started to edit together an hour or so of footage. But when she replayed Rikki’s hilarious monolog with the chopping of duh arms & legs of duh cats&dogs and duh Justin Beeber cone-surt feelm, she said fuck it, fuck the montage, and told Rikki that’s what she was going to give em. Rikki started to protest, not even too much, but Tom-Tom told him it was now in the hands of the lord. With a wild eye she said

  “TOO LATE! Already pusht SEND! It is now in the hands of the Lord, & the Lord’s Resistance Army too. Nigger yo sweet black ass is officially uploaded! You gunna be a moviestar. Now come & get your reward, I’m gunna suck that beautiful black dick til your eyes roll up in your fuckin head. What are you smiling at, whats the matter, you don’t want me to? What, you don’t like the way I suck it? Cause nigger I know you do. Now how’s Reeyonna gunna find out about that shit? Who’s gunna tell her, you? Cuz I sure as hell don’t plan to . . . don’t you like the way I do you? Cause I know you aint never been done like the way I do. Well aw-ite, that’s better now, nigger show me that you mean it, cause otherwise you gunna hurt my feelings. Ooh ooh t
hat’s better. Look at that muthafucker. Just look. And take a long look, cause you aint gunna see it for a while. That’s right. Say ‘Bye-Bye!’ Say, ‘Bye-Bye, Black Beauty!’ Cause that muther is goin in.”

  EXPLICIT

  [Jerzy]

  To Kill A Hummingbird

  Jerzy’s

  intel, his twittinformers, twatsnitches, GPS-holes, whatever, had furnished him plate numbers & car descriptions, so he could still make the I.D. & give chase, even if they did a vehicle switcheroo, even if the windows were blacked out he could still follow them to Melrose Place or Giorgio Baldi or In-N-Out (the one by LAX had been good to him) or the plastic surgeon’s or wherever. This late afternoon, he had cellpics of plates, dents, & scuffs on Rihanna’s SUV, Reese’s Audi wagon, V Beckham’s Rolls, Colin Farrell’s Fiat, Lindsay’s Lex hybrid plus 100 more, all +/- the last 48 hrs at most, because anything later than that was untrustworthy intel.

  A current one to watch was Michael Douglas, who at this moment was being chauffeured around in a Music Express Mercedes. Jerzy was one of a handful of people on planet Earth who knew Douglas was having dinner with Heather Morris at a private estate above the reservoir in Silverlake Hills. He told his twits&shouts to sit on that because if it was a romantic thing (more would be revealed), a furtive exit pic/shadowkiss could gross a fucking mill & if they didn’t keep their mouths shut, they wouldn’t get a penny, which was the only way to guarantee any kind of silence . . . the situation tho was de facto way volatile, he couldn’t keep a lid on it too long, it was a LeakyLeak world like Tom-Tom said, the tomtom drums could be heard in every global village, the Douglas/Hemo tête-à-teats (he sent out a tweet: does Hemo still have her implants?) would need to come to a head soon, i.e., before his rival pack-o’-ratsies found out.

  This, as Hyman Roth said, was the life he chose.

  . . .

  He cycled thru this kind of trouble a couple times a year when sleeping issues got out of hand.

  He needed GBH to come down, GBH worked nicely, but heroin or methadone was still preferable. Tom-Tom became his source, very reliable, gave him just enough to mellow at the end of the day, then a few hours later sleep, problem being eventually it wouldn’t be enough. He’d slide into smoking PCP (to further chill), which worked for awhile, in that way everything works for awhile, until it doesn’t, until came the familiar visitations of paranoia&(mostly) auditory hallucinations.

  He knew a wave was coming, immense & unsurfable, when he switched the sat radio in the truck from CNN manwhores Blitzer & Cooper to Shade 45, the hardcore hip hop station belonging to racist genius Eminem. It was important for him to listen because Mr. Mathers was the enemy, the Emeny, Mr. Mathers (Jerzy always used his white birthname) was the Trojan horse from which all coming racial strife, bondage & pestilence would run havoc. Msquared was the puppetmaster, biding his time with his white cohorts & consorts, slaves too but of a higher class, Elton & David, Fallon/Fey, Ashton & Demi (still together tho maintaining divorced personae per PuppetM’s orders), Tom & Katie, Justins Bieber/Timberlake/Theroux, the list was hella long . . . M2’s most ardent skill being his immense instincts/knowledge of how to seduce the black, how to play on their weaknesses, their whitelove of fame & money, their blackened obsession to be white, their white obsession with it, Mr. Mathers played it like a Game of Thrones.

  For Jerzy, the distant rolling thunder of conspiracy always had the same flavor: the Race Wars, newfangled, coming race wars, grandfather of that which Manson botched. Today, listening to The Shade, he could see the dark familiar funnel of it as yet far away, trunk of an F5, awesome furry black twister spiral-shimmer with untwinkling rhinestones along its wormy trunk which on closer look were upspooling specks of debris, church pews, housesplinters, yard shard jetsam, John Deeres & orchard trees feeding the frivolous maw, Jerzy saw it change direction & begin its slow advance toward him, & it was a warning he recognized, the gargantuan drill-biting clang, the chomping pulverization of the ground in the syncopated broken circle of 4/4 time, ferocious machine shop tapdance roving over the checkerboard of his mindscape like a playstation God of——

  Time to ready himself for his role of counterspy: the White thought he was spying for them on the Black but in actuality he was spying on the Whites for the Black, yessir, that is correct, gathering intel/conducting cointelpro on behalf of those few Black left who could be trusted, the few who hadn’t been bootysnatched by M2 & his minions Jay-Z (Hov), Kanye (Yahweh), Nicki (Miriam), Lil Wayne (Zion) . . . and now Tyler the Creator was owned by the Puppetmathers who came a-raping in the night, Odd Future no longer a collective but collected, oh the tragedy of it! for Tyler had the shiniest shine, for a moment, Suge had thought he was The One, but now it was done, the Odds weren’t good & the goods were Odd, Wolf Gang still pretending to be heretical anarchists flying above their SUPREME t-shirts the SUPREME agitprop banner of Youth, all had succumbed, now blind sucklers of M2’s cock, tongue & tits. They be Gobblin———

  Even the Jackal will offer her teats and suckle her cubs (Lamentations 4:3).

  Jerzy was one of the coveted outsiders (whites) accepted into the camp of the Black; in the manner Tom Hagen was accepted as the only non-Italian consigliere.

  When he first saw him on American Idol, Jerzy looked into his eyes & his soul, down into the ratty mouth of him, & at once he knew—the knowledge electrifying him like a gust from another world, a stellar wind—knew without question that Jimmy Iovine was behind the erasures of Biggie & Tupac—it was I-Veen, with the help of minions Paula Abdul, Spike, Quincy, Arsenio & Eddie Murphy (Tupac said Eddie gave money to charity but the $$$ never ever found its way to the ghetto, Toop said ½ his fans were white & that Madonna was his homie, & Don McClean his mentor), who knocked down that 2nd domino of helter-skelter (Charlie M having pushed the 1st). I-Veen had 50 middleclass Whites standing by, each elected by a constituency of 100,000 Whites all across the land—across the breadbasket & belt of this land my land your land this made for you & me land, by the end they stood for 5 million, all told, but the skittish Black pointed Judaslike fingers at one of their own—Suge—my Suge, your Suge, their Suge, Suge Knight! Suge Knight, who was the only warrior meshugg enough to lead them out of the White darkness that had descended & enshrouded them, if only they had listened—but the water got too muddied, crafty I-Veen knew the triumphant surfacing of the White at that time would have read lunatic-racist-fringey instead of sober-consensus-of-the-White-Mass—so, like a judicious climber who because of inclement weather conditions, turns back a mere 500 feet from Everest’s peak, the wisdom & even-keeled brilliance of General I-Veen bade his infantry retreat. The dominos were scattered, many tin soldiers fell, the Race War was not to be waged.

  Not on that day . . . . . . . . . . .

  It will keep, said the General.

  He would pass the torch to his sons, Ricky Ruben & Liar Cohan, and son of sons Martial Law Mathers. I-Veen the Father, Liar & Little Ricky the Sons, MM the Holy Ghost.

  The blind complacency of the Black set the stage for the rise of Marshall Mathers, his marriage to the assassin Fiddy, & the shame and humiliation that followed of Jay-Z, Drs. Dre/ake, Lil Wayne, Snoop, T.I., Ludacris, Nicki, Rihanna, and so many others by his hands. (The beating she suffered was owing to the talented Mr Brown’s explosive displeasure upon learning the news that had been concealed from him; that she had crossed over to the Puppetmathers’ world. He did not love the way she lied. If one were to make a timeline, it would be clear to see that Rihanna’s easing/lifting of the restraining order coincided to the very day she received word from Jay-Z-hova that her contrite beloved had been made a boss on Mathers’ plantation. Alack, another sad day for Suge Templar Knight, who until that moment had been so impressed with Mr Brown, & now spent sleepless nights bemoaning the fate of all of his once brave brethren.)

  Jerzy kept a diary in a close, careful hand; the wild history clarified things for him. He wrote about Mr Mathers living in his Oz-like home in Detroit, serviced by Black&White sla
ves. Like an emperor, his every need was made manifest: in the middle of each of his many labs there sat a fountain which spewed forth Splenda-flavored diet Coke. Mr Mathers has gone on record that he keeps vast files of wordplay rhymes on index cards for future anthems; Jerzy wrote in his journal other hidden details that he felt must come to light should something happen to him during one of his missions—mainly, that a whole room in itself was dedicated to those troves of songs to be written & played at a future date when the War is over & peace descends upon the land. These are the songs that contain the word nigger; the Puppetmathers would fold them into the compositional theme he used so effectively, time & again, of his dominance over the thickheaded thugs & tatted pickanninnies of rapdom. He dreamed he was King, woke up, he was still King . . . . . of those he enslaved. Watch the (game of) throne . . . as White infiltrate & co-commander of Black Cointelpro, Jerzy had done an exceedingly careful study of Mr Mathers’ manner of speech, his inflections when he talkshowed or spoke to radio press—the Puppetmathers has a playful side, but likes to keep his interviewers on edge, enjoys making them feel honored he has spared them from his whipsaw rage & violent whitened blackhenchmen—Jerzy noted that when M2 was being serious, his broody face formed words with peculiar, post-modern wigger phrasing, odd & somewhat somehow blackified, & strange sounding . . . it isn’t quite white trash not exactly but then what is it? Jerzy realized what caused Mr Mathers’ baffling, unplaceable argot: simply the effect upon his regular speech—a compression or distortion or displacement of sound—by that of an alternate speechifying: as he spoke to whatever obsequious interlocutor to promote himself, he was at the same time sending messages to his slaves. One day there would be a machine not yet born (Suge’s scientists were working on it) able to split his voice in two, & isolate the 2nd speaker: exposing, for the cynics, the pep talk/marching orders he dispenses to plantation workers, in all media & venue.