Mr. Spaceman

by Robert Olen Butler

  Still you get mad. You know? You still got to deal with that feeling in your chest. That’s probably partly why I was wearing a zoot suit when I was forty-four years old. I got robbed of something long before that. Like that boy in the lake. He was maybe twelve, thirteen years old and there was nothing more for him in this life. He got robbed of his childhood, is what. Well, that’s what happened to me, too. What happened to most of us. You don’t live like we all lived in those times from the cradle on up and ever get to wear the bright colors and the big shoulders and the floppy pants of childhood. That’s what they took from us and what I tried to get back dressing up like you there, Mr. Space Alien. I’m ready to believe there be some real good folks among you Space People, too. I hope you had a nice childhood. I sure wonder what it would’ve been like. But I want to shake your hand because I am not a prejudiced man. I won’t never let that happen to me. Man, you’ve got a lot of fingers. But that’s hep, Jackson. Meeting you’s money from home.

  This voice vanishes now into the darkness. I look at my strikingly befingered hand and I think of slapping the skin with Herbert Jenkins and I am glad to have thought of him, to have listened to him at this moment. I realize that part of my present terror, facing my assignment, comes from a sense of those below who will look upon my body and be ravished by its differences from their own and see in me only their fears which they will turn to prejudice and then to hatred and then to rage and then to murder. Have things changed so much down there in the subsequent thirty-two revolutions about this frankly mediocre star? Dear Herbert Jenkins. I wish I could move my hand and bring back your body from that great darkness that puzzles us together, your species and mine. I wish I could hear new words from you. And that is the Bible.

  10

  The cowardice that came upon me in the corridor outside my guests’ sleeping quarters lingers in me now. I do not wish to seek any new voices. I miss my dear Herbert Jenkins, it is true. But it is also true that he is known to me and he is gone from me and that is an attraction to a coward. It is easier to give one’s devotion to the dead than to the living.

  I rise. I make myself move out the door and back to the place where they lie dreaming. I am alone. I am flesh and blood, and though my blood is the color of Presbyterian Punch, it flows just as easily and disastrously as the blood of those who have been assaulted by prejudice and fear on this planet.

  I am amidst the snoring and sighing and rustling now. Perhaps from respect for Herbert Jenkins I am moved to approach the man called Hudson.

  “Hudson Smith, Esquire, attorney at law,” he elaborates in his half-sleep as I lead him down the corridor and into the place where our voices can join.

  He sits. He wakes further. He looks at me.

  “I’d advise you people to stay away from this planet,” he says, though his voice is gentle, almost sad.

  I say, “There are some on my home planet who share that opinion.”

  “They’re right,” he says. “Though maybe it’d be just the thing to finally fix race relations down there. The Irish and the English and the Poles and the Italians and so forth, they all finally stopped fighting each other in America when they agreed on the black folks to unify their hate. Maybe a bunch of folks who look like you would unify whites and blacks just the same way. We can all hate the gray bug-eyes together.”

  This is not what I want to hear. But it is necessary, I tell myself. It is better to understand what awaits me.

  A change comes over Hudson. He shifts in his chair, leans forward, his hand comes out toward me, lingering in the air between us. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I get caught up in my own fight and here I sit saying ugly things about you right to your face. My daddy’d whup me up side of my head for that and I’d deserve it.”

  I nod and I suppose I should engage this self-reflecting male from this parallel species in a dialogue. But I am weary. And I wish to hear his inner self. So I wave my hand and I let go of Desi, I let go of my own inner voice. I am Hudson Smith. My father. I think of my father all the time. He believed in the Melting Pot. Nobody talks that shit anymore. The goddamn American dream. But God bless him, my father, he wouldn’t let any of us be anything but excellent and it was because of that big motherfucking Pot he could see in his head, that thing he thought this country was. You could go into the Pot as a beer-truck driver in Alexandria, Louisiana, which is what he was, and through your children, you could come out a Harvard lawyer, which is what became of his youngest son that he named after a river he never saw. That was me. And he also came out a pediatrician in Cleveland, a University of Chicago English professor, a Proctor and Gamble product manager, and so forth. We were eight of us—my father’s little black babies—which is what he still called us when he could get us all together. Not that that was very often, after we did what he told us to do and became excellent and scattered all over the country. When we did get together, for a wedding or once in a while for Christmas, and he had his captive audience at the dinner table, before we could eat he’d start orating to his grownup babies on the virtues of this Land of the Free where anything is possible, this being the very same table we grew up at and heard him question each one of us about our day, every day, and press us to do better, to be excellent all the time because we were worthy of excellence. We were worthy. And my mother was the same way. You could watch her cut a goddamn carrot into a pot and you’d know she was determined to do it better than anybody who ever cut a carrot before.

  And if Wilhelmina and I had gone on and had a kid before she decided to grab the Lexus and God knows what else she’s going to get before this is over—no matter how good a lawyer my father’s youngest son is—if we’d had our own little African-American, culturally re-rooted, powerfully independent baby—how could I say the things to him that had done so much good to me? If I tried to say my own father’s words to him, I’m afraid they’d sound like lies. They’d sound like the bullshit of White America, trying to take away the dignity of somebody who was different from them. Get rid of your blackness. Melt down here and make it tan. Keep melting and we might even recognize you. Eggshell white.

  We still crave that recognition. So many of us do. And it creates powerful heroes for us. Heroes as in archetypal heroes, bigger than life and carrying around in their bodies a bit of all of us, and they’re also carrying some real old baggage with them. Baggage full of feelings. Feelings that got melted into everyfuckingbody a long time ago. Take OJ, for instance.

  Now that surely is a creature from the Melting Pot. O. J. Simpson come up out of there and he was a football hero and he was a movie star and he was running through airports pimping Hertz cars and he had this smooth off-white charm and he was good to every kid he saw and he had a gorgeous white wife so if you were white, you knew he didn’t hate you for it, and if you were black, you knew that here was a black man that whites not only would share a water fountain with, they’d go to bed with and have his kids—and if with him, then with us—and we all loved him, we all got melted down together in our love for this American hero.

  So when he murdered that wife—and yo, wake up, I’m a lawyer and I look at the evidence, and if I’m the Man, if I’m Johnny on-the-spot Cochran, if I’m Johnny I-make-a-rhyme-and-he-don’t-do-time Cochran, I do the same defense he does because of course there’s racists in the LA Police, but anybody whose business it is to look at evidence and look at human nature is going to know in his bones OJ is guilty—I’m no traitor to my race to say he murdered her—so when O. J. Simpson murdered his wife, how’d we get to fooling ourselves about the truth, those of us of color, those of us who have—thank God—come around at the end of the twentieth century to finally telling the truth, generally, about where we are and what we are and what it is that we’ve been having to deal with all these years? Why are we going against our smart natural selves and making this man out to be innocent?

  Well, it’s that archetypal thing, is why. Because OJ is a tragic hero, is why. He’s a good man. He’s a bigger-than-life man. He�
�s a man who carries with him the vested identity of a whole people. But he’s got a flaw. He’s jealous. Like all of us. But since everything else about him is big, so’s this flaw. And once—just once—he’s in a circumstance that the universe has done up for him and his flaw makes him do something terrible. And the universe is ready to punish him big time. But he’s not just him, he’s you. He’s your own human capacity for doing a bad thing under a certain circumstance. And it scares the shit out of you. And so you make it untrue. You turn it all into a mistake. Better, you make it the work of the devil, a deception and a lie of the sort you’ve been hearing all your life directed at you. If you took Oedipus Rex, who kills his own father in a similar hot-blooded thing and he marries his mother, and you set down twelve Greeks, who see their very selves in Oedipus, and you say—okay, here’s the end of the tragedy, but the writer’s going to defer to you. You make the ending. Should he pluck out his eyes and die? If it’s up to them, they’re going to say, Shit no. It’s all a mistake. He’s innocent. Which is what a bunch of our people did. Those twelve on the jury and millions more, as well. Millions and millions.

  And I can understand that. OJ will go on and never kill again and he’ll be a warm and loving father to his kids, and I can’t help but think of my own father. He loved OJ. Of course he did. OJ was what my father knew his kids could become. You go out and be excellent. You’re worthy of that. And people will come to love you. Black people and white people and brown people and yellow people and red people. You stop along the way and be nice to the folks who love you. Sign those autographs. Kiss those women. Bring us together in the stands, all of America, to cheer what a boy can do who’s got a lot to overcome but he did it. This is the land of opportunity.

  And my father died before that dark and star-crossed night in June of 1994 in Los Angeles. But I know he would have continued to believe in OJ like so many others. And he never would have spoken of it to me, since he knew who I was and how I saw things, and he loved me for it, though he stopped being able to agree with me about much of anything. We would’ve just never spoken of it, like for years we never spoke anymore of the Melting Pot, though he did continue to lecture me now and then, a few sentences at a time, on the telephone.

  And I will never be able to tell him I’m sorry. But I am. I’m sorry, Daddy, for thinking you were, for all your life, a poor deceived old Negro, but I do think that, and I don’t like that in me, and I know I’d never be what I am today, free to think these thoughts, free to be excellent, if it wasn’t for you believing in those lies in the first place. That irony is not lost on me. And I’m grateful to you, Daddy. I’m grateful and sorry as shit.

  I keep my Hudson Smith in his dream state as I lead him back to his bed. It strikes me that after observing his spiritedness at the Welcome-to-the-Spaceship party, I had hoped Hudson’s voice would be, even issuing from his deep and secret place, a voice of unalloyed self-confidence, exempt from the tyranny of yearning. But I was wrong.

  I guide Hudson into his cubicle and he readily lies down and for the sake of his lost father I tuck him in, pressing the covers up under his chin, and his head lolls away and I think that he will sleep. Then suddenly his hand is on my arm. I gasp.

  But he is a gentle man, I have come to realize. He holds my arm with something like tenderness and he looks up at me, his eyelids drooping toward sleep, and he says, “Thank you.”

  I pat his hand and it lets go of me and retreats under the covers and he is asleep. I stand and look at him for a moment. I try to think of the boldest, most confident voice in our memory banks.

  I rush back to our great panel of babble. Something in here must have meaning for me. Somewhere there must be a resolution. The categories before me are meaningless: age, gender, race. The voices all elude their categories. And they all alarm me.

  Here. A voice I remember as bold. Ecdysiast. Call me an ecdysiast and nothing else or I’ll sock you in the chops. Her voice is spilling into the room on its own, even before I can make my own voice one with hers. But that is not strictly true. For she is dead and she is gone and it is my hand that passes over this panel, that lets her captured sounds return. She has no independent will anymore. But I ignore this hard fact for the moment. Instead, I whisper to her, aloud, as if she is in the room, “Wait for me, Scarlet.” I don’t let nobody ever call me a stripper. I don’t care if that comes across as hoity-toity. I am Scarlet. Like my name. I’ve got certain principles and if the pock-faced gropy-handed tiny-dicked club owners don’t like it then they can lump it. It’s Scarlet Moscowitz. Not Scarlet LaRue. Not Scarlet Belle. Not Scarlet O’Dare. Not anything made up at all. Though the Scarlet part is. That’s true enough. But that’s okay. That’s a given name anyway and I got as much right to give it as anybody else. More right. But I’m Moscowitz. That’s it. That’s from my daddy and from his daddy before him and nobody’s gonna fuck with it. And if I choose to take off my clothes before a room full of whoever wants to see it—even if they’re most of them drunks and no-goods—then you have to understand what it is exactly that I’m doing. I’m not stripping. I’m molting. That’s what ecdysiast means. You can look it up. And now, presenting for your extreme pleasure for one night only, the beautiful ecdysiastical spectacle of Scarlet Moscowitz. And I am dressed in a shimmering red dress up to my throat and down to my toes and it’s the most beautiful dress you’ve ever seen, twenty thousand scarlet spangles—my given name cried out loud by a great crowd twenty thousand strong all hollering at once. But even so, this isn’t really me. Not the final me. If I just stayed like this, in this beautiful dress, there’d be trouble. Those men out there would tear the place apart with rage and disappointment. Because the dress of twenty thousand red spangles is like the caterpillar skin. It’s just a stage. The real me is what they want. And that’s what I give them. I molt. The old skin, the lesser skin, it just falls away and there I am, the real me, and they’re happy, they’re whooping in pleasure. As beautiful as that dress was, it isn’t as beautiful as this. I’m the butterfly now. I stand before them in my naked flesh, Miss Scarlet Moscowitz, and they might be drunks and they might be no-goods but they can see that I’m beautiful.

  And I wipe her voice away. Because I hear at last what I’d never heard in this self-confident voice before. When Scarlet spoke to me, a young spaceman newly arrived above this world, and she was a woman old beyond her years and sick nearly to death, she said no more about her father than to explain why she kept her family name. But I realize now that on Burlesque stages across America, from the Day That Will Live in Infamy to the Day of Sputnik, my Scarlet Moscowitz stood naked, time and time again, before her father. Her drunken no-good father who never saw for a moment the beauty of his daughter who loved him, loved him faithfully, and who held his name close to her and who yearned for him to see her as these others saw her. As whoopingly beautiful.

  Dance for me, Scarlet. Dance for your spaceman father. I will be all the things for you that he was not. I can look upon your body—ample as it is, concisely fingered and toed as it is—and I know I will see it as beautiful.

  But Scarlet’s body is dust and bones now.

  This was not the voice I needed to hear.

  I crack my knuckles. But this time the gesture does not soothe me. It only thickens my sadness. Whiplash Willie is dead, too, of course. Willie with his own yearnings, his own keenly felt failures. I myself yearn for a Life from this planet to sit before me and speak its inner words and be, if not happy, then at least content, and if not content, then at least drably unconsidered and bland. One might expect such lives in abundance down there, growing like wheat. But I have found not even one. Not in all the days and nights and days and nights that have passed below me since I first came here. Not one. Not one, even in all these voices that awaited me in our machinery, collected by others long before I arrived. Not one. And I feel, even now, even for the ones who are dead, I feel. What? I feel what? I feel.

  That bit of rhetorical irresolution is the fullest expression I
am capable of. Like another trill of words that moves in me at certain moments: I am. I am. I feel. I wish to say to each life that sits before me and has just finished speaking, “Arise, and be not afraid.”

  I arise now, and I am sore afraid. I feel. I am.

  No one has spoken to me yet of LUCK, of that grand golden purpose of the late-night bus trip from the Great State of Texas to the State of Louisiana where they Let the Good Times Roll. But, of course, I have only spoken to three of the travelers so far, and one of those was the driver of the bus. I should put aside the voices from the past and listen anew. I desperately need new words, new lives spoken through my voice. There is so much I still do not understand, and I am keenly aware of the shortness of time. Once again I do not stop to calculate exactly how much. But I know to fear that I will not even have enough time to speak with everyone now sleeping on my ship. I should speak to another of my visitors right now.

  But I know that first I will do something rash. I have little hope of encountering, among the travelers on the bus, the sort of life I presently wish to study. It is time to spend a few hours on the planet surface. When the night returns to the place beneath my ship, I will go down, personally, in my very body. I will go with great caution, disguised in the trench coat and wide-brimmed felt hat I wore when I first met Edna Bradshaw in the nearly deserted parking lot of the all-night Wal-Mart Supercenter in Bovary, Alabama. My five-hour mission will be to seek out a kind of life new to my studies, a life full of bland contentedness. A life without yearning.

  And though I should gather another voice or two from my present visitors before I go, instead, I return to find my wife Edna Bradshaw still sleeping on our bed. And I lie down beside her and I seek out my own sleep, where dreams never intrude and the Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Music, except there are no hills, either, not even the ups and downs of a landscape. Just music.