“You’d better back up off me, punks!” Kareem yelled, swinging blindly and punching a coiffed white reporter in the throat, knocking him to the ground gasping.
In the ensuing chaos, Kareem scrambled up the wrought-iron fence, but while clearing the top spikes, he snagged and ripped his pant legs with a cartoonishly extended tearing sound while he fell. He bounded back to the Squirrel Tree with his torn black trousers flapping like pirate flags while the cameras recorded every second of his ragged retreat.
When Distraction Becomes Destruction
Left unchecked, the quixotic and paranoid paradigm so typical of superheroes can become self-destructive at even the cellular level. In fact, the awesome psychic weight of believing that others depend on you for their very lives can be lethal. For instance, new mothers suffer from postpartum depression not only because of tectonic hormonal shifts, but because of the juggernaut realization that motherhood will be a lifelong, relentless burden of worry, moral (and mortal) responsibility, and embittering power struggles.
Iron Lass had labored as protectress for two thousand years, but the protector burden had finally crushed her immortal-immune response, giving rise to a lethally opportunistic infection from an otherwise minor attack. X-Man’s Herculean yoke was his Racialized Narcissistic Projection Neurosis—his irrational urge to view all phenomena as the effects of a vast, encompassing, imaginary “white power structure,” rather than recognizing the inherently orderless nature of human societies, the fundamental indifference (or seen another way, impartiality or justice) of the world, and the inescapable ennui that ultimately euthanizes all joy, satisfaction, and human connection.
When dysfunctional self-distraction devolves into delusional self-destruction, neurosis turns into psychosis. If Iron Lass and the X-Man could not discharge their neurotic need to be needed and their yearning for vengeance against nonexistent enemies (whether Menton or “the Man”), their psychotic mortiquaerotic (death-seeking) urges would seal their doom…and the F*O*O*J’s with it.
CHAPTER NINE
Paranoia: It Can Destroy Ya
MONDAY, JULY 10, 3:57 P.M.
XCommunication
It was the morning of the press conference, Kareem’s first statement to the press since the previous Wednesday’s shocking revelations. At the back of the Fortress of Freedom’s Hall of Proclamations, I was standing beside the Brotherfly looking at a veritable herd of journalists awaiting their chance to graze upon a fallen hero’s next words—perhaps the final words of his career.
While some of Kareem’s comrades had turned out to show their support, including attorney Tran Chi Minh, Original Fabulous Man, and the L*A*B’s Shango and the Player Hater, the absence of the majority of F*O*O*Jsters was a death-knell indictment of his credibility, and of his bid for the directorship of the F*O*O*J’s operations.
Polls shunted him down from 75 to bottom out at 15 percent of decided voters. The Flying Squirrel had glided up to 50 percent. Even Spoiler Man at 18 percent had pulled ahead of Kareem.
In the five days since the story had plopped into the fan, the media had subjected Kareem’s life and career—his every article, utterance, deed, failure, and foible—to a public colonoscopy. The only division in the electorate seemed to be over which of Kareem’s “betrayals” was worse—violating his own vow of chastity to prosecute a “racially hypocritical” relationship with a white woman, or his racially paranoid denunciation of Hawk King.
(Shockingly, the media-ravenous Syndi Tycho had completely vanished from journalistic sonar screens; not even X-ray paparazzi had been able to snap a shot of her emerging from a trendy bathhouse or a four-star Kabbalah temple. Her publicist had issued only a single statement in the face of the Billi Biceps autobiography and Kareem scandal: “Ms. Tycho wishes to express her profound sadness at the lack of happiness being experienced by her colleagues at this time.”)
In the previous day’s edition of The Langston-Douglas Crisis, two of Kareem’s former comrades from the League of Angry Blackmen had accused him of being a “super sellout”; on the AANT program Oh No She Didn’t, Ms. Thang of the Supa Soul Sistas had demanded “the return of X-Man’s race card.” And Civil Rights–era icon the Spook had called Kareem “a militant negro threat to democracy as great as that of a Kyklos the Imperial Grand Dragon.”
Amid editorials describing Kareem as a “black supremacist” and “race-fixated head case,” Sentinel-Spectator accusations that he belonged to “a black hate group called the L*A*B, an ‘Ebonics’ acronym translating out to ‘Lots of Antiwhite Blacks,’ ” and a shocking editorial cartoon depicting Kareem as a bell-bottomed pimp wearing a KKK hood while soliciting Power Grrrl on the streets of Langston-Douglas, came the calls for Kareem to drop out of the election, recuse himself from investigating Hawk King’s death, and even resign from the F*O*O*J itself. The turkeys of Racialized Narcissistic Projection Neurosis had come home to roost, and were laying their eggs all over Kareem’s face.
Flashbulbs erupted like mortar fire when Kareem stepped awkwardly onto the stage at precisely four P.M. X-Man took his place at the table arranged with microphones from two dozen news outlets and was shortly joined by other members of the so-called X-Slate in the impending election: Gagarina Girl, candidate for Director of Personnel, and Dynamiss, candidate for Director of Finances, as well as their allies, the current Director of External Affairs, Shockra, and Director of Investigation, the Spectacle.
Flashes illuminated the emptiness of the final seat behind the nameplate for the X-Slate’s candidate for Director of Research & Development, the Periodic Man.
Kareem’s neck rocked side-to-side in the by-then loose collar of his ubiquitous white shirt, while his skullified eyes stared straight ahead, a poker face for facing the Grim Reaper. He looked as if he’d hardly slept or eaten in days.
Having escaped the labyrinth of Langston-Douglas to fly within tanning distance of the sun inside the F*O*O*J’s leadership nucleus, Kareem had allowed the wax of his racial hyper-rage to melt and scatter the crow’s feathers of his afro-paranoia, leaving him to plummet into the seat—and fate—he’d taken at that very moment.
“Time to watch this muthafucka squirm,” giggled André, grinning and literally rubbing his hands together.
I tried to catch André’s gaze, hoping to glimpse some of whatever could motivate such an intense psychemotional response toward the X-Man. But he was as fixed on the proceedings as a Roman senator in the Colosseum about to watch a Christian become cat food.
Kareem’s sole opportunity to salvage his career and psychemotional wellness from the Minotaur of his own delusions, and to flee the maze of his own misjudgment, was to accept full responsibility for his grievous errors and beg the public for forgiveness. Only by throwing himself on his sword, battle-ax, dagger, and pocket-knife could he excise the cancer that was consuming his very soul.
Meet the Press, Beat the Repression
Complaining that he’d been “quoted out of context” and citing his need as a young hero “to shock a deaf, dumb, and blind public into consciousness,” Kareem gave an opening statement that fell desperately short of the apology for which the press had clearly come looking.
His defensiveness intensifying during the “media analysis” section of his rant, he threw back into the reporters’ faces his by-then infamous quotation “I’ve been proudly hating all my life, hating the nation of millions holding us back. We opposing jive turkeys.”
“What I actually wrote,” he said, reading, “was, quote, In the 1960s at least we knew we were fighting the Man. We should’ve called him the Punk. But then in the 1970s, we lost sight and got obsessed with opposing ‘jive turkeys.’ By the 1980s, we’d whittled down our objective to battling sucker MCs. And by the nineties, the best we could do was oppose ‘playa haters.’ Well, I have been proudly hating all my life, hating the fools, suckers, and liars with expensive amplifiers who are blinding, deafening, and dumbing us down, and so I’ve been emphatically opposing the nation of millions h
olding us back, which sometimes—guess what?—is us. We spent too much damn time getting down. Now it’s time to get up. End quote.
“So listen, press. If you people’re going to attack me for what I wrote, at least have the intellectual integrity and the professionalism to quote me in full and attack me for what I actually said—”
Reporter #1: “Kareem, if you’re saying you don’t really hate and want to destroy all white people, why did you say you did? If you didn’t mean it, why did you say it?”
Reporter #2: “Is it true you own a spear inscribed with the words ‘I’m Gon Git You, Whitey’?”
Reporter #3: “Why, after Professor Hnossi Icegaard’s declaration of the Götterdämmerung, did you say that, quote, The world might be a whole lot safer if Iron Lass had a husband, end quote?”
Reporter #4: “Kareem, do you lust after all white women, or just Power Grrrl?”
Reporter #5: “X-Man, will you offer a complete and unqualified retraction and apology?”
“Listen, listen!” he said, and when he lifted his hands in a gesture of quiet, flashbulbs erupted like a prairie lightning storm, capturing his every gesticulation in images that would later be given meaning through captions.
“Let’s get this in perspective, all right? The F*O*O*J is under attack, do you understand that? Hawk King is dead, quite possibly murdered, Omnipotent Man has resigned under mysterious circumstances, somebody destroyed Asteroid Zed, someone tried to assassinate both the Flying Squirrel and the hero formerly known as Chip Monk, Iron Lass is dying—”
Kareem froze, wincing with the realization that he had not been authorized to release that information.
Every reporter screamed for verification and elucidation of his slip.
“—and, and, and meanwhile you people have derailed my investigation for five days because of something you ripped out of context that you don’t even understand that I wrote years ago, when meanwhile a murderer, possibly one of the worst supervillains in history, is systematically wiping out our most powerful champions! And by focusing your attack on me, you people are playing right into his hands, while the real enemy—”
Questions inevitably and correctly called for Kareem to address his own delusional paranoia. Angrily battling the questions, he tried to shift focus onto his Five-Point Platform, his proposed “Götterdämmerung against Corporate Crime and Ecological Evil,” and his slate’s whimsical schemes to use the F*O*O*J to promote their “Mission for Quality of Life.”
But as Kareem dodged weakly, reporters tossed stageward the literary bones they’d exhumed from Kareem’s corpus of writings, seeking his reactions if not retractions: his rage against white people who wore “dreadlocks” or who used the phrase “ghetto blaster,” his charges that “the Beatles had less talent in four voices than James Brown has in a single scream” and that “Elvis was a talentless chicken-fried steak–gnawing junkie thief who should’ve been charged with grand larceny for stealing black music and executed for the treason of taking the title ‘King of Rock and Roll,’ ” that Civil Rights–era pioneering hero the Spook was “a Driving-Miss-Daisied, ham hock–swallowing, yassuh-bossing, friendly-firing, stealth-flying, five-star general house negro,” and that Kareem had once said that “the only position for a woman in the F*O*O*J is sixty-nine.”
“Kot-tam it, how many times do I have to apologize for that ‘sixty-nine’ remark? I said that eleven years ago—when I was drunk—at a Stun-Glas wake for Maximus Security when the F*O*O*J was on the wrong side of the Atlantean war that killed him, and some pretty-boy reporter from the Sentinel-Spectator was there—”
A reporter: “Isn’t it against your black power religion to drink?”
“I wasn’t even in the L*A*B or the Forty-Two Chambers at that time—and it isn’t a ‘black power religion’—and I told the reporter right away I didn’t mean it, but he still up and printed it anyway—”
And on and on went the media melee, with André cackling beside me at every drop of Kareem’s blood.
Reporter #113: “—hate all white people, or just most white people?”
Reporter #98: “—and so how soon will you resign from the F*O*O*J?”
Reporter #141: “—initiated the relationship, you or Power Grrrl?”
Reporter #72: “—still in love with Syndi Tycho or just using her for sex?”
Reporter #122: “—did Hawk King know what you said about him and did that break his heart and if so do you think that may have killed him, Kareem?”
Reporter #37: “—true you repeatedly had sex inside the F*O*O*J Fortress’s Mission Simulator, leading some F*O*O*Jsters to nickname it the ‘Emission Stimulator’?”
Kareem rocketed to his feet, flipping the table and scattering the microphones. His slatemates backed up, stunned. The lashing of a hundred flashbulbs bleached him white. “All y’all can KISS MY MUTHAFUCKIN BLACK ASS!”
The Desperate Need for a Chum When the Sharks Are Finished Dining
By the time André and I squeezed through the crush of reporters to enter the greenroom, the then-anorexic-looking Kareem was still as haggard and harried as he’d been onstage. He didn’t even raise his head from cradling it in front of the vanity mirror.
His wrist buzzed, petitioning him hollowly: “X-Man, some reporters from Jet, AANT, and The Crisis are insisting you speak with them—”
He smacked his wrist, crushing the voice.
I pulled up a chair beside him, sat down, and asked him how he felt.
“That,” he muttered, not even looking up, “was a galactic fucking disaster.”
The sigh he let out was so heavy, deep, and cold, it merited its own frost warning.
“Whole kot-tam world’s falling apart, asteroids exploding, Squirrel’s a corrupt corporate-welfare bum, people of capes dead and dying, and the conspiracy to bring down the F*O*O*J is working on hero number four. You got Wally the junkie jonesing for glowing blue crystals—”
“Kareem,” I asked, “what makes you think that Wally—”
“Give it a rest, Doc! Half those kot-tam reporters out there’ve known the story for years, but do y’think they’d ever report it? You’re never gonna see Wally on the cover of the Urinal-Expectorator with his nostrils and fingertips dusted blue an looking like a kid fiending on powdered blueberry Tang! Wally coulda single-handedly stopped Asteroid Zed from being destroyed if he hadn’t quit his job while fucked up on argonium, and then Iron Lass wouldn’t be dying—”
During his diatribe various logogenic apparitions from his speech flashed into existence, including disembodied nostrils and fingertips. The black body parts rotated around his head, disintegrating randomly into black silt-shadows.
“—and damn in a can,” he railed on, “the man was caught flying under the influence how many times? And the argonium exacerbating his MPD? That’s a bigger kot-tam scandal than anything I supposedly wrote, said, or did! That’s a matter of kot-tam planetary security! Where’s the kot-tam press on that shit?”
In the corner of the greenroom, a large, steaming, malodorous pile of logogenic feces manifested itself, at which point André said, “Whatever you do now, Kareem, don’t say the word muthafucka. Bzzzt!”
Kareem looked up in exasperation, his black irises like two Rolos dotting twin scoops of vanilla ice cream.
“Can you be serious for one stinking minute, André? What if…look…Wally, right? He’s cracked, MPDed, strung out on argonium…What if—I mean, Menton’s powers were always strongest on people hiding secrets—maybe he puppet-mastered Wally into killing Hawk King! Wally’s one of the only beings with enough power to do it, and then, even if Menton suppressed his memories, guilt from that could be seeping into his conscious mind, which motivated his resignation—”
“Tha fuck you talkin bout, Kreem? That got to be the stankiest heap a Tyrannosaurus shit André ever took a whiff of!” The Brotherfly affected his trademarked hiss-laughter despite his obvious rage. “Evrabody, evrabody in the whole world guilty a suh’m but you. Reporters
didn’quote you right, Festus is a corrupt rich man, Wally killed Hawk King, an Hawk King worked f’the white man! But what about Ka-REEM?” said André, grabbing X-Man by his face and shoving it back like a tetherball.
Kareem snapped back and leapt up out of his chair, staggering to stay upright, swinging back at André who danced out of the way, causing Kareem to pitch forward and nearly hit the floor.
“Don’t you get it?” spat Kareem. “You’ve gotta put all that you-me shit aside, Andrew, long enough to see this attack’s bigger than me! This’s about my investigation! I should be pursuing this Sarah Bellum angle, tracking her connections to Menton! Maybe they’ve been working together all along…or maybe she’s Menton! Brother, the timing of that smear-job on me was no kot-tam coincidence!”
“Don’t ‘brother’ me, punk-ass nigga! You deserve this shit. Biggest accuser who ever shit on somebody he don’like now gettin the shit he dumped, dumped back on him. Where I come from, that’s called justice, dawg. Natural justice.”
He stepped forward to lean down his six-three frame and shove his face in front of Kareem’s, close enough for each man to smell the other’s breath, to see the sleep (or lack of it) in the other’s eyes.
“I hope they rip your ass in two, Kareem,” he said, “which’s maybe the only way t’finally clear all the shit outta you!”
“André!” I said, shocked for a moment from my professional detachment. “Why do you hate Kareem so much?”
He didn’t shake his gaze from Kareem for a moment. “I don’t hate anybody, Doctor,” he said crisply. “Unlike this person.”
How will you face knowing that you will never exceed, or even equal, the accomplishments of your predecessors?
Minister Faust Page 24
