God's Gym (11 page)

Please. If you believe nothing else about me, please believe I'm struggling for other words, my own words, even if they seem to spiral out of a mind, a mouth, like the driver's, my words, words I'm trying to earn, words I'm bound to fall on like a sword if they fail me. In other words I understand what it's
like to be a dark passenger and can't help passing on when I speak the truth of that truth. What I haven't done, and never will, is be him, a small, pale, scared hairy mammal surrounded by giant carnivores whose dark bodies are hidden by darkness my eyes can't penetrate, fierce predators asleep or maybe prowling just inches away and any move I make, the slightest twitch, shiver, sneeze,
fluup
it's my nature to produce, risks awakening them.

Imagine a person in the car that snowy night, someone at least as wired as the driver, someone as helplessly alert, eyes hooded, stocking-capped hair hidden by a stingy brim, someone who has watched night fall blackly and falling snow mound in drifts taller than the Studebaker along fences bordering the highway, imagine this someone watching the driver, trying to piece together from the driver's movements and noises a picture of what the man at the wheel is thinking. Maybe the watcher's me, fresh from the Minneapolis conference, attempting to paint a picture of another's invisible thoughts. Or perhaps I'm still in my lime chair inventing a car-chase scene. You can't tell much by studying my face. A player's face disciplined to disguise my next move. Player or not, how can you be sure what someone else is thinking. Or seeing. Or saying. A different world inside each and every head, but we also like to believe another world's in there, a reasonably reliable facsimile of a reality we agree upon and pursue, a world the same for everyone, even though no one has been there or knows for sure if it's there. Who knows. Stories pretend to know. Stories claiming to be true. Not true. Both. Neither. Claiming to be inside and outside. Real and unreal. Stories swirling like the howling, savage storm pounding the Studebaker. Meaning what. Doesn't meaning always sit like Hinckley, nestled in darkness beyond the steamed peephole, meaning already sorted, toe-tagged, logged, an accident waiting for us to happen.

Since I've already violated Poe's rules for inventing stories,
I'll confess this fake Studebaker's interior is a site suspiciously like the inside of whatever kind of car my first coach, John Cini-cola, drove back in the day when he chauffeured us, the Shadyside Boys Club twelve-and-under hoop team, to games around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, fifty years ago, when
fluups
not necessarily warnings of a bad heart or failing motor but farts, muted and discreet as possible in the close quarters of anywhere from seven to ten boy bodies crammed in for the ride, farts almost involuntary yet unavoidable, scrunched up as our intestines needed to be to fit in the overpacked car. Last suppers of beans and wieners didn't help. Fortunately, we shared the same low-rent, subsistence diet and our metabolisms homogenized the odor of the sneaky, invisible pellets of gas nobody could help expelling, grit your teeth, squirm, squeeze your sphincter as you might. Might as well ask us to stop breathing or snoring. Collectively we produced a foul miasma that would have knocked you off your feet if you were too close when the Studebaker's doors flung open in Hinckley, but the smell no big deal if you'd made the trip from Chicago's South Side. A thunderhead of bad air, but our air, it belonged to us, we bore it, as we bear our history, our culture, just as everybody else must bear theirs.

In other words stone funky inside the car, and when the driver cracks the window to cop a hit of fresh air, he's lying if he says he ain't mixed up in the raunchiness with the rest of us. Anyway not much happening in the single-wagon wagon train crossing barren flatlands west of Chicago, its pale canvas cover flapping like a berserk sail, the ship yawing, slapped and bruised by roaring waves that crest the bow, blinding surges of spray, foamy fingers of sea scampering like mice into the vessel's every nook and cranny. A monumental assault, but it gets old after a while, even though our hearts pump madly and our throats constrict and bowels loosen, after a while it's the same ole, same ole splish-splash whipping, ain't it so, my sisters and
brothers and we steel ourselves to outlast the storm's lashing, nod off till it whips itself out. Thus we're not really missing much if we break another rule and flash forward to Hinckley.

One Hinckley resident in particular anxiously awaits our arrival. A boy named Rastus whose own arrival in town is legendary. They say his mama, a hoboing ho like those Scottsboro girls, so the story goes, landed in Hinckley just before her son. Landed butt first and busted every bone in her body when the flatcar she'd hopped, last car of a mile-long bluesy freight train, zigged when she thought it would zag, whipping her off her feet, tossing her ass over elbows high in the air. Miraculously, the same natural-born talent that transforms Negroes into sky-walkers and speed burners enabled this lady to regain her composure while airborne and drop like an expertly flipped flapjack flat on her back. In spite of splitting her skull wide open and spilling brain like rotten cantaloupe all over the concrete platform of Hinckley station, her Fosbury flop preserved the baby inside her. Little Rastus, snug as a bug on the rug of his mama's prodigiously padded booty, sustained only minor injuries—a slight limp, a lisp, a sleepy IQ.

Poor orphaned Rastus didn't talk much and didn't exactly walk nor think straight either, but the townsfolk took pity on the survivor. Maybe they believed the good luck of his sunny-side-up arrival might rub off, because they passed him house to house until he was nine years old, old enough to earn his keep in the world, too old to play doctor and nurse in back yards with the town's daughters. Grown-up Rastus a familiar sight in Hinckley, chopping, hauling, sweeping. A hired boy you paid with scraps from the table. Rastus grateful for any kind of employment and pretty reliable too if you didn't mind him plodding along at his lazy pace. Given half a chance, Rastus could do it all. If somebody had invented fast-food joints in those days, Rastus might have aspired to assistant-manage one. Rastus, Hinckley's pet. Loved and worked like a dog. No respect,
no pussy, and nothing but the scarecrow rags on his back he could really call his own, but Rastus only thirty-six. There's still time. Time Rastus didn't begin to count down until the Tuesday he saw on a pole outside Hinckley's only barbershop a flyer announcing the Harlem Globies' visit.

Of course Rastus couldn't read. But he understood what everybody else in town understood. The poster meant niggers coming. Maybe the word
Harlem,
printed in big letters across the top of the poster, exuded some distinctive ethnic scent, or maybe if you put your ear close to the poster you'd hear faint echoes of syncopated jazz, the baffled foot-tapping of Dark-town strutters like ocean sound in seashells. Absent these clues, folks still get the point. The picture on the flyer worth a thousand words. And if other illiterates (the majority) in Hinckley understood immediately who was coming to town, why not Rastus. He's Hinckley if anybody's Hinckley. What else was he if he wasn't.

Rastus gazes raptly at the players on the flyer. He's the ugly duckling in the fairy tale discovering swans. Falls in love with the impossibly long, dark men, their big feet, big hands, big white lips, big white eyes, big, shiny white smiles, broad spade noses just like his. Falls in love with himself. Frowns recalling the day his eyes strayed into a mirror and the dusty glass revealed how different from other Hinckley folks he looked. Until the mirror sneaked up,
Boo,
he had avoided thinking too much about what other people saw when they looked at him. Mostly people had seemed not to look. Or they looked through him. Occasionally someone's eyes would panic as if they'd seen the devil. But Rastus saw devils and beasts too. The world full of them, so he wasn't surprised to see the scary sign of one still sticking like a fly to flypaper on somebody's eyeballs.

After the mirror those devilish beasts and beastly devils horned in everywhere. For instance, in the blue eyes of soft-limbed, teasing girls who'd turn his joint to a fiery stone, then
prance away giggling. He learned not to look too closely. Learned to look away, look away. Taught himself to ignore his incriminating image when it floated across fragments of glass or the surface of still puddles, or inside his thoughts sometimes, tempting him to drown and disappear in glowing beast eyes that might be his. Hiding from himself no cure, however. Hinckley eyes penetrated his disguise. Eyes chewing and swallowing or spitting him out wet and mangled. Beast eyes no matter how artfully the bearer shapeshifted, fooled you with fleshy wrappings make your mouth water.

Maybe a flashback will clarify further why Rastus is plagued by a negative self-image. One day at closing time his main employer, Barber Jones, had said, You look like a wild man from Borneo, boy. All you need's a bone through your nose you ready for the circus. Set down the broom and get your tail over here to the mirror, boy. Ima show you a wild cannibal.

See yourself, boy. Look hard. See them filthy naps dragging down past your shoulders. People getting scared of you. Who you think you is. Don King or somebody. Damned wool stinks worse'n a skunk. Ima do you a favor, boy.

Barber Jones yakkety-yakking as he yaks daily about the general state of the world, the state of Hinckley and his dick first thing in the morning or last thing at night when just the two of them in the shop. Yakkety-yak, only now the subject is Rastus, not the usual nonstop monologue about rich folks in charge who were seriously fucking up, not running the world, nor Hinckley, nor his love life, the way Barber Jones would run things if just once he held the power in his hands, him in charge instead of those blockheads who one day will come crawling on their knees begging him to straighten things out, yakking and stropping on the razor strop a Bowie knife he'd brought special from home for this special occasion, an occasion Rastus very quickly figures he wants no part of, but since he's been a good boy his whole life, he waits, heart thumping like a tom-tom, beside a counter-to-ceiling mirror while fat-mouth Jones sharpens his blade.

A scene from Herman Melville's
Benito Cereno
might well have flashed through Rastus's mind if he'd been literate. But neither the African slave Babo shaving Captain Delano nor the ironic counterpoint of that scene, blackface and whiteface reversed, playing here in the mirror of Jones Barbershop, tweaks Rastus's consciousness of who he is and what's happening to him. Mr. Melville's prescient yarn doesn't creep into the head of Barber Jones either, even though Rastus pronounces "Barber" as
baba,
a sound so close to
Babo
it's a dead giveaway. Skinning knife in hand, Baba Jones is too busy stalking his prey, improvising Yankee-Doodle-like on the fly how in the hell he's going to scalp this coon and keep his hands clean. He snatches a towel from the soiled pile on the floor. He'll grab the bush with the towel, squeeze it in his fist, chop through the thick, knotty locks like chopping cotton.

Look at yourself in the mirror, boy. This the way you want to go round looking. Course it ain't. And stop your shakin. Ain't gon hurt you. You be thanking me once I'm done. Hell, boy, won't even charge you for a trim.

Lawd, lawd, am I truly dat nappy-haired ting in de mere. Am dat my bery own self, dat ugly ole pestering debil what don look lak nobody in Hinckley sides me. Is you me, Rastus. Lawd, lawd, you sho nuff tis me, Rastus confesses, confronting the living proof, his picture reversed right to left, left to right in the glass. Caged in the mirror like a prisoner in a cell is what he thinks, though not precisely in those words, nor does he think the word
panopticon,
clunkily Melvillean and thus appropriate for the network of gazes pinning him down to the place where they want him to stay. No words necessary to shatter the peace in Rastus's heart, to upset the détente of years of not looking, years of imagining himself more or less like other folks, just a slightly deformed, darker duck than the other ducks floating on this pond he'd learned to call Hinckley.

Boom.
A shotgun blasts inside Rastus's brain, cold as the icy jolt when the driver cracks the Studebaker's window, as cold and maybe as welcome too, since if you don't wake up, Rastus, sleep can kill you.
Boom.
Every scared Hinckley duck quacks and flutters and scolds as it rises from the pond and leaves Rastus behind, very much alone. He watches them form neat, V-shaped squadrons high in the blue empyrean, squawking, honking, off to bomb the shit out of somebody in another country. You should have known long ago, should have figured it would happen like this one day. You all alone. Your big tarbaby feet in miring clay. You ain't them and they ain't you. Birds of a different feather. You might mistake them for geese flying in formation way up in the sky, but you sure ain't never heard them caw-caw, boy. Huh-uh. You the cawing bird and the shotgun aimed for you ain't gon miss next time. Your cover's busted, boy. Here come Baba Jones.

You sure don wanna go around looking just so, do you boy.

Well, Rastus ain't all kinds of fool. He zip-coons outta there, faster than a speeding bullet. (Could this be
it—
not the instant the jump shot is invented, we know better than that, but one of many moments, each monumental, memorable in its own way, when Rastus or whoever chooses to take his or her game up another level—not a notch but a quantum leap, higher, hyper, hipper—decides to put air under her or his feet, jumpshoot-jumpstart-rise-transcend, eschew the horizontal for the vertical, operating like Frantz Fanon when he envisioned a new day, a new plane of existence, a new reality, up, up, and away.) Maybe he didn't rise and fly, but he didn't Jim Crow neither. No turning dis way and wheeling dat way and jiggling up and down in place. Next time the baba seen him, bright and early a couple mornings later, Rastus had shaved his skull clean as a whistle. Gold chains draping his neck like Isaac Hayes. How Rastus accomplished such a transformation is another story, but we got enough stories by the tail feathers, twisted up in our white towel—count 'em—so let's switch back to the moment earlier in the
story, later in Hinckley time, months after Rastus clipped his own wings rather than play Samson to Jones's Delilah.