Mile Zero (40 page)

I have had it ALL. Your mind-bent drugs cooked up by middle-class mugs, your bogus religions invented by thugs in sharkskin suits, your senseless wars and sleepwalking peace, your coming attractions of pieces of ass that never come. I am not some zonked-out critter with bullet holes for eyes and a bucket of beans for brains. I am a trinity of magicians, master of night forests, lord of night earth, king of bright cemeteries. I am sovereign in all these realms. I stoop to touch your troubled body, unbandage your damaged eyes, my hands upon your aching feet, my fingernails cutting through wax in your ears. Feel my lips move on your skin, the heat of my breath on the fur of your belly, your thighs yielding. I am phallic purpose rising, antibiotic treason spreading, purple corpse spinning. Read the map of my lips as I suck where no bee dare trespass.

Ah! You are beginning to understand, beginning to see in darkness. You are divining your own Yankee Devil Dandy, tasting the salad of contradictions, embracing the science of all my Mysteries.
L’Amour
. My child, it is that simple. Love will kill us all.

Sperm is being misspent, the fruit of the womb shrivels in bitterness. “But what can I do?” you feverishly ask. “I did not create this world,” you moan. Did it ever occur to you I
did
create this world. Creation begets destruction. Even your man Einstein knew the world begins with a bang and ends with a whimper. Is that your sobbing I hear again, your song of impotence, tears as futile as unhatched turtle eggs being snared by sea gulls and torn to pieces in the sun? Get a grip on yourself to save yourself. No Guru’s diet can cure you, no soap-opera star can live it for you, no rock and roll pied piper can lead you, no television preacher can absolve you, there is no splendor in a rat’s ass. You cannot hide any longer behind skirts of ignorance. You are guilty and must pay off your sin in wages of retribution. You have cast impurities upon the waters. I guard the crossroads of the great flood gates, control the deluge, correct the imbalance, destroy to create. Come close. Tell me, which came first, the maggot or the fly?

Oh, I almost forgot. Are you coming to my birthday party? Many people are. I hold it every year in the cemetery, the morning after All Saints’ Eve, that’s Halloween to you. It is a party for Loas of Darkness, underworld lords reborn into bodies of the living, into the fresh souls of cast-out disbelievers. There will be three new graves this year, empty and deep, and I will fill them. I will send Horsemen from beneath the oceans to go riding to bring me three souls tainted and tarnished, souls that feed poison to the Saints, drip death in the water. Then I will sink the three into the underworld for all to mock, send them running through hell and beyond in gasoline jackets. They cannot escape the purity of the circle. I will cleanse them and purify them with fire. What is left will be virgin. What is left will be fit for a Loa to slip into on the bright morning of my birthday party, when sun in sky glows righteous red over the Green Sailor, over Cuban Martyrs, over wings of an Avenging Angel. The three graves will be covered by dirt, the documents of destruction within weighted with triangular mounds of stones, the former occupants sent to hell on
the back of an earless goat. Only then will the Loas be released in fresh souls, free to walk among the living, free to select whom they shall save when the deluge comes. The Loas and Saints are watching always, but you do not know them to see them, for when they possess your head they inherit your future, you cease to be. Too late now, you are indoctrinated.

If the world is going to hell in a basket, then I’ve got the basket. When the flood comes my raft rides high. Some people call me a gangster, a hex doctor, a charlatan without portfolio, a sorcerer with no rhyming religion, no singing spirituals, no happy herbs, no grinding magic stones. Don’t you listen to their spider tongues, I’ve got the vaccine. I’ve got the cure, I need only the jawbone of a dog to make things right. Auto-Zobop, my Tiger-Car, you can’t miss me in it. I drive by night, my lights beaming a blue streak to right the way. Some people call me a gangster, don’t you heed their serpent fangs. I am a mob, a howling pack, a force that can turn in a heartbeat a man into a beast to be led to slaughter. My Ghost-Car is not to be eluded. I am here to tell you as water screams in my brain and blood bumps in my veins, while hairless swine slip on distant muddy mountain slopes and green monkeys chatter with laughter in jungles, that it is too late for you. The eternal X cannot be eluded, it will be branded on all disbelievers. Those who step outside the perfect circle will be brought to heel, delivered to swift judgment in this world, everlasting damnation in the next.

I see you quiver. After all, you came here seeking my comfort, my cold mind, my hot forehead, my steel hide, above all on high seeking absolution with your teary eyes pleading. Don’t try to kiss my hand. Get up off your knees. Begging will not secure an honest measure of protection from me. You cannot hail me as your new Loa, salute me as if I were your Drill Sergeant. You cannot trot along in my righteous path, hot as a bitch hound in heat hoping for a hard bone. You cannot bow and scrape to me, for I am not vanity, I am purity. I am not power, I am reality, guardian of earthly and heavenly gates, Master at the Crossroads of all fates, Keeper of all Fallacies, the answer to your unspoken prayers. Do not mistake me for the Messiah. The day you go down on your knees it will not be in obeisance to a false prophet, it will be to accept the blade of the sword across the back of your neck. I will cut you open like a paper envelope, announce to the world the contents of the dead document within. The same way the brains of a sacrificial goat are beaten from its head, with swift
hammer blows between its horns, before the knife is drawn across its throat and its dripping life-giving blood is tasted by all those within the circle, in such a manner shall you also receive salvation. I hear you plead ignorance, protesting you did not know there was a perfect circle of absolution, claiming you were born unaware of purity, born bent by corruption of profit without effort and exploitation of Nature without recrimination. Degradation and despoliation are left in your path as you slouch from your Babylon of modernity, slink off in your space capsule, rocketing away from your history of plunder, implanting in a pure universe pods of decay. Well, let me tell you, you ain’t gonna make it this time, you ain’t gonna get away with it. Zobop is here to be a stop to it, end it, amen. So sit down, shut up, pay attention. Prick up your earless ears and get an education short and to the point. When it is over you will know why I am not who you think me to be.

It is wrong to try to cheat death. Do you remember 1906, when the army of laborers building Flagler’s Overseas Railroad relied on crude barometers, which were nothing more than water-filled glass jars with weeds on the bottom? No, you remember nothing. When the weeds in those jars began to float toward the top it signaled air pressure was dropping and a vengeful wind from Africa was on the rise. On an October night of 1906 the weeds floated right to the top of the jars, but it was already too late, winds were storming over a hundred miles per hour, snapping steel cables anchoring the houseboat barracks of Flagler’s army. The Eye of the Hurricane was bearing down without pity, sharks were rising in the twenty foot tidal surge. Many of the screaming men swilled vials of laudanum from first-aid kits, minds going adrift as waves smashed into houseboats. A Gray Ghost appeared from the Eye of the Hurricane, it flung boats, machines and men southward into the churning Gulf of Mexico. In a puff the Gray Ghost reduced Flagler’s grandiose army to fish bait. Why do I tell you this, you ask? Is it because of my distaste for Flagler, a corrupt old Capitalist in a straw bowler hat who sacrificed the lives of hundreds of work-a-day blokes in the construction of his get-rich-at-any-price scheme, to make of the Florida Keys nothing more than a concrete and iron railroad spur to South America, an elaborate dock of dreams where a cardinal Capitalist could pile ever higher his plunder from the planet, his crude barrels of crude oil, his sagging sacks of gold? No, that is not why I tell you this. That is history you should know, the simplicity of greed itself. I tell you this because my
brain is waterlogged and the weeds are rising fast. Do not be so blind as to think there is a prescription for exemption you can swill like laudanum before the howling wind of retribution arrives. Do not think there is a route of escape across land or water. Do not try to cheat death. Do not forget, four hundred years before Flagler began construction of his pornographic greed scheme, the Spaniards named many of these martyred Keys
matar hombre
, kill man.
Matar hombre
, that is what I aim to do.

Come back here! I told you there is no escape. Don’t be foolish, it is almost over for us all, soon the finish. You have no more routes of escape than the sailor boys in the boiler room of the USS
Maine
had, when the ship shook in the night with a steel twisting blast, sinking to the bottom of Havana Harbor a near century ago. No escape over water or land. One hundred years before that blast in Havana Harbor Englishmen and their hired jackals pursued Caloosa Indians the length of the Keys, then stripped their meager possessions, stripped their red skins, fired musketballs through their hearts, the Union Jack flapping over their sun-bleached skulls. The Caloosa had no more escape routes than José Martí’s ragtag brigade of liberation martyrs had, when they launched from these shores a crusade to free Cuba from Spain. Martí, who dreamed of a free nation of islands, stretching from Cuba to Key West, up to the peninsular tip of Florida. Martí the poet patriot, whose compatriots blew Judas kisses to their Iberian overlords, while others rolled out a blood red carpet of revolutionary fervor extending into the twenty first century. Martí, whose fiery speeches of justice, freedom and democracy raised hard currency to outfit an army, whose poetry inspired troops into battle. No escape for Martí, caged by Colonial captors, betrayed by a web of assassins, sold out by his own for no more than the cost of a loaf of bread. I hear you say, of what interest to me are the bashed skulls of forgotten Indians, the blasted bones of sailors on watch in distant harbors, the choked cry of freedom in the murderous hothouse of Latin American politics, of immigrant railroad laborers eaten by sharks and alligators, bitten by rattlesnakes and malarial mosquitoes, crushed beneath trestle bridges and swept to sea by hurricanes? What does it have to do with my life, you shout! Relax, I’m coming to that.

Life is only for foxes and turkeys, have you ever noticed? Reality is that right around this smogged-up, ozone-burnt, battered globe there are men waking up every morning with their fingers twitching
uncontrollably, men who have to either masturbate or strangle somebody. It’s the same the world over, city-wide and country-narrow. It’s a fox-eating, turkey-shooting gallery out there. If you had a brain to give it all half a thought, it would make the hair stand up on the end of your dick, curdle the milk in your maternal breast. The end of the world is a necessity, necessity is a mother, brother. What I’m preaching here is the
Adios Twentieth Century Cha-Cha
. Some dance, some don’t, some won’t. Hear my words, spread my advice, dance my tune, listen to my strange music. If I make imperfect sense of an imperfect world, then 1 am right. You are without history, a baleful follower to inevitable slaughter, whereas I am born of memory. When the atomic dust falls on the last parade of your heroic antics I alone will know the escape route. If it is true that hope is the last thing to die in a man, then I say fear is the first thing to live, fear of your fellow man. Are you getting the picture? Do you see the weeds rising?

Beware the silence created by noise of your radio airwave pursuits of teenaged angst and lust. Will you never grow up? While you fiddle with the amplification of electronic instruments to give volume to your collective voice the end is falling all around, predictable as volcanic ash. Without me as guide there isn’t a natural chance to escape the coral rubble of this island, yet you still refuse the obvious. You wouldn’t see the lightning bolt until it blasted the nose off your face. That’s right, now you’re learning, I’m here to guide you. I’ve been around for 175 million years, just like the sea turtles. Do you still have my turtle hand in yours? I am the survivor who refuses to succumb to your polluted seas, your poisoned rivers, your lakes of industrial pus, your streams of toxic piss. I am power and purity, not some great blue heron stumbling spindly-legged through a black mangrove swamp with a gut full of radioactive mud worms eating at my vitals. Righteousness gnaws at me, nibbles the edges of my soul, bites my toes, propels me into the night where a new kingdom must be carved out if a new day is to dawn blood red. You say you can’t understand any of this, that it’s mumbo-jumbo jibberish having nothing to do with the likes of you. Well that’s just what will be the death of you, because I know your casket size. There is no escape without me, others have tried, I will tell you the story of one. Maybe you’ve learned enough of my language by now to understand my stories are not what you think them to be, but first let me ask you something. Have you ever noticed how people are like fireflies? People lose color as they grow older, burn out, fade. Ever notice that? Of
course you have. Good, because if you stick with me you will have eternal life,
glow
. My bright fire is on the water, purity is just around the corner.

My heart is a bomb ticking, like the bomb which blasted the Green Sailors to fish bait in Havana Harbor. I am sly as a mouse. No one can outrun me, ho one can outrun their own history, black or white. Do you remember that tall, dark brooding man who returned home to the island after the First World War? Of course you don’t. Elanya was his name, highly decorated he was, a trunkful of medals for valor above and beyond the call, but he was ignored like all the rest returning from a battlefield of distant and noxious trenches, from a war shrouded in gaseous vagaries. Men like Elanya were not like the boys returning three wars later from the mud suck of Southeast Asia, moaning into their beer that they were not exalted for the blood they let. Would you pin a medal on a carpenter hired to hammer a nail? Would you pin a medal on a lion tamer who sticks his head in the lion’s mouth? No. Then why pin a medal on a soldier hired to fire a bullet through the heart of another soldier? It’s a job, if you’re drafted to it, do it. If you don’t want to do it, it’s your job to get out of it. So grow up, drink your beer and shut up. Elanya knew that, all he wanted on his return was to be left alone. He didn’t bleat and moan for a hero’s parade or a gallant statue to be erected in the local park to honor his killing. Nobody cared about the bullet scars in Elanya’s hide, and he didn’t show them off. They only cared when Elanya took up with a woman from across Duval Street on the dark side of town. They jailed him for the lewd indecency of loving a woman of different color. Wasn’t any need to give Elanya a trial, a lynch mob broke into the county jail, roped him hand and foot, trussed him like a turkey, dragged him screaming down the mile of dirt road leading to Martello Tower, the red brick fortress next to the sea where soldiers once manned cannons to blast their invading brothers in a war called Civil. On the very last electric power pole in front of the Civil War citadel Elanya was hung by the neck, welcome home, hero. Turkeys and foxes. The foxes knew all along Elanya was from the island of Elanya in the Lesser Antilles, an island where matters of color played no role in affairs of the heart. In Key West Elanya had passed himself off as white, at most as a mulatto, nevertheless, always on the pale side of black, and the good citizens believed him, after all, he was a veteran. What the foxes hung that day was the idea of a white man who loved a black woman. What they killed was not a black loving a black, but
a man loving a woman. Run nigger run. I am the victim and the victimizer. That is why I tell you these things, to teach you of mistakes past, so you will eventually become smarter than an insect, have a memory, build a history. Remember, a fly or a wasp does not know who its father is, very little separates you from their world, if anything.