Reckless Eyeballing (8 page)

“I've never heard that before; I thought they sent the Jews to those camps because they were scapegoats.”

“Not a scapegoat. A scapegoat is one who is sacrificed to achieve a larger end. In Germany, the annihilation of the Jews was the end.”

“What about this thing about the Jews killing Christ?”

“The Germans did it. The Romans brought in these German toughs to deal with the Jews just like they used to import southern cops to deal with niggers.”

“You mean the Germans did it all along? Then they blame it on the Jews?”

“No longer; the Catholic Church is slowly absolving the Jews of the responsibility for Christ's murder. Pretty soon they'll probably blame it on us.” She put her hand down her back for a moment and scratched. As she did this her ass shifted on the sofa's pillow. He didn't know anybody who had fucked her, but he could look at her and know that she was a gasper. One of those kind who took short breaths when you gave it to her hot.

“Anyway. This is where Becky got the idea. It's a white feminist bourgeois notion that women are innocent victims in a struggle between men.”

“But I've heard you say the same thing. You said that the fight in this country is between black men and white men and that women are caught in the crossfire.”

She jumped up from the sofa and started screaming. “That's a lie. I didn't say it.”

“You did, you know you did,” he persisted.

“That's a big lie, I never said it.”

“Well, what about the castration thing? What about that?”

Ball caught himself. If he wanted to get his play done he could not alienate her. “Of course, I can see how you could be misquoted.” She stood for a minute. She then sat down and lit a cigarette. “I never said it. Becky said it. As though she cared about the Jews. Sometimes she sounds like Henry Ford, she hates Jews so much. She concedes that their men are good lovers. She said that she experimented in college. That's why it's easy for her to say that the women had nothing to do with the rise of Hitler. As for Jewesses, as she calls them, she's always putting them down. Says they talk loud in restaurants and say crass and impolite things, always butting into people's business and always talking about money. She's always talking about their putting on too much makeup. She and her friends make fun of Jewish women getting nose operations.”

“What?”

“Sure, didn't you know? Many Jewish women have nose operations to avoid looking ‘Mediterranean.' They used to not be able to get jobs in Hollywood because they looked too ‘Mediterranean.'”

“But I thought that the Jews owned the media. That's what Brashford says.”

“They don't own the media, they own him.”

“Man, do you get a kick out of running down black men?” This time his mother appeared in his mind's eye. She was wearing that bandanna on her head tied up in that certain way. “But on the other hand,” he said before her frown appeared, “a lot of them deserve it.” He swallowed bitter. Things were so tight for black men, here he was asking Tremonisha Smarts for a handout, in spite of all the things he and the fellas said about
Wrong-Headed Man
and her friends.

“They don't let Jews up there in the boardrooms of the big companies. They may have a few management positions, or they may be storekeepers, or speculate for the big capitalists, but they know that these capitalists will sell them out as they did in all the other countries. Some Jews try to cultivate an arrangement for protection, but others see the futility of it and remain separate.

“But back to the film. It's about this Jew named Joseph Ben Isaacher Oppenheimer. You see, he has this decadent duke in his debt and he strings the slob out in order to win political and sexual concessions for the other Jews. Like, he gets the duke to permit his people to enter Stuttgart from outside the town, where they're living in these filthy camps, and as the Jews enter the German men cry out, ‘What will happen to our wives and our daughters?' The Jews grin at the fräuleins with the same concupiscent stare that the black legislators in
The Birth of a Nation
have in that scene where they check out the southern belles in the legislature's gallery.

“In fact, the films
The Birth of a Nation and Jud Süss
have a lot in common. Just as
The Birth of a Nation
was innovative, the Nazis recruited some of Germany's supreme talent to appear in the film. It was directed by Harlan Veidt.

“The Jew even pimps for the duke. For example, there's one scene where the duke fantasizes about having some ballerinas perform for him and then, presto, in a cut we see the ballerinas the Jew has procured for the duke. Well, there's this one Aryan fräulein that the Jew really has the hots for. He finally rapes her, well, you don't see her actually raped, you see the Jew wrestling on the bed with her and then in the next scene she's walking down a road, defiled, ruined. She commits suicide and after the duke dies, depriving the Jew of his protection, the Jew is hanged for violating the old German law that forbade any Jew from having carnal knowledge of a Christian on penalty of being ‘hanged for all to see.'

“Would you like to have some more coffee?” she asked, noticing that his cup was empty. Before he answered she had bounded into the kitchen. He had been trying his luck in the North since 1979 but still hadn't gotten used to the coffee. It was weak and people drank it with lots of milk. He always looked forward to going home to relax after he'd finished a project. They had real coffee there. She returned to the couch after pouring him some more.

“Boy, Becky has come a long way,” she said. “She started out as a silly radical feminist and now she's producing a play that's sympathetic to Eva Braun, a Nazi. How people change. Seems that the left all over the West is going to the right. Wouldn't even be surprised if the Soviet Union got into a consumer binge. It always takes them a number of years to catch up with western fashion. How these radicals have changed.”

Brashford said the same thing about you: Ball had the words right on the edge of his lips. A long time ago she wrote poems about blacks robbing department stores and shooting down the police, but recently she'd received a lot of criticism for traveling to South Africa. He decided to talk about something else.

“Eva Braun. Wasn't she that woman in the black bathing suit who was always romping about playing with puppies and pinching children on the cheeks at that place Hitler kept as a retreat?”

“Berchtesgaden,” she said.

“Say, you really know a lot about it.”

“I was doing research for this TV special. You know, the one I wrote about Jo Baker and Bessie Smith. Well, I ran across some kind of mention that Jo Baker had dinner with Hermann Göring; this huge Nazi whose abdomen was much wider than his hips, he tried to poison her.”

Göring had a perpetual idiotic grin on his face, Ian remembered. He thought of the photos he'd seen of the fat buffoon in his cream-colored uniforms and giant raincoats. His big cheeks, tiny eyes, and helmet that fitted his head like a bucket. “Why?”

“The Nazis wanted to get rid of her because she was spying for the French and that's not all. I discovered that the night of his Austrian triumph Adolf Hitler slept in a bed with a picture of Josephine Baker hanging above the head. You know, Hitler hated jazz and was always scolding Eva about her collection of American jazz records. So why didn't he order Josephine Baker's picture to be removed from the wall of the inn where he slept that night? He was getting even with his mother. He had her picture on the wall of his bedroom, but the night that he's away from his room, sort of a shrine to his mother, he fantasizes about sleeping with the demon princess, the wild temptress Lilith, Erzulie, the flapper who brought jazz dance to the Folies. It was very significant that he had this fantasy in the land of his birth.

“Jesus Christ had the same experience with a prostitute on the road, away from his prying mother, whom some say was the prostitute. A Lilith or Erzulie of her time. He had the same problem. Jesus, Hitler, both had weak fathers and strong, manipulative mothers. He would have this ambivalent attitude toward the other women in his life, and finally toward the German nation, which in Nazi portraits is a prodigious butt buxom Brünhilde type blond blue-eyed white woman who is either holding a banner or a flag and at the lead of a vigilante mob. Hitler had the best ass in Germany available to him. Actresses, intellectuals, oxenlike bombshells, models, anything a man would desire, but he was a freak for these high-strung difficult types. That first one was his niece. It's rumored that she went and got pregnant by a Jew. Hitler was part Jewish. His relatives in London always threatened to tell the whole story. Hitler had to pay money to keep them quiet.”

“Tremonisha, are you saying that World War Two happened because Hitler was trying to pass for white?”

“Overzealous assimilation, it happens all the time.

“Becky is wrong about the German women. When he pulled up to a station the women in the town would line up for a chance to sit in his lap for a couple of minutes. He was their pimp. He told them to give him babies and they did, and those babies died in Russia and France. They're just like these white women over here. Allow themselves to get sweet-talked and seduced. Look at all of the white women who voted for this war-monger and apartheid champion, Reagan. That's why Becky's wrong.” Apartheid? Ian thought. Tre gave lectures at Women's Centers where no men were allowed. What about that apartheid?

She paused for a moment and drank from the glass.

“I think your version of what happened in Nazi Germany is far superior to Becky's,” he said, trying to stay on her good side.

“Becky's not too much of an intellectual. I think that she went to school in California. But she's a go-getter all right. Sure, Jim's genius brought in the grants, but Becky's administrative abilities kept the Lord Mountbatten in the black.”

“How do you suppose that Jim's disappearance will affect his operation?”

“She didn't care about him. Thought he was arrogant. She just used him to pull in Jewish contributions, but now I understand that this lady in Long Island is going to pay some of the bills they used to pay.”

He noticed her knee bobbing. “Did you know that the doorman downstairs is Randy Shank?”

She was shocked. Her eyes became gleeful. “I thought he looked familiar. Isn't that the nigger who used to dress up like Tom Mix and entertain tourists down in the Village during the fifties? Rent-a-nigger. A dollar a nigger?”

“Yes. He rented himself out to parties for a dollar. But you have to understand it was hard for black writers in those days, Brashford says. Randy played bongo drums in Washington Square Park during the day, and wrote at night. He paved the way for all of us.” She covered her mouth and began to laugh. He looked around at her Danish furniture, blond tables, and lacquered black chairs. Her desk with the post-modernistic lamp. He looked at the original Afro-American paintings on the wall. Even with this affluent apartment, her money and fame, she was making fun of the brother while he was down.

“I thought he said that he was never going to return to America.” She laughed some more.

“He's really bitter,” Ball said. “He blames you and Becky for what happened to his career. Said Becky rejected his play for political reasons and that he had to leave Europe because as soon as your play and Johnnie Kranshaw's books started to get translated into foreign languages the women in those countries began to hate black American men, as if they didn't have enough problems. Says you even have women in Sri Lanka mad at them.” She started to laugh. He wanted to grab her and shake her to make her stop laughing. It was a laugh of revenge, of hatred.

He left her that way and headed to the lobby. Shank was sitting at his doorman's desk reading a newspaper. He saw Ball and jumped up.

“Getting back to our conversation about the Jews.” Oh, no, not again, Ball thought. “There's really no such thing as a white Jew. Real white people call Jews and the Arabs sand niggers behind their backs. Back in the 1900s and 1910s in this town they called the Russian ones Asiatics and Orientals. You couldn't pick up a paper in those days without reading about some Jewish pickpocket or pimp, and when they weren't doing that they were committing arson and poisoning horses.” Ball tried to move out of the building, but Randy Shank blocked his way, insistent that he hear his tortured and odd theories. “They let them be white now because they serve the white man by keeping an eye on us, monitoring us, providing him with statistics about us, and interpreting us to the white man. The white man don't care about them. They didn't care if they burned up in the ovens, Roosevelt, Churchill, these American Jews even, nobody gave a damn. In the old days they even passed immigration laws to keep them out of the country.”

Ball pushed him out of the way as the author of a collection of poems entitled
My Secret Enemy: Me
shouted at him, “
THE JEWS! THE JEWS
!” He was screaming. Randy followed Ball to the outside of the building, where Ball hailed a taxi. “Yeah, you fast all right, fast like you told us a long time ago, Ball, but I didn't know that you were that fast, that you would side with these bitches, these collaborators who are aiding our enemies in destroying us.” Three or four cabs passed by. “You've broken ranks. They've made you into some kind of feminist.” One pulled up. Ball jumped in. “They've made you into some kind of girl.” Ball started to get out of the cab and kick his ass, but he had more important things to do. The cab leaped forward.

One night Ian was having plot problems, so he sauntered on over to Tre's, as he was beginning to call her. Randy Shank grumbled something as he walked in, perhaps still smarting over their last encounter. He went up to the elevator. As he approached Tre's apartment he heard somebody going upside somebody's head. He rushed to the door. It was open. He ran in and inside, a thin, wide bubble-eyed-looking man had Tre over the sofa's back and was strangling her. Ball grabbed the guy and threw him against the wall. The guy begged off. He was a wretched sight. He seemed to have slept in his clothes and his hair was wild and crazy, and he had on some weird clothes and shoes. Must be a musician, Ball thought. Then he recognized him. It was Dred Creme, the alto sax man. He was recently the subject of a long, difficult-to-read piece in one of the downtown art journals. He'd heard that Tre and Dred were tight. The only word the guy seemed to be sure of was “bitch.”

“Hero. A hero.” Dred started to reel and clap sarcastically. He could tell that the guy was high on something. To her he said, “I'm coming back later or I'll see you on the street. And when I finish with you you'll think that what that Flower Phantom did was mild.” He staggered out of the apartment, but not before pausing to look Ball up and down. Ball matched him eyeball to eyeball. After Dred left, she walked up and put her arms around Ball's neck. He could feel her protuberances and her crevices. He wanted to gently let her down and gingerly fuck her on the couch right there, but then he decided that he didn't want to mix drama with sex. She finally let him go and sat down. He went over and sat on the sofa.

“He's always up here asking me for money to…to score with. He's snorted so much that he has to have surgery on his nose.”

“Mind if I ask you something?”

“No,” she said, “what is it? First, let me fix you a drink.”

“I'll have grapefruit juice,” Ball said. She went into the kitchen. He heard the mixer going. He heard her pouring the drinks. He looked at the coffee table, which had been moved to the side because of the struggle. On top was a book entitled
The Complete Works of Amy Lowell
, and next to that was a biography of Jane Austen, and knocked to the floor by the struggle, pages open, was Zora Neale Hurston's
Their Eyes Were Watching God
. Zora Neale Hurston wasn't a joiner but Tremonisha and others had claimed her as one of their own (though being middle-class Christian women at heart they wouldn't touch the Vodoun parts). They had joined Zora and joined her until she was all joined up. He picked the book up. She brought the tray back in and set it down on the table. They began to sip from the glasses.

“What did you want to ask me?” she asked.

“Well, if I may be frank, why do middle-class women like you go out with guys who want to beat you up and take your money?” He and the fellas always wondered why the musicians got all of the pussy. They concluded that it was because they did all of their talking with their instruments. They were nonverbal and so the bitches could run their mouths without fear of being interrupted or being called on the bullshit they were laying down. They also had theories about what the mouthpieces were substitutes for.

“It's none of your business,” she said.

“These guys beat you up. Why don't you date somebody from your own class?”

“Leave.” She pointed to the door. She ah…looked…well, cute when she got mad. His mother's image appeared in his mind. She was giving him a stern look. He'd have to cool it. He wasn't as close to any woman as he was to his mother. Mama's boy? Why not. Ten years ago, when Freud was still riding high, you couldn't say that, but now that even some of his staunchest supporters were stating publicly that there was no empirical foundation whatsoever for his theories, you could say that you dug your mother without anybody, you know, looking at you funny. He started for the door. She'd gone to the couch and was sobbing on her arm. No. He decided. He'd have this out. “And another thing.” She had her knees up, and he could see some of that excellent area above her knees: Her thighs were calling out to him, Ian, Ian, they were saying. He felt like pulling a Clark Gable, in that scene from
Gone With the Wind
, taking her into his arms—she beating his chest and kicking—and going into the bedroom to comfort her and stuff. But since he had her attention he decided to go for broke.

“I know I'm from the South, and I'm not all that hip to the way northern urban proletariat people talk, but some of the fellas say that they can't follow the dialect in
Wrong-Headed Man
. I mean, if they can't follow it, how are these white women who praise it so enthusiastically able to follow it! What do they know that the people who grew up actually speaking this language don't know? The fellas say—”

“What do those hardheaded fools say about me?”

“They say that you know as much about the way black people talk as Al Capp knew about Indian languages—” She started screaming and shouting. Then she started throwing things. He got out of there fast. He knew that he'd fucked up this time. Randy Shank was in the lobby, sitting at his desk. He was a little drunk.

“How come she let you up there and won't let none of the other fellas in there? Only people I see going up there are broads. Man, some of those chicks look rough. They could have gone into the wrestling business. I'll bet you're working on more than that play up there. Does she stopwatch the foreplay? I'll bet a cold biddy like that times her sexual orgasms.” He then began to ramble.

“That Becky French fucked over my play. I'll fix her. That Flower Phantom. That dude is right. Why didn't I think of that?”

Ball started to punch out Shank. These northern guys were always pushing him. He was always having to invite them outside. Always fucking with him. He was just about around the corner from Tre's building when Shank came running out.

“The bitch wants to talk to you.”

Randy Shank waited for him to come into the lobby. He handed him the downstairs phone. He had a silly mocking grin. Ball grabbed the phone from the sucker.

“Yes,” he said. Randy was trying to listen, peering over the top of the newspaper he pretended to be reading. Headlines read:
FLOWER PHANTOM'S NEW VICTIM
.

“I don't want our…what just happened to come between us and the play. We have to forget about our differences and think of the play. I guess I lost my head. Throwing those things at you like that. We'll work tomorrow.” He noticed Shank trying to spy. He put his hand over the receiver.

“Very well.” He didn't want to let on how relieved he was.