Remembering the threat from topside—they may have caused me to choke on my birthday steak to get me to stop playing the game. Wake up and come play, man. Take off the cop uniform and become a wish/wash post-tat beefy dude, kid and wife in tow, working on my F-150, building it out, secret compartments in the wheel well hiding Amazonian blow-dart delivery systems—one whfft and you fall off Victoria—
“Mister master, mister mister master—mister mister ma’am.”
“Yes?”
“I introduce myself as Sheth Jones. Witness. Defendant. Walking myself to the court stairs, up to the witness stand like Ted Bundy (he was just an animal—look at his expression as he prepares for execution). I’d cry too if they made me wear a diaper to avoid shitting myself on the electric chair. My case is made to you today to listen to myself sing my way off the executioner’s axe, rid my curly hair of a pick brush designed to sling off the lice of white kids they come in with that shit in they heads and—yeah, I take calculus, what of it? Take AP Bio, English, PoliSci too. This motherfucker be buggin’ about me lookin’ at Jennifer Lawrence like she’s some kind of cultural coin they pass around among White people to power themselves up after a swim. But I never had much to do with Jennifer Lawrence. Thought that girl was cool for tripping—yes, there was something about it for me but no, it wasn’t what you thought. It wasn’t a metaphor for White culture falling at my magic sight, born to make mermaids sad, every scale dried on the sand, every flair of hair crusted out—died—but no! That wasn’t it at all. It was more of a hippy-chick trip, just her indication that she didn’t know how to walk up stairs in a dress. She probably did the same at her prom.”
“And what interest does this hippy-chick have to you? How does she hold you?”
“I just thought it was funny! Man, who cares? Next year it’ll be some new White chick flowing up those stairs. She won’t trip and it’ll be far less interesting. Fuck it. Fuck. Jennifer Lawrence isn’t the thing, you see? JLaw. Psheesh. It ain’t about that. It’s about a systemic racist system that you and your generation have held mostly in place for another generation. That’s mine. I’ll be stuck with this shit for another lifetime while you’re dead and gone in the beyond. Sucking Pixy Stix in your heavenly crib, everything set for you like a baby in a high chair—mobile within fingers’ reach, music box melodies banging in your ears. That’s how you’ll witness the revolution—our revolution—from the skybox helium in your eye.”
“Sheth, slow down. I’m not a poetess like you. The music box melodies—what’s that? Some kind of metaphor for armed revolution? I’m not mentally ill—I can’t understand you. I think your ADD is talking, Sheth. Sheth, is that your ADD? Speak up, kid. Your delusions are showing. I think you forgot to take your mythorealism tablets. Straight up. Straight to the head. Tell me about Jennifer Law. Tell me of your fascination with her.”
“Well. What you need to understand, Papa Doc, is that this problem is not mine. It’s yours! You have a bunch of ideas in your head about your youth and what Black people mean to you, etcetera, and you’re railing against them like you’re railing against a real person who fits those criteria.”
“And you’re gonna tell me that I’m fighting the wrong person? That you are not my enemy, but my enemy is some other kid who looks just like you?”
“No! I’m gonna tell you, man, that there is no kid who fits your criteria! That kid who’s lusting after JLaw that you bust in on through the window—he doesn’t exist! I’m your best pick but it’s not me. I’m not disturbing the peace. I’m not lusting over your White prize. I’m sitting up there doing my calculus homework and you bust in the door looking for—someone who isn’t there. I’m—architecture and logic. I’m—Wu-Tang and Chopin. I’m the Scrabble champion of this piece! Does that mean anything to you?”
“You play Scrabble?”
Sheth nods.
“You good with words?”
“Yes,” he stresses. Let’s the words seethe through to me. Let your circumflexes invalidate your fortresses of sound. Let the Red fern grow up around your ankles and through your pants and around your head and into your ears! Let those pillars of oak surround you, bind you, find you neck-deep in mulch, able-bodied man, maker of eight times minimum wage, secure man. I stood over you for ages with a sifter, stirring and stirring it, cooking you down to batter, forging your chips with chocolate, milking your bruises toward a pulp, churning that pulp upwards into a cake, baking that cake upward through the oven’s roof, up up up and to the sky, up—up—up into the ether, White, Blue, Black, Super Black. Super—White!! Super pain. Super mother willing, super mother willing to bear the Earth on her back, super mother same.”
I looked upon Sheth as through he was crazy and I continued his speech without a beat.
“Super mother cow friends bringing burgers to your back porch poker party you’re so sly my sister Susan, so super silky monochromatic White. So pseudo-slippery with the numerals. So pseudo-smart. See, Paula was the Pretty one. Susan was the Funny one. Sharon was the Smart one. And I was the nothing one—I was the brother among three sisters, so I didn’t have a name, Pretty, Funny, Smart. In darkness they joked that I was the Stupid one. The Nothing one. And in darkness I became that. In the darkness I withered. Became rot. Became Dark Matter. Became the empty set. Became. Nothing. Became wanting. Became what’s at the end of the stick. Became so lost I couldn’t find (or know) the tip of my nose. That lost. That sticky. That much dopamine in the pit of my stomach. That much off-kilter ketamine. That much Blackness, that much Whiteness, in tow. And with the Pretty one, the Smart one, the Funny ones of you—in tow—with all of you begging at my sleep, pouring in through my lunch hour, making me lock the windows, jib-jab my car into locking order, freaking out in the two-lane on the way to Cincinnati.”
Sheth sat back in his lawn chair, surveying the soccer girls.
“What you’ve got to explain to me,” he said, “is how you exactly feel wronged—how exactly? Because what I’ve got is a whole bunch of Black people on one side of the equation, and this one is enrichened by a factor of x while this one is enrichened by a factor of y! And here we have the disconnect!! X is less than y. Y is White. X is Black. Never the two shall meet, in our world here. Now what are we gonna do about that?”
“About what?”
“About the discrepancy between x and y. Please pay attention.”
“I’m paying attention!! I am! I swear to fucking god. I just got caught between which one of my F-150 and my project bike I’m going to have to get rid of??!!”
“Why would you have to get rid of it?”
“Because of your pay increases.”
“My pay increases??”
“Because you’re going to want to increase your pay thereby virtually decreasing my pay! Fucking over my ability to keep both my F-150 and my project bike!”
“It’s not going to—it’s not going to affect you like that. You’ll be able to keep both your F-150 and your project bike. I’ll just be able to eat at the same time.”
“BUT THE ECONOMY!!”
“No.”
“The economy?”
“No. The economy will be fine. It’s stretchy. Like a woman’s twat. It moves. It’s limp. It grows to accommodate the accompanying child. It’s like her uterus, her ovaries. They grow and move to make room for the new. Nothing breaks. And when the child is grown, the womb grows back into size and the woman’s stomach grows flat again. All natural. All very normal. All planned and padlocked and plasticized for form formal formatting form-fitting fines of fantabulousness fantastic! forerunner forebears forestalls foretelling massive coup-de-gras elementary mountings of ancestors’ flames, anger fills my eyelashes before breakfast, cunts instill in me a fear that God would not take on. Do you read me? Read my intention?? Read my fallibility. Read my flavor. Read my invincibility. My candor. Read my instillation. Read my tears!! Oh White God, hear this cry! Oh God, were you always White, to me?—Were you always fair-haired, a raven in my garden, my kitchen—my falseness, oh that you would preclude me!—Oh, for ferns hidden in seclusion, eagerness tucked away in the reach for them—boom, boom, bee!—I could never ask for another! I’m glad you chose to grant to me a Black child. Ought could not be imagined, and yet, you could have chosen any color child to give to me. Orange, Yellow, Red, and White. A rose of any Color. Would never smell my name. I see myself as a poetry florist—I run the verse of the streets, Mr Police Man. Run the streets. Run for a night and a day, outrunning me this time. You wake up running—running in your dreams. Running in the catch of your hand, in the crack of your butt, nothing less immediate, the sweat of your ass collecting in nuts around the nocte Rx forgiven. You know that. You know not to take that or it might kill you. Why do you take it anyway, nocte? Why you take it anyway? My brethren do kill theyselves with nocte this and nocte that, whining their way down to the bottom of a stalactite cavern with knives for every wayward opinion.”