Minister Faust (19 page)

Despite the darkness of the interior, André was still wearing his tinted Fly Goggles. He’d retracted his wings, and instead of his usual tunic and its fly-with-afro emblem, he was sporting a tight black T-shirt glittering with a sparkly disco-font logo announcing him as
BABY DADDY
.

“Fuck you want, fool?” asked Ahmed Q.

“Why, you gonna take the order?” laughed André. “In that case, give Mista Brotherfly a Cristal-an-cream-soda anna bacon double cheeseburger.”

“Figures you’d be eating the devil’s hound,” growled Ahmed.

“We don’t serve alcohol and we don’t serve meat round here,” said Larry the counterman. “Specially not no pig.”

“Swine,” said Ahmed. “One third rat, one third cat, and one third dog.”

“Must be the new biology,” said André. “Never realized y’all could do genetics in thirds. Somebody gots to tell Mendel he screwed the mock pooch, knawm sayn? Kay, then, Mister Chef—gimme a plate of goat roti, with a extra shell.”

“Like I said, this establishment,” said Larry slowly, “is veg-e-
tar
-ian: tofu cutlets, bean pies, parsnip smoothies. Dig?”

“Brotherfly hafta dig
two
latrines if he ate that shit!
Bzzzt!
” André howled, shifted his hand left and right, palm up, as if expecting someone to put something pleasing into it. “Can Brotherfly get a
bzzzt
? People, people, can a Brotherfly get a
bzzzt
?”

Even from where I was sitting I could smell André, a reek like apricots and cleaning solvent:
maki.
He must have been chewing it ever since he left the funeral, if not during.

“So Brotherfly’s flyin over here,” said André, strutting and waving his arms as if they were his wings, “an he’s thinking, on this most auspicious day when we is all sposta be layin to rest our greatest hero an teacher, when we sposta be payin homage, keepin it real, pouring out the first spurt of the forty an sendin props to the other side, knawm sayn?—an André’s thinking, what would the hyper-righteous Zulucentric QRIB negroes be discussin inside the whitelessness of the soulified Dark Star?

“An what do he find here but all you intellectual ultra-mandigoes speculamatin on y’all’s conspiracies! What a surprise! Feelin all important bout y’selves cuz y’all is crackin the case of the millennium, bigger than ‘Who shot Crispus Attucks?’ Bigger than ‘Who killed Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima?’ Bigger than—”

“André, you come here shit-talking us,” said Kareem, “when you are so fucked up on
maki
you smell like you’ve been lying in a bathtub of Lysol and apricot jam, and you think
you’re
the one showing respect?”

“So who’s behind this grand-ass plot to kill Hawk King, Kreem-pie?”

Before Kareem could speak, Eldritch Cleaver, fingering the edge of his luminescent soul-blade, cut him off. “Kyklos,” said Cleaver, “the Imperial Grand Dragon. He killed SONT. If he found out ’bout the King being a brother—”

André’s laughter stopped him. “Even if Kyklos did know, that double-amputee gots to be seventy years old, not to mention tough as Cool Whip by now. Brother from the HOOD ripped
both
his cross-burners off, remember?”

“He could be in a conspiracy with Warmaster Set,” said the Player Hater. “Or Set could be acting alone.”

“Dam
na
tion…it could’ve been Omnipotent Man himself.”

The accusation hit like a bird into a bay window.

Everyone turned, waiting for the Dark Fantastic to explain himself.

“Think about it. He’s one of the only beings on this planet powerful enough to be able to kill the King. And with his ‘problem’—dam
na
tion, if Hawk King tried to intervene—imagine how OM might’ve reacted. And the resulting guilt…” he said to his crowd’s knitted eyebrows and nodding heads, “that could explain the sudden resignation—”

André kissed his teeth. “Should I come back when y’all worked out your story together? Maybe
y’all
did it, cuz the man wouldn’t eat y’all’s bean pies—”

“It’s Menton,” said the X-Man.

The name ground the butt of the conversation into the floor.

Even a decade after the butchery of the Destroyer was brought to an end by the combined might of the F*O*O*J and its unaffiliated allies, the name
Menton
still poured liquid nitrogen down the slacks of everyone in the hyperhominid community.

“Unless you aint heard,” said André, “Menty done got his ass thrown in the clink way the hell up on Asteroid Zed ten years ago. Kinda hard to kill anybody from up there.”

“Really, André? Then why to this day are people still afraid even to say his name? Knowing that he used to be able to use just the
cognition
of somebody vocalizing his name as his portal? You ready to bet your life he’s no danger anymore?”

“Y’all is too hilarious, quivering like the babies of Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion. Can’t even work up a
bzzzt!
for all y’all scaranoid niggity-knights—”

“Maybe that’s cuz pork-suckin house negroes like y’self don’t care,” said Ahmed Q, “if the Destroyer’s huntin down an killin off the brothers.”

André snorted extravagantly.

“Snort all you like, Hyksos-muthafucka,” said Ahmed. “Brother from the HOOD, Maximus Security, Lou Mumba, SONT…now Hawk King. Two weeks ago in Cripton somebody almost took out Pimp Man. Got beat-down to half a fuck from death—”

“Uh, actually…” said the Player Hater, “the Pimp Man thing…that was me.”

Everyone turned on him. Ahmed howled, “You crazy? The man personally paid to build the on’y decent playground in Cripton!”

“What, Players’ Paradise over on Smalls Street?” cried Player Hater. “Place’s a disgrace—kot-tam ‘merry-ho-round’ an all that shit! An don’t be lookin at me like that—fool was holdin back the race! And Fried Chicken Man better watch
his
ass, too!”

“
Hell
yeah!” said someone.

“All you self-righteous, sanctimonious negroes,” singsonged André, “accusing anybody you don’like, beatin em down, drawin up enemies lists
almost
longer than my dick—y’all a buncha perfectest, holy rollin, no smokin, no drinkin, no fun havin, no dancin, no sexin, impotent, limp-dickin Thirty-Six-Chamber-havin, monkey-ass—”

“This ain’no kot-tam Wu Tang album,” snapped Ahmed. “ ‘Baby Daddy’ shirt–wearin ho-ass trickety-split nigga! This shit’s fuh real,
Forty-two
Chambers, word, not thirty-six! Somebody call nine-one-one on the
pre
emptive fuh this Dead Fool Walkin fore I sweep out the john with this fool’s conk!”

“Y’notice, breddren,” said the Dreadlocker, his hair-tentacles writhing like a gang of cobras at the sight of a squadron of mongeese, “how dis ere sellout naa even join hour side durin di FRAcas at di fun’ral? How ’im slink out di BOCK widdout even trowin a single punch in hour MUtual diFENSE?”

“Like a byatch!” said somebody.

“Too busy ‘swinging’ to do any swinging,” said X-Man. His line got the laugh he was looking for. Whatever his flaws, Kareem was a gifted verbal improviser, as he continued to demonstrate: “Telling everybody how he’s ‘the shit’ and never realizing just how right he is. So busy chilling, he’s completely frost-bit—a slack, slick, loose-dicked, willingly-no-self-control, no-zipper tan-man who
mak
s out his mind to convince himself he isn’t a senseless, thoughtless, shiftless, aimless, brainless, oversized pants–wearing, forty-ounce-loving, penis-fixated, self-underrated supreme cham
peen
of galactic niggativity!”

“And you,
Philip,
” said André to Kareem, “the biggest hypocrite of them all! You think I don’t know why you ‘left’ the L*A*B? When’s the last time you were welcomed here at the Dark Star, huh? You’re what,
half a degree
more welcome than
I
am?”

I was shocked, bearing witness to this transformation of André’s vernacular (and even his accent) into something I’d never heard from him before—clipped and pristine, like Bryant Gumbel’s.

“But now that you’re pimping Hawk King’s corpse,” André railed on, “the L*A*B’s got no choice but to deal with you, am I right? So why don’t you tell ‘the brothers’ here what you’ve told the doctor about you and the L*A*B and your secret scandals? Or should I tell them myself?”

“I aint told her shit, you kot-tam liar, and these brothers don’t doubt that for a second!” yelled Kareem, scanning the faces around him for the doubt I saw wriggling like maggots in the corners of their eyes.

“Don’t say another word, Kareem,” yipped Mofo Jones from down below, before turning to André. “And
you
say one more word, you bluebottled wigaboo, and I’ll sue your slandering ass into the Stone Age!”

X-Man: “Better get the hell outta here while you still can,

Super-Tom—”

“Motherfuck all y’all!” yelled André.

And just as the L*A*B moved against him to rip him wing from wing, André zipped out of the way with the proportionate speed and agility of a fly and was out the door, yelling
“Bzzzt! Bzzzt! Bzzzt!”
and howling a manic, deranged sobbing laugh as he flew away.

W
hereas racial discrimination was once a daily fact of American life for many, legislation and social progress have ensured that what was only a dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial a few decades ago has become a reality for all.

Yet for many heroes of color, the collective memory of that discrimination—and the habits secreted into our culture around commemorating it—have produced a rabid, slavering Cerberus whose heads are Self-Defeat, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, and Pervasive Expectation of Exclusion.

If you’re an ethnic crimefighter who believes everyone is against you, you may find yourself caught in a manifestation-cycle of overt or passive-aggressive behaviors that drive away your colleagues and potential friends. Constantly supercharged by your own antisocial aggression, you are so aswim in your conviction that “discrimination” exists that you remain convinced that everyone else is wallowing in that “awareness” with you.

The belief that everyone shares your worldview, while imputing your own aggression to others’ motives and self-servingly transferring back to yourself the victimhood you impose on them, is a toxic mind-set known as “Racialized Narcissistic Projection Neurosis.” This delusory perspective, rather than supervillains, is the leading cause of injury among heroes of color, because the distraction and poor judgment the neurosis engenders lead to irrational choices, needless danger, and fruitless fighting.

Of course, people who
believe
they are victims of exclusion frequently become excessive excluders themselves. This is the “Rudolph Syndrome.” The atmosphere I observed inside the Dark Star was clearly one of hostile competition, one-upmanship, alpha-doggery, and vicious pecking-orderism. Outsiders, even “outside insiders” such as the Brotherfly, must be attacked bloodily (in body or in spirit) to satisfy the need for a scapegoat. Without such a sacrifice, the self-defeating community would dissolve into civil war; to “riff” upon an African American proverb, the crabs in the bucket would be forced collectively to jump into a boiling pot.

Examine your behavior patterns closely. Are you constantly crying victim? Do you perceive the world as composed of antagonistic institutions whose “propagandized minions” are wittingly or unwittingly “oppressing” you? Do you ever find yourself using expressions such as “the system,” “the Man,” “our people,” or “further evidence of the vast conspiracy against us/me”? If so, you may be suffering from RNPN. And if you are punishing others with the very exclusion you claim afflicts you, you are probably enforcing the ruthlessness of the Rudolph Syndrome.

To deal with your RNPN, begin by recognizing that you are an individual, not a social abstraction. Your destiny belongs to you, not to history, and whatever successes or failures you experience are of your own making. Take responsibility for your own happiness, rather than claiming telepathy you don’t have (unless you are telepathic) or ascribing to others ugly thoughts you can’t verify, and aiming endless, nonspecific blame for your mediocrity at the Trilateral Commission, “the media,” SKULL, the RAND Corporation, the long-disbanded Treemasons, the MAN, the Black Helicopter Legion, or the perennial favorite of paranoiacs, “Them.”

Finally, if you’re the victim of a Rudolphian attack, remember that it’s neurotic to desire the company of those who loathe you. And remember also the lesson of Rudolph, the legendary luminescent crimson-proboscised reindeer: if you continue developing your own abilities and doing what fulfills you without anxiety over other people’s judgment, eventually even those who despise you shall be constrained to honor you. It’s a paradox, but only by abolishing your craving for your critics’ respect will you ever achieve it.

When a QRIB Is Only a Crib: Victim-Identity as Self-Infantilization

E
ager to expel me from his former hang-out spot, Kareem “offered” to escort me to a gypsy cab or the subway. I was just as eager to probe his perspectives and self-delusions while he was still in his native environment, so I persuaded Kareem to take me on a walking tour of Langston-Douglas, including the headquarters of the League of Angry Blackmen, the QRIB.

A couple of blocks away from the Dark Star loomed a renovated building that had once been a bank but had taken on an entirely different purpose under an entirely different appearance. This near-legendary edifice was sometimes called “the underground shrine,” despite the fact that the slightly trapezoidal fortress stood aboveground and five stories tall: the Quarters for Revolutionary Intelligence, Blackified. The QRIB.