The Vulture (21 page)

I kissed her gently on her lips, and she smiled shyly.

White women must have a patent on shy smiles, I thought. I wonder how thoroughly it hides their desires in their own minds?

I disguised myself among the thousands of souls that clutter the Lower West Side of Manhattan. I was turning myself into a multiple schizophrenic with such clarity that at times I could even swear that I had seen my other selves. I could see the guy who wore my body and spoke in monosyllables in order to get into bed with an empty-headed, full-bosomed bore. I could see the other Mr Quinn who sat at a card table in the middle of midnight and filled the air with profanity. All for the privilege of sitting inside a circle of subintellects and drinking Thunderbird wine.

I found my hands beneath Margie’s blouse fondling and squeezing her breasts. Her face was buried in my neck, sucking, biting, and kissing. I looked up, and the sky was covered with stars that only the darkness could truly expose. They were dim and faded in the twilight.

She bit me hard and started to nip at my Adam’s apple. I squeezed her knee and parted her thighs to my hand. The fleshy thigh near the juncture between her legs was hot and damp. I pulled away the protective panties and teased her opening with my fingertips.

‘Please, Ivan,’ she gasped. ‘Please, take me.’

I almost laughed out loud. That seemed like a direct quote from every piece of cheap pornography I had ever read. White women with fantastic builds slid in and out of bed with the ease of a mouse running through the Lincoln Tunnel. They would be tossed across a bed by our hero of inordinate staying power, and then yield to him at least through four thousand orgasms in the next six pages.

Where is the reality here? I asked myself.

I pulled my pants off with my right hand while I continued to tease her and scratch her with my left. When my job of manipulation was done with her underthings, I reached under to spread her legs, and started to enter her, slowly and with as much patience as I thought the situation warranted.

‘Ohhhhh . . . Ivan! Ivan!’ she gasped. ‘Please, Ivan.’

Wow! I thought abstractly. This is the thing that black women are aspiring to when they paint their faces and dye their hair? This is what black women are trying to be when they get nose jobs, faces lifted, padded bras, and wigs? . . . Our people are too much impressed by the media. The white man has done a job on our women’s minds. You can’t tell the whites from the light-brights without a scorecard.

The things that were going through my mind were just what Afro was telling everybody in the neighborhood when he talked about BAMBU. He said that the only way we could retrieve our people’s minds was to take them away from believing that each and every thing they saw on TV would make them more equal.

Afro is really a guy named Tommy Hall. He had been trying to start a chapter of this organization he belonged to in the Chelsea area. I had heard him talk at a P.T.A. meeting in the school on 17th Street. After his speech I
acquired some reading material on the group and approached him at a party given by another guy on the block named John Lee.

I had decided to join because I had been fascinated by the idea of revolution, and all of the material spoke of cultural revolutions, and the intimation was that eventually revolution on a grand scale would be inevitable if the demands of black people were not met.

The whole idea of blackness sent your mind through a fantastic tunnel. When I was young, the biggest insult you could throw at an enemy was ‘You black bastard’ or ‘You black something else,’ and now there was a stigma about the word ‘Negro’ that meant you weren’t hip to what was happening. But the word ‘black’ and the theory about white frigidity and negativity took away the word ‘individual’ from your vocabulary. Anyone who had made a favorable impression on you who was not black had to somehow be made to look as though he or she was something other than white. There was no room within the movement for the search for yourself, because the theory of black unity takes away all of the unique qualities to be discovered within the individual. That was aside from the fact that total autonomy was completely impossible anyway. But what about the countertheories to that? What about the fact that the whole is only equal to the sum of its parts? What about the fact that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link? Without a black man or woman finding out whether or not they were completely compatible with life itself, what was the point of lending total support to the security of a nation? How could a greater cause be supported when first of all the need that we all have to discover our own separate peace was without fulfillment?

The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals within it . . . John Stuart Mill, I thought. And we will have a worthless state
and
nation when we
find our own insecurity unfolded after there are no more bridges to cross.

I even wrote a poem once to convey my dissatisfaction with a total commitment to the movement.

i, the finger on the hand,

refuse to roll up with the fist,

until someone answers this:

How long will this anxiety

persist in my mind? Who am I?

‘. . . And my number is EN 6–0897,’ Margie said.

‘Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night until tomorrow.’

Margie blushed a bit, and I kissed her lips. Then she was trotting away through the clearing, looking back occasionally, perhaps to see if I was real. I waved back, and finally she was gone. The only true reminders of her were the charcoal sketch of me tucked in my pocket and the floating relic of a poem, hung up on a rock in the middle of the stream like a paper ship caught on a sand bar.

I looked up while lying flat on my back, and heard the wind whisper to me and the concert of the animals, unleashed and feeling free to sing now that most of the intruders had vanished into yet another wilderness. The stars lit up the sky like so many fireflies dashed upon a black canvas. The moon watched without so much as a glance at earth’s confusion, cold and removed.

I had promised to meet Margie the next day on 59th Street. We would go to a motel and spend the night. Now I was wondering if that hadn’t been a too spontaneous move, something brought on by the delirium that follows making love, when you swear about love that is not there and whisper sweet thoughts that truly have no direction.

July 12, 1968

It was nearing midnight, and I had gotten Margie to let me out where we met. The entire situation about entering the motel with her and listening to her moan out her pleasure had not been a pleasant experience for me. I felt ill at ease about the surroundings and the whole atmosphere. I felt myself doggedly going through the motions of a man ecstatic with sexual pleasure, but it would have taken little more than an amateur to realize the truth.

Just as I was about to get into the car, a drunk stumbled into me. I turned, and his face was appalling, something that I felt disgusted by. There were scabs along his forehead, and he stank of wine and urine.

‘Looky ’ere, Buddy,’ he choked. ‘I rilly ain’ gon’ han’ you no line, cauz you know sometimes I jus’ ain’ got the energy to git all hooked up wit’ no tale about all this wil’ shit. I’m tryin’ a git me a bo’tl an’ I sho’ wisha God you’a gimme some money. You know what I mean ’bout gittin’ all tied to a goddam’ lie so like you livin’ one? You eveh felt you wuz jus’ livin’ a lie, man? . . . My goddam’ stahs in heaven know I useda be livin’ a lie, but I rilly like to git drunk. . . . Thass why I ain’ got nuthin’ again’ a young hippie anna no motherfuckin’ else cauz why inna hell cain’ a man git good an’ fucked up, right? I mean, thass on him. What you rilly care . . . Have yah got annythin’ I can help git my bo’tl wit’?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Can life itself be not at some times intoxicating to such a point that you are a drunk no matter what?’

The drunk smiled, perhaps realizing what I said and perhaps not.

‘You know, I’m glad you ainna a goddam’ Chrishun, you know? I mean, the onny thing I got agains’ God iz Chrishuns.
BE
cause they is lushes onna one day an’ a Chrishun on anothuh. I would give a goddam’ dollah to the man who can criticize from the pulpit an’ sympathize fromma bar stool. You know what I mean?’

‘There is very little near us, save hypocrisy.’

‘Nigh lemme tell you somethin’,’ he stammered. ‘Nigh you a colored fella an’ you done gimme this quarter. I done been askin’ white folks to gimme somethin’, an’ they look at me like I got some kinda somethin’ thass gon’ kill they chil’ren. I mean thass gonna kill they chil’ren. You know?’

If he had ever been white, he could not now be truly so classified. The dirt from the floor of bars and the scars of living the life of a man with nothing was ingrained in him and as much a part of what I saw as his ragged clothes.

‘Thanx, buddy,’ he said, staggering away.

‘Think nothing of it,’ I called.

I got into my car and took off across 59th Street, turning on Second Avenue and mixing with the light midnight traffic that drifted toward lower Manhattan. The drunk and the things that he had to say were still on my mind.

Who, if there is no God, decides who is righteous and who is not? I wondered. Where is the special reward for the high and mighty here on earth who sneer at their fellow beings because of his or her particular station in life? Imagine the confusion that is caused by people aspiring only to be better than someone else so that they can base their successes only on the lack of accomplishment by others. Regardless of all the talk about milk and honey in heaven, you are still dead. Even the Pope, the man closest to God on earth, will one day be dead. Has he really gone on to a greater reward, or is he in the ground? Are you on the right hand of Jesus walking up and down through golden streets, or are your bones turning to ash and maggots and worms chewing at your flesh?

People rap about reaping the harvest of the earth by gaining friendship, and set out as best they can so that they may count up their friends like S & H green stamps at the end of the day. In the meantime, you can never count on friends the way you can count on yourself. When you are pulled from the womb, dripping and bawling, you are all by yourself. And when they throw dirt on top of the box that contains what once represented you, you are all by yourself. Your friends will not be in there with you. Oh, they may reminisce for a week or so, and your name will come up in the conversation now and again, and your woman will wear a black dress. But after a while your friends will forget you, and the neighbors will stop peering around corners to see what your woman is into, and she will start going to bed with other men. The same gap that first you fulfilled with friends will be covered with dirt and disappear while weeds and grass come to cover the tombstone that carries your epitaph. The same warm thighs that you caressed and the same love funnel that you entered in your woman’s bed will be caressed by others and enjoyed by the living.

And what will you have to show for your kind heart and good will? A stone marker saying ‘Here lies a man with a kind heart and a good will.’ Soon even the greatest of things that stood for you on earth are gone. All the nice comments that were whispered about you as you walked down the street were as worthless as the air that transported them from mouth to ear.

The only true definition that a man can put on death would have to be in relationship to his definition of life. The true philosophical questions must primarily be left out of the ghetto. A man is too overcrowded in Harlem to spend the first sixteen or so years of life establishing the proper moral codes that will guide him when he moves to live next door to a white man. There will be no thoughts of clean, wholesome
America as long as sex, dope, and discord are your next-door neighbors.

These are the thoughts that had first given me my inclination toward joining BAMBU. This and the thought and adventure that the word ‘revolution’ seemed to intimate.

I remembered my establishing a desire to become a part of it when I listened and commented during a discussion with Afro at a party given by John Lee. It just happened to be after I had written a poem about Harlem and poverty.

HARLEM: THE GUIDED TOUR

Claude Brown has made it out!

Let the world stand up and shout!

Forty nights and forty days

Shall we sing the zebra’s praise.

coming outside and reintroducing

myself to the cold that was inside,

smoking a cigarette on 125th Street.

On this block I see six liquor stores.

White man set a black dummy behind

the counter and wound him up. He

responds much like Galton’s dog must have.

You come in and it pulls a string:

‘May I help you, sir?’ sort of like

digging on one of the white man’s talking dolls that

blew your daughter’s mind

and blew your fifteen food bucks for Christmas.

You pay him and it pulls a string:

‘Will that be all, sir?’

. . . and you swear because

that pint is all you
couldn’t
afford . . .

take about five swigs and the Hawk ignores

you . . .

next block you encounter the

get-white-quick man selling numbers,

and you laugh ‘cause some fool said

that the problem with Harlem is that there

ain't no factories for black people

to work in. . . . hell! They got a misery factory

manufacturing hardship and busted dreams.

. . . put a dollar down on 444 an’

cross your eyes for good luck.

. . . bye-bye dollar and

dollar's worth of food and

dollar's worth of heat and

dollar's worth of hope.

. . . bye-bye dollar and

dollar's worth of clothes and

dollar's worth of unpaid bills and dollar's worth of love

. . . cause your wife is gonna

close her legs and open her mouth when she sees