The Vulture (24 page)

add bass to a bottomless pit of insecurity, you

may be plastic because

you never meditate about the bottom of glasses,

the third side of your universe.

Add on

Alice Coltrane and her cosmic strains, still no vocal

on blue-black horizons/your plasticity is tested

by a formless assault:
THE SUN
can answer questions

in tune to sacrificial silence/but why will our

new jazz age give us no more expanding puzzles?

(Enter John) blow from under always and never so that

the morning (
THE SUN
) may shout of brain-bending

saxophones.

the third world arrives with Yusef Lateef and

Pharaoh Sanders with oboes straining to touch the

core of your unknown soul. Ravi Shankar comes

with strings attached/prepared to stabilize

your seventh sense (Black Rhythm!)

up and down a silly ladder run the notes without

the words. words are important for the mind/the

notes are for the soul.

Miles Davis? SO WHAT?

Cannonball/Fiddler/Mercy

Dexter Gordon/ONE flight UP

Donald Byrd/Cristo

but what about words?

would you like to survive on sadness/call on

Ella and José Happiness/

drift with

Smoky/Bill Medley/Bobby Taylor/

Otis/soul music where frustrations are

washed by drums – come, Nina and Miriam—

congo/mongo beat me senseless

bongo/tonto – flash through dream worlds of

STP and LSD. SpEeD kIlLs and some/times

music's call to the Black is confused. our

speed is our life pace/not safe/not good.

i beg you to escape

and live

and hear all of the real. to survive in a

sincere second of self-self

until a call comes for you to try elsewhere.

we

must all cry, but must the tears be white?

My assignment, that is, my task for the coming spring was to connect myself more closely with the interpretation of the insight I possessed so that I might be able to turn others on to the inequalities and hypocrisy involved with everyday survival. I resigned myself to carry a pen with me everywhere I went in order to paint these word pictures during moments of inspiration. Sometimes the thoughts that I wanted to bring out were pages long and often took on the form of essays, but even more often than this I was attacked by little blasts of feeling and sensitivity that I decided to describe as mind messages, for lack of a better name.

MIND MESSAGE #1 I.Q.

Poet am I seeking a separate peace. (John Knowles)

Knowing no boundaries west or east.

Taking the pulse

of a dying world

MIND MESSAGE #2 I.Q.

minds, like beds, hard to make up in the morning.

so many things to decide for a new day.

so many things went on between the sheets.

I was so concerned with the compact nature of the poems that I even decided to abbreviate my name during these intervals. The tragedy was that I still felt a bit like a hoax, an almost everything and a not-quite-anything. I told myself that someday when I had compiled these notes and gotten a concrete theory from the loose ends that I now saw, I would start a sort of cult to rescue people from deadening of the emotions – a disease I enjoyed comparing to hardening of the arteries, because the structure of the syllables was so similar. The results being equal in my mind, fatality.

School was tolerated. Not because I was hung up about becoming a status symbol for my folks, but because it was so easy to do acceptably while still not devoting a lot of time and energy to it. Half the time the school was in an uproar anyway, with all the young SDS hippies and Village ‘anarchists’ helping to stage a quasi-revolution. The purpose was to allow a college student to do his thing while still maintaining this student facade. There were hassles, with heads being beaten in by the City Man while chicks and cats ran around up and down 116th Street with signs about Columbia tearing down the buildings in the community and ruining people's lives and so much wild stuff that I never got involved. My stand was that whiteys didn't
need any help getting their heads kicked in, when, in fact, they were the target of my revolution and eventual cult. I was going to intellectualize on the redevelopment of the emotions while they were running around succumbing to a mob-type stimulus that made them emotionally weak.

In the neighborhood things rolled along as before. I was into a rap-when-necessary thing with the women that allowed me to woo them when I felt like it was physically necessary that I recharge my battery. I would get drunk and get into a beg-and-plead, prayers-and-entreaties type of groveling, when we should have been begging each other, praying for a union of the soul also. The last of this was idealistic, but it expressed my sentiments on what type of hypnotic, puritanical veil the American black woman had become destroyed by. There was always an overtone of ‘I'm doing you a favor,’ until you were both between the sheets.

The only real problem that did not concern the path I was choosing concerned Ricky. He was more of an enigma than ever. He was warm and then cold. He was laughing and then sobbing. I wasn't sure if it was autonomous schizophrenia or drug-induced depression. As far as I could tell, he was still strung out on ‘downs.’ His attitudes intimated smoke, Darvons, liquor, and cats.

It was the cats that I was most concerned about, because he went through the thing about death. It was at a time like that when I felt closest to him and farthest away. Close because I knew I had an answer, and far away because he didn't really listen to me anymore. He came around when he was lonely and just couldn't express what was on his mind within his clique. There had been a time when John Lee first started dealing when he would come to me and ask about highs he should try and for suggestions about combinations that would give him a good ride. Now, there was just an occasional glimpse at what was going on.

July 3, 1969

At the end of the school year I went through a hell of a thing with my parents. During the year I had assured myself of a job as counselor at Camp Cheyenne for boys near Syracuse. At first it was a nice deal for my parents. I would be in the great outdoors soaking up a lot of sunshine, getting a lot of exercise, and all the other garbage that parents like to read into the comics of your life. But, as the year progressed and I finally broke down to them that I was into drugs, not heavily, but experimenting, they became paranoid about not seeing me for two months. By the end of June, when school was out, we had regressed to the ‘We'll think about it’ stage, and they offered me a trip to Boston for the Fourth of July weekend as a peace offering in case their decision went against me. I was already wondering what form my retaliation against the bureaucracy would take, and I thought seriously about leaving home, which I'm sure was a factor which delayed my parents’ decision.

I wasn't very sure that as a writer I shouldn't be away from home anyway. Out from under the umbrella and away from the maternal umbilical cord and the paternal strap. There were many things that I was unable to experience while living with my folks. Things that would be essential in terms of human relations and depicting reality. There was much more involved with introducing yourself to life than a few excursions into drugs. Upon realizing this, I realized how many things there were to do before a man could say he had lived and had nothing more to live for. The problem had been that I experienced too much, too soon, thereby eliminating much of the adventure that comes along with legal, chronological maturity.

I did decide that leaving home would be a poor move, regardless of how my trial turned out. Being able to live at
home had given me a taste of both worlds through my first year of college. I decided that to try to make it on my own would involve a job and college and interfere with my further discoveries within my soul through my writing.

I left for Boston resolute on playing pensive if I could not go to the camp, but remaining at home for a while longer anyway. The plane took off, and I was touched with the reality of
real
flying; how unimaginative it was, and how unlike what flying high was. Being high was a floating, cruising, microscopic drifting through all manmade stops. It was a slowdown for the showdown with your mind. This was nearly nothing after the takeoffs, except a tugging force that kept you erect. I vowed to fly back high.

July 6, 1969 / 7:00 P.M.

‘That's all there is to tell,’ my mother said. ‘Evidently he jumped from the top of the warehouse and killed himself. Lord knows that that's probably the only thing that could have gotten him up there . . . But the poor thing. Ivan. Hating everything so much that he would have to do that! His mother almost died too. Can you imagine? Seventeen years old . . . But you know, Ricky did always seem like an old man. He never knew when to be young and when to be mature. He was always old.’

‘Was there an autopsy?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I think she said there would be an autopsy, but no funeral. Ivan, that woman couldn't stand it! I tell you, it was the most pitiful thing I had ever seen in my life . . . They're going to have the body cremated.’

Sunday night. Went to Boston on Thursday. Said goodbye to Ricky before I left. Said I had some very important developments to tell him about when I got back. I had had
in mind a purpose for both of us. The purpose of life being to experience all that you can along the specter of emotions and senses. Then to leave pictures and phrases depicting more beauty in the world than could be noticed when you were born. Death being not an end to life, but another experience, the final one, that you could not relate to people. Death being
the
experience, and the one that Fate would not let you describe to your fellow man.

Sadness overtakes the man who runs after it. Death overtakes the man who pursues him. Yama and Charon are alive and well in New York City! Ricky Manning jumped from a building, and there would be an autopsy and then a cremation. Where is the reality here?

8:00 P.M.

‘Yes,’ Mrs Manning sniffed. ‘Ricky was taking drugs. I knew this. He got mad at me and started talking about being down all the time, and I was the reason . . . I never even dreamed that this was what he meant. I just thought it was angry talk. He swore at me about cocaine and all sorts of pills . . . ‘

‘I know,’ I interrupted. ‘You know, you really shouldn't be out here talking about all this now. You've gone through quite a thing.’

‘But I had to talk to you. You were very important in my son's life. All he ever talked about was I.Q. this and what you and he had discussed. I had to talk to you, knowing what a big part you played in my son's life.’

I wanted to say, ‘But not a big enough part in his life. And maybe a part in his death.’ Because if what Mrs Manning said was true, Ricky had not been looking forward to me leaving for the summer. But that was absurd. Naturally I had mentioned it. Maybe Ricky was jealous of my having found my answer, an answer which he was afraid he might not be able to relate to.

‘Thank you, Mrs Manning,’ I said. ‘Remember, if there's anything in the world I could do for you, just feel free to call on me. I'll do all that I can.’

‘Thank you, son.’ She smiled through her tears that nearly made me cry. God! There's your reality! In that woman's eyes was a real piece of life and sadness that I had never experienced. Piece by piece, I saw the picture forming again at the top of my mind.

Fuck you, God! my brain was crying. Fuck all that you stand for, because you never even gave him a chance! I was so close! I was close enough to helping him to see my hopes in his eyes. I needed one more day to get back here and talk to him, and you fixed everything! Fuck you, God! And fuck death, because it's real, and there are certain realities that I know exist now. But I'm not ready for them.

‘One more thing, Mrs Manning?’ I asked. ‘Were you told what kind of drugs Ricky was using?’

‘I was given some long chemical term,’ she said. ‘But the police told me that they were called cats. Ricky had taken at least three of them.’

July 10, 1969

‘Look,’ John said, ‘I ain't had no cats in months. I didn't sell Ricky no cats, an’ I didn't see him on the night he died.’

John and I were sitting in my bedroom. I had called him after the ceremonies for Ricky were held on Tuesday and told him to come by my place.

‘Look, man,’ he continued. ‘You keep giving me a hard way to go. I wanna know why! Am I the only man in the world who can spell cat?’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘You want a beer?’

‘Yeah,’ John barked.

I went out into the kitchen and probed the refrigerator for two beers. I opened them and plucked coasters from the rack and took all the equipment back to my room.

‘Where else could he get the stuff?’ I asked after John took a big gulp from the can.

‘What the hell I know?’

There was a thick wall growing between John and me. With every question that I asked and with each minute he spent in the room with me, the wall was growing. I didn't sense that he was afraid of the questions; I believed him. But nonetheless he was annoyed and irritated and a bit shook up. I could see the dark circles under his eyes. The thing that he was doing to the Junior Jones boys took on new meaning. It was no longer only supplying kicks, but quick deaths.

‘What about . . .’ I began.

‘Cut it, Q. Cut it! I don't know nothing. I ain't seen nothing. And I don't want you talking to me about it anymore.’

I made another analysis. He seemed too uptight. Maybe guilt. Maybe personal guilt, and maybe guilt by association, but John Lee was uptight. His face was a sneer. His eyes were on fire. He gulped the last half of the beer in the can and stumbled to his feet, off balance in his hurry to leave. I heard the door slam out in the hall. He was gone.

July 11, 1969

‘Hello?’

‘Yeah, Q. This is Lee.’ I heard the voice coming over slowly and with a hint of danger. ‘Where were you on about the night of January 3 and the morning of January 4?’ he asked.