Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

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.”

“Damnation…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’—damnation, 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 preemptive 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 maks 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 champeen 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.

Understanding RNPN and Rudolphism

Whereas racial discrimination was once a daily fact of American life for many, legislation and social progress have ensured that what