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

Kareem. Are you really saying that everyone is to blame but you? That this is all the result of some vast white conspiracy to, how did you put it, ‘keep the black man down’?”

“I never said that!”

“I think you did, Kareem.”

“Wouldn’t I know what I said?”

“So I’m wrong, the media is wrong, the F*O*O*J is wrong, Hawk King was wrong, the L*A*B and the Supa Soul Sistas who denounced you are wrong, everyone is in on this vast white conspiracy and they’re all wrong except you, the very person who wrote the words that are now coming back to destroy you?”

“This is bullshit! You’re setting up a freaking battalion of straw men! I can hear the quotation marks you put around every political term you spit back at me! And whatever book you plan on writing about all this, I hope you announce yourself in the foreword as being the most unreliable narrator since Jonah went deep throat!”

Feeling the frustration of battering the impenetrable wall of Kareem’s X-rhetoric, I decided it was time to allow him a break.

How will you face knowing that you will never exceed or even equal the accomplishments of your predecessors?

X-Man: “I don’t give a fuck about glory. Give me revenge.”

The Parable of the Two Dogs

After Kareem had discharged some of his anger through a journaling session, I shared with him a Native American parable. It was my hope he’d be able to use the story in visualization to help him contain his raging self-destructive tendencies.

“There once was a tribal elder who found an anxious young brave,” I told him, “who was perched atop a butte beneath a moonless night sky. It was the night before the young brave was to begin the trials of his manhood initiation, his ‘vision quest.’ The brave told the elder, ‘Medicine Man, every night I dream that there are two wolves fighting inside me. In the morning when I wake up, I feel as if I’ve been ripped apart during the night. What does it mean?’

“The shaman told the young brave, ‘Inside everyone there are these same two wolves. One is white, and one is black. The white one is Joy, Hope, Courage, Loyalty, Justice, Honor, and Love. The black one is Rage, Despair, Fear, Selfishness, Revenge, Cowardice, and Hate.’ The brave asked him, ‘Really? That’s what these wolves are inside me? Then which one will win?’ You know what the medicine man answered, Kareem?”

He shook his head.

“ ‘Whichever one you feed.’ ”

Kareem argued with me at length over the colors for the wolves, but I refused to budge on the deeper truth of my story, and throughout his dinner break he ate his bean pies quietly, his every munch a munch of intense, self-actualizing introspection.

Chaos X Machina

After supper, a mellowed Kareem still refused to discuss Syndi, but neither did he launch himself out of the room when I asked him about that relationship. Instead, the ever highly strung Kareem suddenly uncoiled like a black mamba on muscle relaxants, waxing nostalgically on the first hero he’d ever wanted to emulate—not Hawk King, but the Langston-Douglas legend Maximus Security.

Rising to prominence as a crusader against neighborhood drug dealers and the “corrupt police” supposedly in collusion with them, Maximus Security left America in 1975 to fight alongside the MPLA in Angola. The young Kareem, then known only as Philip Edgerton, had idolized the maverick crimefighter throughout those overseas adventures and even more after his return to the neighborhood in 1977, following his every move and filling scrapbooks with everything he could find on the man.

“Old people used to look at Brother Max and shake their heads,” laughed Kareem, imitating their scowls. “They thought he was gay. See, he used to wear this shiny yellow disco shirt open down to his navel, these tight blue pants, and this huge, oversized chain around his hips—”

“Would that bother you? If he were gay?”

“What’re you talking about? I don’t give a frosty freak about any gay/straight yah-yah. Coulda been gayer than Oscar Wilde and Felix Unger for all I cared. He was my hero, understand? He had his own style. Man was always using weird expressions like ‘Holy ship!’ and ‘Jesse H. Chimpmas!’ and saying to the cops stuff like ‘You jive turn-key’—I mean, corny as all hell, but he’d wink and all us kids’d laugh, and he’d toss us some goat jerky. Man was so popular, they actually based the movie Shaft on him, and Schoolhouse Rock even did a cartoon that everybody in Stun-Glas just knew was really supposed to be him: ‘Verb! That’s what’s happening!’ I mean, you know you hit it big time when they start making cartoons of you!”

“There was a cartoon of you, Kareem. Do you feel fulfilled to have ‘hit the big time’?”

“Editorial cartoons depicting me as a Klan pimp and drawn by step-and-fetching, massa-sucking, porch-monkeying, professionally hamboned ultra-Toms don’t count, Doc. And you already knew that, so quit talking shit,” he sniffed bitterly. “Like I was saying, Brother Max, he was every ghetto kid’s hero. So when he up and joined the New Atlantis International Brigades against Reagan’s terrorists, we all wanted to go off with him, be his Stun-Glas junior troopers. He was so tough that if we could be like him we’d never die, cuz he could never die. And then it was 1984, and he did.”

“Did what?”

“Did die,” he said darkly. “So yeah, you’ve been blasting me, blasting me, blasting me about being angry, that I have to ‘take responsibility’ for what I wrote about Hawk King. Yeah, I was angry. And I had a right to be angry. I wrote it and I was right: from Guatemala to Congo to Iran, the F*O*O*J were, quote, agents of global honkification and leucogemony. And yeah, that included Hawk King, going along with all this shit about truth, justice, and the American way. I wrote that you could have truth and justice or you could have the American way, but you couldn’t have