A Changed Man (37 page)

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Authors: Francine Prose

BOOK: A Changed Man
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No wonder Dineesha’s squirming. Raymond’s writhing, too, when a girl comedian comes out and does a round of lame stand-up and then starts working the crowd to change a motley group of individuals into a
Chandler
audience. You’ve come here to see Chandler, right? Yo! We come to see Chandler. Raymond’s drawing the line here. He will not be part of any such group. It’s Communist media mind control, sending its octopus tentacles out to strangle the white race, beginning with these fools who have shown up in person so Chandler can personally brainwash them into mud-race thinking.

“And now let’s hear it for Chandler.” Everyone applauds. The rainbow family gives it up for this Hershey bar with a law degree who wants to get down, get real. So he becomes a TV star and gets paid millions to put on thousand-dollar suits and tell white men how to change their lives.

Raymond knows better than to applaud. He needs his hands free in case all this makes him start puking. At the same time he can’t
not
applaud. Some cameraman will pick up on Raymond’s resistance and broadcast his sour puss on the monitor backstage, where Vincent will be watching. Which will spoil Raymond’s surprise.

There’s nothing to do but fake it. Raymond claps like a trained seal.

Shiny and scrubbed, Chandler bounds onstage. The studio lights wink merrily off his brown egg of a head.

“Brothers and sisters,” Chandler begins, with that famous Chandler look, that phony eye contact deep enough to make a strong individual connection with each member of the studio and home audience.

“Brothers and sisters,” he repeats. That’s the first lie right there. Raymond isn’t his brother. That’s an insult to Raymond’s mother.

“First of all, I’d like to say we have someone special with us today—”

You sure do, thinks Raymond. But you don’t know it yet.

“—My great-aunt Brenda from Cincinnati and my baby niece Dineesha.” The crowd loves it that Chandler’s got family, a baby niece Dineesha. The camera finds them. They’re on the monitor. Of all the people for Raymond to be sitting directly behind!

Raymond lowers his head and puts his hand behind his neck as if it needs scratching. Once again the white man must duck and cover in the land that his ancestors defended with their blood.

As he turns to survey the crowd of welfare queens, pimps, and slackers, Raymond’s gaze snags on a kid who looks familiar. After a moment he recognizes the boy from the driveway in Clairmont. Vincent’s roommate. How nice. The whole family’s here to support Cousin Vincent. Obviously, that’s the kid’s mom, the uptight chick from
People,
that broad so ready to explode that probably not even Vincent could bring himself to fuck her. And there’s a younger boy with them. Have these people no decency, bringing tender young minds to get a faceful of the hot air that Chandler’s about to start spewing?

“Brothers and sisters,” Chandler says. “It makes me extremely happy that a child—my baby niece Dineesha—should be with us today to witness. Brothers and sisters, how many times have you thought about how much better the world would be if we could all live in peace and love, harmony and freedom? How many people have died for that? Brother Martin Luther King, Brother Mahatma Gandhi. And how many times have
you
wished that
you
knew what to do to bring it on, to change the world, to usher in the kingdom of heaven right here on our great green earth.”

The kingdom of nigger heaven, thinks Raymond. The earth hasn’t been green for fifty years. Where’s this city boy been? And what’s heaven doing on network TV? Wasn’t the American democratic system built on the separation of church and state?

“Today’s show,” says Chandler, “will introduce us to two men on the forefront of the battle to do good. Two men involved in the daily struggle for the rights of men and women and children who are not as lucky as we are. Human beings who don’t have our American freedoms to say what we like and go where we please.”

American freedoms? If Americans think they’re free, let them try breaking any of the undemocratic laws that the Jewdicial system has passed. If they think they’re allowed to own property, let them try not paying property taxes. If they think they’re free to defend themselves in their own homes, let them face down the FBI and the ATF like Randy Weaver, David Koresh, and those poor dead babies at Waco. And now this guy whose ancestors came over here in slave ships owned by Jews is telling
them
about American freedoms? What America does
he
have in mind? The America where white citizens like Raymond hide in the bathroom where some stranger is taking a shit while a fruitcake like Chandler has private facilities and a white butler wiping his ass?

“Today,” says Chandler, “a brave young man named Vincent Nolan is going to show us how the way to start changing the world is to change your own heart. First.”

For some reason the crowd applauds. Fortunately, not for long.

“Meyer Maslow needs no introduction. All of you know that he is one of our most beloved and respected Holocaust survivors and writers, one of my personal heroes—”

The Holo-hoax. But what can you expect? It’s in the Negro’s interest to buy into the Holocaust myth. Then the blacks and Jews can compare sob stories, the Holocaust versus the slave trade, I had it worse, no,
I
had it worse, and then the Irish can get in there with their fucking potato famine, and the so-called Native Americans.…They’ll all get reparations at the taxpayer’s expense, with a kick-back in it somewhere for the Infernal Revenue Service.

“He is also the founder and director of World Brotherhood Watch, a foundation dedicated to human rights, to making sure that people all over the globe have food and medical care and the liberty to enjoy it. Dr. Maslow is the author of a new book,
One Heart at a Time,
in which he tells us how we can change the world by turning just one heart at a time toward the path of goodness and love.”

The chatter inside Raymond’s head has ratcheted up to a shriek. He needs to see a pharmacist—now!

“And the really strange part”—Chandler zeroes in on this for drama—“is that Dr. Maslow wrote the book
before
Vincent Nolan came along and put his life on the line to prove Dr. Maslow’s theory. What we’ll see today is…a chay-yanged man.”

The applause is nearly unbearable, but things are about to get worse. Because it’s time for Chandler’s trademark moment. Just before bringing out the guests, he makes major eye contact with the crowd. His eyes are practically jittering in their sockets as he gives you the guest’s whole life story in his super-intense fag shorthand.

“At thirteen, he had a loving family. A comfortable house in Budapest. By the time he was fourteen, his entire family was dead. He slept in haylofts, in cellars and pigpens, constantly on the run. He was almost killed five times until he was caught and sent to Auschwitz and survived.”

Chandler’s run out of oxygen. “Brothers and sisters, how many of you could live through that and not want to make someone
pay?
How many of us would want revenge? But Meyer Maslow has dedicated his life to making sure that no one else ever suffers as he did, and that we forgive and forget.”

Forgive, my ass, thinks Raymond.

The crowd applauds insanely as Meyer Maslow comes out nodding and strutting like a prizefighter during the walk-on, looking like some upmarket Hollywood rabbi to the stars.

“It’s a pleasure to be here.” Meyer shakes Chandler’s hand. “And excuse me, but I feel I have to point out that I have never believed in forgiving and forgetting. I’ve written about the importance of forgiving but
not
forgetting.”

The Jew knows more than you do. The Jew wants you to know that.

“Of course we can’t forget.” Chandler’s so fast on his feet, he could have had a career in basketball. “None of us can forget. Nor should we.”

Boo-hoo. Boo-hoo. The Holocaust. The Middle Passage. Chandler points toward one of the Chandler chairs. Whether the rabbi likes it or not, it’s time for him to heel and sit so Chandler can bring out the other puppy.

Chandler begins again. “His childhood could not have been more unlike that of Meyer Maslow. Born to a mom on welfare and a dad whose life was straight out of
Les Miz,
hounded to his death because of an income tax mistake. A troubled youth, a run of bad luck, an unfortunate meeting with men like himself who’d found a way to blame their bad luck on disadvantaged minorities who are struggling to feed their children just like everyone else.”

Hold on! That’s Raymond he’s talking about. That’s Raymond and his buddies gasping for air under that shit heap of lies. The Jew and the black man are struggling, all right, struggling to take over America. And winning, by the looks of it. They’re the ones onstage. The only white citizens in the room are up in the peanut gallery.

“White men,” Chandler says, like it’s something to be ashamed of. “White men and women who channel their frustrations and disappointments into anger and hate. And Vincent Nolan falls in with these men, and almost slips under their spell. Until one day on a visit to, of all things, a greenhouse—a visit meant to destroy and hurt, to cause its Korean owner pain—he sees the light. He sees how all God’s children and all the beauties of God’s earth are one.”

What the hell are they talking about? That time he and Vincent went to check out the Korean greenhouse and maybe do some damage? It didn’t happen like that at all. Vincent would have been down with it if they’d torched that popsicle shack just to see the special effects when all that plastic went up in flames. But they’d decided against it. He
and
Raymond decided against it. They didn’t want to think about it being traced to them. Detectives, cops, lawyers, the whole nine yards. What do you get for arson? Fifteen, twenty years? For what? Flash-frying some plants? They’d gone home and got drunk in front of the tube instead.

Lately Raymond has given the subject of Vincent plenty of thought. And he’s concluded that Vincent made up his mind, if you could call it a mind, to become a race traitor somewhere around the time he took all that Ex at the rave. After that he started acting weird. Raymond thought his cousin had just punctured another hole in his Swiss-cheese brain, that eventually it would heal over and he would get back to his old self. So what they’re trying to pass off as a heavy-duty spiritual conversion inspired by the beauty of nature was in fact a drug OD and the sort of pathetic revelation a kid might have the first time he got high. Don’t they know that? Why don’t they admit it? How can they spout this crap on TV as if it were the truth? Raymond knows better than to be surprised, but he still can’t help it. It’s his job to correct these lies. It’s his duty as a white American patriot to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Chandler can’t seem to wrap this one up. There’s so much to say about Vincent. “After just a few weeks of working with Meyer Maslow, the sort of person he’d never met before—and who has met someone like Meyer Maslow and
not
been changed?—sure enough, Vincent began to.
Change.
Day by day, thought by thought. Like Dr. Maslow writes in his book. To turn himself around so completely that at the charity fund-raising dinner for Dr. Maslow’s foundation Vincent proved his courage and his resolve. He nearly died. My man nearly died from an allergic reaction, but he kept on pushing, pushing, putting his life on the line, testing himself to the limit, until he said what he had to say, until the brother testified about how he turned his life around and how we can, too.”

You’d think it was a Rolling Stones concert, that’s how berserk the crowd goes. They’re nearly high-fiving each other as they put their hands together and welcome the traitor, the liar, the thief, the truck thief, the prescription medication thief, the drug addict, a guy who is definitely not the hero they think.

If Raymond’s blood has been simmering since he saw Vincent getting made up, it comes to a rolling boil the instant Vincent walks onstage. Because this time he’s not sitting down under a sheet, being fluffed and powdered like some pervert poofter. He’s walking on like he owns the joint, taking Chandler’s hand and…shaking a black man’s hand. The shock nearly knocks Raymond off his seat. He never thought he would live to see this. Well, jeez, why
shouldn’t
he shake his hand? Vincent and Chandler are on the same page. Vincent’s suit is almost as good as Chandler’s. They could be two CEOs meeting in a five-star hotel for a power breakfast.

If this were a different kind of show—the old
Geraldo,
or
Jerry Springer
—they’d dress Vincent in the storm trooper clothes he never actually wore. They’d make him wear sleeves short enough to flash his tats at Mom and Pop Middle America. But this is
Chandler,
and if Vincent wants to market himself as a middle-class middle-management white sellout, Chandler’s happy to go that route. Bring out Mr. Changed Man.

“It’s great to meet you,” Vincent says. “I’m a big fan. I’ve seen your show a million times.”

Lies, lies! Does anybody really think they’re meeting for the first time? Who doesn’t know that Vincent and Chandler have been hanging out backstage, enjoying the Big Rock Candy Mountain with all the babes and free champagne? And sure, Vincent’s seen the show a million times. Raymond can testify to that. Vincent used to watch it with him and the guys, calling Chandler every name in the book and talking about how the black man and his Jewish backers are sabotaging the country.

“Well, thanks,” Chandler says. “It’s good to meet you, too.” Chandler pulls himself away from the crowd and Velcros onto Vincent so everyone can watch Vincent practically get hard from the warmth of Chandler’s attention. A flush comes to Vincent’s cheeks. Can the home audience
see
this, see the white man blushing? Do they know it’s the only race that gets blood rising into its face, which proves that the white race is the only race with a conscience? But what is Vincent blushing
about?
Heavy eye contact with a Negro? In another minute, they’re going to fall down on the studio floor and start sucking each other off.

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