Minister Faust (34 page)

W
hen Kareem finally returned to the Hyper-Potentiality Clinic on Saturday evening, he was calm but sullen. He opened our session complaining that his investigation had been all but destroyed since he couldn’t gain access to the “crime scene” of the Blue Pyramid (sealed by the Ka-Sentinels ever since the funeral), and because wherever he went he was mobbed by reporters, yelled at by angry citizens, and stonewalled by uncommunicative witnesses. But that tirade soon gave way to his obsessive attempts to convince me that his recent reversal of fortunes was the result of a “white power structure” bent on destroying him.

“Is that really true, Kareem? I mean, take that editorial cartoon in the
Sentinel-Spectator
that made you so upset. That was by Melvin Moal, and he’s black, I believe.”

I pulled the cartoon from my file, but he refused even to look at it. I glanced at the image of the Klan-hooded Kareem in a “pimp suit” prostituting Power Grrrl on the streets of Stun-Glas, with its embittering caption
X
-
CONTENDER
.

“Melvin Moal,” sneered Kareem. “The kot-tam Moal-man. Never even stepped foot in Stun-Glas. That Tobytron belongs to the Cartoonist Council of White-Gloved, ‘Yowza’-Howling, Tomosexual House Negroes. It isn’t just
me
he sold out—you should see the racist shit this guy drew about the Crimson Kafeeyah, the Palestinian crimefighter. Drew him like a mad dog, actually used the words
Arab, animal, savage,
and
killer
in the background—I mean, no wonder he’s fucking with me like this! This sellout punk Moal, I swear, he got named Tom of the Year by
Tom Magazine
three years running—”

“Now, Kareem, we both know there’s no such thing as
Tom Magazine—
”

“Well there should be!”

“You can’t heal yourself of your toxic, boundless rage if you don’t admit some culpability, 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

A
fter 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.

A
fter 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 em all together. And you know what happened? After I wrote that?

“Hawk King, who’d supposedly exiled himself inside the Blue Pyramid almost every day and night for the last nine years, he came to visit
me.
”

“You? Personally?”

He nodded slowly and heavily, as if the power of his claim were in the mass of his chin. My wristband buzzed three quick vibro bursts into my skin; I subtly tabbed the
ACKNOWLEDGE
key to let Ms. Olsen know I’d received her message.

“I was sitting up on the roof of my apartment building drinking coffee,” said Kareem, unaware of what I had waiting in store for him, “pounding out my column on my manual typewriter like I did every Sunday night. Every once in a while I’d look around…maybe at all the network transmission towers, at the lights of the Hermes Theater, or over at the Tachyon Tower, wondering what kind of astonishing discoveries they were finding in their dimensional research labs, scanning out past the edge of the galaxy, spelunking black holes, gazing at quasars…

“And while my head was all whirling inside those mysteries, suddenly the moonlight went out.

“I looked up, and I was staring into the moon-frosted silhouette of a man-hawk.

“He swooped down, landed in front of me—six-four, golden beak and gold-rimmed eyes glittering, flapping his huge black-and-gold wings with enough strength in em to crush me like a ripe tomato.

“I thought…I thought he was there to kill me, Doc.”

He shook his head again, got out of his chair to gaze through the window across the Bird Island skyline.

“But he’d come to tell me he’d read what I’d written,” said Kareem, “…and that he thought I was
right.

“I couldn’t believe it. I was completely in awe, humbled that he’d even read something I’d written, that he’d been moved by something I said. And somehow I managed to cough up the guts to ask him why he’d come to me.