The Free-Lance Pallbearers (10 page)

When the nose returned, my case was called by the clerk. “Fannie Mae Doopeyduk versus Bukka Doopeyduk. Will the parties please come fawwad,” the court clerk said.

Fannie Mae wore a black slouchy hat and stood in high black heels and a black dress which made her seem hipless. Her eyes avoided mine as we stood side by side before Judge Whimplewopper.

“What seems to be the problem?” The lengthy bulbous nose peered at Fannie Mae.

“I tried to be a good wife, yo honnah,” she began. “As my grandmother used to say, ‘A hard head makes a soft ass,' so I told him to go to da Harry Sam Ear Muffle Factory where they was hirin' and where they makes some good change. But no. He wouldn't listen. Having a hard head he rather work in that hospital where they got all kinds of screwballs skipping around. We nevvah had 'nough money for the fun I likes to have and whenever my girl friends come over to the house to play whist, he was always rude. Then finally yo honnah, one day he tried to viscerate me!”

“Viscerate you?” the nose said.

“Yes, viscerate me.” A chorus of aws and a few psts swept the courtroom. The nose turned to me.

“What do you have to say about visceratin'-I mean eviscerating your wife?”

I lowered my head and folding my hands in front of me answered. “Well your honor … I did … it … because I had become a … a … a … hoodooed.” Tumult in the courtroom. Reporters holding the top of their hats rushed to telephone.

“Quiet, quiet!” the judge said. “Order in the court. Do you expect me to believe such a thing?”

“It's true,” I said to the nose with freckles on the tip. “My professor, U
₂
Polyglot, was rolling a ball about Europe on his hands and knees and cured me after I galloped into him. This was about the time the Chinese drove into the suburbs on bicycles with skulls for handlebars and kidnaped those heel-kicking housewives hanging out the wash. Well, to make a long story short, the professor had gotten this bottle of de-hoodoo lotion from my wife's grandmother who is an ol witch taking conjure lessons through the mail under the Mojo Power Retraining Act. You see, she looks after her son who sits about the house all day in antlers. Well, anyway, the professor transformed me into my normal self and I've been working very hard at the hospital where Nurse Rosemary D Camp put me in charge of an ol man who died kissing Versailles 1919, so now I have a lot of time to devote to the movement whose leader has been in the John for thirty years due to a weird malignant illness. You see, we want him to get up off his big fat-”

“Wait a minute, Hooooollllllllllllddddddddittttt hoooollllllllldddddddditttttttt,” the judge said, turning his head to the ceiling, making visible two dark nostrils and a quivering red tonsil. “What's all this talk about an old woman who pushes a ball around the world and a nurse who sits in the John all day? Do you expect me to believe that?”

“With all due respect, your honor, you got it all wrong. It's Dr. Christian who pushes the ball all day through areas where nuns are raping the huns and my father-in-law kisses Versailles 1919. … I mean,” fumbling and stammering. “No, it goes this way … a … a …”

But seeing my confusion a man in the audience sprang from his seat and stepping on the toes of his neighbors, rushed into the aisle. “You left out the ol woman who kidnaped Checkers.”

And almost as swiftly another woman stood up and shouted, cupping her mouth with her hands, “Not to mention the plumbers' mutiny.”

But the nose, resting on the bench like a stout lizard, interrupted the spectators. “Now look here, do you think I'm some kinda dunce? I mean, if SAM has taken Checkers, then who is in the John?”

Another man hopped to his feet and said, “Hey, yo honnah, that's catchy.” He then went into the aisle and started a chant. “If SAM has kidnaped Checkers, then who is in the John?” He snapped his fingers and began the old a-one, a-two, a-three, kick. The courtroom audience joined, clapping on the beat. Another woman stood behind him and put her hands on his waist. Together they began a conga line. Soon the whole courtroom was in a conga line singing the ditty, “If SAM has kidnapped Checkers, then who is in the John? A-one, a-two, a-three, kick.” Suddenly the doors of the courtroom flew open and an orchestra of men in damp white dinner jackets rushed in. Their hair was dripping wet and fish flew from their pockets. The musicians accompanied the spectators, putting their soggy violin bows to strings and playing marimbas and steel drums.

I went apeshit. “WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS IS, SOME KINDA JOKE OR SUMTHIN? STOP THIS MONKEY BUSINESS RIGHT NOW! YOU KNOW THIS PLACE IS NOWHERE. NOTHIN' BUT A BIG KLANG-A-LANG-A-DING-DONG-A-RAZZ-A-MA-TAZ.”

The judge jumped up and waving his arms cried, “STOP IT! STOP IT!” He took out a whistle, puffed his jaws and blew. “DO YOU THINK AMERICAN JUSTICE IS SOME KINDA WEIRD CIRCUS? SOME FREAKISH SIDE SHOW? A CARNIVAL ROUTINE?” Everybody hurried back to their seats and the orchestra rushed from the courtroom.

“Now that's more like it,” the nose said. “We will continue with the case.” The nose turned to me and with its beady eyes piercing through the wig said, “I'm not going to have my circus … turned into a courtroom … dog bite it.” He combed his bangs again. “I mean I'm not going to have my courtroom turned into a circus, unnerstand? It's clear to me, Mr. Doopeyduk, that you are a disagreeable person whose head is always in the clouds. Imagine such ravings. If I didn't know that you were a Nazarene apprentice, I'd think you were off your rocker.”

“He talks like dat all the time, yo honnah,” Fannie Mae added, putting her two cents in, tapping her foot and looking at me evilly. “Always talkin' all out his head.”

I looked up to the nose and said, “I'm sorry for turning your courtroom into a circus, your honor. I'll take whatever's coming to me.”

“Very well, then,” the nose said. “I award your wife a separation and fifty per cent of your salary will go to her for support” With this he banged his gavel and called for the next case. I turned around to leave, almost bumping into the next case which was the bearded lady and the fat woman who had brought the juggler into court for hitting them over the head with the lion tamer's stool. I walked down the steps of the courtroom just as the limousine with antlers sticking from the roof pulled away from the curb.

The next morning I was fired from my job. When I opened the door of the floor the orderlies were waiting for me. “Mrs. Nurse Rosemary D Camp wants to see you, Doopeyduk.”

I went into Mrs. Nurse Rosemary D Camp's office. Standing next to her in a gray double-breasted business suit with a stethoscope hanging around his neck was Dr. Christian. “Mr. Doopeyduk,” Mrs. D Camp began, “I can't begin to tell you how sorry I am about the action the hospital is going to take against you so I brought down Dr. Christian to explain to you why we deem it necessary to let you go at this time.”

“Let me go,” I said. “I don't understand.”

“You tell him, please, Dr. Christian, please,” Rosemary D Camp said.

He walked over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “Yes, my boy,” he said, shaking his head, “we were all prepared to give you a job in the surgical department where you would be in charge of the other nurses' aides and orderlies who clean up leftovers from the operations. But you see, Bukka, it's hard for us to keep on people who have outside financial trouble.”

“Outside financial trouble?”

“Yes. Show him the order,” he said, turning to the nurse. It was the greenish-brown seal from the court ordering the hospital to deduct 50 per cent of my salary each week.

“Yes, you see, Mr. Doopeyduk,” the doctor said, his back turned to me as he looked out of the window, “we can't afford the clerical help necessary to take care of garnisheed wages. We are a nonprofit institution here to service mankind, the Hippocratic oath and all that,” he said, removing his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose. “I'm afraid we're going to have to take back your golden bedpan.”

I dropped to my knees and threw the kat all kinds of Al Jolson mammies one after the other, but he wasn't impressed. “O, don't,” I cried, tugging at his pants. “Don't take the golden bedpan, don't take it, do anything but don't take the golden bedpan.”

A sparkling tear of rainbow colors appeared in Nurse Rosemary D Camp's eye and rolled down her plump pink cheek. “Don't worry, my boy,” Dr. Christian said. “I'm sure we will hear great things from you. You shouldn't have any trouble at all, you look just like Sidney Poitier, Jackie Robinson, Nat King Cole, Joe Louis, Harry Belafonte, and Ralph Bunche, so, no sweat. Good-bye, Bukka, here is three weeks' salary,” he said, giving me a small envelope.

I walked down the steps of the hospital. It had begun to rain. Here I was, I thought, twenty-three years old. Lost a job and lost a wife. The future looked quite dim. I drew up my collar and walked through the streets to the sound of the foghorn coming from the pier. I reached into my pocket for a smoke. I felt a card. It was a pink card given to me by the ol man in the Seventeen Nation Disarmament Conference Bar. It was wrinkled and moist. It said, “Go to Entropy Productions. Collect 200 dollars.” Things were looking up. A cloud moved above sagging with rain. It seemed as if it had eyes, nose, lips. It did, my eyes, nose, and lips. Get it. Clouds. Head in the clouds.

 

Entropy Productions was located in the Lower East Side of this WAY OUT BRING DOWN, this sifting area of BAD NEWS, this ugly TRIPS FESTIVAL. Its manager was Cipher X who graduated from M.I.T. in mechanical drawing—but having abandoned this career, he lived in a loft where he made big black gorgeous hoopla hoops with his own wittle hands.

Well, not exactly. Cipher, which means zero, would make a sketch including his specifications and send it off to GENERAL DYNAMICS CORPORATION which in turn would send him a brand new hoopla hoop every two weeks. Cipher was the darling of the fire insurance underwriters, airline ticket reservation clerks, female book editors from Skidmore and the wives of these groups who would flock to the loft to witness his
BECOMINGS
, as they were called. The loft was situated in a run-down factory on Oriental Avenue.

I had moved from the projects that morning because of that rule which forbade single people to live in them. I was broke, having spent three weeks' salary on some rare Nazarene books so as to better prepare myself for a deep thoroughgoing scrutiny of the faith. I must have seemed a little bedraggled as I walked along the street with the bag containing my belongings. The bag was tied to a stick and I carried it over my shoulder.

 

The door said: ENTROPY PRODUCTIONS: FLOAT IN. I opened the door and was tackled by a slim, agile man who wore tight-fitting black pants and a black T-shirt. His feet were bare. Sitting on my chest he began to measure my neck and wrists with a tape.

“You'll do,” said the angular nose, the thin lips, the sterling high cheekbones.

“I'll do? I'll do for what?” I asked, sitting up.

“You'll do for my great BECOMING ‘Git It On.'”

“But I don't understand,” I pleaded. “The man over at the Seventeen Nation Disarmament Bar didn't say anything about a theatrical production.”

“Theater? Acting?” He frowned. “Those old men over there are just a bunch of losers talking nothing but a lot of dumb cannon fire and the way things used to be. Their notion of the world went out with the proscenium arch.

“All things are theater,” he said, vaulting to his feet and wildly gesticulating. “A child playing with a beach ball, a bus driver taking a token instead of twenty cents. Why when I attend a concert, I'm more interested in the spit that leaks from the horn valves than the music. O, I can go on and on. Why every time I hear a newborn baby cry or touch a leaf or—”

“But how do you know I'll do well in this BECOMING?” I said, cutting him off.

“You,” he said, holding my chin, “are a natural. That face, the face of a sphinx, your ample neck, those lean, hard wrists. Tomorrow night's BECOMING should be a stirring one.”

“Tomorrow night? But aren't we supposed to have an audition or a rehearsal?”

“Idiot!” he sneered. “Auditions? Rehearsals? There you go again talking like the Seventeen Nation Disarmament Conference Bar. Why don't you do as you're told. Just show tomorrow night at eight thirty and we'll just allow things to drift. Now no more of these questions,” he said, putting twenty ten-dollar bills into my hand.

“Why, I can't take this. I haven't done an honest day's work. Right here in the Nazarene manual,” I continued, removing my trusty little booklet from a pocket. “Allow me to quote from our beloved Bishop Nancy Spellman: ‘One must sweat one's balls off to be a
head
in SAM's.'”

But Cipher X had crossed to the other side of the room and was now kneeling before the big black hoopla hoop which hung from the wall by a nail. Not wishing to interrupt the man's meditations, I went out of the building and walked toward Connecticut Avenue.

I came upon a room-for-rent sign displayed in the window of a tenement building. I rang the super's bell. A nattily dressed bearded man wearing a fez opened the door. It was my friend Elijah Raven, the heretic Nazarene apprentice.

“Bukka Doopeyduk, you ol son of a gun. What are you doing here?”

“Elijah, my good man,” I answered his greeting as we warmly embraced. “You were saying ‘Flim Flam Alakazam' last time we saw each other. Aren't you still with the Jackal-headed Front?”

“No good, baby. It all turned out to be a plot. What a hummer that was, man. Made me real disillusioned and cynical about organizations. You see, the CIA controlled the organization through an ol geezer who was given to such eccentricities as wearing cobwebbed antlers all the time. In fact, the kat was eating pork on the side and had a Betty Grable pinup on his wall; and to make things worse, his mother, I mean the man's own mother, put the hoodoo not only on the people in the ghetto but one-third of the planet. They made themselves rich by getting the patent on a solution that would de-hoodoo people they'd put the hoodoo on. Well, just as we uncovered that the mystery man behind the organization was this joker, SAM made him ambassador to Luxembourg. Man, we got our nickel plates and were heading for the pier to ice the kat. But just as we drove up to the dock the
Queen Mary
was pulling away and the cocksucker was sticking his tongue out and laughing at us. And you should have seen the party they had. Governesses, maids, companions, manicurists, domestics and a beautiful fly black chick. Man, all kinds of o-fay kats were on their knees in their tuxedos and tall hats serenading her like in those 1930 musicals. She was decked out from head to foot in some of those chic saber-toothed fashions for aggressive living.”

“I wonder, did they take the antler polish?” I pondered out loud.

“What was that, Bukka?”

“Never mind, Elijah, you'd never believe it.”

“As I was saying, Bukka, the
Queen Mary
pulled off with this really Hanging-Gardens-of-Babylon scene taking place on the deck and this traitor that the CIA had picked was surrounded by all of these old blue gums holding ear trumpets and shaking hands with some hooting crackers in creme-colored ten-gallon hats. Man, I was really down in the dumps after that but now I've recovered. I moved down here to write plays about ‘Git It On.'”

“‘Git It On'?” I cried. “Why that's the same thing I'm preparing for. Cipher X, the white BECOMINGS king, and I are doing a thing called ‘Git It On.'”

“Cipher X,” Elijah scowled. “Man, watch that kat. Whitey is a born devil. Snakes hide in his tongue muscles.”

“O, I don't know, Elijah. Cipher seems to be pretty serious. He's in his loft all day fashioning those hoopla hoops. Why, some of them hang in the American collection at the Metropolitan. He even gave me a two-hundred-dollar advance and I haven't performed yet. Now if you'll excuse me, Elijah, I'd like to find the super so that I can inquire about the room for rent.”

“The super,” he said, breathing on his knuckles and rubbing them up and down his chest. “You're looking at the super, my man. I'm the agent in this house. You see, I collect rent for a kat named Irving Gooseman and the dwarf assistant Slickhead Fopnick he got from the Urban League. Two characters the likes of which you'll never see. Once a month they come pouring in here, all out of breath and waving a rod. A real heat. Man, those kats are always in a hurry. Then they put the money in a sack and they're gone, quick as a flash. You should see them speeding around the corner at one hundred miles an hour in that T-Model looking as if they'd seen a ghost. And the kids and dogs and people on the street are like climbing trees and leaping into the air trying to get out of their way.

“Anyway, I'm just the agent, kinda like a catalyst. Little does the Joo know that I'm secretly collecting milk bottles and rags as I prepare for ‘Git It On' right under my man's nose. See, I'm a poet down here in this artistic community, going around saying mothafuka in public by night, but by day I'm stacking milk bottles in the closet instead of taking them back to the store for the two cents deposit. That's what you might call out-maneuvering whitey.”

“There's no two-cent deposit on milk bottles these days, and they're disposable,” I said.

“There isn't? Well, that's even better because Borden's and Sealtest won't even miss them. Hey, Bukka, you're smart. Why don't you help me and the brothers work on a manual for urban guerrilla warfare?”

“I'm too busy looking for loopholes in the Nazarene manual.”

“Bukka, don't you know that HARRY SAM has body odor?”

Another one, I thought, but too weary to take up the challenge, I said, “If you don't mind, Elijah, I'm kinda tired. Would you mind showing me the room?” I followed him up the stairs.

“By the way,” he said, looking over his shoulder, “is Fannie Mae moving down here?”

“No,” I answered. “You see about the time Art Linkletter awarded a life supply of pigeons to these … I mean … you see, I became hoodooed and the Chinamen slashed Dr. Christian … just let's say we broke up, Elijah.”

“Sorry to hear that, Bukka,” he said, turning the key in the lock.

A large sink, a chest of drawers and a closet. Atop the chest was a basin of water and a towel. There were also some Hershey-bar wrappers.

“O, Bukka,” he said, picking up the wrappers, “the last tenant here was a transient who rented for two days. She was a former movie star and the chick was so tired that she slept the entire time. That'll be ten bucks a week, Bukka. Pay promptly on Friday.”

“It's a deal,” I said, untying my bag on the top of the chest.

“See you later, my man,” Elijah said, closing the door of the room behind him. I placed the spittoon next to the bed, the remaining Picayunes I put in my coat pocket, washed out some shorts with the gold dust twins then went to the sink and put the elbow baking soda in a glass of water. After drinking it down I looked at the gold pocket watch: it was July 5, 1945. I fell back on the bed and got a long shot of shut-eye.

 

I spent the next day lying in bed and reading the Nazarene manual for loopholes and making notes in the margins. There were certain things about the doctrine that confused me. For example, the Nazarene apocalypse. What sort of commode should HARRY SAM be sitting upon? Should it be a pink plastic one or one made of mahogany? Should it be done in lavender with a beautiful ring of fur on the seat? I didn't even want to get into the subject of tissue; that one stumped the best scholars in the movement. What about the sanitary, safe modern breeze style? This notion would certainly get me into difficulty with the conservative wing. Some of
them
still preferred the outhouse with the half-moon window. And others were so reactionary that they fought and broke chairs on one another's heads at conventions over the issue of the squat method or as the kats on the block used to say, “wherever you be let your water run free.” I certainly couldn't use dialect, as it was called. The academicians would circulate a petition: