Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

I hadn’t even got my bearings yet and the old van is already rocking along at about eighty and all this neat mountain scenery is flying by in a blur and the tape deck is blasting Bodo B Street’s No Mo Hoes 4 Bo, this gangsta-rap song that was pretty popular then at least with black kids I think it was. I’m thinking for a Christian this guy really wails, maybe he’s not even a white guy so I turn and take a good look at him for the first time and it only takes a second for me to recognize him. He’s white all right. All I can say is, Fuck.

He grins over at me and goes, Hiya, kid! Hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya! Remember me?

Yeah, man. I remember you.

It’s the pockmarked porn dude from the mall, Buster Brown. He’s got both hands clamped onto the wheel and his foot mashed flat to the floor and the van’s flying across Keene like a stealth bomber on a search-and-destroy mission. We’re like swooping under the radar and moving too fast for groundfire. I look out the window and it’s way too far to the ground so I’m definitely going to get busted up on the trees and rocks if I open the door and jump and we’re like slipping up on the sound barrier, flying too fast and too low for me to push the eject button without breaking every goddam bone in my body from the force of the ejection so I say the hell with it, man, just go limp and let fate take care of things.

So how’re they hangin’, Buster? I say to him.

Oh! He laughed. High and dry, my boy. High and dry.

Yeah? Where’s Froggy? Your protégé. She still with you?

Ah, yes, La Froggella. The dear old dear-old. Right behind you, lad, he said and hooked his thumb toward the rear of the van. I turned and searched around the junk in back, boxes and suitcases and concert posters and a mattress and so on and finally found her curled up in a corner sleeping it looked like with a Walkman on and her thumb in her mouth like a baby. She was barefoot and had the same old red dress on as before and she didn’t look any too healthy either. Worse than before.

She taking a nap? I asked him.

Yes. Napping. He smiled and then he asked me where I was headed.

I figured I’d just say the opposite of wherever I thought he was headed so I said north, to Plattsburgh even though that was the opposite direction of where I wanted to go.

Not too smart as it turned out. Buster is going to Plattsburgh too, he says, right into town to a bar called Chi-Boom’s, had I ever heard of it?

Yeah, I say but he doesn’t even hear me, he’s on one of his speed raps or maybe it’s coke except I don’t think he’s got the money for coke. He rips along at about the same speed as he’s driving, yakking about this and that like he’s trying to sell me something only I can’t figure out what it is unless it’s himself. He’s going to meet up at Chi-Boom’s with this band he manages and pay them off and after one more concert dismiss them. He’s gotten back into show business, he says. Only now he’s on the business side instead of the performing side and while the money is much better the responsibilities are also greater, especially since musicians today are not professional in the old-fashioned sense of the word and cannot be relied upon, they have to be treated like children. Especially the niggers, he says which surprised me to hear him dissing black people since he’d been playing the Bodo B Street tape like he couldn’t get enough of it and I’d noticed that there was all kinds of badass gangsta-rap tapes scattered all over the front seat of the van and on the floor in back.

But Buster Brown is a man of contrasts I guess, a guy who at first glance seems to be taking care of a child that he later turns out to be doping for his porn movies, a guy who wants to help kids who’re homeless and all that but also he wants to suck and fuck them too, a Christian in a Christian van who turns out to be a has-been actor with an English accent looking for kids to be protégés and turns out to be a white guy who likes gangsta rap and manages a band and calls them niggers who turns out to be a doper on speed or coke or maybe crack and turns out to be taking care of a poor lost little homeless girl, and so on in a vicious circle like that. Buster Brown was possibly the weirdest dude I’d ever met and I was pretty sure he was capable of almost anything even cold-blooded murder of a teenaged kid so I treated him with the extreme caution and humor that he deserved.

Also I was once again thinking about saving Froggy but this time the idea of substituting myself for her did not occur to me I’m proud to say, as a sign of how much I’d changed in the last few months, since Chappie had become the Bone.

So what’s with the church van? I asked him. You into Jesus and all that now? You finally seen the light, man?

He laughed. The light! Ah yes, I’ve seen the light all right, my witty little friend. You’d be amazed how useful an actor’s skills can be in this vast and wonderfully religious country of ours. A man who gives every appearance of being a man of religion, that is, a man such as myself, can always find shelter and sustenance in America. To become known as a man of religion all you need, my boy, besides a certain verbal dexterity and the usual appearances of sincerity, is a sign. Look for a sign! he said and he laughed like crazy. It’s your only required prop. The rest, lad, is pure acting. But don’t look for the sort of sign those we-three-kings-of-Orient-are happened to see one night arise in the eastern heavens. Or the sort of sign seen by the two Marys when they went to the tomb and found it empty. No, rather you must seek the more mundane sort of sign, the sort you saw painted on the side of my van, the sign of the Church of the Disadvantaged Saints, a sign which having been writ moves swiftly on.

Yeah, I said. How come disadvantaged saints? You mean like crippled?

Hardly crippled but, yes, disadvantaged indeed, for they are the saints who are not yet known to the world at large. They are known, let us say, only to one another.

And of course to the Lord above. Him too. My sign is thus a sign of recognition, a fraternal flag, a secret handshake and a greeting, and wherever I go others like me come forward and offer me shelter and, as I said, sustenance, or as in the case at hand I am able to come forward myself and offer shelter and sustenance to others even less fortunate than I. Which is basically how I’ve been able to get myself started booking musical acts here in the north-country, he said suddenly switching voices and turning into the band manager and booking agent who’d put together this huge rap concert, at least he said it was huge with four or five downstate rap bands none of which I’d ever heard of but that didn’t mean much since I’m not really into rap anyhow, even the Beastie Boys who’re white and pretty good.

The concert’d been booked by the student council or something at the Plattsburgh branch of SUNY which is the state university of New York. Buster handed me this printed brochure that said Get Assassinated at the Soul Assassination Concert and promised to have all these bands appearing at the SUNY field house like House of Pain and the Stupid Club and so on. I was impressed. In spite of everything I knew about him Buster was definitely cool.

He then said he remembered I owed him some money which was true, twenty bucks and I didn’t deny it or anything but I did say he could forget about any fucking or sucking and no screen test either. I’m like a free agent now, I said. You understand what I’m saying, man?

Not to worry, mio taro. Not to worry. He was on his way to meet one of the bands called Hooliganz who were from Troy and they’d just cut a record and everything and he was supposed to take them to the motel where they were staying for the concert. It was a little too complicated to follow especially the way Buster explained it due to his being high although I probably wouldn’t have understood even if he wasn’t. Anyhow he owed this money to the Hooliganz from some other concert they’d played down in Schenectady and unless he paid it to them they wouldn’t do the Soul Assassination concert so now because he’d already spent the money on expenses he’d been forced to take up a special collection from the Brethren of the Disadvantaged Saints and he was hoping I’d be able to contribute my twenty bucks to the pot since I owed it to him anyhow.