Mat Johnson - Drop

‘I love you, black man, just like God does. And it’s obvious you suffering like a sinner. The question is, are you gonna change your ways before you plummet down to hell?’

I started giggling, because wasn’t it a bit late for that?

The next morning I came in early to trade seats with Natalie so I didn’t have to deal with Lynol any more. Clive came in right after I did. We were the only ones in our row. He sat down next to me. His fingernails were clean again, well trimmed, but his clothes were the same ones he’d worn the day before.

‘You see, don’t you?’ Clive asked me.

‘No.’

‘Boy, I see you looking. The clothes. They’re the same ones I wore yesterday, right?’ Clive said smiling.

‘They are?’

‘Yup,’ he confirmed. I smiled and nodded my approval.

‘You want to know why?’ Because you sold the rest of your wardrobe to pack your pipe.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘You know.’

‘No.’ Yes. Because you’re on crack, and this is your new uniform.

‘Cindy,’ Clive said, lowering his tone but enunciating every syllable and looking over in her direction of the room, as if she could see his lips moving through the cubicle walls.

‘You did that?’

‘All night, brother,’ Clive laughed. ‘That was me.’

‘Damn.’

‘Let me tell you, that’s a lot of woman too. I climbed that mountain.’ Clive went to slap my hand and I let him even though I thought he was going to get Cindy juices on me. Between my eyes and his smiling image I saw a picture of Cindy’s inhumanely large pecan butt, naked and aimed towards the moon. Clive would be tense and gritting, banging away from behind like a chimp in a nature film as she snacked on pork rinds and watched Martin on the black-and-white on the other side of the cluttered room. Children would be playing too loud in the hall and Cindy would yell at them to calm down or she would kill them, and Clive wouldn’t notice any of it; his only concern in the world would be keeping his rhythm and controlling his load.

Cindy walked by a few minutes later, and when she passed she was giving an honest smile. For that moment I knew I could love her, that I could lay naked on a bed cupped in her arms, listening to her hum. She was wearing a new blouse today, a blue one; after three months I knew her whole wardrobe. Next to me Clive smiled big again and held up a plastic container of food the size of a shoebox.

‘And that bitch can cook, too,’ he added.

Philly.

‘Come on, we’ll go down the Art Museum. It’s Sunday; it’s free till one.’

Nope.

‘Then we’ll swing down to Penn’s Landing. They’re having music today, this afternoon.’

I shrugged that away from me.

‘Then what? It’s a pretty day and you’re in a rut. You should really get out of the house.’

Why the hell should I do some dumb shit like that? America is TV and I’m sitting right in front of the damn thing already. Nothing exists that isn’t held within its cathode eye. Like Philly could offer anything to distract from its brilliance. Channel to channel click-clicking.

‘Aren’t you going to stop on anything?’ Why stop — 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 — when the next image might be better and yet no sight is worth settling on? When the chance to forget your self, your guilt, your pain, lies just one button away?

‘Al, you know what we need on TV?’

‘What?’ she asked me.

‘More obese black matriarchs.’

‘Chris, why don’t you go for a walk?’

‘You just never see them on TV, do you? I mean, in real life we’re surrounded by them, these rotund sassy black mamas who break everything down to a wisecrack and a baked-potato hand on a turkey-loaf hip. How come there aren’t any of them on TV? They should have a sitcom with one. That’s a novel idea — they should have a sitcom centered around a loud, asexual negress, she could yell at her family every week, roll her eyes, you know how they do.’

‘Sure.’

‘Don’t laugh, it’s true — there hasn’t been a good chocolate mammy on TV since Tom and Jerry , and then they just showed her feet.’

‘Are you trying to piss me off? You know, you can go home. It’s not raining any more.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Not the woman thing. I was just telling funnies. It’s not just mammies, what about the coons? How are all the spades going to support themselves? Used to be when a brother could bug his eyes out a bit that was worth something. How about this — check this out — I got a brilliant idea: why not put a coon in a fish-out-of-water comedy? Like this: take a jigaboo and put him on a set surrounded by literate white people not hip to his negro ways. He could jump around like a confused monkey for a bit, then they could all come to some mutual understanding. How about, for example: me. I could be that coon, fair lady. That could be my new job. Fuck advertising. Maybe that’s how I’ll get out of here.’ I turned the TV off. I wanted to throw the remote against the wall, watch the black plastic crack and see the batteries roll across the floor. It wasn’t my remote to throw, or even my wall, so I just sat there, hoping maybe Alex would wrap her arms around my neck, explain away my suffering and tell me how everything was going to turn out fine. Instead, after silence retook the room, she walked over to the window and adjusted a tear in the screen.

‘So you’ve just given up then. You’re not going to let me help,’ Alex said.

‘I wish I could tell you what to help with.’

‘You get any work done yet, Chris? Any progress on your portfolio? Any movement towards anything that’s going to get you out of this place you’re in?’

‘No. I can’t think.’

‘Well, when you going to start thinking? I talked to Saul, the guy who works for the tourist bureau. You could get on him about doing some work.’

‘Alex, I can’t.’ I can’t even explain myself. All day I think about getting out of here, and then, by the time I get off, I’m starving because I can’t afford to buy a big lunch. Then once I get the food in me, all I can do is lie down. All I’m good for is sleeping. When I get up, it’s time for work again.

This morning was to be different. Mrs Hutton was sending us out into the community to sign people up for assistance. Me and Cindy were to be the ambassadors. Cindy was chosen because she was fast and she wouldn’t take shit from anyone. I was chosen because Mrs Hutton considered my presence generally disruptive and she needed the break. ‘The only reason you ain’t been fired is ‘cause you sound like white folks on the phone’ was how Cindy put it. So we had two days going around the ghetto in a mobile unit seeing what the folks we talked to on the phone really looked like. Like we couldn’t just look around the office.

Eight A.M. was me standing in front of the electric company building with my too-light jacket on, my hands in my pants trying to steal heat from my balls. Cindy stood next to me, bobbing up and down holding herself to fight the last of the spring cold. When she pulled out her cigarettes I asked for one. She said, ‘A quarter.’ All my pockets had was three nickels and ten pennies, which I counted out in front of her.

‘Don’t you have a dime?’

‘Nope.’ I pushed my change closer to her.

‘I don’t want your dirty-ass pennies,’ Cindy said, but she gave me a cigarette anyway, taking the nickels from my palm. I sucked on that thing hard, hoping I could get cancer before noon, cut short my tour of the land I was trapped in. Stealing its opportunity to gloat.

A white motorhome with the blue company logo stretched along its sides stopped in front of the building. Inside there was a miniature office, and we seated ourselves behind the desks as it drove on. I’d never been in one before, but when I was a kid my favorite show was an adventure about a group of scientists who drove an RV around the ruins of the post-Apocalypse. It was easy to remember as we drove through the post-industrial ruins of Grays Ferry, South Philadelphia. Redbrick tract housing with small, trash-laden yards, streets lined with large American cars in need of paint or death, telephone wires that bore sneakers like strange fruit on poplar trees. Too little space for too many things. White people who didn’t look like any white people on TV or in magazines, broken teeth and hair cut jagged and crude, too-bright clothes made of materials nature never intended. White people as far from what they were supposed to be as fact from story. I’d heard about this place all the time growing up but had never been because there was no reason to go to someone else’s ghetto.