Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

And I can understand that. OJ will go on and never kill again and he’ll be a warm and loving father to his kids, and I can’t help but think of my own father. He loved OJ. Of course he did. OJ was what my father knew his kids could become. You go out and be excellent. You’re worthy of that. And people will come to love you. Black people and white people and brown people and yellow people and red people. You stop along the way and be nice to the folks who love you. Sign those autographs. Kiss those women. Bring us together in the stands, all of America, to cheer what a boy can do who’s got a lot to overcome but he did it. This is the land of opportunity.

And my father died before that dark and star-crossed night in June of 1994 in Los Angeles. But I know he would have continued to believe in OJ like so many others. And he never would have spoken of it to me, since he knew who I was and how I saw things, and he loved me for it, though he stopped being able to agree with me about much of anything. We would’ve just never spoken of it, like for years we never spoke anymore of the Melting Pot, though he did continue to lecture me now and then, a few sentences at a time, on the telephone.

And I will never be able to tell him I’m sorry. But I am. I’m sorry, Daddy, for thinking you were, for all your life, a poor deceived old Negro, but I do think that, and I don’t like that in me, and I know I’d never be what I am today, free to think these thoughts, free to be excellent, if it wasn’t for you believing in those lies in the first place. That irony is not lost on me. And I’m grateful to you, Daddy. I’m grateful and sorry as shit.

I keep my Hudson Smith in his dream state as I lead him back to his bed. It strikes me that after observing his spiritedness at the Welcome-to-the-Spaceship party, I had hoped Hudson’s voice would be, even issuing from his deep and secret place, a voice of unalloyed self-confidence, exempt from the tyranny of yearning. But I was wrong.

I guide Hudson into his cubicle and he readily lies down and for the sake of his lost father I tuck him in, pressing the covers up under his chin, and his head lolls away and I think that he will sleep. Then suddenly his hand is on my arm. I gasp.

But he is a gentle man, I have come to realize. He holds my arm with something like tenderness and he looks up at me, his eyelids drooping toward sleep, and he says, “Thank you.”

I pat his hand and it lets go of me and retreats under the covers and he is asleep. I stand and look at him for a moment. I try to think of the boldest, most confident voice in our memory banks.

I rush back to our great panel of babble. Something in here must have meaning for me. Somewhere there must be a resolution. The categories before me are meaningless: age, gender, race. The voices all elude their categories. And they all alarm me.

Here. A voice I remember as bold. Ecdysiast. Call me an ecdysiast and nothing else or I’ll sock you in the chops. Her voice is spilling into the room on its own, even before I can make my own voice one with hers. But that is not strictly true. For she is dead and she is gone and it is my hand that passes over this panel, that lets her captured sounds return. She has no independent will anymore. But I ignore this hard fact for the moment. Instead, I whisper to her, aloud, as if she is in the room, “Wait for me, Scarlet.” I don’t let nobody ever call me a stripper. I don’t care if that comes across as hoity-toity. I am Scarlet. Like my name. I’ve got certain principles and if the pock-faced gropy-handed tiny-dicked club owners don’t like it then they can lump it. It’s Scarlet Moscowitz. Not Scarlet LaRue. Not Scarlet Belle. Not Scarlet O’Dare. Not anything made up at all. Though the Scarlet part is. That’s true enough. But that’s okay. That’s a given name anyway and I got as much right to give it as anybody else. More right. But I’m Moscowitz. That’s it. That’s from my daddy and from his daddy before him and nobody’s gonna fuck with it. And if I choose to take off my clothes before a room full of whoever wants to see it — even if they’re most of them drunks and no-goods — then you have to understand what it is exactly that I’m doing. I’m not stripping. I’m molting. That’s what ecdysiast means. You can look it up. And now, presenting for your extreme pleasure for one night only, the beautiful ecdysiastical spectacle of Scarlet Moscowitz. And I am dressed in a shimmering red dress up to my throat and down to my toes and it’s the most beautiful dress you’ve ever seen, twenty thousand scarlet spangles — my given name cried out loud by a great crowd twenty thousand strong all hollering at once. But even so, this isn’t really me. Not the final me. If I just stayed like this, in this beautiful dress, there’d be trouble. Those men out there would tear the place apart with rage and disappointment. Because the dress of twenty thousand red spangles is like the caterpillar skin. It’s just a stage. The real me is what they want. And that’s what I give them. I molt. The old skin, the lesser skin, it just falls away and there I am, the real me, and they’re happy, they’re whooping in pleasure. As beautiful as that dress was, it isn’t as beautiful as this. I’m the butterfly now. I stand before them in my naked flesh, Miss Scarlet Moscowitz, and they might be drunks and they might be no-goods but they can see that I’m beautiful.

And I wipe her voice away. Because I hear at last what I’d never heard in this self-confident voice before. When Scarlet spoke to me, a young spaceman newly arrived above this world, and she was a woman old beyond her years and sick nearly to death, she said no more about her father than to explain why she kept her family name. But I realize now that on Burlesque stages across America, from the Day That Will Live in Infamy to the Day of Sputnik, my Scarlet Moscowitz stood naked, time and time again, before her father. Her drunken no-good father who never saw for a moment the beauty of his daughter who loved him, loved him faithfully, and who held his name close to her and who yearned for him to see her as these others saw her. As whoopingly beautiful.

Dance for me, Scarlet. Dance for your spaceman father. I will be all the things for you that he was not. I can look upon your body — ample as it is, concisely fingered and toed as it is — and I know I will see it as beautiful.

But Scarlet’s body is dust and bones now.

This was not the voice I needed to hear.

I crack my knuckles. But this time the gesture does not soothe me. It only thickens my sadness. Whiplash Willie is dead, too, of course. Willie with his own yearnings, his own keenly felt failures. I myself yearn for a Life from this planet to sit before me and speak its inner words and be, if not happy, then at least content, and if not content, then at least drably unconsidered and bland. One might expect such lives in abundance down there, growing like wheat. But I have found not even one. Not in all the days and nights and days and nights that have passed below me since I first came here. Not one. Not one, even in all these voices that awaited me in our machinery, collected by others long before I arrived. Not one. And I feel, even now, even for the ones who are dead, I feel. What? I feel what? I feel.

That bit of rhetorical irresolution is the fullest expression I am capable of. Like another trill of words that moves in me at certain moments: I am. I am. I feel. I wish to say to each life that sits before me and has just finished speaking, “Arise, and be not afraid.”

I arise now, and I am sore afraid. I feel. I am.

No one has spoken to me yet of LUCK, of that grand golden purpose of the late-night bus trip from the Great State of Texas to the State of Louisiana where they Let the Good Times Roll. But, of course, I have only spoken to three of the travelers so far, and one of those was the driver of the bus. I should put aside the voices from the past and listen anew. I desperately need new words, new lives spoken through my voice. There is so much I still do not understand, and I am keenly aware of the shortness of time. Once again I do not stop to calculate exactly how much. But I know to fear that I will not even have enough time to speak with everyone now sleeping on my ship. I should speak to another of my visitors right now.