Ishmael Reed: The Free-Lance Pallbearers

“Mr. Doopeyduk,” Hangup said, “surely you’re putting our audience on. Why, I never saw a nun raping a hun in Bronxville. Are you sure you’re not fantasizing?”

“Man, you can put your psychic elbows and shoulders in the way and block like a (beep) if you want to — but I don’t think it’s funny. I mean, if you keep on talking about Bronxville and places that don’t even exist, the place will be turned out. Pure and simple. Every damned cobweb will be ripped to shreds.”

“Mr. Doopeyduk,” the Hangup said, “we’ve had some weird customers up here on the show. Richard Nixon was on once discussing federal dog-napping legislation and so was a man who thought he had visited Mars. But you, Mr. Doopeyduk, by far are the most bizarre.”

“I don’t have time for tricks. I’ve spent the whole week studying watercloset seat covers and I’d just as soon go back to my work if you don’t mind. I think that I’ll hat up anyway because you don’t seem to be willing to run it down front.”

I walked out of the studio as a commercial for Radio Free Europe was quickly put on. Two minutes of barbed wire and Spike Jones playing “Ave Maria.” I was shook from the interview. I mean, didn’t this kat know that he’s living in a freak? If he doesn’t, somebody ought to pull his coat.

The next evening I ran up the stairs, my tuxedo draped over my arm. Once inside the room, I washed, shaved, dressed, put fresh Band-Aids on the craggy bruises which covered my face, applied iodine to swollen areas of my neck and wrists. I tried to do something for the lopsided nose and small slit that ran above my right eyelid.

A rap at the door was followed by Elijah’s voice. “Hey, man, there’s SOMETHING down here who wants to see you, looks like a strange-looking beast.”

It must be one of HARRY SAM’s drivers, I thought.

“Tell him I’ll be right down, Elijah.”

A man was standing at the bottom of the stairs. At least I took him to be a man because he wore a derby and smoked a black cigar; otherwise he was so short, he could have been a child. He wore a white smock, and bow tie of polka dots and butterflies.

“You Bukka Doopeyduk?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered him. “You must be one of HARRY SAM’s assistants?”

“That’s me,” the little man said. “We have to join the others down at the boat, what’s locked up at the pier.”

We went out of the house and climbed into an old Pontiac. I carried the black attaché case crammed full of notes on my knee. “Do you mind if I open the window?” I said to the derby, barely showing above the front seat of the car. I was choking on the smoke issuing from the cigar, in thick black bunches.

“Go ahead,” the little man said, steering the car, its sirens screaming terror at the stricken passers-by.

“Gee,” I said, leaning forward and gripping my knees, “I can’t wait until I get there and engage those bishops in a discussion of the Nazarene apocalypse.”

The man slammed on his brakes, almost sending me flying over the seat of the car. “Look. If you don’t mind, I would appreciate it if you cut out the yap. I don’t go for all the yakkity-yak while drivin’ the customers up to SAM’s. Unnerstand? I mean, I’m not innerstead in your ’pinions so if you want to go shooting off your trap, then swim the Black Bay to the party,” the little man fumed.

“I get the message,” I answered, leaning back into the cushions of the seat. Peppery little fellow, I thought, as we drove the rest of the way in silence.

We reached the pier where the plumbers’ battleships had been decorated for the occasion. We climbed out of the car and jaunted up the ramp to the ship. There was a spattering of applause as some of my fans recognized me.

My escort disappeared into the shadows, leaving me inside the stateroom with some of the guests — which included most of the nothing elements: Nazarene apprentices, Nazarene Bishops, judges and their manicurists, mechanical drawers, and Stephen Wolinski, the mayor of Buffalo, who had left the rest of his party atop the Empire State Building while he accepted an invitation to meet the Chief of State. The guests were doing a dance called the stomp which involved smashing your foot or kinda lifting it and merely stompin’.

In his hand, the mayor held a gift-wrapped kabalsa. Some of the others moved around the edges of the room in their own thing: hands in pockets and doing a mean blasé stomp.

The guests were being entertained by a group of rock-and-roll Nazarene apprentices from the Lower East Side who were playing recorders, lutes, drums, tambourines and electric guitars. They had taken the poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau — all white men with three names, dead many years-and set them to music.

Songs such as “Look at Dat Waterfowl Bending Its Skinny Neck in da Crick Ovah Dere,” “Ain’t Nature Grand?” or “Your Cock Was Nevah So Good but When I Laid Ya in the Calabash Field” rang out with authority over the Black Bay.

I leaned over the rail; NOTHING slipping out of sight before me as the boat picked up anchor and began its arduous push toward the island. It felt as if we were moving above the smooth slime of the Black Bay. I could see the old men trudging homeward after a day of clipping out articles from the old Harper’s Brothers magazine led by a spright-stepping octogenarian beating a bass drum.

In Soulsville the busted microphones resounded with the oratory of live ghosts protesting the mystery of the missing children.

Finally, midway through our journey the public-address system announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, the infamous Black Bay.” Huge yellow lights from the battleship aimed their beams on the nefarious waters. As far as the eye could see, long serpentine tentacles oscillated in the bay and what appeared to be white arms reached from beneath its surface. The silhouettes of peculiar-shaped animals leaped into the air-sometimes many feet high. It was a staggering sight.

People poured from the stateroom, eager to get a better view. Two well-tailored men stood next to me. The men removed field glasses from cases and looked in fascination upon the waters-writhing with odd life. They spoke. “I’ve always had a strange attraction to it, Waldo,” the first man said. “It’s been the subject of a ten-thousand-page report by the International Geophysical Expedition and the Royal Academy of Sciences. Fleets of oceanographers, a special group called the Black Bay Authorities, have examined it.”

“How did it get thataway, Matthew?” responded the other man. (Both of whom looked like the grim sabled brothers on the famous cough-drop box.)

“It’s become a veritable Madagascar of the sea, yielding animals not to be found anywhere else in the world. It seems that in the bad old days the sea was saturated with chemicals coming from the rows of cereal factories that lined the banks. There was no cause for alarm until one day a man was peacefully fishing when a bird rose from the waters and carried away his head in its beak. When the British Museum caught the bird-burning its wings with napalm from a supersonic jet-they dissected it and found it to be full of old Manhattan telephone numbers and skulls. An investigation was immediately launched by Congress. You remember the celebrated bird hearings of the fifties. It was decided that it was merely a crowd delusion. The chairman-a dwarf named Eberett Whimplewopper-did such a fine job that he gained a judgeship in HARRY SAM.

“Science had the last say, however. Science took samples from the bay and put them under microscopes. We had decided that crowd delusions were for the more backward unsophisticated part of the world and that we as hardheaded empiricists could never indulge anything that was not amenable to sensory investigation. Since SAM went up there about thirty years ago and took up residence in the er … er … er … way station, the material that flushes into the bay from those huge lips has stirred even stranger forms of life. That sickness he has must be HORRIBLE. Now it’s only safe to cross the thing in a battleship.”