Ishmael Reed - Reckless Eyeballing

“Towers Bradshaw, my husband,” she said.

“The producer of Wrong-Headed Man ?”

“Yeah,” she said, sighing. “Only for him it’s not just a movie. It has become a way of life. The Jews have their book, the Germans have their cathedral at Köln, the Egyptians their sphinx, he has his Wrong-Headed Man .” She was smart. He now liked that in women. Tremonisha had really changed him. He turned to the magazine inside where the story began. It showed another photo of him. She was standing behind him, of course. They were standing in front of a twenty-five-room Bel Air mansion, and five or six big cars were in the background. Wrong-Headed Man was getting to him all right. His eyes were glassy and he had about five days’ growth on his chin. He appeared as though he hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in some time.

“The picture was taken on the day that I decided to leave him.” In the photo she looked as though she’d already left. “He’d been up for a week reading Wrong-Headed Man . He’d wake me in the middle of the night, he’d be sweating and panting and he’d want me to read some lurid and sick passage from the book. During the session with the photographer he went into one of those crazy fits, you know, kind of like Jerry Lewis, and they had to call his mother to calm him down.” He looked over at the basket on the kitchen table. It held what looked like French rolls. He walked over to the table, and yawned again. He hadn’t bothered to put on a shirt. He wore only a pair of jeans and sneakers. No socks, and no underpants. She stared at him for a moment. “I like your body,” she said. “How do you keep in such good shape?”

“I used to play soccer back home. I keep in shape over at the Y. I swim.” He sat down to a plate of different kinds of cold cuts, some preserves, cheese, and coffee. There was something curled up on the plate. He didn’t like its looks.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Schmalz.” It looked disgusting.

“This is a German breakfast, kind of like the kind we have back at home in Freiburg,” she said. So she was German. He wondered why she kept saying what sounded like kommen, bitte, kommen, bitte , all night long. She told him that she was from Freiburg, a university town, and that in her twenties she went to Berlin, where she hung out with filmmakers in Kreuzburg, the Turkish section. She’d met Wrong-Head’s producer at the Munich Film Festival where he’d come to be honored for his first film, Little Green Men . She came to the States with him. They were married. Since she left him she’d been getting small parts in the New York theater. Before that she’d appeared in her husband’s films. She was always getting mutilated or decapitated. In one, she was dismembered by a chainsaw.

“I still don’t know what he saw in the film. It was so unlike him to take on a project like that.” He did science fiction plots that were so embellished with special effects that you forgot the weak story lines and the bad acting. “I mean, I agreed with the main character’s point of view, I think, but I thought that some of the situations were, well, morbid. She doesn’t seem to offer any alternative to fucking men, and that lesbian business seemed to be really a tease. But, of course, I’m white.” She was dark and Mediterranean looking, probably from Bavaria, he thought. A G.I. had told him that he’d seen Italians with black faces and kinky hair in Frankfurt, and in the German south the people looked like mulattoes.

“What do you think of Wrong-Headed Man ?” she asked.

“In my opinion, a woman who puts urine and spit into her guests’ drinks deserves what happens to her.” They laughed.

“Do you want some more coffee?” She started for the counter where the sterling silver coffeemaker — a gift from his mom — stood. When she came by him he pulled her to him. She sat on his lap. She was wearing a thin dress and he could feel her in his lap. She kissed him for a long time. He put his hand inside her dress and felt her ass. She pulled away and headed toward the counter for the coffee.

“He and Tremonisha have had a falling out, I hear,” she said.

“First she dragged this actress in to play the missionary who had no acting ability at all, but Tremonisha insisted. She got the role over all of the other talented black actresses.” He looked at the schmalz. He decided that he wasn’t going to have any of it. He could see the stuff lying all fat and sluggish in his arteries.

“Do you know the actress?” she asked. No, he didn’t know her, but the fellas had said that to compare her with Butterfly McQueen would be an insult to Ms. McQueen.

“Then he threw out her script.”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” he said.

“She threatened him with a lawsuit.”

“What did he do?” She came back and set the coffee next to his plate. She walked back to her chair at the other end of the small table. She sat down and cut a roll in two and spread some jam on one half. He looked up at his poster of Bugs Bunny, his favorite cartoon character.

“He owned the film and so he cut off all contact with her. He forgot that Tremonisha even wrote it. Kept calling it his play. His film. He’s been working on it for a year now. He’ll never finish it.” The magazine called the film his greatest challenge. “I hear that when he’s not working on it he dresses up in that adventurer’s suit and makes believe that he’s Joe Beowulf. He spends the day tooting up his nose and playing computer games,” she said. Joe Beowulf was a swashbuckling white man that he’d created. He went about the world slapping women left and right and bringing Third World people to their knees. He remembered the ad carried in the newspapers. It showed Joe Beowulf in a camouflage suit and a machine gun in hand. Lurking in the background were the illustrator’s version of black muggers. The illustrator thought that blacks still wore Afros. “Fighting the Grendels of this World,” said the copy that accompanied the photo.

“Guy sounds like he has a lot of problems. Why did you marry him?”

She paused, and shifted her weight before saying, “Guilty, I guess.”

“Let’s go down to McDonald’s,” he said.

“But you just—”

“Yeah. I like your German breakfast, but I lost a lot of protein last night, I need some food.”

“Let me get my coat.” She went into the bedroom. He finished his cup of coffee. German coffee tasted like Maxwell House. He turned to the article again. The one about the filming of Wrong-Headed Man . The magazine said that the film had something to do with “incest, sexual brutality, and Sapphic love.” He looked up the word, Sapphic. The dictionary said that it had something to do with dykes.

After breakfast, he went back to his apartment to read the newspaper. He was still a little woozy from the gin and exhausted from fucking all night.

The morning’s headline hit him in the face like Boom Boom Mancini. “FLOWER PHANTOM SLAIN.” He scanned the column, trying to focus upon the important details. A man identified as Randy Shank was slain a few blocks from the apartment of Becky French, after the suspect attempted to enter her apartment from a fire escape, located next to her window. Randy Shank was a black playwright who had achieved some notoriety in the 1960s. Detective Lawrence O’Reedy pursued the man through the East Village and foiled his attempt to make good on his threat to “get” Becky French for her support of Tremonisha Smarts’ stand on castration for perpetrators of rape. Ms. Smarts, whose play Wrong-Headed Man received international recognition, was Shank’s first victim. At the time, the suspect told Ms. Smarts that he was patterning his actions after those of the French Resistance who shaved the heads of women who collaborated with the Nazis. Experts claimed that Mr. Shank, who became known as the Flower Phantom for his bizarre habit of leaving a chrysanthemum with his victims, was suffering from a paranoid fantasy and that instead of being the political hero he desired to be was actually a hair fetishist. This was shocking to Ball. He had to regain his composure. The phone rang. It was Becky French. He asked her was she all right. She said her only regret was that she’d used a.22 instead of a.44. She said that if she’d used a.44 they’d still be cleaning up his intestines. Ball cleared his throat.