Ishmael Reed - Reckless Eyeballing

“Every time I run into an American at the hotel, they ask me that,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Ball said. “I didn’t mean to be intrusive—”

“She has a right to keep her business to herself,” his mother said, placing her hand gently atop Johnnie Kranshaw’s. They looked each other in the eye.

“It’s all right, Martha,” Johnnie Kranshaw finally said. “I know that many a night I’ve asked myself that question over at that tourist trap with a view. Chain smoking. If it wasn’t for your mother inviting me out here on weekends I don’t know what I’d do.” The maid entered. She came and picked up the soup bowls and placed them on a tray. Martha was glaring at her. The maid’s hands were trembling. Johnnie Kranshaw continued: “They should put a skull and crossbones label on the elixir bottle of success in the United States. It’s thrilling, all right. The interviews, being recognized on the street, having credit cards, meeting people you’ve seen in People magazine, the special treatment at the hotels, favors piling up in your mailbox and people asking you to endorse things. Success in the United States is like the potent rum you have down here, makes you want to do the Soca all night. It gives your soul a gorgeous feeling, but the next morning you have a hangover.”

The three of them laughed. Like Tremonisha Smarts’ plays, her plays were grim, even though the fellas called her a clown. He remembered the cruel things that he and the fellas had said about her. “I should have known when [she mentioned the name of the leading feminist critic] called me ‘seductive’ and ‘ravishing’ something must have been up. I should have heeded the warning signs. You know, in the original version of my play No Good Man , the man and wife get back together at the end. Becky changed the play so that it had the wife running off with another woman.” Ian cleared his throat. He began to have a coughing spasm. “Anything wrong, son?” his mother asked. “No,” he said.

“I went along with the program. I didn’t care what black men and women were saying about me. Why should I? They hardly attended the theaters where my plays were shown, but they always had plenty of opinions.” When she said black men she looked at Ian. He looked down at the plate. It was a dish from Guadaloupe, some sort of fish with curry. Ian was beginning to miss the States. He could do with a hamburger along about now. They had a Wendy’s and a Burger King in town. They were informal embassies where the youth went to practice their American styles. They wore jeans and played Prince and George Clinton on their radios. McDonald’s now occupied a fortress building that had been used by the Mother Country during wars waged by Europeans over the spoils of New Oyo.

He continued to listen to Johnnie Kranshaw’s narrative. She had a wholesome figure, he could tell, and for fifty-two years of age she still had all the stuff in the right places. He’d never made it with anybody over fifty, but the fellows say that after making it with a fifty-year-old you don’t want none of these young women who have the devil with a red mouth where their pussies should be. He wondered how it would be if he was holding her titties and giving it to her from behind, maintaining his pleasure by concentrating on something dull. He wondered how it would be to give her what the Germans call a durchficken . He put it out of his mind. Besides, the only lover she seemed to be fucking was the Caribbean sun.

“One day I was having lunch with Becky at the Four Seasons, and during the course of our conversation I asked her to see if she could get a friend of mine’s book published. The book was about natural childbirth and the black community, and do you know what she said?” His mother and Ian stopped eating. They definitely were interested in what Johnnie Kranshaw was going to say.

“Boy, did that bitch get hot. She turned red as a beet, and started talking so loud some of the other people in the restaurant started looking our way. She said that neither she nor her friends in publishing would have anything to do with a book whose subject matter was even remotely connected to the penis.

“She said that the penis had been used as a weapon against all women for thousands of years and that there would be no peace in the world as long as men were not disarmed of their penises.” The fellas were right about Becky, Ian thought.

“What did you say?” Martha asked. Johnnie Kranshaw closed her eyes and transmitted her answer to Becky. “I turned to the bitch, cool as you can be, and I said, ‘Heifer, you wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for some man’s thing.’”

“Well, what did she do?” Martha asked.

“She ran out of the restaurant. Well, two days went by and I was worried about her, I mean she used to call me every day. So I called the office and they told me that she had left instructions that I never call her at home again. Two weeks later, my photo was supposed to appear on the cover of MaMa , you know, the big feminist magazine. They had Tremonisha’s picture on there and said that just as surely as Eddie Murphy had replaced Richard Pryor, Tremonisha would take my place. They took back all of the praise they’d heaped upon No Good Man , and next thing I know, nobody in New York was doing my work. And Becky had said that my play was the most important play of the 1980s, but I just picked up her biography, Pilgrim’s Daughter , and I’m not even in the index. I read about this package that a travel agency had for Caribbean travel and came down here for two weeks. I stayed. And thanks to your mother and her friends, I’ve met some people who respect me for what I am.” She burst into tears. Martha Ball rose, went over to her and comforted her. Ball was embarrassed. He thought of all the pressure her play No Good Man had put on the fellas.

“What’s wrong with American women,” Martha said. “One of the students from Mother Country University who comes to visit me said that she went to some women’s conference in Copenhagen and there were these women from all over the world. They were talking about poverty and birth control and infant mortality. She said that all the American women wanted to talk about was sex. And I read in one of the Miami papers that we get down here that Ann Landers conducted a poll of American women and found that over seventy percent said they didn’t like to get fucked, oh, excuse my French,” Martha Ball said.

“Penetration,” Johnnie Kranshaw said. “They said that they are opposed to penetration. They want to be cuddled. And hugged. Charlene Hatcher Polite was right. They ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of brat women. They’re the most privileged women on earth, but all they do is complain.”

“Maybe that’s why the American man is always prowling the world with his warships. He can’t find no sexual satisfaction at home so he uses these military exercises as a cover for finding exotic women, women that will give him the pleasure he don’t get at home. They been leaving those Anglo women since the Crusades, going over into the Arabian countries, raping women. Trying to find women who won’t give them none of that ‘Dear, I have a headache tonight.’ Look at all the different kinds of babies that the Caucasian man has left all over the world. Ian, how do you get along with American women?” his mother asked.

“Oh,” Ian said, nervously, “I don’t have time to go on dates. I’m too busy trying to…well…you know, go for it.” His mother frowned.

“He means, he wants to be a success,” Johnnie Kranshaw explained.

“He speaks so much of that American language that he’s forgotten the Mother Tongue. Wears his hat at the dinner table.”