Fiction
The Nigger Knockers
The knock, knock joke, much like the negro spiritual began as a means of clandestine communication, a way for slaves to pass information to each other beneath the radar of hostile whites. For instance, the following joke, or a version of it, was often told by slaves in the upper Southern states in the late 18th and early 19th centuries: ‘Knock, knock’ ‘Who’s there?’ ‘Isaiah.’ ‘Isaiah who?’ ‘Isaiah whole lot of niggers tryna escape over the hills, boss. They thin’ you cain’t see they black asses flyin’ through the night, but you can sees they eyes.’ This craftily designed joke is packed with information, telling a runaway slave who to rendezvous with (Isaiah, a codename no doubt); the path to freedom (over the hills); how fast to travel (fly, boy, fly); when to leave (at night); even the punishment for getting caught (a seizure of the eyes). Slaves made sure to tell the jokes to their owners while their comrades were within earshot. There was a certain excitement in listening to the sweet laughter of a slaveholder, for the slave knew that his owner was chuckling at his own downfall.
—Hiram Skylark Rollicks
Signifyn’ Revolt: Black Rebellion in the Antebellum South
My brain had liquefied for the night. That’s what a day at work does. Long, short—it makes no difference. Pop the top on any weekday evening and in there you will find a slushee. That’s what work, at least my job, does to you. There I was, all zombified in that purgatory where rational thought and loopy subconscious visions mingled. A slack-jawed demon. Probably drooling. The glow of the nightly newscast projecting across my face.
There was another irritating buzz coming from the front door. I stumbled through the living room to the entrance and peered through the peephole. I saw nothing and as soon as I walked to the bathroom the buzz sounded again, long and loud like someone leaning on the button. After I was finished, I returned to the foyer and looked out the window. There was no one outside my door.
I sat on the couch and rested my clearing head on the pillow and the door buzzed again and again. I felt my nerves jangling. Racing to the door, I snatched it open and there was no one outside. Nothing.
Cute, I yelled to the open air, the trees, the birds, the houses, the grass and the curve of the horizon. Very. Very. Cute. Now run along kids.
As I shoved the door closed, I heard cackling and saw a dark boot at the edge of the entryway. The door swung open and there stood a man I hadn’t seen in several years.
E. Fresh was a nickname I had rarely heard after my first lonely semester at Alfred McCoy University on the Southside of Cross River when I would see Kin around campus, but increasingly he faded from my life until I hardly saw him at all. I kept up with his exploits through Ali who was, until recently, several states away. We had all attended District Central Senior High School. I heard Kin was back in Cross River after some years elsewhere. He gave everyone nicknames and no one liked theirs. It was good to hear mine again.
I was more than a little pissed at Kin’s entrance, but his cocky half-smile, always defused things a little bit. It said Relax, It’s all a bunch of bullshit, but it’s not; except for the times when it said, It’s all serious, but it’s really a bunch of bullshit.
It was simply impossible to stay angry with him. Though, for some reason that I can’t understand and won’t analyze, I felt the need to go through the motions.
Chief, what the hell is wrong with you coming up into my house like that? I barked across the room. Ringing the bell and hiding like a little kid. If I had a gun you would have caught one in your chest.
Relax E. Fresh. You wouldn’t shoot an old friend in the chest now would you? Man, I been here forever and you ain’t even offer me nothing to drink yet?
I watched as Kin walked from the foyer into the kitchen where he snatched a 22 ounce bottle of Crazy Ninja Malt Liquor from the refrigerator door. This didn’t bother me because the stuff tasted like piss and I only kept it in the fridge for guests, but other than my girlfriend, who didn’t drink much, I hardly ever had guests. He took a long first sip then turned to me and asked, Want one?
I shook my head and returned to the couch. He parked himself next to me and we made small talk. He told me he was nearing the end of a doctorate in Cultural Studies at Alfred McCoy University. The school was still, as he put it, full of a bunch of bourgie niggas and I told him I expected no different. He asked me when I planned to marry Janice and I was surprised that he remembered Janice, but shrugged and changed the subject and after a long silence I said what I had been thinking all along.
What’s up doc, huh? Why you disrupting my life?
Check it out E. Fresh, I remember you used to be writing a lot back in the days, poems and shit. I still have a stack of your poems in my mom’s house.
Burn ‘em.
Naw, they were good for a teenager’s work. You know, I started writing poetry in college.
Yeah? That’s when I stopped.
You were good. You probably still got it in you.
You thinking about a different dude, a younger dude. All I write these days is press releases and newsletter copy. I’m a hack.
The Society For Public Relations Professionals. That shit’s killed any life I might have had in me, man.
Well, here’s a chance to come alive. I know I came to the right dude. You always been a little weird, a dude that used to think different than everybody else, but I had faith in you even way back in high school when you used to be sitting at the lunch table trying to get ass by writing shitty love poems to that fat bird with the big head and the big you knows, he said spreading his fingers apart and stretching his arms out in front of his chest as far as they would go, palms facing inward.
Yeah, that was brilliant, right? I replied. I wish someone would have told me that poets don’t get no ass. I would have learned to play the guitar. Anyway, what you getting at?
He reached into his bag and pulled out a neatly bound stack of pages with a shimmering plastic cover.
This right here is a draft of my dissertation. It’s short, 350 pages. I feel like I nailed it though. But shit, what do I know? I’m paying a fortune for a PhD in Cultural Studies so I can’t be that smart.
I took the bound manuscript into my hands. It felt heavy. I looked at the title and fell into an amusement so deep and pure that I was cleansed when it began to subside. Nigger Knocks: A Brief Cultural History.
You got to be kidding me man, I said. This is what you wrote your dissertation on?
Yeah. See, that’s the reaction I be getting most of the time, but people don’t understand how important this childhood game (at this phrase he raised his fingers and turned them into quotation marks) has been to the development of this country. People never even stop to ask why it’s called Nigger Knocks. As kids did we ever ask? Naw, we just did it. It was fun too, right?
So why do they call it Nigger Knocks, professor?
Well, it started on plantations back in like the 1600s and shit, he said standing up and gesturing in front of me as if I were the class and he, the teacher. Slaves used to knock on the big house door and run. It was a way to steal food and weapons and shit…man, they used it for all kinds of things. While white folks, or even a house slave, was answering the front door, there’d be black folk taking bread and hog meat and shit out the back. Bet they ain’t teach you about that at Alfred McCoy University.
Naw, they didn’t. That’s actually interesting.
Look at you. You ain’t giggling now. Give it a read. It’s a quick read. At least I hope it is. If it doesn’t grab you in the first 50 pages, you don’t have to keep going. But don’t mock my shit though. Don’t take my scholarship for a joke.
He sported that mean little half-smile when he asked me not to ridicule him, so I wasn’t sure how to take him. Perhaps it was a joke. Perhaps he was serious. I just didn’t, and still don’t, know.
I wasn’t laughing though. Leafing through his manuscript, several passages caught my eye.
He took another Crazy Ninja for the road and before he left I agreed to read his book and give him comments.
Instead, I gave it to Janice to read and she returned one night telling me that she was amazed that a clown like Kin could have such insight. She mentioned it here and there, but still I let it sit for two and a half weeks, occasionally remembering it, until Kin called one day to tell me that he was coming the next night to collect his manuscript. I panicked as I’m a man of my word, but then I sat in my reading chair and in the pool of dim light that I prefer for reading, I gently turned the pages as if they were delicate parchment that could at any moment fall to pieces in my hand. I devoured it in a single sitting, reading long into the early morning hours when I should have been sleeping. I dragged my tired self to bed at 5. My alarm sounded at 7:30 a.m. and the neighbor’s dog started barking shortly after that. I raised my head from the pillow and then sank back into it, sleeping through the noise and was again late for work. Being late bothered me—really, it did—but I was less concerned than I would normally be as I was thinking more about Kin’s manuscript than about my tardiness.
I found his words sublime. He wrote the kinds of sentences that tasted good in the mouth and were easy on the throat. For so many years Nigger Knocks hadn’t even entered my thoughts and now my friend discussed it as I’d never experienced it. Kin performed magic, somehow transporting me back to my childhood days. I could feel the knocks at my knuckles and on the palms of my hands. My old neighborhood, those plain Northside streets with their identical houses and neatly-trimmed lawns, now seemed foreign and exotic. I was truly moved and changed. Kin even mentioned me, though in passing, in one of his many recollections of running through the Northside of Cross River banging on doors and windows, pressing rapidly on doorbells and escaping into the day. He perfectly described the rubber soles slapping against the black tar beneath our feet; being chased by winded and out-of-shape adults; the days when we collapsed at our rendezvous points high with dizzying laughter.
He had convinced me. Nigger Knocks changed the world and I wouldn’t want to live on a planet in which kids had never conceived of knocking on doors and racing away. Former slaves had constructed this town one Nigger Knock at a time, to paraphrase my friend. What was once unknown to me now seemed obvious. I hadn’t been just playing a childhood game. I was participating in a tradition of rebellion, the same tradition of rebellion that lead (sic) to the abolition of slavery, the weekend and the 40-hour work week (Samson 12).
When he arrived at my doorstep the next evening I was still making frantic notes which I had started writing at work and continued at home, foregoing my usual nap. I had 20 handwritten pages and I could have composed 20 more. It annoyed me that when I answered the door, Kin was hiding in the bushes. I didn’t want to play games. I wanted to discuss his brilliant work.
After he rose from the shrubbery and shook the leaves, the dirt and the twigs from his clothing, it took no longer than a moment for me to get to the heart of it all. I spoke rapidly, mixing up my words and making little sense, all in an effort to tell him how impressed I was.
Good, he said. Now we can go Nigger Knocking.
What?
It’s time to go ring some bells, knock on some windows. Doorbell Ditch as the white boys would say.
But we’re adults.
And so were many of the revolutionaries who built this town.
Come on, Kin…how old are you? 25?
26. What we look like—25 and 26-year-old men—running around Nigger Knocking?
The pursuit of freedom, he said misquoting himself, often begins with a rap on the door.
Around here? Chief we gonna get shot.
Look, I’ve made the mistake of writing this whole thing without even testing my theories. I’m on my way to becoming the typical academic. All brains, no balls. They encourage that over at McCoy, but that ain’t me. No sir. Intellectuals have got to get out there and be with the people. Nigger Knocking was one of the very first things they did to spark the Great Insurrection.
Yeah, Kin, I replied. I read the manuscript.
Kin ignored what I said and kept talking.
They knocked on the door, hid out—he crouched by the side of the chair, acting it all out—and when old Master Johnny Weaver came outside looking around, they stabbed that cracker right in the gut. The only successful slave uprising in this country—ever—started with some nigga knocking on a door and running away. Well, I guess he didn’t run away…you see what I’m getting at. We have to do what the common folks do. If the people are Nigger Knocking, I got to be Nigger Knocking, too.
Kin’s manuscript had set my brain ablaze and stirred long-dead urges. What I really wanted to do, had planned to do, was stay home and write; this despite having no clue as to what, if anything, I had to say. The uncertainty of it all gave me the excitement of a young drunk.
But for some reason, instead of staying home, I agreed to go out Nigger Knocking with Kin, probably because I admired his work and relished any way to contribute to it, even if it was a small thing such as this.
He first picked a house in a quiet part of the Southside. It was where Shit-Shit lived. Shit-Shit now called himself Stephen and had some kind of administrative job working for the mayor down in Riverhall.
Didn’t we torment this nigga enough growing up? I asked as we drove slowly by his house.
I parked my beat up old thing at the far end of his street. It shook and rocked as I cut off the engine. We began walking slowly, almost tiptoeing to his door.
Who even came up with the name Shit-Shit? Oh yeah, remember that day he wore that dirty ass sweatshirt and them dirty ass jeans looking like he crapped himself. He never lived that d—
Man, E. Fresh, be quiet. You gonna ruin the element of surprise.
I looked in the window and whispered, He in there. I see him. He watching television.
Shit-Shit had the worn expression of a zombie. Light flashed across his face in the darkened room. His lids were barely open and his expression static. Kin and I crept to the door.
You ready? he asked me. I nodded.
He pressed the bell several times while I made a fist and pounded with the meaty part of my hand.
Who is it?
Shit-Shit sounded anxious, angry. We said nothing, though we snickered.
Huh? I can’t hear you. Who is it?
Kin rang once more and I banged, banged, banged as if trying to strike right through the door.
I could hear him stirring and we both jumped from his porch at the same time. We crouched in the dirt against the side of his house. He snatched open the door, stepped outside and looked left and right, but not down. I bit my lip and shook and dug my nails into my palms to avoid laughing. When he went back inside we made sure he was sitting down before we did it again. Once more he came outside and I could see he was getting agitated as he did when we were teenagers and we would invite him to Ali Abdul’s house to pour buckets of water on him from the balcony above the front door. He always fell for it. Once we did it in October when the cold had come early. Snot poured from his nose as he burst into a mighty rage calling us every name in the proverbial book, as well as some that weren’t, and blaming us for all the problems of his life from his poor grades to his loneliness.
We laughed even though it was barely funny. And I was lonely too, but I didn’t say anything to soothe him. Kin was the instigator. Instead of replying to Shit-Shit, Kin, in his own sly way, urged me to do the mockery. He would reach deep into his witty brain to offer up a humorous putdown or a clever comedic approach which he would pass onto me via whisper. It was as if he was the ventriloquist and I was his willing puppet. At Kin’s insistence, I tried to sound sincere because that was funnier. I told Shit-Shit that we weren’t his problem, his hygiene was the problem and by dousing him with water we were only trying to help, despite the fact that he had no hygiene problem, outside of that one day in junior high school. He kept coming back to Ali Abdul’s house fully aware of the cruelty awaiting him. In this way he became complicit in his own bullying.
The third time Shit-Shit came outside after we knocked, he waved his hands and spat and screamed, You fucking little kids! If I catch you around my house I’m gonna fuck you up, watch.
It was all so out of character, which made it more hilarious. When he went back inside we tried one more time, though we didn’t wait for him to come to the door. Instead, we immediately burst down the street toward the car. He yanked the door open and chased after us. He hadn’t even bothered tying his shoelaces and they tap-tip-ta-tapped against the concrete. I looked back just in time to see him trip and splash into a puddle.
We got into my car as he was rising and yelling and cursing. He ran towards us. My engine cut off as I revved it. Then it cut off again. We were out of shape, wheezing heavily. I wondered how we would explain this to him when he caught up to us. Shit-Shit snatched a rock from the ground and lobbed it into the air as I pulled off. It was a nice throw too, because it smacked into the back windshield and cracked the thing pretty good. Kin and I jumped. I swerved all over the road. When I got control of the car we brayed and coughed, wiping mirthful tears from our eyes.
Houses with bushes were always the best and we decided where to knock, partly, on how well the shrubbery could hide us. At one house, a man came out with a gun after four knocks. Crouching in his bushes, our mouths dry and our hearts beating in our throats, we didn’t dare to even breathe. At another house we watched the police approach the door minutes after we finished with it.
Kin’s older brother, Donny, I remembered, had become a cop after graduating from college. Seeing the police at the door, I imagined running from Donny during a good day’s knocking. He used to be the schoolyard bully, was four years older than Kin and a real dick.
There was the house in which we stomped on some yellow marigolds out front as we fled, by accident of course. At a blue house on Gresham Place, Kin became so mesmerized by the woman who answered the door that he went back and knocked again after she had closed it just to get a look at her. She came outside and looked around, thin arms folded delicately across her frame. Her soft face came to a rounded point. She was indeed beautiful, but a bit skinny for my taste. She closed the door again and Kin said, My man, E. Fresh I’m gonna marry her. Kin knocked again, but didn’t run when she came outside for the third time. He pointed down the street at two neighborhood kids tossing around a football and told her that they were the culprits. They sparked up a conversation and he left with her phone number. Her name was Esterica. Kin said she looked like Peace and that’s what she made him feel, so when the time was right he would nickname her Peace.
After they were done talking, she strode across the street and spoke to the mother of the football-playing children. As we walked away, a woman with a stern face and a mouth with down-turned corners was shouting, Get your little asses in here! Y’all earned an ass whooping tonight!
We had a good run, hitting different houses all throughout the Southside over the course of a couple weeks. We even hit Shit-Shit’s house several times and the monster we made erupted over and over. It was hilarious to watch. Nigger Knocking was exhilarating. I felt new life sprouting in my chest. Kin kept saying that all we saw would make good material for revisions.
But what ended it was something that happened on a day we couldn’t go out. It was a Wednesday. I had to work late and Kin said he was meeting with his dissertation advisor, though I think he really went to see Peace. This was good, I thought, as I would finally have the time to sit down and write.
It was just after Easter when everything, from the grass to the buds on the dogwood trees, were in the midst of re-birth. As The Days & Times described it, Dwayne Jackson stood outside of his house on the Southside of Cross River late one night, struggling with the lock.
He put down his grocery bags so he could jiggle the keys with a firmer grip when he heard some shouting behind him.
The Southside of Cross River is where people go to shout; it’s the neighborhood pastime, so he probably wasn’t fazed. He turned slowly to see five men in black with guns drawn. Dwayne was raising his arms when a silvery glint of light flashed off of the keys in his right hand. The men began firing. When everything was done, the police had fired 37 shots; 15 struck 34-year-old Dwayne, killing him.
I saw Kin all that next week, he would come by in the evenings and help himself to several bottles of Crazy Ninja. All he could talk about was Dwayne Jackson. We both recognized him and his house as one we had hit a few times. Dwayne Jackson saw us the last time we knocked and chased us into the streets. In an article in the Cross River Eclectic, his wife alluded to all the strange things that had been happening recently and we both knew she was talking about us and we felt like shit, at least I did.
Dwayne Jackson’s slaying was something that had us all on edge, making us feel more mortal than we had recognized. We shook a little bit more when pulled over. We stared at the ground when we passed a cop on the street. There were suddenly more police on the Southside, which had the effect of making us feel less safe. We recalled police encounters not as simply moments in time, but as close calls. I thought often of the night I visited a Chinese takeout on the corner near my townhouse one evening while a homeless man was being arrested outside. This big bear of an officer looked at me as I stood out on the sidewalk and ordered me into the store. I tried to speak up only to get shouted down.
You deaf or stupid? the man asked. I told you to clear the damn sidewalk.
A wrong word, a simple misunderstanding and that could have been it. I now existed in a perfectly woven cocoon of fear. The entire town took it hard, though I think Kin took it harder than most, looking gloomier each day. I could tell he was feeling conflicted with his brother being a cop and all, though he said he wasn’t. When we were in high school, Kin and Donny argued about every subject there was from books to girls to movies to schoolwork. Everything was game for a row. Their arguments were long and heated and nonsensical. They seemed to last for weeks. Even when they agreed they wouldn’t notice; screaming back and forth, not listening to one another, just trying to get their points in. It was funny sometimes and other times it was annoying.
Some nights, sitting on my couch, Kin would drink so much that I would have to carry him to my car and drive him to his parents’ basement on the Northside where he lived.
A lot of times when drunk he’d mutter something like, My stupid brother, Donny the pig…Thinks he can tell me what to do. So fucking smug. Thinks he knows everything. Wish I could punch him in his fucking face.
He rarely mentioned his dissertation anymore and when he did he made fun of it.
One evening we sat at a table in the café where Peace worked, sipping free tea and eating free pastries. Kin held the front page of The Days & Times. There was a picture of Dwayne Jackson splashed across the paper. He was smiling. He’d smile forever. Kin passed his hand over the picture as if trying to absorb Dwayne Jackson through his flesh.
Peace slammed a hot jug on our table before pouring the scalding water into our cups. She asked with an exasperated tone, Who do these people think they are?
It’s crazy, Kin said.
It’s criminal is what it is, Peace replied.
That’s when she invited us to a protest the next day. She’d be taking off work, which meant no free tea or coffee for us. The Chairman was scheduled to speak. He ran the People’s Revolutionary Party and was supposed to be a big deal. I tended to roll my eyes, purposefully, every time I heard The Chairman’s name. I had hoped Kin and I would be getting back to our project, but obviously he had other plans.
Hell yeah, he said to Peace. We have to be out in force. We got to show these pigs. E. Fresh, you coming?
I’m too old for protests, I replied. I thought I noticed looks of horror on their faces, but I turned away and said, Watch out Abbie Hoffman, your brother is gonna be the one beating you down and hauling your ass off to jail.
He sucked his teeth, Who Donny? That nigga’s a truant officer. He pretend like he a real cop ‘cause he got a gun, but they don’t let his ass out of the District Central hallway. You should hear him whine, We have the same training and stress-related issues as any other type of…blah blah blah blah…Trying to tell me what to do with my life. Get the fuck out of here. The nigga that taught me how to skip class is a truant officer, imagine that. What a fraud.
Kin still had his sense of humor, though he didn’t use it much anymore. That night when he came by I asked him when we’d return to Nigger Knocking.
Nigger Knocking? he asked in reply. I am Nigger Knocking. A nigga’s knocking over the system.
His face was bitter, cold, and humorless and this was before even a single sip of Crazy Ninja. And after a moment, he took his first sip for the night.
Be for real Kin. You came to me with an amaz—
Besides, I got to go to this protest. Me and Peace haven’t had sex yet and I think if I chant loud enough, she’ll let me hit.
Kin, I don’t care about your sex life. Your book is powerf—
E. Fresh, man, niggas like you don’t get it. That Nigger Knocking thing is irrelevant. Every word I wrote is irrelevant. I even knew that while I was writing. Cultural Studies is dumb. I only did it because my parents wanted me to. And that’s the truth. I’m a poet. I used to accept that as my affliction. Just didn’t have the courage to run with it. If it were up to me I’d have been writing poems, not this stupid ass dissertation. I’m done with this fucking dissertation. I’m done with poetry, too. It’s all irrelevant. We live in a fucked up world. You know what I saw on the news before I got over here? That Dwayne Jackson did like a month for driving with a suspended license. Can you believe that they reported that shit? As if that changes anything. Fucking idiot Mayor McJohnson was like, He was not the angel the media has portrayed.
When Kin said this he deepened his voice, puffed out his chest and wagged around his head in full mocking bluster.
They always do this shit, he continued, try to smear the name of the victim. It’s crazy. On top of that we got madmen from all over the world trying to kill us. Wars all over the place. Perverts touching kids. The fuck is a poem supposed to do? Or a fucking dissertation for that matter? It’s weak and effeminate. E. Fresh, my man, you know what I did today? I took all my notes and every copy of that fucking dissertation and I tossed all of it off the Hail Mary Bridge and into the damn river. Then I took all my poems and I did the same thing. That shit looked like white leaves fluttering through the air on a fall day. That sound like poetry, right? Shit, I can’t escape poetry.
It was beautiful, man, he continued. You should have seen them sheets of paper doing flips. The only copy that exists is the one you got now and I’m asking you to give that one up so I can do the same thing with it.
No, it’s too important. That thing changed the way I think. Everything is different now. I started writing my own stuff after reading that thing. Naw, I ain’t giving it up. No. Nope.
I’m sorry to tell you this E. Fresh, I really am, but I made it all up. Every last word. Nigger Knocking is no more important than Jacks or Tag or Throw Up and Tackle. It was a gigantic practical joke on Alfred McCoy, on my parents. I wanted to see if anyone would notice. And no one did. Don’t no one read these things. I’m sorry. I’m no genius. I was having some fun. Shit, it seems like the person I fooled most with this thing is you. I’m sorry, brother. I really am. It was all a joke, man.
Beads of tears sat in my eyes. I tried not to blink so they wouldn’t fall and when I did blink, I turned from Kin.
Sorry man, he said feebly.
You’re lying, I replied, matching his feebleness. Fifty pages of footnotes? Illustrations? Quotes from scholars?
All bullshit, my nig nig. All bullshit.
He rose from his seat leaving a half-emptied bottle of Crazy Ninja on my coffee table.
I got to go man, he said patting me on the shoulder. I’m sorry, chief. I’ll pick up the dissertation tomorrow.
I heard nothing from Kin for several weeks. Then there was a brief and strange phone call the night we found out that a grand jury had declined to indict the officers who killed Dwayne Jackson, essentially clearing them of any wrongdoing. He sounded drunk, and his voice was full of fire and thunder. It made me feel that the Earth had cracked at the center and was crumbling into its core. I couldn’t make out all of what he said, though I was flattered he chose me for his drunk call. Told me I was the first person he dialed after several bottles of Crazy Ninja.
This is some bullshit, he said. That fraud ass Chairman is calling for peace. I want a piece of them cops’ ass.
Don’t do nothing stupid, I said. Stop drinking all that Crazy Ninja.
I was still hoping that Kin would return to his dissertation.
Fuck a Crazy Ninja, I’m about to get me a Molotov brew and I’m gonna toss it at Riverhall, right on top of the mayor’s desk.
Go home, write a poem—
Hey how’s this for poetry: So much depends on a red brick crashing through the window of a pig’s cruiser. Kin screamed it over and over into the receiver until it sounded fuzzy and distorted before hanging up. I walked over to my reading chair and sat with his manuscript for several hours. It struck me as impossible that he could make up such rich detail. That such a beautiful idea could be nothing but a fabrication. Janice called and we talked for a bit. She suggested I go out and find my friend, but I told her that it wasn’t what he wanted.
Just after midnight he turned up on my doorstep, his lip busted, his right eye purpled and raised and his knuckles scuffed.
Kin was not a big guy. His frame simply wasn’t built for fighting. I brought him ice for his eye and his lip. He sat at the round table in my kitchen and threw his head back.
Look at you! I exclaimed. Didn’t I tell you not to do anything stupid?
Shit, you should see Donny.
Your brother did this?
I did worse to him. He deserved it. The nigga was gloating. Talking about, See I told you there was another side to the story. I told him the whole fucking system was crooked. That’s when he swung at me.
He swung at you first?
Well OK, maybe I swung at him. Man, who knows? I’m a little toxi. So, I hit him in the face, and blood starts pouring from his nose in these dark red streams. Then I pull him by the collar, punching him again and again. I was like a prize fighter, man. I was getting him. Donny is all crouched on the ground covering his face. That’s when things start changing. I mean I look down and I think, Hey, this is my brother. This dude almost raised me. And for some reason, him down there curled up like a fetus reminded me of these stories he used to tell me when we were kids to make me go to sleep, Donny and the Gang. It was like Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, except it wasn’t as funny, but you couldn’t tell me that back in the day. He had this shit where Donny, the character Donny, would be like, Let’s put our heads together to figure this out and the gang would all look at each other and slam their heads together. It was the most hilarious shit. I still laugh when I hear someone say, Let’s put our heads together. A perfectly useful phrase is now made ridiculous for all time because of my brother. He could be a funny dude sometimes. Anyway, my favorite character was Crouching Carl the Coward. He used to roll up into a ball at the first sign of trouble. My brother looked like how I imagined Crouching Carl looked. I was laughing thinking about Bursty the Firecracker Boy and Stinky Stan and Slow-Talking Cheryl and Hollow Harold and James.
Kin shifted his weight in the chair and moved the bag of ice from his eye to his lip and then back to his eye before speaking again. I sat there not saying a word, just studying the monstrosity at my kitchen table spewing madness.
So I guess Donny realizes ain’t no one is hitting him, Kin continued, so he gets up and starts punching me. Doing all this cop shit on me. But I knew right there that my dark moment of the soul was over, ‘cause I heard it like a song whispering through my head. It was a voice. The 37th Shot. The last one that hit Dwayne Jackson. I know what I’m supposed to do man. He was telling me his story. Thirty-seven stanzas. Thirty-seven lines each. Thirty-seven syllables in each line. The last poem that ever needs to be written. The poem that puts the whole world in order. Man, it didn’t even register that Donny was beating the shit out of me. It’s like I went hollow and with everything inside me—all the bullshit—gone I heard the bullet very clearly. E. Fresh, I really heard him, man. Though it’s gonna take a while to unravel everything. Man, if all he says is true we got some crazy days ahead of us.
So how’d the fight end?
Aww man, some cops came and at first they was gonna beat the shit out of me because they knew Donny, but he stopped them and I walked off. I wasn’t thinking about him or them anymore. I was dazed listening to that little bullet talk all this sweet shit in my ear.
What about the dissertation?
Kin rose and walked toward the door. He knocked on it three times before he opened it and stepped out into the world.
Man, fuck a dissertation, he said turning back toward me. We got the thing that’s gonna save us, all of us, everybody. I’ll be back; we got a lot of work ahead of us. What we got can change everything—save the whole fucking world—if we just listen.
Then he walked out and I shut the door behind him. I wrote for a while, longhand as the computer reminded me so much of work and I didn’t, at the time, often use the vintage typewriter I kept dusted and polished on a desk in my bedroom. What I wrote was formless and flowing, meandering and strange—bits of philosophy, aborted narratives starring a dead singer, doodles both pornographic and childlike, voices that passed through my head, cryptic jokes only I could get. It surprised me, but I knew that one day it would all come together. Sometime around 3 a.m., I ran into a barrier that was as solid as a door up against my balled fist. It was like there were no more words inside of me. So I took a walk. I decided that night as I strode through the Southside on my way to Shit-Shit’s house that I wouldn’t answer the door the next time Kin came knocking. I had his manuscript and that was all I needed of him. There were secrets in there that had yet to be discovered. It was OK if I never saw him again.
Still, I imagined my friend by my side as I stood on Shit-Shit’s porch. Other than me, only a few rats stirred about. You ready? I said to Kin and to no one at the same moment before I tapped four quick and heavy blows against the door and waited for it to open.
Rion Amilcar Scott has contributed to Fiction International, New Madrid, PANK and Apparatus Magazine among others. Raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, he earned an MFA from George Mason University
Tagged Fiction
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