RL's Dream

Ten

For the next three weeks Dr. Fey and his assistants administered Soupspoon’s “keemo.” The poisons made his ears ring day and night, took his appetite, and made the little hair he had left fall out.

He lost twelve pounds.

The first few days he staggered around the apartment — vomiting and shivering. He couldn’t get warm no matter how much he wore. Even in front of the stove he felt the chill of death. His blood went bad and the doctor gave him transfusions one after the other. Soupspoon had to lie on a hard table six hours at a time with the blood leaking into his vein.

After a week they decided to keep him in the hospital because the doctor was afraid that the trip back and forth would kill him.

The head nurse had asked Kiki to stay away after the third day. She argued with the nurses and set up a racket whenever Soupspoon was the slightest bit uncomfortable — and he was under the pain of death most of the time. Kiki yelled and commanded and tried to stop them when she thought they might hurt him needlessly

But it was when she knocked down the tray of syringes in a rage that Nurse Jones asked her to leave.

“You’re not helping Atwater, Tanya,” she said as kindly as she could.

After that Kiki had asked Randy to see after Soupspoon — but not as a request. The only way Randy could have any of her attention was to share it with Soupspoon in the cancer ward.

Randy had seen the way she pulled the blankets over Soupspoon while he slept. She’d refuse even to whisper if he was napping.

So when Kiki asked Randy to take some time to go into hospital, he did it. He knew that her temper would have ended their friendship if he had refused.

He was only twenty-five, younger than Kiki by over ten years. But in spite of their difference in age he was crazy about her. He loved her red hair and her pale sinewy arms. The slight southern twang in her voice always made him smile. He liked the way she couldn’t be pushed around and how she was never shy about saying what she thought. If somebody did something that she didn’t like, she told them — no matter who it was. It didn’t matter if they were white or black. Kiki spoke her mind.

It was true that she used bad language and derogatory names, especially when she was under the influence of alcohol or marijuana. Randy didn’t condone the use of artificial stimulants or bad language. His mother had brought him up to be a proper gentleman in Flushing, Queens.

Randy only had a mother. His father hadn’t even been there to see Randy’s birth. For a long time Randy believed that his father had died. That was the story his mother had told him. But when he was fourteen he found a stack of letters from J. Chesterton addressed to his mother.

There was no reason to believe that his mother had lied. It could have been some other J. Chesterton. Maybe a cousin. It couldn’t have been old letters from his father; he knew that because the postmark was only six years old — way after his death.

Randy’s father died, the story went, moving a shipload of Frigidaires from Bethesda, Maryland, to Morocco. Jamal, his father, was a blue-eyed Arabian of ancient stock; a rare Caucasian Arab who had merchant blood running in his veins. Esther, Randy’s mother, was from South American lineage — descended from the conquistadors. Her blood, she said, was ninety-nine percent Spanish, because the upper classes didn’t mix much with the natives. “Most of your mixing,” she told the boy, “was done among Indians and common soldiers.” When Randy asked her why her skin was so tanned all the time she said that as far as she knew the only documented case of mixing in her family tree was with a Mayan princess over three centuries earlier.

“But you know that royal blood is powerful,” she told the impressionable boy. “It shines through the centuries.”

But one day a Negro couple with two small children came to the front door claiming to be cousins of Jamal Chesterton, whose father was an English explorer. Mrs. Chesterton told them, with great patience and reserve, that their cousin and her husband must have had the same name but were in reality two different people.

“But we saw Jamal just last week,” the big brown woman said. “He gave us this address. He wanted to know how his son was doing.”

“That proves it,” Mrs. Chesterton said. “My husband died fourteen years ago and never knew that he had a son. He died in a shipwreck off the coast of Africa.”

“Jamal’s not dead,” the dapper little man in a doe-gray suit said. “He’s in Atlanta.”

Atlanta was the city in the postmark on the letters that Randy had found.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Mrs. Chesterton said. She held the door wide open as if to prove that there was no secret in her house. “This cousin of yours has made some kind of mistake. Tell him that I hope he finds his wife and son, though.”

Mrs. Chesterton gave the couple a big smile and waited for them to leave. Randy could see that they wanted to say more, but instead they gathered their small children, a boy and a girl, and left.

After they were gone, Randy’s mother sat down at the kitchen table in a foul mood. She refused to answer any questions about the couple that had come or make guesses as to how they made the mistake.

The next day Randy looked for the letters but they were gone from the desk.

Three weeks later a moving van came and took them to a new address in Long Island City.

Randy knew that the move had something to do with those letters and the visit from the Negro couple. His mother had always discouraged his relationships with Negro children in school and would get coldly angry when anyone mistook him for anything other than what he was — an exotic Caucasian.

Randy never disliked coloreds when he was a child. He liked it that his hair was so curly, and as soon as he was old enough to defy Esther, he grew dreadlocks. He didn’t mind black people. He had a lot of black friends. He got along so well with black people that many people often mistook him, probably because of his hair and royal Mayan blood, for a Negro himself.

But that’s where Randy drew the line.

You had to be true to your race.

He was an exotic; a white man without clear European lineage. But white still and all. Black people, he felt, could never truly understand his world. Because of slavery and racism the world of blacks could never encompass the path that he intended to travel.

Upon graduation from Pace, Randy would enter an Ivy League law school. From law school he would go to Wall Street, using the connections he’d made. Randy knew that from a position of power he’d still have gentle feelings for the deserving oppressed.

He saw these feelings reflected in the way Kiki saw the world. He imagined them not only married but as a kind of a team. Two conservative white people who made the black people they assisted toe the line in order to receive help from the various charities they would endow. Of course, he’d have to get Kiki to stop using the word “nigger.” But he overlooked those flaws for the present because he loved her. He wanted her to be his wife. And if she clung to her resolve never to bear children, they would adopt; maybe even some African child — that would prove that their hearts were in the right place.

But before any of that could happen he had to take care of Soupspoon. He had to because Kiki had such a sensitive heart that their love might not survive his refusal.

At first he didn’t care about Soupspoon. He was just an old man who smelled like rotted corncobs. Somehow he’d figured out how to take advantage of Kiki’s generosity — that’s what Randy thought.

But even though he didn’t care about being there, Randy saw how terrible the treatments were. Soupspoon suffered nausea and great pain without a complaint. Sometimes when the nurse would just lightly touch Soupspoon’s arm Randy could see a shiver run through the length of his body.

“Oh, no!” Soupspoon’s lips mouthed the words, but he never made a sound. He let the poisons into his body but his eyes seemed to be stronger than the pain.

On his third visit Randy noticed a change in his feelings toward Kiki’s friend. He’d brought a book to read but it lay unopened while he gazed into Soupspoon’s sightless eyes. He felt like looking away but couldn’t; he felt like going down to the rest room but he didn’t have to go. When he finally went outside the room a nurse smiled at him and he turned away quickly so that she couldn’t see him cry. It was then that he knew the feeling that had come over him — it was; shame. He was ashamed of how naked the pain was.

“Yo’ daddy’s dead?” Soupspoon asked during his ninth six-hour transfusion.

“Yes, sir. Died when I was two — shipwrecked.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It was a long time ago. I guess I’m used to it by now.”

Soupspoon took pleasure in watching the young man.

Randy brought textbooks to read when Soupspoon was dozing. Books like In the Street and Investment Strategies for the Eighties. He also brought the Wall Street Journal. He’d read the national and international news items from page one to Soupspoon when the sound didn’t jangle the sick man’s nerves.

Sometimes the needles and poisons and fluorescent lights got to be too much for Soupspoon. He’d start shaking from weakness and the nearness of death. Randy would put down his book and hold the dry old hands in an attempt to stop the tremors. Once Soupspoon shook so terribly that Randy got scared and so upset that he actually kissed the older man’s forehead.

A kiss.

Soupspoon looked up into the worried face of the youngster, still feeling where the lips had touched him. He tried to remember the last time someone had loved him so much that they wanted to kiss him. Not some love partner, not sex, but when was the last time someone saw his pain and wanted to kiss it away? Maybe Ruby and Inez did it, he didn’t remember. He’d been kissed before. Kissed and licked and sucked dry. Kicked and shoved too. He’d been in love with Mavis and other women. But none of them had ever tried to kiss his pain. He’d been in love with the whole world, everything, when the music was right. But Randy’s kiss was something special. Something he’d missed.

That day Soupspoon got his sickest. A fever took him over and he fell into nightmare. Sometimes he was having chills on the transfusion table and other times he was in a plantation barn, surrounded by corpses that had known his name.

“Where’s your family from?” Soupspoon asked. He and Randy were at Kiki’s apartment the day after they’d sent him home. It was two weeks after his final “keemo” injection so his ears were only buzzing slightly.

“North Africa — that is, Morocco — and Brazil.” He looked away as he spoke.

“I guess we everywhere, huh?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Colored people, Negroes, niggahs. We everywhere.”

“Oh, I see,’ Randy said, looking down at his own brown hand. “No sir, you’re wrong about me. I’m not a Negro. My father was pure Arab and my mother was from Brazil. A lot of people think I’m black but I’m not. Not at all.”

Soupspoon just stared, dumbfounded by Randy’s claim.

“That’s why I have such light eyes,” Randy went on.

“That’s from the Arab or the South American?”

“Some Arabs have blue eyes, it’s considered a blessing to have them. There was a whole blue-eyed Semitic tribe in the eleventh century. They were great warriors and scientists.”

“Yo’ momma come down from them?”

“My father. He was a tradesman.”

Soupspoon had known many Negroes who’d passed for being white. Some would just get dressed up and go out to white restaurants and white churches for a hoot. Some, who couldn’t bear being what they were, moved into white neighborhoods and lived like they really were white. They’d marry, raise children and explain their curly hair as coming down from Greece or Ireland or some other exotic Caucasian land. They belonged to the Junior League and the Ku Klux Klan, voted for conservatives, some even ran for office. They spoke the white man’s language better than he did, because nobody knows white people better than blacks. A black man knows the white man inside out. And why not? They took old clothes, old cars, old books, and old food from white people. They lived in a world where they had to be better than white. White men never had to worry about how they talked or walked or laughed. They took being white for granted. Anything a white man did was okay because it was a white man doing it. But a black man was different. No matter how hard he studied or how righteous he was, a black man still had the mark of Cain on him. All you had to do was look.

But if your skin was light and your hair was good then you were treated better. Whites liked light-skinned Negroes more, and a light-skinned lover was the dream of many a dark heart. Light-skinned Negroes had better jobs. The lighter the better. And if you were light enough you might even slip through a crack and make it into heaven.

Soupspoon knew them. Sometimes he’d catch one sitting down in a hotel lobby. By his profile or the way he folded his hands Soupspoon suspected their common roots. He’d be certain when the man would catch his glance and look quickly away. That man would have bad dreams for a month over that look. But he didn’t need to worry, because Soupspoon wasn’t going to tell. Nobody had to tell him why colored brothers and sisters passed. There wasn’t a thing of value to being black in America back then. You didn’t have a damn thing and anything you might get could be taken away. Maybe white people had it hard too, but you couldn’t convince a black man of that. His porridge was so hard he’d put rocks in it to help him chew.

It was a hard life that made people want to pass, but, Soupspoon thought, Randy had it harder than anybody.

At least the people Soupspoon had known knew where they came from. They were passing — making it in the white man’s world the way all colored people do: looking the man in the face and lying about what you feel and what you know — what you were inside. Everybody did that. Lying to the white man was both sport and survival.

The people Soupspoon had known lied to the white man, but Randy lied to himself. Look at him and you saw what he was — a gray-eyed Negro. But when he looked in the mirror he saw a white man. He imagined himself in the white man’s history books and as the star of TV shows. Maybe he loved opera.

Soupspoon used to laugh about people like Randy, made up funny songs about them. But not anymore.

“Well,” the old man said, “I guess we all just folks makin’ it any way we can.”

As Soupspoon’s strength returned he felt the tide of cancer receding. And in forgiving Randy he felt cured of the disease that made black men want to be white. All of his dreams and memories about the Delta and the pathways of the blues became sharper in his mind.

The memory of Robert Johnson was so strong in him that he sometimes felt that he could actually talk to the guitar man. He’d walk around Kiki’s studio apartment, while she was at work, imagining RL was at his side talking about women he’d known and how many records he could play from memory.

It all came in one big rush; too much for him to make sense of. He tried to write it down but the words were flat and toneless. He turned on the cassette recorder that Kiki brought home from Radio Shack and tried to talk out his stories. But when he played the tape back he was reminded of a hapless baby-sitter trying to tell a fairy tale that he couldn’t remember.

Finally he asked Kiki to help.

“Just listen to me,” he said. “I’m a storyteller. Storyteller need somebody wanna hear what he got to tell.”