The Busting Out of an Ordinary Man (11 page)

“Yeah, I got out, fled to Casablanca, Morocco. Now that's a town for you if ever there was one! At the time I swooped in, everything went! You hear me, lil' brothers! Everything!! I hadn't been in town fifteen hot minutes, black in white, white on black, moppin' my face with a snow white hankerchief, when two of the most beautiful lil' girls, teenagers actually 'bout fourteen 'n fifteen, grabbed me to lead me to their virgin mother.”

The men winked across the booze and their male feelings for those games.

“What could I say? What could I do? I ‘married' all three of 'em that weekend and settled down to a harmonious domestic life. I must hasten to add, right in through here however, that the kind of domestic life I had wasn't all that domestic. Within three months I had gotten my pinkie finger into the hash trade, had my big toe in the cocaine thing and was handlin' a few choice gems. I had learned a whole lot about how to judge a stone from the ol' pointy headed diamond merchant, and the rest of me was pushed off into them French diplomats' wives, those that had a lil' somethin' to add to the family treasury.

“But, as usual, I got greedy. The more I had, the more I wanted. I tried to corner the hash market, and the king got salty and kicked me out. He really, actually was usin' my dealin's as an excuse. What he really wanted was my woman, Fatima.”

The Great Lawd Buddha uncoiled himself slowly from Marcus' bunk, stood looking through the barred Gothic window, remembering. When he spoke again, after long moments of deep thought, his voice, a sound track of his experiences in life, carried the flavor of the souk, the yearning cry of the kif fiend, the smoke and intrigue of North Africa.

“Fatima Fatima,” he spoke her name reverently, as though whispering into the Prophet's ear. “So beautiful, so deep and so arrogant that when she walked through the streets … pin-striped tattoo blued from her chin to her bottom lip, dudes used to walk into the sides of the buildings, or start prayin' right on the spot. And Aissa and Naima were just about as fine as their mother. So much of what was happenin' to me in those days was so mysterious, so unbelievable. Like Fatima and her daughters, for example.

“And I had to leave it all,” he said suddenly and remounted his seat of honor. “Yep, once again I had to leave it or run the risk of being drowned by the king's men in a sand dune somewhere.”

“Hey Marcus, you got any black shoe polish?” a fellow con leaned into the cell door.

Marcus frowned, nodded no and tried to wave him away, but the brother, peeking in, caught up by the rapt expressions on everyone's face, eased in and squatted at the foot of Marcus' bunk.

Buddha, Algerian flamenco, wavy blue sand, home brew, Rabat, Marrakesh, Casablanca and Fatima sizzling through his imagination, merely nodded at the brother and rapped on. “After my expulsion I became a lost man. It was as though my senses didn't want to work anymore, as though too much had happened. It was terrible, purely and simply terrible, my brothers. I became a soulless, ash-splattered, piss-stained, dodo-covered representative of humanity, sleeping wherever my head found itself, eatin' goat turds and rat shit, searchin' for my Self again.”

The latest addition to the group looked from one face to the other, seeking some explanation for where they were, but receiving none, listened harder.

“If you can get into what my trip was. Here I had been declared a white man in South Africa, managed to avoid the perils of being lynched, had made it around the eastern fringe of Momma Africa and all of a sudden, for only reasons that the Great It has an explanation for, I find myself in rags, walkin' down through Mauritania, tryin' my goddamnest to get to someplace on the west coast, to get on a freighter, or a slaveship, or somethin', headed for the Indies, at least. My luck had run out, and I knew it.”

He turned the bottle up and sipped delicately, as though it were his by reason of possession no one bothered to correct him.

“I still had a diamond big enough to constipate an elephant in my rags, but I was savin' that for the finale, for my grand exit from Africa. What I had in mind to do was drop it in the Atlantic, a hardened tear for the souls of all our brothers 'n sisters who had jumped, been pushed, or had in some way, wound up being shark's grub for a few hundred years durin' the black human being trade.”

Marcus, an Ourstorian, looked at the Great Lawd Buddha with a tearful gleam in his eye, the home brew almost pushing it out.

“In Africa, amongst the religious people, you always pour what they call a libation to the gods on every occasion. That's what I had planned to do. But, as usual, Mr. Fate spread his fingers all over my plans and took me off.

“I wouldn't even attempt to try to take you dudes through all the supernatural trips, all the days 'n nights of starvation, both physical and spiritual, the times I was lost amongst people who thought I was a god, or a dog, or any of that all of the moments of intense ecstasy and profound sadness I experienced durin' my two-year walk.”

“Two year walk?!” the newcomer exclaimed.

“Shut up, Amos,” Brian said quietly, brutally.

“Yeah, two years I walked,” Buddha favored him with a wise old glance, “from the outskirts of Casablanca, through what they used to call the Spanish Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Liberia, the Ivory Coast on into Ghana.

“Now strangely enough, for some reason, by the time I made it to Ghana, my mind seemed to clear itself, to come alive again. All of a sudden it seemed that I was amongst
my
people. Can y'all get into where I'm comin' from?”

All four men, his audience, nodded yes, yes, yes, yes.

“I don't know what it was, really. Maybe it was that cup of twenty-five year old palm wine a sister on the outskirts of Accra laid on me, or the words of an American blood who spoke to me or whatever, but I was back in the world uhh huhh … back in the world. Naturally I wound up dealin' with the slickest motherfuckers in six countries for this stone I had. Got a decent price for it too, went out and bought some hip kente cloth robes, partied a lil' bit and the next thing I know, the Asantehene of the Ashanti people is requesting the pleasure of my appearance.

“The Asantehene! If you don't know who he is, I can't begin to tell you. All I can say is this: when the Asantehene wants you, you wind up being where he wants you. He's sorta like part god and part African.

“So there I am, in a huge room with the Asantehene and his linguist, that's the dude who does all his rappin' for him. The Asantehene is sittin' on a golden throne, with gold strands of thread hangin' down over his face, a couple gold nuggets weighin' his fingers down, gold woven into his robes. Gold, damnit! Everywhere! And the linguist, a hip lil' ol' dude 'bout sixteen years older 'n' Damballah is rappin' to me, tellin' me that the Asantehene wants me to find the Golden Stool for him.

“He wants me, you dig?! Chester L. Simmons, to find the Golden Stool for him. I almost shat granola crumbs when I heard that. Why me? And then the Asantehene spoke, or rather threw his voice from over in a corner, must've been a ventriloquist … dude had a voice like a bass conga drum.

“‘I have followed your movement around the outer edges of our continent, I know of your spiritual battles, what you have suffered and overcome,' he says to me in letter-perfect, hightoned English, ‘and it is for these reasons that I ask you to find the soul of my nation.'

“Behind that he didn't say another mumbling word, he just sat there, just as cool and serene as you please. The linguist held a medium-sized leather pouch out to me, and I crawled out on my hands and knees, the way I'd crawled in. I mean, like that's the way you came to the Asantehene.

“Once I got outside, about five blocks from the palace, I opened the strings to the pouch and discovered it was filled with gold dust. Gold dust! I was shitless speechless. It was like … it was like the Lawd had asked you to find his favorite pillow and paid you out front for it.

“Now the thing was, I couldn't say anything to anybody because nobody was supposed to know that the Stool was missin'.

“I mean, like if the Stool was missin' people would start dyin' off, out of sadness or whatever, 10,000 natural catastrophes would occur, in addition to the fact that the Asantehene would be lynched in fifty different ways, along with every member of his family, and his name would be in the books forever as the dude who blew the Stool. You talk about a motherfucker in serious trouble!

“I ain't talkin' 'bout him, I'm talkin' about me!

“If I succeeded in recoverin' the Stool, no one but the Asantehene and his linguist would know about it. If I didn't recover the Stool, my ass would be in a sling, six feet under, and no one would know about that either.

“I was so shook up that I went off and drank pink gin for two weeks, tryin' to find the vision for what I was supposed to be doin'.”

He turned the corner of the bottle up and killed it, so into his story that he had forgotten about the other people in the cell. “Oooopps, sorry 'bout that!” he apologized graciously.

“Fuck that, man! Go on, what happened?!” Marcus shot in.

“Well, once I got my head together, I started gettin' the kind of logical vibes I needed. By way of the process of elimination, I figured out certain things. Number one, no Ashanti would be caught dead or alive with the Stool; their uhhh sensibilities just wouldn't know how to deal with it. It would be like havin' God's ghost locked up on the closet. I was pretty certain that none of the other tribal groups had copped the Stool because if they had … hah hah hah well, if they had, they would've had a war on their hands that would've been guaranteed annihilation for everybody, forever. And ever.

“O.k., havin' gone up 'n down, and in 'n out in my head, who could I settle down on that would be insensitive enough, disrespectful enough, vicious enough and cold-blooded enough to rip off the soul of a nation?

“The white boy!” Brian called out.

The Great Lawd Buddha leaned over unsteadily, the potato drippings singing in his skull, to slap Brian's palm suavely. “Right on, brother! The white boy! Now I really had a problem. The English, the white boy in charge at that time didn't dig me being in the country in the first place, and if I made any too wrong moves, my ass was gon' be in another sling, so I had to proceed quietly.”

The sound of a fellow inmate screaming on the tier below them sliced through Buddha's narrative. They all tensed up. They knew the sound well. Someone receiving a “Dear John” letter, or suddenly being overcome by the pressure of the cage surrounding him or from a thousand other prisoned feelings had gone insane. The man below them, his lungs suddenly lined with steel, screamed 'til the keepers finally arrived, billy clubs and gas guns at the ready, prepared to beat and gas and drag him off to the Hole, for “rehabilitation.”

Buddha accepted another cigarette, his hands shaking slightly, aware of the importance of having something complete happen, especially where they were. “As we all know, money talks, all kinds o' money. So that's what I put to work for me. That and my game.

“It took me something like four months to find out how many, which and where foreign archeological expeditions had been, or was diggin'. I had cornered things down to that point. Since no one had ever seen the Stool, other than the Asantehene, I figured that some fool archeologists, rapin' the country like they was doin' in those days, had stumbled across the piece and was definitely keepin' it cool 'til they got it out of the country.

“Usin' the elimination process again, I sifted the expeditions … a French group, an Italian group, a Portuguese group, of all things, and about eight English groups, naturally.

“Gentlemen, you talkin' 'bout a dude earnin' his dust! I sho' 'nuff earned mine that year. I got to the Stool, all boxed and on its way to Rome, the day before the S.S. Aida sailed.

“What I did was this: I found out that the Italians had stumbled across the Stool, which was buried, had lied to the English colonial master guys about what they had found and was gettin' ready to arrivederci.

“Awright, playin' the game, I managed to slip word in to the Englishman in charge. Naturally he's pissed. I mean, like they were gonna put all the dagos in jail 'n shit, … but what he was really happy about was gettin' his grubby hands on the Stool.

“As y'all know, the goddamned English had fought a war with the Ashanti over the Stool, years back, so they really felt groovy about gettin' their hands on something that they'd fought like dogs for. But heyyy, this
is
the Great Lawd Buddha, right?!”

“Right on, Buddha! right on!” Brian yelled, oblivious to his surroundings.

“Yessuhhh, so what I did, with about eight of the most nervy Ashanti dudes you ever thought about hearin' about, was perform the most perfectly executed robbery in the history of the country. One of the dudes who helped me rip the Stool off later became a cabinet minister, or the chief justice, or something like that, after Ghana got independent. The dudes who helped to pull the job off didn't even want to get paid. I had to make them take some dust.

“My con to them was, you dig? I want you all to help me pull off a fantastic, incredible, unreal, daylight savin's time holdup on the English.

“That's all I had to say to those dudes, that's all that we were goin' to embarrass the English so bad that they would be walkin' 'round with red faces for days. And that's what we did, I organized on the q.t., of course, a tribal festival that involved the Asantehene. And while he was layin' his blessings on the buildin' the festival revolved around, with the Duke and the Duchess, the King's representatives in attendance

“This is what we did. At the high point of things, my hip Ashanti buddies eased off with the Stool in a crate, singin' 'n drummin' 'n shit, in the middle of about fifty 'leven million fellow tribesmen.