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ON MONDAY the Soulful marched off to vote. Cadillac needed a break. Soul City was amazing, but it surely was not Utopia. He went out by himself and accidentally found a little place called the Hug Shop. It was exactly what he needed. At the Hug Shop you could get a three-minute hug for $5, a five-minute hug for $10, or a deluxe ten-minute hugging experience for $25. Hug-a-longs, that is, to be hugged by two or more huggers at once, were also available.
The Hug Shop was the first in a planned nationwide chain. Its owner, Giveadamn Brown, saw professional hugging as the fast-food arm of the massage industry. Brown was as eager to please his customers as Ray Kroc was back when the sign in front of the first McDonald’s said 1,000 SERVED. He’d run underground brothels and legitimate massage parlors, and his current venture delicately combined the two, hovering somewhere between the relaxation industry’s legal and illegal branches. His huggers were not call girls, but they weren’t trained masseurs, either. A sign in the window announced, HUGGER ON DUTY: ECSTASY JACKSON. He walked right in.
Ecstasy Jackson was dark chocolate with large pillowy breasts wrapped in a cashmere sweater. Hugging her would be like easing into a big brown curvy talking beanbag. Cadillac paid for a ten-minute hugging experience. She came from behind the counter and their bodies meshed. She put her arms around him, eased her breasts into him, tickled the back of his neck with her nails, let her perfume waft into his nose, squeezed his ass, and held him close and tight until he forgot where he ended and she began. When she finally let go of him, his body was jelly. He stumbled out promising himself he’d come back soon. But if he’d been a local he would’ve known why that was a bad idea. He would’ve known why a great hugger like Ecstasy was always single, why she was a sort of sexual quicksand.
He wobbled down the street until he regained his strength. Soon he found himself in front of the Museum of African-American Aesthetics (MoAAA) and stepped inside.
There was a new exhibit called “Black Is, Black Ain’t. The Visual Vernacular, the Vernacular Visual.” It featured art that, according to the brochure, “gives representations of Black culture through everyday objects, asking the viewer to look beyond the quotidian nature of the objects to see their cultural essentiality and thus artistic brilliance, which begs the questions: What makes up Black culture? What makes something Black? What does it mean to be Black?”
Video monitors were stationed everywhere. One showed a spry old man standing on a corner beneath a street lamp, but the film’s true subject was his cigarette, his Newport, and the camera followed it from the moment it left the pack in his pocket on up to his mouth, then down by his belt as his fingers flipped and dipped and zipped—an anonymous, soundless magician holding court on the corner. There was a series of young men’s lips, just large lips being licked in a bodacious, predatorily sexual way. In a separate room, all four episodes of The Richard Pryor Show ran back-to-back on a constant loop.
In a peculiar piece called Whuppin by Zeitgeist Jones—a leader of the Experientialism movement—the artist, a grown man, goes to his grandmother’s house and asks her to whup him like she used to when he was little. At first she refuses. “Ya ain’t done nuttin wrong, bwoy.” He continues pestering her. “It would highlight the Black male’s perpetual child status in America,” he says. “And point out the sadomasochism inherent in the unrequitable love every boy feels for his first love, Mom, or, in my case, you, Grandma, a relationship that always ends in rejection for the boy because he can never attain the best girlfriend he’ll ever know. And it would add me to the long tradition of masochistic performance art. In the early seventies an artist assembled an audience, gave a gun to a friend, and had his friend shoot him in the arm.” She cringes at the thought. “Why don’t you go run along now and make another painting.” He says, “But that’s just it. Painting is no longer sufficient to express the feelings I have about the Black experience. Painting is flat and dead. The only true canvas that exists is the body.” She looks at him like he’s insane. “Ah used to tell yer daddy, You just askin for a whuppin. But ain’t nobody ever really asked me fer a whuppin.” He continues begging until finally she says, “Ah think all that art’s gone to yer head, bwoy. I wan’t gunna whup ya, but now ya startin to git on m’nerves askin and askin for a whuppin. So ah guess ah’ll whup ya fer gittin on m’nerves by askin a stupid question. Now go out front and git a switch and if ya bring back one too small, ah’ma go out there and find the biggest one ah can!” We see him walk outside, pick a switch from a tree, pull down his pants, and get whupped but good, for five, six minutes, until his thighs and backside are so red he can’t even sit.
There were photo essays on the hi-top fade, a ten-foot bottle of Afro-Sheen, a sculpture of boys playing Cee-lo, twenty-foot dominoes, video of Black Baptist sermons from around the country, and a thirty-foot-tall talk-to-the-hand hand. There was a wall of ornate gold medallions, from a gold Lazarus to gold lion heads, gold grenades, and gold turntables, the Arabic phrase “Allah U Akhbar,” all sorts of Jesuses in various positions and poses, and, the coup de grâce, an angel with exquisite wings clutching an arrow being clung to for dear life by a short-skirted angel who’s being kicked in the eye by the first angel. It was clearly a battle between a good angel and a bad one, though a little difficult to say who was who.
On the top floor was a multimedia tribute to the Black male strut, the Afro, the ultratheatrical shoe shine, and the hand greeting, from hi-fives to lo-fives, including fist pounds, tight clasps, and finger snaps. And in the last room, the exhibit’s finale, was the famous Steviewondermobile itself—a pristine money green 1983 Cadillac custom convertible with gold rims, neon green lights underneath, and a Harman Kardon sound system with sixteen speakers, wireless remote, thirty disc changer, and the clearest sound imaginable, a system that only played records by Stevie Wonder. This was the sexy beast that originally inspired the creation of the Museum of African-American Aesthetics.
The Steviewondermobile was previously owned by Huggy Bear Jackson, who’d donated it to the museum’s permanent collection a few years back. That decision, based on art as much as hubris, proved incalculably ennobling for Huggy Bear. His benevolence turned him into a far greater hero than he’d been in the days when he’d cruised around Soul City, known as the man with the Steviewondermobile. Of course, unlike most people who make significant donations, Huggy Bear was neither rich nor smart. Donating the car meant he could enter the museum for free anytime he chose. It also meant he was without a car. But that’s another story.
Outside the museum Cadillac sat on the lawn under a tree and pulled out his empty notepad. He still needed a spark. One good first sentence, a sentence that would encapsulate Soul City, a sentence with just the right tone. Then the path of how to write about this place would become clear to him. With one true sentence that combined Soul City’s beauty and its ugliness, the dam would break. But something Aunt Jemima had said had gotten stuck in his mind and was clogging up the gears. He’d tried to throw out the idea that ugly could somehow be beautiful, but the thought was so bizarre he couldn’t stop examining it, the way boys are magnetized by dead cats on the side of the road. But now the bullshit detector in his mind had broken down and even the manual hand crank wouldn’t work. If only the place had been a Utopia. That would’ve been easy to paint. It was easy to get the city’s style and energy on a page. It was much harder to find the courage to be honest about both the beauty and the ugliness of Soul City. Writing, he felt, was like intellectual athletics, but when athletes conquered their fears and hit the big shot, the crowd roared. His courage would be taken as a betrayal, an airing of dirty laundry. No one roars for the courageous writer.
He sat there until the sun set but still couldn’t write a word.