5

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CADILLAC, MAHOGANY, and Precious walked into Lolita. Holden Caulfield lazily led them to a table and morosely tossed their menus onto it. “Bunch of phonies,” he said and went back to the host’s stand. He stared menacingly across the room at an oblivious Harry Potter, who was dutifully manning the cash register.

Lolita was a restaurant in Soul City’s ritzy Honeypot Hill owned by a madman. No one knew his real name or where he’d come from. He’d arrived in Soul City thirty years ago calling himself Humbert Humbert. When they asked him where he’d come from, he said he’d recently escaped from a distressing little parody of a jail, but before that he’d been traveling around the country, sightseeing with his, uh, daughter. No one believed his story. They said, You can stay as long as you steer clear of our daughters.

Humbert opened a restaurant and forced his waiters and waitresses to dress and act as though they were fictional characters. Sometimes this didn’t work out so well. The waitresses playing Sleeping Beauty took the liberty of napping in the employee lounge as long as they liked. Whoever had to play the role of Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis was certain to call in sick every time. No one wanted to wear that giant beetle getup. The Cheshire Cat was always disappearing when you needed him, Cinderella kept losing her shoe, and Pinocchio was constantly lying about the specials. (He told the table beside them, “I highly recommend the rhinoceros testicles.”) Professor Jack Gladney from White Noise spent all his time at the supermarket, Nancy Drew was always trying to figure every damn thing out, and of course the white waitresses were scared to death that Bigger Thomas would kill them. Not every character was a good fit. Lila Mae Watson from The Intuitionist applied to be elevator inspector, but despite her expertise Humbert judged her far too plain for Soul City and sent her packing. And don’t even mention the insane little drummer boy Oskar Matzerath from The Tin Drum, crazy Dr. Charles Kinbote from Pale Fire, annoying Enid Lambert from The Corrections, snot-nosed Saleem Sinai from Midnight’s Children, simpleton Jesse B. Semple, reluctantly slutty innocent Erendira (who was never left alone by her heartless grandmother), and that jealous wimp Gwyn Barry from The Information. They were all but impossible to deal with, as you can imagine. And no matter how much they docked her pay, Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout simply would not take the garbage out.

Humbert also had twenty-four large-screen televisions placed around the restaurant, tuned to the twenty-four-hour news stations. He liked to sit back and watch fictional characters coming to life and real people becoming stories and patrons getting intellectual vertigo. He’d wanted to name the place Mind Fuck, but he would’ve never gotten a liquor license.

Dolores Haze jumped down from Humbert’s lap, nonchalantly floated over to the table, and took their order, standing just four-feet-ten in one sock, repeatedly glancing over her shoulder at Humbert, who was ogling her way too much. It seemed as though she was quietly hoping to escape. “This place gives me the creeps,” Mahogany said, lighting up.

“So,” Cadillac said, “how is it that flowers are able to come up through the concrete like that?”

“People always ask about the flowers,” Mahogany said.

“It’s difficult to explain,” Precious said. “It has to do with the soil here being unpolluted. I mean, unpolluted spiritually.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You don’t have any way to organize the concept in your mind because it’s so new to you,” Precious said. “You’re basically gonna have to learn an entire language before you can understand a word of it.”

“That’s why your little notepad’s still blank,” Mahogany said snidely.

Indeed, Soul City was refusing to be captured by his pen. He could see his book was going to take longer than he’d initially thought.

He asked if there was much crime in Soul City. They said no, very little. Well, OK, there was Hueynewton Payne, Precious’s boyfriend, a seeming one-man crime wave, but he never committed his crimes inside Soul City. They explained that most of the Soulful looked out for their neighbor even when they didn’t know their neighbor’s name. For example, late one night on Mumbo Jumbo Boulevard, Jitterbug Johnson slipped and fell through a window, fell a story, and broke his arm. He landed in front of Spoonbread’s, a twenty-four-hour French brasserie run by Spoonbread Sunraider, who had the seats arranged Parisian style—that is, facing toward the street so patrons could watch the Soul City sidewalk theater. Cool Breeze Blackmon and Audacity Brown were in the middle of a bottle of merlot when Jitterbug met the pavement. Cool Breeze jumped from his seat, snatched off the tablecloth without toppling his glass, and used it to apply a tourniquet to Jitterbug’s bloody arm. Then Spoonbread used his red Rover to race Jitterbug over to the House of Big Mamas. There are no hospitals in Soul City because the House of Big Mamas is filled with mothers, grandmothers, and great-great-great-grandmothers—women experienced in every possible medical contingency. Yes, everyone in Soul City looked out for one another and that’s why nothing ever happened.

That was the public story. In truth, though no one wanted to admit it, the person most critical to maintaining peace and morality in Soul City on a day-to-day basis was triple chinned Ubiquity Jones, master of the terribly timed gossip bomb.

The Soulful tried to keep their noses clean because they all feared Ubiquity Jones and her gossip bombs. Somehow, she always discovered your biggest secret and unveiled your dirtiest laundry in public at the most compromising moment possible. One day a few years back she discovered that Bootsy Jones, the official city gardener, had lost his mind one hot afternoon and enjoyed his eighteen-year-old apprentice, Sera Serendipity, while his wife, Sugarpie Jones, was home chasing after their three children. Well, that certainly wouldn’t do. Ubiquity knew Sugarpie well enough to call her immediately and tell her in private, as a concerned friend would do, but Ubiquity was neither concerned nor a friend. A few months later, at the Day of Flight Festival, Ubiquity laid eyes on Sugarpie and sashayed over, her smile beaming as if a piece of the sun were caught in her teeth, her notorious triple chins bouncing as she honed in. She quietly stood near Sugarpie until a few other women noticed her standing near Sugarpie and, relieved she hadn’t sashayed her chins over to them, surreptitiously planted themselves in her vicinity knowing what was about to be dropped.

“Aft-noon, Mrs. Jones,” Ubiquity said in her fakest sweet voice.

A hello from Ubiquity caused most Soul City women to panic like a trapped rabbit, but Sugarpie refused to surrender her ladylike composure even though she knew a gossip bomb was coming. “Aft-noon, Miss Jones,” she said stoically.

“Ain’t it a shame . . .” Ubiquity said, letting her voice rise so the growing crowd could hear her end on a pregnant pause.

“What’s that, girl?” Sugarpie said, cringing.

“Just the way your husband’s been having little Sera for lunch lately!”

The assembled crowd gasped as one. Sugarpie was shocked silent. Ubiquity considered gasps and shocked silences to be her applause.

“Just tryin to help,” she lied. “Now, how old is that little girl? Sixteen or fourteen?” Ubiquity knew exactly how old Sera was. “Cain’t imagine how hard it must be knowin that while you’re at home playin with your children, your man is out in the streets . . . playin with children.”

Sugarpie, embarrassed in front of lifelong friends, crumbled into hysterical tears.

“Goddam you, Ubiquity!” she garbled. “How do you know?!”

“Oh, chile,” she said, her smile beaming, her three chins bouncing. “Ubiquity is everywhere.”

Sugarpie and Bootsy divorced within a week. They had been married fifteen years.

Now, if you didn’t get your gossip from Ubiquity, you could get it from the Soul City Inquirer, whose twenty-seven men and women made it their business to know everyone else’s business. The Inquirer had photographers and reporters swarming all over town, trying to figure out what everyone was doing, like a ghetto Big Brother. Thanks to them, all but the best-kept secrets flew through Soul City at Internet speed. Of course, the people at the Soul City Inquirer never shared any of their scoops with Ubiquity. They hated her. Everyone in Soul City did. But somehow, despite all that rancor and all the manpower of the Soul City Inquirer, which occasionally rented a helicopter and flew above the city in search of gossip, Ubiquity Jones always had a monopoly on the best dish. They had no idea how she did it. Her secret was quite simple. Ubiquity Jones was a busybody and a mind reader.

She could read women’s minds, but they were complicated places and took more effort. Men’s minds were easy to read. All she had to do was look a man’s way and she could rummage through his mind like a mental pickpocket. Anything salacious she found she saved in her gossip-bomb vault until the worst possible moment.

Just then a few of Lolita’s twenty-four televisions flashed to a news report about the Soul City mayoral race. The Soul City Defender’s latest poll showed that with less than two days to go before the Soulful went to vote, the race remained a dead heat. “Looks like it’s going to be a photo finish in the City of Sound!” the anchor said.

Dolores finally returned with their drinks, but as she placed the glasses on the table, Humbert stood less than an inch behind her, brushing up against her ass. She struggled to place the glasses without spilling.

“I fuckin hate this place,” Mahogany said.

“You chose it,” Precious said. She leaned in to Cadillac. “So, you ever do B?”

B was bliss, the newest drug. It was a brown syrupy liquid that you dropped into your ear. It made you limp and motionless but exponentialized your ability to hear. “It’s like,” Precious said, “you put your body in a coma and you just lay there, can’t move, can’t talk, but you hear amazingly.” There was a tweaked gleam in her eyes and a romantic thrill in her voice. She might’ve been talking about a lover. “You can go inside the music,” she drooled. “It’s like LSD for your ears.” Cadillac was reluctant.

Mahogany said it was a fun way to pass an afternoon sometimes. Precious announced that after they ate they’d go score and then go drop and that was that.

They were hungry and Dolores was nowhere to be found. “Good riddance,” Mahogany said, taking a drag. “I never understood why people cared so much about the little raggedy slut.”

Suddenly, the twenty-four televisions exploded into the self-important Breaking News song and dance. Then Hueynewton Payne’s scarred face flashed on all twenty-four sets at once.

“Your boyfriend’s on TV again,” Mahogany teased.

“Oh shit,” Precious said.

They watched Hueynewton emerge from inside a prison in The City. He was still in handcuffs, but his head was held high and his lips were pursed in a badass smile. Emperor Jones was by his side but shielded his face from the cameras. Hueynewton had been arrested in The City for the fifth time this year, this time charged with armed robbery and aggravated assault, after a daring solo daylight raid on a Kentucky Fried Chicken. He’d made off with a few thousand dollars from the store, seventeen wallets from the frightened customers waiting in line, and three buckets of chicken, which he calmly munched during a six-hour standoff with police. Thanks to some deft string pulling by Emperor Jones, just hours after the standoff ended the charges were dropped and Hueynewton walked right out of prison. When they took off the cuffs, Hueynewton turned to the media mob with the gleam of a crazy in his eyes and called out, “I ain’t want the money or the chicken!” A reporter yelled, “Why’d you do it?” Hueynewton said, “I did it for sport!” Then he disappeared into Emperor’s Satchmomobile and rode back to Soul City.

Hueynewton Payne was born in a tough section of Soul City called Niggatown and grew up on Fuck You Road. He was the great-grandson of Nat Turner, who rampaged through Virginia in 1831, chopping sixty white people into pieces, the bloodiest slave uprising of all time. The urge to be insurgent, to rebel, to revolt was not in the Payne blood—it was their blood. In the Payne house barely a conversation passed without a yell and not an hour went by without a fight because none of them ever had a feeling they felt wasn’t worth fighting for. Hueynewton often found himself brawling with his parents over whether Soul City’s mayor should play more hiphop, whether dinner should be chicken or fish, or who would hold the remote control. The passion they showed for causes small and smaller was topped only by their love for each other. Every fight concluded with a group hug that set everything right until the next fight, which was usually about ten minutes later. For them, fighting was a subset of love: an intense interaction that included high-pitched emotion, abundant physicality, and the opportunity to lose yourself. The Paynes found an ecstasy in confrontation, and though most others in Soul City couldn’t understand the goings-on in their house, every-one knew the Paynes loved each other very much, despite copious evidence to the contrary.

But one night things got a little out of control. In the middle of dinner an argument over who would pass the peas to Hueynewton became a shouting match, then a wrestling match, then the parents Payne were grabbing each other’s throats and squeezing so hard they choked off all oxygen to each other’s brains, ending all conscious thought processing, and two people who normally knew where to stop went rumbling right past the line of no return. They went on squeezing increasingly harder for the better part of an hour, arm muscles bulging, heads turning red, steam shooting from hair follicles, neither willing to give an inch in the deadly blinking contest until, finally, they simultaneously choked the last bit of air out of each other. Both died at the exact same time. When someone arrived to remove the bodies, a crowbar was needed to wrest fingers from throats. Their orphaned son ran away to Whatevaworld in the Land Beyond the Speakers, a place no one in Soul City spoke of, where he lived for eight battle-filled years. If Soul City was the beautiful daughter, Whatevaworld was the horribly retarded son locked away in the closet all his life.

Years ago a small group of young Soul City boys decided they couldn’t stand bedtimes and vegetables any longer and sparked a revolution that led to an entire generation of Soul City boys running away to form their own society a few miles beyond the city limits. It didn’t take long for them to discover that creating an orderly city is extremely difficult, and in short time their world turned into a nightmarish, ravaged Mad Maxian land. Yet every year a few Soul City boys run away to live there, away from grown men or any females at all. It’s a land without intimacy, where survival is savored only by the fittest, fistfighting is constant, and hardcore hiphop booms through the speakers day and night. Hueynewton fit in perfectly.

His first month in Whatevaworld he beat down so many boys so fiercely that the leader ran away and Hueynewton assumed the throne. Leadership meant little in that rogue state, except that when there was food he always got some. Through the years Hueynewton had many long fights and adventures, and his warrior instincts were honed and sharpened until he was as fierce as a wild wolf. But as he grew older he missed the sweetness of soul music. He also realized that the reason there was no one older than twenty-one in Whatevaworld was because in a place run and populated by boys free to do whatever, whenever, it was impossible to last. Whatevaworld was an endless, parentless romp where bedtimes, vegetables, brushing teeth, and playing nice were unheard of. After years of improper nutrition, irregular rest, and seven or eight fistfights a day, either you were killed or your body gave out. So when Hueynewton was eighteen, one afternoon, while everyone was asleep, he snuck out of Whatevaworld and went back to Soul City. The day he came back he immediately became the baddest man in town, Soul City’s human junkyard dog, which, by proxy, made him the only member of the Soul City Army.

It was fortunate that Hueynewton would never commit a crime in Soul City because not only was he unstoppable but there was no one around to try. Soul City hadn’t had a town jail in decades. There was no need. Most everyone was either peaceful or scared of Hueynewton and Ubiquity. There was even confusion over whether or not they still had a sheriff. Doofus Honeywood had been appointed sheriff ninety-eight years ago but had never been called upon to do anything. When people asked him if he was still the sheriff, Honeywood would guffaw and say, “If I am, I’m the last to know.”

Because it was so rarely called upon, few realized that there was indeed a crude justice system in place in Soul City. The last time it was employed was in 1847, when Bottle-Eyed Billy killed Gookie Dawkins.

Them two ex-slaves were in a bar, half-past drunk, when some leftover rancor from their old plantation began to crop up. The shouting got loud, the punches drew blood, then Gookie broke a bottle in half. But that bottle ended up opening his own throat and he died. Nothing like that’d ever happened before and everyone wanted to make certain it never happened again. So the elders convened to consider what the punishment should be. Granmama was there and she said, “The Good Book say an eye for an eye. What that mean to me is: the other boy should fuckin die.” So, a few days later, when it came time to bury Gookie, they put Bottle-Eyed Billy in, too. Thing is, he was still alive. He screamed as they threw the dirt on him, but he was tied to Gookie’s coffin so tight he couldn’t do nothing but scream. His wife tried to save him, but they held her back. Hours after all the dirt had been shoveled on that grave you could still hear him calling out from beneath the ground. After a while the yelling turned to whimpering. Then it just stopped. And no one’s ever done much of anything in Soul City ever since.

They had no sheriff, but they did acknowledge that some outsiders weren’t terribly enamored of Soul City for whatever reason, and someday they might need some sort of army to protect them. Few believed him, but Emperor Jones knew that even if the Devil had Soul City with its back to the ropes, Hueynewton would save them. The Soulful hated the way Hueynewton embarrassed them, made them a national laughingstock sometimes, but Emperor kept telling them that if they wanted Hueynewton as their army they had to tolerate him as their thug. So every time Hueynewton was arrested, Emperor Jones went running to save him. That was the cost of doing business with him.

They had no idea, however, that his latest crime would cost them all a lot more than they’d bargained for. The owner of that particular Kentucky Fried Chicken was the vile, billionaire shampoo tycoon John Jiggaboo. As Hueynewton walked out of jail a free man and Precious shielded her eyes, Jiggaboo was riding through The City in his limo, watching the TV in dropped-jaw shock. “I hate Soul City!” he screamed out, unleashing acid bile that burned a little hole in his stomach. The blonde at his side patted his back. He yelled, “They’re just a bunch of nigger Muppets!”

Jiggaboo Shampoo was the bestselling Black hair product in history. In spite of itself. On every bottle was a picture of a jet-black boy wearing slave rags, his gigantic protruding lips about to bite into a slice of watermelon wider than his head while an overweight, handkerchiefed Aunt Jemima figure stood behind him, gleefully shampooing his pickaninny hair with a dialogue bubble over her head reading, “Jiggaboo make us happy to be nappy!” In the television commercials a pair of actors brought these garish images to life, and though the actors were physically and psychically repulsed by the work, they stayed because they were paid far, far above scale, getting hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. As they reluctantly said their lines, John Jiggaboo himself stood by saying, “Ain’t it better gettin bookoo dollars to be a nigger on TV than gettin jack to be one in real life?”

A cartoon on the side of every bottle chronicled the misadventures of SuperNigger (penned by one Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas), a bumbling pseudo-superhero who always succeeded in screwing up whatever mission he set out to accomplish, tacitly proving the supremacy of the white superheroes. “Look, up in the sky!” the bottle’s side says. “It’s a crow! It’s a bat! No, it’s SuperNigger! Faster than a welfare recipient on check day! Able to leap the projects in a single bound! With X-ray vision that lets him see through everything but whitey!”

There were rumors that the shampoo that made your scalp tingle like no one’s business also had a secret ingredient that made the shampoo addictive and seeped down into your brain and eroded your pride. This urban legend was repeated as often and given as much credibility as the stories that St. Odes malt liquor contained rat piss, Nixon Fried Chicken had an additive designed to sterilize Black men, the government once conducted a forty-year study on the effects of untreated syphilis on Black men in which the government withheld penicillin from the suffering men, and managers at Benny’s were counseled by corporate to refuse to give Black children the free birthday meal the restaurant promised every child. (All of these, by the way, are true.)

But Jiggaboo Shampoo flew off the shelves because the product was actually astoundingly good on all types of Black hair, from Afros to dredlocks to Heaven-sent weaves. The streets called it “Kentucky Fried Chicken for your doo” because there was simply no shampoo that met curls, kinks, and naps of African descent and left them fuller, softer, and smoother. Jiggaboo even worked wonders on hair that was lyed, dyed, and laid to the side. The shampoo was a concoction that included aloe, beer, a dab of heroin, a touch of Kool-Aid, and a bizarre secret ingredient. It came in two types: for Good Hair and for Bad Hair.

Jiggaboo Shampoo was a success in spite of Jiggaboo himself, who made no bones about his contempt for Black people. He was born in Los Angeles, the spawn of a Black Hollywood superstar and a Black Hollywood prostitute. He was adopted by a pair of unemployed white actors who groomed him for the screen, and at age six he made the film that would define his life. In Happy to Be Nappy he played second banana to child star Nimrod Culkin, son of Macaulay Culkin, in a story about, well, who knows. The script was a mess, but basically, Culkin played cute and constantly rescued Jiggaboo, his semiretarded tap-dancing sidekick, a routine so grotesque even Hattie McDaniel turned in her grave. The script was actually written in the 1930s by a Ku Klux Klan grand dragon who shelved it because he felt it over the top. His great-granddaughter, a development executive at Fox, found it, tweaked it, and watched it make $100 million its first weekend. Happy to Be Nappy II and III did such boffo business that Jiggaboo never had to work again. Unfortunately, after years of playing that role, there wasn’t enough money in the world for the amount of therapy needed to unscrew his twisted little head. By age twelve he was taking an antidepressive cocktail every morning and sniffing cocaine every night. His parents tried to reverse his growing self-loathing by getting him into the Hollywood branch of Jack & Jill, but “watching Nigroes trying to act white,” he recalled in his autobiography, The More I Like Flies, “showed me that deep down Blacks just wanna be white.”

Jiggaboo’s personal unctuousness didn’t significantly hurt sales because Black hair is a deeply personal cultural crucible. Faced with a choice between OK shampoo backed by good politics and great shampoo backed by bad politics, thousands of Black folk opted for Jiggaboo Shampoo. Too bad they never knew Jiggaboo never used his own product.

Jiggaboo had never forgiven Soul City for banning him. Hueynewton robbing him and escaping punishment was the last straw. Jiggaboo was a man accustomed to getting whatever he wanted, and now he wanted revenge. He knew just what to do.

 

Cadillac, Mahogany, and Precious were beginning to wonder if their food would ever come. They looked around the restaurant for Dolores Haze, but it appeared she’d slipped away. They asked Holden if he’d seen her around. He said, “If you want to know the truth . . .” Then Humbert ran up, frantic. He cried out, “What has become of the light of my life?” He had no idea where she’d gone, and it was driving him even crazier than he’d already been. “I told her do not talk to strangers!” In the commotion Holden slipped away from the host’s stand. He had something to get off his chest.

Stupid old Potter was always sitting there, acting like he was all earnest and humble or something. He acted so earnest he looked like he had a poker up his ass. But he was such a prostitute. Way more than D.B., and he lives in Hollywood. You never saw a bigger prostitute in all your life. Holden hated fistfights, but the bastard was always in the goddam movies, and if there’s one thing Holden hated it was the movies. God, how he hated old Potter.

Holden walked across the room and socked Potter right in the jaw. The wizard collapsed in a heap on the ground, out cold. Holden stood over him, feeling good for a change. He said, “Goddam phony.” In the commotion Cadillac noticed a young Black man in the corner trying to write, failing to come up with a word. The man looked strangely like him.

“Let’s get outta here,” Cadillac said. “This place is giving me the creeps.”

“It’s like living in a book,” Mahogany said. “Who would wanna live in a book?”

In their haste to get out of Lolita, Cadillac, Mahogany, and Precious failed to notice Ubiquity Jones sitting in the corner all by herself, vacuuming up an entire turkey along with greens, grits, candied yams, black-eyed peas, stuffing, collards cooked with fatback, and a whole peach cobbler pie. She’d been reading Cadillac’s mind since the three walked in and didn’t think it at all proper for Chickadee Sunflower’s oldest child and Dream Negro’s only child to be running around Soul City doing drugs with a trifling reporter from The City who spent most of the meal envisioning himself and Mahogany in all sorts of filthy sexual positions. No, this would not do at all. She filed the news away and went back to her feast, waiting patiently for the moment she would drop her next gossip bomb.