This is my best recollection of a phone call I had while coughing feverishly at a dining room table at twilight just an hour ago. You can ask Carbon Mike if I got it right
link › futureradio.com
, or net or org, I forget and I’m offline.PJ: Hello.
CM: Jimmy—are you okay? You sound under the weather.
PJ: Saw you called me. Sorry I didn’t call back—been feeling poorly.
CM: Where are you?
PJ: Portland.
CM: Shoot, you’re in Oregon? You had me there for a moment thinking you were sick. You’re out there abusing some sista no doubt.
PJ: You have me there, sir. Apparently there is a limit to how many times one can shout, “Who’s your Daddy,” before going hoarse.
CM: You been watching any news?
PJ: No—there could have been a nuclear exchange for all I know.
CM: Okay, well I’ve been dying to get your spin on this. There was supposedly a lynching of this gay, sissy black actor who stars on some show called Empire, by two Trump supporters.
PJ: We’d never send a two-man team into Chicago by night. You realize that the only reason why they have 5,000 shot and but 500 killed a years is because their shooting at black fellas by night. Two of us glow-in-the-darks wouldn’t last ten minutes out there.
CM: Well, anyways, he said there was two of these MAGA lynchers who attacked him.
PJ: In his defense, he just thought it was two of us. I was all over his ass—I’m surprised he didn’t think I was three Mexicans.
CM: I see, brother, this is how you devils do, try to get a man distracted, so I’m holding your feet to the fire. As it turns out, this idiot hires two Nigerians to play the lynchers and they use clothesline and loop it around like it’s some lighting cord or something.
PJ: In their defense, it is outside of the cultural skill set. If you need something done right you need to go white.
CM: Speaking of which, this dumbass pays with a check, occupies 12 Chicago PD detectives for days—who should have been doing real police work—and is getting charged with filing a false police report, which leads me to suspect that his sweet little ass wants to go in the Booty House [prison].
PJ: Look at it this way. He might have saved 6 brothers from being slapped with murder charges.
CM: Always looking at the bright side—that’s what I don’t trust about you. So, this lynching in Chicago BS goes viral and a bunch of us on the Dark Web—
PJ: The Dark Web? You’re kidding me, right?
CM: Yes, the Dark Web.
PJ: Seriously, you’re going to take credit for the internet too? I thought Al Gore invented that shit and now you’re suggesting it was a bunch of Hoteps?
CM: No, Jimmy, I’m not saying my people invented the internet but that a bunch of us Right-thinking black men who don’t think we should be represented by sissies, called that shit out. These Lefties are deleting tweets and everything, stepping back from that shit. We ain’t taking that from you—you know some whiteboy in Flyover Country started the Internet while he was cooking up meth in his trailer.
PJ: Okay, so what do you need from me on this?
CM: What I’m calling your ass to task for is that what have things come to, while you are living in a tent this black sissy is making 20,000 and change per an episode for cracking the odd lame joke and mouthing some hip hop platitudes. And if that’s not enough, when a brother needs to fake his own lynching he needs to hire some Nigerians! Brotherman, your White Supremacy is slipping!
PJ: You know, my Opaque friend, it’s not easy scaling that lofty edifice of White Privilege every morning. And then, after you’ve been satisfied for decades that your boot-heel is formerly placed on the collective neck of the savage races, you discover that they’re signing your paycheck.
CM: Jimmy, is that all you have to say for yourself. Quite honestly, I’m disappointed in you.
PJ: Believe me, Carbon Mike, I know how you fell—or, can at least extrapolate, from the turret of my Tower of Power what it must be like for you, standing down there before your grass hut among the jabbering multitudes, looking upward and whitely for guidance, and to see your shining beacon of inspiration sunken in a funk—catching a tan even.
CM: Brother, you’re hurting me out here. I hope you’re not saying this shit in public.
PJ: Naw, I’m looking for that no-account negro, Stevedore Jackson, my literary slave. Shoot, he’s a hundred and twenty-two and I can’t keep track of his old ass. How am I supposed to play God for the rest of you?
CM: Now, that shit right there, that might get you a noose swinging on the branch next to mine.
PJ: Well, not exactly next to—I’m sure there’s some branches on the backend of that unnatural tree…
CM: That’s how you devils do!
Masculine Axis: A Meditation on Manhood and Heroism
Take Me To Your Breeder: Letters from an Extraterrestrial Anthropologist
