Troubledoor Radio Sedan, sole proprietor and driver, Dean “Heavy Fez” Carson
“Yet, as I read,
soon growing less severe,
I liked his project,
the success did fear.”
-Andrew Marvel, 1668, on John Milton’s Paradise Lost
…
It took some getting used to for a rural black man up from Oklahoma come to make his dime running a reference sedan in a to-hell-and-gone and-ain’t-come back city. Portland was not right in the head. He had heard of this niche opportunity from a hobo at the Cattle Yards during the horse auction last year who had told him that the crackheads and thugs and Ubers had run out the regular cab businesses.
Heavy Fez, as he preferred to be known, was a strict Black Muslim, who knew that what white folks would pay high dollar for was a straight-up and honest get-things-done kind of black man, that would protect them from the pork-eating negroes and at the very same time permit those guilty so-called “whites” to feel like they were not racist and were alright.
Heavy Fez kept issues of The Final Call paper on the passenger seat to sell. But he did not belittle himself to traffic in no bean pies, as much as he might like them. When he ordered a box, he ate them himself and had rightfully earned his proud moniker.
There was something about the tall old Blue-Eyed Devil—and that he was! Heavy Fez had seen that cat, striding along like a champion, like as fast as regular people jogged. Dude looked a hundred if a day, like an actual Methusalla. Carrying a full pack and yet having a cane, it was a certainty that this cat would make an interesting passenger. He had, over this last year, picked up, driven around and dumped off an army of stupid, muddle-headed, drunk, drugged-up and mentally messed-up, to include sexually fucked-up [literally fucked-up] Godless white folk. It was enough to make a man’s head spin.
He would normally eye ball a ride he didn’t know and decide between Jericho Green, Jesse Lee Peterson or NPR—usually NPR—in order to sooth his soft devil cargo and to keep from having to talk to these zeroes. But this man, this fellow that looked like he’d eat the Gordon’s Fisherman himself—face first—rather than the actual fish fillets, this man, would call for no thought insertion media to keep him calm or awake as the case may be.
Heavy Fez drove up to the man, who was getting good and rained on, rolled down the passenger side window and yelled, “Old School, get in—the ride is free!”
The man stopped, considered, talked over his shoulder, and nodded ‘Yes.’ Stepping to the curb, taking off that mighty ruck sack and slinging it in to the back seat with one hand, not letting go the vehicle with the other hand so his stuff could not just be roll took, the man was an old hobo hand for sure true. Then, as the over tall man had to twist to get in the back of his Ford F-250 Diesel—which made folks feel so safe driving in and out of Portland and around tweaker camps, Heavy Fez got a chill up his neck. This dude was so tall that he did not have to step up, and his shoulders were so broad he had to turn sideways.
“Thank ye,” piano-like said the man, as the scent of rum came to him.
He returned, “Praise be to Allah most high, and Peace be Upon the name of Mohamed, His Prophet.”
“Sustained, friend of Far Araby,” rumbled the man in a kind of British but also hillbilly accent.
“Sir, Allah demands of Heavy Fez—that’s me—that I deliver an act of kindness each and every day among those who do not yet reside in The House of Islam.”
The man chimed right in, “On behalf of The Damned, our ken, we commend thee.”
That was said with such candid authority that Heavy Fez refused to meet those bloody, blue eyes directly and returned to the normal sedan mode of talking through the rear view mirror.
The man looked away as if seeking something in the dark and snarled, “I seek three certain dens of debouched iniquity, to seek of a peddler in flesh, to apply not man’s law, but HIS WILL to such deeds set there.”
He was off driving, “You are a godly man then, a Christian?”
“Not so good a Christian as ye be a Mohamedan—rather ‘ave I tainted the name. Yet I serve HE ALMIGHTY who cursed me with vagabondry. I be oathed o’ a nabbed lass.”
‘What a cool cat he is,’ mused Heavy Fez as he veered around a bicyclist with a wheeled baby cart in tow.
“Yes, Mister Quartermaine,” said the man, in a tone that indicating that he was speaking to a third person.
‘Shit just went from interesting to terrifying in a second!’
“Never fear, kind Coachman. My associate, Mister Quartermaine, wishes me to compliment your Cap of Morocco. He rides within this sea-bag o’ mine as do I ride upon heavy seas o’ Time.”
So saying, the man lifted the top of the rucksack and a little brown hand waved to him and a voice that sounded Haitian, but with as much Jamaican in it, sang out, “Wonderful good man of fair fine hat, unhandy of height I am. Master Cain carries me about upon his quest of recompence.”
“What da fuuu…” ‘Allah give me strength!’
Then, a black midget with a bad-ass tight Afro, that had been cut and wove into a fez with a tassel of kinky curl, popped his head out of the ruck and smiled to the mirror, “See, Heavy Fez, brothers we, great big you, wee me.”
The tall white man called Cain did not even look alive at this moment, rather sat stiff like a corpse, the whites of his eyes rolled back into his head to show silvery in the sockets, rather than white in the dusky cab soft lit by his devil-soothing running lights, lights that enabled him to see what folks were doing back there at night.
“Yo, Quartermaine—your friend don’t look too good.”
The midget then but his chin on his little hands and frowned back up to his side at the now frozen giant, scary, white man—who was not so-called white, but the real ghost deal, “Woe is he, too much rum. I shall fix him, for I am no his friend, but he doctor. He carry me by pay, legs so weak have me, lungs so rattle squeak has he.”
‘Wow, what a ride! Just in case that rich pink-haired faɡɡot I just dropped off aspirated some drugs in here, I might as well go with it.’
“What can I do for your friend, Mister Quartermaine?”
The dark midget with the big eyes had a silvery eye glued to his forehead, which to Fez looked so Jew-like that the Black Isrаelite in him wanted to slap hands and the Farrakhan in him wanted to bail out before the IDF assassins fell out of the sky. But there was an easy, compassionate, childlike quality to how the midget looked up at the giant. So that Dean’s original boyhood heart of gold went out and above and beyond all of his adopted faiths and suspicions.
Quartermaine frowned, “He afflicted with Whiteman disease of extreme—must be good guy, fight bad guy, though he bad to the bitter bone shed. These wee hands can only mend so many broken bands. Me wee still can only make so much swill. You see, what keeps Cain alive is he will—He The Seeker Supreme! No captain seen so much da Maine!”
‘Chocolate Hitler in a box!’
“So, so, your friend, what’s the places he needs to go, he has three joints—but I’m only down for one. You give me the names, I’ll work it out and set you on the downhill, so you got the direct downhill path.”
“Yaaz… Good aboy, Dean ye be. Ye set me to cemetery near to Captain Cain’s hero pier, so I seek me friend’s o’ past year—then we are un-offended and we Fez fences all mended!”
The Midget then pulled the ruck sack shut overhead and, like that, the big, scary-ass, knob-shouldered whiteman, who seemed all but a corpse, the silvery backs of those eyes rolled in and those blue devil eyes looked through the mirror into him. The whites of the eyes now yellow and shot with red, the chin set like a castle on a mountain, the tone like as one a piano and an organ, and below a dead-pan bell of iron tolled, approximating a voice, “Agreed, Mister Quartermaine, a good man is he, our boon Coachman what took us from the wicked lee.”
‘Yep, I’m fuckin’ high as a Portland kite. Homeboy probably left enough magic mushrooms scattered in the back seat to keep these motherfuckers with me for at least a week!’ [1]
“Well rhymed, says I!” barked the giant, as if he were a forklift trying to laugh.
“I seek yon sooty jabber nabbers o’ a fair forlorn lass, to search thrive vile dens: Devil’s Point, Private Adult Entertainment—across same alley I be told—as well a libertine dungeon so known as Velvet Rope.”
“Gotchyou Old School, Foster-Powell. Thirty blocks out is Lincoln Memorial Cemetery—generally closed at dark.”
“A shadow fears not the dark as a goodwife fears not her home,” intoned the man, like a cast iron skillet that talked.
‘Allah protect me!’ prayed Dean.
“Blessed be thee Samaritan o’ Araby,” rumbled the giant devil like he were made of iron.
…
Remote Viewing Note
-1. Reflected observations projected into the remote viewing field by Drake or Pewter Eye naturally include the inner thoughts of the mesmerized human lens.
Concerning the Chapter Title
A hack is an unlicensed cab or sedan driver as known Back East, by Dean’s cousin, Jewels, who related that such sovereign drivers were once also named “gypsy cab drivers,” from Atlanta to New York.
