“Trophy, trophy in my jar,
“Who be da baddest bitch,
By far?”
He was waking from deep nightmare, a place where he had been weak and helpless, beaten into the dust by the black hounds of The Man.
The strange, somewhat feminine, voice came again echoing softly in the flickering candlelight of some dungeon-like place.
“When dis shit gets raw,
What an old brutha needs,
Is a bitch ta beat all!”
The scent of feminine breath, mixed with some sissy white man’s idea of an aftershave, assaulted his nose, even as his place of rest—was this the Hall of Disillusion he had fallen into for his sins—came blurrily into focus about him.
He was in a row house basement, air conditioned, windows and doors entirely blocked out so that one knew not whether it were day or night. He lay on a real bed mattress. Walls were lined with makeshift shelves made of blocks, crates and boards. Upon a shelf to his left was an odd collection of books, including the version of the Koran that Usef Ali gave to graduating students. On the shelf to his right loomed a collection of canning jars, in which floated various things: a rat, a penis, an ear, a set of dentures, a finger, and two sets of male human scrotums of the African American kind!
His eyes must have bugged out for he/she who was his captor snorted, smacked lips, and drawled, “Piss Pants and Dukee Drawers, in the flesh Akbar."
The figure had been kneeling down next to him on the bed and now stood. He could see that this was a female of the newly ascendant dyke sort, who dressed like a male hoodlum and bound her breasts close under her double t-shirts, and shaved her head.
He looked up at this apparition from his pained state and croaked, hoarsely, “So Kismet sends not her headsman, but comes in the flesh to torment the damned captive soul she holds in her grasp—in her dungeon!”
The girl—for she could not have been past 20 years—recoiled, offended. “Shit nigga, its all a homeless bitch can afford who ain’t sellin’ her ass ta da govoment. ‘Sides yo ain’t damned, just got caught getting’ old en checkin’ you one o’clock when yo should have been mule kickin’ dat six o’clock. I seen dat skanky shankin’ in da alley and got me some justice—got you some justice, en I been hidin’ yo beat ass down hea in da girl cave ta save yo rep, and also ‘cause, dough I might be able to whoop a big nigga’s ass, I ain’t Black Spidaman, able to haul yo big black ass up dat crumbledown wall—you feel me, Yo?”
“I do not feel you, and I am not a yo, nor am I known as Yo.”
“Oh, I know who you is, Mister Akbar Qama, even dough you foget a girl affer she ‘comes a woman. I graduated two years pass—been skulkin’ on you, studyin’ your way, learnin’ how ta go it alone, ever since you refused me—you high en mighty man!”
“You have air-conditioning?”
“I ain’t no sweaty-ass man. I tap into da line down da way, got me a window joint fo fitty bucks.”
His head was pounding from the effort to lift it. She was now sulking like a girl and he felt like a heel. Raising himself up at the waist, despite aching kidneys and a snapped rib or two, he spoke over the sound of his own shoulder popping in protest.
“I am sorry, child, that I don’t recall your name. I see the Koran. You are one of ours. Why then not go to the Mothers for their guidance.”
She now turned on him in a hurt fury, grabbing his wrists with man-strong hands as her admittedly homely face scrunched into pain and squeezed out tears across her brown cheeks. Her voice was aquiver with pain, the pain of not belonging, of not having a place. “Because them old biddies told me to see you, after finding out what I was, and understanding. En you told me to go on my way and be a lady—well look at dis lady!”
She stood up and flexed a muscle that would have made him proud to see it on a son, and punched herself in the nose with that vey fist, snarling down at him, “No sense in tellin’ you who I was, da little girl whose name you never even knew, the little girl who you would not let box ‘cause it fo da boys. Well Supa Nigga, they call this here Lesbo Jones now—en dis wicked bitch done ripped the junk off a dose two dat was stompin’ you into the dust.”
She then grabbed a pair of monkey wrench pliers from between the two jars of red-tinted vinegar in which floated a pair of human testicles each, and tossed it into his chest with a thud—a thud that hurt and made him wince.
Her voice was now filled with the hurt venom of womankind, “I could ‘ave set my rep on this shit, but ruined yours at the same time. Imagine dat shit, da Great Knife beat by two winos and saved by a ugly lesbo bitch! No, Akbar Qama did them niցցers true, en den went on a Dervish vision quest to pray to Mecca from some redneck mountain smeared in the blood of his heathen white enemies—he’ll be back, as soon as his old ass can crawl trough da window a dat retarded joint of a tree house. En den, he’ll do what right by Lesbo Jones, en train her to fight, so she don’t need to be brainin’ niggas wit a monkey wrench—shit is unseemly, you know.”
A true woman—and still a child—despite her masculine affectations, the girl was now sobbing in a crouch on the flour between the bed she had put him in and the jars she had locked away his enemies' filthy souls within. A deep sense of shame washed over him like all the locusts crawling up out of Egypt. There was a hollow sense in his head, and he knew this to mean that he would never be the same again, never as sharp, never again the unbreakable man that had tormented Tillman for 10 rounds.
And there before him was a child of his people who he had somehow failed, and even worse, had retained no recollection of, crying before him, stuck somewhere in a hell halfway between girl and man—which was a mad limitless gulf indeed.
His booted feet hit the neatly swept concrete floor as his hands grabbed her by her cannonball shoulders and raised her up forcefully, though it caused a cartilage in his rib to click and a torn muscle to bleed anew. He was once again pitilessly in command of his own inadequate body, no longer at its failing mercy. He stood straight and stern, the minor pains, and breaks and tears merely the tatters that hung from a rusting tool, a tool that still had a few sure strokes left in it.
He then gave her the stern look that it seems she must have come looking to him for, and again he felt shame for not remembering her. It seemed that half of the girls from the class had asked for his boxing attention after graduation, and he had refused them all. The trend, of girls wanting to box, had troubled him and he had put it out of his mind often. Perhaps this was why he had agreed to coach that poor woman’s now raped girl.
It seemed now that his sins were coming full circle, in disquieting harmony, to call him to account for deeds undone.
The deep timbre of his voice had returned. “As much as I am against women fighting, it does seem that God had rough work in mind when he fashioned you. I owe you a warrior’s debt, and I will not skulk in this basement like some snail in his shell awaiting the French chef to present him to Whitey. I just need to know, Child, are there two wino bodies out in those streets with my name on them?”
She sniffled, gathered herself, and looked him in the eye. “I left dem dey dicks en told dem dey could keep dem so long as dey told the Peeps dat Akbar snatched dey junk, en told the popo dat some white faɡɡots in a van done it. I seen a white faɡɡot in a van recently en jus’ thought of that.”
He looked into her ebony eyes, glistening with equal measures of pain and hope, and felt the connection, felt like he could have been a father after all, and perhaps should begin acting like one, for Atonement’s sake.
“The ‘deys en dems’ must go, woman. You must speak like a human, not as a slave parodying his master's speech with crude jargon.”
She nodded, half whimpering and biting that quivering lip shut.
“How long have I been here? How long—in total, have I been lost to the world?”
“You was laid up in yo brick treehouse fo two days, en I’ve had you down here fo one—you been a gone nigga fo three days. They say it was boxing with the White Devil, the man who came to town in his suit looking for a soul to steal.”
This set a flame to his brain and he bristled, causing her to wince in surprise at the strength of his fingers as they dug into her big boy shoulders, the fingers that he had slammed into a door frame for these past thirty years, and had yet to set to their appointed task.
“What time is it, in this dungeon of yours?”
“Five-fotty-five.”
“Where?”
“I live six doors down—been lurkin’ on your Mister ‘Nobody-follow-me’ ass fo a year.”
As she so said, the white devil cat, that had ever vexed him for these past three years, came a creeping along the shelf top, eying him with evil intent.
“When pigs fly!” he exclaimed.
The lost girl, who called herself Lesbo Jones, then chuckled, “Where you been, Old School? Them pig bitches been flyin’ since I was a shorty. I adopted Princess last month—figured on freaking you out when I saw how scared you was of her—I’ll keep dat—oops, that—shit a secret, along with that wino-whooping.”
He stopped and considered, then asked out of both shame and need, “You have stage-managed my myth since the point of its unmasking at those rude iniquitous hands. Shall I make a public entrance during class, through the schoolroom door, or should I return to my abode and appear in Usef’s chamber?”
“Old School, you like to fall to yo death creeping across da windowsills just yet. Show up like Moses after trippin' on that burnin’ bush.”
He then noticed, to his shame, that he had laid on this child’s well-kept bed in alley-dusted blood-caked sweats and boots, and that he was nowhere near dehydrated—had been well cared for.
He patted her on the shoulder and said, “You begin as the trainer, managing the equipment and keeping the fighters hydrated. You’ve done a good enough job with me. Show up every night—without fail—at six. Tonight make it seven to ally suspicion. I will train you after the regular session.”
She clinched her jaw, trying not to shed another tear, and quipped, “Straight back from here. Pull the tarp back over the doorway. Lesbo Jones don’t play no mosquito shit.”
His eyes suffered and rejoiced at the same time, to be under the harsh gaze of the burning sun. He pulled the tar-papered awning closed behind him to appease the sense of propriety held by this feral woman-child and emerged into a weed-grown ruin of a yard, a world away and yet a mere block down the alley from his very opposite refuge. He felt reborn—haggard, beaten, chewed-up and spit-out—but reborn, with a harder edge to strike back at the Evil World of Men.
