“All you folks think you own my life
But you never made any sacrifice”
-Tracy Chapmen, Crossroads
The Storyteller took the dirt stage, towering and broad, his big head nearly touching the dangling feet of the hundred and one tortured dolls who swung from the elongated tears of the weeping tree.
In the distance moaned the midnight sound snake, preceding the beast that spat it out to journey ahead of its own clattering self, winding through the guts of the world, below the belly of the world, at the Crossroads of the World. If size mattered, the storyteller mattered a might, and he let the listeners know it.
“Listen up ya’all. This nigga true. After I win this night, you will smoke more smoke, drink more drank, look up to ole Otis Bum Lord and say, ‘Shit, before him, shit ‘round here sho stank.’”
Although this was a threat to Reggiemon and his lordship over the fireside camp, the vulture-like man clapped laconically, then reached beneath the folds of his castoff lady quilt of white and rose and produced a bottle—an entire fifth, mind you!—of Crown Royal Canadian whiskey, saying as he tossed it and Otis caught it with big sure hands, “There you goz big brotherz. Since it colds on da world top there some polar bear nectar for youz.”
True to type, Otis did not give thanks, but self-assuredly unscrewed the cap, tossed it aside, downed a mighty cannon shot of the bum’s best friend, kept the bottle to hand like a king holding his crown for all to see, and told his tale in a deep sonorous voice, with somber blood-nighted eyes clouded with hate, a blue-glowing joint of dreaming hanging from the corner of his big meaty mouth…
“Every story have its villain and its hero too. But little do weak-ass storytellers know, that a stage-setter be needed too, and in this case that necessary story facilitating somebody be a cheap dealin’ Jew.”
[Simp grew sad, as he listened to this mean tale, told by the man who mugged him and his boss, Mister Silverstein, way back in the dark-ass day.]
Otis deepened his voice to overpower the sense of reality impinging upon his story of limited imaginativity and yarned on….
“Up over the empty-ass park, way out from the big-ass city, looking down on the skank-ass hood, was the carnival site, the magical place where men laid pipe at night and boys—consigned to the weak-ass light of day—played sports and rode they bike.
“Also, up in that same shit-begotten place were the unpaid business rents. The no-rents was where the hood folk set up they businesses when the carnival not in town; where old Faroe played his cat cards, where little no-fault Pilot washed pimp cars; where the bitch-dressing Faggotsines danced they booty dance; and where one Big-ass Black Baby, not destined to stay up in that joint, was bastard-born and shoved into a shoebox en floated on down the concrete stream to wind up bobbing in the hood casement pond—we’ll get back to that hard-driven brutha, the denied son of Jew-Boy Babble who knock up his cleanin’ lady mamma one day when he come lookin’ for a rent ta be paid. The call go out, find that Black half-Jew Big-ass Baby en adopt his ass out to some Bostonian—but nah, that cleanin’ lady set her son free to float down into the skank-ass hood.
“Which brings us to how God do have certain chose people for setting the earthly stage for his hero, in this case that cleaning-lady-humpin’ developer who go en kick out the no-rent folks who have to now pay ten dollas a day to set up they business at the flea market down in the big-ass city—which we will get to—but for now, his main contribution to the inequity of life were the rising of is vertical church, called the New Man Tabarnacle Church, where sissy white folks sang long into the night while Black as Night en Full of Right Orphan Baby, having been rescued by the bald-headed mayor of the big-ass city, waitin’ for his might!”
Otis punctuated his last line with a flex of his massive bicep, took a swig of Crown Royal, and apologized to his befuddled audience, “Sorry ya’ll, getting’ ahead of the story the hero so compelling, even in his baby chair.
“So, how it go, is that Jew-boy Babble set up his high rise on the old cursed carnival ground, where he laid that little pipe on that big mamma making this big-ass monster vengeance-filled baby, soon to turn into an ass-whooping man—chump-smashin’ hand like this en all, even in the cradle.”
Having lost his place in the story, it seemed, as he one-handed whiskey shadowboxed mightily for a few seconds, Otis took another drink and then seemed to remember the point of his story, even as he sucked greedily on that undiminished blue flame joint that caused his pupils to fill near his entire eyeball whenever he sucked on it.
With a mighty exhalation he intoned in his deep voice, “Nikodemos was the niցցer’s name, brother of Jacob, who got his leg broke wrastlin’ some big-ass white-boy up in the hillbilly lands en who lost his good govoment fire-fightin’ job, when he could no longer climb his secret ladder, which got him into attics to save hood children before they got all burned up screaming like bitches on foodstamp day. Well, that niցցer adopt that Big-ass Black Bastard Baby en take him to the market at the base of Jew-Boy Babble’s Vertical Church—not a church at all, but a office building with a faɡɡot white church on top en show the Baby—smart-ass nigga even at dis young-ass age—all of the fucked–up peoples Jew-Boy Babble be renting to: Koreans cooking up dogs stole from the hood en feedin’ them to they own owners; Japanese killing Barney the Purple Faggot Whale and selling his gay ass on TV, Mexicans, buying up every blade of grass to be cut, Little Chinese midgets with flat asses eating up neighborhood cats on a stick, them tiny Vietnamese bitches taking over Big-ass Mamma’s Jew-pipe-laid-ass hair salon and kicking her out on the street, and the mind-eating Arab motherfuckers buying everything en stealing up all the towels from the YMCA to wear on dey heads so a Big-ass Black Bastard Baby—‘come a Big-ass Boy now—got to dry his big black ass off with a paper towel from the Taco Bell bathroom—which Spanish shit is up in that Jew-Boy high rise too!
“So—what’s-his-fame—a, Nickle-damus, he say to Big-ass Black Boy—who done growed so fast like that that he wearin’ the baby carriage on his ass as shorts and walkin’ around shoving niggas out a day way—his smartass says, ‘Ya see Big-ass Black Boy, this Jew done rented this shit out to folks speaking a hundred languages, more languages than God ever intended in his infinity of wisdom, and that’s why we call his ass ‘Babble,’ ‘cause he got the whole world to babblin’!’”
Otis stopped and took another swig—which would have been a gulp to anyone else—and declared, “This shit is good, mighty good!”
Then, sucking on the still undiminished blue flame joint, he regarded the vulture-like countenance of Reggiemon Thom through the blue flames of the burn-barrel, which likewise did not ever seem to diminish—and said, ‘I got your story, Niցցer, got it right here—Whitey Know-it-All comin’ right up, then you’ll be relinquishing that couch-throne of yours.”
