“I look to the left I look to the right

There’re hands that grab me on every side

All the reasons why I live my life.”

-Tracey Chapman, Crossroads

Otis Jackson was good and drunk now. It had taken booze enough to kill a normal man, but the deed had been done. Standing on wide-braced legs, Otis sucked in his five-gallon gut, expanded his barrel-sized chest and flexed his big cannonball biceps to Simp’s approval, as the little gap-toothed fellow felt better now about having been mugged way back in the dark-ass day by this monster man. And the story surged on, like a flood, the menacing man transformed to a motor-mouth to beat the band:

“Ole Jew-Boy Babble look down from his vertical church, up in the big play pen of a house he got, with hot bitches, ass-kissing snitches, and mean muthafucas gives snitchin’ rats stitches!”

Simp was now on his feet applauding, Otis—now stone drunk—finally getting a little poetic, and, in his own rude way, adding something to the art of it all.

Reggiemon Thom sat, squatting like a stick-figure gargoyle under the castoff lady blanket of rose and white, his black matt of grease-solidified and soot-stained hair somehow not befouling that incongruent garment.

Otis, in a frenzy of creationictivity then reached down for the still piping hot dream tea brewed by Reggiemon—which should have been cold by now—and swigged it gustily. Once his mouth was dripping with the steaming stuff he took the undiminished blue-flame joint from his mouth—where a black groove seemed permanently in place—tossed it before his face, and then licked out his tong and slurped it down like some car insurance lizard. The eyes of Otis Jackson were now naught but glassy black orbs with a mere rim of white around the outside as he stood with palms outstretched and bellowed now his story into the blackly weeping devil-doll-hung night.

“Babble was goin’ ta populate that deserted real estate, people it with debtors that owed his white ass. He had his Faggotstines garrisoning that bitch, walkin’ the streets, laying down the unjust laws, on every valuable that were not nailed down, fell their unjust paws!”

Simp was on his feet again, applauding, encouraging Otis, “Rap on, Big Brutha, rap on!”

Otis, in apparent ecstasy, then made his muscles ripple under his sweatshirt, sucking in the gut once again, and sang:

“Up from the ghetto strutted

A man who like ta fight,

Up-standing, powerful and rugged,

A picture of black right,

Ten feet tall, on legs like trees he trudged,

The menace that do incite whitey to flight!

Half African and half Jew, all men be mugged

When this muthafuca come at night

Unda a crown a braided hair horny bitches tugged

While he’s layin; that mighty pipe—

Cause he’s Black IsrаelMight!”

Simp was dancing and clapping in time to the rising tempo of the tale to beat all tales, not a bit upset that his story now paled by comparison, as a natural follower was he. Otis, sensing this, reached out one long arm, dragging the little gap-toothed fellow uder his arm, gave the top of his head a rub, and continued., “Black IsrаelMight set things right, bitch slappin’ dem Faggotstinians—‘cause dem bitches be morphin’, a spear one day an RPG da next—whoopin’ a army of Arab motherfuckers with a camel skull, keeping his friends tight, mackin’ hos into the night, Jew-Boy Babble a cringin’ up in his—spenthouse!”

Grinning with self-satisfaction in having found his lifelong buried muse, Otis set Simp back on the red couch—which was merely a pretext to take Simp’s half-drunk forty of malt liquor—and then pirouetted back onto his dirt stage, a stage he now owned outright, a fact he used to tone his narrative down to a deep whisper—as if a diesel truck could whisper—for the final stretch:

“Then came Bootylilah, fine like silk chocolate, slick like fine liquor, a hair-braiding bitch come dancin’ up out a Ethiopia, finest bitch Black IsrаelMight eva seen—hair like a chink bitch, tits like a fat white bitch, belly like Bruce Lee, and a butt like a Negro-Hawaiian gymnast! Little do he know, dat bitch who braidin’ his hair—which was the source of his power, why to dis day smelly island motherfuckers let their shit hang and get all nasty—is a hair witch who see the titanium strands of his shit and conspire to take it, weaving a suit of armor-all for his enemy. She says to all dem other bitches up in dat salon, ‘Get on out now, Black IsrаelMight needs to lay some pipe, en I need room to shout!’

“And so they goes. And since our hero’s weakness is pussy, Bootylilah takes advantage of that en while he think he taxin’ that ass, he being taxed and fall on off to sleep. He wake up without a titanium hair on his head, and what worse, Jew-Boy Babble’s pure all-white spiteful child—making that white-nigger his half brother—is dropping hair straightener in his eyes and blinding him!

“That should have been the end of Black IsrаelMight, but Ole Babble like to torment folks and boast too about how big his enemy was. So, once a year, at Kwansa-for-queers, he had Black IsrаelMight led forth in chains, the whole world feasting eyes on his many terrible pains. After eight years, little did Babble know his term was up! On that night, when Black IsrаelMight was paraded before the street lights at the base of Babble’s Hollerin Tower of Unjust Power, he felt, to each side, a pillar, and, being a smart niցցer and having remembered his trickonometry from school, calculated how he needed to push just so to bring all that shit down on those rich faɡɡot bitches, and he did, smashing the news crews and all, and that’s why you never hear about Hollerween and hear Halloween instead, ‘cause Big Mamma come to say a prayer over her boy and the heap of mashed up faɡɡots, and hallowed that shit like a military graveyard on a Confederate lawn.”

Otis then stopped, glared at Reggiemon, and sneered, “Beat that, niցցer,” and slunk over to his couch, where he finished drinking Simp’s malt with unseemly, and unconcealed, relish.

Simp, for his part, applauded the performance and then took a seat and sipped on his dream tea.

All eyes now fell on the vulture-like countenance of Reggiemon Thom, squatting like some great black, hairy spider on the black leather throne couch, which he had been assured would be taken from him by force before the midnight moon rose high in the night sky.