The Man Who Cried I Am (2 page)

In his memories we see many recognizable characters with different names. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Richard Wright, JFK, and many others. These semi-fictionalized characters are enthralling but they pale next to the story that unfolds.

The first section of the book burrows in the gut like the cancer afflicting Reddick. It turns over a fertile soil in which he is destined to sow his final seed.

This beginning is an ode to Death, a delirium of a bitter man's last days. There's no sugar coating, no
Good Negro
. This is a story about a man facing a monumental enemy—his own mortality in a world that conspires against him.

The story is delivered in a Bebop tempo with complex intertwining themes that would challenge Charlie Parker's improvisational skills.

One of the most enthralling aspects of the novel is that it moves exactly as a fictive narrative should: a swirling whirlpool in descending cycles, a conically flowing river of thought realized in ever-changing parallels.

Reminiscent of
Moby Dick
the narrative voice is elusive. It has all the earmarks of a classic first-person narrative delivered almost tongue-in-cheek in the third-person voice. But at times the thread of the story turns away from Max to delve into the private lives of separate characters and situations.

The cry of this novel does not only echo through our past. In a way it is a visionary story predicting through its cracked prism the Patriot Act and the neo-con plan to control natural resources from the Middle East to India. I can imagine that many a moderate reader would have felt the fever of paranoia upon reading this book in the late sixties. But today even the most conservative American might be ready to consider the thriller-like conspiracy that Max uncovers at the end.

This novel cannot be contained inside of an introduction or even a single reading. From the first page there is the urgency of a man who has never had enough time, of an afflicted people who stood in the waiting room until they expired and were replaced by their children's children's children. You feel Max's frustration and turn the pages impatiently wanting to know that he will find success or love or at least a moment's respite. When he's a fool you curse him and when he's wronged you remember your own circumstances. And when you get to the end you begin rereading sentences and paragraphs to make sure that you understand exactly how these final moments play out. But then you realize that there was another level to the book, another novel buried inside the vignettes and subplots. Another story was unfolding while the bittersweet pain of Max and his friends took the limelight.

At some point you realize that Max was not a victim but a hero. His life was not as he experienced it. He never found what the foreign (master's) tongue articulated as happiness but he lived a magnificent (even epic) existence. Fate, I finally found myself believing, conspired to make Max's greatness. He lived in interesting times and navigated through them. He lived to the fullest even in the last moments of his life.

Who but a Homeric hero could make such a claim?

The canvas for this novel is the history of America, and much of the west, painted over by John A. Williams in economic strokes—like a kind of graffiti. The president holding out a hand in welcome has a rude pistol pasted onto his fingers. The
Good Negro
bowing in front of his mistress is hiding an erection while glancing furtively at a landscape that is being rained upon by droplets of blood. Peasants are freed by genocidal armies and Africa eats its own flesh under the table of European conquest.

These templates, placed upon a history we thought we knew, are disturbing and, once exhibited, they take their place in the mind next to Max's cancer. We become aware of the possibility for corruption under the veil of lies placed upon us by the maneuverings prompted by madness and greed.

The indictment was true in the year it was published, it is true today, and a thousand years from now, when America has another name and is peopled by technologically enhanced mutants that combine the attributes from a hundred species, it will still be a document extolling the best and worst characteristics of humanity.

Part  One

1

AMSTERDAM

It was a late afternoon in the middle of May and Max Reddick was sitting in an outdoor cafe on the Leidseplein toying with a Pernod. The factories and shops were closing and traffic streamed from Leidsestraat onto the Plein. There were many bicycle riders. Through eyes that had been half glazed over for several days with alcohol, Librium and morphine, Max looked appreciatively at the female cyclists. The men were so average. He quickly dismissed them. The girls were something else again, big-legged and big-buttocked. (Very much like African women, Max thought.) They pedaled past, their chins held high, their knees promising for fractions of seconds only, a flash of white above the stockingtops and then, the view imminent, the knees rushed up and obscured all view. Once in a while Max would see a girl pedaling saucily, not caring if her knees blocked out the sights above or not. Max would think: Go, baby!

The cafe was empty. That was a good sign. It meant that the people Max used to know in Amsterdam, the painters, writers and sculptors, the composers and song-and-dance men who were the year-round Black Peters for the Dutch, the jazzmen, were working well. They would be out later and drink Genever or beer until they became high, wanted to talk about their work or go make love. Maybe they would go up to the Kring, if they were members or honored guests, and play four-ball billiards while eating fresh herring. It was time for the fresh herring, the green herring.

Max glanced at the sky. God! he thought. It was like a clear high-noon sky in New York. No night would appear here until nine, but daybreak would come galloping up at close to three in the morning. He finished his Pernod and twisted to find the waiter, raising his hand at the same time. He felt something
squish
as he moved, and the meaning of the feeling caught at his voice. “
Ober,
” he said, then more loudly, “
Ober.
” The waiter, clad in a red jacket, black tie and black pants looked up with a smile. This was a new face, a new American. A little older than many others, and a sick look about him at that! Painter, writer, sculptor, jazz musician, dancer …?

“Pernod,” Max said. The waiter nodded and retreated to the bar. Max felt a sharp, gouging pain and he gripped his glass tightly. Water came to his eyes and he felt sweat pop out on his forehead. “Goddamn,” he whispered. When the pain subsided, he rose and went to the men's room inside the cafe.

When he came out he noticed that the fresh Pernod was already on his table and he said “
Dank U
” to the waiter. That phrase he remembered, as he remembered others in French, German, Spanish, Italian, but he could barely put a sentence together in them. He sat down again, glancing at his watch. Where was she?

She had told him in their exchange of polite letters that she had returned to the gallery. If that was so, she should be passing the cafe at any moment, passing with that long, springy stride, so strange because she was small and not thin, passing with her hair billowing back over her shoulders. He had seen her pass many, many times. Before. Before, when he had sat deep inside the cafe watching, and would only call to her when she was almost out of sight. “Lost your cool then, man,” he now whispered to himself. “You ba-lew it!” He always thought of the canals when he thought of her. Now they would be reflecting with aching clarity the marvelous painter's sky. The barges and boats would be on the way in, and soon the ducks and swans would be tucking their necks in to sleep. He had to sleep soon, too; it might prolong his life. A few days more.

Ah yes
, he thought,
you Dutch motherfuckers. I've returned. “A Dutch man o' warre that sold us twenty negars,
” John Rolfe wrote,
Well, you-all, I bring myself. Free! Three hundred and forty-five years after Jamestown. Now … how's that for the circle come full?

He did not really care about the Dutch except that she was Dutch. She was thirty-five now, fourteen years younger than he. Would she still be as blond? (How he had hated that robust blondness at first after the malnourished black of Africa. The blondness had been so much like that of the Swedish blondes, jazz freaks who lived on jazz concerts, who saw the black musicians in their staged cool postures; but how he had been attracted to it as well!) Did he love her still—billowing blond hair; sturdy swimmer's legs; long, sinewy stride on such a small body and all? (And all? What was all? A memory. Nineteen years old.) He supposed he did love her, transposed, a bit bleached out, in a clinical way, the way you'd discuss it in an analyst's office.
Anal
, he thought,
list
. Shit list. Man, am I on that! But he did want to tell her he was sorry; tell her why it hadn't worked. He was glad he was still on his feet and able to move about. If he had stayed in the hospital in New York, it would have happened, his dying, and somehow she would have learned about it. No. Stand on two feet and tell her you had her mixed up with someone who happened nineteen years ago.

No pity. Didn't want that. Perhaps by that time, back in New York, he would have had it, and taken to the winds to watch her and try to comfort her when she cried. She would cry. He would have—you
are
drunk, he told himself, signaling for another drink.

The first time in his life he had ever had Pernod was in a bedbug-ridden flat in the East Village between Christmas and New Year's. The East Village was just the East Side then. He had drunk it straight and had crossed the street to a party where a painter with a penchant for teen-agers was displaying portraits of rhinoceroses with the words
MAU MAU
stitched between their legs. As far as Max knew, the painter was still doing rhinoceroses, marrying young girls or knocking them up and leaving them. When last heard from he was doing a trumpet solo in an Athens nightclub—“Saints”—which was the only number he knew, and the Greeks loved him because he was black, because he skipped and danced when he blew, and because he always reminded them of the spring festival when they put on blackface and roamed the streets drunk. There was no more screwing atop the hills in celebration of Oestra. Now the Greeks did it in bed, just like everybody else, nearly. Maybe Max hated that painter so much for so long, not because he was a phony, but because, when he went home that night from the East Village, he felt as though he had a steel-jacketed slug between his eyes. After some time at home, his phone had rung. It was the girl who had sent him fleeing into the streets to get drunk. But everything was all right, after that call. Pernod. What could he associate Scotch with? Bourbon? Gin? Cognac? Beer? There was always something.

Where
is
she? He would hate to go to her house, but he would if he had to. Maybe he shouldn't have come. Maybe he should have gone right back out to Orly and returned to the hospital in New York. Comfort at least. But he
was
here and he hadn't been any drunker than usual when he decided to come by train. There were only three places to go after Harry Ames dropped dead—another section of Paris, New York or Amsterdam. Hell, he planned to go to Amsterdam anyway. Who was he shucking, himself,
now?
It really hurt to think of old Harry going like that. He should have been drunk and stroking and grinding and talking trash in some broad's ear. He always said he wanted to go like that.

Then he thought he saw her and he came half out of his chair, but it was someone else. He sat down slowly. How would it go anyway? She would be walking with that stride that made her seem even smaller, it was so long. He would call out. She would stop, for his voice would be the most familiar of all voices. Unbelievingly she would come near the table. He would not rise, merely sit there and motion to a chair with a smile on his face. (Haw! Haw! Surprise, surprise!) He would have a drink in his hand, perhaps even the one he was holding.

The stride was not the same: he fitted it into the one he remembered watching in Holland, Spain, France, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, Manhattan, East Hampton, Vermont, Mexico … There was something sad about her stride now. The heels of her shoes still rapped sharply on the pavement and the face, that small face with the cheekbones riding high along the sides, was still ready for the smile, the bright, lyrical “
Daaag!
” And that wise body, curving with motion. Her hair was darker, yes, like gold left too long in the open.

“Margrit! [Lillian!] Margrit! [Lillian!] Margrit! [Lillian!],” he shouted, coming out of his chair like a shot, the pain grabbing deeply at his rectum, and he was halfway across the street, all the while fighting the urge to grab himself, tear himself inside out.

And she stopped. Her mouth sprang open. Her dark blue eyes went bulging. With the deepest part of the eye he saw her start impulsively toward him, but she caught herself and stood waving as a leaf in some slight, capricious wind. He stopped too, out of pain and uncertainty; he had blown his lines again. But when he stopped she moved forward. On she came, the bright face ready to brighten even more, the stride now full, heel-rapping, confident. He stood waving, surprised at his own lack of cool, aghast at the waterfall of love he had thought dammed.

“Mox, Mox, it
is
you?” she said.

That goddamn broad A, he thought, but he said, “Yes.” His arms trembled at his sides. Should he open them and put them around her? Should he simply stand and wait, then wilt when she placed hers around him? Signals. As she approached, her right hand darted out before her, thumb extended ludicrously in the air. Resigned, he took it, shook it gently and placed his left hand over hers. He led her to the table. “Please sit.” It pained him to look at her figure. She wore a blue sweater which, no matter how loose it might have been, would have shown her breasts to tender and exciting advantage; they were always so white and fragile, so vulnerable. Her hips were fuller now. Time does do its work. And her swimmer's legs, big-calved and just short of being too heavily ankled, still made him itch to stroke them from top to—