The Incredible Transition of Dr. Queen
My seemingly vicious father is dead, and my incredibly loving mother is catching up with me. She is dying of cancer, oh so slowly. She will take it because she’s part Native American from Montana, a Rosie the Riveter during WWII. My Dad was all American, a mighty man, had killed the Japanese who were trying to dominate the Chinese, and had to deal with that in his own way. He had high blood pressure, which was giving him psychological problems. He was my hero, the white man. Yet he tried to kill me several times.
I like to think it was due to his having been a chain smoker. He was often the sweetest, kindest, most loving man in the world. It still matters.
But I have to talk about my purple “godparents” now. I have to thank them, trust me. They are mysteriously appearing in a seedy, cheap hotel room somewhere. They are from the past, and they currently no longer exist.
They probably saved my life. It had to do with certain circumstances. How does one thank such people? How does one even attempt to know them?
May we enter their life story somehow, and be right there with them?
*******
One night, a celebrated chocolate man decided that something had gone wrong with his entire set of circumstances, and his wife did, too. Out of nowhere, they had melted into an extremely hot scenario – like unearthly large horizontal giants on a hotel bed. One of them, not being altogether fat, was also strikingly handsome with his little mustache – to the point where my mind was boggled. He was relaxing on never his own bed looking at the small black and white television, laying himself down prone and relaxed after a hard day of walking and interviews. He was sprawled but composed on top of the pilled and soiled covers.
For some reason, a disgruntled look slowly crossed his dark, plump, beautiful – manly, perhaps not at all lovely to some – facial features. A quizzical, bemused grin crinkled the corner of one sleepy but slanted dark large brown eye. For you see, the man on the bed had ended up with what was once the most precious and prized ownership problem of our proto-nuclear age – the TV remote control. He cradled it, firmly enclosed in his massive brown hand. He intelligently scanned the television screen.
The man knew his black eyes looked Asiatic, especially his right one. The staleness of the surrounding air permeated his brain as the cig smoke seeped away from his fingertips. He knew the room, one of many which he practically had been living in, was smoke filled. It had over many years seeped into the walls, permeating the wrinkled fabric of the room’s wallpaper. He had guarded himself from the awful effects of the smoke for millennia, perhaps. He often wondered why people smoked. He had been the victim of second-hand smoke since before he was even born.
Rod Sterling appears briefly and says: For you see now a man going almost completely and quietly insane, both with and without his woman. She’s not around him as much as he’d like her to be. Normally, he lets his stress out at the camera. His wife does not have much to tell people ordinarily, at least not as much as he seems to want to say. She’s right there beside him, but could be killed at any given time. She took classes at her school so many long years ago on how diseases were the main reason they were in this predicament. The classes had informed her of why their lives were a color coded obscenity.
It was for the complicated reason that white people were scared of black people. A disease pandemic was the major point emphasized in those classes. She took one of them, and supposedly wrote a paper explaining back that it might be more worthwhile to face diseases than to tell people they remind each other of their own bowels. She had been studying music and education, but for the greater cause she took a minor side trip.
In a fiction story, the license to guess is all, one could suppose. You do see a lady here, having to explain these small matters to you. Someone once said life is built for graphic pain. The man on the bed is built for fighting, but considers himself otherwise. He definitely had a wife who was worthy of him, but they didn’t get much of a long period of time together.
While he’s watching TV, you also see this man studying an Eventide Zone episode, realizing that he must die shortly, and feeling rather “terrific” about it. He knows he’s only headed nowhere. He gets stressed out about that sometimes, to the point of appearing paranoid. He fears intensively that most people see his four ghostlike “kids” as giant African animals that need to be slaughtered. He is in full dress, a business suit as it were, sometimes called a monkey suit, and is indenting the scratchy, prickly, ancient box spring mattress of many an ancient lust and lost love.
His university self is watching a show on TV that he secretly liked, as it involved his special underground buddy, Rod Sterling. He could relate to the short, dark, intense white man on it, who was artful and clever and told him a good, moral story most of the time.
The man we see before us had also a good story. He had helped form up the Montchapel Bus Boycott, to make sure that Negro people did not ever have to ride solely in the back of a city bus at all times, ever again.
Sideways – Rod Sterling, with his usual slouching class, slips in again here – For you see, the man on the bed is someone who’s electronically color coded to die in advance by history itself, and he doesn’t know why. He knows his name is coincidentally Martin, and that he’s destined to die a martyr. He knows he is the king of a most peculiar kingdom, not unlike “The King,” Elvis Presley, in some ways. He disgruntledly accepts the fact that he has noticed his own “niggerization” by nearly everyone around him who must continue their strange color coded way of life. He shares in a wonderful African American subculture, but his own personal version of it is both studied and almost arrogantly paranoiac. He is his own behemoth of paranoia. In a jovial way, he knows that, but he doesn’t laugh at himself. Ever. That would be to give into a belief with which he has no accord.
And that is why he must now enter The Eventide Zone. For indeed without a jester, a king, and a kingdom�is there ever truly a jest?
THE INCREDIBLE TRANSITION OF DR. QUEEN
He thinks to himself that the color coded nonsense where his people have to sit or eat or live in seedy, cheap places has to do with how things are organic or inorganic, or some such, as he’s been involved rather deeply with his college of supposed choice. His whole life was laid out before him, in spite of the hard work, and he had to go to that particular accredited and highly acclaimed college. At fifteen, and he breezed through it. But as he lies there on the bed, his life is running through his head, as a kind of demolished motion picture show.
Everywhere he had been at the college, he had a tacky red carpet laid out for him at each turn he could see. And he did go and attend to the great place’s more esoteric science classes, where they had taught him racism was a part of nature. He liked to think he had written a good thesis proclaiming loudly against that.
But he is wearing velvety black armor, he was my knight in shining armor you see, and he is feeling sleepy, large and very queasy because he hears his wife preparing him dinner in the kitchen suppinette. They had hiked around town by themselves for a change, without their entourage, and picked up some lovely food at a grocery store. This hotel room at least had a cooker and a small fridge, not to mention a cigarette machine.
This man, not being an animal, doesn’t feel like he has to work hard for a living. He’s been plugging away at words all of his life. He feels a little lazy at the present moment. He feels slightly guilt ridden. He knows I don’t know if he even smoked. He knows that my parents smoked. And he knows, while lying there, all about me. He had seen the episode about me on Sterling’s show. Twice, now.
Why, he muses to himself, do I know about this stranger who is haunting my head? The drug certainly works, he coughs, as he balls up one fist. But the childish cough he was going to withstand suddenly filters away.
In the prior Eventide Zone episode, the one Martin had viewed originally, he had seen my father cruelly teasing me into my running into my small, cheap and tacky bedroom. I was white, and so was my father. I was not entirely white. My father had run after me screaming what he was “gonna” do to me. I had ended up under my bed scrunched up against the wall. My father had not lifted the small bed to reach for me to tear me to pieces. But he had left. Later, I had found my little black hole in the wall and had disappeared into it momentarily. I had stayed in the little hole in the wall to escape my violent father.
He was someone whom I dearly loved. Maybe I had been a bad girl, to get fat and all. And I had wished someone could find me in the tiny hole and save me. No one ever seemed to have done so. And my father was permanently lost in the misery of having lost me forever.
The thing was, in the newer episode Dr. Queen was watching, the ending had changed. The little girl was not lost, and had ended up elsewhere.
The black man on the cheap hotel room bed sighs to himself about the episode. It had reminded him about something stupid about his own upbringing, and about his own father, someone he both liked and disliked. No one had been around his original home life, jotting everything down on a reporter’s small notepad. But cameras have been around him frequently lately, and the man feels like he has become pretty much only his own personal media circus. Would anything he has ever done mean anything real to someone, his own human history?
He honestly doesn’t even know what the Godlike reason is why he’s stuck working for a living, so often away from his family, giving odd speeches here and there. He has a doctorate in the religious sciences, and wishes he was able to answer all of those theosophical questions. He knows the whole thing is a political setup for men to use to manipulate others’ minds. But he’s a phantom stranger who uses some big words indeed, such as philanthropist and egalitarian and perhaps even lethargic toad. He really thinks he is one, honest! The phrase “hopeless romantic” also comes to his mind. He is stuck always trying to write the perfect speech, as he or Coletta mostly writes his speeches.
He is trying to get some well deserved rest while lodging around, a gun sight could even spy his bulky figure through the dirt streaked window one foot away from his bed, and he hears noises outside that do and don’t belong one to oneself. And he knows Africa could attack the United States. He is a pacifist, but he gets angry enough to kill people sometimes.
I have a dream, he thinks to himself. Good line for a great speech, by an absolutely phony white man. I’ll never be one, he muses. He has his own self doubt all nailed. He drifts off and away for a few moments and subsequently dreams the strangest dream he’s ever had: a decade after he and a large herd of Africans and many other such groups have defended humanity through the Mahatma K. Ghandaian philosophy of being a peaceful warrior, a passel of mostly white wheelchair people, all disabled, learn how to get Seattle Metro buses to be equipped with the proper wheelchair lifts. They are thus able to get their civil rights that way. As some of them must go out spontaneously, they need to get on the bus. Every other transit option is the secret hard to arrange trip problem. The disabled people themselves have to fill an independent living need.
How do they do that? They boldly risk their lives purposefully pointing out how faulty the initial wheelchair lifts are by riding them the wrong way in their wheelchairs until they break. One, named John Tyler, is my radical hero for whom I work sometimes. He successfully breaks one of the faulty lifts. The guy has polio and is seriously disabled, and dropping down like that is extremely hard on him – and anybody else, if it were to happen accidentally. It means a possible hospital death scene. Then the new wheelchair lift company shows up and puts the right lifts on the buses. The “folding camel” wheelchair lifts are no more.
I come along. I’m the girl as the personal care attendant for one of these brave wheelchair people, a male handsome Jew who is the son of two Austrians who fled the Holocaust, and I help ensure that the buses are properly ridden once the wheelchair person is strapped in. I have to do battle during this time frame with white male bus drivers who want to strap in the wheelchair people improperly. Their argument is that wheelchair people had all those other forms of transportation. I was the little girl who disappeared through the hole in the wall to avoid her white male father.
Howsoever – I make sure my Jewish fiancÃ?©e is strapped in. Later on, we marry in a beautiful park through a hippie wedding. Both my mom and dad and all of our relatives and friends are there. It’s quite a mixed rainbow crowd of different skin colors and religions, white men and disabled folk alike. Our catering is Matzo Mamas combined with my German-American family’s hot dogs and hamburgers – plus potato salad – smorgasbord.
Dr. Queen, feeling relaxed, hungry and happy, suddenly finds he is applauding at a great distance of space and time away. But as he turns to Coletta, he wakes up, as this dream of Dr. Queen’s ends with many black disabled people not being able to ride the bus. These are all guys like him, but they have no real lives of their own. No woman to marry, no one to make children with. No job they will be allowed to work, no real place to go.
And yet, they all need to ride the bus. It would at least get them out, help them look through a window. The whole situation had robbed them of anything like a real existence, and what they needed when they were growing up was to learn to read – mainly. They are and were stuck in a strange, meaningless existence, until something gets done, either by themselves or others. They need to learn to help themselves.
Possibly by now, though, they have begun to succeed.
Something is up with that. The man there can barely think straight. Deep sleeplessness…it will be affecting her again. She was always lovely, but he had noticed her looking extra bedraggled today. She needed something real. Something good in her life, some way better she could feel.
“Coletta, are you ready for this? Something is coming across on the TV that didn’t belong to Sterling. I remember the previous episode – and this is not the same one in any way, shape or format. Some such is way wrong, and it’s happening, my dear mother goddess. Do you suppose we can do anything about it? HMMMMM!?!?!” He stormily threw an unusually level gaze at her, but glanced away. He was always afraid of his own arrogance with her. But she looked back at him without any fear in her face.
“Well,” she said dryly, her throat parched with both the cigs and the surrounding arid atmosphere, “I suppose we can die at it, handsome, but is that all we’re going to do – given this?” Is that all there is, she meant. She regained her composure, stretching out on the bed in a luxurious business suit of sorts, one that cannot be described herein but as very lovely in the dark, and yet quite wretched. It was relatively expensive and grey, but rumpled somewhat. For you see, she had been about town, and her feathers, as her man knew, were completely ruffled. She relaxed assiduously on the bed, and reclined. “Yes, you’re right.” She snuggled next to him. She knew something weird was going down on the premises. A heat wave was drying everyone up, even black African people.
Something was up in their mutual intellectual heavens, for as the two spontaneous detectives were learning, there was nothing right on television. Doctor Queen was seeing several channels at once. He flipped through them, wondering why they had what appeared to be cable television. He knew that in 1967 or 1968, although the exact year they were in was escaping him, all they had was the ability to manually change the channels. He didn’t know what cable television was, but he and Coletta had certainly gotten it. What was going on, really, that didn’t involve bombing and killing people and having a color coded name. It’s a little hot outside, the weather. Steamy, sultry, Mississippi mysterious. The television is full of the war in Viet Nam, and local news, sports and weather, but it’s not right.
Much earlier, even though they never smoked themselves, they had seen an unusual sight. Two perfectly white cigarettes had been laid out by someone on the small and dingy plastic table next to their hotel room bed. They had obviously been set up by and for someone else, who had roomed there and left. Yet they’d seemed briefly inviting. Both Dr. Queen and his Coletta had broken down briefly, had decided to enjoy life, and had lit up the cigarettes and smoked them.
They felt themselves drifting back and forth in time, between the past and the present, with a feeling that the future cannot be that far behind.
The not so fat man gets mildly uncomfortable. “Hey, Mommy Dearest there, what do you think? How about exploring outer space without all those veggies between our teeth? Did you unpack our toothbrushes? What do you say? The last thing we were ever responsible for was the Viet Nam war. Or these bed bunks. I honestly think the war is the reason they want to kill us. Some of us are even Moslems, you know, their old enemies.”
He smiles at her. Is there any other such thing out there that thinks Africa was Hell? “They still expect someone listening to them as they rant and rave about Heaven and Hell. Africa was Hell, but this USA is the Heaven, you know…?”
Coletta is silent. She likes silence, but she has a degree in something else. “You know there’s no God, we are their God, and we did leave the planet earlier. Whoops, lack of sleep.” She brushes her hair back with one long black finger, which is perfectly polished. She looks at the finger, and realizes it wasn’t all that red and gorgeously shiny previously.
She tiredly spurts, “Yes, something is wrong with one who signifies nothing. Perhaps it is me, perhaps it is you, and perhaps it is the weatherâÂ?¦” There is a hole in the wall diner that appears in his mind. One of her other sons had agreed to meet them there. Their Johnny was like a son to them, but he was always also someone else’s child.
Coletta is sighing as she is lying there. Love with her man was stolen on the fly at all times. She slowly draws her hand down to his rather sizeable and business suited chest, thinking that things don’t change in a thousand years. “Yes, they are into watching us. That is not groovy at all. I may have made up a new word there, didn’t I? Groovy, like the grooves on a record. I’ve never heard that word before. Why do we in particular attract all of that intentional attention from the Spanish Inquisition, you know? That’s all the KKK ever will be. It is the most curious idealâÂ?¦”
“Yes, Coletta, you simply overuse their word too much. We able bodied Africans will simply never get itâÂ?¦cannibalism, I suppose freaks their mental abilities out. They simply MUST cannibalize us you see, because they have figured out that we are highly cannibalistic electronic color coded parts, lost in the mechanisms and machineries of time, don’t you think? And we do have sexâÂ?¦?
He stroked her thick, luxuriantly pomaded hair. They had few children, but enough was enough.
“No, we don’t. Not in front of them. We are going to look for that hole in the wall, starting right now. Get up, you old dog, don’t go for the liquor as you never do that anyway, and I am dragging you to that wall if you don’t get up out of bed,” she dragged out with a sigh. She was very tired and didn’t want to respond to any such rescue requests. She glanced down at the cigs pulling their own suck in there. Smoke curled and wafted up inches from where they lay. Something seemed mildly different about the nature of the smoke. Was it only tobacco? She slowly figured out that the almightly suction device had something to do with it. Cigs. Yes that was it, a certain misguided look crossed her face, and she reeled slightly from all of the hard work she had done before, and she nearly fainted.
Dr. Queen’s muscular arms stoutly caught her. They were now standing on the floor, with Coletta’s supple stiletto heels clicking on the wooden floorboards and Dr. Queen’s large men’s shoes firmly planted on his feet.
This was a bit of a problem. Earlier, they both knew they had kicked off all four of their shoes. What were they doing still there, with their feet still encased in previously peeled off stockings? First their television set, and now this. It had been easy enough to change the channel. Had they been smoking an illegal substance�was that stuff actual Mary Jane?
Earlier, they had been to a lovely old Chinese hole in the wall restaurant. Johnny Jackson had picked up the dinner for them. They had eaten together and enjoyed it without the cameras for a change. Now they were hungry again, for what reason their slightly churning minds fathomed, must have something to do with the two cigarettes being more powerful than they looked. It had seemed so harmless to take a moment off.
“I knowâÂ?¦perhaps not much, my darling, but I have the feeling we are needed somewhere else. Remember that Eventide Zone thing, the one hosted by Rod Sterling? We are experiencing a Field Effect of sorts. I wonder if it’s at all because we are dark. Let us look for that hole in the wall now, before it closes up completely. We are definitely needed by something in there. Somebody else is facing death completely, and we are needed there. Someone,” he spurted with a dry chuckle, “needs us off of cigarettes. We are and were the university PhD crowd, and she never understood us that profoundly. We are going there now, sugar, so come with me to the wall and let’s see if that hole is there. Now. Courage? She says she has not her own life,” Dr. Queen smiled down at Coletta.
He ended his spontaneous speech with a gentle note as he stared at his reflection looking back at him through a woman, a real and light black woman. A lady of color. He grabbed her hand gently, and practically dragged her through the wall. But they made it down the very brief hallway and to the little black hole in the wall and were staring it over.
One of them, with the guts and panache of a lion in what he thought of as the hollow, shabby body of a man, was caught trying to grimace the hole away. Surely it was only another death threat for his woman. Coletta looked surprised at it, and yet neither one of them could eat it – nor did both know they could not. They were both stunned by the simple fact they were still hungry. Yet life itself hinting around about food and drugs was not the answer. The cigs were way back there, and they were someone else entirely as they stared at the hole in the wall.
They felt the divine lift that cigs could give them, and hated it. Yet at the same time as the brief high dribbled away, they felt like someone was trying to thank them for something, and show them some gratitude. Was it the Indians trying to tell them something through tobacco? A thank you for existing, for helping them too? They did not want to leave from their assigned task, or be poisoned by natives…as they were originally displaced Africans. Coletta had studied at her school how all humans had originally come from Africa. We had all spread out and summarily become other racial groups. There was, however, another school of thought where humanity was separated into several species, meeting up again later. Were the Indians somehow an enemy of theirs whom they had discounted?
They had accidentally broken down and smoked two of the leftover cigs�were they poisoned? What an idiotic assassination that would be. No cameras as they pitched to the floor in their final throes of agony.
“I know she’s needed, somehow, and only wants to thank us for being her alternating purple godparents, yet I do know that racism is a field effect that I studied back at that college in the one science class,” said Dr. Martin Luther Queen, Jr. The Right Reverend and all. Perhaps the nearest thing to God on the face of the planet was one proudly arrogant black man. “We must go vanish through that hole for a second and leave. Yet I know we will thus back out on this empty promise and broken dream that way. Shall we do either, or both?”
“Colored, white, white, colored?” sighed Coletta. “How they must keep us apart for fear of diseases, African and European, except when we exist at their sexual whimsy for the sake of the almighty dollar. What an empty place we must leave momentarily my darling. Now I know it is but momentary. Shall we do it, and show them we are Africans at last? Where does that obvious portal lead us to? Death? Should we take such a quaint leap in time, and go through a small purple hole or not, and see into such a future? One where reparations are those which can never be made? One where affirmative action perhaps has to die too? They will never let us approach the arousing majesty of such an arresting moment, you know. They want to see us groping about sexually in public. We are far too conservative for that…the Cotton Club and our entire culture aside. We were practically created to be left alone to our own devices.”
“Well, Coletta, as long as YOU feel brave,” cut off Martin, “We can still play a game of detective work quite well, as long as we, well, hide and stuff, Mommy dearest. What am I but the Batman’s Fatman? My fat is merely to survive the bullets, to speed the power of my elocution to help others, and because I already have you. We have been out in the open for quite a long time. The African veldt was stuffed with animals against us. Anything at all could come through that window over there,” stated the portly black gentleman as he stuffed a strange pocket watch out and put it back in. “I have a feeling we have to travel back in time or something, and I do not know why at all. Surely you are feeling particularly courageous right now.”
Coletta looked at him without that lost little girl look, and then sighed. “Those cigs are indeed a drug from Hell. I suppose we shall simply have to go back where we belong this way, back to the future, back to the past, back toâÂ?¦where we must have come from, as the real answer.”
“Hush up, Coletta, and let’s jump thooooo the damn hole, now, lady.” He looked at her with a terrific smile on his lips. “We are simply needed elsewhere. So what’s wrong with taking a chance once in a while? We are the deadest ducks in all of human history. We’re Daffy Duck, we’re this, and we’re that, LET’S SEE IF IT’S REALLY THERE, okay?” Even Coletta lurched slightly at the power and timbre of his voice. But she was so used to him, she smiled as she did her favorite joke, waving in front of her face to make the breeze there go away. She was now Baptist too, elegantly so.
Baptist means, let’s face hellfire, and brimstone, and actually get in a fight occasionally. The girl in the hole in the wall is and was Baptist, Jewish, and everyone else on the face of the planet. I and Coletta were Baptist…too.
She fell silent. She realized in her own way that making fun of racism was no fun, and felt guilt ridden herself. Over nothing. The little girl, when grown up, had been raped and misused by blacks, browns, and whites, even earlier when she was still a little girl. This had been the veriest nothing, as she had also miraculously saved the lives of a black woman and her two probable rapists by simply interfering with a house burglary.
I had gone out at night, and had merely gotten my feathers ruffled. The burglars had not gotten to slice and dice their chosen victim. Or so the grown up version of that little girl often liked to think…Vera, the black lady, had finally moved to a neighborhood where she could live safely.
Martin coughed. “Don’t ever get that way, lady of mine, but I’m next opening up this black hole with my barest hands. I’m going to jump into it alone without you now. Unless you change your summarily untitled mind.” Coletta sneakily looked up at him. “I’ll jump too.”
It was malicious. Very malicious of her. She twisted her grin a little. “Do go jump first.”
“No, we are going to jump in together,” sighed the large and portly gentleman, as he was getting together with himself and realizing that at this point in time he wasn’t even fat at all. He was rather still thin and attractive, and starting to feel both tragically afraid and angry at himself. He also had a feeling they were being watched. He hoped whoever it was would die more horribly than she would. He had loaded his speeches with every long word he could find that featured any word like the word Negro in it. His speeches were loaded with word bullets, back at ’em.
It was so, even though he had always tried to temper his oratory with the depth and wisdom of human understanding. Even though watering down his speeches was needed, for the sake of masses who did not attend college, he had tried to include something which would not be so lowly in them. Children were what he had leaned on in his most famous speech.
Rod Sterling cuts in sideways with: Is that enough digression for you? Dr. Queen finally pulled the entire wretched hole open with a sudden jerk and slowly gathered that there was a deep blackness where the hole had been. It looked mysteriously like they would both get sucked into something pretty horrible in there. He ground his capped teeth slightly, didn’t feel like himself at all, and wilted at it. The heat was building up outside, and yet he still did not seem to be sweating too profusely. This was getting altogether worrisome. “I suppose I should go smoke a cigarette at it and see if it does go away. Oh, it shall my darling, as I am an electronic component part of amazing humanity of the astonishing Eventide Zone that we are already in, so..?” With an arch smile, he cocked his large head at her quizzically. “Your move.” He realized even he couldn’t get the significance of this moment. What was on the other side of that hole?
“So what?” was dragged out of Coletta, as she had obviously gotten nothing that she wanted out of life but him, who was her man, and a degree, and a fabulous party of some sort had been deeply appreciated. She was suddenly aware that it was a jubilee fit for a queen, to be held some thirty-five years in the future. A major celebration. Her very own wake. Any such children were lost to the obscurity of the thing called history. She had graduated valedictorian from high school. She had breezed through college without much trouble. She had liked those Ohio classes. But she was extremely tired, and felt like she was gonna drop dead any second soon. What would happen to her children?
And she had had children. Oh, so many children to capture and shoot, like they were indeed foreign wildlife of sorts. White, black and brown children to strut before the camera in extremely disheveled nervousness. “Perhaps we are the very partiers, my king?” was what she finally said. “I am a Scott, you know, and it is obvious that something is very odd around these here partsâÂ?¦.” If what one needed was a true Scot of any sort. What was that? And what really was the nature of the God Queen had studied?
They both turned to stones of attention as they contemplated the infinite lack of meritritiousness of a potential Hell. Hell itself, right before them, as if on the horizon of their own doubt. There was something new in the world called Global Warming. The phrase came to both of them in a blinding split second. Calling them forth had happened again. They were being asked to do something straightaway about it, when nothing could be done, at least not by the studious pair of them. Who would do this?
A future icon, they simultaneously thought, an ode to the future called a disease free white person. That was the nature of the so called God. Which Coletta knew was technically impossible. One has to digest one’s food.
“Oh yes, the Klu Klux Klan. They are the ones who leave them scattered through the woods like so many lost limbs of brown treesâÂ?¦Abe Owens finally suicided by using them as a homicide tool. He was a broadcast journalist somewhere in the Pacific NorthWest, apparently. Who is telling us all of thisâÂ?¦it must be her, on the other side,” Coletta finally stated decisively. “Let’s just jump through the hole, but I don’t want to at all. It would be so lesbian, so very thespian and I simply don’t do anything like that in the slightest. I’m so nervous, my dear! I thought of lesbianism. A voice now has told me our Johnny would have problems with that later. He wanted to not have a separate but equal marriage license forâÂ?¦them.”
“Are we disabled or not? Do we ask questions or not? What is life, after all, my dear Coletta? We are obviously nowhere near it at the moment and I am as tired as you are. It is a drag knowing we are both African enough to tolerate this and unable to do it permanently. Something now thinks we need life amongst the joyful stars andâÂ?¦”
They stopped. They both realized they were fully human, colored, and afraid. Afraid not of evil, but of something good – for them. They were highly selfless, unselfish types, generally speaking. They had almost stalked away from the potential obtuse field effect that Queen had been studying on his own – almost assiduously, indeed. It had to do with major flocculation between human joy and sorrow. Lack of sleep can make people into strange bedfellows, do you not think, in the cheap hotels they are forced to sleep in at night? And to be watched can make certain African wonders oh so angry. While breathing. Hard, deep and with a mounting angry curiosity at the hole. What little girl?
But they kept it to themselves in the quiet of a restful sleep they had both altogether shared. The sleep of those who felt they had never done a specious drug, and also of those who had had no sleep. They remembered a certain “son” of theirs, one Johnny Jackson, who had seemed to have accomplished nothing. In short, he may have accomplished something. Surely their own good influence on him had led him to somewhere, and they could be rewarded for his behavior alone. One thing he had not done, even though he was technically a bastard, was murder people. He had at least won awards for helping people, established peace in the Middle East briefly, and still cared about poverty stricken black people, even at his own expense. Dr. Queen broke a grin as he peered across the small distance at his wife, whose mouth stretched into a sort of petulant grimace back.
“One moment, Coletta my sweet, and do take my hand. We must leap through time and space and be there now, but we must leave our entire world behind to do it. We must take thisâÂ?¦jumpâÂ?¦indeed,” he mused as their two fairly slim black bodies in business suits slowly scrunched a mutual way through the symbolic cervix that was finally dilated and big enough for the both of them.
For to be born again can take doing on anyone’s part. And on these folks’ part, we are talking about too large of infants to be stuck whiling their time away in hospital beds, waiting to be toileted by nurses who would have to haul them back and forth for years. As many think, such is little life at all, although Dr. Queen’s relatives would have appreciated it. Even a life of waiting to die in a hospital bed outdoes an assassin’s bullets roundly.
They were, however, now smiling a secret African smile, and needed to go back to where they were headed. They were swiftly moving up the stairs of a large machine. One of them was outracing the other and was practically leaping up the stairs, for you know, at least now, they could truly be African at last. But one of them was heading up the stairs with mounting fear. Yes, it was Coletta. She grabbed the coattails of Dr. Queen, who was sprinting upwards like a superior man, and decided, well, this must be a prettier way to die. She was slowly inching her way up the stairs at lightening speed, while tightly holding his hand. She had to assume her place behind him with a casual reluctance. It actually seemed mostly like home to her.
She was escaping the Spanish Inquisition, and taking her man with her that way. She and he were leaving the most major commitment of their entire lives behind, to help a little white girl who now had a brown daughter, to save her from the same thing that had gone for them – that which notices any vulnerability and always brutally exploits it.
For after the former little girl and then personal care attendant had lost her job, she was feeling like too much of her life had been devoted to the disabled. She’d been rescued from her own vulnerability to others by a new man from the Philippines. He was a degreed doctor who was an osteopath. He’d been a helicopter medic like on MASH, the TV series about Korea, and he was among the ambulance personnel during the Viet Nam War. Running into burning buildings as an army fireman stateside had been another specialty of his. He had magically appeared sometime after her disabled Jewish husband had died. He had sat behind her in a certified nursing class, and kicked her chair hard to get her attention. Looking pretty for a change in her white skirt, she turned around, deciding to be nice to him – and the rest was history.
“Pinoy” Reggie was the man who’d sat on the white side of various color coded stations, even after burly white men had told him not to, during that color coded idiotic period of time in the American South. He had blatantly broken those racial laws which forced people into such peculiar positions, not once but several times. He had beaten up burly white Southern men when touring a town while on pass, and in another case he’d kicked a black man who had attacked him in the army’s chow line. Then he barely escaped court martial for that by explaining it had all been in self defense.
This man, with the Black Person Moniker of Reggie, had married the previously little girl and given her a beautiful, sophisticated, exceptionally charming and altogether gypsy personality ridden daughter. Who was brown as a berry and comical as a nut in a tree. She had her own striking, unearthly brown beauty. Her now grown up mother was proud of her.
Meanwhile, the pomade in Coletta’s hair had loosened, and what was left was strikingly gorgeous in the light filtering through the tragically filthy windowpanes. Surely, thought Dr. Queen, we are still in a cheap hotel, but it is slowly mutating into something like NASA.
They filed up the stairs quite slowly, thinking to themselves that whatever it was it was – and it was – and it WAS – up there, and they must seek it out, kill it possibly, or simply withstand it. One of them got humorously adventurous. Yes, it was Dr. Queen. He looked handsome to her, and she winked back at him very tiredly. She smoothed her own ruffled feathers of a lady’s clothing.
“Somehow,” she said in an awesomely dry and sophisticated way.
I could write such a thank you letter to them, if they did not demand it of me. For they knew. That I knew their veriest secret identities as worried – but not scared – Negroes. It was the others’ way of putting themselves in their place as children. I mean that white people tried to put them there. The place as children is groovy through Bill Cozby, the gent with the degree in Early Childhood Education. Mr. Cozby is an American icon of soul, having a wonderfulness that will never ever die. But his son died, and that fact is killing him oh so slowly. I wish he could read this and feel better.
“Somehow,” agreed Martin, panting as he moved up the stairs. “We should hate to tell her, but we already know what’s going on in everyone else’s heat heightened mind. And of course I know already that I am truly a serious and dead fat comic. We go where we head, and wherever life takes us is where we must go, but I know precisely where I wanted to be. Shall we? Compassion was made for this life, and you are the next one.” He reached down, helping her up the final steps to an early oblivion.
For what are mere words? – Rod Sterling cuts in again and leaves. He exits to the left, and I enter from the right. I say this: Gratitude came to me when John Tyler had rescued me from my father. John had wheeled up to me on the street in Seattle and hired me for a job working for the disabled, which happened before I went home that day to tell my dad in Bremerton that I wanted my parents to fund my school in California. I was going to tell them that community colleges in CA were pretty cheap. If my volatile dad had found something wrong with that – who knows? Maybe he would have finally succeeded at killing me off – directly or indirectly.
It is that “Who Knows?” that drives all unsoiled machinery. Would colored and white sides have worked out? I doubt that. Dad would have yelled at his hippie daughter, and threatened her, and shakened my faith in life again. And maybe he would have demanded of me an answer that I could not have given him. He wouldn’t really have killed me, I think, but supposing he would have sent me to a mental institution is no fun whatsoever. My mother would have had to make the phone call.
They all knew in their own heads what that meant, and that public domain doesn’t mean their veriest bodies are still material for fools like me to make money off of them. Or at least get you to read my occasionally elegant writing. Public domain means that a character, fictional or otherwise, is someone you are entitled to write about. It’s like you own the license to them as much as everyone else does. Actual people are not quite subject to those rules. But they also cannot quite be public domain.
Still, the Queens, being thus my property through an artistic switch of names, were willing to try something for me, if it meant something good for slave labor. That was AGAINST slave labor. That was FOR a small, struggling abused girl child. That is where they obviously knew they were, but they were definitely headed for somewhere else. They had broken the amazing, astonishing rules you see. Even time and space itself can bend in its own way for Rule Breakers, Incorporated. That is the name of the group for people who find STUPID rules, and break them while complaining rightfully much. Are you too a member, perchance?
The American Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and 1960s had gotten something done once about making non-Chinese people who don’t read Chinese newspapers having to read them in Chinese. It had been stupid. It had been against an actual law. Some people had tried to hold up the Voting Rights Act by making people unable to vote unless they read in Chinese. Did this have anything to do with Pinoy Reggie? Who knows.
You may have been ignorant of all this, but it had all happened. As stupidly and idiotically as it possibly could. White people had tried to prove blacks can’t read in Chinese. They can, you can, we all can, but it takes so many years to learn it. My husband can read in Tagalong, but he’s getting rusty.
Do try this trick at home, but none of this story has really been fiction. Mr. Sterling, in an absence that makes the heart grow fonder, had been his very own Civil Rights Worker all along, too. We liked Black and White Magic very much. For example, there had been the Eventide Zone episode where a white man got to become Santa Claus. He moved to the North Pole – and everything. Something about that episode smacked of love and forgiveness, perhaps of the kind that simply never ends.
Once NASA keyed in on our odd couple, they’d entered the small room of the octagonal spacecraft. They felt like they were vacationing in the Florida Keys, where the National Aeronautics and Space Administration used to be located. It was dingy white on the outside, incredibly complicated in its divine machinery all around, and high tech wonderfulness on the inside. And outside the scenery was spectacularly lovely to their senses.
They strapped themselves into the loungelike capsule seats. Somehow, they knew all what the hell they were doing as they worked the varied sophisticated controls. The new little girl, some grown and still brown, was waving at them from a distance. And her grampa was one of the crew navigating the spacecraft, like he’d done during WWII. He had been the first little girl’s father. He was manning a computer at NASA headquarters.
The gramma of that family, who was still alive, was watching it on color television, with such a marvelous look on her face, one of a most familiar depth and persuadable dark hued wisdom. And I? Without missing a single thing somehow, I was writing it all down for posterity.
But as the immense, humongous, moon-sized red spot of the gaseous ball of a giant named the planet Jupiter hovered into view, the Queens both peacefully fell asleep. They were still holding hands. We switch to the deep depth of night as Rod comes back on. “You know who the Queens actually were,” he sighs.
Rod finishes the episode: Such is life itself, moody and mysterious and charming. Such is life when you are a pair of relatively unpaid civil rights workers. Or something more than just a pair of them.
Such is life when you are yourselves the key component of…The Eventide Zone.
