Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! Page 3

  I couldn’t do six months. I didn’t have the time. Not for principle. Not to shame them. Not for the “mopes.” Not even for long, lean and luscious Louisa. I went before the bench, copped a plea and got off with a fifty-dollar fine. And … probation. Not her. I heard she got the six months. I say heard ‘cause I didn’t go to her trial. Though I wanted to. She didn’t want me to and told me so in no ways about it. Six months. Okay, so it ain’t a “dime-to-death” stretch in a state penitentiary but it can seem so when you’re young. I did go and see her once a week in the county. Put some dough on her books.

  At first she gave me the cold-shoulder and turned and walked right back out of the visiting room when she saw who sat behind the wire. I couldn’t blame her. Her jailhouse conversion of herself to the path of martyrdom had been complete. And hell hath no fury like that of the convert. The second time I came, she walked to the bars and whispered through the wire, eyes down and head nodding as she spoke “Thank you for the money. Came in handy.”

  Then abruptly, she spun on her axle and left. The third time she sat down and I talked. The fourth time she talked. After the fifth time I was due to drop payment three of the ten dollars a month I had agreed to. I didn’t. They did. A month and a half later when I got in from a summer class a black-and-white was waiting.

  “Why didn’t you make the agreed-upon payment of your fine?”

  “I’m a student … and besides it was too much money … “

  On that phrase the judge looked down at the case and quickly interjected:

  “Fifty isn’t too much for participating in a riot.”

  My backbone stiffened and the Niggah in me came out:

  “It wasn’t a riot, it was a political demonstration. It only became a riot when the cops started beating people on the head.”

  The cracker slammed down his gavel, peered down at me over the bench and with a glance to his left reminded me of the frowning armed pig bailiff whose private fancying about sugar-frosted doughnuts I had so rudely interrupted with my challenge.

  “Are you going to pay the fine?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then I’m going to give you thirty days in the county jail.”

  “You’re only sending me to jail ‘cause I’m poor.”

  “And a Nigger, Nigger, Nigger…” echoed the judger’s thoughts bouncing around in the judge’s mind. Oh, yeah. How could I have forgotten that? But I kept that thought to myself and my mouth shut as he again slammed down the gavel and the pig came with the cuffs to hustle me off to the big pig-pen. Aww … it weren’t about the money. The lettuce in my garden was green and growing. Nickels and dimes rang up, rang down and rang again and again the cash registers in my mind and in my pocket. Naw. This weren’t about the money at all. Not at all. It was about right. And she was right. She had a point. She had made her point. She had pointed her middle finger at the system and told it to go fuck itself. And, to its credit, it had made her pay. But it had collected no interest out of her ass. It had passed a tax that it couldn’t collect.

  In spite of the nature of my nature, the thirty days was a piece of cake. I say “in spite of the nature of my nature” cause I take to confinement, be in a cell or even a room with closed windows or within the smothers of a serious love affair, like the tiniest bit of being on just this side of the particle/wave continuum, subject to some smart-assed m’f’ing sociopathologically deviant particle physicist seeking to knock down Heisenberg’s barrier and confine the bit to this particular place at that particular time. A confinement that means that its velocity equals zero and therefore does not exist. Now, existence is very very very difficult to deny. Absent speed, the necessitated complement of location, the entrapped attempts to flee its confinement by smearing itself out, canceling out the very existence of any concept of location until all that the scientist has left on his hands—in a manner, complementing the self-inflicted come-stain perpetually darkening the groin of his pants—is naught but an enigma smeared out and into the ether and the firmaments denying the scientist, bedeviling even the laws of God it/our/sel(f)ves. Quantum jitters. And just like such a quantum bit, I don’t take well to being locked up. I jitter.

  Yet the time was a piece of cake. It turned out like a turnover, an icy-rich chocolate moussey confection done up in whipped cream and sprinkled dark chocolate chips topped off with a maraschino cherry. Dreams as yet to be deferred, have a way of taking and making the best out of bad and the better out of worst. Dreams that can metamorphose an ocean oasis out of mere mirage. At night, that helped. It also helped that I got lucky. Inspired by something or the other, drugs or TV, maybe even some wacky woman, I had been on a basically vegetarian diet for a few weeks prior and when I went to jail the job they assigned me was in the kitchen. It was with only a bit of jailhouse diplomacy that I landed a gig in the salad-making section.

  I mean I had lettuce, tomatoes, cabbage, etc up the gazoo. I ate so much of the shit that even the dump I took was green. I had scarfed so many veggies that the first thing I did when they let me out was to walk straight down Macy Street to Phillipe’s and order up a lamb sandwich. Double-dipped. The meat tasted swell and I snapped it up, the grease feeling good as it glided down my gullet. The knot in my stomach … gone. Long … gone.

  Louisa had one more month to do when I got out. When she called on Wed I told her that I would pick her up when they let her out that Monday morning at 7 a.m. The alarm woke me out of a bad-assed dream that I would have loved to have finished. In it, leaning over me, a mass of auburn hair framing flaming cat-green eyes that slowly came closer and closer falling with me as I fell. I fought to stay asleep but the persistence of time overcame that of memory. I fought my way out of the sack, brushed my teeth and jumped in the shower to get some water on my ass.

  I twisted a joint, took six or seven hits, pulled on some rags and hit the door just as the sun was coming up. The tail end of the night’s gray-black itself was turning tail to run, fleeing before the coming brilliance of the oncoming rays. Within myself I was mind-synch-singing the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” and everything under it seemed right under it. For a long awaited change.

  The ride I pushed was a jet black ‘56 Mercedes 180D which actually wasn’t. Someone had swapped out the diesel for a gas engine before I got it as part of a long and complicated dope deal. It had a four-speed manual transmission with the stick on the steering column. It came equipped with a Blaupunkt AM/FM radio that I had amped up and connected to one of the new Sony cassette stereo decks. To handle the load I had two 18″×12″×4″ house speakers under the front seats on 30′ length speaker wire so that when I left UCLA—headed towards my favorite “get-high” spot located on a bluff near the beach, overlooking the vast and wide expanse of the Pacific—and turned left out of Royce Dr and cruised to the beach down Sunset Bl’s slope—“slip-sliding away” all the way down and around its date palm tree-clad curves—oblivious to the motorcars piloted by top-of-the-line self-anointed “captains of industry and finance” with their upscale bleached blonde Beverly Hills and Bel Air bimbos sitting beside them, the cars sometimes in front of, sometimes an oncoming glittering golden blur, sometimes but a fainter and fainter sparkle of an apparition glistening in the rear-view mirror.

  And when I drove by blasting, maybe, John Fogarty howling “Fortunate Son,” the neighbors in their street-lining mansions knew that I had been there. A couple of years before, I recall Rahid recalling Bunchy, the Panther had admonished Niggahs to “Do something … Do something even if you just spit.” Well, the sonic blast let loose as I passed million-dollar pads was my hawk-too-ee: “Fuck you rich mother-fuckas. I hope I woke up yo’ babies and yo’ ol’ day-nappin’-assed mommas up.” Laughing at the recollections, I slid a tape into the Sony.

  “Something happening here … What it is ain’t exactly clear,” Buffalo Springfield throbbed out of the speakers under-seat and into my body and bones, “There’s a man with a gun over there … Telling me I’ve got to beware … “ “Umm
hoo,” I thought, “This is tha jam that shoulda been played on a loudspeaker hung from a buzzing-overhead pig helicopter when tha cops had snatched me up off of my ass on Ackerman and slammed me into their ‘fuzzmobile.’ Yeah, it shoulda been playing as tha star athlete and his cronies, flunkeys and tout men, et cetera, et al and et cie were snatched up off they white asses too. Ummhoo, it shoulda been playing when Louisa, standing unintimidated, refused to bow before the state and its power; shoulda been playin’ when that beautiful dame had been rushed and roughed, subjected to the “incidental” probings and diggings of pig paws, onto the waiting bus… Standing. She was standing! Standing like a signal, a symbol, a portent, a portrait-that-ought-to-have-been memorialized in pure and blended oils bit-by-heroic-bit on top-grade canvas already stretched and aged with a half-chalk ground emulsion of gesso and virgin linseed oil. All tha babe needed was a torch in one hand, a book in the other and a crown across her brow. Lady Liberty. Democracy’s Dame. Freedom’s Femme. My comrade and my friend. And my-lover-I-hope-to-be.”

  “What the hell is this?”

  She pointed at my “ride” after we’d walked the two blocks to where I had parked.

  “That’s my ‘ride,’”I meeked like a “mope.”

  “It’s totally petit-bourgeois.”

  “Petit bourgeois?” Weren’t nothing petty about my ride. I mean did she know how many nickels and dimes I’d slung for this bad-assed m’f’er?

  “Awww … That’s cold,” I told her waving her off but stung by her air. Being this close to her after six long months of waiting and this is what I got? “Damn.” Inside the ride, I side-long glanced at the delicate golden hairs asleep on her long olive arms; paused upon the grace of her Nefertiti neck; examined—almost-tasting—the Grecian entasis that was her lips; sighed at the curves of her wide hips; and, lusted after the rise of her swelling tits lurking but a millimeter beneath fabric denying my kiss. And all the time, somewhere in the background of the foreground she continued her berate. All of this inside of me was building up the pressure as she let off six months of steam. My motor idling but inside I was all but stripping my gears.

  I shifted the car into first and we drove straight out the freeways and on towards the beach. On PCH as I neared my spot a white-robed hippie looking a little like Jesus with a sick-assed self-satisfied wan of a smile held up a sign:

  “When the power of love overcomes the love of power/

  The world will know peace.”

  —Jimi Hendrix

  “Isn’t that what we’re about—the love of the people?” I wanned in simple harmonic resonance with the now-passed “Christ.”

  “It isn’t love of the people but hatred of the people’s oppression, that makes one a revolutionary. “Love … Love,” she all but spat out the word, “Love is a hippie’s pipe dream. Hatred is the fuse of the soldier’s pipe bomb … “

  “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” As I drove on the words love and pipe and fuse, bomb and dream arranged themselves into circumstantial text in the back of my mind: I would love to be laying some pipe and blow off the bomb this dreamboat had lit the fuse to on the day we had first met. Instead, I lit the roach I had in the ashtray. After hitting it I caught a glance of her glare as I held it out to her.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  No, I wanted to answer. “Sheesh. I’m just kidding myself.”

  The sex wasn’t good, it was great.

  Yet all the while as we fucked the sneaking suspicion arose and loomed that while I was enjoying her body, she was too. I mean she was enjoying herself. Only herself. Hell. I couldn’t blame her. I mean “With all of those toys”. And when she came, she came deeply from within emitting a long slow selfly-satisfied sigh.

  You know, it’s amazing how sex clears the mind. How after things that had been said and had just passed by like a leaf blown in a breeze come back into razor-sharp focus. The love/hate thing I mean. She was right. As usual, she was right. As always, she was right. Naw, these punks, these would-bes, these wanna-bes, these ‘mopes’ couldn’t handle it. Couldn’t wouldn’t take it upon themselves to make a real strike at the system. Direct action was what was needed. Naww … they couldn’t do it … but “The Union.” could.

  “The Union” Our union. “The Union” I had been avoiding. “The Union” I’d shirked because of all of the internal debates—squabbles born, commenced and continued—the clash and clang of contending ideologies fashioned of blood and iron. There were Black Muslims with their melanin and Mother Ships. U.S. Niggers with their Swahili and bubas. There were Panthers howling their coronation of the lumpen as the “vanguard of the revolution.” Reds and their working class. And a few hairy, patchouli-smelling, peace-sign-waving, black Hippies and their “freedom” whatever the fuck that meant. It was an amalgam, an oleo, a conglomeration, a cornucopia and a mishmash. But this was a non-homogenous mixture that had been molded, fired, cured and hardened into an iron fist. A fist composed of these intra-contending separate fingers that had folded themselves into an inter-dynamic weapon ready, willing and able to strike.

  The Union. The Union with its secret codes and secret handshakes. The Union with its passwords and co-signs. The Union with its many-layered and thereby almost-impenetrable barriers to entry, its multiple levels of security. The Union that had held itself together in spite of the contentiousness of its constituents; it had been stitched together in the wake of Bunchy and John Huggins killings. None. I mean none of the Panther/U.S. violence and contentiousness raging its way through Lost Angeles made its way past the parameters, the purviews and the prerogatives bounded within “The Union’s” horizon: “Abandon All Bullshit All Ye Who Would Enter Here.” Nothing else. Nothing more. “The Union.” Held together and forged into “The Sword of The People” by the vision, the foresight, the courage, the cunning, the presence and the strength of one man—a man still yet amongst us yet in the process becoming legend—”The Chairman,” Rahid. Rahid who, after consultations with the Central Committee, made all decisions. Rahid, “The Chairman,” who had anointed me as his replacement when the time came, as surely the time would come, when he would be taken away from us.

  Me.

  The “First Comrade” cradled the device, eyeing it intently as if he were a Hassid examining an altogether rare uncut stone. Yet it was simple. A basic Molotov cocktail. A bottle of incendiary with a wick of torn fabric. Nothing but a basic Molotov cocktail … with a twist. Within each of the sawed-off-at-the-neck wine bottles was an elongated metal cylinder itself coated with a gray plastic goo. Studded in the goo were eight to ten balls of .00 buckshot. Simple, at the same time, ingenious. Simple … and deadly effective.

  “Where did you get it?” Rahid began his interrogation.

  “What the hell do you mean ‘Where’d I get it?’ I made them.”

  “You made them?”

  She turned to me, ignoring Rahid and the others grilling her with their eyes, “Is this m’f’er deaf?”

  “Look, woman,” “The Chairman” exploded. “This ain’t no goddamned game!”

  “Right on!” howled Secretary of Cultural Affairs Umoja.

  Another brother, Usamu, the Chief Propagandist who edited and ran The Union’s paper, The Black Nation, co-signed the sentiment.

  “Gimme five, my Brother.”

  The slap of the palms morphed into the beginnings of the Union’s secret shake as knuckles collided knuckles and then each grasped the others thumbs in a twirl that before it ended with another clash of knuckles-to-knuckles included a subtle slide of the pinky finger across the bottom of each other’s palm. The cross-examination continued:

  “I asked you,” Rahid bored in hefting one of the devices, “if you made this?’”

  “Of course I made it,” she snapped back.

  “What’s that thing for?” he said indicating the cylinder within.

  “Technically, it’s a delayed demolition device.”

  “A what?”

  Field Marshal Raymond, the Panther, jumped i
n. “Bitch talk like the po-lice.”

  “Right on,” co-signed William 5X.

  But curiosity was melting suspicion in “The Chairman’s” mind.

  “A delayed … “

  “Demolition device. A ‘DDD.’”

  With military precision she ticked off the attributes of the contents:

  “Take an empty CO2 canister from a compressed air BB gun, fill it with black powder. You can get it at any gun store. Coat the canister with double-ought shot from a 12 gauge stuck in a composition of silica sand—what’s called ‘fire clay,’” she asided. “Mixed with zinc oxide and using thermoplastic resin as a binding agent and you have a device capable of withstanding the heat of gasoline flames for approximately ten to fifteen minutes … “ The pause was electric. “… just about long enough for the cops to arrive.”

  “BAM!!” went The Leader.

  “BAM!” went the dame.

  “Inshallah!” breathed William 5X.

  The realization echoed in the awed silenced room: “We could finally make them motherfuckers pay.”

  “How did you … “

  “I have a degree in chemistry from Berkeley.”

  The awed silence in the room continued because we were listening to the whistle our minds had blown.

  “Berkeley,” it came from Rahid, more awed statement than query.

  “Berkeley. While I was there I joined SDS. Kids … “ she disgusted. “Yet there I hooked up with one of them, I won’t tell you who, but he was ‘Weatherman.’”

  Another wolf-whistle bounced and ricocheted off the gray-mattered canyons of our brains. “Yeah … “ the pause hung like all our animation had been suspended, “… yeah, I’m ‘Weather Underground,’ she looked around, “And there’s money in it for you … A lot of money. And all you got to do is pick up a phone and dial 9-1-1.”