How Louie The Madman Raged Waking Up Last Week

[Aberjhani]

By way of introducing myself, Aberjhani, I would like to share the following story because it was Richard Pryor's mastery of humor as a tool to treat social ills that liberated my own sense of humor, which more than once has saved my life. This story is called THUS SPOKE THE MADMAN: HOW LOUIE RAGED WAKING UP LAST WEEK, and was a performance piece before being included in my first book, I MADE BY BOY OUT OF POETRY:

By Aberjhani

What chu mean bus fare cost a dollar now? Since when it stopped bein thirty-five cents cause that’s all I got anyway. What?! Get off the bus?! Why the hell you wanna say somethin that stupid boy? You better drive this damn bus so we can all get to wherever we goin! And I bet chu stupid enough to think you got a clue, ain’t it? You probably lost ninety-eight percent of your mind watchin filthy movies and jackin off last night then had the nerve to get up this mornin thinkin you knew where you was goin, believin with a bona fide belief that your intelligence was actually that exceptional.
Say what? Go ahead and call the cops if you wanna. All my friends and family already in jail and possibly my heart is grievin to see them. Possibly it sho nuff is, but now look at all these passengers waitin for you to drive this damn bus. Hey y’all, he say he ain’t goin nowhere til I get sixtyfive more cents --SO!--if y’all want this thang to move... Why thank you ma’am, thank you so much sugar. And Lord look at this white man givin me fifty whole cents! Bless your heart boy! Bless your wretched little treacherous heart!
Lady why is you starin at me? I resent your eyes violatin my privacy in public. What?! I know I stink heffa! If you was sleepin up under a bridge for the past ten years your Last-Dollar-dress-wearin-flea-market-shoe-shoppin-high-damn-yellow ass would be stinkin too! Who knows how many times that tide came in and how much shit it dragged in with it? Who knows the uncountable corners of the earth or hell from which said mysterious shit came? Instead’a you freakin out about me smellin so funky, you ought’a be screamin over what a miracle it is that I’m standin here fuckin with your pitiful dumb ass.
But yeah, yes, it has come to my attention that the world ain’t what it was when I knew it in the years gone bye and bye, but it just so happen that you talkin to a man who still is a man so I suggest you respect that fact and adjust your assitude accordingly.
Lo and behold --Bless the Lord-- they tell me these is the 1990s and my black ass is still breathin: I’m here on earth witnessin wonders to be lived and mysteries that astound. Just like right now I’m standin here lookin’ at you black boy and you white girl, sittin there all cozy together with the metal rings in your nose, in your lips, in your ears and eyebrows. Y’all sittin there smilin at me but shouldn’t you be on somebody’s operatin table tryin to get those things off your face? No?! You don’t think so? Well ain’t that somethin? That’s more than I know to say anything about. Hmph!
They tell me these is the nineteen nineties and here I done woke up and I’m talkin bout it y’all. I was walkin down the street this mornin and I saw this little boy on his knees bendin over some grass that was growin out the sidewalk. Well the little boy was just’a cussin at the grass and I mean he came up with some combinations that was downright addmyrable. But I had to ask him: “Little boy why you cussin at that grass so bad?” And you know what that little boy told me? -- He was cussin at the grass cause it was green. And he wanted it to be blue. I was so amazed that I almost did a number two right there in my drawers standin on the sidewalk lookin at that little boy cussin up a storm beneath a bright summer sun that only this mornin rose up like a bird out’a God’s great remembrance when wasn’t nobody lookin and you damn sure better believe my black ass was amazed. Lordy lordy, I’m tellin y’all!
Then I kept on walkin -- y’all understand this was before I got on the bus now, right, this was before the driver --bless his slick ass, don’t hit that car boy!-- before he told me I needed a dollar when all I had was thirty-five cents and that woman who done got off gave me a quarter and this man who still here praying for me to shut up gave me fifty whole cents and now he regret it cause I’m loose loaded and alive. I mean that shit just the way y’all heard it: loose, loaded and alive! That’s...um, is nurse Pemblebrook on this bus? She usually bring my pills round about this time. She a big fat ugly bitch but she kind and she patient like somethin glorious out’a the Bible. Anybody seen her?
...Um, what was I talkin about before the recollection of your presence interrupted me? Yeah, that’s right, I was walkin down the sidewalk and the wind of all this world’s magnanimous incredulity blew a piece’a newspaper right against my face. It had a story in it about a man who raped a woman and beat her up real bad. Beat her up real bad y’all. He left her for dead but somethin more generous than him spoke up and made her to live. He didn’t know for whom that bell was tollin as he walked away without lookin back. The newspaper say he went home, drank two or three beers and went to bed, then another man broke inside his apartment and robbed him and raped him too. Glory Jesus! Well don’t y’all know old people used to say what go around come around but I think somethin done got out’a hand here! Why these people stickin their things inside’a other people without askin or nothin? That man forced his personal self inside that woman’s sacred nature and I can’t call that fuckin cause there wasn’t no grace in their untimely togetherness. He ruled her body and crushed her mind until they threw up pure grief and then somebody else ruled his body and crushed his mind until he... did what? Until he did what? We come to an important aspect here:
Did he bleed and cry about diseases or pregnancy the way the newspaper say that woman did? Or did he reach an understandin about hisself the way we do sometimes when playing with mirrors, cause that’s what the other man was like for him. Right? Like some kind’a dirty broken up mirror reflectin back all the dirty and broken up things he is on the inside and maybe on the outside too? But what I wanna know mostly is why somebody wanna stick a certain piece of hisself inside a certain piece of another human being if the other human being don’t ask them to put it there and why does that communicate to his brain the word we call pleasure when his sperm had to feel and smell like cold mud from hell inside that woman, and that other man’s sperm, that third real freaky corner on this shaky triangle, that other man’s sperm had to feel and smell that way too, didn’t it? Raging up inside that first man’s ass? Damn, gonna rape some hard-legged bastard without prior knowledge to the particulars of his anus.
But chu know what I heard somebody say? I heard somebody say they saw the first man, the one who did the rapin and then got raped, down at the police station. And they was talkin bout how peculiar the expression on his face was. Why was they surprised? Seem to me like anybody who go to bed all by their saintly self then suddenly wake up with somebody else’s nuts sneakin up their butt is bound to walk around for a while lookin mighty damn peculiar. Shit.
So here we had these two men and they was eatin some fierce wickedness cooked up on a woman’s belly. From what I understand they didn’t care nothin bout the reality of God bein inside every single one of them. God as woman inside the woman. God as man inside both those men. Nobody was touchin the other bodies with any kind’a divine music in their fingers. Just grindin out their self-concerned ultra nasty arrogance. What did they think God was thinkin, standin somewhere beside the independence of their human will. And did any of y’all passengers call your president and tell him to get his ass down here and cut this horrendous mess out?! Did y’all call the National Guard or the Marines? That’s what happened when niggers tried to go to college some years back so seems like this would’a been a lot more scary.
Lady is you starin at me or listenin to what I’m sayin? What chu see anyway when you think you lookin at me? I been this big and this black all my displaced life and I know for a fact that my dick is not a creature from your nightmare mythologies, it is a friend to my grief and the carrier of my potential for an undiluted divinity. Is you still starin at me? What? Am I Emma Lee’s baby boy? How the hell would I know who gave birth to me? If you ask me somethin that stupid again I’m gonna unzip my pants and rain all over your parade. Crazy people like you give insane motherfuckas like me a terrible name! You shouldn’t be out in public by yo’self anyway. I think about what your brain is like behind that face and I get questionable just lookin at you.
Lord Lord Lord, this here is the nineteen nineties and I’m standin here talkin bout it, but one thing I know for sure, just as sure as I’m standin here smellin like a river full of chitlins, I am a man, and something other than a man, something which moves and dreams in and out of different dimensions where sometimes planets such as black and white dance to the same drums, where jigsaw pieces like male and female solve the same puzzle when you touch them the right way.
But here we is in the nineteen nineties and... where’s nurse Pemblebrook... anybody seen my old friend nurse Pem-- Hey bus driver! This my stop! Damnit did you hear me boy, I said whoa! Stop this bus immediately! Yes, thank you kindly sir. You understand that I would kiss you goodbye but who knows where all your mouth has traveled in its dubious lifetime. And then too there is the possibility of your falling in love and turnin into a nuisance. All y’all have a good day now, and don’t be pissin me off the next time we share this journey together. We ain’t got time for that.

by Aberjhani
(from the book: I MADE MY BOY OUT OF POETRY © 1998)