3
I arrived back at my hotel to find a death threat scrawled across the back of a bookmark. It said: I’ll kill you, you mimetic Philistine, signed: The Ghost of Wyndham Lewis. I wasn’t worried about the acting out of any such threats, as the clowns who had taken me as their enemy were as unlikely to actually do something as they were to actually write something.
Story idea. A woman gives birth to an egg. She goes in for a normal delivery and what comes out is an egg, a six-pound-three-ounce egg. The doctors don’t know what to do, so they slap a diaper on it and stick in an incubator. Nothing happens. Then they have the mother sit on it. Nothing happens. The egg is given to the mother to hold. She falls in love with the egg, calls it her baby. The egg has no limbs to move, no voice with which to cry. It is an egg and only an egg. The woman takes the egg home, names it, bathes it, worries about it. It is unchanging, ungrowing, but it is her “baby,” she says. Her husband leaves. Her friends don’t come over. She talks to the egg, tells her she loves it. The egg cracks …
Went to my sister’s clinic over in Southeast. Washington hides its poverty better than any city in the world. Just blocks from the mall and Capitol Hill, where thousands of tourists mill about each day, people cover their windows with towels to keep out the rain, and nail boards across their doors when they lock up at night. Though my sister lived up above Adams-Morgan, she practiced in Southeast, “where the people lived.” She was tougher than I could ever be.
I walked in through the front door and ten women’s faces turned to me together, demanding to know what I was doing there. I went to the receptionist’s desk.
“I’m Thelonious Ellison, Dr. Ellison’s brother,” I said.
“You’re kidding me.” The receptionist was not fat, but there was plenty of her. She got up, came around her desk and gave me a squeeze. I sank into her, thinking that was what a hug should feel like. “The writer brother,” she said, stepping back to look at me. “And fine.” She called back down the hall. “Eleanor, Eleanor.”
“What?” Eleanor asked.
“We got us a real writer in here.”
“What?”
“Dr. E’s brother.”
Eleanor came and hugged me too. She was wearing her stethoscope, but that melted into her ample bosom as she crushed me. “Doctor E’s with a patient right now.”
“Yeah, honey,” the receptionist said, beside herself with smiling. “You have a seat and I’ll tell her you’re here. If you need anything, you call my name, Yvonne, okay?”
I sat in an empty, thinly upholstered, orange chair beside a young woman with curling, blue fingernails. She had a little boy with a runny nose sitting on her lap.
“Handsome boy,” I said. “How old is he?”
“Two years,” she said.
I nodded. The chair was more comfortable than I expected a waiting room chair to be and I felt the artificial pressures of my day fading away, trailing off to a whisper in that din of reality.
“So, what are you doing here in Washington?” Yvonne asked me from her desk.
“Came in for a meeting,” I said.
“You must be important to be coming into Washington for a meeting like that,” she said.
I shook my head and laughed. “No, it’s just a meeting of the Nouveau Roman Society. Hardly important. I read a paper this morning and now I’m done.”
Yvonne looked at me as if my words were getting lost in the space between us. She nodded her head without looking directly at me and went back to her work on the desk. I felt awkward, out of place, like I had so much of my life, like I didn’t belong.
“You write books?” the woman with the child asked.
“Yes.”
“What kind of books you write?”
“I write novels,” I said. “Stories.” Already feeling out of place, I now didn’t know how to sound relaxed.
“My cousin gave me Their Eyes Were Watching God. She had it in a class. She goes to UDC. I liked that book.”
“That’s a really fine novel,” I said.
“She gave me Cane, too,” the young woman said, adjusting her son on her lap. “That one’s my favorite.”
“Great book.”
“It ain’t a novel though, is it?” she asked. “I mean, it ain’t just one story and it’s got them poems in it. But it seemed like one thing, know what I mean?”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“I think about that story ‘Box Seat’ and I think I’m in that theater all the time, watching them midgets fight.” She shook her head as if to come back around, wiped her child’s nose.
“Have you gone to college?” I asked.
The girl laughed.
“Don’t laugh,” I said. “I think you’re really smart. You should at least try.”
“I didn’t even finish high school.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I scratched my head and looked at the other faces in the room. I felt an inch tall because I had expected this young woman with the blue fingernails to be a certain way, to be slow and stupid, but she was neither. I was the stupid one.
“Thank you,” I said to the girl.
She didn’t respond to that and, luckily, was called back to an examination room at that moment.
Lisa came out in her white jacket and her stethoscope slung around her neck. I’d never seen her in her element before. She seemed so calm, at ease, in charge. I was proud of her, in awe of her. I got up and though her half of the hug was stiff, mine was not and it worked to soften the whole thing. She was taken by surprise and even blushed a little.
“I’ve got to see two more patients and then we can go,” she said. “You’re lucky, no picketers today. They must be in church or at a coven meeting. You’re okay out here?”
“Yes, Yvonne is taking care of me,” I said, but the receptionist had cooled to me. She offered a mechanical smile and wagged the eraser of her pencil in the air. “I’ll be waiting.”
When I was fifteen, my friend Doug Glass, that really was his name, asked me if I wanted to ride over to a party with him. This was during the summer in Annapolis. He was a year older and had his own car. I was excited to go. When we got there the music was loud and unfamiliar, the bass thumping. The air was full of male voices trying to dig down another octave and girls’ giggles. We stood out on the lawn first and I held onto a beer in a plastic cup until it was warm. I hadn’t acquired a taste for it yet and, to tell the truth, I was afraid it might make me throw up. We were in a part of Annapolis I’d never visited before, but I could see the spire of the capitol building, so I knew about where I was.
“Yo, brother, what’s yo name?” a tall boy asked me, blowing cigarette smoke not quite in my face. “I’m Clevon.”
“Monk,” I said.
“Monk?” he laughed. “What the fuck kind of name is Monk?”