“But Jim said that the budget was already skin and bones.”
“Look, I just work here.” You can say that again, Ball thought.
“Becky wants to put all of her money into Eva Braun’s play. You ready for that? Now, I want you to take the script home and go over my corrections, I mean, my suggestions.” You were right the first time, Ball thought. “And give me a call. We’ll meet at my place early next week.” She handed him her card.
12
The doorman at Tremonisha’s apartment building was Randy Shank, the first playwright who’d made the theater feminists’ sex list in the 1960s. The one who’d gotten into trouble with his satire The Rise and Fall of Mighty Joe Young, whose premise was that American women craved to be raped by a beast. The play not only caused problems for the author but for one of the male critics who’d given it a good review. Feminists had the man followed. The women who dated him were harassed outside their apartment buildings by something calling itself “the feminist education committee,” whose members shouted all kinds of rotten things about the critic as these women attempted to enter and leave their homes. The feminists ransacked his office and smeared blood all over his typewriter and papers. Ball was surprised to see Randy because he’d heard that Randy had left for Europe. He’d heard rumors about Randy and his travels through Amsterdam and Brussels. How women waited for him in shifts at his favorite cafés. Shank was stroking his chin and looking Ball up and down. He frowned and folded his arms. He still walked with his shoulders stooped. In his doorman’s outfit he resembled a World War I Ukrainian general.
“Randy, what are you doing here?” Ball asked.
“Well. It talks,” he said, glowering. “You weren’t so friendly the other night. I caught you down in the East Village on Avenue A. I called and you didn’t even turn around to acknowledge me. And that woman you were with. She looked like a bat out of hell. Had that next-wave shit all over her face and one side of her hair dyed blond, the other looking like a rooster had slept on it. What were you, high, or something?”
Funny line coming from a guy who in the sixties was so full of heroin he couldn’t stand up, Ian thought. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“It was Tuesday night, at about eleven A.M. down in the Village. Avenue A. You walked right by me.”
“I was working on my script Tuesday night; I didn’t even come out of the house.”
“Well, if it wasn’t you, somebody was wearing your face.” All of the fellas were saying that something had happened to Shank in Europe. That there had been a personality change. Maybe he was beginning to see apparitions.
“I thought you were in Europe,” Ball said, hoping to steer the conversation in a different direction.
“Oh, that. I got into a lot of hassles. Man, as soon as Tremonisha’s plays and those other feminist bitches’ books started to get translated into foreign languages, the women in these countries began to come down hard on black men. With the missiles and the strong dollar, anti-Americanism is very rife.”
“Look, I,” Ball reached into his pocket.
“I don’t need your money,” Shank sneered. “I make enough here. Got me a one-bedroom up on West End. I’m saving my money and I’m going to stage my new play myself. That way I’ll have independence and won’t have to rely on these downtown Jews to get my stuff over. I won’t have to kiss anybody’s ass to get over.”
Ball lifted the man from his feet. Ball may have been from the South, but he knew about Afro-American signifying. “What do you mean by that?” he said, ready to punch Shank.
“Nothing, man. I don’t mean nothing.” Ball let him down.
“Man, you country niggers are sure paranoid. Every time somebody say something, you think they talking about you. I just be hearing things, that’s all,” he said, brushing himself off.
“Hearing what things?”
“Aw, man. You know there’s always going to be talk. They say that you’ve given in to those dykes over there at the Mountbatten and that—” Shank covered his grin. “They say that now that the Jew boy, your security, has disappeared, Tremonisha”—he started to laugh aloud—“Tremonisha Smarts is directing your play.” Shank doubled over, holding his gut, he was laughing so.
Ball thought for a moment. “So what’s wrong with that?” Ball said, weakly. “She’s a competent director.”
“Aw, man, you know the reason the white boys love her so. It’s because she portrays black men as hurried, inattentive lovers, and then there’s that scene where this brute throws the woman down the stairs. They love that. That’s all the white boys talk about. Man, do they cream behind that. They love stuff showing black dudes as animalistic sexual brutes because that’s what they are. Just like when they called people cannibals. They’re the biggest cannibals there are. They’ve cannibalized whole civilizations, they’ve cannibalized nature, they’d even cannibalize their own mothers.” Ball had heard this speech a million times over the years in New York.
“I’m proud to have Tremonisha direct my play. I’ve learned a lot from her already.”
“I agree with this Flower Phantom dude. He’s right. Some of these black feminist writers are just as guilty as those French whores who collaborated with the Nazis. They deserve what they get. Cut off their hair, but leave a flower.” He snapped his fingers, annoyed with himself. “Damn. Why didn’t I think of that?” He stamped a foot.
“She’s a collaborator because she told that columnist that rapists should be castrated. You know who’s going to be castrated, don’t you? Me and the fellas are going to contribute to this guy’s defense fund if he’s ever arrested. These Jew bitches are the ones behind it. They’re putting Coretha and Clotel up to it. The way I figure, by having your play produced by Becky French, you’re collaborating with these Zionists.”
“Becky’s not Jewish. Her family’s ancestry goes all the way back to the Mayflower.”
“That’s what all these Jews say. They’d rather be pilgrims and the descendents of slave owners than be themselves. The Jews over here ain’t the real Jews anyway.”
Ball was looking toward the elevator in hopes of escaping Shank’s crazy tirade. He wished that there was some way he could get away. He’d finally run into a man who was more extreme than Brashford in his anti-Semitism.
“How are these hymies over here supposed to be Jews when Abraham was a black man who fucked black women and had babies by them? The Flower Phantom, he said he’d get Becky French for agreeing with Tremonisha. Boy, why can’t I be him.” Shank had a reputation for being on the tail end of trends. Some people called him a copycat. Ball was becoming uncomfortable.
“Just like the Jew. Black people invented Judaism and then these Europeans take it over and water it down into some kind of stale crossover religion. Next the white Jews say they the only Jews and the original Jews, the black Jews who invented the religion in the first place, have to take a test when they go to Israel. Imagine that. Like these Falashas, whose traditions are pre-Talmudistic, have to take a test from these fake Jews when they go to Israel, and Israel is becoming such a theocratic state that they’re even going to stop admitting these jive American Jews. These American Jews want it both ways. They play Marrano pretending to be Christian on the side, but in the back they still Jews. You heard what old Begin told them, didn’t you? He said if they were so Jewish why don’t they go to Israel, but now these reform Jews are scared because the Israeli people might even stop letting them in.” Ball tried to sneak up to the elevator when the downstairs phone rang, but it stopped ringing and Shank continued. “The Jew hates the Gentile. He thinks that the Gentile is a dog, which explains why the Jews who own the media are always shoving this eye dog food up into his face. If you want to know how much the Jew hates the Gentile, watch the fall preview of TV shows, the movies that come out of Hollywood. He thinks the Gentile drinks too much and is uncivilized.” Ball was relieved when a man dressed in a tweed jacket, brown gabardine pants, and casual shoes entered the lobby. The man’s face was distinguished. He had a prominent nose. What in the old days the fellas would have called a “handsome” woman accompanied him. She was wearing a tweed jacket and conservatively styled British skirt, as well as a Robin Hood hat with a feather.