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The Jam (Part 1) · by R.H.S.
Brambleberry Champale makes me more viciouser when it’s dusky. I thought you knew.
“Motherfuck a New’s Year Eve. Crush-kill, destroy if you must, but never ever stress that ol’ next script. You write your nightcap is if it concludes on Sugar Hill, bubblin’ until the freaks of dawn. But level with me, akh. Get off the halcyon. Visualize your future-shock as $25 damage at the door. Five-oh is posting high as the HBO satellite, acting all kinds of extra tonight. Don’t get me started on Dick “I’m-a-Murderous-Cyborg-Beneath-The-Droopy-Jowls” Clark’s Countdown To Armageddon special. Strokes at midnight? Thinkful wishing, dunny. Fishing your plastic collar stays out of the homeslice dip bowl, more like it.”
Raheem unloosens the silverbacked wrapper of a mixed-berry Nutri-Grain bar with domineering tenderness, handling the crummy fruit wedge like an aging barfly does a finicky crypto-virgin. Across the recognized threshold into the nebbish and cluttery parlor my mother reorganizes her mah-jong tiles and dusts her fleet of unicorn figurines on some crazy Rosie the Maid shit that doesn’t make sense. She straight slaughters a pack of Iroquois-scrambled, internet-smuggled Virginia Slims without even thinking.
My sister, my father, and our skittish porcelain calico named Junior witness gumshoe Ethan Hawke kick fire out of Denzel’s gracefallen ass. NJ Transit, that disrespectful crosstown parabellum, wheezes, honks, and whirs through our peculiar colony, smothering my peace for a couple of light years, but you see me wincing not.
“The dips were a popular distraction and they still are. Speaking of which, about the Deltas, and this Moonlit Melodic Rush joint they got going on at the Route 18 Marriott? I dunno, man. You see Ra, there’s but one objective assuming tonight’s the night: get nice and run up in some power-u. Guinness-willing, stay in the cut and tear shit up righteous. Getting home safe, that would be peace too. If I can make it through the night without hearing ‘Hey shawty — it’s yo’ birfday!’ – victory. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves like Uniblab. Zoning on some feast of St. James en route to Zorro’s Halloween Jam in the plush Somerset hills? Fuck outta here with that. Happy 2004.”
I pause to take another swig, ‘cause I’m one nickel-slick motivator. A stupefyingly superfluous gesture, sure. Brain cells been scintillating astro-black whirligig since Halloween. Today’s sermon conversates preacher-to-choir trickeration. Tradition and ritual. From the goodly tents of belovable Borinquen to the totemic ashtrays and notices stacked on a tabletop smudged off-white by Star-Ledger travesties.
The amber tassled hanging lantern may have been lifted from a gypsy palm-reader’s musty parlor in Englewood. Or a greasy bulletproof dim-sum joint in Asbury. No matter. We rest deep in the gone-est backstreets of Eastwick. Mind you, this is not even my table to be bringing anything to. Not my kitchen either.
“I’m saying though, peace to man, woman, and child – but given these options I might as well lay low and wait for Los Tres Reyes with their jet-propelled camels to touch down. Everyone will just have to assume I blinked myself away to some whole ‘nother other realm. You know, where folks get down for the upstroke and, uh, good bitches are the baddest you can bag, I think. Either that or they’ll say I jetted to New Haven, but that’s today’s science, you feel me?”
Raheem rises from behind his tagged-up Book of the Dead, looking about as somber as an ironed t-shirt. A peasy-headed sheep who lost himself wooing the strangest wool, Ra now presumes himself to be founder than a motherfucker. Rumors abound that he was born with a hologram halo orbiting his skully, but felt compelled to pawn it for twenty bucks and a mood-ring after his older brother, a predicate felon and surprise signee to Jay-Z’s Roc-a-fella imprint, caught a charge for toting a plasma gat inside blessed Newark, I mean, Liberty International Airport, thereby grounding his family’s plans to skyrocket into the superstrate. I go ahead with my damned self, as advised.
“The whole wide world’s whylin’ out over the sun, moon, and stars. Taking the divine order for granted. Pagan stowaways on the Mothership Connection boggling on the upbeat. Hedonism across the Heavens. And we’re supposed to ascend past the surly bonds with bells on? Tell me, Ra, what’s so fantastic five about ringing in the ’04, huh? What do you suppose Starfleet Commandant Prince and his belly-dancing star troopers from Venus have to say about all this? Where’s Puffy and Mase with their lunar landing loungewear and Gucci solar-flare goggles? Are you really losing sleep over Y2K, Colombian Heaven, and Illuminati’s role in the free nights and weekends scheme? I thought not. Niggas would both celebrate and dread Tuesday 2:43pm if it could be celebrated and dreaded.”
I swig again. Ra grunts approvingly at my last point, then follows his poignant reply with a clumsily reverberating chuckle. Which devolves into a phlegmatic cough. He concludes with his infamous, Nod N’ Grin super deluxe special knockout supreme, patent-pending. He is not an imbecile or a Stepford Son or a negro-stalgic bobble-head on Jupiter; this is just how it goes for now. Such a response is amicable enough to ensure survival through a routine traffic stop and stoic enough to mush a venegeful breezy before her claws scrape corneas.
Ra’s performed smuggery is born of the same voodoo plus-degree that granted him, the melancholic North Philadelphiatic son of no one special, undisputable ask-cess into the silk e. smoov drawers of a certain cutesily connivingful Atlanta-bred orange blossom. Miss Kalesha Miriam Fairfax-Coaxum. I resume my speech while he slurps Henny-n-Schweppes on the rocks out of a Welch’s grape jelly jar through a looping, phosphorescent crazy straw…
Comments for "The Jam (Part 1)"
Thank you. For words, if not for substance (though I appreciate that as well). I’d be excited by this even if I understood nothing. I think I’ve been forced to take all my nephews to see Rakim and Ghostface next month. Bless you.
— Drewseph Oct 8, 08:36 AM