Iced, p.1
Iced, page 1
Dedication
To all the families who lived in the Louis H. Pink Houses in East New York, Brooklyn, from 1960–1970
—love from your paperboy
Epigraph
Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him:
for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
exodus 22:21
And with him are the keys of the invisible. None but he knoweth them. And he knoweth what is in the land and the sea. Not a leaf falleth but he knoweth it, not a grain amid the darkness of the earth, naught of wet or dry but (it is noted) in a clear record.
surah vi, Verse 59
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Iced
Afterword
Acknowledgments and in Memoriam
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Iced
There ain’t no date. . . . .
I don’t know what time of day it is.
I don’t care.
People call me Cornelius Jr.
That’s my name.
I think.
I don’t care.
My mother the money woman (she used to be the money woman, she moved away) gave me that name. Everybody seems to have a mother.
They curse a lot, they scream a lot, they cry.
I guess it’s because they are women.
I used to be somebody. . . . a long time ago.
I don’t dream much anymore.
I used to dream in color like the colors of Miami Vice.
I miss that program. When did it go off?
I dream about me. I dream about the shit I used to have.
I USED TO HAVE SHIT!
GOOD SHIT!!!
In fact my shit was very correct, very, very correct as they used to say back in the day. I don’t know what they say now.
I DON’T CARE!!
I have to write down what I remember and how I feel before it’s all gone. A little bit goes every day. . . . after I finish pipin’.
I don’t want to talk about the pipin’ bit yet. That comes later.
When I thought about writing this, I had a very important reason why I wanted to do it. Wanted to remind myself of what I was. . . . What I used to be, because I forgot. Soon it’s gonna be gone.
I told you I’m Cornelius. I’m forty-four or forty-five. I had a birthday a while back.
My mother and sister used to send me cards to remind me that I made another year (mother-talk).
They don’t send me them anymore . . . Maybe they do send them and I don’t get them. Maybe the ghost-people steal them like they steal all my other shit—like my welfare checks and bills.
I REMEMBER BILLS!
I REMEMBER RENT!
I’m glad the ghost-people steal the bills.
I call them the ghost-people because I never see them, I only see what they’ve done to me.
I live . . . stop. . . . . That word LIVE confuses me.
I don’t live.
I am alive. I breathe. I don’t live.
I remember life. It ain’t like this.
It’s more like what the TV used to show, not like Cosby, more like Good Times (remember that show?), we didn’t laugh as much as they do but I had a mother, a father, a brother and a sister. My mother’s name is. . . Cora. She went away after my father died. His name is. . . was Cornelius too. I had a brother, but that was a long time ago, he died too, he died first. He had a name but it hurts my head when I try to remember it. It began with an N. . . Nate or Nathan.
I see his face a lot. When the pipe is hot and the smoky whiteness rushes into my brain, I see his face smiling at me and I laugh. It makes me choke and cough up the goodness and I curse because I’m losin’ the goodness and I can’t afford to lose the goodness but I still see his face.
NATHAN
He died.
First.
My sister lives down-Brooklyn with her husband, this sucker who don’t like me. I used to go down to her place and see her. I would jump the subway-money-thing, catch the train and go down and see her, get some money for the pipe-man and see her, but she told me that her husband didn’t want me comin’ round there.
She would cry every time she saw me. Cry all the time, like a woman. She would take my hand into hers, call me “Junior . . . Junior . . .” like she was trying to wake me up or something. She’d try to feed me. I was never hungry. Not for chicken and rice. Lorraine . . . yeah that’s her name. She pays the rent on this place, she must pay it, she or my mother ’cause I don’t pay it, and the ghost-people ain’t come round to throw me out like they done to some of the other people that used to live ’round here.
You must understand something first.
IT WASN’T ALWAYS LIKE THIS!!!
Things used to be up.
So up.
It’s hard for me to tell you how up, specifics escape me.
I see snapshot memories.
My memories used to run across my mind like the movies.
Like a good fast movie. Like The French Connection.
A whole block of memories got smudged or erased when the pipe time came. I don’t know how it happened.
Memories that used to hip-hop like angry roaches across my brain movie-style, slowed down to comic-strip-frames in a funny paper like Peanuts.
Now my memories come in snapshots. One at a time.
I really got to concentrate to focus them in.
Sometimes I feel that I’ll just whiteout!
There won’t be no picture in my mind of anything.
It’ll just be white and black interference signals like when the last picture of TV goes off.
CLICK-SNAP
ME-MOMMIE-DADDY!
Nobody else. Good feeling.
DADDY SMILED THEN!
Didn’t march and bark back then. . . .
Fade-fade-focus-click-snap
Nate and me sharing a bed . . . my little brother what’s-his-name?
Nappy-head-Nate!
Nathan . . . Nathaniel—yeah Nate!
Skelly-in-the-hallway, handball-in-the-alley Nate.
Maybe I’m just makin’ it up.
Maybe it never happened.
There’s nothing in this room to tell that there ever was a NATE.
No picture-letter-card. . . . just a snapshot memory . . . that keeps crackin’ in my head.
I know he died.
Click-click-snap-snap
Lorraine cryin’ . . . kicking.
Some people dragging her away from Nate in a box.
Dead-in-his-graduation-suit.
Lorraine screaming . . . beatin’ the air . . . screamin’ from her guts like a she-goat was kickin’ her in the stomach or somethin’. . . . .
People draggin’ her through the church doors.
The people ain’t ghosts ’cause I can see them.
I don’t want to remember any more right now . . .
I’ll get back to it later.
It takes too much concentration.
* * * * MARCH 14 * 1991 * 3 a.m. * * * *
These days (and nights) all I want to do is pipe.
That’s all!
My only ambition is to pipe.
Pipin’ is my occupation. . . . I will explain later.
I am dedicated solely to the whiteness the goodness pipe brings me.
Symbols are easy. They tell. Quickly.
PIPE = (equals) goodness warmth family cover distance safety one-ness
To be without pipe = (equals) torture confusion coldness hunger
UNTHINKABLE THINGS.
* * * * MARCH 22 * 1991 * 11 p.m. * * * *
There’s an old picture of me I keep in an ancient shoebox.
My Holy-Covenant-Memory-Box.
Bits of golden papers, neophyte scribblings, snapshots.
Daddy.
Mama.
Lorraine.
I cut Nate out.
He died.
Certificates. My life.
This is what I keep in a box under my bed wrapped in a woollen winter coat mama sent me last Christmas (I think).
I look at this picture of me-like-I-usta-be.
I see a dude who looks like he should be president of United Steel.
This guy is smiling like Al Jarreau. . . .
like he knows something I don’t know.
The street-demons that control the pipe-rocks would call this guy a jerk . . . a sucker . . .
On the street there are only two kinds of people.
Dicks and suckers.
The bigger the dick the deeper the suck.
I hear White boys say of someone they don’t like—
“He’s such a dick!”
They don’t know shit.
Most White people don’t.
They wished they could be a real dick.
Come to think of it, the White folk that run the US Gov-ment are dicks.
In fact:
THE UNITED STATES GOV-MENT IS THE BIGGEST DICK IN THE UNIVERSE!!
They got the whole world sucking.
But they better watch out ’cause the Africans got a real HUGE-HARD-ON comin’ and they’re about to fuck ol’ Uncle Sam up the ass without a condom or KY.
They gonna fuck ol’ Uncle Sam big-time.
This guy in the picture, this Cornelius Jr. is a real wicked dude.
Wicked in the good sense.
Y’know like the homies would call a real brilliant brother “bad” meaning GREAT, EXCELLENT.
This Cornelius Jr. had it all figured out at fifteen and six months.
He was his mama’s joy and his daddy’s pride.
Yeah my dad Cornelius Sr. was real proud of me.
I was a true platinum chip off his old diamond block.
I was his Rosetta Stone.
Seeing me made anyone understand him and he loved that.
I was accepted into Columbia University at age sixteen.
I was gonna be a lawyer.
I graduated from Franklin K. Lane High School in East New York at age sixteen, entered Columbia, and for two whole years my life was paradise.
I moved out of my daddy’s house into an apartment near Washington Square Park in the Village in Manhattan.
This was 1964.
Washington Square Park was the center of all happenings.
(Excuse me, there’s a knock on the door.
I will ignore it.
Probably ghost-people trying to take something away from me.
Probably that freak Linda wanting to suck-my-dick for $10 so she can pipe!
I need my $10 so I can pipe later.
I just took a hit to put me in a 1964 state of mind.
This shit is so sweet! Like peppermints dipped in honey.
Smoke rushin’ my body, feel so warm, so loved. The pipe loves me! It wants me, like a big-fat-wet-pussy! The pipe sucks me up as I suck it!
Bliss! Bliss! Heaven! Heaven!)
MOTOWN-STAX-BEATLES-ROLLINGSTONES-STAPLESINGERS-JAMESCLEVELAND-SHIRLEY CAESAR
These were my music Angels.
I played them on my phonograph.
I didn’t have no CD or separated stereo shit then, just an old phonograph player my sister Lorraine and my brother Nate gave me for a graduation present.
I’d sit in the window of my apartment overlooking Washington Square Park, the Supremes or the Ronettes singing in the background, and watch the hippies throwin’ frisbees down below in the park.
“. . . . be my baby . . . be my pretty baby. . . .”
Blonde-White-girls in day-glo scarves and halter tops would dance and smile up at me hoping I’d smile back and invite them up to my room so they could see firsthand if the big-Black-myth was true.
And “YES” they’d yell as I lifted their thighs high in the air and shoved my dick as far and as hard as it would go into their asshole.
And they’d scream “YES.”
I never fucked a White girl in the pussy.
My dick is sacred.
My Black dick only fucked Black pussy.
BUT
I’d fuck a White girl or boy (if I was feeling freaky) up their ass in a minute.
This was a political act to me.
This was my revolutionary statement.
Ferguson (the White boy I roomed with) was a beatnik.
We’d check out the beat clubs that still existed in the Village.
They had been moved lower down to the East Side ’cause folk music was comin’. We’d sometimes go to a coffeehouse on Bleeker St. and catch the no-singin’-mother-fucker Bob Dylan.
I liked his songs though he couldn’t sing worth-a-shit!
“The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind. . . .”
(blowin’ in the wind my friend blowin’-blowin’-blowin’ just like the goodness from my pipe. I’m blowin’ this dick ’n’ I don’t care who don’t like it.)
* * * * MARCH 27 * 1991 * 2 p.m. * * * *
1964–1966—The first free years of my life!
It seems so long ago and so unbelievable that I know that it couldn’t have happened. Maybe I read about it or saw it in a movie
like Alice’s Restaurant
or
Hair
But the reality was better than both of them movies.
Hair the stage play was kind of like it but not really so good.
All I had to do was go to class, work in the record department of Mays department store on 14th St., smoke my reefer, go to clubs and fuck all the pussy and ass I could get my dick into.
PERFECTION
Bliss like this white crystalline wonder
I suck into my brain which torches this memory into action.
I search the floor anxiously
Examining each white ash and lint.
Making sure I drop none of the goodness.
NATE DIED
I know he did.
I remember the funeral.
Everybody shocked.
Everyone crying.
Perfect-Angel-Nate
Nate would stay with me sometimes when daddy got too super-sonic.
It was said that Ferguson (White-boy-I-roomed-with) was a junkie.
I didn’t know because he never did it in front of me.
He and Nate became fast friends.
Maybe I should have watched my younger brother more carefully, but I was too busy watching myself. I couldn’t take him everywhere with me. Daddy plastered my soul with guilt.
Mama wreathed my head.
Said I should have watched Nate, should have taken him with me.
BUT
that’s why I didn’t take him with me.
I didn’t want him influenced by the new toys I had found in my new secret garden. I wasn’t going to play snake to his Eve.
I didn’t have to.
Ferguson wrapped his white rattle around my brother’s black ass and stung him hard.
Before I could say Smokey Robinson
Nate was a fully-fledged-stealin’-from-daddy-needle-poking-noddin’ JUNKIE.
I kicked Ferguson’s ass and threw him out of the apartment, but that didn’t help Nate.
Nate was hooked. Hooked hard.
He would disappear for weeks.
I would walk the streets looking for him. I’d wind up in Harlem on 144th St. in a bombed-out-ghetto-room-with-the-ceiling-half-blasted-in.
The window nail-boarded shut to keep other junkie demons out.
There Nate would be noddin’ or sleepin’.
Piss-shit-stinkin’-dirty-black-from no-bath-in-a-month.
I would sit there and wait for him to come around.
IT WASN’T MY FAULT NATE BECAME A JUNKIE!
I say that here and now.
If my mother ever sees this or if anyone reads and knows her, tell my mama Mrs. Cora Lorraine Washington that
IT WAS NOT MY FAULT THAT NATE BECAME A JUNKIE!!!
Those two years 1964–1966 were the only free years of my life.
I had spent all the other years being the perfect son, the perfect brother, the perfect student, the perfect child.
Cornelius Jr. the perfect!
I should be canonized!
I deserve sainthood at least.
Cornelius Senior was Dr. Terrible.
I feared him more than any hood in the street!
He would kick my ass more thoroughly than any other would-be Tyson at the time could. He was lethal and sadistic with his shit.
Belt buckles, wire hangers, whips, even heated irons did his bidding.
I obeyed out of sheer fear.
I craved his approval fiendishly.
His approval, his praise was the rock of my existence.
When his temper cracked the peace of the night sky, we all ran for cover.
Mama nagged, pleaded, blackmailed us into obedience.
Threatening to feed us to daddy-dragon if we stepped out of line.
At the end of a day, whenever a key turned in the lock, we knew it was daddy time. My mind would swim through the day’s events like a drowning man’s life flashing before him, searching every act to see if I was found wanting, if my ass was hanging in the balance.
I lived like that for sixteen years.
I was smart.
I was brilliant but not for brilliance’s sake.
I was not a hood, I was not a thief, I didn’t or couldn’t run away.
I was not programmed that way.
School was my only way out.
“Education is the key. . . .” mama told me repeatedly.
