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     Schakspir AALBC .com Platinum Poster Username: Schakspir Post Number: 93 Registered: 12-2005 Rating: N/A |
(From Back House Books) “I enjoyed reading NATE so much that I read scenes to anyone within hearing distance. P. Lewis is an original talent whose English cuts through a lot of contemporary BS like a butcher knife. His characters don’t give a flying F- whether you feel for them or not. It’s important that a powerful novel such as this surfaces at a time when the black lit. scene is being smothered by a lot of dumb frivolous chick-lit and down low scribbling. Anybody want to know where the kick-behind black male literary tradition of Himes, Wright, John A. Williams went? It’s alive and well in Berlin.” --Ishmael Reed Tired of all the baby mama drama dreck? Fed up with “thug life” narratives without style or substance? Sick and tired of typos, clichés, boring narratives and just plain bad writing? Try NATE. What is NATE? A literary phenomenon. Eloquent and elegant. Poetically melancholy. Vindictively brutal. Raw. Raging. Infuriating. Who is NATE? Nathan James Morris. Young, gifted, and black. Ambitious, naïve, and foolhardy. Marine. College student. Junky. Hostage. Drifter. Wife-stealer. Murderer. NATE is a reprieve from the piles of endless "urban" horseshit you have probably been eating--often without thinking. It is good, unclean fun. It is the Invisible Man of the 21st Century. Then, again, we are only being modest. You decide. Buy your copy of NATE today. You have certainly been waiting for it. Chapter One The door opened up to a slight, round-faced man in a black, padded leather jacket, black, pointy-toed shoes, red shirt and black leather tie. He had a Kangol cap stuck on his head and a smug grin scrawled on his face. Cockily sauntering in, he headed straight for the bar, where he sat, ordered a beer, looked up at the ceiling, closed his eyes, and giggled. I knew it, I thought. The motherfucker knew all of my hiding places. I couldn’t understand how, or why—he just knew. I couldn’t get away from him to save my life. He hadn’t seen me, yet I knew the motherfucker was thinking of me: he knew I was in deep shit. I was seated just a few tables away and vainly tried to shield myself, but it didn’t work. His head craned toward my table. He rolled his eyes at me, said something to himself, stood up, and in his haste, bumped another student; the student cursed him. Guy Sellers, naturally, cursed back. “Nate, what’s up?” Guy Sellers never really had his shit together—he was just a little boy trying to be a man. He was always dressing like a pimp and always in trouble with the local authorities. But no matter how many times he got drunk, no matter how many windows he’d broken or how many asses he’d grabbed, he always managed to come clean, for he was one of Freedom College’s most beloved students. (How I hated him for it, the cocksucker.) “Hey, Nate,” he continues, in a loud, hoarse voice, “Why the hell are you still here? Are you crazy?” Good question: I should have asked that of myself. “No,” I blurted out, resigned, “I just got expelled.” But I quickly added: “I’m going to Coon State next semester. I read all the pamphlets about it. I realize now what I want to do. I want to be an illustrator! That way, I can make my life count for something, rather than being some dumb-ass, empty-headed Freedom nigger.” “Sssssssssssh!” Guy exclaimed, looking around him, “not so loud, yo! You know how these niggers are around here!” “Fuck ‘em,” I snapped, “I’ve had it. I’m on my way to C.S.U.! You know, after two years of this place, I don’t even feel like a real man? And yet, I’m fucking nineteen already. It’s crazy! This is what it feels like to be castrated!—” “Coon State?” Guy sat down—I saw now he was pretending to be drunker than he really was. “Man, lemme say that again. Are you DEAD serious? You say illustrator, huh? Okay, fuck it. Go to New York.” He looked at me with those cold, unsettling green eyes I have always believed, to this day, many years after his death, to have been contact lenses. “Yeah, Nate. Why not? You recall the last two years of this shit up here? Why do ya wanna go to another college to get your ass kicked all over again? Don't you realize you just wasting your life, your money? Go to New York, yo. Hell, I would. Just a simple trip to the train station is all it takes, motherfucker.” Somebody then changed the channel on the pub’s TV. Ted Morgan of Channel 9 news was blubbering about racism on “mainstream” college campuses. Talk about coincidences. “You STILL wanna go to another college?” Guy shot. He gave me a nudge. “Like I said, New York or bust. Shit, why not do it right now? What's the hold-up?” He took a good, long look around the darkened, dreary pub. He had something on his mind; it was eating him up inside. “Look at these niggers in here, yo....Look at ‘em. Can you believe this tired-ass shit is our race? They don't do nothin’ but sit around, whinin’ about what some asshole said about them in the Times, or on TV or some shit, or starin’ at the fuckin’ wall, you know. An’ out inna street, it’s worse. All you see out there is so bad, why the fuck not come on in here, it’s the lesser of two evils. In here, all they do is mope around and get drunk; out there, all they do is beat each other up or shoot each other, and then here come they mamas hypocritically cryin’ their crocodile tears about shit. Oh, please! Dumb-ass bitches! We ain’t nothin’ but a goddamn cartoon race. No wonder nobody likes us. I didn’t even know we’d fallen so low in the past ten years!” “Well, it’s a new generation,” I said, wanly. “New generation, shit! These niggers are cooped up here ‘cause they scared. Understand? They’re too scared to come face to face with those white motherfuckers downtown, and we don’t fight back.....Lissen, chief. Here’s what I mean. My first semester, I didn’t go here; I went to Tom Watson University near Madison, Wisconsin. Yeah....you know where that is. Well, lissen. I asked a nigger there if he knew who Dr. King was, and this nigger told me, ‘Was it that big black guy who freed the slaves?’ An’ I was like, damn, your ass is so lost! I don’t even know what to tell you, you know? An’ it wasn’t just him. Not at all. ‘Cause another time, they had this football game, an’ the fuckin’ white boys rioted. Yeah, they were all pissed off, ‘cause the niggers at homecoming had whipped their ass, okay? An’ then I felt glass an’ shit sprinklin’ me just as soon as the crackers started screamin’ shit. You know what they said, man? WE’RE GONNA KILL ALL YOU GODDAMN NIGGERS!!” Guy barks, affecting a white boy’s cracker sneer. “An’ that’s exactly what they did. They killed, maimed, burned, shot, stabbed, and raped every nigger as they rushed off the bleachers with anything they could get their hands on....Man, I was there, an’ you know what? I saw those niggers freeze up like ice. But shit, what else could you do inna situation like that, though? The hate on the faces of those white boys was not to be believed, Nate. They were just like the goddamn storm troopers. But if I had my gun, sure as shit, you know my ass woulda been in Brazil tonight, yo!” “Why? You think you’d get away from the Law?” “Law? What motherfuckin’—Nate, you still stuck on that Ronald Reagan bullshit? Don’t you know what time it is? Oh, man, please don’t tell me Malcolm X was just a brand new soft drink like this one nigger told me! I don’t mean to put you down but you sound like you still up at St. Floyd’s talkin’ that shit. You know six niggers were killed in that riot—SIX! An’ ain’t a soul in sight riotin’ up here. Look at ‘em, they’re all fucked up, they ain’t nothin’ but a dyin’ breed. Hell, I saw a pregnant woman get body-slammed on the hard concrete by a rookie cop, an’ all I heard was laughter. Some niggers even cheered! Damn! This is one fucked-up place! An’ the only reason why—” “Yeah, I heard,” I snorted, distressed. “Well, Nate,” he said, now, quietly, “There’s your New Generation for you. A generation of faggots.” The newscasters quickly switched the subject. Soon we were getting live updates on what “our boys” were doing in Numidia. All America was up in arms, and so was the pub—but to be honest, I didn’t know what the fuss was all about. I didn’t even know where Numidia was, let alone that it was in Africa. Some kid was playing a radio a few tables down. The DJ maliciously flipped “Ahab the Ay-rab” on the turntable. Okey-doke white boys phoned in from time to time, swearing to the DJ that they’d shoot anything that moved and wore a towel. On TV, we saw our soldiers doing drills in the desert, moving into town, waving Old Glory—and the natives, happy that “our boys” had freed them from the “iron yoke” of General Ben-Bahraini, waving their hands and savagely ululating. I stopped listening to Guy and carefully watched the TV screen.... “Hey,” Guy snorted, nudging me and pointing to the screen, “why the hell do these idiots think they’re bringing peace to the Mid-east by making a bad-ass situation worse? What’s their story? Why the fuck don’t they stay here an’ fight against those crackers up at Watson University?” “Well, from what I can see,” I explained, “if Numidia goes, then Egypt goes—” “Uh-huh? “And if Egypt goes, so does Israel—and then Saudi Arabia, and then on and on and on. They’ll take over the world! They’ll be even worse tyrants than those asshole Soviets who are padding their asses out.” “Or that Reagan bastard, who’s padding out the asses of King Ahmed’s regime, Guy quickly added. “It’s all silly shit if you ask me. Why don’t they just sit down somewhere in Geneva and chill out?” He gave off a dismissive snort. “It’s idiotic.” But the harder I looked—at the flag, the drills, the bombs bursting in the night over Adjrar (the rebel capital), and the tanks, the harder it was to resist. I’d caught patriotic fever again. Of course, it was nothing more than a last gasp of my Republican attitudes of two years back. I admit I was a goddamn Yankee: the Star-Spangled Banner brought tears to my eyes. Nobody—so I thought—was denying me my rights; nobody—so I thought—was telling me what to think; I didn’t grow up the way my parents grew up, riding in the back of some honky’s bus. I was a free spirit. I even helped put Reagan’s ass back in the White House. (I admit it. Hell, didn’t Malcolm X use cocaine?) Then I thought up something. “You know something, Guy, I guess you’re right about skipping school,” I told him. “Life is the best school there is. So, I’m going to join! I can’t wait! I gotta see the world, I gotta experience! And once I’m out of the war, I’ll be a real man. Just wait! The road to manhood is paved with tanks and convoys!” “Oh, please, Nate,” Guy chuckled, dismissively, “havea drink an’ cool off. It ain’t what you think. Trust me.” But I couldn’t take anymore: I got up. “Hey, where the hell are you going?” “Me? Hell, Guy,” I roared, putting on my coat, barely even hearing myself in my excitement, “I got a future awaiting me!” “Nate,” he told me, calmly, “don’t be a fool.” “Oh, no,” I continued, slipping the strap of the bag around my shoulder, “That’s not foolish—THIS is foolish, sitting in this fucking bar all day whining about life. I’d rather be in a fucking war. C’mon! What’s four years in the service, anyway?” “You wanna know, motherfucker? You really wanna know, since you’re so goddamn smart?? I’ll tell you! Look at what’s happening right now in Adjrar—” “Fuck Adjrar!” I belched hysterically. “Where the fuck is this place, anyway? Transylvania?” “Wait’ll they send you there,” he laughed, jerking his finger in my direction. “‘Cause you don’t know shit. You do not know SHIT. You got your head up your ass, motherfucker, but my eyes are wide open! I’ve seen it happen to a lotta niggers like you! You think you’re ready for the world, an’ they cut your fuckin’ ass down! You so dumb, you think Harriet Tubman was a porn queen!” And he raised his voice an octave as the students grew louder. “DUMB REPUBLICAN NIGGER!” “You can say what you want,” I shouted back, walking away from him, “but what the fuck do you know or even CARE about Harriet Tubman or Malcolm X? You’re just like all the rest, a fuckin’ ego-centered coon with a fuckin’ inferiority complex. Fuck YOU, asshole. You’re not my motherfuckin’ father OR my motherfuckin’ mother, okay. You never gave two shits about where I was at, so why should you care now? FUCK you, stupid-ass cocksucker. Fuck you AND your asshole friends AND that fuckin’ fat whore you stole from me. ‘Cause this is my life, goddammit! Not yours! Mine!! MINE!!—” And with those famous few last words, I deserted the Yellow Dog Bar and Freedom College, never to see either of them again. |
