Me, I was right where I was supposed to be, at Jack's Bar and Grill, with my buns warming a barstool and listening to niggers on my right and niggers on my left lying up a storm, which was about the norm.
A Brown-skinned honey looking like real money strolled into the bar and rolled right up to me, and said, waving a finger in my face, “Negro, I got a bone to pick with your Black ass.”
But a nigger on my left shouted, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Hold on right there, Miss. That man is Hector the Erector, and don't nobody like that nigger. If you want to get on his case, you got to take a number. And I'm number 33 for a few bucks, a foxy thing like you could buy that number from me.”
And before the classy one in diamonds and designer threads can respond, a nigger from my right yelled, “Nigger, please, let the sister breathe. That sneaky rascal you just challenged is Hector Handy, and he is the biggest liar this side of the Mississippi and a very dangerous man, indeed. However, I'm a deputy US Marshal, retired, but for a small fee I will guarantee that he will never lay a hand on your fine frame or my name ain’t Tremain.”
The curvy one who could have been any age from 31 to 41 replied, “I know you right when you say Hector has managed to make an enemy out of most of the people that cross his path, but tonight, I'm going to put it right for everyone, and Hector will no longer grace his space under the sun. Now, I don't want to disrespect your offer to sell me your place in line, but I will buy the house a round to step up to the head of that line.”
There was a loud, unanimous acceptance of that offer.
She turned to Tremain and said, “I thank you for your kind offer of protection, but I have a razor in my shoe, a derringer in my bra, and a 9 mm in my purse. If worse should come to worse I guarantee you I will be the one walking out of here unscathed.”
That little speech promoted another round of foot-stomping applause.
Now, I have been a patron of Jack's for nearly ten years, and most of the customers here are my artist friends. But you know how our people are. So, I’m not too surprised by their failures to rally around and support me in this—whatever it is.
I turned to my attacker. “Ms. Whoever you are and whatever you want, you need to take it up with my attorney of record, Mr. Justice for all Jones.”
And in my usual helpful manner, I pointed to Jones, sleeping off a bender at a table in the rear of the barroom.
Ms. $500 haircut looked me straight in the eyes, leaned into my personal space, and squeezed my right knee like a shark bite.
“Shit! Goddamn! My knee. Aww shit. Let go of my fucking knee.”
She smiled at me and slowly released her grip.
My good friends were so busy swilling down their free booze they didn’t notice her attack on me, or maybe they just ignored it. You know how we are sometimes.
“She said with authority. I’m Voxx, and we are going to have a little conversation in the back room. I believe you have a key to the backroom.”
“Fuck you, Voxx or Sox or whatever the hell your name is—”
Voxx reached for my wounded knee, and I made a valiant effort to stand, but Voxx had to rescue me as my crippled knee gave out.
Voxx was as strong as an ox as she helped me into the backroom.
I stumbled into a seat, and Voxx sat across from me.
“What did you do to my fucking knee? Who the fuck are you? Who sent you?”
I’m rubbing my knee as she pulls out her phone and hands it to me. “Did you write this?”
Vampire
He’s a fucking vampire feeding on loneliness
hiding in your shadow, sipping your vintage
The further you slip into darkness, the bolder he becomes
The greedy fucker drinks too much. You fall into despair,
you step off the chair, pull the trigger, swallow the pills
He’s furious at himself, another fine wine lost before its time
He is one of three mourners at your going-home service
He goes home with your sister. Promises himself to be more patient this time
“Voxx, I wrote this a decade ago. What does this have to do with—”
“Hector, you have disparaged and denigrated my people for far too long. You have to pay for your mischaracterization of an entire people with a long and noble history.”
“Hey, I write about Black women all the time. I have sheroes in many of my fucking stories. I—”
“You have a series about vampires as a species out of Africa before Homo sapiens developed. You described these vampires as, ‘...a predatory infestation of nature.’”
“What are you? Are you some kind of fucked up late out the gate literary critic? That was the ‘Black Scrolls.’ I wrote them twelve years ago. I’m proud of those stories, three trilogies in three years. I still get hits and comments on them. They are still selling. But how does my writing about vampires harm you and your people in any possible way?”
Voxx sits there, her hands on the table, staring at me until I start to sweat.
“Oh, shit! Shit! Shit! Don’t, don’t even try to tell me, to tell me you are a fucking vampire. Bullshit! You need help, sister.”
And all at once everything was silent. Dead silence like the graveyard at midnight. She is staring at me with her black eyes, Obsidian, ancient fears revisited, terrorizing my soul.
It took all my willpower, prayers, and the ancestors' help to break away from her stare.
“Hector—"
I kept my eyes focused on the table in front of me.
“Hector, you wrote that vampires slew whole communities of mammals, including humans, for the thrill of destruction, not for food or self-defense. You described us as nature's most vile creation."
“Voxx, Voxx, it is fiction. Fiction! Fucking fiction! I didn’t and still don’t know if vampires exist or ever existed. I could not defame a fictional creature. I—”
“Hector, you wrote our history. You wrote our real history as we have maintained it orally since our beginnings, over 200,000 years ago. It is not accurate in every detail, but we agree with about 90 percent of what you wrote in the Black Scrolls.”
I glanced up from the table.
“Bullshit! I made up that history. No one told me those stories. I didn’t read them elsewhere. There are no real Black Dead Sea Scrolls. Fiction—pure unadulterated fiction.”
There was a moment of silence, and I stood to break the tension.
“Hector, I believe you. We have kept you under observation from the day you published your first vampire story. We know your friends, coworkers, and family better than you do. And, still, we don’t even pretend to understand how you are our historical voice.”
“You believe me? You have been spying on me, and that is why you believe me? Fuck! I need a drink.”
“Of course you do. When I confronted you in the bar, I was supposed to pretend to be angry at you, but I was truly angry that you had this gift that rightfully belonged to us. I don’t recall ever experiencing that degree of anger before.”
“Okay, okay, but you’re not angry at me now, and we can go back to the bar—”
“We called those indiscriminate mass killings butcheries. We have not been responsible for a butchery in the last 175,000 years. We recognized our problem, and we have corrected it.”
“Wonderful, let's go back to the bar and have a drink, on me.”
“Sit down, Hector.”
I sat.
“The problem with your history is that it doesn’t tell our whole history. It leaves out miraculous movement from mass murders to living among you without being a threat to you.”
“Sounds great. Sounds wonderful. But you need to write that history. I mean, you know it, and I don’t. Remember, I’m not a historian. I’m a storyteller. I mean, I’ll help you write your story. I’ll do that. I mean, I love the angle of moving from barbarian to benign, I could work with that, but it's not my story to tell.”
There was a knock on the door, and Tremain entered with a tray of drinks and placed them on the table near us.
“Hey, yall. We just checking on you. We thought you might be thirsty, you know?”
Tremain winked at me.
I nodded in return.
Tremain stared at us for a minute, sighed, and returned to the bar.
“Hector, we knew that whenever we were in a group of three or more adults of our kind, there was war between us, or we butchered others. We pledged to avoid butchery and internal wars, and over time, we succeeded beyond our expectations. That is a story your kind might have appreciated and emulated.”
“Sure, it's an inspiring tale, but the devil is in the details.”
“Thank you, Hector, and the devil is in the details, but time is of the essence in getting our story published.”
“Why? Don’t you live, like, for 300 years or so? Was I right about that?”
“We live close to 300 to 500 years on average, but we are being destroyed by a more ruthless creature than we ever were.”
“Oh, come on, Voxx, I find it hard to believe that there are any creatures more violent and vicious than the early vampires. I mean your kind slaughtered young, old, aged, every creature in that community for the joy of death dealing.”
“Hector, we still exist on your blood, but we try not to exploit you, and we do not kill you to feed on you.”
“That’s a story I want to hear, Voxx.”
“Hector, in your blood are plastics that are lethal to us and will someday be deadly to you also. Your plastics are short-circuiting our brain functions. We need to celebrate our history before we are gone in the next 50 years or so.”
“Plastics. Fuck me. Yeah, I been following the plastics story. Fuck, man, you must have resources, wealth, power, I mean, this is genocide.”
“Genocide, on a far greater scale than anything my kind ever imagined.”
“Yeah, but Voxx, yours was intentional and ours, ours is, is an accident. We never meant to cause harm. We were just trying to make products cheaper, more affordable, and more available.”
“Hector, that sounds like greedy indifference. I believe we all have a right to hear the whole genocide story. Will you help us?”
I took a sip of my drink, and I stared into the Scotch. I wondered if there was plastic in there and how much plastic I consumed today.
You know how we are, but this is some crazy shit we are doing to living things. Shit, and fuck all. I mean, what more can I say?
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