Made in China Chapter 14

               I pulled in to a half-leveled Holiday Inn in Miracle Whip, Missouri. The hotel was still open for business. The poor souls who were staying on the top two floors were whipped up in a deadly passing wind. Towns were mostly renamed after products when they were rebuilt. Companies paid a few bucks and that was all there was to it. A large wooden billboard welcomed visitors, hand-painted by some local Artie Rachmaninoff knockoff. There was a sandwich on it and a naked woman who had made the sandwich. She was a mermaid. Safe to say that a mermaid has never been to Missouri but there she was. In Missouri the sun is said to be in a two-in-the-afternoon position and it never moves. We were allowed to stop for a free rest, food and a shower at any Holiday Inn between New York and California. All we had to tell them at the desk is our registration number and they would confirm us against a master list and we could go to bed. No one planned to stop in what would be over twenty-four hours of driving, minimally. If you had any chance to win the race you had to keep driving. Drivers were hopped up on speed, pills, amphetamines, coffee—anything they could take to keep them going. I thought of going home to find Chloe. I was consumed by her and could think little of anything else.

            Rusty’s voice came across the radio. He told me to get a room and sleep on it, so I did. The man at the counter said he was surprised I stopped. “You fixin’ to win or to just finish?” he snickered. He was drunk. Cans of empty beer sat on the check-in counter. A free continental breakfast sign hung near a grimy black microwave oven that looked like a magic box. Half the tiles on the floor were split but there was a welcome mat for Jiffy Muffler shop as I walked in. A can of Muncie Sardines sat open on the counter. Flies buzzed and wads of chewed chewing gum lay like corpses of whales on the Formica.

“I need the rest.” I said plainly. He was a jokester. He offered me a room on the third level. Metal keys hung on the wall behind him for doors that were no longer there, ghost rooms. He hadn’t bothered to remove them. There was a framed picture of Adolf Hitler and one of Marty Martian. An odd couple. He gave me the key for room 112 and a dirty canvas tarp for Ruby so no one would mess with her or bother me. 666ers, as they called us, were celebrities that people either love or hate. Either they want to kill us or they want an autograph. He knew all about me. He was rooting for me, “of all them drivers,” he said proudly as though it would mean the world to me. He told me about his father’s Mustang. He gave me a pack of Lucky Cat cigarettes and a cigarette lighter which I took though I was trying to give them up. I don’t like yellow teeth or the aftertaste. The lighter had a naked woman on it. She was sitting on her ass with her back arched and her hands down behind her. Her head was tilted back. She had red lips and big boobs. I went to my room and didn’t bother to get undressed. I didn’t bother to take off my war boots. The room smelled like mold and cigarettes and was overly green, avocado. The bed was neatly made but I didn’t dare sleep near the mattress. I lied on top of the quilt and stared at the low textured ceiling stained yellow from cigarette smoke. My Ray Bans still on, still smoking the cigarette I lit halfway to the room walking under the overhang and the flickering fluorescent lights with the mosquitoes and moths bouncing off the milky-glass cover. The shades were drawn so there was no sun. The TV turned on as I lied there. I don’t know how. Maybe I was lying on the remote control or it was a ghost. Either way, I was too tired to give a damn. My mind raced like a roller-coaster. I reached over to the table to put out the cigarette. I missed the ashtray.

....

I like to think of my adoptive parents as my real parents even though I was adopted as a baby to a mom and a dad that are both black as the ace of spades. I am lily white. Part of adjusting to this society isn’t to dwell upon the terrible events that have happened to you, or to anyone else that you care about. Being born to Nazis was terrible. Being raised by good people was incredible. Things will inevitably get worse and things will inevitably get better. Preachers make a living preaching that kind of stuff. I could see Marty Martian in my head right now in my dreams, amazingly clear. When I was a kid he was a big deal preacher and on TV all the time. He wasn’t Christian or Jewish. He was a Humanist. There are elements of truth in everything, he said. And there are lies in all truths. And the worst thing in the world, worse than pollution, crime, hate, lust, or even murder, worse than people trying desperately to be cool, is people being phony. His face was painted green and he wore an aluminum foil skull cap. But under that hokey exterior he was rather handsome. Even in it he was handsome. He began by impersonating Charlie Chaplin on the streets of New York, panhandling and charging tourists five bucks a picture. He hung out with a guy who wore “The End is Near” sign. Eventually, he began to make quite a bit of money from impersonating and those pictures, enough so that the company that owned Charlie Chaplin’s estate began to pursue legal action against him and being that he didn’t pay taxes, he was on the run from lawyers, private investigators and eventually the police. He started preaching when he realized preachers don’t pay taxes. He started with rats. “If you can convince a rat to hope for a better life, you can convince anyone.” After that he threw away his ratty black suit; no one could prove he was the Chaplin impersonator so he got off scot-free. He went from being an impersonator for change to the world’s greatest motivational speaker, selling out stadiums. The fellow who wore “The End is Near” sign changed it after spending time with Marty to “The Future is Now.”

Marty claimed he wasn’t from Earth or Mars. He wasn’t from anywhere specific. The important thing was that he was here to preach the true gospel and he told everyone what would happen when the ordure hit the fan long before it actually did. He began preaching in old abandoned warehouses and most people laughed at him but what he said was interesting enough to buy a ticket or to listen. Unlike most other preachers and soothsayers, history proved him right. He was pretty accurate. But he disappeared in what was thought to be an airplane accident in the Bermuda Triangle about a decade ago; his followers said that he was recalled from wherever he came. In the plane with him were four beautiful virgins who wouldn’t have been virgins had they landed safely in Bermuda. Marty sold more t-shirts of himself than anyone. I had two. Under my green jacket is Marty Martian living forever via silk-screen and cotton.

....

My first parents did not commit suicide with a luger pistol. In my dreams I accept things the way they are but in real life my mind mud wrestles reality. They were killed by Captain Jumping Jack Flash. He killed Nazis when he began. They did try to kill me when he was closing in rather than letting me live with the thought of me being raised in a Zionist society by Jews or some other mongrel race. The six Goebbels children were killed for pretty much the same reason my parents wanted to kill me and in much the same way in a bunker in 1945. Had I died, I might have been hanging out with them in Heaven if Heaven is a place classified according to cause and manner of death like some hotel. Bobby Bubonic wrote about my parents being killed by Flash in one of those books he published. I was a chapter. He never said what my parents’ names were or how he knew who killed them. In one of the clairvoyance techniques I learned from a Marty Martian seminar I knew that he was going to be lynched by them. They were going to hang him when Flash burst in with guns blazing. I could see it perfectly in my dreams. They couldn’t stand the thought of me turning out to be a Jew lover. They would have really gone bananas if they knew I was raised by two blacks. How do you like those apples?

My mom, Luella, did not raise me like other parents raise their kids these days. Kids are taught to be cage-fighters and little more. It is perfectly okay to walk up to a complete stranger and sock him in the nose. Put it to them before they put it to you. A cage-fighter is everything anyone could want their son to be. The matches are sponsored by penis enlarging pills, energy drinks and beer. Kids are trained to be fighters whether they like it not. They are smacked in the head instead of hugged. They are called “buddy” or “champ” instead of “son.” They are given Red Bull instead of milk. I was trained as a child to be a child, to play with child toys and color and potty-trained, all in the tradition of being a decent kid. I read Bernstein Bears books which I thank for my good sense. I had a big wheel and roller-skates, even. Dad bought me baseball cards from the old days before the collapse of the sport under public scrutiny for excessive salaries and performance-enhancing drug use. Baseball, he says, died in 1998 when baseballs were pin-balled out of stadiums by superhuman behemoths who walked away soon after into cornfields of shame. Strike that, Bobby says. Pete Rose killed baseball. George Steinbrenner killed baseball. Greed. Business. They all had a part. Agents, Budweiser, Miller, Pepsi, Coca-Cola. Ten dollar hot dogs and eight dollar sodas, twenty fucking dollar parking. Bobby played for the Louisville Bats baseball club before it ended. He never had the chance to be called up from “Triple A” to the major league. He named all the rats he killed after all the baseball players and owners who ruined the game. Voluptuous rats as big as bears.

There are kids kicking each other’s asses all over the place; something to be proud of, that boy of yours. They fight them as young as five like they used to fight cocks or dogs. This is a brutal meat-and-bones world. It started when they quit reading, stopped drinking water and brushing their teeth. Why do I care if it is blown away, washed away, sunk in, burnt up or eaten like a rotten crab apple? My parents taught me to care for those innocent ones that are being swallowed up by the bad ones. My father taught me the birds and the bees. He said that the first time having sex is like driving a Ford Pinto in the Indianapolis 500.  My mother said that she married my father when he showed up at her door with a fistful of dying flowers and a promise of a pot to piss in.

It only takes one yes.

            ....

            Dreams are fragmented thoughts. Broken bits of mirror-glass. My father was a loon before he was popular. He was always convinced that he was destined for greatness. He had my mother make him a superhero suit out of white spandex, no cape, and a white pantyhose mask with eye holes cut out. “How do I look?” He asked. His giant balls were bulging at my eye level. He made my mother and me laugh.

            “Ridiculous,” my mother said. He’d laugh at himself rubbing his stomach. His gut and balls bulging out in the mirror as he turned for a profile. In my dreams I smiled. He was a thin hippopotamus. And then he’d walk out along the Ohio River with his javelin in hand and spear giant rats that carried the fleas which carried the plague with his college javelin which he had spray-painted red. This was before he was Bobby Bubonic. Before he made it on the side of a sardine can. He’d skillfully harpoon rats from morning to night in that ridiculous spandex suit. Rats that were as big as cats when I was young and by the time I was in junior high, the size of bears. Dad must have killed a hundred thousand and his friend, Mort Kindly, recorded him with an old digital camera from a safe distance. It was old Mort who gave him the nickname, Bobby Bubonic, and sent the videos to the local television news channel that would send them on to the national news based in either New York City, or the nation’s capital of Wheeling, West Virginia. Before we knew it, dad was an American hero, the most daring daredevil in the world. Everyone starts somewhere.

            One bite from a flea could kill anyone, but what the world didn’t know was that dad was immune to the plague because he was 100% black. The White Plague, it turns out, is just that. There are rumors, but no one knew for certain, that pure blacks couldn’t get the deadly disease. The government knew, but they didn’t spill the beans because it would fuel the hate groups that espoused racial purity. Like cockroaches out of the cracks they came back, the Klan, The Aryan Brotherhood, the Skinheads, on and on. It was just when you thought people were ready to evolve when the ordure hit the fan, and knocked everything back a hundred years.

            ....

            In that bathtub after I buried Betty Brown I wanted to die. The water was dirty and hot. Steam rose from it. I wanted to bleed and bleed until I couldn’t bleed anymore. Goodbye, cruel world! But the razor wouldn't cut as though my skin was some sort of Kevlar. I lived because that is what I do. I am a survivor even when I don’t want to survive. A Blue Eagle. Superstes. I wanted to go to Heaven and sit on a cloud and see virgins and all that jazz. I plugged my toe into the faucet and I thought of poor Zula Zane. We both have attached earlobes for godssakes. I can still hear the bathwater drip. I can hear a fly buzz and my skin is hot.

            ....

            When the KITTY began to kill women, gynecologists were all the rage and arrogantly as doctors are, they pompously figured they would have it solved in a matter of only a few weeks. The World Health Organization has been bamboozled since the beginning of all this plight and when they realized that there would be no hope in solving any of it they put their tail between their legs and suggested that women not wear tampons, not drink tap water, not have sex, and not do anything that might cause irreparable harm to their health. The U.S. Government, and the egghead scientists that were employed by them, knew the problem was from the mixing of sperm, the battle between sperm cells inside of the fallopian tubes, a biochemical titanic struggle, a cage fight of sperm that destroyed both combatants and the cage. But the release of this information would certainly result in panic. God forbid women were ever faithful and had sex with one man their entire life! That was simply too much to ask for these days. Against women’s liberation! Cruelty! And for godssakes, the women who already had sex with other men might not put out for new men so the new men worked in collusion to keep that little nugget of information hush-hush.

            A gynecologist could tell when a woman had the KITTY when her insides looked like a rotting crab apple and she smelled like a pear tree. Meow. That is all there was to say when the KITTY struck. Gynecologists became like undertakers, search and rescue dogs too depressed to work. Many gave up out of depression and committed suicide. Everyone wanted answers and they weren’t willing to accept the reality that there were no answers to be had. It was much more complicated than they could imagine. Complicated, yet simple. Atheists are the greatest dumbasses in the universe. Betty’s dying wish was for me to fuck her and it was like fucking a dead dolphin, let me tell you.

            With the loss of so many women the giant rats became desirable; their private parts it turns out were more identical to the female anatomy than sheep vaginas. Rat herders, they call themselves. Proudly, they too wear letterman jackets with a rat dressed up like a hooker on back. Giant hundred and some pound rats became desirable and lonely men began fucking them. It was better if you cut off their tail, they say, but you must do that delicately because an a hundred pound rat could eat your face off. Marty Martian never had an affair with a rat but he did convince some to expect more from life and convinced them they were worth more than the garbage they eat. When lonely men began fucking rats other men began to pimp them. It was capitalism, entrepreneurship, on and on. And thus, the fleas on the rats carrying the White Plague had the opportunity to spread and the second coming of the bubonic plague arrived much due to the depravity of mankind. I’ve done some terrible things in my life, but I have not had sex with a rat, nor would I. I have never been into trends and I don’t barbecue and eat them either, which is a good indication that despite of everything, economically and morally, I still have a pot to piss in.

            ....

            My parents were black as the ace of spades but they did not pompously define themselves as “Pures.” Blacks had a big role in the New World being that the pure are immune to the White Plague. Some “Pures,” they call themselves, talked of making white people and/or biracial people (Oreos) slaves. It never would materialize. Oreos were once a popular cookie that featured two black cookies pasted together by a white-cream filling before the ordure hit the fan. They still make them, and it is a town in Mississippi. Towards the end of life as normal, life as it ought to be, as they dwell upon it now, circa 2020 something, people felt pretty good about the chance that one day soon everyone would be an Oreo, or some sort of mixed-breed, and with that there would be no more racism in the world. But of course, it wasn’t to be. Some “Pures” wore leather motorcycle jackets with the Ace of Spades logo on them to express their racial superiority.

But when racism was on the mat, about to be counted out, it lifted its ugly head and it now has a second wind and is beating the piss out of common decency once again. Whites are killing blacks and blacks are killing whites.

Ho hum.

....

            The Ace of spades is a black heart turned upside down with an apple stem underneath it. It was a card in a playing deck when people used to play cards and it represented death, according to someone―not sure whom. Soldiers drew it on their helmets in war, which I hear tell originated in Vietnam, circa 1960-something. Even in Turkey there were dopes carrying on the old tradition, leaving the card in the mouths of Turks they would kill like they were some grim reaper. Of the people I saw killed, those were the easiest to watch die. Everyone that I knew who drew the sign on their helmet died, pretty terribly, too. It soon got out not to draw the death card on your helmet because you would end up dead. People get pretty superstitious about that sort of thing.  

            The blacks who weren’t being killed by the White Plague came up with a design for the plague. It was a black background and a white spade in the middle. It’s only fair, they said. My dad wasn’t like that. He didn’t want white folks to be killed. He started killing those rats because he knew that I could be killed by them if he didn’t. He figured it out long before anyone I know of, that somehow, white folks were dying because of the fleas on those rats. “How’d ya know, Daddy? How’d ya know?” I asked him excitedly as he stood there having impaled a dog-sized rat with his javelin, which was slowly sliding to his hand, leaving its guts and blood where it had been.

            “Read my history book, son. Read my history.”

            So he did. Bobby Bubonic, in the Age of Ignorance, was a reading fool. When he wasn’t killing rats, he was somewhere reading anything that he could get his hands on. I asked him once what it was like making love to mom after thirty years of marriage, remembering his explanation of being a Pinto in the Indianapolis 500, and with a smile on his face, beneath the white pantyhose mask, he said the only words he needed to say. “Sunday drivin’, son. Sunday drivin’.”

            The fleas were like the rats army. They protected them from the killers. If I were to write from their perspective, I would have written that they had been murdered for hundreds of years―no, thousands―by cruel jacks who used poisoning agents and merciless traps, on and on; and they had to hide and live in the shadows. Jacks are what rats call people. But at last, the fleas came back to protect them and for many, many, years people quit killing them, convinced that killing them was dangerous business because, before the ordure hit the fan, the people with the highest mortality rate, more than cops, more than soldiers, more than deep-sea fishermen, were lowly exterminators, the dopes in jumpsuits toting around an aluminum can of toxic chemicals. Many exterminators had the ace of spades on their logos, on those cans, on their shirts or their lunch pails (or the equally foreboding skull and crossbones of which the Nazis were fond) or they carried the cards in their breast pockets. I don’t know if there are those that stuck them in dead rats’ mouths. But the joke was on those jack bastards. Honey, I got bit by something get me that itch cream. Too late...

Ho hum.

            The world rolled out the welcome wagon for an old friend. Banners across America, land of enduring sarcasm, read “Welcome Back Bubonic Plague!” It is common knowledge that plagues hate to be patronized.

            Bring out your dead!

Bring out your dead!

Ring around the rosy.

            ....

            I woke up. Someone was knocking on the door. It was a quiet simple knock that didn’t seem at all foreboding. Ray Charles sang Hit the Road Jack on the TV. It is what rats sing to people from the gutters.