Three Kings of the Orient

Chapter 13 – Three Kings of the Orient

Carson relieved himself against one of the support columns beneath the bridge. As he shook himself clean he heard laughter coming from the direction of the river. It was an amoral sound. There was no warmth in it. No assurance that it cared whether a man lived or died. It frightened Carson with its indifference. It was the second time that day he felt afraid. He had few resources to protect himself anymore, to insulate him from a level of meanness in the world that money had always allowed him to keep away. All the usual mechanisms he’d ever employed for harboring his life from peril were lost to him. Now everything rested upon gutter wiliness or brute physical strength. Until he found his way out of this wretched place he had to decipher the source of his fear and wrestle with it to see what it contained or revealed. He knew he would perish if he ran.

He moved deeper in toward the river. He followed the sound as though it promised something unexceptional but was nonetheless necessary to confront, if only to penetrate to the absurd core of a false and inflated terror. Ahead of him he could see the tunnel that led down to the flood channel that was the L.A. River, or what constituted that alleged body of water. The liquid in the dribbly tributary measured several inches deep, as though it might have seeped through a fissure in its concrete bottom, as though it were trying to make a statement, a feeble one, that it really was a river, not a cement culvert constructed to protect property in the event of heavy rains, a trough for over-stressed storm drains choked with the effluvium of petroleum byproducts, spitting the coagulant mass of crud and slop out to a force-fed sea, which offered back its gagging protest in the form of saltwater fish sparkling with mercury and PCB’s, ailing fish caught by the poor Mexicans on the Santa Monica pier and served hot and radioactive to the entire familia, garnished with the assurance of the federal government that toxic levels were well under the threshold of x parts per million, quite safe to eat, certainly so for illegal immigrants. Pass the mole, brother, and dig in.

Approaching Carson from the other direction, appearing suddenly from behind one of the massive columns that supported the bridge, was a young Asian male in platform high heels. He was tall and skinny and snug tight in white Spandex hip huggers and a matching white midriff tee shirt. His outfit clung to him like a thin filament binding the sweet meat of a ripe peach, his genitals straining in a puffed up heap between his thighs, and his nipples pressing out hard against the light synthetic fabric. The hair on the youth’s head was styled in a Beatle mop cut and died a yellow maize. His eyebrows were cleanly plucked and penciled in with long dark strokes. His lips were colored a highly glossed pink. He was an apparition, a shade, a lean and distraught walking phallus. The signifying aspects of his form declared him to be all testosterone and anal lube, a lost boy who looked trapped and unhappy in his predilection, a figure from a Hollywood version of the Inferno, whose crime was his belief in personal freedom, his punishment an unrelieved and torturous concupiscence. When they passed one another, Carson experienced an uncomfortable sensation of desire and repugnance. The boy’s wantonness was almost feminine in nature, as though his desire to have his orifices filled was biologically necessary. The phallus-boy eyed him, but with passive detachment, coy yet indifferent, as though Carson could fuck him or not, what difference did it make? He continued past Carson, swaying his hips in an exaggerated sexual motion.

Up ahead, where the tunnel made its descent to the river, Carson could see three elderly black men seated in a circle. One was plunked down in an upholstered seat from an old Chevy Camaro. The second was lying on cushions and blankets piled on the inside of a discarded baby’s playpen. The third had situated himself in a large shipping crate, which enfolded him like an uninspired, jerry-rigged sarcophagus fitted out with tattered bedding and old crumpled newspapers. The tires from the cars on the bridge overhead keep up a steady buzz from their motion across the grooves of the pavement, filling the shadowy cavern below with an insistent, zip-pulsing drone.

The men were laughing at some inscrutable joke. Their faces were dark and cracked like black walnuts, ancient, too, but the eyes shone lively. European blood had made no inroads in this circle, their genes neither colonized nor distilled. They looked at Carson with amusement, as though it was highly entertaining to observe a white man dressed in khakis and a polo shirt and tasseled loafers wandering around amongst the garbage beneath the 6^th Street bridge. They whispered to one another and laughed again at something comical meant only for themselves. Carson looked a long time at their faces. He found in them none of the malice and acrimony he’d been accustomed to encountering from African Americans. But neither was there any easy comfort. But they didn’t turn in among themselves as a way of ignoring Carson. Their bemused expressions told him he was an odd sight, but no more peculiar than some life form that had lost its way heading to a shopping mall or an all-you-can-eat buffet.  One white man was not a special object of interest. As foragers, these men necessarily had strange lives. They saw the extremes mostly, not the fat middle of things that generally burped its way by, settling into a gummy inertia. By choice or not, the strange was what they’d come to accept. Carson was strange, and way out of his usual orbit, and that’s exactly how they were taking him, like an animal strayed from its pasture.

“Oh, look,” said the one in the Camaro seat, “man got lost on his way to the golf course. Jis up there on the next block, sir. You can’t miss it. It right next to the Office for General Relief. Fact, you probably get yourself a cheap caddy there on your swing by.”

“Long as you pay in crack, you find plenty of caddies, man,” laughed the man in the plywood coffin.

“What’s he got do with a caddy, man,” said the one who sat in the playpen. “He got no clubs to play wid. What’s that, invisible golf? Man must be high hisself. Careful where you step. You wanna trade for them shoes, man? I got some real fine specimens ‘o vintage polyestuh slacks. Yo’ size, too. Only been worn by five other people, so’s they broken in real nice. C’mon now, I know’s you down here for a bargain.”

The three men laughed together. The sound rose up like a fountain, splashing off the underside of the bridge and hanging there above them all as a kind of light, liquid shield over their heads, under which they could take some cover. The laughter bound them up together while the tires and the machines gorged the road on top, clamping down and poking the laughter with its intransigence.

“Gentlemen,” Carson started, in an upbeat manner, trying to make himself coincide with what he read as the general disposition of the ones assembled. “I’m wonderin’ if you can help me out.”

“Sorry, I gave at the office,” said the first man, adjusting himself in the driver’s seat before strapping the seat belt around him.

“I reached my quota, son,” answered the one in the crate. “Each day I start out with five dollars worth of quarters in my pocket, and I gives one of dem quarters to any man who ask. You just got here ‘bout ten minutes too late. I gave the last one to a funny lookin’ man with a peg leg, said his ship went down and he’s all washed up. But you come on by tomorrow, little bit earlier, and I’ll give you two quarters, jus’ as soon as I get back from the bank.”

“Damn, that’s generous ‘o you Ten Brawl,” said the playpen squatter. “Ain’t like you to be so generous.”

“It’s cuz the way my man here is dressed,” answered Ten Brawl. “I appreciates a man of refinement and impeccables. I know that he gonna take my four bits and spend it wisely, too; ain’t gonna waste it on vice and corruption.”

“How you know that?”

“Cuz man got an honest face.”

“Hah!,” said the man in the driver’s seat. “If a face could tell a man’s fortune, what the hell am I doin’ sittin’ here with you fools.”

“Cuz you an ugly son of bitch,” shouted the man in the playpen.

“Only one thing you can rely on less than a man’s opinion of his own self,” said Ten Brawl.

“What’s that?”

“Gimme a dollar, Tatuh Pie, an’ I’ll tell you.”

“I’ll owe it to you.”

“Fuck you will. ‘Sides, e’en you had all the money in the world, Tatuh Pie, you couldn’t buy yo’self a lick of sense no how.”

“What good is sense when you ain’t got the money to put it in motion,” the driver asked. “First come instinct. If you don’t got de dough then you gotta go on instinct. Man survivin’ got no luxury time for good sense. You don’t need it to get outta the rain or the cold. When you hungry, yo’ belly tell you that. Don’t need no good sense to eat. Dis ain’t Africa. Food here is everywhere. Can’t give it away fast enough. Dumpster at McDonald’s feed an army. Myself, I live on Chicken McNuggets. What sense you need when yo’ nose tell you it right der in that dumpster, only a few hours old?”

“Sense tell you that shit gonna kill yo’ fat ass one day, Bison Butt,” laughed Ten Brawl.

“O’ kill us, one o’ the other, with them stanky grease farts you be layin’ on us all day,” added Tatuh Pie.

“Ha, ha,” laughed Bison Butt, shifting himself in the car seat. “That there’s my natural defense mechanism, my chemical weapon, keep you from rollin’ me in my sleep. Try and shake me down and I’ll bust you with a big ol’ mushroom cloud o’ eau de dead chicken.”

“Roll you in yo’ sleep?” Ten Brawl shook his head in disbelief. “Ain’t no goddamn crowbar big enough to do the job. ‘Sides, what you got that me an’ Tatuh Pie e’en want? Sure ain’t yo’ good looks, on account yo’ mamma sold dem to the devil so’s yo big ass wouldn’t bust  ‘er open when she pushed yo’ ugly self out in the world.”

“Leave my mamma outta this,” grinned Bison Butt, looking slightly awkward at the mention of his mother, “she taken enough abuse in life ‘thout you two lump heads pourin’ scorn down on the poor woman, rest her soul.”

“No offense meant, brother,” said Tatuh Pie.

“That’s right,” said Ten Brawl. “You know we’s just ridin’ you.”

“None taken, none taken,” said Bison Butt, looking wistful.

The three men became quiet for a moment, gazing at the ground in the center of their circle. They seemed to have forgotten Carson was still there until he spoke up again.

“I’m not asking for money,” he said, then stopped.

The three men looked at Carson, waiting for him to continue, to state his business. Something inside Carson caught him up, arrested his voice. He was taken over by a deep and immense sadness. It disarmed him, overpowering his normal defense against cheap emotion, against any emotion not necessary for maintaining the constant equilibrium required to keep the world from defeating him, for persevering in his vigilance against all the threats and pitfalls of existence that wished to take him down, to crush him and take away everything he’d hunted down, killed or gathered, in the sense of the accomplishments or objects he arrayed around himself and supported his concept of the man Carson. And that was all gone. Whom was he kidding? He was awash in this sudden sadness because he was realizing for the first time that the old concept, the old, familiar idea of Carson the man had been killed, and for him to continue acting as though he were still alive was a grand deceit. To pretend that this was just a minor setback, was a dire exercise in delusion. Here he was in a toxic dumping ground strewn with garbage, face to face with three homeless black men who looked at him in his obsolete costume of success and, just by the looks on their faces, he knew they were thinking, ‘who the fuck are you? Where the fuck do you think you are, man? Look around you. Look where you are. Do you get it? You are shit. Don’t try to dress up your shit. You are an impostor. You are a clown. You make us laugh.’

But the old concept was all he’d ever had, all he could ever remember having. Without that he was nothing, and he could not cope with that; there was nowhere to go with that. It was zero. A man had to subscribe to something, to call himself something, to rely on what had carried him. The recognition that he had failed, that the old way of being had failed, was the source of the sadness. In his mind, the logical outcome to letting in the sadness was total surrender, a complete letting go, and his character would not allow that. That was like walking off a cliff in a dream and knowing he would land safely. Carson couldn’t trust like that. Trust in what? In whom? Who was there to catch him? There was a wide selection to choose from, from God, religion of some kind, some other philosophy of living, another construct through which a human could find some meaning. One was as a good as another. None of them vouchsafed a life free from pain or loss. It was enough to be sad, it was his human moment, but too indulge it by surrendering, by admitting his helplessness, Carson couldn’t permit that. It meant opening himself up to influences that, in his opinion, were no more trustworthy or safe than the manner in which he had lived until now. Yes, he’d fucked up. And now his sadness sickened him. It was self-pity. To indulge in that was true defeat. He was letting his emotions take control. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing but chaos there. No clear thinking. He couldn’t live that way. He was letting himself become doubtful. The sadness was a ruse, a connivance of the weak and the defeated. It was his moment of weakness, of recognizing himself in peril, admitting he was in a perilous condition, and hating himself for putting himself in that situation, and wanting to kill that self, to blame it, to not take responsibility for it, to fall down in exhaustion from the prospect of all the hard work that he needed to do to extricate himself from his circumstances. It was the response of a child wanting to fall into the lap of its mother to be soothed and reassured. This is what religion did for people when good mothers were no longer around to provide that service. To give them pat answers for the reasons things go wrong and to tell them that all will be made better if they follow plan XY and Z. He realized that his sadness came from desperation. It was desperation that caused people to let go, to drop off that cliff, to annihilate the self that was suffering, and to resurrect a new self with a new blueprint provided by religion or philosophy or psychoanalysis. It was to give oneself over to an authority, a parental figure, who would chastise a person for his human foibles and then forgive him and direct him how to redeem his mistakes. People wanted to be forgiven for being human and to find a system, a feelgood system to help them avoid making the mistakes that brought them so much pain. But it was all a crapshoot. Carson knew there was no escaping suffering and pain. That was certain. Everything beyond that was pure conjecture. A man had to set goals and know at the outset that he was going to take hits in getting there. Carson knew this truth instinctively; he’d been an athlete. Accept the pain as part of the game and try to avoid it as much as possible, but don’t let it deter you from the goal. If necessary, take a painkiller. He needed to remind himself that, at this time and place in his life, Giambone was to be his painkiller.

“I’m trying to locate someone,” Carson went on after pausing. “A friend. I heard he was downtown living on the street and in various shelters. I just thought you might have seen him at one time or another. Here’s his picture.” Carson showed them the old photo of him and Giambone.

“This you in the picture, too,” asked the man Bison Butt sitting in the Camaro seat.

“That’s me.” said Carson. “A few years back.”

“Damn, son; hardly recognize yo’ ass. What the fuck you done?”

“Lemme see that,” said Tatuh Pie. Bison Butt handed him the photo. Tatuh Pie and Ten Brawl studied it together.

“The good ol’ days,” said Ten Brawl, “before you got yo’ ass whupped. Let me see now, what is it? Gamblin’ or women?”

“Them’s the only two choices,” asked Tatuh Pie. “They’s the same thing in my book.”

“The man look beat up good but not down for the count, so I know it ain’t been drugs or alcohol,” said Ten Brawl. “It’s the schemin’ life, ain’t it, friend? Cooked over and well done. Too many brain cells firin’. Am I right? Chasin’ women and that big pot o’ cash that jes’ keep slippin’ through his fingers. Next time I’ll get it, he say, next time. Always tomorrow. Long line of tomorrows add up to nothin’, add up to one more day of sayin’ better luck next time ‘til all’s left to say is ‘better luck next life,’ and the next o’ kin gotta foot the bill to pay the preacher man, who, don’t you know it, never saw the man ‘til they brought ‘em in cold.”

“Ah, yes,” said Bison Butt, “the sportin’ life.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about it,” said Carson laughing. “What makes you such experts on character? You look at one little photo like it’s some kind of crystal ball.”

“No, sir,” said Ten Brawl. “We has got the before and the after. Don’t take no genius to draw the line between the two dots. We been sittin’ here under this bridge for a long time. We seen a lot of debris blow by.”

“And what would I say if I saw a picture of you twenty years ago,” Carson asked. “What kind of conclusions would I draw?”

“Me?” interrupted Tatuh Pie. “Why, handsome then, e’en handsomer now, that’s what.”

“Aged like fine wine,” said Bison Butt.

“You mean cured like a pork rind ‘s what you mean,” said Ten Brawl.

“Say what you want, Ten Brawl; say a lot o’ things, whate’r you like. Know more than one thing, though, an’ erectile dysfunction ain’t one of ‘em.”

Tatuh Pie broke up at that. Bison Butt smiled knowin’ he scored big. Ten Brawl shook his head and said, “Hah. Don’t see you sittin’ with no honey on yo’ lap, Big Daddy; you can take yo magic wand and wave it in the air cuz that’s about as much friction you gonna get outside o’ yo’ shabby pants. Talkin’ like he some kind o’ player o’ somethin’. You a fool, man.”

“Truth hurts, truth hurts, I know,” said Bison Butt, before letting out a loud robust laugh that was infectious. Ten Brawl laughed along this time. Carson, too, but somewhat uncomfortably.

“What the hell you laughin’ at, son,” said Ten Brawl, growing serious. “You think you’s a big man with a big pecker now. Yo’ turn’ll come. You’ll be sittin’ with that hot piece of ass actin’ like you’s some big fuckin’ stud, and she be spreadin’ her legs tellin’ you ‘do it, Daddy, do it now; what you waitin’ for, it sure is hot and juicy, what you waitin’ for,’ and there you be lookin’ like a fool with nothin’ but a noodle for a dick and that hot pussy’ll be lookin’ at you like ‘what you waitin’ for, fuck me now,’ and there you’ll be with yo’ sick noodle and ready to run and hide from that big juicy pussy like it was comin’ to get you and make you bare yo’ soul to the whole world, make you feel like you standin’ in front of the pope o’ the Queen o’ England with no clothes on and nothin’ but a teeny little pimple ‘tween yo’ legs to show for it.”

Everyone laughed then, except Carson, who smirked a little while shaking his head.

“Never had a problem like that,” said Carson defensively, “not even with my wife.”

“Not even with his wife, the man say,” said Tatuh Pie. “When was the last time you fucked yo’ wife, if you don’t mind me getting’ personal?”

Carson was forced to think about his wife and he resisted that.

“I could tell you anything,” he replied. “You’d only have my word. I can say anything I like. Besides, I do mind you getting personal. But just between you and me,” he added, “she never went hungry.”

“Oh,” said Ten Brawl, “so you the one that brought home the bacon then, uh huh? She didn’t have to do her shoppin’ at the butcher’s?”

“One thing to bring it home,” said Tatuh Pie, “but did you fry it in the skillet? Did you peel it off and let it simmer in the pan for a while so the whole house smelled up with the flavuh o’ it?”

“Ain’t no woman no how not gonna pay a visit to the butcher now and again to get herself a fresh cut,” said Bison Butt. “I don’t care what kind o’ chops you got, a woman gonna dine out on occasion, ‘less she got religion. E’en then she gonna think about it on those hot days in the church when the preacher hisself lookin’ less godlike and mo’ like a man who need a reason to redeem his po’ ass time to time. Know what I’m sayin’?”

“Ones that’s gots religion is the ones you gotta watch out for,” said Ten Brawl. “Them’s the ones runnin’ from temptation. More religious they is, the more juice they got locked up inside ‘em, and the longer they keep it locked up there the crazier they get with the Lord and the halleluiahs and amens til one day that juice is gonna start leakin’ out and ‘fore you know it they got to sin, just got to, cuz the pressure gone built up so goddamn much there’s nothin’ else to do. And that’s when they man come home early from work one day and find they Mrs. Holy Joe in bed gettin’ de-leaked by Mr.’s next door neighbor and good time fishin’ buddy. That’s how it go.”

“You soun’ like a man who done some de-leakin’ hisself,” laughed Tatuh Pie.

“If I do then I lived to tell ‘bout it.”

“Probably still fishin’ with the next do’ neighbor, too, you dawg.”

“It’s the service economy. I believe in the service economy. You know, it’s all about re-toolin’. You find yo’self a niche market, well you bettuh fill it brother befo’ someone else do. Can’t leave a po’ lady in distress, ‘specially one who’s confused about what she really need. Wouldn’t be gentlemanly of me, now would it?”

Carson wondered who was fucking Beth, now that he was out of the picture. He hadn’t wanted her for a long time, but the thought of someone else taking his theoretical place made him insecure, an illogical emotion, he thought, since he was powerless to affect anything in that realm. How to break free through the thicket of unresolved accusations, counter accusations, the old wounds, the accumulated misunderstandings, the misrepresentations and false depictions of character, the guilt, the defensive posturing to combat the guilt, all the words and acrid volleys of contempt, the sincere expressions of shock and grief, the howlings of fear and loneliness, the expressions of reactive autonomy and declarations of independence and abandonment, the rare glimpses of unconscious motivations that tumbled ungainly from the morass of conflicted thoughts and raw, bald, anger, and the unrelenting experience of an unjust and embattled existence tied to the horrifying apprehension of another human’s pathetic scrambling for love and understanding? The hardest thing was to live in the knowledge that he had taken considerable time to be with Beth in their marriage, only to come away from that alliance involuntarily saddled with ideas and opinions about himself that were entirely at odds with the image he carried around in his head. The picture that Beth was fond of painting of Carson was one that he could never identify, much to his consternation, and her frustration. And she resisted just as strongly the truths he was certain he had discovered about her, truths that to him were so apparent and so unquestionable. The tensions between them had always been there from the very start. Each of them was argumentative and defensive and insecure in their own ways, and those traits pummeled them both in a perfect symmetry of contempt when they were aroused. It was just that over the years they had become better at camouflaging their instincts for revenge, and choosing deliberately not to take offense at a remark when there was cause. Those decisions to abjure only postponed the inevitable and augmented the force by which the furies eventually were released. The results were debilitating, as though each of them had had to take the stand and suffer an ad hominem cross examination from a sweat-plagued, mean and narrow-minded district attorney out of Jim Crow Mississippi, then stepping next into a boxing ring for twelve rounds with a feral heavyweight armed with a room temperature I.Q. and permission to bite.