Chapter 25
The Scarlet Letter
“Just a straight answer,” said Lev. “What would you say if I told you I was fired from a homeless-shelter after working there for more than five years, for complaining about how the shelter’s executive staff treats African Americans?”
“Did that happen to you?” asked the man behind the desk.
“I’m offering a hypothesis,” politely responded Lev.
“Everyone has a right to his or her opinion,” said the man.
“So why would they fire such a person?” asked Lev.
“They have a right to their opinion,” said the psychologist.
Lev shuddered in the plastic and steel chair, but went on anyway.
“What would you say,” asked Lev, “if I told you that I’m the ghost of Lev Tolstoi, and that I went barhopping last night with Bob Hope?”
“Who’s Lev Tolstoi?” asked the man.
“I am,” answered Lev, remembering.
“Do you have a substance-abuse problem?” asked the man.
“Not as long as I can afford vodka,” answered Lev. “Alcohol is made of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen. That is, what humans breath and drink to stay alive and what you scientists say is the basic element of life. And, although Americans have told me that vodka is made of potatoes, it’s made of wheat and rye, like the staff of life, bread. I don’t understand what you mean by substance. I don’t abuse life, anymore.”
“Well,” said the man behind the desk. “I see no basis for a diagnosis that would justify prescribing medication you could sell on the street to buy vodka, but we can help you if you’re willing to help yourself, and so here’s my answer as straight as I can make it. Until you reevaluate the possibility of your having a substance-abuse problem, my recommendation is that you get involved in our employment-counseling program. Do you think that might be interesting to you? What do you think?”
“I could sure use some work,” said Lev, thinking his work wasn’t done there yet.
“Good,” said the man, writing on a little slip of paper on the desk. “Take this back downstairs and give it to the reception-person. He’ll tell you where you can go for the employment-counseling. I wish you luck, Mr. Tolstoi.”
Lev followed the instructions and found himself on the fourth floor of the building, amid a lot of people chatting and smiling and eating muffins and drinking coffee. The receptionist there, a very nice young black-woman, asked him about himself as she filled out a form, and neither did she show any recognition of his name. She took him on a tour of the floor, showing him a room full of computers with people busy at them and a room full of clothing, where a very pretty woman with flaming red hair was measuring someone. The black woman told Lev she could get him into the employment-counseling program in a few weeks, but she might be able to get him a little work sooner, and she showed she wasn’t lying. She introduced him to a young man who told him he had a request for a security guard, that very evening.
“It’s plain clothes, they said,” said the young man. “If you don’t have a suit, Rosemarie can fix you up. But you’ll have to shave off that beard, if you want this job. You can do that down on the second floor, and take a shower. Is that too much to ask?
“No,” said Lev. “That’s great. Thanks.”
“I love your beard,” said Rosemarie.
“That other guy said I’d have to shave it off,” said Lev.
“Oh, what a shame,” said Rosemarie. “It’s beautiful.”
So Lev dematerialized his beard. And, in the suit Rosemarie had fitted for him, and in clean underwear given him on the second floor after his shower, he made his way to a security agency. Another client of the shelter showed him the way.
“I’m Rodney,” said the man, as they headed out the door with the subway tokens the shelter provided to get them where they needed to go.
“Lev,” said Lev, shaking the hand Rodney offered.
“I used to be famous,” said Rodney. “A bunch of cops beat me up, and somebody videotaped it. Next thing I knew was Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Lev. “I’m kind of famous, too. I wrote some books in Russia, but they’re too long for many people in this country to read.”
“Yeah,” said Rodney. “Span of concentration. Nobody here remembers what they read in the newspaper yesterday, or at least I don’t. I didn’t read the newspaper yesterday, as far as I remember. How’d you get to the Big Apple?”
“It’s a long story,” said Lev. “I guess you could say I’m driven by curiosity. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on in life, if you know what I mean. I mean, sometimes I think I should have died a hundred years ago, or maybe did.”
“Yeah,” said Rodney. “I know what you mean. I’m a drug addict, but I don’t like being a drug addict, and I don’t know anyone who likes being a drug addict, and I know a lot of drug addicts. But I just live from day to day, mostly.”
“Why did the cops beat you up?” asked Lev.
“Beats me,” answered Rodney. “Couldn’t have been the drugs, because white folks do that. I guess it was racism, but nobody’d admit it was, as nobody’d ever admit that racism is the reason the first naked tits on TV were slaves in Roots or the reason that the first naked pubic hair in Playboy was on a black woman or the reason that the first naked people in a magazine in a public library were Africans in National Geographic. Maybe the cops believed that stuff about black men having a big you-know-what and were jealous. Maybe they think we’re animals but not dumb enough, and maybe they think I’m hung like a horse. Ask why any honkies do what they do. I don’t know.”
“You from here?” asked Lev.
“Nah, L.A.” said Rodney. “After my fame went away, and I healed up from having those cops kick my head in, I went back to the doping. And I was sitting in a bar in Watts, and I heard Frank Sinatra on the jukebox singing ‘New York, New York’. A line in the song got my attention, and I robbed a convenience store for the travel money. And so here I am, in the Big Apple.”
“Which line of the song?” asked Lev.
“I don’t remember the exact words,” said Rodney. “That was longer ago than yesterday’s newspaper. But it was something like, if I could make it anywhere, I could make it here. I figured I might be able to make it somewhere. So I came here.”
“’If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.’ is the line,” said Lev.
“That’s what I said,” said Rodney. “I remember it was something like that.”
By this time in their conversation, they had walked to the security agency.
“Didn’t you have a beard this morning?” asked Rodney.
“Yeah,” said Lev. “They said I had to shave it off.”
“Bastards,” said Rodney.
“But I needed this job,” said Lev.
“Yeah, you’re right,” said Rodney. “It’s a good thing security doesn’t have anything to do with security. Or they’d have to pay more for it, and we’d have to eat shelter-food again to get to sleep again tonight. It’s a well-kept secret.”
They took the elevator to the security-agency offices and filled out some forms in a reception-area, after Rodney introduced them and grinned at the little black female receptionist. They kept their thoughts silent as they awaited the next step.
A man called them into an internal office, one at a time, Rodney first.
“We’ll run security-checks on you later,” said the man behind this desk, in Lev’s turn. “I’m glad you’re white. They told me they hoped we’re an equal-opportunity employer, but I hope you’ll keep an eye on that guy. All you’ll have to do is stand in the back and look like you know what you’re doing. Mostly you’ll just have to look mean and not talk if you don’t have to. You’ve got plenty of time to get there. Don’t let that black-guy get drunk. Here’s the address. You’re in charge.”
Lev didn’t say a word during that interview, and the man showed no sign of caring about the void. The man pointed down the hallway to the reception area, and Lev found Rodney waiting there, still silently. The two of them silently left, after Rodney gave another but littler grin to the receptionist.
“You never know,” said Rodney on the street. “One of them might like you. It’s playing the odds, and I need a good woman. I need that more than I need to win the lottery, and the odds have got to be better.”
Lev gave a laugh that didn’t sound ghastly, and he showed Rodney the address.
“Holy moly!” said Rodney. “The Apollo Theater! Who are we guarding? Marvin Gaye, the Pointer Sisters, Tina Turner? Ike Turner needs guarding. That jerk-wad. Jive turkey.”
“What’s the Apollo Theater?” asked Lev.
“What’s the Apollo?” shouted Rodney. “Don’t you know it’s been show-time at the Apollo since the year Theresa was born? Do you know who Theresa is, the bus in Alabama? Now, she’s a good woman!”
“Do you know it’s rude to reply to a question with a question?” asked Lev.
“You honky white-boys can get very weird sometimes,” said Rodney.
After the subway-ride uptown, they entered the theatre and reported to the woman whose name was on the slip of paper with the address. After a long look at them, with nothing resembling a smile, she led them into the auditorium
“The audience is going to be mostly women,” she said. “Don’t stare at them. Just stand back here by the exits and look like you know what you’re doing. If you're with the media, somebody’s going to get sued. Well, I guess you'll have to do.”
She was white, and so were most of the women who soon filled the lower seats of the auditorium, quietly brushing past Lev and Rodney. Rodney and Lev looked at each other across the width of the center tiers of seats. They shrugged but didn’t grin.
Both stood in their shelter-suits, their hands folded in front of their genitals in what public speakers sometimes call the fig-leaf position. Neither of them smiled, and both kept their eyes mostly on the stage. They did what they were told to do.
With the women settled in their seats, reading the pieces of paper handed them at the entrance, light dimmed as the curtain rose. The woman who had led Lev and Rodney to their places walked to the center of the stage, beside a podium.
“Ladies,” she said, “the first lady of the United States of America.”
At that, all the women in the auditorium stood and roundly and soundly and loudly applauded as Heather Rhododendron strode past the receding other woman to the podium and stood behind it smiling, in a bright blue suit and her yellow hair pulled tight and tied with a bow, blue as her patent-leather middle-height heels, behind her head. Placing both of her hands on the rails of the lectern, she stood there in the stage-lights and waited for the sound to subside, the other women to sit before her.
“You are women,” she said, “and I am a woman.”
To that, the applause arose again, and subsided.
“Most Americans are women, and yet men have more power.”
She paused, but the women didn’t applaud at that. They sat silent, waiting.
“Power,” said Heather. “They have more power. And we must ask ourselves why they have more power, while there are more of us than of them in this democracy. Deceit is the answer, because deceit is power, if one uses it right. And I am here to show you how to use it. I will use my husband as my first example. I’ll start with him.
“’Don’t start with me,’ he might say, as I’m sure many of you have said to your husbands, in your desperate defense against their coming home from work and trying to impose on you the lessons they learn each day in their workplace, from which they do everything they can to exclude you. So, today, we will start with him, my Clingon.
“People, men and women, vote for expressed ideas, not for experienced actualities. My so-called husband, with a record of being a philandering jerk, took the presidency from the most predominant player in the winning of the Cold War, and our nation’s preeminent women’s organization and our nation’s preeminent educational association supported him after he admitted to the congress of our nation that he was a philandering jerk, that he had had physical relations commonly called sexual, with a female intern in the Oval Office, and questioned the definition of ‘is’.
“That is, he admitted that he couldn’t preside over his own zipper in the room in which our nation most expects its president to preside, and the people of our nation gave him credit for the economic prosperity that arose largely from the stability that winning the Cold War produced through most of the world. But forget him.
“Let’s move on or rather back, to other recent history and ask why the people, and especially the women of the United States of America, supported Fits Jr. while he was taking the world toward nuclear destruction like a fast freight down a dead-end street, while cheating on his wife. Now let’s move back forward again.
“Why did Ronny get credit for winning the Cold War, while he slept about twelve hours a day, besides in cabinet meetings? Why did Ronny get Christian votes for closing his eyes and claiming to pray, before calling peaceful people ‘grass-eating know-nothings’? In other words, why do people suck up to hypocrisy?
“Ladies, the answer is simple. Ronnie was an actor, and Fits Jr. and my husband were young, relative to other presidents. And they all made nice speeches, while their voting public was too lazy to read the second pages of its newspapers each day, and too stupid to remember the first pages of the papers of a week in the past.
“And we need to take that tack as well, and give no quarter. We need to take advantage of the weakness of men in their desperation to think they’re tough while women have the power of the water that carved the Grand Canyon, and we need to take advantage of the weakness of women who have fallen for men’s nonsense.
“We need to take advantage of everyone, because we need to have the power, for the greater good. And we have precedents to follow, pioneers in taking advantage of the weakness of women, to give them back their strength. I’ll name a few.
“Princess Diana gained her popularity and her power by marrying a prince, and she kept her popularity and her power by divorcing him. She sucked him in, pleasing the fairytale idealists, and she spit him out to show those idealists that she didn’t need the prince, because she could be as ruthless and faithless as any man.
“After she spit him out, she jet-setted around the world with nobody-knows-how-many men in tow. And she made such a claim to humanity, by occasionally visiting poor people and talking about their situation, that her death driven by a drunken man created more headlines than did the nearly simultaneous death of Mother Teresa.
“Mother Teresa. You don’t have to sacrifice yourself like that. You don’t have to go to the black hole of Calcutta and help people. All you have to do is dress yourself fashionably and talk about doing good, preach doing good. Mother Teresa was a victim of the trickery of men’s religion. You are too professional to fall for Christ.
“Princess Diana married to become a princess and remained a princess, stealing power from a foolish man who didn’t consider the future, who didn’t consider that he couldn’t take her power back, not even in divorce. Her man, her prince, lacked the tactics we must learn to overcome men, the strategy of Winnie O’Malley.
“Look at Winnie O’Malley. She has a boyfriend and a talk-show and a magazine titled by her monogram. She’s never married, and that boyfriend is hardly a part of her entourage, and she is one of the wealthiest women on Earth. And none of what she does has any substance while she’s made a fortune by amateur psychobabble.
“She stays just short of the silliness of supermarket tabloids but bounds full length into the silliness of soap-operas, to sell her silly magazines and silly television-advertisements to people who otherwise might be spending their time and money on Tupperware. I mean the women who voted for Fits Jr. and my husband because they’re cute. I mean the weak women I mentioned before, the soap-women.
“And now Winnie’s taken a page from the book of Diana, the goddess of the hunt. She’s made a trip to Africa and arranged a Christmas party for some poor children there, and she says that trip defines her existence. She says she might go there again, because that trip revealed to her her raison d’etre, as though her life of winning billions were not it. My husband’s vice president says he’ll grow a beard to look like Lincoln.
“But the best part is that she not only takes advantage of her own sex but also of her own race. She’s very successfully training black women to be as silly as the traditionally white soap-opera-women. Rather than teaching them that black is beautiful, she’s teaching them silly is beautiful. So she can control. That’s leadership.
“Remember Slavey, the black Muslim. He was so silly he committed crimes blatantly, so he could afford to straighten his hair and buy zoot-suits. When he got caught, he became honest and was killed. Winnie’s getting others to straighten their hair. And she’s profiting by it. She’s profiting immensely. She’s right for real!
“Do you see the pattern? Look at Margo Slick, unmarried also but making a fortune advising homemakers. Margo has been charged with the crime of insider-trading, and the soap-opera-women are saying that the charge has nothing to do with what she did, but rather is because she is a woman, on a man’s Wall Street, in a man’s world.
“Truth is that her market is the worst of the soap-women, women who watch her on television and shop at Walmart for the same reason, because they have no taste. They’re trailer trash, people who buy furnished mobile homes because they have no taste or money to determine their own décor. Margo will be convicted, because the real world has no room for people who eat like pigs, however they garnish. Yet we need their votes.
“Of course we can beat the likes of Ronny, who’s in love with his wife. And my husband Clingon beat the Viagra husband of the soap-opera-wife who ran the American Red Cross, even without having to point out the corruption in the A.M.A. and those soap-opera charities like the Salvation Army. But we have to stand together as women, more than we did when that soap-opera wife tried to win the Republican nomination.
“The Republican soap-opera-women didn’t support her, because they resented not being contenders themselves and made excuses like saying that she’d had too many facelifts for herself or wore too much of the makeup they tried to make work for themselves. She was too much like Tammy Fay Bakker, too able to afford being too much like them. We have to stand together, for our choice to rule.
“We have to stand together, regardless of party, no matter what.
“I have invited you powerful women here to show you how to be more powerful, by carrying the message of empowerment to all women, from yourselves to the soap-women. Showing the steps of Diana and Winnie to the soap-women will show them how to be more ruthless and greedy and corrupt than any man, by feeding them their poison.
“If you can do without marrying, like Winnie and Margo, do. If you find a way to power through marriage, do that without a qualm. But be sure you marry a noisy jerk like Diana’s prince or my husband, or Fits Jr. Don’t marry a strong silent type like Eisenhower, who wouldn’t have screwed around at home. Don’t be a Mamie.
“Eisenhower had the strength to stay faithful, until he found himself alone on foreign shores. Marry a man who will make a fool of himself for the first dumb blonde actress or ambitious intern who comes along, or marry a man who has no interest in you anyway, so you can divorce him on grounds of incompatibility, after you bleed him.
“Jackie Fits’ mistake was in not accepting Linden’s offers upon her husband’s death. Had she been as ruthless as Linden, she may have been the first female president of the United States. No one in this room is a 21-year-old intern or a dumb blonde actress or a birdbrain singer like Barbra Streisand, whose idea of feminism is nail-polish and calling my husband’s presidency happy days, like the NOW and the NEA.
“And neither was Jackie Fits. Yet, instead of using Linden, she married another old man, for nothing but money. So we, you and I, the professional women of these United States of America, must lead women by their noses to the power they deserve. They will learn as children, by our leadership. And here is my next step toward that.
“I will write a book, and its most important part will be how Clingon wronged me, how I am a soap-opera wronged-woman. And, from that, many women will vote for me because they’re silly enough to believe that crap, and many women will vote for me because they know it’s a load of crap, and some men will vote for me because they’re horny buggers, and I’m kind of cute. And, slimy or not, I will glide on the tide of that deceit into the Whitehouse, and anyone in this room could be next. Except those two guys in the bad suits in the back, hiding their crotches. They’re here to protect us, because we have better jobs. And they don’t stand a chance.”
Neither Lev nor Rodney moved their hands when they heard that, but just bore out the craziness to get their minimum wage. After the women left, none of them looking at either Rodney or Lev, the woman who had placed them called them to her.
“Thanks, guys,” she said. “Maybe we’ll use you again.”
Back on the street, Rodney and Lev looked at each other and guffawed, but then Rodney became philosophical on that concrete sidewalk in Harlem
“Of course, it takes a village to raise a child,” he said. “But does that excuse parents from being parents, excuse their passing off their parental responsibilities to their village, or to a boarding-school as rich people often do, if we can call such people rich? With that rationale, the villages will pass their responsibility to the United Nations, eventually. So, in the eventual cycle, the world must unite to pass it back down. But how can the world unite, if families can’t?
“Why can’t we all just get along?” asked Rodney.
Rodney headed off to find a meal and shelter for the night, but Lev didn’t need that and had one more item on his New York agenda. He headed off to Bill’s Bar, where hung out the staff of the Wired Media Net, the most responsive name in news. He wanted to find out why the media so misrepresent.
There, he saw no one he recognized, except Frank Grubbs sitting alone at a table in the middle of the room. Lev knew that Frank had been an investor and executive for WMN and had hosted a program in the traditional evening-news time-slot, but he thought he had left to head a dot.com startup with a website promoting exploration of outer space. Lev thought of that as he approached the table, seeing Grubbs’ moon face reflecting light from a Tiffany-shaded fixture above him.
“Aren’t you Frank Grubbs?” asked Lev, offering to shake hands.
“Pretty much so,” said Frank, accepting the handshake from his seat.
“Mind if I get a beer and join you for a minute?” asked Lev.
“I guess not,” said Frank. “Bill’ll bring you a beer.”
On his way to this bar, Lev had rematerialized his suit into a better fit for this situation, and he pulled out the chair with a manicured hand, which he laid on the table, after he sat. Frank looked at the hand and then into Lev’s face.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I thought you were exploring outer space,” said Lev. “Just curious.”
“Dot.com,” said Frank, looking away to Bill, who was approaching with a menu. “Flash in the pan. Bubble about to burst. What can I say?”
“Just a Bud, please,” said Lev to fat Bill, who stood beside the table, not offering the menu but holding it ready at the bib of his apron.
“So you’re back at WMN?” asked Lev, as Bill receded without a word. “I’ve been traveling. Haven’t seen much TV lately.”
“Back in the saddle,” said Frank, “influencing Earth in my little way. Not much of an audience in outer space anyway, that I could find.”
“I have some pretty spacey friends,” said Lev.
“So do I,” said Frank. “Is that what you were curious about.”
“Not about space-aliens,” answered Lev. “But, about influencing Earth, yes. I’m curious to know what thought is behind your approach to presenting information to the public. Oh, and I’m also curious to know why none of your famous staff is here.”
Grubbs looked around the barroom and shrugged before he spoke.
“I can’t answer the second question,” he said. “I didn’t come in here much before I went to the dot.com. I started coming in when I came back, because I thought I might need dynamically to reestablish myself. A lot of them came in then, but it’s been like this since a few days after. Maybe they’re afraid of me. I am powerful.”
“You do have a rather leading approach to talking to people,” said Lev “if what I’ve seen of you on television is how you are off-camera.”
“You have to lead,” said Frank. Jack Horner, WMN’s founder, keeps a plaque on his desk that says ‘Either lead or follow or get out of the way.’ And that’s what WMN does, leading people down the primrose path to thinking their weakness acceptable. We lead, and they follow. It’s basic.”
“Basic,” said Lev. “You think that approach is basic.”
“I don’t think,” said Frank. “I know. It’s basic, fundamental, foundational, essential. If people aren’t led, they fall by the wayside into a ditch and drown in their own stupidity. Let me give you an example.
“The government doesn’t lead. It grubs for votes, and so we newsmakers have to lead for it. The example I’ll offer is the rhetoric on terrorism, which the presently presiding administration calls the war on terror. Most of the other news networks call it the war on terrorism, but only WMN calls it what it is. We call it the war on radical Islamists. We call a spade a spade.
“You see, everybody else is afraid to offend anyone. So they generalize and blur until no one knows what they’re talking about, because they aren’t talking about anything. So we lead, just as Mayor Gayle did against the blacks in Montgomery, with rhetoric that’s both accurate and pointed. Gayle called Oliver and Theresa and the NAACP Negro radicals, and the phrase served three purposes.
“First, it avoided allegations of racism that would have come from using the other ‘N’ word. Second, it pointed to the fact that what they were doing was trying to change the norm, the world order the rest of us have come to know and love. Third, it didn’t specify all Negroes, only radicals. Third was best, for propaganda.
“The same is true of the phrase ‘radical Islamists’. The word ‘radical’ carries its negative connotation without going to an inaccurate extreme like calling Sacco and Vanzetti anarchists. The word ‘Islamists’ works well partly because it isn’t a word, because Muslims use the word ‘Muslims’ to convey the meaning we’re better conveying with the word ‘Islamists’. So our word can mean anything we wish it to mean, because it’s our word. Because we coined it, we can define it.
“And the way we define it for the public is to use it in particular contexts, and those contexts always show that what we mean by the phrase is ‘terrorists’. It’s a basic propaganda method, as basic as Thomas Paine’s using the phrase ‘common sense’ to refer to his rationalization of the American Revolution.
“Paine was just a pain, because he couldn’t be a monarch. So he had a fit, that ironically left the Fits family to show us how things should have been, had we the courage or craziness of dragon-slayers.
“I mean the mundaneness of monarchs.”