Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

  She starts reading aloud from Soul on Ice, and she’s deep into it. She’s got the whole class into Eldridge Cleaver’s cell-block in San Quentin, and Cleaver is telling about his spiritual awakening and how he discovered the important revolutionary thinkers. She goes on and on, a long passage, and she has a pure serene tone going. When she finishes, she looks up in the most soulful way, with her chin up and her eyes shining, and she closes the book very softly under her chin, the way a preacher closes the Bible.

  Naturally all of the white kids are wiped out. They’re sitting there looking at each other and saying, “Far out” . . . “Too much” . . . “Wow, that’s heavy” . . . They’re shaking their heads and looking very solemn. It’s obvious that they just assume that Eldridge Cleaver speaks for all the black people and that what we need is a revolution . . . That’s the only thing that will change this rotten system . . . In their minds they’re now in the San Francisco State cellblock, and the only thing that is going to alter this shit is the Big Bust-out . . .

  The teacher lets all this sink in, and then she says: “I’d like to hear some comments.”

  One of the ghetto brothers raises his hand, and she turns to him with the most radiant brotherly smile the human mind can imagine and says, “Yes?”

  And this student, a funky character with electric hair, says: “You know what? Ghetto people would laugh if they heard what you just read. That book wasn’t written for the ghettos. It was written for the white middle class. They published it and they read it. What is this ‘having previously dabbled in the themes and writings of Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Voltaire’ that he’s laying down in there? You try coming down in the Fillmore doing some previously dabbling and talking about Albert Camus and James Baldwin. They’d laugh you off the block. That book was written to give a thrill to white women in Palo Alto and Marin County. That book is the best suburban jive I ever heard. I don’t think he even wrote it. Eldridge Cleaver wouldn’t write something like that. I think his wife wrote it . . . Pre-vi-ously dab-bled . . . I mean like don’t dabble the people no previouslies and don’t previous the people no dabblies and don’t preevy-dabble the people with no split-level Palo Alto white bourgeois housewife Buick Estate Wagon backseat rape fantasies . . . you know? . . .”

  As you can see, the man goes completely off his bean on this subject. He’s saying every outrageous thing that bubbles up into his brain, because he wants to blow the minds of the whites in the room. They’re all staring at him with congealed faces, like they just got sapped in the back of the neck. They hardly had a chance to get down into the creamy pudding of their romantic Black Hero trip, when this dude comes along and unloads on them. But they don’t dare say a word against him, because he’s hard-core, and he has that ghetto patter. He’s the one who must know . . .

  So mostly the fellow is trying to blow their minds because they are being so smug and knowing about The Black Man. He’s saying, Don’t try to tell us who our leaders are, because you don’t know. And that’s the truth. The Panthers were righteous brothers, but there were a lot of militants in the ghettos of San Francisco who had their own numbers going. There were the Mission Rebels, the Cortland Progressives, the New Society, the United Council for Black Dignity, the Young Adults, the New Thang, the Young Men for Action . . . it was a list with no end . . . By the time you completed a list of all the organizations that existed at any given time, some new ones would have already started . . . Everybody had his own angle and his own way of looking at black power. The Panthers were on a very special trip. The Panthers were fighting the Pig. And the Pig was fighting the Panthers. If you joined the Panthers, you had to be ready to fight the police, because that was the trip you’d be on. One of the main things you stood to get out of it was a club up side your head, or a bullet. If you were a man who had really been worked over by the police, then you could relate to that and you were ready for that fight. The Panthers were like the Muslims in that respect. But as bad as things were in the ghettos, there weren’t but so many aces who were ready to play it all-or-nothing that way.

  The ghettos were full of “individualists” . . . in the sense the Russian revolutionaries used to use that word about the lumpenproletariat of Russia. The lumpenproletariat—the “underclass,” as they say today—used to drive the Russian revolutionaries up the wall. Someone like Nikolai Bukharin would end up talking about them like he was some cracker judge from the year 1911: “. . . shiftlessness, lack of discipline, hatred of the old, but impotence to construct or organize anything new, an individualistic declassed ‘personality,’ whose actions are based only on foolish caprices . . .” He sounded like some Grand Kloogle on the bedsheet circuit.

  In the ghettos the brothers grew up with their own outlook, their own status system. Near the top of the heap was the pimp style. In all the commission reports and studies and syllabuses you won’t see anything about the pimp style. And yet there it was. In areas like Hunters Point boys didn’t grow up looking up to the man who had a solid job working for some company or for the city, because there weren’t enough people who had such jobs. It seemed like nobody was going to make it by working, so the king was the man who made out best by not working, by not sitting all day under the Man’s bitch box. And on the street the king was the pimp. Sixty years ago Thorstein Veblen wrote that at the very bottom of the class system, down below the “working class” and the “honest poor,” there was a “spurious aristocracy,” a leisure class of bottom dogs devoted to luxury and aristocratic poses. And there you have him, the pimp. The pimp is the dude who wears the $150 Sly Stone-style vest and pants outfit from the haberdasheries on Polk and the $35 Lester Chambers-style four-inch-brim black beaver fedora and the thin nylon socks with the vertical stripes and drives the customized sun-roof Eldorado with the Jaguar radiator cap. The pimp was the aristocrat of the street hustle. But there were other lines of work that the “spurious aristocrats” might be into. They might be into gambling, dealing drugs, dealing in stolen goods or almost anything else. They would truck around in the pimp style, too. Everything was the street hustle. When a boy was growing up, it might take the form of getting into gangs or into a crowd that used drugs. There were plenty of good-doing boys who grew up under the shadows of their mothers and were aiming toward a straight life. But they were out of it in their own community. The status system on the block would be running against them, and they wouldn’t “come out,” meaning come out of the house and be on their own, until their late teens.

  The pimp style was a supercool style that was much admired or envied. You would see some dude, just some brother from down the hall, walking down the street with his Rollo shirt on, and his black worsted bells with a three-button fly at the bell bottom of each pants leg, giving a spats effect, and he is walking with that rolling gait like he’s got a set of ball-bearing discs in his shoulders and his hips, and you can say to the dude, “Hey, Pimp!” and he’s not offended. He’ll chuckle and say, “How you doing, baby.” He’s smiling and pleased with himself, because you’re pulling his leg but at the same time you’re saying that he’s looking cool, looking sharp, looking good.

  Sometimes a group of buddies who ran together, who were “stone pimp,” as the phrase went, would move straight into the poverty program. They would do some fabulous, awesome, inspired mau-mauing, and the first thing you knew, they would be hanging out in the poverty scene. The middle-class bureaucrats, black and white, would never know what to make of an organization like this. They couldn’t figure them out. There was one organization in a city just outside of San Francisco, in the kind of section that catches the bums, the winos, the prostitutes with the biscuits & gravy skin, the gay boys, the flaming lulus, the bike riders, the porno shops, peep shows, $8-a-week hotels with the ripped window shades flapping out. This area had everything you needed for a successful application for a poverty-program grant except for the one thing you need the most, namely, the militant youth. So that was when a remarkable ace known as Dudley showed up with a couple
of dozen bonafide spurious aristocrats . . . his Ethnic Catering Service for skid row . . . There wasn’t one of them that looked much under thirty, and nobody had ever heard of any black youth in that area before anyway, but they could mau-mau as if they had been trained by the great Chaser himself. . . They got a grant of nearly $100,000.

  Every now and then the poverty bureaucrats from the Economic Opportunity Council or from City Hall would hold an area executive board meeting or some other kind of session at their clubhouse, and it was always a bear. A group of poverty workers and administrators would walk in there for the first time, and you could tell from the looks on their faces that something had hit them as different . . . and weird . . . They felt it . . . they sensed it . . . without knowing what it was. Actually it was a simple thing. The pimp-style aristocrats would be sitting around like a bunch of secretary birds.

  There would be Dudley and the boys . . . Dudley, with his Fuzzy-Wuzzy natural and his welts. Dudley was a powerful man with big slabs of muscle like Sonny Liston and these long welts, like the welted seams on top of a pair of moccasins, on his cheeks, his neck, on the backs of his fists. These welts were like a historical map of fifteen years of Saturday night knife-fighting in the Bay Area. And Dudley’s Afro . . . the brother had grown the rankest natural of all times. It wasn’t shaped or anything close to it. It was growing like a clump of rumpus weed by the side of the road. It was growing every which way, and it wasn’t even all one color. There was a lot of gray in it. It looked superfunky. It looked like he’d taken the stuffing out of the seat of one of those old ripped-up chairs you see out on the sidewalk with its insides spilling out after a fire on Webster Street—it looked like he’d taken the stuffing out of one of those chairs and packed it all over his head. Dudley was the fiercest looking man in the Bay Area, but there would be him and all his boys sitting around like a covey of secretary birds.

  That was the pimp look, the look of hip and supercool and so fine. The white bureaucrats, and the black ones, too, walked in trying to look as earthy and rugged as they could, in order to be “with the people.” They tried to walk in like football players, like they had a keg of beer between their legs. They rounded their shoulders over so it made their necks look bigger. They thickened up their voices and threw a few “mans” and “likes” and “digs” into their conversations. When they sat down, they gave it that Honcho wide-open spread when they crossed their legs, putting the right foot, encased in a cordovan brogue with a sole sticking out like a rock ledge, on the left knee, as if the muscles in their thighs were so big and stud-like that they couldn’t cross their legs all the way if they tried. But the pimp-style aristocrats had taken the manhood thing through so many numbers that it was beginning to come out through the other side. To them, by now, being hip was striking poses that were so cool, so languid, they were almost feminine. It was like saying, “We’ve got masculinity to spare.” We’ve been through so much shit, we’re so confident of our manhood, we’re so hip and so suave and wise in the ways of the street, that we can afford to be refined and not sit around here trying to look like a bunch of stud brawlers. So they would not only cross their legs, they’d cross them further than a woman would. They would cross them so far, it looked like one leg was wrapped around the other one three or four times. One leg would seem to wrap around the other one and disappear in the back of the knee socket. And they’d be leaning forward in the chair with their heads cocked to one side and their chins hooked over their collarbones and their shades riding low on their noses, and they’d be peering out over the upper rim of the shades. And they’d have one hand cocked in front of their chins, hanging limp at the wrist with the forefinger sticking out like some kind of curved beak. They would look like one of those supercool secretary birds that stand around on one long A-l racer leg with everything else drawn up into a beautiful supercool little bunch of fluffy feathers at the top.

  They liked to run a meeting like everything else, namely, very cool. Dudley was conducting the meeting when in through the back door comes one of his boys, a tall dude with the cool rolling gait and his hands stuck in his pants pockets, which are the high Western-style pockets. The door he came in leads up a short flight of stairs and out onto an alley. This is a commercial district, and the alley is one of those dead-end slits they use for deliveries. It’s always full of corrugated boxes and excelsior and baling wire and industrial wrapping paper and other debris. It’s the kind of alley that has a little half sidewalk on one side and there are always a couple of cars parked lopsided with two wheels up on the sidewalk and two on the alley. Anyway, the dude comes lollygagging in, as cool as you please, and walks over to where Dudley is sitting like a secretary bird and leans over and whispers something to him. Even the way he leans over is stone pimp-style. His legs don’t bend and his back doesn’t bend. It’s like he’s been cleaned, pressed, and Perma-creased at hip level, right where his hand fits into his Western pocket, and he just jackknifes at the desired angle where the crease is. He keeps his hand in the pocket when he bends over. He just lets the hand bend backward at the wrist. It looks like his fingers are caught in his appendix.

  “Say what, man?” says Dudley. “Don’t you see I’m trying to hold a con-fer-ence in here?”

  “But like man,” says the Dude, “this is ve-ry im-por-tant.”

  “What the hell you into that’s so im-por-tant, sucker?”

  “Well, man, just wait a min-ute and let me tell you. You know that wino, Half and Half, that hangs out in the alley?”

  “Yeah, I know him.”

  “Well, man, he’s out there in the alley trying to burn down the buil-ding.”

  Dudley doesn’t even move at first. He just peers out over his shades at his boys and at all the bureaucrats from downtown, and then he cocks his head and cocks his index finger in front of his chin and says, “We gonna have a tem-po-rary re-cess. The brother ask me to take care some business.”

  Then Dudley unwinds very casually and stands up, and he and the brother start walking toward the back door, but so cool and so slow, with the whole rolling gait, that it looks like Marcel Marceau doing one of those walks where he doesn’t actually move off the spot he started on. They open the door like they’re going out to check out the weather, but once they’re on the other side—whoosh!—it’s like somebody lit their after-burners. They’re up those stairs like a rocket and out into the alley and on top of the wino, Half and Half, in just under one half a second.

  This Half and Half is one of those stone winos who hang around there, one of those winos whose face is so weather-beaten it looks like a pebble-grain full-brogue oxblood shoe. He has white hair, but a full head of white hair, so thick it looks like every hair he ever had in his head was nailed in for good. All that boozing and drinking half-and-half, which is half sherry and half port, must do righteous things for the hair, because there are no old men in the world who have hair like the winos. This Half and Half is such a stone wino that the only clothes he has left are the green KP fatigues they hand out in the hospitals and the jails, because the rest have been ripped up, vomited on, or stolen. He has on the fatigues and a pair of black street shoes with thin white hospital socks. He has pushed the socks way down into the heels of the shoes because his ankles are swollen and covered with skin ulcers, which he swabs with paper towels he cops from out of the public toilets. The old crock hates these black studs who have turned up down on his skid-row cul-de-sac, and he keeps trying to burn up the building. He has a big pile of paper and excelsior and other stuff shoved up against the wall and he has it smoldering in a kind of fogged-in wino way, trying to in-cin-e-rate the mother.

  All of that is going on outside in the alley. From inside the clubhouse at first there’s nothing: silence. Then you start to hear a sound that sounds like there is a paddlewheel from off a Mississippi steamboat out there in the alley, and to every paddle is attached a size 12E motorcycle boot, and as the wheel goes around every one of these boots hits the wino . . . thunk . . . thunk. .
. whop . . . whump . . . thunk. . . thunk . . . whop . . . whump . . .

  The white bureaucrats and the black bureaucrats look at Dudley’s boys, and Dudley’s boys just stare back over the top of their shades and sit there wound and cocked as coolly as the secretary bird . . .

  thunk . . . thunk . . . whop . . . whump . . . thunk. . . thunk . . . whop . . . whump . . .

  And then the white bureaucrats look at the black bureaucrats and the black bureaucrats look at the white bureaucrats, and one of the bureaucrats who is dressed in the Roos-Atkins Ivy League clothes and the cordovan shoes starts going “Unh, unh, unh.” The thing is, the man thinks he doesn’t have any more middle-class Uncle Tom mannerisms and attributes, but he just can’t help going into that old preachery “Unh, unh, unh.”

  thunk . . . thunk . . . whop . . . whump . . .

  “Unh, unh, unh.”

  thunk . . . thunk . . . whop . . . whump . . .

  “Unh, unh, unh.”

  Then it stops and the door opens again, and Dudley and the Dude come walking back in even slower and more cool except for the fact that they’re breathing hard, and they take their seats and cross their legs and get wound back up and cocked and perched, and Dudley peers out over his shades and says, “The meeting is resumed.”

  BROTHERS FROM DOWN THE HALL LIKE DUDLEY GOT DOWN to the heart of the poverty program very rapidly. It took them no time at all to see that the poverty program’s big projects, like manpower training, in which you would get some job counseling and some training so you would be able to apply for a job in the bank or on the assembly line—everybody with a brain in his head knew that this was the usual bureaucratic shuck. Eventually the government’s own statistics bore out the truth of this conclusion. The ghetto youth who completed the manpower training didn’t get any more jobs or earn any more money than the people who never took any such training at all. Everybody but the most hopeless lames knew that the only job you wanted out of the poverty program was a job in the program itself. Get on the payroll, that was the idea. Never mind getting some job counseling. You be the job counselor. You be the “neighborhood organizer.” As a job counselor or a neighborhood organizer you stood to make six or seven hundred dollars a month, and you were still your own man. Like if you were a “neighborhood organizer,” all you had to do was go out and get the names and addresses of people in the ghetto who wanted to relate to the services of the poverty center. That was a very flexible arrangement. You were still on the street, and you got paid for it. You could still run with the same buddies you always ran with. There was nobody looking over your shoulder. You didn’t have to act like a convert, like the wino who has to sing hymns at the mission before he can get his dinner, to get something out of the poverty scene. In fact, the more outrageous you were, the better. That was the only way they knew you were a real leader. It was true that middle-class people who happened to live in the target areas got the top jobs, but there was still room for street types.