Minister Faust by From (html) (librera reader txt) 📕

was posing with Nancy on his lap on a CBS Christmas Special telling kids to just say no. Meanwhile, you know what old Wally was doing on the sly?”

I waited for an answer, finally having to prompt Kareem with a “No, what?”

Kareem looked furtively around the room, his head hunkered turtlelike into his collar.

“Never mind,” he said, snarling.

This was the first time I’d seen Kareem censor himself. Whatever he was hiding, he obviously had no plans to discuss it around these colleagues whose ratification votes he’d need to ascend to the F*L*A*C.

“Well,” I said, “that’s a, a fascinating theory, Kareem, but in terms of your feelings—”

“Jeez, Doc, you don’t even try to hide when you’re patronizing me, do you? You ever talk like that to Festering Squirrel? ‘Fascinating theory’?”

“Kareem, I assure you, I treat all my—”

“—all your colored hero patients the same, yeah, I know. Look, don’t you get it? It’s not about ‘theories’ or ‘feelings,’ it’s about what we can do. The F*O*O*J has patents on all kinds of technology, tech it licenses out to the government, to corporations. If all we did was take a cut of that and create some jobs, we could rebuild these inner cities we’re being paid to protect—and failing to protect—from the maki gang wars our own government’s actions created!

“Instead,” he said, gesturing to the space between his cupped hands as if he were holding donkey dung, “the F*O*O*J hands over its returns on licensing fees to a bunch of kot-tam parasitic investors! That’s what the f in F*O*O*J stands for, Doc. Financial. And failure! And fascist! And completely fu—”

“Brilliant campaign slogan, Rochester,” said Mr. Piltdown from across the ice wall.

“As opposed to yours, Facedown? ‘F*O*O*J über alles?’ ”

“You’re a disgrace to this entire organization!”

“That’s not what Hawk King thought,” said X-Man across the ice wall.

I could see it in Kareem’s body language: He was making a decision. He made it, then stepped forward. “I’m gonna wait one week after the funeral—out of respect—and then I’m holding a press conference to announce the contents of a papyrus Hawk King wrote and gave to me.”

Mr. Piltdown: “Hawk King never gave any papyrus to the likes of you!”

“I’m announcing,” continued Kareem, “that what Hawk King wanted all along wasn’t for the F*O*O*J to be some kind of kot-tam enforcer, the police-mafia in spandex, but to break down walls and build up halls, to shake the powerful and remake the powerless. And when he got roadblocked, steam-rollered, and presidentially knackered, he couldn’t take it anymore, and that’s why he went into exile!

“But he was ready to start all over again, smash the jail they built around him and be reborn with a new mission. And I’m going to reveal what else he said in his papyrus…which included endorsing me as Director of Operations. And I’ll hold up that papyrus for the world to read!”

All work in the room ceased.

“Edgerton, good goddamnit, you’re nothing but a ghastly, ghoulish little phony who’s prostituting the corpse of our finest hero to foist your inadequacies upon Hawk King’s finest creation! There’s no papyrus—you’re a fraud!”

“I’m a fraud? If that aint the fridge calling the stove white. If Americans knew even ten percent of the truth about you, you’d be on multiple death rows right now, Fespus—”

“Well, Kareem,” I cut in, “congratulations. You must be very happy.”

“Happy? Happy that the King wanted me—me—to guide this group? Happy ’cause he left me an endorsement, which is the closest thing to God writing me a reference letter? Happy that I’m gonna lead this sad group into the twenty-first century and remake it into a hammer for justice?” he said in his rhetorical crescendo. “Kot-tam right I’m happy. I’m slap-a-cracker happy!”

“The King would never’ve endorsed you!” yelled Mr. Piltdown from over on his side of Hnossi’s ice wall. “Not in ten million years! Not if you were the last biped on this planet! And you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your watermelon-hole when I put a voting-day thrashing on you that’ll make Hiroshima look like a campfire!”

I expected Kareem to materialize armor and weapons despite my warning, but instead he grinned triumphantly. “Alzheimer’s,” he stage-whispered to me, “has robbed America of its richest moron reactionary.”

“I heard that!”

Icondescension

Anyway,” said Kareem, “what we need is more than just sweeping out the old guard fascists. We also need to clean out the new generation fashionists.”

“Meaning?”

“Have a look,” he said, thumb-pointing toward Power Grrrl and the mannequin she was working on, to which she’d affixed cloth scraps and wiring in a rough approximation of tassels, G-string, garters, and stockings.

Tension between these two had been obvious since the beginning of our sessions together. The X-Man did anything he could to avoid sitting next to Power Grrrl, and most of the time he wouldn’t even look at her or acknowledge her remarks. Given the comments he’d aimed at the Flying Squirrel about Chip Monk and made about Power Grrrl’s iconic status as the lesbian “it” girl, homophobia clearly informed at least part of Kareem’s antipathy. A common cultural trait in the inner city, homophobic neurosis was obviously as strong a component of the X-Man’s id-crisis as his racial neurosis.

Such racial antagonism had publicly marked the X-Man’s career from its inception. Prior to developing his full logogenic powers, Kareem had employed rudimentary pictogenesis in his burgeoning crimefighting career, noteworthy for his corruption-crackdown on the moguls of African American Network Television and the hip-hop/rap industry. Several years earlier the prestigious Los Ditkos Inspector magazine carried a four-page feature on a younger Philip Kareem Edgerton, shortly after he’d switched his alias from “Mac Rude” to “X-Man.” As a rising star in the League of Angry Blackmen, which had drastically reduced crime in the Los Ditkos inner-city neighborhood of Langston-Douglas, Kareem had been invited to speak before a $500 per plate dinner for the liberal West Coast philanthropic group the Dream Foundation.

After disparaging the AANT executives in the crowd as well as hip-hop/rap artist-producers P. Bowels and the Nefarious N.I.G., Kareem,