Foley's Follies

Pre-AI-flashes of light emanate from the half dozen compact discs suspended by ribbons of multiple lengths and colors hanging from different branches of the venerable pepper tree in front of Loana Myers’ suburban house in Heritage Park, a predominantly Hispanic enclave southeast of decayed and decaying downtown Lost Angels.

As the CDs of Loana’s favorite contemporary grind music artists—the homicidal Biggest Small Man, the imprisoned Zulu Tercets, and the billion-streaming Buddhist Nation duo Dukkha by Design—spin and sway in the stultifying, summery, late winter breeze, Foley Gaspers, Loana’s self-appointed husband, notes the chromed transmitters of digital music no longer spook the murder of hulking crows that gather daily to wreak havoc on the artificial lawn the woman who calls herself his girlfriend toiled to install a half a decade ago, when she took pains to make the phony turf have the contours of natural landscaping.

As the polycarbonate platters send now-impotent rays of light into the unfazed flock of birds, inky as bubbling Aurum State crude, Gaspers waxes philosophical to Woodsy, a neighbor with some Anglo, but mostly Saxon, ancestry who is puffing a fat DuraAce-laced joint the diameter of a broccoli stem. Foley has warned his close friend of the side-effects associated with DuraAce—crippling lethargy followed by hyperkinetic sexuality—but Woodsy has repeatedly failed to heed the brotherly green-alert advisories of his marginally Black neighbor.

Woodsy’s being high on the DuraAce literally paid off earlier today when a pair of foxy saleswomen proffering a high-tech home water filtering system left substantially more than panties on Woodsy’s nightstand after he invited them in to show them his “eight toed feet.”

No thank you, said the more demure-looking of the pair, whose name tag read Yvette, had been born male, but was the first inside when Woodsy wiggled his eighth hallux at the door-to-door vixens from the shady area just inside the front entrance to his home. The trio’s deal was sealed after Yvette’s partner, Ilandra, popped a same-day pregnancy prevention pill from a blister pack and coaxed Woodsy into Yvette with an, ¡Aquí y ahora, nuestro grandísimo Dedo! translated roughly as, Give it to her here and now, Mr. Eighth toe!

Anyway, drawls Foley, continuing with one of the customary monologues he delivers whenever the stoned neighbor grants his younger college-enrolled advocate a stoned audience,in Memphis, old folk with taste believe the n-word clings to the subconscious like the scent of Jambalaya wafting from a middle school lunch box after 7th period, when a nappy-haired young ebony nereid unscrews her thermos’s lid to feed her aspiring house-girl marrow the dimpled smile and damp armpits of the grandpapá who has slaved to cook up a cauldron of the house Negro culinary concoction the sultry afternoon before the junior high grandbaby rises in February, ready to hear indoctrinated schoolmarms lecture on the merits of African-American luminaries.

Woodsy, swaying from side to side on overly-worn booted feet strokes his long, silvered whiskers and smiles at Foley in a beckoning manner that urge his Ubuntu-blooded neighbor to continue rhapsodizing.

Foley, never one to balk at pontificating about the urgent need to preserve endangered phenotypes, proceeds with his sermon.

In Chicago, on the other hand, the tasteless, abhorred—and adored—slur fuels polygamy-flavored lust as well as grind-house visions in A-list Negro actors aiming to inveigle the milky, ginger-maned and junked-out female supporting role to squat swamp-deep, groan, then sing choruses for rhymes spat by the beat Black lead, who hopes for presidential change marches as well as for all attendees of thizzed-out concert stadium shindigs to channel the light-brained Marlowe hiding in the dark heart of every nigga with an dying soul.

A dog’s bark echoes in the distance, as if prompted by a full moon in the middle of a sweltering March morning, and Woodsy expels a thunderous fart—as if he were a cantankerous post-impressioniste peinture, reincarnated in the sunny Aurum State 150 years after the demise of artistic decency.

Can’t wait ‘til your next cockamamy plot to restore decent moral hope to the neighborhood, Woodsy jabs at Gaspers, who strung up the crow deterrents a week ago in an exasperated attempt to rid Loana’s front yard of the mayhem and intervallic cawing that plagues him throughout the day.

Back inside the home in where Loana provides him safe shelter, Foley stands behind the perforated double-locked sheet metal door, sweating in lumberjack flannel, watching the brazen black birds return to inflicting mayhem on the front yard.

Loana, says Foley, didn’t you install this grind security door as part of your crusade to keep the house cool during the dog day LA summers? Why is it hotter up in he-uh this ye-uh, than it was last?

It’s all those dang space rockets drilling holes in the ozone, hunne, exclaims Loana, then purring, Now, why don’t you put a t-shirt on? Didn’t you say you were gonna take that flannel off before you stepped outside to preach to Woodsy?

Check this out, Foley purrs back , I said I was boiling and that I’m going to strip down to my thong then step outside to scare these feathery jiggas off, if it’s what I have to do to instill some respect worthy of that Satanist Hebrew comic with bugged out, yet sad eyes, Ramus Havenstein, on this here street and in your house.

This jocular banter is typical of the lovey-dovey repartees the couple engage in now that they have settled into what Gaspers likes to call, smalltown country home domesticity, after nearly a year of being at each other’s throats like a pair of internecine copulating wolves, rabid over not being able to decide whether or not either godly love or lecherous lust had brought them together.

It was hard for Foley to tell, exactly when the turning point of their quasi-married conjugality arrived.

It hadn’t been when living through a part-time job he thought might’ve driven him over the edge while counting countless soda cans, bottles of ketchup, or even oodles of boxed very small dildos for an inventory company that had been the only one to offer him employment, despite his lengthy rap sheet.

It wasn’t when he finally managed to convince his middle-aged, tight-curl-maned incredibly stern and jerk-off hot psychiatrist that the minimum dose of injectable anti-psychotic medication was more than enough to keep him free of the kind of perturbed behaviors that had landed him in crisis wards, jail cells or wandering down dark alleys looking for the kind of action that would land him in more crisis wards, jail cells, or other dark alleys.

It wasn’t even after he decided the goose-sized Corvidae-family birds he thought were digging holes and unearthing the artificial turf’s lining, were feathered stand-ins for what, in less than tolerant moments, he’d call, “shady cats out to fuck with me just ‘cause.”

No, what had finally turned the tables on Foley’s skittishness whenever he heard the blare of a siren, what had erased his fear of work, and even caused him to abandon his daily routine of pelting omnivorous birds with beans hurled from a homemade slingshot, was committing to a woman he had taken many pains to previously torment.

Gaspers had been born in East Lost Angels to a mother, first name Melva, maiden name Carbajal, who considered his birth an auspicious sign.From the day Foley was cut out of her by a gynecologist whom Melva had not permitted to deliver a natural birth for the sake of remaining estrechita, or vaginally tight, the Cuban immigrant considered her firstborn a divine child. He was the center of Melva’s universe, delivered into her womb by Diós mío himself for purposes of righting the wrongs of this mundo injusto y miserable, a miserable and unjust world made even moreso for negritas like herself by the Black women loitering in Andrews Park who’d ask her how much she was paid to take care of that, “Adorable, tiny-Whitey young’un.”

Melva had arrived to the Westernmost state in the DisUnion pregnant with Foley after crossing into Yanquilandia one cold December in 1984, seeking asylum for being a dissident from Fidel Castro’s hardline against petite bourgeois entrepreneurship. While Reagan, with his “Make America Great Again” sloganeering was no champion of immigrant rights, he was generous to sojourners from Communist countries who could prove they had been prosecuted for sucking up to the way of life protected by la Constitución and the Stars and Stripes.

Foley had only inherited one of Dios Dado’s, or Melva’s father’s, distinctly African traits, a sizeable gap between his two front teeth.While neither his lips nor nostrils were exactly the delicate and refined ones of his father, Domingo, whose descendants were from the Basque region of Spain, Foley was able to avoid a lot of the discrimination his mother experienced as a result of having a healthy afro as well as skin a shade lighter than the immigrant Hondureñas living in the southeast Angelino suburb Melva settled in after being granted asylum for opening a paladar in Trinidad, a Cuban city known for its musical history, located several hours from Havana by güagüa, the word Cubanos used to refer to the cheap and roughshod busses they rode to travel across and through the socialismo o muerte Caribbean country.

Diós Dado, loomed large in Foley’s imagination.Diós was from Ubuntu stock, or so he claimed—Zulus being South Africa’s imperialist oppressors—and although he was a staunch supporter and beneficiary of Castro’s Pan-Africanist racial policies, he had almost exclusively bedded White Cuban women, for purposes of teaching fair-skinned Cuban men hard learned lessons in what he called justicia racial.

Diós was a rabid anti-capitalist, but after being incapacitated by terminal cancer for smoking more than his unfair share of illegally imported Yanqui tobacco, he had never hesitated to ask his daughter for American greenbacks when his government salary did not cover the costs of the palliative care he required toward the end of his life.

Ese hijo de puta era un parásito desgraciado, that son-of-a-bitch was a disgraceful parasite, Melva was fond of saying to Foley whenever he’d try to get his mother to recall something redeeming about the man to whom he attributed his Black physicality, but she was thankful Diós Dado was the kind of tyrant who never allowed Domingo to step out of line or make advances of the kind that would’ve left other mulatas pregnant with his precious fair-skinned seed.

Another of Melva’s favorite refrains was, La vida es un martírio constante, life is eternal martyrdom, and after being introduced to Buddhism while behind bars, Foley agreed with his mother that life was nothing but a river that slowly and irreversibly chugged along, flowing up to its banks with foul-smelling, shitty water.