that Luther Stallings, his grandfather, was shit. When, to the contrary, Luther Stallings at one time had stood in full possession of a definite article, not to mention two capital letters. Was most definitely The Shit.
Before this summer, before last week, the name of Luther Stallings was not a memory to Titus but the memory of someone else’s memory, like a minor hit or the vice president of the disco years. A scatter of images caught like butterflies in the grille of his mind. First: an article in an old, a very old, a King Tut–old copy of Ebony tucked into a drawer in his grandmother’s nightstand. Titus remembered little about the article apart from the name of its subject, the title Strutter, and a shot of Luther Stallings sitting in a Los Angeles living room, in tight black pants and white ankle boots, tossing a baseball to a blur of a boy. Second: a scratchy, washed-out clip in a Wu-Tang Clan video, no more than a few seconds long, showing a lean light black man causing grievous harm with his fists and feet to a gang of homicidal Taoists. Third and faintest: the memory, really the acrid residue—and no more—of the low opinion, bottled like smoke in the name Stallings, held by his granny for all the fathers to whom Titus was heir.
None of these echoes prepared Titus for the truth of the greatness of Luther Stallings as revealed in patches by the movies themselves, even the movies that sucked ass. None readied him for the strange warmth that rained down onto his heart as he sat on the couch last night with the best and only friend he’d ever had, watching that balletic assassin in Night Man, with those righteous cars and that ridiculous bounty of fine women, a girl with a silver Afro. Luther Stallings, the idea of Luther Stallings, felt to Titus like no one and no place had ever felt: a point of origin. A legendary birthplace, lost in the mists of Shaolin or the far-off technojungles of Wakanda. There in the dark beside Julie, watching his grandfather, Titus got a sense of his own life’s foundation in the time of myth and heroes. For the first time since coming to consciousness of himself, small and disregarded as a penny in a corner of the world’s bottom drawer, Titus Joyner saw in his own story a shine of value, and in himself the components of glamour.
Man said, “You all having a Luther Stallings film festival?”
“He was good,” said Julie.
“No, Julie, he was not.”
“Well, at kung fu or whatever.”
The man did not look up from the plastic case. He spoke with a soft and furious enunciation. “I don’t want this motherfucker in my house,” he said. “Not in any form. Not flesh and blood. Not in electrons, pixels. Not even the damn name out your damn mouth. Okay? Got that?”
The man scooped up the rented elements of their Stallings film festival, stacked them haphazardly, and tried to hand them off to Titus. Titus just looked at them. The man shoved them at Julie instead.
“Get them out of my house!” he said.
“Okay, okay,” Julie said. “Jeez, Archy, what the hell?”
Boy stunned by the abruptness, the violence, of how he found himself in possession of the DVDs. Looking at the man like he was about to cry. “I’m sorry, Archy. I didn’t—”
“That’s your daddy,” Titus heard himself say, to his surprise if not horror. “Man was a motherfucking movie star! You should be feeling proud of him.”
“Huh.”
“He was good,” Titus said. “He could really act. Better than Fred Williamson, and fight better, too. Better fighter than Jim Kelly, who wasn’t no kind of actor. Better than all them white guys, Chuck Norris, dude with the eyebrows—”
“John Saxon,” Julie said.
“John Saxon. Better than most of them classic Chinese dudes, too. Sonny Chiba, Sammo Hong. You know you love that type of shit, got that screen capture from The Game of Death for a desktop. Fighting that big dude, looks like some kind of giant emu. It don’t even make sense for you to not appreciate Luther Stallings. He can play piano. He’s like a expert at barbecue and shit.” These facts he’d cribbed from a bonus feature on the Night Man disc. “But, I mean, even if you don’t like him, you got to still respect him.”
Titus saw that he had afforded the man a fresh surprise on this unusual morning.
“Two weeks you don’t say ten words,” the man said. “Now you going to make me a whole speech, huh? Telling me what I’m supposed to feel.”
“It’s your father.”
“Uh-huh. So then, by that logic, I guess you must respect me?”
“Nah,” Titus said. “Because you just a sperm donor.”
It left his bow with a snap of inspiration and hit its target with a thwack you could almost hear. It rocked the man back before he rallied.
“Okay, first of all,” he said, “that shit was not ‘donated,’ okay, it was bestowed. Second, that ‘emu’ is Kareem Abdul motherfucking Jabbar. Third, all right, and listen to me now, I got enough shit to worry about, all right, laying my actual father figure to rest day after tomorrow, providing food and drinks for like a hundred people. Rounding up a marching band. Tracking down a parrot. In my garage, okay, I have the Hammond organ that killed Cochise Jones just, like, sitting there, need to be patched up so we can give the man a fitting tribute. I got all this personal shit piling up everywhere, baby coming, wife going out of her motherfucking mind. Got like three hours sleep. Got this skinny little motherfucker here, wandering around in his underpants, wearing a sleeping bag around one ankle like it’s some kind of fucked-up giant sock. You two little faggots,” yanking out the last couple of Jenga blocks from the tottering pile of his cool, “you come in here, dropping DVDs all over the place, disrespecting me, disrespecting my wishes, messing up my gotdamn house—”
Julie looked up accusingly. Disappointed in the man, wanting him to know it. “Hate speech,” he pointed out.
“Think so?” the man said. “Because, brother, that is fucking mild compared to what you about to hear. You little fuckers can put your clothes on, pack your bags, and get the fuck out, both of you. Leave the premises. And take those piece-of-shit movies with you. I am bouncing your cinephile asses.”
“Seriously?” Julie said.
Man seemed right then to want to show Julie that he was in earnest. He picked up the copy of Strutter in its box, Luther Stallings’s first film, made when he was only eight years older than Titus was today. Threw it on the ground, stomped it four times.
“Get. The. Fuck. Out.”
The plastic gave way twice, but on the third blow, the case snapped in half. The last time the disc broke. Three shining pieces of rainbow lying on the rug.
“Asshole,” Titus said.
Murderous, hopeful, he took a swing at his father. Twisted stylishly back around on himself, lost his footing, fell. The hand that broke his fall got caught up in the pieces of the shattered case. A piece of broken rainbow cut him, enough to bleed a little, hurt a lot.
“I fucking hate you,” Titus said, his voice sounding, even to his own ears, dismayingly girlish and shrill. “I hate you so motherfucking much!”
Man stood over him, looking down, hands on his hips, breathing in big wheezy lungfuls of the air they all had soured.
“Now, that,” he said, “is what I call hate speech.”
Two blocks from Brokeland, backing into a space on Apgar Street with a furious swipe of the El Camino’s steering wheel, sucking the last charred millimeter of usefulness from a fatty while trying to confirm an order for twenty pounds of al pastor, twelve dozen tortillas, and a gallon of pico de gallo from the Sinaloa taco truck down on East Fourteenth, Archy Stallings tripped some inner wire tied to hidden charges of remorse. Remorse for his unmanly and irresponsible outburst with the boys, for the hurt done to Gwen, for Gwen’s unveiling of the unanimous squalor into which her leaving had sunk him. Remorse, at last, for his Ethiopian adventure—Archy recalling, with the remorseful acuity of marijuana, the ink of melancholy that flooded the pupils of Elsabet Getachew whenever she looked up at him with his jimmy in her mouth. Regret for his general
