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It was Raoul first told me about Susana Cook. I had stopped in at Tom's on my way back from another ten hours at the magazine when Raoul waved me over from a booth, early edition of the Times spread out before him. That's what I get for being such a creature of habit. "Lying in wait again?" I asked as I struggled to close up what was left of my little collapsible umbrella, the one I'd picked up outside the 28th Street subway station last summer from one of those street vendors who pop up like mushrooms whenever it rains. This storm had a lot of wind with it and had mortally wounded my five-dollar special so that it didn't really close all the way anymore, but that made it easier to splatter water all over page 17 of the front section of Raoul's Times. I even managed to cool off his coffee some, but he was too jacked to notice. He hovered over the words on the page spread out before him, cackling softly, hands palm down and poised above the newsprint, as though willing it, the table it was on and the plywood and plumbing below to levitate into his own peculiar universe. I opened my raincoat a couple buttons and squeezed reluctantly in across from him, catching a whiff of the damp fabric from within. Raoul said, "Check it out, Chuck." I would rather have sat at the counter. I would rather have been alone. I would rather have never met Raoul. But that was all moot now. He was here, and so was I, and the further away I sat from him only meant the louder he would talk at me, and then we might disturb the clientele. Like the Columbia grad geek immersed in his Paul Bowles, slowly twirling on his counter stool, or the girl in the charcoal sweater stuffed in the far corner nursing a strawberry shake. I'd seen her before, panhandling outside of Kim's down Broadway. Wouldn't want to disturb these folks. No, sir. Tom might hear about, and then he'd get mad at me. Raoul spun the paper around. "The Moose is going down," he exulted, jabbing one of those oddly elegant fingers of his at the headline: POLICE CHIEF BLASTS MEDIA AS SNIPER HUNT STALLS. "We're all destiny's children, Chuck," he continued. "Not just those black chicks with the white girl hair. Remember Rudy G. and 9/11? 9/11 made Rudy, man. 9/11 secured the G's future. 9/11's gonna put the G. in the Oval Office while your precious Demos are still scratching their nuts wondering what the hell they're gonna do about Hillary. And you know why?" Raoul didn't wait for an answer. He never did. You either had to talk over him or just get up and walk away. That's what I wanted to do. Instead, I ordered my usual ham omelette and wheat toast with a water back. No coffee. Not at ten past two in the morning. Not when I'd been going since 9AM, when no one who doesn't want to should even have to be awake, much less working. "Let me tell you why. You just sit there. You've had a long, hard day in the corporate world. I can see that. I'm sympathetic. I'll do the thinking for both of us. You just sit there and listen. Just sit there and try to understand." Raoul dropped his elbows on the table, hunching his shoulders forward conspiratorially. I recognized it as one of his moves, one that would read all the way to the back row of the Gershwin. "Children of destiny, Chuck. Situations occur in each of our lives that we can never fully prepare for. We can only respond. And how we respond shapes our futures, our destinies, our very place in history. And how are our destinies portrayed, expressed, archived in this wondrous modern age? Through the media, natch. You don't like the media doesn't mean the media's going to go away. Modern media is a voracious, 24/7 beast, Homebrew. Today's media eats up facts, rumors and innuendo faster than you're gonna power down that omelette. Rudy understands this. "Remember that first day? Chaos and disorder, abounding. Rudy's on the tube right away. Remember? Rudy's immediately accessible. He's there, under the lights, eyes glistening beneath his hardhat. Rudy is the Beast's friend. Rudy feeds the Beast. Rudy understands the Beast. And the Beast loves Rudy. That's why Rudy's going places, that's why Rudy has a future. "Now this poor sorry bastard -- " Raoul jabbed a finger towards the photo of Montgomery County, Maryland Police Chief Charles A. Moose "-- he thinks the Beast is something he can contain, control, lecture. That's why, when this is over, The Moose won't be saying, 'we're pursuing legitimate leads I'm not at liberty to disclose' anymore. He'll be saying, 'do you want fries with that?'" Raoul snapped back in his seat, taking a rare pause, watching me, waiting, calculating my response. His aristocratic fingers traced the small smirk dancing across his face, the same smirk I not infrequently wanted to push out the back of his head with my fist. Out of all the news that's fit to print, I knew why Raoul was pointing this one out to me. The DC Sniper had been picking off average citizens for three weeks now, and neither the beleaguered Chief Moose nor the Pentagon spy planes hovering stealthily overhead seemed to be getting any closer to catching him. I had been pondering the myriad sniper headlines from the Post to the Times on my way home from work a couple nights before at the newsstand at 111th and Broadway. As usual, I was in a hurry for no particular reason other than to get home before the occasional raindrops that were beginning to hit the pavement around me began inviting their friends down. I knew I had lived a past life very badly when Raoul sidled up from thin air or the depths of hell or wherever it is he comes from and nudged me with the sleeve of his old beat-to-shit overcoat. "The gap is narrowing, Chuck." I glanced over at him as he picked up a copy of Time Out New York and casually flipped through it. His hair, parted jaggedly somewhere near the middle of his finely-shaped skull, swung down like a stringy brown curtain almost to the bottom of his jaw, hiding the smirk I couldn't see but knew was there. "Is this a riddle, smart boy?" I asked. "Cuz if it is, let's just cut to the punch line and say goodnight. I've had a rough day." It was true, I had. The editor I worked for, the guy who assigned most of my freelance gigs at the magazine and whom I was therefore fully committed to brownosing at every available opportunity, was a really swell guy three, maybe four days out of the year. This hadn't been one of them. Raoul clucked sympathetically as he flipped through the magazine. "Corporate grind's a bitch, ain't it," he said. "Damn, I love Dixie Sheridan's photographs." He stuffed the magazine into an overcoat pocket and snatched a roll of Lifesavers. "Spot me these, will you, big daddy." He turned away, the smirk now in full bloom. "Hey!" I yelled after him, grabbing a Times and tossing some singles on the newsie's counter. I caught up with him near Kinko's, which really pissed me off because I live in the opposite direction. Raoul snatched the paper out of my hand like that's what I had bought it for. He waved at the front page photo of the latest sniper crime scene. He started to cackle again. "Like I was saying, the gap is narrowing." Raoul was pumped now, and he seemed not to walk as much as glide along, just off the pavement. I had to hurry just to keep up with him. I was tired. My feet hurt. "Ever since V-J Day, ever since the U.S. of A climbed atop the world ash heap on that grand August day of yore, middleclass Americans have come to assume many things. One of those assumptions is the freedom from fear. 'It won't happen here. Not to me.' Fear to middle America -- and I'm talking constant, gnawing fear here, 'Brew, the kind you don't yet know about -- is something that happens to other people, to the cab drivers that take them places, to the guy who does their lawn, to the broad who cleans their house. The whole fucking underclass these cats have worked so hard not to have to see." Raoul shredded through my paper to an inside page that featured one of those nice, reader-friendly chart-and-stats combos the Times is so proud of. This one featured the sniper's victims. "Look at this," he continued, running his finger down the neat graphic. "Shot while mowing the lawn. Shot while gassing up the car. Shot while sitting on a park bench. It's like pissing on a goddam Norman Rockwell painting, Homes. This crazy, deadeye motherfucker has taken fear as a constant component of daily living away from the exclusive domain of the unemployed single Dominican mother and put it right fucking smack in the passenger seat of the Annapolis soccer mom's minivan. My Lordie, my Lordie. Can Westchester be far behind?" Raoul continued. He could go longer than anyone I'd ever met without inhaling. "You know what you should do?" "Yeah. I should get what's left of my paper back and go home." "You should check out this Susana Cook down at the WOW Café. She knows about fear. She talks about fear. I used to hang there some when I tended bar at Fuel across the street. Take my advice. Check this place out. Convince them you're a lesbian and they'll give you a few bucks off." He tossed me what was left of my paper, hung a sharp right around the Columbia School of Journalism building, and vanished. It began to rain. Really rain. By the time I got back to my place I wasn't just pissed. I was soaked, too. Raoul was right about the discount, but the friendly girl in the fuzzy turquoise sweater and the black retro specs atop the fourth-floor landing didn't buy my pitch that I was really a lesbian. "Senior? Student? Transgender?" She was trying to help, but in the end it was no use. I had to pay the full ten bucks. Cook's "Spic for Export", subtitled "A Retrospective" is a jagged, aching patchwork quilt of the immigrant experience in America, an exploration of subsisting powerless in a society where power is everything and those with it want those without it to do their shitwork while remaining silently invisible at the same time. By turns poignant, furious, funny and tragic, Cook hurls out images of fear and despair and sometimes hope like an artist flinging paint upon a docile, empty white canvas. In the hour-long show's most successful passages, Cook creates the tenuous world of the immigrant so buried under the smothering stacks of middleclass asses that she can no longer see the sky, let alone God, and -- in "Spic"'s most graphically effective metaphoric sketch -- wields an impressively lengthy rubber cock&balls as a handgun to induce fear and submission in a female immigrant worker. "I am deeply satisfied to live in America," Cook recites in "Résumé", "Spic"'s ironic, desperate closing elegy. "I would be happy here. I am happy already thinking of how happy I would be to work here. This place is great; I match with the walls." It had rained during the show and the Village streets outside WOW were glistening as I turned up towards the subway. I stopped for a slice at Paul's Pizzeria and thought of how Raoul liked to dig at my "corporate" image because I sometimes had to wear a tie at work. He liked to dig at a lot of things in my life, and more often than I would let on, he knew how to hit a nerve. Now, I could still hear the closing of "Résumé" in my head, echoing in Cook's melodic Argentinean-inflected cadence above the hiss of the cabs on the wet pavement and the waves of passing NYU students chattering into cell phones. "I have a corporate soul. I like this team feeling. I can easily be pressured into conformity and obedience. I can pass as nobody..." Over on 7th, I caught the first train that came by. When it dropped me at Grand Central, I hopped the Shuttle to Times Square and stood amongst the other nobodies on the platform, waiting for the #1 home. At 59th Street, a man with long Rastafarian locks and a backpack boarded and sat next to me. Silently, as the train rocked and swayed uptown, he took out a walking commando toy, a robotic cross between the Terminator and G.I. Joe in Enduring Freedom cammies. In a fist clenched to grip a weapon, he had placed a small American flag. Rasta Man set the little killer upon its tractor-like feet in the aisle and let it go. It whirred methodically towards my shoes. "The gap is narrowing, Homes." I heard Raoul's voice again, the smirking, lowlife bastard. "I can pass as nobody..." I glanced at my fellow riders, uneasily mesmerized by this single-soldier parade lurching impassively about the aisle at their feet. Where did each of them rank on the new American fear scale, and how close had we become now to one another, linked by a common uncertainty and unease in a nation riddled with hijacked airplanes used as attack missles, lethal toxins sent through the mail, a secretive government with a color-coded fear-rating scale and now this elusive, omniscient sniper whose very specificity lay in the apparent randomness of his attacks? Attacks upon middle Americans as they go about doing middle American things. Pumping gas. Mowing the lawn. Going to school. There didn't look to be many "middle Americans" aboard the #1 this rainy autumn night. Not in my car, anyway. We all looked to be on the lower end of the scale. Nobodies. For now, we sat as strangers, bonded by silence in our little sealed tube as it rocketed through this dark hole in the ground, watching a determined, flag-clutching millennial-model killing machine designed to represent fear spread throughout the world wobble against the lurch and roll of the train, teetering, stalling, staggering, spinning around, almost but never quite toppling over. -- Brook Stowe Susana
Cook's "Spic For Export" continues at the WOW Cafe, Copyright © 2002 The Write Word, Inc., except Susana Cook excerpts. All rights reserved. |
