A Jamboree Of The Deaf, Black, Gay, And Latino - A University Professor Makes The Rounds Of The Oppressed

Vicki Marshall although white was a professor at a historically black university where she taught literature - a syllabus which reflected not only the black man's struggle from slavery, but a literary history of the oppressed.  Oppression was a big tent, and all those who had suffered at the hands of the white man were welcome; so Prof. Marshall's course dealt with the extermination of the Native American, the backbreaking farm labor of the Latino, the decades of Jim Crow and segregation, and the homophobic brutality faced by gays, lesbians, and transgenders. 

Colored Girl, by Nora Prentiss Baker, told the story of a Mississippi slave taken as a mistress by the grandee of Equinox Plantation, sexually abused by the overseer and his son, and treated no better than a scullery maid.  'White man give no respect', said Sarah, the main character in the novel. 'He just born of the devil'. 

From Closet To Boudoir - A Tale Of Buggery, written by T. Randall Phipps told the story of a young Iowa farmer boy, taunted and abused because he was different, but whose marginal life led him to San Francisco and then as the top boy in Mrs. Longworth's Washington brothel known for its high profile clients, utter secrecy, and beautiful young men and women. 

I Can't Hear You! was the story of a boy caught between the hysteria of the radical deaf culture and a commiserating, compassionate but vilified doctor who performed cochlear implants.  'A story of today', read the book jacket. 'Would you die for deafness?'

And so on.  The reading list was long and relevant. Vicki knew that these books were topical at best, illustrative of the fight for identity and respect but no Shakespeare, the subject of her senior thesis at Wellesley. There in the heady days of the New Criticism, text was what mattered, Deconstructionism had not yet appeared, and disaggregation, historicism, and exogeny were absent from the canon.  She was lauded for her work, and a doctorate at Northwestern was assured. 

Vicki over the years, like many academics, veered Left and then moved unhesitatingly to progressivism, and in so doing jettisoned her literary baggage and focused on making a difference.  Her liberal credentials honed and burnished at Duke and Haverford were enough for the all-black university to take a chance and hired the first white professor in its storied history.  The Board of Regents was convinced that the commitment, passion, and dedication of a white woman to the black cause would be just the energetic infusion the university needed. 

After a number of years at the university, Vicki began to feel restless.  Somehow it didn't seem enough to spend all her energies on just one item of the progressive canon.  She was far too intelligent, ambitious, and still young enough to reach out to other oppressed peoples. It was then that the idea struck - why not a moral hejira? 

She would form an academic association of universities which had dedicated themselves to the underserved minorities of America - HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), the Schools for the Deaf, and the smaller colleges of South Texas who had welcomed Latino students and given them a both a solid history of their legacy in America and the strength of identity to attain full racial and social equality. 

We have many black students here', said Dean Murchison of Gallatin University in Washington, the nation's premier school for the deaf.  Dean Murchison, profoundly deaf himself had trouble articulating his thoughts with this, one of the few hearing colleagues to visit.  Yet, his moans and grimaces were decipherable and Vicki understood his diffidence. 

'But don't you see, Dean Murchison', she began in special English, carefully mouthing each word in a rounded, heavily lipped way, 'we should be together in this'. 

Murchison smiled, having gotten only a fraction of what Vicki said. 'I know I should have invited an interpreter', but too proud of what he thought was his inter-cultural ability, he had demurred.  In a groaning, moaning monologue he soldiered on about deaf identity primus inter pares and not to be confused with blackness or gayness.  A white woman pushing a black thing to deaf people just wouldn't cut it at Gallatin. 

She finished her tea and cookies, thanked the Dean for his hospitality and left disconsolate but unbowed.  Gallatin wasn't the only deaf place in the country. 

However, she got the same reception in St. Paul, Burlington, and Charlotte, the same inarticulate reception, and the same polite refusal.  Like at Gallatin, she offered her services.  She would teach a course on 'Intercultural Oppression' free of charge and pay the fee of the interpreter.  She was politely shown the door by the Dean who wanted no part of this edgy, pushy woman. 

'Deaf is a matter for the deaf', the Dean scrawled on the chalkboard behind him; but added, 'Thank you anyway' in his nasalized baritone.

There were no Latino schools per se in the country, only colleges that admitted a majority of Spanish-speaking students.  La Universidad del Rio in south Texas was one which had come to her attention because of its Southwest Curriculum, a course of study which featured both Mexican and American history and the 'fertile crescent', the bend in the Rio Grande which was a metaphor for intercultural exchange. 

Now, this visit to La Universidad was the first outside Vicki's comfort zone.  She was a Northeast liberal, born and bred into the traditions of Lafollette and Brandeis, FDR, and the patrician, noblesse oblige Bostonians who on the foundation of untold wealth from the Three Cornered slave trade, were at the forefront of civil rights. 'Senora...perdon, Profesora...' the Dean began, 'relationships between black and Hispanic down here are not luminary....luminescent...lumin--'. 

 Here he paused, looking for le mot juste but it escaped him. His English, as proud as he was of it, was still rather sticky.  'What I mean to say, Madam, is that the two communities have not yet come to an accord'. 

That was putting it mildly.  Blacks and Mexicans fought each other tooth and nail for territory, the drug trade, ferrying migrants across the river, and above-board jobs.  There was no more racial hatred, bitterness, and contention between communities as there was here.  'Our students think black people are...'

Again the Dean paused, looking for a way to frame the deep hostility between the communities.  The Dean heard every Spanish variation of the N-word, every black stereotype, every dunning, dismissive phrase, every epithet possible; and on the streets of the town he heard black boys calling his Mexican students every nastiness in the books.  

'They hate each other, Madam', the Dean said. 'I hear it is no different in Baltimore'. Why he picked Baltimore of all places she couldn't imagine, but he was right.  In the North the racial hatred was just as deep only kept under wraps, unspoken, unadmitted but just as ingrained and ineradicable as anywhere else. 

'What's a woman to do?', said Vicki back in her suburban Maryland home. She felt defeated, injured, insulted, and refused.  She had gone out in a missionary spirit of good well and good intentions, but had been rejected at every turn. No one wanted her intercultural dialogue, her blandishments, and her advice.  She had either misjudged her audience or sadly misjudged her own message. 

Well, at least I have my black students, she smiled; but of course her days at the university were numbered.  The Faculty Committee was meeting at that very moment to purify the staff, black only it was to be from here on in.  'Professor Marshall, you've earned your retirement', her Dean had not infrequently reminded her.  Handwriting on the wall, as unconscionable as it might be.  

'It the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?' rhetorically asks the Anton Shugur character in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. 

'Indeed', said Vicki to her face in the mirror. 'Indeed'; and with that changed her trust, drew down on what was to have been her children's inheritance, and plunked down a big down payment on a condo in Florida. 

The Glories Of A Bi-Partisan Sexual Affair - Rutting Delight At The Follies Of Washington

Vicki Albright met Reed Ramlow on Dewey Beach, a more conservative, quieter resort than Rehoboth or Ocean City.  She was there with friends from Washington, all aides to one Congressman or another, all Democrat, all progressive in spirit and policy.  There was a heady enthusiasm among these young women. all of whom felt they were on God's side in the struggle against the evil in the White House, and all of whom shared a camaraderie that was based on political commitment but annealed by a youthful enthusiasm.  After all they were not just clerks in a five-and-dime but big deals, successful women who had come to Washington not to make their fortune but to make a difference. 

Reed was also a Congressional aide, but to a Senator and in a senior advisory position.  He had been in Washington since the first Trump administration, had served his master well during the penitential Biden years, and was now in the full flush of celebratory enthusiasm now that Trump was beginning his second, decisive term. 

Vicki and Reed met at Joe's Bar, a Dewey Beach hangout popular with the Washington crowd and absent day-trippers, casual tourists, and the curious from Baltimore.  Joe's could have been in downtown Washington but was perched on a pier over the Atlantic Ocean.  Dry martinis, crab cakes, insider talk and sidling up - the ironic term used by these up-and-comers for sexual interest. 

Joe's was the place to see and be seen and was distinctly bi-partisan. Somehow the beach, the ocean, and the summer did away with political allegiances and opened social commerce to both sides; and so it was that Vicki and Reed found each other side by side at the bar drinking oyster shooters, well on their way to the happy abandon for which they had driven three hours. 

They 'sidled' around workday affiliations - this being an eclectic, aisle-free, open season kind of place where it didn't pay to show one's colors or raise one's political flags - and found each other attractive, interesting, and available.  One thing led to another, and they went home together - or rather to The Rodney, a simple, rundown hotel on Airlie Avenue blocks from the beach but comfortable and anonymous. 

Their sex was surprisingly successful.  After all, Vicki, well-brought up in a strict Iowa farm family was not one to jump into bed with just anyone; but in these halcyon days of youthful adventure and independence, why not. AIDS was a thing of the past, contraceptives were state of the art, and abuse and discard were but feminist cant. 

It didn't take much pillow talk to out the obvious - not only were they partisans of opposing political parties, they were committed advocates for their policies.  Vicki was convinced that the black man represented America's best hope for sentient revival.  He, descendant of African tribes which resonated with the tribal energies of the forest, endowed with a primal intelligence which put white pretentious academicism to shame would soon rise to the top of the human pyramid. 

He, a frequent traveler to Africa, thanks to his Senator's place on the Foreign Relations Committee, found the continent a sinkhole of pestilence, corruption, misrule, and barely concealed jungle primitivism. 

How on earth would he and Vicki ever find each other?

They smoked a Bombay Black - the finest Moroccan hash mixed with Afghan opium - and found common ground.  In a marvelous riff Reed created a hilarious send-off of Africa, a cavalcade of intellectual dwarves dancing around cauldrons of white men, whipping up an appetite for human liver. 

He stood up, took off his shirt, blackened his face with burnt Moet Chandon cork and in a vaudevillian reprise of the strutting Stokely Carmichael, old Black Panther black revolutionary, channeled every black leader from Rap Brown to Black Lives Matter. 

Vicki howled with delight, charmed by the antics of her new lover with whom she had found a unique bi-partisan place.  One could be for the black man but not deny the outrageously hilarious caricatures of him.  

Her turn - a marvelous word salad, incomprehensible, ditzy rendition of Kamala Harris who had run for President on the I Am Black ticket and turned out to be a clown, the most insanely ridiculous cartoon character to ever show up on an American political stage. 

One could be for the progressive agenda incoherently proposed by this demented harridan and laugh behind her back. 

Sobriety, and particularly the hangover kind, can quash any budding relationship; but theirs - Vicki's and Reed's seemed to have staying power in the light of day.  Washed, showered, and dressed, they still found each other attractive and appealing. 

This was what was unusual in the sexual street games of Washington.  Political differences tend to divide at every level.  Bitter enemies on the House floor, antagonistic lovers in bed; but Vicki and Reed (she couldn't help thinking of a porn star stud whenever she heard his name) shared common ground  - idiocy. 

It was this - not only getting the vaudevillian hilarity of Washington, but loving it.  The  popular word is 'embrace' but it was really just a rolling, rollicking belly laugh. 

How could anyone take seriously uppity black Black Lives Matter welfare queens lecturing in ghetto-speak about George Floyd, a career criminal, doped up and stupid, as an icon of black American residency?  Or Joe Biden, shuffled to the podium like a rag doll, then left to his own demented meanderings. 

'When I was a boy', Biden said, I filled buckets of water for my sand castle.  Now, why did I do that?', and there he paused, befuddled by the lines in his prepared script about Indonesian democracy, seeing only images of tsunamis and rijsttafel. 'My mother' he said, looking up at the rafters, hoping to see her, an angel surely there to help him, 'was a saint'.  Hooked off the stage like a bad vaudevillian at Grossinger's, he managed a Nixon high wave 

Or The Haircut, Gavin Newsom, or dumb-as-a-sack-of-hammers AOC, 'the reason why instructions are put on shampoo bottles', or...God alone could have created such a menagerie. 

As she and Reed rolled around in bed, smoking dope and draining bottles of Cuervo and noshing on pizza crusts and old felafel, Vicki never wondered about rectitude - that sense of moral dignity which had always defined her. Was the progressive canon really that much of a B-movie sci-fi script?

Why was there nothing so ridiculous about her party?  No transgender, rainbow silked, gay float boys? No tough girl flannel and e-booted Bernal Heights dames? No callused lettuce pickers in serapes? No rainbow coalition of dwarves and cotton-pickers?

The parade down Pennsylvania Avenue was all white, tall, blonde, blue-eyed and normal.  The sounds of waltzes and Frank Sinatra came through the windows open to the Rose Garden.  There wasn't an oddity among them, not one creep or tart. 

They screwed till the lights went out, Vicki and Reed, and never let incidentals intrude. 'We are a dyad' said Reed, rolling over on his side to look at Vicki.  'Just look at us, ebony and ivory', proof that politics are not the barriers to sexual entry they once were. "

Easier said than done, of course, for once back in Washington, the rumors and innuendoes began.  The Vicki-Reed affair, far from the spotlight on a buggering, unfaithful Washington the tabloids were used to, made the rounds in lower-level, aspiring circles. 

'How could she?' was the question, for it was always the woman who was the victim; but by this time Vicki had become fully liberated and would fuck whomever she pleased, and when the affair with Reed Ramlow petered out as they all did, she was ready for the next, whichever wind brought it through the lace curtains to her. 

The Barking Scarecrow, The Man Who Polished His Balls, And A Political Freak Show - Diversity Goes Upscale

The gym brings out the the freakish among us, a side show of dwarves, bearded ladies, and two-headed babies.  Metaphorically speaking of course, but if you factor in where the gym is located – in this case in an upscale professional neighborhood of Washington – then it indeed had the tony equivalent of the side show of a travelling circus.

Take ‘Death’ for example, a grey, skeletal woman, who did not just run on the treadmill, but was outrunning something awful.  Her face became more drawn and ashen the more and the faster she ran.  She never sweated because her body had no sweat to give, no excess of anything, all husbanded for one last ride.  

She was as frightening as the Headless Horseman, frantic on the rubber carpet, desperation in the hollows of her face, in the strands of thin hair which trailed down her back.  No one had ever seen her get on the treadmill or get off.  She was always there, pounding away, eyes in some unknown distance, on some fearful thing waiting for her.

There was The Creep, a giant of a man and in his way as frightening as Death but in an intimidating, threatening way.  He was always dressed in black sweats and a black hoodie, said nothing, did nothing except pump the ellipticals, but implied nastiness, hurt, and chaos.  He had no friends, no easy camaraderie.  People got out of his way.  

He must be on parole, some said, or just released.  The gym had to take him as part of their tax abatement with local authorities – his private half-way house for a few hours a day before he took the bus back to the ghetto.   There was something feral and frightening about the way he strutted back and forth in front of the exercycles, bound up in rubber tubing to add tension to his walk, barbells on his shoulders, grunting like a hog, eyes rabid and distant. 

Jabba The Hut, a mammoth 400 lb. fat man with elephantine legs and a huge bariatric scar from abdomen to gullet, a reminder of his failed operation to tie off his intestines.  He spent hours in the whirlpool, the only place that gave him some comfort, relieving as it did the gravitational pull on his immense body.  

Rolls of fat shook from his neck to his feet every time he took a step, water poured over the sides of the whirlpool as he slid in.  As he sank down to the very bottom, only his surprisingly very small head showed above the water line.  With all the foam, spume, and roiled waters of the pool, no one could tell who was in it; but when he got out, no one could look away.  He shook his body like a St. Bernard and water splashed into the locker room, back into the whirlpool, and onto the low ceiling.

And then there was The Barking Scarecrow, the main attraction, the center of attention, and as batty as any inmate of St. Elizabeth’s.  She was tall, gangly, and neurasthenic.    “Not an ounce of fat”, she barked, but she was stringy, dried out, and bony.  Angular where there should have been no angles, protrusions instead of rounded flesh, scaly, corrugated shins and ankles.  

She ran miles every day, then biked tens more, came to the gym to work out, and then rode and ran home.  Halfway through her workout, she sat on one of the machines to eat her lunch of carrots, radishes, raw lima beans, and water.  And between bites she banged on about her job at the elephant house at the zoo, her work with wounded raptors, and her engagement in liberal politics.

What were they doing here, this collection of fringe elements, especially in the friendly confines of the Laurel Health Club & Spa, an upscale gym in one of Washington's wealthiest suburbs where one would expect only lawyers or real estate investors? 

Yet short of the James Fennimore Cooper rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, the truest, purest local for diversity anywhere in the United States - everyone travels I-95 and everyone needs a rest stop - it is at the gym where everyone also drops their pants.  What is different here is that the weird diversity becomes caricature. 

The Man Who Polishes His Balls who after showering took his towel, put it between his legs, grabbed one end from the front and the other from the back, raised a leg on a locker room bench, and started whipping it back and forth as fast as a shoeshine boy at Grand Central. 

He whipped and slapped, snapped and polished, one side then the other, stopping in between to talk about Donald Trump and how he thought he was a demented fool let out of St. Elizabeth's on a pass to to his St. Vitus' dance in the public arena.  A madman, a crazed, demented boor. 

The irony of all this, a man whipping and snapping his balls until they were as red as cherries and his claims about the unhinged, wild behavior of the President, was lost on most, so unified and solid was the political cast of the gym.  

As Jabba the Hut pulled himself out of the whirlpool, displacing gallons of water, he stopped to catch his breath, turned to the men in the Jacuzzi, and reminded them of Trump's bulldogging Gestapo tactics of his praetorian guard, and his vicious hatred of the black man. 

The Barking Scarecrow was like a demented Union Square prophet, railing and flailing her arms, hysterical with hate, seething with it, and literally unable to stop ranting.  She ranted and shouted on the ellipticals, on the treadmills, and on the recliner bikes.  Again, the ironic conflation of this neurasthenic stringy ganglionic pile of sticks whacking away at the machines howling about Donald Trump could not be missed. 

Death had little of the energy of the Barking Scarecrow who, as she adjusted the incline on her treadmill, talked about her curation of the elephants at the National Zoo, 'magnificent creatures, intelligent, so majestic that I wish I were a member of their herd'.  Death was too preoccupied, too frighteningly intent on looking at something in the middle distance to yell and shout, but there was irony in this poor woman as well.  'Before I die...' she was often heard to say, then citing the canon of good works, progressive works, Utopian-grade works. 

The gym was a side show.  Not only was this assemblage of God's menagerie endlessly interesting per se, but to watch them labor away in the most ungainly, desperate way on the machines, and then to hear the cackling, hectoring, bellowing anti-Trump tirades was worth the price of admission.  

Conflation at its best - when it folds political dementia in with physical oddity and psycho-social hilarity - is a philosophical wonder.  Who could have predicted that the doors to Laurel Sport & Health Spa would open onto a side show worthy of Barnum & Bailey?  Or that the diversity that is the central core of the progressive ethos of the place could be so inverted - or rather so brutally honest?

If there was any reason to finally dismiss the cant of 'diversity, equity, inclusivity' it was the here at the health club.  Human diversity at its most defining and outrageous was on display within the unbending, absolute strictures of received political wisdom.  This diversity, backlit by the communal political group-think of the place, stood out even more.  This was real diversity - the unhinged, aberrant, unfathomably weird deviations that one saw on the floor every day.