About Me

My photo
No, I'm some OTHER Anthony Anderson, not the one you might have seen in movies or on Law & Order. In addition to short stories in "Twisted Dreams", "Horrotica", and "The Nubian Chronicles"; I am also the author of "The Vile, Sinister, and Most Utterly Diabolical Account of Latrina Emerson" currently available at Amazon.com or at lulu.com I'm also part of The Gothic Creatives administrated by Andrea Dean von Scoyoc.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

1/21/2013

Alright, I meant to post this Monday but life sort of got in the way. Anyway, I first wrote this story back on the day of Obama's first Inauguration and it appeared in Nubian Chronicles. Naturally, I got to thinking about this story last Monday and I sorta dusted it off to see how well (or how poorly) it aged. Looking back on it now, I'd say the biggest qualm I have about writing in the first place is that folks would think it's a political story or some kind of pro-Obama propaganda. I swear up and down on my subscription to Reason Magazine and until I'm blue in the face that it's neither of those but people are going to believe whatever they want to believe. With that in mind...



An Obama Tale


            It’s January 20, 2009 as I write this, the day Barack Obama is getting inaugurated.  I don’t think what I have to say is really all that different from a lot of people have said regarding the past election.  And by now, a handful of people are probably sick of hearing about it so I’ll understand if that group of folks decide to skip this altogether.
            In fact, it’s not even really my tale, but the tale of a cousin of a friend of mine.  The guy’s name was Tyrone Watkins and I don’t know exactly know what he did for a living if anything.  I first came across him while visiting that friend I just mentioned.  It was early 2008 and my friend and Tyrone, like a lot of other people, were laid off (I guess you could call me one of the lucky ones:  instead of being out of work, I got to stay up late at night wondering when the axe of unemployment would next fall onto my neck).
            It was late afternoon to early evening and we were all just yakking (it was all we could afford since we were too broke for beer and pizza).  The news was on TV but we were all trying to ignore it because we already knew the economy was bad.  My friend Steve was about to change to channel to “My Wife and Kids” when they had just announced that Obama had won the Iowa Caucus.
            We all blinked and did a double take.  Iowa?  Iowa?
            “Iowa?” Steve said.  “Do they even got black people in Iowa?”
            “Yeah, they have some, I guess,” I said.  “I saw this news story once about how they’ve been trying to get some diversity out there.”  Or at least I thought I saw a snippet of such of news story.  I wasn’t as sure as I had sounded.
            “Well, shit, it’s just a fluke, anyway,” Tyrone said.  “It’s going to be just like when Jesse Jackson ran back in ’88.”
            “You think so?” Steve asked.
            “Yeah,” said Tyrone.  “As soon as it even smells like his black ass is about to get somewhere, white folks are going to wake up and vote for Clinton.  Them folks need to let this Osama cat go and get behind someone who actually has a chance to get elected.”
            “So you think Hillary’s going to get the nomination?”
            “Yeah, with all that experience she and her husband got, they going to roll right over his rookie ass.”
            “Damn, dude, ain’t you going to give the brother no kind of credit?”
            “Look, Cuz, ain’t no way in hell this racist ass country going to put a black man in the White House.  Besides, Bill Clinton close enough to being black as it is.  We oughta be happy with that.”
            At this point, I had decided to stay out of this conversation.
            “Man, you just wrong,” Steve said to Tyrone.  “Just plain wrong.”
            “A’ight, let’s bet then.  Hillary Clinton is going wrap this nomination up before Spring and ain’t nobody ever going to hear about Osama or whatever the hell his name is again. Hell, we in the middle of a War on Terrorism and some fool with an Arabic name thinks he’s going to be President.”
            This was where the whole thing really got started.  And at this point, I should tell you that according to what Steve had told me later, Tyrone liked to gamble.  Quite a bit.  And all things considered, you can probably guess Tyrone wasn’t very good at it, either; so again, I can understand if you want to quit reading this and go fix a sandwich or something.
            Oh, okay.
            Steve and Tyrone had decided that Super Tuesday, the day when a whole bunch of states would have their primaries at once, would be the day that the bet would be settled.  I had decided not to bet and, yes, I’m still kicking myself for that one.  The day had come and gone and it was still a neck and neck race between Clinton and Obama.
            Those Obama t-shirts started sprouting up around Memphis.  They weren’t yet all the over the place like they would be during the election and all the way up to Inauguration Day.  But I could feel the slightly creepy beginnings of a cult of personality coming on and it made me seriously consider some third party come November 4.  Not that I had anything against Obama (and if I wanted to have any kind of social life in this town I’d better not have).
I had run into Tyrone down at the bus stop the day afterward and he looked absolutely sick.  I could also sniff a bit of alcohol on him.  I wasn’t about to ask him how much he had bet (and lost) because there were other people around and I hadn’t want to reduce a grown man to tears.  And I was sort of tired of hearing about the campaign but Tyrone had been the one who’d brought up Obama.
“Oh, they going to find some way to fix it so he don’t win,” he said.  “Osama done got lucky so far, but you just wait.  Those superdelegates are going to hand the nomination over to Hillary.  We going to have another damn Republican in the White House for four more damn years ‘cause ain’t no way in Hell they going to elect a woman or a black man as President.  How much you wanna bet?”
Again, I declined (yeah, I know, I know) but mentioned that I was sure somebody or other were sure to take his bet.
Apparently somebody did.
On the third of June, a whole bunch of those superdelegates that Tyrone was so certain were going to just hand the nomination to Hillary Clinton on a silver platter threw their support behind Obama instead.  Four days later, Clinton officially shut down her own campaign and endorsed her former opponent.
I didn’t see Tyrone again until the following Labor Day.  I was still hanging on to my job by a wing and a prayer.  My grill only saw two packs of hot dogs, two dozen hamburger patties, two bags worth of chicken wings, and two bottles of barbeque sauce (enhanced with a liberal amount of tap water) to cover them all.  I had regular sliced bread instead of buns, salad instead of coleslaw, and more tap water instead of soda.  Any visitors who wanted booze had to bring their own.
Tyrone had had to talk his mama into making some potato salad for him to bring since his wife had left him.  And the only reason I’d known about that at all was because Steve had told.  “I heard he lost a couple of his unemployment checks gambling with some shady characters and that’d been the last straw for her,” he’d said.  “She took the kids with her, too.”  In all honesty, I could’ve done without hearing that.  With the economy the way it was, I don’t know why Steve thought I was really interested in hearing anything more about people’s misfortunes.
And Steve and Tyrone must not have had anything else in their lives because they were talking about the campaign again.  “Damn,” he said, “Democrats done shot themselves right in the foot this time.  You see how Ol’ Osama’s numbers drop after Palin’s speech at the Convention.  He’s going up against the Republicans now and McCain’s got mad experience.  How much you wanna bet that by the time they have their first debates, this race ain’t even going to be close?  McCain’s going to be leading in the polls like 70% to 30%.  At least.”
The moment Tyrone had started seeking takers on this new bet, I made sure I stayed in whatever part of the apartment he was not for an hour or so.  Some people just refused to learn and even with cash being tight as it was, I just didn’t have the heart to take the poor man’s money so easily from him.  And everyone there at my place was tactfully forgetting how certain Tyrone had been that Obama wouldn’t even get that far.
Anyway, it’s pretty easy to guess what happened next.  On Friday, September 26, Obama and McCain had the first of their debates in Oxford, Mississippi.  And as the race was nowhere near the blowout Tyrone had predicted, he had lost his bet again.  He had also lost his some of his hair color, his once all black hair now had some very visible streaks of grey.
I found this out a week before Halloween when I ran into Tyrone at the bus stop again.  By now, Obama was damn near everywhere: t-shirts, caps, children books, even a whole satellite channel dedicated to nothing but his economic plan.  Cults of personalities were eerie enough but when you get one centered on a politician I really start getting the creeps.
“You know if Osama gets elected they going to assassinate him, right?” he said with obvious glumness and with no solicitation from me whatsoever.  “Those two skinheads they caught yesterday was like, you know, a test run.  They are just not going to let—”
“Okay, Tyrone, enough,” I cut in.  Now he was just ripping off Chris Rock and doing it badly at that.  “First, you said Iowa was a fluke.  Then you said Clinton would beat him for the nomination.  Then you said McCain was going to just blow him away in the election.  And you lost every time you took bets on those things.  And those two skinheads were a pair of high school dropouts and all-around failures at life who thought it was a brilliant idea to put on some white top hats and white tuxedoes and shoot up a predominantly black school before driving on to take out Obama and—get this part—brag about on their MySpace page first.  The idiots might as well have called the Secret Service in advance.”  Now maybe I was a little too harsh with him but the joke had run itself into the ground and was now more than six feet under.  “Why can’t you simply admit this one’s not going to be so cut-and-dried?”
Tyrone looked a little hurt but he kept right on with his spiel.  I heard some desperation in his voice.  “Look, man, I’m just trying to keep it real with all these dreamers out here.  They’re just setting themselves up for another big letdown.”
“Maybe, maybe not.  My crystal ball’s in the shop.”
“Oh, you might think this is funny but how much you want to bet—”
“No, I don’t want to bet anything, Tyrone.  And here’s our bus, by the way.”
I next saw Tyrone on the morning of November 5, day after the election.  I was headed out the door for work and he’d met me coming out of the apartment building.
“Damn, man, you still going to work?” he asked me.
“Uh, yeah, Tyrone.  It is Wednesday.”
“Mm.  Thought since your boy Osama won you’d call in black and be out celebrating.”
Who I voted for has no real bearing on this story so I won’t reveal it here.  Also, it wasn’t any real business of Tyrone so I didn’t tell him either.  “No, I went to bed halfway through McCain’s concession speech.  Bills won’t pay themselves.  What’s up?”
“Oh, I uh come to see if I could borrow a couple of dollars.”
By this, it was pretty clear to me that once again Tyrone had found a taker on whatever bet he had been about to make with me at the bus stop a few weeks before. And even if he hadn’t come to tap me for a couple of dollars, I could see he had lost that bet.
This time he’d lost a foot in height, the bass in his voice (gone from high baritone to alto), and all the brown in his eyes (they were now a ghostly light grey).  He was also translucent in the middle; I could just make out passing traffic behind him.  I really didn’t feel like seeing his internal organs so early in the morning, so I thrust a ten into his hand and kept on stepping.
And it’s January 20, 2009 and Tasha is being cute as all get out on TV.  Economic slowdown or not, a million plus people have crammed themselves into DC for the Presidential Inauguration.  Seeing the genuine tears of joy on people’s faces, like the elderly people in wheelchairs so happy to be alive on such a historical day, has (at least for the moment) made me question my initial cynicism about cult of personalities.  I think I can stand to be happy for at least one day.
As for Tyrone, he’d made some other bet about Obama the other day or so.  I don’t know (and don’t care, to be honest) who took him up on it.  This time he’d lost some important chromosomes and turned into a parrot, which his mom keeps now.
And the fool still keeps saying “Osama”.

Copyright © 2009 by Anthony Anderson
 

No comments: