---

chapter 22.1

TRAMP: No Speed Racer XXX

“The sun has gone down and the moon has come up
And long ago somebody left with the cup
But he’s driving and striving and hugging the turns
And thinking of someone for whom he still burns”
—Cake

Mona woke up alone. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, then looked around the cluttered, darkened room, half-lit by the light spilling out of the open bathroom door, slicing at an angle across the foot of their bed. She rose into the light and smiled at the empty bed. Slowly, she rolled her shoulders and rotated her neck in a wide circle as she silently yawned before rummaging through the piles of clothes that covered most of the windowless bedroom floor.

She picked up a T-shirt and shorts, gave them a quick sniff to make sure they weren’t too dirty, then pulled on the oversized black T-shirt and red-and-black plaid men’s boxers. She yawned and stretched again before climbing out of bed. Mona looked at her pale reflection in the bathroom mirror. The broken faucet had been running twenty-four hours a day for months. It had begun as a drip, then a leak, now fully open and broken. It was Nathan’s apartment, and he ignored it rather than call the manager to have maintenance repair the thing.

Her dark hair was a disheveled mess, framing the pale skin of her beautifully sullen face. She washed in the sink using a plush burnt-umber terrycloth towel before quickly brushing her hair and teeth. She stumbled barefoot down the carpeted stairwell, still half-asleep, having slept later than everyone else in the apartment. The smell of freshly brewed coffee drew her toward the kitchen. Never a morning person, she groggily meandered in to pour herself a cup.

Nathan, her fiancé, dressed in pale blue boxers, sat cross-legged on the carpet in front of the aging floor-model Curtis Mathis television, eating big bowls of Rice Krispies while watching Cartoon Network with her best friend Aaron. She smiled at the sight of Aaron’s slender, dreadlocked form sitting across from the pale, bald form of her fiancé, happy he had stayed the night sleeping on her black futon—the only furniture she owned in the apartment.

In the ten years since she ran away from home, this was the first time she had been in a stable long-term relationship. It had been three years since she stopped hustling, when she started dating Nathan’s former coworker Scott Miller, a computer programmer she met at a poetry reading in a coffee shop in Deep Ellum. They lived together for nearly a year before he grew bored with her and kicked her out of his Lakewood garage apartment.

Nathan had heard Scott talk about his lazy girlfriend at work and met her a few weeks later at the same coffee shop at the weekly open-mic poetry reading at Insomnia. A few months later, when they broke up, Mona and Nathan were already involved. Mona moved straight from Scott’s place to Nathan’s room at his parents’ house. Six months later, Nathan’s parents paid them to move out and set them up in this loft apartment a mile from the gated community of their home. As chaotic as everything was, it was a stable chaos now.

When her identical twin sister Nina met Aaron, she immediately realized that Mona and Aaron were in love. She asked Mona what she was going to do. Mona denied it, pretending they were only friends. Nina understood without prying: her sister was with Nathan because he had a trust fund and wealthy parents. Nina didn’t care for Nathan and immediately, like her sister, took a liking to Aaron. Nina was just glad Mona was finally off the drugs and off the streets. Mona waved at Aaron as she descended the stairs. He glanced up and smiled before returning to his soliloquy on Racer X.

“Speed Racer is more tragic than fast,” observed Aaron, taking a giant spoonful of cereal.

Nathan finished chewing and swallowed before responding. “I have always thought of the show as a Shakespearian soap opera about the forbidden love affair between a boy and his monkey, disguised as a TV melodrama. If you’re trying to ruin this show for me the way you ruined Dick Tracy, your little mind games won’t work on me. I’m ready for you this time.”

She smiled, half-listening, as she poured herself a cup of coffee and took a seat in Nathan’s usual spot in front of the computer. They continued their conversation, now both ignoring the Mach Five’s adventures on the muted television, while Mona logged on to check her email.

Aaron continued the debate, ignoring Mona’s entrance.

“His failure as a writer is not as apparent if you’re a member of his target audience. White boys. Like I said, it’s really the story of men grasping at boyhood. None of them wants to put on the mantle of manhood with its obligations, responsibilities, and duties. Kerouac and company reject growing up, and in doing so, are attempting to reject death.”

“Yeah,” Nathan said, “he claims to be the friend of the Black man, or the lover of the Mexican woman, but when I read that shit of his, I don’t hear the voice of a friend or a lover. To me, it’s the same mind that makes Tarzan movies and Planet of the Apes.”

“For all his love of Black people’s music,” Aaron continued, “he is, in the end, a white writer full of provincial ideas about Black people, women, and the world. A white man writing about white men, to white men, for white men. Nothing wrong with that as long as he’s honest.”

“Yeah, but there’s the problem. He’s not. Even the most assimilated Negroes see the flatness of the characters that are not white men in his books.”

“I wouldn’t say the Black characters are flat,” Nathan countered. “I would say they are non-existent. Black writers like Baldwin seem to create fully developed characters regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. In America, most Black people have no choice but to learn to understand white people. Let’s face it—a misunderstanding with a white person in America is a matter of life and death, or an 87% conviction rate. Whereas white people don’t learn about Black people as a matter of survival.”

“So, what do you think about Faulkner?” asked Mona, joining the conversation.

“I think he has the ability to infuse stereotypical characters with some sort of humanity. In the hands of a lesser writer, southern characters usually disintegrate into clichés,” replied Nathan.

“I found him rather weak,” Aaron said. “I thought the characters were southern clichés.”

“That’s because he writes in dialect, and you’re a god-damned Yankee,” Nathan said, half-jokingly.

“This is a typical criticism of Faulkner, especially by non-southerners. I think it has to do with the literary world’s subconscious belief that being southern means being less artistic, with intellectual veracity always suspect. People tend to think southerners are uneducated, ignorant, and violent, perpetuated by Kenny Rogers’ You Picked a Fine Time To Leave Me, Lucille living in a shotgun shack. It’s pervasive in the American psyche.”

“My cousins in East Texas?”

“True, but the eastern intellectual snobbery dominating the intelligentsia and literati’s belief that nothing important can come from the mind of a southerner is a real prejudice every writer south of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the Mississippi must confront. Man, motherfuck the goddamned South and every inbred, corn-fed, country-as-cow-shit peckerwood Beverly Hillbilly. I hate ’em all. I hate every one of these cock-sucking motherfuckers so much I won’t even drink out of a Dixie cup or shop at Winn-Dixie.”

“No, he’s not joking. He won’t eat at the Dixie House because it has the word ‘Dixie’ in the name, and he won’t eat white bread, or any white creamy sauces, whipped cream, or sour cream.”

“Where exactly is the fucking Mason-Dixy line?”

“It’s Dixon. I think it’s next to that line in the sand.”

“That was lame, dude.”

“Did you just call me dude?”

“No, I said ‘Hey Jude.’”

“I think you guys are just being paranoid. After all, think of all the great southern writers: Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind), Faulkner, To Kill a Mockingbird and Inherit the Wind, Mark Twain; exactly. The list goes on and on.”

“They mostly write in clichés and cultural stereotypes. They do not challenge what you think you know about a place or the people who live there. Gone with the Wind is about as historically accurate as Song of the South. I think it’s as culturally relevant as well.”

“I don’t know what makes a great writer, but I do know when I read something great. It’s like when I first read Camus. I didn’t know anything about the author, but I never doubted that he knew what he was talking about or that what he said was true.”

“Have you read Million Dollar Baby yet?”

“The book about the girl boxer? No, I haven’t had time.”

“I’m sorry, you don’t have time?”

“Okay. I’m not much on spectator sports, and I don’t relish the thought of reading 350 ghostwritten pages about some human punching bag’s lame-ass excuse for a life.”

“I think I saw the movie.”

“Not the same thing as the book.”

“It’s no Speed Racer.”

---

About the author
JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.