How to Paint an American

Chapter 4

Chorus

A pitched wind taunted an exhilarated Uri outside of the window of the car as he descended south into the slow weight of heavier humidity. Voices across the radio’s spectrum belched haranguing stories of Hell and evil and the gays. An epic battle being waged now and forever. Uri loved it all. He could understand some of the words that he had heard before, but the countenance of this new land confused him. The vowels were long and gripped like Velcro. Uri imagined the sweating man on the radio broadcast sitting behind a pulpit while he raised a damp handkerchief to stem the flow from his brow as the words poured out into the microphone in a steady and dulcet flow. Uri’s tongue tripped over itself as his accent desperately tried to mold itself around the clay speech that emerged from the radio. He spoke slowly and without confidence until he started to wave his hand like an alcoholic conductor as the excited man on the AM radio must have been doing. In a flash, Uri imagined himself as Adolph Hitler standing on the podium and waving to the crowd. Every gesticulation calculated beforehand, a nation’s looming rage and madness expressed in the singular downward thrust of the small man’s hand.

Uri wondered why. To be on television would be nice, but to speak and persuade . . . that was the fantasy for him now. To express himself so passionately and eloquently that people would believe what he said, believe what he knew to be the truth. Uri sensed a palpable rift in culture and speech along his way down the map. He was possessed of a new mission and destination: Atlanta, Georgia. What had Clive said? “That it be where Sherman stopped to light a fire the South ain’t never gonna forget, knowin’ what you deserve and feelin’ what you deserve toward different things.”

The wind outside increased its struggle against the thick car window. Screeching slowly and then pulling back in defeat as the car slipped through its grasp.

Uri tore through the flesh of stale jerky and winced as it migrated beneath his teeth. When he was a Czech he heard a phrase after a meal, “the meat is stuffed into my teeth.” Everyone laughed and it was true, beer flushed it away. On the long road to the South, he felt the jagged pieces of flesh that tasted like the smell of the gas station and commanded his tongue to make them move. They stayed and slowly dissolved between his teeth that began to shine whiter every day. Across the country the sun would soon sweep away its light for the night; then the same thing would happen in the next time zone and then the next and the next; until babies in Tokyo knew that it was time to sleep. Uri looked at his watch to note the exact instant when the setting sun mysteriously dipped below the sky and stopped warming his face. He looked at his reflection on the face of the watch again, faded silver that could never be coerced to shine, and looked back to the now-vanished sun. The sun would do this thing every day according to a designated moment on the silver dial of his watch. What was the exact power his watch held to dictate to the sun when it should die and when it should be resurrected? Uri had always believed it was the watch that followed the sun, but how could that be accurate when there was a human grid of time imposed upon all life as we knew it existed? How many hours in the day could the drive of man fill with toil and destruction? Wars used to be stopped by the changing of a season. Napoleon had to give his men a break when the winter came. It was the natural order of global domination. A sign of progress is that war could happen whenever now. We stopped the time of war through ingenuity. Did the watch combine with electricity to quell the night and tell the sun when it was time to die and time to wake? Perhaps limitations of man had met their final adversary. Lights went dark when they were told to, the sun set when mathematics said that it should. Time itself had become a property of socialization, why not a twelve-hour day by doubling the existing 60 minutes per second? The math still worked. Why did the world obey this grid, the fusion between how much light the sun had to give and the will of man?

If there was to be a rebellion in the future, the kind of rebellion that plastered sickles and hammers across red flags, the next revolution should be against time; against the fabric of life that says that if s*x lasts an hour, it’s incredible, a good movie should be no longer than two, and unless a person sleeps for eight out of twenty-four the work week of forty-five would be unhealthy.

Grumbling at the humiliation of having been subjected by the timepiece on his wrist, the same thing that subdued the sun, Uri turned on the radio to hear static that then sought a voice. It found it in the word of the Lord as the red car left the orbit of the Northeast and penetrated the cultural membrane of the Mason-Dixon line. The preacher on the radio wailed into a crescendo of perdition while his voice licked the top of Uri’s skull from below.

Uri raced south in the central lane, blaring the country music CD on repeat until he memorized the song and could replay it in his head. His mother had been with an opera singer from Salzburg once who could do the same thing. He was so young that his baritone voice was honed atop polio-ravaged legs that would not support him. He sang operas constantly as his only expression of violence.

Uri blinked and noticed that the geography had changed. The headlights now picked out flickers of new vegetation. Clive’s former car jumped with every pebble on the road and ascended over the next hill and into the dense trees in full bloom. A splinter of their glory cast like raining shadows through the scattered headlights of Uri’s new car and into his mind.

Gradually, the repeated occurrence of the bold white words REST STOP stapled above reflective green squares lulled him to security and he took the offramp littered with gravel and large plastic cups to park snugly in between two monstrous trucks. It was his first stop since Boston. He looked side to side into the darkened truck cabins seeking someone to talk to and perhaps discuss country western music and this thing called the South. Then he turned off the engine, noted that he was perilously low on fuel, and slept.

Beside him in each cabin of the truck were two surly men, one white and one black, m**********g to the same erotic audio tape for truckers. Practicing their preferred way to cool down after a long day and night fueled by a full bottle of pep pills and distilled caffeine washed down by liters of Mountain Dew.

Back in Boston, Clive sat before his computer, exhausted. The Nazi flag was still there. He could not remove it until everything was final and typed out with official letterhead. Everything had been completed as correctly as he could make them and there was one thing left to do. Give his great rap gift to the world. With two keystrokes and a click he sent his music video hurtling into the only grand democracy for the world: the internet. The internet had proved to Clive that if you give people privacy and complete freedom, they will seek connections to their most base instincts.

Clive sent his work of art anonymously to the world. If it had no author, no grand architect that could be shown to be merely human, then everyone would feed off it, raging against the white with that feeling of disgust that a whole cadre of pharmaceuticals had sought to oppress with mind altering anti-depressants whose effects would never go away. There was a reason that an entire nation that knew no starvation was mired in depression. They all agreed with him. The culture of white had to be brought down. Evils one cannot taste are always the hardest to quell. But he would make his city and his nation taste all that was wrong with them. For the very first time, they would be born.