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When he came back, I telephoned him at the number he gave in New Orleans. It was good to hear his voice. Finally, he was Down South, where most of my people come from. I told him he should go out to the parish and check out my cousins. I couldn't send any money, as he had asked, but they could put him up for some real good barbecue. I told him I was pissed off he missed the wedding. But I was happy he go back into the world-trottin' thang. I was happy he had made it to that Roman ruins place in Serbia, too. (Though I'll be damned if I know why anybody would want to go to a country we had tried to bomb back to the Stone Age.)
Tanya says that he is a restless soul, looking for some peace. I just think he's a brother from another planet.
Actually, I met a brother from another planet up in Tahoe. He was hangin' out in front of one of the casinos near the hotel we was stayin' at, me and Tanya.
Me, I wanted to talk with Curtis 'cause I always wondered how somebody could make out as a street performer. After all, bein' a street performer is just one step up from bein' a professional beggar, far as I'm concerned.
I couldn't rain on a high like that.
"Feature this," Curtis burbled to me, "you lookin' down into the eyes of a five year old girl and she never seen nuthin' like you before. Mebbe you a robot, mebbe you a real livin', breathin' person like her. What is it? How she gonnah know you not some giant wind-up toy come to life on the streets of the most beautiful place in America?
"And people pay me for that! This is a wonderful country. People pay me for makin' 'em laugh and smile. It doesn't get any better than that, does it, man?"
I didn't quite get caught up in Curtis's enthusiasm. I asked him how he lived.
"No worries, man," the street player told me. "I get by. Some times it gets kindah dry around here, off-season and all. But durin' the summer, I'm the Kingfish." He smiled and revealed a couple of ghetto gold teeth.
"Thing is, I don't need much. Most people don't need much, if you think about it. A roof over yore head, a few squares a day, a way to show yo' woman a good time. What else matters?"
I didn't have an answer for that.
"Too many people into worries. Worries and bein' afraid," Curtis told me, that brother obviously from another planet. "But it ain't about that. That's why I'm blessed to be able to make people laugh..."
He was right about that, I guess. After all, that was what Tanya and I had decided when deciding to build our lives together. Kurt Vonnegut's "Nation of Two". But even there in Tahoe, on our honeymoon, we had our worries about how we would get by, pay the bills, keep our jobs. We had our worries at the time when we should be happiest. The future is a scarey thing for most folks, Homes...
And here was Curtis, the silver robot man, happy just to make people like me and little kids laugh. Curtis had something goin' on.
I had meant to tell Rod about Curtis, as he was starving down in my people's home state. But I forgot. That's why I wrote this.
Tanya and I honeymooned in Lake Tahoe, up in the high Sierras, one of the most beautiful places in Cali. I read about the World Tour of our publisher, Mr. Rod, with a sense of delight and foreboding. The Man was doing one of his transformations and I was thinking about the Law of Sevens. The Law of Sevens says that every 7 years people have a new life. They become someone else. That definitely fits what I've come to know about my home-slice Rod.
Brotherman said his name was Curtis. He had one of them robot performance thangs going on on the street in front of the casino, meant to snag tourists like me. The thing was, the man was totally covered in this silver paint, wearing this silver outfit. He wasn't just doing the robot thang, he was lookin' robot, too. There was a lot of money in his cup. White folks love seein' a nigger actin' the fool.
Curtis didn't look at it that way at all. He would have been insulted if I had told him I thought he was a beggar. He thought of himself as an artiste.
He started telling me how he was bringin' joy into people's lives with his robot act. He was all high on how little kids were bedazzled by his act. He talked about it like it was some great thing, some kind of magic.
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