by Radio Raheem

G21 Staff Writer

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OAKLAND, CA, USA - I met The Old Man back about 1990. He was one of the forklift drivers at the container warehouse in Oaktown where I had just signed on. I guess he mustah just been pushing forty back then, though he didn't act like it. When I found out how old he was, I was a little surprised, 'cause he was bumpin' it with us young brothers. But that gray hair in his moustache gave him away. Fact is, he was not like anybody I had ever met up until that point. He was not like any of us working there. We used to talk about his shit behind his back. We all called him "Pops" behind his back.

"Yeah, man! Pops actually got a degree and everythang! Used to own his own business!"

"What?"

"No lie!"

"So what he doin' here?"

"It's called 'divorce,' Bitch! Ever heard of it? That mofo was King of the World and got brought down by some pussy."

"Naw!"

"Word. Gave the first bitch ever' thang and the second bitch whatever he could scrape."

"I heard Pops on the radio once."

"What you talkin' about??"

"Yeah, man. He was on there rappin' with Ron Brown and some white bitch from El Lay about the election. Pops knows all about politics and that stuff. That was his business."

"Naw!" (In case you hadn't guessed yet, I was new to the job and all these naws is from me.)

"Word, Blood. Pops already seen a lot. Ever'body wondering why he even workin' here. Him? He just laugh and shuck and jive. Then he go home and meet up with one of his bitches."

That was true enough. When I met The Old Man, he went out with some of the -- well, I should be delicate here -- He liked loose women. All he cared about was that they could dress to the nines when they went to the clubs, but it was obvious what his being with them was all about. I would run into Pops at The Fifth Amendment, the Serenader, some other clubs in Oakland with one or the other of the women he was seeing at the time and watch him dance the night away. He looked happy, I thought, until I looked into his eyes.

I had just turned twenty-one back then. The job at the warehouse was a big deal to me. The idea of writing a regular column for some Web magazine was not even on my mind. There was no World Wide Web when I met The Old Man. I didn't know about computers at all. I was outtah high school and had worked a few jobs here and there, but the job at the warehouse was my first Real Job paying Good Money. I didn't know shit from shinola, as the old folks used to say.

The Old Man changed all that for me. He did know computers. He knew mainframes and micros and minis(what we now call PCs.)

If I managed to catch him when he was not with one of his sleazy whor -- one of his "girlfriends" -- and I poured a few drinks into him, he might even share some of his past with me and the people from it. Shirley Graham DuBois (W.E.B.'s widow), Atiat al-Abnoudi (an Egyptian filmmaker), Khigh Deigh (remember Wo Fat from the "Hawaii Five-O series?), Henry Miller (the writer), Salah Jahin (cartoonist for al Ahram), Jerry Brown (now our Mayor here in Oaktown,) Eugene McCarthy (former Democratic presidential candidate,) the list went on and on. The Old Man once admitted to me that he had committed adultery (he was single but she was married) with Arkansas governor Orville Faubus's(remember him, Black history buffs?) daughter-in-law as an act of revenge. You pour enough liquour in him back then, he'd confess to just about anything. Pops was one crazy mofo back then.

And he worshipped the written word.

So it didn't surprise me when he went back to workin' for a newspaper out in the 'burbs.

Every time I turned around, he was shovin' one book or another under my young-ass nose. He would quiz me on them, ask me what I thought about the "voice" of the writer, about the subject matter, how it made me feel. I first read James Baldwin because The Old Man made me.

That's how we became friends, I guess. If there's one thang I can say about The Old Man, knowing him this long, it is that he really does have a magnetic personality. Even when he's being a jerk, you give him slack because he has built up so much capital in the Bank of Goodwill.

As to his choice in women, I put up with them because I understand what he called "The Biological Imperative." I said, behind his back, that he was just a C---hound. Whatever.

I was as surprised as anyone when he just gave sex up altogether. I'm more surprised that that choice has lasted this long.

I'm tellin' y'all all this, Homes, because this being the Christmas season, I was thinkin' about the one Christmas I spent with him. As I've known The Old Man for twelve or thirteen years, I'm married now myself and almost as old as he was when I met him -- minus a few years -- it sits different in my mind than it did then. Especially after this hard year for him.

The Old Man once told me that John Barrymore, the famous actor, said that every great actor must do a love scene, a death scene and a jail scene. During this past year, The Old Man finally got to do his jail scene, as we all know. Then his Momma passed away -- a death scene that he seems not to have recovered from yet, if I'm reading him right. There's somethin' definitely different about The Old Man now. Something different and kind of out of control... That's what I think.

He used to write on these pages that he was the "Knight Errant" of Love. I had to wonder who he was kidding.

When he came to my Mom's house out in Benicia that Christmas, he brought along his most favorite 'ho, an underaged broad who cussed worst than a sailor. The one he calls "The Count" in his writings. She was one fine fox, I'll have to say, but not someone you'd expect an "intellectual" to be sleepin' with. I never understood The Old Man's taste in women and probably never will.

But I gottah tell you something: The Old Man can string popcorn and cranberries like nobody's business! He claimed he had ten years of experience from when he was married because his ex-wife made him do it. He claimed that there were permanent callouses where the pins would prick most people's fingers. We all laughed. You had to be there, I guess, but The Old Man made it sound real as he magically strung these long bands of popcorn and cranberries to festoon our Christmas tree.

With just the right amount of eggnog (laced with brandy, of course) he tells the most wonderful stories. He paints cities in your mind with words. He had my Moms, my nieces and nephews, in rapt silence as he walked us down the streets of Florence, Italy, showed us Michelangelo's "David", took us to listen to the hippie guitar players on the Piazza San Marco, and then got us drunk all night with a crew of twelve Australians! Everybody was laughing.

Next thing you know, The Old Man was silent. He was decorating my Mom's Christmas tree as we poured out the stories of our lives that we had kept bundled up over all those years.

Every now and then, he would say something like, "That's wonderful, beautiful. But you haven't told me the whole thing."

The words would come pouring out of us, like water over a waterfall. It was like we were grateful that The Old Man cared about our stories -- We could see it in his eyes! It was like he was hungry to hear about who we were, what we knew, what we had thought and lived.

By the time the food came around, we were all glowing from one source or another and it was like family. Plates and platters were passed around the table and even The Old Man's woman was being nice. She hadn't cussed in hours. We all ate like this was the first food we had ever had in our lives.

Y'all know how it goes: after the food, all you want to do is curl up and nap. We were all fat and happy for that one Christmas Day. Fat and happy and cleansed.

I figured it out later.

The Old Man had started out as our entertainer and dream-weaver, taking us across the oceans. Then he had transformed himself into our Father Confessor. He sat behind his veil of interested silence and let us get all our stories out of our systems before the great feast.

After I got to know him better, before he found his calling in the GENERATOR 21, I figured out that his allure was telling you a story that seemed to expose his own private parts so that you would do the same. "I'll show you mine if you show me yours," as the kid's game of sexual experimentation goes.

That was my first Christmas with The Old Man. Now that I'm in my thirties, I realize that it was probably insulting to him that we called him "Pops" back then. Or maybe not. I believe that he has always known that he was an old soul.

I worry for him right now, though. Between the jail thang, his Moms, his (it seems to me) upcoming family problems, his lack of a true lover -- if even just another foul-mouthed slut -- I wonder how he hangs on. Maybe it's this magazine.

Merry Christmas, Old Man. We still love you out here in Cali.

Peace. And Goodwill.

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