The Auto-Obituary of Lucius X

During a decades-long career, noted black revolutionary Lucius X traveled the American South and was proudest of his service as a newspaper correspondent for the McAllen Monitor in a pisspot town up river from McAllen, Texas, on the Mexican border, called Rio Grande City. It was an experience that X later described as frustrating at the time, only because the locals thought that he was a narc, who was sent there to report back to pigs in D.C. on the flourishing U.S.-Mexico drug trade.

“Rio was a major trans-shipment point, money going one way and drugs the other, I was actually trying to score some weed for myself most of the time I was there,” he reminisced years later of his time on the big river. "I asked a trafficker I knew to just let me sweep up the barn after the next load, you know? I knew the mother lode was in reach but no one would sell to me. That has turned out to be a metaphor for my life.”

The only really newsworthy event during his stay in Rio was a shipment of white powder that arrived on the Mexican side of the river and traffickers paid $100 to every man, woman and child in the village, to carry product from trucks to boats, so that no one could go to the federales later and tell tales. Even abuelita was a mule that day, X recalled fondly. The intrepid young X wrote a human interest story about how people planned to spend the $100 they had earned. He was 67 at the time of his passing, in Puerto Angel, Oaxaca. He is survived by daughter China Bates of Salvador da Bahia, and Florianopolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil. His lone offspring was the result of a brief hook-up in Porto Alegre during the period of X's world travels. Genetically-unique from birth Lucius X was tri-testone positive, a rare autosomal-dominant condition in which a Black Man-Child is born with three large testicles and inordinate courage. Only six in 14 billion male babies have three big ones. Of those six, only two will live to mate. Lucius X was one of those Negroes.

This extraordinary condition has been associated thruout history with African kings. Hannibal, Ramses II, Shaka Zulu as well as African-American revolutionaries Nat Turner—Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. All were tri-testonia positive. “I was born with three and I’ll die with three,” Lucius X told his doctors as a teenager, when the medicos wanted to surgically remove one nut in order to bring him to heel. 

This was Lucius X's first refusal to be de-masculated by the White State. It would not be his last. 

Without the extra virility accompanied by a third nut, Lucius X would never have dared to question the status quo, commentators and doctors agree. Efforts by this X-Man to bring race to the forefront of international dialogue translated into various literary endeavors as well. His one-act play The Pool Man Cometh, about a black family entering the middle class, just celebrated its 1,000th performance, in Stockholm after being shunned at home, where X was blacklisted by The Man and The Man's media. If one looks thru a race-critical lens.

“In schools black children are the most heavily disciplined, and expelled, so the wounding starts early and continues until the police give the coup de grace on the street. You feel me? That’s why black men are in such a hurry to have relations with women,” X wrote in a personal reflection for Esquire. “Not just to bust the proverbial nut, not for pleasure nor for fame, not to make a cream pie. Not to carve another notch in my gun so to speak, either. But in order to pass on our genetic inheritance before we die in a hail of gunfire from the pigs.” 

On the scientific front Lucius X predicted the end of skin color as a social distinction within decades, as optimists have hoped, but its quick replacement by DNA. “There are two things a black man can’t allow anybody else to do for him,” he wrote to his unborn child in the New Yorker, “his fucking and his fighting.” The classic X essay “Dick Don’t Lie” explores the Black Man’s spiritual relationship with his bone and includes his famous warning for black men to avoid Caucasian women, as much as possible, if there is other puddy available, because, “White pussy has killed more niggers than gunfire.”

His “Electric Negro” speaks to the African-American and technology and was first published in the U.K. as “The Black Man and the Internet,” in which the prominent social theorist Lucius X predicted the Fall of the White Race through the unfiltered protest of the unchained African-American male. He said he wasn't a sexist, "just a realist." Lucius X believed that, historically, most oppressors have created the means of their own destruction—in the case of The White Man, Lucius X believed that Achilles heel is the World Wide Web. 

“Hills Like Black Elephants,” one of his most beloved stories, chronicles two days in the life of a young brother being asked to deny paternity of his girlfriend’s baby, and is a soliloquy of meditations by this would-be young father, and appears in most credible anthologies of World Fiction. He liked to read women’s magazines, X famously said, “to know what the enemy is planning.” He saw women fundamentally as competitors. Unless she's really really fine. “The fundamental conflict is not racial,” he wrote in the Times, “it’s sexual and I’m not at all sanguine about men’s chances. My sense is that women are plotting all the time.” The series of works that best illustrate X's theme was completed late in his life, during his so-called Black Period, and is called by critics and historians, “The Fall of Man.” The scene of the narrative is deep space, where unfolds X's most controversial work, the post-Modernist science fiction trilogy, Planet of the Hos. 

Unfinished at the time of his death, POH recounts the struggle of a Black Admiral in command of a Federation Star Fleet chasing pirates, who are raiding robot cargo vessels in an outer nebula. To set the scene. The Black Admiral follows stolen cargo to the far outskirts of the Federation itself—to a planet called Ho, run by women, where men are merely reproductive and used like bee drones, only in service to an all-powerful Black Queen. 

The Times of London has called Planet of the Hos, “the ultimate work on race and gender in Deep Space.” 

X's oeuvre includes the black man's account of his Final Confrontation with white women who want to de-masculinate him, by draining his seed. “The medium is the message but more importantly,” Lucius X wrote in his autobiographic Electric Negro Plus, “the writer is the story.” 

Throughout his career, Lucius X tried to create an authentic Portrait of the Black Male, “etched in charcoal,” as he described his vision, “and painted Black.” In terms of his literary oeuvre, Lucius X is probably best known as author of what many critics consider the greatest single work of Black Literature—a unique story of human redemption that has served to light a fuse for an entire generation's struggle. Nigger on the Run is the story of the small-town thug Flood, the mythic Every Nigger, a petty gangbanger who escapes arrest in Mississippi, where he’s been robbing supermarkets after parole, and goes to West Africa and discovers his own Promised Land. 

To set the scene.

Like the author, Flood has three balls. But unlike the real Lucius X, the antihero Flood lacks the discipline to deal with the waves of sudden masculinity that eventually destroy him. Only his African experience allows Flood to rise above baser instincts that he was born with and the sociopathic urges caused by having three big ones. 

But when he returns to the source of his dysfunction, Mississippi, Flood is doomed. In this short work Lucius X portrays a brother “who achieves Black Liberation not in America but from America,” according to the Times. Denzel Washington, who has portrayed Flood on stage, describes Nigger on the Run as the most difficult role in the Black Oeuvre. “Like Hamlet but deeper,” Washington told BBC last year, after a performance at the Old Vic.

Lucius X was always attentive to stagecraft.

His one-man show Black Rage features a Negro male alone, sitting in a chair with a bright light in his eyes, like during a police interrogation. But instead of turning rat and accepting the plea deal he begins rapping to the unseen pigs about his experience as a Black Man in America. The Negro turns the chair around, to sit astride it, still discoursing about Black Masculinity to the white puercos. Rejecting the historical role of the Negro as “victim” of the nefarious White Man, and White Woman, instead this revolutionary Negro chose to be a Black Avenger. Thus was the Black Circle closed. 

The X-Man claimed to believe in so-called “reparations-on-the-go” in which black people take from white society, in small chunks, compensation for past wrongs. Often when no one is looking, like on the Bulk Aisle at Whole Foods. 

In an interview last year, asked to sum up his own life Lucius X said that he attempted to “reach the other side,” he called it, in which he could express his Black Manhood not without fear of retaliation by the so-called “white bitches,” male and female, black and white. That was something that he doubted would be possible during his lifetime. But, instead, without the retaliation having any effect. That was the goal of his life, he said, not Fame nor Fortune, not the most pussy or the best herb, “but the coherence of my rap,” he told the Post three weeks before he put a gun to his own damn head. To set the scene one last time.

 While in an inner tube a quarter mile offshore from Zipolite, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, in order to feed the damn fishes and renew the Black Circle, that is what he planned to do, he told the Black Press before he pulled the trigger. 

The frequent criticism leveled against X's work, that he turned whites into “stick figures,” was never true, Lucius X said. 

“We know white people. How could we not, working in their homes and kitchens and driving them around? Taking care of their spoiled little fuckhead kids? But they don’t know us because when they go to the hood they’re always just tourists, you dig? We are in white homes,” he lamented spiritually, “in order to clean up messes they’ve made.” 

In lieu of flowers X asked everyone to fire up a fat one and put on some funk. 

He suggested, “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” by the Gap Band. 

 

Governor Abbott's Sister-in-Law the MD

  

            Governor Abbott’s sister-in-law is a physician in Austin. She’s internal medicine, works with a group that visits a few hospitals around town, or she did two or three years ago when our paths last crossed. Her name doesn’t matter. Not knowing her on a personal level but having taken orders from her as a nurse, on a couple of occasions, and still not being an expert on her practice or anything but having seen her do her job—talking about her job performance is useful in the context of judging how well the governor himself is doing his, handling pandemic in the state. 

            We had a revealing interaction once a few years ago, not me and the governor but me and his sister-in-law, at my prior hospital or the one before that. So, like, she reminded me, at that time, that we had actually interacted years earlier too—me calling her in the middle of the night to get orders. My first name is not common and she remembered it and remarked this time, in person, about putting a face to the name and all that. Anyway this time in person she was behind the nurses station doing some charting and the reason for approaching her was that my patient—our patient—was going south. 

            So, like, it wasn’t like TV or a movie, people running here and there—no code was called, that was my call actually and there was no reason to make it. Calling the rapid response team as a precaution might have been appropriate, in hindsight, that won’t be debated here. The problem was developing slowly, the patient wasn’t critical and we had time. It was a problem beyond my training to resolve or fully understand. The patient was African-American, not that that’s important here, a former University of Texas football player, again not that that’s important. His blood pressure was dropping, that was important. An IV was started, he’d gotten a whole bag of fluids and his pressure was still going down. So, like, the physician who happens to be the governor’s sister-in-law looked up at me, listened to my explanation of what was going on and after that it was pretty much textbook all the way. She checked her computer for prior vital signs, checked his labs and looked at her notes, a handful of folded sheets of paper taken from her white coat pocket. She picked up her stethoscope and went to the bedside and did a head to toe examination. As it turned out this guy had an internal bleed.

            The thing about the governor’s sister-in-law is that she’s a good doctor. That’s said with 20 years experience as a RN, having taken a lot of orders, having seen a lot of MDs—the good, the bad and the scary. It’s also said given that nurses like to rag doctors. Working with physicians, taking their orders—not only listening to the decisions being made, but having to carry them out—you get to be a pretty good judge of physician foibles and competency. The governor’s sister-in-law more than passed muster. 

            Most of my experience has been in pediatrics and my occasional practice, for whatever reason, is to imagine people as they were when they were kids. Hearing about this lady doctor’s powerful brother-in-law—and checking her out later, out of the corner of my eye—in my mind’s eye she was a kid back in middle school, sitting at a table alone doing her work. 
           A little introverted, and quiet, good at math and maybe science or drawing, she kept her own counsel except maybe mom. And kept on trucking through medical school, graduated about ten or fifteen ago, during a less diverse time, not at all easy, especially coming from a family of modest means, American-born descendants from Mexico, Wikipedia tells us. And the way nurses judge physicians, it comes down to a basic question: Would you want that doctor taking care of you or would you want him or her writing orders on your child? My answer is most definitely yes. Because, me standing there telling her about the patient going bad, what was important about this physician's response was what she didn’t do as much as what she did. 

            She didn’t keep on charting. She stopped typing at my approach. She didn’t tell me to send blood to the lab. She didn’t say, “I’ll put him on my list.” She didn’t tell me to do the head to toe myself. She stopped what she was doing, made eye contact and got up to examine the patient. She’s a good doctor and a good person too. She is probably also under considerable pressure not to fuck up, as the governor’s sister-in-law, and all, the same way the governor is under pressure not to fuck up because he’s the governor. Anyway, no code got called. The governor's sister-in-law took care of the problem before it became an emergency. The thing that nursing teaches you, and taught me, is that the best way to deal with an emergency is not to have it in the first place. 

             Get to the patient early, like the governor’s sister-in-law did with the ex-Longhorn. With kids especially there’s nothing you can say as explanation to a mother or father who has lost a child and the best way to handle that conversation is not to have to have it, which is an impossible standard but one to keep in mind with COVID-19. The best way to deal with a viral outbreak is to lock down—extreme measures are called for—call the code—or better yet, don't have the outbreak in the first place. The learning curve can be steep. 

             An example of how everyone was so caught by surprise involves, once again, the governor's sister in law, the MD. Many physicians, internists like our lady doctor, are part of private practices, of maybe a dozen MDs, or advanced practice nurses, mostly internists, who have contracts to see patients at different hospitals around town and must travel between those sites. 

            Ditto some of the specialists and many, many surgeons. They travel between campuses. And just because you have a medical degree, you know, or a nursing license, and no matter how well you scrub your hands, you can still be a disease vector, and despite the gowns and gloves—and the masks—you can be a carrier. And had people thought of that beforehand, maybe, but maybe not, because what we’re seeing now is unlike anything we’ve seen before. This is some dystopian shit. 

            So, like, that's why it's good to know there are good doctors out there. It’s important because it really is like your mother told you back in the day. You can be judged you by the company you keep. And the governor is presumably keeping good company, with the First Lady and her sister. And let's hope he's listening to their advice.