God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer

by Joseph Earl Thomas

Genres: African American; Family Life; Friendship

Synopsis

A stirring, unsparing debut novel about black life in Philadelphia and the struggle to build intimate connections through the eyes of a struggling ex-Army grad student, from the "extraordinary [and] insightful" author of Sink (New York Times Book Review).

After a deployment in the Iraq War, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a MD/PhD student at The University of Pennsylvania, and an emergency department tech at a hospital in North Philly, he becomes interested in the Holmesburg Prison Experiments, in which the prison conducted scientific trials on their inmates. Through this curiosity he comes to know his estranged father, who is serving time for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, his best friend Murray, a fellow vet, judges the journey he sets out upon, while simultaneously pushing him towards a ruinous self-discovery.

Balancing single fatherhood, his studies, and long shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his more storied friends and colleagues.  GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 256

Sample

OF ALL THE LEVEL 1 trauma centers in one young though very old nation, it’s this one, on the north side of a northeastern middling city where we wear teal scrubs stained with shit which, in this context, helps signify the unbearability of true pleasure in the world. Pleasures in feeling purposeful and needed and useful without forcing the disambiguation. The waiting room is full. In the trauma bay, bright lights illuminate the bleached-out bloodstains and pennies thrown across the tile floor; a small boy is shot through the thigh again with an AK-47, and next door a teenage girl from Temple is sexually assaulted. This homeless dude Greg who everybody loves to lovehate is beaten to near death outside a gas station by teenagers who are not yet shot through their daddy’s deep blue Crown Vics with AK-47s at Sunoco on Broad and Lehigh or Hess on Chelten Ave, or Exxon by the Home Depot where I once worked in the Lawn and Garden section and Hector and them waited outside by the truck for gigs playin ball with every single mom’s little kids on that Fisher Price court in front of where Lorenzo and Giulia made those bangin ass Italian sausages; he started coming here too, Lorenzo, a few years ago after his first heart attack back when he could walk in without the oxygen tank in tow. This one boy who, just last week, strolled in dressed down in all white on his way to this party at Broad, and bad news Champloss is in need of penicillin again; he’s dragged in by a correctional officer; both of them, him and the officer—a girl I went to high school with, rockin late-in-life barrettes, who every teen and two gym teachers called badd—were both coughing up a lung, just back-throat spittin on everybody from the waiting room and through the hallway, from the window to the walls and past the egg-white cashier’s counter, all together makes me remember that one time she had burnt our point guard and was like “my bad” in public to wild laughter that lasted all year. That same year Sean Paul and Busta Rhymes forever christened the colloquialism for gettin burnt: make it clap; and this, the reclaiming of our twenty-four-points-per-game averaging star’s pride would then take a back seat to a more historically salient reenactment, because too soon after, this white girl at an away game ran around askin everybody on the court and in the bleachers if she could give them head and, despite our best efforts, he gave in, needy (what an obvious mistake), after which she informed her boyfriend down court that our point guard had raped her, thus vanishing our sports star into the system like my younger brother after he slapped the taste outta this teacher’s mouth for choking him one Wednesday afternoon because he was three minutes late to his tenth-grade social studies class. They both left behind kids and girlfriends, one of whom, Tasha, is a nurse manager now, on her way out the door after a long night shift reminding me that my scrubs are “fuckin highwaters bro” and I remind her to mind her fuckin business and she says I love you too and I say that’s why I’m not watchin ya bad ass kids no more—one of whom when sleeping over jumped from the top bunk into the ceiling fan at 2:43 a.m., cracking his head open and complaining afterward about his almost-but-not-quite ascension into Miles Morales—but she got a new boyfriend now who’s apparently always dreamed of being a stay-at-home-dad-type nigga who I discovered only recently in our last text thread: a video of him, tall, fine, brown, in Reebok slides and “Every Nigga Deserves” sweater playin Fallout with the kids in her living room while she sat back rolling a blunt just outside on the patio, hummingbirds gathered around her hanging feeders in a scene that, if coupled with the right soundtrack, would have made me cry.

In the next room a skinny girl child with box braids got a toothache; she look like my sister a little, and I play peek-a-boo with her behind the curtain. Back and forth she finds it hilarious as I jump from round the corner and retreat, hit the corner and retreat. She’s laughing. Another child’s face is chewed off by a dog that was not, despite the popular assumptions of many of our straight-haired staff members, a pit bull. Fighting dogs considered, my uncle Red Top, who wore matching leather Thriller outfits and ran in gangs with my grandfather and serves somewhat of a mentor function to my father at Holmesburg and other State Road haunts, is two rooms away from the nurse’s station dying of high blood pressure; it’s so high this nigga might explode at any minute. Ever since my youth on the receiving end of grown men’s knuckles I’d always wondered how they would die; decades of free therapy though, for better and worse at these universities, has obliterated my revenge fantasies and outward animosity, turned all righteous-or-not rage into flaccid Pokémon-style plushies, which is not the same as delimiting my curiosity; a more literal understanding of blood pressure, prior to my overeducation by those my advisor aptly calls the ruling class, was like that Jay-Z line in Mya’s “Best of Me, Part 2”: “Pain is pleasure and pressure bust pipes,” which struck me as being about fucking and eating with equally infinite freedom, which is always the kind that hurts yourself and everybody else, the fantasies that rap music thrums through our tendons as I starve, in true exaggerating fashion, at work, as we all starve, like poor Richard in perpetuity. Red Top is a Motown-only nigga though. An immortal of a certain era, I prefer he not die at all. This is selfish, I often think, capturing and compartmentalizing the pain of others into ways I might feel about it, patterns of thought and speech in the economics of morality, saying fuck it to whatever they might otherwise want or need since I’m the one collecting empathy with the book, reading books.

He’s also an incredible liar though, Red Top, and as my link to an estranged father whose body, if I’m ever to write a worthwhile book, is also my archive, a story, I gotta hold on to that thing just before love, which is probably necessity. Red Top’s been in good with the guards at Holmesburg for longer than anyone should be there at all. This is how he does it: As an ex-army medic, a fate we share however many generations apart, they saw him as trustworthy, the doctors and the scientists, the soldiers and guards and every celly rightfully suspicious of Johnson & Johnson or Dow Chemical; this meant if he was doing the skin tests, well, why shouldn’t everyone else? He strolled around retrofitted with patches glued to non-wounds for twice the pay, hustling as an early influencer on the gospel of new shampoos and skin creams, soaps and detergents, conditioners, growth serums and microbial regulation ointments, the whole spectrum of human scientific capacity on display and waving the green flag of prosperity at anybody who wanted, well, needed, which was everyone, money on their books. He’s a pirate with that leg long lost to diabetes and a fake eyepatch on the surface, suggesting his alliance with fellow inmates all the while collecting cash through the back door. Klingman might as well have christened the man himself; and yet, here he is, every week, still dying. Looking at him, I assume something of what the father, a figure I know little about, might be, and contemplate whether my psychic inquiries through Red Top on all the shit he did and was done to him are private affairs between my father and himself, niggas who all know they know, or whether I’ve earned the right to this information and its deployment through blood or history or wrongdoing or American make-believe. Though in the latter case we all seem to know too much already. He’s my main source of stories for the story about the story these days. He’s also tryna stay calm while screaming “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!” at the drunk soaked in piss beside him who calls me a bitch cause I said he couldn’t have no more prune juice. And Louie the nurse is crackin up too, beside me now, and the dude calls him a fuckin spic—and I think Weird, people still say that?—and the both of us stand outside the curtain wagging fingers at this nigga like “Wow sir, that’s why you bout to stay thirsty today wit ya lil thirsty ass.” Next door a sickly high regular coming down from some new shit the kids are calling crocodile grabs at Anya’s ass, her smacking his hand, him calling her a dirty worthless bitch for the improprieties of “no” and screaming at the top of his lungs all the ways he’s been done wrong by the world and needs some pussy as recompense. I’m paraphrasing, of course, lots of things: the restrictions of narrative forms, a history, a people, a way of life, though fractured by the silliness of responsibilities like protecting the reader—from what, one wonders, if not simply the people I love? At my most desperate back in the teen years up before sunrise and down after the restaurant closed I used to pray for someone to protect us all from labor in every conceivable form, watching some dickhead on television deploy sixth-grade rhetoric concerning working families or the dignity of work and worse, the celebratory clapping after each empty phrase. Bombs exploding in the background.

This old head who cashes her checks at Ace Check Cashing across the street next to Dunkin Donuts, who always calls me Suga and says my mother did a great job raising me, is in the next room after the next room in need of a knee brace. Never would I shatter her illusion about who or what took responsibility for my upbringing because I might love her more than my actual mother. She recalls, and I can’t remember nothin to contradict it, that when I was a baby she would talk to my mom and them when we was waitin outside the Salvation Army for paper bag lunches. This was before the era of Penn’s Chinese store where, on the slimmest of funds, you could overdraw your account by $20.00 at Citizens Bank and then take that twenty and eat rice and gravy for a whole week or so at a dollar fifty per platter. This is prolly not true, but them Salvation Army lines seemed shorter twenty or thirty years ago, and did it also just feel true that there was more food? And is this the appropriate form to question the progress espoused by my more literate peers as I look around at everyone getting hungrier?

“I don’t know how it happened, Suga,” she tells me as I unpack the Sam Splint and Ace Wrap, priming it, digging my fingers in to prefabricate a shape approximating comfort. “I was just walkin wit my hoagie and this dang curb came outta nowhere.” Every day she be talkin about some curb that came outta nowhere, like the curbs be stalkin her, creeping up from the sewer on her jaunts to the market. She’s my favorite patient today and two days ago and the day before that. Always something different: a strange mole, low blood sugar, sprained ankle, carpal tunnel. She’s a courtroom scribe up Fifteenth and Arch, the building that to this day inspires in me tachycardia at the slightest glance or drive-by, and a panic attack twice. How embarrassing. I like the way she says Suga but hate when younger women call me that. She got the hoagie from Wilson’s, the superior option, not that garbage ass Olney Steak and Beer, where, several years before, a man who looks to me like the man who strangled and shot my ganny, beat Eraina Merritt, mother of four, unconscious and raped her. My friend Merv, before he killed himself, called that place, Olney Steak and Beer that is, “super regular,” coining thereafter a description for all underwhelming food up to and exceeding the “overprominent social form of the cold cut writ large,” and the oodles n noodles my son makes with no soup and way too much salt, the class-crossing comparison to what some folks might call “mid.”

I am myself, starving, waitin for Ray to pick me up something from Wilson’s and have been waitin a little too long honestly. He comes by Broad and Olney all the time for reasons I will never truly understand or to take pictures or on his way to some woman’s house who hired him to take pictures or on his way back from some woman’s house who hired him to take pictures and after seeing him in person has since decided to indulge in a little well-fed pretty-boy dick. This nigga refuses to try for a driver’s license again even though he might finally afford a car, dedicating himself instead to the unpredictable rank and randomish violence of the Broad Street line subway. Because of this, or a lifetime of hypervigilance tilted over the edge by our deployment to Iraq, Ray “stay strapped,” even though he don’t even fuckin talk like that in real life. And back in Baghdad Ray and I used to make fun of the white boy’s obsession with guns, especially the AK-47s, those old and boringly mass-produced 7.74 round slinging clunky kind of murderous memorabilia, hanging then from the shoulder slings and wood grain mantles of half the snow honkeys who made it past our first year home; we was mad as hell havin to carry and clean the things as part of our paycheck and health insurance but here these fuckers was, collecting them and posing in they brown bloomers, freshly stolen phalluses, sending the pictures to god knows who—perhaps the K–12 teachers they’d impregnate and start families with, the parade of semiqueer thirtysomethin West Philly social workers tryna save us, random round the way girls later left widows to the suicides—as if we were occupying some kind of paradise, a baby Eden down the street from home with camel spiders and a touchable landscape and, after finding out camel spiders weren’t even really spiders anyway, solpugids apparently, much to my own disappointment, I’d lost all hope in discovery, in developing a true taxonomy of the world as it is, was, or could be, according to the experts. Ray once killed a camel spider and put it on our platoon sergeant’s seat right before a mission brief; the man almost died of a terror that, by then, everybody had long since got used to, the all night every night searching for bombs.

SOMETIMES I FORGET WHICH tense I’m supposed to be in though, and struggle remaining compliant to forms of disciplinarity which shelter us from reality, but often open up into better things, like contingent employability. If there are subjects, objects, and verbs, why not just put them in that order forever as if the main provenance of transferring thought and feeling to page were to convey information, glancing around at all the good such things have done. More importantly though, this is not a story about me. But I do have the flu, I think. Or something. Or it don’t matter. And it might be impossible for me to tell yall the truth, the whole truth and nothin but the story, story, story—where beginnings, middles and ends a. . .