Free The Vulture by Gil Scott Heron

getting the leg that he's after, but stuff that he didn't even know he was in line for. The main man is pulling another fast one on the world. Poor silly bitch can't resist the reputation and the coolness that this nigger wears like another vine. Goddamn! Goddamn a silly-ass Spade and all the idiocy that it represents! Goddamn motherfuckin’ make-believe people! They ain’ out here and they wouldn't dare try to pull all that cool shit in the middle of 17th Street with the P.R.’s on one corner and the whiteys on another and them right in the motherfuckin’ middle! Goddamn! There was no point in getting into a thing about saving the princess from the fat ogre. All I had really been doing was trying to screw John's piece of tail. I had needed that just for myself to prove to me that I was the MAN, while John was just another two-bit dealer. He would never be another Spade. All Debbie had been was just another piece of ass!
    I sat in the corner of the Cobra and drank a Jack D. and listened to Ray Charles sing about crying. Listen to the blind man see.
    Time. The word comes through the turnstiles of your mind, ringing that bell that attracts your attention like the warning bell near the end of a line on a typewriter. Time is here; then it is gone. I remember the first day I learned the meaning of the word gone. I had found my grandmother dead. Gone meant no tomorrow. Gone meant over. Dead meant that you, who had been something , were now nothing. That was the first time I saw a body lowered into the ground while people cried. I cried too, because I realized that I would someday die, and I was afraid of death. No longer was death a shootout in a cowboy movie or Christians being eaten alive in a Roman arena by toothless lions. It was the end of everything.
    Time is also supposed to be the great healer. In the weeksthat followed, I knew that John Lee would give me a chance to explain to him. I was sure that John would be man enough to sit down and listen to what I had to say, but he seemed to avoid me as though he knew that talking with me would be fatal for his ideals. It never occurred to me that he might sense the truth and just not want to hear. I never thought that he would rather believe something that was wrong than to find out the truth about the woman he called ‘love,’ but I was no student of the mind. John held Debbie the way I held Crystal, free of blame. To find out that Debbie never really wanted him would have been to discover that the solid ground he walked on was really only sand.
    July 9, / 8:29 P.M.
    I didn't travel the same roads I had once traveled. The corner Spade had become the missing link, and instead of greetings on the block, I heard whispers being thrown past, talk of my former deeds, as though I were a ghost instead of a man. I was looking down on the corner from my window when the phone rang.
    ‘Eddie?’
    ‘Yeah, Crys.’ Her voice was shaking.
    ‘I've got to see you,’ she said.
    ‘Yeah, baby, tomorrow, jus’ like we planned.’
    ‘Now! . . . Not tomorrow or next week or whenever. Now!’
    ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I'll be right there.’ I dropped the receiver and then picked it up again. I dialed Smoky, hoping that he wasn't gone for the rounds. I told Smoky that there was a family emergency and asked him if he could make my rounds for me. He said that he would, and I thanked him.
    I ran out into the street dressed as I was. Blue jeans and a sweatshirt was all that I wore. Not my general street thing at all. I hailed a cab as it rolled down Ninth Avenue. All sorts ofthings grabbed my middle as I remembered the urgent, pleading tone in Crystal's voice. I had never heard anything like that from her, even during our infrequent arguments.
    The cab made fairly good time, but nothing like the instant teleportation that I wanted. We were going down-town on Avenue D just off 14th Street when I told him to halt. I tossed him two bucks for the dollar-and-a-half lift and made it inside. In the