The Variable Man

By Hugh Walter Nelms

Driving home in the night, Hubert is surprised to see a mysterious light hovering over his car. Scared, he pulls up in his driveway and sees the light beaming down on his garden, irradiating it. Through this light the Prime Matter People direct Hubert to eat a midnight meal of collards cooked with greasy ham hocks whereby he is given supernatural powers enabling him to become invisible or the man or monster of choice, a black or white skeleton. Borrowing from an armored truck so he can fight crime from a Harlem town house, he applies his powers for good, mischievously.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 31, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462837755

Hugh Walter Nelms

Hugh Walter Nelms, novelist, short story writer, essayist and song writer, lives in New York City. Thanks to David Ignatow, he has been published in Chelsea. He has traveled in Europe, lived in Tangier, Vienna, and Fabriano, Italy. Though not a performing artist, he is classically trained, having received his music degree from the Chicago Conservatory, a double major in piano and composition. He also has a bachelor’s degree in English, De Paul University; a Master’s in Educational Psy- chology, New York University, where he did extensive work on an unfinished Ph.D. He is a semi-vegetarian, briskly walks two miles several times a week.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Origin of a Weird Chameleon Superiority

HUBERT HANDLER HAD stopped off after work with a few friends from his job just to have some drinks at a nearby bar in Harlem. Now he was on his way home and feeling good from the Remy Martins on the rocks, but he certainly wasn’t drunk. At the moment, his geographical position on the planet was the Belt Parkway in the heavy evening, rush-hour traffic. The small house where he lived, in which he owned and lived alone, was in the suburbs, not too far from the Queens border, in Uniondale, Long Island, in the state of New York, in the United States of America, in the Western Hemisphere.

All during the drive home he had carelessly noticed a very bright-green light high up in the increasingly darkening sky; it was like a green, twinkling star. But it didn’t bother him since he was not one that believed in UFO’s. He thought it was the light of some airplane, though he couldn’t ever remember seeing an airplane with a green light—not like this one. Another strange thing: Sometimes when he peered up in the sky, the light was not there; it was gone, existing somewhere at least for the time being—peek a boo! there it was, hovering over his brand new car, his first ever, so it seemed to him, though there was a sardine and wolf pack of cars on the expressway. Maybe each of the other motorists, Hubert was thinking, thought the light pertained to them. After all, if he saw it, then the other motorists probably did too, went his thinking, glad that there was such a thing as a car radio, for it helped him to be at peace with himself while being in the middle of traffic so heavy that the expressway was a virtual parking lot. He loved music, hip-hop and especially jazz in the New Orleans tradition, such as he was hearing now, a favorite song, One of the Boys Done Passed.

That’s a pimp’s song, Hubert said, mouthing the words of the first stanza:

I want a strand of hair in my coffin from the fairest lady’s legs.

You needn’t sound no taps,

Just shoot plain craps,

‘Cause one of the boys done passed.

He was delighted to get away from the turbulence of the teeming inner city and to soon seek refuge in his living room while enjoying a cold beer and continuing to listen to some good music, maybe some good old Mississippi Delta blues on his stereo as he slumped sluggishly in a soft chair with his socked feet propped upon a big brown leather hassock. He had never heard any music sung more soulfully than the Mississippi Delta blues with its crude Negroid voice, where the word man was pronounced main, hand as hane , girl as gull, etc. Of course he had a television set, but he never allowed himself to become deeply engrossed in this media. He was an intelligent man and had video principles which he adhered to. In addition, he did not want his IQ to take a dive, which unrestricted television watching could cause, and which some imprudent, overly permissive parents did, allowing their children free reins with the TV, imposing absolutely no restraint or guidance. To Hubert, television was a baby sitter, at best a bad one at that.

He turned his small foreign-made thing off the Southern State Parkway (the name of the Belt Parkway once it snaked into Long Island) onto a curvy, lonely country road. This was the last leg home. Yes it was.

Just before he pulled up in his driveway, it dawned on him to take another glance up at the sky to see if the bright-green light was still moving, messing around up there, or had become lazy and was standing still. So, looking up, he saw nothing he hadn’t seen before, only the dark sky. His lofty conclusion: The green light was gone. Good. No problem. Thus, with his car parked in front of the house, he decided to remain in it long enough to hear the rest of the music and enjoy the quiet New York State summer night. Besides, the pimp’s song hadn’t finished. Coming up now was the second stanza:

I’ll take a toast to the Bowery and my friends on old Broadway

And tell the folks I know upon Striver’s Row.

This is my last day.

Next up will be the bridge of the song, but not right now.

So it was in this mellowed-out, semi-drunken state, combined with the minor-mode music, that caused Hubert to momentarily fall asleep for a few minutes, just for a few minutes, long enough to go into a dream filled with the weird. He actually missed some of the bridge of the pimp’s song and the soulful tenor saxophone and muted trumpet solos. A crying shame at the utmost!

At length, abruptly awakening, he literally jumped out of his sleep; an expression of suppressed, droopy craziness ornamented his face; actually he was looking stupid. He peered in horror to the right of his house, just above his choice, designer crop of collard greens and okra—there it was, again, the blindingly bright-green light beaming down and surrounded by an area so illuminating that he would never be able to know its source. And now it was sparkling, seemingly raining down radiant beads of light upon the best garden of collards (which were a healthy eat) he had ever grown. He had ever known. The phenomenon just about sobered him up. He tried to be brave and stand up to the light, that is, to look squarely at it, perhaps to learn something, but his stare could not withstand the blinding radiance; it simply was too bright, brighter than the center of the sun, far brighter than the blue flame of a welder’s blow torch. And he feared he might suffer some sort of genetic mutation or DNA corruption (down to the nth generation) and would forever lose his eyesight, and maybe more—his sexual potence, for example, unless he surrendered his machismo.

Wow! he exclaimed in fear, suddenly throwing both hands across his genital area, in a protective stance. Both the specter of impotence and the luminous spectacle horrified him. He shuddered, he choked, he couldn’t swallow, he couldn’t even move; he was forced to huddle in his car, his arms now flying upward to guard his eyes and face from the laser-like blast of the mysterious green light. Something, maybe the cat, momentarily kept him from speaking. But since there were no cats around, a better bet would be that it probably was still having paralyzing fear.

Finally he was at least able to utter a curse, a quite audible performance, bringing into play his most preferred ‘holy words of choice, so sulphuric in nature that recording them here might not be a good idea. They might burn this page, or the whole manuscript, or corrupt the computer’s hard drive. So we will instead use a conservative word whose claim to vulgarity is dubious and therefore arguable:

Dammit! Beaming right down on my collards and okra!

Hubert was shaking and earth-gripping the steering wheel even after the mysterious and incomprehensible light was no longer. Its actual presence had only lasted for fourteen and 2/7 seconds, but he remained much longer than that as a siamese component to the steering wheel. Such was the light’s effect, which was only its initial annoyance.

Finally he dared to cautiously, nervously peep over his arm, with his bulging eyes directed above in the direction where the light had been. There was nothing up there now but the celestial residents, the stars, the sky, comets, meteors—things like that, including man-made garbage. For after all, since man had long ago contaminated the below, he might as well contaminate the above. Now everything appeared far more tranquil than before. An eerie feeling consumed him, an eeriness exacerbated by the quiet, surrounding darkness. It was surreal.

Whew! he sighed, exhausted, drowsily collecting himself in preparation to exit his automobile, both eyes still bulging wide from their recent observation of the celestial unknown. But a farmer’s mentality gripped him. I be damned! And right down on my collard greens, and okra too, he cursed again, re-verbalizing his disdain, probably in reference to the beam of bright, green light that had shown on his select vegetable garden without any permission from him, written or otherwise. "And nobody will ever believe me. Man! And to top it all off—that dream."

What dream is he talking about? I the writer hope I can find out something about this doggone dream. It is bothering me too.

Hubert decided to remain in the car long enough to hear out the rest of One of the Boys Done Passed.

Now I don’t want a new suit.

Just give me my blue suit and my long-toed Hanan shoes.

Wire my good woman.

Tell her to preach my sermon from a page of the Hobo News.

Now the last stanza:

Goodbye, all you kind people.

I know I lived the life too fast.

So as the sun goes down spread the news around.

One of the boys done passed.

With the pimp’s song ended, Hubert wobbled or stumbled out of his car and headed for the interior of his small, nice-type Tudor-style house. On his way there, an interpretation of the dream he had had—there is that dream again—during the few seconds he was groggy and still in his car, tried to break through to his intelligence but failed, momentarily.

Anyway, later on, he began to doubt the authenticity of his experience. Maybe he hadn’t really seen a green light after all over his proud patch of collard greens; maybe that was just a part of the dream, too, with no corresponding reality. Then, again, perhaps it was the Cognac, he reasoned with a deep incertitude, naturally confused, nervous and still trembling. He kept repeating to himself almost under his breath that he had never had a similar experience before after stopping off for an after-work drink.

"Must have been something somebody slipped in my drink, an alcoholic virus or something—it must have been. Maybe it was Ecstasy, ha, ha," he laughed instinctively. Just as he was certain one minute that someone had contaminated his drink with a mind-altering drug, he was just as uncertain the next. His human reasoning did as human reasoning often does—it failed, leaving him wondering about the others who had stopped off with him at the bar in Harlem.

He hurriedly helped his intellect’s failing power by dumping a huge portion of straight hundred-proof bourbon into a tall water glass and gulping it down quite quickly, in one fell swallow, not swoop, despite the fact that there must have been at least three double shots in the glass. If this didn’t deaden his young intellect (he was in his middle twenties) nothing could, he reasoned. He succeeded in stumbling to his bed, fell across it like a log filled with lead, clothes and all, including his shoes, and jerked the cover over his head and shook like a bubble of water on a hot iron griddle.

It was around eight o’clock or a little thereafter when he flopped across his bed, where he managed to go into a miserable sleep until around about midnight, as indicated in the dark by the luminous hands of his watch. He felt safer with the lights out, reckoning that whom he couldn’t see couldn’t see him. In bed. A terribly sharp pain stabbed him in the middle of his head; he began to have convulsions and arctic iceberg chills which in partnership with a tropical fever alternately harassed his body. It was frightening, to say the least, and the fright was worse than the physical discomfort. He resuscitated his accusatory thesis, that his drink had been messed with by a mean-spirited individual of the universe, that is, one of the bartenders in the Harlem bar. It seemed that in the midst of this terrible present experience, he was undergoing some sort of metaphysical or anatomical change, a kind of dynamic transmutation. A panic-stricken expression seized him; he looked at himself—at his hands, his arms. They looked as always, not hairy, neither was his face, nor were his fingernails lengthening (though he had noticed the full moon outside but paid no attention to it); even his teeth evinced no change. Thus he wasn’t changing into a werewolf. And since it was nighttime and he was going to bed, this precluded any rational notion that he was metamorphosing into a type of Dracula, who slept in the daytime and roamed through the night in search of human blood—blood! This most vital of human fluids reminded him of the current scourge that had recently invaded the North Eastern United States of America, the West Nile Virus, a possibly brain-damaging and sometimes fatal infirmity spread primarily by a species of the Culex pipiens mosquitoes. But in view of the fact he wasn’t sprouting any legs peculiar to insects, Hubert assumed he was not becoming a mosquito.

Thank God I ain’t turning into a Culex pippin, he said, which is the way he pronounced the species of this nocturnal insect.

He had not taken time out to conquer the binomial nomenclature of this creature which, though little and tiny, was big enough to be spreading nighttime fear among the people, people who formerly had no fear of taking a warm, summer night’s stroll in Central Park or elsewhere. Now the more thoughtful, as a measure of protection, had to douse themselves with an insect repellant, and their beloved city subjected to spraying. To Hubert it all showed how things little could cause big problems and upset one’s right to a peaceful night.

The fearful feeling that he was undergoing a drastic bodily change instantly sobered him up and sent him dashing to the mirror to confirm the maintenance of his identify, that he still was himself, even a little bit handsome, though not quite as much as he envisioned and thought he was. Here too, in front of the mirror’s reconnaissance, he reflected as always, not looking like a werewolf, mosquito, Dracula, or Mr. Hyde. Neither like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, both the doctor and the monster a product of Shelley

Wollstonecraft’s artistic contrivance that seemingly spawned an eternal legacy of films based on her ingenuity. Still, though everything appeared right, somehow everything didn’t feel right; he didn’t know what was wrong. It was a classic case of cognitive dissonance, or some strange, unknown and perhaps unknowable, mystical dynamic at work, or so he believed.

While standing in front of the long, wall mirror he could faintly hear a beeping from a distant molecular, genetic, alien area and entity. Suddenly the interpretation of the elusive dream broke through the barrier of his ignorance and clearly penetrated his intelligence:

The Prime Matter People from a planet not yet discovered by arrogant earthlings had bombarded his beautiful crop of wide-leaf-collards with a powerful power-giving radiated emission, and after a meal of the collards the resultant radiated endowment of his super-strong body could be used for good or evil, free will—but only on the face of the earth. He learned that it would be up to him to discover the extent of these new physical powers and that his experience would be peculiar to him alone even if someone else feasted on his prime collards and okra immediately after this enhancing irradiation.

Suddenly, under the influence of the Prime Matter People, Hubert had an irresistible, supernaturally maddening taste for some of his collards and okra. First he would have to cook them, an unusual culinary endeavor this time of night, something he had never done previously, because he would have to boil the ham hocks for a considerable length of time before allowing them to pot up with the collard greens in the turbulent context of a boiling cauldron. Consequently, under the light of the full moon, absolutely helpless to resist the impulsive urge instilled in him by the Prime Matter People, he picked some of the greens and soon had them boiling in a big black pot with two big twin ham hocks to help out with the seasoning and cholesterol; the ham hocks would also provide a slippery slope—due to their inherent greasiness—for the greens in their dark descent pass the esophagus and towards their final destination, the reservoir of his waiting, growling stomach.

All the while the greens were cooking, Hubert periodically allowed them the luxury of his taste buds, and as soon as they were ready to be devoured, he ate a mile-high pile with some of his authentic cornbread made from scratch; it was mush-mashed into the pot likker (liquid) from the collards.

"I don’t like sugared cornbread, he said to himself, referring to the cloying sweetness that usually infested restaurant cornbread. Sugar in every damn thing, even in salt," he complained. As soon as he had finished eating he fell into an induced deep sleep, but not a natural one, and slept until he awoke to the loud ring of the ugly, old-fashioned German-made, war-ready clock sitting on a stand close to the bed. Strange thing about that clock: Since his experience with the Prime Matter People’s manipulation, sometimes it appeared to Huber to resemble a howitzer or a Stuka dive bomber. This only happened when he was in a drowsy state. But let’s go on pass this.

When he awoke he felt good. He didn’t and couldn’t remember a thing about his dream or its interpretation: The Prime Matter People had completely obliterated everything from his mind.

"Ah, I feel like a real superman," he said, letting out a sustained, wild savage yawn as he stretched forth his arms towards heaven and then pounded hard upon his chest like a gorilla supposedly does, apparently a physical acknowledgment of his supernatural strength.

Hubert quickly dressed in an inordinate quickness and was soon in his car and on his way back to that much-fabled section of the City of New York, Harlem, where he worked as drug rehabilitation counselor and basic arts teacher. Historically, previously he had been a policeman while working his way through one of the city’s senior institutions off higher learning, college, that is. Receiving his degree, and