The Land of Lincoln

I hold these truths to be self evident. The sale of the Lincoln Log waterbed took me to the housing projects on the east side of downtown Tampa. Sparse shrubbery dotted the landscape amidst the yards frescoed with hard dirt and occasional shards of grass. Black people, involuntary secessionists, young and old, gathered for a federal, non-employee festival that I hadn’t officially been invited to either. They lingered outside the two-story apartments and scrutinized the glossy delivery van with its numerous reflectors and chrome-lined, mud flaps. I passed slowly down the street trying to find the apartment address for the Lincoln waterbed. The crowd stared at the rotating hubcaps that spun like a mesmerist’s discs, or maybe they were looking at me, the only honkie that dared to enter non-union territory.
The arrival of the Lincoln waterbed, the outside frame ribbed with split logs to look like Abe Lincoln’s cabin in Springfield, Illinois, created a buzz, a community event, a happening, the rebirth of a neighborhood that had long festered in decay. I parked the van and was quickly surrounded by an audience of dark-eyed curiosity seekers.

A muscular, black man answered the door at the address on the invoice. His name was Lucius Calhoun. He followed me outside to bask in the momentary limelight of his neighbors and friends.

I carried parts of the disassembled bed into the bottom floor of his sweltering apartment.

“It goes upstairs,” he directed.

Concrete steps like you usually found in a warehouse or a parking garage led to the second floor and the Lincoln bedroom where you could count the concrete blocks on the walls. The interior of the two-story, concrete block unit wilted me with its sub-tropical humidity. My shirt absorbed rivulets of sweat after a few trips inside and outside. The light green linoleum floor swabbed recently with a pine-scented cleanser still vented fumes that permeated the apartment. Even my shirt smelled like fresh cut pine after ten minutes in the apartment.

I assembled the Lincoln monument on top of a particle board pedestal. When I finished, I stroked the exterior frame and only got splinters in my index and ring finger.

Lucius’s wife, Wanda, brought in the beer to celebrate their new waterbed that wouldn’t have helped Abraham or Mary Todd Lincoln who went nuts because her husband saved the union but not three of their four children from dying young.

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, grateful for the smell of barley and hops instead of the high-powered pine cleanser that oozed from the linoleum squares to overlay the scent of human sweat and fatigue.

I tried to fill the mattress from their bathroom sink but the hose adapter I carried wouldn’t fit. The threads on the faucet were stripped, maybe non-existent.

I needed water for the waterbed so they could have the children that Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln could never replace no matter how many logs he split or unions he saved.

“Is there a spigot outside we can use to fill the mattress?” So the union can be saved, I thought.

“I think so,” Lucius replied.

His response was tentative. From the looks of it, the threadbare grass outside hadn’t been watered for generations.

We descended the stairs and went out behind the apartments to hunt for one. Bright-colored laundry dangled from nearby clotheslines. It was camouflage used by these unlikely secessionists until they could be bivouacked elsewhere in this nation under God and deconstruction. Long sticks set at angles in the ground propped the heavy loads on the thin strands of wire. Beyond the clotheslines, vacant buildings with broken doors and windows with jagged glass encroached in the background. An entourage of youngsters followed us as we searched for a water spigot, rare in these parts.

Lucius located one, a few apartments away from his. It had no handle. It too was stripped of history.

“I need something to turn the water on,” I said.

Lucius walked nearby and tapped several times on the back door of another apartment. The door inched open. A large, black woman appeared.

“What you want, Mr. New Waterbed, sir? Wanda let you buy that?” she asked.

The news of Lucius’s waterbed had spread.

Lucius explained the situation. She returned a few moments later with a turn handle, shiny and polished like family silver. She handed it to him.

“Make sure that don’t get lost,” she ordered.

The union was saved though never the Lincolns’ children. We stretched the water hose to his bedroom on the second floor a few apartments away. It barely reached. I hooked the hose to it and the bed filled slowly, slow enough for some enterprising non-employees in the neighborhood to get all four tires off Dave’s van and exchange them for concrete blocks. Fucking A Lincoln. They left the mud flaps.