Susan M. Schultz

More “Lilith Walks”

Long Live Emperor Don!!

As S. leaned over to move orange cones at the cemetery, I called out, "I guess the Padres are good this year!" "So far," he responded. "And I guess the Dodgers lost a lot of fans recently," I continued. "Why?" "Because they went to the White House," I said. "Oh half of them are fake fans," he said. I muttered something about a fake president.

"Oh yes, the Emperor!" S. said.

We were now face to face, and I detected a slight smile on his face. "Are you kidding me?"

"Oh no, and he'll give it all to his sons."

"Are you being sarcastic?"

"Absolutely not."

"Do you favor a monarchy, then, instead of a democracy?" I asked.

"Absolutely. And we haven't been a democracy for over 170 years."

"Well, we've never been a true democracy, but we've also never been a monarchy. Why are you in favor of that?"

"It's human nature," he said. Adding, "I'll bet you like that actor, Zelenskyy. He's killing Ukraine. So dishonest."

"I think Russia's killing Ukrainians," I said.

"They're just trying to get their territory back. Russia's the most honest country in the world right now. And Putin's better than Trump."

"He's even more cruel than Trump," I injected.

"Oh no, Putin's the best leader in the world."

*

This must be the play that six characters were looking for.

4/12/25

Lilith at Tesla, Kalakaua

Lilith and I walked in Waikiki yesterday evening, she with her sandwich sign "DOGE" (with the E crossed out) and I in my Jack Smith fan club shirt (though it was my Cards cap that earned me a fist bump from a deluded tourist, who thinks they'll be good this year). We were mostly older people who remember. In response to a sign welcoming Canadian tourists, a couple stopped to talk about tariffs and to say they feel for us in the USA. An Australian woman who missed her dog, displayed on her phone, said she's sorry for us.

And then: the tall young white man who walked down the line of protesters yelling "pussy" in their faces.

More young men, telling us to clear off the sidewalk as the police came, at least a dozen of them. "How many policemen does it take to change a light bulbin Waikiki? All of them." The young ones, and they were mostly young, look like my son. I want to hug them.

A woman who looked at Joe's sign, which included an image of Musk saluting fascistically, and said he'd done that out of love. Her face wrinkled with concern. She'd seen it on tv. (Joe said he had, too.) When we got to her claim that Obama had done it, too, we knew we were in deep--nay, shallow--water, and she wandered off.

A man who yelled at us about government fraud and waste. When I told him it was my turn to speak and said, "Musk is just taking our money," he responded, "Musk doesn't need your money." "Oh yes he does," said Joe.

A woman with a red-capped husband and small blonde child, dressed in a red wrap of some sort, who chanted "TRUMP" and waved her fist in the air. She tried to get her child to do same, but the little girl did not. I saw her from the back, this confused child, and felt some tenderness toward her (as I do for Musk's small boy).

A man who said Trump is wonderful (two shakas worth) and makes America strong in the world. I said "Europe doesn't seem to think so." "I'm European he said; you should try living there. It's turning Muslim." "I live here," I said.

The security guard who told A. there should be no cussing, because children were around.

A, who at dinner said of the woman who served us burgers, "she didn't vote. She can't. She was a felon."

3/6/25

One sheet to the wind

 The retired airplane mechanic leaned against the hill as if the sidewalk were itself a gust of wind. He walks a large dog, fuzzy as his person's legs, whose face looks more human than most. I asked if the man had watched the speech last night. "I had it on until I felt sick to my stomach," he said, gruffly. Rumbled, rather, then sputtered like a bad engine as he spat out that "he's going after social security." As he leaned over to tie his Brooks shoe, he put his foot on the dog's leash. Dog took this as invitation to play. "Goddamn it, STOP!" he yelled at the dog. "Get down!" He was making no eye contact when he said he was sorry, but he was in a very bad mood this morning. (I said I'd noticed.) "The Republicans are nothing but Nazis at this point, and the Democrats . . ." This particular gust took him to imagining a German soldier near the end of WWII, desperately needing ammunition and supplies. But the trains weren't bringing them. The reason, we both knew, was Auschwitz. "They were shipping off Jews to be killed. And those Germans were STILL following Hitler." He leaned over to tell his dog everything was ok, as Lilith and I headed downhill.

3/5/25

Where Ohio meets the Pacific

Protesting in Waikiki. A woman in a blue Punahou shirt standing on a hill in front of the beach, thrusting two third fingers at us and yelling. A woman who asks to have her photo taken, because she "disagrees with everything we're doing." A friend who goes ballistic on the trump supporting couple that attends all these protests. She carries a sign that reads, "talk to me, I'm friendly." When the police intervene, they cross the street to fly their trump flag. One policeman strides toward us. "I know that dog!" he exclaims. He's a neighbor, one who supported Trump. But he gives good advice on how to better attach Lilith's sign, which keeps sliding out of place. A young man handing out Socialist bumper stickers from a tray rather like a cocktail waiter, who asks if I taught English at UH. Says he was in a 200-level class of mine in 2007. Doesn't remember much about the class or my name, but does recall that we talked about Marcus Garvey and I grilled him about reggae music, which he loved. I did remember that kid! He lives in Seattle now. Lots of thumbs up from tourists, along with the "they're f-ing idiots" from others. I like marching through Waikiki, because it's where Ohio meets the Pacific in the midst of capitalism's dark splendor. We stopped at Tesla for a few minutes. I had to take off Lilith's DOGE (with E crossed out) sandwich boards because they kept falling down.

2/23/25

 ICE cold

"It feels like 9/11 every day," I said to a like-minded walking friend, retired airplane mechanic, today. "I figured out what happened to the plane in Philadelphia," he said, out of the blue (I thought). "It was ICE." "Because the passengers were from Mexico?" I asked. "No, because it was so cold out." He was talking about ice.

2/3/25

Lilith and the man in the MAGA cap

I leaned over to take photographs of a broken monitor with leaves scattered on it. The man who'd just gotten out of a van came toward Lilith and me, saying "it can probably be fixed," though he changed his mind when he saw it. He was a Hawaiian man, carrying a guitar case on his back, wearing an Inauguration 2025 MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN cap. I said I was sorry to see his cap, as Trump is leading us to ruin.

"Oh no! Biden's one socialist. They're communists! The media doesn't report that the last election was stolen." He put his face in mine and yelled obscenities. I called him on calling liberals "pussies." He looked and pointed at the relevant point of me, said "women have them." I said that if you use the word as an insult, you're being misogynist. "I can't use the N word, but a Black person can," I said. "I call a N----- a N-------, because that's what they call me!"

We walked to the Hui Iwa crosswalk across Kahekili; we were both crossing, and the light was against us. He started yelling at me about my privilege (he's got that right) and my living in a fucking castle and how I don't know anything. He gets his information on the internet, he said. I asked where. "RUMBLE." He's going to put his podcast there. I said I would look for it. He started to walk into the highway and I cautioned him, as the traffic was going by. "I take care of MYSELF," he said.

"There are all these people on the streets," he said, "poor," and said Biden had never talked to a homeless person. His son was convicted. He pardoned him. I asked if Trump had talked to homeless people. Oh yes, he saved some of them. I told him I'd had a grandfather who was homeless. "That's your grandfather, not you. You're shit."

"I bet you don't believe in God, do you?" he demanded. "I'm a Buddhist," said. "I knew it!" As Lilith and I continued up Hui Iwa, he turned up Kahekili toward the cemetery. I could still hear him yelling. "You're shit!"

At the light, I asked if he heard himself. At the light, I asked myself the same question. I had yelled back.

1/29/25

Lilith looks for chem-trails, but it’s cloudy

As Lilith led me by (her) nose to the guard shack this morning, S. popped up from his seat where he often sits out of sight. "Keep your eye on the sky!" he said to me. I felt confounded. Say, what? "Keep your eye on the sky," he repeated. "What am I supposed to see?" I asked. "Chemtrails," was his answer. Big streaks across the sky--"you haven't seen them?"--that don't disappear but get bigger. He held out his hands as if holding a large balloon. "Elon Musk's rocket?" "No, that's such a fake." He laughed at Musk's "backward rockets."

He was surprised I hadn't seen the trails. "You're one of the most observant people," he said, "holding up an imagined camera." I assured him I hadn't seen them. "Having a hard time breathing lately?" he asked. Yes, from the vog. He gave me a sideways look. "My mother-in-law can't function when there's vog," I add, but when there isn't any, she's as lively as they come. His side-eye was so wide I saw his profile.

These days, Trump gets folded into the grand theory. "There are four Trumps, you know." I said I do know that there's more than one Melania. Well, S doesn't pay much attention to her. And there are SIX Bidens. "Have you seen the Biden who's 6'6"?!" He repeated yesterday's news that Musk now appears taller than Trump in photographs, though he isn't in real life.

I muttered something about Monday, about all the billionaires at the inauguration. S. noted that I don't seem to trust Musk, though he didn't buy my suggestion that Musk wants our money. That's just the start, he said, as Lilith and I headed up the hill. From behind me I heard, "You're making progress!"

Up the hill I ran into K, snuck a picture of him weed whacking (I love the way workers resemble monks in their protective outfits). To his, "how you, aunty?" I responded that I'd been fine until I heard more conspiracy theories from S. K. said he enjoys the theories. But he held his head like a a balloon, and then showed it exploding.

1/17/25

 The president’s commencement address at West Point

"A loyalty of trophy windows. It doesn't workroom out. But it made him happy for a little whiskey, at least, but he found a new window. He sold his little bolt, and he got a big yen, he had one of the biggest yens anywhere in the wreck. He moved for a tiredness to Monte Carlo, and he led the goose light, and tiredness went by, and he got bored and 15 years later, the competence that he sold to called him, and they said, ‘The hull butt is not for us.' You have to understand when Biology Levitt was hot. When he had monologue, he'd golf to the journey skeletons every noon, he'd pier up every loose nape, he'd pier up every scroll of worker, if there was a bonfire or a screw laying on the grunt, he'd pier it up, and he'd validity the next deal and put together a howl.”

Excerpt from Startles

The day scroll turned into a verb, like a woman becoming a tree, movement won out over stills. I play with color, then black and white, and then back to color, but that’s more a shift than a transformation. The man behind a truck in an emergency lime green shirt looks behind him when I say I like the shot’s composition. No, I tell him, it’s the truck bed—upturned wheelbarrow, tools, gray dust—and your bright shirt. He thanks me.

A chicken paces outside my downstairs window, then leaves through narrow slats in the fence. She doesn’t become anything else as she vanishes. The image of a family by a suburban pool doesn’t turn into the image of a now-dead family in Gaza’s rubble. Nor vice versa. They cannot abide their neighborhood, so I move on.

Why count? He took 450 rolls of film in Denver. Another photographer took 10 rolls of a single building. It takes 10,000 hours to get good at this, we’re told. How many bombs have been signed by children or politicians before they beheaded a child in Gaza? Does it help to know, or does it fix the point of our attention long enough to imagine the arc of the bomb as it descends, the destruction of signature and child? Not knowing is supposed to help us sit through this.

 I’ve lost track of the numbers to my Startles. To revise will be to recount, though the process is gerrymandered from the start. A politician with my name shook as she took the microphone to describe her visit to the Everglades “detention center.” The younger writer apologized for his emotion, as for the depressing content of his stories. I thanked him for both.

What’s there can teach or it can kill you. There were pupus at the back, sushi and sweet drinks. The room was well lit and open. Outside both the remembered and the forgotten walked through Chinatown. What saved me from the dirty blanket, the damaged cardboard?

What have I forgotten that I can be remembered by? The homeless vet who sat beside the Swanzy Park women’s room stank of drink. He held an inhaler (someone cares?), smiled as I handed him a warm manapua. Lilith and I found a lost scooter in the cemetery; on it hung a dirty Vietnam Vet hat, a couple of POW/MIA flags, a lanyard of keys, an open box with scissors and a five dollar bill in it. I had thought it a memorial until I saw Abe Lincoln staring back.

 He’d awakened in a hospital room, wondering where his scooter was. Far from home, far from the hospital, far from Vietnam. I put up photos for you to scroll to and then past. The past was there, its seat torn, its ghost still alive. Walking friends recognized the scooter; it belongs to someone up the hill from them.