An American Dream

  Now, as he stood inside Cherry’s door, he was wearing a small black felt hat with a narrow brim, his gray flannel suit had narrow pants, he wore short boots of some new and extraordinary cut (red-wine suede with buttons of mother-of-pearl) and a red velvet waistcoat to match. A shirt of pink silk took light from the vest, even as a crystal glass picks up an echo in the color of the wine, and his tie was narrow, black knit, with a small pin. With his left hand he held a furled umbrella, taut as a sword in its case, and he kept it at an angle to his body, which returned—since his body was tall and slim—some perfect recollection of a lord of Harlem standing at his street corner.

  This was a fair sum to notice in the time it took him to open the door, come in, look at Cherry, look at me, see his bathrobe on my back, and tell me to get dressed and out, but I saw it all, my sense of time—like that hesitation before the roller coaster drops—was as long as the first breath of marijuana when the lung gives up its long sigh within, and time goes back to that place where it began, yes, I saw it all, had memories of Shago singing, and Deborah reading the note, I had one very long instant indeed as he looked at me. A wind came off him, a poisonous snake of mood which entered my lungs like marijuana, and time began to slow.

  Then a curious happiness came to me from the knowledge Shago was capable of murder, as if death right now would carry me over just that moment I had known in Cherry when something went up and into the fall. So I smiled at him, no more, and pushed a pack of cigarettes in his direction.

  “Get out,” he said.

  Our eyes met and stayed together. There was an even raw gaze in his which stung like salt on the surface of my eyes. But I felt damnably abstract, as if my reaction had been packed away, were instruments in a case. When I didn’t move, Shago turned to Cherry and said, “He won’t run?”

  “No.”

  “I be damn,” said Shago, “you got yourself a stud who can stand.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not like Tony?”

  “No.”

  “Well, stand! you mother-fucker,” said Shago to me.

  When I stood up, Martin opened his fingers. He had been holding a switchblade in his right hand, and it opened from his palm like a snake’s tongue. The flick of the blade made no more sound than a stalk of grass being pulled from its root. “I’ll tell you,” said Shago, “get dressed. I would not like,” he went on, “to get cut while I was wearing another man’s robe.”

  “Put away your blade,” I said. My voice spoke out of that calm.

  “I put it away, man, after I cut my initials on you. That’s S. M. Shit on Mother,” said Shago. He turned his head to Cherry, his eyes a startling golden yellow in his black face, they were nearly a match to hers, and began to laugh. “Oh Jesus,” he said, “shee-it, shee-it,” and he held up the blade and flicked it closed. Like a magician. “She’s my honey,” he said to me, “she my wife.”

  “Was your wife,” said Cherry, “till you were so evil.”

  “Well, shit a pickle,” said Shago.

  “Yeah,” she said, “shit a pickle.”

  They were like a man and woman balancing on a tight wire. “Evil,” he cried out, “evil,” he demanded, “listen, Sambo,” he said to me, “you look like a coonass blackass nigger jackaboo to me cause you been put-putting with blondie here, my wife, you see, dig? digaree? Evil! Evil? Why the white girl’s evil, you see.” There was a tiny froth at the corner of his immaculate lips, a strain of red in the white of his eyes. “What you doing with him?” asked Shago of her, “he’s fat.”

  “He’s not,” cried Cherry, “he’s not.”

  “Keep wasting,” said Shago, “he’s a tub of guts.”

  “Just go on talking,” I said.

  “You say that?” he asked of me.

  “Yes, I said that.” My voice was not as good the second time.

  “Don’t cut me, boy,” said Shago. The blade was out again.

  “You’re a disgrace,” said Cherry.

  “Every nigger’s a disgrace. Look at Sambo here. He’s a disgrace to the fat white race. What you doing with him? Why he’s a professor, he’s a professor. He hugged his wife so hard she fell down dead. Ha, ha. Ho, ho. Then he push her out.”

  “Close your knife,” said Cherry.

  “Shee-it.”

  “There’s bird on your lip,” said Cherry.

  “Not bleeding a bit.” He took his umbrella and flipped it behind him to the door. It made a muffled sound like a woman thrust aside. “Her womb is full of blood,” he said to me. “She had a kid and afraid to have it. Afraid to have a kid with a black ass. What about you, uncle, going to give a kid with a white ass, with a white diarrhetic old ass? Kiss my you-know-what.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Get my knife, shit-face.”

  I took a step toward him. I did not know what I was going to do, but it felt right to take that step. Maybe I had a thought to pick up the whiskey bottle, and break it on the table. The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own.

  Shago retreated a step, the blade held out in his open palm, his wrist dipping to some beat he heard in the mood. Looking at that blade was like standing on the edge of a high cliff, one’s stomach sucking out of one, as one’s eyes went down the fall. I had a moment when I remembered the German with the bayonet, and my legs were gone, they were all but gone; I felt a voice in me sending instructions to snatch the whiskey bottle and break it, break it now that he was out of reach and so could not slash me with the knife, not without taking a step, but the voice was like a false voice in my nerves, and so I ignored it and took another step forward against all the lack of will in my legs, took the step and left the bottle behind as if I knew it would be useless against a knife. My reflexes were never a match for his. What I felt instead was an emptiness in his mood which I could enter.

  Shago took another step back and closed the blade. “Well, Cherry,” he said in a cool voice, “this cat’s got valor,” giving a Spanish pronunciation to the word. Then he put the knife away. And gave us both a sweet smile. “Honey,” he said to Cherry, “laugh! That’s the best piece of acting I done yet.”

  “Oh, God, Shago, you’re evil,” she told him. But she had to shake her head. There was admiration despite herself.

  “I’m just sweet and talented, honey.” He smiled sweetly at me. “Shake hands, Rojack, you’re beautiful,” he said, and took my hand.

  But I did not like the feel of his palm. There was something limp and leathery to the touch. “How’s that for putting you on?” he asked of me.

  “First-rate,” I said.

  “Oh, beautiful,” he said. “Such beautiful dozens. Such éclat.”

  I was near to being ill.

  “That’s how Shago can sicken you,” Cherry said.

  “I’m a sick devil, no doubt of that,” he said with charm. And his voice was beginning to take a few turns. Accents flew in and out of his speech like flying peacocks and bats. “Haul ass, the black man is on the march,” Shago said to me suddenly, “and he won’t stop until his elementary requirements are met. Ralph Bunche. Right? ‘Take your hand off my fly,’ said the Duchess to the Bishop cause she was a Duke in drag. Chuck, chuck, chuck.” He looked at me with eyes which were suddenly wild as if the absence of rest had set them racing like cockroaches under the flare of a light.

  “Shago, what are you on?” Cherry asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Well, that’s how it is, sugar. Come and cry with me.”

  “You’re not. You can’t be on again.”

  “Now, honey, couldn’t you tell? When I came in the door with the street corner bit. Up in Central Park! Sambol I mean I don’t go for that sauce, sugar. You know that. I’m too pretty to rumble, and that’s a fact. Rojack,” he said in my direction, “I love you, you’re so gruesome. Put some gravy on the bre
ad.” And he began to cackle. “Why, bless bless, my Cherry, if I got to lose, I got to lose to a square with heart, I mean he’s all that heart and no potatoes, just Ivy League ass. Harvard, I presume, Doctor Rojack.”

  “You’re not on horse,” Cherry said.

  “Stone out of my mind, baby.”

  “But you’re not on horse.”

  “About to take the needle. My steps were leading me there.” He tapped his feet in a tricky little riff. “So I came to see you. You can help me stop.”

  She shook her head. She was mute.

  “Honey,” he said, “you’re still creaming for me.”

  “I’m not. Go away, Shago, go away.” She kept her face averted from both of us.

  “It’s never over,” said Shago. “I said to you once: honey, we see each other ten years from now, we still make it. You hear?” he said to me, “it’s never over with her and me. You got nothing but the whiskey and the embers. All those piss-wet embers.”

  “You won’t know,” I said. But there could be truth in what he said, I thought suddenly.

  “Man,” he said, “let’s get cool and enjoy each other. I can live without my Cherry. I’ve had movie stars. I put them in my scrapbook. That’s cool. Let’s keep it that way. You ask her how many times I throw away my cool.”

  “What are you on?” she repeated.

  “Shit and shinola. Listen, baby, take a vacation from all this. I’m cool, now, I’m back in my cool.”

  “You just waved a knife.”

  “No, I’m back with the living. I swear. Here to entertain. I mean I read the scene. You and me, husband and wife except for the ring—but we know each other, we didn’t make it. I could cry. But still I got to wish you the best. The best, Rojack, the best, Cherry.”

  “Make him leave,” Cherry spoke out, “please make him leave.”

  “No, no, no,” said Shago.

  The blade was out again. He held it point up, his head looking down on it like a priest with a candle. “Throw away the restraints,” he said, “throw them away.” She got up from the chair where she had been sitting since he entered the room and holding her wheat-colored wrapper about herself with both arms, she walked up to him. “Put that stick away,” she said.

  “No. Tell him about the Freedom Rider bit.” But as if her presence close to him, her proximity to that knife, was vertigo for him, he closed the blade, put it back in his pocket and stepped away from both of us. Some spasm of language began in him.

  “Contemplate this,” he said to me, “I did the Freedom Rider bit. Like I was running for President of the black-ass U.S.A. That’s the Dick Gregory bit, not mine, but I did it. I did it. And I mean I got nothing but elegance to sell, plus a big beat. And that big beat comes from up High, it don’t come from me, I’m a lily-white devil in a black ass. I’m just the future, in love with myself, that’s the future. I got twenty faces, I talk the tongues, I’m a devil, what’s the devil doing on a Freedom Ride? Listen,” he said, building up force as he went, “I’m cut off from my own lines, I try to speak from my heart and it gets snatched. That’s Freedom Ride. Why,” he said, with no sense of going off in another direction, “you seen my act, I remember you, you brought your wife back to me, that battleship with the pearls around her neck, you think I forget, I got elegance, man, and elegance is nothing but memory. I mean I got elegance when I do my act.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And I spit in your wife’s face.”

  “Metaphorically.”

  “Metaphorically. Yes, I did. And I said to myself, ‘Man, you’re spitting in the face of the Devil.’ ”

  “I didn’t know you thought twice about it.”

  “Kiss me, sweets. Didn’t know I thought twice about it. Why I knew your wife was society bitch. That’s a bitch! I knew what she was promising, all that White House jazz, mow my grass, blackball, you’re so sexy—think I like to pass that up? But there was your wife asking me to sing at her charity ball for no, for her smile. I said to myself, Why, lady, you wouldn’t give half a buck to the poor nigger woman who wipes your mess in the ladies’ latrine. A quarter, that’s what she’d leave, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fire when ready, Gridley, we have seen the whites of their eyes.”

  I began to laugh. Despite myself. Finally Shago laughed. “Yeah, man, it’s so funny. But I was at the big divide. Pick it up. They were ready to pick me up, make me a society singer, I’d had it with that Village shit, I’d had it with that Mob shit, that big-time shit, ‘What a nice suit you’re wearing tonight, Mr. Ganucci’—no, I wanted the society shit cause I was right for that, but I took one look at your wife and I gave it up. I’d played it cool all the way, passed up their parties, ‘No,’ I’d have my flunky say, ‘Mr. Martin does not attend parties,’ I was a virgin, and had them eating in the crack, I was old Buddha’s ass on the stairs, but it was too much, that wife of yours—she cooed to me, ‘Mr. Martin, you know I can make you change your mind,’ yeah, you bet she could, till I got a good look at her sitting with you in the front, eating me, man, I could feel the marrow oozing from my bones, a cannibal. So, I told her what to do. Pus and dandruff to you, Peter the Great—Shago Martin ain’t adding his tit to your milk and charity.” He shook his head. “That was the end of society shit, yeah, but I was right for them, I was the cup of tea they’d been brewing. They knew it. Cause I can do the tongues, all that cosmopolitan dreck, bit of French, bit of Texas, soupçon of Oxford jazz—I promise you,” he interpolated with a perfect London voice, “that we’ll have masses of fun and be happy as a clam, why,” he said, snapping his fingers, “I can pick up on the German, Chinese, Russian (Tovarich, mother-fucker) I can do a piece of each little bit, St. Nicholas Avenue upper nigger, Jamaican, Japanese, Javanese, high yaller sass—I just call on my adenoids, my fat lips and tonsils, waaaaah, I can do a grande dame, anything from a gasbag to Tallulah Bankhead, ‘Out, you pederast,’ it’s all shit, man, except for the way I use it cause I let each accent pick its note, every tongue on a private note, when I sing it’s a congregation of tongues, that’s the spook in my music, that’s why they got to buy me big or not at all, I’m not intimate, I’m Elizabethan, a chorus, dig?”

  “You’re just an old dynamo out on the moon,” said Cherry. Tenderness for him was back in her voice. Acid entered me.

  “When I start talking, I hear motors. I’m a devil, see. I used to watch your television. You’re a white ass. Her and me used to sit on that sofa and watch your television. ‘What a sweet white ass’ I would say to her. We would laugh.”

  “Now you’re on a television show,” I said.

  “Yeah. Right in the hour where you used to be. Channel Forty-one. They’re so poor they don’t pay the camera. Have some hash.” He took out a cigarette rolled tight as a toothpick, lit it, offered to pass it to me. I refused. There was an unfamiliar pressure at the back of my neck, an accumulation of I did not know what, but it was from the last half hour, and it warned me to say no. I took a swallow from my whiskey glass.”

  “For you, girl.” He held it to her.

  “Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “Uh-uh.”

  “You pregs again?” he asked. And at the expression on her face, he whistled, laughed, made a small demonstration. “Shee-it,” he cried out, “you can’t tell, you can’t tell that fast. That’s a mistake made by many. You don’t know, girl.” But the shaft was in. I saw something in his eyes as the marijuana took hold, he had not been ready for this. He had the expression of a big fish just speared—the flank of the eyeball showed horror; something in the past had just been maimed forever. He was suffering not from the possibility that she was pregnant but that she had had an experience with me which made her believe she was, and he knew all about that.

  “Listen, baby, you don’t leave me,” he said. “I’ll cut out your heart. You got nothing but spade in you, and I’m left with that Southern shit. I’m a captive of white shit now,” he said looking at me, his eyes blank as a prison wall
. “I bathe in the flesh, you ass,” he said again, “I keep it for myself, all that white stinkeroo, all of it, but she ain’t white, no she ain’t, not my girl, she got my black in her. Yessirree, boss, thanks for that thin dime. Listen, man, I made her knock the kid cause it was nigger, you see, black as me, and I’m a white man now.”

  “You black-ass ego,” she said, “you’re not white, you’re just losing your black. That’s why you still got your spade in you and I got my white in me. Because I don’t look back. When something’s done, it’s done. It’s over.” Some whiff of marijuana must have entered her nose for she talked with a strong male voice, some small-town Southern mill boss or politician—her brother, I realized then. “Do you think?” she cried out, “we built white shit and progress by saying ‘Forgive you one more time.’ Well, we didn’t, you ass, we didn’t. It’s done, Shago. Out of here.”

  “Man,” he said to her, “take your devils and banish them down to us. We’re the mirror of your ass.”

  “Come on, baby,” said Cherry, “don’t lose all your cool.” Her face flushed, her eyes bright, she looked eighteen, tough dittybop beautiful, eighteen. They stood glaring at one another.

  “Cool! Baby, I got cool this professor of yours and you couldn’t locate in twenty years. Listen, you,” he said to me, “I should have brought my army down here. We could have put toothpicks under your nails. I’m a prince in my territory, dig? But I came alone. Cause I know this bitch, I know this Mafia bitch, she’s made it with hoodlums, black men, some of the class, now she picks you, Professor, looking to square out, she’s looking for something luke and tepid to keep her toes warm. You kissing them yet, you jackass?” And with that he walked over to me, put his fingers on my chest, gave a disdainful push, “Up your ass, Mother Fuck,” and turned around, leaving the scent of marijuana on my clothes. The pressure back of my neck let go of itself and I was a brain full of blood, the light went red, it was red. I took him from behind, my arms around his waist, hefted him in the air, and slammed him to the floor so hard his legs went, and we ended with Shago in a sitting position, and me behind him on my knees, my arms choking the air from his chest as I lifted him up and smashed him down, and lifted him up and smashed him down again. “Let me go, I’ll kill you, bugger,” he cried out, and there was a moment when I could have done that, I had the choice to let him go, let him stand up, we would fight, but I had a fear of what I heard in his voice—it was like that wail from the end of the earth you hear in a baby’s voice. My rage took over. I lifted him up and stomped him down I don’t know how many times, ten times, fifteen, it could have been twenty, I was out of control, violence seemed to shake itself free from him each time I smashed him back to the floor and shake itself into me, I kept beating the base of his spine on the floor, the shock going up to his head, I had never had an idea I was this strong, exhilaration in the fact of the strength fed my strength itself, and then he went limp and I let go, stepped back, he fell back, the back of his head struck the floor with the blunt dud of an apple dropping from a tree.