Like a fool, I didn’t leave the bar. I stayed there, sitting, like a bigger fool, with my back to the door, thinking about West Indian Archie. Since that day, I have never sat with my back to a door—and I never will again. But it’s a good thing I was then. I’m positive if I’d seen West Indian Archie come in, I’d have shot to kill.
The next thing I knew West Indian Archie was standing before me, cursing me, loud, his gun on me. He was really making his public point, floor-showing for the people. He called me foul names, threatened me.
Everyone, bartenders and customers, sat or stood as though carved, drinks in mid-air. The juke box, in the rear, was going. I had never seen West Indian Archie high before. Not a whisky high, I could tell it was something else. I knew the hustlers’ characteristic of keying up on dope to do a job.
I was thinking, “I’m going to kill Archie…I’m just going to wait until he turns around—to get the drop on him.” I could feel my own .32 resting against my ribs where it was tucked under my belt, beneath my coat.
West Indian Archie, seeming to read my mind, quit cursing. And his words jarred me.
“You’re thinking you’re going to kill me first, Red. But I’m going to give you something to think about. I’m sixty. I’m an old man. I’ve been to Sing Sing. My life is over. You’re a young man. Kill me, you’re lost anyway. All you can do is go to prison.”
I’ve since thought that West Indian Archie may have been trying to scare me into running, to save both his face and his life. It may be that’s why he was high. No one knew that I hadn’t killed anyone, but no one who knew me, including myself, would doubt that I’d kill.
I can’t guess what might have happened. But under the code, if West Indian Archie had gone out of the door, after having humiliated me as he had, I’d have had to follow him out. We’d have shot it out in the street.
But some friends of West Indian Archie moved up alongside him, quietly calling his name, “Archie…Archie.”
And he let them put their hands on him—and they drew him aside. I watched them move him past where I was sitting, glaring at me. They were working him back toward the rear.
Then, taking my time, I got down off the stool. I dropped a bill on the bar for the bartender. Without looking back, I went out.
I stood outside, in full view of the bar, with my hand in my pocket, for perhaps five minutes. When West Indian Archie didn’t come out, I left.
—
It must have been five in the morning when, downtown, I woke up a white actor I knew who lived in the Howard Hotel on 45th Street, off Sixth Avenue.
I knew I had to stay high.
The amount of dope I put into myself within the next several hours sounds inconceivable. I got some opium from that fellow. I took a cab back up to my apartment and I smoked it. My gun was ready if I heard a mosquito cough.
My telephone rang. It was the white Lesbian who lived downtown. She wanted me to bring her and her girl friend fifty dollars worth of reefers.
I felt that if I had always done it, I had to do it now. Opium had me drowsy. I had a bottle of Benzedrine tablets in my bathroom; I swallowed some of them to perk up. The two drugs working in me had my head going in opposite directions at the same time.
I knocked at the apartment right behind mine. The dealer let me have loose marijuana on credit. He saw I was so high that he even helped me roll it—a hundred sticks. And while we were rolling it, we both smoked some.
Now opium, Benzedrine, reefers.
I stopped by Sammy’s on the way downtown. His flashing-eyed Spanish Negro woman opened the door. Sammy had gotten weak for that woman. He had never let any other of his women hang around so much; now she was even answering his doorbell. Sammy was by this time very badly addicted. He seemed hardly to recognize me. Lying in bed, he reached under and again brought out that inevitable shaving mirror on which, for some reason, he always kept his cocaine crystals. He motioned for me to sniff some. I didn’t refuse.
Going downtown to deliver the reefers, I felt sensations I cannot describe, in all those different grooves at the same time. The only word to describe it was a timelessness. A day might have seemed to me five minutes. Or a half-hour might have seemed a week.
I can’t imagine how I looked when I got to the hotel. When the Lesbian and her girl friend saw me, they helped me to a bed; I fell across it and passed out.
That night, when they woke me up, it was half a day beyond West Indian Archie’s deadline. Late, I went back uptown. It was on the wire. I could see people who knew me finding business elsewhere. I knew nobody wanted to be caught in a crossfire.
But nothing happened. The next day, either. I just stayed high.
Some raw kid hustler in a bar, I had to bust in his mouth. He came back, pulling a blade; I would have shot him, but somebody grabbed him. They put him out, cursing that he was going to kill me.
Intuition told me to get rid of my gun. I gave a hustler the eye across the bar. I’d no more than slipped him the gun from my belt when a cop I’d seen about came in the other door. He had his hand on his gun butt. He knew what was all over the wire; he was certain I’d be armed. He came slowly over toward me, and I knew if I sneezed, he’d blast me down.
He said, “Take your hand out of your pocket, Red—real carefully.”
I did. Once he saw me empty handed, we both could relax a little. He motioned for me to walk outside, ahead of him, and I did. His partner was waiting on the sidewalk, opposite their patrol car, double-parked with its radio going. With people stopping, looking, they patted me down there on the sidewalk.
“What are you looking for?” I asked them when they didn’t find anything.
“Red, there’s a report you’re carrying a gun.”
“I had one,” I said. “But I threw it in the river.”
The one who had come into the bar said, “I think I’d leave town if I were you, Red.”
I went back into the bar. Saying that I had thrown my gun away had kept them from taking me to my apartment. Things I had there could have gotten me more time than ten guns, and could have gotten them a promotion.
Everything was building up, closing in on me. I was trapped in so many cross turns. West Indian Archie gunning for me. The Italians who thought I’d stuck up their crap game after me. The scared kid hustler I’d hit. The cops.
For four years, up to that point, I’d been lucky enough, or slick enough, to escape jail, or even getting arrested. Or any serious trouble. But I knew that any minute now something had to give.
—
Sammy had done something that I’ve often wished I could have thanked him for.
When I heard the car’s horn, I was walking on St. Nicholas Avenue. But my ears were hearing a gun. I didn’t dream the horn could possibly be for me.
“Homeboy!”
I jerked around; I came close to shooting.
Shorty—from Boston!
I’d scared him nearly to death.
“Daddy-o!”
I couldn’t have been happier.
Inside the car, he told me Sammy had telephoned about how I was jammed up tight and told him he’d better come and get me. And Shorty did his band’s date, then borrowed his piano man’s car, and burned up the miles to New York.
I didn’t put up any objections to leaving. Shorty stood watch outside my apartment. I brought out and stuffed into the car’s trunk what little stuff I cared to hang onto. Then we hit the highway. Shorty had been without sleep for about thirty-six hours. He told me afterward that through just about the whole ride back, I talked out of my head.
CHAPTER 9
CAUGHT
Ella couldn’t believe how atheist, how uncouth I had become. I believed that a man should do anything that he was slick enough, or bad and bold enough, to do and that a woman was nothing but another commodity. Every word I spoke was hip or profane. I would bet that my working vocabulary wasn’t two hundred words.
Even Shorty, whose apartment I now again shared, wasn’t pre
pared for how I lived and thought—like a predatory animal. Sometimes I would catch him watching me.
At first, I slept a lot—even at night. I had slept mostly in the daytime during the preceding two years. When awake, I smoked reefers. Shorty had originally introduced me to marijuana, and my consumption of it now astounded him.
I didn’t want to talk much, at first. When awake, I’d play records continuously. The reefers gave me a feeling of contentment. I would enjoy hours of floating, day dreaming, imaginary conversations with my New York musician friends.
Within two weeks, I’d had more sleep than during any two months when I had been in Harlem hustling day and night. When I finally went out in the Roxbury streets, it took me only a little while to locate a peddler of “snow”—cocaine. It was when I got back into that familiar snow feeling that I began to want to talk.
Cocaine produces, for those who sniff its powdery white crystals, an illusion of supreme well-being, and a soaring over-confidence in both physical and mental ability. You think you could whip the heavyweight champion, and that you are smarter than anybody. There was also that feeling of timelessness. And there were intervals of ability to recall and review things that had happened years back with an astonishing clarity.
Shorty’s band played at spots around Boston three or four nights a week. After he left for work, Sophia would come over and I’d talk about my plans. She would be gone back to her husband by the time Shorty returned from work, and I’d bend his ear until daybreak.
Sophia’s husband had gotten out of the military, and he was some sort of salesman. He was supposed to have a big deal going which soon would require his traveling a lot to the West Coast. I didn’t ask questions, but Sophia often indicated they weren’t doing too well. I know I had nothing to do with that. He never dreamed I existed. A white woman might blow up at her husband and scream and yell and call him every name she can think of, and say the most vicious things in an effort to hurt him, and talk about his mother and his grandmother, too, but one thing she never will tell him herself is that she is going with a black man. That’s one automatic red murder flag to the white man, and his woman knows it.
Sophia always had given me money. Even when I had hundreds of dollars in my pocket, when she came to Harlem I would take everything she had short of her train fare back to Boston. It seems that some women love to be exploited. When they are not exploited, they exploit the man. Anyway, it was his money that she gave me, I guess, because she never had worked. But now my demands on her increased, and she came up with more; again, I don’t know where she got it. Always, every now and then, I had given her a hard time, just to keep her in line. Every once in a while a woman seems to need, in fact wants this, too. But now, I would feel evil and slap her around worse than ever, some of the nights when Shorty was away. She would cry, curse me, and swear that she would never be back. But I knew she wasn’t even thinking about not coming back.
Sophia’s being around was one of Shorty’s greatest pleasures about my homecoming. I have said it before, I never in my life have seen a black man that desired white women as sincerely as Shorty did. Since I had known him, he had had several. He had never been able to keep a white woman any length of time, though, because he was too good to them, and, as I have said, any woman, white or black, seems to get bored with that.
It happened that Shorty was between white women when one night Sophia brought to the house her seventeen-year-old sister. I never saw anything like the way that she and Shorty nearly jumped for each other. For him, she wasn’t only a white girl, but a young white girl. For her, he wasn’t only a Negro, but a Negro musician. In looks, she was a younger version of Sophia, who still turned heads. Sometimes I’d take the two girls to Negro places where Shorty played. Negroes showed thirty-two teeth apiece as soon as they saw the white girls. They would come over to your booth, or your table; they would stand there and drool. And Shorty was no better. He’d stand up there playing and watching that young girl waiting for him, and waving at him, and winking. As soon as the set was over, he’d practically run over people getting down to our table.
I didn’t lindy-hop any more now, I wouldn’t even have thought of it now, just as I wouldn’t have been caught in a zoot suit now. All of my suits were conservative. A banker might have worn my shoes.
I met Laura again. We were really glad to see each other. She was a lot more like me now, a good-time girl. We talked and laughed. She looked a lot older than she really was. She had no one man, she free-lanced around. She had long since moved away from her grandmother. Laura told me she had finished school, but then she gave up the college idea. Laura was high whenever I saw her, now, too; we smoked some reefers together.
—
After about a month of “laying dead,” as inactivity was called, I knew I had to get some kind of hustle going.
A hustler, broke, needs a stake. Some nights when Shorty was playing, I would take whatever Sophia had been able to get for me, and I’d try to run it up into something, playing stud poker at John Hughes’ gambling house.
When I had lived in Roxbury before, John Hughes had been a big gambler who wouldn’t have spoken to me. But during the war the Roxbury “wire” had carried a lot about things I was doing in Harlem, and now the New York name magic was on me. That was the feeling that hustlers everywhere else had: if you could hustle and make it in New York, they were well off to know you; it gave them prestige. Anyway, through the same flush war years, John Hughes had hustled profitably enough to be able to open a pretty good gambling house.
John, one night, was playing in a game I was in. After the first two cards were dealt around the table, I had an ace showing. I looked beneath it at my hole card; another ace—a pair, back-to-back.
My ace showing made it my turn to bet.
But I didn’t rush. I sat there and studied.
Finally, I knocked my knuckles on the table, passing, leaving the betting to the next man. My action implied that beneath my ace was some “nothing” card that I didn’t care to risk my money on.
The player sitting next to me took the bait. He bet pretty heavily. And the next man raised him. Possibly each of them had small pairs. Maybe they just wanted to scare me out before I drew another ace. Finally, the bet reached John, who had a queen showing; he raised everybody.
Now, there was no telling what John had. John truly was a clever gambler. He could gamble as well as anybody I had gambled with in New York.
So the bet came back to me. It was going to cost me a lot of money to call all the raises. Some of them obviously had good cards but I knew I had every one of them beat. But again I studied, and studied; I pretended perplexity. And finally I put in my money, calling the bets.
The same betting pattern went on, with each new card, right around to the last card. And when that last card went around, I hit another ace in sight. Three aces. And John hit another queen in sight.
He bet a pile. Now, everyone else studied a long time—and, one by one, all folded their hands. Except me. All I could do was put what I had left on the table.
If I’d had the money, I could have raised five hundred dollars or more, and he’d have had to call me. John couldn’t have gone the rest of his life wondering if I had bluffed him out of a pot that big.
I showed my hole card ace; John had three queens. As I hauled in the pot, something over five hundred dollars—my first real stake in Boston—John got up from the table. He’d quit. He told his house man, “Anytime Red comes in here and wants anything, let him have it.” He said, “I’ve never seen a young man play his hole card like he played.”
John said “young man,” being himself about fifty, I guess, although you can never be certain about a Negro’s age. He thought, as most people would have, that I was about thirty. No one in Roxbury except my sisters Ella and Mary suspected my real age.
The story of that poker game helped my on-scene reputation among the other gamblers and hustlers around Roxbury. Another thing that happened in John’s g
ambling house contributed: the incident that made it known that I carried not a gun, but some guns.
John had a standing rule that anyone who came into the place to gamble had to check his guns if he had any. I always checked two guns. Then, one night, when a gambler tried to pull something slick, I drew a third gun, from its shoulder holster. This added to the rest of my reputation the word that I was “trigger-happy” and “crazy.”
Looking back, I think I really was at least slightly out of my mind. I viewed narcotics as most people regard food. I wore my guns as today I wear my neckties. Deep down, I actually believed that after living as fully as humanly possible, one should then die violently. I expected then, as I still expect today, to die at any time. But then, I think I deliberately invited death in many, sometimes insane, ways.
For instance, a merchant marine sailor who knew me and my reputation came into a bar carrying a package. He motioned me to follow him downstairs into the men’s room. He unwrapped a stolen machine gun; he wanted to sell it. I said, “How do I know it works?” He loaded it with a cartridge clip, and told me that all I would have to do then was squeeze the trigger release. I took the gun, examined it, and the first thing he knew I had it jammed right up in his belly. I told him I would blow him wide open. He went backwards out of the restroom and up the stairs the way Bill “Bojangles” Robinson used to dance going backwards. He knew I was crazy enough to kill him. I was insane enough not to consider that he might just wait his chance to kill me. For perhaps a month I kept the machine gun at Shorty’s before I was broke and sold it.
When Reginald came to Roxbury visiting, he was shocked at what he’d found out upon returning to Harlem. I spent some time with him. He still was the kid brother whom I still felt more “family” toward than I felt now even for our sister Ella. Ella still liked me. I would go to see her once in a while. But Ella had never been able to reconcile herself to the way I had changed. She has since told me that she had a steady foreboding that I was on my way into big trouble. But I always had the feeling that Ella somehow admired my rebellion against the world, because she, who had so much more drive and guts than most men, often felt stymied by having been born female.