“I’m going to make more bread than you’ll ever see in your life. You think your peckerwood blood makes you smarter than me? I’m going to show you like I did when I first met you that I’m slicker than you.”
I couldn’t say a word back to him. I realized that I had lost my temper and mismanaged the whole thing. That baboon crack was very stupid.
He stormed past me to his bedroom. I just stood and looked into the mirror and tried to clear my thoughts. I went and lay across my bed. I heard him dialing the phone in the living room.
I heard dresser drawers banging. Then for a moment there was quiet. I heard his feet scrape on the tile floor of the bathroom. He came through to my bedroom. He kept his eyes on the carpet as he stood at the side of the bed. He looked like a coy gorilla.
He raised his eyes and said, “Folks, get up and kick my ass for making that crack about your mama. You know I’m hip that you’ve been the only real friend I ever had. You can tell from my stupid cracks that I ain’t got the sense to play drag con.
“I called a cab. I’m gonna pad down on Thirty-fifth Street. Folks, I know that you gave me that advice about Brown because you’re my friend. But I can handle myself. If things get funky, I’ll cut loose from Brown.
“I ain’t gonna peddle no dope after I get rich. I’ll open a big legit business and jump smack dab into Nigger society. I hope you ain’t salty with me.”
I said, “Livin’, I’ll always be your friend. I’ll be seeing you around the joints. And we can hoist a few together. Be careful, pal. And if you ever really need me, I’ll always do what I can.
“Livin’, I’m sorry for my cracks to you in the bathroom. Put my name and address on a slip of paper and keep it on you all the time. Say, do you need dough to make up that five bills for your merchandise?”
He said, “Folks, I’m a coupla’ bills short. But, you’ve did enough for me already. Besides, I can take off a pocket or two and make up the slack. You ain’t forgot how good I can pick a pocket have you?
“Well, Folks, I hear the cabby blowing. Don’t get up. I ain’t got that much to move. Shake, pal? Don’t think I ain’t gonna miss you.”
I got up and got a fifth of rum from the liquor cabinet. I went to the kitchen table and sat there drinking away my sorrow and loneliness. Finally my misery became wildly hilarious. I laughed until my belly cramped.
I turned on the radio in the living room. A Jolson record was wailing Swanee. It gave me a brilliant idea. I went to the fireplace and put my hand up the flue. I looked into the mirror over the fireplace and patted soot on my face until I was coal black.
I started conning a mythical black father for the hand of his daughter.
I pleaded, “But sir, I’m the Nigger that can make her happy. I love her.”
I answered in a heavy Southern drawl, “Iffen you a Nigger for real, why your hair so yellow and straight?”
“Oh, that. It’s dyed with peroxide and straightened with lye and lard. Honest, sir, I’m a bona-fide Nigger.”
“Mabbe, but Ise smell a white rat in de woodpile. I ain’t lakin dat long keen nos uv yourn. Whar you git dat? You mus be one uv dem Warusi Niggers, huh?”
“No sir, I wish I had gotten it like that. The truth is my great-great-grandmother had big tits and a nice round ass. She was a pet house nigger for a horny white master of a slavery plantation. He socked a squealer into her and passed down this nose through her to me. Sir, just don’t let it worry you. First chance I get, I’ll have it flattened. Am I in, father-in-law?”
“Jes a minit, hold on dar. I warn’t near ’bout worried ’bout dat nos lak I is ’bout dem funny blue eyes. Black as you is, Ise know you ain’t gwine try and mak a star natal fool uv me. Ah ain’t gwin heah a wurd you sayin’ iffen you claimin’ dat white boss-man done passed dem white folks’ eyes to you frum way back in dem slavery days.”
“Sir, I’ll be proud to have a smart father-in-law like you. I’m glad you raised your question. The guaranteed truth is, a hoodoo woman down in New Orleans put a curse on me. Overnight that evil witch changed my Nigger brown eyes into—”
The weird black face in the mirror wobbled and faded behind the swift dark curtain of oblivion.
I woke up huddled on the carpet in front of the fireplace. The empty rum bottle glittered on the fireplace mantle in a radiant shaft of morning sun. I felt a thudding inside my ballooning head. Then I heard a faraway pounding at the front door.
I rose dizzily from the floor and walked to the door on legs of shuddery putty. I looked down through the door glass at Helga, our Swedish housekeeper.
Her blue eyes were wide with alarm staring up at me. I remembered the drunken, blackface playlet I’d performed. Helga turned and scurried away across the porch.
I opened the door and said, “Baby, it’s Johnny.” She came back. I took her hand and led her to the bedroom. She looked up at my black face with a puzzled look. Then she burst out laughing.
I said, “I had a wild party last night I’m so glad to see you. Don’t touch the house today. For some strange reason I need your company this morning in the worst way. Just take off your clothes and get into bed. I’m going to take a bath. When I come back I want to lie in your arms with my head on your bosom and hear you croon your sweetest Swedish lullabies.”
13
THE GODDESS
I was twenty-two years old in the spring of Nineteen Forty-five. It was the year that Blue’s princess bubble burst. It shook him up. But I was glad he lost her. It was better for both of us.
It had been pretty lonesome for me while he was on the road with Tanja. I made a lot of bar room buddies at Club Delisa and other night spots. But always when closing time came and the one for the road had been hoisted, I’d walk out alone into the dismal early morning.
Many times I wouldn’t go straight home. I’d ride down the outer drive to Lake Michigan. I’d get out of the Buick and walk to the very edge of the crashing water. I’d sit there until daybreak listening to the roar of the furious waves reaching out for me with frothy claws.
I often saw Livin’ racing on the boulevards in a flashy white Forty-two Cadillac. We’d honk our horns, wave and go our separate ways.
I told Blue about Livin’ and Brown. He shrugged and told me I was smart to cut loose from Livin’ because Pocket had given me the right rundown on Brown.
Phala had given me several bad scares. Her kidneys got infected over and over again. I wasn’t surprised. She had floated them in Old Crow Whiskey for a long time.
I ran into Midge in the Brass Rail Bar on Forty-seventh Street a week before Blue came home to stay. Her eyes were black-rimmed with the fast life. Her face was a puffed, mottled caricature of the smooth, clear yellow perfection that I remembered.
Blue came home from Tanja’s kiss-off on May tenth. He looked drawn and tired. He had several scabby gashes on his head. I asked him how he got them. He gave me an ugly look and retreated to his bedroom.
He stayed in his room a lot for a week getting himself together, as he put it. I was really curious to find out what had happened between him and Tanja. I figured that Blue had finally murdered Albert and left clues that woke up Tanja that Blue was the killer.
The day before Blue told me about how he was cuckolded, Helga the Swede called and said she wasn’t coming to work anymore. She was going back to Sweden to become the bride of a childhood flame.
Blue was sipping coffee at the breakfast table when he told me about Tanja.
He grinned sheepishly and said, “Folks, is there an honest, faithful bitch on the face of the earth? I trusted Tanja. I went through hell with that goddamn Albert, just for her. I got my skull split because of her. I almost tapped out buying expensive presents, dining her, wining her in the finest places.
“For the first time since Pauline died, I conned myself I’d found a second wife. Now get it straight, Folks. She didn’t make a sucker out of me. I did it to myself. Not once did she play any con on me. You know that’s impossible even if she had
been slick enough to try.
“She was in the third week of a six-weeks stint in a Miami Beach, Florida, hotel night spot. It was a Jim Crow spot, so I couldn’t even come in while she performed. I’d always get there in a rented car when the club closed to drive her back to our hotel.
“That last night when I caught her wrong, I had pulled up near the hotel where she was dancing. I waited and waited until I saw the cabaret’s neon go out.
“A nigger flunkey that had seen me with Tanja walked up to me with a sly grin on his face. I asked him if he’d seen Tanja. He said maybe. I gave him a double saw and he pointed toward the beach.
I walked through the sand and wondered why the hell she’d stroll the beach while I waited out front for her. There was a bright full moon lighting the beach. I didn’t see her anywhere.
Then I heard a faint jabbering. It seemed to be coming from a cluster of beach cabanas a couple hundred yards away. As I walked closer, I knew it was Albert. I followed his jabber to the front of a cabana. The canvas screen at the door was pushed back.
I stuck my head in the door. Tanja was naked and moaning. She was on her hands and knees on a bench. A tall, naked white guy with long blond hair was standing behind her with his hands locked on her shoulders. He was pushing it into her, hard and fast.
“Albert was dancing a wild jig around them. I walked around the outside of the cabana looking for a club. I found a quart beer bottle. I tipped into the hut. The peckerwood was still banging it into her. Albert saw me and screamed.
“I brought the bottle down on the peckerwood’s noggin. Blood spurted like I’d cut his throat. He ran past me, across the beach toward the hotel. I chased him all the way into a rear entrance of the hotel with that jagged broken bottle in my hand.
“He ran screaming down a corridor into the arms of a gang of hotel security police. They beat me senseless with their sticks. I came to in a cell; I thought for sure I’d make the Florida pen.
“I couldn’t believe it when they released me at noon the next day. I was lucky. The bastard I slugged was one of Miami Beach’s most respected married socialites.
“When I got back to my hotel, Tanja and Albert were gone out of my life. Good riddance, I say. Listen, Folks, we’re getting back on the con track full steam this Monday coming.
“I think I’ll dress up and go to Forty-seventh Street for a haircut and a good massage. If you’re out later stop in the Du Sable Hotel lounge. I’m going to be there conning some fine young broad’s pants off.”
The Second World War was over. And Blue and I were back in the con groove as smoothly as ever by the end of May. We beat an elderly white man at State and Lake Streets on the drag for thirty-five hundred.
A week later, a bunco roller from Eleventh Street busted us on G.P. He put us on a show-up, and we caught the elderly white mark’s finger. Fixer put us back into the street the next day.
We had to kick back half of the score to the mark. I guess Fixer squared the right people with his half of the seventeen-fifty that was left. That bust cut the score to pieces. But without the fix we’d have been in the State pen playing the con for screw’s chow and a soft job. The Fixer sure knew the proper pockets to stuff that fix dough into.
We eased up on the drag for a while. We laid the flue and played the smack. We took off some juicy ones using the Dutchman’s bar angle. There were a lot of hate spots like that in Chicago where I could always pull a mark out to Blue for the kill. We never missed a mark with that angle. Squeezing a white mark between a black man and what he thought was a white man was foolproof con.
The last of June I slipped over to Indiana Harbor to Aunt Lula’s cathouse. It was a wasted trip. Black Kate was gone. A fast young New York pimp had stolen her from her Chicago pimp.
Aunt Lula didn’t have a black broad in the house. And I was in a helluva heat for black and nothing else that night. So, I drove back to Chicago and settled for a jet-black, young twenty-six dice-game broad that I had been banging for a year.
I almost missed her. She had closed down her table and was just getting into a cab when I pulled up in front of the Music Box Bar at Sixty-third Street and South Park Boulevard.
She was a wild lay. But I’d always have a helluva time fending off her frantic proposals of marriage after the excitement was over. She’d plead that she’d whore for me, do anything for me if I’d marry her. She had it bad and that wasn’t good, to paraphrase the Duke Ellington hit record.
On the night of the Fourth of July, I was at a ringside table in the Club Delisa. I had a pretty, young, white school teacher from Philly with me. I had lugged her from the Four Eleven Club on Sixty-third Street across from the Music Box.
The joint was crowded with black hustlers and squares. And there were quite a few whites from Chicago’s gold coast soaking up the rich nigger atmosphere.
There was a vacant table right next to ours with a reserved sign on it. If I had known who was going to sit at that table, I’d have run from the joint before she got there.
In fact the rest of Nineteen Forty-five was going to be even worse for me than that horrible year Nineteen Thirty-nine when they took Phala away from me.
It was too bad I didn’t get a year in prison for that thirty-five hundred score from the elderly white mark that Felix fixed. I would have had a better break in the joint than I was going to get in the street. And that’s the guaranteed truth.
My disaster came to the vacant table during the show’s intermission. I had been half turned in my chair for half an hour sweet-talking my sexy school teacher. Then we went to the packed dance floor and stood in one spot and scratched our bellies together to the itchy music of the club’s band.
I had my eyes half closed enjoying the warm, racy glow of rum and coke and the hot softness of the school marm. A delicious whiff of Chanel Number Five opened my eyes. I looked down at my side.
A tall white man was holding a Goddess in his arms. His eyes were bleary. And his face had the flaming ruddiness of an alcoholic. Her angelic face had the gleam of rose-tinted porcelain.
She gazed up at me. Emerald stars glinted in her huge, grey eyes. Her hair was a platinum crown that coruscated in the pastel light.
The music outside me stopped. Her pouty scarlet mouth smiled and dimpled the porcelain cheeks. My enslaved eyes were chained to her as she glided away and sat down at the table next to mine.
I was in an enchanted fog when the school teacher and I took our seats. The emcee came on stage and announced the second show. Billy Eckstein and Moms Mabley were the headliners, I think.
I turned my chair to face the stage. The Goddess was just ahead and to the side of me when she turned her chair toward the stage.
Her black-haired escort was on the other side of her table, turned toward the stage away from us. He swayed drunkenly to the music for the first act.
She sipped from a tall, frosty glass. Her exquisite hands moved like beautiful creatures performing a ballet to secret wondrous music. Her face, her limbs, her body could have been created by the composite genius of all the wizard sculptors of the ages.
Her escort turned his head from the stage and hollered something to her. She answered, and her contralto voice was like the caressing lilt of a gypsy violin.
I was thundering inside with a new mad excitement that I had never known before. The strange thing about it was, it raged in my chest and thrashed inside my head. It was all above the crotch line, if you get what I mean.
I sat there and played a mirror game with her through the first half of the show. A half-dozen times she gazed at me through the mirror of her jeweled compact. Each time I’d gaze adoringly into the grey depths of the emerald-flecked magnets.
The school teacher went to the john and gave me the break I needed. When I stood up for her leaving, I pulled my chair closer to the Goddess.
A sly smile dimpled her cheek when I sat down. I wrote a note on a paper napkin. I put my phone number at the bottom of it. I folded it and flicked it into her lap.
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It said, “Seeing you for the first time makes me so sad and blue. Oh! How Johnny O’Brien regrets those worthless, empty years before we met.
“I sit here adoring you and despising the memories of the dull mortal women I have known. But then how could I have known that a Goddess would bless my path?
“May I know the Goddess’s name? Is it naive to believe that a Goddess has a telephone number? Or must I climb to a mountaintop and beg the stars to bring her forth for love? Shouldn’t we ditch our chains and flee together into the passionate midnight?”
The large vein at the side of her long white throat was pulsing wildly as she read it. She palmed the note and stood up facing me.
I glanced across her table at her escort. His head was turned toward the stage. I looked up at her. For a long moment she stood there sweeping her smoky gray eyes across my face. When she went by me toward the powder room, I noticed the lime silk of her skintight dress fluttering over her heart.
The school marm came back with a new coat of paint and a bedroom smile. She was cute, like a carrot-topped pixie.
I was getting lots of hot, heavy action all right. I heard the swish of silk behind me. A tiny paper square fell into my lap as the Goddess floated to her chair. Her escort hadn’t known she had gone and come.
I took the note to the john and read it.
It said, “Johnny O’Brien, you beautiful, dear, mischievous boy. Shame on you for exciting an old married woman with that pretty blarney.
“Apollo should not be required to climb a dusty old mountain to bring forth Camille Costain and her telephone number. Unfortunately my tipsy chain is my husband. If it were otherwise, I should be delighted to flee with you into your passionate midnight. Call me soon, any time, day or night.”
Her phone number was at the bottom of the note. A P.S. was below it.
It said, “Don’t be alarmed when you undress and retire tonight, if you should hear the wild anxious wings of my curiosity beating desperately against your windowpane.”