“Oh, yeah?”
“ ’Cause it tells the truth. And the brothers out here, they don’t want to know about the truth.”
“Hey, Rasheed: Lighten up with that shit, okay?” Cheek checked out the watch on his fat wrist.
“Where you off to, man?”
“See my girl.”
“Sholinda?”
“Got-damn right.”
“She is big, man.”
“Don’t be doggin’ my girl, now.”
“I ain’t doggin’ her, man. Just makin’ a statement is all. Matter of fact, she’s just the right size”—Rasheed grinned—“for a Rerun-lookin’ motherfucker like you.”
Cheek threw a soft right, pulled it at the last second. Rasheed ducked the punch, did a spin kick he had seen Bruce do in The Chinese Connection. Cheek stepped away from it, put up his hands. Cheek and Rasheed laughed.
“Come on, man,” said Cheek. “I’ll drive you home. While we’re on the move, pick up some good-ass barbecue first, place they got up around my way.”
“You know I don’t eat no pork, Cheek. A pig ain’t nothin’ but a filthy-ass animal and shit.”
“Oh, you’ll eat this, Rasheed. And afterwards? You’ll be lickin’ your motherfuckin’ fingers, too.”
Cheek knocked Rasheed’s cap slightly askew. Rasheed straightened it on his head just right. The two friends walked in the warm summer air to Cheek’s car: a ’67 Belvedere, white over blue, with nice, clean lines.
NINE
Dimitri Karras wandered around Dupont Circle in the early evening. In the fountain area at the center of the circle he did a little business, got the word out that he was holding some good weed. He sold a few OZs like that, just mentioning it to a couple of guys he knew, and told those guys when and where they could cop their bags.
Karras crossed in front of traffic, went down to Bialek’s, Marcus Clay’s main competitor, the wood-floored record and book store on the west side of Connecticut near N. He found an Atomic Rooster LP there that he had been looking for, and a hard-to-find David Sancious LP called Transformation (The Speed of Love), but he replaced them in their bins after a few moments of thought. He’d check with Marcus first, see if Real Right Records could order them in.
He went over to P Street, walked into a small consignment shop, bought a few things for Vivian Lee: a second pair of Levis, already worn in, and a halter top with a brown paisley design. He picked up a red-and-white striped tube top on the way to the register, threw that in the stack as well. Marcus would have said he was buying all the easy-to-get-off, no-brassiere-wearing shirts he could find. Karras was glad that Marcus wasn’t there to give him shit; he thought the girl would look good in those shirts, and he thought she’d be comfortable in them, that was all.
Karras stopped last at the Fairfax Market on P, picked up some essentials: milk, cereal, cigarettes, beer. Karras rarely ate at his crib. He bought some chick shampoo—well, the bottle was pink, anyway—and a bar of scented soap. The geeze at the counter rang him up, and Karras walked back to the Trauma Arms in what had suddenly become darkness.
Duncan Hazlewood stopped him in the foyer of 1841. “Well, what about that party?”
“I’ll let you know, Duncan.”
Hazlewood’s eyes registered mischief. “See that you do, damnit.”
Karras went up the stairs. He transferred his bags to one hand, turned the knob on his apartment door.
Vivian Lee sat on the couch, watching Barney Miller with the sound off while listening to Todd Rundgren’s Something/Anything on the stereo at the same time. A lot of stoners liked to pass their time like that, but the confusion was not to Karras’s taste. He couldn’t deal with it, high or straight.
Vivian turned her head, smiled. She yelled over the music, “You got my cigs?”
“Here.” He tossed her the Marlboro softs and a blue book of D.C. Vending matches with the message “Thank You for Your Patronage” printed on its face. She lit herself a smoke.
Karras put away the groceries, dropped the bag of clothing on the couch next to Vivian. “I got you a few things.” And: “I’m gonna take a shower.”
He went to his bedroom, stripped, wrapped a towel around his waist, and walked through the hall. He stopped, saw Vivian facing the window trying on the halter top, watched the wash of muscle over her rib cage as she reached behind her to tie the knot.
“It fits!” she yelled over her shoulder.
Karras had a cool shower. Thinking of Vivian, the way her body had looked as she tied the halter, it was all he could do to get himself soaped up and rinsed off without reaching down to yank his meat.
“I’m going out,” said Karras, standing over her as he tucked a clean Hawaiian shirt into his jeans. She was rolling a joint with the Tops papers and having a time of it, too. Karras put his feet up on the cable-spool table, one after the other. He rolled up the cuffs, cigarette style, on his Levis.
“Don’t you wanna hang out?” said Vivian.
Goddamn right I want to hangout. It’s my place and there’s a mattress in the back and you’re young and fucking beautiful.
“Nah,” said Karras. “I’m meeting a friend for a beer.”
“Okay,” said Vivian with a shrug.
“Okay.”
Wilton Cooper stopped the Challenger in front of a DGA store in Northeast, cut the engine.
“Be right back,” said Cooper to Clagget.
Cooper went into the grocery-variety market, picked up a six of Near Beer and a jar of Vaseline and took both to the counter. He waited behind an old lady who was pulling pennies from her change purse with arthritic hands. He pulled a paperback off the rack to the right of the counter and placed the book on top of the six. The old lady fussed over her things for a moment and walked away. Cooper asked the clerk to add a couple of decks of Salem longs to the rest of his purchases. Cooper paid, the clerk bagged the shit, and Cooper left the store.
Cooper dropped himself into the driver’s bucket, reached into the bag. He tossed the paperback over to Clagget.
“Got you a present, little brother.”
Clagget read the title, smiling a little as he said the name. “Pimp.”
“By Iceberg Slim.”
“What is it, Wilton?”
“That there’s the Book. The Bible of the Street. Most of what you saw in that movie tonight, they took that shit straight from Ice, man. Read that and you’ll know what’s really goin’ on.”
“Thanks, Wilton.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Bobby Roy Clagget rubbed his thumb along the book’s cover. “Where we goin’ now?”
“Back to the motel. That okay by you?”
“Sure.”
“Thought we’d kick back some, B. R.”
“Sounds good.”
Cooper pulled the ring off a can of Near Beer. “Yeah, you and me, we gonna relax, have us a little fun.”
Karras walked straight to Benbow’s, his neighborhood joint, on Connecticut below the Janus theater near 18th. He wasn’t particularly thirsty, and he had made no plans to meet a friend, but he felt he had to get out of the apartment and away from Vivian. He entered and had a seat at the bar. The tender, a guy named Don, drew a mug of draft and placed it on a coaster in front of Karras. Don looked like he had quaffed a few that evening himself.
Karras raised his glass. “Thanks.”
Don pulled an open bottle of Bud from the ice chest, winked, and drank. “To you, Dimitri.”
Benbow’s called itself a restaurant, though Karras had rarely seen the patrons there partaking in its alleged cuisine. It was a narrow place with a bar, dartboards, a juke, and a couple of heads. When Karras wanted breakfast, he got it at the Jefferson Coffee Shop on 19th between M and N, and sometimes at the lunch counter at Schwartze’s drugstore nearby, but he often took his morning java at Benbow’s. Occasionally he’d go in and make a cup of instant himself, as Don was frequently sleeping one off on top of the bar.
Karras wasn’t much of a
drinker. He sipped his draft and listened to the Hues Corporation doing “Rock the Boat” from the juke.
“Hey, Dimitri.”
Karras turned his head at the voice and the tap on his shoulder. Donna DiConstanza, a secretary who worked at the Machinists building on Connecticut and N, stood by his side. She had a feathery Farrah Fawcett-Majors thing happening with her reddish hair and a wide smile showing crooked, yellowing teeth. Donna wore flared Lee jeans and one of those gauzy, brightly colored shirts out of Pakistan that shrank to nothing the first time you put them in the dryer. She had a pair of red Dr. Scholl’s sandals on her feet. Karras had done her, standing up against the sidewalk side of a parked van back on R street, about six months back. It was a cold night, both of them high and with their pants down at two in the morning, Donna’s ass against the frosty metal door of some stranger’s Econoline, and it had been quick.
“Hey, Donna.”
“Where you been, stranger?”
“Here and there.” Karras with the cool, mysterious response, giving her the fifty-dollar grin despite himself.
“Buy me one?”
Better not.
Karras gave her an eye sweep. She looked a little like Bonnie Raitt on the cover of Home Plate. Not as pretty, but sexy in a high-mileage kind of way. He felt something move, sluglike, in his jeans.
“Sure,” said Karras. “Have a seat.”
He bought her a whiskey sour. He drank his beer and she had her cocktail and they ordered another round the same way. A drunk the regulars alternately called Poppy or Popeye—like the cartoon character: The old guy had a toothless, rubbery mouth—came over to talk to them, and Karras ended up buying him one as well.
“I’m from Mars, man,” said Poppy.
Poppy drifted, and the conversation between Donna and Karras went to dope.
“So,” said Donna. “You holding?”
Karras patted the breast pocket of his Hawaiian shirt and smiled. He retrieved the joint slyly and palmed it over to Donna.
Donna said, “Be right back.”
She got off her bar stool and went to the ladies’ room. Karras ordered another round, and by the time Don served it, Donna had returned. She had the sourish smell of marijuana on her clothes and in her hair, and she had to grab the bar to get into her seat. She drew a Benson & Hedges from the pack set next to her rocks glass. Karras gave her a light.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“Good weed, Dimitri.”
“Always.”
“Here.” She passed him what remained of the joint.
Karras walked past the back of the bar and along a short hallway, went through a door labeled Gents. The head was tiny, with a butt-littered wall urinal, sink, and clouded mirror. Karras pissed in the urinal, cranked open a casement window above it as he drained. Benbow’s management had run a small but decent speaker from the juke to the head, and the long version of the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money,” with its insistent, classic bass line, was now coming through. Karras put his back against the door, watched himself in the mirror and grooved on the O’Jays as he smoked down the joint. He extinguished what remained with his thumb and forefinger, dropped the roach back in his shirt.
Back at the bar, Donna was looking a little more drunk and a lot more beautiful in that Bonnie kind of way than she had before. Karras stumbled a little getting onto his stool.
“Whoa,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Donna.
The two of them laughed.
In a couple of minutes Karras crossed into that zone he always got to when he put reefer on top of a few glasses of beer. He seemed to be floating, rather than sitting, on a stool without legs. The singles on the jukebox, the ones he would never listen to on the radio, sounded damn good. And nothing he said to Donna sounded wrong.
Donna leaned her head on Karras’s shoulder, looked up at him with her waxed green eyes.
“So, Dimitri.”
“What?”
“Wanna fuck?”
“Okay.”
He watched her walk along the bar and into the hallway, watched her stop at the door marked Gents and make a clumsy toss of her feathered hair, her eyes moving broadly and suggestively in the direction of the door. Then she had gone through the door, and Karras got off his stool, excited and kind of sad for both of them at the same time. He tried not to look at Don, who was attempting to catch his eye from behind the bar.
Karras entered the bathroom. He and Donna began to kiss furiously at once. He ran his hands up into her shirt and felt her small hard breasts. She unbuttoned her jeans, pulled them down around her ankles, turned, faced the mirror, bent forward, gripped the sink. Karras took a dirty bar of soap off the sink’s platform, wet it under the tap, lathered up his right hand. Someone knocked on the door and laughed. Karras slid his soapy hand beneath Donna’s ass, lubricated her sex. He dropped his own jeans, soaping his cock quickly as Donna stood on her tiptoes to let him in.
“Uh,” said Donna.
“All right,” said Karras. He caught his reflection in the mirror, a long-haired, handlebar-mustached, city desperado with a Cheshire grin.
They got down to it. Their bodies moved to the sounds of Rhythm Heritage doing “Theme from ‘S.W.A.T.’ ” from the small speaker overhead.
Eddie Marchetti watched the last few minutes, the part those QM Production shows called “the epilogue,” of Streets of San Francisco. The show was a repeat, the one where some high school kid is accused of killing his teacher. Marchetti hadn’t cared for it much the first time he caught it, back in the fall. With Karl Malden in his raincoat all the time and lugging around a nose that looked like it had been stuffed with a ten-dollar roll of quarters, Streets was just another geezer show to Eddie. Well, half a geezer show, anyway. It had Kirk Douglas’s kid in it, at least, a young upstart with longish hair and sideburns, as Malden’s partner.
Harry-O would be on in about five.
Marchetti looked around the darkened warehouse. He scratched his balls through his double-knit slacks. Clarence had gone home to see to his little daughter, and Vivian… well, who knew where Vivian had gone, or if she would ever be back. The place was quiet without the two of them. He heard the television and the faint thump of bass from the disco-fag joint down the block, and nothing else.
“Goddamn you, Eddie,” Marchetti said aloud. And to himself: I shoulda been nicer to the girl.
Clarence Tate looked to his right. Denice, his little girl, breathed evenly, one little chocolate hand moving arrhythmically to some tune playing in her head. She stared at the patterns in the wallpapered ceiling, her eyelids dropping slowly, coming open, dropping back down. Almost there.
At least he had gotten home from that pimp movie in time to put her to bed.
Tate closed the book he had been reading to Denice: The Best Time of Day. The book was about a little brother named William who has a full kid’s schedule—at the community center, at his grandparents’, taking an afternoon nap, shit like that—and then sits around with his folks at night, after his daddy comes home from work. Denice loved that one the best of all her books. Tate kind of liked it, too.
Tate got off the bed carefully, turned on Denice’s portable record player, put the kiddie tonearm on the album he perpetually left on the platter, Gil Scott-Heron’s Winter in America. “Your Daddy Loves You,” one of the most beautiful songs Clarence Tate had ever heard, started in, just the vibes at first and then Gil’s rich, deep vocals. As he did every night, Tate began to sing along.
When the song ended, Tate shut off the phonograph, turned out the light. He stayed in the room a few minutes longer, sitting in a chair he had drawn to the edge of the bed. He watched Denice sleep.
Marcus Clay drove his ’72 Riviera with the boat-tail rear through Adams Morgan, sitting low in the bucket, the AC cooling his face. He pushed in a homemade cassette he had labeled “Superjam, Part 1.” The sounds of Creative Source’s “Who Is He and What Is He to You” began to pulse thr
ough the car. The band was doing one of those long, insinuating instrumental intros like the Temps had pioneered on “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” the same kind of dramatic, intricate production. Marcus figured Creative Source to be a studio concoction, not really a cohesive group, but regardless of the fact that they would probably have little longevity, this was one of those tunes, like William DeVaughn’s landmark single “Be Thankful for What You Got,” that justified an entire career. The song was just all the way bad.
Marcus stopped at Heller’s Bakery on Mt. Pleasant Street and picked up a couple of those Boston creams that Elaine liked so much. Elaine worked as a secretary by day, was doing law school by night. On her two nights off, she liked to cook a nice dinner for the two of them. He knew she’d be doing that now.
He drove over to Brown, a small street on the edge of Mount Pleasant just west of 16th, and parked in front of his row house. He shot the shit with a neighbor of his, a Puerto Rican named Pepe, out on the sidewalk before taking the concrete steps up to his house.
Entering his front door, he smelled the fried chicken Elaine Taylor had prepared for dinner. The living room stereo was softly putting out some planetary jazz, Miles Davis’s Jack Johnson tribute. Elaine loved her Miles. He went to the kitchen, saw her standing there over the gas stove moving some greens around in a lightly oiled frying pan.
“Hey, girlfriend,” said Clay.
“Baby,” said Elaine. “What’s going on?”
“You.” He handed her the Boston creams.
“Mmm, Marcus.”
“Little something for dessert.”
“Come here.”
They embraced, kissed softly. Elaine was a tall woman, six feet without heels, athletic, dark skinned, smooth, proud, beautiful. She looked into his eyes.
“What’s wrong, Marcus? What’s troubling you?”
“Nothin’, baby. Everything’s cool.”
“Uh-huh.” She stood back, looked at him fully. “Pour yourself a glass of wine, go have a seat in that old chair of yours. We’ll have some dinner first, relax. Maybe talk later on. Okay?”