When I got out I knew I had to get my life together. I had met some hard women in the joint and from what I heard they spent half their lives coming in and out. Still, I didn’t know what to do. I found a little piece of job on 135th Street, down the street from the YMCA. I was selling glazed donuts—sprinkles or no sprinkles, you had a choice—and Skeeter came in. He recognized me and smiled.
We talked a little and he asked me if I wanted to go out for coffee after work. I was thinking not really after working all day in a coffee shop, but I said yes and that’s how we started getting to know each other.
Skeeter Bramwell worked here and there, like half the guys in the world, but what he loved most was playing sax. He told me his father had put the All Star Stompers together. I asked him if it was supposed to be a jazz band.
“It depends on who’s playing,” he said. “Mostly I just round up whoever wants to play and we go out on any gigs we can find.”
“Your father brought you into the business?”
“Naw,” Skeeter said. “He didn’t have much time for me. Didn’t have much time for my moms, either, if you know what I mean. I learned to play on my own, and when I heard he died I went and asked if I could try out for the band. They said I could have it if I wanted it.”
The way I figured, Skeeter was sort of thrown away, like me. His mother raised him and I guess she did the best she could, but from the way he talked she was running the streets a lot, too.
We started hanging out steady. What I liked about Skeeter was that when you talked to him you got the feeling he was really listening, really wanted to hear what you were saying. Most guys I know will just uh-huh you to death while they’re scheming on how to get you into bed. Skeeter didn’t even hit on me right away. Sometimes we would just go and sit in St. Nicholas Park and watch the children play—he liked children. Or we would go to a movie. When his band got a gig I would go and hear them play. I don’t know the exact day I got serious about him. I wasn’t even sure that I was serious, but I took him over to my aunt Nilda’s house and afterward she told me I was in love.
“Why don’t you find a boy from the Dominican Republic?” she asked. “Somebody with good hair?”
Before Aunt Nilda ran her mouth I wasn’t even thinking about being in love, but once she let it out I realized that maybe I did love him. We started messing around now and then and making plans about what we were going to do and Skeeter had some nice ideas of what he wanted from life, including having a family.
“But if I have a family,” he said, “I got to be there with them. I can’t be running around dipping here and dipping there like my old man. I want something serious.”
I believed in Skeeter when he said that. I felt like I could look into his heart and see that he was telling the truth. He had a room downtown, a kitchenette, and I fixed it up for him. I got two pairs of drapes from the Goodwill Center and put one pair at his window and sewed the other pair together to make a bedspread. I got him some nice plates and we bought a mirror and hung it over his dresser, which made the room look bigger. We were getting real close and I was about as happy as I had ever remembered. Then I got pregnant.
My mother was all upset and deep into nine kinds of drama and explaining to me how my life was going steady downhill. I felt bad telling Aunt Nilda but she showed big-time and helped me get a kitchenette in her building.
To me, getting pregnant was scary, but it wasn’t the end of the world. I loved Skeeter and he said he loved me. I had seen a lot of girls get pregnant and end up as just another baby mama with the guy coming around whenever he felt like it and arguing all the time. I didn’t expect that from Skeeter. But I didn’t expect him to get all depressed, either.
Skeeter wanted to be a good father, and I knew he did, but he couldn’t find a good job and I could see where that was messing with him.
“I need … I got to have a place for us that’s a real home,” he said.
What I was hoping for was for Skeeter just to change his mind or to get lucky and find a job maybe with the city or with a department store. What he was doing was working with the band at night and selling hats and gloves down on Twenty-second Street during the day. None of that made any money except when it rained and he sold umbrellas down near Penn Station. On the other hand, I was wondering whether Skeeter was just using not having a good place to stay as an excuse. What I wanted was a real good job to show up, or for Skeeter or me to hit the lottery so that when we got the money I could find out once and for all what was happening. I believed in Skeeter, and I loved him, but I just couldn’t wait forever.
“Maybe you could go back to school and get a degree in something,” I said.
“Or at least my GED,” Skeeter said. “A real college degree is going to take years. Now, if I had me some turntables I could make some good money as a DJ. But I ain’t got the money to get the turntables to make the money.”
“How much do they cost?” I asked.
“You can pick up a good set downtown for about six hundred dollars if you got credit,” Skeeter said. “Earl has a real nice set—tables, mixer, and everything—he wants six Benjamins for.”
Okay, I knew Earl had a shop on 145th Street and he was a straight-up guy. But Earl didn’t give credit, so we needed to come up with the whole six hundred. I didn’t have any idea where we were going to get that much money. But sometimes cool things happen to me—that’s because I live right—and when I was getting my hair done I heard that guy from the roti shop telling Mama Evans about how when he was a kid they used to have rent parties to raise money, so I asked him about it. His name was John Carroll.
“When I was coming up, if your money ran out before the month did,” Mr. Carroll said, “some people would give a party and charge a quarter or fifty cents at the door to get in. They’d sell food and cut the card games and make enough money to pay the rent and have a good time doing it.”
“You didn’t have to pay the rent,” I said. “You could do anything you wanted with the money, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Mr. Carroll said. “But for us it was the rent that we needed.”
I couldn’t wait to tell Skeeter about my idea. When I got him on the phone he was down on Forty-sixth Street buying new reeds for his horn. He wasn’t as enthusiastic as I was.
“How we going to have a rent party when we don’t have a place?” he asked. “My room is so small we’d have to bring in one couple at a time to dance.”
“We could just have it in one of the backyards,” I said.
I don’t know where that came from or exactly where it was going, but I was getting desperate. The thing was, I was beginning to dream big about what me and Skeeter were going to do and I just didn’t want to let that go. Not that easy, anyway. I was three and a half months pregnant and I knew I was going to be showing so I needed to get us going.
“You got to tell me how that works,” he said. “You want to meet me this afternoon and we can talk about it?”
“Not this afternoon, baby,” I said. “I have to go to the clinic. I’ll call you tonight.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Mama Evans, you ever hear of a rent party in a backyard if you don’t have any other place to hold it in?”
Mama Evans was putting out new magazines on the tables in the waiting area. “No, I haven’t, Marisol, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. I guess one day one of the Wright brothers walked up to somebody and asked if they had ever heard of an airplane. Just because it’s new don’t mean it’s wrong, girl.”
“That’s what I always say, Mama Evans.”
“Of course it’s going to be hard to keep people from sneaking into your party.”
That was going to be a problem. Some people would probably sneak in but most people are all right and would pay a dollar or two, I thought. And the more I thought about it the more I knew I believed in Skeeter. Skeeter had made me feel so good up in Sunrise House, I knew he could make people feel good at the party, too. That’s what
I told Earl over at his shop.
“And you could even put a sign out saying something about shopping at Earl’s for good used furniture and antiques,” I said.
“I’ve never heard of a rent party to buy turntables,” Earl said, scratching the stubble on his chin.
“Earl, if the Wright brothers came up to you and asked you if you had ever heard of an airplane, what would you say?” I asked.
“I know what an airplane is now,” he said, smiling.
“So now you know what our rent party is all about,” I said. “Isn’t that cool?”
“And you want me to lend Skeeter the turntables so he can make enough money to buy them?”
“I knew you would get it right away!”
“Yeah, well, all right,” he said. “It can’t do any harm. I guess.”
The party was my idea. The idea of having it in the backyard behind John Carroll’s roti shop was his. He sold food in the shop and also set up a grill in the yard. Everything else was all Skeeter.
Skeeter set up the turntables and started playing a little after seven. People who hadn’t seen the flyers we put around the hood heard the music and wondered where it came from. I sat in the back of the roti shop, where they had this huge kitchen with four ovens, and collected the money. It was hot in the kitchen and I drank so many sodas I had to pee a hundred times before the night was out, but it was okay because I was so happy.
Skeeter knew every song out there and everybody was happy with the way he kept things going. He would call out a number and say, “This is for the young people in love who need to be holding each other close,” and all the young people would get up and dance. Then he would play something for the old people who needed to get their shake-shake-shake on.
“And if you don’t know what a shake-shake-shake is don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just get out on the floor and wiggle your parts until you figure it out.”
I almost strained my neck trying to see what the people were doing. Everyone was having a good time and John Carroll said business was so good he might have to have two or three parties every month.
We made four hundred and nine dollars on the door. Skeeter put some money with it and got the turntables from Earl.
“Baby, we got the turntables and sixty-nine dollars toward our place,” Skeeter said. We had brought the tables to my house and were sitting on the sofa with me leaning against him and his arm around me. “I think we’re on our way.”
Skeeter gave me the sixty-nine dollars and told me to do anything with it I wanted to. I knew he thought I was just going to save it but I thought I should buy him something nice with it to show him that I was really feeling what he was doing. So after I went up to the clinic and had my first sonogram I went down to the new store on 125th Street.
The store had three floors and it was just supposed to be smoking. When it opened the mayor was there and the ceremony was in all the papers. But when I showed up it was dead. There were some clerks standing around trying to act cute and a lady in a cleaning outfit watching one of those televisions they had put up in a corner. Other than that they had more security guards than customers.
I looked around for a sweater because I thought Skeeter would look good in a pullover. I found some but they were going for over a hundred each so I just kept walking.
“May I help you?”
I turned and saw this tall guy wearing a suit and a carnation so I figured he must be the manager or something. “How come you don’t have any people in here?” I asked.
“Well, it’s a relatively new store,” he said. He was looking around the whole time he was talking to me like he had something else to do. “It takes time for people to understand what better merchandise is all about.”
“Are you hiring any new people?” I asked.
“Not at the moment,” he said, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping at his face. “You can leave an application in the third-floor office if you’d like.”
“Who’s the—” He had already started away. “Yo, don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you!”
He stopped, turned his big head, and looked me up and down like I was dirty or something. Then he came back over to me and asked me what else I wanted.
“Two things. First, I want to know where I can find the manager of this store,” I said.
“Third floor,” he said, looking down his nose. “Ask for Mr. Reuben. And the other thing was?”
“I just want you to know that you should try to join the human race. They’re taking anything now.”
He turned on one heel and walked away shaking his head. The truth was that I would not have cut him under any circumstances because that’s not the kind of girl I am. But as stuck-up as that fool was I could tell that he needed cutting and it probably wouldn’t be too long before somebody did it for him. In the meanwhile I had better things to do.
I told Skeeter I’d be at his house when he got home and I was. I had brought a quart of pepper steak, a quart of shrimp fried rice, and an order of butterfly shrimp.
“Girl, you up to something,” Skeeter said when he saw the food. “You don’t even like shrimp.”
Skeeter only had a little card table with folding legs but I had bought a tablecloth from Job Lot and a white vase with flowers painted on it so it looked nice. I put the plates out and some food while he watched me. I didn’t want to smile or anything, but I knew he was watching and I did smile a little. Also, he knew I had something on my mind. We were getting close like that, with him knowing little things about me and me knowing little things about him, like how he was going to say “no way” when I told him my idea.
“So guess where I was this afternoon?” I said.
“You told me you were going to the clinic,” he said. “How did everything turn out there?”
“It turned out good,” I said. “And I felt good so I walked down to a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, to that big store on the corner. You know which one I mean? They had all the mannequins dressed in those striped shirts that time?”
“Right down from the Magic Johnson theater.”
“The manager, Mr. Reuben, seemed okay,” I said. “Kind of downtown white. He was wearing his suit inside his office like he thought some television cameras were going to show up or something.”
“Mr. who?”
“Mr. Reuben,” I said. “He’s the one who wants to talk to you.”
“Talk to me about what?” Skeeter had his head back and turned to one side.
“About you setting up a DJ booth in the store,” I said. I finished with the table. “I didn’t get any wonton soup because it didn’t look too fresh.”
“What does this guy know about me and about me being a DJ?” Skeeter said.
So I told him about the guy walking around with the carnation in his lapel looking at me like he was somebody. I told him about me finding the office and asking to speak to Mr. Reuben. I didn’t tell him that I refused to leave until Mr. Reuben came out of his office, but I let him know that I told Mr. Reuben that his store was empty because it was like an undertaking parlor, and that he should have some music and at least talk to Skeeter.
“That he should talk to me?”
“And I said you can set up a DJ studio right in his store and young people would come in and listen to you and think it was a jumping place. We made an appointment with his executive board for Thursday morning at nine-thirty”
“No, that ain’t happening,” Skeeter said. “No way. I can work a party but I don’t know nothing about working no department store—and I don’t even have a suit so there’s no way I’m going to a board meeting Thursday.”
I just sat there at the table with my hands folded in front of me.
“Marisol, honey, I love you and I’m really going to try hard to make a home for us,” Skeeter said. He lifted my hands from my lap and held them in his. “But I’m just Skeeter, baby. Maybe, one day, you know, I’ll get a whole lot of stuff together and be more than I am now, but right now,
I’m just plain old Skeeter.”
He did love me and I felt it whenever I was around him. He put his forehead down on his hands, which were still holding mine, and he looked so miserable.
“Would you meet with him just to see how it turns out?”
“Baby, I’m not ready yet,” he said. “You have to understand that.”
“I do,” I said. “It’s just that … I told Dulce that you were going to try. For her. I know she doesn’t understand, either, but maybe she can feel it.”
“Who?”
“I had the sonogram today,” I said. I was crying a little but I got up a smile to go along with it. “The doctor said I was going to have a little girl. And I was thinking that we would name her together, but until we picked out a permanent name I’d call her by the name they used to call my grandmother—Dulce. It means sweet. Is that okay with you?”
“You going to have a girl? You saw one of them pictures of her?”
“Yeah. And I told her you were going to go see Mr. Reuben even though you might not get the job.”
“How you going to tell her that when she can’t understand anything yet?”
“She knows how you feel about her, right?” I said. “And I know you would do anything for her, right?”
All day Wednesday at the donut shop I kept my cell phone off because I didn’t want Skeeter calling me up and saying that he had changed his mind about going to see Mr. Reuben. I knew Mr. Reuben could make him look bad, ask him a whole bunch of questions about where he had worked and where he had went to school, that kind of thing. I felt a little scared for him but if Skeeter got a steady job right in Harlem everything would work out just perfect. I had seen an apartment on 116th Street near the 3 train. It wasn’t anything fancy but I thought we could pull it off. We could have one bedroom like a studio for Skeeter to practice in for the first year and then, when Dulce got about sixteen months, we could buy a daybed and that would be her bedroom. At first I thought I would put wallpaper in the living room, then I changed my mind and then I changed it back again because I have always wanted an apartment with wallpaper somewhere in it.