Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  And then, “Opal takes it over the top”—and a sigh. The players were known by their gems. James had earlier told me this was the local peculiarity, and no one sat down to the gambling table unembellished.

  “Eighteen on Tourmaline,” the dealer went on, then “Twenty-one!” and a belligerent chorus, a scraping of chair legs, and the refreshening of drinks.

  “Tourmaline shining tonight,” remarked a fat catfish of a toff, helping himself to the bourbon from the tray beside me, throwing it back, returning to the fray. Tourmaline was James.

  I watched them play, and felt a swell of pride when he won, and disappointment when he lost or folded early. They played and drank, and I simply drank, and no one noticed me at all. I went out on deck and looked at the stars, and it was quiet on the water, the blackness all around thick and soupy. I could see across the river to Algiers where a few lights still shone. I sat down in a deck chair to watch the lights for a while, and fell asleep.

  When I woke up, James was standing over me, smiling.

  “Looks like you don’t find it all too exciting,” he said, poking at my shoulder till I grabbed his hand. I felt guilty for having walked out and fallen asleep.

  “Oh, no,” I said, protesting. “It is exciting.”

  But he was right, and we both knew it, and without saying it out loud it got resolved that I wouldn’t tag along any more nights on the Avalon … I imagine I didn’t much like being outside the frame, with him and the others so suave and dark and beautiful in the middle of the canvas. I caught a cold from sleeping out on deck, and was sneezing and wiping my eyes for the next few days, and he was bringing me up honey and lemon from the kitchen, and one way and another the balance got restored.

  James was the youngest of seven children, and all his brothers and sisters were spread out across the country. Two of the sisters were living in Chicago with his mother; the brothers were in Kansas City and Atlanta, and his father had for ten years or so been working at River Hills, living here and there around Lillienthal, and on the river. His mother worked two jobs in Cottage Grove, on the south side of Chicago, and he had lived with her till he finished high school, then stepped out on his own. He was a year older than me, but had collected authority in ways that made him seem more than that—he had a cousin who was in and out of reform school who had taught him all about his own equipment. James told me about how he and Rudolph would hang out together, and how Rudolph had an older white friend who used to take photographs of the two boys playing with each other and whatnot.

  “Used to go down on us too,” he said, stroking my back as we lay together in his big pink bed, drinking bourbon, spreading out our past.

  It was the first time I’d heard the phrase, and it could’ve meant so many things, I was a little disappointed when he told me what it did mean. Putting a phrase on a thing didn’t enhance it much I noticed. There weren’t two others like us in the world, we were unique and fabulous. All the rest was nonsense. I found I didn’t want to hear about him and Rudolph, not how they shot craps together or engaged in this and that bit of petty larceny in the Loop, or how they worked up the photographer, or salesman, or deli man together.

  BESIDES, I HADN’T MUCH TO TELL HIM about my own experiences. I knew that I felt proud of myself when I was with him in a way I hadn’t before—easier to be proud of what you are when you have someone to be proud of it with. Walking down Bourbon Street, sitting at the dock on Decatur, or calling on his friends on Esplanade—anywhere we went something seemed to follow us, a kind blue light that made us glow. The music of the streets was high and tender, and it rang us up and down the streetcar lines. Women reached for us out of their open doorways as we passed; whatever it was we were demonstrating, people wanted to buy.

  Mrs Odum would remark, “You boys look mighty spiffy tonight,” and add one of her quick sighs. I loved wearing my hat when we went out in the evening. James had picked up eyecatching items of apparel that he wore with style: a velvet vest with little pearl buttons that was as smart as anything on the river, a pair of deep red suede shoes with Cuban heels. He moved through New Orleans with a graceful lope. It seemed he was always scooping up the air as he passed—he had played basketball, he had known how to run through the streets—and his smile was like his armor. His spirit and his body were one, and that to me was magical. Remembering his long, lean authority is remembering the night air, the river and the honeysuckle, the smell of his skin that was like all of it together. When I was drawing in the park, or just sitting on the dock and watching the boats go by, I was thinking of him, and the sense of rightness and fullness that came from what we had together carried me along.

  Then the second week I got a job. Little Mr McBride knew someone who worked at Regalia Manufacturing, a ribbon factory in his old neighborhood, and he had heard from him that they might be hiring. He presented this fact at dinner.

  “Taking anybody,” he said, “even Northern boys, I expect …” He liked to have his joke about northern and southern, by which I guess he meant white and black. I got the feeling that the men at Mrs Odum’s were all somewhat enamored of James—Mr McBride included—but they never said anything outright that let me know they were jealous. McBride was good-natured, and handsome in his small impish way. He had learned from Mrs Odum to make sweet potato pie, and for two nights we’d had it for dessert.

  “Printing ribbons for prize winners and for the County Fair. You go talk to Darnell Weeks.” He said he’d take me out on his bus line the next day.

  I had another slice of pie, and considered, and looked to James for his opinion.

  “Young ar-teests do have to eat,” he said.

  So I rode out with McBride on his lurching blue and tan bus, and got off twenty minutes from Borchardt Street. I spoke with Mr Darnell Weeks and he said they’d try me out. Then I started taking that bus every morning.

  THE FACTORY WAS ON THREE FLOORS, and the top floor was where I worked: white and black boys together, women sitting at their spooling tables, winding and winding. Below us, trophies were boxed and the grey cardboard boxes of PRIDE OF PLACE and CHAMPION and RUNNER-UP got labeled and dispatched.

  The spools of color hung from the wall—blue first, red second, yellow third, white then pink, finally green. We got our work orders from Louie at the type table, whose hands moved over the drawers absently; grinning and chewing gum with his eyes always on the ladies. Louie was a Cajun. He sang in a high-pitched whine over the sound of the machines and the chatter. His thing was taking out his dick while he was setting type with the other hand, keeping a conversation up with the woman roller at his side, the high desk acting as a screen between them. From where we six or seven men stood against the wall, on his other side, we could see him pulling on it, spitting in his hand, shooting us a sly wink. I had to be cool and not too fascinated when he first did it. Roscoe to my left said it happened once or twice a week, I should pay him no mind.

  Roscoe was my age and already married with two children; his wife worked down on the second floor, and the kids stayed home with her parents. She’s only going to work another month or so, he told me, or, another week or so, or, sometimes, just till the end of summer. He was disgusted with Louie, and expected me to be too. When Louie took it out, Roscoe would set his jaw and glower at him, as if all the women on all the floors were being demeaned by him, not just the roller of the moment. The other men on the line were unperturbed.

  The work wasn’t difficult, but we were on our feet all day, and the bending and pulling tired me out. The air was thick with the smell of sizing, and bits of gold leaf that clung to every stationary surface; it was under my fingernails and in my hair when I came home every afternoon. An old white man named Harris was the foreman, and walked among the workers frowning and complaining and blowing his nose in his grey handkerchief when he was especially upset. The years of surveillance had dropped his chin low on his chest, and his back rose behind his neck in an odd hump. He was a short man, with no authority in his bearing, and the
workers generally ignored him.

  I came home flattened out, but James would cheer me up. I tried to do some drawing in the evening, but it seemed there was always something else going on. It was a job, and I was glad I had it, but it taxed my body more than I imagined it could. It was like the first days of football back in Lillienthal, when you practiced early in the morning and then in the early evening, and in between, lay around the house trying to consolidate your strength.

  We went to Tipitina’s club the second weekend after I started at Regalia, and I was still feeling sluggish and heavy-limbed. My shoulders and back hadn’t yet got used to the pulling pressure of the press handles. A knot had developed on my right shoulder near the neck, and at one point in the evening James leaned across the table, smiling through the welter of Dixie beer bottles and fried peanuts, and massaged it. It made me feel proud and happy that he didn’t care who saw. The club was smokey, and the man on the piano had a round mouth and the songs came out like bubbles from a fish. Everything was underwater. James moved like a shark, coming up close and then fading back; the waitresses danced like waves. We were crowded into the tiny room with a hot Saturday night crowd and the music was pumping up and down:

  And when you come to New Orleans

  You will see the Zulu King

  coming through the sweet sticky air. They called the piano player Professor, and he kept on squeezing the notes: they flew out of the piano like squirts of lemon, hit the walls and the ceiling and happy faces. He rode the piano, and the young broad-shouldered men behind him slapped at their drums and guitar, all of them nearing the finish together.

  The music was the closest to the earth that I’d been—the swaying, bouncing crowd kept my face right against it. The sort of music you could smell and taste, the kind that swirled you around in its vortex, pulled something out of you that you didn’t know was there. James stood behind me when the tables got too crowded, tight in the middle of a netful of shining arms and faces, white sleeves rolled up over muscles of midnight blue, men with their women standing pressed against them, women in scarlet- and mustard-colored dresses, in terry-cloth halters and pedal pushers, a crowd coming out of its shoes. The Professor would throw his notes toward one or another of the couples, and they would shout them back, and the rinky-tink sound of it all was something thrilling.

  Hard and fast, like a storm at sea, and the music rose up in higher and higher waves, with James rocking and sweating behind me, and then things all tilted sideways, and were quiet.

  I came to in what must have been the manager’s office, the photos of this and that jazz great slowly coming into focus over the couch where I lay. James was bending over me, concern all over his face, and his brown eyes as big as I had ever seen them.

  “Giving me a turn here, Mickey,” he said, and I saw there were some other men standing behind him, waiters probably, and as I started to sit up, one of them came forward and motioned me to stay where I was.

  “Too much heat,” he said in a low rumbling voice, and gave James a wink. “You all right now—but you better have your friend carry you home and put you to bed.”

  He was grinning so hard that I had to sit up to prove I wasn’t just some little pastey-face. James wasn’t crazy about his smirk either, I could tell.

  “That’s all right,” James said, exaggeratedly polite in the midst of innuendo. He asked was I fit enough to get up and come home and naturally I said I was. The man still stood over me. I recognized him as the bouncer. He was taller and heavier than James, with a smile that you might call nasty, but you would not call unattractive.

  Get me out of here, I thought.

  The next morning, I felt embarrassed, as if I’d behaved badly, gotten drunk. Maybe I had gotten drunk. People did, after all, pass out. But the guilt I felt wasn’t so much to do with what I’d done as what I hadn’t. It had to do with the big slick-looking bouncer at the club, with wanting him to crawl right on top of me while I lay on that couch. This was something new, something I hadn’t had to deal with before now. Up until that moment, I hadn’t seen anybody but James. Up until then, I’d thought I was set for life.

  I got back to drawing in the park again the next few days when James went overnight on the Avalon, up to Vicksburg and back. I was drawing the white statue, giving it more life than it had, filling up the paper around it with oleanders and dark faces, getting it wrong and starting up again. One of the sketches I produced looked like a real drawing when I finished it, and I put it up in James’ room, stuck under the rim of the mirror. When he came back, he professed to like it a great deal, and that made me keep on. I got the idea I’d like to draw him sitting in the park, and I couldn’t tell if he thought that was an especially good idea or not, but he agreed. Next afternoon, when I came home from Regalia, and after his nap, I sat facing him on the wooden bench, and tried to get his fine dark features down. Trying so hard, I made a mess of him again and again; a lot of other faces began to peep through the smudges of pencil and conte, but none of them was his. I wouldn’t let him see my little stack of failures, wadded them up and threw them into the backyard trash can before dinner. But the next afternoon I tried again, and finally something came through, which might have been his brother or his cousin. But he didn’t even see that resemblance when I relented and showed it to him.

  “Why don’t you just use your imagination,” he suggested after wrinkling and unwrinkling his nose, giving the sheet of paper a long look of disapproval. “I know your imagination’s a powerful thing.”

  But that’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to draw him from life, not memory. I got short-tempered and said I’d do it my way. I drew something ugly and beady-eyed the next time, and finally decided that was enough of that.

  James was proud of his looks, and me not doing them justice must have been like denying the veracity of that handsome charm. You look into a mirror that gives you back a distorted image, quick enough you look away. I felt something lacking in me, in not being able to catch his likeness—not so much a lack of talent as a lack of affection. I had to get him down.

  Work at the factory plodded along, the July heat becoming steamy and uncomfortable. Roscoe disappeared for two days in the middle of the week, mumbled about trouble at home when he came in again. Darnell Weeks fired a girl in the trophy department because she was taking home as many pieces as she engraved—little bitty things she stuck in her purse, like statuettes from a midway: she just had to have her own collection.

  The presses wheezed and sighed and clanked, and at night it took me a good number of drinks before I felt my ordinariness slip away, and my sense of uniqueness return. The more time I put in, away from James and away from my drawing, the less I felt I inhabited an adventure that was mine (ours) alone. The pattern I was setting for myself at Regalia seemed decidedly humdrum.

  James was a glamorous figure, but was I? Could glamour rub off? If it could, I was. Otherwise, I had to admit, as the 4-H streamers passed beneath my fingers and the other Regalia workers spat and swore, glamour was elsewhere. I might as well have stayed in Lillienthal, and gone to work across the river at Hamilton Beach. It was only when I brought James into the picture of my life that it brightened, took on colors other than the glossy blues and purples of the ribbon factory. Through him, I was learning things about myself, about the life of the senses, and at a rapid clip. That, I knew, was what an artist was obliged to do. And I was earning my own way in the world, which was a not inconsiderable satisfaction to me. Most of all I felt the pleasure of spending my emotions, emotions hoarded so long—and delighted in the fine soaring freedom, the solidifying of my amatory intent.

  Lillienthal was hundreds of miles upriver, with tiny figures going about tiny chores. Here in New Orleans I was larger than my previous life. My younger brothers, Dennie Lee and Chris, sent me letters; they were now working as caddies the way Franklin and I had. I realized how quickly they were coming up behind my older brother and me—and that, too, augmented my feeling of freedom, as if,
by filling our shoes, they let us step up out of them, move on. James asked me to read these letters to him. He was enthralled with the idea of having younger brothers; being the youngest himself, he’d never had the chance to baby any of his siblings—had never expected from but always been expected of. And he wanted to counsel, to help; he often talked to me about doing this or that with my life, using my imagination, fulfilling my potential. No doubt his expectations were too high. Sometimes he sounded like Mr Adams, the guidance counselor back in high school. All I had in mind to do was soak up life, become in turn all the vivid colors that came my way, never mind about potential.

  What resolve I had hardened into a determination to see all I could, to do all I might, and worry about putting it to use, sorting it out, later. If I was lucky, I deserved to be lucky— wasn’t that the way it went?

  It got to be a Sunday afternoon in late July, with James upstairs asleep, and me down on my park bench, thinking about my brothers, making a series of desultory passes with my pencil, wishing I could be a little bit more inspired. Usually I would have been in the boardinghouse at this hour, or out with James calling on friends and players. But he was exhausted from running up and down the river and he hadn’t done too well at the tables either, so he was sleeping off Mrs Odum’s pork roast and his discontents, and I was marking time.

  Women who usually sat in the park on weekdays were home now with their families; children who played kick-the-can next to the entrance gate were drowsing on their daddy’s knee. Everything was still, except for the blue jays who kept on with the usual disclaimers, contending with the church bells and the notes of a listless piano that came from the direction of Bufort Street.

  “Well, now, you look recovered.”

  Some familiar voice coming low and wet from behind me; a man standing in a patch of speckled sunlight beside the bench. Big and powerful looking. Smiling in a way that said he knew something I didn’t, but that I’d find it out soon enough.