Vanishing Rooms

by Melvin Dixon

  “Four teenagers, suspects in the recent stabbing of a young reporter for the Daily News, were apprehended today in the vicinity of the murder, which occurred last week. Police discovered fifteen-year-old Lonny Russo lying naked in the chalk outline of the body this morning and brought him in tor questioning. Neighbors had reported seeing him in the area several times and just hours before he was arrested. Later, police obtained a confession from him in which he named three accomplices. Max Bono, Louis Iacuzzi. and Cuddles Manzani. The others were also arrested and were arraigned earlier this evening. Bail was set at $25,000 each, but it is doubtful whether they or their families can meet it. The boys are being detained at Rikers Island until their trial date. Mr. Jon-Michael Barthé. the victim, had been with the News for only several months. He was an avowed homosexual, and the police suspect he may have known one of the boys. Barthé’s body, following an autopsy performed at Bellevue Hospital, was flown to Louisiana at his family’s request for burial there.”

  I saw their faces. Scary faces. Mean faces. I watched as they walked handcuffed into the police station. They didn’t hide under stretched T-shirts or jackets pulled over their heads like most suspects in front of the camera. These boys walked proudly, defiantly, as if they had a world of support behind them. Metro’s college graduation picture was shown, but it had been cut off at the shoulders, right where another arm could be seen draped around him. a brown hand clutching another diploma rolled with ribbon. That hand was mine. The television room was quiet, almost hushed. Some men squirmed in their seats, others were roused from their reclining positions to take notice of Metro and what had happened. I said nothing.

  I turned to Clementine who was absorbed in the newscast. “It just keeps happening, huh?” he said. “Why, just last month in Central Park some guys went around with baseball bats and attacked people from behind. People they only suspected were faggots. Who do those fucking kids think they are, anyway? Who are they to decide who’s a faggot and who ain’t?”

  “Yeah, who the hell,” I said, turning from the screen and for the first time seeing two rows of single doors. When the news had finished some doors opened, some closed. Men left the carpeted area for whatever retreat was available.

  “Shit, baby,” said Clementine. “Sometimes it’s just as bad in here as it is out there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have to find that out for yourself. Maybe for you it won’t be so bad, pretty as you are.”

  “Real pretty,” said someone passing me. I soon lost him to a sea of towels.

  “You want to stay and see the late movie? It’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? We all say the Bette Davis lines in unison. It’s like being in church and reciting scripture.” Clementine looked delighted.

  I frowned.

  “Then let’s go up another flight. You’ll like what’s there, even if these rooms ain’t much. Hold onto your fantasy. It’s gonna be a bumpy night.”

  “Wrong film, Clem.”

  “Don’t I know it? I wrote the original lines, darling.”

  “My darling Clementine.”

  “Now you’ve got the hang of it.” Clementine put his arm around my shoulder and led me up the stairs. For no reason at all Metro’s voice came to me. The closeness was scary.

  “Hello again.”

  “Hello, there.”

  “I’m Jon-Michael.”

  “I remember. I’m Jesse. ”

  I loved him. I loved his eyes. I loved his angular face and awkward walk as if his body tilted with the weight on his back or in his mind. His fingers were thick, nails chewed to red blunted tips, and when he brushed back his hair you could see the oval of his head smooth out from the triangular nose and square jaw. His teeth were perfect. Once he gave me a tooth. His dentist had extracted a painful wisdom tooth growing in too small a space. It was a perfect specimen, no cavities, not even a line of tartar where tooth meets gum. Metro laughed when he presented it to me. I placed it in a box where I kept my high school class ring, my frayed Boy Scout badges, my Honor Society pin. His smile, his teeth, now a jewel of his body I could keep.

  Which is what I remembered most about him that cold February evening when he called out to my row of marching demonstrators as we returned to the Nkrumah Center. Later, at dinner, he came over to my table where I was sitting alone. “Did everyone make it back all right to the Center?” he asked. “No one hurt?”

  “No one. Thanks for asking.”

  “May I join you? I’m still finishing dessert.”

  He brought his tray over and sat down close enough to make me nervous. I said nothing at all about the demonstration, just to be sure it was me he wanted to get to know.

  “The dining hall is closing. We have a few minutes. They’ll ask for our trays soon.”

  “You’re right. They are closing.”

  He had an accent, somewhat disguised, but an accent just the same.

  “You want to come back to my room?” I asked. “We can talk there.” He seemed cautious.

  “Sure. Let’s go. Is it far?”

  I had a single room that year. My own room, for the first time in my life. At home my brother Charlie and I shared a bedroom, and we would either be fighting or conspiring to scare my parents when we heard their regular late-night sounds from the other side of the wall. The room I now had on the second floor of Andrews Hall looked out on the campus cemetery. Abandoned, I was sure. Then one morning I saw an elderly woman place flowers at a headstone. When she left I discovered the last resting place of a retired professor of English, dead only a year. The ground beneath my feet was still soft. The headstone, unlike the moss-edged others, was so new it shimmered in the sun. I watched for her regularly from my window. She came only on Sunday mornings. She never knew I was watching, or that other rooms above mine also had eyes.

  We reached my room through the tunnel connecting dorms and dining hall. I cleared a place for Jon-Michael to sit on the bed and searched for records to play.

  “Jazz?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Classical jazz.”

  “Are you French? I mean, you have a French name. I’m told Europeans really have a thing for jazz.”

  “Can’t you tell by my accent?”

  “It’s a mixture. Southern? British? What is it?”

  “Well, I’m just a poor boy from Louisiana. Lafayette, Louisiana. Cajun Country. You know about the Cajuns of the South?” ’

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, our ancestors are French. Protestant refugees from France who settled in Canada, then when the English kicked us out, many left for Louisiana which was still under Napolean’s control then.”

  “I remember. The Louisiana Purchase. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “How’d you manage to come to Wesman, this far cast?”

  “My father’s a veterinarian. He wanted to go to Harvard, but his family was too poor to send him cast to school. He wanted me to come east. I’m on scholarship.”

  “So you’re one of the disadvantaged white boys of the South,” I said, laughing. “Culturally, I mean. That’s the way they see it, don’t they?”

  “Maybe. But I’m here, and glad of it.”

  “I’m from Connecticut. Hartford. A northern ghetto.”

  “Ghetto kid meets farm boy.”

  “Sounds like a double-feature horror flick.” And we laughed. We later discovered we were both English majors Jon-Michael wanted to be a journalist; I, a dancer. I also majored in theater arts. But I didn’t tell him then that I wanted to be a dancer. It was considered too unacademic. Frivolous. But what better way to fulfill a gym requirement without having to run track, swim, play football or soccer. And in cold New England weather! I tried tennis and barely got the ball to the other court, and I never got away fast enough from the squash ball that always found my head or foot to bang against instead of the front wall.

  Then I joined the crowd of students at the “black table” for meals and had to give up telling anyone I wante
d to dance. Until someone asked me why I played “B-ball” so much.

  “You always in the gym, man.”

  “You’ve seen me?”

  “Yeah, Jesse. You must be pretty good.”

  I couldn’t help chuckling at the confusion. “I go to the gym for dance class.”

  Sudden silence.

  “What?”

  “Dance. I study dance.”

  “For what? To be a ballerina?”

  The table broke up laughing. People started looking from other tables. I tried to hide. And for once I regretted there was only one black table, a gathering of friends that the New York Times called “Wesman’s failure in liberal education,” which meant that black students weren’t supposed to have each other as friends. We were supposed to be “textbooks” for liberal whites, which is what my friend Randolph used to say. But who’d speak up for me? The brothers, or whites who never expected to enroll at this prestigious university near the Connecticut River with black boys from Harlem or the South as roommates? Or worse, competing for the same A in government class or freshman composition. So I was caught. And I tried to dance with words this time.

  “If you knew anything about dance you’d know that ballet is only one form. One of many. You must be reading too many comic books or men’s fashion magazines.”

  “Whoaaaah—” said someone else.

  “Just vamp all over him, Jim,” said another.

  “My name ain’t Jim,” I said.

  “You trying to start something, man.”

  “Just that it’s modern dance. I study modern dance.”

  “Modern Dance?”

  “Yeah. You know like Alvin Ailey. Merce Cunningham. Murray Louis. Pearl Primus. Modern dance.”

  “You still wear tights and leotards and swish don’t you?”

  “I thought you were smarter than that. All of you.” I looked around the table.

  “Dance,” he said again. “Shit.”

  “Then you take that shit to the cleaners,” I said, picking up my tray. The food half-eaten, cold. Behind me was silence, then laughter sharp as nails. But months later, when the same students organized the takeover of the classroom building and asked me to dance as part of a memorial service to Malcolm X, I refused. Yes, I was there demonstrating too, but I left the barricaded front door for the second-story window, and I looked out on my own.

  When I told Clementine I had recently graduated from college he rolled his eyes in despair. He sucked his lips. “I never heard of going to no college to be a dancer. You just dance, that’s all, and hope the music keeps on playing.”

  “Is that how you sing, to just any music?”

  “I just spreads my mouth and holler. ’Specially when it goes in.”

  “I’m not talking about sex.”

  “What else is there to holler about or to spread for?”

  “Metro and I were different. We met in college.”

  “That’s what you think. You still holding on to that shit? Carrying that load? Honey, here you get your load off. Any way you can.”

  “Not me.”

  “That’s cause you think you too pure to pee. But when that boy got killed you found out that he wanted to get down sometimes, huh? That he really came to the baths just to get away from you. Pretty as you is, he probably felt ugly because he knew he needed him something raw. Something you was just too refined to give up.”

  “That’s not right, Clementine. Metro and I came from the same stuff.”

  “The same dirt?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because I know what Metro wanted. And I know what I want.”

  “That’s what you think. It may be that cut-and-dry in here, but you got to bring your own lubrication.”

  That first evening in my room, Metro and I didn’t talk long. But we discovered one main interest we had in common, literature. The next semester we found ourselves in the same English class at 8:30 a.m. and afterward arguing about poetry over coffee in the campus snack bar. Metro told me then that he had spent the summer before in France with a study group from the college. I couldn’t hide the envy that came through my silence. I wanted to know everything about Paris and even dragged up remnants of my high school French to use in conversation. Metro described the city: the wide boulevards, clean subway, skeletal Eiffel Tower, and the muddy brown Seine that sometimes crests over the stretch of road circling the banks. I had always thought of the Seine as silvery and dark and smooth as wine.

  Then he talked about Lafayette, Louisiana, and the farm where he grew up, and the black people who clustered in small villages nearby. Parishes, he called them. The smell of woodsmoke and tobacco hung everywhere. Blacks living there had French names, too. Then I told him about my father and grandfather, both from Pee Dee, North Carolina, where the river gave the village its name and where it runs as chalky brown as the Mississippi or even the Seine. I told him about my mother’s mother who lived and died in Irmo, South Carolina, just outside of Columbia. When we went to her funeral, I was only six or seven. The only thing I remember is our changing trains in the middle of somewhere with hiss and steam rising from the tracks, and later, my mother’s scratchy sobbing which was even then a language the two of us shared. “Her name is Jessica,” I said. “And she named me Jesse. Boys named after their mothers are different.” He smiled. And I smiled.

  Late one night, he came back to my room. I had just finished typing a paper and was about to begin my dance exercises, stretching and pulling each muscle to relax for sleep. He was startled and uneasy at first to find me in tights and leotard. He watched my movements silently. He sat on the bed, his face flushed, hands nervous. I ended my last relevé repetition. I didn’t say anything, either, but sat cross-legged facing him. He got off the bed and sat on the floor.

  “Could you like me just a little bit?” he asked abruptly.

  “I could like you a whole lot.”

  “I can’t help that I’m from the South.” He looked worried. Then he put his hand on my thigh. The warmth seeped through the stretched black cotton to my brown skin. “You look good in tights,” he said.

  “Let me show you how I look without them,” I said.

  “Do you like me a little bit?”

  “I like you a whole lot.”

  The next morning we were late for the same class. We ran through the snow covering the ground, slipping and falling along the way. I called him Metro for the fast, slippery train we were on.

  For the rest of that semester, our junior year, I took dance class three afternoons and Metro worked on the campus paper several nights a week. He wanted to become editor the following year. Sometimes we studied together all night. Sometimes we were together all night without studying.

  In our senior year, Metro became editor of the paper and I performed in the college’s spring dance concert. Wilona Agnes and I danced to a Billie Holiday song about a man leaving a woman and driving her to drink. And I did a solo to “Strange Fruit.” I dressed in tattered cut-off jeans, baring my chest and dancing in a series of small, contracted movements in a circle that extended from a single rope ending in a noose about my neck. The spotlight held my glistening head and body. My arms and head dangled alternately from the noose. Oil on my body glistened with sweat in the light that held me as tight as the rope did against the thick suggestion of night. White makeup around my eyes made the sockets appear to bulge and my head look like a dangling skull. My movements silenced the audience, and I wasn’t even sure of their presence until the last wailing chord from the song finished and my head turned in the noose and hung there limp. The house lights brightened. Applause was hesitant, then gathered weight. It was my first solo, a statement in itself of where I might go from this limited space of light and shivering movement. It was a dance I kept on dancing in my mind long after the concert. The next day someone asked me what the dance meant. I said the meaning, if there was any meaning, was obvious. Then he asked if I wasn’t really saying some
thing about people ostracized from society, outcast, martyred, some fruit unpicked and rotting in its sugar. I didn’t know what to say. I promised to think it over. And I promised myself that I’d keep on dancing no matter how hesitant the applause, how rooted the tree, how strange the fruit.

  Then I saw the gleam of metal prison bars on level six.

  Clementine started loosening his towel, taking it off, rolling it around his neck like a scarf. He was grinning wide this time. Grinning and pulling me after him.

  “You don’t need a room for this action, baby. It’s all out in the open.”

  “You mean caged in.”

  “That’s just a figure of speech. You can do anything you want here. With one person, two, or several. I don’t know about you, Jesse, but I’m getting me some action.” He disappeared into the darkness. I looked around but I couldn’t really contain all I saw. Instead of private rooms with numbered doors protecting the sounds and action inside, these were open spaces bordered by aluminum bars extending floor to ceiling. People lay everywhere, on bunk beds or single twin-sized mattresses covered with dark vinyl, no sheets. And every 4 x 8 space was measured out by the flat metal bars and the people in them waiting for pleasure or punishment. Men filed in and out of the cells. Some remained coupled or in threes for just as long as it took to imagine you were a prisoner and they were the guards or fellow inmates, coming to take their pleasure or revenge on your youth or safety. It didn’t matter if you were lubricated or not. Or if you really wanted it that way. They took pleasure in your pain and confinement and you lay there, ass open and crying for more, more, and more.

  “But you want pain,” a voice inside me said. “Don’t you? Why then did you come here? It’s not because of Metro anymore. He’s dead.”

  “Why did you choose that dance, Jesse?”

  “Look Metro, I don’t want to discuss it. It’s my favorite Billie Holiday song and I wanted to dance.”

  “But why do you always act like black people are the only ones oppressed? There are other oppressed people.”