by Melvin Dixon
Once I was there for a while and on good behavior they gave me visiting privileges. Once a month I could go home. Moms was getting sick and Patty had to take care of her after school. That also helped me get leave. Soon, I’d be home for good. But I wasn’t going near those meat-packing warehouses on West 12th, and I was staying away from Chelsea. Maybe I could talk Moms into moving back to the Bronx since she still had some friends there. Maybe I did, too.
The country is different from the city. And it wasn’t until I was upstate long enough that I really thought about that difference. You forget things you want to remember when you’re on the inside and counting cinder blocks to pass the time. But you remember shit you want to forget. In the country I knew I was cool. Not only because I came from the city but because I had left dead leaves and cloudy skies behind me on the endless concrete. There were no leaves in the hospital and no leaves following me upstate, just snow and chores to do like shoveling snow, cutting wood, and going to class for job training: cooking, auto mechanics, even drafting if you wanted. I didn’t make many friends. How could I? I didn’t want nobody to know what had happened to me at Rikers. They might get ideas too, thinking I was really like that, or that I really wanted things to happen the way they did. Like it wasn’t even those white guys and black guys pumping into me and trying to kiss me, but in my mind it was one guy only, Cuddles. And they’d think I really liked that shit. The doctor did. He kept asking me questions about me and Pops and how we got along. I told him that Pops built things, that’s how we got along. What kinds of things? he asked. Walls, I said. We got a roomful of walls. What kind of walls? Walls that have ears and eyes and big red lips. Walls that don’t talk back and don’t even touch you, but walls that get painted very, very often.
I didn’t get what the doctor was driving at. He didn’t get me either. So we stayed there quiet for a while, me with my legs up and open and my ass all swollen and sore trying to tighten itself back and at least control itself, and the doctor grinning down at me asking if I really wanted it that way and if that wasn’t the real reason why I had held Metro’s face to my groin while the others made him take it up the ass. Shit no, I thought. But he kept asking me that and grinning, so by now I knew what he wanted. I said yes. Yes, I wanted it that way. He stopped smiling. He wrote stuff on his notepad. “That’s fine,” he said. “It’s good to get it off your chest.” But I didn’t have nothing on my chest. I just wanted him to shut up about Pops and about me being one of those guys who needed his touch or the touch of any man. Then he left me alone. I thought about the pain between my legs and the smelly guys who put it there and dug so deep that I lost all control of blood and shit and even my feelings inside. Damn, I said aloud. Damn. Damn. Damn. And there I was still lying in it. It took time, but I got well. Got a light sentence, too. The attack was proof enough for the judge, lawyer, and jury that I was really different. But this doctor was trying to make me more different than I was. Which is why I had my own room at the boys’ farm upstate. Something must have been in the psych report about how I wanted it to happen the way it did, and how I must have wanted Metro, too, all the while before they killed him or found me lying in the chalk. I had a room to myself They was afraid I’d harm the others. Shit. I liked going solo. I was good. I followed the rules. And I got to go home once a month.
Which is how I learned about the quick bucks on 53rd Street between Lex and Third. How much money you could make just following along. I could use the money. It took all my allowance to pay for the bus trip down and to try to surprise Moms and Patty with a little something. My first time out, I sat on the bus next to some guy who kept rubbing my legs the whole trip to the city. He was the one who told me about the bars and corners on 53rd and how much money he made. What the hell, I thought. Let some guy blow me for twenty dollars, why not? That wouldn’t mean nothing since he was doing the blowing, not me. He was asking me for it, with a crisp new bill folded in his hand. All I had to do was sit in the car like I was waiting for a red light or something. It was the simplest thing. But I was too scared to do anything that first weekend out. I was sure I’d get caught. When you already had a record, even the first one, you had to be more careful.
The second weekend free I made it to 53rd and Third. Just checking it out, see. I didn’t say nothing to nobody. I just stood at the corner. I didn’t even go into any of the bars. What for? I didn’t have no money to spend on drinks. And I didn’t know yet how to look like I wanted something to drink so the men who was buying would notice. I stayed outside, checking the whole scene out until it got cold. I stopped at a nearby coffee shop and had hot chocolate. I didn’t expect nothing there. That’s probably why I looked so relaxed and calm. But this older guy spotted me and sat down at the counter. He ordered a coffee. Black. No sugar. Before I knew what was happening, he pushed a folded note to me. I thought it was just paper and would have thrown it away, but it felt like money. It smelled green. A ten-dollar bill. Then he reached for my check and paid for both of us. I didn’t know what else to do. I followed him outside.
Ruella
THAT SPRING OF 1976 I LOOKED FORWARD to the coming dance concerts and theater festivals. Especially since I was with the Taylor Johnson First Company. We’d been in rehearsals all winter, doing warm-up stretches close to the radiators and with as many leg and body warmers as we could wear and still move around. I thought about Phillip who was getting out on parole. And I thought a lot about Jesse. In spite of all we had been through, he was still my friend. We still fussed like cat and dog, but I couldn’t keep him and couldn’t let him go.
After the trial in December, when the boys were found guilty of murdering Metro, Jesse returned to the apartment on West 4th Street. He fixed it up differently and he was living there alone, but he was dating Rodney, who hurt his ankle and wasn’t cast in the show. Too bad for him. Truth is, I didn’t care if Rodney got back into the company or not. I was dancing solo. Jesse got my message and left me alone. I didn’t even miss him staying with me. We saw each other enough during rehearsals. Sometimes we danced together just to practice.
Jesse was luckier than I thought. He was asked to create a piece for a workshop presentation at City Center in May. He wouldn’t talk about the piece except to say it was a dance for males. I figured as much. Something about brothers, maybe, or fathers and sons. Lovers, perhaps. He promised to show me some of the steps before the company director saw the whole thing. Up to now Jesse had been silent. A little too cautious, if you ask me. They were at least giving him a chance. That was more than most dancers got …
I wrote Phillip to tell him Jesse and I broke up. He was sad for me at first, but he said he understood how a man like Jesse wouldn’t stay with a woman long. I understood, too. That’s why I wrote him about it. But I also wanted Phillip to know a man could be loved for his tenderness, not ridiculed or called a faggot. And Jesse was tender, most of the time. Phillip had a tenderness too, until it got too hard for him to show it and he had to cover it over with drugs. At least he could say he was high. Just high. Never lonely or afraid or just wanting to be loved. I wanted Phillip to know I could recognize that need in a man and not make fun or try to dominate him. Anyone. I saw the same feelings in myself. I knew it couldn’t be weakness. “It couldn’t last long, Lady. Not with a man like Jesse,” he wrote. But what about you, Phillip? I wanted to ask. What about you? He said we could talk about it when he got out. He thought he’d be released in time to see me dance. And Jesse, too, if he came to both programs.
When I saw Jesse he didn’t talk too much about himself. I had to ask questions, or guess. He didn’t say much about Metro anymore, either. I didn’t ask about Rodney. When Jesse did say something about the dance he was choreographing, he said he was watching men do different things to study their motion. He gathered his material, he said, from watching men strut with their ladies on Saturday nights or play basketball in the street, but I never thought that was his kind of movement. These are black men, he told me, dancing by themse
lves. And I said, maybe that’s why I’m dancing solo, and to my own music. No black men to dance with.
One afternoon the phone rang just as I was returning from the office. It was Abdul. Yes, I remembered him. He said he was living in a halfway house out in Brooklyn. Could I meet him for dinner? Yes. Movies? Sure. But I told him before he said anything further that I didn’t have any room at my place. I repeated my whole name, Ruella McPhee, and said how much I liked my name—all five syllables. You just can’t squeeze them all into one like Jesse did, calling me Rooms.
“My name used to be Gerald,” he said. “Gerald Washington, before I converted to Islam. Now my name is Ibrahima Abdul Assiz.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s an Arabic name. For me, it means that I know who I am. I can choose my own name. Not what anybody else wants to call me, like Ger or Gerry or even plain Washington. Sometimes in prison you even start to hate math because the numbers say you’re an inmate.”
“I like Abdul.”
“I like Ruella. There’s a tune to it. Are you a song in disguise?”
“Sometimes. What instruments do you play?” I asked, laughing. And he laughed with me.
“I live alone, Abdul. I like it that way, at least for the time being. I need all my space.”
“I know. Maybe I’ve already said too much.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“I’m sorry if I have. I just wanted to see you again. I don’t know that many people. Good people, like you.”
“Thanks.”
“Can I call on you again sometime?”
“Sure, I’d like that.”
“So would I.”
After that we went out a lot together. Abdul wanted to go everywhere: The Bronx Zoo, Central Park, the Bowery, even riding the tram to Roosevelt Island at night just to see the lights. “I love being outside,” he said. And I could feel how much he enjoyed it. Then he took my hand and held it for a long time. The halfway house helped him find a job, and at night he studied Arabic. He had ideas about women, strict ideas. But I had ideas about men. I was a dancer, I could bend. I had had lots of practice. I told him that maybe I could teach him a few things. He laughed at first. Then we talked. He was learning another language and moving in a different space. I felt good with him. I liked the sound of his name and the soft way he said “Ruella.” I tried imitating his voice when I was alone or staying late at rehearsals.
The opening was in a few weeks. And Phillip would be out on parole soon. I was afraid he’d want to stay with me. When you have family you don’t have to go to a halfway house. I was afraid of Phillip being that free. Truth is, I was afraid he’d be like Jesse and want all of my space, the space I was just beginning to share with myself and Abdul. Jesse filled that space with so many horrors I could barely breathe. Abdul showed me other spaces. Spaces inside. I still had a little time to think things through.
Before rehearsal one Saturday Abdul suggested we visit the Statue of Liberty. We left early in the morning to have enough time to climb all the way inside. I hadn’t been there since I was a little girl in a crowd of summer tourists. The winding stairs inside the green metal gown seemed endless and huge, but this time the stairs were only wide enough for one pair of feet in a slow climb. Abdul climbed in front of me and held my hand, easing me up and around the narrowing spiral. When we neared the top to look out from the windowed crown, Abdul stepped back as if he had hit a wall. Then I felt it—a wall of heat that came from the sun beaming on the shut windows. “What heat,” I said, pulling back.
“It’s not just the heat,” he said. Then he pointed to the Wall Street area and the twin World Trade Center buildings. All you could see were the thousand squares of windows towering up. “That’s the view from the joint, too,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Windows you can’t open. From Rikers all you sec are windows you can’t open. Your own window and all the windows of Manhattan across the river. But you also see the bridges, and you hear planes taking off and landing at LaGuardia so you know people are going somewhere. But when you get outside all you see are windows. Windows that don’t open.”
“Exchanging one prison for another? It can’t be that bad, Abdul.” Then I thought about my return trip from Comstock State Prison last fall and how I noticed for the first time the locked gates on the windows of my building, especially the upper and lower floors. I was glad my windows had no locked gates. But Jesse looked out of them with the same trapped look I remember Phillip had when I’d seen him last. Jesse was different. It wasn’t a question of windows or gates. He was trapping himself all the time.
“Let’s get out of here,” Abdul said, moving from the heat and the shut glass. He led me down the spiral stairs. I was afraid of missing a step and falling or twisting my ankle this close to opening night. Besides, I still had a rehearsal to make. We hurried to the ferry, and it didn’t seem like Abdul took a full breath until we were nearing Manhattan and finally disembarking at Battery Park. Our hurrying put me a little ahead of schedule. We sat in the park and looked back across the river. The statue seemed small now and hardly important at all. Just somebody’s tarnished rag baby doll.
Tarnished is exactly the way I began to see Jesse after that. Green and rusty brown. As soon as I arrived for rehearsal he started in on me, asking where I’d been for the past few hours he’d been calling on the phone. “Out,” I told him. “I’ve been seeing the city from the outside.” Another cat-and-dog fight was beginning. I didn’t want him to hurt me more than he already did by giving Rodney so much of his time. But I hadn’t expected that he would sound hurt too.
“With Sheik What’s-his-name? He’s probably got you walking three paces behind him.”
“Since when do you care about names? Real names, I mean. You jealous?”
“Not another fight, please, Ruella. I just wanted to tell you about this dance. I’ve found the music for it. Ellington’s ‘Take the A Train.’ ”
“How original,” I said, trying to turn away. “Then I know what your dance is about.”
“Traveling,” Jesse said, a little too quickly. “It’s about moving from place to place.”
“Rooms to rooms, you mean.”
“What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing, Jesse. But you’re still moving underground. You haven’t changed at all. I was stupid to expect as much, huh?”
“Why stupid?”
“I was stupid to fall for you. It was a stupid idea. I’m over it now. You’re seeing Rodney. I’m seeing Abdul.”
“You happy?”
“Don’t say it like that. You act like a person’s not supposed to be happy. Well, yes, I’m happy. Some feelings you don’t have to fight for.”
“I’m glad for you, that’s all.”
“Don’t condescend to me, Jesse. Not after all I been through.”
“And me? What about me?”
“You never saw me, Jesse. I was just a place to come to. Metro was the same, only he was transportation. Traveling, you call it. Only you never arrived.”
“Where was I supposed to go?”
“You never arrived at knowing who he was. Like he wasn’t worth it, or wasn’t good enough. And you know what happened?”
“What?”
“Metro stayed underground.”
“I don’t follow you, Ruella.”
“You’re not supposed to follow me, Jesse. I want you to listen to me.”
“I’m trying. I really am.”
“Maybe. But you know, Jesse, I caught on pretty quick. I wasn’t going to let you do to me what you did to Metro. You probably drove that boy to hate himself. Just like you tried to drive me. Metro couldn’t live with you, because you made it hard for him to live with himself. He probably was looking all the time for some way to die. Maybe he wasn’t strong enough to do it himself.”
“Suicide?”
“Or self-hatred. It’s all the same. He was traveling, all right. Right into the goddamn tu
nnel you trapped him in.”
“You’re cruel, Ruella.”
“I’m honest.”
“That won’t happen to you? Ever?”
“Not with these thighs, baby. I found my way to the outside. I’m visiting places on my own. So, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get ready for the next call.”
He said nothing. He waited. He said nothing more. I turned back and started to leave. Jesse couldn’t see my lips quivering or my knees weakening. I got to the ladies’ room just before the tears came. But I didn’t really cry. Not for real, anyway. Well, just a little. After a moment I joined the other dancers on the floor.
Truth is, I didn’t have a solo part. Not really. I was just one in a group of girls. We all got carried in on the shoulders of a few male dancers. Jesse wasn’t one of them. Rodney would have been if he hadn’t twisted his ankle so badly. I wouldn’t have minded Rodney carrying me in. Once across the floor we entered again on triplets, then held in alternate time. Arabesque. We made a circle that broke as soon as it was formed. On a second count of eight I did an extension. Right leg, then down. Left leg, then down. Light steps into a circle again, then hold. Each girl ran forward to join arm and leg with another dancer. We collapsed in a heap. We rose alternately, off the beat. Then a flurry of jazz. Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” As each woman rose, swayed hips, then arms, she appeared to be reaching offstage and stage-front for something at a distance, something out there to hold on to. Some were pulled up from the heap, others fell gracefully back down. Step-two-three, relevé. First one, then another. Everyone was up. Hold-two-three. Extension: three o’clock, five o’clock. Someone at six o’clock. Hold. The men had gone. No one to carry us offstage. We continued to reach from inside ourselves, stomachs in contraction, for those things at a distance. The saxophone droned on, and on, and on. Lights dimmed. We held in relevé.
