The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  I want to die under a Moroccan blue sky. I want to die where I can get a drink of water. I want to die in a country where rioting will produce emotions other than boredom. It seems, despite the looting, the wounded, the dead—an extremely mild happening. The fact is, I was rather disappointed. What would have been marvelous is that the ugly old city should have burned to the ground. This shock and a minor little civil war would perhaps force us to face the cold cunt of reality. Blacks would lose the war. But we have nothing to lose but our lives, and that doesn’t seem very important in the present climate.

  That rude bitch of sweet dreams, Mama Nightmare, has hung me like a polka dot, like a black Star of David, below the fascist, Germanic clouds of South Africa, U.S.A.

  She has been with me for a very long time, even before I could read and write. The guys at Smitty’s gas station in Boonville, Missouri, called me dago. Aged five, I knew dago was not nigger. But they have remained stepbrothers to this day, forming an uncomfortable army with kike, Polack, poor white trash. But I had nigger, Negro, coon, black, colored, monkey, shit-colored bastard, yellow bastard. Perfect background music for nightmares. The uric sperm of those years has flooded my mind. Was I ever Charles Stevenson Wright? In private moments, I say aloud, my face igniting a sulphuric grin, “Your name is Charles Stevenson Wright.” Occasionally, I applaud this honest sea dog facing me. Charles Stevenson Wright, the man. Face myself or else suffer the living horrors, the grind of a real fuck, guaranteed to keep you moaning until death.

  Inherited bitterness, barriers, color nightmares. A rainbow then. Not Finian’s “I’ve an elegant legacy waiting for ye,” but a remembrance of you trying to rim the daylights out of me in the hope of producing another petrified black boy. My grandfather, Charles Hughes, was a boy at the age of seventy. It is remembering my grandfather and all the other boys who have been buggered through the years by that name.

  Like a quarterly, ghostly visitor, one nightmare always returns. I am facing a Kafka judge (perhaps a god) and his court. Their skin and hair are as clear as rainwater. The quiet is frightening.

  “But I always thought I was simply Charles Stevenson Wright,” I protest desperately, then roar with mad laughter, knowing that whitey, too, has great problems, nightmares. At this stage of gamy, Racial American Events, it is impossible for whitey to produce good niggers. But he still is capable of producing Uncle Toms. But always remember: hoarded prejudices beget slaves who impale their masters on the arrow of time.

  DAY AND NIGHT, night and day. An endless freight train chugging through memory, braking against the present. The enormous blast of the engine is a proclamation of exhaustion, a depressive motif of summer. Another summer on urban Hades. Pollution, Violence, and Corruption are the gods here. The young protest, riot. Their elders bite their lips, inhale anger, or flaunt their power. Nailed between two worlds, I try to stay stoned, clang like a bell in a small tower, comforted with the knowledge that I’m moving, moving on.

  Get it! Get it! Get it!

  I’ve moved again, moved near the financial district, two blocks from City Hall. The streets are always jammed. Jammed to the point of being stationary like a motion-picture still. Then, as if a powerful switch had clicked, the crowd becomes animated, moves on, goes through the repertoire of living, boogalooing between gray inertia and the red-hot scream of progress. They are as dedicated as a perverse Communist. Silent or vocal, the white and black American majority fills me with nausea and a suffocating sense of horror.

  It is morning. My room is in the only hotel in the district. High ceilinged, half its former size, due to progress. The walls have a fresh coat of paint, Puerto-Rican-blue; small deep blue bottles highlight the paint. The large Victorian porcelain washbasin is a monument to another age of splendor. But the bentwood hatrack and chair, the vile painted furnishings dominate—a seedy stage for Tennessee Williams or Graham Greene (the stage is not waiting for me; I live here). But the mattress is clean, firm, and makes me feel good. Already I am debating whether I should christen it with the pretty black junkie girl. A daily visitor, Betty is always trying to “straighten up your pad, man,” asking me to kiss her, or doing one of those brief junkie naps. I “respect” her; we get along damn well. But pride and the cold technician have always kept my emotion in check. At the end of each visit, Betty looks me straight in the eye and announces, “I will be back.”

  And Betty always leaves something. Things that females can’t bear to part with in this age of liberation.

  Bopping through a pauper period, I have nothing of value for Betty to steal. “Would you take money from me?” she asked.

  “Nope,” I replied.

  “What about a little gift?”

  Betty could steal a “boss” pair of sunglasses or an umbrella (it was raining that afternoon).

  “Oh, Charles.” Betty pouted, then laughed madly, displaying a solid gold wristwatch she had taken from a man in a West Side motel.

  Depression knights my forehead. I cannot move.

  Finished the wine. The lukewarm beer, a bummer. I go to the window. The gray street looks fresh and clean after the rain. Directly across the street, the city branch of Swiss Farm nurseries displays young green trees, plants, and flowers in red clay pots. I am seized with hunger for the country, the sea. Surrounded by the Hudson and East Rivers, the Atlantic Ocean, I second Eugene O’Neill’s cry: “I would have been much happier as a fish.” Yet like an addicted entomologist, I am drawn to people. Let them flutter, bask, rest, feed on my tree. Then fly, fly. Fly away. Goddamnit. Fly mother-fuckers.

  In the afternoon, bless the solitude, salute it with vodka. Finished reading Henry Green’s Loving and Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori. Talk about a good high. Read a paragraph from an Imamu Amiri Baraka essay (no matter, no matter. I remember LeRoi Jones when he lived on Third Avenue and was married to Hattie Jones. It was the beat generation then).

  “We own despair,” Imamu writes. “And then some cracker sits in space with a part in his skull and lectures about what we need. What we need. What we need first is for him to cut out.”

  Turning on the black radio for a little afternoon jazz, a white Southern woman tells a radio reporter in a voice like bitter, congealed honey: “Governor Wallace? He’s a gone man.”

  Voices of a hall argument penetrated the door like the blade of a power saw.

  “Do you want my woman?” A black male asked.

  The white male reply was cautious. “Addie’s a friend.”

  Stoned, Addie seconded the reply: “Dickie, I’ve lived here a long time. Since way back in 1968. Jefferson, Dickie’s young. Younger than I am. He just got back from Vietnam, the poor thing.”

  “Yeah,” Dickie shouted. “Vietnam! And I’ll—any man that fucks around with my woman. Do you wanna fight?”

  “Do you wanna fight?”

  “Dickie . . .”

  “I said, by God, do you wanna fight?”

  “No. There’s nothing to fight about.”

  A long silence until Addie said, “Why don’t you two grown men stop it. I never seen such carrying on. They won’t even let me have a dog for protection.”

  “I just don’t want no white motherfucker . . .” Dickie began.

  “Dickie,” Addie pleaded. “I’ve lived around white people for forty-eight years. But that white son of bitch down at the desk won’t let me have even one little old dog.”

  No, it was not a Daily News robbery, a typical lower-echelon robbery (estimate of “goodies”: $800-$l,000), powdered with the frost that occasionally makes living in the City of Dogs interesting.

  The facts: At 10 A.M. one morning, a budding thief climbed up the fire escape of a building on East Eleventh Street, then, with the skill of an acrobat, raised an unlocked window and climbed into a front fifth-floor apartment. The thief, a thirteen-year-old boy, was familiar with the apartment, having visited many times. A chubby Tom Sawyer type, he lived two floors below in a rear apartment. He had given one of the two occupants a perverse young f
emale dog. The boy fed Blackie and unlocked the entrance door. But he exited by the fire escape, lugging a brand new tape recorder.

  A cardiac man (a constant people watcher) saw the boy and called his wife. The couple lived directly across the street and watched our Tom try to hawk a “heavy, black case.” Watched until the boy disappeared out of their view. Shortly after this, the boy returned, minus the tape recorder. The cardiac man did not have a phone, but vowed to tell the people in the fifth-floor apartment about the “heavy, black case.” The Welfare Bonanza was nine days off, and it was a gritty time for the poor, especially for people who lived beyond the monetary welfare standard, for party people. But the couple across the street saw chubby Tom’s mother dash out and return with “heavy goods” from the Pioneer supermarket.

  Now it was almost 11 A.M. Eugene, one of the occupants of the apartment, returned and found the apartment in a shambles. He called his cousin Dash, who arrived an hour later. By this time, the police had arrived and departed. Dash waited for the detectives. Then it was time for Gene to go to work. Dash called me. I arrived at 3 P.M. and performed amateur spade-work. The locked American armoire was almost unhinged. The two doors were like two flags at half mast.

  “Well,” I said, “I doubt if it was a junkie. They didn’t take clothes or record albums. And the phones are still plugged in. They could have taken Gene’s stereo. It isn’t that heavy.”

  Laughing sadly, Dash, an IBM man said, “But they took the tropical fish and the bird.”

  Blackie, the perverse little bitch, had eaten the other bird. “I have a funny feeling,” Dash said. “I bet it was the little boy downstairs.”

  Tom’s boyish charm seemed too smooth, like rich country butter, and I had been watching him for a long time.

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

  It was now around five, and the sky was an explosion of red, and we eased the pain with Gordon’s gin and waited for the detectives.

  “Call the detectives again,” I said.

  “Hell. I’ve called them three times. They said they’d be over.”

  “Well, call them again. What have you got to lose?”

  The man on the phone at the Fifth Precinct had a happy-go-lucky voice. He wanted to know if anything of value had been taken. I gave him a rundown. Yes, he said—that’s a little money. Did he have a rough idea when the detectives would be over? No—but rest, rest assured, they would be over. Yes, sooner or later, the detectives would be over.

  Around midnight, we had definite proof that Tom was our man. The window-watching man and his wife would testify. In court! By this time, we all were a little high and laughed and joked and waited for the detectives. Blackie defecated on the bathroom floor and ate it.

  Gene and Dash worked on Saturday, and I stayed in the apartment with young Blackie. Each time I went to the refrigerator for a beer, the little bitch tried to grind against my leg. Jesus. What a dog. But: this is the City of Dogs. Mongrelsville. Sanitary-minded people let unleashed dogs roam at will and defecate on the sidewalk. These people probably wash their hands before leaving the bathroom. But they seem to suffer from the Camelot illusion that the city is their urban estate.

  Our Tom is a collector of dogs. He charms people into giving him dogs or steals them. He houses the dogs in the wrecked basement of the Eleventh Street building. Sometimes he will find a man or a woman or a young hippie couple and croon with raffish charm: “Mama won’t let me keep Rover. Will you take him home, and may I visit him sometimes? I love him, and he is a good dog.” Our Tom will visit Rover or Susie and take a buyer’s astute inventory of your flat or studio. Already, he knows your work schedule as well as you. And I knew a great deal about chubby Tom. Knew that he was one of five children, that his mother had been forced to move from East Sixth Street, that she was husband-less, that it was always party time in their apartment. I also knew that the thirteen-year-old boy took dogs and threw them off the roof. These dogs usually belonged to neighbors. He was the talk of the block. The police arrived a few times, but nothing ever happened. Something was always happening to Tom’s sister: she was fourteen and whored.

  Dash arrived at 4 P.M. and called the Fifth Precinct. About an hour later, two policemen arrived, and the four of us stood in the bedroom and went over the robbery again. One of the policemen was silent. He was chubby and might have been Tom’s father. The other policeman was young, slender. A philosopher. He said, rather sadly, “There isn’t much proof to go on.”

  “If you don’t catch the boy with the goods, what other proof could you possibly have? Except a man and woman who saw the boy—and our willingness to testify.”

  Up to this point, the slender policeman had ignored me. Now he gave me his attention. We talked about crime in the street, kids. I wanted to go to the bathroom. Finally, we said good-bye, and the two men in tired blue departed. Once again Dash and I got high and waited for the detectives.

  Sunday was sunny and pleasant after the rain. It was also a busy day for our Tom. Apparently he sensed that something was up, for he was in and out of the building about ten times. But we never saw him.

  Later that morning, the detective who had been assigned to the case called. He warned us not to talk to the boy or harm him. And please, please, do not stage a personal raid on his mother’s apartment. The detective would be over later in the day with a search warrant. He was an overworked, sympathetic man, who arrived on East Eleventh Street at exactly 6 P.M. that Sunday evening, almost three days after the robbery had taken place.

  It was party time in Tom’s mother’s rear apartment. A toast to the delight of Miller High Life. Music, laughter created a stereophonic noise in the crowded, dimly lit four rooms. The detective had trouble getting in; people pushed and ran from room to room, at times creating the effect of a crazy, jet-paced counter drill. There was almost no furniture in the apartment. All the detective could do was issue a summons to Tom’s mother. They were requested to appear in Juvenile Court.

  Dash and Gene arrived at Juvenile Court. It was 9 A.M. Their case came up at 2 P.M. Tom’s mother would not accept legal aid. She would get her own lawyer. The judge warned her not to return without a lawyer. A new date was set for the trial.

  But the sullen woman returned without a lawyer. She was alone and occasionally smiled at the judge.

  Where was our Tom?

  In a clear, today-the-sun-is-shining voice, Tom’s mother told the judge, “He didn’t feel like coming.”

  The brief silence in the courtroom was deadly. The judge was outraged and issued a summons for Tom’s arrest. He would be placed in juvenile jail until the case came up again. Tom’s mother made a quick exit from the courtroom. The sympathetic detective said, “I’ll let you know when we pick up the boy.”

  That was almost five weeks ago. Sitting over a lazy Sunday-afternoon drink, I asked Dash about the case. But he changed the subject and talked about getting laid. We had another drink and listened to Richard Harris sing “Didn’t We.”

  Then I remembered a UPI report: “Hove, England—The City Council has voted to build fourteen more public toilets for dogs, following experimental use of six fenced compounds equipped with dummy light posts.”

  Case dismissed. Dogs. Dog lovers.

  ANOTHER CASE VIA AIRMAIL, another perfumed note from Paris, France.

  Dear Charles:

  Anne T. returned from Portugal with a terrific suntan and bruises. Bruises, hon. The poor thing is black and blue, thanks to a fat, Princeton type of young man (he said he was working for the C.I.A. “Top-level stuff”). This young man stole a twenty-dollar bill off Anne’s dressing table. She left it there deliberately. And now she’s back, all bruised up, and wants to go to the south of France. But I haven’t got a bathing suit. I haven’t bought a thing all year except hose and a panty girdle. I’m so poor. George’s alimony is a pittance, and I was such a fool. I should have taken that bastard to the cleaners. But I was thinking of the kids. His kids. I never could conceive, and I’m too
old now, anyway. All I can do is play solitaire, work crossword puzzles, and read detective stories. Paris is terrible, terrible. The City of Lights doesn’t mean a damn thing to me anymore. I’m seriously considering returning to the States. Ask Miss Feldman or Mr. Miller at the Albert or those nice people at the Hotel Van Rensselaer. I must live in the Village. Gone are the Barclay days! Have you seen Charles Robb or that bitch Hilary? I hope you are writing and everything is going well. I’m baking bread and drinking black-market Scotch. That’s Paris for you. Bebe sends his love. He still thinks he can talk. Silly dog.

  Love,

  Maggie

  Maggie, I say aloud. Someone on the sixth floor threw an empty beer can down into the courtyard. Maggie. The former country-club wife. The little match girl. A Chesterfield girl in World War II. It comes as a surprise to remember that she is white, that her eyes are blue. What surfaces first is Maggie in a yellow dress and dinner in a graveled court in Seville. Ma Griffe and Joy perfume, a chemist’s supply of pills, booze. Maggie desperately trying to keep me from writing. Dear Dr. Joyce Brothers, have you seen Kafka lately?

  Remembering, feeling black, I have a stiff vodka, hear heavy footsteps on the muddy brown floorboards of the hall. Footsteps like an aggressive soldier, then swift taps on my door, instantly telegraphing stoned horrors. The hoarse voice calling, “Charles, Charles,” sounding like a man who was resigned to silence and closed doors.

  I opened the door. Clancy swung in, shadowboxing. “Man. Goddamn.”

  “Hello, sport.”

  “Look.” Clancy beamed. “A whole fucking gallon of pure grape wine. Pretty, ain’t it?”

  “You got money? Baby, we’ll have a snowstorm in August.”

  “There you go. I made a little score. Do you want me to go out and get you a sandwich, cigarettes?”

  “No, Clancy.”

  “Well, let’s drink the juice and screw the moose. Hey, I like that. Screw the moose.”

  “What happened to Martha?”