The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  “Man. That bitch is crazy. She starting fucking with my mind. I can’t stand anyone fucking with my mind.”

  An occasional student of mainlining, a heavy drinker, thirty-year-old Clancy sat down and shook his head. There were tears in his eyes, but he looked up at me with the last of his altar-boy charm and laughed.

  “Hey. How you keep yourself together? When you gonna crack up?”

  “Tomorrow or never,” I said, then poured two tumblers of wine.

  “Ain’t that something?”

  “That’s right, baby.”

  “No kidding, Charlie. You’re together, and I had to see you.”

  “Here’s to the vineyards and the people who toil in them,” I said, thinking: At least he doesn’t want to borrow money, doesn’t need a place to flop for the night.

  Clancy shook his head again. “I don’t know, sport. I had this gig and was starting to get myself together. I bought some clothes. A TV. Then I start messing round with Martha. Shit. I’m gonna get me some dope.”

  “Well,” I said, sitting down on the unmade bed, “you’ve had it before. And you’re all screwed up. Why not a little dope? Maybe you’ll get lucky and get hooked this time.”

  “Charles,” Clancy pleaded. “Don’t put the bad mouth on me.

  “Did you call your brother?”

  “No, but I will.” Clancy sighed and filled the tumblers. “You know he’s got a cabin up in the mountains, and this fall we could go up there and hunt. Do you good to get out of the city. Maybe you’d like it up there and could write.”

  Clancy and I did not hunt last fall, nor fish in the spring, but I said, “Yeah. I’d like that. I like the country. Anything to get out of this fucking city.”

  We had more wine, and Clancy began singing in a Rex Harrison voice, “California Dreaming,” then bolted up and smashed his fist against the wall.

  “That bitch. My fucking mother is in California. After Daddy died in prison, she left all of us kids and went to California with a shoe salesman. What kind of mother is that? Don’t wanna bring you down, Charlie. Let’s have some more wine.”

  “God said, Let there be light, and there was light,” I said.

  “You should have been a preacher or a teacher. You’re good with kids.”

  “Yes, my son. Pass the jug.”

  “You can’t destroy yourself, man. You just can’t.”

  “Clancy, I think you’ve got a point.”

  “Goddamnit!” Clancy exclaimed, banging his hand on the table, spilling wine. “You can’t destroy yourself.”

  I watched Clancy stagger to the bathroom, staggering like a man trying to avoid a great fire.

  The afternoon wine flowed. Cigarette butts filled ashtrays, became tiny smokeless igloos. The hotel was very quiet. The silence was strange, and it seemed to block our conversation as we continued to drink. Once, Clancy choked on wine and cried, “This shit is getting to me, and I’m gonna die. Die and burn in hell.”

  “Clancy. Take it easy. Feel sleepy?”

  “No, man,” Clancy said, frowning. “Can’t sleep. Have all these terrible dreams. Priests and nuns are coming at me with bull whips, and I have no clothes on.”

  Sobbing and shaking, Clancy fell to the floor. Pounding his fist he shouted, “Everyone is against me, and they’re trying to screw up my mind.”

  “Oh, shut it, Clancy. You’re stoned.”

  “You nigger bastard. You think you’re so fucking, fucking intelligent. So Goddamn cool.”

  What could I say? I laughed, stretched, yawned, had another wine. This name-calling game bored me. I can live without it. Whitey can’t live without it. Without the “games,” perhaps we would not be friends: equal in my eyes which you do not acknowledge. Therefore, I am always on my guard. I never know what son-of-bitching trick whitey might pull. My reaction is based on whitey’s historical dealing with my people. If that’s a poached egg, digest neckbones, chitlings. I know that sooner or later whitey will take a swing at the left nut of my psyche and shout “nigger,” in anger, in jest, in sex. At the moment, whitey is trapped on an antique escalator in a building of the future. This is the level where whitey has sunk. With all his power and money.

  I left the red-headed, former altar boy on the floor and went up to St. Marks to see what was happening, to bask in the zone of the departing, defeated army of hippies. There used to be a little magic on St. Marks. The black novelist Ishmael Reed calls it hoodoo magic, which means J. W. (jamming whitey). In the Village world of panhandling, the put-down, blacks jam whitey from the center of his emotions to nature’s exit. On St. Marks, I met Larl. We had been out of touch and caught up on what had happened: the salt-pork taste of nothing. The mood on St. Marks was calm, almost like the Village in the old days. People sauntered through the speed zone. Up ahead, I spotted a young white man zeroing in on us. Pop-art print shirt, blue jeans. Larl did not see him until he said, “Baby, can you spare a little change?”

  Larl turned swiftly, enraged. “Can’t you see my face is black, boy! How the hell can I spare anything?”

  The healthy boyish charm faded. The young man went away as if he had been punished.

  Another small St. Marks encounter. The beggar is a wiry black man who bolted down from a stoop and began rapping with a young man whose face was a map of suburbia. The black man really rapped. Suburbian, Jr., would not release any coins. The black man put his arms around Junior and gave him a peace-movement kiss on the cheek. A few more words and Suburbian, Jr., reached in his pocket and gave the black man a quarter and a dime. The black man told me, “I wish America had another hundred thousand hippies. Then I could make a steady living.”

  But the fat black hairless queen does not have to worry about a steady living. He is a male nurse, has a sideline hustle. Waddling like a grand female duck, large brilliant eyes, going from left to right, he comes on like a Southern mammy. The queen specializes in young white beggars. “Oh Lord! So many homeless chickens. All they want is a little change or some pot and pills. So they put the make on mother. But I been round since the year one. I take’m to my penthouse on Avenue A. I got plenty of pills, pot, and poppers, and I turns them over faster than you can say eggs and grits. Sometimes they comes back and brings their little long-haired girlfriends. And they just all love mother. Oh, my word. Look at that boy crossing that street. What a basket. Well, I must rush off and tend to my chickens.” The black queen’s dimes, quarters, dollars are a good investment. If a black gives money to whitey, he will be the winner, regardless of what game is being played.

  Like Shuffling Joe, who is determined, threatening. Union Square is his base. Union Square is filled with rats; Shuffling Joe has to find “fresh ground.” One reason why Shuffling Joe is determined is that he will not drink La Boheme wine, which costs fifty-five cents a pint. “Gallo, man,” he says. Gallo is seventy cents a pint. I watch Shuffling Joe hustle a bearded photographer and his lady friend. They are about twenty paces in front of him. The photographer shakes his head, gestures with his hand. His lady friend turns, looks serious; Shuffling Joe watches them move on, still rapping. He grabs the photographer’s arm. Photographer grabs camera. Now Shuffling Joe is really rapping, gesturing dramatically. The lady friend has been watching gravely. Suddenly she opens her handbag. A good hustle. Five minutes netted one dollar. “Man,” Shuffling Joe says, “I made that cat feel like a turd. I was rapping to him but watching his old lady. I told that cat I was tired. Tired. Tired of fighting whitey and never winning and now all I want to do is drink wine. I can’t win ’cause I’m always losing.”

  This, of course, is a black panhandling truth. We know whitey is still violating our rights as men, as human beings. Whitey is still taking, taking. Even that stuffed rectum of a phrase, RIGHT ON, has reached the portals of the White House. Even the most angelic of white liberals fails to understand black anger, why we react as we do to the most ordinary happenings. Example: window shopping on West Eighth Street, trying to decide if my tight budget would okay an ex
pensive shirt. A bearded white Jesus-type asked for a cigarette.

  “Ask your mama,” I shouted. In the early hours of morning, I had a pizza on St. Marks. Another white, bearded Jesus-type. This one wanted fifteen cents.

  “Motherfucker,” I screamed. “I need $5,000.”

  “Brother,” Jesus said, “don’t get so uptight.”

  “Cocksucker,” I said, spitting pizza, “I ain’t your brother.”

  I couldn’t finish my pizza, suddenly remembering a Connecticut-New York bus trip. My seatmate was young, white, and drank wine. Good Spanish wine. The conversation turned to panhandling. My seatmate was an old St. Marks hand. He had given a black man $15 a few weeks before. I laughed. The boy assured me he would do it again. Indeed! That night the boy (who had made peace with his parents) would go to Kew Gardens, bathe, eat steak (“Ma said . . .”), take the old man’s car, pick up his girl, and his buddy and his girl, and buy a pound of grass. Indeed.

  But blacks putting the make on other blacks is a cold and colorless story. Even on the Bowery, even when they’re sort of on the same wavelength. The “Hey, brother” bit is passé, suspect. The other night a black cat hails me with “Hey, brother. Got a minute to rap?”

  “I ain’t got shit,” I said.

  “How you know I want something?”

  “Why the hell you stop me, motherfucker?” I asked.

  A black and white combo, then? Sometimes this can be very effective, disarming, especially the West Village-St. Marks type. Especially if they’re clean and bright as daisies. But what I want to tell you about is a black and white team, a classic encounter. Larl was at Astor Place and Fourth Avenue. Two teenage girls, one black, the other white, skinny as jay birds in their hip department-store finery. The girls asked Larl for some spare change, Larl ignored them. In unison, the girls shouted, “Cheap cocksucker!”

  Larl swung around, marched toward the girls. Then silently raised his hand and, with one powerful stroke, slapped both girls. A crowd gathered. Larl, very aloof, walked away and did not look back. He had to pay $40 to have his watch repaired. A costly street encounter. The games of affluent space-age children, I told a group of supposedly hip hustlers recently. They suggested that I’d make a great panhandler. But panhandling doesn’t interest me, just as playing tennis or owning a string of polo ponies doesn’t interest me.

  LAST NIGHT OPENED tinned sardines. Frequently, opening sardines produces images of hallucinogenic power. It has the feel of a fast “Saturday-night special” (a cheap gun), zipping through that old blasé thing, reality. So I blessed the quart of domestic vodka, bedded on crushed ice in the large Victorian basin. Sardines in tomato sauce. A product of Poland. Sardines tasty, sauce thick, a recession bargain at twenty-nine cents. But do we have a trade agreement with Poland? Cold, iron countries thawing or what the hell, I think, blaming the bad pot. I must read The News of the Week in Review in the Sunday New York Times and not scan the damn thing.

  The vodka is ice cold, delicious. All right then. Three stiff drinks. After working sixteen hours (washing dishes, cleaning up vomit and excrement), I need to unwind. Marat and Sade were the ancestors of my co-workers. The first, second, and third boss? What is there to say about one Jew, one Italian, and one black man? No doubt their mothers loved them. I know their wives do not play the old marriage game. Oh boy! Love is not a dunghill, Hemingway. Love is a 75-caliber machine gun. Another drink and I’ll get carried away. In lieu of Beluga caviar (the caterers use supermarket caviar, pasteurized caviar, and spoon it out like misers). In lieu of Beluga cavvy, I’m opening another import: smoked sardines from Norway . . . a country that I know very little about except that there is a Lapp tribe in Karasjok. I have a crazy idea that Norway is like California’s Orange County. In fact, the vodka just informed me that Norway is exactly like California’s Orange County. So conservative that the barks of trees are covered with burlap bags. A country that produced Knut Hamsun, the novelist, and Henrik Ibsen, the playwright, has to be uptight.

  The Norwegian sardines have a key opener, which means that I do not have to use my dime-store can opener. Except that I do have to use my opener. The key opener breaks under my muscleman pressure. I even have difficulty using my own, the tin being soft, so soft that a child could bend it.

  I try to make a long cut here and there. Finally, take the stem of my opener and pry the goddamn thing open. Mon Dieu! The tin is smaller than the average bar of soap. But what do you expect for twenty-five cents?

  The smoked sardines are a perfect complement for the vodka. But I’m thinking about the cost of labor, the men or women who fished the sardines out of the sea, the people who packed them, the profits of the Norwegian businessman and the American importer and the Chinese owners of the store where I bought them, and how kind and smiling they are as if I were a new billionaire and had walked into their Knoedler’s or Christie’s or Parke-Bernet’s and said, “Gimme twenty million dollars’ worth of art.”

  Let me lay it on the line: I think progress is simply grand. The chilled vodka agrees. I believe in free enterprise, and hate indifference, cheap products, cheap people, careless people. Two nights ago at Numero Uno, the Pont Royale caterers, the steward, the pantry man forgot the parsley garnish for the prosciutto and melon. With the poise of third-rate comedians, the red-and-green-coated waiters wheeled the carts of prosciutto and melon into the main dining room, for the reception was breaking. Cursing like a nut-ward chorus, they returned to the kitchen with the carts. Dishwashers, bus boys, cooks frantically jerked plastic bags off the parsley, untied strings, snapped stems.

  “The parsley hasn’t been washed,” I said, looking at my wet, dirty hands.

  “The parsley hasn’t been washed,” I protested in a loud voice.

  No one answered me. I became frightened and felt like a character in a Kafka novel. Dishwashers, bus boys, cooks, waiters, the steward, the pantry man worked silently and extremely fast. They were putting the final touches on a twenty-five-thousand-dollar wedding party.

  The other day, weaving through the East Village, I was accosted by a small black boy about five years old.

  “Hey, mister. You got two cents?”

  Smiling, I looked down at the boy. “What are you gonna do with two cents?”

  “Buy a cookie,” the boy replied; his eyes danced darkly. He was very clean; perhaps his mother had just released him from the house.

  “Here’s a dime, sonny,” I said, feeling good. I walked away, skipped a mound of dog excrement, regretting that I didn’t have a son. I’d make a great father, friends are always telling me. Unwed mothers, divorcées, widows adjust their antennae of hope, and while I am very fond of these women and their children—they are not the women of future dreams. Maggie? Perhaps. But she is fifteen years older than I am; her womb was always barren. I have no knowledge of fathering children. A romantic rumor of a son in Mexico, that’s all.

  I looked back at the small black boy. He stood on the corner, counting coins, then approached another man.

  I laughed. Clean and bright-eyed. Little black boy. Hustling in the city. Heir Apparent. Crown Prince of Con.

  City children are special, seemingly endowed with a knowledge of life, endowed with the knowledge of surviving in the urban jungle while retaining the quicksand innocence and charm of childhood. Once, sitting in cutthroat Chrystie Park, I witnessed a little drama, a scene from a long first act, a lesson in surviving, a lesson for future street gangs. Actions that frequently lead to jail.

  I wanted to smoke a joint and walked to the quiet section of the park. A high iron fence enclosed a special area for senior citizens. But that midnight, a group of prekindergarten-age boys had managed to get inside the senior area. They were having a dandy, cursing, rock, wine-bottle, and beer-can battle.

  One little boy approached me. “Mister. You’d better watch out. My buddy is gonna throw a bottle over here.”

  I looked back and ducked in time. A white port-wine bottle zipped through the air, landed at the bas
e of a young tree, where pushers dropped their three-dollar bags of scrambled eggs.

  Children are great. Our future. Children are great. Charming little buggers. Especially at midnight. Always midnight. Especially if they are prekindergarten age. Especially if their parents aren’t around.

  Charles Wright was born in New York City and not New Franklin, Missouri. Charles Wright grew up in the ghetto, joined a gang, which staked out a piece of the turf and took possession of it. A cold Walter Mitty dream? But what takes place in the following dream? No doubt street money and politics would have been involved. A sharp pimp, pusher, addict? There is no doubt in my mind that I would have served time. Perhaps I’d be writing my lawyer, family, friends, asking for books, candy, and cigarettes—instead of writing an entry into a journal.

  MOTHERS: California ain’t Mississippi. New York ain’t Georgia. All offer the same old racial climate. You do not have to go to the heartland of America—say, the Middle West—to take the pollen count of pro-George Wallace sentiments. Simply open the door that fronts on your own back yard. The death of George Jackson, one of the Soledad Brothers, made me realize that the Auschwitz gates are not closed. They are not awaiting instructions from their superiors. They are waiting to act on their own. Who will be next? Angela Davis? You, me? In Manhattan each day, blacks and Puerto Ricans are roughed up daily before they see a judge or jury. It happens every day to the little people from the urban jungle. Seldom do we hear or read about it.

  Sometimes these happenings have the deceptive innocence of childhood, have absolutely nothing to do with drugs, mugging, or even disturbing the peace. It can be nothing more than a handwritten note: “Come for a drink around six. My aunt is coming down and there will be a few other people. Perhaps we’ll have dinner. Anyway, please come. They want to meet you.” Because I felt guilty for not calling friends, for accepting invitations and never showing, I went to the dinner party, wearing my best suit of depression. Before the hostess offered a drink, she invited me into the kitchen. “I’m so glad you could come. Randy’s in the bedroom. I’ve got to get him out of here before my aunt comes. Could you help me?”