Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff

by Walter Dean Myers

  Sam and Clyde were going to enter the contest. Only, one of them was going to get decked out like a girl.

  “You can be the woman, and I’ll be the man and we can win this contest,” Sam said. “Ain’t nobody around going to beat us. And that’s a f-a-c-t fact.”

  “How come I have to be the woman? You can be the woman, and I can be the guy.”

  “I got to be the guy,” Sam said. “Because I can’t be no woman.”

  “Why not?” asked Clyde.

  “Because it messes with my image.”

  “And it messes with my image, too,” Clyde countered.

  “Anyway, I’m so manly that anybody looking at me could tell I was a man,” Sam said.

  We told Angel and Maria and it was decided that me, Angel, and Maria would decide who would be the girl and who would be the guy. Me and Angel figured the guy who was the most manly would be the guy and the other person would be the girl. Maria, Angel’s sister, said the guy who was the most manly would be the girl ’cause it wouldn’t bother him as much being the girl. Which made sense in a funny kind of way. Anyway, we had a manly contest to see who was the most manly between Clyde and Sam.

  The contest was simple. Whoever did the manliest thing was going to be the woman and the other guy would be the man. We figured we had three votes and it couldn’t be a tie. But that was before we considered Maria.

  Sam and Clyde, me, Angel and Maria all met at Clyde’s house. Sam was supposed to do his manly thing first.

  “I am going to do fifty push-ups,” Sam announced. “Every time I go down I’ll go all the way down until my mustache touches the floor.” When he said “mustache” he gave Clyde a look because Sam was the only one in the whole bunch who had even a little bit of a mustache.

  “He got his mustache by having a transplant from under his arms,” Clyde said.

  “Yeah, baby,” Sam said, “but match these fifty.”

  Sam then did fifty push-ups. I think he could have done more if he wanted to, too. Then it was Clyde’s turn.

  Clyde announced that he was going to take any torture that Sam could dish out. Torture!

  “You’re going to let him torture you?” Angel asked.

  “Right,” said Clyde, “and I’m going to take it without giving up.”

  “You got to be jiving, man. I’ll put you through so many changes that you won’t even remember your name. I’ll put bamboo splinters under your eyelids and tap dance on your forehead. You might as well give it up, turkey, because you’re going to be crying for mercy in the worse kind of way.”

  Clyde laid down on the floor and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Sock it to me, and see what a real man can take.”

  Sam looked down at Clyde on the floor and then went and got a fork, a knife, and a toothpick. I held my breath. I could just imagine what he was going to do. I imagined him sticking that toothpick under Clyde’s eyelids and I shivered. Or I could imagine him sticking the fork into Clyde’s stomach. But he didn’t do anything. He couldn’t hurt Clyde at all. Oh, he came near him with the fork and made a lot of little growling noises and what have you but he really couldn’t hurt him. He got disgusted with himself.

  “You win,” he said. “I ain’t even man enough to sock it to you.”

  Then we had a vote and me and Angel decided that Clyde was the winner because any dude that could stand torture had to be a real man. But that’s when Maria got heavy.

  “Not hurting his friend is more important to him than proving he’s a man,” Maria said, “and that makes him a real person. And in my book that’s better than being a real man. Because being a real man is biology and what I’m talking about is living like people, dig? Not roles. This ain’t MGM, this is 116th Street.”

  And so Angel and me got outvoted, one to two with the one being stronger than our two. And Clyde finally said that he’d be the girl anyway because he was the best-looking, and that’s how they decided who was going to be who.

  The morning of the big dance we all met in Clyde’s house. His mother was going shopping and then she was going to work. She said she was going to have the groceries delivered and left fifty cents on the dresser as a tip for the delivery boy. Well, she shopped at Met Foods and they had a real young-looking white boy delivering the groceries and Clyde figured he would only give him a quarter so that was cool. You’ve probably figured out that everything that Clyde did was cool, right? Not quite, baby, not quite.

  Okay, so we all gathered at Clyde’s house. Cap had borrowed his half sister’s wig and Sam had gotten a dress from his cousin and I’d copped some of my mother’s cosmetics. So then we fixed up Clyde. I mean we fixed him up good. He had on a dress with half a tennis ball and some toilet tissue up front, some low platforms, some screw-on earrings, a wig, some lipstick, and a little bit of eye liner. Well, let me tell you, Clyde looked Boss. I mean, he was just so cute it was ridiculous. He started walking around acting real mannish because he felt self-conscious, but everyone was shocked because of how good he looked. They said he was the best-looking girl on the block. So he and Sam practiced some more and we told Clyde to get into a girl’s thing.

  “Hey, Clyde, why don’t you wiggle your butt around a little?” I said.

  “Because I don’t want to wiggle my butt around, that’s why!” he said.

  “If you’re going to be a girl you’re going to be a girl. Wiggle a little!”

  So he started wiggling a little. Just a little at first. And all the time he was looking around to see how we reacted. But when he saw that we were just looking at him like we wanted him to win the contest, he really started into a nice kind of wiggle. First it was a real exaggerated kind of wiggle, but then it kind of calmed down into a cute little thing that he did with his hips. Then Angel told him he wasn’t doing it right.

  “Do it like this, man.” Angel walked around the room and started wiggling his butt and really looked like a girl, the way he walked, but Sam said that it wasn’t the way he was wiggling his butt so much as the way he was moving his shoulders. Sam had a good eye for that kind of thing. And when Clyde started to move his shoulders just a little bit differently he really looked good.

  Everybody thought he was really good and I had already decided how I could spend my part of the money. I figured to get ten dollars. I was going to give part of mine to charity, because that’s the kind of guy I am. And with the other $9.75 I was going to buy two Stevie Wonder albums. Sam was going to buy a secondhand stopwatch to figure out just how fast he was, and Cap and Clyde hadn’t decided yet. We had to give ten dollars to Cap’s old lady, too, for being a technical consultant.

  So the big night came. Carnation Charley was there, with this tall, long-legged girl. Sam and Clyde were there—we were calling him Claudette for the evening—and nobody else we knew. There were a few dances, when Sam and Clyde danced around just so they could get a feel of the floor. The floor was good, too. Not too dirty so you’d be slipping around and not too dead so you couldn’t get any action.

  Now Clyde wasn’t looking too good but, then again, he wasn’t looking too bad. As a girl, I mean. Everything was cool, really, except me. I thought I was going to bust out laughing every time I looked over at Sam and Clyde. I mean Claudette. They were dancing pretty good and you could see Sam was starting to get into his thing. You could tell because when he got close to Claudette and started backing away he would kind of jerk his head from side to side and hunch his shoulders. Claudette was being blasé. I mean looking around the place like she just knew she was the most boss chick in the place. I tried to imagine Claudette as a real girl. I’d kind of look away and then look over casually and check her out. But then I’d see Sam twisting and going into his thing and I’d crack up. But I kept my hand over my mouth so it didn’t look too bad. Then when I had a real fit of laughing I’d point to Carnation Charley.

  The funny thing about it is that Carnation Charley was checking out Sam and Claudette, too. First he’d sneak a little peek from the corner
of his eye, and then when they weren’t looking in his direction he’d practically stop and peel his eyeballs back to get a good look. You see, Carnation Charley knew that Fast Sam could really dance. I guess he was saying to himself something like “Hey, look, there’s Fast Sam with a cool-looking chick.” Now that was important, to have a girl that could dance, too. A lot of guys dance so far away from their partners, doing all this acrobatic stuff, that they could be dancing with the jukebox. But the real groovy dancers, like Carnation Charley and Fast Sam and Clyde (when he wasn’t being Claudette, which was all of the time except that night) danced close to their partners and acted as if they really enjoyed dancing. Even Carnation Charley, who would be sweating and carrying on until his suit got wet under the arms clear through his shirt, would manage to smile at his partner every once in a while.

  Then the announcer, who was Mr. Reese, the center’s athletic coach, turned off the record player and said it was time for the dance contest. Then he went around and gave everybody a number. Your partner and you would both have the same number, see? And the announcer would tell people to sit down until there was just one couple on the floor. Okay, now there was going to be two rounds to the contest. The first round was going to have a Jackson Five tape which they had made about four minutes long, and the second round was going to have a fast number by Al Green, which was really dynamite. Sam and Claudette had number thirty-seven and Carnation Charley had number twenty-eight. The announcer looked at everybody for a long time and then called out:

  “Let’s party!”

  And the dance was on. Do you hear? The dance was ON! Everybody on the floor was looking like dynamite. Going through their numbers, dig? Sometimes they were doing the same thing. The guy would turn left and the girl would turn right and you could see that they had been practicing for some time. Then everybody had their own little number. Some little step that nobody had seen before or something. See, if you threw a step on them that nobody had seen before, everybody would have to say, “Wow! That guy’s got a new step!” And then they’d realize they’d have to come up with something to match it. But you had practiced yours and they had to make theirs up right on the spot and then try to get it coordinated with the girl. But in the Jackson Five number nobody was doing too much. I mean, there were a few steps that I hadn’t exactly seen but they were really only a little different from ones I had seen. Also, Carnation Charley had pulled a few moves during the warm-up where he fell back and caught himself on one hand and then came back up again. It looked okay and Sam thought that when they got to the final round he was going to try it out. But Sam and Claudette had a little something, too. They had this move—get this—where Claudette leaned all the way back and swung around three times and Sam leaned back and swung around three times, then Claudette leaned forward and swung around once while Sam swung his leg over Claudette’s head. I had seen them do it in Clyde’s living room and it was bad.

  Anyway the dance is going on and the announcer starts calling out numbers. When he calls your number he says, “Hey, hey, hey, let’s give a big hand to number so-and-so.” And then everybody gives you this big hand and you sit down because you’ve been eliminated.

  “Hey, hey, hey, let’s give a big hand to number fourteen!” And fourteen, this short fat little guy, stopped dancing on a dime. Whomp! The cat was stone still and he gave the announcer an evil look that would make water run backwards. Then he strutted on off. The announcer gave a few more numbers and the floor started to clear out a little.

  Now when the floor is crowded you can get by. But when there’s not too many people on the dance floor you have to let it hang out. Okay. The pace is picking up. The music’s getting good and everybody around the floor is doing their own little move as the dancers are doing their thing. The announcer keeps calling out numbers and the floor’s getting thinner and thinner. But the record is almost coming to an end, too. So everybody had to hang on in there a little longer. Finally there were about nine couples on the floor and about a half a minute to go. And the announcer went into his hey, hey, hey bit. Well, let me tell you what happens. When the announcer starts his hey, hey, hey he already knows what couple he’s going to sit down. But the couple doesn’t know it, so everytime he gets into a hey, hey, hey the dance gets a little more frantic. Because you throw out your best move so it won’t be you that has to sit down. Not only that, people from the sidelines start yelling things out too. Things like:

  “Hey, sit number nine down. He can’t dance!”

  “Number thirty-one must be a cripple. Either that or his shoes are on the wrong feet!”

  Well, like I said, there were about nine couples on the floor and the first round was almost over. The announcer went into his hey, hey, hey and three things happened. Carnation Charley went into his fall back, and two other couples bumped into each other and both of the guys fell. When Carnation Charley sees this he gets nervous and he comes up and falls back again, only this time he don’t catch himself right and he hurts his wrist. You look at this guy and you know he has hurt his wrist. His wrist hurts so bad he wants to cry. But he keeps dancing. I mean Carnation Charley has heart. Anyway, the announcer calls the numbers of both the guys that fell and they stalk off the floor mad as anything. I don’t think they were that good but their ladies were really outa sight. It’s always some guy who’s not into much that gets mad first.

  Then there was the intermission and Sam and Claudette come over and sit with me. Some other people came over, but Sam said that Claudette wasn’t feeling too well and please not to crowd her. So they left. I told Sam about how I thought Carnation Charley had hurt himself and Sam said that he knew. He heard him grunt when he hit the floor the second time. We looked over to where the Carnation was sitting and he looked over at us and gave us this big smile. He looked like a crocodile with a toothache. His old lady was rubbing his wrist and trying to get it back together again but I knew it was too late. When the announcer called the contestants back onto the floor Carnation Charley went out like an old gunfighter who knew his time had come.

  The music started again and Al Green, with his high voice and funky self, starts singing and grooving and the dancing gets serious. All the lames are off the floor and the D-A-N-C-E-R-S are on the floor. Sam was really getting into his thing and he looked like the best. Carnation Charley wasn’t slouching either—he was just about perfect. The music played on and the dancers danced on. Somebody on the sideline bet seventy-five cents on Carnation Charley and somebody else bet fifty cents on Sam and Claudette. Two more numbers were called. There were four couples left on the floor.

  Now, with four couples on the floor and the floor getting a bit slippery you had to be careful, and this is where Carnation Charley’s sneakers came in. He wasn’t about to slip in them sneakers. I was a little worried. Then the announcer called another number. Sam and Claudette, Carnation Charley and his woman, and this Puerto Rican couple were still on the floor. I knew the Puerto Rican couple didn’t have a chance. They were good, real good, but they just weren’t fancy enough. Sure enough, after a few minutes the announcer called their number and they had to sit down. Everybody gave them a real big hand. It lasted almost a minute. Then there was only about a minute left and Carnation Charley went into his thing. He did his fallback thing, but instead of falling back to the floor where he would hurt his wrist he just leaned all the way back and touched his heels and came up again. But he did it good. I mean the guy was really going. Everyone started clapping and my heart jumped into my throat. Then Sam and Clyde started doing their thing. They did their lean back and spin and it was outa sight, too. Then they did it again, only this time they did it twice in a row without stopping, and the people started clapping again, but this time for Sam and Clyde, I mean Claudette. Then they went into a third time. But this time they both went around two times, froze for about four beats and then finished it with Sam swinging his leg over Claudette’s head, dropping into a modified split, then he came up, they both spun again, this time slower,
went through the whole routine again slower until Sam hit his modified split and then started the whole thing again even slower. And cool. Oh, it was so cool. They were slowing down and finishing with the music and everybody started yelling and clapping and it was all over. The announcer called out “Hey, hey, hey, let’s give a big hand to Carnation Charley.” Carnation Charley had to sit down. Sam and Clyde had won the money! I felt so good I didn’t know what to do with myself. Carnation Charley came over to Sam and gave him five and then five more on the black hand side and then some more palm. That was really together, seeing how he had lost and everything. It had been a great contest and a great win.

  The story would have ended there except for the victory dance. The guy who won had to dance with the first girl eliminated and the girl who won had to dance with the first guy eliminated. They played a slow Roberta Flack side. In Sam’s case that was cool because he was too tired to dance fast any more. So he takes this chick onto the floor and starts dancing with her. He had already gave me the money to hold and he was feeling all right. And Clyde was dancing with this guy and everybody drifted onto the floor and started dancing. It was a slow number—Roberta Flack does a lot of slow numbers that are hard to dance to—and they turned the lights down a little. Not way down like in a grind-em-up but just kind of dim. Now get this, this clown that Clyde is dancing with wants to dance close. Can you dig it? He keeps pushing and Clyde keeps backing away. And he keeps trying to dance close enough for a cheap thrill. So Clyde kind of murmurs uh-uhn to this guy, but he don’t take no for an answer. Now Clyde can’t get engaged in any heavy conversation with this dude because he’s going to recognize that Clyde ain’t Claudette. So Clyde is just backing away and this guy keeps moving on forward. I guess he must have figured that Clyde was just bashful or something. And this was a weird-looking dude, too. Tall and skinny with a real stupid grin. Anyway he keeps pushing up against Clyde and finally Clyde stops and gives him a little poke in the ribs. Then this guy rubs his hand on Clyde’s side and starts talking about how he was getting all excited and everything and didn’t Clyde want to give him a little soul kiss. Clyde was just about to lay another uh-uhn on the dude when the guy suddenly lifts Clyde’s chin and sticks his tongue in Clyde’s mouth in a soul kiss. That was when Clyde took off his wig and punched the dude in the mouth. Man, the place cracked up entirely. They put the bright lights back on suddenly and there was Clyde, the wig on the floor behind him, wailing on this dude. The announcer like to have had a fit. Sam didn’t say a word, he just came over to me, took the money out of my hand and went over and gave it to Carnation Charley. Then me and him pulled Clyde out of the place, while the guy Clyde was dancing with sat in the middle of the floor, holding his jaw and wondering what the heck had happened.