The man sitting next to me is wearing a beautiful suit that cost him a couple of grand easy and he's spread out calculators, calendars, and legal pads across his tray table like the plane is now his personal office in the air. I think all that shit is for show. I don't believe anybody can really concentrate on business when they're hurtling through the air at six hundred miles an hour. Besides, ain't nobody that damn busy.
He was surprised as hell when I sat down next to him. White men in expensive suits are always a little pissed to find themselves seated next to me in first class, especially since I started wearing my hair so short. They seem to take it as some kind of personal affront that of all the seats on the airplane, the bald-headed black woman showed up next to them. It used to make me uncomfortable. Now I think of it as helping them take a small step toward higher consciousness. Discomfort is always a necessary part of the process of enlightenment.
For the first time in a long time, I didn't grip and pray during takeoff. It wasn't that I was drunk. I've been a lot drunker on a lot of other airplanes. It's just that at this point, a plane crash might be just what the doctor ordered.
• 2
I always forget how small the terminal is in Grand Rapids. Two or three shops, a newsstand, and a lounge with a big-screen TV, but barely enough vodka to make me another double while I wait for Joyce, who is, of course, a little late. I truly love my big sister, but I swear if she was ever on time for anything, I'd probably have a heart attack at the shock of it.
The bartender seemed surprised when the drink he poured for me emptied his only bottle of Absolut. He set the glass down in front of me on a cocktail napkin printed with a full-color map of Michigan.
“Sorry I don't have lime,” he said. “Most people come through here just drink a beer or something.”
“It's fine,” I said, taking a long swallow to prove it. I knew that if he could think of something else to say, he would, but our brief exchange seemed to have exhausted his conversational skills. He headed back to the TV.
It feels strange to be sitting here writing all this down. The last time I kept a diary was when I first got to Atlanta in 1984. Things were happening so fast I started writing it all down to try and keep up. Just like now. I was nineteen. I had a brand-new cosmetology license, two years salon experience, and an absolute understanding of the fact that it was time for me to get the hell out of Detroit.
When I was growing up in Idlewild, my tiny hometown four hours north of the big city, the motor city had always seemed as close to paradise as I could probably stand. Two years of really being there showed me how truly wrong I could be.
I had heard that if you were young and black and had any sense, Atlanta was the place to be, and that was the damn truth. Those Negroes were living so good, they could hardly stand themselves. They had big dreams and big cars and good jobs and money in the bank. They had just elected another one of their own to the mayor's office, they were selling plenty of wolf tickets downtown, and they partied hard and continuously.
My first week in town, I hooked up with a sister who was going to work for the new mayor, and she invited me to a cocktail reception at one of the big downtown hotels. When we got there, I felt like I had walked into one of those ads in Ebony where the fine brother in the designer tux says to the beautiful sister in the gorgeous gown: “I assume you drink Martel.” Folks were standing around laughing and talking and pretending they had been doing this shit for years.
My friend was steadily working the crowd, and by the end of the evening, I had been introduced to everybody who was anybody among the new power people. My first impression was that they were the best-dressed, best-coifed, horniest crowd I had ever seen. I knew my salon was going to make a fortune, and it did. I'd still be making good money if I hadn't tried to do the right thing.
When I got the bad news, I sat down and wrote to all the men I'd had sex with in the last ten years. It's kind of depressing to make a list like that. Makes you remember how many times you had sex when you should have just said good night and gone home. Sometimes, at first, when I was really pissed off at the injustice of it all and some self-righteous anger seemed more appealing than another round of whining, I used to try and figure out who gave it to me in the first place, but I knew that line of thinking was bullshit. The question wasn't who gave it to me. The question was what was I going to do about it. Still, when I think about all the men I slept with that I didn't even really care about, it drives me crazy to think I could be paying with my life for some damn sex that didn't even make the Earth move.
When I called Joyce and told her what I was going to do, she told me I was crazy and to let sleeping dogs lie, but I felt like it was only fair. I didn't even know how long I had been carrying it and I sure didn't know who I got it from. Atlanta is always full of men with money to spend on you if you know how to have a good time, and I used to be a good-time somebody when I put my mind to it.
So I sat down and tried to figure out how to tell these guys what was up without freaking them out. “Hey, Bobby, long time no see! Have you been tested for HIV yet?” “Hey, Jerome, what's up, baby? Listen, it might be a good time for you to get tested for HIV.” I don't remember what all I finally said, except to tell them I was really sorry and that if they wanted to talk, to call me anytime.
To tell the truth, I was a little nervous. I'd heard a few stories about people going off on their ex-lovers when they found out, but nobody contacted me for a couple of weeks, so I figured they were all going to deal with it in their own way. Then one Saturday, the salon was full of people, and in walks this woman I've never seen before. She walked right past the receptionist and up to me like we were old friends, except her face didn't look too friendly.
“Are you Ava Johnson?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“You can tell me what you think you're doing sending my husband some shit like this through the mail.” She reached into her purse, took out one of my letters, and waved it in my face, her voice suddenly rising to just short of a shriek.
As noisy as the salon always was on Saturday afternoon, it got so quiet so fast, all I could hear was the Anita Baker CD we'd been playing all morning. I tried to stay calm and ask her if she wanted to go into my office so we could talk. She didn't even let me finish.
“I don't want to go anywhere with you, you nasty heifer!”
I knew she was upset, but she was pushing it. I wondered if he'd given her the letter to read or if she'd discovered it on what was probably a routine wifely search through his pockets.
“All right then,” I said. “What do you want?”
“I want you to take it back,” she said.
“Take it back?” I was really confused now. What good was that going to do?
“You heard me, bitch!” She shouted over Anita's soothing admonitions about the importance of finding your own rhythms. “Take it back!”
I held up my hand to let her know she had gone too far, and she drew back and slapped me across the mouth. Two of my operators grabbed her and pushed her out the door, but all the time she's hollering at the top of her lungs, “This bitch got AIDS! This bitch got AIDS!”
I tried to play if off, but it really shook me up. I finally had to cancel the rest of my appointments and go home for the day. I was distracted, and that's when you run the risk of leaving the perm on too long, or cutting the bangs too short, or putting the crimp in sideways and your life isn't worth two cents. Sisters will forgive you a lot, but do not fuck up their hair.
The slap didn't do me any serious damage, but the rumors that scene started didn't help business any. I sent out a letter to our clients explaining the difference between HIV and AIDS, but they were scared. They started calling to cancel appointments or just not showing up at all. That's when I really started to understand how afraid people can be when they don't have any information.
All those folks who had been giving me those African American Businesswoman of the Ye
ar awards and Mentor of the Month citations and invitations to speak from the pulpit on Women's Day stopped calling me. When people I'd known for ten years saw me out, they'd wave and smile and head off in the other direction. Everybody knew, but nobody mentioned it. They acted like it was too embarrassing to bring it up in polite company. I guess we were all still supposed to be virgins instead of just stupid.
When I got a good offer from a hotshot young developer for the downtown land the salon building was sitting on, I figured this was a good time to take the money and run. It was time for a change. I wanted to open another business that didn't require doing heads or frying chicken, and I was truly tired of living in a place where so many people still thought getting AIDS was proof that you were a child of Satan.
I know as well as anybody that being diagnosed HIV-positive changes everything about your life, but it's still your life, the only one you know for sure you got, so you better figure out how to live it as best you can, which is exactly what I intended to do. I wanted to move someplace where I didn't have to apologize for not disappearing because my presence made people nervous. I wanted a more enlightened pool of folks from which to draw potential lovers. I wanted to be someplace where I could be my black, female, sexual, HIV-positive self.
The salon sale gave me enough money to finance a big move without stress. Add to that the money I made when my house sold immediately and I was set for a couple of years without working at anything but living right. From where I was sitting, San Francisco looked like heaven, earthquakes notwithstanding. Natural disasters were no longer my main concern. That's one of the things about being positive. It focuses your fear. You don't have to worry about auto accidents, breast cancer, nerve gas on the subway. None of that shit. You already know your death by name.
When I called Joyce to tell her I had decided to move to the West Coast in the fall and ask her if she wanted some company for the summer, she did the big-sister thing, got all excited and started talking a mile a minute. She started some kind of youth group at her church, and now that Mitch's insurance settled out, she's quit her job as a caseworker with the Department of Family and Children's Services so she can work this thing full-time. She said all the young people in Idlewild are going to hell in a handbasket and if we don't do something pretty quick, the town is going to be just as violent and crazy as the cities are.
I tried to say “What you mean we?,” like that old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, but she sounded so much like her old self again, all happy and optimistic, I didn't want to discourage her. After Mitch, her husband, died, I never thought I'd hear her sound like that again. She hardly talked at all for months after, but I should have known that was only temporary. Joyce always finds a way to make it better.
She's had some bad luck, too. In fact, until recently, I thought Joyce had been given our family's entire allotment. Two kids and a husband, all dead before she hit forty. One baby died in her sleep two weeks after they brought her home from the hospital. The other kid was walking home from the school bus and got hit by a drunk twelve-year-old who stole his mother's keys and then passed out behind the wheel of the family station wagon.
Mitch drowned two years ago this February, and in the dictionary under the words “freak accident,” there would be a picture of that shit. A couple of years ago the lake in front of their house got real popular with ice fishermen. These guys would come out early in the morning, drill a big hole in the ice, and sit there all day drinking beer, peeing in the hole, and wondering why the “spose to be that stupid” fish didn't swim on up and commit suicide for a chance at a plastic cricket.
By evening, the fishermen were too drunk and disappointed to clearly mark the area with safety flags like they're supposed to do, so the lake was dotted with all these open holes. Once it got dark, they froze over with a thin sheet of ice, not enough to support your weight, but just enough to camouflage the hole.
Mitch and Joyce went walking beside the lake on this particular night and he started sliding around on the ice, doing tricks, showing off for Joyce. They had been married twenty-three years and he still acted like she had just accepted his invitation to the senior prom. So he got up some speed, slid way out, opened his arms into the wind, hollered, “I love my wife!” and disappeared. By the time they pulled him out, he was gone. Mitch was the sweetest man I ever knew, and for a long time after he died, I kept thinking how unfair it was for him to die that way. I was still naive back then. I thought fairness had something to do with who gets to stay and who gots to go.
In the bad-luck department, there's also the fact that my mother chose Joyce's wedding night to mourn my father's death five years earlier by taking all the sleeping pills she'd been hoarding for this occasion and drinking herself to death with a fifth of Johnny Walker Red. She left a note for Joyce, who was almost eighteen, saying she was sorry and that maybe Joyce would understand if anything ever happened to Mitch. I was still a kid and didn't even have a boyfriend yet, so she didn't leave anything for me.
I don't know whether or not Joyce finally understood when Mitch fell through that ice, but my mother's choice made a lot of sense to me when my doctor gave me the bad news. It occurred to me for the first time that there might be circumstances where what you don't know is infinitely preferable to those things of which you are already certain.
I was glad me and Joyce were going to get a big dose of each other before I moved three thousand miles away. I waited for her to take a breath and then told her I'd be on the four-o'clock flight to Grand Rapids on Tuesday and for her to swear she wouldn't be late to pick me up. She swore, like she always does, but I knew she was still going to be late.
Before we hung up, Joyce asked me if I ever prayed. I told her I had tried to start up again when I got sick, but I quit because I knew I was just hedging my bets. I figured if I was smart enough to know that, God must know it, too, and would probably not only refuse to grant my selfish prayers, but might figure I needed to be taught a lesson for trying to bullshit him in the first place. I know once you repent, Jesus himself isn't big on punishment, but according to all the Old Testament stories I ever heard, his father was not above it.
• 3
Joyce sent wild Eddie Jefferson to pick me up. I couldn't believe it. I'd been sitting there for an hour and a half, which is a long time to be waiting, even for Joyce, when I see this brother with a head full of beautiful dreadlocks, some kind of weird-looking Chinese jacket, and some Jesus sandals walk up to the gate and look around. Now, there is no reason for the look since everybody else on the plane has been picked up by their grandparents or caught a cab to meet their boyfriend and ain't a soul in sight but me. The way he's looking, you'd have thought it was rush hour at Grand Central Station and he was trying not to miss somebody in the crowd. He takes his time like he's got no place to be but here and nothing to be doing but looking.
At first I thought I recognized him, but I didn't want to stare, so I looked away. The last thing I needed was some wanna-be Rastafarian thinking I wanted company for the evening. When he didn't move on, I took another look at him, just to be sure. He had one of those smooth, brown-skinned faces that could be any age from twenty-five to fifty. He had great big dark eyes and he was looking right at me in a way that you don't see much in the city anymore. Like he had nothing to prove.
When he caught me looking at him, he walked right up, stuck out his hand, and called my name like we were old friends.
“Ava?” he said. “You probably don't remember me. I'm Eddie Jefferson. Mitch's friend.”
As soon as he smiled, I knew exactly who he was. Remember him? Was he kidding? The exploits of Wild Eddie Jefferson were beyond legendary. He had done everything from getting into a fistfight with the basketball coach to threatening his father with a shotgun for beating his mother. He drank, smoked reefer before I even understood that there was such a thing, and had two babies by two different women before he got out of high school. One of them graduated and moved away. The other one, a
thirty-year-old divorcée, went back to her ex-husband, convinced him the baby was his, remarried immediately, and lived happily ever after.
Mitch was always so straight-arrow, nobody could believe they were friends, but they were so close, they might as well have been brothers. The last time I saw Eddie was at Joyce's wedding. He was Mitch's best man and he brought a date from Detroit who had on a red strapless dress and silver shoes at eleven o'clock in the morning. After that, he got sent to Vietnam, and by the time he came back, I had finished high school and headed up the road to Detroit.
I'm sure he was at Mitch's funeral, but I don't really remember. That whole thing is still a blur to me. Besides, he looked so different, I probably wouldn't have recognized him, although I'd sure have remembered that hair. I wanted to touch it to see if it was as soft as it looked.
“How ya doin', Wild Eddie?” I said before I thought about it.
He cringed a little like he'd just as soon I forgot the history that produced the nickname. “Just Eddie.”
Joyce had sent him to pick me up because some woman had shown up on her doorstep in labor and had to be driven to the hospital in Big Rapids, more than an hour away. They left so quickly, Joyce didn't even have a chance to call Eddie until she got there, which is why he was so late.
That was typical. Anybody with trouble knew if they could get to Joyce, she'd take care of it. Her feeling was that all crises could be handled if someone would take responsibility and start moving. Joyce could get going faster in an emergency than anybody I ever saw. When I first called and told her I was sick, she was on a plane and at my door by nine-thirty the next morning. Once I explained everything the doctor had said, I think the hardest part for her was realizing that there was nothing she could start doing that would fix it.
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