The Awkward Black Man

by Walter Mosley

  “ . . . and a thick veal chop,” the waitress continued, “flattened, breaded, and fried in olive oil, served with broccoli di rape.”

  “I want the pasta,” Chai said.

  I ordered the blue-cheese cheeseburger with a baked potato and salad.

  “If you lost some weight,” Chai said, when the waitress was gone, “and did some weight liftin’, you’d be fine.”

  “I’m gonna start my diet next week,” I said. “Monday morning. I got Special K for breakfast and seven grapefruits.”

  “What kinda milk?”

  “Milk milk.”

  “If you gonna diet it’s got to be skim milk, fat-free.”

  “Oh. Uh-huh. That’s why I was walking on the promenade today.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m starting to get healthy. I’m gonna walk up to my house on One Fifty-Eight.”

  “You better walk up to one thousand fifty-eight if you gonna eat that hamburger.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  “I want to be a nutritionist,” she said. “But first I’m gonna get into clothes design. I made my bathing suit.”

  “You did?”

  “Uh-huh. Made it fishnet to make you think you could see sumpin’ and then lined it so you couldn’t. You like it?”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  That was the only moment that Chai was at a loss for words. Her head moved back slightly, and her eyes opened wide enough that I could see them clearly through the flush of her plastic lenses.

  “Where you from, Rufus?”

  “I was born in Baltimore,” I said. “Then we moved to Portland and Oakland and then LA . . .”

  “I wanna move to Atlanta,” Chai said. “Then go to LA after I get established. ’Cause you know they say LA is a hard town, and somebody black got to be ready if they want to live out there.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was only there for a year before my mom brought me to Brooklyn.”

  “And then you moved to Washington Heights?”

  “Yeah. My mom made sure that I was in school at Hunter, and then she moved back to LA to live with my uncle Lon.”

  The food came then. I regretted every bite of my burger. I wanted to leave some, to start my diet a few hours early, but I couldn’t stop eating. I couldn’t even slow down.

  “So you alone out here?” Chai asked me.

  “My aunt Beta,” I said, shaking my head, mouth full of meat. “She lives in Brooklyn.”

  “What kinda name is Beta?”

  “Mom is Alpha, and her sister is Beta,” I said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s the beginning of the Latin alphabet. A and B.”

  “They named two little girls after letters?”

  “My grandfather. He’s like an inventor. He said that he thought all children were like experiments, that every child born was a test of nature to make a better human being.”

  “Huh. That’s weird.”

  “Yeah. He said that all the tests so far had failed, mostly, and that we should keep track of the failures, that one day the government would agree with him and start naming every person so that they could see how the process was coming along.”

  “He sounds crazy.”

  “That’s what my grandmother thought. That’s why she left him and moved to Baltimore.”

  Chai had pecan pie and chocolate liqueur for desert. I had a bite of her pie. After that I showed her all around the World Financial and World Trade Centers. She’d been in them before but didn’t know all the ins and outs the way I did.

  There was an award-winning exhibit of news photography in the sky tunnel that connected the two centers. The scenes were mostly of suffering in other parts of the world. The one I remember was an African soldier raising his machete to deliver the killing blow to an unarmed man that he’d been fighting. The man was already wounded, and this was obviously the last moment of his life. I was sure that there was another photograph—a picture of the murdered man, evidence that his attacker was a murderer—but that photograph, wherever it was, was not an award winner. Chai spent a lot of time examining each picture. She was interested in photography too, she said.

  I kept close to her, waiting to hear that tone in her voice again, the tone that made me feel like I had always known her.

  We went to J&R Music World, and she bought CDs for her sister. And then we went to the building where I worked. She said that she wanted to see it.

  After that we walked some more, and then we had tempura at Fukuda’s Japanese restaurant.

  “I don’t have just one boyfriend,” she told me when we were walking down Broadway in the early evening. I hadn’t asked her, but I did want to know.

  “Right now I see two guys. One’s a cop, and the other’s a ex-con. I like the cop ’cause he know what to do, and I like my convict ’cause he make me feel it when we together.”

  “They know about each other?” I asked, as practical as my grandfather.

  “Uh-uh. Strong men like that cain’t share without fightin’. So I just don’t tell ’em.”

  It was then that she took my hand.

  “Take me to the movies, Rufus. Take me to see The Thomas Crown Affair.”

  “I only have enough for two subway tokens.”

  “You don’t have a bank card?”

  “I don’t have any money in the bank.”

  “I thought you said that you work for that insurance company?”

  “I do, but I just started and I haven’t been paid yet.” This was mostly true. Actually I had worked at Carter’s Home Insurance for three months, but I was just promoted to my new position two weeks ago. Before that I had only made minimum wage.

  Chai let my hand go. I thought that she would leave now that she knew I was broke.

  “I know somethin’ we could do, don’t cost but fifty cent,” she said.

  “What?”

  Again she took me by the hand. We walked farther downtown, our fingers interlaced. My hand was sweating, and even though I always thought that holding hands meant something close and special, I didn’t feel the closeness that I had on that sunbathers’ lawn. It was just two hands and some fingers pressed together on a day that was too hot.

  “What’s this?” I said, holding back at the outside escalator.

  “The ferry,” Chai said. “The Staten Island Ferry. It only costs fifty cent. Don’t worry, I’ll pay for it.”

  We held hands up the escalator and through the swinging glass doors. She had to let go in order to pay at the kiosk. We came into a cavernous room that was over a hundred feet across, and just as long. There was a magazine stand in the center of the room and wooden benches along the walls.

  “Good, it’s pretty empty,” Chai said.

  Now she held my arm. I still didn’t feel that closeness I craved, but there was security in the touch. I’d never been to Staten Island and said so. She told me that her cousins lived out there in Saint George. She used to visit them when she was a girl.

  At the far end of the large waiting room was a huge door that sat on wheels. Through the door we could see a crowd of people all walking in one direction, toward the exit and the city.

  “That means the ferry is unloading. When they’re finished and when the cars are all off, then we can get on.”

  “They take cars?”

  “Uh-huh. Right down below us.”

  The door was pushed open from the outside by an older, red-faced white man. The color reminded me of the man who was so angry when his girlfriend looked at me.

  “Great, it’s one of the old ferries,” she said as we walked up the ramp.

  It was like one of the old barges that my uncle Lon used to take me on off of Redondo Beach. Lots of old wooden benches and a galley where you could get hot dogs and sod
as.

  Chai ran, dragging me along, to the front of the boat. There we looked out over the watery expanse.

  “I used to love this when I was a kid,” she said. “Thanks for coming with me.”

  The horn sounded, and the big boat lurched out into the water. Six or seven others came out onto the prow with us.

  Chai grabbed my hand again and said, “Come on.”

  She led me back into the boat and up a flight of stairs that went above the galley. Up there was another room full of old built-in benches. On either side was an outside area with a long bench that looked out to the water. On one side an old couple sat, and on the other two little kids looked out from the front.

  Chai took me to the aft part of the side where the children were. We sat and looked out for a moment or two. We were going to pass Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. I was about to say how great it was when Chai kissed me.

  What I remember most about it was her tongue. It was very large and muscular. My old girlfriend, the only girlfriend I ever had, Rachel, had a small tongue. When we kissed, Rachel opened her mouth, but her tongue didn’t do anything. But with Chai it was a real physical experience. The boat ride was smooth, but that kiss was like stormy seas. It still wasn’t the intimacy I had experienced on the promenade, but it was overpowering.

  Chai laid a hand on my thigh, right on my erection. She didn’t move the hand or squeeze but just let the weight sit there. After a moment I was kissing back. Every time my tongue pushed into her mouth it was pressed back. It was almost like the tongues were engaged in a war or maybe a war game. My chest started to hurt, and there were sounds coming from my throat. Chai used her other hand to caress the back of my neck.

  When I started to come, Chai moved back from the kiss to watch my face. Her hand was still just weight, but it was enough. I struggled not to make too much noise. I could see that there was someone down on the other end of the bench; I could see their form in my peripheral vision.

  My body tensed, and my legs went straight. I wanted to cry.

  It was then that Chai whispered, “So much.” Then she leaned closer and spoke right into my ear, “Don’t stop,” and I had another orgasm and I thought I was going to die.

  There it was, cast in something stronger than stone, the intimacy, and the closeness I had always wanted but never suspected until that day. I panted like a dog, and Chai grinned broadly. My body was still shaking.

  “That was good,” she said, and then she curled up beside me and put her head on my shoulder and her hand upon my chest. We sat there looking out at the water. The ferry slowed for landing and then jarred against the wooden pylons of the pier.

  Whoever it was at the other end of our bench got up and left. I think Chai fell asleep. I did too.

  “So I told my mothah I didn’t care what the hell he told huhr,” a woman said. It was real, and I heard it, but I was still asleep.

  I felt a forward pitch of the boat and awoke. An old woman was sitting next to me. A man in some kind of uniform was next to her. Two young women were standing at the railing looking out over the water. It was one of them who had been talking about her mother.

  Chai was asleep. Just seeing her seemed to fill my lungs with air. This time I watched the water and the sights.

  It might have been eight o’clock. The sky was still light, and the ferry was full of Staten Islanders going out for the night in Manhattan. I stayed still, hoping that Chai wouldn’t rouse.

  “Hey,” she said, when we were close to shore.

  “Hey,” I said in a new voice, one that echoed the intimacy I craved.

  She sat up and said, “I got to get home.”

  “Can I call you?”

  “I don’t really have a private line. But you give me your number, and I’ll call you, OK?”

  There was a yellow nub of a pencil in her bag and the inner side of the ingredients flap from an empty package of trail mix that had been thrown away in the terminal building. There I wrote my full name and the phone number of my temporary desk at work. I hadn’t gotten a phone in my house yet. I didn’t have the deposit.

  “Goodbye, Rufus Coombs,” Chai said after she kissed my cheek. “I’m gonna call you and see how your diet’s comin’.”

  I wanted to walk her to her subway station, but she said she needed to walk alone.

  The first time I woke up it was because of that pain in my chest. I guess I got excited in my sleep. The pain turned into fear of a policeman who found out that I had been kissing his woman. That fear gave way to fear of an ex-convict, a murderer, who would kill me for the same reason. I fell asleep again only to awaken to a phrase, AIDS kiss. I wondered if I had heard those words on the radio or read them somewhere. The thought of the disease crawling through my veins got me up out of bed. I went to my tenement window and looked out over New Jersey. I wondered if she would call me. It would have to be within the next six weeks, because that was how long I’d be in the claims department.

  I sat in my heavy chair waiting for the sun, wondering if she would call and if I saw her would one of her boyfriends kill me. I wondered if she might die from AIDS and never call to warn me. Somewhere in the tangle of fears I fell asleep again.

  Local Hero

  My grandfather, and Sherman’s, was Theodore Brownley from Spiritville, Louisiana—a town that no longer exists.

  Theodore moved to Brooklyn soon after the flood that washed Spiritville into the Mississippi in November 1949; at least that was what my cousin Sherman said that our grandfather told him. Grandpa Theodore came to Flatbush, bought an empty lot, built the house that Sherman was later born in, married Florida James from Brownsville, New York, and fathered three sons: Isaac, Blood, and my mother’s husband, Skill.

  Florida bore their three sons in the first four years of marriage. The brothers Brownley courted three sisters born to Lucinda Cardwell, who lived with her brood across the street and down the block from the Brownley clan.

  Three brides for three brothers, and, if you believe the rumors, there was some cross-pollination too.

  My father, Skill Brownley, was married to Mint Cardwell. Our first cousin Theodora’s mom was Lana, and her father was Isaac. Blood married Nefertiti, then got killed in a bar fight just a year after she bore his son.

  These names are very important because they are the stakes that hold down the billowing tent of my story, my lives. I am Stewart Cardwell-Brownley, born into the family of Skill Brownley—Grandpa Theodore’s youngest son. I have two brothers and one sister. Theodora had one sister and one brother. The three sisters that the Brownley brothers married had five other siblings. But the rest, even though I love them dearly, don’t figure much in the telling of my tale.

  What matters is that Sherman, like his father, Blood, was killed in a street fight not three blocks from the house Theodore built. My first cousin Sherman did all things good and bad. He was a straight-A student, a Lothario of mythic proportions, nationally recognized for high school baseball and basketball, a devout Christian, a sometimes heavy drinker, and a street fighter. His hunger for truth was equaled only by his thirst for life. He could never get enough, and his heart was all over the place. I was closer to him than to anyone else in the Brownley clan. Partly because, even though he was only a year older than I, Sherman was my protector and teacher; he taught me almost everything I knew, including, though it seems unlikely, most things I learned after his death.

  As a youth I was never very good in school or at athletics; neither was I popular. My parents never pushed me much, but they always offered to help me with schoolwork, and my father played catch with me and my younger brother Floyd on fair days in Prospect Park, when he wasn’t putting in overtime at the machine shop.

  I had three friends through all the years of public school. Bespectacled Mister Pardon, Fat Jimmy Ellis, and Ballard “the Perv” Ingram. We would hang out on the lunch court before an
d after school, trading comic books and gossiping about the sex exploits of everyone else.

  Every now and then Sherman would join us, usually waiting to hook up with some girl. We liked him because he was the best of us, all of us. He ran faster, stood his ground no matter the odds, and he could recite every school assignment by heart. At church he sang with the gospel choir, and afterward he’d make out with one of the church daughters in the storeroom behind the dais upon which the choir performed.

  But even though he was a blazing star among assorted lumps of clay, Sherman would join me and my friends on the lunch court just as if he was one of us, talking about the X-Men and teachers he couldn’t stand.

  I remember one day he asked short, squinty-eyed Ballard the Perv what comic book character he wanted to be.

  “Not,” Sherman stipulated, “the one you like the most but the one you would be if you could be.”

  Ball, which is what we called Ballard sometimes, scrunched up his eyes and stared at my first cousin like he might be a cop who needed the right answer or else he would kick some ass.

  “The Thing,” Ball said at last. “The Thing from the Fantastic Four.”

  Sherman smiled and winked at me.

  “He’s ugly,” Fat Jimmy said.

  “Yeah,” Ball replied, “but he’s got a secret power.”

  “What power?” Mister asked. Mister Pardon was dark-skinned, like the rest of us, and named Mister, in the Southern black tradition, so that no white man could disrespect him. He was an exceptional student, though he stuttered when talking to anyone but us three and sometimes Sherman.

  “His dick,” the Perv said. “It’s rough the way my uncle Billy says that girls like it, and it’s really big ’cause of those cosmic rays.”

  Ball’s voice was so filled with wonder and desire that I was afraid Sherman might turn mean and make fun of him. I and my friends were all around thirteen, while my cousin was fourteen going on forty. Sherman could be cutting, and I had the urge, but not the nerve, to stand between him and Ball.

  Sherman bit his lower lip and cut his eyes at the Perv.

  “Yeah, right?” he said with a smile. “That’s what I always thought about the Hulk. You know like if the madder he get the stronger he is, then maybe the hornier he get the bigger his dick is.”