“You had enough, Hammer Head,” I yelled. “Just bring your crummy self in this yard and I’ll pick up where I left off.” Violet was knocked out and the other kids went into a huddle. I didn’t have to say anything else. And when they all pressed me later, I just said, “You know that hammer he always carries in his fatigues?” And they’d all nod waiting for the rest of a long story. “Well, I took it away from him.” And I walked off nonchalantly.
Manny stayed indoors for a long time. I almost forgot about him. New kids moved into the block and I got all caught up with that. And then Miss Rose finally hit the numbers and started ordering a whole lot of stuff through the mail and we would sit on the curb and watch these weird-looking packages being carried in, trying to figure out what simple-minded thing she had thrown her money away on when she might just as well wait for the warm weather and throw a block party for all her godchildren.
After a while a center opened up and my mother said she’d increase my allowance if I went and joined because I’d have to get out of my pants and stay in skirts, on account of that’s the way things were at the center. So I joined and got to thinking about everything else but old Hammer Head. It was a rough place to get along in, the center, but my mother said that I needed to be be’d with and she needed to not be with me, so I went. And that time I sneaked into the office, that’s when I really got turned on. I looked into one of those not-quite-white folders and saw that I was from a deviant family in a deviant neighborhood. I showed my mother the word in the dictionary, but she didn’t pay me no mind. It was my favorite word after that. I ran it in the ground till one day my father got the strap just to show how deviant he could get. So I gave up trying to improve my vocabulary. And I almost gave up my dungarees.
Then one night I’m walking past the Douglas Street park cause I got thrown out of the center for playing pool when I should’ve been sewing, even though I had already decided that this was going to be my last fling with boy things, and starting tomorrow I was going to fix my hair right and wear skirts all the time just so my mother would stop talking about her gray hairs, and Miss Rose would stop calling me by my brother’s name by mistake. So I’m walking past the park and there’s ole Manny on the basketball court, perfecting his lay-ups and talking with himself. Being me, I quite naturally walk right up and ask what the hell he’s doing playing in the dark, and he looks up and all around like the dark had crept up on him when he wasn’t looking. So I knew right away that he’d been out there for a long time with his eyes just going along with the program.
“There was two seconds to go and we were one point behind,” he said, shaking his head and staring at his sneakers like they was somebody. “And I was in the clear. I’d left the men in the backcourt and there I was, smiling, you dig, cause it was in the bag. They passed the ball and I slid the ball up nice and easy cause there was nothing to worry about. And …” He shook his head. “I muffed the goddamn shot. Ball bounced off the rim …” He stared at his hands. “The game of the season. Last game.” And then he ignored me altogether, though he wasn’t talking to me in the first place. He went back to the lay-ups, always from the same spot with his arms crooked in the same way, over and over. I must’ve gotten hypnotized cause I probably stood there for at least an hour watching like a fool till I couldn’t even see the damn ball, much less the basket. But I stood there anyway for no reason I know of. He never missed. But he cursed himself away. It was torture. And then a squad car pulled up and a short cop with hair like one of the Marx Brothers came out hitching up his pants. He looked real hard at me and then at Manny.
“What are you two doing?”
“He’s doing a lay-up. I’m watching,” I said with my smart self.
Then the cop just stood there and finally turned to the other one who was just getting out of the car.
“Who unlocked the gate?” the big one said.
“It’s always unlocked,” I said. Then we three just stood there like a bunch of penguins watching Manny go at it.
“This on the level?” the big guy asked, tilting his hat back with the thumb the way big guys do in hot weather. “Hey you,” he said, walking over to Manny. “I’m talking to you.” He finally grabbed the ball to get Manny’s attention. But that didn’t work. Manny just stood there with his arms out waiting for the pass so he could save the game. He wasn’t paying no mind to the cop. So, quite naturally, when the cop slapped him upside his head it was a surprise. And when the cop started counting three to go, Manny had already recovered from the slap and was just ticking off the seconds before the buzzer sounded and all was lost.
“Gimme the ball, man.” Manny’s face was all tightened up and ready to pop.
“Did you hear what I said, black boy?”
Now, when somebody says that word like that, I gets warm. And crazy or no crazy, Manny was my brother at that moment and the cop was the enemy.
“You better give him back his ball,” I said. “Manny don’t take no mess from no cops. He ain’t bothering nobody. He’s gonna be Mister Basketball when he grows up. Just trying to get a little practice in before the softball season starts.”
“Look here, sister, we’ll run you in too,” Harpo said.
“I damn sure can’t be your sister seeing how I’m a black girl. Boy, I sure will be glad when you run me in so I can tell everybody about that. You must think you’re in the South, mister.”
The big guy screwed his mouth up and let one of them hard-day sighs. “The park’s closed, little girl, so why don’t you and your boyfriend go on home.”
That really got me. The “little girl” was bad enough but that “boyfriend” was too much. But I kept cool, mostly because Manny looked so pitiful waiting there with his hands in a time-out and there being no one to stop the clock. But I kept my cool mostly cause of that hammer in Manny’s pocket and no telling how frantic things can get what with a big-mouth like me, a couple of wise cops, and a crazy boy too.
“The gates are open,” I said real quiet-like, “and this here’s a free country. So why don’t you give him back his ball?”
The big cop did another one of those sighs, his specialty I guess, and then he bounced the ball to Manny who went right into his gliding thing clear up to the backboard, damn near like he was some kind of very beautiful bird. And then he swooshed that ball in, even if there was no net, and you couldn’t really hear the swoosh. Something happened to the bones in my chest. It was something.
“Crazy kids anyhow,” the one with the wig said and turned to go. But the big guy watched Manny for a while and I guess something must’ve snapped in his head, cause all of a sudden he was hot for taking Manny to jail or court or somewhere and started yelling at him and everything, which is a bad thing to do to Manny, I can tell you. And I’m standing there thinking that none of my teachers, from kindergarten right on up, none of them knew what they were talking about. I’ll be damned if I ever knew one of them rosy-cheeked cops that smiled and helped you get to school without neither you or your little raggedy dog getting hit by a truck that had a smile on its face, too. Not that I ever believed it. I knew Dick and Jane was full of crap from the get-go, especially them cops. Like this dude, for example, pulling on Manny’s clothes like that when obviously he had just done about the most beautiful thing a man can do and not be a fag. No cop could swoosh without a net.
“Look out, man,” was all Manny said, but it was the way he pushed the cop that started the real yelling and threats. And I thought to myself, Oh God here I am trying to change my ways, and not talk back in school, and do like my mother wants, but just have this last fling, and now this—getting shot in the stomach and bleeding to death in Douglas Street park and poor Manny getting pistol-whipped by those bastards and whatnot. I could see it all, practically crying too. And it just wasn’t no kind of thing to happen to a small child like me with my confirmation picture in the paper next to my weeping parents and schoolmates. I could feel the blood sticking to my shirt and my eyeballs slipping away, and then th
at confirmation picture again; and my mother and her gray hair; and Miss Rose heading for the precinct with a shotgun; and my father getting old and feeble with no one to doctor him up and all.
And I wished Manny had fallen off the damn roof and died right then and there and saved me all this aggravation of being killed with him by these cops who surely didn’t come out of no fifth-grade reader. But it didn’t happen. They just took the ball and Manny followed them real quiet-like right out of the park into the dark, then into the squad car with his head drooping and his arms in a crook. And I went on home cause what the hell am I going to do on a basketball court, and it getting to be nearly midnight?
I didn’t see Manny no more after he got into that squad car. But they didn’t kill him after all cause Miss Rose heard he was in some kind of big house for people who lose their marbles. And then it was spring finally, and me and Violet was in this very boss fashion show at the center. And Miss Rose bought me my first corsage—yellow roses to match my shoes.
Mississippi Ham Rider
“I’LL BE HERE TOMORROW for my early-morning coffee fix. If you gonna meet me, sister, bring your own dime.” He swiveled away from the counter and stomped out past the jukebox, huddling his greatcoat around him. I flipped my notebook open and wrote: “Mississippi Ham Rider can best be described as a salty stud.” We had talked for nearly an hour—or rather I had talked, he had merely rolled his eyes and stared into his cup as he swirled the watery coffee revealing the grounds—and still I had nothing to write up really except that there was no humor about the man, and, at seventy, was not particularly interested in coming to New York to cut records for the new blues series.
The waitress had wiped the counter menacingly and was leaning up against the pie display with her hands on her hips. I was trying to figure out whether I should follow Rider, put Neil on his trail, or try to scrounge up a story from the townsfolk. The waitress was tapping her foot. And the cook, a surly-looking bastard in white cap, was peeping over the edge of the kitchen counter, his head kind of cocked to the side so that the sweat beaded around his nostril. I was trying to get myself together, untangle my legs from the stool and get out of there. It was obvious that these particular sinister folks were not going to fill my dossier with anything printable. I moved. But before I even reached the door I was in the third person absentular.
“So what’s this high-yaller Northern bitch doin’ hittin’ on evil ole Ham?”
There was only one Rider in the ten-page directory, an Isabele Rider, the address typed in the margin. I folded myself into Neil’s Volkswagen and tried to find it. The town itself was something out of Alice or Poe, the colored section was altogether unbelievable: outhouses, corner hard-heads, a predominance of junkyards with people in them, poverty with all the usual trimmings. And Isabele Rider ran one of those time-immemorial stores—love potions and dream books and star charts and bleaching creams and depilatory powders, and mason jars of ginger roots and cane shoots. A girl of about sixteen was sitting on a milk box, reading a comic book and eating a piece of sweet potato pie.
“Mrs. Isabele Rider around?” I asked.
“No.” She went right on reading and eating.
“I’m Inez Williams,” I said. “The people I work for are trying to persuade Mr. Ham Rider to record some songs. They want him to come to New York and bring his guitar. He’s a great blues singer,” I said.
She looked me over and closed the book. “You want some pie?”
“No thanks, just Mrs. Rider. She around?”
“No. Just me. I’m Melanie. My mother says Ham ain’t going nowhere, nor me either. Lady before asked me to sit-in somewhere. My mother says I ain’t going nowhere, Ham neither.”
I leaned on the counter and unbuttoned my sweater. A badly drawn zodiac chart was right in front of me. I traced the orbits looking for Aries the Ram to give me the high sign. He looked like a very sick dog in the last stages of sickle-cell anemia. I tried to figure out the best way to run it down to this girl right quick that they didn’t have to live in this town and hang around in this store and eat sweet potato pie for lunch and act like throwbacks, before I totally distracted myself with the zodiac or consideration of abnormal hemoglobins and such like.
“Look,” I said, “back in the twenties a lot of record companies put out a series called race records. And a lot of blues singers and country singers and some flashy show-business types made a lot of records. Some made a lot of money. But when the Depression came, the companies fell apart and these singers went on home. Some stuck around and mopped floors and ran elevators. Now this jive mother who is my boss thinks he can make some bread by recording some of the old-timers. And they can make some bread too. So what I want is to get your granddaddy to come with us and sing awhile. You see?”
“You best speak to Ham himself,” she said.
“I did. But he thought I was just trying to get into his business. All I do is write up a thing about the singers, about their life, and the company sticks this on the album cover.”
She licked the last of the pie from her fingers and stood up. “What you wanna know?”
I whipped out my notebook. “What does he like, where does he come from, who’re his friends. Stuff like that.”
“We three all what’s left. His landlady, Mama Teddy, looks out for him when he gets drinking and can’t help himself. And I look out of his way when he gets raffish.” She shrugged.
“Any chance of us all getting together? My partner, Mr. Neil McLoughlin, is the one who handles the business and all. I’d like you all to meet him.”
“This some fay cat?”
“Uh … yeh.”
“Uh-hunh.” She ripped off the edge of the calendar and wrote an address. “This here is where we eat, Mama Teddy’s. You be there at six.”
Neil was going into one of his famous crouches by the time I got to the park. He had spent the day trying to find quarters for us both, which was a lost cause. There was not even a diner where we could trade notes without incident, so I fell in beside him on the bench, jostling the bottle in his pocket.
“I’m beat and burnt-out, I mean it,” he wailed, rolling his eyes up to the heavens. “This is the most unfriendly town. I escaped from an unbelievable little rooming house down the road just as an incredible act of hospitality was about to be committed.”
“Yeh, well, look, pull yourself together and let’s deal with the Rider character first. He’s quite a sketch—jackboots, the original War-One bespoke overcoat, razor scar, gravel voice and personality to match and—you ready?—he’ll be damned if he’s going North. Says he was badly mistreated up there. Froze his behind off one winter in Chicago. And in New York, the Negro artists had to use a drafty freight elevator to get to the recording studio.”
“Not like the swell conditions here.”
“He wasn’t an artist here. I think the best thing to do is just tape him here and let him sign whatever release one signs.”
“But old man Lyons, dearheart, wants him in the flesh to allow the poor folkway-starved sophisticates to, through a outrageous process of osmosis, which in no way should suggest miscegenation, to absorb their native—”
“All right, all right, calm down. The thing is, his last offer was to sing obscene songs for party records. He damned near committed mayhem. In short, the man don’t wanna leave, buddy.”
“But wasn’t he at least knocked out by your superior charms, not to mention your long, lean gams?”
“Those are my superior and singular charms. He was totally unimpressed. But the man’s seventy-something, keep in mind.”
Neil slouched over into his hands. “This is hard work, I mean it. And I feel a mean and nasty spell coming on. I never had so much trouble and complication in my life before. I’ve got consumption of the heart and—”
“Neil, my nerves.”
“They were always pretty easy to find. Mobile, Auburn, just sitting there in a beat-up room in a beat-up town in a beat-up mood, just sitting there w
aiting for an angel of mercy—me. Doing nothing but a moaning and a hummin’ and a strummin’—”
“All right, cut it out. We’re in trouble. The man don’t wanna budge and all you can do is indulge in these theatrical and most unnerving, irritating fits of—”
“Dearheart, recall,” he demanded, shoving his spread hand in my face. “There was old man Supper, a real nice old supper man. Kinda quiet-like and easygoing, just dipping his snuff and boiling his supper. And then ole Jug Henderson, the accident-prone saint of white lightning, fiddling away and sipping that bad stuff out of a mayonnaise jar. And—”
“Neil, my nerves.”
“And ole Blind Grassy Wilson from Lynchburg, only one leg left by the time I arrived, but swinging still and real nice about talking into the machine to tell how his best gal slapped a razor across his chops.”
“Enough, you’re running amok.” I got up and stretched my legs. “We’ve got to find a place called Mama Teddy’s. And please, Neil, let me do the talking. I’m tired of eating sandwiches out of paper bags. Just be quiet till after we eat. And no wisecracks. We might get killed.”
“Good Lord”—he jumped up—“I’m not insured. One false move and the man’s liable to cut me, beat me up, starve me to death and then poison me.” He grabbed himself by the throat and rolled around atop the mailbox. A truck passed, I stepped aside and acted like I wasn’t with the lunatic.
“Amazing how your race has deteriorated under segregation, Neil. If only you’d had an example to follow, you might have been a halfway decent dancer.”
He smoothed his hair back and walked quite business-like to the car. “Get in, woman.”
Mama Teddy’s was a storefront thing. Fried chicken legs and bar-b-qued ribs were painted on the window pane. And scrawled across the top of the glass in fussy little curlicues were the various price-fixed meals. In the doorway were three large jugs with soapy brown something or other in them, rag wicks stuffed into the necks and hanging over the sides to the floor. But you could see that the place was clean, sort of. I was starving. Neil was dragging along the tape recorder, mumbling statistics about hernia and prostate damage.
Gorilla, My Love Page 4
