by Ed Bullins
“HEY, WHAT YOU BOYS DOIN’?” Some older people ran from their stoops. “WHAT YOU DOIN’ TO DAT WHITE MAN?” a mammy-lookin’ woman said.
As the white man spun away from the soggy thumps of Red’s shoes, I waited for his dribbling mouth with a chopping left hook and a straight right which split a knuckle.
“Oh Lord, Oh Lord,” he whimpered on his back.
“Lord God … have mercy on me.”
We all call on him at least once.
“ACCEPT THE SAVIOUR, THE LORD JESUS,” the white missionary lady said in the skid row rescue. The room: half-filled for the evening meal of beans and bread with coffee having a detergent tang. But we homeless and drunken had to first wait on the Lord.
“Kiss mah ass,” one friend said to another, his arm about the man’s bloodied head.
“What … ?” the bloodied man replied. “Shussck maah dick!”
“HE WILL FORGIVE YOU YOUR SINS … HE WILL …” the preacher lady continued.
“Wha don ya come home with me, ah could hold ya in mah arms all night,” the pushy one said.
“Get ya hands offa me, ya creep.”
“C’mon, it ain’t no sex involved … sex is da fardest thing from my mind …” He tried to cradle the other man’s bleeding head.
“JESUS … JESUS … JESUS IS …” the preacher lady began singing.
“… it’s just dat you’s human,” the drunk said.
“Shussck mah dick!” His friend pulled away.
“GODDAMMIT!” a woman screamed and hovered about them. Her short height tied her obvious muscles into a ball of biceps. “YOU BASTARDS,” she said rolling up her sleeves, flexing her arms and shaking a red fist in their faces.
“Shut up! Can’t decent worshippers of the Lord get some respect? … RESPECT!!! … what you’re gettin’, you no good bastards!”
“Jesus … Jesus … Jesus …” the preacher lady crooned.
The two drunks frowned at each other and mumbled to themselves.
“JESUS … JESUS … JESUS …” the preacher lady raised her voice on the last chorus.
“Respect …” the muscled woman whispered the threat for the last time and sulked back to her seat.
“Shussck our dicks,” one of the drunks whispered, and they sat holding each other and mumbling, waiting for their beans and bread and cleansing coffee.
“He’s a fag!” I heard Red tell the woman and two men as I dragged the maimed man out of the street and propped him aside a pole. The group of snoopers were drunk, or they wouldn’t have interfered.
“You mean he’s a queer?” one of the men asked.
“Yeah,” Red said.
Sniggers rustled in the night.
“Jesus … I wish you’d kill the paddy mathafukker,” the big woman said and turned to move away with blackness surrounding her.
One of the men followed. Soon only one shadow stood by. Seeing the remaining man, the stranger tried to twist out of my hands.
“Please …” he started, arms outstretched, and I sagged him with a gut punch. He vomited on my shoes.
“Mathafukker!” I kicked him in the face, feeling his teeth give.
“Don’t hurt him real bad, boys,” the man said from the darkness.
“We ain’t … just showin’ him a lesson, that’s all,” Red said.
“Damn, you guys really work over a sonna bitch, don’t ya,” the drunken voice said.
“We ain’t gonna hurt him anymo’,” Red said. “Just talk ta him and find out why he’s messin’ ’round here fo.”
Then there was no one under the light but Red and me and him; he began to cry.
The poor lonely bastard.
“HEY, BOY,” the bleary-eyed old man said. “Hey, boy, help me, will ya? Thank ya, son, will ya wheel me in here so I can get somethin’ ta eat?
“Here’s a table … get me a bowl of soup, will ya, and you get anything you want …
“Only coffee! Hey, get yourself anything you want. Get it, I say, ya want me ta slap ya?
“Ya just got ta town? From where? … Oh! Been in jail! I just got out myself, ya know, kept gettin’ drunk. When I got out, the only guy would help me was a colored boy, yeah, pushed me all over town … that boy was really okay; I bet I took him in over a dozen restaurants and the only thing he ever got was nit nats. Yeah, just like you … nit nats.
“Here’s the change … here, take it. HERE TAKE IT, YA … ! Ohhh … take it, fellah … I want ya ta have it.
“He never would eat a full meal … only one who helped me … Hey, boy, where ya goin’! … Come back here when I tell ya … COME BACK!”
I smashed him once more in the face; his head bounced on the pavement.
“Cool it, Chuckie,” Red said to me.
I turned away, breathing deep; I could feel the many eyes back in the darkness; eyes cursing us; eyes hating us for doing the things the eyes wished to see.
Red handed me some bills in a wad; the blood from my busted hands wet them before I shoved the money into my pocket.
“Everything’s straight, baby?” Red asked. I looked at him. He gave me the hit’s ring; he kept the watch.
The game was over when we got back to the corner; it took close to an hour to describe the chase and the mugging.
“Yeah, I told some people he was queer and they just went ’bout dere business,” Red repeated over and over.
“Hey, Chuck, tell us what happened on the road before you got busted and came back,” Little Willy said.
“Yeah, you always makin’ it somewheres, man. You’s worse den some fukkin’ hobo!”
“Where you go every summer, Chuckie?” Big Willy had asked too, before the cruiser had crept up, and the cop had shouted out the window that somebody had just stomped a fag on 13th Street, and that he wanted our corner and we better get our “black asses out of sight, pronto!”
“Wow, man, if he had’a searched us we’d been fucked,” Red had said before we split.
“Yeah, he never thought we’d be lame enough to stand around bull shittin’ ’bout it.”
That morning as Red and I walked to our block through the early, deserted streets, me holding my aching fists, with the dawn glowing about us, Red said: “Yeah, Chuck … where do you go every year?”
“Man … it ain’t far enough … it just ain’t.”
Mister Newcomer
She was the single person ahead of me. The door stood locked, and we waited. Her girdle and halter tied her swells down but not completely. She wore open-back heels; I knew she was a Southerner.
“I guess we’ll get seats,” I said.
“Ah huhh, I guess we will.”
I learned her name, that she had been born in Mississippi, where she worked and how much she made in less than the ten minutes before the door was opened by the short instructor. I knew I would make the girl in less than a week. I told her my birthplace, name, and lied about my address and past.
“I was between jobs and had a little cash, so here I am, Catherine.”
Catherine rested her arm next to mine in class. The class excited me. The instructor was hardly older than me and bragged from the first of doing his final work toward his Ph.D. He talked in a special vocabulary that none of that class of daytime clerks and shop girls knew, but I had picked up on some of it from having read a little literary history. I shot him a few questions that seemed to please him and in answering he soared above all our heads with his newly acquired university knowledge.
I had been away from a real school for years, and if this was a school and learning then this was where I belonged. There are too many books I hadn’t read … There were too many words I needed to know. (What is the origin of turnpike?)
Who was Aristotle and what’s his noise? I had to learn quickly and well.
“He likes you,” she said as we walked toward her bus stop.
“We do seem to get along.”
“Don’t be so modest. He likes you because you’re one of his best students.”
&nb
sp; “It’s too soon to say that. Just because I’ve read a few books—”
“Maybe not but it helps. You’ve got it made in that class; you’ve got ‘college bound’ written all over you.”
“It shows, huh?”
“Sho … what made you stay out of school so long?”
“It has been long, I guess. At least for high school. I quit in the first half of the tenth grade and bummed around for several years until I got old enough to join the Navy.” I told her only half as many lies while waiting for her bus.
“Is that all the education you have?”
“No, I used up my GI Bill in a jerk business school and spent a little while in a private high school before coming out here and enrolling in this adult program.”
“You really have a past,” she said.
Next Thursday night Kate and I were again in class. We went out for coffee at the break; I hardly noticed her drawl.
That night when we walked to the bus she gave me her address and telephone number. It was certain that I would be over before next week’s class meeting.
I felt it was good to know a need could be fulfilled by reaching out and making your wishes known. It was good to have a sharp quick mind and a young hard body; that’s all it took.
I had gotten a job with the county a week after I hit town. It was in an old office at the General Hospital typing files and records from midnight till the morning. I had to work the weekends and they gave me Wednesdays and Thursdays off.
Most people had told me that a newcomer couldn’t get a job with the county. But I did. My supervisor had wanted a man badly for that shift and wasn’t particular where he came from.
And I almost refused to learn to type; it was a requirement to get out of business school, and I only took that business course because I wanted something that was easy to waste my GI Bill on. Besides, some guy had told me the school had five girls to every fellow enrolled.
But I had a knack for typing and the rest of the boring subjects were easy, except English. English was a bitch.
I’ve always been a nut for reading, but I hate grammar—nouns, verbs, agreement—ugh—it all grabs me the wrong way. I had to take a year of business English and there wasn’t one book to read in the damned course but our practice workbooks. But knowing hardly anything about the subject, I was still years ahead of my classmates. The little shabby teacher always put me in the spotlight and the other guys hated my guts within two weeks (I’m glad the chicks didn’t).
Getting good grades in English almost became an obsession till I passed the state achievement tests in the upper ten. By then, the education bug had bitten me. I even made the honor roll in that jerk school.
They cheated me of twenty-seven months of education. I took all they had to offer in nine months and after that I shot my big mouth off and fought the teachers. But none of them had any academic background; they were just jerks and have-nots who could be bought cheap and appear to the country cousins and unlearned folks, like myself, as scholars.
A shyster named Blackwell was the president. A bigger phoney I never met. Each semester and during the summer he sent down South all types of literature about his “institution.” Harvard could be spoken of in the terms that Blackwell used to seduce high school graduates as far away as Florida, and he did make ludicrous statements like: “You future leaders from Blackwell Institute will someday stand beside alumni from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc….” I almost puked each assembly when he made his promises to his charges.
He conned me but also taught what a real education meant and how much I needed one.
I left against Blackwell’s advice, before my course was completed in another twenty-seven months, and enrolled in a university-run high school for drop-outs, wayward girls and other misfits, like me, who could afford tuition and pass the entrance exams. It was enriching, if hard work enriches, and I got canned within the year.
Kate’s house was fifth in the block. The street was dark and deserted at seven and I bumbled around for twenty minutes before I had nerve enough to walk from lawn to lawn checking the house numbers until I found hers.
I rang once.
“Hello, sweetcake. Come on in out of the night air,” she said.
“I thought I told you my name.”
“All right, then, for you.”
I really go for people addressing me formally. That’s one of the things that got me snowed at Blackwell’s.
All the students were required to call each other by their surnames. Blackwell said it was good practice for business. After its uniqueness had worn away, I thought it weird.
Calling teen-aged broads Miss So and So got under my skin. I never did learn all of their first names. I slept with several on successive weekends and habitually addressed them in a dignified business manner.
It really gave me gooseflesh when one would groan, “You’re so good, Mister, I’m in love with your body.” It made me feel as if I came in the sanitized package with the Kotex or condoms.
“Call me by my name, honey, or not at all,” I would threaten, but it did little good for I would find myself saying repeatedly, “If it isn’t on by Monday, Miss So and So, I’ll get something to really fix you up.”
And if we hadn’t gotten it on, I wonder if I would have called our little bastard Mister or Miss. I’ve imagined its mother mentioning me to Baby Bastard as “… You’re just like that goddamned Mr. Mother Fucker of yours.”
“You’re so cold sometimes,” Kate said.
“You just think that; come a little closer.”
She pulled beer from the refrigerator and we watched television with my arm about her.
“It’s two more damned weeks to payday,” I said before I left.
“You get paid only once a month, don’t you?”
“Yeah, and it seems like a year.”
“This will be your first payday, won’t it?”
“Yeah … yeah, it will.”
“Oh, I’m so selfish. I shouldn’t have let you spend the carfare to come all the way over here,” she said.
“Damn … when I can’t afford to catch a bus—”
“But you couldn’t afford it,” she said. “Now, could you?”
“… ?”
“Let me give it back to you.”
“Are you out of your head?”
I tried to stand.
“Oh, come on now,” she said, pushing me back. I felt her tight breasts. “Let me be a friend; I understand how it is when you just get in town.”
“Nawh, I’d feel cheap.”
“No, you won’t. Not when you need it. Wait until I get my purse.”
She went into her bedroom and I heard a drawer opening.
“Here take this, it’ll last you until payday.” She slipped a bill into my shirt pocket.
Waiting under the streetlight at the bus stop, I searched. It was a twenty.
I cashed my paycheck the next day. I hadn’t mentioned to Kate that I had been working for a month and had my salary split in bimonthly payments.
I had enough to pick up a seventy-five-buck Buick, pay my room rent for a month and get two five-buck meal tickets. I hadn’t spent Kate’s gift, but I did over the weekend on a girl in tight pants on Adams.
Kate wasn’t waiting the next Tuesday when I walked into class. I looked around at the other students but most ducked their heads or gave saccharine smiles.
It was an American literature class and the stuttering instructor began reading critiques on Steinbeck. My mind wandered, recalling the many different volumes I had enjoyed of his. I remembered many nights at sea, on watch or in my bunk, reading the Monterey series.
And then I heard: “Steinbeck shouldn’t be tolerated for his worthless, hopeless characters … he shouldn’t be tolerated for creating plots to exploit tiring social idealism … he shouldn’t be tolerated for his …”
And somehow my voice was rising above the instructor’s: “I don’t think we should tolerate the critic.”
&nb
sp; A hush fell, and the instructor stood above me, stuttering more, sputtering out flecks of sputum. “I thought you came here to get my views as well as those of the author’s, sir. I can only give you what I know and believe.”
The bell rang. I don’t remember walking from the room.
I didn’t return the second hour. Before leaving school, I stopped at the desk and got a tuition refund. I arrived at Kate’s in fifteen minutes. The porch light was on.
“Hi there, handsome,” she greeted and unloosed the screen.
“Hello.”
“What’s wrong? I couldn’t reach you and tell you that I wouldn’t be in school tonight. The guy on the desk at the hotel said he’d never heard of you.”
“He’s new,” I said. “I don’t hang around there very much, anyway.”
“I’m sorry …”
“For what?”
“Oh … thanks,” she said.
“I wondered where you were and if anything was the matter.”
“I bet you did.”
“Yeah … really. Forget my mood; I get like this sometimes. Now what’s wrong?”
“Oh, nothin’.” She giggled. “Not really, honey.”
“Good, I thought all sorts of things when I didn’t see you. That’s why I left after the first hour and came over.”
“You sure can be sweet when you want to.” She moved closer.
“You give me more credit than I’m worth. Wait till you know me better.”
“I know you now, honey.”
“Maybe you do,” I said.
“Do you know what, sweetie?”
“No.”
“I’m going to move …” she said.
“You are?”
“Yeah, I’m making enough now; I just got a raise. Isn’t that great?”
“Yeah … I can see your point,” I said.
“So, this year I’m not going to go to school; I’m going to make some changes in my life. Find a new place, buy some nice clothes, and settle down and take care of business.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
“Then you think I’m doing the right thing?”
“Sure you are.”
She found a bottle of VO in the kitchen and some ginger ale.
