Tragic Magic

by Wesley Brown

  “Dance.”

  “Let’s sit down then, cause I want you to do both.”

  Back at the table Pauline was lamping the goings on with some very strong eye contact.

  “You leave somethin on me, Mouth?”

  “No, I was…”

  “I know what you was doin. You always doin with your eyes what you ain’t swift enough to do with your hands. I catch you starin at me again and I’ll put so much of your business in the street there won’t be enough left for you to keep to yourself!”

  “Give me some slack, Pauline!”

  “You in the wrong store, turkey. I deal in flack!”

  “Hey, man, I said I was sorry.” It was Otis arguing with someone on the other side of the room.

  “Sorry don’t shine my shoes,” a man hollered back.

  “Look, I’m trying to be nice, but if you keep fucking with me, you gonna end up with some extra lip.”

  “Look, you no-hand muthafucka, you try that shit again and you gonna be all nubs.”

  “You want some of me, man? Well, come on and get some of this ass-whipping. It’s free.”

  “You gonna have me right now, muthafucka!”

  “Stop it, Johnny, please! It doesn’t matter!” a woman pleaded.

  “Get the fuck off me!”

  I finally broke through the crowd surrounding Otis. “Hey, come on, Otis,” I said, “what you trying to do?”

  “It ain’t what I’m trying to do. It’s what I’m going to do.” He stuck out his lips in the shape of a snout and began to suck air into his lungs. After exhaling several times, he went into some T’ai Chi movements, winding his arms into arcs and pivoting his legs simultaneously left and right.

  “All right!” someone shouted.

  “Do it!”

  “Don’t hurt nobody!”

  “Yeah, you a stone killer when you fightin the air. But I got somethin for your karate ass!”

  Otis said nothing, just stared at his adversary and rocked in a stance of preparation: knees bent slightly, back straight with hips, and behind tucked under.

  “Neither one of you is mean,” Pauline hollered. “You just want to be seen.” The room was spiked by a general outbreak of laughter. Then a whistle blew and the disc jockey chimed in over the microphone:

  “Come on, bloods, don’t bleed. Remember what the people’s champ Muhammad Ali once said: ‘Games is only for a little while, but you face and teeth is all your life!’”

  “No, unh, unh! I’m not takin this shit! I don’t care if he don’t have no hand!”

  “Please, Johnny, let’s go!” the woman said.

  “No, unh, unh! I’m not takin this shit! I don’t care if he don’t have no hand!”

  “Please, Johnny, let’s go!” the woman pleaded again.

  “Bitch!” It was so quick I never saw it, but I heard her face break from the force of his fist. Blood jumped from the woman’s mouth into her waiting hands. There were screams, and people moved out of the way to allow the woman room to hit the floor, and for Otis and the dude to scuffle.

  In the midst of the fierce clinching and teeth gritting, it was difficult to tell who was doing what, since wrestling has a way of confusing the issue of a rumble.

  “You ain’t gonna get no reputation off a me,” the other dude yelled.

  “You better pray for your soul, cause your ass is mine!”

  “Unh, unh, you ain’t gonna get no reputation off a me!”

  “Have your fun, muthafucka, cause I’m gonna have mine in a minute!”

  “Ain’t this some shit? These lames ain’t gonna do nu-thin,” Pauline hollered. “All they doin is huggin. They both probably faggots!”

  “Hey, you two. They callin the PO-LICE!”

  They kicked back from each other with the recoil of a high-powered rifle and contented themselves with calling each other out of their names before things quieted down.

  “I know about a party uptown. Wanna go?” Alice asked. We all agreed.

  “What happened?” I asked in the cab.

  “Aw, the lame got uptight cause I stepped on his shoes.”

  “Was it on purpose?”

  “No, his feet were in the way. He shouldn’t a even been with that broad anyway… Yeah, I know what you thinkin. That’s why I want to do the thing I told you about. It’s just what I need. It’ll clean me out… That dude was lucky he came at me in-between moves. I didn’t have a chance to get my breathin together.”

  “Nigger,” Pauline said, “if you was as bad as your breath, you would a been able to deal no matter how he came at you.”

  “Yeah, that’s easy to say when you on the sidelines.”

  “And I ain’t never claimed to be nowhere else. You the one grandstandin, not me. And if you talk shit on front street, your ass should be ready to make a public appearance!”

  “You keep runnin off at the mouth and my foot’s gonna make a public appearance in your ass!”

  “Oh, yeah? Try it. And I bet I’ll kick you in your balls so hard you’ll think it’s the World Series!”

  THE PARTY WAS IN a multi-terraced highrise on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson River, not too far from the George Washington Bridge.

  “Alice!” a woman screamed, when she opened the door. “I’m so glad you came, girl!” Her hair was slicked back tight against her scalp, and her glossy walnut face was meticulously highlighted with eyeshadow, rouge, and red raspberry lipstick.

  “You know I wasn’t going to miss your party, Norma. I want you to meet some friends of mine. This is Pauline, Melvin, and Otis.”

  “Hi,” she said, flashing a flawless set of gems.

  “Hi,” we said in unison.

  We followed her into a huge apartment of rooms spilling with people. In each room was a bazaar of different moods and scenes. I recognized faces I hadn’t seen in years. It looked like a reunion of the old Ivy League set who once wore cardigan sweaters, desert boots or penny loafers, dug the music of Herbie Mann and Johnny Pacheco, subscribed to Esquire magazine, went to Coattails on Thursday nights at City College, partied at the Kappa House, went on the Q boatride every year, and had gone to schools like Central State, Hampton Institute, and Virginia Union. I had always been on the periphery of this crowd, able to crack the ranks in appearance only.

  I pushed my way into the room where most of the dancing was going on and was boxed in by a contact high of body heat and song. “I Only Have Eyes for You,” an oldie by the Flamingos, had just come on and was causing a stampede of dudes in the direction of all available women.

  All the odors of life were alive and well as the room became a gathering of hip-shifting Lonnie Youngbloods and Sassy Shirleys. The stink of laying dead left me, and I could feel myself cooking in the body and the head. I took a deep breath and could tell the difference.

  Beep, beep ahhhh

  Beep, beep ahhhh

  It’s in the air

  It’s everywhere

  It was the fire now and I wanted to turn in an alarm for Alice’s presence to burn against me. But she had disappeared. So, without a partner, I didn’t move, but let the slang from the bodies jostling me take me on a sea cruise.

  Otis wasted no time. He had Norma surrounded. And I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to eavesdrop on a practitioner of the sly, the slick, and the wicked.

  “What you into?” he asked.

  “Me,” Norma answered.

  “You ought to spread yourself.”

  “I do.”

  “I mean on something besides yourself.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Don’t knock new bread until you’ve tried it.”

  “I’m my own sandwich!”

  “Yeah, I bet. Two pieces of bread and wish you had some meat.”

  “And I suppose you’re the meat?”

  “Government inspected.”

  “I’ll take my chances with a ricochet biscuit.”

  “You’ll go hungry.”

  “But not for you.”

>   “You’re not bad.”

  “No, I’m better.”

  “Hey, where you goin?… Oh, you just gonna walk away from me, hunh? You know, you look better goin than comin. Hey, Mouth, check out the ticktock of them buttocks… Well, tell me somethin. What’s the digit on Alice?”

  “Naught.”

  “Yeah, I ran a zip myself. Fuck em! They both probably switch-hitters anyway.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I can tell just by talkin to that broad Norma that we both lookin for the same thing.”

  “Bullshit!” I said, walking away.

  “Hey, I’m just tellin it like it T-I-S!”

  Alice and Norma. Switch-hitters? They couldn’t be. But if they were, I wondered which side of the plate they batted on when facing men. I wanted to find Alice but it was almost impossible to move. The crush of people had begun to get to me. I finally found a little more breathing room in the kitchen, where two dudes were talking and smoking a joint.

  “Those were some good old times,” one said.

  “Remember how we used to initiate the new pledgies?” the other said.

  “Yeah! What was the line we ran on them?”

  “Ahhh… Oh yeah, I remember. We would tell a lame that in order to become a Gentleman of Quality he had to get down with the baddest G.Q. of them all.” The joint was passed to me and I took a drag.

  “And who was that?” I asked, deciding to get into their game.

  “Who are you?” the one who had passed me the joint asked.

  “I don’t mean to get in your conversation, but I once pledged for the Gentlemen of Quality and I just wanted to know who the baddest G.Q. was.”

  “He was Peter Prep,” he said, giving his friend a conspiratorial glance. But I had something for their asses.

  “Where would I have found him?” I asked.

  “He was in the Ivy League.”

  “What position did he play?”

  “Okay, my man, since you want to be funny—he played the field!”

  “What did he have on?”

  “You couldn’t miss him. He would be wearing a British casual sky straight out of Scotland, a three-piece herringbone suit, a canary yellow shirt with a maroon tie, a silk maroon handkerchief in the breast pocket, and a pair of oxblood cordovans.”

  “What would I have said had I seen him?”

  “You wouldn’t have said nothing. You just had to be seen in the spots where he hung out, and sooner or later he would notice that you were bucking for a place among the Gentlemen of Quality. The rest would be up to you. There were a lot of cats who thought they were G.Q.’S, but most of them weren’t for real. They may have been gentlemen of quantity, but they weren’t gentlemen of quality. Being a G.Q. wasn’t a state of mind, my man. It was a fact of life. You didn’t decide to be a G.Q. It just happened that way!”

  “ORRR-riiiight!” the other dude said, and they both slapped five.

  “I hope you didn’t mind me having a little fun,” I said.

  “No, that’s all right,” said the one who’d done most of the talking. “Were you jiving when you said you pledged for the Gentlemen of Quality?”

  “No, I really did.”

  “Did you make it?”

  “No, but I did find Peter Prep.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where at?”

  “It was back in 1964 at the Forty-Second Street Library. I was working in the stacks below the main reading room. And when somebody wanted a book I would send it up on the dumbwaiter. There was always a lot of action in the stacks. Dudes would be steady trying to get next to broads on a studious tip. You could always tell the cats that had the most smarts. They would dress kind of roguey, wear horn-rimmed glasses, look all wild in the eyes and hair, and always carry a beat-up-looking book in their back pocket.

  “Now, the baddest dude in the place was a cat everybody called Booksnake cause he read a lot. I knew he was Peter Prep even though he didn’t dress according to the description. His game was more together than the card catalogue. When the word got around that Booksnake had a cap, goo-gobs of chicks started inviting him over to their cribs to help them get into their books or whatever else they wanted him to get into.

  “After a while, Booksnake began acting very strange. When a request for a book came down to the stacks, he would stare at the slip of paper and say, ‘Ask me something I don’t already know.’ Finally Booksnake’s mind locked on him. He not only wasn’t working with a full deck, but jokers were running wild in his head. The last time I saw Booksnake, he was in front of the Forty-Second Street Library gangster-slapping one of the lions until his hands looked like chopped liver. I think he’s out at Creedmoor now.

  “Some people say all that attention went to his head. But that wasn’t it. What really happened was that everybody figured Booksnake had it all, so nobody ever gave him anything. That’s what did the job on him… So the moral of this story is: Never get branded as someone who’s got it all. If you do, you in trouble.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Well, if it isn’t it ought to be,” I said.

  “You sound like you ain’t got it all.”

  “Who does?” I said.

  “Yeah, well, whatever I got I’m taking it out of here and seeing if one of these fine hammers wants any of it!”

  “Yeah, bet!” the other dude agreed.

  I was fucked up. The smoke had really gotten to me. I moved unsteadily to a room just off the kitchen. Seated were about five or six women, dressed in one continuous wraparound fabric that changed colors as it draped each different one. They seemed cut off from the festive mood in the rest of the apartment, forming a tableau staring at nothing in particular, while listening to a Gloria Lynne record that had just come on.

  Trouble is a man

  a man who loves me

  no more, no more

  “Sing the song, Gloria! Sing the song!” one said.

  “If it only wasn’t so,” another chimed in.

  Nothing good to say about him

  Still I hate a day without him

  “You chewin my cabbage now, girl!”

  Trouble is a man

  who’s for himself

  and that’s all

  “That’s a man’s menu all right—me, myself, and I!”

  After all we planned

  he didn’t mean it

  Now I understand

  I should have seen it

  “Go on, Gloria! Sing the shoulda, woulda, coulda blues, girl!”

  A man staggered into the room. The platform shoes elevating his heels like staircases were about to cause him to make a crash landing.

  “I don’t know what you women talkin bout,” he said. “I’m Sir Rap a Lot and it’s time for me to get a shot at the limelight. I was born in the Dixie Peach but raised in the Big Apple. I’m still fruit but on a different tree. But now nobody can take a bite out a me, you dig. If looks could kill I’d be murder one! Shit! Don’t tell me nuthin!”

  “Somebody should!” a woman said.

  “That’s all right. But I know what I’m talkin bout. I’m qualified, you dig. I just had to give up seed for skin. Seed for skin. Trouble is a man, eh? So what! What you broads want me to do about it, throw up?”

  “Yeah, if that’ll shut you up!”

  “All right, I will!” His throat groaned but he clapped his hand over his mouth and wobbled away.

  My head throbbed. I tried moving but it was too late.

  “Just a minute. Don’t leave us so soon,” one of the women said. “We’d like to hear from another male man. We’ve heard from Sir Rap a Lot, but since he had some difficulty talking with his mouth full of whatever he was trying to say, maybe you’d like to speak on the topic of Trouble Is a Man!”

  “I’m not in it,” I said.

  “But you’ve already been picked. And there’s always a chance that if you chew your cabbage slick enough, one of us might be willing to relieve you of some of that sweet batter we know you got backe
d up in you.”

  “Come on, sweetie, tell us what your menu is!” They were ganging up on me.

  “What do you think about the shoulda, woulda, coulda blues?”

  “Have you given up all your seed for skin?”

  “All right,” I said, “if you really want to know—for me trouble ain’t a man; it’s my hand, cause for the last two years I’ve given up seed for foreskin and come away with a very tender groin!”

  “Uh-oh, the male man is gettin an attitude.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “So what are you gonna do? Cause I’m ready to fuck or fight. But I’m not gonna listen to any more of this shit about your claims to pain!”

  I expected a comeback and was surprised when none came. I found my way into the next room and saw Pauline sitting by herself in a corner. When she saw me, her puffy cheeks slackened and their fullness drained down into her jaws. I wondered at what point she started believing that she wasn’t too much of nothing and not enough of anything. Maybe never having been asked to dance had something to do with it. But as the saying goes: If you dance to the music, you got to pay to the piper. Ask your mama.

  “I haven’t seen you since we got here,” I said.

  “You’ll get over it,” she said.

  “What is it, Pauline? You got a beef with me or something?”

  “You givin yourself too much credit, Mouth. I don’t get that excited about nobody. Not since I was a little girl and asked my mama to tell me about the world. She spit in my face and said, ‘Now you know about the world.’ You see that dude over there all wrapped up with that woman?”

  “What about them?”

  “Look at her eyes. They wide open. Whatever he’s doin ain’t doin much for her imagination. And she’s probably drugged cause she thought if she danced with him, he would take her somewhere. I ain’t never expected that from nobody. I remember the day I decided I was in the world as a result of myself, that I wasn’t born but was spit from a volcano. And that’s the way I like it, cause I don’t need nobody’s five senses but my own for me to close my eyes.”

  “Since you’re so in touch with your senses, have you seen Alice?”

  “It’s not my week to watch her.”

  Fed up, I walked away from Pauline and made my way toward the front door. I was leaning against the wall near the elevator cooling off when Alice came out of the apartment. I liked the way the flow of her bell-bottoms suggested the shape of her legs. And when she swung her arms, the way the mound of her shoulder curved into her upper arm made my skin pebble. And by the time the bell shape of her nose, the proud stones in her cheeks, and her thickly fleshed lips were up in my face, I was hard.