She was the queen of 256 Stanley Avenue, Brookline Projects.
Everyone knew Luscious, and Luscious knew everyone.
She’d arrived there from Detroit in 1953. Back then, the apartments were still filled with white people, the courtyards with colorful blooms that lasted from April straight through to October.
The benches unmarked, well-lit hallways, working elevators, and clean stairwells.
Neighbors bidding you hello or good night, and even asking about that ailing family member they’d heard about.
Back then, Luscious was hefty but still considered a good-looking woman. Green-eyed and honey-colored with soft wavy hair that rested on her shoulders.
Like Brookline Projects, Luscious would change, and her beauty would become a shadow of what it once was. Her weight would bloom from two hundred to four, and her skin would hang in folds, her beauty retreating into the creases of her flesh, and Luscious would look every bit the hog people began to refer to her as.
* * *
In 1975, on Campbell’s moving day, Luscious sits and watches over the broken pavement on a blemished bench beside Campbell and her closest friends: Pat, Anita, Porsche, and Laverna.
The girls have been together since nursery school, and they would be together in one form or another throughout their adult lives, but on that sweltering July day, Campbell was fragmenting their circle, leaving them behind and moving what seemed to them miles away—to another part of Brooklyn.
Luscious nudges Campbell’s waist and winks at the girls. “So will you come and visit us? Or will you forget all about us once you’re gone?” she asks.
The girls look at Campbell expectantly.
“Uh-huh,” she replies, and slurps up the last bit of soda from the can. “Y’all gonna come and visit me?” Campbell poses the same question.
“Hmmm, maybe,” Luscious says nonchalantly, and starts to examine the chipped pink polish on her fingernails while the girls rapidly nod their heads.
Luscious’s response forces the loose smile on Campbell’s face to fall away. The girls twist their mouths and give each other the I-told-you-she-was-mean look.
“Maybe?” Campbell questions, and her bottom lip drops in disappointment.
The corners of Luscious’s mouth tremble, and a light not often seen dances in her eyes, and Campbell knows she’s kidding and happily exclaims, “Yeah, you will!” and all of them break down with laughter.
More furniture sails past them, and then the black Hefty bags heavy with clothes and shoes.
“No, we don’t need any help, Campbell,” Millie says sarcastically as she makes her hundredth trip past them. “Yours neither, Rita,” she slings at Luscious.
“Good thing for you!” Luscious yells back at Millie. “Your mama always gotta be starting with someone,” she says to Campbell, and rolls her eyes.
“Here, Campbell, go on over to the store and get me a bag of potato chips, a Pepsi cola, and some Now and Laters,” she says, and stuffs a dollar into her hand.
The girls give Luscious a quick look and then drop their eyes to their sneakers.
Luscious considers them for a moment and pulls another dollar from her bosom. “Get your little friends something too.”
* * *
They move into a brownstone on Bainbridge Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The house is old and leans to one side, but Millie don’t seem to mind that or the fact that all three fireplaces are sealed.
“They don’t even work no more,” Fred says. But Millie doesn’t care; she likes them, working or not. She’s content with just looking at them and admiring the intricately carved wooden mantels. Those mantels will help to occupy her thoughts, and she can forget that Fred cheats and hardly ever reaches for her anymore at night.
She will keep those mantels dust free and glowing and won’t even complain when Fred measures the floors for wall-to-wall carpeting. “It’ll save on the heating bill,” he says.
Campbell waves bye-bye to the beautiful design in the wood floors and looks up at the twelve-foot-high ceilings and wonders about what’s living in the cobwebs that occupy all the corners above her head and if her new room is far enough away to block out the sound of her mother’s weeping.
* * *
When they purchased the house, they inherited the tenant, Clyde Walker, a squat man with red-brown skin and bulging eyes.
Fred advised him that he would have to go up on his rent by fifteen dollars.
“Well, I ain’t about to pay no more than I been paying. Been paying too much already. Floors squeak, pipes leak, had pneumonia every winter I been here. Drafty, oil burner work when it want to. Cold water freezing, hot water cold. I ain’t paying no more than I been paying.”
“So I guess you’ll be leaving, then,” Fred said real quiet-like before reaching into the breast pocket of his shirt and pulling out his pack of Winstons.
“Guess so,” Clyde Walker said just as quietly, and closed his door.
A week later he was gone.
Campbell was more than happy for that. She had encountered him a few times sitting out on the front stoop, his back resting against the step, his hands working at something deep inside the pockets of his pants, his mouth toiling away at the red-and-white-striped peppermints he constantly sucked on.
“Hello, pretty girl,” he would say, but his words were oil slick, and something about the sound of his voice and the way he looked at her made Campbell’s skin crawl.
Yes, she was more than happy to see him lumbering down the sidewalk, suitcase in one hand, overcoat in the other, goodbye and so long sailing over his shoulder.
Good riddance!
Two weeks after that, Clarence Simon rang the bell and inquired about the sign Millie had placed in the front window: Apartment for Rent.
Millie showed it to him, moving through the small space, pointing out things like the women that showed the prizes on The Price Is Right: “And here we have . . .” “The bathroom is over to the left . . .” “The rug was just shampooed and the windows cleaned . . .” She spoke softly as she glided through the house with her practiced smile. “Already furnished, but still plenty of room for anything you might have,” she said as she admired Clarence’s long lean body and dark, neat suit.
“Two hundred a month, including light and gas,” she said, and her eyes dropped to his well-manicured nails and the black snakeskin briefcase with the gold embossed letters that gleamed right below the handle.
“This is fine,” Clarence replied as he counted out one month’s rent and one month’s security.
He moved in the following Saturday, him and his friend.
Clarence Simon and Awed Johnson. Roommates.
Fred peeked through the curtains again. “He tell you he was going to share the place with someone?”
Millie wrung her hands nervously and paced at her husband’s heels. “No, but I—”
“Did you even ask?”
“No, I didn’t think to—”
“Shit, Millie, can’t you even handle business right?”
Fred never took his eyes off Clarence and Awed. He stayed at that window until every last box, suitcase, and lamp was off the sidewalk and in his house.
“Two men. I don’t know,” Fred said when he finally turned around to look at his wife.
Clarence’s friend—his roommate, Awed—was barely five feet tall, with midnight skin and a broad chest. Dagger tattoos dripping blood graced his left and right biceps. A shag of hair hung at his chin, and he would plait it into four braids, clasping the ends with multicolored rubber bands.
Campbell thought he was handsome, in a jailhouse sort of way, even with the fishhook scar that started at the top of his right ear and ended in a curve just above his cheekbone.
“You make sure you stay away from him. Both of them,” Fred warned her before throwing Millie a nasty look. “They mess up one time, and they’re on the street,” he said.
Awed claimed to work construction, but he seemed to
be home more often than he was at work. From what Campbell could tell, he spent most of his days chain-smoking, drinking beer, and blasting his Rick James albums.
You could hear everything through the heating vents. Everything.
Clarence, on the other hand, toiled away as a paralegal for a number of prestigious downtown law firms.
“Well, you know, at Lieberman, Hertz, and Fitz, we don’t have to . . .” “At Lieberman, Katz, and Jacobson, we always . . .” “I may have to look for another job because Lieb, Howard, and Cole . . .”
Clarence changed jobs regularly. Six times in the first three months they’d known him.
“Mrs. Loring. Mrs. L.—hellloooooo!” he’d sung through the door one day. “I picked you up a little something. Just a little gift, you know, to celebrate . . . celebrate the house and, well . . . you’ve been such great landlords. A little housewarming-slash-appreciation gift, I guess.” Clarence had a tendency to babble. He shoved a small red-and-white-striped box at Millie.
“Oh,” she exclaimed as she looked down at the words Junior’s Most Fabulous Cheesecake. “Oh,” she said again, and then smiled with delight. “You really shouldn’t have gone to so much—”
“Oh, it was no trouble at all. It’s a strawberry cheesecake, my favorite. My, do you like cheesecake? Strawberries? Stupid, stupid me, I really should have checked with you first, shouldn’t I? I mean, you could hate cheesecake—be allergic to strawberries, even. I had a friend that was allergic to strawberries; he would just swell up like a big red ball whenever he had one. How could anyone be allergic to a little ol’ strawberry? I mean, they are the sweetest things. Now blackberries, yuck! I hate those with a passion. I could understand a person’s body breaking out in hives after having one of those things, although some say the blacker the berry the sweeter the— Oh, look at me going on and on.”
Clarence finally took a breath, and Millie took one right along with him. Campbell, who had been listening from the kitchen, just giggled to herself.
“I love strawberries and cheesecake. Thank you so much,” Millie said, and another warm smile spread across her face.
“You’re welcome. Very, very welcome,” Clarence said, and surprisingly turned and walked upstairs without another word.
“Yeah, he’s got plenty of sugar in his tank,” Fred commented afterward as he grabbed a glass from the cabinet.
“Oh, Fred. Some men are just a little feminine—it don’t mean he’s gay.”
“Oh, he’s a faggot all right,” Fred said as he held the glass up to the light to examine it.
“Fred!” Millie screamed, and turned on him.
“What?” He gave her a dumbfounded look.
“That word, it’s disgusting.”
“What word, faggot?”
Millie went rigid. “Yes.”
“Well, that’s what he is, Millie. I’m just calling it the way I see it.”
“Can’t you just say gay like the rest of the world?”
“I don’t know anybody who says gay, Millie. What world do you live in?”
“Stop it.” Millie shook her head.
Well, it was becoming quite evident to Campbell that Clarence did have a little sugar in his tank.
The more comfortable he became with them, the more melodious his voice grew, the more expressive his hands became as he used them to pilot himself through conversations. Campbell thought of them, his hands, as pigeons during their morning flights over her house, diving and climbing, their movements sensuous and erratic all at once.
Fred rarely stayed to listen to Clarence’s drawn-out, overwrought stories, but Millie and Campbell quietly, politely took in every word he had to say.
If Clarence was gay, then Awed was something else, but at that tender age, Campbell didn’t know what the proper term should be.
It seemed that Awed liked women too, liked them enough to bring them home when Clarence was at work, bring them home and do to them what he did to Clarence on nights Clarence came home with a case of beer or a fifth of scotch.
Somehow Campbell felt that Awed didn’t touch him in that way on evenings when Clarence came home empty-handed.
One day, as Campbell sat at the kitchen table trying to concentrate on a particular history problem, a steady knocking started beneath her. She was used to the sound, accustomed to hearing it on nights when the house was quiet and she was supposed to be asleep.
On those nights, Millie would pull herself out of bed and turn the television on to drown out the sound of Clarence and Awed’s lovemaking. If Fred happened to be home, he would shake his head in disgust, grab his bathrobe, and step outside to have a cigarette or take a walk.
It was always over quickly, just as Fred flicked the glowing butt of his Winston out into the street or rounded the corner that happened to have a working pay phone.
But on that day, the sun still high in the sky and schoolchildren playing hopscotch on the street, the knocking sound was annoying, and Campbell thought it inappropriate for that time of day.
She slammed her pencil down on the table and put her hands over her ears until curiosity overwhelmed her and she scurried from the chair and down to the floor to press her ear to the vent.
She heard a woman’s soft giggle and then Awed’s voice, thick and guttural, “Whose pussy is this, bitch!” and the thumping sounds became louder, faster.
“Yours! Yours!” the woman screamed.
Campbell’s eyes bulged.
“Whose, whose!”
“A-a-aweeeeeeeeed!”
Campbell remained at the vent, alternating ears, ignoring the pain the beige and white linoleum was causing on her soft knees. She was mesmerized with the lewd call-and-response game Awed and his lady friend played.
“Whose, whose, whose!”
“Aweeeeeeeeeed!”
Millie called from work, just as she did every day at four p.m.
“Hello?” Campbell answered breathlessly, the sudden ringing of the phone catching her off guard and making her feel guilty.
“What you doing?” Millie asked suspiciously. “Who’s there?”
“No one—I was in the bathroom.”
“Uh-huh.”
Millie announced that she would be detained at least another hour and said for Campbell to remove the frozen chicken parts that she planned to fry for dinner that night.
“Is your father home?” she asked as an afterthought, but Campbell knew that Millie had wanted to ask that question at the very beginning of the conversation.
“No.” She sighed, her eyes glued to the vent, her ears straining to hear what she was missing.
Fred had not come home from work yet. He worked the midnight-to-eight shift for sanitation and should have been home by ten o’clock that morning, but it was just past four, and he’d still not arrived.
Millie was quiet for a moment and then offered a quick goodbye before slamming the receiver down in its cradle.
Her mother’s orders forgotten, Campbell rushed back to the vent. Just as she was getting herself situated, the front door swung open, and Clarence whisked in, hands laden with shopping bags.
“Hello, Princess Campbell!” he sang before gliding down the stairs to his apartment.
“Hey,” she called back.
She’d barely been able to get to her feet before he’d breezed past the door. If it had been closed, like it was supposed to be, she wouldn’t have had to move at all, but she’d gotten so used to it being open when her parents were home and had taken to doing the same.
She could hear Clarence jiggling the lock, could hear the keys clinking together as he became more and more frustrated. He breathed and then sucked his teeth before knocking; he knocked softly at first and then called to Awed through the door.
“Awed . . . Awed, you’ve got the double lock on. You know I don’t have a key for that. Awed?”
Awed’s feet hit the floor; quick shuffling sounds followed as he and whatever woman he had there tried desperately to locate their clothing.
“Awed!” Clarence’s voice was shrill. He’d heard the rustling, shuffling sounds too. “Awed, you open this door right this minute. Right this goddamn minute!”
Clarence banged on the door now, his shouts climbing to the screams of a frantic woman.
Campbell wondered if she should call the police, Millie, or Luscious, but she couldn’t move; she was glued to the vent.
There was an endless instant of silence that was so intense she could hear the insistent tick-tick-tick of the pumpkin clock that sat on the wall above the refrigerator.
She held her breath and waited.
“Gimme a damn minute,” Awed’s voice finally came.
The door slowly opened, and Clarence was met with a dusky blackness that was weighed down with the scent of cigarettes, beer, and sex.
Awed, who was wearing just a pair of red-and-white-striped boxer shorts, stood with his arms folded across his chest. The sight of him, half-naked with that nonchalant look on his face, almost undid Clarence, but he quickly composed himself and screamed, “Oh no, you didn’t bring some bitch up in here!” Clarence pushed past him and stormed into the apartment. “Where is she! Where is that skank!”
Awed just snorted, scratched his balls, and calmly followed Clarence inside.
There was a scream. Campbell couldn’t tell if it was the woman or Clarence. A crashing sound followed and then another scream.
“Oh, bitch, you done did it now!” Clarence screeched before a half-dressed female, whom Campbell recognized as the token booth clerk from the Ralph Avenue train station, came running out.
Her jeans were on, but only halfway up her hips, leaving quite a bit of her naked behind exposed.
She took the stairs two at a time, her face a canvas of terror. Clarence was on her heels, his long fingers grasping for the shoulder-length synthetic hair that flared out behind her like a woolen cape.
Campbell was in the hallway by then. The woman made it through the front door, but only because Clarence lost his footing when he slipped on the throw rug that Millie had laid out in the hallway for days when the rain fell and shoe bottoms were damp and muddy.
What followed was horrible: Clarence pacing the hallway, his hands balled into tight fists, screaming and crying, cussing at the top of his lungs.
Loving Donovan Page 2
