by John Ridley
“Who asked you to?”
“What do you mean, who as—”
“I sure as hell didn't tell you to come down and get your nose in my business.”
“Nobody … I read about the protest, or march, or whatever, in The Times, saw your name, saw how you got arrested. I'm getting you out of jail,” I said strongly, trying to show him with my tone the good works I was doing that he seemed otherwise blind to.
“I don't want out of jail.” Morris was back at the steel door, slapping at it with the flat of his hand. “Hey,” he yelled to whoever was on the other side. “Hey!”
“Stop it.”
“Open up!” Hand fisted, pounding now. “Open the door and let me back in!”
“Morris!” I went to him, grabbed him, pulled him from the door. He turned; our eyes got into a mum duel. The look he had melted mine, made me flinch. My eyes went to his coat I was clutching, torn at the shoulder. Torn on the sleeve. The shirt underneath torn, too. Below that were scrapes and cuts that hadn't been treated but allowed to dry and crust naturally.
I asked: “They do that to you in there?” my head nodding at “them,” whoever was beyond the steel door.
“No.” Mo's voice was quiet, tired of fighting for a minute. “Happened when I got arrested. And this.” Mo lifted his shirt. Welts and bruises. A field of them. So bad, they were visible even against his black skin.
What do you say to that? I didn't know. I didn't say anything.
Mo lowered his shirt. The curtain coming down on the horror show.
“I didn't mean anything by getting you out. Read you got arrested. I read, and I figured … I thought—”
“You thought writing a check for my bail would make you down with the struggle.”
“I thought you'd rather be outside than inside, so I came here to spring you.”
“The point is to be inside. The point of our protest was to get arrested and stay in jail to be a reminder to the people of the inequity of the treatment of the so-called Negro by the white power structure.”
“I'm not a reporter, so quit the lecturing. I'm tiying to talk to you, and you're making speeches.”
“I'm telling you what's what. The point is to demonstrate our suffering the way Dr. King demonstrates his suffering by staying in—”
“The point is to get beat up and tossed around so you can feel like you're super-Negro—”
“Black, Jackie. When you gonna get—”
“So you can look down your nose at anybody who isn't trying to integrate the same way you are.”
“What kind of dumbass … You think I go out looking to take a beating from the pounders? You think catching their billy clubs makes me feel like the big nigger?”
“The word is black!”
“Then how about we integrate your way, Jackie? Should we shuffle over and get a room at the Plaza, or a suite at the Ritz? Or how about we just find us some white girls to fuck?”
Well, let me tell you: That was the straw. “Shut up!” I was grabbing Mo's jacket again, not caring about the rips and tears. “Shut the hell up! I'm sick of you talking me down!” My hand was a fist, my arm was cocked, ready to send it blindly into whatever part of Mo it could most quickly find: his temple. His jaw. His mouth … His mouth. His mouth was made up into a little bit of a smile, the corner of his right lip pulled up some, just some, toward his cheek.
Mo said: “How about that? I always knew you had some fire in you, Jackie.”
My eyes took a sheepish trip around the room. With my yelling, with my hand ready to toss Mo a beat down, I figured people would be staring. They weren't. They had other things on their minds. A husband or father or brother or lover who was still on the other side of that steel door. I let go of Mo.
Mo moved across the room to one of the chairs and sat, the wood making noises as it took his weight. About half a minute later I sat in the chair next to him.
I said: “Know what I remember most about us?”
“The old woman.”
I nodded. He knew.
“To this day I still got a picture of that ashy old battle cleaning herself out in the pond. Just about ruined me for women altogether.”
Independently, we smiled some.
Another half a minute passed.
I said: “We were friends, Mo. How'd we wind up so different?”
“Don't know.”
“Must be a reason. You don't like me, must be a reason why.”
“I like you just fine, Jackie.”
I got a little laugh from that. “Got a queer way of showing it: come around every two years to preach at me, let me know how I failed the Neg … black race.”
“I preach at you because I'm trying to get through to you.”
“Get what through? I don't have the pride you do?”
“Know what else I remember about us? I remember when people used to pick on you: kids at school, at that logging camp. I remember how you used to flip the situation, make jokes, make people listen to you. You're good with words, Jackie. You're good with your lingo. You always knew how to make people pay attention. And all you ever did with it was turn yourself into a comic, a nightclub Stepin Fetchit. Guess I just expected more from you.”
“You see how wrong that is? You expected more from me, from my life. My life, Mo. You ever stop to think that this, what I'm doing, is what I want?”
Morris accepted that. “I didn't mean it as no dig.”
“There's another way I should take you don't like my choices?”
“You should take it as meaning … to me, you're better than what you ended up doin' with yourself.”
Another thirty seconds of sitting, the wood of the chairs doing the only conversing as we both fished around in them for an unfindable position of comfort.
Pretty soon I said: “Sorry for getting you out of jail.”
“You were just trying to do right.”
I know Mo was making an effort at being sincere, but even that little bit came off as stooping.
We left the House, left the other people to their waiting.
We did a little walking.
“Let me ask you something, being onstage, being in front of people. It's just you … you and nothing. That must be frightening as hell'
“Nah, it's not really … ” I started my standard response, then quit it. The question Mo was asking was one I'd gotten a hundred times before. A hundred times before, I'd given the same answer. But this time, this time because I was talking to a guy I'd been familiar with all my life, but knew by the measure of distance we'd traveled apart, I was probably talking to for the last time, I thought about the question. I thought, I said: “There's this moment, this one quick tick that's always waiting right between when the audience stops clapping and you tell that first joke. When you're there, when you're facing that beat, it's like … Can you imagine what it's like to stand on the edge of a deep, dark hole, not knowing what's down inside it, but still you've got to jump in? Yeah. That's frightening as hell. But then you make the jump; you tell your first joke, you get your first laugh. After that, once you've got the audience, once you know you own them … Morris, can I tell you: It's the sweetest thing there is.”
Mo nodded to that. Maybe he understood where I was coming from. Maybe he didn't and was just nodding to nod. Then he said: “I don't think I could make that jump.” What he meant, what he'd never said to me before: He respected me.
We did a little bit of standing around.
I asked Mo where he was headed, if maybe we could head there together. He said he wasn't exactly sure, but that he figured he should go and try to get arrested again.
Trying not to make a joke of the moment, I wished him luck, then hailed a cab for Midtown.
Mo kept walking.
I WAS HOOFING BACK to my apartment after a set at the Copa. Walking, letting the night air clear out my gummed-up head. Doing a stand at the Copa had gone from being nearly all I could ever dream of to being just doing a stand at the Copa—goin
g to work and doing my job. Nothing more. Nothing special.
As I approached my apartment, a voice called: “Jackie.”
It stopped me shotgun dead. The voice, vivid as a bad scar. The accent, Southern.
WE SAT IN A BAR drinking. Dighton drank. I just watched as he liquored himself.
“Goddamn whore, Jackie. They all … She wanted tah leave me, she coulda goddamn well left. Ah don't give uh … World's fulla whores. But she ain't gotta make uh foola me.” He was weepy and pitiful, the cracker version of my father, and every glass he downed only made him more so. Yelling at a waitress: “Sweetheart, yew see muh glass is empty!” To me: “She knows Ah'm tryin' tah get uh drink over heyah, an' she don't … Yew see how they all whores, don't yew?”
“Why don't you go home?”
“Don't yew tell me what tah do!” Me just opening my mouth swung Dighton's pendulum from pathetic to psychotic. It was a unbalancing made fertile by alcohol: its only growth would be twisted. “Ah don't need some black boy tellin' me …” That quick the pendulum swung back. “Jesus Christ. Tha principal. Tha grade-school principal she run off with.” He was talking about his wife. I remembered her. Kind. Pleasant. A bruise to her eye. I wouldn't blame her for anything she did to this man. “Yew see how that makes me tha talka tha town, tha laughin'stock. That's what Ah'm sayin, Jackie—they're whores. Know sumthin': Ah thank she likely wanted tah do yew. That time we seen yew in Kansas City. Tha way she looked at yew up onstage, Ah think she …” Dighton gave me a good looking-at, his eyes x-raying my heart, trying to find truth or lie. The diagnosis: “Nah, yew wouldn'ta done that tah me, would yew, git all jungle with muh wife? But that no good … Run off with tha principal of tha grade school, an' took muh every last dime with her. Took muh money, Jackie! It was all Ah had left jus' tah get heyah. Knew you lived in New York. Big goddamn city. Didn't think Ah could find yew, excep' yew was playin' at tha Copacabana. Shit, yew play uh fancy place like that, it's all over tha papers.”
My luck.
I knew where things were going, it was obvious, so I just went ahead and got there. “I'll give you some money, then you're through here. You're on your own.”
For a moment Dighton looked ashamed. It was as if, even though his intentions were nothing but bad, it was still a disgrace to have arrived at a place in his life where he had to travel half the country to shake down a “nigger” just to get by.
He covered failure with rage. “Ah told yew: Don't yew tell me what ta do!” Dighton went to work on his freshly delivered drink, giving the waitress a sneer as she walked away. Anyway, the booze seemed to calm him. “Ah … Ah cain't go nowhere. Ah cain't leave yew, Jackie. Yer all Ah got left. Ah need yew, an' yew need me.”
“How do I—”
“Yew jus' do! Yew jus' …” He took in a little more booze to help him grease his logic. “We tied together. Tha's tha queer parta it all. One wild night, an' now yew an' me arh like white an' niggrah blood brothers. Spilled blood bruthas.”
I felt very ill and very cold.
“Nah,” Dighton went on, “Ah don't think Ah'll much be movin' on from heyah. Ah ain't gonna be movin' nowheres 'cept tah maybe uh better hotel. Heyah that Waldorf place is real good. Yeah, Ah'm gonna want tah be real close tah yew. Jus' like Ah said, white an' niggrah blood bruthas.”
I got his meaning. I'd always feared, in my heart I'd always figured, him putting the touch on me wasn't a one-time thing. But what he was talking about now was a state of permanence: me making money and handing a cut of it over to him like he was a Charlie on my payroll, a vig to be paid off, and if I didn't … The article, the incident, the police, the scandal rags.
Maybe.
Maybe there was all that. Maybe there was none of it. Maybe he'd send me to jail or kill my career, or maybe he'd just limp away a sick drunk too scared to risk doing time himself. Like old dynamite, he could've been harmless or deadly dangerous.
Sweat glued my clothes to my skin. I felt all bunched in, nervous and anxious, claustrophobic in my own body. I felt like I was being buried alive.
Drunk as he was, Dighton could see me going scared-white under my flesh. “What yew worried 'bout, Jackie?”
I hated the way he called me by my first name. Easy, I'd take “nigger” over him being familiar with me.
“Ah ain't gonna do nuthin' foolish.” Some more of his drink, then Dighton followed that with a smile dimmed by his yellow and black teeth. “Lessin' yew arh.”
Foolish?
Foolishness was thinking that a black man in the 1950s could walk alone at night from Miami Beach to Miami without encountering some craziness that would chase him for the rest of his life. Foolishness was thinking that once a guy got a taste of free money, his appetite for it would ever go away.
I wasn't going to be foolish anymore. From that moment forward, everything else I did were actions marked past due.
THE NEXT NIGHT AT THE COPA. I talked to Jules, told him I needed a favor. Told him I needed to speak with Frank. Frank C.
He asked what about.
I said it was a private matter.
Jules didn't ask anything else, just gave me an “I'll see what I can do.”
The next day. Over the phone I got an earful of a raspy voice I hadn't heard in a good while.
“Jackie, what's doin'?”
“Hello, Mr. Costello.”
“Frank. You know it's Frank with you.”
“You well, Frank?”
“Ah, you know. Got some time on my hands now. Wife likes havin' me around. Drivin' me fuckin' crazy. Heard you got hitched.”
“… We took the cure a while back.”
“Sorry for that. Sad thing when a marriage don't take.”
I wondered how the table full of blondes Frank had when I first met him figured into his philosophy but was sure it did somehow. Anyway, I wanted to let the comment pass, all remembrances of my bogus wedding, and slide into another conversation.
Frank beat me to it. “Jules said you wanted to talk.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe we should have a sit-down.”
“Yes.”
Frank gave me the address of his place in Port Washington. I told him I'd be out in the afternoon. We swapped good-byes, hung up.
I took the LIRR out to the island, looking forward to seeing Frank. Most guys in life wouldn't be caught dead talking to a moolie. Frank had done everything he could to help me. He had always been a decent guy. Extremely so for a mob boss.
And being decent was the reason he was now an ex-mob boss.
When the other heads of New York's big five wanted to expand their trade to include hard narcotics, Frank nixed it. Not strictly because he was a thug with a heart of gold. He knew that drugs were as much trouble for the people who sold them as the people who took them. Cops might look the other way with prostitution, gambling—probably they were the best customers—but toss some heroin into the mix, all of a sudden all the greased palms in town can't keep the law off your back.
The other bosses didn't care. The other bosses thought Frank was getting old and should take a rest, and told him so Mafia-style— a bullet to the back of the head. Only, Frank had luck riding with him. The slug tore some flesh, chewed up his fedora, but otherwise didn't do much damage. Still, Frank didn't need things explained to him twice. He got the message just fine and took a retirement out on Long Island. He had a nice house, a nice quiet life, but, I hoped, not so quiet that he couldn't help me with a few things.
Forty minutes out of the city, and you were out of the city. Concrete and skyscrapers replaced with trees, grass, yards … suburban whites eyeballing the stray black who'd wandered into their neighborhood.
Real quick I got myself to Frank's.
“Jackie! ” Frank's big hands swallowed mine as he welcomed me to his place. He guided me by the shoulder to his wife, Bobbie, did an introduction, and asked her to pour us some lemonade, then gave me a quick tour of the house—brick traditional down to the shuttered windows and fron
t-yard birdbath. That, and huge—while we caught up some. He asked me how things were going, how the Copa was.
“Good,” I told him. “Not like the old days.”
“The old days, listen to you. Make it sound like you been in the business since the silents.”
“You know, it's not even like a few years back. The room's not as jammed. Don't see people climbing all over each other to get in the door.”
“Television,” Frank lamented. “Television's gonna be the death of clubs. Sit at home, see whatever the hell you wantjust by changin' the channel. The box is the future,” he prophesied.
Me, having zero television in my history and not seeing me with any in the days to come, was made nervous by the thought.
“But you didn't come all the way out here to talk about the Copa.”
No, I hadn't. “Mr. Cos … Frank, you've always been decent to me. You helped me out early on with things for no good reason except you thought I was funny, and I appreciate that. … I could use some helping out now.” I was very straightforward with my delivery. “And the kind of help I need, you're the only one I could think to turn to.”
Frank nodded. He got my meaning.
He walked us over to some chairs out on the patio.
I sat. I said: “A few years back, when I was in Florida this one time—”
Brushing air with a hand: “I don't need the specifics. Don't want 'em.”
“There's a guy causing me trouble. He can cause me—”
Bobbie came 'round with those lemonades. I thanked her, exchanged a few pleasantries.
When she was gone: “He can cause me a whole lot more trouble if he felt that way.”
“And you want…?”
“I would like … I want him to stop causing me trouble.” I was not at all dramatic about that. Not dire, not desperate or weepy in my request. I was simply asking a favor. Could I borrow a cup of sugar? Would you pick up my newspapers while I'm out of town? Mind shaking up the guy who's trying to shake me down?
And that's how Frank took it, just one cat asking another for a favor. He made an offhanded gesture, said: “You gotta understand, Jackie, I'm sort of out of the life.”
