The Great Pretenders

by Laura Kalpakian

  “Who called the cops?” I asked.

  “Who knows?”

  We watched, horrified really, as the Negroes were processed, one by one at the high desk in front of us. Most of them—patrons, musicians, even the waiters and bartenders—were arrested and booked. They would stay overnight in the slammer. Terrence rose wearily when his turn came. As they led him away, his gaze rested briefly on me, but I could not read the expression on his face, which was battered and bloody, his eye swollen, but the set of his jaw suggested a cold, abiding anger.

  Except for Jonathan, Diana, and me, the white people arrested at the Comet Club all got processed, made their calls, and left. When at last the three of us were the only people left from the raid, still in handcuffs, our bruises puffing, our clothes torn, five photographers came in, including dear old sweat-stained Al Gilbert, and snapped what felt like a hundred pictures while we cursed them and their misbegotten mothers.

  After the photographers were done, the cops took our handcuffs off. They let us go to the bathroom. A uniformed cop stood there at the open door of the women’s room while Diana and I each did our business in stalls with no doors. Then they herded us back into the waiting room, where we huddled together, beat-up, stinking, filthy, caked in dried blood, silent and spent. Only then did they tell us we could each make one phone call.

  Diana called someone from MGM. On behalf of Jonathan and myself, I called Irene. Who else was there? Thelma didn’t have the money to pay off the cops, and that’s what needed to happen. I grew up here. I know how this works.

  Gordon showed up near dawn. Diana asked for Gordon’s help, and he said nothing doing. She was MGM and not his problem. He called us all goddamned morons then he marched up to the desk sergeant. I’m sure he was armed with many envelopes of cash, suitably spread around among the undeserving. He spent a long time talking, though I couldn’t hear what was said. They released Jonathan and me to Gordon. He even got my handbag back. Diana was left alone. I felt sorry for her. I hoped MGM would come to her rescue.

  Gordon had a lot more to say to us in the car, heaping abuse on our stupidity and saying how the newspapers and gossip rags were going to love this. It was full morning by now, and the bright light hurt my eyes. Hell, my whole face hurt. My whole body. Our defense about being ambushed by photographers? He didn’t want to hear it, even though he knew—everyone in our business knows—that the cops and the press were dirty-hand-in-dirty-glove, always had been, always would be. He left Jonathan off in front of Casa Fiesta in Laurel Canyon with a few choice remarks about auditioning for Fly Me to the Moon with a great big fat split lip. I started to get out too, to go to my car, but Gordon stopped me.

  “Irene says you’re not driving home. She told me to bring you home with me. Oh, and by the way, Leon is furious with you.”

  “He knows?”

  “Of course! You think I’d let him read shit like this in the papers? I called him. He said he bailed you out when you rolled the Packard, but you’re not sixteen anymore, and if you’re going to go on making reckless choices and stupid decisions, then you should take the consequences.”

  “So who paid off the cops?”

  “I did. You and Jonathan can pay me back. Five hundred. Each.”

  “Really? That much?”

  “No, but you can just pay up and shut up. Both of you.”

  “Gee, thanks, Gordon. You paid it yourself. I’m kind of surprised.”

  “Irene made me do it,” he said as we pulled up the long drive to his Benedict Canyon house, where the lights were all on, and Irene opened the door and took me in her arms.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Gossip about the Comet Club raid and the arrests ran through the streets of Hollywood like the bulls of Pamplona. By the time the afternoon papers came out, barbs, gibes, and photographs peppered the pages, including pictures of the three of us looking like sodden criminals. “Merde!” I cried, reading the afternoon newspapers in Irene’s kitchen while swilling orange juice, wearing one of her peignoirs, and holding an ice pack over my left eye. Our names and ages and occupations were printed, and I was explicitly referred to as Leon Greene’s granddaughter.

  “Why did you go in the first place?” Irene rebuked me for the hundredth time. “A Central Avenue jazz club with Diana and her Negro boyfriend?”

  “I keep telling you! We didn’t know she had a Negro boyfriend.”

  “Well, now the whole world knows it. She’s finished! Professional suicide. She’ll be a waitress in El Monte this time next year!”

  “You wouldn’t believe how the police treated the Negroes, Irene. Much worse than they treated any of us. I was stunned. They—”

  “Oh, please, Roxanne. I don’t want to hear it. Will you please just show some sense next time? Better yet, no more next times! Understood?”

  “Yes,” I replied, chastened.

  I borrowed a dress of Irene’s (mine was ruined), and she drove me over to Jonathan’s to pick up my car so I could drive home, where I went straight to bed.

  At Clara Bow Drive on Monday, Thelma had the newspapers spread out on her desk. She regarded me with an appraising look. “Back in the old strike days, a shiner like that was called the Red Badge of Courage. All the Reds had them.”

  “Yes, my makeup took me an hour this morning. I felt like Picasso—one color for one side of my face, another color for the bruises.”

  She handed me a stack of phone messages from Terrence Dexter. “He keeps calling. Who is he?”

  “He was arrested at the Comet Club with me.”

  “With you and Jonathan and Diana Jordan and her Negro boyfriend. How could you have been so stupid, Roxanne? That whole Casa Fiesta crowd is bad for you.”

  “I keep telling everyone! We didn’t know she had a Negro boyfriend! We were ambushed by photographers! We went for the music.”

  “And stayed for the raid.”

  I went into my office, closed the door, and dialed the number; it belonged to the Challenger. I asked for Terrence Dexter, only to be told he wasn’t there. I called three or four times and always got the same answer. Then I said, “Listen, this is Julia Greene’s granddaughter, and I want to talk to Terrence Dexter.”

  The next voice that came on belonged to none other than August Branch. “Miss Granville,” he said in his softly Southern-inflected voice, “I hope you weren’t too badly hurt in that fracas at the Comet Club.”

  “I’ve felt better. I’m concerned about Terrence. How is he?”

  “A few stitches over his eye. Booker got the worst of it. They’re recovering at their sister’s place. I’ll have Terrence call you.”

  “Can’t you just give me his number?”

  “’Fraid not. We don’t give out numbers here. But I’m sure he’ll call.”

  I thanked him, hung up. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. But when I picked up, it wasn’t Terrence, but Mr. Branch again, who said that Terrence couldn’t talk right now, but he wanted to know if I would like to come to the Challenger tomorrow around noon, and he would take me out to lunch.

  * * *

  • • •

  By day Central Avenue looked entirely different—no neon, no jostling crowds. More just an ordinary street, only everyone was colored. I left the Silver Bullet in a parking lot between a dry cleaner and the offices of the Challenger, a two-story brick building. Emblazoned across the windows and the door were two stylized figures, one large and overbearing with a club, one small but strong, arm upraised, rock in hand. Inside I saw orderly rows of desks, but very little else orderly: stacks of paper, books falling over, files lying atop cabinets, an arsenal of phone books, and an array of lamps. I didn’t see Terrence anywhere.

  “If you’ll just have a seat,” said the receptionist, a matronly woman who didn’t seem to pay my shiner the least mind, “he’ll be back soon.”

  The Challenger itself was spread ou
t on the coffee table in front of an aged leather couch. Leafing through a few issues, I got the impression that, like a small-town chronicle, it covered local high school heroics of both sporting and musical varieties, the meetings of social and service and church clubs, the awards collected by church choirs, the travels of pastors, the closing of a pawnshop, and the arrest of three inept men who tried to rob a shoe store. However, the Challenger also lived up to its name. Its pages described questionable police activities, including bribery, extortion, and cruelty. Its editorials called for the immediate universal implementation of last year’s Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education (which I had never heard of). Terrence Dexter’s column talked about the integration of the black musicians’ union #767 with the whites’ #47 two years before, not just the advantages, but the clubhouse camaraderie that black musicians forfeited with the merger.

  Terrence came in the front door and said my name. He had stitches over his eye that looked raw and painful. He wore a jaunty fedora, and he bristled with energy or indignation, I couldn’t tell which, but not that cold anger I had sensed at the police station. He commented ironically on my shiner.

  “All the girls are wearing them this spring.” I pointed to the newspaper and asked why there was no mention of the Comet Club raid in the Challenger.

  “Next issue. We only come out three times a week. Used to be six days a week before the War. Ben Tupper’s writing the article. I’m writing the column. I have more leeway with the column. Come with me; I know Mr. Branch would like to meet you.”

  I followed Terrence through the low gate and toward the back, where August Branch had a glassed-in office with a door wide enough to accommodate his wheelchair. Like the rest of the Challenger, his office was a melee of stacked papers, folders, overflowing inboxes, two telephones, a typewriter, an array of fountain pens. On the wall were photographs of serious-looking Negroes shaking hands in front of NAACP banners, framed plaques honoring the Challenger, and August Branch personally. Mr. Branch righted the carnation in his lapel as Terrence introduced me. He spoke in a formal fashion, his accent left over, he said, from his childhood and youth in Alabama. He went on at length and with respect about Julia Greene, her courage, and her commitment to racial equality. I replied with vagaries. Certainly I did not say that in all the years I had lived with her, I knew nothing of this commitment.

  Then he turned to Terrence. “Did Booker get his horn back?”

  “Well, yeah, sort of. After you called the station I went back there, and they said there’d been a mistake and they had mislabeled his horn, and that’s why they couldn’t find it. But when they gave it to me, there was a mop handle shoved up the bell. Bastards charged me for the mop.”

  “No!” I cried. “That’s terrible. That’s absolutely awful!”

  “No shit. The only thing more important to my brother than his horn is his dick.” Terrence coughed and excused himself to Mr. Branch and to me. “I paid it. But I’m not giving the horn back to Booker till it’s fixed. He won’t be playing it for a few days anyway. I dropped it off at Corelli’s to have it fixed.”

  “A wise choice. Now take Miss Granville to lunch at Ruby’s, and be back in time for the editorial meeting.” To me he said, “Ruby’s is Central Avenue’s best-kept secret.”

  As Terrence and I passed the dry cleaner, a small brown woman stuck her head out the door and said, “Terrence, your shirts’re all clean and pressed, lotta starch, just how you like ’em. Your suit’s ready too. Oh! Look at your face, Terrence! Those bastards! They didn’t even find no drugs, did they?”

  “Hard to say, Sally, if they found them or brought them to the party.”

  “It was our fault,” I said as he and I walked on. “Diana fired her agent, and he knew about Diana and your brother. He wanted to bring her down, but just look at the terrible things that happened to everyone else.”

  “Including you,” he reminded me with a nod to my shiner. He grinned so broadly his gold tooth gleamed. “Don’t worry. It’ll go away and you’ll be pretty again.”

  On the other side of my face I could feel the birthmark flush, pleased that he had called me pretty.

  As we walked down Central Avenue, many people greeted him, some calling him Terrence, some calling him Mr. Dexter, some merely tipping their hats. They all looked rather askance at me. These were well-dressed people, the women wearing hats, the men in suits. At the same time, many of the businesses we passed were shuttered, and in those doorways drunks sprawled, or men squatted, their faces to the sun, their eyes closed, their shoes broken, their pants stained with urine.

  As we passed one of these derelicts, Terrence said, “When I was a kid, this was a great place to grow up. My brother and sisters and I, we had a fine childhood here, my mother’s family all around, Bowers and Goodalls, and Prestons. In these neighborhoods, doctors and lawyers lived next door to plumbers and carpenters. Kids went to the same churches, the same schools. We all took piano lessons or sang in the church choir. We all went to Jefferson High. Everyone looked out for everyone else. But since the War, everything’s changed. Now . . .” He stopped to light a cigarette. “Now heroin’s moved in. And with the old covenants breaking down, lots of people are moving out. It’s all different.”

  “Covenants?”

  “Don’t you remember Hattie McDaniel fighting those covenants on West Adams? Took her years in court, but she won, and now there’s no more covenants saying where Negroes can live or rent. I mean, now they’re illegal, but we’re still fighting for fair housing.”

  “Hattie McDaniel. You mean Mammy from Gone with the Wind?”

  He gave me a look I can only describe as pained, more pained than the fresh stitches over his eye, as he pushed open the door of a large café.

  Ruby’s had a long counter and a lot of booths (everything upholstered in maroon) lining the walls with tables in the middle. The air was full of cigarette smoke and scents I couldn’t immediately identify—frying, I expect. A big colorful jukebox blared out music I had never heard, a raucous voice I can only describe as Not Perry Como. It was like a foreign country. I was relieved, though I’m not sure why, to see a mixed group, two whites and two Negroes, come in and take a table in the center.

  A colored woman, full-bodied and broad-shouldered, strode out from the kitchen at the back. She wore a neat uniform in black and white trimmed with red. Terrence introduced her as his Aunt Ruby, Clarence’s wife. “Oh! Look at you!” she cried. “Look at you both! Miss Granville! I heard you was caught up in that nasty business the other night. How is Booker, Terrence?”

  Terrence shrugged. “He’ll live.”

  “And the horn?” she asked urgently. “You get the horn back?”

  “I did, but don’t mention it to him yet. I gotta have it fixed first.”

  “What was Booker thinking! Carrying on in the open with that . . .” Ruby slowed and turned to me. “You remember your grandmother bringing you in here when you was just a kid?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “Well, she did. Yes, she’d come in here now and then after she’d had a meeting with Mr. Branch, and sometimes she brung you. You was just a tot. You had a root beer float. Sit right here”—she gestured to a booth—“and I’ll be right back with some corn fritters and a root beer float.” She gave me a warm, welcoming smile.

  “Your aunt seems so unlike Clarence,” I said when she had left us. “I mean, she’s so warm and friendly. The staff at Summit Drive lives in fear of him.”

  “Clarence knows how to make people tremble, all right. He made me and Booker tremble when we were kids. He stepped in to help raise us after our daddy died, and it wasn’t easy. The girls were mostly grown up, but me and Booker, we were a handful, high spirited and full of ourselves. Clarence is stiff and stubborn, and things have to be just so.”

  “Like the white gloves.”

  “Oh yes, the white gloves.
We tried his patience something awful. He was always saying he was giving up on us, but he never did.” He handed me a menu that was sticky with use. A thickset woman, her hair pulled into a tight, shining bun, appeared at our table with a pad in one hand, coffeepot in the other. “This is my sister, Coralee Winters.”

  She looked to be a good deal older than Terrence, forty at least, and she licked her pencil with the gravity of a judge writing a verdict rather than a waitress taking an order. She nodded toward my shiner. “Cops do that to you? What’s the world coming to?”

  “Not the cops. I got in a fight with a photographer.”

  “She got him good,” said Terrence, easing back with a lazy grin. “Knocked him down, busted his camera.”

  “Hmm,” said Coralee. “They teach street fighting in Paris, Miss Granville?”

  “Please. Call me Roxanne. You knew I lived in Paris?”

  “Clarence keeps us up on the Greenes,” said Terrence, and though Coralee’s expression remained unchanged, her balance shifted slightly, and I could swear she kicked Terrence under the table. I flinched to think of the tales Clarence might have carried out of Summit Drive in those years that Julia and Leon were screaming at each other. I let Terrence order for us, and she wrote it down and left.

  “You’ll like the food here,” he said. “The women in my family pride themselves on their cooking.”

  Cooking is not something I can talk about, or care about, really. I don’t even much care what I eat (as long as it isn’t liver or cauliflower or Brussels sprouts). But the food that day was a revelation. We had corn fritters still sizzling from the pan and with a spicy sauce of some kind of tomato and horseradish. A big messy sandwich full of pork cooked so soft it was almost buttery and a tangy sauce and crunchy greens and little crispy potatoes.

  While we ate, all sorts of people came up to our table, all of them indignantly commenting on the black eyes and the Comet Club raid. I didn’t catch all the names when Terrence introduced me. Some were his cousins, or second cousins, his friends from Jefferson High School, his colleagues at the Challenger, or just people he knew. He had an easy, noisy camaraderie with each of them, and a capacious memory for the details of their lives.