Through the sad Negro imitation of the Indiana contingent of Good Old Boys, the very reason I could not refuse his assistance,
this is what my father came up with: his accountant, with the blessing or wink of some minority-business program, maintained an office in Manhattan that audited federally funded community projects. I was to be an auditor’s trainee. One majestic Monday, when odd vapors enveloped my fellow workers as they made for the holes of public transportation, this job, this violation of my personal liberty act, had me sneaking upstairs on a wrong stretch of Broadway in the uninspected vicinity of the Flatiron Building.
I entertained dreamy feelings about dereliction. Granite that long ago had been stained by fumes of coal, vacant lots, junctions of shattered glass—these pockets, when depopulated, silent, were to me, at night, the height of romance. Run-down, bricked-up blocks were cozy, and when a building was fixed up, which seldom happened back then, I resented it, as if it had been taken from me or a friend had kicked cigarettes and left me puffing. I’d not reckoned with having to be a working part of the landscape of marginal stores and squalid businesses, as if my job would force on me a clarification of social status. But the accounting office didn’t take my presence seriously. I was one of the absentee boss’s whims, a favor he was doing a client.
It was a skeleton of an office. The Filipino manager and his wife were not around much. In a room of army-green file cabinets the secretary, the third runner-up in the 1969 Miss Afro America Contest, swiveled in her house slippers. I sat in a back room at a blank metal desk with an adding machine and a manual. Whether I read it or not was of no consequence to my supervisor, a corpulent Argentinian who spent much of the day bawling out his rabbi. He was after a religious divorce. He dealt out handsome documents in Hebrew on his desk while his wife obstructed justice from Buenos Aires. He talked to the ceiling fan about her, about the trouble that had started when he confessed that
he wanted to become a U.S. citizen. He’d met a woman in New Jersey and the ceiling fan told him not to lose hope.
Meanwhile, if you can’t have it all, you can get away with something. My lunch hours got longer, I came back reeking of mouthwash. The secretary painted her nails tequila-sunrise orange. I’d ask how she was and invariably came the reply “Trying to be better.” I settled into a boogaloo of come late, leave early; became as adept as my supervisor at inventing errands that required my immediate attention around 3:30. This summer rhythm suited the secretary, whose duty it was to lock up. I departed in a mood of perfect blamelessness, a cog in cream or sky-blue three-piece suits, costumes no pimp would suffer near his skin. Along my noisy block the fire hydrants ran on and on, just like in the movies.
Then my supervisor announced that I was ready to go into the field. Issued a plastic briefcase, tablets of giant graph paper, and bundles of virgin pencils, I followed his stomach into the subway. He asked the driver-education ads why God had sent his wife to torment him, and somewhere in Brooklyn he beseeched God Himself in different languages. At the door of a day-care center my supervisor pulled out the name tag of his charm, tossed his thick mane, which he must have thought was still fragrant with the morning’s shampoo, cocked his head in boundless sympathy. I thought of the flesh of his handshake, soft like pads of butter in a humid restaurant. The director of the day-care center fluttered and showed us to a corner room where ledgers and cartons of receipts were layered on a table. It was like putting yourself in a jar and screwing on the lid.
My supervisor fell to, as if it were a meal. I copied whatever he told me to, filled columns with numbers, and in the sweat surrendered to something like a Carthusian’s serenity, though I did not know what FICA stood for or why I had to retrieve this
information by such slow means. This was before portable computers, but Xerox machines were not unheard of. The audit consumed several days. We munched lunches that tasted like shredded telephone book. I switched to my supervisor’s brand of cologne. He revived himself with Hostess cupcakes. Outside, the children rioted, and then I laid down my pencil nub and taped together sheets to make a chart the size of a tablecloth.
I was sent out in my drenched paisley tie, shirt, and vest to audit books on my own. I was given Bedford-Stuyvesant, the part of Brooklyn where theft was known as the five-finger discount and sneakers as getaway shoes. I got lost and everyone I asked directions of either ignored me, tried to sell me diamond rings, or ran from me. Even the pigeons were fierce. Day-care centers in converted warehouses, in basements, in mere sheds compressed by too much sun; in streets depleted of cars, empty of shop life; streets overrun with small people skipping rope, playing jacks in the potholes, jumping on tar patches—“God will give you back the days the locusts have eaten,” Grandfather liked to say—and I could not hear those children without the fear that I was heading home, guided by their cries, to my own childhood, my early summers, when I suspected there might be something shameful about my crowd of little baseball players and lagged behind so that white motorists wouldn’t think I was one of them.
I was treated at some day-care centers as a lackey for the revenue man, and at other places, holding pens for children, the wardens were amused that I fit right in, watched soap operas with them straight through the blazing afternoon. I had no idea what those numbers, forms, and vouchers were supposed to amount to, and proudly faked findings, made up sums, jotted down any combination of integers in order to complete the intricate grid of those green sheets. It never occurred to me that I might slander a scrupulous staff or acquit a dishonest one by
tinkering with the figures. I didn’t care if someone skimmed from the milk money so long as my head was free to wander. I thought the deep-eyed Black Muslim women in flawless white that made them look like nurses in photo histories of World War I were sending out the murderous vibe that they had figured me out, when they were, like me, just waiting on the subway platform.
The best thing about working was not showing up. I called to tell the secretary at which day-care center I’d be—and who was to check that I was not in a stupor in front of my fan? Sunday conversations with my parents I padded with talk-show-level sincerity about how much I was learning about Black America through my job, yarns that had the self-sabotage of the patient in analysis who gets nowhere because he thinks he has to keep the therapist entertained. Then the con man got conned: my paycheck bounced.
The secretary said the boss had forgotten to put the money in payroll, don’t worry about it until Monday, and continued to file her nails. A week later the yellow rectangle bounced again. The secretary said that was why she had a second job as a salesclerk, the manager and his wife as teachers of English, and my supervisor as an instructor at a business institute near Macy’s, and to come back that afternoon. I saw HELP WANTED notices at Dianetics centers in my sleep. The third time it bounced, the secretary turned down the voice reeling off baseball scores and said that the first lesson of Black Capitalism was faith, faith that the money withdrawn to dig metaphorical ditches out there in the great somewhere would one day make it back to behave again as payroll.
My connection with the office trailed off, much like those other relationships you forget because they were made out of having had nothing better to do. Then I called home to play injured.
The boss had taken the secretary on a Caribbean cruise. I was never so happy to have been associated with a crook.
I didn’t have to roam the Village, the meat-packing district, or the Lower East Side. Summer loitered in boxing gloves on Broadway, close to my front door. I met Jesse, the security guard, barrel-chested between shifts. His personality changed with his uniform. “You look ready to Freddy,” he said. To reaffirm our kinship as soul brothers he introduced me to Betty, a redhead of indeterminate age with sharks in her eyes whose name was on the liquor license of a dive called the Melody Coast. “He’s good people,” he told her. Betty smoked cigars.
To Jesse I was a college boy, and Betty, I learned, did not like students.
Absolutely No Pot,
a banner in the men’s room read. When students, the few around for the summer session, happened into the Melody Coast, they received a lesson in discrimination: waitresses vanished into the clatter of the kitchen; Betty became hard-of-hearing when sophomores yelled for pitchers of beer. “Their politics stop at the cap and gown,” she said. Black students were not above suspicion. “You’re not one of those brainwashed gray boys, are you?” She didn’t want her place to become an “in” spot, which is what made it so “in” to me. The jukebox offered no rock, just the Philadelphia Sound and some throwback favorites like “Fine Fat Daddy, Please Don’t Reduce.”
Cats prowled the shelves. Most students looked in and went away. The Melody Coast presented too much of an exclusive scene: concrete floors, red booths that recalled the interiors of gas-guzzling cars with tail fins; mirrors; low yellow lights; an enormous pool table in the back cave; and at the long, dark bar mottled with polished burn marks the murky regulars, the “working people” to whom Betty catered. Some of them were between jobs or waiting for the right thing, but it was against
the code of the Melody Coast to ask too many questions. Everyone understood how hard it was out there.
Betty was in sympathy with their struggle, with all struggles, with Union 65, the Palestinians, the Khmer Rouge, women, women of color—as if a person could be discolored, Thoreau said—Puerto Rican nationalists, the Tupamaros, the June 2 Movement in Germany, even the Molly Maguires, the secret society of miners in nineteenth-century anthracite country. A prole or a member of an oppressed minority never left the Melody Coast without the support of a free drink. “No sleeping in my bar,” Betty repeated several times a night.
Jesse said that for a white woman Betty was more than right on. “The lady’s down with it,” he said. She had poured drinks and expressed solidarity for years, but I wondered if any of her best customers could say where she lived in the hours between last call and the unlocking of the gate over the door the next day. Betty hired only women—many off the books—but not even those single mothers and former topless dancers who swore they’d be up the creek without her seemed to know much about her beyond why she did not believe in voting. “We go way back,” Jesse said when she cashed his checks.
She fueled discussions about batting averages, and the “links” between Vesco’s private army and the Freemasons, and gave advice. “He wants an apartment near his wife to be near the dog? Tell him the dog can take a taxi.” Mostly she called as little attention to herself as possible. She kept watch from her post at the till, a smooth hostess—that is what I and the other com-boozelated flies told one another, happy with the summer lightning over the dark brick façades because it gave us a reason to stay a little longer. What we whispered to ourselves when we came to well after noon was something else.
The idea of going someplace my friends from school
couldn‘t—or wouldn’t—gave me a feeling of sophistication. I could have it both ways. “You’re with us now,” Jesse said. “I’m watching your back.” I belonged and he was looking out for me. When the telephone rang I could show Betty that I, too, was down with it by joining in the chorus of “I’m not here.” When an old-timer wavered in the doorway and called out to the assembly, “If you see my wife, you ain’t seen me,” I could join in the ritual response of “I hear you.” No one had to know that I set myself apart. We all thought ourselves the exception to the rule, the one elect among the lost.
Sometimes I checked the newspaper to see what day it was. My parents had every sympathy for how hard it was out there. By the time my neighbors came home from work, by the time their wet children tromped in, by the time the airshaft reverberated with sheer living, I was ready to take up my position in the bar, my back to the window, ready to shake my head with Betty over the “heightening contradictions” in the political situation, ready for the consolation in the way she said, “Your usual? First one’s on the house.”
I looked forward to meeting Jesse on his dinner break, on his way home, the hair around his bald spot tame with Afro-Sheen, his shirtsleeves somehow crisp when everyone else on the street dripped like a rag. “I’m as broke as the ten commanders.” It was my business to be there to greet the twinkle in his left eye when he performed his pirate-patch gag with the other. I appreciated his eloquence during uneventful innings of a baseball game when the whole bar seemed to be engaged in an effort to get to the essence of things. “What we’re saying to you young folk”—I adored the distinction—“is come on out of the fog. It’s time to put something on the table. You got the contacts. Now what are you going to put on the table.” Usually another Jack Daniel’s for Jesse.
“Who’s backing Jesse up?” Betty polled before she flipped the bottle upside down.
I looked forward to his brotherly confidences, often on the dangers of whipping “it” out. “Don’t do like I did. You break it, you buy it. Got four kids and two jobs. And they act like they don’t want to be bothered with me.” His children were in North Carolina with his mother. “But you’re good people. My main man. Cheers.” My brain floated in my drink and said that Jesse was a man of parts as numerous as the valid and invalid laminated employee ID cards that swelled the gills of his wallet. “Fass-ism. It means the world’s living too fast.”
When Jesse wasn’t around I went undercover. Nurses, tellers, and social workers flopped into the red booths, tucked soggy shopping bags between their ankles, slipped off shoes, wiggled feet. “Same old same old, girl.” A group of retired gentlemen, among whom bets were on and off as swiftly as transactions downtown, claimed the area around the pool table to remember who of their number had been “funeralized.” Stray misanthropes frowned over their chins at crossword puzzles. The configurations changed according to who was on—every waitress had her following—and then the evening let loose over the regulars, the hard core, the bangtails and double clutchers like something that had been wound tight and suddenly released.