A fraternity of flamboyant players had the cue sticks, their quarters and shot glasses on the rim of the table as they took aim in an expansion of goldlike watches and rings, and their good time was ruled over by a group Jesse called the Five Bottoms, though there could be anywhere from three to nine of them in a booth. They wore makeup that lightened or darkened the anticipation in their faces, sculpted Afros or hairpieces in terraces that fell here and there like hopes. They checked their reflections in the mirrors, displayed fancy cigarette cases and bejeweled
lighters, were themselves accessories to the ear loops and arm rolls of bracelets that chimed when they squirmed.
Jesse said their purpose in life was to “get up in somebody’s face, smell under somebody’s dress, and generally get into everybody’s business.” I admired his ease with the Five Bottoms. They shot contemptuous looks of appraisal in my path, raised their glasses almost in unison, like musicians preparing to attack the same note. They latched on to gossip, ravished it, and slumped against the ersatz Naugahyde of the booths. They went to the ladies’ room in pairs, rearranged blouses, skirts, switched in tight denim by the pool table. I thought of the girls back in my grade school who said to a new girl, “Let me see your purse.” They dumped the contents of the new girl’s bag on a desk, sifted, studied, dropped the items back in one by one, and returned the purse without comment to its humiliated owner.
An outbreak of some kind was never far from the surface. Old scores were settled and resettled, but every musty night the verdicts were overturned, and the same misfortunes, bad breaks, had to be gone over and dispatched again. Spouses, Presidents, New York City, white people—the world had a lot to answer for until ice watered down the bliss of analysis. Sometimes the boredom alienated best friends. People succumbed to unknown reveries, groped down steep, unlit alleys in their minds. Jesse was rare in that his cheerfulness never failed him. He was always ready to rally anyone with a slap on the back. “I just came through to holler at you.”
But we enjoyed someone “going off.” The Five Bottoms liked to scream. “No fighting in my bar. Outside, 86.” Once Betty threw you out, Jesse said, she didn’t let you back in. She could count on the muscle of her regulars. We demonstrated our loyalty by not deserting the Melody Coast when the air conditioner went on the blink, by hauling garbage sacks from its door to the door
of some other establishment when the sanitation workers went on strike. Betty repaid our devotion by flipping bottles upside down, her bun of red hair flecked with ash from the cigar clenched between her tiny teeth.
A new face was an irresistible adventure. “Baby, I went to California for the weekend two years ago and I just got back,” I heard at the front door one night. I saw a squat tumbler of a woman remove space-age sunglasses to unleash eyes as startled as a doe’s. Her honey face described a beautiful oval thickly powdered, like a cake. A hugh mouth raced ahead of her under a shield of bright red lip gloss. To look at this woman for the first time was to feel yourself about to get run over at an intersection.
Jesse helped her onto a bar stool as if it were a throne and hovered around the artificial rose that heaved in her cleavage. Burgundy-brown curls peeked out from under a black sombrero, paused on her forehead shiny with excitement, and came to rest around black saucer earrings. “I told the woman straight up, ‘If you don’t do my head right I’m taking you out. ’Well, she messed up and now I have to see some friends uptown to cancel her jive behind.” It came out at top volume and wiped out the roar of the National League fans on the television overhead.
Jeanette accepted the homage of the regulars and a vodka gimlet from Betty, who was not otherwise inclined to make a fuss over her return. She did, however, allow the homecoming party to spill over after she locked the doors for the night. I was in with the in crowd, Jesse’s grin said. Jeanette said she kissed off L.A. because she got sick of nothing but promises from record companies. Jesse said Jeanette had worked as a backup singer all over the globe. Jeanette said she hoped to get hooked up with a tour like the one she made to Australia in 1966 or the one to
Amsterdam in 1968. We drank a toast to the absence of racism among the Dutch, to Jeanette’s future, and one to Jesse and all good people. “We go way back,” Jesse said. “She’s one dynamite lady.” I bought Jeanette a vodka gimlet and she said that black clothes solved her laundry problems. We hit it off immediately.
It was like a party whenever Jeanette came. Phantoms from her past, men with unclear faces, like those in a group photograph, cropped, sliced by the margin, somehow got word to attend. Jeanette never made her moist and out-of-breath entrance before eleven o’clock. We saw her sombrero and space shades in the streetlight, navigating around boxes and Hefty trash bags that multiplied at the curbs, reproduced on the sidewalks, heaps of waste that took on the aspect of barricades. Jeanette brought in the perfume of one who had seen something of the great world. The pool players and even the surly Five Bottoms crammed into her corner to listen to scurrilous tales about the real “Miss Diane,” to get “the truth” about Tammy Terrell’s brain tumor. “Baby, give me a drink first. This is a good one.”
On the third night after Jeanette’s return Betty refused at four o’clock on the dot to mix another drink. “She’ll be back,” Betty said when I protested, the way you tell a child that the circus has gone. Maybe that’s why she laughed when she heard Jeanette count for me the clubs where she’d been held over. The curtain fell on Jeanette’s act, on the microphones that had loved her blister of a mouth. Outside her fans forgot her, went home talking about the play-offs. I found out from Jesse that Jeanette had been back in New York for some months, slowly working her way down Broadway, but in the Melody Coast absence was a kind of victory, and everyone had his story. It was a breach of manners to doubt these covers, not to respect them in the fabricator’s presence.
The next day at sundown Jeanette was on her perch in the
window, right next to mine. She wore unflattering jeans and a baseball cap with the bill turned backward. I ordered a vodka gimlet; “clear and green,” she called it. “Baby, you take your vodka, gargle with vermouth, and say ‘Hello’ right over the vodka,” she said. She knew many things. “To make brown rice you just take it easy. You check the clock and then you check your pot about three albums later.” She admitted that she was not feeling quite her old self, maybe was a little down.
Men had been through Jeanette as through a canal. This one didn’t come back, this one never phoned again, this one stuck her with the bill on Lake Pontchartrain. “Imagine trusting somebody like that? Like having rats for lunch. If it was just about stepping, he’d step, quit you like nothing.” She’d never learn, she said. She needed to be in love in order to work. She looked for the handsomest man in the club and sang to him. I said she should have more confidence. She said I was probably right, but it was a tough, lonely business, and yes, thank you, baby, she wouldn’t mind another vodka gimlet. It was, she said, one of those days. I said I believed in her talent and she said she believed in me.
We came in entitled, as if we’d been on the job all day. We left bushed, as if we’d run all night, though we hadn’t moved for hours. I told myself I was just getting away from my dreary studio and Jeanette said she was just waiting for a call from her agent. Big emotions sprang full grown in the Melody Coast and Jeanette told Jesse that she had the super feeling that she and I went back a long ways, that she had always known me, that we probably knew each other in one of our past lives, maybe in ancient Egypt. She said she’d show me the real Harlem, the Harlem that could still jump, but the evening I put on my glad suit the excursion was indefinitely delayed by one more vodka gimlet for the road.
Talk was Jeanette’s only capital and I was, she said, her last friend. I knew how to treat a lady, how to listen, and whom to listen to. I knew what she should say to her agent, who was giving her the runaround, and what she should say to the desk at the private hotel, as she called it, that threatened to lock her out. I was her kind of people, she said, not like the pool players who couldn’t see their paunches, the dudes who arrived in white hats and a state of almost insane confidence. I was not like the Five Bottoms, who twisted their bangles and belts in the red seats and handed her attitude because, she said, men preferred her company. I was more dependable than Betty. “I don’t want to tell you how many white women I was silly enough to trust.” Night swirled against our window, ran across the jealous street, and air like that from the back of a furnace tried to steal through the door when someone hesitated over which way to go. “Stick with the winners,” Jeanette said.
She held a seat for me every day. “Baby, I hate to ask you for another cigarette.” If Jeanette had had one of those days, with a flick of Betty’s wrist she was her old self again, revving up behind tinted glass, her lips accelerating, soaring from left to right. I’d picked up the shell of a crustacean just to take it for a stroll, but it turned out to be a living thing, a giant clam that left pink half-moons on several glasses. With a flick of Betty’s wrist I was swallowed up, pulled through sewers of Jeanette’s repetitive reminiscences until Jesse’s shadow made her cough me up.
It was only because Jesse inserted himself between us to holler at his number-one lady and saw my change on the bar that he got the ten dollars I owed him. Jeanette said he shouldn’t take money from children. Jesse said he wasn’t taking anything. Jeanette said if he was so flush why had he told her he couldn’t lend her five dollars. Jesse said people fell into two categories:
those you loved and those you loved and lent money to. Jeanette said after what they’d been through she belonged on both sides. Jesse said she was all over his list. Jeanette said she didn’t understand how he could talk that way after the ribs she had cooked for him. Jesse said he didn’t eat ribs. Jeanette said she had never met a nigger who wouldn’t eat ribs and then lie about it. Jesse said if she started something he’d have to teach her how to play the Dozens. Jeanette said she didn’t use language like that.
The precious little in my pocket wasn’t going very far and Jeanette said I should have kept my ten dollars. I said the money wasn’t mine and Jesse was good people. “He sure enough is good people. Come a long way for a man who’s done time,” Jeanette said, as though Jesse weren’t standing there. “You know what I’m saying? Work with it.” I asked what prison was like before I could stop myself.
“No big thing.” He walked away.
Summer was almost over. Already leaves in the parks I never visited were beginning to turn. Express mail from my parents was my only rope to the real world. My friends had thrown away my whereabouts and I had misplaced theirs. Often when I held my telephone I heard nothing. Not even a wrong number could get to me. Water as dark as tea bubbled out of my faucet, hit movies had come and gone without me, but dusk still wallowed in a red lion sun. My street beamed with hubcaps, discarded refrigerators, exploded sofas. Black bags made fences and didn’t know whether the sanitation strike had been called off or not. Children on safari beat the creatures that stalked the industrial-strength jungles with vacuum hoses and table legs.
Day was sneaking off, going home to make a salad, to try out a new contraceptive, to watch reruns of situation comedies, or to get gussied up. I stood in a bodega deciding between potato
chips and corn chips. I thought I saw my former self zip by on roller skates, a large radio on my shoulder, but it wasn’t me. I never skated. I didn’t wear loafers without socks like preppies just back from Shelter Island. I wore a jacket so threadbare it was comfortable. It had belonged to Grandfather, but I had made it mine, had made it sour with the poisons I had to sweat out. I bought marshmallows. A smoked bank window showed me what I looked like eating something like Styrofoam. Behind me Broadway was spacious. The rush from work was over, but a nebulous light reigned, and that was the mischief about summer that still made me marvel: how the planet rotated to turn wayward side up.
A group of students joshed on a traffic island. Soon it would be time for freshman orientation. It was starting again, but I was separated from that identity by a muddy river. I thought of the doors in Furnald Hall that flew open and shut on the slightest pretext, the sound of Grace Slick, the incense and psychobabble that went with the music, even the list of classes. The students kicked up dust, milkweed, and I obeyed my steps until they delivered me to the feeble wires over the Melody Coast, refuge of the down with it.
I saw Jeanette’s silhouette in the window and turned away. A man in suspenders sold gloomy meat from the trunk of his car. A few women swatted the air, searched through the stacks of coagulated plastic. A streetwalker hurried by with her breakfast of Chinese-Cuban takeout. I saw a boy launch record after record from his window. Maybe he was weeding his collection in preparation for the upcoming parties. Black discs spun against the deepening sky, nested in awnings, broke under tires. Lights in a pharmacy went out, others went on. The M4 bus glowed and swam on to mount the darkness. Passengers were reading, talking, or looking straight ahead. They had someplace to go. “Where
you been?” I saw Jeanette’s mouth grand and teeming in the pit of the door. Her eyes scanned the street like headlights, as if someone might be after her.
All the good people were in the bar, and on their backs their pet ghosts egged them on. Betty said nothing about my absence. I looked for Jesse. He returned my wave but stayed where he was, adjudicating, jabbing with his index finger. Jeanette said that she, too, had been away, to Long Beach, the Long Beach in Queens, to her new hairdresser’s patio, where she ate barbecue and counted the golf carts that rolled by on the other side of a ravine. Her talk advanced, but I interrupted, said I’d been to Montauk, where I square danced, drank champagne on a dune at midnight, and threw myself into the surf with all my clothes on. Maybe, like me, she had been holed up in a room, pacing, waiting for the relief check. Maybe not.