Manchild in the Promised Land (29 page)

I tried to get tight with her again. I didn't beg her or anything like that. I asked her to be my girl, but Sugar said she didn't feel the way she used to feel about me. She didn't think she could be going through what she went through before. She was a big girl now, she was older, and she felt it would be silly to go back into her childhood thing with me.

I felt sort of bad when she reminded me how I had mistreated her. I didn't feel bad about having mistreated her. I felt bad about her remembering this and not wanting to go with me, as fine as she was. I just said, “Hell wit it,” but I sure wanted her to be my girl. When she told me no, it was a big letdown. I felt that she wasn't supposed to say this. She was supposed to be mine. I guess this was one of the hardest things I ever had to accept. Sugar had declared her independence and become a person.

She dug this lame, some cat who worked in a grocery store. That's the way she was. She dug him, and nobody could change her mind. All the older hustlers in the neighborhood were offering her money, like a hundred dollars for one night. It just didn't bother her. I hated that nigger, even though I'd never seen him, because I didn't think any cat who was working in a grocery store deserved a girl like this. She was
something wonderful. If she was yours, she was all yours. She was sensitive; she would do anything for you. But I guess I didn't deserve her either. I had had her and had let her slip right through my fingertips by mistreating her. I just said, “Fuck it; that's the way the cards fall.”

I met an older girl at Washington Irving. She was about nineteen. She was married. She was hip. She had a couple of kids, and I told her I liked her. When I first met her, I thought she was younger than she was. I approached her the way I would have approached any other young girl. I stopped her in the hall one day and said, “Hey, you, young lady, hold it right there!”

She stopped and looked around as if something had happened, as if she was afraid to move. I came up to her looking pretty serious, so when I spoke, I guess she expected me to say something serious. I just walked up to her and solemnly asked, “Where in the world did you get that lovely ass on you?”

She just looked at me and dropped her eyes as if to say, “This crazy-actin' nigger! And here I am, standin' here and waitin' for it too.” She smiled, turned around, and walked away.

This chick looked like an animal, a natural-born freak. She was short, a little shorter than I was. She had a beautiful shape, jet-black skin, long, jet-black hair, and slanted eyes. Her skin was real smooth. She looked like a beautiful black Chinese. The next time I saw her, I just waved and smiled. Every time I'd see her, I'd talk to her and say something that she wouldn't forget.

I came out of school one night about ten o'clock. This gray boy was trying to talk to her. He was a little older than me, but I couldn't imagine him ever getting anywhere, so I just went on up and started talking to her like he wasn't even there. She excused herself from the cat and started talking to me. I asked her if she was going my way. She said she was, so we just left him standing there looking.

We started walking toward the corner, and I asked her if I could take her out.

She said, “Yeah, but I'm married, you know.”

I said, “Well, like, that's okay.” I'd never played around with any married women before. It should have bothered me, I guess, but it didn't. I said, “I won't hold it against you if you don't.” I took her out on that weekend, and we partied.

She was married to some cat I didn't know, so it didn't make any
difference to me. She had a couple of kids, but that didn't bother me either. I just couldn't believe I was getting anything as beautiful as this girl. She had a whole lot of nature. I'd gotten high when I took her out. I had smoked some pot, and we'd drunk some liquor. I didn't think she smoked pot or used cocaine, so I just started her off drinking.

I took her down to Basin Street and to a movie, then took her to my room and knocked her off. I was ready to go after I'd knocked her off one time. But the chick was really something—she couldn't see anybody just knocking her off one time. I was young and had a lot of energy. I used to box and this sort of thing. I thought I was in good shape, but I had never busted my nuts more than three times in one night without any cocaine or stuff like that. But this chick just wouldn't let me go. She wouldn't stop. I thought, Shit, I'll probably die behind this. It was a whole lot of work, but she knew something. She knew how to keep me stimulated, and even though I was tired as hell, I could never lose that erection, and she just kept forcing me and forcing me. She was a beautiful girl, so I just kept going at it.

I wasn't too anxious to see her again, but we'd started something. I used to take her out just about every weekend. Sometimes we'd cut a class or two; we'd go by my place first, and I'd knock her off. But she was killing me. I felt that this was a whole lot of hard work.

She wasn't like the average young girl I'd been jugging. She was oversexed or something. It was okay at first, because she was so beautiful and it was something new, but I just couldn't see doing that thing every night. I'd turned her on to some pot. She liked pot, and we used to get high just about all the time. When she got high, all she wanted to do was screw and screw and screw some more. I just couldn't take all that.

I was supposed to meet her one night, but I was tired, so I just went to school. She was waiting for me when I came out of my last class. We always used to greet each other with a “Hey, buddy.” So when I came out of my last class and I heard somebody say, “Hey, buddy,” I knew who it was without turning around. She said, “What happened to you tonight? I waited for you.”

I told her that I had forgotten all about it, that it had just slipped my mind.

She said jokingly, “That's a bad sign.”

We went to an Italian restaurant and had some sausages and spaghetti. Then we went on up to my place and started playing some sides and smoking pot. I went to bed with her, but it had become a
chore. Right in the midst of everything, I just jumped up and said, “I'm sorry, baby, but the party is over.”

She looked kind of stunned. She said, “Look, Sonny, what have I done? What have I said or what didn't I do or what didn't I say?”

I said, “It's nothin' that you've done, baby. It's just that I'm tired, and, you know, I just can't fight it any more. I'm tired of this thing, and I'm tired of you.”

She got kind of mad, and she started screaming, “Okay, nigger, but your day'll come. I believed everything you said. I love you, and I believed you when you said you loved me. I became a tramp for you. I made my kids' mother a tramp because of you.”

I just said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, baby. You just needed somebody else and somethin' new, and I just happened to be there.” That was the way I felt about it.

She just walked. She called me a couple of times and wrote me some letters, but I just never paid any attention.

I learned something in school that wasn't on the program. I learned that you just can't go and try to get some body from every chick that looks nice, because you'll get yourself involved in a whole lot of stuff that you wouldn't want to walk with. I decided that I wasn't going to get involved with any more married chicks, not right now anyway.

I started concentrating on the books. I guess I started learning a little bit. People didn't take it too seriously, my family and all the other people I knew. They just saw that, as usual, I was doing something new. Just about everything I'd done, the reason I had tried it in the first place was that it was something new. School was this way too.

The next time I saw Papanek, I was in school. He said he had known I was going to do something like that. I didn't take him too seriously. I was just there, and all there was to do there was learn. I started feeling torn between two things, the street life and the school life. After a while, I just didn't know where I was going. I didn't feel a part of Harlem any more. I had the same slang as the cats on the street, but I wasn't out there on the avenues. I wasn't in the bars any more, and I didn't do a lot of things that the other cats did. I was way behind in just about most of the happenings in the neighborhood. After a while, I thought it might be a good idea for me to move out of the neighborhood and see some other sides of life.

I'd been doing a lot of changing in less than a year. I had gotten out of the garment center, and that was the place where everybody worked. Cats used to call it a “slave.” A guy who worked in the garment center wouldn't say he had a job; he'd say, “Man, like, I got a slave.” That was what it amounted to. It was a real drag. I had seen old men down there, old colored cats, pushing those trucks and sweating. They looked like they were about sixty years old, but they were still pushing trucks through the snow. I knew I didn't want to be doing that kind of shit. I'd rather be in jail or someplace. Someplace where it was warm in the winter.

Since I had gotten out of Warwick, I had left the garment center, gotten a job at Hamburger Heaven, and started school. I'd done a whole lot of things. But I was still looking for something new.

After working at Hamburger Heaven for a year, I got tired of that. I just couldn't take it any more. I got tired of being the old-style nigger with the rag around his head. I didn't have any kind of skill or trade, so the only kind of job I could get was doing some labor. This shit was beginning to bother me. I knew I didn't want to do this all my life.

I was pulling further away from the Harlem scene. I didn't swing with the old cats any more. I'd go up to Harlem and party, things like that, but I wasn't for going to jail any more. One thing began to scare me more than anything else about jail. This was the fact that if I went to jail and got that sheet on me, any time I decided that I didn't want to go the crime way, that I wanted to do something that was straight, I'd have a lot of trouble doing it behind being in jail. I didn't want that sheet on me, and I knew if I kept hanging around Harlem I was going to get busted for something jive, something like smoking reefers. And it would be a shame for anybody to get busted for smoking reefers and get a sheet and have his whole life fucked up.

I decided to move out of Harlem. I started reading the papers, looking for places down around school, which looked like a nice neighborhood. I was kind of fascinated by Greenwich Village anyway. I moved to a little loft room down on Cooper Square.

It was just the thing that I needed. I'd still go up to Harlem on the weekends and party, because I didn't know any people in the Village. That was one of the reasons why I liked being down there—the cats in the street life weren't coming around, so I got a chance to open a book every now and then. I knew what street life was like, but school and the
books and the Village—all this was new. I wanted to get into it and get into it good. I couldn't do it in Harlem. Being down there, I could.

When I moved down to Greenwich Village, it was no big thing. I had come out of the house early. But Mama still kept saying, “Why don't you come on home?” I couldn't make her understand that it just wasn't home for me any more.

I got a job working for a watch repair shop. Everybody in there except for two cats was Jewish. There was one Japanese guy and one Puerto Rican guy. All the others were Jewish. They were straight-up, nice people. They seemed to be some of the happiest people I had ever been around. Of course, they were all straight. They weren't into any crime or stuff like that, as far as I knew.

I liked it. It didn't pay much, only forty dollars a week, but I didn't need much money. I had all the clothes and stuff I needed, and I was free. For the first time in my life, I didn't have the feeling that I had to go to Coxsackie, to Woodburn, and then to Sing Sing. I had the feeling now that anything could happen, anything that I decided to do. It seemed a little bit crazy, but I even had the feeling that if I wanted to become a doctor or something like that, I could go on and do it. This was the first time in my life that I'd had that kind of feeling, and getting out of Harlem was the first step toward that freedom.

One night, I went uptown. I was talking to Tony in the Club Harlem, on 145th Street. We'd gotten high, and we were sitting there drinking some beer and talking. I was telling him how just one little bust could close a lot of doors for him in life, doors he would never think now that he wanted open.

Tony listened. He usually listened to me, and he took it seriously. A couple of weeks later, he came down to the Village. He got a job, and he got a loft room right next to mine. He was going to try to make it this way too. I knew he was still going uptown and dealing pot now and then, but that was all right. The main thing was that he wanted to do something. He wanted to get out of Harlem too, and he wanted a chance at life. Even though he'd never been in anyplace like Warwick or Wiltwyck, he was beginning to feel a need all on his own, apart from what I was telling him. He was beginning to feel a need to free himself from that Harlem thing.

This was a start. This was a big start.

WHEN
I first moved down to Greenwich Village, I didn't know anybody but Tony Albee, who lived next door to me. We used to hang out together whenever there was time. Going to school and working, I didn't have too much time to hang out. For a long time, I just fell into that groove of going to school, hanging out on the weekends, going to work during the day, getting high with Tony and philosophizing at night, peeping the Village scene from the outside, the artists, the quacks, the would-be bohemians.

Most of the time, I would go up to Harlem on the weekends, because this was the only place I knew to go when I wanted some fun. It seemed that if I stayed away two weeks, Harlem had changed a lot. I wasn't certain about how it was changing or what was happening, but I knew it had a lot to do with duji, heroin.