Martine was a stocky Dominican dude with pale eyes and stiff, short-cropped orange hair. He'd come to America as a teenager and described himself as “a real immigrant success story,” having worked his way up from bag boy at a grocery store in Queens to manager, to owner of that store and others. Recently he'd sold his empire and moved to Long Island, where he got into the ice-cream trade. I
can see Martine sitting in the lounger of his new living-room set, plotting what to do with his grocery-store profits, flipping through a fat binder of franchise brochures. He comes to the Jonni Waffle pamphlet—“True Belgian Flavor!”—and the pictures and text address something deep in his nomad soul. “This is a nation of immigrants,” he'd say in wonder, when he came in on Monday and surveyed the damage of the weekend rushes. Which didn't make much sense—was he saying that our customers were literally immigrants, or was he addressing a larger notion of universal dispossession briefly remedied by ice cream? “Immigrants!”
“Some of us came on slave ships,” NP would say.
“Always so negative!” Martine responded. NP was on the ten-cent-raise track. So you know.
Martine had plenty of philosophical nuggets he'd scoop out and share from time to time, mostly related to the intersection of certain theories he had about human behavior and ice-cream-store management. “No one wants to look at fruit flies,” he'd murmur to the Toppings Bar, while shooing away the tiny swarm hovering over the raspberries, the tenor of his voice making it clear he wasn't really referring to fruit flies but something else. Some elusive profundity. “Heavy cone, light of heart” was another favorite, expressing his joy at the sight of a customer's arm dipping under the weight of a triple-scooped extravaganza. “People come here for a crunchy flight of fancy” was an end-of-shift declaration of satisfaction at his life's course.
Obviously, he was black.
“Don't pull that shit on me,” NP told Nick, the architect of this provocation. “He has blue eyes and blond hair.”
“I'd say they were hazel, shit, your sister Mary has those hazel eyes,” Nick countered, anticipating this attack. “And his hair is that red you see on those Caribbean niggers sometimes, and that's where he's from, Dominica.”
NP shook his head.
“What about Little John?” I said. Little John was Bobby's cousin. He had straight dirty-blond hair, gray eyes, and an indisputably
Caucasian cast to his features, profile-on-a-coin Caucasian cast. But he was Bobby's cousin, and he acted black enough … frankly we never really talked about it. In fact, maybe we made an extra effort not to talk about it.
“Exactly!” Nick said.
“But that's Little John,” NP said dismissively
“Martine keeps his hair short because it's kinky as hell,” Nick said. “You know that.”
“He's not no black Dominican.”
“They got Dominicans walking round blacker than all of us.”
“But if you called them black they'd punch you in your face.”
“That's true,” Nick had to concede.
NP looked at me. “What do you think, Benji?”
“I don't know.” I shrugged. “You never know.”
It was Nick versus NP in this quarrel, which went on for weeks, with each side coming back with their new evidence to bolster their cases.
“Why do you think he hired so many of us?” Nick demanded one evening when the last of the rush trickled out. “You know these white people out here don't want to have black people behind the counter.”
“Because he pays minimum wage?”
One shift, Nick had been on edge. Messing up more than usual. Giving the incorrect change, confusing Chocolate Banana with Chocolate Banana Hazelnut, peeling mealy waffles off the grill—rookie stuff like that. Martine was in the store that day, in the back making a lot of calls. I noticed that Nick kept eyeballing him. When Martine said good-bye and walked out of the store, Nick summoned us excitedly to the window.
“You see! You see!” Nick said.
“What?”
“Martine walking to his car.”
“What about it?”
“You can't tell me that's not a black walk!”
“I don't see it.”
“His arms! His hips!”
A couple of days after that, Smokey Robinson came over Nick's radio and Martine started in on a lumbering shuffle while talking to a distributor on the phone. He was a bit stiff, but well within the range of Middle-Aged Black Man Getting His Groove On. Nick elbowed me in the stomach and I heard a crack—in surprise, I'd fractured the Two Scoops Raspberry Swirl in a Waffle Cone that I'd been packing. Nick tipped his head toward Martine and glared. You see? You see?
See indeed. We'd strayed into deep eye-of-the-beholder terrain. And you know we weren't going to ask. If he wasn't, he'd fire us for thinking that he was, and if he was, he'd fire us for it not being obvious. The question would have remained academic if not for the Head-Patting Incident, which raised the stakes. Drawing me in, actually, even though I'd tried to stay on the sidelines.
THE DAY OUR ELECTRICITY WENT OUT
, NP sauntered in late, wearing a fresh Jonni Waffle shirt his mother had washed for him. His mother was no weekend parent. She was a teacher by profession, and dashed out to Sag, packed for the summer, as soon as the final school bell of the year started ringing. He said hi to Nick, slapped my hand, and then looked at my hair and, with a glance at Martine, said, “You sure you want to leave it all exposed like that? You want a hat?”
I said, “Shut up, bitch.” I'd been experimenting with “bitch,” trying it out every couple of days. Going well so far, from the response.
Nick flicked NP's arm with his finger. “Why you got to instigate something all the time?” he asked.
NP headed straight for the soda machine and shouted out, “Martine, you get enough Pistachio this time?” winking at us over his fake diligence.
The Head-Patting Incident had occurred the week before, after a post-lunch rush. It was a hot day, steaming, riling the natives. The waffle-cone supply was low when the rush hit, and of everybody on
shift, I was known as a clutch waffle-roller, knocking them out at an enviable rate when the pressure was on, not that such a skill was worthy of envy, but you get the point, I got the job done without sacrificing quality and with few rejects. The rush ended on a brutal note when a family of six, mom and dad and their nattering brood in every species of khaki shorts—Sansabelt, pleated, hip-hugging elastic—decided it would be neat if they all had banana splits. Which were our absolute bane because everyone thought the banana split was very exotic and so they eyeballed every step of the construction process and traded notes afterward, with one of the group inevitably complaining when their split had a smidgen less fudge than their companions'.
Eventually, the family beat it out the door. The guys behind the counter, and me in my waffle perch, began to relax. Martine emerged from the back and, observing my accomplishment, the stack of cones, said, “Great job, Benji, those are some real cones you got there,” and he patted me on the head. Two bounces.
I stiffened. I think I heard NP's jaw drop. Martine was out the door with his briefcase.
“What the,” I said.
NP came around the counter. “Yo, Martine just patted you on the head like you were a pickaninny.”
“I'm not his—” I started.
“White man patted me on the head like a pickaninny, I'd kick his ass, shit.”
“Martine is black,” Nick said. “He was just saying, ‘Good job, brotherman.’”
“That's some racist shit right there,” NP said. “Pat a black man on the head.”
There has been far too little research done in the area of what drives white people to touch black hair. What are the origins of the strange compulsion that forces them to reach out to smooth, squeeze, pet, pat, bounce their fingers in the soft, resilient exuberance of an Afro, a natural, a just-doin'-its-own-thing jumble of black hair? It's only hair—but try telling that to that specimen eyeing a seductive
bonbon of black locks, as the sweat beads on their forehead and they tremble with the intensity of restraint, their fingers locked in a fist in their pocket: I cannot touch it, but I must. A black-hair fondler has a few favorite questions that they like to ask when they fondle. “How do you comb it?” “How do you make it do that?” “How do you wash it?” With a pick; just does it; shampoo. Jerkoff.
A good starting point for such a study might be a metropolitan preschool, where the races
are forced to mix with each other
. Let the camera roll. The hours of footage, capturing the white schoolteacher's pats of her charges' nappy heads—good-morning hello, after-recess howdy, end-of-day farewell—will be a fruitful avenue of research. It's an ancient curiosity, no doubt, one that finds its first full expression during slavery. The contact of the two races on a daily basis, on New World soil, as they breathe its strange air. Picture the slaveholder as he surveys his property, both animate and inanimate, walking between the rows of the slave shacks, the field niggers standing at attention. He passes a young boy with bright eyes, round cheeks … and an irresistible 'Fro, untamed, almost flirtatious. Is it … can it be … winking at him? He will pet his property and pet is the correct verb, for these are animals before him.
I had punched a white classmate or two or three, some boys and a girl, in the stomach or the eye, during my early elementary-school years for inappropriate 'Fro-touching. “I just wanted to see what it felt like.” I punched them according to my father's lessons. In each case, the principal called our house that evening, my mother answered, my father listened to one side of the conversation, came to a boil, asked for the phone, and then schooled Mr. Aletta in the finer points of black history, patiently, inexorably. That was a long time ago.
NP started a campaign. In slow moments he'd whisper, “It's like lamb's wool,” with a tone of wonder in his voice.
When I returned from my ten-minute break, he'd squeak excitedly, “I love its kinky texture.”
And also, “It springs back so fast.”
And merely “Nappy!” if he was feeling pithy.
Nick said, “He's black, I'm telling you,” and that's how things went for a time. What had been Martine's intent? Caught between NP's indictment that I'd been punked, and Nick's vision of racial solidarity. I was in the middle, bending as usual in the direction of whatever breeze was blowing through me that day. The day our electricity went out, I inclined toward NP and his vision of eternal, unending race warfare.
What are you going to do about it? What are you ever going to do about anything?
MARTINE DIDN'T STAY LONG
after the delivery guys left, driving off to “check out the other stores,” leaving us in the care of Bert, our noble skipper. Bert made a good show of being upright when Martine was about, but once the boss left he spent half the shift in the bathroom, shivering in hangover. I didn't know much about hangovers at that point, so in the years since my Jonni Waffle time, Bert has stayed with me as Patient Zero of Morning-After Incapacitation. It was always nice when Bert came up on manager rotation. He made the tough shifts easier, too preoccupied with his nausea and that night's plans for him to get in a fever over refilling the carob chips or too-generous scoops.
The final member of the Thursday night shift joined us in the form of one of the Cousins, Meg, and I was immediately reminded of my shirt. Why did I have to stink today? “I thought Marsha was on today,” I said, then realized that it might appear as if I were overly familiar with her schedule. Which was true.
“We switched,” Meg explained. Marsha had a date with one of the boys, one of the Teds and Derricks and Sammys who populated the Cousins' lull-period conversation and hovered outside near closing time. The Cousins were fun. Marsha, a plump little thing with dyed red hair, lived up-island in Center Moriches, and Meg had come down from her home in Rhode Island somewhere to spend the summer with her kinfolk. Meg pushed my buttons, mostly due to her New Wave haircut, which sliced across her face in a nice, hard angle.
It was a couple of weeks before I noticed, as she bent over one day, that she cut it that way to cover her lazy eye. That I knew her secret made it even more exciting when her breast grazed my elbow, or my elbow grazed her breast, depending on your perspective, although I have my perspective and I'm sticking to it.
My elbow smooshed her breast at least once per shift. It was a tight fit, there in the vats. We reached past each other, leaning in, accumulating our little shavings from nearby or adjacent flavors, sometimes competing for the same flavor, trading scoops one after the other. Breathing each other's cooled breath. So there was plausible deniability vis-à-vis the tit collisions, between gravity working on her body, and my long, skinny arms. But the thing is, it never happened with Marsha or Arianna, the other girl I worked with sometimes. And it happened every shift, which was outside probability. I always murmured a quick “Sorry, sorry,” and Meg said, “No problem,” and we continued on our cones or sundaes.
One scoop dread, one scoop excitement—such was my portion when I worked with Meg. As a shift progressed without a tit collision, I'd think, the spell is broken, and then a few minutes later—smoosh, that soft inevitability. Sorry, sorry. All these years later, I can only come to the conclusion that she was steering her breasts into my elbow the whole time, as a joke or a thrill, I don't know, other people's kicks are as mysterious as my own. (Holding hands in the roller disco, a tit collision in the ice-cream vats—an arc seems to be shaping up here, or, given that there are only two points, a straight line of ascent, Team Man-Child coming from behind in the second half.) When I think about it, the memory calls up this odd mix of sensations—the heat of her breast and the cold gusts of the freezer, the latter overpowering the former so that desire was cooled off and extinguished the moment it came into being. Sounds about right.
The Cousins had a car, and a network of party tipsters, and were generally having a much better summer than I was. Meg invited me—or us, really, me and NP and Nick, so I can't say it was a personal invite—to join them at one of the parties they heard about every weekend, at some arcane West Hampton address or sinister-sounding
East Hampton beach I'd never heard of, Plow-Buddy Bluffs, Sugar-Bang Drift. I wanted to go, but didn't want to go alone, and NP and Nick weren't interested in the Cousins' lifestyle. Of Marsha, they opined that she “need to shave her arms” and “got some booty,” and regarding Meg they offered that she was “too skinny,” had a “flat ass,” but was “okay in the face.” Imagine if they knew about the lazy eye! They weren't interested, but there was something else there, too, a fear of going off-map, of traveling to a part of the East End that we didn't know. Where we didn't know where the exits were in case something racial went down, that small radius of light created by a beach-party bonfire magnifying the deep mysteries that lay beyond it, that greater darkness. Fuckin' rednecks.