To save face, I flip Jimmy off as he brushes past me, but there’s a stitch in my side as I walk him away. Mama says that’s guilt.
I haven’t seen Jimmy much since Ms. Mabel died two years ago. He’s Paul’s friend and I only ever saw him when me and my friends was hanging around with our older brother, trying to be hip, trying to be in the middle of it all. And if I’m honest, even when we was following Paul and his friends all over the East Bay, Jimmy didn’t stand out too much.
Jimmy was the quiet one. Jimmy was the one who laughed with his eyes, but never out loud. Jimmy was the one whose clothes were almost as shabby as ours. Jimmy was the one with a light Louisiana accent. He was the one with the dirty brown eyes but sometimes the sunlight hit ‘em just right and they were interesting and pretty in ways that did nothing for me, but had made Natalie fall apart a couple summers ago. Jimmy was the friend mama trusted to keep Paul out of trouble, even though Paul ain’t have no interest in trouble, to begin with.
Jimmy was the old soul.
But he seemed older tonight. Those pretty and complicated brown eyes are complicated in new ways; or, at least, one new way.
I know what grief looks like. I see it every day in mama’s eyes, even though daddy might not be dead, he sure is gone, and mama’s been living with his absence for damn near half my life.
And apparently, now Jimmy has years and years ahead of him where grief about his mama’s passing will haunt him.
“Damita,” Tia whispers, her tone soft and full of censure. She sounds like mama again. In fact, I swear I can hear mama’s voice in my head, saying my name with a soft sigh, asking me when I’m gonna grow up. When I’m gonna think about other people before myself.
Asking me when I’m gonna be more like Tia.
The answer is I don’t know. Not right now. Maybe never. I see what putting everyone else ahead of self has gotten mama and I don’t want no parts of that life.
“Come on,” I say, reaching for my sister’s hand. I didn’t come here to think about Jimmy or to let mama’s hateful words or Jimmy stop me from starting the life I know I deserve.
I pull Tia to the bouncer and the man looks us up and down like pieces of meat. I feel Tia shift closer to me and squeeze my hand, and so I smile just a little bit harder and wider like I always do in moments like this; taking what little heat off Tia as I can. The scrutiny lasts for a full, awkward minute before finally tilting his head to the right and motioning us inside.
My mama calls me a dreamer, but she says it like a curse. Like my dreams are sins. Like she’s gonna need to pray double time to save my soul. Like I’m gonna dream my way into hell.
When she catches me in the living room, practicing the dance moves from the tv, she reaches for her Bible. When my pants are too tight, she calls me fast – and hustles me off to church – when really, we’re just poor and none of us can afford to get rid of clothes until they’re falling apart, and sometimes not even then. When I spin my records, she turns her radio up, trying to drown out the devil’s music with the gospel. And the first time I told her I was saving all my money to move to LA, she got right down on her knees in the living room and started praying to anyone who would listen.
And maybe mama’s right, but as soon as I take one step into The Downtown Groove, I know there’s no turning back.
I’ll never be the same.
My uncle Ronnie found Jesus a couple years ago and he said his baptism felt like the Lord ripped his skin off in one full shred and then wrapped him in clouds. Uncle Ronnie spent a good couple decades on coke so I was used to not understanding what he was talking about, but when my toes hit this dancefloor, I get it.
As I step into The Downtown Groove, I feel born again, like I’m making my way to heaven through hell.
Like I’m finding myself in the beat.
***
JIMMY
I don’t come to The Groove to…well, groove. It might be nice and maybe one day I’ll tread out on the dancefloor, but I ain’t the best dancer in the world and some nights people act like the dancefloor is a stage and they’re the main act; even when they ain’t.
Especially when they ain’t.
And I appreciate the entertainment, cause there ain’t nothing I love more than sippin’ on a couple drinks and watching the crowd on the dance floor move to the rhythm. That’s exactly what I need to take my mind off of life and Paul’s fast ass little sisters.
I swing by the bar and order a rum and coke. I spy the twins making their way toward the dance floor looking bright-eyed, shocked, and damn young.
Not my problem.
I head in the opposite direction toward a staircase behind the bar that most people don’t even notice. When the door closes behind me, the sound of the music is muffled and I have a moment to hear myself think, but that’s not what I want. I take the steps two at a time to the second floor. Next to the door in a dark corner, I see two bodies, wrapped together, and I avert my eyes, giving whoever’s there getting in on a bit of privacy they clearly don’t need.
I like to watch, but not like this.
I pull the hallway door open and music floods back into the hallway. I step into the room and the air is a silky off-black. The rhythm, the beat, the smell of pot, and the anonymity; that’s all I need. All I want.
“I know I must be goin’ blind. Ain’t no way I’m seeing who I think I’m seein’.”
I shake my head and take a sip of my drink before I turn toward the voice. In a corner of the room, there’s a curved velvet couch fitted against the wall. I know damn near everybody seated there, but it’s the man in the middle, in a shiny lame dress shirt, lifting his glass of brown liquor in the air in greeting. I roll my eyes and move toward him.
“Jimmy Africa,” he says, “in my club lookin’ chill as a motherfucker. My eyes must not be workin’.”
“You gon’ do this every time I come here, Charles?”
“Charles?! A nigga take a couple community college classes and all of a sudden I’m Charles.”
“No, Negro, I’ma call your ass what your mama call you when actin’ out.”
I’ve known Charles damn near my whole life, longer even than Paul. He used to live in the apartment next door to mine, but he tried to be there as little as possible. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat, the sound of his daddy screaming in his sleep – dreaming about the war – still ringing in my ears. I can’t imagine what it did to Charlie. When being home was too hard, he used to stay out in the neighborhood ‘til all hours of the night and sometimes mama would send me outside with a couple pieces of fried fish for him to eat. And if it was raining, he’d come over to sleep on our couch. If there was anyone who loved my mama almost as much as me, it was Charlie.
“You just ain’t been here in a while,” Charlie says. “I was starting to think you was avoiding me.” even with the music too loud for me to think, I can hear the rare softness in charlie’s voice. Last time I heard it was at my mama’s funeral.
I shake my head. “Just been busy is all,” I tell him. “This my first day off in a couple months.”
Growing up I looked at Charlie the way the twins look at Paul. He was a little bit older and a lot hipper, and even when I could see his life falling apart, I still wanted to be him. I’m grown now and we’ve been on different roads for years, but every time I see him, it’s hard to shake that childlike wonder.
Charlie tips his head. “Come on, have a seat.”
I shake my head quickly. “I once saw a chick licking coke off her man’s dick right where you standing. I’m good.”
The group around Charlie bursts into laughter.
“I think that was me,” one of the chicks says and they laugh harder.
Charlie takes another sip of his drink. “What you been up to, Mr. Africa?” he asks casually.
I shrug. “Nothing but work.”
“You still drivin’ delivery for that furniture store?”
I nod and my shoulder twinges from the phantom weight of the couch I helped carry up three flights just this afternoon.
“Pay all right?”
“You lookin’ for something legit?” I nod, reaching for the soft pack of cigarettes in my back pocket.
Charlie recoils at the suggestion. “Hell naw, but every time I go by Ms. Geraldine’s she asks about you like I’m your keeper.”
I nod and look away, mostly to stop from crying.
Ms. Geraldine was my mother’s closest friend. They’d hopped on a bus from Baton Rouge in the summer of 1954 together with barely more than the threadbare clothes on their bodies. For the longest time, I didn’t understand that Geraldine was my aunt not by blood but because my mother willed it to be so. Ms. Geraldine was as much my home as my mother, but then mama died and every time I stopped by to see Ms. Geraldine, all I could see was my mother. I didn’t want to hear her tell me about mama. I didn’t want to see the framed pictures of her and mama, mama in her prime, and me and mama, scattered all over Ms. Geraldine’s house. So, I stopped by less and less until somehow, it had been six months since I’d been by to see my auntie, and hearing Charlie say her name ached.
I shake a cigarette out of the pack and try not to crush it between my fingers. I turn back to Charlie. “Tell her I’m doin’ all right,” I say, just loud enough to be heard over the music.
Charlie stands from the couch and everyone shifts out of the way so he can pass. I back up mostly so I can try to dip into the shadows and hide my watery eyes.
“You could tell her yourself,” he says once he’s close.
“I know,” I whisper, staring down at my shoes.
Charlie might be a lot of things - he might have had to become a lot of things to survive – but to me, this man is the same boy who never had to be told to clean his plate when he came over for dinner. The same boy who passed out on my mother’s brown paisley couch like it was a king-sized bed. Who once put a gun to a man’s head for hassling me on my walk home from school. The boy my mama understood would have to be a hard man eventually, but she treated him like a boy for as long as he could, to remind him that someone still cared.
He claps a hand on my shoulder and turns me away from the couch. “Gone ‘head and light ya cig, Jimmy. Let’s go watch the dancing. I know you like that.”
I nod and lift my cigarette to my lips. I have to fumble around in my pants pocket until I find my lighter in my shirt pocket.
Charlie leads me to the edge of the balcony just as I touch the lighter to the tip of my cigarette. Over the tip of the flame, I see Demetria down on the dancefloor. I don’t even know how I spot her in the crowd and the dim light, but I do and then I look away.
Ain’t none of my business.
I got my own shit to worry about and apparently she’s grown.
Or young enough to think she knows what she’s doing.