Despite Mama’s misgivings, I knew I had to stay proactive, so I went to my friend Jo Jo’s place out in Sunny Vale. Sunny Vale was once a gated community, but the fence boards had rotted out before the most recent recession and were never replaced. Now nothing separated its nearly identical rows of fussy American Craftsman–style homes from the service road Nigel and I waited on. We were in the Bug. We were caught in a long line of cars turning into the subdivision. My knee quivered.
Nigel watched my knee. He wore my fedora, which, although pushed back from his face, sloped down to cover his ears. As he leaned forward, with his palms pressed against the dash, I had that hiccup-in-time feeling, as though I were the passenger and Nigel were driving.
“Can you see what the holdup is?” I asked. Nigel slid back the fabric sunroof, gleefully climbed onto the seat, and peeked out. This was all strictly verboten in Penny’s presence, of course. But my dove wasn’t around, and I needed a distraction, because to answer Nigel’s unasked question: Dad was not okay. Dad was not in the same ballpark as okay. Dad was on a cruise missile headed in the opposite direction of okay at hypersonic speeds. My throat was a knot of twigs. Eyes sat on rusty ball bearings. Left heel swarming with bees. I had another more pressing reason for going to Sunny Vale. Imagine my surprise when I found my pill holder, a Daffy Duck Pez dispenser, empty.
My desperate state was my own doing. I should have planned ahead. I should have restocked days ago. I should not have brought Nigel. But with Penny at work, I couldn’t explain a midday disappearance, leaving Nigel at home.
“What’s the deal?” I asked Nigel.
“It looks like some kid dropped a ball,” he said.
I stood up through the sunroof, crushing Nigel to one side of the gap. A ball was wedged under the bumper of a dump truck.
“This calls for evasive maneuvers, petty officer.” Thus continuing a role-play we engaged in less and less frequently as the world adulterated Nigel. The narrative was ridiculously complex by that point, but the basics were easy enough to understand. We were in a submarine when we received a garbled command to attack the mainland of that tragic kingdom, our homeland. Meanwhile a distress call came in: innocents trapped on a sinking ocean liner. Nigel: We should probably save those kids. The captain: Hell no. Me: Oh well. Exposing the captain, Captain Swartzman, as a double agent, Nigel confined the cretin to quarters. We usually succeeded in our rescue mission. But in recent times we tended to arrive belatedly due to a confluence of quick-moving icebergs and demonically possessed winds, which hampered operations and, by extension, saved lives.
Nigel saluted. “Aye-aye, XO.” He wiggled back down into the car.
I followed suit. “Safety first,” I said. “Prepare to surface.”
“Preparing to surface, XO.” Nigel clipped on his seatbelt.
“Blow the ballast.” While I depressed the clutch, Nigel threw the stick shift into drive. “Brace yourself,” I said. And we swerved around the kerfuffle. Horns honked. Voices called out angrily. I cut through a backyard, glimpsing an elderly woman on a radioactive green Slip ’n Slide.
Entering the neighborhood proper, I clipped a yard jockey, putting him out of his eternal misery. After I killed the engine in Jo Jo’s circular driveway, the Bug’s rear engine pinged in well-earned exhaustion. Nigel was pressed against his seat.
“Did we save them?” I asked.
“Some,” he said.
Inside, Jo Jo greeted us wearing jodhpurs, riding boots, and a black beret. He was dressed like someone’s idea of a film director from the silent era. He even wore a floppy black mustache that didn’t match his sandy brown hair or pale skin at all. Same old Jo Jo. My college roommate had a penchant for the oddball, the whimsical, the obscure. I fit all the categories, which I suppose is why we hit it off from the day we met in freshman orientation. Our tastes were generally different—I liked classical pop, he enjoyed contemporary avant-garde; I favored dandyish clothes, he liked whatever didn’t stink too bad that day; I tended to date white girls, he never went out with anyone lighter than a paper bag (until he met Casey)—but our energy signatures were the same. We rarely had to explain ourselves to each other. Like we’d been separated during a mix-up in the maternity ward.
In our undergrad days, when it looked as though we might get a black woman president, it seemed as if the country were turning away from the old troubles of systemic racial oppression. Jo Jo used to say that one day we would walk into a room and people would see us as the twins we were, despite the fact that he was white and I wasn’t. I bought into the hopes, too. But those hopes died fast. It sometimes felt like we were the only people in the world who experienced the whiplash and loss of those years, because no one else talked about that era. Not that Jo Jo and I did.
“There’s my handsome brother,” Jo Jo said.
“What’s with the Cecil B. DeMille?” I asked.
“Dress for the job you want, killer.” Sometimes Jo Jo worked in the local film industry as the guy who stood a mile away from the action to ward off the public. He had wanted to make movies—used to make funny-as-shit shorts starring me and our classmates—before he became a pharmacist and, later, a discredited pharmacist. He got a headless teddy bear each month from the mother of the child he’d inadvertently poisoned.
“Where’s Randy, Jerry, Reynaud, and Milford?” Nigel asked.
“You didn’t tell him?” Jo Jo asked.
I hadn’t brought Nigel to Jo Jo Baker’s in a long time. His wife and kids had moved out the previous year. Casey and the boys were replaced by a rotating cast of scruffy subculturalists who loved the irony of Jo Jo’s suburban compound: a local experience so authentic that it was more or less exactly like where they came from, only with endless Plums and other exotic nipple twisters like ziziphus berries.
Jo Jo, the poor bastard, seemed to think Casey would step out of the kitchen at any moment and declare that all was forgiven.
A woman stumbled from the kitchen on one platform heel. Her hair was piled into a crooked beehive, and she wore little more than an unsashed kimono that revealed one light brown breast. Mild, hard-to-pin-down accent when she spoke.
“Tozz fiik, Jo Jo. You could have warned me that you had a kid in here, no?” The woman cinched the kimono together with a looped metal belt.
Jo Jo introduced her as Polaire from Egypt. A friend. He told her who I was.
“I’ve heard much about you, Jo Jo’s friend. You have such a fantastic complexion. Like the chocolate they melt onto strawberries.”
“Um. Thanks?” I said, my cheeks warmed.
“Oh no. Did I embarrass you?” she asked.
“Honestly? A bit.”
“Good,” she said.
Nigel and I stepped into the kitchen and opened Jo Jo’s fridge. I saw an empty egg carton, some Camembert, and a cornucopia of beers, but there was a container of freshly squeezed lemonade. Nigel removed the container.
“Whoa, kemo sabe.” Jo Jo took the container from Nigel and turned to me. Jo Jo took off his mustache. “Not for the little one. Not unless you want him seeing orange stars and green clovers. Would you?” He nodded at Polaire, who grabbed Nigel’s hand.
“Want to see something spectacular?” She gestured toward the staircase. I gave Nigel the okay signal. “Come, my little chimpanzee,” she said, and led him out of the kitchen.
“Is she safe?” I asked.
“Her? Safest person in this flying circus. Daughter of a sultan or something, but don’t bring it up. Speaks like a dozen languages. Brilliant photojournalist, too, although she’s too busy trying to get back to that war zone. Those animals shot her. She barely made it out.”
I asked him how he was doing lately. He said his life sucked, but at least he kept busy. “You didn’t come here to check on me, brother.” He placed hands on both sides of my neck, squinted, and sniffed. He snapped his fingers. “A little out of focus.”
“It’s not just the Plums. Work trouble.” I told him about the diversity campaign. I sipped juice from another cup and immediately spat the liquid out. “Castor oil?”
Jo Jo handed me a napkin from his sleeve. “Probably.”
“So I need a director to make a commercial. Someone with style. I’ll need some stills, too.”
“I can help you with that.”
With Octavia’s budget and leeway, I could build any team I needed to get the job done. Jo Jo was flaky, but he knew his shit. He’d gone to school to become a pharmacist, after his parents’ wishes, but he blew that off and eventually found success as an independent video producer. He started out doing weddings, then training films for midsize companies. Now his artistic video installations were the talk of the City and quite lucrative. It turned out my pal was a creative genius after all.
And while a normal person couldn’t pay him enough to do commercial work, he could help me make an Afrocentric Seasons ad campaign to impress Octavia and PHH. Octavia would be one step closer to her big deal. When she closed the deal, I’d get my cut, and Nigel would be healed.
I grabbed Jo Jo’s shoulder. “I’m thinking something light and quick. Lots of smiling black faces. Upbeat music—”
“Like one of those Caribbean tourism commercials,” Jo Jo said.
“Precisely—”
“But with local flavor.”
“Correct.”
“We’ll need some good locations,” Jo Jo said. “Location is everything.”
“I know just the place.”
The doorbell rang. I opened the door and a man in fatigues stood there, a shotgun slung from his hip. I raised my hands. He shoved me into the wall, choking my windpipe with his forearm.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Jo Jo said. “Easy, officer. The good brother is with me.”
“Oh. I didn’t know.” The officer released me. I grabbed my throat.
“Why’d you do that, man?” Jo Jo said. I gasped and coughed.
“I did it for his safety.”
“My safety?” I asked. “How is that possible?”
“I had to make sure you weren’t a danger to me or yourself,” the officer said. His neck was bigger than his head. “I’m not used to seeing black guys around here. You can’t be too careful these days. There was a robbery—”
I was still coughing. Jo Jo patted my back. “Just take your goods,” he said. He threw a stuffed brown paper bag to the officer. The officer tossed a stuffed envelope to Jo Jo and left.
“Sorry about that,” Jo Jo said. He explained that the cop wasn’t a real cop. Not anymore. He and his buddies had a camp out in the swamps where they ran tactical maneuvers 24/7. They needed stimulants to stay alert.
“You mean they’re a group of crazies,” I said.
“By definition, any gathering of humans is a group of crazies.” Jo Jo waved at the man as he drove off in his gigantic black pickup. “You look like you could use a backrub.”
“No, thanks. Maybe a medic.”
“Not that kind of backrub. A Blue Geisha Backrub. One of the kids camped out back said I should call it a Blue Geisha Blowjob, but that’s just crass, y’know?”
Jo Jo explained that the Blue Geisha Backrub was a Plum, so it did what all Plums did: pumped the air back into your soul. “Two differences though,” he said. “It’s a little slower on the uptake, but more powerful. And you know that stuff I add to the Plums that warms your insides? It’s got a lot more of that.”
“That’s three things.”
“I guess so.” Jo Jo gave me a packet of regular Plums. Then he counted out three Blue Geishas into his palm. “You don’t want to take more than one of these a week. Trust me on this.”
I swallowed one. Jo Jo sipped lemonade. He clicked on the television. A commercial for Paul Pavor for Mayor came on. Jo Jo sipped lemonade, which had somehow taken on the appearance of Malbec, and made finger frames with his hands. Terrible composition. I had the sensation of time stretching like a wad of currently-being-chewed gum. He sipped lemonade. Actually, it’s Zinfandel. Although I didn’t recall asking Jo Jo aloud. You can’t escape. The wall is real, and it goes on in both directions forever. Eventually, Polaire and Nigel appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
Nigel was in blackface. My words came out in the strangest way, like cannonballs down a children’s slide: “Why. Does. My. Boy. Look. That. Way?”
“He said he’s playing a famous musician in a play but he’s too light.”
I tried to stand but collapsed onto my knees. Soon I was crawling. Spit drooled from my lower lip.
He can’t look like that.