IT SEEMED AS IF JACKIE had avoided him deliberately. He’d gone to Tuyen’s and Carla’s frequently over the last two weeks. He even spent a few nights, but she hadn’t appeared, and when he asked Carla or Tuyen, they said she hadn’t called. Why didn’t he simply call her, they asked, or go by the store on Queen Street?
He should be able to do those things, after all, what about the Lula Lounge? Why couldn’t he simply leave it at that, though? One night—a shared high. And fucking. People did that every day, casually. Jackie felt nothing for him. Nothing or simply amusement. Coming on to her two weeks ago had apparently annoyed her to the point that she didn’t want to see him, even as a friend. But maybe all of it was only in his mind and Jackie was going about her business being Jackie, who appeared and disappeared as she liked, and could have sex with him at the Lula with three hundred people dancing two feet away and forget it the next day. So he would make an ass of himself calling her. He felt like a child with her, not the man he wanted to show her; the man who would be devoted to her, who would love her. Christ, just thinking this made him cringe at her response. Jackie could be so cool, so off-centring, so distant.
The phone rang early. He grabbed it before his father could reach it upstairs. It was one of his “boys” from Eglinton. Kwesi.
“Hey, what’s up, man? You awake?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m cool.”
“So we’re down for next Wednesday. You know, like, at Syreta’s.”
“Yeah, man, I know. I’ll be there. Why you calling me so early?”
“Just checking, man. You know. What you up to later?”
Kwesi was the guy with the black Navigator. Oku hung out with him now and then when he needed “smoke” and a few dollars. Kwesi had taken a particular liking to him even though Oku didn’t seem to be interested in his schemes to get rich. “You’re a smart brother,” he told Oku. “We could do some great shit together.”
Oku usually laughed at this flattery, saying, “Yeah, man, but I’m not into that shit. It’s too time-consuming.”
But Kwesi persisted nevertheless, as if he thought that one day he would wear Oku down or one day Oku would face the inevitable. Kwesi and most men he knew lived by their wits.
Kwesi’s business was a mobile store held at his girlfriend, Syreta’s, or at her friends. The latest Nike, Reebok, leather coats, bags, designer dresses, anything you wanted, could be had. Racks of dresses, blouses, stands of shoes would be moved in just like at a department store and discreet invitations would be put out, though invariably too many people would be lined up outside a house or apartment on the appointed day. Oku helped with the traffic. Everything was marked down to thirty per cent of the original price. There was a slight sense of danger for Oku, but it was understood that he’d go no further—despite Kwesi hassling him about how he didn’t need a university degree to make money. Oku called it capitalist bullshit and Babylon, and they both laughed, but Kwesi’s logic sat uneasily with him. Kwesi was driving around in a Lincoln Navigator, had a leather coat for every season, a nice apartment. Oku couldn’t help but be envious sometimes. Envious not only of the money but of the balls, the certainty. He had a dilettante’s curiosity about Kwesi’s life, though he was much more tempted lately and found his objections wearing thin. If he continued his friendship with Kwesi, he would have to commit to going the whole way.
“Listen, you wanna help me pick up the stuff today?” There was the usual hesitation from Oku’s side. “You know, I’ll give you—what?—three per cent?” Kwesi was talking about pick-ups. He had other guys who helped him do this, but Oku knew that he wanted to draw him in deeper. “No sweat. No hassle. It’s inside stuff.” Three per cent would certainly get rid of his anxiety about his dwindling student loan. “Come on. You down with this or not?”
“Got things to do today, man.” Oku wimped out, and he felt like it. There was a disturbing feeling in his stomach. His voice couldn’t take on the aloof quality it usually did with Kwesi. “I’ll check you at Syreta’s Wednesday, all right?”
“Cool, bro. But you know what I’m saying, right?”
“Yeah, yeah. Peace, man.” Oku rang off.
His own logic was falling apart. He could get busted at one of the sales just as much as on the other side of the deal Kwesi was offering him. He had convinced himself that being caught actually and undeniably stealing stuff was worse than being caught selling it. He knew he was splitting hairs and Kwesi was testing him and would punk him out soon.
Oku had stayed good friends with Carla and Tuyen because he’d found hanging with the guys exhausting. Yes, he could become the bad public hard-ass kind of black man everyone appreciated. Everybody knew it was bullshit. The leather coats, the dark glasses, the don’t-give-a-shit attitude. Life was all about getting the car, the bling-bling, the honey. All that television talk had made it to the street, or was it the other way around? You slapped a few bitches in the mall and faced down a few dickheads in the alleyways. Underneath it all you loved babies, played video games, and loved your mother’s cooking and loved nobody like your mother. So much energy put out just fronting. And you sometimes forgot you were only fronting. You were dangerous. There was a kind of romance about that dangerousness, and Oku teetered at times in that alluring space. Which man wouldn’t want to be thought of as dangerous? Yet who wanted to have that mantle drawn around his shoulders all the time? Some, but you couldn’t crack into the full register of yourself.
One night when Oku was eighteen, he was walking up Beverley Street. It was about 2 A.M. and he’d just left a blind pig on Baldwin, and he was thinking how quiet it was and how he loved the city. He was thinking that he was all out of money and had to walk home, and he was thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad because it was balmy, and anyway, the quietness of the city would help him write a poem as he walked. He was high. He’d had two beers, but mostly he’d smoked ganja and danced by himself. He was at Baldwin and Beverley. A car sped south, leaving a silence behind it, then another car came north behind him. This one slowed; he saw the flashing turning light as it swerved into him. He stopped. Two cops came out of the car. He can’t remember if they called him, if they told him to stop. His arms rose easily as if reaching for an embrace. One cop reached for him. He can’t remember what they said or what they wanted. He only remembered that it was like an accustomed embrace. He yielded his body as if to a lover, and the cop slid into his arms. That was the fucked-up thing about being dangerous. It was a surrender to violence, to some bruising, brutal lover. He remembered how instinctively his arms opened, how gently, as gently as they would have opened to embrace Jackie. But this was another kind of impeachment. A perverse fondling. Another car sped by, slowed to look and then sped on again. The cops didn’t find anything on him, and he said nothing to them, just smiled and shook his head. They asked him his name, he smiled again. Their fondling became rougher. Oku let his body go limp. The cops folded him into their car with a few more shoves. He laughed. He was still high. They took him to fifty-two Division. They couldn’t find anything to charge him with and let him go around 6 A.M.
He had come to expect this passion play acted out on his body any time he encountered authority, and it was played out at its most ecstatic with the cops. Whenever he encountered them, he simply lifted his arms in a crucifix, gave up his will and surrendered to the stigmata. Some of his friends didn’t. They resisted, they talked, they asserted their rights. That only caused more trouble. They ended up in the system fighting to get out. They ended up hating everyone around them. Homicidal.
Perhaps it was his father’s tenacity that took him the other way. His father was so voracious, yet so bitter—and that was the part that Oku hated—that in the middle of loving, or eating, everything seemed bitter.
Jackie, he thought, Jackie was somehow the solution to it. If he could one day find the precise words, she would come around. There was some specific thing he had to say, and then the two of them would fall into place. It was like a series of locks: when particular words were said, each lock fell open. Which is why he’d been silent with the cops. There were no words for the doorway they emerged from, no word that would send them back or pacify them. The words to Jackie, on the other hand, were only hidden. He knew, too, that Jackie was only half of it.
Twenty-five years old, living with his mother and father, and heading nowhere. The university was such a straitjacket, it all made him hunger for another world. Maybe he was fooling himself that he could think his way out of this box. Did Jackie want a man like that? A man who was stable? And what did the Nazi boyfriend have that he didn’t? His white skin, for one. Oku laughed at himself. Not fair. Okay, a mother with a lot of rundown properties across the city. Okay both, white skin and a mother who was a slum landlord. This cynicism aside, wasn’t he, Oku, depending on the dark tenor of his own skin to woo Jackie? So why couldn’t the Nazi boy use what he had?
Oku would spend hours going over the arguments he would put to Jackie. When he did see her, it came out in intolerant bursts, like the last time he’d seen her at Tuyen’s. He didn’t yet have the words to make that lock fall open.
And what about the lock for himself? His father said he lived too much in his head. The truth was living in his head was what kept him safe. Living in his head meant he didn’t react reflexively to the stimuli of the city heading toward him with all the velocity of a split atom. That’s why he kept pretty much to himself. That’s why he risked being called a “flake” and a “faggot” by the guys in the jungle. That’s why he cultivated the persona of the cool poet—so that he wouldn’t have to get involved in the ordinary and brutal shit waiting for men like him in the city. They were in prison, although the bars were invisible.
“Don’t be a faggot, man. You never, never let people fuck with you,” Kwesi had lectured him.
“You bide your time and you take your opportunity,” his father had lectured him.
Christ, he was scared sometimes, scared of something lurking in himself, in his body—some idea threatening to overpower him. It took all his power to shut down the crazy person inside of him who wanted to tear things up. He avoided the guys from the jungle more and more. And soon he would have to move out because his father’s alchemy was just as potent.
He had nightmares of putting his fist through his father’s face; of lifting the breakfast table and smothering him with it. He was afraid that one morning he would wake up and do those things. He would actually wake at times in fear out of a dream thinking he had done just that. He would lock his bedroom door to prevent himself from sleepwalking into these acts.
Oku stayed in his room in the basement until his father left. He didn’t want to talk to his mother. His mother could get things out of him. She probably already knew that he had dropped out. He heard her come back to the kitchen. He let himself out the basement door, yelling to her, “Bye, Ma!” He heard her faint calling but pretended he didn’t.
Exams were supposed to be happening now. It was the end of May. His father, making him feel like a child, insisted on seeing grades. “Let me see what I’m paying for, boy.” He would have to move out.
Instead of the university, he would go to Kensington Market. It was his every day except Wednesdays, when his mother went there. He’d always checked with her each week in case she varied her movements—he’d make a pretence of asking her to get something for him, like guineppes or gizadas. There he would sit at a coffee shop, watching people go by and reading Amiri Baraka or Jayne Cortez. He’d found them while trying to put some life into a class in American poetry at the university, though he hadn’t been able to last out the class even with Baraka and Cortez. So what if he knew the classics, if he understood figures of thought? He himself was a figure of thought in those classrooms—an image and not a being, not a solid presence. So what the fuck, he thought, what the fuck was he doing there? Better to read Baraka and Cortez and Neruda and Lorca and Yevtushenko and Brecht on his own. The classes were a waste of time—holding him back as a poet. So fuck that.
He read and watched the street, and depending on his mood that day he might spend the afternoons with Tuyen and Carla, then in the evenings he would sometimes go up to see his boys in the jungle, though less and less these days—get a smoke, tool around, and then go home when the lights were off and his mother and father sleeping.
It was in the market that he’d met the old Rasta and the musician. Not together, but he’d come to think of them as together. As parts of the same person or the same state.
The Rasta was in his sixties. He worked the blocks of the city, panhandling. Some days he was at the corner of Bathurst and Bloor, some days he was at Spadina and Queen, and some days in the market. On the days that he disappeared, Oku learned later, he was playing the horses at Woodbine. His hair was roughly dreaded. He had a hoary beard, which he tied with green and red rubber bands, his pants were sometimes held up with a piece of twine, and he wore boots, winter or summer. He knew the Scriptures by heart. Oku had met him outside the parking lot, close to the Caribbean food store.
“Beg you a money, dread,” he said to Oku, surprising him. His face close, the smell of outdoor life reeking on him. Oku stepped back, his senses shocked.
“Hey, college bwoy, dread, beg you a money. The street them hard, you know, dread. The air is abstraction me tell you. Give a likkle something for the I and I.” He was aggressive and biblical. “Beg you a likkle something to hold I soul together, man. The spirit massive but the body weak.” He followed Oku down the street.
The poetry of holding the soul together stopped Oku. He turned, fished in his pockets, held out a dollar, waiting for the Rasta to open his hand. He didn’t want to touch him, still scornful of the man’s appearance, but the Rasta grabbed his hand warmly and roughly.
“Blessings on you, brethren. Is the fate of the world you one decide right there so now. Seen? Jah guide, dread. Is I heartbeat unno save. Selassie I.”
Oku escaped across the street to the coffee shop, the Rasta continuing to call after him, “Walk good, dready.” He sat at the coffee shop, a little undone. His hands quivered from a mixture of scorn, fear, and elation. He had sensed what he felt was all of the man in that grasp. The man’s scent repulsed him, but the man had drawn him into a kind of embrace. There was something genuine and plain about it, something vigorous. The man had definition. He was living on the street, but he had definition.
“True brethren, what a merciful morning!”
The next time the Rasta came up on him as he was daydreaming his way past.
“How the I and I today, Rasta? His anger endureth only a minute, for his favour is life, dread. Anything today, Rasta? It rough out here, you nuh know?”
Oku fished in his pocket but could only come up with fifty cents. He gave it apologetically to the Rasta.
“Ah know, nothing, Rasta. Weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning. You nuh see it?”
The Rasta grabbed hold of him as if to hug him, and Oku shrank with the same feeling of revulsion and allure.
“Is nothing, man. Is only fifty cents,” he said, brushing aside and trying to recover himself. The Rasta had rejected something, some way of living, some propriety, and with all his derelictness, Oku envied him.
“Me ah learn, Rasta, me ah grow and me ah learn.” Often the Rasta stood at his post in the market, his arms over his head in a gesture requesting mercy.
One day he said to Oku, “Me ah give up the business, Rasta. Me ah give it up. What you think? It too rough, the begging.” Oku couldn’t help but burst out laughing. “Me nuh joke, Rasta, it rough. You nuh understand?” he said, as if he and Oku had become such familiars that he expected Oku to dissuade him from leaving the begging business.
He was a gambler too.
“Bwoy, the pony business steep! Jah Rastafari. Schoolbwoy, me was one length from millionaire. But Jah know what is not for you, is not for you. Seen! So me ah struggle. Is what you ah read, read so, Rasta? Is only the one book, dread, only one book.”
Oku wished he could be so single-minded.
And then there was the musician. Some afternoons the musician sat in the coffee shop muttering, a short pencil in hand, scribbling musical notes onto a tattered fragment of a brown paper bag. He kept a worn leather folder of music under one arm, sometimes shifting it to the inside of his grungy coat, sometimes to the table, then back to his armpit. He was a tall, lean man, his deep dark skin setting contrast to his pink palms. You noticed his palms because his hands were so large, his fingers long and slender.
On their first meeting Oku made the mistake of looking at him too long and nodding to him in greeting. Thinking the musician was an ordinary black guy, he said to him, “Hey, bro, what’s happening?”
“I’m not your brother.” The musician jumped up, spilling a small table over. He flew at Oku, his face livid.
Oku reached out his hand in front of him, “No problem, bro, no problem.”
“I am not your brother, I say.”
The musician’s sudden looming scared Oku. His outstretched hand touched the musician’s coat, offending him even more. He grabbed hold of Oku, spinning him around. Luckily for Oku, the leather folder fell to the floor and the musician dropped him and scrambled for his music. The small clasp on the folder was broken, and the music sheets slipped onto the floor. The musician became frantic, whimpering as he collected the sheets. Oku moved away from him, disappearing out the door. But he appeared to have forgotten Oku, and tears of relief filled the musician’s eyes when he had put his folder back together. And he appeared to have forgotten the whole incident the next time Oku saw him.
He was a pianist, classically trained. He held the folder as if it were his life; the leather was blackened and dogeared. All the sanity he ever had, had been poured into a symphony, Sepia Ceremony, which he had created as homage to Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11 and Duke Ellington’s sacred music.
He would walk up to perfect strangers in the street and show them his reams of notations for his symphony. He would launch into explanations about this or that movement to surprised passersby.
They wanted him back home in London, he said, they wanted him to go to Munich, but he had come to Toronto on the promise that his composition would be played by the Toronto Symphony. But when they realized he was a black man, their promises had dried up, he said. Bewildered people skirted him, thinking he was a panhandler. He rushed out to them to reassure them. They fled or threatened to call police.
He inundated the Human Rights Commission with complaints against the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Roy Thomson Hall. Leaders of the black community had taken him seriously at first, but his deteriorating mental state would make him launch into outbursts that made his claims confused, if not dubious. He was an artist, a great genius, and they were all fools—his supporters as well as the commission and his persecutors.
Oku came out of the St. George subway one day, and as he walked toward the university, he saw the musician sitting on a concrete embankment, his leather folder in his lap, his large hands making a gesture of piano playing. Oku slowed his pace, trying to decide whether to take another route and avoid another unpleasant encounter. But he saw that the musician was heedlessly playing his symphony. His face was a beautiful mask of pleasure, his long fingers lustful on some arpeggio.
Oku walked by close enough to observe these things and far enough away to run if the musician recognized him. The musician looked up and met his eyes, but there was no recognition there except as an artist to his audience, a great pianist to his adoring fan. Oku paid the musician the compliment of listening, then after some minutes, when the musician seemed to have come to the close of his solo, Oku applauded. The musician bowed his head to receive the accolade. From then on when they met at the Market Café there was no trouble. Oku never made the mistake of calling him “brother,” and the musician went about his business, composing his music on brown paper bags and securing his leather satchel full of the contents of his sanity.
The musician was never as lucid or as friendly as the Rasta, so Oku came by his name through the Rasta, whose own name Oku never found out.
“See him there?” The Rasta pointed to the musician. “Him a mad, you see! Is talent what have him so. Talent and Babylon take him. Not like the I and I. Babylon don’t down cry me yet.”
He was patting himself warm in the cold spring day, standing near the parking lot in the market. He waited there often to arrest shoppers as they exited the lot. Oku was on his way to the café.
“See him? See what me tell you?” The musician was playing his phantom piano outside the café. “Him mad!”
Oku felt like laughing. Between the Rasta and the musician, who was more mad?
“Nuh take things to make jokes, dready. Him is a genius. Him name Clifford Hall. Him get scholarship from yard to go a London when me was a big man. Look pon him now! You nuh see it? Follow the white man ways and you doomed. See, them make him mad.”
Clifford took money out of his mouth, and the Rasta said, “Is how me supposed to compete with a madman? You nuh see me trial! Cha, man. Anyway, ah nah nutten. Make him live. Jah will take care of the I and I. Seen.”
The Rasta and the musician had become a strange source of friendship for Oku. Though, of course, he had a home, albeit increasingly uncomfortable. A mother, a father. A roof over his head. And the anxieties of a failed career were still in the future for him, if at all. And the elixir of faith, which held the Rasta, was not anything that Oku could say firmly he desired. His was for a sense of sovereignty. How had they started out? he wondered. Like him? He knew he hadn’t experienced the moments, he hadn’t visited the scenes that would lead him where the Rasta and the musician had gone, but he had a presentiment, a moment when he glimpsed all directions of this possible life.
The Rasta and the musician would be an embarrassment to men like Oku’s father. They had gone mad, the worst kind of giving into the system that could be imagined among black people in the city. Violence could be understood, but not madness. Violence at least had a traceable etymology—it protected your life, your remaining will, and all your sense of beauty. But madness, madness was weak. Oku’s boys in the jungle felt the same: “You see that crazy motherfucker playing air piano? What the fuck is wrong with him? Shame.” The Rasta got a little more respect, even though they still thought him mad. At least he answered to higher powers, they said. That a steady stream of them lay open-chested on sidewalks and in the parking lots of after-hours clubs was just how the world was.
Did he want to end up bled out in a parking lot outside a club? Did he want to float out of his body like the Rasta and the musician? Or did he want the hard-headed bitterness of his father, living in the fantasies of if only?
“If only what?”
He was sitting at the café, his thumbs on a page of Baraka’s Blues People. A hand was on his shoulder. It was Jackie’s. He hadn’t seen her come in.
“If only what?” she repeated.
For a moment it seemed right. He felt as if he was in a room, an accustomed room, alone with her, and had merely drifted off. Her hand was utterly familiar, as if they, the two of them, existed in a particular universe, their particular universe. But, of course, it was the Market Café and they weren’t alone. He smiled at her, shaking himself awake.
“Nothing, nothing. Hey, what are you doing here?” He didn’t hear her reply. He was suddenly aware that Reiner had also come into the café.
“Hey, man,” Reiner greeted. “What’s happening?”
His happiness at seeing Jackie became all awkward. “Yeah, cool, man, cool,” he answered Reiner.
“Get me a cappuccino, Reiner,” Jackie said, sitting across from Oku.
“What do you want on it, hon? Cinnamon?”
Oku flinched at the intimacy between them. He felt like making an excuse to leave. Jackie reached over for his book. “So this is where you are these days.”
What did she mean “these days”? “You’re the one who disappeared.”
“I haven’t disappeared. I’m at the store. You know where to find me.”
Was she saying something to him? He could never quite figure her out. A simple conversation was soaked in double entendre. And if he made the mistake of acknowledging the double meanings, she withdrew.
“Do I? Do I know where to find you?” He leaned over the table to take his book back.
“Yeah, you do.” She thumbed the pages, looking at Oku with an appraising sensuousness. Just then Reiner came back with cappuccinos. “Check you later,” Jackie said, rising.
“Yeah, man, see ya.” Reiner followed Jackie to the door.
Well, that was confusing, he thought. He watched them cross to the other side of the street. He hated the easy way Reiner put his right hand in the small of Jackie’s back. He hated him seeming to guide Jackie with this very hand across the street. He took comfort in a fantasy—Jackie had seen him in the café and had come in to tell him that she missed him. That was what the conversation meant. She could have passed by, he thought, trying to dismiss the other interpretation, namely that Jackie’s mother and father lived not too far away, a block, really; in fact, Jackie still lived there sometimes, so it had been sheer coincidence and her words meant just what they said, no more.
But what the fuck did she see in Reiner? That’s what he wanted to know. Well, given the things he’d been thinking about before Jackie came into the café, perhaps it was obvious what she saw in Reiner. Reiner was safe. Reiner was white. Musician, bullshitter, and Reiner did not, could not possibly see the city as a prison. More, Reiner must see it as his place—look at how he took possession of it, took possession of Jackie’s back, guiding her across the street with one hand, warding off traffic with the other, in which he balanced his coffee. Look at his face, it spoke of someone in control and certainly not threatened. Someone comfortable, easy. Oku hated the familiarity with which Reiner spoke to him too, as if they shared something, a language. He had the sense that for Reiner it was a second language, the “Hey, man, what’s happening?” As if Reiner had switched into the second language to arrive at Oku’s level, so to speak—to talk to him in his own tongue. Those few words were so charged. In any other situation the meanings would be simple. Here, they were the difference between being white and being black, in control or out of control.