WHEN THE PARAMOUNT CLOSED, Jackie’s mother and father were lost. Everyone in Alexandra Park was lost. Even some up on Bathurst Street and Vaughan Road and Eglinton Avenue. As far out as Dawes Road and Pape Avenue. All the glamour left their lives.
Le Coq d’Or—the nightclub on Yonge Street where American acts used to play and where Jackie’s mother and father saw Parliament-Funkadelic and the Ojays, the Barkays, and Rick James, who was put in jail after some freaky behaviour—that had closed down a few years before too. And then the Piccadilly Tube, where they danced till three in the morning, went under. And then Mrs. Knights, where they danced too and sat in the raised section and a man from Ghana had tried to pick Jackie’s mother up right in front of Jackie’s father, and he did it so directly and as if it was such a bargain that even Jackie’s father would have gone off with him to Accra. The guy took Jackie’s mother on the dance floor to “Me and Mrs. Jones,” and Jackie’s mother almost didn’t come back.
“Come and go with me back to my country,” he said. “You will be loved by my whole family, you will have my children. It is not like it is here. You are lost here. No one loves you here. In my country you will be a queen, life will be your plaything, the sky will always be blue when you are there, the rains will only come when you remember a sadness.”
Mrs. Knights closed. And These Eyes, where the marquee was a purple-rimmed eye, that was gone too. Jackie’s father loved the deejay there. His name was Maceo, and he could spin some rhythm and blues like nobody’s business. The Web was gone too—DJ Ghetto Soul used to play there and Grand Master—and the Upstairs Side Door closed last, and anyway it wasn’t such a funky place. All the glamour left, in other words, the chance to show a bit of style and flash. All the people who looked like they were famous, like the pimps and whores, all the athletes and the intellectuals, the jazz aficionados, the newcomers from down home, the just-comes from the Caribbean, all of them had to fly solo, go places where nobody knew them.
Jackie’s mother and father could take hard time, anyone in the Park could. But the thought of hard time without even the relief of the Paramount was unbearable. What’s life without a little fantasy, a little Diana Ross, a little Chilites, some Bobby Womack, some Billy Paul, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes? Well enough if your fridge didn’t work, if your sofa was on credit, had a spring busted, if, Jesus, you were one dime short of a dollar, but what was life if your imagination didn’t work? If you couldn’t see yourself strutting into the Paramount to the appreciation, the love of other dreamers like yourself? If no one else could verify your state of cool existence? Not a single soul who could say that last Saturday you were the flyest, the baddest, the most solid dancer/lover/dresser; the one with the edge like a razor, the slickest, funkiest, the most crisp, the sleekest, the foxiest, the most outta sight, the wickedest in the whole damn place. Well, that’s the end, isn’t it? That’s the bottom, that’s the final. And Jackie’s mother and father weren’t thirty yet when the Paramount closed.
But Jackie couldn’t wait for them to find bottom, she had to save them from the downstroke. The bottom was the Duke of Connaught, and she had no intentions of going in there to find them. The Duke wasn’t dangerous, it was just sad. Full of might-have-beens and should-haves. It was a dive on Queen Street across from the Kentucky Fried Chicken long before that side of Queen Street became trendy. And even now the Duke still maintains that down-and-out feel, as if its ugliness were so congenital that not even the trendy makeovers all around it could change it. All the glamour and daring of the Paramount had come to a colourless rest at the Duke. Some didn’t have the heart for it, so they stayed home. The Duke just wasn’t made up to be glamorous. It smelled of wet carpet and beer spills, the walls were a dishevelled cousin of moss green, the lighting was sickly. No, the Duke depended on lost hopes, it depended on crushed spirits, it was not there to cheer you up, it was there to trawl in all the phlegm of your life; the I-never-got-to-do-this-and-that, the wrong-headed mistakes, the unavoidable ones, the inevitability of ending up at the Duke, which you had always seen in your face when you woke up in the morning but disregarded in your enthusiasm for life, your love for someone, and your lust for fun. The Duke was always lurking in the mirror—the bald-faced bad luck of it, the straight-up knowing of it. There was the Duke, waiting to swallow you. There was the Duke, ready to swaddle you in its seedy arms; there was the worn-out shuffleboard table, the deep bar chairs, the smell of spunky beer on tap. Didn’t make sense putting a good dress on to come here, didn’t make sense trying to hold up any attitude. If you came here, dressed in your fly threads, the Duke showed up that they were really cheap, that they were bought down on Spadina off the back of a truck. Didn’t make sense going to Gabriel Kay’s apartment to see what he had heisted from Holt Renfrew; it would be wasted at the Duke. The Duke stripped you naked in an ugly kind of way. Every person in there looked like they were ashamed to be there, like they had lost respect for themselves and therefore each other. If you strutted into the Paramount, you slid into the Duke.
So when Jackie heard her mother and father talking about going to the Duke—“Well, maybe I’ll just step down to the Duke tonight,” her father said. “Yeah, think anything’s shakin’ there?” Her mother. “Gotta hook up with Gabriel, said he had some business thing.” Her father. “Well, maybe I’ll tag along. Leave Jackie with Liz,” her mother said—she knew it was the end. She had felt their restlessness for weeks, ever since the Paramount closed down. First they had been mournful. “Sheeeet, why’d they have to go and do that, man? For all the money I spent up in there, just that shoulda been enough to keep that place open.” Her father. They’d even sworn they would never go to the Duke. “Never find me in that place. Ain’t got enough room to swing a cat and they play some country shit in there.” Her mother. They held out a good few weeks, Jackie’s father stroking that particular spot in his beard, switching from the television to the stereo. He loved Wilson Pickett. He played “When a Man Loves a Woman” over and over again, saying to Jackie’s mother, “Hear that, girl! Hear that? That’s what it takes, that’s what it takes.”
He took Jackie up in her lessons. “You gonna have a high school diploma, Jackie baby. Do better than me. Do better than your mother.”
“Yeah, Daddy.”
“ ‘Yeah, Daddy’? You say ‘Yes, Daddy.’ No yeah this and yeah that.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
Jackie’s father didn’t get a high school diploma, not because he couldn’t but because there wasn’t time. There wasn’t time for that among the six brothers and one sister that he had. They had to work, and besides, when the older ones were ready, Nova Scotia wasn’t ready, what with de facto segregation and what with Jackie’s grandmother and grandfather needing the help. And when Jackie’s father was ready, it still wasn’t worth it for a black person to have an education. Where would you put it? What would you do with it, what good was it? What kind of job would you get with it? Jackie’s father had the kind of sense that mattered—street sense. That’s the kind of intelligence that was worth something. Here in Toronto he’d come to a feeling that it wasn’t worth passing on. It was good enough for him and Jackie’s mother. He figured they were country, they were from down home, but Jackie was going to be from here.
Jackie liked the attention. She loved the few weeks when there was no Paramount and nothing up to standard for her mother and father to go to. It was like being on holiday. She already had a picture-postcard idea of how her family should be, and it was coming true.
“Jackie, go over to Liz and see if she’ll take you tonight.” Her mother, testing the waters.
“I ain’t going.”
“ ‘Ain’t’?” Jackie’s father.
“I am not going.”
“That’s right now, but you going.”
“No.”
“Do like your mother says, girl.”
“Can’t. Won’t. Cannot, will not. Stay with Aunt Liz.”
“You cut a switch to beat yourself there, my man.” Jackie’s mother to Jackie’s father. “She’s telling you now. But, girl, don’t let me have to get up.”
Much as she tried, though, Jackie couldn’t keep her mother and father away from the Duke.
They had turned the Paramount into a liquor store by the time Jackie grew up. There’s no sign of the life it once had. When Jackie’s mother and father pass by these days, it’s all a different place. All their good times, dancing and fighting and styling, gone. All their nights with Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear” and Stevie Wonder’s “In the City,” all their youth has been jackhammered open, dug up, and cemented over in a concrete-and-glass brand new liquor store with small red-and-green tiles on the front. There’s no sign of their sweet life, the dancing—that’s what they mostly miss—the high-platformed shoes, the thrill of meeting the R & B bands after hours, the particular night when Jackie’s mother almost ran off with the bass player from Parliament Funkadelic and Jackie’s father had to stage the drama of his life—walking out the door as if he didn’t care, so she would know that if she was gone, she was gone—to get her back.
How does life disappear like that? It does it all the time in a city. One moment a corner is a certain corner, gorgeous with your desires, then it disappears under the constant construction of this and that. A bank flounders into a pizza shop, then into an abandoned building with boarding and graffiti, then after weeks of you passing it by, not noticing the infinitesimal changes, it springs to life as an exclusive condo. This liquor store that was the Paramount will probably, unnoticed, do the same thing in three or four years, and the good times Jackie’s mother and father had here—the nights when nights weren’t long enough, when they all ended up at a blind pig on St. Clair Avenue because they couldn’t go to sleep with so much life lighting up their beautiful bodies, or at Fran’s on College, eating greasy eggs at three or four in the morning—all this, their lovely life, they would not be able to convince anyone it had existed.