Andre never knew that chicken could taste so good. Fiery wing sauce collects at the corners of his mouth, and he feels like an animal—chawing, swallowing, only to tear more meat from the bone in hungry glurps. He looks up from his plate and notices Rock smiling.
“Haven’t eaten all day,” Andre says, a large ball of chicken lodged in his jaw.
“I ain’t mad,” Rock says. “Go ’head and get your grub on, brother.”
Andre sees Fredrick stroll in. The moment he spots Andre, he does an about-face and heads for the steam table in the back of the room stocked with wings and baked beans. Two other men enter and grab plates.
Rock looks at his watch. “After you guys get your gut fuel, we’ll go ’head and get started.”
The five men gather at a table in the center of the room. Fredrick and Andre avoid looking at each other while Rock makes the introductions.
“Fredrick, you already know my brother Andre. Mark and Strange-O, this is Andre. Andre, Strange-O and Mark.”
Strange-O pokes his hand out first. “That’s my old emcee name, but I prefer it to my real one. My mother smote me with one of them old-school COGIC names, Obadiah. But I love her anyway and it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Mark pumps Andre’s hand next. “What up, Dre? You mind if I call you that?”
“Nah, it’s good,” Andre says.
“Alright,” Rock chimes in as he looks at Andre. “We usually open with prayer. You’re welcome to participate if you want.”
Andre has never really prayed. Sure, he’s spouted things, usually in anger, to that impersonal force that seems to hover over all of human existence, but prayer? Never that.
He’s not sure how to respond, and it must have been evident because Rock says, “Don’t sweat it.”
Andre steps to the side as the four men join hands and bow their heads. Rock closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and relaxes. After another beat he begins.
“Father, we thank you that you’re God and we’re not. And we accept that you’re sovereign over all peoples and activities in the earth. We thank you that you’ve given us eyes to see and hearts to believe that you are in fact God. And we acknowledge that you’re good . . .”
Anger purls around Andre’s stomach. Then he remembers.
Andre Bolden Sr. was an actuary for Farm Bureau Insurance Company in tiny Hertford, North Carolina. He also served as the treasurer of the tiny country church the family belonged to. Andre’s mother, Margretta, was a schoolteacher who taught six days a week—five at Hertford Grammar School and one at Sunday school at the Bagley Swamp Baptist Church. They were by-the-Book Southern folk.
Rock’s prayer drones on. “And we thank you that you’re holy and righteous, which gives you the right to judge sin . . .”
Andre cuts out onto the street and looks up at the night sky. A dirty fury grips his head like interlocking pliers. “Good? Prove it then!”
In his periphery, Andre sees people on the sidewalk alter their path and veer away from him, but he’s not moved. His gaze is fixed firmly on the dark expanse that surrounds the earth. His unanswered recriminations diffuse into the night.
“Yo, Dre.” Rock pokes his meaty dome out of the meeting place. “Why’d you bounce?”
Andre turns his back on him. “I’m not going back in there, man.”
“Hang on a second.”
Rock disappears into the building and returns with a chair in each hand. He’s followed by Mark, Strange-O, and finally Fredrick. The men encamp around Andre and take a seat. Reluctantly, Andre sits.
———
Several people pass by with strange looks.
What are these fools doing out here in the freezing cold on a Wednesday night?
———
Rock, Strange-O, and Mark are focused on the meeting, but Fredrick seems nakedly self-aware as he spies each person that passes to see if he’s being seen.
“So Dre,” Rock says. “We’re bringing the Realness to you. What’s on your mind? The floor—well, the sidewalk—is yours.”
“I don’t have anything to say,” Andre answers.
“Why’d you roll out, fam?” Strange-O asks.
Andre sours and shoots him a prickly glare. “I’m not down for twenty questions, alright? Now I’ll sit here and listen until I get cold, but that’s it. Matter fact, let’s go back inside because I’m cold right now.”
Rock cracks and then Strange-O. Andre does his best to appear too serious to participate in silly snickering, but after Mark breaks up, yuks push past Andre’s lips. Fredrick is the last to join in the laughter.
“Yo,” Mark says as he laughs and points at Andre, “you were looking mad serious until your nose exposed you!” He sings, “Rudolph the red-nosed black dude!”
Rock slaps Andre on the back, still laughing. “And you’re carrying your own chair inside, Rudolph, ’cuz it’s nippy-bob out here!”
Fredrick extends his hand to Andre, who studies it before he finally takes it. “I’m sorry if I offended you,” Fredrick says.
Andre shakes his hand even though he still doesn’t trust him. He is still a dude and he is sniffing around his ex-girl.
After everyone has filtered out of the meeting place, Rock pulls Andre aside. “You need a place to stay tonight?”
Andre contemplates whether he should retreat from his earlier candor, because technically he doesn’t need a place to stay. He’s a lease holder on an apartment—he’s just not able to get in it. Plus he’s sure that if he really pressed Sandra, she wouldn’t have him on the street.
Rock stares Andre dead in the eye and waits for an answer. “It’s not rocket science, Dre. Earlier you said you didn’t have anywhere to go.”
Andre tangles with his ego. “Yeah, I need a place to stay,” he admits, despite an aversion to further emotional exhibitionism.
“Done.” Rock slaps him on the back and heads for the door.
A canary yellow 1955 Studebaker Champion coupe skirts the curb. Rock subtly flosses behind the wheel of the glimmering, vintage vehicle sitting on triple-gold Daytons. To Andre, the scene is an exercise in cognitive dissonance—a midthirties, rugged brother outfitted in Carhartt from head to toe behind the wheel of a brightly colored antique ride with hip-hop rolling from the speakers.
Andre smiles without even realizing it. He’s made aware that his choppers are on flash once he slips into the well-oiled, white leather seats.
“What’s up with all the teeth?” Rock promptly asks.
“You, man. I’ve never seen a brother your age in a classic car, especially a yellow one. You can afford something like this on a preacher’s pay?”
“Brother, I ain’t no preacher. I just try to live my life by the Scriptures with God’s help. The offering we take up keeps the lights on, oil in the furnace, and helps us feed and clothe some of the people around here. And pay?” Rock shakes his head. “I don’t do this for money.”
“Then how can you afford a whip like this?”
“For my paying job, I’m a bouncer. At Club New York.”
“A bouncer? At Club New York?”
“Yeah.”
“Isn’t that like . . . contradictory?”
“To what?”
“The whole preacher or living by the Scriptures thing you just said.”
“You’d be surprised how open people are to Jesus after they fall on their face drunk and split their head open in VIP.”
Andre snickers.
“I’m serious,” Rock says.
“You talk about God at the club?”
“As God is my witness, I never once brought it up on my own. Opportunities just pop up. Plus it’s the only job I could get where it didn’t matter that I had a record. And half of New Jersey Truth I met up in there. Fredrick, Strange-O. All of those cats.”
“And a lot of stars come through there too.”
“Yeah, but what’s a star? At the end of the day they’re people just like everybody else.”
“I hear that,” Andre says.
He notices a Snoopy air freshener dangling from Rock’s rearview mirror. The smug, vanilla-scented beagle transports Andre to the tidy brick house at the end of North Covent Garden Road in Hertford.
Andre’s father always hung a new Snoopy air freshener on his rearview mirror after he waxed the car. The smell was so wonderfully dizzying.
What I wouldn’t give for a hug from Pops.
Which was always followed by a firm kiss on the top of Andre’s knuckle head.
“You okay?” Rock asks.
“That air freshener just takes me back. My pops used the same kind.”
“You serious? Mine did too. Your pops still alive?”
“No. Died in a car wreck.”
“Mine died in Vietnam.” Rock extends his hand and gives Andre five. “Big ups for making it through the tough-life matrix. Not having a pops puts you at a competitive disadvantage in life, especially in the department of manhood.”
Before Andre can respond, Rock cruises to a stop in front of the Greenville police precinct. “You can drop off firearms here, no questions asked. Just go to the front desk—”
“I’m familiar with the program,” Andre says.
He sits for several moments and stares out at the empty street before he opens the door. Once he’s inside the station, Andre searches for Jackson and Carollo.
A pale-faced officer swallowed up in his uniform sits—or rather is keeled over—at the front desk. He looks over fifty, but his manner makes him seem twice that. He smacks hard on gum, and his emerald green eyes pierce Andre as he approaches.
Andre holds out both hands. “I’m going into my waist to pull out a weapon. I’m just here to turn it in.”
The officer sits up straight and places his hand on his service revolver. The fiery excitement that zings through his pupils makes Andre fear that he’s being set up.
“Go ahead. I’m watchin’,” the officer says. He speeds his chewing, which makes his gaunt face look like a rolling bag of bones.
Andre slowly removes the weapon and plunks it on the desk. The officer’s chomping slows to a normal pace and his posture shrinks as he sinks back into his uniform.
“Is that it?” Andre asks.
“That’s it.”
Andre hurries out of the station as quickly as he can without compromising his cool.
Rock lives in Bayonne on the second floor of a midrise apartment building a block from the water. Andre steps into the smartly decorated living room, looks around, and says, “Bayonne on the bay, huh?”
“You start a gang and drama has a way of finding you,” Rock says. “Even years later when you’re trying to keep your nose clean. There’s the couch, the bathroom’s down the hall, and my room is off-limits. I don’t have to worry about you tossing yourself off the balcony, do I?”
Andre looks as deadly serious as he can. “No.”
“Cool. Good night.”
Andre removes his shoes, turns off the light, and gets comfortable on his second couch in as many nights. Twinkling lights dazzle the surface of New York Bay, or is it Newark Bay or Kill Van Kull? Andre doesn’t care. He folds his arms across his chest, and as he surrenders to burnout, he thinks, Maybe tomorrow will be better.