I left out the best part. I saw Jesus on the ceiling of her church. We were all standing and singing, and the pastor had his hands in the air—and I looked up for a second and there He was. Just a flash of light between the rafters and then poof! He was gone. But it was Him. I saw the light—literally.”
“What did He say?” Sparks were shooting from Kim’s eyes. “Sin no more, Samuel Stein, for the fiery pit awaits!”
“No message—it was more like a bubble bursting. I was probably just hallucinating from exhaustion. After everything she told me that night I barely slept.”
“So now you’re a Christian?” Kim’s laughter cascaded through the train car. “No more sex till you’re married—those are the rules.”
Sam looked around red-faced to see if anyone was listening. It was an icy clear Friday midday and he and Kim had cut school to go to an anti-draft rally in the city. Kim’s idea. Was it obvious what they’d been up to in her bedroom before dashing to the station? The car was mostly empty—a young mother with a frosted perm swatting at her two squirmy kids, a bleached blonde in a red miniskirt and white go-go boots, a scattering of shifty unshaven men glued to their tabloids—and not a single pair of eyes rose to meet his. They might as well be alone. Sam opened his hand between them and Kim slid her fingers into the gaps between his and squeezed: they were a perfect fit. “Au contraire,” he said. “Lots of sex. God is love. That’s what the preacher said. It doesn’t matter if you’re black white yellow or brown—as long as you love God, God will love you back.”
“Love is all you need.” Kim held his gaze. “Love, guns, and comrades. That’s what my preacher says.”
“And who would that be—John Lennon?”
“No, Vladimir. You know—Lenin, Stalin, Marx?”
“So now you’re a Communist?”
“Not a Communist, a socialist, Sam I Am.” She gave his fingers one last squeeze. “But I have to hear the rest of the story. What happened to Tutu’s son—what was his name, Albert? And how did she wind up out on the Guyland with you crazy Steins?”
Sam beamed. At home with his family, he could hardly get a word in—even when his brothers were away, his parents were so wrapped up in their own business that they barely registered his presence. And half the time Tutu refused to listen to his foolishness—fushness, she pronounced it. When did anyone ever ask him to finish a story? So he told Kim everything he remembered, flinging Tutu’s life in her face like handfuls of dust. She left her son—yes, his name was Albert—with her mother before the boy was even crawling and went to Baltimore to look for a job. Washing clothes, slinging hash, raising white folks’ kids, scrubbing toilets, vacuuming office buildings at night—she bounced around Virginia and Maryland doing whatever work she could get. It killed her to leave Albert behind, but what choice did she have? But even though Tutu only got to see her son twice a year, he knew who his mama was. And she knew what made her boy happy. God had given Albert a gift for baseball. By the time he was five, Albert had taught himself to pitch and hit. By twelve, his arm was so strong that even white folks came to watch him throw. Tutu swore that he could have been a professional if he’d been born a few years later, but those were the days before Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays. No coach. No uniform. No money. No opportunity if you were black. So when he turned fifteen Albert stashed his mitt and went to work on the water like his father and grandfather. Crabbing and fishing was his life—the baseball dream was done. He married a maid called Nanny—“domestic worker,” she called herself—and they had a son. Tutu was a grandma before she even reached fifty.
Sam stopped. What harm would it be if he spilled a little to Kim? So he took a breath and barreled on.
“This part’s really tough. One Christmas Tutu was back home for a visit, staying with Albert and Nanny. There’d always been bad blood between Tutu and her daughter-in-law—and this time, when Tutu saw Nanny whaling on her little grandson just like her mama used to whale on her, she totally lost it. Tutu pulled a knife and threatened to kill Nanny if she struck that child one more time. They were still screaming at each other when Albert got home. Nanny gave her husband an ultimatum: either Tutu left for good or she did. That was the last time Tutu ever laid eyes on her only child. Two months later a call came in the middle of the night that Albert had drowned while tonging for oysters. He’d slipped off the side of his boat, hit his head, and gone under. Dead at twenty-nine. Tutu blamed herself. ‘Divine retribution,’ she called it.”
“Retribution for what?”
Shit. He had boxed himself into a corner. If he told Kim the truth—how Tutu believed God had taken her son because she’d let Mr. Jamie die, a death for a death—he would be breaching her darkest secret. He couldn’t betray her. “Long story,” he finally said. “Tutu made me promise. . . .” Kim pulled a face. For a second Sam was afraid that she was going to make him choose—her or Tutu—but she let it drop.
“So that’s when she came north? After her son died?”
“Right. With Albert gone, there was nothing keeping her down south anymore. The grandson was lost to her. Her sister and brother had both already moved to Harlem. She felt like her life was over. So she took the train up from Baltimore, signed on with an employment agency, and the first job she landed was us. A year after she moved into our attic, I was born on her birthday. A little freckled bundle of joy.” Sam dragged the corners of his lips apart in a crazy clown face. “She’s been with us ever since.”
“And now they’re just tossing her out like a broken toaster?”
“Maybe not. My dad’s a total hard-ass but I’ve been working on my mom. Tutu’s too proud to beg, but I’ve been begging for her. I think they might let her stay till I go to college.”
“I have to meet her, Sam. She sounds like she’s been through so much.”
“Just don’t . . .”
“Don’t what?”
“You know—don’t let on that you know about her drowned son and everything. . . .”
“Oh, Sam.” Kim rolled her eyes and turned away.
The car filled up at Flushing—old ladies with bulging shopping bags and swollen ankles, skinny skittering dudes with fros, construction workers with hard hats and yellow vests, a couple of long-haired teens who grinned at Sam and Kim like old friends.
“Do you think those two are heading for the same demo?” Sam whispered, but Kim shook her head. “Nah—I bet they’re going to Macy’s for some fake tie-dye charged to Mommy’s credit card.” “I bet they got kicked out of school for smoking dope,” Sam countered. “When they start college he’ll cut his hair and join ROTC and she’ll take up tennis.” “Or knitting.” “She’s definitely gonna major in cosmetic arts—Eyeliner 101, Lipstick Studies, Reflections on Rouge.” Sam snorted—he loved it when she was snide. “But who am I to talk?” Kim cut the chatter short with sudden bitterness. “Here I am practically through high school and what do I have to show for myself except a stack of report cards?”
They fell silent as the train rocked through the industrial no-man’s-land that separated the dinge of Queens from the glitter of Manhattan.
Kim took his hand again, but she was looking out the window. “God, it’s ugly,” she breathed. “Maybe instead of demonstrating we should be out picking up garbage, painting houses—you know, doing something instead of just yelling about it.”
Sam followed her gaze out the window to a tableau from hell: half a dozen trash-strewn train tracks were snarled beneath the sooty brick wall of an immense warehouse in which every window was smashed. Past the wall, a pit cratered like the stump of a rotten tooth. And beyond that, on the western horizon, the Manhattan skyline charted its soaring and plunging graph on the cloudless sky. “I always wondered if these were the ash heaps from The Great Gatsby,” Sam said, trying to break the mood. “You know—that wasteland with the googly eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg looking down from the billboard.”
“I hated that book,” Kim murmured without taking her eyes from the window. “Everyone was always drunk and those parties were an epic waste and Myrtle got that pathetic little puppy that peed all over the place. Gatsby was a fraud. Tom was obviously a total fascist and Daisy wasn’t much better. She and Tom deserved each other. And the anti-Semitism! Jesus, Fitzgerald laid it on thick with Meyer Wolfsheim. Can you think of a single person in that book who stands for anything good?”
Sam kept his mouth shut. Gatsby was the first novel he ever loved. He’d highlighted so many passages the pages were practically translucent. Gatsby’s yearning became his yearning—to win and lose everything for love. Sam had practically memorized the final page about the transitory enchanted moment when Dutch sailors first beheld the “fresh, green breast of the new world . . . the last and greatest of all human dreams.” It hadn’t occurred to him until just this transitory enchanted moment how much Kim reminded him of Daisy.
Sam bent his head until his lips were practically brushing Kim’s ear. “Do you think anyone else on this train is in love?” What he’d meant to say was “has just made love” but this slipped out instead.
Kim took forever to turn her face from the window. “Anyone else?” she finally said. Her eyebrows had disappeared into the curls of her bangs. Sam felt his cheeks flame and he remembered what Tutu had told him that night in her apartment: “Never be the first to say ‘I love you.’ You can think it all you want but don’t say it. Take it from me, you’re asking for trouble.”
as soon as they heard the chanting, Kim broke into a sprint, dragging Sam along behind like a distracted puppy. “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war.” No demonstrators were in sight yet—just their soundtrack crackling over the racket of a thousand engines. Sam had no idea where he was: everything in the city he loved so much looked the same to him—enormous, treeless, dirty, brown. Sun glinted off the upper windows of the skyscrapers but the bottom of the canyon was already in shadow. Pedestrians rushed through the cold oblivious to the siren song of revolution. Kim, dangling Sam from an elbow, bulleted through them, rounded a corner and there it was: a street sealed off with yellow police tape; cops standing shoulder to shoulder in a solid wall, a baton at the ready in every hand; and at the far end of the block, maybe a hundred demonstrators jammed together like grains of sand in the neck of an hourglass. Over the blue shoulders and black helmets Sam could just make out a thin bespectacled guy standing above the crowd with one clenched fist in the air and the other wrapped around a megaphone. “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war.” The grains of sand took up the cry. Sam did a quick mental calculation: a hundred protesters, three speakers on an impromptu stage (overturned trash cans with a board laid over them), and forty cops. Which meant (thank you, SAT prep) slightly less than two-fifths of a cop for every demonstrator.
“Excuse me. Coming through. Make way.” Kim, without breaking stride, skirted the phalanx of New York’s finest, ducked under the tape, elbowed through the bodies, and beelined for the choke point at the far end of the street. Sam could now see that there was a second wall of riot police massed at the other end of the block. We’re nothing but sardines in a blue bathtub, he was thinking. If those two rows of cops closed ranks, there would be no way out. Sam eyed the guns and batons and wished he’d worn a hat—or better yet a helmet.
“What do we want?” the guy with the megaphone was shouting.
“Peace!” they all roared back.
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
“What do we want?”
“Peace!”
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
And then in unison: “Peace now! Peace now! Peace now . . .”
It sure didn’t sound to Sam like the Movement was running out of steam.
But then came the speeches. The protesters stood huddled in the cold while one by one the organizers harangued them with platitudes. Sam had assumed there’d be some kind of conflagration—a bonfire of draft cards!—but Organizer #1 said burning stuff in public was against some city ordinance, so instead a couple of greasy-haired guys flung the shreds of their draft cards into the air like confetti. “No littering!” a cop squawked through his megaphone, and that put an end to that. Organizer #2 droned on endlessly about the plight of the innocent, downtrodden Vietnamese people—he had a slight lisp so “innocent” came out “in-ah-thant.” Organizer #3 was all about solidarity and collective action and making common cause. Sam silently dubbed them Three Thstooges. If this was the Revolution, he’d rather be in chemistry class. . . .
Then he heard Kim mutter “Jesus Christ” under her breath and the next second she had shoved through the front-line demonstrators, mounted the garbage can podium, grabbed the megaphone from the Third Thstooge, and opened fire. “Brothers and sisters!” Maybe it was the megaphone, but he barely recognized her voice—it sounded so urgent, so momentous. “The war in Vietnam is not just a war against the people of Vietnam—it’s a war against the people of the United States of America. Most of all a war against black people. Did you know that more black Americans are fighting in Vietnam than in any other American war? Did you know that more black soldiers have died in Vietnam than in all our other wars put together? When a white kid gets drafted, he rips up his draft card and goes to Canada. When a black kid gets drafted, he ships out and dies.” The crowd had stopped shuffling. Even the cops seemed to be paying attention. “But most of the black guys in Vietnam were not drafted—they enlisted—yes, they signed up willingly, because if you’re black, dying in Vietnam is preferable to living in America. At least you get paid for it.” Laughter rippled; raised fists pumped the air; scattered voices shouted, “Right on!” “Tell it!” “Go girl!” The guy next to Sam elbowed his ribs and asked, “Who is that redheaded firebrand?” “Kim Goodman,” Sam responded proudly—but instantly regretted it when he saw the guy—man, actually, because on second look he was no draft-age kid but a balding jowly flush-faced adult—pull a notebook from his pocket and scribble something down. “Or maybe it’s Bonnie Goodstein—I dunno, we just met,” Sam backpedaled lamely—a terrible liar as always. But Kim was full steam ahead. “Now maybe some of you are familiar with our brothers in the Black Panthers.” More murmurs; cries of “Free Bobby!”; more scribbles in the notebook. “Well, I’m here to tell you that the Panthers—not the Green Berets—are the true freedom fighters of this country. If you want justice. If you want peace. If you want freedom, you better stand up and make your voices heard. Panthers are being gunned down right now in the streets of America while our black brothers die like flies in Vietnam. The only path left to us is revolution—peaceful if we can, but armed if we must.” The soprano static of the megaphone reverberated off the skyscrapers and rained down in shards of glass. “Free Bobby! Free Huey! Avenge Fred Hampton! All power to all the people!” Pumping her fist in the air. “The struggle is ours to win!” Pumping harder. “Power to the people—right on!” Pumping and jumping. “Revolution—now. Revolution—now. Revolution—now.”
All hundred of them had their fists in the air with her—all but Sam and the man next to him, writing furiously in his notebook. That’s when he lost it. Without thinking, without planning, while the demonstrators were shouting and pumping and the air was exploding with their voices and Kim was brandishing the megaphone like a javelin above her head, Sam snatched the notebook out of paunchy man’s hands, buried it deep in his coat pocket, and fled.
forty-five minutes later he was on a downtown street corner freezing his ass off and scanning the faces of passersby from underneath the hood of his parka. He still couldn’t believe he’d gotten away with it. Or how easy it had been. When the notebook man lunged after him, Sam squeezed beneath the canopy of raised arms and, shouting, “Narc! That guy’s a narc!,” melted into the crowd. The man screamed, “Stop that kid!” at the top of his lungs—but the other demonstrators took up the “Narc!” cry and closed ranks. Sam heard the man cursing “You goddamn son of a bitch,” as he pushed into the lobby of the nearest building. He expected a herd of cops in hot pursuit but there was nothing. Luck was with him—the building straddled an entire block and there was an exit at the other end into the next street. He zipped across the lobby and out the revolving door, and once he was on the street, he nonchalantly joined the stampede to the subway—rush hour. He thought Kim was crazy when she had insisted on fixing a rendezvous spot downtown in case they got separated—why would they get separated?—but now he saw the wisdom in her plan. So there he was on the corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place, waiting for Kim to materialize out of the crowd. The notebook was like a lump of coal burning a hole in his parka pocket. Chuck it? Read it? Hide it someplace? Sam was petrified.
What if she’d said Third Avenue?
“What happened? Why did you take off like that?” Sam spun around—and there she was. He fell into her arms and the two of them hugged each other on the sidewalk while the world surged around them.
“Oh my god,” he breathed into her curls. “That was so incredible. You had them eating out of your hand. How did you know all that stuff about black soldiers in Vietnam?”
Kim broke from his arms and tilted her head back. “The truth?” Her eyes twinkled. “I made most of it up.”
Sam dropped his jaw. Kim punched him in the stomach. And then the two of them were flying down the sidewalk, both of them laughing and talking at once. It was like they’d just been sprung from school—or prison—or battle. When Kim finally calmed down enough to take in what Sam was saying about the guy with the notebook and how he’d grabbed it and fled, she stopped and rounded on him. “You realize that guy was an FBI agent, right? Those pigs have totally infiltrated the Movement.”
“Let me show it to you,” Sam said, reaching for his pocket.
“No way—not here.” Kim took his hand and started walking again at a normal pace so they wouldn’t draw attention to themselves. They were in the heart of the East Village so blending in was easy—everyone on the street was young, long-haired, dressed like a hippie, and either stoned, tripping, crazy, or all three. Kim stopped at the first phone booth they came to. “Richard lives right around here. I’m gonna call and see if he’s home. We can stash”—she looked at Sam’s parka pocket—“it at his place.”
Two minutes later they were racing up the dark crumbly stairs of Richard’s tenement building near Tompkins Square Park. The door opened at the first knock and Richard, barefoot in torn jeans and a Hells Angels T-shirt, ushered them in. Kim got a hug and a kiss on the side of the mouth. Sam got a squeeze on the shoulder. Richard, lit up at the prospect of mischief, was even more intimidatingly handsome than at the New Year’s party. His long dark hair was wet and his cheeks smooth and ruddy as if he’d just stepped out of the shower. A gold stud Sam hadn’t noticed before winked on his left ear. Richard looked like a big cat—puma or leopard—that had escaped from the zoo and wound up caged in a slum.
Sam was still taking in the flat—a long narrow coffin of a room with a single barred window at the far end, a couple of ratty mattresses slumped beside a lumpy sofa, and a green plastic table strewn with take-out cartons, hash pipe, beer cans, rolling papers, weed baggie, tweezers, ashtray, socks, and album covers—when the door to the bedroom opened and a swarthy sleepy guy stepped out. “My Israeli cousin, Eli,” Richard introduced them. “He’s crashing with me for a while. I’ve got the bed—he’s on the floor, in case you’re wondering.” Weird to share the bedroom, Sam was thinking, but then he remembered how Richard once told him that what he hated most was to wake up alone in the dark.
Eli shook hands. Sam shifted his eyes from Richard to Eli, searching in vain for a family resemblance. Everything about Eli was three shades darker—hair, eyes, skin—and where Richard was chiseled Eli bulged. He couldn’t have been much older than Richard, but he looked like a man, not a boy—a man who liked to have a good time and didn’t take life, or himself, too seriously. “Shalom Kimmy, shalom Shmuel, please to meeting you,” Eli said jovially. There was a gap between his two front teeth and a patch of black hair at his throat. “Reekie is my favorite leetle cousin”—Eli’s head did not quite make it to Richard’s shoulder—“but with the cleaning he’s not so good.” He tweezed a sock off the table, wrinkled his nose, and dropped it on the floor.
“Eli here just finished his stint in the IDF—you know, the Israeli army,” Richard said. “I’m trying to ease him back into civilian life with some good old American R and R.” He pulled a chair up to the table and started rolling a joint on a Grateful Dead album cover. “But what brings you two into the big bad city on a school day? Do your mommies know you’re playing hooky?”
Kim and Sam flopped down side by side on the sofa—a spring corkscrewed into Sam’s left buttock—and launched into the story simultaneously, but Richard interrupted. “Let’s toke up first. This is way better than the shit at that party.”
Kim waved the joint away but Sam took a hit and passed it to Eli, who passed it back to Richard, who winked at Sam. “Hey, Sammy boy, have you ever done a shotgun?” And before Sam could ask what a shotgun was, Richard stuck the lit end of the joint in his own mouth, leaned over to Sam until the unlit end was between his lips, and then blew with all his might. Smoke billowed into the stoned-out cavity that used to be Samuel Orin Stein: SOS. Richard had a hand clamped around the back of Sam’s neck like he was going to head-slam him—then he let go and pulled out the joint. “Count to ten, Sammy.” But Sam didn’t count. He didn’t explode either, though his head was levitating off his neck. What just happened? Where did all the smoke go? And how did Richard do that without burning a hole in his tongue? Richard took another hit, exhaled, stuck out his tongue, and waggled it at Sam. “See Sammy—no burn—magic! Wanna shotgun, Eli?”
“Lo. I mean nein. I mean nyet. I mean no frogging way.”
“Whats a matter, Eli, can’t you talk and toke at the same time?” Richard stretched out on a mattress with his back to the wall. “Okay, spill it. What are you two so hot and bothered about—aside from each other?”
Sam was about to jump in, but Kim cut him off. “We were demonstrating against the draft. You’re draft age, Richard. How come you weren’t there?”
“I pulled number 309 in the lottery.” Richard took the last hit and flipped the roach into an ashtray. “Lucky me—you’re free to go, young man.” Kim scowled. “Anyway, somebody’s gotta stay home and roll the joints, right? So what happened? Did you guys get teargassed by the pigs?”
Sam and Kim were like a comedy team, jiggling up and down side by side, stepping on each other’s lines, clapping a hand on the other’s mouth when they got to a good part. “So I was wrapping up my speech—” “She was so cool. It was all about how black guys—” “And there was this commotion at the front of the crowd—” “Some goon with a notebook was writing down everything—” “And the next thing I knew, Sam had vanished—” “Everybody was going crazy yelling and waving their fists and I—” “What the hell was going on. But the organizer guys wanted to talk to me and I couldn’t—” “Stuffed the notebook in my pocket—” “And they were like, ‘You’re such a fantastic speaker, we could use someone—’” “Jumped on the downtown subway—” “And there he was on the corner of St. Mark’s—”
“Whoa, whoa, slow down!” Richard held up both his hands until he finally silenced the two of them. “You mean you, little Sammy Stein, boosted an FBI agent’s notebook and got away with it?” Sam and Kim nodded in unison. “That is so absolutely totally fuckin’ A cool. Well, cough it up, man, we gotta see what’s in it.”
Sam fished the notebook—a reporter’s steno pad—out of his coat pocket and Kim and Richard pushed in on either side of him to have a look (Eli was passed out on a mattress). It was still open to the page on which the agent had been scribbling when Sam grabbed it. “Curly red hair,” Sam read aloud, “apparent BPP affiliation—”
“BPP is the Black Panther Party,” Kim interjected.
“Possible liaison between BPP and CU SDS.”
“Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society—you know, campus radicals.”
“Sophisticated command of facts and data—maybe a CPUSA plant . . .”
“Communist Party of the USA—wait, this pig thought the Commies sent me?”
Sam flipped to the previous page. “‘Freckle-face school kid’—that must be me—‘claims her name is—’” He broke off.
“Wait—you told him my name?”
“Sorry, sorry—I didn’t realize—but don’t worry—I made up something . . . see?” He pointed to where the agent had written “Kim Goodman??? Bonnie Goodstein???” “Anyway, we’ve got the notebook.”
“But what if he remembers?” Kim grabbed the steno pad from Sam and started flipping through it wildly. “Jesus,” she muttered under her breath, “look at all this. . . .” But Sam was barely listening. How could he have been so fucking stupid? When would he ever learn to keep his big mouth shut? Tutu was always warning him. . . . Now, because of him, Kim would be on some FBI watch list. She’d probably never speak to him again. Inside his chest, it felt like a cold fist was tightening around his heart.
While Kim and Richard huddled over the steno pad, Sam got up and walked over to the window. The vertical bars and zigzag slash of the fire escape gridded the world outside: a torn patchwork of yellow and black windows on the tenement across the street, clumps of neon letters flashing meaninglessly on the shop signs, severed heads of pedestrians floating above the fissured sidewalk. It was like watching a movie through a shattered lens. Even four floors up, he could hear shouts and laughter echoing up from the street: the soundtrack of people with lives. Everyone was having such a blast—everyone but him all of a sudden. Sam felt himself split in two—one Sam stood with his forehead against Richard’s grimy windowpane, while the other Sam looked up in wonder from the street below. Enchanted and repulsive, the city licked at his ears. Its infinitude crushed him. He wanted to be the hero but he ended up the clown. The traitor. The rat. The plug slipped and he felt himself spiral down the drain.
“This thing is a gold mine,” he heard Kim say.
“We could sell it—or trade it for a shitload of drugs.” Richard sounded like a kid on a treasure hunt.
“No way,” said Kim. “This is my foot in the door—a free pass.”
“To what?”
“The BPP, you idiot.”
“You’re gonna use this to infiltrate the Panthers?”
“Not infiltrate—join. They don’t usually trust whites—but with this!”
“Are you really that into the BPP or are you just trying to get a black boyfriend?”
The two Sams instantly merged back into one quivering whole. He still had his back to Kim and Richard but his ears were cocked to their every breathy syllable. I already have a boyfriend. Don’t be a jerk, Richard. Sam and I are going to fight for justice together. Kim didn’t say any of that—she didn’t say anything at all. Sam turned and there she was sitting hunched on the sofa with her head bent over the notebook and her ginger curls bobbing in front of her face. At the back of her neck, the hair was parted around a webbed triangle like the pyramid on the back of a dollar bill. Sam wanted to cover that pyramid with his lips and inhale her lily of the valley perfume—but instead he plunked down silently beside Kim and waited. When she finally looked up, she blinked at him twice as if she’d forgotten who he was. Sam felt the deep creep of paranoia but he shook it off. He had to say something, anything, to break into the magic circle that Kim and Richard had conjured around themselves. “Hey, I almost forgot.” He forced himself to smile. “This is so cool.” Tutu had made him promise—swear—not to reveal to anyone what he was about to say, but Tutu was orbiting in a different galaxy at the moment. “On Sunday morning, after I spent the night at Tutu’s place—”
“What? That witch is still alive?” Richard broke in.
“Yeah, she loves you too, Richard.” Sam liked the little edge he’d just honed in his voice. “Anyway, we were walking to church and Tutu was taking me down this old elegant street of brownstones and big trees—Convent Avenue, she said it was called. We turned a corner and this tall skinny kid with a really long neck starts coming toward us—dressed all nice for church in a black suit and tie. Tutu’s smiling like her face is going to break open. ‘This is my grandson, Leon,’ she says. And I’m like, Grandson, what grandson? Leon had been living in her Harlem apartment since he was fourteen, but she’d never said a word about it. Not to my parents—not to me—zippo. I think there was some trouble back in Virginia—I don’t know—she just shook her head when I asked. Anyway, the night I came she made Leon stay with her brother so I could have his bed. But she wanted me to meet him. Show him off—you know, like ‘Look what a fine grandson I have.’ She made us sit on either side of her in church. ‘My boys,’ she kept saying.”
“Yeah, one of each—chocolate and vanilla,” Richard snorted, pinching Sam’s cheek. “With pink sprinkles. So what’s he look like, this Leon? Is he hot?”
“I don’t think he’s your type,” said Sam.
“Richard doesn’t have a type,” Kim cut in. “Black, white, guys, girls. He’s an equal opportunity slut.”
“Not slut, honey—luuuuvaah-boy.”
“Anyway, hands off Leon—and don’t tell anyone I told you. Tutu would kill me.”
“So why’d you say anything?” asked Richard, grinning like a tabby cat. “Death wish?” Sam groped for an answer, but Richard waved him off and started rolling another joint. “Relax, junior, your secret’s safe with us.”